David Gillespie Knows How to Spot a Psychopath [re-release]

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Not really. I get the feeling that that will be someone's reaction to reading the book, But as a general rule, I don't do it myself. Unless it's something that I or a person I'm contemplating getting into some sort of a financial or other close relationship with, then it's really important to know. But the rest of the time it doesn't really matter. Why write this book because I experienced working for and with psychopaths on a fairly frequent basis.

And can you tell me what industry?

Roughly in just about every industry I've ever been involved in, so, I've been involved in tech, I've been involved in law, I've been involved in government departments, startups, all kinds of things. It's unusual, to, in fact, find a place where you don't encounter them in fairly significant numbers, usually at the top of the organized and when I first encountered them,

Toxic is a word obviously in the title of your book, But that's a word that has been used more commonly in the last few years. Hasn't it to just explain that person at work whose behavior is confounding and excruciating, and.

It's also the effect they have on everybody else You can often the easiest way to tell that there is a psychopath in a workplace is to look at what's going on. If there is a large group of people fighting for no good reason, large amounts of confusion, in fighting, distrust, lack of cooperation, then there's going to be a psychopath in the center there somewhere. That's the effect they have on normal people, and so that's often the telltale sign

That that's not always possible.

Is well, particularly unhelpful advice, because you know, most people need their jobs. Most people can't just cut and run from a relationship or their family, or their employer or their parents. That's right. It's just tricky and dangerous, often with a psychopath. And I felt that surely we can do better than that. Surely the science must have advanced to the point where we've got better answers than run away. And so I've spent probably most of the last decade

Just jumping in to tell you the characteristics. According to David in his Book of a Psychopath, they include being charming, being self obsessed, being a fluent liar, emotional manipulation, someone completely lacking in remor or guilt, emotional shallowness and callousness, someone who takes no responsibility for their actions. Impulsive, parasitic, fearless,

It's a word whose meaning has drifted. When it was first coined, it probably did mean what I mean it to mean, which is someone who lacks empathy. So there's two types of people in the world, psychopaths and empaths, and we'll talk about that in a little bit more detail, but that's all it meant when it was first introduced to sort of in common usage in the nineteen forties.

So that's more about psychotically exactly.

He probably wasn't a psychopath at all. Norman Bates was probably psychotic, but not a psychopath, But that took that meaning in that direction, and instead we invented a new word, sociopath, which essentially meant the same thing, but it was a nicer way of calling someone a psychopath, and now people even suggest that they're different things altogether. The difficulty is that from a psychological perspective, there is no diagnosis of

So correct me if I'm wrong. Is there almost a spectrum of psychopathic behavior? Or is there a spectrum of antisocial behavior upon which different things sit like narcissism, sociopath, psychopath? Does it kind of work like that?

There've been a lot of people who've published a lot of papers that puts forward all those sorts of hypotheses over the years. I would say that the science is at a point now where we can say you either are or you aren't okay this kind of person, and the only real difference is the degree to which or

Are all psychopaths perfectly happy to kill people if necessary.

They don't see a problem with killing people, and that's a fundamental and that probably in the most stark example of how they think differently to the rest of us. To us, if I said to you, oh, look, if you hit someone, you won't want to do that because you'll be causing pain to another person. And you don't want to do that because it kind of bounces back at you through empathy, and that you cause pain to others, you feel their pain. And some people say, oh maybe

So a psychopath might not want to kill someone, but only because it would be inconvenient for them because they would have to go to jail.

And they're not afraid of consequences. But they are well aware of the practicality, so it's more like a computer assessment of things. Okay, am I likely to get away with this? Can I do it in such a way that I won't suffer harm or or just it won't impair my ability to continue, and being in jail will impair their ability to continue. So it's more like a logical planning than any kind of a fear of going to jail.

You talk about the difference in your book between feelings and emotions. Yes, can you explain how that fits into being an EmPATH or a psychopath?

Sure, Often psychopaths are described as having an no capacity for emotion, and that's not strictly correct. They have the same capacity for emotion as we do. They just have no control system over the top of it. So let me be clear about that. Our ancient reptilian brain, the limbic system, experiences very direct emotions, and there's various theories about it, but people put it between somewhere between five

So the things you almost don't they're almost reflexive.

Yes, they are reflexive, so completely unable to be managed in any way whatsoever. Psychopaths experience those just as much as as empaths do. What happens in an EmPATH, though, is that, using a system called spindle neurons, they transfer those emotions up into the frontal cortex in the brain, which would be what i'd call the adult supervision of the human brain. This is our most recently evolved part of the brain. It is the bit that makes decisions

And so if they experience anger.

