EPISODE 022: THE SCIENCE OF HANDWRITING

DRINK INFORMATION

Every episode we drink a different libation – so what are we drinking this episode?

Tom’s Drink – Adictivo Tequila

– A surprisingly delicious (delicioso?) tequila from Mexico that is great for sipping.

Ian’s Drink – 14-year Tomatin

– Really smooth 14-year Scotch Whiskey. A very mild barley flavor.

*Visit our “Tasting Room“

TRANSCRIPT:

Ian R
Welcome back to Drinking With Tom everyone, after a short little hiatus for a couple of weeks while Tom did volunteer work, darn you, Tom, you and your giving spirit, gosh.

Tom Kubiak
Stinkin volunteering, can’t stand it. I don’t know why people do it. But I missed, I missed our Drinking With Tom episodes.

Ian R
I know. That’s okay. Every, every series has to have a couple, couple weeks off, but we had people desperate for your sultry voice and the sounds of you sniffing your liquor.

Tom Kubiak
I know that’s, that’s what I missed the most actually, because I didn’t have an opportunity to sniff liquor a lot while I was volunteering.

Ian R
Yeah, there’s not a whole lot of liquor sniffing when you’re volunteering, helping people, you know.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, that’s true.

Ian R
But we’re glad to have you.

Tom Kubiak
But anyway, how have you been doing?

Ian R
Doing good. We’re glad to have you back.

Tom Kubiak
Good.

Ian R
Glad to be doing another episode. And this episode was really interesting. I think, it’s handwriting.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, actually, this subject came up in a discussion while I was volunteering over the past couple of weeks with a good friend of mine. And we spoke about, hey, the need to talk about handwriting analysis. So I said, I think I’ll add that to the list of the subjects that we’re going to discuss on the podcast.

Ian R
Yeah. And it’s really interesting research. But before we get into that, I’d love to know what you’re drinking. But let me ask you, how many bottles of liquor have you opened since we started our podcast?

Tom Kubiak
That’s a good question. So I have a pretty as you know, a pretty good collection. And a lot of them I’ve either bought or received as gifts and never opened. So what I’ve been doing over the past, you know, times for the podcast is trying something new. I have worked in a couple of things that I do drink from time to time, but I’ve been working on trying to open bottles that I’ve never tasted before, to be able to get an option to try things that are new. So that’s what I’m doing tonight. So as you know, I’m a Scotch drinker. But tonight, I’m drinking tequila.

Ian R
Ooo, nice. You know, I should have brought out my tequila. Yeah, I have something here. But I actually bought a bottle of tequila for the show. But tell me about your tequila.

Tom Kubiak
So again, a friend of mine sent me a beautiful gift. It’s Adictivo Tequila from Mexico, Anejo, and I’m not a tequila drinker at all. So I’m probably mispronouncing everything. But it’s it’s a beautiful bottle. And I’m really looking forward to trying it. You know, I think it’s an aged tequila from what I understand. And I think it’s two years, I’d looked up online a little bit about it. And again, I need to spend more time to learn about tequila. But I know there’s a couple of different types of tequila. And a lot of it is dependent upon how long it’s it’s aged for. But this has a beautiful aroma, sugar, and fruit and caramel, similar to what you would get in a scotch.

Ian R
That’s what you like though, you like the caramel taste don’t ya?

Tom Kubiak
I love it. Yeah. And it seems to be thick in the glass. It’s got a beautiful golden color.

Ian R
Oh, he’s taking a sip.

Tom Kubiak
And it’s sweet. And caramely. And it is really good. I like it. Yeah, yeah. You know, I was reading an article about tequila, how a few you know, relatively recently, maybe within the past couple of decades, tequila was a bottom end spirit. Okay, oftentimes was a mixture of distillate and sugar water. And it was the type of thing where, you know, we, I think all of us have, if you’ve ever had tequila, you lick some salt you you drink tequila, and then you suck on a lime to get the taste out of your mouth. But this is not that at all. This is a beautiful spirit. Like very, very good. Easy to drink. Nice. I like that.

Ian R
So it’s funny you say that because I got a couple of bottles of tequila. And I didn’t bring them. But as I said, my same reaction was that. I’m like, wow, this is surprisingly good. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a, like a real tequila. Because you know, it’s like a mixed drink or something that they put it. But yeah.

