Ask Dr. Drew - Psychopath / Dictator Expert Dr. James Fallon on Putin’s Brain & Russia’s Invasion – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 81

Episode Date: March 28, 2022

Dr. James Fallon – whose research led him to realize that he is a "pro-social" psychopath – discusses Vladimir Putin's brain and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. – Dr. James Fallon is Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, and emeritus professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology, at the University of California, Irvine School Of Medicine. In addition to authoring over 300 papers and books, he has written two personal memoirs: including “The Psychopath Inside: A neuroscientist’s journey into the dark side of the brain" which reveals how Dr. Fallon's study of brain functions led him to realize that he himself has the neurological and genetic markers of a psychopath. [The podcast was originally broadcast on March 7, 2022] Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). SPONSORS • REFRAME – Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol, but only 10% of them are actually getting the help they need. Reframe is a neuroscience-based smartphone app that helps users cut back or quit drinking alcohol. Use the code DRDREW for 25% off your first month or annual subscription at https://drdrew.com/reframe • BLUE MICS – After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew’s iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don’t need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue’s lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew’s Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue  • HYDRALYTE – “In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market.” Dr. Drew recommends Hydralyte’s easy-to-use packets of fast-absorbing electrolytes. Learn more about Hydralyte and use DRDREW25 at checkout for a special discount at https://drdrew.com/hydralyte  • ELGATO – Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato’s Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew’s streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato’s lights transformed Dr. Drew’s set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/  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. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM. A sportsbook

worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you,

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. Hey, everyone. I want to get right to it today. Very excited for today's guest. He's literally probably the most exciting person. I mean, my favorite interview. Whenever I get to talk to Dr. James Fallon, it is truly

a privilege and I learn something. Believe me, you will learn a lot today. Dr. Fallon is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine. He is also a professor of the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. In addition to authoring 300 papers and books, he has written two personal memoirs. The one, Caleb, why don't we put it up? The Psychopath Inside, A Neuroscientist's Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain.

There it is. Well worth your read. He has a TED Talk up there that is very popular as well. And as I said, he is my favorite guest. Please welcome Dr. James Fallon. Our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this.

He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f*** sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, 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. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly one in five Americans has reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol. Could be you, but only 10% of them are actually getting the help they need. Reframe is a neuroscience-based smartphone app that helps users cut back or quit drinking alcohol altogether. Using evidence-based tools, techniques, and content, Reframe guides users through a personalized program to help them reach their goals. Comprised of daily tasks, a comprehensive toolkit, a community forum, and accountability guides,

Reframe is a modern, accessible, and affordable resource that can help anyone looking to reevaluate their relationship with alcohol. Reframe is backed by Harvard University and Emory University Schools of Medicine, and it is ranked the number one alcohol reduction smartphone app worldwide with over 350,000 downloads. With Reframe, there's no stigma, just science, no labels, just support. To learn more, go to joinreframeapp.com slash drdrew. Use the code drdrew for 25% off your first month or your annual subscription. That's at joinreframeapp.com slash drdrew. Dr. Fallon, welcome.

Drew, good to be with you again. Good to be with you as well. And it has been a couple of years. And today we have been brought together by world events. And we're going to talk a little bit about Mr. Putin's brain. And it's a long story I want to build into. First, if you wouldn't mind, people who aren't familiar with your work and your story, if you could sketch for them your story and the meaning of the the psychopath inside yeah I grew up always thinking I was a completely normal guy no I really and I am and I found out through some very through

some serendipity we're doing an Alzheimer's study we're doing PET scans and genetics and all this in psychiatric analyses. And we needed another group of normals. We had, you know, in order to finish this clinical study, this clinical trial. And so I said, look, I'll have all my family come in and myself. That was the first mistake. And we'll get scanned and do all that because we're all normal. And so we had that done. And at the same time, I just had finished analyzing a whole group of these serial killers and murderers who were psychopaths or impulsive or disorganized murderers. And I'd come up with a model of psychopathy that was, you know, back then it was the most a comprehensive one that was back in 2006 and at this so there's two studies came together and they weren't intended to and my the the uh technicians brought

in the scans from my family and i went through them and what i went through seven or eight of them and they all looked very normal i could tell tell generally how they were. And I got to the last one. I said, very funny guys, you've slipped this in. It's one of the psychopathic murders and you put it in my family. We're having fun in the lab and everything. They said, no, it's not. So I had to pull back the tape because I never know who I'm looking at, right? And I pulled back the tape and there was my name and Gandalf showed up at my door and I was it. And that began this weird story. And so I have a pattern. Let's look at that pattern, Caleb. Let's throw Dr. Fallon's brain up there versus normal.

And why don't you go ahead and describe to us what we're looking at. It's essentially the cold is decreased activity. The red is hot activity. Go ahead. That's right. Compared to some comparison. So you can see the controls up above, that's the normal PET scan. That's through the middle of the brain. So if you look to the side, the nose would be to the right and the back of the brain would be to the left. And this is through the middle line. And you can see on the top, what is normal, all that red there is an area that's been stimulated during this PET scan. And the yellow, it's pretty evenly, you

know, activating a lot of areas. And you look down at mine, and you can see the blue and the green there, that means it's turned off, and very abnormally off. And if you look at that orbital cortex, and ventromedial cortex which is where the red arrow is you can see it's just just about completely turned off but also the hippocampus and anterior cingulate and the amygdala is weird so it's a really classic psychopathic pattern that was mine and this looked like all the psychopaths i had looked at since 1989. And so this came back to life. It's such an ironic story. And yeah, shoot, what was I going to ask about that? That's my COVID brain, which I'm sure is cold in certain areas now. We'll talk more about the ventromedial

prefrontal cortex and the amygdala and their importance. And you said in your life, you probably compensated for that in many ways. Well, I didn't even realize it. But in going back, after when I finally sort of accepted it, when I told my wife the pattern, I said, I got the weirdest thing to say. I said, my brain scan and my genetics look exactly like psychopaths would or the traits of psychopaths. And she said, it doesn't surprise me. That should have been a clue. And by the way, if you didn't have that pattern in your brain, that would

have bothered you. Yeah, that would have been a warning signal. But yeah, my genetics really line up with the traits having to do with psychopathy, you know, very low emotional empathy, very highly aggressive, competitive, and just being, you know, all the things associated with being a jerk, really. And this was new to me, and I just laughed it off for several years until I gave a talk with the ex-prime minister of Norway, and I had to use my data. He had bipolar, and he came out. This was in 2002. And so he and I gave a talk meeting, but the head of psychiatry

stood up and said, he said, well, first of all, you're hypomanic and you have bipolar and you don't even know it because you're never depressed. And of course the hypomania or the mania is what defines bipolar, not the depression. I thought, that's cool. That was public. We don't talk to you afterwards. So we met afterwards over drinks for three or four hours, he and the other psychiatrist.

And they talked to me for three or four hours. We got a little loaded. And at the end, they said, you probably are very close to being a psychopath. And I said, you've got to be kidding. That's when I took it seriously. And that's when I, you know, this thing really started taking some form because I really started looking why, you know, I'd been married forever. I've been with the same girl since we've been 12, same job forever.

It didn't look like the pattern of a psychopath. And then in asking everybody I know, the wife, kids, grandkids, siblings, my mother, my father, you know, the wife, kids, grandkids, siblings, my mother, my father, you know, people close to me. And they all said, well, you do psychopathic things. You just don't even know it. You don't, you think that's fun. And I said, it is fun.

