Lemonada. Okay, I'm starting to record something for you. I just got to say off the bat, I'm so bad with anything technological. I've spent the last 10 minutes fucking this up, and oh, man, it's so frustrating to me. All right, all right. I think I got everything working now. You're hearing my voice, right? We're making a podcast. It's called Fail Better, and I'm David Ducoubne. Why am I making a podcast? The best answer I can come up with is that I felt like I've been failing my entire life. So on some level, I can speak from plenty of experience. I've I've had personal failures like we all have. I've had professional failures like we all have. I have things that I've been called as an actor. I had a high-profile divorce. I had a magical mystery tour through rehab. We don't have to get into specifics now, but stay tuned. Maybe we will. There's a sense in which failure looms over us, and I want to know what's good about that, and I want to know what's bad about that, what's inhibiting about that, what is pushing us forward to be better and what is holding us back in shame.

That's what I want to get into. That would be a wonderful result of this if even a little bit of shame in our lives could fall away. One of my most painful professional failures is what prompted the whole idea for this podcast. I was in Canada shooting a movie, and my movie, House of D, that I wrote and directed the first movie that I directed, had just come out in the States. And what I read is in bold letters, David Ducouveny's House of D gets an F. An F. An F. And the hairs on my neck started to do weird things. I could feel sweat dropping from my armpit to my waist. I could feel my ears getting red. I was had vertigo, just that... I don't know what else to call it, but when you just feel shame or humiliation, and it's a real interior feeling, like you're sent deeply inside yourself in some childhood shame. And the first line of the review was, Have David Ducouvenue's brains been abducted by aliens? Good one. Yeah, it was a good one because that just went... It hurt. I get to my trailer and I'm still in this vibrating, dizzying, jittery state.

I'd had 10 cups of coffee, but it was like, the shame coffee, the best, strongest coffee of all. But then I thought, I have a job to do. These people have me to act on their movie. My review from another movie is not their problem, not their interest. So I tell myself, I got to suck it up. I got to figure out a way to go out there and do decent work today, even do good work, do work. And so I do that. I go out and I have a day. I can't remember if the work was good or bad or different. I suppose it was good enough. And then I went home, went to bed, and I woke and I feel fantastic. I've never felt better. And I remember, oh, that paper, oh, that review. And I realized in that moment that I felt so light and free is because My whole life, I'd been terrified of getting an F from school on, from childhood on. Just like an F, I think at some point in my head, I made the equation F equals death. And here I was on a Saturday morning in Montreal, and the sky was blue, and I was breathing air, and I was drinking coffee, and I was feeling good.

And I had my F because I realized that you don't die when you get an F. And I'm so happy now, all these years later, to have gotten that F and to have been somewhat freed from the tyranny of past fail of A, B, C, D. Why did they leave out E? What happened to E? Why can't E be a grade? Why did they go from D to F? I guess because of failure. Fail Better is a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. This is my very first interview. It's my very first interview that I've ever done. I've been an interviewee. I've never been an interviewer, and it's a different seat. It's a different vibe. But luckily, my first time is with a man who I've been fortunate enough to fail alongside a few times over the years. He lasted only four episodes on Saturday Night Live. His sketch comedy show won an Emmy after it had already been canceled. He is the man who directed The Cable Guy, and he's responsible for Zoolander 2. That's right, it's Ben Stiller, my friend, and here's our conversation.

Hey, there you are.

How's it going, man? All right. How are you?

I had to make sure I had my cup of coffee ready.

I know. I got one right here. Good. I'm just going to slam it at some point.

How are you doing?

I'm good. Thanks for doing this.

Yeah, I'm so into it. Look, It's actually, I think, a really good idea.

Well, I see the thing is it's nice that you say that because I don't really know. I have this idea that it's a good idea, but I'm not even sure how it happens or how it takes form, which is exciting, but also nauseous making on the other side.

Yeah, I know. Taking a chance. But there's so much to talk about in that world, I guess. I don't know.

I know. What I wanted to say to you was, do you remember how we came to do Zoolander together. I say together. I had a small part in it, but you know.

Small yet pivotal role. That's basically very important.

Do you remember how it happened?

Not quite.