Then they experience anger, and it is full on, uncontrolled, uncontrollable anger.

Right with this idea of psychopaths not being able to experience empathy, yes, that is sometimes said. I want to draw a very clear distinction sometimes set of people with aspergers that they can't experience emotions in the same way that people who aren't on the spectrum can.

There's two types of empathy. There's cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. Psychopaths experience cognitive empathy. That is, they can observe somebody and they can judge why they are reacting the way they are, assign an explanation to it, and make moves based on what they are seeing. That's cognitive empathy. Psychopaths

So it is like watching a sad movie and crying.

Yeah, well, it's even more than that. It's seeing somebody be hurt or feeling joy and feeling it yourself and not just thinking, oh, that's joy, that's good for them, but which is what a psychopath would think, but actually feeling it, actually feeling it, as if you were.

Expect when your sports team wins.

That's right, yeah, But a psychopath could feel joy at that because they want to bet or something like that, but they wouldn't feel the emotion. They wouldn't feel that as if they were experiencing it themselves. And there's the difference with Asperger's, so aspergic people are the other way around. They have enormous capacity for emotional empathy and no capacity for cognitive empathy.

So they just feel things, but.

They feel exactly but don't know why. So they're almost kind of the opposite of a psychopath in that sense. But in a societal sense, it often, as you say, comes across in a very similar fashion, which is that they're disconnected in some way. And you often see aspergic people described as if they were psychopathic in their responses, but it's not. It's actually them shutting down because they are feeling so much.

You say in your book that the job psychopaths are most attracted to ceo, lawyer, TV or radio hosts, salesperson, surgeon, journalist, police officer, clergyperson, chef, civil servant. Yes, and the job psychopaths aren't attracted to include sort of the caring professions, so a care aid, a nurse, a therapist, a crafts person, a beautician, stylist, charity worker, teacher, creative artists, doctor, accountant.

Well, psychopaths, whether you're born at it as one or not is an interesting question which I don't believe we've got a good answer to at the moment. There's a couple of things we do know, which is that those spindle neurons, which are essentially the circuitry for empathy, are hardwired into the adult human brain at a certain density, and we know that when they are there at that density, the human brain is a normal EmPATH. When they are there below that density, we know they are a psychopath.

I say so they often can become very successful in these professions and rise quite high. Why is that.

Psychopaths interview really well, like really well one of their real skills, and this arises out of their strength and cognitive empathy, which is they are very very good at reading us. Within seconds, they can read us. It's almost psychic in their ability, and it isn't psychic. All it is is that they have. Because they lack cognitive empathy, they can't rely on automatic emotional detection. They have to do it manually. They have to do it by reading you.

So when you say target, you know early in the book, in fact, on the first page, you compare a psychopath to a tiger and you say, if it looks like a threatening presence, then I will leave it alone. This is the tiger thinking if it looks like something I can use, then I will do so. So what is a psychopath trying to achieve.

The same thing all the time? And this is worth remembering because it's the same no matter who the psychopath is or what the current situation is. They are always trying to achieve more money and power for themselves. That's it. There's nothing creative about it. That's it. And often people are quite surprised when it oils down to just that the lengths that they will go to, because it is just from moment to moment as well. It might be as simple as I don't know, getting the bigger bowl

More So, Donald Trump, quite famously in the White House dining room, insists that he gets two scoops of ice cream and everyone else only be given one.

Is that an example, Well, that's an example.

That's just a dick.

Well, no, no, that is an example of him demonstrating to the room that he is a superior person. And you might think the president of the United States doesn't need to remind people by how much ice cream he eats, But they don't think that way. They think everybody needs to be constantly reminded that I am better than them.

Next, David explains how to tell if you work with a psychopath. What are some of the ways that you can recognize a psychopath in your midst at work?

Usually one of the most obvious ways is a comparison of what they were like when you met them with what they are like now. So often when you first meet a psychopath, they are the most charming, wonderful person you've ever met in your entire life. Because they don't know you from anyone. They don't know are you going to be useful? Are you not going to be useful? And so they will play you. That means reflect back to you whatever they think you need to hear.

So not even we're not even just talking about an interview situation, although that is why they will interview well, yes, when they're looking for a job, but once they've got the job, yes, everyone they meet. They will try to chart.

Everyone they will meet at first, unless they get the sense that the person is a psychopath as well, which they'll be very good at picking, because there's no point they know they can't manipulate another psychopath.

Is they're like a secret an.

