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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. Lemonada.
- [01:49]
David Duchovny
Hi, I'm David Duchovn in this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Gia Tolentino is a culture critic and staff writer for the New Yorker. Gia was born in Canada and moved to Texas with her family at a young age. She spent much of her early years deeply involved in the evangelical church. In 2019, GIA published a collection of essays called Trick Reflections on Self Delusion. It captured a lot of Gia's interests and fears in one book. So it's a good place to start to get to know her point of view as a writer. I read it when it came out, but I thought it was one of the first brilliant books on the Internet that was really getting into the dangers of what that world was becoming at the time and has become since. She was really at the forefront, almost a prophetic voice. Gia became a mother in the past few years, and that adds yet another layer to her perspective on the world. As you'll hear us get into in the New Yorker, she covers everything from Abortion, access to body image. But today, I'm the one in the interviewer's seat, unfortunately. And here's my subject. Hey. Hi. Hi. Gia.
- [03:03]
Ellie Kemper
Hi.
- [03:03]
David Duchovny
Nice to meet you. I'm David.
- [03:05]
Ellie Kemper
Really good to meet you, too.
- [03:07]
David Duchovny
Thanks. I got your book Trick Mirror when it came out, because I read a really interesting review on it, and my kids. This is 2019, right?
- [03:19]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah.
- [03:19]
David Duchovny
Is it 2019? Yeah. And we were going on vacation, and I just conspicuously was reading it in front of them, you know, trying to get them interested in it, and it didn't work, but I got interested in it.
- [03:34]
Ellie Kemper
I can't believe you read it. I'm honored. How old are your kids?
- [03:38]
David Duchovny
Well, now they're 22 and 25. So then they were. No, what were they? They were 20 and 16.
- [03:46]
Ellie Kemper
Well, can I ask you, are they readers like you are?
- [03:52]
David Duchovny
I think if you compare them to their peers, they're readers. They're not readers like I am. I don't know if that. I think it becomes more and more of a niche kind of a consciousness, the reader's consciousness. But that's a really good question for me, because I want to kind of start in a weird place with you, because you were an English major, and that's. It's rare that I get to talk to somebody who subjected themselves to that kind of rigorous training.
- [04:27]
Ellie Kemper
I know you could be here talking to a famous person that has done so many interesting things, and instead you're just talking to another English major. Well, I've been thinking about the kid thing because I have a four and a one year old, and I suddenly was beset by this fear that I was like, what if neither of children loves books the way that I do? And then I remembered instantly. That's maybe likely enough, and I need to just.
- [04:50]
David Duchovny
Yeah, it. Well, I don't know what the answer is. I mean, I came from. My dad was a writer. You know, he published his first novel when he was 75, his only novel, and he died a year later. But he said his whole life he was a novelist and a reader. So he finally showed the truth at 75. And my mother was a schoolteacher in New York. You live in New York. You send your kids.
- [05:17]
Ellie Kemper
I live in New York. And actually, one of my best friends had your mom as a teacher, said she was incredible, and said that her crush on you originated through having a crush on your mom. And she said, I'll unpack that in therapy later. Yeah.
- [05:32]
David Duchovny
But when you went to college, you were thinking of a career as a writer. You were Thinking of a career as a fiction writer, you didn't know what you wanted to do?
- [05:47]
Ellie Kemper
I didn't know what I. Well, I think that as a child I was aware that, you know, I wrote all the time as a child. A copious journaler. I wrote horrible short stories. I was always writing. And I was aware that this was the main. One of the main things that I liked to do. But I didn't grow up. Like, I didn't know anyone in a creative field at all. Like, everyone in my family was like a nurse or a teacher or some sort of manager. And when I got to college, I was sort of like, presumably I can parlay some sort of reading and writing into some sort of employment after school. I assumed it would be like, teaching or grant writing. And then I graduated in 2009 and no one had a job unless you were working in finance. And I did the Peace Corps. And from there I actually, this is. I started working on a novel. It was, it was. It was. It was four main characters, four best friends from college, four girls. And it was set, you know, it was like this kind of cliche MFA type setting where it all took.
- [06:52]
David Duchovny
Don't you say cliche.
