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This week, I’ve got some more behind-the-scenes content for you. As you know, at the end of each episode you hear a little snippet of my thoughts from after the interview wrapped up. What you might not know is that I share the full version of those thoughts with our Lemonada Premium subscribers each week. Today, I’m giving you all a chance to hear what those are like. And I figured, why not give you a chance to hear my thoughts on the guests that you’ve been listening to the most? These are all from fan-favorite interviews, some of our most-listened-to episodes.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

David Duchovny

David Duchovny  00:19

Hey Fail Better listeners, we’re going to be back next week with a new interview, but for this week, I wanted to share something different with you, as you know, at the end of an episode, you hear a little snippet of my thoughts from afterwards, usually a day or so after I’ve had time to sit with it and start to feel terrible about how I conducted the interview, and I share the full version of those free form reflections with our premium subscribers every week. But today, I wanted to give you all a chance to hear what those are like. And I figured, why not give you a chance to hear about the guests that you’ve been listening to the most. That’s right, these are all from fan favorite interviews, some of our most listened to episodes. If you want to get these kinds of insights each week, click the link in the show notes to subscribe to lemonade premium. As added incentive, you’ll also be able to get bonus content from all the other lemonata shows when you subscribe, I’m starting with Stephen Dubner, who I’m realizing now was one of the first people I interviewed when I was green. Also, I’m not really sure how I got there, but I talk a little bit about cancel culture and why it worries me with kids in particular. You uh,

 

David Duchovny  02:45

Just some thoughts after the Stephen Dubner podcast, which felt way more comfortable so far than the others I feel settling into the job of interviewer rather than interviewee. But that’s not for me to decide. I missed a couple of areas that I wanted to get into with Stephen. One was, and I don’t know why I’m coming back to a German word again, schadenfreude. I don’t know about the pronunciation, but you know the the delight in other people’s distress, which the Germans have a word for. And we we know it here in English speaking, wherever we are, it’s bandied about quite a bit. And I guess I wanted Stephen, who is somebody who has, you know, done a lot of interviewing about failure, failed enterprises, mostly failed business ideas. And what I wanted to ask him is, you know, so his stance is always, you know, releasing the shame around it, releasing inhibition around it, and therefore increasing innovation, increasing risk taking, which he feels is good for for business, good for life. One would think, if you’re not terrified of failure, then you can take risks and be creative. But I wanted to ask what role schadenfreude has to do with the popularity of such discussions, not just the releasing of shame, but actually the displaying of abject failure, and how we we like to look at that as we as we rubber neck at car accidents and things like that. There’s something in our nature, unfortunately, that takes a modicum of delight, and maybe more than a modicum of delight at other people’s failures. And I wonder if. If that’s part of the appeal of this podcast, I don’t think so. You know, I guess I’m as guilty as anyone sometimes, of of taking pleasure in in somebody else’s distress or failure. I don’t feel like that’s a primary kind of impulse of mine, and I wouldn’t want to contribute to it in any kind of major way. But I think I was raised in kind of a mindset of scarcity, and I think many of us were and are, and not just scarcity of resources, for those of us that didn’t grow up with a lot of money, but scarcity of love, in a way that there’s not enough, there’s not enough love out there to go around, not just material, but love as well. And in a world of scarcity, in a world in a world view 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? You know, because it is all, as Stephen does, is reframing the narrative of success and failure, reframing the definitions of success and failure. So those are things I want to get out in the open 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 that in themselves, so they they, maybe they don’t go out of their way to avoid people that have experienced this thing that they’re afraid of experiencing, or that they dread experiencing. But I think it’s a thing the contagiousness of failure, or the superstitious contagion of failure, something to talk about at some point, I don’t know, with who, obviously, just with myself. I want to talk about Miss Lonely Hearts, one of my favorite books by Nathaniel West. It’s about an advice column, guy who gets too involved with his readers, people that write in these horrifyingly sad letters to him, and I wonder how a person, let’s say me, not even Dubner, but who’s setting himself up as a confessor, confessor for failure. How do you keep from feeling too much, or, how do you keep from trying to make it light? Because that’s one of the things I was trying to draw out. A difference between myself and Steven was this, this notion of how painful failure is, and there has to be grief around it, not necessarily the business failures that he’s mostly dealing with, but, you know, the emotional baggage of failure. I also wanted to talk a little about this is a sticky subject, but I notice it with kids. My kids definitely if you’re growing up in a kind of a cancel culture milieu, it inhibits honesty, because you may have a not even an opinion, but you may have a thought that you feel is possibly offensive to someone, anyone. You’re probably not going to say it. But then, how do how will you be disabused of that notion? How can you then enter into an honest debate where what you’re considering in your heart of hearts may be dark, and you’re yearning to at least speak that you. And have someone debate you out of it, or prove you out of it. But you can’t even take that risk to say it, because you’re afraid that you’ll be judged. Your character will be judged by an opinion. And I think that’s a scary place to be, mostly because, you know, the public discourse becomes pre censored because we’re afraid that just this one comment, oh, God, I’m not going to give an example, because I’m afraid, right, one comment is going to be attached to you, and that’s it, that you’re that thing. You’re that thing that said that thing rather than, hey, oh, I had this idea. I don’t feel great about it. Throw it out there. Thank you for processing that with me. Thank you for proving me wrong. You know, that’s the way bad ideas get killed, in the in honest debate. But if you can’t speak a bad idea out loud, then it’s going to harbor you’re going to harbor it. It’s going to fester. It can’t get it can’t get disproven. You go back to Milton, an area aerial Bucha, which is a treatise against censorship, where he basically says, you know, hundreds of years ago, that we have to allow bad ideas to be spoken because that’s how they’re disemboweled. That’s how they’re banished. Good ideas are strong. They will, they will do well in the light, and they will vanquish bad ideas in the light. And I see this, you know, mostly we see this in politics right now, more than anything. Yeah, oh, nothing funny today. It’s raining. That doesn’t make it not funny, but maybe that’s my mood. Wish I had something funnier for you. Hmm, I’m hearing my voice. It just doesn’t even sound like it could get near the country of funny stopped at the border later.

