The One You Feed - Failure as Fertilizer: Learning to Bloom Again with Debbie Millman

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

In this episode, Debbie Millman explores how we can use failure as fertilizer and learn to bloom again. Debbie's book and this conversation is about more than just gardening tips or tools, it's about what happens when we let ourselves be bad at something, especially later in life. Debbie opens up about learning to grow and why failure might be the richest soil we have. Whether you've ever felt stuck, afraid to try, or unsure if it's too late to start. Key Takeaways: Personal growth and development through gardening Lessons learned from failure and embracing new experiences The metaphor of gardening as a reflection of personal growth The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on personal endeavors The importance of understanding circumstances that affect growth The balance between effort and environmental conditions in achieving success The significance of being a beginner and confronting fears later in life The role of external support and accountability in personal challenges The interplay between creativity, self-worth, and professional obligations The connection between nature, personal experiences, and emotional well-being If you enjoyed this conversation with Debbie Millman, check out these other episodes: Fluke or Fate? Embracing Uncertainty to Live a Fuller Life with Brian Klaas How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You don't control nature, not in the slightest. Nature is much bigger and stronger and more capable. That is a very liberating realization. You can do your best, you can try your best, you can try to provide the best possible conditions, and you have to just leave it at the door. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true.

And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people

keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. It's not every day that someone you think you know, someone urbane, accomplished, cerebral, shows up with mud on their boots and tears in their eyes from doing a pull-up. Debbie Millman, longtime host of Design Matters and acclaimed designer, returns to the show with a quiet surprise. A book about gardening. But the garden isn't about

tips or tools. It's about what happens when we let ourselves be bad at something, especially later in life. In this conversation, Debbie opens up about learning to grow and why failure might be the richest soil we have. Whether you've ever felt stuck, afraid to try, or unsure if it's too late to start, this episode is for you. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. This is an iHeart Podcast. Why is a soap opera western like Yellowstone so wildly successful?

The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today. Listen to The American West with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts.

This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg, and Kaleidoscope, about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs by Greg. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war. This year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes. We met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi Debbie, welcome to the show. Hi Eric, thank you for having me. I am excited to have you back on. We are going to be discussing your latest book which is surprising to me about gardening and we'll talk about

that in a second but before we do we'll start in the way that we always do with the parable. In the parable there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, as a designer, I think that we're constantly in a mode of making very deliberate decisions about our work, solving problems, making choices about which direction to take. And I think that extends to every aspect of one's life.

I think that we don't just design things, we design our choices and we design our paths. So the parable really dovetails quite seamlessly into, I think, what it means to be a designer. I've had you on the show before and you very kindly had me on your show a number of years ago. That day is carved into my memory as one of my favorite memories. Tell me why. I was in New York City and you interviewed me. No, you're a big part of it. You're a big part of why I came to New York City. So I came to New York City and you interviewed me and I believe I might have also appeared on Jonathan

Field's show but it was a whole day where I did things related to this podcast and its work. And at the time I was still working a full-time job in the software business, but it awakened this thing in me that was like, maybe someday this could be what I do. And now it is. But anyway, I just think back to that day. I remember coming to your studio and everything about it was wonderful. So I want to thank you for that day because I have a terrible memory, but that day really stands out to me. That day also introduced me to you in person at which time I thought and this is similar to what you say in the book The Garden about what your wife Roxanne thought about you which was I

was like she is such a New Yorker, you know, sophisticated and design oriented and all of these like New York type things. So I, when I saw you had a book about a garden, had a little bit of a double take. I was like, hang on a second. Like I've got you as this very urbane, sophisticated person, not that gardeners aren't sophisticated, but it just sort of surprised me. So when I was reading your book and you mentioned that your wife, Roxanne, had the same reaction when you talked about gardening, it sort of tied all these memories together for me. So talk to me about why a gardening book now.

Well, it wasn't something that I was seeking. But first, let me just say thank you. Thank you for having me on the show again. Thank you for caring about my work. And thank you for sharing that memory because it's really wonderful. And I'm so glad that we have this connection. As far as why a gardening book now, it's primarily because I was asked to write one. I was not in any way seeking about gardening, how to garden, anything about gardening, honestly. I've always, as an adult, tried to cultivate

some sort of greenery around me in the various apartments that I've lived in over the four decades I've been in Manhattan, but writing a book on gardening was not in my wheelhouse. It wasn't on my bucket list. I had these various somewhat dubious attempts and results in the previous spaces that I tried to cultivate as some outdoor space slash gardening in, as I mentioned, various apartments since the 90s. But it wasn't really until I came to Los Angeles during COVID that, no pun intended, that my efforts blossomed.

