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0:00
they saw a psychopath Kevin here and I don't care about you at all 10 years of free educational content that benefits the world no you're just a view to me you're a portion of a penny a click that buys me Doomer fantasy manga and why would I feel guilty about that berserk is awesome does it make me a bad person maybe I don't really care and do you there's 750 million votes for no you need psychopath Kevin as much as he needs you and there we go I just manipulated your curiosity for 30
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seconds so YouTube will officially count you as a view because that's what a psychopath would do okay um I'm not a psychopath uh or even close really I'll give you my score later but you just got a glimpse into the manipulation of a psychopath when we hear the word psychopath we instantly think of serial killers and the most evil criminals in human history and that's not entirely wrong but the cardiac surgeon who saves your grandma's life might actually be more of a
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psychopath than John Wayne Gacy I'm gonna break down what a psychopath is and isn't with a few examples that'll show you whether you think like a psychopath I'll show you the science of how a psychopath operates why he is what he is and give you a detailed analysis of why someone the whole world considers to be a psychopath actually wasn't then I'll show you why it's so important that you turn into a little bit of a psychopath yourself first here's how a real psychopath
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thinks Dr Kent Keel is one of the world's leading researchers on psychopathy he's currently a professor of psychology neuroscience and law at the University of New Mexico as he runs the lab at the Mind research network but he got his start by interviewing and analyzing the brain scans of psychopaths in Canadian prisons including one inmate he called Bob in his book The psychopath Whisperer he details one of Bob's criminal Endeavors hiking over the border from Canada to the United States
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to buy cartons of cigarettes to smuggle back to resell on taxed pretty standard low-level crime stuff but what Bob did to sell his smuggled smokes shows the difference between Psychopaths and us so let's consider how a criminal might unload his Goods the easiest solution would be to wholesale them to a middleman and then back guy does the tedious work of selling each carton it's not a bad solution you'd make your money and then you're ready for another trip
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over the Border but a psychopath can do better than that the obvious customer base for cigarettes is smokers they're your target market here anyway so you sell directly to all the smokers that you can find then rinse and repeat it makes perfect sense but it wouldn't occur to a psychopath to do it that way there's got to be a more lucrative option like selling to underage kids they'd have a hard time getting smokes on their own so maybe there's a thriving Black Market
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waiting to be tapped and this starts to hint at a psychopath's lack of moral compass he just wouldn't care that he was potentially doing harm to kids but that's still not good enough for a real psychopath and what Bob actually did demonstrates the psychopath's total comfort with serious depravity if it makes utilitarian sense Bob's preferred customer was someone who couldn't walk into a convenience store and buy a pack or even ask someone else to buy for them
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someone who really shouldn't be smoking someone who would be ashamed to be seen buying cigarettes at all let alone actually smoking them someone who would pay way more money for the product than anyone else to avoid all those situations Bob sold his cigarettes to pregnant women because they paid the most not only did he never think twice about the consequences or morals of it but it was actually pretty proud of identifying the most vulnerable and most profitable customers for his smuggled
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Goods Bob was a true psychopath but his callous dispassionate approach and his total lack of any guilt is only a tiny portion of what constitutes psychopathy the word itself is really good and really useless John seabrook's 2008 article in the New Yorker was titled suffering souls for a reason that is literally what the breakdown of the word psychopath means the awkward marriage of of the Greek psyche meaning soul and pathos meaning feeling or suffering it's a great way to describe something so
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complex and it also tells us nothing the Paradox with psychopathy is that we barely understand it despite Psychopaths having always existed every tribe in human history has had a couple Souls that just weren't quite right the conscience that exists for everyone else that moral code they operate within to play nice with the rest of society it just isn't there for them Psychopaths have a pattern of anti-social behavior that extends throughout their lives and Society has to find some way of dealing
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with it the book of Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Hebrew Torah it was probably written around 400 BC and here's how Deuteronomy dealt with an anti-social kid if someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the Gate of his town they shall say to the elders this son of ours is stubborn and rebellious he will not obey us he is a
