AI transcript
0:00:07 Hey there, it’s Steven Dubner and we have got a bonus episode for you today.
0:00:12 The roots of this one go back to 2023 when we published a four-part series called How
0:00:14 to Succeed at Failing.
0:00:18 One of the hardest questions we asked was, how do you know when it’s time to give up
0:00:19 on something?
0:00:24 It’s a question of what kind of resources you have, what’s your tolerance for pain,
0:00:26 what are the alternatives.
0:00:32 Was that kind of reluctance to admit that you’ve wasted all of these resources?
0:00:38 The problem is that quitting is usually seen as an admission of failure.
0:00:42 I would argue that view needs a serious rethink.
0:00:48 Some quitting is productive if it keeps you sane or keeps you from wasting time.
0:00:54 And then there’s quitting while you’re ahead, while you’re way, way ahead, like David Duchovny
0:00:55 did.
0:01:01 That was the biggest success I could ever quit, like a global phenomenon of a show.
0:01:07 Duchovny is, among other things, an actor, and the TV show he quit was The X-Files.
0:01:11 Some critics say it is the show that most shaped modern TV.
0:01:17 I just knew that I had done everything I could in that format.
0:01:20 It felt like it was going to be my whole life at that point.
0:01:25 If I went any longer, I was going to be doing karaoke, me, whatever that was.
0:01:29 So it was like a lifesaving thing for me to do it.
0:01:37 Duchovny didn’t quit acting, but he did spread out music, writing, parenting, and recently
0:01:38 he started a podcast.
0:01:40 It’s called “Fail Better.”
0:01:45 Now, why make an entire show about failure?
0:01:46 Here’s why.
0:01:48 I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from success.
0:01:54 Duchovny invited me to be a guest on his show, and since I think he’s an interesting person
0:01:58 and I think failure is an interesting topic, I took him up on it.
0:02:01 So that is the conversation you are about to hear today.
0:02:05 If you want to hear more, Duchovny, just search for “Fail Better” in your podcast
0:02:07 app and give it a follow.
0:02:24 If you want to hear more of me, well, you’re already in the right place for that.
0:02:29 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.
0:02:35 With your host, Stephen Dubner, appearing today as a guest on the podcast “Fail Better”
0:02:38 with David Duchovny.
0:02:46 I’ve quit a bunch of things in my life, probably, but the most glaring of those is graduate school.
0:02:52 So I quit on getting my PhD in English literature from Yale in the mid-80s, and it was something
0:02:58 that my mother, till the day she died, asked me if I was going to go finish my PhD.
0:03:05 But I wish that I had, if only because I would like my credit to read such and such a role
0:03:08 played by Dr. David Duchovny, I think would be fun.
0:03:14 Or Dr. So-and-so played by Dr. David Duchovny, that would be meta-meta.
0:03:18 And as much as I joke about it, it hurts not to complete something.
0:03:22 It hurts to quit on something.
0:03:26 My consolation, however, is that I did go a long way.
0:03:30 I went as far as the dissertation.
0:03:32 There was never one moment where I decided to quit.
0:03:35 I kind of faded away from graduate school because I had started acting.
0:03:40 I had started riding my bicycle to the train station in New Haven, getting off at Penn
0:03:44 Station in New York, riding my bicycle to my acting class and riding it back.
0:03:49 So I was living kind of a dual existence between New Haven graduate school and English literature
0:03:52 and starting to think about acting.
0:03:57 And as I went further along, started working harder to try to become an actor, started going
0:04:02 on auditions, started going to L.A., I never really left.
0:04:11 It’s possible that they’re still expecting my dissertation at this point.
0:04:17 I’m David Duchovny, and this has failed better, a show where failure, not success, shapes
0:04:22 who we are.
0:04:26 Stephen Dubner is the host of the podcast Freakonomics Radio.
0:04:31 He’s made that brand his life after co-writing Freakonomics back in 2005, which I read back
0:04:33 in 2005, and it blew me away.
0:04:39 I couldn’t believe the kinds of questions that he was asking that made sense.
0:04:42 And in that way, asking questions, let’s say it’s Socratic.
0:04:45 That was the Socratic method, was asking questions.
0:04:51 So I look at him not just as an economics, brilliant economics guy, but he’s also kind
0:04:54 of an intellectual and a spiritual guy for our time.
0:04:58 He recently had a series on the show called How to Succeed at Failing.
0:05:02 Of course, he comes to us as a failure expert, not only because of that series, but because
0:05:06 of his own false starts and wrong turns, which you’ll hear about.
0:05:12 He quit a successful band, quit the New York Times, and we both quit PhD programs.
0:05:14 And he’s such a podcast veteran.
0:05:16 He’s an icon of the podcast.
0:05:27 So of course, he kind of welcomed me to the club, which was sweet.
0:05:31 So David, are you excited about having a podcast?
0:05:35 I’m the last one not to have one, so I’m happy.
0:05:39 Yeah, but most of the people who started them out of FOMO have stopped by now.
0:05:40 So it’s actually like a–
0:05:41 That’s true.
0:05:42 It’s a good new moment.
0:05:43 Right.
0:05:44 Well, you were early.
0:05:46 I mean, you’re a trendsetter.
0:05:48 Yeah, I thought I was late, Julie.
0:05:49 At the time, you thought you were late?
0:05:50 It’s a good lesson.
0:05:56 Like, a lot of times when you think you’re too late, you’re just stupid.
0:06:03 No, I want to talk about– I mean, I know where I’m coming from on failure.
0:06:04 I just know.
0:06:06 I know my soul.
0:06:12 But I’m interested to hear, what’s your origin story of failure?
0:06:18 I am scarred by seemingly minor failures from youth, as probably we all are– I don’t know
0:06:19 if we all are.
0:06:22 I mean, right off the top of my head, I can think of at least three, which I won’t bore
0:06:23 you with all of them.
0:06:24 But I will say this.
0:06:32 I think my feeling about failure was also informed by my family’s religious orientation.
0:06:35 So I had a weird family religiously.
0:06:41 My parents were both Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of standard issue Brooklyn Jews, right?
0:06:43 They both came from immigrant parents.
0:06:48 And long story short, the two of them, my parents, before they met each other, but during World
0:06:52 War II, which was not insignificant, they both converted to Catholicism.
0:06:56 They both became extremely devout and believing Catholics.
0:07:01 Was it an attempt to assimilate further on their point, or was it merely they just felt
0:07:02 better in that religion?
0:07:08 The short answer is that neither of them, I would say, were really about assimilating,
0:07:13 and neither of them were moving away from being Jewish because of anti-Semitism.
0:07:18 But really, they were both very, very deeply spiritual people, humans, as evidenced by
0:07:23 the fact that when they converted, they became among the most devout Catholics I knew, and
0:07:26 we hung out with only Catholics.
0:07:29 The end of the story is that years later, when I moved to New York in my 20s, I ended
0:07:33 up becoming Jewish, or returning to being Jewish.
0:07:38 But I was Catholic for the formation, and the notion that gave me the most pause, I’ll
0:07:41 put it that way, was the idea of original sin.
0:07:45 This idea that when you start, you’ve got a black mark on you.
0:07:46 You failed already.
0:07:48 I didn’t like that idea.
0:07:51 You were conscious as a child of not liking that idea.
0:07:52 Oh, yeah.
0:07:57 It’s a big idea when you grow up that way, because you’re living your life to try to
0:08:02 essentially erase or supersede the failure that you were born with.
0:08:05 And I remember being like 10, 11, thinking, “What kind of God?”
0:08:07 I say it in an old Jewish man voice.
0:08:13 What kind of God is it that would have me love him or it for having marked me with this
0:08:14 failure?
0:08:15 Yeah.
0:08:18 I’m going to disparage Christianity or Catholicism, because many of my best friends and most
0:08:20 of my family members are there.
0:08:21 Right.
0:08:25 But I did not like, you know, failure hurts.
0:08:26 And you know what else hurts?
0:08:28 And this is the other thing.
0:08:32 Being accused of something you didn’t do, I find, is one of the greatest injustices
0:08:33 in life.
0:08:36 You think, again, you felt punished because you were born into the world, and now you
0:08:39 got to work off your sentence in a way.
0:08:43 So anyway, yeah, failure burned me deeply.
0:08:49 And I made, you know, so I was a musician, and when I was probably 12, 13, somewhere
0:08:54 in there, I was asked to play the organ for the high school graduation, pomp and circumstance.
0:09:00 And there’s this big, massive organ that was backstage in the auditorium.
0:09:02 And I f**ked up.
0:09:05 I like didn’t rehearse enough.
0:09:12 I rehearsed at home on the piano, but then when I got on it during the ceremony, I couldn’t
0:09:15 quite hear myself, and I started getting lost.
0:09:20 I didn’t really read music, so I was playing by ear, and you can’t stop playing when there’s
0:09:22 a processional or whatever you call it.
0:09:28 So I just started vamping, and like I grew up playing like Chicago blues piano.
0:09:30 So you’re playing Boogie Woogie?
0:09:34 Yeah, I feel my forehead heating up now with shame.
0:09:40 And so it was a horrible experience, and the lesson I learned from that is you can never
0:09:45 over prepare for anything, and if something matters to you, you need to suss out all the
0:09:48 elements and figure out how to solve for them.
0:09:56 So at a similar failure like that, when I was around the same age, I was the live announcer
0:09:59 for the lineups of the Varsity Basketball.
0:10:02 So you know, Varsity Basketball in a little town is a big deal.
0:10:06 It’s the biggest event in town every, whatever, Friday night.
0:10:12 And so all I had were the lineup that the opposing team had submitted, and it just had last names.
0:10:16 Now I knew the first names of the guys on our team, because it was a small, you know,
0:10:17 you knew everybody.
0:10:20 So I get up there and I say, “Johnson!”
0:10:21 “What?”
0:10:26 It sounded like really bad names of pro wrestlers, you know?
0:10:27 No first names.
0:10:34 I just felt like an idiot, but these failures help because they burn at you.
0:10:36 Well, these are very public.
0:10:38 These are very public failures.
0:10:43 It’s funny you say that because I don’t even consider failing in private failure.
0:10:45 I consider that experimentation.
0:10:46 No I’m serious.
0:10:49 Well, that’s very, that’s very healthy of you.
