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“Who can explain the athletic heart?” These are the words Sally Jenkins’ father would ask, driving her to follow in his footsteps and become a groundbreaking sportswriter. From eating a cheeseburger alongside golf legends as a child, to writing memoirs of the world’s top athletes and coaches, Sally has had a unique look into the lives and minds (and hearts) of some of society’s most exceptional individuals. She shares the lessons she’s learned from athletes ranging from Lance Armstrong to Billie Jean King, how they can apply to all of us, and why losing might be the best thing that can happen to you.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Sally Jenkins, David Duchovny

David Duchovny  00:00

Speaking with Sally Jenkins and, you know, famously, she wrote two books with Lance Armstrong, who infamously, after those books, was was found to have been taking performance enhancing drugs and shamed, and you know, we all know the story there. And there was also a, you know, obviously, a personal relationship there between writer and subject, and we talk about all that, but it got me thinking about performance enhancing and I started to think about performance enhancing drugs in all professions, most of us, I’d say 98% of us, are taking some kind of performance enhancing drug or food or supplement or something to help us get through our days and our days get through our nights. So are we going to have to put asterisks across everything you know, are we going to have to say this novel was written with the help of caffeine and therefore should not be should not get the the reviews it should get I started thinking about all the actors who have always acted a little buzzed. Should their awards be disallowed because they calm their nerves with booze? Or they opened up their imaginations and they freed their inhibitions by having some booze or smoking a joint and doing a take? Are we going to investigate them and take away their their awards? Or should we? Should, should? What about prosthetics? Are those performance enhancing? It’s all a very strange thing that we do in sport where we have this idea that there’s an objective performance, a clean performance. And I think the problem is with us and our conception of what we think is clean. And I think that’ll change. I, for one, will be, will be out there picketing the Oscars against any kind of prosthetics.

 

David Duchovny  02:01

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Sally Jenkins is an award winning and celebrated sportswriter. She’s been a columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post for over 20 years. It’s not an understatement. She’s been a trailblazer in a male dominated profession. She was the first woman inducted into the National sports writers and sportscasters Hall of Fame. Sally’s written several books. She’s teamed up with some of the most influential figures in sports to help them tell their stories. This includes the legendary basketball coach, Pat Summitt and Lance Armstrong. But we start by discussing her latest book, The Right Call, what sports teach us about work and life, where she draws upon her decades long career to deliver practical, real world advice for all of us. Here’s our conversation.

 

David Duchovny  03:06

Hi, Sally.

 

Sally Jenkins  03:07

Hi, how are you?

 

David Duchovny  03:08

I’m good, how are you doing? Nice to meet you.

 

Sally Jenkins  03:10

Good, nice to meet you too, after all your travels.

 

David Duchovny  03:14

Yeah, I loved your book. The Right Call. I mean, I just, it seems to me like a distillation of a career, in a way, not not that you’re, you know, ending, not that you’re retiring at all, but it just felt like, to me, like somebody bringing to bear, you know, an entire career of wisdom and observation onto a bigger canvas of trying to figure out, well, what are the what are the main themes that I’ve been dealing with my entire career? So I loved it for that, you know.

 

Sally Jenkins  03:49

Well, you’re very kind. I’m very flattered to hear that. You know, my father used to ask this rhetorical question, who can explain the athletic heart? And he really, he made it sound like the most important question in the world, you know, and because it feels like if you could explain that question, you could explain, you know, everything.

 

David Duchovny  04:10

When you said that, I felt a little twinge of teariness come to my eyes so I’m with you 100% on that, you know, I’m a former, you know, you know, athlete myself. I call myself an athlete, whatever. But my heart that I got in touch with through athletics, is the favorite part of my heart. I think sometimes you know, because you really have to, you come face to face with your own bravery and your own cowardice. And you know, you know if you choked or not. You know, even if you didn’t choke on the outside, you know how you were feeling. And it’s, it’s an amazing, you know, face to face that you’ve got to do with yourself. And there’s no bullshitting, you know, there’s no bullshitting.

 

Sally Jenkins  04:58

I couldn’t agree more. And I think that what athletes do is they don’t just go, I choke, they go, why? Why did I not bring it in that particular moment the way I wanted to? And, you know, realizing their process around that really altered me as a writer, and you’re a writer and an actor, which, you know, I think everything is athletic on some on some level, you know.

 

Sally Jenkins  05:23

Everything is performance.

 

Sally Jenkins  05:25

Right?

 

David Duchovny  05:25

I want to get to that, yeah.

 

Sally Jenkins  05:27

From a professional standpoint, we’re all performers. We’re asked to perform every day when we don’t feel like it, you know, and we’re asked to do two tedious things quite often that we don’t want to do, and so it’s who can, who can cope with that the best on the day in and the day out. So, you know, the book was really, there’s so many things that had nagged at me over a 35 year career that I wanted to pull all the threads together, you know, and into the full tapestry,

 

David Duchovny  05:56

Yeah well, for me, it was a beautiful job, because, I mean, just in terms of what I what I think I’m doing with this podcast, because I don’t really know, you know, I mean, they’re, you know, you paint the picture to find out what the picture is, right? So, and I’m sure you do that as a writer.

 

Sally Jenkins  06:13

You throw the paint up on the wall.

 

David Duchovny  06:14

Yeah, so my color that I’m using is failure, right? That’s my, my major color for this, whatever it is that we’re doing. And you know, you you have quotes here, failure is the most common experience in the world, yes, yeah. And yet we don’t, we don’t talk about it like it’s like it joins us all. We talk about it like it separates us into, you know, a shameful space of loneliness and regret you know.

 

Sally Jenkins  06:41

Boy, isn’t that true?

 

David Duchovny  06:44

How do we fix that? Let’s, let’s fix it. Let’s figure it out.

 

Sally Jenkins  06:47

Yeah,  it’s so stigmatizing, right? You know, we’ve built this stigma around, you know, loser, you know, the big L on the forehead, it’s a scarlet letter, right? And you’re right, it’s separating. It’s, you know, it’s the foundation for all what you might call bullying in the world. You know, it’s the.

 

Sally Jenkins  07:04

I hadn’t thought of that.

 

Sally Jenkins  07:05

Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s really a, it’s dehumanizing, you know, the way we treat it in a lot of ways, it’s the, it’s the bedrock of the worst part of elitism. I love elitism. I’m an elitist. But there is a downside to it.

 

David Duchovny  07:20

What do you mean by that? You mean in terms of athleticism, and.

