Category: podcast

A new YouTube “news” channel, Station One, was launched in 2026 by a popular fraud named Chase Hughes. Hughes has been lying about his credentials and knowledge for many years, and spreads false and increasingly paranoid information on a broad range of topics. For details about the lies of Chase Hughes, and the harm he’s doing to vulnerable people, see whoischasehughes.com. For a podcast series on various aspects of the Chase Hughes scam, go here.

Episode link:

• YouTube

TRANSCRIPT

How much can we really learn from people’s words and behavior—and where do we risk fooling ourselves? In this talk, former Secret Service agent and polygraph examiner Brad Beeler explores the practical realities of interrogations, deception detection, statement analysis, and reading people in high-stakes situations. We discuss why confirmation bias is such a threat to good investigations, why many popular body-language claims are overstated, and how investigators might make use of subtle behavioral clues without becoming wrongly overconfident in them. Brad shares stories from criminal investigations, explains how experienced interviewers think about truth and deception, and offers a polygraph examiner’s take on the controversial subject of polygraphs. We also talk about the importance of rapport-building and listening to what people are actually trying to communicate.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:

• Brad Beeler’s site
• Brad Beeler’s book Tell Me Everything
• Episode with Mark McClish, author of I Know You Are Lying, on statement analysis 
• Episode with Leonard Saxe, on polygraph criticism
• Propublica article on SCAN statement-analysis pseudoscience

(transcripts are automatically generated and will contain errors)

Brad Beeler: You look at the Amanda Knox situation…  She was being emotional and she was kissing and hugging on her boyfriend after she was told that her roommate had been violently slain… So my perception, if I’m an Italian investigator, I might say, “That’s weird. Wow, that’s really strange. You know, why is she doing that?” But if I get into her perspective, she doesn’t know anybody here. She’s been given this horrific news that somebody has come into her room and violated that, and now she’s afraid. Who’s she gonna go to? The only person she knows, her boyfriend, and of course, she’s gonna show emotion. Comfort, that’s what we look for….

Gut instinct is for walking down the street, bottle breaks, walking up to a car as a police officer, hand on the back of the next stands up. My pattern recognition says something’s not right, call for backup, run, whatever the case may be. Too often, though, we use that same principle in an investigation and say, “Oh, my gut tells me this.” Gut instinct is terrible for personal and professional relationships because cognitive biases are more powerful.

Zach Elwood: That was a clip from my talk with Brad Beeler. A bit about Brad: he’s a retired United States Secret Service Special Agent with more than 25 years of experience in high-stakes interviews, interrogations, and protective operations. He conducted the most criminal polygraph examinations in Secret Service history and was named Special Agent of the Year for his work combating crimes against children. Brad later trained federal law enforcement and intelligence professionals at the National Center for Credibility Assessment in interviewing, deception detection, and credibility assessment. He is the author of the book “Tell Me Everything,” which shares practical strategies for building trust, improving communication, and uncovering the truth in difficult conversations. 

Brad and I get on topics related to the polygraph, interrogation strategies, rapport-building, and the dangers of confirmation bias. We talk about examining statements for clues and about the importance of listening closely to what people are saying. Along the way we discuss some interesting stories from Brad’s career and from some well known criminal cases, and we talk about fake behavior experts who make false, inflated claims about what you can do with reading nonverbal behavior; people like Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel.

In my recent talks for this podcast, I’ve been trying to understand some puzzling aspects of how people talk about nonverbal behavior. For example, why do some law enforcement people talk about how important nonverbal behavior is in interviews and investigations, while some law enforcement officers say:  it is of very low importance? One realization I had in that area when reading Brad’s book and talking to him is that the concept of rapport can be responsible for some of the talking past each other in that area. A good chunk of Brad’s book is about establishing rapport, and how to adjust one’s nonverbal behavior to do that. That is a worthwhile and good thing; I think that clearly matters. But adjusting behavior is also an entirely different area from reading and making use of behavior; in fact, our ability to adjust our behaviors in order to manipulate others’ perceptions helps show the challenges in getting useful and accurate reads based on nonverbal behavior. I think there are other aspects of behavior that can help explain the very different views people can have about nonverbal behavior, and Brad and I talk get on that topic.

If you like this talk, note that I have a good amount of episodes in the backlog related to crime and investigative-related topics. For example, a July 2024 episode of mine features a talk with Leonard Saxe, who criticizes the use of polygraphs due to their known fallibility. I also have an upcoming talk with Maria Hartwig and Christian Cory, who work on promoting interview techniques rooted in what the scientific research shows is useful. I also may myself be getting a polygraph in August, and doing a report about that; I’ve always been curious to experience that and see firsthand how it works. If you appreciated what I’m doing with this podcast, hit subscribe on the platform you listen on, and maybe go to my site behavior-podcast.com to sign up for updates or look at episode summaries and compilations. 

Okay, here’s the talk with Brad Beeler, author of Tell Me Everything. 

Zach Elwood: Hi, Brad. Thanks for joining me. 

Brad Beeler: Thank you very much for having me on. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for the time. Um, so how is, how’s the, uh… I was curious how the book launch has been going. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah, it’s been, it’s been really good. You know, you get the Secret Service angle, you get the tech deception, uh, the business angle negotiation.

So a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but it’s been, uh, it’s been fun. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Can you talk a little bit about, uh, what kinds of cases you worked on at the, for the Secret Service? 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. So Secret Service was founded in 1865 to stop counterfeit. A lot of people don’t know that, but about 20 to 30% of the money supply, the Confederates were using that as a weapon of war.

Because when you lose faith in anything, whether it be honesty or, uh, someone’s veracity of their statements or the currency, it is, uh, is a problem. So that was one of the last acts that Abraham Lincoln signed into law. So it wasn’t until 1901 that we picked up protection, and then we just kind of grew from there.

But starting in Chicago, I was assigned a counterfeit squad, uh, a two-way counterfeit squad, and then, uh, worked some organized crime in the form of, uh, organized credit card fraud, identity theft, stuff like that. And then, uh, you would do, uh, basically protection from those type of duties. You’d get pulled off for protection.

Uh, then you go to a permanent protective assignment, which for me was H.W. Bush. Uh, so my protective experience was more like guarding tests, uh, versus in the line of fire, to use ’80s and ’90s, uh, Secret Service movie references. So basically, I took care of grandparents more than anything else. And then I got into polygraph.

So after that, 17 years of polygraph and teaching it for the last seven years at the Federal Polygraph School. 

Zach Elwood: What was that reference you made, uh, Guarding Tess? What, what was that? 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. So Guarding Tess is a, is a movie where, uh, it’s, it’s a very forgotten movie, but, uh, Nicolas Cage plays, um, a former protectee, uh, a former Secret Service protectee spouse detail leader.

Um, so it, it is a, it’s a decent movie, uh, if you- Hmm … if you’re bored, uh, someday. 

Zach Elwood: One of my favorite movies from back in the day was In the Line of Fire, and that was like how I- … you know, how I got a good amount of my, my small amount of information about what I know about the Secret Service. And I’m curious, you know, how, uh, probably what I imagine it wasn’t too accurate, but how, how accurate did, did you view it?

Brad Beeler: Yeah. We– I mean, well, when you’re a snot-nosed high school kid, it’s a great recruiting tool, and it’s probably one of the things that shaped my interest in the Secret Service. But once you get there, you don’t realize there’s too many 65-year-old guys being called back into service to, uh- … run next to the limo and single-handedly saving democracy.

But, uh, uh, to each their own. 

Zach Elwood: Cool concept, though. I mean, it was- 

Brad Beeler: Yes … 

Zach Elwood: yeah, it was a great, it was a great concept, and they had such great acting and script. Uh, yeah, I, I, I was curious, one thing that stood out from that movie was, um, you know, the Clint Eastwood character in the very intro scene where they’re doing some kind of counterfeit bust, and he, he’s able to tell that the gun he believes is empty, and that plays a, a role.

How, how realistic is it that a, that someone could tell if a gun was completely empty or might have a few bullets in it? 

Brad Beeler: I would say in that situation, because I can’t remember if it was a revolver or a, uh, semi-automatic. I mean, obviously, if you had taken all 13, 15, 17 rounds out of a semi-automatic, you might be able to tell ’cause that’s almost half the weight at that point.

But, uh, if you’re talking a revolver, I wouldn’t wanna bet my life on the, the fact that it’s either empty or it’s missing a round, especially when your heart rate’s about 150 or 160. You know, old Clint looked pretty cool in the moment, but, uh- … I’m sure if that was your partner that had a gun pointed to his head, uh, it’d be a little different.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, he said something like, “Eh, it coulda had one or two bullets in it,” something like that. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, yeah. And it, yeah, for people that don’t get that reference, watch the movie. It’s a g- it’s a great movie. So to more, to more serious questions. Uh, so when it comes to, uh, criminal interrogation type work and getting people to tell you everything, if you only had– Say you only had like a couple hours to train somebody who was a complete layperson who didn’t have any interrogation experience, if you were gonna train them on some one or two or three basic concepts that they would go in and, you know, have to interrogate someone, say that that was a scenario, what, what kinds of scenar- uh, what kinds of concepts, uh, would you focus on to maybe get them to avoid some of the m- worst and most common mistakes maybe?

Brad Beeler: I’d say the biggest return on the investment for me would be prep, primacy, and perspective. And I guess at a 20,000-foot view, that’d be what we do obviously before the interaction, how we stage or the first impression of the interaction in the form of a primacy effect, and then perspective because it’s so important that when I’m talking to horrible people that I try to look through things through their lens because everyone is the hero of their own adventure.

Uh, so if I’m interrogating, uh, Osama bin Laden, I have to view him and speak to him as if he’s George Washington from that perspective. So those are the three things I’d look for. Prep is so important in any communication. Um, I don’t care if we’re talking a business deal or if we’re talking a criminal interview.

And my focus first off has to be is to get to the truth because confirmation bias is a thing. It is amazing at how it can affect me. It’s affected me before, how we put horns and halos on people. So I wanna prep neutrally as much as possible. You know, we, we, we don’t realize how much we put out there in our digital footprint, and 30, 40 years ago, we’d write things in a journal, we’d write things on a Bible.

We, we didn’t want anybody to see these things, and now, uh, we’ve gotten all narc- narcissistic, I guess, to a point where we just throw everything out there on Instagram, TikTok, whatever the case may be. So I’m gonna suck that up as much as possible, and that’s gonna give me a really good sight picture of the person that I’m talking to.

Look at pain points, look at areas to explore, look at all those things in which what I’m trying to do is create a metaphorical social media reel for them because access is everything. I want them to be on my information, um, kinda superhighway to where they’re constantly swiping right, they’re constantly hitting thumbs up as I’m talking to them.

And having the idea of what makes them tick ahead of time i- is priceless. So that’s a good thing for me, and it’s also something we need to realize that it makes us an easy mark to predators out there on dating sites. Uh, people that go on dating sites, somebody can come a mythical Prince Charming by looking at what you have.

I, I always tell the ladies that I, I, I talk to at these groups, I’m like, “You are making yourself out to be an easy mark because, uh, they know what you are looking for, and they can easily become that, uh, in a short period of time.” 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, that’s a good point about the same ways that, you know, we, you, or anyone might attempt to, you know, get information or, you know, manipulate someone in an interrogation setting.

That’s the same kind of things that people are exploiters, scam artists and, and such are using On us. That’s a, uh, that is a good point. Um, the second thing you said, uh, primacy. Uh, what– I might have missed what that was. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. So real quick, you know, it’s the first impressions and, and we sometimes confuse this with, uh, what truly is a first impression.

If I think first impression, I think of safety, and we go back 200,000 years ago. If I’m walking around a corner or if I’m listening in the bushes, my ancestors, they were using their ears and their eyes to understand, is something gonna eat me? Okay, is that branch, is that a tiger or is that a, a friendly tribal member?

If I see a tribal member that I don’t know, is their face coded neutral or aggressive, meaning they may cause harm to me. So now I’m gonna have a dump of adrenaline, epinephrine, norepinephrine to run away, climb a tree, whatever the case may be, fight harder than I ever could. So I’m gonna try to prime that interaction as much as possible to create a perfect, um…

You know, we talk about eyebrow flashes, we talk about some of this Amy Cuddy/uh, Vanessa Van Edwards stuff, uh, Paul Zak. I mean, there are neurochemicals that we can put out into the world that the person receiving them is more likely to put a halo upon us, and that’s what I wanna do. Um, not even from a manipulative standpoint, I just don’t want their confirmation bias to be negative because it’s gonna stay negative or it’s gonna take me a long time to, to get into positive territory.

So- Mm-hmm … I can do that either with the setting. So think about a dental office. If you walk in and you hear drilling, you hear people banging their credit card for $1,500 for the crowns that they got, and you’re, you’re sitting there, you’re like, “Oh, this is gonna suck.” If you come in and you hear the right music, you’ve got things to read, you’ve got choice in the Keurig that I can pick up or the soft drink that I can pick up or the tea that I can brew for myself, um, I don’t hear the drilling because of good soundproofing.

I walk into a room that’s completely separate. I have choice on the fluoride. I have choice on the toothbrush I can pick. Um, choice leads to perceived control and it brings anxiety down. And the thing about anxiety is one of the best predictors on detecting deception is not what you think. It’s a lower resting heart rate And we take a lot of things w- like, what does that have to do?

Because if I’m in a heightened state of awareness, Yerkes-Dodson law, if I, if my heart rate’s at 140, my tunnel vision of what I can take in is severely throttled. It’s governed. Whereas if my heart rate, my resting heart rate’s 60, I have the ability to do a lot of things. Everything slows down for me. And, you know, they tried to recreate Ekman and, uh, O- Sullivan’s, uh, 19, I think it was, uh, ’91 research on who can catch a liar, and they couldn’t find a lot of correlations on what makes someone good at catching a liar.

But the thing that they saw above all else was lowest basic heart rate or resting heart rate. Um, so I just thought that was interesting. So I want to get their heart rate down. I want my heart rate to down with the setting, with that initial interaction. I want those halos, and as a result, I’m more likely to allow the truthful person to tell me the truth because they’re not anxious.

They don’t have the Othello effect. And I create that broad dichotomy between, uh, what a guilty person and what a truthful person, what they can show me. I don’t want that noise in the signal. If I’m running a polygraph, I want everybody’s heart rate to be low so that I can see through the noise. I don’t want there to be a jumbled signal physiologically.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Um, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was your extensive polygraph, uh, experience, and obviously polygraph, uh, you know, everybody knows that that can be a controversial topic because it’s, you know, obviously far from 100% reliable. Uh, but I’m curious, you know, with your extensive experience on that, how, how do you see the usefulness of the polygraph?

Brad Beeler: It’s a tool that needs to be used at the right time, on the right person, in the right place, at the right stage of the investigation with guardrails. And if done, it’s a very effective tool in that manner. If it’s used in the Jerry Springer manual or the Jerry Springer type that we see, it gives us a bad name.

So sometimes there’s mission creep when you have an amazing tool, and people use it in situations that they probably shouldn’t use it. So from an applicant standpoint, we’re gonna have very good luck with it because I’m only looking at what you’re putting down in your application forms. Um, you know, a lot of times people make polygraph out to be something that it’s not.

I’m looking at the veracity of what’s in that application form, and as a result of that, it is exponentially the greatest tool in getting derogatory information in the screening process. Um, and I will tell you, having been in the Secret Service polygraph program for a long time, we’ve had applicants admit to rape, robbery, murder, sexual assault, um, you know, downloading inappropriate child-based images a-at numerous times that without that, a background check would not have turned that up.

I mean, what’s a background check? They run criminal record checks, but most criminals haven’t been caught. Um, especially most sex-based offenders have never been caught for their offenses at this point. And what are neighbors gonna say? “Oh, John was just such a, such a great young lad.” I mean, that’s like every serial killer.

They, they talk to the neighbors, and what do the neighbors say? “Oh, he was just a quiet young boy.” So polygraph lets us kind of look under the rock, so to speak, as far of how– as far as how they’ve lived their life. In a criminal setting, once again, you need to use it at the right time, the right place, on the right person, um, as part of a process.

It should never be used in court. It shouldn’t be used to say you’re gonna go to jail because you had a bad outcome on the polygraph. But I can take a coin flip ability to detect deception or maybe slightly better, and I can turn that into mid-eighties to ninety percent. And if you have a scoring criteria on the polygraph where there’s a broad gulf between passing and failing, that means, okay, I have an inconclusive result, so it’s not gonna help you, it’s not gonna hurt you.

So, um, if you sit there and have a very narrow gulf in how you score the polygraph, then it becomes problematic. So for me, I want the person to have to respond multiple times at a significant amount, um, in order to come up with an accurate result for the polygraph. I know that’s– I’m trying to make it lay-layman’s terms for your, for your listeners.

Um, but I, I guess that’s the best twenty-thousand-foot I- view I can give you is, uh, use it, but use it with caution. 

Zach Elwood: I guess so. I mean, uh, and I’m just giving some of my, my views on it as being someone pretty distant from it, obviously, as ways f- things for you to bounce off of. But I’m, I’m curious, you know, uh, it’s not clear to me how our, our organizations, our departments Using it in such a way, like say they’re using it for applicants hiring procedures, like knowing that, knowing that it’s far from 100%, would they be using, you know, fails on a polygraph alone to like reject people?

Or would it have to be like using the polygraph to get people to actually tell information, if that makes sense? 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. Without getting too specific, it, uh, depends on the agency, and I think, uh, there’s been a sea change a little bit where some agencies might say, “Hey, if you have a problem on a polygraph, you’re done forever.

You’ll never get a job with this organization.” I think most agen-agencies now take that with a grain of salt and people can reapply, you know- Hmm … go through the process. So, um, you know, the belief out there that if somebody fails a polygraph with Agency X, that they’ll never get a job in law enforcement ever again, I just, I don’t believe that.

I don’t believe that that’s accurate. Um, but I understand your concerns and, uh, they’re concerns that a lot of people have. Uh, that’s why there are polygraph protection acts in the civil sector where, you know, you can’t, you know, if you apply for certain businesses outside of government that don’t require security clearance, you have rights to refuse to take that polygraph.

It can’t be part of the hiring process. So, um- Hmm … it, it is a very limited scope typically, uh, where polygraph is used, um, if there’s some type of national security nexus. 

Zach Elwood: And, uh, yeah, I don’t pretend to have strong opinions on this because I’ve gone, you know, I have, I have conflicted views just based on my limited information.

I mean, d- based on what I know, it seems like it’s mainly useful as a tool to like manipulate or kind of pressure someone to give information. It’s like, we see that you’re showing responses for this and, you know, and using that as a way to get information out of them. Is, am I– Is that accurate in like the main way it’s used, or would you push back on that?

Brad Beeler: I mean, I would obviously push back on it, but, uh, that’s the company line. So people would say, “Well, of course you’re gonna push back, uh, on that, Brad.” Um, I think when I went to polygraph school, it’s kind of like a red pill, blue pill moment where you go to the polygraph school and you start doing it, and you start seeing the results and you start seeing it.

And, and I think there’s– If you, if you look at detection of deception, what am I looking at? I’m looking at three to five second periods of time around yes or no questions. And I think outside of polygraph, we do the same thing when we’re looking at credibility assessment. When I am a, a– When I have a broad Area of questioning.

You know, yes, we, we, we can talk about statement analysis scans, peers’ work. Um, there’s some great stuff out there. But I’m looking at transitional moments. I’m looking at so, then, next, after that. I’m looking at, you know, lost time, all the w- why did you use left versus went? You know, some of these concepts that we, we talk about.

But the dog is off the leash, and it can take me wherever it wants to take me in an open-ended statement. What is polygraph and what is, in my sense, the best way to detect deception is making it a yes or no question. That’s what a polygraph is, yes or no questions. By forcing into a yes or no question, you create a cognitive load.

You have the spotlight on them, and we’re looking at brief three to five second periods of time where I’m providing you stimulus. You know what the truth is, and you’re either just speaking the truth, so that movie reel is playing without any interruption, deletion, addition, whatever the case may be. You remember seeing it, touching it, tasting it, feeling it.

It’s easy. Or you do the opposite of that. You say, “I didn’t shoot the man,” knowing that you did shoot the man, and now you’ve had to insert a new truth. You’ve had to cover up the truth. The amount of mental processes that were taking place and the fear of that detection in your body betraying you causes those parameters in the body to change.

And you can try to un- you know, hold it back. You can try to do X, Y, and Z. You can try to do the in- what the internet says as far as countermeasures. We’ve seen that. We’ve trained in that. We know that. 

Zach Elwood: Clenching the anus or something 

Brad Beeler: as well? Yeah, various things. Yeah, various things. Yeah, various things.

It’s like, like one of the things I always get is, so if I fly and I fly armed, I’ll, uh, I’ll have to stop by and talk to the pilot, and the pilot will be like, “Where you headed, son?” “Oh, I’m going to Toledo to run some polygraphs.” And they’ll be like, “Polygraph? Man, I heard those things don’t work and you could beat them.”

I say, “Well, sir, you know, uh, there’s 350 people on this plane that walk through a magnetometer that’s not 100%, but you probably feel a lot safer as a result of having that magnetometer there.” And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a pretty good point.” “You mean, so some people, yeah, they may not have came on or tried to go through the magnetometers because of the magnetometers.”

I said, “That’s a pretty good point, right?” And I said, “A really good person that operates that instrument, they’re probably really good at it, right? And a, a really bad person that really doesn’t care, that’s just kinda pushing buttons, and they may miss some things, right?” And I said, “Well, that’s polygraph.”

And I said, “As far as beating it,” I said, “Is there a manual to this plane?” He said, “Yeah, it’s about 1,200 pages.” I said, “Could somebody read it?” “Yep, somebody could read it.” And I said, “So I could read that and then fly the plane?” And he’s like, “No, you couldn’t fly the plane.” And I said, “Why not?” He said, “Because you wouldn’t know what the throttle and what the rudder and what this button and that button, what it would do as far as how it would affect the plane on the horizon.”

“So, so I would actually have to fly the plane and see the biofeedback in real time?” And he goes, “Yes.” I said, “It’s the same thing. You can read all you want about a polygraph, and you can do this, squeeze that, push this, push that, whatever you think you’re gonna do, think this, think that, take this into your body or take it out of your body.

You don’t know how it’s affecting what I’m seeing from your physiology.” So right now on this podcast, we’re seeing those little wavelengths. I don’t know how much I’m speaking is affecting that wavelength on that recording. So if, if I couldn’t see it, I wouldn’t know what it said. And that’s the problem.

People, there are so many more people that read the online hype, that read the TikTok, do this, do that, come in and ruin an opportunity to get a job. It would be just like trying to water down urine on a urinalysis. They’re trying to affect the outcome. It doesn’t work, and unfortunately, that’s what removes them from the process, whereas if they’d have just been honest on their application forms, they would’ve been fine.

Zach Elwood: Does it often come up in, in practice where, say, you’re doing a polygraph and someone’s like, “Well, I, I don’t, I don’t care what it sa- or I don’t know why it’s doing that, but I’m just telling you the truth,” and, and, and you’re seeing, you know, the spikes you see, the– you’re reading the polygraph and, and you’re thinking, uh, I guess how often does it happen that someone’s denying that they’re lying, but you are very confident based on the machine?

Sure. Does that, does that often happen, and if so- 

Brad Beeler: No, and it- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah, and it, and it happens, too, when people fail a urinalysis, and then they tell me that the cocaine fairy put cocaine in their beer, uh, accidentally You know, what, what do I say to that, right? I say, “How often do you think that happens?” And I give them an opportunity to clear that up, and if they don’t, it’s a consensual process, and that’s their choice.

Zach Elwood: Mm. 

Brad Beeler: Um, but we don’t like question marks. We like exclamation points. So if somebody wants to go down that route, that’s, once again, completely their, their choice. But, you know, polygraph’s been around since the 1920s, and it’s been refined, and a lot of money is spent on it to, to make it the perfect version of itself, to make it the best mousetrap that we have.

I would love to create, and there is much research on this, to create a perfect environment where I can look at an MRI or I can look at thermal or I can look at other things and get 100% read on are you creating that thought process or is that coming from the recesses of your memory? And if, if that day comes, that’s great, but as of right now, what we have is what we have.

And we can debate it, but the efficacy as far as what comes from it, that’s what people don’t see. You know, and, and it’s not like we publish that on a website going, “Hey, guess what?” You know, the intelligence agencies aren’t gonna come forward and say, “Hey, guess what we caught. We caught a spy today. We caught an applicant that was trying to infiltrate this organization.”

Those are things that don’t get said. But you know what gets said on TikTok or Reddit is user41296 that says, “Oh yeah, that Brad guy, he was on, uh, that, uh, People Who Read People podcast today, and you know what? He’s an idiot. I beat a polygraph.” Uh, you know, that’s what gets put out into the world, not the other side 

Zach Elwood: Well, there’s– Yeah, I mean, I’d say for a lot of topics there’s a lack of nuance.

I mean, y- y- leaving aside all the controversy and debate about polygraphs, I mean, I think we could both agree or many people could agree that they are useful even just for, uh, getting information out of people. Like I saw, you know, I watched a good amount of interrogations, and one that stood out recently was, you know, they were– they gave a polygraph to a guy, and I, I don’t think he, he probably wouldn’t have admitted it except for the pressure that he felt in the polygraph, uh, situation.

And that’s how they, you know, that was a big part in, in cracking the case. So it’s like leaving aside all the debate about how accurate it is- Yeah. Yeah … or, you know, what you can, what you should be able to do with it, I think it’s clear that it has played a role in, you know, cracking many cases. 

Brad Beeler: If you look at it from the standpoint of our agency has done over 1,000 exams on individuals who have traveled to meet undercover police officers posing as 12 and 13-year-old boys and girls, or subsequent to people who have downloaded child sexual abuse material.

And when we polygraph them after that, we have no evidence that they’ve been hands-on offenders. But 60% during the polygraph admit that they’ve been hands-on offenders in their adult years. So just to kind of speak to your point, the efficacy and what comes from it, does it justify a tool that’s not 100% perfect?

In some aspects, yes. So but I, I think the, the thing that I try to get across is, once again, it’s not perfect. It shouldn’t be used in court. And where we use it there, it needs to be a really, really tight parameters on where and how we use it. 

Zach Elwood: It gets into the subject of like, you know, it’s, you know– ‘c- ’cause often in interrogations they might be like, “You know, we know you’re lying based on the polygraph,” which gets into the area of like manipulation or d-deception of subjects and such.

But then it’s like, you know, h- it gets into the question of how much, how much deception is okay, which is a-also a controversial topic. But then it’s like If you, even if you are deceiving a subject to get a result, as long as you’re doing some things to avoid false confessions and, and things like this, it seems like there’s a, there’s a whole– What strikes me is the nuance.

It’s like, uh, for a lot of these things, there is so much nuance and discussion about, like, where the line should be drawn or, you know. So, yeah. 

Brad Beeler: I agree. So Frazier versus Cupp is the Supreme Court ruling that talks about you don’t have to be 100% honest to people when you’re talking to them in an interrogation setting.

And sometimes you can say that you have evidence that you don’t. It’s called a false evident ploy, the evidence ploy, which I don’t agree with at all. It’s led to false confessions. It’s very problematic. So just let me, 30 seconds here. When I talk false confessions, I, I don’t talk to juveniles because that prefrontal cortex is not set up yet.

We have to be ultra careful when it comes to talking to juveniles. Uh, they don’t understand the ramifications sometimes of their actions. You look at the, uh, the Crow case from many years ago, where you saw a 15-year-old kid basically just be– There was a voice stress test, and they said he failed, and they, they basically interrogated him for seven, eight hours without his parents, and they made up false evidence saying that he killed his sister.

It’s just a travesty. And, you know, so when we talk to juveniles, not making up fake evidence, not interrogating people for six, seven, eight hours, not office– offering promises or guarantees, and having hold back information that I can validate whatever they tell me, is that we have to be very, very careful about.

The worst day in any law enforcement official’s life would be getting a false confession. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Does that mean you’d, uh, avoid saying something like, “You know, th-this machine is 100% accurate. We know you’re lying,” and you would instead, like, word it in, like, you know, other more ambiguous ways and being like, “We can tell by the indicators that you’re…”

You know, uh, just wording it a little bit different. But I, I’m curious. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah, I’d be a, I’d be a little bit more nuanced, uh, than that as far as, as focusing on 100%. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, avoi-avoiding making outright, uh, false claims in the, in the, even in the context of the interrogation. 

Brad Beeler: Correct. 

Zach Elwood: Okay, let’s segue to the, um, more general behavior, uh, areas.

O-One thing I often think about with the behavior, uh, analysis, reading behavior type stuff, it, it kind of relates to the, the polygraph. I mean, the, the question I think is often, um, unstated in the behavior analysis space is how useful Is it when you have, you know, a, a hunch or, or a deduction that’s far from 100%, right?

This applies to like, you know, reading non-verbals, it applies to statement analysis, it applies to so many behavior-related areas, and I rarely see that talked about. You know, it’s like where, where– when is the situ- where are those situational types where that is useful? And I think, you know, to name one, I, I, I wanna get your take on that, but to name one it’s like, you know, if you’re in an interrogation and you think somebody’s s- reacting in an unusual way to a specific question, that might be a reason to ask a few more questions about that at the very least.

That’s one place where it might play a role. The- these kind of areas where things could go multiple different ways. But I’m curious to open it up to you to, to get your, your take on that question. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, the, the thing about it is I look at behavior from the standpoint of lyrics, soundtrack, and the music video.

So if you, if you break it down like that, my best friend growing up, and this is maybe what got me interested in communication, was deaf, and I had to be present, I had to look him in the eyes, I had to sign, I had to really focus on my body language and, and read his body language. And he was the most impressive individual at determining hidden emotion that I’ve ever seen, because when you lose one sense, you, you get another, and you’d think, wow, if you can’t hear, how would you be good at, at– Well, his, his ability to read body language was just next level.

And then emojis came along and that kind of got habituated. Uh, emojis were great for him, but if you think of it from the standpoint of words, I have to look at that word choice, and that’s where obviously when statement analysis comes in. So that’s one component of it. So, you know, for, for one, I’m gonna look at their word choice and I’m gonna be very careful about my word choice.

Like I’m gonna– After– I’m not gonna use the word murder. I’m gonna say this situation. I’m not gonna use the word sexual assault. I’m gonna say inappropriate contact. I’m gonna use words that are not triggering. That’s why doctors say injection and not shot. That’s why politicians say not taxes, they say investments.

I mean, word choice is important. Um, and sometimes when you’re looking at truthful or not truthful statements, we recently had a, um… You know, if you look at it, the senator that recently posted the word awesome on a tweet after, you know, one of the, uh, Iranian vessels got past the US blockade. Well Some people are saying, “Well, that was, uh, uh, something that a traitor would say,” is the word awesome.

You’re, you’re going against the United States. Well, all it is is a tweet. So did he say, “Oh, that’s awesome,” as if I wish we had a better blockade? Or did he say, “Awesome,” like, “This is great the Iranians get around it”? So the words without context are that– are not that helpful. Does that make sense if I just say that?

Is that, uh, there’s a no with an exclamation point, and then there’s no with a voice inflection. Well, how you said that no can clarify everything. If I ask my daughter, “Sydney, did you clean your room?” “Yes.” Well, that’s not very confident. That’s a problem. But if she just texted me, “Yes, I cleaned my room,” and I have nothing else to go on, it’s very difficult.

So lyrics are important. But then how the– We go to the soundtrack. That’s so important, okay? How Eddie Vedder says his lyrics make the music. I don’t know… Nobody’s gonna look at Pearl Jam lyrics and go, “That’s amazing lyrics.” But they’re gonna look at the soundtrack and be like, “I’m gonna, I’m gonna buy that record right now.”

So how we say it is so important. And then lastly, the music video. Why was Milli Vanilli, the group, so successful? It wasn’t because the lyrics of “Blame It on the Rain.” The, the, uh, m- the soundtrack was decent, but it was a two dancing, good-looking, attractive actors that were basically not the true, you know, artists.

They were the ones that once it came on MTV, that’s why it was effective. So how can I look at all that as far as how I’m perceiving them, right? Is that congruent? Meaning is their spoken word with how they’re saying it, with how they look while they’re saying it, is that good? Meaning am I getting the no or am I getting the yes?

So the shaking of the head no with the speaking of the word yes, that’s not congruent. If am I getting R. Kelly when he’s interviewed by Gr- uh, I think it was Grace King, uh, about the sexual assault allegations, and he goes from zero to 60, how I think this is kind of what led into the question as far as almost like a barometer for how somebody takes your question.

And he went from I’m just chatting with you to now he’s pounding his fist and he’s standing up and he’s screaming and he’s doing fake emotion. That is incongruent with how we communicate. So one of the ways I’m looking f- at communication is, is all of this congruent, right? Is there comfort? Is there not comfort?

That’s how I look at non-verbals. Non-verbals, you can ask Joe Navarro, no, non-verbals are not about detecting deception. They’re about comfort and discomfort And that’s how I’m taking in information. Now, how am I putting information in the world, out into the world? This is the hidden part because if my body language sucks, if my vocal inflection sucks, if my word choice sucks, I may be contaminating them by their reaction to what I’m putting out into the world.

So am I just seeing a mirror as a result of my emotional contagion? So it’s, it’s twofold. When people look at body language, they don’t realize what we’re doing, um, what we’re putting out into the world. They always view it as I’m reading body language, which is so difficult based on contextual clues. And they’re looking at the wrong things.

They should be looking at the feet. They should be looking at the lower body. That’s where the longest cabling from the brain stem is, and that’s where we get a lot of our really good diagnostic stuff. So, so much of… I, I know I’m taking you down a, a little rabbit hole here, but so much of the stuff that’s out there with body language, uh, they make it for 20-second TikToks.

It’s nonsense or it’s taken out of context. 

Zach Elwood: I mean, I, I, I tend to think, uh, and correct me if you, if you disagree, it seems like, I mean, for, for these– If we’re especially talking like nonverbal things in an interrogation setting, it seems like the main practical application would be Just like changing your line of questioning, um, uh, but, you know, asking more questions about a specific area.

But I’m curious, you know, uh, would you agree with that? Is that, like, the main practical outcome, would you say? 

Brad Beeler: So for me, non-verbals on my end are going to be– And when I say non-verbals, I’m also talking vocal language. I’m, I’m talking, um, uh, the way I speak the words. So too many times, once again, we’re just saying non-verbals from body language standpoint.

I throw in there also- Right … how we’re speaking. So think of a Catholic confessional, right? A Catholic confessional, how is it set up? It’s set up for privacy. But if the priest was on the other side and he could see you, you wouldn’t have privacy. If there was one of these fancy microphones, there wouldn’t be any privacy.

If you could hear people outside of the confessional, there wouldn’t be any privacy. So privacy trumps a lot of things. But how is the priest reacting? The priest isn’t saying, “What? What did you do?” He’s not being judgmental, and he’s speaking in a very soft con- con- um, tone with a very– a little bit of a deeper tone.

A higher pitch is going to be coded as either not confident or it’s going to be scary by the person hearing it. Because once again, we go back in history, what did a higher pitched voice mean? It mean- it meant danger. It meant summon the tribe for help. That’s what, you know, police officers when they get on the radio the first time as a rookie and they call for assistance, they sound like the 12-year-old version of themselves.

Yeah, 

Zach Elwood: the 

Brad Beeler: anxiety raises the voice. So I need to hack that a little bit. Yeah, the anxiety. So even there are times where I’m anxious, but I have to deepen my tone a little bit. I have to slow down, I have to be non-judgmental, and I have to lower my volume slightly because people don’t scream secrets, they whisper them.

So from a non-verbal standpoint, I have to do those things to create an environment in which a truthful person can feel like they can be truthful and a guilty person, once again, can feel like I can unburden myself potentially with this information. So from non-verbally for me, and I’m also– When I do talk verbals, I don’t want anchor points, so it’s kind of hard to see.

I, I don’t want to get too far away from the mic. But when we talk anchor points, obviously within context, if it’s cold or, you know, if they’re always having their arms crossed, I’m looking for the reception of my message. For me, body language is not about detecting deception, it’s about reception of my message.

So if I’m saying something and all of a sudden I get an anchor point, okay, don’t say that again or let’s reframe it. If they’re like this and they uncross their arms after I set a new point, rinse and repeat And then also I’m gonna wanna have a slight forward lean because what is a confession posture?

A confession posture is a slight forward lean. So if I’m leaned back like a therapist where I’m all the way back in my chair and I have multiple anchor points, they may be mirroring me, but that’s mirroring me in a very closed, restrictive posture, and that’s negative for communication. So, uh, open communication for me is having my forearms on my knee– on my thighs, leaning slight forward with a slight head tilt, and once again, with good active listening, uh, skills with my head.

That’s more likely to have them mimic, and when they mimic that, they are in a very receptive body language to make a disclosure. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Um, when I talk to, uh– I mean, you probably know ’cause you’ve listened to my podcast a little bit, but, uh, one thing I focus on is the, the practical difficulties o- of using, uh, behavior when we’re talking just like reading non-verbals, leaving aside the rapport aspects.

Uh, when I talked to Eric Robinson, a, a former FBI agent and some other people, uh, in law enforcement, they talked about, you know, the, the difficulties in using the, the reading non-verbals part. Eric gave an example of when they had talked to a, uh, somebody they suspected of doing something, uh, and they got– they showed him a picture of someone, and it was clear from his non-verbal reaction that this guy, you know, knew something even though he wouldn’t admit to it.

I mean, they felt pretty– You know, it was one of those cases where it was on, on a more extreme end of, you know, non-verbal reactions, so they felt quite confident. But y- their– his point was even in that context, it’s like, well, if he’s not gonna talk about it, there, the, you know, we already have… Usually, you know, there’s already some evidence pointing to someone.

He’s– So his, his point was, um, it, it can be pretty hard to make use of it even when you have quite a strong read on somebody. It’s like if they’re not gonna talk, what can you do? But I’m curious for your take on that. Yeah, and I guess that gets back to my, my general question of like finding the, you know, pinpointing the, the practically useful parts of it, yeah.

Brad Beeler: Yeah. So, uh, I’ll, I’ll tell you real quick about a case. And so with the Secret Service, the way our polygraph program worked is we love to give back to the locals for all the resources that we take from them in our protective investigative missions. So we would– Most of my criminal polygraphs were done in the form of offering it up to the local police department.

And I can think specifically about a missing persons case that I worked where we had a one percenter and a hang-around in a motorcycle club. And for your listeners that aren’t familiar with one percenter, it goes back to the ’50s where one percenters were coined as being the troublemakers and the, they made all the problems for the entire club, and the other 99% of the club members did the right thing, right?

Yeah, 

Zach Elwood: the motorcycle 

Brad Beeler: outlaw 

Zach Elwood: types. Yeah. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. Motorcycle outlaw types. He had a 1% patch, and I think the ATF agent working this case remembered, it was t- was basically telling me, “I think this guy’s killed people. He’s a bad dude.” So the missing person is dating both of these people, the hang-around and the one percenter.

And the hang-around is maybe 5’6″, 140 pounds, doesn’t even own a bike, looks like a banker. The hang-around’s about 6’4″, 230, and he looks like if you were typecasting the next “Die Hard 7” movie or whatever, right? He would be the perfect foil, uh, to be the, the terrorist in that situation. Um, so from a body language and just from a picture standpoint, you thought, “Well, that’s probably the guy, so I’m gonna test the hang-around first.”

Plus, when you ta- throw confirmation bias in there and you have the locals saying, “Yeah, this is a bad dude,” the one percenter, what’s my frame of, you know, uh, my thought process here is the hang-around failed the polygraph regarding being involved in the disappearance. Well, I viewed that word involvement as, okay, he must have seen it.

He must have participated. Maybe after the fact, he came into this information. So for a couple hours, I’m, like, theming him from the standpoint of, “Hey, you’re probably afraid of him. You were in there. You were, you’re afraid of your own life. You went along to get along.” Whatever the case may be was my themes, and he kept saying this: “That’s not it Okay?

He’s not saying he didn’t do it, but my tunnel vision and confirmation bias was so high, I didn’t just peel the words apart. That’s not it. That’s not it. That’s not it. And about two hours after that, there were two detectives that didn’t have that confirmation bias, and they knocked on the door and they said, “Hey, can I come in and chat with him for a second?”

‘Cause they heard, “That’s not it.” And they just said to him, they said, “You keep saying that’s not it. What is it?” And he just looked at them and said, “Oh, I killed her, cut her up in six pieces, and threw her in the river.” And it was just like a Mike Drak moment for me that the confirmation bias had got me. I didn’t see him with horns, I saw him with a halo.

And it wasn’t about the one percenter, it was about everybody’s capable of a bad act, and that’s what he did, and he took us to the body right after that. And it was, uh, once again, ki- I realized at that point that horns and halos can be an issue, and maybe not body language, but just looking at two pictures, you can easily say, “Oh, that’s the bad guy.”

And that’s what I, that’s what I fell victim of. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I like that anecdote, um, in the story i- in your book. Um, yeah, it really does highlight confirmation, uh, hov- highlights confirmation bias. It also, you know, maybe is a good segue into this, the statement analysis or just listening to what people say. I, I, uh– Well, I’m curious if you, if you, if you would agree with me on, um…

I mean, I, I– Some of the same, you know, major cav- caveats apply about reading, uh, small statements, reading too much into small statements. But I tend to think statement analysis and what people say is, like, much, much more relevant and meaningful than the non-verbals, you know. Uh, y- you know, leaving as- leaving aside, like, overall, uh, rapport kind of building things entirely, if we’re just talking about reading specific non-verbals for, you know, clues about what somebody’s thinking.

I tend to think, you know, things like that, that Mark McClish talked about in his book, “I Know You Are Lying,” these kinds of, uh, small clues about, you know, what people are thinking based on what they say. Like that guy saying, “That’s not it,” it’s like, well, what is he really- Yeah … what’s he communicating? Uh, but anyway, I’m curious if you agree with the general point that, like, in general, listening to the things people actually say is, is gonna be much, much more important than non-verbal.

Brad Beeler: I typically do, because once again, especially if I’m looking at deception, because once again, body language is about reception of message and comfort, discomfort. So the– whereas word choice is them trying to potentially erase, change perspectives, you know, erase time, whatever the case may be. And it makes me think, I just saw something today about the redistricting, and, and this is not a political statement, but the redistricting in Virginia.

And they looked at the, the question for the, the governor was running. When she was asked about that, when she was running for governor, you know, “Are you gonna be involved in redistricting?” And she said, “The short answer is no.” Now let’s break that down. What’s the question? Are you going to support redistricting?

Is that a yes or no question? Yes. Was yes or no answered? No. What was said? The short answer is no I mean, I just, I just- More information 

Zach Elwood: there. Yeah. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. There’s way too much information there. You’re right. The short answer is no. Or 

Zach Elwood: more, more– There’s 

Brad Beeler: more 

Zach Elwood: infor- Yeah. Yeah, there’s more 

Brad Beeler: in that. Yeah. And, uh, you know, so seeing that, seeing, uh, there’s a really good– I mean, obviously Jerry Sandusky, uh, his interview with Bob Costas is, is beautiful for true sandwiches because, you know, he’s asked a very legalistic term, “Are you a pedophile?”

He does not view himself as a pedophile, so he says no with an exclamation point. Then he’s asked, “Are you sexually attracted to young children?” What does he do? He buys himself time. “Am I sexually attracted to children? Sexually attracted to children?” Then he does a true sandwich because we don’t like to lie.

We don’t like the feeling it gives us. So what does he do? He gives two truthful statements where he says, um, “I like hanging around kids. I like spending time with them.” Those are two truthful statements. I agree with both those statements. But he answers, “Well, the, the answer is no.” So anytime you say the answer is no, that’s not a no, right?

That’s a, that’s a problem. Um, you know, same thing with, uh, Rachel, uh, Dolezal or Dolezal when she was asked about, you know, if she’s African American. She doesn’t answer the question. She says, “That’s a strange question. I don’t know why you’re asking me that. Um, you know, I did tell you my father was unable to come, uh, you know, to the wedding, you know, X, Y, and Z.”

