Soothe Your Damaged Masculinity With This Moisturizing Balm

The most successful industries out there are the ones that play to consumers' insecurities. Many self-care companies prey on people’s anxieties about how they look and smell, offering products that purport to make the wearer more appealing to romantic prospects and the rest of society by making them more attractive and less smelly. For much of the modern era, these products have been aimed at women, reinforcing dominant beauty standards and making loads of money as sales have soared. Recently, that strategy has grown to reach a previously untapped market: men and people with penises. A slew of companies now offer all sorts of sprays, balms, and supplements for men’s nether regions. In addition to persuading men to invest in full-body hygiene, they’re also changing modern ideas about masculinity.

This week on Gadget Lab, we invite WIRED’s head of research Zak Jason to describe his descent into the weird world of testicle sprays, bag balms, and men’s wellness products.

Read Zak’s story about his balls-out exploration of the nascent men’s beauty products industry. Read Ashley Lauretta’s investigation into why we stay up late even though we know it’s bad for us. Find our conversation about voicemails and audio messages in episode 590.

Zak recommends leaving your friends voicemails in the middle of the day. Mike recommends the podcast Bad Dates with Jameela Jamil. Lauren recommends going to bed earlier.

Zak Jason can be found on Twitter @zakjason. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: If I asked you what the most popular podcasts are, not your favorite shows, but generally the more popular shows, what do you think their common theme would be?

Michael Calore: Well, I think of people like Joe Rogan, of course, and other shows of that ilk, which is like confident men interrupting each other into microphones with their opinions.

Lauren Goode: Ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah, a lot of the most popular podcasts are pretty bro-y.

Michael Calore: Oh, they are?

Lauren Goode: I mean, not all of them, but a lot of the most popular podcasts are hosted by these charismatic, long-winded men who have, shall we say, unique interview styles and also discuss some questionable topics and interview guests for two hours plus. And I was wondering if maybe the Gadget Lab should give this a try.

Michael Calore: Are you saying that that you want me, the charismatic, long-winded male, to host this week? I thought this was your turn to host this week.

Lauren Goode: Well, maybe we could flip it on its head a little bit and I could host it, but we can channel some of the vibes of those really popular shows.

Michael Calore: I mean, on paper it sounds terrible, but secretly I'm here for it.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, this could fail spectacularly, but let's give it a try. Yes.

Michael Calore: Please.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren Goode: Hey everyone, welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by the head of our fact-checking and research department here at WIRED. Zak Jason. Zak is joining us from a bathroom in New York City. Is that correct?

Zak Jason: That's right, yeah.

Lauren Goode: OK, good. I'm glad we didn't have to fact-check that one. Zak, it's great to have you on the program.

Zak Jason: Great to be here. It's a privilege. Thank you.

Lauren Goode: So Zak, you wrote a story this week for WIRED.com that I thought would be fitting for our new theme here on WIRED's Gadget Lab, which we are calling the “bro show” today. I can't believe that we actually decided to do this, but here we are. Zak, I'm going to make you read aloud your headline. What is the headline for this story?

Zak Jason: The headline for this story is "My Balls-Out Quest to Achieve the Perfect Scrotum."

Lauren Goode: So you decided to go on a quest to test out these deodorizing sprays marketed at men and people with scrotums. And just so some of you are prepared for what we're really getting into, I wanted to read aloud some of the comments from our Instagram page. After WIRED's social media team promoted Zak's story on the gram. Someone wrote in, "This has Pulitzer all over it." To which someone else responded, "You mean Pu-litzer?" Someone else wrote, “You OK, WIRED? Congratulations, you've reached a new low.” And my favorite, “These comments are nuts.” The comments are indeed nuts because we are talking about Zak's nuts. Please don't fire me, Condé Nast HR. We're talking about Zak's nether regions, and I want to hear all about this dive down the rabbit hole to find the perfect ball spray.

Zak Jason: I think I've—in part I blame Gadget Lab for this. I, like several dozen other WIRED colleagues, are a part of the Gadget Lab Slack channel at work. And some months ago, one of our colleagues sent a Slack that began, I think he wrote something like, “Just been emailed asking if we'd like to review this. I'm trying not to be offended.” And it was a bottle of Sack Spray, which is a pH-balanced scrotal deodorizer that had lavender and chamomile and a few other scents baked in. And being ignorant, I thought this was a joke product. I thought it was like something you'd find at Spencer's Gifts. But I Googled “ball deodorant” and turns out I was dead wrong, and there were dozens and dozens of competitors of sack sprays, and I regrettably had to find out why this was a thing.

