Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.

Most of us fill up our lives and end our boredom with our involvement with other people - people we love, people we hate, people we're afraid of, people we're interested in - and that's what keeps our minds going. So if you're sociopathic and you really have no caring for anybody, there's not much left, only boredom, and the way to relieve that, apparently, is to play a game and make sure that you win.

To learn to be charming is fairly easy - you can teach somebody to be charming and to learn human emotions - or to learn the behaviors that go with human emotions. A sociopath, a smart one, will study the way we emote, and will learn how to do that quite effectively.

Sociopaths are not usually physically violent. A typical sociopath never kills anybody and doesn't look like Charles Manson - they look like you and me and everybody else. You're not looking for someone who's recognizably evil or scary-looking, but rather someone who looks normal. Another lynchpin is dishonesty. Lying for the sake of lying. Lying just to see whether you can trick people. And sometimes telling larger lies to get larger effects.

Sociopaths are not afraid of very much, except for physical harm and dying - really primitive, basic kinds of fears. The problem with being alone for a sociopath is boredom.

Usually sociopaths will look down upon us for that very reason - that we're gullible. We're weak. One person told me that he thought he was the only honest person because he would admit that he didn't have a conscience and everybody else was clearly faking it.

Another thing that's fun for sociopath is speed, literal speed, going very fast in your car. Not that everybody who goes fast in their car is a sociopath, by any means, but anything that gives you a rush will lessen your sense of boredom.