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glutton and a drunkard then all the men of his town are to Stone him to death you must Purge the evil from among you all Israel will hear of it and be afraid yeah this is one of the earliest if not the earliest mention of psychopathy including several elements of the modern checklist we use to help identify Psychopaths such as clear patterns of irresponsible Behavior a history of juvenile delinquency and a failure to accept responsibility for one's actions it reflects how terrifying a psychopath
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is to normal people and how much of a disrupter they can be so so much that the takeaway was better beat him to death with rocks a hundred years later the Greek philosopher theophrastus wrote characters which outlines 30 different moral types and their behaviors one was the unscrupulous man who shamelessly cheats others and takes advantage of them part of what clinicians might now refer to as a parasitic lifestyle from the Torah to characters we see bad people but are they actually Psychopaths
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maybe but it's really hard to tell who's a narcissist or selfish or uncaring or who's just neurodivergent Hans Asperger himself initially called Asperger's Syndrome autistic psychopathy and it's easy to see why Asperger used the term Alexa thymia is the inability to identify or communicate one's own feelings is it instant definitely obvious whether someone is Alexa thymic or that they don't even have feelings to communicate what about the lack of social emotional
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reciprocity that's part of an Autism Spectrum diagnosis or less nuanced facial perception how do you separate someone who isn't very good at it from someone who isn't programmed to care hey take these five words and rank them from most emotionally positive to most emotionally negative okay for me the list goes like this it's totally possible that you rank puppy first because you love dogs and puppies bring you a sense of Joy that's even stronger than laughter that's totally
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valid but the rest of the list seems pretty clear a table is neutral it's it's just a table you really should not feel too positive or negative about a table but the two negative words are different a parking ticket sucks but cancer is really bad you wouldn't want either one but a parking ticket is clearly preferable real psychopaths struggle to rank words in this fashion because to them they're all pretty value neutral words there's no fine line between puppy and laughter and even
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puppy and cancer whatever they're both just things who cares to a psychopath it is what it is the Nuance we see in the world although little details that determine who we are how we navigate life and how we process what's around us is seriously dampened for a psychopath but it's like that line in Wayne's World you know I thought I had Mono once for an entire year turned out I was just really bored can you identify where common problems stop and psychopathy begins or think about this maybe a
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person with a long history of antisocial behavior is just a big jerk all of that stuff is part of psychopathy but on its own it's insufficient to meet our current threshold of diagnosis as Humanity very slowly identified the worst among its own ranks they still had to figure out what to do about them for hundreds of thousands of years there was probably some version of the Deuteronomy solution just get rid of them if not attack them physically you shun them
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into Exile you eliminate the problem and negate the danger these people bring to your tribe's survival the yorubas of Nigeria called their psychopaths are a knocking and the Inuit called them conlangeta psychopathy is not a modern phenomenon that's a consequence of our outrageously complicated lives no no culture has been immune but here's a question what if we could harness psychopathy to actually benefit us in the invention of friends I examined the concept of dunbar's number
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anthropologists and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar posited that we have a limited cognitive capacity for Meaningful social networks but in Kevin dutton's the wisdom of psychopaths Dunbar points to a popular early example of how people made use of the Psychopaths liabilities Viking Berserkers these were totally Fearless Warriors who fought in pure rage their brutality and savagery differed markedly not only from the European soldiers who they encountered but even from other
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Vikings they existed on the fringes of Viking Society they were dangerous so why Exile your psychos when you can unleash them on your enemies maybe they were useful after all we couldn't scan the brains of Berserkers in 900 A.D but if we'd subjected them to functional magnetic resonance imaging fmri we likely would have encountered a seriously malfunctioning amygdala the amygdala is the almond-shaped brain region that's part of the limbic system I detailed in My Pain video we describe
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it as the fear center of the brain when you look over the edge at the top of a building your amygdala goes wild you know not to lean any further we are hardwired to process a snake with our eyes and instantly Sound the Alarm Danger get away that's the amygdala in action it is an amplifier of stimuli to tell you what to do and what not to do so what happens when your amygdala just isn't very sensitive Kent keel's early fmri scans showed clear activity deficits in the emotional processing
