1408: Patric Gagne | How a “Sociopath” Decides Right from Wrong

1408: Patric Gagne | How a "Sociopath" Decides Right from Wrong

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Patric Gagne: I can show you volumes of research that indicates that punishment in general is not effective, but it is particularly ineffective when you're dealing with a child or an adult who is psychopathic. The way that they learn is not through punishment, and that's really important because, newsflash, if you punish a psychopath for behaving in a certain way, they're just going to figure out a different way to do it. The phrase, the truth shall set you free.

I never felt that way as a child. For me, telling the truth was the quickest way to get into trouble.

Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional organized crime figure, investigative journalist, or special operator. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Patric Gagne, author of Sociopath.

She learned early that telling the truth about her emotions got her into more trouble than faking them. Today, we explore how that masking fed a cycle of stealing and break-ins, why she rejects the idea that morality has to come from the heart, and what helped her change her behavior. It's a look inside a mind most of us think we understand from serial killer movies, but really don't.

Here we go with Patric Gagne. Most of us like to think we don't hurt or steal from or manipulate people because we're good people, right? But your argument, one of your arguments in the book is basically, a lot of us behave because guilt, shame, fear, empathy, remorse, they're all doing this invisible reinforcement or enforcement work.

And you say that many of those brakes were not installed for you growing up or just ever with your hardwiring. So when you were a kid, what stopped you from doing whatever you wanted all of the time?

Patric Gagne: Logic. We all know that kid that is just a better liar, a natural-born liar, natural-born thief sometimes. I think of my sister, who if she tries to tell a lie, even now her face gets beet red and she starts to panic and sweat and she'll usually tell on herself halfway through the lie.

And I was never that way, which isn't to say that all children who have that manipulative temperament end up being psychopathic. It just speaks to foundation. So as a child who didn't get nervous when I lied or when I broke the rules, I realized early that I needed to have self-discipline in order to move through the world relatively unscathed.

I didn't seem to have the emotional complexity that those around me had. Again, I had a sister, so I understood what complex emotional development looked like and I knew that I didn't have it. But at the same time, I learned that admitting to that, speaking to the fact that I didn't feel bad about things, speaking to the fact that I didn't feel guilty about things was also the quickest way to get into trouble.

I have said in my book, I quoted the phrase, the truth shall set you free. But I never felt that way as a child. For me, telling the truth was the quickest way to get into trouble.

So I learned to mask and I learned to lie about the emotions that I was having or was not having. And that turned into a maladaptive coping strategy that then bled into a maladaptive life strategy as I got older. But to your original question, I learned to do that by understanding quickly that I didn't have those guardrails that my sister did.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. When you say, I'm a sociopath, what exactly are you claiming or stating? What do you experience different from me, for example?

You said complex emotional development. But I think a lot of people, myself included, aren't 100 percent sure what that means.

Patric Gagne: So before I get into the specifics of that, I think it's really clear to point out that the term sociopath is clinically obsolete these days. At the time that I received my diagnosis, that's what I got. But the term has advanced to be known as secondary psychopathy in my case.

So psychopathy is a spectrum. And there are extreme cases and there are not so extreme cases. And the majority of people who fall under that psychopathic umbrella fall on the mild to moderate side of that spectrum.

What that means is that everyone experiences the inherent emotions. If you hold a baby, that baby's going to be sad, happy, anger, trust, fear, disgust, surprise. These are hardwired emotions.

Everybody experiences them, including psychopaths. What we struggle to understand are the learned emotions. Things like empathy, shame, guilt.

You aren't born understanding these concepts. They're learned, usually through modeling. And those are the emotions with which I struggle.

I am capable of learning them, as are most secondary psychopaths. The primary psychopaths, they are believed to be genetically incapable of learning these emotions full stop. Which is why it's so important to make that distinction.

Because if most of the people who fall under the psychopathic umbrella are secondary psychopaths and most of those people are able to learn those social emotions, it's important. Because treatment is possible for these people. Screening is possible for these people.

It's just a matter of learning those emotions differently.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Thank you for clearing that up. Because whenever I do a show about psychopathy, I get a hundred emails that say, psychopathy is not a thing anymore.

How dare you? You guys are a bunch of idiots. I'm a therapist and I know that you should have said sociopath.

And then I get a hundred more that say, thank you for saying psychopath instead of sociopath, which is an outdated da-da-da. And then you get people who are like, type in, I don't know, a 20 page excerpt from the DSM that I'm supposed to understand what they're referring to. And so this makes it a lot more clear.

I think it's really interesting that some people can learn these emotions and other people can't. I don't think I've ever heard that before. Is that new knowledge or is that just something that most people don't know?

Patric Gagne: No, it's not new knowledge. In fact, there is so much research that indicates that not only can they learn these emotions differently, but it starts in childhood. And if the precursors for psychopathy are believed to be conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, mood dysregulation disorder in kids.

And what this basically means is these children do not learn emotional regulation or emotional connection the same way that neurotypical kids do. They absolutely can learn. The problem is parents are so fearful, rightfully, of their children being stigmatized by these disorders that they don't want.

They don't want that diagnosis. They'd rather just live in denial. But treatment is very effective.

The way that they learn is not through punishment. And that's really important because, newsflash, I can show you volumes of research that indicates that punishment in general is not effective, but it is particularly ineffective when you're dealing with a child or an adult who is psychopathic. And so what that means is if you punish a psychopath for behaving in a certain way, they're just going to figure out a different way to do it.

The way that they learn is through re-socialization, which is basically relearning how to socialize, relearning the importance of community, but from the inside out as opposed from the outside in. And by that, what I mean is if you take a child and you're teaching them empathy, what you're going to say is, you don't want to hit Susie because that's going to hurt Susie's feelings and we don't want to do that, do we? And of course, the child's going to say, no, I would feel terrible.

Yes, you would feel terrible. But a kid like me never, that didn't hit with me. I didn't necessarily want to make Susie upset, but I didn't really care.

The way to do it is if you hit Susie, you're not going to be able to go to the pool later. Okay, then I should probably not hit Susie. Great.

And that's how you start. You make it about themselves first, and then through that understanding of self, you can then start building on empathic responses for others. It's just reversing emotional instruction.

Jordan Harbinger: It does sound like punishment. You can't go to the pool, but it's more a threat of punishment that holds a mirror up to their behavior then, right? It's a little different.

Patric Gagne: It's not, I'm going to punish you. It's, hey, listen, here's what's going to happen. If you pull on Susie's hair, she's going to go home and tell her mom and then her mom's going to call me and she's probably going to say, you can't come over later and it's going to be a whole nightmare.

Do you want to deal with that? It's that type of situation as opposed to that is bad and you should feel bad. And if you don't feel bad, something's wrong with you.

It's a logical approach instead of an emotional approach.

Jordan Harbinger: I understand that distinction now. Thank you. Okay.

So you mentioned before that you're not necessarily upset if Susie's hair gets pulled. Do you feel nothing? Are you bored?

Are you numb? Are you calm? Are you dissociated?

Or is there just an absence where you can tell that somebody else who did the same thing is experiencing something, but then there's just nothing there for you? Just a void.

Patric Gagne: Are you speaking generally or if I am in a situation where I've upset someone?

Jordan Harbinger: Maybe generally. I think that's a good point. I think the question could work either way.

Patric Gagne: I experience the inherent emotions probably a little bit less than a neurotypical person does. But I get angry. I experience joy, sadness, surprise, disgust.

These are all hardwired emotions that I feel. Where I struggle is empathy, shame, guilt, even jealousy to a certain extent. I understand it intellectually, but there's no emotional component to it, which is something.

Because if you can understand something intellectually, it's better than not even being able to understand the concept of an emotion at all. Sometimes if I'm struggling to understand someone and they will describe to me what they're experiencing, I can find a way to plug it into something that I have in order to connect to the experience. Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Your husband must have had to go through the wringer a little bit. Hey, you know, that really is a thing that makes me feel terrible. And you're like, okay, I've got to remember that.