0:10:53 No, I mean, do you consider a, well, what do you mean by a private failure?
0:10:56 It’s a good question.
0:11:01 You know, you have discussions in your work about, you know, different types of failure
0:11:02 as well.
0:11:06 Like, and I think of sins of omission and sins of commission, you know, in the Catholic
0:11:10 Church, and I would say the private failures were like sins of omission, you know, just
0:11:15 thinking I was not a kind person today or something like that, or I should have said
0:11:18 something in that, you know, something I didn’t do, mostly.
0:11:22 You know, the minute you say it though, the difference between private and public, I realize
0:11:27 this is probably not a healthy thing, but I totally cordon them off.
0:11:31 Like if I’m the only one who knows that I failed, like let’s say I failed to be kinder
0:11:38 to help someone that I could ever should have, I consider that a misdemeanor at worst.
0:11:39 You know what I mean?
0:11:40 Yeah.
0:11:43 Whereas if you do it in public, but I don’t, I don’t, you know, I wonder if that’s a good,
0:11:46 it might be a good thing, actually, because…
0:11:49 Well, I think it brings the shame into it, you know, which is terrible and motivating,
0:11:52 but it’s a master.
0:11:56 And sometimes I wonder, how are we ever going to learn from other people’s failures?
0:12:02 How do we release the shame enough to allow people to start to heal themselves through
0:12:03 other people’s failure?
0:12:08 Or is that just, is that just a dream that you have to go through the hard pain of shame
0:12:11 and failure in order to come out the other side?
0:12:17 I don’t consider myself very good at many things, but one thing that I’ve only recently
0:12:22 realized is I’ve gotten a lot older that I’m pretty good at, is I’m just good at observing.
0:12:25 And I always thought that everybody does that.
0:12:30 So we just did this freak radio series on Richard Feynman, the physicist who is a kind
0:12:31 of hero of mine.
0:12:36 And one thing that I loved about him is that he was just observant.
0:12:44 And I think the one advantage I had in failing a lot in all my failures is that, and maybe
0:12:49 this was Catholicism, honestly, because, you know, one thing about growing up very religious
0:12:57 is you are trained to constantly inspect your behaviors and decisions and choices and usually
0:12:59 declare them rotten.
0:13:00 Right.
0:13:01 And then you have to make up for them.
0:13:03 But then there’s forgiveness.
0:13:07 Well, forgiveness within the Catholic Church never felt great.
0:13:08 No.
0:13:09 No.
0:13:13 It was like, you know, 10 Hail Marys and then you’re kind of free to go.
0:13:18 Look, I’m just going to be honest, I’m a big believer in positive reinforcement.
0:13:19 I really am.
0:13:21 And I’m not a big believer in negative reinforcement.
0:13:24 And I’ve been in both kinds of environments.
0:13:26 I used to work at the New York Times, which I loved.
0:13:31 And I was, you know, my dad was a newspaper man for small papers upstate New York.
0:13:34 And when I got hired at the New York Times, he’d been dead long time.
0:13:35 He died when I was a kid.
0:13:40 But all I could think about was, oh my gosh, I wish I could tell my dad, this is awesome.
0:13:45 And then I got to the Times and I was proud of being there.
0:13:48 I did a lot of work that I really, really enjoyed.
0:13:53 But one thing I realized about it is it was an institution built on negative reinforcement.
0:14:00 Many people did a lot of their work with an eye toward not f***ing up because the penalties
0:14:02 were really severe.
0:14:05 And I think when you’re a creative person of any kind, and I would argue everybody’s
0:14:10 a creative person, it’s just it gets beaten out of us in certain occupations and realms.
0:14:14 You can’t create out of fear and negativity.
0:14:21 So because I just for some reason believe that when I have a failure, whether it’s messing
0:14:26 up with pomp and circumstance, messing up as a basketball announcer, I internalized it.
0:14:31 And I guess I do feel shame the way you were describing, but I do think if you call every
0:14:38 failure an experiment that didn’t go the way you wanted it to, then that can project you
0:14:43 onto a more positive route, which is to say, you know, like all the great scientists, all
0:14:49 the great thinkers ever, they’ve all failed way, way, way, way, way more than they succeeded.
0:14:51 That’s just the way it is.
0:14:58 But we who look at their work from a remove, and there’s a thing called survivorship bias,
0:15:01 which is we only look at the successes.
0:15:04 And that is just a very immature way of being a human.
0:15:07 You have to recognize that everybody is failing all the time.
0:15:12 And if that’s the case, then you can process that however you want.
0:15:17 You can process it negatively, beat yourself up, exhibit shame, be afraid to interact with
0:15:22 people or put yourself in pressure situations because you’re afraid of it.
0:15:26 Or you can look at it like a scientist or an artist and say, you know, I’m going to
0:15:33 write this first scene, you know, 80 times, and it might be the eighth one that was good,
0:15:35 but you’re never really going to know until you get there.
0:15:36 Life is an experiment.
0:15:42 I mean, I may sound pollyannish now, but I think if you look at it positively like that,
0:15:43 then failure can be thrilling.
0:15:45 It really can.
0:15:46 It’s information.
0:15:47 It’s feedback.
0:15:48 It is.
0:15:49 It can be liberating for sure.
0:15:53 But I would just, I think it’s a beautiful way to look at the world.
0:15:55 It’s a beautiful way to look at experience.
0:15:57 It’s a beautiful way to look at education.
0:16:05 But there’s a lot in my life experience that says you don’t learn unless something hurts,
0:16:07 you know, in many ways.
0:16:12 And I don’t mean hurts necessarily in terms of shame or, you know, public shame or something
0:16:13 like that.
0:16:16 But Nietzsche said, we only remember that which gives us pain, you know.
0:16:19 And I want to have the world as you describe it.
0:16:22 I want to educate children as you describe it.
0:16:28 I want to live in that world, but I’m afraid that human nature is such that I can’t.
0:16:33 I have to touch the stove and it has to hurt or else I ain’t going to learn it.
0:16:34 Look, I don’t disagree.
0:16:39 It causes pain, but then you have a choice of what to do with the pain.
0:16:41 The pain is a piece of feedback.
0:16:42 That’s all it is.
0:16:44 It’s not a judgment on your soul.
0:16:47 It’s a piece of feedback.
0:16:52 Coming up after the break, David Duchovny and I talk about living with the struggle.
0:16:58 I’m Stephen Dubner and this is a bonus episode featuring Duchovny’s podcast, Fail Better.
0:16:58 We will be right back.
0:17:13 Okay, here is more of my conversation with David Duchovny from his podcast, Fail Better.
0:17:18 You’re hearing a lot more of me talking in this episode than you usually do on Freakin’
0:17:19 Umics Radio.
0:17:25 If you are starting to get a bit sick of me, well, that makes two of us, but it’s only
0:17:30 for today, I promise.
0:17:34 So I have a friend, Angela Duckworth, wrote this book called “Grit.”
0:17:37 And we made a podcast together for a few years and I learned a great deal from her and she
0:17:43 learned a great deal from Marty Seligman, who’s considered one of the founders of positive
0:17:44 psychology.
0:17:47 And I remember when I first started reading about positive psychology, I was a lot younger
0:17:49 and I was like, “Oh, that is so foolish.
0:17:50 There’s no way.
0:17:51 That can’t work.”
0:17:59 But I’ve since gradually become convinced that it is, on average, a better way to process
0:18:02 your own fears and failures, et cetera.
0:18:06 Not to ignore them, not to sweep them under the rug, but to really process them whenever
0:18:09 you fail, you really inspect it.
0:18:13 You examine it just like you would if you’re a golfer, you look at your data on all your
0:18:14 swings.
0:18:18 If you’re a musician, you listen back to your recordings and you think, “What’s exactly
0:18:20 going on here?”
0:18:24 And then you move forward with passion and perseverance of the words that Angela Duckworth
0:18:25 would use.
0:18:32 It very much dovetails into my son when you’re raising your kids and I’m sure you are as
0:18:39 perplexed as any parent about how they come into the world with their own set of valences
0:18:42 and directions and instincts.
0:18:44 And they’re just complete.
0:18:45 They’re not tabula rasa.
0:18:48 They don’t appear that way when they come in.
0:18:51 They’re full tables.
0:18:59 So let’s say my son, I’d call him a stoic from a very early age and he would speculate
0:19:05 the worst and his mom and I were very perplexed at where does this, what we thought of as
0:19:09 pessimism come from?
0:19:15 And eventually we just came to the conclusion that he was softening the blow that might
0:19:16 come.
0:19:20 You know, should the worst happen, he’s rehearsing it.
0:19:25 So you could say, yes, positive thinking maybe creates a positive world.
0:19:26 I don’t know.
0:19:27 You draw positive energy to you.
0:19:28 I don’t know.
0:19:33 But there’s also an argument to be made for negative thinking or stoicism, which is, well,
0:19:38 should the worst happen, at least I will have rehearsed it in my mind and I won’t be blindsided
0:19:39 from it.
0:19:40 It won’t kill me.
0:19:41 Yeah.
0:19:42 That’s interesting.
0:19:44 This is a topic I think about a lot.
0:19:46 It sounds like you like to live with the struggle.
0:19:47 Oh, I do.
0:19:50 I mean, I do.
0:19:56 I’m attached to it in a way that may be unhealthy or it may be mature and it may be that I like
0:19:59 to live with less struggle.
0:20:01 I’m impatient when there’s a problem.
0:20:07 I like to get at it and get it to some kind of resolution, but I don’t like to live with
0:20:08 the problem.
0:20:09 Yeah.
0:20:10 Yeah.
0:20:14 I guess I feel like living with the problem is the point, you know, sometimes.
0:20:15 Yeah.
0:20:17 I mean, that’s, you know, some would argue that’s the human condition.
0:20:23 I do call you a spiritual teacher because I really see the way you work through these
0:20:25 problems as being part of a spiritual tradition.
0:20:31 And I’d love to talk about the Christ philosophy is really one of failure is the meek shall
0:20:33 inherit the earth.
0:20:39 And that would seem to me to resonate with you, Stephen, as part of the Christian message
0:20:40 is really one.
0:20:45 It’s an upside down message of in the Roman world, really, which was one of strength and
0:20:46 victory.
0:20:51 So you had a religion of the downtrodden of the meek.
