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- [00:00]
Megan McArdle
It's morning in New York.
- [00:06]
David Duchovny
Hey everybody, I'm Andy Patinkin. And I'm Kathryn Grody. And we have a new podcast.
- [00:12]
Megan McArdle
It's called don't listen to Us.
- [00:14]
David Duchovny
Many of you have asked for our advice. Tell me what is wrong with you people.
- [00:19]
Megan McArdle
Don't listen to us. Our take it or leave it advice show is out every Wednesday, premiering October 15th. A Lemonada Media original foreign.
- [00:36]
David Duchovny
Hey, just a quick message before we get started. You can now listen to every episode of Fail Better ad free with Lemonada Premium on Apple Podcasts. You'll also get ad free access to and exclusive bonus content from shows like Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis Dreyfus, the Sarah Silverman podcast, and so many more. It's just $5.99 a month and a great way to support the work we do. Go ad free and get bonus content when you hit subscribe on this show in Apple Podcasts. Make life suck less with fewer ads with Lemonada Premium. I'm David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Meghan McCardell is a columnist for the Washington Post, where she covers economic, public policy, and societal issues. And as we find out in this conversation, pie. She's also the author of the Upside of Down, a book that takes a deep look at failure, why we fear it, why we need it, and how often it lays the groundwork for future success. Megan and I talked about everything from embracing some degree of risk to her nuanced relationship with being a libertarian or a liberaltarian. Here's that conversation. I'm fascinated by you because you were at the vanguard of this kind of re imagining around failure, you know, and this is. Yeah, this podcast is nominally about Failing Better. I don't even understand what that means anymore because I'm sure as you know, the more you interrogate or investigate failure, the less those terms failure and success mean anything. They start to kind of bleed into one another and become part of the same experience, which is life.
- [02:39]
Megan McArdle
Yes.
- [02:39]
David Duchovny
And I think that, you know, you were really early, early on, kind of bridging that. That consciousness of tech failure, which was, you know, we all kind of fell in love with, like move fast and break things, you know, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. It. Fail is. Failure is great. And now, now we're kind of, we're kind of investigating that idea. So I was just wondering. This is not how I intended to begin this conversation, which is always how I fail. But I. I guess I'd ask If. If you were writing your book today, the Upside of the Upside of Down, which I like very much as a title, would you change anything? Would you. Would. Would you like to write an addendum to that book, which is. It's now 10 years old, isn't it? It's about 10 years old, yeah.
- [03:35]
Megan McArdle
More. More than 10 years old.
- [03:37]
David Duchovny
Has it changed at all for you?
- [03:39]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I think I would probably write a somewhat different book now, in part because I'm older. And I think as you get older, the idea of failure and success, as you say, becomes less clear. You know, when you're 30, you have an idea about the world that ends with you, like, you know, living your glamorous life, whatever that is, whether it's on a homestead or, like, jetting around to. Between Khan and Macau. And then there was actually a great line from Tom Hanks where some woman ran up to Tom Hanks and she said, Mr. Hanks, it must be so amazing to be you. And he said, you know, honestly, no matter who you are, at the end of the day, it's just one damn thing after another. And, you know, I don't know many people who really feel even like these incredibly successful people, who none of them really feels like they ever reached that point, even if they did objectively reach that point and acknowledge that they have the glamour job or whatever it is, they're not having the experience they imagined at 30. And so I think now I would think more about. I would probably talk more just about what it even means to succeed or fail, what it even means to, you know, reach what you were aiming for or not reach it. Because I think most people in their lives often realize that the thing they didn't reach that was a good thing and that the thing that they were aiming for was not something that would have made them happy. Some of them realized that maybe being happy isn't all they want out of life. Right. They want some sort of higher meaning or they want to feel like they're struggling in a great cause.
- [05:34]
David Duchovny
I think that I would have done more struggle. That word struggle is very interesting. Yeah. Because I think. I think struggle in many ways is happiness. Happiness is a word that I don't understand either. But struggle feels like immediacy, feels like involvement, feels closer to a transcendent moment, at least. At least if you can look forward to a transcendent moment. And I think as you. As you. As one gets older, one realizes that transcendent moments are few and far between. And I feel like life is in the creating of these things to kind of inspire you to get off your ass and try to figure something out, you know, and it's not the actual figuring out.
- [06:17]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. You know, I actually just had some friends, a couple of friends who I've known for a really long time were at my house for a week. I took the week off, or I tried to take the week off. I don't always manage, but. And we just sat around, we went for walks, we. And I was thinking that, you know, when we were 25, this would have seemed like a very lame vacation. And I can't really point to anything in particular. We just sat around and talked. And a lot of what we did was what people rhdu, which is, you're like, this thing in my body broke. I didn't even know I had that thing. And it was delightful. And we all left feeling so renewed because ultimately, you know, if there was one thing that I wish I could convince younger people of, there's a great line. And I can't remember the name of the rabbi who said it, but he said, when I was younger, I admired people who are clever. And now that I'm old, I admire people who are kind. And I think that. Which I really just completely resonate with because it's easier to be clever than to be kind consistently. But I also think that when you look back and you see who the friends that you still have when you're 50 or 60 are, it's not necessarily the friends you thought you would have. It's not the most entertaining people in your group. It's not the most, you know, exciting people in your group. It's the people who were just there year after year after year. I mean, my friends are very entertaining and exciting and all that, but it's just that, you know, love and friendship and all of that stuff, it is much less about the. The movie High, and it's much more about just the everyday minutes of sitting around and complaining about your divorce or your kids or your. Your torn labrum. And I've had that.
- [08:07]
David Duchovny
I've had the labrum.