So you sent the script, or the producer sent the script to Tateya to read for some role, and it was lying around the house, and I was like, What's this? And she said, Oh, that's a Ben Stiller movie. I said, Why? Ben Stiller is not sending me a script. He's sending you a script. Well, can I read it? And then I read it, and I think I got in touch with your reps and said, I would love to do anything that you want me to do. And you offered me the brother role or the hand model. And I thought, I'll do the hand model. I think I can understand that. So we go and we're on set and we're shooting. What was that island off the Coast of New York City?

That was Roosevelt Island, right?Right across from the U.Yeah..

So We're shooting that scene, and I've got this crazy monolog, basically, with a few interruptions from Zoolander. What you stumbled upon goes way deeper than you could ever fathom. The fashion industry has been behind every major political assassination over the last 200 years. And behind every hit, a card-carrying male model. We did it like three, four, five times, and the fourth or fifth time, I fucked up. I flubbed the line or whatever. And you and Christine both said, Finally. And I was just so liberated by that because I was trying to be perfect. I was trying to get it right, get it right, get it right. And I just wanted to... That was like a moment of gratitude I had for you as a director, as a creative artist and everything, to just recall that, to recall that moment.

Yeah. Wow. I didn't remember that part. I do remember from that scene that I think I screwed up my line and said, But why male models twice? A couple of times. And we ended up leaving it in the movie. It seemed like Derek was just stupid. It was really just me being stupid.

But why male models?

But why male models?

You serious? I just told you that a moment ago.

Right. Everything you're talking about I so identify with. A little moment like that on a I mean, it's so scary sometimes to just, especially if you don't know the people. We didn't know each other, really. No, we didn't. I was just so excited that you wanted to be a part of it. I remember being nervous with you there, too, wanting it to work out, wanting you to have a good experience and wanting this to- That's ridiculous. No, but for real. I used Dave Ducoubny, cool actor guy, and I had reached out about being in the movie, and I just jumped at the chance. But I think you really do appreciate those little moments. I remember when I was... One of the first jobs I ever had was playing a tough guy in a Bette Midler movie, this movie called Stella, and I played her daughter's tough, wrong side of the tracks, boyfriend, which is a role I ended up getting typecast in for years and years after. But it was maybe my second or third role in a movie, one scene or one or two scenes. She was like, drilling some food on a barbecue outside of her apartment, and we were on the porch, and I was trying to be tough.

I took a piece of meat off the barbecue and I ate it. It was so ridiculous. But God bless the director, his name is John Erman and for giving me this opportunity to play this guy. I was so nervous trying to be cool. I remember the script supervisor who's in charge of keeping track of the continuity that you do the same thing every take said, Oh, no, no, no, you picked it up with your left hand, or you picked it up on this line, the last take, you should pick it up there. I was so nervous because I'd never been in that type of situation. I remember the director just jumped in and said, No, don't worry, he hasn't found it yet. Let's just let him do his thing. It was a little moment like that, like you're talking about, that I always remembered that the director was there going, No, it's okay. You know what I mean? All of this machinery and these things that you can get judged about or that you don't know when you're walking in. It was a slightly different situation. But it's the same thing where somebody just gave me the freedom to say it's okay to just figure it out.

But that does get to the essence, I think, of what it is to have to take these chances when you do anything, creatively, for sure.

I remember the first job I got was a commercial for Loewenbrow, and I was terrified. I mean, somehow I got the commercial.

Loenbrow was a beer for people who don't know, right?

It was a beer. Yeah, it was a beer. Thank you. I remember. It was a beer. Let it be Loewenbrow was the tagline.Exactly.Let it be Lohenbrau. Let it be Loewenbrow. Let it be Loewenbrow. I get there and they tell me, Okay, There's no dialog. It's just an image of me and an older guy at a bar, and they tell me he's an old professor of mine that I run into. That's the vibe they want to get from us. At one point, it's very much like your meat thing. I tossed a pretzel up into the air and caught it in my mouth. Just Mr. At ease at the bar. The director was like, Yeah, that's good. Then I just glomed onto it. I couldn't stop tossing pretzels up in the air and catching it in my mouth. And finally, I just run with the director and, We got the pretzel. We got the pretzel. And then the shame just started. When somebody sees what you're trying to do, it's the worst.

