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Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, go back to Michael Jackson's cousin.
I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Mon.
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, is GPS technology changing your brain?
When people give me directions, they're like, and then go three blocks and then you'll turn east.
And I'm like, as if I know what east is.
Angela, do you ever stop to think what it would be like to live in another age?
Like, maybe the Renaissance in Italy or the Roman Empire or the Wild West?
No. That is such an interesting question.
I probably should stop to think about what it would be like to teleport to another era in history.
Well, here's the thing.
I don't actually think about that much either, but I just want to be clear that I'm 100% confident that basically in any other time, I would not have survived.
So I have glasses. I can't see well without them.
I have health issues that require modern medicine.
But to top it all off, I have literally like no geographic intelligence.
What? Did I know this about you?
Yes, I can get lost in my own neighborhood and never find my way home.
When I first moved to Boston, I decided to go for a run without my phone.
And I figured out where to run and how to get back.
But I ended up miles away from where I thought I was.
And I stopped to ask someone for direction, told him where I lived and just asked him if he could point me how to get home.
And he just looked at me and was like, uh, that's really far away.
And I was like, right, I don't have a phone.
I don't have a wallet. I have two legs and that's how I'm going to get there.
So if you could just point me in the right direction.
And again, he's like, ah, that's really far away.
So I finally convinced him I said, look, I can't run fast, but I can run far.
Can you just point me where to go?
Finally, I got there, but I thought about this idea.
If I lived in any other time, I don't know that I would have survived.
I would have never made it back to the village after the hunt or whatever.
Okay. I think I can top that.
I lived in New York City for two years.
And like, you know how New York City is one of the most mapped out cities.
It's an easily navigable.
Yeah, the number of streets.
Every time I would walk outside my apartment building, I'd have to like look for the Empire State Building and then like get reoriented again and like count street numbers.
But okay, you and I could get lost in a paper bag together.
This is actually very humanizing.
I have a brother, Dave, who's good at literally everything.
It's kind of crazy. He's charismatic.
He's good looking. He's athletic.
He's an incredible business person.
When I found out that he was geographically challenged as well, it was the first time I realized that my perfect older brother was human.
Super Dave. Anyway, it was really eye opening for me.
So here's my question for you.
I'm so grateful I live in a world with GPS.
But I'm curious. Am I dumber for using GPS or better put what is using GPS all the time doing to our brains?
Okay, that question more generally like what is technology doing to our brains?
That one I have thought of and one of the reasons I was thinking about it is I stumbled across this paper by two scientists and their names are Louisa, Demani and Verenik, Bobat.
And they wrote this paper called habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation.
Okay, see that is very depressing because if I'm already bad without it, I think how much worse I am with it.
Yes, that would be the depressing conclusion.
But let me briefly tell you about this paper because it was really cool and very ambitious.
So basically, you know, we all have our favorite GPS like I don't know Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, you know, our cars now tell us where to go.
And we don't even have to look at anything because of course our cars are speaking into our ears.
So what these two scientists did is they did two kinds of studies.
One is they just looked correlationally at a cross section of how much time people had spent using GPS and then gave them tests of spatial memory.
Like you're here, you know, there's like 12 arms in the space.
You get this clue. Now figure out where the treasure is.
That sort of thing. And how many people just say I give up are like me and just like thank you so much for this test.
Here's my pen. I'm just going to walk out now.
This has been super fun.
Just like fall to their knees weeping.
Yeah, I might say like there's no way I have like a less than one in 12 chance.
So getting like the right one of the 12 arms.
That would have been you and me, but I don't know that this was true of the they looked at drivers actually I think they looked at adults who owned cars and drove.
And they were cross sectionally for pattern and low and behold they find that people with greater lifetime GPS experience right with use GPS more they had worse spatial memory during these self guided navigation test self guided meaning like, okay, now you have to figure this out without GPS.
So what kind of like use it or lose it story.
That is so depressing. Okay, let me give you the second like super depressing finding from this paper, which is okay.
And they were like look who knows correlation is not causation let's longitudinally follow some of these drivers and see whether they are spatial memory declines as a function of how much they use GPS in the three years following the first cross sectional study.
And yeah, that's pretty much what they found so this is a quote from their abstract although the longitudinal sample was small we observed an important effect of GPS use over time whereby greater GPS use was associated with a steeper decline in hippocampal dependent spatial memory.
