Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Hi, I’m Dax Shepard, and I love talking to people. I am endlessly fascinated by the messiness of being human, and I find people who are vulnerable and honest about their struggles and shortcomings to be incredibly sexy. I invite you to join me as I explore other people’s stories. We will celebrate, above all, the challenges and setbacks that ultimately lead to growth and betterment. What qualifies me for such an endeavor? More than a decade of sobriety, a degree in Anthropology and four years of improv training. I will attempt to discover human “truths” without any laboratory work, clinical trials or data collection. I will be, in the great tradition of 16th-century scientists, an Armchair Expert.

Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

A lively linguistic exploration of the speech habits we love to hate—and why our “like”s and “literally”s actually make us better communicators

Paranoid about the “ums” and “uhs” that pepper your presentations? Concerned that people notice your vocal fry? Bewildered by “hella” or the meteoric rise of “so”? What if these features of our speech weren’t a sign of cultural and linguistic degeneration, but rather, some of the most dynamic and revolutionary tools at our disposal? […Learn More]

After the Ivory Tower Falls: How College Broke the American Dream and Blew Up Our Politics—and How to Fix It

Today there are two Americas, separate and unequal, one educated and one not. And these two tribes—the resentful “non-college” crowd and their diploma-bearing yet increasingly disillusioned adversaries—seem on the brink of a civil war. The strongest determinant of whether a voter was likely to support Donald Trump in 2016 was whether or not they attended college, and the degree of loathing they reported feeling toward the so-called “knowledge economy” of clustered, educated elites. […Learn More]

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Plane

For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.

Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever. […Learn More]

Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization

Bringing his cosmic perspective to civilization on Earth, Neil deGrasse Tyson shines new light on the crucial fault lines of our time—war, politics, religion, truth, beauty, gender, and race—in a way that stimulates a deeper sense of unity for us all. […Learn More]

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human. […Learn More]

Bully Market: My Story of Money and Misogyny at Goldman Sachs

Jamie Fiore Higgins became one of the few women at the highest ranks of Goldman Sachs. Spurred on by the obligation she felt to her working-class immigrant family, she rose through the ranks and saw it all: out-of-control, lavish parties flowing with never-ending drinks; affairs flouted in the office; rampant drug use; and most pervasively, a discriminatory culture that seemed designed to hold back the few women and people of color employed at the company. […Learn More]

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. […Learn More]

The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: A New History, from the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

We humans are the inheritors of a dynasty that has reigned over the planet for nearly 66 million years, through fiery cataclysm and ice ages: the mammals. Our lineage includes saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, armadillos the size of a car, cave bears three times the weight of a grizzly, clever scurriers that outlasted Tyrannosaurus rex, and even other types of humans, like Neanderthals. Indeed humankind and many of the beloved fellow mammals we share the planet with today—lions, whales, dogs—represent only the few survivors of a sprawling and astonishing family tree that has been pruned by time and mass extinctions. How did we get here? […Learn More]

Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us

An “absorbing, provocative, and far-reaching” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) look at what power is, who gets it, and what happens when they do, based on over 500 interviews with those who (temporarily, at least) have had the upper hand—from the creator of the Power Corrupts podcast and Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas. […Learn More]

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. […Learn More]