TOP Crime Psychologist - Dr. Jo Clarke On Prison Stories, Murderer Mindsets & Trauma | TRS 469

As a forensic psychologist, I spent 20 years in prison. I've worked with men who set out to kill people. I think everybody is capable of breaking a law. The one thing I would say is that I have never met a really high risk offender who hasn't had major trauma abuse and neglect in their childhood.

In recent times, what's been the most notorious serial killing case in the United Kingdom? This particular individual found himself getting sexually aroused to the torture of the animals. He fantasised about that and that turned into a fantasy about killing a person. So he deliberately set out to make that happen. Have they ever described that moment of murder and how it feels to them? One or two have definitely talked about the power they felt about deciding whether or not someone lived or died.

What do you think senior terrorist leaders look out for in potential terrorist youngsters who are disenfranchised who are disconnected who don't have an anchor in their community and I think that's absolutely the same with the way people target victims of sexual abuse. Really?

During the time I was working on the unit with very, very dangerous offenders, I got pregnant. And one of the men on the unit had actually murdered a pregnant woman. And whilst I was pregnant, I was fine. But I had my daughter. I had to go back onto the unit. And that particular prisoner said, Oh, Joe, how are you? How's your baby? And in that moment, I wanted to kill him.

Professor Joe Clark is one of the most memorable people that I've hosted on my podcast. So if you're someone who enjoys episodes related to crime or psychology, you're in for something over the next two hours. It's a very intense episode. We went into the details of her experiences working in prisons for more than two decades. There's a very dark side of the human reality that was revealed in this podcast. It will force you to

Look within your own mind and ask yourself some very deep questions about human reality. This was one of my most memorable episodes from our TRS UK tour. Definitely going to be hosting Dr. Jokalak again on the runway show. But for now, enjoy her debut on our podcast.

Dr. Joe Glark, welcome to the TRS UK tour. I'm deeply excited to speak with you. How are you? Good. Thank you. Really good.

you have such a fascinating subject that you deal with. And I don't think that it's just an Indian thing. I think it's a global thing where people are obsessed with the subject of crime because one, it helps people understand the nature of other human beings. And two, I think that when people understand the mind of a criminal, they often understand the shortcomings of their own mind for some reason.

Um, no, based on whatever I just said, do you think that's accurate? Do you agree? Do you disagree? I think everybody is capable of breaking a law. Um, because laws are arbitrary. I mean, if you're speaking about things being criminal, I speed in my car. So I'm breaking a law. That's a criminal act, but probably most of us have a limit to where we're going to go. So if you imagine on a continuum, the way we think, um, most of us will have internal inhibitions that prevent us doing something really.

major or really against our moral code or against the legal code. So I think in a sense you're right that understanding a criminal mind helps us understand an extreme perhaps of a continuum where most people wouldn't go but for various reasons other people do. An extreme of a continuum.

I suppose there's very variations in the extreme. So some people might be able to justify shoplifting. Some people might be able to justify taking somebody else's car without their permission. Some people might justify violence if they felt they were defending their sense of self. And some people will try and justify murder, which is probably the main extreme. But it's really interesting when you think about that, because I know I'm pretty sure, I hope it's never actually put to the test, but I suspect there are circumstances where I could kill.

If I was defending my children, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hesitate to take somebody else's life if it was their life or mine. So in that respect, I suspect understanding the criminal mind is really helpful, but understanding the circumstances, the history, the culture, the ethics around the offending is really important as well. So many dungeons that we can dig.

Couple of questions for you to begin this conversation. What is criminology? That's the first question. And the second question is, why did you take it up?

Well, criminology is a study of criminal behavior. Why do people offend? How do you understand risk and how do you prevent offending? My own journey into it was rather unexpected, I guess. I did a degree in human psychology, not really. Actually, when I went to university, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And then I thought, well, people are interesting. So I'll do a psychology degree. I went to university later than most people and I did a four year course. So I had a year of work experience in the middle.

where I actually worked for the Army, which was really interesting. So I worked for the Ministry of Defence for a year. So I left university at 23, where most people would leave at sort of 21. And there was a job advertised for psychologists in prisons.

And I at that point thought it sounds really, really interesting, but I think I'm a bit young to work in a prison at 23. But offenders, that would be interesting. So I actually ended up getting a job in the probation service where I was supervising offenders in the community who'd been sentenced to community programs. So not, not major offenders, not serious enough to end up in prison, but who would

giving retribution to the community, perhaps by cleaning streets or decorating care homes or things like this. What were their offenses? More minor. So driving offenses, maybe shoplifting offenses, fraud, but not offenders who would be considered a risk, a serious risk to the community. So they're fairly, and I didn't at that stage get into their offending at all. My job was to supervise their placements, make sure that they did their hours and they completed their community orders. And then

I've been doing that for about 18 months and loved it, super job. And it was doing a clear out and found the advertisement for the prison psychologist. I'd kept it. So it obviously sort of wetted my appetite enough. And I thought, well, I'm ready now in the 25. I'm ready now. I could work in a prison. So I applied and got offered a job, got through the selection process and the rest of the day says history. Okay. Yeah. What do you enjoy the most about your job and what do you hate the most about?

Well, I should add that now my work involves supporting staff who work in what we call critical occupations. But I'll go back to my time in prison. So I spent 20 years in prison, mostly high security prisons as a forensic psychologist, because the terminology changed as well. So we used to be called criminological psychologists. And then through our professional body, we became forensic psychologists. I no longer practice as a forensic psychologist, but I did for 20 years.

And what I loved about it was the challenge, the really trying to get inside the minds of men who'd committed some really serious offences in order to help them not offend in future. And that was the purpose of it. So unless you can really understand the steps somebody takes to offending, it's very, very hard to prevent that in future.

I just also want to add though that that's one very small part of understanding offending because you do need to understand history, you do need to understand education, the culture, the family, what people are going back into. So you can understand why someone committed an offense, but if you then release somebody to the environment they were in when they before they came to prison.

no amount of psychology is going to be able to support them on its own. It has to be with community education, jobs. So what I loved was really trying alongside offenders to help them understand as well, because sometimes they didn't understand what had happened. And many of the offenders I was working with were high risk. They committed really serious offenses.

they didn't want to talk about what they'd done. There was often a lot of shame, fear, guilt, sometimes just pure pickheadedness, they just were not going to let anyone in. So it was a real challenge to build the relationships you needed to be alongside somebody as they tried to unravel what had happened in order to prevent it happening again. So that's what I loved.

what was really difficult was the environment that happens in. Prison environments are harsh, they're nasty. By their nature populated by a lot of people who are very antisocial. And then the staff who work there have a really, really difficult job as well.

for me as a female in a male prison, I only worked in male prisons. So there were all sorts of issues around gender too. So it was a very harsh environment to work in dealing with some very, very difficult, disturbing subjects. And that's really actually in the end, why I ended up looking at how do we ensure staff can thrive

in environments that are so difficult. So yeah, I'll stop there. It could go on forever. I mean, the thing is with someone like you who has these kinds of experiences, it's a bit of a challenge for me to enter or domain because there's so much I want to explore with you. Let's begin by talking about the spectrum at least. Yes. You said that there's a spectrum when it comes to basically the human conscience, right?

It's a way of describing it, I guess. I suppose a lot of it's around moral code. So some people would no more even break a rule, let alone a law. They would rather crumble in a heap than even upset anybody by doing something, like pushing in in a queue or behaving in a way that might disturb other people. So that would be at one end.

And then at the other end, there's somebody who deliberately sets out to kill somebody. So when I said at the start of this, I'm pretty sure I'm capable of killing. I would never actually set out to do it. But if I walked in on something where my children were at risk,

you know, the, the lioness of a mother would come out and I would do what I needed to do to defend them if I could. So, so there's a difference, I guess, between that conscious decision and certainly I've worked with men who set out to kill people. They're men that I worked with who I say accidentally would hurt somebody. They were in a situation with very heightened emotion and lost control.

So it might not have been their original intent to murder somebody, but that was the outcome. And then I've, as the other end of the spectrum worked with offenders who've stolen some things from a shop. I worked with a postman who opened People's Post and stole checks from the post because he was really poor and had no money. You know, so it's about you have to understand the context of the offense before you can make any kind of judgment really about what's going on.

We spoke about dealing with some men who had deliberately killed other human beings. Is there one particular person that sticks out in your memory? There are few. Yes, there was a... Maybe the one that was the most difficult for you.

This man was probably the most fascinating but it's very, very disturbing so I don't know how much detail he wanted me to go into. He worked in a slaughterhouse and he was young. He almost certainly had some educational needs, some learning difficulties.

He also probably had a personality disorder, but that wouldn't have been necessarily evidence people who were working with him at the time. It's a psychopath. So this is a particular personality disorder where people, it's quite complicated to explain, but so for example,

They have glib superficial relationships. They lie pathologically. They don't even know they're doing it half the time. Completely responsible, sexually promiscuous. There are a whole load of characteristics that you would look at for an assessment. It's changed over the years. So when I was assessing people for that particular personality disorder, we had a way of doing it that I know has evolved over the last sort of 20 or 30 years.

I know people might be listening to this to assess for psychopathy and think, gosh, she's a bit out of date. And I am. I think that's fair enough to say. But it's looking for a whole series of personality features that would indicate somebody isn't functioning in the same way.

that you or I would say be a lack of empathy, lack of emotion, complete disregard for other people's feelings. Could you compare to a movie character just for people? Oh, gosh, what a good question. Have you watched the movie American Cycle? No, I'm thinking probably Anthony Hopkins depiction in Silence of the Lambs would be the most obvious one. There was a very good TV program in England called Happy Valley. And the main character in there would fit many of the characteristics as well.