- [08:09]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. So. And that. That's. That's actually the richness of just being there with people. Which is not to say I'm very lucky. I have a great job. You've had a lot of success as well, but it really just gets more and more true that on your deathbed, that's not. You're not going to be like, wow, I'm so glad I spent the extra day, like, talking to someone important and doing that. You're you're kind of really. You do look more and more to the, the work you've done that you really think is great, which in my case, I don't know about you, like, my favorite pieces of my work are not necessarily my reader's favor pieces of my work.
- [08:47]
David Duchovny
What are your favorite pieces?
- [08:49]
Megan McArdle
Oh, that's. I wrote a long. I wrote a 3,000 word essay on the history of pie and I loved that piece. I just, it was like my heart and soul. There was a piece that I wrote.
- [09:02]
David Duchovny
Do you love pie?
- [09:02]
Megan McArdle
I love pie. So I grew up. American pie gets a bad rap because almost no one makes their crust from scratch anymore. And making crust from scratch is pretty difficult to do. And it's especially different difficult to do if you've never had it, if you never had a good pie crust. And so, yeah, I am obsessed. My mother and my grandmother were amazing pie bakers. And my grandfather, who had grown up on a farm and left as quickly as possible, owned a gas station in western New York. And then at the age of 50 decided he needed a two acre garden. So the grandchildren would go up every summer and we'd pick all this fruit and then we, we'd make pies and jellies and so forth. But for me, pie, my favorite food in the entire world is pie made with purple raspberries, which are this, Most people don't even know that this kind of raspberry ex. It's not a black raspberry, it's not a red raspberry. Yeah, they don't, they, they don't really ship well. So they're not commercially viable. So you basically have to grow them or buy them right where they were grown.
- [09:59]
David Duchovny
Sensitive berry.
- [10:00]
Megan McArdle
They're a sensitive, delicate. They're special. And this is my favorite food in the whole world is purple raspberry pie. So I wrote, I wrote a 3,000 word essay on pie and family and how to. And also because I am a nerd on how technology had made it had kind of eclipsed the pie.
- [10:21]
David Duchovny
Well, that's exactly what I'm thinking when you're saying this because I know you write on technology a lot.
- [10:27]
Megan McArdle
Yeah.
- [10:30]
David Duchovny
I was wondering if we've lost, you know, in your TED Talk that I watched you talk about borrowing from the future or something like that.
- [10:40]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, borrowing from the future.
- [10:41]
David Duchovny
So that this is not a, you know, you're saying so we should, you know, if we lose our jobs because of AI, well, that's just something we're going to have to swallow because we're, we're giving it to the future. We're paying it forward in some way. But what you, what you don't address in that talk and what I think you're addressing right now in your discussion of PI is do. Do we lose something just by farming out so much of our shit to technology? We lose. Let's say the mastery of the pie crust is what you're talking, is a 19th century skill. Let's say.
- [11:18]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. I mean, it's funny that people say easy as pie now because still say it because pie is much harder to make than cake. But in the 19th century, that wasn't true because the machines that we use to make cakes now and the mixes and all of those things, but also just a stand mixer just makes cake much easier. Baking powder and all of these new novelties. Ovens with regulated thermostats. No, it's absolutely true. But I would say a couple things, and the first is that I think, well, a lot of people have lost pie. That's a choice. I have not lost pie. I have a pie crust thawing that I've froze. I made and froze earlier thawing in my fridge right now. And I'm gonna make a pie tonight that we can preserve things. But yes, it is true, it can.
- [12:03]
David Duchovny
But I think what. And I'm using gross generalizations now, but what technology offers is ease. And we can look at that with a moral valence and say, well, you know, ease. Everybody should have ease. But over the long term, ease eats away at us, I think.
- [12:23]
Megan McArdle
And I think that that's right. But let me, let me think about this. If you ever go to see a beautiful illuminated manuscript like the Book of Kells, right? Or any of the old medieval manuscripts, they're amazing, right? We don't do anything that intricate that, you know, you read something, it doesn't look like that. And a lot of books look like that in the medieval era, but they looked like that precisely because books were so rare and most people couldn't read. And so we did lose something when the printing press came out. We lost a lot of things. I mean, it really is true that the printing press, if you look at the wars of religion, it triggered. If you look at the witch burnings and all of these other terrible things, we lost something with mass literacy. We didn't just gain something. Culture shifted. There's a great book by Walter Ong on the difference between oral and written culture, and it is different, but we also gained a lot, right? And I personally would not go back to the era pre mass literacy Although we might be going back there anyway, I might not have a say in that. But I think that it is true that you. Now, I think what you can do is first of all, think about what's worth preserving. Right. And I think people in your business and in my business are thinking about that a lot right now. Right. AI is enabling movie producers to do things that were not possible before are not possible at that cost. Right. You know, special effects are getting better because it's easier to do things on screens that you couldn't do with physical effects. Although I will say, you know, looking at the old physical effects in, like, Star wars, they were pretty amazing. And there is something tactile about them that I miss in the new CGI stuff when I watch the new Star wars series and in journalism, we're thinking about, what is this going to do to our business from the outside, as people just use AI rather than newspapers, but also, what's it going to do from the inside? Derek Thompson, who just started a newsletter, used to work for the Atlantic, just started a newsletter on abundance and progress. He said, you know, something that really resonates with me, which is that you don't think to write. You write to think.
- [14:40]
David Duchovny
Well, that's exactly right.
- [14:42]
Megan McArdle
Right. And so if you're not doing the writing yourself, that you're not having the experience. And I. I will say, though, that I think most people are not as good writers as.
- [14:55]
David Duchovny
And they don't. They don't care to have the experience.
