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The journalist Maureen Dowd has many notches in her belt, from feats like winning a Pulitzer Prize and writing pivotal profiles on some of the world’s most powerful people. She shone light on Elon Musk before DOGE and Uma Thurman’s emotional struggle with Quentin Tarantino, all of which is captured in her latest book, Notorious. Even for her, though, the process of writing remains fickle. Both Maureen and I want our writing to place readers in conversation with the greats who came before us, and whether we succeed is always up for interpretation. We never stop trying, though — and only occasionally read the comments. We also commune over a shared value of education once Maureen tells me I was the reason she decided to pursue graduate school.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

David Duchovny, Maureen Dowd

David Duchovny  00:06

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Maureen Dowd is an author as well as a columnist for the New York Times, where she’s been since 1983 she started at the paper as a metro reporter, and before that, she reported on various topics for other papers. She describes the role of a news reporter as a hard one to fill, since she’s had to approach subjects who’d just gone through violence and other horrors. We talk about how she coached herself through doing that work, and how she eventually found her voice. You may know Maureen for her writing on Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent backlash to it, starting in 1998 it was actually for that commentary that she won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Marine has continued writing, and her new book, notorious, brings together some of the most interesting profiles she’s written. Apparently, she didn’t see fit to include the two profiles she’s written of Me, but that’s okay. We talk about the through lines of power and even some behind the scenes details of interviewing those powerful people. For the rest, you’ll have to read the book until then, here’s my conversation with my friend Maureen Dowd.

 

David Duchovny  01:23

Good morning, Maureen.

 

Maureen Dowd  01:24

Good morning, David.

 

David Duchovny  01:26

How are you?

 

Maureen Dowd  01:27

I’m good.

 

David Duchovny  01:28

Good, thanks for doing this shoe on the other foot. I wanted to start with, well, I hope you had a good time meditating on failure in some way.

 

Maureen Dowd  01:43

I always say I have gotten into more scrapes and had more failures than anyone who still seems to have a career. Really. Do you feel that way? Huh? Yeah, because you can always find ingenious new ways to fail. You think you’ve learned a lesson from one failure? There’s some amazing, incredibly clever new way you can find.

 

David Duchovny  02:09

Yeah, that’s, it’s interesting to think about it that way, because I think it’s, it’s really, it’s really the most human of things is failure.

 

Maureen Dowd  02:19

I mean, obviously, when you never learn from success, do you?

 

David Duchovny  02:23

Well, you learn, I mean, if you chase it the same way, you learn that it’s actually failure in disguise.

 

Maureen Dowd  02:29

Some of this is, this is Beckett, right?

 

David Duchovny  02:33

Well, you know, it’s interesting that, you know you’re a reader, and we’re going to talk about, we’re going to talk about books, I hope, and your your career as a graduate student?

 

Maureen Dowd  02:43

Well, you, I just have to tell your listeners that the reason I went to graduate school recently at Columbia in my advanced senility is because of you, ever since I came to interview you in Vancouver or for The X Files. And you talked about how you went for your PhD at Yale, but then didn’t finish your dissertation. I just thought that was the most incredibly romantic thing, and I wanted to do exactly the same thing, except getting my masters was so hard that I couldn’t even pretend to try and go and fail at getting the dissertation right.

 

David Duchovny  03:31

Well, I mean you, you went back to being a student, our first kind of brushes with A, B, C, ds and F’s as as students and you, you went back after a hugely successful Well, during a hugely successful career, and put yourself at the mercy of some Pimply graduate student slapping a C or worse on your on your papers. And I wonder how that felt. You know, going back into that student mode.

 

Maureen Dowd  04:02

Yeah, my first course, it was a British professor. It was a pre Renaissance place, and I got a B plus. And at Columbia, a B plus is an F, but they all wrote exactly the same thing on my papers. They said, you’re a good writer. This paper is so well written and entertaining, but it is not written in an academic style. You know, as you know, you’ve got to have a thesis and you’ve got to back it up, and they like it’s hard when you’ve been a journalist, because the whole thing with a journalist is you take a small thing and then universalize it. You expand on the small thing. And in academia, they want you to do the reverse. You know, they want you to zero in on that little thing. And I never did. I never did learn to write an academic style.

