220. Is Your Attention Span Shrinking?
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I savored it. I absorbed it. I loved it. I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Mike Mann. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, are attention spans really shrinking? 10 minutes sounds so long to me, Mike. Angela, I have a question for you today. I have been hearing...

a lot about how the modern attention span is so much shorter than it used to be. And I know that there are more potential distractions today with phones, the internet, social media, et cetera. But is our ability to focus actually diminishing or are there just more things battling for our attention than there used to be?

Do we now have the attention span of a gnat or a dog like squirrel? By the way, I have also asked this question. Are our attention spans shrinking? It is possible that human beings in 2024 have the same attention spans that we had in 1924 or 2026.

15, 24 or whenever, but we happen to be in this buffet of amazing things. And so, of course, we move from one item to the other quickly, but we have the same attention spans. It's not that we're any different. It's just that our environments are

very attention grabbing. But I think when people ask this question, they are asking whether because of the environments we're in, we're different. Can we not even pay attention if we're maximally motivated? Here's where like, I will admit the other week I was with two of my friends at a concert. It's called Croce by Croce. So Jim Croce died in a plane crash. And

And his son... Who's Jim Croce? I think I know who that is, but I think I don't know who that is. He has some iconic songs like Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And his son now sings his music. And the amount of great music Jim Croce was able to put out that's still iconic today in just a short period of time before he died was amazing. But I'm sitting there at the concert. We've got great seats. We are hearing the music.

And it's only 90 minutes. The whole concert. Yes. And I, after maybe 45, was just like so antsy. And I looked at both my friends and I said, I do not have the attention span to sit through this concert. Like, I got to go do something.

I can't just sit here. Like I can't do it. Yes. And so this is where my question comes from. I will on the flip side say, though, however, I also think about Netflix. Recently, I saw a stat that 73 percent of people said they had binge watched a show, meaning they have watched more than five hours in a single sitting.

Have you ever done that? I have not. The most I've done is to watch two consecutive episodes of Game of Thrones. You don't seem like a Game of Thrones person. I've never seen Game of Thrones. Yeah, that's not very Mike Bond. It's very violent, but I...

really loved it. And I did indulge in two consecutive episodes, which must be what, like two hours total or something like that. I don't know. Well, you're certainly in the minority. Right. So that leads me to think, OK, maybe attention spans aren't decreasing. It's just how we spend our time and what grabs us. Right. Well, I will say this. If I were going to be a cynic about the Netflix thing, I have not watched a young person watch Netflix without multitasking. So

So I'll just say that we're not sure about what attention is drawn to when we just see the statistic that people are binging. Absolutely. But I think one of the things that led to this idea about attention spans was a massively erroneous statistic that

that ran wild in recent years. Have you heard about this goldfish stat? Go ahead, tell me, enlighten me. So in 2015, there was a stat that really came to life saying that the average attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds in 2015.

And that the attention span of a goldfish is only nine seconds. So then everyone on the internet starts blowing up with this idea that the human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish. It's in Time Magazine, The Telegraph, The Guardian, USA Today, New York Times, Harvard professors are citing it. And all of it is going back to this 2015 report by the Consumer Insights team of Microsoft Canada. But that didn't actually come from any of the Microsoft resources.

Someone on Microsoft's ad team had found it on a website called Statistic Brain. That sounds credible. Which is basically just a search engine optimization page that was masquerading as this website to look like a place with deep academic insights, but it was just trying to drive Internet traffic.

And the website had two different sources that it was citing for this attention span thing. One was an analytics report about 25 people who quickly left websites they didn't like, which is this enormous logical leap into a attention span deficit. And the other source was completely false.

Fake news. Exactly. And especially because, if I may, in defense of goldfish, there's this wonderful professor, Felicity Huntingford, at the University of Glasgow who studied fish. And she said that goldfish have a model system for learning and memory formation. And so we're knocking goldfish, too.

You know, actually, I did an informal straw poll of my students because I'm teaching undergraduates this semester. So I have asked them this question. Do you think our attention spans are shrinking? And I did mean like the capacity to devote attention to one thing and not get distracted, not the habit, but the raw ability. I think every hand in the classroom went up. Now, by the way, it's a straw poll, so that's not scientific evidence.