There's one audition where I had to do a whole monolog. This was when I was 17 for a play in New York, and the monolog was about a bris, like somebody having a bris. And Yeah, should know that. I didn't know that, and I pronounced it Bri, B-R-I-S, as Bri, like brie cheese, the whole monolog. At the end of the audition, they said, Thank you very much, and it's pronounced bris. Next. Yeah. I mean, especially at that point when you're just starting out and you're lucky enough to get work, it's so exciting to get the work and it's so charged. At least I've always I was so nervous. I mean, all these things are like, I think as time goes by, I don't know, we just change as people, I think. We change as people every year. And I have a different perspective on When I look at myself 20 years ago, I'll watch B-roll footage, which is like behind-the-scenes footage on a film or a movie of me making jokes about something, and I'm thinking I'm really funny. I look at this guy and he thinks like he just knows, and I look like such an asshole.

I'm just like, Oh, this guy really thinks like he's got it all figured out. But there's something about when you're young, too, there's that aspect of like, okay, you have this- Absolutely. Right?

Just this dry. You need that. We also need that confidence that you have it figured it out. Exactly. It's not supreme confidence. It's like a green confidence. And I had it, too. When I first started acting, I was like, I'm fantastic. Fuck. I'm just going to I look at old X files and I'm like, Oh, man, that is just bad. But there's an eagerness that is winning. Then at some point, I feel like I lost that eagerness. Then what do you replace that with? You become a different a maker. Yes. Because you can't be 21 forever in any way, even in a creative way. Yeah, for sure. There's a different creation that comes as we get older, a different relationship to it. I When I look at your work. I mean, your work is incredibly varied. And what I notice is, in the beginning, I see a person who's engaged in having a conversation with the television and the movies with the medium.

I feel like I had a lack of self-awareness or understanding of why I wanted to have that conversation with movies and TV other than I loved them and I wanted to be a of it, and I grew up around it, obviously, with my parents. But I have to say, failure has contributed to that in a big way because I think the times where I've experienced that They were pretty... There were a couple. I'd say they're two professional ones that really, I feel, really affected me.

What do you think of specifically when you say that?

Specifically in terms of failure?

Those failures, yeah.

Well, the first one was the cable guy with Jim Carrey. We had so much fun making that movie. When the movie came out, it was not well received and did not make a lot of money at the box office. It was the first movie that Jim Carrey did that didn't do well. I remember picking up the New York Times review of that. I remember where I was at the St. Regis Hotel and opening up the New York Times review, which said the first disaster movie of the summer has arrived, and it's called The Cable Guy. Because at that time, disaster movies were a big thing, too. That was shocking because it was just like, Oh, I thought we were so into this, and We were having so much fun doing it, and Jim was so into it. We spent so much time and energy making this thing. That thing of like, Wait a minute. I thought this was... But this is the thing we work really hard on and we all really think is good. But I did feel the lull in terms of after that, people not calling. You know what I mean? You don't get a lot of calls.

First of all, you don't get calls. It's that thing when the movie comes out and it doesn't do well, you always You always get a lot of calls and congratulations when things are going well, when something isn't good, it's just a silence. Nobody calls.

Or there's the worst call, which is like, I don't care about the New York Times. When you've stayed away from the New York Times and not read the review.

Yeah, that's the best. When you get the text, Fuck the New York Times text. I'm like, Okay, I guess- Thank you.

I wasn't aware until now. Now, I guess I have to read the New York Times and see how bad it is.

I don't think I've ever gotten a good review in the New York Times. But it was like then the real repercussions, like the show business repercussions were like, Oh, well, not a lot going on in terms of directorial offers. Because it was You're like a high-profile failure. It's just so... It really sticks with you, obviously, those moments, the feeling... Like you said, it's shame, this feeling of shame. What you were just talking about at the beginning to me That's beautiful. I love that story that you woke up just feeling free because that's the reality of it is that nothing has changed. Okay, maybe somebody reads the review who is a producer who might have hired you, who now will go like, Oh, I don't want to hire him, or somebody who doesn't like you will laugh at you or talk to their friend about... But in your reality, in the reality of the lives that we're living on this planet, nothing has changed.

Your dog didn't read the review and look at you like, Yeah, that fucker. I wish I had a different owner.

