rabbit hole rabbit hole no no no white rabbit I'm not following you down the
rabbit hole I'm Angela Duckworth I'm Steven Dubner and you're listening to
no stupid questions today on the show what's the difference between a habit
and an addiction but my addicted to Netflix my addicted to Facebook am I
addicted to fill in the blank
so Angela I have a question today that's inspired by your behavior the last time
we recorded I don't know if you remember I do remember the last time we
recorded you were guzzling down a tiny can of Diet Coke and during our break
you exclaimed with great gusto that it was wonderful and then you said Steven I
think I'm addicted to Diet Coke and I've been thinking about that because I
hear people say this all the time these days I'm addicted to smoked almonds I'm
addicted to that new Netflix series or I'm addicted to Diet Coke and I wondered
are you really addicted to Diet Coke because we know that addiction is a real
scientifically circumscribed thing and we typically talk about it in the context
of vices or maybe if not vices things that are not good for you drugs alcohol
cigarettes gambling but then the slope starts to get slippery people say they're
addicted to food and food is really good for us in moderation and people are
addicted to sugar which is I would argue much less good people say they're
addicted to sex which is kind of important this question of what is an
addiction I think is at the heart of what you're asking is that right yeah
what is an addiction what's a habit what's the thing you just really like to
do and where should we draw the line what can you say about actual addiction
and perhaps near addiction that could be useful to people even like you who say
they're addicted to something like Diet Coke I don't know whether I should or
should not confess to you Steven that while having this conversation I am
holding another adorable miniature can I say it's miniature but I'm looking at
seven and a half ounces it's only miniature by 2022 standards I think this
would been a full serving back in the day but it's cold and it's carbonated
and it actually doesn't taste that good to me but yet these in a weird way
delicious so let's tackle these questions there is as you will not be
surprised some debate about what constitutes an addiction but I think a
very good starting place would be the DSM you've heard of this right the
diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders and it gets updated
every what five to ten years something like that it does I remember when I
started graduate school we were on DSM 3 or something like that now I think it's
at six but it is the official playbook as it were for a therapist and
psychiatrist insurance companies use it it's a catalog of mental illness
problems can I interrupt and ask you a tangent that I really am curious about
occasionally I catch a whiff of a story about the jockeying for position in the
DSM for something that should be included that hasn't been or something
that has been included that shouldn't be do you have a story you could tell us
about something that was either added or subtracted with some friction right now
the big revolution is thinking that some of these labels that we have are less
useful than we might have thought in part because basically for every
disorder there is a list of symptoms and you don't have to have all of them
and in fact it's possible to have non overlapping symptoms you could have you
know these six out of twelve or somebody else could have these six out of twelve
and so what is it really to be depressed was it really to be anxious and when I
read some of these lists that symptoms sound like the characteristics of a
human being if you don't mind me saying so right and you're wondering is this
psychopathology or is this just psychology is this just a description of
human beings I will say that there is this way of analyzing the data to see
whether the problems that people might be suffering are difference in degree
versus a difference in kind like there are people who have this and there are
people who don't but most of the psychopathologies in the DSM are really
more a matter of degree than a matter of kind and so you can look at these and
say well what about schizophrenia and it turns out even that for example is a
continuum and it really does explain why when we think about let's say depression
or anxiety it's hard for me to imagine any human doesn't sometimes experience
some of what we call the symptoms of depression but obviously it is a matter
of degree and there's a spectrum what about with something then like addiction
is it the same case there that it's really essentially a matter of degree
and how much the consumption of something disrupts your life well how
about we start with the DSM why don't we just read through the criteria you mean
start with the thing that you were about to start with until I interrupted you
like 12 times yeah pretty much I stand down okay let's begin with criteria
number one for substance use disorders number one is substance taken in greater
quantities and over a longer period of time than intended number two persistent
desire yet repeated unsuccessful attempts to quit using the substance
number three significant time spent obtaining the substance using and or
recovering from the effects of substance use for important social occupational or
recreational activities given up or reduced due to substance use five use of
substance despite knowledge of adverse physical slash emotional consequences
six an increase over time in the amount of substance use or decrease over time
in the desired effective experiences let me unpack that for you Steven basically
over time you need more and more to get the same effect or if you're having the
same amount you're getting less and less of benefit or reward from it right