Tom Kubiak
But it’s not something you would normally choose to sip. But I think there’s a whole market of sippable tequilas that are, you know, premium spirits.

Ian R
Oh, nice.

Tom Kubiak
Okay, I have an 18 and a 12. What are you drinking?

Ian R
So I actually went back to one of our old episodes recently. And if you go to our website drinkingwithtom.com, you can go to the tasting room. And we have some additional information about stuff we drink. And I was looking through and I’m like Tomatin, that’s the one that sounded like tomato. So I went out and I got a Tomatin, a 14 year Tomatin. You have an 18 and 12. Okay, so I’m in between, I’m at a 14. Yeah. Surprisingly good. Almost no pete, almost a little bit of sweetiness. And, did I say sweetiness?

Tom Kubiak
Sweetiness. You did.

Ian R
You know what I mean, sweetness.

Tom Kubiak
I know what you mean.

Ian R
Peatiness and sweetness together make sweetiness. No peatiness, a lot of sweetness. And as it dribbles down my chin. It was, it’s good.

Tom Kubiak
Nice. Yeah.

Ian R
Yeah, no, I like that.

Tom Kubiak
Originally, I got that bottle for the name because it’s Tom, Tomatin. And so I figured it has to be good. And it was pretty good. I liked both the 12 and the 18.

Ian R
Yeah, there was, um, there was a couple of for some reason. I don’t know why it was sitting on a shelf with with a bunch of Japanese whiskies. Yeah. And I don’t know why. Because it’s a Scotch right?

Tom Kubiak
It is scotch. Yeah, it’s definitely scotch.

Ian R
But I was very tempted to buy, maybe that’s why they put it there, tempted to buy one of those Japanese ones. I might go back and get one of those. But yeah, I like it, a 14 year old Tomatin. And I like it. Well, very cool. So nice. We can put our old John Hancock on that, did you hear the segue?

Tom Kubiak
I did. Yeah. That’s a nice segue.

Ian R
So let’s talk about handwriting. We’re not going to talk about just signatures, but from my research. Signatures are a big part of it. But handwriting overall, is, it’s an interesting pseudoscience they call it.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, pseudoscience came up in all the different articles that I read about handwriting analysis, too, you know, and by pseudoscience, I think they mean, you know, it’s not really as scientific as something that’s definitively science. So there’s arguments and and reasonably strong arguments that handwriting analysis is not as reliable as some people might think it should be. And interestingly, I don’t, did you see any crossover between handwriting analysis and the Myers Briggs personality tests?

Ian R
Well I was gonna say, they actually relate handwriting analysis to things like Myers Briggs, where it’s more of a, it’s more subjective because one of the things that they brought out is the it’s called the Barnum Barnum effect, where basically, the Barnum effect is basically your perception of yourself with a combination of just enough vagueness, with just enough specificity, specificity. Specificness.

Tom Kubiak
Say that after you finish your scotch.

Ian R
Yeah, I just got started. But just a combination of that. So I mean, here it says the tendency to interpret vague statements as specifically meaningful is basically the summation of the Barnum effect. Yeah. So you could interpret into something that isn’t there, like somebody could write something out really quick. And you will interpret their handwriting one way, or with the Myers Briggs, well, oh, you’ve answered this question. So you must be like this. And yeah, exactly. But it is kind of pseudoscience, there’s not really anything hard about it.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, but I think you do see, you know, as you’re as I was reading the articles about handwriting analysis, you know, you you look for the people who are doing the analysis, look at specific traits in the, in the handwriting, they look at how you cross your t’s they look at where you dot your i’s, they look at the space between letters. And each one of those things tells you something about each of those, you know about the person based upon the way they do these things. And, and frankly, as I was reading it, I was thinking about my handwriting and what you know what my handwriting would, would reference it. Did the same thing happen to you?