Yeah. I mean, the people who love you in your life still love you, and the people who respect you still respect you. If you really look at it, look at the history of people doing things and taking chances and making art, it's just like it happens literally all the time. I found for me, it always comes back to just my own feelings of insecurity. That's for me. When I would look at how somebody would react to something I did negatively, it's usually because I'm somehow thinking, Oh, yeah, that's It's something that I agree with that I don't like in myself.

You give it weight. Exactly. If it's negative, you tend to give it more weight. Right.

But then you have to... What are you going to do? Quit the business? Are you going to stop doing it? You have that moment where you go, Okay, they're right. I suck. I'm awful. And anytime that's happened with me, it's always allowed space for other things to happen in my life. Eventually, things change. Anytime you're forced to have to just be with yourself, usually good things come out of that because there's so many distractions in success.

Yeah, what is it? Success has many fathers, and failure is a bastard. When you're sitting there, you're alone as a bastard.

That's the most real time because that's when you're really, really... You're just there with who you are. The other big one for me was Zoolander, too. That was That was a really shocking one to me because that was later in life. I was also like, Okay, well, I thought everybody wanted to see this movie. Then I was like, Wow, I must have really fucked this up. Everybody didn't go to it, and it's gotten these horrible reviews It was really it really freaking me out because I was like, I didn't know it was that bad. That's what scared me the most on that one was like, Wait a minute. You question yourself. I'm losing what I think, what's funny. Yeah, questioning yourself. But on Zoolander 2, it It was definitely blindsiding to me, and it definitely affected me for a long time. But it also it was the same thing, only I wasn't as young, so it's almost even harder, too, because you're like, Well, wait a minute. But for me, it was the same thing, by the way, as cable guy, too, where then there was a quiet time. The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was Again, was just having space where if that had been a hit and they said, make Zoolander 3 right now or offer some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that.

But I had this space to just sit with myself and have to deal with it. Other projects that I had been working on, not comedies, some of them, I had the time to actually just work on and develop. It ended up giving me the space. And really because I didn't really have a choice at that moment other than... Even if somebody said, Why don't you go do another comedy or do this? I probably could have figured out something to do, but I just didn't want to.

Why didn't you want to? What's that feeling there? Is that anger? I don't want to.

No, it was just hurt. I think hurt. Take my ball and go home and you don't want me.

Yeah, right.

All right, you don't want to do it? You're not going to get to do it. I'll show you. You're not going to get to do it. I just didn't feel like putting myself out there. But over all these years, you're talking about finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do. I always love directing. I always love making movies. I always, in my mind, loved the idea of just directing movies since I was a kid and not necessarily comedies. Over the course of the next nine or 10 months, I was able to develop out this limited series, Escape A Dianamora, these comics who escape, that I don't think would have happened if I had gotten distracted with something else. For me, that was really transformative because it was the first time I was ever directing something that I wasn't in, which had not been in my intention over all these years, and I was so happy doing it. That set me off on a different path that I don't think would have happened as a director, that I I wouldn't have pursued or made the space to pursue if I'd had the success with Zooland.

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Visit betterhelp. Com/failbetter today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, h-e-l-p. Com/failbetter. I love ButcherBox. It's an unbelievably convenient way to get high-quality cuts of meat delivered straight to your door. They offer 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, and wild caught seafood, all humanely raised with no added antibiotics or hormones. I made the most incredible salmon using honey mustard and everything but the bagel reasoning. Yeah, it tasted great, and it really was because of the salmon quality. Did we mention Butcher Box offers free shipping on all orders? Plus, you can get exclusive member deals. They also offer these great recipes with every box. The whole shipment is just really well thought through. Sign up at butcherbox. Com/failbetter and get our special deal. Butcherbox is offering our listeners a free for a year offer, plus an additional $20 off. Choose salmon, chicken breast, or steak tips free in every order for a year. Sign up today at butcherbox. Com/failbetter and use code failbetter to choose your free for a year offer. Plus, get $20 off your first order. Tired of not being able to get a hold of anyone when you have questions about your credit card?

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There's no such thing as half Jewish, David. There isn't? But yes, my mom was Irish Catholic. My dad was Jewish.

Yeah. Yeah. My mother was a Scottish Lutheran, and my dad was from Brooklyn. Was your dad born in the States?

My dad was born probably in Brooklyn. Yeah, in Brooklyn. Lived all over the Lower East Side. Super poor.

