Stephen Dubner and the Joy of Quitting

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Lemonada

I've quit a bunch of things in my life, probably.

But the most glaring of those is graduate school.

So I quit on getting my PhD in English literature from Yale in the mid-80s.

And it was something that my mother, until the day she died, asked me if I was going

to go finish my PhD.

But I wish that I had, if only because I would like my credit to read, you know, such and

such a role played by Dr. David Duchovny, I think would be fun.

Or Dr. So-and-so played by Dr. David Duchovny.

That would be meta meta.

And as much as I joke about it, it hurts not to complete something.

It hurts.

It hurts to quit on something.

My consolation, however, is that I did go a long way.

I went as far as the dissertation.

There was never one moment where I decided to quit.

I kind of faded away from graduate school because I had started acting.

I'd started riding my bicycle to the train station in New Haven, getting off at Penn

Station in New York, riding my bicycle to my acting class, and riding it back.

So I was living kind of a dual existence between New Haven, graduate school in English literature,

and starting to think about acting.

And as I went further along, started working harder to try to become an actor, started

going on auditions, started going to L.A., I never really left.

It's possible that they're still expecting my dissertation at this point.

I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes

who we are.

Stephen Dubner is the host of the podcast Freakonomics Radio.

He's made that brand his life after co-writing Freakonomics back in 2005, which I read back

in 2005, and it blew me away.

I couldn't believe the kinds of questions that he was asking that made sense.

And in that way, asking questions, let's say it's Socratic, you know, that was the Socratic

method was asking questions.

So I look at him not just as an economics, you know, brilliant economics guy, but he's

also kind of an intellectual and a spiritual guide for our time.

He recently had a series on the show called How to Succeed at Failing.

Of course, he comes to us as a failure expert, not only because of that series, but because

of his own false starts and wrong turns, which you'll hear about.

He quit his successful band, quit the New York Times, and we both quit Ph.D. programs.

And he's such a podcast veteran.

He's an icon of the podcast.

So of course, he kind of welcomed me to the club, which was sweet.

So it's actually like a...

I mean, you're a trendsetter.

At the time, you thought you were late?

A lot of times when you think you're too late, you're just stupid.

I mean, I know where I'm coming from on failure.

I just know.

I know my soul.

But I'm interested to hear, what's your origin story of failure?

So I do.

I am scarred by seemingly minor failures from youth, as probably we all are.

I don't know if we all are.

I mean, right off the top of my head, I can think of at least three, which I won't bore

you with all of them.

But I will say this.

I think my feeling about failure was also informed by my family's religious orientation.

So I had a weird family religiously.

My parents were both Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of standard issue Brooklyn Jews, right?

They both came from immigrant parents.

And long story short, the two of them, my parents, before they met each other, but during

World War II, which was not insignificant, they both converted to Catholicism.

They both became extremely devout and believing Catholics.

better in that religion?

And neither of them were moving away from being Jewish because of antisemitism.

But really, they were both very, very deeply spiritual people, humans, as evidenced by

the fact that when they converted, they became among the most devout Catholics I knew.

And we hung out with only Catholics.

So the end of the story is that years later, when I moved to New York in my 20s, I ended

up becoming Jewish or returning to being Jewish.

But I was Catholic for the formation.

And the notion that gave me the most pause, I'll put it that way, was the idea of original

sin.

This idea that when you start, you've got a black mark on you.

You found it already.

I didn't like that idea.

I did not like-

It's a big idea when you grow up that way, because you're living your life to try to

essentially erase or supersede the failure that you were born with.

And I remember being like 10, 11, thinking, what kind of God?

I say it in an old Jewish man voice.

What kind of God is it that would have me love him or it for having marked me with this

failure?

Yeah.

Now, I don't mean to disparage Christianity or Catholicism, because many of my best friends

and most of my family members are there, but I did not like...

Failure hurts.

And you know what else hurts?

And this is the other thing.

Being accused of something you didn't do, I find is one of the greatest injustices in

life.

You think, man, you felt punished because you were born into the world and now you got

to work off your sentence in a way.

So anyway, yeah, failure burned me deeply.

And I made...

So I was a musician.

And when I was probably 12, 13, somewhere in there, I was asked to play the organ for

the high school graduation, Pomp and Circumstance.

And there's this big, massive organ that was backstage in the auditorium.

And I fucked up.

I didn't rehearse enough.

I rehearsed at home on the piano, but then when I got on it during the ceremony, I couldn't

quite hear myself and I started getting lost.

