Whenever I hear the phrase really annoying people, I just immediately join that tribe in my head.

I'm Angela Duckworth.

I'm Stephen Dubner.

And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.

Today on the show, what changes will we see in post-pandemic society?

You've always been living the pandemic lifestyle, Stephen.

Also, would you take a confirmation bias vaccine?

I might want to be a conspiracy theorist at some point.

And this is going to be a real problem.

So, Angela, once the pandemic and the shutdown fade away, what would you say is one permanent change we will see in the life of Professor Angela Duckworth?

Well, what's leaping to mind is that I have a nonprofit called Character Lab, and during the pandemic, our small team moved out of our

beautiful office space, and everybody started working from home. For the first few months of the

pandemic, I thought, well, isn't this a shame? And now we have decided as an organization that we

will never go back to business as usual, that we will be a remote first organization.

Was that driven by finances in that you can save all that money on real estate and use it to buy cotton candy instead?

Well, it was partly influenced by that. We are saving a couple hundred thousand dollars a year by not

moving back into our original built-out space. And are you distributing that money to people who work

for you so that they can add on to their homes since they're now going to be doing all their work

from there? We said, make your work from home space whatever you need

to be. And within reason, we'll support that. So you're obviously one small part of a gigantic

trend, which seems to be moving in the direction that you are. But did you consider the options

and feel this is going to produce better work? I would say that we thought that it might increase productivity because you're not commuting,

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