Socioeconomic Trends in Naming

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I'm Stephen Dubner, and you're listening to no stupid questions . Today on the show, what does your level of punctuality say about you? It's an early arriving arms race. Also, what does your name say about your personal history ? Smith might have meant you came from a family of blacksmiths. I'm married to a Duckworth. Is that like duck farmers ? Angela, a listener named Kaylin has written with a question and I cannot wait to see how you answer this question. I cannot wait to see what Kailyn's question was. It feels like a very angry question in that it seems like a problem you would not have. Kailyn writes to say hi NSQ. I volunteer with a compost drop off program . And usually the hours are eight AM to twelve noon , but sometimes we extend to one PM whether the drop off ends at noon or one PM, I've noticed that people often the same ones will come running at the very last minute to drop off . When drop off ends at noon, they come running at eleven fifty five AM, but when it ends at one, they come running at twelve fifty five PM Why not just arrive at eleven fifty five AM and save yourself the stress when the drop off ends at one PM for so I'm getting confused about how people even know that it ends at noon or one PM. I was thinking that. That seems like a lot of trouble to keep track of. Piece of advice there for the compost drop off program. You should like keep your hours the same, but anyway, that's not the question. Here's a question from Kailyn. Why do people always seem to wait until the last minute to accomplish a chore or task or project ? So let's just start there. Why do people always seem to wait till the last minute? Are we just talking about procrastination here or is it something else? Well, Stephen, you said that I wouldn't have a lot in common here and I want to tell you no, no, no, no, no, not only in my procomposting , but also , I am one of those people who comes in at the last minute. You are not Yep. You were such a punctual planning person . Well, I don't come late to things that are important , but let me give you an example. So I don't actually have a compost drop off place because that's not how our composting works. But I do go to yoga classes and you're supposed to come to yoga fifteen minutes early. You have to come in, sign in, roll out your mat and get centered . And I am invariably the last person. Is getting centered a physical thing or an emotional thing? No, no, no, it's all on the minds . Gotcha. But I'm that last person. I'm always the annoying person where everybody else has to move their mats around to accommodate the geometry of my mat now having to fit in. That surprises me because even though I know you might want to time maximize and not waste seven minutes centering yourself that you could be doing something else, I could answer twenty five emails in that time. But you're also I think or I thought , a very considerate person. And we all know it's a little bit disrespectful to come at the last minute because yeah, other people have to get disrupted and interrupted. I think I'm at the edge, Steven. I think I'm just like a millisecond before being inconsiderate because I don't come late . I frequently resolve to myself that I'll come a little early. So I love this question. It allows me to think about why people in general do this, but it also allows me to introspect a little bit about why I do this. That's good, and I'm glad that you have something in common with these problem composters. On the other hand, I do wonder if I'm bringing the question to the wrong person. Well, it could be, maybe we should be asking you, Steven , are you an eleven fifty five AM or I guess twelve fifty five PM composter depending on when the hours end? Well, I am not great at keeping track of things when the times on those things constantly change, so I would probably quit composting if they were sometimes closing at noon and sometimes at once . But I will say this , I am not sympathetic to the late arrivers. I'm with Kalein. I think my father once said when I was young and it probably would have come ideally in a thick Yiddish accent, even though my father didn't have a thick Yiddish accent, but it probably would have sounded something like better to be early one hour than to be five minutes late. So yeah, I do have it kind of baked into my soul not to be late. Stephen, I respect your father's commitment to earliness. And by the way, many high achievers, I'm thinking in particular of this article on Olympic swimmers that a colleague of mine named Dan Chamblis, a sociologist wrote, many of them will embrace the Five Minutes early is on time princi p foral all kinds of interest ing psychological reasons. It not only allows you to be centered mentally before whatever is about to happen, whether it's swim practice or yoga or I'm not sure how much mindfulness you need for composting, but it allows you to really just be there and not be a frazzled frenzied mess. But the reason I think that this behavior persists is that you are trying to squeeze in things. You're trying to maximize what you can do with your time . And so it's not entirely irrational to say, look, I'm going to put this off until I have to do it. I also think there might be some amount of procrastination in there. It's certain ly the case that I keep resolving to come earlier to things like yoga. So that suggests to me that this isn't just an optimization strategy and that I should probably interrogate a little more my tardiness. I think those are both good points. Let's take a one at a time. Optimizing your time would be the first one. The second one would be something along the lines of procrastinating . So yeah, I could imagine, especially