And then I asked them, like, why do you think that is? And you won't be surprised that they basically blamed technology. They were like, we've kind of grown up with the ability to swipe left, swipe right, swipe up, swipe down, click.

Tab to tab to tab, device to device. And I think Stephen Dubner, actually, you know, on our sibling podcast for Economics Radio, he interviewed this professor who is a psychologist, but she's also a professor of informatics at UC Irvine. Her name is Gloria Mark. And she has, I think, some of the only defensible data. This is not like the goldfish stuff that you were just telling me, but Gloria Mark says

suggests that the attention span of, you know, your typical adult has shrunk. For example, like on computer screens, right? Like how often do we switch from one screen to another? In her research, the

The attention span was at some point like about two and a half minutes. I think this is about like two decades ago. In other words, you could stay on a screen as long as you wanted, of course, but on average people would stay about two and a half minutes. And then she did another study, and this one I think is about 10 years ago, so in the span of, I don't know, about a decade, that had gone down to a little over a minute, 75 seconds. Wow.

Interesting. And like you said with your class, I think there is a general sentiment that the human attention span has shrunk.

What's interesting to me is the impact that that has on some business decision making. So there's a company called Quibi that was started by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who's a very influential film producer and media executive. He was chairman of Disney. Right. He got Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, to come in and run it. She's an incredibly well-respected business.

And so she was CEO of Quibi. And the idea behind it was that it was a short form mobile streaming platform. So it was going to give you

10 minutes or less for these high quality short videos. And it was meant- What year is this, by the way? April of 2020 is when it launches. Not that long ago. Okay. They raise almost $2 billion. And much of the idea behind this is that human attention spans are shrinking. 10 minutes sounds so long to me, Mike. I mean, I'm just-

Marveling, right? 2020. Well, 10 minutes if you're comparing it to a TikTok video or a YouTube short or a Instagram reel. Which is, by the way, much more consumed, at least in frequency, than movies.

Absolutely. But they go in with this idea that maybe there's this middle ground. You've got these really short 30 to 90 second videos or whatever on TikTok. You've got these 24 to 45 minute episodes on Netflix or some other streaming service. And then you've got these two hour movies. But maybe there's this window where people want to consume a short episode.

television show, if you will. I think I know the epilogue of this because I haven't heard of Quibi. So tell me what happened. It didn't last long. And after raising two billion dollars and going all in and having these great executives, it shutters after just six months. Now, part of what they blame is that it was during covid.

And they were banking on people watching a 10-minute show on your commute on the train or something like that. They blamed stiff competition from established streaming services. And their content was only available on mobile. You couldn't get it on a desktop or television. But that said, others speculate that Quibi just fundamentally misunderstood this idea of

of human attention span and they bet on the fact that people want to consume television and some of these other things in much shorter increments. I mean, this mention of 10 minutes, you're talking about the idea that like human beings have an attention span shorter than a goldfish and this kind of

fake science news statistic. There's another apocryphal notion about attention span in my domain, which is like, how long can a student hold their attention in a lecture before it wanders off to something else? So there has been this notion that many professors believe is rooted in science, which is that the attention span is somewhere between 10 to 15 minutes.

And at that point, you have to do something like take a break or switch up the activity. But there was this process.

Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, so not a psychologist, Neil Bradbury, and he's at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. And he got interested in this and just basically did a literature review. He's like, wait, I've heard this. Is that true? When he dug into it, he was like, yeah, I could find no evidence that this is true. But

What I found really interesting from his literature view is that the thing that he did discover kind of accidentally, and I'll just read you the line from his paper, was this. The greatest variability in student attention arises from differences between teachers and not from the teaching format itself.

Certainly, even the most interesting material can be presented in a dull and dry fashion. And it is the job of the instructor to enhance their teaching skills to provide not only rich content, but also a satisfying lecture experience for the students. So I think he's like, you know, you're really good.

Maybe you can capture attention for longer. But I want to say something about a very recent paper. It was published this year, and it looked at data from 287 samples across 32 different countries over a time span of...