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centers of the brain including the amygdala and the anterior and posterior cingulate they just weren't very responsive when we think of psychopaths as being cool calculated and unemotional this is one of the reasons why and it also means you can be an incredible climber the documentary free solo profiles Alex Honnold a rock climber who doesn't use ropes or protective equipment free solo climbing is being hundreds or thousands of feet up mountains using just your hands and feet
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it's hard to believe anyone actually could do this let alone feel comfortable with it but scans of Alex's brain show that his fear Center doesn't work like ours if we're peeing our pants trying not to fall to our deaths Alex is just looking for the next Rock to grab onto is this the same physiological phenomenon that made Michael Jordan or David Ortiz such clutch performers in basketball or baseball are those guys immune to the pressure with their amygdalas just drinking a pina colada on
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the beach while ours would be exploding yeah probably and despite possibly sharing this particular quality with Ted Bundy none of those athletes are a psychopath so how does this work you've got a unique amygdala and at some point you're at a fork in the road where you either nail a three at the buzzer or start burying bodies in your backyard Dr Benjamin Rush was the preeminent physician of the early American era and he was one of the first to recognize that something really different was
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happening here he noticed that injury and brain damage could actually change one's Behavior seemingly shifting their internal moral code in medical inquiries and observations on diseases of the Mind Rush describes a Nation he had who exhibited what we would Now call psychopathy she was addicted to every kind of Mischief her wickedness had no intervals while she was awake except when she was kept busy in some steady and difficult employment in these cases of moral depravity there is probably an
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original defective organization in those parts of the body which are occupied by the moral faculties of the mind okay so is psychopathy inherently biological psychological or both French physician Philippe penal called the phenomenon Mani sandelir delirium without Mania because it encompassed the behavior of this severely mentally ill without presenting the obvious outward behavioral symptoms all the bad behavior with none of the crazy in 1835 James Pritchard refined penal's ideas by
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describing the condition as a moral Insanity absent of the impairments or delusions other patients exhibited it took a full Century of theories and research to take the general term psychopathy from meaning any illness of the Mind into the focus definition we use today in 1941 the psychiatrist hervey cleckley broke through the mask of Sanity which outlined most of the characteristics of psychopathy that we're still using now insincerity lack of remorse incapacity for love no
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realistic Life Plan superficial charm and a dozen more more a list that goes Way Beyond Simple sociopathy we'd finally categorized a Next Level derangement the kind that defined the most serious outliers in criminal society that the mass murderers and the most unprincipled immoral monsters in the decades since we've come to apply the term psychopath to anyone who has done something really really bad the kinds of things no decent person would seem capable of but are they really all
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Psychopaths who actually has a suffering soul and who is mentally broken in other ways if we're going to diagnose and treat the disease or maybe even prevent it we gotta know the difference here's an interesting update now we can see it in the brain neurons in the brain generate tiny electrical fields that can be measured by electroencephalograms eegs when you're hooked up to an EEG and presented with a stimuli like a picture of Jaws about to bite you in half you'll
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generate a pattern of electrical responses that can be graphed with Peaks and valleys the third positive Peak generated is called the P3 and it correlates with your brain recognizing stimuli as being important it's also basically a psychopath litmus test Kent Keel conducted research using the Oddball task a series of tones were played for subjects and almost all of them were the same pitch but when a higher tone was played the Oddball tone the subject had to press a button as
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quickly as they could the results were incredible out of 81 inmates he tested 97 of those diagnosed with psychopathy showed an extremely elevated P3 response zero percent of the non-psychopathic inmates had an elevated P3 this simple hearing test was almost perfect as a diagnostic tool for psychopathy but what if you don't have an EEG machine handy and you're hiding from people who want to kill you how you respond to a really perverse version of the trolley problem
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might give a clue there's one version where a doctor sees a perfectly healthy patient with organs that could be donated to save the lives of five of his other patients so does he carve up one completely innocent guy so five others can live happily ever after and that one's not too bad I said really perverse and realistic imagine a family is in the midst of a horrible brutal Civil War the atrocities visited upon the Igbo people of Biafra and the Nigerian conflict of
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the late 1960s or Khmer Rouge ravaging Cambodia in the 70s or the massacres of Rwandan hutus in the 1990s two parents a son a daughter and a newborn baby are all hiding under the floorboards as soldiers search for them the baby starts to cry if the family is discovered all of them will be killed what does the mother holding the baby do if she's a psychopath she doesn't even think about what to do to save most of her family her baby is just an alarm that needs to
