If Books Could Kill - Surrounded By Idiots

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Peter and Michael discuss "Surrounded by Idiots," a book that dares to ask: Can the mystery of human relationships be unraveled by a workplace personality assessment?Where to find us: Our PatreonOur merch!Peter's newsletterPeter's other podcast, 5-4Mike's other podcast, Maintenance PhaseSources:Pioneers, Drivers, Integrators, and GuardiansCreator of Lie Detector Test Dies; Lecturer and Author Produced Comic StripOne of Sweden's biggest scientific bluffs Pseudoscience and the Claim of Practical Utility: The Case of Thomas Erikson's Surrounded by IdiotsThomas Erikson accepts being called a pop psychology writerFour personality types may be neither robust nor exhaustiveSpuriouser and spuriouser: The use of ipsative personality testsReconsidering the use of personality tests in personnel selection contextsUsing Personality Tests in Pre-Employment ScreeningEmployment Tests and Selection Procedures The Cult of Personality TestingA history of the early days of personality testing in American industry: an obsession with adjustment  Psychological Testing in Personnel Selection, Part II: The Refinement of Methods and Standards in Employee SelectionPsychological Testing in Personnel Selection, Part III: The Resurgence of Personality TestingACLU Files Discrimination Complaint Against CVS Target Corporation to Pay $2.8 Million to Resolve EEOC Discrimination FindingPersonality Tests Are the Astrology of the OfficeThe $2 Billion Question of Who You Are at WorkThanks to Mindseye for our theme song!Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/IfBooksPod

What do we have? Surrounded by idiots, what am I at a meet and greet with my fans? Let's go super toxic right off the bat. What if you just went super lib-coded? And you're like, surrounded by idiots, what am I at the Republican National Convention? Ooh, the T-Rump administration? That's what I'm doing. I'll say drumpf the entire episode.

I must be in the White House. Let's try that. Let's do that. Let's try that. Michael. Peter. What do you know about surrounded by idiots? All I know is that 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, yeah, 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 two. Idiots and Not Idiots. The bummer about this book is that the Surrounded by Idiots title is a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Right. 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 that. Bo.

Yeah. So it's made 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 bestseller. 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 100 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 Moulton Marston, and he publishes a book called Emotions of Normal People.

Also, something said only by the worst person you've ever met. So among other things, it established a personality framework called D-I-S-C. It stands for dominance, inducement, submission, 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 psychonic energy that is transferred through a web of nerve cells that he called psychons. The four personality types arise, he claims, as variations between different people in the structure of their iconic network. I love it 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, psychons. Satan's, yes, you take a stress test. Yes, I'm familiar. So this was not originally created as a personality assessment. 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? Where 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, which he starts selling to businesses.

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 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 hero? The comic book character, Wonder Woman, was created by the guy who came up with the lie detector test. What? 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, he was trying to invent the lasso for his entire career. Like people trying to discover alchemy. He's like, damn it. Under the rope that doesn't work. So you have this company, the activity vector analysis company, which is selling a revamped version of this to businesses, right?

Then a guy who was employed by that company creates his own spinoff. And then in the 70s, a third dude creates his own version. And they're all still using this disk 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 indicator, too. 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 Grindr. I realized I 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, 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 all right 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. 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. In 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 got 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 material. of one of these companies that sells talent 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 like, find someone else's idea and like steal it and write a quickie self-help book.

So here's Thomas. Since I began studying 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 categorical 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.

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, this broad, you know, we're starting off perfectly fine and inoffensive. Yeah. He wants to improve interpersonal dynamics and maybe alleviate anxiety that results from interpersonal disputes, right?

Yeah. And that remains, I think, the most positive element of this all throughout. Even as we get into the details and it begins to fall apart to an astounding degree. Okay. So one of the opening chapters, why are we the way that we are? Hmm. He says that the temperament and character traits we have inherited affect 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 inoffensive. He's like, we inherit traits from our parents. And you're like, yeah, man. And then he's like, also from other people.

Who knows? No. Ants, uncles, cousins, you're getting jeans from everywhere. Yep. Just fully whiffing on ninth grade bio in like the first chapter. It's like, no, you're not. That's germs. You're talking about germs, not genes.

Look, if you're going to call your books surrounded by idiots, we're going to 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 inoffensive. Yeah. You have some inherited stuff. You have some stuff that you learn over time. Fine.

I've sent you a diagram. So it's a two-by-two thing. You're either task-oriented and issue-oriented or relation-oriented. 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 you're 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. Oh, really? Conscientious, like analytical, uh, 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 detail-oriented.