Although we should come back to psychopathy because again, that's a spectrum. So all of us might have some characteristics, but we have to reach a certain criteria before you would be diagnosed as a psychopath. But this particular individual probably had all those characteristics. What happened for him is that he found himself getting sexually aroused to the slaughter of the animals. So he got an interest in blood.

he fantasized about that and that turned into a fantasy about killing a person. So he deliberately set out to make that happen. Is there a problem in the nervous system? It's a problem because of the storyline of his life? Well, the one thing I would say is that I have never met a really high risk offender who hasn't had major trauma abuse and neglect in their childhood.

And I know people say, oh, psychologists are very warm and fluffy about offenders. You know, you're always looking for an excuse. Well, it's not an excuse because it's a reality. So I remember writing a report on a man who'd been in what we used to call the dangerous and severe personality disorder units in prisons.

I'd never met him, but I was sent all his file information to write an objective report. And his offence was horrific. He'd murdered a teenager. He had deposited her body in a dustbin. It was just awful. And I remember reading it feeling quite disturbed, but then I read about his childhood and that disturbed me as much. So as a three year old, he had been left in a back garden with a dog collar around his neck chained to a washing line in the rain as a punishment.

Now, how we would expect somebody who'd experience that in childhood to grow up and be pro-social and law-abiding and respect the rules, it's a ridiculous ask. How could we expect somebody who's experienced that?

It makes you feel full of your own childhood as well. Oh, doesn't it? Yeah, absolutely does. Yeah. So, I think there is almost certainly for the most serious offenders, there will be elements of their history that will help understand why they've ended up in the place they've ended up.

I have met plenty of offenders who are less serious, who've had come from perfectly decent backgrounds and really have absolutely no indication that they were going to end up committing offences. But the most serious ones without without a mission, they would have had a hideous, hideous childhood.

a childhood in care, a childhood with neglect, abuse, you know, lacking lots of physical violence. Yeah, horrific, really. You don't really even want to think about it. It's hard.

I want to touch upon this childhood trauma aspect a little more, because I think it's kind of relatable on different levels to a lot of the listeners all over the world. Everyone goes to something or the other. You know, either you're scolded at by your parents, sometimes you're hit by your parents, you're punished, but these are still

on the right side of the spectrum and the right side being the easier side. What is the left side of the spectrum that the serial killer in his childhood? He was a serial killer, right? So this is really interesting because you've got to bring nature and nurture both into the conversation.

And I've worked with an expert in working with challenging children. And he says the challenges that children present are 100% nature and 100% nurture. It's both things. So for example, and we also need to talk a bit about neuroscience and brain development, because that's relevant too. So for example, you may have somebody who has a genetic predisposition to doing something antisocial.

but they're brought up in a family that's very stable and secure, and that genetic predisposition is never materialised, because there's no trigger for it to be exposed. So, and I have no scientific evidence, you need to speak to a geneticist about this, but I think it's the case that if, even if you're genetically predisposed to something, and we know that physically, if you're genetically predisposed to

stroke, you can prevent it by your lifestyle. So there's always going to be a mix between nature and nurture. So there will be people who've grown up perhaps with a disposition to antisocial behaviour that never materialises because they're brought up in a very stable, secure family setting. And remember our genes aren't just our mum and dad, our genes come from it's a mosaic of our ancestors. So we can't assume that we get all our genetic inheritance from our parents.

But then you might have another child who does have a genetic predisposition and then grows up in a family where there's abuse, neglect, violence, and that does materialize in later life. You may have somebody with no genetic predisposition.

who grows up in a family with abuse and never becomes an offender because there's no predisposition in there either. So I'm in addition to the work that I do. I'm also a foster parent. So I've fostered children who have come from very difficult backgrounds and are wonderful. They've grown up into extraordinary human beings, extraordinary human beings. So you have to look at all of it. You can't just say it's one thing.

You know, it's been only like 20 minutes that I've been speaking to you, but you're one of the most empathetic people that I've had on the show. It comes through, which is what blows my mind when it comes to the fact that you've spoken to like the serial killers because I am pretty sure that you gave them empathy as well on some level.

It's so interesting that we're talking about childhood and what happens. And I remember in my childhood growing up in what was a really protective bubble. And it was it's more kind of personality thing, I think, than the nest, although my mum is an extraordinary woman. And she grew me in my sister by herself in a time when there weren't really many single parents. But I'm very different from my sister. She's a very different character, different genetics. And I was in this little bubble where I just believed that the world was lovely.

And the world was safe and if people bullied me or teased me I had no idea. I'm sure they did but I just wasn't aware of it because I just thought everyone was lovely. And I think I probably lived in that bubble until I was, well I think I'm probably still in it, to be honest. I still believe fundamentally even though I've

being privy to some of the most extreme forms of what some people might call depravity, I still believe that fundamentally everybody's lovely. And it must be genetic, must be. I don't know where it's come from, but otherwise other people call it naive.

I mean, I'm going to be very transparent about something. Often when you speak to psychologists who are dealing with other people's difficulties because of their job, I often see that psychologists also kind of store some of those people's difficulties in their own minds and hearts. I don't feel that about you or so kudos. You've been able to work that out. I want to go back to the same person you were talking about, just to close the loop.

So you said that this particular human, he had a very traumatic childhood. He used to work in a slaughterhouse and he would get aroused because of killing the animals in the slaughterhouse. And that led to him having a thought that, hey, what would I feel if I killed human beings instead?

This is kind of the image that most of us have about serial killers because of movies and shows like Dexter that there's got to be some level of arousal or some dopamine rush because of the sake of

Yeah, I think in the case of sexually motivated murder, there are if you pair orgasm with deviant thoughts, the pairing becomes very strong. So when one of the things that we needed to understand was about masturbatory fantasy, which is

really really hard for people to talk about and obviously some men might enjoy talking about that to a woman and you had to be really careful in your job about making sure that this was part of a therapeutic process and not

part of something else. But understanding why perhaps violence or other people's fear would arouse somebody is something that needs to be addressed. And we worked hard. I wasn't involved in this element of the work in prisons, but there were programs to help kind of desensitize, disconnect the arousal to the fantasy and the action.

I would assume this is a one off thing, but the way you're describing it right now, it seems like there was multiple people. Not that many. The thing is when you're in prison, you feel you're immersed in a world of sexual violence and deviant. So it's easy to believe that everybody is sexually violent and deviant because that's where you are every day. Whereas actually that's a tiny percentage. I think I'm trying. I don't know the percentage of men committed to sexual offense in prison against the whole prison population.

but it's really small. But when you're immersed and it becomes your whole world, so it feels like it's everywhere, but it isn't. It's very rare, very, very rare. Statistically, it's rare. And this is, I mean, one of the things is interesting when people work with men who've been convicted of sexual offenses. And what got me interested in what I currently do is how it plays with their head and this belief that everybody's really dangerous and that it affects the way people behave with their children and they don't want to be alone with their kids and they don't want to bath their own children.

because they're so fearful, because they've got all this stuff in their head that they've heard from offenders who have behaved in that way. And actually, I took a rather opposite view and felt that that knowledge and understanding actually really helped me grow up, my daughter and my foster children, in a way that was balanced and sane and kept them safer. You know, so whilst most people might think that men who are convicted or commit sexual offenses are the stranger in the street with the dirty metacon and, you know, got no friends.

Actually, the reality is most people know their abusers. Most children know the men or women who abuse them. And so for me, when my daughter was little and going on sleepovers, I was really aware and cautious and did my own kind of risk assessment about and also was able to have conversations age appropriate with her about her body.

and when to say no, and if an adult tells you to keep a secret, you don't keep it. Don't tell mum, then the first thing you do is tell me, and we had that relationship where she was able to do that from a young age, but without scaring her either. So I actually found the work an incredibly empowering thing on a personal level, rather than a terrifying and scary one, but that's probably a whole other conversation.

I'm happy to explore all of this, which is why I told you before the show began that I think we're going to have a very long tangential conversation. Okay. Why was that particular man difficult for you to work with? In himself, he wasn't. He's one of the things that became really important in the work is you have to find something to like

in the people that you work with, otherwise you can't do it. And nobody is all bad, nobody. Although it's really, really hard sometimes to find the good. I mean, the risk of being hideously political, I think about Donald Trump, not my cup of tea. I would never vote for him, but half of America think he's marvellous, slightly more than half America. So even though I might listen to the things he says and go, can you say such thing?

other people love it. And that's the whole point, really. So bringing that back to serial killing psychopath, nobody is all bad. I think what made him hard was he was very graphic and when he eventually told us what had happened, it took a long time, you have to form a relationship with somebody for them to disclose that stuff.

You know, his original explanation of his offence was that the kiss he offered to his victim as a thank you for an Easter egg was rejected, so he killed her. That's what he told us. He was rejected, so he killed her.

But actually, when you really begin to, it didn't make any sense. It's a very extreme thing to do, isn't it, when someone says, please don't kiss me, it's just to kill them. So it didn't make sense. And that's your job as a psychologist, is to say it will in that situation.

what you're telling me doesn't make sense. There's more to this and I need you to help me understand, talk me through what happened. And it took a long time. So you are immersed in their minds. And that's hard. You know, that's not a job for everybody.

