Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

Chapter 6 SAINTS, SPIES, AND SERIAL KILLERS

I recently visited New Zealand and learned that it has a very diverse ecosystem. Until the arrival of humans, it was populated almost entirely by birds. They occupied every niche in the food chain, from tiny flightless things to predators so enormous they could snatch a hundred-pound prey for dinner. For millions of years, birds dominated their man-less, mammal-less world, a universe of feathers, beaks, and talons, knowing of no other form of higher life. The birds acquired a host of abilities and natural defenses optimal for their environment.

But then in the thirteenth century, while the Europeans were still busy with their crusades, Polynesian explorers came, and with them came rats—with fur instead of feathers, teeth instead of beaks, and tiny paws instead of fearsome talons. The defense mechanisms that worked well against other birds failed against the rats. Small flightless birds who, when sensing danger, would remain perfectly still to avoid being spotted by predators flying overhead, would do the same when encountering a rat. Fighting for its life, in its passive way, the little bird focused its every effort on not moving a single muscle—only to be gobbled up where it stood.

The scientific term for animals like the little bird who had not encountered rats or humans is naïve. I find this charming, as if the little bird existed in a moral universe of which his New Zealand was a kind of Eden, its inhabitants living a peaceful existence disrupted only by the victimization of a cunning intruder, preying on their relative innocence.

I often think the people I encounter are naïve, but only because they may never have encountered someone quite like me. Sociopaths see things that no one else does because they have different expectations about the world and the people in it. While you and everyone else are doing emotional sleight of hand meant to distract the average observer from certain harsh truths, the sociopath remains undistracted. We are like rats on an island of birds.

I have never identified with the little bird, trapped by fear and an instinct for passivity, the wide-eyed victim of circumstance. I have never pined for an Eden of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. I am the rat, and I will take every advantage I can without apology or excuse. And there are others like me.

Some of the most amoral and manipulative people I met in my life I knew in law school—rats who gamed the system with little regard for others at a level of meticulousness baffling even to me. They calculated every event or encounter to optimize their advantage, even when the advantages were so trivial as to mean having a slightly better breakfast. Many of them seemed capable of committing massacre, grand theft, or real destruction, had a sufficient motivating desire struck them to do so. I don’t know how many of them were diagnosable sociopaths, but clinical research and my own experience lead me to believe the rate was much higher than in the general population. Many, however, were the most interesting people I have known, and not so dangerous, really. Sociopaths are unlikely to be zealots; we can’t be bothered to take up causes outside of ourselves.

The law school environment made everyone a little more sociopathic, since we were encouraged to view our successes in a zero-sum game measured by precise numbers. At the end of every semester in law schools across the nation, grades are collated and detailed rankings published. Rankings among my classmates had a direct relationship to our career prospects—it was as if everyone was walking around with a number above his head, and you could see it flittering there like a train station signboard, knowing that each adjustment around you reflected a change in the number above your own head.

Of course, I gamed the system perfectly. I had three years, two semesters a year, for a total of six semesters, each of which had a different impact on my résumé: possible first-year summer internships, whether I got on law review, the paid internship during our second summer, the last hope to improve my GPA before federal court judicial clerkship applications were due. I made Excel spreadsheets. I determined the odds. I chose classes and teachers on the basis of whether I knew I’d get an A. I used the school’s generous policy of allowing law students to take undergraduate courses pass/fail to pad my class schedule with such fluff as Jazz Improvisation, Music Ethnology, and Introduction to Film. While some of my classmates were learning about the intricacies of federal jurisdiction, I was relaxing in a classroom while two try-hards were locked in a heated debate over whether Tuvan throat singers were misogynistic. And the best part about it was that there was nothing wrong with what I did. That’s the beauty of numbers—there are no points awarded or taken away for being seen as either nice or ruthless, at least when grading is anonymous like ours was.

I look better on paper than I do in real life. On paper I have all the hallmarks of success. But in my real life, things have often come to me the hard way. I don’t mean in the usual character-building way; I mean the untidy and indirect way that sometimes requires me to be extra resourceful and handily unabashed.

I am absolutely shameless when it comes to asking for, pushing for, and ultimately inducing people to give me what I want, whatever it takes. At BYU, I played in all of the top music ensembles and performed in the closing ceremonies for the winter Olympics. These bullet points on my résumé look impressive as long as you don’t know that they were substantially the result of coercion. How? Through well-placed allegations of gender discrimination in my department with the university administration, an easy claim to make when all the music administrators were men. In law school I used the back door to get onto the prestigious editorial board of the student-edited law review, via a program designed to solicit more participation from women and minorities. From that subsidiary program, I campaigned vigorously and successfully to get elected to the editorial board, based again on the gender divide. To graduate with honors, I argued one of my professors into raising my grade. To get my first internship, I practically begged the interviewer during my sendoff handshake. I looked deeply into her eyes, beseechingly, earnestly, and said, “I really want this job.”

I loved being perceived as smart and successful. And I didn’t care if I had to do ugly things in front of a few people to get there. A few scattered looks of disgust and heads shaking in disappointment hardly mattered to me. It mattered much more that I had the right little asterisks and icons in graduation ceremony programs indicating my various honors. I am not ashamed to admit that seeing them still gives me pleasure.

When I graduated from law school, I landed a prestige-whore’s job (and we lawyers are all prestige whores) with a fancy firm in Los Angeles, making ridiculous amounts of money. I pre-spent my first months’ salary on a wardrobe that would make me look like a high-flying, style-conscious Los Angeleno, but once I was actually sitting behind my desk I just wasn’t that interested in doing any of the work. I realize now that I was all about the form and disregarded the substance.

The thing that allowed me to survive this way as long as I did was that I didn’t feel insecure about my backdoor methods. If anything, I was proud of them. I felt entitled to what I got. And why not? I had won every indicator of success in life through whatever means necessary—my test scores were consistently at the top of the charts, and my résumé was perfect. My career trajectory was astonishing, especially because it felt like a scam, and I loved to play that kind of game. When I was young, it was not enough for me to get A’s on all my tests. That part was easy. What thrilled me was the risk of figuring out just how little I could study and still pull off the A. It was like this with being an attorney. I had no real desire to be one, only to playact as one. And really, to the extent that everything in the industry was a scam, I was just one pretender among many.

I loved the subtle and not-so-subtle power games that played out in my office. I became a connoisseur of insecurities and used that knowledge to manipulate junior associates and senior partners alike, in big and small ways. The insecurities of high-powered attorneys are especially delicious, acute, and ever-so-finely grained. They have the usual things, like penis size, body image, and age, but the other, more obscure things are far more interesting.

For instance, there was a partner in the office next to mine who was strangely insecure about the fact that he had six children. He wasn’t motivated by a religious commandment to multiply, so he felt like he had to explain himself. He cornered me during the office Christmas party, drunk on appletinis, and all I had to do was grin and be gracious while he confessed his sin of having too many children among urban professionals. Then he suggested that I coauthor his latest treatise. I didn’t take him up on the offer back in the office on Monday, but the feeling that he had revealed too much lingered.