You’re not answering the question. Um, and if your viewers will look up the vice presidential– uh, vice president of French Guiana, uh, during the Vice interview, he’s asked about who his best friend is, uh, individ-individual named, uh, s- uh, Su, uh, Sugiron. And, uh, he’s asked about this, and it’s his best friend for like 20, 30 years, and they know that, and they ask him directly.

They say, “And you– you know, do you know a guy named Sugiron?” And he goes, uh, “Yeah, he’s a tenant in my place.” The distancing language. Then he’s asked again, “Well, you’re friends with him, right?” “Uh, he’s a friend of ours.” Once again, distancing language. It’s, uh– So yeah, just to– I wanted to just throw you and your listeners a couple examples of ways in which you’re giving simple yes or no questions, and then you offer that up.

That’s, uh, it’s not 100%, but it’s a nice red flag that we want to go back and, and dig into again. 

Zach Elwood: I mean, I, I was a big fan of Mark McClish’s “I Know You Are Lying” and, uh, uh, just in general, you know, the hidden ways that people, uh, try to conceal information or misdirect you in various ways. I mean, that’s le-leaving aside the discussion of how practically useful it may be, you know, the same questions that apply to the polygraph for things that are, you know, not 100%.

It’s like, A, it’s interesting and there’s often information there, and then B, it might be useful in actually like directing how you conduct an investigation, how you do an inq-interrogation, you know, your, your confidence that you’re on the right track, especially if there’s no other, you know, major forms of evidence, these kinds of things.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here: as with a lot of behavior-reading areas, there is a lot of controversy in the area of so-called “statement analysis.” Similar to nonverbal behavior-reading areas, there are people who claim you can make highly confident proclamations about someone’s guilt or innocence based on examining the small ways someone has phrased their sentences. 

One prominent example of this overreach is the SCAN system, that’s S. C. A. N., which is, in my view, unethical and unreasonable bullshit spread by a guy named Avinoam Sapir who strikes me as one of many con artists in the behavior-reading space. There’s a great Propublica article about that titled Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool? The subtitle is: The creator of Scientific Content Analysis, or SCAN, says the tool can identify deception. Law enforcement has used his method for decades, even though there’s no reliable science behind it. Even the CIA and FBI have bought in. https://www.propublica.org/article/why-are-cops-around-the-world-using-this-outlandish-mindreading-tool

So I wanted to distinguish this overreach of statement analysis from what I view as more reasonable and defensible versions of statement analysis. For example, I enjoyed Mark McClish’s book I Know You Are Lying, and I was inspired by that book to write my own book on verbal clues in poker titled Verbal Poker Tells. I do believe there are many small clues in people’s phrasing as to their train of thought and, more importantly, their communicational attempts at managing other people’s perceptions. One common pattern is that innocent people are more likely to make vehement and direct proclamations of their innocence, and state directly that they did not do something. I was watching the reality TV show The Traitors recently, and there are many manifestations of that general pattern in that show, and in social deduction games in general. And in poker, I can confidently say that there exist some highly reliable verbal tells, and in general verbal tells are much more reliable than nonverbal tells. 

But also, clearly, such small verbal patterns are far from 100% reliable and it would be a mistake to reach highly confident views in law enforcement scenarios based on one or even a few small phrasings, and it would be a mistake to act as if such things are anywhere close to actual physical evidence. 

Anyway, I just wanted to address that, as you’ll see statement analysis often referred to as a pseudoscience, which I think is unfair, because, if such things were studied scientifically, which they have not been, I think you would find that many of the patterns that people like McClish have written about do have significance, even if they’re also far from 100% reliable. It’s just that so many decent and interesting observations of human patterns have been jumbled together and associated with the bad ideas and approaches of unethical charlatans. Which I think is also related to how group polarization and toxic conflict tends to work: the traits and beliefs of an entire group can become associated with the traits of a few prominent toxic representatives of that group. But I digress. 

Okay, back to the talk…

Brad Beeler: And that ties into behavioral indicator questions very, very well because it’s a, a– it’s separating the wheat from the chaff in that if I ask you, you know, “Hey, Zach, can you give me…” Or, or, “What do you think should happen to somebody that…” And you, especially in serious crimes, what do you think should happen to somebody that, that shoots somebody?

Uh, I, I think they should go to jail. That’s a pretty easy question. But when I ask that question to somebody and they says, “Everybody deserves a second chance.” That’s a problem because that’s what they want to have happen to themselves. I mean, this is a Reid technique from the 1940s, and Reid has a lot of issues.

But when it comes to that question, it’s really good, uh, due to, um, certain biases that we have where we open up that file cabinet of our brain and we don’t think about it long term enough and we just provide that answer that’s extremely diagnostic. When I ask somebody that’s accused of hurting a child and I say, “What do you think should happen to somebody that causes significant harm to a child?”

“Well, you know what? I think they, they should, they should get treatment.” That’s a big problem, and that’s, uh, of the reddest of the red flags. Same thing with I… If I ask you an evidence connecting question. If you tell me you’re on the north side of town and the crime happened on the south side of town and I say, “Hey, is there any reason why your GPS or a license plate reader would show you down on the state streets on the south side of St.

Louis on such and such date?” “Uh oh, you know what? You’re right. I did.” You know. Yeah. When, when you hear that, that’s a, that’s a problem. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. It just seems like there’s so many– I mean, getting back to the general question of, you know, there, there’s so many ways that we can reach deductions and clu- and, and have hunches and logical hunches about how what people say or, or what they do, uh, you know, lead, relate to their, their guilt or what they’ve done.

And it, it’s like, it seems like, well, I’m curious. I mean, we know, uh, the, the, the cliched thing or the, the true thing is, you know, often crimes that are… that go 48 hours without being solved, you know, have a much less likely chance of being solved. I, I, I would think that some of these small clues, even if, you know, people can debate, uh, how accurate they are, how useful they are, it’s like as a practitioner, if you’re a law enforcement person trying to get an answer to something quickly, a lot of these things help you get a read that you’re on the right track, right?

It’s like if you’re trying to like sort out a bunch of information quickly, especially like, say, you’re not even– somebody might still be alive or something. It’s like you’re trying to get a read on like where to direct your attention, right? So tho-those things can be, can be useful in a very short term, like time pressured scenarios especially, I’d imagine.

Brad Beeler: Yeah. How does, uh, how does… When we– when you, when you get down to bedrock you get the best gold. But to get to bedrock and, and when you do get that gold or close to bedrock, what do you do? You filter it. You put it through a, a very broad coarse filter first and then you get it down to a fine filter. So I’m trying to get a coarse filter level, say, where should I sort you?

Are you this person here that, uh, we don’t have anything to worry about or are you this person here we gotta ask some additional questions for? 

Zach Elwood: Right. And, and it can be that, you know, people would say like, “Well, what about the, the actual evidence?” And usually that’s going on at– sometimes it’s going on at the same time where it’s like you’re talking to people and people are gathering evidence.

So it’s like, yeah, obviously you’re not– you’re gonna go where the evidence leads, but you’re also in the, in the context of these interactions you’re gonna also try to feel your way to the, to the truth, yeah. 

Brad Beeler: Nothing’s gonna be better than DNA. But unlike what people that watch NCIS or Criminal Minds think, they think that D- you know, uh, they, they think that DNA just falls off of our body and is just vacuumed up, and in real time we see it and get it analyzed.

It’s not that easy. Juries think that, unfortunately. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Brad Beeler: Uh, but, uh, I wish, I wish it was that easy. There are some amazing advancements in DNA technology that are currently, um, on the horizon, but… And it’s an amazing tool, but, uh, it’s not the way, uh, it appears. 

Zach Elwood: That, uh, Sandusky example you mentioned, yeah, reading that in your book, I mean, that, that is such a textbook example of like S- somebody really giving away, uh, you know- Yeah

that, that something is going on there. And I, I think it leads to a interesting psychological fact about people. It’s like, it, it is very strange, uh, when you read, like, “I Know You Were Lying” by Mark McClish or, you know, just looking at these things in general, it is very strange that people who have done horrible things seem to have such a hard time directly just saying that they didn’t do them right.

They, they, they word them in all these unusual ways, and it, it does seem like a big part of it is surprisingly, like, just that people have such a hard time lying directly. Uh, i- i- it’s like I think it’s a combination of, like, people are uncomfortable lying directly, even for people who have done- Mm-hmm

horrible things like murder and other things. Uh, but then it’s also, like, the other aspects of, like, they don’t wanna be caught in a lie sometimes, so they word things ambiguously because they want to avoid being caught in a lie. But I’m curious, how much do you think boils down to just the fact that for whatever reason, people are just uncomfortable lying, even when it would be to their major benefit to just lie directly and lie, you know?

Brad Beeler: Well, it’s, it’s uncomfortable lying. Once again, everything that you said is truthful, but there’s also a physiological component, and that’s why polygraph gets us to the level that it gets us, is there is a physiological and a mental component put together. When you put people in a yes or no question, they have to provide a yes or no answer, and that editing and things are happening because of cognitive load.

There’s a lot going on, and our brain, it, it’s almost like this computer, if, if our, you know, if our internet connection was slow or you were running eight other programs, uh, at the same time while you were recording this, the recording quality would go down as a result of that because the RAM would be stressed.

And our brain has a certain amount of RAM, and we got all these things going on and, “Oh, shoot, this reporter may ask this question,” or, “Do they have that evidence?” I’m thinking Anthony Weiner when he’s asked, you know, “Did you send those text messages?” Or, “Did you send that, that post on Twitter?” If we go back about 10 years when he was involved in his scandal.

And I just think about all the mental processes he had to be going through ’cause he’s like, “Well, I can’t turn it over to the FBI because then I might get caught for lying to a federal agent, and then I can’t do this, and is there gonna be any other accusations?” And there’s so many things running through that we don’t really think about the words that we’re saying, and that’s where we pick up those inconsistencies sometimes.

Zach Elwood: I, I do think in general, like, the, the behavior space can be really hard to talk about because there are so many factors that kind of, like, bleed into each other and are, are overlapped. So for example, you know, we have We all, we all every day know that, you know, interacting with other people, reading people happens every day.

Like, we, we read that our people we know are uncomfortable. We read that people we work with are, you know, s- feel certain ways or might feel certain ways, and so that’s obviously true. But then there’s also this spectrum going up to, like, people who make claims about, like, this, you know, looking a certain way tells us a specific thing- Yeah

and all these granular things that- I looked up 

Brad Beeler: to the left. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, like this Behavior Panel- I looked up to the right … Chase Hughes stuff. Yeah. There’s this spectrum going up to, like, you can make all these amazing deductions with specific granular things, so the- you have that spectrum, but then you also have, like, the rapport spectrum of, like, obviously rapport is a big thing, and that involves you adjusting your behavior, which is separate from the reading behavior.

So just to say there’s this space that, uh… And, and also that, oh, yeah, one more thing. You know, law enforcement or, uh, professionals, people doing interrogations, I think even they can have a hard time understanding where, like, their reads of, like, the meta level situation, like ev- the evidence, the things people have said, uh, and the things that they have done and re- suspicious things they’ve done in, in a case, a- and then you, a- and then the behavior, the non-verbal behavior itself, all those things can kind of blend together.

Yeah. So you could come away from, like, interrogating someone and be like, “I think they were… You know, their non-verbals were suspicious,” but- Yeah. My gut, my gut 

Brad Beeler: says- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, but their gut might be all these other things- Yeah … in the mix, so I think it can be hard- 100% … to extrap- ex-extract that entirely. So I think all these things lead to this fuzzy area, which I think helps explain why there’s so much bullshit in this space, why you have people like, you know, Behavior Panel and Chase Hughes peddling a lot of bullshit where people, even, even practitioners can be like, “Well, I’ve, I’ve had value with some of these things, so maybe there is truth- Yeah

to some of these other things.” I, I think it kind of helps explain why there can be… I- it can be hard to sort out this amorphous area, but I’m curious if you’d agree with all that. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah, it, it is. I mean, you, you look at the Amanda Knox situation. I mean, if you kind of take a look at that and say she was being emotional and she was kissing and hugging on her boyfriend after she was told that her roommate had been violently slain Now, what’s the context?

If you have a difference between perception and perspective, right? So my perception, if I’m an Italian investigator, I might say, “That’s weird. Wow, that’s really strange. You know, why is she doing that?” And I would be crying, and I would be this, this, and this, and why is she showing this emotion, right? But if I get into her perspective, she doesn’t know anybody here.

She’s been given this horrific news that somebody has come into her room and violated that, and now she’s afraid. Who’s she gonna go to? The only person she knows, her boyfriend, and of course, she’s gonna show emotion. Comfort, that’s what we look for. We are, we, we are basically 99.7% chimpanzees. What’s a chimpanzee gonna do in that situation?

They’re gonna, you know, c- you know, console each other, just like they did. So that’s the problem. They, they viewed it as their perception, uh, or their perspective, not with… You know, and that, and that was a problem. So I, I say that that’s where it all kinda gets jumbled up and, you know, gut instinct is for walking down the street, bottle breaks, walking up to a car as a police officer, hand on the back of the next stands up.

My pattern recognition says something’s not right, call for backup, run, whatever the case may be. Too often, though, we use that same principle in a investigation and say, “Oh, my gut tells me this.” Gut instinct is terrible for personal and professional relationships because cognitive biases are more powerful.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. 

Brad Beeler: And those biases will lead you astray every time. The anchoring bias, the confirmation bias, all that. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, no, I, uh, it comes to mind the, uh, American Nightmare documentary. I’m not sure if you’ve seen that, but it was- Mm … really good. It, it kept- 

Brad Beeler: Great show … 

Zach Elwood: a bunch of… Yeah, it was a d- documentary about some bad reads and decisions some- Yeah

some, uh, poli- police made in regards to some quite honestly, yeah, it was bizarre series of events. So yeah. 

Brad Beeler: But, but Zach, like go to that, go to that episode. Think about this, and I know any of your listeners that was seeing this, anybody that saw episode one, you’re going, “How many more episodes are there to this?”

Because that guy obviously did it. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, exactly. No, the, the- 

Brad Beeler: Right … 

Zach Elwood: the vibes and the reads can be very unintuitive- Yeah … especially for unusual situations where it’s like stra- you know, strange and unusual cases where, where your, your reads for the situation can be completely off. 

Brad Beeler: Yeah. Anybody, if anybody knew that and they watched it, any of these experts that go back, and I’ve seen a couple on YouTube do this, “Oh, well, I saw this, and you saw how his feet were pointed, and you saw he looked here.

I knew all along that they had the wrong guy.” You’re full of it. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, yeah. No, no. No, that’s why, you know, the, a lot of these, you know, so-called behavior experts who make all the YouTube video content, it’s like they usually will… I, I thought about writing a, doing a piece about this where, like, where, how they tend to approach the content creation, ’cause it’s like they’re not gonna choose a case that just happened where they know it could go- Yeah

multiple ways, right? ‘Cause that could make them look foolish. You know, they wouldn’t have made, you know, done an analysis or at least a confident analysis of that g- uh, right after that case happened of the, the first suspect in that case, right? So there’s certain, there’s certain patterns you, you can know apply to the content creation.

And yeah, if, if he, if that guy had been found out to be guilty, they would’ve taken the same behavior and, you know, interpreted in a, a different way. Yes. And yeah, the, the, the, the confirmation biases are, are, are very real. I think that’s the most important thing about this is, uh, realizing how we can be led astray.

Even skilled practitioners obviously are, are often, in any, any domain, leaving aside law enforcement or anything, it’s like you can often be led astray, uh, especially for more unusual 

Brad Beeler: situations. I mean, how many people dated somebody that they thought the person was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and then it turns out they weren’t?

Their first impression was horrifically wrong, because people can change behavior shor- for short periods of time, but the pathology always wins. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and um, and in your book too, I think, uh, what stood out to me too, getting back to the statement analysis, is i- in your DECEIVES acronym that, uh, talking about, you know, uh, practical tips for, uh, reading people, getting information from people.

You know, a, a good chunk of that was, was just li- you know, about listening to what people say and, you know, uh, and avoiding, you know, confirmation biases. Mm-hmm. But a, a big part of it was, you know, l- listening is huge. I think that’s a very undervalued part of all of this is, you know… And, and when I talked to Gary Noesner, you know, the, the, the hostage negotiator- Mm-hmm

for, for the FBI, that was his thing too, and he act- he actually said doing the hostage negotiation work, because it was so auditory focused, you know, they, they were just usually talking on the phone, it actually allowed more focus on the words and listening and, and reaching deductions about what people were saying, which I thought was a, a very good point too.

Brad Beeler: No, that’s, uh, obviously that guy’s, that guy’s, uh, amazing with what he’s done and what he’s seen, and I think that’s an interesting point because some people would say more information is always better. But sometimes, especially if you’re having to make decisions, sometimes limiting that, that flow of information’s helpful.

Zach Elwood: Right. Yeah. Uh, do you wanna a- and this has been great. Do you wanna add anything else, Brad? 

Brad Beeler: N- no, I really appreciate the, uh, the opportunity. I think we covered, uh, a lot of things. I mean, I think once again, I try to caveat everything by saying what gets the clicks is by saying absolutes, but absolutes just don’t exist when it comes to two individuals getting together and having a conversation.

What if some job applicants aren’t actually trying to get jobs — but are instead trying to infiltrate companies? Dani Tepedjiyska, who works with the recruitment firm Michael Page, describes a strange and growing world of fake resumes, organized applicant networks, AI-assisted interviews, and suspicious staffing firms that may be helping fraudulent actors gain access to banks and other financial institutions. We talk about the real-world signs she’s seen while interviewing deceptive candidates — from people secretly receiving answers during interviews to applicants who suddenly crack under simple follow-up questions. We also explore how AI tools are making this kind of fraud much easier, why remote work creates new vulnerabilities, and how some infiltrators may be playing a very long game. Along the way, Dani shares practical insights for job seekers about how recruiters analyze applicant resumes and behavior, and tips on optimal LinkedIn strategies.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:

• Reddit thread about fake job applicants
• Australian Financial Review article: How North Korean deepfakes are duping hiring managers
• Forbes article: Fake job seekers are exploiting AI to scam job hunters and businesses
• Justice department post on North Koreans fraudulently gaining jobs posing as Americans

TRANSCRIPT

(transcripts are automatically generated and will contain errors)

Dani Tepedjiyska:  A lot of these individuals… they’re looking to sell that information to fraudulent groups that are essentially sponsoring them. So where I’ve seen an example of that being very organized is… there’s multiple people that are applying or that have gotten employment from you that are all residing at the exact same address.

Zach Elwood: What are some indicators that, uh, you know, alert you to the fact that somebody’s maybe being deceptive or underhanded in their approach?

Dani Tepedjiyska: Surprisingly enough, some of the, some of those individuals are some of the most polished, you know, uh, candidates I’ve, I’ve seen in the market. They always dress very professional… They start off very confident. They have a lot to say. Where they really start to crack is when you ask them some more pointed questions.

Zach Elwood: That was a clip from my talk with Dani Tepedjiyska. Dani is a recruiter at the recruitment firm Michael Page; she specializes in recruiting and placing applicants in positions related to financial crime prevention. I met Dani when I recently attended a conference in New York City highlighting women working in anti-financial crime areas, which was put on by the organization Coalition Against Financial Crime. At that event, Dani won the Anti-Financial Crime Recruiter of the Year award. 

Dani spoke about experiences she and others have had with deceptive job applicants; people with a variety of suspicious behaviors and possible malicious motives. Some of these applicants are suspected of trying to gain access to sensitive data and processes in order to do malicious and illegal things. This was an interesting discussion and why I wanted to talk to Dani. 

The rise of AI has resulted in a proliferation of scams. I’ve been looking for work recently and I’ve seen this proliferation first-hand, in addition to seeing many people on linkedin talking about such scams happening to them. I’ve had quite a few fake recruiters reach out to me, with a variety of approaches; one sophisticated one pretended to be a real recruiter and sent me several long AI-generated emails tailored to my own experiences and resume. Kind of interesting in that case: the main immediate tell of their deception was how much they fawned over me and also just how much they wrote; both those things immediately stood out to me as suspicious. But still, these approaches are all getting much more sophisticated. 

To give you a sense of the problem from the hiring side, the following is from a 2025 Forbes article titled Fake Job Seekers Are Exploiting AI To Scam Job Hunters And Businesses: 

It’s hard for people to find a job in this current market. To make matters worse, the U.S. job market is contending with a growing threat of fraudulent job applicants. They are armed with artificial intelligence (AI) tools that deceive hiring managers to secure remote positions. Using deep fake videos, voice manipulation, and fabricated resumes, these impostors exploit generative AI to create convincing false identities. This scam isn’t just a hiring headache. It’s a cybersecurity crisis. Bad actors are infiltrating companies to steal data, plant malware, or steal funds. As remote work surges, businesses, recruiters, hiring managers, and job hunters must be careful and cautious.

End quote 

The following comes from an Australian Financial Review article from 2025 titled “How North Korean deepfakes are duping hiring managers”: 

A quiet plague of organised criminals and nefarious state hackers have been using artificial intelligence to pose as remote job applicants in an effort to infiltrate companies from the inside, steal data and hold them to ransom.

Farther on in the article it reads: 

Companies that have fallen victim to the practice have generally refused to speak publicly or to be identified. But over the past 18 months there have been several reported cases of North Korean state hackers using AI to create intricate counterfeit personas to apply for jobs, particularly at major US-based companies.

Fake applicants are using AI deepfake software to trick interviewers on video and phone calls.

The practice became so widespread at the tail end of last year that Sam Rubin, senior vice president at cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, told a San Francisco conference: “If you’re hiring contract workers, you either are interviewing or have already hired a North Korean.”

End quote

From my brief research into this area, it seems there can be a multitude of motives for deceptive practices by job applicants. Dani talks about her suspicions that some applicants she’s talked to have been deceptive and have had malicious motives. But it seems that it can be hard to pinpoint the scale of the problem, largely because if an applicant does seem fishy, they almost certainly won’t be hired, so those suspicions likely will never be confirmed. And if an applicant with malicious motives succeeds in getting the job, their malicious actions may never be found out. So it’s a vague area for understandable reasons. The vagueness seems to be aided by the fact that, as mentioned in that article I just read, companies don’t like to talk about their internal security failures; there can be incentives to not draw attention to such failures and to handle such things privately. 

I talk to Dani about the experiences she’s had recruiting and interviewing job applicants, including what has stood out to her as suspicious behaviors. Toward the end we talk about some tips she has for job seekers. 

For completely self-serving purposes I wanted to mention again that I’m currently looking for work. These days I’m in New York City. My primary career has been as a technical writer for software companies, explaining highly technical features to developer audiences. I’ve worked at the observability company New Relic and Amazon, and I’ve held Senior and Lead roles. But related to the topic of this episode, I’ve also had a side career since 2017 of independent investigative journalism, so I’ve also been applying to a few investigative roles that have interested me. I’m currently open to any independent research and open source investigative type projects, including one-off projects. If you want to know more, reach out to me using the contact form at my site behavior-podcast.com. 

If you’re interested in crime- and investigative-related topics, you should subscribe to this podcast on the platform you prefer. I’ll continue having guests who work in these spaces, including an upcoming interview with the renowned investigator Craig Silverman. 

Okay here’s the talk with Dani Tepedjiyska, who works with the recruitment firm Michael Page: 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Hi, 

Zach Elwood: Dani. Thanks for joining me. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Of 

course. I’m so excited. Thank you for having me. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. So, uh, when I saw you speak recently at the, the Fraud Prevention Conference, I, I was very interested in what you were saying about people, applicants at, uh, job applicants who had ulterior sh- uh, shady motives who were trying to get employed and infiltrate companies, and I was…

wanted to talk to you about that obviously. So I was curious, maybe you could talk a little bit about w- what the motives are for people who are doing that sort of thing. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a topic that not many people talk about. I think it can– A lot of behind the scenes, I think a lot of staffing firms are seeing it firsthand, but I do think there’s a bit of a stigma there as far as talking about it because a lot of the times if you’re talking about it as a recruiter, to some extent, you know, potentially you’re admitting to some faults in, in your own organization, in your own process.

So I think a lot of the times people like to, to kind of leave that, um, under wraps. Um, but a lot of, a lot of these individuals, their, their reasoning is not financial gain. It’s not employment. Actually, that’s probably the least of, of their concerns. Um, really the, their reasons are, you know, far more nefarious than that.

They’re looking to, a lot of the times, sell that information to fraudulent groups that are essentially sponsoring them, right? And in, in some ways they’re sponsoring them by giving them housing. They’ll have a house in the middle of nowhere, a lot of the times in Texas, that would house a couple of, of those individuals in that place.

So that could be a reason on its own. Um, but in a lot of ways they are essentially selling that information back to these fraudulent organizations, feeding them intel and relaying back to them sensitive information, gaining access to email addresses with certain organizations, uh, that they can then use to kind of their advantage.

Um, so there’s a lot of those reasons, again, are far deeper than people think at first, at first glance. 

Zach Elwood: You know, when you talk about getting access to information, is it like stealing emails to sell on the black market kind of stuff? Is it, you know, getting access to those databases or what, you know, what are the, what are the kinds of range of things when we talk about infiltrating and, and getting data out?

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. I mean, it’s obviously that email address then could be, you can, you can use it to sign up for, you know, sign up for certain, um, services or to, to your point, sell that on the black market. Um, a lot of the times it’s just being able to approve or get rid of certain emails because you have that, like, email with a certain bank or a certain crypto platform.

Zach Elwood: I don’t know if you’ve dealt with this personally, but I was reading about like, um, for example, uh, North Korea-sponsored efforts to infiltrate companies. Have you seen any y- more state-sponsored kind of things personally, or is that just something you’ve, you’ve read about? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Haven’t really seen a lot of the effects just yet.

Um, I think a lot of them are, are not public information from, from what I’ve been able to tell so far. Um, I think that there’s different countries, high-risk countries that are doing this, that are sponsoring, um, these sort of groups and, and, and getting a lot of, you know, immigrants or people who are, you know, newer to the US introduced into that, into that ecosystem.

Um, and again, providing them with housing, um, introducing them into the network to say, “Hey, they’re gonna refer you for a job.” Um, so I think that a lot of those efforts are still, like we’re still yet to see some of the consequences off of, off of these- Mm … kind of, um, schemes. 

Zach Elwood: S- I know it’s probably hard to say because some of them might just be like inklings you get or, you know, suspicions you have, but, uh, do you have a sense of how much of it is like organized efforts?

You know, when you talked about like somebody putting an effort together to get applicants into companies, how much of this is like a big organized scheme versus like, you know, a small, uh, individual or a couple individuals kind of thing? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Mm-hmm. A one-off. Yeah. I think that I’ve seen it most prevalent with recruiting for a certain project, and a lot of the times the way that these individuals will go about things is they would apply to the remote project, typically a large scale project within financial crime, right?

So compliance, they would apply to that project. What they’re banking on is that if, if a bank, um, is looking to hire a lot of people, they would go through a management consulting firm. The management consulting firm essentially handles that entire process. They would go to a third-party vendor, so a staffing firm, to say, “Hey, we need the people.

So we need 50 people, let’s say, for this project.” So these individuals will then refer each other and apply through different channels. So typically, multiple staffing firms sometimes can partner up with the consulting firm on that project. And in the same, in that same breath, also multiple management consulting firms could be working on that project as well.

So these individuals will gain, try to gain information and then refer each other so that as many of them can get onto the same project. Um, so where I’ve seen an example of that being very organized is working directly with the end client to say, “Hey, there’s multiple people that are applying or that have gotten employment from you that are all residing at the exact same address.”

So there’s Five to seven people that came from a different staffing firm a lot of the times working through, you know what, a different management consulting firm that all claim they live at that exact address. When you give them a call and you say, “Hey, do you, do you have roommates? Do you live with other people there?”

A lot of the times they’ll be confused. They, you know, might not know the name of the person they, they supposedly live with. Um, and then you start hearing them, uh, sort of concoct stories as far as, “Oh, you know, that’s their, you know, that’s their American name. So when you at first asked me if I knew this person, I, I didn’t recognize, uh, you know, the name that you provided me with.”

Zach Elwood: Oh, yeah. That, I mean, that seems like a, some, some major red flags there. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, so… And I would imagine if they’re trying to infiltrate companies, they’re looking for jobs that are pretty entry-level, that are fairly easy to get into, and where the, a company is hiring multiple of those kinds of jobs.

Am I, am I right on that? And, and, and if so, what kind of j- what kinds of jobs are they pursuing that have the most likelihood of them getting into it? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. So they’re definitely going after the, the bulk hiring sort of projects. So whenever they hear around that, “Hey, you know, this bank right now is looking to hire, you know, number of, of consultants, contractors,” that’s, that to them is what they’re targeting.

So, um, not necessarily even entry-level jobs. Mm. I would say some of them are a little bit more senior level as well. Oh. So I think anything, the sweet spot would be anything in that five-year mark, three to five years, um, and remote. They w- especially during COVID, I think that’s how a lot of them were able to, to, to do this back, back, I would say 2021, 2022, when we were seeing a lot of those larger scale projects being available for people, you know, remotely all over the US.

Uh- 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm … 

Dani Tepedjiyska: that was their target. 

Zach Elwood: And, um, and sorry if I’m not, um, understanding it, but when they’re, when they’re going after these bank, uh, jobs, compliance fraud type of jobs, um, may- maybe you could talk a little bit more about what exactly they’re trying to do at tho- at those specific bank jobs. I know we talked a little bit about getting data out, but- 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Mm-hmm

what do 

Zach Elwood: you think they’re trying to do in general, specifically? Oh, 

Dani Tepedjiyska: a lot of the people are, again, they’re applying to the either anti-money laundering positions or, uh, KYC, so know your customer. So a lot of the times what they’re looking to do is understand how people, you know, how actual analysts are being able to detect red flags, alerts, suspicious activity out there, um, and then essentially go to these organizations and warn them to say, “This is how they’re catching you.

These are some of the things they’re looking out for in the transactions. These are some of the things that, uh, trigger alerts for them.” Um, so they’re just the, you know, someone on the inside to- Wow … feed them information. So, 

Zach Elwood: I mean, that seems… The, I guess that was the surprising thing to me is that these places would be that, uh, organized and that they would have people Set up to give, get information like that.

Do you have a sense, like, like how many, uh, how big a problem do you think this is these days? Have you encountered many people personally that you think are, are trying to do these things? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah, I think that it, there’s a, it’s a long game for a lot of these individuals, for a lot of these fraudulent groups.

There are still candidates into the market that I’m, I’m seeing who are applying to a job. They have a great resume, but when you look back at their original job, their first job into compliance, their second job into compliance, that’s when you start to notice those unknown staffing firm names. So a lot of the times people will put on their resume that they worked for a certain large bank.

When you actually ask them, “Hey, who was your employer?” Right? Like, “Who payrollled you?” They will say, “Well, actually, it was a staffing firm, so I just put on my resume the name of the bank because that was the project I was on. However, really my employer was the staffing firm.” And a lot of the times organizations really weren’t doing their due diligence and taking a look into the staffing firm.

Um, they would just call- Mm … the staffing firm, talk to the manager, the manager will clear them, will say, “Yep, this person worked with us on this project.” But no one was actually taking a look to see, well, is the staffing firm a legitimate business? Are they really working with this large bank? Um- Mm. Or are they just clearing people?

So there were a lot of these organizations that I would, I would see pretty regularly, certain staffing firms that always claimed that they had a lot of consultants out on projects working with really, um, you know, reputable consulting firms or banks, um, and, and they would, they would clear people. But again, that, the question mark there was how legitimate is the staffing firm?

Because when you take a look at their website, you would always find that they never really had certain people listed on there. There was always just one HR number, um, that you could call, but it, it, that’s really all you got. When you take a look into LinkedIn and you search up the company, not many followers, not many employees on there.

It tend, it tended to be a lot of the actual consultants that would, um, be listed under, uh, people instead of actual employees or recruiters at the company. 

Zach Elwood: Have there been, um, major stories in the, in the news about people being, uh, people or groups being caught for this kind of thing that you know of that come to mind?

Dani Tepedjiyska: I think the North Korea example you mentioned, um, a lot of those individuals were more so on the technology side of things, uh, system engineers, system implementations. Um, I haven’t seen a lot of that come out of compliance, but I do expect it to at some point come out, um, because again, some of those individuals, as I mentioned, now have successfully infiltrated, right?

So if they got cleared And actually secured a legitimate, a legitimate gig, a legitimate role. Now they have continued on to move from one project to the next to a point that it wouldn’t even pop up in their background check anymore, right? Because certain companies don’t go back far enough. So as, as time passes, they would be fully integrated into the, the ecosystem, and no one’s going to go back and check, well, who was your employer back in 2021 or 2020, right?

So I think that that is the longer term play there for a lot of these individuals is to get to a point where they’re pretty high up in their career, uh, where they’re no longer just analysts, right? Like they’ve been in the space long enough, um, and they’ll have a little bit more, more access and more, more power.

So I think that that is the, that’s the scary part. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. When you, uh, when you talked about staffing agencies that might be corrupt or, or underhanded in some way, ha- have any of those been exposed? Or is that, um, more just a, a suspicion of what might, might be happening? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: A lot of the organizations I’ve worked with, the consulting firms, the banks that have caught onto this, that have, you know, sat me down to say, “Hey, this is a problem.

This is, this is something that we’re seeing a lot of.” They do have lists of certain staffing firms that they keep as sort of like a red flag to say, “Hey, these are some of the ones we’ve noticed in the market. You know, very small, not many people there. They tend to– They claim that they work with these re- reputable organizations.

Um, we have a suspicion that this is not a real staffing firm.” So- Hmm … they kinda keep track of a lot of these. And listen, the same way I do as well. I have a list of certain staffing firms I’ve come across where I’m not feeling too comfortable really submitting individuals for roles. So that list is pretty long.

You’d be surprised. Hmm. But, uh- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Is, is it the case that the staffing agencies are actively doing something malicious, or is it the case that they’re more just lazy and, like, doing what, uh, the applicants say and not really– they’re not vetting people? I’m not really clear on that. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: No, they are very much involved.

They are essentially backing them up. So that is the entire engine behind these individuals being actually able to clear background check because if it wasn’t for the staffing firm clearing them, none of this really would, would work, right? Um, but again, when you’re going through all these different layers, when you have a bank working with a consulting firm, then working with a staffing firm, things can get lost.

So, you know, you can clear someone just because you called a number of their manager and they cleared that individual, um, saying that they, they worked on a certain project. So you never really have to get any real, you know, clearance. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Uh, when it comes to, um, indicators, uh, whether it’s malicious actors or maybe just people being, um, deceptive in some way when it comes to personal interactions you’ve had on calls or And I imagine it mostly happens on calls, but what are some indicators that, uh, you know, alert you to the fact that somebody’s maybe being deceptive or underhanded in their approach?

Dani Tepedjiyska: I think that they have only gotten smarter and better at, at what they do. I think, you know, surprisingly enough, some of the, some of those individuals are some of the most polished, you know, uh, candidates I’ve, I’ve seen in the market. They always dress very professional. They carry themselves, um, again, in a, you know, really professional manner, always on time for the interviews.

I, I always Zoom or Teams call my candidates. But they start off very confident. They have a lot to say. Where they really start to crack is when you ask them some more pointed questions and you, and you, um, question something that they’re saying. I think that their expectation is that a lot of recruiters in this space, you know, who maybe are not as educated, don’t know compliance as well, they’re going to hear someone who sounds really confident, um, really polished, and they’re going to say, “Great, this person is exactly what I’m looking for.

They’re hitting all the things I need them to say. Let me just move on to clear them on the job, and that can be done.” Right? “I can submit this candidate to the job.” But when you give them a little bit of pushback, which I would do all the time, that is when you see them get nervous. All of a sudden they’re not as confident.

They’re not acting as professional or as polished. So just seeing that, that change, it’s something in their eyes, right? You can kind of notice that, oh, something went wrong when you ask them a very simple clarifying question. So I’ve seen a lot of people give it away- Mm … when, when you do ask them a question back, and a lot of the times they just, they would, they would say, “Oh, my Wi-Fi does- isn’t working,” or, “I couldn’t hear you.

Can you repeat that?” Um- Oh, yeah. But– and for the people who actually are not as prepared as they should be, um, I have seen examples of people who wear glasses or maybe will sit behind, um, something that has a reflection, whether it’s, um, uh, like a mirror or, um, something where I could see their screen, right?

I’ve seen individuals who have, uh, will very clearly open up a chat of some sort, and as I’m asking questions, someone’s typing back answers. I just see that, that movement or they’re asking ChatGPT. It’s just very clear that they are communicating with someone, um- Hmm … another, another way. You know, you know, in other examples I’ve, I’ve heard people whisper answers.

If, if I could kind of hear, I’ll wear my headphones typically so I can hear a little bit more clearly what’s going on in their background. I have heard people whisper certain things to them, you know, them looking around the room, looking at someone, uh, reading off. I can see their eyes moving. They’re reading off something.

So there’s a lot of ways to tell if you care to push back and ask and really listen, which again, a lot of the times when you’re working As a recruiter, there’s a sense of a, “Okay, I just need to submit as many people as possible,” especially if I’m working on a big project, “Let me just submit this person, clear them on the job, move past it.”

So it’s easy for things to fall through the crack, but there’s definitely a lot of signs out there. 

Zach Elwood: Do you think, uh… I mean, are these people that are living in the United States, or are some of these people pretending they live in the United States? Or h-h-how does that break down, you think? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: A lot of the ones I’ve dealt with, they are in the United States.

I’ve seen hubs of people who would do a lot of this in, um, Dallas, in, in Maryland. Um, but I hear- I’ve heard of m-multiple different stories, especially from North Korea, people who would, you know, fake an IP address, right? Like, they would be pretending to be working out of, you know, a certain state in the US, but they actually are in North Korea.

But the individuals I’ve dealt with personally, they are. They’re, they’re in the US. They are, um… This is just a, another job to them. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Uh, I g- yeah, I guess the thing that really surprised me about it was, I mean, I know, I know scams are so prevalent these days, but I, I kind of e-expected people to be more careful with, like, actually putting their face on something.

So I guess I, I guess I was surprised by, you know, the idea that people would be so– take such risks to theoretically, like, put themselves out there. But I guess it make- it can kinda make sense in terms of, like, well, it’s a long, it’s a long con kind of thing. Like, they’re actually gonna be doing the job and, you know, for a while, they’re actually gonna be working, and then they’re just gonna be, like, you know, doing, um, whatever things maybe on the side that they’re, that are doing underhanded things.

So it kinda makes sense in the terms of, like, if you view it as more of, like, they’re just more of, like, bad, uh, industrial espionage type of employees, which, you know, that kind of thing happens, and it’s not really that surprising. I guess, I guess at first I was just like, I’m surprised people would take such risks, but- Mm-hmm

yeah, people do do that kind of stuff all the time. It’s every day, right? Yeah. Yeah. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Um, I’ve, uh… I had an individual I, I interviewed, and I’m assuming maybe he was really early on in his, you know, this sort of work. But he had a Indeed account that I, I found his resume on, and obviously it was a compliance, uh, resume.

We had, we had a call, and at one point, you know, I just kept asking more and more questions and, and he would just, he just looked at me and he just shook his head and he’s like, “I, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying,” and, and just hung up and never spoke, never spoke to me again, right? That didn’t pick up.

I refreshed his Indeed account maybe two days after- And everything was changed back to, I guess, his actual job, right? So all the five, six years of experience he had that he claimed were at a bank working as an AML analyst, actually he was a, a, a truck driver, uh, a delivery person. So it w- all, it all went back to, I guess, whatever he was actually doing.

So I guess stopped one right there in his tracks. 

Zach Elwood: Now, do you think, uh, I’m curious, I mean, because obviously there’s a lot of incentives for people to just exaggerate and lie about their experiences to get a job in general. Do you feel like it can be kinda hard to t- I mean, I imagine you must deal with a lot of people who do that even just for non-nefarious, just trying to get a job reasons, which w- might make it like you might be prone to being like, is was this a malicious actor or just somebody who was just lying to try to get a, a job?

Do you have a sense of like, a- and d- do you feel like maybe it’s made you a little paranoid being like, “Eh, is this guy some sort of a, you know, a, you know, mastermind trying to get access to things, or is he just lying to get a better job?” Do you have any thoughts on that? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. People ask me that all the time.

I’m very skeptical that if someone wants to get a job and they’re gonna fake a resume and go through that process, they would fake a financial crime resume- Hmm … and try to get into financial crimes, right? Like- Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, they can do that with other industries that are maybe gonna be a little bit less intense and, um…

And I think another part of it would pay more, because I think a- another consequence of, of this entire scheme is how this actually affects, you know, the real people, like the actual actors in, in this space, actual professionals in, within compliance. Because these, these folks were willing to take whatever.

They didn’t really care that much about the, the hourly rates. So you’re talking about an anti-money laundering analyst who’s applying to a remote job saying, “Yeah, I’ll do this for 25, 27 an hour.” Um, which the actual, looking back 2019, 2018, people within compliance with that kind of experience were making 70, 80 an hour.

Hmm. Right? Like the, the rates were significantly higher. And then I think that the introduction of these kind of, you know, uh, fraudulent actors into the space has only negatively affected, um, sort of like the market and the salaries out there for individuals. Um, because there’s all these people who are just willing to, to work for whatever salary, that I think it gave a lot of hiring managers, a lot of companies, a false sense of what salary expectations are out there.

Hmm. And I think that that then pushed a lot of people away from compliance because they said, “Hey, I can’t work for, for this kind of money. This is a very intricate job. A lot is expected out of me, especially if I’m getting into more complex, uh, industries like crypto or fintech.” I, I don’t understand why the rates are, are becoming lower than they were before.

Zach Elwood: Speaking of other indicators you’ve seen, h- I know, um, I mean, I, I personally have gotten all these messages from fake recruiters using AI to reach out to me and try to present some, you know, realistic front, like long… Actually, the AI-generated content was like the first thing that gave it away, where it was like this long thing, you know, basically like flattering me.

I’m like, “This is really weird” off the bat. But I’m curious, have you seen AI-generated content, uh, play a role in, um, or, or maybe even deepfake, uh, kind of technology that might be more rare? But, um, have you s- have you personally encountered much of that in, in applicant, uh, b-bad applicant, deceptive applications?

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. I think at this point, everyone’s resume looks alike, extremely identical, right? So I’m seeing a lot of great resumes out there and a lot of people applying to jobs, so it makes it difficult for recruiters, makes it difficult for hiring managers to really distinguish who’s actually good, who, who is, you know, really who they say they are.

So I think it’s only making it easier for people to, to do things like that, to have a, a, a better resume. They can prepare, right? Like these individuals will prepare for an interview much easier now, where they can just go into, you know, an AI platform and say, “Hey, how can I go about answering these kind of questions?

What if they give me pushback?” And with how quickly AI can get back to you, they can do it live during the interview. They can pull up their phone, uh, or another monitor behind them, and as I’m speaking, it’s directly feeding into the, in the AI platform, generates an answer back, and then they sound, you know- Yeah.

It’s so easy … really, really professional. They sound good. Yeah. Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: That’s crazy. I mean, yeah. That’s– It’s wild how much these tools can help enable scams and deception so much on so many fronts. I mean, it’s, it’s just wild. Um, do you have any other, uh, any other anecdotes that come to mind about interesting spots where you found somebody was, uh, saw indicators of somebody doing something, uh, underhanded?

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. I think one of the, one of the scariest things about, you know, about these, these networks is that they all know each other. So a lot of the times, the people who are doing this are not just individually working with a certain organization, right? They– A lot of the times there is a really big network.

They know of each other. They refer each other. Um, so I have had experiences where, again, someone who potentially even got through to me and did really well in an interview with me was then said, “Hey, I have a couple of people I can refer over to you.” Um, I think that that, um, again, just the, the depth of, of how extensive this entire operation could be, um, but, but also it helps to then go back and see who potentially is You know, of, of imposter, um, through these references as well.

