New Podcast Release: David Duchovny
In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to David Duchovny, actor, writer, musician, and thinker,
In the latest episode of Lives Well Lived, the podcast I co-host with Kasia de Lazari-Radek, we talk to David Duchovny, actor, writer, musician, and thinker, about art, meaning, and what it takes to live a thoughtful life.
In this wide-ranging conversation, David reflects on the philosophical themes that run through his creative work, from The X-Files and Californication to his novels and music and how storytelling can be a vehicle for exploring big ideas about love, loss, truth, and belief.
We talk about the tension between fame and authenticity, the role of fiction in helping us understand ourselves, and what it means to seek purpose in a culture often driven by distraction.
David also shares how his academic background in literature and his lifelong curiosity shape the way he sees the world and what he thinks a life well lived really looks like.
Below are some highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred platform.
On The X-Files and belief in conspiracies
PETER SINGER: Do you have any sense of how people received it, whether it made it more plausible for some people, whether more people started to believe in aliens having landed, and various other psychic phenomena because of the popularity of the series?
DAVID DUCHOVNY: I think it spoke to kind of a hunger for wonder, a hunger for some other kind of life or existence that was out there and the conspiracy aspect of it, the idea that your government was lying to you, that there was fake news, et cetera.
Obviously, it was ahead of its time. Although I am not a proponent. Fake news is a very destructive concept that has taken hold, especially in America. However, it is part of the X-Files.
It is a part of my character saying, “Don't listen to the man,” “Don't listen to your government,” “Don't listen to the newspapers,” “They're not telling you the real story.” And, you know me today, I see the bias of mainstream media, but that doesn't mean they're lying. Bias does not mean that you are lying.
On fame and fulfillment
PETER SINGER: We recently had Moby, the musician, on this podcast, and he told us that the time when he had all the money, fame, sex, booze, and drugs he wanted was also the time when he was most depressed. So, you've had that experience of fame and other times when you haven't, and I wondered to what extent that's shaped your ideas about what truly matters in life.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: One of the things that you can come away with from being famous is that you realise that it doesn’t, for the most part, bring happiness. If you are looking to feel happiness or fulfilment from the outside, there's never going to be enough.
It doesn't matter. It could be drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, or fame. All these things are often ego-driven aspects of life. The ego just grows and grows, and there's always going to be an emptiness inside it. It's nice to know that it's not an antidote.
On writing and family legacy
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: So, let's talk about your novels. As I understand, you wrote your first one in your fifties?
DAVID DUCHOVNY: I didn't know what I wanted to say because, as a writer, you learn that you find out what you want to say by writing. If you know what you want to say, you won't write a good novel. It may work differently for philosophy. I don't know, Peter, if you surprise yourself when you start writing something or know where it's going. But if a novel is good, the writer has to be surprised by what happens once you start writing. So, to me, that was the magic of what happened. I had certain stories in my head that I wanted to tell as movies, but I couldn't make them from the script I'd written.
I was thinking about how I want to tell this story anyway because I have a story. I don't know what it is yet because I haven't written it and want to get it out there. So, if I can't find people that want to give me millions of dollars to make it, which is a big ask, I can sit on my ass for free and do it. And that's what I did.
On failures and shame
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: I wanted to ask you about your podcast ‘Fail Better’. Why this name? is it about failures? Would you be willing to tell us something about your failures...?
DAVID DUCHOVNY: I've had work failures. When you're an actor or a writer or a director, you have very public failures. The question is, what to take from that that is worthwhile? Consider the sources and consider your weaknesses. Consider your own capacity for growth or getting better at something because, ultimately, when you're talking about the arts, there is no real failure. It's all a sense of play.
It could be a failure today and, like Vincent Van Gogh, a couple of hundred years later, not a failure. So, we don't know how trapped in the current time we are in art. What is a failure and what is not doesn't feel that way. So, a sense of shame comes with a public failure.
I think Peter, you as well, are somebody who rubs people the wrong way. You're someone who swims against the tide. And I wonder when you are attacked personally, as I'm sure you are, because challenging the Anthropocene challenges the sense that we are at the centre of the universe and the be-all and the end-all.
So people get upset when they come at you or want to debate you. Like the first movie that I wrote and directed, this reviewer gave it an F. And I'm like, I know it's not an F. You may have hated it, you may not like it, but it's a competent piece of work, so give it a D.…It still hurt, and I still felt shame, and I felt that physical sense of the hair on the back of my neck, standing up and all our kind of prehistoric sense of danger that we have around the shame of being singled out, separated from the herd where we're now vulnerable.
