Lemonada. So I wrote this book, Bucky Fucking Dent, which takes as its backdrop the '78 penant Race between the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The book is about loving the losers, really. And it's really, in many ways, the same philosophical bent as this podcast. It's about how failure, in this case, the Boston Red Sox losing every year since 1918, teaches you to be a better human being, teaches you to be a more empathetic human being, teaches you more about life than winning, winning, winning. So that's what I'm dealing with there. And also there's one of the underpinning of the book is the disruption of a father-son relationship that happens very early on in the child's life. The child gets sick, the father gets scared. There's a disruption. And when I was reading Gabor's book, The Myth of Normal, I was about these things and how he's writing about these things in a clinical or philosophical or doctorly way of issues that I'm going at artistically or as a novelist in a novelistic way. I thought that's an interesting place where we can find common ground. I wanted to send Gabor, the copy of the movie that I made of Bucky Fucking Dead, which I did.

I felt a little icky about it because it is a weird thing to send your work to somebody whose work you're going to be talking about. It was a little like, Hey, look, we're going to be looking at you, but let's first look at me. But I overcame that. Might not have been hard enough to overcome But I overcame it, but I overcame it. He liked it so much. I'm going to take him on the press tour with me. I'm David Ducouveny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. So Gabbar Mathe, his latest book is called The Myth of Normal. It really refrains the narrative over what is normal and what is abnormal from society's point of view. And the big premise is basically that we're sick because society is sick. Our mental health, our physical health, our addictions are all linked to the pressures of modern day living. But Gabor also talks about parenting. As a parent, I was fascinated and fascinated with how Gabor talks about parenting. I was struck by the discussion of parenting and attachment and how a break in the attachment, especially at a very young age, could be very detrimental.

Traumatic is what he calls it, specifically between zero and three. This book has been a huge success for Gabor, and it's what I wanted to talk to him. How do we deal with these preverbal injuries in a verbal way? All right, here's my conversation with Gabor. Hello.

Hi. Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you as well.

I got to tell you something right away, if I may.

Yes, please.

My wife and I watched Bucky Fucking Dead last night.

Yes.

First of all, we loved it, just both poignant and humorous. But what you don't know is that my son and I are writing a new book called Hello Again: A Fresh Start for Parents and Adult Children. That movie was right along the theme of that film.

Thank you. That's why I wanted to send it your way because it's a thinly vealed account of my spiritual landscape at the time. And why I thought you might appreciate the story is because when I read what you'd written about attachment between a parent and a child and your regrets over or your guilt over not being completely present at that point in your life for your children, not being completely self-regulated, I think is the word you use.

That's right.

For me, my daughter, she got her first cold when she was nine months old, very much like in the movie, the story.

In the movie, yeah. Parents overreact, right?

Parents overreact, take the kid in, but the kid is very sick and needs to get a spinal tap. My daughter, I was working. I was working on the X files at the time in Los Angeles, and my daughter and my wife were in the hospital for a week. There were nights where I went home alone after work, and I started to think about the world without without my daughter in it. And I realized I would never get over it.

Which is what the father character in your movie pretty much articulates, just that fear.

And then she lived. She's going to turn 25 any day now, and she's wonderful. But in those first few weeks and months of having her back, I felt afraid afraid of her power over me in a way. I felt afraid to reattach. I felt an inability to reattach.

To open your heart again.

Yeah. I go over and over in my head, how do we deal verbally with these preverbal failures that we perpetrate on our kids? To me, that's another big bridge to cross, is how do we address preverbal trauma? And you say in your book, what did you say?

I just want to know if I can talk to you about this.

You're like saying, Shut up. Is that okay? Yes, please.

Okay. First of all, the language that you perpetrated, that's a self-judgment.

Yeah.

It's a self-accusation. Would you talk to me in the same way?

No.

How come you wouldn't?

Because I would be able to see that it wasn't an aggressive action. It was an action taken out of hurt and fragility and emotion and not anger or aggression.

And it wasn't a conscious, deliberate decision either, was it?

