Categories
podcast

Is the “behavior expert” industry corrupt? A critical look at Paul Ekman, Joe Navarro, and others

In this second part of a talk with former CIA officer Kent Clizbe, we discuss the exaggerated, irresponsible claims made by many self-described “behavior experts,” focusing especially on Paul Ekman, Joe Navarro, microexpressions, and attempts to detect deception from body language. We discuss why facial expressions and physical movements cannot be interpreted through a universal dictionary, how cultural and individual differences make behavioral judgments especially difficult, and why nervousness or discomfort is rarely meaningful evidence of guilt or deception in high-stakes situations. We examine the failed TSA SPOT program, the influence of shows like “Lie to Me” (which was loosely based on Paul Ekman’s work), and the lack of convincing real-world, high-stakes examples supporting “behavior expert” claims. We also explore how behavioral hunches can contribute to tunnel vision, false confessions, and wrongful convictions; why games like poker can offer a more constrained and useful setting for behavioral reads; and why the most actionable information in high-stakes situations usually comes from what people say, what they leave out, and how their claims compare with known facts.

Related links and a transcript are below.

Episode links:

Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:

TRANSCRIPT

(transcripts are generated automatically and will contain errors)

Kent Clizbe: [Paul] Ekman had massive contracts. He had contracts with the CIA, with the DOD, with Special Forces. He was selling his training to them. Then based on that, he got a massive contract with, Homeland Security, DHS, TSA. He had a program called Spot, SPOT. All of these bozos and DHS saw Lie To Me — Lie To Me was Ekman’s TV show — and said, wow, that’s cool. He can read micro expressions and tell who’s lying. We gotta get him. They gave him a contract for Spot. The idea was using Ekman’s micro expressions. He would train TSA officers to use his microexpressions, uh, technique, methodology to identify terrorists… they spent DHS spent $900 million on this program. You know how many terrorists they identified? 

Zach Elwood: How many? 

Kent: Zero. Not a single one

Zach Elwood: That was a clip from my talk with Kent Clizbe, a former CIA officer and the author of the book Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment: A Reality-based Alternative to Deception Detection, which is available on Amazon. In this episode, we talk about the well known behavior researcher Paul Ekman, we talk about Joe Navarro, we talk about micro-expressions, and we talk about the “behavior expert” industry in general. 

This is actually the second part of a talk I had with Kent back in January, eight months ago. The first part of that talk was he and I talking about his efforts to expose Wayne Simmons, who appeared on Fox News for 15 years claiming to be a CIA intel expert but who, I think the evidence clearly shows, was not. You can read about Kent’s role in that story in a NY Times article titled The Plot To Take Down a Fox News Analyst (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/magazine/the-plot-to-take-down-a-fox-news-analyst.html) – which by the way I think is a very bad title, as the use of ‘plot’ sounds like something shady was happening, when it was a highly justified and ethical pursuit of exposing a liar. 

I also featured Kent in another episode of mine; we went through the military career of Chase Hughes, a popular “behavior expert” who has more than 2 million youtube followers and has appeared on major podcasts but who is quite obviously a pathological liar and con artist. With Kent’s experience in CIA and military circles, he helped me examine Chase’s official Navy record and what Chase has said publicly about his life, and we compared the quite banal nature of the reality of Chase’s military career to Chase’s deceptive and frankly delusional depiction of it. 

There are a couple reasons I’ve sat on this episode for so long before releasing it, and I just want to be transparent about those reasons. For a while I thought I actually was not going to release it, but eventually I decided it was an important talk, even just important for me personally. Kent and I’s conversation got me down a path of thinking and was a contributing reason for me ending up deciding to write a general audience book about reading people and reading behavior, which will be called Read People For Real. One of my goals with the book will be to help explain how much bullshit and nonsense there is in the quote “behavior expert” space about nonverbal behavior — and just a note that when I use “behavior expert” it will always be in quotes, as in alleged behavior expert. And the book will give some thoughts on what I think actually matters for making quick reads of people in real-world, high-stakes situations; which is mostly around what people say. So even though I had misgivings about sharing this episode, I ended up wanting to share it because it was important to me, personally, and I think it contains some very good points made by Kent that you will not often hear made. I also did enjoy Kent’s book and it contains some very good points about what actually matters in trying to judge other people’s credibility. 

One reason I didn’t want to share it was because I think Kent himself shares some stuff publicly that I think is very unreasonable and wrong, so I just didn’t want to be associated with him. I’m talking about things I view as harmful, pseudoscientific, and conspiratorial. Honestly, I just didn’t want people asking me, “why are you promoting this guy who has said x, y, and z?” These were things Kent’s posted that I became aware of after first talking to Kent months ago for the podcast. So that was a factor. But eventually, like I said, I thought the conversation we had was important and unique, and because I do agree with Kent on most things in the domain of behavior-reading and so-called “behavior experts.” 

And if there’s anything my work on political polarization has taught me, it’s that it’s okay to view someone as very wrong on some topics, but to view them as intelligent and correct on other topics.

And in some ways I think Kent’s strengths and faults, as I view them, are intertwined; he is, I think, much too pessimistic about some people and their beliefs and motivations— and even as that can be a bad and harmful thing, I think there is an aspect of that that can have positive outcomes sometimes — as I think it was this aspect of his personality that helped him recognize Wayne Simmons as a fraud and to then work hard on exposing him, at a time when nobody else was willing to do that work, and even though that work came with significant personal costs and risks to Kent. To put it another way: Kent is willing to lash out at and harshly criticize people, and sometimes he will be making some good points that should be listened to. 

Another reason I sat on this episode for so long is that it includes Kent saying that the well known “behavior expert” Joe Navarro spreads bullshit and is, to quote Kent, “like Chase Hughes”. Again, if you don’t know him, Chase Hughes is a “behavior expert” con artist I’ve examined and exposed on this podcast; just an egregiously unethical liar who spreads false and exaggerated information about behavior and mind control and a slew of other things, and who has lied about just about every aspect of his past. Now, when Kent compared Navarro to Chase in our talk, I felt the need to defend Navarro a bit, because I didn’t want to seem like I was grouping him in the same category as someone like Chase Hughes. I still think Joe Navarro and Chase Hughes are in entirely separate categories, for a number of reasons, but I will say that after thinking about this topic for these past few months, and doing a lot of reading and research, I have come around to agreeing with Kent saying that what Navarro does in the behavior-reading space is similar to what Chase Hughes does. I do think that what Joe Navarro does is the same thing, basically, as what these other “behavior expert” people do, whether we’re talking about Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel, or the slew of other people in this space. There is a spectrum of falseness and unethical behavior in there, of course, and I think Navarro is much more truthful and ethical than a lot of these people. But still, what I eventually decided, after thinking about it many months, is that if I said and did the things Joe Navarro has done with his behavior-related work, I would feel highly unethical. I would feel I was unethically deceiving people about the importance of nonverbal behavior. 

Now this is a tough topic to talk about, because many people will say “obviously nonverbal behavior matters” and yes, it’s true; obviously it does; we are reading and interpreting people’s nonverbal behavior every day in our personal and professional lives – in what you might call these various everyday low-stakes situations. And I’d say we often do a pretty good job of it, mostly because in low-stakes situations people aren’t trying to hide their feelings and motives – often people want you to understand what they’re feeling, or sometimes they may not care that much if you get some clues to their feelings. 

But what Navarro and other “behavior experts” do — which I think is where the mistake lies and the unethical aspects creep in — is claim that reading nonverbal behavior is highly powerful in high-stakes, real-world situations; that I think is the mistake, as I think it’s clear that it’s barely useful in those domains. This is because in high-stakes situations, anxiety and other negative emotions are present for many people, not just deceptive and guilty people. This means that a focus on studying behavioral indicators of anxiety and irritation and other feelings, or the lack thereof, are pretty useless in high-stakes situations. This is not to say that we can’t sometimes make defensible deductions about what people’s nonverbal behavior means; it’s just to say that it’s to me clearly not something that is powerful and highly useful, as the standard “behavior expert” claims tend to go.  

What matters the most in real-world, high-stakes domains is what people say, and what they don’t say; that’s where 99% of the actionable information is, in my view: making logical observations and deductions about what people say, and how it stacks up to what is otherwise known. And by the way, that’s also what Kent Clizbe focuses on in his book Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment. 

Another major factor is that in real-world, non-game scenarios, you cannot base major decisions on small ambiguous nonverbal clues, as the stakes are just too high in terms of harming other people — whereas in game environments, you can often use small behavioral clues to make decisions. This is because games are different from real-world scenarios in multiple ways: from the structured, formalized nature of games, to the low-information nature of games where you can defensibly base decisions on information that is far from 100% reliable because decisions are close and you are lacking better information; to the fact that acting on slim sources of information in games won’t theoretically harm people in real ways. 

One simple fact that shows I’m right about this is that there is a glaring lack of anecdotes and stories of people making use of nonverbal behaviors in high-stakes situations. Even in their own books and videos, behavior experts will struggle to show you examples of how to use nonverbal behavior in high-stakes domains. The examples that do exist are either quite banal, like the kinds of observations that many of us make in our day-to-day social and personal lives; other times, they aren’t even really examples of reading nonverbal behavior, they’re just examples of people doing things and taking actions and acting suspiciously; sometimes there’ll be examples that seem intended to try to exaggerate the usefulness of nonverbal behavior, even though such uses would in practice be indefensible and unreasonable as protocols; for example, claiming that one has based major investigative decisions on small nonverbal clues, like someone’s cigarette shaking or someone’s facial reaction changing when reading a list of murder weapons. There’s a reason such approaches aren’t really used by law enforcement; most people would find the idea of such applications absurd and immoral, and that includes multiple law enforcement people I’ve talked to. 

If nonverbal behavior were truly as powerful as “behavior experts” claim, we’d be surrounded by examples of people using that information in all sorts of ways in high-stakes domains. But we aren’t. On the other hand, we can find many examples of people acting on what people say and do and how that stacks up to reality and known facts, because that’s where the information is. Deciding to focus on the highly ambiguous and hard-to-interpret nonverbal behavior when there is so much information in what people say and do; that would simply be madness. 

These points map over to what research shows us in the deception detection domain: that nonverbal behaviors are faint and unreliable when it comes to spotting deception. Now “behavior experts” will sometimes pay superficial homage to that research, but then turn around and claim that, nonetheless, their training on nonverbal behavior will help you detect deception. They can simultaneously promote their work as helping you detect deception in high-stakes, real-world environments while at the same time referencing that deception detection is hard, based on what the research shows. But the implication is always that, with the proper training — namely theirs – you can nonetheless become strong at detecting deception. If this is rather confusing, you are not missing anything; it is purposefully vague and opaque, because “behavior experts” want to “have their cake and eat it, too.”

If you’d like to read a great paper that talks about this aspect of “behavior experts,” check out a paper by Vincent Denault titled Darwin’s illegitimate children: How body language experts undermine Darwin’s legacy (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365331711_Darwin%27s_illegitimate_children_How_body_language_experts_undermine_Darwin%27s_legacy). Vincent’s paper actually focuses a lot on Joe Navarro’s work, and he also mentions Paul Ekman in there, David Matsumoto’s company Humintell, and more.