I said, it ain't fun. And when the psychiatrist said, you think it's fun. It's not fun. You put people in a lot of danger. You do it for fun. And you try to dominate and manipulate people. And I said, You're probably close, but I'm not categorically a psychopath. I'm like a regular guy. And you said you in during adolescence, you feel like maybe

you compensated for some of this by becoming hyper religious? Well, I was, you know, when I, when I was about 11 12 13 I became a really full-on OCD and it expressed itself in terms of hyper religiosity and it took you know and in a worried people and I also acted strangely when I wasn't busy so my mother made sure to tell all my teachers keep this guy busy all the time with sports tire him out every day which I did my whole life. And that was the, you know, it was like the, the way to get rid of it. And her way was to do that, to keep me busy. And I was busy, but I was also had thoughts, thoughts that were not like other people, certainly. And adults

throughout my life, starting when I was about 12 or 13, noticed this. Psychiatrists who lived near us, things like that. And so, but I never painted any dude, you know, because I, you know, how do you compare yourself? You're a kid, you know,

even when you're 15, 18. But this has been my whole life of adults who should know better and, you know, clinicians, et cetera, who said there's something really and is there a crossover between ocd bipolar and psychopathy is there any sort of relationship there similar brain regions involved and certainly the ocd part but and the hypomania yeah it's the reverse because you know when you have a high level of activity in the striatum, and I don't,

and you have a high, you know, and you have high prefrontal activity, so you're always obsessing about things, that's in a way opposite of psychopathy. It's almost like a switch occurred when I was about 18 or 19. OCD went away, and all these sorts of psychopathic-like behaviors started at the same time. It's almost they were inverse. I don't know the causality there, but it was certainly not occurring at the same time.

And one took over the other. I became sort of this other person. Now, what we're going to talk about, thank you for reviewing the story. I mean, it's such a great story. I mean, I just, I can't get, I could hear it a thousand times and get something out of it every single time. My wife doesn't like it, but, and the kids think it's funny. My grandkids love it because grandpa, you know, grandpa's got that cookie. And so that's, they like this stuff.

And that's all I'm... And you also told me that you went back in the family history, and you found your mother, I think, mentioned something about her grandfather, and then lo and behold, what did you find? Well, it turns out, you know, on my mother's side, they're all Sicilians. And her father came over, lived on the streets of New York from time he was 11 onwards alone and and then met his wife my mother's father another system you know another Sicilian they didn't meet in Sicily they made it they met little Italy in Brooklyn actually and so that right of the family the Mafia side is not the bad, that's not where the bad people are.

It's on my father's side with English. So it's on the English side. And we have a couple of really good historians and genealogophers. You know, one is a New York State editor of a newspaper and does great research. And another one was kind of a holy man. See, in our family, we're like really either too good or really bad. And that was the whole pattern going back. So we've got, you know, cousin Lizzie Gordon, you know,

but it's worse than that. Going back to our families, you know, when they got here on the Mayflower, we have seven, maybe eight now, grandparents that we can prove that were on the Mayflower. So it's this old English Yankee family. But the parents of those, there are three lines we found out, filled with murderers and bad actors. And they go back to some of the worst kings in England. And I know that's kind of a parlor game. actors and they go but they go back to some of the worst Kings in England and I

know that's kind of a you know it's kind of a parlor game you say who are the horse thieves in your family but this is a lot of them in our family on that side and my mother loved that because you know she's the Goomba and she was always there was work to Rover all the civilians which are nonce you know the non-italians for her she and her sisters being mafiosa. And so she got a kick out of that and loved that story. Believe me. She lived to almost 102.

That's fantastic. And I've always said, look, it was not the healthy people that decided to climb on those ships and risk their life going across the country to end up in a wilderness with natives. I mean, it's just that you have to have been bipolar, drug, alcoholic, psychopathic. It's got to be all that. We wonder why we are the way we are in this country.

And then the super crazy ones, 100 years later, decided it was a great idea to get on a wagon and go west. Those were the extra super crazy ones. And then the others invented better beer in Australia. get on a wagon and go West. Those were the extra super crazy ones. And then the, the others invented better beer in Australia. Right. And so it's true. And if you look,

you know, why do we have so many psychopaths? It's a, it's a pan cultural it's, it's with us, you know, one to 2% in every culture. Why is it a pervasive prevailing sort of reality?

And, you know, well, it, those genes and behaviors that make you want to go over out of your house every weekend and have sex with every other woman on the other side of the mountain uh that's that's the you know that sort of aggressive hypersexual uh trait is terrible for families terrible for villages but it's great for the species because it mixes genes up. So, you know, when we talk about the good and evil of this, well, good and evil, according to what, and, you know, according to the species, psychopaths are very

useful, very useful. There are, there are evolutionary reasons why many so-called conditions persist in the genome. Being hypomanic is a, is a survival in sort of an advantage. Alcoholism has lots of survival advantages when you're not drinking, but let's, let's leave the general topic and the kind of move on over towards your study of psychopathic leader and psychopathic psychopaths in history why don't

you tell us you know what what motivated that study i'm interested in kind of how you're feeling about it because it seems to really animate you uh and you tell me when you want me to pull the slides up with the list of traits that you've discovered this animation animation is just, it's spielkes, you know, it's ants in the pants. Yeah. It's, it's, it's that, well, the way that occurred was started over 12 years ago. Um, when the people in the human rights, uh, foundation and Oslo freedom forum, I had heard my talk and asked me to give a talk on dictators, because that group, that group that I've belonged to for years, our job is to get

rid of dictators, but doing it peacefully, okay, so by peaceful means, and I belong to another group that is centered in Russia and Ukraine and in London that is also in the business of trying to topple dictatorial sociopathic or psychopathic regimes. And then third, for some years now, for about 12 years, I've been working with the Department of Defense and Pentagon. I was on James Mattis's, our Secretary of Defense. I was on his committee on soldiers and how to, well, what's the perfect soldier? So I've been involved in three different groups that are related to not only psychopathy, but dictators. so when I was asked to give a talk on dictators and when I spent some months going through you know in the books behind me and there's about 30 books behind me having to do the history and tastes and everything of dictators so I went through for months and then you know annotated that and said what are the traits so I took with the traits and

put them according to which of the dictators had which traits. And I just started to catalog them and a pattern popped out. So when I gave that talk at the Oslo Freedom Forum, since then I've given talks more specifically on Putin over the past 10 years at different film festivals, but also in New York City at the PutinCon. And in Europe, I've given talks both in Ukraine, on Putin, and also in London, and other places. So I've given talks about the dictators for those three different groups I'm allied with that are trying to get rid of these guys, get rid of guys like me, you know, in leadership roles,

certainly as the heads of nations. So, we're involved in a fair amount of mischief, but we're anti-violent, so it restricts what we can do other than cause mischief, intellectually, I guess. Are a lot

of the members of the panel similarly constituted to yourself? On which panel? Well, you were saying that the ones that are trying to remove the dictators or to prevent them from carrying out violent acts. Well, it's a real mix of people from different political persuasions.

And most of them would be, I would call classic liberals, right? Which overlaps with libertarians. Now, there's not a lot of classic liberals left other than libertarians. Most of them have gone, you know, in the present, for example, the present so-called liberals are really leftists. You know, they're really, they're more Marxist and fascistic. So a lot of them have gone away, but this group, there's a high, very high percentage from all over the world,

from the, you know, two groups of the three, not the one in the military, that has some other countries involved. But they are what we call classic liberals, you know, non-violent, you know, nonviolent, uh, you know, non-aggressive physically non-aggressive. So that's what they have in common. But some of them are pure Marxists.

Some of them are, you know, you call Democrats, Republicans, old style, Democrats, and old style, Republican conservatives and libertarians. So let's go back to the psychopaths. It is, you were talking about the, then in your own family, it's either all one way or all the other. Is that some, the ones that were sort of not being troublemaking, is that what some people call a pro-social psychopath and would you characterize it that way?

Well, they could be. A lot of them are the angelic, uh, and we can't find any psychopathic traits at all. So they're not even psychopaths at all, but they're very, very, so we've got a lot of nuns and ministers and, you know, people and really well-behaved people are very sweet and giving. So it's not like they're pro-social psychopaths. It's like they're really, really, really sweet people.

