The Jordan Harbinger Show - 465: Thomas Erikson | How to Protect Yourself from Psychopaths

Episode Date: February 4, 2021

Thomas Erikson is a behavioral expert, active lecturer, and bestselling author of Surrounded by Idiots and Surrounded by Psychopaths: How to Protect Yourself from Being Manipulated and Exploited in Business. What We Discuss with Thomas Erikson: Not all narcissists are psychopaths, but all psychopaths are narcissists. So how can you identify the psychopaths in your life who don't act like the ones you see in slasher flicks and psychological thrillers? What psychopaths have to gain from manipulating and destroying other people. The insidious tactics psychopaths use to sow doubt and reap chaos in others. How you can resist these tactics before they're used to ruin your life. What to do if you suspect that you might be a psychopath. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/465 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!Thomas Erikson is a behavioral expert, active lecturer, and bestselling author of Surrounded by Idiots and Surrounded by Psychopaths: How to Protect Yourself from Being Manipulated and Exploited in Business. What We Discuss with Thomas Erikson: Not all narcissists are psychopaths, but all psychopaths are narcissists. So how can you identify the psychopaths in your life who don't act like the ones you see in slasher flicks and psychological thrillers? What psychopaths have to gain from manipulating and destroying other people. The insidious tactics psychopaths use to sow doubt and reap chaos in others. How you can resist these tactics before they're... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. Kittins, they would like to go on the hunt for a mice because it's what kittens do. They hunt mice. Didn't you understand the mouse and his family was sort of sad? No, you know, I'm a cat. We have to understand the mentality of these people. They don't care.

They just don't care. The more you tell a psychopath how sad you were or how hurt you got, you're only few than with more tools to make the situation even worse. You should never tell a psychopath how you feel about it because they will use this information in order to use you. That's just the way it is. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, from astronauts to entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional mafia,

Russian chess grandmaster, neuroscientists. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical address. that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, we have episode starter packs. Those are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or you can help someone else get started with us. And you know, I love that. I love you guys when you do that. Sharing always helps.

Now, today, we're doing a deep dive on psychopaths. I've done some shows on this before, for example, with Dr. James Fallon, which we'll link in the show notes. He's the guy who was studying psychopaths and found out that he was a psychopath. That's an incredible story in itself. If you enjoyed that one, this one's going to be right up your rally. Now, we'll discuss the hallmarks of a psychopath, their behaviors, and how we can spot them in the wild, so to speak. And of course, we'll also make sure you know what to do once you identify a potential psychopath in your life, how you can extricate yourself from the situation,

and how you can execute a bit of a psychopath self-defense, if necessary. This is a super interesting episode. Who doesn't love a little psychopath talk, am I right? And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, psychopaths every single week, it's because of my network

and I'm teaching you how to build a psychopath-free network. Well, I probably shouldn't guarantee that, but I'm teaching you how to build a network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Most of the guests on the show, they're in the course. they contribute to the course, they subscribe to the course, come join us. And you'll be in smart, virtually psychopath-free company where you belong.

Now, here's Thomas Erickson. By the way, you've written a book about being surrounded by idiots and another about being surrounded by psychopaths, so you must keep some pretty interesting company, man. You should see my friends. Or maybe you shouldn't. Maybe I shouldn't, yeah. Maybe you should.

Well, the book I am finishing this week, actually. I'm finessing it right now is something really, I can't talk about. but it's, let's call it, something asked for by my American publisher, actually. They said, how about writing this book on that topic? And I said, I don't know. But now I did it and I don't regret it. And it's going to be either people will burn it or love it. Right.

I'm guessing the people who talk a lot online about loving freedom are going to be the ones who burn it, ironically. Freedom of information, burn this book and don't read it. Yeah, true. That's how that works, usually. I used to keep myself out of politics, but it's you, you're living in interesting times. I have to say. I don't end you very much. Yes. Yes. We've done many, many shows about that sort of thing and about how we are isolating ourselves and making ourselves more victimizable to both leaders and each other. It's really

kind of a shame. And that's probably a good way to dovetail into this work that we're talking about now. I'd love to start off with some qualities of psychopaths because I think the stereotype is that psychopaths are violent. They come after you in the... the shower with a machete and talk to their dead mother who's sitting in a chair in the basement, right, like Norman Bates or whatever. But psychopaths, the most intelligent ones anyways, are walking around with everyone else. They're not in jail because they don't resort to violence to get what they want. They're just bastards, right? They choose manipulation instead. True. Psychopaths are usually, as you mentioned, it depends. I mean, they are stupid psychopaths as well,

are an intelligent psychopaths. The stupid psychopath, he would go up to you on the street and see, hey, you got a nice watch, and then you will bang you in the head and take it to watch. And then he will end up behind bars, obviously. Maybe. Maybe. And the smart psychopath, the intelligent psychopath, he will see your beautiful watch. And he said, that's a nice watch. And then he will talk you into giving him the watch.

That's the difference. And even though you might say to yourself, I am not that stupid, well, you haven't met the best psychopaths, the best manipulators yet. They are usually not Norman Batesis or Hannibal Lecter. actually they are looking exactly like you and I, but they are not thinking like you and I. They are always in this sort of manipulation mode. How can I trick this dude? What can I do to gain some extra points for myself?

They're always in this mode, actually, which makes it really hard to be around them. But they are still usually very charming, which makes it hard to understand because it was such a nice guy or girl. I say usually he, him and guy, because usually statistically 75% of all psychopaths are men, that is just a sad fact, but it's what it is. We don't know why that is, so we're going to have to go there.

But they are usually manipulative and they are sort of pathological liars. They lie because it's fun to lie. Not always because they want something from you, but they lie because why not? How far can they take this show, you know? How much can they fool you? How big a fool can they make out of you? It's all a game to them. they don't feel empathy.

They have sort of disconnected from their emotional center, actually in the brain. That is actually, have been studied thoroughly. We know they don't feel the same thing as we do. So they just don't care. All of us are just a huge smorgasbord for the psychopaths to pick whatever they choose, to be honest. There are far more psychopaths around than most of us are aware of. When I was reading the book, what percentage of the population are psychopaths? I thought, okay, it's probably like point.

0.01%, and it's like 4% at the high end, which is shockingly high. Yes, it depends on who you're asking. It depends on different scientists claim different numbers. In Europe, we say 2%. In Sweden, we say 1%. They say, let's assume it's 1%. Nobody knows where it comes from. International studies claim that it is basically probably between 2 and 4. It could be as much as 5% depending on actually what country you are looking into. I have to say, One thing, there are probably statistically, and these are just the numbers. Don't kill the messenger, okay? But there are more psychopaths in the U.S. than it is in Europe.

I don't know why that is. It could be a matter of measurements. It could be we use different systems. As I pointed out in the book, I have to make an explanation, I think. So it could be different methodology in some way. Sure. But basically, if you're a male in the United States, by pretty much all accounts, you have a better chance of being a psychopath than you do in other areas. And you know what's

interesting. Occupations, show fans listen to this one, right? Occupations that primarily attract psychopaths. And listen, I am not kidding. This is from the book. Lawyer, media and broadcast, CEO, and journalism. Does anything listeners strike you about that list? Because I have done every single one of those jobs. Should I be concerned here? I skipped over drug cartel hitman. So I got that going for me. At least I'm not drug cartel hair me. But you're the one of the good ones, right? Yes.

Yes, I'm a nonviolent, well, I mean, I don't even want to say that in a joking way because people are going to be like, oh, I stopped listening to Jordan when he outed himself as a psychopath. It's a little scary to read that list. Yes. But the thing is, if you take a look at the psychopath checklist, that's based on David Hare, who is a Canadian psychologist, sort of, let's call it, the godfather of psychopathy research, let's say.

And he says that he made this list of over 20 bullet points and charming and manipulative and, you know, lying and taking risks and so on and so forth. And the thing is all of us would score some points on the list. I mean, we have all been using lies sometime, maybe white lies, but still we are not 100% honest. Some of us are really, really charming. Some of us like to talk about ourselves and so on. Some of us takes risks. But the thing is, so we all have some of the traits within us, not saying that we are psychopaths, but we have to show a certain number of psychopathic traits in a certain frequency, so to speak, in order to get the diagnosis. It's not an exact term.