Here’s one quote from that paper: 

One way to help the public evaluate what body language experts are saying is to unpack and comparetheir claims with actual research findings. This could, of course, displease body language experts. Yet if they appeal to science, either implicitly or explicitly, they must expect and accept scrutiny. They cannot reject the rules of science, while simultaneously using science as a source of legitimacy.

I interviewed Vincent for this podcast a few months ago, and had a great talk with him; he has an interesting story for being someone who used to be deep in the behavior-reading world, who thought he was on his way to becoming an expert at reading people’s nonverbal behavior – but who eventually realized that much of that world was garbage and turned to the scientific research of behavior. 

There’s a lot more to say here, as the topic of nonverbal behavior is a huge, sprawling topic — and actually, the sprawling and hard-to-talk-about nature of this domain is something that can help defend “behavior experts” from criticism — but that’s to give you a brief rundown of my views on the topic. If you’re curious to hear more, sign up to get updates about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com, and that way you’ll be in the loop about my new book, which will delve deep into the problems in the behavior expert space. 

I’ll also mention that criticizing Joe Navarro, as I’ve done here, is not an easy thing to do for me. For one thing, Joe has said nice things about my poker tells work before. For another thing, after I did my first deep-dive on Chase Hughes in late 2024, exposing his many, many lies and unethical behaviors, Joe called me to thank me for doing that work, and said I’d done a great job on it, and we had a very nice talk. So these were also factors weighing on me with this episode. But eventually I decided that talking about these topics is important, and it’s really an unavoidable topic, if I really want to talk about the nonsense in the “behavior expert” space, which I obviously do. I think there’s something interesting here, too, in how personal associations and relationships can make harsh criticism more difficult. If I hadn’t had a personal conversation with Joe, I would be less hesitant to put out criticisms of him. And I think this is a big factor in the “behavior expert” space, which helps explain the lack of harsh criticism of “behavior experts”. Meeting someone, even once, can dramatically put the brakes on public criticism, and I think this is a factor because there are many alleged “behavior experts” who have mingled with law enforcement people at various events and conferences, and even with some academic behavior people. 

I think another big factor that helps explain the lack of public criticism is perceived authority, and how that also makes criticism more difficult. In talking about this, I have to contend with the fact that many people see Joe Navarro as an esteemed expert on reading and using nonverbal behavior. I know that criticizing him will result in some people criticizing me. This is a reason why some academics avoid talking directly about the bad things “behavior experts” do; I think it’s a reason that Vincent Denault, in that previous paper I mentioned, doesn’t even mention Joe Navarro’s name, even though the paper focuses on him. Few people want the drama that comes with criticizing well known and respected people. 

I have talked to a couple law enforcement professionals who agree with me about “behavior experts” generally and about Joe Navarro specifically, but who have said, to paraphrase: “Joe Navarro is so well regarded that criticizing him publicly would alienate me from too many peers and hurt me professionally; I can’t do it.” One maybe nice thing about me is that I have none of those professional concerns; I don’t have to worry about any impacts to my professional life from calling things as I see it. 

For what it’s worth, I do think that my view of “behavior experts” is the norm in the law enforcement community, and not an outlier. I’ve talked to quite a few law enforcement people for this podcast, both publicly and privately, and I do think these views are the norm. There’s a reason hardly any law enforcement and intelligence agencies these days are using nonverbal behavior stuff, and a reason why it is increasingly rare to find people who can defend making such things any part of an official protocol. It’s just that the exaggerated claims of “behavior experts” spread widely and get a lot of attention, which leads people to assume those views are commonplace. 

Kent and I talk about Paul Ekman in this episode, too. Ekman is a well known behavior researcher who still gets a lot of respect and is still cited a lot. You may know the TV show Lie To Me, which was loosely based on his ideas. His ideas were also used in the TSA airport security SPOT program, which Kent was talking about at the start of this episode. What has stood out to me the last year or so of doing the podcast, in the public and private conversations I’ve had, is just how negatively Ekman is viewed by behavior researchers. Kent’s view of Ekman shared in his book and in this talk, which is also my view, is that Ekman was a deeply unethical person, basically an academic con artist. I don’t think Ekman started that way, but as he got more attention for his ideas, I think he became more unethical in his approaches and claims, and less willing to address the clear failures of his ideas as shown by the research. He did less and less research and made more and more grandiose and detached-from-reality claims. And what I’ve found talking to various behavior researchers is that this is the view that many of them have of Ekman, too, but they just don’t like to talk about that too directly and publicly. I think there is a natural inclination in academia to be very polite, and to restrict criticisms to specific papers, and to avoid even the perception of personal attacks. One researcher I invited on to talk to, who had written criticism of Ekman, said that now that Ekman was deceased, he didn’t want to talk about him and preferred to just talk about his ideas. So I think there are various aspects that have helped Ekman escape much harsh public criticism, and to continue to be highly regarded; although if you search for criticisms of Ekman online, you can start to put the pieces together. I will say that Kent Clizbe’s book is worth reading, even if only for the highly critical section on Ekman’s career. Unlike academics, Kent does not hold back in his negative views of Ekman. I can’t vouch for everything Kent said about Ekman in his book, or in this talk we had, but in my experience Kent’s highly negative view of Ekman is not an outlier in the behavior research community and is more the norm. 

I hope this rather long preface gives some context for why I sat on this episode for so long, and also why I eventually ended up this episode was worth sharing and worth listening to. Hopefully you find it interesting and worthwhile. As with any talk I’ve had for this podcast, or maybe any talk ever, there will be things anyone can criticize and find fault with, but if it makes you think a bit and see things from some different perspectives, it will have been worth it.  

Okay here’s the second part of my talk with Kent Clizbe, author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment: A Reality-based Alternative to Deception Detection. Note that I start this in the middle of a discussion where I had ended the first talk with Kent. He’s talking about his dedication to outing liars like Chase Hughes and helping educate their fans.

Kent Clizbe: I might be up for, uh, starting a new deprogramming service.

Zach Elwood: Well, you know, uh, y- I don’t know if you know, but Chase Hughes claims to be an expert cult deprogrammer too. That’s one of the many things he claims he’s an expert-

Kent Clizbe: You are kidding me.

Zach Elwood: No, that’s one of the things. There’s a Reddit- What a freaking joke

there’s a Reddit thread about, there’s a Reddit thread about him being an expert cult deprogrammer. People are like, “Is he really?” And then, you know, it’s just, he’s claimed to be an expert in literally everything psychology-related. It’s just, it’s so funny, you know? Uh-

Kent Clizbe: Pitiful. Pitiful.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Yeah, so you had mentioned, uh, Ekman there.

Maybe that’s a good, uh, a good segue into, uh, into your book about, um, where you critique, um… Sorry, I’m forgetting the name. What was the name of your book again? Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment, right. Um, and you, in that book, you make a lot of good points about the amount of bullshit in the behavior space, specifically behavior analysis in context of, like, interrogations and field work and, and things like this.

There are many, obviously many behavior experts out there, behavior experts in quotes, uh, who promote the idea that reading body language, nonverbal behavior in interviews and interrogations in the field for law enforcement and military kind of work. They promote the claims that reading behavior is hugely important.

You know, for example, you’ve got shows like The Behavior Panel, which Chase Hughes is on. You’ve got other, uh, alleged behavior experts who promote this idea that various facial and body language movements are commonly being used by advanced operatives and law enforcement and military, uh, that, uh, that allow them to make deductions and detect deceptions about people and such.

So you’re obviously someone with extensive field experience. And, um, you know, m- maybe you could talk a l- little bit about what value do you see in those ideas about studying body language when it comes to the military and field work, uh, that you’ve done?

Kent Clizbe: Zero. I mean, for normal people, there is virtually no value in trying to figure out what any kind of physiological sign means.

You cannot translate physiological signs, whether it’s eye movements, facial expressions, hands, legs, body. Normal people have a huge variety of physiological movements. A- and that includes blood pressure, pulse, breathing, sweat. Everybody’s different. There is no… A- and different individually, different culturally, different subculturally.

[00:24:00] The vocabulary and, uh, definitions of body movements are totally different across So many different domains that it’s… I, I think it’s insane to try to generalize that there is some kind of generic, um, way of understanding or translating physiological symptoms, movements, body, body function, bodily functions.

They cannot be translated into, uh, emotions or meaning generically. You can individually potentially figure out, “Hey, my wife’s pissed at me because she raised her voice,” or, “She, uh, is not looking at me,” or something. But that’s not… You can’t then s- smear that across all humanity and say that ev- this is what everybody does when they’re angry, or this is the way everybody…

The fa- this is everybody’s facial expression when they’re angry. I learned this because I, I grew up a redneck in North Carolina. I, I, I started, uh, middle school the year after desegregation. Be- before that, there were totally separate Black and white schools. I started sixth grade when they integrated. I was in an 80% Black county.

We’re all Americans, Black and white, we’re Americans. We have a common American culture. But very quickly, I learned the subcultures, including communications, language, uh, bodily movements, uh, behaviors, if you will, are totally different And that, that was my first exposure to cross-cultural communications. I, I, uh, joined the military and became a, uh, uh, a linguist.

I went to, went to school out in Monterey for Vietnamese. So here, here I was out of the, the cotton fields of North Carolina, suddenly transported to California, beautiful Monterey Bay, Defense Language Institute, going to eight hours a day for one year, 40, 47 weeks, um, Vietnamese language immersion. I learned, wow, not only is it language, it is everything about how we interact with other people.

[00:27:00] Facial expressions, it’s body movements. It’s totally different. Vietnamese is totally different, uh, from the, the, the physiological movements and what’s expected and accepted. Totally different from American culture. That began my immersion into foreign cultures. Then went to the Philippines. I lived, I lived in the Philippines for three years working in the military, and I immersed myself in the Filipino culture.

Same thing. The physiological vocabulary, cultural vocabulary, expressions, facial expressions, um, hand movements, totally different. From there, I, my- I married a, a lady from Malaysia. I was immersed in Malay, in Malay culture, Malaysian culture. There’s three main culture- subcultures in Malaysia, Malay, Chinese, and Indian, all totally different.

Just like America, they have a Malaysian culture, but each one of those subcultures has totally different physiological linguistic vocabularies. Worked for a year in Saudi Arabia. I was the only Westerner in a, a, a very rural province, immersed in the, in this, the Arab culture Totally different. From there, went to England.

Lived in England for six months, immersed in, in the British culture. Totally different. We speak the same language, but it was very difficult to communicate with them. The physiological, linguistic, e- even though it’s the, uh, English language, totally different. Moved to Italy. Lived in Italy for six months.

Totally different. Mm-hmm. And then s- since then I, I’ve worked, uh, a- across, across Asia. I’ve, I’ve worked across the Middle East, Africa. I spent five years in a, in Latin American culture as a kid. Anybody with that kind of experience has to say physiological body language, facial expressions, there is no generic universal vocabulary of expressions to express emotion or meaning.