And so it's back and forth. But I don't know whether they have other problems. Not everybody wants to come out and say, yeah, I have OCD and I'm crazy this way. So we don't know a lot of them exactly what they had. And it's only, you know, in the past few years where people are more open about these things. Yes, true. Now, one of the things you discovered in your studies is that what makes a psychopath really problematic is, well, I'm not sure if you're, you better clarify this for me. I don't know if you found this to be causational

in the psychopathy or the manifestations of the psychopathy. And I'm referring to loss of parents, abandonment, neglect, childhood trauma. In all of the psychopaths I've studied, that is living or executed, murderers, serial killers who were psychopaths, every one of them came from a broken home and they were either abandoned or abused severely in those families. So it seems to be the trigger for epigenetic changes that fixes the promoters of genes, that is those things that regulate these genes for these traits, for social behavior. It fixes them so

they're out of context. You know, everybody can kill somebody at an inappropriate time if they're trying to kill you or your family, but they do things out of context, out of social acceptability, out of moral reasoning that's accepted in that society. So it seems to be the triggering event that is you can be born with these traits. So each each personality trait may be coded for by 15 major genes, right and you can inherit one or two Forms of the genes from your mother and father you get the high acting allele Low acting allele when you put all of these 15, let's say, for each of these traits, let's say it's for aggression and violence. Well, it's a roll of the dice, which one you're going to be born with. And some people naturally normally have inherited all the aggression

related genes. Now that doesn't make them psychopathic or criminals or anything, but it means they're a pain in the ass to play Scrabble with they have to win everything They have to dominate every conversation they have and they don't have Emotional empathy they have cognitive empathy that is they're very good at knowing what you're feeling What they do with it is another matter a good normal person with this Psychopathic trait of cognitive empathy, but it does really great things for people. It says, I understand your problem, and I'm now going to give you a bunch of money and do a bunch of work for you. That's what a good person does, but they can still have the so-called psychopathic trait.

So these are traits that are neither good nor bad. It's just the context. Now, if you have a preponderance of these genetic alleles and you are then abused or abandoned between birth and about two years old this is big trouble because those promoters on those genes like the warrior gene is really a promoter it's like putting a it's like putting a brake on the gas pellets always on and so it's out of context dependence and this is what leads to personality disorders it seems so it seems to be more than permissive it is in some way causative as which was your you know your question yeah yeah just

because you a lot of people are abused or early on in life or they are not raised by their parents they they turn out wonderfully. See, it's not like if you're abused, you're going to be bad. You know, it's bad news. You have to have the genes and then also be abused early. That combination is what creates this, it appears to be. Right. As usual, the gene-environment interaction.

Genes are not destiny, as we say. Right. environment interaction genes are not destiny as we say right and so you mentioned something i'm going to keep going back now towards the the the leaders that were psychopathic you said you slipped by and i didn't don't know if you were being funny or if there is such a thing you called it the putin con like the... The Putin con was the Human Rights Foundation put together. And it was, you know, it was tongue-in-cheek, but it was all these leaders from around the world,

all these experts on, you know, in government and otherwise and in business. And these were people from all over the world who were the leaders, the ex-leaders of all these countries. You know, Belarus, Chechnya, Ukraine, Russia, North Korea, all the, you know. So we had a whole group of people from around the world.

So we got to call it something PutinCon. And there I gave a talk about, I put together this thing. I went beyond just general, you know, your generic dictator, if you will, over the past 3,500 years and then zeroed in on Putin so I've been talking about Putin for about 11 years now where he came on the radar and just been followed him so I've given you know talks and I know people who know him who work with them and and so I've been trying to keep in contact with you know with these people and then this happened so now i you can imagine the amount of uh i i i don't get much sleep the past 10 12 days uh and so i've been doing this you know over in ukraine in russia

to the extent that they can get them out uh and in other places, you know, in Europe, etc. And I've had film crews here the past week to discuss this from different countries, mostly European countries. And but there, here we are in the United States, of course, Drew, you're the man, really hard. So here we're talking about it. So, you know, there, I appreciate that. I do. Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, you got, you got the, you know, you it's true i mean you got you got the you know you got the guts man and you got the and you got the insight and plus you're a physician who's hip you know you just know a lot about people and so i you know i've said who is going to give me a call locally i said god i hope it's true and bingo there it was so michelle oh no kidding oh. Oh, no kidding. Oh my God, that's fantastic. You made my day. And I hope it's not just your psychopathic manipulation that is bringing me to feel this good. Either way, I feel good.

Well, you know that. I'll say. You know better. So, and tell us a little bit about, because I want to start digging into the specifics. We'll bring up this list in a second. But before we do, tell us about the Dow series. Yeah, Dow stands for Lev Landau. Lev Landau, they called Dow, was a Russian physicist who created the Soviet atom bomb.

And he was the one putting that together and Stalin took Dow and the other physicists having to do with the weapons of mass destruction just mass destruction and put them together in this Institute in Moscow and kept them prisoner there basically so this Russian producer this really wild producer he gave me a call about 12 13 13 years ago and said I'm doing a film So this Russian producer, this really wild producer, he gave me a call about 12, 13 years ago and said, I'm doing a film and it has to do with psychopathy,

but it's psychopaths having to do with how women psychopaths treat other women, how men, how gays treat each other psychopath, how countries are. But it's all about tyranny, tyranny of people on others. So it took a lot of years to do this. And it's a rough watch. There are 13 films. And so I went over to Ukraine and was enacted in it. And then I helped edit later. And it finally came out. And if people want to go to dao.org, they can look at that DAU and you can

watch them online they're pretty rough but they're in the raw you know this is like this is like the Truman Show on every drug imaginable and um and so it's still very controversial but that was the group was funded by a uh a Russian oligarch right and and we didn't know this during the whole time but he also we were funded for putting up the Bobby our monument in you know in Ukraine and that was a kind of a war this past year of who was going to run that so again involved with these theseigarchs. Some are very sweet and just really rich, and some are pretty brutal guys, you know. But anyway, in that whole mix, we opened, you know, in Paris, and then we had in London, and then in Germany, and then it went online to make it more broadly available. But part of that, that whole series was having meetings.

So we went there for a couple of weeks at four times over two years, and we brought in people, experts, for the four guys who broke up the Soviet Union in 1990 to 91. And those four, I ran a panel with them about tyranny and about the Soviet Union and with some of the things that were said they're quite prescient for what's happening right now and I learned a lot about you know Putin there but also through the Dow series and all these talks that we was kind of held through the House of Commons and then the House of Lords. And then we gave some talks at the Royal Society of London. So it was very well funded and a very interesting group. And so there I gave talks with the ex, you know, jihadists in the UK and a KGB agent.

And I befriended each other. And I learned a lot of stuff about the way they think. I also you know I talked that to Helen Mirren and I said Helen who I know through you know her nephew Simon who did that first show that I was on with criminal minds they did episode 99 outfoxed and he saw the whole thing and I asked Helen Mirren so how do you go how do you know get to know the real Russia? And she told me where you had to go, how far outside of each major town. She had went through great details because they have a Russian background, right?

And so I tried to put all of these together to get the mindset. And my cousins who are Ukrainian and all the people, the former secretary of state in Russia, in the Soviet Union, actually, and the former head of Belarus, who I got to spend time with, and the former prime minister of Chechnya. He was that cool looking guy with the, you know, the AK-47. He's a very sweet guy himself, but the toughest sort of guy you can imagine. So I spent a fair amount of time face to face with him. And also, Viktor Yushchenko, people will know him. He's the guy that Putin poisoned with the sarin. He's got all the bumps on his face. So I've been in contact with him for years. And they've

given me a lot of insights into what's the motivation of Putin. And so I got the motivation of Putin through Garry Kasparov. I think people know the chess champion. He's one of our groups. But also people, they had from Belarus and people who were close to Yeltsin and other people. So I gathered this information up over the years, over the past 10 years. And then I started to see some alarming things.

I gave one talk several years ago, three or four years ago, in Oslo. I gave it to a public group, large group, and talked about how dangerous Putin was. And I was, a curious thing happened. I left and walked out back to downtown Oslo after this big auditorium, circular rotunda. And I was followed by a guy about my age. And he goes, well, that was an interesting talk. He said, if you keep talking like that,

you will get assassinated. said he's talking about he goes yeah he says and you may get it from both sides well turns out he was a CIA guy so he was in the Vietnam War but he's still a CIA guy and he says you gotta watch it so I kept getting these things about exactly the wrong thing to say that is I'm a nobody but I'm an academic with no, I have no bone to pick. Do you know what I mean? I have no ideological bone to pick. I'm not crazy about communism, but I'm not, you know, I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I'm not pro this or, so the, the only part of the voice that matters is that I seem to be neutral and it was about as neutral as you can get I think it's for me it's an academic question

but it's becoming more important it's less academic as the days go by here is is Putin the psychopath call somebody a psychopath and in a question oh because of the Goldwater rule from back in the 60s you can't you can't diagnose somebody from looking at that so you look at their traits and you get as much information everybody who knew them or knows them I did this with President Assad of Syria and got very good information on him from his you know from the family pediatrician and but anyway so you get all this information and you just line up the trait and you say are the traits there you put them on a scoreboard and this is not how you do psychiatry right but

it's the it's the way that you you say does are the traits there and that's what it is how you do psychiatry it is how you do psychiatry though you ask the questions of the patterns and you yeah and you watch the patterns and i i psychiatryiatry is a very close relative of dermatology. I mean, you can hold up a rash and you say, you know, how long you had it, what are you feeling? And just because it's across electronic media doesn't mean you can't come up with a diagnosis. And the same thing, sort of the extremes of psychiatry, it's very easy to make diagnostic assessments. And you can because there's nothing different between an electronic distribution, a screen, and the photons hitting my eye across the room. It's the same thing.

