The Jordan Harbinger Show - 767: Sohom Das | Decoding Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, and Anna Delvey

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

Dr. Sohom Das (@dr_s_das) is a consultant forensic psychiatrist who works in prisons and criminal courts to assess and rehabilitate mentally ill offenders. He is the author of In Two Minds: Stories of Murder, Justice, and Recovery From a Forensic Psychiatrist.  What We Discuss with Dr. Sohom Das: How was fake heiress Anna Delvey (aka Anna Sorokin) able to convince even the savviest New York social elites that she was one of them and gain access to their checkbooks? The numerous non-violent ways psychopaths act out to exploit others for their own gratification. Is social influencer Andrew Tate mentally a 12-year-old playground bully in the body of a former professional kickboxer, or is he just playing a caricature of one for fun and profit?  Why InfoWars honcho Alex Jones can't resist peddling provably false conspiracy theories even though it's bankrupting his media empire down to the rivets. Are narcissists psychopaths? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/767 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Did you hear our conversation with Paul Holes, the former investigator known for his contributions to solving the Golden State Killer case using advanced methods of identification with DNA and genealogy technology? Catch up with episode 725: Paul Holes | Solving America’s Cold Cases here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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out of you. So don't wait. Get this offer before it ends on December 25th. Visit one peloton.com. All access membership separate. Offer ends December 25th cannot be combined with other offers. See additional terms at one peloton.com. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Sociopaths tend to, they're a lot more reactive and they're a lot more impulsive so they can't contain their emotions as well as a psychopath can. So if you piss off a psychopath, they won't react necessarily at that time. They will sort of harbor onto this resentment and they will wait for the best time to get their revenge. So their revenge is a dish that's definitely served cold,

whereas a sociopath is a lot more likely to snap at that moment. They can't contain themselves, and they can't sort of plot their revenge. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists,

even the occasional Russian chess grandmaster, arms dealer, extreme athlete, or gold smuggler, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs as a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like disinformation and cyber warfare, abnormal psychology, technology and futurism, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start,

for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, back on the show for a little bit of a round two, Shaham Das, Dr. Shaham Das, he assesses mentally disordered criminal defendants for a living, so we don't have to. In other words, are the people who commit horrible crimes insane and in need of treatment, or are they just horrible people who deserve to be in prison? You don't have to go through part one. It's not mandatory if you want to hear that first. You will have more context about Dr. Das and who he is, what he does, how he knows what he knows about criminal minds if you do. But today, we're going to go over some famous criminal cases that have been in the news lately and see what Chahan thinks about the criminal mindset. Are they bad or are they mad, so to

speak? And what disorders make people behave in these seemingly bizarre and unconscionable ways? We're going to cover Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who had his followers harassed the parents of school shooting victims, Andrew Tate, one of the most hated men on the internet, I guess you'd say, online influencer, I guess you'd call him, and Anna Delvey, that con artist of inventing Anna fame, if you've seen that on Netflix, who ran around New York defrauding people, and finally got thrown in prison and deported. So I want to know what is wrong with these people, what causes them to behave the way that they do? And let's hear it from a professional instead of just my armchair take. Now here we go, round two with Dr. Shaham Das.

I wanted to get some more time with you because, well, we've got a lot of, I'm going to say psychopaths, but really, we don't know. That's what we're going to talk about today. We've got a lot of bad people or possibly just mad people, so crazy, or I should say mentally disturbed people, I should be a little bit probably more compassionate when talking about these folks. We picked some bastards so that we don't have to be as compassionate. Let's start with Anna or Anna Delvey. For people who don't know who she is, I followed this like crazy. I binged slash hate watched the Netflix series inventing Anna, which is about her. How do we sum her up, man? She's a con artist that ripped through New York pretending to be a German princess, which in itself is hilarious

because she did not have a German accent. And it was really obvious, even from anybody who served a stereotyped German accent, that this was a Russian accent and not a German accent at all. And then she just ran through and conned investors out of money and didn't pay for hotels and conned her friends out of money. It wasn't very sophisticated. And yet somehow, she managed to scam people out of hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of dollars. She certainly came across as very credible. I think that's the thing that stands out to me, comparing her to most, your average kind of con artist,

is that people believed her. Many, many people believed her over a long period of time. She had all these lies about how she had this massive trust fund. She was very rich, but she couldn't access the money because she was in the States. And, yeah, so you've got to give a props. There's got to be something about her personality and a presentation that she's just able to convince people.

There does have to be something. And that's the thing. Of course, what I did as a guy or as a human, The first thing I did was look her up and I went, this very not special looking, not particularly friendly looking, not very bubbly looking, not fun looking. This is just a person that doesn't look interesting, doesn't look special at all in photos, somehow managed to in person be so charming and so disarming that she managed to con people out of all this money in New York.

This isn't like, she didn't go to some small town where people trust everybody at first glance and get people to drop off a couple hundred bucks, she conned notable bankers and investors in Manhattan who you'd think would have enough street smarts to be like, nope, not this one, she just ran over them. It was unbelievable. What's going on here? The thing that really stood out to me

when I first heard about her and her personality traits was that she could potentially be a psychopath. So you've already mentioned psychopath in this court, I think it's often overused and overdiagnosed. It is, yeah. So I'll tell you very briefly what psychopath is and then I'll tell you why I think she fits into that profile perfectly. So psychopaths, I think we did talk about this briefly, didn't we, in part one?

We did, and I've done a bunch of shows about psychopaths, but here's the thing. People might have listened to it a month ago or never, so we can go ahead and redefine psychopath just in case this is someone's first time hearing it or they need a refresher. I could use it myself, frankly. And you're right, we do overuse this term. It's like, nowadays you see somebody put too much salt on their food or put, I don't know, too much hot sauce on a burrito and it's like, what a psychopath. This guy's weird as hell. It's a, it's a, it's a, We've completely lost all meaning of this particular word, diagnosis, definition, whatever. So I think that people assume that it's anybody who's either a bit unhinged or anybody who's

aggressive. And I think the term psycho is often kind of misconstrued with psychotic, which is completely different. That's, you know, a mental illness. A psychopath is an extreme personality disorder. So psychopaths are impulsive. They completely lack empathy. They kind of see everybody as an opportunity to take advantage of. So they might be close to people, they might be married, they might have kids, they might even have friends,

but they see everybody as like a stepping stone to achieve something. And I think that perfectly sums up Anadelvie because she even conned her own friends or people that she seemed to show affection towards and she even ripped them off to the point that I think one of her friends helped in the sting operation that got her arrested.

Uh-huh, interesting. So if I'm friends with a con artist and I've known him since middle school and he's just a son of a gun, he may not con me or if he does, he'll feel really bad about doing it. But if we go to Walmart and he tricks them into giving him a, I don't know, a bunch of the money out of the till, he's just going to say, screw it. It's a big company, who cares? And that's good old con artist's buddy from middle school. So I see.