- [06:54]
Ellie Kemper
Well, wait till you haven't heard what it's about. It's. It was gonna, you know, there's gonna be a present day timeline that was just one day. And it's like a long September day along the Hudson and ends like a plane crashing in the Hudson. But then it flashes back to their friendships and their whatever. And I wrote. And my working title for this novel was Girls, about four girls. And I. And I worked on it, you know, I read like 150 pages of it. And then I was Skyping my boyfriend in an Internet cafe because there was only like three cities where you could go and get Internet, where I was doing the Peace Corps and my entire backpack got stolen out from like under my legs because I was so excited to see my boyfriend face to face. I wasn't thinking. And so the whole novel went with it. And I was, you know, I was devastated. I was weeping. Like, I was literally. My friends were sort of picking me up off the floor. And then my friend Akash did the nicest thing that anyone's ever done for me, which he, like, he lent me his laptop, which in the Peace Corps is like, that's your whole life, you know, that's absolutely everything is your laptop. And we lived like 12 hours away from each other. And he said, I know you're not going to feel better until you start writing again. And that was the moment that I think I realized, like, whether or not I ever get paid to do this, I will keep doing it. And so I might as well just accept that about myself and accept that I'm gonna be writing. And maybe, you know, maybe there will be some way to do it professionally. But that's when I knew I was just like, well, I'm going to be stuck doing this forever.
- [08:24]
David Duchovny
Well, we should be on the lookout for some pseudonym out there publishing a novel about four girls in a plane crash on the Hudson one September day. So we gotta scour. We gotta scour for that. But I think that. Does it feel like a compulsion to you to write, or is it something that you have to make yourself do?
- [08:42]
Ellie Kemper
I was gonna ask you that about fiction. Cause I don't. I miss writing fiction all the time. And I used to try to write so much of it, but I'm not good at it.
- [08:52]
David Duchovny
Well, you did win a short story prize your first time. I have that right in front of me. So I don't think. I'm not sure that's true.
- [09:00]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, I mean, I was just good enough to get into an MFA where it was like. Because in my time of trying to figure out how can I get someone to pay me to write this very mysterious question. It was like going to a fully funded MFA program was the only way I could think of at age 22. But I do feel a compulsion to write. Less so in quite recent years because I have, you know, a one and a four year old. It's more like my compulsion is to sleep and, you know, my. But I feel like I have no access to my brain without writing. I don't know if you ever feel like that. Like, there's absolutely. I am not thoughtful unless I'm writing. I'm not observant. I'm not careful. I'm not. I'm not anything. I'm not very honest. Like, I'm. I can only become certain things through the process of writing. And so for that reason, I feel kind of a larger compulsion to do it, even if on an everyday basis. I'm a little bit more likely these days to take any excuse I can to not write.
- [09:59]
David Duchovny
Yeah, I agree with that 100%. I had a professor at Yale, a guy named Michael Cook, who used to say that he couldn't think without a pen in his hand. And I feel that that's true about myself at this point. Not only that, but when I'm involved in writing a kind of extended piece, probably A novel or something. Once I look back on the thing and I'm reading it for editing purposes or whatever, it seems like it's written by somebody else as well. That there's kind of an aggregation of consciousness day by day by day by day as you go in writing. That makes me smarter than I am. And it goes back to something I wanted to talk to you about as well. Because, you know, if you look back on the technologies of knowledge, say, and the printing press being the first thing, you know, everybody's like, up in arms. This is going to ruin the world. Because now everybody's going to have the Bible and they won't need the priest to read it to them, or they won't need to go to church to hear the Bible. And then when I was growing up, TV was the devil, movies were the devil, probably the generation before me. And then now we have the Internet, you know, and it's every step of the way, we're terrified that the technology is going to warp the human brain in a way that we. That we don't want.
- [11:34]
Ellie Kemper
I have theories, as you might expect, about why, you know, I feel really conscious. I mean, whenever I write anything, like whenever I'm reporting something, because I kind of get assigned the sort of like, youth, ish. Cultural phenomenon beat at the New Yorker. And I always try to, like, one of the things that I am on guard the most about what the Internet does to my brain. And I think everyone's brain is. I think it. It's this uncanny sort of eternal present that sort of erases depth per. Like depth perception in knowledge and historicity and kind of. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's. It's like this flat plane where everything is infinitely and immediate, immediately available. And I do think when I first started learning about uncovering information, you know, looking stuff up in a book, there was a sense of distance, there was a sense that knowledge had to be sort of physically obtained, that there was, you know, that the acquisition and the refinement and the. And the synthesis of knowledge, like, required kind of intense human labor to get. To write down, to file away, to retrieve and all of that. And that existed when I was starting school and then kind of vanished by the time I was out of college, I would say. And I try to find myself resisting anything that I write about. It's like, it's not new, right? I wrote about, you know, the sort of. I, like five years ago, I wrote about the thing where everyone started to have the same face, like all the. All the 30 year olds, you know, and. And I was like, you know, this sort of repressive, like, wild alterations of beauty technology, I mean, that's centuries, millennia old. You know, it's not. Nothing is new. But I do think. And so when I get afraid about the Internet or climate change or, you know, these things that do feel kind of like we've reached the end, like sort of scientifically we reached the end, try to remind myself that we've always been afraid, that it's the end of the world, the end of our minds. But the Internet, I do. It's different from all these other technologies because none of them were surveilling us back, right? Like television, you have someone who's maybe keeping track of ratings if you've got a box or whatever, but none of them, none of them were surveilling us every second of our interaction with them and manipulating our actions on these technologies to retain our attention for as long as possible. They weren't interactive and they weren't based on surveillance. In the same way, if we got bored of tv, we would walk away and read a book. And now if we get bored of our phone, our phone says, wait, here's 45 other things that I'll just, you know, give me five seconds, give me five seconds, and I'll get you for another 35 minutes. And then you'll feel, you know, I think that is that interplay, that dynamic quality, the literal sort of organizations of these things to be maximally addictive. Like, I do think that is new.
