Why Quitting Is Usually Worth It

Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner, and we’ve got a bonus episode for you today. The roots of this one go back to 2023, when we published a four-part series called “How to Succeed at Failing.” One of the hardest questions we asked was: how do you know when it’s time to give up on something?

Gary KLEIN: It’s a question of what kind of resources you have, what’s your tolerance for pain, what are the alternatives? There’s that kind of reluctance to admit that you’ve wasted all of these resources. 

The problem is that quitting is usually seen as an admission of failure. I would argue that view needs a serious rethink. Some quitting is productive, if it keeps you sane, or keeps you from wasting time. And then there’s quitting while you’re ahead — while you’re way, way ahead. Like David Duchovny did.

David DUCHOVNY: That was the biggest success I could ever quit — I mean, like, a global phenomenon of a show. 

Duchovny is, among other things, an actor. And the TV show he quit was The X-Files. Some critics say it’s the show that most shaped modern TV.

DUCHOVNY: I just knew that I had done everything I could in that format. It felt like it was going to be my whole life at that point, if I went any longer, I was going to be doing “karaoke” me, whatever that was. So it was like a life-saving thing for me to do it. 

Duchovny didn’t quit acting, but he did spread out: music, writing, parenting. And recently, he started a podcast. It’s called Fail Better. Now why make an entire show about failure? Here’s why:

DUCHOVNY: I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from success. 

Duchovny invited me to be a guest on his show, and since I think he’s an interesting person, and I think failure is an interesting topic, I took him up on it. So that’s the conversation you’re about to hear today. If you want to hear more Duchovny, just search for “Fail Better” in your podcast app, and give it a follow. And if you want to hear more me — well, you’re already in the right place for that.

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I’ve quit a bunch of things in my life, probably, but the most glaring of those is graduate school. So I quit on getting my Ph.D. in English literature from Yale in the mid-eighties, and it was something that my mother, until the day she died, asked me if I was going to go finish my Ph.D., but I wish that I had, if only because I would like my credit to read, you know, such and such a role played by Dr. David Duchovny, I think would be fun. Or Dr. So-and-So, played by Dr. David Duchovny. That would be meta-meta. And as much as I joke about it, it hurts not to complete something. It hurts to quit on something. My consolation, however, is that I did go a long way. I went as far as the dissertation. There was never one moment where I decided to quit. I kind of faded away from graduate school because I had started acting. I’d started riding my bicycle to the train station in New Haven, getting off at Penn Station in New York, riding my bicycle to my acting class and riding it back. So I was living kind of a dual existence between New Haven, graduate school, and English literature, and starting to think about acting. And as I went further along, started working harder to try to become an actor, started going on auditions, started going to L.A., I never really left. It’s possible that they’re still expecting my dissertation at this point.

I’m David Duchovny. This is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Stephen Dubner is the host of the podcast Freakonomics Radio. He’s made that brand his life after co-writing Freakonomics back in 2005, which I read back in 2005, and it blew me away. I couldn’t believe the kinds of questions that he was asking that made sense, and in that way, asking questions, let’s say it’s Socratic, you know, that was the Socratic method, was asking questions. So I look at him not just as an economics, you know, brilliant economics guy, but he’s also kind of an intellectual, a spiritual guide for our time. He recently had a series on the show called “How to Succeed at Failing.” Of course, he comes to us as a failure expert, not only because of that series, but because of his own false starts and wrong turns, which you’ll hear about. He quit a successful band, quit the New York Times, and we both quit Ph.D. programs, and he’s such a podcast veteran, he’s an icon of the podcast. So of course he kind of welcomed me to the club, which was sweet. 

DUBNER: So, David, are you excited about having a podcast? 

DUCHOVNY: I’m the last one not to have one, so I’m happy.

DUBNER: But most of the people who started them out of FOMO have stopped by now. So it’s actually like a—. 

DUCHOVNY: It’s true. 

DUBNER: It’s a good new moment. 

DUCHOVNY: Well, you were early. I mean you’re a trendsetter.

