Modern Wisdom - #476 - Mark Freestone - Why Do Psychopaths Exist?

Episode Date: May 21, 2022

Mark Freestone is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, an author and an expert in psychopathology. There's a modern fascination with psychopaths. True Crime is the most popular single podcast genre and Netflix documentaries about real life serial killers capture everyone's attention. But why are we so obsessed with dangerous individuals? And what is it that makes a psychopath who they are? Expect to learn what the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath are, why having psychopaths in society was an advantage for a long time, why there are so few female psychopaths, what happens when a university lecturer discovers his own psychopathy in his 40's, the scariest criminals Mark has ever met and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 30% discount on your at-home testosterone test at https://trylgc.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERN30) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Buy Making A Psychopath - https://amzn.to/381UpGt  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mark Freestone. He's a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, an author and an expert in psychopathology. There's a modern fascination with psychopaths. True crime is the most popular single podcast genre out there, and Netflix documentaries about real-life serial killers capture everyone's attention. But why are we so obsessed with dangerous individuals? And what is it that makes a psychopath who they are? Expect to learn what are the differences between a psychopath and a sociopath? Why having psychopaths in society was an advantage for a long time? Why there are so few female psychopaths?

What happens when a university lecturer discovers his own psychopathy in his forties, the scariest criminals markets ever worked with, and much more. Obviously, there are a lot of episodes on Modern Wisdom about improving your mindset or understanding yourself in the world around you, but I do also enjoy the ones that are just a cool story or just interesting. You don't have the pressure of having to remember it so that you can then wake up and journal it in the morning. It's just something fascinating, right? About some of the most interesting

and strange elements of human nature. Today definitely counts as one of those. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mark Freestone. Mark Freestone, welcome to the show. Thanks Chris, pleasure to be here. Those people that are watching on YouTube, you may notice a slight change in my usual recording setup. I'm still here in Guatemala. It's taken a little bit longer than expected to get my visa back from the US Embassy.

So this is the hotel room locale and I've brought a coconut from downstairs at the breakfast buffet. So all is not completely terrible. But today, speaking about psychopaths, why is it that you got into working with psychopaths? Mark, I don't know what compels someone to think when they're in their youth that this is the road that they want to travel down. Well, that's a really good question, Chris. I think lots of people do want to be forensic psychologists. I think crime scene and CSI and all that stuff has got the word forensic into people's brains is something glamorous maybe.

And there's never a sort of shortage of people with an interest in serial killers, quite a few of whom tend to be psychopathal, but not all means all. But I didn't really have any of that. I just sort of fell into it. My job was as a sociologist. I was a sociologist PhD student

and the way that I practice was using a technique called ethnography, where you basically put yourself in with a group of people doing something you think's cool and interesting. You watch them do it, you do it a little bit yourself, maybe, participant observation and then you write about it. And my PhD was on anti-globalization process, which is miles away, but just as I was finishing, the local mental health trust opened a new wing in Rampton hospital, which is one of the three maximum security mental hospitals in the UK, four people that were called dangerous and severe personality disorders.

So that means basically people who are psychopaths or people who are very, very complex and usually high risk personality disorders such as anti-social or borderline personality disorder, means that they're at risk of committing a crime. And the opportunity came up to do an ethnography there. I was like, yeah, that sounds great. Cool, sign me up. What's a psychopath? And I just sort of stuck that.

So I really did honestly fall into it. And I think early on in my career I was a little bit kind of running from pillars of post being manipulated, confused, and not generally getting a whole thing. But with time, it sort of comes, I guess. Was there a harsh learning lesson early on in your career? Did you, with wet behind the ears and naive, was there anything that you came up against? Definitely, definitely. I think two classic ones is

first of all, Psychopaths are very manipulative, you when you meet a psychopath for a short space of time, you often experience what we call the glib and superficial charm. So I often say, someone, if you had to have a 10 minute conversation with a psychopath, you probably wouldn't notice anything on the award. You might actually find it quite warm and pleasant and certainly charming, because that's part of the disorder. I think it comes from the way that psychopaths learn about other people by observing what other people respond well to, but without having that sort of sense of wanting to please others, but simply aping the behavior that they see around them. So when I was working in the prison service,

there was a very, very charming and very, very manipulative psychopath. And I think I wasn't the only person to be deceived by this man, but he was also playing in the guitar club where I played the basic guitar myself. So I come to the guitar club and provide with a bass backing for all the prisoners doing, Lenny Cohen and white stripe songs. And we'd meet there and we talk about music and things. And I was sort of, I found this guy very intimidating. We're calling Paul for the sake of argument. It's also his name, my book, but he,

I found him quite intimidating at first, but over time we kind of got to know each other. We bonded a little bit over music. And he asked me sort of towards the end of my time at the prison, whether I bring him in some sheet music and internet. Now you think about something like this and you're like, well, you know, what's the harm, right?

It's a few pages printed off of, you know, guitar to have literature or something. What could possibly be done in fact? If someone were there to give someone a nasty paper cut. I mean, it's not worth the time and spending segregation for that, I don't think. So I thought, well, that's, you know, that's fine. Let's go ahead and do it.

But of course, what manipulation like that doesn't sort of come, it doesn't start with somebody asking you to bring in half a kilogram of cocaine into the prison, right? It starts with little things like that. So as it turned out, I brought the sheet music to the prison and left it in my car because I had other things on my mind. I think I also had this sort of twinge of conscience

at the last minute, like maybe this isn't such a good idea. And then I had to spend some time away from the prison. When I came back, it turned out that not only had Paul been manipulating several other members of staff in many ways, but he was actually having a sexual relationship with one of the female officers. And it had all come out. And I think, you know, this sort of thing happens from time to time, but the problem was that it was quite clear that other officers were aware that this was going on, but hadn't said anything. And when you have that kind of collusion where everyone's supporting the manipulation to take place, it really is quite worrying because it means the person at the centre, the psychopath in this case,

has fingers in virtually all parts of the organisation and everything is very compromised. So once you have that happen, Paul had to be transferred out and the prison officer lost her job. And it was quite lucky she wasn't in mental health because otherwise she would have been possibly accused and convicted of sexually beef. So that's one aspect. The manipulation is constantly right there

when you work with psychopaths. The second thing is that not everybody who's a psychopath is necessarily rock hard scary and manipulative. Some of them are really really quite vulnerable and you often find yourself getting into the state feeling sorry for them or feeling what we call us a heart sink. Oh my god, this guy's such a terrible life. And it's usually with the young men I'm a dad now I think I may have had a bit of a dad like impulse at the time, oh, look at this guy, he's had a terrible life.

