In Search of a Shepherd
New blog, new rules
Hi there,
Long time no talk. Hope you’re great.
I’m starting a new weekly blog project featuring posts on almost anything. You can get the entire post for free, but if you want to support the blog you can pay five Aussie bucks a month to get audio posts as well (along with the ability to comment and get full access to the archive).
Scroll to the bottom to upgrade to a paid membership.
Why am I doing this? Because writers should write. That’s pretty much it. Love to hear from you, and if you have a second, would love you to share this around.
This week, I talk about podcasts and Dax Shepherd and male loneliness. Next week…apples! (I’m not kidding). Scroll to the bottom for the audio post if you’d prefer.
As always, I wish you poodles and noodles and joy galore.
Thanks!
Dave
PS, below is a photo of me taken by my three year old. You’re welcome.
It’s not until I see Kristen Bell that I understand what will happen. As the car turns the corner on the massive, dark-brick home, I see her through a kitchen window.
Holy shit. That’s Kristen Bell.
She is washing dishes and has soap up to her elbows. She sees me and smiles and waves. I do the same, thinking I should ask her to sing ‘Do You Want To Build a Snowman?’ into my phone for my young daughters.
The house has three stories. There is a punch to my sternum when I realise what this means.
‘Oh my God. I think I might cry if I see the attic.’
I say this aloud to the driver, Monica Padman, co-host and co-creator of *Armchair Expert*, which she records with her best friend and Bell’s husband, Dax Shepherd, in the attic of their home. The five-year-old podcast is an international smash hit, and I’ve listened to every episode religiously for the past three years (at times, that’s been more than five hours a week). Padman and Shepherd’s voices have kept me company during long weeks of lockdown in the pandemic, bouncing my newborn daughter to sleep in the hours before dawn and on afternoon walks through my neighbourhood.
Dax is in his front garden, wearing a pair of dirt-steaked denim overalls. He has been gardening with his two daughters. He beams when he sees the car approach.
‘Dave!’ he cries with genuine warmth.
I get out of the car and can barely think before Dax embraces me in a tight hug. He’s a big, strong man, and smells faintly of engine grease and soil.
‘Man,’ he says, holding me close, ‘you’re doing so well. Oh my god, I’m so proud of you.’
I breathe in the hug, his body pressing into mine.
Then I wake up.
It’s a few minutes after four in the morning. I’m not in Los Angeles. I’m in humid Brisbane, in a bed next to my sleeping wife. But the memory of the hug remains. My face is wet with real tears.
That was the best hug I’ve ever had in my life.
I’m thirty-five years old, have been in and out of therapy my entire life, and tend to think deeply about things. I’m not sure this qualifies me to discern dreams as mostly bullshit, but that’s my judgment.
If dreams were important, our brains would be designed to remember them. As it stands, I only remember a very small handful of mine, and all of them feature a male celebrity validating my existence. In my early twenties, stumbling through early adulthood and flirting with mental disorders and suicidality, Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, showed up in my dreams several times. Martin had left my subconscious alone for well over a decade, and now, here was Dax Shepherd strolling into my bedroom at dawn to tell me I was okay.
Chris and Dax (surely we’re on a first-name basis at this point?) aren’t precisely artistically similar. But they are both men who lead with vulnerability. They have big feelings, and their feelings are part of what they put out into the world. They are also both incredibly masculine. One is a twenty-first-century pseudo-bohemian rock star, the other an ex-addict, gym-obsessed, car freak. Coldplay’s albums were on repeat for the first decade of my adulthood. But Armchair Expert is the sound of my thirties.
While the ubiquity of podcasts is moderately recent, they’ve become an emblem of intimate parasocial relationships for millions. Often publishing several times a week, it’s impossible not to feel a closeness with your favourite hosts. Outside of my wife and daughters, Dax Shepherd and Monica Padman are the people I ‘hang out’ with the most. In the last three years alone, I’ve listened in near-real time to Monica’s journey in freezing her eggs, Dax’s drug relapse, treatment and recovery, and every family vacation in between. I know a surprising amount about Wobby-Wob, the mostly off-mic engineer. I’ve delighted at the slow integration of New Zealand doco-maker David Farrier into the fold of regular voices as he’s struck up an unlikely and affectionate friendship with Monica. All of this is auxiliary to the format of the show, which generally revolves around two interviews a week: one celebrity (past guests have included Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Prince Harry) and one - usually incredibly academic and specialised - expert (past guests have included scientists and researchers on global economics, religion, psychology and creativity).
Of course, I am far from alone. Most of the human race listens to podcasts at this point, including other cis, straight(ish), white guys like me.
This a problem, because most of the podcasts we’re listening to are hosted by other cis, straight, white guys. We are often listening to them for many hours, sometimes every day.
And a lot of them are dangerous morons.
I’ve spent most of my adult life monkey-swinging between male mentors. Each one was a beautiful disaster. Recounting the stories makes me sound like I’ve spent a decade chasing after douchebags, but I swear they’re great once you get to know them.
They would offer me some masculine warmth and validation. In return, I pledged my soul to them and offer to leap into fire on their behalf. Alcoholism or addiction was a frequent feature. So was attempted suicide or psychotic breaks. Others worked themselves into a complete physical collapse and urged me to do the same.
