Carter Sherman (on the sex recession)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert.

I'm Randall Shepard.

I'm joined by Monica Padman.

Hi.

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.

This was fun.

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.

We get to learn.

Please enjoy Carter Sherman.

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He's an all-chancel.

We had a whole conversation.

On what topic?

We had a whole interview about fashion.

Yeah, I was fashioned.

And it was really in-depth.

I am an expert on fashion.

Okay, for how long?

My entire life.

Wow.

I came out of the moon.

Very stylish.

Do you live in New York?

I do live in New York.

And where are you from originally?

Seattle.

What part of Seattle?

Laurelhurst, 15 minutes north of Capitol Hill.

Oh, okay, great.

I've been blackout drunk many times on Capitol Hill.

Oh my gosh, congratulations.

Yeah, I've gone to gas work parks and drank 40s.

I've gone to the troll bridge and drank 40s.

I have also done those.

I was going to ask.

Yeah, have you been drunk a lot there?

I think it's standard biz up there.

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

Even with all the rain.

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.

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.

We love a drizzle.

Okay.

Kind of Hawaii then.

Hawaii has that.

Like, rain kind of every day, but quick.

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

Okay.

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

Well, that is one upside of global warming is that potentially it will be.

They tell me that LA is going to get tropical.

Do you know it hailed the other day while we were recording?

Oh, when we had that downpour?

Yes.

It apparently was hailing.

That doesn't happen here.

What did mom and dad do in Seattle?

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 is now just commerce.

Basically early on the trend of helping companies sell Thicks Online.

So basically office jobs for both of these people.

Yeah, yeah, okay.

And what drew you to journalism?

First of all, how do we get Carter?

That's someone who named a girl Lincoln.

I feel like I can relate to your.

I appreciate the presidential connection.

Thank you for that.

Was it after the president?

No, it was after my 1967 Lincoln Continental, which ironically, Kennedy was killed in, so you could make another presidential connection.

Oh my gosh, yes.

All flattering connections.

I thought you were asking, was it after

his death?

Oh, and that was like quite some she was born in 1883.

Yeah, was it pre- or post the president?

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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.

I can't.

Well, you got June Carter famously.

Yes.

Well, that's the last name.

I have to spend a lot of time telling people it's Carter Sherman.

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.

Oh, yes.

Oh, that happened to Monica.

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

I like that.

I'm happy about that.

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.

It truly happens at least twice a week, I would say.

I think it's kind of helpful sometimes because sometimes I'm like, I wonder if people get back to me because they think I'm a man.

Oh, that's interesting.

Or like if I got further along in job application processes.

And this would be other men.

Who knows?

Women can be sexist.

I'd way rather call a woman back than a man.

I think most people probably would prefer to call a woman back.

Well, it depends on what you're calling them for.

I mean, for jobs.

For oil change, you probably.

I don't know.

Maybe Carter is great at oil change.

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

My God, you're a polymath.

That's what I've always said.

So how did you find your way to journalism?

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 until I was in second grade.

They put me in a bunch of remedial reading classes.

Saxed as well.

I didn't learn to read till fifth grade.

Oh, okay.

Well, now I feel terrible.

And I was like, you're a genius compared to my reading.

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

Yes.

Whereas you, they did not.

Yeah, what was your learning disability?

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 R's, which is great for the name Carter.

How would you pronounce Carter?

Kata.

Oh, how do you know?

So you sound like you're from Boston.

Yes, I also got that all the time.

Yeah.

And so I think that also contributed.

My parents have been like, we were a little worried that you were stupid.

Sure.

You gotta wonder.

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.

Sure.

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.

Because you like the economy of information.

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.

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.

I think so.

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

Exactly.

And you guys are probably also nosy.

Yes, exactly.

Extremely nosy.

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

Yeah, we choose the word curious.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

Yeah, please take that.

Two sides of the same

thing.

Yeah, in fact, when we've had babysitters, I can only extend them as much character

as I would give myself.

So when we've had babysitter, I'm like, well, they're definitely going through everything I have.

What do you think?

What if they're reading your journals?

Then they're reading the journals.

I still need a babysitter.

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

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 is so much better than me.

And you are nosy and you have a lot of integrity.

You just said you went through people's shit.

No, no, I didn't.

Oh, I thought you said you did.

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

Carter did.

I did.

Yeah, you did when you babysitter?

Yeah.

you gotta see what's going on i was a very trusted babysitter she actually can't admit to it because she babysat for us for a while

she knows that we'll reverse engineer her gear i appreciate your ability to keep yourself a locked vault here when you she's completely full of she went through everyone's stuff

frontward and backward okay so what school did you end you ended up in a sorority at a school i did end up in a sorority i went to northwestern when did you graduate 2016 you're much younger than me okay she's five years older.

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah.

I heard it's just the best school ever.

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.

That's pretty sage advice.

It's not bad.

It worked out for me.

At Northwestern, it's usually become a journalist or become a consultant.

Okay.

Or an actor.

There are a number of actors.

That's true.

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.

Right.

Do you remember that prevailing fear?

Not really.

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.

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

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

Oh, God.

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.

Oh, I see.

Right, right, right, right.

Okay.

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 both things are true.

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 warm-up is.

You haven't presented the proper diagrams.

You've just been in the middle of the day.

You're getting lucky.

Yes.

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

Usually the dude gets lucky and the woman doesn't.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Conventional.

We just had an episode come out today about sex.

We had a sex educator on.

Shan.

Sexologist.

On Google.

It says educator.

Okay.

I just like the term sexologist.

Certified sexologist.

It sounds like a mixologist.

Yeah.

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

What did she say?

Oh, so many things.

She taught us how to squirt.

Okay.

If that's something you're doing.

If that's something anyone's treating.

I'm intrigued.

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.

You want to hear the worst news?

Women like chore play.

When their male partner does chores, their horniness goes up dramatically.

And it's like, when you're doing like, that's the least.

I'll rub your legs.

I'll give you a massage.

I'll kiss your neck.

They want you to make the kids lunch.

Fucking sweep the floor?

I mean,

like a maids outfit.

No, it's not a role play thing.

It is an act of service.

And that endears.

women to their partners.

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.

Right, so it's not extra.

Yeah, he actually probably does most of the chores.

So maybe I should do chore play for him.

Yeah, oh, he might.

Yeah, if you've noticed he's not so horny for you, why don't you try a little chore play?