And all his, you know, all his rage is directed inwards. But the thing is that even when people are not outwardly aggressive and difficult like Paul, but maybe like someone like Danny in my book where he's just constantly harming himself and can't really see the good in himself. The problem is that can actually be quite bottomless, that lack of self-esteem, that lack of an identity. And if you start pouring empathy into it, which I did initially, and a lot of staff, I think, never actually stop, it just keeps being drained from you. You never reach a point where that person has filled up with the empathy and the love that they need, because they haven't been able to change the way they think about what the people fundamentally. So those two things, sort of, you know, riding the line

between being alert to the fact you're being manipulated, but also trying to give an appropriate amount of empathy and sympathy. That's what makes the job really, really, really, really challenging. And I think the part of the reason that we were never able to fill the nursing and the doctor and the psychology post that we wanted to to make the program a success, but there you have it. Are there different types of psychopaths? Another in narcissism, you have grandiose narcissists and vulnerable narcissists? Is there any sort of equivalent in psychopathy? I'm very glad you asked me that question, Chris, because this is my current thinking about it, because I think if you look at Paul and Danny, so we have somebody who's got a history

as a sort of drug enforcer, he killed a man, but he didn't do it directly, he got other people to do it for him and then denied or plausibly denied. That was a manipulative guy. That's right. Oh, yeah, as as his character evidently. Absolutely. Killed him with San Guitarsheet music. Oh, God, someone else to kill him with Guitarsheet. I don't know. I don't know. And then you take someone like Danny who has a much more sort of personal crime where he is, he forms a sort of healthy relationship with the local priest and then when he thinks that

the priest is rejecting him for his ideas, he stabs him in the back. I doesn't kill him, but you know, it's a really horrible thing to do to somebody who's trying to help you. And when you think that both of those two members have met the criteria for being a psychopath, I've been, there's lots of argument about where the threshold is using the psychopathy checklist, which we can maybe go into later, but these guys were both way up there, like way over the American threshold of 30, which is higher than the British one. And to say that those guys are both defined by being psychopaths is, I think, totally unhelpful

on a number of levels. And this debate actually goes back a long way to the 1940s and 50s, when Herve Cleckley first published his book on The Mask of Sanity Out To Identify a Psychopath. He quickly, there was a debate in American psychiatry about the fact that actually there were two kinds of psychopaths. There were people that we would call a psychopath or understand a psychopath to be who always have this sort of,

it feels like a character or logical element. And when I say that, I mean that they were sort of, it feels like a character or logical element. And when I say that, I mean that they were sort of born that way. And when you read books like, we need to talk about Kevin, by Lionel Shriver, or you see people who were just bad to the bone on TV like Patrick Bateman or Hannibal Lecter, those of what was traditionally thought of as being a psychopath. And there was another term, sociopath, which referred to people who presented in much the same way as a psychopath. So they had that same lack of empathy. They tended to lie, but they were a bit more violent. They were a bit more sort of uncontrolled.

They were a bit more sort of impulsive. And they were turned sociopath. Now, we don't really use those words anymore, but the idea of a sort of primary psychopath, and a secondary psychopath, the primary psychopath being much more narcissistic and much more sort of outward directed. And the secondary psychopath being a little bit more inward directed and maybe being a psychopath simply for them is a way of defending against horrible emotions

and feelings and guilt and shame for the things they may or may not have done as kids. So that distinction's always been there and I think if you get really into it, you can see how some narcissistic psychopaths and primary psychopaths might be more or less charming. They might be people who are simply very, very good to talk to and great con men, whereas others, I think this is especially true of robbers, just tend to have this really macho image where they think they're on top of the world and they don't need to be charming because if people don't like them,

they'll just bully them into being friends. So there are many more gradations we can start to make. Is the psychopath sociopath distinction? Is that even a thing? Is that just bro science or is that used as a terminology? It's sociopath was used, but then when the Americans published their DSM4, the way that they diagnosed bent for the sort of, they included, in 1983, they included something called

anti-social personality disorder. And this is pretty much, it's just a term for the sort of the behavioral aspects of psychopathy. So none of the sort of conning, manipulative, charming stuff, but more the sort of anti-social lifestyle, parasitism, teleglize, lacking remorse, breaking the law, things like that. And that came to be known in sociopathy over time. But I think because of that confusion between a proper psychopath who's probably made more by the environment and by their genes, being a sociopath to somebody simply an antisocial personality disorder. And to get an antisocial personality disorder is a much more

inclusive term. I think something like 80% of people in prison in the UK and something like 70% of those in the USA will have this diagnosis because one of the traits is breaking the law. So you break the law a lot. Check. But then you get ran to this. Well, why do they break the law? Because they've got an antisocial personality disorder. Why do they've got an antisocial personality disorder? Because they've got unsocial personality disorder, why do they've got unsocial personality disorder? Because they've broke the law. It doesn't really go anywhere. So it's not a terribly helpful diagnosis. But if you think of it as a sort of a Venn diagram,

the vast majority of psychopaths will also have unsocial personality disorder. And most people who have unsocial personality will won't be psychopaths. And there's only that sort of interesting distinction of people with a diagnosis of psychopathy who won't have ASPD, and then more we like to think of a successful psychopaths, people who haven't been caught

or people who just don't break the law, but they're still psychopaths, right? How much is heritability and genetics, how much does that play a role when it comes to someone becoming a psychopath, and how much of it is the environment? So that's a tricky one because we have pretty good evidence that there are, I suppose, heritable characteristics in psychopaths and in particular, those are what we call the callous on emotional traits. So the fact that psychopaths don't really seem to feel any remorse or what they do, They struggle to have empathy with other people and they can be very callous.