Oh, that's a psychopath. That's not a psychopath. It's a sort of a floating line here. And it's really hard to tell where the line should be drawn, I would say. You have to look for patterns, I would say. You mentioned in the book that psychopaths get fuel from manipulating and destroying people. That seems strange to me because if I were a psychopath, right, I would just want to get things from myself like money or fame or power.

What do I have to gain by actually ruining other people's lives? And of course, this is maybe why I would make a terrible psychopath because I would feel really guilty manipulating somebody and having them face consequences. But I guess that's what makes normal people normal, right? Or am I just saying that? Because that's what a normal person would say. But it seems like you really do have to go to the end. extra mile to make a fool out of someone else instead of just like taking their money. Why go the

extra mile to make them miserable instead of just like running off with their bank account? You know, that's the part that I don't really understand. I think normal folks, we just don't understand why, like why the extra cruelty involved in all of this? It's a really good question. And the thing is, we have to take a look at narcissism as well, because all narcissists are not psychopaths, but every psychopath is a narcissist. And narcissism means you like to win, you have this grandiose feeling that you were better than everybody else, you like to feel superior, and you like to sort of use your supremacy in order to sort of dominate people. It's a personality trait that can be found in many people, but again, it's really high-frequency pattern, so to speak. Then you see

somebody that likes to use people, and psychopaths have that with. But everybody shows it because, as I mentioned before, the intelligent psychopath know he will be hated for it. So he can sort of downplay this instinct. But narcissists, they don't have this smartness. So they do it all the time. But it is within every psychopath. The need to use people, because it makes them feel better, bigger, smarter, and sort of more

valuable than anybody else. You know, every time I talk about psychopathy, people say, well, that's not logical, but you have to skip all the logic. This is not logical. This is just manipulated. These are predators. These are hyenas. They're not even wolves.

They are hyenas. They kill sort of half-dead prey, so to speak. That is what they do. So, yeah. Oh, dear. Not good. It's fascinating and scary at the same time. It's like a big accident on the highway.

You say to your family, oh, look at that. That was very scary and unpleasant to watch. But is that a leg? I thought I saw some blood there. You had to slow down and do some rub, because you can't keep your eyes away from it, you know. The same thing is psychopathic, scary, but fascinating. You mentioned in the book you had a stalker at one point,

and she was just a great liar, and she almost seemed to believe her own words. But you stopped short of saying that she did believe her own words. So psychopaths, they know they're lying and manipulating. They're just, are they not in a world of their own where they actually are the victim, or they know what they're doing the whole time, and it's just complete apathy?

They know what they are doing. The thing is that they know they are lying, They know they are cheating. They know they are stealing. They know they are manipulating us. But the thing is, they don't care. They think it is their right. They are entitled to act in this way.

It is their birthright because they are born superior. I mean, they are at the top of the food chain, so to speak. So it is their right to use you and me and anybody else. It's hard to explain. It's like you can talk about a little kitten, you know. Kittens, they would like to go chasing or go on the hunt for a mice because it's what kittens do. They hunt mice.

You can't talk to them. Why did you do that? Didn't you understand the mouse and his family was sort of sad? He was what you did? No, you know, I'm a cat. Why are you even asking me these stupid questions? We have to understand the mentality of these people. They don't care.

They just don't care. The more you tell a psychopath how sad you were or how hurt you got, you're only few than with more tools to make the situation even. Even worse, you should never tell a psychopath how you feel about it because they will use this information in order to use you. That's just the way it is. I wonder why these people haven't been bred out of humanity, but it all, I mean, it seems like if money and status are of primary importance for the psychopath, it sounds like

that drives ambition and achievement in many ways, right? So maybe they're good, I hate to frame it like this, but maybe in a way they're good for society because they can control large organizations ruthlessly. a lot of these sort of, I really hate to paint any particular job, but like a CEO or a military leader might actually be well served by some of these traits. Well, there has always been psychopaths. All societies has had their psychopaths. Throughout history, we can see the science or psychopathic behaviors. And even though the word psychopathists, something comes from our modern ages, it's a trait that has been known for humankind for at least 10,000 years.

We don't know why psychopaths exist at all. We don't know why nature provided us with this kind of, let's call it, personality disorder. I mean, it's not an illness. It's not a sickness. It's not a mental disease. It's a personality disorder. It's inheritable. I mean, it's not usually psychopathic in some way you can inherit it from your parents.

The exact percentage nobody knows, extremely difficult to say it is this or it is that. But the thing is, it has always been around like, you know, colorblindness or using your left hand or your right hand. It is just what it is. The only way to get rid of every psychopath is actually to do something really bad, which I can't phrase in your show here, because it would not be very humane of me to do so. But, you know, the Inuits, Inuits, yeah. The men went out for, you know, hunting whales. One guy said, you know, I have bad back. you know, I can't come with you.

I had to stay home and check the village. So they said, okay. And then when they got home again after two months at sea, the village had burned to the ground and all the women were pregnant. So they took this guy and put him on a piece of ice, ice, ice flute. Flow, yeah. Ice flow. And said, bye, bye, you know, just off you go then.

Because that was their sort of final solution. That's the only way that you actually can deal with psychopathy. You can't get rid of them. And still, who would you frame with psychopathy? It's an impossible thing to do because some people are just jerks. Right. Some people are just unpleasant to be around and I have received literally thousands of emails from all over the world. I mean, the book about psychopaths is translated into, I don't know, a third language or something.

And people give me examples of real psychopaths in their family, people who are born with psychopaths, but still again, one lady emailed me and said, you know, I've just gotten through this terrible divorce. my ex-husband, he didn't give me my cooking books. He kept those, you know, do you think he's a psychopath? So, you know, you need to have some more information. You can't make the diagnosis yourself. You have to have some expertise. I mean, to be honest, it's not enough to read a book. I could probably not sort of discover all the psychopaths in my surroundings.

I will see some of them because some are more easy to wrap your head around than others. but it's a tricky question. We just have to learn how to live with this sort of lethal personality. So therapy doesn't work for psychopaths. They can't be healed. It's not. What I found was interesting is this is not a mental illness, you've said. So what's the difference between psychopathy and a mental illness? I guess I didn't realize that psychopathy was not a mental illness itself. It's what is it a brain condition? I mean, I guess I don't really understand the difference. Well, a mental illness is sort of, I mean, if you're psychotic or if you are suffering from schizophrenia, or something like that. That can be treated with therapy, with a specific kind of medication. We know there are good methods to treat,

let's say, schizophrenia as an example. It's just one example. There's several of these diagnoses, plenty of them. Psychopathy is not an illness. It's a personality disorder. It starts at the moment in the woman's womb, actually. It's actually at the second when actually the fetus is created. It's a really hard thing to think about a child being a psychopath,

but grown-up psychopaths were children some years ago. It is just the way it is. We know for now, because we can use real advanced brain scans or MRIs, and we can see where in the brain the disorder is. It's in the amygdala, which is, to simplify it, it's the center of the brain that sort of controls your emotional reactions. I am taking this down, if any neuroscientists here, this, they would say, not really, but in short words, it's the amygdala and it controls your

emotional center. We can see on brain scans, they are lacking certain areas in the amygdala. So they actually cannot sense the things that you and I can sense. They cannot feel the same thing. They do not have the same ability to feel certain kind of emotions, which makes some people say, well, so the psychopath is actually the victim. The nature made him like this. So, we should feel sorry for him. But that's a misinterpretation of the whole thing. Because, again, if a hyena takes your baby, will you feel sorry for the hyena? No, you will not.

You will still like to have your baby back in the same condition as before. But with a psychopath, that is really hard to achieve, to be honest. I want to talk about some of the characteristics of psychopaths. And we've talked about this a little bit already, a lack of remorse, narcissism, being completely unmoved by the plight of others, along with that path. psychological lying, cunning and manipulative. This is interesting because they spot weakness very easily. Is that because of practice or because there's less interference with other feelings happening that they can just zero in on that? I mean, or do we just not know why they can do that?

That's a really interesting question. How can they be so good at this? I mean, this is a kind of social competence. Right. Let's say. They can read me, they can read you, they can read anybody, usually easier than the average guy than average joke can do. And why is that? Well, it's two things actually. One is what you touch upon is they don't have to sort of use their emotions.