Right. No.

So the language of self-accusation. Just notice that, okay? That's the first thing. The second thing is, what happened, as I understand it, is your heart was really hurt. The fear of losing your daughter was just overwhelming for you. So You didn't decide to shut your heart down. You didn't wake up one morning and say, Hi, David, I'm going to shut my heart down to my daughter now. It was an automatic movement inside you, wasn't it? It wasn't conscious, it wasn't deliberate.

I was terrified, I think.

Yeah, but you didn't deliberately say to yourself, I'm going to shut down my heart to my daughter.

No.

Okay. Therefore, it was an automatic dynamic in you. I'm telling you, that only happened for one reason is that this wasn't the first time that your heart had been hurt and you had to shut down to protect yourself. Had I known nothing about your history, I still would have said something happened to you when you were very small, when your heart was very open and it got hurt and your defense was to shut down. And so all that happened was that when that pain got re-triggered, you went back to your childhood self-detection, which is to close down your heart. Now, what blame is there? And so the guilt is inappropriate here. There's no guilt. You didn't do anything wrong consciously. And no parents, most parents don't, actually. That's one point. Two other points. One is, I often say to people, When in your life did you not feel guilty? When in your life did you not feel guilty?

Never. I've always felt guilty.

Okay. Well, except the first day you were born, maybe you didn't. But in other words, the guilt long preceded the birth of your daughter. So that guilt has nothing to do with your daughter. It was there long before. It just is naturally triggered with our parenting, but it doesn't belong there. So that's the second point. The third point is the last thing our children need from us, and believe me, I get this message from my kids all the time, is a guilty parent. They don't want be seen through the eyes of our guilt. Nobody wants to be seen as somebody else's mistake. My kids are not my... But for all the years that I carried this guilt and I just saw them, that's actually I was only seeing myself God, I wasn't seeing them at all. I wasn't seeing their creativity, their wonder, their capacities, their resilience. I was just seeing what I had done wrong. And so that guilt is very narcissistic that way. It is, And it keeps you from seeing the other person. So that's my little sermonette, if you can take that.

I will be unpacking it for a while, but yeah, I appreciate that. You talk about most of the damage that we do as parents. If you get them past three years old, then you've done a great job. And I get back to my feeling about generational trauma and trauma Trauma being preverbal, how do we get to the preverbal healing? How do we bounce back from those kinds of failures that are not just, Hey, let me to a good place?

Well, so That depends on how we understand trauma. This is a distinction that I really insist upon. Trauma is not what happened to you or happened to somebody else. Trauma is what happened inside us. The word trauma itself originates from a Greek word for wound. So trauma is a wound that's not healed. That's the good news. If the trauma was what happened to you and I, it's over, it's done. It never will not have happened. But That's not the trauma. The trauma is not what happens to us. The trauma is what happens inside us. The trauma is the wound that we're carrying. And so that, if I can use the analogy, if I get a blow on the head, the trauma is not the blow on the head. The trauma is the concussion. And the wound can be healed in the present moment. It doesn't mean having to go back to the past. And those preverable traumas that you talk about, and they're just universal, almost, we carry them in our bodies today. It shows up in our body language, in the tone of our voice, in the tension in our chest or our belly or in our muscles, tightness of our throats, whether our jaws are clenched or not.

It shows up in many, many, many ways. When I teach my students on how to work with trauma, it is far more than just talking. It's actually about being present to what the whole body is experiencing in this moment because the portal to healing is through the body. And so that trauma healing isn't just understanding something intellectually. It's actually working through the emotions. And the emotions are physical events that are present for us at all times if we know how to pay attention to them. I don't know any trauma, psychological trauma, that cannot be healed.

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Com/failbetter. Com. Fail better. Visit iXL. Com/failbetter to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price. I'd love to talk about addiction. How did you get into that area as a doctor?

