Now, you've got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat,
I think this one's based on one of the Marx Brothers actually,
Harpo Marx, who I believe never said anything,
But, be that as it may, they're these ne'er-do-well characters,
the fox in particular.
Now, a fox is a standard trickster animal,
it's a classic animal,
maybe because it's good at hiding and it's good at hunting,
I don't know exactly why, and coyotes are like that too
They're classic trickster animals.
He's like Wile E. Coyote in fact, the Warner Brothers character
whose genius at large and whose arrogance continually get him walloped,
this character has a lot of features like that, but he feigns being an English gentleman,
of, like, the 1890s, and he pretends to be educated,
and he has that high-blown way of talking, and he's a fraud through and through,
he's got this sidekick, who is barely there at all,
and he doesn't treat him that well, but he's got someone to lord it over,
so that keeps his dominance-hierarchy thing going well,
the fact that he's a second-rate companion, he never really notices that.
although he'll treat him contemptuously whenever he gets the chance.
So anyways, they're walking down the street,
and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he's done,
how he pulled the wool over someone's eyes.
He confuses that with wisdom and intelligence, and one of the things that you see:
this is worth knowing too, because...
...if you're preyed upon by a psychopath,
which you will be to some degree at some point in your life,
the psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you're stupid,
and that you deserve to be taken advantage of, because you're naïve and stupid,
so it's actually a good thing that he's doing it.
His proof-and I'm saying "he" because there are more male psychopaths-
the proof that you're stupid and naïve is that he can take advantage of you.
If you were wiser, you'd know his tricks,
and it wouldn't be morally necessary
to show you just who knows what about what.
And so the psychopath will use his ability to fool you
as proof of his own grandiose omnipotence, omniscience and narcissism.
And the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath.
Virtually anybody can.
So that Robert Hare, for example, who studied psychopaths for a long time,
and interviewed a lot of them,
like hundreds of them,
and videotaped many of the interviews,
he said when he talked to the psychopath he always believed what they said,
and then he'd watch the video after and see where the conversation went off the rails,
but the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong,
and if you're polite, you don't object to how the person unfolds their strategy,
and psychopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate people
the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low.
Go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on YouTube.
That's bloody... that's enlightening, man.
Paul Bernardo, he's like the CEO of a meeting in that video.
He gives the cops hell, he gives the lawyers hell,
he protests his innocence,
he basically tells them that they're rude and untrustworthy,
because they don't trust him because of a few little things seventeen years ago.
And he gets away with it! "A few little things", right,
I mean, he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his then-girlfriend,
he was a repeat sexual offender and murderer, but he basically goes:
"Well, you know, that's a long time ago! We're past that, aren't we?
I mean, I'm having a discussion with you, I'm trying to help you solve the crimes,
which, by the way, I committed, but we won't bring that up,
and you're accusing me of being a liar! You're not playing fair, what's up with you?"
And then when they answer, he just looks at his fingernails,
that's a lovely little manipulative thing, because it basically means:
"whatever happens to be under my fingernail at the moment is much higher priority
than listening to your foolish story". And you watch,
you'll see people do that to you, and you get an insight into what they're up to.
He's very good at that. Or he looks outside,
or he looks at his hands, or he looks out the window,
immediately dismissive in his non-verbal behaviour.
It's brilliant.
The courts were forced to release that, by the way,
look it up, Paul Bernardo on YouTube,
it's just mind-boggling. He's so good at what he does.
And he's good-looking, and he's charismatic,
he can really pull it off.
You can't tell what's happening with the cops and the lawyers,
whether they're letting him play his routine to get some information from him,
or if actually he's setting them back on his heels,
and I suspect it's a bit of both,
but it's a masterful performance.
If you didn't know who he was,
and you were watching it without the audio,
you'd think he's the CEO of some company,
giving his employees hell for not being up-to-scratch.
That's all his body language, his eye contact,
everything just speaks that. It's amazing.