DUBNER: Yeah, I thought I was late. Truly.

DUCHOVNY: You did? At the time you thought you were late?

DUBNER: It’s a good lesson. Like a lot of times when you think you’re too late, you’re just stupid. 

DUCHOVNY: I want to — I want to talk about. I mean, I know where I’m coming from on failure. I just know, I know my soul. But I’m interested to hear, you know, what’s your origin story of failure?

DUBNER: I am scarred by seemingly minor failures from youth, as probably we all are. I don’t know if we all are. I mean, right off the top of my head, I can think of at least three, which I won’t bore you with all of them. But, I will say this. I think my feeling about failure was also informed by my family’s religious orientation. So I had a weird family, religiously. My parents were both Brooklyn-born Jews. Kind of standard-issue Brooklyn Jews, right. They both came from immigrant parents. And, long story short, the two of them, my parents, before they met each other, but during World War Two, which was not insignificant, they both converted to Catholicism. They both became extremely devout and believing Catholics. 

DUCHOVNY: And so was in an attempt to assimilate further on their point, or was merely they just felt better in that religion?

DUBNER: The short answer is that neither of them, I would say, were really about assimilating, and neither of them were moving away from being Jewish because of anti-Semitism. But really, they were both very, very deeply spiritual people, humans, as evidenced by the fact that when they converted, they became among the most devout Catholics I knew, and we hung out with only Catholics. The end of the story is that years later, when I moved to New York in my 20s, I ended up becoming Jewish or returning to being Jewish. But I was Catholic for the formation and the notion that gave me the most pause, I’ll put it that way, was the idea of original sin. This idea that when you start, you’ve got a black mark on you.

DUCHOVNY: You failed already.

DUBNER: I didn’t like that idea.  

DUCHOVNY: You were conscious as a child of not liking that idea. 

DUBNER: Oh, yeah, it’s a big idea when you grow up that way, because you’re living your life to try to essentially erase or supersede the failure that you were born with. And I remember being like 10, 11, thinking, “What kind of God” — I say it in an old Jewish man voice — “what kind of God is it that would have me love him or it for having marked me with this failure?” Now I don’t mean to disparage Christianity or Catholicism, because many of my best friends and most of my family members are there, but I did not like — you know, failure hurts. And you know what else hurts? And this is the other thing: being accused of something you didn’t do, I find, is one of the greatest injustices in life. You think, again, you felt punished because you were born into the world, and now you’ve got to work off your sentence in a way. So anyway, yeah, failure burned me deeply. And I made — so I was a musician. And, when I was probably 12, 13, somewhere in there, I was asked to play the organ for the high school graduation, “Pomp and Circumstance.” And there’s this big, massive organ that was backstage in the auditorium, and — I f’ up. I, like, didn’t rehearse enough. I rehearsed at home on the piano. But then when I got on it during the ceremony, I couldn’t quite hear myself, and I started getting lost. I didn’t really read music, so I was playing by ear, and you can’t stop playing when there’s a processional or whatever you call it. So I just started vamping. And — like, I grew up playing, like, Chicago blues piano.

DUCHOVNY: So you are playing boogie-woogie? 

DUBNER: Yeah. I feel my forehead heating up now with shame. And so it was a horrible experience. And the lesson I learned from that is you can never over-prepare for anything. And if something matters to you, you need to suss out all the elements and figure out how to solve for them. So I had a similar failure like that when I was — around the same age, I was the live announcer for the lineups of the varsity basketball. So, you know, varsity basketball in a little town is a big deal. It’s the biggest event in town every, whatever, Friday night. And so all I had were the lineup that the opposing team had submitted, and it just had last names. I knew the first names of the guys on our team because it was a small— you know everybody. So I get up there and I say, Johnson and Watkins, it sounded like really bad names of pro wrestlers, you know?

DUCHOVNY: No first names. 

DUBNER: I just felt like an idiot.   But these failures help because they burn at you.

DUCHOVNY: Well, these are very public. These are very public failures. 