Patric Gagne: I think a lot of it's common sense. There's nuance to hurt feelings, but there are some basics that you just understand. And obviously I do.

But there's a lot of argument about how psychopaths can't experience love. And I've really struggled with that descriptor because I think a better way to describe it is that the way I experience love seems to be very different from the so-called neurotypical experience. But that doesn't mean it's non-existent.

And I think that's a really important distinction to make. So many people want to compare the neurodivergent experience against the neurotypical experience and they will cancel out things that don't line up. And where I'm coming from is, no, I experience love.

I just don't know that I experience it the way that you do. And I think that's okay.

Jordan Harbinger: We'll get more into that later on because I do have more questions about that. But I think when people hear sociopath, they're picturing Hannibal Lecter with the mask and convincing the guy to swallow his tongue or whatever it was in that movie. Give me the most boring Tuesday afternoon version of secondary psychopathy.

Patric Gagne: The easiest way I can break this down for you is that, from what I understand, the primary psychopath suffers from a brain abnormality that makes it absolutely impossible for them to progress through emotional development. So while they can feel those hardwired emotions, they are absolutely incapable of experiencing the social emotions, love, empathy, guilt, shame, etc. The primary psychopath is extremely rare.

I think the last time I checked, it was 0.004% of the population. What is far more common is the secondary psychopath. These are people for whom emotional development is possible.

They just learn those emotions differently. In my book, I described it as an emotional learning disability because that's how it felt when I was a kid. But the biggest difference is that treatment is possible for secondary psychopaths.

We are capable of learning these things, learning these emotions. We just learn them differently. And the experience overall is muted.

So it doesn't mean that we don't feel, it doesn't mean we don't care, it doesn't mean that we don't have the ability to understand what it means to be a productive member of society. It just means that the way that we internalize emotion and process information is different than those who are overtly emotional.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, this is starting to become clearer for me and hopefully for the listener as well. Take me back to first grade. There's a girl named Clancy, probably, hopefully not her real name.

I don't know. Who is she? What's happening inside your head that day?

Why did stealing a pink barrette from her hair make you feel physically better? That was an interesting anecdote.

Patric Gagne: Obviously at the time, I had no idea. I just knew that I was compelled to do it. Looking back, what I can guarantee was happening was I was experiencing a lot of upset as a kid who understood that I was different and was not able to share those differences with anyone without getting into trouble.

My entire life felt tight. I felt very claustrophobic. I could never just be myself.

I could never just tell someone the truth. I could never just lay out the way that I was feeling or not feeling. What I would experience when that claustrophobia would become insufferable, just waves of wanting to act out.

I think what was going on is I wanted to break out. I wanted to get out of this tightness. When I did something that was bad, it was a way of taking all of the pressure out of the balloon.

It was a very subtle way of saying, look, I just did something completely authentic to myself and nothing happened and I'm still here and it's okay. I also think that I probably wanted to get caught. I wanted someone to demand to know what was going on with me who would do more than just change the subject when they received the answer.

If I had understood at the time that I could have asked for something like this, I would have wanted to speak to a therapist. I understood there was something wrong and I didn't know what that was.

Jordan Harbinger: So this is an important distinction because it sounds like you weren't stealing because you desperately wanted a pink barrette, right? The act of crossing the line was the drug, so to speak.

Patric Gagne: A hundred percent. In fact, I was recently talking with someone about the abuse of animals and how a lot of kids who are later diagnosed as psychopathic, they have animal abuse in their history. And in the book, I tell a story about squeezing a cat.

And a lot of people have a hard time with that story, understandably. And when I was asked to describe it, the person was asking, what was it about the pain of the animal that appealed to me? And I remember thinking nothing.

It had nothing to do with wanting to see an animal in pain. What was going on was I was trying to force an emotion and my behavior at the time, the things I had been doing, the ways that I had been acting out, they weren't producing that anymore. So I thought, what if I just did this, which I know is up there with really bad things that bad kids do.

And I was trying to squeeze a reaction out of myself. And I remember intellectually, the voice in my head saying, you're not going to be able to do this for much longer. If you squeeze this cat much longer, the cat's going to die.

You don't want to kill the cat. You have about 10 seconds left. So I was very aware, but it was never about the pain.

It was never about the stealing. It was never about wanting to hurt other people. It was always about me trying to understand where my threshold was and where my emotional boundaries began and ended.

Jordan Harbinger: So at that age, did you already know, okay, other people would feel guilty about stealing this barrette? I don't. That's fine.

That's weird. That's part of this thing that's going on with me. But you had a clue.

You weren't totally running on autopilot. You had a clue at this point.

Patric Gagne: No, I was very aware. I understood. I had read an article, a magazine article about OCD and people feeling compulsions to do things like count.

And I remember that really resonated with me. I remember thinking, this is what I have, only I do other things. And so then I tried to research, is there a type of OCD that's with bad behavior?

And I didn't get anywhere. I had an inkling, very clear inkling that something was wrong. But again, I knew from a very early age that admitting to any of it was not a good idea.

Jordan Harbinger: Patric learned early that telling adults what they wanted to hear was safer than telling the truth. So basically, childhood prepared her perfectly for a job in corporate communications. Speaking of carefully approved messaging, here are our sponsors.

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Your mother finds this whole big box of stolen objects. I assume, I don't know, barrettes of various colors and among other things. She tries to make you imagine how sad the owners must be.

So what's going on in your head when she asks you to feel something that maybe is not there?

Patric Gagne: Nothing. And again, that's a perfect example of, this would have been a great time for me to say, no, actually, I don't feel anything and I think there's something wrong. But I didn't have the tools to offer that.

She most certainly did not have the tools to receive something like that. So I just found myself saying, yes, mommy, I feel so bad. And it's really important that this is where psychopaths learn to lie.

So much of the lying of it all and the superficial charm of it all and the lack of remorse, it's always tainted with this idea that it's grounded in evildoing or malice. But really where it starts is learning to survive. If you have to start lying about how you feel at a very early age and you have to start masking at a very early age and using manipulation and charm tactics to stay safe, to stay below the radar, it snowballs from there.

But it's rarely about wanting to inflict pain. I might not necessarily care about the pain that someone I don't know is in, but that doesn't mean I want to cause more of it. And I think that's really important.

Jordan Harbinger: That is important because a lot of people think, OK, Dexter has this compulsion to kill people, but he chooses other bad people. So it's OK in the viewer, because otherwise we're just watching a serial killer horror movie instead of a thing where he's secretly the hero. Right.

But he's enjoying he's like, oh, I want to see all the blood. Right. That's not quite what's going on with you.

But there's a shade of it.

Patric Gagne: There is a shade. And I remember watching Dexter and really being very moved by it because I remember thinking, I don't know who wrote this, but whoever did knows what's going on. Because, yes, because this is a very extreme version of psychopathy where it's violence driven.

I didn't have that, but I was just a few ticks down. The compulsion is the same. The framing of that compulsion is the same.

The way that he orchestrated it so that he could act out within a type of moral boundary is the same.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a good way to put it. What did he call it? The dark passenger or something like that?

Patric Gagne: Dark passenger.

Jordan Harbinger: Dark passenger. So if you're going to have a dark passenger, hopefully it's just a barrette stealing dark passenger and not a chainsaw.

Patric Gagne: Yeah, that would be ideal. But I would argue that if somebody had intervened when he was a kid, he would have never had the dark passenger to begin with.

Jordan Harbinger: I see. That's really good news as long as we start paying attention to this stuff, that is. There is a darker moment when you're still a little kid.

This girl, Sydney, ends up with a Hello Kitty pencil, I should not laugh, but I'm going to, lodged in the side of her head. Not her brain. Relax, people.

No. Yeah. What happened?