My first job after I graduated from medical school and I did my internship was with a highly addicted population in Anchorage on East Side. I worked there for six months, and something in me knew that I'm going to come back here, that this is my place. But I I wasn't ready for it yet. Something in me always knew that I belong there. These people I worked with in the downtown East Side of Vancouver, which is North America's most notorious and concentrated area of drug use.

I know it.

There's nothing about them that I didn't recognize in myself. The addictive compulsions, the capacity to be dishonest and to manipulate, the shame, the lack of freedom in the face of my addictive drives. There's nothing that they didn't have that I had or vice versa. Now, the degrees were different, and my addictions were much more socially acceptable and rewarded. But the problems they caused in my marriage and my parenting, it It's a matter of degree. People often say, How can you compare your addictions to their heroine use? Well, the differences are obvious. But what always struck me was the similarities, which are much more interesting. That's the first thing that drew me there. I understood these people because I saw myself in them. Number one. Number two, there's something about that population that they lie and they cheat and they manipulate. They have to. That's how they get their of course. But they don't pretend not to lie and cheat and manipulate. They're really authentically themselves. You've been in the glaring world of Hollywood and elsewhere, and all the facades that people erect and hide behind and behind them there's all this misery, but on the surface, they're just beautiful people.

That degree of authenticity, of not having to pretend anything, that's just such a refreshing I was ready to work in.

Would you identify your addictive vector as being workaholism?

Workaholism was one, yeah. Which meant that it doesn't matter how busy I was, I was I was taking on new patients. Why? Because I needed to be needed. I would never say, No. You want to come to me, my patient? Oh, I must be a good guy. Well, underneath that is the belief that I'm not worthwhile. So I have to prove my worth to my work. But I also had a severe shopping addiction, particularly to music, and people laugh. But no, I'd spend $3,000, $4,000 someday on classical music, and I had to go back the next day or even even the same day. And Actually, I would lie about it to my wife, and I would ignore my kids to pursue my addiction. It has significant consequences for my family life. So the addiction was to acquiring more and more.

Possess it. Possess it.

Exactly. Yeah.

For me, it was work, Elizabeth, and then there was sex. For me, that's where I felt, I guess. That was the one area, Coming from the relationship with my mother, I was her agent in the world. I was her badge of honor. She raised me without my father, and I was I was to reflect on her, that she could do this alone. So my achievements were not my own. Whatever I did, whatever grades I got, whatever I did in basketball, whatever, it was always a reflection on her, in a way. In a way, it felt that way. Sex was the one area where I was in the dark to her, and it became- If I ask you, no one was wrong with your sex addiction?

Because that's self-evident, but what was right about it, what did it give you in the short term? It gave you something That you craved.

It gave me independence. It gave me an identity in a way as a sexual being and as a man, really as a man, if I was to be crass about it.

It gives you some validation, maybe also a sense of being wanted. Sure. Well, independence, validation.

These are good things.

These are really good things. That's my whole point about addiction, is that it's not this disease that you acquire or inherit. It's an attempt to solve a problem. And the states of nonindependence, the state of not being wanted, non-validated, these are states of emotional pain. And so my mantra is always not why the addiction, but why the pain?

It's a beautiful question. It's a beautiful question, and I appreciate it when I read it in your work. And I just hope that you mentioned you say, Oh, I have this addiction for shopping for classical music, and people laugh. Well, people laugh about sex addiction, too, because sex makes people uncomfortable. And people will... They'll get pissed off about addiction as a disease, which is not a great word for it because I think it confuses people. But if we could have as much empathy and just that pivot of, Hey, what's right about it? It works until it doesn't work anymore, and then it fails miserably.

That creates more suffering by its very nature. But it doesn't begin as a disease. It begins as an attempt to solve a problem of suffering. And then what happened to create the suffering? That's where trauma comes in. When it comes to sex, I would even imagine that people's reaction isn't simply discomfort. There might even be an element of envy about it because a lot of people would love to see themselves as sexually desirable and free.