And there's a lot of behaviors that are diagnostic. And so if you get on top of that, the history and the patterns, and you get all the other information from the surrounding personnel, which is usually how you get it when somebody has serious mental illness, because the person won't talk to you that has the serious mental illness. That is how psychiatry is done. So you can come up with some provisional ideas. Yes. Yeah, you can come up with ideas. The thing is, what is important is to differentiate sociopathy from psychopathy is an important distinction.

Yes. And for that, you have to have a dialogue with the person. What do you think about your feelings? What do you think about what you do? That usually takes an informal sort of discussion as opposed to what you're saying. You know, you can add up those traits. But if somebody believes that what they're doing, which is objectively immoral and awful, if they really believe it's okay.

See, psychopaths believe what they're doing is okay. Sociopaths know what they're doing is wrong, but they do it anyway. Yeah. And so if, so somebody with a personality disorder, they believe their own shit. You know what I mean? Whereas somebody with a lesser form,

somebody with narcissistic personality disorder really believes that the greatest thing in the world, people who are just narcissists really are coming from weakness. They don't think they're very good. They're very different. One is personality disorder. So that's where it's like you want to sit down with Putin and say, what do you feel about these behaviors?

And it's very hard to get this information. So you can get the, but to separate out the behavior and the disorder from the personality disorder, that's where the direct interaction is important. Because somebody who's a sociopath is the true sinner. In all Abrahamic and even Eastern religions, you've got to know what you're doing and believe what you're doing is wrong and immoral. Or else it doesn't count and psychopaths it doesn't count they're really not what you call they're extremely dangerous people but they're not evil in this sense whereas a sociopath knows what they're doing is terrible and they do it anyway they're you know these are people who are feel like and they yeah and they spend a lot of energy convincing themselves they're right, while a psychopath doesn't have to convince.

They just feel they are. Yeah. And let me ask two quick sort of pert... Keep going. Yeah, just... So the idea with the dictators, especially now with Putin, is what he's doing is sociopathic. I think when almost every culture says this is... It's probably sociopathic. I think when almost every culture says this is, you know, it's probably sociopathic. Whether it's a psychopathic thing is different because you may think it's really

beautiful and completely moral. Anyway, I cut you off. Two quick questions, again, sort of out of the sort of the current moment. I don't know if you saw that series, Inventing Anna, that girl that came over here and sort of talk, I think she is a really true psychopath. You might enjoy the series. And when I saw that series, I thought, God, somebody like that could probably be very useful to the military. I'm sure they have lots of reasons to deploy people like that

and probably look for them, do they? And James Mattis and the other, some of the other brass that we work with, they were concerned about this. Because the experience of the military was who are the guys that never get killed in battle? The ones that at least they can smell a bad situation, they get out of there, they never get killed, are Los Angeles gang leaders. That was their most, but now they go back and they're better psychopaths, if they were psychopaths, than they were before. So what is useful and then what it does to society are two different things. And so the question is for those, for responsible military leaders is, you know, how do we get people with the, with the useful traits without having them triggered into psychopathy or going back or getting psychopaths in to begin with?

You know, it's, it's a big problem. Interesting. And then the other thing I've noticed these days is that there are people that sort of like, I'm not, I'm not making a specific assessment, but I've seen an awful lot of people that like authoritarian leaders these days. They like getting direction from the state and from the government. And they even like stuff that sort of has a psychopathic quality to it. Do we know anything about those people? Because that's as interesting as the person mandating the behavior. Well, they don't. See, the thing is, psychopaths don't exist unless there are people who play along with them, people who will hire them, people who will really concerned with Putin, I said, well he's a very weak person and not completely compass mentis as we know, but he is, you know, this is the last person you want to be dealing

with a bully because bullies look for people like Biden or look for people like, who are easy targets. And so if you try to be nice to them, you know, you said, well, if you're nice to them, they'll be fine. Well, this is like the worst thing you can do. So I'm telling you, even though I didn't vote for Trump, when Biden was elected, I said, we're in trouble with Putin because he's going to go for it. I'm not the only one who said, who could see this coming. And so you have to have, in order for a Putin to be a real danger to you, you have to have a Biden, somebody like a Biden, who is... You see, you got me all worked up. My tone's going off here.

Your computer's talking to us, making all kinds of noise at us. Yes, I'm going to move this over here. Sorry about that. I get too many computers. I'll tell you what let's do. Let's take a little break. He's just getting to the Putin part. I know. We're going to get to the Putin part. Let's take a break break just get into the putin part i know we're gonna get to the putin

part we're gonna let's take a break and we come back we're we're gonna go over the traits that you have found in the leaders and then you're going to talk specifically about how that applies to putin's let's talk about our friends at hydrolite i can't say enough about hydrolite you hear me talk about them all the time it gets me through workouts and medical procedures and colonoscopies and coveted absolutely contributed to my recovery from COVID. Hydration is key to feeling healthy, and there's never been a time when that could be more important. We're in the height of cold flu season.

Every headache has got you testing for COVID. Staying hydrated can keep the questionable symptoms at bay, and there's nothing better than Hydrolyte to get it done. Taking their hydration formula one step further, now there is Hydrolyte Plus Immunity. It Taking their hydration formula one step further, now there is Hydrolyte Plus Immunity. It starts with their fast-absorbing electrolytes and adds a host of great ingredients, plus each single-serve, easy-pour drink mix contains 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and 300 milligrams of elderberry extract. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity comes in convenient,

easy-pour powder sticks that rapidly dissolve in water to make a great tasting drink that is a 75% less sugar than your typical sports drink. It uses all natural flavors. It's gluten-free, dairy-free, caffeine-free, non-GMO, and even vegan. Hydrolyte Plus Immunity is also now available in ready to drink bottles at the Walmart,

next to the pharmacy, or as always, you can find it by visiting hydrolyte.com slash drdrew. That is h-y-d-r-a-l it by visiting hydrolite.com slash drdrew. That is H-Y-D-R-A-L-Y-T-E dot com slash drdrew. And be sure to use that code drdrew25 at checkout for a special discount. And we are back. Thank you. Sorry to Clubhouse.

I accidentally stopped the room. I'm starting it back up again. So I see you guys coming in here. So let's go through the traits that you've discovered amongst these leaders you studied across the last many centuries. Shall we start with the, I think it's the traits we've got up there first, the most common traits? There they are. Personality traits. One take-home message preceding this is that every one of the dictators that I looked at over 3,500 years where I had the full as much of the biographical material as I could

were either orphaned or or and or abused tremendously from birth to a couple of years of life that was consistent through all of them. The only one that said that his life was normal, his early life was Pol Pot. He's the only one. He claimed it. We don't know if it's true. But all the rest of them, it's very clear, including Putin, who was pretty much abandoned

and then was a street kid and was bullied heavily, especially in St. Petersburg and beyond that. He was a little guy and he was bullied and he earned his stripes on the street, certainly. So that's the first thing. The second thing that most all of them were quite intelligent and had very good memories. Their memories were quite good. And the only exception to that was Idi Amin, who was not very smart, and his memory was not very good. And so with those two provisos, those are the first two things you could say generally. Now, if we then go and look at the most consistent personality traits for almost all the dictators I looked at where I could get that information, you know, since the Syrian times

and before that, you know, before the Greeks, was that, you know, many were, of course, glib and charming, and they had great notions of themselves, or very narcissistic and very grandiose. They all, almost all of them showed a tremendous amount of charisma and they have what is called it's you know when somebody walks into the room you say that guy's got charisma that gal's got they fill up the room with that light well that has it's called fearless dominance and it's a main trait in psychopaths that's what it's called and almost all of them have that they come into the room you see it and uh and and they have a glow about them very consistent uh they're you know most of them are all pathological liars but there you say well they have to lie it's like did