Right. As people can tell from this point, I will send you his sort of summary of this. About 80% of all people have a combination of two colors that dominate 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 comment is entirely red behavior or red behavior in combination with one other color. Am I stupid? The colors reflect quadrants across two axes.

So how can you be dominated by three colors? I don't entirely get it. Also, if your framework is splitting people into four different types and you're, like, dominated by three of them, that doesn't give you away, 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, yeah. It's like, how is this clarifying? Like, greens are patient, loyal, modest, thoughtful, reds are timekeepers, they're fast, their results oriented, their performance oriented.

Right. It's a jumble by the time you start absorbing it all. Right. But nonetheless, because we're professional journalists, we're going to go through each color, which gets a chapter from him. Hell yeah. This is where the book really starts to fall apart. Also, wait, wait, wait.

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. But 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 agree to strongly disagree sort of thing.

Oh, 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. Well, it's not real.

So it can be... Good point. Good point. One thing you need to remember is that is... Yes. Tapping my nose and pointing at you right now. Yes. So we're going to start with reds. You're being such a fucking red right now.

Alpha. Is the chapter called Red Dead Redemption? The Red chapter is titled Red Behavior. How to recognize a real alpha and avoid getting it in his way. Red behavior sounds kind of racist. There is a way in which it becomes... I'm like weirdly offensive sounding. It sounds like it should be problematic because like 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 extroverted and active. He says, nowadays, you might call a red person bold, ambitious, 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 who have lots of red in their behavior are task-oriented extroverts, and they enjoy challenges. They make quick decisions and are often comfortable taking the lead and taking risks. A common perception is that reds are natural leaders. These are people who willingly take command and go to the fore. 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 downsides, he says, when they get going, they become control freaks, and they repeatedly trample 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 fall into this category. Although, to be fair, I was doing that in my head. I was like, this is a Ronald Reagan type, so I can't talk shit. He says, if you want to get to know some famous red people, consider Steve Jones. jobs, FDR, Venus Williams, or Margaret Thatcher. There's also Barack Obama and Mother Teresa. Oh, yes, it's true. If you consider Mother Teresa's deeds, the strengths 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. But I first, I was just like, are you, are you pretending that you gave, like, Mother Teresa a workplace personality assessment? Like, here's a form. Yeah.

Like, the Catholic Church had one day where they're like, Deloitte is here. 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. I know. What if it was red, yellow, black and white? Real black behavior. You'd be like, whoa, hey. That would be a good bit to do it as like not very subtly, but just subtly enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm talking about personality types here. I'm judging people by the content of their character, obviously. Yellow is extroverted and active, but relation-oriented, rather than task-oriented. Okay. 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 are driven by merriment and laughter, and why not? The sun is always shining somewhere. They're jolly. So he's just saying, you know, they're optimistic, they're outgoing, they're charming, they're enthusiastic. Downsides when they are given unlimited space, they will consume all the oxygen in the room. 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 a sociopath. Are you a scientist? Are you a scientist? I'm sorry. I defer to the experts. I defer to the author. Sorry. I'm sending you something. Yes. I was like, I was about to be like, shut up, Peter. Give me the famous people. He says, famous people who exhibit clear yellow traits. include Oprah Winfrey, Robin Williams, Ellen DeGeneres, and, to take some fictional examples, Pippin from the Lord of the Rings, and Han Solo from Star Wars. I feel like 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. Green's 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 of 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. Also, how is it a spectrum, but you're also the average of the others? I don't know. I hate when you try to talk it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're just like, what I thought it was a spectrum? All right, never mind. Green people are kind of. personified. Thank you. You can expect a helping hand whenever you need it. They are pronounced relational people who will do everything within their power to save your relationship and they will invest lifelong. They will keep track of when your birthday is, when your partner's birthday is, when your children's birthdays are, et cetera. Michael, when's my birthday? Well, Michael, Michael? I was about to say they don't need to keep track of birthdays because you can schedule texts in advance.

Oh. And so it's pretty easy to be like, happy birthday. bud and send it for like 9.17 AM on somebody's birthday. I like doing this. I do this constantly. Does he mention that? That is psychopathic behavior. No, that is nice. That is fucking nice.

People like getting a happy birthday text or like a gooey New Year's text. It's not nice because you're not even really doing it. I'm doing it in advance. This is the same thing as 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 bot.