How did that end up in her head?

Patric Gagne: I remember feeling really overwhelmed. First and foremost, it had nothing to do with Sydney. I don't want to say she was an innocent bystander because she was a bully.

So she was an easy target. I don't want to give the impression that I did it because she was a bully or because she had done anything, because it wasn't about her. It was about this feeling, this building pressure that I remember experiencing.

And again, none of the things that I had been doing at the time were working to neutralize the pressure. And I just remember feeling like a balloon, just expanding, expanding, expanding. She was there and the pencils were there and I just...

Jordan Harbinger: She kicked your backpack and said something nasty. I remember that.

Patric Gagne: She did. But again, I really don't want to indicate that it was something she did that led me to do it. She gave me an easy reason to do it.

So yeah, she kicked my backpack and she had been pushing me and I wasn't giving her the reaction that she wanted and she just pushed me too far. And so I turned and stabbed her with a pencil. But again, it wasn't anything she did as much as it was the pressure that I had been experiencing in the moment and the immediate evaporation of that pressure in an instant.

And I remember thinking, I don't know that that's great news.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, right, right. Like, oh, all I have to do is, oh, stab people in the head with pencils. It's not as sustainable.

Patric Gagne: Now we're tipping into the Dexter thing and how something like that can become habit. There's also a lot of gender bias within the PCL, which is the measure that is used to diagnose for psychopathy. And so much of what is in the PCL is violence-driven because that's how men typically assert dominance is through some type of violence.

But women don't tend to do that as much. And I remember thinking, even if I wanted to, this would not be sustainable for me. I cannot be in a situation where I'm having to rely on violence to neutralize this pressure.

I cannot do that again. It's too slippery a slope.

Jordan Harbinger: Your brain essentially learned that violence is an extremely efficient emotional regulator, which is not a good lesson to get at that particular point in your development. And you don't describe exploding in rage. You describe becoming calm.

That's a little more frightening, actually, in retrospect, right?

Patric Gagne: Yes. And I think why it was frightening to me is because I recognized that, which was that it was such a quick neutralizer. And I think that's what's going on with a lot of people who tend to be very measured in their reactions once they have committed a crime.

If you see someone going really calm, it's most likely because they've neutralized some type of pressure in much the same way that, you know, taking a stimulant can regulate someone who has ADHD. It's a similar hit.

Jordan Harbinger: Fascinating. I bet she never kicked your backpack again. Not that you should have done that.

But she didn't. Right. It did work.

A little overkill, but it worked. You sometimes describe these acts in the book as almost like symptoms happening through you. But not in this case.

You didn't plan this. But other times you planned, concealed, rationalized behavior. Was it hard for you to tell where your illness stopped and the responsibility was supposed to begin?

Sometimes you did things where you planned or rationalized behavior, right? It was different. It wasn't just stab her with a pencil, oh, oops, like that was more impulsive.

But there were other things that were less impulsive.

Patric Gagne: Oh, you mean like the breaking into houses?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly.

Patric Gagne: I don't remember ever justifying that. I knew that was not right.

Jordan Harbinger: You did it because you had this illness or a diagnosis. Do you call it an illness or is that not accurate? I don't know.

Patric Gagne: It is a mental illness. But I think the more specific, it's a personality disorder. And I think that's important because you don't ever get rid of a personality disorder.

You just learn to manage it. And I think that's important.

Jordan Harbinger: So I guess what I'm asking here is like, where does the symptom of the illness stop and then personal responsibility have to begin? It's a challenge for me if I'm putting myself in your shoes to separate my behavior is this versus like, well, I did have a really long time to think about and plan this and figure out how I was going to get in and out and not get caught. The pencil in the head is more like, hey, look, she's got a mental illness.

Breaking in someone's house, which just seems like it's not as impulsive. So it's harder for me to figure out how did you figure that you could just do that? And that was fine.

Patric Gagne: Well, it wasn't fine. I mean, it wasn't fine from a societal point of view.

Jordan Harbinger: No. I mean, but in your head, you were like, they're not home, who cares?

Patric Gagne: Because I wanted to make sure that I never resorted to violence as a recurring method of pressure reduction. So I sat down and I asked myself, what are the things that I've done in my life that have worked to reduce the pressure, but that are not violent and that don't hurt people specifically? There was a time in college where I was stealing cars, basically joyriding them from fraternity houses and that was very effective for a while, but it required a very specific set of circumstances and I was also going to age out of it.

I wanted something that I could do for the rest of my life if I had to, ideally I wouldn't have to, but, and where I landed was, I really enjoy being in homes when people are not there. And this is something that I can do anytime, anywhere, any place, any age. And I liked it because although it was a violation of privacy, that doesn't resonate for me.

I understand that it's wrong, but I didn't have any bad feelings about it because I thought they're not going to know who cares.

Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say, if this is going to get easier as you get older, I mean, if you're 80 and you show up in someone else's house, they're going to be like, oh, you poor thing. Let me help you get home. And you just have to go, oh yeah.

It's like in Breaking Bad where he shows up to the grocery store naked and he goes, oh yeah, I was in a fugue state. I wasn't kidnapped by Tuco, the meth hound drug cartel guy. I just had some kind of stroke and then, yeah, and you can just go, oh, I don't know.

I'm so confused right now. And your husband's like, again, Patric? Come on.

Patric Gagne: And let's also not forget the fact that I am very clear in that I am a white woman of privilege, which allows me all kinds of easy exits to which other people do not have access. So, and there was a case one time where I was in someone's house and I saw them pull into their driveway. And I remember thinking, I was sitting in their living room and I remember thinking, all right, I can make a case for running out the back door, but I think they're going to catch me before I get out the back door.

And my gut said, I bet if you just walked out the front door and waved at them as you walked by, they would be so shocked and confused and thinking that they missed something that you could be in your car and gone before they fully reacted. And that's what happened. But that's only because I'm a white woman.

So even right there, I had an easy out that most people could not take.

Jordan Harbinger: Guy was like, the maid you hired is really young. And she was like, I didn't hire a housekeeper.

Patric Gagne: They waved back and they were definitely confused. But I was like, hi, see you guys later. Like and they were arrested by confusion, which is provided just enough time for me.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. You must hate Ring cameras like, oh, crap.

Patric Gagne: I love them. Actually, I love them because I can't do that anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, OK. OK.

Patric Gagne: It was really hard for a long time when I had told myself, this is not how you're going to handle this anymore. You're going to actually do it the hard way. You're going to go to therapy and figure it out.

I always had that break in case of emergency out in the back of my head. Once people started getting Ring cams, it became really easy for me to say, actually, you don't have that anymore. And I never really needed it.

But yeah, I like that there are Ring cams because even if I want to, I can't do it now.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, now that you wrote a book, you're going to have a hard time being like, sorry, I'm just so confused. I don't know where I am. And it's like, no, I picked up a copy of your book.

You know exactly where you are.

Patric Gagne: And I'm calling the police. Yeah, I did wrestle with that when I was writing it. I was like, this is officially it if you do this.

But at that point, it was fine.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, I hope if you do end up doing it again, you find a copy of your book sitting on their kitchen table. That would be very meta.

Patric Gagne: I'd sign it.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you could sign it and then leave. I would. Actually, that would be quite a hit and run.

God, that would be hilarious. Not for the people who found a random signed book on their kitchen table, I don't think. But you know what?

You could also break in, bring your own copy, sign it and leave.

Patric Gagne: I don't think I would do that. It's definitely not a smart thing to do, but I don't know if I could resist if I did find myself in a home where I wasn't supposed to be and I saw a copy of my book. There's no way in the world I wouldn't sign it.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, you'll know when you're in my house because it'll be sitting right there. Oh, he's waiting for me. And then I'll say hi to you on my Ring camera because it'll get you right away.

Your mother in the book, she becomes this outsourced moral compass for you. So you had this cake table system the two of you developed. I found this really interesting.

