Armchair Expert: Jedidiah Jenkins on Trust, Sobriety & Self-Acceptance

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So let's talk about this incredible episode with Jedidiah Jenkins. When Dax Shepard and Monica Padman sat down with him, the conversation just took off in every direction—funny, personal, and then unexpectedly deep. Jed's become such an Armchair Expert favorite, hasn't he? And for good reason. He's the author of Mother Nature, To Shake the Sleeping Self, and Like Streams to the Ocean, with a new book coming in early 2027 called Go Quiet on the Mountain.

What struck you most about this episode? The opening was so revealing. Jed shared this moment from Japan where his partner insisted, "We're not returning this car dirty." That simple idea of leaving things better than you found them became this running theme throughout the whole conversation—whether they were talking about cleanliness, memory, or emotional responsibility.

I love that. And then they shifted to those tiny observations we collect, right? Like whether Dax keeps a notebook like David Sedaris does, capturing those nicknames and fleeting ideas before they disappear.

Exactly. But then comes the classic Jedidiah mix of humor and chaos. He's riffing on wordplay, recalling bizarre military experiences, and at one point says, "I've literally shot every gun on planet Earth." But underneath all that, there's this deeper thread about how people move through the world— who gets to drive, who gets carried, and how those roles form early in life.

The road trip stories were legendary. Dax and Jed revisiting their years living out of Dax's 1984 Mustang, sleeping in fields, surviving that brutal 30-hour winter drive home from Salt Lake City. But what really got interesting was when the conversation turned to relationships and sexuality. Right, and Jed was remarkably candid about the gay world, dating apps, and that gap between public presentation and private feeling. He talked about being "an exclusive top," then trying bottoming and finding it transformative, saying, "It was so profound." For him, sex shifted from performance to trust—he said, "Sex is this opportunity to physically display the level of trust you have." That vulnerability carried into his discussion of sobriety and health too. The story about getting mysteriously sick around his first book release was intense—losing weight, night sweats, repeated ER visits, and then the symptoms just vanished after the book came out.

Dax and Jed connected that to psychosomatic stress, how unresolved pressure manifests as pain, addiction, or avoidance. By the end, the whole episode became this meditation on identity, honesty, and the long arc of self-acceptance. And that closing was perfect. Jed revisited advice he once gave a friend: "God does not want you to be lonely." Then Dax told him, "You are an explosion of thoughts." It's a fitting ending for an episode that was funny, intimate, and full of that restless curiosity that makes Jedidiah Jenkins such a compelling voice.