“I only want good things in life, and I’m gonna get it,” declares a 25-year-old psychopath who claims to know which people to manipulate ‘just by looking at them’.
Loic De Marie says he felt ‘different’ from an early age, but it was only when he was 23 that he was formally diagnosed with psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and impulsivity alongside narcissistic tendencies.
Healthline notes that psychopathy isn’t an official clinical diagnosis in the US, though the word is often used to ‘refer to symptoms of antisocial personality disorder’, including limited empathy, manipulative behavior, and little to no remorse.
Loic, who is from Belgium, believes he was born this way, even though studies suggest these traits can be influenced by both genetics and upbringing.
Speaking on LADbible Stories’ Minutes With, Loic, now 25, described an incident from childhood that he says reflects how he thinks: at six years old, he didn’t help his sister when she was drowning in a pool because his ‘clothes were clean’.
He also pointed to a moment at school that made him recognize how out of step he felt with other people emotionally: after a classmate died in a car crash, he said he couldn’t grasp why others were in tears, viewing them as ‘f**king weak’.
Over time, Loic says he learned to copy the emotional cues he saw in others, explaining that he began to ‘mask’ what he felt by presenting himself as ‘very charming’ and ‘very empathetic in appearance’—something he says fed into his ability to manipulate.
He also claims he could quickly identify who might be easy to influence, saying he could tell ‘just by looking at them, walking onto the street’.
“Psychopaths [have] got pretty good instinct on who they can manipulate,” he asserts, before adding: “There is some people they’re gonna walk like that, they’re gonna come at you and talk in a very shy way. And when you’re a psychopath, you understand pretty quickly that this person can be manipulated.”
While acknowledging that he’s ‘not proud of it now’, Loic said his approach to targeting people was deliberate, explaining: “I tend to search for a certain type of girl, girl without a father, girl who are depressed, girl who are pretty empathetic, because in the mind of a psychopath, we’ve got this brain wired differently.
“So we tend to have more attraction to dopamine and to results. So if you target a weaker person, you get pretty quickly what you want.”
He then framed his motivation in straightforward terms, arguing that to him, ‘manipulation is only about one thing: gain’.
Loic explained it like this: “You need to gain something. And how to gain something, you only need to get the confidence of another person. That’s [as] simple as that.”
“So when I was manipulating somebody, that was for personal gain,” Loic adds. “That was kind of a mentality of you are ruthless, you’re like, ‘I only want good things in life, and I’m gonna get it’.”
Loic also argued that looks can be a powerful tool because appearance is ‘the first thing other human beings are gonna see’.
He says: “A beautiful smile. It’s always a deadly weapon for a psychopath because just imagine somebody is on the side of the road, and you got a problem to your car, and a good psychopath [is] gonna come at you with a beautiful smile and they’re gonna tell you, ‘Nice to meet you, how can I help you?’
“And inside of you, you don’t believe anything. But it’s the first appearance that’s gonna manipulate others.”
In Loic’s view, reading and reflecting emotions doesn’t come naturally—he describes emotions as a ‘second language’ for psychopaths—so he says actions and gestures become the primary way to build trust.
Watch Loic’s full Minutes With episode below:
“Your body is like an instrument, and you can transfer emotion to others just by making a gesture,” he notes.
Since beginning therapy in 2023, Loic says his ‘life completely changed’, and he claims he now wants to pursue a career in politics.
“I’m honest, at least as far as I can. And people tend to believe in me now because it takes courage and it takes a lot of work to change yourself,” he says. “That’s sometimes difficult. But I think this is my way of being honest.”
Still, when reflecting back, he said he wouldn’t rewrite his past, concluding: “I had a beautiful life, even in the past, I don’t regret anything.”