Do auditions.

Yeah, exactly.

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 that.

It's hard to get objective.

You're changing the environment by being in it.

Dramatically.

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.

I remember feeling that way because the way that she did the interview was not just we were sitting down and we were talking, it's that she came to the sorority house while some of us were getting ready to go out to a party at a fret house because she wanted to observe us getting ready and see how we dressed.

What we thought about.

Not in a creepy way, but she wanted to know why we wore what we wore.

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.

There was a strategy.

She wasn't wrong to ask.

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 i definitely had a strategy you did 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 that was not happening at my college really

norm core am i picturing the right thing that's more seinfeld outfits yeah that's actually cool this was not cool this was just a very random aberration

for a few years there.

Yeah.

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

So you got suspicious during it, no?

I did.

Tell me about that.

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 and 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.

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.

Yeah.

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

Right.

Well, she wrote for the New York Times.

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 of rats.

She sort of deflated.

She just wasn't that interested in hearing that version of the narrative.

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.

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.

Oh, no, no, you do a good job in your book of saying it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to 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.

There was another book about boys.

Who is it?

It's Peggy Orenstein.

We've had her on.

We have.

Yeah.

Many, many, many years ago, but we have indeed had Peggy on.

Wow, do you remember what?

I think it was about boys and sex, actually.

It came out

after me too, which was what?

2017?

February 2020, she came on.

The COVID years are blurry.

We were doing them all over Zoom.

She was in person.

Yeah.

Well,

we're cutting her.

Thanks for helping, Rob.

Anyway, when you said Peggy, I was like, oh, she's entitled to her opinion.

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.

Right.

Okay, so let's just go through your bona fides because you write for Guardian.

I write for The Guardian.

What is your domain?

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.

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...

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 and 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.

Oh, no, each individual generation is experiencing the amount of change that probably seven generations in the 18 to 1900s experienced.

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.

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 nonstop.

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 seven 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?

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.

So that's for women.

That's for women.

And then there's also

men.

That sounds pseudo-feminist.

I think that's

also

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.

Makes some sense.

Which makes sense.

There's like some menopause stuff probably.

Yeah, you know, it seems like they've probably dated men and made some decisions.

Yes.

Not for me.

And that's fine.

Yeah.

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?

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 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're 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.

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.

Yeah.

And pursuing sex is hard.

You have to open yourself up and be vulnerable.

Yeah.

I think it's apex vulnerability.

Reject me or accept accept me.

It's that literal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

How valid do you think that explanation is?

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.

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

I'll be very provocative.

I worried that this is part of me to backlash, that you have guys that are now afraid to approach any woman because any unwanted attention is no good.

Everything they've been reading about for the last five years has made them think, no, I don't want to just a fear of approaching women now.

I only had one young man bring this up to me where he said, I do worry 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 for people because it is terrible to walk around thinking that the world is a dangerous place, even when it is.

So you talked to more than 100 people.

How did you source these people and how do you approach these people?

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 anti-sexual assault groups, sex ed groups, LGBTQ plus rights groups.

Another way was I was like Troll 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?

Yeah, because all those other sources you just named are very left-leaning.

Yes.

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

The other ways that I would do this is be like, do you have friends?

People talk to me.

You end up going down and down the line.

And once you get further enough away, you do get 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 going to 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.

And were they as willing to talk to you?

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.

too yeah what i found among young people who are 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 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.

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.

And how do you start that conversation?

In the interview.

Yeah.

Well, I would go through all of the biographical details, which I think sort of eased 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 what 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.

Yep, 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 reign.

Yeah, but a lot of men had never spoken to their friends about this stuff.

Yeah, the pressures on a man are, you're supposed to be incredible at this immediately with zero experience.

And then you've got to act to your friends like you're a pro.

Right.

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

Yeah.

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.

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.

Yes.

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

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.

Yes.

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 of someone who didn't tell someone when I was losing my virginity, you probably do want to tell them.

We got to applaud Monica.

I was old, really, really old.

No, I was older when I had sex for the first time.

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.

My peer group's done it a bunch.

Oh my God.

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

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 our face.

Chore play was over.

Yeah, chore play is over.

I was like, so I do have to tell you something.

And it's horrible that anxiety hanging over.

So I get being like, I'm just going to keep kind of pushing this off.

Did they take it well?

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.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

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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 few years of high school because I was just constantly researching, like, how do I have sex?

Yes.

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

I legitimately kept it secret.

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

Do you think he knew?

Let's give him a shout out.

Come on out.

You brought him.

No, I never told him.

So if he listens to this podcast, can I ask

what's going on mentally for you guys?

Because again, from our side of the street, it's like, well, y'all can have sex anytime you want because we're all dying for it and we're happy to do it.

I couldn't.

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

Do you remember?

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.

Yes.

I was like, I'm not going to sleep with someone who.

I don't know at all.

I'm not going to sleep with someone who I know a lot because they're my friend.

And I was like boxing myself in.

Narrowing your options with every criteria.

Yes.

There were definitely looking back boys in 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.

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 got to be special.

It's got to be perfect.

Candles, ideally.

Rose petals.

Yeah.

And 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 girls' 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.

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 be really good at obtaining sex all the time.

Yes.

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.

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

Oh, my status shot up immediately.

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

I didn't.

Well, girls do that.

I mean, that was also part of of it.

It's like, if your friend was having sex, you're going to know immediately.

Right.

And you're going to call all your friends.

They literally have to be.

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

See, yes, yes.

As the door was closing, like I was like,

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.

So as you talked 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.

Sociocultural shifts, political?

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 legislatures, 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.

Yeah, could you give some hard examples of that?

Think about sex ed.

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 a 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.

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 as like a sermon on the mount this was legitimate this felt like oh this is what legally the district has to do but did you feel like you had holes in your knowledge after that no i learned about how to put a condom on learned about stds 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 a lot of people brought up the mean girl scene to me

yes.

Oh, I bet.

Sex Ed 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 watched it.

Yeah, honestly,

this is a potential.

Exactly.

And it was horrifying.

There weren't any how-tos.

There were no like, here's how you put on a condom.

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 PowerPoints on STIs.

And so all 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.

Yes, yes.

Which sounds silly because it is.

Although it happened once in Africa.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know that one?

No.

It was so violent.

She had blown a guy, then got stabbed in the 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 that.

It's real.

She lived?