But a psychopath just says, screw it. If I'm able to con you, you deserve it. And you shouldn't even, I can't even feel bad about it. And neither should you. Or who cares how you feel. Yeah. And everybody in their orbit is somebody that they will happily rip off, or take advantage of, not necessarily rip off, but take advantage of. And that's why psychopaths tend

to, they usually have quite a lot of friends, but they change their circle of friends. It's always very fluid because once they've kind of squeezed everything out of you that they can, then they move on to something else. There's no reason for them to hang out with you or to be friends with you anymore if they can't get anything from you. Also, I would imagine, if you join my circle of 10 close friends and you screw over one of them really bad by taking their car and selling it illegally. We're all going to find out and none of us are ever going to talk to you again. So then you've got to go use your charm on another circle of friends until you do something stupid or psychopathic and ruin that as well. So it's funny because of course, whenever I hear

about these things, I start looking at people, and I'm sure you hear this all the time, you start looking at people in your life who did you dirty or did someone in your circle dirty and you're like, what happened to that person? Are they still going from person to person or circle to circle and just burning it. I have people I've known like this where now it's like, why is so-and-so living in Thailand now? Oh, let me guess. He's out there meeting new people to rip off, and then he's going to buy a ticket to Hawaii and stay there for six months until he's run out of town, and then he's going to buy a ticket to China and get in with the expat community there until people find out he's a no-good leech. And I just, I see these guys, and it's been 15 years

since I've known them and I look at their Facebook profile and they're still doing, they still appear to be doing the same crap. Yeah. They just never settled. And the irony I think is, is that because part of the characteristics of a psychopath is being superficially charming, they're actually very good at it. So they're not, you know, shy, reserve people. And Anadelvie is exactly like this.

She can, you know, insert herself into a new group of people and kind of just camouflage herself really well into social circles. So I think one thing I remember reading about Anadelvie is that she would throw these big parties and she would invite some, like, socialites. And sometimes they were a bit confused about why they were being invited, because they barely knew her. They'd literally met her once. And she was talking about them and treating them as if they were all, like,

really close friends. And she did this constantly, so she had this massive social circle. And this is interesting, of course, because what this would do is, if I invite a socialite and another socialite and they kind of know each other or maybe they don't know each other that well, they're in different circles, one's a banker and one's, I don't know, a fashion mogul, if I'm treating them both like close friends and they see me doing that, they just assume that I'm actually close friends with the other person.

And even though I'm doing the same thing to them at the same time, they are going, oh, well, this is unusual the way she's treating me, but look how close she is with all these other people. And then you just think, oh, well, I'm just being very welcomed into this particular high value circle, which is hilarious and so naive. And I would totally fall for this as well, I think. It's funny because you can see it happening in front of your face and then happen to you and you just nod there, sit there and you nod and you smile like a dummy,

because this is what she does professionally, essentially, is trick people like this. Absolutely. So you might be interested to know there's something called a psychopathy checklist, which is like a formal test, a psychopath test. Have you heard about this? Yeah, is it the PCR or something like that? Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, PCR. So that psychopathy checklist revised.

So it's got 20 items. I won't go through them all, but I've picked out a few that I think. Do the fun ones. Yeah. Okay, so I've got a little note here. So just so your viewers know, what happens is that you score somebody from zero, one or two on every single point. So you got a score range from either zero or 40. And there's a cutoff point.

So in the UK, it's 25. In America, it's 30 to become a clinical psychopath. So that's the kind of test that forensic psychiatrists such as myself would use. Obviously, in real life, we'd get lots of different information from different sources. The patient would usually be an inpatient in a secure unit and would have all of their medical notes, history, like hospital notes. We might even speak to their family members, speak to them, obviously, maybe even speak to their victims. So we get lots of information from lots of different sources, sources, to get as much coverage

as we can. Obviously, I can't do that with Anna. Yeah, you can't do that with Anna. But this makes sense because I always wondered, and I've actually taken the PCR on another show that comes out after this one. That's specifically about psychopaths. I think it's the American version, although I'm not sure. I'll leave my results as a surprise, or not very surprising reveal.

But the idea that somebody would answer these honestly if they were actually being analyzed, that was what sort of bugged me because I'm thinking, who goes, yeah, I'm sexually promiscuous and I have behavioral problems and I always have as a child. And yes, I have a very parasitic lifestyle. And I don't feel empath. I mean, you just never answer this. You do have to, it seems like you do have to get this from their partner, mom, dad, childhood friends, people that they live and work with. Otherwise, you're never going to be able to assess this person. Because of course they're going to lie to you. Why would that? they tell you the truth. They're a psychopath. Maybe. I think you're right in the vast majority of cases, Jordan. I think I can think of one or two cases where I felt that a psychopath has been truthful. And the reason I think is because they've been stuck in either the prison system or within psychiatric units for most of their adult lives to the point that they actually want an answer. Interesting. So they've probably been used to being slippery and a bit crafty and potentially lines and clinicians for years. And then, you know, 15 years down the line, they're like, look, I'm still in and out of prison.

Maybe there is something in this. Maybe I am a psychopath and maybe it would be helpful to get that diagnosis, so I get the right sort of treatment form. But it is very rare. It only happens very occasionally. Yeah, let's talk about some of these characteristics of a psychopath. Cool. So the ones that stand out to me immediately are sort of being glib, being grandiose.

So that's, you know, thinking of yourself highly compared to others, like a need for stimulation. So like constantly being bored, pathological liar, being cunning and manipulative. So all of these absolute bond. and Adelvie. And then you mentioned one yourself actually, there's a parasitic lifestyle. So they leach off other people. Yeah, usually financially, but it can be, in other ways it can be sexually, it can be in

terms of status. Lack of remorse, a callous lack of empathy. And they don't have to be violent, right? This is just somebody who sleeps in your house and doesn't leave and eats your food and never pays and then borrow something without telling you and maybe sells it and then lies about all of the above and then talks about how they have these giant plans. I mean, Anna Delvey's thing was she was going to start some art center or whatever and she wanted to buy a building. And then she lied about actually buying the building to get the investment money from the other investors.

And it's just a whole bunch of nonsense. They don't believe this stuff, though, right? They don't believe this. They're just lying to get their way and they don't care about the consequences. Is that accurate? Yeah. So I'm going to address a couple of things there. So first of all, about whether they have to be violent or not.

So you're absolutely right. They don't have to be violent, but they do tend to be quite criminally versatile. So even if they've never, if they're not violent like Anna Delvey, they are good at having lots of different schemes. So some of it might be like literally stealing credit card fraud. Some of it might be stealing cars. Some of it might be like sexual offences. So they tend to have a history of not very serious offences. I'm not talking, you know, attempted murder or murder generally.

There are some exceptions, obviously, but they have like a history of lots of repeated small kind of offending. And then your second question was whether they believe it or not. I think when they tell a direct lie, then they don't believe their lies. They know that they're lying, so they're in control of their actions. But I think they have this almost delusional self-confidence. So somebody like Anna Delvey, I imagine that even though she knew she was lying about being a German heiress and having access to the trust fund, I think on balance she probably had enough confidence in herself that at some point she would make all this money, and at some point she would become this kind of, you know, successful millionaire entrepreneur.

or so she doesn't believe the lies, but she probably believes in her own hype a bit too much. So what I wonder what percentage of entrepreneurs actually have a lot of these same characteristics, possibly are psychopaths, and have just been successful in what they do because they did think big and then they did create the killer app that changed the world of, I don't know, transportation in some way. And now they feel, of course, like they are this genius that made it happen. Right? Like, what's the real difference between a psychopath who's delusional and a psychopath who's just a really bad leader is the level of success they've had in whatever endeavor that they've tried.