Ian R
Well, yeah, so if you’re listening to this podcast, do the same thing that I did. As I began my research, I signed my name to a little sticky, sticky note. And I wrote a couple things down. And then I began my research because I wanted it unbiased. I didn’t want too much Barnum effect in there. So do that right now, before we go over some of this, write your name down somewhere. If you’re driving, listening to this, don’t do that. Pull over. Think about think about writing your name. But it was interesting the stuff that it came up with based on my handwriting, and I actually want to talk about, there’s people that dedicate their whole life to this. There’s a lady that studies the handwriting of serial killers. Oh, that’s morbid. Well it’s morbid, but it’s interesting, because serial killers tend to be psychopaths. There’s a difference between a sociopath and a psychopath. And that can be a whole different podcast, but they tend to be psychopaths. And she finds that there are consistent markers of psychopaths and I went back and checked all my writing. I’m like, Oh, my goodness. This doesn’t seem like it’s outside the scope of reality, like, like, she found that.

Tom Kubiak
Which are you?

Ian R
I’m okay. It’s okay. You know, bullet dodged. But she found things like multiple corrections, but not for like grammar or spelling issues, but for stylistic issues, like a word didn’t look the way they wanted it. And you know, we’ve all done that are like, okay, that doesn’t look right. I want this to look nice. But they’re like, they’ll they’ll go and they’ll just correct and correct and correct until the style is just right, like an OCD level. They’ll often fill the page. And the spacing between words. And the spacing between letters is almost the same space. Oh, I thought that was a weird one.

Tom Kubiak
That is weird. And she’s seen this consistently in amongst serial killers?

Ian R
I mean, I haven’t talked to her personally. But she was very deliberate in the things that she wrote down in what they look for. What she looks for, I should say, in serial killers. But I thought that was interesting with the spacing of the letters being about the same as the spacing in between words. And they had a cycle..

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, that is interesting.

Ian R
They had a pseudo psychological reason for it something about they, they distinguish things differently. Like, they’re not thinking about how somebody else is going to read this. They’re just worrying about their thoughts on paper and what looks right to them. But again, what if you’re just a doofus, and you write it down wrong?

Tom Kubiak
Well, and that and that’s the thing, I think that makes this into a pseudoscience is that, you know, you, you can pull the handwriting’s sample from a serial killer and draw conclusions about it. But that doesn’t mean that everybody who writes in that style is going to be a serial killer, or has those characteristics. And I thought one of the things that, you know, made me think that as, as I was reading through, my handwriting is atrocious. You know, it’s, it’s messy, and it’s scribbles most of the time. And I always say, you know, the, your level of intelligence is, is directly related to how unintelligible your handwriting is, you know, like doctors, you can never read their handwriting. But I, but I saw in the, in some of the discussions about how the handwriting analysis is done, is that there there is an argument that as writing becomes less clear, it’s an indication of a person drawing back from society and wanting to be more private. And, and I’m like that, that’s not me at all. So I’m wondering about what causes them to feel the way that they do about that analysis.

Ian R
Well, some of the research that I saw about that is, I mean, there’s a level of reasonableness in what they’re saying. But the same reasonableness applies to like me, my, my handwriting is really, really bad. My daughter makes fun of me. But it’s always because I’m in a rush. So there’s a difference between somebody who makes notes that only they can understand. Like, I’ve met some weird people. And they’ll have like these little notes written down. They’re only worried about if they know what they wrote down. They don’t care about anyone else. Same as the psychopath example that I gave you. They’re not worried about the spacing between letters and words, because they don’t care what you know, they’re only worried about themselves knowing.

Tom Kubiak
Good point.

Ian R
But the same thing can happen too, if you just rush through writing a letter, you know?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah. But do you, do you think that any of that, the messiness of writing is related, is it a personality based thing? Or is it related to our transition to digital note taking?

Ian R
There’s a level of both. But I find that young people when they’re actually forced to write by hand actually have decent handwriting. But they don’t write in cursive. That’s like, just like the Davinci Code of handwriting.

Tom Kubiak
Can you write in cursive?

Ian R
I was one of them. I’m a geriatric millennial. I was one of the last people that they actually, taught to write in cursive. And I’m totally against writing in cursive. And everybody who’s listening can send me hate mail. But here’s the thing. Why? My wife is like, but it looks nicer. I’m like, does it? And everybody writes their cursive a little bit differently. So you have to kind of decipher it. I’m like when you print it, a P is a P, and a T is a T, you know, in a cursive situation, you don’t know what they’re writing. And I’m like, there’s apps out there that will convert text into scripts and vice versa. So it’s not like I’m ever going to..

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, I don’t..