Lauren Goode: And to be fair, you took a very WIRED approach to this. We're starting a new series here called Rabbit Hole. Our writers really are going to go deep down the rabbit hole. You spent two months with these sprays, right?

Zak Jason: Yes. I spent two months with a near daily routine of spritzing and spraying and smearing my scrotum with way too many of these sprays. And yeah, I think my interest was twofold. I think for one, I was wondering, why was this a thing? Why had this become a seemingly multibillion dollar industry as part of some $70 billion men's grooming industry? It became quickly obvious that these scrotal deodorants didn't serve any medical purpose. There wasn't a novel strand of bacterial flora that was spreading among men. It was clearly just messaging that was quite effective. So what did it say about men's place in the world that millions of them were spending $30 a pop to make their balls smell like tapioca?

Lauren Goode: Is that a desirable... Please continue.

Zak Jason: Yeah, we can get into that. Yeah, and I also... I had been feeling a little bit schlubby myself. I was in my early thirties. I'd had a kid, I had moved to New York, and I don't know, was feeling a little removed from who I am and who I once was and was looking for ways to feel myself again. And there was admittedly some kind of strange appeal of, this is really ridiculous, but maybe kind of whimsical, to treat myself in this odd way. And so I was mailed, had a several dozen types of sprays to play with, and I talked to users and makers and cultural theorists.

Michael Calore: So it seems as though the products were appealing to both your deflated self-esteem and maybe your deflated sense of masculinity? Is that what the marketing is really like, is that the bell? The marketing is ringing?

Zak Jason: Yeah. I think it's appealing toward a really fragile sense of masculinity. A sense that men have lost their standing in the world, their place in the world, and things like skincare and sack sprays are offering the promise to make yourself smell and feel amazing and get yourself back in the game. I think that's part of it. This is also coming out at a time when there's a lot of dating influencers who are almost like belittling men into doing everything they can to find a mate, including making their selves smell amazing down there.

Lauren Goode: So after you started using these products, and presumably you were doing some internet research and placed some orders for them, what happened to the rest of your online experience? Did you start seeing ads for hair growth products and erectile dysfunction pills and all the things?

Zak Jason: Yeah, I think there was a lot of ads that were following me. It was strange to be reading The New York Times and have ads for Ballgasmic Sack Wash. I think one of the stranger things was, as I was looking at some of the influencers who do sponsor content for some of these sack spray manufacturers, the biggest one of them is this company Manscaped, who I think has dozens of ads on a lot of these bro-y podcasts. They have an army of some 6,000 influencers from every walk of life. There are drag queens, there are UFC fighters, there are dating coaches, there are alpha male influencers, and following them, watching their content for a couple hours, TikTok and YouTube and Instagram started feeding me some more unseemly content. Some like men's rights activists type contents, like misogynistic content. Now, I don't think the purveyors of sack sprays work with those types of influencers, but it was a quick slope toward some pretty gnarly stuff.

Michael Calore: So did they work? Did you feel more moisturized? Did you feel more deodorized and more importantly, did you feel more confident? And did you feel more like a real man after two months of using these things?

Lauren Goode: This is very scientific.

Zak Jason: No, I did not feel like more a real man. I think one of the main promises of what these sack sprays make is to make you feel like a refined man. To make you level up and live your best life. But when I was removing Balgasmic Sack Wash from my kitchen table to make room for my daughter's lunch, it did not feel like I was living my best life. I feel like it's a totally unnecessary thing. We've had baths for 50 centuries and they work just as well as any of these products do. I really couldn't quite tell who they were for. It's not like ... I'm on the subway a lot. I'm in close quarters with people a lot. No one is telling me your sack smells fantastic. Yeah, I think for the most part I felt just quite silly doing all this, but there was, I'd say the greatest benefit is just like, there's a moment of whimsy in my day. There's this part of me that is just kind of ridiculous and hanging there and giving it some love and spraying it with this silly, heavily scented product brought, like—it's a childlike sense of whimsy, so I can't knock it for that.