And that’s what Ekman claims. Ekman claims that, and, uh, it ain’t right.

Zach Elwood: What’s, uh… L- yeah, we’ll come back to that. I, I was gonna have, have you clarify though. I mean, in, in your opinion I th- I think you’re also saying that even, say we’re just talking about a specific culture. Like, I would s- uh, I, I would think it would still be your stance that there’s not…

I- it’s really hard, if not impossible usually, to get meaningful information about what somebody’s thinking or if they’re telling a lie from their behavior from… You know, if we’re just talking about non-verbal behavior specifically. I, I think that’s what you’re saying too, but you’re making the point that, like, that’s especially shown when you [00:30:00] take into account all the different kinds of cultures and such that people have, yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So, so the reason I get into that, uh, the, the, uh, debunking Ekman-

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm …

Kent Clizbe: about facial expressions expressing emotion is because he, he asserts his hypothesis, and he claims he’s proved it- Mm-hmm … is that it is universal

Zach Elwood: Right

Kent Clizbe: That facial expressions, micro expressions showing emotion are universal, number one.

Number two, he can read those micro expressions. Number three, he can interpret those micro expressions. Number four, he can use those interpretations to detect deception universally. So that’s why I, I give the background of actual universal experience to show that that’s bullshit.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here, there’s a lot of nuance here regarding the idea that there are some universal similarities between facial expressions and how they manifest from underlying emotions.

I actually think there is a lot of truth in the universal facial expression idea, at least in the realm of core basic emotions, but there is a lot of disagreement about that in the research. But I think it’s largely a pretty moot point because it’s possible to think that there can be some core universal facial manifestations that apply well across all cultures, while still believing that even if that were true, trying to make use of such things in a practical way in high-stakes, anxiety-producing environments is extremely difficult.

Put another way, even with what deception detection research shows us about the ambiguity and faintness of nonverbal behaviors in the realm of deception detection, it still might be theoretically true that there are some core universal facial manifestations of emotion. So regardless of the nuance and disagreement around that topic, I think the important practical takeaway is that all that doesn’t really matter.

It’s clear that it’s very hard to make use of facial expressions in high-stakes environments simply because those situations provoke a lot of anxiety and agitation in many people, and also because there are all sorts of personal deviations and randomness Just leaving aside any cultural factors. Okay, back to the talk

Kent Clizbe: But if we, we backtrack to your point, in my system, HCCA, a holistic contextual credibility assessment, the detector, the, the, the operator, the person who’s making judgments, must first assess themselves for contextual competence.

That is, if I am going to be working in the, uh, rap, hip hop subculture of America, am I competent in that subculture? Do I speak their [00:33:00] language? Do I understand all of the… You know, they have complex hand signs, all kinds of stuff that means something to them. If you’re not competent in that context, the context can be a, a national culture, it can be a subculture, it can be geographic, ethnic, religious You must assess yourself, am I competent in this context, first.

Second, if you are and you’re working in that context, you also have to realize that there, even within the con- that context that you’re competent in, there’s no glossary, there’s no vocabulary, there’s no looks to the right, therefore he’s thinking about the past. Looks down, therefore he is retrieving future plans.

It’s all bullshit. There’s no such thing.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Individuals may have some sort of physiological response, and you may be able, once you understand that individual, you may be able to begin reading his physiology. A, a great example, uh, of that is, for example, the polygraph. The polygraph is measuring physiological responses, breathing, blood pressure, and sweating.

Skin gal- galvanic- Galvanic s- galvanic skin

Zach Elwood: response, yeah …

Kent Clizbe: which, which, which means how much you’re sweating.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: It’s measuring how much you’re sweating. It was designed with a specific culture in mind. If you think about it, it is a culture that at the time was based on shame. If you’ve done something wrong, you’re ashamed, you’re guilty.

You know? Like, it’s sort of like the, a Catholic, uh, uh, uh, choir boy is, is probably the perfect subject for a polygraph. They’ve gone through training their entire life to make them ashamed of having sinned, having done something wrong. And then once they feel that shame, they go and they confess. If you’ve, if you’ve grown up in that culture, you are used to responding to shame or to guilt.

If you’re in a subculture where, uh, where, where shame and guilt have been denigrated or, or, uh, deprecated, where, uh, well, yeah, man, whatever goes. Yeah, do what, do whatever, whatever floats your boat. You’re not gonna start sweating, “Oh my God, I’m gonna have to tell the priest on Saturday.” No you’re not.

You’re never gonna have to tell anybody

Zach Elwood: And plus people might start sweating for any given reason. They might be nervous for- That- … all [00:36:00] number of reasons or feel weird- Exactly … for a

Kent Clizbe: number of reasons. So, so-

Zach Elwood: A quick note here, I recently had the opportunity to take a polygraph for my own research purposes, and that’s something I might talk about at some point for this podcast.

That experience did actually increase my respect for the polygraph in terms of seeing its power firsthand. I was actually impressed, although in some other areas I was not impressed. I also read a very interesting book titled Gatekeeper, which is a memoir by a CIA polygraph examiner, and that also increased my respect for the polygraph.

All that said, my stance on the practical usefulness of polygraphs has not changed. It’s still obviously a fallible machine, and there’s a good reason polygraph results are not allowed in a criminal court of law. I still would basically never voluntarily take a polygraph. But the nuance around the polygraph is actually a good point about making use of behavioral information generally.

Even if one acknowledges that the polygraph can get some impressive results, the underlying question is when is imperfect information actually actionable? Even if the polygraph were somehow 95% accurate, it would still be considered too fallible to do much with and would still not be good as evidence.

Many debates about making use of behavioral information are really at their core about this underlying question of when is imperfect information, information that may have some general validity but be known to be far from 100% reliable, when is that information actually actionable? Okay, back to the top.

Kent Clizbe: I, I, I don’t wanna say that there’s no physiological response that can be associated with a certain emotion or lying, but there is no generic, general, universal-

Zach Elwood: Right …

Kent Clizbe: and, and, and that’s wh- that’s why I go into that, it- my experiences globally. Once you have- Yeah … the global experience, it can also be applied to any, any specific subculture.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I do, I think, I think you have a great, uh, f- people interested in, in, in these things and behaviors and making practical use of it. You have a great takedown of Ekman and, and the whole general concept of this, uh, so I do recommend people check that out. And, and you’re not the only one obviously.

I mean, there’s academics who criticize Ekman. There’s all, all sorts of people who have criticized Ekman. I’ve talked about Ekman on my podcast with Tim, uh, Levine, who’s a respected, uh, behavior and deception detection researcher, you know, criticizing, uh, his work. So, uh, just to say, yeah, it’s, it’s… it, it very…

you make very good points. And, uh, so yeah, let me, let me pivot to, um, you know, I often get people asking me for my takes on using, making practical use of body language. I mean, I’ve worked on poker tells. That’s like my main claim to fam- fame is my, you know, the fact that I’m a former pro poker player for a few years and I wrote some books on poker tells, which, uh, you know, I, I’ve sold a lot of copies of those and, and such.

And I also have this [00:39:00] podcast where I talk about behavior and psychology. So I often get people asking me like, “Hey, what resources do you recommend for making use of behavior in these, you know, real world situations?” So, and I always strive to make clear, and, and this is not a answer people find very satisfying, but I, I strive to make clear that in real world scenarios, if we’re leaving aside the game and the sports stuff, which I think is a very different section because games and sports are very formalized environments.

You have very specific goals, like granular goals you’re trying to achieve at any given time, et cetera, et cetera. I think if we’re leaving aside that context, which, you know, I do believe there’s a lot of value in those contexts. If we’re talking about real world non-game scenarios where it’s like interviews, interrogations, field work, whatever, I, I, I tell people like, “I don’t think there’s anything that valuable to study there.

Uh, I, I, I think you’re much better off studying, you know, how to make logical deductions of the things people say and do.” If you really wanna delve into some behavioral stuff, like check out like, um, verbal or written statement analysis, which I do think is interesting, but it’s still, I think by far the, the most useful thing is the thing, kind of things you’re talking about in your, in your book where it’s like you need context and you also need to make logical deductions about, you know, what, why is someone saying what they are?

What i- what is the story they’re telling? What are they leaving out? You know, the- these kind of logical deductions and like a- as you and I and others have talked about, there’s, it’s just very hard to take these minute pieces of nonverbal behavior and make anything useful out of them. And I, I, I think we’re on the same page there, but I wanna see, you know, do, would you say we’re on the same page?

Kent Clizbe: I think so. I, I have not looked into the, uh, the domain that, that you’re an expert in, that very, uh, constrained sports-

Zach Elwood: Game …

Kent Clizbe: competition sort of communications. It makes sense to me that in, in that very constrained world of game-based communications, you’re, you’re dealing with a much, uh, smaller set of, uh- Uh, what?

Variables, I guess Yeah That it makes sense.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here. If you’d like to hear an episode dedicated to differences in reading and making use of behavioral information in game versus non-game environments, check out an episode I shared recently on my podcast. It was a talk that I did with the Deductionist Podcast.

Back to the talk.

Kent Clizbe: I can tell you for sure that, that in the larger real world of communications, whether it’s a, a, a cop sitting down to, uh, question somebody in, in a interrogation room Or it’s an intelligence officer meeting someone at a, at a, a reception, a diplomatic reception for the first time, or it’s a [00:42:00] immigration officer encountering s- a, a traveler trying to come in the country.

Even though each of those has, i- is constrained in some way, uh, it’s really wide open. It’s social- Mm-hmm … cross-cultural communications. I, I’ve been in every one of those situations I just described except being a poker player, a- and, uh, I can tell you there was zero value in trying to figure out why his eyebr- his left eyebrow just raised-

Zach Elwood: Yeah

Kent Clizbe: or why he crossed his legs, uh, at the ankle, not at the knee, or it … Zero. Zero.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: I- and if you start focusing on that stuff, you’re losing the real, what you should be focusing on, which is the, uh, information that, that you’re gathering from him.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm,

Kent Clizbe: mm-hmm. It’s sort, you know, at, at the end of, uh, for an intelligence officer when, a human intelligence officer, you meet somebody, you elicit information, you talk with him, you build rapport, you create a relationship, um, through a meeting or series of meetings.

Y- each time you meet a subject, you write up a report. You may mention, “Seemed kind of nervous,” or, “W- was very emotional,” or ev- when, when he talked about his mother who’s dying, uh, it, it really, he start, he teared up. But you’re not, there’s no value to record, uh, in your report, uh, what micro expressions you saw, what his facial expressions were, what his body movements were.

Anybody who knows what they’re doing doesn’t. There’s probably people who do, I don’t know, but, uh, there, there’s, there’s no value in that. It’s all about the overall holistic. That’s what I, my, my system is holistic, contextual credibility assessment. It’s the overall. It’s taking everything into account.

Zach Elwood: I think you and I are similar on this, and I think you mention this in your book.

I mean, when I hear somebody telling me that they have some strategy for making some Doing something, you know, whatever it is, making some practical use of something like behavior, my first question is, “Well, show me examples of how you use this,” right?