seven withdrawal symptoms when cutting down or abstaining from the substance
and use of substance to relieve withdrawal symptoms eight cravings for
the substance nine failure to fulfill role obligations due to substance use
ten substance use despite interpersonal or social consequences and finally
number 11 substance use in physically hazardous situations for example while
operating a vehicle so what do you make of that Steven I think there is a
through-line to these 11 diagnostic criteria that really begin to tell a
story of well what's an addiction versus just a bad habit for example what I make
of that it's very clear I am addicted to golf as you just described it I don't
mean to be flip and I understand the difference between a substance that is
harmful to your physical and mental well-being and your family and your
livelihood and hobby I do understand that but I mean this is getting to the
point of the conversation I think I hit at least nine and a half of those 11
symptoms when it comes to golf so you play golf in greater quantities or over
a longer period of time than intended Oh 150% true really but the thing is when
you list those symptoms this gets us again up to this kind of squishy line
between substance abuse let's say and addiction to behaviors like I watched
nine hours of Netflix yesterday I think the center of gravity like what are all
these 11 criteria really pointing to is dysfunctionality that is of course
arguable but I think the idea of qualifying for a mental disorder is that
the impairment in your functionality at work in your close personal relationship
as a member of society and so forth is beyond a point where you would say you
know what this is really impairing my goals and I don't think you could say
that about golf I couldn't but that's kind of the point of this conversation
because the DSM definition sets a necessarily high bar and I would argue
based on knowing almost nothing except what you said about Diet Coke last time
we spoke was that there's a lot of room under that bar where you can still feel
an addiction a compulsion that really does get in the way of your life and I'm
not saying this is you and Diet Coke but I do know a lot of people who say they
are addicted to eating sweet things at night I know people who say they are
addicted to watching Netflix and look all the digital firms like Netflix and
Facebook and so on are really good at playing into that appetite they make it
really easy to keep doing what you've been doing for the past hour so you
don't even have to press a button anymore for the next episode to come up
and so on and so under that high bar that the DSM sets for substance abuse
addiction when you said you were addicted to Diet Coke how much of a joke
was that are there things in your life that you feel that you're sort of
addicted to or do you have total control over all your consumptions and
behaviors I will address that question I don't want to sound like a politician
but first I want to say that when we talk about addiction really having this
high bar to qualify for DSM remember this is used for insurance payment to
providers and so there has to be a bar and understandably it is a pretty high
bar for dysfunctionality but it is a continuum so when you ask yourself am I
addicted to Netflix am I addicted to Facebook am I addicted to fill in the
blank you should ask yourself on the continuum of dysfunctionality where am I
and where you choose to draw the line to call it addiction or not is I think to
some extent arbitrary unless I'm trying to get reimbursed from my insurance
company for watching too much Netflix for instance in which case it's still
arbitrary except for you have to make it sound non-arbitrary right so they can
get compensated by your insurance company wouldn't that be a super fun
lawsuit to bring though oh I am guessing it has been brought so I am actually not
addicted to Diet Coke you interact with me in these conversations and you're
like wow Angela seems to have a adorable miniature can of Diet Coke with her but
that's only because they have them for free in this sound studio but during the
week and in between our conversation Steven I rarely drink Diet Coke you are
so unaddicted to Diet Coke that you can joke about being addicted even while
knowing that many people are addicted to many things that's heartless yes I can
be callous well look I speak from experience all the way up to about 10
years ago I would drink maybe a couple of cans and the big cans not these
adorable miniature cans and then feeling virtuous I would switch to caffeine free
Diet Coke and then one day a professor from Yale and I'm desperately trying to
remember her name but I can't remember she came to visit my university
University of Pennsylvania and we got to be talking about her line of work which
was addiction and the research that she felt was compelling that Diet Coke was
really bad for you in particular she was talking about random assignment
controlled trials of animal studies so like water that had sweetener in it like
Diet Coke has you know Splenda or aspartame whatever compared to sugar
and then compared to nothing our conversation was did you know that when
you ingest these drinks that have this artificial sweetness but your body's not
getting the actual sugar that it completely disrupts your homeostatic
balance and your body doesn't know what's going on and then you can
actually crave sugar later etc and the details elude me but I do remember this
I was like what am I I am a psychologist what do I study I studied
behavior change that day I said I am gonna stop drinking Diet Coke and then I
went about using all the tricks of the trade that I was familiar with to change
my habit and now I do not have that habit anymore
