Why Do Psychopaths Exist? - Mark Freestone

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 #psychopath #criminal #truecrime - 00:00 Intro 00:53 Working with Psychopaths 07:29 Different Types of Psychopaths 12:39 Genetics Vs Environment 19:24 Impact of Negative Childhood 27:00 Society’s Evolving View of Psychopaths 37:50 Sexuality in Psychopaths 52:05 Can You Cure Psychopathy? 56:28 Where to Find Mark - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  There are heritable characteristics in psychopaths. Psychopaths don't really seem to feel any remorse for what they do. They struggle to have empathy with other people and they can be very callous. They can do things and they're not really feel sorry for them. They don't have the connection between the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the amygdala that the rest of us do to identify things like disgust, fear, anger. Psychopaths don't really interpret those signals in the same way.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Mark Freestone, welcome to the show.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Thanks, Chris. Pleasure to be here.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  For 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.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Well, that's a really good question, Chris. I think lots of people do want to be forensic psychologists. I think, you know, crime scene and CSI and all that stuff has got the word forensic into people's brains as something glamorous, maybe. And there's never a shortage of people with an interest in serial killers, quite a few of whom tend to be psychopaths, although by not all means all. But I didn't, I kind of didn't really have any of that. I just sort of fell into it. My, my job was as a sociologist. I was a sociology PhD student and the way that I practiced 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 a little bit yourself, maybe participant observation and then you write about it.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  And my PhD was on anti-globalisation protest, 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 for people that were called dangerous and severe personality disorders. So that means basically people who are psychopaths or people who have very, very complex and usually high-risk personality disorders, such as antisocial or borderline personalities, or that means that they're at risk of committing a crime. And the opportunity came up to do an ethnography there and I was like, yeah, that sounds great. Cool. Sign me up. What's a psychopath? And I just sort of, I just sort of stuck there. So I really did honestly fall into it.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  Um, and I think early on in my career, I was a little bit kind of running from pillar to post, being manipulated, confused and not generally getting the whole thing. But with time, you know, it sort of comes, I guess.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Was there a harsh learning lesson early on in your career? Did you, uh, with wet behind the ears and naive, was there anything that you came up against?

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Uh, definitely, definitely. I think two, two classic ones is first of all, psychopaths are very manipulative, you know? So 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 to someone, if you had to have a 10 minute conversation with the psychopath, you probably wouldn't notice anything untoward. You might actually find them quite warm and, you know, 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 behaviour that they see around them.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  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, I played the bass guitar myself. So I'd come to the guitar club and provide a bit of bass backing for all the prisoners doing Leonard Cohen and White Stripes songs. And we'd meet there and we'd talk about music and things. And I was, uh, sort of, I found this guy very intimidating. We'll call him Paul for the sake of argument. It's also his name in my book. But he, I found him quite intimidating at first, but over time, we kind of got to know each other and 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 on the internet.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  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 tablature or something. What could possibly be done with it?

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  Attack anyone with it.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, give someone a nasty paper cut. I mean, it's not worth the time and spend in 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, you know, half a kilogram of cocaine into the prison, right? It starts with little things like that. So as it turned out, I, 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, 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.

• 5:17Speaker 00

  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, 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. Everything's very compromised. So once you have that happen, Paul has to be, 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 sexual abuse. So that, that's one aspect. Manipulation is constantly, you know, right there when you work with psychopaths.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  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, you often find yourself getting into the state of feeling sorry for them or feeling what we call a sort of heart sink where you're like, oh my God, this guy's had such a terrible life. And it's usually with the younger men. I'm a dad now and 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 just constantly harming himself and can't really see the good in himself.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  The problem is that 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 stuff I think never actually stopped. It just keeps being drained from you. You never reach a point where that person has uh filled up with the empathy and the love that they need. Because they haven't been able to change the way they think about other 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 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.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  But there you have it.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Are there different types of psychopaths? I know that in narcissism you have grandiose narcissists and vulnerable narcissists.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah.

• 7:38Chris Williamson?

  Is there any sort of equivalent in psychopathy?