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be deactivated in 1884 the RV Dudley and Steven's trial in England was actually pretty close to this concept the yacht minionette wrecked and four men were stranded at Sea after three weeks of floating in the middle of nowhere Tom Dudley and Edwin Stevens killed and ate a 17 year old crewmate who'd become severely ill from drinking sea water a German vessel rescued them and when they were brought back to England two of them faced trial for murder and the non-psychopath Court ruled that
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necessity was no legal or moral excuse for murder they were sentenced to death which later was altered to A radically reduced six-month imprisonment which kind of sends a mixed message here Tom Dudley regretted nothing and never accepted the guilty verdict was he a cold-hearted psychopath worthy of being put to death or was he a guy in a terrible situation just trying to stay alive a century later Jeffrey Dahmer killed and dismembered 17 men including drugging them to allow for brain
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experimentation that would turn them into living zombies and engaging in cannibalism of others during a nearly 18-year period that overlapped much of Dahmer's activity Theodore Kaczynski mailed 16 explosive devices almost indiscriminately leaving three dead and 23 wounded it wouldn't be wrong to describe either one's Behavior as Psychopathic but are they both Psychopaths forensic psychologist Robert Hare built upon cleckley's psychopathy rubric to construct the hair psychopathy
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checklist which he further revised into the current pclr a 20 item inventory conducted through a structured two-hour interview and a full review of one's case history each of the 20 items is scored with a zero one or two depending on whether behavior is definitely not somewhat or definitely present the checklist is meant to be comprehensive over the course of one's life so if you've lost your temper a few times that's not a marker of psychopathy and a general rule is to score the questions
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independently of the big event that got someone locked up I can't sit down with Ted or Jeff and run the pclr interview but I don't really need to because we've got so many hours of interviews with them testifying to every facet of their lives in their own words and testimony from a range of people close to them when I'm done evaluating these two you'll know what a psychopath is and isn't and maybe you'll know who around you might be one this year I finally started exercising
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likable charismatic and even alluring pretty useful to entice victims Ted Kaczynski had very little charm and a lifelong struggle with interpersonal relationships Jeffrey Dahmer had enough Charisma to get his victims and others to trust him he uh he was very polite I was somewhat surprised I guess at uh how cordial Jeff was but he wasn't a master at interpersonal manipulation throughout his life and he didn't even have friends so Ted zero Jeff won somewhat present
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number two egocentricity or grandiose sense of self-worth this can come off as narcissism or inflated ego a psychopath is always the smartest guy in the room and if he fails at something it's never his fault it's just bad luck Ted Kaczynski probably he was the smartest guy in every room he had an IQ of 167 and he constantly ridiculed law enforcement and the FBI for being stupid
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zero Jeff put himself on the same plane as evil he saw in movies with delusions of grandeur that even involved Emperor Palpatine and mimicking his yellow eyes he really identified with the emperor he wanted like that mind control he had those you know yellow eyes so Jeff actually found some place where he could get contacts of her yellow eyes Ted 2 Jeff too number three prone to boredom slash low frustration tolerance boredom seemed to be a theme for Dahmer and he
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sums up how he felt as an 18 year old out of school living at home and drinking all day I'm depressed
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Ted on the other hand was pretty satisfied in his cabin living in the wood want to get a depth in that way of life there's almost no such thing as boring and Ted had no trouble completing degree programs in mathematics first at Harvard then Masters and doctoral degrees at the University of Michigan he was frustrated with pretty much all of society though and at not being able to hurt more people frustrating that I can't seem to make a lethal bomb Jeff's lifelong pattern of boredom and
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frustration is clear Ted's is more of a mixed bag Ted won Jeff two number four pathological lying and deception Dahmer was pulled over by a cop while he had body parts in a garbage bag in the car and he very naturally pushed emotional buttons to convince the policemen that he was just going to the dump in the middle of the night the officer asked what it was he said well it's the garbage my parents are breaking up and I'm alone and couldn't sleep so I thought I'd get rid of the garbage Ted
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did engage in deliberate deception to avoid raising any suspicion from his neighbors Ted was sly because we would think he was holed up in his cabin but he was in Salt Lake he would come back and stay in the woods until he got all scruffy again and then we would see him I think he planned a lot of that Ted exhibited a clear consistent pattern of deception as part of his adult activities but it was focused and controlled so Ted won Jeff too number five conning slash lack of sincerity