 

Sally Jenkins  07:24

Yeah, excellent, you know, striving for excellence in what you do. And you know, Fran Liebowitz says, Look elitist. There’s an assumption within elitism that you have an expertise that makes you a worthy critic. You know, of other work. You know, why is some work good? Why is some work not so good? And you have to have a sense of elitism in order to do that.

 

David Duchovny  07:48

Well, you’re getting, you’re getting to a bit of a pet peeve of mine, which is, like, when people say, oh, you’re being judgy, and I’m like, I’ve spent my entire life learning shit so I can be judgey.

 

Sally Jenkins  07:59

Exactly.

 

David Duchovny  07:59

You know, I’m not. I’m not being a hater. You know, that’s the other side of it, whatever. But I’ve been collecting thoughts, wisdom experience for a long time now, and that enables me to have an opinion. And I won’t be, you know, you can try to talk me out of it. I listen to your opinion, but I know in my gut and talk about sedimentation again. It’s all been swirling around there for many years. When I see bullshit, I know it. When I see sports, when I see a choke, I know it, you know. And you can’t really talk me out of it. And my judgment is what I have.

 

Sally Jenkins  08:35

Yeah, and when you see the when you see the right thing, when you the great thing, when you see, I mean, there’s two quotes that come to mind. One is Mark Twain that the in writing, the difference between the right word and the and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.

 

David Duchovny  08:53

And Mark Twain, let us, let us all be clear. Mark Twain could hoop. He could hoop.

 

Sally Jenkins  08:58

Yeah, you know, Tom Stoppard’s great monolog about the sound of the cricket bat, hitting the hitting the ball, when a when a ball is hit. In cricket, there’s this walk, you know, that stopper describes, and it’s a very athletic passage in Tom Stoppard.

 

David Duchovny  09:13

I didn’t know that marvelous, yeah, having having grown up with the sound of a baseball on a wooden bat, I then had to acclimate myself to the weird sound of a baseball hitting aluminum band, you know, metal.

 

Sally Jenkins  09:25

Yeah, which I don’t like. I don’t know anybody else.

 

David Duchovny  09:30

I don’t think anybody likes it, but I did like the extra 10 feet I got on my swing. But I’d love to start at the beginning with you, because, as you mentioned, your dad was a sports writer and quite a well known one, and a great one. And I wonder, where did you grow up? What was it like growing up? Were you were you into sports yourself through your dad’s interest in sports? Was your dad an athlete? Your brothers all that stuff.

 

Sally Jenkins  10:01

Yeah, I came to sports writing the way Austrians come to skiing. You know, it was a full immersion you know, childhood birthright. My dad was a sports writer for Sports Illustrated magazine. I was born in Texas, but raised in New York City. He went to work for Sports Illustrated magazine when I was very small, and he was away every weekend, at at football games, he covered World Cup skiing, Olympic skiing. He covered golf and college football and then pro football.

 

David Duchovny  10:30

I’m sure I’ve read them. Let’s put it into context. There Sports Illustrated when I grew up, that was not only the Bible. It was the only, the only place that you could go that what for, what wasn’t daily sports writing or coverage, for in depth coverage, really, I’m thinking, right? I mean, I guess there were news, but.

 

Sally Jenkins  10:48

Yeah and it had a literary quality, you know, it was, it was kind of the New Yorker of sports. They had a lot of writers in its pages that you would consider, you know, literary writers. My father was a best selling novelist in addition to being a sports writer. And so were a lot of other, a lot of other people at the Met, you know, George Plimpton wrote for the magazine. You know, people like that, people of literary aspiration. And so it was better than the average sports page. It was difficult for for a long time, for anybody to compete with Sports Illustrated. It’s kind of a tragedy with a tragedy. What’s happened to the brand.

 

David Duchovny  11:24

Yeah, my dream, you’ll relate to this, but my dream as a kid was to make it into faces in the crowd. For people that don’t know what faces in the crowd was, it was at the back of the magazine. I’m thinking they would, they would list like three or four or five young kids, boys and girls, who were, you know, the elite at that age, at whatever sport they were doing. And as I said, my dream was to be a face in the crowd.

 

Sally Jenkins  11:50

Yeah, there’d be a little close to stamp picture of you.

 

David Duchovny  11:53

Exactly.

 

Sally Jenkins  11:54

Yeah, I think Andy Reid was in faces in the crowd as a he won the punt, pass and kick contest.

 

David Duchovny  12:00

Really.

 

Sally Jenkins  12:01

Went on to become the head, you know, head coach of Super Bowl winning Kansas City Chiefs. But Andy Reid is a face in the crowd.

 

David Duchovny  12:07

Yeah, and you discuss him in your book as well, in a very interesting way, because he, he came back from quite a lot of, if not failure, then just not, not full success, to crazy amount of success now.

 

Sally Jenkins  12:20

I mean, he got yeah, he got fired for he couldn’t win the big one they said.

 

David Duchovny  12:24

Yeah.

 

Sally Jenkins  12:25

Mismanaged games. He was considered a guy who mismanaged the clock, mismanaged play calling, and all of the things that he’s renowned for now.

 

David Duchovny  12:33

Do you think that that changed with with experience, or was it just post judging from the lack of success to, Oh, this must be the problem. And he was always kind of a genius at it just didn’t work out. Which do you think it is?

 

Sally Jenkins  12:47

I think people mature in their craft. And I also think that age gives you a certain willingness to die with your boots on.

 

David Duchovny  12:55

Really? So I do think as you get older, you’re willing to take the big swing more than when you’re younger.

 

Sally Jenkins  13:00

I think so well, I think that I think in a different way. I think when you’re young, you have this great sense of experimentation. You want a rule break, you know you have to master the rules in order to break them effectively, and so you’re sort of learning the rules while you’re breaking them. But then as an older person, a more mature person, I think you can feel a certain command of the fundamentals that you lacked as a younger person, that gives you the ability to break them more effectively. So where your younger work can look very sort of raw and vital, but also really, really flawed or excessive in some ways, and then your mature work looks has real surgical can have a real a real precision to it, a real edge.

 

David Duchovny  13:39

We can hope, yes, if you keep paying attention.

 

Sally Jenkins  13:43

I think the trick is to keep scaring yourself, don’t you?

 

David Duchovny  13:46

Elaborate on that what do you mean by scaring yourself?