 

David Duchovny  16:38

Next up Rosie O’Donnell, this interview was famously the one where I asked her to sit with me in silence for a full minute. Now that’s some radio right there, so it makes a lot of sense that my post interview thoughts were all about big abstract things like psychology and power. And I also talk about how even though Rosie likes to downplay her skills, I really think she’s great and talented, and has something that few people have. All right. Good morning. Well, here we are. This is the thoughts on the 20th episode that we recorded, and 20 was the original order and 20 was the original thought, like, how can I get to 20? Jesus, that’s a lot. And I just wanted to celebrate that, that we got to 20, there will be more. And I don’t know 20 is 20? What is it? I’ve spent my so much of my life, kind of like, let’s say it’s an achievement to do 20 podcasts. I mean, it’s not a huge deal or anything, but it’s, it’s something, it’s something that I set out to do, and now I’ve done it, and so much of my life I’ve gone without celebrating any kind of achievement. I don’t like using that word. Makes it sound crass in a way, but commitment, I said I was gonna do 20, I did 20, and then the initial thought after that is like, well, where’s the next 20 or where’s the next project? Or that’s not good enough, or podcasts that’s not good enough, you know, you got to do more. And it’s kind of speaking to my situating myself inside a podcast about failure, that I can take even a success like having done 20, and turn it into a goad on myself. Turn it into something that makes me feel less than or, you know, what’s next? Jesus, get well soon. David, you know, it’s like my friend Jason, always like, Get well soon. You know, am I learning? Am I learning through this podcast? I think so. I’m definitely getting different perspectives. The question is, Is it sinking in? That’s always the question with us as humans, isn’t it? We become habituated in some kind of way of being, and then, you know, we see that it’s not healthy for us to be that way. And we we try to change. We grasp onto things that will help us change. And I think a doing this podcast was a way, in a way to try to change myself through through these discussions of failures and I feel slightly changed. Maybe it’s going to take 20 more. Maybe it’s going to take 20,000 more. That seems more likely. But I guess that’s where I’m sitting today after 20 you know, it wasn’t that wasn’t the only itch that this was scratching the podcast. It’s, you know, I’d had times in my life where I was like, Yeah, I’d like to do a talk show. I’d like to do a talk show. And I guess this was part of that too. This is part of that too. So I can’t read my own head, right? I had like, little notes like, what do I want to talk about? The post Rosie stuff, you know, we didn’t get to is how much work Rosie does for other people, how much charity she’s done, how much money she’s given away. And I think that’s important, you know. And obviously, a podcast interview is not an advertisement for a person. It’s a discussion. But I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that fact about Rosie, what a generous, concerned person she is living in the real world.