• 7:41Speaker 00

  I'm very glad you asked me that question, Chris, because this is my, this is my current um thinking about it. Because I think if you, if you look at Paul and Danny, so we have somebody who's got a, you know, 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 all, plausibly denied all.

• 8:00Chris Williamson?

  That was a manipulated guy.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, as is, as is his character evidently.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 8:06Chris Williamson?

  Killed him with some guitar sheet music.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Or got someone else to kill him with guitar sheet. I don't know, I don't know. And then you take someone like Danny, who has a much more sort of um personal crime where he is uh. 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. It 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 men would have met the criteria for being a psychopath. And I, 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, the American threshold of thirty, which is higher than the British one. And to say that those guys are both defined by being psychopaths is, I think,

• 8:54Speaker 00

  totally unhelpful on a number of levels. And this, this debate actually goes back a long way to the nineteen forties and fifties, when Herv Kleckley first published his book on the mask of sanity, how to identify a psychopath. He, quickly, there was a debate in American psychiatry about the fact that actually there were two kinds of psychopath. 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 characterological 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 are just bad to the bone on TV like Patrick Bateman or Hannibal Lecter,

• 9:37Speaker 00

  those are 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 termed sociopaths. 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 second, 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 things they may or may not have done as kids.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  So that, 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, and they might be people who are simply, you know, very, very good to talk to and great con men, whereas others, and 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, into being friends, you know. So there are many more gradations we can start to make.

• 10:53Chris Williamson?

  Is the psychopath sociopath distinction, is that even a thing? Is that just bro-science, or is that used as a, as terminology?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Sociopath was used, but then when the Americans published their DSM four, the way that they diagnosed mental disorder, they included, in nineteen eighty-three, they included something called antisocial personality disorder. And this is pretty much. It's just a term for the sort of the behavioural aspects of psychopathy. So none of the sort of conning, manipulative, charming stuff, but more the sort of antisocial lifestyle, parasitism, telling lies, lacking remorse, breaking the law, things like that. And that came to be known as sociopathy over time. But and I think because of that confusion between, you know, a proper psychopath who's probably made more by the environment than by their genes, being a sociopath, to somebody simply with antisocial personality disorder.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  And to get antisocial personality disorder is a much more inclusive term. I think something like eighty percent of people in prison in the UK and something like seventy percent 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 round to this, well, why did they break the law? Because they've got antisocial personality disorder? Why have they got antisocial personality disorder? Because they 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 antisocial personality disorder. And most people who have antisocial personality disorder 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.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And they're more, we like to think of, a successful psychopath, people who haven't been caught, people who just don't break the law, but they're still psychopaths, right?

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  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 unemotional traits. So the fact that psychopaths don't really seem to feel any remorse for what they do, they struggle to have empathy with other people, and they can be very callous, they can do things and not really feel sorry for them. I think because, you know, their wiring's different, they don't have the connection between the

• 13:15Speaker 00

  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 as young as 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 forty percent will ever progress to a point where they have something like, you know, enough enough traits to be diagnosable as a psychopath. So it's not the whole picture to say it's just it's just genes. And then there's, you know, these wonderful cases like James Fallon

• 13:55Speaker 00

  and professor 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 a unpleasant image of maybe wound detail, or maybe a pleasant image of a butterfly or something like that. And then he measures their their brain response using, I think it's contrast tomography. So you look at which areas of the brain are being activated, like a CT scan. And then you 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 don't know, a war zone, and you gave the same image to someone who isn't a psychopath,

• 14:37Speaker 00

  the psychopath will show much lower levels of neurological activity in response to that stimulus, because they don't recognise that something is 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. This person is completely psychopathic. He's like, oh, my god, have I got this wrong? Is this person definitely in the control group?