 

Sally Jenkins  13:48

Well, I think you have to. I think you have to keep taking on fresh challenges that make you a little uncomfortable, so that you discover your weak spots and your vulnerabilities and where you actually really, really need to improve. And I think that that’s what Andy Reid did. I mean, one of the things he does that interests me so much is he will script the opening plays of a game, and they’re really diagnostic probes. It’s like the plays that he’s calling. He wants to see how the other side is responding to all of that. And he’s got this great brain and this great sense of organization, and he and he learns from those things over the course of the game. And they may not look very good at first, but by the fourth quarter, he’s got a couple of plays in his hip pocket that he is pretty sure is going to really sting the opposition. And I think that that’s something he really had to learn over, you know, 35 years.

 

David Duchovny  14:37

That’s it, makes me think of a lot of things. One is not, you know, the most boring things to tell other people about your dreams. But I had terrible dreams last night. I knew I was going to do this conversation with you early, and I had terrible dreams that I was going to oversleep. I had those I’m on a train and they’ve lost my luggage dreams, and so you talk about scaring yourself clearly, you know, podcasting, whatever, interviewing, is new to me, and it scares me. You know, even though I’m I don’t feel scared talking to you or whatever. Clearly my unconscious was like, you’re not prepared enough you know, you shouldn’t sleep. You can’t sleep. If you don’t sleep, it’s going to be screwed up. And I was chasing my luggage. I ended up losing my guitar. I found my luggage, but I lost my guitar. I do not know what any of it means, but I will tell you that I’m scared.

 

Sally Jenkins  15:27

Okay, that’s really strange, because the dream that I had right before I woke up this morning was that I couldn’t unlock my phone or my laptop or my iPad, and so I couldn’t communicate with anybody.

 

David Duchovny  15:37

So we’re still scared. This is good. This is good, the other thing I thought, well, probing was a very interesting thing that you say, because you see boxers do it, you see tennis players do it. You see a lot of one on one athletes do it. And that takes wisdom and restraint, you know, and not coming out and spending it all in the first 30 seconds of the first minute, the first game, the first set. You know, the wisdom to know that this is a long game we’re playing.

 

Sally Jenkins  16:09

It takes a real lack of vanity. One of my favorite you know, we’re in the middle of Wimbledon right now, and this is one of my favorite statistics. Roger Federer talked about this when he gave a commencement speech at Dartmouth a few weeks ago. So even the greatest tennis player in history only wins about 54% of the points they play. It was true of Federer, Nadal Djokovic. It’s true of currently. It was true of Martina Navratilova, Chrissy Everett, you name it. John McEnroe was around 50% Johnny Jimmy Connors was like 51% No, no one does better than 50 to 54% and when you look at a match, a five cent match, you can see that the difference comes down to over five sets. A men’s a men’s Grand Slam tennis match, the difference comes down to about eight points. So even a guy who’s lost a really, really painful match is probably, I mean, Frances Tiafoe the other day was only eight points worse than Carlos Alcaraz in their match. So it takes the ability not to be embarrassed by those losing points and to understand or by a six, two set in which you may only have lost three crucial points. And tennis players, the great ones, really learn a resilient a mental resilience, as much as a physical resilience.

 

David Duchovny  17:55

If we go back to your dad and and sportswriting and you’re kind of, you know, you’re a young kid, or you’re a teenager, and you’re thinking about, what am I going to do with my life? Am I going to go into dad’s business? You know, this kind of stuff, get me inside your head at that, that kind of pivotal moment, and you’re.

 

Sally Jenkins  18:13

Well, the most, the most visceral impression it made on me was that sports writing could take you to Europe and country clubs, that was a very.

 

David Duchovny  18:23

That’s like, that’s like me saying I want to be an actor because I like craft service, yeah, right, like the free candy.

 

Sally Jenkins  18:30

So, you know, as a kid, you kind of approach it from that standpoint, ooh. You know, I get to go cool places with with dad. I was very smart. My brothers would pick football games because they were guys, and I would pick golf tournaments because I I was strategic. I understood golf tournaments lasted four days, and a football weekend was only two days, right? So, uh, anyway, but you know, from a very young age. I mean, I think I went to my first US Open golf tournament when I was seven, and my first British Open when I was seven. We traveled with him in the summers. So that meant golf tournaments. And it was fascinating, you know? I mean, I literally can remember, my father was doing a feature story on Tom Watson, the great grand slam golf champion. Tom Watson, and I was at a tournament in Akron, Ohio, and my dad had to go do some work, and so he sat me down in the restaurant at the country club there and said, you know, get yourself a burger. And Tom Watson saw me sitting alone, and he and his wife came over and sat down to keep me company. So, I mean, I remember having a cheeseburger with Tom Watson when I was really probably 13 years old. So I feel like I’ve been around athletes my whole life and sort of understood a little bit of their psychology and gotten to know them, some of them, well enough to really talk to them and pull the curtain back and with the right call, what I really wanted to do was, was, again, you know, pull it all together. They’re individual things that I’d noticed and picked up on over the years, that my father and I would talk about sometimes, and I. I really I’d never read a book that that, you know, there’s some books about the neurology of sports, there are some books about leadership, there are some books about decision making, and but I’d never seen it all pulled together in one comprehensive picture. And then one of the things that I really believe is that we waste athletes. We waste the learning that we can get from them. We view them as trivial. We view them as celebrities who have nothing extremely important to teach us. They’re there to awe us and entertain us, but not especially all the time teach us. And yet, on some gut level, we really do know that what they’re doing is important, because we spend an awful lot of money building stadiums to watch it. And you know, as someone who’s just spent time in Greece, you know, sometimes you’ll enjoy this, like a lot of times I tell audiences, or I tell people I’m speaking to look at this from an archeological standpoint. Someday, people are going to look back at our culture and draw conclusions about us based on these really, really large stadiums that they dig up, and they’re going to say, Well, we know something about them. We know how much they valued play and competition, and that’s true of the Greeks too. That’s one of the things we really do know about Greek culture, is the the importance they placed on competition and compete. Competitive cultures can create genius cultures, and that’s one of the things that in cultural studies, there are such things as genius clusters, and a lot of them come out of highly, liberally competitive cultures.

 

David Duchovny  21:29

Right, so were that, was there any hesitation or fear about going into the family business?

 

Sally Jenkins  21:40

Very much. So I stayed out in California and failed quietly at a at a couple of California papers that that at the time, did not get huge national distribution. I covered high school I covered high school football in Marin County, yeah, in the rain for the San Francisco Examiner for two very, bedraggled, wet, muddy, years.

