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.

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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

famous, I don't know if I'd wanted to be famous so much.

Yeah.

What lesson can you ever learn from success, I guess, is the flip side to what we're talking

about today.

And I would say nothing.

No, honestly, I don't think I've ever learned anything from success.

Why do you think that is?

I think it goes back to hurt.

Because failure sends you inward.

And you start to think.

And I quit a hugely successful television show after seven or eight years.

That was long enough.

I quit The X-Files.

And that was the biggest success I could ever quit.

Like a global phenomenon of a show.

And I just knew that I had done everything I could in that format, in that show.

And that it felt like it was going to be my whole life at that point.

It felt like if I went any longer, I was going to be doing karaoke me, whatever that was.

Whatever version of karaoke me it was.

So it was like a life-saving thing for me to do it.

And yet, to quit.

Quit can be very noble and strong and courageous.

But I have to say, maybe you felt this when you quit The Times.

Maybe if you quit your band.

I don't know if you said you did.

But when you do quit an enterprise, you also quit people.

It's like quitting a family.

And there's a lot of pain.

A lot of pain that comes with stopping a train that's moving happily along.

Just because I've got some misgivings about it.

And I still carry.

To this day, I carry misgivings about myself.

Because what you just said.

You're, I don't want to say letting people down.

But you're changing the calculus of the lives of a lot of people around you.

When I quit the band, it wasn't like...

I don't think it was like that.

Because I think there were two of us who were singer-songwriters.

And now there was one.

And in a way, that made it a clearer path for them.

So they may have missed me.

They may not have.

But when I quit the Times, that didn't matter to the Times.

But you, you were...

What's that phrase in the entertainment contracts?

Key man clause.

It went another year after I left.

It didn't feel like I had taken bread out of people's mouths immediately.

I mean, what was the state of popularity at the time you quit?

I mean, it reached its peak.

But it was complicated.

It was complicated to do that.

It's like disconnecting from a power source.

I wonder, you have your mainstream of creativity, which is Freakonomics and now the podcast.

And are there any days that you wake up and feel like the boss and go,

you know, I don't feel like singing the song today.

I'd rather try and write that novel.

One is, I built a little company to do this.

So we're 15, 20 people.

And I do think about that.

I'm not saying I will never stop.

But, you know, this past year, we had our first two Freakonomics Radio babies born.

Two women on the staff, both had kids.

I like having a company that is solid enough and real enough that people come here to work

and they get parental leave.

We built a thing.

So that's very meaningful in terms of waking up and saying, I don't feel like writing this.

So the one thing I will say about that, that I learned from my friend, Angela Duckworth,

this was the first time.

So we became friends because she wrote this book, Grit.

And I interviewed her for Freakonomics Radio for some episode we were doing years and years

and years ago.

Then we started hanging out and I realized she's awesome and would be a great collaborator.

And then we collaborated.

But the very first time I, I believe this was the first time I ever talked to her, really.

I asked her, like, you know, if you think about Grit versus Quit,

like, how do you know?

How do you know when you should stick it out or how much more it will take?

And there are two dimensions.

There's one is, can you get good enough where it will be fruitful for you?

But also, like, do you want to do that thing?

And so I was asking her, you know, what do you do if you're doing a thing that you do like,

but you just kind of get bored?

Does that make you a dilettante?

And do you just quit and move on to something else?

And that's when she taught me this notion of what she calls substituting nuance for novelty.

She said novelty is what everybody wants.

You're always going to try new things because it's exciting and fun.

And that's kind of the way that we're wired.

But if you're not in a position where novelty is an option, let's say, you know, I'm married

and I have a spouse and like, yeah, I might like to be married to that person or that person.

Well, that's, you know, there are pretty high transaction costs there.

And maybe you don't want to do that.

But nuance for novelty means that within the thing that you're doing,

let's take this back to work and not marriage or whatever,

find different ways to make it exciting to you by nuance.

So when she taught me that lesson, probably six, seven, eight years ago,

that was a turning point for me with Freakonomics Radio.

I've now been doing it 14 years.

And honestly, I think it's more fun for me now than ever because

she helped me conceive of a sort of creative framework whereby

my show is whatever I want it to be.

But don't tell anybody.

Don't tell it because people...

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Hi, I'm Leisha Haley.

And I'm Kate Manning.

which quickly morphed into us being actual best friends for the rest of our lives.

It feels like we're an old married couple, but with fewer cats,

although we each have a number of cats in our lives.

And we're pretty much inseparable and have more or less zero boundaries.

because at this point you can't have one leg without the other.

which then leads to much oversharing and little left to the imagination.

Whether it's sex or therapy or money fears,

literally nothing is off the table in terms of discussion topics.

You know, the genesis of our friendship.

One of the things I was struck by during the pandemic was,

I don't know if you're a basketball fan, but you know, the last dance came on

and it became this, this, this hothouse hit because everybody was, was home.

