← Fail Better with David Duchovny
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- [00:01]
Reshma Sajani
Hi, I'm Reshma Sajani, founder of Girls who Code. Look, I'd consider myself a pretty successful adult woman. I've written books, founded two successful nonprofits, and I'm raising two incredible kids. But here's the thing. I still wake up wondering, is this it? And if the best years are yet to come, when's that going to start? Join me on My so Called Midlife, my new podcast with Lemonada Media, where we're building a playbook for navigating midlife one episode at a time. Each week, I'll chat with extraordinary guests who've transformed their midlife crisis into opportunities for growth and newfound purpose. At some point, we all ask ourselves, is there more to life? I'm here to discover how to thrive in my second act, right alongside you. My so Called Midlife is out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:01]
Ellie Kemper
Hi, I'm Ellie Kemper from the Office and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. And this is my fantastically funny friend, Scott Eckert. Hi, everyone. We host a podcast called Born to Love. It's a show where we talk to the people we love about the things they love. Each week, we bring on a celebrity guest to discuss their secret passion. Did you know that my friend Jenna Fisher loves Keanu Reeves movies? She does, she does. And how about Al Roker? Samantha Bee, Tony Hawk, Jane Lynch? What do they love, Ellie? You have to listen to the show to find out. So check out Born to Love wherever you get your podcast from. Lemonada Media.
- [01:39]
Gloria Rivera
Lemonada.
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David
Hi, everyone.
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Emily Deschanel
David here.
- [01:48]
David
I know what you're thinking.
- [01:49]
Emily Deschanel
It's the weekend. Why do we have a new episode?
- [01:52]
David
Well, let me explain myself.
- [01:54]
Emily Deschanel
I wanted to come back to you all with more of my thoughts that I share after the interviews, the ones we normally share with just our premium subscribers. It's really where I'm more intelligent than I am because I, you know, I just fumble the ball in mid conversation constantly. So afterwards, in retrospect, I can be a lot smarter. My conversation with Lisa Loeb that came out earlier this week really unlocked some things for me. Plus, it really dovetailed well into some of the thoughts I was having after talking with another musician recently, Kathleen Hanna. So I figured, why not let you hear both for Lisa. I came into that interview in a very specific headspace, trying to juggle all the things going on with this show in my life, my other work, and talking with her kind of refocused all of that for me. So I wanted to share my thoughts afterwards. It's all about perfectionism and Finding joy in our work and how joy and perfectionism can be antagonists. Hope you enjoyed.
- [02:49]
David
Hope you enjoy. Hey, here we are. Post Lis Loeb talk time. What I'm finding interesting about doing the podcast now is, you know, I always knew I was never going to find out, you know, what's the right approach to failure, what's the right processing of failure, whatever. You know, it's kind of like there's as many different types of response to failure as there are people in the world, right? Maybe not quite that many, but a lot. And, you know, with Lisa talking about her approach to writing, it was certainly kind of perfectionist is the word that gets thrown around that's in a negative connotation. But I'm not seeing it that way right now. I'm seeing it as a control that someone has or on a vision. You know, in the past, I would have thought perfectionist makes things tight. But it also could be that I'm being lazy by wanting to collaborate in a way or let mistakes in or, you know, open myself up to lightning striking and chaos. Mistake comes in and it's better than what I had originally planned. And I got the sense with Lisa that it's not that way when she's writing, when she's recording. And my sense before that perfectionism was like a priori. It was like already decided, like, there was going to be no, as I said, lightning strike. There was going to be no chance happening that was going to make something different in the making, in the doing, in the playing, in the recording, in the acting, in the filming, whatever. And that there was something tight and constricted about that kind of vision that was hard for me to see as fun. And I realized that I want to have fun when I'm creating. But when I see Lisa talk about, you know, being a perfectionist, that's my word, not hers. She's still having fun. And I'm now turning back by myself, as I have, you know, the past couple weeks. Kathleen, Hannah and Andy Cohen, people that are. That are making quote, unquote art or doing work that is very different from what I've ever done or what I think of doing or what I like to consume in many ways. And fun is an important part, has always been an important part of why I became an actor. I think I was always kind of, you know, as I said, the good student, like with Lisa, also a good student. And she went one way with it, which is, you know, she still wants to check those boxes and get all the answers right. And she's talented enough to do it, and she's in tune enough with her own internal sense of music or song to do it. I went the other way. I was like, oh, I've had enough of getting tested, getting tests, right? I'm going to have fun. I'm going to let instinct or chance or lightning striking or mistakes or failure get into my work, get into my life. And part of this podcast was trying to figure out how not to be ashamed of opening myself up to lack of control over a finished product, letting the air in. And then if it's deemed a failure