Lauren Goode: I have to ask, how did your partner feel about this new ritual of yours?

Zak Jason: She belittled it relentlessly. I think one of the first times I used a crop exfoliator, I may have one of these products near me, and she said at one point that my testicles smelled like a hospital floor. She said at one point that it smelled like hot tub water from MTV’s Spring Break. They were not ... I think a lot of the ads for these products make sack spray really presentational. Use this, you're going to find the hot date. Pete Davidson, who's like America's most—

Lauren Goode: Famous dater. Really.

Zak Jason: ... Most famous dater, is the face of Manscaped, which is the largest purveyor of sack sprays. The implied message in all of his commercials is, spray this on your balls and you can be a famous dater as well. But that was not the case with my wife. I mean, this is also part of a growing trend of men manscaping in general, men trimming their pubic hair. When I used one of the products Manscape's Lawnmower 4.0, which has a 4,000 RPM motor and a three—

Lauren Goode: Sounds incredibly dangerous.

Zak Jason: 3000k, yeah, LED light. I used it and my wife, I think there's a line in the piece that she looked at it in the same way that she looked at my parents' dachshund when the groomer got a little carried away. So it was, yeah, no net benefit for my wife.

Lauren Goode: My parents ... All right, there's so much to unpack here, Zak, we have to take a quick break. We're going to take that break. We're going to take some supplements and when we come back, we'll have a two-hour interview with the dubious source. More of the Gadget Lab bro show when we return.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: So Zak, you said earlier that this isn't just about Sack Spray, it's about self-care companies offering salves for fragile masculinity. Women have certainly had all kinds of beauty products and wellness services marketed to us over the years. And I mean, I think it reached a kind of peak with Goop, which is the Gwyneth Paltrow–founded brand that has become the epitome of luxury self-care pseudoscience. But more and more are these brands, and a lot of them are online only or direct to consumer, are trying to use the same playbook with men. Explain how this is actually much bigger than balls spray.

Zak Jason: Yeah, balls spray is just a drop in the pond in the men's self-care machine. And there's a history of hygiene, particularly like scent hygiene, migrating or expanding from women to men. I go into it a little bit in the story where deodorants first caught on with women and they were marketed almost exclusively with the messaging that if you smell like yourself, you're not going to be accepted in polite society. And this was the time when women didn't even have the right to vote. Men didn't glom onto the idea that they needed to cover their natural scent until the Great Depression when ads started suggesting that if a man brought his natural musk to the office, he would risk his livelihood. And suddenly, when at a time of economic fragility, men glommed onto deodorants. And it's a similar path today with, in some sense this is a male equivalent of douching and it's a similarly economically uncertain time. So men are increasingly susceptible to messaging that their scent is risking their livelihood. But that's ... OK. That's like beside the larger point of, men's self-care game is exploding. It's like a $70 billion global industry. The celebrity men's skincare line is the new celebrity tequila brand. I think like Jared Leto and Travis Barker and Idris Elba and a bunch of other male celebrities have their own skincare line. There's like a 400 percent increase in Botox treatments for men over the past 20 years, and sack sprays are a very affordable way to level up. Now there are like $75,000 leg lengthening surgeries that thousands of men are doing each year. There are tens of thousand dollars ab-etching surgeries that the men are doing to just optimize every square inch of their bodies. This is all part of a broader trend.

Lauren Goode: Is there any scientific evidence that men or people with penises need to clean their nether regions? You mentioned pH balance earlier. Does that area need to be pH balanced?

Zak Jason: That's a great question, and it may have been a fact-checking hole of mine to not dig deeper there. I think there are technologies that are 50 centuries old—baths that do the job just as well as any of these scrotal potions.

Lauren Goode: Scrotal potions.

Zak Jason: Scrotal potions or scrotians. Yeah.

Michael Calore: Scrotians.

Lauren Goode: Oh my God.

Michael Calore: There it is. So I mean, what you're talking about is an explosion in marketing, and the thing that I noticed both from reading your story and from just poking around in this world is that a lot of these men's grooming companies, they use the same cheeky tone with a lot of innuendo and sort of self-effacing humor. So they're walking a fine line, they're trying to get men to take their full body hygiene more seriously, and you should really wash, son, you should really wash. But they're also making fun of themselves and they're making fun of their customers' bodies.