So I think it, it could also be helpful for us to catch people in that way to say, “Hey, like this person referred this individual to me.” The likelihood of them also, you know, not being who they say they are is even higher now, so. 

Zach Elwood: With the rise of the AI stuff making it, you know, making it even easier, easier than ever to create good-looking resumes, realistic-looking resumes and such, does it become even more important to have, uh, services that, um, check someone’s background?

Like I, I, I would imagine that gets more important than ever, and if so, are there, are there known… I guess I’m curious if there are apps, services that are known for like, “Hey, we wanna easily check if, uh, if this person actually worked at these places.” Although I imagine it must, in many cases, require a good amount of manual review to like actually verify someone’s worked a bunch of jobs, especially if they were working through staffing agencies or something.

But curious- Mm-hmm … if you have any thoughts on that. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. I think every– That’s the difficult part. Every staffing firm has their own, you know, internal background check processes. Every bank or consulting firm that is working with them has their own requirements as far as like what needs to be seen in a background check for the person to actually clear and start.

So it makes it difficult because it’s not standard, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and I think that, to your point, it does have to be manual, unfortunately, because sometimes it, it… If someone applies to a job and on their resume they say the name of the bank and then in parentheses the staffing firm, and let’s say it’s a fraudulent staffing firm, technically speaking, when the person gets an offer and you’re going through the onboarding process, if there is a W-2 form from that staffing firm that says, “Yep, the person worked here,” that does count as a cleared background check because it matches.

Whatever’s on their resume is on their W-2. But that extra step of verifying the legitimacy of the staffing firm, no one seems to be thinking about. It, it just, it never is part of the process. So I think it, it comes down to the organization having knowledge about this and then doing their own due diligence, right, to actually check that.

But it gets a little bit dicey because there are some legitimate staffing firms out there that are smaller that do have- Right … connections to, you know, maybe the, the owner has, uh, used to work at that company and they do really have a, you know, a point of contact there, and they do really work with that firm.

But it’s difficult a lot of the times to really tell apart who’s, who’s real and who’s not. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I guess it’s j- yeah, it’s the usual problem of like In general, I mean, I’ve been involved in hiring processes in software, uh, tech companies and, I mean, even just hiring alone is difficult because people, you know, people can exaggerate and, uh, mislead you, and it’s really hard often to really know if someone is who they say they are.

And then you add in the fact that there’s people being, you know, extra malicious on top of that, you know, and e-extra deceptive. I imagine that becomes much, uh, very hard space to navigate. Mm-hmm. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. And I think that that has made it really tough on, on staffing firms out there, right? I, I speak all the time to organizations who are very hesitant to work with a staffing firm partly because of this, right?

I think it created a lot of distrust to say, “Hey, we don’t wanna add another layer to, to this, to this process. We want to keep it as close to, to our chest as possible to really ensure that none of these things happen.” Uh, which I think then created a lot of, um, yeah, distrust. And, and I know a lot of the times I reach out to a lot of crypto platforms, fintech platforms to say, “Hey, let’s partner up with Michael Page.

We should work together, have great people in my network.” And a lot of the times their response is, “Hey, we’re really hesitant to work with third parties and really hesitant to work with staffing firms.” So that, that, you know, obviously caused a… That, that’s a consequence, um, that obviously doesn’t make me happy, but I think overall it did.

It just, um, everyone’s very worried about adding an additional layer to their process. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Right. Um, I was gonna pivot to a more general topic of, um, you know, as someone who’s been applying for jobs myself recently, I was, I was curious if you have any, uh, tips about, uh, as, as a recruiter, things that, uh, are pet peeves or frustrations with, um, resumes and, and cover letters in general that if you could share like a, any tips off the top of your head that either you’ve encountered that people often do wrong or that you’ve heard, you know, the, the companies themselves, uh, complain about applicants doing wrong.

Mm-hmm. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: I think whether it’s distinguishing yourself from fraudulent candidates or distinguishing yourself from your competition, because it, it has been a tough market. One of the key, the key things anyone can do, I think, is to provide references, 

uh, 

along with their resume because to your point about AI, there is a lot of really great resumes out there that just look identical.

So now a lot of people will say, “Hey, I applied to a job and I see that there were 200 applicants that applied within the hour. How am I going to stand out?” So I always say the people who have good relationships in this space who are able to say, “Hey, I have two to three good people who can speak on my behalf that have a good title at a, at a good company that I’ve created a relationship with over however long I’ve been in this space A lot of the times that could be a, a really big deciding factor, and it could give the hiring manager or the recruiter a sense of trust to say, “Okay, this is, this is probably someone I wanna speak with.

This is someone who, um- Right … you know, I can actually distinguish from the rest of the bunch.” So that would be one of those things. The other thing would be, you know, for me as a recruiter, I go to a lot of compliance-related events because I’m, I’m a compliance recruiter. I always urge people just, you know, stay involved, try to network with people, go to events.

Um, there’s a lot of opportunities out there to meet people in real life, and in a market like this, that can really make a difference between someone applying online versus meeting someone at an event and saying, “Hey, this is someone I actually spoke with. I’m willing to kind of go that extra step and push them through this process quicker than I would’ve if they just were another applicant online.”

Um, and then lastly, I think LinkedIn presence is very important because it does, it, it, it’s another layer of trust and credibility that someone can have, um, to their prospective, uh, industry. So I always recommend to people, update your LinkedIn and, and keep active there. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. To that last point, I recently learned, this was news to me, I talked to a recruiter who told me, you know, some of the behind-the-scenes of how LinkedIn works for recruiters, and she had taught me that the more active you are on LinkedIn, the higher up in the search results you come for like, you know, say recruiters are searching for specific, uh, keywords and such, the higher up in those- Mm-hmm

uh, results you come. And that was pretty eye-opening to me. I, I, I guess it’s, it might’ve been kind of obvious in hindsight that LinkedIn would do that to kind of like give you an incentive to use LinkedIn more if you’re, you know, looking to network or looking for jobs. But that, that seemed like a very important tip, you know?

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. Yeah, and, and also replying to recruiters, right? That is, uh, one of the boxes you can click when you’re reaching out to people is people who are most likely to respond to, to a, um, it’s an InMail that essentially we send out to people. But just responding to recruiters, even if it’s to say you’re not interested, even if it’s just to kind of have a conversation, I think things like that will make you, in the algorithm, stand out a little bit more.

Right. So just highly recommend being active in that way. Um, and again, update, update your experience. Just because your resume is updated, if that’s not reflected on your actual LinkedIn background, it can be tough sometimes for recruiters to find you and like really seek you out. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. The other tip, uh, curious what you think, think of this, the other tip someone gave me was, that I thought was important, uh, was putting, uh, important keywords in your title Uh, because that really played a role in when, when recruiters were searching in LinkedIn, the title played a big role in what was returned, which I didn’t really know before.

I would’ve assumed it was, like, the job titles itself. So that made me change my title to, like, basically keyword stuff, my, uh, my, my main title with, uh, various things. But I’m curious if you think that’s important, too. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Absolutely, and I think that even if it’s not in your title, um, or in your header, it could be a bullet point under, you know, the different titles and different roles you’ve had.

Mm. And again, a lot of the times you have to remember for, for job seekers out there, there are recruiters that are looking at your resume that might not fully understand what you do. So if you think that, “Oh, this is pretty clear, right? Based off of my title, based off of this abbreviation, they can tell what I’ve done.”

But a lot of the times you are dealing with just a potentially a junior level recruiter just looking to find, uh, the best match and then pass it over to the hiring manager. So make it as easy and simple for them to actually tell, “Okay, this is a good candidate,” you know, “I should get them through the process.”

Zach Elwood: Yeah, no, I had a personal experience that because at Amazon recently, you know, I got laid off in the Amazon layoffs, but I was there for about four months, and my title was programmer writer, which I, I just put that on LinkedIn, but then people were like, “What the hell is that?” And I was like, “Oh, it’s,” you know, I put in parentheses like API tech writer, you know, so people would understand more.

I was like, yeah, their title was kinda weird. Like, nobody uses that title. Nobody’s gonna even know- Mm-hmm … what that is, you know? So that’s a good, that’s a good point, yeah. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. Um- So just always spell it out as, as much as you can- Yeah, make it obvious … make it as clear. 

Zach Elwood: Use the regular language that other people use.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Um, and to your first point, too, like I– the thing about standing out, I mean, I’ve thought about that, too. And then to your point about making your, uh, relationships with other people more clear as like a way to establish, uh, authenticity or credibility. It’s like I, I, I, I hadn’t seen anybody else do this, but I put a quote about my work, basically a testimonial at the top of my resume from somebody I know who works at a well-known company who was my former boss, and I hadn’t seen anybody do that.

But that was kind of my way to like try to do that and be like, “Hey, uh, I have, you know, I, I have some legitimate, uh, people I’ve worked with who can vouch for me.” And yeah, that was kind of my way to like combat this sense I have of like, A, there’s a lot of applicants, and then B, there’s just a lot of people who’s, who are creating pretty decent looking resumes and cover letters now because of AI, which makes it even harder to stand out.

Yeah. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. No, I think that’s great, and I think more people should do that. Utilize your network as much as possible because, you know- People being able to speak on your behalf is, is such a, such a power in a market that is as slow as I think it has been recently. So highly recommend to people to, again, you don’t have to include the names of the individuals.

You don’t have to include the actual, you know, quote of the things that they’ve said about you, but just being able to say, “Hey, there is someone with an X title at an X kind of organization that is willing to speak on my behalf if references were to, uh, be requested.” Right. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I’ve always been, I’ve always been kind of surprised when I was involved in hiring at past companies.

Uh, I was always kind of surprised how little the, uh, they focused on, um, references from other people, which I thought maybe it was some- something where those had kind of fallen by the wayside as, uh, seeming, uh, not cool in some way anymore. But I don’t know. They al- it always seemed to me that that was like a, seemed like a very important thing to check that.

But I, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Is that like, i-i-is that still a thing that people check references and stuff these days? I mean, m- and maybe it’s different in different industries, but… 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Mm-hmm. Not as much, but I do that for a lot of my clients, and what I started doing recently is actually submit references before they even have an interview, right?

I think in the past it was a thing of, hey, once we’re at the, the, the offer stage or we’re towards like the final, you know, the, the final process there, um, that’s when you would ask for references or submit them. I started doing that as I submit candidates to really showcase to my clients, “Hey, these people, you should really meet with them.

You should really speak with them.” Because of the, just the, the amount of people in the market, you have to do something right away to stand out. But I think that in a, in a candidate-driven market, you know, um, that changes, right? So it really depends on, on what’s going on at any given time. Right. I think right now it’s just a lot of really great people and not many job opportunities out there, so- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah … things have reverted back to- 

Zach Elwood: Gotta do what you can to- … checking references … stand out. Yeah. I, that’s why I, in my portfolio, I put like the testimonial section at the very top basically, and have a few quotes there to try to do that. Um, well, because this is a, um, behavior-focused podcast, I, I wondered if, you know, uh, uh, uh, if you have any last-minute, um, observations about interesting reads that you’ve gotten of candidates that involve like things that they do or things that they say.

Any, any anecdotes that come to mind? It’s, it’s cool if not, but I figured I’d end with that question. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. It, it i- it is so interesting the, how Easily you can tell, even if it’s on a video call, if it’s on a Zoom, when someone gets really nervous and- Mm … their eyes start to shift, their body language, um, goes from super confident and, you know, sitting straight to, you know, okay, now I’m, uh, slouching.

I’m kind of looking around. Um, I can see I’m opening up a new browser because, uh, the lighting will change, right, on, um, from the screen. So- 

Zach Elwood: Mm … 

Dani Tepedjiyska: the a lot of the- Yeah, you see that flash 

Zach Elwood: of white. I’m, I’m always worried- Yeah … that people will read into that when I’m, like, on a call. Not, not a, not a job application, but you know, that, when that screen- Yeah

changes to white, they’re, they’re always wondering, I, I assume they’re wondering like, “Oh, is he looking at something else? He’s distracted by something,” you 

Dani Tepedjiyska: know? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think that people can go from cool, calm, and collected and very confident to jittery and nervous. So that, that shift is a big, um, giveaway, I would say.

Because sometimes people are just nervous the whole time, and that, that’s one thing. But when you see the change, when you see the shift- Mm … that’s when you really start to kind of question it. Um, same thing with you can see when someone is reading off their screen, right? When you’re on a camera, when you’re on a call, I can see their eyes moving and shifting.

And when I ask them, “Hey, are you reading off of, off of something?” The response to that is very, a big giveaway because people who become really defensive, I have a, you know, a red flag for them. Like, okay, that’s, uh, that’s suspicious. Yeah. The people who, who will say- Better to admit it … “I just have-” Yeah.

Yeah. “I just have a couple of notes I was looking at,” and they can be honest and, and admit to that, then I’ll say, “Okay.” Right. “That makes sense.” Yeah. Right? Like that, that’s normal. So- Right. Right … um, just the shift in their energy and politeness as well. They’ll get a little bit impatient if I ask them, you know, questions about things like that.

Um, like, “Why do you have to know? Why are you asking?” So. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m curious on the, uh, on the behavior front. Uh, you know, obviously there’s many reasons people can get anxious, but I’m curious, like, when you see somebody get more anxious, is that sometimes a clue to you to, like, maybe ask more questions about that?

Is that, like, a practical outcome of noticing somebody’s anxiety? 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah, I think that If that anxiety is there right away, then well, that’s something we can work through and I can say, “Hey, let’s work on, you know, getting you to a point where you feel a lot more confident to prepare you better for your actual interview with the, with the client.”

But if I see that it’s a shift, then that’s when I am a little bit more alert to say, “Why? What, what is there?” Right? So like I’ll go back to asking them some more technical questions. A lot of the times, um, I’ll just kind of go back to the content to say, “Hey, tell me a bit more about this specific thing that you do,” or, “Give me an example of the types of documents you collect.”

Whatever the, you know, the question could be. But- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm … um, it is, it’s a bit of a, it’s a red flag when someone switches up in the middle- Yeah … of the interview. 

Zach Elwood: And you would usually, like, as a red flag, you would, you would, you would probably just dig into it a little bit more. Or, or would you, would it ever be like an- enough of a red flag?

Well, I, I guess it would depend on if you dug into it, what you found. But I… Would you, would you tend to, if you notice somebody becoming more anxious, would you, uh, dig into it a little bit more as a standard procedure and be like, “Hey, I wanna see if there’s something causing this anxiety, if I can on the call?”

Yeah. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah, absolutely. Because on my end, I’m on the candidate side, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Like, I want the people that I’m interviewing- Yeah, you wanna win-win … to succeed and to do well. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. I wanna get them, get them the job, right? Yeah. Like, that benefits me. So- Yeah … um, I wanna get to the bottom of it so that we’re better prepared for their actual interview.

So I do, I’m really honest to say, “Hey, like, you know, I don’t want to, um, I don’t wanna lie to you. I don’t wanna pretend like, you know, this is going great,” or, you know, “You, you answered this really well. Um, I wanna be honest with you because you, I mean, you deserve that feedback as is so you can be better.

Um, or, you know, we can make you better for, you know, the interview that I’m gonna submit you for.” So I tend to be pretty transparent with the people that I’m meeting with. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. That’s great. Um, well this has been great. Dani, thanks for taking the time. Is there anything else you wanna add before we go?

Dani Tepedjiyska: No, this is great. I think that the key takeaway from this is to the companies out there that are hiring, really know the recruiters you’re working with. Vette all the staffing firms you’re working with, and invest in people who are really educated and knowledgeable in, in, in the space that you’re actually looking to hire for.

So whether that’s compliance or technology or whatever it may be, I think it’s extremely important to have specialized recruiters out there who can actually catch some of that. I wouldn’t be able to catch someone doing something, something nefarious if they were, let’s say, in technology, right? But I can really catch those people within compliance because that’s, that’s my bread and butter.

That’s the domain. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Um, so I think that that is, that’s kind of the push is, hey- Let’s turn to more of a specialized, like, recruiter out there, um, that really can help you navigate whatever specific industry you’re in, whether you’re a candidate, um, looking to work with a recruiter or staff or a, a company looking to work with a recruiter.

Um, so that’s a big takeaway, but very interesting. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more out of this in the future, and- Yeah … we’ll be here to discuss that when something, when something- We will … something else happens. If you 

Zach Elwood: ever get any, if you ever en- encounter any, uh, video deepfakes in the wild and wanna talk about it, I, I, I’ll be here for you ’cause that’ll, that’d be interesting.

Dani Tepedjiyska: Yeah. 

Okay. I’ll let you know. 

Zach Elwood: Okay. Thanks Dani, appreciate it. 

Dani Tepedjiyska: Thank you.

Many people think police interrogations often involve reading body language and catching “tells” of deception. Interrogation trainer Mark Anderson explains how much of what’s taught about using nonverbal behavior in high-stakes interviews is based on myth, not science—and how a faulty focus on “reading people” can actually damage interviews. We dig into why stress behaviors don’t signal guilt, how confirmation bias warps investigations, and why “reading people” is far less useful than most believe. Instead, Mark lays out what actually works: deep listening, better questioning, managing conversations, and building real rapport—even with people who’ve done serious harm. Along the way, he shares stories from his career that show how empathy and curiosity can unlock information in surprising ways. If you’re interested in psychology, communication, or the reality behind interrogations, this episode might challenge some of your basic assumptions.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

TRANSCRIPT

(transcripts are automatically generated and will contain errors)

Mark Anderson: A lot of the nonverbal stuff was very much taught in, in the classroom and took up quite a bit of time in the classroom. I really immersed myself in a lot of the research and, uh, I recognized that the stuff that I was taught, there really was no research or basis for it other than folklore.…I’ve had to come to the realization that what I did was wrong and I, uh, how many interviews I damaged as a result of that…

Zach Elwood: That was a snippet from my talk with Mark Anderson, someone with over 40 years of experience in law enforcement, investigation, and training, and someone interested in sound, science-based practices for interrogation and interviewing. 

This is the People Who Read People podcast, which is aimed at better understanding the people around us: the things they do, and the things they say. You can learn more about it and sign up to get episode updates at behavior-podcast.com. 

I got interested in talking to Mark based on a few posts he wrote on LinkedIn earlier this year. I’ll read from one of these posts (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7427004276175966210/): 

After 50 years of research and hundreds of studies, the verdict is in: behavioral lie detection doesn’t work.

Not “needs improvement.” Not “requires better training.” Doesn’t work.

Meta-analyses show that people achieve hit rates around 54% when trying to detect lies from behavioral cues—barely better than flipping a coin (50%). 

Even more damning: when researchers account for publication bias, the data suggests there may be zero human ability to detect deception from nonverbal behavior.

The problems are fundamental:

 → Both innocent AND guilty people show stress behaviors in interviews

 → Training in behavioral cues produces only “marginal effects”

 → Confirmation bias makes us see what we expect to see

 → Individual differences make baseline assessment nearly impossible

Yet we continue teaching it. We continue relying on it. We continue making consequential decisions based on watching for fidgeting, eye contact, and nervous gestures.

I wanted to talk to Mark about the question: What works and what doesn’t work in interrogations? Topics we touch on include: 

• His journey from believing in and training common nonverbal-behavior myths to arriving at a more nuanced and realistic view
• Why there is so much bullshit about behavior out there – including bullshit spread by a good amount of law enforcement professionals 
• The faulty emphasis on looking when we should be focusing much more on listening 
• The importance of setting people at ease and gaining rapport in interrogation settings
• The importance of empathy and rapport-building in interrogation and undercover policing scenarios
• What Mark finds actually works the best for gathering information in high-stakes interviews
• Mark’s views on statement analysis

A little bit more about Mark from his website andersoninvestigative.com 

A retired Special Agent with the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Mark also served with the FBI, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and as Deputy Inspector General for New York State. He directed the nationally recognized Advanced Interviewing and Interviewing for Fraud Auditors programs at the Inspector General Criminal Investigator Academy (IGCIA) at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers , and taught extensively at both of those groups’ Behavioral Science Division.

Okay here’s the talk with Mark Anderson of Anderson Investigative: 

Zach Elwood: Hi, mark. Thanks for joining me. 

Mark Anderson: Hey, Zachary, it’s great to be here today. Thanks for having me. 

Zach Elwood: Thank you. So, um, maybe we could start with, um, the reason that I, um, wanted to talk to you was I saw some of your posts on LinkedIn talking about the, um, use of nonverbal behavior in interrogations or deception detection, and basically you were saying, uh, you know, everybody knows that these things aren’t useful, so what does really work?

So that was what got me interested in talking to you, and maybe you could start out, uh. Talking about how your views of, um, nonverbal behavior, uh, changed over time in, in the space of working on interrogations and interviews. 

Mark Anderson: Yeah, that’s a long story. Uh, for anybody watching, you can see that I’m kind of old.

So I learned, uh, uh, this stuff a long time ago, uh, a long time ago when a lot of the nonverbal stuff was very much taught in, in the classroom and took up quite a bit of time in the classroom. Uh, and so I learned under that model and worked with people who clearly subscribed to that model and did it that way for a long time.

So this transition has been one of those transitions over time, uh, where I’ve had to come to the realization that what I did was wrong and I, uh, how many interviews I damaged as a result of that, you know, so as I have done investigations over a long period of time and then studied them and researched them, and now.

Teach, uh, interviewing and interrogation. Uh, I really immersed myself in a lot of the research and, uh, I recognized that the stuff that I was taught, there really was no research or basis for it other than folklore. Legacy practice stories told from one person to another. And, and that somehow was good enough.

Uh, and there is such a huge body of research out there that has debunked so much of that stuff, uh, that really, it would compromise my integrity to keep talking about, and this is an issue I struggle with all the time and people that I, I run into and, and their response to it, it’s almost like they feel, uh, they would be admitting fault if they say this stuff doesn’t work, because that’s what they’ve done.

And from my standpoint, uh. I, I couldn’t, you know, I, I can’t be faulted for not driving a car before a car is created, but once the car is created, if I’m still riding a horse and, and, uh, acting like the car doesn’t exist, that’s where my integrity is compromised. So I, I just wrestled with that for a long time and realized I was not in the right place and that things needed to change and I had to change.

I had to change first and then the rest of it, uh, would come about as a result of that. 

Zach Elwood: So, I’m curious, could you get into a little, a few specifics about, you know, what it was that you used to maybe use in the non-verbal space, or, or what was commonly used and what you kind of found eventually that you, that you moved away from?

Any granular things you care to talk about there. 

Mark Anderson: Yeah, sure. And, and, and there’s a, there’s a ton of them and, and I still, like, when I’m teaching classes, I have to really keep myself focused not to fall back into, and a lot of times it’s wording, uh, uh, I, I, I think the big issue is some of the words that we choose to use, uh, but it’s also a mindset issue as to how you’re approaching these things.

So, which is something I never learned in interviewing, in interrogation, uh, training before was the issue of, you know, where’s my mindset out? Mindset at, and it gets into a lot of what I’ve heard you speak about before, uh, Zach, with regard to the issue of cognitive biases and, you know, confirmation bias and all the rest of the stuff.

That’s all a mindset issue. So we need to address that first. But from the standpoint of some of the specifics, you know, a lot of it I was, uh, taught was it’s an issue of deception versus not deception. You know, when you see this stuff, oh, if they’re, they’re twitching and they’re looking this way and they got this closed posture, you know, the way I learned that was, that’s an indication that the person could be deceptive.

Uh, and, and, you know, you take it at face value. You know, my first interview training was with the FBI, when I went with the FBI and it, all that stuff was there. So it’s like, well, who else would do it better? So then you start using that stuff. But when you start using it. Common sense kind of, uh, uh, drops in, you know, and human relationships drop in and you say, this isn’t working right.

This isn’t the right, uh, situation. So, you know, some of the stuff would be the body movement, you know, positional type stuff, uh, eye movement stuff, uh, which is still out there. Uh, I mean, I just, I was just wrestling one last week that I saw, uh, online. Somebody was talking about the use of contractions. Uh, there was always this, uh, statement made that 60% of people who don’t use contractions are not being truthful.

And, and like that was in my, you know, nonverbal and verbal, uh, baselining and behavior type stuff. And so I really started researching it. I could not find anywhere where that statistic, where that statistic came from. And I don’t even know to this day where it came from, but how do you put an exact statistic in there on that?

And, and then I I, if you don’t have a reference for it, so I think that you’ve seen, if you’ve read some of my stuff, everything I write now, there’s now scientific references for it. So you don’t think I’m just pulling out of my ear, you know? Uh, so those are some of the type of things that I’ve wrestled with, and there’s a ton of them.

Mm-hmm. There’s a ton of them. And, and I think the thing that we have to change first is what if we’re seeing that stuff for what it is, number one, it isn’t truth or deception. Uh, I, you know, it’s a, as you’ve talked about before, and it’s absolutely true, it’s a stress response and, and we see stress responses in all sorts of, uh, situations, you know, high, you know, high impact type situations.

I see stress from the innocent. I see stress from the guilty. I see stress from everyone because it’s a high impact situation. That’s how our life operates. So, you know, why do we assign something different to it? So, kind of long answer to a short question. Sorry about that. 

Zach Elwood: No, it’s, I mean, this is great. We could, like you said, before we started, we could talk about this for hours and really only scratch the surface on some of these things.

I mean, one, I’ve been, I’ve been really delving into what’s out there in the, you know, deception detection and interrogation, uh, help space. You know, like people doing writing books and doing consulting on this. And for example, I was watching, uh, Susan Carneros. A couple of her presentations on YouTube.

She’s the co-author of Spy the Lie, a, a pretty well selling book there. And for her and other people that I’ve seen give presentations or, or write about this, it can often seem like there’s just a pressure for them to talk about the nonverbal stuff. It’s almost like, I mean, a lot of the stuff they say makes sense because when, when they talk, when they’re talking about the content of what people say, it makes a lot of logical sense.

Like, are they answering the question, you know, logical deductions about the things people say, but then they get into the nonverbal stuff and I’m like, that is like the weakest part of what you’ve said. It, it it, and she, you know, for example, like she was saying, you know, one of her presentations, she’s like, in the first five seconds you’re looking for various responses, including these nonverbal things of like shifting your legs or like, you know, touching your face.

And I was like. That is just such a bad advice to me. Like I don’t, you know, but, but compared to all the logical things about content deduction, it’s just kind of surprising to me that there’s so much of this nonverbal stuff mixed along. With the more logical, you know, content deduction. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that, but do you, do you get the feeling that’s, there’s almost like this pressure for people to be like, well, Joe Navarro and other people talk about nonverbal stuff, so we have to throw some stuff in there to give people something on that front or something.

I don’t know. I, 

Mark Anderson: I think I, I absolutely, I I think you’re hitting on a good point. I, I have a theory on that just from, uh, training and been in, being in lots of training classes, people like that stuff because it’s fun to look at. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. 

Mark Anderson: Uh, but yeah, something, I mean, so’s aro, uh, you know, a, a good comedy on tv, but it’s not gonna help me in the interview room.

So I’m not sure, uh, it’s real useful, but talking about. Verbal content is not as sexy and fun as looking at people on the screen. 

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Mark Anderson: Uh, and, and I think that’s getting worse because I think more and more we wanna be entertained and, and this business is not about entertainment. And, and I do think there’s some pressure to have some of that stuff in.

Uh, I have cut so much of that stuff out. And frankly the stuff I’m replacing it with is a little bit more ah, you know, yawny. And so I, I have to find a way to make that, you know, Hey, see how this is just as fun? You just have to, you have to apply yourself more. And, and it’s a mental application rather than a visual application of, oh look, he must be lying.

He looked up into the left. You know, you, you gotta listen, you gotta engage. You gotta create an environment where that person is willing to share with you. Uh, so now what plays into that? Well, empathy and all sorts of stuff like that, which some people I don’t think are capable of. So they just wanna look and say, oh yeah, that person’s lying.

So I do think there’s some pressure to address that stuff. And some people have made their bank roll by addressing that stuff and so they’re gonna stick to it, 

Zach Elwood: right? Yeah. There is a sexiness to the behavior thing. I mean, that’s, yes, I’ll, I’ll be honest. I, I, I mentioned this in a podcast. I just did it. I mean, that’s one of the reasons my poker tells books have sold.

Well, even though I go outta my way to say this is much less important than the fundamental strategy. Like, you know, you should only be thinking about this stuff if you, uh, you know, if you are a, a quite a good practitioner of, of the strategy itself. So I do, I think pe I do believe people are really drawn to the reading people aspects.

And I think, you know, for some of these trainings I’ve watched and read, if, if these people, if we’re talking about real world scenarios, leaving aside the game scenarios, which I really distinguish between, but in these interrogation and law enforcement things, I really do think, like if you subtracted the stuff they’re talking about nonverbal, a lot of these trainings are quite good to me.

But the nonverbal and inclusion almost like greatly ruins it in a lot of these cases because you’re getting people encouraging them to focus on stuff that. Doesn’t matter. And even worse, you’re, you’re making them more likely to have confirmation bias about like, she touched her face, she moved her leg.

I am getting a sense that she’s being deceptive or whatever, you know, so it’s like, it takes, it takes training, education that could be quite good and actually makes it quite bad to me, which is an interesting thing, you know. 

Mark Anderson: I think that’s a, a really interesting observation. It, it really, I guess I’ll go with the two L words here.

Uh, it, it causes us to focus more on the looking and a little bit less on the listening. And we really need to spend more time on the listening. And most of us pretty much suck at listening, but we can Sure. Run our mouths really good. Uh, so I think anything that takes us away from the listening and whether you call it active listening or discipline, listening, engaging all of our senses in the process of paying attention to the person sitting across from us takes a lot of energy, a lot of cognitive energy to do that.

Uh, I don’t need to be wasting time on the looking side if it’s not gonna reveal anything anyhow. Uh, I, I’m not saying I do my interviews with my eyes closed, but anything I see I then wanna verify via what they say. So I’m not gonna make any assessments based on what I see. I might note it that I need to address that issue and get them to say it.

Because I, I think you’ve spoken to this several times. You, you see the verbal analysis of things much more valuable than the, uh, the visual analysis. And frankly, if I can get you to tell me what you’re feeling and what you’ve done, that’s what I want out of that interview. That’s you telling me. Not me assessing or assuming.

Uh, I, I, I think it goes with the, the line that I use a lot now, which is curiosity over certainty. So when I see something that’s curious, I’m gonna ask you about it. And then when you give me the answer now I have certainty. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And actually this reminds me of, I, I interviewed, uh, Gary Nener recently, who was the mm-hmm.

You know, lead hostage and standoff negotiator for the FBI. He was at Waco, and one thing he said was. Be they’re often, they were often in the situation of being on the telephone talking to people. Yes. Uh, and, and, and, and because of that, they were much more focused on what people said. And he said that was actually a benefit because taking away the visual element allowed you to really focus on what people say.

And I think, you know, your point about we really need to, I, I do think there is this undervaluing of what people say because what people say contains so much information, whether it’s what they’re, it’s what they’re telling you, it’s what they’re leaving out, it’s what they’re trying to avoid. You getting to know, you know, the, the, these various clues.

I mean, it’s, it’s where we get most of our, almost all of our information from leaving aside this myth that, you know, most communication is nonverbal, this very, uh, persistent 

Mark Anderson: mm-hmm. 

Zach Elwood: Myth, you know, but yeah, there just is so much information in, in what people say and really listening and really thinking about what they’re telling you is, is most of the game in these spots, you know?

Mark Anderson: Right. Absolutely. 

Zach Elwood: Well, I think, uh, you know, one thing that makes this area kind of hard to talk about is that we do read people every day in various ways. Like we’re, we’re, we’re always, you know, say we’re at work or we’re giving a presentation, we’re we are keeping track of how people are responding to us.

Are they looking bored? Do they seem like they don’t like us? Do they seem anxious? These kinds of things. And I think that that’s kind of the response I sometimes get out. Like just the other day I had somebody email me and say, Zach, I think you’re being too negative. Like, I often use these nonverbal things in my workplace.

For example, he, he was telling me, and I think that’s a one reason it’s hard to talk about, it’s because there’s a big distinction between like general social situations, say workplace, um. General social situations, giving a presentation, there’s a big difference between those areas where people are unguarded and you can get genuine signals, and we’re, we’re actually trying to communicate with each other in some way, uh, versus the situations that we’re talking about, which are, you know, interrogations that are antagonistic.

There’s a, um, you know, an understanding of, uh, some level of threat and risk involved. So, you know, when you get in those situations, trying to make use of tells that relate to anxiety just become really non meaningful because there’s a baseline of like, well, yeah, every, there’s many reasons why even an innocent person or a truth telling person could be anxious in these spots.

So that makes an entirely separate area from these, you know, more, uh, mundane and more social elements that we’re used to seeing in our everyday life. But I think that, uh. The fuzziness of that distinction, I think is what leads to a lot of people being like, no, we’re reading people all the time. It’s gotta be of some use in these, you know, interrogation and uh, you know, high, high conflict kind of spots.

Right? But I think that’s, I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of, of the application. 

Mark Anderson: I, I think it is. I think there is a kind of natural extension of it though. If, you know, if I’m in everyday life with you and you come into work and you’re looking tense and stressed out, uh, I’m gonna observe that.

I’m gonna probably know that a little bit because I know you from day to day, but the only way I’m gonna verify what’s going on is I’m gonna ask you about it. I’m gonna say, man, Zach, what’s going on? Are you okay? Right. Uh, I do the same thing in the interview room. Uh, yeah, I’m going to observe it, but I can’t make conclusions because of it.

’cause you could be in the work environment too, and somebody’s stressed out. It’s because their child has just got sent to the emergency room. I mean, you don’t know until you ask. Good point. And so to me, it’s the same situation in the interview room. If you’re up and I say this all the time in class and they say, you don’t really do that in the interview.

I said, yeah, I do. If somebody’s sitting, sitting across from me looking all angry at me, uh, or, or acting hostile toward me, I’m gonna ask them, what’s wrong? I’m gonna say, what’s wrong? Is it something I’ve done? Are you just upset with the situation? Are you up? Do I look like your sister’s ex-husband? I mean, what is it and can we resolve it?

Uh, because that’s the only way I’m gonna put any sort of parameters around what’s going on. Not by sitting there and looking at him and say, oh, he’s angry, he must be guilty. I mean, I, I, you could be angry for all sorts of reasons. So the only way we’re gonna get to that is then through verbal application and asking them what’s going on and getting, getting their answers and having a discussion about it.

Uh, and I think that is true for all of us if we’re good communicators across the span of our lives. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, no, that, that is a great point. I mean, yeah, the fact that, I mean, we can all think of workplace or social situations where we might get a vibe about something, but we’re hardly ever Sure. Like for example, yeah, like you say you’re talking to somebody at work and you’re like.

Are they mad at me? Are they just having a bad day or, you know, what’s really going on with them? And yeah, you have to ask them. I mean, we’re, I’m, I’m constantly in situations in life where I’m like, I, I don’t really understand why this person’s acting this way, you know? Uh, so that’s a very good point.

Yeah. I’m glad you That’s a, that’s a great response. Yeah. Uh, one response I’ve seen, you know, when we talk about the non usefulness of these things in, in interrogation and interview type settings, I think some of the more responsible people in this space, I would say people like, you know, David Matsumoto or Joe Navarro, they, they would say, uh, you know, leaving aside the, the obvious grifters in the space, let’s say, uh, like Chase Hughes and Jack Brown, people I’ve discussed on this, uh, podcast.

But I think some people who would, would say. Well, we’re not saying that you can, you know, detect deception with these things. Clearly the research doesn’t show that. But what we are saying is that you can get clues as to people’s, uh, mood and, and vibes and such, and what they’re thinking, various clues, even if it’s not deception detection.

But I, you know, I’ve thought about this a lot though, especially in the last year and I think, I think it’s pretty much a cop out to me. Like it’s, you know, ’cause it, it’s avoiding the question of like, well, what use is, is this stuff really? Like, if you’re saying you can get vibes as to what people are feeling, you know, like what, what is the practical application?

And, and when it comes down to, I just, you know, I’m, I’ve been reading, like I said, I’ve been reading a lot of things in the past few months about this. And when you look at the writings and trainings these people give. Even the more responsible people. What you’re really lacking is like actual real world examples of like, how would you apply this?

And I think there’s a, a real, you know, the, the, the, there’s a real reason why you can’t find those examples is because you’d be hard pressed to find an example where you could, you know, justify basing some, uh, EE even a minor decision. But I mean, I, I could, I could see, I’ve often said you, it’s easy to imagine basing like minor question shifts based on, oh, they look uncomfortable.

Maybe I’ll ask them a few more questions, but it’s, you’d be hard pressed to find many real world examples of like, oh, this made a big, you know, this made a big impact in my, in, in how I approached it in an investigation or interrogation. But correct me if I’m wrong there, where if maybe you see things differently.

Mark Anderson: No, that’s the, it it’s a, it’s a very good point. I, I understand exactly where, uh, you’re coming from, uh, on that issue. Uh, I see it. I don’t see it as a, a huge shift. I’m paying attention to that stuff. From a conversation management standpoint, uh, there’s a couple things at play here. Number one, the stress level.

The person sitting across from me, I do not want them stressed at. Certain times of the, uh, the, you know, in the conversation that we’re having. And so I’m going to address that. There’s so many benefits to doing that. Number one, it shows that I’m listening and I’m paying attention. I don’t know about you, but I wish more people in my life listened and pay attention.

They didn’t just run over me, you know, so, uh, listening and paying attention that builds trust. And that trust builds respect. And again, what I said to you is we kinda have to earn the right to be told the information that person has. And that becomes where rapport is very ipor important in, in, uh, generating and developing rapport with the person.

Well. And so conversation management would say, if this stress level is going up at this point in time, why is it going up? And do I need to address this? Is it me? Is it the situation? So let’s talk about that fear or that stress that’s going on at this point in time and deal with that before we deal with the intricacies of what I’m asking about in, in this, uh, interview.

So it kind of has a multifaceted approach to developing relationship so that I earned the right to learn more information. Uh, is it a ca I gotcha moment. It, it sure shouldn’t be. Because remember, part of the science-based interviewing is we move from a confession model where I’m focused on getting a confession to an information gathering model.

That doesn’t mean I’m not gonna get a confession, but that changes the confirmation and cognitive bias in my mind where I have a different emphasis and focus. So if it’s an information focus I need to manage and, and address these issues in the conversation to keep stress level down so that I can get information.

Because we know that when stress goes up, fear goes up, information gathering goes down both the quality and the quantity of that information. So I’m paying attention to that stuff to manage the conversation. Nothing more than that, does it? Does that make sense at all? 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I think it’s good to, um, yeah, it’s a good, it’s good to dig in, dig into the nuance because I think a lot of people.

Would be, would be thinking that we’re saying there’s no use whatsoever to keeping track of nonverbal behavior. But I think what you and I are on the same page about is no, you can, you can use those things to get a sense, just like we do in, in day-to-day life. You get a sense of how people are reacting, but the idea that you’re gonna get some major information is, is where the, the bad thinking happens.

Right. And would you say that’s where we’re on the same page there? 

Mark Anderson: Yeah. I would say that I absolutely, by managing that, then I have a chance of getting that good information, uh, not by the action itself paying attention to it. I then put that per posi person in a position where they now can share quality information with me, which is what my goal is.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it’s, it can be hard to talk about these things because as soon as you start to criticize a section, people are like, oh, you think the entire thing is, is bs? There’s nothing of interest there at all. But I, you know, I think digging into the. The nuance is good. Um, so I wanted to ask you about a specific thing that I was curious about.

I, I wanted to get your take on it. Um, years ago I had interviewed, uh, David Zuki, who’s part of, uh, uh, Wilander. Zuki. Yep. They’re a WZ. They’re a, um, you know, a, a firm that specializes in consulting for interviewing and, and interrogation. And, um, that was actually one of my first interviews for the podcast.

And, uh, thought he had some, you know, really great insights. I, I read, uh, their book they put out. But, uh, then years later I was doing an episode on, um, eye movements. You know, there’s this persistent thing, this belief, which is spread by a lot of people that you can get clues as to, uh, what people are thinking and maybe.

Their level of deception based on the eye direction thing. And kind of the older, the, the less sophisticated version of that myth was like, based on NLP and neurolinguistic programming where mm-hmm. Looking in certain directions was tied to, uh, you know, recall or, uh, you know, so actual memory or looking in another direction was called to, to correlate it with more creation.

So more lie related, but then a later, a more sophisticated version of that, because most people recognize the research didn’t bear that out. But I think a more sophisticated version of that argument, which was in this, um, which I found on, uh, WIC Alkis website, talking about eye movement misconceptions.

They were defending the, the version of the idea that, oh, you just, you just need to figure out if there’s a correlation for specific people. Like some people might look. Up into the right and some, for some things it might look up into the left for another. And they gave an example of, you know, using that in interrogation where they thought, oh, they noticed that this person who they were questioning looked up into the right, or whichever it was when, for, when they were recalling something, but then they did something else on another line of question.

And I, I have to say, like I, I respect a lot of the stuff they’ve put out, but that, to me, I just don’t think that that’s a valuable source of information. Like the, especially even, I mean, I can imagine theoretically somebody having a very person specific tell in that regard, but the idea that you’re gonna get meaningful information from that within a fir, you know, even, even hours of interviews seems like a stretch that you would be able to deduce.

Like the person’s tells and be able to sort out all the factors involved and what they might be thinking. But in their example, they were just talking about like a few questions into the interview they had deducted that they had some eye movement. Uh, tell but I’m, I’m, I was curious. One thing, one reason I wanted to ask you is because I do respect a lot of the work they’ve done, so I was curious, do you think they’re just off base on that and they’re, you know, going down a confirmation bias, uh, rabbit hole on that topic and they’re wrong?

Mark Anderson: I, I used to teach it. I, it was part of the federal lesson plan when I was teaching for the, uh, the federal government in interviewing interrogation section on I accessing cues. Uh, is there something to the movement? Yes, but we’re back to the same situation. Well, number one, I don’t use it a whole lot. I’m a holistic interviewer.

I wanna see the whole body and just be watching the whole body. If I’m focusing on your eyes, that’s just a weird interview because you’re sitting there saying, what the heck is he looking at? Just kidding. You’re stress, stress almost going up because I’m staring at you and it’s just obnoxious. So I, I’m not a big eye guy anyhow, and there’s been so much bad information out there.

I’ve seen stuff in the last year on, uh, YouTube of this guy that was, you know, interviewing guru, uh, who said, you know, it was basing on lies versus truth, you know, deception versus honesty. And there there’s absolutely nothing associated with that. Uh, because if you think about it, there is a, uh, a situation with regard to the recall and create, but the percentages doesn’t make it real valuable.

You really have to establish a baseline, like we you’ve talked about before on many of your shows, and that baseline happens over time. You. I raised some kids, and over the years, I, I, they would do some nonverbal behavior and I’d know exactly what it meant, but that’s because I was with them for years. If you’re in the interview for room for 10 minutes, how valuable is that baseline?

You know? So that, that’s kind of silly to begin with. But the whole issue of, you know, possibly recall and create, and I, I do an example sometimes in the class where I, I, I debunking some of these myths, but getting that eye movement, like if I said to you, and, and I always do this with the class and face the other way, because if I look at them, the whole class is sitting there staring at me and their eyes don’t move.

Uh, but if I said to you, like, if you went back to the first house you ever lived in, how many windows are in that house? Well, generally you feel some eye movement when I ask that question. Most people do, some people don’t because of the percentage breakdown. Uh, for me, I go up left. Uh, so that’s a, that’s called, that’s a visual re uh, cre or visual recall.

I’m recalling something that exists. So, you know, you go up left. I don’t know what that tells you necessarily, because in most cases, when you get in the interview room with me, if you happen to be somebody who chooses to deceive me for whatever reason, you’ve already recited the lie before. Which means when you come in the room to answer the questions, where are you gonna look for that lie?

