Hello.
OK, this is a talk about how to spot a psychopath.
The statistics, by the way -
which Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist,
came up with this -
says 1 in 100 people is a psychopath.
There's 100 people in the room, so one of you ...
(Laughter)
... is a psychopath.
If psychopaths enjoy going to talks about psychopaths,
there could be more than one of you in the audience.
(Laughter)
And I think psychopaths do enjoy going to talks about psychopaths
because of item 2: grandiose sense of self-worth.
So, 1 in 100 regular people is a psychopath, Hare says,
but 4 in 100 CEOs are psychopaths.
So you're four times more likely to be ruled by a psychopath
than you would have one as your subordinate.
OK, so I'm now professionally trained,
and, I've got to say, an extremely adept psychopath spotter.
I'll tell you the story of how I became a psychopath spotter,
and what I did with my powers.
It started at a friend's house,
and she had on her shelf a book called the "DSM."
Do people know the DSM?
It's a manual of mental disorders.
In the 50s, it was very slim, like a little pamphlet,
but now it's an enormous book.
They've come up with a huge number of mental disorders.
There are 886 pages, 374 mental disorders.
I was leafing through the book wondering if I had any mental disorders,
and it turns out I've got 12.
I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given.
I've got nightmare disorder,
which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued
or declared a failure.
All my dreams involve somebody chasing me down the street
going, "You're a failure!"
(Laughter)
I've got malingering, and I think it's actually quite rare
to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder
because malingering tends to make you feel extremely anxious.
And I have parent-child relational problems,
which I blame my mother for.
(Laughter)
And I have caffeine-induced disorder, which I've got right now.
(Laughter)
So I was leafing through this book, wondering,
"My goodness! Am I crazier than I thought I was?"
Or maybe it's not a good idea to self-diagnose
if you're not a trained professional.
Or maybe the psychiatry industry
has a strange fetish to diagnose normal behavior as a mental disorder.
I have no idea which was true.
I was quite excited to have so many mental disorders.
It kind of made me feel
like it's good to know there's something wrong with you.
I wondered whether my anxiety was a good thing.
Maybe it's a thing that drives me forward to achieve.
Maybe it makes me do interesting things. I was wondering what is all this.
I thought it'd be interesting to meet a critic of psychiatry
to get their view on it,
which was how I did a pubby lunch with the Scientologists,
who have a crack team of psychiatry busters
called the CCHR.
So I said to them, "Can you prove to me that my thesis is right
and that psychiatry is pseudoscience?"
They said, "Yes, we can, we can prove it to you.
We can introduce you to Tony."
So I said, "Who's Tony?" And they said, "Tony's in Broadmoor."
Now Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital which used to be known
as "Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane."
So I said, "What did Tony do?"
And the Scientologists said, "Hardly anything."
"He's completely sane, he beat somebody up or something.
He's totally sane. He faked madness to try to get out of a prison sentence.
He faked it too well, and now he's stuck at Broadmoor.
The more he tries to convince people he's sane,
the more they take it as evidence that he's crazy.
Do you want us to get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?"
So I said, "Yes, please."
So I went to Broadmoor.
The Scientologists got me in.
It's not easy.
We were sitting in the Wellness Center.
(Laughter)
And Brian the Scientologist said,
"By the way, Tony is the only person in the entire DSPD unit
to have permission to meet people in the Wellness Center.
So I said, "What does DSPD stand for?"
He said, "Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder."
So I said, "Is Tony in the part of Broadmoor
that houses the most dangerous people?"
And Brian said, "Yeah, isn't that crazy?"
So then the patients started drifting in, and most were overweight,
and they were wearing sweatpants, and they looked quite docile.
And then Brian said, "There's Tony."
Tony came in, and he wasn't overweight, he was in extremely good shape.
He wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit,
and he was walking towards me with his arm outstretched,
like someone out of "The Apprentice."
Somebody wants to convince me that he was very sane.
So he sat down.
I said, "Was it true that you faked your way in here?"
He said, "Yeah, I beat someone up in Reading.
I was on remand in my cell, and my cellmate said,
"You're looking at five years. What you need to do - fake madness.
Tell them you're mad, you'll go to some cushy hospital,
nurses will bring you pizzas, you'll have a PlayStation."
I said, "How did you fake madness?"
He said, "I asked to see the prison psychiatrist.
I'd just seen this film called "Crash" by David Cronenberg,
in which people get sexual pleasure from enacting car crashes.
So, I told the psychiatrist,
"I get sexual pleasure from enacting car crashes."
And I said, "Why?"
"Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist I like to watch women as they die
because it would make me feel more normal."
So I said, "Where did you get that from?"
He said, "From a biography of Ted Bundy that they had in the prison library."
So he evidently faked madness much too well,
and they sent him to Broadmoor.
He took one look at the place and said,
"There's has been a terrible mistake.
I'm not mad."
I said, "How long have you been here for?"
"If I'd just done my prison sentence, I'd have got 5 years.
I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years."
So, for the last 12 years,
he's tried to convince them that he's sane.
I said, "How do you do that?"
He said, "Well, it's not easy. I subscribe to New Scientist.
I like to try and talk to them about normal things, like football.
And there's an article in New Scientist that recently said
the US Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives.
So I said to the nurse,
"Did you know that the US Army's training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?"
He said later when he saw his case notes, they'd written,
"Believes bees can sniff out explosives."
He said, "The more you try to act sane, the more crazy you seem."
So, Tony seemed completely sane to me, but I'm not a professional.
I left, and I wondered what to do.
So I decided to write to his clinician, Anthony Maden.