Lauren Goode: And they're being totally sophomoric.

Michael Calore: Yes. They're making everything more juvenile than it should be for profit.

Zak Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's a great takeaway, and I think it took some trial and error for these companies to get there. Manscaped, to come back to them, is founded by this guy Paul Tran, who's in Vegas, and he told me that for the first year or two, Manscaped tried out a very clinical messaging, you should do this because it's an area that's prone to bacterial growth and men didn't care. They just like—sales were tanking. And then once they started, they arrived at this cheeky tone where they would have billiard balls, anthropomorphized as testicles. Or hand grenades as balls, or sending out tweets, “Trimming your balls is main character energy.” That's when sales started to take off. And yeah, I think they're all playing this clever game where they're framing, judging your testicles as a way to become more of a masculine man, but it's also part of self-care. So it's a means of tapping into vulnerability while simultaneously enhancing masculinity, which is I think for many men, a sense of mild relief looking for an outlet. I mean, I do feel like in some ways they promise the opportunity to work on your manhood without actually working on yourself as a man.

Lauren Goode: Mike, I'm almost afraid to ask, have you tried any of these?

Michael Calore: I have not. I have used Gold Bond, of course, but I'm sort of averse to scented products in general. Strong deodorants or strong deodorizers, or even my shampoo and my soap and my moisturizing lotion, are all unscented just because I am a little bit adverse to those things on my body. But I did ... I was curious about what's out there for me. So I noticed this, Zak, you probably noticed this too, but a lot of these companies that sell these things, they offer product finder quizzes on their websites. So I took one of these quizzes, I went to Ballsy's website. Ballsy is another pretty big company in this world. Their main product is called Ball Wash, so of course their URL is Ballwash.com.

Lauren Goode: Wow. Kudos to that web manager who secured that domain. Please continue.

Michael Calore: So I took the quiz at Ballwash.com. It asked me about what my priorities were. The options were things like healthy hair, I want to smell good, I want to stay clean. I want to keep my skin moisturized. It also asked me where I lived, if I lived in the suburbs, in the city, in the mountains, on a tropical island. And it asked me, curiously, what my favorite alcohol was. There were options for beer, wine, and liquor. There was an option for sober, but there was not one for cider, which I was offended by. Then it asked me for my email address just to capture my email address. I gave it foo@ballsack.com, and then after procuring my fake email address, offered me a recommendation for three products I could buy. Each of them was $20. There was a scrotal cologne.

Lauren Goode: As one uses.

Zak Jason: Was this Nut Rub?

Michael Calore: Yes, it was. It was Nut Rub. It was the ocean and air scent of Nut Rub. Quote, “modeled after the same, incredibly clean and yet not overpowering scent we use in Ball Wash, ocean and air captures the freshness of aquatic territory, crushed mint leaves, warm brown sugar, and the zest of a lemon.”

Lauren Goode: Oh my God. Oh my God. I've—

Zak Jason: Where's air in that? What does air smell like?

Michael Calore: Obviously you've never ... You've never experienced the freshness of an aquatic territory.

Lauren Goode: Obviously, you've never been on a date and said, "Oh, you smelled like aquatic territory." This is hot.

Michael Calore: It also offered me a scented body wash for my whole body and a collagen face moisturizer.

Lauren Goode: Oh, so they went right in for the kill. Yeah, they were like, you want the ball spray, but also your face is losing collagen.

Michael Calore: Yes. Because they also asked my age.

Lauren Goode: Right, OK.

Michael Calore: They also asked my age, and me being—

Lauren Goode: Which is 39.

Michael Calore: Yes, being of advanced age, it might be time for me to start applying collagen face moisturizers. And to be clear, I didn't buy anything and I probably would never use any of these products because of all the scents in them. But it was interesting to me that there was lifestyle stuff that was sort of shoehorned into this quiz that is just about hygiene.

Lauren Goode: I have one thing to say to all of this, which is welcome to the club. Truly though, one of the women on our WIRED Instagram page wrote, “so glad men finally have the opportunity to join women and our crippling anxiety around overmanaging things bodies do naturally.” Zak referenced this earlier, but women have been just pummeled with marketing around vaginal cleansers for years. I mean, for centuries. Douching for people with vaginas has been around for a really long time. At one point, Lysol even jumped on the bandwagon.

