The Jordan Harbinger Show - 28: James Fallon | How to Spot a Psychopath

Episode Date: April 12, 2018

James Fallon (@jameshfallon) is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine and author of The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. What We Discuss with James Fallon: The ingredients that go into creating a psychopath. The differences between psychopaths and sociopaths. How we as a society can limit the expression of psychopathic and sociopathic traits -- and why evolution hasn't done the job already. How to spot a psychopath. Why psychopaths are so good at manipulating people -- and what we can do about it. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

I think it's very important to have enough people in any population that, well, first of all, would love to go kill somebody. Also, they are people, especially the thrill seekers, love to go over the mountain and have sex with anybody they find on the other side. And so psychopathy, which is so stable in all human society, they can come in handy. And they take risks that others don't. And they take smart risks. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer. Jason DePhilippo. On this episode, we're talking with Dr. James Fallon. He is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Psychopath

Inside, A Neuroscientist's Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. This is a psychopath who studies psychopaths, but the story of how he discovered he was a psychopath will trip you up. You're never going to believe it. We also discuss the ingredients of a psychopath, or a psychopathic brain, sociopaths, and the difference between the two, and how we, as a society can limit the expression of psychopathic, sociopathic traits in our civilization and why evolution hasn't bred these personality traits out of existence already. And last but not least, certainly a couple of practicals here, how to spot a psychopath as well as why psychopaths are so good at manipulating people and what we can do about it. Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's

episode so you can make sure you solidify all the key takeaways and your understandings here from Dr. James Fallon. That link, as always, in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. All right. Here's Jimmy Fallon. And how many people say, Jimmy Fallon and make some joke about that, you know, in the last few years? That's got to be your life now.

Well, I do get that. And Jimmy Fallon did have my book on his show. He showed my book. And it was kind of funny because we come from the same area of the country in upstate New York and went to Catholic schools and we were both class clowns, you know. And so we shared a fair amount. a background. And so I usually get that, but I get it in the funniest places. It's when I go to the racetrack and they're signing in for something and they go, and they'll ask me some wise guy

question about Jimmy Fallon. So I'll get it all over the place. Do you know what I mean? It's in weird places at the bank or, you know, something like that. Yeah, I would imagine that happens all the time. Yeah. And your reservation, what's the name, James Fallon? Oh, well, cool. Nope, it's just me. Absolutely. That's exactly it. Yeah. So, This is a crazy story I've read about in many other books coming across the science of the mind, which made me look you up and reach out to you. Tell us the story of how you were researching this topic and what you found that changed your life. I'm a neuroscientist.

I do a lot of neuroanatomy. And since about 1989, I've studied the PET scans, you know, brain imaging scans of killers, serial killers, really bad murders. And you should did one or two a year. for many years. And then in 2005, 2006, I got set a ton of them. And there were spec scans, fMRI, PET scans and everything. And it's something that I really wasn't an expert in at all, psychopathy or murderers. I did a lot of other things. We do a lot of work in schizophrenia and addictions and Alzheimer's, you name it. But this was something different. And these were students

of mine who became psychiatrists. They were doing these court cases. And so they'd bring these guys in and manacles and do a PET scan, and then I get a call saying, what do you see? So I did that for a number of years, one or two a year. And then, like I said, 2005, 2006, I got a bunch of them, and I analyzed them. I said, oh, my God, there's a pattern. So I saw this pattern that nobody had ever described, and it's still the pattern that's agreed upon today, because other people have done the study since then, and they did it better than I did, and they did it really in a rigorous way on the brain patterns of psychopass. So I had finished doing those analyses. But at the same time, we were doing a clinical study on the genetics of Alzheimer's disease.

So we're doing PET scans, Alzheimer's disease, genetics to look for the other genes that were involved other than the APOE. There was something missing. As it turns out from the study, we found out what that other missing one was, so successful. But anyway, we were finishing that study, and we had all the Alzheimer's patients we needed. So we needed normals, just normal controls. So we were really in a bind. We had to write it really, write it fast and write it patent up and all the stuff like that. And so I asked my family, that was kind of my first mistake.

I said, look, guys, you want to all get in. I have my brothers, my wife. And I said, we'll test you. And the idea being that on my side of the family, there was no Alzheimer's at all. But on my wife's side, there was. Her mother and father had Alzheimer's and her brother and her aunt. And so she had a lot of it. And I said, you know, Dee, that's my wife.

I said, I don't know if you want to do this. to find out any bad news, right? And she said, the hell with it. Because, you know, she had had lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and she beat it back in 2000, 2001. But she said back in 2006, she says, I'm probably going to die of cancer before I die of Alzheimer's. This is a kind of sense of humorous.

She's very stoked. Yeah, she's very stoked. But she said, let's go ahead with it. Plus, the kids find out, the grandkids, what the genes are. And if they, based on that, they can maybe change their lifestyle to offset, you know, any nascent oncoming Alzheimer's. So she said, let's do it.

So we did it. And the results came back. And the two technicians walked into my office. And on my right side, I pile all these murderers brain scans. And they handed me the pile of my family scans. And they were covered up so I couldn't see the names. Now, I've seen over a thousand of these. So I could quickly go through to see if there's any gross abnormalities in the PET scans.

And so I went through, I went through one, two, three. four, five, six, seven, I was really relieved that they looked at the first pass normal. And so I was very happy about that. And then I got to the last scan and it looked at it. I said, okay, guys, I called in the technicians. I said, this is very funny. Because, you know, in the lab like any place, you kid around with each other, right? And I said, okay, you switched him.

You took one of the worst psychopaths from this pile of murders and you switched it into my family. Ha ha. And they go, no, it's part of your family. I said, you've got to be kidding. I said, this guy shouldn't be walking around in open society. It's probably a very dangerous person. They said, no, they checked the computer, the machine, everything. They said, is somebody in your family?

So I had to tear back the covering on the name of it because at this point it became a public health issue. And there was my name. And so it's like Gandalf showed up on my door. And I was it. So you were testing a bunch of people for scientific purposes. You brought in your family to compare some gene samples with people that you know wouldn't give you a hard time about the privacy and who you could ask plenty of family-related questions to.

And then you found that your own brain scan was that of a psychopath, even though this is what you'd been studying for a long time or one of many things that you'd been studying for a long time. I just happened to be studying. yeah, for a number of years, but it was tertiary. And I was it. I got the joke. You know, it's like, okay, I've been studying this, and then I'm the monster.

So I thought it was funny, and I just laughed. But when that week, when I went home, I told my wife, after a few days, I said, the damnedest thing happened. I was going through these pet scans, all these murderers, and I saw a pattern. And I said, we went through ours, and it looked like every ball of you were normal, which is great. and I said, but mine looks like just like the worst psychopath I had ever seen. And she goes, it doesn't surprise me. Now, I just thought she was kidding, right? Because she does kid around.

