In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes: This Unpleasant Personality Trait May Earn You More Money This Is Why You Should Sleep in a Cold Bedroom Giant Sloths Once Ruled the Americas
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following stories to help you learn something new in just a few minutes:
Full episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/money-earning-personality-traits-why-you-should-sleep-in-a-cold-bedroom-and-giant-sloths
CODY GOUGH: Hi. We've got three stories from Curiosity.com, to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today, you'll learn about the unpleasant personality trait that may earn you more money. Why you should sleep in a cold bedroom. And all about giant sloths that once ruled the Americas.
CODY GOUGH: Let's satisfy some Curiosity.
ASHLEY HAMER: Cody, have you ever heard the phrase, nice guys finish last?
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. I don't know if I believe it necessarily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Well, new research is saying that it's true.
CODY GOUGH: Uh-oh.
ASHLEY HAMER: At least when it comes to the professional success of well educated men over 40. In a new study, University of Copenhagen economist Miriam Gensowski analyzed data from the Terman study, which is a massive psychology study that started in 1922.
CODY GOUGH: Wow.
ASHLEY HAMER: The study followed more than 1,000 Californians who had super high IQs of more than 140, from the ages of 18 to 75. Gensowski couldn't draw conclusions about how personality may affect women's careers, since the data was from a time when not many women worked outside the home. But for men, the results were clear. Three personality traits are linked with higher earnings.
CODY GOUGH: All right. What do I have to do?
ASHLEY HAMER: OK, Cody. The first aren't really surprising. Being conscientious or being hardworking and dependable. And being extroverted. Makes sense.
CODY GOUGH: Cool.
ASHLEY HAMER: But the third trait is, that the less agreeable or nice a man was, the more he earned. Especially later in his career when he was likely to be pursuing leadership roles. Men in the top 20% of agreeableness earned about $270,000 less over a lifetime than the average man. And the effect was especially large for highly educated men with graduate degrees. So why is this?
Well, we don't really know. But in his 2013 book, Habits of Leadership, psychologist Art Markman suggested that employees appreciate a boss who can give frank feedback. And agreeable people may have a hard time providing criticism. So maybe give frank feedback and don't be a total jerk.
CODY GOUGH: I will try that method.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. I think maybe there's a happy medium here. Where, you don't have to be a jerk to everybody, but also be assertive and speak your mind.
CODY GOUGH: I can do that. All right, Ashley. How much attention do you pay to the temperature when you go to sleep?
ASHLEY HAMER: Not a lot. I keep my apartment the same temperature all the time. I think.
CODY GOUGH: Really? You don't make it colder when you sleep?
ASHLEY HAMER: No, I don't.
CODY GOUGH: I totally do. So that I can cover myself with blankets.
ASHLEY HAMER: That is a very cozy feeling for sure.
CODY GOUGH: It is. And research shows, that sleeping in a cold room could help boost your metabolism and make you burn more calories even during the day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. And it's because of fat. So quick refresher on fat, [LAUGHS] all you non-fat enthusiasts out there, when you were a baby, you had two types of fat. There's white fat, and that stores calories. And that's pretty much all it does actually. And then there's brown fat, and that's what you would call metabolically active. That burns calories to generate heat. Now, brown fat is what warms up babies since they don't have the ability to shiver yet. And once you get older and your body figures out how to shiver and do other stuff to regulate your body temperature, you lose most of your brown fat.
So back to the sleep angle of this. A recent study published in the Journal of Diabetes, suggested that you might be able to boost your body's levels of brown fat by sleeping in a chilly environment. The researchers collected data on men sleeping in climate controlled rooms and varied the temperature. An average room is about 75 degrees Fahrenheit or 24 degrees Celsius, and a cold room was 66 degrees Fahrenheit or 19 degrees Celsius.
And after just one month of sleeping in the cold, the men had almost doubled their stores of brown fat, which helped improve their insulin sensitivity. And they even burned more calories during the day.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow.
CODY GOUGH: Yes. But the effects were totally undone after just a month of sleeping in a normal temperature again. So keep the thermostat turned down.
ASHLEY HAMER: Wow. Good news for sleeping in winter, I guess.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah. Saving on your heat bill.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. Not so much for summer.
CODY GOUGH: I set my overnight thermostat for 68.
ASHLEY HAMER: Oh, that's pretty good.
CODY GOUGH: So, yeah. I mean, during the winter. During the summer, I don't want to spend all my money--
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
CODY GOUGH: Freezing myself.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right.
CODY GOUGH: But it's totally worth it.
ASHLEY HAMER: OK, Cody. When you think of a sloth, what do you imagine?
CODY GOUGH: As something that my old co-workers used to be obsessed with. I have so many friends--
ASHLEY HAMER: I'm a little obsessed with them too.
CODY GOUGH: Are you into it too?
ASHLEY HAMER: The baby sloth is the cutest animal there is, pretty much. I know many people who would agree with you. They look like little aliens, little ewoks. It's adorable.
CODY GOUGH: That's what I picture as Instagram, people's Instagram.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah, totally. Well, I bet you never think of a towering giant with enormous claws that was big enough to feed an entire prehistoric family.
CODY GOUGH: No. That sounds more like a tyrannosaurus rex.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It's like a monster. Well, just last month, paleontologists published definitive proof that humans hunted giant sloths.
CODY GOUGH: What.
ASHLEY HAMER: And there are footprints that prove it. You can see pictures on Curiosity.com. But 10 human footprints were found embedded in the sloths, oriented the same way and placed so far apart, that the person would have had to be moving pretty awkwardly. That suggests that the person was deliberately attempting to hide their tracks. Scientists have thought for a long time that humans played a role in driving the ground sloth to extinction.
And before they found these footprints, sloth bones with marks possibly indicating human tools had been dated to 30,000 years ago. Today, there are only six surviving species of sloth. But the ground sloths of the past were a lot more diverse and a lot more widespread. They covered two continents from Tierra del Fuego at the very tip of Argentina, to the northernmost reaches of Alaska. And they came in all shapes and sizes.
Some were subterranean. Some adapted to an aquatic lifestyle. And some, like megatherium, were literally the size of an elephant. Megatherium might have been a predator, with massive arms and claws that might have been more suited for stabbing and slashing, than grasping heavy branches. We do know that these sloths ate plants, but cows, deer, and other herbivores, have been observed scavenging bodies. So a little meat eating wouldn't be unheard of.
Or the claws might have been used to defend their territory against other sloths. We might not know about the claws, but one thing we do know is that the sloths evolve very quickly. Some lineages were found to have gained an average of 220 pounds every million years. And that's some of the fastest rates of change in the entire animal kingdom. Not everything they do is slow.
CODY GOUGH: That is some fun trivia for the next time your coworker or friend goes off on a sloth rant.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. When someone shows you a baby sloth, then just Google megatherium and you will have a conversation.
CODY GOUGH: Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
A conversation. You can read about all of these stories and so much more on Curiosity.com, or on the Curiosity app for Android or iOS.
ASHLEY HAMER: Join us again tomorrow for the Curiosity Daily, and learn something new in just a few minutes. I'm Ashley Hamer.
CODY GOUGH: And I'm Cody Gough.
ASHLEY HAMER: Stay curious.
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SPEAKER 1: On the Westwood One Podcast Network.