Ask Dr. Drew - Ask Dr. Drew - Dr. James Fallon & Leeann Tweeden - Episode 7

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Aaron Hernandez murders discussed on #AskDrDrew plus the new revelations in Netflix’s “Killer Inside: The Mind of Aaron Hernandez” documentary. Dr. Drew is joined by Leeann Tweeden and Dr. James H Fallon, neuroscientist and a leading expert on psychopaths.  Order Dr. James Fallon's book at this link and a portion of your purchase supports our shows: https://go.drdrew.com/jfbook Missed the live show? Get an alert next time Dr. Drew is taking calls: http://drdrew.tv Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (@KalebNation) and Susan Pinsky (@FirstLadyOfLove). THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. Psychopaths start this way. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction. Fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f***ing sake.

Where the hell do you think I learned that? You go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help.

I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. There we are. Welcome to Ask Dr. Drew. We have a very special afternoon here with you today. We are going to have Dr. James Fallon in just a second. Dr. Fallon is a neuroscientist. He's got a great story.

I've interviewed him in the past. And we want to frame this around the story of Aaron Hernandez. Aaron Hernandez's documentary is out there. And a lot was made of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in his case. A lot was made of this suppressed homosexuality. But I'm here to tell you it's far more complicated than that. I believe Dr. Fallon is going to be able to help us sort that out. The next show is at 4.30 with the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness,

so-called Czar, Mr. Robert G. Marbut. If I don't get to your questions during this episode, please call back for that one. And my friend and co-host of KBC, who we worked together for over a year, Leanne Tweeden. Leanne is right here. There's Leanne. Oop, I need her mic on. Hi, Leanne. Hello.

There you are. There I am. Hi. Call Leanne at Leanne Tweeden, L-E-E-A-N-N-T-W-E-E-D-E-N. And you know Leanne from Best Damn Sports Show and a million other places. I used to do your show all the time. All the time back in the day. I loved mine. After your own call, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's right. I used to do your show all the time. All the time back in the day. I loved mine.

Dr. Jerome Call, yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's right. She was regular on the HLN show. I forget about that show. So like watching that intro with you and all of that stuff just gets me pumped up. It's just like you through the years. I love it.

I'm like, I think I feel like I've been there for all of it. You have been there for a lot of it. Yeah. And those of you, in just a second, we're going to get to our sponsors. We're going to get to Dr. Fallon. And Dr. Fallon, you can follow him, find his book, The Psychopath Inside, A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. You'll find out what he means by that in a minute.

Also, he is on Twitter at James Fallon, just like Jimmy Fallon, F-A-L-L-O-N, but James Fallon. Let's just take a quick break, get some business out of the way, and talk about our friends at Needle Destruction Device and Social CBD. Can we go to that right now? And then we'll bring Dr. Fallon in here. The CBD industry is still pretty much the Wild West. When it comes to claims and criticisms, the science is catching up with the industry. We will have clinical science soon enough.

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each of which is clearly described so you can make an informed decision without all that hype and promises that sound too good to be true. To learn more, go to drdrew.com slash socialcbd. That is my website, drdrew.com slash s-o-c-i-a-l-c-b-d. For a limited time, you can save 20% at checkout with the code drdrew. Now let's get back to the show. Needles have increasingly become a part of everyday life. Proper disposal is both difficult and expensive. We have the solution. Simpler, safer, affordable, and fulfills the obligation to protect our environment. A single stick with something like this means tracking down the user, it means blood tests for the person's stock, it means possibly medication for an extended period of time.

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so there's no biohazard. You can just toss them out. It's crazy what an advancement that is. So please check out NeedleDestructionDevice.com if you have any interest in that. So anything going on with you right now? We should go before we talk about Dr. Fallon. No, just being mom and neighborhood watch. Yeah, and so we're going to do

the homeless thing coming up. And I know things have gotten worse where it's really pouring into your cul-de-sac slowly but surely. Yeah, crazy. Sending you videos of a woman just standing up against the pole

just, you know, right in our neighborhood. Right. Good times. Perfect. And you live a distance from the sort of ground zero. Oh, yeah.

We're a total neighborhood. Did I show you Dr. Jetly's new video? Yeah, of course. Okay. The river one? Oh, yes. The LA River one, not the Canoga Park one.

No, no. The LA River one, yes. Okay, good. Okay. Well, look up Dr. Jetly LA River tourist video or Canoga Park tourist video. That is what it looks like. Yes, indeed.

We even play that. Look up the Canoga Park video. If you don't like the name, just change it to West Hills or whatever he said. Yeah. All right, so let's get to it with our special guest. Again, the book is Psychopathy Inside a Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. Dr. James Fallon, emeritus anatomy and biology professor at the School of Medicine, I think at UC Irvine, where

he's also a professor of psychiatry and human behavior. Dr. Fallon, good to see you again. Dr. Drew, it's been a while. A couple of years, huh? It has been a couple of years, and I missed you. I missed you, too. I've been worried you'd be sick. You've shrunk. Well, not about you, but about the Chargers and what quarterback we're going to get.

Well, clearly, since you got worried, you worried so much you couldn't eat. You've lost a ton of weight since I last saw you, no? Yeah, but I've been successful in putting back about 20 pounds every three years. I got down 80 pounds, up 80 pounds. My wife really likes that. So before we get into the whole Aaron Hernandez story, would you do me the, I know this is something you've had to do a million times,

but would you just give a little thumbnail of the dark side of the brain, the personal journey of the dark side of the brain, what happened with your psychopathic research and what happened to you in that process? Yeah, I'll try to do it very, very quickly. It's basically, I've always been a completely normal person. And my wife and I just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. We've been going out together since we were 12 years old.

So we don't know anything else. So that's part of it, I guess. And I've always been like a very good student and had a lot of friends and I have no criminal background at all. And so I've always assumed that I was a completely normal person, even though since I've been about 10, there's always some adult saying there's something evil about me. I thought they were just kidding. Really? Seriously? Anyway. Yeah, absolutely. It still happens. It's either a priest or a rabbi, some of the psychiatrists or professors that I had every year, starting at about when I went through puberty.

They couldn't put their finger on it. So there's something really evil about you. A weird aura around you or something? A weird feeling he creates, I guess. And also, you said for about five years. What is it? You can see the light around me here. The halo. That's what they're responding to. Artificial halo to keep the boogeyman away. So at any rate,

so starting at about, you know, I've been a professor and I've been doing science over 40 years. So I'm like a potted plant at the university here. But at any rate, starting about 1989, my ex-students in psychiatry started bringing me these scans of, it turned out to be murderers and bad guys. So I did that as a sidelight. This is not my thing, right?