- [14:32]
David Duchovny
It feels like it. It feels like it. I mean, I have so many responses to what you're saying. I hope I can hold on to them. The first one is, what is our duty as parents? Is it to raise them to live in the world that we thought best or the one that we liked best, or to raise them in the world that exists? And does that mean letting them play on the Internet and getting as savvy as they can and, you know, having to deal with it the way they're going to have to deal with it, or does it mean pulling them out and giving them the consciousness of a reader or whatever it is that we validate more highly? I don't know how to answer that.
- [15:11]
Ellie Kemper
I think about it like, I have, I have Internet brain. I've got. I've got brain disease, you know, I've got Internet brain disease for sure. But I think about, you know, because, like, my children, like, my younger one just turned old enough to watch a screen, like, and have her attention be held by it. And I was sort of like, oh, thank God, you know, like, oh, now I can make dinner. You know, like, it's actually.
- [15:31]
David Duchovny
It's a bit of a babysitter. Sure.
- [15:33]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah. And, you know, and I. You know, I'm not. There's no. I stand no chance of being a purist. I. Because I'm not one. And the way that I think about it, the thing that has rescued me from full powerlessness at the hands of the sort of trap and surveillance machine is that there are things. There are. There's a certain set of things that I have always liked more and will always like more that will feel more physically absorbing and more fun and, you know, will make me, like. I think about it, and I think kids still feel like, this way. Like, you. You look at your phone for too long and you feel less human instead of more. And there's a certain subset of activities that make you feel more human and not less. Reading is the most profound of these. Like, I think it instilled, presumably, in both of us and everyone that read so much as a kid and, you know, pursues this. It teaches you from age, like 4 or 5, whatever it is, to that one of the best things you can do is fully subsume yourself in someone else's reality, not even watch it the way you would on a screen.
- [16:46]
David Duchovny
So it's. It's an empathy tool.
- [16:48]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah. The Martha Nussbaum thing, like, I think, you know, it clearly is not a foolproof one, but. But it just makes you want to get in other people's heads and find total absorption in someone else's. You know, like, it. It teaches you kind of about an interdependence that I find sort of politically useful, spiritually useful, you know, and. And I can't. That's like, my only hope for the. For my children, who I know will be as addicted to their phones as I am, probably more, is like, hopefully there's something. Maybe it's reading, maybe it's making something. Maybe it's. You know, my partner is like an architect, and he builds things. Right. It's like, I just hope there's something. If it's going out, dancing, if it's like, whatever it is, that there's something that reminds them that there is kind of no substitute for presence.
- [17:44]
David Duchovny
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- [19:01]
Gia Tolentino
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- [20:08]
Ellie Kemper
Hi, I'm Emily Deschanel. And I'm Carla Gallo and we're excited to tell you about Boneheads, our new Bones Rewatch podcast. I played Dr. Temperance Brennan. And I played Daisy Wick. And we are gonna watch from the very beginning. We're gonna watch the episodes. We're gonna reminisce, we're gonna laugh, we're gonna cry. We're gonna tell behind the scenes stories. We're gonna go on tangents. A lot of tangents. So whether you're a seasoned bones fanatic or a newcomer looking to dip your toes in to the wild world of forensic forensic anthropology. This show is for you. Boneheads from Lemonada Media is out now. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:10]
David Duchovny
I think your journey is very interesting because you said, you know, in the beginning your experience of the Internet there. You are a Southern Baptist in Houston. Your experience of the Internet was, oh, there's a great wide world out there that I can be a part of. Not. Not necessarily this little area that I'm in. So that was, that was the original impulse and the original beauty of it.
- [21:30]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, it was like, oh, here's a place where you are free to be yourself. And then that sort of curdled broadly for ev. For most people on the Internet, you know, 10, 15, 15 years later into, oh, like, here's a place where you are going to be algorithmically micro targeted and like forced into a particular type of self. But I, I think something that I wrote about with this Instagram face that I was referencing earlier, where it was.
- [21:54]
David Duchovny
Like, I love that article. Can you name the article so people can find it if it's called the.