in the case of the compost drop off that you're not only optimizing time, but you're prioritizing. You are probably considering dropping off compost as a relatively low priority event. Cover your ears, compost ers, but it may not be the most important thing you get done today . So it makes sense to leave it to last. And if you don't get to it, then you don't get to it. You could think of that as did you ever learn the inverted pyramid model of newspaper writing? No . Basically you want all the important stuff at the top and then you think of it as an inverted pyramid where the further down you get into the piece, the less consequential the information is, and this was especially applicable in the old days when publishing was very space determined. Articles had to be a certain number of inches . And if you thought you had twelve inches, but at the last minute a bigger ad came in or a breaking news piece came in and you had eight inches, the way editing was done was to just take off the last four inches. And so you wanted your writers to write in a style where the least important stuff came at the end and therefore you could just cut it off. So these five of arrivers at the composting facility , maybe they had tasks that they considered more important and they figured if I get to it great and if not, then it's no great loss. That goes perfectly well with the Olympics for because what that says is I've decided to make practice the most important thing and I will not be late. I will be early. I think that's true for me probably about yoga too, that it's not the most important thing that I'm gonna get done. By the way, at this yoga studio, if you come late you actually can't disrupt everyone. They just shut the door. So I guess I was willing to live with that risk. So Kaylan's Tardy composters are perhaps at least some of them optimizing for higher priority tasks. That's let's say an optimistic assumption or an optimizing assumption. What about the other one though? You mentioned procrastination. If you see this pattern of people coming at the last minute all the time, is that procrastination or is that more like what your people call the planning fallacy ? Well, procrastination has an intuitive definition, right? It's putting things off that you in retrospect or upon reflection think you shouldn't have put off. The planning fallacy is different and little a less widely known. I think it was Danny Conaman, the psychologist and behavioral economist who coined the term planning fallacy. I think with Amos Diversity, if I'm not mistaken. You're exactly right. So Turski and Conneman said that the planning fallacy is what happens when you fail to anticipate how long or how effortful or how complicated a task will be. Let's use the example that Danny Kottman often uses. Say you're renovating your kitchen and you think it's going to take two months and twenty thousand dollars . It's going to take probably forty thousand dollars and at least twice the amount of time. The consistent reality is that it will more likely take double the amount of time if not more. And so the fact that we make the mistake is not all that remark able. The fact that we consistently and repeatedly make the mistake is interesting . I have read that the planning fallacy is to some degree and in some cases a result of optimism , that you are optimistic that you can complete something in a certain box of time , even in fact when you can't. So do we know anything about whether people who have been measured to be more optimistic or worse at planning fallacy than let's say pessimists who might not be as much fun to be around as optimists, but maybe they're much better at planning and therefore don't fall prey to the fallacy. I do know that there has been empirical research tying the planning fallacy to optimism in a very specific way because optimism means different things to different researchers , but in particular fo,cusing on positive version of the future. Basically you make a mental movie of what's going to happen and it's a best case scenario. So that optimistic future oriented bias may explain or at least explain a lot of the planning fallacy. Say, for example, you say, Hey, I think we should swap out our gas stove for induction and at the same time, what the heck? Let's tear out these cabinets. So you start looking through the IKEA website and you have a mental movie of what this is going to be like, and you're like, Oh, we're going to hire a contractor and then we're going to buy this stove and this is going to happen. And that mental movie is certainly one of the movies that could happen , that might happen. The problem is there are ninety nine other movies. Like the contractor turned out to be a complete flake. We had to actually move to a second contractor. They were out of the stove. IKEA doesn't have any cabinets left. It's a pandemic after all. And I think the challenge is that when we forecast the future, we are very likely forecasting one possible future and a rosy one at that. I am looking at this list from an article called How to Stop Being Late by Ellen Hendrickson, published in Psychology Today. Most of the tips are pretty common sense , but I think a few of them could be helpful for instance, beware, quote, one more thing , that little thing you add that you kind of treat as if it takes a phantom amount of time, like zero time. Oh, I'm so bad at this. Give me an example. Well, the yoga thing, I know damn well how long it takes me to get on my shoes , get my mat, and of course run because I never have time to walk to the yoga studio. And I think to myself, yeah, but I can probably answer these next three emails. I have forty five seconds , after all. So I do think the one more thing is part of my problem. Here's one last tip. Transfer