Surrounded By Idiots

What if you just went super live coded and you're like strata by idiots. What am I what am I the Republic of National Convention?

“Oh the T-Rump administration. That's what I'm doing. I'll say Trump the entire episode. I must be in the White House. Let's try that. Let's do that. Is that Michael Peter?”

What do you know about surrounded by idiots all I know is it's brave to base a book on the three words You only hear from the worst person you know This is a 2014 book by Thomas Erickson who is a Swedish author It was a worldwide success. It sold millions of copies, but it was a mega hit in Sweden Really if you ask most people about this book, they'll be like I've heard of that

But if you ask someone from Sweden they'll be like this book ruined my life. It is the most toxic of the Scandinavian country So it makes sense. This is a book about personality types. It divides people into four personality categories. Oh, I was hoping it was going to be too idiots and not The bummer about this book is that the surrounded by idiots title is a little bit tongue-in-cheek The idea is that you know, you think you're surrounded by idiots, but actually it's just people of different personality types

You need to understand them

Yeah, so it's basically a clickbait title for like a more nuanced typology. Unfortunately. It's a very reasonable

Top line. I'm getting ready for a really boring episode. Erickson is not a psychologist He is not a medical professional or expert of any type. He is just a guy Okay, he sort of comes out of nowhere with this book emerging from relative obscurity from what I can Tell with his best seller like many of our if books could kill authors his idea is not his own nice It's an existing idea that he has repackaged for public consumption

That means we need to go a hundred years back in history to really understand it to Friedrich Nietzsche We start with Plato's the Republic So back in 1928 there's a psychologist named William Molten, Marston, and he publishes a book called Emotions of normal people Also something said only by the worst person ever that so among other things

It established a personality framework called disc d-i-s-c It stands for dominance inducement

“Sebastian and compliance. I only know these from grinder. Can you explain a little bit more can you spell it out a little bit?”

I don't really want to get into the framework as Marston understood it in 1928 But here is a little bit from a critique of Erickson that sort of explains what Marston was doing It says Marston hypothesized that our behavior is influenced by Cyconic energy that is transferred through a web of nerve cells that he called

Cycons the four personality types arise he claims as Variations between different people in the structure of their psychonic network I thought when they make up scientific sounding words. Well, look it was 1928 and you got like Psychologists were just spitballing even more than they are now, right? They were just sort of like, yeah, I don't know Cycons

Yes, you take a stress test. Yes, I'm familiar. So this was not originally created as a personality assessments It was meant as just like a theory to describe emotions, right? His basic idea is that there's like a primary set of emotions a set of primary emotions Similar to primary colors, right? We're like every other emotion is comprised of these basic four emotions

Okay, the idea is basically ignored by the broader academy

There's only one favorable review written of his book and it is by his girlfriend nice But then 15 years later one of his former students takes it and turns it into an assessment called the activity vector analysis Okay, which he starts selling to businesses Mm-hmm. The assessment is just a checklist of 81 words and you check a word if anyone has ever used that word to describe you Oh, and also if I if you think that a word describes you

Oh, okay, and at the end you use the results to map yourself along four vectors similar to the ones established by Marston one last fun fact about Marston before we move on He was relatively important in the invention of the lie detector He held himself out as the father of the lie detector, although it's a little more complicated than that and also He created

Wonder Woman wait what the the hero the comic book character Wonder Woman was created by the guy who came up with the lie detector test and also The personality framework that it forms the basis of this book. Is that why she does the honesty lasso?

“Dude, that's why she's got the fucking lasso dude. It all clicked because he was trying to invent the lasso for his entire career”

Right like people trying to discover alchemy. He's like dammit

Right then a guy who was employed by that company creates his own spin-off and then in the 70s a third dude creates his own version

And they're all still using this disc framework and this basic trend where someone takes this assessment and then slightly modifies it to sell to businesses Has essentially continued uninterrupted until today now There are literally hundreds of companies that sell disc assessments to managers There are many more that sell what's basically the same thing just repackaged with different terminology I've seen estimates as high as 75% of Fortune 500 companies using something like this internally

I mean, this is the Myers Briggs type and get her to it's also just like basically made up by two random people and then it catches on Yeah, if you've ever been given a personality assessment at work that maps you across four different personality types Especially if they were color-coded with red blue yellow and green chances are that this was a disc assessment or some knockoff version of it If your boss has been telling you that you're a sub-bottom, that comes from the disc assessment So his initial version said dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance all of the later versions are less horny. Unfortunately. Yeah, too bad

Yeah, it's a bummer bummer also an identity on grinder. I realized that took something like this back when I was at a law firm

“Oh, yeah, it wasn't exactly the same but I was like trying to remember it and I started googling stuff”

I remembered and found out that what I took was the Deloitte business chemistry test What this is a test proprietary to Deloitte. They said that they brought in various experts in biology to help put it together Nice and yet what they come up with is extremely similar to an assessment that you see in hundreds of different companies Yeah, they say that there are four work styles across two axes Pioneers and guardians drivers and integrators

Pioneers are risk-taking dreamers guardians are analytical pragmatists Drivers push for results integrators bring people together. Do you remember what you got? Yeah I remember because it was like clearly wrong. Okay. Yeah, so I was a guardian which is like the analytical pragmatist type And I immediately knew I was in the wrong group because they like they were like, are you a guardian then you're blue so go with the other blues Then they were like, all right, so discuss what are your what are your pet peeves and everyone was like

I hate it when someone has a typo in an email and I was like, okay, I'm in the wrong group I don't know what the fuck is going on and yours was like white supremacy or something So that is like the super broad history of this concept the basic premise of this book and really of all of these workplace workshops

“Is that people have these different personality types and the key to having better relationships with them is to understand your type and theirs”

And how they work together best which on some level is fine. This is it's a very defensible high level thesis, right? Yeah, you believe that everyone around you is an idiot, but really they just have these different personality types Their brains work differently. Yes, whatever. It's a non-judgmental way to talk about difference. Yes All right, why don't I read part of his intro here? I was in high school when I first noticed that I got along better with certain people rather than others

It was easy to talk to some of my friends and any conversation. We always found the right words and everything just flowed smoothly

There were never any conflicts and we liked one another with other people however everything just went wrong What I said fell on deaf ears, and I couldn't understand why relatable aside from the fact that he's saying he was in high school when he first noticed that he Wrattle along with some people more than others His story is that he starts looking into this and he comes across this disc idea. Although his version is Disa D-I-S-A dominance inducement submission and analytic ability, okay, much to his credit. He does not pretend to have invented this idea

He does not try to repackage it with different terminology, which is more than I can say about Deloitte He in fact expressly says that he borrowed a lot of the book from the materials of one of these companies that sells Talon assessments to managers TTI success insights headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona The CEO of TTI success insights writes the forward for the version of the book I read I wonder if he read Tim Ferriss's book where he's I find someone else's idea. I'd like steal it and write a quick-y self-help book