- [21:59]
Ellie Kemper
Age of Instagram face, it was sort of like, you know, it was like 2018. It was like, why does everyone on the Internet look like the same five professionally beautiful women? Like, it was just when everyone started getting the same exact injections because. And went to the Kardashians. One of the Kardashians, plastic surgeon just posed as a journalist. And I was just like, I want to look better. What should I do? And you know, within 30 seconds, he was like, here, I recommend $75,000 of work. And he, you know, he had face tuned my face live and projected the face onto his face.
- [22:28]
David Duchovny
Tune.
- [22:28]
Ellie Kemper
And I.
- [22:29]
David Duchovny
Wait, you said facetune?
- [22:31]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, and I, And I like had.
- [22:32]
David Duchovny
What is Facetune? It's like autotune for a face.
- [22:35]
Ellie Kemper
Yes, it literally is. It's an app you can download and you can, you can.
- [22:39]
David Duchovny
So your face can have perfect pitch at some point, basically. Okay.
- [22:44]
Ellie Kemper
And it was interesting because it's like, it felt to me, you know, I, at the same time I was like, if I was trying to be someone that had my face on screen, I would probably do this, you know, Like, I would. It's not that I don't understand why everyone started to have the same face. It was more like it felt like the algorithm itself, the Instagram algorithm was physically rewriting people's faces in order to make them perform better on the platform. And that seemed to me, to be just a quite specific and interesting use case of the way that we have adapted ourselves, you know, and I think in many ways, like, truly spiritually to this system of, you know, surveillance technology that is sort of using the raw material of our selfhood as its. As the gold that's mining out of the ground. But. And I think it is true, like, the extent to which I have already utterly been shaped by the incentives of the social Internet, maybe irreparably, even as I try to, like, stay off of it as much as possible, I feel that, like, I feel that I've already been shaped by it. I've started to think about that is my. My older daughter, who's 4, is. Is so much like me. Like, she shows no signs of not being, like, a real clone in every. And she.
- [24:07]
David Duchovny
How does that feel?
- [24:08]
Ellie Kemper
And I think about. I'm sort of like, well, it was sort of like I sewed and now I have to read. You know, like, I was like, oh, God, she's gonna party. You know, like, this girl's gonna party. And, you know, and I hope she has a great time with it. But I'm almost like, oh, no, you're growing up in New York. That's a whole different. But. But I do think. I feel that I emerged pretty unscathed. Like, as unscathed as one can. Like, as a girl that grew up in the 90s, early 2000s can from, you know, this a sense of being alienated from my looks and my body. Like, I was. I was. I have not felt disconnected from it in my life. Like, I feel lucky that I've had that experience. But, yeah, I do remember that all of high school, like, I thought I was fat, you know, Like, I was. Like, I was tiny, thought I was fat, you know, didn't like xyz about that period of adolescence where you just cannot stand yourself and you wish you were just better in every way. And I realized how. I realized thinking when I think about my daughter. How painful it must be for your parents to see their children going through that. These creatures that they think, you know, like, I think she's the most beautiful. Like, I think she's so. The idea that she would ever look at, you know, this heavenly figure that she is and be unhappy and basically to be able to forecast that she will because she's socialized as a girl and that all of my motherly reassurances that she's perfect or whatever, it doesn't mean anything because she'll grow up as a teenager.
- [25:52]
David Duchovny
It Means something. I assure you, it means something, but it doesn't mean enough, I don't think.
- [25:57]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, it's kind of unbearable to think about that. To think about her being subject to the hierarchy and the sort of. If I had been in middle school and had been able to get numerical likes on a picture of myself and have that every single day of my life and have that be with everyone around me, I'm deeply glad that I never experienced that.
- [26:19]
David Duchovny
You know, the tough thing, too, and it's probably exacerbated by the phone, is that kids don't like to fail. Usually kids don't like to fail, you know, getting back.
- [26:30]
Ellie Kemper
Oh, my God. Yeah.
- [26:31]
David Duchovny
And so it's hard to get them to put themselves in those positions where they're not expert, you know, and they're not expert in anything. I don't know where that comes from. It's some kind of human DNA that it's like. And I found.
- [26:46]
Ellie Kemper
Were you a perfectionist about yourself growing up?
- [26:50]
David Duchovny
Yeah, I was. I'm not anymore. In fact, I value the other side. I value the imperfection so much more. But, yeah, no, I was bad. I mean, there was. My father would remind me of this thing where we would have a catch. You know, you say that back in the East, I think they say, play catch here on the West Coast, I can't stand it. They also say tennis. Tennis shoes rather than sneakers. But I can still live here, you know, it's okay. I can. I can put up with it. But having a catch. I drop one. I had a fit of crying, crying. My. And my dad says, pick it up, throw it back to me. You'll catch the next one. And he says, might be apocryphal. But he says. I said, no, I want to catch that one. The one I already muffed. So that's kind of where my brain was living as a child. And I think a lot of kids brains are in that place. And I wanted to get my kids to be at home with failure. And one of the reasons I started playing guitar at the age of 50, or even skiing with them, which I had never done, was I wanted to see them see me suck at something.