I didn't really read music, so I was playing by ear and I got lost.

And you can't stop playing when there's a processional or whatever you call it.

So I just started vamping and I grew up playing Chicago blues piano.

So you were playing boogie woogie?

And it was like, I feel my forehead heating up now with shame.

And so it was a horrible experience.

And the lesson I learned from that is you can never over-prepare for anything.

And if something matters to you, you need to suss out all the elements and figure out

how to solve for them.

So I had a similar failure like that.

When I was around the same age, I was the live announcer for the lineups of the varsity

basketball.

So, you know, varsity basketball in a little town is a big deal.

It's the biggest event in town every whatever, Friday night.

And so all I had were the lineup that the opposing team had submitted, and it just had

last names.

I knew the first names of the guys on our team because it was a small, you know, you

knew everybody.

So I get up there and I say, Johnson, Watkins, it sounded like really bad names of pro wrestlers.

And again, I just felt like an idiot.

And so, but these failures help because they burn at you.

These are very public failures.

I consider that experimentation.

No, I'm serious.

You know, you have discussions in your work about, you know, different types of failure

as well.

You know, and like, and I think of sins of omission and sins of commission, you know,

in the Catholic Church.

And I would say the private failures are more like sins of omission.

You know, just thinking I was not a kind person today or something like that.

Or I should have said something in that, you know, something I didn't do mostly.

this is probably not a healthy thing, but I totally cordon them off.

Like if I, if I'm the only one who knows that I failed, like, let's say I failed to be kinder,

to help someone that I could ever should have.

I consider that a misdemeanor at best, at worst, rather.

You know what I mean?

It might be a good thing, actually, because.

and motivating, but it's a, it's, it's a master.

And sometimes I wonder how are we ever going to learn from other people's failures?

How do we release the shame enough to allow people to start to heal themselves through

other people's failure?

Or is that just a, is that just a dream that you have to go through the hard pain of shame

and failure in order to come out the other side?

realized is I've gotten a lot older that I'm pretty good at is I'm just good at observing.

And I always thought that everybody does that.

So we just did this freak radio series on Richard Feynman, the physicist who is a kind

of hero of mine.

And one thing that I loved about him is that he was just observant.

And I think the one advantage I had in failing a lot in all my failures is that, and maybe

this was Catholicism, honestly, because, you know, one thing about growing up very religious

is you are trained to constantly inspect your behaviors and decisions and choices and usually

declare them rotten.

And then you have to make up for them.

No, no.

It was like, you know, 10 Hail Marys and then you're kind of free to go.

Look, I'm just going to be honest.

I'm a big believer in positive reinforcement.

I really am.

And I'm not a big believer in negative reinforcement.

And I've been in both kinds of environments.

I used to work at The New York Times, which I loved.

And I was you know, my dad was a newspaper man for small papers upstate New York.

And when I became when I got hired at The New York Times, he'd been dead a long time.

He died when I was a kid.

But all I could think about was, oh, my gosh, I wish I could tell my dad this is this is

awesome. And then I got to The Times and I was proud of being there.

I did a lot of work that I really, really enjoyed.

But one thing I realized about it is it was an institution built on negative reinforcement.

Many people did a lot of their work with an eye toward not fucking up because the

penalties were really severe.

And I think when you're a creative person of any kind, and I would argue everybody's a

creative person, it's just it gets beaten out of us in certain occupations and realms.

You can't create out of fear and negativity.

So because I just for some reason believe that when I have a failure, whether it's messing

up with pomp and circumstance, messing up as a basketball announcer, I internalized it.

And I guess I do feel shame the way you were describing.

But I do think if you call every failure an experiment that didn't go the way you wanted

it to, then that can project you onto a more positive route, which is to say, you know,

like all the great scientists, all the great thinkers ever, they've all failed way, way,

way, way, way more than they succeed.

So that's just the way it is.

But we who look at their work from a remove and from a distance, and there's this thing

called survivorship bias, which is we only look at the successes.

And that is a very immature way of being a human.

You have to recognize that everybody is failing all the time.

And if that's the case, then you can process that however you want.

You can process it negatively, beat yourself up, exhibit shame, be afraid to interact with

people or put yourself in pressure situations because you're afraid of it.

Or you can look at it like a scientist or an artist and say, you know, I'm going to write

this first scene, you know, 80 times.

And it might be the eighth one that was good, but you're never really going to know until

you get there. Life is an experiment.