You’re gonna look to recall, you’re recalling the lie that you’ve already told yourself or told somebody else. So what does that tell me? It doesn’t tell me a whole lot. It, it’s not like you’re gonna create it when you come in the room with me. So, you know, is there something to eye movement? Yes. I would think if you look at WZ Materials now.

I would be surprised if that that stuff is still in it. I’ve seen a lot of transition with WZ over the last, you know, 10 years, and I would assume they may address it from the standpoint similar to what I do, uh, but they’re not gonna be putting those statistics on it that you heard from, um, if it was David Zaki or who, if you talked to him.

Uh, yeah, you know, 10, 10 years ago. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, that, that I kind of suspected that because that piece on their site was from like 2012 and I kind of suspected that if you asked ’em now, they would, uh, kind of move away from some of the stuff they said in that old paper. Uh, but yeah, people interested in that topic.

I have a whole episode about the eye movements going into nuance about the older kind of. P associated ideas moving into, I would say, more sophisticated arguments, even if they’re, you know, controversial still. Uh, so yeah. And I, I wanted to ask you too about, um, I’m a, I’m a fan of, uh, statement analysis like Mark Ish’s.

Work I found, I actually based my book, verbal Poker tells he, I was inspired by his work. Uh, I know you are lying. The the statement analysis. 

Mark Anderson: Yep. 

Zach Elwood: I was moved to spend a lot of time. I actually spent eight months studying a bunch of footage and taking notes when I was playing about people’s various patterns about how they phrase things when they were playing poker.

Um, so I do find that, you know, that getting into the, you know, going back to the finding verbal actual content much more interesting and meaningful than, than nonverbal. Um, that is true for that I think, because a lot of that stuff I think makes sense at a psychological level. But I think even, you know, even for that though, if we’re talking these small verbal.

Turns a phrase, you know, I, I can find it interesting and I can reach deductions and opinions about what people say. Like we all do every day about the things people say. But even for that stuff, it’s like, well, what is the actual, you know, where does it get into the actual, uh, practical applications of using it?

’cause you know, we can, we can believe people are guilty all day long, but how, how does that help us? Right. In the, you know, so I think it gets to this fundamental. Question, which is something I’ve been thinking about is when, when are the situations when having a hunch or having a strong suspicion or even a confident feeling that someone did something that someone is guilty or lying.

When, when are the actual situations when that is useful? And, and the fact is, I think it’s very rarely useful because, you know, you could be cert as an investigator, you could be certain somebody did something, but it doesn’t, doesn’t do you much good, right? In the practical sense, unless, you know, I guess the, some areas where it can play a role is you might be more pointed or more, more in, more direct in your questions or go down a specific line of questioning the more certain you are.

Or you might, uh, even change a bit of the scope of the investigation if you’re certain, but you know that those are all things you would do if you didn’t have the evidence to go on, right? It’s, it’s pretty rare you’re lacking, uh, evidence but have the strong hunch, right? Uh, it’s pretty rare that you have the hunch just based on the.

A verbal, uh, clue, but you don’t have the, the evidence. Right. But I’m curious, you know, do even, I’m curious what you think of the statement analysis, and then I’m curious what you think of even there, the applicability of it. 

Mark Anderson: Yeah, I, I, I absolutely, uh, agree with you. The verbal is far more useful than the nonverbal.

Uh, I, I was, I, listen, I know that you’ve referred to it as body language before. Uh, my issue with using the term language is language is generally something that’s understood by both parties involved, you know, and body language is, it’s, 

Zach Elwood: yeah. There 

Mark Anderson: is no body. It depends on, there 

Zach Elwood: is no 

Mark Anderson: language, no. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, yeah.

Mark Anderson: No, there’s no language associated with it. So I would much rather have language. Uh, so in the case of the, the verbal or the, you know, the written analysis, I think there’s certainly some value to that. But the same caution applies if we’re hypothetically determining this. The only way I’m gonna truly get the quality information is to ask the person about it.

So what, what did you mean? I mean, I have people in interviews tell me a story and I just look at ’em and say, okay. So what are you really saying? You know, because sometimes our e simplest response is the best response, which basically means whatever you just said is a little bit clouded. Clear it up for me.

Or, you know, I don’t know if I’m a little slow here, but I don’t really get what you’re really saying. Tell me more about it and then just let the person speak. Because in there is where we get the information. So with the written analysis, if I’m looking at something and I don’t like the way it’s phrased, or we see tenses being used incorrectly or however it’s set up.

The only way I’m gonna move that from a hunch to, to certainty is by asking the person about it. So I think the same caution applies there. And, and I see that, you know, people hook their, you know, their, their horse to star and they just wanna ride that thing. I think we just have to be really honest about that.

That that’s fine. But we really have to communicate. We need that rapport, we need that conversation management. We need that trust development in order to get the best information. 

Zach Elwood: I should mention in the statement analysis space, just like in the, in the nonverbal space, there is this range of just complete junk, uh, science of, uh, there’s this system called Scan se.

Yep. Which is like taking the, you know, I said that I find these small verbal clues interesting, but the scan system is basically taking it to, like, you can definitely tell based on these small statement analysis, whether someones are guil guilty or not. You know, it’s basically in the same way that people act as if you can read some nonverbal, uh, behavior and be highly confident that someone’s lying or guilty.

So just to say in these spaces, there’s this spectrum from like, Hey, that’s interesting and something to think about and maybe even just to yourself to find interesting versus like people saying, you can definitely use this stuff to, you know, unlock powerful certainty about, uh, all these things. And yeah, it’s worth pointing out that there’s for, for a lot of these ideas, whether nonverbal or, or, or, or verbal analysis, there’s this, this range of people, uh, promoting, uh.

Anything from more responsible, you know, uh, defensible uses to more extreme and clearly, uh, bad, uh, applications. Yeah. 

Mark Anderson: And then there always seems to be money involved in that as well. 

Zach Elwood: The more you can convince people, you have amazing powers that you can teach them, the more you can charge them. Right?

Theoretically, 

Mark Anderson: what makes us think that human interaction is that simple. I mean, are they not living life? You just have to live life for a few years and you understand that’s not the way it works. So there isn’t gonna be this magical catchall. You’re gonna have to invest, you’re gonna have to, uh, uh, work hard at that stuff.

And you asked too about the uh, uh, written statements and the concept of walking in with a hunch and everything like that, back to that kind of mindset and the science space interviewing side. I don’t go into an interview anymore without several hypotheses of what could have happened. I may have an idea what happened, but if I walk in with that idea, my confirmation bias is gonna kick in.

So in my planning, before I walk into an interview, I’m gonna come up with alternative hypotheses of what could have happened instead. Then I’m gonna ask questions about those. And again, it’s the person sitting across from me that’s gonna tell me the story, not me tell the story. So I need to get that information from ’em.

So I think it’s very important to not, and believe me, uh, you know, hand up, uh, I’ve done it wrong, you know, early in my career. You walk in with your hunch and you know, I’m sure in hell gonna prove this hunch to be true because, you know, I’m the professional here. I think we have to be very careful. We have to be real careful and come up with some alternative ways to keep those biases in check.

We’re not gonna get rid of ’em, but we can keep them in check so they don’t color the information that we’re getting out of the interview. 

Zach Elwood: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, people are always gonna have their hunches based on an assortment of things, whether it’s, uh, you know, no matter what you.

No matter what they read about these spaces, everyone’s gonna have their hunches, uh, when they’re doing their investigations or interrogations. I think it’s more about embracing some humility about, Hey, could you be wrong here? No matter how wrong, strong your hun is, you have to keep in mind that your hunch could be wrong because it, we’ve all had strong hunches that turned out to be wrong before.

Uh, yeah. So the humility is big, I think. So let’s pivot to what do you think works, you know, what are, when it comes to getting information, reading people in interrogation type settings, what are the biggest strategies that you rely on that, that you focus on? 

Mark Anderson: I think there, you know, I’ve mentioned mindset several times.

That’s something that was never addressed early on. It’s something I address in every class. Now. We cannot be good listeners. We cannot process information accurately if we have, uh, those same stressors and issues going on in our lives that prevent us from being present in the moment. So we need to a assess where we’re at before we walk into that room.

So we’re gonna use tools to assess where we’re at. We’re gonna come up with these alternative hypotheses. We’re gonna be of clear mind when we walk in so that we can engage and we can hear at a level that we need to. So I talk about that, which I never talked about before. Uh, I think this conversation management and the issue of rapport becomes very important.

I think the issue of being able to extend strategic empathy, I’m not saying you agree with the person, but put yourself in that position. And I think over time, maybe it’s an aging thing. You know, when I got into this business, I saw this as black hats and white hats, and you know, I’m. Bing, Bata, boom. And over time I realized that one step this way to the left versus one step to the right, and I could be in the same situation this person is in.

So stopping number one, our job is not judgment anyhow, that’s up to the courts or up to the administrative people that are making decisions. My job as a mediator of the truth. So all I’m there is to get the truth and I need to understand that that’s what my job is. So then what do we do to, uh, compensate for this stuff?

Well, uh, I think there’s a lot of things we can do, which we talk about this and I just wrote. Uh, two articles on this over the last two weeks that it came out. And this is based on, uh, work by, uh, Dr. Christian Meisner, who’s a kind of leading researcher in this, uh, this arena of science-based interviewing.

Uh, wonderful guy’s. Uh, I think he’s at the University of Iowa. And, uh, one of the things that we talk about this nonverbal and verbal and, you know, guess and all the rest, and I say, well, we need to ask questions about it. He talks about this issue of, uh, when we’re asking questions, we should be assessing two things.

Number one, access. And knowledgeability does this. Was this person in a position that they could have seen what they saw, heard what they heard, and all the rest? And now knowledge. Knowledgeability is, did they have an understanding of the situation well enough that they can process that information and relay that?

And you say, well, that seems very specific and you know, you know, how would you get at all that stuff? But think about what it does. It opens up a whole line of questioning, which is not accusatory. It’s, it’s just assessing the situation. It’s much more neutral in how you ask the questions, and then the quality of that information that you get generates more questions and, and gets you to the whole big picture.

So I think we have to be more, much more creative in how we ask questions. And questioning is a huge issue that, you know, I don’t know how many leaders I’ve dealt with over the last. 20 years in the training en environment, they’re like, Hey, we don’t need interview training. Our people can talk to people.

They’re all set. Well, that’s not what interviewing is. You do need the training. And I spent 30 years in the field with no interviewing classes. So I learned by screwing ’em up, you know, because I, I, I didn’t have that training. I think we really have to train people because the knowledgeability and accessibility, uh, thing I never would’ve gotten in the field.

But now that I’ve learned it, I can see the applicability in the field. So there’s just a ton of stuff like that. And if you think about it, the type of questions that would, we have to ask better questions, and we don’t do that. So that’s another one. Uh. You know, we could go on for hours. Cognitive load, the issue of cognitive load, the issue of cognitive interviewing.

You know, how we ask questions better to get it to full. Uh, it, it, uh, uh, substance of what took place. Uh, strategic use of evidence, which is a technique that was, uh, researched around 2014, how we deploy evidence in order to elicit truthful information. There’s just, there’s a ton. And I’m big on this, you know, so many people say, well, you’re taking all these tools off the, you know, off the shelf here.

Well, yeah, if they don’t work, get ’em off the shelf. But I’m not gonna take anything away if I don’t give you something else. So I, I, I would give you, for every three I took away, I’d give you five to use, because there are that many that have been researched and, and really have a difference in how we get information.

But most of those are based on what Zach, they’re based on conversation and words, not on what you look like. 

Zach Elwood: Right. Right. Yeah. Do, can, uh, do any, uh, examples, I know people listening, uh, to these shows, these podcasts. I like to hear granular examples. Do you have any, uh, e examples of, um, real world cases where, uh, using some of these better, you know, um, statement or, uh, listen, listening to people’s stories kind, kind of, uh, methods came into play.

Anything that that comes to mind? You care, sir. 

Mark Anderson: Yeah, I got, I, I got one that’s, uh, pretty, uh, somewhat unusual. I was, uh, working for Department of Justice for a period of time. I had cases, uh, work cases in federal prisons, uh, looking at, you know, wrongful conduct by correctional officers. So I had a, a case involving a correctional officer that was bringing stuff into the prison.

Uh, there was some possible relationship issues. There was a bunch of stuff on, on the plate. There was also some indication of possible child pornography involved. So, uh, I, I worked in an area where I was the only guy there, so I had a good relationship with the FBI and I told the FBI about this case and they were like, well, you know, we’ll go with you because of the child porn aspect of it.

And, uh, I’d done a lot of planning is another issue. Part of the reason interviews don’t go as well as they, uh, should is because we don’t plan enough. One in 10 interviews have adequate planning. We get in a room, we don’t get the results, and we say, well, they, you know, it’s their fault. No, it’s my fault. I didn’t plan for it.

So in this case, I’ve talked to probably 50 people about this guy and they just kept getting, getting the same answer. Oh yeah, yeah. He different. Well, doesn’t help do interview with him. His house, uh, which I’m not afraid to go to somebody’s house, especially, I delivered a package to the house. Well, the postal service did that I knew was there and I wanted it, and he’s not gonna bring it to the interview with him.

So we went to his house and sat down with him. And had a discussion first two hours of that interview, I just rapport with the guy because I knew I needed to understand who he was before I attacked the issue of what he might have done. So we talked about all sorts of things and the question is, are you ready to go on that trip with that person where you can extend that empathy, you can address them where they’re at and, and, and, you know, get to understand this person before you put the stuff on the table.

So two hours, over two hours we just chatted so that I could understand him before I start asking him about stuff. And then I asked him about stuff in a way that’s non accusatory conversational. I wanna keep the interview as conversational as. Eventually he admitted to the stuff, uh, allowed us to take all sorts of stuff out of his house.

Uh, and, and I think the thing that’s most revealing about this is when he was sentenced on the, his way, walking out of court, he looked at me and said, mark, thank you for helping me get my life straightened out. And I’m thinking, man, you are going to jail. That’s not when I would be saying that. So what happened during that time?

I addressed stuff that nobody had ever addressed with him in his life. And, and, and can we have that empathy? I mean, he pretty screwed up guy. Uh, but can we have that empathy where we try to understand how did you get to where you are? Can we have that curiosity to understand? How did you get to where you are?

So I, I mean, I got tons of examples like that. Yeah. Where it wasn’t based on the training I received, it was based on being a human being, interacting with another human being without judgment. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. The, uh, I mean, I, I, I, I watch a lot of interrogations because I’m interested in psychology and I’ve gone down recently, I went down a rabbit hole of reading.

Uh, I’m on my third book about undercover agents stories, real undercover agents. I started out with Donny Broski and read a couple more books. Um, so, and, and one of the recurring themes in the undercover. Asian books is talking about, you know, you really have to see people as people and you really have to have an empathy for people.

Like, you’re never gonna be a successful undercover cop if you have extremely high judgment of people, because that’s just gonna get in your way of rep rapport building and getting along with people. So that was a frequent theme in the Undercover books, people talking about the ability to get over that.

And some people just can’t do that. If they’re too judgemental, they’ll never interact normally in, in relaxed ways with people because that is just gonna be a, a huge blocker for them. And in the same way in the interrogation setting, it’s like if you have all this really high judgment, you can’t even, you know, relax yourself enough to have a normal human conversation with someone that’s gonna be a huge blocker to you.

Yes. Absorbing or, you know, inducing them to share information to you. And some of the most, you know, the examples that have stood out in the interrogation footage, uh, YouTube videos I’ve watched is where people are just. Being very genuine and the person surprisingly dumps all this information on them.

And even I saw one recently where some, uh, child molester guy was, ended up hugging the detectives who were in there with him and just wanted some, you know, wanted some comforting, basically. And it’s like, yeah, that’s what happens. You know, you, when you treat people like, uh, you know, fellow, fellow humans, you get a surprising reaction sometimes.

Mark Anderson: Yeah. Because they don’t expect that either. You know, because they watch the same TV footage that you and I watch, and they don’t expect to be treated that way. And I don’t know how many times people have said to me, I, I’ve never been treated like this before. I said, well, I’m sorry. Sorry. You haven’t been, you deserve to be right.

Sexual abusers of children, stuff like that. He, I have a harder time with that one. You know, we need to know where our limitations are as well, you know, so maybe that’s not what I’m cut out for, but I, I’m, I mean, there’s other areas. I, I worked international terrorism for a while and it was amazing. We have to find commonality with the person that we’re sitting with, you know, that we’re dealing with.

And it sometimes we have to seek and look a little bit to find that commonality and where you find it can be very unique. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, it can be a challenge. I was reading, uh, Bob Hammer’s, uh, book. Uh, he’s an undercover, he was an undercover agent and he, he had infiltrated, uh, Nala, you know, the, uh. NA National, uh, or whatever it’s called, the Man boy Love Association.

And he was talking about, yeah, it’s a big challenge to, uh, reduce your contempt and disgust, but he was talking about his methods for doing that and how it was important to try to do it. Like if he was gonna succeed at the mission, he had to, you know, get, try to find, uh, you know, the humanity in these people he was interacting with, which I thought was a, that was an especially interesting example of, uh, yes, trying to get over that in order to build rapport.

Yeah. Uh, so, uh, yeah, I’d be curious to a ask, you know, the, the people who were interested in, in reading behavior, getting nonverbal clues, um, they might, uh, uh, well, I think in general, people are interested in, in shortcuts like shortcut deductions we can make. And I think when people, that’s why when people ask me about.

Because they’ll often ask me, because I have worked on poker, tells I’ve, I do this podcast that they’re like, Zach, well you’re skeptical about all this nonverbal stuff and real world scenarios. You know, what do you recommend? What are good behavior resources? And I tend to say, well, I wouldn’t recommend focusing on nonverbal behavior.

I would recommend focusing on, you know, if you’re really interested in, in shortcut deductions, I would recommend statement analysis, because that’s much more, you know, and we’re talking about the, like, small patterns in people’s speeches. We’re not talking about the meta-level stories that are told. We’re talking about these kind of small, uh, turns of phrase and how people phrase things.

And I think that’s much more a much, A, it’s much more useful. And then b. It’s giving people who want these shortcut deductions a little bit in that space, but it’s a more defensible and, and logical iteration of shortcut deductions. But you know, even even with that, obviously you, you, you should not reach, uh, firm conclusions about people based on a few small turns of phrase and such.

But that’s what I tend to tell people because I think that helps, you know, wet their whistle for these kind of shortcut uh, deductions. But I’m curious, do you have, uh, are there things you would recommend in, in that space as far as resources for people that are interested in these psychological, uh, kind of reads of people quick reads?

Mark Anderson: Yeah. Uh, I probably, I probably wouldn’t, uh, I wouldn’t give them, I would, number one, argue with the fact that there’s any quick way to do that. And yeah, uh, I would ask them to examine their life and see the people that quick read them, how accurate were they at really understanding where they’re at and if you wanna be understood, do you not wanna understand others?

So what I would say to them is, learn how to listen better, because I think. Primarily, that’s a huge problem. We suck at listening. There’s a book out there, there’s lots of listening books. There’s a, a book, uh, discipline listening by a guy named Michael Redington, who, uh, it comes out of this interviewing space.

I think he worked for WZ for a period of time. Uh, but he does, he’s in executive leadership and stuff like that now. But an excellent book, it causing you to stand in the mirror and say, gee, really, how good am a listener? Am I, am I listening or am I thinking about the next thing I’m gonna say in order to convince you of what a freaking expert I am at whatever I’m not an expert at.

Uh, so I, I would say spend more time in that arena of listening and being curious. Uh, there’s so many people dying for connection, you know, like you said with the child molester, that you just wanted a hug, just wanted to be understood. Not that I’m saying what you did is right. But just wanting to be understood.

And there’s just people dying for that out there, and people aren’t given it. Uh, so if we can learn how to do that better, then we can ask those questions better to help that person under, you know, to, to gain understanding of that person. And then we know exactly why they’re doing what they’re doing. Uh, we have to invest more.

And, and there just isn’t a quick read on that. I might get a quick read if I walk in Walmart and, uh, you know, the greeter doesn’t look happy. I might say, Hey, man, are you okay? You know that, but I can walk away from that if I’m wrong. You know what I’m saying? But if, if this is something valuable and important and the person is valuable and important, let’s invest a little bit more.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. Do you, uh, do you have anything else you wanna share before we go? Anything that stands out as, as something you’d like to add or, um, story you’d like to tell? 

Mark Anderson: We’ve covered a lot and there’s so much to cover on this stuff. It’s like, you know, talking to you for an an hour, I’m, I got about 10,000 things on my mind now that I have to, you know, research and, and write a little bit more on, and be a little bit more, uh, specific about.

I, I think we have to get out of this realm of, you know, this and it’s really tough, right? Because attention spans have really gone down with, you know, uh, media the way it is. You know, the, you know, you, you can’t. Talk for too long. Sermons get long, shorter and shorter in church because people can’t sit and listen.

Uh, so we’re fighting a tough battle here because what we’re saying is we’re taking these quick fixes off the table because they aren’t fixes and people don’t wanna invest the time. So it’s kind of an uphill battle on this thing. Uh, and and I spend time every day trying to figure out how do I make a difference in that regard to get people to understand that.

And, and I, I think where I’ve gone with that on that side and. I, I’m, uh, putting together a, a book on investigative interviewing on science-based interviewing and doing it more as a workbook type thing. And I was telling one of my accountability people. I think that’s the other thing, we should have people around us who keep us in check so that my arrogance doesn’t let me sell.

Some of this crap out there as you talk about with some of the people that you are not happy with, that are, uh, promoting crap, is I want people around me that are gonna say, Hey, hey, you need to reign that back in. And one of these accountability people, I said, I was doing this book. And he said, yeah, but you’re talking about the importance of wellbeing and that people have to be in a good place too, because you know, we aren’t taking care of our people that well anymore.

How can you tell them to do interviews better and you’re not addressing the other side? So now all of a sudden, I have to write two books and the other one’s gonna be on wellbeing and resilience. Uh, because what are we doing to take care of our people, to put them in a position where they can then interview better?

So what does that all say? It says that we need to start being a little bit more concerned with the people around us. And do you wanna do it cheaply? Is that how you wanna be dealt with? Or do you wanna invest the time and do it appropriately? Uh, so. Take the time with those people that are important in your life to see where they’re at and then ask them about that.

So you now know where they’re, that’s so important.

That was a talk with Mark Anderson; you can learn more about him at andersoninvestigative.com 
This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast and sign up for updates at behavior-podcast.com

Visa officers make life-changing decisions in minutes—often after just a brief conversation through a glass window. I talk with former U.S. visa officer Travis Feuerbacher (ZFvisa.com) about what really goes into those rapid judgments. How much do behavior and “gut feelings” actually matter? Can anyone reliably read honesty or deception under that kind of pressure? And what happens when cultural differences, personality differences, or just plain anxiety get mistaken for something more suspicious? We explore the hidden psychology behind visa interviews, the limits of reading people in high-stakes situations, and why the system can force snap judgments—whether they’re fair or not. Travis also talks about a time he caught an applicant trying to deceive him.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

TRANSCRIPT

(transcripts are automatically generated and will contain errors)

Travis Feuerbacher: “An applicant comes to a bulletproof window where the visa officer is standing on the other side… Then they start asking questions. And to put this in perspective, uh, when I was an officer in, in both China and Mexico, I would conduct regularly, well over a hundred interviews a day in Beijing, it was generally over 120 interviews a day. So I had maybe one minute. Maybe up to three minutes per interview, to reach a decision… 

It’s like being a weather forecaster… They’re trying to forecast… if I give you this ticket into the United States, you know this visa, are you going to do everything exactly like you should?

And, you know, this is potentially life changing… In the back of your mind, you know that this is a, a, a major decision you’re making. But you’re expected to make it time, after time, after time all day.” 

That was a clip from my talk with Travis Feuerbacher, an immigration attorney and a former consular officer who’s done many, many interviews of people seeking American visas, mainly in China and Mexico. In addition, Travis is an immigration attorney. With his wife, Travis runs a business called ZF Visa Guides, which helps prepare people for seeking American visas; you can learn more about that business at zfvisa.com. 

If you haven’t listened to this podcast before, this is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. I’m the author of a trilogy of books on reading behavior in poker, aka poker tells, and the success of those books is how I got into doing this behavior podcast. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com.

I wanted to talk to Travis to answer some questions I had about how consulate officers were doing visa interviews. I was curious how much reading nonverbal behaviors might be a factor in whether visas get denied or approved. The reason I got interested in this was because I talked to someone who was recently doing some visa interviews and they were telling me how quick and random the process often is, and how often an officer’s “vibes” and ambiguous feelings about someone could determine which way an interview went. This got me interested to delve into this a bit. I’d theoretically be interested in talking to other people who have previously done visa interviews and are now retired and able to speak freely, if you have any ideas on that front. I’m sure it’s a topic where there are a lot of interesting stories and different views about what happens. 

In this talk, topics we discuss include: 

How visa interviews are typically conducted, and what visa officers are trying to determine

A story from Travis’s career about a deceptive visa seeker

How fair visa interviews and determinations generally are

The difficulty of trying to use behavior-based reads for such a task

A little more about Travis from his zfvisa.com site: 

During more than six years as a career U.S. Diplomat assigned to China and Mexico, as well as a brief assignment to Guatemala, Travis interviewed thousands of business executives, students, tourists, employees, investors, and immigrants seeking visas to travel, work, study or migrate to the United States from across the globe. Travis also managed a fraud investigation team in Mexico which investigated potential visa and passport fraud. Through these interactions and experiences, Travis developed a deep understanding of how Visa Officers conduct interviews and ultimately reach their decisions. He realized that visa applicants often failed at their visa interview because they didn’t understand the nuanced requirements or simply did not know how to effectively convey their personal and professional situations to the Visa Officer.

Okay here’s the talk with Travis Feuerbacher: 

Zachary Elwood: Hi Travis. Thanks for joining me. 

Travis Feuerbacher: Hey, Zach. Thanks for having me. It’s a, it’s a pleasure to be here. Really 

Zachary Elwood: appreciate your time. So maybe we can talk about the. Work of Visa interviewing what that entails. Maybe you can walk us through what the, I know it may differ from country to country and such, but maybe you could talk us through what the general processes look like.

Travis Feuerbacher: Yeah, certainly. And, and surprisingly it doesn’t change much from country to country visa officers. First of all, maybe I should talk a little bit about training, and I think that might, that might shed some light on this, but Visa officers are, are generally, they’re, they’re called foreign service officers, which is a, a fancy word for diplomat.

They work for the US Department of State. They have to go through, you know, a lengthy kind of test and vetting process and security clearance and all sorts of stuff. But once a foreign service officer is, is minted, you know, once they go through kind of the, the vetting process, they have to choose a specialization, what we call a cone.

Uh, I have no idea why it’s called a cone, but it is. And so I chose consular work as my cone or my specialty. My wife, Mandy, as another example, chose public diplomacy. So her job was essentially to, you know, liaise with press and foreign media and be a spokesperson. Other people may choose to focus on management, which is things like, you know, managing facilities, human resources.

There are economic reporting officers, political reporting officers. There’s, there’s a number of specializations you can choose from. Now, the, the first or second foreign assignment for every foreign service officer. Must be in a consular tour, which basically means you have to do visa interviews. And so virtually every diplomat who works for the US Department of State is at one point or other in their career, a consular officer, a, a visa officer, and they all go through the same training in Washington, DC what we call congen, which is it’s, it’s roughly divided in half over about five weeks.

Where half of that training is dedicated to how you support Americans abroad. You know what happens if, if an American is incarcerated or if they are, you know, hospitalized or. What happens if somebody needs to renew their passport? You know, more mundane things. And then the other half of that training is dedicated to visa processing.

What are the requirements for every different category of visa? How do you conduct an interview? And ultimately how do you make a decision? So long-winded way of saying it’s, it’s. Very similar a across the board, but when you arrive at a post, at, at your foreign assignment. So my, my first overseas assignment was at the embassy in Beijing, China.

Uh, you know, I had gone through a couple of weeks of, of basic consular training to, to understand how to conduct a visa interview, but I had never conducted a visa interview at this point. So much of your training is, is kind of on the job and, and this is where it may differ a little bit. So some embassies and consulates will, and, and Beijing was, uh, an example of this.

They will have you shadow a more senior officer, maybe a manager or somebody who’s done this for a while. Then after a week or two, once you figure out the process, then somebody shadows you to make sure you’re doing it right. Then you are on your own. So it’s a little bit like becoming a pilot, right? You, you kind of are trained, then you do it, you solo and then you’re off, you’re off to the races.

So the, you know, generally speaking, there, there may be some, some nuances from country to country because of that kind of on the job training, you know, there’s a bit of culture that may be different at the embassy in Beijing. From, let’s say the consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. But you know, beyond that, the, the process is very similar.

Uh, an applicant comes to a, a bulletproof window where the, the visa officer is standing on the other side, the officer will scan a barcode on a confirmation sheet that the applicant has, or sometimes they’ll pull the applicant up out of a, a small batch of, of people. And that’s the first time in almost every instance, except for a few types of visas.

That’s the first time the Visa officer will see any details about the applicant. They’re going to read the responses that the applicant submits to an online application form. They may not read all of them because they’re under extreme time constraints. They will look at a couple of details on the screen, such as, you know, has this individual been arrested before?

Have they applied for a green card before? Have they ever been approved or denied for a non-immigrant visa before? They will read some notes entered by previous officers. If this individual has applied before. Then they start asking questions. And to put this in perspective, uh, when I was an officer in, in both China and Mexico, I would conduct regularly, well over a hundred interviews a day in Beijing, it was generally over 120 interviews a day.

So I had maybe one minute. Maybe up to three minutes per interview. 

Zachary Elwood: Wow. 

Travis Feuerbacher: To reach a decision. And you know, in the back of your mind, this is potentially life changing. You know, this is something, this is maybe somebody who wants to go and study in the United States, or even if it’s just a vacation, you know, this is something maybe they’ve been planning for, for years and saving up money for, for years.

And so in the back of your mind as a, as a visa officer, you know that this is a, a, a major decision you’re making. But you’re expected to make it time, after time, after time all day. And it can be a, a, a very exhausting job. But that’s kind of the, the format of the process, generally speaking. 

Zachary Elwood: Mm-hmm. Well, yeah.

Uh, they’re very quick and you do a lot of them, I guess. 

Travis Feuerbacher: Mm-hmm. 

Zachary Elwood: Could you give your thoughts on how. Fair, the processes in general, because it seems like by definition it couldn’t really be fair, but I’m curious to get your thoughts on that. It seems like it’s, by definition, it seems like it’s gonna be often random and quick judgements, but 

Travis Feuerbacher: you know, I, I think that you, you could argue that it’s patently unfair.

How can a, how can a human being in such a short timeframe make the right decision? But I will tell you, you know, a couple of things. First of all, visa officers take their job very seriously. These are people who have chosen to do this as a career. Even if, even if I was going to be a, a political reporting officer.

This is a really important part of my career as a foreign service officer conducting visa interviews. You know, I never worked with somebody who was cavalier about this job and just kind of randomly made decisions. And then beyond that, the training is comprehensive. It may be short. But officers are constantly honing their skills.

They’re constantly learning how to try to reach the right decision. And so, you know, there are countries that generally make these types of decisions on paper, you know, some European countries, uh, and I’ll use a, a student visa as an example if I want to go and, and obtain a graduate degree at, you know, Travis University.

I submit a bunch of documentation and I may be approved or denied just on the basis of, of that documentation. Now, is it more fair for a human being to make that decision? I might argue that it is, you know, because I think documents can be forged. Documents can, can kind of tell a, a certain story without context when you have a human to human interaction in person, you know, we’re, we’re speaking through technology so.

You’re not seeing all of my mannerisms, my body movements, when you’re speaking face-to-face, even though it’s through a bulletproof glass window, you’re picking up on a lot of both verbal and nonverbal cues, you know, and officers are trained to ask specific questions to address, you know, specific concerns that might be floating around in their brain.

And even though it is a, a very short amount of time, I do think that the right decision is reached far more often than not. Now there were situations though, Zach, where uh, and, and quite frankly, this is why I do what I do now. It’s why I’ve, I’ve focused my immigration law practice on, on what we call consular processing.

You know, helping applicants navigate through this interview stage of their visa journey. And that’s because as a visa officer I’m under intense time pressure and, and far too often I encountered an applicant who might be qualified. For whatever reason, you know, maybe they just weren’t prepared. Maybe they had no idea what this process required.

They, they couldn’t really convey their qualifications to me. And the law by default requires me to say no. And so if the applicant doesn’t establish their qualifications, and if I simply am just running out of time, I can’t say yes. And that was super frustrating. That’s why I, I, I focus on what I focus on now.

Zachary Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, uh, you know, it might be worth clarifying, you know, some people might think that if I’m saying the process is unfair, it, it’s not like that’s a lar a major judgment because every human endeavor is, is unfair in some way. Like every, every human area of judgment or justice is unfair at some level because it can’t be perfect.

Right. So I think, uh, 

Travis Feuerbacher: totally 

Zachary Elwood: to clarify, it’s like. The sheer quantity of people that need to be processed and interviewed, I mean, sets it up so that it, it can only be a short period of, uh, of interview and, and review, right? So. Just to say there’s a, there’s a limit to hell. You know, with, with infinite time, maybe you could make even more better decisions, but there, there is a limit to everything, you know, all these processes.

Yeah. Uh, just wanted to clarify that so people didn’t think I was being too, like, pessimistic about it. 

Travis Feuerbacher: No, and I, I think it’s, I think it’s fair though, and, and think about, you know, again, back to this idea that you’ve got a, a minute, maybe a couple of minutes to, to make this assessment, to reach this decision where I think the process can be a bit less fair.

When you talk about cultures that may not be as, as apt to volunteer details and, and share information and, and China is a culture that was like this, you know, I think the, the average Chinese citizen is not generally going to volunteer a lot of details to a government official. They’re, they’re not even going to volunteer a lot of details to somebody that they don’t know well.

You know, it’s, it’s not a, a, a super free flowing, you know, expressive culture. And, uh, you know, there’s a, there’s a phrase, I think it was Nelson Mandela who says that if you speak to somebody in your language, it goes to their head. But if you speak to somebody in their language, it goes to their heart.

And that resonates. You know, in the world of Visa interviews, it’s not that applicants need to speak English. You know, I was trained in, in Mandarin, I, I could conduct my interviews in Chinese, but if somebody was able to speak to me, like I would assume a conversation should go, or like, I would expect a conversation to go, they’re already in a better position for success.

And so a an example for you, you know, if I said, what do you do for work? A lot of applicants in Beijing would say something like business, okay, uh, what company do you work for? Travis Company. Okay, well, what kind of company is that business? And now, okay. I’ve asked three or four questions at this point, and I have, I’ve gotten no closer to understanding your situation, right?

I’ve gotten no closer to being able to make a good decision, and I’m looking at this whole time, I’m looking at, you know, a hundred more people standing behind you that I still have to interview. So at some point I just can’t reach a, a positive decision. I can’t say you’ve convinced me that you are qualified.

Zachary Elwood: Right. 

Travis Feuerbacher: And that’s where I think, you know, culturally, culturally, this, this can be tough and that can be unfair, right? 

Zachary Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And leaving a certain culture, I mean, sometimes just, you know, personality types can be more reserved or reticent or these kinds of things too. Yeah. Um. So I was curious, uh, you know, as you, as you know, the reason I got interested in doing, uh, an episode on this topic is because I talked to somebody who did, uh, visa interviews and Visa, um, did, did this same work, and they were describing what they saw as very, uh, you know, occasionally very, because the system, you know, because the system is so rushed, they were describing people, relying on quick reads of behavior and sometimes basing it on.

Things that you would hear about and you’d be like, well that’s patently unfair. Like you shouldn’t judge it on. Like whether they, you know, these kind of things where somebody was averting eye contact and somebody thinking that, that they were reading, that they were deceptive or these kinds of things.

Right? But because the process is so, uh, rushed and because it does rely so much on quick personal judgment, it is understandable why people. Are basing it on vibes and such, even if those vibes that they’re getting can be criticized by other people. Right. But I’m curious if you have observations about how much these kind of, you know, ambiguous or high variance behavior things might have played a role in, uh, people making quick judgements.

Travis Feuerbacher: I think it does. I mean, for better or worse, like you said, it, it’s almost just like the, the system welcomes that kind of of decision making process. I think it’s, it’s kind of human nature, right? For us to, to compartmentalize or, or put people into, to buckets. And I think the Visa interview process does kind of welcome that type of behavior.

And you know, an example would be. I’m talking to a young person that, well, actually, let me take a step back. Let’s, let’s, let’s take an example of a tourist visa application. What’s called a B one, B two visitor visa. The, the legal requirements are essentially, you know, number one, you’re planning to do something in the United States that you’re allowed to do, so maybe you’re going for a vacation and you’re not planning to work, which you wouldn’t be allowed to do with this visa.

Number two, you’ve got enough money to afford this trip. And then number three, you’re going to leave the United States after your trip comes to an end, and this is what we commonly refer to as having ties to home. Some compelling reason or multiple reasons that you’re likely to, to depart the country and in, in a very short amount of time an officer is trying to arrive at, at those three kind of considerations so that they can make a, a decision yes or no.

And so I’ve been in a situation before where I encounter an applicant who’s young. They haven’t yet really started a career. They’ve never traveled abroad, so they haven’t built any sort of pattern showing that, you know, they always come home after they leave their country. Uh, they can’t really articulate kind of a clear plan, you know, they just want to go and experience the United States.

Now, that exact fact pattern was me after I graduated law school. I went to Europe for a month and a half backpacked through countries. I had no firm itinerary. It was the greatest time of my life. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t violate any laws. I was a tourist. The problem though, in the Visa interview for for the United States is that that fact pattern can welcome lots of concern.

You know, how can I be concern? How can I be convinced or at least confident that this person is going to not try to find a job in the United States? How can I be confident that they even have enough money to afford a trip? How can I be confident that they’re ever going to leave if there’s. No, you know, clear reason to, to kind of pull them back home.

And that’s where I, I do think that there’s a, a semblance of, you know, kind of bucketing people and may maybe reaching a, a bit of a premature decision. The problem is, you know, there’s, there’s not really any other way to do it. Right? I mean, you’ve, you’ve gotta make these decisions in a, in a short timeframe.

Zachary Elwood: Limited informa, limited information, limited time. Yeah. 

Travis Feuerbacher: Totally. And you know, the way I think about this. Now I think about this all the time when I, when I did this for my career, it’s kind of like being a weather forecaster, because if you think about it, a, a weather forecaster is expected to tell you if, if it’s going to be hot or cold, you know, rain or maybe sunny tomorrow.

There’s never going to be a 100% accuracy rate. You know, a forecaster’s looking at kind of historical data, maybe some projection models. A visa officer is doing very much the same thing. They’re taking a limited amount of data about that applicant standing in front of them, and they’re trying to forecast, if I give you this ticket into the United States, you know this visa, are you going to do everything exactly like you should?

Are you going to qualify with every regulation? Are you going to leave on time or am I concerned that one little thing might go wrong? And if I am and if, and if I can’t really overcome that concern again legally, I should not say yes. 

Zachary Elwood: Yeah. Getting back to the concept of fairness, it’s like it can never be fair on an individual level because as, as we’ve talked about, incomplete information, incomplete or limited time, limited information, but the, the goal in sort of a game theory optimal way is to minimize the risk below a acceptable amount.

Right? So That’s 

Travis Feuerbacher: right. 

Zachary Elwood: That’s kind of the, the goal. The goal is can’t be to, to make the right decision for every single person. The goal is to. At large make decisions that optimize, um, optimize or minimize the risk. Yeah. 

Travis Feuerbacher: Yeah. I mean, I, I think that’s partially true. I would argue that the goal really is to make the right decision for every person, though.

Zachary Elwood: Hmm. 

Travis Feuerbacher: I mean, it, it really, it it truly is because again, mm-hmm. One, one thing that always stuck with me when, when I was in Congen, which again, it’s that initial, you know, five week training program I went through for consular work specifically, one of the things the instructor told us was. This Visa interview, this interaction may be the first time a, a person from that country has ever interacted with an American.

And so at the end of the day, we are diplomats, we’re representing the United States abroad. And so we need to make sure not only that the interaction is, is, you know, fair and, and polite and respectful, but also reaching the wrong decision, especially if it’s kind of premature. That’s doing nothing to promote American interests.

Right. I mean, that’s, that’s damaging our reputation and, and, and our relationships. And so I think the goal really is to make the right decision. And that’s why the job is so exhausting. Mm-hmm. Because you’re really trying to get at that, that kernel right. That, that, you know, detail that’s going to give you the, the confidence that you’re saying yes or no.

And you’re, and you’re making the right choice. And it’s hard to get to that, 

Zachary Elwood: right? Yeah. It is the goal. Even if we know that. It can’t be possible, but the, that is the goal, right? Yeah. Um, 

Travis Feuerbacher: that’s exactly right. 

Zachary Elwood: I’m curious, you know, because, um. I focus on behavior and especially, um, kind of bad behavioral reads and applications.

More recently, do you have any anecdotes where coworkers or people you heard about were basing decisions on things, behavior related things where you’re like, that’s, that’s just bad decision making. 

Travis Feuerbacher: I mean, look, everybody’s done it and, and everybody’s seen it happen. Uh, again, we’re all human beings. You know, we, as much as we try not to, we bring our own kind of biases with us, and, and we project, you know, on, on people that we’re interacting with.

I think every, every vs o officer has a story like what I’ll, I’ll tell you here, which is where you, you go in. With a, a bit of a, of a, an optimistic worldview. You know, you, you want to think the best in people and, and you want to take people at their, at their word. Then you get burned and then you start, you know, maybe being a little more cynical or, or at least a little bit more skeptical, which is arguably what the job requires.

But in early in my career as a visa officer, this is when I was in Beijing. I was interviewing an applicant who, I won’t share a lot of details for obvious reasons, but you know, this individual was at my window and they had tears streaming down their, their cheeks. They were telling me about a family member who they had been very close with, who passed away in the United States.

They were planning to attend a funeral, and so, you know, I was speaking with them. I, I offered my condolences. I, I mentioned, you know, I’m, I’m sure this is so hard on you. I hope you and your family are okay. And, uh, one of our managers tapped me on the shoulder and said, Travis, come back here. He had pulled this individual’s Facebook page up on, on his computer, and this individual, smartly enough had posted right before their interview.

They had figured out how they were going to get a visa. They had come up with this whole story about how somebody had died in the United States and they were going to cry and they were going to convince some, you know, DPE visa officer that, that they deserved a visa. I was so angry that this happened. I mean, I was completely duped.

I, I was, honestly, I was about to say yes. I went back to the window and I’m not proud of this, but I told this individual. This bulletproof glass is usually here for my protection. At this point. It’s here for your protection. I was so angry. Obviously I wasn’t gonna do anything violent, but of course I denied their application because they had been completely lying to me and that was my turning point as a, as a visa officer, right?

That was my reminder that people are not going to come with with honesty every time. Some will. I hope they will. But you really do have to have your antenna up. You have to be skeptical. You have to poke holes in stories if you’re going to reach the right decision. 

Zachary Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I kind of wonder if you have a take on this.

I mean, some, something I’ve wondered about, whether it’s, you know, FBI training, CIA, training, any, any training, I kind of wonder if they go fairly minimal in some cases because they do, they don’t want to be. They don’t want to, uh, they want people to learn in the field and come up with their own takes, and they also don’t want to be responsible for like, giving bad training to people at some sense.

So that might explain why they might leave it a bit open-ended and say, you’re gonna go learn in the field. And also like, you know, it’s, as you say, everyone’s gonna have their own. Biases. We can’t, we can’t remove people’s biases and judgments from, you know, when they interview people, how they feel about people.

So in some sense it’s like giving people kind of like, you know, if they don’t train them to specifically, it’s basically saying, you know, go out there and do your, use your best judgments however you, you see fit. But I’m curious what you think of that take. 

Travis Feuerbacher: There, there could be some, some, some rationality to that.