So here's Thomas since I began setting how people function and painstakingly strove to understand the differences in the way we communicate

I've never been the same. I'm not as kind of Oracle anymore judging people just because they are not like me

For many years now my patience with people who are the complete opposite of me has been far greater I wouldn't go so far as to say that I never get involved in conflicts just as I wouldn't try to convince you that I never lie

“But both these things happen very seldom now. Yeah, honestly”

Good shit whatever framework is making you like be a more agreeable and nice person Yeah, I really don't have a problem with the fact that the framework is arbitrary if it's making you nicer Yeah, the broad person, you know, we were starting off perfectly fine and in offensive He wants to improve interpersonal dynamics and maybe alleviate anxiety that results from interpersonal disputes

And it begins to fall apart to an astounding degree So one of the opening chapters. Why are we the way that we are he says that the temperament and character traits We have inherited a fact our behavior a process already begun at the genetic stage Exactly how this works is still a bone of contention among scientists But all are in agreement that it does come into play not only do we inherit traits from our own parents, but also from their parents

Also in varying degrees from other relatives. Yes. I inherited lots of genes from my brother This is a great little capsule of the book where he's just like saying something totally in offensive He's like we inherit traits from our parents and you're like, yeah, man. Yeah, and then he's like also from other people who knows No dance uncles cousins you're getting jeans from everywhere

Yeah, just fully whipping on ninth grade bio in life at first chapter. It's like no, you're not that's germs

You're not germs. He's looking you're gonna call your books surrounded by idiots We're gonna we're gonna be a little nitpicky about the text and then he talks about core values and attitudes He says my core values are found deep within me values so deeply embedded in my character That it's almost impossible to change them These are the things that I learned from my parents as a child or that I learned in school when I was very young

Attitudes are things I have formed opinions about based on my own experiences or on conclusions

“That I have drawn from encounters in the latter part of my schooling, okay?”

So I guess he's saying you have genes. You have your core values and you have your attitudes and those sort of comprise your personality, right? Fundamentally in offensive. Yeah, you have some inherited stuff You have some stuff that you remember time fine. I'm sending you a diagram. So it's a two by two thing You're either task oriented and issue oriented or relation oriented. Mm-hmm. That's one axis and then the other axis is Introvert passive reserved on one end and extrovert active implementer on the other

What if we're introverted and implementing Peter and then there's also this chart that has the various colors

Right, so there's four personality categories red yellow green and blue, but basically yeah

It's like your task oriented or relationship oriented and you're introverted or extroverted That's like the two by two. That's right. That's really it. So I think based on this I think I'm blue. So what does it say for blue? Blue is the that's the one that Deloitte said that I was a conscientious like analytical Detail oriented you're not introverted though. No, I mean, it's not correct Michael. Okay

“Because I think it's correct for me, but I'm also not very detailed oriented right as people can tell from this point”

Oh, I will send you his sort of summary of this about 80% of all people have a combination of two colors that Donnie their behavior approximately 5% have only one color that dominates behavior the others are dominated by three colors Throughout the book I focus on the single colors individually because they are the fundamental components of a person's behavior It's like a recipe. We need to understand all the ingredients before we bake the cake entirely green behavior or green in combination with one other color is the most common

The least common is entirely red behavior or red behavior in combination with one other color. Am I stupid? The colors reflect quadrants across two axes. Hmm, so how can you be dominated by three colors? I know. I don't quite entirely get it. Okay, if your framework is splitting people into four different types and you're like dominated by three of them Right, that doesn't give you a way like as a manager as an employee of like Helping your relationship or help you click with that person. You're reading off if you like look at the chart of all the traits

that he lists under each color. You're just looking at so many words. Yeah, yeah. It's like how is this clarifying like Greens are patient loyal modest thoughtful Reds are timekeepers. They're fast. They're results oriented the performance oriented right it's a jumble by the time you start absorbing it all But nonetheless because we're professional journalists we're gonna go through each color which gets a chapter from him Hell yeah, this is where the book really starts to fall apart also way way way way. Maybe you said this before

Is this test the way that you determine whether you're whatever color you are? Is this by circling the words that Apply to you or is there like a list of questions like there is for the MBTI different companies do them different ways Oh, okay, generally speaking They'll describe a personality trait like I Prefer to get hands on and blah, blah, blah, blah, and then you do like a strongly agreed a strongly disagree sort of fate

That okay, okay, that's I think the most common version of the disc personality assessment But there is no single standardized version of this necessarily it can be done in different ways

That's interesting actually there isn't a standardized assessment that comes with the like diagnosis basically

You will it's not real. So okay

“Good point. Good point. Yes, one thing you need to remember because it yes”

Tapping my nose and pointing you so yes, so we're gonna start with reds you're being such a fucking red right now

Sounds kind of racist

“There is a way in which it becomes like weirdly”

Offensive sounding it sounds like it should be problematic because like yeah, yeah by the end of the book He's just like you know how greens are All right, so I just sent you a little bit about reds okay red by the way is someone who is Very task and issue oriented and also extraverted and active. He says nowadays You might call a red person bold and vicious driven but also potentially hot tempered rash or dominant

You quickly notice a red person because he doesn't make the slightest effort to conceal who he is People have lots of red in their behavior are task oriented extraverts and they enjoy challenges They make quick decisions and are often comfortable taking the lead and taking risks Common perception is that reds are natural leaders these are people who willingly take command and go through the four They are so driven that they will get through despite any obstacle in their path

Their disposition is ideal in competitive situations It's not unusual for a CEO or president to have lots of red in his behavior So the downside is he says when they get going they become control freaks and they repeatedly Trampal on people's toes so now for my favorite part of every color chapter here is where He speculates wildly about what famous people might lead to this category although to be fair

I was doing that in my head as like this is a Ronald Reagan type so I can't dog shit

“He says if you want to get to know some famous red people consider Steve jobs”

FDR Venus Williams or Margaret Fatcher there's also Barack Obama and mother Teresa. Oh, yes, it's true If you consider mother Teresa's deeds the strength she needed and whom she had to deal with to achieve what she did Then you'll realize she was extremely determined and forceful a typical red profile

Well, I first I was just like are you are you pretending that you gave like mother Teresa work place person

Like here's a form. Yeah, like the cat the cat the cat the church had had one day where there was a boy this year All right yellow behavior how to recognize someone whose head is in the clouds and get him back to reality again Stop laughing. I know you think it's racist What if it was red yellow black and white and black behavior you be like whoa, hey There would be a good bit to do it as like not very subtly but just subtly enough

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm talking about personality types here Judging people by the cognitive the character obviously yellow is extraverted and active, but relation oriented rather than task oriented These are of course words that make sense

He says these are people who live to live always finding opportunities for enjoyment

“Life is a banquet and yellows will see to it that they savor every bite”