DUBNER: It’s funny you say that because I don’t even consider failing in private failing. I consider that experimentation. No, I’m serious. 

DUCHOVNY: Well, that’s very healthy of you. 

DUBNER: No. I mean, do you consider — well, what do you mean by a private failure? 

DUCHOVNY: It’s a good question. You know, you have discussions in your work about, you know, different types of failure as well. You know, like, and I think of sins of omission and sins of commission, you know, in the Catholic Church. And I would say the private failures are more like sins of omission. You know, just thinking, I was not a kind person today or something like that, or I should have said something in that — you know, so something I didn’t do, mostly. 

DUBNER: You know, the minute you say it, though, the difference between private and public — I realize this is probably not a healthy thing — but I totally cordon them off. Like, if I’m the only one who knows that I failed, like, let’s say I failed to be kind or to help someone that I could ever should have, I consider that a misdemeanor at worst, you know what I mean? 

DUCHOVNY: Yeah. 

DUBNER: Whereas if you do it in public — but I don’t I don’t. You know, I wonder if that’s a good — it might be a good thing actually, because —

DUCHOVNY: I think it brings the shame into it, you know, which is terrible and motivating, but it’s a master. And, sometimes I wonder, how are we ever going to learn from other people’s failures? How do we release the shame enough to allow people to start to heal themselves through other people? Or is that just, is that just a dream that you have to go through the hard pain of shame and failure in order to come out the other side? 

DUBNER: I don’t consider myself very good at many things, but one thing that I’ve only recently realized is I’ve gotten a lot older that I’m pretty good at, is I’m just good at observing. And I always thought that everybody does that. So we just did this Freak Radio series on Richard Feynman, the physicist who is a kind of hero of mine. And one thing that I loved about him is that he was just observant. And, I think one advantage I had in failing a lot, in all my failures, is that — and maybe this was Catholicism, honestly — because, you know, one thing about growing up very religious is you are trained to constantly inspect your behaviors and decisions and choices, and usually declare them rotten. 

DUCHOVNY: Right. 

DUBNER: And then you have to make up for them. 

DUCHOVNY: But then there’s forgiveness. 

DUBNER: Well, forgiveness within the Catholic Church never felt great. 

DUCHOVNY: No?

DUBNER: No. It was like, you know, ten Hail Marys, and then you’re kind of free to go. Look, I’m just going to be honest. I’m a big believer in positive reinforcement. I really am. And I’m not a big believer in negative reinforcement. And I’ve been in both kinds of environments. I used to work at the New York Times, which I loved, and I was, you know, my dad was a newspaperman for small papers, upstate New York. And when I got hired at the New York Times, he’d been dead a long time. He died when I was a kid, but all I could think about was, “Oh my gosh, I wish I could tell my dad, this is awesome.” And then I got to the Times and I was proud of being there. I did a lot of work that I really, really enjoyed. But one thing I realized about it is it was an institution built on negative reinforcement. Many people did a lot of their work with an eye toward not f’ing up, because the penalties were really severe. And I think when you’re a creative person of any kind, and I would argue everybody’s a creative person, it’s just it gets beaten out of us in certain occupations and realms, you can’t create out of fear and negativity. So, because I just for some reason believe that when I have a failure, whether it’s messing up with “Pomp and Circumstance,” messing up as a basketball announcer, I internalized it. And I guess I do feel shame the way you were describing. But I do think if you call every failure an experiment that didn’t go the way you wanted it to, then that can project you on to a more positive route, which is to say, you know, like all the great scientists, all the great thinkers, ever, they’ve all failed way, way, way, way, way more than they succeeded. So that’s just the way it is. But we, who look at their work from a remove, and there’s this thing called survivorship bias, which is we only look at the successes. And that is just a very immature way of being a human. You have to recognize that everybody is failing all the time. And if that’s the case, then you can process that however you want. You can process it negatively, beat yourself up, exhibit shame, be afraid to interact with people, or put yourself in pressure situations because you’re afraid of it. Or you can look at it like a scientist or an artist and say, you know, I’m going to write this first scene, you know, 80 times, and it might be the eighth one that was good, but you’re never really going to know until you get there. Life is an experiment. I mean, I may sound Pollyanna-ish now, but I think if you look at it positively like that, then failure can be thrilling. It really can. It’s information. It’s feedback. 