• 15:22Speaker 00

  And he looks at the scan, goes to his master key, where we see all the people who are taking part, and he realises that this is his own brain scan. He is functionally a psychopath, studying psychopaths at Stanford University. He's got a wife and kids, 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, I struggle with a lot of the roles that I play in life because I don't see why I have to, I don't see why I have to be a good dad. When people come to stay at my house, I just think, why, 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, and, and these kids are, there's also a little video associated to promote the book and his kids are like, yeah, that can be difficult. He doesn't really do emotion things. All these little tiny clues that add

• 16:07Speaker 00

  up to a picture of somebody who, you know, clearly has some sort of background, maybe, you know, a relative or something that would have caused his psychopathy to come out, but doesn't have any of the behavioural features, you know, good career, good family life, bit cranky at the weekends maybe, but that could describe me as well. I'm far too neurotic to be a psychopath.

• 16:28Chris Williamson?

  Would he have met the criteria, whatever it is, 26 or above or 30 or above on the, the scale? Would he have met that?

• 16:35Speaker 00

  No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't because I think that the psychopath test, Bob Hare's Psychopathy Checklist revised, has pretty much, I'd like to say an equal split, but actually the behavioural stuff, so breaking the law, being impulsive, being irresponsible, taking drugs, being what we call criminally versatile, so having a lot of offences from different categories. All that's in the, the secondary psychopathy factor, factor two, as we call it. And Jim Fallon had none of that. So he'd never even got halfway up the scale, which wouldn't have had enough to diagnose him as a clinical psychopath, if you like.

• 17:07Chris Williamson?

  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 behaviourally deployed that into the world in a psychopathic way. Is that the right way to look at it?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And, and I, I think I can, I can even support your hypothesis a bit further by saying that all of the psychopaths I've met in, you know, 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, 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, or let's talk about. Tony, who's one of the cases in my book, he had an enmeshed relationship with his mother, where he was never really able to break away from her emotionally. So even though he was in his

• 18:08Speaker 00

  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, you know, very upset nurses who'd been supervised in the visit saying, oh, they did that thing again. You know, what are we going to do? We have to address this. And sort of, you know, visits in hospitals are quite sacred. So we can't necessarily, 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 in the way that it sort of overrid his, his own personality. It sort of, it meant that he, his own personality, you know, who, who are you, Tony? And he would really

• 18:49Speaker 00

  struggle to answer that question as well. 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, read and write about psychopaths. That's who I am. But for Tony, there wasn't that sort of core. He didn't have anything that wasn't the slick con man. And that's really strange.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  No concrete sense of self, is there? He's very, very malleable. If you were to, if you were to design the childhood to activate the psychopathic genetic tendency, what would you, what would you have happen to a child?

• 19:38Speaker 00

  It's an interesting way around of asking it, Chris, but I'd say you've got, 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, very, sort of, 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, who had never been caught, but there we go.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  And then the father, in Tony's case, disappeared. So once, if a father leaves a kid, particularly in sort of, you know, the preteen, teen years, they can become very, very. I guess embedded in the kids' memories as like a perfect dad. Yeah, they they didn't stay around all of 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,

• 20:50Speaker 00

  but having that sort of, you know, that 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 enmeshed mother as well. There are lots of people talk about Ted Bundy as being a sort of nice.

• 21:12Chris Williamson?

  I was literally about to say the same thing because his mother was still at the trial. Had this sort of angel boy, my my beautiful, perfect child's vision of him.

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Right, and and that, so there's that. And there's also the fact that, you know, I think his father was not particularly somebody of merit, but his grandfather was a hugely sort of paternalistic, overbearing, dominating figure in his life. And he, there were all these sort of signs that would encourage somebody to to be psychopathic. I don't know about, well, this is the interesting thing is being a psychopath doesn't necessarily make you a criminal like Jim Fallon, right? You, what pushed Bundy 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're talking about sociopathy as well and secondary psychopaths, I think they can be much more formed by an environment that's very abusive and harsh.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  And I remember somebody I worked with in the UK, actually, who was very much, you know, a sociopath, a secondary psychopath. So somebody who wasn't charming, wasn't particularly cunning, wasn't very glib, but was very antisocial, a very remorseless. And very callous, you know, did bad things to the people, didn't feel bad about it. He recanted this, this episode that still stays with me. He's not in the book, he's just a very interesting character and, and he was 12 years old and he was, um, uh, his dad was very, again, very dominant, but he, and his dad wanted him to be tough, you know, so he gets into a fight with some older boys and this guy was, you know, even in his 40s, very cheeky and sort of like to push boundaries. So he probably said something