your biggest morning headache to the night before. So I have to say, this resonates for me because this is something I try to do , but I often fail to do. But I find that if I have an interview that I need to prepare for that's in the morning , I don't really want to do it at night because I'm afraid that all the preparation will leak out of my brain while I'm sleeping. Especially if you sleep on your side . But I do like to at least give it a really good hard look the night before so that in the morning I'm on my way . So maybe for the composting people, if any of Kailyn's enemies are listening to this , let's imagine that you bought fifty pumpkins to decorate your house for Halloween , end Thanksoor giving and they're all rotting now and you think the right thing to do is to bring them to the composting center. Maybe what you should do is you should put all the stinky rotten pumpkins in your car the night before and therefore you're also creating a commitment device because now you'll really want to get them out of the car and into the composting center. So two birds, one pumpkin, two birds, one pumpkin . I will say this that I really like about where you're going and that's about intentionality. And by the way, sleep and memory researchers would add that because there is this mental rehearsal that you do while you're sleeping, it turns out that probably does actually help in terms of really. Yeah, there's some stuff going on between the ears when we are sleeping and that is one of the reasons why it's very, very hard to learn when you're sleep deprived. The brain needs sleep to consolidate memories . But I think intentionality is the most important thing that you picked up on. You know, what would I like my life to be like? Do I want to get to yoga one minute before the class. I think if I reflect upon my competing priorities , it might be that I say , yeah, I'm good, that's fine. I am curious in the era of the Zoom call. When do you habitually show up? You've told us that you're often last minute for yoga , but compared to others on Zoom calls, do you tend to be early right on time or a bit late? I am never as early as Danny Conneman. Sometimes I log in earlier and earlier just to see if he's there and he is. I'm like, what the hell are you doing here? It's an early arriving arms race then. It is. You think he sleeps over in the zoom room? I don't know if he ever goes off zoomed. I don't get it, Stephen. It's a mystery. Do you think he wrote about the planning fallacy simply as a commitment device for himself so that he would always have to be early? I mean, it really is striking and haven't I talked to Danny enough about this, but I think it says a lot about him. He puts the time that other people are taking to talk to him as pretty high up in his priorities and maybe I'm undervaluing it. I am the sort of person who if we have a two o'clock call , I consider that two o'clock and fifty five seconds is still two o'clock. That's my general MO, but I'm striving toward the Danny Conneman asymptote of lier is better . I will say this, the thing that has probably been the most helpful in terms of reforming my borderline and even sometimes late behavior is that I have a lab and in my lab there young people. And in my lab, I say to the young people , you have to come at least two minutes or three minutes early. First of all, you own the zoom room, second of all, God forbid you come in after Danny Conneman. So now that I've said that out loud, there is something in psychology called the Saying is believing effect, where what you affirm you follow through on because you don't like the dissonance between saying one thing and doing another. So that more than anything has helped me reform. I'm not at Danny Conneman level yet, but I don't think I'm horrible. One last question for you on the yoga dilemma. How close to the yoga studio do you live? And before you answer , I am going to make an assumption based on a little bit of data, but my assumption is going to be, you live quite close to the yoga studio. Am I right or wrong? Very good, Steven, I do live quite close to the yoga studio blocks. So the reason I ask this question and I don't know if there's any good academic research on this , but I've often thought that when you live close to your destination, you're more likely to be late, which seems a little counterint uitive because if you live right around the corner from or work or your church or whatever, you'd think you'd always be on time. There's no travel hassle, there's no delays . But I will tell you when something is close by, I'm more likely to be late. And I just wondered about it for years . Then we received an email from a freak ecomics reader. This was a few years ago. We published this on the Freak Enomics blog and I'd love, to run this past you and see what you think. Go ahead. This was a young reader in India. Her name was Abaya , and she wrote to say, I'm a twenty one year old girl from Puna, India, who's on the brink of a bachelor's degree in computer engineer ing as a kid, I was always interested in how things work and why people do the things they do. So I decided to analyze something I've seen, noticed, and been a part of, but never really given that much thought to. The relation between distance between your home and place of work and the probability of being late. So she writes, my college class has fifty three students. All of them live in Puna, either with their families and rented apartments as paying guests or at the h ostel. Of these , twenty six or forty nine percent live near within a radius of seven kilometers and twenty seven or fifty one percent live far. So roughly half and half. Of those who live near , she writes, seventeen own a car or motorcycle or scooter and thus have