 

David Duchovny  21:19

Couple things I’ve been thinking about I was into this therapist. Nobody ever met, but when I was in college, there was this French therapist named Jacques Lacan, who was kind of famous at the time, and he just had a very weird approach to therapy. You might call it anti Freudian. But I remember reading about one session where it was called, like the 15 second session, and basically the patient would come in and sit down and start talking about, you know, their their work, or their life or their dream, and after 15 seconds, la COVID, say, okay, that’s it. That’s enough. See you next week, same charge, you know, whatever he charged for the hour, he charged for the 15 seconds. And what I got from that was that he was saying that he was in control of this situation, that he was the one who was going to get to the unconscious, he was going to uncover the problems. And you coming in all energized. The thinking that you know what you want to talk about, or what you want to talk about, is interesting no, he was going to stifle that because that was just the same old bullshit, same old dodge, you know, as you get into therapy, and as you’re, you’re, you know, you realize you’re in a situation where you’re going to try to uncover the truth, the verbal diarrhea starts and like, I’m going to get it, I’m going to talk around it, I’m going to get to it. And the the mentor, the doctor, says, nope, nope. Not interested in what you think is important. What you think is important is unimportant, and what you think is unimportant is actually important. Sometimes I think about doing the 15 second podcast, you know, just get a guest going. Oh, here I got a subject that’s interesting, and I’m going to give you my rap. And after 15 seconds, I go, hey, thanks. That was wonderful. And now we’re going to listen to 45 minutes of commercials. How would that go over? I have a feeling how that would go over what I did with Rosie, not that I wanted to do that. It feels aggressive and hostile. I know what I did with Rosie was I sat for a minute. I asked, let’s just sit with eye contact. Let’s just sit staring at one another for a minute before we before we get into the discussion. And we did that, and it was it’s intense. It’s intense to look into another human being’s eyes for a minute without looking away, without words, without cover, without dodges, the Dodges of words. And my hope, when I asked to do that, was that, like it would forge some kind of connection or a trust or something. And who knows, maybe it did. It’s  hard to do that over zoom, right? I wonder if I can hold eye contact over zoom, and it’s not like the stare down before a fight, you know, because this isn’t adversarial, even though there’s always the sense of in which, oh, I hope I don’t say something that I’m going to regret. When you’re being interviewed. So maybe it was like an antidote to that adversarial stare down. Another thing I thought I was I heard, again with martial arts, there was this tradition where the two opponents before they fought, would sit down and have a conversation with one another for a few minutes, but neither of the fighters was allowed to use the word I, and I wonder if we could do a podcast where neither participants can use the word I. I wonder what that conversation would feel like. Would sound like. You know, you’re not talking about yourself. I mean, that’s literally what you cannot do. You cannot use the word I so maybe in the next 20 that’ll come up too, yeah. But Rosie was fantastic very present, smart, you know, there’s a reason why she has done what she’s done, and then this is what we talked about, is like, you know, she says, oh, I was on Broadway. They were better or better this, better that. And we talked about it, you know it as the thing you chase through art. But also, you know, a person having it, and it’s, it’s a weird thing, I guess they call it Riz, now, charisma, whatever the itness of it all. Is it God given? Is it just something that some people have? Where does it come from?  What is it? It’s a I’m sure books have been written about it, trying to figure it out. It’s just something that happens in a person’s soul, or it’s something you just come in with. Who knows, but Rosie has it, and it was interesting to talk to her about that because she actually explicitly writes about it in that book, The Celebrity detox book, where she’s chasing it, and to her, it is that moment of presence, that moment of transcendence, that moment where something happens, you say something, you tell a joke, you know, you make a connection that wasn’t planned and had never been there before. And it’s a, it’s a real beautiful thing, and actors chase it, musicians chase it with live performance. Poets chase it, writers chase it. And so there’s two. It’s there’s the it out there, which is when something happens, the chaos comes through, the mistake that is more interesting than the perfectly executed jump shines through. And then there’s the it in the person that makes you want to listen to them, look at them, connect with them. And maybe it’s the same it. Freud called it the ID too, which translates into the it, which we have come to think of as you know, the the instincts, the sexual instinct, the death instinct. You know, the thing that can’t be tamed is the ID, or German or Latin for the it literally, it’s like ego, super ego, and it, it’s kind of funny to think about the thing that holds the instincts. The thing that can’t be tamed is it not cousin it, but it.