- [14:57]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, they don't, but they're also. I wonder if they are having that experience. Like, for me, you know, yesterday I was writing and it was going reason. So I just spent, I don't know, six and a half hours. And it just flew by. Right. It just like. And I was actually wrestling with the P's. It was like, this needs to go. This is too long and so forth. But the experience of doing that, of just losing yourself in it, is so intensely. When I get out, I feel exhausted and wonderful. And I think most people just don't ever feel that way about writing. And that's okay. Everyone has their thing, right? And so the question is, how do the people like me preserve what we are getting out of writing right now? How do people in entertainment who are using AI to make images, how do they preserve that experience?
- [15:45]
David Duchovny
Well, the question. The question is also, if you take the cliche of, you know, blood, sweat and tears dripping onto the page, is that part of the page that people are consuming? If AI creates a page of writing, there are no blood, sweat and tears on that page. There are on yours. Is that something that the reader can feel sense, appreciate, or is that just a writer like myself trying to hold up the fact that the process is all important?
- [16:22]
Megan McArdle
I actually think that AI is probably going to split out the middle pieces of work in my business.
- [16:29]
David Duchovny
What it's going to do is journalism.
- [16:30]
Megan McArdle
Journalism, yeah. What it's going to do is take over the kind of just fairly straightforwardly flatly written explainers by someone whose byline. Look, you know, I look at the bylines, but most of our readers don't look at the bylines. When I worked at the Economist, that doesn't have bylines. I used to love when people would say, oh yeah, I've seen your stuff. And I was like, really? How did you know that? Right, because they don't know. They didn't even, they literally didn't even know that the Economist doesn't have bylines. They never looked. But that stuff I think is going to be taken over by AI What I think is still going to be incredibly valuable is number one sources, right? Like people. AI is not going to be able to get congressional staffers drunk for quite some time. So those people, the AI can get.
- [17:16]
David Duchovny
Them drunk on their own supply, though.
- [17:19]
Megan McArdle
Well, fair enough. But it's not going to get them to tell them secrets and then print them. And then the other side though, I think is going to be, it's becoming more and more important. Important to build a relationship with your audience for them to feel like they know who you are and struggle with that.
- [17:37]
David Duchovny
Yeah, I struggle with that. Yeah. Because I have this, well, I have an old fashioned sense that the work should stand on its own. And I have trouble, I have trouble letting go of that. I, I, I, I had it even from the beginning of my acting career where when people were, you know, go on this talk show and talk about the moon, I was like, if the movie's good, they'll go see it, you know, whatever that kind of. And yeah, one, you laugh at me because it's so rid. Ridiculous to think like that.
- [18:02]
Megan McArdle
But I still, no, I actually wasn't laughing. It was more of a friendly laugh because I get it, right. I spent a lot of years building because I did start blogging. And one of the things that works in blogging is building a community. You don't get the reach of the New York Times, the Washington Post. What you get is a bunch of readers and it's a two way relationship and I really like it. But I also know a lot of people who are deeply uncomfortable with it, right? They find it. They want the page between them and their readers. And I get that.
- [18:49]
David Duchovny
You spend a third of your life working. Are you spending it well? For so many of us, we're spending that time in jobs that feel more draining than fulfilling. Maybe it's a job you've outgrown, or one you never wanted in the first place, but still you stay and you tell yourself, I've already put years into this place. What if I make a change and it's even worse? I mean, isn't everyone kind of miserable at work? Let's be honest, those aren't reasons to stay. They're excuses for not moving forward. But you don't have to stay stuck. That's where today's sponsor, Strawberry Me comes in. Strawberry Me matches you with a certified career coach who helps you go from where you are to where you truly want to be. Your coach helps you get clear on your goals, uncover what's holding you back, and build the kind of confidence that doesn't just dream big, but takes action. You'll make a plan, you'll follow through, and most importantly, you'll stop feeling like your future is happening to you and start shaping it on your terms. So if you're ready to get unstuck, visit Strawberry Me Failbetter to claim a special offer and get started today. That's Strawberry Me Failbetter. Stop settling. Start building the career and life you actually want. It's beginning to look a lot like that time of year when we all crowd into cars and airports, stress over finishing off our work, and likely find ourselves off our nutritional game. This year I can stay one scoop ahead with AG1. AG1 is an easy, great tasting daily nutritional drink and it's super easy to work into your schedule. It's trusted by athletes and health minded people everywhere and it's clinically shown to support gut health and fill in common nutrient gaps. Travel that causes strain on our systems is no match for the antioxidants, probiotics and functional mushrooms that support immune resilience. Dark evenings and shorter days may throw off your rhythm, but superfoods and B vitamins can support steady energy without the crash. And with prebiotics, probiotics and enzymes, AG1 helps support regularity and gut resilience even with all the stress and disruption that the holidays can bring. I've done a lot of travel over the past few years, as always, and I wish I'd had this to give me a boost. It's the simplest, all in one solution I've seen and that's exactly what I need when I'm strapped for time. Head to drinkag1.comfailbetter to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 when you first subscribe. That's drinkag1.comfailbetter I believe that humility is a super important quality. We have so much to learn from others and that's why I love Masterclass. Through my own research, I've really come to appreciate the creative practice of the writer Joyce Carol Oates. And she just happens to have a fascinating and in class about short stories. I'm sure that pretty soon I'll be quoting it to anyone who will listen. With Masterclass you can learn from the best to become your best. Plans start at just $10 a month and that gives you unlimited access to over 200 classes. They're taught by the world's best business leaders, writers, chefs and more. And every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. That's the kind of learning I like. Low stakes. Learn to eat more ethically, healthfully and sustainably with Michael Pollan or build habits that stick with atomic habits. Author James Clear these are bite sized lessons with big impact, which means they can fit into even the busiest schedules and they really make a difference. Three out of four surveyed members feel inspired every time they watch Masterclass. Right now our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership@masterclass.com failbetter that's 15% off@masterclass.com failbetter masterclass.com failbetter I would love to kind of backtrack and take me through your own childhood version of family ties, which is what, what I imagine your life must have been like.