their independent mode of transport. The other nine in the near group rely on public transport. This is impressive. It was impressive. So as she began to analyze these data, she writes Conventional Wisdom dictates that those who live near and have their own modes of transport should reach college earlier than those who live far and have no modes of transport. But my data, which I noted on three regular weekdays and averaged out , betrayed this. Ooh, betrayed. As it turned out, she writes eighteen people were late, of those twelve or sixty seven percent lived near, and only six, thirty three percent lived far. Exactly the opposite of what you might think. Exactly the opposite of what you might think. Of those in the near latecomers, ten owned their own mode of transport out of the twelve and two had to rely on public transport. So, she concludes, as it turns out, people who live near to college come late and of those students who were in control of their own mode of transport were even more late. I love this because I think it gets to the sort of one more thing. I am guessing that these people who are like, Oh stop in the car, it's so close , you're more prone to these optimistic predictions . Again, it is possible that you'll hop in the car. There won't be any traffic, there won't be any problems, but then you have failed to anticipate the ninety nine scenarios, many of which are not nearly as positive as that one. It might also expl ain, if not excuse, my somewhat on the brink yoga behavior. And when I said the name of the game here is intentionality, if we consistently make the planning fallacy . I think there are two things that you can do. One is you can look at distributional data. In other words, if you're going to, for example, renovate your kitchen , before you come to your own estimate of how much it's going to cost and how time consuming it's going to be with your own general contractor, et cetera. Just Google, look at how long it takes other people to complete their kitchens, et cetera. You can do this for most tasks, but people don't bother to . Danny Conman points out that we don't tend to think statistically on our own, but we can force ourselves to. And the other bit of advice is to try to remember other things that you've done that are somewhat similar and how they turned out and what your original projections were and where you may have gotten things completely wrong in terms of being overly optimistic. Regardless, I think that intentionality plus some amount of this perspective taking, it may not be a cure, but I do think it might help us . That sounds like some really useful advice, whether Kalein's composters will heed is another matter. I will say this, the evidence from Abaya in Puna India does suggest that for Kalin , the best thing to do rather than worry about people showing up at the last minute is maybe they should move the composting center very, very, very far away from everybody . Still to come on no stupid questions, St andep Anhengela discuss the significance of a person's name. It's Daniel Craig Duckworth or Angela, whichever you prefer. No Stupid Questions is sponsored by Mint Mobile. Mint pl moansbile are only fif teen dollars per month. Wondering what's the catch? There isn't one. There are no gimmicks and no gotches. Just unlimited talk text and data, fast reliable coverage on the nation's largest five G network, and an award winning care team . That makes Mint Mobile a catch. You can bring your current phone and your number, choose from three, six or twelve month plans, and say goodbye to a monthly bill. Ditch overpriced wireless with Mint Mobile. It's so easy. 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So level up your grill game and your outdoor ch ill game and head to Wayfair. com now to get your outdoor space ready for the season. It feels good to be in control. No matter what, keep your business connected with invincible Wi Fi from Spectrum Business, the fully integrated WiFi seven five G and eight hour battery backup solution . Keep connected, keep working, and keep security systems running reliably. Be in control . Be invincible. Invincible Wi Fi from Spectrum Business. Visit Spectrum. com slash be invincible to learn more. Restrictions apply, services not available in all areas. Steven, we have an email from Alex and I'm going to read it to you. Let's hear it. Alex writes, My kindergarten aged daughter and I are in the process of joining the Girl Scouts. Over the summer we were briefly connected with a troop outside our town . The names of the leaders in this troop are Lauren, Erin, Erin, M. Lauren. For a reason unrelated to the names of these troop leaders, some local parents and I decided to form a new troop in town , I volunteered to be a co leader with another parent whose name is Lauren . There are a disproportionate number of people with the first name Alex in my social circle. A particularly weird example is that I'm not the first bass player named Alex in my rock band, the lead singer of which has the middle name Alexander and whose significant other is also named Alex . My question is this, does a person's name predispose them to seek certain jobs or participate in certain activities or social circles ? Thank you for your consideration , Alex . PS, I also play in a different band with two other people named Lauren and Erin . So perhaps the issue is that the universe has willed me to be surrounded by people with these names. Interesting. We've discussed on this show in passing at least the notion of an aptonym, this idea that your name fits your occupation, or I guess it could be a hobby. And you had these really good examples, but I can't remember any of them. Well, the racist one was about a man who was, I believe, arrested for masturb ating