Ian R
And then..

Tom Kubiak
I don’t write in cursive at all, I write and I print everything, even formal. I do handwrite letters, because I value the you know the written word. So when I’m, when I’m writing a letter to someone I handwrite it, but I always print.

Ian R
You know, it’s funny, because somebody made the point I was talking about how I’m against, you know, cursive. And they’re like, and I gave all those reasons I just gave you and all that. And they gave me the same reasons you did you know, it looks nice. And then I gave all these reasons why I didn’t want it. And they’re finally like, Well, what happens when all the computers are down, man, when you don’t have a phone to scan that letter, to show you what it says in print, I’m like, okay, then in the mind, this post apocalyptic situation..

Tom Kubiak
When the zombies are knocking at your door.

Ian R
When there’s been a nuclear holocaust, I won’t be able to read my mema’s letter. Not going to be my first situation I’m going to worry about, like, oh, darn it.

Tom Kubiak
I think we’re going to have other problems.

Ian R
Yeah, we’re gonna have other problems.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, but you know, speaking of the difference between cursive and printing, you know, both you and I know, Russian. And that is like a, a perfect example of how difficult cursive is to read because in Russian, and I guess the same is true in English. But we went to school in English. So we we recognize the Russian the English characters in cursive, but in Russian, it was like, unintelligible when someone wrote in script, you know, Cyrillic script, I could not read it at all.

Ian R
Well, and we want to be very specific too because this, you bring up Russian script, which is some of the letters are just completely different. It’s a whole different..

Tom Kubiak
Completely different language.

Ian R
Is he, is he, is he a super organized person? Completely different, which is not, it’s already complicated enough. But when you get into different languages and cultures, their script is different. And when you’re analyzing handwriting, it can, it can be very much specific to your culture and the country that you’re in, your age group, your peer group, but then also even how you write and in just straight text versus cursive, they actually read into, so people who tend to print more tend to have a logical mindset. A mutual friend of ours, he’s like, I never write in cursive, because and he always writes an uppercase. I’ll tell you what, though. And he, if he writes something down for you, you know exactly what he wrote. There’s no mistaking it, there’s no misunderstandings. Yeah, there’s no deviation between the letters or height of anything. And I’m like, wow, it’s like a computer printout. So there’s a measure of that. Yup.

Tom Kubiak
And okay, so there is, so there’s your, you know, argument against the same this pseudoscience is that the person who’s, like engineers is a good example of this, when you see someone who’s an engineer write, you know, something out, that tends to be very precise, you know, specific sizing, very precise, you know, evenly spaced, very neat. So there is an argument for that.

Ian R
Or even just an art, an artist, as I’m sure. I, I’ve often, like seen somebody sign their name, and I’m like, hey, are you an artist? Yeah. How do you know? Like, because your signature looks like somebody put it on a Monet? You know, it’s like, this is pretty.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, when, when it’s coming down to me, like my, my signature changes every time I do it, it’s basically a scribble. But I, I saw an interest. Oh, no, go ahead..

Ian R
No, I want to hear your point first.

Tom Kubiak
Well, I saw an interesting thing in one of the one of the articles that I was reading about, we mentioned about Myers Briggs. And, you know, we did a podcast on Myers Briggs a little while ago, which was really interesting. And, and I thought, you know, I thought pretty, pretty, pretty well captured my personality trait. And I even learned things about my personality, which I agree with based upon it. But interestingly, in this handwriting analysis, there, there have been studies about people who do personality test based on handwriting, and they don’t regularly match the Myers Briggs Personality of the individual. So that kind of tells you that there’s a disconnect, you know, between handwriting, it’s not, it’s not a consistent science, where, when you see traits in handwriting, it’s going to flow over into their personality.

Ian R
No, and that’s, that’s exactly true. It’s not it’s not exact or consistent. Myers Briggs is not either, but it’s way more consistent than handwriting. But interestingly enough, we’re talking about the broader handwriting situation, where it really gets down to the nitty gritty is signatures. So signatures for 1000s of years, whatever your seal was, or whatever, it was something that was relatively unique to you, and people will try to copy it, but oftentimes, they’ll be like, hey, that’s not that’s not exactly right. You know, you tried to forge a check, and they’re like, hang on a second. They’ll bring up the other checks and be like his signature doesn’t line up well. So signatures is where they actually get into it. I remember, you ever watch that show, White Collar?