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Dahmer lured many of his victims by offering them money to pose for his photography when he intended to drug them and assault them he would offer money when they would let armor take photos of him but he'd say you have to come to my apartment Ted was less of a manipulator but he did use his family to his Advantage I used to send a statement again Ted's mother would send him money he would say I've got some chest pain and they say I should have some tests but I don't have the money and would in
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a sense scam her into sending money which he would then use to make bombs Ted won Jeff two number six lack of remorse or guilt this one is pretty interesting because Jeff Dahmer had what clinicians call Insight he knew what he'd done he knew that it was wrong and he knew why it was wrong and he felt bad about it indecision over whether I should confess to her talking about it and analyzing it shows me just how it worked my thinking was when someone annoyed Ted he'd do
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even Petty things to hurt them and then celebrate it like when some motorcyclists made too much noise I hey there I picked a nice rainy day when no one would be around I went over again [Music] they went in and just destroyed their cabin and then took a poop in their tub what yeah poop Justice is not a thing but Ted also kept a secret coded journal with his thoughts and he made it pretty clear that he didn't feel bad about the big stuff either I'm no longer bothered
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by having crippled this guy I laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling an airline pilot for this one Ted 2 Jeff zero number seven lack of effect and emotional depth effect is the normal range of emotions we both recognize and feel Psychopaths tend to be emotionally flat Jeff sums it up I was capable of a real sense of Love even back then not even sure if I am now when a family member of one of his victims attempted to attack him physically at his trial he
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was cool he kept control I would have thought he'd jump up he didn't he just sat there this is Jeffrey Dahmer under stress and Ted emotions just seemed to be totally off his radar this is one of the spots where pretty normal people can score some points and there's some Crossover with the autism spectrum where it's perfectly reasonable that someone could have a limited capacity for the complex feelings and emotions that most people have Ted 2 Jeff 2. number eight
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kallus slash lack of empathy empathy is hard to evaluate because it's so subjective between individuals and cultures so how do you evaluate such a nuanced thing with a serial killer the normal feelings of uh empathy that was easier than I thought a psychiatric assessment agreed his personality pattern was an individual who uses people sees them as objects does not have any empathy my recommendation really said that this person is too dangerous to be in the community Ted had
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no qualms about injuring or killing innocent people even the ones who weren't his intended victims and he also didn't care about being cruel to his own brother couldn't wait to tell my big brother about my ideas but it seemed like wow he was very dismissive of my ideas and he said you know Dave real smart people have a sadistic streak Ted 2 Jeff 2. number nine parasitic lifestyle Dahmer lived with his father and then his grandmother for most of his adulthood he used their houses for
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several of his assaults as he worked low-level jobs only in the last year before for his arrest did he live on his own in an apartment Ted really didn't depend much on anyone else he saved up enough money to buy land in Montana and although he occasionally took advantage of his parents Financial generosity it probably wasn't enough to get him any points as a parasite maybe enough for a one Ted won Jeff two number 10 short-tempered slash poor behavioral controls though he wasn't often enraged
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Jeff ultimately had no ability to control himself Dahmer took a barbell from a weight set and hit Stephen Hicks over the head with it exactly my head and since I wanted to stay with them Ted was pretty in control of himself everything he did was methodical and he played the long game rather than giving into flashes of anger he spent nearly two decades playing a chess game with the federal government but he exhibited some really Strange Behaviors like when he pointed a gun at
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a neighbor's child playing in the woods and I thought it was a mountain lion and uh so I told her it was time to leave but it turned out it was Ted he had a gun on her so yeah it was not like he was always in control Ted won Jeff two number 11 history of promiscuity Ted was pretty much an incel so that's an easy zero he was concerned about technology and his theories on its destructive effects and the ladies did not factor into that Jeff's life from his teens
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onward was tainted by his pair Ophelia and doing whatever he could to fulfill his desires