 

David Duchovny  22:02

Yeah, how did you feel during that time? Did you feel like, Oh, I’m I’m no good at this, or I’m paying my dues.

 

Sally Jenkins  22:07

I felt like I was paying my dues. My father said, learn your craft. And he said, You can’t learn your craft without writing every day. And you know? He said, whatever you decide to do, you need to. You need to learn your craft, and a newspaper is is the place to do that. You write every day. You learn to write on deadline. You learn to beat writer’s block, you learn to get it right, to have a sense of accuracy. And he just thought newspaper writing taught really great fundamentals.

 

David Duchovny  22:34

But you went to when you when you were in college, you studied English literature, right? So, so there was, there was the notion, at some point, I’m going to be a fiction writer and not a journalist.

 

Sally Jenkins  22:50

Yeah, early in college, it wasn’t always necessarily writing. I thought I might. I toyed with being a history major. I’m a history junkie. Writing sort of evolved. I went to work at the school paper as a freshman. My dad said, you know, it’s a good place to get to know people. It’s a large campus at Stanford University. It’s a much bigger school than you’ve ever been around. And I knew a couple people on the school paper already. They were upperclassmen who had interned at Sports Illustrated and my dad said, why don’t you, why don’t you wander over to the school paper and introduce yourself? And so I started very early. Think my first beat was water polo, which, at Stanford was an Olympic sport. We had a lot of Olympians on that team, so it was a great place to cut your teeth. Applied to a bunch of big papers right out of college, and didn’t get a job, like a lot of kids and and I got laid off very early. I got laid off from my very first job at the San Francisco Examiner after two years of high school football.

 

David Duchovny  23:45

Did that make you doubt?

 

Sally Jenkins  23:46

Oh, yeah. You know, I had anxiety attacks sure, I was breathing out of a paper bag. I took a job at the old la Herald Examiner as an assistant to the gossip columnist, which was the only only job I could get. Yeah, it’s the only job I could get.

 

David Duchovny  24:01

Spilled a T.

 

Sally Jenkins  24:02

Yeah, yeah. I mean, my job was terrible. The one I remember having to make a phone call that Midler had just played, had just played, and I had to call her publicist and ask whether she had exposed one breast or two on stage.

 

David Duchovny  24:16

Matters of these are matters of world important.

 

Sally Jenkins  24:18

Yeah, I remember getting screamed at.

 

David Duchovny  24:21

What was it? Was the answer, by the way?

 

Sally Jenkins  24:23

I think it was just wine. She’d come on stage in a big diaper. And something was not potion, you know, it was a it was more defyingly Low work, but I did it to earn a paycheck. And lived in a little squalid, little studio apartment off of, uh, Olympic Boulevard.

 

David Duchovny  24:42

But take me back to that time, because that’s a that’s a time. You know, most of the people that I’m talking to on this podcast are successful, but I’m trying to get back to the place where it wasn’t written that way, it wasn’t a sure thing. You’re freaked out. How you get your shit together?

 

Sally Jenkins  25:01

I got my shit together through another critical piece of advice that I think my father gave me where, I mean, he basically said, Look, you don’t get the job or the assignment that you want by doing the job or the assignment that you don’t want poorly. And so you may not like what you’re doing right now, but you have to do it well, because that’s the only way.

 

David Duchovny  25:21

You were raised by Yoda, apparently.

 

Sally Jenkins  25:23

I mean, I wasn’t, I mean, I was raised by this guy who, you know, was not a very conventional father. He was gone a lot. He was, you know, he everybody always associated him with drinking scotch and making it all look very easy. But he was actually really, really dedicated to his craft and to his kids and his family, and never drank at home, work through the night with a real unswerving concentration on deadline. Made it clear he would tell us, you know, I really love my job, and you you should appreciate that, because 90 I remember he said it all the time. 99% of the people in this world don’t like what they do for a living. They do it because they have to. And if you have a job, if you find a job you like, you’re one of the real lucky people on the face of this earth. And so, you know, the first early career reversals where I was making mistakes and getting laid off, and because I was young and they didn’t need me, and I wasn’t that good, it was just, you know, go back to the fundamentals and learn. Learn something, work hard at the job. You don’t want to try to get the job that you do. And I spent, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half in LA and then a job came open. I was hustling letters to sports editors and stuff. And a job came open covering small college basketball up in San Francisco at the San Francisco Chronicle, which was the larger paper in San Francisco, and so I, I managed to grab that and was working desk shifts at night. I would, I would cover my beat during the day, write a little story, and then take a desk shift at night, writing headlines and editing wire copy for digests and stuff.

 

David Duchovny  26:55

Working your ass off.

 

Sally Jenkins  26:56

Oh, working my ass off, yeah, and working my ass off, alongside mostly men much older than me, who were really, really good to me.

 

David Duchovny  27:04

You know, we haven’t, we haven’t touched on that, that you’re, you’re a woman in a what would you say the percentage of sports writers were male when you got into the business?

 

Sally Jenkins  27:13

Um, 99.5% 99.7%.

 

David Duchovny  27:17

You were that point, you were.

 

Sally Jenkins  27:19

Yeah, I mean, I.

 

David Duchovny  27:21

Know any other women?

 

Sally Jenkins  27:21

I did, there was another a great, a great columnist, city columnist named Diane K. Shaw, who had covered sports for a while for Newsweek magazine and then become a, become a, taken a job as a columnist at the LA Herald. And I spent some time with Diane, some good time. She was a good teacher, too, but in the day to day, my my bosses and my colleagues were, were mostly men and desk guys who who had ethic. You know, you had to, when you were editing a story or writing headlines, you know, you had to be quick and efficient and make deadlines, even in editing a lot of times under a lot of tension, and so you couldn’t screw up or some horrible typo got in the paper, or garbled headline, and so you had to be really responsible. And they were, they were demanding taskmasters in a very kindly way. And again, they preached the same ethic my dad did. My dad had been a newspaper man, and you it was, it taught responsibility. You were, you were responsible to all these other people and to the overall product of the paper, your personal error could literally show up in the paper in a very embarrassing way, that indicted everyone’s credibility around you. And you were taught that at 21 years old.

 

David Duchovny  28:34

Well, that there’s a couple things I want to talk about. So much of what you said about responsibility is something that you talk about in your book about culture, you know, and the culture is not, does not come from one person. Culture is something that we all kind of enforce with love upon one another, you know, winning culture, or responsible culture, or whatever.

 

Sally Jenkins  28:53

That’s really well said.

