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Episode 43: Inside the Criminal Mind
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all right good evening everybody good evening dr. Lyle how are you doing today good good good to be here excellent well you know the previous shows that we've had we we've been talking about different cycle evolutionary psychology as it explains - as it pertains to relationships and love and sex dating and all kinds of different topics and today I thought we would just learn a little bit more about you and your experiences as a psychologist for the criminal justice system now you used to work in Dallas Texas all right tell us about that yes I was the psychologist I was the in-house psychologist for the Adult Probation Department and so I worked as the I was actually all by myself I was the only guy and I did evaluations for the courts for both the criminal and excuse me the felony and misdemeanor courts and for people that were on probation and this is where the judges would you know they would be looking at a situation and they were trying to figure out what should be done with the some individual yeah they would get sent to me and then I would give him my opinion I was that was a very interesting work yeah and so so these people were they were they a violent violent offenders or I mean was it kind of everything out there that you could think of yeah I would say he was all kinds of stuff so it was men women the women were rarely having anything to do with violence it was mostly it's mostly men men are about 93% of the people that are incarcerated and the and some of the a lot of the things with the men were violent in one way or the other a lot of them worked so a lot of them would have been when drug crimes or or some other were stealing that sort of thing but certainly a fair amount of it is in some ways some kind of violent problem yeah so all kinds of different stuff and and my job would be to essentially figure out what the judge ought to be thinking about this person is this person a person of decent character that got into a set of tough circumstance or this is a bad apple but I should throw the book at and so that's the kind of questions essentially that I was being asked and it seems like like because nobody I mean was were you talking to this with the court reporter kind of talking the judge and the court reporter has to write down everything you say or was just more like you know you just talked to him and kind of give him an honest opinion about you know what this criminal is there's actually what I would do is they would send the people to me and I would know that that what they were trying to figure out and I would interview the individual and then I would write a report so I was occasionally called into court not very often and occasionally the there would be a go-between probation officers that worked in the courts would ask me sort of on the side well you know I know what your report says but what do you really think and that's how some informal communications would go on this way it was I learned a great deal in doing this and I actually learned some some critical skills that would become important later in all kinds of situations certainly in conflict resolution and also and a key component of conflict resolution is in marital therapy or relationship therapy and so because that's a conflict situation where you're trying to resolve but also in other conflict situations and so I could actually describe for you how I learned this it just occurs to me now that this might be interesting for people because it sets the stage for a very methodical and excellent technique for dealing with conflict resolution kind of situations so let me describe how this came about because it took me quite a while to evolve this technique and then it wound up being useful much later when I did get psychotherapy with you know normal people the a lot of times when people would come in and I saw thousands of individuals in my time in Dallas the what I would do is I couldn't tell how bad of an apple they were and it turns out that if they were 24 years old for example and they were in for some felonious thing you didn't know they might not have had much of a record and on the other hand they might not have been in Texas for that long either so you don't know and there there wasn't a national database at that time so of course the the people don't know this so the criminals don't know this there was a little bit of national data like I don't know FBI stuff and we would certainly run Matt but if some locale up in Oklahoma had a rap sheet on some guy we would never know it and so what I would do is I would play possum and I would say things like you know I just sort of took a glance at your file and you know I saw what's wrong for the there's you know I guess there's a there's some there's a whole big this whole big write-up in there what sorts of things when I when I look at this thing later what sorts of things have you ever you know in other states or other locales what sorts of things have you ever been arrested for okay and I would keep my mouth shut and act real casual and I would watch them hesitate because they weren't sure what they could get away with or what they couldn't and and generally they would spill it so this is was a this was a very this is sort of this was a little acting job and so then also another another part of this information fishing that that I would do is that I would the person would come in and essentially save it more or less they were innocent and it was been blown out of