They can do things and then not really feel sorry for them. I think because you know, they're wiring's different. They don't have the connection between the forefront of the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the amygdala, the rest of us do to identify things like, you know, disgust, fear, anger, disappointment that we sort of live our lives by. Psychopaths don't really interpret those signals in the same way. So they don't feel shame. They don't feel guilt.

And children's young is seven or nine years old can experience or show those traits as well. But of course, a large proportion of them won't then go on to be psychopaths. I think only about 40% will ever progress to a point where they have something like enough traits to be diagnosable to the psychopath. So it's not the whole picture to say it's just genes. And then there's these wonderful cases like James Fallon in press of neuroscience in Stanford University. Successful career, I'm very interested in psychopathy himself, I wonder why. And he was doing a study where he exposes people to unpleasant stimuli, like looking at an unpleasant image of maybe wound detail, or maybe a pleasant image of a butterfly or

so on and at that. And then he measures their brain response using, I think, its contrast to tomography. So you look at which areas of the brain are being activated, like a CT scan. And then you look at particular areas of the brain are being activated, like a CT scan. And then you look at particular areas of the brain corresponding to how people are, with the stimulus that people are receiving. So if you give a psychopath an image of, I'd know, a war zone and you give the same image to someone,

who isn't a psychopath, the psychopath will show much lower levels of neurological activity in response to that stimulus because they don't recognize as something that's necessarily bad. So Jim's conducting this experiment and he has a lot of clinical psychopaths for his experimental arm and he's looking for some people for his control arm and he's struggling because he's used up all his grad students and he hasn't properly advertised. He's like, well, I'll just scan

myself and then you know that'll be fine. And then he's looking through the results of the trial and he finds in his control arm, a brain scan for someone who really looks very, very psychopathic, there's virtually no brain activation. He's written a book about this, which is really interesting. And the scans in the book, and it's terrifying. His person's completely psychopathing. He's like, oh my god, have I got this wrong? Is this person definitely in the control group? And he looks at the scan, goes to his master key, where we see all the people who are taking part and he realizes that this is his own brain scan. He is functionally a psychopath studying psychopaths at Stanford University. He's got a wife and a kid, he's got a very successful career and he thinks about it and he thinks

well actually when I really think about it, I really struggle with a lot of roles that I play in life because I don't see why I have to do, I don't it, I really struggle with a lot of the roles that I play in life because I don't see why I have to do, I don't see why I have to be a good dad. When people come to stay at my house, I just think, why am I letting you eat my food? It's my food. Get out of here. I didn't invite you. Who are you anyway? And these kids are in there. There's also a little video associated to promote the book. And it's like, yeah, that can be difficult. It doesn't really do emotion things. All these little tiny clues that add up to a

picture of somebody who clearly has some sort of background, maybe a relative or something that would have caused his psychotic come out, but doesn't have any of the behavioral features you know, good career, good family life, a bit cranky at the weekends maybe, but that could describe me as well. I'm far too neurotic to be a psychopath. Would he have met the criteria, whatever it is, 26 or above or 30 or above on the scale? Would he have met that? No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't because I think that the psychopath test, Bob Hayes, psychically checklist revised, has pretty much, and

I'd like to say an equal split, but actually the behavioral stuff, so breaking the law, being impulsive, being irresponsible, taking drugs, being what we call criminally versatile, so having a lot of offenses from different categories. All that's in the secondary psychopathic factor, factor two, as we call it. And Jim Fallon had none of that, so he'd never even have got halfway up the scale, which wouldn't have had enough to diagnose him as a clinical that, so he'd never even got halfway up the scale, which wouldn't have had any benefit to diagnosis a clinical psychopath if you'd like. Well that's interesting, because what that shows is that you can have someone who has the predisposition, or perhaps the ingredients, to become a psychopath, but for whichever

reason they haven't behaviorally deployed that into the world in a psychopathic way. Is that the right way to look at it? Absolutely. And I think I can even support your hypothesis a bit further by saying that all of the psychopaths I've met in clinical practice have lives that are really just messed up. And I can mean a lot of different things like that, like some of them are from the middle class, but their relationships with their parents, their mothers and fathers are messed up in really

sort of, sometimes quite twisted ways. And, you know, for example, this is something we call enmeshment where somebody never quite breaks away from one of their parents. So typically, you're all, let's talk about Tony, who's one of the cases in my book, he had an enmesh relationship with his mother where he was never really able to break away from her emotionally. So even though he was in his late 40s when I was working with him and his mother would come to visit, often they would part with quite a lingering kiss on the lips and I used

to get all of these very upset nurses who've been supervising the visit saying, oh, they did that thing again. You know, we're going to do, we have to address this. And sort of visits in hospitals are quite sacred. So we can't mess it up, but it really did freak people out. And the way that, you know, he seemed to sort of function or do the things he did just to sort of please his mother all the time was really interesting

and the way that it sort of overrid his own personality. It sort of meant that he, his own person, you know, who, who are you, Tony? And he would really struggle to answer that question. So he was a very good con man. He was very psychopathic. But none of those things really make a person who they are. And I think one of the reasons that he was such a good con man is because he could play any role, because he wasn't really playing a role. That was him. He lacked to sort of, you know, I'm Mark, I'm an academic, I'm neurotic, I do very strange things in my spare time, like read about, I'm reading right about psychopath. That's who I am. But for Tony, there wasn't that sort of call. He didn't have anything that wasn't the slick

comment. And that's no concrete sense of self is very, very malleable. If you were to design the childhood to activate the psychopathic genetic tendency, what would you have happened to a child? That's a interesting way around of asking it, Chris. But I'd say you've got a lot of options unfortunately. You've got. So let's start thinking about someone like Tony, where does enmeshment come from? And I think enmeshment comes from, well, in Tony's case, there's two things. First of all, a father who's very potent, very present. So the father was a con man, as well, a very successful one, considerably more successful than Tony, because I can't find any record of who he was or who never being caught, but there we go. And then the father, in terms