31 years. So it's data that starts being collected in 1990 and then all the way up to 2021. And these researchers asked the question, what is happening to attention span in a way that is much more rigorous than the

goldfish statistic and what was dug up about attention spans and lectures. Essentially, what they do is they look at this one particular attention task called the D2 test of attention. And the way it works is there are lines of text. They all are D's or P's.

there are these little vertical hash markings above or below each letter. And when you take this test, your job is to cross out only the letter D, but not the letter P, so you have to pay attention because they look so similar.

And only the ones that have two markings. It's like a proofreading task, right? Sure. And the way you're scored is that the more letters you can correctly get, the more points you get in a limited amount of time. So speed matters, but also accuracy matters. So that's how they score this task. And you can make your own judgment about whether that is a good measure of attention span, but it certainly takes attention. And when they crank out the analyses of all this data...

They do not find a decline in attention span. If anything, adults in that 31-year time span from 1990 to 2021 have actually improved their attention span. Not at all our intuition, right? But basically, you're not finding...

There's resounding evidence that, you know, our attention span has gone from that of an owl to that of a gnat. But what do you think? Do you think that our habit of paying attention to things has changed? Do you think in addition to that, our raw capacity, like the maximal ability? Like, what do you what do you really believe?

I genuinely do not believe that our capacity has shrunk. I do believe that we're sitting at this endless buffet of distraction. If you have a really clear ability to tell a story and capture a narrative, I think you can capture attention in a really meaningful way. And with teaching as well, right? There have been professors who teach maybe the most dull material

But if they can capture attention using these elements of storytelling, whether that's novelty or tension or relatability, you can string it together in such a way that keeps people's attention for a long time. So people clearly have the ability to pay attention to something.

And Angela and I would love to hear your thoughts on whether or not attention spans are shrinking or your experience with your own attention span. Record a voice memo in a quiet place with your mouth close to the phone and email it to us at nsq at free economics dot com. And maybe we'll play it on a future episode of the show.

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Now, back to Mike and Angela's conversation about attention spans.

I think it's important to ask the question, like, why do we have attention spans? Why can't we pay attention to everything? Because our brains would explode. Well, so it is a gating mechanism, right? So it turns out that these brains that we have, it's an amazing computer we have in our head, but it's...

a small computer. And, you know, we did evolve from primates and then, you know, before that, more primitive animals. And trying to create a brain that is awesome runs up against other constraints. Like, the brain is very metabolically expensive. So your brain actually burns many more calories for its weight than the rest of your body, right? It's a very expensive computer to run. So the reason why we need to have

selective attention, like why do we need to pay attention to one thing and necessarily ignore literally everything else, is because our brains are not able to process an infinite amount of information. I cannot pay attention to you, Mike, and also the ticking clock, and also every tab on my browser, and also think about what I ate yesterday, and also make a plan for what I'm going to do afterwards. I can't. We need this gating mechanism. We do not have infinitely large

computational capacity. And if we really understand that's why we have attention spans, then I think it just helps us at least appreciate that

Attention may be our most precious resource because when you pay attention to something, it enters your awareness. And when you don't pay attention to something, it's as if it didn't exist. You know, Danny Kahneman used to say, what you see is all there is. And so if we have evolved this way, if this is just part and parcel of being a human being, then we're not going to be able to do anything.

then if we're not intentional about it, if we don't like notice where attention is going, do we like how long it dwells on one thing versus like where is it going? Then in a way, we're allowing our whole existence to kind of like bob like a cork on top of this ocean current.

It reminds me of this really interesting Modern Family episode where Haley Dunphy, who's the kind of ditzy, fun older sister, she loses her phone for a while and doesn't have phone privileges. She loses her phone as in like her...

Her parents take it away as a punishment. Is it Phil and Claire? Did I get that right? Phil and Claire. Yes. I have watched a lot of Modern Family, I will say, over the shoulders of my daughters. But she's sitting there, I think in a golf cart, and she's looking around. And because of...

not the amount or ability to pay attention, but because of a lack of distraction. So making that distinction that we've discussed. She is suddenly looking around and saying she's hearing the birds and she's noticing the sunshine and she's observing all of these things that because of distraction and how distraction has limited her attention, she's never noticed any of these things. And it's this

parody on how much we miss because we're constantly bombarding ourselves with things that pull our attention away. Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer, wrote a book called The Creative Act, A Way of Being. He talks so much about how creativity will flow through us if we just give ourselves space to observe without having to pay attention to a specific thing.

