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The Threshold: The Moment Crime Stops Being a Thought · Inside The Criminal Mind

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  Speaker 1: Welcome back everyone. We would be doing long form.
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  Speaker 2: Podcasts on Sundays and then short ones during the week,
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  Speaker 2: so make sure you share and subscribe so you don't
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  Speaker 2: miss any episodes. Today, we're looking at the moment crime
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  Speaker 2: stops being a thought.
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  Speaker 1: It starts as a thought.
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  Speaker 2: For most of us, it stays there, a fleeting impulse
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  Speaker 2: in traffic, a passing calculation in a store, a surge
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  Speaker 2: of anger in an argument, and then we don't act.
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  Speaker 1: But for some the line is crossed.
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  Speaker 2: This is the story of that threshold, the moment they
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  Speaker 2: thought becomes an act and everything changes. We have long
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  Speaker 2: framed crime as a deliberate choice, a free decision made
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  Speaker 2: with full awareness of consequences. Our legal system, our moral language,
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  Speaker 2: even the way we teach right and wrong rest on
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  Speaker 2: this idea. But what if that framework is incomplete? What
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  Speaker 2: if the crossing is not always a calm, rational selection,
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  Speaker 2: but a threshold event, a brief convergence inside the person
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  Speaker 2: and outside in the world where the.
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  Speaker 1: Usual breaks fail.
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  Speaker 2: Today we go inside that moment, drawing on neuroscience, clinical psychology,
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  Speaker 2: and real cases, because understanding the threshold may be the
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  Speaker 2: key to explaining why most of us never cross it
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  Speaker 2: and why some do. So, let's break it down. We're
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  Speaker 2: going to go to a journey in neuroscience. At the
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  Speaker 2: center is the pre funnel cortex, the brain behind the forehead,
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  Speaker 2: responsible for what they call executive function. We have the
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  Speaker 2: largest pre funnel cortex of any species. The prefunnal cortex
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  Speaker 2: handles planning, anticipating consequences, and crucially inhibiting impulses, but it
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  Speaker 2: also does other things. Short term memory, regulating emotions, moral judgment,
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  Speaker 2: even empathy can be located here. When it functions well,
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  Speaker 2: it allows us to feel anger and still not strike,
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  Speaker 2: to want something and still not take it. Yet, this
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  Speaker 2: system is not fixed. Its capacity fluctuates. Acute stress, elevated cortisol,
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  Speaker 2: sleep deprivation, or chronic trauma can weaken its regulatory power. Now,
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  Speaker 2: let's talk about the amygdala, the brain's rapid threat detector.
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  Speaker 2: It can overwhelm slower prefrontal signals. Just to give you
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  Speaker 2: a little bit of insight. The abigdala then puts itself
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  Speaker 2: into the prefunnel cortex as well, and it can hijack
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  Speaker 2: the prefunnel cortex, especially if the communication highway isn't strong enough.
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  Speaker 2: Over time, sustained high stress can even alter the structure
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  Speaker 2: of these inhibitory pathways. The result is not a broken brain,
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  Speaker 2: but one adapted to persistent threat, making reactive behavior more
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  Speaker 2: likely and deliberate restraint more costly. This is structural neuroscience.
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  Speaker 2: It means the capacity for self regulation we assume everyone possesses. However,
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  Speaker 2: this this is not equally distributed. For instance, the connections
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  Speaker 2: between the ambiguala, the threat center, and the pre funnel cortex.
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  Speaker 2: The communication is much slower when it comes to people
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  Speaker 2: under the age of twenty four twenty three. You probably
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  Speaker 2: heard that the brain finally develops a twenty five kind
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  Speaker 2: of does it's the highway communication between that emotional center
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  Speaker 2: and the prefunnal cortex does. The brain still takes another
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  Speaker 2: seven years to reorganize and keep whatever neurons and needs.
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  Speaker 1: But for teen agers the highway is very left. It's
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  Speaker 1: not very strong at all.
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  Speaker 2: So the communication is not as strong as of somebody
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  Speaker 2: who's twenty six or twenty seven.
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  Speaker 1: So let's look at two cases.
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  Speaker 2: To contrast this, because I think this is where it
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  Speaker 2: gets interesting. In twenty ten, row Mote Moat was released
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  Speaker 2: from a short prison sentence and the UK within days
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  Speaker 2: he shot and killed his ex partner's new boyfriend, wounded
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  Speaker 2: his ex partner, and then shot a police officer, blinding him.
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  Speaker 2: Voice recordings reveal a man flooded with rage and perceived betrayal,
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  Speaker 2: not calmly calculating, but propelled by an overwhelming emotional flood.