Roxanne had gotten this house that I'm sitting in right now, two weeks before we started dating, and I had been living in Manhattan for all of my adult life. And so when we first met and started dating, we were long distance commuting to each other. And she has a beautiful house. The backyard when she first moved in was a very typical sort of suburban backyard, beautiful, beautiful tree, a lot of grass,

boxwoods, boxwoods. Because I had always tried to cultivate some outdoor space in the various places that I had been living, when I first got here, I asked her if she would mind if I zhuzhed it up a little bit with potted plants and various herbs and things like that. There was a beautiful garden center a couple of blocks away, so it was super easy, very convenient. And so that's what I started doing. And it was very rudimentary because it was during COVID. Let me backtrack. Then when COVID hit the world, we decided that I would come to California because I had a lot more time.

We had sky, we had a car. It made more sense for us to be somewhere where we could get out a little bit. And so that's what I did. At the time, we had no idea that the world was going to shut down for as long as it did. I remember the then president at the time saying, oh, we'll be all back together for Easter. And that was in March. And so Roxanne was like, oh, pack for two weeks

and I'm sure everything will come back to normal after that. Well, we all know what happened after that. And so I need a lot more underwear. And so we were here, I had a lot more underwear. And so we were here. I had a lot more time. I was working on a book at the time, but also had a lot of other time to do things and decided to expand my efforts in the garden as a way of trying to feel closer to the world.

And I was having some luck because of the weather. I started with the herbs and then I went to lettuces. Then I got more ambitious and started to plant tomatoes and cucumbers and things that I really loved. I was documenting that on Instagram. And I was making these little 10 panel stories about what I was doing, but it was also very much about what was happening through the eyes of somebody that was also, as the rest of the world was, living through COVID and how gardening made me feel more hopeful

and a bit more optimistic and seeing how we could grow and evolve. And the TED folks, who I have good relationship with through my podcast and through speaking there and so forth, reached out when the TED conference went completely online that year and asked if I could create some interstitials between the online talks to break up the talking. And I made some stories about gardening. They asked me if I would make some visual essays that I would narrate and that would be shown throughout the conference. And so I made one about gardening. Fast forward to 2021 and for my 60th birthday,

I had decided to take an expedition to Antarctica for two reasons, one to see Antarctica and then also to try and witness the total eclipse of the sun that was happening over Antarctica at the end of 2021. And it was a magnificent expedition and it was everything I hoped it would be, except for the eclipse, which I didn't see because of cloud cover.

And so I wrote all about that and also put it up on my Instagram. And somebody from a wonderful art director and editor saw it on Instagram, and she worked at a farm magazine and reached out and asked if I'd be interested in doing a piece for the magazine, which I did. Fast forward another year as things happen, and I get an email unsolicited from an editor at Timber Press, which is part of one of the big five hasachette. And she asked me if I'd be

interested in doing a book on gardening, having seen all of these visual stories that I had done. And I thought she was pranking me. I'm like a New Yorker. I'm not a gardener. If you're interested in my talking about my journey to try to be a gardener and the myriad failures along the way and what I've learned and how I've grown and evolved and so forth, then I'm all in. But if you're expecting me to be the next Martha Stewart, you have the wrong girl. So she wrote back and said,

that sounds great, a quest to become better at gardening through the lens of visual storytelling would be welcome. And so that's what I did. Yeah, and to say that it's a book about gardening is to sort of describe it and also sort of not, right? Because there's no real gardening advice in there unless you take like move to California because it's easier than New York to grow things like as advice, which you don't even directly give. And like you, it's a beautifully designed book that with very few words and not a whole lot of pictures really conveys some beautiful things.

Thank you. And I think it's a lot like your design work and your podcast, which on the surface it's sort of about the surface, right? And yet there's a deep reservoir right underneath it of lots of depth and and wisdom. And you kind of start off early on by saying that seeds are tiny and densely packed with their entire existence. What does it mean to exist? And you also sort of talk about how the universe itself sort of came out of this seed idea. And I think it's a beautiful place to sort of start with this idea of something coming from not quite nothing, but almost nothing. Talk to me about how that as an overall

idea has been important to you throughout your life. Well, as I was beginning to become more adept at gardening and was not just planting container plants and things that I bought already born, so to speak, from nursery. I was also planting seeds. And to think that any plant, any vegetable, any tree, starts from this sort of tiny, compact enclosure that then opens to create an entire universe of sorts is endlessly fascinating to me. And I'm somewhat obsessed, endlessly fascinated, I don't know the right words here, about how we all got here. And I think about it all the time, Eric. I think about it all the time. And in some ways,

it's sort of depressing because I'm never going to know. We're so far away as a species from understanding the mysteries of how we got here and why we're here and how it all started. You know, how did the helium and the hydrogen get here in the first place? You know, where did the carbon come from? You know, there's so many questions that I have. Yep. And I'm on this quest of trying to understand my purpose here and what my contribution can be and how I could potentially, if at all, make a difference. And so it all ties together.