Yeah, yeah. So it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I suppose the other difference is that a entrepreneur who's just got a massive motivation and won't be knocked down won't necessarily take advantage of other people, whereas a psychopath has all of those traits. I see. Plus would take advantage of people, like, you know, would lie to people just to get the investment. So they would lie about how well their app has been doing so far in a very credible manner

to get more investment. Well, we see that a lot. I mean, have you heard of this fire fest debacle, Billy McFarland? Have you heard of this guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he went to prison not because the event didn't work. He went to prison because he lied to the investors primarily, right? He just said, sure, yeah, this is already set. And this band has already confirmed. You know, meanwhile, he just heard that that band had completely canceled and they were not going to come because the stage was not set up properly or whatever. And he just did a bunch of that. And then when he went to prison, he wasn't supposed to have certain development. like recording devices. I know you spend some time working in prisons. It wasn't supposed to have a recording device, but he had a hidden pen recording device, and he was using that to record notes because he was going to write a memoir or is a flash drive or something like that. He was going to write a memoir, so I was like, that's a little grandiose. You're 27 or something like that. You've done one thing that failed spectacularly, and you're writing a book about it. Okay. And so he got caught with that,

and then he got thrown into another prison slash solitary. And then he comes and does an episode with yours truly, does an interview with me here for episode 422. And it turns out that he had told or pulled some scheme that said that he was calling his attorney and he was borrowing phone time from other inmates and yada, yada, yada. And he did the interview with me in pieces on ABC News and on this show, again, episode 422. And they find out about that, obviously. And they throw him in solitary confinement for something like six months for just breaking

the rules over and over and over again. And he gets out of prison. and now he immediately starts another business called the pirate crew. It's got something to do with scavenger hunts and there's events, of course, attached to it. And I'm just thinking, you know, this guy has so much motivation. ABC did a follow-up interview with me after he got out of prison, or was about to get out of prison. What do you think of him? He's going to start a business.

He's right on the line, right? He's like a real go-getter. He's a real motivated guy. He's a real, got a lot of entrepreneurial ideas. but he just kind of can't help himself. He can't just do a job working for somebody who's on the straight and narrow and learn the ropes of all this stuff.

He's got to just go far into left field and say it's going to be the next big thing and always have the clicks. It sort of rubs me a little bit like this. I don't want to diagnose somebody who I interviewed once who has been nothing but nice to me, but it strikes me as a little odd

that a lot of these things seem to line up. The other thing that stands out to me about Billy McFarland is that if I've got this correct, whilst he was on bail for being investigated for the fire festival, he had another con. Right. I forgot about that. Selling these fake ticket experiences.

Yeah. And there was a famous pop star. I can't remember if it was maybe Miley Cyrus or Hannamintan. I can't remember who it was. But he had on his website, one of the prizes was like a one-to-one session or sit-down meal with this pop star and she saw it. And she kind of alerted the authority saying, you know, I know nothing about this. And then he got caught for that, which is, again, I can't really diagnose him.

I don't know enough about him, but it is typical of a psychopath because one of the factors of the PCLR is revocation of conditional release, which basically means you don't learn from your lessons. So he's on bail already in trouble, and he just goes straight back to committing another scam. And like you're saying, he's just done it serially. He never learns his lesson. He doesn't have any fear of the law. There's a famous quote from him, I'm not going to jail. And, well, we know how that worked out.

Although I think a lot of criminals probably do say that, especially when it's white collar stuff, they probably think, of course, I'm not going to jail. I'm going to just weasel my way out of this. I've done it before, and I'm, you know, I haven't killed anyone. But you're right. I forgot all about his bail scam where he's out on bail from the Fire Fest event, and he was selling tickets to something called the Metball, which is not something you can buy tickets for.

It's you have to be a super relevant, famous cultural figure globally, usually, but usually also possibly in and around New York, and you get invited to this. And it's like, Lady Gaga goes there. They probably invite somebody like the. first lady, whoever the wife of the president is, a bunch of New York billionaire type people, pop stars. You cannot buy a ticket to this, at least not out in the open market. I don't think invites are transferable at all anyway. And yeah, and he's just got some dumb kid calling people up off the internet and offering to sell them these tickets and getting deposits and taking the money.

And it's like, what are you doing? People are watching you with scrutiny. And this is the racket you choose this transparent con. And they filmed it. They filmed themselves doing it, which I don't know if that's psychopathy in action, but it's certainly stupidity in action. It is very stupid. I mean, suppose at a stretch you could say that it plays into his narcissism. So psychopaths are, by definition, narcissistic as well.

But I have to ask, what was he like when you interviewed him? What kind of vibe did you get off him? Did you find him charming? There's some part of me that feels kind of like a prick talking negatively about a guest that I've had on the show. That said, he is guilty of the crimes that. he has been, you know, he went to trial and was found guilty of these particular crimes. And I think my honest opinion here, and a lot of people have asked me about this, is I said this

even in the episode, the first couple of calls, because we had to do the interview over a series of calls, because again, it wasn't even supposed to be allowed. It was just a series of calls that I think he said were with his attorney or something like that or personal phone calls. The first call, all he did, and the first few calls, all he did, and you can hear it in the episode, was basically recite what sounds like a memorized or written script that is an apology of sorts. It was very obvious. Then when we got through that, I was able to ask real questions. He had some scripted answers to some of them, which I understand when you are convicted of a crime.

You maybe don't want to admit more crimes when you're already in prison, so there's that. But it came across as, I would say, not super extra charming. I don't think he's a not charming or not nice guy or had a bad. personality or anything like that. But it wasn't particularly like, you know, Jordan, you're such a smart, interesting guy, blah, blah, he was kind of just normal. It wasn't what you would expect when you meet a psychopath and they're just trying to sweep you off their feet. I've met a couple of cult leaders in Los Angeles. They do this whole thing where they play to your ego and it's actually ridiculous. There's a guy that I met and I really don't want to identify him, but he was a leader of a

self-help cult in Los Angeles. And we were at a party and a couple of my friends were in his little self-help cult. And one of the women, she played the harp, and the harp was in the room at the party. And I said, can I try that? Because who the hell gets to play a dang harp? I mean, the thing is taller than me. It was amazing. Probably costs like $30,000. I wanted to try it. So he's sitting there, and he's like, look at the way Jordan's fingers strum the harp. He's naturally so gifted at this and this and this and this. And I thought, I don't know this guy. I just met this guy. He knows that I have a pot. show that he probably wants to be on because it'll increase his self-help cult recruitment stuff. He's already tried to get people at the party to tell me to have him on the show in a very

transparent way that he tried to make look like wasn't him doing it. And now he's complimenting me in this way that he thinks I'm not aware of, but having studied cults and manipulation, it was just really obvious. Billy was not like that, right? It wasn't this sort of ham-handed charm. it was actually just, he was very normal for a guy calling me from a prison phone. Anna Delvey strikes me as somebody who could really turn it on if they need to. Billy McFarlane doesn't. I bet he's a great sales guy. I doubt he's got the type of charm where you would say,

I got to invite this guy to my son's wedding. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I suppose when I was, you know, I don't think either of us can confidently say that Billy McFarlane is a psychopath and there is a speculation here. But just to play devil's advocate, if he was, then it could be the reason. that he wasn't laying on the charm with you during the podcast of recording that you did

could simply be because there's no reason. He's got nothing, he's already on your show, so there's nothing further to manipulate. And it could help his self-image if he tried to be a little bit, come across a little bit humble because he's, you know, been arrested for these crimes and he is in prison. There was a lot of humility. Yeah. Yeah, but it was, there was a lot of, I should say, sort of scripted humility. And I want to say false humility, but there was very much the, I am guilty of lying to my investors, and I am contrite about this. and I have replayed what I would do over and over in the time that I have spent in prison where I have definitely learned my lesson.