Uh, you know, part of it is there are nuances, there are very, very specific nuances in each country around the world and even in, in regions of each country around the world. And so, you know, I mentioned that part of this experience was, was essentially on the job training. But, you know, a, a, a story that my wife Mandy likes to tell, and this is, this is very true, it’s something I experienced myself is when she first got to, to Beijing, when we, when we went out there together, she denied a couple of applicants who said that they were going to the United States on a honeymoon and bringing their parents.

And in my wife’s, you know, perspective mine too. We were always thinking, how could this be true? Who’s gonna go on a honeymoon and bring their parents? That’s ridiculous. Like, that doesn’t make any sense. Well, uh, my wife talked to a couple of our local staff members at the embassy about this pattern, and they said, no, no, no.

That’s totally common here in our culture. You know, the, the parents raised this kid. They, they may have paid for the, the cost of the wedding ceremony and everything else. This is a way for their child to, to give back to them and, and gift them with a vacation. And so those types of nuances, this isn’t something you can teach in Washington DC because it may be completely different in South Africa, from Mexico, from Azerbaijan, you know, name a place.

And so there is a, a fair amount of. Understanding the, the local landscape, you know, once you arrive. And we’re also taught, there’s a, there’s a series of courses called Area studies that many consular officers will go through before they’re dispatched to a foreign country, you know, to learn about culture and history and, and, uh, and local customs.

But I think a, a fair amount of this is specialized, it’s localized 

Zachary Elwood: context is huge. Yeah. The social context. Yeah. I was curious. Specifically for the nonverbal behavior kind of things. I was curious if you had any observations about the trainings or guidance in that area, because, you know, we’ve seen that kind of go into different stages.

Like post nine 11 there was an upsurge in like Paul Ekman’s work being used in this spot program for um, TSA kind. Work and then it kind of fell out a favor when it was obvious that that stuff really wasn’t doing much. But I’m curious, did you experience much in the way of nonverbal training, or did you hear much about that and how it changed over time?

Travis Feuerbacher: We did go through some of it. Uh, I never, I never subscribed, you know, completely to it. You know, the, there is this idea floating around online that, that visa officers are human lie detectors and, and I’ll be the first to tell you that’s, that’s not true. I mean, I don’t even know if that is possible. Well, 

Zachary Elwood: they’re like, they’re like lie detectors because they’re often wrong.

Maybe. 

Travis Feuerbacher: Yeah, that could be. 

Zachary Elwood: That’s, that’s my joke. That’s my own joke. I, I’ve said that before. Not about visa, not about visa people, but just about general. I’m, I’m a human lie detector general. I’m a human lie detector, which means I’m often wrong. 

Travis Feuerbacher: I think. I think that’s probably true. 

Zachary Elwood: Yeah. 

Travis Feuerbacher: But I think in, in, in training, you know, we were taught, uh, about nonverbal cues, things that we would call micro expressions.

And so if you’re, if you’re really watching somebody while you ask them a question and while they answer your question, there are sometimes cues that might raise some additional concerns. You know, people may kind of grimace quickly or smile quickly, or look to one side or fidget a little bit. Sometimes that can, that can lead you to maybe ask a few additional questions.

You know, maybe this isn’t true. Maybe you’re, you’re trying to remember a script that you, that you were taught, something like that. But, you know, I, this is not to disparage. Computer science majors, let me, let me preface what I’m about to say with that. But I would often interview international students who were coming to the United States for a degree in, in computer science and, you know, their, their life was going to be, you know, writing computer code and, and working in front of a computer screen.

A lot of respect for these people, but they’re not always, you know, great conversationalists, right? Uh, everybody’s going to come to the Visa interview with some degree of nervousness because it’s a, it’s a major milestone in, in whatever you’re trying to achieve. And I would’ve a lot of trouble with some of these students because they would really appear robotic and, and much of their answers would be very vague.

It would just sound like a Google search result. Right. And you know, if you’re thinking about non-verbal cues, they may exhibit a lot of nonverbal cues that would lead you to think that they’re lying. But in reality, they’re just not good at conversation. It’s, it’s not their strength. Like, I could never write a, a computer code, right?

That’s not my strength. And so I, I think that there’s, there’s probably a place for, for some of this kind of body language analysis, but I don’t really think that it, it very often forms, you know, the real basis for the ultimate decision. 

Zachary Elwood: Well then, and then you get into the, you know, some people are just highly anxious.

I mean, I, I, myself, if. You know, and me, I would say if I, if I ever got accused of a crime or something, I think I would come across as very suspicious to police because I’m just a highly anxious person. And so you add that in the mix too, and it’s like 

Travis Feuerbacher: you’d be admitting to the JFK assassination immediately.

Right. 

Zachary Elwood: I don’t know if I’d do a false con. I don’t know if I’d do a false confession, but I definitely would be sweating and, uh, probably acting very suspicious to them. Uh, but I was so I was gonna ask you Yeah. The. When you talked about getting small, um, you know, expressions of maybe anxiety or unusual behaviors, that’s something I’ve talked about where it’s like, I’m very skeptical of using, uh, behavior for the reasons, you know, we’ve talked about in, in real world non-game scenarios just because of the, you know, difficulty of determining true anxiety from, uh, regular anxiety, from deception, anxiety, these kinds of things.

But I do think, you know, the one thing, like you said. The, the most useful thing is like, oh, if you think somebody’s acting strange based on one question, then ask them a few more questions about it. Like that. That seems to me like even if you’re not gonna make any big judgements and you know that you could be wrong, that’s like the one practical outcome that can come from interviews and, and interrogations and such.

It’s like. I’ll follow up, maybe follow up with a few more questions. Does it, but I’m curious, is that something you know, how often would you, do you think you would base. You know, a change in interview tactics based on like a little reaction like that, was that a common thing or rare thing, or? 

Travis Feuerbacher: It was actually pretty common And, and I, I will say I have trained visa officers during my career, and I would train them to do exactly what you just said.

Zachary Elwood: Hmm. 

Travis Feuerbacher: You know, if, if a, if a concern develops, ask more questions, you know, try to get at the root of this, try to get some, some clarity. Right. Uh, I think the worst thing a ES officer can do is reach the wrong conclusion prematurely. Take a little bit of time. You know, there’s that old adage in sales where it’s be, it’s, it’s better to get to a no quickly so that you can move on to the next customer, right?

Same as in a Visa interview if, if there’s a really easy yes, just to prove the visa and move on. If there’s a really easy no, like if somebody wants to get a tourist visa, so, so that they can go work, well, you know that you can’t do that on this visa. So deny it and move on and then take more time for those complicated cases.

But I think, you know, to, to the other part of your question, I wouldn’t say it was common, but it was, it was more common than, than you might expect to have some nonverbal cue. Prompt additional questions and a, a common example I’ll share is you would see somebody who had, maybe spent several months in the United States a year or two ago, you know, maybe this is an individual who was in the United States for four months, and they say that they have a job, a career.

And so the, the first thing I’m thinking is. How in the world could they afford four months in an expensive country like the United States? And then if they were working during this time, how could they have taken four months off of their job? Because you can’t even work remotely on a tourist visa in this country.

And so I would ask them a question about, okay, well what were you doing during that time? And this is where you might see somebody kind of tense and, and look down and fidget a little bit. Maybe the answer was something like, oh, I was just staying with friends. Well, now I’m concerned. Right now my antenna are up and I’m thinking they were doing something more than just visiting friends.

So now I’m going to ask some more questions. Alright. Tell me about your job. How were, how were you able to take that much time off work? How did you pay for this time in the United States? I’m gonna probe some more and I’m gonna spend some more time to try to get it at what really happened, right? 

Zachary Elwood: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that example, because I do think, um, it’s hard to talk about the behavior aspect and separate the behavior from the content because 

Travis Feuerbacher: mm-hmm.

Zachary Elwood: For example, on that example, like if they had a better answer in their content, regardless of what their behavior was, you might’ve been like, oh, okay, that makes sense. But it is, I think it is hard for people to separate, like, oh, they seemed uncomfortable, coupled with a unusual or non satisfactory. And that can make you think like, oh, they were acting funny, but in a different, in a different version of reality where they acted the same and maybe gave a better answer.

You might have been like, okay, that made sense. But, but I’m curious for your take on that. ’cause I, I do think it makes, it’s what makes the behavior aspect hard to talk about because we can Yeah. Combine the behavior and the content. 

Travis Feuerbacher: Well, you know, uh, the way I would think about it, this was all kind of subconscious, but now that, now that you’re, now that you’re mentioning this, I would kind of form a baseline or, or kind of observe a baseline of, of behavior, right?

You know, I’m talking to this individual, I ask them a couple of questions and I, I see kind of their level of nervousness, how they’re answering questions. Then my fourth question is, well, what did you do during that time in the United States? And then their behavior totally changes. And they tense up.

Right? They look 

Zachary Elwood: down or they, you know, 

Travis Feuerbacher: start 

Zachary Elwood: staring down or whatever. Yeah. 

Travis Feuerbacher: That’s where, because you know, back to my earlier point, everybody is nervous during the Visa interview. Why wouldn’t you be? It’s, it’s, it’s completely crazy. You know, you’ve waited in line for maybe a couple of hours at this point.

You’re talking to some random person who you know in 30 seconds is going to decide your fate, right? And you’re speaking through this bulletproof glass window and you’re hearing people get denied all around you. It’s a crazy experience. And so everybody’s nervous and, and as a visa officer, you know that everybody’s nervous.

You know, there’s, there’s some tricks that we would employ where, you know, I, students would stand in front of me, they’d be shaking. They couldn’t really explain anything. Sometimes I would just say, all right, hold on. Tell me what you ate for breakfast this morning. Or, tell me what color your shoes are.

You know, some ridiculous question just to break the, the, the scene up and, you know, let’s take a deep breath. Let’s get through this together, because, you know, that’s not helping anybody if, if somebody’s that nervous. 

Zachary Elwood: I was gonna ask about, uh, the managing of behavior. Is that something you deal with when you give advice to clients about, you know, trying to remain, uh, you know, open seeming and not very, or behavior much?

Is that, do, do you get into that element of coaching people? 

Travis Feuerbacher: Absolutely. And you know, I I, there’s a, there’s a fine line here, right? I’m, I’m never going to tell somebody what to say because I want it to be honest. I want it to be their own, their own story, their own details. But I will tell them how to say it.

You know how to bring the honest details out. And, you know, back to that Nelson Mandela quote where, you know, if you speak to somebody in, in their language, you, you go to their heart, right? I tell people to channel your inner American. Show your emotions, you know, smile, if you’re excited about this, you might even just say, I’m excited about this.

You know, I’m really excited for the opportunity to go to Travis University to pursue my MBA. Like, this is something you’ve been working for, or you’re excited for that trip to Disney World, or whatever it is. You know, be a little bit less robotic, be more voluntary. When you, when you describe details.

That as Americans, that’s kind of what we expect in our interactions. And so if you come to this officer kind of speaking in their style, you’re going to resonate better. So yeah, we, we do work on that a lot when I work with clients. 

Zachary Elwood: Do you have any, uh, any more interesting anecdotes related to making quick reads of people that stood out from your years of work?

And that could be even just like logical deductions of someone’s. Bad intent or, or bad motivations based on something small they said. Anything stand out like that? 

Travis Feuerbacher: You know, one, one thing that I’ll mention is appearance. And, and I will tell you that this could go, you know, both ways. It could, it could lead to, I think, correct outcomes.

It could also re lead to, to mistakes. Uh, I used to encounter people in everywhere that I’ve worked as a visa officer. I would encounter people who clearly were, they were, they were trying too hard. Maybe they were wearing a, a suit and a tie, but you kind of look at ’em and you see that that suit doesn’t fit them.

Uh, the tie is tied in a weird way. You know, they’re, they’re uncomfortable and stiff, like this is not how they would normally dress. That leads to some questions, you know, why are you trying so hard? I appreciate that you’re taking this seriously and you want to appear professional, but. You are so uncomfortable, you know, something doesn’t, doesn’t make sense here.

Or, you know, I would encounter people who claimed to be A-A-C-E-O of a large company, and, and you look at their hands when they hand you a passport and you see a bunch of dirt and grime under their fingernails and their hands are weathered, you know, and you’re thinking. That doesn’t match up right, that doesn’t kind of fit this, this mold of a CEO that I’m thinking about.

But I will tell you also that you know, now that I’m no longer a Visa officer and I’m on the other side as a, as an immigration lawyer and I’m working with applicants. I encounter people that I probably would have refused, you know, based on these kind of visual, uh, assumptions that are made. Uh, you know, I I, I was talking to somebody who runs their own family office a couple months ago.

They’re extremely wealthy, but they look like they’re homeless. You know, they’ve, they’ve got that kind of, I don’t need to dress nicely. I could buy and sell you kind of vibe going on. And, and I had to, I had to tell this individual. You know, change your appearance a little bit for that Visa interview.

You’ve gotta kind of look the part. And so I think that, you know, again, we all bring our, our kind of biases, our expectations as as human beings. And, uh, you know, back to your question about ease, this fair, you don’t have a lot, a lot of time. You’ve gotta make that first impression. You have to judge that first impression as a visa officer.

And that can lead to, you know, maybe the wrong decision sometimes. 

Zachary Elwood: I was curious if you care to share, uh, no pressure to, but do you want to, do you have any observations about, have you heard how Visa applications have changed in any way since Trump took office? 

Travis Feuerbacher: Yeah. I, it’s a really good question, and I think, you know, generally speaking, uh, and this is true, this is something that I, that I, I tell people quite often.

The culture of the Visa officer has not changed. And, and not only has it not changed in the past year, it hasn’t changed in the past couple of decades. Uh, you know, the, the underlying training that that officers go through is the same. The computer system they use is the same. The, you know, the, the local staff have not turned over in any meaningful way.

I mean, it, it’s the same process and the same expectations. What has changed is that I think officers are expected to be harsher towards people who have any sort of complication. Uh, you know, an example would be criminal records. In the past and, and the law hasn’t changed either, by the way. The law does allow for, for some kind of flexibility, you know, on the part of the visa officer for many types of crimes.

Uh, if it wasn’t a violent crime or what we would call a crime involving moral turpitude, which is basically something that’s inherently evil, you know, for, for most types of criminal offenses and criminal records. If an applicant can explain what happened and, and kind of take responsibility and, and indicate how they’ve, they’ve kind of turned their life around since this happened, uh, I would’ve expected many of those to be approved in the past.

Now we’re seeing that officers are taking a much harsher stance, and I think that that’s for a couple of reasons. One would be right after President Trump, you know, retook the, the office of the president last January. There was a, I don’t remember if it was a proclamation or an executive order, I think it was an executive order, and it essentially said.

If any foreign service officer is found not to be promoting the, the president’s agenda, they’re subject to investigation and separation, which is State Department speak for being fired. And so what we’ve seen is, is a bit of a chilling effect. I think a lot of officers are, and, and by the way, uh, there have been reductions in force a couple of times where I’ve had people who I went through the initial training with.

Find that they were terminated seemingly at random. You know, people who have been award-winning and, and exemplary officers have been removed from, from the service completely arbitrarily, it seems. And so there is a, a, I think a, a, a well-based concern, uh, uh, bordering on fear that many officers are looking at this as.

This is my career. This is the only thing I’ve ever known. My, my spouse, my children are here, I’m supporting them. I don’t wanna lose my job. And, and, uh, you know, we are seeing anecdotally, I think more refusals, but certainly more refusals for people who have any sort of complication on, on their record.

Zachary Elwood: Right. I imagine, I imagine that would lead to, uh, an upswing for requests for your consultations to people really wanting to get the application right. 

Travis Feuerbacher: It is, you know, and people often ask us if, if we’re busy, and, and my answer is always yes, we’re, we’re busier than we’ve ever been. But honestly, it’s not necessarily the type of work you want.

You know, there’s a lot of people who are just scared. They’re facing separation from their family. Maybe they can’t obtain that degree that they’ve been working towards. They, they can’t travel to the US for the job that they’re, that they’re hoping to secure. And, uh, you know, in the past, immigration law has been fairly stagnant.

You know, there’s been a, a clear kind of goalpost and, and you work towards that with a, with a clear strategy. And I think now the goalposts are kind of moving and, and we’re, we’re quite often we’re, we’re trying to kind of react to. A new visa ban or a pause or a new restriction or a new way of, of imposing a, you know, a denial on, on certain situations.

And so it’s a much more fluid, you know, paradigm than, than I think we’re, we’re used to. 

Zachary Elwood: This has been great. Travis, do you want to throw anything else in there before we end about anything we’ve talked about that you think is worth mentioning? 

Travis Feuerbacher: No, I, I, I, this has been really fun. I appreciate the, the opportunity to connect with you.

I think, you know, I am a lawyer and so of course I’m trained in the law and I’m, I’m constantly offering people, you know, legal advice. Right. But when you get down to the interview itself, it’s, it’s far more psychological than, than legal. And I think most Visa officers, I was definitely an exception. Most visa officers are not lawyers and, and I would even argue that they’re not making legal decisions, they’re making administrative decisions.

You know, they’re applying kind of the, the, the framework of legal requirements, but they’re, they’re making their administrative decisions based on the dialogue, the verbal back and forth with the applicant. And, and that’s why, you know, a lot of my interactions with my clients is less based on here’s legally what you should do and more on here’s how you can resonate with that officer.

Here’s how psychologically. You can put yourself in the best position for success. That’s why I think that, you know, this type of podcast is excellent because it really is a game of psychology at the end of the day. 

Zachary Elwood: Yeah, that I thought of another question that I wanted to ask. I was curious how much, uh, say the, they review, uh, say they deny a Visa application, how much justification do they have to go on record for giving and uh, yeah, I’m curious about that because I can imagine.

A situation where they don’t have to provide much justification, which would allow them to act on vibes more versus giving very concrete reasons. 

Travis Feuerbacher: It’s a really good question. So, first of all, every time an applicant appears for an interview, there is essentially a, a, a written record of that interaction that’s maintained.

So in the computer system, the Vs. A officer is required to note their, their decision and, and provide a kind of a justification or an explanation for the decision they reach. Now, unfortunately, those notes are completely confidential. Me and you can never see those. They’re, they’re not subject to FOIA requests or anything else.

They’re secret, but they are visible to other Visa officers. So if, if I’m an officer and, and you’re the applicant and I deny you. I’m gonna type in some notes, and they’re probably going to be fairly negative because I’m, I’m explaining my rationale for my, you know, decision to deny you. Then the next time you go for your next interview, my notes are visible to your next officer or to, to the officer who interviews you.

And that can kind of, you know, to use our American phrase, it can kind of poison the well because if that’s the first thing the officer’s looking at. Hey, I’m worried that this guy doesn’t have enough money for a short trip, or I’m concerned that, you know, based on these details, he may not leave the United States after his trip concludes.

Whatever it is. Well, now that’s planted in my head, right? And now I’m fixated on that concern as well. And, and that’s where this can get a, a little bit difficult. 

Zachary Elwood: Is there any repercussions to being very vague about why you rejected someone? Can you just say like, something very minor or, or, or is there somebody reviewing that and being like, I want more information, or is it pretty wild west?

Travis Feuerbacher: Well, I mean, first of all, I, I think that you are motivated to be specific because, you know, if, if I am concerned, if I have a reason to refuse a visa. I wanna be specific about that because I know that this individual’s at some point probably going to reapply and I want to help the next officer make the right decision.

So I do want to note my specific concerns so that they can address that it’s not so that this person’s always going to be refused. That’s not my goal. My goal is for them to get a fair assessment and so the next officer needs to understand what to do. But the flip side of that is, you know, training and and management of officers.

So first of all, officers are trained to be specific, but then after the fact, managers are required to review a certain number of, of officer decisions. And while they’re not expected to change that decision, you know, a decision is final. Once it’s made, it’s not appealable. If an officer is not giving any details or maybe they appear to be making the wrong decision, that’s where a manager is expected and, and they should jump in and use this as a teachable moment.

You know, let’s talk about that last interview and, you know, maybe even shadow an officer if they’re showing a pattern of, of not doing enough or maybe not making the right decision. This is a training requirement at this point. Mm. 

Zachary Elwood: Mm-hmm. Makes sense. Okay. This is great. Uh, thanks a lot Travis. Really appreciate your time.

Travis Feuerbacher: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

That was a talk with Travis Feuerbacher, a former visa officer who now helps people with American visa applications with his company ZF Visas, which you can learn more about at zfvisa.com. 

This has been the people who read people podcast, with me, Zach Elwood. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. 

Thanks for listening. 

Music by Small Skies.

What if much of human behavior—from everyday interactions to wider political and cultural dynamics—is driven by hidden “status games” we’re all playing without realizing it? In this talk with Cards Against Humanity co-creator and evolutionary psychologist David Pinsof, we explore his provocative idea that status-seeking is a fundamental human motive—but one wrapped in a paradox: we all want status, yet seeking it too openly makes us lose it, forcing us to pursue it in subtle, strategic, and often unconscious ways. We also talk about another interesting idea of David’s on the nature of humor: it’s possible that David may have solved the long-standing mystery of what humor is and why we laugh. Along the way, we talk about our capacity for self-deception, how his ideas might relate to mental illness and cult leaders, the nature of charisma, the Cards Against Humanity origin story, the Gazzaniga split-brain experiments, and more. 

A transcript is farther down below.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources mentioned in or related to this talk:

• David Pinsof’s Everything is Bullshit blog
• A Pinsof post on status and a post on the signals we send to others
• Pinsof’s paper “All mixed up,” on the evolutionary purpose of humor
• Pinsof’s post on the nature of charisma
• Pinsof’s paper “Strange bedfellows” on political alliances
• Summary of Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments
• Peter Turchin’s idea of an overproduction of elites and elites becoming frustrated with insufficient high-status roles

TRANSCRIPT

(transcripts are auto-generated and will contain errors)

David Pinsof: “Humans are of course, hyper social and highly dependent on other humans for cooperation. So it, it seems to, it seemed to me that status was this huge underlying motivation in human psychology, this huge elephant in the room. And then to see that, wait a second, it’s this huge motivation, and yet we can’t talk about it. We can’t be overt about it. ’cause if we, if we are overt and we do come off as a status seeker, or we reveal to other people that we’re trying to seek status, we lose the very status that we seek. And I just became thinking about, I just got really ensnared with that problem and just thinking about what are the implications of, of this idea that we are a status obsessed species that cannot admit that it is status obsessed, right?”

“In working on Cards Against Humanity and in developing content for the game and working on copywriting for the game, uh, I developed this writing style. This voice, you know, Cards Against Humanity sort of has a voice. If you, if you, uh, read any of our, our stunts or our emails or our, any of our ads, like it all has a pretty clear voice that it’s like a blunt, cynical, smart ass character. Uh, and it’s really terse and it doesn’t mince words. And, uh, it’s just kind of really direct into the point and kind of edgy. Um. And I thought it would be interesting to try to just write in that style on topics that interested me as a psychologist. And it just so happens that I, I had been interested in a lot of topics that had pretty cynical implications.”

Those were a couple clips from my talk with David Pinsof, the co-creator of the game Cards Against Humanity, who is also an evolutionary psychologist with some very interesting and I think profound theories about status-seeking, group tribalism, self-deception, and the nature of humor.

I think you’ll find this a highly interesting episode if any of the following are true for you: you’ve played and enjoyed Cards Against Humanity; you’ve wondered about how much of our behavior and actions may be secretly motivated by seeking status and power; you’ve wondered about the mystery of humor – why we call some things funny, and why we emit strange sounds from our mouths when we find things “funny”. 

Regarding the humor topic: I think it’s possible that David Pinsof has solved the ages-old mystery of the nature of humor. And as someone who read Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious at a young age, and who has long puzzled at the nature of humor, this alone makes Pinsof’s work very intriguing to me. But the truth is David has some deep and intriguing ideas on a wide range of topics; things that’ll make you think deeply about the nature of the world and other people and yourself. 

I’ll say that I only learned of David’s work recently. Alan Crawley, who studies nonverbal behavior and who I interviewed for this podcast, recently told me about Pinsof, saying that he thought Pinsof was doing some very impressive work and would be making some big impacts in psychology. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of Pinsof, as he works on so many things I find interesting, including Cards Against Humanity, which I was an early player of. Back in 2014, related to my poker tells work, I wrote a blog post on my readingpokertells.com blog about behavioral clues in Cards Against Humanity and similar games, like Apples to Apples. 

If you have listened to this podcast before, you know I also work on political polarization-related topics, and David’s ideas on status-seeking have implications for group polarization. He and his colleagues wrote a paper titled Strange Bedfellows: The Alliance Theory of Political Belief Systems, which had some great ideas about the hidden motivations behind tribalism and us-vs-them conflict. This is just to emphasize that I was surprised I hadn’t heard of David, as he’s doing some fascinating work. 

A little more about David: 

He is an evolutionary social scientist at UCLA, from which he has a phd. He has researched political attitudes, status hierarchies, and social signaling. He is one of the co-creators of the popular party game Cards Against Humanity and director of The Pulse of the Nation public opinion poll. He explores the psychology of bullshit on his blog, Everything Is Bullshit. 

Many people balk at David’s ideas on the hidden social status games we play; how we try to hide these status games from other people and also from ourselves. Many people, for understandable reasons, don’t like the idea that we may be much more driven by status seeking than we know. This relates to discomfort about similar ideas that say that we have less awareness of our motivations than we know; that can include a wide range of psychological theories all the way to the idea that we lack free will. So in this talk we get into the pushback people can have, and why it makes people uncomfortable, and we also talk about why these ideas are not nearly as cynical and dark and pessimistic as people believe; we talk about how they can fit into more positive or at least neutral and non-threatening ideas of human social dynamics. 

Here’s a personal observation that might be helpful as an introduction to these ideas. I like to think of myself as someone who likes figuring things out; as someone who likes understanding the world and the people in it. I would say, and like to think, that even if I were on a remote island, by myself, that I’d like figuring things out; that I’d devote myself to many of the same things I currently work on. But is that really true? If I was indeed banished to a secluded island, or a secluded planet, and I knew with certainty that I would never interact with anyone else, and that no one else would ever learn about anything I did, what would I really spend my time doing? How much of what I spend my time on, that I think are things that I do because I am interested in them, are actually things that I do because I want to impress other people and gain status in some way? Or when I do something nice for someone or donate to a charity, how much of that is because I genuinely care and how much of that is because I want to be seen as someone who cares? It’s possible such questions are impossible to answer because, and I agree with David on this, it’s impossible to separate our views of ourselves, our self-definition, from the perceptions that other people have of us; these things are intertwined because we are inherently such social creatures. From when we are babies, we grow to see ourselves through other people’s eyes – that is the nature of socialization and of becoming a quote “normal” person; so it would seem impossible to separate our views of ourselves from our views on how other people see us. 

Just a quick note that if you’re listening to this on audio, there is a video of this talk on youtube. Also, I’ll mention that my last episode of the People Who Read People podcast was available only on youtube; it was the most intense and time-consuming YouTube video production I’ve done, and I only put it on youtube as it was highly visual in nature; it’s about modern con artists and cult leaders and how they gain influence and followers in the modern digital age. It’s gotten almost 10,000 views at this point and has gotten a lot of positive comments, so you might like checking that out. And that actually relates to something David Pinsof has worked on; in this episode we talk about how his theories on status-seeking relate to people who are good at charming others, people who some would say have a lot of “charisma,” and this has implications for cult leader dynamics. 

We also talk about how these ideas tie into self-delusion and our inability to know ourselves and our motivations. For example, we talk about the fascinating Gazzanica experiments on people whose left and right brain hemispheres were severed and how they learned that people will make up reasons for the actions they’ve taken, ignorant of the real reasons for their actions.

And in this talk, we also get on the topic of mental illness and mental struggles. Because as I have personally experienced, realizing that you are surrounded by status games can be demoralizing and can have mental health implications. For example, in Catcher in the Rye, you could view Holden Caulfield’s constant focus on people’s “phoniness” as partly being his awareness that he was surrounded by people playing status games, as being selfish and non-authentic. And we can see how that perception played into his mental struggles. And I’ll say that I myself have had personal experience in that, in that I dropped out of my first college due to some mental struggles that related to seeing everyone as selfish and inauthentic and being stressed out by that. So we talk about that a bit towards the end. 

We also talk about Peter Turchin’s ideas that there is what he calls an “overproduction of elites”; basically a successful society produces many people who expect high status, and there aren’t enough high-status spots in society, and this leads to social destabilization as some of those people seek to undermine the system due to discontent and anger. This idea relates to non-conscious status-seeking and to political polarization.   

Okay here’s the talk with David Pinsof, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity and an evolutionary psychologist with some highly interesting ideas. 

Zach Elwood: Hi David. Thanks for joining me. 

David Pinsof: Yeah. Glad to be here. 

Zach Elwood: So maybe we could start with, um, how you came to work on, uh, cards Against Humanity, be part of that endeavor and also, uh. Engage in the, uh, academic psychology research. That seems kind of an interesting, uh, combination of things. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that backstory.

David Pinsof: Yeah, sure. So, uh, cards Against Humanity is kind of an unusual business in that, um, none of the business owners really expected it to become a business. So I just made that game with my friends in high school, uh, and we made it to play with ourselves for fun. And then, uh, we brought it with us to college, uh, and it sort of became viral as an underground thing.

People were printing out copies of it and cutting it out with scissors and paper. Um, and eventually, like it just started to dawn on us that like, this is. Really a thing like this could become a major business. This is becoming a phenomenon. We should try to capitalize on this. And so we, uh, were one of the first Kickstarter success stories.

So we put the game up on Kickstarter. We, we, uh, collected money to print out the game in like a nice box with nice cards so that people wouldn’t have to like, cut it out and print it. Um. So, uh, yeah, we, we raised a ton of money on Kickstarter and then, um, the rest is, as they say, history. It just became, uh, a successful business.

We were repeatedly selling out in the early years of the, of the game. Um, and then we eventually 

Zach Elwood: just, yeah, I was, I’ll say I was an early, I was an early, uh, my ex-wife and I were early buyers of Cards Against Humanity Right when it was coming out. Yeah. 

David Pinsof: Oh, cool. Yeah. You’re with us from the, from the start.

Yeah. So, uh, we just gradually got our shit together and, and realized that it was a business, but like none of us, we were all kind of, you know, under the expectation that this thing would collapse at any minute and it would become uncool very quickly. And we just continued to be surprised that it just continued to gain momentum and popularity.

Uh, and so, like I, at the time, like, I, I did not think that Cards Against Humanity would be my career and, and I would be able to make a, a livelihood with it. Uh, I was working toward my PhD at the time that cards like really started taking off, uh, financially. And so I had to choose like whether I, you know, should.

Work full-time at cards or keep pursuing my PhD. And what I ended up doing was just doing a combination of the two and sort of working, uh, part-time on both, uh, at the same time. Um, and I, and that’s sort of what I continue to do. Um, I, I still work part-time for cards doing stuff like data science and play testing.

Um, and so I’ve been able to use the skills that I’ve acquired in my PhD analyzing data for, um, uh, analyzing data with cards, um, and with understanding the statistics and the psychology of humor. So. That has been helpful and, and I still sort of have those two sides of myself in part because I wasn’t expecting cards to, to be a side of, of myself until it was too late and I was already kind of too deep into my PhD.

So, um, I am really glad that I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to continue to have those two sides of myself. Um, it’s been really fortunate for me because I haven’t had to deal with the bullshit in academia, for lack of a better term. I have a financial stream that allows me to do research on the topics that I find interesting without having to worry about, um, administrative stuff with universities, without having to worry about publishing or perishing and getting a certain number of publications.

I can just work on stuff that I inherently find interesting. Uh, I can Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, so it’s, it’s been a really cool, um. Situation for me that, uh, you know, I’m, I’m really lucky and a lot of people don’t have that. So, yeah. 

Zach Elwood: No, that’s, uh, it’s, yeah. I have a lot of questions, uh, but I I, I’m curious, was there, is there a relationship between your interest in creating Cards against Humanity and your interest in psychology?

Do you see those two things as linked in some way? 

David Pinsof: Um, perhaps, uh, I, I did not intentionally or consciously link them, but, um, I’m sure that they arose from similar impulses within myself. I, I like understanding how people tick. Um, I like getting inside people’s heads. Um, I think being a good, uh, comedy writer, uh, necessarily involves getting inside people’s heads.

Uh, you sort of have to be a good psychologist to be a good humorist. Um, so. They were sort of inadvertently intertwined in that they sort of arose from similar sides of myself. Um, but beyond that, it was just kind of a lucky accident that they happened to collide, you know? Mm-hmm. 

Zach Elwood: Do you think, uh, would you have ended up writing, uh, working on the, uh, psychology of humor, you think?

If it wasn’t for the Cards Against Humanity part of things, 

David Pinsof: it certainly made it a more appealing topic for me. ’cause it was, um, an opportunity for me to combine the two sides of myself in an interesting way. Um, maybe I still would’ve come upon it naturally, I don’t know. But it certainly increased the likelihood that I, that I would discover that topic.

Mm-hmm. Um, and I think I, I’m, I’m pretty happy with, uh, the work that I’ve done on that topic if for a while. So I study evolutionary psychology. That’s, um, my, uh. Special interest. Uh, I am really gung-ho and enthusiastic about applying principles of evolutionary biology to human behavior, to understanding humans as animals, to understanding the mind as an evolved organ.

And I’ve been constantly perplexed by humor as an outgrowth of the evolutionary process. It, it’s Darwinian function always seemed really puzzling to me, and it was always something like in the back of my head that I had been wondering about. It was always like kind of a pebble in my shoe of like, I feel like I understand a lot of different aspects of the human condition really well when I apply Darwinian principles to understanding things.

But humor is just the last thing that I just, I don’t think we really have a good answer to it. And so it had been in the back of my mind for a while. And I just sort of gradually, uh, I, I, the, the solution to it came to me by accident when, when I was studying a different problem. So I’m, I’m really interested in coordination games and the game theory of coordination and common knowledge.

Uh, so common knowledge is this idea that everyone knows that everyone knows something and it’s really important for us to have common knowledge if we want to coordinate, if we want to show up at the same time and place, if we want to communicate such that we can agree on, which sounds coming out of my mouth, correspond to which things in the world.

Um. So I, I’ve been, I was really interested in that. I was looking at the game theory of coordination and it, and it occurred to me that, uh, when you have a mix up in a coordination game, say I say one word intending, one meaning, and you hear a different meaning, or we’re trying to pass each other in a hallway and we both go left, or we both go right, and we keep sort of dancing back and forth that these are mix ups in coordination games and they can be mathematically modeled quite precisely.

And that maybe that is the essence of what humor is. And so I started thinking about that as a potential solution to the Darwinian mystery of humor. And I realized that it’s actually a really elegant and profound solution to the problem of humor because coordination is our superpower as a species.

Language depends on us coordinating, you could think of language itself as just a massive coordination game where we’ve all agreed that these particular sounds correspond to these particular things. And we would be unable to communicate if we did not. Solve that coordination problem. And you can think about norms and conventions and social roles and leadership are all solving this problem of coordinating, of putting our heads together effectively so that we can work together and communicate and solve challenges cooperatively.

So, uh, given that we’re so good at coordinating and our survival as a species depends so much on coordination, it really is not mysterious at all that we would, that, that, um, coordinating would be a major selection pressure and avoiding mix ups in coordination games would be a huge selection pressure.

And so I started pursuing that idea. Now I have this academic paper that’s, that’s now pre-print, uh, exploring this idea as, as a solution to the evolutionary mystery of humor. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I, I, uh, I have to say, yeah, I read your. Your work on that. And, uh, I mean, I’ve been, I also have been interested in the psychology of humor for a long time.

Like I read Freud’s, uh, what is it called? The whatever, something of, of humor or comedy, whatever his book on comedy was a long time ago when I was a kid. And then since then I’ve thought about it, probably like you, but not in a as thorough way as you obviously have. And when I read your work on it, I really thought, I mean, it appealed to me so much.

I was like, this guy, I think you figured it out. Like I, it made, it makes so much sense to me. Just like when you laid it out, I was like, intuitively. I’m like, yeah, I think you are correctly. Right. And, you know, humor is, we’re, it’s showing that we’re signaling that we understand these mix up and of, and and, and it has a social, um, yeah, it has a social value.

A real social value. Yeah. I think it makes so much sense. 

David Pinsof: Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. 

David Pinsof: I’m glad to hear you say that. Yeah, so hopefully, hopefully it’ll get, uh, published on a nice journal soon. We’ll see. 

Zach Elwood: Are you getting a lot of, um, uh, positive feedback on that, the humor 

David Pinsof: so far? Yeah, no, people, I, I’ve, the reactions that I’ve mostly gotten from, uh, people and from fellow academics is it just, it makes a lot of intuitive sense.

Um, and, and it’s, it’s hard for anyone to have like a serious objection to it, just ’cause it fits the empirical facts of humor so well. So I’ve been really encouraged by that. Um, hopefully there’s, there’s not a math error or something in my analysis, but, uh, yeah, so far it’s, it’s been well received and, um, I have high hopes that it’ll be, uh, published in a good journal and hopefully make a major contribution to the field.

Zach Elwood: That’s awesome. Um, and one more Cards Against Humanity question. Sorry. Um, do you see, you know, and I realize some of this may be just me reading into looking for links between it, but, uh, cards Against Humanity has this kind of, you know, dark and edgy. Aspect to it, which I think you’re, uh, everything is bullshit, kind of status seeking examination also has an edgy, you know, kind of cynical aspect to it or, so it would seem to, to many.

Uh, do you see a link between kind of like a, your, your interest and, uh, delving into some, you know, darker, edgier parts of things? 

David Pinsof: Yeah, I definitely do see the link there. I think, you know, my, my blog is against humanity to a certain extent. It’s kind of, uh, misanthropic, uh, it’s, it’s pretty dark and cynical.

Um, uh, it, I think they both stem from the fact that I have a, a dark sense of humor that I enjoy playing with and cards against humanity, and I also enjoy writing about, and, you know, uh, a lot of my posts while very dark and cynical, often have jokes in them that people, uh, occasionally find funny. So yeah, it, those two are, are merged.

Um. Coincidentally, um, I actually sort of strove to tie them together, uh, because in working on Cards Against Humanity and in developing content for the game and working on copywriting for the game, uh, I developed this writing style. This voice, you know, cards Against Humanity sort of has a voice. If you, if you, uh, read any of our, our stunts or our emails or our, any of our ads, like it all has a pretty clear voice that it’s like a blunt, cynical, smart ass character.

Uh, and it’s really terse and it doesn’t mince words. And, uh, it’s just kind of really direct into the point and kind of edgy. Um. And I thought it would be interesting to try to just write in that style on topics that interested me as a psychologist. And it just so happens that I, I had been interested in a lot of topics that had pretty cynical implications.

You know, I’m an evolutionary psychologist. I like looking into our deeper motives that we’d be hap we’d perhaps not want to admit to, um, like, for example, social status. And I found that trying to marry those two sides of myself actually worked out really well. That, like, you know, writing about these topics in sort of the cards against humanity voice, um, it, it, it, it worked out and, and it allowed me to sort of be more open about the, the cynical implications in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

So I feel like a lot of evolutionary psychologists, when they write about ideas from evolutionary psychology, they try to sort of tiptoe around the cynicism and apologize for it and put, you know, caveats around it and reassure people that this isn’t really as cynical as it seems. And, you know, there’s so much dancing around it and.

Personally, I got kind of frustrated with that. I thought that, you know, it really does have cynical implications and we should be honest about that. We should be forthright about it. Uh, and I, so part of the, the impetus for writing the blog was just to explore, you know, what it’s like if we just embrace the cynicism of these ideas and just see how far they go, see where it takes usintellectually.

Um, and it seems like, you know, there, there has been a demand for that kind of honesty. You know, you don’t really get that perspective a lot, uh, in think pieces in the media and it seemed like, seems like people are kinda hungry for it. So I’ve been really pleased by the, the response I’ve gotten, uh, in the blog.

Zach Elwood: Well, so related to your, you know, status seeking and status games work, it seems like maybe some people can be kind of afraid to be, um. That openly cynical, or at least seem that openly cynical. So they hedge it in various ways, whereas maybe you have, you know, you, you, you’re not as afraid to, to do that maybe, or maybe, you know, getting to the status seeking games.

Maybe there’s value in being, in, being that direct from a status seeking, uh, perspective. But, um, maybe that’s a 

David Pinsof: Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: Good segue into the status, um, you, your, your elevator pitch on the status, uh, games ideas. 

David Pinsof: Sure. Um, it basically, this idea came to me when I was reading an empirical paper showing that people who are judged as status seekers lose status.

And that really fascinated me. Uh. That people who overtly try to seek status such that other, other people see them as a status seeker. They’re judged as mean, cruel, manipulative, disingenuous. They’re judged as assholes, basically assholes, douche bags. We have a variety of colorful terms to describe status seekers that elicit disgust, which suggests that we’re kind of grossed out by overt status, seeking it’s gross, and that.

Was really puzzling and profound to me as an evolutionary psychologist because my entire career studying evolutionary psychology, the idea had been drummed into me that status was hugely important to humans. That it was one of our central over, you know, under underlying motivations to so much of what we do, and that there was this huge link between status and reproductive success and ancestral environments.

You see these links in other animals. Humans are of course, hyper social and highly dependent on other humans for cooperation. So it, it seems to, it seemed to me that status was this huge underlying motivation in human psychology, this huge elephant in the room. And then to see that, wait a second, it’s this huge motivation, and yet we can’t talk about it.

We can’t be overt about it. ’cause if we, if we are overt and we do come off as a status seeker, or we reveal to other people that we’re trying to seek status, we lose the very status that we seek. And I just became thinking about, I just got really ensnared with that problem and just thinking about what are the implications of, of this idea that we are a status obsessed species that cannot admit that it is status obsessed, right?

What, what are the cultural implications of that? And so I just started just, you know, thinking about what follows from that idea. Well, one thing that follows from that idea is that when we all play a status game together, when we compete for status, we cannot become aware of the fact that we’re playing a status game.

Because once we become aware of that fact, then we all start to lose status. And the, and the social hierarchy almost starts to invert a little bit like those who won the most status. Well, they’re the most icky status seekers. And those who are at the bottom of the social ladder, well they were less, they were the least interested in status.

Uh, and so. The top of the hierarchy gets lowered and the bottom sort of gets lifted. And everyone who is involved in this IY v glorious pissing contest becomes gross. And everyone who is not involved in it, or who is distant from it, they begin to look cool and, and that the outsiders begin to gain status for not caring about status.

And so what that creates is a kind of cultural dynamism where status games can collapse and invert and then take the opposite form as as the form that was taken previously. So if we’re playing a status game, that’s all about making money and insulting poor people and, and, and encouraging ideas of social Darwinism, if we’re all, if we all realize that we’re playing that status game, that we’re all just, uh, puffed up, uh, greedy status seekers, and the social Darwinism idea is just a rationalization for us, preserving our privilege, if we all become aware of that fact, well the status game collapses and you get a kind of opposite status game that emerges.

Out of the ashes, like, well now we, we don’t care about money. Greed is icky, greed is bad. Uh, we, instead of being a social darwinists, we want to, we want to be in favor of social justice. And so the opposite status game sort of arises, uh, and, and replaces it. And I think we see a lot of this happening, you know, throughout history across cultures.

And I think it gives rise to a lot of the seemingly arbitrary variation in status games and status symbols that we see throughout cultures or across cultures. Because if status games are constantly collapsing and reemerging in antithetical forms, then it creates a, a, an engine of arbitrariness that can arise.

It’s a, um. It, it, it creates a, a kind of dynamism. So I, I saw it as a really cool explanation for why status symbols were so variable across time and space. I saw it as also providing insights into the nature of cynicism itself, cynicism and idealism. Because if you think about a status game as having the potential to collapse and invert, well, who wants that status game to collapse and invert, presumably the people who are not playing it, who have, who are less invested in it, the people who are at the bottom of the social hierarchy in that game, and those people have a, a vested interest in trying to make that status game collapse by exposing it.