They can be just sort of cold, what's the word, callousness. Yeah, they're just completely, I don't want to say rational, but like if you do something and I want to manipulate you, but I'm also angry, that's going to mess with me, right? I'm going to be like, I want to do this thing because I'm mad at you, but if I'm just going, Huh. Earlier you said this and I want to take all your money so I'm going to feed your ego and I have no emotional kind of like I don't feel weird manipulating your ego by faking that I am beneath you. I'm just manipulating you. It's just more of a pure. The channel is not crowded. Right? There's no other traffic on that road.

You answered a question better than I did actually. But they are 100% rational, logical and not affected by emotions. any way. So they can do this in a really balanced way. As you mentioned, they are observing us. We are like, imagine just a laboratory rat, you know. We can look at him through the glass and say, okay, there he goes. Going left, going right. Okay, interesting.

And then take some notes. If you yell at a psychopath, he doesn't care. He doesn't mind. He's superior to you. He doesn't care. If you're angry, that's just interesting information as you said. Okay, that makes Jordan angry. How can I use this? And they put it on shelf 2B, you know.

It's just what they do, all this irrational thing, which actually makes some psychopaths really useful, you know, in extreme stressful situations or when it comes to, let's say, war situations or really, you know, physical danger. They are still really sort of irrational and not scared, not stressed out or anything. So they can actually act in a really good way. The problem is you can still cannot control them. But they are using all these things in order to learn. And of course, a really young psychopath. He hasn't learned the game yet. He's learning, he's testing and trying some things, you know,

and getting better and better at this sort of weird, really absurd game. Because it is a game. It is actually a game. They are building their own routine, so to speak, and then they know. Sometimes when I hear people describe people as a victim for psychopaths, They describe, let's say, behavioral patterns that are so similar that sometimes I think there is some sort of manual out there. The psychopathic handbook, if you know what I mean. Because a lot of them are using the exact same methodology, which only tells me they really know how to read people.

Because usually people react in an emotional way, they are just that number of emotions to use, you know. If I would like to make you sad, if I would like to make you angry or completely. mad or hurt or happy or whatever, I know your trigger points. If I need you to be happy now because I would like you to lend me some money, then I can make you smile. Then when you ask me to give the money back, I will make you sad because I need to sort of distract you. It's just following the manual. The more you present yourself to the psychopath, the more understanding he has about you and the more dangerous he becomes to you as to victim because you are a victim. characteristics, and there are a lot, so I won't go over all of them, but impulsive, easily offended.

And this one, I think, is almost like a, this factor here needing dopamine and stimulation, that almost opens up a whole tree of other things, right, underneath it, because you see that they have superficial emotions or emotional poverty. And that probably goes hand in hand with needing dopamine and stimulation, because if you're not easily fired up in a good way or a bad way about something, you've got to get your dopamine and stimulation elsewhere, which leads to some of these other factors such as sexual aggression, being promiscuous, these types of things would result in you getting a lot of stimulation and dopamine if you're sexually assaulting or just assaulting people or causing problems that get other people really angry at you. You know, you're getting

that stimulation through that. And that kind of explains earlier why instead of just calmly draining someone's bank account, you have to do it in a spectacular way that causes their entire family anguish because that's what's sort of making, reminding you that you're alive by giving you some sort of stimulation in your defective brain? Well, the thing is they don't have any patience. They need the quick fixes and they need dopamine kick, so to speak. They can do things in, as you said, a spectacular way because it makes them feel something. Probably deep down inside every psychopath. There is some small piece of understanding. I am not like everybody else. The humanity in general are experiencing things that I maybe, maybe I don't.

Don't miss it. I know I am lacking emotionality, if you, let's say, or empathy or whatever, but still it's not a problem because it puts me on top of things. They need the drama because, I mean, that's the narcissistic part within the psychopath. They need the drama. They need to feel superior. The need is stimulation of their need for feeling grandiose, entering a room and saying, I am here, look at me, all you peasants, you know, all you sort of just easy, usable assets give me the support that I am entitled to. It is complicated. As I mentioned before, skip all the logic.

Just understand how they are wired. A lot of people say to me, I think you're exaggerating. I don't believe in those kind of people because they can't, I don't think a lot of people don't want there to be psychopaths because they are so mean. And some people tell me, do they have to be psychopaths? Couldn't it just be, they are evil? But hey, for me, same thing. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Thomas Erickson.

We'll be right back. Now back to Thomas Erickson on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Not every psychopath is evil, though, right? Or not every psychopath does horrible things. Is that correct? I feel like I've studied this or read about this before, I should say, where there are psychopaths that have decent relationships with their family. Have you heard of James Fallon, the author?

Yes. Look, he could easily have just pulled the wool over my eyes, but it looked like from his work that he has an okay relationship with his wife and kids, and, you know, he didn't even know that he was a psychopath because of the story. But then again, that's his own story. So what do we really know about that? Or are all psychopaths so inherently dysfunctional that they really can't hold normal lives? Well, James Fallon is an interesting thing.

He's actually a psychologist and a researcher who were studying. He was here in Sweden a couple years ago, and I listened to him when he was on the biggest Scandinavian talk show on television. It was fascinating to see him and to hear him, and I'm pretty sure he's a very competent guy. Having that said, I have read some statements from his wife about his tantrums and things he can call people that he claim he loves. On Swedish TV, he got the question. I mean, he had done some brain scans on criminals. Okay, that's a psychopathic brain, that's another one.

Oh, now whose brain scan is this? I had to put it in this pile because that's a psychopathic brain. Oh, that's my brain. No, dear. No, if I would have discovered myself as a psychopath, I would not have made it public. I will not have entered the media saying, hey, look at me, I am a psychopath, but I am the single good psychopath on the face of the earth. I am the only one that you should trust. Because being a psychopath, he needed the attention saying, hey, look at me, I am a psychopath, you know, because they are sort of making magic in our faces without we understand. it because on TV he looked charming and

smiling and... He is charming. Very charming. I do not question his competence. I'm pretty sure he is providing for his family. That is not the point. But the things he said behind the smiles, I mean, the host of the TV show asked me, can you

feel love? He got the straightforward question. Can you feel love? Then he said, hmm, hmm. And then he smiled and said, no, not really. Still smiling. I don't know what love is. And for me, who knew what that was, for me, I get, you know, I get shivers down my spine when I think about it. But he was smiling and the audience said, oh, look at him.

He's so charming. He can't feel love all, but he's still a pleasant guy, you know. For me, that's the scariest part of everything. That is so, so scary because that's how they get under your skin. Again, I say nothing more about James Fallon. Sure. other than based on his books because I have read them and his TV performance. That is all I can comment on.

That makes sense. And I appreciate that answer. I would love to know more about how we can protect ourselves against psychopaths, right? It seems like it would start with increasing our self-awareness and also probably doing what we're doing here on the show, which is learning how to recognize psychopathic behavior. Am I barking up the right tree here? Absolutely. Absolutely.

I will say there's three ways to deal with psychopathic. One is obviously to understand psychopathy, to sort of take off the shades, you know, don't blind for yourself, be realistic. Don't be naive. Fool me once, blame on you, you know, that kind of thing. Don't be naive in the aspect. It's not beautiful to be naive. For me, it's sort of being able to hurt you or it's not a virtue to be naive. It's actually a sort of a weakness in a way, even though being naive is probably sounds. lovely on paper, but it isn't particularly useful in these situations. Understand what psychopaths are like. Understand some people are out there and they are actually out there to do you evil, to do evil things to you. They don't care about you. Even though they say they love you, they do not. I'm not saying people should walk around, you know, and being scared about new acquaintances, but just have a natural sense of looking for patterns and, you know, don't open your wallet your wallet on the first date.

Don't tell a new acquaintance your deepest secrets because let's say you go on a date. You meet this guy and he say, okay, what are your worst scares? What are you scared? I'm really super horrifyingly scared for. Don't tell him that, you know. He will ask you and he will learn. He will put it on shelf to be again, right?

And he will use it, you know, in six months or something. And he will tell you his worst fears in life to make you tell. But you need to understand these patterns. So read a book, some book, any book about psychopathy and understand what it actually is and learn to see the patterns. That is number one. You need to understand these people are, they are evil. And you need to understand yourself.