And she goes, and after, you know, after I had reminded her even, you know, a year or two, three years later, she said, I always had reminded her of, you know, some psychopaths that have been in, you know, movies. and the ones that weren't murderers but had all the urges. You know, that was where she got it from. She's a very honest person and insightful, really bright. I said, okay, that's, I get it. You know, I'm glib and charming. She goes, no, it's a little worse than that. You're trying to layer it on all the pleasant, well, you know, this is my wife.

Oh, I get it. I'm a really charming guy. She's like, yeah, that's not what I meant when I said I'm not surprised you're a psychopath. Yes, I laid out all the pro-socials. traits that people are drawn to. Charisma, fearless dominance. Yeah, but not quite. So, and so we kind of had fun with it. Now, I did at that, at that point, I did, I think, what any scientists would do. I just assumed that my theory was wrong because I started to give talks on this. But it turns out my theory wasn't wrong because other people since then had started to

publish the same pattern. So that was kind of a curious thing. But, We were so busy. I had started up a adult stem cell company, and I'd raised about $7 million for that. And so I was very busy doing that. This was for stem cells for Parkinson's and chronic stroke. And also we were doing all these studies, clinical studies, on schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, and we were so busy with all this stuff. I really forgot about it.

And when I've talked to people, they said, well, how could you ignore this? Well, I did. I just laughed it off. I didn't even care. So this is a crazy story. I mean, you're studying brain science, psychopathy. You find out you're a psychopath due to a brain scan. I mean, should we be worried about this?

What percentage of the population is a psychopath and just maybe doesn't even know about it? Well, Jordan, about 1% of all cultures, these are all people, are full-blown categorical, clinical psychopaths. But there are probably maybe 5% of people who are borderline, maybe even more than that, who have the traits. Because now in the past 10 years, we don't look at, in terms of psychiatric diagnoses, when we do the studies, what we do is we look at the traits of people. And there may be, you know, for a psychopath 20 to 30 traits and for a narcissist and all these things. We look at the traits and then we use mathematical statistical models to regress that,

those traits against brain areas like for PET scans, fMRI, and genetics. And that way we form a mathematical model of what genes and brain circuits are involved in every subtype of a disease. So there may be 20, 30 kinds of schizophrenia. And so the whole point is that when you're trying to treat people, you want to go right to the best treatment. And we were really pioneers for the past 19 years on a thing called imaging genetics, which is what I just described of taking brain imaging, genetics, psychometric, psychiatric analysis.

and then coming up with all the different types of people that have types of who have Alzheimer's or types of addicts. And then we're able to directly go into the type of treatment that they have. You know, the first thing you want to do is like cognitive behavioral therapy. And then it may be RTS, which is a very mild stimulation. Then it may be, you know, sleep deprivation for depression. So we go all the way down because the last thing you want to do is surgery. And then before that, the last thing you want is to do drugs.

So we're looking at this whole range of them. And there are so many different subtypes of these disorders, psychiatric disorders, that we don't want to torture people by testing things. This is how it's always been done. Somebody may go through a year of taking different drugs for depression, and they could make it worse. And it's really torture. So we wanted to get right to it.

So it was a way of looking at these individual types. So we like to do the same thing with the psychopathologies. So that's the scientific medical idea of the approach. And so instead of just saying, oh, you're a categorical psychopath or categorical schizophrenic, we like to get all the traits and subtypes and really drill into this at a much deeper level. But if you look at the traits, people who score on a hair test, the Robert Hare psychopathy test, anybody with 28 or 30 or more, it goes from zero to 40 on the scale, anything more than that is a categorical clinical psychopath. But a lot of people who have scored 20, 15, 25, and who are not clinical categoricals, but they have these traits.

And those are the people you would tend to run into on your everyday life, you know, your job and people you meet. And so you'll see these traits of people, but they're not full clinicals. They're, I guess you call borderline psychopaths. And many people have just pro-social traits. I have the pro-social traits, which sounds sweet, but it really means that they're adaptive and I can navigate through society without raising suspicion. And so those are the people you run into and they can still mess up your life. They may not come across as the full psychopath, but they've got enough traits to make your life miserable.

So, all right. That is definitely a little scary. let's define what a psychopath is. And I know that in the book, in your book, The Psychopath Inside, a neuroscientist journey into the dark side of the brain, you actually said that it's quite difficult to pin down what exactly this means. That's true.

The first mistake, I think people have gotten because of scientists like me and other people that they may listen to. The first thing is that you can't look at like a brain scanner genetics and say, ah, that's a, that's a psychopath or that's a killer. It's upside down. The correct way is, and the only way to do it is they first have to be tested by an expert, a psychologist or psychiatrist who's an expert in personality disorders. There are 10 major personality disorders. The people who do the most damage to other people are the cluster B types, which includes a psychopath, narcissistic personality disorder. Those are the people that really do the damage. Other

people mostly get tormented themselves, but the other ones are more social, intersocial. And if you look at the psychopath, first cut of a definition, it's an introspecies predator. That is a human who is a predator on other humans. That's the first sort of cut on it. And it says a lot. Yeah. I'll jump to something that's also important. You know, people always talk about psychopaths versus sociopaths. And everybody's got a different reason. I use a definition, and you can call it what you want, but there's a primary psychopath. That's like your regular psychopath. Then there's a secondary psychopath, which we call a sociopath. The primary ones are ones that are biologically primed for psychopathy. And they're also ones that are not only prime, that is, their brain connections and their genetics

make them susceptible to early abuse or abandonment. And so if you've got the biology, the brain connections and the genetic alleles, that is the forms of genes from your mother and father. So if you inherit, let's say there's 15 warrior genes, and you randomly will inherit these from your mother and father, and you get different combinations. You and your brothers and sisters all have these different combinations. So you're not all the same, but your mother and father are donating these to you,

as it were. And so if you get a high number of those, a warrior genes, you're going to be a very aggressive, competitive person. But that doesn't mean you're a psychopath or a murderer. What it means is that you're highly aggressive, highly competitive. And these are the people who are, they don't have a clinical syndrome, are the people that are really good at game playing. And they know game theory. Naturally, they take risks at the right time. They tend to win. You would see that in some people, for example, people would see this highly aggressive, highly competitive trait in people they know, or like Donald Trump. Well, in some case like that, we don't know is really a psychiatry, but those traits are normal. That is part of the normal spectrum. Some people are not

competitive at all. They just don't even care if they win. They just want to have a warm, fuzzy time with each other. So it's on the spectrum, depending on the combination of the high and low impact genes for each of the traits. And so this is what makes up humanity. and most of your personality is genetically based. Now, once you have the basic genetics, it assumes that you're going to grow up in a normal environment. That is, you're going to have a regular home life and loving parents, or at least not abusive.

But if you have these high-risk alleles for all these different traits that have to do with psychopathy, which include aggression, emotional empathy, which is different than cognitive empathy, Emotional empathy is the touchy-feely thing that you usually have with your best friend. When they're happy, you're happy. When they're sad, you're sad. You mirror their emotions in a very, in a very personal way.