Tom Kubiak
My wife does, I haven’t though.

Ian R
So I never actually finished the series. But I remember the one episode, it was kind of cool, because it would bring in a little, just a little bit of truth. And then embellish it, they’ll be like flying out of a helicopter, you know, diving into a, whatever, just made for television.

Tom Kubiak
Which happens every day.

Ian R
But he did something, he was forging a check. And he turned it upside down. And the guy with him goes, why’d you do that? He goes, because there’s too much personality to forge someone’s signature. You turn it upside down. And now it’s just a doodle like any other doodle.

Tom Kubiak
Ah, interesting.

Ian R
So I did think it was interesting. And there’s a little bit of truth to that. So for instance, looking at your signature, Tom, it’s messy, which is one of the points here, but does it angle upward, slightly downward or straight across? I think it’s pretty straight, pretty straight across. So that means you’re pretty even keeled. You’re not overly optimistic, but you’re not negative either. And you just kind of take things as they come. I would describe you as that.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, I guess? Pretty much. Yeah, I think I tend to be more optimistic. But yeah, I mean, I’m definitely not negative.

Ian R
Look at your signature, you got to sign without a line, though. You can’t have a line to go by, if you sign on a sticky note.

Tom Kubiak
I’m gonna do it right now.

Ian R
While you write your signature out. Take a ruler afterwards. And you’ll probably note that it goes slightly upward. So mine goes almost straight across with a slight upward turn. So that just means..

Tom Kubiak
Mine’s pretty straight across.

Ian R
Straight across. Okay.

Tom Kubiak
Pretty straight across.

Ian R
So if you have an ascending signature, it means going up towards the end. That means you you know, you’re optimistic. And you know, you basically have a, I mean, you have a good outlook on life, not saying that’s not.. Here, let me read it. A straight signature on a blank piece of paper is a sign of balance and control. I think that’s a better way to..

Tom Kubiak
Okay. That’s..

Ian R
I think there’s a better way to say it.

Tom Kubiak
That’s probably accurate. Yeah.

Ian R
Balance and control, organized and self sufficient, I think those describe you. But now, if you take the pseudo science part of that and say, well, that’s a generalization, the Barnum effect, that doesn’t really apply to the first one, where you’re an overly optimistic person. Or the second one where it descends as you write, negative person, and you can kind of almost see somebody signing when they’re negative. They’re just kind of like, my hands dropping because life is hard. You know, not rocket science. Yeah. Okay.

Tom Kubiak
True. That’s a good point. Yeah. Another thing I was thinking of is, is if you’re done with signatures is handwriting analysis for crime, you know, crime scene, or for identifying criminals, you know. And I think that is a really interesting topic. And I don’t think I wouldn’t, I mean, not that I’m an expert on this. Well, actually, I am, I am an expert for the Dunning Kruger but the, you know, handwriting analysis to catch a criminal is not a, you know, a pseudoscience, it’s, it’s a real thing. Because the reality is, if you write a particular way, you tend to write that way all the time. So when when you’re not paying attention, and not deliberately trying to change your writing, you revert to what your, your basis, your standard is in writing, and that’s identifiable across, you know, written documents.

Ian R
Yeah, and even. And I found that research pretty interesting, too, that even if you’re trying to change your handwriting, like you’re deliberately trying to avoid being caught with a crime, there’s certain things that you have muscle memory, there’s certain things that yeah..

Tom Kubiak
That’s a good description.

Ian R
Your body won’t let you change it. Because if you’re 40 years old, and you’ve written like that, for 35 years, is, something’s gonna not fit. Like, everybody has a weird way of writing things. Like maybe, like, my teacher taught me how to write an I, a cursive I. And to this day, it does not look right. And everybody’s like, why do you write like that? I’m like, I don’t even know how an I would look otherwise. Yeah. So if you tried to force me to write an I different I might be like, oh, I don’t know. How do we do this?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, because your, your hand has done that 5000 times and it’s going to do it that way. You know, unless you’re, you’re purposely choosing to write a different way. But even at that, it’s it’s difficult to do and it doesn’t look right.

