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I've done research on this for 30,000 hours in real life. If anyone tells you they're like, "Here's the way to spot a psychopath," they're full of it.
Babies that are born in the winter are more likely to have 99%. We would be inaccurate. The mistake you make in dealing with sociopaths is views a human being the same as throwing away a paper cup.
When you're dealing with a psychopath, if you just get these two right, you see a psychopath, he's looking in his bathroom mirror going like this. Can a psychopath be saved? There's no way out.
What's the most fascinating or chilling case that you remember that you analyzed? Aaron Caffy. I've studied psychopathy for a long time, but I never felt it until that video where you could just feel that that's not a human being almost like there's no human in there. That's a wild creature that views a human being the same as throwing away a paper cup.
The horrifying truth is that you can't spot a psychopath until after they've done something like that. You could have the 50 best behavior profilers in the world, the top 50, and 99% we would be inaccurate in predicting who is a psychopath and who's not. They're so hard to spot.
I teach a course for women on how to spot narcissists on a first date, and that's a lot easier where if you ask them about an ex relationship, everything is someone else's fault. They're always the victim. Narcissists will never have friends that are local. They're always out of town. I've got my friends are in another city. They have a hard time maintaining relationships. So, you'll see a lot of that and that's like the number one trend.
You'll see very similar things with psychopaths. And psychopaths are attracted to large cities. In my analysis, I think that cities are not just attracting psychopaths. I think that cities are helping to manufacture them.
Let's talk about one thing that'll make sense right away. You've heard of the bystander effect. What this means is if I'm in a big city like New York or something like that and I get hurt and I'm laid on the ground and I'm wounded and I'm begging for help, the more people that are around me, the less likely I am to get help. Like people will take pictures, they'll take videos, they all assume that somebody else is going to call 911, but they'll stand there and watch.
So if I took this behavior in isolation and I told you a story about a person watching another person get stabbed and they stand there and watch. They watch in interest, you would call that person a psychopath. When you get into a large city, that behavior is common. That is the bystander effect is the behavior of psychopaths.
So, us not relying on reputation. And we're not in a tribe anymore, our brains are not wired to handle millions of people. They're wired to handle a tribe of about 150. So, when we get to a big city, we have no capacity for empathy for that many people. So, it gets shut off. Our brains say, "I can't do that." And empathy goes away.
People are bad drivers because there's no reputation. You're never going to see those people again. I don't have to rely on reputation. That means I don't care what other people think. So more psychopathy.
I think psychopathy is a spectrum. And some people view it as a diagnosis of you have to hit this checklist of all these things to be a psychopath. You can get close, right? Which means that there's a line. There's some kind of a spectrum there. Sociopaths have no concern for human feelings. Psychopaths have no concern for human life.
We have been dealing as a species with psychopaths and sociopaths for a long time. There's nothing new. We have evolved an instinct when we get around those people to not say that, oh, that's a psychopath. Not even I can spot a psychopath like we would in a couple hours. Just can't do it. But we all have this little feeling of something's off. Something doesn't add up. Something's not right.
So, we get those little feelings and a lot of people ignore them because the psychopath created so much dopamine in their brain. So for anybody out there, like any conversation you have where it feels absolutely fantastic and then right afterward you don't feel good anymore, you would need to return to that to feel good again. You may have been dealing with a psychopath.
So if you have a great conversation with a grounded person who is humble and kind and honest, you're going to feel good after that conversation. The good feeling is going to linger for a while. So that's one of the key indicators our ancestor part of our brain is sensing something and trying to say, "Hey, something's not right."
One of the best ways to start, and I'm never gonna say like here's the list on how to do that. If anyone tells you they're like, "Here's the way to spot a psychopath." They're full of it. But you can start spotting a psychopath by looking at a person's face and seeing if they mirror your expressions. If I'm saying something exciting and it's cool, see how your eyebrows just went up, right? Yeah. If I'm saying something sad like, "My aunt just got put in the hospital," or something like that, and you see somebody's face kind of fall a little bit, you're seeing a mirrored emotion in other people's face.
Sometimes psychopaths don't know how to react. So you'll either see a lack of a effect where their face has no reaction to it or you're going to see an inappropriate response. So they'll smile on accident cuz they're trying to fake an expression.
Over time, our facial expressions etch onto the face. Usually by the time we're like 16, 17. So it's not like old people wrinkles. Like if someone's seeking social approval their whole life, this is how we seek approval from other people. That's why I have the lines on my forehead. Yeah. because I'm seeing a social person. You see a psychopath blank forehead. It looks like Botox in a psychopath. You see a person that spent their whole life super happy and in full enjoyment. You're going to see these crows feet here from smiling all the time. You see somebody who's been depressed or angry, you're going to see this muscle right here forms these two wrinkles. This is called the gloella. So, you'll see lifetimes of behavioral patterns etched onto the face. I call this facial etching. I've done research on this for 30,000 hours in real life on facial expressions. But skepticism squeezes this lower eyelid up here. The less skeptical someone has spent their lifetime, the more suggestible that person is.