There's probably a secret look. I don't know, but they are extraordinarily efficient at identifying both victims and hard obstacles will be other psychopaths. People that can't be manipulated are no good to a psychopath because almost everything they do revolves around manipulating people to gather power and money to themselves.

Do a psychopath know they're a psychopath.

They probably don't have a label for it. They certainly know they're different and, in their view, better than everybody else, So they will have known this from a very very young age. They'll have known just by looking at an earthquake on television and seeing people suffering and seeing the effect on the people around and they go, oh, gosh,

And so they'll meet they'll meet you. They'll be charming because they won't know yet what you can do for them or not do for that.

That's right.

What will happen next.

Once they're in So, once they're in a relationship with you, working for you, working with you, whatever, they'll drop the facade. It's a lot of work to maintain a facade. It's even more work to maintain multiple facades to different audiences. So they'll drop that and you'll see it slip at first, and then eventually they won't bother at all.

So does this happen over a period of weeks? Does it happen over a period of years. Let's stick to the workplace for a sex. I'm going to ask you about relationships in a minute.

It depends on the level of dependence that they have from you, meaning it depends how tightly they feel you are bound in. Once they feel you have nowhere to go, then they don't bother anymore.

How do they create that situation where you have nowhere to go?

Well, they get the job for starters, So one way is to get the job to be your boss. And then once they're your boss, then they work on destroying trust in the workplace, so destroying the trust of the people who are underneath them, so not trust in them, but trust in each other. So they'll tell this person a story. They'll tell that person a story. They'll tell that person a story.

Yes, tell this person that the other person doesn't rate them very highly, and they tell the other person that this person thinks they're no good and.

It won't even be as obvious as that. Sometimes they'll rotate favoritism, so that's a favorite tactic, so that there'll be you know, there'll be a golden haired child of the month, and everyone else you know is either ignored or evil, but that'll get rotated around. They'll do public executions is a term I use for it, meaning you know, they'll publicly demean someone in a meeting or whatever in

Those people, so they manage up very well.

Manage up very very well, and kick down.

So how is a psychopath in the workplace different to a workplace bully or is that just another name for some psychopaths? I think they behave you can be interpreted.

I think most workplace bullies, or at least the worst ones, are definitely psychopaths. And there is a quantitative difference, and it has been done in the research. Your average workplace bully, just a bad manager, just you know, it's a terrible manager, is going to bully their workforce once a month on average, so ten to twelve times a year. A psychopath will

You know, you speaking, Just my eyes are widening, as I'm sure many people have when you've talked to them because you go, oh my god, that guy or that girl, And I wanted to ask you about that. How many psychopaths are men and how many women?

If you had asked most of the research is that question ten years ago, they would have said, it's almost entirely men. The research has moved a long way from there now. The reason is because most of the studies done up to that point were done on male prisoners, so of course it was almost entirely men and almost

I can think of a couple. So you suspect you've got a psychopath in your midst he or she might be your boss. How do you deal with it?

If they are your boss, then you are probably in a workplace where you've gone from trusting and enjoying working with the people around you to not knowing who you can trust.

You will have got so they like to throw everyone off balance.

Absolutely everyone is. The cloud of emotional confusion is what they use as cover for they are trying to achieve. And so you'll be experiencing a significant change in your workplace where suddenly people you thought you could trust you're not sure you can. You certainly can't talk to them about the psychopath because you're never not quite sure whether they are on the inside or the or not, and whether what you're saying might get relayed back to them,

Whatsoever as you try to get the hell out of it.

As you try to get out of there. Take notes of everything. Do a James Comy take notes of every meeting you have so that the lies are recorded. One of the things about psychopaths is that they have no particular attachment to the truth. To an mpath, the truth is kind of a core message. Might not always stick to it, but it's kind of a core thing that we keep coming back to. Psychopaths don't have that at all.

Been quite submissive.

Absolutely, And then one little thing that I guess the cream on the cake is flatter them. They are extraordinarily prone to flattery, even obvious flattery that you might consider way over the top obvious, they will think is perfectly realistic. They do think they're the smartest, best person in the world, So occasionally telling them that will keep you on their.

Good side as you try to get the hell out.

That's right.

What are some of the other signs that there is a psychopath in your midst You write about process in Micromanager.

Yes, yes, So. One of the things that psychopaths tend to do in a workplace pretty well straight away is that they obsess over process. So they come in and they're inventing new processes, new reporting schemes, everything has to be done in triplicate. By the time they're done, you're almost spending more time reporting to them than you are

So that's why they do it absolutely. And look, when you come into a new job, and if you're a new manager, you don't want everyone to be dying nicing psychopaths everywhere because some of these things aren't just what new managers do, right, So you come in and you say, hey,

It is, and it gets regular and worse, and.