- [23:31]
Megan McArdle
I was, I had a pretty normal, I mean a pretty normal Upper west side childhood, which is not very normal, right.
- [23:38]
David Duchovny
Which is very, very liberal, right?
- [23:41]
Megan McArdle
Oh yeah, Upper west side was very, I knew people who went to socialist can't date like, like sleep boy camp. Right. That was still, I think they were closing down by that time in the 70s, but they still existed into the 60s and 70s. And you know, there were, I knew, I knew some older kids of communists who'd gone off to sing like read the Deli Workers.
- [24:04]
David Duchovny
My grandfather was part of that.
- [24:06]
Megan McArdle
He was a, oh, okay. So yeah, you, he emigrated from, from.
- [24:10]
David Duchovny
Ukraine and he, the, the socialist camps. He was a playwright for kids. You know, he, he would write these socialist screed plays for these kids to perform. So yeah, I get it.
- [24:23]
Megan McArdle
What? That must be amazing to read your grandfather's play.
- [24:26]
David Duchovny
Don't have it. Don't have.
- [24:27]
Megan McArdle
Don't have it.
- [24:28]
David Duchovny
Don't. Only have references to it. Oh, no, don't. Don't have any of it.
- [24:32]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, but. So I. Yeah, I grew up in a very liberal milieu. My. The funny thing was my mother's parents were from western New York, and my grandfather was a Republican. He was the head of his county party for a while. He was an alderman, but as far as I knew, I didn't know any Republicans. And I said this to my mother years later, and she said, well, we weren't hiding it from you. I'm not even sure that's true. But then I went to high school at a pretty fancy.
- [25:04]
David Duchovny
You went to Riverdale?
- [25:06]
Megan McArdle
Riverdale, yeah. It was not that fancy then. And then I went. I got, despite my really shockingly abysmal high school gpa, thanks in part to the fact that, like, it was their job to get me into a good school, and thanks in part to the fact that I was born in 1973 at the. Very close to the trowel after the baby boom. So I had a very small generation and Penn was admitting a lot higher percentage of their classmates than they are now of their applicants than they are now. So I went off to Penn. I spent four years there studying English with a minor in economics, which would turn out to be useful, surprisingly.
- [25:46]
David Duchovny
What was the plan? I mean, the shorthand of your sentimental education is liberal to libertarian to what you call yourself now, liberal tarian.
- [25:58]
Megan McArdle
Which I. Yeah, that's about right.
- [26:00]
David Duchovny
And so at this point, you're in college, you're setting goals for yourself. I'm imagining you're reading, you're thinking, I'm going to have something to do in the writing business.
- [26:12]
Megan McArdle
Oh, yeah, no, I decided I wanted to be a writer. When I was 8, I wrote a novel in like one of those black and white composition books.
- [26:20]
David Duchovny
What was it about?
- [26:22]
Megan McArdle
It was about a girl named Janie who goes on a bus. I did not have wildlife experience and going on a bus was about the most exciting thing I could think of at the age of eight.
- [26:30]
David Duchovny
Does she get off the bus at any point?
- [26:32]
Megan McArdle
She does. She meets all sorts of people.
- [26:34]
David Duchovny
She does.
- [26:35]
Megan McArdle
She met a. Talk.
- [26:36]
David Duchovny
Look, look, the bus as a. As a driver of plot is perfectly respectable. And for an 8 year old, I think it's. It's pretty damn smart.
- [26:46]
Megan McArdle
But then I. And then I. I wrote a novel right after college, but it was like the worst novel Ever written in the English language. And thank God I no longer have a copy.
- [26:55]
David Duchovny
Oh, tell me about it. This is a failure. This is a failure.
- [26:58]
Megan McArdle
I need to get. It was, it was a stunning failure. It was. I mean, I hadn't done anything. I had grown up on the Upper west side, I'd gone to private school. I had attended an Ivy League college, and unsurprisingly, my heroine had grown up on the Upper west side attendant Ivy League college. It was about a group of old.
- [27:17]
David Duchovny
Friends that get on the bus. They all get on a bus together.
- [27:19]
Megan McArdle
No. They reunite for Thanksgiving dinner.
- [27:23]
David Duchovny
Well, that's not terrible.
- [27:25]
Megan McArdle
It wasn't a terrible thing. But I was not very good at what I was doing, right? I was good at the sentence level. I was not good at the plot and structure level. But the thing is, everyone, all writers are like this. And so when young writers ask me for advice, the first thing I tell them is, do not go into this business. It's collapsing. But the second thing I tell them is, look, you have to be comfortable with the fact that your work's not going to be very good a lot of the time and that you have to take the not very good work and make it better, rather than thinking, well, I can't, you know, I can't start because it's not perfect yet. It's not perfect in my head. It's never going to be perfect.
- [28:00]
David Duchovny
Perfect in your head. What are the parameters, do you think, that go into a work that's going to be good or a work that's not going to be good? And how, how can you, can you only figure that out by executing, or can you figure that out for myself? It has to do with what is resonating with me in some way. And, But I'll, I won't listen to that. I'll go, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, know, I'm going to make this work. I'm going to, I'm going to make this into something that resonates with me, and I think that can work, and that's where the struggle is. But do you think it's, can you kind of head that off at the pass and is that some kind of advice that you give people as kind of an expert on failure? And it's a success, which is what you are whether or not you, you want.