 

David Duchovny  28:55

What did I say?

 

Sally Jenkins  28:56

The culture is something that we enforce in a loving way on each other. It’s not something we alone can create, we have to have collaborators.

 

David Duchovny  29:07

Yeah, and you talked about, in your book, you talk about, well, the culture, Steve Kerr’s culture with the Warriors, popovich’s culture with San Antonio, and pop, which is somebody you you touch on, I think, but, but as somebody that I think is really interesting, because he’s, he’s one of the rare professional coaches today who I think is not only 100% committed to winning, but also 100% committed to to the lives of his players as people, is that fair? Do you think?

 

Sally Jenkins  29:40

It’s really fair, and the great coaches, to a man or woman, are deeply, deeply invested in the lives of their players, and they have, no matter how sort of egotistical and demanding they can seem, they have an incredible generosity in their soul. They are truly happy for the successes of others, which is incredibly rare quality, I mean, probably similar to something you experience in a really great director.

 

David Duchovny  30:06

Well, yeah, I mean, a movie, a television show, is a highly collaborative endeavor. You’ve got hundreds of people all rowing in the same direction, hopefully. But what I love about Popovich is he doesn’t play that game with the media. You know, like his, his halftime question and answers are legendary because you know the they’ll say, pop, what do you need to do in the second half? You know, score more points.

 

Sally Jenkins  30:35

Right.

 

David Duchovny  30:36

Play defense, put the ball in the hoop right away, he’s brilliantly undercuts the game of covering sport, so you say you respect Popovich, and I do too, and I know you do that’s you’re not bullshitting. But also your job, and the guy, the poor guy, interviewing him on on the court, is to try and get something new, trying to get something real.

 

Sally Jenkins  31:00

That’s part of the challenge. It’s part of the challenge.

 

David Duchovny  31:02

So in a way, you’re adversarial. There’s something, is there something adversarial?

 

Sally Jenkins  31:07

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t call it adversarial so much as I would call it, you know, challenging doesn’t necessarily mean adversarial or, okay, he’s an opponent, but he’s he’s a wall to crack, you know for sure.

 

David Duchovny  31:20

And you’re not gonna tell me your tricks.

 

Sally Jenkins  31:21

Yeah, you know what? The only trick you know, you’ve already learned this. There’s only one trick in interviewing, and that is authenticity. Like pure curiosity wins people over. It’s the most disarming thing in the world. So the trick becomes, the real trick becomes, how do I ask something I am truly curious about that he may be curious about answering you.

 

David Duchovny  32:08

I contributed an essay to I’m looking at the book right here. It’s called coach, and it’s just writers on their coaches, and I would have run through a brick wall for my high school basketball coach, who just died, just died about a year ago, and I went and saw him before he died, and it was still, when I get around him, I’m his fucking player, you know, and he’s still right. I would still, last year when I saw him before he died, Larry Burns, if he would have said, get on the floor and die for that loose ball, if he would have had a basketball in his wheelchair and he just rolled it across the living room floor, and he said, Duke, dive at that ball I would have. And because I trusted him, you know, it’s like when he got me, which was my junior, my junior year, and he only had me for two years. I was nonchalant, you know, I had long hair, wore headband, stupid, you know, on the court, you know. And he got me to cut my hair, you know, all that stuff, and to to act, to care, and to act like I cared, you know, because I did care, and I was covering that, you know.

 

Sally Jenkins  33:12

And isn’t that like the fundamental job for for any, any teacher, right? Because all kids are probably a little more concerned with their outward projection than they are with what’s going on inside, right? And if you don’t have someone in that comes into your life and and it really triggers that for you, you know? I mean, look, I still had some of it. I was very lucky to write three books with Pat Summitt, you know, because I told, I told her I was lucky enough to be able to have a couple of these conversations with her before she died. I said, Look, Pat. I wrote one, not very good book before I met you. I wrote 10 after, you know, she had an effect on me as a young woma so.

 

David Duchovny  33:50

Can you? Can you unpack that a little bit? What was the effect?

 

Sally Jenkins  33:54

First of all, watching someone work with unembarrassed intensity at their ambition and and the an overtly stating that they wanted to be great at something. And I think, as an unfinished younger writer, I was a little afraid to do that. I was a little afraid to go all in, you know, and I was a little afraid to fail.

 

David Duchovny  34:14

Well, if you go all in and you fail.

 

Sally Jenkins  34:16

It hurts, and that’s what Pat really taught me, and taught all of her players, was, it’s gonna hurt, you know, there’s no you’re, you’re not gonna I mean, Pat coach, 38 years, she only won, I say only, she won eight national championships. 30 years she went home losing really hurt her, you know? And she said, most people are afraid to say, that’s the best I can do. That’s what she taught me.

 

David Duchovny  34:41

You’re gonna hold back. And then they know in their heart, well, if I’d really given it my all, I probably would have won in this fantasy, fantasy league in their head.

 

Sally Jenkins  34:50

And there’s this beautiful thing that happens the first time you go all in on a piece of work, and you may not get the result that you want out of it, but you walk away going, I I left it all there. I left it all on the page. I left it all I could not have worked any harder. I could not have have been any pure in my intention on that. And it’s amazing how much better you can accept the result when it’s that, you know.

 

David Duchovny  35:21

Absolutely, I think you’re getting something really, really valuable here, because if you are authentically all in and you lose, there is something beautiful that happens.

 

Sally Jenkins  35:37

You feel so good about yourself.

 

David Duchovny  35:39

But think about what we’re saying right now, we are saying.

 

Sally Jenkins  35:45

You hurt really hard, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  35:47

And you lose.

 

Sally Jenkins  35:48

You hurt so bad, and you feel.

 

David Duchovny  35:50

The most wonderful thing.

 

Sally Jenkins  35:53

Right? No.

 

David Duchovny  35:53

It’s better than winning. Is it better than winning? I don’t know, but it’s it’s a different better than winning.

 

Sally Jenkins  35:59

Well, because we separate those two questions when they’re really conflated, there’s no separating the winning and the losing. There really, really, isn’t I mean, it’s we always ask in sports, do you learn more from winning, or do you learn more from losing? Billie Jean King hated losing, didn’t think she learned much from it and and, you know, I had a hilarious conversation with her once where I said, Billie Jean, what does it say? What is the Kipling quote that’s engraved over the door of Wimbledon, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same? And she slapped her hand down on the table and said, Kipling is full of shit.

