How DANGEROUS Minds Actually Work | Evy Poumpouras

It's naive of us to think that people will not cause you harm because there are some people that will. I know this as a former criminal investigator. You can't live in La La Land. That's reality. But if I know this and I understand this, I'm going to move through the world in the best way I can. And I'm not going to be surprised when people cause me harm. I'm aware of it. I'm not expecting it. But when it does happen, I have the understanding that these people exist in the world. They move through the world. And most people that cause you harm don't think they're doing anything to you. They're not intentionally doing it. They will validate it. I have interviewed countless people in the interview room. People who committed horrible crimes against other people. And they will sit down and they will validate or justify to me, I did this, but here's my reason. You can sell anything to yourself. We've all done it. You've hurt people. I've hurt people. And when we did it, we sold it to ourselves a certain way. Well, I'm doing this because of X, Y, and Z. So maybe you sell it to yourself like, well, this is how it works for me. But in the end, you still end up hurting someone else. It happens. Now, there are varying degrees to that, but you can sell anything to yourself and make it okay for you to cause harm to someone else. I would see it with all sorts of crime. I remember working this big, it was a big enough case, but it was a bank case. It was an employee. A lot of the fraud that happens at banks, a lot of it does come internally from employees. So there was one person who worked at the bank. And I guess this bank, we won't say what bank it is. This bank would leave their money out, like they didn't lock the safe. They would leave stockpiles of money out. So this person, this employee would steal money. They stole a lot of money over time. And he knew where the cameras were. So there were blind spots where he would take the money and they wouldn't see it. So actually, it was a simple case. So this money's disappearing. I sent the person down. Over the years, it turned out to be a lot of money. And his justification was, the way he sold it to himself was, if that money was so important to them, why didn't they lock it up? Oh my gosh. It obviously wasn't, so I took it. If they cared about their money, they'd lock it up. Shame on them. That's how he sold it. You can sell anything to yourself if you want to. Wow. And that's how we sell to ourselves when we cause somebody harm. Now, there are varying degrees of how much harm we cause, but you have to pause and say, am I causing true harm, or is the harm I'm going to cause enough for me to feel okay because I have to make a certain decision? You remind me of a story I went through where we had an employee here a few years ago that we had a $100 bill out, and it was gone one day. And we confronted them and one of the other employees and saw someone else take it. And we're like, did anyone take this or move this? We weren't thinking that anyone stole it, but they just were like, hey, where is this? And when we confronted the guy and he pointed at the other person, we confronted him and he said, hey, did you take this $100 bill that was out? And he goes, oh, you mean this $100 bill? I go, yeah. He goes, oh, it was just out there. I just thought I could take it. Just like this justification. It was like, well, it's not your $100 bill. Why are you just taking the money? But that's what this person thought at the bank. Well, it's just out there, so they didn't care about it, so I'll just take it. Exactly. That's how he sold it to himself. That's interesting. But it didn't act like it was a big deal. It was like, oh, it was here, so I'm just going to take it from the office. Because if you cared about it, you would have put it away. It's still stealing. Did you? Oh, he was fired that day. OK. Yeah, yeah, that day. I was going to say, I was going to have a moment. I'm like, what do we do? He was fired that day. Yeah, yeah. There was a number of red flags before that anyways, but that was like, OK, you can't steal money. But pause. The red flags are the behavior signals that people give you. Yes. So you see these signals. It's the behavior. I think when you brought up narcissism before and all these labels, labeling people, don't label the person, label the behavior. That's interesting. Label what they show you. What am I seeing in this moment? What is the behavior I'm seeing? That's what you label. And that's what's going to show you what's going on. Because when you label the person, the problem with labeling people is also they're people that we have emotional ties to often. That's my this. That's my that. And so it becomes a little muddy and we can't see clearly. But when you label the behavior, if you can just put aside who the person is and just label what they do, you will see clearly. That's why it's easier for you to give somebody else advice about someone they don't that you don't know, because you're you're hearing about what this person did to them. You're hearing about the behavior and you're making a rational assessment based off of the behavior of this other person. Yeah. Not the relationship or the chemicals of love or whatever might be there. No, you're not introducing all those complexities. All those complexities muddy the water. And that's why we make bad decisions sometimes because we're like, well, it's this person. Forget who the person is. What did they do? If you label the behavior, you'll make better choices.