Yeah.

She had a baby.

Like, the semen impregnated her because of the stabbing.

Yes.

It's wild.

Yeah.

It's the violent version of Virgin Mary.

Yeah.

I think it's only happened that one time.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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 i don't mean to laugh a lot of people really believe and then i wonder if engagement was even a thing i know i don't know 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 a sex ed and everyone passed around a butterfinger.

Do you remember this?

Vaguely.

And everyone took a bite from the butterfinger.

And then it was like the person at the end had this like kind of nasty butterfinger.

And 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.

Slobby.

Yeah.

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.

A, 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.

But how does it differ?

Because obviously abstinence education has been happening forever.

Now 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 abstinence-only sex education has been around for a long time, it is becoming a stronger force.

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 sexes 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.

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

Wait, what do you mean all this data?

About the decline in sexual activity.

Oh, yeah.

So no.

It's like already a well-established.

This is a part of it.

It's definitely not the explanation for it.

Okay, okay.

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 on.

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 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 that.

I guess so.

I didn't know.

I thought every single person on earth

was sex.

You guys were born the wrong time.

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

Would have been great.

I just remember growing up and my mother pointing out nonstop: 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.

There are plenty of studies that show that people who go through federally funded abstinence-only sex ed, 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 they don't use 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 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 safely?

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.

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, 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.

It's nuanced.

For LGBTQ plus 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 Z is 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, as social media has been super helpful for young 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.

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.

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

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.

Well, that's a bummer.

I didn't know that there was another option.

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.

You know, I appreciated 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 disparing.

That is a very reasonable way to respond.

What's the the other option when you're seeing it all?

You're seeing all the options.

That's new because of social media.

Right.

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

Exactly.

Or having all the options.

Or having 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, I made my shoulders look bigger.

Because this goes back to like how men should be

big, tall, dominant, etc.

Yeah, yeah.

You don't want someone at 17, 18 to be thinking about all the ways that their body is deficient because they're already doing that.

You're already in the midst of puberty.

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.

Yeah.

So this, I found it 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.

Believe they're entitled to

it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Entitled to sex.

They don't have to do anything to earn it no no good job no talking skills it's just yours by virtue of being a man how cool for them 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?

That is how the men approach.

Right.

And so I think that they're discounting that possibility.

And it does make men feel bad about themselves.

Yes.

Also, from the second me too happened, I had two immediate thoughts.

One is great.

Two is we are going to be in a transition phase that's going to be very fucking painful because, okay, men are going to be less rapey.

That's the request.

Exactly.

Right.

Women are going to have to pursue men.

That's also going to 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.

Yes.

If we want people to hook up.

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?

We wouldn't be a species that got here if that wasn't a primary 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.

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.

Yeah, I would want both for people.

Yeah.

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

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.

Tall order.

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 week.

The chastity thing did not necessarily reverberate with people.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

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.

I bet.

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.

You should absolutely get your heart broken.

I agree.

It's a quintessential experience.

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.

That's right.

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.

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 that 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.

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, but they're voting conservatively.

So the question is, why are you voting conservatively if you are so left?

What about the influx of vibrators and toys and stuff that are good?

A lot of women, myself included, are like, I'm good.

You can meet your needs.

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 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.

What's interesting is that masturbation is also falling.

What?

Yeah.

Really?

That's so weird.

I know, because to your point, masturbation is really free.

You don't need another person to do that.

You don't even need a toy to do that.

You don't have to ask them to leave.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you know how.

There's no awkwardness.

Unless someone walks in or your mom catches wind.

Yeah, well, that, I know.

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.

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 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 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.

He's not.

This group

does.

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

Unless they were saying the many problems that men present.

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.

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.

Oh, interesting.

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

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.

Accidentally, yes.

Because you have a guaranteed source of it.

And you have better sex with the partner in general because you've had those communications.

And Republicans tend to have higher marriage rates.

So if Republicans have a source of sex, it would make sense that they're having sex more often.

Yeah, more sex and better sex.

And I'm growing up as a progressive and a very sex-positive person.

I'm like, how could that be?

That's the group that seems to be terrifying.

Probably self-reported.

They're saying we have great sex.

Also, Republicans are more likely to be men.

So you might be over-indexing on the men reporting better sex.

No, no, these are women.

It was women having orgasms.

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.

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.

It's in support of their values, which is family 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 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 got to have enough good faith to grant that what they told you is the truth, or we're nowhere.

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

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

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.

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

I think there's also this misconception that the right is anti-sex.

I deliberately chose the term sexual conservatism and not anti-sex in the book because plenty of right-wing groups are very pro-sex once you're married.

Like there's a very rich tradition tradition of evangelical handbooks on how to have your best sex life ever with your husband.

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, you need to be good in bed.

Burn up the bed sheets.

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 site 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.

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

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

Well, I don't know who's lying.

I don't care.

Maybe the left is lying.

If I had to guess, everybody's lying.

Because everybody lies.

Yes, yes, yes.

Everyone's equally a piece of shit and everyone's equally good.

No side has a monopoly.

I don't know how many people really want to be like, yeah, my sex life is shit.

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

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 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 good sex.

Across the board, I don't know if it's left to.

I'm just saying specifically, I recognize that.

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.

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.

No, we're going to solve

this conversation.

We're fixing it right here, right now.

What do you think the impact of Me Too was?

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

But I mean, in the impact of people having sex with one another.

I don't think it led to the sex recession.

This exorcession was already well underway by the time that that was happening.

Yeah, yeah.

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.

Tell me about Title IX.

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 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 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 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 Me Too 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 it.

And then you have Me Too 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 these are environments where sexual assault is rife.

We are seeing a lot of sexual 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.

How about COVID?

That seems self-evident, but what did we find out?

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

Oh, really?

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 sex ed.

It moved 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 right with their families yeah

stay tuned for more armchair expert

if you dare

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Okay, and now, Roe v.

Wade, what do you think the ripples of that are?

I think we're definitely still living in this.

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?

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 and the overturning of abortion rights.

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

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 Robie Wade.

Everybody who paid attention to reproductive rights, both sides of the abortion debate, knew that Robie Wade was on its way out.

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 going to go.

I was guilty of that.

Yeah, saying.

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 anxiety 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.

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

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?

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.

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 a gender right now to be a certain way?

Oh, power.

I think all three of us could admit it's not that simple.

So it's definitely some percentage of both.