Kent Clizbe: Give me a case study. Let’s, let’s hear it.

Zach Elwood: And ex- and the simple fact is when you read all this behavior stuff or listen to these behavior panel guys, whoever it is, these people telling you that you can make use of all these behaviors, you won’t find any consistent example or, or like any, any real practical example of how they’ve actually used this, you know?

And that, and that’s really what’s lacking. It’s like… And this goes for, you know, like you got Chase Hughes. He makes all these just completely outlandish claims about what you can do with behavior, including [00:45:00] like, you know, he also goes into- Show me, buddy. Yeah, it’s like- Show me.

Kent Clizbe: Tell,

Zach Elwood: show- Even when you read his-

show me

Kent Clizbe: a case where you did that.

Zach Elwood: Even when you read his Ellipsis manual, which is complete horseshit, it, y- you know, he, he, he can’t even come up with examples of how he… You know, it’s like you read through it and you’re like, “Where are the practical examples of how you’ve actually used this,” you know?

And he’s a serial liar. He can’t even like come up with something to like put in there of like, “Here’s how I’ve actually…” You know?

Kent Clizbe: I mean- Yeah, he can’t make something up and put it in there.

Zach Elwood: He makes, he makes some, he makes outlandish stuff up, but it’s all like clearly like, uh, imaginary or like conceptual, you know?

But, but that’s an, an extreme example.

Kent Clizbe: But- Hypothetical.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, hypotheticals, like… But, but then, you know, you go into… I mean, even, even people that are more respected, I won’t name any names, but there’s people that have worked in law enforcement and such that, that do, you know, claim that they’re behavior experts, but you read their stuff too, you won’t find practical examples of how they’ve used this stuff.

It’s like all very… Unless it’s like really obvious, where it’s like… That’s what I was gonna say, too. The, if you go in, you know, the, the defenders of this stuff can always point to extreme examples. So to name a few extreme examples, like sure, people can behave in, in very suspicious ways. Like for example, like you’re in- you’re interrogating somebody whose wife died, and they’re acting like they’re crying, but no tears are coming out, right?

Like that’s an extreme example. Or someone who’s like completely not showing, uh, any emotion and maybe even like laughing or smiling in inappropriate ways. Like, these are, these can be extreme examples o- of things. Or somebody just like acting catatonic when they’re being interviewed, which is another ca- you know, famous case of an interrogation.

So just to say, there can be extreme examples where behavior play a role, but by and large, we’re, you know, m- almost all the information comes from, you know, what are, what are people actually communicating? And like- Even, even, uh, y- you could even class, uh, you know, it comes down to their words. ‘Cause even if you have a hunch about somebody’s behavior being suspicious, that’s almost never gonna be meaningful in a way if you don’t have other things, like about the story or about the context to back up your hunch, right?

So, but curious what you

Kent Clizbe: said all about- The problem with those, with those case studies you just cited, you know, the, the e- extreme not crying or crying without tears or being catatonic, everybody responds differently- Yeah … to, to crisis.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: To, to, to situations. The, those kind of things I, I, I looked at when I started, started really delving into and researching, uh, deception detection, and in my book I have a small section on it, is false confessions a- and interrogations that, that induce people to confess falsely.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: Uh, the Reid technique was, was one of the, one of the ways that happened. They, they’re doing less and less of it. But it’s all, it was, those are all based on cops’ hunches that, oh, he’s, he’s not reacting, you know, his wife just died, but he’s not reacting right. [00:48:00]

Zach Elwood: A quick note here. If you’re curious about what we’re talking about here, you can look into what’s called a behavioral analysis interview, which is part of the Reid technique, and which involves looking for small non-verbal indicators to responses.

Back to the talk. Right.

Kent Clizbe: Many people have b- that they then become, they focus on, “He, okay, he’s our only suspect.” The murderer, turns out it was a guy just walking by, saw the window open, climbed in and killed her. And, you know, there’s no, no obvious motive. There’s no obvious connection.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: But they, the cops, because their, their hunch about his behavior wasn’t right, now they’re totally focused on him.

And people have been arrested, tried and convicted wrongly-

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm …

Kent Clizbe: based on hunches like that. So I, I, I say- Yeah, so even for- Yeah, maybe there are… See, see, the, the cops will say, “Hey, the dude confessed,” or, “He was convicted. Ha ha. Check.” Well, w- 20 years later- False confessions, yeah … it, it was overturned. Yeah.

You know, especially now with, with DNA, many, many, uh, bad convictions, false confessions, cops railroading somebody, cops going on these hunches based on behavior, based on whatever, and then they throw the whole weight of the, uh, uh, of, of the justice system behind them and-

Zach Elwood: It, uh, yeah, to your point, it’s like even for the extreme examples of, of non-verbal behavior that somebody might think is suspicious, even for those you’re often gonna be wrong.

So which, you know- You’re

Kent Clizbe: often …

Zach Elwood: how can you trust these, like, all these little micro things that are, like, not even- You

Kent Clizbe: can’t. Yeah. And that’s my point- Yeah … is you can’t, and people have suffered because of it. People’s lives have been lost. People have been convicted, imprisoned. Uh, decisions are made, uh, i- in immigration interviews.

Uh, intelligence operations are, uh, are, are, are initiated and run and stopped based on bullshit.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Again, as you said, show me you’ve got this technique. Give me a real, uh, confirmation that your technique works. I don’t, I, I don’t see… Like you said, there’s no case studies.

Zach Elwood: No.

Kent Clizbe: Except in my book, I, I give multiple case studies, a- as well as a couple failures where my system didn’t work.

Uh, but I admit it, and I s- I explain why.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: I, I, I make the point that my expertise is not academic. Like, although I’ve gone back and researched all of the background, once I, once I developed my own system, once I realized that, uh, in, in my various roles that these, uh, body-based, [00:51:00] physiological-based credibility assessment doesn’t work, I developed my own system.

Not only did I run… Did I use that system inside intelligence, and I used that system to, uh, and I give case studies in my book, to expose what were bad operations that were based on deception, that, that other, uh, officers a- and the entire system had been running these, these cases for years in many cases.

But when I looked into it a- and looked into it at holistically, I identified, uh, these bad cases. I give those, those examples. But also, I t- I, I believe that the most, um, most valuable case studies are when I, I was a headhunter. I was a, an executive recruiter And I only made money, I only got paid, I was on a commission basis.

I had clients who would pay me if they hired a candidate that I brought to them. When they hired the candidate, I ga- they paid me, and I gave them a 100% guarantee, six months, because after six months things can change hugely. A person can change. But for the first six months, I’ll give you 100% money back if this person is not ready, willing, and able to do the job that you want.

So what that required for me to give that guarantee that my livelihood was based on, to give that guarantee, I had to have a vetting system. I met hundreds, thousands of candidates, and I ha- I had to have a system that worked in reality. Re- uh, it’s real, hard, cold, hard reality cash. My, uh, livelihood, supporting my family was based on me being right.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: And I never had to pay that. I never had to pay it. So my system of vetting was holistic, contextual credibility analysis. S- I would identify a person, and then I would talk to them. I would gather data. Start with the resume. Go down the resume and you find a- all of their experience, their education.

Let’s see, uh, uh, send me your transcripts. Give me some references. Who did you work with in this place? What was your job? What was your experience? I have a conversation with them. I gather data. 99.9% was virtual, was either on the phone or, uh, through written communications, emails usually. Email and, and on the phone I didn’t see them.

I didn’t see how they twitched when they told me they went to [00:54:00] Stanford. I don’t know. Did he look up or down when he said it? Frig if I know. All I know is I’ve got that information and now I can vet it. I can do a logical analysis of does it make sense that this guy went to Stanford? So when I give a case study, my case study is based on my life was depend- depended on my system working.

Cops, academics, intelligence officers, it doesn’t matter. Nothing they do matters. Intelligence officers, dozens, hundreds, a huge chunk of cases are bad. It’s all hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Nobody can dig in and open up, uh, these cases and say, “Look, you’re wrong here.” And inside they… There’s no incentive to identify bad cases.

When I inside identified bad cases, 100% of the time I would be attacked. The pe- the people who had been running the case for years or who had started the case, it, it’s, it’s like they see it as an attack on them. They were, their judgment was bad and had been bad for many years and there was a lot of bad results Nobody ever thanked me inside for, uh, exposing or dropping a bad case, but I was attacked virtually every time

Zach Elwood: A quick note here.

Reading that CIA polygraph examiner’s memoir, which was titled Gatekeeper, was really eye-opening and related to what Ken is talking about here. That book details so many cases where intelligence assets were faulty and were lying, and there was a lot of pressure on the people who brought in those assets and trusted those assets to defend those choices.

They were resistant to being shown that those assets were not credible and not trustworthy. It’s a really fascinating read about such things, let alone for the information about the use of the polygraph. Okay, back to the talk.

Kent Clizbe: So that’s just a, a, a way of saying that when you hear about, uh, uh, inside i- in- intelligence successes, take that all with a grain of salt.

Zach Elwood: Well, I think, uh, you know, similar to what you’re saying, you know, getting, getting feedback on your reads, like, you, you, and there has to be accountability and provability for, for your reads for something- Exactly … to mean something. I, I think there’s a similar thing in games and poker and sports and such where it’s like, for examp- I’ll give you an example.

Uh, like I was on a live stream poker, uh, playing poker once, and I made a fold based on a verbal tell, and people were like, “Oh, that was a tough fold. How would you make that?” And, and it’s like, well, I could make that same read with the, from that same tell in many situations, and I could do that on camera even on a, in a game, and I could show how it’s valuable over the long term.

You know, but the more accountable and provable something is, [00:57:00] the more valuable it is. And I, yeah, getting back to the… I, I think when people make claims about how to use stuff, especially like impressive sounding claims, you really need to dig into what, what are the examples they’re giving you? And like this behavior panel on these kinds of shows, the fact is they just go and talk about a bunch of ambiguous things that could go many different ways, and at the end of the show, you’re like, “Well, I’m not really sure how I would, I would make use of any of the stuff they said,” right?

And that’s what, you know, getting back to you being, you know, you b- you being driven by being lied to, it’s like, it makes me angry because I’ve, I, I go out of my way, like in the poker tell space, it’s so much less important than like real world stuff. But I go out of my way to say like, “Hey, you might only use these things very occasionally.

You might go for a long time and never base a decision on a read in poker,” for example, because these things are ambiguous often. They’re far from reliable. You have to look for specific spots where you’re comf- comfortable using that, that specific behavior. But like these people just make these grandiose claims about real world things that impact people’s lives, you know, that, that are, that are causing people to think that they’re amazing readers of people when really they’re just promoting, you know, people are just using this bad info to, uh, basically exaggerate their own biases.

Because they’ll be like, they’ll watch some footage of, like, Meghan Markle or somebody, and they’ll be using this bad information to be like, “Oh yeah, see, I learned that on Behavior Panel. I know she’s a compulsive liar.” And it’s like all these just bad- Yeah … reads and promoting, you know, people who think they know what they’re doing.