- [27:58]
Ellie Kemper
Right.
- [27:59]
David Duchovny
And not be upset about it.
- [28:01]
Ellie Kemper
Okay, can I tell you a child story, please? So my. This is when. So my daughter looks. She just turned four. She's pretty young, but she. I had gotten her like a little workbook that had a bunch of shapes and a little pair of scissors. Because I was like, okay, maybe, you know, she can have some fun cutting out some Shapes. And she immediately tried to cut out a star, and she botched it. And the more she tried to correct herself, the more she sort of made this sort of nubbin, this sort of like, like many headed nubbin of, you know, like an unrecognizable amoeba where a star used to be. And she started crying, and she was like, mom, I didn't do it perfect. I really wanted to do it perfect, but I didn't do it perfect. And I was like, oh, you know, I was like, oh, Paloma, like, I got you this to just practice, you know, like, the whole point is we do things really, really badly, and we do, you know, we get slowly better. But I was like, the whole point of this is practice. The whole point is to mess it up. It's, you know, it's okay. It's okay. And I was like, let's start with, you know, let's do an easier shape. I'll give you this triangle. Triangle. Star is so hard. Let's do. Let's do something easier. And she's like, through her tears, she's going, but I don't want to do something easier, Mom. I want to do something harder, and I want to do it perfect. And I was like, oh, no.
- [29:16]
David Duchovny
Oh, no.
- [29:17]
Ellie Kemper
Oh, it's genetic.
- [29:19]
David Duchovny
It's me. It's me.
- [29:21]
Ellie Kemper
It's many, you know, because it's like she. And it really did feel, you know, the arena in my life in which those impulses come out. It's not really within the domestic scene. You know, it's like maybe she's seen me, like, burn something on the stove and get mad at myself, but really, most of that impulse is contained within a zone of my life and my day that she doesn't see right. And it really. And my. And my partner is exactly like this, too, as are, you know, almost anybody in. In.
- [29:48]
David Duchovny
Well, you're successful people. That's what they're seeing. They think that you're great. They think you're great at everything.
- [29:54]
Ellie Kemper
Oh, you have the. You have the brain disease that every single person in New York that I know has. You know, like, you want. I want to do something harder, and I want to do it perfectly. And. And I. And I felt. And. And I both felt a great sadness that this quality was already manifesting itself within, like, a very tiny little person's brain. And I felt a weird pride that. That will drive her to do something.
- [30:19]
David Duchovny
Yeah.
- [30:19]
Ellie Kemper
You know, sure.
- [30:21]
David Duchovny
Well, I think we're in a dangerous place for kids to make mistakes, period. You Know, kids are supposed to make mistakes. And unfortunately, what we've done, you know, with the Internet that curates everything and that everything exists forever, we somehow, you know, I was thinking about it this morning that just that phrase that usually bad people use when they get caught, which is like, you shouldn't judge me for my worst day. Now, it's usually bullshit because it's usually those kind of People had a lot of worst days. But kids, you know, teenagers, they're going to have worse days. And we're now in this place as a culture where we're judging people for their worst days, and it lasts. And I think, forget about adults, you know, they're going to have to handle it. They're going to have to take their medicine, whatever, but kids should not have to take that medicine. And I don't know that we figured that out yet.
- [31:12]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah. Do you know about the right to be forgotten?
- [31:14]
David Duchovny
No, but I love it.
- [31:17]
Ellie Kemper
This is like a legal principle in the eu. It's a GDPR thing, that General Data Protection Regulation act in the eu. And it's just the right. It's the right to erasure. It's the right to have personal information removed from online searches and directories. It says so I guess.
- [31:33]
David Duchovny
So it's more of a technical thing and less of a spiritual exercise. You know, it's very.
- [31:38]
Ellie Kemper
I think, you know, there's no. There's no hard line between the two of the things. Right. Like, it is kind of a spiritual thing. It is an assertion that there should be selfhood that is removed from, you know, instrumentalization. And I think that's a, like, fundamentally, that is a spiritual thing. Right?
- [31:57]
David Duchovny
Yeah, yeah. I'm a machine of use as opposed to a machine of being. Yeah. And I think that's why you're so uniquely kind of poised to be thinking deeply about these things, because you were raised in an older spiritual tradition.
