Ask a Psychopath – What are some things you’ve done?

Ask a Psychopath – Video Transcript

What are some things you’ve done as a result of your psychopathy?

Sometimes when I think about these stories, these Guilt stories, I don’t know what people would feel guilt about so I do have a little bit of mind blindness There. You know like I I’ve never lived the life of somebody who feels this empathy, this guilt, and so I don’t know what might trigger it.  

I’ve never really felt anything for animals you know. I’ve never had a pet or ever felt like a connection to animals.  I’ve never tortured animals. I know you know some Psychopaths do torture animals for various reasons but I never was one of those that tortured animals. There was, however,  one time I was teaching swimming lessons and I went out saw that there was this baby opossum in the water. It was just struggling to try to get out of the pool and I thought the baby opossum must have fallen in the pool during the night or in the early morning and now he’s trying to get out. But I also thought an opossum is a pest and I don’t want this opossum around me. If I fish the opossum out then who knows what he’s going to do.

Even domesticated animals can kind of turn on you especially when they feel like they’re kind of in that fight or flight kind of moment so I was like, I’ll just drown the opossum. What I did is I just got a hose and just kept hosing him so he’s trying to get up and I’m just trying to drown him with the hose and I do that for five minutes and he’s he’s actually a trooper this baby opossum and so I thought, this is not working. I figured I’ll just cancel the swimming lesson and just go off and do something else, you know, go to the beach for that afternoon. 

I think maybe that seems cold-hearted to people the way I went about it but that’s just kind of an interesting thing too – we’re socialized to certain things. Different things are cold-hearted to different people and I guess I am just immune to socialization in general. 

Another example that stands out to me is I was living in Los Angeles and it would have been a 12-unit apartment complex. It was kind of a nice apartment complex and I was an attorney at the time and I was making well into the six figures and so it was very comfortable for me to pay the rent. But I noticed that my neighbors across from me were driving like 1980s 1990s Civics. Both of them were driving these old Civics and I thought I wonder how these people are paying rent? I thought of it sometimes and I also noticed, since they parked right next to me, that they had these two bikes that were collecting dust.

I had a friend visit me one weekend and I thought let’s go biking. And I thought, well I have my bike but I don’t have a bike for you and I don’t want to have to drive somewhere and rent a bike because it’s very inconvenient. I figured we should just take my neighbors’ bikes. So I went down and I pumped up the air and the seats had dust on them – I mean they clearly hadn’t been ridden for years and they were just little cheap Schwinn bikes you know probably $100 or something.

So we bike and we come back several hours later–we bike to the beach and it was great, it was fun. And then in the evening I get this knock on the door and I go answer it. Luckily it was me who answered and not my roommate at the time because I answer it and it’s my neighbor and she said: you know my bikes were missing earlier and we were looking all over for them and then we noticed that they were replaced. Do you know what happened with the bikes? I said yes, I borrowed your bike and I took it to the beach with my friend.

Color drained from my neighbor’s face–she was so angry at me. She was like, why would you do something like that and I’m gonna call the police and that’s theft. And I said it’s probably not theft technically –  if anything it’s conversion, the tort of conversion, and you’d have to sue me in small claims court and I don’t think the damages would be very high because I just took the bikes for several hours. That was kind of my reaction but she was livid.  

The thing that people find most shocking about the book is when I say that I’m probably smarter than the person reading the book. I find that to be an unusual reaction for that to be the most shocking thing in the book. It surprised me, I didn’t understand why people would feel that way because that’s just statistically true. I mean I score in the 99th percentile on all standardized tests.

Maybe there’s been once or twice when I haven’t scored the 99th percentile even on graduate school tests. Probably the more shocking thing is that I’m just willing to kind of own things. I think people find me to be narcissistic. I think they think that I have such a big ego, when really I just kind of feel like: I know I’m five foot four, I know I weigh the amount of pounds that I weigh, I know that I am like the whatever size and underwear, bra, shoe you know and I also know that I’m in the 99th percentile for sure for intelligence – at least as it’s measured on standardized tests.