And then it, you know, leave it, l- let alone, like, how it seeps into, like, intel or law enforcement kind of stuff, and is even more damaging. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So, so the problem is, is it does.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: It does. Ekman had massive contracts. He had contracts with the CIA, with the DOD, with Special Forces. He was, he was selling his training to them.

Then based on that, he got a massive contract with Homeland Security, DHS, TSA, uh, Transportation Security Administration. He had a program called SPOT, S-P-O-T. I forget what it stands for, but what it was, they, uh, all of these bozos in DHS saw Lie to Me and said, Lie to Me was Ekman’s TV show, and said, “Wow, that’s cool.

He can read microexpressions and tell who’s lying. We gotta get him.” They brought him in. I, I did a, a, a Freedom of Information Act and got thousands of pages, uh, of the, their interactions, DHS interactions with Ekman. All of the financial stuff is blacked out, but what, what you did see is they were inviting him to these internal conferences.

They would all fly down to Miami, everybody from all over the country, stay in a five-star hotel and, and have three days of speakers, and Ekman would be the main speaker. They [01:00:00] did such things like that. Uh, after a, a, a few times of that, they gave him a contract for SPOT. SPOT was, the idea was using Ekman’s microexpressions, uh, he, he would train TSA officers to use his microexpressions methodology to identify terrorists passing through immigration lines to get, get on, uh, airplanes, get on transportation throughout the US.

In, I, I, I wanna say it was, like, five years that it was in existence, he got $900 million. They s- well, they spent $900

million. I c- I haven’t been identify, able to identify how much money he got, but they spent, DHS spent $900 million on this program. You know how many terrorists they identified?

Zach Elwood: How many?

Kent Clizbe: Zero. Not a single one. At the same time, multiple terrorists we know, because they ended up carrying out operations, terrorist acts, passed through these spot-trained officers.

So this is, uh, one of the very few case studies of one of these bogus techniques.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: It was a total failure. Total failure. It didn’t work. It, I… They, they would pull aside people, um, who were nervous for, nervous about flying. They, he, they, he had a checklist. He gave them a checklist of micro… And they, they went through his microexpression training, and then he had another checklist.

And then after a couple years they tweaked it, and it seems like they even dropped microexpressions because it’s… Microexpressions are, are, are, maybe they’re useful if you’re studying a frame-by-frame video of someone. Even then, n- I Again-

Zach Elwood: No evidence I’ve, no evidence I’ve seen that they’re useful. I mean, yeah,

Kent Clizbe: I- In, in a one-on-one, real time s- uh, going through an immigration line, totally useless.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here. If you’re curious to hear a criticism of microexpressions, check on a recent episode of this podcast where I talk to Maria Hartwig and Christian Corey. But long story short, there is no evidence that microexpressions as Ekman conceived of them even really exist, and there’s evidence against being able to use them for any practical purpose like deception detection.

It might be worth noting that despite this and other failures in his ideas, Ekman in Congressional testimony about the SPOT program in 2011 said that his team had attained, quote, “Between 80 and 90% identification of who was lying and who was telling the truth.” End [01:03:00] quote. Based on my knowledge of this area and having talked to behavior researchers privately about this, I think Ekman basically perjured himself in a major way with that statement, and I think that says a lot about the problems with his work and ideas overall.

I hopefully will get to talk to someone soon about that Congressional testimony he gave, as I think it’s a rather interesting story. It might be interesting to note that one major reason why Ekman got so much mainstream attention, and what led to him having so much power, was him being featured in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2005 book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

Gladwell, rather gullibly in my view, just trusted what Ekman claimed about his research, and basically hugely promoted Ekman as an amazing reader of people, and that in turn led to his mainstream popularity, the TV show Lie to Me, and Ekman’s large government contracts. Back to the talk.

Kent Clizbe: So they, they, seemed like they later kinda condensed their approach to, you know, does he look nervous?

It was sort of their checklist. And it, it-

Zach Elwood: Right. And there, there’s some good exposes about there, I mean, about that if people are interested. There was an Intercept article in 2015 called TSA’s Secret Behavior Checklist to Spot Terrorists. Yeah, SPOT was s- short for screening of passengers by observation techniques.

Yeah. A quick note here. As stated, I think a lot of this stuff can be hard to talk about because the term behavior is so sprawling. The failure of studying facial expressions and micro expressions and such does not take away from the argument that it can be valuable to look for other behavioral things.

For example, the actions people are taking, whether they’re loitering in suspicious areas or whether they’re carrying suspicious and unusual objects. The sprawling domain of the concept behavior can lead to people saying, “Well, of course, we should study and observe behavior,” where behavior means literally everything someone might say and do.

So it’s good to emphasize that we’re talking here about a specific subdomain of nonverbal behavior largely facial expressions and movements and postures of the body and such. Back to the talk

Kent Clizbe: So in, in my book I have a section on Ekman, ’cause it really, running across Ekman being touted and, and being, uh, students, human intelligence officers training in, in the military, um, and, and the military paid for them to use Ekman’s training.

It just really, uh, flipped my switch and that, that’s sort of what got me, uh, focused on, on him. But anyway, the, the, the point here is that this is a, a very unusual public demonstration of the absolute unusefulness of behavior observations. Totally useless. Almost a billion dollars. Most other law enforcement and intelligence, uh, applications, [01:06:00] you know, Ekman was trained, quote-unquote, “training people” throughout the governments, local, state, national, intel, military.

That’s all internal and nobody ever sees it. You, you’re never able to actually see the results or lack of it. The failure of SPOT was a very unusual, but it’s a total humiliation for people who think this works. I have references. I have bibliography and footnotes that all of the, like you just mentioned, those reports are all there.

I want to say one other thing, behavioral approaches. Who, who’s the, the, the law enforcement sort of, uh, accepted king or, or the, the, the gold standard of behavioral assessment? It’s the FBI’s behavioral, I forget what they’re called- Profile? … behavioral something. The FBI does great PR, you know, they ha- they are tied at the hip with, uh, movies, with TV, with, uh, journalists, and they feed them all of their, uh, all of this, uh, great PR.

Let’s look at a couple case studies. The, the, I think the best one, the perfect one of how useless they are, what are they? They’re profile- profilers. They, they call themselves profilers. Do you remember, it must have been the early 2000s, like 2005, 2006, there was the, the DC sniper.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: There were cases, people would, uh, be pumping gas at a gas station and be cut down by rifle fire.

People walking on the street cut down by rifle fire Uh, just random sniper attacks. It got to where everybody… And it was across the, the Washington, DC area. Huge, high-profile, the whole place, everybody’s paranoid. So this is perfect for… And, and they can’t, they, they can’t find it. They don’t, they don’t have suspects.

They can’t… It turned out the shooting was coming from a long ways away. You can’t even tell where the fire’s coming from. They’re shooting from, you know, several hundred yards at least, maybe more. So hey, here we go. FBI behavioral assessment unit. Let’s get a profiler in. They put out a profile. It’s a, uh, a, a white guy, disaffected white guy, blah, blah, blah.

All total bullshit. Ended up being a, a, a Black Muslim homosexual, and his… And, oh, oh, and there was, he was also, the, the profile was he’s a loner. It was a, a, a, a, a Black American Muslim homosexual who’s pissed off at his ex-wife, and he’d r- he had recruited a teenage boy, was his lover, and trained him to, to shoot out of [01:09:00] the…

They, they knocked out a hole in the back of, of their big old American car trunk, and the kid lay in the back of, in the trunk and shot, shot out the hole, uh, from several hundred yards away. Profile was totally wrong, totally wrong.

Zach Elwood: So is it your stance that there’s zero benefit even in the, the profiling in general too?

Kent Clizbe: Virtually zero. Hm. Virt- they, any- look at the case studies. They, they hide the case studies. Hm. It’s all hidden, and then they cover it up with their PR. You know, they crank out these TV shows that are, you know, that in every single episode, the, the profilers, uh, you know, have it exactly right and, you know, uh, FBI heroes come in and swoop in and get the bad guy.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here. I don’t pretend to know the accuracy and success rate of behavioral profiling, but if you’re curious for criticisms of profiling, check out a 2007 article by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker titled Dangerous Minds. It goes into the highly shaky scientific foundations of profiling I think this relates to my previous point about the polygraph and behavioral information in general, though.

Many of these discussions are really at their core about how actionable imperfect information really is. For example, let’s say that behavioral profiling did have some above average success rate, like say it was, I don’t know, fifty-five percent accurate, a bit above chance. Would that be actionable? Might it be useful in the right context, even knowing it was highly imperfect?

It might be if people took into account its flaws and didn’t rely too heavily on it. Again, I don’t pretend to know much about profiling, but a single case study failure or even many case study failures don’t necessarily tell us anything about the overall accuracy of any practice or technique. So I think if more people discussed this underlying question more openly and it wasn’t often just a simple discussion of either it works very well versus it has a lot of failures There’d be better discussion of risk assessment and risk analysis.

Back to the talk. Hey, I wanna come back to that, actually. I want, I, I, I wanted to talk about, um, why people can think there is value, why practitioners especially can think there’s value in studying non-verbal behavior. Uh, one thing that strikes me there that I don’t think, I haven’t really seen anybody talk about is I think there can actually be muddled ideas even for practitioners about what they’re spotting and if it’s behavior related or actually related to the content of what people are saying.

So for example, if you’re a police officer doing an interrogation, if somebody’s giving you a, a, a, a story that doesn’t make sense, you might afterwards start thinking like, “Oh, they were acting funny in various ways,” right? Yeah. And so in your mind it can be muddled about what’s behavior related, like non-verbal behavior related, and what’s actually related to the content.

Kent Clizbe: Absolutely.

Zach Elwood: So maybe you

Kent Clizbe: could- Absolutely.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. What do you, what do you think about that idea? I just haven’t seen people talk about that. I

Kent Clizbe: think- Well, well let me, let [01:12:00] me give you an, an excellent observation. Well, I say excellent ’cause it’s my observation, but there, there’s this dude out there, uh, he’s like Chase Hughes, Joe Navarro.

He’s got books everywhere. He’s all, he’s got a YouTube. He’s blah, blah, blah, blah, behavior, behavior, behavior, behavior, body language, body… I don’t know what he calls himself, but he’s a profiler. He’s an FBI profiler. To me, the, the, the like the ultimate denigration of his, and I say it professionally, bullshit, is he’s got a, uh, a YouTube video, I think it’s like six minutes, where he, he riffs on the nonsensical, totally unproven, totally wrong, uh, canard that 80% of communication is, uh, non-verbal.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. That’s-

Kent Clizbe: Is that- …

Zach Elwood: major, major bullshit. Like, uh, many people repeat- It’s

Kent Clizbe: total bullshit …

Zach Elwood: many people repeat that. And he- Yes … you’re saying he, you’re saying he was acting as if that was a

Kent Clizbe: good- He has his… Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean it’s, his entire shtick is based on non-verbal. You know, he talks about crossing legs and looking this way and your hand movements.