Zak Jason: For decades. Lysol was the most popular douche, and it burned cervixes and just a completely nasty product. But, yeah.

Lauren Goode: And I remember growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, seeing it on the shelves of pharmacies. Seeing all different kinds of feminine deodorant products. But a lot of OBGYNs say, you don't actually need to douche. And now I think what we're seeing a little bit more of now is self-care as an indulgence or some kind of bomb for, I don't know, everything else that's troubling in the world. Why have we seen the emergence of 12 step skincare routines? Why are people willing to spend $300 on a jar of luxury lotion that some celebrity says that they need? I mean, why do I find YouTube “get ready with me in the morning” videos soothing? And at the end of the day, what you're touching on here with this idea that these are being marketed to men at a time of economic precarity and male fragility, I mean, maybe in some way the reason why women have been so susceptible, myself included, to this kind of wellness marketing is because of, I mean, as Zak said, there was a period of time when women were told that they were unclean and they had to do X, Y, Z in order to clean themselves, but they weren't allowed to vote. And it could be because of the power dynamic that exists in households. It could be because we make less money than men generally. It's like this way of wresting control back over your day-to-day life of saying, well, I'm going to do these little rituals and these self-care and theses beauty routines as a way of, I mean, you're not combating any big problems with these, but maybe you're making yourself feel a little bit better just in the moment.

Zak Jason: Absolutely. And to your point, when I told my wife that I was embarking on this journey, she said like, "Oh, hi guys. It's beauty standards. Welcome. This is Sephora for the schlong or Goop for the gonads. We've been waiting for you."

Michael Calore: Sorry, but your wife sounds like the real—

Lauren Goode: She should have written the headline.

Michael Calore: She sounds like the real comedian in the relationship.

Zak Jason: She's the funny one. Yeah. She's much more professionally buttoned up than I am, but she can grill me better than anyone. In terms of this bomb or this idea of control in a time when we have less and less of it. I read this book, A Mind of Its Own, which is a cultural history of the penis, and it came out in 2001, and it's by this writer David Friedman. And the history ends around 2001 with the explosion of Viagra and Cialis, and the writer attributes that in part to technology. He says that technology has rendered nearly all the previous definitions of masculinity obsolete. Man is no longer measured by his physical strength, his ability to build shelter to his family, fight in hand to hand combat, or draw water from a well. Machines do that for him. Muscles are more symbolic than useful, so the erect penis has become the most powerfully symbolic muscle of them all. I read that to my wife and she just said, wah, wah, wah. Which was the take-home point. But it made me think that that book came out more than 20 years ago, and that was all before social media, smartphones, and drone strikes, generative AI. Maybe there's something to, as 21st-century technology further subsumed humanity's physical and mental lives, the logic could follow that, so grew the desire to control not just the penis, but everything around it. Big Tech begets big testes.

Lauren Goode: Oh my God. OK. I'm speechless. I think we should leave it there.

Zak Jason: Sorry.

Lauren Goode: All right, let's take another quick break and then we're going to come back with our recommendations, although it's going to be hard to top Zak's sack spray.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Zak, what's your recommendation this week?

Zak Jason: I recommend calling your friends on the phone in the middle of the work day, and ideally them not answering and leaving a voicemail. I know you all talked with Jason Kehe a bit about the rise of voice notes a few weeks ago on the podcast. I think voicemail is a lost art. I have a friend who will call me two, three times a week and leave two, three-minute-long voicemails, just pretending to be various characters from an auto repair shop or a hardware store trying to sell me tens of thousands of pounds of Phillips head screwdrivers. And I think it's finding a few moments in the middle of the day to actually connect with a friend and leave a voicemail is a great way to remind yourself you're alive and you have people out there who you can connect with.

Michael Calore: OK, this is chaotic because first of all, you're talking about calling somebody on the phone, and then you're talking about asking them to check their voicemail. So if you really want to connect with people, I mean, that's a pretty brutal way to connect with somebody. But I appreciate that about it.

Zak Jason: Yeah, I have a small circle of friends that I've been testing this with.

Michael Calore: OK, so the expectation is built in that you may be calling each other on the phone and leaving each other voicemails.

