Page 2 of The New House

Science♦Entertainment♦Technology

Inside the mind of a psychopath |Original Air Date 9 July

The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

I appreciate the introduction, Ken, but I’m guessing you all know who I am, or you wouldn’t be here.

[Laughter]

I know you’re all desperate to get to the juicy stuff, the Glass House Murders, and we will soon, I promise.

But this talk is supposed to be educational, so let’s kick off with a statistic: one in a hundred normal people – and I’m puttingnormalin inverted commas here – is a psychopath.

I can see you all doing the maths, so let me save you the trouble. There’s about a thousand of you in this room.

So that means roughly ten of you are psychopaths. But since the stat I just gave you rises to one in twenty-five when we’re talking about business leaders and CEOs, we’ve probably got about forty psychos in here this evening. It could be carnage by the end of the night.

[Laughter]

But let’s get serious for a minute. It’s essential you approach this subject with something other than a pop-culture understanding of psychopathy.

Think of it as Psycho 101. I’ll do my best to make it as painless as possible.

Thanks to Hollywood, when you hear the termpsychopathyou imagine a knife-wielding maniac with crazy eyes. Jack Nicholson inThe Shining, Hannibal Lecter inThe Silence of the Lambs, Norman Bates inPsycho. Well, I guess the clue’s in the name with that last one.

[Laughter]

But what about this young ladywho looks like Sandra Bullock sitting here in the front row? If you could just stand up – thank you. Lovely sweater, by the way. Looks like butter wouldn’t melt, doesn’t she? The archetypal girl-next-door. But trust me,she’sthe one you need to be scared of.

[Laughter]

Well, not literally. Thank you, Ms Bullock, you can sit down now. My point is, not all psychopaths are wild-eyed serial killers. It’s a spectrum disorder, like autism. At one end, you’ve got Ted Bundy and Charles Manson and Jack the Ripper, Hollywood’s bloodthirsty predators.

And at the other you’ve got the brain surgeons and TV presenters and tech moguls and corporate business leaders. The people everyoneneedsto be ruthless and focused and unemotional in a crisis.

People like me.

When I tell people I’m a psychopath, their response is usually a mix of horror and fascination. I mean, whoadmitsto being ‘deceptive, callous, manipulative, reckless, superficial, predatory’, right?

[Laughter]

And I’m not going to lie to you: I’m all of those things.

You’d think it’d put people off me, but no. You might be nervous, but you’re riveted and excited, too, aren’t you?

And why wouldn’t you be? I’m extremely charming when I want to be. I’m well-liked. I have lots of friends. Functionally, I’m a good person. I’m one of the ‘safe’ ones. I love to cook, and I’ve got a dark sense of humour. I often make people laugh. People come to me with their troubles.

So what makes me so different from most of you?

Well, I’m not going to bore you with lots of science about the amygdala and the orbital frontal cortex, but the bottom line is, psychopaths like me are biologicallyincapableof empathy.

A dozen scientific studies have confirmed it: we literallycan’tfeel your pain. We don’t experience fear or remorse. So we don’t care about blending into society.We’re not bothered by punishment or disapproval.

It’s a miracle more of us aren’t serial killers, to be honest.

We’ll lie and cheat to get what we want, but we don’t make moral choices; we make pragmatic ones. Usually we’re not out to get you. We’re like water: we’ll always find the quickest and easiest route to where we want to be, and if you get in our way, you’ll be washed away.

But we’re as capable of love and nurturing as we are indifference and destruction. Most of us aren’t a threat; remorse and empathy may not come naturally to us, but we canlearnto care. It takes practice: it’s like learning a different language, and it’s exhausting. But we want to fit in, we want to be good people, and so we work at it.

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