 

David Duchovny  04:56

I think what’s instructive thinking about you. Your style and your career is to go back and look at, I think you are a reader of people and of history and of politics. And I think you approach people as texts to be read in a way. And you and you let, sometimes you even let words kind of lead you in certain directions. You like you obviously love words, and you kind of almost short circuit your own narrative sometimes to follow a pun or the truth in a word. And I don’t, there’s no question there. I guess I’m just.

 

Maureen Dowd  05:38

Readers are always it was funny because I never read the comments, because I am so hypersensitive. When I was little, I I thought sensitivity was like leukemia. I thought it was something that got in your bloodstream. If you were criticized, you could die from it. I thought literally, you could die from criticism. And that’s my been my whole life now, for decades getting criticized, so I never look but I was really proud of a lot of the themes I did after while I was getting my degree at Columbia, so I decided to look at the comments. Oh, you did. All the comments were, is she ever gonna stop showing off with all this hoity Twitty education stuff. But the readers also complain when I use big words, like my favorite word is Ensor sold like you’re in sorce Ling. Very few people are and I try to throw it in there.

 

David Duchovny  06:36

I don’t know what that means either. Well, James Joyce said every word is a novel. And if I could turn this screen around, I get the same criticism as you in my novels. I because I go to Goodreads and I look at the I look, I shouldn’t say that, because now I’m going to get really nasty comments on Goodreads. But I go there to kind of look at what the reviewers are saying, not not the paid reviewers, but the, you know, the people. And I get a lot of shit for using big words and showing off. And, in fact, I don’t know how to explain it, but, and I’m sure I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it’s not, it’s not showing off. It’s entering into a dialog. It’s entering into a conversation with your mentors and your teachers and your for me, it’s trying to continue a dialog that was started in my head when I first started reading. They’re they’re chosen by me in a very intentional way to almost to lead people back to those things as well, and to breathe life into you know, this way of thinking that I think is very valuable still and is neglected.

 

Maureen Dowd  07:52

Also, what you do that I love is in Miss subways You you make it so much deeper by bringing in myth. I mean, if I like, you know that old Barbara Stanwyck movie, Ball of Fire, which is based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I mean, she’s a gangster, small and she has to hide out with professors, you know, old, stodgy professors in a townhouse. And I just love anything where there’s an element of myth. And it’s funny, because now covering Donald Trump and Elon Musk, I feel like everybody always says, which Shakespearean character is Trump? Right? Right? And, you know, there’s a touch of Leo, there’s a touch of Caliban, and lately, I realize there’s a lot of Richard the Third, in the sense that Richard the Third, even though he was a villain, would come to the edge of the stage and with humor, he would tell the audience what bad thing he was about to do. So he let them in on his thinking with humor, and I feel like that’s an important component of Trump. But really, I don’t think he’s like too much like Shakespeare. He’s more like PT […] but I think also he and Elon are like Greek gods because they behave in that way, like capriciously and cruelly. And so Trump would be Zeus with the Thunderbolts, and Elon would be Dionysus, the god of fertility. Because, I mean, that’s how I think of them. Yeah, I love, you know, I love, I just think myth just gives everything a whole different depth.

 

David Duchovny  09:52

Well, I think what you’re approaching there, and what you’re talking about and what you’re teaching when. Refer back. I think when someone like you is rhyming historically, is going back to Shakespeare, is going back to the Greek myths, and talking about our current predicament, you’re really saying underneath it all, we’ve been here before. We’ve always been here. This is where this is where we go. This is where we are. This is not unprecedented, which is like everybody’s throwing their hands up and saying unprecedented every day.

 

Maureen Dowd  10:26

Right.

 

David Duchovny  10:27

And you’re saying no, no, just look back here. Just look back here and look here and what happens in the play to that person.

 

Maureen Dowd  10:35

But that’s why you know these arguments that Shakespeare is now irrelevant or so silly, because human nature hasn’t changed. He dealt with like the Crayola box of human emotions, the primary jealousy, you know, envy, Macbeth like, I guess all of us have something in us that would like to know if we committed a murder, how would we do it, or why would we do it? I mean, he dealt with those emotions that just never change, and you can just see them played out in the White House, you know, all the time. I mean, it’s, I don’t think people realize that, you know, when they vote for a president, it there’s so many things out of their control. The president’s family relationships are going to have so much control over life and death decisions. So yeah, shakes, you know, I just think those basic, primal emotions never evolve. We’re always with them.