To be honest with you, When I went through it and I was stripped of my anonymity immediately, which if you're going to attempt to do 12-step stuff, anonymity is a keystone of that. I was barred from that almost immediately. Lately in my journey there. There was laughter, or people say, Hey, I wish I was a sex addict, or something like that, and that's hurtful. And then there was, in my mind, I just didn't know what people were imagining I was into. I had a judgment that was coming from me, and I wanted to say... I wanted to clear it up and say, I'm not this, and I'm not that, I'm this. It wasn't just about what you're saying. It's the dynamic of what it is I'm using it for. That's the point. It's not what I'm using.

Exactly. Exactly. There's a reason why we ostracize the identified drug addicts so severely is because we don't like to see ourselves reflected in their behavior. But when you look at this society as a whole, when I ask the question, it doesn't matter where I am, how many of you had dynamics where you engaged in behavior that gave you temporary pleasure, craving, and relief, and then you suffer negative consequences and you didn't give it up, almost everybody will put their hands up. So that in this society, which deprives us so thoroughly over essential human needs for connection, contact, intimacy, love, and self-acceptance, addictions are the norm. It's just that we ostracize a certain segment of the population so that we can deny our own presence on that same addictive spectrum. That's the other aspect of my title, The Myth of Normal, is that there's so many things that are normal in a society. In a society that are so common and so ubiquitous as to look like this is the normality. But in fact, what is normal in this society is neither healthy or natural. If you look at the many ways in which this society feeds addictions and glorifies them and profits off them, and how many products and blandishments and seductions out there in the economy that are designed to take people away from themselves and give them temporary soothing so they don't feel their pain.

I mean, almost the whole economy runs on that.

Yeah. I mean, that brings me to the myth of normal because The economy reflects the world we live in, and the world we live in is wild. I don't know where I heard it first, but it's just like the only sane reaction to an insane world is insanity, right? And it's working in that area, your book. And I think it's a very important book in that sense.

Yeah, well, listen, thank you. I'm really glad the book spoke to you.

I think it works beautiful on an intellectual level, but I just want to I'll tell you that for me personally, my response was to go back and think about my relationship to my mother. And let me tell you, I came up with the realization that I started to think about why I became an actor. I grew up with a mother who, like you, was given away when she was very young to be with relatives. And I think was scarred by that forever and was an emotionally fragile and scared person. My job, I like to make her laugh. That's what I did. Somehow, I was the one who could make her laugh. But the flip side to that deal was my emotions, my negative or unsavory emotions, like anger or independence from her.

Or sadness or grief.

Or sadness, grief, anything. Anything that was difficult for her to handle. I knew intuitively, I can't do that. I can't put that on her. She was I'm the only caregiver after the age of 11, so I had to keep her safe. Then I walked into acting class, and here were these people, and there was this world where emotions were actually the currency. I had stumbled on into a world of play, as you might say, where all these things that seemed so dangerous to me in life were actually not only not dangerous, but they were appraised. I came to this through reading your book, so I just wanted to thank you for opening up that part of myself that led me to a direction that I'm still walking and in many ways.

For a previous book of mine, I studied the life of Gilder Radner, the comedian.

Did you?

Yeah. Her ovarian cancer had everything to do with her self-suppression. The only way she could connect with her mother was to make her laugh. Then in myth of normal, I talk about Robin Williams. Robin Williams. Robin Williams. It's a very common story amongst comedians, particularly Exactly. It doesn't mean that the comedy isn't real, that there's not really talent there, but the drive. The other thing about acting and plays is that it's very much like real life, because when you watch a play, the characters don't know that they're scripted. They think they're free.

True.

But nothing they do is free. Not only that, they go through the same drama every night, and next night, they show up not having learned a thing, still back in the same roles. The reality is that so much of our life is like that. We're scripted, and we don't learn from experience, and then we keep reenacting the same traumas over and over and again.

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Go to quince. Com/failbetter for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's quince. Com/failbetter to get free shipping and 365 Today returns. Quince. Com/failbetter. In the myth of normal, to me, it's not just a map of healing, but it's an actual act of healing for you because you wrote it with your son. Can you talk a little about that as a healing and also how difficult that must have been at some points in the creation of it?