DUCHOVNY: It is. It can be liberating for sure. But I would just — I think it’s a beautiful way to look at the world. It’s a beautiful way to look at experience. It’s a beautiful way to look at education. But there’s a lot in my life experience that says you don’t learn unless something hurts. You know, in many ways. And I don’t mean hurts necessarily in terms of shame or, you know, public shame or something like that. Nietzsche said we only remember that which gives us pain, you know? And I want to have the world as you describe it. I want to educate children as you describe it. I want to live in that world. But I’m afraid that human nature is such that I can’t. I have to touch the stove and it has to hurt, or else I ain’t — I ain’t going to learn it. 

DUBNER: Look, I don’t disagree. It causes pain. But then you have a choice of what to do with the pain. The pain is a piece of feedback. That’s all it is. It’s not a judgment on your soul. It’s a piece of feedback. 

DUCHOVNY: Right.

Coming up after the break: David Duchovny and I talk about living with the struggle. I’m Stephen Dubner, and this is a bonus episode featuring Duchovny’s podcast, Fail Better. We’ll be right back.

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Okay, here’s more of my conversation with David Duchovny from his podcast Fail Better. You’re hearing a lot more of me talking in this episode than you usually do on Freakonomics Radio. If you’re starting to get a bit sick of me — well, that makes two of us. But it’s only for today, I promise.

DUBNER: So I have a friend, Angela Duckworth, who wrote this book called Grit. And we made a podcast together for a few years, and I learned a great deal from her, and she learned a great deal from Marty Seligman, who’s considered one of the founders of positive psychology. And I remember when I first started reading about positive psychology — I was a lot younger — and I was like, Oh, that is so full of sh — there’s no way, like, that can’t work. But I’ve since gradually become convinced that it is, on average, a better way to process your own fears and failures, etc. Not to ignore them, not to sweep them under the rug, but to really process them. Whenever you fail, you really inspect it. You examine it just like you would if you know, if you’re a golfer, you look at your data on all your swings. If you’re a musician, you listen back to your recordings and you think, what’s exactly going on here? And then you move forward with, like, “passion and perseverance” are the words that Angela Duckworth would use.  

DUCHOVNY: It very much dovetails into — my son, when I, and you’re raising your kids, and I’m sure you are as perplexed as any parent about how they come into the world with their own set of valences and directions and instincts, and they’re just complete. They’re not tabula rasa. They don’t appear that way when they come in, you know, they’re full tables. Full tablets. So let’s say my son, I would call him a Stoic from a very early age, and he would speculate the worst. And his mom and I were very perplexed at, you know, where does this, what we thought of as pessimism, come from? You know, and eventually we just came to the conclusion that he was softening the blow that might come, you know, should the worst happen, he’s rehearsing it. So you could say, yes, positive thinking maybe creates a positive world. I don’t know, you draw positive energy to you. I don’t know. But there’s also an argument to be made for negative thinking or stoicism, which is, well, should the worst happen, at least I will have rehearsed it in my mind, and I won’t be blindsided from it and it won’t kill me. 

DUBNER: Yeah, that’s interesting. This is a topic I think about a lot. It sounds like you like to live with the struggle. 

DUCHOVNY: Oh, I do, I mean, I do. I’m attached to it in a way that may be unhealthy. 

DUBNER: Or it may be mature, and it may be that I like to live with less struggle.   I’m impatient. When there’s a problem, I like to get at it and get it to some kind of resolution. But I don’t like to live with the problem. 

DUCHOVNY: Yeah, yeah, I guess I feel like, living with the problem is the point, you know, sometimes. 

DUBNER: Yeah. I mean, that’s, you know, some would argue that’s the human condition. 