 

David Duchovny  36:34

Kipling had a weak backhand. We all know that right after his backhand.

 

Sally Jenkins  36:38

She didn’t care, she thought losing could become a bad habit, and I think she’s partly right about that, but winning can make you really, really complacent and really, really arrogant, and you stop, and it’s a you can reach a dead halt in your learning and your risk, you become risk averse, all of those things. So the truth of the matter is that you can’t, I don’t think you can learn to win without losing first number one in anything that that’s a fundamental thing that’s in this book that athletes teach you and coaches teach you is that you have to stress, some stress, something any organism only improves under stress, right? It’s physiological, you know. Let’s talk about pressure for a second. Pressure is an actual physiological barrier. Okay, it’s not just I think when people feel like they’re losers or chokers, they feel like they responded to some kind of invisible phantom thing, and that’s one of the reasons why it makes them feel so weak. But when you understand information is power, and when you understand physiologically what’s happening to you under pressure, you really start to find ways to cope with it. So the fight or flight response, which is triggered by pressure, right? Whether it’s a time deadline that I face at the Super Bowl at midnight, when the game has been electrifying, and I have 60 minutes to write it, and I’m just, I’m exhausted, and my day is just, is only half over, right? Or there’s the pressure that a Steph Curry feels in the clutch. You know, with a with a big game on the line, what happens is your body sets off a series of physiological reactions, one of which is it shunts blood from your small muscle groups to your large muscle groups. That’s why you get tight. That’s why you get tight, and that’s why a tennis player will double fault because he’s lost blood in his hands and his toss is off his fingers.

 

David Duchovny  38:26

What is the reason for that? Is the body?

 

Sally Jenkins  38:30

The blood is literally draining from your hands and feet and going into your larger muscle groups. So you can fight or run, yeah, protect, fight, run. It’s an involuntary physiological response that can be set off.

 

David Duchovny  38:42

And this happens to non athletes every day in life.

 

Sally Jenkins  38:46

It happens to me on deadline. It’s literally harder to type. I mean, I lose fine, fine motor control in my fingers. And you also get tunnel vision. Your pupils dilate, you get tunnel vision. And so it’s harder to read the scoreboard and to type like I transposed numbers, one thing I’ve become alert to is, I can, I can get the score wrong. The most fundamental thing in the story, if I’m not careful, golfers have reported looking at the scoreboard and literally misreading it under pressure. Down the stretch in a major championship, there’s famous examples of that sort of thing happening. It’s why guys it’s why Rory McIlroy can miss a three foot, a slippery three foot, putt in the US Open, you know.

 

David Duchovny  39:27

Or Chris Weber calls the time out.

 

Sally Jenkins  39:29

Yeah, no time, yeah that’s exactly what happens, right? So there are all these. You get tunnel vision, your brain chemistry is literally changing your body, your blood flow is literally moving in an opposite direction from what it was doing five minutes earlier. And so when you unpack these things now, there’s methods to cope with them. There’s little exercises you can do, from breathing exercises to just pure awareness.

 

David Duchovny  39:53

Well, I think, I think the non athletes listening today may be interested in what those are did.

 

Sally Jenkins  40:00

I mean, breathing is a huge one. But also, there’s nothing better for dealing with stress than practicing under stress so that when you do encounter it, you’re just more practiced at coping with it. So for instance, if you’re preparing to give a presentation to people, you may memorize all the facts, but are you reciting them under a time deadline in front of other people with very appraising, judgmental eyes on you, right? I mean, that’s one thing you know, we don’t practice like the perfect example is golf. We all go to the driving range, right? And we beat balls into the distance at on a perfectly level driving range, and then we go out on the course, and we don’t understand why we don’t hit the shot we hit on the driving range. Well, there’s not a level lie on the golf course, right? Golf courses, they move. They have all kinds of contours in them. You know? They’re not flat. You never have an even lie.

 

David Duchovny  40:51

Not in life either, yeah.

 

Sally Jenkins  40:53

So practicing under adversarial circumstances in the face of the actual stresses you’re going to be facing is a big aid Tiger Woods. When he practices bunker shots, he doesn’t just hit the ball out of the sand. He’ll drop a ball in the sand and step on it to mimic a really bad buried lie. In a motor, right?

 

David Duchovny  41:12

I’ll translate it for you into an actor’s point of view as well, because this is something that actors deal with a lot. We call it like, when you’re off camera, like it’s on the back of my head. I’m doing I’m on you. The camera’s on you. I feel completely at ease actors, you know, it’s not on me. I’m just gonna be here for you. You know, I’m gonna I’m not even trying anything. I’m just, like, trying to be a good team player, you know, trying to give to you. And then all of a sudden the camera turns around and it’s like, oh, now it’s about me. What I do is I try and still make it about you like to get because those nerves of like, okay, now it’s your close up we’ve got, you know, we got three minutes to get this before lunch. You really got to deliver that all sucks in terms of, like, performance, but you can either choose to embrace that and go, Fuck yeah, here we go. This is it, or you can go, I’m gonna play a game of myself, where I’m still off camera, I’m still off camera. Somehow I’m gonna just play, you know, so.

 

Sally Jenkins  42:15

Yeah, you have to be find a way to be happy in that moment, right?

 

David Duchovny  42:20

Happiness is important, and the authenticity of it is like, why am I here too? Like, am I here to call attention to myself and be great at something, or am I here to collaborate and have a good time and make something nice and good with all these people, you know?

 

Sally Jenkins  42:35

And that’s why I finally understood something. Billie Jean King has always said, she’s always said, pressure is a privilege.

 

David Duchovny  42:41

Yeah, that that’s that’s now at the US Open, isn’t it?

 

Sally Jenkins  42:44

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I never entirely understood, for years, didn’t entirely understand what she meant. But you know, my mate, my partner, watches these games with me. You know, I have to watch stuff all the time for work, and she’s like, I don’t understand it. I don’t understand how they do it. That looks miserable to me. And I say, you don’t, you don’t understand it. They love it. They’re enjoying this. They are, they are. They even if.

 

David Duchovny  43:05

They look miserable?

 

Sally Jenkins  43:05

Even if they look miserable, but they do live for it, you know, they truly do, yeah. I mean, that constant test is enjoyable, you know, once you embrace it. And the guy who really personifies that for me right now is, is Carlos Alcaraz in tennis. He’s so creative with the racket. He’s got so many choices and so much feel in his shot. Yeah, the drop shot. And he drives his coaches crazy, because he tries these glamorous little drop shots. And one time, his coach said, when he was a teenager, which was all of two years ago, his coach said, Not one more drop shot in this match. I don’t want to see you do it one more time. And literally, a point later, like alcavez did it again, and he turned around and just shrugged. I couldn’t help but I couldn’t help you know, he plays with real pleasure in the, in the racket and.