proportion and what I would do is I would actually do a technique that I would ultimately call crystal clear and what crystal clear is is that we just keep asking questions until we have it crystal-clear until every little thing makes sense like well you know it wasn't even my car and then they pulled me over you know I course I was on probation and I didn't know there's guns in the trunk and you know it's my cousin's alright so then what we do is we back up from there and we say well where were you going and you know how did you come to have the car keys and how is it that you weren't driving some different cars how why is where you drive in the car save your customer and you know what was happening at that time etc did you know that your cousin had anything to do with guns that they even had them etc so we asked all these tiny little questions and about this time I would probably been on the job for a couple of years and I happened to read a book I had read obviously being interested in criminal psychology as I was I had read helter skelter by Vincent Bugliosi if nobody has read it people have not read it and you have any interested in criminal criminal behavior helter skelter is double of the Manson murders and by the guy who prosecuted and solved the Manson murders which was Vincent Blio see and it's a hell of a book and so I was very interested than a few years later when bits of bully OSI published a book called and the see will tell which was an extraordinary murder case where he was on the other side he was the defense attorney for a woman who was being prosecuted for murders that took I took place on an island called Palmyra which was south of Hawaii on this very lonesome brutal place where she and her lover were there on their boat and then there was another couple that came with a much much nicer boat and the her lover killed these two people and it actually it wasn't found out for very many years later when their bones washed up on the shore you know ten years or fifteen years later this incredible any rate it turns out that this woman was totally innocent and had no idea that this is how had happened and the and her her lover was absolutely psychopathic and it is an extraordinary story of how bull yossi goes through all all these tiny very incidental issues questions on every little detail and would make sure that everything made complete sense to him and then when he could reproduce that thinking very carefully for the jury the jury could see how every little strange thing fit into place and how this woman was actually innocent even though all the prima facie evidence would have indicated that she was guilty and I had no doubt when I was done with that book that she was completely innocent and yet and so bully OSI discusses the concept of cross-examination and how cross-examination is a normal course of events in human life so when you know the kid comes home late you're like well where you been you know that's that begins the cross-examination and so we naturally do this and people kind of get ready for it but as we press people if they're lying to us they'll pretty quickly get on squishy ground where they'll start to gloss over details and that is when we have to get crystal clear so we have to know exactly why it is that they were thinking and doing what they were doing at that time and that's what I would do with my provisioners so I got to practice what Vincent Bugliosi had talked about and I would do this over and over again for hours a day with criminals that were trying to look like they were nicer people than they were and the reasons for their behavior were more benign than they were and I have to say that very often they were right so I can remember to this day some little sad-sack woman that we saw in probation for a felony of all things for welfare fraud and of course I'm looking at her and she's a pathetic looking thing and I'm thinking oh where is she some clever welfare queen who's taking ten checks at all no it wasn't anything at all she was she was keeping her welfare while she was secretly working another job and she had three children and I have to tell you I looked at that situation I thought you've got to be kidding me like this is a crime and I told her that this I I wouldn't have done it any different and all I can tell you is you're not allowed to do this and so you will see things in the criminal justice system that will make you shake your head and wonder at how people are mistreated by the system and you'll also look at the criminal justice system when you see some real Lulu's and you'll say thank god we've got prisons and we've got people that are willing to take the time to prosecute these people so in any event I spend years getting perfecting my determination to not let things slide when I don't quite understand something and and this evolves into what I call crystal clear and so this then winds up being extremely useful in marital therapy and it's very useful for people in a marital conflict when they are upset with each other that I actually if they're in the room with me and we're trying to talk something through I explain to them that I want to have it exactly clear what everybody's thinking which means I need one person to be quiet while the other person explains to be in perfect detail what they're thinking is and I will ask questions and ask questions and ask questions for reaffirmation until I get it exactly clear and then I do something else which is that I feed it back to that individual so that so that I explain to them so you're thinking this because he said this and then you're