Ian R
But that’s why I go back to that example of the signature of White Collar because he had turned it upside down. So now it’s just a doodle.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah. Yeah, it’s not a signature anymore. Good point.

Ian R
But you know, it’s, it’s interesting that I mean, I guess it would have to be like a TV series kind of level crime where people could use that to their advantage, you know?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you if you’re purposely trying to avoid getting caught and well, that’s don’t criminals oftentimes cut letters out of a magazine.

Ian R
That’s just the 80s man, come on.

Tom Kubiak
Every crime I’ve done, I’ve, I’ve cut letters out of magazines, and you know, made my ransom note out of People magazine.

Ian R
Exactly. Meanwhile, your fingerprint is all over every one of those letters.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, exactly. Just emulating the joker.

Ian R
They, they talk about fingerprints in the same light that they talk about handwriting analysis, because, interestingly enough fingerprints, we should do a podcast on that, are a bit of a soft, soft science that they say wouldn’t be allowable in courtrooms if it hadn’t been allowed already years ago, because it doesn’t meet.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, really? I didn’t, I didn’t know.

Ian R
It was very subjective. You have somebody sitting in there going, yeah, it kind of looks like his, like his thumbprint. And a computer kind of finds it close, but they have found many, many errors. It depends on what kind of ink there is, you know, what was the guy doing for work that day before? You know, were his hands sweating? Lots of things. It’s, it’s not an exact science, and neither is the handwriting analysis.

Tom Kubiak
Okay, yeah, handwriting analysis, I can see, the fingerprint I didn’t know. But yeah, I can, I can definitely see that. But you know, that that also brings up an interesting thing is that, and we mentioned it a little bit earlier, too, about how you know, in today’s world, we’ve transitioned away from handwriting. And we are more connected to digital note taking and digital writing. So I would imagine that there are long stretches of time that people go without physically writing anything. Whereas in the past, that might not have been the case, it is true nowadays, although there are some people who still want to be connected to physically writing. So there’s a whole community that uses fountain pens, I personally have a fountain pen, or several fountain pens that I that I like to write with, and that I like to take notes with, because it just makes you feel connected to the document. Yeah, do you, do you keep a physical to do list like the one that that you hand write out? Or do you do do it all on digital?

Ian R
Yeah, I tend to do something similar. Like I, I type and I print, and I don’t even print a whole lot. I only print if I need to bring something with me. And I don’t want to bring my whole device. But I make handwritten notes on the printed documents or electronic documents, because it stands out. So if I need to make a point stand out, I’ll say something like, you know, emphasize this, or here’s the main point. Yeah. And it helps me because my own handwriting speaks to me. All on digital format, I’m a big weirdo. Because in the 90s, when everybody started to get free email from Google, somebody’s like, just email yourself reminders. And I started doing that, and I can’t stop doing it. So my to do list is usually one of my emails that I get all my to do stuff, or I’ll use Google notes or something like that.

Tom Kubiak
Okay, yeah, I use Google Keep to take notes that I want to remember. But, but I’m still a physical paper to do list, I have a stack of five cards that are five by seven inches, and I take notes on them. And you know, one for each day.

Ian R
I do keep sticky notes. And I do run through them pretty, pretty vigorously. Because especially while I’m on the phone or working, I can just very quickly without even looking just write out a quick note. And those sticky notes, you know, are all over my office. I guess it kind of looks like a serial killers office.

Tom Kubiak
Well, your handwriting did point you towards you know, so..

Ian R
No. We’re good I said, we’re good.

Tom Kubiak
I didn’t know if that meant you confirm you’re a psychopath or..

Ian R
No, no, no, we’re clear. I’m not a psychopath. Borderline sociopath, maybe, I don’t know. Well, we’ll have to leave that out there. But you know.. So here’s a, here’s a mid episode quick fact for you.

Tom Kubiak
Borderline. Tell me.

Ian R
A report by the Hungarian Parliamentary Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information says that handwriting analysis without informed consent is a privacy violation.

Tom Kubiak
Oh, that’s interesting.