 

David Duchovny  43:55

And force, yeah. This has been a wonderful talking to you before, before I let you go. I just wanted to touch on, you know, kind of a, I think, a subject that that impinges on a lot of what we’re talking about is your experience writing the book with, with Lance Armstrong, you know, and then, and then finding out that he hadn’t been entirely forthcoming, you know.

 

Sally Jenkins  44:23

About a reversal, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  44:24

Yeah, and, you know, I read the letter that you wrote after, you know, you found out that that Lance had been taking the steroids, and you know, that you forgave him. And I thought that was a beautiful thing.

 

Sally Jenkins  44:36

Look, he called to say he was sorry, and he kind of stammered around. And I said, Lancer, are you trying to apologize? And he said, Yeah, I am, and I said, well, look, you know, I said, I’m a big girl. I knew it was a possibility. We had talked about it over the years. I had said, Is there anything you need to tell me? Do you need help telling something to the world? You know.

 

David Duchovny  44:54

You did, you phrased it like that. I mean, that’s obvious what you’re talking about, yeah.

 

Sally Jenkins  44:58

And I said, I mean, I said, we have to talk about doping. For these I did two books with him, and I said, we have to talk about doping. And you have to, you know, you have to address this. And, you know, and he said, I’m, I’m fine. I mean, I basically, like, I wouldn’t have done the books if he hadn’t talked about doping it. And, you know, he was very persuasive, and he passed an awful lot of drug tests. And my first question for him, when he finally came clean, was, how on earth did you pass all those tests? You know? I mean, I had some fundamental questions because I really had a lot of faith in him and and they were based on the fact that he took 1000s of drug tests and had passed them. And so, you know, after the apology, he said something very meaningful, and this is why, you know, I really forgave him. First of all, I had known it was a possibility, and I wasn’t stupid, you know, number one, but number two, and I took responsibility. I got all the benefits of working from Lance Armstrong. I was part of a number one bestseller. I got to go to the Tour de France and watch this extraordinary event. And I really enjoyed his friendship and his dash and his courage. I love it’s not about the bike, it’s a book about cancer, not about cycling. And he beat cancer fair and square. So I had no moral qualms about his basic character. And I really find the anti doping fight very hypocritical and very misplaced by conviction. And so I didn’t struggle with it from that standpoint. What I struggled with was, you know, he should have told me first, right? And and I said, you know, if it had come from you, like it came from Andy Pettit, you know, I think the public would have had a whole different approach to you, but the fact that they learned it from someone else, the public is going to feel the way I feel like it. What bothers me is learning it from someone other than you. And so we talked about that, and he said, you know, there are all these people who say they’re my victims. And he said, and they’re not my real victims. He said a lot of them did a lot of the same things I did. He said, my real victims are the people who believed in me, and you were one of them. And that was a very meaningful thing for him to say. And I said, well, look, I’m nobody’s victim. I’m not your victim either, but I appreciate that apology. You know the because I did believe in him and my.

 

David Duchovny  47:11

Did you have to unpack something for yourself like.

 

Sally Jenkins  47:14

No, I mean this. I mean I, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  47:18

Should I have been harder on him anything like that?

 

Sally Jenkins  47:20

Yeah, I did. I did definitely unpack, like, should I have been more confrontational with him, especially as, like, you know, he got into these court cases and, you know, should I have called him up and really confronted him? Should I have forced the issue? And I don’t think that was realistic. You know, when I when I wrote the books with Lance, I was a freelance writer, and then I had gone to work for the Washington Post, and we had a reporter on the story, and I felt like it was my job to stay out of all that. I felt like let our reporters do their work, and I think I may have facilitated a couple of phone calls with him, or given somebody some numbers or something. But I was, I was pretty cognizant of sort of staying in my lane. You know, I had been his collaborator on a book that created a conflict of interest in any investigation of him as a doper, and so, so I didn’t, yeah, I had to unpack some of that stuff. But the main thing I was concerned with at the time, when he when he finally came forward, I was, I was concerned for him, personally, what it was going to do to him.

 

David Duchovny  48:29

That’s, that’s, that’s a beautiful thing, but I wonder, you know, and, and I love, I’m a big Lance Armstrong fan, but I wonder if he acknowledged that he could have done you damage as a writer.

 

Sally Jenkins  48:44

Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that he felt like, you know, I think he said, you know, you took a real hit or something to that effect. I mean, he was certainly cognizant of that. But again, you know, like, I take responsibility for my own status there. I enjoyed all the benefits of working with him. I didn’t get rich, you know, I got paid a flat fee, and it was a handsome one, but it was certainly not a career maker, but, but I certainly enjoyed, you know, I’d never had a number one bestseller. I mean, I certainly enjoyed a lot of the success of, it’s not about the bike and and enjoyed his friendship. So it wasn’t again, my issues with him was not, I mean, I felt like, I’ll put my head down, I’ll go back to being a good writer and good reporter and doing my job. And, you know, it’s a good, humbling experience. It’s a good reminder of you know.

 

David Duchovny  49:37

Did it? Did it set you back professionally? Do you think, or no.

 

Sally Jenkins  49:41

I probably in some people’s eyes. I’m sure I’ll never recover in some people’s eyes, but I don’t really care. You know, I care the Washington Post was great. Don Graham, the publisher of the paper at the time, is a lovely human being. I saw him not to. I mean, I think within the week at a. Book party for a colleague, and he grabbed me by the elbow and he steered me into a corner and and I was I felt awful for the paper. What I cared about was not what my reputation. I cared about whether I’d given any of my colleagues, you know, like I cared about the paper, and Don got me by the elbow and steered me into a corner at this party, and he said, listen. He said, don’t ever feel badly about believing in something. And it really put me right back on my feet. I don’t know. I’ve never felt this badly about the whole experience, as some people want me to.

 

David Duchovny  50:37

I don’t know, I don’t want.

 

Sally Jenkins  50:39

You know what I mean. I love Lance Armstrong as a friend, and I never saw him become impatient with the cancer experience. I never, I never saw him be anything but absolutely great about cancer and two other people with cancer, I treasure that experience of talking to him during his recovery period and learning about that disease through him and and, quite frankly, I’ve never really understood. I mean, I don’t know how people expect these cyclists to get to the top of an ALP on a bicycle that a car transmission has a hard time getting up.