That's emotional empathy. So to clarify, psychopaths have no or maybe little code for morality in their brain. And a sociopath might be like an angry, evil, super competitive person, but maybe they know morality and they just kind of disregard it. Right. And that's where I was headed. So if we go to the psychopath versus the sociopath, they can both have the identical behaviors. They can both be killers. They can both be terrorists. They can both be murderers. So superficially, they look the same. What's causing it are completely different. For example, with somebody who is genetically wired for all these potential psychopathic traits, if they're abused or abandoned between birth and three or four years old, mostly two and three years old, this is very very bad because it sets up epigenetic marks. That is, it changes the regulators of those genes forever. And so instead of being on and off, because there are times to be aggressive and times not to. There are times to be empathetic times not to. But the regulators of those genes, and they have to do with stress, anxiety also, they get turned down forever because a kid who's born

into an abusive environment and is bullied early on or is abandoned. Their frontal lobe, that part of the brain, that part of the social emotional brain, what is seeing is hostility. So that seems to set their brain, the regulators of genes, in their frontal lobe for violence. So the way they survive is by being violent themselves. So those are kind of set permanently like that, as opposed to being just on or off. I mean, you can kill if somebody comes and attacks your family. it's appropriate to kill him. So there's a time for all this stuff. In a psychopath, the context is gone.

And also that part of the brain, that part of the frontal lobe, prefrontal cortex above the eyes, the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, is not regulated correctly. And so that is always turned, you know, off, basically, in these situations. So you have somebody who's always ready to rumble, are always ready to manipulate other people. And so that's how these epigenetic marks work. Okay. If someone's pre-wired to be a sociopath or a psychopath and they're abused, these traits can come out in a bad way. But if not, if they're not abused, they grow up with a normal childhood, then these might even be invisible and you might find them on a brain scan after you become a psychiatrist and a scientist and you're studying these things. That's right. You would have

the traits, but they wouldn't combine into this permanent sort of hostile. behavioral pattern. Now, in the case of a secondary psychopath or sociopath, this may be somebody who may be genetically wired that way, but is not abused, let's say, bullied until they're like nine, 10 years old, right? In that case, most of that brain has been developed so they have a sense of moral reasoning. So this orbital cortex, ventrometrial prefrontal cortex develops normally, and you get this normal sense of morality. So sociopaths have that. They know what's right and Whereas a primary psychopath doesn't. To them, they know you think it's what they're doing is wrong.

To them, you know, murder or rape, maybe just like a parking ticket, you know, in terms of how it activates it. It's not that they don't know that society thinks it's wrong, but they don't feel it. And so whereas a sociopath knows it's wrong. And therefore, in that funny way, a sociopath is more evil, if you will. I don't really buy evil. But if you would say, who's more evil? be a sociopath, not a psychopath, because a psychopath doesn't even think what they're doing is

particularly immoral at all. Right, right. So the analogy here might be, well, I'll leave the analogy to you, but it seems like the genome is kind of like this book, this code book that you're born with, and the epigenome, the book that is written by your environment, those two things have to match up in a certain way in order for these psychopathic or sociopathic traits to come out, right? epigenetics punctuate the genetic code and make it into something else? Right.

Every cell in your body has basically the same genes, but which ones are turned on and off makes a complete difference, you know, whether it becomes a hair cell or a liver cell or a brain cell. But even within that, these epigenetic changes can change parts of your brain that regulate behavior, just like you said. So those that are regulating morality and aggression, if they're always turned on, then that person is permanently like that. And that's different than a sociopath,

or what we call a secondary psychopath. They'll take the same risks, but they react to stress. They worry about what they do. They're very prone to guilt. Whereas a psychopath doesn't. They simply will do those things, which makes them harder to catch

because if they're caught by the police or by their spouse doing something, they say, no, it's not, you know, it's just everything's cool. And since they don't seem to be anxious about it or guilty, the cops or a parent or somebody who's judging them will say this is an innocent person. See, they don't, they're not even, they don't feel guilty. That's not a sociopath when you catch them. They will get really nervous and feel guilt prone and everything.

So they can both kill the same amount, but for different reasons. And usually the secondary psychopath is a typical pattern is some kid who's been bullied when they're like nine or 10 years old. or they watch their family get blown up by a terrorist or something. Or those people want to get even. And they tend to be loners who are kind of losers. We're getting even with the world for what happened to them. That's a psychopath, a real psychopath, doesn't even care about that. For them, it's all just a play, a game, a predatory play game.

So the environmental stressors that can change in effect the epigenome are things like drugs, maybe anxiety in the mother, prenatal, climate, diet, family, abuse, that kind of thing. and that can decide whether or not somebody with these wiring, whether these switches get flipped in a way that creates these psychopathy or sociopathy. And you mentioned earlier that you don't really believe in evil. What do you mean by that being somebody who studies killers and things like that? Well, I'll answer the first question or the first issue, which is that I agree with what you just said.

And it's true. Okay. So I agree with that. And the second thing about the nature of evil, well, there's an Abrahamic sort of idea. Most religions have an idea about evil. And part of it is almost always that you have to understand what you're doing is wrong, right? And the people who are psychopaths or have personality disorders, they don't, at a fundamental level, think what they're doing is particularly wrong. And in fact, they may think it's very just.

So in that way, it doesn't count as evil. and usually people who are not psychopaths, what they'll do is since they're getting even with the world, you know, which is why, you know, psychiatrists tend to think that, like, Hitler was not a psychopath. He thought what he was doing, because he had some empathy, but he thought what he was doing was correct. And part of this, you have to jump to another kind of empathy, another axis of empathy. Do you want to hear about that? Because it fits your question. The axis of empathy.

Sure. Let's go down that. You mean like cognitive empathy versus emotional empathy. Is that what we're talking about here? No, that's the first kind, the first axis of empathy, that there are brain connections and genetics that wire you for either emotional empathy, that touchy-feely, I feel your pain, empathy, or cognitive empathy, which is, I understand you're in pain. I understand that you are in pain.

I don't feel it, but I understand you have need. So, in fact, a lot of people with just cognitive empathy can be more. involved in charities. They say this people, this group needs help. And so you get these people that are wired for cognitive empathy. They don't feel people's pain, but they understand they have needs. So they actually tend to be involved more with charities. Some people are really, they say, oh, I care so much, but they actually don't give any money or time to people in need. It's a funny thing. So they feel it, so they think they're very charitable. But it's really these cognitive empaths that do most of the charity work because it's unemotional, but they understand. So it's an intellectual

understanding of need and they follow it. Now, that's one kind of empathy. There's another kind of access of empathy, which is in-group versus out-group. But in-group are people who basically what they care about is their family. Everything, they will do anything just for the welfare of their family. They don't care about nation or international stuff. They don't care about. the poor, basically, you know, any special way or any of those. But they will do anything just for their family. So people are wired for in-group. And so that's for family and clan, let's say. At the opposite end are people who are out-group. The ultimate out-group, when people, they care mostly about the environment, about the earth, they care about all humanity, and they have no

particular connection many times with their own family. if you look at people who have this outgroup empathy, some of them are very famous people. That would include Gandhi, Mother Teresa, also Nelson Mandela. And Nelson Mandela's daughter talked at his funeral. She said, this is a great man, but she didn't want to be his daughter. And that's usually what you hear. The same thing with Gandhi. And these were all prickly characters.