Did you have to gain his trust? That's basically what it was. Yes, absolutely. Because he was a friend first and then opened up to you. That's a really interesting question. I remember when I started in prison, be friendly, but not friends. You're not friends with the offenders. You can't be. It would breach a boundary, but you do need to develop a very strong therapeutic rapport. So if I were his friend, I'd be telling him all about my life too, which obviously you don't do. So the

boundary issue is a really important one in prisons and in therapeutic work, and you've got to be very clear where the lines are, the line you don't cross. And most of that's professional, but also some of it's personal, you know, it's about what am I prepared to share to build a relationship, because you have to give something of yourself, otherwise you can't build a relationship. So,

working that out in the course of working with an offender. I'm the another offender I work with, actually, who I found really hard to like, but we had to do a thorough assessment of his offending. And I had to work really hard at building a rapport with him, but we managed it. We spoke about him gradually opening up to you. Yes.

You know how we're doing a podcast right now? I'm sure you've gotten no things about me as well just through the conversation. Yeah. But in that case, we're talking to probably one of the most difficult murderers that you've spoken to in your career. Yeah. A little weird question, but in that phase of your life, did you get dreams about this situation at all? Did it affect your head at all?

Yes, of course, it couldn't not, but that's really what got me into what I do now is how do you understand why some people are impacted negatively by the work and other people aren't? And why might we be impacted more at various stages in our life than others? So one thing that, just as an example, first of all, you have your own supervision. So you have somebody to go and discuss things with and process it with.

I think also it depends on how well-resourced you are outside of work. And one of the things that happened during the time I was working on the unit with that particular, many other very, very dangerous offenders, I got pregnant. So, and in those days in the prison service, you were still allowed to continue working with offenders when you were pregnant. And I actually, I'm laughing because I think back, I think I don't know how I did that, but I worked up until the Friday before the Monday my daughter was born.

And I was literally nine months pregnant. Does she enjoy crime documentaries? I don't know what I think I was doing. Anyway, my poor daughter, I don't know what she would have heard while she was in neutral. But anyway, and I knew that I couldn't carry on doing that job once I became a new mum.

I knew that once I become pregnant, I thought I'm going to have to stop doing this work once she's born because that would have made me incredibly vulnerable. So an awareness of your own vulnerabilities, awareness of your own skills, your own strengths, your own resilience, knowing when to ask for help, knowing when to stop. And that, it's probably interesting because it's relevant. At the time I was pregnant, one of the men on the unit had actually made a pregnant woman.

So, and she and her baby had died. And whilst I was pregnant, I was fine. I was, for some reason, I don't know, maybe it's the hormones, just I didn't threaten me, it didn't disturb me. But I had my daughter, I have three months of maternity leave, so that's all you're allowed. I had to go back onto the unit to clear all my stuff out, because I moved to a new job at prison service headquarters. And that particular prisoner,

And I remember it so clearly, he was stood at the top of the stairs in the unit. And we'd always gotten really well. And he said, oh, Joe, how are you? How's your baby? And in that moment, I wanted to kill him. It was really fascinating. And this is why I'm saying to you about what happens, particularly when you're a parent, I think, that desire to protect your young.

And I remember thinking, if I was stood at the top of the stairs with you, I probably have pushed you down them. How dare you even ask me? Up until that point, I've been fine with them. So it really, I think, makes the point about your circumstances, how you're feeling, your vulnerability, your resources, the support you've got, all of that makes the difference.

Do you think he asked as a threat? No, I really don't think he did. I think he was genuinely trying to be pro-social. I don't think he was being asked at all. He wasn't one of those offenders that would be class as a psychopath. He made some very serious, I was going to say mistakes. That sounds so belittling of what he actually did. He did some hideous thing.

And it was very difficult to work with, but he wasn't in the same category for me as the other guys we've been talking about. So yeah, it was just very interesting. And I think so, yes, you can't expect not to be impacted by what you hear. And I think one of the difficulties for lots of people when we started out in this field all those years ago,

was that they started worrying that they were dreaming. I remember being at a conference actually and it was a workshop on the impact of the work and the facilitator was asking people what changed for you as a result of working with sex offenders and

People are saying, I can't bath my children. I look very suspiciously at men. I feel anxious when I'm on my own at home. And I remember standing up and saying, but why are you surprised at these things? Because you are immersed in this world all the time. And the key to thriving is to remind yourself constantly that this isn't the actual world. It's your world of work. And you need to put things in place to make sure that you can still function.

what kind of dreams do people see? They didn't actually go into detail but I remember for me one of my most vulnerable times was when my daughter was two and I was doing some freelance work in a prison and it involved supervising psychopathy assessments so reading reports, reading offence accounts and I'd go into the prison and I'd sit in a little room all day reading these accounts and things

And then I go home at night, and it wasn't so much sleeping nightmares. It was waking nightmares, this overriding anxiety that a prisoner was going to escape from the prison and come to the house and kill me and my child. You know, they're very vivid. And while, you know, just you're going about your daily life, they were really scary. Didn't affect my sleep so much. But it was a time when I was really vulnerable. I'd recently moved house. I didn't have lots of support network around me. I was growing up, my daughter on my own.

repeating the history of my own mum. I was working with some very high risk offenders and the one thing I realized is that I mentioned to you before you have to find something to like in the people that you work with but when you're sat in a room just reading reports there's no one, there's no person to connect it with so it stayed in my head.

And played and played and played and it was, it was horrible. It was a horrible period, a very vulnerable period. So, but I understand why that was. And in the end, I found myself my own therapist and went and did some resolution and that was really helpful, really helpful. And that was combined, not just with the work, but with an in addition to moving and being in an area I didn't know anyone.

I had some relationship difficulties as well. You know, there was just so much going on that takes you resource. So you need to be in a really good psychologically stable place to be doing that kind of work. I can't imagine you psychologically not stable. Well, I have my wobbles. I have my wobbles as we all do. Yeah. Yeah. A little harder up my head.

I'm very good at writing myself, and I've got lots of really lovely friends and great resources. And I spend my life now training people how to lead a stress free life. So I practice all of those all the time. Did you hear about the Jeffrey Darmokies before the documentary? I was aware of it and I didn't watch the documentary. I was at that point immersed in it all the time. I didn't need to watch a program about it.

Why do you think the average viewer is so fascinated by crime documentaries?

because it's not something we have access to normally. You see, when you access it as part of your job, when you're immersed in it, you don't need to watch them. But quite a few of my colleagues, officers and psychologists alike came into the field because they had been watching them. I probably, I can't remember whether or not I watched many of them before I joined the prison service, probably not. I don't remember having a massive, interesting crime or criminality.

I've heard from, I think it was Haboview told me this, that even when it comes to criminals or murderers, it's that one moment where they lose control often, not all in all cases, but in a lot of cases, it's that one moment they lose control and they may not be inherently bad people, but some kind of anger, some kind of rush takes over them.

They make a bad decision. They regret it almost immediately because they know they'll have to pay a price for a lifetime. Yeah. Is that a fair description? For some. Yeah. What's what's really interesting for me is that they're really interesting part of my career, but then I had a baby. So I stopped doing it. The unit I was managing in London at one point was for men who

had approached the end of their prison sentence. So they were life sentence prisoners. They hadn't been convicted of a sexual offense. But they would come to the end of their sentence and people were reviewing their files to look at their release. And because we'd learnt so much about sex offending over the previous five years. So this was sort of 1990 to 1995. People would look at their file and go, shit.

There's a sexual element to this offence. They might not have been convicted of rape or sexual assault, but perhaps there were bite marks on the body or the underwear of the victim was missing or something weird had happened with the underwear of the victim. There were just indicators that were saying, actually, this isn't just a straightforward murder. So these men were then referred to this unit I was working in and we would do an assessment of them and treatment.

therapy where appropriate. The reason I'm telling you that story is that what emerged from working with the men there was a kind of typology and we came to the conclusion and it was tested but later on by somebody else not by me

that there appeared to be four types of men who committed sexual murder. There was a group of men who had some form of neurological problem, some kind of brain issue maybe. They may have also, and that would have been evident in their general demeanor and behavior, in their memory,

in their problem solving, that, you know, there was clearly something was problematic. Then there were men who committed a sexual offense and killed probably by accident, which I guess is in a way what you're saying about her avium and having what she said is that they got angry in the eyes of a sexual act or the victim said something insulting to them about their performance and that was it. They lost it and they ended up killing.

And then there were men like the first guy talked about who were aroused to the thought of murder. And that's why they offended. And then we've got the psychopaths, the kind of instrumental use of violence that you kill the victim. So you can't be identified. So we have these, you kill the victims in order not to be identified. It's what we would call instrumental use of violence. So right, I've done this. I can't be identified only to kill the victim, which is different from somebody who, who in the heat of the moment does something really impulsive.

different again from the people who are fantasizing about killing and different again from.

men who had a neurological dysfunction of some sort. And it just emerged from all the cases that there appeared, all the men that came in to that unit fitted one of those categories. And that was important in terms of treatment and therapy and things going forward. And I believe that that typology was then taken on and tested out a later date, but I don't know the results of that sadly. I'd moved, so.

Is there any commonality between these four? Only that they've all ended up killing. They seem to be quite different in their presentation. I'm still not able to wrap my head around that sexual arousal through murder thing. Most people couldn't wrap their head around it and I wouldn't suggest that they try.

I mean, there's no way to empathize with something like that. Maybe, maybe for a psychologist, this is, you know, the job that you're good at. For us, this level of empathy, it's very difficult. Yeah. And I really would advise people not to try because it's, um, it's very dark.

You mentioned something some time ago about thought-related masturbation. Why do you have to bring it up as a part of your job when you're working with me? Yeah, I didn't, actually. It wasn't a part of the work that I did, although we might talk in a therapy group about the

the strength of it and whether or not somebody was getting aroused to the things that we're thinking about. But, um, and this is an area that I think isn't very wise to go, but that would be around child abuse, um, sorry, around child abuse and not around sexual murder, but abuse of children about men who are aroused to, to children. And that is so hard for your average, normal, lovely man to get the head round is, and it is really hard. Is it?