well congratulations I will say in your choice of Diet Coke you definitely have
good taste in terms of keeping with the rest of America it's a number two selling
soda in America after coke after coke I'll read the top 10 coke diet coke
Pepsi dr. Pepper Mountain Dew sprite number seven rhymes with a beloved
holiday character oh god this is too hard how many truly beloved holiday
characters are it's not Easter Bunny Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer correct
holiday wrong character frosty the snowman again correct holiday Santa Claus
there you go Oh Fanta number seven Fanta I cannot believe I got that
Steven you are so good at every riddle oh thank you all right so that's the
list of popular drinks the memory that I have you know this decade-old memory of
a half-hour conversation from somebody at Yale name I can't remember there's
been a lot of science since then there's basically mixed findings about the long
term effects on your appetite and whether you compensate you might have
a higher tolerance for what it means to be sweet I don't want to say that
science is decided one way or the other but given that there is nobody saying
that soft drinks are good for you and there's mixed findings on how it could
be bad for you I dispute that statement what wait somebody's saying that soda is
good for you I believe the Coca-Cola company has pretty much been persuading
us for years that soda is at least good for our spirits as has Pepsi-Cola just
for like holding hands in a circle and smiling but there haven't been health
claims recently they haven't but I will tell you this Coca-Cola does explicitly
say that they're not addictive which is an interesting statement to me because
let's keep in mind there's also caffeine in coke and diet coke and I'm pretty
sure caffeine is established to be an addictive substance but here's a
statement on the Coca-Cola website quote many people enjoy sweet tastes from time
to time and that's normal oh my god this sounds like a children's book about
masturbation or something let me read that again many people enjoy sweet
tastes from time to time and that's normal regularly consuming food and
drink that tastes good and that you enjoy is not the same as being addicted
to them caffeine is a mild stimulant and if you have it regularly and then stop
abruptly you may experience some headaches or other minor effects but
most of us can reduce or eliminate caffeine from our diets without serious
problems now look I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of you know what's
defensible what's not rabbit hole rabbit hole come on no no no white rabbit I'm
not following you down the rabbit hole however I've read a lot of books on
habit and there are a lot of really good ones but one that I read again last
week was by Russ Poldrak he's at Stanford and he's a neuroscientist and
his book is called hard to break why our brains make habits stick I'm gonna read
for you his definition of addiction here's what he writes judging from the
titles of popular songs one can be addicted to just about anything
including love Robert Palmer orgasms the buzzcocks danger iced tea and bass
pure tone however neuroscientists reserve the term addiction more
specifically for the compulsive and uncontrollable engagement in a particular
behavior in spite of its harmful consequences to the user so there's a
lot of overlap between the DSM criteria and then this definition from Russ but
what I want to underscore here is the compulsive nature of the behavior and I
think when you ask the question like what do neuroscientists or psychologists
what do they mean by compulsive the idea is that you are doing something out of
an urge to do it but it's no longer fulfilling it's no longer actually that
the craving to do something lines up with the reward what it really is is
that the wanting and the liking of whatever you're doing no longer line up
in healthy behaviors you want what you like and you like what you want but when
it comes to certain drugs it's possible to have the wanting and liking come
apart still to come on no stupid questions Steven and Angela dig into the
idea of wanting things that you no longer like I'm starting to think that
maybe we've cracked the Angela Duckworth coat it's not Diet Coke it's not heroin
it's not golf
before we return to Stephen and Angela's conversation about addiction
let's hear some of your thoughts on the subject we asked listeners to let us
know about things or behaviors they may feel addicted to outside of the realm of
substance abuse here's what you said hi my name is Hannah McLean before the
pandemic I worked at a tech startup with free snacks and beverages in the office
and I became absolutely addicted to polar orange vanilla seltzer it was to
the point where I was drinking eight or nine cans a day and also waking up in
the middle of the night with terrible acid reflux from all the carbonation
while I loved the flavor of the seltzer I really think part of the addiction
came from the benefit of being able to leave my desk and take a walk to the
kitchen throughout the day my new year's resolution in 2020 was to only drink one
can per day and I stuck with it all the way until March when we stopped going
into the office I actually haven't had a can since then because I'm afraid my
addiction will come straight back hi Stephen and Angela this is Shlomo
Hupcher from the suburbs of Jerusalem my addiction to the adrenaline I get after
a good run on the treadmill keeps me coming back for more I run three to four
times a week but if I ever miss one I find myself hankering for my drug hi my
name is Jacob and I want to share a little bit of a story about how when I
was growing up my mom would have these very strong addictions to these very
random foods and it all started with a tuna fish sandwich for breakfast lunch