It’s all bullshit. There’s no physiological tell, period. So the six minutes, his point is 80% of communication is non-verbal. Huh, let’s see. And it, this is, this is proving your point that these people have a, uh, they’re confusing what, what they’re see- you know, what, what is their clue- Logically deducing versus…

Zach Elwood: Yeah …

Kent Clizbe: logical versus body language. He… So logically, if 80% of communication is non-verbal and he’s gonna talk, he, he’s gonna communicate that for six minutes. Shouldn’t he be 80% of six minutes, four and a half minutes, four minutes? Shouldn’t he be just mouth shut- Communicating non-verbally? Just look at the logical inconsistency there.

He’s communicating. How is he communicating? Verbally.

Zach Elwood: Content, yeah.

Kent Clizbe: 100%. And when he’s sitting there… And, and it just, it blows my mind

Zach Elwood: that this guy, he doesn’t- Well, you can listen to the audi- You can listen to people’s audio and get the same information, right?

Kent Clizbe: It blows my mind that this guy… It, it’s, it’s cognitive dissonance.

In his mind, he, he’s, his message is 80% of communication is non-verbal, but he verbalizes that. He communicates verbally the fact that 80% of communication is non-verbal.

Zach Elwood: Mm.

Kent Clizbe: And his non-verbals in this six minutes is, you know, he’s, he’s twitching, he’s moving, he’s crossing his legs. You know? What the hell? Look at it logically.

If 80% of communication is non-verbal, what the hell are you saying, buddy? What is your message in this six-minute video? [01:15:00]

Zach Elwood: A quick note here, the idea that most communication is non-verbal is a well-known fallacy and myth among people who are serious about studying behavior. If you’d like to hear an episode where a guest of mine delves into that, check out a conversation that I had with Elizabeth Stokoe, who is a conversation analysis researcher.

Or just search online for criticisms about the idea that most communication is non-verbal. There are many of those you can find. Okay, back to the talk. In Joe’s slight defense, I, because I do mostly agree with you that there’s not much practical use to this, I, I, I will make a distinction between the, on the spectrum of, uh, bullshit, I think, uh, Joe Navarro, I, at least I’ve seen him say, like, it’s very hard to make use of this, and sometimes you’re just getting a vibe of somebody’s discomfort, which might, you know, m- may not make you, like, fully confident someone’s lying, but might make you ask another question or two.

So in his defense, I- Why

Kent Clizbe: is he talking about it if it’s not useful? His entire career is based on it. He’s the body language guy. It’s not useful? Okay, then shut up, dude.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I mean, and getting, and getting back to the looking for practical examples of how people use this, I mean, I, I think, uh, I, I f- I’ve had the same experience of looking for those practical examples and just…

You know, one that, one that came to mind from his book was, like, he was talking about when he was a kid, somebody was standing by the cash register at a store and, like, staring at the cash register, and I was like, but that’s not really nonver- you know, he was getting a sense that somebody might rob the cash register.

I was like, but that’s, like, just basic deduction of someone look- looking at a cash register. I mean, that, that’s not really related to, uh, you know, non-verbal behavior to me. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like blurring the lines between, like, just blatantly, you know, what is content about what someone is doing versus, like, non-verbal behavior, right?

In the, in the same way I think it can be muddled if somebody’s telling a story that doesn’t make sense, some law enforcement people might be like, “Oh yeah, he had a kind of a shifty quality as he was saying that,” but it’s like most of the, m- most of the usable information is what he’s actually saying, right?

Like- Yeah, yeah … I, I just think there’s, like, this muddled idea of what’s behaviorally useful, right? A quick note here. Again, I think these things are hard to talk about as they are so complex. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using a vibe or a read about someone being anxious or uncomfortable in order to follow it up with a few more questions on a topic.

In fact, that’s the main practical use of vague behavioral reads and vibes in real-world contexts that I see, just asking more questions. And I don’t see any real risk of using behavioral information of any sort in that way. But using behavioral information in that way occasionally is a far cry from what behavior experts claim you can do, and it’s a far cry from the immense power and mystique they ascribe to it.

In fact, that pretty banal use of it, to just ask a few more questions if we think someone is [01:18:00] uncomfortable or agitated, is already a skill that many of us have and often use. It’s a far cry from the amazing powers of deception detection that behavior experts claim they will be able to teach you. Back to the talk.

Kent Clizbe: Well, well, the only way to prove it is to, is like spot or it’s like my placements.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: I say, “I am going to give you someone who is ready, willing, and able to do your job,” and then I give them someone, and let’s look at the results Ekman said, “I’m gonna use microexpressions to identify terrorists.” Okay, I’m gonna train people to do that.

Do it, and let’s see the results. Right. My results were 100% exactly what I predicted. Ekman’s results were 100% wrong. Let’s see an FBI profiler, the f- the, the, the, uh, Washington sniper. There’s a case study. They s- they said, “Here’s the profile.” They were 100% wrong, and there are multiple. They hide them, and it’s hard to find them, but you, you have to follow cases as they’re happening.

Because once, you know, they, they put out the profile d- in the search for somebody, they’ll put out the profile. Once the person is found, that’s all forgotten. It’s all pushed aside, and they never talk about it again. They talk about how cool we were when we went in with the arrest team, and they show the video of, you know, 18 guys in, in vests taking somebody down.

But they, they forgot that profile. Uh, let, that, that’s what has to be done to… If, if you’re telling me that you can profile somebody or you can use behavior to predict something, tell me what your prediction is, let’s let it happen, and then we’ll compare those two.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I w- I would say even, yeah, e- e- even at an anecdotal level, often you won’t even find examples of, like, an anecdotal practical example.

Like, if it was actually useful, you’d see more people, behavior experts, giving an example, like, “How did I actually use this? Tell me the story of how you used it.” But the truth is you won’t really even find those. I mean, you’ll, you’ll find a lot of meandering things. Like, sort of like your example in the book talking about that case where Ekman gave his testimony about someone’s, uh, you know, t- about someone else’s, uh, you know, testimony, whether it was real or not or what his thoughts were.

It w- and it was just complete, completely meaningless. It was just like somebody blinked here, somebody blinked there, you know? But there was n- there was nothing… You reading his, reading his analysis, it was like, how would you ever make use of this? You, you couldn’t, you know?

Kent Clizbe: That’s the o- And, and that, that example is, a- after I did an exhaustive research, that example that’s in the book is the only- On record case of Ekman trying to apply his theory.

Right. Except for Spot. [01:21:00] Once he sold Spot, now we can really see how bad it was.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: But yeah, that case is the, is the only anecdotal evidence. And, and he tried to cover it up, you know? He, he never mentions that-

Zach Elwood: Yeah …

Kent Clizbe: but you dig and dig and dig, and you, you can find that in there.

Zach Elwood: Well, yeah.

Kent Clizbe: I just wanna say that my, I give plenty of anecdotes of how my system works, and it does work.

Zach Elwood: Right. I mean, and I would say, you know, n- not to minimize your system, but I mean, your system is about logical deductions. And so, like, you can back it up with an explanation of how you’re using it, right? Where- Yes … versus, like… And there’s a reason why you won’t see these guys go out on a limb, right? Like, y- y- the behavior experts, you won’t see them walk through their logic.

I think Ekman probably learned his lesson where he’s like, “I can’t make this as transparent. People are gonna realize I ha- I don’t really have much meaningful to say,” right? So he probably realized, like, “I shouldn’t, I h- you know, I shouldn’t do that.” And then the, which ties into him, like, trying to say later like, “I can’t talk about it, I can’t do research about it because it’s, like, top secret and people are using it so much.”

It’s

Kent Clizbe: classified now. That’s- Yeah … yeah, he tries to cover it up. Yeah. But you know what they do do? Guys like Ekman and the, the FBI behavioral analysis guys, they, they recruit, uh, Hollywood and TV, and the TV shows and movies do show them using the techniques and being successful.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: That’s where- PR

everybody, e- e- the, the idea that this works comes from media.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Both- Yeah … both, uh, news, uh, uh, a- and entertainment.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Television, uh, movies, uh, w- whatever. Where, where it’s, it’s fictionalized, but the Lie to Me, um-

Zach Elwood: Such

Kent Clizbe: bullshit … TV show, E- Ekman, when it was on, Ekman had a blog, and he would, like, live blog each, every, e- each episode, you know?

Well, the, the, he, his expression of, the micro expression of fear was, uh, you know, the, the hero saw that and he knew blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in the show, they’re demonstrating, each, each episode demonstrates- how it works. Yeah. But that’s fake. Yeah. It’s fiction. Yeah. It’s not real. There is no anecdote or case study of microexpressions being useful- Yeah

in real life.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Well, and, and even organizationally, these organizations also have an incentive to promote this amazing, mysterious, you know, expertise they have because it makes, it makes… You know, it might help them get more confessions or it might help the people be intimidated by them, in the same way like the polygraph is usually used.

It’s mainly an intimidation factor. So I think there’s a, there is this incentive that’s like the more PR we put out there about our amazing secret knowledge about all these things, the more people might respect us and then the easier it makes our jobs, and so on and so on. So I think, I think there’s a tie-in there.

It’s like you have people that, who have ins- personal incentives to promote, promote these things. But then the, [01:24:00] I think there’s also, it helps explain why, you know, the, the organization has incentives to not… Like, why don’t you see the organization debunk some of the, these ideas more often? Or pe- even people within the organization don’t, don’t debunk it that often, you know?

Kent Clizbe: Oh, no. Yeah. No, absolute- un- it cannot be done. It was not gonna happen. That’s why, like, I, I, I make the point that intelligence operations are hidden behind a veil of secrecy. Uh, all that’s happening back there, you never see any of it. They, they can be, they can fail and nobody ever knows, except their buddies, and then they’ll all cover it up.

Law enforcement, they can, they can railroad somebody and call it a success. And, and say it was because of- The shoes I wore, or because of I saw him blink funny, or because, uh, whatever. They can make up anything they want, sell it to the media, sell it to entertainment, and it’s a self-licking ice cream cone.

Zach Elwood: If- do you feel, would you agree though it- it’s gotten a little bit better? Because I feel like with the spot thing being exposed and other things kind of be- becoming, other behavioral things becoming less popular, it feels like it’s, uh, uh, the, the law enforcement and, and military and such are in a better space when it comes to that thing over the years.

Do, do you feel that way?

Kent Clizbe: Eh, sort of. They’re still looking for the painless technical solution. They’re researching, they’re, uh, paying for… What big thing now is AI, uh, enabled video deception detection.

Zach Elwood: Oh, right.

Kent Clizbe: That’s totally based on microexpressions. You can use AI and video to do real time analysis of, you know, what flits across my face.

I call it face dancing, you know?

Zach Elwood: Yeah, like-

Kent Clizbe: Where- …

Zach Elwood: a, a, a microexpression of disgust briefly passed my face as I- Yeah, of disgust passed over his face … was talking to you, and I, and I must be d- They can- … I must be disgusted or judgmental of something you said, this kind of nonsense, you know?

Kent Clizbe: So who, but they can put all of that into an algorithm.