The universe and the, if we did get here from this Big Bang, this tiny, tiny, densely packed point then expanded to create what we are in such vastness that it's inconceivable, it's incomprehensible for us to even be able to envision what we're a part of. And to think that trees have this grand underlying root system that communicates. And it's all so beautiful and so abstract and so mysterious. And it all feels so mystical and magical in so many ways that for me it became the ultimate way of trying to express the questions that I have and the tiny little answers that I attempt to tell myself. One of the things that I really thought about a lot as I was reading

the book is that you describe your early attempts at just buying plants and putting them outside and them dying and failing. And there's two narratives I think that we sometimes tend to separate about what doing anything successfully looks like. And one narrative is you just have to keep trying. You know, failure is just a chance to move on. If you just keep trying, you'll succeed. And there's truth in that. Absolutely, right? I mean, you've talked about it a lot. There's a lot of truth in it. And then at the same time, there's another element that sometimes the story is, well, yeah, except it's all about circumstance. And what I think is interesting about the gardening example is that you actually need to bring those two together.

You can't grow anything anywhere. You could keep trying and it's not going to grow, right? So it's not all about just keep trying effort. And yet at the same time it is about iteration, it's about learning and it's about saying okay if I want this thing to grow whatever it is whether it's this plant, whether it's my career, whether it's my relationship, that there are circumstances, conditions that are more conducive to things growing and I think that's one of the big challenges that a lot of people wrestle with.

It's one of the, I think the core tension is like, do I just keep going in this direction? Or have I learned something that tells me, yes, keep going, but go in that direction? And I feel like your book somehow to me just brought that whole question into really clear focus. I don't know what my question is now. That's my reflection. I'll let you go where you like with it. Well, I write about how as I've gotten older, it's a lot more difficult for me, or it had been more difficult for me to attempt things that I'm not good at.

It's a bit narcissistic in a lot of ways to think that if you try anything, you're going to be good at it. Why should you be if you haven't been taught, if you haven't practiced, if you haven't extended yourself into a realm that is further than what you're currently aware of? And so asking for help has never been particularly easy for me. Asking for favors has not been particularly easy. And so the idea of trying to learn something new out of a school environment where that's sort of the accepted norm, and it's been a long time since I was in a desk as opposed to behind a podium teaching, it took a while for me to realize that in order to no pun intended here, grow that I had to ask for some guidance and

that watching HGTV wasn't going to be enough. So I really needed more deeper learning about the conditions that I was in. This is a good metaphor for life, I think, and how to grow from there, how to get better at what I was attempting, and this is a good metaphor for life, I think, and how to grow from there, how to get better at what I was attempting to do. And this experience actually helped me find the courage to begin to do other things that I've said for as long as I can remember that I really wanted to do, but for some reason had this obstacle path in front of me that felt too daunting to attempt.

And it's opened up that obstacle a little bit to make more attempts at doing things that I never really felt like I had the ability to do. And that's been liberating in a lot of ways. Can you share what any of these new attempts have been? Well, you don't have to if you don't want to. But no, I'm fine with it. I'm on day 481 of learning French on Duolingo. Nice. You know, it comes a time where you're like, I can't keep saying, Oh, I wish I knew how to speak another language.

I mean, you either do it or you don't do it. I just, it was tired of hearing myself wishing for this magical ability and thinking that somehow I'd learn it in my sleep. And so I've done this now for a year and a half and I'm not very good and I'm not a great learner, but I know a lot of words. Yep, yep. That's been also revelatory. And then the other is getting into shape.

And so I've been working with a trainer for two years. And so, you know, got a little bit of muscle. Oh yeah, all right. And so those you know, got a little bit of muscle. Oh yeah, all right. And so those two things are things that I never really envisioned that I'd be able to begin to do in the way that I'm doing it now with consistency. I think that ability to do something and not be good at it and still do it is so sort of fundamental. And for some reason for me I think that it's an ability that has gotten better in me as I've gotten older where I think when I was young I thought that how good I was

at various individual things with some reflection on how good I was overall. And now I've realized like whether I can roller skate or not says nothing at all about who I am as a person or my value. So if I go out and make a complete fool of myself roller skating, which I assure you is what happens. I mean, the last time I went roller skating, they now have designed these things. they look like walkers on wheels and I'm out there tottering around with one of them which was I mean my younger self would never have got like no way my older self is like well this is kind of mildly humiliating but I'm just gonna keep doing it but I think that maybe it's certain things like I decided early on I was gonna be a musician and I'm not musically talented