They're driven by married and laughter and why not the sun is always shining somewhere They're jolly okay, so he's just saying you know they're optimistic they're outgoing they're charming They're enthusiastic yeah downsides when they are given unlimited space They will consume all the oxygen in the room. Oh, they won't allow anyone into a conversation and their stories will reflect reality less and less That seems like a leap from being like people oriented and extroverted to like you're basically a sociopath

Are you a scientist? Are you a scientist? Are you sorry? Sorry. I defer to the experts. I defer to the author. Sorry. I'm sending you something Yes, I was like I was somebody like shot up Peter give me the famous people. He says famous people who exhibit clear yellow traits Include Oprah Winfrey Robin Williams Ellen to generous and to take some fictional examples Pippin from the lower of the rings and Han Solo from Star Wars

Really Han Solo was pretty task oriented huge mistake to leave that in for you to discuss Green why change is so difficult and how to get around it okay greens are relation oriented and introverted Okay, that's me. That's me. Okay. Okay. Yeah. He says the green person is the most common you'll meet him virtually everywhere What's the easiest way to explain who he is? Well, I would like to describe him as being the average if all the other colors greens are more passive than others

They're not as driven as reds not as resourceful as yellows and not as orderly as blues See Michael you described yourself like this and it turns out you're just the ordinary loser I'm actually three colors Peter, so we haven't got to my other colors yet, so also how is it a spectrum But you're also the average of the others. You know, I can't I don't know. I hate when you try to like talk it out

And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're just like what I thought was this background? All right never mind green people are kindness personified. Thank you

You can expect a helping hand whenever you need it They are pronounced relational people who will do everything with and their power to save your relationship And they will invest life long They will keep track of when your birthday is when your partners birthday is when your children's birthdays are it's Cetara Michael wins my birthday. Well Michael Michael. This is I was about to say they don't need to keep track of birthdays because you can schedule texts in advance

But and send it for like nine 17 AM on somebody's birthday

I like doing this. I do this constantly that is does he mention that that is psychopathic behavior That is nice that is fucking nice people like getting a happy birthday text are like a gooey New years text Not nice because you're not even really doing it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it in advance This is the same thing is asking AI to send your no, it's not because I'm doing it I'm the one typing it. It's not AI. I'm not like telling a chat box original years

You're typing it like six months in advance and you're probably doing it for the next five years Yeah, six months in advance with like a week in advance. I have it in my calendar And I'm like oh next Wednesday is like so and so is birthday If you're doing it a week in advance why not just do it the day up because I have ADHD and I'm afraid I'm gonna forget Peter. This is like one of my little tasks

But I worked right up for getting this is one step from like AI. Please fuck my wife That's like four steps from that Peter. It's at least four steps from that all right down sides about greens See if this resonates with you Michael. There are none. There are none. They can be too wishy Watchy and unclear. They can downplay trauma Well

Interesting

“Fuck off. Fuck off. I think you're in serious. Fuck you. Thank”

Everything you say to have really been well clocked really really got clocked, but it's trash [laughs]

So anyone who never takes a stand eventually becomes difficult to handle

You don't know where they really stand and in decision kills the energy in other people In decision true the taking a stand thing is not true at all There's like 600 hours of my opinions on the internet at this point I like how you self diagnose and now you're already you're disagreeing with your own self diagnosis And now I'm debunking it. Yes. All right. I'm gonna send you the people. It's my favorite one. Oh, oh, okay

Mr. Rogers, Gandhi, Michelle Obama and Jimmy Carter are some well-known people with elements of green and yes Jesus. I'm always saying this. Jimmy Carter and Jesus are the most habsian of public figures. Whenever I'm reading these books I'm I'm trying to like imagine someone who likes the book reading it and I'm trying to fathom them Getting to this part where he's like, you know, who else is a green personality God? Yeah, it's like the best people alive also Mr. Rogers this is one of the most beloved public figures in American history

You just describe these people as being a free of change Never taking a stand and in decisive and you're saying that Jesus or like Gandhi is too afraid to take a stand

That's the one thing you always hear about God. He never did anything and finally blue

In pursuit of perfection. Of course. This is what our friends at Deloitte think I am More or less. So I know with it risk of versus how I would describe someone who started a podcast about how the Supreme Court sucks while working at a law firm It's a good idea. That's super risk of ours It's a serrally

“Yeah, but you need to be fair before that. I just like became a lawyer, which is”

That's sure that is risk of us if you have any potential and you become a lawyer that is it's inherently risk of us, right? You've just sort of you really capped your ability to do any good in this world All right, here you here you guys about blue. So these people are Task oriented and introversion. Yeah, okay. Yeah, well a green will just go with a flow a blue has all the right answers In the background, he analyzes classifies evaluates assesses

You know you met a blue if you visit someone's home and everything is organized in a particular way Clear labels and names on each hook so the children will know exactly where to hang up their jackets Dinner menus divide it into six-week intervals to ensure a balance diet stuck on the refrigerator door If you look at his tools you'll find that everything has its own spot and nothing is out of place He's also a pessimist. Sorry a realist. He sees errors, and he sees risks

He's the melancholic who closes the circle of behavior reserved analytical and detail oriented are some words You might associate with a blue. Okay, it's like the most annoying friend that you have the pessimistic part resonates with me You know seeing risks. I kind of get that analytical. I get a little bit of that for myself the idea of being hyper Organizing a personal life such that I had like labels labels on the children's hooks or whatever The matter is the opposite of how I live. That's not how I live at all. It sounds like he is a green

And so he says a lot of nice things about green and he's not a blue and so he says kind of mean things about blue

“I think he says that he's three colors, but I forgot for fuck sake. Well, just say you're all four then”

So our his famous people for this like Tito stall and and Satan He says have you identified some blues in your life bill gates and Albert Einstein both used their attention to detail A meticulous nature to build their success maybe we also have Sandra Day O'Connor who incondolees a race and of course From the fictional world Mr. Spock from Star Trek. There you go perfect blue all logic rationality and intellect even if a few of the jokes slip past him

And now he's now he's just like it's actually autism We all know how good kind of these erases it assessing information like looking at evidence and coming to the conclusion being like very Organized very thorough and robust not a risk taker. Yeah, so those are the four chapters

Both part of the appeal of a system and why it like immediately reads his bullshit to me. Yeah, okay

Myers Briggs is pseudoscientific, but at least it has 16 categories which feels less insulting Yeah, there can't be four types of God Even as you're reading this you'll be like okay Yeah, I've got a little bit of green or blue sure Like then you look at the whole description. You're like oh no right because you're classifying people on this

“Introvert versus extrovert which I think is a real distinction, but of course a spectrum and situation”

Sure, and also this like task oriented versus relationship oriented thing which does feel a little bit muddy Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big problems with this is that it treats Personality is static right you know

I am very introverted in certain settings and very extroverted in other settings, right? Yeah, yeah

He describes personality as being like genetic and then also core values that you learn early in life and then Attitudes which are a little more malleable, right, but it's like unclear how static Things it is he treats it as if like people are just a certain way at work I'm very task oriented typically like when I used to have like an office job I was very much like, okay, what are our indicators? What are our deadlines? What do we need to do?