DUCHOVNY: I do call you a spiritual teacher, because I really see the way you work through these problems as being part of a spiritual tradition. And I’d love to talk about — the Christ philosophy is really one of failure, that’s “the meek shall inherit the earth.” And that would seem to me to resonate with you, Stephen, as part of the Christian message is really one, it’s an upside down message of the Roman world, really, which was one of strength and victory. So you had a religion of the downtrodden, of the meek. And I wonder why that didn’t resonate for you. And what is it in Judaism that did resonate for you in terms of what is clearly your life’s work around failure and thinking outside the box, and innovation, in that? 

DUBNER: Yeah. So I do wish that there were more conversations about religion, theology, spirituality within an intellectual perspective. But religion has really become sidelined in that regard, and I think for good reason. Which is I think a lot of the most prominent religious figures are not really approaching things from a, you know, not just intellectual perspective, but even — even a kind of universal perspective. You know, my favorite thing about Christianity is that there are billions of people around the world praying to a rabbi all the time. I mean, that’s just cool. I mean, Jesus was a rabbi, for those of you who are not aware of the history, and that’s um—. 

DUCHOVNY: And probably a magician as well. 

DUBNER: Right — loaves, fishes, you name it. 

DUCHOVNY: Water and wine. Where was it hidden? He had a rabbit somewhere in a hat.

DUBNER: So, with Judaism, I was attracted to it for a specific set of reasons. As I mentioned, my parents were Jewish, lived in very Jewish families. But then by the time I was a kid, they were no longer Jewish. But then when I moved to New York City from upstate New York in my 20s — New York is a very Jewish city. And so a lot of my teachers, a mentor or two, or three even, you know, a lot of them were Jewish. And I just began to absorb this Jewish history. And then I began to think about, oh, my parents used to be this thing. I don’t really know what this thing is. I should figure out what this thing is. Then in the course of doing that, I felt myself just slipping into it. But then, because I was religious by nature as a kid, or at least religious by experience, I did begin to learn the religion of Judaism. And there were some things that really resonated with me. This notion of tikkun olam in Judaism, which is the idea of fixing the world, repairing the world, and the idea is that you should really live your life in service of making things better. As basic as that sounds. It’s not about triumph. It’s not about escaping evil. It’s about trying to — you know, there’s a line in Talmud, “Turn it, and turn it, and turn it, for everything is in it.” And the it is — it’s the tradition. And so Jews for, you know, many, many, many, many centuries have been arguing and talking about, you know, what is this thing? Whatever the thing is in front of you — could be a political issue, could be a food, whatever — turn it, and turn it, and turn it, and keep trying to figure out. 

DUCHOVNY: Debate it, debate it.

DUBNER: Debate it. And debate is good. 

DUCHOVNY: Well, here’s Stephen, and this is this is it gets back to me conceiving of you as a spiritual teacher because, well, first of all, you like golf? Because that’s amazing to me because I can’t stand that game.

DUBNER: Yeah, I love it. I took it up maybe 15 years ago. But wow, do I love it. Like when I was a kid, when I was playing music, you know — for anybody who plays music, or any sport, or anybody who does any anything like that, there’s such a thrill of learning. And, you know, it’s ridiculous to me that we delegate most of the learning in our society to kids like, you got to go to school and learn all this stuff, but then once you become an adult, you’re just like this block of thing that doesn’t really —

DUCHOVNY: Well, you’re supposed to do what you’ve been doing. 

DUBNER: Yeah I don’t like that idea. 

DUCHOVNY: I don’t like it either, Stephen. I’ve started two different careers after the age of 50, as a writer and as a musician, and I care if you like it or not, but I don’t care as deeply as I might have cared once about whether you like my acting, because my bread and butter, you know, was that. And I had to succeed in order to keep on doing it. But the state of mind that I get to — because I just learned how to play guitar ten years ago. 

DUBNER: Seriously? Are you good now? 