Everyone has defenses to protect themselves from hurt, stratagems to disguise their weaknesses and to avoid potential exploitation. The girl who grew up in the trailer park wears only Christian Louboutin shoes and Hermès scarves. The Nazi’s grandson works at the multicultural soup kitchen. The kid who grew up with learning disabilities spends his adulthood earning PhDs from the very best universities. The thing about these defenses, however, is that they work only if they are invisible. If they are somehow exposed, if another person can see them, then you might as well be naked, or standing stock-still waiting to be eaten. There is something so excruciating about being seen—really, truly seen—because people not only see the trailer trash in you, but they also see the striving heart that wishes it wasn’t.

As in poker, many people have unconscious tells or little changes in behavior or demeanor that let me know the strength or weakness of the hand they’ve been dealt in life. Tells having to do with class usually work well. I don’t believe I have ever encountered a person without some kind of readable insecurities about their class or socioeconomic status. And these self-doubts pervade every aspect of a person’s life, from how to hold chopsticks in a sushi restaurant to whether to say hello to your mailman. In such circumstances, I can establish a favorable power dynamic by showing just the slightest disapproval couched in an easy, generous tolerance. It’s a kind of gently condescending noblesse oblige.

I had been assigned to work for a senior associate named Jane in one of the firm’s satellite offices, so I only saw her once every few weeks. In law firms, you are supposed to treat a person who is a couple years senior to you as if she is the ultimate authority in everything you do in your life, and Jane took this hierarchy pretty seriously. You could tell that she had never enjoyed such power in any other social sphere. Her pale white skin, mottled with age, poor diet, and middling hygiene, was evidence of a lifetime spent outside the social elite. But you could also tell she had tried to cultivate her own brand of brittle class privilege, albeit poorly. Jane had obtained—in answer to all of her dreams and as a result of her unimpeachable assiduousness—a modicum of power in her office, having satisfactorily worked for one of the more powerful attorneys at the firm. She wanted so much to wear her power well but she was clumsy with it—heavy-handed in certain circumstances and a pushover in others. You could tell that she was self-consciously aware of it, which made her a particularly entertaining blend of ostensible power and self-doubt.

I was not, perhaps, her best associate. As much as anyone I have ever encountered, Jane believed that I was undeserving of all that I had accomplished. Whereas she had taken so much effort to dress appropriately (ill-fitting beige suits with shoulder pads), I wore flip-flops and T-shirts at every semi-reasonable opportunity. While she regularly billed as many hours as humanly possible, I exploited our firm’s nonexistent vacation policy by taking three-day weekends and weeks-long vacations abroad. People were implicitly expected not to take vacations, but I had my own lifelong policy of following only explicit rules, and then only because they’re easiest to prove against me. She could sense that I flouted this and other unspoken rules with little consequence by a quick look at my time sheets and my less-than-formal office attire. It wasn’t that she hated me; she just didn’t know what to do with me. To her, I was walking injustice. It disgusted her, but if I had sold my soul to the devil, she wanted to get his business card and contact information.

I had driven to her office for a meeting, and we met in the lobby by coincidence as she was coming back from lunch. We walked together to the elevator, and when it opened, there were two tall, handsome men already inside. One was French, and both apparently worked at a venture capital firm that shared the building with our firm. You could tell by looking at them that they received multimillion-dollar bonuses and likely arrived via one of the Lotuses or Maseratis regularly parked in the underground garage. Lawyers might be wealthy, but they are almost without exception surrounded by far greater wealth.

The two were in the midst of a discussion about the symphony that they had attended the night before, which I had also happened to attend. I didn’t go to the symphony all the time; a friend had happened to have some extra tickets. I casually asked them about it, and their eyes lit up.

“So lucky to have met you! Perhaps you can settle a disagreement between my friend and me,” the Frenchman said. “My friend thinks that it was Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto that was performed last night, but I think it was his third. Do you recall?”

I didn’t miss a beat. “It was his second. It was incredible, wasn’t it?” I actually could not recall, and it turned out to have been his third. Of course, it hardly mattered what the right answer was.

The two men thanked me profusely as they left the elevator, leaving Jane and me to travel up to her office in enough silence for her to contemplate the dimensions of my intellectual and social superiority. It was the kind of elite encounter she hoped she would one day have when she was just a nerdy teenager clasping on to her dog-eared copy of Mansfield Park—that she would attend symphonies and be able to speak intelligently about them to handsome strangers. She had envisioned that matriculation at a highly ranked university and employment at a prestigious law firm would make such a moment possible for her, but it wasn’t hers. It was mine.

Jane was a little jittery by the time we got back to her office, a combination of caffeine at lunch and worry that she had wasted her life. We were supposed to talk about the project I was working on for her, but instead we talked about her life choices from about the age of eighteen, her worries and insecurities about her job and her body, her attraction to women despite being engaged to a man for several years, and other things that I can’t bother to remember. After the elevator, I knew I had her—which is to say that I knew that whenever she saw me, her heart would flutter; she would worry about all of the secret vulnerabilities she had exposed to me and wonder what it would be like to undress me, or to slap me across the face. I know that for a long time I haunted her dreams, and that even now, years later, I could make her hands tremble just by flashing her a smile. Of course power is its own reward, but with this particular dynamic between us established, I was able to leverage a brief cancer scare and outpatient procedure into a three-week paid vacation. Which is also a form of reward.

I think that sociopathy gives me a natural competitive advantage, a unique way of thinking that is hardwired into my brain. I have an almost invincible confidence in my own abilities. I am hyper-observant of the flow of influence and power in a group. And I never panic in the face of crisis. I bet there are a lot of things about which people would want to be a little sociopathic. It frees me from the fear of public speaking or the possibility of becoming an emotional eater. Sometimes it is not clear to me whether I have fear or emotions, but I know they don’t affect me the way they do others.

In the book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, Kevin Dutton argues that there is a thin line between a Hannibal Lecter–type killer and the brilliant surgeon who lacks empathy. Sociopaths are primed for success because they are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused—qualities that define them as sociopaths but are also “tailor-made for success in the twenty-first century.” I used those traits to climb the social ladder from misfit kid to talented musician to high-flying legal student to well-compensated attorney—and who knows where else they will take me in the future?

Sociopaths also think fast on their feet. Recent research suggests that sociopath brains learn in a chaotic way, similar to brains with attention deficit disorder, namely by breaking up the information into small fragments and storing it randomly in both hemispheres of the brain. Perhaps due to this odd storage system, the sociopath’s corpus callosum, that bundle of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, is longer and skinnier than in an average brain. Consequently, the rate at which information is transmitted between hemispheres in a sociopath’s brain is abnormally high.

Of course, researchers almost never credit the sociopath brain as having any advantage over an empath brain, despite the demonstrated greater efficiency in transmitting information between brain hemispheres. Instead this efficiency is vaguely insinuated as the cause for the sociopath’s “less remorse, fewer emotions and less social connectedness—the classic hallmarks of a psychopath.” Normal people, even scientists, won’t ever admit that a sociopath’s brain might actually be better in any way. Every single article I have seen that even comes close to discussing some of the advantages of the sociopathic brain eventually backs off and makes some pat conclusion about how broken we are. In fact, the title of an article about the sociopath’s corpus callosum is “Out of Order.” But there are two meanings to that phrase, and I think one of them applies to this sort of bias thinly masked as science.