You had to be like, Mom, crazy, not crazy, normal, not normal. What are we dealing with here? And she obliged in many ways.

Patric Gagne: I think for a long time I used her in much the same way that people in Catholicism use, you know, the priests with confession. And I felt I don't have these constructs that keep people in line. But my mother does.

And as long as I am disclosing to her the things that I'm doing, she'll let me know if I ever really cross a line. And she did for a long time until she couldn't anymore, until it became clear that I had overstayed my welcome in her confessional that didn't exist. You know, she didn't sign up for that.

She did the best that she could. But at some point, what are you going to do if your kid is telling you these things? In fact, then we hardly had words for anxiety and depression, much less psychopathy, much less antisocial personality disorder.

I mean, she didn't know what to do. And once I understood that she couldn't really be my compass anymore, I had to figure it out on my own.

Jordan Harbinger: This is the beginning of the break-ins, right? Because she says, hey, go next door to the Patels and get some sugar. So nobody's there.

Tell us what happened because you let yourself into the house like, oh, I'll handle this.

Patric Gagne: It's really funny because and yes. So my mother asked me, hey, can you go to the Patels and ask them for some sugar or flour? I don't actually remember which one it was anymore.

Sure. No problem. So I ran up there and they weren't home, but their back door was open.

I knew where it was. So I just went and got it and came home. And when my mom found out what I had done, that I had just let myself in and they weren't home, she had a huge reaction to it.

And understandably, and again, I'm saying understandably purely from an intellectual place, because even now, I don't see the problem.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What scares me is I totally can get in your head right now. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, if they never knew and they were going to give you the sugar anyway, this isn't like you crept in there and you played with the dog and grabbed the sugar.

It's like for all you could have known, somebody else was breaking in. You would have called the police. Just check in on your house.

No need to thank me. I'm just going to grab this sugar and make sure everything's OK in here and then go home. I can also get into your head like that.

And I'm like, OK, I also sort of only intellectually understand that's a bad idea. And as a guy, I'm going to get shot doing that. But yeah, if I'm a white girl, you're going to get shot now.

Patric Gagne: But in San Francisco a million years ago, you're not going to get shot. I think I remember her asking, what if they had come home? What would you have said?

But that was a really important lesson for me even then. Like she was like, tell me you understand that. Tell me you know that this is wrong.

And of course, I was like, yes, I do. But I was like, no, actually, I don't at all. I think this is ridiculous.

But I remember thinking, oh, I have to lie about this because I can't tell her the truth, which is that I think that it's an overreaction.

Jordan Harbinger: But what's fascinating, I should say, is that it suggests morality wasn't invisible to you. It was like a rule book, but the reasoning wasn't intuitive.

Patric Gagne: Correct. The reasoning wasn't emotional. And I think that's really important because everyone likes to say it only counts if it comes from the heart.

And I call bullshit on that all day long because I make really good choices every single day and they don't come from the heart. And it actually reminds me of this quote that Penn Jillette, the magician, somebody asked him, if you're an atheist, you don't believe in God. So if you're an atheist, what's to stop you from hurting and murdering people anytime you want?

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, it's so funny. I was going to say the same thing.

Patric Gagne: And he said, I do hurt people all that I want and the amount that I want is zero. And I do murder people all that I want. And the amount for that is zero.

So the fact that people think you need emotional constructs like shame and guilt to keep people from murdering is insane to me, because what you're basically saying is that human beings want to harm people at all times by virtue of the fact that they have these constructs like shame and guilt. They don't. And to quote Penn Jillette, that's just about the most self-damning argument I think that anyone can make.

Jordan Harbinger: I agree.

Patric Gagne: So saying that my morality is less than simply because it isn't tethered to emotion, I can make the counter argument that if your morality is tied to emotion, I've seen it happen where you can justify just about anything if you feel emotionally entitled to it. And people talk all the time about, oh, psychopaths are all murderers are all serial killers. And it's not only is that inaccurate, but I see far more of these crimes of passion than I see serial killers.

And all that is is a decision that was made because emotion got overwhelming and too much to handle and somebody lost control.

Jordan Harbinger: If you find an autographed copy of Sociopath on your kitchen table and you didn't buy it, congratulations, you've experienced the world's least reassuring author event. Maybe check the Ring footage. We'll be right back.

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Most of the people listening right now, despite what laws and society say, are doing all of the raping and murdering that they would like to do in any given day, which is zero because they don't feel the call to do that at all. I do see that a lot of these organizational structures we have are probably also not stopping people from doing that because there's still plenty of it going on. And it happens in all of the communities where you think that it wouldn't because they have even stronger, supposedly, guardrails against it.

So, yeah, it's really interesting that you can build this new learned architecture of morality, and it's just as effective in practice as somebody who maybe has it for another reason. They built it because of their religion or their upbringing or because they naturally had the emotions that prohibit them from doing it, if that's even possible. It seems like the outcome is the same.

Patric Gagne: It's not even just that the outcome is the same. I could even argue that there are some advantages to psychopathy. Guilt chief among them.

Guilt to me has always felt like something of a huge double edged sword. I see people that I love struggle with shame and guilt, and I feel very grateful that I don't have to because it seems like a very, not just a heavy burden, but an unnecessary one. And also people pleasing.

That's not an issue for me, which is not to say that I don't want the people around me to be happy because I don't want to contribute to someone's misery. But people pleasing comes out of need, a need for someone to like you, a need to be approved. And I don't have that.

I'll tell you, it really pisses me off that sociopaths and psychopaths are vilified for using their traits as an advantage. Meanwhile, to your point, neurotypical people are encouraged to embrace sociopathic traits as long as they're repackaged as strengths. So lying, right?

Lying is so bad. Psychopaths, they all lie and they can't be trusted. They're not good people because good people don't lie.

And it's like, really? Then what is Santa Claus? It's a big lie that all of you collude to tell your kids every year.

But because it's been repackaged as traditional and cute, it's fine. Aristotle, reason free from passion. This is a sociopathic, psychopathic approach, but not just.

It's held up as a judicial ideal. But the general public, for whatever reason, they set the two things apart. We think of lack of emotion as uniquely the realm of a psychopath.

Was Aristotle a psychopath? I don't know. But his wisdom is the foundation of the Western legal canon, the blindfold, the lack of emotion.

What we tell our judges to do in other contexts would be considered psychopathic. It's not just a moving of goalposts, but it's the rules don't apply to me. And then other times they apply too much for me.

Jordan Harbinger: I do wonder if morality is a consciously chosen system for you. What keeps you committed when following that becomes just genuinely inconvenient?

Patric Gagne: Because I understand the importance of functioning within a society. Mammals are species that best survive and thrive in groups, whether I like it or not. My life is better if I find a way to fit in with a tribe, but I've learned to do this authentically instead of faking it.

And that is what has helped it when it gets really tough. And when I get really fed up, I usually just say that instead of lying about it and trying to find a way to fake it, I just say, I've had enough, this is ridiculous, and I'm going to do something that I enjoy doing, because if I don't, that I'm going to end up doing something that nobody wants me to enjoy doing. Just owning it and acknowledging it and understanding that I am a low feeling person trying to exist in a very high octane feeling world, sometimes that sucks, and I think just acknowledging it is how you get around burnout.

Jordan Harbinger: At some point, you realize hiding doesn't mean being quiet and invisible. It means becoming whatever the person in front of you wants to see. So this is the masking part, right?

Patric Gagne: And mirroring.

Jordan Harbinger: And mirroring. Yeah. How did you learn how to do that? And I know you mentioned some examples earlier, but I'm talking more about the adult version of you or the teenage version of you. You meet somebody at a party, you know, what are you unconsciously or consciously reading about them in order to, charm seems like a corny way to put it, but maybe that's the best word for this.