Originally, you're typing it like six months in advance and you're probably doing it for the next five years. Not six months in advance, but like a week in advance because I haven't my calendar and I'm like, oh, next Wednesday is like so-and-so's 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 that I'm going to forget, Peter. This is like one of my little tasks that I'm most worried out forgetting. This is one step from like AI, please fuck my wife.

No, it's not. It's like four steps from that, Peter. It's at least four steps from that. All right, downsides about greens. Let's see if this resonates with you, Michael. There are none. There are none. They can be too wishy-washy and unclear.

They can downplay trauma. Well, That's interesting Fuck off Fuck off You're looking to think you're being serious Fuck you Everything you say now

Really like wow clocked Really got cllocked by this trash book He says Anyone who never takes a stand Eventually becomes difficult to handle You don't know where they really stand And indecision kills the energy In other people

Indecision 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-diagnosed and now you're disagreeing with your own self-diagnosis. And now I'm debunking it. Yes. All right. I'm going to send you the people. It's my favorite one. Oh, ooh. 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 Hobbesian of public figures. Whenever I'm reading these books, 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. Like one of the most beloved public figures in American history. You just described these people as being afraid of change, never taking a stand and indecisive. And you're saying that Jesus. Or like Gandhi is too afraid to take a stand.

fame that's the one thing you always hear about god he never took a stand on anything and finally blue in pursuit of perfection of course this is what our friends at deloitte think i am more or less also i know that risk averse is how i would describe someone who started a podcast about how the supreme court sucks while working at a law firm i know that's super risk of verse necessarily yeah but to be fair before that i just like became a lawyer which is like that's true that is risk ofverse if you have any potential and you become a lawyer that is it's inherently risk averse right. You've just sort of, you've really capped your ability to do any good in this world. All right, here you guys about blues. So these people are task oriented and introversion? Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Well, a green will just go with the flow. A blue has all the right answers. In the background, he analyzes, classifies, evaluates, assesses. You know you've 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 balanced 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. call. I get a little bit of that for myself. The idea of being hyper organized in my personal life such that I had like labels labels on the children's hooks or whatever. That 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 forget what they are. For fuck's sake. Just say you're all four then. So are his famous people for this like Tito, Stalin and Satan? He says, have you identified some blues in your life, Bill Gates and Albert Einstein both use their attention to detail and meticulous nature to build their success. Maybe. We also have Sandra Day O'Connor and Condoleezza Rice.

And of course, from the fictional world, Mr. Spock from Star Trek, he's the perfect blue, all logic, rationality, and intellect, even if a few of the jokes slip past him. And now he's just like, it's actually autism. We all know how good Condoleezza Rice is at assessing information, like looking at evidence and coming to the right conclusion, being like very organized, very thorough and robust. Not a risk taker. Yeah. So those are the four chapters, obviously, condensed a bit.

The fact that this whole system divides people neatly into four categories is both part of the appeal of a system and why it, like, immediately reads as 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 gods. Even as you're reading this, you'll be like, okay, yeah, I've got a little bit of green or blue. Sure. But 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 situational. 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 as 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 you learn early in life and then attitudes, which are a little more malleable. Right. But it's like unclear how static he thinks 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. Erickson 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-backed, right?

That's like, there's science in the background supporting it somewhere, right? Not that it's like directly supported by research or something, but that it's science-backed. It's science-ish. So TTI Success Insights, the company that Erickson seems to have worked with here, says on their website that they offer science-backed talent assessments. The reality of 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? If you look at the type of test that disk is, it's what's generally called an Ipsitive 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.

Right. 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 Dan Katz, a licensed psychologist and psychotherapist, 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. It can be useful to categorize people just for convenience, but you can like very quickly go off track here. 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

a 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. 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 going to mention this. Yeah, those two 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? Right. This is another idea that there's just not a ton of support for.

You can go really deep on this. This traces back to like Jungian archetypes at least. And there have been some studies that tried to like bundle people into categories. Some of those studies claim to have shown some results. There are other studies contesting those results. We don't need to get into this too deep. 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 that 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. These are 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. Boiling 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 Erickson's providing here, a lot of them are just describing the same one or two traits several different ways. Yeah, yeah. It's 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 social. But I like socializing and I'm very social when I'm with other people. I'm just fucking exhausted after like two hours. 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 it. Yeah, yeah, right. Because they're asking you. Right.

How are you? Like, are you social? Are you courageous? Are you organized? And people are not good narrators of their own personalities. And there is some research showing that especially in workplace settings, there are problems with this honesty with these types of assessments, which makes sense. Of course. Obviously, if 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. Right. And so there's just sort of not a lot there. And as I mentioned, Erickson, 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 self-describes as a behaviorist at times in interviews.