But I analyzed all sorts of PET scans and eegs and genetics and and all that and this was just one of the things so i went through and uh and i didn't pay any attention to it but then in 2005 2006 i got a whole load of them from different uh groups different kinds of scans and i told them don't tell me who's the murderers who what they have or not normals i said it's throwing normals, throw in schizophrenics. And so I went through those. And to my surprise, there was a pattern. It was very obvious.

And when I broke that code, it turned out that this one pattern was in all the psychopaths. So I said, oh, this is nobody really talked about the brain pattern of psychopaths. So I just started giving talks about it and vetting it. And during that process, our own family, well, I was involved in a completely different study on Alzheimer's disease. We were trying to look for the missing genes in Alzheimer's besides ApoE. And in the study, we actually found it. It's called Tom40. But during that study, we had to quickly get normal. So I had the bright idea of getting my

family and me, my brothers, my sister, you know, not my sister, but my brothers and our kids, and put them through all these scans and genetics. And they came back. And, you know, I had just been looking at all of these scans of the murders on my desk and it had this story and they brought the missions brought in the scans of my family and i looked at it and flim through it i couldn't see the names on it because they were covered up and i got to the bottom of the pile and i just started laughing i said okay guys very very funny you got me but you you gave me the worst psychopath pattern i've ever seen so it's one of the murders and haha so you kind of you kind of, you know, you pull a prank, you know, there's, we do this in the lab and they go, no, no, it's actually, this is one of your family. I said, well, I said, whoever this is, has got to be taken off the

street because it's probably a very dangerous person. I told them this. They're like, oh, they said no. So I had to peel it back, you know, to, as just a civic duty. And of course there was my name and that started a whole trip and the genetics showed the same thing. And of course, there was my name. And that started a whole trip. And the genetics showed the same thing. And I had the pattern of like a pure psychopath, and the genetic mix of someone with those traits too. And that, and I kind of laughed it off. But it, after a couple of years, and I finally got diagnosed, and I, you know, very slow, because I didn't take it seriously i said i'm a regular guy i'm okay and then people started telling me things of what they really thought of me and that changed everything so that's what the book is about is that whole trip and as i understand it's you you

discovered a particular pattern of psychopathy that is relevant in your family lineage which is how family members treat each other correct yeah you know as it turns out as this was going along why we had known in our family about our cousin Lizzie Borden yes so that was gonna be my question you pass this down to your kids so I mean well your kids bring look the genealogy is not genetics which is not But my mother, and she just died last year at 102. She just didn't want to leave the planet. She was wild. She was a very, very person.

Anyway, she found this book. And finally, you know, she's Sicilian. And she's always been teased about being mafiosa. You know, they knew mafia and they were bootleggers. My grandfather grew up on the streets in New York after he came from Sicily. The whole thing, you know. But he was a nice guy, really great guy, in fact, and so he, she found a book, was finally, it's get even time, she was sick of being called mafiosa by all the civilians, and of course, my aunts, they all married non-Sicilians, which we call civilians,

and, but at any rate, in it, she says, read this. And it was at a party. And I said, Matt, we're cooking. I went out and caught all these albacore, and we had a bunch of people there. She was so excited. And so at the end of the party, we sat down, and she got me to the end of the book.

It's called Killed Strangely. And it's a story, a historical story that had just come out about the first murder of a mother by a son the first case of Matris by you know in white America Colonial is back in the 1670s and and she goes read on so after read on there were several more in this direct lineage so I got these grandfathers and since that time there were three other lines on my father's side the english side uh where all these bad actors you know murders and just scoundrels completely or they were like they were like you know ministers and very very well-behaved people so in our family you go one way or the other there's no in between

there's no like regular guy it's really interesting so there's that part of it too and uh so at any rate it's my my one cousin who found a lot of this out he ended up doing a thesis on all the good things in our family so he got his phd thesis to show the balance of this and how how these things are passed down it was almost the epigenetics of good behavior and holy behavior as opposed to the epigenetics and genetics of evil that's fascinating. So did he have a theory? And you almost went down that sort of hyper-religious path, right?

Yeah, I was always, from the beginning, I had obsessive-compulsive disorder, not the personality disorder. I knew I was having crazy thoughts. From the time I was about 10 until, it slowly started to go away at 18, 19, 20, it turned into panic attacks which is kind of weird so um so anyway yeah i had this obsessive compulsive disorder and was a um i was it was about religion so this is called hyper religiosity and i had that and i had to finally when i got the first year in college I had my priest where I really got along one of the priests I went to a catholic college in Vermont St. Michael's College and the

priest there that became buddies with it was great he goes you got to get out of the church man he says you do not need any religion he says you're so high so I actually had a priest when I was 18 talked me out of uh being a catholic or any He says, you don't need it. You're so much the other way. And he really helped me, you know? And so it's like, you try to get rid of the formalities of something, but keep the heart of morality to understand morality, moral behavior. So can you tell me what, like a psychopath, you know, when you think of psychopath, you think of like what, killing Eve or something like that, right? Where people are crazy. I mean, inherently are people murderers? I mean, I think i've known a few psychopaths that i've worked

with in the past and they can be crazy don't talk about my friend but they're also very convincing and they they bring you in early and you're so convinced that they're great people those are probably more sociopath but. But let's talk about the difference. Because obviously you're not a murderer that we know of. No, no. I'm well-behaved. I really am. But I have crazy thoughts. You know, I have urges and thoughts.

I just don't act them out. And, I mean, it's in my psychiatric reports. Interesting. Two of the people looked at me and said he's got all of the dreams and urges and thoughts, mentations. A full-blown psychopath. He just doesn't act. It's kind of curious. But at any rate, you don't know this inside, right? You don't know.

You figure everybody's having these thoughts and they're not. So at any rate, it's a good thing to bring up what basic personality traits are, for the most part, genetically determined. And so for each personality trait, like extroversion or aggressiveness, there's all these different traits. And there's usually 10 to 20, let's say 15 genetic genes that code for that. And it depends on the alleles, the form of the gene you get from your mother and your father and that combination. It's a casino mix of these things. Very hard to predict what you're going to get it's quite random but at any rate if you get a group of high aggression genes now you know they're called warrior genes well then you'll have an aggressive personality

it doesn't make you a psychopath it doesn't make you a criminal but you're really aggressive and you're a real pain in the ass to play Scrabble with or any sort of hyper competitive, real aggressive. And it's usually very good to have, you know, if you're in business, if you're in advertising, if you're in any competitive field, it really helps you win. It's drive and energy, too. So anyway, now that you're born with, right? So you're born with these and they're all on kind of a sliding scale and a spectrum. And how these are put together with other things like the kind of empathy you have.