That is, they don't seem to connect to individual people, but they connect with the world. And so they do a lot of great things. but I think people think because these people care about all the animals or Gaia or like greens, that they also care about individual people. They tend not to be. So this is normal wiring of people. And so people, if you look at it in terms of voting patterns, under any sort of stress in the society, people will tend to vote according to that level of empathy.

So if things get kind of tough or there's some stress or fear, they will, the default, will be that way. So people will tend, for example, to vote specifically who will lead them that will help their family, right? Whereas under no stress, people are more likely to be either at one end, they'll vote as an internationalist. So if you find like a nonviolent, honest Marxist, these are pure outgroup people or a green, you know, a green that's kind of non-political green, but a green that cares about Gaia and the environment, that's a normal thing. That's a normal thing. and so they're going to always have an identity. They'll be more connected to all the people of the world than their own country.

That's interesting. So they can really only, can we have both of these types of empathy at the same time or is this sort of one or the other? This would be their default position, which is basically when they go into the voting, you know, they go into the voting box. They will almost always choose according to these, the types of empathy they have and how they identify. And so a lot of people, when they do polls, they'll try to say what seems to be nice. They'll try to be a very generous, tend to say they're outgroup, you know, I think of either the country, I think of the world or environment and everything. But when they get in the voting booth, they go into this, you know, they'll default to whatever it is. And there are a lot more people who are more in-group people, more family and clan.

And so that's why you'll get the polls not lining up with the actual outcomes of elections. One lesson that we're taking from the hard wiring and the nature versus nurture in that we're finding out it's both is that even though our brains may have certain kinds of wiring and hardware, it doesn't mean we're destined to end up a certain way or with a certain malfunction or a certain condition. And we know that you found that your own brain was that of a psychopath. Did you have a fairly normal childhood? I had a wonderful childhood, which is this is what really got me interested because I said, look, I got all the biological determinants and the brain pattern. My genetics were the same thing. I completely wired for the same traits as a psychopath. But the girl I married was the one I dated at 12 years old.

We were both 12, by the way. And we're still married. And we've got, you know, three kids and five grandkids. And so this is not what a psychopath looks like. Yeah. Very stable family life with all these people. Also, I've had the same job forever. You know, I'm like a potted plant here at the university.

and so I always wanted to be a scientist from the time I was three or four. And that's what I became. And I was always interested in these things. So it's like all those conflicts that people have of what am I going to do with my life? Who am I going to marry? This was a slam dunk from the time I was 12 years old. So I was very lucky that way. But my parents really loved me.

And when I went back and looked at all the old pictures and the old movies of growing up, I was always happy and laughing. I was always with my father or my mother, my grandparents. My whole extended family were wonderful. And I had a very fortune of having a very intelligent, tuned-in matriarchy. You know, not only my mother, but my aunts and my grandparents, and they were very, very insightful. And, you know, years later, this is, my mother never told me this.

She's 101 now. She's still alive. But once I came out with this and my book and everything, she started to tell me things. She goes, she said, I was very worried about you when you were going into puberty. They were very strange, and she alerted the teachers, don't leave this kid alone. And I was always involved in like football, all these sports, like four sports a years, and all the band and student government was always busy. And in fact, when the psychiatrist later, you know, more recently analyzed me,

they said that I, you know, I bore easily. And so I'm the type of person that needs to be constantly busy. And I am. So, you know, my mother saw this and alerted my teachers. And so they always kept me busy. It was a very light touch, but very insightful. And she treated my other siblings differently because they were wired differently. So I was very lucky and I was treated.

It was just great. And I was very close to my parents and extended family and we still have a big family, which means our house is always full. So this was the key back then, which is like I've got the biological determinants. And I had always told my colleagues that genetics were everything. And I was wrong. And I had to eat crow on this. And scientists hate to be like really wrong, but I was wrong.

But it's not that it's not genetics. It is genetics, but with a twist. And that is it's the intersection of susceptibility genetics, which is really good to find out if you got them, with your early upbringing. And so if you're wired, I very susceptible like to psychopathy or another personality disorder, but you're treated well, all you do is you have those traits. So you'd be very aggressive, you know, you'd be very chatty, very glib and all this, even though I'm not being very glib at the moment. But you have all these traits that look like leadership. People have always wanted me to be the president of the faculty and all this stuff, just a natural trait. You don't even try.

So that's if you're treated really well. And I had a wonderful growing up. And so at this point, it all made sense. It's like there's a real biological, hardcore biological reason to treat your kids well and to treat your kids well. your neighborhoods well and to treat groups of people well. And that really changed me. So that's, we changed our research direction with my colleagues to go for this and to, to now look at this epigenetics of violence and bullying and personality disorders around the world. Right. Because according to this new theory then, the nurture factor, cleaning up environments,

cleaning up neighborhoods with dangerous thugs hanging out and these environments where people get abused, bullied, et cetera. It's worth it because it helps ensure that. that the epigenetics and surroundings produce the kind of people, including psychopaths and social, you know, that are valuable to society instead of becoming a detriment to society. Because if we take these same groups of populations and we put them in these nice school districts where everybody's kind of nice, you can have these undercover psychopaths where everything is more or less functioning normally. But if we put them in a place where they have to be careful and they're getting their stuff

stolen and people are picking on them and they're getting harassed by gangs and stuff, we can end up with bad people being manufactured at like a factory. That's right. And that was the idea. I gave a TED talk on this about 12 years ago. And a producer or a showrunner, Simon Mirren, who is a showrunner, one of the two criminal minds, he called me up after my TED talk was published. He says, I know what you're talking about. And that night he had written the episode, number 100, it's called Out Fox. He completely got the point. He goes, in your TED talk, you're not talking about your You're talking about transgenerational violence and why, you know, the real biological, hardcore reason to treat people well.

And so after that, we did studies on nomads in the desert and the Sahara and all sorts of sort of views of this, looks at this. You know, everybody knows war and violence is bad, but nobody will do anything. But if you tell people that if their own people, if their own leaders, keep their tribe or their group always under a state of siege, they're going to be triggering more and more cycle paths, and it's going to create a warrior culture. A warrior culture is not a cute thing. And what warrior cultures do is they kill themselves.