So there are more processes and more micromatag yes.

And it never seems to end. Just as when you think that they've gone as far as they possibly can, they come up with something else. They have no strategic focus at all. So a normal manager will say, oh, how are we taking this business forward? They'll direct somebody to do some work on that, provide some recommendations. It will be discussed, there'll be a consensus decision, et cetera. Psychopaths don't work like that. They'll be in a meeting, they'll have an idea that will be the plan.

But that's me. But that's just a bad manager. Like I think, I'm just sometimes a bad manager. And sometimes I'll do that thing of our micromanage. But as soon as I feel like people, I'll only micromanager if I feel like things aren't right. But as soon as I feel like I can trust that things are right, I'm out of there.

Yeah, that doesn't happen, So that means I'm.

Not a psychopath.

I hope though, But is that true?

So the fact that I get out of there means that I'm probably a psychopath.

Won't be able to do that, won't be able to walk away from it.

Right, But sometimes they do just have an idea and then just well, they are bad managers. Bad managers aren't psycho rece either.

Any of the things I've described you could probably attribute to a bad manager. It's having all of them together and the effect it has on the workplace, which is the complete and total destruction of trust in the workplace. That is the absolute, definitive symptom that there is one there somewhere, Because workplaces are communities. At the end of the day, they're a group of people putting the community or the workplace's benefit or or good outcomes above their own.

Okay, So now I want to talk about psychopaths in relationships because I, like many women, have been in an emotionally abusive relationship. But I don't think he was a psychopath. So tell me how psychopaths behave in relating romantic relationships, it's.

Very similar to what I've described work. They don't change because they're at home versus when at works. So they're all about control. They're all about micromanagement, they're all about reporting. They don't trust their part at all. They are people who need to be controlled at all times and are in their mind a possession something who is there to

If I'm in a relationship with a psychopath, or I suspect I am, what might I notice is happening.

Well, it'll be really clear in the relationship.

They'll probably be very charming at first one.

Yeah. Absolutely, they will be probably the fastest, most accelerated relationship you've ever had in that you will move very very fast. They will seem absolutely perfect upfront. They will tell you exactly what you want to hear. They will be exactly what you want to be. They will be the best lover you've ever had. The sharing I was going to.

Say they must get a lot of sex because if they can like turn it on, and you also say that they're more likely to be the ones that will approach the woman that intimidates other men.

Yes, absolutely, Why is that a challenge? Why not, you know, go for that. They believe that they are entitled to the best of everything, so why not choose the best looking or most appealing possession in the room.

And they won't always be the captain of the football team and the highest you know guy, and the you know, socially upwardly mobile or will they like.

They'll pretend to be if that's what you want to hear, okay, And they.

Won't necessarily be the most good looking person.

Well, people often say psychopaths are especially good looking. But when But when studies are done on this with objective testing, where people don't know ahead and aren't actually speaking to the person you know, they're looking at a photo, there doesn't appear to be any particular bias towards psychopaths. But I think it's it's once again, if they're telling you what you want to hear, maybe they look better.

So it's all happening very fast. I'm in love, he says, he's in love, he wants to introduce me to his family. He's talking about our future. It's all happening very very fast. And then what happens.

Once you're in, once you're committed, once you're hooked into the relationship, and you can't leave because you've.

Moved in, you're pregnant, you've got married.

Ed banking accounts, shared possessions. He's probably moved in or she's probably moved into your home. You will be providing most of the possessions and resources, even though the story so far might well have been that they had all sorts of resources available. There'll be some unfortunate event which has drained them away in some way. Yes, but to help them get back on their feet, they'll be moving in with you, using your car, You'll be paying for dinner,

Wow, So what do you do? How do you get away?

Unfortunately, there are not a lot of good answers for this, particularly if you're in very deep that is, have children with them, money with them, those sorts of things where you are entangled with them. It is very, very difficult, and they will use the fact that you are emotionally attached to the children and they are not against you, so you know they will use children and possessions as tools to manipulate you with and to hold you and

Squirrel away opening up another bank.

Account, just doing it.

Slowly and imperceptibly, that's right.

And maintaining the same rules that I said about being in the office, which is maintain compliance, do not react emotionally, et cetera. But ultimately with the plan of getting out of there and never coming back.

But look, because psychopaths can't change.