There's emotional empathy, and then there's cognitive empathy. And psychopaths have cognitive empathy. They know what you're feeling, but they don't feel it with you. They don't care, right? They cannot care because they don't feel it with you. That's their liability.

But this is a normal trait. There are people that have this and they're good to go to because they'll give you advice. They don't cry when you're telling a story and they'll figure it out and then they'll try to help you. And it turns out a lot of people with this cognitive empathy are the ones that give money, that help people, that are fully early in the scenario because they do things. Whereas the people who kind of cry with you, a lot of times they don't give money, that help people, that are fully early in the lessonary because they do things. Whereas the people who kind of cry with you, a lot of times they don't give money. You know, they just hug.

They give you their emotional money. It's what some people call pro-social. Well, that's why, yeah. Pro-social psychopaths, right? They can be highly pro-social. Well, they can be absolutely high pro-social and very giving. So there are all these different traits. And when you add them up,

and this was started by Cleckley back in the 40s and 50s and then all the way into the 90s, and he really came up with the first differentiation and good definition of a psychopath versus a sociopath. Now the psychopath has the genetic predispositions for these behaviors. So they have low, they're wired for low emotional empathy, high aggression. They don't show any anxiety. So when the police catch them or their wife catches them, I didn't do it, they show no guilt. And in fact, they don't care.

There's no moral reasoning there. But they have a cognitive moral reasoning, right? Sometimes they don't have moral sensibility, but they they have a cognitive moral reasoning right sometimes they don't have moral sensibility they can have moral cognitive like the husbands that'll stand there they've murdered their wife and kids and then they just act like oh i've been looking for her we miss her and yeah exactly well they know that you think it's wrong but to them it's like being blind from birth you you know people are talking about this but you don't know what light is and so in that way they don't have moral reasoning and the parts of the brain which sort of adjudicate this are the orbital cortex and what the base of the frontal lobe uh which is also the place where football players get hit a lot you know right here there's a lot of

damage right here but it's right in that area and then part of the temporal lobe where the amygdala is, and then the connector, which is the insula. And that's one of the centers for empathy processing. Right. So we're talking now, so we're getting into slowly into chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which was one of the things Aaron Hernandez had. Right. But can I ask a question? You were talking about the genes from the mother and father and how it's kind of like casino night and they go together. But how much does environment play into, like say for you, for example,

or not acting out on your, you know you're having these thoughts, but you're not going out there murdering people or doing crazy things. So how do you get a Killing Eve versus a James Fallon? Yeah. That's the question. Well, yeah. I think I was just very lucky because the family I was brought up in were very loving. And my mother and my aunts, these are very bright women.

The matriarchy usually are the ones who can sense all this stuff and do something about it. And so it's the mothers oftentimes. I had a very strong relationship with my father, always and with my uncles and grandfather but with my mother and her sisters were very smart women really smart and all went to graduate school when I was back in the 30s and 40s and and so she perceived and one of my aunts especially said there's something wrong with him and she didn't tell me this until a few years ago she said we were always concerned about you. You're acting very dark and strange. I was where I was like a happy-go-lucky kid. And they just told my teachers and the people around me,

make sure he doesn't get in with the wrong people. Make sure he doesn't, you know, bully or get bullied. And all my teachers who were great too they followed this and they were uh really kind of guided me along and these are angels and you know had i not had them because uh like my mother said and also some psychiatrists i know at the time whenever any of my wife will say this whenever he gets bored whenever he's not busy watch out which is another feature of psychopathy is they need stimulation and if you notice i noticed killing eve he tries to take her to a museum and she just she looks at the thing and she goes bored boring she's like in the middle

of the museum and i was like yeah that's a psychopath. That's perfect. Let me take a quick call here. I'm going to take a quick call because somebody wants you to distinguish specifically. I want to make sure they're understanding what you're saying. Christine has a question about what we've been discussing. Christine, go ahead. Hi, guys. I'm just wondering. the sociopath is like it's a learned behavior that being raised in a household where they don't have the empathetic parents that they learn how to be a sociopath but that the psychopath is an actual change in the brain that they have from birth so is that even close to being on track here

it's close close but yeah it's uh halfway halfway there that's christine that's great. I mean, it's halfway there because the thing is, if you have the genes that code for this, that is the extremes of behavior, and those then put methyl groups in the brain, on those social brain areas, the frontal lobe and the amygdala, and it seems to fix them. This is where epigenetics, that the environment at that time, it's not any time, early, a couple of years. I would argue up to age five. Clinically, it seems like that's a better window for this. It does, but it doesn't.

Yeah, but okay. It's graded. So by the time you get to five, it's a lot less. But it's true. I mean, it is, but it's maximal up to two or three. And so that then fixes the regulators of genes, the promoters and inhibitors of genes. And that sticks on there. That chemical group that was added

by stress sticks there that means they're always on right so always on now with other people it's it's related to all yeah it's really more brain integration the brain doesn't integrate properly the social centers don't integrate with the emotional centers and stuff so go ahead and so that connection right between these upper areas of the frontal cortex for cognition and thought and rational behavior in the lower areas which are emotional limbic behaviors these are not connected up properly now everybody goes through stressors okay now if you don't have the genetics there's nothing to trigger right and so a lot of kids have all these you know can get abused and thrown down the stairs and they just laugh and get up and

walk away so it doesn't happen everybody but if you have those genes you know it could be 20 of kids if you have them and you're abused then these stay like locked on and you know if you let's see how this makes sense you know in terms of the evolution of this. If you were brought up in an abusive world or in bullying, and there's all this war and fighting, and that's what your brain sees, well, in order for you to survive, you better be a tough son of a bitch. And so you are then keyed for life to react and fight back and to be aggressive. So it makes sense. Whereas if you're brought into a loving world, that doesn't happen. Now, it doesn't mean you can't be attacked and kill

somebody, but you're not like on all the time. With a psychopath, that's the way it is. And in fact, there's no moral reasoning. So, you know, in terms of all Abrahamic thinking, Judeo-Christian and Muslim culture, in order to have something, to do something immoral, you have to understand that it's immoral, right? It's not just doing it. You have to know that it's wrong. And if you've ever seen the Aztec Codex, the Aztec Codex, and it shows you how to abuse kids. It's how to create a warrior. It's how you hold them over fire when you're when you roll them up yeah well and they made this great warrior nation that's what they did but then they started tearing everybody's hearts out right throwing them down yeah yeah

a bloody mess yeah and it happened in greece it happened in assyria turkey so a lot of ancient cultures these warrior cultures that people you know if you look at it seems so cool and cute that's really sexy it's a warrior it's not it seems so cool and cute. That's really sexy. It's a warrior. It's not cool because they kill you for no reason. Seems very short-lived. What's that? It seems very short-lived. You know, that life can only, you know,

you can't have a 102-year-old life living that extreme all the time. It's true. Yeah. And so now that's for a psychopath. So when they do something immoral they it's not immoral because they don't think it is right and in that weird sense the psychopaths are not really you know they're not really culpable they're not able to commit a sin because they don't think it's even a sin you have to understand it's immoral and a sin so So in a weird way, it makes psychopaths just basically great white sharks.