Ian R
Here’s the thing. So we have some people on one side saying it’s pseudoscience and it means nothing. But yet, like a country like Hungary says, Hey, listen, that’s an invasion of privacy because you can tell too much about a person.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, well, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it means nothing, like I do agree, even with my limited knowledge that it is pseudoscience, that the extent that some people try to go to identify, you know, minut aspects of a person’s personality by how they dot their I’s and cross their T’s, probably is not, you know, realistic, but at the same time, I think there are things you can learn about how someone writes. So, as an example, like you mentioned, you know, when when, you know, someone is an engineer, and they tend to be detail oriented are very, you know, precise, and they and they write, and their letters are all spaced identically in the same size and very consistent in how they write, that’s an indication or a window into their personality. But, you know, because they put the dot immediately above the eye or to the left a little or to the right, a little does that tell you something about their personality? Probably not.

Ian R
I do.

Tom Kubiak
That’s how I feel.

Ian R
No, and I and I agree, I think granularly it doesn’t work. Like if you’re really just gonna go through, like you said, is the I, you know, sixteenths of an inch this way or that way. You’re probably not gonna go anywhere. But now if you’re looking at it as a whole and saying, listen, the letter spacing here is weird. Multiple corrections for just stylistic purposes. And this guy has killed 13 cats in the neighborhood. Yeah, okay.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, probably, yeah, indication of, of serial killer tendencies.

Ian R
Just even in between serial killer and engineer somewhere in there. Somewhere in between, I don’t even know.

Tom Kubiak
They tend to be pretty close.

Ian R
Yeah, what’s in between an engineer and a serial killer? Architect.

Tom Kubiak
Or accountant. Leaning towards serial killer.

Ian R
It’s all about the numbers. But yeah, I think. I think ultimately, there’s certain things you can tell, like you said, right off the bat, I don’t think you need to be a handwriting analyst to be able to tell most of that stuff. If you’re looking at mine and yours, chicken scratching. You’re like, this guy is busy and just doesn’t really care what, what’s going on here? You know, like, they brought out some examples like Mark Zuckerberg. You ever noticed his signature? It’s just..

Tom Kubiak
No, I haven’t paid any attention to that.

Ian R
He just writes M Z. And it’s not very neat either. And it’s just kinds of shows like he tends to be very private. And just his whole persona is unassuming, he doesn’t write a big flashy signature and he doesn’t wear big flashy suits. He has the same, what is it, a blue t shirt and pants? Okay, yes, is unassuming kind of private personality. So there’s certain things you can tell from handwriting. I personally think most of it comes from, I think it comes from your signature more than anything else. I think you can tell.

Tom Kubiak
I can, I can see that. And there are other people who have very flamboyant signatures, or they tend to use very, you know, bold, broad pens to make their signature stand out even more in that, you know, maybe relates to their desire for, or their personality’s a larger ego, or, you know, they want more attention. And I guess those are realistic possibilities.

Ian R
Well, look at, look at John Hancock, we made that joke at the beginning. Yeah, he thought a lot of himself and he wrote this giant, big embellished signature.

Tom Kubiak
Well he wanted the king to be able to see it. His signature without glasses. Yeah.

Ian R
I think you’re right. But you know, if we’re writing big, you know, if you’re writing a big fancy signature, you’ve spent time thinking about it, practicing it. Yeah. And you’re gonna make everybody stand around you if you’re in a room signing something watching you sign. Me, mine is basically two finger swipes.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, I agree. That’s and that’s exactly what mine is too like, I’m not planning this out. I just want to get this transaction done.

Ian R
That goes along with your personality type, you know?

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, true. True. Yeah, it’s an interesting discussion.

Ian R
Yeah. We seem to be having some more pseudo sciences here. This one is, I think less reliable than the Myers Briggs one though.

Tom Kubiak
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think it can point you in the right direction, but I don’t know that you can take a whole lot of value out of out of, you know what’s being seen.

Ian R
I agree. Well, to take us out, Tom, do you have a Tom joke for us?

Tom Kubiak
I do have, I do have a Tom joke. So this is, this is a bad one. But it’s about, it’s about writing. So what do you get if you cross a green monster with a fountain pen?

Ian R
I don’t know, what?

Tom Kubiak
The Ink-credible Hulk.

Ian R
Dude. Come on. That’s pretty bad. I don’t even know how to follow up to that one.

Tom Kubiak
You can’t, it’s impossible.

Ian R
All right, well, we just lost half our listenership. So thanks, Tom.

Tom Kubiak
Good to see you, Ian. Talk to you soon.

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