thinking that because he did that and then you feel like this is the case etc etc and I will get to the point where the the person that's telling the story will have a tremendous sigh of relief and they'll say yes that's exactly how I feel so now they can relax because they understand that my that I have it exactly clear what it is that they are thinking and what they're feeling and why I mean while the other person is like ready to pee their pants this is so upset because they want to interrupt which they often do and I have to tell them don't interrupt you know you're you're going to you know get your chance to explain everything else on your side of the equation and so we get completely crystal clear the value of this is very often the person who's listening to this finds out that the other person is making inferences based on some incorrect information and this winds up being unbelievably important and so then when we switch switch hats and we go to the other side and we meticulously go down through we find the the the critical points where they disagree this is the equivalent of the critical point where the criminal says hey this is the moment where I say I'm innocent or they're glossing over the critical detail but they really cannot explain the critical detail and so this is precisely where we take out the magnifying glass and we have to get it exactly clear what they were thinking and what they were doing and how come the evidence says this but you say that how can we have the contradiction and I would say that in almost every case not every case but almost every case there was enough there was either enough fuzziness I'm glossing over the details on the part of the criminal that I knew they were lying or it was very clear that they had an alternative explanation for the pattern of evidence that actually was more plausible than the explanation that was given by the courts and given by the prosecutor and that there there had been and they absolutely had an argument and actually their argument made sense and it actually fit the evidence better than any other alternative explanation at which point I became convinced that that their argument made perfect sense and then of course it has to line up to their their criminal history etc but this is where crystal clear' gets very useful and it gets very useful in the couples therapy because as we get it very clear where the where the really key disagreements are then we take out the magnifying glass and we get exceptionally clear on what those are and then then we are then one fertile ground to to essentially investigate and negotiate how that disagreement come comes to be I had a beautiful case I just remembering now this is about fifteen years ago or so so I had a guy who who came in with his wife and he was he he said that he couldn't she thought he was cheating on him and and then he said that he couldn't call her on his cell phone because the cell phone was given to him by his workplace and and I said and the wife was absolutely insistent that she believed that he was cheating on her and that he did not call her because he was off on his adventures with the other woman etc were Yahoo's chippy on her so I said well this shouldn't be a problem all you have to do is we can solve this problem by simply getting another cell phone that's your private cell phone that isn't your work cell phone and then when your wife calls your private cell phone you can just answer any time where you should look on this side it was an instant checkmate the wife was delighted nobody had thought of us and he thought he had a foolproof so then the most entertaining thing of all was they wind up divorce and about a 6 or months or a year later he drags in the so he had he had gone down with the ship and explained that you know it was all a mistake and it wasn't true and he wasn't cheating so about six months or a year later he drags in the girl that he was cheating with I can't imagine how I kept my rapport with this guy but I did somehow and so anyway he he then is cheating with somebody else and she suspects to be sure you were the only one who caught him you gotta have Chris own credit for that this is amazing his and I can't remember what the particulars are of the that thing but the but the gal of course was very convinced that he was cheating and Christian obviously watched this firsthand from the other direction and anyway that relationship also fell apart but you know we did what we could you know I'm curious when you're in the the couples counseling do you tell them yes that you're using techniques that you learned in the criminal justice system to help them out the no I don't it's it just sort of it's actually it's a very benign version of the same thing because you know we're not usually trying to catch quote lying what we're really looking for is a difference of interpretation about something important and some central issue and so when two honest conflicted spouses come in and there's a lot of hurt feelings this is exactly what we need to do is we need to let everybody essentially understand more fully what's going on inside the other person's head there is a I believe that there is a program inside of human nature quite convinced to this that that says that if you're going to win an argument you have to win it very fast because it's going to be taking place in front of third parties in the village that aren't that interested and as a result you must win the argument very quickly and you'll watch the human mind is well designed to essentially take a an extreme polar Polar position that you're bad and I'm