And here's the thing when they say hippocampal like you have a hippocampus on each side of your brain on the left and the right and it's shaped a little bit like a seahorse random fact love it and we all love seahorses it's kind of the seat of memory they say importantly we found that those who use GPS more did not do so because they felt they had a poor sense of direction suggesting
that extensive GPS use led to a decline in spatial memory rather than the other way around.
Oh my god, you know they wanted to know whether this relationship was a reverse calls relationship like oh you have a bad sense of direction therefore you rely on GPS but they want to say in this study that there was more evidence for the GPS doing the causing so we're talking about like structural brain changes as a function of using technology.
So because I use GPS so much I'm really bad at directions right one thing that I think is really interesting about this idea of GPS versus maps and kind of how we use to navigate there was this thing was reading in scientific American about how GPS weekends memory and what we can do about it and they talked about two different types of navigation allocentric versus
egocentric and allocentric obviously all means other obviously sorry I don't know why I said that I didn't know that.
Before I read this it does mean other it's a great little prefix try dropping aloe into your casual conversation the next we have the allotry please not this entry the allot so allocentric navigation means other but that's when you look at a map and everything is displayed as it relates to all the other features and landmarks in the environment and so it's giving
you this sense of what's around you it teaches you contextually what the world looks like and that is so different than this egocentric navigation which is what we use with GPS right because egocentric means ego self that when I did know that when I think you could drop like of course Ego obviously but that means that all of the information is relative to you and your
current position your current orientation on the map they wrote that we are no longer active navigators we are passive passengers aboard the GPS and we're no longer allocentric navigators we are now egocentric navigators right OK I'm just going to go all in on egocentric navigation because that is the only way I can get anywhere so for those who recognize this kind
of navigation pattern it's like this you're telling somebody how to get to that restaurant and you're like OK so you go like three blocks and then you know that wall that kind of closed but it's sort of open but it's closed OK when you see that and it's on your left then turn right and then go another block and then there's going to be this like purple weird apartment building
so then you go two more storefronts and there's the restaurant that's egocentric navigation because it's all relative to you can I point out how amazing it is that you just described it that way because you were using points of interest like turn left at the wall when people give me directions are like and then go three blocks and then you'll turn east and I'm like
as if I know what east is right and by the way when I think of allocentric navigation which I don't do a lot but I do with more frequency than you would imagine because I married to Jason Duckworth who has possibly the world's best allocentric navigation sense like he could migrate to the north pole like this kid my husband he lands at an airport in some city he's never
been and hope you like I think it's like north northeast from here right like what why would you ask me the question just just and then he has a sense of where true north is is amazing and I asked him once how he does this and by the way this is a whole topic of research won't be surprised many scientists wonder how birds do migrate they have maybe navigational systems that we
don't but with humans you know at least with Jason he actually notices things like the length of the shadow and the angle of shadows right people actually who have like excellent senses of navigation have said they'll notice things like in nature for example like the side of the tree that the most is I mean things that you and I would probably not notice but this allocentric
navigation is actually navigating the world more top down you know as opposed to this egocentric like oh it's all relative to me the mailbox the water and right on your left will be this and I have to say that for a long time I thought that Jason's allocentric navigation and Angela's egocentric navigation I thought it was because I was a girl I was like oh there's a gender
difference like girls navigate the world egocentrically and men navigate the world allocentrically but I found this paper because you just fed it is so many stereotypes I did not even said girl I'm just going to say I hope that's not true but I honestly I don't think this is a settled research question but there is this paper in 2014 and it's called navigational strategy
maybe more a matter of environment and experience than gender and what they did is they gave people again these sort of like navigation games if you will because you don't take people out into a forest when you study their navigation says here's a compass good luck if we see you again lucky us yeah right hopefully you can run long even if you can't run fast but basically
they you know didn't find any differences in gender in terms of the strategies people used but you know egocentric navigation navigating the world by like where you are and where everything is relative to you whether or not it's related to gender I don't know I personally feel like I'm okay with that I'm okay with that as well but I will say the one magical piece of allocentric