But, you know, I mean, I may sound Pollyannish now, but I think if you look at it

positively like that, then failure can be thrilling.

It really can.

It's information, it's feedback.

But I would just I think it's a beautiful way to look at the world.

It's a beautiful way to look at experience.

It's a beautiful way to look at education.

But there's a lot in my life experience that says you don't learn unless something hurts,

you know, in many ways.

And I don't mean hurts necessarily in terms of shame or, you know, public shame or

something like that. Nietzsche said we only remember that which gives us pain, you know.

And I want to have the world as you describe it.

I want to educate children as you describe it.

I want to live in that world, but I'm afraid that human nature is such that I can't.

I have to touch the stove and it has to hurt or else I ain't I ain't going to learn it.

It causes pain. But then you have a choice of what to do with the pain.

The pain is a piece of feedback.

That's all it is. It's not a judgment on your soul.

It's a piece of feedback.

Right. So I have a friend, Angela Duckworth, wrote this book called

Grit. And we made a podcast together for a few years.

And I learned a great deal from her and she learned a great deal from Marty Seligman,

who's considered kind of the the the founder, one of the founders of positive psychology.

And I remember when I first started reading about positive psychology, I was a lot younger

and I was like, oh, that is so foolish.

There's no way like that can't work.

But I've since gradually become convinced that it is, on average, a better

way to process your own fears and failures, etc.

Not to ignore them, not to sweep them under the rug, but to really process them.

Whenever you fail, you really inspect it.

You examine it just like you would if you know, if you're a golfer, you look at your data

on all your swings. If you're a musician, you listen back to your recordings and you think

what's exactly going on here.

And then you move forward with like passion and perseverance are the words that Angela

Duckworth would use. And again, I realize I sound like a really bad televangelist

now or talk show host, but I think it's the way to be.

And I'm sure you are as perplexed as any parent about how they come into the world

with their own set of valences and directions and and instincts.

And they're just complete.

They're not tabula rasa.

They don't appear that way when they come in.

You know, they're full tables.

So let's say my son, I'd call him a stoic from a very early age, and he would

speculate the worst.

And his mom and I were very perplexed at, you know, where does this what we thought

of as pessimism come from, you know?

And eventually we just came to the conclusion that he was softening the blow that

might come. You know, should the worst happen, he's rehearsing it.

So you could say, yes, positive thinking maybe creates a positive world.

I don't know. You draw positive energy to you.

I don't know. But there's also an argument to be made for negative thinking or

stoicism, which is, well, should the worst happen, at least I will have rehearsed it

in my mind and I won't be blindsided from it.

It won't kill me.

This is a topic I think about a lot.

It sounds like you like to live with the struggle.

I mean, I I do.

Right. I I'm attached to it in a way that may be unhealthy.

I like to, I'm impatient, like when there's a problem, I like to get at it and get it

to some kind of resolution.

But I don't like to live with the problem.

Life can be pretty chaotic.

One thing that keeps me grounded is therapy.

It's been a key part of my routine, helping me manage the roller coaster of daily life.

When things get tough, when we feel like we're failing, that's when making time for therapy

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If you know me, you know that I am constantly traveling.

I was just in Greece for a shoot, and I had an amazing time,

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I do call you a spiritual teacher because I really see

the way you work through these problems as being part of a spiritual tradition.

And I'd love to talk about the Christ philosophy is really one of failure.

It's the meek shall inherit the earth.

And that would seem to me to resonate with you, Stephen, as part of the Christian message.

It's an upside-down message in the Roman world, really, which was one of strength and victory.

So you had a religion of the downtrodden, of the meek.

And I wonder why that didn't resonate for you.

And what is it in Judaism that did resonate for you in terms of what is clearly your life's work

around failure and thinking outside the box and innovation and that?

So I do wish that there were more conversations about religion, theology,

spirituality within an intellectual perspective.

But religion has really become sidelined in that regard.

And I think for good reason, which is I think a lot of the most prominent

religious figures are not really approaching things from a, you know,

not just intellectual perspective, but even a kind of universal perspective.

You know, my favorite thing about Christianity is that there are billions of people around

the world praying to a rabbi all the time.

I mean, that's just cool.

I mean, Jesus was a rabbi, for those who are not aware of the history.

Right.

Where was it hidden?

He had a rabbit somewhere in a hat.

As I mentioned, I was born, my parents were Jewish, lived in very Jewish families.