- [32:17]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, yeah. And, like, you know, everything about the way I think about politics and morality and the purpose of being alive, it's inevitably so rooted in this spiritual framework that I in many ways find abhorrent and don't believe in at all. But I am grateful for that, for the imprint that it left on me, the damage and the boon, you know, and that. Yeah, like, that's something that I was so growing. I grew up in this giant evangelical church. This kind of incredibly overwhelming, constant. This, like, terrifying sacred was always hovering over me. And this. This idea that there was some sort of, like a mystery and consequence and revelation and these things and punishment and these ideas Just hovered so intensely. But as did, like the idea of transcendence. This, this feeling that I first, I think, experienced in these giant evangelical worship services in the dark with so many people listening to a hymn and someone, you know, some kind of person with abhorrent political views talking about salvation. But I felt some sort of disappearance and transcendence in that, that long after I lost that religious framework, I still feel that I'm actively chasing. I think it's almost impossible to experience the Full Body Sublime on the Internet. It's impossible to forget yourself because you are always.
- [34:00]
David Duchovny
I just want to copyright the Full Body Sublime as a. As a term and as an aspiration.
- [34:05]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah. I mean, because you are not allowed. It's sort of like what we were talking about. That space that you're in when you are writing something. You are, in one way you are deeply inscribing your own ego and ability, but in another, perhaps more significant way, you were erasing it. You're disappearing into service.
- [34:26]
David Duchovny
You're in service of an idea, of a mission.
- [34:29]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, you're part of a mission and you feel. And the most pleasurable part of like, you know, I mean, it's anything like dancing, music, drugs, sex, like, whatever. Like the feeling of being in a crowd, in a march, like it's being part of a movement. Sorry, I just whacked my mic. It's like it's this dissolution of self. To me, that's when I feel the most human, is when I experience that. And I do think that the nature of the phone, in every way, it's so antithetical to that experience because the phone requires you to be like this very precisely micro targeted combination of monetizable demographics. Every second that you're looking at it. That's the exact opposite of what we experience in any one of those moments of profound beauty on the edge of fear and disappearance. And I think about that actually with my kids, like how. And I was talking about this last weekend with a friend who was also raised in this extremely strict religious environment, like I was. And I want my children to hunger for like that hunger for transcendence has been in many ways like the guiding force of my personal and possibly my professional life. And I don't know if I could have had that without.
- [35:47]
David Duchovny
Right.
- [35:48]
Ellie Kemper
You know, spending 18 years within a church where I never met a person, you know, that didn't believe that abortion was murder, you know.
- [35:55]
David Duchovny
Yeah, well, you saw it was possible. I mean, you saw transcendent. The feeling was possible whether or not the framework was, you know, mentally acceptable to you or. And that.
- [36:09]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah. And that it's universal, right? That it's like, like it's a reminder that actually probably all of us are engaged in this quest in some way, you know, and we just find it in different things.
- [36:32]
Reshma Sajani
I love me some me. And my nipples are touching my gut.
- [36:36]
Ellie Kemper
Yes, girl. Welcome to the Body Collective podcast. I'm Katie Storino. We're here to change the conversation about weight. We're going to take everything we've learned about shame, unlearn it and transform it into a source of power. And I'm doing it with some of my greatest girlfriends. I'm Hunter McGrady.
- [36:53]
Reshma Sajani
Ashley Longshore.
- [36:54]
Ellie Kemper
My name is Tracy Moore from Lemonada Media and Weight Watchers. The Bodi Collective is out now. Hey, everyone, it's me, Ricky Lake. Despite all my success, I've been through some serious challenges. Struggles with my weight, with hair loss, grief, everything. But despite it all, I have managed to create a life filled with ease and a whole lot of fun. Finally, in midlife, I feel like I have mastered the art of choosing happiness. And I want to share that hope, love and good health with you. Listen to the High Life with Ricky Lake from Lemonada Media. Out now. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [37:43]
Gia Tolentino
Get ready for a wild mythical adventure. Melissa McCarthy leads an all star cast in a hilarious new podcast, Hildy the Barback and the Lake of Fire. In this fantastical fictional tale, McCarthy stars as Hildy, an unlikely hero from the land of Golgorath who must embark on an epic quest with an unlikely team of warriors to save the world. Starring Melissa McCarthy, Ben Falcone, Octavia Spencer, Glenn Close, and more, Hildy the Barback and the Lake of Fire spins a legendary laugh out loud tale you won't want to miss. Hildy the Barback and the Lake of Fire is out now. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [38:37]
David Duchovny
Your experience with Trick Mirror, I mean, it's, it's outrageous that, you know, as you said, you put together a collection of essays out of the blue and you had this huge success and in a way you're still. It took a couple years to sit in the catastrophe of that success. Right. You know, cause this is, this is a podcast about failure, right? And how wonderful failure is. And the flip side to that is like how inhibiting and crazy making success can be.
