Hello and welcome to Money Talks.

I'm your host, Elizabeth Spires, and today I'm joined by Dr. Leon Tenbrink.

Dr. Tenbrink, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about your new book?

Sure.

I am an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia.

My background is in studying deception, dominance, and dark personalities.

And my new book, Poisonous People, is on that latter topic.

So it's about dark personality traits, how we can detect them and how we can

manage interactions with them, perhaps when we can't leave. And I hope to actually have a pretty

optimistic perspective in my book. This topic can get pretty dark. But I think I tried to

illustrate how these are a small number of people, and if we have tools to manage them,

we can really improve the lives and the productivity of ourselves and the people around us.

We wouldn't normally do a very prescriptive book on our podcast, but what fascinated me was

your background in studying this in a business context.

Your postdoc thesis, I believe, was about

hedgeman managers and whether psychopaths generate better returns. I have kind of a varied

background. You know, I started studying these personality traits in a forensic population,

so people who were incarcerated. After a few years of studying deceptive murderers, that was my PhD dissertation.

I was like, this is a real bummer. You know, I still loved the topic, but I wanted to go somewhere

else with it. And it was around this time when I started to think about, like, there must be

some situations where these personality traits are beneficial or

helpful. And so I thought, oh, maybe if I go to a business school, I can study instances in which

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