What This Episode Is About
Every one of us is born a “psychopath”—calm, decisive, fearless, and completely self-interested. Then society spends twenty years dismantling that “factory setting” bit by bit, installing fear, conformity, and people-pleasing in its place. In this episode, I take a close look at The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success: How to Use Your Inner Psychopath to Get the Most Out of Life (written by Kevin Dutton and Andy McNab)—a top Oxford authority on “psychopathy” teamed up with a legendary former SAS special forces soldier who is still hunted by terrorist organizations and whose real name and appearance remain secret. Together, they tell you this: what keeps you perpetually one breath short at crucial moments is often not a lack of effort or intelligence, but too little “psychopathy” in you.
Highlights
• What exactly is a “good psychopath”? Dutton uses the metaphor of a DJ’s “mixing-console knobs” to turn fearlessness, coldness, empathy, and conscience into knobs you can adjust up or down—the serial killer’s knobs are jammed at maximum, while doctors, traders, and top lawyers can adjust theirs freely to fit the situation.
• You are born a little psychopath: from the “chemical warfare” a fetus wages on its mother in the womb to the way a baby controls you with crying, smiling, and an unblinking stare, a look at how evolution equips everyone with a “starter kit for psychopathy.”
• The three locks society puts on you: fear (“anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”), the gaze of others (the Asch conformity experiment and the phone-booth game), and empathy welded in the “on” position—and the keys that good psychopaths use to unlock them.
• A counterintuitive truth about decision-making: when a Wall Street broker and a general fight the same war, why does the “more ruthless” one end up saving more soldiers? Good intentions themselves can sometimes create casualties.
Jump to a Section
- 00:00 You’re not trying too little; you’re too normal
- 03:14 What is a “good psychopath”?
- 05:35 The mixing-console model of psychopathic personality
- 06:35 McNab and the shepherd boy: a moral choice or cold calculation?
- 09:21 Why say you are born a “little psychopath”?
- 13:17 The three locks society installs: fear, reputation, and empathy
- 13:34 The first lock: how fear locks away your fearlessness
- 16:46 Planes don’t think, so planes don’t crash
- 17:00 How psychopaths shift attention from “punishment” to “reward”
- 19:27 The second lock: how the gaze of others locks away your independent judgment
- 20:09 The Asch experiment: why are most people afraid to differ from the group?
- 22:15 The phone-booth button game: why would McNab press the button immediately?
- 24:50 The ultimatum game: a sense of fairness may be the costliest emotion
- 26:55 The third lock: how empathy locks away your calm
- 28:18 Psychopaths aren’t incapable of empathy; they just leave it off by default
- 29:32 Marines vs. Wall Street traders: who is better at fighting a war?
- 32:02 The real answer: don’t become more ruthless—take back control of the settings
- 32:36 Epilogue: between a good psychopath and a bad psychopath, there’s only one notch
- 34:10 Summary
The Book
- Title: Think Like a Madman, Act Like a Genius
- Authors: Andy McNab and Kevin Dutton
- Publisher: Chongqing Publishing House
- Publication date: 2016-11
- ISBN：9780593073995
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