As, as hollow, as vain, as narcissistic. And if they can succeed in casting the players as status seekers, then uh, as the game collapses, their status will rise. Right? And so it, it creates an incentive for a kind of strategic. Cynicism and also strategic idealism because if I’m really winning in this status game, I wanna make sure it doesn’t collapse.

’cause then I could lose all the status that I’ve accumulated. So I wanna make sure that I spread idealistic narratives about my pure hearted motivations and the pure hearted motivations of everyone who’s playing the status game. How none of us really care about status. We’re pursuing this higher noble end.

And this leads to the invention of what I call sacred values. That we’re not pursuing status, we’re pursuing higher ends, like, uh, authenticity or self-actualization or egalitarianism or, uh, uh, authority or diversity or tradition. These sort of high-minded ideals that we can all rally around and we can agree that that’s what we’re seeking and not status that protects our status game and keeps it from collapsing.

Zach Elwood: So I, I was curious, um, to get your take on, how much of this do you see as unconscious? Like do people in your view, you know, when people think that they have. Like something that they’re doing that they believe is highly righteous and morally pure. Do you see, you know, is there an aspect where they may not even be aware that they’re seeking status, but that is in, in many cases what they’re doing?

David Pinsof: Yes. I think for the most part it is unconscious. Um, and I think there are a number of reasons why it might be, for one thing, if we have a strong incentive to convince other people. Of a fact about ourselves, then we are likely to convince ourselves as a side effect. And so insofar as we are strongly motivated to convince other people that we’re motivated by high-minded ideals and not by status, we’re going to start to convince ourselves as a side effect, and, and that will involve a certain amount of self-deception.

Another idea is that I’m gonna be more convincing if I truly believe the stuff that I’m saying, right? If, if I have to hold the false information and the true information in my head at the same time, and I have to be aware of the fact that one’s true and one’s not, and, and keep them from being mixed together in my head, it’s actually really hard to lie.

But if I don’t have that problem, if, if I only have the lie in my head and I see it as the truth, I’m gonna be much more convincing and, and effective. And so this is the idea from Robert Trivers, um, the evolutionary biologist. His idea is that self-deception evolved, uh, as a way of more effectively deceiving others that we lie to ourselves to more effectively lie to others.

So that’s another part of this. Uh, and another part of it is that we may not really even need to know, or it’s, and, and it, and it’s possible that we, we can’t know our underlying motivation to a certain sense, and that there was no selection to truly delve to truly, um. Perceive our own deeper motivations.

’cause we don’t really need to know them. We need to know where the stuff is in the environment. We, we need to know where the tables and chairs are. We need to know where other people are and where the predators and prey are and what, what other people think of us. But we don’t really need to know our true underlying motivations, or we don’t really need to know what’s happening at the unconscious level.

And, and to a large extent, I don’t, I think we don’t know what’s hap what’s going on unconsciously in our heads. We are strangers to ourselves in, in, in relevant respects. Um, so I think that’s another big part of it is just we just, we don’t really know the answer to the question of what’s driving us. And that allows us to more fluidly and effortlessly make up a story about what’s motivating us and believe that story as if it were real.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I that I was gonna say that, um, that’s the, one of the parts I really liked about reading your work was, uh, talking about how it’s. Pretty much impossible to separate the thinking about what others think of us and trying to manage and manipulate that aspect. It’s, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to separate that from what we ourselves are thinking or our views of ourselves.

And I’ll, I’ll quote something you wrote in a recent essay. It said, humans have a filter in their heads screening out for botin impulses in nearly every waking moment. The what will people think filter practically everything we do passes through this filter, even when we’re in the pr, even when we’re in the privacy of our own homes or in an anonymous, uh, situation.

So I think that, I mean, I think that’s a really key point because I think a lot of people who would balk at these ideas, I think if they saw the point that from the moment, you know, our personalities ourselves were created at, at a young age. Everything we did was filtered through this filter of how other people saw us.

You know, we were going through various socialization processes, you know, where we learned to be embarrassed about various things. So like, it’s really hard to separate how we see ourselves from how others see us. And as you say, it may not even be possible to really do that because they’re so intertwined.

And I’m curious, am I getting that right? Am I explaining it right? 

David Pinsof: Yeah, you’re absolutely getting it right. So an idea I’ve been thinking about is that it’s probably much easier to deceive ourselves about the contents of our own minds or the, the motivations that are driving, guiding our behavior than it is to deceive ourselves about reality.

So if I’m trying to, so I have an apple in my hand and I’m, I’m holding it behind my back, if, if, let’s just assume for the sake of argument that that’s true, and I’m trying to convince you that there’s no apple behind my back. That’s gonna be really hard for me to do because I’m gonna feel the apple in my hand.

Right. But if I’m trying to convince you that I truly care about authenticity or equality or diversity or self-actualization or whatever, I have no equivalent of the apple in my hand. I have no direct access to the true reasons for my behavior. I have, I’m a stranger to myself. So in that sense, it’s gonna be much easier for me to convince you and, and to convince myself than it is for me to convince you of something that I have direct sensory access to.

’cause I have no sensory access into my true motivations. I’m gonna have a much easier time convincing myself of whatever story I come up with to explain my behavior. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. One, uh, when I was started reading your work because of the crossover, one example I started thinking of for myself is when I play, when I’ve played, uh, Kurd Against Humanity or other silly, you know, social games that are, that are fun, I sometimes find myself, you know, I, I know that there’s a drive in me.

To want to do well at the game, even though I know it’s very silly and it’s a very trivial thing, but there’s a part of me that’s like, well, I wanna do well in the game. I want to perceive to be doing well in the game. ’cause you know, for example, I’ve worked on games, I’ve written books about poker tell, so there’s a part of me that wants some sort of status, even for doing well in a silly game, like Cards Against Humanity.

There’s another part of me internally that’s like, what are you thinking? It’s just a stupid game. Like, take it easy. You know? Like, why are you, why are you trying to imp impress, you know, why do you wanna impress people about a silly game? You can’t, that you can’t really, you know, there’s always so much skill in it, obviously.

Uh, so I have this conflict in my brain. So that’s just to say like, that’s a conscious conflict. And then you have. Theoretically in, in your view, you have that kind of conscious conflict going all the way to more, like you’ve convinced yourself that it’s entirely altruistic or that it’s, uh, you know, there’s, there’s no, there’s no, uh, you have no motivation to seek status.

But I thought that was an interesting example that popped to mind for a very trivial aspect. 

David Pinsof: Yeah, no, totally. That’s an interesting example. Um, and even there you have the part of yourself that doesn’t want to be seen as a status seeker. 

Zach Elwood: Right. It’s part of yourself that doesn’t Yeah, it part’s perception.

It’s, it’s a big part of the perception. You’re like, and, and, and part of the getting back to like the difficulty of separating how others see us from how we see ourselves. It’s like, I don’t even like the part of myself that wants to seek the status for, for such a silly thing. You know, it’s kind of like this internal thing of like.

Why, you know, so just to say we, I, I, I very much liked your points about how we can be con conflicted and maybe not even see aspects of ourselves that are, that are seeking the status. Yeah. Yeah. 

David Pinsof: Cool. Yeah. No, I, I agree. Yeah. Do 

Zach Elwood: you have any, do you have any, uh, examples from, from your life that come to mind that you maybe you’ve written about in your blog that are granular examples, 

David Pinsof: uh, examples of people not wanting to be seen as a status seeker 

Zach Elwood: or you, you yourself in your, your own, uh, da daily life or examples from that?

David Pinsof: Um, yeah. I mean, I often, uh. Get a reaction from my blog posts where people will, uh, apply my cynical lessons to my writing itself. Um, they’ll say, well, is this essay just another bid to gain status? Um, and my answer to those replies is always the same. Yes, it’s, I don’t exempt myself from these processes. I, I wanna be intellectually consistent about my ideas.

Um, I think that it is all too easy for cynics to drift into a selective. Cynicism that exempts themselves from their cynical views. It is very easy for cynicism to drift into solecism where everyone else is a phony. Everyone else is in it for themselves or selfish, or status seeking or whatever. But me, I’m the authentic one.

I see the world how, how it truly is. I’m the only one who really cares about these high-minded things. A lot of cynicism is like that, and I really try hard to resist that urge as much, much as possible. I want to, uh, include myself in my explanations of the human condition because if I can explain myself as well as I can explain any other human, then that’s a really good sign that, that I’m onto something intellectually, that these explanations are powerful and they’re not just a, a self-serving strategy for gaining status.

I mean, they also are at the end of the day. Right. I gain status from having ideas that seem insightful to people and that seem to Yeah. Are smart ideas. Yeah. They’re smart ideas. Right. So I ultimately gain status for it. Um, but I al but I also, you know, uh, I, I gain status in so far as the ideas are right and people are aware of the fact that they’re right or that they’re, they’re revealing something important about the world.

So that’s ultimately, yeah. Ultimately what, what, what’s guiding me? Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: I mean, I think you would say to such accusations about, you know, I, I, ’cause I don’t see in your, in your view of things, I wouldn’t see such accusations as even, you know, as being insulting in any way, in any way. Because even if you, you know, even if you embrace that view, your view of, of things, it’s like clearly there are some ideas that are more correct than others.

Clearly there are some, uh, approaches that are less narcissistic than others. So it’s like, I, I, I think you would say that there’s a, there’s a, there’s a spectrum of accuracy and goodness even within the, the status seeking realm. 

David Pinsof: Yeah. Yeah. Some status games are better for the world than other status games.

It, it would be, uh, absurd if that wasn’t true in, in pursuing our ends of, of trying to gain prestige and admiration and esteem. It would be surprising if every attempt to do that had the same consequences on the world as any other. Like some status games are really good for the world, like the scientific method.

I think science is a status game. At the end of the day. Scientists are competing for prestige and notoriety just like anyone else. Uh, but it’s a, a status game that’s really good for the rest of us, right? They’re, they’re competing to generate important discoveries about how the world works, and we all benefit from that.

Um, so I, I think it’s, it’s good to, um. Be honest about which status games are good and which status games are bad. And the only way we can really evaluate which ones are good and which ones are bad, is if we admit to ourselves that they are status games. Right. That at the end of the day, these, these things are status motivated projects, which is uncomfortable for us to admit, but I think if we want to be clear about which ones are good and which ones are bad, we have to, you know, begin with the starting point of, of being clear-eyed about how these games work.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. Getting back to the, uh, to other, um, views of these ideas as cynical one SAU wrote talked about how, you know, a way to see these things as less cynical is that many of them are defensive in nature. Do you care? Talk about that a bit. 

David Pinsof: Sure. So, um. We have motivations to ascend a social hierarchy, to gain status, uh, even if it means stepping on other people.

And we have motivations to avoid a dissent to the bottom of a social hierarchy. We, we want to avoid losing status or looking bad. And I think if you reflect on your personal experience. It should be pretty clear that the motivation to avoid losing status and avoid falling in status is stronger, more intense, more urgent than the goal to gain status or to gain superlative status at, at other people’s expense, or to look superior or better in some way, which makes a lot of Darwinian sense because if you sort of map any of our goals, if you, if you, if you plot them on a graph, let’s say, and uh, the x axis is biological fitness and the y axis is any other goodie like, um, status, food, sex, whatever.

Almost always what you’re gonna get is a sharp drop off. It’s zero. Followed by an increase and a curve of diminishing returns, right? Um, if you have zero status, your genes are going nowhere, you’re not gonna get a mate, you’re gonna get excluded from the group. You’re dead, right? Um, as you start to get a bit more status and you start to get a bit more attention from the opposite sex and a bit more resources and social support, your fitness is gonna increase.

But at some point, like your fitness is the, the, the increases of additional status are gonna be smaller and smaller and smaller, right? Because of diminishing marginal returns. So, because increases in status, um, are less urgent from a Darwinian perspective than than decreases in status, we’re gonna be more attentive.

To the decreases. And that’s, this is true. I think in general of all of our motivations and emotions, the negative aspects of our, uh, uh, emotions, the negative aspects of our motivations are gonna just take a much stronger hold of us than the positive emotions. The fear that we feel is gonna be more intense and pervasive.

It’s gonna guide us, uh, more effectively than, say, happiness or joy or playfulness. Right? Like negative emotions are just more serious. They, they grab a hold of us much more strongly. This is a very well replicated finding in, in psychology, you know, bad is stronger, right? 

Zach Elwood: Excuse is loss or much more pertinent.

Yeah, 

David Pinsof: exactly. It’s called loss aversion. So, um, if you just apply that to status and to signaling, it becomes clear that probably most of our status seeking, most of our signaling is of the defensive kind, where we’re trying to avoid a loss in status more so than we’re trying to gain status at someone else’s expense or, or to look superior.

And once you start carving up our motivations in that way, it, it begins to, uh, be clear that. What we really don’t like is the offensive signalers, the offensive status seekers, the ones who are motivated to be superior to us and to look better than us, and to outdo us, outshine us, insult us, diss us, upstage us, whatever.

That that is the stuff that we really find icky and gross and defensive status seeking. And defensive signaling is really not as icky or gross. It’s more sympathetic. It’s more relatable. Um, and so what I began to realize is that when I was writing about status seeking and signaling, a lot of people would interpret me as saying that all of this is offensive.

And they would draw the wrong implication, which is that the world is just more full of assholes and narcissists than they thought. And so what I want say very clearly is that I’m not, I’m not saying that, um, there are roughly as many assholes and narcissists as you thought there were. Right. We’re usually pretty good at, at picking up on these things and other people.

And I’m not saying you’re wrong about that. What I’m saying is that, uh, as soon as you realize. That defensive signaling is probably playing the bulk of the role here in these status and signaling processes that you don’t, you no longer have to be extremely cynical to agree with me that status and signaling, you know, plays a huge role in human life.

You only have to be moderately cynical, and hopefully that will make my views an easier pill to swallow. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Getting to the, um, I mean, another way to see it as less cynical is that, you know, we’re, we’re talking about status, but you can also see, I mean, status is another way to achieve connection with people, right?

It’s like we, we seek status. I think, and correct me if you think differently, a big part of it is. Not just getting power over other people, but being able to influence people so that we can gain connection. And because we’re social creatures, you know, from an evolutionary Yeah. Especially from an evolutionary psychology, um, perspective.

And I am, I, am I getting that right? It’s talking about the connection aspect? 

David Pinsof: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think that’s another way to avoid being extremely cynical is, is to also understand that a lot of these motives are driven by connection, uh, getting along in addition to getting ahead. Um, and of course, I think status and connection are deeply intertwined in many different ways.

You are much more likely to achieve connection if you’re high status than if you’re a low status. And the more connections you have, the higher your status becomes, sort of by definition. So I think they’re, they’re deeply intertwined, but at the same time, um, connection is seen as less icky, less cynical.

And I think a lot of our motivations ultimately come down to that and reminding ourselves of that is also a way to avoid being too cynical about these things. 

Zach Elwood: You had, uh, you’ve written too about how, um, you know, uh, cult leaders, people, uh, people that we might call cult leaders, cult of personality types, they, uh, successful ones can have kind of a superpower as you put it, in terms of managing, um, exploiting or, or manipulating others or gaining status without other people.

Uh, understanding that they’re being manipulated, making other people see them as, uh, altruistic. And when I was reading that, I was thinking of, uh, Keith Rani, because I was just watching a long documentary, the Netflix documentary, multi-part documentary about him and thinking about how, you know, he made people think that his motives were altruistic and that he was not seeking status over them, even as he clearly was.

And I’m curious if, you know, if you could talk a little bit about how, uh. Am I, am I getting that right? That those people have, you see them as having a kind of superpower over people? 

David Pinsof: Yeah. So if we’re creatures that need to seek status without coming off as a status seeker, then by definition the people who achieve the highest status will be the, the people who are best at doing that.

The people who can hide their status seeking most effectively in order to better achieve status. And so what that is, is a kind of deception and that you are hiding something about yourself and your motives. And the result of that hiding is that you’re gaining more status. Um, and I view that as a big part of what charisma is.

Charisma is the ability to hide all of these unflattering motivations and hide these unflattering sides of ourselves, our desire to gain status. And the result of doing that well is that you gain status. And there’s something kind of weird about that. Because you would think that being deceived would be bad for [00:38:00] us.

So if you are actually just really, uh, interested and motivated by status, you wanna rise to the top, um, and you cover that up successfully, such that I think you’re just an authentically, selfless, humble person who doesn’t care about any of those petty things. And I really admire you. But deep down, you’re just a selfish status seeker.

If you’ve deceived me, you might think that’s bad for me, but in an important sense, it’s actually not, it’s actually good for me because if you’re likely to deceive all of my friends and relatives, and you’re likely to deceive everyone in my social group, uh, as effectively as you’ve deceived. Then it’s actually bad for me if I see through your deception.

’cause if I’m the only one who calls you out on your bullshit and sees you for the narcissist that you are, well then all of your friends and allies are going to come to your side and have your back. And I’m going to be the one who looks like an asshole. And you are going to use your tremendous status and influence to retaliate against me and make my life a living hell.

Right? So [00:39:00] it’s one of many examples where it is often better for us to coordinate on a falsehood than to fail to coordinate with other people. Right? So if we all agree that you’re awesome and we all have your back, if I’m the only one who disagrees with everybody, then I’m screwed. 

Zach Elwood: You’re in trouble.

David Pinsof: Yeah. It it, I’m in trouble. So it, it, it, it weirdly benefits me to be deceived by you. And I think that’s a, a big part of, of what charisma is and why it’s so ineffable. Because if we realized. The deception that was being practiced, the charisma would disappear. If we could pinpoint exactly what it was about the charismatic person that caused us to admire them or to want to affiliate with them, then, then their charisma would disappear.

They would become a phony. It’s, it’s because we’re not aware of the magic trick being played on us, that the charisma is successful and it’s actually, uh, uh, better for us to be, to buy into the magic trick than to see through it. [00:40:00] 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. It seems like, uh, people who are good manipulators of other people, it seems like they have, they’re really good at.

The theory of mind stuff, like understanding how they’re perceived by other people. So they’re constantly like thinking like, well, what would, what would, um, what would put this person’s mind at ease? I have to be very careful about how I word things, how I say things. And they’re able to, to, to foresee how saying something a different way or saying something in a different, uh, using different, slightly different words might trigger somebody else’s.

Um, you know, understanding that they might be manipulating, and I’m thinking of extreme cases of like Keith Rani, not necessarily like, you know, Ted talk people or something. I’m thinking of the, the extreme manipulators. It seems like they have a very good, just a very good radar of the, like, recursive mind reading about like, how, how is this thing I’m gonna say be perceived and how can I set this person at ease Right in, right in this moment, you know?

David Pinsof: Yeah, absolutely. They’re, [00:41:00] they’re very good at, uh, manipulating people without. Appearing manipulative. Right? And, and in fact, you know, you, you can’t manipulate someone if you appear manipulative. The only way to successfully manipulate someone is to not appear as as manipulative. Right? And, and, and Keith Rania was an expert at that as any cult leader is, is an expert at that.

Um, and I think another aspect of his success and a lot of cult leader success is being really tapped into the sacred values and the narratives that people use to disguise their status seeking. Um, because I think a lot of cult leaders will, will come up with a sacred narrative that portrays what the cult is doing in very altruistic and high-minded or utopian terms, you know, we’re saving the world.

Um, you know, Keith Ranier’s cult was, was very much steeped in, in these utopian ideas that they were, uh, at the vanguard of, of a utopian movement that was going to change everything and revolutionize, uh, human wellbeing and human happiness and, you know, whatever. Um, I think manipulators and, and charismatic cult leaders are also experts in the sacred and in sacred values and in utopian narratives.

Zach Elwood: A quick note here: in a previous episode, I talked to Ellen Huet, who wrote a book about Nicole Daedone and her OneTaste organization, which promoted what they called “orgasmic meditation” and which some people called a cult. Ellen made a great point that charisma is in the eye of the beholder; that some people will respond to different things. This helps explain why one person can think “wow, that person is really charismatic and charming and genuine” and another person can look at that same person and think “They’re fake and sleazy; they’re an obvious con artist and liar.” 

There’s also Tim Levine’s Truth Default Theory, which says that by default we believe unless something raises our suspicions to question something. 

When coupling these ideas with David’s ideas, we might say that people can have different views on what constitutes inauthentic and suspicious status-seeking. There might be a range of types of behaviors that could raise someone’s alarms and get them to distrust someone. And everyone will have different types of alarms for that. 

Inside living beings, there are certain biological molecules that fit together with other biological molecules and chemicals to interact and unlock chain reactions. Things have to fit together in precise ways to trigger reactions and activations. We could view certain types of personalities as fitting together well and meshing well with certain other types of personalities. Someone like Teal Swan; her personality and approach and the things she says and the way she says them are going to interact well with certain types of people, while others with different types of guards and sensors and trip wires will be immediately turned off by her. Certain personalities unlock reactions in certain other personalities.  

Anyway, just some thoughts that I think are relevant and that help explain why what we call charisma and charm are nothing real and intrinsic but are subjective… merely in the eye of the beholder….

A quick note here: I talk here about some tie-in I see with David’s ideas and mental struggles. I don’t think I did a good job communicating it here, as I’m not used to talking about such things, so I figured I’d try to preface it with what I was trying to say. 

I think it’s true that we are surrounded by selfishness and status-seeking. I don’t say that to be pessimistic, I just think it’s the nature of being an independent, thinking entity, and therefore the nature of being human. And for people who don’t feel mentally well, for people who find the world and the people in it threatening in various ways, that can be a source of stress. One can feel that one is surrounded by inauthentic, selfish creatures. And to be a quote “normal” functioning person, one must be willing to play the “games” that most people in society play; one must be willing to play various status games and be selfish, in various ways. Being emotionally healthy and quote “normal” means accepting, at some level, being okay with… the various status games and status-seeking that ourselves and others engage in. And I think David and I’s discussion of some of the more positive and non-dark ways to see his ideas is pertinent here; seeing the understandable and more positive aspects of why status-seeking is common can be a way to combat the more pessimistic and threatening interpretations of that, which can have implications for mental health. 

Hopefully that overview helps make my line of questions here make more sense. Back to the talk…

Zach Elwood: Uh, so this might be a little oversharing, but I’ve talked about this sometimes on this podcast. I, and in college I dropped out, uh, in my sophomore year due to, you know, a so-called nervous breakdown. And I was having all these, uh, panic attacks and, uh, you know, dis I was dysfunctional, couldn’t really function in college anymore, so, uh, went back home.

But part of that experience was about, uh, kind of like the Holden call field thing and catch her in awry you, you seeing everybody as phony, seeing everybody as essentially greedy and out for themselves, and finding that very threatening and, um, so yeah. And then, uh, and I, I think, uh, so I’ve thought, thought a lot about the, um.

You know, [00:43:00] psychology and, and, uh, psychosis and, and mental illness things over the years since that experience. And it seems like to, to me, the, the isolating, the, the fears of isolation and the anxiety that comes from isolation is part of that. And I’m curious if you’ve thought about how your work can relate to, uh, mental illness.

Because it seems to me that a big, to me, a big part of reaching some, uh, mentally ill state or psychotic state is kind of being so stressed out by the normal, uh. Uh, normal interactions that are required to be a, you know, a normal human because there is just so much calculation involved. And if you, you know about thinking like, well, what does this person think of me, you know, how do I interact with them?

You have to keep track of your own, uh, uh, a model of yourself and model of other people and all these complex interactions. And it seems like, you know, if you’re not feeling well, if you’re [00:44:00] anxious, if you start going down a rabbit hole of feeling unwell, you kind of get to this point where these so-called normal interactions that are required of us to be, you know, so-called normal people, functioning people, that that kind of stuff can just become really overwhelming and we kind of like drop out of it internally where we just kind of give up on trying to manage all this, this complex calculus.

At least that’s the learnings that I think I’ve, I’ve gotten from my own experiences in reading a lot about psychology over the years, but I’m curious if you’ve thought much about. How your, your work and, and thinking relate to mental illness? 

David Pinsof: Yeah, I mean, I haven’t written a lot about mental illness. Um, I’m, I’m not a clinical psychologist by training.

I, I, I’m more interested in, in basic research on, into how the mind works. Um, I, I, in terms of, you know, anyone listening who might be experiencing similar mental health problems about social anxiety, um, I, I wouldn’t have much to say beyond just the normal platitude [00:45:00] of, you know, seeking therapy, seeking psycho pharmaceutical treatments.

You know, these things are effective and, and they can, they can help. Um, but, uh, I’ve, I’ve been thinking a bit about how some mentally unhealthy patterns might be results of positive feedback loops. So the clearest example of this might be something like a panic attack. I’m beginning to think that what a panic attack is is.

A positive feedback loop where you’re afraid of your fear itself. So when you’re, uh, experiencing a fear response, there are a lot of physiological and bodily reactions that kick into gear, right? Your heart starts racing, your muscles tense up, your blood pressure increases. Um, and what I think can happen is when you interpret some of those physiological and bodily responses as scary in and of them themselves, then that creates a positive feedback loop where you get afraid of something, your heart starts pounding.

You start being [00:46:00] afraid of the fact that your heart is pounding. Maybe, maybe you’re having a heart attack, maybe you’re dying, maybe you know you’ve been poisoned or you’re sick or something, right? And once you start being afraid of your heart pounding, well, you, you get more afraid, and that makes your heart pound even more.

And then you get even more afraid, and then your heart pound even more. And it’s a kind of mental explosion. That can lead into a panic attack. Um, and I’ve been interested in the hypothesis that maybe some other mental illnesses might have that kind of flavor where it’s an emotional system where the snake starts to eat its own tail, where the output of the system starts to become the input in a way that can create a kind of mental explosion.

Um, and I haven’t thought about anxiety in particular as, as being an example of that, but it’s, but one possible way it could be. An example of that is if social anxiety prevents you from, uh, making connections with other people, um, and in so far as you are, um, less connected with other people, um, and you are [00:47:00] less affiliated with others, you’re gonna be more anxious, which.

Makes it even harder for you to connect with other people, which makes you even more socially anxious and so on in a kind of feedback loop. And I think a lot of people might fall into that trap where, um, they’re anxious because they’re not connected with people and they’re not connected with people because they’re anxious.

And the only way to break out of that is, is just to temporarily be really uncomfortable and anxious to try to break outta that cycle. And that’s really hard, right? I don’t, I don’t have a recipe for doing that. It’s, it’s the problem of, of the, the enduring the short-term cost for the long-term gain. And, you know, humans have been struggling to solve that problem for millennia, and I don’t have a, you know, a magic bullet solution to it.

But I do think that, um, I, people have to get over that hump of trying to make connections with people, even if it’s scary or uncomfortable or, or anxiety provoking, that getting over that hump can, can get you out of a, that vicious cycle. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I think it’s pro, I think it’s like a lot of, [00:48:00] um, psychological.

Thing is there’s, there’s a lot of various feedback loop loops involved. I, I do see some, uh, I’d probably put it better in words writing it afterwards, but I do see connections between your work and, uh, so-called mental illness because I do think, you know, getting back to the way that we can see other people, as in very cynical ways, I think a lot of, uh, mental, mental illness can come down to seeing other people as very threatening and kind of being, being made dysfunctional by that in an, in an extreme, you know, pathological sense.

We just start seeing other people, as you know, we, we start seeing other people as so threatening, as so greedy, as so out for themselves. And, and you go down this, uh, pathological rabbit hole and you lose the sense that maybe I’m like other people, maybe I can connect with them, these kinds of things. And I see your, I see your, your work kind of related to that because it’s like, uh, to be a.

To be a normal functioning people, we do kind of have to accept that other people are like us, uh, that [00:49:00] other, that we are like other people. And that even, even if we all have, uh, you know, at, at at heart kind of self-serving, uh, motivations that that isn’t necessarily a, a horrible thing. You know, that, that there’s still positive things within that.

So that, that’s where I kind of see some relations there, at least from my own experiences and having read about a lot of people’s experiences of mental illness that are, that kind of have similar map overs. But anyway, just throwing it out there for, for you. 

David Pinsof: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think another interesting aspect of this that my work touches on a little bit is our.

Compulsion to tell stories about our behaviors and about our motives and, and about our minds, and how we have very little access into what’s really going on in our unconscious mind or what, what we, yeah. What we’re really striving for in life. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I wanted talk about the, I wanted to talk about the gica thing tied into that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 

David Pinsof: yeah, sure. So the, yeah. The gica experiments, he has some pretty disturbing experiments where he looks at split brain patients, which they have their corpus callosum severed, and that’s the, the [00:50:00] set of nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemisphere of the brain. And what he finds is that the left hemisphere will often confabulate, uh, reasons for something that the right hemisphere did.

So he can actually, uh, isolate which hemisphere gets a particular piece of information, because the right eye is connected to the left hemisphere, and the left eye is connected to the right hemisphere. So he can show you something in your left eye so that only your right hemisphere gets it. He can show you a command, like get up and go to the door.

Right. And your left hemisphere, which is more involved in language and producing verbal responses, will not be privy to that. It will not get that sensory stimulation. So what you will feel if you are a split brain patient is a, a, an urge coming from your right hemisphere to get up and go to the, to the door.

And your left hemisphere will make up a reason why you got up and went to. Yeah. They they asked them 

Zach Elwood: why, why did you do that? And they confabulate. 

David Pinsof: Exactly. So, um, if, if you, so the, the correct answer of why they got up and got to the door is because, you know, their uh, [00:51:00] their right, sorry, their left eye got the command to get up and go to the door.

That’s the correct reason. But they don’t say that because they don’t have that. Instead they make up a reason like, oh, I went to go get a drink of water. I went to get a Coke, or I went to the bathroom, whatever. They’ll make up something that is not the correct reason, um, but is a sort of superficially plausible reason.

Right. And the disturbing implication is that we’re just doing this all the time. Right. We’re constantly confabulating. Superficially plausible reasons for why we do what we’re doing. Um, and you know, we, we certainly have more, uh, evidence to work with when we’re constructing that story. And we have to make it consistent with our sensory evidence and with the stuff that other people are aware of.

And so that constrains us, uh, to some extent to, you know, generate stories that are, you know, more likely to be true or have some truth to them. But we still have a lot of wiggle room to bullshit a lot about why we do things. Um, and we often bullshit in the direction of making ourselves seem more benevolent.

Uh, more altruistic, more competent, more rational than we in fact are a lot of the time. [00:52:00] And connecting back to the idea about mental illness, it, it might be that this actually, uh, pours fuel onto the fire of mental illness in a lot of cases, and that we could have mental health problems, but talk ourselves out of the fact that we have them or be unaware of the fact that we have them.

So if I am, have a hard time connecting with other people, uh, one way to interpret that is I’m having some kind of social anxiety problems. Having some kind of mental health problem where I can’t, uh, my, my normal social machinery is just isn’t working well or I have anxiety or depression or whatever.

That’s one way to interpret it. And in a lot of cases, that’s the correct interpretation. But because our confabulation and storytelling minds, uh, are so active, they will off that, that answer will often not come to us. We’ll just rationalize why we’re having a hard time connecting with people and instead of giving the correct answer, which is I’m having, you know, depression or anxiety or whatever.

We’ll come up with an answer. Well, oh, everyone just must suck. [00:53:00] Everyone’s just a phony. Uh, everyone’s out to get me. Uh, everyone’s trying to hurt me or conspiring against me in some way. And we’ll cook up a superficially plausible sounding story to defend. We’re having a heart to defend ourselves too.

Yeah. To defend ourselves. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. 

David Pinsof: And we’ll often end up believing that story and, and that story actually prevents us from solving the mental health problem and in fact, makes the mental health problem worse. And so I think a big part of the solution to mental health problems is trying to see through our own bullshit stories that we tell ourselves.

’cause oftentimes those bullshit stories will get in the way of us actually solving our problems, uh, in a, in an effective way. And so I think we really need to be skeptical of the stories we tell ourselves. Uh, yeah. And because often they’re wrong and often they’re preventing us from actually getting better.

Zach Elwood: No, that’s great. I think that’s actually one of the, if I had to sum up one of my biggest tips for people dealing with, you know, mental health struggles, it’s like, be skeptical of your own certainty about your issues. Because so often we do reach. And not just, yeah, I would, I would say not even, this applies to everything.

Getting back to the confabulation aspect, I mean, when you, the gica experiments were so kind of mind blowing and, uh, counterintuitive and scary. It’s like we should, and getting back to your, what you read about in your, in your blog posts, it’s like, it’s a, it’s a good thing to be skeptical about what we believe our own motivations are, because that helps us cut away the, the dangerous bullshit or the harm harmful bullshit and, and try to get more to the heart of the matter, whether it’s societal things we’re working on, or whether it’s our own personal lives.

Yeah. I was curious to ask if you were a fan of, uh, Peter Turin’s ideas, or is it Turchin, I, I can’t remember how he pronounce it, his idea about the frustrated elites. Do you know much about that and would you care to talk about that, how it tie might tie into your work? 

David Pinsof: Sure. Um, so Peter Turchin has some ideas about.

What’s called elite overproduction. And uh, the idea there is that there are a limited number of slots for elites to [00:55:00] fill. And these might be positions of power, uh, in either in government or in organizations. And when you have too many elites to fill that, those limited number of slots, then you have a lot of competition and rivalry within elites.

And what he thinks happens as a result is a lot of societal unrest that disgruntled elites will try to start, you know, uh, revolutionary political movements will try to, uh, disrupt the status quo in various ways politically. Um, and that leads to a lot of societal unrest. So I think there are, um, a lot of problems and things you could critique about this idea.

Um, it’s kind of unclear what counts as a slot. To fill it, it’s kind of hard to measure, like what, how do, how do we know if there are too many elites and like how, how does that result to like, what is societal instability? What does that even mean? Like there, there’s a lot of fuzziness here and a lot of things you could, you could criticize, but I am sympathetic to the [00:56:00] overarching idea that there is competition between people for status in one form or another.

Certainly positions of power in, in government or in organizations are one kind of status that, that people compete over. And I am sympathetic to the idea that those competitive dynamics really matter for society in shaping how society. Functions. So, uh, part of me is sympathetic to the idea and think that he’s on, I, I think that he’s onto something there, but in, in terms of the details and how you measure it and how you define societal instability, I, I’m, I’m a little more skeptical.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I saw a little map over between the two. You’re in his ideas because I, I did, like, the thing I liked about his idea was I, I liked the idea that. People could be, could come to be very anti-establishment for reasons that were not obvious to them, similar to your work where it’s like they might be reaching for these ide things that they think are ideological, but it’s actually about them just kind of hitting the system because they haven’t achieved sufficient status.

And I, I [00:57:00] saw that as being connected. 

David Pinsof: Yeah. I will say, um, probably what I think is the best defense of Turian ideas for, for lack of a better term, would be, uh, musa elgar’s work. Um, we have never been woke, so he has a book where he dissects the phenomenon of wokeness and where it comes from. And also I think he, he is a very skilled anthropologist of us, of ourselves and sort of defines.

Us, namely the people listening to podcasts like this as symbolic capitalists. We are people who are good at manipulating symbols, who’ve achieved, you know, high levels of education. We are, uh, to a certain extent elites. And he does a really good job of taking an outside perspective as an anthropologist would of that culture.

And why, uh, woke ideas, for lack of a better term, are appealing to that, uh, subculture. And he takes a very ian analysis of that, where he thinks a lot of wokeness stems from competition between elites for social status and he views wokeness as, as, as a product of that kind of competition. So I’d recommend that if, if, uh, if your listeners are interested in, in, in that lens.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve said with my work on political polarization, I often say that I thought moose is one of the, uh, most important contributors to understanding. American polarization with his work, and especially his paper that came out years ago, race and the Race for the White House. Understanding, you know, more liberal democratic contributions to polarization.

I think his work has, has been great. But yeah, this, this is opening up the polarization thing, which I don’t, I don’t wanna take up all your time, but maybe one day in the future we can talk about your polarization related work because Yeah. EE even there I was, I, I just really enjoyed reading your work on that, examining, um, the, the, the nature of the, uh, the shifting tribal allegiances that help explain, uh, you know, political conflict.

But yeah, we don’t need to get into that now. I’ll just leave that as a teaser maybe for the people listening and maybe we can talk about it someday in the, in the future. But, um, yeah. Yeah. 

David Pinsof: Sure. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, but I really appreciate you joining me, David, and find your work very interesting. And do you wanna talk a little bit about how, how people can stay in touch with your work and follow you?

David Pinsof: Yeah. So, uh, I write a substack. Um, it’s called Everything is Bullshit. Um, you can find it at, uh, everything is bullshit blog. Um, you can feel free to DM me if, if you’d like, um, either on Substack notes or on Twitter slash x. So I also have, uh, I’m on Twitter at David Soff. Um, those are two ways you can reach me.

Feel free to, to DM me. Um, you could also email me, me if you want David pins off at Gmail. Uh, I’m pretty easy to reach and pretty friendly. So yeah, 

Zach Elwood: whenever I hear your name of your blog, I think you should make like the Lego movie. Uh, everything is awesome. Turn it into everything is bullshit, kind of theme song for your, uh, anyway, just an idea.

David Pinsof: That’d be awesome. Yeah, it’d be fun if maybe I’ll see if I can get AI to do that. That would be fun. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, there you go. Um, okay. Thanks a lot David. 

David Pinsof: Yep, my pleasure.

Zach: That was a talk with David Pinsof, co-creator of Cards Against Humanity and an evolutionary psychologist who works on status-seeking, tribalism, humor, and more. I recommend subscribing to his Substack, which is called Everything is Bullshit. 

This has been the People Who Read People podcast with me, Zachary Elwood. You can learn more about this podcast at behavior-podcast.com. You can learn more about my work on poker tells at readingpokertells.com. 

Thanks for listening. 

See the full podcast series on con artist Chase Hughes

An episode examining the all-knowing-guru aspirations of the con artist Chase Hughes, and how his attempt to manufacture an illusion of deep authority and induce paranoia and confusion in his audience is similar to the strategies of other narcissistic gurus (e.g., Teal Swan, Keith Raniere, L Ron Hubbard). This episode is focused on one person but it’s about something much bigger than one person: it’s about how false gurus build cults in the digital age. Towards the end there are quotes from former Chase Hughes customers and inner circle members who see Chase as doing highly unethical and harmful things.

This episode is only available on YouTube, not on audio podcast platforms. For a transcript and summary, go here (I purposefully put that on Aemula because I recommend people sign up for Aemula and support them; learn why).

Did MK Ultra actually accomplish anything impressive in brainwashing- and mind-control-related areas? Did the US government, as some people claim, create “Manchurian candidates” who would kill on command? In this episode, I talk with Stephen Kinzer, author of “Poisoner in Chief,” a book about the head of MK Ultra, Sidney Gottlieb. We discuss the strange, disturbing reality of MK Ultra—and the many exaggerations made about it over the years. While pop culture and deceptive gurus (e.g., Chase Hughes) spread tales of the program achieving impressive psychological control, Kinzer describes a disorganized and amateurish series of experiments that harmed many people but failed to demonstrate anything impressive. We explore why MK Ultra has become a perfect canvas for all sorts of paranoid ideas and wild speculations, and why the lack of evidence of anything approaching actual mind control hasn’t stopped people from confidently claiming otherwise. If you’ve ever wondered what’s real—and what’s myth—about MK Ultra, you’ll probably appreciate this talk.

Topics discussed: the myths versus the realities of the MK Ultra program; what makes MK Ultra such a perfect case for people to imagine and believe all sorts of things; what Operation Mockingbird was and its relation to MK Ultra; the hypnotist George Estabrooks and his wild claims of mind control; the likelihood of large plots succeeding in the modern age; the more realistic and banal ways that governments try to “control people’s minds” by persuading and shifting opinions in the modern age; and more.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources mentioned in or related to this episode:

• Stephen Kinzer’s website
• About Kinzer’s book Poisoner In Chief about MK Ultra and Sidney Gottlieb
• Episode of mine discussing exaggerated hypnosis and mind control claims made by Chase Hughes and others: a talk with hypnotist Martin S. Taylor
• Wikipedia for John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (a fact-based examination of MK Ultra)
• Wikipedia pages for: Operation Mockingbird, Tavistock Institute, Edward Bernays, George Estabrooks (all things Chase Hughes has spread false, exaggerated conspiracy theories about)
• Some of the wild claims about mind control made by George Estabrooks (who seems to me to have been a lying kook)
• A chapter from my book on paranoia and conspiracy theories, and their link to toxic polarization
• Research on the difficulty of succeeding with a large, secret plot

(Transcripts are automatic and will contain errors)

[Several clips play…]

Chase Hughes:  Along comes this other program called MK Ultra. The CIA went full-blown mad scientist. It was about breaking minds completely open in the cleanest way that they possibly could, and it was about a racing identity. Keep that in mind. In the fifties, they were becoming experts at erasing people.

Shawn Ryan: With the proliferation of assassination attempts in the past several years, are you at all concerned about the possibility of Manchurian candidate type scenarios?

Chase Hughes: I, I think the Manchurian candidate stuff has been going on for a while. It looks like Sirhan Sirhan to me. I’m 100% convinced that he was programmed to, to do that.

Shawn Ryan: Oh shit.

Chase Hughes: There, there are step by step programs they have for creating a candidate. The CIA is. One record creating manchurian candidates that can assassinate, quote American officials, and it’s not that hard to do. You don’t need a bunch of advanced training to, to get that done.

Stephen Kinzer:  MK Ultra produced, I guess one big conclusion, which was Gottlieb’s conclusion that there’s no such thing as mind control. A lot of things have been overlaid onto MK Ultra because it fits so perfectly into the conspiratorial mindset that seems best to describe the era in which we’re living. It’s actual history is brutal enough, uh, without having to embellish it.

Zach Elwood: The person in the first few clips I played, the guy talking as if brainwashing and Manchurian candidates are real things, is a con artist named Chase Hughes who spreads all sorts of false information about behavior and psychology. 

The second person in those clips is Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Gottlieb was the head of the infamous government program MK Ultra. 

If you aren’t familiar with MK Ultra, it was a human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the CIA to develop procedures and drugs that could be used to alter and control human behavior. It began in 1953 and ended in 1973. 

I’ll read from the description of Kinzer’s book Poisoner in Chief: 

The visionary chemist Sidney Gottlieb was the CIA’s master magician and gentlehearted torturer―the agency’s “poisoner in chief.” As head of the MK-ULTRA mind control project, he directed brutal experiments at secret prisons on three continents. He made pills, powders, and potions that could kill or maim without a trace―including some intended for Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. He paid prostitutes to lure clients to CIA-run bordellos, where they were secretly dosed with mind-altering drugs. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture. For years he was the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.

End quote. 

There’s a lot of bullshit about MK Ultra out there spread by many different people. As stated, one of those people is Chase Hughes, whose clips I started this episode with. Despite his obvious con artistry, Chase has succeeded in gaining some decent online popularity; he’s appeared on the popular podcasts Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO, and he’s now amassed more than 1.5 million youtube followers. The motive for Chase Hughes to lie about what happened with MK Ultra is obvious; he claims that he himself can brainwash people and install multiple personalities in people and such things, so lying about MK Ultra makes his own claims that much more believable. If you can swallow his claims about MK Ultra, you might start to think that maybe Chase Hughes’ claims of mysterious and awe-inspiringa abilities might be real. It’s a real Wizard of Oz kind of playbook.  

So I wanted to talk to Stephen Kinzer to try to separate the reality of MK Ultra from the fiction about it that people like Chase Hughes spread. The fact is there are many people who spread all sorts of myths and legends and speculations about MK Ultra, for various reasons… some want to get attention and clicks and sell books; some are truly conspiracy-minded believers; some are a combination of the two. This means it can be hard to figure out what really happened. 

In this talk with Kinzer, we’ll talk about his observations about MK Ultra, and the inflated and paranoid views versus the reality of what was found. I’ll also ask him about other myths and conspiracy theories that Chase Hughes and others spread; for example, ideas that there are secret groups controlling the world with sophisticated psychological operations, and how that relates to theories about Operation Mockingbird , the Tavistock Institute, and more. We’ll talk about paranoia and conspiracy theories in general, and how likely it is for groups to actually pull off large secret plots, especially in the modern digital age when so much is recorded and monitored. 