Whereas in a sociopath, that can happen from later bullying. So let's say somebody's bullied at five or six or seven. Or abuse. And they have, or what? Or abuse too, right? Real. Yeah, abuse and bullying and everything. Well, that, then you don't have a permanent change in the brain okay and that's

where i think christine was saying well it's learned well it's like if you get you know bullied at that point or if you're not genetically set for that but you're then get bullied seven eight nine ten eleven twelve well then you become what is also known as the very angry loser right and you're always trying to get even. I gave a talk in the Royal Society of London with the former head of the jihadist movement in the UK. So he and I talked about, you know, what the training had done to him. And but he said he was brought up fine, and he got out. So that's why he gave, we did the talk together. And he said that basically, you know, they're looking for people who are not necessarily psychopaths per se,

but people have been bullied, abused, raped. And these guys are getting even with the world. They're looking for revenge. And that's what a sociopath is. That's a sociopath is the angry loser. They think they're losers, right? And so this is the way they take it out in the world. That's different than a psychopath who does it as part of, like a white shark, they're just natural predators.

They're just predatorial animals. Yeah, that's a big difference, even though they do the same thing. It's crazy. And sociopaths also, by the way, can be very charming. Well, and it reminds me, what's that group of guys that feel like women don't want them and then they get very very angry like the one murderer kid up in santa barbara in cells yes in cells what do those yeah this is the typical thing the it's the you know these these uh not just the terrorists but these kids would blow up things you know it's it's like um and and what they tend to do the sociopaths tend to do they will end up killing the same kind of woman. It's that

girl when she was 15 that had the part in the middle and the hair with dark hair, and that's what they kill. They're getting evil with all those women for being shunned, and that doesn't happen to everybody. You walk across the dance floor, and the girl goes, no, I don't want to dance with you. These guys, it's different, so there is a bit of wiring, but that abuse can come later, not before two or three or four years old. James, does your brain structure allow you in any kind of – like I know alcoholics can see other alcoholics very vividly. Can you see other psychopaths more vividly than the average person? Just curious. Well, one of the things that is not on my CV, and I'm part of some organizations that work to, how do we say this, overthrow other governments, right? But since they're all libertarians, they don't believe in violence.

But the idea is to kind of evince this or to support those people who are going to overthrow these pernicious governments. The thing is, they want to find out if the person coming in is worse than the guy they are now. So usually what I do is I'll go out drinking with them all night or for two nights to see if they're worse. And this is true for a lot, you know, because I know a lot of the Eastern European and former Soviet. I work a lot with them and also have i know the

yeah the opposition in korea and in syria and other places it's not something on my cv but frankly this is so i'm brought in to to to to be them right i'm trying to put myself into their mindset and you know oftentimes when you know if you look at a jury trial they'll say and it happened in the you know in one of the aaron hernandez's trial it's like who would do this would you act this way would you act very calm after you kill somebody well they're what they're appealing to is your ignorance that they don't if you're you got a psychopath or somebody they don't care and so they can a psychopath or somebody, they don't care. And so they can kill both people and then turn around two minutes later

and have a beer and look completely happy. Bounce their infant baby on their knee like nothing happened. Yeah. Nothing happened and they really don't. So that kind of behavior is more like- Who do you explain who Aaron Hernandez is? So Aaron Hernandez,

I may let you do it, Leanne. He was a famous tight end for the New England Patriots who ended up killing a bunch of people. is more like who aaron hernandez is so aaron hernandez i may let you do it is he was he was a famous tight end for the new england patriots who ended up killing a bunch of people that's the short strokes and then going to prison for it and then killing himself uh but i'm going to get back to what dr fallon just said about aaron hernandez so you're building a case that he probably one of the things he may have had was psychopathy well if you look at it, it's a confusing case because he had so many things. Right. That was what I thought.

That's exactly what I thought. It's the only thing. You look at, you know, between nature and nurture and what was internal in him, in football terms, it was piling on. There were so many ways that this could have happened. And so if you looked at his background if you looked at his mother who seems to be kind of without any sort of emotional empathy she right she was sort of psychopathic or something that relationship that one phone call about well you should have just given me a million dollars and i'm thinking oh my god she took off with his best friends his cousin husband not see but she doesn't she may not think it's wrong but also yeah right but also there are people you know it's like the mothers who have no connection

to their babies that's a normal thing it's not so it's kind of you know not common but it's not a pathological thing because it happens it depends how you're wired if you have no you know if your vasopressin receptors and your oxytocin receptors your angiogen receptors and all these bonding uh sorts of uh receptors if you inherit that you can have very low connectivity with your kids or anybody and it's not it's not criminal and she may have that so i'm not saying she's a psychopath but we're saying just like this, a lot of eyebrows raised. When you look at it all together, eyebrows raised.

So that's one thing. So his relationship with his mom was not bonded. He has evidence of psychopathic features, the lack of anxiety and lack of remorse, that kind of stuff. Lost his father, who was very big in his life. But the father was physically abused. His father was kind of the great santini this overbearing very strict sort of guy and abusive and also and an abusive

you know when you when you hear that and then on top of it he gets sexually abused as a kid did you notice that they didn't show that until the like the last the third hour at the last minute you saw the interview with his older brother and he said well he was taken into the closet we were playing hide and seek and that was the first time that they had said that it wasn't him having a relationship with another man on his own oh he was abused when he was little and i'm like whoa they just kind of threw that in there and then into the show i'm like wow well that and so when you go good god this you don't have to go to football right you don't have to go to football, right? You don't have to go to drugs. Just this is enough to create a person who, by the time they're teenagers, are really causing trouble in society and are prime candidates for psychopathy.

So you've got two parents that are not ideal. Because I don't know them, but it looked like that. Based on what the documentary shows because I don't know them but it looked like that's a great documentary show right we don't know right and so based on that if you as you can't assume it but they made he may have been genetically inherited from his parents right and then on top he's abused and he's got a very cold family really uh but he he learns to love it because he needs that structure structure that's right that's what football gave him. And the football, yeah, the beard, to give you structure,

but he was in trouble early on. You could see that. And so people always like their favorite thing they hate, right? And so it becomes a political sort of story to a lot of people. So there are people that hate competition. and so they want it to be football because they hate competition in football.