It was a difficult process, and we had a lot of stumbles along the way that we had to work our way through. Daniel is now 48 years old. So we started writing a book four years ago together, I think, or five. This is a boy about whom I've had a lot of guilt as a parent. I mean, I've cared a a lot of guilt as a parent because when my kids were small, I just wasn't conscious. Not that I didn't love them, didn't do my best, but many of the ways I showed up was either directly hurtful to them or created a lot of insecurity for them. So this is a kid who, when he was three years old, I wax him across the face for not saying happy birthday to me. And as he writes in the book, Myth of Normal, In our home, the floor was never the floor. He was never sure when the emotional floor would cave in under his feet. And of course, I've had this awareness of how my, you might say, this functions when they were small helped to shape my kids' lives and challenges. And then I had all this guilt about it.

And that's From my point of view, from Diane's point of view, I'm the one who helped to shape his nervous system. That's just what happens. Parents shape their kids' nervous systems and their brains. That's biological science. Sometimes when we're writing the book, I got into very difficult states because this is a difficult book to write. I mean, this took me 10 years to research. There's so much at stake. At times, I would get despondent or pessimistic about my capacity to even finish it. And then my emotional state, he'd have to live with these anxieties in the part of his father and work with it.

Sure. You say there was so much at stake. What do you mean by that? I mean, there's There's always something at stake when you're putting something out in the world, but it seems like this particular one felt more dangerous to you.

Yes. And at a certain point, I actually... I was so desperate that I actually talked to a therapist. I don't need a therapist. I am, but of course, that's ego. I reached out to a therapist, and what I learned was that my problem wasn't the book. My problem was my relationship to the book and that I identified myself so much with the success of this book so that if this book didn't succeed, then despite whatever I've done before in the world, my failure or incompetence or lacks would be exposed to the world. So I had to disidentify from the book. I had to say, Okay, I'll do my best. If it fails, I'm still an okay person and worthwhile. And this is where my son really helped me a lot. I mean, I'd written four books before, and they were well-written books, but this one, I really needed help. And so this is where Daniel came into it, and thank God.

And how did you know that Daniel might be able to do that? I mean, that's a real act of trust from father to son.

Well, Daniel, if anybody knows my self limitations and knows how to talk to me about them, he can also rein in my... When I get them to get too pedantic, he knows how to call me on that. And he's just a really fine writer in his own right, and he's got a facility with words. He's a lire system. So it's a facility with words that just help to make the message more clear and intimately available to the reader.

Can you give me an example of when you guys what it has over a certain aspect or a passage or an idea?

Yeah. Here's what I've learned as a writer, that editors and others who look at the work write about 95% of the time.

Yeah.

But that's not my initial reaction. My initial reaction is, I've written this and it's wonderful, and I just want you to admire it.

Yeah, we're the same.

So Daniel wouldn't universally admire what I did. In fact, he'd call me on stuff and he'd rewrite it. I get very tense and even aggressive sometimes. And yet here we were, committed to this project together. Actually, what helped us work our way through it, apart from our own desire to make it work between us despite the old stuff that stood in a way. But we had a commitment. We had a commitment to a publisher Sure, this book would be done. So inside of that commitment, eventually I had to let go of my initial reactions. And okay, and you know what? Most of the time, what he had to say or what he contributed was just a gift. But my initial egoic reaction is to be defensive and to militate on behalf of the way I said it and what I said. This has to be right.

I understand. I mean, for me, it occurs as if I'm writing or I'm creating, it's coming from someplace else, and then my conscious mind or my ego gets its hackles up. But you've said, and I find this to be very interesting, you said that parents should have disciples in their children.

Yeah.

Were you looking for that moment where you became his disciple? Was Is there a blissful turning of the tables at any point between father and son?