Nature nurture.

Yeah, yeah.

Reed 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.

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

Cheat, just like powerful men do, and powerful female rulers have done terrible things.

I think power is a very corruptive force.

I do think that women would be serial killers in this circumstance.

Yeah,

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

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

And is it gendered?

Because men would be incentivized to say, no, they would kill two.

Men do tend to say that they would kill two.

It's women who sort of flip back and forth, generally speaking.

Yeah.

There are cultures that 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 with female serial killers i'll ask but i don't

know if i was hearing that there was a lot of serial killing happening 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.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Okay, so everything that you learned talking to all these people and all these patterns you saw emerge.

Again, you asked me, do I even think sex is good?

I do.

I don't know if you do.

I personally like sex.

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

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

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 in 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.

And their population is declining.

Which sparks all of this talk about parenatalism.

And they haven't necessarily been able to turn that around.

The thing that we do know is that as countries industrialize, 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.

Yeah, me too.

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, and then we get into the future, that's not hard to imagine at all, which is you're going to have an AI partner and it's going to fulfill all your needs.

And that's it.

That's the wrap on humans.

Well, the planet might appreciate it.

We had our time.

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 young people.

Get out in the world and interact.

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

Yes, go get drunk.

This is what we do.

Meet some people.

Yeah.

Change numbers.

There was one 19-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 in the second because I was like, you've just knifed me.

I want you to know how hurtful that was that just happened.

The late 20th century.

He's not wrong.

He's not wrong.

Or whenever you're talking about the early 1900s, you'll go like the turn of the century.

And I'm sure they'll start saying the turn of the century.

Oh, my God.

No.

It is really hard to know when you're just becoming old and when you have a really principled point of view.

It gets harder and harder to know.

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.

Yeah, yeah.

And has more nuanced discussion than just, why aren't these young people fucking?

They've got to get out there.

What's wrong with them?

Yeah.

Pull your boots.

What is it?

Pull your pants up.

Oh, pull your boots out.

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.

Yeah.

I'm sickened by the notion.

This topic is politicized to begin with.

Yeah, we can't let them take that.

But sex is always political, isn't it?

That's my stance that I'm building this whole book off of.

You mean historically?

Historically.

Hunting and gathering, it's been political.

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.

Oh, interesting.

I think of politics as a bizarre abstraction, a story we came up with.

And I think of survival as an intrinsic real thing.

But doesn't politics determine who survives?

Who gets to tell the story of how the survival happened?

I'm saying politics were invented as we understand them 1,300 years ago or whatever.

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 an institution

which involves governance of the people.

I don't know if I think it's political.

I think it's survival, yeah.

They were trying to reproduce and make sure they had a partner that would bring in resources.

So the survival is that political?

It depends on how you're defining politics.

Political, yeah.

Yes, because 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.

I think I'm very informed by the 1970s feminist tradition of consciousness raising.

Are you guys familiar with this?

No.

It's very simple.

It was during second wave feminism, you would have groups of women get together and they would share their personal stories about whatever was going on in their lives.

Like, I'm a housewife.

My husband doesn't do any chores, no tour 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 different places here, there is some kind of political core that is driving.

Product of a system.

Yes.

And the product of a system is always shaped 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.

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.

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.

Yes.

And I'm urging everyone to reject that.

If you're on the left or the right.

Just go out to a bar.

Just get out there.

Pursue your personal desires with it and do not avail yourself to this stupid architecture that gets mapped onto everything.

The fucking 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.

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.

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.

I feel like we keep on devolving into borderline arguments.

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

Thank you.

Yes.

I love arguing.

I don't know if that's going to be.

Yeah, yeah, me too.

Me too.

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

No, I grew up in a family where we love to debate and argue.

So I'm enjoying this.

Okay, good, good, good.

Okay, so let's say I was actually sold 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.

No, no, no.

I was molested.

I'll hit you with that.

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 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 like a long reverberating effect.

And particularly, like if you're a sexual assault survivor and you get disenfranchised out of 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.

Yeah, it's hard to know.

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.

Has not enough options.

You're going to be picking between two bad options.

I agree with that.

I I think people should come up with their own values and see how they map on to politics.

I really enjoyed this.

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.

I'm really happy you took the time to do it.

And I hope a lot of people read it.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Stay tuned for the fact check.

It's Red and Party Down.

We're rolling

with the homies.

What?

I'm embarrassed about something.

Two things.

I'm embarrassed about something this morning, too.

Oh, great.

Let's talk about our embarrassed seat.

Yeah, it's time to cleanse.

Okay.

Time to repent to confession.

Yeah, confession

hour.

Okay.

I'm embarrassed because some people consider my feet

very

attractive.

Eric.

Yeah.

One person.

Yeah.

Well, maybe a ton of people, but just specifically, Eric.

He has stated that he loves my feet.

I have perfect feet.

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 L.A.

Have we ever had him do his whole schmeal?

We need to do that at some point.

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.

He had to sell these shoes and to women.

And he, of course.

He didn't sell any shoes to men.

He wouldn't shoot sell shoes to women.

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

Well, he can look at someone's feet and go like, I'm five and a half.

You know, like he, he knows people.

And he knows when they're more or less attractive than others.

He's seen a lot.

He's seen a lot.

He's a bit of an expert.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he it's like if you make love to warren beaty and he says you're the best that says a lot because there's been tens of thousands of people that's like when that massage therapist gave me a very nice compliment about my body right it felt extra good yeah because he sees he sees bodies for a lot of french bodies french bodies um anyway so I knew I was going to be seeing Eric, and I didn't even think about the fact that I haven't, I've let my feet go a little bit.

I haven't got a pedicure in a while.

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.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Oh, yeah.

I don't care if you've done your nails or not.

I wouldn't notice that type of thing.

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

but you thought that on the plane yeah you did yeah okay also mixed with like i'm gonna be in bathing like my toes are gonna be out sure sure in general but also eric was gonna be here and like

i don't want to ruin the illusion for him yeah

and um and i just remember because

I hope no one can see on the camera.

I think you should hold them up.

No.

I show my comb over.

No, I can't.

Okay.

You're not ready.

I'm not ready.

You did last fact track have your shoes off and feet out.

And you could see them?

Yeah.

On the wide.

But you couldn't see up close.

The problem is they're just not cut or, and the paint is all chippy.

And I have a new scar on my foot.

There's a lot going on.