He's admitted that he has no relevant degree. Some skeptics of 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. Which is like the fakesest 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, is behaviorist like a specific field? And, like, the answer is like not exactly. Like, it's a subcategory of psych. But like there are groups of people who describe themselves as behaviorists who have no expertise, but they seem to have like, it's like they've just found a word.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I can say that I'm a behaviorist without technically running a foul of any like psychologist because they don't use that exact terminology. Because you're not technically claiming anything. Erickson'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 designed to trick you into thinking that he has

formal expertise. Yeah, it's 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 who said I was a doctor. It's funny to be like, look, I'm an animal expert. And someone's like, but you have no degree in biology. And you're like, right, I would never call myself a biologist. Right. I have pets. I'm just an expert of the, of the body. Most of the rest of the book is just expounding on different elements of the personality types. There's a chapter on body language. He says red lean forward aggressively and have powerful handshakes.

Yellows gesture expressively. Blues speak without gesturing. Sure. One of my favorite lines in the book, he says that blues quote, either sit or stand. I was like, 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. I'm going to send you some of the body language stuff because it's funny.

Sorry. Also, is this one of these books where he kind of like runs out of things to say like halfway through, but he needs to hit his word count? Absolutely. So he's just like have some body language stuff. I mean, a lot of it is sort of like, all right, I've introduced these colors to you, these personality types. And now we're going to talk about like in a little more detail how to identify them

and then deal with them. Okay. And like the body language thing is a good example of just like, well, what else is there? He says a simple handshake can reveal a. a lot about a person. Limp and feeble handshakes often indicate a submissive behavior. So if you have such a handshake, it might be a good idea to press a little harder. If a handshake is firm, it probably suggests that the person is determined. Anyone who squeezes way too hard belongs 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 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 or like a perfectly firm handshake. I mean, I have like met interview candidates and who have incredible, like, who just like put

their hand there and you squeeze it and you're like, ah. Yeah, I've met people like that too. Just like wet, warm fish. You're just like, ugh. Right. You're just like squeezing a limp body part. It's like, I don't, I don't think it says anything either, but it does feel like one of those things where it's like, please just follow the social norms. Well, 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 immediately were like, actually, this is how I judge people. Well, no, it's 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? Like, what is going on?

I like this part too. A 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 sighs indignantly when he's been accused of lying. Would 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. Do people do that? They're like, who, me? fucking FBI over here. This is like how cops think about this shit, right? Also, yeah, who has ever done this? Would I lie? How can you say that about me?

That's not me doing like animated movies to like exaggerate everybody's body language. I feel like that's what was, he was watching a movie from like 1961, right, where someone did this and he was like, that person's lying. I know it. Gee, Willickers, I would never lie. Again, we don't need to go through the rest of the book piecemeal. It's the same sort of thing over and over again, right? and I promise that 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 yellows and here's what went down. Like it's just like, just give me a fucking break. Oprah Winfrey and Hans Solo were there. It was crazy. People talk about the reading crisis in America, but there's also a 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 top? I bet you'd be flying. Charge 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 bookie. 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. Which we've seen so many times. Oh, yes. So he says like, Hippocrates viewed the human body as a balance of four humors. The Aztecs viewed people as embodied by a spectrum of fire, water, earth, air. And he's like, does that sound familiar? Like 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 deep roots in our intellectual tradition. And this framework is just building on that. By the way, he starts off 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 Hippocrates and you read about the Aztex and that's how you got here. Because early in the book, you were like, oh, this comes from TTI success insights in Scotts, Arizona. And then the last chapter is like interviews with a couple of business leaders about it. Hell yeah. Oh, that's good. There's the CEO of a private equity company. And she says, now my staff

know that I'm not an evil despot, just red. That's also the dark side of personality test, though, too. It's like, objectively toxic behavior can then be recast. It's like, oh, 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. And therefore she does not employ them anymore. By the way, that was the Jesus color. Yeah. 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 psychopats are really task-oriented rather than relationship-oriented. I think that's a lot. 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. In 2024, he puts out surrounded by liars. So there's like an initial six-year period where he's just coasting off this book. And then he just churns out.

When was a chat GPT 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 that it was the same thing over and over again, but perhaps he just wants to emphasize these ideas. Yep. 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 as like a cultural phenomenon. 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 had 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? The military, even less sensitive to trauma than you were in our body. I'm right, I'm right, I'm right.