While I have to admit that I am not exceptional at multitasking (and, really, most people aren’t), I have a genius for clear-minded focus. With me, my attention is always on one thing at a time, and I toggle rapidly through thoughts in a way that makes it sometimes seem that I have ADD. Despite this appearance, I am excellent at directing all my attention onto a single focus, particularly when driven to it by adrenaline. This can be very bad, like the time I became entirely fixated on killing that DC metro worker who hassled me for walking on a broken escalator. It can also be great in clutch situations, because I am able to tune out all of the white noise that might distract other people, the daily petty worries or insecurities that might plague other competitors. I can achieve a relaxed calmness in even the most frenetic situations. I believe that my lack of nerves is the reason why I performed so well on standardized tests in school. I don’t remember a time when I scored outside the ninety-ninth percentile. During a mock trial competition, the judge remarked, “At one point I wanted to go back there and check to make sure you still had a pulse. You seemed as cool as a cucumber.”

During the California bar exam, people were literally crying from the stress. The convention center where the exam was given looked like a disaster relief center, with people sprawled out on any available floor space, in a desperate attempt to recall everything they had memorized over the past eight or more weeks, the contents of their backpacks and briefcases spewed out around them. I had spent those weeks vacationing in Mexico, making a cross-country road trip, and teaching my nieces and nephews how to swim. Despite being woefully underprepared by many standards, I was able to maintain calm and to focus enough to maximize the legal knowledge I did have. I passed while many of my equally intelligent and better-prepared friends failed. Psychologists have described this single-mindedness as “flow” and have opined that champion athletes, master musicians, and other performers function at their best when focused in this way. Through this hyperfocus, I was able, with minimal work, to achieve a level of performance in school and my career that others would have to spend many times the number of hours preparing for, simply because I was able to marshal the exact mental resources I needed in the moment.

But other activities require a broader focus, including things as simple as walking efficiently through an airport, engaging in a conversation with more than one person, playing poker, or navigating office politics during a staff meeting. For these things, I have gradually learned to expand my hyperfocus to include multiple, varied targets via what free divers call “attention deconcentration.” I’ve heard another practitioner refer to something similar as “situational awareness.” Unlike meditation, which seeks to eliminate all thought, attention deconcentration focuses the user on everything all at once, feeling everything simultaneously. According to free diver Natalia Molchanova, “What you do to start learning is you focus on the edges, not the center of things, as if you were looking at a screen.” She mentions that people who are subject to persistent stress factors where quick decision-making is necessary can find it useful to diffuse their attention and blunt their “emotional reaction in critical situations [where it] can lead to the wrong decisions and panic.” When I get closest to achieving deconcentration, I am so hyperaware of all sensory inputs that I reach a total-body experience that one might call ecstasy. It’s very pleasurable. And useful, particularly in combating unwanted impulses by forcing myself to see the bigger picture, which makes a single impulse seem so inconsequential in comparison. Hyperfocus achieved a similar effect by keeping me so engaged in one activity that I was blind to other temptations. Attention games became one of the best ways for me to finally liberate myself from the tyranny of my impulses and finally acquire some measure of social and professional stability.

I lived for a long time as an undiagnosed sociopath, trying as best I could to figure out ways to cope with my differences to succeed and to pass as normal in the wider world. But I wasn’t doing a great job pulling it off. I was stretching the patience of the partners at my law firm. Ultimately, I was fired for shirking my work assignments. My relationships with friends and lovers were dissolving before my eyes. As I began my period of self-analysis and began investigating what it means to be a sociopath, I realized that though I had brought a lot of suffering on myself and people close to me, there was nothing objectively damning about having these traits. If I could figure out how to direct them in useful and productive directions, I could be true to myself and still live a satisfying life that minimized the harm I did to myself and others. It was time to take control of my life. The obvious starting place was my career.

Despite my laziness and general disinterest, I actually was a great lawyer when I was trying. After I lost my corporate job, I worked for a short while as a prosecutor in the misdemeanor department of the district attorney’s office. My sociopathic traits make me a particularly excellent trial attorney, as compared to, for instance, an attorney who must learn and adhere to typeface requirements for court documents or carefully cull through millions of documents redacting minutiae. I’m cool under pressure. I charm and manipulate. I feel no guilt or compunction, which is a handy thing to have in such a dirty business.

In law there are a million and one mistakes you can make, particularly when approaching a trial, particularly as a prosecutor. Prosecutors bear the highest legal burden of proof and ethics and face disbarment or other disciplinary action for errors. Despite this, misdemeanor prosecutors almost always have to walk into trial with cases they’ve never worked on before. It’s like buying a foreclosed home at auction sight unseen—it could be a steal or a nightmare. All you can do is bluff and hope that if there is an issue, you’ll be able to scramble through it. No problem. At least for someone like me. The thing with sociopaths is that we are largely unaffected by fear. It’s not because I am certain I’ll do a terrific job, although historically that has been true. With my intelligence, quick-wittedness, and level head I’m pretty sure that even if I don’t impress the judge I’ll at least put on a good show.

The stereotypes about the bloodlessness of lawyers are true, at least about the good ones. Sympathy makes for bad lawyering, bad advocacy, and bad rule-making. The prosecution and the defense would both benefit from a little hard-hearted sociopathic lawyering. Whether you’re a down-on-your-luck welfare recipient or a billionaire corporate executive, you’d be best served by a sociopathic counselor like me. I won’t judge you or your supposed moral failings; I’ll just stick to the letter of the law and ruthlessly try to win by working every angle I can—and I like to win as much for me as for you.

Lawyers deal with issues that most people would rather turn away from. Neuroscientist and sociopath researcher James Fallon has lauded sociopaths for performing “dirty work”—work that most people have no interest in doing themselves but that needs to get done, like providing legal representation for people whose behavior is (allegedly) abhorrent or disgusting. Somebody has to defend the Bernard Madoffs and O. J. Simpsons of the world. Not only are the sociopaths willing to do the dirty work, they are often better at doing it than others. Working the slippery spot between right and wrong to my advantage is not only personally satisfying but has the additional benefit of being good lawyering. Lawyers know that a fact can only be made fact if wrestled from a sea of strenuously argued maybes. And like all sociopaths, lawyers recognize the self-interest that hides in every heart, ferreting out the hidden motivations and dirty secrets that underlie criminal acts.