of some kind, like originally when I talked about House of D, that review, then how do I make that not a judgment that stands in eternity on me as a creator or whatever and continue to have fun and not to go over to the side of, okay, I'm gonna have ultimate control. Because the way I made movies, this last movie I made, you know, the budget I'm making, I can't have ultimate control. I mean, I can have a lot of control because, you know, I'm not gonna have a big studio and a lot of money trying to control me. But on the other hand, I've only got so many days, you know, I've got to do it quickly for that kind of a budget. So, you know, when you're doing things quickly, there's a lot of chance that comes in, can come in. Anyway, I'm rambling about it, but I'm thinking, you know, Lisa really flipped my mind around a little bit on the joyfulness of her quest for perfection. It wasn't like this tight, unsmiling notion of getting a test completely right. There was something else. There was a joy in there, too. And that was not something I'd seen before. So three kind of interviews, podcasts in a row, from Kathleen to Andy to Lisa, I'm seeing failure differently in a way. Approach to failure differently, response to failure differently, and opening myself up a little bit to another way of looking at it, which is kind of what this podcast was all about from the beginning. I was struggling recently with the amount of podcasts that I had to do to fulfill my obligation, which was 20, and I ended up doing three in a week. And I was thinking, this feels like homework, this feels like school that I no longer want to be in in life. And my question to myself was, how do I make this fun? How do I continue to make this a journey of discovery and not just, oh, my God, I've got to research this person or I've got to read this or listen to that podcast where they were interviewed. So I don't seem like an idiot when I walk in. But maybe I can be an idiot when I walk in. Maybe that'll lead somewhere else. That's one side. Or maybe I can take joy in the research, in the work, in the quest to be a perfect podcast host or whatever. A quest to make the perfect podcast on Failure Saying it out loud makes me laugh right there. I got to it all right.
- [09:45]
Unknown Sponsor
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- [11:01]
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Emily Deschanel
Hi, I'm Emily Deschanel.
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Carla Gallo
And I'm Carla Gallo. And we're excited to tell you about Boneheads, our new Bones Rewatch podcast.
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Emily Deschanel
I played Dr. Temperance Brennan.
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Carla Gallo
And I played Daisy Wick. And we are gonna watch from the very beginning.
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Emily Deschanel
We're gonna watch the episodes, we're gonna reminisce, we're gonna laugh, we're gonna cry, we're going to tell behind the scenes.
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Carla Gallo
Stories, we're going to go on tangents.
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Emily Deschanel
A lot of tangents.
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Carla Gallo
So whether you're a seasoned Bones fanatic or a newcomer looking to dip your toes into the wild world of forensic anthropology, this show is for you.
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Emily Deschanel
Boneheads from Lemonada Media is out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [12:55]
Welcome back. After I talked with Kathleen Hanna, I was investigating this idea of a pop song or a rock song being a conduit for an idea, especially a politically charged one these days. It's not something I've often gravitated towards myself, both as a maker and as a listener, but there's power in there. So I'm wrestling with that idea. Right after talking with Kathleen.
- [13:17]
David
Take a listen. Hey, this was a great conversation again with Kathleen Hanna. What a force of thought and feeling that woman is. Anyway, I was thinking about these things as my dog walks up. I'm just. My dog looks at me like, why are you talking into that piece of metal? You are crazy. Um, yeah, I wanted to think back on, I guess, when I was asking whether or not a pop song or a rock song or a punk song, whatever, is a. Is a good delivery system for an ideology. I guess I had some. I guess I had a horse in that race. Because I always kind of push against what I've seen. If I see politics being pushed forward in art or even ideology, I guess from the artistic point of view, I get itchy on that because I think any kind of overt politics and art turns into propaganda. Whether or not I believe in the politics or not, whether or not I agree with the politics, and in this case I do. But it's, you know, the artist's decision whether or not to approach their art that way as a political tool. Totally legitimate, if that's your approach, but not something ever that I wanted for myself and not the art that I was drawn to. Again, as I had a discussion with Mary Trump about graduate school. It wasn't about plot. It wasn't about the deconstruction of these books. For me, the politicization of these books. For me, the ideology, the ideological boiling down of a song or a book into a political statement, into a statement of idea. For me, words was always about trying to say the thing that wasn't sayable, and then that's the thing that's also not campaignable, I would think. But this is a completely different approach to art, and I want to say completely legitimate. It's just not something I was ever drawn to. And I thank this podcast. I thank my experience of being able to speak to different types of artists in this through this lens of