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 an emotionally 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 is meant to measure neuroticism. Oh, yeah.

Sample questions from this assessment. Do you usually feel well and strong? 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.

I was getting track. Do you have trouble walking in the dark is fucking hilarious? It's 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? I know. And also that, like, feeling of falling when you're about to go to sleep is literally a universal human thing.

Yeah, that's super normal. I love that like a 1918 colonel or whatever was like, you ever feel like you're falling when going asleep? That's because you're a coward. Yeah. And also have you ever just hurt your dick by jacking so furiously? That's also universal. There's hypnotic jerks and there's injurious jerks. Everybody knows this. Another 40 years before television's 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 maker's intuition about what a neurotic person would answer. Right. There's a book about the history of personality tests from about 20 years ago by Annie Murphy Paul, who's a journalist. It's called The Cult of Personality. Send you a little bit from that.

She says, Robert Bern-Royter was a Pennsylvania State University psychologist who designed one of the era's most popular tests, the Bern-Royder personality inventory. In it, he posed the question, are you critical of others? Surmising that a positive response suggested psychosocial difficulties. Come on. As it turned out, more than two-thirds of normal people taking the test answered yes. A reply given much less frequently by neurotics and psychotics. Likewise, the query, do you daydream frequently?

Assumed by Bern-Royter to be a sign of psychological instability was endorsed more often by healthy individuals than by the mentally ill. Are you critical of others as just a test of whether you're a liar? Yeah, and so these guys, were sort of just spitballing it. What do I think a neurotic person is? And they're getting it wrong very frequently. Right.

There was this guy, Elton Mayo, an Australian psychologist. And in 1926, he's hired to head up industrial research at Harvard Business School. And he becomes a pioneer in workplace psychology. He is primarily concerned with the impact of worker 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 maladjusted workers could cause problems by lowering work morale, fomenting 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 in the early 30s when you get like major pieces of labor legislation. Right. 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 multidimensional 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 multifacic personality inventory. You had the Hum Wadsworth. scale, which measured personality along like multiple dimensions, including hysteroid, manic, depressive, autistic, paranoid, epileptoid. Comey, Pinko. The folks could kill listener 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, they 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 2 million people across 225 companies. And apparently an article about the test inspires Isabel Briggs. Aha.

To start up with Myers-Briggs. 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 Urban says, quote, clearly the government. should not send out an investigator to peer through an employees or an applicant's bedroom window. Right. Neither should the government ask through subtle psychological questioning what a person does and thinks after he draws the curtains. That's always the issue with these things 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 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 hum wadsworthing is none of your business.

Hold on. Okay, maybe it doesn't work. I'm trying to she hums on my wad until I work. I hum on my own wad. Then it works. Then it works. Unease about the increasingly prevalent use of personality tests like the MMPI had been growing for more than a decade. In 1956's The Organization Man, William White,

sounded a warning about the stifling conformity such tests imposed on American executives. More explicit critiques with titles like The Brain Watchers and the tyranny of testing appeared in the early 1960s. Newspapers and magazines ran investigative exposés 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 purpose of the test. Right. So Senator Urban introduces legislation to forbid the use of personality assessments in government. there are congressional hearings. There's a big public PR fight that takes 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, which results in the EEOC and courts suggesting that these tests might functionally discriminate based on race or gender or whatever else. Right. Many companies run by pretty expressed racists were just using personality and aptitude test to come up with an excuse to discriminate against black applicants after the Civil Rights Act passes. In the early 1970s, there's a Supreme Court case Griggs v. 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 changed 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 the 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 in 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? 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 very 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 tests, which are a combination of the MMPI and another test. They were trying to screen for turnover risk and competence, but I'm going to send you some of the questions which you're meant to answer with a yes or no. What? Okay. Mm-hmm.

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 test, were. And so they're pulling from these old personality tests that have this sort of shit in them. This gets settled 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. Annie 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 had been scheduled to participate in a budgeting workshop, but company leaders instead announced an 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. I'm going to send you 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 in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the managers might well have felt that they had slipped down the rabbit hole. The test, of course, was the MMPI. Things only got worse when the test results were returned. Renton 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 included 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. Yeah, it's basically like a surveillance state where they're looking at your internal frame of mind. I have diarrhea once a month or more is fucking, like, 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 was really hard for me. But everything tastes the same. I know. There's something so funny about it to me where, like, in the middle of it, it's sort of like they're asking these personal questions. And then they just, like, insert everything tastes the same, which I would imagine is the sign of, like, some kind of severe chemical imbalance. Right. Like a physiological issue that you're having. Yeah.

Also, my mother was a good woman. I mean, maybe your mom was trash. Yeah, why not? Some moms have bad vibes. That case gets settled too. A lot of companies are basically taking these personality tests and modifying the questions to determine how likely people are to follow rules or be on time to work, how friendly they'll be to coworkers, 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.

Hell yeah. And pornography and obscenity have become serious problems and must be curbed. Anyone who failed it was deemed chemically dependent. Oh, my God. And I had to enter a six-month rehab program if they wanted to receive benefits. No way. It turned out that the test was classifying 45. percent of all applicants as chemically dependent.

Not even based on question of like how often do you use drugs, just like other random ass questions. Right. Like what was your mom like? And it's like you're on crack. 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? Because that would mean that they could give you really bad tasting food. It wouldn't matter to you. Yeah. That's the only reason it's on there.

They're like the food here. sucks. So in the 2000s and 2010s, you see even more legal attention starting 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 the complaint against CVS in 2009. CVS had a questionnaire in 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 from day to day. Oh. The ACLU pointed out this could function as discrimination against people with certain mental health conditions, right, or anxiety. Also, just like everyone's mood changes.

I mean, so many of these questions are 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? Seven out of seven, baby. 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 inoffensive 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 sort of version that you see 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, I'm assuming. Yeah. So disc is meant to like aid managers in managing employees, right? It's like everyone is different.

Here's how you manage this type. 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 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? Have you ever jacked it so hard at that? The lingering question in my mind is why. Why are companies doing this? Yeah, 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 coworkers is going to be our, So first, there's been some New York 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's 2017 survey of its members said they used personality test to fill executive roles. At McKinsey and

company, some consultants do due 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. Because you're like, if 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, they're using it for the same purposes as when they ask, like, are you a commie or whatever on the questions? Here's another bit from the times.

Often the tests 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, orderly sales quotas, but at least among teammates, it can be a conversation starter. Yeah, I mean, it's typically our defense of these things. It's like, it's an opening of a conversation. You can talk about how people are different. It's pseudoscience as team building. It's like, like, here's something for you guys to talk about, right? 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'd get a little bit of insight into 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 organizations about this, right? Well, how much efficacy does like trust falls have? Or these like, you know, these like days out that they'll do with your colleagues where like you all go bowling together or 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-ass personality assessment. 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, and 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, when's the 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 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 objective criteria of any type will make them more diverse. If your number of black hires

is at 1% then just like, yeah, any change to your process is probably going to improve that. You get up to like 2% or 3% you're like, we triple the diversity of the company.

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 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. You're a 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 a reason to be toxic to each other or like, 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. Yeah.

This is another bit. This is Emma Goldberg from a Times piece in 2019. Personality assessments short-circuit the messiness of building what is 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 hocus-pocus systems do, because it's fun to divide people into categories. They tap into the angst of the where-are-all-sitting meme, the hunger to know where you belong in the lunchtime cafeteria scene.

I think this is right. This is like half cynical. Yeah. This is a way to create culture. Yeah. But it's sort of a cheap, weird, pseudo-scientific way to create culture. But what I can't stop coming 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, yeah, 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, yeah. And I think they buy it. I think they fundamentally are like, ooh, 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 all bullshit,

but this is a good way to get these people interacting and talking about their workstiles 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 in 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 of most companies, right, deciding, oh, we're going to bring this guy,

this guy in. It's like some department that is put in charge of like workplace culture and events. Exactly. And they have a massive budget. And they're like, well, what are we going to do? with it and 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

that 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 what you get people doing as long as you get them a little. 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 about 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 in the actual workplace but i feel like that's what stupid managers think and they're like we're going to find secret leaders like i can't remember if i told this story on 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, when was the last time I felt alone? Why the fuck you asking me this? Yeah. Folks, let's all team up against this company that's doing this to us. But it's just like, kind of like the handshake thing. They're almost a measurement of like, how well do you fit into a corporate environment? Like you just need to come up with something quippy. if I got the horrific alone question, I would just come up with some dumb quip to move on.

I wouldn't like, 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. The day of my mother's death. Yeah. I wouldn't, 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 fun. God, that would be fun. Just ruin the tone of the entire rest of the day. I guess it was probably when I had diarrhea three times in a day

and then jacked myself so hard that I was injured. The third time I injured myself masturbating.