good and I'm honest and you're lying and that this is and in your I've been grievously treated etc and so this is the the outrage and the accusation and the character assassination that goes on is pretty pretty this is normal state of affairs for humans and they are very quick and they're designed to be moving at a thousand miles an hour mental to try to quickly spa spot the flaw and any any line that goes on which of course everybody is going to be shading the truth their direction because if the other guy is shading the truth then you have to shade the truth your way there's an evolutionary arms race that's going on in the situation so hyperbole and distortion are wind up being essentially the the you know the soup of the day and so this is this winds up being a very fast ruthless poker game that goes on and when couples try to resolve this they're relying on the same Stone Age argument device and it's not good and so what it's not very productive it's not actually in the best interest of the relationship it may have been effective in the Stone Age for making sure that you got at least an even break out of resource allocation disputes but it one ends up being pretty rough in relationships and even the most mature intelligent you know wise people can very quickly get caught up into this because it's a genetic program so what we what we want to do is we want to know that that programs in there and we want to understand that what all the urgency that you feel is you're feeling a time pressure that our ancestors felt that the audience isn't going to be very interested and they're going to make up their mind pretty quickly on a superficial sample of the facts and so what we want to do is we want to slow everybody down to about 10% of the speed that the argument devices is working on and sometimes when I'm in couples therapy if some someone begins I cannot get the other person shut up because they're so upset and so sometimes we have to I'll have to take you know one individual and say look they're just not able to be quiet we'll come back to you and I'll just shift over and let you know motormouth just spew because they can't stand it and this is just the circuit that's going off and they have to spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin and spin it's very interesting that very often people will reiterate the same argument or the same grievance several times within you know seven minutes they got at it three four times as if it's new evidence and they want to make sure they hammer it in there this is obviously a genetically embedded you know rhetoric technique that sits inside of human nature we slow it down we ask the questions we get crystal clear and then we feed it back when we do all those things what happens is the relaxation on the part of the listener is profound okay it is profound the innocent man who I would cross examine to crystal clear and actually has an explanation for why something happened that is very very plausible it fits all the facts is absolutely relieved that I have taken the time and I've stepped through the evidence and that everything when I start to turn to the file and start to look through the file when the guy was sitting right there it turns out everything they say lines up and it's true okay that's that's where you get to that's where you want to get to in conflicts and that's the beginning of the resolution of the conflict now so this is for the innocent people who are relieved that they're actually telling the truth and they've got somebody's believing you right sounds too like you're kind of almost like interrogating them but in a much more benign way like a police officer would or a detective would and so have you ever had anybody turned violent or angry towards you because you've kind of stepped on you know you basically determined that they're you they had to admit that they're guilty oh no no I've never had that the UH with with pretty violent nasty people I would would make sure that I would and this also winds up being very useful clinically in a number of ways let's suppose that I have someone who has some bizarre history one way or the other psycho socially like for example let's suppose that they they think all the time about stabbing their mother to death okay this is this is not out of bounds there are there are people that that have a lot of morbid thoughts they don't have any morbid motivation this is probably secondary sort of an OCD like characteristic and people with obsessive compulsive disorder essentially by definition massively over rate the or overestimate the statistical likelihood of disaster that's why they wash their hands a hundred times a day that's why they check the stove 50 times before they leave the house this is they've got little open loops to the worst case scenario and they're very imaginative and they can imagine vividly these terrible things happening unless they made unless they take care of these things as best they can and sometimes what they have is they have very morbid thoughts they don't feel morbidly towards their mother they just see a knife there and it occurs to them that this could happen okay and it's pretty awful for them to live with and a lot of these folks they just live with it they but they recognize that this is the this is sort of very embarrassing and that people would freak out if they found out about it so early in my career when I had not run into this very often but when people would admit things like this it pays to be very nonchalant have the experiences in working with criminals was very good because you would you would