fdr really have to tell us moment by moment the truth you know when you know for every move that would occur no and so that's that's got an asterisk because pathological lying is something that's like well you have to you know you have to in order to save your country so uh and all were very manipulative very cunning people very bright quite quite brilliant and uh none of them ever showed any remorse at all no sense of guilt for anything that happened at all and you know and one of the great uh i say great great leaders who was a really as true psychopath was stalin there's still a question about hitler again he was a full-on sociopath but he had close emotional relationships which kind of discount it kind of disqualifies you

from the psychopath you're certainly a sociopath So there's a question on a number of traits for somebody like Hitler. Stalin had all of them. He was the grand poobah of this. Now, they're emotionally very shallow, and we've seen that with all of them where I could find information. And they had that callousness that young kids have

who are kind of pre-psychopathic, unemotional, callous kids who look right through you. Of course, a lot of kids are like that. So anyway, but that's a very consistent thing. And they always kind of externalize blame, you know. But again, as leaders, they almost have to unless it is congratulatory to them. I did. I'll take responsibility for this, know because it enhances them you have you see a couple of the the

sexualities very interesting they're either hypersexual and have strange you know by any norm strange sexual behaviors or completely asexual so there's sexualities off in three directions uh they can be impulsive but they're usually under control and when if you go to the uh different psychopathic uh trade analyses like malone's you look on the spectrum going from one end which is kind of normal and the other end where it's abnormal and it's psychopathic so you you can look for changes. So if you're looking for dynamic changes over a period of a year or two years in these people, you're looking for changes. So in looking at somebody like Putin right now, I'm looking for changes of behavior

over the past year or two, which can be due to a number of things in them because they usually don't change unless they have some sort of disorder like tertiary syphilis, or they're developing a dementia. Like Joe Biden is developing an obvious dementia. It was obvious two and a half years ago, almost three years ago, with mild cognitive impairment, which doesn't sound bad, but it's hard to run a popsicle stand if you've got it. And so there's that where you can see where they're starting to get some dementia, not necessarily Alzheimer's. There's 50 kinds of dementia and half the cases are Alzheimer's, but the other large group is like frontotemporal dementia. And frontotemporal dementia, which is, you know, damage that's due

to degeneration of the prefrontal cortex and the anterior temporal lobe, those two, frontotemporal. But also if you have damage there, like a tumor, you have these changes of behavior. So like we saw in John McCain, so people so people with frontal temporal dementia oftentimes their sense of humor changes their sexuality their hypersexual they become hypersexual that changes and they change political parties so we saw john mccain go from being a republican democrat but it was arnold inspector had the same thing now he had a tumor removed and had damage. You can see where it was done on his prefrontal cortex. He also changed. This changed in him, too.

In fact, he was a Republican who became a Democrat, but his sense of humor changed and other stuff. Interesting. I'm looking at Putin for changes of behavior in the past year or two because maybe he thinks he's got a terminal you know disorder he's going to die so he's got to fulfill his historical destiny of being vladimir the 10th century you know czar the czar of the kievan rus you know that's who he thinks he is he's the czar of the kievan he is the old vlad and um so and i know that part, just a little diversion here from talking to Yushchenko, the former president of Ukraine, I spent a few hours with him and the former head of Chechnya and other people in the know, leaders in Russia, that the reason why he's doing,

he said, why the Donbass the why is he going for that? There's several reasons but those the interesting thing they said the driving thing is because he thinks he is like from centuries many centuries ago Just like Hitler tried to grab on to the Aryan, you know this they you know dictators terrorists fascists stalinists they all have this thing where they grab on to some ancient deep dark impenetrable past that nobody can prove or disprove we come from this glorious people we come from this great people and he's doing it so he's having this hallucination but he had this sense before and I know this because I know the people who know him well and why he was doing that. He had to get a connection from the Donbass all the way

up to the Baltics, all the way up to Scandinavia, that whole Rus system, the Kievan Rus, that was the great Slavic empire. That's what he wants back, right? You can say it's the Soviet empire, but he's nearly not a communist. He's a dictator. He's not a communist necessarily. And so he, in his mind, you see, in his imagination now, I think this has gone hog wild, which is as he was falling apart, as Hitler was falling apart, it became more and more this ancient past. And, you know, and this was something that has roots in a philosopher from 1800 who wrote mostly around 1800 named Joseph de Maistre, D-E-M-A-I-S-T-R-E. And he was a Savoyan politician and philosopher, and he set up the whole game book. So between him and Hegel, they set up the

entire reason and how you become dictators, whether you're Nazis or you're Stalinists, you're some form of dictator or terrorist, you do these things and they follow Joseph de Maestri's guidebook for doing it. And so he's doing all of those things. If you want to find out this sort of historical and now psychotic historical background, it's very interesting because there are driving ideas in these people. So is he a rational actor? It does. Yeah.

It does look like he is trying to restore some mother Russia border sort of via Catherine, the great era, Peter the Great, one of those. And it's not about the Soviet Union. It's about back before even. Because Kiev, my understanding, was the original source of Russian culture. And so obviously that's a big deal to him sort of mythically.

He was in Rus, and that's what's back. Yep. And so you mentioned him possibly being ill. Do you see any evidence of that? Well, I've been watching as much footage as I could, and certainly he has switched over in this Malone, M-I-L-O-N, that sort of formulation of psychopathy. He is switching over to things he hadn't done before. He's losing his cool. Never lost his cool. He's losing his cool. He's exploding publicly at his inner circle.

He's starting to have these made-up sort of meetings. You know, most of the time he's completely alone and he's straight. He's completely separated from people, which he wasn't before. And I work with a BBC reporter who's in Ukraine right now in Kiev Who knows Putin well, and he said the distancing is dramatic. So he's this whole social distancing is is dramatic, but he's also Threatening people his head generals in public. this is something you would never do and he's got these silly meetings with like young girls that were probably taped before because they have you know the Soviets and the Russians they always

do they tape a bunch of stuff of the leaders and then they roll it out like it happened yesterday that's not surprising but there's kind of these silly things we said look at I'm normal and but he's his he's becoming very fractious now if he has in his mind uh this this this this enhanced glory of being the head slavic kevin ruse leader from the 10th century 11th century which almost he certainly does this is what he's trying to put together. You put that together with behavioral changes associated, normally associated with frontal temporal dementia or some sort of degeneration of the frontal lobe.

We have release of impulsivity. You have a loss of control and a lot of anger. And so you see this with people with dementia, the onsets of dementia. And you even, not to pick on Biden again, but you see Biden's behavior in this way, impulsive. He's become a bully on weak people. Trump was a bully on powerful people.

Biden picks on like average working person and he explodes at them. And his sense of humor is weird and all that. That's typical of it i'm not saying biden is dangerous but he's dangerous in the sense that he won't fight back right and so for somebody like putin who is has this may have the similar thing this is uh this is red meat for him for putin to have somebody like putin have somebody like biden that's why this combination in time, and with two of them potentially having different forms of dementia, it couldn't be worse. So if you say begin with, and one with these dreams of grandiose glory. And then you have another one who really has mild cognitive impairment. It's getting worse.

And when you can't read off a prompter, like it would be you misspeaking and saying well I'm a doctor instead of doctor well you know immediately said something wrong people with dementia as you know right the malacca they can't read in themselves and Biden is making these mistakes of things you would never you I could never mispronounce as crazy as I could get an old I would could never print that mispronounced neuroanatomy I mean it's been in my head for 60 years. But Biden is missing, though, so his mind's falling apart, no question. But I think Putin's is, too.

So here you've got a very weak person, a very strong person. As people age, they can get lots of cognitive changes with systemic illness, right? And I've noticed that Putin seems to be bloated, almost like corticosteroid bloated, like a moon face kind of thing. I wonder if he's on corticosteroids for something. And corticosteroids are for cancers many times and inflammatory diseases. It just crosses my mind. What do you think? Yeah, he has the corticosteroid face of somebody on heavy cancer therapy, immunosuppressive therapy. Yeah. And that's the most, like he's got maybe a blastoma or something

because he has that, and he's kind of steroidal, and he's aggressive, more aggressive than he ever was, and explosive. You wonder. These are guesses we're making, and I'm not disagreeing at all with what you're saying. Yeah, no, no. I am not in any way even rendering opinion. I'm just thinking out loud, really, is what we're doing. Now, what would you do?