of case, disappeared. So if a father leaves a kid, particularly in sort of, you know, preteen, teen years, they can become very, very, I guess, embedded in the kids' memories as like a perfect dad. They didn't stay around on them to fuck it up, basically. So in that case, the relationship turns very much towards the mother because that's the only parent you've got left. And in this specific case, I think the mother also tended to be very, very overbearing. She didn't want to separate from her son. She wanted him to be around all the time. She wanted to have almost like an adult intimate relationship with them. You know, with not necessarily sexual, but having that sort of, you know, that same level of intimacy, like we cannot part, we cannot

be different from each other. And if you look back at some of the early psychoanalytic writing from sort of the 40s, 50s and 60s, this is all very much identified, very strong patriarchal figure and potentially overbearing over in meshed mother as well. Lots of people talk about Ted Bundy as being a nice... I was literally about to say the same thing because his mother was still at the trial, had this sort of angel boy, my beautiful perfect child's vision of him. Right, and so there's that, and there's also the fact

that I think his father was not particularly somebody of Mary, but his grandfather was a hugely sort of paternalistic, overbearing, dominating figure in his life. And there were all these sort of signs that would encourage somebody to be psychopathic. I don't know about, this is the interesting thing is being a psychopath doesn't necessarily make you a criminal like Jim Phalam, right? What pushed

Bundy to commit his crime specifically is a different question, but certainly being a psychopath and not having that same level of moral restraint could make it easier for you to commit crimes like that. The other, if we think a little bit about what we talk about, sociopathy as well, secondary psychopaths, I think they can be much more formed by an environment that's very abusive and harsh. And I remember, some of the work within the UK actually, who was very much a sociopath, a secondary psychopath.

So somebody who wasn't charming, wasn't particularly cunning, wasn't very glib, but was very anti-social, a very remorseless, and very callous, did bad things so that people didn't feel bad about it. He recanted this episode that still stays with me, he's not in the book, he's just a very interesting character and he was 12 years old and his dad was very again, very dominant but his dad wanted him to

be tough, you know. So he gets into a fight with some older boys and the scarves, you know, even in his 40s, very cheeky and sort of like to push boundaries. So he probably said something a little bit out of his station. So much group, much older boys chase him alone down the street. And he knows he's going to get everything beaten out of him if he stays around. So he runs home, bangs on the door. There's that open to the door and says, what is it? Jim and Jim says, oh these guys are chasing me, they're going to beat me up dad, you've got to help me. And he says, no, sort it out yourself, it'll make you stride and closes the door in his face. Other guys arrive, beat him up right side, right outside his family's front door. And he never forgets that. But he

doesn't remember it as I would, which is my God, wasn't your dad an awful bastard, but rather as his dad making him tough, unless being a good thing, that his dad made him realize that at the end nobody's got your back, I was just like, that's an awful lesson to learn from that story. But nevertheless, if you are brought up like that, then you're gonna develop something like a psychopathic defense

because feeling emotion and trying to think about events like that in terms of what they mean for you as a person, it's going to be really hard, so better just not to think about them emotionally at all, better distance yourself and act like a psychopath. Have you got any idea why psychopathy is adaptive? Why it would have evolved at all? So we often think about this about personality disorders of all kinds because they're chronic, they don't go away.

I think the way that we think about personalities or in terms of anti-social, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic isn't terribly helpful because it suggests that there's sort of a typical psychopath or a typical narcissist or a typical skit toy person. And that is very rarely the case. These people are often very, very different. But they do have these sort of core features. And I think the thinking is, if particularly you, if we think back to, let's say Vikings, yeah, a society which very, very limited resources, it has to sort of parasitize from other societies in order to gain the resources it needs to proliferate, right? To start new colonies to expand. So, you know, we both lived in Newcastle for one, Linda's farm, the Montenores Street there was very rich and very prone to

raiding by Viking invaders. Absolutely. And they were sacked and they were murdered. And now all that stuff was taken, they kept coming coming back bless them. And I think, you know, there's some sort of period when the sick, sickle is entry where the Vikings came four or five times a year. In order to do that, to be able to, I mean, you know, anybody can do something terrible, but to be able to do something terrible, and then do it again. And I think this is where we start to think about post-traumatic stress disorder. It's literally the case that some offenders in prison have done such terrible things that they've traumatized themselves. So when they sort of say, I don't really remember the offense, in some cases, they might be telling the truth because they may not be actually able to access those memories. But that isn't how a psychopath works because

a psychopath wouldn't experience that shame and trauma in response to doing bad things because they don't see these as bad things. They see, I'm going to go and protect my family. In order to protect my family, I have to provide them with food, and I have to find them as clothes, I have to find them as well, so that we can have more kids. If I have to kill some people to do that,

it's not a problem, because that's what I want to do. And this is what we call instrumental reasoning. So all that the focus is is on the end. Yeah, the means are totally relevant. Yeah, I need to get there. If people die or get messed up on the way, oh well, that's unfortunate because you say it's unfortunate, but I don't really buy into that.

So having a group of people in your society, not all of them, I should stress, but a group of people in your society who can repeatedly go out and do violent, stressful, traumatic things in service of the wider family is extremely adaptive. And you can actually think of how there are certain models like this for things like borderline personality, to sort of people who lack a fixed identity, who require a level of support and steer that just isn't available in our societies anymore today. You can see how genetically that would actually be quite adaptive, but in modern societies where you can't be a violent asshole and you can't be entirely violent asshole and you can't be entirely dependent on other people rather than you want because it's an individualistic

society, they're no longer adaptive and they cause problems for people and they also cause problems for the people around them as well. Dude, you blow my mind. That's so interesting. That's so interesting. So if you were to think of a typical tribe, your Dunbar, 100 person tribe or whatever, as like a football team, you need a goalkeeper. And your goalkeeper has a very specific role to play. Now the team wouldn't work if everybody tried to be a goalkeeper.