Patric Gagne: Charm is tough because that is what it is. But it's again, much like the other buzzwords associated with this disorder, it's taken on this malicious aura. Like, oh, I'm trying to charm you like I'm a witch.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. It sounds a little like you're going to murder me in a closet after we hang out. You have social skills, but they're conscious.

I used to teach guys how to meet women years ago. And they're like, oh, that's so creepy. What are you teaching?

And I'd be like, you find out what they're interested in and you talk about the things that you're interested in. You relate to them emotionally. And then women would go like, oh, that's awesome.

You're teaching guys how to do that. And I'm like, I thought I was a creep five seconds ago until you found out how it actually worked. And they're like, oh no, I thought you meant lying and all that stuff.

And I'm like, no, it doesn't have to be that way. You can relate to people authentically, but most of us don't really know how to do that very well. And that's what I'm teaching.

And so it becomes less creepy if you explain it. And so I'm giving you that sort of, the way you did it, is it not creepy because you're not doing it to get the person to do something that's against their interests. You're just trying to be a normal person that can relate to others and is not an alien and is not treating them as aliens.

Patric Gagne: And thank you for that. I'm very appreciative that you acknowledge that. The way that I'm going to describe this is going to be very Noises Off in the sense that it's going to seem jilted and nuts at first, but then once I flip it and explain to you what's going on behind the scenes, you'll understand it more.

When I meet someone, not so much anymore, but when I would meet somebody before and I would mirror them, the first things that I would look for are signs of the social emotions, shame, guilt, jealousy, any of these things. These are tells. These will tell me about you.

And then if I pick up on any of those things, I'm going to get you talking about it, and then I'm going to identify with what you're talking about, whether it's accurate or not. But to your point, I'm not doing any of these things because I'm trying to harm you or steal from you or manipulate you into doing something for me or doing anything malicious. I'm trying to find something that I can connect to.

I understand that I can't connect the way that a neurotypical person does. But if I can get you talking about yourself long enough that I can find something about you that I truly can connect with, I will use that to then form an authentic connection. So what starts as charm and what starts as mirroring is really just me trying to backdoor my way into an authentic social connection.

Jordan Harbinger: Yes, this makes sense. And I want to highlight that secondary psychopaths or whatever are not the only people who struggle with this. People who are on the spectrum struggle with this.

People who are not on the spectrum struggle with this. Most of my clients were really normal guys that were like, Hey, I've been working for 10 years and I didn't go out all the time like my friends. And I feel like I'm way behind.

How do I mechanically figure out this process so that it becomes natural for me? That was it. And they weren't creepy sexual assault machines or whatever.

It was nothing like that at all. And we had types of people apply that we would screen out, but they were really just normal guys or they were divorced. And they're like, I don't know how to date.

I've been married for 25 years or 20 years. I have no clue how this works anymore. People have mobile phones.

I met my wife in high school and wherever. And now I live in New York. I have no clue what I'm doing.

So we had to get around that. So it's a service in many ways. And most people could use lessons in doing this, I think.

And so the fact that you had to learn it manually as a woman is that's the only thing that's really unusual about this. I think every guy who's read a dating book is wait, where's the part where it's supposed to be creepy because we've all done this and it's like many women are naturally a little bit better at this because they learn it earlier in life naturally, but you didn't.

Patric Gagne: Such an interesting point. I didn't think about that. That's really interesting.

And again, this is something with which tons of people struggle, but only the psychopath is vilified for it. Only the psychopath is vilified for their superficial charm and their mirroring and their masking where, you know, people mask every day for different reasons. If one of my kids is in a bad mood and they have to go to school and talk with their teacher, they're going to mask in order to get through it.

These are children. They understand that. And I also understand it.

And so it's one of the reasons why I tend to limit my social interactions only because I don't really like them. I enjoy people, but I enjoy people one-on-one. But when I do have to engage with people, I just hold up a shiny, bright object, which is a mirror.

People love talking about themselves and I don't mind listening.

Jordan Harbinger: God, this is so familiar. Okay. So right now, a lot of my listeners who are on the spectrum are probably like, wait a minute, I do this.

Here's the thing, to your point, if you do this and you're a psychopath, people are like, oh my God, how could you? If you do this and you're, I don't know, on the autism spectrum, people are like, yay, look at you. You're doing great.

You're doing great.

Patric Gagne: You're doing great, sweetie.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You go you.

Patric Gagne: It's the Santa Claus analogy where it's okay. It's not okay for you to lie. Lying is bad.

Lying means you're a bad person. But watch me tell my children this insane lie for their entire lives. And that's, by the way, something I have never done.

I've never bought into that, which is not to say that I've robbed my children of Christmas, but one of the things that I have done since a very early age is when they talk to me about Santa Claus, I just, I say, you're out of your mind. And they say, no mommy, Santa Claus. I'm like, so let me get this straight.

You're telling me that a giant man who never changes his clothes 365 days a year breaks into a fireplace that we don't have so that they can leave things in our home. And that's not, that's something I'm supposed to believe. So I put the burden on them so that I never had to lie to them so that it always became about them convincing me it was real and me always telling them that it was nuts just because I did.

I found it very, I'm prickly about Santa Claus.

Jordan Harbinger: That's really funny. My kids totally know because my son will say, dad, here's the thing. We don't have a chimney.

I'm like, oh yeah, he's magic. The other thing is my son goes, he's bringing the toys that I see in commercials and stuff on YouTube and that other kids have or that I see at Target. So if the elves are making them, are they making the toys at Target too?

And I'm like, listen, here's the thing.

Patric Gagne: But how many lies did you tell before you got to that point where you finally had to say, all right, here's the truth.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I kind of decided early. I was like, I want the breaking point to be early.

So I'm not like, here's 8 million little lies. I'm like, the big lie is that they're Santa Claus. And when he's like, I don't get how he's magical.

I just go, maybe he's not real. And he's like, got it. And I'm like, don't tell your sister, who's four.

Right. Let her figure it out on her own. He's like, all right, fine.

And I'm like, yeah, I just don't want to be like, yeah, the elves make all the toys. Even the ones at Target. Yeah.

Well, they must be really busy. Yeah, sure. There's millions of them.

It's just, it's ridiculous at a certain point. It's already ridiculous.

Patric Gagne: And don't get me started on the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. Like that's a whole separate situation where it's like, all right, so you're going to leave your teeth for a witch to come and trade out for cash. Listen, you do you, if that's what you believe.

Jordan Harbinger: That one blew up in my face too, because my son was like, I've got to pull out a few more teeth because I need more money. And my daughter was like, I don't want any teeth. Me and my wife were like, all right, that's enough of the tooth fairy.

Here's what's really happening guys. And it's fun and it can be fun to put it under your pillow. It's our money.

If you really need it, leave your teeth in, we'll get you some more fake gold coins, okay? So we're terrible parents, I think is the moral of this section of our podcast.

Patric Gagne: This, that one blew up in my face because my youngest said, mommy, what happens if you leave something for the tooth fairy that's not a tooth? And just offhanded, I was like, you die. And apparently he had.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, geez. How long does it take to die, mom? Because I don't know.

My friend told me.

Patric Gagne: He was like, what? And I was like, yeah, no, that's, she gets real mad if you do that. And then he was like, oh, I think I did it.

And I was like, just kidding. Like I had to make it funny, but I just remember thinking, yeah, I might have to dial back that super dark humor for my children every once in a while.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. My wife was like, why does he keep asking me for fake teeth? And I'm like, oh, let me step in here.

Patric Gagne: That's what it was. I was like, yeah, you don't want to leave fake tooth. You'll die.

No, I don't know how it happens. I don't know how it works.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. He had this like mouth that would chatter and he's, what if I leave all the teeth? Will I get 38 gold coins or whatever?

Is that 30, whatever I'm anywhere in there? Maybe, but you won't be alive to spend it. Yeah.