Really? No, I'm not. I'm surprised. Yeah, I don't know why I am I'm deeply not natural at it But I love it deeply but I've just stuck with it for I don't know 35 years now and I'm I'm okay You know like my friend Chris is a natural. Like I'll spend three months figuring out and learning how to play something that he will then turn around and play in like an hour of time which is mildly like infuriating and I'm like you know what that just doesn't matter. Because I'm doing this thing because I love doing it and I think that with

your gardening is such a great example of you just embracing learning how to do something because you simply wanted to do it. Same way with French or with getting in shape. Getting in shape has been the hardest one for me, even harder than French I think, because I'm much more comfortable doing anything cerebral because I'm much more comfortable doing anything cerebral. And I'm also more comfortable learning anything on my own in that I can go at my own pace. I don't have to worry about judgment. For lots and lots of reasons that we've talked about on your podcast before, I, for all of my life, have been very cut off from the physicality of living and always approach things from a much more cerebral point of view where I can think through things and not necessarily engage physically

through things as much. And so I was forced to start working with my trainer when I had surgery and needed to do PT. And that's how I started my relationship with my trainer. He's also a physical therapist. He's a PhD in physical therapy. And I was very compliant with what I needed to do. The one physical activity that I did engage in on the daily was walking. I'm a native New Yorker and was always walking through

the city and always walking wherever I could go because I enjoy it so much. I didn't want to give that up because that was at the time my only physical activity besides pacing. So I started to feel better about myself physically and then decided that I should continue working with him in weight training and so forth. And so that's what I've done. And I've even started running. People I tell, they're like, did aliens take over your body?

Yeah. And I'm like, yes, take over your body? So. Yeah. And I'm like, yes, they did a long time ago. Now I'm shooing them away. Right, right. When I first started with him, because of all the trauma, if I couldn't do something, Eric, I would start crying involuntarily.

Like it wasn't like, oh, boo hoo, poor me. This was involuntary projectile tears because I was facing so much of my own, I don't even know what the word is, bad wolf. And so the first time I did a pull-up, I actually cried, but it was not because of my trauma, it was because of my joy that I could actually do something like that. And again, it was involuntary. And that's been one of the most surprising things in my life actually, I'd say. To be able to be conscious in that way,

or even allow my subconscious to bubble up in the way that it has, has done a lot to help me. The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network hosted by me, writer and historian Dan Flores and brought to you by Velvet Buck. This podcast looks at a West available nowhere else. Each episode I'll be diving into some of the lesser known histories of the West. I'll then be joined in conversation by guests such as Western historian Dr. Randall Williams and bestselling author and meat eater founder, Stephen Rinella. I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll say when cave people were here.

And I'll say, it seems like the ice age people that were here didn't have a real affinity for caves. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today. Listen to The American West with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug means. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter.

Liz Caramouche. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple podcast. Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcast. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in

an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts. That looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the

front lines of a global battle against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy and I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's hard to separate natural affinity from avoidance responses sometimes. So I think I do have a natural affinity towards the brain. I think that's part of who I am. And I think I was very disembodied for a lot of my life. And so, yeah, physicality is something that I've sort of learned and I also paradoxically have figured out that it is for me the most important mental emotional health tool I have. If you forced me to only have one the rest of my life, which I'm glad I don't

because I need like 27 of them, but if you forced me to have one, I would probably say it's exercise. Really? Because there's something about what it does for me, the way it connects me up inside, the way it releases anxiety, the way that it increases energy. It's just, it is for me, maybe my most important one. Again, I'm glad I don't have to choose, but it's been a really important one for me. And the thing about exercise that I always find fascinating,

listeners have heard me talk about this a lot, but I do find it really interesting is how if something we come to see as so valuable, for me every time I've ever done it, when I'm done I'm like I'm glad I did that, like literally every time, why does it remain hard? You'd think basic reward learning would have me running to the treadmill every day but I don't and I think it's just because it's such a significant output of energy that as organisms, we are designed to evaluate that amount of output very closely. You just don't go running around for no good reason as an organism trying to survive. But I still remain kind of fascinated by that that dynamic of how I faced it today

I was like I know I really the best thing for me to do would be to get on the peloton and ride And that's really hard. So what I've learned to do is I just went like well, okay You're preparing for Debbie instead of sitting in front of a screen Reading put in your headphones and just at least go walk outside in the Sun while you prepare, you know So those little sort of hacks help. That's why I have to keep working with a trainer, Eric, because I'm too weak and lazy to do it on my own. David Foster Wallace talks about what a real leader is in Considered Lobster, his collection

of essays. And he talks about how a real leader is somebody who helps people who are weak and lazy to do things that they would not consider doing on their own. I'm paraphrasing. Yeah. But weak and lazy were in that I'm not paraphrasing those words. And that's what my trainer does for me. He helps me get over my weakness and my laziness to do better things that I can do on my own. And if I don't have an appointment with him, I don't do it. And I'm hoping that I can get to a point where I can.