0:20:53 And I wonder why that didn’t resonate for you.
0:20:59 And what is it in Judaism that did resonate for you in terms of what is clearly your life’s
0:21:04 work around failure and thinking outside the box and innovation and that?
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:10 So I do wish that there were more conversations about religion, theology, spirituality within
0:21:15 an intellectual perspective, but religion has really become sidelined in that regard.
0:21:21 And I think for good reason, which is I think a lot of the most prominent religious figures
0:21:27 are not really approaching things from a, you know, not just intellectual perspective,
0:21:30 but even a kind of universal perspective.
0:21:34 You know, my favorite thing about Christianity is that there are billions of people around
0:21:35 the world praying to a rabbi all the time.
0:21:37 I mean, that’s just cool.
0:21:41 I mean, Jesus was a rabbi for those who are not aware of the history.
0:21:43 And that’s probably a magician as well.
0:21:44 Right.
0:21:45 Loves, fishes, you name it.
0:21:46 War on the wine.
0:21:47 Where was it hidden?
0:21:50 He had a rabbit somewhere in a hat.
0:21:57 So with Judaism, I was attracted to it for a specific set of reasons.
0:22:01 As I mentioned, my parents were Jewish, lived in very Jewish families, but then by the time
0:22:03 I was a kid, they were no longer Jewish.
0:22:09 But then when I moved to New York City from upstate New York in my 20s, New York is a
0:22:10 very Jewish city.
0:22:16 And so a lot of my teachers, a mentor or two or three, even, you know, a lot of them were
0:22:19 Jewish and I just began to absorb this Jewish history.
0:22:22 And then I began to think about, oh, my parents used to be this thing.
0:22:23 Right.
0:22:24 I don’t really know what this thing is.
0:22:26 I should figure out what this thing is.
0:22:30 Then in the course of doing that, I felt myself just slipping into it.
0:22:35 But then because I was religious by nature as a kid, or at least religious by experience,
0:22:38 I did begin to learn the religion of Judaism.
0:22:40 And there were some things that really resonated with me.
0:22:45 This notion of tycoon olam and Judaism, which is the idea of fixing the world, repairing
0:22:50 the world, and the idea is that you should really live your life in service of making
0:22:53 things better, as basic as that sounds.
0:22:56 It’s not about triumph.
0:22:58 It’s not about escaping evil.
0:23:04 It’s about trying to, you know, there’s a line in Tom and turn it and turn it and turn
0:23:07 it for everything is in it.
0:23:09 And the it is, it’s the tradition.
0:23:13 And so Jews for, you know, many, many, many, many centuries have been arguing and talking
0:23:18 about, you know, what is this thing, whatever the thing is in front of you could be a political
0:23:22 issue, could be a food, whatever, turn it and turn it and turn it and keep trying to
0:23:23 figure it out.
0:23:24 Debate it.
0:23:25 Debate it.
0:23:26 And debate is good.
0:23:31 Well, here, Steven, this is, it gets back to me, conceiving of you as a spiritual teacher,
0:23:35 because, well, first of all, you like off because that’s amazing to me, because I can’t
0:23:36 stand that game.
0:23:37 Yeah, I love it.
0:23:40 I took it up maybe 15 years ago.
0:23:42 But wow, do I love it?
0:23:46 I think when I was a kid, when I was playing music, you know, for anybody who plays music
0:23:54 or any sport or anybody who does anything like that, there’s such a thrill of learning.
0:24:00 And you know, it’s ridiculous to me that we delegate most of the learning in our society
0:24:01 to kids.
0:24:05 Like, you got to go to school and they’re all set, but then once you become an adult,
0:24:08 you’re just like this block of thing that doesn’t really.
0:24:10 You’re supposed to do what you’ve been doing.
0:24:11 Yeah.
0:24:12 I don’t like that idea.
0:24:13 I don’t like it either, Steven.
0:24:19 I’ve started two different careers after the age of 50 as a writer and as a musician, and
0:24:23 I care if you like it or not, but I don’t care as deeply as I might have cared once about
0:24:27 whether you like my acting, because my bread and butter, you know, was that and I had to
0:24:30 succeed in order to keep on doing it.
0:24:35 But the state of mind that I get to, because I just learned how to play guitar 10 years
0:24:36 ago.
0:24:37 Seriously?
0:24:38 Yeah.
0:24:39 Are you good now?
0:24:40 No, no, I’m not good, but I’m good enough to write.
0:24:44 I’m good when I write because I’m good with words and now I got the chords and I can hear
0:24:50 melodies even though I can’t really sing that well, but I hear the melodies and I’m 19 in
0:24:51 my head when that’s happened.
0:24:56 No, honestly, my brain isn’t spongy like it was when I was 19, and that’s why I’ll never
0:25:03 be a great player, but the mindset that I get, the kind of soul sustenance that I get
0:25:06 even when I write, I’ve been writing my whole life, but I didn’t really start to focus on
0:25:10 it till the last 10 years.
0:25:14 It’s like the fountain of youth inside.
0:25:19 After the break, we hear about quitting the X-Files and how Bruce Springsteen inadvertently
0:25:22 gave me some career advice.
0:25:24 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:25:39 You’re listening to a bonus episode from David Duchovny’s podcast, Fail Better.
0:25:43 Before the break, David Duchovny got me talking about golf.
0:25:48 Really is about the thrill of learning new things as an adult, but because I love golf,
0:25:52 that’s where my mind went.
0:25:59 What I love about golf is you are trying to get your mind to cooperate with your body
0:26:05 in a way that is kind of like music, kind of like writing, kind of like business, but
0:26:06 different than all of them.
0:26:07 And it’s really hard.
0:26:10 And when you sync it up, it feels good.
0:26:15 And I like being a person that gets older, learning to do new things because I believe
0:26:21 one of the most powerful emotions that any of us can have is the feeling of accomplishment.
0:26:23 And failure is a part of accomplishment.
0:26:24 It’s just simple as that.
0:26:29 So if you want to get the high of accomplishing, you have to go through failure to get it.
0:26:32 And I look at it as like the work that you do.
0:26:36 Failure is the work that you do to get to the thing you want, knowing that you might
0:26:39 not even get to the thing you want, but you’re still going to be better off having tried.
0:26:42 That’s the way I look at failure overall.
0:26:44 But there is a point at which you say quit.
0:26:47 I mean, I’ve quit so many things, David.
0:26:52 The first big thing I quit, other than Catholicism, I guess, was music.
0:26:58 So I played music, I said, as a kid, was in bands in high school, not good.
0:27:03 And then I got in a band in college with another guy named Jeffrey Dean Foster, who was really
0:27:04 good.
0:27:06 And we just synced up.
0:27:08 We were both raw, but we got good together.
0:27:12 We had a band, two other, three other very good guys.
0:27:15 And then we ended up going through all the stuff you go to traveling, touring, being
0:27:19 bad, playing covers, starting to write songs, et cetera, et cetera.
0:27:23 And then we ended up getting a record deal, moved to New York, start making the record.
0:27:30 And it had been a couple of years of being heading towards success and a series of events
0:27:35 over those couple of years that kind of lodged themselves in my brain, including getting to
0:27:41 meet Bruce Springsteen one night backstage when he came to sit in with this little band
0:27:42 called the Del Fuegos.
0:27:44 You remember the Del Fuegos from Boston?
0:27:45 Really good.
0:27:46 So we had the same managers as them.
0:27:51 And I went to see them play at this pub in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they happened
0:27:52 to be touring.
0:27:53 And I was living down there.
0:27:56 And Bruce Springsteen was playing at the Coliseum.
0:27:59 And he stopped by, told him he liked their record.
0:28:04 And then they’re just talking between sets with all the beer in the back.
0:28:09 And this was right when I’m born in the USA was out, you know, he’d been great if you
0:28:10 liked Springsteen.
0:28:11 He was like a god.
0:28:16 But then born in the USA was like the big commercial record that made him a superstar.
0:28:21 And he didn’t say it in these words, but the message I took from that night is if I knew
0:28:26 that this is what it means to be famous, I don’t know if I’d want to be famous so much.
0:28:32 So it’s the trap of success or success being its own type of failure in a way.
0:28:36 What lesson can you ever learn from success, I guess, is the flip side to what we’re talking
0:28:37 about today.
0:28:38 And I would say nothing.
0:28:41 No, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from success.
0:28:42 Is that true?
0:28:45 Why do you think that is?
0:28:46 I don’t know why it is.
0:28:50 I think it goes back to hurt, you know, because failure sends you inward and you start to
0:28:57 think, I quit the hugely successful television show, you know, after seven or eight years,
0:28:58 that was long enough.
0:29:03 I quit the X-Files and that was the biggest success I could ever quit.
0:29:06 I mean, like a global phenomenon of a show.
0:29:13 And yet, you know, to quit, you know, quitting is, quit can be very noble and strong and courageous.
0:29:18 But I have to say, you know, maybe you felt this when you quit the times, maybe if you
0:29:19 quit your band.
0:29:22 But when you do quit an enterprise, you also quit people.
0:29:24 It’s like quitting a family.
0:29:30 And there’s a lot of pain, a lot of pain that comes with stopping a train that’s moving
0:29:34 happily along just because I’ve got some misgivings about it, you know?
0:29:38 And I still carry to this day, I carry misgivings about myself.
0:29:39 Yeah.
0:29:44 What you did is, I think harder because what you just said, you’re, I don’t want to say,
0:29:48 letting people down, but you’re changing the calculus of the lives of a lot of people
0:29:49 around you.
0:29:53 When I quit the band, it wasn’t like that because I think, you know, there were two
0:29:57 of us who were singer songwriters, and now there was one.
0:30:00 And in a way that made it a clearer path for them.
0:30:01 So they may have missed me.
0:30:07 They may not have, but when I quit the times, they didn’t, you know, that didn’t matter
0:30:12 to the times, but you, you were, you know, there’s that, what’s that phrase in the entertainment
0:30:13 contracts?
0:30:14 Key man clause.
0:30:15 Right?
0:30:16 The key man clause, sure.
0:30:17 You were the key man.
0:30:18 I will take key man if I have to.
0:30:26 So how many people were, how pissed off at you as a result of quitting that enterprise?
0:30:29 Well, I mean, the show continued, it went another year after I left.