Okay.

Okay.

Don't look.

No one look.

Everyone turn away.

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.

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

Doesn't look good, guys.

It looks fine.

It might not look its best.

Doesn't look its best.

And to me, that means bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So yesterday, we were in the sauna.

Eric was, I may, I felt like I managed to get by without him noticing.

Because you've been on the boat and stuff a lot.

Yeah.

They've been out.

Shoes have been off.

Yeah.

But I don't think he noticed.

But then he was sitting above me in the sauna.

And I was like, he's going to notice and he's going to puke

and cry because this prize possession is

exactly and so I said Eric don't look at my feet I know but I just

that's tactically not the move I wanted to get ahead of it like I didn't look at your feet at all but if you said to me don't look at my feet all All I would do now is look at your feet.

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

No, that's not how people's people's brains work.

If 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, 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 pedicure.

And I was like, this is about,

it's happening.

It's all going to come out.

And I got to get ahead of it.

And I said, Eric, I haven't got a pedicure in a long time.

Don't look at my feet.

So even more like, they're messed up.

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 hold it.

Anyway, he said, okay, I won't look.

And then a couple of minutes later, he said, money.

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

I know.

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

It was disappointment.

Yeah.

I would like to know if is it your toes he likes?

The whole foot.

He says it's the whole foot.

The whole foot.

I wonder if there's certain pieces he more fetishizes than I like.

I wonder too.

Yeah.

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

And he's like, oh,

I mean, I have that when I think about people who I'm attracted to.

There are like parts that are random parts, very random, not the expected parts.

Right.

That I like, like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Okay.

That was one.

Did you say there was two?

Yeah.

Yeah.

My second embarrassment.

Okay.

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.

Yeah.

And it's very good.

I think it's in a bunch of games.

It's certainly in Euchre as well.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's very, very, very bad.

And it's rare.

Like, 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.

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.

Right.

That's why it was so, it was so

right.

Like I was, I, I know, I know what happened.

There's no reason to explain to the people.

Yeah.

Um,

but I was out of something.

Yeah.

And so in my head, that's what you were playing.

So I was ready immediately to just do that.

Yeah.

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 very embarrassing.

Oh, wow.

I didn't notice that you took that hard.

I didn't know you took it that hard.

Okay, mine is worse than those two.

I mean, they pay a lot more culpability on my part.

So yesterday was a big birthday celebration, Kristen's birthday.

Yeah.

And

there were little things playing throughout the day, but there was a sauna in.

Yeah.

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 got to 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

and i came outside to meditate this morning oh oh no

And the hose was still in there.

Oh, no.

Yes, I have been overfilling it all night.

I'm so bummed.

Shoot.

And then

it's broken.

I just wasted a ton of water.

I mean, we're in

a waste.

We're in a sea of too much water currently.

We're not in LA.

I just was like, I can't believe you left a hose on for 12 hours.

It's longer.

Now I'm exaggerating in the reverse.

I'm minimizing.

It was probably 14 hours.

Okay.

It's not great.

Well, that's a rough way from me to start my day, like recognizing I made a

little bit of a grumpy mood.

was like,

I did notice that.

I don't think I was in a grumpy mood, but maybe it read that way.

Well, because I meditated and then I journaled and that was a, I was able to kind of steer out of

the flagellation.

It's just so funny.

Like that to me is a huge failing as a man.

Yeah, and to me, if I did that, I'd be like, of course I did it.

I mean, I wait.

Okay, no, I would be, I would think, oh, 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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

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.

It wasn't.

Also, it's your house.

Like, it's one thing if you do 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 huge but

in that adventure i lost a shirt okay okay

and i so then yesterday morning i walked over to the boat to see if i could find the shirt

um and it was closed the boat was closed yeah yeah, yeah.

So I got kind of down.

Yeah, you can crawl in there.

Yeah, I got down and I was like, oh, I'll crawl in.

And 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 tight and then I'm floating away and I don't know how to get your boat back.

Did you have your phone with you?

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 got to.

I know I wouldn't even 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 I generally generally take that pretty well.

I'm only mad when I fail.

Yeah, but it's so scary.

Oh, yeah.

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

I know.

So I didn't, I didn't.

You just gave up.

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

What shirt is it?

I found it.

You found it?

Where is it?

Yeah.

I found it on the walk back.

It had fallen out on the walk back.

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

Exactly.

It was a new shirt.

It was a vintage shirt I got.

Yeah, so our big adventure, which was was

what a day.

Yeah.

What a day.

It was a crazy day.

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 26 miles once you've passed the locks.

Right.

So a lot to think about there.

I don't, you know, what are we going to average?

How much fuel do we need?

Yeah.

How long is that going to take?

Blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

So we,

and we had to race to the locks because the locks are mostly used by these huge barges.

Yep.

And it takes hours for them to load all the different barges into the locks.

You might need to tell people about the locks.

I had no idea what they were.

Okay, great.

So locks

help connect two bodies of water that are at different elevations.

So if you imagine one swimming pool is 20 feet 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 of the upper lake.

You go in the water.

Then you let all of the water out of this big chamber.

Yes.

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 lock master.

All this stuff's new to me.

There's a lock master who controls the lock.

Oh, God.

I was glad he was there.

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

No, no, no, I just wanted some oversight.

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 that.

So anyways, I got the lock master's number off of the internet and I called and it just a dude answers.

Yeah.

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, they're very cool, so much cooler than I was expecting.

I think I thought we were gonna drop down like 20 feet, maybe.

And we dropped down 60 feet.

Yeah.

We did, we dropped down 60 feet.

We did the math.

We did the math and we looked it up on the internet.

But the locks are 400 feet long and 87 feet wide and 60 feet deep.

And if you add all that up, that's 15 million gallons of water.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

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

It was really cool.

I liked it.

I liked it for a while.

Then as we were getting really low, I did feel very,

why do I keep

no, it's the movie.

I keep forgetting that.

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.

A 60-foot wall of water.

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.

Okay.

Right.

That we know, we think.

And when you

do know.

When you say we, you mean I.

I said, less, we forget I can't swim.

Oh, I can't swim.

Okay.

Yeah.

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

I think I still have a case.

Okay.

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

Okay, that's fine.

There we go.

Okay.

I knew there was.

You're the only one that thinks you can't swim.

I, here's, okay, I can swim a little bit.

I can't, I can't, and I am certain of this, swim up 60 feet.

of water.