The more you understand yourself, the more where you become about your weaknesses. Why are the weaknesses important? Well, it's because psychopaths are looking for the weakest of the weakest of the spots. They are always looking for where to push the knife in and twist it around a little bit. They are not trying to build you up. They are trying to break you down. And some of them, the smart ones, they have patience.

They can use a year or two to sort of build their lovely persona to all the people in the whole neighborhood and in your family and everything. So they are sort of positioning themselves. And then they sort of open up to you. And if you don't know what they are doing, if you don't understand, these are my weakest spots. I mean, I met this lady who said, my father always shouted at me. He yelled and shouted really loud. So somebody is raising his voice.

I react, immediately physically react. And he told her husband to be on the first date. And he used it against her five years later. So for 10 years, the only thing he did when he needed her out of balance was to raise his voice. Really terrible, terrible story. But the third point is how much value would you put in yourself? How much do you think you deserve in life? Do you deserve the good relationship?

If the answer is yes, you are stronger when it comes to sort of fighting psychopathy. If your self worth, if yourself, let's say, well, the word is escaping me. Self esteem? Self esteem, yes. Thank you. Self esteem. If you have a high self-esteem, meaning you are appreciating who you are, not saying you are egoistic or self-loving, but you think you are a good person.

You deserve the best. That's the best way to actually build sort of defense towards me. many predates you of any kind psychopaths or any kind of people. That would be my, my recommendation. Learn psychopathy, learn yourself, learn how to understand yourself, and build yourself esteem in a positive way. Is that sort of adjacent to setting firm boundaries where it's like, hey, you know, look, I realize everyone loses their temper sometimes. That's fine. It's happened once every six months you say something that's a little out of line when we're fighting. Okay. But if somebody every week is exploding because you asked them to give you your $10,000 back that you lent them for something, and they're just redirecting the conversation by tormenting you, you know, you've got to draw the line. Is that kind of what we're talking about? Like set firm boundaries based on the way you want to be treated in a relationship. Again, everybody has fights, right? So it's like you fight with your wife here and there, but you don't make her cry every month or every three weeks or something like that just because she didn't do some little thing that you wanted and you want to control her, right? You have to

set up a bound. I guess I'm just beating this to death, but you have to set up a boundary and then stick to it. You're answering your own question. Yeah, the psychopath looks for somebody who's, who doesn't have boundaries or sets a boundary and then lets them just walk right over it every single time, right, and just trample it. Boundaries are really good. I mean, one thing that you have to pay attention to is comparing what did he say he should do and what did he actually do. I mean, compare words with actions. If the actions are very unsimilar to the words, words, that's manipulation. A lot of people are saying things to get out of an unpleasant situation. I've done that and you done that. You told you, man, you're going to fix that project.

I'm going to do this. I'm going to fill in the report, you know, and then thinking, ah, let's see when I can squeeze in that one as well. But that's not what I'm talking about. Again, look for the patterns. Look to see, is this frequent behavior? If somebody's always sort of tormenting you when you bring, let's say, money, I mean, psychopaths are, they will like you to take the bill on everything. Could they make you pay? They will. They are parasites when it comes to finance.

Parasites. Can't shun-call this word. They are parasites, basically. If the topic of money comes up, the subject of money comes up, and every time the person starts to do something, then you can say, okay, now I am looking at this pattern. Again, he just might be a jerk or just somebody who hasn't, isn't in touch with himself.

Maybe he doesn't see it. So you have to say, okay, when I said this, you did that. That is not okay with me. I need you to do something else. That doesn't work. Do not say, you made me feel bad. You hurt my feelings. Again, just more ammunition for the manipulator.

Say instead, when you did this to me, that is not okay. I need you to stop it now. You will hear, oh, I am so sorry, absolutely. If it comes back in the next week, there you go again. Now you did the same thing again. That is not okay. The psychopath can't control this for two weeks, five weeks, maybe a month, and then he will fall back into his own sort of behavioral pattern.

That's when you know, as you said, Jordan, in a normal relationship, you have arguments, you have fights about this and that, and it's usually you can sort it out, you can discuss it and sort of balance your opinions. You negotiate your way through the situation, but a psychopath always negotiate himself through the situation in order to be the biggest winner, always to sort of gain the upper hand, and you have to look for it. Sometimes you have to take notes. what did he actually tell me, you know?

Some people say, when I started to thinking, I have to record our conversations. Now, that's a warning sign, if nothing else, that is a huge warning sign. But you have to look for these things. And there's 20 traits to look for. So, yes, it is complicated. Look, tell me if I'm oversimplifying this,

but I sort of tried to reverse engineer this from the book. So if we know that psychopaths are really good at spotting weaknesses, shortcomings, vulnerabilities, exploits, it follows that we should then be on the lookout for people that spot those and attempt to exploit them easily. So if we have really good self-awareness and we know, okay, I'm easily flattered and I'm always looking for shortcuts on how to make easy money because I grew up poor, something like that. And then we see somebody swooping in and doing that to us. We can't necessarily diagnose them as a psychopath, but it seems like a pretty good indicator that that person

is trying to victimize us. If we know that they're going to be good at spotting it and we know our own weakness and then they do just that. Is that sort of a safe, would you recommend that sort of tactic? Like if we have that sort of self-awareness to obviously be on the lookout for people who spot it right away and come after it? Absolutely. That's a good point. Again, a lot of people use manipulation techniques. Not all of them are psychopaths. Not all of them are narcissists or sociopaths or anything. Some people just found a way to make life easy for themselves. That is just the way it is. I mean, as I just said before, if you confront somebody, say, hey, that's not okay.

Now, I can see what you're doing here. I must sort of call them out and say, hey, I know what you're doing. I know what you're doing. That should be done in all kinds of relationships. It could be at work or with some, you know, your brother-in-law or whoever. You have to do something. Don't let people step on you. That's never okay.

You have to react. I mean, my advice is if it feels bad, it is bad. do something. And what you just said, I can't rephrase it, but what you just said is actually what we have to do. Act and do something. If it's a jerk, he or she will see, okay, sorry, my bad. I didn't realize I did that, actually. I haven't thought of it like that. Help me to sort of adjust my behavior boys. I don't want to be seen as a jerk. I want to be seen as at least an okay person. If you can't change, let's say it's sort of a loose acquaintance of somebody at work or some sort of friend of a friend something.

Well, just block him on Facebook or whatever, you know, so you don't have to deal with it. Because usually you cannot change other people. You can never change a psychopath. You can't treat them. You can't sort of do anything. You can usually not change other people either. I mean, just look at how hard you have to change yourself.

Yeah. And imagine to put that pressure on somebody else, it's usually it cannot be done. Sure. You can tell them that is not okay. if you don't stop this, this relationship is over. And then you have to back up your word with words with action. If you say, I don't recommend to use threats, but if you say to the manipulator,

if you don't change your behavior, I will move out of this apartment. Then you have to solve the situation. Are you going to sleep over at a friend's house or should you have got your own apartment? you have to have a plan because if you phrase this threat and say, if you don't stop, I will move. And he doesn't stop and you don't move. Right. My God, now you're in deep shit. Yeah, yeah.

It totally makes sense. That is bad, bad because now you only have proved that your words doesn't count. Right. Your boundaries aren't real. So then they go, oh, well, shit, I can do whatever I want. I have learned more about your weakness. You say things you don't, you're not willing to back them up with your actions. Now I know even more about you.

Please hand me some more rope. Don't do it. Just don't. If it feels bad, it is bad. Do something. How do we separate a psychopathic partner or coworker or whatever from somebody who's just a regular asshole? Or does it just not matter? I guess in a way it doesn't matter.

Regular assholes make us feel bad. Is that okay? No. The psychopaths make us feel even worse. Is that okay? No, it's never okay. Nobody that makes you feel bad is acceptable. The difference is, again, as I said, you can maybe have a sort of, let's call it,

you can have a conversation with a regular jerk and make him listen. And maybe he can change himself. The psychopath will always lie to you and he will still try to fool you. He will never change because he's born like this. The regular jerk, he's just, some people just don't think. They don't use what's between their ears. they just don't think about these things. They just wander through life because nobody has stopped them from being a jerk.