0:30:35 So I, it didn’t feel like, you know, I had taken bread out of people’s mouths immediately.
0:30:38 What was the state of popularity at the time you quit?
0:30:39 Well, it was waning.
0:30:40 It was waning.
0:30:44 I mean, it reached this peak, but it was complicated.
0:30:46 You know, it was complicated to do that.
0:30:48 You know, it’s like disconnecting from a power source.
0:30:57 I mean, I wonder you have, you have your mainstream of creativity, which is Freakonomics and,
0:30:58 and now the podcast.
0:31:03 And are there any days that you wake up and feel like the boss and go, you know, I don’t
0:31:04 feel like singing the song today.
0:31:07 I’d rather, I’d rather try and write that novel.
0:31:09 I would say two things about that.
0:31:11 One is I built a little company to do this.
0:31:14 So we’re 15, 20 people.
0:31:15 And I do think about that.
0:31:17 I’m not saying I will never stop.
0:31:23 But you know, we, this past year, we had our first two Freakonomics Radio babies born to
0:31:29 women on the staff, both had kids and like I like having a company that is solid enough
0:31:34 and real enough that people come here to work and they get, you know, parental leave.
0:31:36 And they, this is, you know, we built a thing.
0:31:38 And so that’s very meaningful.
0:31:42 In terms of though, like waking up and saying, I don’t feel like writing this.
0:31:44 I don’t want to play born in the USA today.
0:31:48 The one thing I will say about that, that I learned from my friend, Angela Duckworth,
0:31:50 we became friends because she wrote this book, grit.
0:31:54 And I interviewed her for Freakonomics Radio for some episode we were doing years and years
0:31:55 and years ago.
0:31:59 Then we started hanging out and I realized she’s awesome and would be a great collaborator
0:32:00 and then we collaborated.
0:32:05 But the very first time I, I believe this was the first time I ever talked to her really,
0:32:11 I asked her like, you know, if you think about grit versus quit, like, how do you know?
0:32:15 How do you know when you should stick it out or how much more it will take?
0:32:16 And there are two dimensions.
0:32:21 There’s one is, can you get good enough where it will be fruitful for you?
0:32:25 But also like, do you want to do that thing?
0:32:29 And so I was asking her, you know, what do you do if you’re doing a thing that you do
0:32:32 like, but you just kind of get bored.
0:32:36 Does that make you a dilettante and do you just quit and move on to something else?
0:32:42 And that’s when she taught me this notion of what she calls substituting nuance for
0:32:43 novelty.
0:32:45 She said, novelty is what everybody wants.
0:32:49 You’re always going to try new things because it’s exciting and fun.
0:32:52 And that’s kind of the way that we’re wired.
0:32:56 But if you’re not in a position where novelty is an option, let’s say, you know, I’m married
0:33:01 and I have a spouse and like, yeah, I might like to be married to that person or that person.
0:33:05 Well, that’s, you know, there are pretty high transaction costs there and maybe you don’t
0:33:06 want to do that.
0:33:10 But nuance for novelty means that within the thing that you’re doing, let’s take this back
0:33:15 to work and not marriage or whatever, find different ways to make it exciting to you
0:33:16 by nuance.
0:33:20 So when she taught me that lesson probably six, seven, eight years ago, that was a turning
0:33:22 point for me with Freakonomics Radio.
0:33:24 I’ve now been doing it 14 years.
0:33:30 And honestly, I think it’s more fun for me now than ever because she helped me conceive
0:33:37 of a sort of creative framework whereby my show is whatever I want it to be.
0:33:44 But don’t tell anybody, don’t tell it because you’re not really doing Freakonomics anymore.
0:33:46 Yeah.
0:33:52 One of the things I was struck by during the pandemic was, I don’t know if you’re a basketball
0:33:57 fan, but, you know, the last dance came on and it became this hot house hit because everybody
0:33:58 was home.
0:34:02 It seemed like everybody was watching the Jordan Bulls.
0:34:05 Look, I love Michael Jordan to me, the best player ever.
0:34:07 I couldn’t love him anymore.
0:34:12 But when I watch him give his hall of fame speech and, you know, holding a grudge against
0:34:17 the kid in high school, you know, the kind of, the crazy need to win.
0:34:23 And then I see a country applauding this as if that’s what you got to do to be a winner.
0:34:25 You have to be a killer.
0:34:27 You have to humiliate the loser.
0:34:33 And I’m wondering what country are we living in, you know, and coming off of, obviously,
0:34:36 we don’t want to talk about Trump, but here’s a guy who can’t lose.
0:34:42 You know, here’s a guy who his entire life is trying to reinterpret his biggest loss.
0:34:45 Before that, he lost billions of dollars as a businessman and he’s, you know, litigated
0:34:46 that through lies as well.
0:34:52 So we have two major, let’s call them aspirational figures.
0:34:59 What does that say to you about any way that we can educate our children, either through
0:35:06 sports or through, I don’t know, that’s a long-ass-winded question.
0:35:12 I think the thing about Trump that is most frustrating for people who don’t love him,
0:35:14 and I think the majority of people don’t love him.
0:35:18 There are a lot of people who will vote for him, despite not loving him.
0:35:23 But I think the thing that’s most frustrating for people who don’t love him is that it’s
0:35:27 pretty obvious that he doesn’t fight fair, and there’s something about this country that
0:35:33 has always promoted fairness, and that’s a big part of what sport is about.
0:35:37 But his word, he always uses loser, and people love that, they love it.
0:35:44 And what is it in us that’s unhealed or misshapen as a country, as a people?
0:35:47 Trump had long before he ran for president.
0:35:49 He had a long history of golf.
0:35:50 He’s played golf.
0:35:51 Cheating of golf.
0:35:55 Yeah, anybody who’s ever played with him, who has any ounce of truth to them, will tell
0:35:56 you, big, big cheater.
0:36:02 And in golf, if you play golf, you always encounter a cheater or two, and then you stay
0:36:09 away from that person, because it’s a game of character, supposed to be, at least.
0:36:16 But the thing that I love about sport, sport is a way for all of us to get our yaya’s out
0:36:18 as fans and competitors.
0:36:23 It is literally a proxy for the old-fashioned version of what humans used to do.
0:36:28 I mean, the way, I’m sure you know this, the reason we shake hands when we greet is it
0:36:29 comes from showing your opponent.
0:36:30 The weapon hand.
0:36:31 Yeah.
0:36:32 You don’t have your sword in your hand.
0:36:33 Exactly.
0:36:38 So, like, I love the fact that we have developed this whole system of sport that is really,
0:36:41 you know, if you think about sport, it’s really different if you’re talking about participatory
0:36:46 or spectator.
0:36:49 Scott Galloway, this, I think, really smart guy, teaches at NYU, he says, “The success
0:36:56 of a young human, especially of the male variety, will be a direct proportion of the hours that
0:37:01 they sweat versus the hours that they watch other people sweating.”
0:37:05 And I think about that because, you know, I sometimes enjoy watching other people sweating
0:37:08 on a Sunday afternoon, whatever, especially if you’re playing fantasy football.
0:37:18 But it saddens me that what should be a play-acting version of war is harnessed to give inspiration
0:37:20 to people who really want to hate.
0:37:26 But the fact is we attach ourselves to these tribal affiliations with the zeal of people
0:37:29 living in Babylonia 5,000 years ago.
0:37:32 So, you know, the world is complicated.
0:37:36 It’s easy to beat up the people who do the stuff you hate, but I do feel that for all
0:37:42 of us, there’s a lot of upside in seeking out the people who are just quietly putting
0:37:47 their head down, figuring stuff out, experimenting, experimenting, experimenting and failing and
0:37:49 failing and failing.
0:37:51 And I think that’s a nice role model.
0:37:52 I agree with you.
0:37:54 I tried to do that for my kids.
0:37:57 I would constantly tell them, “I feel like a failure.”
0:37:58 Constantly.
0:37:59 How do they respond to that?
0:38:00 I don’t know.
0:38:01 You know?
0:38:03 They were just nod.
0:38:07 Well, this was a pleasure, Steven.
0:38:08 Thank you.
0:38:10 Thank you for coming on and trusting me.
0:38:11 I love the conversation.
0:38:13 Love getting to know you a little bit.
0:38:17 And I predict great things for this podcast because, you know, what can go wrong with
0:38:18 a podcast about failure, right?
0:38:19 Yeah, exactly.
0:38:25 I mean, if I fail, I succeed.
0:38:27 Thanks to David Dukovny for this conversation.
0:38:29 His show is called “Fail Better.”
0:38:33 If you want to hear it, just search for “Fail Better” in your podcast app.
0:38:36 We will be back soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:38:38 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:38:41 And if you can, someone else too.
0:38:46 “Fail Better” is a production of Lemonade Media in coordination with King Baby.
0:38:50 It’s produced by Kegan Zima, Aria Brodschi, and Donny Matias.
0:38:52 The engineer is Brian Castillo.
0:38:55 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:01 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:39:03 transcripts and show notes.
0:39:07 This episode was produced from our side by Augusta Chapman.
0:39:12 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Dalvin Aboaghi, Eleanor Osborn, Elsa Hernandez,
0:39:17 Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Julie Canfer,
0:39:22 Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, Theo Jacobs,
0:39:23 and Zach Lipinski.
0:39:26 The theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:39:29 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:39:36 Nothing funny today, it’s raining.
0:39:40 That doesn’t make it not funny, but maybe that’s my mood.
0:39:42 Wish I had something funnier for you.
0:39:43 I’m hearing my voice.
0:39:47 It just doesn’t even sound like it could get near the country of funny.
0:39:54 The Freakonomics Radio Network.
0:39:59 The hidden side of everything.
0:39:59 Stitcher.
0:40:02 (upbeat music)
0:40:04 you
0:00:12 The roots of this one go back to 2023 when we published a four-part series called How
0:00:14 to Succeed at Failing.
0:00:18 One of the hardest questions we asked was, how do you know when it’s time to give up
0:00:19 on something?
0:00:24 It’s a question of what kind of resources you have, what’s your tolerance for pain,
0:00:26 what are the alternatives.
0:00:32 Was that kind of reluctance to admit that you’ve wasted all of these resources?
0:00:38 The problem is that quitting is usually seen as an admission of failure.
0:00:42 I would argue that view needs a serious rethink.