hear and find out about some incredibly nasty things people had done and your internal reaction is oh my god you you sob unbelievable and meanwhile what you need to maintain is a nice Pleasant face that says well that's no big deal okay what else it means they're giving you they gave you that sense for that that's pretty incredible I can't believe how brutal it is you know in the system know what else I mean what sorts of other things you know it has come up and you act very nonchalant and then they spill it and and so this this is acting nonchalant when things are actually disturbing or odd is a is a very useful technique in conflict resolution because that's how people will feel more comfortable telling you more and more the story and you need to know more and more story and we need you to respect the fact that that people are coming from their own position and we need to understand it if we're going to get a resolution hmm now never thought about it that way I know that like I was backpacking you know hiking and and I'll stand at the edge of the mountain to kind of look at the edge and I kept in my thoughts I'm like I don't fall over don't jump over oh you if you did jump over it probably be an interesting you know five-second ride down no don't Jabar doesn't mean I'm suicidal right it just means I'm now kind of rehearsing through the scenarios that I don't want to get myself into and uh yeah and there's people that essentially have those things a hundred times more than you do Wow yeah and so you know when it comes to to criminals you know what kind of I know a few few have a few shows back we talked about personality characteristics what you're saying it sounds like this is a like an obsessive-compulsive disorder would be very conscientious but very open-minded yeah visual yet not necessarily open but the the the OCD the openness is is independent of that the the obsessiveness will cause them to to be thinking about very low probability disasters and they also tend to have a streak of emotional instability so that when they imagine these these rare events they are upset about what they're imagining and so as a result the the internal experience is quite vivid and marked and so you know this is just this is just part of life you know there's people that I almost well we've all had and we will all have some of these sort of bizarre way out lots will cross your mind as a possibility but for somebody like myself who's very boring and stable and not that conscientious these sorts of things are rare let's they do out yeah yeah and and I'm curious you know with the criminal with with criminals in the criminal justice system is there an overarching you know personality characteristic you know pattern that you've observed yes that that's a very good question and people are people are inherently interested in criminals the reason why I believe they're interested is because criminals are very biologically expensive they they are rule breakers in the village and some of the rules that they break they are they're essentially always directed at conflicts of interest between them and other people the readers stealing from them or they are they are essentially going to defend their status by beating the daylights out of them or they're going to rape them in other words these are this doesn't just happen randomly there's a cost-benefit analysis that we can all understand that's going on inside the the criminal mind at the time that it's taking these actions and so not quite understanding why they are not inhibited but we would be inhibited under similar circumstances this poses an important question for people who are of a non criminal bent because they want to understand how vulnerable they are and how they could theoretically protect themselves against such an individual because one of the things that you discover is the criminals are not behaving criminally all the time in fact they're behaving criminally a very very small percentage of the time so therefore you could be in a relationship with someone who has a criminal bent and you may not know it so where you may sort of ignore it because some of the signs of it are not directly impacting you and then it turns out that you wind up being a victim so this is you know a lot of a lot of women have wound up victimized by men that have these characteristics and we're perfectly charming and pleasant and even exciting and the early going of romance and then it turns out that we've got a conflict of interest now six months later and they resolve that conflict than their own favor with violence and intimidation so the the primary the primary individual difference variable that divides criminals from non criminals is actually very simple and very basic and not very exciting or sexy and that is just straight intelligence so criminals are considerably less intelligent on average than normal people the now they are not they are not extremely low ability so if you are to think of a bell curve of intelligence with with the mean or right in the middle of that bell curve is 100 IQ and then if you go down down a notch kind of lower to around 90 I think that's probably somewhere around the well maybe the 30th percentile or cell that that is the typical criminal typical criminal behavior is taking place somewhere in from about the 5th percentile to the 30 30th percentile or so in human nature now of course what's exciting to people and gets written up are when criminals are very intelligent and probably what's exciting about that is that when criminals are very intelligent they are very very scary because they are