Maybe you can help this guy or girl for that matter saying, hey, now you're being a jerk, a bit of a jerk there, you know, you think that's okay? Is that the rumor you would like to build? Oh, I didn't think of that. So now you can make them do them a favor. But still, it's difficult to change other people. It's really tricky. You've mentioned some behavioral traits of psychopaths as well, aside from what we've already

discussed, one of which is. staring, and this is obviously not super reliable, right? It's one characteristic among others. Not everyone who stares at somebody is a psychopath automatically, but I found that interesting. Why is, why can sometimes staring be an indicator of psychopathy? Is that just because it's predatory? I didn't really pick that that up from the book. No, the reason, it's called the long, the long glance, I think, in English. Gaze, maybe. The long gaze, maybe. But the thing is, it's about social competence. Again, a psycho, The psychopath does not always understand, let's say, the social game, so to speak.

They can understand and learn, they have to learn each and every individual. It's not like saying they understand you, then they understand me. It's not that simple, but if you are sort of, you don't understand, you don't have the social skills in the way that you can manage your threshold through a mingle party, if you know what I mean. If the psychopath is interested in you, he will look at you like this, you know, like an interesting, object. And he doesn't know it's looked upon as being a bit rude, you know. The only people who stare at you, it would be a psychopath or maybe a policeman because he's looking for, you know, fraudulent behavior. Are you, are you a criminal or, you know, what? That's a policeman's business, looking too much into people's eyes. But if you look in somebody's eyes more than,

I don't know, two, three seconds, it feels unpresent, you know. That's why we are doing this, you and we are looking into the camera. Yeah. Simultaneously, we are looking away, you know, because it's a bit strange. We don't do this because we know it just instinctively that it's not a nice thing to do. It's taken me years to realize that you can't really tell via the webcam if I'm looking directly at your eyes. So I worry about it a lot less,

but I still try and keep up the habit of looking away because I don't want to be in a normal social situation and someone's like, yo, you're being super weird. And I'm like, oh, sorry, I'm used to staring at people on a video screen who can't really necessarily tell if I'm looking directly at their eyes. So you're right, this psychopath may simply have never learned that. And moderating how long you look at somebody

or how long appropriate eye contact is, that is a very difficult skill to do manually, and it's almost impossible. Well, the thing is it differs between different cultures as well. If you go to Japan, you might get a smack on the head second one, you know. If you do it in, let's say Hungary, it's more okay because of the culture. The thing is there's millions of these small, small signals that you don't really know how to deal with. But again, it's easier for us because we can sort of sense the other person's unpleasantness

and we don't want to make people feeling unpleasant. The psychopath, again, is putting it in his notebook. Interesting. When I look at you like this, you will feel unpleasant. Now, let's see where I can use it. You and I think, oh, that was bad. Maybe I think I'm a sort of a weird idea, I did those things. So again, we have.

It's a totally different manual again. Yes. One of the other behavioral traits was isolation. So psychopaths often attempt to isolate their victims by turning them against their friends, pretending to be the only person that they can trust. And this makes them more powerful and it makes their victim more forgiving of what they're doing because they're afraid to lose their only friend, right? They don't have anyone else to turn to.

We hear this a lot about cults and things like that as well. So I would sort of advise people to look out for this. but one that I wanted to ask you about was nitpicking, right? Psychopass will nitpick someone's behavior. What's going on here? That was new for me. I hadn't really ever thought about this. Well, there's a certain, that's another manipulation technique that is actually, it's kind of,

it doesn't work on everybody. I mean, we have people who are, let's say, everybody that we meet is not relation-oriented, so to speak. Everybody doesn't love to be surrounded by lots of you people all the time. Some people are feeling pretty okay during lockdown, working from home and nobody distracts them and it feels pretty much okay actually. But the thing is, a lot of us are focused on relationships. And when we are focused on other people, it's easy to get us, so to speak, because of that.

And it's tricky to understand what they do is, I mean, if the psychopath is presenting his persona to everybody around you and making himself look like Prince Charming or whatever, Princess Charming, for that matter. And then they have to show themselves to you because the truth. manipulation starts, then I was sort of taking the mask off a little bit. The mask of sanity sort of falls apart. And then you will know who what's going to happen here. And then you will call your friends and say, hey, he's really nasty. You know, that's a, he's a jerk or he's a psychopath. Two things could happen. They can say, okay, that's bad. You should move out, you know. Or your

friend could say, no, no, he's the nicest guy on the planet. It depends a little bit how far this goes. It depends on how skilled this psychopath is in this sort of manipulation game. The only way to make sure you cannot call your friends is to isolate you from them, making you totally dependent on the psychopath, saying that Bob over here is, he actually said this and that about you, and I don't think you should

stay away from Bob, you know. And in Georgia over there, she said this and that and that wasn't a very passionate. How can you hang out with those guys, you know, when your mother, she's really mean. I heard her, overheard her saying these things about you. I sort of stood by you that you weren't there, but I fought for you, you know.

Then you start thinking so many people dislike me for reasons that the psychopath know you will react to. Your mother said something that you know she could say. Your friend Bob here, he said something that you know is one on your maybe not so pleasant side, so to speak, and Georgian and so on. So they are sort of building this puzzle. And all of a sudden you believe these people don't like you. And then they have you, the psychopath have you in a little box. Now you're completely dependent on the psychopath's goodwill. I'm the only one.

This is something to look for as well. The long gaze, but it's this me. I am protecting you from this unpleasant world, you know. You can trust me. I will always be on your side. This is, why do you do this? It's a stupid gesture. But still, it's to point out, I am trustworthy.

Why do you have to point out that you are trustworthy? Either you are or you're not, you know? Your actions speak for you. So now you're dependent on them. So the only thing you have to say, could you talk to him? Could you talk to her? And they come back and say, they hate you. They totally hate you, you know.

Putting you in a box, isolating you. That's pretty common for psychopath to do, because they are sort of taking out every possible threat to the persona that they are building around themselves. And then when they have sort of bled you dry, they would just leave you. Yikes. Again, not caring about where you end up.

They don't give it out. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Thomas Erickson. We'll be right back. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us going. By the way, we put all the deals in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you'll find all the codes. They're all in order.

It does really help us when you support our sponsors. So please consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we've got a worksheet for today's episode. If you want some of the drills and exercises and psychopath avoidance strategies we talked about here in the show, they're all in one easy place. They're in the worksheets. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of our episode here with Thomas Erickson.

There was a sub-story in the book about psychopaths trying to sabotage memories, so gaslighting in a certain way, and say maybe that a good evening was terrible for some bullshit arbitrary reasons that the psychopath creates in their own mind. So like you come back, you have a great evening with friends, and then as soon as you get home, she says, I can't believe it, you ruined this perfectly good evening. You were making so-and-so's wife so uncomfortable,

and you're thinking, what? I thought we all had a great time. No, it's embarrassing. And then when we went to the bathroom, she was saying how weird you were being. And I've experienced this myself from somebody that I used to work with who would, we would go out with friends and then they would say, oh, man, we have to apologize for your weird behavior. And I'm thinking, what? It doesn't even make sense. They just called me when I was on the way home driving in my own car to chat. But then no, you don't understand. Everyone, everyone there thought you were being a jerk. and I'm just sitting there questioning myself because I'm in my late 20s, early 30s, and it kept happening over and over and over until it almost got to me, right?

It did in many ways get to me, but I finally started, I got a girlfriend who was very, very socially aware, and she started to say, hey, every time that we do something, he says something like this. Have you noticed? And I went, yeah, I have noticed that. But, you know, maybe I just can't control my behavior. I'm socially unaware. And she goes, no, no, no, he's just doing this on purpose to make you feel bad. And I go, you know, I always thought that, Nobody whose normal wants to think every time someone points out negative behavior that I'm doing, it's them and not me. I don't want to think that way.

I want to learn and grow as a person. And that's what this person was picking up on, which was, I can just tell Jordan he's being a weirdo and he'll believe me. And I can break him down gradually over time. And then he could tell me what to do in social scenarios because otherwise I might make a big gaffe again. So I got to lean on him to show me to lead by example. and my girlfriend was finally like, no, he is a jerk and a creep, and everyone that we know doesn't like hanging out with him. We tolerate him because we want to hang out with you.

And that was a big turning point for me. But if I hadn't met this girl, who knows what would have happened? I would have kept going down that road potentially for years. It's a good example, and of course, it's a horrible story. And still, this guy would claim to be your best friend probably. He did. He indeed did claim. I am really caring for you.