They hate those winning and losing. Or they want it to be the toxicity of testosterone. And it's not just the testosterone level. It's what receptor. They also want it to be homophobia, that he couldn't come out with a sexual orientation. There's that in there. And then they want to put in chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And I almost wonder, the way the documentary shows it, the CTE is sort of pushed forward as primary.

The CTE might have actually made him more docile, right? It may have made him more docile. And so people who want to get rid of football, we're going to make care. But if you look at that, there are people who get not just genetically caused damage, you know, certain wiring, like in a pure psychopath without brain damage,

that you can do it because, you know, in the murders that I've looked at, all the scans of a bunch of them, a lot of times they got holes all over their head because they've been beat up they take a lot of drugs and but it masks that's what i was able to see is that under all of this sort of noise because they had been beaten up by their you know their uncle and they had taken a lot of drugs there was all this noise but all of those murderers from the psychopaths had this underlying pattern so they didn't need you know all these holes in the head and the drugs they were headed that down that road anyway so you could you could argue that maybe the prefrontal

cortex was sort of not functioning normally and it's d it's re-released but let's let's i'm going to put a scan up there where you have a question okay yes i do so so at one point when he goes down to florida and everything sort of just kind of explodes he's he's very popular they have a great football program he gets away with a lot of things how do psychopaths do when they do have authority figures come in and say he would be been put in jail or held accountable for the actions that he did like murdering people and all underage drinking and things could that have changed his path in life or not? Yeah, that's where, you know, at this point, where the environment helps sculpt the ultimate behavior moment to moment, because, you know,

if he was a psychopath, we don't know, right? But if he was a psychopath, and he's certainly a sociopath, because that's the behavior, but if he's a psychopath, he is going to take any opportunity that's given to him, any little open door, any little crack in the door by interacting with people. And psychopaths will use all of that. And they're very clever at it. And since they don't have to think about other things, about caring about people really, they can spend a lot of neural energy in scheming and seeing the holes, right? And really abusing people. So you get a situation like that and it's uncorked headers. I mean, now he's in a situation

where he can get away with anything. Everybody loves him and will let him and idolizes him. And there, you know, it is really open season in the whole society. And then we throw in, he was doing K2, which is God forsaken stuff synthetic pot and tons of pot and maybe withdrawing from pot so given all these things we're adding it up so it is uh physical abuse sexual abuse abandonment cold environment genetics cte drug abuse of various types uh bad bad etc etc do you think he committed suicide does that fit does the suicide fit with the entire story not not completely yeah so there's some questions they made it seem at the

very end that all of a sudden that maybe he had a lover in prison and that at the last minute that maybe that's why odin you know was murdered because Lloyd, because he found out that he had a relationship with another man. They made a lot out of that in the doc. Right. Well, that's what I'm saying. But they're like, and two days later, he was found hanging in his room. So I'm like, were they trying to make that correlation or was that just something they were trying to make us think?

A psychopath is less likely to do that, right? And a sociopath is somewhat more likely to do that right and and the sociopath is somewhat more likely to do that right and but we can't you don't know that you know the problem is you don't know because it could be anything and in fact he couldn't he knew that the game was up right and he and and so he could have just thought intelligently this is a way to get uh get my wife and my child a lot of money which you know you'd say what a normal person could do that but you really don't know but it wouldn't follow you know psychopaths can can can go to the end man they can just stick in there and they'll commit suicide too much a

sociopath might but so I don't know you know about that the um the the whole gay angle is an odd one because they don't really murder at a higher rate they don't do anything you know it's like yeah it's an independent business but it makes for a more of a story but it's uh yeah yeah it was that's why they had the other guy on there that was gay and he's like you know what i took from that is when he said i thought about you know once football was over i would just take my own life but that was more of him just hurting himself not like aaron hernandez just going out murdering people but that's one of the things that if people one of the general principles i've noticed in people that can kill is that life

has very low meaning in certain moments for them And their own life also has oftentimes low value too. So they can suddenly and impulsively do things like suicide, especially you throw drugs in because then the desperation kicks on top of that. Does K2, does that, do people have? That can do all kinds of crazy stuff. Yeah. All kinds of crazy stuff. And didn't you say chain smoking pot also kind of affects?

The withdrawal? With the withdrawal, maybe you couldn't get any. Yeah. And K2, that causes a lot of pain, a lot of psychic pain. It's the withdrawal because that withdrawal releases corticotropin-releasing hormones, the main stress hormone, into the amygdala, and it feels like hell. And that's when people lose somebody they love. Like a migraine or something?

No, no, no. Like physical pain? No. What do you mean by that? Psychic pain. What does that mean? With cannabis and, well, so. Psychic pain, what does that mean? With cannabis, and well,

depends on which drug, each one, well, withdrawal syndrome is slightly different, but that found is right. A core biology is the corticotropin

releasing factor, CRF, that's released in high, it floods, which creates dysphoria of all types, muscle aches, depression,

and your insular cortex is firing off, so you have misery. You feel like you have the flu, but you're at the but you also feel desperate. You know, in many of the bad withdrawal syndromes that people don't recognize, desperation is the worst symptom.

It's the one we really can't treat very well. And they can't specify what they're desperate about. They just feel desperate. They got it to end, whatever this is. Well, it's interesting. On one of the phone calls too, you hear Aaron Hernandez say, man, my whole body aches.

My knees are aching. Football just took a lot out of me. But maybe he just thought that aches my knees are aching football just took a lot out of me but maybe he just thought that i mean of course football does take a lot out of you any professional athlete that's been doing it for his whole life but you know maybe he was feeling that psychic pain maybe yeah not everybody gets it the true addicts and the addicts we've studied over the years you do pet scans and their genetics are different it's not just they want another hit it's this the crh system which you can never get rid of that feeling unless you have the drug in you and so you know even with smokers we did a whole very long series of studies with smokers and everything and they're all living

for that first cigarette of the day that's what gives them pleasure but the rest of the day all the cigarettes sort of keep the pain away to keep that CRH from being injected into their brains. It feels terrible. Like you've literally lost someone. Lost a loved one. Terrible. And so not everybody has that. True addicts have it. But not everybody's wired that way at all. So a lot of people take drugs and it doesn't matter.

Because they don't get that response. And weirdly, adolescents often don't have much of a withdrawal syndrome. I've noticed, you know, I worked in an adolescent unit for a while, and you'd see kids just stop heroin. They'd walk, two hours later, be fine. Never have any withdrawals. Very, very strange.

Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. So I'm flooded with ideas about this case. Leanne, do me a favor and describe just for people that don't know who Aaron Hernandez was, because I'm sure you were covering him when you were in sports. Yeah. I mean, you know, he was a favor and describe just for people that don't know who Aaron Hernandez was, because I'm sure you were covering him when you were in sports. Yeah, I mean, you know, he was a very, people knew he was,

and especially going to the New England Patriots, right? Bill Belichick and with Tom Brady, the greatest of all times with Robert Kraft, right? They win because they do things the right way and they keep a tight lid on everything. And I think he came in and they're you know as of late the new england patriots have taken some people that have always been questionable as far as like is that the kind of person but they look at how good they are in the field as an athlete and i think their culture can contain yeah maybe we can sort of keep an eye on him maybe not make him go back and forth well you saw urban meyer his college coach was like we were desperately trying not to let him go back to connecticut because that's where all his bad friends were and that's where he does bad things

when he's away from the structure of coming to my house with my family and kids and you know you saw urban meyer's wife she's like he would come and play on the floor with my children that's not the guy that i knew but the minute he got away from that you know there he was getting back in the wrong crowd and easily fell right back in but he was a very very very talented player that you know there he was getting back in the wrong crowd and easily fell right back in but he was a very very very talented player and you know i think when he was drafted and he wasn't drafted to like middle of the fourth round and i think people a lot of people were surprised but they weren't surprised right because you thought he'd go right at the top one of the top picks and then he didn't and it's like right there is a red flag because they do their history they know

if they're going to give you multi-year contracts with millions of dollars that adds to the stress now you're not playing college football i sure college now you're on the big stage and i think they had a lot of reservations about that which is too bad for somebody that had so much talent let's now also talk a little more generally about psychopathy we have we have scans uh that kayla bone if you could put up could put those brain scans up and so dr fallon could there that's normal versus psychopath can you see the scans we're looking at dr fallon yes sure all right and tell us what those are your positron emission tomography pet scans that's the highest resolution scale from the highest

resolution scanner so these very high quality scans that show the individual metabolism of cells throughout the brain so it's been put into a color scheme where red means very high activity so these are cells that are taking up a lot of glucose and really firing like crazy so wherever you see red's very active uh and really hyperactive above normal yellow is kind of in the middle. And then where you see blue and some of the dark green and blue, it's off. And so you can, if you challenge a person in a

scanner and you show them pictures of school buses of kids blowing up or some awful stuff and people getting caught up and everything, the normal person shows those top two,'s a two people that are normals um they all those areas are activated the psychopath when you show them awful pictures down below there's no response in that area in the frontal lobe it's called the orbital cortex and

ventromedial cortex and interior cingulate and also insula uh there's no response and there's no brain response. And in fact, it doesn't even bother them. And they may even laugh at those images. So that's to show with a functional scan. It's not a CT scan or an MRI. It's a functional PET scan. And that shows metabolism.

Yeah. How hard those cells are working. And the areas of the brain on the lower section with the psychopath, those areas are not turned on at all by these stimuli when they should. And so the brain areas that are supposed to care about ethics and morality, empathy are not turned on at all. And it even looks like it's shrunk a little bit in that backside of the psychopath, the blue, it looks smaller or the front side, it looks smaller even than the rest of the other normal dark and if you look at the mri

the ct you can see that the brain structure is there it's just there's absolutely no activity yeah no lights on no lights on in the house yeah and so you know how we feel some people believe the insula and the anterior cingulate are the key means whereby we feel. It's a great book about the insula called, I think it's called How We Feel. And there's a lot of data to know about the insula being constructed anterior to posteriorly as a series of homunculi of increasing clarity and sort of with body, with sort of information coming in from interoception from the body. Right. And yeah, the insula really is, it maps your guts out, you know. And it's a map of emotion and internal feeling. And you can see in a psychopath what's turned on.

There's a part of the insulin that's turned on with cognitive empathy. So it's not like it's completely dead. The brain stuff is there. But you've got to show them something and they will be cognitively understand somebody's in pain. Let's say, are you saying like, Oh,

I know that other people would feel sorry for this person. I don't, but I know that that should be the normal response. That's right. And you can learn that you can learn, you know, I understand that you're in pain and, and people who are normal,

you know, they become very charitable and they who are normal you know they become very uh charitable and they because and they they don't get emotionally involved so it doesn't get in their way either so it's pretty handy it's uh it's interesting but that's what you were talking about on the show a lot that a lot of successful business people sort of you know that's why a lot of these bad genes or traits have sort of continued on because you need certain people at this high level to run there's there's adaptive advantages to having some of these people amongst us yeah it's good to have you know you don't want complete psychopaths but you want psychopathic

traits in the culture well you know psychopathic traits which are can you differentiate something i had not heard of before the the distempered versus charismatic psychopath? Is that a psychopathic categorization or sociopathic? Go ahead. Well, Aaron Hernandez would be a distempered. These are people that shoot off, get very violent and angry, whereas a real smooth operator, really the charismatic ones, these are the real charmers. Calculate. You know, it's always funny because people,

I give talks about Putin and all these leaders and about presidents and how they rate on these things. And people don't, I don't think a lot of people quite understand it because they think a sweet talking guy is a good guy. And it turns out, if you look at the biggest people with the most psychopathic traits that is presidents of the united states uh they were jfk fdr um uh you know the roosevelts were were classics and bill clinton bill clinton was way up there and he may have been i talked to

another psychopath expert and she she put roosevelts uh and bill clinton not not and by the way i thought bill clinton had a great presidency i thought he was a great administrator but well my other psychopathic expert friend said he's a pro-social psychopath what about yeah i'm not going to talk about it he's got to be here defend himself but people always think that there are people who are um who you just don't like so they always want bill they always want like uh donald trump or these other people there and and i try to tell them donald trump is a psychopath well no there are no psychopaths that talk like he does he just you piss people off psychopath will do that he knows he's pissing people off they're all you know a psychopath we gotta love your baby you know i really love you know it's all that that kind of con uh you're

trying to get the female voters they tend to go toward that now it could be guys too and they buy into it but somebody like trump they don't talk like that he i mean he's narcissistic but he knows what he's doing it's not you know the thing about personality disorders the most pernicious people who commit murders and other capital crimes have these what are called cluster b personality disorders which includes narcissistic personality disorder and psychopathy and borderline there's sociopathic yeah and so and so the thing is what makes it different if you have the personality disorder you don't realize you don't know you have it. So people, for example, who have obsessive compulsive disorder, they know their thoughts are crazy, but they can't stop them. People with OCD personality disorder, they think the thoughts are fine. You see, that's the difference is that the cluster B personality disorder, they believe

it. And you know, listen to Trump, he's just, it's playing with people, and he's a salesman and all that stuff, but people don't like him. I didn't vote for him, I've never voted for a Republican, but fair is fair here, and he's not, that guy is not a psychopath. And right now, we're