• 22:52Speaker 00

  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. His dad opens the door and says, what is it? Uh, Jim and Jim says, oh, these, 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 strong. And closes the door in his face. Other guys arrived, 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 and this being a good thing that, you know, his dad made him realise that at the end, nobody's got your back. I was just like, that's an awful lesson to learn from that story.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  But nevertheless, if you are brought up like that, then you're gonna develop something like a psychopathic defence. 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 to distance yourself and act like a psychopath.

• 23:53Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea why psychopathy is adaptive? Why it would have evolved at all?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  So we, we often think about this, about personality disorders of all kinds, because they, they're chronic, they don't go away. Um, I think the way that we think about personalities or in terms of antisocial, 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 um, schizoid 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, if particularly you, uh, were, if we think back to, um,

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Let's say Vikings, yeah, a society with 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 a while, Lindisfarne, the monastery there was very rich and very prone to raiding by Viking invaders.

• 24:58Chris Williamson?

  They got fucked up.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And they were sacked and they were murdered and that whole stuff was taken, they kept coming back, bless them. And I think, you know, there's some sort of period when the sixteenth century, where the Vikings came four or five times a year. And 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 offence, 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 won't experience that shame and trauma in response to doing bad things, because they don't see these as bad

• 25:42Speaker 00

  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 provide them with clothes, I have to provide them with wealth 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 irrelevant. 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

• 26:26Speaker 00

  there are certain models like this for things like borderline personality disorder, 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 dependent on other people for everything that 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.

• 26:55Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you're blowing my mind. That's so interesting. That's so interesting. So...

• 27:02Chris Williamson?

  If you were to think of a typical tribe, your Dunbar hundred person tribe or whatever, as like a football team, you need a goalkeeper and your goalkeeper has a very specific role to play. Now, it wouldn't, the team wouldn't work if everybody tried to be a goalkeeper. Now, the same thing is happening here. So I had, um, 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, to work. So not only do you have social norms which restrict sort of narcissistic tendencies, but narcissists

• 27:45Chris Williamson?

  are probably killed at a higher rate than non narcissist people. And I'm going to guess that psychopaths, it's like a high risk, high reward strategy of, of existing. So you're more likely to die, but you're also more likely to become the billionaire or the chieftain of the tribe or something like that, which is a lot of the time why people point the finger at presidents and say that they're a psychopath. So, but that's so interesting to think that individually as a person, psychopathy, 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, certain circumstances. And then if

• 28:28Chris Williamson?

  you scale up to the size of, you know, the Vikings, I don't know how big that was, but 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 Lindisfarne to sack them and, and come back. That's so good.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think just to add to that, it's a, the other thing about psychopaths is they have terrible risk reward reasoning, particularly socially. So if you

• 28:56Speaker 00

  You know, if you play a game of poker with a psychopath, they'll continue to to bet outrageously based on very, very bad cards. And I think that that's really interesting that psychopaths are such good con men in some cases, you know, they can actually carry that off. They can play brag very effectively. But if you have somebody who can't make those risk rule calculus thing, if I go off to Lindisfarne, they may have got wires and stationed, you know, Celtic soldiers all the way 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 psychopaths. We've shown this again and again in research literature, they just don't, you know, they don't factor that in. And also, if you, you know, again, I was talking about trauma, if psychopaths 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.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  And I think with the example you were 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, you know, you, you can only be as so much of a narcissist before it becomes intolerable for society. And I think that changes over time. I think the amount of narcissism that we'll accept shifts quite a lot. I'm not necessarily in the, 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 written an article that got quite a lot of attention that says that's not how, it's not helpful. I think you've got to really be-

• 30:21Chris Williamson?