You know, they can, they can give the here’s what a, uh, disgust looks like, uh, and now analyze this person as he’s standing in line to be interviewed and, uh, match those and then give us a, an analysis of what that means. It can spit out, you know, “This dude’s a liar. This dude is, uh…” Well, whatever. You can make it say whatever you want.

But it’s garbage in, garbage out. The garbage in is Ekman.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: It’s all based on Ekman. And

Zach Elwood: that’s why you focus so much- Or,

Kent Clizbe: or Ekman-like …

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Huh? That’s why you focus so much on Ekman in your book. You see him as the, you know, he’s kind of like the grandfather of all these ideas of how they get spread out- Yes

to all these, yeah, yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Yes. Yes. He, he is, and, and that approach is. So I mean, I wish that there was, uh, there was a move away from it. I don’t think so.

Zach Elwood: Mm.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. There are always… The only way [01:27:00] that you can do credibility assessment is holistically With contextual expertise. Holistic contextual con, uh, credibility assessment.

They don’t wanna hear that because it’s hard. They, they want to hire a 24-year-old girl who has a MA in international affairs, who did a semester abro- abroad in Barcelona, and they wanna send her to Afghanistan and spot assess and recruit human sources of intelligence on Islamic extremism. They don’t, that girl doesn’t have the contextual expertise.

It’s hard to get the contextual expertise. They don’t want to do that. They

Zach Elwood: want to- There’s a structural pressure to seek easy answers because they want… Yeah, it’s hard to get the talent, so they want, they wanna check boxes at le- at, at the very least, they wanna check boxes that say, like, “Well, we tried to implement things that allow us to use these people and make them useful,” e- even if, even if they kinda know it’s not much.

Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah, exactly. They take the person with no contextual expertise and they support her with whatever the latest technical or fashionable approach is, whether it’s microexpressions or NLP or, uh, some, some kind of physiological measurement. She meets somebody, recruits him, they bring him in and they do tests on him, physiological tests, and say, “He passed.

Now, okay, good to go.” Well, no. Uh-uh. That, it doesn’t work. You have to have, have contextual expertise and look at the whole, the whole person with understanding their context, and only then can you begin to judge whether they’re credible or not. And that, uh, the example I’m giving is, is for foreign intelligence.

Exact same thing in law enforcement, in immigration, in any other Context where you’re, you’re, uh, making a judgment of someone, vetting someone. I wish they were all calling me and saying, “Hey, man. Can you come train us in holistic contextual credibility assessment?” Ain’t happening.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Hmm.

Kent Clizbe: Nobody… They, there’s a lot of talk in the behavioral community about does this work, but there’s still a behavioral community.

They’re still talking about behavior.

Zach Elwood: I- Well, there’s this,

Kent Clizbe: there’s- I have yet to figure out what it’s good for …

Zach Elwood: there’s this field. Have you heard the term, what is it? Syner- synergiologist. Synergiologist. Have you heard of this? It’s- Wow.

Kent Clizbe: No.

Zach Elwood: One second. So I only learned this- What

Kent Clizbe: is that?

Zach Elwood: A note here. It’s actually pronounced synergology.

It’s a school of thought based on one specific guy’s teachings. I had talked to behavior researcher [01:30:00] Vincent DeNault for this podcast after I had this talk with Kent. Vincent is a former synergologist and has written criticisms of it. Back to the talk.

Kent Clizbe: Synergology, a discipline focused on decoding the human mind through

Zach Elwood: body language to improve commun- communication.

This is apparently a word used outside the US, I think in Canada and elsewhere, but there’s people that they’re basically body language experts, but they have… There’s this whole discipline around it. Uh, this was surprising to me. There, it’s like, because it, it’s almost like this is the u- word they’re using in some of the law enforcement aspects outside of the US.

I, I had never heard it. But anyway, just to say, yeah- So it’s- … this stuff is pretty rampant …

Kent Clizbe: they’re just putting a new term on it.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, it’s a new term. They’re putting new terminology on body language. It makes it sound, makes it sound scient- tific. It’s, yeah, S-Y-N-E-R-G-O-L-O-G-Y. Synergology.

Kent Clizbe: The button. There have been dozens of different flavors like that, and it’s Any physiolo- any attempt to, uh, interpret human actions and thinking, uh, by interpreting physiological signs doesn’t work, whatever they call it.

Um, did you say you, you talked to, uh, Vincent Denall?

Zach Elwood: I’m going to. I, uh, we, uh, we’re, we’re gonna have a talk in a few weeks.

Kent Clizbe: Great. I highly recommend. He was a believer in one of those.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: It may have been synergology.

Zach Elwood: That’s

Kent Clizbe: it, yeah. It is. He was in the cult, and his eyes got opened, and that led him to where he is today.

His focus is fantastic, is in, uh, trying to, to help judges and the justice system understand that you cannot judge people based on their behavior. Yeah.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So, and, and- That’ll be a good

Zach Elwood: talk …

Kent Clizbe: it, it’s a fascinating story that he was a true believer, and now he’s not.

Zach Elwood: I wanted to ask real quick about, have you had, have you ever read Mark McClish’s book, I Know You Are Lying, about verbal statement and written statement analysis?

No. I’d be c- I, I enjoyed that book. I, i- but again, it’s about, it’s about, it’s basically about, like, uh, analyzing patterns and statements, so I think it’s much more legitimate than body language because you’re actually talking about the content of what people are saying. I’ll send you a link and I, I’m actually b- I’d actually be curious what you think of it.

But again, it’s still in the realm of like, even if you get these hunches from these langua- from language, it’s like what exactly are you gonna do about it? You, you still need to have a reason to, uh, you know, about somebody’s story to, to base a major decision on. Like, little hunches about the language are not gonna help you much.

You know, they might help you, they might help you be more confident and like ask a few more questions in a practical sense, but even then it’s har- it can be hard even. But it i- but it is an interesting area, and I’ll, I’ll send you a link to it later. A quick note here. The concept of statement analysis I think gets a very bad rap from some people.

If you read the Wikipedia for the entry for statement analysis [01:33:00] You’ll read that it’s a pseudoscience, and I think this is a mistake largely based on the overreach and bad ethics of some people who do so-called statement analysis. Basically, I think the concept of statement analysis at a high level means just trying to analyze statements for meaning, which is what all of us are trying to do when we interpret any statements.

So to call the whole category of statement analysis a pseudoscience is to me clearly a mistake conceptually. But, uh, one bad system that had given the whole idea a bad name is known as SCAN, S-C-A-N. The creator of SCAN is, in my view, a highly unethical person who has hugely exaggerated what you can do with small language clues and claims that he can solve crimes and be highly confident in people’s guilt and innocence based on such things.

I think it’s clear that people’s small language choices can contain meaning. Some of those things have been studied and have legitimacy. Some have not been studied at all, but may or may not be legitimate. Some ideas have been debunked and disproven. But I think here too, this can get back to that fundamental question of when is imperfect information, information that has value but that we know will be far from one hundred percent reliable, when is that actually useful?

There can be some interesting things in the statement analysis space, and maybe even sometimes lead to asking a few more questions if such things pique our interest. But by and large, they will not have major power. Few people would argue that such things should be used as reasons to pursue an investigation or change the course of investigation, or as a reason to charge someone or as evidence Back to the talk

Kent Clizbe: Again, it’s holistic.

You have to look at everything.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: There’s no-

Zach Elwood: Quick fixes

Kent Clizbe: or quick- … generic-

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Magic bullet Uh, when someone re- writes the word, uh, onomatopoeia, that means they’re lying.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: Or if someone repeats the phrase, “I don’t know,” in writing, that means they’re lying. Yeah. There’s no magic bullets. You’re on bullshit.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, yeah. There’s no…

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. You’re, you’re e- what- whatever you call it, you’re gathering data from all sources, whether it’s from discussions, whether it’s from reading what they write, whether it’s from talking to them and, and getting a, a, a, uh, uh, a read of their aura if you will. But none of those, there’s no, uh, you know, here’s the four things that will sh- tell you somebody’s lying in his writing, in his speech, in his non-verbals.

There’s no such thing.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: You have to gather everything you can holistically, and you have to realize, you have to analyze yourself, am I competent in this context?

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: You know? Okay, r- let’s talk about writing. Brain surgeon is writing a, a story about his [01:36:00] last surgery. I’m not competent. I… It doesn’t matter whether he tells me verbally or he writes it down.

Yeah. I don’t know.

Zach Elwood: You wouldn’t be

Kent Clizbe: able to tell his- No, there’s, I don’t-

Zach Elwood: Yeah …

Kent Clizbe: it doesn’t matter how he twitches when he says it, it doesn’t matter what his handwriting looks like. Oh, oh, that’s, that reminds me. Uh, when I joined the agency, the, the CIA in the ’90s, they were still using handwriting analysis.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: We, when… That was one of the CI tools, vetting. Get a written statement and send it to the graphologist It’s nonsense. It’s nonsense. You know, it’s, that’s as, as good as phrenology. You know, feel his head and see how, see what the bumps are like.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: I don’t know, maybe graphology and phrenology could be part of a holistic approach.

But I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t base my, uh, my decision just based on, uh, the graphologist reading.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: I don’t know if it jumped out at you in my book, because I, my I’m, I’m focused on reality. I’m not focused on theories and hypothesis and to tell me what you think might work. Let’s see what works in reality.

It’s kind of hard to do those case studies. So I created a protocol for evaluating deception detection approaches. Most research, quote unquote, that academics do with deception detection or any of these reading people’s body language or whatever, is they’re all academics. They have a psych- psychology 101 class of undergraduates.

They put up a, a, a notice, “Volunteers wanted for psychology experiment.” So you get 20 18 and 19-year-olds, uh, undergraduates to, to be the subjects of your experiment, and then what- that, that’s what you start with, and then you say, “Okay, this half you’re gonna lie about whether you did something. This other half, you don’t lie about your belief.”

You- they, they come up with all kinds of different scenarios. What bullshit. Totally useless. Doesn’t tell us anything. They write papers on it, and they, you know, they build theories around it. Totally useless. Real-life situation of actual somebody having to use assessment, credibility assessment in the real world, it ain’t 18-year-old psychology student pretending to lie It’s a hardened criminal, it’s a trained intelligence officer that you need to assess whether what they’re telling you is real or not.

Those people, hardened criminal, trained intelligence officer, a fraud, Wayne Simmons, [01:39:00] somebody applying, trying to get a job that I am filling for a client. They’ve cr- they created a fake background.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Real stakes.

Kent Clizbe: Those are real subjects.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Intelligence officers and criminals especially, but these other fraudulent people, they’re all trained.

They’ve practiced. They’ve thought about their lies. They’ve identified shortcomings in their lies. The intelligence officers, we call it a cover story. They create a cover story, and they practice it. They have documents to back it up. They live their cover as much as possible. How can… That’s the real world.

How can we create a situation that is a research protocol, but as close to the real world as possible?

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: Right. We use actors. You, you get actors who… A- all of these, uh, uh, real fakers, intelligence officers, criminals, uh, fraudsters, and bad candidates, they’re all in effect acting, right? Uh, an intelligence officer’s cover is he’s playing a role And he’s practiced that role.

