I'm Angela Dufforch.

And I'm Steven Dubner.

I'm a psychologist at Penn, and I run an educational nonprofit called Character Lab.

You also wrote the book, Grit.

Yes.

And I am a writer and I host a podcast called Freakonomics Radio.

And you wrote the book, Freakonomics, among quite a few others.

I did.

And you and I became friends.

We did.

And we discovered that both of us really like to ask each other questions.

And there's only one rule.

The rule is there are no stupid questions.

Each week joins Steven and Angela in a mutual question asking society

about the weird and wonderful ways that humans behave.

Sometimes the takeaways are practical.

A lot of people, I think, are uncomfortable being alone in public.

They feel the world is kind of judging them to be a loser for being alone.

Do you have any advice for people to feel better about being alone in public?

I think that one of the great general truths about how we're perceived by others

is that we tend to overestimate how much anybody really cares at all anyway.

We assume everybody's looking at us, but no, they're looking at something

...