navigation is I think it can lead to greater adventure because if you're always going from one spot to the other spot in the other spot is linear path where you're just going to follow the directions and get there I think so often we miss out on all the things that are around us that we may never have noticed before so let me give you just a silly example I was living in Chicago
and some friends and I had gone to Eastern Ohio okay since I do not have a good allocentric navigation sense wait let me Chicago is in Illinois correct and Ohio is I mean this is how bad I'm going to say like on the left side the west side like where is Ohio is further east than Illinois okay all right I'm with you keep going so I'm driving if you're looking at a map I'm driving
from Ohio I got left to Chicago okay thank you but I'm with two of my really good friends Lori sorenson and Jimmy party which is great last name by the way to party Jimmy party whoa but we are driving back to Chicago and we have time because we left early and we don't have to get back to Chicago till that night and so at some point along the road trip we decided we're going
to stop at every brown roadside sign now brown traffic signs there the things indicate like a recreational activity or cultural interest or something like that what I didn't know that wait is that true 100% true wait for the whole country yes that's my understanding I mean if you know that is perhaps the most useful thing you've ever said to me that the brown signs
mean that they're like recreational sites yeah it's like here's a presidential library or here's a other I don't know interesting site gosh that is just the most useful thing to know kind of I mean you don't drive so I don't imagine your ten of road trip I know it's true I'm never going to go on a road trip but it might come in useful case I have a personality change and may you
not because we love your personality but we're doing this I'm not going to drive from Ohio to Chicago we decided to stop at all the brown roadside signs and it turns into this amazing adventure because we weren't just having to go from point A to point B my only one that I really remember is we ended up stopping in Gary Indiana at Michael Jackson's childhood home and they
have this huge like I don't know monument in the front yard of this house and we paid like an extra ten dollars instead of taking a picture away outside the fence we wanted to take a picture right next to it of course we talked to Michael Jackson's cousin you did it was all really dumb but it was just a fun adventure wait wait wait wait wait wait wait go back to Michael Jackson's
cousin yeah we talked to him what do you mean you talked to it was he just like hanging out there he lives in the house oh he's like selling access to the house didn't let us in house but access to the yard and talks and that's why they charge your money to come in and take a picture and we totally paid because we're like look I'm never going to be in Indiana again so might as
well have the fun experience no you will not so if we hadn't decided to have an adventure and if we just gone from point A to point B we would have missed out on one of my favorite road trips and one of my most fun experiences exactly still to come on no stupid questions Mike and Angela explore how other forms of modern technology may be affecting our brains don't use a computer
don't use a calculator don't use a thesaurus don't use a dictionary now back to Mike and Angela's conversation about how technology changes our brains okay let me expand our question a little if I could we've talked a lot about maps and I think that's important and as two people who are shall we say geographically challenged a good question I'll centrically challenged
I'm ego is indirectly challenged to just challenge yeah yeah just challenged let's expand the question though you know there was a fascinating article it's old now in 2008 in the Atlantic by the journalist Nicholas Carr but it kind of shook the cultural zeitgeist at the time and the headline was his Google making a stupid I read that article it was the cover of the Atlantic
the month that came out right and I think it's still one of the most famous articles written in the Atlantic I remember talking about it then the fact that I remember a specific Atlantic article all these years later it really had a big impact on people and he talked about how the internet was chipping away at his capacity for filtration and contemplation my favorite
line in the article he says I was once a scuba diver in the sea of words now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski oh that is such a good line isn't it beautiful you know what it's so good I don't think chat GPT could have come up with it okay I see where you're going here I mean because you could argue that if Google's making a stupid chat GPT is making us total idiots
right 100% but so talk to me about that is technology making us dumber and I want to warn that there's always I think before you answer I think there's always this worry that we catastrophize new technology and we're like oh no it's going to be the worst so he talks about as well in this article and I'm just going to caveat here that Socrates was really like scared about the development
of writing true but he thought everyone's going to rely on the written word and then they're going to stop having these good memories they'll become forgetful and there was this other guy when the Gutenberg Bible came out his name was Hieronimo Squarsha Fiko that's an even better last name than can I just want to say I can pronounce Hieronimo Squarsha Fiko which is really