DUCHOVNY: No, no, no, I’m not good. But I’m good enough to write. And so when I write, because I’m good with words, and now I got the chords and I can I hear melodies even though I can’t really sing that well. But I hear the melodies. And I’m 19 in my head when that’s happening. No, honestly, I’m not — my brain isn’t spongy like it was when it was when I was 19. And that’s why I’ll never be a great player. But the mindset that I get, the kind of soul sustenance that I get even when I write. I’ve been writing my whole life, but I didn’t really start to focus on it till the last ten years. It’s like the fountain of youth inside. 

After the break, we hear about quitting the X-Files and how Bruce Springsteen inadvertently gave me some career advice. I’m Stephen Dubner, you’re listening to a bonus episode from David Duchovny’s podcast Fail Better. 

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Before the break, David Duchovny got me talking about golf. Really, it was about the thrill of learning new things as an adult but because I love golf, that’s where my mind went.

DUBNER: What I love about golf is you are trying to get your mind to cooperate with your body in a way that is kind of like music, kind of like writing, kind of like business, but different than all of them. And it’s really hard. And when you sync it up, it feels good. And I like being a person that gets older, learning to do new things, because I believe one of the most powerful emotions that any of us can have is the feeling of accomplishment, and failure is a part of accomplishment. It’s just as simple as that. So if you want to get the high of accomplishing, you have to go through failure to get it. And I look at it as, like, the work that you do — failure is the work that you do to get to the thing you want, knowing that you might not even get to the thing you want, but you’re still going to be better off having tried. That’s the way I look at failure overall. 

DUCHOVNY: But there is a point at which you say quit. 

DUBNER: I mean, I’ve quit so many things, David. Like, the first big thing I quit — other than Catholicism, I guess — was music. So I played music, I said, as a kid. Was in bands in high school. Not good. And then I got in a band in college with another guy, named Jeffrey Dean Foster, who was really good, and we just synced up. We were both raw, but we got good together. We had a band, two other, three other very good guys, and then we ended up going through all the stuff you go through — traveling, touring, being bad, playing covers, starting to write songs, etcetera, etcetera. And then we ended up getting a record deal, moved to New York, start making the record. And it had been a couple years of being heading towards success and a series of events over those couple years, it kind of lodged themselves in my brain, including getting to meet Bruce Springsteen one night backstage when he came to sit in with this little band called the Del Fuegos. You remember the Del Fuegos from Boston? Really good. So we had the same managers as them, and I went to see them play at this pub in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they happened to be touring. And I was living down there, and Bruce Springsteen was playing at the Coliseum, and he stopped by, told them he liked their record. And then they’re just talking between sets with all the beer in the back. And this was right when Born in the USA was out. You know, he’d been great — if you liked Springsteen, he was like a god, and then Born in the USA was like the big commercial record that made him a superstar. And he didn’t say it in these words. But the message I took from that night is: if I knew that this is what it means to be famous, I don’t know if I’d wanted to be famous so much. 

DUCHOVNY: It’s the trap of success, or success being its own type of failure, in a way. What lesson can you ever learn from success, I guess is the flip side to what we’re talking about today. And I would say, nothing. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever learned anything from success. 

DUBNER: Is that true? Why do you think that is? 

DUCHOVNY: I don’t know why it is. I think it goes back to hurt, you know, because failure sends you inward and you start to think. I quit a hugely successful television show, you know, after 7 or 8 years, that was long enough. I quit The X-Files, and that was the biggest success I could ever quit. I mean, like a global phenomenon of a show. And yet, you know, to quit — you know, quitting is — quit can be very noble and strong and courageous, but I have to say, you know, when you’re — maybe you felt this when you quit The Times, maybe if you quit your band,  but when you do quit an enterprise, you also quit people. It’s like quitting a family. And there’s a lot of pain, a lot of pain that comes with stopping a train that’s moving happily along just because I’ve got some misgivings about it, you know, and I still carry it to this day. I carry misgivings about myself. 