So I want to give you a quote from one of my heroes. I never met him, actually, but I don't know that you would know his name, Herb Simon. I know the name. You do know the name Herb Simon? Because it's like not a household name, but it should be. I'm sure I've just heard it in conversation with you, but yes. That is very likely. I mean, he was, oh my gosh, like an academic sequoia in the forest of, well, cognitive psychology, of computer science, of economics. I mean, he really was...

a complete and total genius. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics. But anyway, here's the quote from Herb Simon. In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else, a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. It consumes the attention

the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. I think he is making a profound point. My gut instinct, I mean, I asked yours, so I should share mine. I feel it myself. Like, I feel this

And again, I'm not saying necessarily that my raw capacity has changed, but like just standing in the infinite buffet line of my life, you know, there's always a new text message. I don't even text a lot of people, but there's always a new text message.

Then there are phone calls that still get through despite my phone being on do not disturb, which I don't understand. You just call twice. Oh, is that how it works? If you call twice in a row, it breaks through do not disturb. Oh, I did not know that. I think I get like 200 emails a day, Mike, like, you know, 100 of which actually require a substantive reply. Yeah.

I feel like my attention is just being, like, grabbed, like, pulled by the collar, you know, one place or the other. And I will say that when Herb Simon says that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, I feel like there is so much that I could pay attention to. And indeed, I feel impoverished because this limited resource, you know, this, like, little spotlight that I have, right? I only have one. It's just like, oh, I can go here, I can go here. You know, I do feel...

kind of robbed. And one of the books that I started reading, but I haven't gotten too far into it, is called Stolen Focus. Have you heard about this book? It's by, I think he's a journalist named Johan Harry? Yes, I haven't read it, but I've heard many people cite it. It was recommended to me by my daughter, Lucy, who's 21. She was like,

I totally think that this hypothesis that Johan Harry puts forth, which is that we really are in a kind of war of distraction, right? Like we're living the world that Herb Simon described well before he could anticipate just how many distractions there would be. The book really focuses on technology, by the way. So she tells me with great urgency, like, Mom, you have to read

No.

I actually got one as a gift once. You know, if we have smartphones, it's like deliberately a dumb phone because, well, at least the one I got, and I think the one Lucy now has apparently, you can't use maps. You can't surf the internet. You can't go to social media. Because I think there are a lot of people who are like, you know what? I need to modify my situation. I can't use willpower. Like, I cannot just...

will myself to pay attention to what I need to pay attention to. Well, if I can't use maps, I will die within like, I don't know, 27 minutes because I can't get anywhere. Right. So the light phone, at least the one I got, it was literally just a phone. And I asked Lucy, like, what has it been like? And she's like, amazing. Yeah.

I was like, really? This 21-year-old is delighted to have a phone that has reversed the technological trends of 20-plus years of engineering. And I think it... Well, I know. It's because she feels like she has put herself in a room not with an infinite buffet of things that she could go look at or listen to or swipe to or click to and just kind of taken more control. She wants...

less information because she senses in herself this like poverty of attention. Right. I don't know how much this is going to be a trend, but I think she's experiencing something that honestly we're all experiencing and looking for a solution as many of us are. But,

But it's also this idea that we are constantly consuming, whether it's the next podcast, the next audio book, the latest Taylor Swift drop or a show or whatever that is. And when you're constantly consuming, we're never processing. I've been trying to just write more to process some of my own thinking and recently wrote a note to myself on why I should only listen to things on iTunes.

regular speed. Because I, in audiobooks- You don't listen to things at like 1.5x? No, I always listen at 1.75 or higher. Okay, okay. And in fact, it drives me crazy to listen at single speed, but it was on Why I Should, right? And it was just a note to myself- Mike writes to Mike. About why I should listen on single speed, because then instead of just plowing through as much information or as many books or as many podcasts as possible-

it might give me time to actually begin to process the information. And what's fascinating, we're coming up on the end of a year. I'm looking back at all the books that I've read or listened to. And you know the shocking part? I can't even remember.