 

David Duchovny  11:45

Well, I think your approach is often and what I think people love about your work is that the the political is personal.

 

Maureen Dowd  11:54

That’s it, you know, it’s funny, it’s it’s amazing to me when I look back, because a lot of the guys I started with in political reporting were always sort of, I remember one of them criticized my work as being emotional and not intellectual. But they did not. They felt like you just dealt with the horse race. You know, the statistics, the but they never got and maybe this is an Irish thing, but politics is about people. If the vote for president is like the most personal vote you can make, it’s about your future, your kids future. And also, you know, when America has gone through traumas like Watergate, Vietnam, Iraq. Those were made by Presidents with Gremlins and on Shakespearean emotion type things. They weren’t, you know, calculated by a data set, you know.

 

David Duchovny  12:56

Right, they were just going with their gut, yeah?

 

Maureen Dowd  13:00

Or, you know, I mean, Dick Cheney was the kind of Iago to W I think if he had chosen, maybe people his own age that he knew, instead of getting these older regents superimposed on him, they led, they basically stole his presidency, and He was too unseasoned and insecure to stop them.

 

David Duchovny  13:52

You have a way that you come into a room. You have a way that you interview. I feel like it comes from another time. I feel like your heroes or heroines came from as you referenced 50s movies and things like that. So I see you as this kind of figure that straddles many different styles, modes of truth, modes of interviewing, modes of journalism. So that’s a huge it’s not even a question.

 

Maureen Dowd  14:23

No, well, you know, I’m my family is still astonished that I got into this profession that is so rough and tumble. In the sense of, you know, with a column, when you’re taking on presidents, it’s like being in a godfather movie. You take one of theirs, they take one of yours to go to the mattresses. And my family is is shocked, because, you know, when I was little, I was so shy I could barely speak. I still don’t do TV or that kind of thing, unless I have to promote a book or something, because I do. Us free. So when I first started to be a reporter, and I was covering a suburb of Washington, and they would send me out on crime stories, and I would drive up to the door of something where a woman had just killed her three little kids, or a guy had lost his son on prom night in a car accident, and I would try to knock on the door, but I couldn’t, and I would just go back and put my head on the wheel of my car. And sometimes I would leave and pretend they hadn’t been home. And at some point, I had to have a talk with myself, and I said, you know, you’re getting paid to do this, and if you don’t have the personality to do this, you have to find a different profession. And so I learned how to kind of project a different thing the way, you know, Beyonce has Sasha Fierce, where she just puts on a different thing. And so that’s what I tried to do, because in the end, you do have to go and ask people questions that they might not want to give you the answers to. So you have to work up your nerve and, you know, just be something else. But also, when I first got into journalism, it was mostly men, and they could be very dismissive. I almost got fired once because an editor sent me out for beer, and I brought back light beer was not good, but I used to watch. My brother introduced me to old movies at AFI, and I used to watch film noir and the women clearly dominate the men. So I did study up not on the vixen part of film noir vixens, but on the how to how to be an equal and even a superior to men you were dealing with.

 

David Duchovny  16:57

Well, I think, and forgive me if this is wrong, but you didn’t try to fight the male fire with male fire. You You came. You came with your own fire. So when you, when you go into an interview, and I appreciate what you said about you know the young Maureen Dowd, unable to knock on the door of the parents that had lost a child that is very relatable for me personally, as I’ve been doing this podcast, I don’t like asking people questions about things that might make them unhappy, and it’s something that I have to and, you know, I could, I could kind of parse it and go, yeah, well, you know, you want to be liked too much, or whatever. But when you go into an interview and let’s say, let’s say it’s that, let’s take the musk interview, or even the Costner interview because or the Uma Thurman interview which.

 

Maureen Dowd  17:57

Thurman loves you, by the way.

 

David Duchovny  17:59

I love him. You know, we were in acting class together.

 

Maureen Dowd  18:02

Yeah? She said she she loves you.