But that's just like a function of work. I feel like this does seem like a meaningful distinction But it's very difficult to measure and also at work. I feel like people would mostly lean toward Task oriented, right, because that's like why you're at work right? I would think that whether or not you are Prioritizing relationships versus tasks is also completely situational right we can talk a bit about the science here Right like what is there what isn't there and it really is a story of what's not there

Ericsson makes different representations about the scientific validity of disk at different times He says in the book that it's not an exact science but then a lot of the companies that sell this sort of testing explicitly say that it's science backed Okay, they love to say science back to right that's like yeah this science in the background supporting it somewhere Right, not that it's like directly supported by research or something but it that it's science back

It's science-ish so TTI success insights the company that Ericsson seems to have worked with here Says on their website that they offer science backed talent assessments. The reality this is that there's just no research Establishing the validity of disk. There's a lot more research on similar tests like Myers-Briggs

“Which tend to show that they have low validity and there's no serious evidence that you could like predict something like job performance with these types of tests, right?”

Right if you look at the type of test that disk is it's what's generally called an Epsitive test one that measures your traits against one another. You're less outgoing more introverted Right that's as opposed to a normative test which would benchmark against peers These types of tests and I'm speaking very broadly here tend to struggle with validity, but again the real bottom line There's just no good research here, right so any claim that it's supported by science is going to be very thin

There's a blog post a few years back by a guy named then cats license psychologists and psychotherapists Really going after Erickson one thing he points out is that a lot of frameworks like this Foster the idea that personality is a causal mechanism like you have XYZ personality and therefore you act in a certain way But the model of personality that experts generally use is It's not a thing in your head that causes you to act in a certain way

It's just a description of how you act

“That might seem like a subtle difference, but it's important if you want to understand why people act the way they do”

A lot of what you might describe as personality is situational right people are reacting to their environments You might be quiet in one setting loud in another Some behavior might be the result of a disorder in one person and the same behavior might not be in another Yeah, you can be useful to categorize people just for convenience But you can like very quickly go off track here an Erickson describes personalities like they're hard-coded right in speeches

He has described personality. It's existing on a deeper level than behavior Which seems to imply that there's this thing called personality that causes your behavior Rather than your personality just being a description of how you behave. Also, aren't there like very powerful structural forces in specific workplaces That produce certain behaviors? I mean some workplaces are very task oriented right you get fired if you don't reach your targets by the end of the quarter or something Yeah, whereas other places are more slow the kind of the nature of the work is more relational

There's also a question here of whether there are personality types at all Meaning that like people can be sorted into a handful of discrete and usually static groups based on their personality right a sub topic here is like do personality traits appear in clusters like Erickson was saying blues are analytical, but also hyper organized right do those traits generally come together?

Do they always come together? I was gonna mention this. Yeah, those those things don't necessarily seem all that length

That you're good at analyzing a situation, but you also like meal prep every week Those just seem like different things and yeah, are people who are organized generally less ambitious?

You can go really deep on this this trace is back to like youngy and archetypes at least

And there have been some studies that tried to like bundle people into categories Some of those studies claim type showing some results. There are other studies

“Contesting those results. We don't need to get into this too deeply, but I think to put it very lightly”

The idea that there are personality types at all is a controversial one right even the research the tends to support personality types Often shows that those types have a ton of overlap with one another and then large segments of the population Don't fall cleanly into any type right there's generally more support for Dimensional personality traits Traits that exist on a spectrum right so you have like the big five personality traits is a very popular

There's some research showing decent validity what those are doing is mapping Several traits along a spectrum rather than trying to take a ton of traits and then funnel you into a personality type Right, because saying there's no such thing as personality types isn't the same thing as saying like people don't have different personalities Right, but any effort to separate people into types even if it's like a hundred different types Any type is going to have elements that don't really apply to you

Boyling it down to four is like you know the lower the number of types the more silly. It's going to be and yeah I mean you'll actually if you look at a lot of the color categories that Eric's in the providing here A lot of them are just describing the same one or two traits several different ways Right, like yellows are enthusiastic outgoing charming blues are systematic structured analytical It feels sometimes like he's describing one thing, but he's sort of like trying to give you the impression that he's not

Because I find this with a lot of these personality tests include as synonyms introverted and shy But I'm not shy. I'm introverted like I get burned out by doing a lot of socializing But I like socializing and I'm very social when I'm with other people Yeah, I'm just fucking exhausted after like two hours

“Right, and I think for each of these things it's like it sort of seems like it's a very clear cluster”

But it's actually distinct for different people even if personality traits or types are real phenomena That doesn't mean that these types of assessments can actually identify Right, because they're asking you Right, how are you like are you social or you courageous? Are you organized and people are not good Narrators if they're own personality and there is there's some research showing that especially in workplace

Settings there are problems with dishonesty with these types of assessments which which makes sense For obviously if your your boss is giving you an assessment you might give answers that you think they want to hear right so big picture with this

You have this what's basically a completely

Unproven idea mostly an untested idea and it's sort of stacked on top of a theory of personality That's already very shaky, but so there's just sort of not a lot there and as I mentioned Eric's in no scientific background But his author bio, which you can find in several versions of the book describes him as a Swedish behavioral expert His website describes him as a behaviorist He also was self-described as a behaviorist at times and interviews. He said, "Midded that he has no relevant degree. Some skeptics have his work

Did some digging a few years back and couldn't find any evidence that he attended any university in Sweden. Wait, really? Yeah, he's like a random high school graduate. It just like started saying I'm an expert They said that the most likely situation is that he only holds a high school diploma fascinating, okay his background was in sales He was a management consultant a couple months ago I was looking up a random like wellness person for maintenance phase and instead of listing any credentials on their website

They described themselves as a medical news expert

“Just like the biggest thing I've ever fucking heard in my life. I thought that's how you self-described is that not”

I mean, aren't we all behavior experts like I'm around people who exhibit behaviors all the time? Well, so I was like, well, it's behaviorist like a specific Yeah, and like the answer like not exactly like as a subcategories in psych but like there are groups of people who Described themselves as behaviorists who have no expertise, but they seem to have like it's like they've just found a word Yeah, I can say that I'm a behaviorist without right technically running a foul of Any like psychologists because they don't use that exact terminology because you're not technically claiming anything

Eric's been confronted with some of this stuff He was asked about his critics once and he says in Sweden We can't have successful people. We bring them down because we're an envious society Yes, my haters. Yes, do it. He was asked to describe his background. He says I'm a behaviorist which means I studied behaviors I've read the literature back and forth up and down and I know a lot when it comes to behaviors and personalities