It seemed like everybody was watching the Jordan Bulls.

Look, I love Michael Jordan to me, the best player ever.

I couldn't love him anymore.

But when I watch him give his Hall of Fame speech and, you know,

holding a grudge against a kid in high school, you know, the kind of, the crazy need to win.

And then I see a country applauding this as if that's what you got to do to be a winner.

You have to be a killer.

You have to humiliate the loser.

And I'm wondering, what country are we living in?

You know, and coming off of, obviously we don't want to talk about Trump,

but here's a guy who can't lose.

You know, here's a guy who is, his entire life is trying to reinterpret his biggest loss.

Before that, he lost a bunch of, he lost billions of dollars as a businessman.

And he's, you know, litigated that through lies as well.

So we have two major, let's call them aspirational figures.

Um, what does that say to you about any way that we can educate our children,

either through sports or through, I don't know.

That's a long ass winded question.

and I think the majority of people don't love him.

There are a lot of people who will vote for him despite not loving him.

But I think the thing that's most frustrating for people who don't love him

is that it's pretty obvious that he doesn't fight fair.

And there's something about this country that has always promoted fairness.

I mean, and that's a big part of what sport is about.

And people love that.

They love it.

And what is it in us that's unhealed or misshapen as a country, as a people?

He's played golf.

Anybody who's ever played with him who has any ounce of truth to them will tell you big,

big cheater.

And in golf, if you play golf, you always encounter a cheater or two.

And then you stay away from that person because it's a game of character.

Supposed to be, at least.

But the thing that I love about sport, sport is a way for all of us to get our yayas out

as fans and competitors.

It's a way, it is literally a proxy for kind of the old fashioned version of what humans

used to do.

I mean, the way I'm sure you know this, the reason we shake hands when we greet is,

it comes from showing your opponent.

Yeah.

You don't have your sword in your hand.

So like, I love the fact that we've developed this whole system of sport that is really,

you know, if you think about sport, it's really different if you're talking about

participatory or spectator.

You know, Scott Galloway, this, I think, really smart guy teaches at NYU.

He says the success of a young human, especially of the male variety, will be a direct proportion

of the hours that they sweat versus the hours that they watch other people sweat.

And I think about that because, you know, I sometimes enjoy watching other people sweating

on a Sunday afternoon, whatever, especially if you're playing fantasy football.

But it saddens me that what should be a play acting version of war is harnessed to give

inspiration to people who really want to hate.

Right.

But the fact is, we attach ourselves to these tribal affiliations with the zeal of people

living in Babylonia 5,000 years ago.

So, you know, the world is complicated.

I don't know.

It's easy to beat up the people who do the stuff you hate.

But I do feel there, and I understand that, but I do feel that for all of us, there's

a lot of upside in seeking out the people who are just quietly putting their head down,

figuring stuff out, experimenting, experimenting, experimenting and failing and failing and

failing.

And I think that's a nice role model.

I tried to do that for my kids.

I would constantly tell them I feel like a failure, constantly.

You know, they would just nod.

Well, this was a pleasure, Stephen.

Thank you.

Thank you for coming on.

And trusting me.

Love getting to know you a little bit.

And I predict great things for this podcast because, you know, what can go wrong with

a podcast about failure, right?

I mean, if I fail, I succeed.

I missed a couple of areas that I wanted to get into with Stephen.

One was, I was raised in kind of a mindset of scarcity and, you know, in a way, you know,

in a world of scarcity, in a world, in a worldview of scarcity, then it's possible

to think of other people's success as making it harder for you to succeed.

And that's another thing I want to investigate in this podcast is, does someone else's success

contribute to my failure?

Contribute to my feeling like a failure?

As well as like this, I woke up this morning with this idea, like, is failure, does it

feel contagious to people?

When I got divorced, I found that there were some married couples that didn't want to hang

around with a divorced guy.

Not naming names, but, you know, there's a certain kind of contagious quality to,

deeply painful experiences that other people go through, you know, that people don't want

to confront.

I think it's a thing.

Because that's one of the things I was trying to draw a difference between myself and Stephen

was this, this notion of how painful failure is, and there has to be grief around it.

Nothing funny today, it's raining.

That doesn't make it not funny, but maybe that's my mood.

Later.

There's more Fail Better with Lemonada Premium.

Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes

thoughts on this episode.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts.

Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby.

It is produced by Keegan Zemma, Aria Bracci, and Donny Matias.

Our engineer is Brian Castillo.

Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson.

Our VP of new content is Rachel Neal.

Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski, and Kate D. Lewis.

The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and

David Duchovny.

The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart,

Davis Rowan, and Sebastian Modak.

Special thanks to Brad Davidson.

You can find us online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at David Duchovny.

You know what it means when I say at David Duchovny.

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