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  Speaker 2: His history included a trauma and difficulty regulating intense emotion,
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  Speaker 2: so a compromised pre final cortex. The stress of release
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  Speaker 2: landed on an already compromised regulatory system. The result was
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  Speaker 2: rapid destructive action, no anticipation of consequences. FBI would possibly
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  Speaker 2: classify this as a disorganized killer. It just happened spontaneously,
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  Speaker 2: couldn't control the emotional rage. Well, let's contrast this with
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  Speaker 2: Joseph James DiAngelo, the Golden State Killer. Over more than
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  Speaker 2: a decade, he committed dozens of rapes and murders while
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  Speaker 2: maintaining an outwardly ordinary life as a police officer.
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  Speaker 1: And family man.
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  Speaker 2: His crime showed structural precision, stalking, planning escape routes, wearing gloves. Here,
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  Speaker 2: the pre funal cortex appeared functional, but in service of
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  Speaker 2: a deeply compartmentalized internal structure of grievance and rage. The
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  Speaker 2: threshold was not a sudden collapse under stress. It was
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  Speaker 2: a planned permission. Let's look at our third example, Stephen Pannock,
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  Speaker 2: who in twenty seventeen engine leered the Las Vegas mass
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  Speaker 2: shooting from the hotel room, killing fifty eight people, the
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  Speaker 2: largest mass shooting in history. No clear prior criminal record
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  Speaker 2: or even a diagnosed condition. Instead, months of preparation created
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  Speaker 2: this precise convergence of internal readiness and opportunity. Let's look
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  Speaker 2: at that word convergence, because these cases highlight what criminologists
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  Speaker 2: call the convergence problem. A primed internal state, an accessible target,
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  Speaker 2: and the absence of any interrupting factor. Remove any one
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  Speaker 2: element and the act often does not occur. Additional mechanisms
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  Speaker 2: can relocate the threshold itself. Prolonged manipulation is seen in
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  Speaker 2: Leeboid Malvo's involvement in the DC sniper attacks. I don't
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  Speaker 2: know if you remember those attacks. It was an interesting
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  Speaker 2: case substances or environments, but in the Lee Malvo case
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  Speaker 2: members a prolonged manipulation. Lee Boyd was about seventeen years
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  Speaker 2: old while his partner was about thirty something. Substances are
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  Speaker 2: environments that normalize harm can erode prohibitions that once felt
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  Speaker 2: like core identity. In the neurological moment of impulsive acts,
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  Speaker 2: many describe a building physiological response or pressure. Actually, it's
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  Speaker 2: more of a pressure that they keep saying over and
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  Speaker 2: over again, and they also talk about a narrowing intention.
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  Speaker 2: Sympathetic activation the fight or flight response of a human
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  Speaker 2: being followed by a gap where conscious decision seems absent.
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  Speaker 2: Brain activity associated with action can precede the subjective experience
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  Speaker 2: of choosing. So who wins in this conceptual debate? The
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  Speaker 2: traditional legal and moral view the crime is primarily a
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  Speaker 2: free choice, retains practical power. It supports accountability, deterrence, and
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  Speaker 2: social order. It anchors prosecution and observable behavior rather than
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  Speaker 2: unverifiable internal states. Yet the neuroscientific and clinical perspective wins
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  Speaker 2: on explanatory death. It accounts for why knowledge of wrongfulness
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  Speaker 2: often remains intact while regulatory capacity fails.
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  Speaker 1: It explains patterns.
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  Speaker 2: That pure choice models struggle with impulsive acts amid known
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  Speaker 2: moral rules or highly organized violence emerging from outwardly functional lives.
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  Speaker 2: What to traditional view sometimes does wrong is over lie
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  Speaker 2: on a shorthand of the fully rational actor. What the
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  Speaker 2: neurobiological view must guard against is reducing all behavior to mechanism,
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  Speaker 2: thereby diminishing the reality of harm and the need for accountability.
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  Speaker 2: Some would argue a more accurate model treats the individual
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  Speaker 2: as a system, a system embedded in biology, history.
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  Speaker 1: And context.
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  Speaker 2: Prevention requires addressing conditions that chronically impair prefrontal function, trauma, poverty,
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  Speaker 2: sleep disruption, substance effects, not merely repeating moral instruction. It
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  Speaker 2: means designing environments that disrupt dangerous convergences. I want to
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  Speaker 2: go back for a moment and look a little bit
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  Speaker 2: at some of these individuals that we looked at, because
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  Speaker 2: I find it kind of fascinating when you look at
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  Speaker 2: certain of these individuals, especially the James Joseph James DeAngelo,
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  Speaker 2: the Golden State Killer.
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  Speaker 1: He committed more than fifty.
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  Speaker 2: Rapes and thirteen murders across California during the nineteen seventies
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  Speaker 2: and eighties. For decades he evaded capture, living in suburban Sacramento,
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  Speaker 2: working as a police officer, attending neighborhood barbecues, raising a family.
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  Speaker 1: He was not a man in the grip.