  Someone that likes to take selfies and post them on Instagram, we're not, we're not talking about that.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  No, we're, 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, we've done right things. Yeah, that we're important, right? And if we don't have that, then our self-esteem drops and we feel terrible. And narcissists, particularly grandiose narcissists, don't have that need at all because they're so absolutely convinced that they're, they're right, that it's it's that sort of a non-issue. So like with psychopathy and narcissism together, and there's a lot of correlation between the two, I should say, so a lot of the sort of more grandiose narcissists can also have psychopathy and vice versa. I think there is a limit. And I think that if we think about Steven Pinker's work on the reduction of violence in societies over time,

• 31:11Speaker 00

  these aren't societies that value the traits and the qualities that psychopaths have, but I'm sure that there were such societies at many stages in our past.

• 31:19Chris Williamson?

  Who was that guy that tried to get someone to buy the Eiffel Tower?

• 31:25Speaker 00

  I do know you're a French con man sometime ago. I do know who you mean, but but that that so someone like Tony. That's that's an old con, you know, selling off old ones of the world or or structures that have, you know, had quite a few years on them and plausibly could be ready to be decommissioned and replaced as something better. That's one of the oldest cons in the book is you try and attract investors into this great opportunity and you're basically selling, you know, selling the Eiffel Tower to someone who's gullible enough to believe that it could be up for sale. And that's all about that's all about the graft, right? That's all about how you present yourself as a plausible salesman. So someone like Tony in the book, you know, he's he's got the best suits. He's got his own bank. He's got a chauffeur. He's got a Mercedes, stretch Mercedes Benz.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  All things that he's obtained through very dodgy means, but nevertheless, you know, when you start signing 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 con. It's very difficult because this is what, I don't want to get too technical. 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 con. And you think, why do they fall for the con? And you're not thinking emotionally, you're thinking they fall for the con because they want this. So if I can promise that plausibly, then I can pretty much take them for everything they've got. Because once I have them believing they're going to get, you know,

• 32:54Speaker 00

  a 10,000% return on their scrap of the Eiffel Tower.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  But, you know, they're finished because the psychopath will keep doing that that scam over and again. I I work with a a guy who posed as a police officer. And he would go into people's flats and an offer to move their jewellery and money to a safe place in the flat. I'd say it was, you know, we see 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 six hundred is just unbelievable numbers of sort of cons

• 33:43Speaker 00

  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 and again. So it really is quite a sort of remorseless rate of success. Once they get the graft right, you know.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  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 hundreds, 200, 300 years, it's now no longer adaptive. It's now a big problem. And it's kind of strange that we may have like culturally competed psychopaths out of their place in society.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  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 psychopathy, particularly about whether things like aggression, violence and antisocial behaviour 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 as psychopaths. Are they aggressive? Are they antisocial? 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. And we need to do that without thinking about behaviour, because the factors that drive

• 35:14Speaker 00

  behaviour are very, very complicated. There's a colleague of mine, Kerry Danes, forensic psychologist, has also written books about her work. And she says, I know a guy who is a murderer. They've killed, I think, about 15 people in their lifetime. 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 an SAS commander, Special Forces commander, who does this as part of their job. Now, that behaviour, it's possible this person is a psychopath, sure, 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

• 35:58Speaker 00

  that'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. Think much more in terms of the sort of psychological, emotional traits that people have. And if we were able to do that, well, I guess the corollary is that we have identified a lot more psychopaths in probably politics, used car sales, possibly chief executives.

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  Is it true?

• 36:21Speaker 00

  Stock traders.

• 36:22Chris Williamson?

  But there's that, that sort of folklore thing about 1% of the population are psychopaths. Is that, is there any legs to that?

• 36:32Speaker 00

  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 an equivalent of in the USA, but there are some other surveys you can use to estimate it. We actually included the PTLSV, 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 population, it's about 1 or 0.4 to 0.6%. So about 1 in 170, 200 people would have been diagnosable as a psychopath, which is

• 37:10Chris Williamson?

  Still quite a lot.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. And if you think, you know, they tend to get banged up with quite high propensity. And 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 odd bankruptcy.

• 37:45Chris Williamson?

  High risk, high reward, man. High risk, high reward. Why is it, why is it that there's so few female psychopaths?