 

David Duchovny  18:05

Yeah, I love Uma, too. I haven’t seen her in so long, but thank you for saying that. But do you go in with an a priori in your mind? Do you have an angle that you’re looking to get? I mean, my when I go into a conversation with somebody, I always want to, I want to hear, and this is my need to be liked, probably, but I want to hear their version of the best of themselves first, and then we can get into failure and stuff like that. And I wonder when you go into, I think the Uma Thurman pieces is very interesting, because you kind of got a scoop in that, and you’re not really, you’re not like a scoop writer, you’re a profile writer.

 

Maureen Dowd  18:49

Yeah, I don’t know when I get them. I don’t know what to do.

 

David Duchovny  18:54

So, so you’re sitting there and you’re having this conversation with Uma, and all of a sudden you’re getting a scoop. What are you Yeah.

 

Maureen Dowd  19:03

I mean, when NUMA Thurman tells you that Quentin Tarantino tried to kill her, I mean, you sit up and listen, they had put her in a dangerous position, doing a stunt for Kill Bill or Kill Bill Two, one of them, when she was in the turquoise Carmen Ghia, and they gave her a car, I think it was an automatic when she wanted a gear shift, or they switched the car at the last minute, and they and unbeknownst to her, they switched the route to add a curve, and then he gave, unbeknownst To her, all the stuntmen the day off because he didn’t even want it to be an option that the drive could be done by stuntman, because he wanted to get her face in the rear view mirror with her hair blowing. And it was funny because I called one of a friend of uma Nathan Hawks. Then I said, I have a question about him. And he goes, Did she tell you that Quentin tried to kill her? So this had been something in their circle for a long time. And Ethan was at some monastery, I think, and he had to rush to the set. And he said to him, Hey, man, you know, she’s not a stunt driver. What are you doing? You know, and I was so scared when the story published, because it was so emotional, and she was crying at two in the morning. And, you know, I kind of sat here frozen for three days until Quentin Tarantino gave and interviewed the deadline. He wouldn’t return my calls and said, Yeah, you know, I made a mistake. I put her in danger. And you know, he just copped to the whole thing, which was all she wanted to hear, right? I mean, she had neck and back pain from that accident. They never she spent 15 years getting the footage of the crash out of him, because she just wanted to prove that the people she trusted had not treated her correctly. And you know, who is, clearly she thought at one point she would never walk again. They had to lift her out of the car. And I think the story really helped her.

 

David Duchovny  21:22

Yeah, what I like about that story, and it’s hard, as is, to hear about somebody going through pain like that, it remained a personal story. It remained a personal story between between uma and Quentin, and it nobody was trying to blow it up into a parable of women versus men, or directors versus actresses, whatever it was.

 

Maureen Dowd  21:45

Yeah, maybe it’s, you know, my mom used to say there’s no such thing as a private apology for a public insult or something. I mean, she just needed to set the record straight on all that. And in the end, Quentin decided she was right, and she was right to want that, and he gave it to her, but it took 15 years or whatever.

 

David Duchovny  22:08

Yeah, I mean, it’s something that I talk about a lot, you know, in terms of failure, of forgiveness and forgetting, and just the almost the impossibility at times of forgetting and the difficulty of forgiving, and the form of forgiveness, and as you say, whether it’s public or private, and the the Grace or The generosity to actually forgive an apology. You know, I think we live in a society that is constantly publishing apologies of some sort or the other, and we as people can smell bullshit on certain apologies, and we smell, you know, some are true, you know.

 

Maureen Dowd  22:46

And I think his career was not hurt. I mean, the way they both handled it, it wasn’t meant to push him through the trap door, like what happened to all these other guys.

 

David Duchovny  22:57

It was that was not, that was not her intention either. Yeah, but I’m wondering you’re sitting there and whatever your angle was going in on, okay, this is a profile of Uma. I have certain thoughts I have about Uma. You’re thinking I’m a fan, or, you know, I like this work, or whatever.

 

Maureen Dowd  23:17

And that case, in that case, she had put a comment on social media. Oh, and it was elliptical, but it was pointed.

 

David Duchovny  23:29

Okay, so yeah.

 

Maureen Dowd  23:30

And I saw it, and I thought, wow, you know, it was after the times broke, the me too story, and she wasn’t in it. And I thought, Wow, maybe there’s a story here. So she was starring in a play in New York, and I called and said I saw this quote, and if she has a story and wants to talk about it, I’d love to do it. So that was sparked by her.