Like there was a lot of that. And you're right, I think it would look bad if he was too slick and too unbothered because it's like, well, wait a minute, you're in prison for fraud, and you sound like you're on vacation in Cancun. Maybe you need to stay in prison a little bit longer. Exactly. So it could be that he was just kind of assessing the situation. And instead of manipulating you as a person, he's just manipulating the situation,

which is, I've got a bit of a platform. Let me try and look contrient. and let me try and look sort of humbled and remorseful, and that's the best thing that I can do at this point. Whereas in another set of circumstances, if he met you at a party, then he might have laid the charm on on you. I guess we'll never know. Well, we might know because there's a very good chance, unless he hears this particular episode, there's a very good chance that I would end up at a party with Billy McFarland because the way that I got that interview in the first place, those connections are still in place and in play. And I actually had a couple of opportunities to

interview him after he got out. I just, I think there's no juice left to squeeze. Speaking of people who are using others for their personal gain, there's no juice left for me to squeeze out of that particular interview guest. I, no, that's not necessarily true. I think for me, I just didn't want to platform the new business venture, whatever it is, because it's not really what I do on the show. And also, hey, maybe there's going to be a problem with that too. Do I need to be complicit in that not necessarily? So maybe I should take that psychopath test one more time. But, and, and, and, Anna Delvey, going back to inventing Anna, Anna Delvey here, she really did have, of course, the parasitic lifestyle.

She really did use everyone. There's no notes on her being sexually promiscuous. Maybe we just don't know. We don't know about her early behavioral problems either because her parents in Germany, I guess, are not talking about that to their credit. But she certainly was a pathological liar. And she certainly got bored all the time, vacations, parties, big things, all on someone else's dime all the time.

Yeah. So I can't say any better than that. There's a certain number of traits that she's. hasn't shown. I'm surprised that she didn't try to be sexually promiscuous. I mean, I suppose there's a possibility that she could have done, but it's not in the public domain. Psychopaths usually use all the tools at their disposal, but you're right. She wasn't particularly promiscuous. She didn't have lots of short-term relationships as far as we know. And as you say, there was no problems that we know about in her early childhood. So those are elements of the psychopath test that she

wouldn't score highly on or score on at all. But I think, I mean, this is a whole other conversation. I think some parts of the psychopath test itself is quite flawed because it gives you. It's a gives equal weighting to a lot of different things, some of which I don't think of that relevant. Interesting, right. So you can score low or high on certain characteristics that maybe skew the results of the test. Absolutely. So I'll give you a couple of specific examples. So sexually promiscuous and a number of short-term marriages are both items. But if you're not that, then you could lose a potential four points. So there's impulsivity is one of the items, and poor behavioral control is another one. Okay. So they're not exactly the same thing. So impulsivity is

is literally not being able to control yourself in that moment. So you make a rash decision. Sometimes you might regret it afterwards. Whereas poor behavioural control is more about long-term decisions, but there's still bad decisions, if that makes sense. So it's not a decision that you've suddenly made on the spot. It's something that you choose to do repeatedly throughout your life, but it's still something that hurts other people or maybe even hurts you.

But the point I'm trying to make is I, again, I think they're too similar, factors, two similar categories in the psychopath test. So I think it could skew the results. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Shaham Das. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these folks for the show, it's always about the network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free in a non-gross, non-shmoozy way.

Course is free, jordanharbinger.com slash course. It's about improving your relationship-building skills and inspiring other people to develop a relationship with you. And again, the course does all that in a non-cringy, down-to-earthway, no awkward strategies, no cheesy tactics, just practical exercises that are designed to make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer, six minutes a day, that's all it takes, and many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us.

You'll be in smart company. Once again, you can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Dr. Shaham Das. Why short-term marital relationships? What if I'm just a guy who goes around otherwise psychopath that goes around banging everything in sight to get what I want, but I never get married? I score a zero for many short-term marital relationships. That makes no sense at all.

It makes no sense to me as well. That's one of my criticisms of the psychopath tests. I see. Yeah, it's almost like that was written in the 60s where everybody just got married. And it's like, well, wait a minute. What if I just decide to ruin other people's marriages? I score a zero like I'm some kind of angel for that one.

And it gives my results on this test. Yeah, no, I totally agree. And then just to give a bit of closure about Anadelvie, so I just read before I call that she's, you know, she's out and she's on house arrest and she's making money. So she is throwing a party in Miami and she's selling lots of paintings. This is only a few days ago. She's under house arrest, so she couldn't physically attend, but she attended via Zoom.

The point I'm trying to make is that she's out there and she's, you know, being entrepreneurial still after everything that's happened. I mean, I'm going to note that because somebody like that probably can't say no to coming on the Jordan Harbinger show and talking about what they're doing in life. I would love to talk to Anna Delvey. Let's go ahead and write that down. I bet she's reachable, even if her lawyer doesn't want her to be. I bet she's very, very reachable, especially somebody with a blue check. checkmark on Instagram. All right. It makes me feel weird admitting this because I'm like, I'm going to manipulate this person into coming on the show. But on the other hand, I'm also like,

you know what, though, you are a predator and I almost don't care. It's like, hey, I'll live in your world for a minute. Maybe I should take that psychopath test one more time. Did I say that already? Let's talk about, before we move on to Andrew Tate, psychopath versus sociopath versus narcissist, there's definitely got to be a difference here, but I honestly have no idea what those differences are. Okay, I can answer that question. So I'll start off with narcissist because it's probably the least complex of those three diagnoses. So a narcissist is somebody who's quite sort of grandiose, so they have an inflated sense of being important. They're very critical of other people, and they're quite envious. They get angry themselves if they feel that anybody's kind of criticizing them.

So they're quite, I wouldn't say paranoid, but they're very sensitive, so they're very easily slighted. So a psychopath is all of those things. So all psychopaths are narcissists. plus they are conning and charming and manipulative. Gotcha. So narcissists are not necessarily those things, but if you put the narcissism plus the ability to con other people and the charm to do it, all of those things together is a psychopath. Gotcha, okay.

And we did a big double episode on narcissism with Dr. Romney, episode 742, 743. Those were hugely popular. Once you listen to those, you will have a full primer on narcissism. But yeah, you're right. Psychopathy has that almost additional element of just extra horrible predatory behavior. on top of the grandiose me, me, me behavior of a narcissist.

What about a sociopath? Because I've had people write in and yell at me that we don't use the word psychopath anymore. One star review, your show sucks because you're not supposed to say psychopath. It's derogatory. And here we are. No, I completely disagree with that. So psychopath is a clinical term that is used in forensic psychiatry, for example. Sociopath is more of a social term.

And psychopath is defined. So I've already told you about the psychopath test. So if you asked 10 forensic psychiatrists what a psychopath is, all of them will say pretty much the same thing. Whereas sociopath, because it's a less formal phrase, if you ask 10 different people what sociopath is, you might get slightly different answers because it's not as well defined. But the difference is that sociopaths tend to,

they're a lot more reactive and they're a lot more impulsive, so they can't contain their emotions as well as a psychopath can. So if you piss off a psychopath, they won't react necessarily at that time. They will sort of harbor onto this resentment, and they will wait for the best time to get their revenge. So their revenge is a dish that's definitely served cold, whereas a sociopath is a lot more likely to snap at that moment. They can't contain themselves, and they can't sort of plot their revenge.

A psychopath's really good at slipping into society. So again, going back to Anna Delvey, she's really good at being a comedian and being and presenting herself, however she needs to be so that she can carry on, kind of going up the hierarchy of these socialites. Right. Whereas a sociopath is not very good at doing that. They tend to live on the fringes of society.