Now the same thing is happening here. So I had a really good discussion about narcissists a couple of years ago. And in that, it was basically suggested that the social ecology constrains narcissism, that if you have too many narcissists, it becomes so chaotic within your tribe that it can't continue to work. So not only do you have social norms, which restricts sort of narcissistic tendencies, but narcissists are probably killed at a higher rate than non-nascist people. And I'm going to guess that psychopaths, it's like a high-risk, high-reward strategy of existing. So you're more

likely to die, but you're also more likely to become the billionaire or the chiefed-in of the tribe or something like that, which is a lot of the time why people point the finger at presidents and say they're a psychopath. So that's so interesting to think that individually as a person, whether it's adaptive or not is kind of up for debate, but for the tribe overall, having a few psychopaths, or maybe one or two psychopaths per group, is actually like having a very specialized weapon or a tool that you can deploy into certain circumstances. And then if you scale up to the size of the Vikings, I don't know how big that was, what

I'm going to guess, perhaps in the thousands, you may be able to condense down a boat, a long boat of 30 psychopaths with a couple of non-psychopaths, and you can send them over to Lindisfan to sack them and come back. That's so good. Yeah, and I think just to add to that, the other thing about psychopaths is they have terrible risk reward reason, particularly socially. So if you, you know, if you play a game of poker with the psychopath, they'll continue to bet outrageously based on very, very bad cards. And I think that that's really interesting that psychopaths are such good conmen in some cases.

They can actually carry that off. They can play bragg very effectively. But if you have somebody who can't make those risk rule or calculate those, think if I go off to Lindisfar, they may have got wires and station Celtic soldiers all around the edges and we're going to go there and we're going to get fucked up. They won't think of it in that kind of way. All they'll be focused on is the potential reward. The

risk is irrelevant to cyclists. We've shown this again and again in research literature that they just don't factor that in. Also, if you, again, I was talking about trauma, if cyclists come back from these raids and they're not traumatized, they can just go and do it again and again till they're all killed off. I think with the exactly we're using of narcissists, again till they're all killed off. And I think with the exactly we're using of narcissists, again, there is sort of like, you know, a sense of maybe a critical mass or maybe a point to which those kind of traits are valued by a society,

but only up to a point. You know, you can only be as much so much of a narcissist before it becomes intolerable for society. And I think that changes over time. I think the amount of narcissism will accept shifts quite a lot. I'm not necessarily in, so I think about narcissism as a clinical condition. And when I read stuff from the United States

about there being an epidemic of narcissism, I've recently went to an article that got quite a lot of attention that says, that's not how, that's not helpful. You've got to really post them on Instagram. We're not talking about that. No, we're the, because we need to draw a line between, I think we all have, we all need a bit of what's called narcissistic supply. We all need a little bit of telling that we're good people who've done right things. Yeah, that we're important, right? If we don't have that, then our

self-esteem drops and we feel terrible. And NASA assists a particularly grandiose, and our assists don't have that need at all because they're so absolutely convinced that they're right, that it's sort of a non-issue. So like with psychopathy and our nurses and together, and there's a lot of correlation between the two, I should say, so a lot of the sort of more grandiose, and our assists can also have psychopathy and vice versa. I think there is a limit, and I think that if we think about Stephen Pinker's work on the reduction of violence in societies over time, these aren't societies that value the traits and the qualities that psychopaths have, but I'm sure that they were such societies

many stages in our past. Who was that guy that tried to get someone to buy the Eiffel Tower? I do know who you were comment, some time ago. I do know who you mean, but that, so someone like Tony, that's an old con, selling off old ones of the world or structures that have had quite a few years on them and plausibly could be ready to be decommissioned and replaced at something better. That's one of the oldest cons in the book, because you try and attract investors into this great opportunity. And you're basically selling the Eiffel Tower to someone who's colourable enough to believe that it could be up the sale. And that's all about the graph,

right? That's all about how you present yourself as a plausible salesman. So someone like Tony in the book, you know, he's got the best suits. He's got his own bank. He's got a chauffeur. He's got a Mercedes-Benz. All things that he's obtained through very dodgy means, but nevertheless, you know, when you start signing in checks from your own bank, people start to pay attention. And if you've seen enough, and I think with Tony's case, he'd seen enough from his dad about how you get people to buy a cotton. It's very difficult because this is what I don't want to get to tell you, we call this malignant pseudo identification. So you see what somebody wants in a situation, you learn from watching other people in the same situation fall for the cotton. And you think, why do they fall for the cotton? And you're not thinking emotionally, you're thinking

they fall for the cotton because they want this. So if I can promise that plausibly, then I can pretty much take them for everything they got because once I have them believing they're going to get, you know, a 10,000% return on their scrap of the rifle tower, that, you know, they're finished because the psychbevel keep doing that, that scam over and over again. I worked with a guy who posed as a police officer and he would go into people's flats and offer to move their jewelry and money to a safe place in the flat. I'd say it was obviously a secret police procedure and he'd tell them where he was going to leave it. He'd take it, put it all in a police marked bag and then walk out of the house and then tell them to check after he's gone it was all there but of course when they checked it wasn't there and he wasn't

a police officer so there was no way they'd track it down and that you know isn't a particularly complex scam but what is amazing is the fact that he had something like 600 instances of the same scam on his rap sheet like 600 it's just unbelievable numbers of sort of cons that have gone down in this guy and how good he must have been to be able to identify people who would fall for this and carry it out again and again. So it really is quite a sort of remorseless rate of success once they get the graft right, you know. What's interesting to me is that psychopathy perhaps for a long time throughout human history, let's say maybe the last 10,000,

20,000 years has been pretty useful. And then for the last 100, 200, 300 years, it's now no longer adaptive. It's now a big problem. It's strange that we may have culturally competed psychopaths out of their place in society. I wouldn't go too far with that. I mean, I think there's still a lot of places where psychopaths can flourish to a degree.