So, so she's like, why does he keep asking me for more teeth? This is the weirdest requests. I'm like, let me fill in some blanks for you that make our son sound a little bit less like the guy from the Silence of the Lambs, right?

Oh yeah. So, okay. What are people leaking constantly that they don't realize they're leaking that you're picking up on?

You alluded to this earlier.

Patric Gagne: Their psychopathy. What you were saying before is that so many people identify and that you were talking about somebody that was like, wait a second, I'm recognizing these traits, does that mean I'm a psychopath? And I hear that so often and my response is no, you just probably have the normal amount of genetically distributed psychopathic traits.

I'm just not using sensational language to describe and define those traits. So it's the first time you're really noticing and identifying with it. So that's when I'm around people, and I think I've said this before, the first thing they want to do once they are familiar with who I am and what I do is they want to tell me their deepest, darkest.

I always feel it's such a curious exchange because to me, I'm like, am I, am I really the only person you're talking to about this stuff? It's because they feel correctly that I'm not going to judge them and I can receive what they are offering. So I don't know that it's so much what people are leaking.

No, it is because they're so desperate to unburden themselves. And nine times out of 10, I mean, these aren't bad things that they're sharing. This darkness that they're so ashamed of is not deserving of shame.

It's deserving of some processing perhaps. But that's what I notice when people are talking to me with intention, with intentionality, just generally in the world. When I'm moving through the world, what I notice is how much people need to be liked to their own detriment.

And again, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be liked. There's nothing wrong with wanting to get in, get along with other members of society, but that desperation for approval, it's such an easy thing to be exploited. And that is something that I would caution any neurotypical person to keep closer to the chest.

If you understand that you're somebody that is a people pleaser, if you understand that you're somebody that needs approval, be careful who you share that with, even if you're just tipping your hand a little bit, because people pick up on things like that and then they use it to their advantage.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense and is quite scary because I think a lot of people are people pleasers and they're like, oh, they're trusting and they probably do fall into this or have experiences where this has been used against them, weaponized against them. At 14, you met somebody named David at a summer creative arts program. So this guy, spoiler alert, is now your husband, correct?

So why does meeting him scramble your theory of yourself? It's understandable that it did.

Patric Gagne: Because he was the first person who saw the things that I did and heard the way that I felt and didn't feel and didn't recoil. And I remember feeling so much liberty in that space. Just, oh, this is somebody I can tell anything to.

And he's cool with it. And if he's not cool with it, he'll let me know that without a ton of judgment. It was very cut and dry.

This is, that's not cool, as opposed to, and you should feel very bad about that and you are a bad person or all, you know, whatever language that typically follows judgment. And at 14, having experienced that for the very first time, I think I felt what anybody feels when they are in the presence of somebody who sees them and hears them and wants to see and hear them.

Jordan Harbinger: So you're showing him what secret blueprints you've taken instead of presenting this polished version of yourself. It seems like being known was more powerful than being admired. In that particular situation.

Patric Gagne: Always. Admiration does not do anything for me. But being seen and understood is everything.

Jordan Harbinger: The tooth fairy sounds adorable until your kid starts plotting dental fraud. Then you're explaining to your wife why your kid keeps asking for fake teeth. Parenting.

Somehow both magical and one search warrant away from a Netflix documentary. We'll be right back. All right, y'all.

I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Now for the rest of my conversation with Patric Gagne.

So you'd read earlier before you met David. Psychopathy involves this incapacity for love. We touched on it at the top of the show.

Years later, you're sitting in a dorm room and suddenly you're like, David, wait, I loved someone. So why did that memory feel like evidence that you weren't doomed to die alone?

Patric Gagne: Because at that point I was just getting into the research of it all. So my knowledge at the time was mostly pulled from pop culture understanding of psychopathy, which was non-existent essentially. And it was just those very extreme examples.

Incapable of love. Incapable of feeling. Callous.

Unemotional. And some of them fit, but not all of them fit. And but the love thing was something that I really kept resurfacing because I had love for my family.

I had love for my pets, but yeah, beyond them, I can't remember really loving anyone. And then I realized, oh no, wait, yeah, David. And so I was able to check that one off the list of things that aren't zero-sum in the realm of psychopathy, which it's not, which for obvious reasons, but no personality disorder should ever be zero-sum.

It should never be all this or all that. It's not a black and white issue. And that piece of it helped me understand the disorder a little bit more than I had prior.

My experience of love might not be the neurotypical experience, but I experienced something that's love to me.

Jordan Harbinger: I think it's very interesting. You called the harm reduction system, you called it feeding the dragon. I wish I'd brought that up earlier.

Because I think that's such a funny and apt way to frame it, right? Because it's like Dexter's Dark Passenger, although again, not as bad, but there's just like dragon chomping around and you're like, okay, okay, calm down. I'm going to break into the neighbor's house and you can settle down.

How long did it last? Was it like weeks would go by and the dragon wakes up again? Or is it like, it's Thursday and I only did this on Monday.

How often were you having to feed the dragon?

Patric Gagne: It's hard to remember because once I put myself on a schedule, I wasn't on the schedule of the dragon's hunger anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, you put yourself on a schedule. Okay. Tell us about that.

Patric Gagne: So as I said before, I went through a period where I was going to fraternities and stealing cars and joyriding them.

Jordan Harbinger: That was the Friday night then?

Patric Gagne: Yes. That was a weekly thing that I would just, whatever. But I got a job.

I was trying to graduate and it just, okay, we've got to figure something out that's more mindful. I can't believe I'm using that word to describe.

Jordan Harbinger: I need to do mindful crimes.

Patric Gagne: Like criminal versatility, yeah, mindfully. But so I said, okay, so here's what you're going to do. Instead of waiting for the pressure to get almost unbearable and then do these things, I'm going to put myself on a schedule in the same way that you don't want to wait until you're starving to eat something because then you're going to binge and I was noticing that if I waited too long, my behavior would become more extreme and more difficult to control.

So I think I called it a destruction schedule where I would allow myself to engage in what I perceived at the time to be acceptable criminal behavior as a way of offsetting potentially extreme criminal behavior. So once I started putting myself on the schedule and I never skipped, I didn't really have to worry about it anymore. Almost like it was like a prescription.

I didn't, oh, I don't have to worry about these symptoms anymore because I'm taking this prescription and the prescription handles it. So I'm never having to concern myself with, oh God, I remember I used to ride horses and there was a horse that she was so beautiful, black, and they kept her mane really long, like almost to the floor long, and she was really passive and really quiet, but if they left her in her stall for too long, she would just start to kick the door of the stable and it would just be over and over. And if they didn't let her out, it would get bigger and bigger.

And I remember feeling that's what this is like when she kicks that door, but it would thunder, like her kicks would just make the entire row of stables shake. And that's how I remember feeling like, oh God, I don't want to wait for those kicks to increase.

Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, that's so interesting. It's like this urge, this crazy urge. I want to go back to the breaking in, right?

Because you said, hey, look, I don't, I still to this day, it's fine. They're giving me the sugar anyway. Who cares?

They went home. But I don't know if somebody secretly, now that you have kids, if somebody secretly entered your children's bedrooms while they were at school and then was like, hey, don't worry, I didn't take anything. It just regulates my anxiety.

Would you consider that as harmless? Or would it be like, hey, that's violating and weird. You shouldn't do that.

Patric Gagne: It's a tricky question to answer because I'm essentially inviting people to come and walk through my children's bedrooms. Would I love it? No, I'd rather not know about it.

Eternal Sunshine this stuff, and I'm going to go back in time and not know this and you can keep doing it. I think that's what it was is I don't want to know that you're in my, I don't want to know any of this. If this is what you need to do to regulate as someone who completely understands it, yes, I understand that.

Do I love it? No, just keep me out of it.

Jordan Harbinger: You started doing this cognitive journaling thing with your therapist, Dr. Carlin. So what, tell me a little bit about that process. What are you writing down?