I have no ambition to call myself a psychologist and no time for the five and a half years It takes to get the degree in Sweden

He says he has never held himself out as a psychologist, which I think is true

But I do think he's using language that is basically Yeah, I'm trying to trick you into thinking that he has formal expertise Yes, like putting MD in your email signature and then when people are like wait a minute You're not a doctor being like yeah, I'm from Maryland. I never said I was a doctor It's you guys. I said I was a doctor. It's funny to be like like I'm an animal expert and then someone's like

Most of the rest of the book is just expounding on different elements of the personality types

“There's a chapter on body language. She says red-bleen forward aggressive. Yes”

Have powerful handshake. Yeah, yellows gesture expressively blues speak without just sure one of my favorite lines in the book

He says he says the blues quote either sit or stand I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess the other colors spend a meaningful amount of time horizontal just like in normal day They're doing wall sits like Tim Ferriss at a restaurant. Yeah, I'm gonna send you some of the body language stuff because it's funny Also, is this one of these books where he kind of like runs out of things to say like halfway through But he's the hit his word count. So it's just like have some body language stuff

I mean a lot of it is sort of like alright, I've introduced to these colors to you these personality types and now We're gonna talk about like in a little more detail of how to identify them and then deal with them and like the body language It's a good example of just like well, what else is there? He says a simple hand shake can reveal a lot about a person

limp and feeble handshakes often indicate a submissive behavior

“So if you have such a hand shake, it might be a good idea to press a little harder if a hand shake is firm”

It probably suggests that the person is determined anyone who squeezes way too hard But longs more than likely to the former category, but would prefer to belong to the latter. I like how he's like You can tell a lot about somebody from their handshake. Also, you can alter your handshake to give people the particular impression that you want a lot of guys and in hiding I'm including myself. I'm not being judgmental at some point in their life Have been like am I doing handshakes with the right firmness? It's a weird sort of like

Circular thing because this myth of like you can tell something about someone from their handshake is so popular Everyone thinks they have to have like an overly firm like a perfectly firm handshake. I mean, I I have like met interview candidates and who have it in credit Like who just like put their hand there and you squeeze it and you're like, oh, yeah, I'm happy Like that's it Just like what warm fish is like

You're just like squeezing a lip body parts like I don't I don't think it's anything either But it does feel like one of those things where it's like, please just follow the social norms Exactly. Yeah, to me. It doesn't say that like anything about them as a person It's just like can you fake this I love that we've we immediately were like actually this is how I judge people Well, no judging people on whether they can perform these little social niceties that we all do all the time to get along with people at work

Right if you're not willing to squeeze my hand a little bit. Are you even washing your ass right? What is going on? I like this part, too. The more effective way to spot a liar is to notice if he puts the palm of his hand on his chest Preferably his right hand over his heart and size indignately when he's been accused of lying What I lie how can you say that about me? This gesture is intended to strengthen his honest intentions But it immediately puts those around him on their guard because it is so unnecessary and excessive

There's definitely something fishy going on there. Yeah, do people do that feel like who me fucking FBI over here This is this is like how cops think about this shit right. I'll tell you who has ever done this. Would I lie?

“How can you say that about me? That's what they do in like animated movies to like exaggerate everybody's body language”

I feel like that's what was had he was watching a movie from like 1961 Yeah, where someone did this and he was like that person's lying. I know it

Gee will occurs. I would never lie again

We don't need to go through the rest of the book piece mail It's the same sort of thing over and over again, right and I promise that I I found the funniest bits Okay, there are chapters at the end of the book that are like once I was at a party and there were too many I was in here like it's just like just give me a fucking break Oprah Winfrey and Hansel over there It was crazy people talk about the reading crisis in America

There's really writing crisis in America where people write these fucking books. It's the writing crisis, dude Everyone's like oh my god, no one reads books anymore But how many would you read if they were 80 pages of time? I bet I'd be flying Charged me half as much and have the book be like a quarter as long Some of the there are a couple later chapters that are very one booky

There is a chapter titled a short reflection through history and this is Erickson's attempt to pretend that like what he's describing in the book is like ancient wisdom Oh my god, I've seen so many times. Oh, yes, so he says like hypocrites Viewed the human body as a balance of four humors the Aztecs viewed people as embodied by his spectrum of fire water Earth and he's like does that sound familiar red red blue avatar the last airbender had four nations We're cooking we're cooking so he's saying like you know the idea of four traits in balance has

Decorce in our intellectual tradition and the this framework is just building on that by the way He starts off at that chapter by saying this chapter explains how I arrived at the research that forms the basis of the information in this book It's like okay wait. You're saying that you read Hypocrites and you read about the Aztecs and that's how you get here because early in the book

Scottsdale Arizona and then the last chapters like interviews with a couple of business leaders about it Hell yeah, oh, that's the studio of a private equity company and she says now my staff know that I am not an evil Despit just red That's also the dark side of personality has so too. It's like Objectively toxic behavior can then be recast as I'm just a red. Yeah. I'm a bit of a red and then she says that she learned that greens talk behind her back

I'll be just not employ them anymore By the way, that was the Jesus color

Gandhi was a catty little bitch. People are always saying that so Erickson publishes this in 2014

In 2020 he publishes a follow-up surrounded by psychopaths The premise of that book is that the disc model doesn't apply to psychopaths

“Wait, what which seems like even more like something you'd need expertise to be talking about?”

It seems like psychopaths are really task oriented rather than relationship oriented. I think that's an easy one great point So that's 2020 in 2021. He puts out two books surrounded by bad bosses and lazy employees and surrounded by setbacks In 2022 he puts out surrounded by narcissists in 2023 he puts out surrounded by energy vampires He puts out surrounded by liars

So there's like an initial six-year period where he's just coasting off his book and then he just churns out when was a chat BT released again. Sorry, what's the year? Great question, but he appears to have beaten it to the punch Okay, I imagine that you've encountered this, but if you're when you're doing like a quick Google for a book like this You'll find like someone's medium post where they're like here's my review of surrounded by narcissists Yeah, and I found one and they were like I did find it. It was the same thing over and over again

But perhaps he just wants to emphasize these ideas It's like how the pale king is boring on purpose because it's about the boredom of work life. Yes, so I

“Got curious about this not as a substantive thing, but it's like a cultural phenomenon on like how did it come to be?”

That these personality assessments are such a big workplace thing. Yeah, yeah, so I read a book and I read a bunch of articles Most of the sources I look at trace modern personality tests back to World War I

Obviously there'd been various attempts to describe personality types before, but World War I was the first time you see a

Standardized personality assessment done at scale and the primary reason is that soldiers were returning from war with shell shock Right as a society, we didn't really understand trauma like this right in the military even less sensitive to trauma than you were in our body Although they were in a position to provide horses to many more people. They basically thought that like anyone with shell shock was the product of Unemotionally unstable person being exposed to war, and so they were looking for a test to assess emotional stability for troops

So this guy Roger Woodworth and his team they go about mapping symptoms. They see they compare them against who they consider to be normal people And they come up with a questionnaire that doesn't meant to measure neuroticism. Oh, yeah sample questions From this assessment, do you usually feel well and strong? Who are you troubled with dreams about your work? Do you ever have the sensation of falling when going to sleep? Oh, do you have trouble walking in the dark?