In law we have a word that is rarely used in other contexts: dispositive. Dispositive means “relating to or bringing about the settlement of an issue,” so a dispositive point of law or a particular fact is one that will allow a party to either sink or swim on a disputed issue. For instance, let’s say that I walk past someone hurt and bleeding on the sidewalk a mere twenty feet away from a hospital and I do not stop to help. The fact that I have no previous relationship to the victim is dispositive; the law would say that as a stranger I had no duty to help and I am absolved of any legal liability. Case closed. All other facts are worthless: that the victim screamed for help, that I had a phone and could have called 911, that I even had a first aid kit and surgical gloves with me at the time. Dispositive is a word that is rarely used outside of law because almost nothing in regular life is so final. Most of life is made up of vague moral and social norms that are annoying in their complexity and their ineffectiveness. Law is straightforward: a flush always beats a straight, and the specifics of each hand are irrelevant. Because of this, law is also powerful. If the law says you did not murder someone, for all intents and purposes you did not, as the O. J. Simpson case famously illustrated. Although the law is fallible, we pretend it isn’t. This makes the law a trump card, as long as you can manage to manipulate a situation to where the law is on your side.

Perhaps because it is so high-stakes, the courtroom is the scene of the greatest human drama. But I believe it is to my advantage that I am relatively unfazed by the emotion that seems to sweep up many of the players. In particular, I seem to be immune, if not blind, to the extremes of righteous anger. As a child, my siblings and I would occasionally be shamed and chastised for what, I’m sure, were infuriating infractions. My mother could justify her acts of violence and indignity as discipline and punishment, the prerogative of a parent. It was as if the prickly edges of cruelty could be bundled up in moral righteousness, and in this insulated state, they could be trotted out for their day in the sun when petty child thieves were caught in the act.

It wasn’t until law school that I was able to identify this thing and know that I had no real part in it. In every course we took, our casebooks were filled with outrageous stories of fraud, deceit, and oppression, demonstrations of how deeply and creatively human beings can wrong each other. Once in a while some story would prove too much for my classmates, and they would collectively become incensed, getting visibly upset over things that had happened decades or centuries ago to dead strangers. Watching them, I was fascinated but nervous. These people apparently felt something that I did not. From such outrage, I heard the most ridiculous suggestions for my classmates’ illogical, knee-jerk calls for vigilantism, in complete disregard for the carefully balanced scales of justice. When my classmates could no longer identify with the child molesters and the rapists in the pages of our casebooks, they allowed righteous anger to determine their decision-making, applying a different set of rules to those people they considered morally reprehensible than they did to people they considered good, like them. Sitting in class, I saw how the rules changed when people reached the limits of empathy.

This impulse plays out not just in the rarefied space of the law school classroom but much more palpably in the public square. Almost every action movie constitutes the enactment of darkly violent wish fulfillment. A son avenges his mother. A father avenges his daughter. A husband avenges his wife. Each act of vengeance is more gruesome than the last. It isn’t enough that the bad guy is prevented from doing his bad deeds; he must suffer as much as possible. It is as if the existence of evil—or something that can be designated as such—provides a safe haven for the good to engage in evil. It’s a safe space to indulge in inflicting harm, to experience the sublime of suffering.

I do not understand or participate in the rush to judgment and punishment that seems to sweep up empaths, even in their roles as attorneys, judges, and jurors. If you have been falsely accused of a horrific crime, wouldn’t you prefer to have a sociopath defend you, or sit in judgment of you? The nature of your presumed crime is of no moral concern to me. I am only interested in winning the legal game we play in sorting out the truth from the jumble of facts, partial facts, and misunderstandings.

Practicing law in front of a jury and judge is much more satisfying than slaving away in an office as one of many anonymous, highly educated drones. Trial is the culmination of everything that came before it, and after it little else matters. It is the quintessence of “dispositive.” Trial is do or die—successfully persuade twelve jurors to vote how I want or lose. At trial, I get to perform. I am a lion tamer, the center of attraction in the three-ring circus that is the modern courtroom. It requires me to understand what people want to hear, not one-on-one, but on a grand scale. Trial forces my people-reading skills to go into overdrive, which in turn requires me to use attention deconcentration—focusing on everything at once. To get what I need, I must spin together a convincing narrative. I play off people’s hopes and expectations, their preconceptions and biases. I use everything I’ve learned from a lifetime of lying about what makes a story plausible, even believable, to make my story seem like “the truth” and the opposing attorney’s story seem like a pack of lies. And finally, because I don’t trust people’s rationality (particularly in issues where morality is implicated), I play off the one thing that you can always trust people to respond to—their fear. And I am like a cancer-sniffing dog when it comes to finding exactly which buttons to press to tap in to someone’s ready supply of fear.

During jury selection, and depending on the laws of the state, the lawyers are allowed to question jurors about any prejudices before they are empaneled. Jury selection is a juror’s first chance to form an impression of me. It is seduction in suits, and like any good seducer I start out casually. I first ask about their occupation, nodding simple approval for those jobs of which the juror is neither proud nor ashamed. For the jobs of which I can sense the juror is ashamed, I make a remark like “That job must be in high demand” to indicate my approval before the rest of the jurors. With this comment, I become his ally and champion. I’ve done him a favor for which he owes me a certain amount of allegiance. If I can tell that the juror is especially proud of his job, I express surprise and amazement at his accomplishments. The best predictor of whether someone will like you is whether they feel you like them. I like to optimize my chances.

Being a juror is a hard job. Evidence is not presented linearly and is limited in all sorts of ways before trial for unknown evidentiary and procedural reasons. Witnesses show up according to their availability, each telling a story that makes up only a small piece of the puzzle. Often, the purpose of their testimony might not even be apparent.

For this reason, jurors often direct the bulk of their attention to the drama occurring between the attorneys. It’s only natural. Lawyers are present the entire time and seem to be running the show. Jurors spend the whole trial watching from the jury box as we move, speak, and act, knowing that there are invisible rules governing our behaviors. They understand that important things often happen in the courtroom while they are sequestered in the deliberation room. And even more maddening are the sidebars in which lawyers and judges conduct whispered conferences out of their earshot. Even in the halls, jurors are not allowed to speak to the lawyers. All of this makes us walking mysteries to them—celebrities starring in the only show in town.

I am always polite to opposing counsel, but never so much so that it would appear I like them. In the halls, I smile lightly and with ever-so-slight coquettishness, signaling that I share with the jurors embarrassment at the awkward situation in which we find ourselves. I am never ingratiating to the judge.

Inside the courtroom, I am likable, too, but armed with power, authority, and knowledge to which the jurors are not privy. People can be afraid of having power. Asked to choose between having power and giving up power to a “trusted” entity, people often prefer to give it up rather than have the responsibility that comes with that power. This is particularly true if they don’t feel like they have a specific expertise and are worried about making a mistake, like deciding if a defendant is guilty or innocent. I know that they are unsure of themselves and are looking for someone to trust, to take away the burden of power. I make myself that trusted repository of power by exuding confidence and authority. I make meaningful eye contact with them when I discuss certain disputed issues in the case. I want to convey to them that they aren’t hearing all of the story, and that if they knew what I knew they would come to the same conclusions I have about the case. I always make a more compelling character than the other attorney. I imply that, outside of the courtroom, I am a lot like them—the type of person you could turn to when you have a thorny problem you need help solving.