Patric Gagne: They were cognitive behavioral prompts. So a lot of the cognitive behavioral modality focuses on irrational belief systems. So for a neurotypical person, this would look something like, if I say the wrong thing at the party, everyone will hate me and mine were a little different, but it's basically taking these things that you unconsciously believe and really asking yourself, is this true?

Is this real? So for me, it was, if I don't consistently engage in criminal behavior, I'm going to end up doing something really bad. I'm going to end up being violent.

And I do believe that the incident with the pencil really took up a lot of space in my brain. I remember being concerned that if I didn't act out, that eventually I would become violent because it was such a cure-all for me. And a lot of the journaling was, is this true?

Is this really true? And I had to think about it. Is it true?

I don't know. And so when I was working with my therapist, one of her conditions was that I stopped engaging in criminal behavior. And we processed those feelings of pressure when they came up and figured out ways to deal with them constructively instead of destructively.

And journaling the feelings that I had or the thoughts that I had when I was listening to that, those thumps of the stable, what's really going on? There's that expression, there's a thousand miles between your thoughts and your actions. You might be thinking this, but what is the reality that you're going to get in your car and go hurt someone right now?

Right now? No, I'm not going to. Are you going to do it tomorrow?

Probably not. What about the next day? I don't know.

I don't think so. But it was really honing in on what is happening that you feel you need to do this and is there a way for us to neutralize that without acting out destructively?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, this is quite interesting. So let's forget psychopathy for a moment. If somebody listening has a destructive loop, anger, I don't know, drinking, compulsive spending maybe is an easier one just because it's not a substance.

What questions from the journal are transferable?

Patric Gagne: Well, anger's tough.

Jordan Harbinger: Pick a different vice, compulsive spending.

Patric Gagne: I'll do self-harm because I think when you're dealing with anxiety and you go into what is driving this self-harm, and I guess this could apply because any of these things that you referenced before are versions of self-harm, let's get into why you feel the need to act out because it can be anything. Why do you feel the need to do this and list them? And I feel the need because I'm ugly.

People hate me. I'm never going to find a career that I enjoy. I'm never going to find a person that I enjoy and really go through and mindfully respond to those prompts with the truth because so much of what we believe, they're just echoes.

They're echoes of things that we were taught as kids that we were never informed that we were able to un-teach and so much of that is going back and unpacking these lessons that we did not sign up for. We had no say in learning, but were put upon us and as adults, so much of being a high-functioning adult, I think is going back and getting rid of a lot of these systems that are not yours. They're not mine.

These are your parents. This is something your mom taught you. This is something your dad taught you.

This is something your caregiver taught you, your uncle. What are those belief systems that you're carrying around and not realizing? And then answer them in your journals.

Jordan Harbinger: This is interesting. So the breakthrough almost seems less like, hey, control yourself, and it's catch the sequence earlier and try to realize that it's happening so that you can have a little more agency.

Patric Gagne: Exactly. So if you have issues with spending, what's your money story? What is that story?

Where were you? Is it scarcity? Were you taught that you have to buy now because it's all going to run out?

If you have a drinking issue, what's your drinking story? Where did you learn that this was how to neutralize your demons? And what are those demons' names?

Let's give them names. And I'm serious. Give them names.

Identify them and let's figure out who they are. If you're anxious, what are you anxious about? And where was it that you learned that those things are anxiety producing?

I'm anxious about people not liking me. Where did you learn that it's bad if people don't like you? Where did you learn that you don't have a tolerance for not being the brightest shiny object in the room?

It's introspective and it's hard work. But I really responded to CBT because it's action driven.

Jordan Harbinger: Cognitive behavioral therapy for people who are following along at home?

Patric Gagne: Yes. And I do believe that a certain amount of analysis is critical. I think it's essential that you understand your childhood and the role you played in the role others played.

But there's only so much navel gazing we can do before it's time to start applying things to our adult life. And cognitive behavioral therapy is all about homework. It's all about journaling and action and immersion therapy and being an active participant in healing as opposed to just reflection.

Jordan Harbinger: At the beginning of your life, you needed your mother to tell you what was right and wrong. And today, when nobody's watching, nothing inside of you is going to punish you emotionally. What tells you what kind of person to be?

Just habits over the years or something else?

Patric Gagne: I understand the value of being a productive member of society. I understand that there are things that I want that are only possible through gatekeepers. So I want my children to thrive, for example.

Okay, well, if I want my children to thrive, then I have to provide an environment in which they can thrive. And that environment does not include a mother who's in prison or a mother who's fighting off charges that might send her to prison. And it's also bandwidth.

I think of it a lot. If I have $100 in energy to spend and I know that doing something destructive costs $50, that means I only have $50 left for the rest of, you know, whatever. And it does, it adds up.

It's if you're not doing something impulsively, planning to be destructive, it takes a lot of bandwidth.

Jordan Harbinger: The cleanup, too. Even if you do it impulsively, then you, oh, crap. Now I've got to go to court.

I've got to hire a lawyer. That's going to damage my reputation. I have to explain this to my husband.

My kids are going to find out. That's $80 of energy, right?

Patric Gagne: It is. And lying, it's so much work. And I mean that.

I wish I could tell you that I don't lie anymore because I've come to understand that lying is bad and I feel badly about it. No, that's not why I don't lie anymore because I don't have to. I don't feel that I have to conceal who I am.

I don't feel that I have to wear that straight jacket anymore. I can just speak the truth, which is I'm really not feeling like being here anymore, so I'm going to leave. Or I don't really care about this.

I want to care, but I don't. So I'm going to choose another direction. And there's so much agency just in that, just in being honest.

Because again, there's so much talk about, yes, I'm a liar, I'm a thief. Sure, I am those things because by virtue of the fact that I am someone who was born with that toolkit, but I don't utilize those tools the way that I used to. Now it's so much better to just be honest because it's very freeing.

It's a selfish choice as much as it is a societal choice.

Jordan Harbinger: What's something about psychopathy you believe today that you suspect psychology will eventually discover you were right about, but you can't prove it right now? The answer could also be nothing, but I feel like you have something.

Patric Gagne: It's a tough question because so much about psychopathy, the fact that it's a spectrum disorder, the fact that it's treatable, the fact that it's screenable, all of these things have been proven. There is so much research out there that proves all of these points. But society has not caught up yet.

The field is getting there, but people really like believing that monsters are easy to spot because as long as monsters are easy to spot, they don't have to worry that they're living with one or sleeping with one or having given birth to one. So they want to keep all monsters in a neat little box called psychopathy, and this is what all monsters look like, period, end of story. And that's great, but choosing to be in denial about something doesn't make that reality any less real, sort of like climate change.

You can say all you want, climate change isn't real, but it is. And you're really just harming yourself the more you don't want to acknowledge that. In terms of what's not proven is that there are real benefits to the psychopathic personality, true benefits to living without shame and remorse and guilt.

And I have learned so much from neurotypical people. I am endlessly fascinated by neurotypical people in much the same way it seems that neurotypical people are fascinated by neurodivergent people. But I feel like if people could just acknowledge that, if we could work together instead of constantly projecting our fears and wanting to label psychopaths as singularly evil, think if we could start to learn from one another, the world would be much more honest for starters, but there would be so much more acceptability.

And I think a lot of people would get the help they need that they currently are not able to receive because the word psychopath has become so stigmatized.

Jordan Harbinger: You have spent much of your life wondering whether someone like you can become a good person. At this point in your life, what evidence would you give the seven-year-old version of yourself that the answer is yes?

Patric Gagne: You already know. That's what I would say. You already know in your gut.

You already know that you're a good person. You already know that you have all the tools you need to make great choices. Forget anyone telling you that you have to be like other people, that you have to feel the way other people feel.

You already know that you don't. Trust your gut and you'll be fine. That's honestly what I would say.

