Fail Better with David Duchovny

Episode Summary: John Seabrook’s Family Was the Vegetable Version of ‘Succession’

Date: December 9, 2025
Guest: John Seabrook (Author, The Spinach King; Staff Writer, The New Yorker)
Host: David Duchovny

Episode Overview

In this rich and revealing conversation, David Duchovny sits down with his old friend and acclaimed writer John Seabrook. Their discussion centers around Seabrook’s latest book, The Spinach King, an intertwining family memoir and American business history spanning the Seabrook family's rise and eventual unraveling of their vegetable empire. The episode dives deep into failure across generations, the impact of legacy, personal struggle with identity and addiction, and the immense challenge of facing family history with honesty. With humor, candor, and poignancy, Duchovny and Seabrook draw connections between past and present, illuminating how familial cycles of ambition, betrayal, and survival echo through time—and how confronting those stories can ultimately lead to growth, forgiveness, and even redemption.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Finding (and Failing) as a Writer

• Seabrook’s Early Ambitions & "Fiction Gene"
  • John reveals he initially wanted to be a novelist, seeing it as the pinnacle of literary achievement.
  • Quote: "I could never believe in the truth of what I invented. Whenever I would write like a made up thing in a story, I would sort of like recoil from it a little bit... It actually took me a long time to figure that out." — John Seabrook (03:27)
• Influential Mentors & College Days
  • The conversation explores their days at Princeton, pivotal teachers (Joyce Carol Oates, Jeffrey Wolf), and the gradual realization that non-fiction was a more authentic fit.
  • Quote: "It was really the first time I began to think that, like, I could somehow write about my grandfather, this kind of great Duke of Deception, in his own way." — John Seabrook (07:59)

2. Craft, Journalism, and the Evolution of Interviewing

• Learning the Art of Listening
  • John describes his progression from scripted interviews to the realization that the richest material comes from letting conversations breathe—embracing silences and spontaneity.
    • Quote: “The spontaneous moments are always the best moments, the unplanned moments... Silence is your best friend as an interviewer, I think.” — John Seabrook (12:52 & 14:00)
• Technological Change in Storytelling
  • From tape recorders to iPhones and AI transcription, Seabrook observes how technological advances changed not just the process, but the intimacy of interviews.
  • "You can just like people... you put your phone down in front of somebody, it doesn't seem weird. They don't feel like they're being recorded." — John Seabrook (11:36)

3. The Seabrook Saga: A ‘Succession’-Like Legacy

• A Vegetable Empire’s Tumultuous Rise
  • Seabrook offers a condensed history of Seabrook Farms and his grandfather C.F. Seabrook’s quest to mechanize farming—modeled after Henry Ford—resulting in massive success, at times packing a third of the nation’s lima beans (21:05–27:57).
  • Quote: “He found these investors to loan him money to create this kind of vegetable factory that was modeled on Henry Ford’s car factory... a little quixotic, because vegetables are very different from cars.” — John Seabrook (21:52)
• Original Sin & Family Betrayal
  • The foundational betrayal—C.F. Seabrook cheating his own father—sets the tone for generational strife, paranoia, and cycles of familial betrayal.
  • Quote: "It's the original sin. ...there's betrayal at the heart of this story." — Seabrook & Duchovny (23:06–24:03)
• Complex Relations with Labor & Race
  • Seabrook addresses his grandfather’s harsh suppression of a 1934 Black workers strike and the subsequent recruitment of Japanese Americans (interned during WWII) and European refugees, noting the contradictory narratives within the family and community memory.
  • "He crushed the strike with hired vigilantes, fired them all, and kind of wrote them out of company history until really this book." — John Seabrook (27:57)

4. Personal Reckoning: Discovery Through Writing

• Writing as Family Excavation & Conflict
  • John tells of a pivotal New Yorker article (1995) where he uncovered dark family secrets, including uncles’ violent acts during the strike—triggering family backlash and exposing the limits of family loyalty versus truth-telling (29:28–32:19).
  • The family saga comes full circle with the sons ousting their own father, echoing the original patriarchal betrayal.
• Inheritance of Trauma & Addiction
  • Seabrook recounts how alcohol, introduced by his father at age 13, became a core ritual that bound and also harmed them.
  • He only fully confronted this cycle after his father’s death in 2009, having left him a trove of damning records (“Save for JMS Jr.” boxes).
  • Quote: "Alcohol was another one of the sort of pathways the Seabrooks followed to the elite... alcohol kind of got the better of him." — John Seabrook (32:19–33:22)