 

David Duchovny  51:14

This is the whole point. You know, we are responsible for the culture of sports that we’ve created, where we’ve been asking these athletes to do more and more impossible things for the for the human body, and then we say, oh, but you can’t. You know, steroids is basically a way to recover quickly. It’s, it’s not.

 

Sally Jenkins  51:37

Yeah, I mean, there’s some substances that genuinely make you faster in the moment, right? Like EPO will do that, but in the heat, it will also potentially kill you, you know, or slow you down. I mean, these things are dangerous and not near as effective as people think. I mean, that’s the thing. There’s a certain amount of fraudulence in how these things are sold to young athletes that really pisses me off. You know, they’re not that.

 

David Duchovny  52:00

In my mind, it was always, and this is going to sound ridiculous to you, and it’s just something that I came up with, is, we’re cool with baseball players wearing eyeglasses. You know what we’re saying is, you’re supposed to come to the field with what God gave you. That’s what we’re saying. Although, now you know, if you have money, you can have a trainer. You know, you can have the best kind of diet like you. There are advantages that money can bring, but basically, it’s supposed to be your body. So why do we let people wear glasses on the field?

 

Sally Jenkins  52:31

Or, or the Tommy John surgery, volunteer surgery for the Tommy John surgery, which artificially strengthens your arm. Or Tiger Woods had had voluntary eye surgery to improve his vision. I mean, there are lots of things that people do, sleeping in altitude tents. I mean, it’s very, very difficult to draw the line right, and the band subs.

 

David Duchovny  52:49

We’ve just decided, we’ve just decided that it’s doping. We’ve just decided.

 

Sally Jenkins  52:54

Yeah, they throw it all in one big box and call it cheating. And I mean, the vast majority of things that athletes do is for recovery. I mean, one of the things I love to do when I speak to large groups about this sort of thing is, I say, okay, how many people in this room took something to help them sleep last night? How many people in this room took something to help them wake up and be a little more alert today? You know? How many professors in this room have taken Adderall in the last couple of years or coffee, you know? I mean, so the bottom line is, the rest of us are allowed to do whatever we need to do to get back to work for one more day. And it’s called professionalism, and if we don’t do it, we’re called.

 

David Duchovny  53:33

Or ambition.

 

Sally Jenkins  53:34

It’s called or ambition. And if we don’t do those things, we’re called, you know, irresponsible or, you know, something worse, and we may even lose our jobs. When athletes do it, we call them cheaters. You know, when a roofer takes something for his back, you know, or a pilot taste some take something to stay more alert, it’s, it’s called professionalism, you know.

 

David Duchovny  53:53

Let’s, let’s just go on the record and saying to all those pilots out there, we are 100% behind you, taking whatever you need to stay aware of, right.

 

Sally Jenkins  54:02

Right? You know, I mean, I don’t know. I just they have this stupid rule that, you know, you can’t even take an IV in some of these sports anymore, which is insane. That’s more unhealthy than anything, you know. So I find it. I find the entire argument to begin with. And by the way, they can’t catch. I mean, the entire Chinese swimming team can apparently dope, and the entire Russian weightlifting team can apparently dope, and you can’t, you know, the bodies that are mostly catching individual athletes in smaller sports that don’t have huge bureaucracy, country bureaucracies behind them, are the ones getting punished, you know? I mean, there’s an insane case in our paper this morning by a great writer named Adam Kilgore about a brilliant young sprinter who, it appears, probably took a couple of Gatorade recovery cubes that may have been tainted in pictogram amounts. By some sort of substance that’s on the band list for some reason, and the kids suing Gatorade and everyone else in sight, because it’s, you know, it’s such a draconian system. And so I really hate the whole system. And so that really underpins and I hated it before I even knew Lance Armstrong. I hated it around Marion Jones. I hated it around Barry Bonds. I load the entire system. I think it’s grossly unjust, and one day we’ll look back on it the way that we’ll look back on Jim Thorpe being stripped of his Olympic medals for the sin of professionalism.

 

David Duchovny  55:35

Beautifully said. I think, I think we can end there.

 

David Duchovny  55:45

Well, thank you so much for this.

 

Sally Jenkins  55:46

My pleasure.

 

David Duchovny  55:47

Fascinating and

 

Sally Jenkins  55:49

This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time, talking about.

 

David Duchovny  55:52

Don’t say that, don’t say.

 

Sally Jenkins  55:53

Oh, truly, it was so good to meet you online.

 

David Duchovny  55:57

Thank you.

 

Sally Jenkins  55:57

Thank you, my pleasure, thank you.

 

David Duchovny  56:09

Well, here I’m speaking to you from the cold tub, so that might explain the discomfort in my voice, the tightness so thinking about Sally Jenkins and what a informative conversation it was for me. I mean, the thing that’s struck me most is when she said she was complimenting me about the questions I was asking. She said there was authentic curiosity behind them. Because I think I was asking about, you know, how do you get beyond the rote answers that athletes give or will want to give, you know? And I started thinking how hard that is, you know, when you’re interviewing different people, and also that you’re not going for any kind of gotcha moment. And I’m not. I could be less interested in that. I realize it gets news pickup or whatever, and it probably, probably would make this podcast more popular if I went for those moments. But it’s not in my nature, and I’m also not interested. I don’t want it. I do want them to say what they want in a new way. I want them to rethink the rote answers. You know what I call resting podcast phase. There’s 6 million podcasts out there, right? So most people that I’m talking to, because they’re successful and well known. Most of them have done numerous podcasts, have been asked the obvious questions, and have got their responses. Another thing I was thinking about is I read somewhere that, you know, we don’t actually remember events. We remember the last time we remembered them. We remember the last time we spoke about them. And so if you start doing the math on that, the game of telephone math on that, you’ve got, this is removed once. It’s removed twice. 10 podcasts later, you’re remembering 12 times you’ve remembered this event. You’re telling a story at that point, you know you’re it’s fiction. So how do you how do you break beyond that cycle?

 

CREDITS  58:36

There’s more Fail Better with Lemonada premium subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content. Subscribe now on Apple podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada Media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Keegan Zema, Aria Bracci, Donnie Matias and Paula Kaplan. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Niel, special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom kupinski and Brad Davidson. The show is executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, 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 @DavidDuchovny, follow, Fail Better, or wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.