So they tend to be, you know, like gangsters or thugs or people that don't fit in. So their sociopaths are easier to spot psychopaths are far slippery. Gotcha. Okay. That's interesting. So when we think sociopath, we might think of the person who you step on their foot at a nightclub and they've had two beers or zero beers and they start mercilessly pounding the person next to you because they assumed that that was that person who did it and they must have done it

for a reason, yada, yada. You see these people especially popping off in prisons and street violence and things like because of the impulse control, whereas like you said, the psychopath might be in prison because they were a nurse in a surgery somewhere, and they killed patients by overdosing them with medication slowly over periods of decades before getting caught. There's different types of behavior. Absolutely. So if you're using the prison analogy, your sociopath in prison would be exactly what you said. So there'd be like the head thug or the leader of a particular gang is clear that they're in charge, whereas your psychopath might be somebody like Billy McFarlane who's kind of

playing the system and conning the other inmates to use their telephone time, but doing it really subtly so that nobody even really realizes what he's doing. Yeah, that's funny. That was what was going on. I don't know exactly how he got this other guy's phone time, but he got this other guy's phone time, and he got a lot of it. And he used it on my show, and then he went to solitary confinement for like six months. It's just every time I think about that, I feel bad that that happened,

but I'm also like, wait, he had to have known that that was what was going to happen if he got caught and just made the calculation. So coming on this show is worth going to solitary confinement for six months. That's how good being interviewed on the show is apparently. I don't know if he'd make that choice again. All right, let's talk about Andrew Tate. This guy's been in the news a bunch lately. He's the guy for people who don't know.

He's the guy you see in these videos where he's like, women, they're just a bunch of dumb idiots and, you know, whatever, having sex with them sucks. It's a chore. But I have a different one every day 10 times. And, you know, I'm rich. And I talk about being rich. And if you don't, if you think that having nice cars is something you should talk about,

it's because you really don't have enough nice cars. Because look at my cars. I show, I don't tell. Every video's the same. None of it really makes sense. It sounds like, in my opinion, what a 12-year-old, 13-year-old boy would sound like if they were pretending to be a rich, wealthy guy who's successful, and they didn't really get how to do that.

What am I missing here? He has a lot of these characteristics that are so over the top that they almost seem, to me, fake. And I've had to ask numerous friends who know him in real life what he is like. But I'm going to save that for our discussion here because I want to hear what you think first. Okay. So there's a few things that stand out to me about Andrew Tate. One thing is that he actually was quite a successful kickboxer and he won a couple of championships.

And that's not easy to do. You know, the amount of time and training, lack of fear, courage, physical fitness, you need to become like top of your game is actually quite impressive. So whatever you say about him, and there's a lot of bad things to say about him, he's somebody that clearly has a lot of discipline and motivation. I suppose if I had to sum him up, I would say toxic masculinity. He's a perfect textbook example of toxic masculinity. So that's just like hypermanliness, being the alpha male at all costs, putting other people down, refusing to accept any kind of weakness or showing emotion, always acting tough, putting on this front or this type of aggression. he's literally the definition of toxic masculinity.

As to whether he means everything he says, I'm not sure. I mean, he says it with a lot of conviction, and he said his sort of misogynistic comments repeatedly so many times that it's hard to not believe that he's not invested in it. But at the same time, it's made him famous, hasn't it? And it's also earned him a lot of money. So I believe he has these different websites, these like manliness websites.

And at some point he was like selling cryptocurrency, and he had some sort of, I don't know if I call it a pyramid scheme, but at least a scheme of recruiting where he would get other people to recruit others to his website and he would charge for the privilege of being on the website and he made a lot of money from doing it. So I think it's really hard to know where to draw the line. How much is it is his actual misogynist mystic belief, which I 100% believe he has? And how much is it of him saying what is the most outrageous thing that I can say?

Because it's obviously working for me. And if I can say something that tops the last thing I said, I'll get another TikTok video out and it will get tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. and it will drive traffic towards my website and it will make me money. There is a part, by the way, videos of these people are readily available. Just Google the name Andrew Tate. If you're like, oh, I can't follow, who is this person? Clearly a narcissistic guy in the videos. And like I said, his personality, it seems fake and overblown,

which strikes me initially as trolling to get people talking about him like we're doing right now. And I've had many chances to interview this guy, but I'm just not, I'm not interested in platforming nonsense. Let me put it this way. If I have an actor on the show, I don't want that actor to come on the show in character. I want them to come as themselves. And if you can't get them to come as themselves, it's not going to be an interesting interview, right? I don't want to interview Superman.

I want to interview the person who's playing Superman on the show. And so I think that's kind of why he hasn't been on here before. One of the reasons. And you're right, maybe he's joking in a way, back to the trolling thing, but I think he does believe a certain percentage of what he's saying. I know you mentioned toxic masculinity. In that term, in my opinion, is quite overused because people will label any guy with any sort of equality they think is negative in that moment is toxicly masculine.

And I'm not sure that that is beneficial to the discussion around toxic masculinity. But certainly a guy who says the things that he says about the opposite sex, about money, about life, and how you should be a predator and you should always be going this way. And I only hang out with straight killers. that type of thing, of course, is way over the line and it's a negative influence on society. What I think we can definitely agree on is he is narcissistic, right? It's always about how great he is. There's no sense of humility involved here to the point where it seems ridiculous. I mean, I looked at a video the other day and I thought, this guy's got to be a joke because it's him

next to a swimming pool playing with num chucks and then he does a flip into the pool and I thought, oh, he's just, this is a joke. He's kidding. Nobody would put that out there. think this looks cool unless they're so detached and so emotionally damaged that that doesn't occur to them that that looks like a teenage boy pretending to be a ninja, right? It was so silly. I just thought, no, but he must not have known this was filmed and uploaded because nobody would want that out there if they're trying to act like a cool, tough guy. This is almost like the opposite of that. It's so dumb. But then having said that, a lot of his videos are dumb in that he's topless and he has, you know, women with bikinis all around trying to have serious conversations.

So he's absolutely narcissistic. That's clear his day. He's a bully. He seems to target people that are quite vulnerable or people that are less successful than him. He shows like a lack of empathy in general, a lack of fear. I suppose you can interpret that in different ways, can't you? But like a lack of fear, the consequence, he doesn't seem to care if he offends anybody at all. He's obviously misogynistic.

He's very entitled. I mean, that's another thing that really comes out to me. He talked very openly about being entitled to sex. So I've heard him say in a video how he doesn't see the point of having any female friends. So you only need one female and that's, you know, for sexual gratification or multiple females. There's no, in his mind, there's no purpose to have any female friends or for female to have male friends, which is extremely immature. I mean, that's literally the thought process of a child of a pre-pre-present child, isn't it? Yes.

That's what makes me think wrongly, of course, because I know better, that his audience is entirely 12 and 13. year old boys. It's actually not. I know a lot of adults that like this stuff, and it's really disappointing and really shocking, because when I ask them what's to like about this, those adults that I previously thought were pretty intelligent people will also exhibit very narrow, narrowly channeled, but still very immature behavior. Like somebody who's an engineer that should know better will say, yeah, but look at how many hot girls he hangs out with. And I'm thinking, okay, but he's in another country where he has a lot of money. Do you not, there's no assumption here that maybe he's paid them to hang around or that they are allowed to live there for free?

I mean, you just want to shake people and go, what are you thinking right now? What are you even thinking right now taking that attitude and then saying this is what must be working as far as getting women? And it's just like, you're 40 years old. How do you not know that this is not how to succeed in life? It's absolutely mind blowing to me. I do have some insight info on this guy. It's very clear to me that he wants to control the way that he's perceived, which is why it was also surprising to me to see some of these really dumb videos come out. Since he's not an idiot, and he does want to control the way that he's perceived, there's a lot of choices that go into some of this stuff that comes out where I just go, what is this stupid crap? Because

I'm not the target audience. That has to be the reason. It's not just off-the-cuff stuff. It's branding for controversy. It's branding for clicks. And it looks like he doesn't care what people think, but whenever I meet guys like this, they're always hyper concerned with what other people think about them. The whole, I don't give a fuck people, those guys, I don't give a fuck. They give all the fucks. These guys always give all the fucks. That's all they have, are fucks to give about how everyone views them, which is probably the root of the problem in the first place. What do you think? It's not what is the argument or what's the point that I'm trying to prove here and what's the best way of making that point. I don't think he gives a shit.