I think the difficulty is that we have to think a little bit more carefully in the way we define psychology, particularly about whether things like aggression, violence and anti-social behavior are necessarily part of that. And if you think about, I don't know, I'm sure we can all imagine some recent political figures who've been diagnosed with psychroath. Are they aggressive? Are they anti-social?

I mean, they're very self-serving, I'm sure. But those descriptors don't really define them. aggressive, are they anti-social? I mean they're very self-serving, I'm sure, but those descriptors don't really define them. So we need to think more crisply, I think, about what it is that makes a psychopath. We need to do that without thinking about behaviour, because the factors that drive behaviour are very, very complicated. There's a colleague of mine, Kerry Daines, forensics like I was also written books about a work. And she says, I know a guy who is a murderer, they've killed, I think about 15 people in their life, life time, they've killed women and children included in that total, but they've never been to prison and they're not a psychopath. And this person is of course a, then a say yes,

come on, no, special forces, come on, who does this as part of their job. Now, that behavior, it's possible this person is a psychopath, short, you know, my colleague didn't think so and she's quite experienced, so it's possible this person is a psychopath, but that's sort of irrelevant here because the reason that they're doing these things is not because they are instrumentally driven, it's because it's their job and it's their function in life to do that. So we can't really infer psychopathy from behaviour and we need to start moving away from that way of defining psychopathy and think much more in terms of the sort of psychological and emotional traits that people have.

And if we were able to do that, well, I guess the core is that we have a lot more, I don't know, a lot more psychopaths in probably politics, use car sales, possibly cheap executives, stop traders. use car sales, possibly cheap executives. Is it true? Stop traders, but. Does that sort of focal or thing, about 1% of the population are psychopaths? Is there any legs to that? Yeah, it's less than that. But we did in the 2000 Adult Psychiatric Mobility Survey,

which is a representative survey of people in the UK, which isn't currently in equivalent of in the USA, but there are some other surveys you can use to estimate it. We actually included the PCLSV, the screening version of the psychopathy checklist, which you don't need to do a long interview for. And we looked at the proportion of people who were diagnosable psychopaths in the UK household populations, about 1 or 0.4 to 0.6%. So about 1 in 170 to 200 people would have been diagnosable as a psychopath.

Which is actually why I would have. Still quite. And if you think they tend to get banged up with quite high propensity, that we did also find that group, the group of successful psychopaths who didn't have long criminal careers. But what was interesting about was that they did use a lot of designer drugs. They tended to have quite high risk high-reward jobs. They also had declared bankruptcy a lot more often. And very interestingly, their annual average household income was significantly higher than people in the general population. So they were successful, like more successful than not just getting by, but actually flourishing, give or take the bankrupts.

I risk I reward man. I risk I reward. Why is it? Why is it that there's so few female psychopaths? Well, I think that that that sort of part of this is recursive. Like if we are judging psychopathy on the basis of behavior, male men are more anti-social men, they're more men who go to prison, they're more men who meet the criteria for juvenile delinquency, for criminal versatility, for poor behavioral controls. And therefore, that's sort of a bias factor in using something like the psychopathy checklist

because we use a lot of behavior that's just more typically associated with men. There are female psychopaths in my book I talk about Angela Simpson, who presents very much as a really seriously high scoring male psychopath. What does that mean? So that means that on the psychopathy checklist she would score in the mid to high 30s. You know, there are very few of the items that she doesn't hit, very glib, very superficially charming, very manipulative because she manipulates a disabled man into her apartment on the premise of sex

and then tortures and brutally murders him over a long, long period of time. So it's a really gratuitous unpleasant offence. And I think actually when Phoebe Wallerbridge was starting to think about killing Eve, she wanted to start thinking about a psychopath She saw these interviews on TV and she was like, that's amazing And they are really that's really really masculine presenting psychopath traits and there's a sort of It's a literature that sort of how people think about female psychopaths that there isn't really There isn't really a sort of clinical basis for like we don't have a lot of female psychopaths So we're kind of guessing here but people think of female psychopaths as more emotionally

aggressive using people as cat sports, something of something like dangerous liaisons where you know the market uses people around her to do the dirty work so she can manipulate people but that can do it behind the scenes. That's sort of the archetype but again again, if you were doing that successfully, you wouldn't necessarily get caught for it. And secondly, of the 2000, we commissioned like 2000 beds for May, it mailed psychopaths in the UK in dangerous and severe personalities order. And then caught it for tea beds, for zero beds for women of which 15 were only ever filled. I love the rest of just decommissioned. So the profile of women who we would be able to use

to say a research population, this female psychosis, very, very small, and we don't know enough to sort of say, well, the archetypal female psychopath is like this. The evidence that we do have is that psychopathy tends to be invariant, but then you can't have behavioral invariance when one of the behavioral factors is aggression

or anti-sociality, for example, because we know those are possible as men. I suppose as well that if you have aggression and beating someone up or killing somebody is such an obvious red flag for you to identify a psychopath, whereas it must be easier to get away with manipulating people, doing the cat's ball type thing, you know, the femme-fetile type, but without perhaps the physical aggression, because fewer people are going to report the fact that they were conned by a woman and blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, that's, I mean, what you're saying is if you are going to be a psychopath, make sure that you're a woman first, because it's going to be easier on average to get away with it.

But what's explained the story of that lady, because that was really surprising when she did to that man. Well, and this is a, this is a gain of very psychopathic trait of a sort of grandiosity. So believing that you are the central world and your decisions are the right ones to always make.

