Kim Jong Un Psychological Profiler on China & Most DISTURBING Patient | Ken Dekleva • 321
Julian Dorey · 20 Jul 2025 · 3h 4m
Guest: Ken Dekleva · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
A psychiatrist who spent years as a State Department regional medical officer and forensic expert in capital murder trials talks through how he learned to interview people accused of horrific crimes, including a child molester who got 99 years and a woman who killed her own daughter during a psychotic episode. He describes the mechanics of embassy medical work in places like Moscow, Havana, and India, including constant FSB surveillance, and how his own family's history as refugees from the former Yugoslavia shaped his interest in language, diplomacy, and human resilience. The conversation moves into his second career as a psychological profiler of authoritarian leaders, drawing on work with the CIA's leadership-profiling pioneer Jerold Post. He walks through profiles of Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, arguing that dehumanization of an out-group is a necessary precondition for genocide in every case he's studied, and that calling foreign leaders psychopaths or delusional is analytically lazy since most operate as rational, if ruthless, actors. He pushes back on labeling Kim Jong Un irrational, defends engaging dictators diplomatically rather than name-calling them, and warns that cutting American funding for science, space, and AI research while other nations invest heavily could cost the US its edge. The episode closes on his current clinical work with terminally ill patients and his side career writing spy fiction set in Vienna.
Ask this show a question Watch on YouTube
What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Testifying in capital murder cases
- Career as State Department regional psychiatrist
- Working with forensic mentor Dr. Jim Grigson
- Interviewing accused killers and child molesters
- Family history fleeing former Yugoslavia
- Learning from a master psychiatric interviewer
- Life and surveillance inside Moscow embassy work
- Trips to Havana and other postings
- Profiling Karadžić, Milošević and the roots of genocide
- Profiling Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un
- US-China competition in AI, space and talent
- Treating terminal cancer patients and writing spy novels
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“Do not put your defendant on the stand. The juryy's going to barbecue.”
“I'm willing to sacrifice an entire generation of Serbs so that the Bosnian Serb Republic can be pure”
“They're rational. They're ruthless. And they're very very unfortunately for us very resilient.”