I've seen more dogs dance the flamenco than I've seen children voluntarily give a piece of their birthday cake.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, is it possible to be self-interested and altruistic at the same time?

What if I want to be a drug dealer? What if I want to be a politician? That plainly has no good effect on anyone.

Yes.

Also, why do we become desensitized to the most wonderful things about life?

Can you imagine how bliss out I would be if every time I flushed a

toilet, I thanked my lucky stars? Like, what kind of planet is this? This is amazing.

Stephen, I have a question for you. Sure. In your experience, would you say that ambitious and

successful people are also selfish?

So, as with every question and answer in the world, it's highly context dependent. I mean,

ambition and success and service of what? Ambitious in the service of promoting themselves as the best blank in the world or ambitious in the

service of something that's going to be a social or a public good. So my knee jerk is I really

want ambitious and successful people to be selfish because I want them to succeed if they're

working on something that one cares about. I want them to do what they feel is most in their interest to get to their

goal. You mean like you want them to be single-minded and determined? Yeah, and all the things that

might add up to selfish. Here's the example it came to mind, Jonas Salk. The vaccine guy.

Right? An inventor of the polio vaccine. You like Jonas Salk, right? We're all in favor of Jonah Salk.

Vaccines are good, I think.

You have to think back how devastating polio was because it was mysterious. The cause was not known. There was no good treatment.

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