 

David Duchovny  23:55

But do you come in generally, do you come into an interview having some a priori thoughts on the subject.

 

Maureen Dowd  24:00

Well, most of the time I’m just it takes me a really long time to get some of these interviews, because people are thinking, I will carve them up, which I only do to presidents or politicians when they have it coming. You know, it’s not my preferred mode of writing. So with these longer profiles, I’m picking people like you, people who I think are really talented or really great leaders or really fascinating, larger than life, people. I mean, you know, my brother took me to Hamlet when I was 13, and I immediately thought Hamlet was my boyfriend, and without realizing he’s the worst boyfriend in literary history, but I got addicted to people who burned through the screen, you know, who just I don’t care about David Franz and novels I don’t want to read about siblings fighting. I get that in my own. Life. I want to read about larger than life, Shakespearean people who have talent and what they do with it. And there was this Shakespearean actor who told me one of the main themes of Shakespeare is you become your own worst enemy. Yeah. And I’m really fascinated with people who are at the top, where they have everything but they become their own worst enemy.

 

David Duchovny  25:52

You say in the introduction, I’ve always been fascinated with how powerful people wield power, how charismatic people create charisma. That’s an interesting line, how talented people nurture or squander their talent. As a Shakespeare fan, I’m endlessly intrigued by the high and mighty self destructing and by those who topple from great heights and somehow soar back Phoenix like so you’re talking about failure and resilience there really.

 

Maureen Dowd  26:17

Yeah, when you were at the White Hot center like Maggie, the cat on the Hot Tin Roof. You know. How do you handle that? Do you use your power for good or for evil? Do you, you know, do you make your life better, or do you stumble because the power is too intense, like it’s in politics too. When I first saw Barack Obama, I thought, okay, this guy’s burning through the screen. It was like seeing a movie star. And, you know, I went on the road with him for a year because I knew this was going to be an amazing story. And he used that power that he had to have this amazing it was the young prince usurping the Queen Hillary.

 

David Duchovny  27:00

So, what have you learned? What is the macro in terms of failure and resilience? But I think we began by saying, you know that these lessons don’t, can’t translate from place to place or time to time. But I would think with that line about creating charisma, that’s an interesting I would like to, like, do a close reading of that sentence, because.

 

Maureen Dowd  27:23

Well, that’s a, you know, that’s a Greek word. And yes, it is, yeah, you know, I’ve always thought movie stars. There’s more than movie stars in the book, you know, there’s tech, lords of the cloud, and singers, comedians. But with movie stars. I do think they’re a little bit like Greek gods. I mean, I just think the rules don’t apply. Average rules don’t apply to them. They’re special creatures, if you have and especially now, because, in a way, social media was like the French Revolution. I was like, with my New York Times column, Marie and Twitter, you know, they overthrew us. They decided they were going to be the stars. You know. Why should they care about movie stars? They can be the stars on Tiktok and of their own lives. So in order to be a real, you know, a star you have to be so much more magnetic now, because everyone has decided they’re the star of their own Tiktok film, you know?

 

David Duchovny  28:29

Right? Well, I’ll say this when I’m watching movies or TV, I will call out, you know, who I think has it, or, you know, they call it, it, whatever.

 

Maureen Dowd  28:41

So, yeah. So who has it?

 

David Duchovny  28:44

Well, let’s just say, when I was casting my first movie House of D, and I was watching a kid show with my kids called Even Stevens, and there was a kid on that named Shia LaBeouf, and I went, got it. He’s got it. I want that kid in my movie. I didn’t eventually get him. Another kid came in and audition. He had it. I chased him out of the parking lot and made him sign the contract to be in the movie. And that was the beautiful young man, Anton Yelchin, who died tragically.

 

Maureen Dowd  29:17

Yeah, I love House of D that’s such a great movie.

 

David Duchovny  29:20

Thank you. So it is just it or charisma, and it goes back to the Bible. You know, we can talk about that with David, the biblical. David, he had charisma. He wasn’t a great guy. He sent Bathsheba, his husband, to go die in war, and then he took her as his lover, and Moses did everything that God asked him to do, and got a shit deal, you know, Moses brought him. He brought Moses up to Mount Pisgah. He said, Hey, take a look at the promised land. You’re never going to get there. You see it? So God himself is a movie fan. God Himself reacts to charisma or not, yeah. And I think it was also very interesting to see Obama back. Out on the trail this past cycle, not as effective like his style already seemed. It was like watching, you know, yes, perform in 1995 after Nirvana came out, you know, it’s like, no, this is not hitting the same way it did.