So, for a lot of my life, I've been susceptible to that kind of shame, fearful of failing, which inhibits you as a thinker, an actor, or a writer. If you go into anything inhibited by reaction, reception, or a sense of perspective failure, you are already limiting yourself.
You are already adjusting in a way that you should not be adjusting. so that's where I come at it as an artist: what do we glean from a failure that's useful, possibly, but also how do we go into things without that sense of prospective shame, without that sense of being prospectively singled out as unworthy or maimed in some way.
And I wonder, Peter, how have you, in your long career, gone through these controversies where people are very upset with you, and how do you not take that in?
PETER SINGER: You're right. I have had a lot of criticism. The first serious criticism that I got was with Animal Liberation. Some people were enthusiastic about it and said things like, “yes, I've been thinking something like that all along, but I never put it in words as you did”, and they appreciated it. But other people simply ridiculed it, including a late-night TV show that I did in Australia where the host just thought that I was crazy to say that we should stop eating animals. That was an absurd idea, and at that stage, in 1975, there were very few vegetarians, very few Western vegetarians, anyway, and a lot of them were seen as cranks in some way, they had ideas that were regarded as quite mistaken. Maybe some of them were mistaken, but I was really convinced that what I was saying was right. The argument seemed very strong, and I did get some support. If nobody had agreed with it, I might have had to go back into my shell and wouldn't have had the confidence to keep going. But because there were some people who I greatly respected who agreed with it, I wasn’t too discouraged by the opposition.
One the first people to tell me he thought I was right was the philosopher James Rachels, whose work I'd read and admired. That was really encouraging. I just felt, well, excellent philosophers like Rachels agrees with me, and I think I'm right, and I will have to go on with this. And even if it takes time for people to appreciate it, they will eventually. And fortunately, that has worked out.
The other issue that I've been attacked for is in my views about euthanasia. Especially the idea that parents of severely disabled newborn infants should have the option to humanely end the life of their child if they think that that is for the best, and if the doctors think it is a reasonable thing to do. I still get a lot of criticism for that. I can see that it's more sensitive. But I also think that I'm not wrong because, after all, we do withdraw treatment from premature infants; for example, when the prognosis is very bad for them, most doctors in intensive care units for babies will say, it may be better to withdraw life-support. So, you can end a child's life by deciding to turn off the respirator; but if your child doesn't need a respirator but still has the same very grim prognosis, why shouldn't you be able to end the life of that child by, say, an injection that will make the child die without further suffering?
I'm still prepared to defend that. And I suppose that's a little bit different from being a creative writer or actor where, perhaps, you rely somewhat more on whether people like it or not, and on what they take away from it. I'm not sure how you feel about that.
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Well, I think it's similar. What you have to work with as an actor is yourself as a writer, too. It's your consciousness that you're playing with. It can feel very personal when you put it out there, and somebody says, no, thank you.
It can feel devastating in that way. Part of the trick, part of maturing, is to separate the personality of the attacker, the reviewer, from your own. They are also coming from their own consciousness; if you can separate it out, much of the criticism is about them, not really about you. It's more of a projection. That sounds like a cop-out, 'cause sometimes they're right. Sometimes, you didn't do a great job. Or maybe somebody else would've been better at that…
On compassion vs. empathy
KASIA DE LAZARI RADEK: What values do you support or work on or would like to have more of?
DAVID DUCHOVNY: Probably compassion. I've never had that much problem with empathy, and that's why I like it; I don't know if it was with you, Peter, I had that discussion with, about how one death is a tragedy, a thousand deaths is a statistic? I think there are limits to empathy even though we're in this kind of cultural moment where everybody is being told to grow their empathy. What they're talking about is compassion, which is different. That's a value that I'm trying lately to parse: empathy, compassion, and patience are virtues. I'm trying to have things like this.
PETER SINGER: I think you're right. Empathy tends to be for specific people, often people who are more like us; we can empathise with them more easily. This can lead to biases. Compassion, I think, extends to people who we find it harder to empathize with, and maybe there is no identifiable individual for whom we have compassion, it can even be for all sentient beings.
If I donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides bed nets for people in malaria-prone regions, and saves the lives of children who might otherwise die from malaria, I will never know which children we've saved. And it's hard to have empathy with an unidentifiable child, just as it is hard to have empathy with a statistic. But if you have compassion you can say, well, there's suffering there. Even if I can't empathise with a particular individual who is suffering, I can do something to reduce that suffering. That's important and worthwhile.