really hard but he was so worried about books becoming available because he said books are going to lead to intellectual laziness people will be less students at a week in their minds I got news for you Squarsha Fiko books are not the problem buddy news flash but here's my point there's always this worry about catastrophizing what's going to happen and so I don't
want to be that guy but at the same time talk to me about what it means okay so I had a friend well I mean I have a friend but at the time and I'm thinking of January of 2023 my friend Lyle Unger who's a professor of computer science I think it's hard to appreciate just how much AI has shifted in less than two years he's really one of the computer scientists that leading edge
of the stuff so he texts me and he's like we should write an op-ed together because the New York City Department of Education is banning the use of chat in schools no no no bad choice right so like I mean it's debatable but I'm like New York Department of Education how dare you people as if they're listening to me well you know maybe they should listen to Mike Mon what would be
your visceral intuition of why that would be a bad thing I mean you understand why they want to ban it they're like we don't want kids to cheat on their essays and you know pretend to know things they don't but why do you think they shouldn't do that so I completely understand the knee jerk reaction to ban something like this absolutely I was teaching my class at BYU yesterday
and our guest was Omar Johnson former CMO of Beats by Dre Apple executive artistic genius artistic genius creative genius and we were having this conversation about artificial intelligence more generally but also chat GPT and this is where we came down on it I don't believe that artificial intelligence or chat GPT will rule the world but people who know how to
leverage artificial intelligence and chat GPT will rule the world so we can either say over afraid of this don't bring this into my classroom or we can say look if you are going to survive in the new economy in the new world where chat GPT and artificial intelligence are running everything you need to be the person who knows how to leverage it and Omar talked about you
have to become a prompt genius you have to figure out how to prompt these things I mean otherwise it's just like saying oh you can't use the internet for your research paper it's like well okay that was a bad bit of advice someone may have given you back in the early 2000s or whatever yes so if we tell all of our young people you know from age five to 18 in the city of New York
hey don't use this technological innovation I mean it's almost like don't use a computer don't use a calculator don't use a thessaurus don't use a dictionary and Lionel and I did end up writing that op-ed which we published in the Los Angeles Times and we said at the end of this op-ed will AI one day surpass human beings not just in knowing but in thinking maybe but such
a future has yet to arrive for now students and the rest of us must think for ourselves and our last line is like any tool GPT is an enemy of thinking only if we fail to find ways to make it our ally and my my chat GPT story is I've been using it pretty much every day I'm trying to keep a tab open to chat GPT and there's this plugin where you can get chat GPT to read like a Google
dog or PDF and I'm writing this book as you know Mike and I will regularly let chat GPT give me feedback on entire chapters wait on your own book yes wait so you say read the chapter and tell me what tell me what you think wait what give me an example of what it spits out for you so the advice that I've gotten from Lyle who's trying to get me to become more like a prompt genius
but right now I'm just like a prompt you know like I don't know where I am between like total idiot genius junior in college yeah exactly I'm a sophomore um so you tell it who you are you tell it who you want chat GPT to be so I'll be like I'm Angela Duckworth and I'm writing my second book I'm a psychologist and then you know you can say whatever else you want to say about your
audience it's that but then you say you are my editor and you were giving me feedback at this rough draft stage and oh my gosh Mike the feedback is so damn good you know once it said so you did this in this chapter it's a little wordy you repeat yourself and then I wrote back to chat GPT because it is like a conversation so you're like responding to its last utterance so I
say okay interesting you think I'm repetitive how so and here's one very specific true example I started one of the chapters in this book that I have not yet finished with a story of Jason working really hard earlier in his life and his career and then I made my own point about my own life about me working a little too hard not not working smart just working hard and then
chat GPT gave me the feedback that maybe I should choose one of our stories and not tell both of them so I go back and read the chapter and gosh darn it if chat GPT isn't spot on I was like so true chat amazing why oh isn't that amazing it's amazing see this is such a good example of how technology is actually making us better instead of maybe where GPS is making us less good
at navigating life do you think it's making us better or is it just making the product better like is my brain better hmm that that dear friend is the question okay let me suggest that there is a classic study that shed sunlight on this it was published in current biology in 2011 the two authors were Catherine Woolett who's a clinical psychologist and then Eleanor McGuire
who's a professor of cognitive neuroscience at university college London and the title of the paper is acquiring quote the knowledge unquote of London's layout drives structural brain changes so first I will tell you that London taxi drivers you probably know this right they're like legendary legendary I mean you tell them an address and they're like okay you're