it you can't see it coming and therefore people feel vulnerable and therefore they're glued to their television sets to learn about cases where they can now learn something about how the smart person with a criminal bent could have outwitted put out with them and therefore they need to be sort of mentally prepared for that possibility those are rare so most of the time most criminals that you're going to find are our sort of blue-collar --is-- you know ie marginal high school graduate kind of humans that's who they are and not very sophisticated the average robbery robbery not not being this isn't a burglary this is theft where somebody sneaks into your house this is a robbery where somebody holds a gun in your face or they hold a gun in somebody's faces a 7-eleven etc where there's an where there's an interaction between the victim and the perpetrator the average robbery has a planning time of less than two minutes okay there's there's basically no plan they're not thinking through the consequences of the actions very effectively these are not very sharp knives in the drawer and so that's that's most of an incidentally the second factor that's critical to understand is that almost all this behavior is men and the reason why that is that is the case is that men are are essentially in a bind to try to get resources for women so criminal behavior is largely directed at not very smart men who do not have very good skills to compete in the world economically and as a result what they do is they do risky sorts of behavior in order to impress females or to get resources to impress females and therefore compete sexually in the mating pool you know and remove a disadvantage that they are experiencing from having less resources than the average male so that's that's the of course you know this is a broad brush and that's not going to be the case in every single case but if there was a single explanation that would help people understand what is going on inside the criminal mind the criminal mind is not so fascinating and devious and dangerous and exciting and complex no that may be true of a Ted Bundy or a Kenneth Bianchi hillside strangler there there are psychopaths extremely dangerous Psychopaths that can be very intelligent and they're extremely rare this is not typical of human nature what the typical criminal is is low conscience is disagreeable okay not not extremely so low conscientious disagreeable and stupid and those three characteristics form a triumvirate of an algorithm that basically says your best option to get resources to impress females is going to be to break the rules and that's what they do mm-hmm Wow and so there's really no is there any chance to rehabilitate them yeah this is uh this is sort of a the liberal joke okay the that we if you have people that first of all we're not going to cure low intelligence that's we're not going to stop that so that's not going to change somebody's is twenty four year old and low intelligence there is no program to improve that intelligence so that's out okay the low conscientiousness we're not going to improve the low conscientiousness because that's genetic the and so and we're not going to make them more agreeable so that's not going to work either so we're not actually going to change these people's personality through through any mechanism now obviously one of the one of the most useful things that we could ever do would be to in a way that we we could address this on a societal basis but we don't of course because we've got some we've got some mistaken understanding about human nature and it seems like it's a nice it's a nice misunderstanding but it's actually brutally expensive and causes a considerable amount of the criminal behavior that we have we should we should have we should not be wasting public education dollars on people that that we're going to quote give them an equal education and have them learning you know American history in the tenth grade and then learning algebra because they got to do that to pass their high school exam that is insane these people that are going to prison could not pass those classes and so they limp their way through or they dropout but the truth is what they need to be learning is a skill so by the by the eighth grade they need they would be most appropriate for them to be directed towards skill development that would actually make them possible to actually make a living with skilled labor as opposed to unskilled labor and so the last thing they need to be doing is trying to compete for a limited number of unskilled labor jobs that doesn't make any sense that that's a prescription for poverty and a prescription for desperation and then therefore criminal behavior on the part of low conscientiousness low intelligent young men so instead what we ought to be doing is having programs that early in the game they are directed towards were things that they can learn that would are actually marketable that would be an industry should be involved all this sort of stuff so now you have Doug Lyles pie-in-the-sky ideas about how the world should work but I have seen many young men who at twenty-five years old thirty years old are doing desperate stupid criminal behavior and they're really not that bad of people I mean they're not great people but they're not that bad of people and I had a slew of them in prison and many of them were doing life sentences behind the absurd concept of three strikes the just because you know baseball had that saying a bunch politicians got elected behind that but it's an absurd idea so I had I had one guy that his third strike