- [28:49]
Megan McArdle
Look, I, I, you know, so for writers, right there, there's famously two kinds. There's the pantsers and the planners.
- [28:55]
David Duchovny
I didn't know that.
- [28:57]
Megan McArdle
I'm definitely a pantser. Pantser, and by the seat of your pants. Right. You just like. My preferred writing mode is that I'm gonna launch in and then I'm gonna come up, you know, 8,000 words later and be like, wow, that needs a lot of work. My husband's preferred mode is the opposite. He's also a writer, and his favorite mode is he knows exactly how it's supposed to be laid out. He knows what the structure looks like. He's a movie critic in addition to a journalist, so he has a lot of sense of. Movies are much more structured or they're known to be much more like. People talk much more explicitly about structure in the movies than they do in journalism. Right. But I tend to write, try to kind of naturally towards vague goal points where like, okay, here I'm gonna turn. Here's gonna be the surprise, et cetera. Whereas Peter is just like, nope, I know what the sections are. I know exactly what goes in each of them before he starts.
- [29:54]
David Duchovny
Is there a similar. When you're writing a journalistic piece of. Gee, I don't want them to leave in the middle of this piece. You know, I've got to.
- [30:03]
Megan McArdle
Oh, absolutely.
- [30:04]
David Duchovny
I've got to give them something here in the second act of this piece that's going to keep them reading in their seats till the end. Yes, there is, huh?
- [30:11]
Megan McArdle
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So I look at what I'm doing and I say, okay, where is the audience right now? Are they arguing with me? Are they enjoying themselves? Are they getting kind of bored because we just did a whole paragraph of statistics, and then I try to work with that. So if we're getting kind of bored because I just did a whole paragraph of statistics, then I stop and I say, okay, we need a joke. Or I need to just acknowledge. Or if. Or if I think they're confused. We need to acknowledge that you are confused and just ask you bear with me for a minute. I'm going to clear this confusion up. I know that. Right. I think about it all the time. Do you, when you're. When you're writing, talking, acting, think about what the. Think about the audience?
- [30:56]
David Duchovny
Probably not enough. Probably not enough. But. But while you were saying that, I. I was thinking from my. From my own experience of doing a play, and I've only just done one, but. And it was a. It was a dark play, but like, many dark plays had moments of dark comedy in it. And I was amazed at how different the show would play to different. Different audiences. Whether I got the sense almost immediately what version of the play the audience was. Was in for wanted if they laughed, if they just jumped at a laugh right in the beginning, it was like, oh, they want to. They want to laugh. Or if they didn't, it was like, oh, they want to go there. And it was kind of fun as a performer to be led and then lead them into that area. But it was very unconscious. And I think it probably is for you at this point, being so experienced, to have those moments of reaching out, leading the audience, being led by the audience, that kind of a thing.
- [32:04]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, they're just always there, right? I mean, they're just always in my head. I just know, I mean, in part because I am the things. So you asked what, what things do I find go best? And I also think this probably varies by writer, but for me, the things that always go best are the things I am resonating with the things where I am the primary audience, where I really want to read a 3,000 word essay on the history of American pie and why people aren't making it. And I will say that while I don't know that that was the best read piece I've ever done, the people who reached out, the people for whom that was the audience. I got so many emails and letters from people who love pie, loved their moms, wanted to talk about, or their dads in some cases, or their grandma, and wanted to talk about what it had meant for them to have this iconic food and to, you know, come downstairs on a cold, on a like a cool Vermont morning and get the huckleberry pie your grandmother had just pulled out of the oven. And I love those pieces. I love, you know, those. When I am passionate, whether either positively or negatively, when I am passionate about it, those are the pieces that I love the most. And also often pieces that people will come back to me again and again, you know, and say, I remember that.
- [33:31]
David Duchovny
Well, this is what I was going to say is that whatever words you want to put on that feeling, I would put joy on it. It. Not because you love pie, but because you love thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, knowing about it, and you love it. But.
- [33:46]
Megan McArdle
Oh yeah, I definitely actually love it, but also love thinking about it.
- [33:50]
David Duchovny
Yeah, you're 360 around this joy of this, of this subject and that that comes through.
- [33:57]
Megan McArdle
Exactly. And I think, I mean, to go back to the thing we were talking about at the beginning is that do you define success as having a ton of people reading this and being a bestseller or, you know, being interviewed, or do define it as having done that right as having gotten to spend the six hours. And the older I get, the more inclined I am. I mean, you know, I guess in fairness, I've already had a fair degree of success in my profession, so maybe it's now easier to. But the thing itself has to be the success, not how other people reacted to it. Look, you gotta pay the mortgage, you gotta put the. But at the end of the day, it has to be, I think that I did a thing that I loved.
- [34:55]
Julia Louis Dreyfus
Well, hi, everybody, it's Julia Louis Dreyfus from the Wiser Than Me podcast. And I'm not going to talk about food waste this time. I'm going to talk about. About food resources. All that uneaten food rotting in the landfill. It could be enriching our soil or feeding our chickens because it's still food. And the easiest and frankly, way coolest way to put all its nutrients to work is with the mill food recycler. It looks like an art house garbage can. You can just toss your scraps in it like a garbage can. But it is definitely not, not a garbage can. I mean, it's true. I'm pretty obsessed with this thing. I even invested in this thing. But I'm not alone. Any mill owner just might corner you at a party and rhapsodize about how it's completely odorless and it's fully automated and how you can keep filling it for weeks. But the clincher is that you can depend on it for years. Mill is a serious machine. Think about a dishwasher, not a toaster. It's built by hand in North America and it's engineered by the guy who did your iPhone. But you have to kind of live with Mill to understand all the love. That's why they offer a risk free trial. Go to mill.com wiser for an exclusive offer.