Is it only men or could they be women as well? I've never worked with female sex offenders. The bulk of my understanding and of my knowledge around that is generally women offending against children in the context of a man being part of the process. I have personally not come across a woman who actually abuses children of her own volition. I have come across women who will find children

for I don't even want to go there because it's so so difficult for even the professionals to get their head round although we know for example that our police services require police officers to view images of sexual abuse and things because it's online it's such a growing thing it's a growing thing oh yeah yeah no no you'd be horrified it is horrifying

You mean offense against children is going. Yeah. Yeah. Because the internet provides anonymity, doesn't it? So it's not my area of expertise. So it's not something that I feel really, I mean, I can put you on to people who will talk to you about it. I mean, one of the things was really interesting. There's an organization called the Lucy Faithful Foundation.

who work with offenders and sex offenders and work with internet offenders and they've worked alongside porn hub and have stopped 80% of searches for illegal material of children, which is absolutely brilliant so.

Yeah, somebody goes on to porn hub and it starts looking for inappropriate images. A message comes up saying what you're about to do is illegal and you can probably be traced. So think hard about what you're doing. And it's stopped 80% of searches for, for that kind of material, which is brilliant. Yeah. Don't understand why something like this is going up culturally in the world. Like what's happening on a cultural level that people are getting sexually aroused by children as time is moving forward.

I find it so, so sad and sick. You know, the fact that people make images, the fact that people share them, the fact that people get aroused to them is very, very difficult to understand. I mean, that's been part of my work as well and I've done that work in the past. What did you learn about the psychology of someone who's into this kind of stuff?

I think again, it's a little bit like thinking about the typology of men who've committed sexual murder. There isn't just one answer. It's really, really varied. So there will be men who've been abused themselves as children who find a normality in that type of behavior. There will be men who found themselves unexpectedly aroused to an image of, say, a young teenager who then goes on and supports that arousal through

searching for images, they'll be, I think they're just such a whole host of reasons. It's not just the fact that maybe they got molested when they were children. They'll just know. It's a bunch of other things. So you'll have men who've been molested as children who don't go on to sexually offend. You'll have men who've not been molested as children who do go on to be such sexual offenders. You'll have men who

There's another category. There's, you know, I think there's four of them. So abused abusers, non abused abusers and abused non abusers.

Abusable. Nonabuses. Yeah. So, so, and it again, it will be looking at the individual. It will be trying to understand the individual psychology. And, you know, we have ways of doing that therapeutically about really trying to understand the steps that somebody takes to offend. It's, it's difficult work, but it's only really by understanding that you can then put breakers in, you know, to prevent it happening in future.

And, you know, fenders would often say, I don't know what happened, but it'll never happen again. You say, well, if you don't know what happened, how are you going to stop it happening again? So we have to know what happened. Because something took over them. Not even then. Sometimes it's really planned. I mean, I work with an offender with hundreds of offenders, but I remember this particular offender saying that when he was abusing his stepchildren, he would put toys out on the stairs and in the hallway so that he would hear if anyone came up the stairs. He knew exactly what he was doing.

exactly what he was doing, planned it to the last thing. If you, if you'd spoke to him initially, he'd say, well, it just happened. You know, it was just an accident. I didn't mean to do this at any other. And then through building that relationship and using, you know, the skills that you're trained in and working alongside that individual, then you can begin to understand. And the importance of that being

But the reason that's so important is that when you can understand the steps somebody takes to offend, you can help them put things in to stop it. So, you know, a warning signal for that individual would be planning to put toys out in in strategic places. So at the minute he does that, and he's probably been thinking about it way before then anyway, but the minute he does that, if he's got that far, that's a really high risk situation. And he needs to have a load of strategies to prevent him.

taking a course of action that results in the abuse of a child. Okay. I'm sorry I'm taking you to all these conversational places. I haven't been there for a long time. It's crazy how again, I repeat myself, it's crazy how you've been able to process all this, despite having this kind of experience on your own. Yeah. Well, maybe at some point we should talk about the things that you do to look after your own mind, because, you know, I have had colleagues who have become very, very ill because of their job, psychologically ill with post-traumatic stress.

depression, anxiety. So it can, it has the weight to really impact on the minds of people who do the work. And we're still not doing enough in my view to protect those people. And we need to do more, which is why I do what I do now. So, you know, when it comes to Britain and we're talking about serial killers, one of the names that we hear about growing up is Jack the Ripper.

Yes. I don't know. I'm laughing. It's not even funny. It's just, it was so long ago. Yeah. But Jack the Ripper was a real thing. Apparently, yes. For people who never heard what Jack the Ripper could give us some context.

He was operating in the East End of London, I believe, and he murdered a series of women. And I think, I'm not really an expert on this subject, I think at the time it was thought that he was murdering prostitutes, but it would appear that actually some of the women that were murdered were certainly not prostitutes.

So we had a more modern day version that the press labeled the Yorkshire Ripper, and that was a man who murdered prostitutes in the Yorkshire area, actually. So it's relevant to here. We're in the Yorkshire area. Yeah, west Yorkshire, I think mostly. Yeah. Okay. And we had the Moors murderers, who were a man and a woman who murdered children and buried them.

in the mores in West York and Yorkshire. Yeah, it's a bit of a dark place isn't it, Yorkshire? I'm not. Yeah. But I think here. Yeah. How's life? Lovely. It's a beautiful city. Yeah. It's really nice. Did you have a chance to work with that man and wife? No, no. It's before my time, actually. I think they have both passed away recently, actually, in the last five years they've both died. But there was a lifetime in special hospitals.

Was there a criminal who you felt fell in love with you? I think it's a legitimate question because if you just think about human nature, men who are in prison and locked up for long periods of time and they don't see their family or their loved ones, I'm sure they do become fixated on females that work in the prison.

And of course, then, you know, my job is to be alongside them and to help understand. And when you've got somebody who you feel sees you for who you are and isn't judging you, I would think I would fall in love with somebody who

who was like there. A thing in the world of therapists, they call it something where you're not supposed to fall in love with your patient. Yeah, no, you're not supposed to. Well, I mean, the thing is you can't help who you fall in love with what you can help is what you do about it. So, yeah, yeah. So, you know, therapeutically, you have a code of conduct that you are, you agree to abide by. So if you behave inappropriately, you get struck off if you get found out. Yeah.

But there are therapists who fall in love. Oh, I'm sure there are. And certainly, I mean, in terms of human nature, there have been offenders, I've been found much easier to work with, have enjoyed spending time with whether or not I've fallen in love with any of them, I think. No, but certainly some I felt very fond of. And when that's the case, you really have to put your boundaries in place if you want to carry on practising otherwise you're in big trouble.

How did that criminal tell you that he's in love with you? Oh, they just tell you. Send you letters and declare on dying love. That's happened.

I love you. Once I get out of prison, we should get married. That's literally what it was. And sometimes it's a bit more thorny than that. I've been in the prison two or three years, so I got a bit savvy. I was a bit wiser. And I remember walking through a wing one day and this young, when I say young, he's about 22. I was about 27.

came running up to me as a prisoner that I'd worked with and he said, Joe, Joe, I've got a letter for you. And he shoved this bit of paper in my hand. I really shouldn't be telling the story. And he said, don't let anyone see it. But I happened to be walking through the wing with the principal officer.

And we got out of the prison and I said, let's have a look at what he said. He said, Joe, I love you. I want to dot dot dot. I'm not going to tell you exactly what he said, but it was very graphic. And me and this principal officer just stood there laughing our heads off. It was really very inappropriate. And of course, because it was inappropriate, I couldn't let it go if I hadn't responded. So I had to, in the colloquial term, he said, I had to nick him. I had to put in a complaint and it had to go to an adjudication.

And, um, and I had to write what had happened, which I did, but I was not going to read out the note in an adjudication. So I just had to say, and the prisoner said, and so gave me this letter.

the contents of which I attach because I wasn't going to read out what he said he wanted to do. But yeah, so sometimes it's a bit more basic is where I want to do this to you. And other times it's very poetic. You know, I've got some very poetic letters. The really important thing about that is that you talk to your boss, you let people in the security.

Department know that this is happening because they need to keep an eye on you for your own safety. And they need to keep an eye on the offender as well. Did you meet him after that? I didn't work with him again. But yeah, I saw him on the wing. So what energy did he give you? He was fine. He understood. The prisoners know the rules. I think if I hadn't, if I hadn't done anything, he may have thought that there was something there. Do you see what I mean? If you don't put that boundary in place really clearly,

it would have been misleading for him and that would have not have been fair. But this is, you know, working in prisons is incredibly complex and working with people who are incarcerated, it's a total institution. Relationships do have to build up, not intimate sexual relationships, but relationships have to be formed. And if you don't state and maintain your boundaries, it can be really a risky place to work.

Has there ever been a situation in a prison where you're working with a criminal? And then it's done dangerous for you? Twice. Which is not bad in 20 years, is it? Because you have to build and work on your relationship. So two occasions where I felt at risk. I'm trying to think what they were now.

No, that one of them is actually quite funny. Again, I mean, it isn't funny, but you have to laugh. So we had an emergency call to our department saying this prisoner was so and can somebody please come and see him straight away and I was the only one in. And you know, obviously part of why you do this job is you want to help.

He's not very driven to help people solve problems. I'm like, right, I'll go. So I rush down to the wing and all the time I'm on my way there. I'm thinking, I know that person's name. Why do I know that person's name? Anyway, so I end up in the interview room, which is basically a prison cell. So it's.