was you know selling marijuana you know a few hundred dollars worth of it and they locked him up for goodnes previous two strikes were were no big deal all same kind of behavior so this was this is just you know political grandstanding on the part of politicians people do not understand that these criminals are not quote all dangerous and thick and that they all a bunch of animals this is what they are mostly what they are is the kid from your high school who wasn't very smart had a lot of testosterone has low frustration tolerance is not a horrible human being but he's not a great human being either and if we can put him in it in a shop you know I don't know making metal buckets or plumbing or you know this is not to denigrate all the all the trades but put him someplace where his limited abilities can can actually be developed to the point where he can learn some real skill and be productive and make a decent wage then we have a citizen potentially instead of a criminal and that's what we should be doing but we don't under the guise of you know everybody could be an Einstein and everybody could be a doctor which is of course totally ridiculous mm-hmm and so depending on whether or not this this guy would be very disagreeable would he'd be happy in a in a trade like that where you teach him a skill and he just continues to jeopardize the guys like that in those trades okay there's a lot of people just like that and that in fact in work that I did in the real estate industry and construction there was a lot of guys like that there's guys that had spent time in prison and but we're good carpenters and then once they had work they were perfectly good citizens and hard-working etc so the the the notion here is to understand the criminal behavior is all behavior makes sense from the standpoint of gin survival and so when we when we stand up and look at criminal behavior from from the correct perspective we understand that these big criminal behavior is almost always very understandable cost-benefit analysis on the part of the individual there's reasons why they're doing what they're doing now there are animals out there human animals that are so far off the charts that you would say to me Doug let me tell you this guy like cut these people into little bits and they did this and they did that and you know what Scott whatever his name was that bear you know dumped his wife in the bay yeah there's some pretty I see psychopaths out there but those are not typical of the vast majority of criminal behavior that you will see the vast majority of criminal behavior you'll see is very sort of simplistically calculated cost-benefit analysis that that isn't too smart and as some you know is somewhat disagreeable and low conscientious sometimes it's not even that one of my one of my favorite guys in prison was a was a Latino man and he he was a nicest guy in the world and I wondered what he was in for I finally pulled his file and you know he it was totally reasonable everything that he did and his third strike incredibly was he had you know he had like I don't know several whole bunch of children and any oddest wife and she used to come and visit him and he had this three-strike life sentence it's just a miserable situation and he was always so easygoing in such a sweet guy and so I found out what his third strike was third strike was when he was out on parole the last time he he and a buddy had backed their truck up to a construction site at in the middle of the night loaded a bunch of wood on there to steal it hi well of course he did this guy didn't didn't have much in the way Skil he had a bunch of hungry children he's trying to be a dad and trying to trying to be a little you know a hero and help his family for God's sakes what would you expect and so the the notion that that is a that that is a human that we need to house in the criminal justice system until he dies at 77 years old is insanity so trust me those guys exist in there and I am in no way some bleeding-heart liberal about this there are brutal incredible human beings in there where we need very thick concrete and electric fences okay there and they're all in there together and and amazingly it functions to me of course I would be terrified if I was an inmate but they seem to be able to to manage a reasonable date on most of the time but these guys there's a lot of guys in there they're very decent human beings who got their through essentially largely their financial desperation or limited stress tolerance behind insults and their temper got the best of them and they just don't have that much stress tolerance for for taking hits to their ego hmm yeah I remember one of the first shows that we did you were talking about the evolutionary necessity for a male to defend their ego in a village setting yet because if they lose that fight then there they're going to be it's going to be very expensive in terms of mates there's no question so human males have a chemical that females just can't understand and it's called dihydrotestosterone and it's a super rapid testosterone that that impacts males to essentially go all-in and have this feeling that I don't care what happens but I'm coming after you because you you've insulted me and so an awful lot of guys are locked up behind an incident where that got activated and they may have shot at somebody some a few of them have shot people most people that are in prison have have not killed somebody and they haven't they haven't been particularly brutal there are those individuals but they're those are you know and there's some I always have to say