Let's say he is a psychopath. Let's just say for the sake of argument. Let's say he is a psychopath, and he is for the sake of argument say he is a psychopath and he is degenerating what would you do to stop him well we may be past the point you know what you probably can't do is any immediate open threatening move that will completely embarrass him right now well you can do that you do What you do with bullies is you immediately strike back at them and they run, right? But we've passed that stage. We've opened this door and he's opened the door and we've kind of let him in and we're not fighting back in any real serious way. And of course, anything you you give in he'll keep

taking it this is there's not a great revelation he will just continue to do that until he swallowed up the rest of Europe the rest of what the Europe he believes he owns and which threatens other parts of Europe so we're in that game right now you know how to stop them I think you do have to and i'm out of my field now just this would be common sense we do have to go uh you know to completely cut them off uh we we need uh financial and goods blockades arms blockades those things that are not directly aggressive that allow enough time for somebody, some general or two who's in there who really has the rushes in the world at heart to do what he should be doing, which is taking them out, right?

I mean, I can't say that. I'm very much against violence. But at this point, it's getting to the world, right? And it's getting to a lot of innocent people. And the Rubicon is sort of being passed right now. And so you don't want to do anything where he will pull the trigger. But we don't know any. I haven't heard anything from the people I know in the CIA, people I know that were FSB and KGB people that have come out who have intel that says that the chain of command in Russia is different and that Putin can't simply override.

See, we can't do that here. Right. Most countries have a lot of built in these fail safes that still can go haywire. But in this case, he may be able to do it on a whim and I can't find anybody who can who's told me that information I haven't seen it so without the knowledge of the deep knowledge of the chain of command whether he is can proscribe and prescribe these events I himself I don't know I you know and so this makes it more dangerous because if he can pull the trigger himself, this world is in for lots and lots of trouble. Because if you keep giving them what he wants,

you can't. It's like giving a bully everything they want because he's a bully too. But beyond that, he's a psychopathic. He has these dreams of grandeur. The world it to me owes it to the slavs owes it to russia mother russia owes you know and this it's written in the stars when you got somebody who's really on that that bent which he is on right now oh this extraordinarily dangerous yeah and and um i don't like to think about it. If the dimension is that bad and you can't stop him, then the dimension, like if he if he knows he's going to die, he's going to. Why would he care if he pulled the trigger on everybody else? Because it's all really about him. Have there been notable American leaders that you suspect were psychopathic?

Well, Drew, there was a study done several years ago. It took all the main biographers of all the American presidents. right, who had all this information, and they gave them the list. They gave them the psychopathic personality inventory and gave them the list of the traits. And they went through and added them up. And the people with the lowest psychopathy were George Bush Sr. This guy's like the mensch on the cycle. He's like, now his son scored higher. His son scored toward the top

quarter. Bill Clinton's very high. Bill Clinton is probably the most psychopathic, certainly modern president. Teddy Roosevelt is right up there. He was,

you know, number one, but at the time, that was at a time where what he was doing was normal, right? But the best one, people think that psychopaths, effective psychopaths, snarl, and they piss people off. They don't. You know, these effective, they're all about, I love you, baby. Who loves you? This is Bill Clinton. And so, and I was fortunate enough to know people who work very closely with Bill who terrified of Hillary, said they're terrible people. And the person who's, I would say, the most like a truce, pro-social psychopath is Bill Clinton. But, you know, there are others up there, FDR, JFK, very high.

Who loves your baby? They still have the same thing. People are always looking for the asshole. Who's the mean, grumbling guy? That's not the psychopath. That guy's a jerk, but he's not a psychopath. You see, so they get it wrong all the to, they want to go for somebody who they hate their personality as opposed to somebody who's truly a psychopath. Uh, a pro socialist. I, I known you for,

I knew you for a long time. I know you just call it, you see it. All right. Uh, if somebody were to hear what you were just saying and, and take you on and say, Oh,

you're being partisan just because you're a Republican or you're, I don't know which side you're on. I'd have no idea. How would you, how would you're being partisan just because you're a Republican or you're a Democrat. I don't know which side you're on. I have no idea. How would you push back on that? Well, I've never voted for a Republican in my life, and I've been voting in every election forever since 1970. And I didn't vote for Bush. I didn't vote for Trump either time, any of that.

So it's not like, no. And let me, I'm just giving you a chance to defend yourself in case people fail away. But there's another piece to this too, which is, which I find really interesting. You're not the first person to say this to me about Bill Clinton. I've heard it before and it sort of looked that way to me, what's called a pro-social psychopath. I've heard it from multiple sources, different and mental health professionals, frankly. But what's interesting to me is he was a great administrator and a really effective president. So just because you're a pro-social psychopath doesn't mean you can't be

a really excellent administrator, excellent president. Yes, you can be great at all this stuff. And, you know, the profession with the highest number or highest fraction of psychopaths is journalism. They're very effective. And people like to think like the heads of large, CEOs of large companies are psychopaths. Those are not. They're the CEOs of startup companies. That's where you find them. But people love to hate big corporations.

So they say that's where the psychopaths are. It's not true. And I'm not a businessman. So it's, you know, it's just, this is from study. So I'm, I'm real, I don't believe I'm a partisan at all. Hell, I came out and called myself a psychopath. What the hell were they? What kind of, you know, what kind of partisan? That's really funny um so let's go back let's go back to finishing our list caleb give us the next uh slide on the list of psychopathy uh we did this let's go to the next one uh consistent traits and we talked about this a little bit but go ahead yeah the next set of traits you can see up there not all of them had it but it was common in them and it it's one of the funny things you

know i have a a couple of sources and books back here on the artistic and architectural tastes of dictators and mostly sociopath and psychopathic dictators and they have terrible taste in an art and architecture almost oh it's amazing how lousy their taste is and and and they usually marry very poorly they don't they don't really marry well at all and it's a curious thing like many of them are very short and they have some sort of physical anomaly that they're embarrassed about it's like kaiser wilhelm you know he had the short right arm and you can notice putin also has that short arm but that doesn't make him psychopaths but a lot of

them had these anomalies from from very early in life that that probably they're overcompensating for, right? You're laughing at me because of my limp, but I'll show you. And so they have these other things, including being sadistic. Now, psychopaths, many psychopaths are not sadistic, but many of these dictators who are psychopathic or sociopathic are also sadistic. And I think you got one last slide on this would be. Let's keep going. Next slide. And then, you know, many of them also have these narcissistic traits.

These are not necessarily psychopathic traits, but you can see there the list of narcissistic traits where they have an exaggerated sense of self-importance. Now, and you know, there's a lot of overlap between psychopaths and narcissistic personality disorder, which makes them hard to deconflict, to separate sometimes. But not all psychopaths are narcissistic, but many of the dictators were. And people like that. You know, they like to vote for it. And when, you know, one of the talks I had given in Ukraine was, you know, you have 350 years of czarist rule with the czarist police. To me, you become that whole, a large chunk of the population gets very used to it and they depend on it. This goes back to a previous question you said that, you know, who are the people who keep voting them in? become that whole a large chunk of the population gets very used to it and they depend on it this

goes back to a previous question you said that you know who are the people who keep voting them in they like dictators these are the these are the people that protect you from the other people who are worse and uh and so you can see this and you could predict this in 300 years of slavery, 350 years of czarist rule. You can find any culture where that happens, where there's a large slice, they become very dependent on it and expect it. So they vote in these people. So they're democratically elected, even though many of these manipulate the hell out of the elections, in communist country, especially. But so at any rate, they have these traits, too. And these map out to the brain.