Have you hurt yourself by masturbation? No, no, yes, yes, yes, yes, I was gonna track have you do you have trouble walking in the dark is it fucking hilarious

“Like well, what do you mean? I do find it harder than walking in the light if that's what you're asking”

Well, yeah, and then they're like have you ever fucking jacked it so hard Another that like feeling of falling when you're about to go to sleep is literally a universal human Yeah, that's the super normal. I love that like a 1918 kernel or whatever was like you ever feel like you're falling when going asleep That's because you're a coward and

Also have you ever just hurt your dick by jacking so furious. That's also universal There's hit nick jerks and there's injurious jerks Everybody is this another 40 years before televisions invented so time to jerk off for the eighth time today So almost right away people start modifying this test and coming up with similar tests with broader Applications and most of those early tests were designed to locate maladjustment right the tests are very rudimentary

The questions they asked are often based more on the test makers intuition about what an erotic person would answer There's a book about the history of personality tests from about 20 years ago by any Murphy Paul who's a journalist It's called the cult of personality Send you a little bit from that. She says Robert burn writer was a Pennsylvania state university psychologist who designed one of the eras most popular tests the burn

Reuter personality inventory in it. He posed the question. Are you critical of others?

Surmeizing that a positive response suggested psychosocial difficulties come on

a reply given much less frequently by neurotics and psychotics Likewise the query do you daydream frequently a soon by burn writer to be a sign of psychological instability was

“Endorsed more often by healthy individuals than by the mentally ill are you critical of others?”

Is it just a test of whether you're a liar? Yeah, so these guys were sort of just spitballing it Right, what do I think a neurotic person is and they're getting it wrong very frequently right there is this guy Alvin Mayo and Australian psychologist and in 1926 he's hired to head up industrial research at harbored business school And he becomes a pioneer in workplace psychology. He is primarily concerned with the impact of workers Psychology on productivity. I'm reading from some research here

Mayo believed that problems at work were most often due to mental disintegration and maladjustment These malagested workers could cause problems by lowering work morale Fementing workplace violence and agitating for unions So the premise almost immediately after these assessments sort of pop up is like Maybe we can filter out problematic workers from our employee pool right that continues to be a very popular framework for

Understanding unproductive or unruly workplaces Which is a big problem at this time because we're in a period of labor unrest right where it's it's in the early 30s when you get like major pieces of labor Legislation because there's so much labor unrest in the late 20s so then in the 30s and 40s

“You start to see the rise of multi-dimensional personality tests. So the question moves from like how do we identify personality disorders?”

To how do we categorize normal personality types right there's the MMPI the Minnesota multi-phasic personality inventory You have the hum wadsworth scale which measure personality along like multiple dimensions including Histeroid manic depressive autistic paranoid epileptoid Cami pinko The influence could kill this in her special folks hum wadsworth sounds like what I call it when I injured myself masturbating

I knew that you would think hum wadsworth was funny You couldn't even resist giggling so the hum wadsworth guys the immediately start to sell it to companies to use on their employees and it gets quite popular

In 1942 time magazine writes an article about it. They say it's been applied to two million people across

225 companies and Apparently an article about the test in spires is a bell brigs to start up with mire's brigs Over the next couple of decades these workplace assessments become quite popular and it's not just these tests It's all matter of like aptitude tests right they start gearing them towards aptitude in 1939

There is a survey of businesses showing that 14% use these tests in 1963 It's 90% yeah, but then in the following years the use of assessment falls off a cliff a couple of reasons for that one Cultural backlash in the 1960s the federal government had started to implement personality assessments Into their hiring on government employees so there's a lot of resistance to that

Senator Sam Irvin says quote clearly the government should not send out an investigator to peer through an employees or an applicant's bedroom window Neither should the government ask through subtle psychological questioning

What a person does and things after he draws the curtains that's always the issue with these because they're not about your work performance

They're about who you are as a person right which is supposed to not be a factor in a sort of capitalist system where they're purchasing your labor

“Like you should have a private sphere sending you a little bit from the the cult of personality book”

I can injure myself masturbating as many times as I want and my boss shouldn't know about it The number of times I'm home walls were thing is none of your business. Hold on. Okay, maybe that's when we're all guys Right, she's she homes on my wall till they were I home on my own wall. Yeah, then it works then it works Unease about the increasingly prevalent use of personality tests like the M and P. I had been growing for more than a decade

In 1956 is the organization man, William White sounded a warning about the stifling conformity such test imposed on American executives More explicit critiques with titles like the brainwaters and the tyranny of testing appeared in the early 1960s newspapers and magazines ran investigative exposays under such headlines as the snoops and the I love my mother tests There were even reports of public burning of test data by parents angry that their children were given the questionnaires at school

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like it was very obvious at the time that they were like are you a fucking weirdo? Was like the face of the test right so Senator Irvin introduces legislation to forbid the use of personality Sessman's in government They were congressional hearings. There's a big public PR fight that these place in popular magazines and newspapers

The bill never passes and everything sort of dies down

But this combination of scientific skepticism and public outcry puts a damper on all of this The other big development is the civil rights act of 1965 which makes racial discrimination illegal

Right many companies run by pretty expressed racists

“We're just using personality and aptitude tests to come up with an excuse to discriminate against black applicants after”

Decival rights act passes In the early 1970s, there's a Supreme Court case grigs the Duke power company this company had restricted black employees to one Low paying department Then the civil rights act is enacted and on the day of they change the policy to allow employees to transfer out of that department But in order to do so

They needed to pass certain aptitude tests that white people were much much more likely to pass. Yeah, I learned about this from a podcast So these Supreme Court says no you can't do this. This test has a disparate impact on black employees and is still considered discrimination It's at this time and like the 70s that you start to see the rise of a different type of personality assessment One that is meant to categorize people in a less judgmental way

Instead of trying to determine whether someone is socially adjusted or not The tests are just trying to place people on a spectrum of normal personality traits, right? Injured self masturbating parentheses non-derogatory in the early 90s You start to see a bunch of research coming out that seems to demonstrate that personality tests can actually be a good predictor of success in the workplace That's for a useful to companies because now legally

You can show that the test has a validated use which can be enough to overcome a claim of discrimination in certain situations

Right, so in the early 1990s, you see the first big class actions about this

Target gets sued for its personality test, which are a combination of the MMPI and another test They were trying to screen for turnover risk and competence But I'm gonna send you some of the questions which you're meant to answer with a yes or no. What okay? I believe in the second coming of Christ. I believe there is a God. I am very strongly attracted to members of my own sex