And so the message, you know, the hidden message was always, here is the reason for these belligerent groups. And it could be any country, any group, not to do this because you're going to destroy yourselves. People listen to that. They don't care if you say, oh, war is bad for other people. But if you say this sort of maintaining kids completely under fear or under, you know, harassment or bullying or military sort of constant military stuff, that this will trigger those that are susceptible. So there will be this basic percentage of these kids that will have personality disorders and it'll kill your own people. This has a detrimental effect on society. So if we're looking at a place like Guatemala, sorry Guatemala, I'm picking on you.

This is a dangerous place with a lot of favelas and things like that. Are you saying that there's going to be a preference for the warrior who can protect people and then that's going to get bred into the society at large? Yeah, that's the idea because with transgenerational epigenetics, you have things passing from grandparents to the kids. And this was first seen in a Dutch famine study where the grandchildren were absolutely affected with obesity and smoking, and they weren't even involved in the original insult, which is the famine.

Also grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, those grandchildren, they have the same kind of nightmares that the Holocaust victims had, even though they're not, they were never subjected to it. So the idea that these violence could, you know, skip two generations that could become concentrated epigenetically in generations, you know, you might look at this the following way. Let's say if you look at Putin and Russia, well, Russia is, well, 350 years of imperial rule by the Tsars. Putin is simply another one of the Tsarist police chiefs, right?

Okay. And why? In that he's a dictator, you mean? Yeah, he's kind of a thug. But he's a dictator, but he keeps getting reelected. Now, some of the election is rigged, right? But there's still a fair amount of popularity. Putin doesn't need fraud to get elected.

He just does it for sport because it's. part of the tradition. Right. He doesn't need it. Now, why would people like that? So, and I've talked with this with different writers and different scientists in Russia, that Russia has been transformed. And Russia's been transformed because of 300 years of bizarrest rules and kind of thuggery. And so they've become to expect it. Now, if in those people that are genetically wired to be potentially have personality disorders like psychopathy, well, then they become trigger. They become full psychopaths. So the actual number of clinical psychopaths goes up, but also with all the abuse, the number

of sociopaths go up. But the people who are not genetically susceptible, what do they get? PTSD. So here you've got a whole country of either PTSD or sociopathy or psychopathy. Of course, that's not true, but you have a higher percentage there perhaps. So the idea, and I've been working with the Russians on this, and different, he gave a talk on Putin last week in New York, on this possibility. And it's worth looking into.

At any rate, that's the idea. But there's also, you know, sociologically, if I was a 16-year-old girl living in the Gaza or downtown L.A. or, you know, in a chronic trouble spot where it tend to concentrate these abuses and traumas, well, if I was growing up, I'd probably want to like hook up with and pal around with and even have sex with, I guess, or marry, a tough guy. Well, then now you have mating patterns that tend to concentrate this too. Social problems or behavioral patterns of behavior. So I think this is one potential way to understand hotspots in the world. Gaza, Somalia, some of Serbia, but also Russia, parts of L.A.,

Chicago. It's a way of understanding this. And it's, you know, we can look at our own country. My interpretation of, for example, the plight of blacks who were born in America, who are descended from slaves, they had hundreds of years of abuse, and that may be epigenetically wired them for higher levels of violence, right? Not particularly their own doing, but because of transgenerational epigenetics. That is, the society actually created this higher level for aggression. And so that's one way of understanding it. What about our own soldiers? I mean, should we be testing our own soldiers so that they don't see combat until their brain is developed or that some soldiers should maybe never see combat because this could affect them in a totally

different way than it affects somebody else due to the way that they're wired? Yeah, I've been an advisor to the Pentagon for some years. And that is basically what I had mentioned to him. I showed brain development throughout life, and especially these different epochs where people are really vulnerable. And also when the brain is really finely developed, the highest cognitive development, just cognitive, occurs when you're in your 60s. But before that, the brain is fully mature when you're about 35. And it really becomes pretty hardwired with all the neurotransmitters and all the myelination patterns.

That is what hardwires the brain when you're about 25. And so I've used this developmental sort of reason to argue at the Pentagon and people make these decisions not to have anybody in the military, in the infantry, who's under 25. Because you're just absolutely asking for trouble. Because, you know, people who are 18, 19, 20, 21, they're very susceptible. And therefore, I mean, this is a good reason to not have younger than 25. And it would vary from, you know, a person to person. Some people are very mature at 21, some, not until they're 30.

Some of us, not at all. And so I think it's a good argument for limiting who participates in warfare. Because you want to make sure that they are not wired for PTSD. They're not, they don't have the behavioral patterns or the sort of characteristics of a potential psychopath or are a psychopath. And so the idea is to minimize this, you have to have an effective military, but you don't want a pathological military or one that is crippled by trauma and PTSD. So, yeah, that's one of the ideas using the biological psychiatry and developmental patterns to make arguments, broad arguments about society, the military,

etc. Since you found out that you were yet a psychopathic brain as an adult, do you look back at your history and go, oh, yeah. I mean, like your wife said, oh, I'm not surprised. Do you look back and think, oh, yeah, this thing I did was a little strange? Or, and there's one story in your book, particularly about a car crash that you'd witnessed. And I thought, okay, yeah, that's not normal. Right. That's not how I would react. Right. And so I can see really terrible things and not be affected at all, right? And just kind of walk away from it. And when this happened, you know, when I found this out with my biology around 2006 and then had the genetics, though, which showed the same thing, had a lot of the genetic alleles that are consistent with psychopathic traits,

I was invited to give a talk by a group in Norway to give a talk with the ex-prime minister of Norway. And he had been prime minister for eight years, and he had, in his first term, found he had bipolar disorder, and he came out and he got treated and he told everybody this. I thought this was very heroic because for a European to admit to a psychiatric disorder, for a Norwegian or Scandinavian, it's unheard of. But he did it. He was treated and had eight successful years. So he gave a talk and then I gave a talk about the underlying biological psychiatry.

And I had to use somebody's data. So ethically, I could only use my own. So I put up my own PET scans, genetics, all my behaviors, and all my funky behaviors throughout my life, and use that as how we determine the genetics behind different disorders, you know, like bipolar or whatever. And at the end of the talk, the chair of psychiatry, the University of Oslo stood up. He goes, well, thank you for that talk. I got to tell you one thing. First of all, you're bipolar, but you don't know it. He says, you're just hypomanic, but you don't get depressed.

I said, that's cool. And the second thing is we'd like to talk to you afterwards. After my talk, we went to the president of the University of Oslo's house, and these psychiatrists and psychologists came over, and we all started having some cocktails and talk for a few hours. At the end of that, they said, you're probably also a borderline psychopath. And these people didn't know me. They saw my biology, right? And they saw these traits.

And so I had to take that seriously. It's the first time I took it seriously. So when I came back, flew back. I started asking people one at a time, my wife and then my kids, my brothers, my sister, everybody, my mother, what do you really think of me? What do you really think of me? And don't worry, I really need to know the truth. And they all had the same story, that I had these traits that were consistent with a very cold, distant. And like two of the women in my family, they said, you're not there.