Yeah, which is the brain. Oh, here's another one. The last thing about and somebody who knew Putin quite well, he added this thing on several years ago to me. He says he's caught stealing people's rings he likes stealing things from people's houses now he's about the richest guy in the world but he's a kleptomaniac so he's got this added bonus thing and that actually the it maps on to like a brain problem so i've tried to put all of these together for putin to first of all look at if you look at the psychopathic brain I think we can look at maybe next let's do it next slide that's these are the areas of brain that is turned off psychopaths you see that that's the limbic loop the

social brain it's the it's that area the brain you used to use to interact with other people that's the social brain psychopaths this is. It was all the way from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Yeah So the ventromedial prefrontal cortex the the so-called the oculogy the Optic nucleus there as well as the amygdala sees off too. So they don't get anxious. They don't really worry about stuff, right? But they the if you look at close with the high resolution imaging you'll notice that which hasn't been done a lot of

where half of the amygdala is up too high and half is down too low and so it's a mix it's a mosaic of high and low in the amygdala even though the overall amygdala is small in psychopaths parts fit are higher actually in activity so the next slide if we go from a psychopath you look at narcissistic personality disorder it's a subset of those so if you look with imaging and you take that average you'll notice that the narcissistic personality disorder not a lot in the amygdala or cingulate or hippocampal formation more in the prefrontal and anterior cingulate and then if we go from there uh next slide and there's a one more i think so i put together all with the if you could do imaging brain imaging on all these dictators what the

average would look like uh for all the traits and it would look something like this so this is the money slide if we can if if anybody can talk a dictator and get it done uh and i and i worked in london with the where i worked in london with the two lawyers actually three of them heard a talk and they got in touch with a guy the last guy who was up for crimes against humanity. Remember in the Serb with the huge hair. Misalovich? Misalovich, whatever his name was. Beans with a K.

I'm sorry. I can't remember either. But anyway. So they called him up and said, look, would you, there's the impression he left on me, but he's the big haired guy who is a psychiatrist. And now he's, you know, he's in for life.

But they wanted me to do a full study on him, do the scanning. And they got back. So we're going back and forth in London. So they called him because he had just been put away. And they said, would you do this? And he goes, that's that Fallon guy. He said, I don't trust that son of a bitch. I said, you're the butcher of Bosnia, for Christ's sake.

You don't trust me. I mean, it's over, man. So that's how sometimes these guys are, like, really full of themselves. I'm above this. Radovan. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Radovan. about carriage it's carried it's i can't pronounce it okay and then the last slide for putin so for putin i try to put all his specific things and he's got some extra business going on two of the red dots for being a kleptomaniac and he and he has this core of the roticular formation in the thalamus etc along the middle line and read there you see that is associated with some of these other

traits so I would I would expect he would have a pet skin that would be high in those red areas very low in the blue areas that's my prediction for putin but if you just line up all the traits like we were talking about yeah the drill in a little bit so this isn't his brain this is just what it would look like yeah this is a the notes they this susan yes we took his brain out of his head and we we sliced it I want to dig into a little bit. So, so is that the vermis of the, what am I seeing there?

What's the red part in the occiput? What is that? That's not the, the cerebellum is clear on that. That's part of the, what's called the posterior. It's part of what's called the precuneus and posterior cingulate that I would expect to be higher and there are people we had done the study here on people with perfect memory

autobiographical memory that came out years ago was on CNN why did the neuroanatomy for it and had these with perfect memory they have these fiber bundles that connect the hippocampus on both sides plus some other spots that are very highly active which probably these people can remember every day of their life what happened other parts of their memory are not affected they may have actually poorer memories but in the case of the people the uh with these great memories and certainly putin is one of them will have these higher areas where the areas connecting memory circuits, key memory circuits, are larger than normal. Mary Lou Henner has that autobiographical memory thing.

Yeah, I talked to her. I interviewed her, and I said, you know, I saw you talking to David Letterman. I remember this vividly because I was having kind of a weird depressive episode in 1979, the summer. She goes, oh yeah, I was wearing a white dress. I went, yes, you were. Because I remembered that strangely. And she remembered the shoes. She remembered what they discussed. She remembered what she had for lunch that day. That was 50 years ago. It was crazy. Oh yeah. And of course, all of us, many of us, guys from that generation who watched Taxi, have a perfect memory of everything she did because she was so hot and so adorable, too.

I just thought she was adorable. It's like, God, you know, this is the one. And so many of us guys have a perfect biographical memory on Mary Lou. And what is that hotspot on the reticular activating system? Well, that's through the core. That's the limbic core having to do with memory. So that goes, that's a medial thalamus, a part of the mesencephalic reticular formation that goes up into the

preoptic area. Okay. And it's the whole core of tissue that regulates lots of things. But when you're able to suppress emotions quite well, that can be very highly active. So people who can suppress it can have that. And up until the past year, Putin has seemed to be a person who can really suppress it. But like I said, his behaviors have changed. And some of those spots may be melting away before our eyes.

And then there's that one little cold area up there at the front of the anterior sulcus or something. What is that? Well, that, yes, that is a spot that is part of the colossal system and where the, between two hemispheres and where it intersects with the, what's called the interior portion of the internal capsule,

which has to not only do with memory, but it's also very active in kleptomaniacs of all things so that's what the kleptomaniac interesting interesting and then and then the that part that sort of folds under the blue part that's the sort of orbital frontal which is how you understand other people's feelings that's where all that kind of comes together and reflects out. And he ain't got that. Yeah. And so, yeah, orbital cortex is, in ventromedial cortex, one of the first to develop in an infant.

And so I had looked and reconstructed with a certain kind of imaging called DTI infants' brains who didn't have myelin yet, but you could see the beginnings of those pathways. And it's one of the first pathways to develop and to myelinate. That's why it happens early. That's why it's so susceptible early, where the early trauma, not later trauma, early trauma will affect that because it's one of the first areas to develop. And it's an area, it's the center of the connecting, the connections called the connectome. It's one of the centers for moral reasoning and for control of impulsivity. And so people that have tumors there, problems there, lots of, you know, there have been cases where people have had tumors in that orbital cortex

where they become pedophiles in the middle of their life. And then they have it removed and all their pedophilic urges go away. I mean, it's unbelievable. It's not unbelievable to a neuroscientist, but it's to a regular person in me. I'm just talking about, they would say, that's just remarkable. Something you would seem so twisted and strange it could be affected by a little pressure on the brain but it can well and if you want to read a more dramatic story antonio damasio who i interviewed on this streaming show wrote a book called descartes error where he uh regales the story of phileas gage who had a thing go through his frontal lobe and uh he deteriorated over time interestingly yeah they're

very they couldn't put their finger on it so to speak yeah he was in Vermont and he you know I had he was he blew up these granite blocks and he was the one that would poke the hole with the steel rod and he would put dynamite in there well Well, one time he put dynamite in, and it blew up and went right through his eye. It didn't kill him at all, but he had these slight changes in personality. So it's like, and it was like, you know, resemble a lot about psychopathy. Well, he seems to be as smart as he was, but he doesn't have interpersonal, sort of normal interpersonal relationships anymore. He seems very distant

and weird like that but he's just as smart so yeah that's where it went through uh infinious gauge yeah it's it was almost the descriptions are almost comical because he had a bawdy sense of humor and he became a rogue and all these kinds of language that they described sociopathic psychopathic behavior frankly so yeah that's what happened to me at 18 yeah um and it's yeah well that's the epigenetics in writ large writ large um so let's sort of wrap the putin conversation up here so so summarize it for me what you've learned about him and what you how you describe the present moment. And then you've already described how to approach it.

But I'm just curious, you know, all the people you've spoken to about him, all the observation, all the study of previous psychopathic leaders. And I'm curious also what you said that made people, made somebody tell you you could get killed. Because I haven't heard that yet, really. But maybe it's just anything problematic that he would come after you for. It's kind of summarize it for me. You're you're you're paint the character. Go ahead. He has,

he has many of the traits of a, of a real full blown psychopath. I would say that. And I, and I really don't see psychopaths everywhere. I look pretty rare're pretty rare. But he's got all of the basic traits. If you go through the checklist, he has the background.

You always look for the background when they were born, between birth and two or three years old, to see whether they were abandoned, orphaned, and abused. And he has those. And he has in his background, people in his background that would indicate a genetics. Just because your aunts and uncles are a certain way doesn't mean you are. But he has it in his family. So whatever we can interpret from what his genetics might be, we don't know. But he has all the traits. And the things that he does, you know, to this day, have been very much, you would consider psychopathic, except that if you're in the

Soviet Union and you like dictators, you would say there's nothing wrong with what he's doing. And this is the problem with saying, well, this person is a psychopath because where they come from, it's not a psychopath. If you want to see psychopathy, walk outside in L.A. or New York City or in Baltimore or D.C., you'll see psychopathy everywhere, where there are people who will kill, maim, steal, anything, and they think it's perfectly okay. And so, you know, but that's psychopathy.