DUBNER: Yeah. What you did is, I think, harder because what you just said, you’re — I don’t want to say letting people down, but you’re changing the calculus of the lives of a lot of people around you. When I quit the band, it wasn’t like that because I think, you know, there were two of us who were singer-songwriters and now there was one. And in a way that made it a clearer path for them. So they may have missed me. They may not have. But, when I quit The Times, they didn’t, you know, that didn’t matter to the Times. But you — you were, you know, there’s that phrase in the entertainment contracts — key-man clause, right? 

DUCHOVNY: The key-man clause, sure.

DUBNER: You were the key man. 

DUCHOVNY: I will take key man if I have to. 

DUBNER: So how many people were how pissed off at you as a result of quitting that enterprise? 

DUCHOVNY: Well, I mean, the show continued. It went another year after I left, so it didn’t feel like, you know, I had taken bread out of people’s mouths immediately. 

DUBNER: What was the state of popularity at the time you quit?

DUCHOVNY: It was waning. I mean, it reached its peak, but it was complicated. You know, it was complicated to do that. You know, it’s like disconnecting from a power source. I mean, I wonder if you have — you have your main stream of creativity, which is Freakonomics and now the podcast. And are there any days that you wake up and feel like the Boss and go, you know, I don’t feel like singing the song today, I’d rather try and write that novel? 

DUBNER: I would say two things about that. One is, I built a little company to do this. So we’re 15, 20 people. And I do think about that. So I’m not saying I will never stop. But, you know, this past year, we had our first two Freakonomics Radio babies born, two women on the staff, both had kids. And, yeah, like, I like having a company that is solid enough and real enough that people come here to work and they get, you know, parental leave, and they — this is, you know, we built a thing. And so that’s very meaningful. 

DUCHOVNY: Sure. 

DUBNER: In terms of though, like waking up and saying, I don’t feel like writing this —. 

DUCHOVNY: I don’t want to play “Born in the USA” today. 

DUBNER: The one thing I will say about that, that I learned from my friend Angela Duckworth. We became friends because she wrote this book, Grit, and I interviewed her for Freakonomics Radio for some episode we were doing years and years and years ago. Then we started hanging out and I realized she’s awesome, and would be a great collaborator. And then we collaborated. But the very first time I believe this was the first time I ever talked to her, really, I asked her, like, you know, if you think about grit versus quit, like, how do you know? How do you know when you should stick it out, or how much more it will take? And there are two dimensions. There’s one is can you get good enough where it will be fruitful for you? But also like, do you want to do that thing? And so I was asking her, you know, what do you do if you’re doing a thing that you do like, but you just kind of get bored? Does that make you a dilettante and do you just quit and move on to something else? And that’s when she taught me this notion of what she calls substituting nuance for novelty. She said, Novelty is what everybody wants. You’re always wanting to try new things because it’s exciting and fun, and that’s kind of the way that we’re wired. But if you’re not in a position where novelty is an option — let’s say, you know, I’m married and I have a spouse, I’m like, yeah, I might like to be married to that person or that person. Well, that’s, you know, there are pretty high transaction costs there. And maybe you don’t want to do that, but nuance for novelty means that within the thing that you’re doing, let’s take this back to work and not marriage, or whatever, find different ways to make it exciting to you by nuance. So when she taught me that lesson, probably six, seven, eight years ago, that was a turning point for me with Freakonomics Radio. I’ve now been doing it for 14 years, and honestly, I think it’s more fun for me now than ever, because she helped me conceive of a sort of creative framework whereby my show is whatever I want it to be. But don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell because —

DUCHOVNY: You’re not really doing Freakonomics anymore. 

DUBNER: Yeah!