this there are some really bad people in there that we are really glad that we have a way to humanely sequester them but there's an awful lot of perfectly decent people in there that are no different than the guy that is working on your car or the guy that you run into at the hardware store or the guy that's painting your neighbor's house the those there's an awful lot of blue-collar 11d pretty decent human beings in there that that in their young lives usually it took a path behind some desperation and some limited stress tolerance and our pain prices for it as they should but we have failed them in and preparing them for the adult world Wow very interesting perspective it's oh it's always nice to hear the evolutionary psychology perspective for for criminal behavior because it like like you said when crystal-clear behavior makes sense and a lot of the the pop psychology I've heard it doesn't quite hit all the buttons right yeah here here's the here's the story that you'll hear Oh Johnny Johnny came from a broken home and Johnny you know and this is what happened and that's what happened etcetera the truth is is that what's happening in their young life is not shaping their character the what's happening in their young life is there under stresses from whatever the circumstances are but believe me there's Johnny's that they didn't come from a broken home they broke it Johnny could breed any oh okay so the but but the truth is what counts now is what happens to Johnny when he's 14 15 16 and he's starting to enter the the problems of reproduction and so so now he's he's having to compete to get resources in order to bring those resources and lay them at the feet of females that that's fundamentally the problem that he's up against and for for males that are sufficiently open to experience and disagreeable and have low conscientiousness on drug dealing and the dangerous sides of drug dealing you know make a coal heck of a lot of sense to do that the and so they do that and as a result you know we you wind up because we've made the drugs illegal we wind up with unenforceable contracts between traders and as a result of that you wind up with violence and tragedy so that's that's an inevitable byproduct of making things illegal so in the 1930s that gave rise to outcome inevitably you know there was there was no no no question if you made orange is illegal in Orange County you would wind up with smuggling law-breaking and a rough element trying to take advantage of essentially supernormal prices on the black market very high profit margins if they're willing to take those risks that's a brutal systemic problem that human beings have not solved very intelligently to this point they've got a lot of preconceived notions about human nature and about how things they ought they ought to run things so in the future I believe that the next you know I won't be around to see it but I believe that over the next couple hundred years the the understanding of psychology that we now have from the evolutionary perspective will slowly but surely erode the ignorance that exists in the field now and it's actually happening fairly quickly a lot of major thinkers now understand the kinds of things that I'm talking about very well and they speak from very high places and they're impacting a lot of ears and minds throughout the academic world I melt leaks over into sociology and the law etc so these ideas you know a hundred years from now or two integers from now will saturate their self themselves in the system and we will have a more humane and more accurate understanding of human nature and the problems that the human beings naturally have living together and we will we will diffuse many of those problems in the same way that we have come a tremendous distance in the last 200 years in terms of how it is the human beings deal with each other etc so the you know you can you can just imagine that we were that we were locking up alan turing for god's sakes because he was gay the the man that probably did more than anybody else did for winning World War two the so this is this is a human beings evolved an understanding of each other when that understand it becomes more accurate or removes distortions that people have and so this is you know one of the reasons why I would like the ideas of evolutionary psychology to be much more widely disseminated is because it will help countless individuals in the president in the future to get more just and appropriate use of societal resources and understanding as we as we move forward into the future fantastic and speaking of justice as well one of your videos called the willpower paradox describes the evolutionary psychology reason for why some judges grant parole to two prisoners versus others which I guess we'll talk about in another show yes yes they're very interesting that the judges minds are highly susceptible to fatigue and that people are not getting a fair shake in the criminal justice system as a result of us putting judges under stresses that are that are not natural to the species you know we're going to talk about that in a couple of shows and and so for the listeners out there the way we disseminate this information is to share the podcast share it with your friends share with your Facebook Twitter etc etc it's it's a great way to get this information so dr. Lyle thank you very much it's great they love it there thank you for a very Danielson I've been a criminal mind alright Vera it's a pleasure and we'll talk more about whatever it is that people want to know
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