And she worked as a sex worker and a waitress and she had, she knew a guy in the community around her who'd been to prison for a while and they had a sort of on-off relationship thing and he was probably destroyed his body with drugs and alcohol and other things and he was sometimes used to wheelchairs to get around. And then one day it turned out she heard, I think, from a third party that this guy had said that he'd informed on one of his colleagues for criminal behavior to the police. And she sort of, from this idle conversation forms

and I did, she's going to kill him. So she persuades him to come and meet her and then she's sort of quite tantalizing and sort of sexually provocative and gets him to come back meet her and then she's sort of quite tantalising and sort of sexually provocative and gets him to come back to her flat and leaves his wheelchair a quite some distance in the stairway. So it doesn't look like a way from the stairway, so it doesn't look like he's come in there. And then you know brings him into the living room, sits him down in front of the TV, then ties him up while he's not going to his wheelchair, can't really get away, and starts torturing him, driving nails into his skull, and he lives for about

sort of seven or eight hours through this, and only dies in the early morning after the end of the ordeal, and then she gets her current partner to help her, take the body that says, dismember it, burn it and get rid of the evidence, all because she doesn't like, she says she doesn't like snitches, and if you, there's a lot of YouTube videos available of her being interviewed by some of the American TV channels, and it's quite chilling, the way that she presents this. Somebody says, would you do a game's hell yeah,

without a second's hesitation. Really, actually just aggressive, it's just aggressive, the way that she presents. And very, very remorseless, callous, just, pretty typical male psychopathy. And that's quite rare in a female presenting, sorry, female presenting with psychopathy, but there are elements to it that fit with the stereotypes. She doesn't just dispose the body on her own, she gets her boyfriend to do it, and then gets him to keep stung with some sort of promise. There's the sort of sense of, you know, she's using sexuality to bring somebody up to

be murdered, maybe some, well, I can't think of the male cyclist I've worked with is doing that, although some of them would attack sex workers, so it's not completely different. Who was that one in America? Was it the night stalker? Was he the one that was going around killing the endless numbers of? Oh, no, the Yorkshire Ripper in the UK was someone that was almost exclusively working on sex workers, right? Yes, yes, yes, that's right. And there was a... I think you would qualify as a serial killer,

I think he had two, three offenses. So we target men in toilets, coaching locations in London, and you know, bring them back, put them in a cubicle with the premise of sexual contact, and then strangle them from behind, and again, very, very, very psychopathic because you've got to have that charm to get people to do what you want to do. And some of the other, you know, some of the robbers I've worked with, like I said, they just, they don't have the graph that you couldn't,

you wouldn't trust this man's voice, you could throw them, right? So you'd never be able to, to trust them in a situation where you were vulnerable. There has to be a sort of something disarming or seductive about that. So you need, they need the charm to offset the Ick factor that people feel when they're

around them. How often is it, how often does sex come into this? I was watching, um, who is the dude that dressed up as the clown in America? That clown killer. You know the one I mean, come on, people are screaming it into that. I'm terrible, I'm terrible. People are terrible on Zoom. I'm screaming it into their apple,

I'm gonna Google it. There was this guy who was regularly killing people, he's one of the most famous serial killers, clown, clown, serial, John Wayne Gacy. John Wayne Gacy. Right. Like I said, I'm terrible was you know so One of the things that he it seemed like he did was He seemed to be sexually attracted to

Some more many or all of the boys that he killed it was mostly guys that he killed might have been exclusively guys that he killed But it seemed like he had a self-hatred of his own sexuality. It seemed like his shame was one of the compulsions that caused him to do that. I'm just interested by how much, you know, we've talked about some of these killers going after sex workers, John Wayne Gacy here, almost killing in response, perhaps to his own sense of guilt or shame around his sexuality. How often does sex seem to come into it? So yeah, that's an interesting question.

I think I guess I'm just hesitant to say that psychopaths have a particular pattern of offending behavior because they, you know, really, the range of offences we had in somewhere like Rampton was very, very broad and it included child sex offences. But one of the interesting things about Rampton was that nobody in a hospital you don't disclose people's offences. So nobody knew what anyone else had done. So we have this really interesting dynamic between two old friends of a guy who were in their 50s when I was there. So, you know, 20 years ago, they'd be quite old now. And one of them was a child sex offender. Very sort of overweight, not particularly appealing person, but his best make was someone called

overweight, not particularly appealing person, but his best make was someone called Tony or something. Tony was in the hospital because he killed and dismembered H.R. sex offender. And it was really interesting that these two had such a sort of positive dynamic that they, you know, didn't know simply because they didn't know each other's offences. So a real range of men in this same ward with very, very different offenses. And I think the thing about where there was, it seemed to be that where there was a sexual element, psychopaths, I'll quite sexually promiscuous, they don't kind of have maybe the same scruples or strong feelings about what their partners should be or look like that the rest of us do. So they tend to be very promisc curious, but they also tend to target partners in a way that would suggest

like a sort of marital type relationship. So they don't just sort of randomly go off and pull people and you know have sex with them and then leave them. They tend to try and pull people into and more into a relationship, but only with the goal of satisfying their needs for comfort intimacy and perhaps also, you know, things like money and Safety so you know you'd live with someone because they are partner But not because you're really interested never having a long-term relationship And it was they are meeting or instrumental goals immediate instrumental goals So this means that sex becomes quite a sort of currency for psychopath It's something I would say, but the thing is then

The current justice system gets very very black and white about what exactly takes place in the index offense of currency for psychopaths, which is something I would say. But the thing is then the current justice system gets very, very black and white about what exactly takes place in the index offense. And if you rape someone and kill them, it's likely that the crime prosecutions have as well go for just the murder as the crime rather than murder and rape because then you've got two cases to build, two charges to consider, two lots of evidence, you just go with the murder. So some of the crimes that people or that I would have understood as being murder might well have had sexual elements that were not necessarily present in maybe the description of the offense. And it could be kept secret because they were never charged and convicted of, you know, a sexually intended murder. An example

was when I worked within special hospitals who murdered a woman by inserting a sharpened a broom into her vagina and it's just you know horrible way to go and he was convicted of murder which meant that he had protection from all of being perceived as a I'm so sorry being perceived as a sex offender or a nonce or anything like that. And he was also quite grandiose and quite manipulative and he used his status as a violent criminal, a murderer to avoid being targeted as a sex offender. And this is all about, I guess, the hierarchy of offenses and prisons of why people present themselves in the way that they do.