If you want to learn about the reality of MK Ultra, apart from this interview, I recommend being very careful with the books and other resources you consume. The truth is there is just so much demand for paranoid content, like the stuff Chase Hughes spreads. And high demand equals high supply. And aside from just filling your head with nonsense, there’s a real risk you’ll make yourself more paranoid, and that it will negatively impact your mental health. 

My guest Stephen Kinzer has an impressive resume. Here’s some info that I learned from his website stephenkinzer.com; that’s Stephen spelled with a ph and Kinzer spelled KINZER. 

Stephen Kinzer is an award-winning foreign correspondent who has covered more than 50 countries on five continents. His articles and books have led the Washington Post to place him “among the best in popular foreign policy storytelling.” Kinzer spent more than 20 years working for the New York Times, most of it as a foreign correspondent. His foreign postings placed him at the center of historic events and, at times, in the line of fire.

Stephen has published ten books, with one of his areas of focus being America’s attempts to manipulate and affect what happens in other countries. For example, one of his books is Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala. Another is All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Another is Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. Stephen’s interest in MK Ultra can be seen as related to his interest in documenting how America has sought to affect and control people, whether that plays out in other countries or in this country.   

Ok here’s the talk with Stephen Kinzer.

Zach Elwood: Hi, Steven. Thanks for joining me.

Stephen Kinzer: Good to be with you to discuss this strange subject.

Zach Elwood: Yes. Uh, it’s, it’s a strange one and, uh, I’ve been curious about it for quite a while, even apart from the reasons I reached out to you. But, uh, maybe we could start with, uh, I was curious how you found yourself drawn into that, uh, subject.

How did you find yourself wanting to write that poisoner in Chief book?

Stephen Kinzer: I was working on a book that covered a series of US interventions in other countries. One of those was the intervention in which the United States participated in the overthrow and assassination of the Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.

In researching that story, I discovered that the CIA. Had sent a guy with poison to the Congo. Uh, and I was quite, uh, taken aback by this. I think it might be the only time, certainly that I know of where an employee of the US government was sent to a foreign country with poison. Aimed at killing the leader of that country.

So I wanted to figure out who, who would’ve brought that poison? Would it have been perhaps a courier or somebody who does that kind of thing, carrying stuff as a job at the CIA turned out? No, it was not a courier, it was the guy who actually made the poison. And that was Sidney Gottlieb, who was then head of the CIA’s chemical branch at the same time that he was running, uh, MK Ultra.

So. I followed that trail a bit and I saw that Gottlieb was indeed later questioned about his involvement in creating poison pills and, uh, other chemical compounds to be used against, uh, real or presumed enemies of the United States. Uh. And they asked him about his involvement and making pills that were supposed to kill Fidel Castro and a few other things.

But the more I looked at Godly, the more I realized that his work in making poison pills was just a sidelight really, that wasn’t so important. He was just acting as a pharmacist. If he weren’t there, somebody else could probably have done that. But he was involved in something much bigger, much different, and much more the result of his own conceptions, and that was MK Ultra.

So I began to realize there was a big story that was hidden behind a small footnote. And since I’m always looking for untold stories, I sense that Gotlieb was a big one.

Zach Elwood: Uh, besides your own book, um, what, what stood out to you as, uh, some of the better books about MK Ultra out there? Because I think it’s, I think for a lot of people it’s hard to separate fact from fiction in that area, so I’m just curious what resources besides your, besides your book you’d recommend.

Stephen Kinzer: There’s really a pretty thin file of material about MK Ultra. Uh, the first book that really is the foundation of this field, if you want to call it that, was the search for the Manchurian candidate by John Marks. He was the one that filed the Freedom of Information Act request that produced what little we know about MK Ultra since most of the files were illegally destroyed at the end of Gottlieb’s term, at the CIA.

Um. So I would be careful in reading a lot about MK Ultra. Um, a lot of things have been overlaid onto MK Ultra because it fits so perfectly into the conspiratorial mindset that seems best to describe the era in which we’re living. Um, while I was researching that book, I realize that, uh, all you’re only, you’re always only a few clicks away.

From wild theories, although the more I got into the book, the more I thought that some of those wild theories maybe weren’t so wild after all.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, uh, that’s, uh, and I will, I, I do an intro where I’ll explain this obviously, but the, yeah. The reason I wanted to reach out to you was how, how I got interested in that was examining this guy, chase Hughes, who makes all these wild and exaggerated and clearly false claims about.

MK Ultra, which in his case the motives are there to exaggerate those claims because he himself claims to be able to brainwash people and such. So he has obvious motivations, which I think map over to other people’s can, can have other motivations in terms of like sensationalism wanting to get clicks, or they may actually be, you know, believing in all these conspiracy minded things of all sorts.

Uh, but I’m curious, uh, it might be a. Wide area to touch on, but I’m curious what you see in terms of like the public’s perceptions of the amazing and impressive things that were done during MK Ultra versus what the reality might be. Because what, from what I’ve found looking into it, it including reading John Mark’s book and other resources, it mainly seems like nothing impressive was done.

Like the ran up into the, the limits of, um. What’s possible with mind, mind control and didn’t actually find much there. Uh, but I’m curious, maybe you could talk about in your view, what, what was impressive that was done, if anything, and what’s the public’s perceptions versus the reality?

Stephen Kinzer: I think one of the reasons that the CIA was interested in pursuing this possibility of.

Seizing control of people’s minds had to do with the cultural context, uh, in which those people grew up. There were countless stories and books and movies about, uh, people using drugs that would make, uh, their victims say or do what they want. Uh, you give a guy a drink and then he goes back to the embassy where he works and he takes all the files out and gives ’em to you.

Uh, or you turn somebody into a psychopath or you turn a psychopath into a normal person by, uh. Shaking a, a watch in front of his eyes, something like that. So, uh, the early CIA officers who conceived MK Ultra were shaped in part by fiction. Now, the odd part about this is that MK Ultra itself then wound up giving birth to an even larger amount of, uh, literature, books, video games, articles, everything.

Um. You’re absolutely right that, uh, so Sidney Gottlieb worked for almost all of the 1950s on the MK Ultra Project. The goal of that project was to find a way to seize control of people’s minds. Uh, officers at the CIA believed probably correctly, that if you could do that, the prize would be nothing less than Global Mastery.

Um, but. Uh, although Gottlieb concentrated in very gruesome ways on every possible, uh, approach to the secret of mind control, he finally. Confirmed in the end that he was barking up the wrong tree. That there was no such thing as mind control. There were psychologists who were telling him this as he went along, but, uh, he didn’t wanna listen to that.

He wanted to make his own experiments. And at the very end, actually, uh, there was some move in the ccia A to try to curb him and limit what he’d be able to do. And he, in his typical zen fashion, went even further and said, you don’t need to curb me, I just wanna end it. Let’s, let’s just cut the cord. Uh, so.

MK Ultra produced, I guess one big conclusion, which was Gottlieb’s conclusion that there’s no such thing as mind control. But by the time the CIA reached this conclusion, uh, the public mind was already captured by the idea. I mean, now there are so many references to MK Ultra and related, uh, projects in all sorts of books, and.

Magazines, articles and movies. You see it cropping up all the time. MK Ultra has become something like a code word for all the evil secret things that government does. Um, its actual history is brutal enough, uh, without having to embellish it.

Zach Elwood: Right. And I was perusing the reviews for your book, poisoner in Chief, and you can see some of this, uh, these kinds of beliefs in the reviews and some of the reviews in your book.

So I’ll read a couple of them. You know, one of ’em said, does a superb job of purporting to exhaustively detail all the goings on within MK Ultra while hide, while hiding the most important truth of all. We did in fact discover how to effectively control the human mind, and we were able to systematize various approaches to doing so.

And with great and ongoing success, another person says. The author goes out of his way to deny things that are obviously MK Ultra. The real fact of the matter is that Steven Kinser and his book are what is called Limited Hangout, which is a reference to a term, you know, he, they’re accusing you of like putting out a little bit of information to hide the the real truth.

Right? And somebody else wrote, the scariest part is knowing these experience experiments never ended. They have just changed over time. So this is just to give a sense of. There was just a lot of public perception that there were all of these successful mind control experiments and that these things even went even further and they might still be ongoing.

Uh, but I, I’m just, I’m curious if you, have you encountered a lot of that and where do you see, uh, do you have a sense of where a lot of those motivations and feelings come from to, to, to create that? I, I know, I know part of it is just general. Paranoia and related to political, political polarization and pessimism and things like this, but I’m curious if you’ve encountered that in the wild and where you see those kinds of views Emanating from

Stephen Kinzer: my book, poisoner in Chief is strictly factual.

I don’t speculate. Everything in there has a footnote. On the other hand, I’m painfully aware that I have only discovered a small portion of what. MK Ultra was and what Sidney Gottlieb did, uh, most of that remains unknown and probably will remain unknown forever because as I mentioned earlier, um, Sidney Gottlieb and the then CI, a director, Richard Helms, agreed to destroy all the records of that project.

So that leaves a void onto which everybody can project their own fantasies, right? It’s true that, uh, in a sense, uh. Government and our political system and our economic system have come up with forms of propaganda, uh, that you could describe as a mind control, I suppose. Um, and in that sense, maybe you can say that, uh.

Although Gottlieb was looking at it in the wrong direction, like trying to use drugs to control people’s minds. Maybe there are other ways to do it and maybe governments have managed that. Yeah, that yeah. Like a, like advertising. Exactly. Um,

Zach Elwood: it’s a form

Stephen Kinzer: of

Zach Elwood: mind control.

Stephen Kinzer: Exactly. So in that case, yeah, I think, uh, mind control can easily be said to exist in terms of the masses.

Um, but the fact that. So many of the secrets of MK Ultra, uh, were destroyed. Lee allows everybody to project what they think might be in that black box. And, uh, it’s frustrating to me to know that, uh, many of the protocols for all the experiments that were carried out have been destroyed. But I still left with the conclusion that Gottlieb came up with at the end of the 1950s, which is that there’s no such thing as mind control Now.

He probably knew more about that subject than anybody else in the world at that time. So I’m going to take his word for it. On the other hand, he was speaking about 80 years ago, uh, or 70 years ago. And so he might’ve been right when he was talking about it. But now there’ve been so many advances in neuroscience and cyber technology and computer programming that you have to wonder if now there might not be experiments going on.

Um. In those areas and, and to find a, uh, uh, a kind of revived interest in mind control through modern technologies. Now, nobody knew MK Ultra was going on in the 1950s. It was one of the deepest secrets in America. Um, so it’s not so unreasonable to speculate that some agencies in the US and abroad today might be experimenting with mind control again.

But as for. Hidden aspects of MK Ultra and, and the suggestion that it continued to function, uh, decades after Gottlieb, uh, turned off the faucet, uh, puts us into a different area. And as I said, uh, I’m only dealing with facts in my books, so I don’t go beyond that, that. I’ve heard a lot of speculation and people talk about Sirhan Sirhan and, uh, the Unabomber and so forth.

Those are kind of interesting cases, but there’s no factual evidence for any connection there. And, um. Just my own style of writing is to stick to what’s factually provable.

Zach Elwood: Well, that’s what, yeah, in that area. I mean, not, not even for MK ter, but it is a general, uh, aspect where when people are talking about kind of conspiracy minded, uh, theories, paranoia, you often hear people say.

We don’t know. It didn’t happen. It could have happened, but it’s like that’s not a reason to believe in something. Right? Like it’s not a reason to believe somebody like Chase Hughes who tells you confidently that these things, these various things happened. It’s like, yeah, sure, many things could have happened, but we don’t, if you don’t have evidence for, it’s not a good reason to embrace the most paranoid views of something.

Right. I, I guess that’s what I. Come down to when it, when it comes to people who seek to want to believe some of this stuff, it seems to me,

Stephen Kinzer: and I just would like to add to that, that MK Ultra actually gives ’em the perfect canvas on which to paint. Uh, it was so wild, uh, in its conception and in its execution that you can allow your fantasies to run wild.

And there have been fictional, uh, accounts of, uh, what might have happened and what could’ve. Have been developed. Uh, but those are all fiction. I think. Um, one of the reasons that MK Ultra was first launched, as I mentioned earlier, was fiction. It was a result of people think con concluding that what screenwriters and novelists could imagine the CIA could make real.

And I think there’s also a kind of a bleeding of reality into that kind of, uh, sensation today.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I mean, the same with the, the, uh, you know, kind of, um, remote viewing, um, you know, telekinetic kind of experiments, the men who stare at goats stuff. I mean, that’s like also a perfect canvas to make, you know, if you want to imagine all of these magical things being possible, that’s like a great canvas for letting, letting you see what you want to see if you’re predisposed to those things too.

Right?

Stephen Kinzer: Indeed, that’s exactly the way it works. And, uh, again, MK Ultra was. So bizarre that there’s no reason for some people not to think it was even more bizarre than we know.

Zach Elwood: Right. Um, I want, if you’re up for it, I want to talk about a couple specific things that, um, this guy Chase Hughes talks about specific exaggerations, and I’m curious if you have takes on them with the research you’ve done.

One person he focuses on is George Estabrooks, which was a, um. I guess he was a, a psychologist in Canada who claimed that he could do extreme hypnosis and create split personalities and such. From my reading on, it didn’t, it didn’t seem like he actually was involved, like he was writing letters to try to be involved in MK Ultra from, but from the little I’ve, I’ve found about it, it doesn’t seem like he did much.

There wasn’t evidence that he was involved much. He seemed like a kook. Uh, but in Chase Hughes’s telling, and I think in other people’s telling. You know, they, they’ve, they’ve li lifted him, him up to some sort of like, you know, have, having God-like powers of hypnosis and mind control, which is like in their, in their telling of the story evidence of the amazing things that were done.

But I’m curious if you came across anything about George Estabrooks specifically.

Stephen Kinzer: I don’t think that a number of these people, that all of the people who were involved in experimenting in this area in the 1950s were actually connected to the CIA or to MK Ultra. Uh, there may have been some overlap, but people were out freelancing, and particularly in Canada.

Um, interestingly enough, Canada has done something the United States never did, which is actually to compensate some of the victims of, uh, MK Ultra. But, uh. Some one, one thing we don’t know is, uh, what were the contractual relationships between these various figures who were doing their experiments and the ccia A so, uh, every, anything beyond that in, in this case or in others, in which we try to figure out what exactly this person was doing and whether that person was under contract and whether the CIA was aware of what he was doing are, uh, uh.

Subjects that we don’t know anything about. So you can speculate, uh, but just keep it in the realm of speculation.

Zach Elwood: Just a quick note here about George Estabrooks: He’s a guy who had made all sorts of claims about being able to create multiple personalities and do extreme hypnosis and essentially program people, and these over-the-top claims are why Chase Hughes focuses so much on him, as it lends credibility to Chase’s claims about being able to do the same. But there’s no evidence that such things were done. When I read John Marks book about MK Ultra, Estabrooks was an extremely minor figure mentioned only a couple times, and he came across like a nutty kook;  Estabrooks was writing to people in the American military and trying to get himself involved in some way in these MK Ultra-related programs, but there was nothing in John Marks’ book that showed Estabrooks being involved; Marks just includes the letters Estabrooks had sent, as an example of how various people in psychology were interested in helping with such efforts. From reading a little of Estabrooks’ writing, I think he was a strange narcissist making grand, absurd claims to promote himself. And there were quite a few people in the MK Ultra era who made all sorts of inflated, deceptive claims. Just as we have such people around us today. 

To give you a sense of how easily this nonsense can spread, though: on Estabrooks’ wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Estabrooks, it reads: During WWII, he helped the US military create “hypnotic couriers”—agents who could carry secret information in their subconscious without knowing they were doing so, making them “un-interrogatable.”  The source for that claim? Estabrooks’ own writing. But Chase and others repeat such things as if it was fact. 

Okay, back to the talk. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, what about Operation Mockingbird? That’s another thing I hear about. Have you, do you know much about that and the claims people make about that thing?

Stephen Kinzer: Operation Mockingbird was a real project.

It was an operation quite far reaching and wide ranging in which the CCIA sought to influence the news that people received, particularly news about other countries. This produced, uh, a number of journalists who were on the CIA pay role. And were planted in, uh, various news organizations. It involved, uh, all the way up to phone calls from the CIA director to leading, uh, uh, controllers of media outlets, asking ’em to publish or not to publish things.

So Operation Mockingbird definitely was a real operation that was aimed at controlling what Americans get to hear about the world. And also as a subset, what they don’t get to hear about the CIA and what it actually does. But it was not connected to MK Ultra. It doesn’t, it doesn’t have anything to do with using drugs.

It has to do with more traditional campaigns of things that Edward Bernas came up with about how to influence people’s minds, uh, rather than, uh, try to use pharmacology on individuals.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, like you said before, there’s these various areas where it’s just about public persuasion and you can paint a very pessimistic and scary portrait of that, which is what Chase Hughes and other people do where like taking Edward Bernas for example, or the Tavistock Institute or whatever it may be, it’s like it’s completely banal and understandable that governments.

Seek to control perceptions, right? Like that’s not surprising. And in some sense it’s entirely banal. They may be doing various unethical things or bad things in the pursuit of that, but it’s not any more surprising than, uh, you know, any, any kind of, you know, during a war effort trying to change public perceptions.

And it’s not, even if we may criticize it in various ways, it’s not anything like amazingly, uh, controlling in the sense that some of these people would paint the image of like. These people have perfected these amazing psychological control mechanisms. It’s, it’s just like people trying to influence perceptions in various ways.

Right? Um, so, but there, there, it’s possible to paint this picture of like tying in with MK Ultra and all these things, which is what some of these people do. But it’s also just a, a, a pretty. Understandable, uh, outcome of, you know, people feeling under pressure and feeling like they, they want to try to control, uh, or, or influence public perception in the same way advertisers do.

Stephen Kinzer: Well, the whole advertising idea is, is, uh, based on propaganda. You know, there used to be an old joke, uh, about a, an American and a Russian who are coming home on a, on a plane together. This was during the Soviet days. And they’re talking about Russia. The American guy says, well, I really liked Russia, but there’s so much propaganda there.

And the Russian guy says, it’s true. We have a lot of propaganda, but our propaganda is nowhere near as good as yours in America. And the American guy says, what do you mean we don’t have propaganda? And the Russian guy says Exactly. Yeah. So, uh, it’s, this is nothing unusual from one country. I mean, the effort to try to twist public opinion has always been a part of government.

Um, but. That’s very different from using pharmacology to influence the minds of individual people or groups, uh, or

Zach Elwood: hypnosis. Yeah.

Stephen Kinzer: Yeah. The spraying LSD into a radio studio, uh, they, the C-C-I-A-M-K Ultra did actually do a lot of work on hypnosis and didn’t find that it, it was working, that their idea was.

Again, you can hypnotize somebody into doing something that under normal circumstances they would never do Now, uh. And the CIA actually received correspondence from Carl Menninger, who was one of the leading psychologists in America, ran the famous manager clinic, and he told them there is no way that a human being can be made to do something that’s against his fundamental principles.

Uh, but he, he godly didn’t wanna believe that. And, uh, that’s where a lot of these movies about hypnosis and uh, other kinds of mind control come into play. And it’s also why. So many of those kinds of movies and other media, uh, events, uh, were built on MK Ultra. It’s, it’s almost tailor made, uh, for exaggeration because it was itself such a crazy exaggeration.

Zach Elwood: Do you have any takes on, um, the claims that, uh, or the beliefs that Sirn Sirhan, um, was brainwashed to kill, uh, Robert Kennedy, which is something Chase Hughes claims. He’s, he confident believes he, he’s sure of, but I’m curious if you have any, uh, he came across any information about that, those ideas in your work?

Stephen Kinzer: It’s a curious case. There’s some interesting aspects to it, but that’s all as far as I know. I mean, there’s no, there’s no evidence. Uh, you can put pieces of the story together if, if you wanna make it come out a certain way. Um, and I, I just. Stray, stay away from that. When I, when I was working on the book, I looked on some of those cases, including the Sirhan case, to see if there could be some relation, but I didn’t find any.

So, uh, poisoner in chief doesn’t venture into those areas. It’s crazy enough the story that I tell in that book without me having to go off into areas that nobody’s sure about.

Zach Elwood: Uh, reading John Mark’s book, I was struck by, uh. I mean, the one thing that stood out to me the most was just the bungling aspect of so many of the situations.

It was almost comical, not not just disturbing, but just downright comical some of the anecdotes from that time period about what they were doing. But I’m curious, is that mainly your perception, or do you feel like, did, did anything stand out to you as things that you were actually like, wow, that was really impressive, something they did?

Or was it mostly just like, this is a bunch of bungling and weirdness?

Stephen Kinzer: Uh, it was more like the latter. So it was really amateur hour. There was no science there. It should have been a scientific project and rigorously, uh, carried out with scientific method, but it wasn’t, I mean, for example. Uh, MK Ultra set up a bordello in San Francisco.

Uh, men were, uh, brought there and then the girls would give them a drink in which had been poured. Whatever compound MK Ultra wanted to test that day. And then the, uh, man’s reactions would be monitored, but who’s monitoring them? Some big overweight drug. Agent who’s sitting behind a one-way mirror on a portable toilet, drinking cocktails out of a pitcher and just watching what’s going on in the, in the bed.

There’s no, there are no experts there, there are no psychologists or people understanding about sexual practice or how the mind works. So, uh. It really, it was, uh, it was done in a, a very slip shot way. It destroyed and damaged a lot of lives. It was hugely reckless. Uh, and the reason for that was that people felt the threat from the Soviet Union was so great that the loss of a few lives or a few hundred lives, it was meaning.

Right. Uh, but, uh, really, uh, it was like Gottlieb was throwing, uh, a lot of cement onto the wall and just seeing what would stick. He just wanted to try everything and, um. Well, that’s one of the reasons that he got into LSD. They, they were fascinated when LSD was invented because they thought it might be, as one of gottlieb’s scientists put it, the key that could unlock the universe.

But on their, in their LSD experiments, they found out that surprise LSD is very unpredictable. It might make some people tell the truth. It might make some people tell wildly exaggerated lies. So, uh, they went through stabilizing everything. Yeah, they tried everything and it was, it was not rigorous. One of the things that really jumped out at me was that this project should have been run by scientists and people who really had a, a concept of how to develop a, an experimental project, but in fact, perhaps, uh.

Motivated by what was perceived to be the urgency of the situation. Everything was tried from electroshock to sensory deprivation, to wild drug combinations. Um, and there didn’t seem to be any real scientific monitoring when we were carrying out these experiments in Germany. We would, there wouldn’t be anybody in the room that spoke German, who would even know what the person was talking about.

So really it was very amateurish, uh, by scientific standards.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. That was, that might be one of the anecdotes I was thinking of where they brought this guy over this kind of clownish figure from America to, I think it was Germany, where he was claiming like, oh. I know how to do this. I’ve done some hypnosis stuff with the, my students at this college, and they brought him over and he like brought his, uh, you know, girl girlfriend over, like his, his mistress or something.

And he was doing these, uh, trying, they were trying to use him to do stuff to these prisoners, trying to get information out of him. And it was just like a clown show. Like he didn’t have the slightest idea. And it was clear, very clear that he didn’t know what he was doing. And he was like, oh, these. These people are very different than my students.

You know, it was very, it was very silly, but it just, I was laughing out loud at some of the stories in the, in the, in the Marks, uh, book. I, I, I admit, I haven’t read your book. I, I’ve just skimmed a little bit of it. Uh, but yeah, what stood out was just kind of this, uh, kind of a clown show of, of efforts, which getting to the Occam’s razor of what happened with hemp.

K It’s like, you know, you would, the, the fact that so many of these stories are like that. And, you know, theoretically they did impressive things. But when you, when you add in all of the clownish and the bungling that were apparent and you add in like what Sidley Sidney Gottlieb said, and other people have said about it, it’s like the Occam’s razor, uh, uh, of what happened seems to be that it was largely this bungling ineffective affair that they.

Ran up against the limits of what you can do with such things and recognize that. But, uh, that seems to be my, my takeaway. Well,

Stephen Kinzer: just, just saying that essentially puts a target on your back by you because you’re sexually denying the fact that the, the, the theory that. Actually, it’s way bigger than we know about it.

This is you just seeing the type of the iceberg, which is true, but it’s not true that anyone knows what’s in the rest of the iceberg.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, exactly. Getting back to the idea that like, sure, there’s things that are unknown, but that’s not a reason to embrace things that you don’t know. Right? It’s like you could make the same claims about the extreme paranoid in certain views, which people spread.

It’s like you don’t know either, so why are you embracing the most paranoid vision? Right? Like that’s, that’s what I get back to. It’s like. You’re, you’re also, they’re, they’re the ones embracing the certainty about things that they can’t be certain about. You know, people

Stephen Kinzer: like Chase people. And I, I would just repeat that MK Ultra is tailor made for this because it was so bizarre.

It was totally secret. It was gruesome and brutal. Uh, it was based on wild ambitions and, uh, it was carried out, uh, with full legal approval. So Sidney Gottlieb had what amounted to. A license to kill issued by the US government. So when you put all that together, um, it’s wonderful fodder for a lot of movies and video games and stuff, uh, whether those, uh, are really based in reality.

Is something different. So I, I don’t mind people having wild speculations including about MK Ultra, but just be sure you understand that there’s speculations, it’s, it’s like everything else in life, you know, it’s great to have a fantasy life. I think it’s very important, but it’s really important to understand what’s fantasy and what’s reality.

Then you can let your fantasies run wild as long as you realize that they’re just fantasies. And in my work, uh, in that book, poisoner in Chief and in my other books. Uh, I try to stay away from that, uh, lure and just stick to, uh, what I know I can prove and what I can put a footnote in my book to prove.

Zach Elwood: Uh, I’m curious. Uh, you know, I’ve, I I’ve spent time on the, uh, political polarization front. I’ve written some books aimed at trying to reduce toxic polarization and, and some of that ties into the. Paranoia that a lot of people have, you know, across the political spectrum, there’s just a lot of pessimism about what the other side is doing or what political enemies of various sorts are doing, and that increases in highly polarized times.

But one of the things that I’d be curious to get your take on is I’ve spent a good amount of time explaining how these big plots that people imagine happening are just very unlikely. I mean, a. They’re, they’re unlikely to succeed because we’ve seen time and time again how hard it is to keep even small plots under wraps, let alone, uh, large plots, you know?

Uh, but I’m curious for your take on that, and in terms of people’s ideas of big plots going on around them. My, my take on it, one of my takes is that one of the reasons that it’s, uh. Less likely than it was in the past is there’s so much more monitoring of all sorts of things these days. You know, audio, emails, video recordings, surveillance, everywhere.

It’s easy to set up the systems to release information if you yourself were to get killed or something. These kinds of things. So in various ways, these, these systems make big plots less likely, including even an attempt to make a big plot because people know how easy it is for people to leak information.

But I’m curious to get your take on that, that kind of worldview.

Stephen Kinzer: It’s definitely true that, uh, there was a time probably during the Eisenhower administration was the last moment when people really thought all these operations would remain secret forever. Nobody believes that anymore. In the age of leaks and surveillance and journalism, uh, it’s very difficult for something that large, uh, to be concealed.

But this is always, there’s always been a, a drive to do this. For example, I’m still interested in, uh, the, uh, death of Doug Alt, the Secretary General of the United Nations, who went down on a plane over the Congo during that Lumumba crisis. Um, and I, uh, got a report that. Or I, I read that maybe there could have been a joint operation between the Belgian, French and American Secret Services.

And I talked about this with a guy that I know who’s had a lifetime inside the CIA, and he told me that that secret could never have been kept if there were three different agencies all working on a plot to kill a major figure like that, you would know about it by now, that those things can’t be kept secret forever.

Um. So I, I do think it’s important to look behind, uh, the curtain that government, uh, uses to, uh, obscure what it’s doing. Uh, governments don’t tell the truth and neither do political leaders, and it’s important to, to know that and, and to, to try to, uh, uh, act accordingly. Um, on the other hand, uh. It’s also important not to think that everything is the result of hidden conspiracies.

Um, it’s, it’s, you don’t wanna be a non conspiracy theorist and believe that everything is the way that it seems to be because it isn’t. Um, but Right.

Zach Elwood: There’s definitely plots. Yeah. There’s, there’s people always trying to do various things. Yeah.

Stephen Kinzer: But sometimes I feel that too much attention to how the world is being governed by.

Secret plots takes attention away from the fact, from the overt plots from what you can actually see, right? You don’t have to speculate about the world to understand that there are a lot of dark webs and networks out there that are pushing, uh, huge projects like wars and upheavals and overthrows of governments.

Uh. That’s all out there. So why do we need to go to another level of thinking that, uh, there are intense secret conspiracies when there are so many ones that are easy to detect and sometimes, uh, are, don’t get the focus they deserve.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, when I’ve talked to people about this, you know, some of the, you know, I’ll ask for examples of big plots that people can name that they think have been successful for a while, and you know, some of the things that they name are just not good examples.

For example, there’s the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, which a lot of people thought was a conspiracy, but it was actually completely in the open, like the, the people talked about that experiment openly, and it only just got attention for it later. So that’s just to say some of the things that are in people’s minds about.

Various big conspiracies and bad conspiracies aren’t even conspiracies. They’re just misunderstandings of what actually happened. And I and I, and I think the difficulty of keeping plots under wraps is why, you know, even like if you take Russia for example, who does various, you know, underhanded operations, it’s like they seem to know that.

You can’t really keep much of that under wraps. And it’s like they, they seem to have come to the conclusion like, well, even if the word gets out that we’re doing this, it doesn’t really matter because it can still be effective. Right. So that’s what it seems to me. Anyway.

Stephen Kinzer: Let me make a couple of comments.

First of all. In the 1980s, in the wake of all the scandals that shook the CIA, um, the US government came up with a new way of intervening in foreign countries. The CIA wouldn’t destabilize governments anymore, and the reason was that those projects always wind up becoming public and it’s very embarrassing to the CIA and to the United States and it’s harmful to our foreign policy

Zach Elwood: right

Stephen Kinzer: back FARs.

Yeah, so the US created something called the National Endowment for Democracy, which was a government funded organization that wound up spending hundreds of millions of dollars around the world in countries where we wanted political change, where we didn’t like the government. These projects were all branded as democracy promotion, or, um.

Independent media building civil society. Uh, so these were the same kind of projects that the CIA used for years. But there’s no danger of the secrets being revealed because there are no secrets. They just do it out in the open.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Stephen Kinzer: So that has become the way that we influence countries and that has resulted in the overthrows of government.

It has been a successful technique,

Zach Elwood: right. And it’s all done in the open. Yeah. The nice thing is you don’t have to hide anything. It’s just, it’s basically just. Persuasion and propaganda or what, you know?

Stephen Kinzer: Yeah. That’s the beauty of the whole idea or the, the pernicious beauty of it. And I would just, uh, add one other thing.

I, I, uh, when, when Poisoner in Chief first came out, I did a little book tour and, uh, I actually gave a talk at my own university, brown University. And one of my colleagues, another professor raised her hand and asked the question, which I really think, uh. Or she made a comment. I, I think it was the best thing I heard in my whole book to her.

She said, you know, you say that Sidney Gottlieb admitted there was no way to brainwash people. And you say that he never managed to brainwash anyone. He said, she said, I wanna disagree with you. I think he did manage to brainwash one person. He brainwashed himself. He made himself believe in that. There was mind control out there.

There was a holy grail and all he had to do was find the right place to dig and he would find it. So in a sense, I thought that was a very trenched comment that, uh, although he never managed to, uh, brainwash anyone else, he brainwashed himself and a few of the people around him.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Uh, well, this has been great, Steven.

Uh, I, I, I wondered if you’d, uh, I, I know you’re probably getting a lot of, um, requests because of your Iran work. Um, do, would you like to share any observations before you leave about the Iran situation or, um, is that maybe too big a topic to, um, get into?

Stephen Kinzer: All I can say is that one way it relates back to what we’ve been talking about.

Is that the American people have been fed a constant diet of attacks on Iran. How many times have you heard that Iran is so close to building a nuclear bomb, that it’s the, uh, principal sponsor of state terror in the world? Um. You don’t hear about the richness of the story in Iran. Most people don’t even know that the whole slide toward tyranny in Iran began in 1953 when the CIA destroyed the only democracy that Iran ever had.

So Iranians are very aware of this, but we aren’t. And that shows a great success of, uh, propaganda campaigns that probably might even be more. Important, more valuable than anything that Sidney Gottlieb imagined doing during MK Ultra.

Zach Elwood: Right. Right. Okay. This has been great, Steven. Thanks a lot for your work and thanks for taking the time for this.

Stephen Kinzer: Okay. Good to have been with you. Thanks.

Zach Elwood: Okay. Uh, Steven, don’t turn it off or anything. I need to.

Vincent Denault once believed he was learning how to read people’s hidden thoughts through analyzing body language. As a young lawyer in Quebec, he attended behavior analysis and “synergology” trainings that promised the ability to detect lies and determine hidden thoughts from small gestures and movements. But after digging into the research, he realized much of what he’d been taught wasn’t true. In this talk, Vincent describes that journey and we explore how body-language myths spread through trainings, media, and YouTube behavior “experts.” We also discuss his research on how judges use behavior to assess witness credibility, his views on Paul Ekman, and his views on how bad-behavior-information spreaders protect themselves from criticism and responsibility. Along the way, we examine why nonverbal behavior still matters in human interaction—just not in the reliable lie-detection ways many people assume.

Topics discussed include:

• His journey out of the people-reading/Synergology world and into science
• How judges can use nonverbal behavior to judge witness testimony and determine veracity, and why that’s a problem
• How spreaders of behavior bullshit can use calls for caution, and calls for “baselining,” as a way to evade criticism and avoid taking responsibility for their bad info
• The role of media and shows, like the show Lie to Me and assorted movies, in spreading bad behavior info
• Critical views of Paul Ekman
• The oft-repeated but false claim that nonverbal behavior represents most of the meaning in communication, and where that false idea stems from

Episode links:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Resources related to this talk:

• Vincent’s own account of his journey from behavior pseudoscience to research
• Vincent’s podcast on behavior
• Vincent’s papers
• His paper on how witness nonverbal behavior can influence judge’s views
• Body of Evidence podcast episode on Synergology
• A talk with researcher Tim Levine about behavior not being useful for lie detection

(coming soon)

How does someone who makes wildly grandiose and clearly false claims about mind control, interrogation mastery, and secret military psychology operations gain more than 1.5 million YouTube subscribers—and land appearances on shows like Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO—without anyone vetting his story? I’m joined by ex-CIA officer and fraud-exposer Kent Clizbe⁠. We take a hard look at Chase Hughes’ Navy record and compare it to his many lies, exaggerations, and ambiguous statements about his experiences and credentials. We dig into the specific stages of Chase’s military career, his claims of Harvard and Duke neuroscience education, his belief that we live in a simulation (and that psychedelics have helped see the code of that simulation), his pick-up artist background, and his grandiose — and just plain absurd — claims about his knowledge and abilities. If you’re interested in how cults of personality and false gurus work—and how even experienced professionals and major platforms can help these people on their rise to popularity—this deep dive into Hughes’ background and the psychology of modern con artistry is one you won’t want to miss.

Kent is also the author of Holistic Contextual Credibility Assessment, in which he explains his view of how to check authenticity and veracity. That book also explains why using nonverbal behaviors for that work is a waste of time.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes lot of video, recommend)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Resources mentioned in this episode or related to it:

• NCI University’s YouTube video we examine: Chase Hughes life story
• First episode in my Chase Hughes series, including summary of his lies and exaggerations
• Other episodes about Chase (including one on the silliness of his mind control claims)
• One example from 2014 of Chase claiming to be widely known for his behavior/psychology work, despite it being obvious he was not, and despite later claiming he only focused on the behavior/psychology work publicly when he was near his 2019 retirement from the Navy.
• Kent Clizbe’s write-up about Chase Hughes

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcripts are generated automatically and contain errors.)

Joe Rogan: Even if they exhibit all the behavior characteristics of someone who’s confident there’s gonna be something off. ’cause we have some way, some ancient way of detecting bullshit.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. We get those gut feelings.

Joe Rogan: Yeah. We know when something’s off. Someone’s a little full of it.

Steven Bartlett of Diary of a CEO: And who exactly have you worked with?

Chase Hughes: Lots of government agencies. Uh, notably I’ve worked with intelligence agencies. I’ve worked with the Psychological Operations Department, US Army, which is the Special Operations Command. I’ve trained a lot of the US Navy leaders nowadays.

Chase Hughes on Joe Rogan: A friend of mine was killed on USS coal during the, the terrorist attack in, in 2001.

I was like reading these intelligence reports afterward that said there’s failures on the ground. We didn’t develop assets in the country. We didn’t. Take the actions that we needed to take to, to get this intelligence. And I was like, man, they need this behavior stuff. So I got more and more obsessed with it and I started training people in the government, uh, probably around the age of 30 or so.

Merlin O’Brecht: Was there kind of a jump to getting deep into like the real deep end of professional behavior psychology in an applied way? As much? I know you can’t talk about the balance of it, but

Chase Hughes: I don’t think, for me it was ever in a hugely professional way.

Kent Clizbe: There’s nothing in his background in the military that has anything to do with mind control, brainwashing behavior.

This guy’s a conman. He makes claims that are total bullshit. He implies that he has background and expertise that he doesn’t have, but people fall for it.

Zach Elwood: Chase Hughes, if you’ve never heard of him, is a serial liar and con man who falsely claims to be an expert on everything from analyzing nonverbal behavior, to influencing and controlling people’s minds, to government psy-ops, to cult deprogramming. Despite his obviously absurd and false claims, he has succeeded in getting many gullible podcast hosts to interview and promote him, and this has included the popular podcasts Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO, and quite a few others. He currently has more than 1.5 million followers on youtube, and still regularly gets promoted by various podcasts. 

As you saw in the intro, he has stated, but more often these days just implies, that his psychology- and behavior- related work has something to do with the military — that during his 20 year Navy career he worked on some impressive operations involving psychology, behavior, interrogations, top-secret intel, and more.  

That’s what we’re going to look at in this episode: his military career. I’m going to be talking to Kent Clizbe, an ex-CIA officer who specializes in vetting and counterintelligence, and who is perhaps most known for his role in outing the fraud Wayne Simmons, a guy who appeared on Fox News for 13 years claiming to be a CIA operative and intel expert but who was, like Chase Hughes, a fraud. I recently had an episode of the podcast talking to Kent about his experience working to expose Wayne Simmons, and if you’re interested in frauds and con artists, I think you’d like that episode. 

Now, this video won’t be a neat summary of Chase’s many lies and unethical behaviors; if you want to see that summary, search online for ‘chase hughes many lies’ and look for the result located on my page behavior-podcast.com; it’s the first episode I released on Chase Hughes and on that page I’ve included a text summary of that research. When i’ve done some of these follow-up episodes, some people will complain ‘but you didn’t actually show why he’s a liar and a con man’. Look, i can’t continually restate all the evidence in every single episode; that is what the main web page I’ve got on Chase hughes is for; if you want to see the main evidence, go there. It’s a doozy. 

So in this talk with Kent, we’ll talk about: 

• Chase’s Navy service record, which I got by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request
• The specific stages of Chase’s Navy career
• Chase’s use of ambiguous language when trying to imply his career was more impressive than it was
• The brain issues Chase claims he suffers from
• Chase’s claims of having neuroscience-related education from Harvard and Duke University
• Chase’s belief that we live in a simulation, and that hallucinogenic drugs have allowed him to see behind the simulation
• Chase’s early experiences as a pick-up artist
• Chase’s pivotal experiences loitering outside of a girls’ Abercrombie and Fitch store at a mall in Hawaii  

Here’s a bit more about Kent Clizbe’s career from his website kentclizbe.com (his last name is spelled CLIZBE): 

Kent served as a staff CIA case officer in the 1990s, and as a contractor after 9/11.  He has worked in various capacities in intelligence positions in Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.  His specialty is Counter-terrorism and Islamic Extremism. 

Kent has also worked Counter-intelligence, Counter-proliferation, Counter-narcotics, and other targets.  In addition to extensive liaison work with foreign intel services, he has worked in the US Intel Community in inter-agency, inter-governmental intelligence operations since 9/11.  He was awarded the Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the highest civilian intelligence agency decoration for contractors, for his counter-terrorist operations in the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia.  His work in the Philippines was described in an article by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly in March 2007, “Jihadists in Paradise.” 

And again, Kent is also known for his work exposing the fraud Wayne Simmons, who appeared for years on Fox News and who fooled millions, but who Kent immediately, upon meeting him, suspected was a fraud. Watch my previous interview with Kent talking about his suspicions of Simmons and how Simmons eventually ended up being outed and arrested. 

Okay here’s the deep dive on Chase Hughes’ life story and military career with Kent Clizbe….

Kent Clizbe: So first let me say that this, this isn’t coming from just, uh, some, some guy who, who did it a couple years in the military and got out. I, I do have a background in the military. I’ve worked, I’ve spent five years enlisted in the Air Force.

I worked very closely with the Navy throughout that time. After I got out, I have worked in the DOD, well, that’s not the Department of War, but we used to call it the DOD Department of Defense. I worked in the Department of Defense and with the Department of Defense, including the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Uh, I have worked short or long-term assignments, uh, with the Army at the Special Forces, uh, training, uh, uh, JFK Training Center in Fort Bragg. I’ve done classes for the seals. In Little Creek where Hughes was stationed. I have, uh, spent a couple years working in the, um, defense Intelligence agency’s training program for the, the first tier of, uh, human intelligence officers.

I, I was an instructional designer and a subject matter expert in, in those courses, so I know a lot. I, I’ve been in the DOD, I’ve been in the military. I, I understand the lingo. I understand how to, uh, navigate when somebody makes a claim. I can, I can vet it. Not only that, but I’m also a vetter, I’m a professional vetter.

I, I, uh, look at various aspects of someone who makes claims about their career, their education, their background, and I know how to vet. Those claims and get to the truth. So this isn’t just somebody who came off the street and said, Hey, tell me what you, what you think about Hughes. Anyway, with that said, the data that we have is, it’s very interesting.

Hughes, I, I, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full, one of the, all the many videos he puts out except this one he put out the Chase Hughes life story, I think was the title of it. And it’s him sitting down and chatting with it looks like a guy, this guy must be his employee. Um, it’s

kind

Zach Elwood: of an acolyte.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah, acolyte. At least it’s a, a follower, a Chase Hughes,

Zach Elwood: yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Uh, cult member in some way or another. In, in the course of this interview, uh, the guy mentions, well, I, I’m just a roofer, but, uh. Yes.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. He has a roofing

Kent Clizbe: business.

Chase Hughes: I’m gonna be doing dirty work. I don’t wanna be doing this backbreaking, sunburn, sweat and kind of stuff.

I mean, you are a roofer, you know the

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: You know the, the labor. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: He is a roofer. And, uh, you know, here he is interviewing Chase Hughes about brainwashing or whatever the heck it is. Hughes is claiming to be. Um, but he’s very, uh, obsequious to Hughes. He’s very, you can tell that he worships him.

Merlin O’Brecht: I’ve seen Chase on so many different podcasts where people are kind of talking about the books that he is written and all of the things that he is done, or his models of influence.

But I’ve never seen anyone talk about Chase’s life story yet.

Kent Clizbe: And in the interview, Hughes gives his entire, pretty much life story. But out of that, you, you can get a sequential. Overview of, of Hughes career from the time he joined the Navy when he was 17, to the time he got out the same time. Uh, Zach, you got, uh, I guess through a foia uh, freedom of information, you got Hughes’s DD two 14.

The DD two 14 is the military. It’s like a transcript. It’s like your, um, a a a university transcript. It, it tells everything that you did in, in the military. It, it’s everything. A transcript of your military experience. It was great. So I’ve got the DD two four. Hughes is DD two 14 and his Hughes My Life story.