- [39:08]
Ellie Kemper
You're the only person that has ever put that quite so succinctly and it's a little devastating and. Cause it also, it feels so churlish for me to Say that, right? Sounds like what I experienced was the best case scenario for any, like, youngish writer. And to be read when you thought, you know. Cause it's like, I came out of, like, MFAs, like, places where I understood UVA, even I took some when I would take creative writing classes there. I found out so early that, like, Most books sell 5,000 copies. You know, it's like, you. That's what you expect. That's all a person can expect. And I think that I had a lot of complicated feelings. Like, I'm uncomfortable with praise because I think, you know, I mean, you know how it is. You write something, you're like, I don't think I've ever known, like, a good writer that is very pleased with the stuff that they do, right? I mean, the ambient state is like.
- [40:05]
David Duchovny
I did the best I could.
- [40:06]
Ellie Kemper
I did the best I could, you know, and you have to be displeased with your own work in order to think that you can do something better than it next time, right? Like, I feel in general that, like, extreme praise is as meaningless as extreme sort of criticism slash hatred, you know, it's like both feel a little bit not my business. I felt this great heartbreak that. It feels so fucking stupid. Thank you for letting me talk about it. But it was like, I realized when my book came out that the thing that I wanted was not to have written a book that people were reading, although that was a great blessing and, like, made it possible for me now to be doing a thing that I didn't think I'd be able to do as college student, which is right for a living, right? Like, it doesn't. It was. It's all worth. Anything is worth it for that. But I realized, like, I felt this heartbreak that this book was this thing that I thought I was doing for myself. And then suddenly it was this incredibly public thing. And I realized, like, that sacred space of. Of just the thing that I liked, the thing that I loved the most about writing. It was over. And I felt. And then I felt the thing, like, tugging, which is where. And it felt like so. And I was like, what have I done? What have I done? And then. And I was like, okay, I need some ego death. And then I had a baby, and then I had another baby, and then my ego has fully died. Good.
- [41:35]
David Duchovny
Congratulations.
- [41:36]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it feels great.
- [41:39]
David Duchovny
It gets back to kind of the heart of why I wanted to begin this podcast in the first place, which was, for me, you talk about intention. So intention is the beginning. But as you know, As a writer and as any creator knows, that between intention and execution, there's all these little failures, there's all these approximations, there's the inchoate kind of thought in your mind, and then there's the translation into words as you sit at the typewriter or the keyboard or whatever. And it's never quite, quite, quite what you wanted. And I'm drawn to especially, you know, when I'm working as an actor. It's like, ah, I really like the discomfort of like. No, it's not quite, it's not quite, it's not quite. And that's what it's all about.
- [42:29]
Ellie Kemper
I think a lot about. I think a lot about, you know, I think that the economy in the last 10 years, and certainly the entire economy of the Internet has been geared towards frictionlessness, right? Like seamless transactions, seamless, personless stuff delivered at your door in a click of a button without any sense of all of the human sort of agony that goes into it, right? Just like an erasure via the impression of seamlessness. And that as sort of a goal, like almost an ideological goal. It's something that's been implanted almost as an ideological goal without giving us any time to think about what that means, right? And it's one of those things. It's one of those sort of fundamental tenets, fundamental sort of principles of the current Internet, which I. It's, you know, it's surveillance and it's seamlessness. And I do think that, you know, think about the best times you ever had as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult, like they were probably completely unsurveilled right there. You were completely free to just be doing whatever you were doing and fucking up and, you know, and starting over the next day, right? And I think it's the same thing with seamlessness. I think about this was something that having children reminds, you know, it's kind of a continual reminder of that the things that are actually meaningful is. It's what you're talking about. It's friction, it's imperfection. It's the struggle to reach the thing that you are trying to get to. And it's sort of the perpetual struggle to be able to express something unreachable is the. Is the whole purpose of trying to make any kind of art, right? And without that struggle, the whole process loses meaning, right? It's not, but the. The whole point is that the closure of the gap between the empty page and the imperfect approximation, right? And I mean, that's what I realized actually in Writing my book, too. It was like, I actually, you know, it's nice to have written in that. Like, you don't have to be in a manuscript agonized anymore. But actually, the thing that I like is that intermediary agony.
- [44:32]
David Duchovny
Yeah.
- [44:33]
Ellie Kemper
There's nothing like it.
- [44:34]
David Duchovny
Well, there's nothing. You're involved, you know, you're in a relationship with that thing.
- [44:41]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah.
- [44:41]
David Duchovny
You know, and it's an intense relationship.
- [44:44]
Ellie Kemper
I wrote a novel after my MFA that I worked on for five years and then shelved it, and it was bad.