showing up a picture of Aaron Hernandez's brain, which shows the ventricular enlargement, see there, you have these fluid-filled vessels in the middle of your brain. In the middle. Yeah, see how big they are on the right? Is that because he had a picture of Aaron Hernandez's brain which shows the ventricular enlargement see there we have these these fluid-filled vessels in the middle of your brain in the middle yeah see how big they are on the right is that because he had a lot of injury and fluid built up and no the brain just shrunk and replaced it so he's got shrinkage there and that's the CTE and that may or may not have been a feature of all while this went down right and you know it also looks kind of like Alzheimer's I I work with a computer guy to create an automatic way of determining alzheimer's by looking at the gaps in the size of ventricles

and everything we we get about 97 accurate but in this case you get some of the changes are like alzheimer's um and it's not like concussions concussions are you know reversible damage uh but with this chronic uh sort of damage and it probably has something to do with the type of tau protein genes you have too so there's a there's a genetic component probably but nobody really knows what that is but it's how you are able to metabolize and fold the tau protein and the uh and in in the case of ct in the case of aaron hernandez it almost it looks a bit like alzheimer's but also depending on where you've been hit if those brain areas go offline you've been hit the front wall well you lose inhibition so you become disinhibited uh and you see that in psychopaths, but also in impulsive killers, which are not psychopaths.

But they both have that in common. They both have degeneration or loss of activity in the lower frontal lobe. I want to go back to really two quick things. One is you were talking about personality disorders and how one of the features of personality disorders is you're not the problem. The world is the problem. They don't have insight into what their features are. That's right. But how is that the same or different than anosognosia?

Well, yeah, anosognosia is usually linked to a problem with the dorsal parietal cortex, this part, not up here, but this part. And this is an area that maps external space in relationship to your eyes, your body, and you. What is you? And so people with damage on the non-dominant hemisphere, if they have either a tumor there or some sort of damage, they will deny that parts of their body belong to them. So they can be in a hospital bed, and they'll call the nurse in and say, could you get that out of here? And it'd be their leg so psychotics

and the and the OS the psychotics and the daddocks where they don't have insight and the personality disorders what what's a funny and there's a frenzy they don't see what's happening to them it looks it feels like anesthesia to me yeah well the that's just a denial that there's something wrong right that's that's fun, that's a disorder. So it's a denial. And so people with this, and it has to do with sense of self and how the body maps to the external world, maps to your brain and your body, and how that maps to your sense of self. And there can be a disconnection there along the way if you have damage in those fiber bundles that connect it. So you may feel the arm, feel the pain and be able to move the parts of the body, but they don't belong to you. And this is part of a sub part of what's called the mirror neuron system. And the mirror neuron system and the mirror neuron system is drew as you know connected to the insula which

then applies an emotional content and people who don't have that um they may understand that they're being chewed up but they don't care right they don't care and one of the you know this is one of the uh one of the interesting parts of this is people with terminal cancer who have this sense of dread. You know, it's the fear of not existing. Well, you know, psilocybin, the mushrooms, the hallucinogens seems to really work. So you can still know what's going on. You can still feel the pain of what's going on, but you don't care about it. You don't have that dread.

So these are all components. Yeah, I get it. Do we have a name? I want to come up with a name. I've been calling it anosognosia. What do we call this? Because the denial and lack of insight in certain psychiatric conditions is so intense, it feels biological. Yeah, there are different kinds of anosognosias. There's propane in agnosia there's several kinds and you know if you're mapping the world what's out there socially or just stimulus out there to the brain and then the brain to the body the body to the emotions well they're going to show up in different ways if there's damage to one of those circuits so you may have everything else is okay and i think this

is one case where you can say well the brain is kind of like a computer remember the hal computer uh from 2001 space odyssey where at the end he's pulling out the modules and he's singing slower and slower daisy daisy well these modules there are brain brain circuits that you can still have the rest of the circuit sort of working and pulling these out. So depending on where you've been hit on the head, where the tumor is, you can have different agnosias. And the agnosias are just like not knowing. So you don't know certain things. And then finally, my last point is you mentioned Trump is not a psychopath.

But to me, he and Teddy Roosevelt seem like the same personality to me. And I keep saying, Leandro, as I've been saying this, I'm curious on your intake. Are they both manic? They're both – Up all night, work, they're fighters, they're counterpunchers. Teddy Roosevelt used to run around the street, beat people up in the middle of the night when he was a – Yeah, he was very aggressive. But all these traits, you can have a group of traits that are some of the psychopathic traits or narcissistic traits.

It doesn't make you a categorical psychopath or categorical narcissist, but you have the traits. Right, right. And everybody's usually got something. And if you don't have one of these things, you're called a boring person. Right. I'm not saying. No, you're right. I shouldn't say that.

It's not quite true. My son's in psychology now. My son's in psychology. I kept telling him, I go, look, man, everyone's got something. Come on, everyone's got something. Otherwise, it's not interesting. But James, as always, do you have any last questions? No, no. No, with the Hernandez, when they did the sort of cross of a normal 27-year-old brain

and his brain, it just seemed to me like a dying brain. I mean, as the non-doctor in the room, it just looked like it was dying and looking dead. But the drugs can do that. Alcohol can do that. You're right. He had it all there. Yeah.

I'm glad you had the exact same impression I did. Like, there's so much here to try to parse out one thing as causational. It's just impossible. There's so many horrible things going on. That's yeah and certainly with all of them that covers that was a perfect storm it was just any any one of them dr fallon before that you go do you have anything else to promote you've got a movie about the dalai lama yeah it's out we've won about 13 film festival awards this is the dalai lamaama, the scientist. And he's,

and he's really into technical stuff. So I was brought on as the science advisor and editor where it has took a while is to take a Tibetan Buddhist thought from, you know, 2300 years ago and then map it onto modern scientific findings of cognitive science, genetics, or as close as you can get,

but also cosmology and quantum mechanics. And it's matching those up and those insights because a lot of, you know, this goes back a long way that people, the human brain has insights. We don't know why we have this insight, right? And Kant, you know, Kant had it was the a priori sort of effect and also Plato had it's a platonic thing where we are born with knowledge that is the ideas are already in there the right Aristotle was wrong Plato was right as it turns out which is not great for libertarians but you know there you go yeah on this one so yeah so so the idea being that like you know khan's point was that there was like numbers and series and the causation

and the things that we naturally sort of knew uh that we evolved to know that we didn't need to be taught we're born with a sense of beauty go ahead finish please no yeah you're yeah i mean we're it seems that we're born with a sense of beauty we We're born with a sense of fear, different kinds of fear. We don't need to be taught these things. And, of course, I guess it comes from French humanism and post-enlightenment that everything is the environment, right? And that's how you're created. And it turns out not to be true after all. The last 10, 12 years of neuroscience shows that that's not the case.