DUCHOVNY: One of the things I was struck by during the pandemic was, I don’t know if you’re a basketball fan, but, you know, The Last Dance came on, and it became this hothouse hit because everybody was home and it seemed like everybody was watching the Jordan Bulls. Look, I love Michael Jordan — to me, the best player ever. I couldn’t love him any more. But when I watch him give his Hall of Fame speech and, you know, holding a grudge against the kid in high school, you know, the kind of — the crazy need to win. And then I see a country applauding this as if that’s what you got to do to be a winner. You have to be a killer. You have to humiliate the loser. And I’m wondering, what country are we living in? You know, and coming off of, obviously we don’t want to talk about Trump, but here’s a guy who can’t lose. You know, here’s a guy who is his entire life is trying to reinterpret his biggest loss. Before that, he lost billions of dollars as a businessman. And he’s, you know, litigated that through lies as well. So we have two major, let’s call them aspirational figures, what does that say to you about any way that we can educate our children, either through sports or through — well, I don’t know, that’s a long-ass-winded question. 

DUBNER: I think the thing about Trump that is most frustrating for people who don’t love him, and I think the majority of people don’t love him — there are a lot of people who will vote for him despite not loving him — but I think the thing that’s most frustrating for people who don’t love him is that it’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t fight fair. And there’s something about this country that has always promoted fairness, and that’s a big part of what sport is about. 

DUCHOVNY: But his word he always uses is loser. And people love that, they love it. And what is it — what is it in us that’s unhealed or misshapen as a country, as a people.

DUBNER: Trump had had long — before he ran for president, he had a long history of golf. He’s played golf. 

DUCHOVNY: Cheating at golf. 

DUBNER: Yeah. Anybody who’s ever played with him, who has any ounce of truth to them, will tell you — big, big cheater. And in golf, if you play golf, you always encounter a cheater or two. And then you stay away from that person because it’s a game of character. Supposed to be, at least. But the thing that I love about sport — sport is a way for all of us to get our ya-yas out as fans, and competitors. It is literally a proxy for the old-fashioned version of what humans used to do. I mean, the way I’m sure you know this, the reason we shake hands when we greet is it comes from showing your opponent —. 

DUCHOVNY: The weapon hand. 

DUBNER: Yeah. 

DUCHOVNY: You don’t have your sword in your hand.

DUBNER: Exactly. So, like, I love the fact that we’ve developed this whole system of sport that is really, you know, if you think about sport, it’s really different if you’re talking about participatory or spectator. Scott Galloway, this, I think, really smart guy who teaches at N.Y.U., he says, the success of a young human, especially of the male variety, will be a direct proportion of the hours that they sweat versus the hours that they watch other people sweating. And I think about that because, you know, I sometimes enjoy watching other people sweating on a Sunday afternoon, whatever, especially if you’re playing fantasy football. But it saddens me that what should be a play-acting version of war is harnessed to give inspiration to people who really want to hate. But the fact is, we attach ourselves to these tribal affiliations with the zeal of people living in Babylonia 5,000 years ago. So, you know, the world is complicated. It’s easy to beat up the people who do the stuff you hate. But I do feel that for all of us, there’s a lot of upside in seeking out the people who are just quietly putting their head down, figuring stuff out, experimenting, experimenting, experimenting, and failing and failing and failing. And I think that’s a nice role model. 

DUCHOVNY: I agree with you. I tried to do that for my kids. I would constantly tell them I feel like a failure, constantly. 

DUBNER: How do they respond to that? 

DUCHOVNY: I don’t know. You know. They would just nod. Well, this was a pleasure, Stephen. Thank you. Thank you for coming on and trusting me. 

DUBNER: I loved the conversation. Loved getting to know you a little bit. And, I predict great things for this podcast because, you know, what can go wrong with a podcast about failure, right? 

DUCHOVNY: Yeah, exactly. I mean, if I fail, I succeed. 

Thanks to David Duchovny for this conversation. His show is called Fail Better. To hear it, just search for “Fail Better” in your podcast app. We’ll be back soon with a regular episode of Freakonomics Radio. Until then, take care of yourself and, if you can, someone else too.

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Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It’s produced by Keegan Zima, Aria Brodsky, and Danny Mathias; the engineer is Brian Castillo. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced from our side by Augusta Chapman. Our staff also includes Alina Kulman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Julie Kanfer, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, Theo Jacobs, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.