The one area where I think I might is actually with running. Now, and I don't know that I'll ever be a runner. Maybe, maybe I'll be able to do a 5k one day. But I experienced that runner's high one time once. And that was like, wow. I never felt something like that before, but I totally hear you. It's not like I'm going rah rah time to run. I mean, I haven't run since the last time I had a training session and I've been on a book tour, so you can only imagine what that's been like. And I do find it super interesting this whole idea that you just brought up because I don't

have any issue starting to make a drawing. I have no issue engaging in anything I really love on my own. I don't need a trainer to draw. I don't need a trainer to read. I don't need a trainer to write. I need an editor, but I don't need anybody to motivate me. So I do find that I have to think about that a lot. That's a really, really interesting observation that I need to mull. And if you do find the solution to that, please let me know. Well for me, the solution has been accepting that that's normal, right? That it's just okay that making myself do something very physical is always going to

take a certain degree of coercion, right? I told you before the call, I just got done writing this book, I turned it into the publisher about a month ago, and a bunch of the book is about how we actually change. And one of the things that I'd picked up through years of doing the show, but also really got driven home as I did a lot more research for this book, is that if you gathered all the behavior change scientists together in the world and you put them in a room, right, I think the

thing they would all agree on is that relying on our own internal engine, what we would commonly call willpower, is generally a bad idea for anything that is for whatever reason for us difficult to do. Why is that? Because our environments matter so much and willpower is a very finicky thing because it's tied somewhat to mood, right? Because if we think about motivation or willpower in the sense that most of us know it, it has to do with how much we feel like doing something. And if you've got a mood system like mine, it is just up and it's down and it's up. There

are some people who are a whole lot probably like, you know, steady or up at like 80%. I feel good 80% of the time and for them might be a little bit different. But for people whose mood system is as variable as most people, you can't rely on just that. So it becomes all about what are the strategies that you as an individual need to figure out that will get you across the start line for whatever that thing is. So there may be people listening to this are like I don't have a problem going running I just get up and I just go running but when I think about sitting down to do something creative oh my god it's like a total block comes up. Okay. And I would say they're not lazy you're not lazy it's difference in what we find easy to

do. So for you you need to set up a structure and a trainer is a very wise structure. Which is why fitness classes exist because people are like, oh if I sign up to go to the class I'm more likely to go and if I actually go then I'm more likely to work hard. It's just it's wisdom to know like, oh I need support, I need help, I need these structures. Whereas for somebody different, they might need to sign up for an art class to do it because they just won't do it. Because for them, the friction is high related to previous failure or doubts that they're good at it. And so for all of us, I think that

change to me, I always think of it just as like a puzzle. Like what are the puzzle pieces that I need to put together that make this thing work? And for you with exercise you finally got the puzzle pieces lined up and they'll probably get unlined again at some point and you'll need to go oh let me think okay what what pieces do I need to put in here? I think it also has a lot to do with who's teaching you. Yes. And I think that part of what has made me feel capable or emotionally available to do this is my trainer. He's so lovely. He's so patient. He really, I was very clear with him when I started. I'm like, look, I have all these issues and so I hope that you can be respectful of them. And I have a lot of limitations and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And he was like, okay. He's been super respectful always, but he's also unwilling to let my own limitations, my own self perceived limitations impact my actual abilities. And I'm not talking about abilities to do any physical activity, I'm talking about my mental. Your mental. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something.

What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there. You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism, that quietly derail our best intentions. But

here's the good news, you can outsmart them. And I put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at whenufeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. My partner, Jenny, who you met when I came to New York, she's similar to you in physical things. When we met, I guess it's been almost 11 years ago at this point probably, she just hated everything

that had to do with exercise and movement. It was something she was like, I know I need to do it and I hate it. And she could find periods where she made herself do it. And over time, she has learned, I think, just to appreciate it more. But I remember we took, I was like, I really want to learn to play tennis.

Like, why don't we go take tennis lessons together? And the first two tennis lessons, similar to you, ended in tears with her. There was just something about a ball flying at her that just brought up like being scared as a child and like, I hate this. You know, and just the inability to know what to do and just, so I think some of that stuff is really real for us. And again, I think that people face this in different ways.

I mean, I know people all the time are like, I really wish I could learn to play guitar. And I'm like, well, of course you can, you know, but you have to be really, really uncomfortable for a while in doing it. Right. Because you're gonna be terrible at it for a little while. I mean, everybody's terrible at guitar to start just because you can't make those shapes with your fingers. Your fingers just aren't strong enough. But learning to do anything, and so I think when we look at that and we're like, okay, there's this thing that I want to do and I'm having a really hard time doing it, to me is just

about, okay, what's the strategy that we can come up with? And you sort of snuck in the back door of it by having to have a trainer for your back that also then managed to shepherd you through another door. Which is amazing. I love how you're helping me better understand myself in this podcast. It's fantastic. So speaking of podcasts, when I was getting into and preparing for this interview, something happened that as I was doing it I was like that is amazing and it is this, you have been doing your podcast you're at the point I am at now I've been doing this podcast a decade so when I started this podcast you had already been doing it for a decade before that and everybody's always to me like well you're one of

the early founders I'm like no not exactly But holy mackerel, 20 years. Does that fill you with pride? How do you feel when you think about 20 years of having these conversations? It makes me very humbled about the nature of time because that went by in a flash. Yeah. And I remember my first podcast.