I think it is what is the most outrageous thing that I can say just to get attention. And it kind of makes sense, especially if your platform is social media, if it is like TikTok. I mean, when you think about what are the most popular things on TikTok is not people giving sort of intelligent, balanced, thoughtful statements. It is, I don't know, prank videos. It is, you know, people who are showing off their Ferraris and their, you know, they're really expensive cars. So it wouldn't surprise me if it is all very calculated with the calculation being,

what is the most controversial thing that I can say? I wouldn't surprise me if it's all extremely kind of crafted. and pre-planned. And also he puts out his content himself, doesn't he, or him and his kind of crew. It's not like there's a random person that's seen him say these outrageous things and to put it up. It's all very controlled. Right. No, these are all managed. They're all filmed mostly at his home in Romania, as I understand it. There's a crew of young guys, as they always are, young guys hanging out with their cameras and editing and all that stuff and, you know, working with his brother.

For me, it's a little bit of a sad scenario with him. Like, yes, he's a terrible influence. I don't know if somebody like this is physically dangerous, even though he's a champion kickboxer. He's a dangerously bad influence, but not necessarily going to physically hurt somebody. I wouldn't, knowing what I know about him outside of the videos, I don't think he's a guy who goes around beating someone up because he's had too many beers.

In fact, what I've heard with mutual close friends, I've heard that a very different version of him exists when he's among those friends. Completely different. He's kind, charming, he's generous, which actually, makes this kind of worse because it's fake, right? It's branding. Or if it's not fake, it's just he's ignoring all of these other positive qualities about himself that he could be displaying and

only displaying this stuff. Yeah. So a couple of things jump out to me there. I think another thing we've not read talks about that makes him dangerous, he's actually quite eloquent. So to my surprise, like I saw, I don't know if you've seen his interview with Pierce Morgan. I've not seen the whole thing I've seen clips of it. Pierce, as always, was trying to kind of put words in his mouth and trying to make Andrew Tate look as bad as possible by making assumptions about him or kind of drawing inferences of things that he said. But to my surprise, Andrew Tate was actually very, very good at standing his ground and being very clear in what he said and what he meant and things that he didn't say and mean. There's irony of Piers Morgan doing that. There's a lot of irony that Piers Morgan is the guy

that's trying to trip up Andrew Tate. Like I would be less surprised if they were hanging out together slamming shots of whiskey and yelling at, well, anyway, continue. No, no, you're exactly right. There is a, it's quite hard to know who to root for when you're watching that interview, I guess, isn't it? Yeah, Pierce has his own reputation, y'all. He's got his own problems. So if he was as dumb as he might come across in some of his comments, if he was actually that dumb in real life when he's being pulled apart by cleverer people who are trying to make him look stupid during interviews, then it would be easy because he would come across as a bit of a fool. but because he's actually quite good at arguing his corner and separating out exactly what he says and what he means,

I think that makes him even more dangerous because it's harder to make him look like a fool to try and mock him. That's basically what happened. Pierce Morgan tried to mock him repeatedly and he parried all of Pierce's strategies. So another thing that I think makes him dangerous is that I think that some of his supporters

don't know, see or care about that nice, charming side of him. They just see the inflammatory stuff he says and that makes him dangerous. So even though he might not physically go and abuse people, although having said that, to go on a quick tangent, in 2016, he was removed from Big Brother because apparently he did beat a woman and he was asked to leave. He beat her with a belt, although later on he and the woman apparently said it was consensual, so it's all very weird. Yeah, that could have been a publicity stunt gone wrong. Like that could have been, hey, this is going to make a great clip and then it went wrong. I don't know.

I did see both of those. It's hard to tell what happened. Yeah. Yeah. But what I fear, what I worry about is that his followers are just going to be sort of base-level, Nealelian. Andrethals who only hear the misogynistic bit and take it to the extreme. Of course. Best case scenario kind of affects their sexist attitudes in life.

And worst case scenario could actually encourage like violence, domestic violence. That's the thing that strikes me about him is he must know that because he is smart enough to know that. And yet he doesn't give a crap about that. He's willing to perpetuate that and go, oh, well, they're going to do what they're going to do even if I encourage it, but also look how rich I am. That's the problem that I have. If you want to be a clown in videos, I don't think it's a great idea, but I understand it.

But if you want to be a clown in videos that make people worse and your justification is, oh, well, I'm making money. Screw you. I've got mine. That's bad because you are now a predator of other people, regardless of how you feel, especially if you're not really that guy in real life and you're just doing it for money. Even that's worse, right? I know that his father and mother separated when he was young.

His mother moved him to the UK from the United States. By the way, his dad passed away before this version of Andrew Tate sprang up. Coincidence? I don't know. Yeah, that does make him really, really dangerous. The one thing I wanted to bring up that he said that really interests me, personally as a psychiatrist, is that he said on a number of occasions that he doesn't think depression is real. And he was pushed on this matter by Pierce Morgan.

And he tried to backpedal a little bit. And he basically said that he believes the feeling of depression is real. but the concept or the diagnosis of depression isn't real. And what I think he meant by that is that he doesn't like the position that he believes some people take, which is that depression is something that happens to me and they don't take responsibility and they don't try and turn their lives away and control their own kind of destinies. And it's a shame because I think that somewhere in that is a reasonable point.

And I think the point he's trying to make is that people should try their best to change their mind state if possible. But the way he says it is so toxic and so sort of just horrible. and hostile that I think is lost in the message. But also as a psychiatrist, you know, I've treated depression hundreds if not thousands of times. And I think it's fair to say that there are, on one end of the spectrum, there are people that have milder forms of depression that are related to their social situations and their

lives, whether it's their relationships, whether it's drug and alcohol problems. And the only way to really solve that is by taking away the social factors that are causing them the stress in the first place. I 100% agree with that. But what he's not talking about and what he, I presume, has never seen clinically is the other end of the spectrum where you have people that have like very severe depression, which is linked to like, you know, self-harm and suicidality. So I think it's really dangerous thing to make those kind of comments because if his followers,

especially if they're not particularly intelligent, believe that, then they're not going to have any kind of sympathy or support for people that actually seriously do suffer a severe mental illness. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Shaham Das. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, please do what other. smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All the codes, all the discount codes, all those special URLs are all in one place.

Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website as well, right over at Jordan Harbinger.com. Thank you so much for supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of my conversation with Shaham Das. Do you think it's possible for somebody like Andrew Tate to play a character or play himself as this character in videos and in interviews and then have any sort of normal life? Is it possible to compartmentalize these things? Or are we going to have to see a redemption from him

in five years where he goes, you know what? All of that was wrong and now he's sick of living that way. What do you think? I think he gets off on everything that he says and does. I think he loves the attention. He loves being a bit of a villain. I think he loves the controversy. He loves going on other platforms and kind of arguing his case, which, as I said to my surprise, I think he does actually quite well. So I don't see that being any kind of reason for him to want to have redemption or to change his image. I think he's quite happy. I think it's very calculated, as we were saying before.