5. Redemption, Healing, and Honest Memoir

• How Therapy and Sobriety Shaped the Book
  • Seabrook’s personal turn—via therapy and internal family systems—allowed him to both see his relationship with alcohol (and his father) more clearly and write honestly about it.
  • Quote: “My obsession or attraction or relationship with alcohol really was very deeply connected to my relationship with my dad. Both, like, how I acquired the taste and then a sort of medicine for the pain of that relationship.” (44:58)
• Shifting Perspective on Patrilineal Ambition
  • The book’s final section discusses both the personal and historical necessity of truth-telling, including attempts at reparation and engaging with descendants of those harmed by Seabrook Farms.
  • Duchovny notes the shift from memoir to historical reckoning, and the bravery in facing “the not-so-hidden shadow of this book, the shadow family behind this book.” (25:38)

6. Reflections on Failure, Family, and the Broader American Story

• The Universal Lessons of Dysfunctional Family Business
  • Seabrook and Duchovny discuss the “Succession”-like nature of his family's story, drawing broader parallels to American meritocracy and flawed concepts of generational privilege.
  • Quote: “Like an addictive drug, the family business creates a high with delusions of grandeur and power...it feeds the addiction.” — Kenneth K., quoted by Duchovny (51:14)
• Empathy, Forgiveness, and Understanding
  • The episode closes with reflections on growing empathy for traumatized parents, the courage to break cycles, and the realization that failing better—personally and historically—may be the best any of us can aspire to.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “I could never believe in the truth of what I invented. Whenever I would write like a made up thing in a story, I would sort of like recoil from it a little bit...” — John Seabrook (03:27)

• “The spontaneous moments are always the best moments, the unplanned moments... Silence is your best friend as an interviewer, I think.” — John Seabrook (12:52 & 14:00)

• “It’s the original sin... there’s betrayal at the heart of this story.” — John Seabrook & David Duchovny (23:08)

• “He crushed the strike with hired vigilantes, fired them all, and kind of wrote them out of company history until really this book.” — John Seabrook (27:57)

• “You hope you’re in a scene where something is actually happening.” — John Seabrook on narrative journalism (12:52)

• “My obsession or attraction or relationship with alcohol really was very deeply connected to my relationship with my dad. Both, like, how I acquired the taste and then a sort of medicine for the pain of that relationship.” — John Seabrook (44:58)

• “Like an addictive drug, the family business creates a high with delusions of grandeur and power... it feeds the addiction.” — Kenneth K., quoted by Duchovny (51:14)

Segment Timestamps

• [02:32] John’s early literary aspirations & realization about fiction
• [07:00] On mentors and their pivotal advice
• [10:29] Evolution as journalist/interviewer; the art of silence
• [20:58] The Seabrook family’s agricultural empire—rise and fall
• [27:57] Racial, labor, and ethical dimensions of Seabrook Farms
• [29:28] Discovering and documenting dark family history; family reactions
• [36:06] Parental trauma—understanding his father through memoir
• [43:26] Sobriety, therapy, and writing the book’s personal ending
• [51:14] Quoting Kenneth K. on family business addiction
• [52:35] Duchovny reflects on the book’s impact, bravery, and contemporary relevance

Final Thoughts & Tone

The episode is candid, contemplative, and often warmly self-deprecating—true to Duchovny’s and Seabrook’s dry, literate sensibilities. It offers a textured look into the ways failure is perpetuated and how it can, eventually, be transformed into understanding and even love. Both Duchovny and Seabrook speak with empathy toward their forebears and themselves, making this conversation not just an excavation of history, but a moving guide for any listener seeking to reconcile with the failures and shadows in their own lives.

For listeners:
Whether you’re captivated by family sagas, American history, literary insight, or the tangled roots of personal growth, this is an episode—like The Spinach King itself—that will linger long after the last note.