You said such a nice thing. Let me hug you.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, why are we so attracted to the idea of fame?

If I were Michael Jordan, oh my gosh, I'd feel great.

Also, how aware are we of the people and things that shape our identity?

The fact is, I may have just been reading a bunch of comic books and eating Cheetos and I had these ideas.

Stephen, you're famous.

No.

All right. Well, let's assume for the. No. All right.

Well, let's assume for the moment that I'm right and you're a little bit famous.

I have niche fame.

Yeah.

So I want to ask you about fame and how you feel about being at least a little bit famous and maybe what functional role celebrities play in modern life, because I'm not sure

that society's old has celebrity the way we do today.

I like the second part of that question a whole lot about the functional role.

Well, I sidestep the first one completely.

I do know that fame has been around a long, long time. There's a Greco-Roman personification,

phama in Roman. I always think of Jean Phama, the University of Chicago economist, who's got

some fame and he won a Nobel Prize. And then I guess it's Feme in Greek. And I do know that

fame was portrayed by Hesiod, the Greek poet, as an evildoer that was easy to stir up, but then impossible to quill.

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