Well, again, in this society, we take this word discipline and we interpret it as punishment or coercion. You discipline somebody. When you look at disciple, it just means to follow somebody. In a parent-child relationship, it's not that... I don't mean disciple in the sense of worshiping the other, in the sense of feeling their love and trusting them so that you'll follow them. That's what's interesting about the parent-child relationship, is that no relationship starts up as unequal. When you meet a friend, your level of your relative equality When you meet an intimate partner or potential intimate partner, there's some level of equality. So, yeah, the parent needs to show up in such a way that the child trusts and loves the parent, feels the love of the parent, so the child will naturally want to follow the parent. So the parent doesn't have to exhort and punish and threaten or hit. The child will just naturally... That's just what happens. And if you look at traditional societies, particularly, I'm talking about Indigenous societies in the land, that's pretty much how it worked. Now, as the relationship becomes more equal, as the child individuates and becomes their own person, that discipleship now becomes mutual.

At a certain point, that Crosby, Stills, and Nash song about teach your children well. At some point, they say, teach your parents well. At some point, we have to learn from the kids when it's appropriate. In fact, you know what? Right from the beginning, we have to learn from them. But at a certain point, that discipleship becomes very much a mutual exchange.

And what a sweet moment for you, I'm imagining.

Oh, yeah. No, I tell you, it's so satisfying and such a relief when I can do that.

Yeah. Because you talk about the way Indigenous societies raise their children, and I see you trying to inform our dialog about parenting in that way. I wonder if you see a possible road for that to happen within our... Because I know what was your alternate title, Toxiculture: How Capitalism makes us sick. Within our culture, can we raise children like that?

If we're aware that in this society, the gravitational force pulling parents and children together has been deeply weakened by social structures, by parenting modalities that go against the needs of the child, by schools, by institutions, by cultural expectations, then we can compensate, and we can put that gravitational force of parent-child attachment at the center again. But we can't do that until we become aware of it. Basically, what I'm saying is that gravitational force between parent and child, which is an attachment force, pulling these two bodies together. It used to function in Aboriginal cultures, but we've lost it. Now we have to be aware of what we lost. Then we can compensate. Yes, we can do it, but we have to be aware of it. That means literally going against many of the teachings and expectations and practices of this culture.

I agree with you 100%. My fear and what I told myself when I fucked up my job as a parent, when I gave my kids' phones when I didn't think they should have phones, shit like that. I said to myself, Okay, I grew up in a world where my mother told me television was the devil, right? So that was the social evil of that time. And my kids are growing up at a time where we're saying the phones are the devil. But they have to be prepared to live in that world because the phones aren't going away. And if I try and enforce a more buccolic vision on them, maybe I'm doing them a disservice. That was the way I justified it to myself.

Yeah. Here's what I would say to that. First of all, that's a very understandable way of thinking, but it's missing something. The phones have not replaced human attachments very much in the lives of our kids, and the results are disastrous. If you even look at the brain scans of children who are on screens and phones a lot, their brains are not developing the way they naturally would. Nothing wrong with the phones. It's a question of when do you introduce them? No. You introduce them when you have such a relationship with your children that they don't need the phones and they rely on your guidance. It doesn't have to happen before seven or eight or nine. They're not going to lose anything. It'll take a kid one day to catch up with the technology, believe me. They don't lose anything. What they gain in terms of self-awareness, though, and self-discipline and self-motivation is much greater than any conceivable disadvantage that you get from not using the phones early. I would say, yeah, bring in the phones when they're ready for it. Until then, they're not. Again, it goes back to the centrality of the parent-child relationship.

If it's working, it's fine. If it's not working, the forms become the competitor, the devil, the devil that tempts the child on the wrong path.

Or, God forbid, they should be bored. I mean, that was always the thing. If I was allowing my kid to be bored, I was somehow a bad parent. But I would say to myself, Boredom is good. Boredom is good. Let deal with the boredom. Let them deal with the boredom.

Well, that's really funny because I think you're familiar with another book I wrote called Hold on to your Kids. The main writer of that book is a psychologist friend of mine, Gordon Newfield. Gordon and I don't believe in timeouts and sending kids to their rooms and all this. Gordon says jovially that the only time you should send a kid to his room by himself is when he says he's bored. Let him go and find something to do. But basically, a kid who is comfortable with themselves, they're never bored. You give them a puddle and a stick, and they'll be happy the whole day. So the boredom itself is a sign of estrangement from self.