We might be You and I should never have a baby. Let's just put it that way. To get back to the initial impulse, right? You're the son of two performers. Do you think you wanted to make people laugh? Is that the first thing? Because your parents are professional funny people, right? Is that like little Ben Stiller? Is he going, I'm going to make him laugh? I'm going to make him laugh.

Well, maybe it's little Ben Stiller wanted to get Jerry and Anne to laugh at him and to pay attention.

Really? Is that so?

Well, I think it's that, your folks, your parents are actors. It's a whole world that you're in where you see people paying attention to them, and you, as a kid, want your parents to pay attention to you. My parents were amazing. But it's also like, they were just living the life of a comedy team who had to write their act. They were writing and making commercials. They were doing television episodes. They were just doing their thing. They brought us along with them. But I think as a kid, you see that, and there's something very exciting about it, too. I didn't really have the desire to be funny. I remember very young, being excited to be on a set and to see the cameras and to see how they set stuff up and just the aura of excitement when we're about to shoot something. My I went on the set of taking a Pelham 1, 2, 3, and my dad was in it. Being around that and going, Oh, this is the coolest thing ever. The making of movies to me was that's what I remember as a little kid thinking, I want to be a part of making movies.

So there wasn't a moment where you got that first laugh and you were like, Oh.

Well, my parents would bring us up on stage sometimes after they would do their act or they would do summer stock productions and do a play, and then to bring Amy, my sister and I, up. We do some lines from the play or something, and people would laugh.

Yeah. How did you feel about the fact that the family life, the relationship, was part of the act, right? And therefore, at some point, you must have felt like, Am I going to... Did they talk about their kids? Am I going to be part of the act? Was there ever that?

Well, there was no. Yeah. I'm working on a documentary about my parents right now, so I've been looking at a lot of their stuff. And really... My dad made a lot of audio recordings of their rehearsals and their process, and he just recorded stuff around the house, too. And there was always that... My parents act, my My sister and I knew it inside out, and there were all these jokes that they would make that we didn't quite understand about marriage.

Would you and your sister actually... Would you play your dad and your sister would play your mom and you'd do the act?

Yeah, we'd do the act. Yeah, that's weird. That's what you'd I didn't really think about it. I mean, we were just like... There was a lot of performing going on in the house. My parents would go away to LA to work, do a Loveboat episode or do Corchipivete's Father. They'd do a guest shot because they never moved to LA. Then my sister and I would be alone for a week or two weeks with our housekeeper, Hazel, who took care of us. We would just go crazy and then come back and we'd act out the first act of Jesus Christ Superstar for my parents or Pippin or something like that. I guess we were trying to get their attention, but we definitely knew their act. My mom would have these jokes like, I'm Irish Catholic. That means I'm paralyzed from the waist down. It was like a joke that would never fly today. That was like, What does that even mean? Oh, she doesn't have a sense.

What does that mean?

Yeah, and it's politically incorrect. But jokes like that that were... My dad would say, This is my wife and the mother of my two kids. My mom would say, And this is the father of one. And that would get a big laugh, and we would- I'm laughing. I'm sorry. I know. It's funny. They were brilliant. But as kids, we were like, What does that mean? But we didn't question it. It was just that's the act. There's a joke. It was a melding of the act and life, and all of it was intertwined. By the way, those '70s shows, because I have been looking at a lot of them for my parents' thing, what people talked about on talk shows in the '70s was so real. People just talk- Was it? Well, they just talk about real stuff. There's not funny anecdotes that you see now on the Tonight show where they ask you what you're going to talk about and you tell something funny. People just talk about... I have my parents talking about, Barbara Walters asking my parents, When Jerry goes on the road, do you worry that he's going to cheat on you, Anne.

Things like that, for real. For real? Yeah, and everybody's smoking cigarettes. It's just amazing. It was just everything was just so much more less polished. Honestly, later on, looking and exploring that stuff and seeing the reality of what it was like to be a kid in the '70s when your parents weren't around a lot and we were left our own devices a lot to take care of ourselves. Parents are doing the best they could, but that was the reality. And watching your parents on TV was like, wow, that reality seemed more in a way more interesting to me than the reality of our lives.