I know six by six it's a bit bigger than that maybe 10 by 10 feet it's tiny it's a desk and a chair and the door and me and him and he's huge this prisoner he's probably about six foot five he's quite seriously overweight he's quite young

And he starts telling me how he's having weird thoughts, but he said that he told me that he could run a mile in a minute, which given how I've just described him, sounded very unlikely. He told me that he predicted a couple of world events that had happened, and it's quite clear he was quite delusional. And as he was talking, I suddenly realized why I knew his name, and it's because in big bold letters on our whiteboard in the office, this prisoner should not be seen alone by women.

I sat there with him thinking, shit. He sat sort of by the door, and I'm thinking, I have to get out of here, my heart raised up. In the cell with him? Yeah, it wasn't a prison cell, it was an office, but it was the size of a prison cell. And I'm like, shit, I really need to get out of here. He wasn't being threatening to me at all, but he clearly was having an episode.

And I did manage to say to him, you know, I think we need to go and get down to the medical centre. So let me just go and see if the doctor's free. And that's how I got out of the office.

But yeah, and that was just stupid. That was my own fault for being impulsive and not listening to my head saying, why do I know that name? And he was fine. He wasn't, he didn't do anything. But nonetheless, he was dangerous to women. So I was lucky. And another occasion, I remember having to write a parole report for somebody and I hadn't recommended release. And the word on the wing is that he was very, very angry with me and

would have hurt me if he had an opportunity to do it. So I still needed to go and talk to him about his report but we were just very, I was very careful about how a man that happened. How did he do it? We met outside where there were lots of people and I told him how aware I was of how angry he was and was able to explain why I made the decisions that I made and that settled him down. So, but just made sure it's very, very public.

and I wasn't shot in a small room where I had room to run if I needed to. And then there's another prisoner actually. And I didn't feel, did I feel threatened by him? He was interesting. So this was a different prison. He was on remand, meaning we didn't know very much about him, but his offenses were very, very impulsive. And I remember having to go and see him and just intuitively based on what I'd read thinking, I need an officer with me. That would be really unusual.

because it's hard to build a relationship with someone therapeutically, if you've got prison officers sat there with a, you know, but this, this guy, I thought, yeah, I need someone with me. And as he was talking, it was really clear he had no impulse control at all. So if he felt like going for you, he'd go, whereas most of us, you know, we'd sort of build up, wouldn't we, if we were going to do something, and particularly if it's antisocial or dangerous, we'd probably have to build up to doing it. But this guy absolutely no, no filter. He'd have just gone. So I'm glad I had someone with me there.

Is there any way to classify the traits of a serial genome? If there are psychopaths you can, because you can do the assessment, but I don't think all serial killers are psychopaths.

So I don't know. Could there be really materially successful psychopaths in this world? There are. Oh, yes. And as a psychologist, you're able to look at a celebrity or a business owner or a politician and go, hey, that's a psychopath. Yes, we're really careful not to do that because, you know, it could lead you into trouble. Basically, there's a chap called Robert Hare, who

Bob Hare, who we all worked with in the 90s and he developed the way of assessing psychopathy and one of the books he's written is called Snakes in Suits. And that's about psychopaths who aren't criminal, well at least not criminal in the way we might think of psychopaths and they are often incredibly successful.

that is they have this kind of glib superficial charm, and they can make people feel really special. I think nowadays we hear a lot about narcissism, and it's very closely related to psychopathy. I think that kind of a grandsman

being very grandiose, being very charming, superficial, trying to impress people, very shallow sense of emotion. And I'm very sensitive to having worked in prisons for so long. So somebody might not reach a classification for psychopathy or narcissists, but it makes my hackles go up when I come across it. Like, I'm sure your job has made you very intuitive.

Well, I hope so. I mean, when my girls bring her, if they bring a boyfriend home, I'm like, and I remember actually my daughter, she's about 18, she did, and it was such a tiny thing. She was going on a date with someone, she was at 17 or 18, he was about 21, and I was driving her into town, and as we were driving in, he messaged her to say he was gonna be late and could he meet her at a different place. And to me, that was like, you don't do that to somebody, you just don't, there's something wrong.

And I said to please be really, really careful. Anyway, it turned out he was very mentally unstable. So yeah, I trust my intuition. And it was such a tiny thing, you know, most people wouldn't probably even have bothered really. But what's wrong with like saying I'm late and I want to change the place. It was the first day she was much younger than him. He was going to be leaving her alone in a place where she didn't know anyone got something was wrong. So all the factors added in, you don't treat somebody like that.

But intuition, I am absolutely a firm believer of trusting your gut always, even if it turns out you're wrong. But often you won't know if you're wrong. So if you trust your gut, you'll take a different course of action. So you'll never know if what you were reacting to would happen or not, because you haven't put yourself in the situation for it too. Could you help me with the theoretical definition of a psychopath?

Somebody who lacks feeling or conscience, somebody could do this much better than me, who lacks feeling or conscience, who is very superficial in the way they interact with people, who is mostly very irresponsible. We talked about pathological lying. Psychopaths will just say something for the sake of saying it.

Whereas most of us, if we lie, we have to, there's a bit of a tell. If somebody tells a lie, you can generally see that they may be thinking a bit differently or they hesitate or they pull a second puzzle, just tell you anything. So a really good example is when I was working on the unit with such a murder as I walked on to the wing one day and a new offender had turned up and he came up to me. Oh, Joe, he said, I'm so pleased to meet you. My brief has been talking with the home secretary about my case.

And I really shouldn't be here. His brief being his solicitor, his barrister, the home secretary being one of the top politicians in the country. So this guy, without any sense of shame or anything, just tells me that he's friends with the home secretary. It was hilarious. So I didn't even really need to do a psychopathy assessment with him because he knew straight away. And he was very high on the site. We did. We had to do one, obviously.

Another of my favorite stories around psychopathy is you often you can come across it in behavior and sometimes it's even the way somebody sits. So I can't sit the way a psychopath sits because it would be inappropriate, but there's a kind of like a, you know, I own the place. I own the place as a swag. And I remember assessing this offender once and we used to video the assessments and we'd have a checklist and an interview to go through and prisons got a bit wise to what we were doing.

So they knew what we were assessing for. So I went through this whole assessment with this guy. His file would say psychopath, his behavior, his demeanor would say perfectly normal ordinary guy. And that's quite unusual. So we've gone through the interview and I got to the end and I closed the interview booklet and said, okay, the interview's over. And he'd forgotten that the camera was still running. And here at that point literally went

You'll probably find that I've lied quite a lot through my past. People say, I'm a liar, but I'm not. And that was it. That was that moment. It was very funny. So their behavioral things that you can look out for. Let's go a little deeper. Okay. They are lying this much to hide what's actually going on beneath the surface, right? I don't think they don't have a reason to lie. They're just like, yeah. Just because it... Dopamine from lying.

Probably, I mean, maybe, I mean, the grandiosity, the things that they'll tell you is because it gets a lovely reaction from somebody, you know, the home secretary, that's amazing. Of course, I didn't react like that, but there's, and they can very good at sucking people in. If you don't know what you're looking out for, a psychopath can make you feel like a million dollars. Like you're the only person in the room, the only person that matters, they'll promise you the world and deliver nothing.

They'll get, they'll love them you, you know, yeah.

So, and obviously there are people like that in the community who aren't criminal. So the thing, obviously, for most of the guys I was working with, one of the factors is criminal versatility. So what? Criminal versatility. So most defenders, not always a massive generalization. But you know, if you're a burglary or a burglar, if you're violence people, you're violent. If you're a sex offender, you're a sex offender, psychopaths to all of that. Fraud, violence.

sets of ending, stealing, everything. So there's a lot of versatility in the way they commit crime.

There's a category of human beings that can be classified as being a psychopath. And there's also many criminals who are psychopaths, but not all criminals are psychopaths. And not all psychopaths are criminals. Yeah. That's a fair assessment. Yes, absolutely. I'm trying to kind of encapsulate this thought from a viewer's end perspective, because I think a lot of people are thinking of their exes and people that they know. Is that not a psychopath?

So my question to you is that if someone is a psychopath who's not a criminal, who's just in a city going about the regular life, how do you spot it? More probably from the presentation. So people who promise you the world and don't deliver, people who regularly let you down, people who make out that they've got some amazing mega contacts, but never actually introduce you to them.

Yeah, those kind of things with the things and people who, things you can do all of these things and not be psychopaths. So you now have to be a bit careful. You know, so when somebody, if somebody's love bombing you, it doesn't mean they're actually a psychopath or a narcissist, they might just not have any boundaries. So you have to be a little bit careful about assuming that just because somebody does one or two of these things, it means

their narcissistic or psychopathic or whatever. So I don't want to just, you know, have people going away feeling, oh my God, he's done that. He must be a psychopath. It's much more complicated than that. And the assessment is very nuanced. But I would look out for people who make promises they don't keep, who, who seem very grandiose, you know, they make claims that seem unlikely, that kind of thing. But what leads to these psychopaths committing grain?

Probably it is that mixture of nature, nurture, drive. Okay. Because from everything you've described, I think that psychopaths who are motivated and who are hardworking can become great politicians. Yes, I think that's probably true. Mentioning no names at all. Politicians from all over the world have some similarities. This is what I've noticed always.