 

Maureen Dowd  30:18

Well, Obama is a fascinating case this new book. You know, Trump’s an off stage character, and I have Peter Thiel and Elon at a time when he didn’t like Trump, but it doesn’t have politicians in it, but Obama is such a fascinating case about what we’re discussing, the charisma, because he I always thought of him as like Luke Skywalker, he had the force, but he didn’t always want to use it, and he wanted to use it less and less and less. And when you look back at his presidency, I find it hard to remember with him smiling and giving that smile like he did it during the campaign, and when his campaign was in trouble with Reverend Wright, he gave that amazing speech I went to in Philadelphia where he talked about the world from the point of view of his White grandmother in Hawaii and his black father and and he was able to give us both sides of that. And if he had been able to beat that guy and explain globalization and all the other forces that were scaring the working class, instead, it was just like, just get on the bandwagon. You can’t fight it. You know, he never used that gift. And I think he stopped using his gift of charisma. You know, I spent a lot of time investigating this, and when he was at Occidental College, he made a speech, and everyone went crazy, and he was sort of disdainful of easy emotion, and he decided that he didn’t like being able to summon that easy emotion in people, and that’s why he disdained like sound bites. He did poorly in the debates because he wouldn’t accept it was a joust and you had to have a good line, you know, he was disdainful, so he kept that pretty much under wraps in 2007 2008 but then, when he got to be president, it turned out he didn’t like politics. And Michelle, who was also an excellent politician, hated politics. So it was frustrating because the art of politics is persuading people to do what they don’t want to do. That is the business we’re in here in Washington. And he did not want to do that, and he couldn’t pass a gun control bill because there were five guys that he had to persuade or give something to and he refused. He wanted to state his position. It was the right position, right? And people should just come along.

 

David Duchovny  33:07

Well, it’s kind of not how human nature works.

 

Maureen Dowd  33:10

Yes, exactly human nature.

 

David Duchovny  33:12

It’s to go back to literary matters. It’s like Faustus. You have, you can have this power, but there’s a fear that if you exercise it in this this passion, this unreason, that you can control with your charisma, that that you that it’s morally wrong in some way. Just a couple of other things I wanted to ask before I let you go. Thank you for giving me so much time. The the essays in this book are, they range from, I think is 1991 maybe the oldest one, or 1989 even. I mean, they’re different quite a while ago, some of them, right? And in a way, you know, and I’ve gone through this, like, X Files, reboots, you know, in a way like this is, this is a, the journalistic equivalent of a reboot. And the question is, I was like, What’s why? Why? What’s the reason to do this now? And I think when I as a reader, I can read Shakespeare every five years, and it’s a different thing. And I wonder if.

 

Maureen Dowd  34:16

Columbia, it’s like a different thing.

 

David Duchovny  34:19

So I wonder if you have that sense of like, okay, maybe these are old articles or whatever. Maybe you’re not interested in that time, but to read it now. These are still people in play, some of them to read it now. Does it read differently? Is that […]

 

Maureen Dowd  34:35

Interesting? Because I was worried about that. And Al Pacino has a memoir out, and they put together some of Paul Newman’s, you know, diaries into a memoir. And you do learn things when they write about themselves that I couldn’t get as a reporter meeting them once. But I did get things that they don’t have, you know, like Paul Newman. I grew up with a picture of him and his tight white t shirt on my wall. I thought he was my ultimate, you know, Hollywood heartthrob, and then when I interviewed him, I was dumbfounded to find out he wasn’t sexy, but he wasn’t sexy because he had this lifelong struggle with being cast as a sex symbol, and he really didn’t like it, and he felt it consumed his life in a way he didn’t like, and when you spent time with him, you could see that. Because he didn’t have any vibes, he had shut down all vibes going out. I went out with his racing team, and we were in Wisconsin, and we were at the hotel, and we were sitting in the bar after the race, and women were like, lining the balcony and the bar like it was like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. There were just more and more coming, and it was getting kind of threatening. And then this one woman came over and pulled out a chair and sat next to him and said, Hi, Paul, how’s your day going? Or something. And he just looked at her, like she just joined us, as though she were part of the, you know, drink. And he just looked at us, and he said, I’m gonna go to my room, I mean, so he had to withdraw. He knew how to turn it on, like he wanted to bring a six pack of beer onto the plane. And the flight attendant said, you’re not allowed to do that. And he took down his sunglasses and looked at her, and she goes, you’re allowed to do that.