- [44:48]
David Duchovny
You sure it wasn't stolen?
- [44:51]
Ellie Kemper
It's in a drawer that I can picture the drawer that it's in, never to return. But that writing experience.
- [44:58]
David Duchovny
Wait, wait. Why did you deem this a failure out of him?
- [45:03]
Ellie Kemper
Because it was bad.
- [45:04]
David Duchovny
That's your interpretation.
- [45:06]
Ellie Kemper
I mean, no, I think it's objectively bad.
- [45:08]
David Duchovny
Do you think you're a good judge of your own, the best judge of your writing?
- [45:12]
Ellie Kemper
I do. I think I have a good internal bar. I mean, I think that's probably one of the most important faculties to cultivate when you're a writer anyway. Right? Like, you know when something is shitty and you gotta abandon it?
- [45:24]
David Duchovny
Well, I don't know. Because if I'm out on a ledge, I don't know if it's a stupid ledge and nobody cares about it or I'm really onto an interesting ledge here. So I don't know, I push back a little bit on that. Like, I know what's good, but I don't know what's great and what's horrible.
- [45:42]
Ellie Kemper
Yeah, that's true. I, however, felt quite certain that this one was not good, but I. But writing it. I still think about it as one of the most valuable writing experiences of my life. Because it was exclusively that part. It was exclusively the struggle.
- [45:56]
David Duchovny
Yeah. I want to show you my copy of the book because you'll see that the. It's yellowed. Right?
- [46:04]
Ellie Kemper
It's the original.
- [46:05]
David Duchovny
It's the original. You can tell I'm truly honored. Yeah. This is not. This is not. I didn't buy this shit just to do this. This is yellowing.
- [46:12]
Ellie Kemper
I truly am so honored. I've been watching you on TV since I was a tiny child getting fucking terrified out of my mind on expiled.
- [46:20]
David Duchovny
So that's a horrible thing to say to a person, but thank you.
- [46:25]
Ellie Kemper
Can I ask you. What. Have you. Have you read anything great lately that you would recommend to me?
- [46:29]
David Duchovny
Read anything great lately? Oh, yeah. Where is it? It's by Markson. It's called the last novel.
- [46:39]
Ellie Kemper
Okay. I'm going to write that down and go buy it.
- [46:41]
David Duchovny
David Markson. It's not really a novel at all. It's just a thinking. It's just a mind. It's just a brilliant mind. So I loved that. Anywho, thank you, Gia. How about you give me your recommendation for some fiction?
- [46:57]
Ellie Kemper
Okay. Loved and Missed by Susie Boit.
- [47:00]
David Duchovny
Don't know that. Get that.
- [47:03]
Ellie Kemper
It's been like kind of a word of mouth circulator among my friends here. And I sobbed. I sobbed my eyes out and I never cry. And it felt amazing. It's interesting. I mean, it's like a book about a mother child relationship. And it's one of the most kind of like devastating evocations of love I've ever read. But it was Parent Child, which, you know, that's. That's quite rare. That. That's the intensity. And yeah, I really loved it.
- [47:32]
David Duchovny
I will get that. Because blowing my own horn. I mean, the book I wrote, Bucky fucking Dent, is really about parent child love and the intensity of that. And I'm a. I'm a sucker. I'm a sucker for that setup.
- [47:45]
Ellie Kemper
Oh, I hope. I hope you like it.
- [47:47]
David Duchovny
Tell me the name again. Let me write it down.
- [47:48]
Ellie Kemper
I hope you cry. It's called Loved and Mentioned. Missed.
- [47:51]
David Duchovny
Loved and Missed. Thank you, Gia. What a pleasure.
- [47:56]
Ellie Kemper
Really, really wonderful to meet you.
- [47:58]
David Duchovny
Yeah, likewise. Hey, everyone, post Gia Tolentino thoughts again. I'm always just so pleased at the kind of conversations that I get to have by virtue of doing the podcast. I'm grateful for that. As much as I've been struggling with the preparation workload, I feel grateful to have these conversations. And the other thing I struggle with is just my self, my sense as a creative person. Like, is this what I want to be creating? Is this creative? Are we making something? Are we making something together? I sure hope so. It was a great conversation, I thought. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful to have this opportunity to talk to interesting people about what I feel is a very human and interesting subject. Even though we rarely talk about, like a failure per se, we always kind of circle back to some situations that brought great pain through expectations not filled, fulfilled. Yeah, man, we keep going. 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 Keegan Zemma, Aria Brachi, Donnie Matias and Paula Kaplan. 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 Brad Davidson. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittleswax, Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian Modak. You can find us online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen Ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership.
- [50:59]
Ellie Kemper
Hi everyone, Gloria Riviera 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.
- [51:35]
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.