I mean, who who wants that level of power unless they have some traits that mean they're kind of immune to other people's opinions that they'll do what they want that they might like to get to where they need to be. Yeah, I mean, would you want the power of running a country? I wouldn't.

too much responsibility. Exactly. I mean, and you've got to think about what does it take for somebody to want to run a country? What? Really, we should only have reluctant leaders. I think we should people should lead when they don't really want to, but feel that, you know, it's the only option. Would you also classify some actors and celebrities as you would?

I can't think of any offhand, but if I were to meet some, yeah, probably. You'll be able to watch an episode of a dog show and go, yeah, psychopath. Yeah, probably. I would make a formal diagnosis, so I get struck off. It would be very inappropriate. Again, another slightly twisted question. What other occupations can psychopaths flourish in?

flourish anywhere, really, if it serves their need, it's wherever works. I mean, they tend to be very, my experience of the people I've worked with are very self orientated. So if it works for them, but I probably the finance industry and places where you can make loads of money. But I guess it depends on the individual. Anywhere, really.

The reason I'm asking you these questions is to understand the topic a lot better because what I assume is that being a psychopath, of course, it means all those things on the outside. You lie more than normal and you want that validation from the world a little bit. But on a deeper level, there's definitely some level of emptiness.

I would think so. Obviously, I'm not one. It's really hard to imagine how it feels. I know there's lots of work gone on looking at brain imagery as well around psychopathy and whether the brains of psychopaths light up differently in the context of emotional stimulation and things.

it would appear that psychopaths don't respond empathically to emotion. They doesn't mean they don't pick up emotion because actually that can be quite helpful to understand if somebody's scared or anxious or or not. But they the parts of the brain that light up when we are feeling an emotional connection with somebody who seems to be missing in psychopaths. Could there be psychopaths who have good intent towards the world?

What a question. I think it's unlikely. It's unlikely. I would think so. Wow. Because I think generally, if you've got all those psychopathic traits that orientated to yourself, it's sort of defence of ego. Now, this is something that's completely researched uncharted. This is just my theory. But because I do like a continuum.

You know, sometimes you meet people who, who just completely diminish themselves. You know, they, they'll always step out of the way. They'll always put other people first. Everyone else's needs are more important. And then the other end of the spectrum, the more psychopathic end of the spectrum, their needs are the most important things in the world. And my, my experience sort of psychologically, therapeutically is in both those cases, it's kind of a defense of self.

So psychopaths are doing it in a really bullish, sometimes dangerous way. People who diminish themselves are trying to protect their own ego as well, but not in a grandiose.

big way. So, and this is just something I've come across. It's not a theory. It's nothing that's been tested. But when I work with people therapeutically who struggle with their sense of self worth, there's definitely a sense of protection of self in the same way that I think psychopaths protect themselves, but just in a very, very different way. Just a little theory I've got going. Wow. They protect themselves. That's where they lie and try to get validation. It's a defensive ego, ultimately.

On a more primal level, just survival and fear. I think, well, I wonder. I mean, this is my unvalidated theory. I really question, again, the mind of a criminal. That why would you look at another living being and want to cause any form of pain?

And you have to really get inside someone's head to work that out. It's too layered. There's no one single answer, right? It's like culture, your story, your genetics. It's a lot of different things. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so sorry I'm asking you this next question. Because we- I'm glad you apologized up front. What are you going to ask me? We're going back into that same realm that we came out of. But when you speak to someone who's mother and other human being,

Have they ever described that moment of murder and how it feels to them? I'm not sure they even know.

One or two have definitely talked about the power they felt about deciding whether or not someone lived or died. Power. Power. It's interesting because it's just unlocked a memory of somebody I work with who brought someone to near death and then stopped and then took them to near death and then stopped and eventually killed them. And he talked about the power that he felt

But how do you take someone near death? Strangle... The negotiation, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And to know that he had somebody's life or death in his hands was overwhelmingly powerful for him. Very, very damaged individual. What had gone on in...? I got you know, I can't remember.

I mean, one of the ways, I guess, of surviving through this work is that you let go of a lot of memories that you don't want stored. You're such a lovely person. I hate taking you back for these dark rims.

work through it. Now, one of the ways actually that has helped me is that now I support people in these jobs to process the trauma, the stuff that they experience as part of their work. And it isn't all necessarily about listening to people or reading files, it's also the experience of

seeing somebody injure themselves or witnessing violence between prisoners is all those sorts of things that can just play with our minds. And interestingly, it's often not the really big things that stick with you. It's the smaller things. So, you know, we've been talking about some of the more grisily gruesome cases and people would say, Oh God, that must be so hard to live with. Actually, some of the things I find most difficult are much less significant. So for example, I remember vividly reading

a statement given by a mum about the time her six-year-old boy told her that a neighbour had abused him. And she repeated the words the child had used. And I remember that, that sticks with me. Not all the gruesome, horrible details of mutilation or murder. It's this little six-year-old. And she she described how she was sat on the stairs with her son, giving him a cuddle because he was crying. And that's when he

told her what had happened to him and that I was of floods of tears and it stayed with me for 35 years you know it's never left me that image of them on the stairs and if you know if I engaged with it it would be really distressing but the way that that you manage that and I suppose it's a loser little bit to what you're saying about the things you hear in the darker side of human nature

Why would I not be upset? It's okay to be upset. I don't have to deny my distress or upset about that. It was really distressing. It was horrible. And it's okay if I have a good cry about it. That just makes me human. So there's an acknowledgement of emotion and allowing yourself to experience it. I think people get into more trouble when they try and push the feelings down. They try and ignore them.

They feel as if those feelings make them somehow less of a human being or make them more vulnerable. And I'm saying, no, you need to welcome those feelings. They're telling you something and they're telling you you've had a difficult experience. You know, that's okay. I mean, I go back to that topic of conscience.

That's what your mother tells you when you're a little kid that, hey, if you feel like it's wrong, don't do it. And I think it's a very primal element in every human being's brain, where if you know that something's wrong, you don't usually do it, which is why with this murderer who almost took that person to the edge of the person, then didn't be the person, then finally be the person.

I really wonder about his own minds in a voice. You have a voice in your head saying, don't do that. But what happens when you're that close to murdering another human, you're taking away someone's life. And again, on a spiritual level, there's a huge karmic price you pay for taking away someone's life. I think you're inviting suffering towards your future self.

I'm going to just venture into a realm that I know very little about. But when you think about the wars that are going on around the world, people are taking people's eyes all the time in the name of something. I'm not even sure what.

And, you know, you look at what's happening in Ukraine, you look at what's happening in Gaza, and you think about Putin, and you think about Benjamin Netanyahu, the people who don't have literal blood on their hands because they're not doing it, but they're ordering the slaughter of people. They are allegedly not criminal.

And I cannot get my head round. I can, I can understand why an individual in a moment might take somebody's life because I've been on that path with them. I cannot get my head round. World leaders thinking that slaughtering masses of people is an okay thing to do. How do they sleep?

How do you think this is my mind? I think they absolutely they have to just completely block it out or somehow have such a sense of righteousness about what they're doing and absolutely believe in their right to do it. But I can't.

I mean, I think if they stood outside of that, I'd like to think there was enough humanity in them that they could see why the rest of the world are going, what are you doing? I wonder if I had that level of power, some level of empathy dies out. Oh, I think it must do. I think it must. I don't know. I never ever were talking earlier about who wants that kind of power.

people, I guess, who were able to make decisions about the mass loss of life. And yet we have world leaders in the name of politics or religion or whatever else who think it's OK to end the lives of thousands of people. I can't get my head around that. Have you ever wondered about terrorism in the same way? Oh, what an interesting question. I have worked with some terrorist defenders. Really?

I think terrorism feels in this, I can do it really careful. It's different from being a world leader. I think that lots, and I say lots of people haven't worked with a lot of terrorists, but are the ones that I

have worked with there has been such a strong sense of justification. I guess that is the same, I guess, for a world leader. But I also know that some very vulnerable people have been manipulated into behaving in a particular way.

We had one of the senior police officials from Mumbai on the show a few years ago. So Mumbai had gone through a really bad terror attack in 2008, the 26-11 attack on the Taj hotel. And the one terrorist that survived from, I think it was a group of eight to 10 terrorists in total, I think. And they were all taken out in one way or the other by the commandos.

But the one guy who survived was kept alive for, I think, a couple of years after that. Eventually he was given a death sentence. And his name was Kasab. His topic has been brought up on the show a lot. I asked Mr. Shiva Nandan, I asked Vishwas Nagrei Parthal, all these police officers who were kind of a part of saving Mumbai during 2016.

The ones who met Kasab have all said that he was an 18, 19 year old boy from some village in Pakistan where he was brainwashed, told that he's going to do something right. He's going to do God's work and went and took out the lives of countless human beings through bombs and things. And they had mercilessly killed a lot of civilians. Like I remember as a kid, I was 14 years old that time, 13, 14. And we were shocked even as kids.

that this very normal city where you grow up in the railway station that you know about has been brutally attacked. There were images of dead bodies just lying down. Very, very brutal terrorist attack. But this kid thought that he was doing something right.

I think where I'm going at with this whole conversation, the question I'm going towards is about this element of brainwashing when it comes to terrorism. You said something about vulnerability in a potential terrorist. What the police officer said was that vulnerability comes from a lack of education. They haven't seen the world. They don't have perspective. So it's fodder for being able to be brainwashed. So I had to just give this context here.