 

David Duchovny  31:16

To finish things off, I’m going to leave you with my bonus thoughts from my conversation with Jillian Anderson. Wasn’t quite sure how that conversation was going to go. I was happy that we got to do it in person, and it felt like a felt like a really kind of warm and honest reconnecting after a few years of not having seen one another. So here are those thoughts from my conversation with Jillian. Okay, out there and podcast land, just trying to get some thoughts down after having a very emotional I felt and satisfying discussion with with Jillian Anderson couple days ago, what did I want to go into about that? Ah, something I forgot to tell her was, you know, because she has this soft drink. I don’t know if you call it a soft drink, though, because it’s supposed to be good for you. Soft drink sounds like it’s a soda, but a soft drink, literally, is just a drink that doesn’t have alcohol in it. So let’s say it’s a soft drink. These G Spot drinks, one of the I didn’t, I didn’t remember to tell her, I’m always looking for a name for my band, because it’s just, at this point, it’s David du COVID. It’s been that way. I got a fourth album coming out soon, and, you know, my band is, it’s, we’re one. You know, it’s not just me and the players. It’s like we’re functioning band now, and we we write together. You know, it’s like an entity. And I always thought we should come up with a name, and that my favorite name recently has been lots of names. There’s a whole sub genre of naming rock bands, isn’t there? My favorite name comes from an experience I had doing some press. Okay, here’s what happened was I was getting something out, some project, and they were kind of auctioning off 10 minute zooms for maybe this was charity. I don’t know what it was, but anyway, they were auctioning off 10 minute zooms. And so I was doing a series of 10 minute zooms with fans or or people who wanted to do a 10 minute zoom with me, and one of them. And of course, you know, I’m way more interested in I’m not interested in me. You know, people are going to ask me questions, but I’m interested like, hey, you on the other side of the Zoom who I’ve never met. What do you do? What’s What brings you here? And this one woman was, she was a professional taster, and I didn’t even know this thing existed. You know, this is because she had perfect taste, and I didn’t know that existed. So there’s a thing where you have, like perfect taste, you can identify, I guess, like having perfect pitch, but it’s with taste. So these people are coveted in the food and beverage industry, for obvious reasons, they have perfect taste. So this woman had perfect taste. And I was like, how do you know? I guess there’s a test, some kind of test, you can take. I’m sure I don’t have perfect taste clearly. But anyway, so this woman had perfect my mind is already blown. I’m like, wow, this is like a whole other world of knowledge I didn’t even know about. And she said, yeah, I work for a soft drink company, whatever that company was. And not only was she a taster of soft drinks, but she was in possession of one of the proprietary flavors. And the way I remember it, I could be making this up, but the way I remember it is not everybody. Very few people know the exact recipe for this proprietary drink, so special, so hidden, so secret that they can’t all get on planes at the same time. You know, it’s like they got to make sure that this recipe survives. And not all of them have the whole recipe. Some of them have just a few of the ingredients. And never will you have all those people like they can’t be in all in the White House at the same time unless it gets bombed. And I thought this was hysterically funny and wonderful, but then she said, there’s these people are called the flavor trust, and that was the name of the band that I wanted. So I may still call them the fourth album might be the flavor trust, because I just love that phrase, the flavor trust. What does trust tastes like? Is a question that you’d have to ask, but also like, it’s like the boardroom. Yes, we’re the flavor trust. Something very officious about this most sensual of things. And anyway, I missed having that discussion with Jillian where I told her all I knew about perfect taste and tasters and flavor trust, because we did talk about, like the creation of this drink, and her going in and smelling and tasting and, you know, jiggering with the formulas and the ingredients and trying to get the perfect thing down, so there’s a miss, there’s a fail, but here