This alliance with the jurors is key when jurors reach the deliberation process. Jurors are instructed that they must reach consensus based on their rational understanding of the evidence presented. If one differs from the rest, he must make his case to the other jurors. The worst thing that can happen to a juror is to appear a fool for believing something that is clearly not credible to everyone else. Good attorneys use this peer pressure in two ways. First, I make myself into the most reliable and powerful ally a juror could have, making him believe he is not the outcast, because his alignment with me, the most popular girl in school, makes such a prospect impossible. I become the invisible juror in the deliberation room, controlling my puppet jurors by ensuring that they respond to any challenge by saying: “But remember when the prosecutor said this?” If I have done my job presenting my story in a way that it seems like “the truth,” this should be sufficient to ensure a verdict in my favor.

But because people cannot be counted on to act rationally, I also engage their fear centers by subtly shaming them into believing my version of the story. The message I want to be broadcasting at all times is “You would be an idiot to believe the defendant’s version of events.” People do not like to feel like they were duped, so a juror’s fear of looking stupid overcomes any anxiety about sending a fellow citizen to jail. I’m not a bully about the shaming; rather, I suggest to each and every juror that I believe he or she sees it my way because I can see that he or she is an intelligent, reasonable person. The juror and I are on the same team, and it’s the winning one.

I enjoyed being a trial attorney, and I was successful at it. I loved the sensation of risk, for instance the risk of making a misstep that could result in a mistrial or the possibility of being waylaid by a witness changing his story on the stand. There was the seductive aspect of winning over the jurors and judge, not to mention the feeling of power I got from being the center of attention. Instead of seeing trial as a big moral issue, I played it like a game of poker—both sides dealt a specific hand and determined to play their hand better. Law is great that way—there really are winners and losers in clear, defined ways. Doing justice is fine I guess, but beating someone is its own reward. Luckily the justice system was designed exactly for this type of partisanship—an adversarial system in which our closest approximation of truth can only be reached if both parties are putting forth their best efforts at winning.

Indeed, there are a lot of careers for which the skill set of a sociopath is particularly well tailored. Jim Fallon mentions surgeon and investment banker. Sociopath researcher Jennifer Skeem has suggested that the protagonist in the film The Hurt Locker, a bomb-disposal specialist in Iraq, is a classic example of a sociopath due to his lack of regard for the rules, his boldness and fearlessness in defusing IEDs, and his trouble relating to the emotions of his team members. By looking at the list of characteristics, I could also add professions like military officer, spy, hedge fund manager, politician, jet pilot, underwater welder, firefighter, or many others. A high risk tolerance allows people like me to take opportunities that others could not, providing us an edge in competitive environments.

And as Al Dunlap, the former CEO and possible sociopath, describes it, those sociopathic traits can be a real boon in the corporate workplace: unemotional, ruthless, charming, confident. Lots of sociopaths are ambitious or are hungry for power or fame—all traits that are lauded in the business world. Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, argues that if corporations have “personhood” under the law, then it makes sense to question what kind of people they are. He posits that corporations behave with all the classic signs of sociopathy: They are inherently amoral, they elevate their own interests above all others’, and they disregard moral and sometimes legal limits on their behavior in pursuit of their own advancement. Organizations of this type would thrive under the leadership of people who have the same traits: sociopaths. And, indeed, a study for a management development program discovered that managers at the highest levels of their companies were seen as “better communicators, better strategic thinkers, and more creative”—and they also scored higher on measures of sociopathic traits. Though they weren’t popular with their staffs and were rarely seen as “team players,” they were generally believed to have leadership potential. The authors concluded that “the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant (and sometimes abusive) in society can facilitate a career in business even in the face of negative performance ratings.” Perhaps it can be argued that there is something wrong with corporate capitalism, but that is the system society has settled on, and it’s one in which sociopaths can excel.

In my own work life, I’ve found that my need for constant stimulation means I am excited rather than stressed when deadlines approach. My desire to win whatever game I play makes me ruthlessly efficient, and my unflinching confidence that I will win inspires others to follow me. I am logical and decisive, a natural leader, particularly in crises where others panic or fall apart. I can get angry in a flash, but it is also over in a flash, which allows failing members of my team to realize that while failure will not be tolerated, no one is holding grudges. Now that I have learned to steer my inclinations along useful paths, I am a natural leader and a success in my professional exploits, not in spite of my sociopathic tendencies, but because of them. Commenters on the blog have attested to similar experiences:

Another commenter suggested that sociopathic managers “want to out-do each other. They don’t care about their colleagues or praising someone else at their level. They are self centered. But they get the job done and that’s all that really matters and if they are high up the ladder it’s unlikely they will be confronted with the way they run their ship.”

Sociopathic traits can and do manifest themselves in malignant ways. But particularly in the field of business, one reader suggests, sociopaths might actually create less discord than empaths do:

In fact, when corporations or managers mix business with their personal feelings or sense of morality, it can often lead to decidedly negative results, like the backlash against corporations such as Chick-fil-A for their anti-gay-marriage stances and the lawsuits from shareholders against corporate officers for having the corporation support political causes that are unrelated to the company’s business. As another reader put it:

No, at least when it comes to business, cash is king. This doesn’t mean that corporations can’t do good things. As one reader pointed out, “corporations, like sociopaths, can choose to act in a benevolent manner out of their own best interest—and often do.”

I love money. It’s so impersonal. In a world where everyone likes to win, money is frequently how the score is kept. I don’t like spending it, necessarily; I don’t get much pleasure from buying or owning things. Money doesn’t matter to me in itself. But the acquisition of money is a game I like very much. It seems that other people care about money more than almost anything else in the world, and because they care about it so much, they will fight hard for it—against me or anybody else. They’re just as committed to winning as I am, which makes the game very fun.

Sometimes all you need is a different perspective to win, particularly in something like the stock market. As Sir Isaac Newton famously confessed after losing a small fortune in the stock market in the early 1700s, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

I have an incredibly green thumb for money, particularly in the stock market. I fully funded my retirement by the time I was thirty years old. Since I started investing seriously in 2004, I have averaged a 9.5 percent return in the stock market—257 percent better than the 3.7 percent average returns of the S & P 500 over the same period. Beating the market this soundly and consistently is unheard of and many argue it is impossible (or due solely to luck). In 2011, only one out of five mutual fund managers beat the S & P 500, and only a handful of individuals have managed to do so with any regularity. I do it every year. I am not trading on better knowledge. In fact, I am a relatively unsophisticated investor. Instead, I am trading on a special vision. When I look at the world, the flaws or vulnerabilities in people and the social institutions that they’ve made jump out to me, as if they were highlighted for me and only me to see.

Sharks see in black-and-white. Scientists have suggested that contrast against background may be more helpful than color for predators in detecting potential prey, helping them to focus on crucial spatial relationships rather than extraneous details. I’m color-blind in a way that makes mass hysteria seem particularly striking in contrast to normal, expected behavior. My lack of empathy means I don’t get caught up in other people’s panic. It gives me a unique perspective. And in the financial world, being able to think opposite the pack is all you need.