I can't.

I can't even, I think 10 feet I can't do.

I can barely do five feet, which is my height.

Okay.

So

I'm dead, right?

Like I am dead in that scenario.

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

this.

And then how soon were we out of it?

Another 10 minutes?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what was your anxiety level out of 10?

It was like equal parts.

As we were going down, my anxiety was going up incrementally.

It was inversely proportional.

Yeah, which was cool.

Yeah, yeah.

So it drops us out onto this river.

Yes.

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 reminded me of the St.

Joseph River in Sturgis, where I used to go canoeing with my pippi.

Just the most beautiful scenic boat ride.

It was nice.

It was definitely.

So, so there was a girl at the house earlier that morning

who lives here.

And

you weren't here for this, but she, she was like, what are you guys going to 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, I mean, 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.

I got the feeling when we we went through the lot 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 yeah that lives on the lake or very few clearly and then there were no other boats on the river no and then we never saw anyone on the river yeah we went 26 miles on the river and we didn't see anyone so we were definitely doing something of novel but i loved it because you're seeing the back we saw a naked woman out in our um

watering her flowers on her deck lincoln spotted oh wow she said oh that woman's nudie uh and i thought yeah she has has the freedom to be nudie because 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 going to be difficult.

It was not.

You can just pull, again, nobody's doing this.

Pull your boat right up to this dock right under the pedestrian bridge that leads into Nashville from the stadium.

QR code, registered

code to get out of the locked gate.

So easy.

It was easy.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And then we went into, we walked into town.

It was 350 degrees.

Yeah.

We walked over to

what I think was one of the best burgers in Nashville.

It was a good burger.

Yeah, the one hotel has an incredible restaurant.

We had a wonderful lunch.

Everything's right.

Went shopping, which I normally hate.

Yeah, you bought pants.

I bought pants and sunglasses.

Wow.

That's the most I've shopped in in a decade out in public it was weird to see you shopping ding ding ding these pants are one of the things i like

yeah they're nice 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 yeah because it took about two and a half hours to get there it was a it was a hike yeah and so we come back again everything's honky door i call the lock master 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 60 feet.

And that takes a bit longer.

Yep.

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.

I think we had about an hour left, anyways.

By the time we get on 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 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 in a pontoon boat, 44 actually.

What a machine.

Starts crazy downpouring.

Uh, there's lightning everywhere.

Um, 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.

Um, it was harrowing

from your perspective, what was happening.

I was driving.

Yeah, you were driving.

Rain just blasting in my eyes.

It was painful.

I had to put a shirt on midway through.

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, 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 this towel.

But very quickly, the towel just becomes a hundred pounds, right?

It's just like a weighted water towel on you, but it did help with the hail on the face.

Yeah, I really did think we were experiencing hail at one point because the raindrops got so big, they're like the size of your eyeballs.

Some of them that

might have been huge, and I'm like, gee, are we transitioning to hell right now?

Yeah, so fucking cold at that point.

Freezing cold, yeah.

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 why are my underwear exactly the whole thing is why is my anus wet yeah how does water gotten everywhere like I just sat in a puddle yeah yeah yeah yeah um anyway it was it was rough and I

I was like

let's just we're just gonna

we're just gonna I was thinking several different times while I was driving.

Yeah.

This is a challenge for me.

Of course.

Yeah.

Like, this is painful.

Yeah.

And you got to see it through.

Yeah.

I mean, you just have to imagine it's like a good 35 minutes of that experience

before it let up a bit.

Barely.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

And I was, I had mentioned, I'm aware of lightning.

Very aware of it.

Cause 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 a 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.

And I just did the math quickly.

What are the options right now?

No, that's exactly.

You can't go to shore.

We're going to go to some stranger's dock.

We'll 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 got to, you got to pedal down and get through this.

I know.

I guess, yeah, I was like, I'm just going to, I'm just going to breathe through it.

Give immersion therapy for you.

Yeah, I

you don't need any immersion.

I hate,

I

hate

being cold for one.

I just hate being cold.

Yeah, you like being hot.

I love being hot.

I can stand a lot of heat, but I can't stand barely any cold.

Almost no cold.

And I hate

being wet in clothes.

Oh, sure.

Well, I don't think anyone likes that.

No one likes that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't think you're unique in that.

No one likes that.

There's no way to know people's sensitivity levels, right?

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.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

And it was pelting it.

But then Eric, Lily, and Lincoln

answered the call of the wild.

They were like Lieutenant Dan in

Forest Gum.

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.

Yeah.

They were dancing at the front of the boat.

Yep, 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 a ton great

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 not me yeah you are not neither was Kristen yeah it's a bad analogy and I also and Molly so no all of them makes no sense yeah just those were up those kids were up there 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.

No, no one was a stinker.

Yeah, everyone was just

complaining.

Yep, we're doing it.

Even Delta, who hated it, she knew complaining wasn't going to be.

Yeah, everyone was just like, we're here.

We got to get through this.

We got to get through it.

There's no point in

doing anything other than just whatever you need to do.

To get through this.

Yes.

Yeah.

so yeah it's just a funny snapshot of all of our different wiring and our dopamine levels and whatever else yeah it was funny because at one point when the when the towel was so heavy yeah i was like is it

am i is it worse is it worse under here like i mean 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 a second i was like should i just do that

but i was like i can't like i can't

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 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 i know give yourself emotions with your physicality yeah and so i think in that situation my brain caught up to my body.

Yeah.

But you're more likely, you're already more likely.

I'm a little more primed for that.

Anyways, we got back.

We made it safely.

And you got us home safely.

It was an adventure.

Oh my God.

It was so fun.

It was a big adventure.

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

Which ones?

The boat, the boaty situation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

that's a good question.

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.

right?

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'm just very

activated by those.

Yes,

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I think you see,

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

Yeah.

So for you,

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

This is how you operate, right?

I don't do that.

Right.

Yet.

I

also have a

billion stories.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right.

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

Yeah.

We already have the answer for this.

Okay.

Let's hear it.

Because yours, the stories that are impactful for you, the threshold's just way lower.

So it's like, and this is what we joke about, like your Seinfeld stories.

Yeah.

It's like kind of nothing happened,

but so many things happen because how you're experiencing it mentally.

No, I couldn't get to the store.

Right.

You know, you're just like, and then I knew I couldn't go in there.

Yeah.