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zero Jeff two number 12 history of early behavioral problems Psychopaths tend to have prominent behavioral issues from an early age from physical assaults to theft to the sadistic emotional and psychological treatment of others Ted's brother described him as detached which his mother blamed on the mysterious treatments given to him during a hospitalization in his infancy but otherwise just a little weird Jeff's interest in animal parts probably went into unnatural territory and even in his
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teens he was conspiring to victimize people and not just thinking about it he saw it off a bat for a weapon to knock the man unconsciously he had hid behind a tree the jogger he was targeting didn't run by that day but it demonstrates how early Jeff was engaging in seriously anti-social Behavior Ted zero Jeff two number 13 lack of realistic long-term plans Ted enrolled at Harvard when he was only 16 then went to Michigan and then was a professor at UC Berkeley as he saved money to move to
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Montana where he then engaged in a carefully planned 18-year campaign of wreaking havoc now most of Ted's Life Plan wasn't good but he was realistic and did exactly what he set out to do Jeff drank for a while then did a few months at Ohio State and dropped out then went into the army and got kicked out and then worked his night shift Chocolate Factory job in between getting booked for acts of public lewdness assault of a minor and yeah uh no real life plan there Ted zero Jeff two number
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14 impulsivity Ted Kaczynski spent most of his time thinking before he acted the total opposite of impulsivity and that total opposite of Jeff my thoughts obviously weren't the thoughts of the same person at the time I would have rather be stayed alive but strangling seemed to be the way to keep him Ted zero Jeff two number 15 irresponsible Behavior Ted didn't really engage in the sorts of everyday behaviors we'd call irresponsible not not like Jeff's habitual drunkenness which landed him
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his army discharge his father and Sherry is soon to be stepmother came back to the house there wasn't much food in the refrigerator alcohol bottles were around it looked like a life that was in trouble Ted zero Jeff two number 16 frequent marital relationships yeah no so this is a quality of many Psychopaths a Perpetual cycle of serious relationships and often having kids they end up distant from or completely detached from Ted didn't have any romantic relation relationships to speak
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of Jeff had one Tony Hughes who he ended up killing but to give you an example of how bad Ted wasn't wooing the ladies he sent three letters to a waitress one inviting her to be his Squall in Canada a second one with a resume of his academic credentials and a third one kinda shaming her for not being interested in dating him Ted earned his zero Ted zero Jeff zero number 17 history of juvenile delinquency formal contact with the juvenile Criminal Justice System wasn't part of either
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man's childhoods neither child was normal but there wasn't an obvious pattern of criminal behavior that would have tipped off anyone even their own families this one is really tricky with Jeff he probably gets a point here for going way past normal scientific curiosity with his Taxidermy and which was glossed over because he hid it so well and the family's shed and because it wasn't really obvious how to get him professional help back then he became interested in the internal organs obviously
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kids slicing up animals is now considered a well-known red flag Ted zero Jeff won number 18 revocation of conditional release Ted was never charged or arrested with a crime before the FBI finally identified him as the Unabomber and hauled him in but Jeff was a known quantity to Milwaukee Police in the 1980s as a series of senses like public indecency lewdness and inappropriate contact with minors he kept offending even after getting slaps on the wrist and his offenses actually
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got more frequent and more severe Ted zero Jeff too number 19 failure to accept responsibility for own actions Ted accepted responsibility for his actions and Justified them as the necessary execution of his political philosophy he knew what he was doing and he accepted those consequences so much that he refused to let his lawyers enter an insanity plea as he thought it would undermine his arguments Jeff less so he indicated that he was sort of a passive vessel for his actions
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he knew what he did was wrong but he didn't feel like he was the one doing it and this is a really tough gray area because it's nearly impossible to sort out his exact level of culpability he had already confessed so I knew Dahmer didn't have a defense so I said to him what do you want me to do he said I want to know who I am what I am Ted zero Jeff one finally number 20 many types of offenses Ted engaged in one type of offense over and over he had ideation of others as a
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younger man but Psychopaths tend to do damage in a lot of different areas they hurt people physically they steal they engage in fraud the pclr gives a score of two when there are six or more types of offenses present Jeff's criminal Behavior was much more varied than tez and evolved a range of different offenses by now you know all the details here enough to know his score Ted zero Jeff two okay when we add up the totals from all 20 inventory items Jeffrey Dahmer scores