But it was a little bit chilling that, you know, this was clearly a sexual offence, but he got away with being judged in that way because it being classified as a violent one, by a sort of slightly arbitrary system. That's so interesting, the fact that because what the criminal justice system is actually looking for is a conviction. And if you've got a conviction of murder, presumably that you're going to be in there for so long that adding rape on top of that is kind of pointless, it doesn't really make any sense. So yeah, it's also every time that I speak to somebody that works in prisons or with criminals and stuff like that, this hierarchy of offense always seems to come up. And I suppose that

of offense always seems to come up. And I suppose that beyond your net worth in the prison has a little bit of a bearing on you but not tons because you don't have your money with you. You know your possessions or your house or the clothes that you wear or the watch that you have and all of that stuff's been stripped away from you. Your job title, your qualifications, your education, your family, all of this stuff really doesn't really matter.

So one of the few things you have that can quickly identify where you sit in there is what's on the rap sheet. Absolutely, and this leads to these very bizarre hierarchies where often, as I said, sex offenders are at the bottom. Yet, they are vulnerable prisoners. Often, we spend a lot of time and sort of thought in the prison service protecting them. And the top is, you know, the violent criminals, say murderers or people who've committed attempted murder

which can be very misleading. And at the very top of that, the robbers, because the thing about robbing, so I want to say it's pretty definitely, you know, indisputably, a violent offensive. Maybe you did, you know, maybe you did or didn't kill someone. I love that in Prison break the the guy gets himself into the prison by being a robber because you just all you have to do is a robber

So it's threatening with a weapon, right plausibly So you walk into a bank with a gun make some sort of unspecified threat. You're a robber and that That goes a long way from sort of somebody who is maybe a serial robber who targets people very aggressively and looking for an excuse to harm them, to someone who makes a botched attempt because they're a drug addict, to hold up a convenience store or something, and there's busted and charged with a very serious, violent offense, very, very different. But the group of robbers contains, for example, a lot of psychopaths,

a lot of psychopaths. Has anyone tried to cure psychopathy? Yeah, a lot of things have been tried, Chris, but it's a pretty sad tale. In the 1670s, they got quite experimental. They tried things like naked encounter therapy. They tried LSD. What's naked encounter therapy? So you take off all your clothes,

and this was specifically targeted for cyclists. You take a look close, sit around in a room together, talk about your life, you're offending. And there's sort of the idea, I think, behind it was that if you strip off all the social expectations you find that at heart, it was social society that made Cyopast bad and then you put them in a sort of primal situation, they'd be much better to each other.

They weren't, and curiously enough, it actually made them worse or more likely to be convicted of a violent offense after that. So, totally, total failure on every point. Isolation tank therapy, and there were a few, there'd been a few like, you know, well-meaning but misguided attempts to use like less less directive form so actually a hospital had a Personality disorder board which have quite a few psychopaths on it and the staff tried to be given a little bit more freedom and I think the staff somehow got the wrong under the stick about what freedom appropriate freedom was for a psychopath and there was One of the patients who was there on a transfer said that there was or accused or told the hospital authorities that there was a girl being groomed by the ward patients to come onto the ward and be used for sex and other terrible

things. And they lost the hospital authorities and there was an inquiry which found that basically the staff at Ladinselves be completely manipulated out of the ward altogether. So there's also an interesting lesson there about putting a lot of psychopaths together in one place which maybe we hadn't learned by the time of DSPD. Who is one of the scariest psychopaths that you've worked with? that you've worked with. So we, I think thinking about Paul, I mean, he was sort of scaring the sense of interpersonal, you know, you wouldn't want to be with him for any length of time because you, you know, he might try and manipulate you

and he would just might try and bully you. And that sort of constant sense of threat, the idea that there might be other people on the ward everyone from patients to prisons to prison officers might be working for him on some capacity. That's a very scary thought as well. You never quite know who's on your side. But I think that there are other characters who are slightly more sinister than that. Characters, you really don't get to the bottle. And there was a patient I worked with in lower conditions of security, but who'd been up in high security for a long time. And was someone who'd just seen to be wired very very differently and the way that his wiring worked was that he was deeply unpredictable. So you could talk to him

one day and you'd have somebody who was quite pleasant and engaged and interesting. And then it wasn't necessarily like hour to hour but certainly day to day he could switch into a very very aggressive and work at any questions. What the fuck you ask me that? And you were still thinking of the guy from yesterday, so you didn't know where this new guy came from. And his offending history was very complex and there was a murder in his history and several of their attacks on people.

And some of it may have had a sexual element, but it was again very difficult to tease out. And if somebody's not willing to work with you to think about sort of the psychosexual aspects of their offending, you're never going to get to the bottom of those things. And I think let's call him Trevor. So Trevor A, the pleasant one often dropped hints that he was ready to talk about this stuff. And then curiously enough, Trevor B would shut the next day and tell you to fuck off and that would sort of be the end of the discussion at least for the next year until Trevor A appeared again. But I think this was a case that really affected me and maybe I'm not describing it enough but that inconsistency, it used to give me

nightmares like I used to have nightmares where either he was killing me or I was killing him because working as a clinician with someone like that you get very very frustrated and confused and difficult to organize your thoughts because you don't know who's going to be presenting your opposite. So I think that's sort of when somebody's deeply unpredictable. If someone's predictably nasty, that's actually okay, but it's like, you know, how trauma works, if the goalpost change every time you come into work, it can really mess you up quite quickly. And I think that, I would have have said was the case that thinking of sort of generating a sense of fear and anxiety, I mean, that certainly did it the most, yeah. All right, Mark, let's bring this one home. If people want to check out the work that you do, where should they go?

I would say, you know, Google me, I've got a university web page, you can also find my book, Making a Psychopath, published by Penguin in the UK and Millen in the USA. It's a short read, it's not intended to be very heavily academic or anything like that. And some of the characters I've talked about today are in it as well. So I hope you enjoy it if you do happen to find it. All right Mark, I appreciate you. Lovely to be here Chris, thanks so much for having me. Offense, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah