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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're going to talk about failure now. In particular, failure in sports. If you've been paying attention to the NBA playoffs this year, maybe that's on your mind. Are you a Milwaukee Bucks fan or a fan of the star player who led them to their first NBA championship in 50 years back in 2021, Giannis Antetokounmpo? Big things were expected of the Bucks this year, but they crashed out at the first round of the playoffs last week. That led to this viral moment from a press conference after a reporter asked Giannis whether he considered the Bucks' season a failure.

Giannis Antetokounmpo: "You asked me the same question last year, Eric. Okay. Do you get a promotion every year on your job? No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no? No. Every year you work, you work towards something. Towards a goal."

Brian Lehrer: A very thoughtful and productive way of thinking about loss in sports. Let's consider what Giannis has to say as we hear from a podcast creator whose central premise is that there's much to understand about our world through sports. The podcast is called Good Sport, and it's from host Jody Avirgan and the TED Audio Collective. They've even got a whole episode on what we learn from losses. Jody Avirgan joins us now. Podcast host, producer, and editor, host of the Radiotopia show This Day in Esoteric Political History. Again, his new podcast is Good Sport from the TED Audio Collective, and he is an esteemed former Brian Lehrer Show producer. Local boy makes good.

Hi, Jody. Welcome back. Always good to have you.

Jody Avirgan: I was waiting for you to get to the most important part of my resume. [laughter] It's great to be on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to play another part of Giannis's response to the question of whether the Bucks' season was a failure. Before I do that, I'll play an excerpt from your new podcast that I think serves as important context for what Giannis had to say. The first voice you hear, listeners, is psychologist Ian Robertson.

Ian Robertson: "You have this emotional reaction to losing. And it's actually very close to some of the pain centers of the brain. So it feels like pain. It's a-- Not only is it an absence of reward, it's a failure to get an expected reward. And that lowers your mood and it lifts your anxiety."

Jody Avirgan: "Losing feels like pain. It hurts, and it can change your mindset."

Ian Robertson: "And so it's much easier for us to default to very imprecise modes of thinking. Thinking big thoughts like, 'Oh, I'm useless. Oh, this is terrible. This is the end.' You know, these big kind of thoughts that are really motivationally debilitating."

Brian Lehrer: That from Jody Avirgan's podcast in the Good Sports series. Jody, did you know before working on the podcast that losing can have such a profound effect on the brain?

Jody Avirgan: [laughs] Unfortunately, yes. I've lost plenty. A big part of this series is me going through my experience playing sports and all the lessons I've learned playing sports and then trying to match it with larger lessons. The way that Ian framed it as the emotional pain of a loss gets in the way of all of these lessons that are contained within that. Maybe more lessons in a loss than a win really kind of shifted my thinking.

Brian Lehrer: Here's that other part of Giannis's response, and he invokes one of the NBA's winningest and most legendary players.

Giannis Antetokounmpo: "Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championship. The other nine years was a failure? It's the wrong question. There's no failure in sports. You know, there's good days, bad days. Some days you're able to be successful, some days you're not. Some days it's your turn, some days it's not your turn. And that's what sports is about. You don't always win."

Brian Lehrer: Do you buy it, Jody, that there is no failure in sports? I think Giannis has a reputation as a very hard worker and somebody who really wants to win. But I can just hear the calls to sports talk radio saying, "If he says the season isn't a failure when you're expected to win and you lose, then he doesn't care enough."

Jody Avirgan: Should we open up the phones and get Mike from Staten Island to chime in on Giannis being a big loser? No. Look. I will say I'm so impressed by Giannis's comments, and frankly also pretty impressed by the conversation even in the pockets of sports radio that has broken out as a result of it. I mean, people are really trying to be thoughtful and nuanced about what he said. Your question. Do I buy it? Losing when you're the No. 1 seed to an 8 seed is not good. I don't think there's anything that Giannis is saying in there that says he's not disappointed or that he doesn't consider that not what he was hoping for.

I don't think there's anything in there that means that Giannis doesn't want to win. But I really do think the key is what does that word failure do for him? I think what he was trying to say there was that that word is not helpful for him in trying to achieve his very lofty goals and very high standards. He has lofty goals and he has high standards. He has won championships and MVPs before, so I don't think we need to question that.