failure. Because, you know, whether or not your art or your work is a delivery system for ideology or for beauty, it's a delivery system. And we're talking about failure and success around that delivery system. How many times am I going to say delivery system? It's like Groucho's word at this point. I just saw the duck come down. Delivery system makes me sound scientific. I think that's why I like it when it's not scientific at all. So that's been something that I've been thinking about. And also I was thinking about the role of humor in all of this. And I think back to a description of the Beatles that was always thrown around was that they were funny, you know, Stones, not so much. And that it was that the Beatles were in good humor. That kind of made them the extreme, one of the factors that made them extremely popular. And it's something that disarms me and something that Kathleen Hanna has found to disarm the kind of defensiveness that people might come into in her work, in her project. Yeah, so all those things. And to talk to an activist like Kathleen who uses artwork to espouse her ideas, it's a completely different gauge on failure and success. Because the question is not, oh, did somebody enjoy my song? Was somebody moved by my music, by my writing, by my acting, whatever. No, it's, did somebody get the message? Did that message affect them? Did it change their lives? Completely different metric of success and failure. And again, I thank the kind of flexibility of the guests on this podcast to open me up to different modes of success and failure, to different modes of the way that art can exist in the world. I'm still more on the side of just naturally, instinctually, and also intellectually on the side of art for art's sake. Ars gratis artes. Is that the Latin you know, that art is our way out of politics in a way, and into eternity, out of what's Trump done today and into what joins us to the Greeks, you know, the humanity of it. But I'm open, you know, and maybe, maybe I'll get more politicized. Maybe I'll dive in more into the headlines. I don't know. I don't know. It's not my comfort zone, but now I can see it. And I thank guests like Kathleen, I thank guests like Mary Trump for keeping my eyes open. Any who. There you go. And the other aspect of failure that I wanted to get to, and I think I touched on in my discussion with Kathleen, was this idea that failure within a, a fucked up system, a rigged system, is a rebellion, can be seen as a rebellion. Intentional failure, almost intentional failure in a rigged system, in a broken system, in a bad system, in an outdated system, in an obsolete system, is a kind of success and revolutionary act. I've been getting to this point. I got to it with Kamel at first. You know, the narrative was, oh, this is a show about how failure, you know, leads to success. Obviously you need to fail in order to get to success. Trial and error, kind of positive way, positivistic way of looking at failure. And now through these discussions, I'm kind of coming to a place where failure might be a good in and of itself, as I said with Kamel, as it increases humility, not humiliation, not shame, but humility. The kinship between us all, possibly gratitude too, but also just in a political sense. And this comes across, I think, with Kathleen, and my thinking with Kathleen is the harshness of, of the punk enterprise or whatever the punk sound is. Actually to point out the bloated bullshit of whatever 70s arena rock was becoming and its outdated attitudes and its misogynistic attitudes. So the intentional bad sound, possibly what I would react to when I was a kid as, oh, that doesn't sound beautiful to me. And that was kind of the point. It might have been just exposing the whole sweet sound hierarchy of the big music machine capitalist business. So my hat's off to, you know, Yoko Ono, you know, the original punk singer. That's what Kathleen said. I used to listen to the what I thought of as screeching. I was like, oh my God, turn that shit off. But now I see it as a, a howl of rebellion. Very meaningful. So thanks, Kathleen.
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Emily Deschanel
For more of my post interview reflections like this, make sure to subscribe to Lemonada Premium on Apple podcasts by clicking the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening.
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David
And we'll be back on Tuesday with another interview.
- [22:14]
Emily Deschanel
Remember Wimpy from Popeye? I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. I'll gladly play you a new podcast on Tuesday for a hamburger today.
- [22:25]
Gloria Rivera
Hi, everyone. Gloria Rivera here. And we are back for another season of no One Is Coming to Save Us, a podcast about America's childcare crisis. This season, we're delving deep into five critical issues facing our country through the lens of childcare, poverty, mental health, housing, climate change, and the public school system. By exploring these connections, we aim to highlight that childcare is not an isolated issue, but one that influences all facets of American life. Season four of no One Is Coming to Save Us is out now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [23:01]
Reshma Sajani
Are you in bed by 10? Can you feel your hormones raging more than ever? Do you wake up every day wondering, is this it? Guess what? You're not alone. Welcome to My so Called Midlife, a weekly podcast hosted by me, Reshma Sajani. On this show, we're going to expose the con we've been sold about middle age, figure out what the fuck we want from our lives and how to get there. We'll have help from guests like Julia Louis Dreyfus, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Ilana Glaser. You can listen to my so Called Midlife ad free on Amazon Music.