- [36:24]
David Duchovny
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- [37:43]
Megan McArdle
Is it just me or are things actually really scary right now? In the world of public health, every day brings another confusing headline. Or yet again, a far fetched claim. Vaccines are somehow up for debate and parents are scrolling TikTok for medical advice. I'm Chelsea Clinton, an advocate, author, investor, teacher, and mom navigating this insane time right alongside you. I hope you'll join me on my new podcast, that Can't Be True, a show that sorts fact from fiction, especially on issues impacting our health. From Limonada Media and the Clinton Foundation. That Can't Be True is out October 2nd.
- [38:38]
David Duchovny
How did you get from liberal to libertarian? Was it. Was it, you know, in the way that. That we rebel against our parents? You know, was your rebellion to be more conservative in this sense? I know that you read Milton Friedman at some point and was.
- [38:54]
Megan McArdle
Yes.
- [38:54]
David Duchovny
And Ayn Rand. You had a pen name that was. That was Jane Doll, right?
- [39:00]
Megan McArdle
Yes. I should explain that. I was never an objectivist.
- [39:04]
David Duchovny
What is an objective.
- [39:05]
Megan McArdle
No, an objectivist is a. And the movement Ayn Rand started. I was. I picked that pen name in the stupidest way possible, which is that when I was young and the Internet was new.
- [39:16]
David Duchovny
When I was young and the Internet.
- [39:18]
Megan McArdle
Was new, the Internet was new. We were all Galloping Song coming on. Yes. So I think it was like 1996. I discovered the New York Times comment forums and I went in and I was lurking and then there was someone I wanted to respond to and he was super lefty of a type that you and I will both recognize fairly well from the Upper west side of like, he called anyone who was to the right of like Chairman Mao fascist. A randroid. A randroid. Randroid. And so I wanted to respond to him and I Then it made you pick a handle and I thought, oh, this'll make him mad. I did not realize how that choice. And then I got it as my email because I already. And I did not realize how that choice would reverberate through my career and So I started, I started changing and yet I kept, I tended to keep fairly quiet about it because I would then went back and lived on the Upper west side and it was only the Internet. Yeah, yeah. Closet gold. I mean I actually remember being in the elevator of my parents building and there was a kind of classic Upper west side person who had like the, the dark hair streaked with gray piled in a messy bun on top of her head. And she wore a lot of like hemp clothing or like unstructured linen. And she was married to a violinist, so you kind of get the type. So she. I got in the elevator in my parents building. I wasn't living there anymore, but I got it. But. And I'm riding upstairs carrying my copy of Free to Choose and all of a sudden I see she's looking at it it and I thought, oh no, she knows what it is. And she just before she gets. And so I'm very silent and I'm just pretending I don't see her. And, and I've known this woman my whole life lightly. And she get. As she gets off the elevator, she said good book. And I was like. It was like I had found the other gay person in my 300 person Iowa town.
- [41:17]
David Duchovny
You were in the Dakota you just met Ruth Gordon.
- [41:20]
Megan McArdle
Yes, and then I told my mother that and my mother said, oh, she's a fascist.
- [41:23]
David Duchovny
Fascist, of course, course. But, but you know what's, what's interesting to me is to, to talk to, to you on this subject because you've, you've slept with the enemy in a way. You've, you've been there, you, you, you did that, you thought about it. And I'm sitting here and I'm looking at our present day kind of conundrums here. And when I look at your progression, I think you can look at it from both sides in a way that I think is really instructive. And I wonder if you've thought about it that way that we are in a moment.
- [42:06]
Megan McArdle
I think there are multiple ways to be a libertarian. Right. There's a way that's obsessed with taxes. I am not one of those libertarians. I have been now since 2007, I think was the first time I was on a panel and just said Republican. The, the cutting taxes thing is done. This is not even a good political strategy. It's.
- [42:27]
David Duchovny
Well, what just happened creating these.
- [42:30]
Megan McArdle
They didn't listen to me obviously because. So I'm not that kind of libertarian. I'm a libertarian who is skeptical of government power in a number of ways on a lot of regulatory stuff. And that's not to say that I think we should just let people just dump their toxic waste into a river. Right? But I think what you're seeing now in California, right, is you can't build houses because the environmental regulation is so costly to get through. Or there's an example in my neighborhood in Washington where the NIMBY's have been delaying this project for 10 years and one of the things that they, you know, negotiating with the developers and one of the things they demanded was a grocery store. But because they keep delaying the project, there's two grocery stores have pulled out and now the third one that they have is smaller than the, the previous two. And the neighborhood is like, no, we have to hold out for the bigger grocery store. It's like, do you want a grocery store or do you want to just have this fight endlessly?
- [43:28]
David Duchovny
But can I interject and use your, use your own kind of arguments against you for a moment, which is you talked about in that TED talk is what do we owe the future? And I think that that is what people are trying to figure out with regulations is what do we owe the future.
