This is really fun. Yay, go.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, when is family estrangement healthy?

This isn't working out. Do you want this clock radio? Because if you don't, I'm taking it.

Also, what does it mean to have a good personality? You, by the way, would be called an ambivert, Stephen. Sounds a lot like a pervert, which I'm not crazy about.

Stephen, I have a question I've been thinking about lately. It's about family. And it's about whether getting kind of divorced from your family, estrangement. Is that ever the right thing to do, the healthy thing to do?

So I find this question very interesting because I've thought about estrangement a lot. In fact,

I've been trying for five years to do a good Freakonomics Radio episode on Estrangement.

Why have you been trying and why have you been able to?

Well, I've been trying because I think it is one of many under-examined elements of life that has all

kinds of implications, financial, familial, obviously, emotional. And I wonder about it because

it turned out that I had quite a few friends who had deep estrangements within their families.

Either they were estranged from a parent or from a sibling or one of their parents

was estranged from another family member. And I realized that I had grown up in kind of a

bubble. Of non-estrangement. Well, yes, non-estrangement, but because of estrangement. That may not make sense. So I'll explain a little bit. My bubble was mom, dad, although not for long. He died when I was a kid. And seven siblings. There were eight of us. And we all got along pretty well. There was certainly nothing like an estrangement then and is not to this day.

But what I didn't know as a kid was that a generation back, both my mother and my father

had serious estrangements within their families, mostly having to do with their religious

peregrinations.

So my father's family totally cut him off.

And my mother's family, there were a number of

...