And I just don't think he cares. I think he cares more about being popular and being infamous and making money than he cares about sending the right messages. So the redemption would only come if this schick stops working and becomes less popular and stops being lucrative. And then maybe he gets another bite at the publicity apple by saying, you know what? I'm going to come out and say that those beliefs were wrong and do my last PR tour that way and sell a, I don't know, sell a book on why it was all wrong. Yeah, I think that'd be a good move for him. You should suggest it. I'm open to that. If you want to, Andrew Tate, if you want to come on this show, I know you want to come on this show. If you want to come on this show and then talk about that,

I'm open to that. I just don't want to be part of the PR machine where we're talking about the same crap he talks about in all the other videos. That to me is boring for multiple reasons. All right, I know we're running short on time. I want to talk about Alex Jones. The Info Wars founder, if you don't know who he is, he's the guy that yells and frothes at the mouth and says that there's chemicals in the water that are turning the frogs gay and what he got in trouble for the most, out of all the ridiculous conspiracy theories that he's promoted in the last few decades, really, was that the Sandy Hook shooting in the United States, which was school shooting where a bunch of young kids died. It's absolutely horrifying and heartbreaking. He had said that it was a

hoax and that all the parents were crisis actors and they didn't really lose their kids, which is horrible enough. But then he kept saying it and kept saying who these people are and where they lived in their names and all this stuff. And his followers would harass these people to the point where their lives were ruined by this. They had people threatening them and death threats. And I mean, these are people whose, you know, five-year-old, six-year-old kids were murdered by somebody in a school shooting. And now he's taken it upon himself for the past few years to make their lives even more of a living hell. And he turned the trial into a spectacle.

He was on trial for defamation. He lost horribly. He now owes them like a billion dollars, some of these parents. Actually, $1.5 billion. And that's just one verdict in one of the case. There's other $50 million verdicts that he's got to pay. So basically, he's going to be ruined. He turned the trial into a spectacle, yelling at the judge, telling her she doesn't have authority.

And she had to remind him that this was a real court, not his show, and that he couldn't lie and he had to deal with this. And then he declares bankruptcy and says, oh, I don't have any money to pay the verdict. All my money is held by another company called, and it's his initials. And apparently one company now owes that other company all of his money. So he can't give it away. And he gave a bunch to his, think, his parents or something like that. I mean, it's just so clearly trying to avoid this. And I wonder what is going on in someone's head like this, where they are, I would just feel horrible if a school shooting happened. I wouldn't want to touch that subject, let alone make the parents' lives harder. And then when you get sued for it and then you lose, try and hide the assets.

I mean, the whole thing is so crazy to me that I need a doctor's opinion on what is wrong with Alex Jones. So from what I know about Alex Jones, obviously I've not had the advantage of ever assessing him in person. I strongly suspect that he has what we call the delusional disorder. So I'll just break that down what that is. So it's a form of psychosis. So, psychosis, different from being psychopath, is when you step outside of reality. And usually it comes in two different types of symptoms. So there's hallucinations, which is, you know, hearing or seeing things that don't exist, like hearing voices, and delusions. So delusions are fixed thoughts that don't make sense, that don't come from an understandable place. So, for example, like an extremely right-wing,

religious idea isn't a delusion necessarily because it's in keeping with your culture and what other people around you think. So there's different types of psychoses. The most famous one will be schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is associated with like a cognitive deplying and a lack of function. It's about affects about 1% of the population. Delusional disorder is really rare, so it's about 0.1% of the population. And you have these delusions that are kind of borderline bizarre. So they're not quite based in reality, but they're not absolutely completely crazy. They're not like talking about, you know, shape-shifting aliens, for example.

He does talk about things like that. Like certain people are lizard people and that they crawl around in tunnels underground, and it's famous people. It's like Hillary Clinton is a lizard secretly. I mean, this is not... It's not reality, is it? He is that delusional, unless he's making it up, yeah. And a couple of other things that he said that stood out for me is...

You mentioned, like, frogs turning the water gay. I think you said that juice boxes can make people gay, and that Obama and Hillary smell of like sulfuric acid, and he could smell evil off them. So these are not just like right-wing conspiracy theory, slightly bizarre ideas. These are actually delusions. And the other thing with delusional disorder is,

unlike schizophrenia, you don't have negative symptoms, So you don't have cognitive decline. You can function quite highly. You can be quite intelligent and you can live like quite a high functioning level. And Alex Jones clearly has because he's managed to make a media career. He's managed to make a lot of money out of it. And the very fact, I didn't know about the trial, but the very fact that he was kind of crafty and devious enough

to create these kind of companies to not have to let go of his money, shows a really high level of functioning. But I think he's got delusional disorder and I think he's 100% believes his crazy ideas. That's interesting. I always wondered about that because, of course, the idea is how can somebody be this mean? And your explanation sheds a little bit of light on it. If you believe it to be true, then it's easier to be this horrible because you think you're just telling the truth. That was one of, I think what was one of his arguments at the trial was I said this and at the time I believed it to be true. And then the judge said, what about all these mountains of evidence to the contrary that you were wrong, that you ignored? And, you know, he didn't really have much of. away around that. But if he actually does have a disorder, maybe that evidence just goes in one ear and out the other, so to speak. Absolutely. But almost by definition, delusions can't be argued against with logic. So when you have somebody that has a true delusion, so I've met people who, you know, believe that somebody who punched me actually in a psychiatric ward who

believed that I was like a high school bully in disguise from years ago, even though we'd never met, I've seen people who believe that the next door is a paedifier. I've seen people who believe the FBI are following them. And they're 100% convinced. And if you, try and tell them otherwise, or if you bring evidence, they're not going to check the evidence. They're just going to assume that you're part of the conspiracy and that you're, you know, you tie into their delusional system. One thing that I was thinking about when I was reading up on Alex Jones is, I don't know about in the States, but in the UK, he would probably have been sectioned, actually.

So what does that mean? For the Mental Health Act to be committed, I think you'd say. Yeah, so detained against their will for psychiatric treatment. The definitions are that you've got to have a diagnosable disorder, which I think he has, clear symptoms and you're either a risk to yourself to others, to risk to yourself, your others or your own health. And I think it's, you could argue that even though the vast majority of people that I would see a physically violent towards other people, I think you could make a strong argument that he is a danger to others just by spreading all this like bullshit and this misinformation

and having other people go over to the victim's house. I think that after that's happened, you've got evidence that he is dangerous. So I think he could have been sectionable in the UK. Really? Okay, yeah. In the United States, this falls firmly under free speech, even though it's absolute nonsense and craziness. And of course, the counter argument that I think his lawyers have had in previous litigation is, this is a performance. People know it's nonsense. No one reasonable believes this, but that's where he's got you, right? Because his audience is not made up of reasonable people. That's the whole point. It's made up of unreasonable people who believe unreasonable things. And the way that he makes money is by selling supplements that are supposed to, you know, raise your testosterone. testosterone and protect you against bio weapons and stuff like, I mean, it's just stupid, right? It's stupid prepper stuff. That's low quality. And that's one of the primary vectors of him making all this money. He fell in between the cracks of our system here because

it's free speech. He really can argue that no reasonable person believes this because the things he's saying are by definition completely unreasonable. But I think that he actually believes it. And I think that's what makes him slightly different from somebody like Andrew Tate, who I think on balance is probably kind of over-egging things because he knows that they'll be controversial. I don't think Alex Jones is doing that. The reason I say that is because, again, when I was reading up on him, I read that when he had some conspiracies about 9-11, and he lost a lot of his fan base.