Zak Jason: Yeah, exactly. I mean, yeah, you may want to brief them ahead of time or establish that this is going to be a practice, otherwise you may scare them shitless of calling them at 1:00 pm.

Michael Calore: And then you're basically encouraging them to not pick up. Right?

Zak Jason: That's the hope. I mean, if you get them at the lunch hour or whatever, late morning for three minutes, it's like you're both in on something, that you're chit-chatting on company time and you feel just a little bit of burst of—

Michael Calore: Masculinity.

Zak Jason: Masculinity, yeah, humanity. Or it's another way to fend off the fear of death is by leaving your friend a voicemail, I'd say. Yeah. Do either of you leave voicemails or receive voice voicemails?

Michael Calore: I receive voicemails from the people in my life who are older than me, and I leave voicemails—

Lauren Goode: Is that like two people?

Michael Calore: And I send voicemails to a very close circle of friends. And these are people who I've had telephone relationships with since before the dawn of the smartphone.

Lauren Goode: I don't receive voicemails. My voicemail inbox has been full since 2019, and I've kept it that way.

Michael Calore: Again. Chaotic.

Lauren Goode: Yes. So no one can leave me voicemails. And then when I leave other people voicemails, it's usually by surprise. I'm calling them, and then it just kind of goes to the inbox and I'm like, Ah. And then I feel that I have to preface it with, well, I'm going to do this old-fashioned thing and leave you a voicemail, and then maybe I apologize a little bit too for doing it. And then I hang up as quickly as possible and throw the phone down, and I'm like, what did I just do?

Michael Calore: Like it's radioactive.

Lauren Goode: Yes. That's the voicemail process. Now I do do voice notes once in a while.

Zak Jason: It just doesn't, does it not feel good to hear a voicemail to you?

Lauren Goode: No, it feels good. It's just, well—

Michael Calore: It's usually a robot telling me that I have a prescription ready to pick up.

Lauren Goode: It's usually for me, a public relations person who—

Michael Calore: Is just checking in and circling back.

Lauren Goode: Just checking in, following up, circling back, and to suggest they're like SVP client of a company I've never heard of. And I'm really, really overwhelmed by messages. If I paid attention to the 33,000 messages in my inbox on any given day and all the voicemails, I would not get anything done. And I have to prioritize. So I don't like receiving voicemails in most cases now. And the people who are closest to me will leave little voice notes, and we talked about this with Jason. If you like it, you can save it. You can hit “keep” on iOS and it saves it. And if not, it just disappears. It's ephemeral. Goodbye. And that's it. It's perfect. But Zak, you know what? I respect that you're coming on this show today. You're pitching ball sacks, you're bringing back voicemails. We're talking about fragile masculinity, you're podcasting from your bathroom. You're really bringing a lot to the table here, so I very much appreciate this recommendation. Mike, what's your recommendation?

Michael Calore: I am going to recommend a podcast. It is called Bad Dates, and it is hosted by Jameela Jamil.

Lauren Goode: Oh, from The Good Place?

Michael Calore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: She's great.

Michael Calore: Yes. She's an actor and a host and an activist. I think she's a Marvel character now. Anyway, she hosts this podcast and it's pretty new. It started at the beginning of March, I think. So it's about six or seven episodes in, and it is—

Lauren Goode: What would make her bad dates better?

Michael Calore: What's that?

Lauren Goode: Balls Spray.

Michael Calore: Oh, yeah. Yeah. It would make them less agonizing, maybe.

Lauren Goode: I guess.

Michael Calore: Or at least make them smell better.

Lauren Goode: Let's ask Zak.

Michael Calore: So the show is people talking about their bad date experiences. The guests on the show relate their own experiences. Jameela relates her own bad date experiences, and then there are listener submissions. So people leave a voicemail or write in an email about their own bad date experience, which she then recounts to the guests, and it is a lot of fun. It is also very much R-rated, which makes it super fun. There are some just horrendous stories about dates gone wrong. There are also just some really funny comedy of errors type stories. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a really great show. The conceit of the show, which is also their motto, is that everybody has a bad date story, and if you don't have a bad date story, that means you are somebody's bad date story.

Lauren Goode: I love it. I've had a lot of bad dates, so I'm not a bad date by that motto. Do they talk about their bad dates with other celebrities or are these normies?