I was interviewing John Fulbrook, who was then the art director at Simon & Schuster. And I was super nervous. I had my notes in front of me, but I also had, because he's a book designer, a book jacket designer, I had covers of his books all pasted over my office walls so that I could easily refer to something. I chose John not only because he's a fantastic designer and a good friend, but because he's extremely gregarious and I felt like if I choked, which was a really good possibility,

he could carry on. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thankfully, I think I've grown in the 20 years, but it's surreal, Eric. It's surreal. And it's also surreal to see how both I and the show have evolved and what it means to, again, coming back to this pun that I don't really intend, but to really grow as anything. Yeah. I didn't grow up thinking,

I wanna be a podcaster when I grow up. There was no such thing. And that this very unusual path that my life took based on a cold call from an internet radio network. Please edit that out. Like what if I hadn't picked up that call? Isn't that fascinating? I interviewed a guy recently his name is Brian. I think you say it Kloss. He wrote a book called Fluk and it is a on many levels. Do you know the book? No, I'm going to read it. It's a great, great title.

Yeah, it's all about how life is like you just described. Like, you don't answer that phone, your whole life is different. You know, he talks about how the city of Kyoto was originally on the slate to be bombed by the US and it turned out that the war director of the US had gone to Kyoto about 20 years before on a vacation and loved it. So he said, no, let's not do that one. Like, it's crazy. Like, that is life when you look at it. There's just all these things that I could have just decided not to do X and my whole life would look different. And his point is ultimately that if you embrace that, how little we actually control and how little actually happens like, you

know, for a reason, that it can be freeing and liberating, it's also deeply disconcerting on some level too, I think. Yeah, I mean it takes both the good and the bad things and puts them in a completely different, you see them through a different lens. And I think that's also something to honor. Yep. It goes a little bit back to what we were talking about

earlier with gardening, right? Like there's both what you do, which matters. What you do matters. And there's all the elements that you can't control about growing anything. You can be more strategic, like you cannot plant roses like you once tried to do in a fully shady patio. That's plant a fern there, right? There's strategy.

And ultimately though, you control what you can, right there's strategy and ultimately though you control what you can but there's a certain element of it that is just out of your control you can't make something grow that's for sure you don't control nature not in the slightest nature is much bigger and stronger and more capable and that is a very liberating realization. You can do your best, you can try your best, you can try to provide the best possible conditions, and you have to just leave it at the door. The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network,

hosted by me, writer and historian, Dan Flores, and brought to you by Velvet Buck. This podcast looks at a West available nowhere else. Each episode, I'll be diving into some of the lesser known histories of the West. I'll then be joined in conversation by guests such as Western historian, Dr. Randall Williams, and bestselling author and meat eater

founder Stephen Rinella. I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll say when cave people were here and I'll say it seems like the Ice Age people that were here didn't have a real affinity for caves. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today. Listen to The American West with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glodd. And this is season two of the War on Drugs Podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man.

We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown.

We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouche. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. It really does.

It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcast. In 2020, a group of young women in a tidy suburb of New York City found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare. Someone was posting photos.

It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. It happened in Levittown, New York. But reporting the series took us through the darkest corners of the internet and to the front lines of a global battle

against deepfake pornography. This should be illegal, but what is this? This is a story about technology that's moving faster than the law and about vigilantes trying to stem the tide. I'm Margie Murphy. And I'm Olivia Carville. This is Levertown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. Listen to Levertown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Another point of intersection with you and I a little bit is that your wife Roxanne and I both did a project with a company called Rebind.ai where you pair a person like Roxanne with a book. She did Age of Innocence, I did the Tao Te Ching, and mine is about to come out, I think hers has probably been out for a little while. The Tao is all about that idea of you just have to work with the way nature is. If you try and go against it, you're going to lose every time. I had a plant that had died and it had been really established over the years in a previous home that I lived in.

I talked a little bit about this in the book, the Rooted Dendrons in my previous home. I was devastated to watch them die and wanted to pull them out of the ground after they had died. It was really hard. I felt like I was fighting with nature. It didn't want to come out of the ground. And if pulling a plant out of the ground is fierce, so is everything else.

Yeah. I don't know if you said this in a book itself or elsewhere, but I put it under the notes I have for the book which is failure is fertilizer. It feeds the next attempt, the deeper insight, the unexpected path. And I love that idea because it doesn't just say just again this idea that we mostly talk about with failures, try, try, try again. But I think that the wisdom there is yes, try again, but as you point like maybe there needs to be a deeper insight before you try again. Maybe there needs to be a different path. You actually have to be learning. It's not just keep trying. Right. And I think that it's really important to be conscious about your failures and not just keep trying.

