Paul Scheer

If they're introverted, they're going to stay introverted and so on. It may be more difficult, but I think change is possible at any point in the lifespan.

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Studies of why people turn out differently, which is one of the big and most exciting areas of psychology where it connects with behavioral genetics and other fields, find that there's really the two big factors that shape our personalities. One is genetics, and in which case you and your genetic sibling, a child and his genetic sibling would have the same 50% of the same genes.

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A child and his adopted sibling would have none of the same genes in particular. So that's one of the genes. Say that counts for 50%. So you might think the other 50%, that must come from parenting. But it appears not. It appears that a lot of the other 50% comes from experiences, life experiences. You get bullied in school. You fall in love. You win a prize.

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You try something and you're really good at it. You know, these life experiences that different kids in the same family experience pull their personalities apart. As you can have identical twins, right, raised in the same family.

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Same, there's no first born, there's no second born, they share 100% of the genes, they have the same parents, same family environment, yet their lives will pull them in different ways and they can end up quite different in all sorts of interesting ways.

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The more genes you share, the more likely you are to be similar. And so identical twins are on average going to be a lot more similar than any two siblings who aren't twins, and certainly than any two strangers. But the very fact that they don't come out exactly the same. I know twins where one's very liberal and one's very conservative, for instance. And I think that's interesting.

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That shows that factors of life can shape you in different ways.

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How Your Mind Changes Over Time & The Upside of Uncertainty - SYSK Choice

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I think for all of this. Let's focus on the good side. On Einstein's. Put the Dahmer's aside for a bit. Part of his genetic gifts. So everyone's noticed for a long time. These things run in families. These families of geniuses. even if they're raised very differently, certain genius abilities, mathematical abilities, say, or musical abilities crop up. They get a very lucky throw of the genes.

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But that can't be enough because you need the opportunity, right, to have the genes flourish. I bet there's a thousand Einsteins raised in parts of Africa and parts of Asia where they never get a mathematical education. They never learn physics. Nobody supports them. They don't go to school. They're not nurtured.

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For a long time, roughly half the world, women, whatever abilities they have would not be given environments to flourish. And so you need both, right? You need the genetic gifts. Without the genetic gifts, you're not going to be an Einstein. But without the environment, you're not going to be it either. You know, take your favorite athlete.

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You could have somebody born with exactly the same skills of that athlete, but if they never meet a coach and never see the inside of a gym, they're just gonna die and I've never known.

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How Your Mind Changes Over Time & The Upside of Uncertainty - SYSK Choice

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You know, there's a story going around. Everyone knows about post-traumatic stress disorder, when trauma damages you. But there's a story going around about what sometimes people call post-traumatic growth, where they argue that certain sorts of trauma, you come out of it on the other side better than you were. And I've always been very skeptical about that.

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And it turns out that when the big studies are done, it turns out not to be true. Trauma is very rarely good for you. And so again, more common sense advice from a psychologist, try to avoid bad things from happening to you. So you're not going to get tremendous benefits from trauma. But now here's the good news. The good news is we are far more resilient than we thought we were.

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The typical effects of even the very worst experiences are they mess you up for a while and then you get over them and you're back to normal. Post-traumatic stress disorder, psychological harm and so on are the exceptions and not the rule.

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Total nonsense. Wishful thinking. Wishful thinking, which by the way can lead, I think is often cruel. Someone whose child dies and you say, well, you're going to come at it as a better person. You know, stronger, wiser. Who would say that? How could you say that?

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Well, I know people who believe it. And there was an article in the New York Times recently that somebody said, I went through some terrible trauma, yet I don't seem to be a better person. What's wrong with me? And I wanted to scream, no, you're not supposed to be a better person. Something bad happened to you. Work to recover. And again, the good news is we're good at recovering.

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But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I guess one of Nietzsche's aphorisms has to be the dumbest thing a philosopher has ever said.

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Oh, we are often deluding ourselves. People's perception of how others see them is often deeply distorted. And sometimes it's distorted in that people, psychologically healthy people, often see themselves as better than other people see them. People overrate their own intelligence, their own attractiveness, their own sense of humor, their own kindness.

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It's sort of a psych 101 finding, the better than average effect. But there's another way in which we get things wrong, which I always found very reassuring to hear, and it's called the spotlight effect. The spotlight effect, it's right in the title, where the spotlight effect is we each feel as if we're more the focus of attention of other people than we really are.