Let me put you in the mind of a psychopath really quick. So he is in his apartment in a city one day and he decides, you know, I'm going to go get some tacos. So he leaves his apartment. He walks down the street. He's walking to a nearby place. As he's walking down to this taco place, he sees a car accident. And a mom is screaming and crying and holding her baby that has passed away, maybe a 2-year-old, and there's people on looking and crying and screaming with her. The police are there trying to help her and stuff like that. And as he's staring at this incident unfolding inside of his head, here's what you're hearing. I think I want lettuce. I'm going to put lettuce on the tacos, maybe some sour cream. And then he turns and goes to get his tacos. And then walks back by the scene again, looks at it again, comes back home and eats. And then that night before he's going to bed, he's looking in his bathroom mirror going like this, just trying to mimic all of those facial expressions of people grieving and being sad by the car accident. Just rehearsing those facial expressions. It's terrifying to understand that there's no empathy in that person. That's a pure psychopath.
Jim Clemente was an FBI profiler who would interview somebody who just killed their spouse. And I said, "So what causes these guys to do it? The psychopaths." He says, "Genetics loads the gun. Personality and psychology aims life experiences pulls the trigger." That's the most beautiful way I've ever heard it described. So, you can have tons of genetic markers that are just loaded up, ready to go in the gun, but they never get triggered because of life experiences. You're not going through any trauma. There's no huge stress. And stress is not just psychological. You can have physical stress like getting sick as a kid. Getting sick as a baby can make those genes start to express themselves. It can really make our genes do weird stuff.
We have babies that are born in the winter are more likely to have those genes express themselves because the mom might be sick during the child birth. The baby might be sick in the younger days. That's not some guarantee or anything, but it's definitely well researched that winterborn babies can have genetic disadvantages when it comes to the brain.
What's your advice on how to manage dealing with a sociopath and then how to manage dealing with somebody who you think might be a psychopath? It would be the same two things for both sociopath or psychopath when you're dealing with a psychopath. But if you just get these two right, you'll be good to go. So the first one is I'm going to be more calm than that person in every interaction. I will never escalate anything. And the second one is I will be non-reactive. So even if they say something shocking, my eyebrows aren't going to go up. I'll say, "Oh yeah, okay, that makes sense." I will be as non-reactive as humanly possible.
When you're looking at any conversation, even if it's not with a sociopath, the person reacting the least to the other person is in charge. And I encourage people all the time, never, ever, ever view the world in terms of hierarchy. It will make you fail every time because you're constantly worried about external validation. So the mistake you make in dealing with sociopaths is, am I above them? Are they above me right now? Am I being subordinated? All of those, that's all concerned for hierarchy, and we have to get rid of it. Am I the calmst person in the room? Am I non-reactive? This is all internal. I'm in control of me only, and I'm only worried about those two things. I'm non-reactive because they feed on those emotional reactions. So, they start to realize this fishing spot's not working. They're not going to bring their boat back there and keep fishing.
Can a psychopath be saved? I don't think so. When a psychopath goes to therapy, what the therapist works with them on is here's how to ask better questions. Here's how to make a face like you look like you're interested in something. someone saying it's all just let me teach you how to fake your way in. So he's a he's a normal life and I think a lot of those positions to get to the top there's a degree of psychopathy that you need to get up there in today's world and I think maybe that's the reason we're looking at what we're looking at all psychopathy starts with separation all of it. If you just think of ego, an ego means I'm separate from Danny. Me having less of that is like we're similar. But if you take ego way to the top, that's where you get psychopathy. You have psychopath behavior there. It's just centralized. Everything is different from me.
Those people will memorize like a library card catalog, human emotions and facial expressions and words and phrases and everything that they will ever need to survive in the world and to rise up to the top of leadership. And everybody talks about psychopaths as if they're bad people. I don't think they are. And none of them chose to be that way. Most psychopaths don't even know that they're psychopaths. They just think we're all the same. They think we do what they having those genes expressed means that you're born and the next thing you know, like my kid is shoving needles into our cat or our dog. And just to see the dog's reaction and stuff like that. Jesus. There's no way out. There's no counseling. There's no therapy. There's no psychedelic journey that you can go on and like reverse some of that stuff.
Interesting. Hey, hope you found this one eye opening or maybe a little unsettling. The truth is, psychopaths aren't hiding in dark corners. They're out there blending in, studying you, mirroring your every move. You can't spot them on site, but your gut can. That weird off feeling you get around someone, that's your brain picking up what your eyes can't. So, here's the key. Don't ignore it. Stay calm, stay non-reactive, and never let anyone pull you into their emotional game. Because the less you react, the more control you have. And in a world full of masks, your empathy, your humanity is your biggest edge. In a world that rewards charm over truth, empathy is your superpower. Protect it, trust it, and remember, monsters don't always hide under the bed. Sometimes they shake your