in a public restroom and his name was Limberhand. Oh yeah, Libert. Who could forget Liberand? Oh, right, and then I got to tell you about my gynecologist named Dr. Breast. My favorite apronym of all time, which I may have mentioned before , was a woman who was a fact checker at a magazine and her name was Paige Worthy , which is great because she has to make sure that what she reads is indeed worthy of being printed on a page. That said, the reason these things stand out is because they are fairly rare and I would argue almost entirely coincidental. You know, there are those people who make an argument that your name has a causal relationship with what you end up doing , but it's a pretty weak argument overall. That can't be a big effect. There was a paper some years back . It was called Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions . And it makes the argument that when, for instance, a person named Dennis becomes a dentist, it's not a total coincidence, but the effect is, as you can imagine, fairly small . I don't believe it . I think that most of us who've looked at some form of data around names and destiny would agree that there isn't a whole lot of relationship between name and destiny. All this said, if you go back a few centuries , your name often indicate something about you. It might have been a place name, it might have been a physical attribute, but a lot of them were about occupations. So there were people called Tailor because there were tailors. Smith might have meant you came from a family of blacksmiths. I'm married to a Duckworth. Is that like duck far mers . He was the guy in the village square who was handling the scale that weighed the ducks and the geese and they were always saying to him, Hey, what's this duckworth? What's Dubner? Dubner is a place name. It would have been Dubner. And that comes from a city in what's now Ukraine called Dubna . When the Jews got kicked out of that part of the Ukraine and pushed up into what is now Poland, a lot of them took that last name. And then you know , there's those lineage names like Jorgensen, son of Jorgen, right? Simonson, son of Simon. How sustainable is this strategy? Because then isn't it like Eric's son's son and then Eric's son's son's son? Or do they use notation like Eric's son to the fourth or something? Like squared cubed, right? Yeah, that would make sense. But anyway, those are last names. What Alex is asking me about is first names. And also there's nothing to do with girl scouts that I know about that has anything to do with Lauren and Erin. Nothing to do with rock bands, it has to do with Alex. So we're not talking about aptonyms. It has to do with where she was born and when she was born. So does a person's name predispose you to participate in certain activities or social circles, I would say sort of, by which I mean that the key here is that naming patterns have a strong socioeconomic component. One example that we highlighted in free economics in our first book was about how in America, especially in the last fifty to one hundred years , new names tend to be adopted by higher income families who see them as kind of interesting and maybe classy , but then they get adopted by the rest of us and they get passed down and down until they get so popular that high income families don't want those names anymore. So if you go back thirty, forty, fifty years ago and you think about a handful of girls' names, Tiffany , Brittany, Ashley, those were high income names, then they got popular in the middle, then they got popular at the bottom by which point the middle and the high end had totally jumped off. So I think the name is much less destiny and it's more of an indicator of who you are, what kind of family you come from what your parents thought because after all they're the ones that named you, but what I think Alex's question really gets at is that when you have a lot of similarly named people in your social circle , it probably means you tend to hang out with a lot of people who are quite similar to you in terms of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. An age, right? An age. You know, how many people are named Gertrude today? Four . Yes , because sadly all the Gertrudes you know want to live forever. Now Angela, let's look you up. Ooh, I love this. This is like when you get your license plate, you know, you're in a gift shop and they have your name. Like, let's look for Angela. If I were to guess, I would guess that when you were little , you would find your name in the gift shop. I was pretty good at finding my name on the four dollar ninety nine cents faux small license plate. And my guess is that if you go into that same shop today, if that same shop exists, and they sell thirty dollars tiny license plates, I'm gonna guess your name is not on there. Oh, because it's like now becoming an old person name. Yeah. So the Social Security Administration keeps a really nice database on names. It's super fun to play with. What year were you born nineteen seventy? nineteen seventy. So check this out . I did not know this. Angela, you were the one , two, three, four, five, sixth most popular girls name in nineteen seventy. What? It went Jennifer, Lisa, Kimberly, Michelle, Amy, Angela , Melissa, Tammy, Mary and Tracy. Now , if anything I said before about how names have moved through American society over the past fifty years or so is true , one would think that you probably don't encounter a lot of little girls these days named Jennifer Lisa Kimberly, Michelle, Amy Angela, Melissa, Tammy Marian Tracy. So what are the new names ? Let's see, if I look at the current top girls names . Oh , so this is what you would call Shwa City . There's a lot of Shwas . This is like high school English. Remind me what a sh is a