I mean, vulnerability is I don't think it's just about education or lack of it. I think it's about lack of community support. It's about mental health. And we all move in and out of vulnerability all the time. You know, there'll be times in your life where you felt more vulnerable in my life when I felt more vulnerable. One of the things we do in our line of work is safeguarding and understanding how we move in and out of vulnerability. So I thinking in prisons,

let's say young Muslim lad who maybe has had a really shitty time in the community he's been in the experience a lot of racism and prejudice he commits an offense he gets into prison he hates everything about his community he's lost his connection to his family because he's committed an offense

And then there's some very charismatic leader of some cell who says, come on, we'll look after you. We'll take care of you. We'll make you feel special. It's very seductive. Why wouldn't you go into that if you're already feeling really vulnerable? Now, it may be, maybe you're very bright and maybe you are educated, but you're still vulnerable. So you get sucked into something.

And then, of course, we get into this whole issue of life and death, you know, about what are people willing to give up? They're willing to give up their lives for a cause that they believe so strongly. And if we'd started talking about

Suicide bombing, for example. And that's a whole other mindset. How do you get into the mind of somebody who's willing to end their lives for a greater good that they presumably believe is going to happen, even though I view they'll never know. So this could get really deep. No, sure. What do you think senior terrorist leaders look out for?

in potential terrorists who are not terrorists, youngsters who are disenfranchised, who are disconnected, who don't have an anchor in their community. And I think that's absolutely the same with the way people target victims of sexual abuse. Well, that was a very complex story.

So the one thing we know is that youngsters who have a very present parent, somebody who makes their presence obvious, are far less likely to be targeted as a victim of sexual abuse and almost far less likely to be targeted as a victim for potential terrorist activity as well. You know, if I am

trying to think of how I could give you an example. Let's say I'll just talk about children generally, so this could be targeting a child for anything, for trafficking, for terrorism, for abuse. If I'm an offender looking out, if I'm a terrorist cell leader or a child trafficker or an offender, and I'm hanging around the playground,

I'm going to look for the child whose parent never comes to pick them up or who's always late, or who doesn't really talk to their child who's always on their phone. Those are the kids I'm going to target, the ones who don't have a present adult, the ones who are left hanging around on their own, who are unlikely to talk to their parents about things. I am not going to target the child for whatever purpose is.

whose mom or dad is always there, who's engaging with the child in conversation as they leave school, who isn't constantly on their phone or distracted. Okay, so, and I think that's the same for anyone who's trying to suck somebody into nefarious activity, they're going to choose the most vulnerable person.

And that vulnerability might come from like a education, but it might come from an absent adult or a strong adult figure. It doesn't have to be apparent. I mean, we know from research that the most resilient people are the ones who've had a strong adult figure in their lives. Could have been a teacher, could have been a

a care of some sort could have been a grandparent and aunt or uncle, doesn't have to be a mum or dad, could have been an older sibling, but they've got someone, some stable source in their lives who keeps them safe. But the kids who have no one, they're the kids who are most vulnerable and that's the same in prison, that's the same in terrorism, it's the same in abuse, in my view.

So, I mean, I'd also categorize terrorists as criminals. Criminals before committing a crime scout the location that they want to commit the crime and scout all the situations around the location.

So you're saying that the senior terrorist probably targeted this potential unit errors by first observing his family. Just making observations about who gets visits regularly, who's getting into trouble, who's looking most vulnerable, who's less involved and maybe isolated. It's very easy to find vulnerability if you look for it. So you have worked with someone who's been a terrorist. Yeah. Do they look at killing another human being as plus points for their own cause?

I remember a time when a terrorist attack happened and the terrorists on the unit were celebrating the death of the people who died because it was part of their cause. It's very hard for the staff to watch this celebration of people dying. In the prison? Yeah, the terrorist that didn't happen in prison, it was televised. And the guys who were on the unit who had been convicted of terrorist defenses were celebrating this terrorist attack.

which obviously resulted in a lot of life. And I remember the staff, I was working with the staff at that point, just saying how repulsed and disgusted they felt and that, you know, it made them, it made it really hard for them to keep their professional boundaries. And I get that totally, but they have to because they're professionals. And that was part of that debriefing with them about why were those people celebrating the death of people in a terrorist attack. So yeah, the human mind is a, is a very, very, very complex thing.

What's the mental soup that they're in? Who knows? Who knows? It's too complex. Well, I think if you had time and you were working alongside those people, you would begin to understand it just in the same way that we've understood other offences, but you have to walk in their shoes to really get it. From out here, it's too hard. Okay, kind of unrelated, but yet possibly related question.

Is there an element of hypnosis of some kind at play? And is hypnosis even a real thing?

I think you're going to be hypnotized if you allow yourself to be. Do you think you have a choice about whether or not some people are hypnotizable? Because they just don't want to relinquish the control of their mind in that way. So I think hypnosis is a thing. Paul McKenna would argue it is, isn't it? It's a very famous hypnotist. I've never trained in hypnosis and I've never tried it and I've never been hypnotized. Have you dealt with any element of hypnosis? No. There is a part of me that kind of feels like that. I mean, for lack of better words.

Some level of hypnosis is at play with these. Like, how do you get a human being to go kill a bunch of people and not feel anything about them? I think, well, I think maybe indoctrination. And I think also we don't necessarily assume that they don't feel anything. I mean, it seems like such a weird thing to do. Weird being a understatement. The terrorist that you work with, did he feel anything at all?

we didn't really get into the therapeutic side of it. So the terrorists, they wouldn't engage in therapeutic work. So I was working with them more in terms of the staff and the imams who are responsible for their care. So I wouldn't get that far. But I think it would be wrong to assume they don't feel anything. And I think also when you think about what terrorism means, it means to create terror and our serial killer can create terror. We just don't

choose to call him a terrorist or her. So terrorism is just a way of labeling a bunch of people who are offending, but they're offending in a particular context and in a particular way. I often feel we should probably change the word. I think it gives it a

I don't know, I want to. The word that came into my mind is a glory. It gives it a glory. I'm a terrorist. I mean, we can be terrorized by a dog. You know, a dog running rampant is terrifying. And that's what terrorism is. It's designed to cause terror. Effectively, they're just a demon serial galos. Basically, I guess, ultimately, or mass, rather than serial killers, mass, they kill a lot of people at once rather than a number of people sequentially.

Yeah, but then we could say the same. It depends what side of the venture on, doesn't it? You could say the same about politicians who order the execution of thousands of people in the name of whatever, whether that be Bosnia or Yugoslavia or, you know, I'm not pointing out any particular war, but somebody makes a decision that all those people are going to die. I just find that mind blowing. And why is that different from terrorism? Somebody makes a decision. A lot of people are going to die.

It's just one of them's legitimate allegedly and the other one isn't. I know there's no difference. It all ends in the massacre of lots of people. I wonder what weight one carries after committing murder.

very interesting. I had a colleague when I joined the prison service who did her master's thesis on the post-traumatic stress resulting from the murder of somebody. She diagnosed post-traumatic stress in the man who committed the murder as a result of the murder he committed and definitely some people will really really struggle with what they've done and the safest thing to do is to deny it or to minimize it or justify it or blame someone else. Have you worked with soldiers?

No, no, but I think it's extraordinary to me that we can train people to kill people. That's what they're being trained to do, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, but that's why in the army, we're training people to kill people, to override that survival instinct of their own and of other people. But that's, I think, why we get so much post-traumatic stress in soldiers, because the thought of doing it is very different from the reality. And you're here, you know, police officers in communities that are armed, so in America, particularly, if you talk to police officers who've taken a life.

It's really traumatizing for most of them, not all, but most. It's a really traumatizing thing for most ordinary people to do. You know, on one level, this is a conversation about psychology and criminology. And if you view the same conversation from another very, very primal lens, what are we? We're like nomadic hunter-gatherers. And there were probably murders that happened before civilization was a thing.

bizarrely, apparently, we're living in the least violent period of our history. It feels really hard to believe, given what's going on around the world, but we are less violent now than we were. In terms of our brain development, hopefully we are developing the skills to override that primal instinct.

Wow. So this conversation we just had about terrible and crime. If you dial it back to the medieval period or something. Yeah. There's a lot more terrorism happening at that point. Yeah, apparently so. You need to speak to a historian, but that's my understanding. Do you have anything to say about World War II? Just let's never happen. Let it happen again, except it wouldn't happen again.

No, I think wars are, I find it extraordinary that it's the most intelligent species on the planet. We think wars are okay. Although, having said that, just to contradict myself and be a little bit more controversial, if we didn't kill each other off, we'd be in big trouble because the planet wouldn't be able to sustain the number of people on it. So maybe, maybe there is a purpose, maybe there is something programmed in us to kill each other off.

Like our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, they have wars with each other as well. Different types of chimpanzees will go to war with each other. Effectively, we're just the most evolved apes. We've used our brains to build guns and weapons. That's what we're doing. We're just apes who are programmed to kill.

It's fascinating how driven we are. We're getting a bit philosophical here, but how driven we are to survival, you know, that science is constantly working to help us live longer and longer and solve more and more illnesses. But actually the reality is if we all started living forever, we wouldn't be able to, because the planet couldn't support it. So we're a great big mix of contradictions, aren't we? Again, another human question about

murderers. Are there any murderers who actually want to be helped? Yes. There are. Yes. In what case do they want to be helped? They want to be able to live a free life and to not be at risk of committing a similar offense again. And most people wouldn't. Most wouldn't. Have you ever asked any of them about their relationship with the person that they've killed, not in terms of the romantic or human equation, but post the murder happening?

Do they think about the person that they've killed in some cases?

some do and it can be really distressing. It goes back to what we were talking about with somebody being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress as a result of the murder they committed. Some would do it in a very deviant way, a malicious, horrible way, get some kind of pleasure from thinking about what they've done. But I've met very few actual serial killers, you know, somebody's killed once and they've been so shocked by what's happened.

happened. And obviously they tried to evade detection because they don't want to spend a life in prison, which is what they're looking at. And I do really understand why people deny, minimize, cover up. Because shame is a very, very powerful emotion. Not saying that they all feel shame, but most, most of the offenders I've worked with have felt devastated by what they've done. What goes on in the mind of someone who spends years in prison?