and dinner she would eat a tuna fish sandwich when she didn't have a tuna
fish sandwich she would show the classic signs of withdrawal and this is how I
found out I have addictive tendencies last Easter my work was leaving out
Cadbury eggs and I'd grab one on the way to my desk every single morning and
when they ran out I was grumpy for what seemed like a few days so I went to the
store to go buy essentially a lifetime supply of Cadbury eggs and I realized
that Cadbury eggs had turned into my tuna fish sandwich so I put them back
and realized I need to be a little bit more aware of my addictive tendencies
that was respectively Hannah McLean Shlomo Hupcher and Jacob Barela de
Herrera thanks to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts now back to
Steven and Angela's conversation about the line between habit and addiction
I once came across an argument that basically anything can be addictive as
long as it offers a reward and that it's the reward that attracts us so a is that
true and B if that is true it sounds like what you just told us overrides at
a little bit because you're saying that even once the reward diminishes or even
disappears the habit has been formed and we can't get away from it so we're
gonna have to now talk about how habits and addictions have overlap but also how
they're not exactly the same thing okay so what is a habit what a habit is is a
behavior that you repeatedly do in response to some cue and that you are
rewarded for in a way that eventually it becomes an automatic behavior and you do
it unthinkingly in the presence of the cue so if I can interrupt for a second
it sounds from that definition as though every addiction would be a habit but not
every habit would be an addiction is that the case I will say that every
addiction does hijack habit machinery but not every habit is an addiction but
I think that the key is that when you want to understand what an addiction is
this compulsion element that Russ Poldrak was talking about the compulsive
and uncontrollable engagement if you think about drug addicts who actually
make plans of how they're gonna get their heroin and they're thinking really
hard they might have schemes like first I gotta rob this person in order to get
the money and then I have to go over here so that is not habit like habits
are behaviors that are so autopilot that they are not even enacted with conscious
awareness so already we have this coming apart between habit and addiction they
don't look the same and this kind of conscious planful behavior already tells
you that it's not exactly the same thing as habit because habits are more like oh
oops I turned left I always turn left at this stop sign I didn't realize I turned
left but that sounds almost a little backwards to me because you're saying
that addiction requires a certain level of intentionality and planning and so
on which sounds less like quote addiction not always but it can it's
just an existence proof that the behaviors of addicts can actually often
be planful and goal-directed now it doesn't mean that it's good and it
doesn't mean that the person doesn't regret it but it's not that kind of
unconscious autopilot like oops of mere habits do you know the famous paper by
Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy back in the I want to say the late 1980s and I
believe was called a fury of rational addiction do you know that paper you
know I don't know it as well as you do but I did read it once so refresh my
memory so Gary Becker for those who don't know was an economist at University
of Chicago incredibly interesting human he died maybe five to seven years ago
and my partner Steve Levitt on Freakonomics is an economist very much
in the mold of Gary Becker yeah he's kind of neo Becker Ian Gary Becker loved
economics but he didn't resemble an economist at all for many he was more
like a psychologist I think I know he was interested in sociology because he
had a lot of curiosities and questions at a typical economist especially of
that era in the 1950s and 60s economics was not at all about human behavior it
was really about the math of the economy I believe the story is that he found
sociology great on the topics but not very good on the rigor and so he wanted
to bring the rigor of economic analysis to these things Gary Becker went on to
write many many papers that were often ridiculed within the economics
establishment is that right oh he was considered not only a heretic and a fool
but like downgrading the whole reputation of economics I did not know
that fast-forward 30 40 years he wins a Nobel Prize he's considered one of the
most humane and interesting and thoughtful economists to have ever been
around because he applied economic analysis to a lot of elements of the
modern world that economists had typically ignored also he wrote as I
said this paper called a theory of rational addiction with Kevin Murphy and
in it they argued that addiction is well the title kind of says it it's
rational in that it shows a set of revealed preferences and that rather than
thinking about someone who's addicted even to a drug as someone who is in the
throes of this intense craving which they may be also they basically argued
that someone who is an addict is weighing the costs and weighing the
benefits and making a decision and revealing their preference through their
addiction now as you can imagine it was a very controversial idea and there were
those especially in the treatment community who absolutely went against it
but the papers really held up is something that is at least a great
foundation for a discussion I think it's provocative but here's the thing I wish
Gary Becker had been alive to see this research really come to full prominence
in the neuroscience literature one of my very favorite thinkers is Kent