I love you, buddy. You're my best buddy. I've heard similar stories over and over and over. And I mean, if somebody's talking bad about person X, he will talk bad about person Y and person Z and whatever. Some of them use a technique called triangulation, that you sort of play two people against each other and you step in as the hero.

It's really complicated, but they do it. And some of them don't even have a purpose. Why would this guy make you feel bad? What did he gain from it? It was just fun. I mean, it's sort of a grown-up. play, if you know what I mean. It's appalling. It's nobody should. But sometimes you need the third part to come in and say, hey, I am observing this situation from some distance.

And I see, this is bad for you. Step away from it, you know. Leave this relationship. If it's a job or if it's a, I got this message on Instagram actually this very morning from somebody said, in our family, some brother-in-law with some, I don't know, doesn't matter. And he is, He's really struggling. He's suffering severely from this relationship, his fiancé or whatever it was. And she said, he's not listening to anyone. Nobody can make him listen to our logical arguments. And I said, skip logic.

Ask him to look for the true emotions. Ask him to describe how does he feel in situation A or situation B. And she answered, I'm going to try that one because we have tried to prove things in making lists. It doesn't work. If you think you're in love with somebody, don't use lists, you use emotions. So it takes time. It's easier to fool and manipulate somebody than it is to convince them they have been fooled and manipulated. That is a sad story actually about it.

I read also in the book that psychopaths don't feel jealousy, but they will pretend to feel it to gain control. I thought that was interesting because you would think somebody who's this manipulative and petty would actually feel some hint of jealousy. but I guess that requires you to care about the other person or what they think, right? Well, it's not jealousy as in why aren't you spending time with me. It's more of, let's say, to being in control. They're not jealous at you in this sort of emotional way, feeling bad when you're outdating somebody else or something like that. It's not that it could be.

It's more about gaining control. They are irritated and maybe annoyed, maybe even angry, that you didn't pay them sort of the required amount of appreciation or attention or whatever. Again, it's this grandiose feeling of being superior and being having a higher worth than everybody else. It's more of that. They need to control you, but jealousy, that's not the thing. It's like feeling sad or feeling stressed or being a victim. I mean, they don't feel these emotions. Again, it's related to the amygdala story there. But the thing with psychopaths is they're really good at playing this

emotion, sort of imaging, mimicking this emotion, sort of a mirror. mirroring the behavior that you have when you are sad, producing some tears, because they know victims are usually sort of supported and getting a lot of attention and so on. A lot of people with psychopathic behaviors are playing the victim role now in society. You can see this. I am the victim here. Please feel sorry for me and give me the goods, you know. You can see it publicly, but you have to look for it. Some people are playing the victim card over and over again, but still being actually tough as the toughest, you know.

How could he suffer from that situation? Well, I felt bad. I felt so hurt, you know. But the victim card is so important. There's positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement, which is kind of standard manipulation. So I think we can kind of gloss over that, right? If you do something they like, they reinforce it. If you do something they don't like, they punish you for it.

But love bombing, this is something interesting because I've heard about this being used in cults. Can you tell us about this and how this is used by the psychopath? Because this is something, love bombing, it just sounds hippy, but it's actually quite dangerous. Love bombing is one of the most dangerous manipulation techniques that they can use. Usually, again, they are not looking for the alpha in the herd, so to speak. They are looking for somebody weak enough to fall prey rather quickly. And people that are sort of hanging with their heads, you know, going like this around in life, feeling unloved, thinking they are useless and miserable and everything.

If somebody starts telling you all of a sudden, oh, you are a lovely person, oh, I love this, I love that, or you are so fantastic, you are so brave and interesting and charming, and they bring your flowers and they tell you all these spontaneous good things, and they invite you for fancy dinners, and they lend you money, they do everything that you have never experienced in your whole. You have to be a robot not to react. If you see somebody, again, rest of short, they look like they think what they are saying. They look like they actually think that you are God's gift to mankind. So when they say, oh, you are the most amazing character I have ever met.

You will trust them. You will believe it. No, no, I'm just me. Oh, this feels really strange. But if you heard it for three weeks, you start to believe it. My God, I think he likes me. Wow. You know?

So then you're like an open book. Tell me your biggest weaknesses. Let me use you. I love you, you know. Love bombing is really, really dangerous. I will take care of you. I will provide for you. I will protect you from all the bad stuff.

I will bow you fancy things and whatever. And then they just jank it away. And you will think, what happened here? But you will remember that feeling. You will remember all the really strong emotions from the love. This is very, very common because usually people don't feel, well, let's say true love. I'm a bit of a romantic myself. If you haven't experienced, let's say true love, let's call it.

And then you think you have it within your reach, you're done. Yeah, and they'll spot that in you, right? Oh, yes. Go for the jugular. They have a sick chance to spotting who will be easy, usable on these terms. It's, this is scary. I've seen this several times as well, and it's horrifying to see, actually. How do we find out if these techniques are being used on us?

We've touched on some of these ideas, but it almost seems like Boiling Frog, which, by the way, the Boiling Frog, I asked an actual scientist about this, probably a psychopath himself. Anyway, he actually tested Boiling Frogs. Turns out, they just jump out of the hot water. They don't actually stay in there. That's a myth, but it's a good story anyway. The allegory is not true, but it is useful. How do we find out if these are being used on us? because, you know, look, if I'm dating somebody and they're really, really great, and then they start

being kind of crappy, I might think, like, oh, well, they're having a rough time at work, their life is stressful. This isn't how they've been for the first three months of the relationship. It's fine. And then, like, six months later, you know, your mom calls you and says, you're a different person. What's wrong? Oh, well, you know, we're hitting a rough patch in the relationship. And then, you know, you realize you haven't seen your best friend in seven months because your new girlfriend doesn't like him. And you're all your female friends that you were so close with for so many years, you haven't talked with them because she gets really jealous and, you know, she's really stressed. Like at some point, how do we wake ourselves up and go, holy crap, I'm isolated. This person

is nitpicking and breaking me down. And the relationship has been more crappy than it was good. But in the beginning, it was so good. And I remember that. You know, how do we sort of fight our own cognitive bias where we say, but in the beginning it was so great. And she is my soulmate or whatever garbage we're telling ourselves. How do we wake the freak up? Yeah, true. Very important point. you come with it. Well, I will use, let's say, the trust argument. Good sound relationships are based on trust, right? You have to trust each other. You have to trust your man or your woman or whatever. If you don't trust your partner, it's not going to work out. And trust means you can tell them your your inner secrets without them using them against you. You can ask them for help and they will

actually give you real help, you know, and all these things. And you can cry on the show. oldest and all of these things. But trust is, it has to be sort of fresh. Old trust is useless. You have to gain new trust every day. You have to sort of build a trust every day, every week, every month, every year, sort of showing that you are a trustworthy person. Well, let's say, why not every day? That you stand by your words, that you are trustworthy, that they can rely on you when you say you will come at eight, you will come at eight, and all these things. Because what you say, what you say here is it was so good before six months back, everything was brilliant, you know, and now it's just rubbish. You have to look at this. You don't have to step back and see, hmm, what's

happening here? And if the person hasn't been trustworthy for three months, then there's something wrong, you know. You can't base trust on what they did in January. Now you're in September, and everything is just gone completely south. You can't trust anybody who isn't trustworthy now. You have to be trustworthy all the time, right? That's something. something to look for, actually. And then you will see, he came up on time, you know. He picked me up when he said he should. Now he don't even bother to come at all, you know, but still, I think I love him or her. No, you don't. You are just getting used to the person. Go away, you know, just leave. You can't stay there. That's the toughest message to say, because people,

maybe you have one of those questions on your plan there, but what should you do? Well, leave. Just leave. There's nothing you can do. Leave. If it feels bad, it is bad. again. One thing I noticed that you mentioned in the book also is taking notes and documenting things to protect yourself and your sanity. I may have read that in something else you wrote and not the actual book itself, but taking notes to write down, because if you journal things, right, and then you, it's easier to get clarity in hindsight. If you notice that the first 90 days were really good in the last two years or three years were horrible, it's easier to then get clarity on that instead of saying, oh, well, most of the relationship is good. Well, is it?