Yeah, and unfortunately, our country has gone a little back to that post-Enlightenment French humanistic romanticism. Oh, yeah. And denying basic neurobiology. But, okay. Yeah, that's like downhill. Incredible. They deny any sort of individual differences based on the genetics and what we've inherited over millions of years the circuits are already there yeah well you know what i've noticed when

it comes to any feature or or disorder the the way i say it is on average about the about 60 percent of the disorder if we're looking at disorders about 60 percent of the disorder, if we're looking at disorders, about 60% of the trait or disorder can be accounted for on the basis of genetics alone. How does that sound? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, but it's not the whole story, right? 60%. This is the nature of the thing.

If you have the genetics for a problem and then the insult, the environmental insult comes, that's what does it. But if you don't have the genetics for it, it doesn't happen. The environment doesn't mean anything. Do you think there'll ever be a day where we'll be able to figure out if somebody has those genetics, if they're born with it? Is there some way we can test it? Someday. Oh, yeah.

We can do that pretty much now. The thing is, do you want to know that? That's what I was going to say. The next part is, if you know that, do you want to know that? That's what I was going to say. The next part is like, if you know that, do you try to take those genes out and then you're playing God? And then what could happen? They're necessary, but not sufficient to cause these things. That's it. That's good.

But let's wrap this up. I want to take a quick couple calls before I wrap the whole show up. But Dr. Fallon, I will say goodbye to you. The book is The Psychopathic Inside. And James, it is always a pleasure to talk to you. I hope to talk to you again soon. Thank you, sir. True. Lee, I'd say yes. All right. Bye.

People have been so quietly, so patiently on hold. I don't want to let them go too long without getting to some of these people. We're going to wrap this up in about five minutes. Miranda, go ahead. Hi, Dr. Drew. It's nice to talk to you. Long time, long time fan. Thank you. Yeah. So I was diagnosed with a hereditary neuropathy over a year ago. I have a bachelor's

degree in communication. Used to plan fundraising events. Economy went down. Went back to school to get in the medical field. Fell in love with surgery. Had my plan all planned out. Was going to go back to school, be a PA, so I could do even more in surgery. And then my neurologist diagnosed me by a genetic testing. And it's a sensory motor loss in my extremities.

So he and I had a talk and he said, for the safety of yourself, your patient, et cetera, et cetera, you need to resign from surgery. Not being able to use your fingers. Dropping instruments, things like that, right? So your dream of doing anything in surgery is basically gone. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, if I'm doing two, three, four things at one time all the time in surgery, you know, I'm retracting here or, you know, trying to cut something with my left hand

and I've ever shown my right hand and I accidentally poke a cut something with my left hand and a pressure with my right hand. And I accidentally poke a suture with my gloves on and I don't feel it. And I hand it to the surgeon and then he uses it on the patient. And none of us know until I see, oops, I have a hole in my glove. Yeah. You know, that's. No, you did the right thing. And also the strength.

But let's talk. In my, right. Yeah. Yeah. And I know I did the right thing. I did the right thing but but let's talk in my right yeah yeah and i know it's the right thing i did the right shark omari tooth is the syndrome you're alluding to right yes i've got two rare stuff sub sub that's what i was gonna say no but but but shark is sort of an old... No, there's no treatment. Yeah, it's sort of a catch-all term. It's a bunch of French neurologists. You know, Charcot was famous for Charcot feet and joints and stuff like that.

And in more recent years... I can't believe you've heard of it, yeah. Oh, yes, I've treated it a number of times. And it breaks down into subcategories now. So my question to you is, did you get a sural nerve biopsy? Did they actually look at the nerve on a past specimen? It breaks down into subcategories now. So my question to you is, did you get a seral nerve biopsy? Did they actually look at the nerve on a past specimen? They have not done a nerve biopsy.

Does somebody want to? They didn't. I have found that to be an important piece of the story these days. I know the genetics are kind of worked out, but some of it's active. If it's immunologically active, there may be ways to direct treatment at that immunological activity and slow this thing down. Perhaps. I mean, I'm not a neurologist. I'm just guessing that there may be something going on.

Right, right. Like are your fingertips, like do you feel numbness in your, in your extremities, like your fingers and stuff? So for example, I usually test, when I turn my shower on, I usually test it with my upper arm or my shoulder with water so I don't scald myself. Oh my gosh. My symptoms are very slowly progressing. I'm very lucky. But looking back from when I was young,

you know, I couldn't run as fast as anybody because of the drop foot situation. Interesting. So, and then I wouldn't feel safe. You know, I have bruises all over my legs. I have no idea how I got them. So that's what we're looking at kind of. But my feet, my neurologist pokes them. He'll sterilize it or sanitize a thumbtack just for a quick test. And he'll have me close my eyes and poke me starting at the bottom of my feet.

I feel something there. And he's not poking lightly. And then he'll get to kind of like right below my knee and I jump because it's just the weirdest feeling. So it hurts. It's weird. Yeah. And I'm also losing my muscles. My experience of Charcot-Marie-Tooth, though, is it kind of plateaus sometimes,

and I'm hoping that, again, I would keep kind of aggressively, you know, seeing what's out there because it is such – these are rare conditions, relatively speaking. And there's always people doing research on these things. And now with all the immunological modulators we have, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody's doing something, but they probably will need to biopsy the nerve and look at it and really specify exactly what's going on immunologically.

Thank you, my dear. Thank you for the call. And interesting, right? This is an interesting show, is it not? Very, very interesting. James Fallon is just, I love talking to him. I love learning new things and being around smart people. Had you spoken to him before?

I think we talked to him on the show once. A briefie, right? Yeah. Next live show, we're going to do a show in about 20 minutes on homelessness. And so hang on, everybody, those of you that have called in. And we're going to have the so-called homeless czar in here from the White House. No, I was going to, can I throw you under the bus? What was the test that Dr. Judy Ho did with you?

Rorschach. Aren't you like, not a psychopath. No, no. Can I throw you under the bus? What was the test that Dr. Judy Ho did with you? Rorschach. Aren't you like, not a psychopath. No, no. What I was was all my personality characteristics that I thought I'd work through in therapy, which don't bother me. I don't think about them anymore. We're just, there they were. There they were on the Rorschach.

I'm like, God, I thought. That's not my test. No, no. I was like, really? I thought that was over with that those things and it was a lot of people pleasing

and those kinds of stuff I do and I thought I wasn't doing so much of that next live show will be January 26th to make sure to sign up at drdrew.tv

we're going to have we're going to have Robert Marbut in here in just a few moments at 430 we're going to do a show on homelessness Leanne's going to stay with me

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