Berridge and he has done this path-breaking work explaining to the
rest of us how wanting and liking are not the same thing I'm gonna read from a
2021 paper that he wrote with two colleagues who are also neuroscientists
and they write the positive affect of rewards is an important contributor to
well-being reward involves components of pleasure liking motivation wanting
and also learning liking refers to the hedonic impact of positive events with
underlying mechanisms that include hedonic hotspots in limbic brain
structures that amplify liking reactions wanting refers to incentive
salience a motivational process that makes reward cues attractive and able to
craving for their reward mediated by larger dopamine related meso cortico
limbic networks all I heard was miso and it made me hungry you got me at miso
cortico limbic the expression but look the point here is that after studying
this what Kent Berridge has discovered is that dopamine which people talk about
all the time it's like oh dopamine is the pleasure chemical dopamine at least
in the context of what he's investigating here is really more about
the wanting system it's essentially that when we have certain experiences it can
stimulate parts of the brain that make us motivated to do that thing again and
that's different from stimulating parts of the brain that make us enjoy the
thing now typically these things go together we want what we like and we
like what we want it's all good right like oh my gosh I want to listen to that
music and I like listening to that music great but the funny thing about
drugs and one of the through lines of all the substances that have been
studied that have very strongly addictive qualities is that they
stimulate the dopamine system and they stimulate this wanting response it's
called incentive salience in the technical terms in a very unusual
intense and prolonged way and I think it's really not that these drugs make us
like things more and it's not a pleasure thing it's actually the stimulation of
the dopamine system related to wanting and craving that actually make these
things addictive so to go back to Gary Becker if Gary Becker wants to say hey
you look at an addict and you just are seeing his revealed preferences that's
what he wants but I think what economists are now gonna have to wrestle
with is that the very notion of utility in economics is the things that you like
but here we have a separation between the things that you like and the things
that you want and that's very complicated that is fascinating and it
makes me think of something else Gary Becker once said and since you're so
good at guessing things I'm really curious to know if you can get this one
oh another riddle Gary Becker once said this was in casual conversation I think
with Steve Levitt who told me about it and I talked about it later with Gary
but he once put forth his argument for what he thought was the most addictive
thing in the world what do you think Gary Becker might have said is the most
addictive thing in the world the most addictive thing in the world I think
Gary Becker probably said something like reading it's a very good guess not
correct it's not golf right no not golf he was a big tennis player it's not
tennis either it's much less prosaic than golf or tennis it's something that
is a very core part of the human experience for just about everyone praise
very good guess Gary Becker said the thing that most people are most addicted
to is other people hmm interesting so what did he mean by that exactly my
interpretation was that if you really look at human beings and you think of
all the things that we are quote addicted to or drawn to or want or need
or like that people is the strongest and most universal among them we are very
much social animals and people want and need other people and they do want praise
from them and they want love and they want approval and all those things and
what I thought was most interesting when he said that was I thought of a
counterexample of someone that I'd written about years earlier the Unabomber
the Unabomber was this guy who went cold turkey he went without people and the
reason he did that was long and complicated he had a childhood where he
was very very very smart and his parents kept encouraging him to move up a grade
and up a grade so by the time he was in like sixth or seventh grade in school he
was two or three years younger than his peers and you could look at that and
say well that's pretty hard for a kid who may not be the most socially
competent kid in the first place and then he had a really hard time forming
friendships he had a really hard time having girlfriends all of which he
craved very much and there came a certain point at which he gave it up
went lived in a cabin in Montana and started building bombs and sending them
to people to blow them up now I'm not saying that everybody who becomes
unaddicted to people or distances themselves from other people is going to
go move to a cabin in Montana and start making bombs to blow people up but it
did speak to me as a counterexample of what Gary Becker talked about our need
to be around other people you think it's a counterexample to what Gary Becker
was claiming because you could argue it's just an example he could have you
know moved to a remote cabin and then I think if you really didn't need people
you wouldn't need to interact with them at all including sending them bombs so
he was clearly still interacting with people even in a violent and terrible
way that is true I must say you've given the whole word interacting a new
definition but it's looking for attention you could argue yeah that's
true here's the thing about saying that being with other people is addictive so
if you go back to either the DSM criteria or Russ Poldrak speaking on