0:00:48 Some quitting is productive if it keeps you sane or keeps you from wasting time.
0:00:54 And then there’s quitting while you’re ahead, while you’re way, way ahead, like David Duchovny
0:00:55 did.
0:01:01 That was the biggest success I could ever quit, like a global phenomenon of a show.
0:01:07 Duchovny is, among other things, an actor, and the TV show he quit was The X-Files.
0:01:11 Some critics say it is the show that most shaped modern TV.
0:01:17 I just knew that I had done everything I could in that format.
0:01:20 It felt like it was going to be my whole life at that point.
0:01:25 If I went any longer, I was going to be doing karaoke, me, whatever that was.
0:01:29 So it was like a lifesaving thing for me to do it.
0:01:37 Duchovny didn’t quit acting, but he did spread out music, writing, parenting, and recently
0:01:38 he started a podcast.
0:01:40 It’s called “Fail Better.”
0:01:45 Now, why make an entire show about failure?
0:01:46 Here’s why.
0:01:48 I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from success.
0:01:54 Duchovny invited me to be a guest on his show, and since I think he’s an interesting person
0:01:58 and I think failure is an interesting topic, I took him up on it.
0:02:01 So that is the conversation you are about to hear today.
0:02:05 If you want to hear more, Duchovny, just search for “Fail Better” in your podcast
0:02:07 app and give it a follow.
0:02:24 If you want to hear more of me, well, you’re already in the right place for that.
0:02:29 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.
0:02:35 With your host, Stephen Dubner, appearing today as a guest on the podcast “Fail Better”
0:02:38 with David Duchovny.
0:02:46 I’ve quit a bunch of things in my life, probably, but the most glaring of those is graduate school.
0:02:52 So I quit on getting my PhD in English literature from Yale in the mid-80s, and it was something
0:02:58 that my mother, till the day she died, asked me if I was going to go finish my PhD.
0:03:05 But I wish that I had, if only because I would like my credit to read such and such a role
0:03:08 played by Dr. David Duchovny, I think would be fun.
0:03:14 Or Dr. So-and-so played by Dr. David Duchovny, that would be meta-meta.
0:03:18 And as much as I joke about it, it hurts not to complete something.
0:03:22 It hurts to quit on something.
0:03:26 My consolation, however, is that I did go a long way.
0:03:30 I went as far as the dissertation.
0:03:32 There was never one moment where I decided to quit.
0:03:35 I kind of faded away from graduate school because I had started acting.
0:03:40 I had started riding my bicycle to the train station in New Haven, getting off at Penn
0:03:44 Station in New York, riding my bicycle to my acting class and riding it back.
0:03:49 So I was living kind of a dual existence between New Haven graduate school and English literature
0:03:52 and starting to think about acting.
0:03:57 And as I went further along, started working harder to try to become an actor, started going
0:04:02 on auditions, started going to L.A., I never really left.
0:04:11 It’s possible that they’re still expecting my dissertation at this point.
0:04:17 I’m David Duchovny, and this has failed better, a show where failure, not success, shapes
0:04:22 who we are.
0:04:26 Stephen Dubner is the host of the podcast Freakonomics Radio.
0:04:31 He’s made that brand his life after co-writing Freakonomics back in 2005, which I read back
0:04:33 in 2005, and it blew me away.
0:04:39 I couldn’t believe the kinds of questions that he was asking that made sense.
0:04:42 And in that way, asking questions, let’s say it’s Socratic.
0:04:45 That was the Socratic method, was asking questions.
0:04:51 So I look at him not just as an economics, brilliant economics guy, but he’s also kind
0:04:54 of an intellectual and a spiritual guy for our time.
0:04:58 He recently had a series on the show called How to Succeed at Failing.
0:05:02 Of course, he comes to us as a failure expert, not only because of that series, but because
0:05:06 of his own false starts and wrong turns, which you’ll hear about.
0:05:12 He quit a successful band, quit the New York Times, and we both quit PhD programs.
0:05:14 And he’s such a podcast veteran.
0:05:16 He’s an icon of the podcast.
0:05:27 So of course, he kind of welcomed me to the club, which was sweet.
0:05:31 So David, are you excited about having a podcast?
0:05:35 I’m the last one not to have one, so I’m happy.
0:05:39 Yeah, but most of the people who started them out of FOMO have stopped by now.
0:05:40 So it’s actually like a–
0:05:41 That’s true.
0:05:42 It’s a good new moment.
0:05:43 Right.
0:05:44 Well, you were early.
0:05:46 I mean, you’re a trendsetter.
0:05:48 Yeah, I thought I was late, Julie.
0:05:49 At the time, you thought you were late?
0:05:50 It’s a good lesson.
0:05:56 Like, a lot of times when you think you’re too late, you’re just stupid.
0:06:03 No, I want to talk about– I mean, I know where I’m coming from on failure.
0:06:04 I just know.
0:06:06 I know my soul.
0:06:12 But I’m interested to hear, what’s your origin story of failure?
0:06:18 I am scarred by seemingly minor failures from youth, as probably we all are– I don’t know
0:06:19 if we all are.
0:06:22 I mean, right off the top of my head, I can think of at least three, which I won’t bore
0:06:23 you with all of them.
0:06:24 But I will say this.
0:06:32 I think my feeling about failure was also informed by my family’s religious orientation.
0:06:35 So I had a weird family religiously.
0:06:41 My parents were both Brooklyn-born Jews, kind of standard issue Brooklyn Jews, right?
0:06:43 They both came from immigrant parents.
0:06:48 And long story short, the two of them, my parents, before they met each other, but during World
0:06:52 War II, which was not insignificant, they both converted to Catholicism.
0:06:56 They both became extremely devout and believing Catholics.
0:07:01 Was it an attempt to assimilate further on their point, or was it merely they just felt
0:07:02 better in that religion?
0:07:08 The short answer is that neither of them, I would say, were really about assimilating,
0:07:13 and neither of them were moving away from being Jewish because of anti-Semitism.
0:07:18 But really, they were both very, very deeply spiritual people, humans, as evidenced by
0:07:23 the fact that when they converted, they became among the most devout Catholics I knew, and
0:07:26 we hung out with only Catholics.
0:07:29 The end of the story is that years later, when I moved to New York in my 20s, I ended
0:07:33 up becoming Jewish, or returning to being Jewish.
0:07:38 But I was Catholic for the formation, and the notion that gave me the most pause, I’ll
0:07:41 put it that way, was the idea of original sin.
0:07:45 This idea that when you start, you’ve got a black mark on you.
0:07:46 You failed already.
0:07:48 I didn’t like that idea.
0:07:51 You were conscious as a child of not liking that idea.
0:07:52 Oh, yeah.
0:07:57 It’s a big idea when you grow up that way, because you’re living your life to try to
0:08:02 essentially erase or supersede the failure that you were born with.
0:08:05 And I remember being like 10, 11, thinking, “What kind of God?”
0:08:07 I say it in an old Jewish man voice.
0:08:13 What kind of God is it that would have me love him or it for having marked me with this
0:08:14 failure?
0:08:15 Yeah.
0:08:18 I’m going to disparage Christianity or Catholicism, because many of my best friends and most
0:08:20 of my family members are there.
0:08:21 Right.
0:08:25 But I did not like, you know, failure hurts.
0:08:26 And you know what else hurts?
0:08:28 And this is the other thing.
0:08:32 Being accused of something you didn’t do, I find, is one of the greatest injustices
0:08:33 in life.
0:08:36 You think, again, you felt punished because you were born into the world, and now you
0:08:39 got to work off your sentence in a way.
0:08:43 So anyway, yeah, failure burned me deeply.
0:08:49 And I made, you know, so I was a musician, and when I was probably 12, 13, somewhere
0:08:54 in there, I was asked to play the organ for the high school graduation, pomp and circumstance.
0:09:00 And there’s this big, massive organ that was backstage in the auditorium.
0:09:02 And I f**ked up.
0:09:05 I like didn’t rehearse enough.
0:09:12 I rehearsed at home on the piano, but then when I got on it during the ceremony, I couldn’t
0:09:15 quite hear myself, and I started getting lost.
0:09:20 I didn’t really read music, so I was playing by ear, and you can’t stop playing when there’s
0:09:22 a processional or whatever you call it.
0:09:28 So I just started vamping, and like I grew up playing like Chicago blues piano.
0:09:30 So you’re playing Boogie Woogie?
0:09:34 Yeah, I feel my forehead heating up now with shame.
0:09:40 And so it was a horrible experience, and the lesson I learned from that is you can never
0:09:45 over prepare for anything, and if something matters to you, you need to suss out all the
0:09:48 elements and figure out how to solve for them.
0:09:56 So at a similar failure like that, when I was around the same age, I was the live announcer
0:09:59 for the lineups of the Varsity Basketball.
0:10:02 So you know, Varsity Basketball in a little town is a big deal.
0:10:06 It’s the biggest event in town every, whatever, Friday night.
0:10:12 And so all I had were the lineup that the opposing team had submitted, and it just had last names.
0:10:16 Now I knew the first names of the guys on our team, because it was a small, you know,
0:10:17 you knew everybody.
0:10:20 So I get up there and I say, “Johnson!”
0:10:21 “What?”
0:10:26 It sounded like really bad names of pro wrestlers, you know?
0:10:27 No first names.
0:10:34 I just felt like an idiot, but these failures help because they burn at you.
0:10:36 Well, these are very public.
0:10:38 These are very public failures.
0:10:43 It’s funny you say that because I don’t even consider failing in private failure.
0:10:45 I consider that experimentation.
0:10:46 No I’m serious.
0:10:49 Well, that’s very, that’s very healthy of you.
0:10:53 No, I mean, do you consider a, well, what do you mean by a private failure?
0:10:56 It’s a good question.
0:11:01 You know, you have discussions in your work about, you know, different types of failure
0:11:02 as well.
0:11:06 Like, and I think of sins of omission and sins of commission, you know, in the Catholic
0:11:10 Church, and I would say the private failures were like sins of omission, you know, just
0:11:15 thinking I was not a kind person today or something like that, or I should have said
0:11:18 something in that, you know, something I didn’t do, mostly.
0:11:22 You know, the minute you say it though, the difference between private and public, I realize
0:11:27 this is probably not a healthy thing, but I totally cordon them off.