He is getting at something that I think is really important in sports and has all sorts of lessons for the rest of us and the rest of our lives, which is as we approach a task and a goal, how do we find language and a framework and a process that leads to real achievement and satisfaction, and isn't hung up on words and goals and so forth that don't give us what we need to really feel like we're growing and achieving?

That word failure may work for someone else, but I think what Giannis was really saying was that it doesn't work for me. For a lot of us, we get hung up on this kind of black and white terms.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some of your calls on this. If this is the moment when The Brian Lehrer Show kind of rubs up against sports talk radio, no, we're not going to take your calls on the Yankees' trainers should be fired because their players keep getting injured. We're just going to take your calls on what are the lessons you've learned from losses. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

I guess I'll say, in these 10 minutes that we have for calls, we're especially interested in hearing about your sports losses and what you may have taken away from them for the rest of your life. Even if you've experienced failure in a different context and learned something from it, we can take a call or two like that. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Here's what might be an interesting losses story. Christian in Waterville, Maine, you're on WNYC. Christian, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Christian: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I just graduated high school last year, and I think I failed so much in one of my history classes. I started to have an F on every test at the beginning of the year, but by the end, I ended the entire year with a B. I think the value of failure in an academic context like that, especially in high school where you have so much support even if you do fail, with teachers and stuff, I think it's undervalued.

The importance of everyone thinks they need to get an A, but really learning and developing those skills to fail, that then you can apply later in life through college or through the workplace, is so important.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Now, if you're calling from Waterville, Maine and you graduated high school last year, I'm going to take a wild guess and say you're a freshman at Colby?

Christian: That is true. Yes. [laughter]

Jody Avirgan: Christian, did you--

Brian Lehrer: Well, that in of itself is a success. Oh, Jody. Go ahead.

Jody Avirgan: Well, I was just wondering if Christian told his teacher that Michael Jordan probably would have failed this test four times as well before finally passing it.

Christian: [laughs] Yes. [crosstalk], yes.

Jody Avirgan: It is the case that sports-- I mean, it's what's wonderful about sports. It puts all these other things that we have to deal with in life in really sharp relief. In sports, there's a very clear-- and often it's good because it's clarifying, but often you can get hung up on it as we see with that reporter and Giannis, but there's a very clear "Did you win or did you lose? Did you win a championship or did you not?"

Life is not always like that. Even as Christian was pointing out, academics is not always like that. When you talk to the best athletes and the best coaches and ask them "What is satisfying to you? What made this season a success?" they probably won't mention wins or losses. They will often talk about the team that was built, their relationships with other people, the incremental goals along the way. I just think it's a really important reframing.

Brian Lehrer: Christian, thanks for calling. Good luck on your finals, and call us again. Mary in Andover, New Jersey, you're on WNYC. Hi, Mary.

Mary: Yes. I'll make it short. I don't really want to get on any personal experiences, and of course, I've had many losses. I was in sports in school. I was listening to the interview that you had with this sports player. The basketball team paid big money for this player. These athletes make enormous amounts of money. Just millions and millions of dollars. In the corporate world, if you don't produce you don't get promoted. Sometimes you don't even get to keep your job. You're going to look at it both ways.

Brian Lehrer: Mary, thank you. Jody. Do you have an opinion on how the big contracts which set the best of the best, like Giannis, set them up for life when they still have years to go in their competitive career whether it drains their competitive edge?

Jody Avirgan: Ha. Well, we actually do a whole episode in Good Sport about retirement and how athletes have to do it much earlier than the rest of us. They have to face that moment of what comes next. Yes, often they are set up-- Not very often. A lot of athletes don't make that much money, but often they're paid well.

I would push back slightly on the idea that in the corporate world, you are measured exclusively on your failures or successes. We're sitting here in a moment where there have been lots of people who have driven lots of companies into the ground and are still getting paid pretty handsomely. I would actually argue that sports is pretty meritocratic in that sense. That people get paid pretty much based on their performance and their achievement. Yes. I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Rachel in Astoria has a failure story, I think, from another line of work. Hi, Rachel. You're on WNYC.