Before you ask, no, my father had none of those features, although his spectacularly low self-esteem has now calcified into a long list of mental health diagnoses. He’s a good, gentle man, but our relationship is complicated. Like most sons, I wanted more fathers, so I went looking.
Dax’s connection with other men is a frequent topic of conversation on his podcast. He’s now been attending all-male Alcoholic Anonymous meetings for seventeen years. AA is a societal anomaly: a space where men come to talk face-to-face and practice deliberate vulnerability. I’m not an addict, but I share some of Dax’s history with surviving abuse. I can certainly relate to his feelings of being lost and uncertain, and a few pieces of his childhood trauma.
But really, what man couldn’t? At this point, male isolation and loneliness is an accepted societal norm, and most of us don’t have AA. The easiest place for men to find company is the internet, where para-sociality (the asymmetrical companionship that comes from media figures) reigns supreme. As a man over thirty, I’ve been startled by YouTube’s algorithmic ability to channel me into ideologically based viewing. A beginning interest in stand-up comedy will inevitably lead me to comedians who poke fun at the ‘woke’ agenda of leftist politics. I made the mistake of watching some of these videos. You know, how you might slow down to examine car crash wreckage. Within moments I was led to videos of some of Dax’s podcast competitors: Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
I haven’t devoted hours to Peterson and Rogan that I have with Dax. Both men are regularly held as the problematic children of a surge in toxic masculinity. Spending a little time with them reveals that most of their messaging is banal. They encourage their listeners towards ‘healthy’ lifestyles, although everything sits inside a patriarchal philosophy of diluted stoicism that’s comfortable for conservatives. Discipline is key. So is self-accountability. If something is wrong, you’re probably not working hard enough.
They are also emotional men, talking about distressing topics at a time when, for many of us, the world is falling apart. But then, of course, Rogan questions the validity of vaccines. Or Peterson plunges into a repugnant analysis of the ‘role of women’ reliant on pre-second-wave-feminism gender binaries, and I’m lost.
But many others lean in.
‘Whoever gives men a sense of community wins,’ said the celebrated psychologist Dr. Esther Perel on another podcast about masculinity (The Man Enough Podcast). It’s the only cure for loneliness: other people. The sense of community a podcast can foster becomes essential to the richness of our lives. Dax turning up in my dream isn’t a fluke; it’s a sign of how deeply embedded he’s become in my subconscious.
I’ve found my perfect fit in Dax, who is science-friendly, centrist, empathetic and often in open, friendly conflict with co-host Monica Padman. Their friendship is a check and balance system that is built into the show's architecture. Padman is from Atlanta, Georgia, but her parents come from India. Having a female person of colour sitting alongside Dax at all times is vital. Years of therapy and AA meetings means Dax is refreshingly self-aware of his own ego, but he would be the first to admit that the show would be drastically worse without Padman. The post-script to every interview is framed as a ‘fact-check’, ostensibly serving the purpose of Padman correcting any BS that Dax spouted throughout the interview. This tames the show in a way that Rogan and Peterson, who are given complete free reign, never bother with. It’s also the show’s secret sauce in more intimate terms. Most of the time, the fact check becomes an audio journal of two friends catching up. Listen to that twice weekly for a while, and you’ll be convinced you’re their new best friend.
Still, a lot of my friends who I’ve recommended the show bounce off immediately. Shepherd and Padman are just another two obnoxious Americans who interview celebrities. I get their point.
For the modern man, if Dax, Rogan or Peterson aren’t for you, there are mountains of other dudes with a microphone. They range from useful and kind-hearted to extreme and dangerous. The science-forward Andrew Huberman with information-dense episodes on topics related to health and wellbeing. The former monk Jay Shetty wants you to meditate and contemplate the meaning of love. The alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones who said school shootings were staged. The naked yogi Will Blunderfield can teach you a course on semen retention (turns out that’s a thing) and turning male lust into a ‘positive life force’. The entrepreneur and psychedelic advocate Tim Ferriss. The supplement maker and hippie body builder Aubrey Marcus. The literate anarchist and chaos-machine Russell Brand. The thousands of ‘comedians’ who grab a mic and start talking with the explicit purpose of building a community.
I have tried listening to all of the above men and have found myself allergic (and sometimes disgusted) by many of them. Others I check in with occasionally (Huberman, Shetty and Ferriss are within reach when I’m up to date with Dax and Monica). Before my beautiful-hug dream, I found it easy to condemn other men for falling down internet rabbit holes with ideological weirdos. Worse, I felt pity. I thought myself superior.
I’m not. I can give you all the reasons why Dax and Monica are different, but for many men, I know there are other podcasts that are just as important for their wellbeing and sense of belonging. I began listening to *Armchair Expert* because the interviews were an intereseting way to pass the time. But my subconscious knows the truth.
I don’t think of myself as a lonely man, but Dax Shepherd has become the only adult male I hear from regularly.
The warmth of my dream hug leaves me bathing in a golden aura. It’s a quarter past four in the morning, and no one else is awake. Still, the feeling is lovely enough that I don’t want to forget it. I get out of bed and eat a banana in my underwear in the pre-dawn dark, trying to mentally remember the feeling of being held and safe.
More next week. Audio post available for paid subscribers.