Because every day you're writing in your journal about how tormented you are and how you, you know, there's tear drops that have smeared the ink on each of the pages. Maybe you don't have such a great relationship. You're just kind of succumbing to cognitive bias. To keep a journal is good. It's a sad thing to do because, as I said a couple of minutes ago, if you feel you need to take notes and record the conversations. Yeah. Something is wrong here. But let's say your journal every week or every day or whatever.

You have a diary maybe. The thing is usually people are using sort of self-defense mechanisms, let's say, to protect themselves from bad emotions. So therefore, you sort of sugarcoat the today. Today is really good. And you sort of tell you that this is good, this is great, this is so super, everything is fantastic. They look at the lovely house. We have my beautiful kids and so on. Okay, obviously, but still everything is good, you know.

If you look at the pages the week before and the week before that, you will see the pattern again. The tricky part is probably to start journaling things, to start to write things down. Probably you need a good friend to say you have to take notes, you know. But again, as you said, put a heart on all the good days. And then you put, I don't know, the crucifix on all the bad days or black heart or I don't know. A frowny face. But still again, now we are being rational. We have two guys thinking, okay, maybe we should do this and that.

And that's good advice. But rarely will somebody use this advice because it sounds so strange. weird thing to do. Have a journal about my relationship. What do you mean? I guess if you have a friend that you confide in, they could write down all the days where you call them. They don't even need to write it down. They can just put a frowny face on every day on the calendar, which you called them crying. And then one day they come over and they go, look at August, 23 days. Look at July. 19 days. You know, this guy is a bastard. I freaking tracked it. I've got, you know, a point by point. And then when they do their intervention with your mother and your sister and your brother-in-law or whatever,

you know, they've got something that isn't just their impressions and things that they remember. They've got, like, data. I don't know. It probably wouldn't work anyway, but it's better than nothing because... I'll vote for that, definitely. What if we feel like we're capable of some of this or we're using some of these techniques on our coworkers or our partners or our friends? Does it mean we're a psychopath or have psychopathic tendencies? I get letters like this on our feedback Friday inbox, our advice episodes.

Often people say things like, well, I'm very concerned about this and that and the other thing. Am I a narcissist? I want to make sure my team is taken care of and that I'm not hurting anyone. Am I a psychopath? My reply to that is usually something like, look, if you're that concerned with how people view you and you don't want to hurt their feelings and you want to make sure that they feel valued and you're valuable to your friends and family, you're probably not a narcissist or a psychopath who's too self-involved.

But I guess the question is, what's the difference between an unpleasant trait in someone's personality and a psychopath? I would say what's the meaning behind a certain action? I mean, if you mean to hurt somebody or you don't care, then you probably are a psychopath or some kind of manipulator. I mean, we all manipulate in a way. I take in the book the examples of a salesman. Somebody will like to sell you a car.

So he will try to say everything that makes the car look good and he will deal with all your bad answers and your bad reactions to these things, you know. but we know he's a salesman. We know that's his job. His job is to make us think that's the best car ever. It's sort of, it's on the table, you know. If you go to a doctor and he said, well, you need to lose some weight, you know. That's a good advice.

Okay, or you need to gain weight. You need to go to the gym and build some muscles or whatever. At the same time, I have this pills that I am actually producing and selling myself a little bit to the side, you know, buy my pills, you know. Now, where goes the line between good advice? or sort of making people think in a certain way and manipulation, the line is somewhere. And again, you need to be really, you need to pay attention because it's not so easy to see these things. But if you mean good but act in a bad way, that's better than to mean bad but act in a good way, if you know what I mean. The intention behind the act has to be sort of a, I mean, our proclivity to do good is there.

but sometimes we do bad things because we don't understand. We misread the situation. But if the intention is positive, I think we could get away with it and say, okay, I'm sorry, I misunderstood. I didn't mean that. I do apologize. If you mean bad, you will always do anything that goes, that makes you sort of win the game or come out with the upper hand or whatever.

Manipulation can be used by your old mother who would like you to make her more phone calls. nobody's calling me anymore. During lockdowns, everybody's gone, you know, nobody's visiting because they don't dare to come here, you know. So, oh, you have forgotten me. But how about dad? Oh, dad, yeah, him, yeah, all right.

So that's a kind of manipulation again. But still, she means good. She needs you, maybe you should call her more often, you know. That's okay. But if she says, you know, you never calls me and I think you hate me, that's bad because that's not true. Right.

She only wants to make you feel bad. But again, we need to look. for the patterns and the people closest to us, they are the most, I mean, all psychopaths have families, right? The psychopath within a family is the most dangerous one because we have to trust him or her because his family. The closest ones are the easiest that can fool us, you know. Those are the ones where, yeah, I think about this and I go, like, what if your brother's

a psychopath and he's like, let me take the kids to Disneyland? You're like, crap, I don't want to tell my brother that I can't give him my nephew and niece to go to Disneyland when he's trying to do a nice thing, but he's a freaking psychopath. So, like, do I really want to do that? I guess we all have to go to Disneyland so we can keep an eye on him. This sucks. I wasn't planning on doing that, you know. It's not a perfect system.

I mean, we can't control everything. Sure. But again, get the knowledge. You read the books, train yourself to look for these things and try to confront people with, let's say, disrespectful behaviors and call them out and say, hey, I think you're disrespectful. I understand if you have a bad day, but please tell me about it. it. I mean, practice these things. Confront people. Make it positive. I would like this relationship

to be a little bit better. Can we talk about it? If there's nothing to talk about here, you know, nothing to see here. Everything is perfect. Warning sign. Or, okay, we can talk. Let's have a conversation about these things and see what can come out of it. You can practice these things. And the thing is, the more you, they call them out, but the more you sort of, let's say in a positive way, confront somebody with things that you feel is a bit unpleasant. The more you practice this, the more self-assured you will be in those situations. And then you will probably, at the end of the day, have strengthened yourself. So now you can call the manipulator or the maybe psychopath out. Even though I don't recommend it, if it's a 40-point person on the list, is dangerous.

To clarify what you mean by a 40-point person on the checklist, in the book there is a checklist where you can essentially score some of the behavior of the people in your life. And if they're checking off a large number of those boxes, it might not be somebody you want to confront. You might just want to vanish from their life. But if it's a lower number, you might want to use it to see if maybe you can correct the behavior. Maybe they're just having a bad time. Maybe they don't handle their temper well because they were raised a certain way,

not necessarily a psychopath. Is there any good news here that we can leave people from? Because right now everyone's like, okay, so the world's a dangerous place. Everyone's out to get us. Everybody I know in love is a psychopath, potentially. Maybe I'm a psychopath. Thanks, Jordan. Great show.

You know, what can we leave people with it? They don't, that they feel better for having learned this instead of simply an ominous warning. Yeah, okay. How much time do we have ever? But the thing is this. Plenty. Psychopath can be used in society for good reason. I mean, let's take James Bond, right?

He's probably the most famous psychopath besides Hitler. Okay. Okay. Did he say James Bond? Yes, he actually did. again, he's a serial killer. He's a liar. He's extremely charming,

manipulative. He is a criminal. He would score pretty high on the checklist. But he's one of the good guys. We can use him for lethal situations and he will save the world a couple of more times before he retires. But the thing is, I am

not telling people to go around and be scared of talking to people or be afraid of things. Still, the psychopaths are a minority between two and four percent of the population. So you won't meet them every week or every month even, but they are out there. But it's like going,

I mean, it's like, you know, driving your car through a really heavy traffic, you know. It's dangerous to be in traffic. The heavier traffic, the more dangerous. But still, you don't keep yourself from using your car. You go out there, but you keep it, you pay attention. You look in the mirrors, you know, take a look to the sides, you know.

You look at the traffic lights, you know, and you observe the guy in the bicycle over there and that's an old lady with a, I don't know, three handbags and, you know, so you wait for her, you let her over, you know, and that car comes a little bit too close. You are aware. That's the same thing.

You have to be in the traffic as you have to be in the world, but you can be at least awake. Again, don't be naive. Use your common sense, even though that's not so common as people might think, having common sense, that is. Use your common sense and just, Be aware. Be awake and look around and see what happens. And if somebody's behaving bad,

we'll just increase the distance, you know. Don't take them too close. If you meet new people, it feels good. Fine. Go on another date, on another meeting. If they start to behave weird, you can just say, okay, thanks. That's about it for me, you know. Don't just take them too close. That's all I'm saying, because they are out there regardless that we are talking about it or not. Thomas Erickson, thank you so much. We'll link to the book, of course, surrounded by psychopaths and surrounded by idiots, in case you're also interested in the stupid people in your life. We'll link to that in the show notes.