I said, "What's the story?" And his clinician emailed back and said,
"Yeah, we accept that Tony's story is true.
We accept that he faked madness to get out of prison sentence
because his delusions were very cliched.
However, we've assessed him,
and we've decided that what he is is a psychopath!
And in fact, faking madness
is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath."
So, faking your brain going wrong
is evidence that your brain has gone wrong.
He said, "It's on the checklist - cunning and manipulative."
And I said, "What else?"
He said, "Well, pinstriped suit - classic psychopath
That speaks to 'grandiose sense of self-worth,'
and also 'glibness/superficial charm.' "
Tony had told me that he didn't like to hang around with his neighbors.
He has the Stockwell strangler on one side of him,
so he stayed in his room a lot.
They take that as a sign that he's a psychopath
because it speaks to lack of empathy, grandiosity.
Only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers
be a sign of madness.
So Anthony Maden said, "If you want to know more about psychopaths,
you can go to a psychopath spotting course
of Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist.
So I did, I went on a three-day course,
which is exactly the same as people who now are court experts,
who speak at sentencing hearings and so on,
to determine whether somebody is a high-scoring psychopath or not.
I went on the three-day course,
and I am now an extremely adept psychopath spotter.
Hare said to me, repeatedly,
"Some guy in Broadmoor who may or may not fake madness -
that's not a big story.
The big story is corporate psychopathy."
He said, "Psychopathy is so powerful, a brain anomaly."
"It is a brain anomaly," he says.
The amygdala doesn't send enough signals of fear and distress
up and down the central nervous system.
Psychopaths are the neurological opposite of me.
My amygdala sends way too many signals of fear and distress
up and down to my central nervous system.
So, they don't feel anxious. No anxiety.
He said, "It's such a powerful brain anomaly
that it molded society all wrong."
Capitalism, at its most ruthless,
is a physical manifestation of psychopathy.
That's how powerful the condition is.
We are all victims of psychopathy.
He said, "You'll really want to try and get an interview
with a corporate psychopath."
So I looked around, and I chose ...
Al Dunlap.
Al Dunlap, in the 1990s, was a very notorious asset stripper.
He would come into a company, and he'd fire everybody,
and the share prices would shoot up.
He did it at Scott's,
which is one of America's leading toilet paper manufacturers.
He came in, closed down plants all over the place.
And he'd kind of fire people quite often with a quip, with like a funny joke.
So one of his stories was somebody came up to him and said,
"I just bought myself a new car."
And Al Dunlap said, "You may have a new car,
but I'll tell you what you don't have - a job."
He once went to a plant in Mobile, Alabama,
asked somebody how long he'd been working there,
and the guy said, "30 years."
"Why do you want to work at a place for 30 years? It makes no sense."
Then he closed the plant down and fired everybody.
He said something that wasn't psychopathic.
Like, for instance, he said no -
I didn't ask him about promiscuous sexual behavior
because his wife was there, and, frankly, I chickened out.
But he said no to juvenile delinquency, and he said no to early behavior problems.
He said, "Because I got accepted into West Point,
and if I was a delinquent, they wouldn't have me in."
There's no rumors of affairs. He's already been married twice.
Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers
that he once threatened her with a knife
and said, "I always wondered what human flesh tasted like."
But he has only been married twice.
Also, by the way, he would often speak about his wise and supportive parents
but didn't turn up to either of their funerals.
But even so, there were quite a few items on the psychopath checklist
that didn't apply to him at all.
So I thought to myself, well, I won't put that in the book.
Then I realized, my goodness,
being a psychopath spotter has turned me somewhat psychopathic.
I was displaying lack of empathy, I was being cunning and manipulative.
It had turned me kind of power-mad.
Then I got a call from Tony in Broadmoor.
By the way, Tony has always denied being a psychopath.
He said the problem with the checklist - one of the items is lack of remorse;
another item is cunning, manipulative, and pathological lying.
So if you tell them, "I feel enormous remorse for what I did,"
they say, "Typical of a psychopath to pretend to be remorseful
when they're not."
He said it's like voodoo - they turn everything upside down.
And the Hare checklist is used by experts in sentencing hearings,
in parole and probation hearings all the time.
The rest of somebody's life can be determined
on how high they score on the psychopath test.
Anyway, Tony said he had a tribunal planned,
and would I like to come?
So I went to it.
And after 14 years in Broadmoor
for a crime that would have got him five years if he hadn't faked madness,
they let him go.
And he's now out.
He said to me, "Jon, the way you got to remember -
everybody is a bit psychopathic."
He said, "You are, I am. Well, obviously I am."
I said, "What are you going to do now?"
He said, "Well, there's this woman in Belgium I fancy, but she's married.
[inaudible] get her divorced, but that's OK because we're manipulative.
So Tony is out and about.
I spent a long time wondering what I should think about Tony.
I was worried, you know,
because part of me really wanted to support him,
and another part of me thought, well, you know, he might be a psychopath,
and they have a 60% recidivism rate.
What do I do?
For a while, I've wondered
if I should write about him in a supportive way,
but not quite good enough for it to actually work.
So, like campaign for his release but quite badly like a sort of crap Bono.
(Laughter)
But now I've decided, actually,
is Tony a psychopath or is Tony a miscarriage of justice?
And the answer I came up with is "both."
You can be a psychopath and also be a miscarriage of justice
because we should not be determined by a checklist.
And we should be defined by our sanity
and not our madness, if we possibly can.
And sometimes it's our madness,
it's the least attractive aspects of our personality,
it's our anxieties, our compulsions, and our obsessions,
that lead us sometimes to quite interesting things,
that leads us to move forward and succeed.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)