“Maybe some minority groups do get rough treatment, but it's no business of mine. My sex life is satisfactory. I have often wished”

I were a girl my eyesight is as good as it has been for years. I hardly ever feel pain in the back of my neck Many of my dreams are about sex matters. I am worried about sex matters. This is why I say it's sort of a hybrid era Target is not trying to figure out if you're a Christian, but the old personality tests were And so yeah, yeah, they're pulling from these old personality tests that have this sort of shit in them This gets sailed out of court and the industry is sort of put on notice that if you use these super

Old-fashioned tests, you're risking liability any Murphy Paul's book covers a lawsuit brought in the late 90s by some employees of rent a center. Oh, okay. I am going to send this to you one morning The managers were herded into a chilly conference room. They've been scheduled to participate in a budgeting workshop But company leaders instead announce on a abrupt change in plans Employees would immediately begin taking the management test a five-hour battery of nine separate examinations

An anxious hush fell over the room as the exams were passed out within minutes, however The silence was breached by a stir of astonishment the questions in front of them had nothing to do with renting furniture or managing employees Or keeping the books. Okay, what up?

“Sandy some of the questions. Oh my god my sex life is satisfactory. I have diarrhea once a month or more”

I would like to be a florist everything tastes the same my mother was a good woman. I am a special agent of God Arriving at the question. I liked Alice and Wonderland by Louis Carroll the managers might well have felt that they had slipped on the rabbit hole The test of course was the MMPI Things only get worse when the test results were returned rent a center hired an outfit in Kansas Associated Personnel technicians to produce an extensive personality description of each manager

How self-sufficient self-confident and dominant he or she was how fearful depressive and impetuous Most needed work in one or more of these areas APT advised and so each profile include a specific plan for improvement Employees who were restless and impatient should lay off nicotine and caffeine they counseled Workers with the tendency to retreat from reality should drink lots of water

Yes, it's basically like a surveillance state where they're looking at your like internal frame of money

I have diarrhea once a month or more is fucking funny. No, it's so funny. That's so funny Like we can't go into every ridiculous question and all of these and there are so many and like picking out the funniest ones It's really hard for me But everything tastes the same There's something so funny about it to me where like in the middle of it

It's it's sort of like they're asking these personal questions and then they just like insert everything tastes the same Which I imagine is the sign of like some kind of severe chemical and bad right like a physiological issue That's right. Yeah, also my mother was a good woman. I mean, maybe here mom is trash

Modifying the questions to determine how likely people are to follow rules

“Right beyond time to work how friendly they'll be to co-workers how prone they are to slacking off, right?”

And this is obviously being sold to companies as a way to glean insights into applicants that like you otherwise couldn't right in the mid 90s There's a lawsuit against Contra Costa County in California Because they were using a personality test on welfare applicants to determine whether or not they were abusing substances Oh nice. It had questions like I believe everything is turning out the way the Bible said it would pornography and obscenity have become serious problems and must be curbed anyone who failed it was deemed

chemically dependent. Oh my god to enter a six-month reading program if they wanted to receive benefits No way it turned out that the test was classifying 44% of all applicants as chemically dependent Not even based on questions like how often do you use drugs? It's just like other random ask questions Right like what was your mom like and that's like you're on crack And they're like what's your diarrhea situation? Yeah get to rehab because the funny thing about these tests is it's so

“Fucking obvious what they want you to say do they is it better to have more or less diarrhea?”

Do you think they like it if all food tastes the same that I mean they could give you Really bad tasting food it wouldn't matter you That's not the only reason it's all in there. They're like the food here sucks So in the 2000s and 2010s you see even more legal attention start to get paid to these assessments and this is where Companies are really ratcheting up the volume of use because of computers

The ACLU filed a complaint against CVS in 2009 CVS had a questionnaire and its application process that asked applicants if they agreed with statements like you Change from happy to sad without any reason you are unsure of what to say when you meet someone and Your moods are steady from day to day. Oh the ACLU pointed out this could function as discrimination against people with Certain mental health conditions right anxiety also just like everyone's good changes. I mean so many of these questions

Just like universal human behavior like yeah, sometimes it's hard to meet people. I don't know Target had to settle with the EEOC about a decade ago because it was alleged that their application tests were disproportionately filtering out women and people of color It's like how angry do you get when you see a pride display 7 out of 7 daily all of this litigation made these types of personality assessments less popular in workplaces But it seems like instead of companies eliminating them altogether. It just sort of accelerated this shift toward the so-called normal personality tests

Right and so you have these tests like disk which are like sort of in offensive ways to group people into personality types right right

So from the 80s through now you're basically seeing this big shift from these old style tests to

this sort of like weird goofy, but not horrifying, right sort of version that you see in in disk. Although companies are probably still Doing analysis on like who's the most likely to be late to work and stuff based on various test questions on assuming. Yeah, so disk is meant to like aid Managers in managing employees, right? It's like everyone is different. Here's how you manage this type if you're an employee Here's how you get along with your colleagues who are a little different from you. It's after the hiring process

But if any company is still doing a hiring assessment That is obviously designed to filter out people right who they think are less likely to be Quality employees that is less common these days, but you see it. It's not that's it's not gone Yeah, now they just do it in person. They're like for legal reasons. We can't ask you whether you have kids, but what is the diarrhea situation? What was your mom like and you ever jacked it so hard at that?

The legal question in my mind is why why are companies doing this? Yeah, I understand the hiring assessments, right? Even if they're problematic, they have a clear goal. Yeah, they're trying to filter out shitty employees. But why disk? Why something like this? Why this color coded bullshit where Everyone knows there's no real scientific validity. I wonder if they just see it as like another form of team building, right? Like any other activity you do with your co-workers is going to be arbitrary?

So first I'm there's been some near times reporting on this. Here's a bit from some reporting

in 2023. Nearly one third of the respondents to the Society for Human Resource Management 2017 survey of its members said they used personality tests to fill executive roles. I'm a kinsian company. Some consultants do do diligence when staffing projects, which often means looking at the balance of introverts and extroverts on a team. College fundraising offices love the color code, which among other things tells you who can

best work the phones parentheses, yellows. These are like, that's color code. It's literally the

“same bullshit as disk. Because of course, that's the only thing companies are going to be”

concerned with, right? Is your productivity at work? Like your ability to do the job. So of course,

questions? Are you here's another bit from the times? Often the test aren't a diagnosis, but are

more of an opening for people to talk about the softer parts of office life, their relationships. Identifying as a blue through the color code might not feel all that relevant to quarterly sales quotas, but at least among teammates it can be a conversation starter. Yeah, I mean, it's typically our defensive these things is like, it's an opening of a conversation. You can talk about how people are different. It's pseudo science as team building, right? It's like, like here's here's something

for you guys to talk about, right? Yeah. And maybe you find some commonalities to some people you didn't talk to before or think you had much in common with before. Maybe you get a little bit of