You talk about culture as... I really like the way you talk about culture in the beginning of your book, because you talk about it almost as a scientist. Culture is like this petri dish that we swim in. It's literally a culture that we can grow bacteria in, but it's also our culture. When you look around at our culture today, what do you see as healing? I wonder, what are our children? How are they learning how to be adult humans, productive, empathetic humans in the culture today?

Well, I think in any culture, there's always a tension between destructive and disorganizing and then forces on the one hand and then healing dynamics on the other. You never quite know where the healing is going to show up from. Now, There's so much compassion in this world, despite all the negativities and aggression and the terror and the rage that we direct to use to each other. There's also so much compassion. I'm sure you've experienced it. I've experienced it. Most people, at some point, have the capacity to be touched by compassion. So that's a healing force in itself. We don't just create it. That's a part of who we are as human beings. And then, more specifically, in the last few years, and I doubt that you and I would have been having this conversation 15 years ago. Right now, there's so much more awareness of trauma and the need for healing, the need for parenting that's loving and unconditionally accepting. So as society, in one sense, descends into more chaos and more darkness, the forces of light are also waking up. And so I think healing is a capacity that's inherent to human beings and also to human societies.

Maybe not the particular forms of societies. Forms have to change, but culture will go on. I know that's a very general answer, but fundamentally-I don't think of it as general at all. Okay, well, good. I see healing as all around us, actually. I witnessed it so often. I've experienced it myself. So it's just a reality.

Yeah. I'm moved by that. I think we should just end right there. I want to thank you for being so open with me and compassionate and for modeling that. I hope I can return the favor.

Well, thank you. May I say something there?

Yes.

Where does that come from, the need to return the favor?

I almost got away.

Because you know what? You know what we do? And you know what you're doing? Whether you return the favor personally to me, and not that you can't, But you play it forward.

That's what I was going to say, Pay it forward. But I didn't love that phrase. I don't like the phrase either, but I like what it means. Yes, I was actually thinking that. So thank you for... Yes, you got me. Where that comes from is because I felt vulnerable. I wanted to thank you, and it wasn't enough somewhere in my mind to thank you. It was some way I had to give you something back. Thank you. It's an honor to meet you. And I'm so grateful that you talked to me and talk to me in the way that you did. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, here's some thoughts about the interview podcast, whatever the hell it is. What I'm finding about the podcast is what makes an episode good is if I'm surprised. It's like any work of art I've ever been involved in. If I'm surprised, something good is going on. If I'm writing and I'm surprised by what I'm writing, that's great. That's a sure sign that you're in a good place. Same with acting, surprises, mistakes, things like that, the best. They read the best on film. You go into these podcasts thinking, I only got such amount of time with this person, and I want to cover these things. But you have to leave room to be surprised, and you have to let go of the reins enough to be surprised. You can You should prepare. But the best moments, they come out of nowhere. And in this case, with Gabor, I believe it was seeing him get emotional over certain things, seeing him take his time to answer certain things. My outstanding feeling after doing the interview was one of just immense gratitude, not only to Dr. Mathe, but to people who are doing this podcast with me, to put me in a position where I can have such a powerful conversation for me personally with somebody.

That's what this podcast was in that case. So, shit. 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 Widdles-Wax, Jessica Cordova-Kramer, and me, David Dekovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stuart, Davis Rowland, and Sebastian Modack. Special thanks to Brad Davidson. You can find us online at Lemonada Media, and you can find me at David Ducouvenue. You know what it means when I say at David Ducouvenue. Follow failbetter wherever you get your podcast or listen ad-free on Amazon Music with your prime membership. Tired of not being able to get a hold of anyone when you have questions about your credit card? With 24/7 US-based live customer service from Discover, everyone has the option to talk to a real person anytime, day or night.

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