 

David Duchovny  36:46

Well, you have to use your power for the for the good things.

 

Maureen Dowd  36:49

Yeah, use your power.

 

David Duchovny  36:51

But you’re talking about is very interesting, because it’s very similar to the way we’ve just been you’ve been talking about Obama, you know.

 

Maureen Dowd  36:59

Yes.

 

David Duchovny  37:00

That he had this.

 

Maureen Dowd  37:01

But in his power, it wasn’t that, isn’t he sort of, I think it’s more like what you were saying about fast he made an intellectual decision, that he was able to summon emotion in people too easily, and that that was something he distinct

 

David Duchovny  37:19

Or morally wrong in some way.

 

Maureen Dowd  37:21

Yes, I love that formulation, yes.

 

David Duchovny  37:24

Yeah, I’m thinking now about Newman and Obama in the sense of, you know, and charisma, where it’s almost like the deal becomes okay. You love me for this thing that I have no control over. Really, it’s just something that arose in me over time. But I want to be loved, or I want to have effect or effect in the way that I want to control in a way in a different realm, you know, say, Newman wanted to be known as a great actor, and not, you know, sexism or whatever. And Obama wanted to reason you into agreeing with him, rather than passionately persuade you into it. And I think that’s something that we see a lot, or something I think that you kind of get to a lot in your in your profiles, you know, this kind of you’re talking to people who are beloved in some way, and you’re asking them, how would you rather, how would you rather be loved, you know, than the way that you are?

 

Maureen Dowd  38:30

Yeah, and in the Kevin Costner one, you know, it’s just you’re hitting the meta. Certain I was hitting Kevin Costner at the moment, where he was famous, but he was starting to be criticized. He was in JFK, and there was a lot of controversy about that. You know, he played the district attorney, and yeah, then he was in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and there was a lot of criticism about his now, you see it now you don’t English accent, yeah. And he did not like that phase of his career where he was the top Hollywood honk, but he was getting criticized, and he was just in a very surly mood, not only to me, but we were in New Orleans walking to the interview, and he these very sweet senior ladies asked if, if they could take a picture with him at a red light. He wasn’t going anywhere, and he just started yelling at them. Couldn’t they see he was in an interview? You know, it was like watching someone kick kittens.

 

David Duchovny  39:37

But on the other hand, were you also thinking at some point, Wow, he’s really not performing. Kevin Costner, for me, he’s.

 

Maureen Dowd  39:45

Yes, and you only have to do it for an hour, you know? But that’s what’s so interesting. That’s what that’s why. When I went back and read these pieces, they did not seem, uh, older, out of date to me, because. It’s it’s a portrait of someone. They say, life is a series of snapshots, but it’s a portrait of someone at a certain moment. And most of these stars are at their height, or they’re about to go into kind of a different phase of their career. Two of these things, when I interviewed Al Pacino and Paul Newman, they had never gotten an Oscar. And then they got Oscars for the movies that I was writing about. So I feel like that’s a good luck thing if anyone wants to be an energy.

 

David Duchovny  40:32

And also you have, you have musk in a kind of, almost an innocent Elon Musk in yours. And I wonder.

 

Maureen Dowd  40:39

Yeah, so, and that’s, that’s what’s so interesting, because we’re never going back to this Elon Musk, you know, the one I captured. It’s not even that he’s so different. But he his priorities were different because he was focused on the existential threat of AI. He was trying to find a kill switch for AI so that if it got smarter than us, which it’s going to do very soon, you know, and starts improving itself and makes us the family pet.

 

David Duchovny  41:13

Can I bring it back to what we’ve been talking about? Just because what you said just struck me. It’s like our relationship to AI is very much the relationship we’ve been talking about with Obama and Newman with respect to their charisma. You know, it’s like AI is our charisma. It’s our magic power. It’s going to be and we have to start discussing it in terms of morality, whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, and not just because we can do it. Do we do it?