several of the books or what they were about. And these are books that you read cover to cover. That I read or listened to cover to cover. And so I've actually now taken time where I, when I finish a book, I make myself sit down and just write down three to four paragraphs in a Google Doc on what the lessons I learned from the book were and how I can take them with me. Even if it's the most

beach novel type of quick read. I still want to be able to glean things. And it's moving from this consumptive behavior, which wasn't the goal anyway, but that's what ends up happening. So here's the last thing I want to say on this question of, you know, are our attention spans

shrinking these days. I wrote an email to a pastor named Chaz Howard. He's, I don't know if I'm using the term correctly. He's, I believe, the chaplain for my university. I think he has lots of other fancy titles, but I

I really, really appreciate this person. And he sent me his latest book to endorse. And this book is called Uncovering Your Path. I started reading it the way I honestly read most books that I'm asked to endorse, which is like trying to read it at the

the equivalent of 1.75x, right? Trying to proceed through the text as efficiently as possible so that I could get to the next thing on my seemingly infinitely long to-do list. But only a few pages into this speed reading, I come upon a passage where Chaz Howard says, please don't rush through this book. Please savor it.

So I did something very unusual, and I want to actually read to you what I wrote to him only six days ago. Hi, Chaz. Your honesty in this book spurs me also to be honest. I often rush through books. As you suggested, I did the opposite with yours. I read every word slowly, and my endorsement below is as sincere as could be.

And in the endorsement, I don't have to redo the whole thing. I say, to say I read this book would be an understatement. I savored it. I absorbed it. I loved it. And so I just want to say, Mike, that I'm not patting myself on the back for having truly savored at one X time a book. I'm saying that I think...

that what we're all craving is something closer to that than the, you know, swipe left, swipe right, swipe down, swipe up, click, make the next unread email go away, then read the next one. And so I don't know what the answer to the question is. You know, is our attention span really shrinking? But I think the question itself is,

is an indication of something very profound that's happening in all of our lives. Right. Journalist Nicholas Carr has created this interesting analogy of jet skiing versus scuba diving and how so often today we are just jet skiing and going as fast as we can across the surface. My usual MO for reading books like this, yeah. You kind of have to scuba dive if you want to get out of it what you want. Right. I think it begs this larger question.

of how do we really jump in and savor life? I had this moment again at this concert where I'm sitting with two of my dearest friends listening to live music and thinking, I should probably be able to savor the beauty of this moment instead of 45 minutes in to only a 90-minute show wondering,

How do I get out of here? Because my mind is wandering and I feel ready to pounce. And it was indicative to me of maybe something is wrong in my own ability to just sit back, relax, and savor the beauty of life.

Mike, I couldn't agree more. And I will say this, the other blessing that I've had in the last few weeks is there's a gentleman named Paul Robertson, who is a kind of mentor, I guess, for my husband, Jason, whom you know. And he came in from Michigan, which is where he lives, to come to Michigan.

you know, a meeting for Jason. And before he left for the morning, he had breakfast with me. And it was maybe 45 minutes or an hour. But what was so striking to me was that he was so fully present. I mean, his attention was not divided. It was not wandering. We were both fully present. And I think he was remarkable for me because I'm usually sort of like,

just rushing to the next thing. So whether it's a great book or a wonderful human being, if we can have some control over our attention and if we can be where we are, I don't know, Mike, I'm working on it. And the greatest gift we can give is our attention to somebody else. Coming up after the break, a fact check of today's episode and stories from our NSQ listeners.

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And now, here's a fact check of today's conversation. The name of the 90-minute concert that Mike struggled to sit through is Croce Plays Croce, not Croce by Croce. Mike then says that 73% of U.S. consumers report having binge-watched a show, meaning they watched five or more hours in a single sitting.