Traders laud the “contrarian” mentality. Warren Buffett said: “Be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy.” Easier said than done for the vast majority of stock traders. And when I’m trading stocks, those are the people I am up against. On every stock trade there is someone who wants to sell and someone who wants to buy, at least at a particular price. Each tends to think the other is an idiot. In simple terms, the person who is selling thinks that she is getting out just in time while the person buying thinks that he is about to make good money.

Because the actual transaction is faceless, I can’t practice my usual people-reading skills or manipulation, but I don’t need to. The truth is that the market doesn’t really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis. It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock. It is the sum total of everyone’s hopes and fears about what a company is capable of doing. Preying on people’s hopes and fears is my métier, even en masse. It’s how I played my jurors. There’s a desperation to both hope and fear that becomes obvious once you’ve learned to spot it. With my color-blind eyes, I see these features more starkly than anything else.

And you only need to see this desperation in a few people to know that it has reached a critical mass of people. Joseph Kennedy said that he knew it was time to pull out of the market before the stock market crash of 1929 when even his shoe-shine boy was giving him stock tips. Joseph Kennedy may not have been a sociopath, but he certainly acted like one. In a 1963 Life magazine feature on him, Kennedy was described as having the sociopathic traits of being able to mix well “in all kinds of company, against every background,” from the very highest of the social elite to the “theatrical unknowns” inhabiting Greenwich Village. “Only the keenest observer” would realize that Kennedy was actually allied with none of these groups—“he belonged to no world but his own.” Kennedy was no doubt aided in his stock market exploits by this ability to be both one of the crowd and completely independent. In fact, Kennedy was described by a broker whom he shared an office with as a man who “had the ideal temperament for speculation” because he “possessed a passion for facts, a complete lack of sentiment and a marvelous sense of timing.” I may not be as talented as Joseph Kennedy, but I also am blessed with a complete lack of sentiment.

Kennedy and I are not the only cool heads that have been drawn to the stock market. An estimate that 10 percent of Wall Street employees are psychopaths was being casually thrown around the media in 2012, but the research so far doesn’t confirm that number. A 2010 study by Dr. Robert Hare of psychopathy among corporate professionals found that about 4 percent met the threshold for clinical psychopathy, versus about 1 percent for the general population, though as Hare has said, “we do not know the prevalence of psychopathy among those who work on Wall Street. It may be even higher than 10%, on the assumption that psychopathic entrepreneurs and risk-takers tend to gravitate toward financial watering-holes, particularly those that are enormously lucrative and poorly regulated.”

While the fall of Enron and the banking collapse of 2008 are sometimes blamed on sociopathic behavior, it’s not clear whether the ringleaders were actually sociopaths or not. On the one hand there are some pretty sociopathic-sounding quotes from Enroners talking about cutting off power to Grandma so they could squeeze more money out of the state of California. On the other hand: (1) most Enroners didn’t necessarily break the law but were careful to stay within the letter of the law, and (2) they did what they were supposed to do—make lots of money for the company, even if it involves manipulating markets in unethical ways. Some have suggested that the only reason that most Enroners may not have technically engaged in unlawful behavior was because they used their money to eliminate or change the regulations that they didn’t like. The rise and fall of Enron was shocking to people because it exposed the face of corporate hubris and amorality. A sociopath would be well at home at a corporation like Enron. A sociopath might also do something as reckless and risky as being a whistle-blower. In a lot of ways sociopaths and corporations are like the weather: Sometimes rain is a blessing and sometimes it is a curse. The most people can do is hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

I might have been a good lawyer but I gave up practice a few years ago, because it got boring, and I realized I am not very interested in helping people or corporations. I would much rather indoctrinate them, which is why I became a law professor. I was lucky to stumble upon law teaching as an option—one of my friends was a professor and encouraged me to send letters to schools in case they had any emergency teaching needs. And it turns out that I love teaching: the lifestyle, the pay, the power, and most of all the autonomy. Every year a new crop of students arrives to be charmed. I have a small cadre of legal “nemeses” that I play one-sided games with—other academics in my field whom I disagree with or don’t like. My scholarship often focuses on ruining theirs. People are often surprised to learn that I teach less than six hours a week, less than eight months out of the year. In many ways it’s a dream job for someone inherently lazy and unable to do grunt work like me, but eventually I’m sure I’ll get bored of it too. After I do, I don’t know what, but I’m sure things will work out. They always do.

As an academic, I work in an institutional setting organized within idiosyncratic parameters. For instance, law professors are the most formal of academics in that they are expected to wear business attire, given the formality of dress that their students will be expected to adopt upon entering their profession; however, they are also less often expected to abide by community norms, since their role is to challenge existing legal regimes. In other words, you should wear a suit, not be one. Some of the biggest legal academic superstars bring their dogs with them to work and some of the biggest losers wear power ties. This is the kind of environment in which I thrive because I am used to both trying to conform and never managing to conform completely.

My students love this charming quirkiness I exude. I am unusually attentive to their needs. My first few years I performed extensive market research, subtly surveying my students on hundreds of topics until my teaching had as much mass appeal as a Big Mac. I always get exceptional teaching evaluations that cite my thoughtfulness and my apparent lack of ego. I am described as witty and never condescending. Even better, I am entertaining—making jokes and livening up dry material with videos or group work. By my second year at my first teaching job, my class enrollment doubled as students raved about my ability to make even the most esoteric subject relatable. It helps that I am, according to one of my teaching evaluations, a “stone cold fox.” Not true, but I am well aware of the research that attractive people get treated far better and are perceived as being far more competent than ugly people. Consequently, I dress carefully for class. I shop for clothes that are both conservative and sexy, like a three-piece skirt suit with a vest that fits more like a bustier and a knee-length cigarette skirt cut to fit a pinup model. If I wear a pantsuit, I’ll sometimes push the gender lines by wearing suspenders and a tie. To the men, I am an object of desire—a ready-made “hot teacher” fantasy. For the women I am a whip-smart, successful role model, who also has an eye for fashion and is not afraid to say the word tampon in class. All of this is a carefully calculated persona meant to appeal to the greatest percentage of the student population possible.

Of course this could all go horribly wrong, and sometimes does. Sometimes I overplay the sex appeal. I had one student accuse me of pandering to the male students. The truth is that many new students are suspicious of my easy charm and what is starting to seem like a cult of personality built around me. This can be a serious danger with sociopaths in the workplace. One blog reader told a similar story:

I don’t mind some students’ skepticism in the face of my magnetism. They’re law students; we train them to be cynics. As with jurors in a trial, it takes a while to build up a rapport with them. I am aware of their distrust so at first I am very straightforward, efficient, and professional. I don’t want to seem presumptuous. Nor do I want to seem overly available, as if they are on my same level. I am confident and aloof. If someone is acting out of line, I will put them back into their place with a quick, dispassionate put-down. I will correct some slight misunderstanding of theirs or call on them for a particularly thorny question so the class can see them squirm. The class likes this. They don’t like gunners or the teachers who cater to them. Apart from that, there are no power struggles. I have nothing to prove. Their tuition dollars are paying me, and handsomely. They can try to fight me, but in that classroom I am God. I write the test. I give them the grade. If I say something is the law, it is the law. Even so, I show off just enough so that they feel lucky to have me and not someone far less engaging.