sh a I think is just the soft sound like at the end of a name like Olivia . But the top ten baby girl names of twenty twenty are Olivia , Emma , Ava , Charlotte, Sophia, Amelia, Isabell a, Mia , Evelyn, and Harper. Interesting . No Angela's, no Amy's, no Michelle's and so on. So I would say that Alex in noticing all her Alex's and all her Lauren's is seeing a generational trend happening before her eyes , and it probably means that she's hanging out with a bunch of people, I don't mean this to sound pejorative, who are kind of similar ish to her . There's so much fascinating research on it. There was a study in the Journal of Labor Economics. This goes back to two thousand nine by Mahmoud Arai and Peter Thorsy. These are researchers in Sweden , both at Stockholm University, and they were looking at what happens when an immigrant or the offspring of an immigrant from an Asian or African or Slavic country would move to Sweden and have their surname from those countries and whether they were perhaps discriminated against, and the way they wanted to measure that was to look at the people from those countries who had actually adopted a Swedish sounding surname. Interesting. They write, there is a substantial increase in annual earnings after a name change , no effects on earnings prior to a name change and no positive general effects of a new name for other groups that renounced a foreign name. Based on these findings, we argue that these effects are due to a name change as a response to discrimination. So that's compelling. I think you would agree. I would definitely agree with that. I mean you could ask the question, Is there something else that's really going on? Good question. You didn't exactly randomly assign people, but it's still very provocative. I was just watching this Broadway play called the Lehman trilogy, which I highly recommend. It was about the founding of Lehman Brothers. And the three original brothers who founded it actually the first brother who came over to the United States at Ellis Island , the agent there couldn't pronounce his name. I don't remember what the first name was , but it was not Lehman. And then after they had enough of an interchange, he was like, You know what, I'll take this other one. This Ellis Island story that we all tell and have been told many times, I'm pretty that in most cases it's total BS. What? So as it turns out, if you go back and look at how Ellis Island operated during these years of massive immigration , they had people working there who spoke many, many languages. They had all kinds of translators . I think that if you were to talk to an expert genealogist who knows the workings of Ellis Island, they would tell you that most of these stories are told by ancestors who are a little bit I don't want to say ashamed, but a little bit maybe second guessing having shortened or taken a more American sounding name because the matter of fact is you were traveling with official documents in order to get in the country and your name was written there in full. Also I'll just say as my parents' own story suggests there are some languages like Chinese is a tonal language . There are four tones and that doesn't exist in English. I can't even pronounce my mom's real name. Give it a shot. It's like ru sorry, mom , I just never learned and her American English name is Teresa . And my dad's name was Ying Kao, which again, I'm sure I got the tones wrong on that. When he came here , people couldn't pronounce it. They certainly couldn't even spell the English phonetization. So they just called him YK . So there are some reasons why people change names, which have little less to do with de likeep reasons and more like practical ones. So, you know, what's in a name? I don't think I took it that seriously when Jason and I were naming our two daughters. And I was just like, oh, we gotta get a name. We named Amanda after the most recent doctor we had seen. We were like, That's a nice name. She seems like a good doctor. We'll name her Amanda. And Lucy, I think I had seen a dog named Lucy. I was like, Oh my God, what a cute name. I have a naming my daughter .'s good It to know you put such thought and effort into your offspring. But the bottom line is if anyone doesn't like their name, it's really easy to change it. I mean, I come from a family of big name changers. What? Well, both my parents, when they underwent a religious conversion, they both changed their first names. Wait, you don't have to change names. Well , they both wanted names that more reflected their new Catholic faith. My father was named Solomon, and he took the name Paul, Paul being the famous convert in Christianity. My mother, her given name was Florence , and she took the name Veronica, which is a very meaningful name in Christianity. It is . Veronica is the woman who is supposed to have given a cloth to Jesus when he was being paraded through on the way to his crucifixion and that was then imprinted with the image of his face. Hey, I changed my name for a while. You did? So my childhood football hero was this guy that I just loved who is a real Messiah figure to me. I think I've told you about this recurring dream I had about this football player. His name is Franco Harris . And so I was so in love with Franco Harris in grades maybe four to six that I adopted the name Franco. That would be like I could walk around and be like, It's Daniel Craig Duckworth. Oh, sorry, or Angela, whichever you prefer. Right. So my point is if Alex thinks that there are too many Alexes in her circle, she should change it. She should change it to Angela because that's not in fashion . And if she really wants to stand out, she could change it to Steven or Franco Harris . Coming up after the break, a fact check of today's conversation