You get an actor in- for our research protocol, we get actors. We give them a cover story, and they practice it. We help them practice it, just like, uh, an intelligence training would do. We help them practice it. They become fluent in their lies. Now, give me a, a, a, a FBI profiler, give me an Ekman spot guy, give me a, a polygraph guy, give me a voice stress ana- analysis.

Uh, let’s, let’s have all of these lie detection, and then give me somebody like me who’s, who’s, uh, holistic contextual, and now we, we send them, each of these credibility assessors is in a, a, a isolated room, and we send the candidates to them. And we do a series of them.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Some are telling the truth.

Some are really a brain surgeon. Some are faking it.

Zach Elwood: That would be a

Kent Clizbe: great study. Nobody… I, I published that. I published that, uh, two or three years ago, and it’s repeated in my book.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Nobody does that. I mean- None of these researchers do it. They all keep using Psych 101 students.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here. For a very good book about understanding the mistakes and faults in deception detection research, I recommend Tim Levine’s book, Duped.

He discusses the aspect of stakes in such research, which is what Ken is talking about here, and he talks about other faults and bad thinking and bad [01:42:00] interpretations in the academic space. I’ve interviewed Tim several times for this podcast also Okay, back to the talk I mean, why you’d be, why it’s surprising that the government wouldn’t do some research like that, you

Kent Clizbe: know?

Yeah. No. No interest. No interest.

Zach Elwood: Uh, I was gonna pivot to, um, the, this whole gaining rapport thing is big with behavior experts. Um, and obviously, you know, in your work and in field work in general, like dealing with agents and operatives, you know, g- uh, gaining rapport is an important thing in the real world in, in many cases, in, in many situations.

But I think a lot of the, uh, you know, the alleged behavior experts, they spend a lot of time talking about, like, controlling your own body language in order, in, in ways to gain rapport, a- as ways to be more confident seeming, to be more likable, and so on and so on, which I think, you know, as an aside, I think it’s an understandable focus for them because as we’ve said, there’s often not much they, for them to actually talk about, about how they use behavior, like, use other people’s behavior, so it’s a natural pivot to be like, “Well, I’m gonna teach you how to control your behavior to influence other people.”

It’s a, it’s a nat- it goes together, which is why those things often, so often go together. It’s a big thing in the NLP, neuro-linguistic programming space, you know, because they’re all about behavior and manipulating and behavior and reading behavior. So, uh, I think there’s some basic points in there that can be valuable, you know, like, sort of like we were talking about, like, obvious points about other people’s behavior, too.

You know, it’s good to avoid standoffish body language p- with people. It’s good to avoid seeming, like, shifty-eyed. You know, you d- th- there’s these various, uh, things that, that are kind of basic for, like, s- not seeming, uh, suspicious to people and, and gaining rapport and b- being likable and seeming trustworthy.

But I think in that area, too, to me, it’s mostly bullshit because I think it’s much more important to, like- be a realistic person and be yourself and, you know, a- and, and to work on, like, what you’re actually saying than it is to, like, try to, like, manipulate people with your body language. Beca- because I think most people are pretty savvy and they, they can sense that they’re being…

If somebody’s doing these body language, stereotypical body language things, I think most people can sense that, like, or there’s a risk of them sensing that this person’s trying to manipulate me by trying to mirror my body language or, like, come across as super likable or something. There, there’s all these risks, and I think to me, I’m curious to get your take, but I think a lot of that stuff is just bullshit because I think it’s much more important to just, like, work on what your story is or what your approach is content-wise and just, just try to be yourself, whether that’s, you know.

A- and I think a lot of people are likable without these stereotypical likable aspects. There’s many people that might come across rather autistic that are very likable and, and, and [01:45:00] seem trustworthy. But I’m curious to get your take on all that, yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So I, af- after, uh, a lot of experience as a, uh, as, as a human intelligence officer, I came up with, with a credo.

When you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. There are stereotypes of behaviors that people believe. I guess we, we, there’s a lot of descriptions if, of people who are onto those behaviors. Smarmy, slick, salesman-like. All of those are describing people who are attempting to be trustworthy and likable.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: The thing is, though, it works because people believe in the stereotypes. Adjusting, uh, your behavior when you want to be liked or believed can work-

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm …

Kent Clizbe: because people believe the stereotypes.

Zach Elwood: Would you say, would you say that’s a, an area where like the behavior, these behavior experts who are getting into that space about like using body language to manipulate or affect other people, would you say that’s a more credible use of, of their expertise than actually reading people?

Kent Clizbe: Yeah, it’s more credible, but it’s hilariously disproves their, their entire, uh, their, their entire belief system.

Zach Elwood: Oh, yeah.

Kent Clizbe: If- I see what you’re saying … i- their, their belief system is behavior tells you what people, uh, are thinking or feeling. But here, fake it and then you’ll be okay. Well, well, wait. If it can be faked- I-

then what are you talking about? I never

Zach Elwood: even thought… You know, it’s funny, I never even really thought about that, but that, that-

Kent Clizbe: It’s again, cognitive dissonance. It’s, it’s Joe Navarro babbling for six minutes about 80% of communication being non-verbal. We, we believe that you can read body language. But here, fake it and you’ll, uh, and, and nobody will know what, know what you’re doing.

Well, a- a-

Zach Elwood: and I do agree, I agree with you. I might have come off too negative. I d- I do think there is value to… Because, because so many other… It does work on people. So many people believe these things- Yes … you know? A- a- and so I do think there is value in it. But I also, when reading some of this stuff, like, you know, to give an example Vanessa Van Edwards, I think is her name, or other people that…

There’s Mark Bowden from the Behavior Panel. They talk a lot about how to manipulate the things that you do, the behaviors. To me, a lot of it’s just, like, common sense stuff. Like, you know, it, it, it’s making a mountain out of a molehill, which is, like, there’s a, a molehill of, like, some useful basic information that you can do to come across as, [01:48:00] you know, trustworthy and open and genuine.

There’s a few basic things that you might- Yeah … learn about, and you’d be like, “Oh, that makes sense,” you know, that people would-

Kent Clizbe: Yes …

Zach Elwood: have that impression of those things. But then it’s like, once, once you start reading a lot of it, you’re like, you’re just saying the same stuff over and over. There’s not really that much to learn there.

I mean, that’s at least my, been my reaction to it all.

Kent Clizbe: I, I completely agree. There, there, a- again, there’s no list of, “Here are the four things you can fake that will make you believable or likable.” Building rapport is extremely important-

Zach Elwood: Yeah …

Kent Clizbe: in many, many things. Right. Intelligence operations, uh, law enforcement, your everyday life, sales.

Even personal

Zach Elwood: li- even personal friendships. Either people

Kent Clizbe: you meet, you know? Yeah, everyday life. Yeah. That’s what it’s about. Yeah. It’s rapport. Yeah. It, and there, there are, like, a, um, a list of things that you can do that will help you to build rapport with people. Listening. W- don’t… W- whatever. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s several-

Zach Elwood: Making, making, making enough eye contact, not too much, not too little.

You know, these kinds of- Yeah … things that some people… You know, I’ll, I’ll admit, I had a, you know, a, I think I have a bit of an autism thing, so it’s, it was hard for me to learn some of those things growing up, where I was like, how much is too much eye contact? How much is not enough,

Kent Clizbe: right? Exactly.

Zach Elwood: So I think there, there are these-

Kent Clizbe: I was the same way.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: And, and, and, you know, once, once you learn those things, though, there, there are body language or, or, you know, physiological ways, the, of carrying yourself that make people trust you or feel comfortable around you But that doesn’t mean that you’re trustworthy. Right. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t have bad intentions.

Right. So again, it’s cognitive dissonance.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: It’s, you’re, you’ve ch- taught people to read body language, and yet pe- you’ve taught people to, uh, fake body language or, or, uh, uh, a way of acting that hides their true intent.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: I mean, do, which is it?

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Can… Is, does body language mean something, or can you fake it and it means anything?

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I mean, getting, getting back to the idea that content and analysis of content is the most important thing. It’s like, I mean, you got somebody like Chase Hughes, he comes across as very confident, very smooth, and it’s like, but if you listen to the things he’s saying, you can quickly put together that this guy is full of shit, right?

Like, so, you know, a- and you could be the, and you could be the most autistic person who comes across as very untrustworthy or, you know, shifty or whatever, and, and, but, but if people listen to what you’re saying, they’re like, “Well, this guy is credible,” right? Like, he… You know, so it go, j- just to say, yeah, there are true things there that, that matter in behavior that af- that affect other people, but it’s also true that-

Kent Clizbe: Because people- Yeah

go by the stereotypes.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, yeah. Like crossing arms is a, is a common stereotype. It’s like, people cross their arms for many reasons. It doesn’t mean you’re standoffish or not being [01:51:00] friendly, but many people will interpret it as being unfriendly. So, you know, you should probably avoid doing it, this kind of thing.

Kent Clizbe: So, so the, the perfect case study for that is con men and salesmen. Con men and salesmen are all trained to be non-confrontational, to be, uh, friendly, to be building rapport, but they do not have your be- they’re, they’re hiding their true intent. They’re hiding the, the actual feelings, thoughts, and ideas.

Their body language is not telling you, or their, just their demeanor is not telling you the truth. They’re, they’re faking it.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: Which is why my, my, uh, protocol for testing deception detection uses actors. Actors fake it. That’s what they’re… That’s their job. They’re faking it. Same with con men, criminals, and intelligence officers.

They’re faking it. If it can be faked, you know, like for example, Ekman, his entire shtick is built on, it’s un- the, that microexpressions are unconscious, they’re uncontrollable, they’re universal And that is in effect what all body language people are saying, even though they don’t, they don’t wanna say it explicitly.

But implicitly, they’re saying that every … That I can read your physiological symptom, your physiological approach. Whatever, whatever your body is telling me, I can read it. And if it can be cloaked and faked, what’s the point?

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: You gotta look at it holistically.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Uh, this has been great. Kent, do you wanna mention anything else before we go?

Or, uh, I was gonna wrap up, but …

Kent Clizbe: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Just, uh, thanks a lot. Appreciate spending the time, and g- it was a great, great conversation. You’re, you’re doing a great thing. Let’s, let’s do something on, uh, with Hughes.

Zach Elwood: That was a talk with Kent Clisby, a former CIA officer and the author of the book Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment.

By the way, if you wanna see that episode that Kent mentioned just now where he and I talk about Chase Hughes and Chase’s military record and career, you can check that out. That came out earlier in 2026. It might be interesting for seeing Kent use his credibility assessment methods in a real world context, examining the lies of Chase Hughes, an alleged behavior expert.

The ease with which Chase Hughes has spread his lies and nonsensical ideas about behavior reading and mind control and other things via social media and via popular podcasts like Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO is good insight into the corruption of the whole behavior expert space in general. There’s a reason con men like Chase Hughes are drawn to this space.

It’s a space with obviously huge [01:54:00] demand that also seems to reward lies and exaggerations and outlandish claims. Okay, thanks for your interest, and stay skeptical out there.