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So the experiments often get people to put on a funny t-shirt and walk into a room and then later ask people, how many people noticed you? Oh, everybody noticed me. No one talking about me. But what we miss is that people, everyone else isn't focused on you. Everyone else is focused on themselves. We're all focused on ourselves.

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How Your Mind Changes Over Time & The Upside of Uncertainty - SYSK Choice

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And it's kind of good to know that what you do and how you act matters a lot less to other people than you think it does. People's big regrets in life later on when they're asked are, tell me what they don't do. They didn't talk to this person. They didn't make this decision. And then when you ask them, why didn't you do it? They said, I didn't want to look foolish.

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What you find is as people age, their personalities on average get a little bit better. They become less belligerent, more understanding, more agreeable. They're more conscientious. You can trust them more. We seem to kind of mellow out maybe once we pass 30 or 40.

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And, you know, nobody wants to look foolish, but it is a bit liberating to realize that people don't notice us as much as we worry they do.

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I'll tell you two obvious things, then I'll tell you two less obvious things. Money makes people happy. For a long time, psychologists were saying the opposite. And of course, I don't mean everybody who has money is happy and everybody who's poor is unhappy, but there's a definite relationship in how much money you make and how happy you are, both for individuals and also within countries.

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So richer countries have happier citizens than poorer countries. And Like I say, that's kind of obvious. Money buys things like health care and luxuries and freedom and protection from various harms, lets you pay for luxuries, lets you travel, lets you take time off work. That's obvious fact number one. Obvious fact number two is the tremendous value of social connections.

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I mean, your grandmother could have told you this, but it's good to have friends. It's good to have families. We have people who love and respect you. Yes, there are happy loners, but on average, being alone is not good for your soul. So that's some obvious things. I'll tell you two non-obvious ones that you may not have known. One is happiness changes in the lifespan, and

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I'll ask you again, let's see, maybe you'll, you'll prove me wrong. When are people the happiest in their lives? I would think in childhood. It's a good guess. And they are not unhappy in childhood. They get, they're, they're pretty happy as children. Childhood depression is, is rare, but that's not the answer. People are happiest on average in their seventies and their eighties.

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In fact, what, uh, what happiness shows if you graph it over time is a perfect you. where you start off pretty happy, you've got childhood, you dip, dip, dip, until you're about your mid-50s. And honestly, for a lot of people, that's the worst time of their lives.

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And then it creeps back up again until when you get to your 70s and 80s, until the very last period when maybe bad health really takes over. You are typically happier when you were an adolescent, happier than as a child, happier than in midlife. And this finding's been replicated all around the world.

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It brings us back to memory. Where if I think about my childhood, sometimes I just dredge up some happy pictures, happy events, and forget about all of the times where I was miserable. And if you have young kids, young kids are very sad a lot of the time. They're bored, they're lonely.

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You wouldn't think old age is the time for happiness because your health is declining, your power is declining, maybe your social status is declining. But the mindset changes. Your personality shifts in various ways. you're less neurotic, you're more conscientious, and you could become satisfied and attain a sort of wisdom.

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And I think a lot of talk of wisdom is often nonsense, but the happiness data is just clear. People who are much older will tell you that they're much happier.

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Honestly, you would think that. And certainly, no matter how old you are, death, you know, if your life is going well, is an ugly and horrible prospect. And there's a certain point, it's not that they welcome it, but there's an acquaintance to it, at least to a point where it doesn't interfere with their happiness.

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The second mystery of happiness is a genuine mystery, and it goes back to what we don't know, which is there's a lot of debate over whether having children makes you happy. Some initial studies found it doesn't. Some later studies find that in some countries, parents are happier than non-parents. There's a difference between men and women, mothers and fathers. But the data is complicated.

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I've written about this before. And the response I get by parents is often like, yeah, it's complicated.

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I think that's exactly right. And I actually think that asking about happiness is sometimes the wrong question. We want to maximize different things in our lives. We want to be happy, like a pleasure, but we also want to be good and we want to live meaningful lives. And I think that, Having children is an extraordinarily, for many of us, deep and meaningful and important decision.

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It means a lot, it matters a lot. My children are now off in the world, but I define myself as a parent. And that's different from saying, oh, it made me happy. Like a hot foot Sunday would make me happy.