It's not exotic. It's all over the streets in the United States. You can see it every day. And people very coldly, just pointlessly kind of beating up people and stealing, you know, and just robbing them beyond anything in a gang. It's individual people usually picking on somebody old or very small. And these are psychopaths. So we don't have to go to Russia to find a whole ton of psychopaths that have been spawned in this society. But certainly Putin is a smart one. He's a smart

cookie. So he knows how to play the game. The problem is that in the past year or so, especially in the past six months, he seems to be falling apart. That is, he seems to have some either neurodegenerative disorder that's coming on, or he realizes he's going to die, something like that. I can't get enough information of that. I have it being vetted now in Ukraine and Russia, the people I know, to come up with what he might have, and nobody has come up with it yet. But all the little behaviors, the way he looks at people, the way he treats them, the way he has lost his sense of humor, all the little physical tells he has, he's really becoming a florid, more of a florid, what's called a distempered psychopath.

Some are just cool, calm, and collected, and then some are distempered psychopath you know some are just cool calm and collected and then some are distempered it's like he's turning into a distempered psychopath the real wild man so um it's very disturbing it's um you know i'm in contact with my friends in sweden and norway or and uh i don't know many people in the baltics so i haven't been able you know that that and they're extremely worried these are people who are neuroscientists who've studied these things too and they're absolutely terrified as of the past two days and they of course you know it's really the nuclear weapons that make this so much more extraordinary well dr fallon uh I have to wrap this up.

You've been very generous with your time. I appreciate what you're doing and that you've shared it with us. I hope more people hear it and think about it because it's pertinent to the present moment and something that we need to all kind of, I guess, I don't know what to do about it, I feel helpless about it it but it is certainly um you know very much impacting all of us and we can you know when people from our generation look at like the gen z's now this is not a going to be sort of a rant on them but you know just driving down here two days ago students couple of students

on we're carrying around a communist flag cheering on the destruction of ukraine these are college students at uc irvine um and so so it is not over there it's here people welcoming it here uh and you really got to help you really really got to hate yourself to do this. It's like, do you really want the most brutal sort of worse than the, you know, the Soviet Union and all these dictators? You really want that here? Oh, yes. Bring it on. Because these kids are mad at their father or something.

Who knows what has gotten to them. But, you know, it's like, how do you get even with, you know, yeah, I mean, it's crazy, but you find all these kids even from the suburbs who it's like, they, what they're hating, they don't know what they're asking for. It's unbelievable. These are kids, college kids. It's just not on the street. Do you have any last questions? Yeah. He's seeing that it's in the college setting and that's the way it is. There's

always a communistic side on every college campus. Looking for dictatorial sort of leadership is what's... They aren't aware of what's really going on they need to go to Russia these are the guys and gals help me become powerful now you've been stepping on me now I'm gonna these dictators are great because we're

gonna get even now and that's what college students are saying some personal problem they had they dated poorly or they're mad at their father or uncle or mother or something right and um oh boy you know and that's what they are there's a way that's sociopathy getting even with the world i don't care if the world blows up i don't care if this country is destroyed i want to get even because i didn't get my own and this is well this helps people like putin yeah it it um when you put it that way it you know i immediately started thinking about the function of religion and helping people contain some of those impulses and i think about your own history with having become a little religious during a period of time i wonder if that was a compensation for these uh tendencies It could have been.

It could have been a compensation. It was struggling back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. Well, is there someplace you'd like me to send people? I've got your Twitter at James Fallon, F-A-L-L-O-N. Anywhere else besides Twitter? Get the book.

There's the book, The Psychopathic Side. Yeah, I'm posting any talks. I'll post our talk today on Twitter. Thank you. You didn't talk about his illness, did you? Whose illness? You said that, remember, he got ill when he was visiting the… Oh, well, he implied…

I remember that. I don't know if that was during the… Yeah, you implied you got poisoned because you were talking about this stuff right no no but this started this started me on on a i've never i never get sick and that was it started then we don't know so i never i've never haven't been tested for this so i don't know it's just curious but the guy i you know like i said paled with who was a kgb guy that turned around that that that night when I left London he died that night and and I get really sick for a long time I think was babies just coincidence yeah because you know why that why would they waste time

they wouldn't waste time on me but they would waste time on him because he was an insider who turned on the regime and after all putin is can you he's kgb yeah yeah yeah and well and of course putin was the head of the kgb fsp uh and uh the guy that i befriended for some years and gave talks about Putin and about tyranny. He was, he was, he was the head guy in Ukraine with the, with the KGB, but he turned, he became a good guy and we became great friends. He looks like something out of central, central casting. He was bald head pointed and just look like he was ready to tear anybody apart at all. And he could, he was, he was very scared. But it was very scared yeah but it was

very sweet we would give each other head rubs and and and the two psychopaths who were we we really hugged a very sweet relationship my wife wished i had a sweeter relationship with her as i did with the kgb psychopath. I understand. And did he teach you anything about the KGB that was a surprise for you? Lots. And some of the stuff he talked about is in those Dow films. He went through all sorts of tricks, and they're mostly psychological tricks. The torture is psychological, which is much worse and which was always an attraction too because you know i i grew up in loudonville new york and

the guy living across the street was a kate was a mk ultra psychiatrist uh with electroshock and a guy two two two streets down was the guy who ran MKUltra. So we had MKUltra in the air in our neighborhood. It was always like having boogie night. Interesting neighborhood. We had generals on one side. You talk about psychological

torture or terrorism. I mean, that's basically what they're using on us now. You know, they're threatening that they're using on us now uh that's what you know they're threatening that they're gonna you know push the button yeah all this fear and i think all of a sudden covets one now we've got a new fear it's keep always keeping people in fear this is psychological constant chronic psychological trauma which which has been put on us the past two years, a year mostly. Keep them worried, keep them terrified, and we can manipulate you.

That's the oldest sort of manipulation. I mean, the Greeks knew about that one. It's ridiculous. All right, let's wrap this up, my friend. Thank you so much. Is there a book on Putin coming out? I'm not, I don't know of one, you know. You, not you, you're not writing one. No, no, no, no. I'm trying to work on, you know, other things. We're trying to work on PTSD and suicide and addictions and all of that. So that's, you know, you and I, that's our main thing. So I can't, but I'll let you know if that happens.

And at PutinCon, there's going to be all those people that came together are coming back in a few days. I'll post that to, you know, all the people I was talking about, including Garry Kasparov and a lot of the russians and ukrainians they'll be on there discussing it we all won't be talking but if you go to the human rights foundation and look up the putin and i'll send you that link for what for people who are interested in these people who really know most about it let's see what it is the putin con and then you have dow.org also da, D-A-U dot org.

Is that also the other one where the series is? Yeah, DAU, D-A-U dot org, and you go to, and you can rent the films for like $3.50, and there's a bunch of them. The main one is called Degeneration. You've got to have a strong stomach, and it's really at the edge of what people can take. It's not a regular horror film. These are all real people. They're not actors doing their thing. And so I advise looking at that cautiously because a lot of people don't like it. They don't like the amount of terror involved, because they know that these are the people who did that,

and are doing it to each other. So it's really at the edge. But anyway, if you like that kind of group of films, it's pretty wild. All right, my friend. Yeah, but it's educational. I want to get all those kids in college to see that, so they can understand it.

Oh, yeah. They don't understand it. It really goes on. Really, how people brutalize each other in normal, what they consider loving relationships, or just two women working together in a cafe. The depth of the pathology that goes on. Yeah. So thanks for having me on. And, uh, thank you,

Dr. Fallon. We're going to have you back. We'll have you back soon. We'll talk, we'll do some of the genetics, CRISPR stuff. Maybe we'll do a little neuroscience,

uh, presentation. How about that? All right. All right. And then, uh, and as I,

there's no doubt, you know, the historic, the present historical moment is going to evolve. And I may have questions for you. So I may ask you back to analyze what Putin's up to. Okay. I'll give it my best shot. See you. All right, my friend. Talk to you soon. Takeinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine

and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.