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The Narcissist's Playbook: Sam Vaknin, H.G. Tudor, and the Men Who Sell the Monster

15. 10. 2026  ·  narcissism psychology documentary

Narcissist's Playbook — official flyer

The Narcissist's Playbook (also Empathy Not Included), directed by Mark Vicente, is useful for one reason above the rest: it catches Sam Vaknin mid-performance and lets the mask slip on camera. This is not a survey of narcissism documentaries. It is about two men who built careers selling proximity to the predator — Vaknin as the psychopath in professor cosplay, H.G. Tudor as the devil with a microphone — and what happens when one of them gets filmed without a script.

Who else is in the frame

The film is not only about the predator educators. The other voices are worth naming — and following on their own channels — because they are the ones who keep the story from collapsing into one man’s brand:

Still: the story that sticks is the expert who became the exhibit. The rest are why the exhibit got built.

Sam Vaknin: the psychopath who sold the mirror

sam-vaknin-selfie

Look at the face first. Not as gossip — as branding. For years Vaknin’s public image has been exactly this kind of carefully staged self-portrait: the stare, the framing, the “I already confessed so I cannot be caught” energy. The selfie is not a side note. It is the product. He sold proximity to the monster by posing as the man who owns the mirror.

His YouTube channel is the factory: thousands of hours of lectures, books, the posture of the insider who named himself so the audience lowers its guard. Oldest trick in the book — confess a softer crime so nobody looks for the harder one. Narcissism is the costume. What shows through is colder: instrumental people-use, zero remorse, and a talent for turning every confrontation into theater about him.

Early in Vicente’s film, that brand still works. He enters almost as a guide. Then the map turns on the cartographer.

While the documentary was still being made, multiple women came forward with serious allegations against him — including women who say they were clients / in a therapeutic or advisory relationship — alleging sexual and emotional abuse, misuse of private disclosures, and coercive dynamics. Investigative reporting tied to the film and Traquair’s companion podcast The Storyteller: Narcissist’s Playbook follows those accounts in detail (trigger warning: sexual violence and suicide are discussed). Julia Raeside’s Hiding in plain sight? summarizes the pivot cleanly: the incidental talking head becomes the subject.

Traquair confronts him. On camera, according to that reporting, he does not engage the substance of the accusations; he attacks the interview as a “trap,” criticizes her ethics, and walks out. That walkout is the tell. A narcissist might rage, argue, or perform hurt. A psychopath treats accountability as a procedural nuisance and leaves the room when the frame slips. Exit. Smear. Procedure talk. No empathy for the women. No curiosity about harm. Only control of the narrative.

The film’s about page now carries an explicit warning: multiple allegations of inappropriate conduct involving women, including clients; do not contact him or seek his services. That is the production telling the audience: the “expert” we let speak became a case study — and not of garden-variety vanity.

Vaknin has called the film and podcast a defamatory smear campaign (see his Medium response). Contested claims belong in courts and journalism. My read of the pattern he performs — on camera and for decades online — is simpler: he is a psychopath who built a career explaining predators so he could keep operating next to them, and next to the people who came to him for help.

H.G. Tudor: the devil’s voiceover

H.G. Tudor — The Ultra

Tudor is not in the film. He does not need to be. He is the other pole of the same YouTube ecosystem — the one who never bothered with academic varnish.

Look at the mark he chose for Knowing The Narcissist : Ultra: black void, exploding sun, The Ultra. No face. Just cosmic theater. That is branding as theology. On narcsite.com and on YouTube he sells the predator’s catechism as a daily liturgy — calm, absolute, endlessly repeating how the trap works, how the empath feeds it, how escape is almost impossible unless you buy the next lesson. Useful as a specimen. Not a guide. A voice that sounds like it came up from under the floorboards of the internet and decided empathy was a punchline.

Where Vaknin plays the professor who already confessed, Tudor plays the devil who enjoys explaining. Same product line: I am the monster, so trust me to describe the monster. Same audience: people in pain, scanning for recognition, and getting a brand instead of a boundary. If the film is the court date for Vaknin, Tudor is the radio station still broadcasting after the verdict — the genre continuing without apology.

Why these two, not the syllabus

The internet’s narcissism niche did not invent abuse. It invented a market for men who narrate abuse from the predator’s chair and call it education. Vaknin and Tudor are the cleanest examples I know: one collapsed when the camera stayed on; the other never stopped performing the same sermon under a logo that looks like a hellscape.

Watch the film for the walkout. Then open their channels — Vaknin on YouTube, Tudor on YouTube, Tudor’s site — if you want to see the brand machinery that made the walkout possible. Not for advice. For pattern recognition. Same lane as my note on narcissism in 2026: naming moves over vibes. Neither man is a therapist. Neither is a safe guide. Both are exhibits.

Watch / links

Film

The predator educators

Everyone else worth clicking

Thanks to Richard Grannon and Mark Vicente for this reveal — for putting the playbook on screen and not looking away when the “expert” became the story.

If you watch, watch for moves — especially the ones performed by the men who claim to teach them.