I think when you say watching your parents on TV, I got emotional because it was like, I know they were great parents, and I know you're not saying anything but that, but to have that substitute and then to watch you then go say, I'm going to live inside that box, too. If they're in there, I'm going to get in there. But they weren't there when they got there. I want to be with them. You know what I mean? But I wonder also, because they were successful, but they were not uber successful, and they were constantly... They were gigging actors, right? They never could stop hustling. They never could stop hustling, right? Yeah.

No, they were working for a living. They were having to do what they needed to do. Right.

When you You must have been aware of their sense of, maybe not failure, but of anxiety and the constant threat of it all going away and stuff like that. I wonder if that was part of any of your the creation of your consciousness towards the business.

Yeah, definitely not consciously for me. I wasn't thinking about it. Sure. Because for me, looking at them, all I saw was their success. It was that they were working. You know what I mean? I wasn't comparing it.

That looked like a huge success. Yes. Just being on the box.

The fact that they were doing the $10,000 pyramid.

I'm not going to argue.

To me, it was the coolest thing in the world. I was so excited to go and hang out there. I think for them, whatever their own personal feelings of what they aspire to, which is the stuff as an adult now, and I talk to my parents about it when they were older, too, that wasn't what I was... As a kid, I wasn't aware of that. All I experienced would be maybe the residual feelings or tension between them sometimes when they were having... My dad was trying to figure out how to get my mom to write with him or when she was less interested in doing that because my dad was more interested in doing the act and my mom wasn't. Things like that. But it wasn't ever conscious. It was just like, okay, they're doing their thing. As a kid, you don't think that way. I think you're not even thinking about your parents' issues. At least for me, I wasn't. You know what I mean? No. I'm just thinking about myself. As a kid, I'm just thinking, right?

No, I know. It's wonderful. I love that about kids. I also don't think a kid thinks of his dad as a failure or a success, which is the weird thing when we become fathers and we're thinking, Oh, I bet my son wishes that movie did more about it.

Exactly. He doesn't care. I'm sure your kids, because your kids are older.

My kids do care. My kids care. They do care. Oh, my God. My dad, who I didn't think of as a failure or a success, he once said to me, I'm giving you one of the greatest things a father can ever give a child. I'm not very successful. That's what he said to me. I had no idea what he... I didn't really know what he's talking about. Yeah. Yes, you're right. There's no such thing as half Jewish. Exactly. I just proved it because Yeah, for sure. Now, because in a way, that humility, the humility of that is really what joins us together. When I was raising kids, I was always embracing their failures, and I never knew if that was the right thing to be doing, if I should be like, All right, just get back in there until you win. Fucking. Sometimes I was always like, Maybe you're too comfortable with not giving up, but just going, Hey, you don't always win them. You're not always the winner. And it's funny how we reparent ourselves when we parent our kids. We make different mistakes than our parents made. But we make them-Well, definitely different and some of the same, too.

You made me think of it when you were saying about me watching my parents in the TV set and then wanting to get in the TV set. And both my kids are interested in acting. That made me think about when I went off and started doing movies and had kids and my parents being away, that I went through the same thing with my kids, where I would be away working It's at one point, just feeling that. I think my parents had to keep working, doing their thing, and were doing the best they could. But at a certain point, I had that conversation with my family, which was like, Oh, I'm away a lot. I remember my son, just that thing. I was going off to do a Night at the Museum 2 or 3 or something like that. I was like, Hey, but you like Night at the Museum? He's like, Yeah, but I don't like it when you're away. I And I feel like that... When we talk about failures, definitely as a parent, you always think about the things you could have done better, like to be around more. But I also think, but it's like, Oh, that was a little bit of a cats in the cradle moment, too, for me.

Oh, that song kills me, man.

It's truth. It's just truth.

I was doing this thing when we took my daughter to college. I was just on this jag where every time there was a silence in our conversation, I'd start singing cats in the Cray' because they'd all laugh. But I would start to cry. I would literally start... I cry when I sing that song.

It's amazing. It's because it just captured reality.

I know. The thing about... I don't want to let you off the hook for being away or whatever, whatever you feel is right about that time or whatever. But what I told myself when I was away, if I was away from my kids working, Well, I knew they had a loving mom at home. I knew that. So I wasn't leaving them alone, nor were you. But what I told myself was like, Oh, I'm modeling an engaged person. I'm modeling a person who's not just defining themselves as a father of this child. I'm modeling an adult out in the world doing his or her thing. And is that bad? What's the balance? Is the balance like, I'm just going to be your father, and I'm on you 24/7? It's just me and you, buddy. Or is it, I'm on you when I'm on you, 24/7 when I'm here, but I'm also, I'm into my life, and I'm into my work, and I'm into the world. I don't know.