like I'm I'm so sorry what you've heard of that street before and London is not laid out like so apparently the knowledge is like shorthand for this like incredibly voluminous set of you know landmarks and street names and like what's one way and what's closed a certain times a day and it's so hard to navigate these London streets that it can take years to train to become
a licensed taxi driver in London but I did get fascinated by this because this study is like so famous and it's so often used to make the point or at least raise the question that maybe there are trade-offs when you train it and gain it in one domain okay great line by the way train it and gain it we're gonna mark that I'm sure someone said it before me but everyone all says
use it or lose it and I was like oh that's so negative how about train it or gain it but anyway I'm sure chatship and we're gonna document that forever I think it is more positive but the story is actually interesting of how the study came about so one of the authors Eleanor McGuire neuroscientist she first gets the idea of studying London cab drivers because she knows
that in animals so in the animal kingdom some birds and mammals they like hide their food I mean like squirrels do this right and then you know months later right there's supposed to dig up that acorn that means that certainly Mike Maughan and Angela Duckworth would have starved like we have no idea where we love that acorn I probably wouldn't remember I had an acorn
yeah you'd be like acorn what acorn and so these animals are amazing at memorizing the locations of all these hiding spots because by the way they bury these things in a way that like other animals can't see which means they can't see it either so they truly have to memorize and they come back in a different season where it doesn't even look the same doesn't that just
give you a whole new level of respect for squirrels yes I mean come on we bow down to you squirrels so anyway so here's what Eleanor McGuire finds she's like okay if these squirrels have this amazing spatial memory and she knows that there's a part of the hippocampus that's responsible for this right a specialized part of the hippocampus for spatial memories she's
like I wonder if London taxi drivers also use this part of their hippocampus and she's then asked the million dollar question and it's so genius she's like I wonder if in all those years that they're studying and driving in order to pass this exam to get their license whether their hippocampus grows they have to rely on their own brain so they're actually training
right this area of the brain and not relying on GPS whether it would change those brain areas and in fact that is exactly what she finds so she and her colleague were able to scan the brains of London taxi drivers and let me just read you from the abstract of this paper we utilized a unique opportunity to study average IQ adults meaning they were normal people not a desk
it wasn't a desk yes it was like these are not clinical patients with brain lesions right operating in the real world IRL as they learned over four years the complex layout of London streets while training to become licensed taxi drivers in those who qualified so those who actually got their license acquisition of an internal spatial representation of London was associated
with a selective increase in gray matter volume in their posterior hippocampi and concomitant changes to their memory profile gray matter Mike is the neurons themselves but when you have an increase in gray matter it's like it's like when you lift weights and your bicep gets bigger that's analogous to what they discovered in the study that these London taxi drivers
had bigger areas of their hippocampus the area that's associated with spatial memory and they were better at spatial memory tests and it was one of the earliest studies to kind of definitively show you are changing your brain by what you do with it and if it really is trained or gain it I guess you could say that if you use chat GPT to do certain things if you use GPS to
do your navigation then maybe you are getting smarter in some ways like how to use these tools but the actual function that the technology is doing for you the argument might be collectively looking at all the research that there's a trade-off right that the actual thing that you're actually using the technology to do maybe your brain is doing less of therefore
you may be shrinking that part of the brain and that's the guess from this trade-off research well that is both encouraging and depressing all at the same time look I think Angela and I would love to hear from you what are your thoughts on how modern technology is affecting the way we think and what's your experience with it personally so record a voice memo in a quiet
place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to us at NSQ at Freakonomics.com and maybe you will hear your voice on a future episode of the show Angela I want to share with you a story that I think brings together a little bit of what we talked about in this conversation today from a deer mentor of mine just kidding named Michael Scott.
Ah okay I get it just kidding now go on.
Thank you. Michael Scott is a character in the TV show The Office and there is a point in season four where they are launching the thing called Dunder Mifflin Infinity and they are moving their sales online onto a website and it's threatening all of this sales people who are like oh no what's going to happen to my job.
I love this go on. It's in early 2000s debacle where people are thinking the internet is going to take my job take it today for what chat GPT and AI is going to do to your job.