“insight in some of your colleagues, right? Which honestly, I don't think is totally implausible,”

like it probably does work for that. Maybe it does. I mean, I certainly didn't find any research

about this, but I would be shocked if there is like lasting impact to organizations about this,

right? Well, how much efficacy does like trust falls have? These like, you know, these like days out they're going to do with your colleagues were like, you all go bowling together, whatever. Yeah. It's sort of the same kind of thing. It's not clear to me how much those are doing either, but given the other options, this might be fine. Yeah, the basic idea that people think and work differently is important to reinforce, right? Even if you're doing it on the back of some

bullshit as personality, it's good to know like Kathy doesn't prioritize the same things as I do, but that doesn't mean she's stupid, right? The New York Times had a similar piece in 2019, they said, Myers Briggs provided a shorthand to talk about a whole range of personal needs. How much you like to fill your calendar, how you want your manager to give feedback, how personal you want to

“get with colleagues at the water cooler. So yeah, I think it's maybe just a way to get people to”

talk about themselves, right? And maybe that has some benefits. Yeah, because like as an icebreaker,

I've often done like, hey, Kathy, once a last time you injured yourself masturbating. And then she tells a story, I can tell a story and then like we have some anecdotes to show. How often do you guys, how often are you guys having diarrhea, just like you're sitting around a circle with 20 people? What was your mom like? I will also say, as often as you see companies get sued for racial discrimination for using these, there also have been like some examples of companies implementing

hiring assessments that do improve diversity. Most of the time, it seems to me at a glance and I didn't look too deep. That's because they're so not diverse in the beginning that like the introduction of any of any type, make them more diverse. If you're a number of black hires, is that 1%. Right. Then just like, yeah, any change to your process is probably going to be bad. You get up to like 2% or 3%. Like we triple the diversity. Right. Right. Right. I think that's

like the good faith sort of read on what these things are doing. Right. Maybe they're just like an excuse to get people chatting. Yeah. And maybe sometimes even like the hiring context, they

“might have some positive impacts here and there. I think the more cynical read which obviously,”

as a blue. I buy into real condolese is that these types of assessments, like the disc assessment in particular is a pitch to managers that your problems are really from like mismatched and misallocated employees. Right. Rather than like structural or organizational issues. Right. So if you're a manager and you're like, why doesn't my team function well? Deloitte is there to be like, that's because you've got the greens working with the blues to whatever. Right. As opposed to like

your incentives give people the reason to be toxic to each other. Really, you're not clear about tasks. So most of the people on the team are not task oriented stuff like that. You know, I think it sells something to managers that they want to hear. Yeah. Which is like your problems are actually the result of these personality types. And you can solve them without any structural changes. Yes. Another bit this is Emma Goldberg from a Times Peace in 2019. Personally,

assessments short circuit the messiness of building would have now referred to as a culture. They deliver on all the complexities of interpersonal office dynamics, but without the intimate and expensive process of actually speaking with employees to determine their quirks and preferences. They appeal also, perhaps, for the same reason, astrology, numerology and other hopeless pocus systems do because it's fun to divide people into categories.

They tap into the angst of the where our yall sitting meme, the hunger to know where you belong in the lunchtime cafeteria scene. I think this is the right. This is like half cynical. Yeah. This is a way to create culture. Yeah. But it's sort of a cheap, weird, sort of scientific way to create culture. But my, I, what I can't stop kind of back to, my real like why do companies do this is I think these organizations are just kind of suckers.

Because there's a huge industry selling these tests to them. Yes. Massive industry, hundreds of companies sell this shit. Yeah. And I think they want to believe that there are shortcuts for efficiency and culture. Yeah. And yeah, they have these companies who are like we're backed by science. Yeah. And I think they buy it. I think they fundamentally are like, oh, that looks good. Yeah. So I don't think that these, the people making these decisions at large companies to

hire a company like this to do a disc assessment. I don't think they're like, look, this is

work styles or whatever. I think that they're just like, oh, this is going to make us more efficient.

“It's going to improve our culture. They're literally receiving a sales pitch by TTI,”

success insights and Scottsdale Arizona. And they're like, oh, that sounds fantastic. And they're typically large corporations who have fairly large budgets. Right. This is not like the CEO if most companies, right, deciding, oh, we're going to bring this guy this guy. And it's like some department that is put in charge of like workplace culture and events. Exactly. And they have a massive budget. Like what are we going to do with it? And they, uh, they get pitched on something

like disc. And they say that sounds great. It was either this or like we all go to a baseball game. Because also, I mean, a bunch of the other like team building, stuff they do at work, you know,

“like do escape rooms together or something. I don't know if there's great ROI on that either.”

But yeah, it's just somebody's job to do this. Right. On the other hand, just getting people interacting probably is good for culture. And so it is arbitrary what you're actually interacting about. Right. I think that that's probably true that it doesn't really matter. Yeah. What you get people doing as long as you get them a little bit off their guard and interacting in a friendly manner. That said, as an employee, this has to be the worst one. Right. Like, just

please put me in an escape room. Um, I don't even care if there's no escape. Just anything

with this fucking assessment. The escape room one drives me nuts because then you're basically like

reformulating the same work dynamics. Like somebody has to lead somebody has to follow. It's like

“the same potential for like conflict as you have any actual workplaces. But I feel like that's what's”

stupid managers think. And they're like, we're going to find secret leaders. Like, I can't remember right till this story in the show before, but a friend of mine did one of these like icebreaker exercises. These like team building things. And everybody got like a little index card and they went around the circle of their like icebreaker question. And the person next to him got what is your favorite sandwich. And then my friend got when was the last time you felt alone? He's like, what the

fuck? I will say, and this is probably obvious. I crush in these settings. I, uh, there's nothing that I like more than a company being like, by the way, uh, this is a space for jokes. Maybe this is proof that personality types aren't real. But I would say in 50% of these sort of workplace things, I'm just dead silent ready to die. Yeah. And in 50%. I'm just like, what is the last time I felt alone? Why the fuck you asking me that's right? Folks. Folks, that's all team up against this

company that's doing this to us. But just like, kind of like the handshake thing, they're almost a measurement of like, how well do you fit into a corporate environment? You just need to come up with something quippy. If I got the horrific alone question, I would just come up with some dumb quipped to move on. I wouldn't like, right, there's no fucking way, I would even consider that question and like answer it in anything like an honest way. Dude, it would be so funny to answer that in a

serious way. Uh, the day of my mother's death. Yeah. What are you going to say? I wouldn't have it in me to do it. But if someone just pulled it together and like knowingly answered that sincerely, like knowing that it would be a good bit. God, that would be funny. Just ruin the tone of the entire rest of the day. I guess it was probably when I had diarrhea three times on a day and then

jacked and then jacked myself so hard that I was injured. But third time I injured myself and that's

a big one. [Music]