You're not emotionally there, which really lined up with this lack of emotional empathy. They say, well, you're a good father, a good brother. you're good, you know, a friend. But you're really emotionally not there. You're like not connected, but you're fun and you're interesting and all that. So I saw you, you got to be kidding. Well, after some time, I finally got some psychiatric analysis because I never took it seriously until that point. And they went through all behaviors over the years of what I had done and how much, I'm kind of a thrill seeker. And so I put people in danger, in real danger. Give us an example of what you mean by putting other people in real danger.

Well, let's see. I've lived in Africa a couple of times, and the first time we went to East Africa, I lived in Nairobi, and I used to drive out into the wild because I'd love to be out in the middle of all these wild animals and everything. I'm a biologist, and it was thrilling. And so when my parents, my family showed up, we would go on all these trips and be surrounded by really, all these lions and everything. I'd have my own car, but it was kind of, I'd get in the middle. of like a wildebeest stampede and they'd be all over the place and you know it'd be wild a lot of fun but we went up to mount kenya and they had trout fishing there so i took my son up and i found a spot in on the spot entering in the woods to where the trout stream was it said danger lions

and i said well this will be fun i said let's go in and i think he maybe he must have been out 14 and we went in fishing and i knew there was lions there he did and it was thrilling right and i and i went the probabilities. What are the chances that we're going to get attacked? And it was like maybe 5%. And he was with it. And he's a thrill-seeker too. So that was fine. But, you know, when I got a boat out here, I'd take the kids out water skiing and there'd be sharks around. We water ski among the sharks. Again, what is the probability that, you know, a blue shark is going to bother you, not that high? So this is very typical. I've done many of those things all my life. And, you know, and I did running with the bulls. I did what regular guys do.

and I was a downhill skier, competitive skier, and I liked high speed and all that stuff. So this to me was just fun. But people had reminded me of all the danger that they had put them in. And I think maybe the worst for one of my brothers is I took them up to the Ketim Cave. This is where the old matriarch elephants bring the other elephants into the caves in northwest Kenya to dig into the caves to get salts and minerals. And so I took them there. but I knew, I said, this is going to be thrilling. But I knew nobody was there because they had a scare.

There were these Ugandan rebels that were on that mountain. So I knew people weren't going, but it was the bigger reason is when they first had the Marburg virus, which is. It's like Ebola. It's almost identical to Ebola. And I had heard about this because I worked at the University of Nairobi Hospital. They told me the story. I said, I got to go up there because this guy had come stumbling into the hospital, bled out. And I retracted is where he stayed.

And so he was up in those mountains. And I found out where he was spent the night around a campfire, went into the caves and everything. And I didn't tell my brother this because I, you know, I didn't think he might not go for it, even though he is, you know, he's like an extreme skier and everything. So he might go for it. And so I took him through there. I told him not to touch anything on the ground. So you take your brother into an Ebola cave.

but it's scared in an Ebola hunter, not the same thing. Not exactly the same as it turns out. This was a slight miscalculation. So we went in there and it was thrilling. We saw all these animals because nobody had visited there in six months and I knew it, partially because of this Ebola-like virus, when first popped up and also because of these Ugandan rebels. And so we had the whole mountain to ourselves.

And it was that night is when the Gulf War started, not the Gulf War, but, you know, this was like 1991. And so the Kuwaiti attack, Desert Storm had started. So it was, these were exciting times. Now, some years, two years later, two or three years later, a movie came out with Dustin Hoffman and a book. And it was the hot zone. And it was about that cave and about the start of Marburg virus.

And he gave me a call. Your brother did. My brother gave me a call. He said, you son of a bitch, you knew it all along. I said, yes. He said, I could have died in there of this terrible disease. I said, you didn't. Was it thrilling? He goes, it was fantastic. I said, the other things I brought you through with the thrilling. He goes, yes, he says, but I really can't trust you. This is a very common thing over the years. And for me, it's always been just fun to other people and to the psychiatrist, putting people in that level of danger without them really knowing the whole story.

It's kind of psychopaths. And you have all these sort of non, or I guess I would just say inappropriate reactions, like the car crash. You witnessed this car crash and you go down to the victim and then you're suddenly just not affected by this hours or minutes later. Tell us about that. I was in Canada and this is when I was younger and I was driving. It was wintertime and a car passed me going high speed and another one. And he went off the road and then hit a tree. and so in there, I knew the guy was choking out, and I went in, dove in the side of the car,

it was kind of on the hill, and gave him mouth to mouth for probably 25 minutes. And then the police and the ambulance showed up and they pulled me off him because he'd been dead and kind of throwing up my face for half an hour until he died. The police wanted me to file a murder report. And I was very mad that they were about it. And I just walked out. And that was the end of it. It never really, that was the end of it.

Somebody was with me and it freaked out completely. But those types of things are probably too matter of fact for me, and they've always been that. And even when I've been really hurt myself, I put my arm through a window and opened up my entire arm, I just looked at it like it was a piece of anatomy, you know? It was like interesting. And so those kinds of things are very common in my life. But apparently, not everybody responds that way. Right. Yeah.

One example that stood out as well was you had gone to a funeral and there was this little girl who had passed away. And I think you'd said something like, oh, that's a nice dress. Yeah, she was in a white dress laid out on a slab. This was in Africa. You know, in a comment about the dress, it was a curious scene. You know what I mean? This is perfectly white dress and family around in our morgue. And that was what stood out was the improbability of the dress in that situation rather than any green.

You know, it was very interesting. Have you ever tried to maybe manually fix or hide your behavior somehow? I know when we watch shows like Dexter, which are really mainstream, you hear his internal dialogue and he's like, I have to pretend like I want to go out for drinks later. Once a month or so, I'll go out with everyone and kill enough time so that I'm seeing being normal. You know, stuff like that. He's obviously extreme. But do you ever think like, oh, okay, I have to say something like, oh, I'm so upset that this person has passed away.

that's what everyone else is doing and it's going to make me look normal. I don't really do that, you know, and people are always kind of put off by it. But I can get emotional about something. It's not like a completely non-emotional. It's just it doesn't seem to be appropriate to a lot of people. What is emotional or not? But when I see like somebody on the street who I don't know, I said, well, this person needs help. And I'm involved in a lot of charities.

people have been jailed and work with a lot of people like that. I've worked soup kitchens and everything because I know it's the right thing to do. It's just aesthetically the beautiful thing to do. It's just the way to live, not like a big hero. Just it's the right thing to do. And so I'll be involved in those because it's the correct thing to do. But there's no emotional engagement with it per se. It's mostly an aesthetic, I guess, basic sort of what one should do.