I don't know the answer. No, I think there's elements of that that are very valid. And of course, as our kids are now young adults, you're able to have those conversations conversations with them, where they can talk to you about it. Hell no. No? My kids will talk to me about it. They give me a lot of shit about it. But also we connect on other levels about the work and all of it because they do get it and they both are interested in that world. So it really is... What would that have been if I was home all the time being the dad? I don't even I don't know what that would have been. That would have been worse.

It would have been like Tannenbounce. It would have been like the dad in the tantabounce. Dressing them all in the same sweats.

Exactly, right.

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You You have good researchers.

I want to talk about Silver Mind Control so badly.

Did you do Silva Mind Control?

No, I never even heard of it until the research came in from Ben Stiller, Silva Mind Control.

Seriously, A plus to your researchers. Nobody has ever asked me about Silva Mind Control. I did it when I was literally 15.

Can you tell me what it is first and who is Silva?

I did it when I was 15. Okay, 15 or 16. So it's been a while. It was a guy. I want to say his name was Jose Silva. I'm not sure. He came up with a mind control method to Basically to visualize things that you wanted to manifest. My friend Adam Max, who his dad is Peter Max, the artist, grew up in my building. Sure.

I know Adam Max.

Adam told me about... He somehow Maybe his dad knew about it or whatever. It was like the '70s, late '70s. We went down to this 12th floor of a building on 33rd Street between seventh and eighth Avenue and did a seminar for a weekend where they taught you how to meditate and can visualize. The thing I remember from it was a thing called the three-finger technique. They said you could use this if you're trying to find a parking spot.

Just a parking spot.

You visualize the parking spot and you put your thumb and your forefinger and your middle finger together and visualize the parking spot, and it would supposedly manifest it.

Very New York thing. You didn't have a fucking driver's license, so you weren't looking for a parking. So whatever I remember my mind control was telling you, it was not useful.

It was something to do as teenagers that wasn't drugs.

Yeah. And my researchers say, yes, it is Jose Selt. Okay. I got it right.

You are correct. It is Jose Selt. My parents did Est because there was a whole 'Est' craze in the '70s, which was hard seminars training and this self-actualization thing. And they had a children's training. So my parents did the regular adult training two weekends. They'd go to a ball room in a hotel and They break you down.

Yeah, well, that's the interesting thing is the breakdown stuff, right?

Yeah. The whole idea was to get it. Are you getting it? And they wouldn't tell you what it was other than it was the idea that you have to accept that you are responsible for everything. So that was the idea of what getting it was. In other words, not blaming, just taking responsibility.

At 15, you're 15?

No, I did it when I was 12. That one I did when I was 12, and it was children in a room for two weekends. I just remembered that they had pictures of emotions, anger, sadness, happiness. They had different pictures of these cartoon characters representing emotions. They talked to us about which emotions we connected with the most. It was a little less intense than the adult training, but it was definitely weird.

I knew somebody who ran the forum.

Yeah, that was a later version of it, right?

Yeah, a later version of it. They really yell at you, and they try to break you down of all your bullshit and all manipulations and all that stuff. There's always a moment in the funny Ben Stiller film where you fucking tell the truth. You take shit, you take shit, you take shit, you take shit, and then you No S on everybody. It could be the Mariachi guys or De Niro and the Fockers or whatever. But there's always that moment where you've had enough and your anger is funny. I don't know. That's the genius part to me. It's like the people that can make the anger universally funny to all of us. I'm going to try to relate it back to failure because I think There's something in there that you're just tired of being shit on and being seen as an ineffectual failure in these movies. I'm just wondering, like when you said Est, when I read Est, I was like, that's like He's like an Est counselor. There's always a moment where Ben is going to go fucking Est on you in a movie. I don't know. I'm sure you never made the connection, but- I didn't.

Look, when you said that, Did you say that?

Did you relate to that moment? Yeah. That moment.