My students become interested in me as a person. They develop little crushes on me, which I feed with the selective disclosure of more and more personal information—that I am a musician, that I have an interesting background in the law filled with high-profile clients whose names modesty prevents me from dropping. I am rarely explicit about anything. I make people work for these personal details about my life, drawing their own conclusions, which makes the information seem all the more authentic and valuable to them.

Now, if I had shown up on the first day of class touting my credentials, talking about my personal life, nurturing people’s crushes, it would have been disastrous. Every once in a while I forget and make a joke too early, show familiarity too soon, and have to immediately back off again with a renewed period of neutrality, but I’ve gotten better. Now it’s like cooking an old familiar recipe, which makes me worry I’ll get bored of it soon.

It seems to me that many people could benefit in their work from this kind of analysis of how to manage people by managing their expectations, how to endear people to you by being respectfully aloof. I don’t get wrapped up in the emotional conflagrations that can undermine a serene workplace, and it seems to me that a lot of leaders fail to deal wisely with problems. Once in church I attended an “air your grievances” meeting. Within minutes people were erupting in angry accusations. Although each person’s grievance wasn’t much on its own, the sheer number of them surprised everyone there. People became incensed that the church leaders remained heedless of all these pressing concerns. Everyone left riled up with grievances that they never knew they had before. I thought this was absolute idiocy. I couldn’t imagine a meeting being run more poorly.

When I have little insurrections in class or any other professional environment, I target the biggest complainers individually. I schedule a meeting or write them a quick e-mail saying things like, “I noticed that you seemed really frustrated by X.” I let them talk for as long as they need, commiserating with them without necessarily committing to any particular position. I neither justify nor entrench myself in any particular position nor agree with their own position. As part of the commiserating, though, I focus on their feelings: “That must be so exhausting,” or, “I understand, the reading assignments are very demanding.” I try to use words that sound sympathetic but also make the problem sound either surmountable or like something that should be expected from a lawyer in training, or whatever their position or skill set is. I figure that most people just need to vent, but I am also trying to subtly shame them. I say things like, “Law is hard, that’s why you’ll get paid the big bucks,” implying that the student is being a crybaby and should toughen up.

By isolating the potential instigators and stealing their thunder, I never give them the chance to speak publicly and gain support. Everyone else is left knowing only about their own particular struggles, assuming that any issue with me or the class may have more to do with their own personal failures than a larger institutional failure. I rely on people’s need to appear smart in other ways. For instance, it’s traditional in law school for lecturers to cold-call on students during class. I don’t like to do this because frequently they’re ill prepared and it wastes time. If I never cold-call, however, the students will pick up on this and stop preparing as thoroughly for class. What I have started doing is e-mailing a student ahead of time that I will call on them for a particular case. To the rest of the class it appears as if I have cold-called on them. The student performs marvelously. The other students can’t help but wonder, Am I the only one who isn’t completely getting this material? So they work harder. The student whom I e-mailed has every incentive to keep the e-mail secret because it makes his performance more impressive. This divide-and-conquer approach to classroom and workplace management has been effective for me on many occasions, and I’m surprised more people don’t adopt it.

I once worked with a bully. She had no position of real authority but had managed to make herself indispensable in the office where I had just started. At first I was lulled by the bully’s seeming good nature and charms; she just seemed nice, asking me about what projects I was involved with, how things were working out. But one of my new coworkers warned me that the only thing she wanted to help me do was fail.

As the bully was saying good night to everyone, I pulled her aside, put my hand on her shoulder, and said, “You know, I have to apologize to you. I made a joke this morning that was in poor taste. You asked how everything was going with my new project and I said, ‘So far so good.’ I didn’t mean to imply that I wasn’t giving the project my full attention and skill. On the contrary, I am one hundred percent dedicated to the success of this project. I think I was just trying to be self-deprecating, but I realize now that the joke fell flat.” My apology caught her off guard.

She started to spill, “Well, it’s true that the last few people in charge of that project got fired, and I was just thinking, maybe … but maybe you’ll be different …” And just like that she showed her hand. She acknowledged that she was aware of what my project was (even though she pretended to have no clue the day before), its history, its importance, and her obvious interest in my failure.

The next day I was all deflection. She asked me a question, and I gave her a nonanswer and asked her questions back, even for the most meaningless of things. “What did you get for lunch?” “Oh you know, same old. What did you get for lunch?”

“What are you working on now?” “Little this, little that. What are you working on?” The terser the answer, the more off-putting it was to her. The bully, now desperate and sensing the shift in power, quickly progressed from “chummy” sideways questions to direct inquiries. “So how did that project turn out yesterday? Did it get approved?” Wouldn’t you like to know.

As one blog commenter said regarding bullying:

These tactics may be inspired by a sociopath’s selfish desire to avoid emotional drama and upheaval, but they can benefit any organization.

In addition to the pleasure I take in teaching, one of my favorite activities is attending academic conferences. All of the professional action happens there, so everything about the way I present myself is extremely calculated. First, I am careful to wear something that will draw attention, like jeans and cowboy boots while everyone else is wearing business attire. The cowboy boots both emphasize and explain my strut, and I want to indicate that I’m not interested in being judged by the usual standards. This is important because people look at my name tag to see where I teach. Because I don’t teach at a top-tier school they don’t immediately expect that I will be brilliant, but the truth is that I am. I’ve also found that, in a predominantly male profession, it’s helpful to remember that women are seen as objects. I don’t fight their expectations, I just play with them. They like to be played with and I like to force them to see things my way.

I know they underestimate me but I don’t fight it. My shtick is that I am just the messenger giving straight facts. “But also do you see how X only looks like Y from this angle? If we looked at it from this other angle, doesn’t it look more like X?” I let them see it for themselves. I think it is more convincing. I learned this from my experiences with juries. I’m trying to transplant an idea into their heads. I need to be careful how I present it so they don’t reject it as foreign before it even gets settled.

But I also want it to seem a little like magic, the same way an answer to a riddle seems a little like magic. Of course riddles are not by their nature puzzling, they’re puzzling due to the way they are presented—leaving out vital pieces of information. Riddles have the appearance of being solvable; that’s why people get engaged in guessing and trying to show off. When I present at conferences, I also try to get people engaged in guessing. In fact I specifically ask for shows of hands guessing about the results. When you finally reveal the end of a riddle, it makes you look like a genius, when really it’s because you purposefully presented the issue that way.

One riddle I frequently use in law discussions is the riddle of why the Salt Lake City airport has some of the best smoking facilities of any airport in the United States. The majority of the state population is Mormon. Mormons do not smoke; they believe the body is a temple and that smoking desecrates that temple. I ask people to guess why a state full of nonsmokers would build such convenient smoking facilities in an airport. Everyone thinks this is an answerable question and they are intelligent people so everyone hazards a guess, but no one has yet guessed correctly—just me, after I asked myself the riddle one day pacing the halls of the airport during a weather delay. That makes me the magical keeper of the riddle.