0:11:31 Like if I’m the only one who knows that I failed, like let’s say I failed to be kinder
0:11:38 to help someone that I could ever should have, I consider that a misdemeanor at worst.
0:11:39 You know what I mean?
0:11:40 Yeah.
0:11:43 Whereas if you do it in public, but I don’t, I don’t, you know, I wonder if that’s a good,
0:11:46 it might be a good thing, actually, because…
0:11:49 Well, I think it brings the shame into it, you know, which is terrible and motivating,
0:11:52 but it’s a master.
0:11:56 And sometimes I wonder, how are we ever going to learn from other people’s failures?
0:12:02 How do we release the shame enough to allow people to start to heal themselves through
0:12:03 other people’s failure?
0:12:08 Or is that just, is that just a dream that you have to go through the hard pain of shame
0:12:11 and failure in order to come out the other side?
0:12:17 I don’t consider myself very good at many things, but one thing that I’ve only recently
0:12:22 realized is I’ve gotten a lot older that I’m pretty good at, is I’m just good at observing.
0:12:25 And I always thought that everybody does that.
0:12:30 So we just did this freak radio series on Richard Feynman, the physicist who is a kind
0:12:31 of hero of mine.
0:12:36 And one thing that I loved about him is that he was just observant.
0:12:44 And I think the one advantage I had in failing a lot in all my failures is that, and maybe
0:12:49 this was Catholicism, honestly, because, you know, one thing about growing up very religious
0:12:57 is you are trained to constantly inspect your behaviors and decisions and choices and usually
0:12:59 declare them rotten.
0:13:00 Right.
0:13:01 And then you have to make up for them.
0:13:03 But then there’s forgiveness.
0:13:07 Well, forgiveness within the Catholic Church never felt great.
0:13:08 No.
0:13:09 No.
0:13:13 It was like, you know, 10 Hail Marys and then you’re kind of free to go.
0:13:18 Look, I’m just going to be honest, I’m a big believer in positive reinforcement.
0:13:19 I really am.
0:13:21 And I’m not a big believer in negative reinforcement.
0:13:24 And I’ve been in both kinds of environments.
0:13:26 I used to work at the New York Times, which I loved.
0:13:31 And I was, you know, my dad was a newspaper man for small papers upstate New York.
0:13:34 And when I got hired at the New York Times, he’d been dead long time.
0:13:35 He died when I was a kid.
0:13:40 But all I could think about was, oh my gosh, I wish I could tell my dad, this is awesome.
0:13:45 And then I got to the Times and I was proud of being there.
0:13:48 I did a lot of work that I really, really enjoyed.
0:13:53 But one thing I realized about it is it was an institution built on negative reinforcement.
0:14:00 Many people did a lot of their work with an eye toward not f***ing up because the penalties
0:14:02 were really severe.
0:14:05 And I think when you’re a creative person of any kind, and I would argue everybody’s
0:14:10 a creative person, it’s just it gets beaten out of us in certain occupations and realms.
0:14:14 You can’t create out of fear and negativity.
0:14:21 So because I just for some reason believe that when I have a failure, whether it’s messing
0:14:26 up with pomp and circumstance, messing up as a basketball announcer, I internalized it.
0:14:31 And I guess I do feel shame the way you were describing, but I do think if you call every
0:14:38 failure an experiment that didn’t go the way you wanted it to, then that can project you
0:14:43 onto a more positive route, which is to say, you know, like all the great scientists, all
0:14:49 the great thinkers ever, they’ve all failed way, way, way, way, way more than they succeeded.
0:14:51 That’s just the way it is.
0:14:58 But we who look at their work from a remove, and there’s a thing called survivorship bias,
0:15:01 which is we only look at the successes.
0:15:04 And that is just a very immature way of being a human.
0:15:07 You have to recognize that everybody is failing all the time.
0:15:12 And if that’s the case, then you can process that however you want.
0:15:17 You can process it negatively, beat yourself up, exhibit shame, be afraid to interact with
0:15:22 people or put yourself in pressure situations because you’re afraid of it.
0:15:26 Or you can look at it like a scientist or an artist and say, you know, I’m going to
0:15:33 write this first scene, you know, 80 times, and it might be the eighth one that was good,
0:15:35 but you’re never really going to know until you get there.
0:15:36 Life is an experiment.
0:15:42 I mean, I may sound pollyannish now, but I think if you look at it positively like that,
0:15:43 then failure can be thrilling.
0:15:45 It really can.
0:15:46 It’s information.
0:15:47 It’s feedback.
0:15:48 It is.
0:15:49 It can be liberating for sure.
0:15:53 But I would just, I think it’s a beautiful way to look at the world.
0:15:55 It’s a beautiful way to look at experience.
0:15:57 It’s a beautiful way to look at education.
0:16:05 But there’s a lot in my life experience that says you don’t learn unless something hurts,
0:16:07 you know, in many ways.
0:16:12 And I don’t mean hurts necessarily in terms of shame or, you know, public shame or something
0:16:13 like that.
0:16:16 But Nietzsche said, we only remember that which gives us pain, you know.
0:16:19 And I want to have the world as you describe it.
0:16:22 I want to educate children as you describe it.
0:16:28 I want to live in that world, but I’m afraid that human nature is such that I can’t.
0:16:33 I have to touch the stove and it has to hurt or else I ain’t going to learn it.
0:16:34 Look, I don’t disagree.
0:16:39 It causes pain, but then you have a choice of what to do with the pain.
0:16:41 The pain is a piece of feedback.
0:16:42 That’s all it is.
0:16:44 It’s not a judgment on your soul.
0:16:47 It’s a piece of feedback.
0:16:52 Coming up after the break, David Duchovny and I talk about living with the struggle.
0:16:58 I’m Stephen Dubner and this is a bonus episode featuring Duchovny’s podcast, Fail Better.
0:16:58 We will be right back.
0:17:13 Okay, here is more of my conversation with David Duchovny from his podcast, Fail Better.
0:17:18 You’re hearing a lot more of me talking in this episode than you usually do on Freakin’
0:17:19 Umics Radio.
0:17:25 If you are starting to get a bit sick of me, well, that makes two of us, but it’s only
0:17:30 for today, I promise.
0:17:34 So I have a friend, Angela Duckworth, wrote this book called “Grit.”
0:17:37 And we made a podcast together for a few years and I learned a great deal from her and she
0:17:43 learned a great deal from Marty Seligman, who’s considered one of the founders of positive
0:17:44 psychology.
0:17:47 And I remember when I first started reading about positive psychology, I was a lot younger
0:17:49 and I was like, “Oh, that is so foolish.
0:17:50 There’s no way.
0:17:51 That can’t work.”
0:17:59 But I’ve since gradually become convinced that it is, on average, a better way to process
0:18:02 your own fears and failures, et cetera.
0:18:06 Not to ignore them, not to sweep them under the rug, but to really process them whenever
0:18:09 you fail, you really inspect it.
0:18:13 You examine it just like you would if you’re a golfer, you look at your data on all your
0:18:14 swings.
0:18:18 If you’re a musician, you listen back to your recordings and you think, “What’s exactly
0:18:20 going on here?”
0:18:24 And then you move forward with passion and perseverance of the words that Angela Duckworth
0:18:25 would use.
0:18:32 It very much dovetails into my son when you’re raising your kids and I’m sure you are as
0:18:39 perplexed as any parent about how they come into the world with their own set of valences
0:18:42 and directions and instincts.
0:18:44 And they’re just complete.
0:18:45 They’re not tabula rasa.
0:18:48 They don’t appear that way when they come in.
0:18:51 They’re full tables.
0:18:59 So let’s say my son, I’d call him a stoic from a very early age and he would speculate
0:19:05 the worst and his mom and I were very perplexed at where does this, what we thought of as
0:19:09 pessimism come from?
0:19:15 And eventually we just came to the conclusion that he was softening the blow that might
0:19:16 come.
0:19:20 You know, should the worst happen, he’s rehearsing it.
0:19:25 So you could say, yes, positive thinking maybe creates a positive world.
0:19:26 I don’t know.
0:19:27 You draw positive energy to you.
0:19:28 I don’t know.
0:19:33 But there’s also an argument to be made for negative thinking or stoicism, which is, well,
0:19:38 should the worst happen, at least I will have rehearsed it in my mind and I won’t be blindsided
0:19:39 from it.
0:19:40 It won’t kill me.
0:19:41 Yeah.
0:19:42 That’s interesting.
0:19:44 This is a topic I think about a lot.
0:19:46 It sounds like you like to live with the struggle.
0:19:47 Oh, I do.
0:19:50 I mean, I do.
0:19:56 I’m attached to it in a way that may be unhealthy or it may be mature and it may be that I like
0:19:59 to live with less struggle.
0:20:01 I’m impatient when there’s a problem.
0:20:07 I like to get at it and get it to some kind of resolution, but I don’t like to live with
0:20:08 the problem.
0:20:09 Yeah.
0:20:10 Yeah.
0:20:14 I guess I feel like living with the problem is the point, you know, sometimes.
0:20:15 Yeah.
0:20:17 I mean, that’s, you know, some would argue that’s the human condition.
0:20:23 I do call you a spiritual teacher because I really see the way you work through these
0:20:25 problems as being part of a spiritual tradition.
0:20:31 And I’d love to talk about the Christ philosophy is really one of failure is the meek shall
0:20:33 inherit the earth.
0:20:39 And that would seem to me to resonate with you, Stephen, as part of the Christian message
0:20:40 is really one.
0:20:45 It’s an upside down message of in the Roman world, really, which was one of strength and
0:20:46 victory.
0:20:51 So you had a religion of the downtrodden of the meek.
0:20:53 And I wonder why that didn’t resonate for you.
0:20:59 And what is it in Judaism that did resonate for you in terms of what is clearly your life’s
0:21:04 work around failure and thinking outside the box and innovation and that?
0:21:05 Yeah.
0:21:10 So I do wish that there were more conversations about religion, theology, spirituality within
0:21:15 an intellectual perspective, but religion has really become sidelined in that regard.
0:21:21 And I think for good reason, which is I think a lot of the most prominent religious figures
0:21:27 are not really approaching things from a, you know, not just intellectual perspective,
0:21:30 but even a kind of universal perspective.