How do we spot a psychopath? Are there details about how they operate that we can see? sort of internalize here and say, okay, this is, this is happening, this is how I can spot it, this is how you might defend against one, or this is what I might do if I'm in a business or a personal relationship with one. Do you have any advice for this, spotting and identifying and defending against this type of thing? Yeah, it's a very difficult thing because, and I think probably most of your listeners who are, you know, high-end people, professionals, et cetera, the kinds of psychopaths that they would run into. You know, there's this idea that,

that CEOs of large corporations are psychopaths, that's not where they are. They're in the CEO numbers, which are, you know, higher than the average population, maybe 5%. It's due to the startup companies. The CEOs of startup companies is where you find it like the Wolf of Wall Street. It's a very good portrayal, not violent, but manipulative and, you know, all that. And they're very, very alluring and very attractive and very charismatic. And so the people that you would tend in normal life, they may be working five, ten people at a time. And so they don't play their hand. They will show you the pro-social side. And they know how you're thinking. They're very good analyzing what you're thinking in your emotional state. And they play to that. And so oftentimes,

somebody will be played for three months before the negative part of it shows up, right? Some of them people have are setting people up for almost for even years that there's so there's only different people that they're setting up. These are high functioning psychopaths, a lot of them borderline. And they're setting them up, you know, for future use. And they groom them. And so it's very hard to tell them because they're reading what you want to hear. And if they think that you're hip to having their ass kiss, oh, you're so wonderful, you're so wonderful view and all that stuff, they won't do that. they will try to appeal exactly to the way you respond.

So they don't overcomplement you or under compliment you. If they think that you respond to being called, oh, you're just a jerk, and that you like that, that's what they'll do. And so there's no absolute behavior you'll see for many times a long time because they're grooming you with what you want. They're looking for your weaknesses and what your needs are. And that's what they'll play to. And so it's very, very difficult to ferret.

out a real high-functioning psychopath that you would run into. You know, a lot of them that have been, you know, brain damage and beaten up and everything, a lot of them are in the prison system by the time they're 21 or 23 years old. So you don't even see those guys, the really, you know, kind of the violent, out-of-control ones that you usually think of. Because most of the ones that are dangerous to you, to the average person, aren't like that. In fact, they're not going to kill you or rape you, but they're going to manipulate you for something to try to control you.

of a game. So it's manipulating you to play a game. And they're always on the make, and the make will vary according to how they think you are. And the smart ones can get away with this for a long, long time. So the answer is, for an intact, smart psychopath, they're extremely hard to read. But at some point, they'll make their move. And they'll say something that makes you nervous. That's, you know, you will sense a nervousness about all of a sudden they've become familiar in a weird way or be talking in a new strange way to test whether you're, you know, kinky or not or vulnerable for an investment or something. They start doing that. They start, but it may be months and even years down the line before you see it. Interesting. Okay. So this is like a chess game.

They're waiting. They're waiting. They're waiting. They're looking for vulnerability. And then do they, do they try to isolate us? Because I've seen this happen with friends of mine where I think this person is, this one person around a group of my friends has maybe got some of these traits. And then that person will notice that maybe I don't really, I'm not falling for their crap, you know, or if another friend of ours isn't falling for their crap, and they'll try to sort of chip away and isolate the person that they're trying to victimize from the rest of the friend's group because they know that there's two or three people in the friends group that are like, you know, I don't like this person. And we're sort of countering their influence. And they will gradually chip away at this. Yes, they'll do that with all the person's friends, and it could take many, many months to do that. But they won't start out that way. They'll start out as a nice group person, very cooperative, fun, interesting clip.

And then slowly you'll start seeing that where somebody is getting isolated. They're isolating something, telling stories about it. That's a warning sign. They're trying to isolate the target. And they have to chip away, like exactly like you're saying, at the people that that person is friendly with or trusts or will interfere. And so this isolation always occurs. They want to ultimately, they're trying to get you one-on-one in a closet, as it were. So what do we do to defend against this once we do spot it? Say we go, oh my gosh, this is my business partner, this is my significant other, this is my friend or roommate. What do we do?

Is the only option just get away from this person, cut them out of your life? Is that really the safest strategy? What do we do here? Well, if you can get away from their influence by, you know, you may want to move laterally in an organization or in a social group, you want to get away from them. You do not want to, they're trying to sucker punch you, too. And so they're going to try to get some engagement at some point to humiliate you or whatever. And they cannot be fixed.

You're not going to talk them out of it. So if you can walk away, you walk away immediately and don't say anything. Like you don't care and just walk away. Or if you can, you know, ask to be moved to another part of the organization to avoid them. Because, you know, if you get some of them mad enough, they will then try to take you down. They could physically harm you or really go after you. So you don't want to engage it. Once you feel this, you really move away, you back away, you know, like you would

from an attacking bear, you know, like a grizzly. You got to watch it. You got to slowly back away and then just kind of walk away. You don't want to run. You don't want to attack. And so because these are predators. I think it's a little scary, of course. But I do wonder why hasn't evolution bred these people out?

If it's bad for society and only favors individuals, and they're still around after hundreds of thousands of years, what is the evolutionary pressure keeping psychopaths in the game? Well, about 50,000 years ago, we went through this bottling up. We were down to about 6,000 pairs of humans. And we were almost extinct at that point. I think it's very important to have enough people in any population that, well, first of all, would love to go kill somebody. also they are people, especially the thrill seekers, love to go over the mountain and have sex with anybody they find on the other side. And so psychopathy, which is so stable in all human society, they can come in handy and they take risks that others don't and they take smart risks.

Because of that, they can lead the way under great stress in a population. And they're more than happy to fight usually, but they will tend to have sex with as many people as possible. And so the way to look at this, there are no good or evil genes. You have to look at it in the context of whether you're talking about a person or family or a clan, those genes and behaviors that are good for individuals and humans and the clan tend not to be good for the species and vice versa. So psychopaths are good for the species because they will climb them out and have sex with as many other people as possible. dominate them. They will also try to conquer. You know, they tend to want to conquer

said they'll move across different environments and populate different environments. So this is, you know, good for the species and just terrible for individual humans and families. So that's, so it's the context of what's good or bad depends on how you do look at that in that way. Right. It's almost like a disease that wipes out a ton of people and you go, my God, that was so terrible. But then you find, well, you know, it wiped out a lot of the young and the elderly and made this population able to move away from this catastrophic set of, you know, climate changing events or things like that. That's right.

So it's really just almost like another force of nature that's neither good nor bad. It's just in the, if you zoom out far enough, neither good nor bad. But it's really bad if you're sitting there in your little peaceful village and gangas cons people come and burn the whole thing down, kill everyone, take all the women away, you know, rape them and have a bunch of kids, drop them off somewhere else in Central Asia and they create different populations. that's really bad if you live there. It's great if we're separated from that by thousands and thousands of years. And we end up in a nice Western or developed country where as a result of this kind of thing,

this kind of pressure over time. Well, Jordan, this is good. You're starting to think less like a human and more like a neuroscientist. You know, this is what you said is quite true. So people have got to have that perspective. I think when they look at the, that's why the other part of a good and evil, It depends on the view you take and how far if you're looking from way back and you're looking at whole populations of the species, it's a very different interpretation.