Thanks so much for your time today. I know it's late over there as well in Sweden, so I'm glad that we were able to make this happen. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Pakistan was just one of the many bad things that happened to me. in my life. I've had so many things happen, and I just learned to get over it. You know, you get

knocked down six times. You get up seven. And that's the only way I've ever known how to live. When I got out of the cab with the suitcases to leave Pakistan, the guy who was there was like, next time you come back, we'll show you around, we'll hook you up with some girls, you'll have a great time. And I'm humoring this guy. I'm like, yeah, sure, next time I come back. I know for a fact. I'm never coming back to Pakistan. Country sucks. That fucking country sucks. And I'm good at finding like good things that are everywhere. So it's early in the morning, and I go, and I go, into international departures and a long line curving around the corner. I'm waiting in the line and the line goes all the way up this wall to where there's customs

tables. And when the customs officer sees me and flags me because I'm about six inches taller than everyone and I get brought to another room, finally the guy who asked me if there was narcotics in his suitcase comes in and he's holding these two sandwich sealed things and his exact words to me is, what is this? And I said, I don't fucking know what it is. Yeah, sure. He says, this is all film.

I said, why are you showing me this? Because it came out of your suitcase. Felt like such a fucking idiot. Yeah, because I thought that the DEA was going to hook me up, you know, because they were going to see that I'm innocent. I truly thought those guys are going to be there to help me now. Because I wasn't guilty, so this shit doesn't happen to innocent people. Three years of my life for a crime I didn't know I was being used to commit.

To hear the rest of one of the most harrowing stories I've ever heard in my time doing this podcast, check out episode 147 with Eric A'Day here on the Jordan Harbinger show. Man, I don't know what it is, but I just love me some psychopath talk. The stories in the book, by the way, are really sad and terrifying, just because of how manipulative some of these people are in the examples. Hypothetical or not, it's heart-wrenching. Psychopaths give and withhold praise in order to manipulate. But not everyone who uses these manipulation techniques is a psychopath. Some people are just damaged assholes. I think we already knew that, right? Psychopaths, by the way, they totally understand how we feel. Okay, it's a misconception to think that

psychopaths don't have emotions or that they don't understand the feelings of others. They do. They just don't care. Let that chill travel slowly up your spine, right? Now, we wear our seatbelt, we do a good job at work, we eat healthy, we work out, but we do nothing to protect ourselves against psychopaths. Why? Why? Is it because we don't want to believe that they're so common? Is that why? Or maybe we just didn't know they are until now. By the way, if you're easily flattered or you're looking for shortcuts in life to make easy money, you are especially vulnerable to psychopaths. I see this all the time online, these fake gurus going after the young and going after the vein. It's very, very common. Younger or less educated people fall in for these scams by people who are obvious

psychopaths. Think about those guys you see in YouTube ads all the time or Instagram ads selling their dumb real estate courses. I'm pointing, yes, it's the one you're thinking about. I won't mention names, but if you're falling for real estate investment scams or drop shipping scams online from these big name wannabe gurus, you're likely dealing with the psychopath. You've heard me talk about these guys. By the way, if you haven't heard the CoffeeZilla episode where me and CoffeeZilla, the YouTuber, take down and dismantle the guru scams, we'll link to that in the show notes. That's a good one. Search for CoffeeZilla in our feed. You won't regret it. You'll know exactly who we're talking about. Psychopathy also cannot be cured. It's a conunded.

condition of the brain. Therapy often makes things worse with psychopaths. They tend to calm down over the years. That's all we got. As they get older, they tend to just sort of chillax a little, thankfully, but it doesn't mean that they're not dangerous. If you run into one or you know one, distance yourself. Any contact you have with a psychopath, it's always on their terms, unless it's through bars, okay, they're in prison. These people are full-time manipulators. You can't keep up with them. You can't compete with them. You can't make the relationship normal. It is a disorder. And remember, the psychopath's real personality is the abusive one that you see now.

If you're dealing with one, you know what I'm talking about. It's not the charming personality that they used to snare you. That is fake. It's a tool to accomplish the goal of getting you to trust them. So there's a lot of people that think, I just want the old you back. That was never you. It's like meeting someone on Halloween and being like, I just, I miss when you were a kangaroo. I miss when you were Pokemon.

They were never Pokemon. It was a costume. The sooner you realize this, the better. And no, you can't just go back to the way things were before that person changed. The person you thought you were with before never existed, right? They were Pokemon. Okay, it was a facade. That person built for appearances to earn your trust and get into your circle.

I'll tell you from personal experience, I was in business with somebody who was probably not a psychopath, but was extremely manipulative. Not just with me, but with his girlfriends, with all of our staff and employees, he would use a lot of these techniques we heard here on the show on people, like making them think that they were senile or misremembering something or claiming he didn't say something even when he did, just straight up gaslighting. I finally started to regain some sanity when I hired an assistant who took notes on every conversation. Then later on I would check with my assistant to see if it was me who was crazy or what? And my assistant, who by the way had a great memory for detail,

would refer to her notes and find that not only did he misremember some things or claim that we misremembered something, but the story was completely different, not just one shade of different, but completely and totally different, often the opposite of what he had said, often the real version of events was totally in a different direction. And this kept happening in the business, setting people up to fail and yelling at them for failing. And it was really a mystery. You don't have to have enough money to hire an assistant.

What I do suggest here is taking notes. So when someone says, hey, this is up and this is down, and you write it down and you're very clear. And then later on they say, what's wrong with you, you idiot? yet that's not up and down. You can really look back and go, no, no, no, I wrote this out at the time. So now I know I'm not crazy, because these people will gaslight you until you feel like you can't even trust yourself. Further, this person I was in business with would never solve the problem. He would just keep abusing people and berating them for not getting something right. It always

mystified me why he would not want to solve the problem. I'd say, if this person is so bad, fire them. If this situation is so bad, stop contributing to it. If this company we're working with is so bad, let's fire them and get another vendor. Until I started looking at this as manipulation and abuse and not simply bad corporate governance, it made no sense. But once I realized he was a manipulative person and an abusive person, then it all clicked and it all made sense. You don't want to fix the problem when you are the one creating the problem in the first place so that you can control other people. Solving the problem defeats the purpose of setting up their regime of control in the first place. You don't fire someone or solve the problem.

because then you just have to start over manipulating and breaking down a new person who takes their place. And so once I started looking at this guy as a classic manipulator, I got a lot more clarity. And I also felt a lot worse for his girlfriends and people who were in a relationship with him as well because they were dealing with this guy every day and they were thinking it was their fault. Further, psychopaths usually pounce on people who are having a rough time because those people are more vulnerable and easier to manipulate. So if you're going through something or your self-confidence has taken a hit, now is the time to be especially vigilant against psychopaths and other people that might try to take advantage of you.

So if you just got out of a breakup or you just got fired or something like that, not the best time to jump into a relationship with somebody who's trying to move the relationship quickly or seems like they might be a little bit shady. You've got to be very, very careful here. Of course, the problem is when you're vulnerable, you are less careful, almost by definition. So, look, it's maybe not even good to have these people in our orbit because even if we're not vulnerable now, having them around us just positions them to wait until the right moment to pounce and then they've already got access to us. So that's a little bit of psychopath self-defense there.

Last but not least, look, many high-level people are psychopaths. They make important decisions for everyone in the world, for everyone in their country, for everyone in their business. We can't really do anything about that. But we can, and we should, keep our own backyard clean. Thanks to Thomas Erickson, the book title is surrounded by psychopaths. We'll link to that in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy the book. That always helps support the show. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts of the episode in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube at Jordan Harbinger.com.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also find me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with

great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is always free. That's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig the well before you get Thursday. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast 1. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogartie, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabe Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you Share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know someone who's dealing with a psychopath or you suspect they're dealing with a

psychopath or maybe they're dealing with somebody at work that's driving them crazy, they're in a relationship with somebody who's a little suss, share this with them. I hope you find something great in every episode of this show. We work real hard on this, so please do share the show with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time.

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