Does something change? Yes, I mean, you have to adapt to an environment where you stripped of all your freedoms, rightly. It's correct. Yeah. Prison as a concept. Depends what you think it's for. In this country, we send people to prison as a punishment, not formal punishment.

People think the prison's easy. People have never been into a prison. Oh, they've got TVs in their cells and they can phone home and all this sort of thing. But they have no idea what it's like to be completely deprived of your liberty to not be able to make any decisions for yourself, to be locked in a tiny room, sometimes with people that are dangerous or that you don't like.

that you don't see the light of day for an hour a day if you get some exercise. It's a horrendous way to live, an absolutely horrendous way to live. And also at the moment, a very dangerous way to live. Our prisons are very dangerous in this country. The assault rates have gone up. They were understaffed. It's a horrible, horrible place to be. And I would challenge anyone who's had prisons easy because it isn't. What does it strip off your mind?

Well, actually, there are some changes to try and help prisoners maintain some level of making choice and responsibility because otherwise we're going to release people who for five, 10, 15 years have not had to make a decision for themselves and then expect them to flourish in a community, which is going to be really hard to do. But I stripped you a view.

you know, it really does strip you of your, I think your fundamental self. I think people find ways of adjusting human beings are incredibly adaptable. There's a process we call cognitive deconstruction where it happens to people who go into total institutions, particularly hospitals, where your world just narrows down totally to your current existence. Whereas, you know, we have the freedom of our world is huge, you know, we can walk outside when we want, we can buy food when we want, we can eat when we're hungry, we can sleep when we're tired,

when you're in prison, all of those things go.

You know, you might want to sleep, but you can't because, you know, there's loads of noise or your mind is racing. You might want to eat, but you've got no food and it's not. There's nothing available till breakfast time, you know, you want to know what I mean. So you deconstruct into this tiny world. And then obviously when people release, we expect them to, to be able to reconstruct into some kind of prosocial non offending individual, which is ridiculous because they're not ready for it. And also the other thing that's really hard about therapy and prisons is that,

the context in which people commit offenses is not the same context as when they're in a prison so they can't apply anything they learn therapeutically that's really hard you know so for example if if somebody commits an offense when they're drunk or they're more likely to affirm when they're drunk or they've been using drugs i mean yes they're sadly our drugs available in prisons and they shouldn't be um but you know there's circumstances perhaps someone's had a row with their partner or their family and their cars broken down and they've

had some alcohol and they've taken some drugs and then they offend. You can't replicate that in prison. So it makes therapy harder in some respects. I think we should make much more use of virtual reality actually to help prisoners practice skills for an offence free life. And that'll come. I think that'll come. I mean, if you imagine, if you're talking in a fender through making a choice about whether or not to steal that car,

or whether or not to hit that person or whatever. And you can do that, you can put them in a situation where there's heightened emotion, there's lots of other stimuli around. You can really help them practice those skills in a virtual world, which I think would be brilliant for rehabilitation, but I'm not sure if it's happening yet. Have you seen prisoners or happy to be in prison? Yes, and I've known of prisoners who've actually fought not to be released because prison is safer for them than the streets.

A gang wars. Yeah, there's lots of gang problems currently in prison. Not so much when I was in prison. We didn't really have gangs in the 90s. Well, we probably did, but not in the way there are now. So, but yeah, I've certainly I've known of prison to say I'm going to offend as soon as I get out because I'm safer in prison. I've got a bed to sleep in that's my own. I mean, that's heartbreaking, isn't it? As a young offender, I remember

absolutely kicking off when he had to leave prison. He said, I've got nowhere to sleep. Here, I've got a bed and I get fed three meals a day. I don't care that I can't do anything else. I'm safe. Isn't that heartbreaking? Makes me so sad that they prefer to be in that awful environment than free. What do you think that tiny cell that they sleep and what do you think that does to the brain?

Well, I think it's not the size of the cell, it's the not being able to get out of it when you want. It's like someone locking you in your room. In a way, it wouldn't matter too much how big the room was. It's the fact that you haven't got the choice to leave. Yeah, it's that you can't go anywhere. And it's harder if you're in a tiny space that you can't exercise or you can't walk around. You know, so really, really difficult. I couldn't survive in prison. I think I'd last five minutes.

I mean, I don't know why I'm asking you this, but this whole element of homosexuality in prison, is this why it happens? Because you feel this degree of being chained and you want some kind of companion. Companionship and intimacy and relief of sexual needs. I'm sure it doesn't make somebody homosexual. It doesn't mean that they're actually attracted to the same gender, but it's the only option. So it's not uncommon at all for

men and women in women's prisons to engage in sexual relationships with other prisoners as a relief, as comfort, as support. Yeah. This has been a very heavy conversation. Yeah.

Are you okay to have these conversations? How do you feel about this? It's lovely to have someone really interested, actually. These are the elements of my work I haven't talked about for a really long time. It's actually been really reflective for me to think about where I've been and where I am now. It would be lovely to talk briefly about

my current work, because it's so related to my history. So I don't know, you're happy for me to talk about that. Yeah, please go ahead. Yeah, so no. You've given us so much with this podcast, like, please, whatever your heart says, just put it out there.

Well, I mean, nowadays my, I run a small business and it's a nonprofit business because we want our profits to go back into supporting people who couldn't otherwise afford our services because we are reassuringly expensive. But we, we support organizations and individuals to thrive. And my heart is still in criminal justice. So even though

We will work with engineering firms, we'll work with fuel companies, we work with medical regulators, basically wherever there's people, we'll work. But my heart is still in criminal justice and the business was set up on a couple of experiences, actually. One was as a mum and the other was as a forensic psychologist in prisons. What is the business? The business is called Petros and it's our Stratplan is Resilience for Life.

and our role is to support individuals and organisations to get the best out of themselves and their people. So it's about understanding people, understanding what helps people thrive and it came from my PhD. So I'd been working in prisons for about 10 years and about the five-year mark two of my colleagues took the prison service to court for psychiatric injury because they felt so damaged by their job.

And you may remember at the start of this, I said, you know, I felt I was too young to go to prison and I was quite reluctant to work with men convicted of sexual offenses because I was very aware of the potential impact. So when my two colleagues were so fundamentally damaged by their experience of the work, I wanted to understand why. And that's why I did a PhD. So I studied for three years looking at the factors that influence who might be more vulnerable.

to the pressures of the mind, and who may be more resilient to that. And as a result of that PhD, had a formula framework that we could use. And I went back into prisons and put that into practice for another 10 years before I bet she's spent more time in academia, and then set up Petros. So now I do work with prison officers.

And we look at how they prepare for the trauma of the work, how they manage their mind, how they build the skills of resilience so that they can thrive in the face of the things that we know they're going to experience. You've figured, I mean, again, I'm bracketing something extremely complex into a very simple sentence, but you figured how to make people tougher and more detached.

Okay, I'm going to challenge the word tougher because I don't think you have to be tough to thrive. I think you need to be skilled. And detachment is one of those skills. So that's the ability always we've mentioned is to look at the kind of bigger picture and to help you keep your psychological balance. But yes, essentially, we support individuals to lead a stress free life. You help build mental strength. Yeah, again, it's interesting because I, I

I shudder a little bit at the word strength because I think when we talk about people being mentally strong, if they don't survive, it must mean they're weak. And I don't think it is that people are weak. I think it's that they don't yet have the skills they need to to navigate their way through some of this trauma, mentally equipped. That's much nicer. It's to give them the equipment to navigate their way through the trauma. I mean, you've, you've been very flattering and said to me a few times, you know, I don't know how you've kept your mind basically through all this work.

And it's not through strength, it is through skills, it's through learning the skills to process, to understand things, to respond well to your emotions, to understand that your mind is a very complex and naughty mischief maker. And if you can understand the way your mind works, you can manage it much better. And you know, yeah, I mean, we're talking about a very extreme end of the spectrum where you're a good human being who's having to deal with human beings who've not done the right things in life.

using their minds, you've understood certain nuances of the mind. And now you're able to help all kinds of human beings become momentally equipped. Yeah. I like to think so. That's what we aim to do. Yeah. Doctor, very, very, very grateful for your time and this conversation.

loved it. Thank you very much for having me on the show. I hope you had fun. I really tried doing justice to your body of work and I don't think we've covered even like 5% of everything that you know. But genuinely, this was very enlightening. It wasn't just about like the crime and the psychology related stuff. All of us have a very bad admiration for you and who you've become at the end of like this whole timeline. And I'm sure there's a long way to go.

But it's crazy how you've been able to deal with all this yet speak about it in such a, you know,

elaborate manner and still be stable on the inside. So a lot of admiration for you. Thank you. It's been a delight. Thank you, Doc. I hope to have a conversation with you at some point in the future. Thank you. Thank you so much. That was the episode for today, ladies and gentlemen. Please send your feedback. I hope that you enjoyed this episode, but I also hope that you got to know yourself a little more deeply through the course of this podcast.

definitely share it with your friends. I think that conversations like this are a need of the hour from the global perspective as well. Definitely send in your guest recommendations. We're going to be traveling all over the world. We're seeking out people like Dr. Joklak who know the subject of psychology this deeply.

So looking forward to your guest recommendations and your feedback on this particular episode. This was one of the most memorable chats that we've had this year and this year is only getting started because there's a lot more global podcasts coming away on the Ranbir Show.