Rachel: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I just wanted to call and say I'm an artist, and I moved to New York to be an actor. I have a manager and I've been auditioning for film and television and regional and New York theater productions for years and hundreds of things. I've come close to a lot, and I've only booked a few. I feel like that's not talked a ton about in the industry.

Going through all the educational systems I've gone through to get here, and to have the opportunities I've had, there's a lot of successes along the way that have come with that, that have helped me to grow within this industry, and also to learn more about myself as a creative person. I think that they're difficult to have conversations about because saying like, "You know I've auditioned for Law & Order three times," and then being like "I was on Law & Order" are different things.

It's hard to feel like you're not judged by people on the outside as not being a success if you don't have those concrete things to say. It's also hard to say, "I've pitched a children's television show to these networks but they're not getting it.' There's not a lot of room to have conversations across a gray spectrum, I think, in the world sometimes. I think it's important to have those conversations. Hearing that quote from that basketball player, I think it was, [crosstalk].

Brian Lehrer: Yes. That was an NBA player.

Rachel: Thank you. Sorry. I don't watch a lot of sports. I apologize, but I saw that before hearing it on your show and I was like, "What a wonderful person. How wonderful for them to reframe perspective around success."

Brian Lehrer: Rachel, do they train actors either formally, if you're in acting school, or are there informal resources maybe to deal with all the failure? Because, typical unless you're a big star, you're going to audition for a lot of things and you're going to get rejected a lot. You're going to face a lot of rejection, especially in the early part of your career.

Rachel: Yes. That's a really nice question. I wish there was more of that. I found in school there's a lot of optimism and positivity around like, "If you work hard in these ways, you're going to get through," and there's less conversations about privilege within the structure, and about other--

There are some conversations I found in the apprenticeships that I went to about how to define success for yourself. I feel like the most help I've gotten through failures, through this industry, and also in other areas of my life, have always come from personal relationships and from my dad, who's a very maternal person and talks about feelings a lot. Personal relationships have really helped me the most. I wish there were more actual mandatory classes to take about nuances of people being vulnerable, exposing the difficulties that they've had.

Brian Lehrer: Rachel, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Rachel: Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Please call us again. We're going to take one more, and I think we're going to end on a pretty intense field of work in which somebody can fail. Ron in Fort Lee, you're on WNYC. Ron, sorry to say we have about a minute for you.

Ron: Yes. I'm a surgeon, and sports is the toys and games division of life. What we deal with and the failures we have are real failures. People die, they don't get to go home, and that puts it in perspective.

Brian Lehrer: How do you handle it?

Ron: How do you handle it? You have to steel yourself. You learn how to separate yourself, I think is what it's called. You try not to take it home. But we manage. It's part of the training, and it's why the training program is so long. That's one of the reasons everybody can't do it.

Brian Lehrer: Ron, thank you for your call. Jody, there's failure and then there's failure.

Jody Avirgan: Yes. I'm very aware that sports is different, and the stakes are different from the rest of the stuff we have to deal with in the real world. My only argument over the course of this series, and in the thinking that I do about sports is that it offers us this arena, this platform on which to learn some lessons that then yes, the important thing is can we carry them into the rest of our lives? Giannis did that. He connected it to your job, your family, and I think that's the right approach.

Brian Lehrer: Well, Jody, you've inspired a great call-in here. Before you go, do you want to tell us what we can expect in upcoming episodes of your podcast Good Sport?

Jody Avirgan: Yes. The first season is just wrapped up. There's eight episodes out there now. Each episode is built around an idea or a sort of provocation I have from the world of sports that I feel I can unlock a bigger idea. Rachel, the caller earlier, sort of hinted at it, but the best thing I'm hearing is from people who say, "I don't like sports but I really like the show, and it's given me stuff to think about." We talk about failure and gender and stadium deals and all sorts of stuff, so take a listen.

Brian Lehrer: Jody Avirgan, former Brian Lehrer Show producer, now podcast host, producer, and editor, host of the Radiotopia show This Day in Esoteric Political History. Again, his new podcast is Good Sport from the TED Audio Collective. Jody, thanks so much.

Jody Avirgan: Thanks to you.

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