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a 33. the minimum score for psychopathy is 30 so he qualifies this is not very surprising but it should be because some people get perfect scores of 40. that means there are psychopaths who check even more boxes on the pclr and some more severely than Jeffrey Dahmer the guy who cooked and ate a whole bunch of Milwaukee wasn't even a peak psychopath conversely the man who waged a two-decade war against airline Executives scientists and anyone around them all throughout the United States he
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scores a 13. he wasn't even close to being a psychopath but something was clearly very wrong his actual diagnoses are disputed one psychiatrist who examined him diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia while a forensic psychiatrist suggested he had a schizotypal personality disorder whatever psychiatric disorders Ted Kaczynski suffered from it wasn't psychopathy by the way the average North American male scores about a four on the pclr it's pretty normal to have a few
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quirks or negative qualities I had an independent analysis done to get my own score I got a two which is two more than zero so obviously we got a sense of Jeffrey Dahmer's psychopathy a little too late but what are the options when a psychiatrist diagnosis psychopathy is there any way to treat it first of all think about what Psychotherapy is the patient is the center of a doctor's attention with a captive audience solely concerned with whatever the patient says
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that is a fantastic scenario for the psychopath those situations are exactly what he feeds off of and yeah it's usually a he female Psychopaths occur about 10 percent as often as males do and how can the therapist be sure the patient is telling the truth when he's likely to be a pathological liar it's extremely delicate if therapy isn't done right it can make a psychopath worse the best approach is to identify Psychopathic behavior in Youth and intervene early that's possible with a
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modified youth checklist for the pclr like kids in high school tend not to have frequent marital relationships and the Mendota juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin has made serious progress with high scores they use a decompression treatment model named after the gradual transition of divers Rising back to the surface and it slowly pulls them out of the strictest incarceration like solitary confinement and into the normal general population as they go through a host of tailored mental health
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interventions and cognitive behavioral therapies it seems to work serious violent offenders reduced recidivism by half and the overall group was less likely to engage in violent felonies and even the kids who did reoffend were out longer before they did a cost-benefit analysis and the Journal of research in crime and delinquency showed that for every dollar Wisconsin spent on njtc's interventions the state saved seven bucks but what if we don't want to treat psychopathy at all that doesn't sound
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like a serious question but it's a very real argument in the wisdom of psychopaths Kevin Dutton quotes one of the UK's top neurosurgeons I have no compassion For Those whom I operate on that is a luxury that I simply cannot afford in the theater I am reborn as a cold heartless machine totally at one with the scalpel drill and saw when you're cutting loose and cheating death high above the snow line of the brain feelings aren't fit for purpose emotion is an entropy and seriously bad for
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business I've hunted it down to Extinction over the years it's like Alec Baldwin the surgeon in Malice saying you ask me if I have a God complex let me tell you something I am God that's admittedly an extreme example but do you want your heart surgeon to be emotionless and cold as he cuts you open or do you want them to worry that if they screw up they'll turn your kids into orphans sweaty shaky hands and scalpels are a bad combination Dutton argues in his book that some
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qualities of psychopaths are actually extremely desirable he calls them the seven deadly winds think about this in the context of the Psychopaths I've talked about like cigarette Smuggler Bob and Jeffrey Dahmer ruthlessness how many times have you not gotten what you've wanted or even what you've needed because you didn't fight strongly enough for yourself you gotta do what you gotta do would you prefer a political leader who gets bullied or one who ruthlessly
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advocates for your best interest charm charm is great when people like you everyone gets along and it's easier to persuade them in a study ranking professions of the highest scores on the psychopathy index salespeople were number four and journalists were number six where are those careers without the same kind of charm that Ted Bundy used to impress dozens of women focus focus is really interesting Stanley Rockman researched the heart rates of decorated bomb disposal
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operators while they were in the field when the very best operators entered a state of danger their heart rates didn't just remain stable they went down they were so focused on the task and so unaffected by the danger that they were actually relaxed what would your life be like if the things that should stress you out actually calmed you instead mental toughness a psychopath does not feel anxiety there's just nothing to be anxious about they're incredibly resilient including not being bothered