Because if you keep trying to do something the same way without understanding what led to the failure and what you can do to improve the odds of success, I don't know why anything would be different if you just keep trying in the same way. Yeah, I think it's one of those really difficult things about people who are trying to build anything. I'm thinking of it in a business sense, having been in the startup world for a lot of my life, but it's really hard to know. It's like, do I just need to keep going in this direction? Because it just takes time and people are slowly coming on or or is this the wrong idea the wrong direction when do I pivot how have you thought about that in your life like do you have any way of sort of thinking

through that whether as a designer or in any way I think it depends on who you're doing things for okay and the bar that you need to be able to reach in order to do something, if you're doing something for someone else and you're getting paid to do it, there's much less tolerance for failure. And that could include your shareholders, it could include a board, it could include clients. If you're doing something for yourself, I think you have a bit more leeway. For example, when I started the podcast, I was working a full-time job. I was working as a corporate executive and I was making a good salary. So I wasn't dependent on this other effort that was really started as a labor of love.

Yeah. I didn't need to monetize it and I didn't need to do anything other than really fulfill my own creative dreams and hopes and aspirations. To a large degree, it's still the case for me. I'm lucky that I can monetize it in some ways, but I've never been dependent on it. And when you take out the dependency equation, it gives you a lot more freedom to experiment or evolve in ways that don't impact others. If you're being hired to make something for something else or for the public or for profit, it does change the way in which I think you approach anything.

And ever so slowly, now that I'm in my sixth decade, I've tried to eliminate the need to decade, I've tried to eliminate the need to fulfill any obligation to the outcome for others' purposes. It's taken a long time, and I'm very lucky and privileged that I'm in a place right now where I can do that more frequently. But that's also a choice. I'm not as comfortable anymore fulfilling financial obligations. I don't wanna live a life anymore

where I'm working to increase the market share of products that I don't feel proud of doing. And I did that for a very long time. Not that I wasn't proud of them. I mean, I am very proud of the. And I did that for a very long time. Not that I wasn't proud of them. I mean, I am very proud of the work that I've done. I just don't feel the need to redesign any more fast food restaurants or over-the-counter pharmaceuticals

or soft drinks or salty snacks. And again, I am very lucky that I was very successful doing that. But there comes a time where you have to decide how much more of this work do I want to do in service of that work. And so I feel extremely privileged to be able to take the talents that I manifested and grew and developed over my corporate career and now applied them to movements and efforts that I feel are helping the world be a little bit safer or a little bit kinder.

And that's the work that I'm trying to dedicate myself to doing now. Yeah, it's a really tricky thing. I mean, we started this conversation with me sharing this magical day in New York City, coming to your studio and me being like, God, I wish I could do this full time. And now I get to do it full time and that comes with a shadow side to it, which is that this thing that started just because I wanted to do it and loved doing it

now provides a living for me and for a couple other people. And so it's different. And I think for me, the thing that I have to sort of continually sort of do is like, yes, I have to hold that there. It's real, it's true, it needs to be. And I also need to turn as much of my attention as I can to what about this matters to me most deeply. And that actually is then what ends up creating the best work but it's always a mixed thing. I wanted to ask you about your career. You talk a lot about and you've advised a lot of young people about their careers and it's easy

to look at your career, maybe many people's careers, but I can look at your career and I can see it okay it started know, down over here to the left and today it's up over here to the right in that all the things you just described are true. Like you are better able to do the work that you want to do, you've had some degree of financial success. So if I look at it, I go, okay, look, started down here to the left, ends up here to the right, straight line up. That's not it, right? So I was wondering if you would share a little bit

about some of the times that you might have felt like, okay, my career was going well and now all of a sudden it feels like, uh-oh, you know, or any sort of bumps in the road or different things that sort of give us a little bit more of the nature of the up and down that happens in that chart if we zoom in on it. Yeah, I mean I don't know anything that is just a straight line up. I can't even imagine what that would be like. I graduated college in 1983 and moved to Manhattan.

I'm a native New Yorker so it wasn't that big a jump. And the first 13 years of my career, there was some success there and some highlights, but for the most part, it was a lot of despair as I was trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be. I graduated with a degree in English literature, so I wasn't really prepared for the big time. And at the time, I wasn't in a place where I either could or wanted to go on for a higher degree. I wanted to live in Manhattan and be a working girl, so to speak. And because I didn't have a lot of training or a lot of guidance or any money, it was

really, really hard for me. And I was also grappling with a lot of unresolved trauma and was living on my own for the first time in my life. And I often say that I consider that first decade of my career just experiments in rejection and failure and a bit of humiliation. And then quite serendipitously ended up in the world of branding. You know, I had some skills in design coming out of college because I worked on the student newspaper. And the editor of the section also had to put the paper together. And that meant designing it.