He was on a radio show at the time. And he lost like 70% of his supporters. And the radio producers actually came to him and said, I think you should retract all of this. And if you do that, then you'll keep a lot of your viewers, a lot of your supporters and we can kind of make another type of show around you and basically we can make you into a star and he apparently said no I'm not going to do that so he in his mind it was more important to spread what he I think probably believed to be true about these 9-11

conspiracies rather than have popularity as a as a media personality that's interesting yeah I found out about him probably 13 years ago because a cab driver in New York told me no Jews died on 9-11 this is probably 2009 and I said what are you talking about? That's completely not true. I mean, first of all, New York, finance. A lot of Jews are in finance in New York. Surprise, surprise. So, you know, sadly, a lot of people died on 9-11 and many of them were of all faiths, but certainly Jews died on 9-11. I know a few who died personally and had people who were related to them that were Jewish that died on 9-11. And I said, who told you that? And he's like, go to prison planet.net, man,

it's real. And I went to that website and I was like, holy cow, there's people that believe this crap and sure enough that was one of his sort of early attempts at monetizing kookiness. Yeah. You've hit the nail on the head. That's the dangerous thing is that anybody can make any content on the internet nowadays. And I suppose maybe like a generation ago, you probably had all these people that had these very bizarre thoughts, but they were kind of kept separated, whereas now it's very easy to find somebody that has your own paranoid beliefs and your conspiracy theories and it's kind of an echo chamber. So he attracts wrongens, as we'd say in the UK, just people who are a bit sort of mentally unstable. They feel.

feed off each other and it grows and it's dangerous. It is potentially very dangerous. So I guess in conclusion here, your opinion is that Alex Jones probably sees himself as the victim in this whole thing, just like he says, the man or whatever, the government's trying to silence me with this trial and bankrupt me. So you're thinking he really believes all or most of what he says and it's not just a performance. Yeah, I do think that the main sort of reasons would be is he said too many things. So it's not just one sort of slightly weird idea.

he's had so many different conspiracy theories repeatedly that it's hard to imagine that somebody's faking it for that long. And also if he was faking it or if he was doing it for attention or clout, why didn't he stop? Like what would have been the point of pushing and pushing and pushing to the point that, you know, victims of Sandy Hook were, you know, the families were getting harassed? How does that benefit him? You know, he's already popular. He's already making lots of money. And that is like the beginning of his downfall. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that the beliefs were just a bit too bizarre for me. to think that they're intentionally fabricated.

They sound delusional to me. They're the same things that my patients believe. That's so interesting. You know, you're right. It's a guy who made a media empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars, find something that's too hot button that's getting him in trouble, keeps doing it even though he could have picked or made up a billion other things that would not have gotten him to this point.

And now he's looking at losing everything and possibly prison time if he keeps trying to hide his assets and things like that. So yeah, you're right. It's like, why would you do this unless you really believed in it at some point? It's not like him retracting this would have even cost him much. He's still going to have an army of cooks following him, even if he loses 10 or 15% of the diehard Sandy Hook shooter deniers. He still has hundreds of millions of dollars.

And now he's going to lose that. Yeah, that's an interesting point that I hadn't thought of. Maybe he really does believe all this stuff. Jeez. So let me ask you this, Jordan, because I haven't followed his trial. Did he retracts anything that he said in any way, like to try and become less culpable? I actually don't know. I'm not sure, but if he did, it would have come at the end or after or right before the verdict,

which don't you do that before you end up in a court having to testify and with a jury in fronty? I mean, you would have done that months and months and months ago if it was just a ploy to get everybody off your back. And his legal team would have said that. Sure. When we're talking about this level of money, he must have had like an extremely professional and experienced legal team. and they would have said right from the beginning.

Well, you need to deny this. You're digging yourself in a massive hole. Just say it's not true. Apologize. Funnily enough, on that note, he actually had some of the dumbest and most incompetent lawyers that I have ever seen do anything in a trial. And I haven't followed this trial closely,

but one of his lawyers accidentally sent all of his phone content in communication, text messages, and everything to opposing counsel by mistake. That's the worst thing you can do. generally in a litigation. One of the worst things you can do. It would be like if I'm in the mafia and I've got a bunch of crap on my phone and my lawyer has it and goes, all right, this is under lock and key and then just sends it to the police. Whoops. I was headed to lunch and I forgot to select which file was, that's what happened. And so now all of these text messages with politicians and

other crazy cooks and all the people you can spy, they're all accessible. Yeah. Which is just ridiculous. No lawyer with two brain cells to rub together would have made this mistake. Yeah, that is hilarious. Yeah. So no, he hasn't hired professional representation. He's hired absolute clown shoes, morons, to do this, which also kind of proves your point that he wanted to pick somebody who was also a true believer in all the crap that he was saying, not somebody who was actually a good attorney.

So he picked somebody who was a complete dumbass and happened to agree with a lot of the crap that he has on his show. And he got what he paid for. Yeah. I guess he got what he deserved at the end. Well, we're still waiting for justice. We're still waiting for that verdict to come through, I suppose, be enforced and for that money to change hands, but nothing's going to bring those people back. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you coming on. I know a lot of doctors in the United

States, they will not do this kind of thing. I'm not sure if it's because they're subject to litigation for saying, hey, this person's a narcissist or a psychopath when they haven't been able to professionally do that. Do you have any insight on that? Well, I'm not 100% sure that I won't get a tap on the shoulder from my government buddy and get into trouble. I mean, obviously there's the Goldwater rule, which is created by the American Psychiatrist Association, is not like a hard and fast rule that we follow here in the UK, although it is generally supported by the Royal College of psychiatrists. I mean, I think what I'm doing is more of speculation and suggesting that these are typical character traits. I've never said at any point in this interview or any other interview

that this is a definite diagnosis that I'd ever give somebody. And personally, I think that psychiatry is mental health is a topic that's kind of growing in popularity and I want to use my expertise to explain concepts to people so I'm hoping that I'm kind of educating viewers by picking out and people don't just want to hear like the different categories of a diagnosis that's boring they want to see it happen in real life so the best way to do that I think is by picking the characters like we have who are interesting who do have these personality traits so I like to think that I'm educating rather than trying to label or judge individuals. John, thanks for coming back on the showman.

Really appreciate this. I think this is kind of a fun way. It's a little bit outside my usual format where I'm really prepared. I'm glad your opinions came through on these folks. And I think it's interesting to attack pop culture, if we can call these trials and these characters pop culture. I guess we can, right? They're sort of in the zeitgeist right now.

I think it's interesting to analyze them through the professional psychological angle that you can take. So thank you very much for your time and your expertise. It's an absolute pleasure, Jordan. Love being on your show. Thanks for having me. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with the investigator who solved a serial killer case

that had gone cold for decades. There was a definite spike in serial predator crime in the 1970s. Part of it was the ready victim pools that don't exist today. Houses generally didn't have alarm systems. We don't see women hitchhiking much today. Joe DiAngelo was a full-time law enforcement officer. He's breaking into houses in the middle of the night, raping women or girls that are home alone that he's binding up and sexually assaulting.

He ended up committing 50 of these attacks in Northern California between 1976, 1979, and just disappeared. I started working that case in 1994. As a cold case investigator, even though the case is 30 years old, It's like, no, you know, this is still a public safety issue. We need to remove this offender from society. And in 2001, 10 people had been killed across six cases. I'm seeing this woman's body laying inside her house in the photos of her alive on the shelf above her body.

She battled for her life that I could see this combat go throughout that entire room. After the Golden State Killer raped some of his victims, he would crouch in the corner and cry. They said he was sobbing, you know, it was like genuine. In fact, one victim, he was sobbing while he was raping her. The last thing I did in my career before I retired was I drove up and parked in front of his house. I debated, should I just go knock on his door? I didn't know he was a Golden State killer, but this was such a brazen, brutal predator. He absolutely had to be caught. To learn more about how Paul Holes puts himself inside the minds of serial killers, check out episode 725 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Really interesting perspective. I'm glad to hear from a

professional on this, because we watch these people online and we think, are they crazy or am I crazy? Because that guy looks crazy to me. What would make somebody behave that way? Big thank you to Dr. Shaham Das. Links to all things Shaham will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who make the show possible. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.

I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day. It's our six-minute networking course. The course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I want to teach you how to dig the well before you get Thursday and build relationships before you need them, many of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us, you'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in watching those cases on YouTube or interested in true crime, definitely share this episode with them.

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