This is slightly incorrect. He pulled the statistic from Deloitte's 11th Annual Digital Democracy Survey, which defines binge-watching as viewing three or more episodes in one session. The survey found that millennial and Gen Z bingers viewed an average of six episodes or five hours of content in a single sitting.

Later, Mike references an episode of the ABC sitcom Modern Family in which the character Haley Dunphy begins to pay attention to her surroundings in a new way after losing her phone. This happens because the character accidentally breaks her phone after throwing it at a pack of squirrels, not because it's confiscated by her parents.

Also, we should note that while the Light Phone does not include an internet browser or social media apps, it does offer a directions tool, along with the following applications. Alarm, Calculator, Directory, Hotspot, Music, Voice Memos, Podcasts, and Timer. All of those tools are optional and not pre-installed. Finally, Charles Howard uses the honorific Reverend, not Pastor.

Reverend is a general title of respect applied to clergy members, whereas pastor is a specific term that describes a spiritual leader of a congregation. As Angela mentioned, he's also the chaplain at the University of Pennsylvania. A chaplain provides emotional and spiritual care to individuals and communities in institutional settings. That's it for the Fact Check. Before we wrap today's show, let's hear some thoughts about last week's episode on narcissism.

Hi, Angela and Mike. My name is Elizabeth, and I'm located in the United States. Your episode on narcissism hit quite close to home. My mother was clinically diagnosed when I was an adult. However, my father had the best explanation when I was around eight that has really helped me keep perspective. The day after an incident, I confronted my mother trying to understand why it happened or what I had done wrong. She denied any of it happened and told me to stop lying.

I knew it had happened, though. I was there. I went to my dad in tears, and he explained to me, quote, This empowered me to, one, feel empathy for her, two, find ways to parse the truth, and three, create space to prevent harm from her words.

Whenever she and I are in conflict to this day, I hold that lens firm to help understand her and yet to hold tight to truth. One last word to any children of narcissistic parents. It can be a hard road to understand them, but you're not alone.

Hi, Angela and Mike. My father was a narcissist. And as I reflect upon his upbringing, it makes sense. He was shuffled between his divorced parents, neglected by his father and adored by his mother. The perverse swings between being seen and unseen drove him to do his best to be extraordinary.

During World War II, as a Tuskegee Airman, he found a place to be competent and was awarded various commendations for his ingenuity and his creativity. But when he returned home, his father once again failed to acknowledge that he had anything to offer. I think this hurt drove him in his adulthood to always seek to be the best. A good trait, yes, but sometimes at the expense of others, a zero-sum game.

Being the daughter of a narcissist was difficult and led me to study psychology in college. Understanding the mechanisms behind what can cause narcissism helped me to develop some grace over the years.

That was, respectively, Elizabeth Henson and Patricia Wetmore. We also have an email we'd like to read from a listener who wants to remain anonymous. They write,

I know I can be hard to work with. I'm ambitious and proactive. I have high standards, and I'm so scared of failure. I'm overly sensitive to criticism, and I do sometimes have rather grand ideas. But yeah, something that has taken more than six years for me to accept, you cracked it. All self-awareness is good and helps us be better for ourselves and for those around us. So I'm hopeful that I can use my personality traits for good, not evil."

Thanks so much to them and to everyone who shared their stories with us. And remember, we'd love to hear your thoughts on attention spans. Send a voice memo to nsq at Freakonomics.com and you might hear your voice on the show. Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions, are we becoming more pessimistic as a society? Yeah, it's really hard to have hope for the world. Like, yeah, I really wonder if there's any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation. That's coming up on No Stupid Questions.

No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio, People I Mostly Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. The senior producer of the show is me, Rebecca Lee Douglas, and Lyric Bowditch is our production associate.

This episode was mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rapson. Our theme song was composed by Luis Guerra. You can follow us on Twitter at NSQ underscore show. And you can watch video clips of Mike and Angela at the Freakonomics Radio Network's YouTube Shorts channel or on Freakonomics Radio's TikTok page. To learn more or to read episode transcripts, visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ. Thanks for listening. ♪

I'm eating my mother-in-law's leftover crab cake on a slice of Trader Joe's bread. It's pretty good. The Freakonomics Radio Network. The hidden side of everything. Stitcher.

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