we are talking about it. Now, maybe when she comes back, we’ll we’ll talk about the flavor trust, but I’m more serious and more spiritual tips the other thing, I got a real problem coming out off of my podcast with Jason mcgay and now with Jillian. These are two people that I have long histories with personal, personal histories, going back 30 years in Jillian’s case. Now, is that right? Yeah, almost 30 years. So I got a real be in my bonnet about performative friendship. You know, where I see, call me an old fuddy duddy, go ahead, but I see folks on Instagram or whatever, displaying their friendship. It’s very, it’s very, especially celebrity friendship, displaying celebrity friendship. And it’s very, it my flavor trust doesn’t like that doesn’t that doesn’t hit my taste buds. Well, it tastes like hypocrisy and bullshit. And look at me. So I’m very in these two cases, with with Jillian and with Jason a couple weeks ago, very I’m watching myself, you know, like, I don’t want to perform this friendship, because the friendship is what’s important, not the performance of the friendship. Much like, you know, the past few years, we’ve all talked about, like on social media, the performance of virtue, Virtu, signaling all that shit. I didn’t want to signal the friendship, you know, but there I am, you know, asking her on the podcast. So I guess I’m guilty a little bit, but I wanted to handle it in a way that wasn’t performative. And we get into it, you know, it’s the failure, my failure, I can only speak for myself, my failure of, you know, I guess being number one on the call sheet and not making sure everybody was okay, everybody, in this case, being her, not being as good of a team. Player not getting as good of a human being as I know that I can and should be, especially knowing what I knew she must have been going through, because I was going through something similar with the explosion of that show. So aside from being, I think, an interesting thing to talk about. It’s very not therapeutic, but it’s nice for me to be able to say I’m sorry or I regret or I could have done better, because once that’s out. All that’s left is gratitude, and that’s the best place to be. So whether or not, I mean, I know that I did the best that I could, whether or not that was good enough, we’ll never know. But it’s a lot to dance around, you know, without getting into specifics, right? But I think that wemanaged to do that. We managed to kind of cop to our part in a dysfunctional relationship that we had as co workers, you know, back in the day. And I think that’s cool. I also think, you know, there’s all this hokum you hear about, oh, it’s like a family. This shows like a family. This movie was like a family. And that’s true. But what happens is, a lot of the times people in life, I would say, all the time, until you get wise, is you recreate your family situation in other situations, in other social situations, and other family type situations. Let’s say that’s a show this time, or a movie, whatever.

 

David Duchovny  42:00

And especially when you’re younger, and if you’re not careful, you’re going to recreate certain dysfunctions in the new family, in the working family. And I think this, this can kind of speak to all different kinds of businesses, every kind of business in the world. So I think this is a, probably a good, valid point to make right now is, once you start to cop to the failure of the way you’ve handled this new relationship, not the failure, but The failings, then you can start to see clear, Lee clear, how you are recreating certain family situationships, in your business life, in your social life, in your life. And I think we both kind of touched upon that in a way that I thought was liberating, in a way. You know, me talking about my my mother, my father, her talking about her parents, and I really appreciate her candor on that. Yeah, gratitude.Don’t make me spell it out for you. Gratitude. That’s all for now. We’ll see you next week with a brand new interview, take care.

 

CREDITS  43:44

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 in Apple podcasts.  Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby.  It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo.  Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel.  Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, David Duchovny.  The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […].  You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny.  Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.