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think that that that's sort of that part of this is recursive. Like if we are judging psychopathy on the basis of behaviour, male men are more antisocial. They have more, there are more antisocial men, there are more men who go to prison. There are more men who meet the criteria for juvenile delinquency, for criminal versatility, for poor behavioural controls. And therefore, there's sort of a bias factor in using something like the psychopathy checklist because we use a lot of behaviour that's just more typically associated with men. There are female psychopaths. In my book, I talk about Angela Simpson, who presents, you know, very much as a really seriously high-scoring male psychopath, very.

• 38:32Chris Williamson?

  What does that mean?

• 38:34Speaker 00

  So that means that on the psychopathy checklist, she would score in the mid to high thirties, you know, there are very few of the items that she doesn't, doesn't, 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.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  And I think actually that when Phoebe Waller-Bridge was starting to think about Killing Eve, she wanted to start thinking about psychopaths. 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 that 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 Marquez uses people around her to do the dirty work so she can manipulate people but can do it behind the scenes. That's sort of the archetype.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  But again, if you were doing that successfully, you wouldn't necessarily get caught for it. And secondly, of the two thousand, we commissioned like two thousand beds for male psychopaths in the UK, dangerous and severe personality disorder, and then forty, forty beds, four zero beds for women, of which fifteen were only ever filled, and a lot of the rest were just decommissioned. So the profile of women who we would be able to use to say a research population is female psychopaths is 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 and one of the behavioral factors is aggression or antisociality, for example, because we know those are by our swords, man.

• 40:25Chris Williamson?

  I suppose as well that if you have aggression and beating someone up or killing somebody is such a obvious red flag for you to identify a psychopath, whereas it must be easier to get away with manipulating people, doing the catapult type thing, you know, the femme fatale 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, blah. So, 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, explain the story of that lady, because that was really, that was really surprising, what she did to that man.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  Well, this is a, this is a, again, a very psychopathic trait of a sort of grandiosity, so believing that you are the, you know, the center of the world and your decisions are the right ones to always make. And she, 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, they had a sort of on off relationship thing and he was, you know, he probably destroyed his body with drugs and alcohol and other things and he was sometimes used a wheelchair 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.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  And she sort of, from this, you know, idle conversation forms an idea that she's going to kill him. So she persuades him to come and meet her and then she's sort of, you know, quite tantalizing and sort of sexually provocative and gets him to come back to her flat and leaves his wheelchair at quite some distance in the stairway, so it doesn't look like, away from the stairway, so it doesn't look like he's come in there. And then, you know, brings him into the, the living room, sits him down in front of the TV, then ties him up while he's not got his wheelchair, can't really get away, starts torturing him, driving nails into his skull and he, he lives for about sort of seven or eight hours through this and then he dies in the early morning after really the end of the ordeal and then she. Gets her current partner to help her take the body down, says dismember it, burn it and

• 42:35Speaker 00

  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, you know, somebody says, would you do it again? Hell, yeah. Without a second's hesitation, you know, really, actually just aggressive, it's just aggressive, the way that she presents them, very, very remorseless, callous, just, you know, pretty typical male psychopathy. And that's quite rare in a female presenting, or sorry, a female presenting with psychopathy. But there are elements to it that fit with the stereotypes, like she, you know, she doesn't just dispose the body on her own,

• 43:17Speaker 00

  she gets her boyfriend to do it and then gets him to keep stum with some sort of promise, you know, there's the sort of sense of, you know, she's using sexuality to bring somebody up to be, to be murdered, maybe some, well, I can't think of the, the male psychopaths I've worked with is doing that, although some of them would attack sex workers. So it's not

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  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, there was the Yorkshire Ripper in the UK was someone that was almost exclusively working on sex workers, right?

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, that's right. And there was a, I've worked with a, I think he would qualify as a serial killer. I think he had two, three offences. So would target men in toilets, costuming locations in London and, you know, bring them back, get, 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 graft that you couldn't, you wouldn't, you wouldn't trust this man as far as you could throw them, right? So you'd never be able to sort of trust them in a situation where

• 44:38Speaker 00

  you were vulnerable. There has to be a sort of something disarming or seductive about

• 44:43Chris Williamson?