So there must be a cost of violent psychopaths. I mean, we incarcerate these people. They create all kinds of damage. I mean, there's terrorism involved in some of these people's past or future, unfortunately. But is there a way that they're good for us even now? I mean, or is it, are we still in? Well, they're bad. But if we zoom out far enough, they're still good, a la Ganga, gangis Khan.

Well, if you look at there, there are a fair number of people, and usually when you're young, you say, can't we get rid of war? So if you ask every millennial, what if we could breed out all the warrior genes and we'd all be passive? They'd say yes, right? But the problem is that humans, the species, is mutating faster than just about any other species. Very modifiable, not only by epigenes, but also by these little critters called transposons, which have shaped big jumps in our evolution. And the transposons are little pieces of DNA

that we've picked up from like viruses, like HIV and other viruses for millions of years. Well, these give us a lot of power. For example, in the immune system, they help us battle any disease and help us be omnivores that are able to live in any environment on the globe. But they also are responsible for a lot of cancers.

So there's always something to give up and something you get. Now, if you look at this psychopath presently, if you bred out all the warrior genes, all the psychopathy, well, within a generation, there's going to be a bunch of people who have them back. And it makes it easier for them to take over the world. So you're not going to get rid of this ever. It's like you're not going to get rid of war. You're not going to get rid of violence or any of this stuff or psychopathy because it will keep coming back because that's what our genome and our transposons do to us. It's almost it ensures our

existence of the species. It's like the idea, you know, we'd all like to be pure pacifist, but it doesn't work because it's so easy for one person to take over who's not like that, who doesn't have those sensibilities. I think a lot of this, the idea, and it's mixed in with the concept of old humanism, French humanism, and French humanism, which is our basic liberal ideas, I'm talking about liberal, classic liberalism, not political liberalism necessarily. But in that way, part of that is that we're all molded by our environment. So society is what determines who you are and also religion and everything. And really, genetics mean nothing.

Well, we know now in the past 10 years this isn't true. And another way of saying this is that Plato was correct and Aristotle was wrong. And a whole lineage of this idea of tablo rasa that were born a clean slate. We're not. We're born wired for all sorts of things already. and we know genetics and now epigenetics really changes the whole interpretation of that. But it also, because of the Nazis and eugenics, the whole idea of genetics really took a hit from 1945 onward.

And it dominated all the social sciences and all the ideas in universities about, you know, every person is good inside, only environment, the only society makes them not good. and so if we have a perfect society, we wouldn't have any of these obnoxious, belligerent, evil people or groups. And this turns out not to be true. So it's partially a reaction to the Nazis that we had 60 years of this French humanism. And, you know, it's basically every child is good. It turns out, no, I'm sorry, it's not true. And everybody could be rehabilitated.

So you never, you can always let people out. you rehabilitate them in jail, murderers and rapists in jail. And we can rehabilitate them. It's just an old small L liberal. I consider myself a small L liberal, but an old liberal idea that's been mutated. And in that, you say, well, we can fix them and let them out. And invariably, you let these murderers and rapists out. And the next week, they're murdering and raping again.

So it's a mistake. It's a misunderstanding of biological psychiatry and what makes us tick. And so the idea that we can just breed this out and make it illegal or something, something like that. It's so naive. It's just ridiculous. James, thank you so much for coming on the show today. This is extremely interesting, and you're very open about your own brain, which is not something everybody would probably do. I think a lot of people in your situation might go, I'm just going to not tell anyone about this. Well, Jordan, I got lucky. I had a very fortunate upbringing, very happy childhood, which kind of negated that. And, you know, it's genetics. It's not a

death sentence. It's not fate. And if you're treated well, and I found that if I really concentrate every day, it's like Oprah thinking about keeping her weight off. If you think about the one thing, like for addicts, every day, you can kind of beat it, but only about 5% of people can do this, it seems. Everybody snaps back to their epigenetic self. But doesn't mean it can't be done. And we're always looking for ways to change that. James, thanks so much for your time. Thanks, Jordan. Jason, I don't know, man. If I saw a brain scan and it turned out that my brain had a defect like that, and I say defect because it's not exactly an adaptation that serves most of us, I would freak out, man.

I don't know. I don't know if I would dedicate my life to the study thereof. I guess he was already a brain scientist, so it worked out. Yeah. Talk about, you know, walking into work one day and having something interesting to study. It's not like he figured out that he was destined to be. destined to be a farmer. You know, it's like, oh, this is right in my wheelhouse.

This is great. Yeah. Yeah. He said actually elsewhere in the book, and I think post show a little bit, we talked about this, just that there was a lot of people that were like, oh, interesting, but a lot of people said never talk to me again. You know, he lost a bunch of friends and things like that that just didn't want to be around him.

Oh, that's too bad. Yeah. Yeah, it is too bad. You know, but I understand it because he also discusses in the book that he's really great at manipulating people. even his friends. He doesn't use violence. He says being nice and charming and charismatic is easier. And that's affected his marriage and his close relationships negatively for the most part. I have to say in the pre-show talk that I had with him when we were going through tech issues,

he was definitely one of the more likable guests we've ever had. Didn't phase him that some of the tech wasn't working and he worked with me to get through it. And he was absolutely awesome to work with. So I can see how he would be great at manipulating people. because by the time we started the show, I was like, I like this guy already. He didn't yell at me because Zencaster didn't work. Awesome. Yeah, I mean, he self-describes as a pro-social psychopath because he's good at behaving in ways that are socially acceptable. And so that makes it even more interesting because, of course, you know, what we're looking at as a result of this is, and thankfully we've covered the difference between, you know, a murderous, violent psychopath, sociopath, and just regular, regular run-of-the-mill psychopath.

Yeah, your everyday psychopath. Yeah, you're everyday psychopath. It's really that there's a certain set of behaviors that they just know, okay, this is going to work for me. But it is really interesting to see because my first question was, why does this still exist in society? You know, this would have been bred out a long time ago. You're going to have these small tribes of people. There's going to be a psychopath and people are going to say, no, this person's bad for the group. But if they're pro-social, they can really sort of just climb to the top.

Suddenly everyone's like, well, you know, it's for the greater good. Even when really it's for their own good in the ways that their needs, their wants, their desires align with that of the tribe and they find themselves at the top. I don't know. It's a really interesting set of behavior. And it's really less black and white than we previously thought, or at least that I previously thought. No, it was a fantastic interview with the psychopath next door. Yeah, or inside. Go get your brain scanned.

That's the big takeaway from this one. You might be one. Great big thank you to Dr. James Fallon. The book title is The Psychopath Inside, A Neuroscientist's Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. If you enjoyed this one, don't forget to thank Dr. James Fallon on Twitter. That'll be linked up in the show notes for this episode, which can be found at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast.

Tweet at me your number one takeaway here from James Fallon. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And don't forget, if you want to learn how to apply everything you learned here today from James Fallon, make sure you go grab the worksheets in the show notes at jordan harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode is produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty. Booking back office last minute miracles by Jen Harbinger. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

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