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do good for the world and feel compelled to and feel rewarded by doing that and other people take the other path there's even the broader question before that which is why do we do good at all why is an animal that evolved through natural selection capable of kindness and love and caring not just to its kin because there's evolution explanation why you take care of your kin

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But to friends, to strangers, we care a lot about things like natural disasters across the world. We give money to save people we had never met. I think that's extraordinary and beautiful. And studying moral psychology is my day job as a researcher. And I find it extremely interesting and really important. But your question about differences also weighs heavily.

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And I guess you have to say two things about that. One is there's natural variation in every aspect of a person, every physical aspect. We're taller or shorter. We burn in the sun or we don't. Our knees ache when we walk or they don't. There's all these variations. And the same holds true once you go above the neck. Some of us are extroverted, others aren't. Some of us are timid. Some are fearful.

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Some like to joke around, others more serious. And the variation extends through morality. Some people are more aggressive than other people. Some people care more, are more sympathetic, are more empathetic. And there's natural variance you see. Some of it's that genetic that you will see even in a kid. Some two-year-olds are not all the same when it comes to how they treat others.

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So that's part of it. The other part is I think we're too quick to see the behavior of others that we see as evil. I don't know, take an example from a while ago, the bombing of the Twin Towers on 9-11. We see this as evil, I think correctly so. But what we forget is that the perpetrators don't see themselves as evil. The perpetrators often see themselves as good.

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And some of the very terrible acts in our lives are done not through a sort of psychopathy or some perverse desire for evil, but instead through a genuine desire to do good just in a different way.

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It's an interesting question. Um, a lot of my research involves, I said, I studied moral psychology, often studying children. So there's a profound difference between a five year old and a 10 year old. and a 10-year-old and a 15-year-old.

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And this is in part could be explained because the brain's a physical organ and grows and ages and atrophies, just like our knees and our bellies and our spines do. And it could be part explained in terms of experience. As you get more and more experience, you change. But we know even in adulthood there are profound changes. Some of them are bad. Your mental speed gets slower after a certain point.

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You might know a lot, you might have what they call crystallized intelligence, but you're just not as quick. The quickness fades. That's one part of it. On the positive side, there's been these studies, not just in America, but of dozens of different countries, finding regular personality changes in aging. And what you find is as people age, their personalities on average get a little bit better.

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They become less belligerent, more understanding, more agreeable. They're more conscientious. You could trust them more. They're less neurotic about things. We seem to kind of, to some extent, mellow out maybe once we pass 30 or 40. Oh, thank God.

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It's sort of in between. There's some truth to the fact that Both events and interventions that happen early are more powerful, have more in effect than those that happen later in life. Something as simple as brain damage, the brain recovers from it quicker if you're two years old than if you're 22 years old.

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Some capacities, like learning a language and some social skills, are best learned early in life. The brain seems to shut down a bit, maybe after adolescence or after 18. But the story's been so oversold. So in a strong way, you're putting it, no, it's not true. It's not true. Oh, once somebody's four, you can't do anything with them. Once somebody's eight, they're a goner.

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The Secrets to Being a Successful Adult & Building Your Own Mental Fitness

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We're talking Parasite to Home Alone. From Grease to the Dark Knight.

Something You Should Know

The Secrets to Being a Successful Adult & Building Your Own Mental Fitness

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know

The Secrets to Being a Successful Adult & Building Your Own Mental Fitness

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

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The Amazing Things Your Heart Does & The Power You Have to Change Lives

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

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The Amazing Things Your Heart Does & The Power You Have to Change Lives

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From Grease to the Dark Knight.

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

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No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada.

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Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

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Alone Together: The Decline of Social Interaction & Is the Future in Nuclear?

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From Grease to the Dark Knight.

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

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A Paradox That Makes You Miserable & How We Amplify Our Own Stress

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You got this. No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada.

Something You Should Know

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

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Fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them.

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From Grease to the Dark Knight.

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

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The Startling Impact of Peer Pressure & Why Shyness Can Be a Plus

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

Something You Should Know

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From Greece to the Dark Knight.

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

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How to Create Real Wealth & The Ways Technology Ruins Relationships

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

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Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

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It is.

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Fan favorites, must-sees, and in case you missed them.

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From Grease to the Dark Knight.

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And we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of like Ganja and Hess.

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

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Something You Should Know

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Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know

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And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

Appearances

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