  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, who was the dude that dressed up as the clown in America?

• 45:01Chris Williamson?

  That clown killer. You know the one I mean. Come on, people are screaming it into their

• 45:06Speaker 00

  I'm terrible, I'm terrible.

• 45:08Chris Williamson?

  Screaming it into their airport. I'm gonna, I'm gonna Google it. Um, there was this guy who was regularly killing people. He's one of the most famous serial killers. Clown, clown, serial, John Wayne Gacy.

• 45:21Speaker 00

  Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I said, I'm terrible with serial killers.

• 45:25Chris Williamson?

  So, um, one of the things that he, it seemed like he did was, he seemed to be sexually attracted to some or 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?

• 46:11Speaker 00

  So, yeah, that's an interesting question. I think, I guess I'm just hesitant to, to say that psychopaths have a particular pattern of offending behaviour because they, you know, it really, the, the range of offences we had in somewhere like Rampton was very, very broad. And it included child sex offences, but, um, one of the interesting things about Rampton was that, uh, nobody in a hospital, you don't disclose people's offences. So nobody knew what anyone else had done. So we had this really interesting dynamic between two old friends who were guys who were in their 50s when I was there. So, you know, 20 years ago, this, they'd be quite old now. And one of them was a child sex offender.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  And, you know, very sort of overweight, not, not particularly appealing person, but his best mate was someone called Tony or something. And Tony was in the hospital because he killed and dismembered a child sex offender. And it was really interesting that these two had such a sort of positive dynamic, um, that they, uh, uh, you know, didn't know, simply because they didn't know each other's offences. Um, so a real range of men in this same ward with very, very different offences. And I, I think the thing about

• 47:28Speaker 00

  Where there was, it seemed to be that where there was a sexual element, psychopaths are quite sexually promiscuous. They don't kind of have maybe the same scruples or strong feelings about their, what their partner should be or look like that the rest of us do. They tend to be very promiscuous, 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 a more intimate relationship, but only with the goal of satisfying their needs for comfort, intimacy, and perhaps also, you know, things like money and, um, uh, safety. So you, you know, you live with someone because they're your partner, but not because you're really interested in ever having a long-term relationship.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  And because they are meeting your instrumental goals, immediate instrumental goals. So this means that sex becomes quite a sort of currency for psychopaths, which is something I would say. But the thing is then, uh, the criminal justice system gets very, very black and white about what exactly takes place in the index offence, you know? And if you, someone then kill them, it's likely that the crime prosecution service would 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 and as being murder, might well have had sexual elements that were not necessarily present in maybe the description of the offence. And it could be kept secret because they were never charged and convicted of, you know, sexually intended murder.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  An example was, um, when I worked within special hospitals who murdered, murdered a woman by inserting a, a sharpened, um, a broom into her, uh, into her vagina. And it's just, you know, horrible way to go. And, and he was, uh, uh, convicted of murder, which meant that he had protection from all of being perceived as a, I'm so sorry, being perceived as a, a sex offender or a nonce or anything like that. And he, he, he was also quite grandiose and quite manipulative and he. 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, sort of the hierarchy of offences in prisons and why people present themselves in the way that they do.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  But it was a little bit chilling that, you know, this was clearly a sexual offence. But he got away with it being judged in that way because it'd been classified as a violent one by a sort of slightly arbitrary system.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  That's so interesting, the fact that because what the criminal justice system is actually looking for is 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 is kind of kind of pointless, kind of 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 offence always seems to come up. And I suppose that beyond, like, your net worth in the 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.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  All of that stuff's been stripped away from you, your job title, your qualifications, your education, your family. You know, 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.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Absolutely, and this leads to, you know, these very bizarre hierarchies where often, as I said, sex offenders are at the bottom, yet they're vulnerable prisoners. Often, we spend a lot of time and sort of thought in the prison service protecting them. And at 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 are the robbers. Because the thing about robbing someone is this pretty definitely, you know, indisputably a violent offence, and maybe you did, you know, maybe you did or didn't kill someone. I love that in prison break, the guy gets himself into the prison by being a robber. Because you just, all you have to do to rob someone is threaten them with a weapon, right?