Because I remember, I remember when I went to the prison with my uncle and he was talking about all the sociopaths in the prison and what he was describing them felt so much like how I perceive myself in terms of the lack of emotion and the stealing of the wallet. And, but he followed it up with, they're all monsters, they're all evil. And I was like, but I don't feel like a monster and I don't feel evil.

And there was a long time that I remember thinking, what if this is just something that happens? If all psychopaths, if all sociopaths are evil monsters, is it something that just happens where I wake up one day and something's clicked? I remember carrying that fear for a long time because the word was so synonymous with evil.

And I didn't feel that way, but maybe it just hasn't happened yet. Maybe it's something that I can't avoid. And that's a huge piece of wisdom that I wish that I had.

And again, just to elaborate on that, you know, you are not a monster. You know, you are not an evil person. These things that you are doing are not great, but there is a reason and you just have to untangle that reason and maybe redirect it in a different way.

Jordan Harbinger: I think one of the reasons that society has such a negative view of psychopaths is because the most visible examples are the people we catch eating somebody in a basement that they've dismembered or whatever.

Patric Gagne: Those are the visible examples that we are showing. There's tons of examples out there. I can show you volumes of research on something called the successful psychopaths, the CEOs, but yes.

Jordan Harbinger: The ones that make the news. It's not like, oh my gosh, this executive has earned a ton of money. Yeah, they've done some shady stuff.

Maybe they're a sociopath. It's like, no, no, no. Tell me about Jeffrey Dahmer.

I want a movie made about that guy. I don't want a movie made about, I don't know, Bob Iger who ran Disney. And I'm not saying he's a psychopath.

I have no idea. He's probably a very nice man. I really have no clue.

First CEO I thought of. And if we're going to do a biopic on, I don't know, Jeff Bezos, I'm probably going to focus on building Amazon and not what is your internal state when you had to lay off all these, you know what I mean? It's just, but when it's a serial killer, I'm like, what were you thinking?

You had the guy in a barrel of acid. What are you thinking at this point when you're buying acid at Home Depot to dissolve a body? So we're just way more interested in those people and that's why they get all the press.

You don't hear from the teacher who's like, yeah, I do a really good job and I utilize my lack of guilt so that I can do the best job as a principal of this school or whatever. Right. I mean, it's just way less interesting.

Patric Gagne: Yeah. But is it, wouldn't you want to hear about that teacher?

Jordan Harbinger: I would, especially if my kids are in that school. And it's fascinating as a person who's interested in psychology, but does the New York Times want to write a front page article about them? Probably not unlikely.

I don't think you're going to get a biography of them from Walter Isaacson, the guy who writes about Elon Musk. You're not going to get the book like that about this principal or the school administrator or the CEO. You're just not.

Patric Gagne: But again, I think that you're talking about the most extreme version of antisocial behavior. And I understand why that's so fascinating, but continuing to focus on the only the most extreme types of psychopaths is akin to only focusing on stage four cancer. So you don't want to talk about stages one, two, or three, where treatment is possible.

Screening is possible. Prevention is possible. You only want to talk about stage four.

Who would do that? No one would, because you're basically guaranteeing more stage four by refusing to talk about one, two, and three. And yet that's what we're doing with psychopathy.

Jordan Harbinger: Really good metaphor. Pass. I get it though.

Guilt, remorse, spontaneous empathy. I don't know. It does sound kind of nice that you never have to deal with that.

Learning it manually, kind of a pain in the ass, but I don't know.

Patric Gagne: And yet the line for ketamine is out the door. What does ketamine do? It depresses all of that.

All of you normies are hand over fist for ketamine. And ketamine has been described as allowing for a more, dare I say, psychopathic state where you just kind of don't care about anything. And it's the best thing in the world.

And I think that there's a reason for that because so many of these emotions are burdens. They've become so polluted as measures of control that any good that guilt serves is undercut by all the damage that it does. I can't tell you the people that I used to see as a therapist, you know, most of them were not coming to see me because they were so burdened by psychopathy.

They were coming to see me because they were so burdened with shame and with guilt and anxiety, so much anxiety and so much depression as a result of those other constructs. So if you were to hand me the Matrix pill and say, you want to nibble? I would absolutely not.

It sounds like a hellscape, truly.

Jordan Harbinger: Have you heard of Kevin Dutton? He was a guest on the show. He researches psychopathy.

He uses a machine, I think it's called transcranial stimulation, and it turns off a part of your brain and you basically turn into a air quotes psychopath for, I don't know, an hour.

Patric Gagne: Yes, I have. Yes. I know the study.

I understand those measures. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: He invited me to go to London. Next time I'm in London, I'm going to go and try it. Are you going to do it?

And I was like, oh, this is great. Where are we going to go? And he's like, we don't let you out of the office.

We'll play Xbox and you'll play video games and you'll get an experience of it. And I'm like, we can't go out for like one beer. And he's like, absolutely not because he needs to be able to control.

Because he's like, look, you're probably going to be totally fine and not do anything surprising. And he's like, but sometimes when the reins are off, you just don't know. And he's like, it's easier for us to measure how you play a video game.

And I thought that was a funny guardrail.

Patric Gagne: I would like to invite myself on that journey with you because I think that would be fascinating. I would actually be interested in that myself. Like what part of, I wonder what the results would be there.

Jordan Harbinger: Does he do it to you? And you're like, yeah, that didn't work. And I'm like, are you kidding me?

Let's go whoring. I don't know. I don't know what would happen to my brain.

Patric Gagne: You know what would probably happen is that if I did feel something, I'm so used to navigating the world that way that I might feel something more extreme, but I'm so used to it, whereas again, somebody who is not used to that, they're going to be like a kid in a candy store. Whereas I've been living in the candy store my entire life. So I'm not, I don't need to line my pockets with Hershey kisses, but I can see myself saying, oh yeah, I can see how this might be problematic.

Jordan Harbinger: Well, I'll let you know how it goes when I get a chance to do it. Patric, thank you so much. This is a fascinating conversation.

Patric Gagne: Thank you. I had a great time.

Jordan Harbinger: Are you intrigued by the mind of a psychopath? Join us on episode 879 to explore the fine line between psychopathy and genius and why being labeled a psychopath might not be the curse it seems.

Kevin Dutton: Going back to the good psychopath question. I think the key here is how you dial those up. It's exactly like mixing a soundtrack in a studio, right?

It depends on the combination in which you dial those traits up. It depends on the level and it also depends on the intention that you're going to use them for. If you've got ruthlessness, fearlessness, no conscience, no empathy, all turned up to max and it's stuck there, you're likely going to be a bad psychopath.

However, if you can twiddle those dials in various combinations, depending on the circumstances that you might happen to find yourself in, ruthlessness, fearlessness, mental toughness, self-confidence, coolness under pressure, emotional detachment, lack of conscience, lack of empathy, those kinds of things. Now, none of those characteristics that I've just outlined is necessarily a problem in itself, in isolation. All of them in the right context and kind of dialed up at the right levels can actually prove pretty useful.

What I call rather controversially some precision-engineered psychopathy. So you're going to be what I call a good psychopath. Great quote by the famous British writer George Orwell, good men sleep soundly in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Good psychopaths do exist, but it all depends on those dials. It's a very unpalatable sentiment, but unfortunately, some people might say happens to be true.

Jordan Harbinger: Discover the unexpected benefits of psychopathic traits, how they influence career choices and take a revealing two minute quiz on the episode to see where you stand, episode 879 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. My big takeaway from Patric, doing the right thing still counts when you have to think your way there. We give ourselves a lot of credit for feeling guilty, but feeling bad isn't the same as behaving better.

Whatever your emotional wiring, the useful question is what you actually do with it. All things Patric Gagne will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

Don't forget about Six-Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. This show was created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Remember we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, 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 psychology, especially the psychology of a sociopath, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.