And honestly, when you said that, it made me think of my dad, because my dad, who I think was truly just one of the funniest people ever was and where he had his most success Seinfeld and King of Queens and people, the way that he would blow up and get angry, I always felt was that was him releasing so much real, real rage and anger that he had. But he was the sweetest human being in the world who would suppress it. And he found this way to channel it in a way that was so incredibly funny, but it was coming from such a real place.

Right. That's the point. Yeah. This is real. But I see now that you mention your dad, wow, when you say it like that- That's from a well.

That's from him, a well of just years of real pain, and real anger, and rage, and frustration, and all those things that he really only found a way to, I think, express through his work. He loved it. He loved being able to... I think he was aware of that, too. It was for him. That's why he had so much joy in doing the work.

Yeah. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's beautiful to me to think about you guys connecting through expression or style or of something that's handed down in a way from father to son, which there's something lovely about it.

Well, I also just want to say, I just think your creative impulses, I always tell you what I see, but you do so much. It seems to me that whatever battles we all have with those fears and those insecurities, you continue to create and push yourself and take chances in different forms, whether it's music. I have so much fun playing with you that time.

Yeah, we should tell them. I got Ben to drum for a couple of... I like to say my band is so big that I have Ben still on drums. And what I saw, talk about process or whatever, talk about leaving it on the field. I was like, Yeah, you say you're a drummer. I'm like, Just come and drum. That's because I'm an idiot. And you're like, No, I want to rehearse. I want to be good. I was like, Fuck that. But then you came and you put your heart and soul into it. You came and practiced with us.

Yeah, I just didn't want to fail.

They loved you for it. I know. What a pleasure, man. I don't know what I'm doing. Again, I appreciate. I think it's good.

I like talking about this stuff. I think it's good to talk about this stuff, too. I think it's good for me personally to talk it through.Thank you so much.Yeah.

This is great.Thank you for your time.Thank you for your time.

Glad you're doing it.

Talk soon.I hope to see you soon.All right, man. All right, I just wanted to get down some thoughts about doing the first podcast yesterday with Ben Stiller. And I feel like a failure. It's funny. You have this idea of what things are going to be. Who knows? Maybe I'll figure it out for next time a little more. But specifically, what I didn't like was, yeah, we can get to that point where we talk about failure as a sign that we should try a different road. But what we don't get is, what's the process? How long does it take? What is the mental process? What is the spiritual process? What is the emotional process? And fuck me, I didn't ask any of those questions. A fucking Jackass. And I think Ben with the generosity of spirit, touched on those things without me asking. So he probably saved my bacon, as they say. I don't know why they say that. Why did they say, Save my bacon? He saved my ass because he was super generous with his time and his thoughts and his feelings. And just generous to be the first guy to come on with me doing this thing that I don't know how to do.

And the day after, I'm like, You suck at that. It's the first time I did this thing. I've been an interviewee a lot in my life. I've never been an interviewer. And I'd always thought that I'd be a terrific interviewer. So I was dealing with, oh, reality smacking me in the face as I saw it. So you can't just play Major League Base right away, can you? Yeah, but that's what we expect sometimes of ourselves, isn't it? So I think failure and expectation are twins. Never quite what you imagine, never quite the expected. And that's what life is, isn't it? So blahdy blah blah, baby. There's more fail better with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Donny Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of Weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of New Content is Rachel Neil. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Krupinski, and Kate D. Lewis. The show is executive-produced by Stephanie Wittleswax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and me, David Ducuovny.

I mean, Ducuubny. Ducouveny. Damn it. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stuart, Davis Rowan, and Sebastian Modack. Special thanks to Brad Davidson. You can find us at Lemonada Media, and you can find me at daviddecovny. You know what it means when I say at davidducouveny. Follow failbetter wherever you get your podcast or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your prime membership.

Oh, wait. This is crazy. I'm still on. Yes, sir. Get out of here. It's interesting. No, it's curious. I thought I had disconnected, but I had.

How do I get away now? We didn't tell you.

That's so crazy. Maybe we'll just keep talking forever, David. I'll never go away. Okay, that's really interesting. Oh, Zoom. I got it. Here, wait. There it is. I got it. I didn't leave this. Okay, there it is. Bye, David. Bye, Keegan. I'll see you. All right.

Yes.

Now he laughs.

All right. Okay, what do I do?