- [43:46]
Megan McArdle
I think it depends on the regulation, right. A lot of regulations end up. Look, I again, I'm not a. Just don't ever regulate anything ever. Right. I'm not an anarcho capitalist. I just lean on the side of what if government didn't did less stuff and how we should think about government doing stuff. Right? How we should think about when you give government power, where does that actually end up? Because one thing that I think people do is they compare. They look at real problems in the real world they want the government to fix and then they kind of imagine an ideal government solution and then they compare the ideal solution to the real world thing. But the solution you're going to put in place is not going to look like your ideal system. Right? And I think you can see this, whether or not you supported Obamacare, that Obamacare did not look like what anyone thought it was going to look like. It ended up being incredibly more complicated and covered fewer people and in various ways just wasn't what you'd imagined. Because the real world process of doing stuff is much harder. And if I think about the tech guys, I think that what people think it's about is not so much about, you know, I did this all by myself. No one's allowed to take my money. And it's much more about I am doing this very difficult thing and the government is coming in and trying to tell me how to do this very difficult thing. And they have no idea what it's like to even do the thing. Right. They're standing outside and offering notes and that, that is what maddens them much less the, the, you know, should the tax rate be 40% or 45% because they, those guys have so much money, they're not going to miss it. They really, I don't know, they might quibble with that. But I would say the, the extra utility they're getting from the money they might lose to higher taxes is not much. But the, the ext. They will lose to not being able to run their companies the way they want to run their companies is large.
- [45:46]
David Duchovny
But it does seem to me that they're infected by this idea that because they were success in one area that they know everything about everything else. These people.
- [45:53]
Megan McArdle
Oh yeah, everyone is. All the journalists I know who could totally be off, you know, running a Fortune 500 company if they weren't so busy with their incredibly important reported future on, you know, the future of pizza. Everyone thinks that they.
- [46:10]
David Duchovny
Well, I think we have the Doge experience.
- [46:13]
Megan McArdle
Right, right. And that's exactly what happened is, you know, if Elon Musk had acted. Everyone says they want to get businessmen into. Or everyone on the right anyway, we need to get businessmen in there to bring a real market discipline in. Well, if he'd acted like a CEO. A CEO going in to do a turnaround does not just walk in and fire everyone he can find in the first day. He goes on a listening tour. He tries to figure out how the thing works and what needs to change and then maybe he fires everyone, you know, three months later. But at least he stops to figure out. And Musk didn't do that.
- [46:47]
David Duchovny
But I, I just can't help but believe that the kind of egotism and the blindness involved with these people is endemic at this point. You know, that their massive success has turned them into, you know, these heroic figures in their own minds that think that their success can translate into any other arena.
- [47:10]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I mean, I will argue, because I'm a libertarian, I will argue that anyone who does anything that's unique and takes the kind of risk taking and intensity.
- [47:19]
David Duchovny
There's a lot of heroic risk taking.
- [47:21]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I mean, they took a lot of risk. They put it on the line and they made.
- [47:25]
David Duchovny
Then the question is, do you want your government to be a risk taking entity? Entity.
- [47:29]
Megan McArdle
Well, so this is a really interesting question is how do we think about how the government should take risk in some Ways I do want the government to be more of a risk taking entity. So for example, the way we fund science right now, we tend to fund older scientists who have established labs and we tend to, to fund, if you think about it like baseball, we fund singles instead of home runs. Right. Home runs are harder to hit hit, so you're going to have a lower hit rate. But the Silicon Valley mentality is fund a lot of home runs and a lot of them are just going to strike out. But the ones that don't are going to go take us into the future. We could do more of that with our science funding, but those risks should not be on people who count it, who made plans based on decades long promises that the government gave them. We should not be saying, well, we're going to take a risk with the disability insurance. We actually, the disability insurance system could probably use some reform, but, but not in a way that's going to risk people who are disabled not being able to feed themselves or not getting the assistance they need to, you know, be healthy. Right, that's. Those are different questions. But on the things where the government, the government also does have a role in trying to push us into the future. It does have a role in, for example, funding science research which the Trump administration is, you know, going after in order to get at the woke people he's mad at in universities. And I think that's terrible. Right? This is the opposite of how we should be approaching this. We should be, we should be rethinking our science funding a little bit. But we should understand that this is the kind of risk government should take.
- [49:02]
David Duchovny
You look at the one success of Trump's first term and that was throwing all that money at getting a COVID vaccine. And that was, it was great.
- [49:11]
Megan McArdle
We should do more of that.
- [49:12]
David Duchovny
I mean, I mean I, I don't want to give him credit because like, who wouldn't have done that? I mean any president would have had to have done that. But that's, I'm actually investing in a home run. Yeah, go ahead.
- [49:23]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, it was, I'm actually going to argue that he did it better than, than Hillary Clinton would have for a couple reasons. Okay, well, so for one thing, he had a pharmaceutical CEO running hhs and many people have some qualms about the that. But when you have a pandemic and what you really need is a vaccine, the dude who has been running a company that develops vaccines is exactly the guy. So Alex Azar was a great person to have in charge then because he not only understood we need this vaccine. He understood how trials worked, how to set up the funding so that it would have maximum effectiveness for maximum speed. And then he went out and he also thought about the distribution. Right. He thought about, well, you know, you have to have what's called a cold chain where you, it's always refrigerated as your. How are we going to do that? He got the military involved. And I think that the Clinton administration would have had a hard time doing two things. First of all, that person would almost certainly have been a Democratic official and not an executive who had actually done this job. But the other thing is that I think they would have have had a hard time just saying, sky's the limit. You know what, I am just going to funnel money into. And by the way, this was a cost savings for the American consumer. We saved so much money by reopening the economy that the money we spent on whatever extra we spent on the vaccines was irrelevant. But politically that would have been just give a corporation tons of money, especially a pharmaceutical manufacturer. That would have been a hard sell for Democrats politically within the coalition. And so I actually think, I'm not saying this was like personal to Trump. I do think that by luck, the, it was better to have his administration for that specific job than it would have been to have a Democratic administration.