And that's when I discovered my love of graphic design and began to develop the skills that were required to be a graphic designer. It was still pretty rudimentary, although I had, I think, a good eye and some good ideas. I didn't at that time have the drafting skills that were required in the 80s. I developed them and that was a good thing. Again, it was very serendipitous, a fluke, that I ended up in branding. And then, as you were talking about earlier,

discovered I had a natural ability for it. My brain just understood the psychological underpinnings of wanting to engage with products that made people feel either better about who they were, gave them more social confidence, made them feel like they were part of a bigger tribe, were enjoying a moment that they were engaging with that brand and what that did

to our psychological makeup. And though even that entry point was marked with difficulties, I came into an agency that was mostly comprised of young British guys and I came in as a sort of loud mouth female American that was challenging for the first couple of years. Then I was embraced mostly because I was doing well for the company. I was bringing in a lot of business and so I was then finally embraced. But then when I was bringing in the business, part of my original offer to join the company was that I would begin to earn equity.

I knew that the senior partner was interested one day in selling the company. I wanted to be part of that and initially there was some resistance as there would be for anybody asking for equity. I had to say that if I didn't get equity, and I don't know where this courage came from, that I'd have to leave the company. I didn't want to leave the company because it was the first time in my life that I was really successful and happy doing what I was doing.

And at this point, I'm in my mid to late 30s. I didn't become a partner at Sterling until I was 38 and was terrified that they'd call my bluff and say, okay, well, sorry, we don't want to give you shares. And then I did get on an equity path, which became really important to my life. But I remember that night going home and thinking, oh my God, what have I done? I made this threat that I would leave this job that I love, that I'm finally good at something,

from a professional point of view. Then thankfully that worked out. But there were a couple of moments in there where I wasn't sure it would. And working a new business the way I did is a constant street fight because you're competing with other agencies, you're at the whim of what a client might or might not want. I was the chief rainmaker for a long time

in the division at Sterling that I was running. You can only imagine what that pressure was like, especially for somebody that is not only competitive, but using their success to buoy their self-worth. And that is really challenging because if you aren't successful at something, if you don't win a piece of business, that can just decimate whatever little self-esteem you've built. So I had to get off that hamster wheel, but that's a really long time and I still grapple with that. Not necessarily in rain making, but just in any area where I have to prove myself. HOFFMAN Yeah, I think that that is something that many of us wrestle with and I think we can get better at, but I don't know if it ever completely goes away.

Yeah, I'll let you know. I'm still searching for that. That's my holy grail, Eric. That's my holy grail. Just to feel good as is. Well, that is sort of the ultimate way to be because as we've said, you sort of can't necessarily make what is

aligned with the way you want it to be. So a certain ability to be like, okay, this is, I'm going to be okay with what is, is the thing many of us are striving for. I suspect that there's a creature though who may be good at this. Is Maximus Toretto Blueberry adept in this skill? Well, Maximus Toretto Blueberry, the little multipoo we adopted during COVID, is really an example of what it means to live in the moment, to have utterly no self-consciousness consciousness about any of our bodily requirements, and is proof that unconditional love exists. So Max is not my first dog,

Max is Roxanne's first dog. So it's wonderful to see all of those realizations birth themselves in her, and the realizations and the relationship she has with Max, which is just heart-bursting. I can't even explain it. But the first dog that did that for me was my dog, Duff, and that was 25 years ago.

One of the great loves of my life taught me what it meant to feel loved unconditionally and to love unconditionally. That is one of the great, great gifts to the world that our pets can do for us. And so I love to have my furry family around me. We have two cats and a dog. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be?

Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at OneYouFeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. OneYouFeed.net slash ebook.

Well I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up with the happy image of Maximus and your wife and your old dog. And I think it ties right back to kind of where we started, which is nature. Dogs are part of nature and there's a special type of connection that comes from being in partnership with nature. Yeah, and also witnessing what grows and what develops and what evolves with or without our participation. Well, Debbie, thank you so much. It's always such a pleasure to talk with you and I appreciate you joining us. Eric, thank you. Thank you so much for all of your kindness and generosity to me and thank you for a really nice interview.

Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you. Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text With the episode link to someone who might enjoy it your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom

One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one you feed community Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? The American West with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th, where we'll delve into stories of the West and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today. Listen to The American West with Dan Flores on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2020, a group of young women found themselves in an AI-fueled nightmare.

Someone was posting photos. It was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts. This is Levittown, a new podcast from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope about the rise of deepfake pornography and the battle to stop it. Listen to Levittown on Bloomberg's Big Take podcast. Find it on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Clayton English.

I'm Greg Glott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs by IK. Last year, a lot of the problems of the drug war this year, a lot of the biggest names in music and sports. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We met them at their homes, we met them at their recording studios. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. It makes it real.