Michael Calore: Yeah. No, a lot of them date in the celebrity pool. They're all on Raya, so some of them are like, oh, yes, yes, this is a famous person, or this is a person—when we dated was not famous, and now he is extremely famous. But it's all anonymized, so you don't know who they're talking about. You only get very subtle hints about who they're talking about, and I have not been able to figure out who any of these people are. So.

Lauren Goode: That sounds really fun.

Michael Calore: It is. It's a lot of fun. It's just, it's like it's gossip. But in a raunchy package.

Lauren Goode: Is it subscription?

Michael Calore: It works just like any other podcast. It's a Wondery show. It also appears on Amazon Prime Music, but I think you can get it. I don't pay for it. I just get it in my podcast feed, just like any other podcast. It's also a Smartless production, so it works, I think the same way Smartless does, where if you subscribe to their Patreon or whatever, you get an episode a week early maybe, but I don't know, anybody can listen to it anywhere. It's has a regular RSS feed, just like every other podcast.

Lauren Goode: I love Smartless. You know what Smartless is?

Michael Calore: It's a bro show.

Lauren Goode: It's a bro show.

Michael Calore: But it's kind of different than normal bro shows, because we don't do the bro show thing.

Lauren Goode: It's not like Joe Rogan. It's just three bros. But I like it.

Michael Calore: Good bros.

Lauren Goode: Good. I like that bro show.

Michael Calore: It is fun. What is your recommendation, Lauren?

Lauren Goode: My sleep was a little off because I traveled to New York last week. I was on the East Coast for about five days, and just as I was getting, my body was getting adjusted, I was flying back to the West Coast. And so now I'm been tired this week at 9:00 pm at night, and rather than fighting it and waiting for that second wave where I'm like, no, I have to do some writing, I have to read. I have to watch this TV series. I have to ... I'm just giving into it, and I'm going to bed at 9 pm. Really more like 9:30. It's great. That's my recommendation for you, or typically, if you have the ability to and the luxury of going to bed early, don't fight it, just go to sleep. You're not missing anything. It's like that saying your parents used to say to you when you were in high school or whatever. Nothing good happens between midnight and 2 am or something. I feel like nothing good happens between 9 and 11 pm.

Michael Calore: But that's when all the crappy local bands play at the bar on a Tuesday night.

Lauren Goode: Well, good for you. Happy for you. I don't know what's been wrong with me. Actually. I do know what's been wrong with me. WIRED published a story a while ago about why you stay up so late, and it was related to the pandemic, and it was like this idea of, we do this as a form of revenge, that we feel like we've lost something during our days, or something's being taken away from us during our days, or we're working too much, or we have too many obligations. And so then at night, it's that time for you to reclaim your time, and so you just keep pushing yourself to stay up later and later and later. And I have been really susceptible to that over the past couple of years and staying up way too late. And yet, I'm an early riser, so just not getting enough sleep. And this week I've been, I'm just giving in. I'm giving into the 9 pm tiredness. I'm going to bed. It's great.

Zak Jason: Are you falling asleep?

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Zak Jason: To ask a question that you ask on your other podcast, what keeps you up at night?

Lauren Goode: What ... Thank you for that plug, Zak. You're welcome back anytime. What keeps me up at night? My cat. His name is Nougat. This is the famous, the famous Android cat who was the inspiration for Android Nougat many years ago. But he's ... That aside, he is a very cute cat, but he is a very active cat, and he is a large cat too. So when he comes and sort of clumps on the bed at night, his presence is known. And I wake up typically, so he does keep me up at night, but I don't know. The past few nights it's been ... I really feel like a different person. I think this is the start of something beautiful, guys. We're starting a bro show. This is the new bro show of Gadget Lab. I personally want to hear from people. I hope people listen to this show and give us their honest feedback in the comments. I'm a little afraid, but actually I can't wait to hear from people. All right. That's our show. Zak. Zak, thank you for joining us on this episode of The Bro Show. This was really delightful.

Zak Jason: Thank you. It was a privilege. You could also call it Sleep Sack.

Lauren Goode: OK. We're going to move on, and thank you all for listening to this very special episode of Gadget Lab. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes. Our show is produced by the excellent Boone Ashworth. Goodbye for now, and we'll be back next week with another scintillating topic.

Michael Calore: Don't forget to microdose.

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