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  Speaker 2: Of uncontrollable flooding like Raoul was. Initially, this man was
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  Speaker 2: organized in his violence. He stalked his victims for weeks,
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  Speaker 2: He cut his phone lines before entering homes, He wore gloves.
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  Speaker 2: He would be considered an organized killer. Two men, two
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  Speaker 2: completely different tracks, and yet the fundamental question is the
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  Speaker 2: same for both of them. What was happening inside the
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  Speaker 2: brain at the moment the crossing occurred, the convergence.
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  Speaker 1: We talked a little bit about the.
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  Speaker 2: Convergence, but I want to talk about now the other
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  Speaker 2: individual that we brought into this case, right, Stephen Paddock.
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  Speaker 2: We talked about how he opened fire on a music
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  Speaker 2: festival in Vegas, where remains the deadliest mass shooting in history.
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  Speaker 2: Investigators examined his life, found no criminal record, no diagnosed
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  Speaker 2: psychiatric condition, no history of documented violence. They found instead
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  Speaker 2: a man who had spent considerable time months in fact,
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  Speaker 2: according to the timeline of hotel check ins and equipment purchases,
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  Speaker 2: constructing the convergence point himself. He was now waiting for opportunity,
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  Speaker 2: He was engineering it. The absence of obvious warning signs
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  Speaker 2: in Paddock's case did not mean there was nothing to see,
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  Speaker 2: and meant the internal permission structure, a set of belief
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  Speaker 2: a person develops often without being consciously aware have been
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  Speaker 2: quietly been building over a long time in a way
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  Speaker 2: that never surfaced in any of the channels where it
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  Speaker 2: might have been noticed.
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  Speaker 1: We talked to once again.
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  Speaker 2: Earlier too about the case of Lee Malvo in the
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  Speaker 2: DC area, but we didn't talk about internal permission structure,
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  Speaker 2: and most of us have one. It tells us what
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  Speaker 2: we would do and what we would not do, under
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  Speaker 2: what circumstances and for what reason. For most people, the
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  Speaker 2: permission structure around serious harm is stable. I do not
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  Speaker 2: hurt people. I do not take what is not mine.
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  Speaker 2: These are not rules we consciously consult. They're closer to identity.
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  Speaker 2: They're deeply internalized, and violating them would require us to become,
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  Speaker 2: at least temporarily a different person. However, these permission structures
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  Speaker 2: can be eroded. Let's look at the internal monitor that
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  Speaker 2: would notice the permission structure shifting. The teenager we mentioned earlier,
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  Speaker 2: Lee Boyd Malvo, acting alongside John Mohammad in the d
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  Speaker 2: C sniper case, participated in a series of shootings that
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  Speaker 2: killed ten people across three weeks. Malvo was seventeen, as
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  Speaker 2: I'm as you remember, he had been taken in by
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  Speaker 2: Mohammed when he was a young teenager, separated from his
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  Speaker 2: mother and subjected to what psychological evaluations later described as
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  Speaker 2: a systematic program of psychological manipulation. It was the deliberate
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  Speaker 2: reconstruction of his own internal permission structure by an older
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  Speaker 2: man with an organized violent agenda. Malvo in later interviews,
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  Speaker 2: described the experience in terms a clinical psychologist found compelling
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  Speaker 2: and disturbing. He did not experience himself as choosing in
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  Speaker 2: any conventional sense. He experienced himself as having been remade,
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  Speaker 2: as having been piece by peace, converted into someone whose
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  Speaker 2: permission structure recognize violence as not only allowable, but required.
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  Speaker 2: A more accurate model we talked about earlier treats the
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  Speaker 2: individual as a system embedded in biology, history, and situation. Again,
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  Speaker 2: the law can retain its behavioral focus while acknowledging that
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  Speaker 2: the window for deliberate choice narrows under certain conditions. This
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  Speaker 2: never excuses harm, but it does demand honesty about the
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  Speaker 2: mechanisms actually a work.
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  Speaker 1: The thought that most.
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  Speaker 2: Of us entertain and then release is not as distant
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  Speaker 2: from the threshold as we prefer to believe. The difference
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  Speaker 2: between dissolution and crossing is real, but it is sometimes
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  Speaker 2: less a divide between good and evil, and more a
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  Speaker 2: matter of regulatory resources available in that precise moment. Crime
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  Speaker 2: is not simply a decision, It is a threshold event.
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  Speaker 2: Understanding that threshold does not minimize harm. It equips us
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  Speaker 2: to see the complexity clearly and to respond with both
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  Speaker 2: accountability and wiser prevention, because the line we draw between
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  Speaker 2: thought and act.
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  Speaker 1: Is thinner than we like to admit.
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  Speaker 2: I hope you enjoy today's podcast.
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  Speaker 1: Make sure to share and subscribe. Have a great one, everybody,