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Plausibly. So you walk into a bank with a gun, make some sort of unspecified threat, you're a robber. And that, you know, that goes a long way from sort of somebody who is maybe a serial robber who targets people very aggressively and is looking for an excuse to harm them, to someone who makes a sort of botched attempt because they're a drug addict to hold up a a convenience store or something and is busted and charged for a very serious violent offence. Very, very different, but robbers, the group of robbers contains, for example, a lot of psychopaths, a lot of psychopaths.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  Has anyone tried to cure psychopathy?

• 52:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, a lot of things have been tried, Chris, but it's a pretty sad tale. There's in the sixties and seventies, they got quite experimental. They tried things like naked encounter therapy, they tried LSD.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  What's naked encounter therapy?

• 52:23Speaker 00

  So you take, basically you take off all your clothes and this was specifically targeted for psychopaths. You take off your clothes, sit around in a room together, talk about your life, you're offending. And there's sort of the, the idea, I think, behind it was that if you strip off all the sort of social expectations, you find that at heart, it was society that made psychopaths bad. And then, you know, you put them in a sort of primal situation, they'd be much better to each other. But it, it, they weren't, and curiously enough, it actually made them worse or more likely to be convicted of a violent offence after that. So totally, total failure on every point. Isolation tank therapy. And there were a few, there've been a few, like, you know, well meaning, but misguided attempts to use like less directed forms.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  So Ashworth Hospital had a personality disorder ward, which had quite a few psychopaths on it. And the staff tried to be, give them a little bit more freedom. And I think the staff somehow got the wrong end of 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 the, or told the hospital authorities that there was a, a girl being groomed by the, the ward patients to come onto the ward and be used for, you know, sex and other terrible things. And they lost the hospital authorities and there was an inquiry which found that basically the staff had allowed themselves to 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,

• 53:51Speaker 00

  which maybe we hadn't learned by the time of DSPD.

• 53:54Chris Williamson?

  Who is one of the scariest psychopaths that you've worked with?

• 53:59Speaker 00

  So we, I think, thinking about, um, uh, think about Paul, I mean, he was sort of scary in the sense of interpersonally, you know, you wouldn't want to, to be with him for any length of time because you, you know, he might try and manipulate you and he just might try and bully you. And, and that, that sort of constant sense of threat, uh, the idea that there might be other people on the wall, everyone from patients to prisoners 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 that you really don't get to the bottom. And there was a patient I worked with in lower conditions of security, but who'd been up in, uh, high security for a long time. And he was someone who just seemed

• 54:43Speaker 00

  to be wired very, very differently. And, 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 mode where any questions, man, why the fuck are you asking me that? And, and you, you're 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, um, there was a murder in his history and several other attacks on people. And some of it, uh, may have had a sexual element, but it was again, very difficult to tease out. And if somebody's

• 55:25Speaker 00

  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, uh, 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 reappeared again. But I think that, uh, this was a case that really affected me. And maybe I'm not describing it enough, but it, that, 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 organise your thoughts because you don't know who's going to be presenting your opposite. So I think that's

• 56:07Speaker 00

  sort of when somebody's deeply unpredictable. If someone is predictably nasty, that's actually okay. But it's like, you know, that's how trauma works. If, if, if the, the goalposts change every time you come into work, it can really mess you up quite quickly. And I think that, I would have said was the, the case that, thinking of sort of generating a sense of fear and anxiety in me, that certainly did it the most, yeah.

• 56:26Chris Williamson?

  All right, Mark, let's bring this one home. If people want to check out the work that you do, where should they go?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  I would say, you know, Google me. I've got a university webpage. You can also find my book, Making a Psychopath, published by Penguin in the UK and Macmillan 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.

• 56:50Chris Williamson?

  All right, Mark. I appreciate you.

• 56:51Speaker 00

  Lovely to be here, Chris. Thanks so much for having me.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 57:10Speaker 04

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• 57:14Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.