- [51:19]
David Duchovny
Yeah, I can see that. No, no, really, I can. But, you know, to, to kind of wrap up, I'm just to go back to, to the beginning of our conversation. You know, I mean, I, I'm, while you're saying those things, I'm just thinking of like, we're, we're just so addicted to our ease again, to get back to something that we talked about before, it's like, but that's killing us, you know, that's not killing us physically. That's killing us soulfully, I think. You know, and we talked about how important a struggle is for your process. If it comes easy, it's not necessarily something that's that good for you. And I think that we have, if we look at just all the bubbles that you talk about, like, you know, the, the social media bubbles, all, all the bubbles that we, they're all about ease. They're all about not being confronted, not being made uncomfortable. And that there's something, it seems to me that we've come to at some point recently in history where ease and smooth sailing have, has become the thing that is the most coveted and not the struggle. We don't, it doesn't seem like we want, we want the struggle anymore. When the struggle is actually what makes us the most human and the most grown.
- [52:41]
Megan McArdle
Well, maybe it's just that we have the choice for the first time in human history.
- [52:44]
David Duchovny
Right, I suppose that's true.
- [52:47]
Megan McArdle
We don't, we don't have to struggle against the land, we don't have to struggle against. And I think that that is actually something that we are going to have to think hard about about is how do we maintain our struggle. Because I agree with you, that is something, it's not just something that makes us human, it is something that makes us happy. When you look back at, you know, like when you beat your five year old cousin at pool, maybe you had a good time playing with your cousin, but you don't really feel good about that. But you beat a five year old.
- [53:15]
David Duchovny
Oh, as an adult.
- [53:16]
Megan McArdle
Yeah.
- [53:16]
David Duchovny
I thought you were five.
- [53:17]
Megan McArdle
Right, no, sorry.
- [53:18]
David Duchovny
Yeah.
- [53:19]
Megan McArdle
If you beat a five year old at pool, you just don't feel great about that.
- [53:21]
David Duchovny
That on the other hands, how much money we were betting, really.
- [53:25]
Megan McArdle
Well, fair enough. But on the other hand, if you came in like number 15th at the world Pool championships, you would be sad you didn't come in number one, but you'd feel a lot better about yourself than you would if your metric was I beat my 5 year old cousin at pool. And that is the thing is that what, what we remember is our struggles. It is the things that we struggled for and sometimes the things we didn't get and we feel bad about that, but also the things we did get and we feel great about that because, because of the struggle. That, that, that is what's valuable about it. Right. I just spent a weekend painting an old desk of my aunts and it would have probably been cheaper to go buy a new desk than to do all the. But I love that thing now. I pass it every time and I just smile because it's mine.
- [54:15]
David Duchovny
Well, well, that's why, that's why I find it fascinating to talk to you because you have, you know, you have traversed the spectrum in many ways. If we go like we said in the beginning, from liberal to libertarian to libertarian and what I'm, what I'm often trying to figure out, like many people in the country right now, is how do we speak to one another? You know, and to, to watch you debate yourself is, is exemplary, you know, it's an exemplary way to, to see how the debate might happen because you are at home, home on both sides in some ways, which is admirable, you know, and open. And so, you know, in ending I'd Just like to thank you for having that discussion within yourself and hopefully modeling how we can have start to have this discussion in this country.
- [55:07]
Megan McArdle
Well, it's very kind. Thank you for having me on. This has been an amazing discussion and really enjoyable.
- [55:28]
David Duchovny
Okay, so Megan McArdle, when you talk to a iconoclast like that, it's so easy to meander as we did from subject to subject. And while that's fun, sometimes I can lose sight of things, which is probably good. I think we're finding out that if I have some kind of agenda or place I want to get that's the thing about questions is I realize that the dumb questions are great because they don't imply an answer. I think when I have a really good question, it's because I'm looking for a certain kind of answer and that's not the best question. That's not the best way to find shit. I out to some quotes that I found in her book that I wanted to share with you all the Brain is a failure machine one Dr. Stibel has said the brain is a failure machine. The brain starts shrinking after four years old. When the brain is shrinking, you actually are learning through failure. That's fascinating. I don't quite know what that means, but what it says to me is that failure is a natural state of mind for the human being and that there is no shame involved in that. It's actually how we learn. It's actually what we want. And for some reason over the time of civilization, failure has been stigmatized and something to be ashamed of when in fact failure is learning. It's mind boggling to think of that in a way. Not mind boggling, because yes, that makes sense. We learn by failure, but mind boggling to think that that's our natural state of being. And why did shame arise from that? How did that happen?
- [57:27]
Megan McArdle
Foreign.
- [57:32]
David Duchovny
Thanks so much for listening to Fail Better. If you haven't subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now's the perfect time. Because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus you'll unlock exclusive bonus content like the full version of my post interview thoughts that you won't hear anywhere else. That's more of my recaps on interviews with guests like Chris Carter and Emily Deschanel. Just tap on that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or head to lemonade premium.com to subscribe on any other app. That's lemonadapremium.com. don't miss out. Fail Better is production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zema, Aria Brachi and Donnie Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Kupinski and Brad Davidson. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Whittles, Wax, Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band, the lovely Colin Lee, Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian Modak. You can find us online at Lemonada Media and you can find me at David Duchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon Music with your prime membership.
- [58:53]
Megan McArdle
You know when you're just going about your busy day and a voice asks.
- [58:57]
David Duchovny
You something like why do people have crushes?
- [59:00]
Megan McArdle
Or do dogs know their dogs? The Brainz podcast is here to help.
- [59:05]
David Duchovny
Every episode answers tough questions with funny.
- [59:07]
Megan McArdle
Skits, cool facts, and more. It's a science show for kids of all ages. Whether you grew up with jfk, mtv, tlc, or tmz, brainson is for you. Listening may induce uncontrollable laughter and turn backseat squabbles into harmonious car trips. Find brains on wherever you get your podcasts.