Those things.

They're more psychological.

What I'm suggesting is like me in

60 mile an hour winds, rains with in my eyes is you looking at the laundry mat, not knowing if you're going to go in there because there's a guy in there pulling his hair.

So it's like, does that make sense?

Yeah.

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.

Yeah.

to feel scared of the woman screaming on the street.

She was scary.

Right.

But for me, I almost wouldn't remember that 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 uh-huh and then later it will come up or something as a story yeah and then that's fun or whatever but like i don't i don't know then you don't crave it i don't crave it but i'm not because i don't have to like and you're not evaluating your life by it life

is gonna happen whether I'm aware of it or not.

There's going to be stories.

There's going to be things that happen.

I personally don't need to instigate.

Exactly.

I know it's here.

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'm not ever worried about that.

Yeah, 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, 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, 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.

I know.

And that's what's so funny.

Like, I also have things like that.

They're not adventures.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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.

Yes, yes, but they're not like yours.

They're not high arousal.

Correct.

Correct.

Yeah.

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

Yes.

And ding, ding, ding.

What?

My shirt that I lost is Mark Twain.

What?

It's a picture of Mark Twain, and it's like, yeah.

And it's like the rep, a repertory theater put on a Mark Twain play.

That's what the shirt is.

Oh,

wow.

Well, he was a riverboat captain on the Mississippi.

I was thinking about that as we were driving on on the river

because 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.

Yeah.

And you want to 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.

Yeah.

And then once you're there, you're traveling all these crazy ways.

You're not getting on a car car or anything you know i know horse yeah all kinds of

and uh and yeah he just was constantly in your i'm like that's a crazy back then you're making a three-month decision to go to europe 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

she was like yeah i would just never go anywhere i was like yeah i guess yeah Dopamine levels.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

If there was like

a 90% off rose sale on the other side.

I'd go three months.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I loved it.

I loved it.

Good.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was a fun adventure.

Want to do some facts?

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

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Another cut.

My hands have really taken a beating in this life.

Yeah.

You're prone to cut those.

Yeah.

I tend to cut those.

And hurt your ears.

Your ears tend to get these are your Achilles.

Your fingers and your ears.

Yeah.

And it was scary because

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 nine, you know, at 9.30, it was like, we're leaving at 10.15.

It was like, ah, you know, and so it was like Kathy, you you know, and everyone's like running around, home alone, very home alone.

Get out the body.

Very home alone vibes.

We could have left Delta behind on accident.

Yes, exactly.

And

I have a little pocket knife on my keychain.

It's very cute.

Awful.

It's tiny and adorable.

Can you bring it through Carry-On?

I didn't.

I'm shocked I was able to.

I think it was an accident.

It wasn't in your checked bag.

We're so sorry, DSA.

I'm so sorry.

So anyway, I had, I was going to wear an outfit that had, it was new, so it had tags on it.

So, I used the pocket knife to

cut the tag, and I did a big slice.

But then I was very, I was like, oh my God, because we have to go, like, we had to go.

Yeah, and you might need to go to the emergency room.

I know.

I knew I wasn't going to 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 deal with this on the boat.

Yeah.

And then you brought a lot of, you brought a lot of band-aids.

In fact, in your purse on the trip, someone needed a band-aid and you had an entire band-aid box.

You had a full bag of medications.

I basically had a roll of

paper towels.

Yeah, you have a right-aid in your bag.

I do.

I carry a pharmacy in my bag, and everyone benefits.

Yes.

Everyone.

Everyone does.

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.

Yeah.

Link, everyone gets to pick a night of what movie we watch.

And Lincoln picked Mission Impossible the first night.

Yep.

I think six we watched, Am I Six?

Yeah.

And all of us were like, this is

fucking great.

Yeah, really fun.

And then I think maybe because we had watched that, it suggested other Tom Cruise movies.

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, Eric and Molly's daughter, who invented Turkey Christmas, Magic Turkey,

very creative young lady.

Very.

She said,

I think

Tom Cruise should open up Tom Cruise's Cruise.

Yeah.

And it's a theme park.

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.

Top Gun.

Top Gun, whatever.

Days of Thunder Ride would be incredible.

Yeah.

We said Rainman, Kristen said, Rainman could be like the sensory area.

The sensory area.

Yeah.

It's a good idea.

So then Tom Cruise's Cruises became a funny joke.

And then also, then Dahlia said you could also do a show about the people that work there called Tom Cruise's Cruise's Cruise.

Cruise members.

Cruise members.

Yeah.

Tom Cruise's Cruise.

Tom Cruise's Cruises Cruise Members.

Yeah.

Crew members.

Yeah.

No cruise members.

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,

fuck, A Few Good Men was so good.

Yeah.

Oh my God, was that movie good?

Yeah.

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

First time I'd seen it.

Was it?

Yeah.

What did you think of that?

I loved it.

I mean, it it won best picture.

This isn't a revelation, but loved it.

Tonight, maybe we're talking Rain Man.

We're talking, there's so many good options.

There's so many.

I think, I really, I think Jerry Maguire,

I think the kids will like Jerry Maguire.

They will.

It's a great film.

They're not getting enough love stories.

Jerry Maguire is

a great love story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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.

You had me at hello.

Yes, you can't handle the truth.

Like,

the risky business.

Whatever he said, Matt.

Yeah, he says 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.

Oh my God, yeah.

More than anyone.

Anyway, he's a movie.

He's no, like, he's

a a movie star

he's a movie star 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 okay yeah let's do some facts

okay so this is for carter sharman great talk she studied gen z sex yes the sex recession gen z yeah very interesting and um i like her she was really cool yeah she was really really cool 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.

She was awesome.

Really enjoyed her.

I really like that first name for Carter.

Me too.

Me too.

And that's my one of my facts.

Oh, um, she said it's uh, she thinks it's a common name in the South, where we currently are.

So that's a ding-ding name.

Yeah.

Now, I have appeared, and this is the social security website.

They would know.

I guess.

Um,

I can pick names by year.

I mean, year and state.

So, what should I pick?

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

Oh, that's a good question.

She was like five years younger than me.

So she was.

Oh, geez.

92.

Search 92.

Okay.

And should I, what state should I do?

We should do a southern state.

Yeah.

Let's do Mississippi.

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: can you specify female Carter?

These are 100.

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.

I'm going to have to go 100.

Okay.

92.

No.