0:21:34 You know, my favorite thing about Christianity is that there are billions of people around
0:21:35 the world praying to a rabbi all the time.
0:21:37 I mean, that’s just cool.
0:21:41 I mean, Jesus was a rabbi for those who are not aware of the history.
0:21:43 And that’s probably a magician as well.
0:21:44 Right.
0:21:45 Loves, fishes, you name it.
0:21:46 War on the wine.
0:21:47 Where was it hidden?
0:21:50 He had a rabbit somewhere in a hat.
0:21:57 So with Judaism, I was attracted to it for a specific set of reasons.
0:22:01 As I mentioned, my parents were Jewish, lived in very Jewish families, but then by the time
0:22:03 I was a kid, they were no longer Jewish.
0:22:09 But then when I moved to New York City from upstate New York in my 20s, New York is a
0:22:10 very Jewish city.
0:22:16 And so a lot of my teachers, a mentor or two or three, even, you know, a lot of them were
0:22:19 Jewish and I just began to absorb this Jewish history.
0:22:22 And then I began to think about, oh, my parents used to be this thing.
0:22:23 Right.
0:22:24 I don’t really know what this thing is.
0:22:26 I should figure out what this thing is.
0:22:30 Then in the course of doing that, I felt myself just slipping into it.
0:22:35 But then because I was religious by nature as a kid, or at least religious by experience,
0:22:38 I did begin to learn the religion of Judaism.
0:22:40 And there were some things that really resonated with me.
0:22:45 This notion of tycoon olam and Judaism, which is the idea of fixing the world, repairing
0:22:50 the world, and the idea is that you should really live your life in service of making
0:22:53 things better, as basic as that sounds.
0:22:56 It’s not about triumph.
0:22:58 It’s not about escaping evil.
0:23:04 It’s about trying to, you know, there’s a line in Tom and turn it and turn it and turn
0:23:07 it for everything is in it.
0:23:09 And the it is, it’s the tradition.
0:23:13 And so Jews for, you know, many, many, many, many centuries have been arguing and talking
0:23:18 about, you know, what is this thing, whatever the thing is in front of you could be a political
0:23:22 issue, could be a food, whatever, turn it and turn it and turn it and keep trying to
0:23:23 figure it out.
0:23:24 Debate it.
0:23:25 Debate it.
0:23:26 And debate is good.
0:23:31 Well, here, Steven, this is, it gets back to me, conceiving of you as a spiritual teacher,
0:23:35 because, well, first of all, you like off because that’s amazing to me, because I can’t
0:23:36 stand that game.
0:23:37 Yeah, I love it.
0:23:40 I took it up maybe 15 years ago.
0:23:42 But wow, do I love it?
0:23:46 I think when I was a kid, when I was playing music, you know, for anybody who plays music
0:23:54 or any sport or anybody who does anything like that, there’s such a thrill of learning.
0:24:00 And you know, it’s ridiculous to me that we delegate most of the learning in our society
0:24:01 to kids.
0:24:05 Like, you got to go to school and they’re all set, but then once you become an adult,
0:24:08 you’re just like this block of thing that doesn’t really.
0:24:10 You’re supposed to do what you’ve been doing.
0:24:11 Yeah.
0:24:12 I don’t like that idea.
0:24:13 I don’t like it either, Steven.
0:24:19 I’ve started two different careers after the age of 50 as a writer and as a musician, and
0:24:23 I care if you like it or not, but I don’t care as deeply as I might have cared once about
0:24:27 whether you like my acting, because my bread and butter, you know, was that and I had to
0:24:30 succeed in order to keep on doing it.
0:24:35 But the state of mind that I get to, because I just learned how to play guitar 10 years
0:24:36 ago.
0:24:37 Seriously?
0:24:38 Yeah.
0:24:39 Are you good now?
0:24:40 No, no, I’m not good, but I’m good enough to write.
0:24:44 I’m good when I write because I’m good with words and now I got the chords and I can hear
0:24:50 melodies even though I can’t really sing that well, but I hear the melodies and I’m 19 in
0:24:51 my head when that’s happened.
0:24:56 No, honestly, my brain isn’t spongy like it was when I was 19, and that’s why I’ll never
0:25:03 be a great player, but the mindset that I get, the kind of soul sustenance that I get
0:25:06 even when I write, I’ve been writing my whole life, but I didn’t really start to focus on
0:25:10 it till the last 10 years.
0:25:14 It’s like the fountain of youth inside.
0:25:19 After the break, we hear about quitting the X-Files and how Bruce Springsteen inadvertently
0:25:22 gave me some career advice.
0:25:24 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:25:39 You’re listening to a bonus episode from David Duchovny’s podcast, Fail Better.
0:25:43 Before the break, David Duchovny got me talking about golf.
0:25:48 Really is about the thrill of learning new things as an adult, but because I love golf,
0:25:52 that’s where my mind went.
0:25:59 What I love about golf is you are trying to get your mind to cooperate with your body
0:26:05 in a way that is kind of like music, kind of like writing, kind of like business, but
0:26:06 different than all of them.
0:26:07 And it’s really hard.
0:26:10 And when you sync it up, it feels good.
0:26:15 And I like being a person that gets older, learning to do new things because I believe
0:26:21 one of the most powerful emotions that any of us can have is the feeling of accomplishment.
0:26:23 And failure is a part of accomplishment.
0:26:24 It’s just simple as that.
0:26:29 So if you want to get the high of accomplishing, you have to go through failure to get it.
0:26:32 And I look at it as like the work that you do.
0:26:36 Failure is the work that you do to get to the thing you want, knowing that you might
0:26:39 not even get to the thing you want, but you’re still going to be better off having tried.
0:26:42 That’s the way I look at failure overall.
0:26:44 But there is a point at which you say quit.
0:26:47 I mean, I’ve quit so many things, David.
0:26:52 The first big thing I quit, other than Catholicism, I guess, was music.
0:26:58 So I played music, I said, as a kid, was in bands in high school, not good.
0:27:03 And then I got in a band in college with another guy named Jeffrey Dean Foster, who was really
0:27:04 good.
0:27:06 And we just synced up.
0:27:08 We were both raw, but we got good together.
0:27:12 We had a band, two other, three other very good guys.
0:27:15 And then we ended up going through all the stuff you go to traveling, touring, being
0:27:19 bad, playing covers, starting to write songs, et cetera, et cetera.
0:27:23 And then we ended up getting a record deal, moved to New York, start making the record.
0:27:30 And it had been a couple of years of being heading towards success and a series of events
0:27:35 over those couple of years that kind of lodged themselves in my brain, including getting to
0:27:41 meet Bruce Springsteen one night backstage when he came to sit in with this little band
0:27:42 called the Del Fuegos.
0:27:44 You remember the Del Fuegos from Boston?
0:27:45 Really good.
0:27:46 So we had the same managers as them.
0:27:51 And I went to see them play at this pub in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they happened
0:27:52 to be touring.
0:27:53 And I was living down there.
0:27:56 And Bruce Springsteen was playing at the Coliseum.
0:27:59 And he stopped by, told him he liked their record.
0:28:04 And then they’re just talking between sets with all the beer in the back.
0:28:09 And this was right when I’m born in the USA was out, you know, he’d been great if you
0:28:10 liked Springsteen.
0:28:11 He was like a god.
0:28:16 But then born in the USA was like the big commercial record that made him a superstar.
0:28:21 And he didn’t say it in these words, but the message I took from that night is if I knew
0:28:26 that this is what it means to be famous, I don’t know if I’d want to be famous so much.
0:28:32 So it’s the trap of success or success being its own type of failure in a way.
0:28:36 What lesson can you ever learn from success, I guess, is the flip side to what we’re talking
0:28:37 about today.
0:28:38 And I would say nothing.
0:28:41 No, honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from success.
0:28:42 Is that true?
0:28:45 Why do you think that is?
0:28:46 I don’t know why it is.
0:28:50 I think it goes back to hurt, you know, because failure sends you inward and you start to
0:28:57 think, I quit the hugely successful television show, you know, after seven or eight years,
0:28:58 that was long enough.
0:29:03 I quit the X-Files and that was the biggest success I could ever quit.
0:29:06 I mean, like a global phenomenon of a show.
0:29:13 And yet, you know, to quit, you know, quitting is, quit can be very noble and strong and courageous.
0:29:18 But I have to say, you know, maybe you felt this when you quit the times, maybe if you
0:29:19 quit your band.
0:29:22 But when you do quit an enterprise, you also quit people.
0:29:24 It’s like quitting a family.
0:29:30 And there’s a lot of pain, a lot of pain that comes with stopping a train that’s moving
0:29:34 happily along just because I’ve got some misgivings about it, you know?
0:29:38 And I still carry to this day, I carry misgivings about myself.
0:29:39 Yeah.
0:29:44 What you did is, I think harder because what you just said, you’re, I don’t want to say,
0:29:48 letting people down, but you’re changing the calculus of the lives of a lot of people
0:29:49 around you.
0:29:53 When I quit the band, it wasn’t like that because I think, you know, there were two
0:29:57 of us who were singer songwriters, and now there was one.
0:30:00 And in a way that made it a clearer path for them.
0:30:01 So they may have missed me.
0:30:07 They may not have, but when I quit the times, they didn’t, you know, that didn’t matter
0:30:12 to the times, but you, you were, you know, there’s that, what’s that phrase in the entertainment
0:30:13 contracts?
0:30:14 Key man clause.
0:30:15 Right?
0:30:16 The key man clause, sure.
0:30:17 You were the key man.
0:30:18 I will take key man if I have to.
0:30:26 So how many people were, how pissed off at you as a result of quitting that enterprise?
0:30:29 Well, I mean, the show continued, it went another year after I left.
0:30:35 So I, it didn’t feel like, you know, I had taken bread out of people’s mouths immediately.
0:30:38 What was the state of popularity at the time you quit?
0:30:39 Well, it was waning.
0:30:40 It was waning.
0:30:44 I mean, it reached this peak, but it was complicated.
0:30:46 You know, it was complicated to do that.
0:30:48 You know, it’s like disconnecting from a power source.
0:30:57 I mean, I wonder you have, you have your mainstream of creativity, which is Freakonomics and,
0:30:58 and now the podcast.
0:31:03 And are there any days that you wake up and feel like the boss and go, you know, I don’t
0:31:04 feel like singing the song today.