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by imprisonment to them it's just whatever where would you be if nothing ever got to you fearlessness do you want to be fearless or a better question are there people around you who really should be here's an example if you live in Uvalde and your kids sitting in chemistry when you get the phone call of your nightmares do you want the police officers outside to have the fearlessness of a psychopath or be too scared to save your daughter mindfulness imagine always being cool calm and
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collected having a permanent sense of mental Clarity free of any interference from negative or irrational thoughts just you present all the time with the mindfulness of a Buddhist monk action CEOs and lawyers rank number one and number two on that list of Psychopathic professions because taking action matters to their success they're decisive they're confident they don't second guess themselves if you had to hire someone to to run your company would you want them to be like Steve
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Jobs or the really nice old lady at your local library sorry Myrtle the trick with all of these qualities dutton's Seven Deadly winds is to be able to control them it's deploying them strategically so you're ruthless at the negotiating table but not at the dinner table it's having a knob on each one where you can dial it up or down depending on the needs of the situation and never cranking it up to 11 beyond your control because we know those same cops that you want to be Fearless can
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overdo that with catastrophic results you want to keep an open mind but not so open that your brain falls out and you do want to be charming and charismatic but not to the point where you're faking it and people start thinking you're a snake if you handle each of these qualities right you've got super powers and if you don't you'll be sitting in a Cell in a super max this is the terrifying beauty of psychopathy it's our brain's most dangerous game and there's so little
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room for error maybe it's so dangerous that you don't even want to play it maybe you don't want anyone else to play it either if we can identify psychopathy and somehow cure it a tremendous proportion of the world's most serious problems would go away instantly murders violence fraud about four out of every five psychopaths in the United States are in prison because their behaviors put them there psychopathy is tied to some of the most destructive heinous behaviors in society
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and wouldn't preventing serial killers or domestic abuse be incredibly useful let's say we hit a point where an fmri scan takes 30 seconds and is cost effective enough to be part of your annual physical if your doctor could screen everybody for psychopathy then what should someone with a pclr score above say 20 be obligated to disclose that to their neighbors employers and domestic partners for everyone's safety or is that a violation of their individual rights and effectively making
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them pay for crime they haven't even committed yet should gun owners have to pass a pclr and should brain surgeons have to fail it what's the level of culpability for a criminal who is a clinically suffering Soul how responsible is he for the Terrible Things he's done when his amygdala couldn't terrify him he isn't programmed to feel any guilt and his entire world is a utilitarian calculation of value if we could identify genetic markers for psychopathy in the womb should the
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pregnancy be terminated it could spare us from serial killers and it could also wipe out a generation of Visionaries eighty percent are already locked up but that other 20 that remain have found a way to be integrated into society they're the lawyer who successfully defends a grieving mother from a homicide charge when the problem was actually sudden infant death syndrome they're the firemen who ran into your neighbor's burning house and dragged his kids out safely Through the flames they
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make the UFC amazing entertainment and they helped give you the phone or computer you're watching this video on their our Berserkers when James Fallon was studying brain scans to identify Psychopathic Behavior he found one that had several clear markers of psychopathy when he looked up the scans reference number he discovered the scan he was reading the one with Clear Proof of psychopathy was his they take the incredible risks none of us are willing to take because
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it simply doesn't bother them if they fail they're the nurse whose heart rate goes down when you're rushed into the ER after a car accident been to space and the next ones will be on Mars because normal people don't have the temperament for those kinds of greatness we need the world's most dangerous people to push their aberrant qualities to the brink of psychopathy and then barely catch themselves before falling off the edge the most outrageously destructive psychopaths are
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household names and they get lurid documentaries on Netflix but about one percent of people are clinically psychopathic is about 80 million Psychopaths worldwide and it means that about 45 000 of this channel subscribers are psychopaths how many of you are hiding in plain sight walking around wearing your mask of sanity tiptoeing the tightrope of super villain or superhero and how many of us would ever even know and as always thanks for watching like I would love nothing more than to kill
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somebody nothing more to make me super happy I would own that too I don't know if it may be liable I might have to say I'm sorry if the cops came but own it man be a psychopath it's fun see you later [Music]
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