But then by the time I was a kid, they were no longer Jewish.

But then when I moved to New York City from upstate New York in my 20s,

New York is a very Jewish city.

And so a lot of my teachers, a mentor or two or three, even, you know,

a lot of them were Jewish.

And I just began to absorb this Jewish history.

And then I began to think about, oh, my parents used to be this thing.

I don't really know what this thing is.

I should figure out what this thing is.

Then in the course of doing that, I felt myself just slipping into it.

So but then because I was religious by nature as a kid, or at least religious by experience,

I did begin to learn the religion of Judaism.

And there were some things that really resonated with me.

But like, you know, this notion of tikkun olam in Judaism, which is

the idea of repairing, fixing the world, repairing the world.

And the idea is that you should really live your life in service of making things better,

as basic as that sounds.

It's not about triumph.

It's not about escaping evil.

It's about trying to, you know, there's a line in Talmud,

turn it and turn it and turn it for everything is in it.

And the it is, it's the tradition.

And so Jews for, you know, many, many, many, many centuries

have been arguing and talking about, you know, what is this thing?

Whatever the thing is in front of you could be a political issue,

could be a food, whatever.

Turn it and turn it and turn it and keep trying to figure it out.

because, well, first of all, you like golf?

Because that's amazing to me, because I can't stand that game.

I took it up as a, you know, maybe 15 years ago.

But wow, do I love it.

Like when I was a kid, when I was playing music, you know,

for anybody who plays music or any sport or anybody who does any, anything like that.

There's such a thrill of learning anything.

And, you know, it's ridiculous to me that we delegate most of the learning in our society to

kids.

Like you got to go to school and learn all this stuff.

But then once you become an adult, you're just like this block of thing that doesn't really.

I've started two different careers after the age of 50 as a writer and as a musician.

And I care if you like it or not, but I don't care as deeply as I might have cared once about

whether you like my acting, because my bread and butter, you know, was that.

And I had to succeed in order to keep on doing it.

But the state of mind that I get to, because I just learned how to play guitar 10 years ago.

Yeah.

Are you good now?

And so when I write, because I'm good with words and now I got the chords and I can hear melodies,

even though I can't really sing that well.

But I hear the melodies and I'm 19 in my head when that's happening.

No, honestly, I'm not.

My brain isn't spongy like it was when it was when I was 19.

And that's why I'll never be a great player.

But the mindset that I get, the kind of soul sustenance that I get, even when I write, I've

been writing my whole life, but I didn't really start to focus on it till last 10 years.

It's like the fountain of youth inside.

your body in a way that is kind of like music, kind of like writing, kind of like business,

but different than all of them.

And it's really hard.

And when you sync it up, it feels good.

And I like being a person that gets older, learning to do new things, because I believe

one of the most powerful emotions that any of us can have is the feeling of accomplishment.

And failure is a part of accomplishment.

It's just simple as that.

So if you want to get the high of accomplishing, you have to go through failure to get it.

And I look at it as like the work that you do.

Failure is the work that you do to get to the thing you want, knowing that you may not even

get to the thing you want, but you're still going to be better off having tried.

That's the way I look at failure overall.

I mean, I've quit so many things, David.

The first big thing I quit, other than Catholicism, I guess, was music.

So I played music, I said as a kid, was in bands in high school, not good.

And then I got in a band in college with another guy named Jeffrey Dean Foster,

who was really good.

And we just synced up.

And we were both raw, but we got good together.

We had a band, two other, three other very good guys.

And then we ended up going through all the stuff you go to traveling, touring, being bad,

playing covers, starting to write songs, et cetera, et cetera.

And then we ended up getting a record deal, moved to New York, start making the record.

And it had been a couple years of being heading towards success.

And a series of events over those couple years, it kind of lodged themselves in my brain,

including getting to meet Bruce Springsteen one night backstage when he came to sit in

with this little band called the Del Fuegos.

You remember the Del Fuegos from Boston?

Really good.

So we had the same managers as them.

And I went to see them play at this pub in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they happened

to be touring.

And I was living down there.

And Bruce Springsteen was playing at the Coliseum.

And he stopped by, told him he liked their record.

And then they're just talking between sets with all the beer in the back.

And this was right when Born in the USA was out.

He'd been great.

If you liked Springsteen, he was like a god.

And then Born in the USA was like the big commercial record that made him a superstar.

And he didn't say it in these words.

But the message I took from that night is, if I knew that this is what it means to be