The nice thing about this riddle is that it has a very simple answer: the airport has always been nonsmoking since its construction in the 1960s. LAX, LaGuardia, and many of the other major airports in the United States have smoking accommodations that seem like an afterthought. And they were, because those airports originally allowed smoking throughout the terminals. While the main terminals of those airports were a haze of cigarette smoke in the 1960s, the Salt Lake City airport was originally built to be nonsmoking. To appease smokers in a larger society where indoor public smoking was the norm, the airport was built with easily accessible “smoking rooms” spread throughout the terminals. In this way, a good accommodation for smokers actually arose out of a special awareness on the part of nonsmokers. People like this little twist. It seems to be a parable about the difficulty of predicting unintended consequences or a cautionary tale about how quickly the dominant majority can become an oppressed minority (maybe making special allowances for sociopaths is not so ridiculous an idea?). I like the riddle for its moral ambiguity and for the way it reveals the simplistic complexity of the world.

My legal work is not fake, any more than my answer about the Salt Lake airport is fake. What is manipulative is how I present it. I lead them down a particular path that predestines them to reach only one conclusion—my conclusion. They don’t know where it’s going to end up at the end, and that’s part of the thrill. It almost seems like intellectual magic. Really it’s just effective rhetoric.

As a law professor, my original ideas represent almost the sum total of my worth to my school. I like to say outrageous things and have people challenge me. I like the controversy. The more controversy, the more people will remember my talk. I have an answer for everything. Their initial underestimation draws them out for my attack. They’re used to a world of hiding behind credentials. My point: I am not what you think I am. I want them to hesitate before challenging me again. I want them to be afraid to call my bluff. Law is appearances, and it is rare to have a sure thing, so I make the most of it when I have it.

I know I can’t compete with the oxford-shirt types, or even the types who can rattle off the facts of the last dozen decided Supreme Court opinions. Like everywhere else, there is an old boys’ club of lawyers and judges who want to hire someone who looks and acts just like them—or at least the younger, more virile version of them. They whip out their knowledge of substantive law in a way that makes it seem like they are comparing penis size. I don’t care to engage in legal debates. Most of substantive law is boring, particularly to someone who needs constant stimulation as much as I do. I don’t have that type of brain, nor do I care enough to acquire an encyclopedic knowledge of the law. And I don’t have any interest in keeping up on any current legal issues. This is why I was not well suited to being a practicing lawyer. I can’t make myself do things the way most people can, even very important things that matter a lot to the client. Luckily, as an academic, I have the freedom to learn and teach whatever I want.

Still, I must keep up at least the appearance of competency, which is why, when I am engaged with the old guard of the legal community with my reputation at stake, I am very aware that I must choose my battles. Like the revolutionary army fighting the redcoats, I lure my enemy from their comfort zones and ambush them with my own strengths: reading people, seeing flaws or areas of possible exploitation in a system, and thinking outside of the box. I nod pleasantly at my colleagues until they make a mistake and then engage them on that. It is a little more guerilla warfare than they are used to. Some might say that it is not fighting fair, but I am keenly aware that there will never be a fair fight. Not for people who teach at the school I teach at and can’t manage to remember the names of all nine current Supreme Court justices.

Conferences are also minefields of emotional complexities for me. I dread the cocktail parties and sometimes invent a persona for the evening, allowing me to inhabit yet another role. One of my paramours remarked that this paradox was what drew him to me initially—he wanted to know which one of these personas was the real me. He claims that he could tell there was much more going on in my head than met the eye because although I seemed perfectly pleasant when engaged in conversation with acquaintances, I disengaged much too smoothly for it to have not been thoroughly premeditated—as if I spent the entire conversation with a smile on my face and the thought of escape plots in my head. Unless I am actively trying to convey a particular message or to seduce, I would rather not talk to people. There’s too much risk of my saying something incriminating and no corresponding benefit, so I will just stay silent.

I actually do prepare anecdotes for the purpose of engaging in small talk at social events that I am frequently required to attend, like my riddles. This has proven to be essential in seducing my colleagues and friends, getting through otherwise painfully awkward evenings, and even scoring career points. I have learned that it is important always to have a catalog of at least five personal stories of varying length in order to avoid the impulse to shoehorn unrelated tidbits into existing conversations. Social-event management feels very much like classroom or jury management to me; it’s all about allowing me to present myself to my own best advantage.

As I’ve learned to satisfy my sociopathic tendencies with more productive professional behavior, I’ve also reined in some of my youthful impulsiveness. I was reckless as a young attorney, but always with the sense that the downside would be outbalanced by the benefit. I would do stupid stuff like submit easily verifiable fake reimbursements for pittance sums. I got the law firm to pay for my tennis lessons one summer. I tried to seduce one of the lead partners who was in a very happy relationship with her longtime partner. I successfully seduced one of the more obscure partners, but he didn’t stay spellbound by my charms after I did subpar work for him. I got away with most of it, and no one ever called me out—until I was fired.

But now I have more to lose if things go wrong—more money, a more stable life, a career, a relatively constant set of close associates. All these figures get crunched in my head and make me aware of a million different risks, which added together are not negligible. And that awareness gives me the symptoms of what is probably best described as “anxiety,” even though I used to be completely oblivious to all of it (or didn’t care). Every time I have gotten this far in the past I have quit and started over. The older I get, though, the fewer do-overs I have left.

I may still seem reckless, particularly in circumstances in which people are irrationally afraid and I am relatively unfazed. I still like excitement in my life; I tend to seek out new and potentially dangerous experiences, like a recent bungee-jumping trip I went on with friends. But as I have aged, I have admittedly retreated into more of a life of the mind in which my excitement and thrills come more from mind games or intellectual pursuits where the reward-risk ratio is high. I play fewer games with my colleagues’ emotions, though I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to stop completely, or if it will even be necessary to.

In truth, a lot of lawyering was smoke and mirrors. I play the part that people expect. It’s not like there weren’t bad parts. There were really bad parts. I’m a little bit of a legal idiot, at least when it comes to certain topics. I have terrible fashion sense. My first impulse in a conversation is frequently a bad one. I’ve just learned to fake my way through errors, or outsource my fashion (and moral) decisions, or spin misstatements into clever, sarcastic jokes. Like an actress who is aware that she has a good side and a bad side, I was always careful to put on the right sort of show for the right sort of audience, for lovers and employers and friends. And for a while, I pulled off my performance to general acclaim.

Now, many years later, after this period of self-analysis, I have learned to be basically honest with myself, my family, and a few intimates. But for the sake of getting by—holding a job, having a life—I present a mask of normalcy to the world. It can be lonely. I become restless from pretending to be normal for too long and too hard. But going through the motions of being normal and stable does make them true, to some degree. What’s the difference between acting the part of a good lawyer and being one? What’s the difference between pretending to be a valuable colleague and being one? I’ve come to realize that the scam I was playing as a new lawyer has acquired the weight of reality—it is my life.