They can't, they can't, they won't change, they and they don't feel like even if they could, they wouldn't because they believe they're the better version of humans and were the emotionally crippled cheaple. So they wouldn't change even if they could.

What would a psychopath do if they caught you square money away?

Yeah, that's the reason to leave them. That's the risk, both in the workplace and at home, is don't get caught, don't get court applying for other jobs, don't get caught squirrelling money away, don't get caught having an exit plan. Because they are extraordinarily vengeful, extraordinarily vengeful, and they really

Psychopaths more likely to be violent than not, do. They just see that as one of their many tools, and they don't differentiate it from anything else.

Yes, there's two things at play here. The first is that they do experience emotion, volatile, high powered, intense emotion that empaths will control with higher order thinking. Psychopaths don't control. So if something is making them angry, and any insult to their power is likely to make them angry. If something makes them angry, then they will react instinctively with anger with no ability to control it. Sometimes they do that for show as a means of manipulating you. Sometimes

You talk about two tests in the book. One is the hair psycho Psychopathy. I never can say that. One is the hair psychopathy checklist.

Yes, what's that? That's a checklist that was designed until he designed He did it in the nineteen eighties and he was doing it in prisons and its purpose was to more accurately diagnose people who are psychopaths in the prison population. The reason that he needed a checklist was because up until that point, whether someone was a psychopath or not depended on who was doing the interview. You know, it really just depended how easily they were manipulated, etcetera. Etcetera.

What was the test that was I thought it was the hair one, but what was the one with the noise?

That test was actually a series of studies done to measure fear in psychopaths, because one of the things that people notice really early on was that psychopaths don't react the same as everybody else to situations that would engender fear, and they gained a reputation for being fearless. That's been nuanced a lot. But those studies were done in the eighties and nineties, and they were done on prison populations

Okay, So I guess my last question for you, David is what happens when psychopaths have children?

Yeah, Well, to a psychopath, a child is a possitionion, so like a pet is a possision, and as long as it is a well behaved position, that's fine. As soon as it's not a well behaved position, then it can be discarded or brought back into line. So to a psychopath, it's our child is nothing more than a dog that needs to be disciplined because it's not performing as required.

So they have no feelings of love.

Love is a higher order feeling, so they can't experience love, and so they have no sense of that joy. Well, no, they can. They experience lust and sexual attraction, which are the law order emotions, but they can't translate that into love. They don't know what love is. They hear us talk about it all the time, but they have no idea what we're talking about.

So they have children why because they think they should.

Oh, there'll be lots of reasons. It might be part of the entrapment. It might have been necessary to have children because the person they were targeting wasn't going to stay in the relationship unless children were produced.

But there will also be mothers that are psychopaths.

Yeah, absolutely, same deal way around. Well, so, same deal. It could be that the only way she can keep the partner in the relationship is to provide him with children.

And will she or he always be abusive towards their children? If you're a psychopath, will you always abuse your children, either physically or mentally or emotionally.

Well, only if that's what's necessary to control them. At the end of the day, the purpose is control, not abuse per se. You know they're not abusing for the fun of abusing. They're abusing to an end, which is to control. If the possession can be controlled without abuse, then it'll be controlled without abuse.

If the possession can be controlled. So as children get older, what would be a sign that your parent is a psychopath? I guess I wanted to ask you.

That kind of relationship where you have no real emotional connection with them, that you see them projecting publicly a very different face to what you see when you are

They would perform the parent because that's what they know their friends need to should be seen exactly.

They would act like happy families and then bang, it would just be shut off as soon as the person left the room. So that's the kind of thing. And kids growing up in that environment often many of them in the case studies say they thought that was normal. They thought that's what all parents did. And it's only once they got out into sort of socializing with other kids sort of in their teens and so on, they realized, wow,

David, your book is phenomenal. I can't recommend it highly enough for anyone who is in a relationship with anyone, people who have a job, who encounter people in any aspect of life. Whether you think there's a psychopath in your life or not, it is it's almost like an immunization against encountering psychopaths in life, which we all will. I mean, I can think of half a dozen that I've encountered through my life.

Every wonder I've not spoken to a single person who looks back at me blankly and says, got no idea what you're talking about? Never meant anyone like that.

I'm sure people are listening with their eyes wide David, thank you so much. Taming Toxic People is a study on psychopaths. It is available now. Thanks for listening to No Filter A lot to think about. Hey, you can buy David's book Taming Toxic People and my book work Strife Balance at Eyebooks at Apple dot Co, Forward Slash MoMA Mia, and this is where you can also subscribe