Yeah.

Start way higher.

No, no.

I'm sorry.

Oh, the year.

Oh, my God.

Just for that, I'm starting at 100.

Sex book monitoring.

I wanted to.

I want to still.

Please don't.

Please don't.

Just start at the top.

I could go so fast.

No, start at the top.

Okay.

Number one male name is Christopher in Mississippi,

1992.

Female name, Ashley.

Tracks.

Yeah, Ashley Madison.

Okay.

How many?

Well, we can pick a new state.

I want to do a multiple.

You want to do multiple.

You went from 100 to just giving me the top one and two.

I said, start at 10.

For a lot of states?

No, for Mississippi.

I know, but I want to do multiple states.

That's what I'm saying.

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 write me a couple more names off of Mississippi?

Sure.

Thank you.

Okay, top

of three male names

for Mississippi Mississippi in 1992.

Christopher, James, Michael.

These are standard.

Okay, female names.

Top three.

Ashley, Jessica, Brittany.

Yeah.

I know them all.

Met them?

Know them all.

Already met them.

Okay, now let's do a different state.

Let's do, okay, then I want to do Michigan

and Illinois.

Should I do 1987 my birth year?

Okay.

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

Oh, my God.

Monica's number one?

No.

Okay.

Christopher?

Yeah.

Again.

Yeah.

Jessica, female.

Then Ashley.

Ashley was number one in the O list.

Jessica Ashley Brittany.

Wow.

Christopher Michael Joshua.

Joshua.

Yeah.

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

Josh's, yeah.

Okay, let's do Michigan when you were born, 1975.

Where Dax was the first name.

Okay, Michigan, 1975.

Way back when Dax was coming out of the vagina.

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

Your mom's vagina.

Your mom's vagina.

Okay, top three.

Michael.

Michael's hitting that top.

Biblical, baby.

Jason.

That's new.

Christopher.

Chris banging.

Christopher.

Okay, girl.

It's a name for any season.

I guess so.

Top three.

Or Amy.

Let me guess because it's growing up.

That's fun.

Yeah.

Amy, Julie, and Sarah.

Amy's number two.

Oh, that was good.

Jennifer is number one.

Sure.

That's classic, too.

And Heather is number three.

Oh, I had a stepsister named Heather.

What was the other one you said?

I said Julie, Amy, and

Sarah.

Okay, Sarah is 12, and Julie is 14.

So you're pretty good.

Julie's 14?

Yeah.

Did you know any Angela?

Carrie.

Carrie is 21.

Oh.

That's good.

These are still like, this is top 100.

You won't even let me say.

Will you do

four through 10?

Harranous.

Harry.

Yeah,

I met so many Haronouches.

I dated two Haranoushas before I was even in high school.

I wish I dated a Haronouche.

That sounds beautiful.

It does sound nice.

I was trying to quickly go from 100.

It was Sharon, Misty.

No, no, no, I didn't dance for 100.

It was 10, 10, 10.

This isn't your opportunity to do 100.

10.

When can I ever do 100?

On my birthday?

You've done 100.

Everyone loves it so much.

Everyone always writes in.

It says more 100 plus lists.

Okay, 10.

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

Lisa.

I'm surprised Lisa's not higher.

Lisa's seven.

That's pretty high.

Melissa, Michelle, Angela, Heather, Amy, Jennifer.

Okay.

Now I feel like I kind of want to go back real quickly.

And do what I asked you to do in Georgia.

Yeah.

But now I already know, but I want to do top 10.

Yeah.

Okay.

10, 1987, Georgia.

Because a lot of lists are top 10.

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

I think it's the most popular kind of list.

So, 10 females.

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.

1996.

1986?

88.

Oh, yeah, I made you older than you.

I'm going to do 86 because I'd like you to be older than me.

Okay, boys.

You're not going to like 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've not used any of the same years.

So we've really learned nothing.

We did Georgia, but we didn't do

the same

year.

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.

That's better than what we have here.

And lucky.

Anna Baker's preferred dozen.

That's right.

Now, the girls, Jessica, Ashley, Amanda.

Jessica and Ashley, my God, they really hit the U.S.

Jessica Chastain.

The Simpsons.

Jessica Simpson.

Took both of them.

Okay, now I'm going to 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.

And I think that's.

There's a gap between it's more popular in the south and it's the top, it's in the top 10 in the south.

It's not on the top 100 in Georgia.

I guess let me look at Tennessee real quick.

Let's take a look at Andy.

Oh, you can look at 100 names.

But Carter would be in Georgia because President Carter's from Georgia.

And that's not there.

Okay, Tennessee.

No Carter's in Tennessee.

Okay.

In the top hundred.

Dominique makes the list, but no Carter.

All right.

Well, that was really fun.

That was great.

Did we need to look at any more states?

No, I think that's.

Oh, I do want to just

want to look at California.

Wow.

Xavier.

Oh, yeah.

Salamander.

No, that's where you think you're so funny with California being so weird.

Chris, Michael, Tony.

Michael, Daniel, Christopher, Jessica, Ashley, Stephanie.

Michael, Daniel, Lisa.

Okay, well, I think this is fun.

If anyone wants to 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 oh my god congratulations northwestern week yes unifile i gotta say out of all those elite schools that one's at the top of my interest level yeah it feels very artsy it is artsy i think and then i have a lot of friends who went there and they're all cool yeah i think they're like they're super smart but not snobby about being smart 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 Yale or like these Ivys.

So it's like still a very, very good school.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's not Ivy.

So that would line up with what you're talking about.

Yeah.

And I went there.

What?

Zach Brath.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

And the last fact is that you're not Zach Brath.

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

Yeah.

I thought that was great.

That's great.

Okay, that's it.

All right, love you.

Love you.

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Hi, I'm Monica.

Welcome to Reclaiming.

I would define reclaiming as to take back what was yours.

Something you possess is lost or stolen, and ultimately you triumph in finding it again.

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My 2013 is your 1998.

I lost everything during that time in my personal life because of the choices I was making professionally.

Chelsea Handler, welcome to Reclaiming.

I did have a teacher who instilled in me that I was going to do something special.

And she was like, you're going to have an impact.

Sophia Bush, welcome to Reclaiming.

You went all the way.

You committed.

And if it wasn't for you, you had the courage to tell the truth and get out.

And I had to say that to women in my life, and I had to learn how to say it in a mirror to myself.

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