 

Maureen Dowd  41:41

Yeah, you know, Peter Thiel has, there’s a piece on him in the book, and he has an interesting line that made me think of you. He said, when AI gets consciousness, it will be like extra terrestrials landing on Earth. It will be like that. It will be like this whole other species among us, and then things are going to start moving so fast that unless we have some prior planning, it’ll be too late. It probably already is too late, because now the lords of the cloud have taken over Washington and gotten rid of all the Watch Dogs, the little Doge boys are getting rid of all the watchdog groups and inspectors and, you know, they’re just dismantling the things that would have so regulation on AI is not even being discussed anymore in Washington. I mean, it never was really but so I captured Elon at this moment where he wanted to be an advocate for humanity, and now Elon is busy. He himself has turned into an existential threat to government in Washington, so he isn’t paying attention. So no one’s paying attention. So any year now, you know this, aliens are landing among us, and there’s no one anymore who’s looking out for us. Let’s end on a positive, okay, destruction of humanity.

 

David Duchovny  43:20

Yeah, we could end on that, but I’d rather end on like, what’s, what’s the ambition at this point now you know, to be at this place in your career. Is there a book in your.

 

Maureen Dowd  43:33

Go for that PhD?

 

David Duchovny  43:35

Well, my, my mom, who has passed, would be very proud of you if you did. I she, she’s, she had dementia the last 678, years of her life, and she would, every time I saw her, she would ask me if I was going to finish my PhD. But for you, do you have a, do you have an ambition to write the story of you going back to graduate school, to write the story of you confronting literature again after all these years, and all the things that would bring up in you, which would bring in up your your early life, probably your Catholicism as well. And it because that’s what going back to school, does it? It makes you young again in that way. And you get to you get to confront these things that you confronted as a young person from the place who are not I wonder if you think there’s a book in that, or is it just the PhD.

 

Maureen Dowd  44:27

I don’t know. You know, one time many years ago, I told my mom that one of my fellow columnists was writing a memoir, and she thought about it. She goes of whom, I think that put the fear of God into me about, yeah, not being vain enough to write a memoir.

 

David Duchovny  44:51

Well, I think your your mom is right, but she’s wrong about you, because I think you are a character, and I. You are a character in your pieces as well. And I think people are interested in you, not only as a writer, but also as a figure. And I think as what I got back to earlier, just speaking about whatever your style is, how much of it is intentional, I think, and how much of it has just grown over the years, or I think people are interested in that. So I think that there is a story that that would be interesting in a memoir.

 

Maureen Dowd  45:28

But David, your mind, you caused me to get my master’s degree. So I’m gonna listen to any advice you have for me.

 

David Duchovny  45:39

Well, I will just speak to you, as my mom might, and I’d say, go get that PhD. All right. Thank you so much, and I’ll be in touch. I hope we stay in touch. Thank you.

 

David Duchovny  46:03

Um, there was one quote from Hunter Thompson that I had wanted to run by Maureen that I didn’t get to. There’s one Hunter Thompson was having trouble with Jan Wenner at Rolling Stone. And he said, I think Jan Wenner should be ashamed, because Rolling Stone is not more of a weapon than a tool. And I wonder about journalism these days. You know, it’s a time when I think journalism needs to be a weapon. Hunter Thompson was, of course, talking about the Nixon years, rather than a tool. Some something that I think all journalists are thinking about right now, also was very moved by her discussion of how she did not have the balls or the toughness to go knock on doors of you know, parents that might have lost a child in search of a story and that she had to steal herself, toughen herself up in order to become the journalist that she is, but there was that initial failure of nerve that she overcame. Very instructive.

 

David Duchovny  47:26

Thanks so much for listening to Fail Better if you haven’t yet, now is a great time to subscribe to Lemonada Premium. You’ll get bonus content, like my thoughts on conversations with guests including Alec Baldwin and Rob Lowe. Just hit the subscribe button on Apple podcasts or for all other podcast apps, head to lemonadapremium.com to subscribe. That’s lemonadapremium.com.

 

CREDITS  47:43

Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby.  It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias. Our engineer is Brian Castillo.  Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel.  Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer and me, David Duchovny.  The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […].  You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny.  Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.