Dax Shepard, Anthropology Major

On his podcast, “Armchair Expert,” the actor unpacks the slippery chaos of human behavior.
Dax ShepardIllustration by João Fazenda

The actor, writer, and director Dax Shepard rounded the corner at the Hall of Ocean Life at the American Museum of Natural History, where a twenty-one-thousand-pound fibreglass model of a blue whale is permanently suspended from the ceiling. “Holy smokes!” he said, then paused and cocked his head. “I’m going to be honest: I thought it would be a little bigger.” He gestured toward a walkway encircling the exhibit. “Let’s go lateral with it, and see if we’re more impressed.”

Shepard began his television career in 2003, as the rascally sidekick to Ashton Kutcher on the MTV prank show “Punk’d.” He now stars in “Bless This Mess,” a sitcom about two New Yorkers attempting to sustain a family farm in Nebraska, and hosts “Spin the Wheel,” a new game show co-created by Justin Timberlake. In early 2018, Shepard launched “Armchair Expert,” a podcast in which he and his co-host, the actress and writer Monica Padman, affably unpack the glory and the chaos of human behavior. The pair would be working, an early press release promised, “in the great tradition of 16th-century scientists.” “Armchair Expert” was the most downloaded new podcast on iTunes in 2018, and it now averages around a million downloads an episode. In conversation, Shepard is agile, generous, and relaxed. His work on the podcast, as he sees it, is accepting that people are slippery and complex. “How are we hardwired, and what tools do we have to transcend that hardwiring?” he asked. “If it were only nature, we’d be at 7-Eleven at all times, foraging for winter.”

Shepard studied anthropology at U.C.L.A., and he often invokes his education on the podcast. “The No. 1 thing that people make fun of me about is how frequently I mention I was an anthropology major,” he said. “When we do live shows, someone will raise their hand to ask a question, and it’ll be ‘Hey, what did you major in?’ ”

Shepard, who is forty-four, tall, and athletic, was wearing a striped sweater over an “Armchair Expert” T-shirt. He and Padman have recorded more than a hundred and fifty episodes, interviewing a mix of celebrities (Will Ferrell, Gwyneth Paltrow), intellectuals (the developmental psychologist Todd Rose, the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein), and celebrity intellectuals (Esther Perel, Bill Nye). Even Shepard’s real-life conversations are peppered with facts—“The ratio of a human’s body-mass index compared with his penis length is astronomical,” he said, while passing a diorama of early man—and each episode of “Armchair Expert” ends with a calm and thorough fact-check, led by Padman. The probing, gentle rhythm of their conversation sometimes mimics that of a therapy session. Shepard hopes that his own vulnerability—he speaks often and frankly about his sobriety, his career, and his marriage to the actress Kristen Bell, who was his first guest—will make people feel more comfortable disclosing their own fears and weaknesses.

“A lot of our guests want me to know that they feel flawed, too,” Shepard said. He has come to understand that impulse—our desire to admit to imperfection—contextually: “Evolutionarily and culturally, we live in a manner that’s so different from how we were designed to live. We used to live in groups of a hundred people, and the illusion of perfection couldn’t possibly be maintained. You saw people shit on the side of the house; you heard your aunt and uncle having sex in the next hut over. Now we live in very private ways, and we all think that everyone else has this figured out.” It has been instructive for Shepard to see how his peers and his idols manage the difficult work of being alive. “It confirmed my suspicion that fame and money don’t cure any existential ailments,” he said. “That was the fairy tale that I bought into. But, if it’s not that, what is it? I’m endlessly interested in what works for people, and what I can copy or emulate. That’s the A.A. model,” he added. “Find somebody who has what you want, and then figure out how they got what they have.”

Shepard wandered into the Hall of Human Origins. When it opened, in 1921, it was one of the first museum exhibits to explore human evolution. “Oh, my gosh, early hominids! Look how tiny and cute!” Shepard exclaimed, walking toward a pair of australopithecines, the furry, bipedal primates that lived three and a half million years ago and stood around four feet tall. Fossils of their footprints suggest that the male had had his arm curled around his female companion as they trekked together through a field of fresh volcanic ash. “They’re adorable,” Shepard said. “So sweet.” He moved on to a diorama of a Neanderthal campsite. A male wielded a sharpened stick. “Now, look at this beastly son of a gun,” Shepard said. His voice was admiring. ♦