So Michael Scott who is a famously terrible manager good human but terrible manager who makes so many dumb mistakes is on a tour of vengeance to prove that technology is not the future that people matter you need the human connection to make sales and all these things and so he's going to try to prove this and in the midst of that he is using a GPS in his car and he comes
to a point in the road where it says turn right and he's like well it says turn right and he's in the car with Dwight Shrut who's this other character who's kind of this annoying guy and he's like no Michael it means veer right it means veer right and he said no it said turn right so he turns hard right and he drives straight into a lake and then it says to Dwight see this is what technology
will get you technology can't make the right decisions it told me to drive into a lake now obviously Michael Scott was interpreting technology poorly right obviously it was the difference between turn and veer turn and fear but it did say turn so in fairness to Michael and I think this is a silly story it's a very funny episode of the show but it paints the picture yeah
it makes like a serious point right of like you get to either control technology or it can control you I think that's where I would summarize kind of what we've talked about yes your brain's going to change either way but you can also control what you do with it and how you leverage technology to sort of advance your own cause is that fair it's so fair and because we are talking
about London taxi cabs I do have this quote from Winston Churchill who said we shape our buildings and afterwards our building shape us amen I think you would agree I don't know how you'd feel about Dunder Mifflin infinity but I think you would agree I think he'd be so confused this episode was 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 we all have our preferred mapping systems and she mentions Yahoo Maps as a potential favorite however Yahoo Maps was shut down in June of 2015 as it struggled to compete with other navigation apps like Google Maps, Ways and Apple Maps later Mike tells the story of visiting Michael Jackson's childhood home
in Gary Indiana coincidentally located at 2300 Jackson Street which is also the title of the Jackson's final studio album he recalls taking pictures of a huge monument to the pop star in the front yard however you won't see it if you visit today the 5,000 pound granite monument featuring a silhouette of Jackson was removed for unknown reasons when siblings Janet
and Randy Jackson visited the property in 2017 and it's unclear whether Jackson's cousin still resides in the 867 square foot home that once housed nine siblings and two parents but it's true that various relatives have lived in the space and maintained the property over the years and according to Amy Howell vice president of tourism, marketing and communications
for the state of Indiana you should not have to pay to take a picture in front of the house finally Angela discusses the cognitive trade-offs that might result from using artificial intelligence or GPS technology but we should note that the authors of the London taxi cab study wrote that drivers who completed the knowledge might experience trade-offs as well
cognitive neuroscientist Eleanor McGuire found that although the rear of a driver's hippocampus was often larger than average the front was usually smaller than average meaning the drivers might excel at some forms of memory like where specific addresses are located but become worse at others that's it for the fact check before we wrap today's show let's hear
some thoughts about last week's episode on burnout hi this is TGA TITCOM from Lancaster, Pennsylvania back in the 80s I was the assistant director and one of the original victim assistance programs in the country our staff of seven responded to the scene with police for about 700 calls a year helping after the most traumatic events that humans could face we learned
a hard way to screen our job applicants for one common quality of professional helpers we watched out for what we called the savior complex I can save the world because I care so much those folks quickly burned themselves to a crisp the counselors who were most successful and effective were able to pull back except the often harsh realities of life and lift others
up without taking on their pain that was listener TGA TITCOM thanks to her and to everyone who shared their experiences with us and remember we'd love to hear your thoughts on how GPS and other technologies are affecting the way you think send a voice memo to nsq at Freakinomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show coming up next week on no stupid questions
what is the connection between creativity and happiness if your child's like hey I want to be an artist or I want to go into this job you're like starving artists maybe we could think about and then you give them a trip back to Lancaster like you could be an accountant and hate your life that's next week on no stupid questions no stupid questions is part of the Freakinomics
Radio Network which also includes Freakinomics Radio people I mostly admire and the economics of everyday things all our shows are produced by Stitcher and RunBud Radio Lyric Baudich is our production associate this episode was mixed by Eleanor Osborne we had research assistants from Daniel Moritz Rapson our theme song was composed by Luis Gera you can follow
us on Twitter at nsq underscore show and on Facebook at nsq show if you have a question for a future episode please email it to nsq at Freakinomics.com to learn more or to read episode transcripts visit Freakinomics.com slash nsq thanks for listening my desk actually it's got like seven boxes of pumpkin spice mix that my computer is standing on because my standing
desk is at work the Freakinomics Radio Network the hidden side of everything Stitcher