behalf of neuroscientists there's an element of dysfunctionality of
compulsion and by the way one of the hallmarks of such a behavior is that
it's regretted it can be regretted in the moment it can be regretted
afterwards I don't know that people would say that about their dependence on
other people yeah so I could say like oh I'm so addicted to talking to my best
friend every Tuesday morning when we go running I would miss it I depend on it
it's an integral part of my life but it lacks that dysfunctionality part it's
not like I do it and I regret it so I think that's an important thing to not
lose sight of that perhaps when the dopamine system that's related to the
incentive salience or the wanting part of the brain which by the way it's not a
part of the brain that's bad it's a part of the brain which is good we have bad
parts of the brain no we have no bad parts of the brain but that's my point
Steven it's just hijacking a part of the brain which is designed to help us two
things like achieve goals and get off the couch and so forth the thing is is
that the unnatural stimulation of the dopamine system in this way especially
by the way for opioids there are certain drugs where the effect on this wanting
system is so profound it not only changes your dopamine response in the
moment it creates long-term structural changes and that system gets all screwed
up you can be one more sensitive in the short term which makes you do drugs more
then over the long term it gets less sensitive which means you have to
increase the amount of drugs that you're doing I feel like I'm Nancy Reagan here
or something telling everybody not to take drugs just say no that was a
terrible campaign it's that easy it has no evidence of it working but I will say
this when we talk about like I'm addicted to Diet Coke or I'm addicted to
Netflix or I'm addicted to social media you can ask these questions with
seriousness but I do think you want to keep in mind like do you really mean
that on the continuum you're at the level of compulsion and dysfunction so
those are great points in summary I would say number one Angela Duckworth
says Gary Becker mostly wrong on being addicted to people yes okay and number
two I've concluded from this conversation that you are plainly not
addicted to Diet Coke you were yanking all of our chains that's pretty obvious
it sounds like you are not at all an addictive type and so I don't think you
probably ever will be addicted to anything except except for no stupid
questions that's what I was gonna ask you you just keep showing up every week
here are you doing here I barely have to do it I just have to give you the
slightest nudge just like one little email hey Angela do you feel like going
to the studio and you're there so I'm starting to think that maybe we've
cracked the Angela Duckworth code it's not Diet Coke it's not heroin it's not
golf it's no stupid questions yeah well you know it's not the worst place in the
world no stupid questions is produced by me Rebecca Lee Douglas and now here's a
fact check of today's conversation in the first half of the show Angela says
that she thinks her seven and a half ounce can of Diet Coke is only miniature
by today's standards this is correct bottles of Coca-Cola were originally
six and a half ounces the 12 ounce can that we're familiar with today was
introduced in 1960 later Angela says that she used the third version of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the DSM while in
grad school but that publication would have been out of date at that time she
would have instead used the revised DSM for which was published in the year
2000 she also said that the most recent publication of the manual is the DSM 6
this is incorrect the DSM 5 which was originally published in 2013 was revised
and republished in March 2022 as the DSM 5 TR or text revision there is not
currently a release date for the DSM 6 then Angela assumes that there has
already been an addiction lawsuit brought against Netflix it doesn't
appear that anything of the sort has occurred just yet however people have
been sued for binge-watching behavior in 2019 Robert De Niro's company Canal
Productions filed a six million dollar lawsuit against a former employee who
was accused of binge-watching enormous amounts of television on company time
including 55 episodes of Friends over a four-day period finally Stephen begins
to list the 10 best-selling sodas in the United States but he only gets to
number seven according to a recent publication from Newsweek Sierra missed
SunKissed and 7UP round out the list that's it for the fact check coming up
next week on no stupid questions what's so bad about nepotism we talk a lot
about how unfair it is that people who are less qualified get certain positions
but perhaps the trust and ease of communication that comes with someone
being a family member or a friend is also important that's next week on no
stupid questions for that episode we want to know if you've ever hired a
family member been hired by a family member or worked with someone who was
hired by a family member let us know how it worked out to share your thoughts
send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics.com with the subject line nepotism
make sure to record someplace quiet and please keep your thoughts to under a
minute no stupid questions is part of the Freakonomics radio network which
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read episode transcripts visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ thanks for
listening as they say you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting a Nobel
Laureate in the Department of Economics at Chicago and believe me they are
swinging a lot of dead cats there's a whole dead cat department by the way the
Freakonomics radio network the hidden side of everything stitcher