0:31:07 I’d rather, I’d rather try and write that novel.
0:31:09 I would say two things about that.
0:31:11 One is I built a little company to do this.
0:31:14 So we’re 15, 20 people.
0:31:15 And I do think about that.
0:31:17 I’m not saying I will never stop.
0:31:23 But you know, we, this past year, we had our first two Freakonomics Radio babies born to
0:31:29 women on the staff, both had kids and like I like having a company that is solid enough
0:31:34 and real enough that people come here to work and they get, you know, parental leave.
0:31:36 And they, this is, you know, we built a thing.
0:31:38 And so that’s very meaningful.
0:31:42 In terms of though, like waking up and saying, I don’t feel like writing this.
0:31:44 I don’t want to play born in the USA today.
0:31:48 The one thing I will say about that, that I learned from my friend, Angela Duckworth,
0:31:50 we became friends because she wrote this book, grit.
0:31:54 And I interviewed her for Freakonomics Radio for some episode we were doing years and years
0:31:55 and years ago.
0:31:59 Then we started hanging out and I realized she’s awesome and would be a great collaborator
0:32:00 and then we collaborated.
0:32:05 But the very first time I, I believe this was the first time I ever talked to her really,
0:32:11 I asked her like, you know, if you think about grit versus quit, like, how do you know?
0:32:15 How do you know when you should stick it out or how much more it will take?
0:32:16 And there are two dimensions.
0:32:21 There’s one is, can you get good enough where it will be fruitful for you?
0:32:25 But also like, do you want to do that thing?
0:32:29 And so I was asking her, you know, what do you do if you’re doing a thing that you do
0:32:32 like, but you just kind of get bored.
0:32:36 Does that make you a dilettante and do you just quit and move on to something else?
0:32:42 And that’s when she taught me this notion of what she calls substituting nuance for
0:32:43 novelty.
0:32:45 She said, novelty is what everybody wants.
0:32:49 You’re always going to try new things because it’s exciting and fun.
0:32:52 And that’s kind of the way that we’re wired.
0:32:56 But if you’re not in a position where novelty is an option, let’s say, you know, I’m married
0:33:01 and I have a spouse and like, yeah, I might like to be married to that person or that person.
0:33:05 Well, that’s, you know, there are pretty high transaction costs there and maybe you don’t
0:33:06 want to do that.
0:33:10 But nuance for novelty means that within the thing that you’re doing, let’s take this back
0:33:15 to work and not marriage or whatever, find different ways to make it exciting to you
0:33:16 by nuance.
0:33:20 So when she taught me that lesson probably six, seven, eight years ago, that was a turning
0:33:22 point for me with Freakonomics Radio.
0:33:24 I’ve now been doing it 14 years.
0:33:30 And honestly, I think it’s more fun for me now than ever because she helped me conceive
0:33:37 of a sort of creative framework whereby my show is whatever I want it to be.
0:33:44 But don’t tell anybody, don’t tell it because you’re not really doing Freakonomics anymore.
0:33:46 Yeah.
0:33:52 One of the things I was struck by during the pandemic was, I don’t know if you’re a basketball
0:33:57 fan, but, you know, the last dance came on and it became this hot house hit because everybody
0:33:58 was home.
0:34:02 It seemed like everybody was watching the Jordan Bulls.
0:34:05 Look, I love Michael Jordan to me, the best player ever.
0:34:07 I couldn’t love him anymore.
0:34:12 But when I watch him give his hall of fame speech and, you know, holding a grudge against
0:34:17 the kid in high school, you know, the kind of, the crazy need to win.
0:34:23 And then I see a country applauding this as if that’s what you got to do to be a winner.
0:34:25 You have to be a killer.
0:34:27 You have to humiliate the loser.
0:34:33 And I’m wondering what country are we living in, you know, and coming off of, obviously,
0:34:36 we don’t want to talk about Trump, but here’s a guy who can’t lose.
0:34:42 You know, here’s a guy who his entire life is trying to reinterpret his biggest loss.
0:34:45 Before that, he lost billions of dollars as a businessman and he’s, you know, litigated
0:34:46 that through lies as well.
0:34:52 So we have two major, let’s call them aspirational figures.
0:34:59 What does that say to you about any way that we can educate our children, either through
0:35:06 sports or through, I don’t know, that’s a long-ass-winded question.
0:35:12 I think the thing about Trump that is most frustrating for people who don’t love him,
0:35:14 and I think the majority of people don’t love him.
0:35:18 There are a lot of people who will vote for him, despite not loving him.
0:35:23 But I think the thing that’s most frustrating for people who don’t love him is that it’s
0:35:27 pretty obvious that he doesn’t fight fair, and there’s something about this country that
0:35:33 has always promoted fairness, and that’s a big part of what sport is about.
0:35:37 But his word, he always uses loser, and people love that, they love it.
0:35:44 And what is it in us that’s unhealed or misshapen as a country, as a people?
0:35:47 Trump had long before he ran for president.
0:35:49 He had a long history of golf.
0:35:50 He’s played golf.
0:35:51 Cheating of golf.
0:35:55 Yeah, anybody who’s ever played with him, who has any ounce of truth to them, will tell
0:35:56 you, big, big cheater.
0:36:02 And in golf, if you play golf, you always encounter a cheater or two, and then you stay
0:36:09 away from that person, because it’s a game of character, supposed to be, at least.
0:36:16 But the thing that I love about sport, sport is a way for all of us to get our yaya’s out
0:36:18 as fans and competitors.
0:36:23 It is literally a proxy for the old-fashioned version of what humans used to do.
0:36:28 I mean, the way, I’m sure you know this, the reason we shake hands when we greet is it
0:36:29 comes from showing your opponent.
0:36:30 The weapon hand.
0:36:31 Yeah.
0:36:32 You don’t have your sword in your hand.
0:36:33 Exactly.
0:36:38 So, like, I love the fact that we have developed this whole system of sport that is really,
0:36:41 you know, if you think about sport, it’s really different if you’re talking about participatory
0:36:46 or spectator.
0:36:49 Scott Galloway, this, I think, really smart guy, teaches at NYU, he says, “The success
0:36:56 of a young human, especially of the male variety, will be a direct proportion of the hours that
0:37:01 they sweat versus the hours that they watch other people sweating.”
0:37:05 And I think about that because, you know, I sometimes enjoy watching other people sweating
0:37:08 on a Sunday afternoon, whatever, especially if you’re playing fantasy football.
0:37:18 But it saddens me that what should be a play-acting version of war is harnessed to give inspiration
0:37:20 to people who really want to hate.
0:37:26 But the fact is we attach ourselves to these tribal affiliations with the zeal of people
0:37:29 living in Babylonia 5,000 years ago.
0:37:32 So, you know, the world is complicated.
0:37:36 It’s easy to beat up the people who do the stuff you hate, but I do feel that for all
0:37:42 of us, there’s a lot of upside in seeking out the people who are just quietly putting
0:37:47 their head down, figuring stuff out, experimenting, experimenting, experimenting and failing and
0:37:49 failing and failing.
0:37:51 And I think that’s a nice role model.
0:37:52 I agree with you.
0:37:54 I tried to do that for my kids.
0:37:57 I would constantly tell them, “I feel like a failure.”
0:37:58 Constantly.
0:37:59 How do they respond to that?
0:38:00 I don’t know.
0:38:01 You know?
0:38:03 They were just nod.
0:38:07 Well, this was a pleasure, Steven.
0:38:08 Thank you.
0:38:10 Thank you for coming on and trusting me.
0:38:11 I love the conversation.
0:38:13 Love getting to know you a little bit.
0:38:17 And I predict great things for this podcast because, you know, what can go wrong with
0:38:18 a podcast about failure, right?
0:38:19 Yeah, exactly.
0:38:25 I mean, if I fail, I succeed.
0:38:27 Thanks to David Dukovny for this conversation.
0:38:29 His show is called “Fail Better.”
0:38:33 If you want to hear it, just search for “Fail Better” in your podcast app.
0:38:36 We will be back soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio.
0:38:38 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:38:41 And if you can, someone else too.
0:38:46 “Fail Better” is a production of Lemonade Media in coordination with King Baby.
0:38:50 It’s produced by Kegan Zima, Aria Brodschi, and Donny Matias.
0:38:52 The engineer is Brian Castillo.
0:38:55 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:01 You can find our entire archive on any podcast app, also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish
0:39:03 transcripts and show notes.
0:39:07 This episode was produced from our side by Augusta Chapman.
0:39:12 Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Dalvin Aboaghi, Eleanor Osborn, Elsa Hernandez,
0:39:17 Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippen, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, John Schnars, Julie Canfer,
0:39:22 Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Coruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, Theo Jacobs,
0:39:23 and Zach Lipinski.
0:39:26 The theme song is “Mr. Fortune” by the Hitchhikers.
0:39:29 Our composer is Luis Guerra.
0:39:36 Nothing funny today, it’s raining.
0:39:40 That doesn’t make it not funny, but maybe that’s my mood.
0:39:42 Wish I had something funnier for you.
0:39:43 I’m hearing my voice.
0:39:47 It just doesn’t even sound like it could get near the country of funny.
0:39:54 The Freakonomics Radio Network.
0:39:59 The hidden side of everything.
0:39:59 Stitcher.
0:40:02 (upbeat music)
0:40:04 you
Stephen Dubner appears as a guest on Fail Better, a new podcast hosted by David Duchovny. The two of them trade stories about failure, and ponder the lessons that success could never teach.
- SOURCES:
- David Duchovny, actor, director, writer, and musician.
- RESOURCES:
- “Martin Seligman and the Rise of Positive Psychology,” by Peter Gibbon (Humanities, 2020).
- “Rick Reilly: ‘Donald Trump Will Cheat You on the Golf Course and Then Buy You Lunch,’” by Donald McRae (The Guardian, 2019).
- “How The X-Files Invented Modern Television,” by Emily St. James (Vox, 2018).
- “Happiness & the Gorilla,” by Scott Galloway (No Mercy/No Malice, 2018).
- EXTRAS:
- Fail Better with David Duchovny, podcast by Lemonada Media (2024).
- “How to Succeed at Failing,” series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
- “Annie Duke Thinks You Should Quit,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).
- “The Upside of Quitting,” by Freakonomics Radio (2011).