So that’s what this, this analysis is based on is those two things. What, what I was looking at in doing this vetting is. This guy has made, and, and I don’t have quotes, uh, exactly of what his claims are, but generally speaking, he, he has made claims that he was, he has some sort of special military intelligence experience training, uh, that, that has given him a background to be the world’s greatest behavioral expert.

Again, whatever his claim is, he is, he’s claimed to be a mind reader. He is claimed to be a brainwasher, multiple claims. Yeah. Many things, but all of that, all of his claims are explicitly or implicitly based on hi his, his having been some kind of special operator, some kind of military intelligence. Uh, high speed load, drag, double, not something.

Zach Elwood: I got a few quotes here that he’s had on his website over the years, you know, because after 20 years of teaching my unique system and those top intelligence agencies in the world, uh, you know, luckily I had top secret CL security clearance in the military, which I used to figure out the answer to this question.

How can we make intelligence gathering more powerful? With over 30,000 hours of infield practice and training, I perfected the skill of per persuasion and influence. That’s just a small snippet, but he, he often says that he or implies that he’s been involved in these various, you know, military related things, training, you know, agencies of organizations, uh, you know, about these amazing things.

Anyway, that we can go on for a while about that,

Kent Clizbe: but, but can carry on. Yeah, that’s a good one because that’s kind of classic Hughes there from what, what I have seen is you notice in those quotes that you just, uh, read, he, he never says I was a. CIA case officer. Right. He never says I was a Delta Force operator.

Zach Elwood: Right. Ambiguous.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. The only, the only claim that he makes there really is I had a top secret security clearance and that gave me, I think that he probably did ev although it does not, uh, uh, DD two 14 does not cover, I, I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t. So I’m guessing that in his career, and, and we’ll go over exactly what his, uh, uh, assignments and positions were, that in one of those, he had to get a security clearance.

Zach Elwood: Right. It, it, it, but it seems, it seems quite non, uh, impressive to be able to get one, like he’s dealing with, uh, ship operations and navigations and stuff, but it doesn’t seem that crazy that he would. Have a top secret security clearance, right?

Kent Clizbe: So that, that’s the key is that there’s many jobs in the military that require a security clearance,

Zach Elwood: right?

Kent Clizbe: May, he may have had top secret, he may have just had secret, but getting a security clearance doesn’t give you access to intelligence stuff unless your job is an intelligence related job. So having a security clearance means nothing. Once you have the security clearance. Classified information is totally based on need to know if your job is driving a boat.

You have no need to know anything about human intelligence, trade craft, or about, uh, influence or mind reading. You’re driving a fricking boat. Definitely the plans. About what’s gonna happen with your unit are gonna be classified. There might be a classified, some kind of classified equipment on the, on, on your boat, probably some kind of communications equipment.

So to, to have access to that, uh, classified communications equipment, you need to have a security clearance. So, in other words, you got a, a guy who’s a boat driver and he’s got a security clearance because he turns on this, uh, uh, a radio that encrypts the communications, for example. You gotta have a security clearance to work that, that radio.

So with that, let’s, let’s talk about his jobs. This is according to both he and, and his, his life story video is kind of surprised me because he gave it straight.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: He, I think he told, he told the truth in this life story. Yeah.

Zach Elwood: He knows that now that he’s got all the attention on, I mean, this is pretty common for con artists, you know, they exaggerate and lie a lot early, but when they get a lot of attention on them, they’d have to start twisting the narrative because they know that the facts are out there.

So then they have to start trying to fit the previous lies into like, the new narrative. ’cause he, he knows it would, you know, for example, he knows that we’ve examined him. He knows that it’s only, it was only a matter of time before, you know, somebody got a service record, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s like he’s gotta try to manage the perceptions and try to, you know, and you can see him doing that with that video.

That’s the whole point of that video, I think is to say like, Hey, everybody’s calling me a liar. Uh, you know, uh, I have to try to manage the perceptions and, and fit my supposed expertise into the realm of what, what really happened. Right.

Kent Clizbe: And we’ll talk about that in a second. Uh, let’s, let’s go over his.

Uh, what, what he actually did. So he, he went in the Navy as a, just a basic semen and semen, uh, in the Navy are, if you think of them, they’re the guys who are deck swabbing. They’re the ones polishing the brass on the, on the railings, cleaning the deck, emptying the, the porta-potties. They’re, they’re a laborer.

They’re a manual laborer with no skills, nothing. He did that for three years, uh, dur. At the end of those three years, he became a, a signalman where they, they use flags to, to communicate between ships. At the end of the, those three years, he got qualified in that, and then they did away with that, and they must have gone to electronic communications.

So his, his first, uh, qualified job flag waver, they did away with. In the Navy, generally speaking, especially for unqualified people like him, and, and generally for mo, almost all sailors, you do a rotation a few years out on a ship, a few years on shore, a few years out on a ship, a few years on shore, two, three, whatever.

Um, so he, his first three years he was on ship, uh, a ship or a couple ships. His shore assignment after those three years was, he was a jail guard.

Chase Hughes: Uh, at, at this time I get stationed at a detainee facility, right as this is happening and on and off. Um, working with the ES for three straight years.

Kent Clizbe: You’re, uh, be sure the jail doors are locked.

Be sure the guys, the prisoners haven’t hanged themselves.

Zach Elwood: One thing he said in there, this kind of, I mean, he, he works in various. Exaggerated claims that relate to the behavior influence. So one thing he said in there that was, and they’re all ambiguous, and, uh, so he says, I developed this one little protocol that a person could use in a detainee situation, and it got adopted by the Department of Defense.

And he acts as if that was like some big thing. But, you know, again, it’s ambiguous. Did did that really happen? Was it just a tiny little vein? You know, who, who knows what it was, but he, he tries to act as if that was like one of the things that led him down the behavior influence thing where, you know, he just, he just tries to exaggerate the importance of these various things in his career and in a very ambiguous way.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But again, he, he is a, he is a jail guard. So your, your protocol that you developed is probably, hey, uh, if somebody, uh, says they’re gonna hurt themselves. Don’t give him a fork and a knife. Give him a spoon. You know something? Yeah. Could been something like that

Zach Elwood: if he

Kent Clizbe: even developed a protocol.

Prisoners.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: It’s not how to read their minds or, you know, I, I came up with a, a, a protocol to read their minds or, uh, whatever the hell his claims are.

Zach Elwood: He’s, he’s keeping it ambiguous for a reason. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Uh, after being a jail guard for three and a half years, he, uh, got an assignment as a quartermaster, uh, on a ship.

Quartermaster’s job is related to navigation. They do various duties, various tasks related to getting the ship from one place to another. First two, or quartermaster might be. In charge of being sure all the maps are in the right, are in the right place in the library or running to get a map when the navigator needs, uh, needs a map.

So, so a ship, the navigator is generally speaking, gonna be an officer that, an officer is someone who has a college degree. Maybe they went to Annapolis, the Naval Academy, maybe they were in ROTC, uh, went to a a civilian university and then did, did naval training afterwards. But they’re gonna be a college educated officer and they’re, and then they go through a navigation school, uh, to become qualified as a navigator.

The quarter masters are like assistants to the nav. The officer navigator, they take care of all of the admin and. Kind of grunt jobs related to getting the ship from one place to another. So his net, his duty after being a jail guard, he was a quartermaster on a ship. He tells a story that the navigator officer was a Coast Guard officer doing a rotation to the Navy.

The, uh, military branches will do that. They’ll send people, send an army officer to do time with the Marines, send a naval officer to do time with the army. In this case, it was a Coast Guard navigator on a rotation with the Navy. According to Hughes, because she was Coast Guard, she didn’t know the Navy systems.

Therefore, he was, he did the job. Is what? That that’s his claim. My guess there is he’s puffing himself up a bit. Yeah. This is one of the points where he’s a little bit exaggerating.

Zach Elwood: I was kind of gonna, I was gonna throw in there too. He also has this thing where he says he was working on these ships and various equipments, pieces of equipment, and he said the Navy had like no standard operating procedures.

I had to create these procedures myself, do it all myself. I’m like, really? All these expensive things. They had no SOPs. You know, I, I, I found that also, you know, he, he, he works in these various things that I think are ambiguous exaggerations that would be hard to fact check. Right. But it makes him sound more important maybe than he was.

Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. That, that example is from a couple, a couple assignments after where we’re at now. Oh, yeah. I’m

Zach Elwood: jumping ahead, sorry. Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: yeah, yeah. So he was, uh, on, on a ship for, I, I, not really sure. I don’t remember, but I don’t think he, he lies about it. I don’t, I, I think that his claims. Of that time as quartermaster on a ship are matched by his DD two 14 experience.

Uh, after that he got an assignment as a recruiter, a Navy recruiter, uh, in Texas. I wanna say it was somewhere out right outside of Dallas, uh, but somewhere in Texas. And he did that for I think three or four years.

Chase Hughes: And I transitioned from there to back to Houston, Texas, where I was a Navy recruiter for a little while.

And this is like the type of dude that goes into your high school and like hands out little key chains and t-shirts and stuff like that.

Merlin O’Brecht: So now that’s, this is May, this, this is in your off ship time, I’m guessing, right?

Chase Hughes: It’s after that five year period? Yeah. Yeah. I was in a town called Cleveland, Texas, so I’m going into high schools, talking kids into going to the Navy, and, uh, did well in recruiting.

Kent Clizbe: A recruiter is just a salesman. Their training. They, they have a, a very intensive military recruiters go through an intensive training course. It, it is the, I don’t know what to, what kind of civilian equivalent. It’s, it’s, it’s sales. The training is hardcore sales. Sales and recruiting go through. Kind of phases of what the fashionable sales approach is.

So probably depending on what, when you went through recruiting training, you went through, uh, one or more different sales theories and practical approaches. And a lot of people don’t make it as recruiters. They, they flunk out of the training because just like a lot of people don’t make it as salespeople because, uh, generally speaking, you gotta be a fast talker and you gotta be a bullshitter, right?

And there are horror stories of people, people’s re recruiters lying to them. ’cause recruiters, just like salespeople have quotas and they gotta make that quota. And if you don’t make the quota, then you get beat up.

Zach Elwood: We should, uh, Kent, real quick, let’s throw in that, um, you know, he wrote, uh, chase wrote his, um, pickup artist book it, at least it was published in 2007, which means he probably was in the pickup scene for, you know, a couple years before that, or at least a year.

So I’m thinking, you know, based on my timeline, ’cause I think he entered the Navy at, in 99, 19 99, and then took eight or nine years to get to the recruiter job or whatever it was. I think he, so he was in the pickup artist scene before. He got into recruiting, which I think helps explain, like he was already into that space of like, I’m seducing women at clubs kind of space.

He liked that, you know, influence and, uh, reading people’s stuff from the pickup artist scene. So I think, but I think it dovetails with him being interested in recruiting or, or finding it, finding a map over to it or something

Kent Clizbe: that, that’s great. That’s, that’s a perfect insight, I think. Um, let, let’s get on the record his, um, his experience and then we’ll go back to Yeah, sorry.

Plug in.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, keep

Kent Clizbe: going. No, no, no. I, I just, it’s great. ’cause, ’cause what I’ve done here on my notes is I’ve got these exact same kind of things. I’ve got him, uh, plugged in on the side.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Cool. Let’s, yeah. Keep

Zach Elwood: going with

Kent Clizbe: the career. Let’s get on the record.

Zach Elwood: Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: yeah. Get, get the career and then we’ll go back and say, well his, he was, he was doing pickup bullshit when he was

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Okay. Makes sense.

Zach Elwood: Okay. Keep going.

Kent Clizbe: So, so he, he was a recruiter for three or four years, I think. After that, he got a job, got an assignment at Little Creek, Virginia, uh, in a Surface platoon. So Little Creek is, it’s a, a huge sprawling naval facility in and around Norfolk, Virginia. Uh, Norfolk, Virginia is the, um, is the headquarters of, I wanna say the seventh fleet.

I don’t remember. It’s the whatever fleet services, the Atlantic. Um, all the ships are based out of Norfolk, Virginia, and then they have little auxiliary bases around the Norfolk Naval Base. And one of ’em is, uh, special forces, uh, uh, base and I’m pretty sure it’s Little Creek, the Special forces, the, the, in the Navy, the special forces of the seals, even though they’re in the Navy.

They have all manner of various equipment. Special forces’ job is to be a quick reaction, all purpose sort of instrument to do classified covert kind of operations. And the seals are trained in intelligence collection as well as weapons combat. And then they’ll have various equipment, they’ll have, uh, land vehicles, airborne kind of, they have helicopters and planes and they’ll have all kinds of different boats.

The special forces have all of this equipment. They don’t take care of the equipment. They’re, they’re operating, they’re going out and doing stuff, and they, when they need a boat or they need a a, a a a a tank or they need a helicopter, they, they have groups that are in charge of, they’re taking care of their boats, their helicopters.

They’re, they’re Humvees. What Hughes was doing was taking, he was one in one of these groups that was taking care of probably special forces stuff. He, he never says that. It’s interesting. I, I would think that he would, uh, he, he would try to make a claim about being connected if he was, but, so probably he wasn’t.

I

Zach Elwood: think we can assume if there was something impressive, uh, related to combat psychology influence, he would be very specific about it. So anytime he’s not specific about it, we can read a lot into that. Right.

Kent Clizbe: So, so he was, he was in Little Creek where the, there’s seals around there. Probably he wasn’t working with the seals, but he says he was, he was in charge of a surface platoon.

So by now he is a non-commissioned officer. He makes a big deal about it. You know, they, in the Navy they call non-commissioned officers. Uh, petty officers and he made Chief Petty officer. It’s like the, the ranks, enlisted ranks are E one through E nine, and the, the top, um, the, the top three in the Navy, E seven, E eight, E nine are chief petty officers.

Uh, EE five and E six are petty officers. So when you make E seven, you become a chief and the Navy is very tradition bound and they have different uniforms for, uh, different color, uh, for, for chiefs E seven, E eight, and E nine. Uh, and, and they have different, I, I guess on ships and on shore, they have, uh, chief dining facilities in the military, in the Navy, uh, you become, it’s, it’s special.

In the real world, it ain’t so special. You know, you’re just, you, you’ve been a welder for 15 years and now you’re, you get a lot of jobs because you’re good. You’ve had a lot of experience and you’ve been around. He makes a big deal. Oh, being chief, you know, oh, they have a ceremony and oh, the military has ceremonies.

When you go take a, take a crap and wipe your butt, right, you know, it’s, uh, no big deal.

Chase Hughes: They have 390 something applicants ba and they, all of your record goes up there. The day you j from the day you join the Navy, every time anyone’s ever evaluated you, every time you’ve been counseled, you’ve been written up, uh, you got in trouble.

Everything is there. And their job is to like, bring all this stuff up on the screen, kind of like, let’s rank and stack them. Oh, this guy beats that guy. You have to do this with 400 people until they have like this list of like top 10 have tons. Crazy. So it’s like

Merlin O’Brecht: a. Super selection process. Yeah, I like that.

Chase Hughes: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So what the, the chiefs do, generally speaking, is they’re managers think about it like a, not, they’re not officers. They’re, they’re non-commissioned officers, but they’re managers. So now he’s from, from his positions after this are all in, in management. So even though his, uh, he, his unit is doing, taking care of Humvees and radios and underwater UAVs, robots that go underwater, he’s not qualified in any of that stuff.

He’s the one that’s sitting back in the office and when somebody says, Hey, I need a, uh, underwater UAV, he. He checks his, his records and says, oh, okay, well number 79 43 is gonna be available next week. And then he tells an underling, go get number 79 43 and give it to these operators. He, he throws out all of the terms, uh, and the things that he was dealing with, but had, he has no training in these.

He didn’t do any training. Uh, at this time. He did do, I think a one week, uh, they call it expeditionary. There’s a specific name for it. Expeditionary Combat Training, something like that. It’s every single Navy personnel who go, who went into the, uh, the, the, the combat zones back then back in the Global War on Terror.

So you’re talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf. Persian Gulf, the Red Sea. If you’re going to any of those places, you’re gonna be in harm’s way. And that’s what this course, it’s a one, I think it’s a one week course, expeditionary Combat training. Everybody who went there, who went to these potential danger zones, did this, this course, this course is not teaching somebody to be a, uh, a, a trained killer, not teaching somebody to read minds.

The course is, if you get shot in the leg, put a tourniquet on it. Here’s what a tourniquet looks like. If the siren goes off, that means there’s missiles coming in. When the siren goes off, get into a bunker. It’s, that’s the level of training this expeditionary combat that, uh, he’s been, that, that he did. So as part of, of this unit that he was in, in Little Creek, I think he did that expeditionary train, uh, combat training.

His next assignment after that in Little Creek was in the Harbor Master Office. The Harbor Master is in charge of, think about it as a parking lot attendant and, and slash uh, logistics guy. When boats are, or ships are coming in, or small boats comes in, the harbor master says, okay, you go to, uh, pier 14.

You know, it’s like making a reservation at a, at a hotel. You got a slot on Pier 14 for six months, you need to go to Pier 73 A, and then they’re in charge of being sure that. Uh, the, the, the harbor is secure, clean, that they have access to water and food. So that was his, his next role there. His next role was, he was in a unit that did coastal river boats.

So he was in, he was assigned to a unit there, again, as, as a petty officer, as a manager. He’s not trained to, to, to be, to combat training. He’s not the one going out in combat. He’s taking care of these boats in some way. He probably, uh, learned to drive the boat, but I, I don’t think I see that on his DD two 14 may, I don’t know, maybe being a quartermaster qualifies you to, uh, to drive a, a small boat like this.

Chase Hughes: Then I went even more into the hardcore combat side of the military. Wouldn’t this thing called CRS four, coastal River Squadron four, working under CRG to Coastal River, Marine Group two. And if you’ve seen the movies at like the Vietnam movies where the dudes on like the boat, little tiny river boat and they’re like all dudes on there.

Yeah. All blackout face paint and like submachine guns and stuff. And like they jump off the boat, do jump warfare and stuff like that, get back on the boat. That’s the unit. So that’s where our unit got its starts. The riverine operations, uh, got started in, uh, Vietnam where they were, they were called brown water, navy, both Big Navy’s, blue water.

It we’re what they prefer us as the brown water, the dirty little rivers and stuff like that. Yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: When, so at this point you started doing combat training, I’m guessing? Yeah. Or right. Or when you were in, when, what was the first time you started doing the combat training? Is it when you’re in the underwater robot?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Before going to that, I went to. Ex expeditionary and I think advanced combat school in Gulfport, Mississippi on the way to this new command,

Merlin O’Brecht: if that makes sense.

Kent Clizbe: In that interview, uh, the, the roofing guy asked him, so, uh, was this the first of your many combat deployments, sir?

Merlin O’Brecht: Is this around when your first combat deployment is, or did is, do you have a combat deployment before that?

Chase Hughes: Uh, I wouldn’t call any of my deployments a combat deployment.

Merlin O’Brecht: Okay.

Chase Hughes: Uh, with the stuff that dudes go through, I, I would not say any of mine had been combat deployments.

Kent Clizbe: I, I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe it. Uh, because in, in all of his other stuff, it seems like he’s talking about, I, I know one I saw, yeah.

I was a black beret.

Chase Hughes: When you’re working intelligence operations, you get to this point where you’re like, any day. It might be the last day if we don’t do something drastic, right? In a World Day

Morgan Nelson: today, I sit down with an ex Black Beret, special forces interrogation expert.

Chase Hughes: We go through some serious, crazy training, and it’s the most stressful thing you can imagine.

We should not be seen, we should be forgotten the next day.

Morgan Nelson: This guy spent over 20 years on a secret ship doing very secret things, learning how to interrogate people from all around the world to literally get them to give up. Secrets of intelligence

Chase Hughes: we’re about to teach you is called the Omega Punch strike.

It is possibly lethal and very dangerous.

Kent Clizbe: So here on, on this one, he says, no, none of my deployments were combat deployments. Okay? So in this unit, in this small boat unit, he was deployed to the Gulf, uh, which means probably they was, he was working out of like Bach, rain or uh, Qatar. There’s huge, huge naval base, uh, in Qatar.

So he, he was deployed with, with his boats out there, and, uh, it looks like he, he was a driver of one of these boats. And then he tells the story in this, in the video about going out on a boat into the Gulf and getting out to, pretty far out. And he started to have chest pains. They had to, uh, had to abort the training or whatever it is they were doing.

Came back and he went to see the doctor. And for the next one and a half years, he was seeing doctors. I, I don’t think he mentions what he, what he was doing in those, in that time, what his job was probably, uh, in, in my experience in the military, when somebody is sick like this has some kind of, some kind of medical problem.

You’re in a, they, they, they have various names for it, but it’s a, like a, a casual unit, which means you’re sitting around waiting for your processing to be done. Uh, whatever the processing is, guys are getting kicked out. Guys who are, who failed schools, guys who, uh, what whatever. They have issues that need, uh, processing and the, the bureaucracy in the military, it is not instantaneous.

It takes a long time. So evidently he was in limbo for a year and a half. In the, in the video he talks about, oh, I became close friends with my doctor. Okay, cool. Then he was discharged. He, according to him, he was discharged after a year and a half. He doesn’t mention what the discharge was. He doesn’t mention.

That year and a half, there could, there could be a lot of stuff going on, although he seems to be pretty, uh, pretty honest. Uh, there could be, there’s a lot of stuff that might have been going on in that time. Could be a, he got, he had a medical discharge. I don’t know. Could be a, other than honorable, could be honorable.

Discharge, don’t know. A actually looking as DD two 14, I think I’m, I’m almost positive that it’s a, uh, uh, either they blocked it out or it was honorable. I don’t, I have to check that, but there’s no, he doesn’t say what his discharge was. And that’s the end of his military career. That’s it. Mm-hmm. That’s what he did.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Nothing to do with spies. Behavior, intelligence, brainwashing, mind reading.

Zach Elwood: Right. And this and this video of his, I mean, it seems like a way for him to try to get ahead or maybe a little late in the game, but to try to say. Yeah, my career really did have nothing, you know, I admit it. My career really did have nothing to do with psychology and behavior really.

Although he tries to work in little story, ambiguous stories about how it might have, but then he does this, you know, the thing that really stands out, I don’t know if you wanted to talk about this, is the guy tries to ask him like, well, how did you get into these things? And it’s really ambiguous. Like he almost says almost nothing about like, you know, how did you become an, an expert, a supposed expert on these things?

He’s like, yeah, I basically studied in my free time and I talked to a lot of experts and I, I, you know, he, he, he drops these ambiguous stories about like seeing through the matrix when he was talking to some guy in Hawaii about, like, I had empathy for him instead of. Treating Hi. Seeing him as some sort of enemy.

I saw it was like I was seeing through the matrix, and it was like, he, he, he makes these stories that sound very exciting about, like, stuff that just sounds rather mundane that he doesn’t, se doesn’t sound that impressive. You know, it, it was interesting for just how little actual things he talked about in terms of why should anyone view him as some sort of expert in these things.

Right? So that’s kind of an amazing cell phone. I think that, I think it relates to him and his accolades being so in the weeds and narcissistic that they think this sounds impressive to people, but I think most people would be able to be like, well, what exactly have you done? You know, there’s not much there that you, that you talk about.

Kent Clizbe: Actually, I, I don’t think so, Zach. I don’t think most people do, especially the, his followers.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. From what I’ve seen, they don’t, if they don’t have a, a, a background in the military or bureaucracy. This all sounds so high speed, low drag. This all sounds so exciting. And, and as you said, he, he, he doesn’t make any claims that I was a spy for the Defense Intelligence Agency, but there is so much in his, uh, outside of this Chase Hughes life story, video conversation, other places, claims that he’s made.

Marc the Beginning host: Right.

Kent Clizbe: So what I, I got a note here. Uh, his, his roofer lackey, who’s questioning him at the end of this, of, of Hughes’s giving his recitation of his military career. The poor dude, the poor lackey is like, uh, uh, you know, did, did I miss something?

Merlin O’Brecht: Was there kind of a jump? To getting deep into like the real deep end of professional behavior psychology in an applied way as much.

I know you can’t talk about that much of it, but

Chase Hughes: I don’t think, for me it was ever in a hugely professional way. Um, I was developing curriculum for a long time.

Kent Clizbe: The, the, the poor lackey, we expected to have all kinds of. War stories about, yeah. When they dropped me into Afghanistan, behind the lines, I was in charge of the unit that brainwashed, uh, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Nothing, he doesn’t make any of those claims. So the lackey’s confused.

Zach Elwood: I like also setting, setting ’em up, uh, you know, lowering the expectations. I know you can’t talk about much of it, you know,

he,

Kent Clizbe: well, well, it’s, it’s not, I, I think that is not necessarily lowering the expectations. It’s giving him the, the lackey is assuming because he was so high speed, low drag.

Mm-hmm. He was so deep undercover. Therefore, he can’t talk about it. That’s, that’s what I hear in that question is he’s assuming that Hughes was so, uh, secret, but so he does give them that out. And Hughes response, well, I was never in that in a hugely professional way. I was developing curriculums for a long time.

He doesn’t say what kind of curriculums. It’s pretty clear the curriculums were like, how to turn on a radio, uh, how to lock the cell door, you know, developing curriculums doesn’t make you an expert in, in brainwashing. And

Zach Elwood: that’s when he mentions

Kent Clizbe: the

Zach Elwood: protocol. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Then he says,

Chase Hughes: but the first time that it, like it really meant something is I developed this one little protocol that a person could use in a detainee situation and it got adopted by the Department of Defense.

And it was like, wow. Like it was my first time where I was like, I am, I needed that external validation to feel like this is something that’s worth pursuing. Like I am worth, uh, continuing down this path. So I need to keep doing it. And I was probably 35, I was three years away from retirement at the time.

Kent Clizbe: So when he was three years away from retirement, according to his DD two 14 and his life story, he, uh, was, was doing boats. He was, uh, in the, uh, coastal riverine boats. What’s he doing with the detainee situation? Maybe he’s doing it on his own, but regardless, a protocol in a detainee situation, that’s the ambiguous language.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Kent Clizbe: And what, what I read that is as is not, I came up with the newest way to brainwash detainees. It’s, I’ve, I came up with, uh, put the handcuffs behind their backs instead of in front of their. Their body. Well that’s what a, a protocol in a detainee situation is.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And then, then, then he, and he speaks really ambiguously right after that.

He kinda like yada yadas over a bunch of stuff.

Chase Hughes: I did a lot of training and stuff like that along the way, like teaching people and walking people, mentoring people through the process. And there were Intel guys and uh, there were is dudes at Intel Specialist guys.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: That was really rewarding ’cause they got that.

And every time I would train one of these guys that went through all these intelligence schools universally, they would say, this is 10 times better than our school. And I thought at the, I think the first few times I heard it, I was like, wow, thank you. But in the back of my mind I was like, they’re lying to make me feel good.

That was exactly what went on my head. They’re lying to me so I feel better about myself. Uh, it took a while for me to kind of have the enough self worth. To say like, wow, these things are really gonna change a lot of people. They’re gonna change a lot of lives.

Zach Elwood: He kind of just yada yadas over, you know, his amazing abilities or knowledge.

And he is like, then I decided I needed to train people on this stuff and my wife encouraged me and I got into it.

Chase Hughes: As I’m retiring, I’m, I’m living with my girlfriend who’s now my wife, she’s actually in the next room and I had a resume typed up and I, I was applying to be a guy working in the shipyard, fitting people’s faces with PPE and safety gear.

Let’s just not say it. Just could

Merlin O’Brecht: the grade chase hug, you know?

Chase Hughes: Yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: I know you’re just a normal guy at the end of the day too, but a lot of people look up to you and, and, uh, I certainly do and it’s incredible to me the depth of your knowledge that’s built, uh, into my mind. It’s actually a really interesting story, uh, because it just kind of goes to show.

Like, for me anyways, it makes me feel like, dang. Well, if Chase was feeling like he was about to go just fit masks in the Navy shipyard at one point in his life and really thought that he, that it would what he was gonna do, yeah, maybe some roofer from Canada could be more than a roofer from Canada as well, you know,

Zach Elwood: but also, you know, it’s, it’s all ambiguous.

There’s not a lot, hardly any details. Uh, but then it’s also, it also, this also just conflicts with his own records on his website and his website, chase hughes.com, which I covered in my first video. And, and, and the entry for that about it as many lies. He, he started that website in 2012. He was immediately claiming to be an expert in reading people, in influencing people.

He, he claimed even like, I think it was as early as like 2014, to be an internationally recognized, uh, person in the behavior and influence space. He had the, this like fake quote about his. You know, uh, his behavior, uh, table of elements. He had, uh, claims that like his stuff was being used by agencies, that it was being used by media, uh, organizations worldwide and such.

So his, his, uh, claims in this, even in this ambiguous way that he kind of veered into being some sort of expert later in his career, completely conflict with him. Try claiming from an early time period to be an amazing, internationally recognized expert in these things. Right?

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. Yeah. He’s, his, his big problem is he’s here, he is coming clean in this life story, but he’s still got all of his past, uh, past claims on the record.

So, to wrap up that interview, the, the poor roofing lack, he says again, he’s, he’s confused, he says.

Merlin O’Brecht: What about, uh, any of, any other studies or anything else about that I’m missing that we wanna cover about the human behavior stuff at your time in the military?

Chase Hughes: No, I think we’ve kind of, we’ve at least kind of glossed over the biggest pieces.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah, for sure. Okay. Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: he, he was expecting this to be a, a big, long explanation of how Hughes had become such an expert, and Hughes says, Nope, we covered it. So now let’s go back to when he was. A, a, a jail guard, I guess he was stationed in Hawaii. He tells a story in this life story that he was studying psychology and body language and reading Jung and uh, I had a, a US government manual, unidentified, he doesn’t say what it is.

I’m guessing he got it off of, uh, off the internet. You know, there’s a lot of like 1950s CIA stuff.

Zach Elwood: He also speaks as if it was amazing that you can’t find the government manual on Amazon, and he’s like, you to this day, you can’t find it on Amazon. The guy’s like, wow. I’m like, that’s like the least amazing thing ever.

It’s like if I, there’s many government manuals you can’t find on Amazon. It’s strange.

Chase Hughes: I was reading these psychology books. I’m reading Carl Jung and profiling books and stuff like that. It was FBI profiling manual that I got a hold of. It was a government manual that you couldn’t even find on Amazon.

To this day, you can’t find on Amazon.

Merlin O’Brecht: Well.

Chase Hughes: I’m reading through all these things and kind of piecing all this stuff together, like a schizophrenic with the yarn, you know, that goes Yeah, I do how to do newspaper. There’s

Merlin O’Brecht: that internet of the guy with

all

Chase Hughes: this. Oh yeah. Pets. Yeah. Yeah. That’s what my brain was like.

Little stuff. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: Here he, he’s a jail guard and he’s studying psychology body language on his own. EE evidently. ’cause there, there’s no indication he ever went to college. I don’t think he ever mentions any academic studies. Um, he, he, he went to a military high school and I think he pretty much, he had some kind of issue when he was in, in high school and he, he had to join the military, I think.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. He said he was a horrible student. He said he was getting horrible grades, I assume maybe some behavioral issues, maybe. I mean, he comes from a wealthy family. He, people have told me, people have told me he comes from a wealthy family. And then I saw him talk about it in his, um, life story. He says it was a.

It’s very, you know, privileged, uh, upbringing. So it’s an interesting, uh, yeah, something, something was going on with that, uh, military school. And then, yeah, he, uh,

Chase Hughes: it was a, a very country club existence. It was like, let’s go to the golf course, let’s go to tennis lessons, let’s go to the country club, summer camp and swimming pool and all that.

Throughout the summers, going through middle school, like around fourth, fifth grade, I started getting like D’s and everything. Everything was like a D.

Merlin O’Brecht: What do you think was happening there?

Chase Hughes: I think I just lost interest in school. Like, I, it wasn’t fun. Uh, I don’t know. Something changed in my brain.

Kent Clizbe: Rich kids who get in trouble, uh, being sent to military school is a very common.

Kind of, uh, way to grow up. So that’s what happened to him. He was, I guess, a rich kid who got in trouble sent to military school and, but anyway, what, what I’m getting to here is academics. He, he’s never, never made a claim and I’ve never seen any kind of indication that he is ever been to college.

Zach Elwood: I, I don’t know if you wanna mention, he does in his life story video, talk about his, um, signed up for Harvard postgraduate level and, uh, duke University, uh, opening at Duke University, something in medical neuroscience.

He makes these claims that he did some, some sort of classes after his, or, or near the end of his, uh, Navy career. But it’s also very vague. And he used to claim that he had, apparently used to claim that he had like an Harvard degree on his LinkedIn, but then deleted it. Like people mentioned that years ago as like him claiming he had some sort of Harvard degree.

So anyway, just to say he’s, he’s made these claims and I, I kind of feel like the. Probably the truth of the matter is with those is he found some like really minimal, you know, week or couple week long class that you could take from Harvard and Duke to bolster his resume, like the easiest thing you could possibly find that was associated with those schools.

I have a feeling maybe he did that. Maybe he didn’t even do that. I don’t know. But whatever it is, it’s not really clear what he did.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. So, so there, there are, uh, a lot of, um, uh, Harvard or Duke or any university does conferences, does, uh, professional training, something like that. It may, it may just be a conference, but you, you sign up and, uh, enroll and maybe you pay a, pay a fee and you are now a.

Graduate of Harvard’s history seminar. You know, once you get that, then you can say, well, I’m a Harvard graduate. I don’t see any indication. He has an undergraduate degree and he never claims to I a graduate degree. Ain’t gonna happen. But unless you got an undergraduate degree.

Zach Elwood: Actually I’m just reading this now, Ken, it’s kind of interesting.

I’ll, I noticed how ambiguous this language is. Like he says this

Merlin O’Brecht: And what about neuroscience, like endocrinology? When did you first start getting interested in all that? Because it seems it’s kind of different. Right.

Chase Hughes: I signed up for this Harvard, uh, postgraduate level, so like a master’s level, uh, certification in neuroscience and neuroendocrinology.

And right as I started learning that is when I discovered my brain. These like neuroscience neurological disorder, like at the same time. Really? Yeah. Damns. And so, like at the moment, I, that’s when I started classes. Like I still had, I only had 18, 20 pages in my little notebook drawn out and taking notes and stuff.

Little, couple sketches of neurons and stuff like that in there,

Merlin O’Brecht: right?

Chase Hughes: Uh, but the moment that diagnosis came down, I was more interested in that kind of learning that I’ve ever been in my life. I wanted to lo, I wanted to know more about my condition than any neurologist that I would ever see. And I spent four and a half years studying and studying and studying and ensuring that, like, I, I wanna know more than anybody in the world about what’s going on in my brain.

And that may or may not be true, probably not true. There’s probably lots of people that know a lot, but I wanted to be, feel like I had a hand on the steering wheel of what was gonna happen to my brain. It’s gonna happen. Uh, so like me becoming a good student. I don’t think that’s what that was. I think it was desperation.

The moment I finished with Harvard, there was a course opening up at Duke University.

Zach Elwood: He doesn’t, he never says he finished it. He says, I signed up for it. And then later, yeah, right. And then later he says, the moment I finished with Harvard, there was a course opening up at Duke University. He never says what he got at Harvard.

He never says he even finished it. He says he signed up for it. Yeah. So yeah, there’s a lot of ambiguous stuff there. What’s he say about Duke? He says,

Chase Hughes: there was a course opening up at Duke University at Duke University Medical School, and this was in medical neuroscience. And I was like, I need to take that.

And it was relatively cheap compared to all the other universities out there.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: And this is another postgraduate certification in medical neuroscience and neuroimaging and neuroradiology and. I started that same exact thing, just nonstop every day, five, 10 hours a day. Still you nonstop.

Kent Clizbe: You know, this may have been that one and a half years when he was on medical casual status.

Zach Elwood: He does mention the medical, he mentions his medical issues at the same time, you know, he’s, he talks about his medical issues. Uh, so I mean, reading this, he doesn’t, from what I can see, he doesn’t talk about any actual finishing, finishing anything. He doesn’t talk about what the classes really were, and he, but he does also talk about his own medical issues about like, having all these memory and brain problems and such.

We don’t need to get into all that stuff, but just to say, getting back to when people say a lot of ambiguous things, you should pay attention. You know, getting, getting to what really works in interrogation and interview scenarios. You know, when somebody is speaking very ambiguously about things, that’s a, that’s a red flag that you want, you want to dig into, right.

Kent Clizbe: Yep. So, um, back to him being, when he was at the jail guard, uh, he was studying psychology and body language reading j and a US government manual. Again, as you say, it’s all ambiguous and he’s probably doing these kind of things. He means he was probably on the internet going, huh, that’s interesting. And that’s what he, you know, he spins that as I was studying psychology.

So he went, this, this is a, uh, the anecdote he tells his, the, the poor lackey interviewer.

Chase Hughes: And I, I remember going out to Waikiki Beach and Honolulu and this guy, like everybody else, was like, really afraid of this guy. And for the first time in my lung, uh, something clicked in my head and like, like I went from brain to heart.

Instantly something shifted where I was like, there’s a voice in my head was like, oh my God, he’s scared. He’s just fearful. And I felt empathy, uh, instead of like, I’m calling him a douche bag or which I would’ve done. Right, a hundred percent would’ve done. Um, but I felt this like surge of empathy. Like I can see the matrix.

Like I was, I felt like it was neo,

Merlin O’Brecht: right?

Chase Hughes: I can, no one else could see what IMC, like that’s kind of what Neo is, you know? That’s Yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah. He sees behind the code.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. So that was the biggest one for me. And then I started moaning the, the really deep, hardcore persuasion level stuff. And the first time I ever used that on a person, um, it worked so well that my far rate was probably at like 180 or 200.

I was like, I’m gonna go to prison. Like, I just felt like I was breaking the rules of reality. Like, like reality shouldn’t work this way. I

Kent Clizbe: felt like I was neo in the matrix. When I heard him say that, I said, you know what, this dude sounds like he was taking drugs. There’s, there’s drugs like, uh, I think it’s called MDMA or MDA, the party drug.

It’s what those Yeah, ec when when they go to raves. Yeah. They take that and it, um, it makes you love everybody. You, it, it’s like an empathy drug. It makes you feel like, oh, that poor guy. Oh, I understand him. That’s what this, it’s like he’s describing a, a, an experience on MDMA or something like that.

That’s what I thought when I heard that.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Well, it sounded to me like just pure, kind of narcissism, like over, over, over exaggerating the importance of fairly minor thing. It’s like what you mean empathy made you feel like you were neo in the matrix? Like I don’t, he, but he, but he often talks about, I mean, he, even today.

A big part of his spiel these days is talking about how we’re in a simulation and how drugs have helped him. Various hallucinogenics have helped him see the matrix. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: There you go. See, that’s it. I may, I, I didn’t, I didn’t know that, but Oh, didn’t know that. When

Chase Hughes: he says this, this is going to rip a hole in your brain that you cannot plug.

It’s going to permanently change the way that you see stuff. There’s so many symbols and signs that human beings are experiencing a simulation of reality.

Merlin O’Brecht: Have you seen the DMT experiment with the laser?

Marc the Beginning host: I have seen it on Instagram and I heard you and Danny talking about it. So you’ve done it.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, I saw it on Instagram and flew Danny to my house right away.

Marc the Beginning host: Like, break this down for people because it got shared amongst my group. And it’s like, what the fuck?

Chase Hughes: Exactly. And that’s the only question you’re still gonna have after you see it.

Marc the Beginning host: It doesn’t answer any questions. It just invites a lot more.

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Nothing else. There’s code. Absolutely. There is code.

Marc the Beginning host: So the code’s not like spinning there.

It’s like it’s literally like kind of written out static.

Chase Hughes: It’s static. I can move the laser up and down and see all of the letters, but it’s like three dimensional. So I can get close to the wall, I can look down inside of the laser that way, and I can look up in the laser that way.

Kent Clizbe: When he says this, I hear that’s somebody who has been on psychedelic drugs.

Oh, he is done a lot of, he’s done a lot

Zach Elwood: of drugs. He, he, he encourages

Kent Clizbe: this there. Well, there, it’s right there. Yeah. So that’s the explanation. He, he’s in Hawaii as a jail guard. What a fricking horrible job. I cannot imagine being a jail guard. What a sucky job. But you’re in paradise. So what these, the, uh, Navy guys do is they party all the time.

I mean, I, I, I, I’ve been with many Navy guys when they’re on shore, they drink nonstop. Guys I knew in the Navy weren’t doing drugs, but I’m sure that there were, there. There’s a, a party culture, and that’s what this sounds like, a party culture. This was his introduction to psychedelics. He took. Some kind of drug and it made him feel empathetic and it changed his life.

That’s what Well, you’re, that’s what he’s describing here.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I mean, we’re speculating here to be clear, but that’s your, that’s your guess.

Kent Clizbe: Yeah. It’s total speculation. But I’m, I’m telling you, I, I, I, this is, this is not just, uh, total blue sky. I, well, we, I’ve been, I’ve been in the drug culture when I was a kid.

I, I know a lot about it and, uh, when you, when, when somebody says this, and then later on they talk about that, how psychedelics have changed their life.

Zach Elwood: Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: there it is right there. Well, we should, he just said it should,

Zach Elwood: it might be a

Kent Clizbe: good everyth shifted a voice in my head.

Zach Elwood: It might, it might be a good time to throw in too that, you know, the pickup artist stuff.

He, he released his, uh, passport book in like 2007, which means he was probably in the pickup artist kind of seen for a couple years or so. And so he, he was traveling around, uh, you know, seducing women and including with his navy friends, like some of the people he mentions in his, in his book, you know, giving him testimonials in his passport, uh, book, you know, you could do the research and find that they were navy people, so the speculation might fit in with that party kind of lifestyle, going to clubs and, and such too.

But I think, you know, it’s interesting too, the pickups part of stuff.

Kent Clizbe: He goes, yeah, it’s just speculation, you know? I mean, it does, he doesn’t say I was taking drugs and this happened.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: But he, he says something shifted a voice in my head. I felt like I was neo in the matrix. He’s describing a psychedelic experience.

That’s what it feels like to take psychedelics. He goes on to say, now I was into the hardcore persuasion stuff this first time. It worked so well. I thought I’m going to prison. I’m breaking the rules of reality. Wait, wait, what? What? Rules of reality. Only the only way you’d say that is if you’re taking drugs.

And then what does he say? It was addicting. Dude. Drugs are addicting to live in a reality that others don’t live in. How do you get into a reality others don’t live in? You drop acid.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I mean, you

Kent Clizbe: take MDMA

Zach Elwood: or it was like a narcissistic or it was like a psychotic break. Who knows? You know, but there’s some, it’s also just interesting for like, him

Kent Clizbe: drugs.

I, I would, my, yeah, we

Zach Elwood: don’t,

Kent Clizbe: my educated assessment is, yeah, I, this is a, a, a drug. He, he, he had life changing experiences taking some kind of, or multiple kinds of drugs. And now he goes on to say, well, this isn’t hyperbole, this is legit shit. I now, I tried to use my new skills and I was very successful. I was the king of the detainee facility.

I had all the tricks,

Chase Hughes: but it’s, it’s addicting because you get, you live in a re a layer of reality that other people don’t live in. And that’s not even, I’m not, that’s not hyperbole. That’s. Legit shit like aren’t you’re seeing stuff nobody else is gonna see.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah.

Chase Hughes: So that is, it gets so addictive because every time you get better at it and you start seeing this next layer and next layer, you can’t stop chasing layers because every time you’re like, there’s gotta be something even more than this and more.

So that’s been the en entire past 30 years of my life is what’s the next layer? What’s the next level?

Merlin O’Brecht: Like a never ending onion, I think. Ever use that pineapple.

Chase Hughes: Yeah, it’s true. And that’s, uh, I’m probably 29 or so, 28 at this point. 25.

Merlin O’Brecht: When we, when you first got obsessed with bi language, human behavior.

Chase Hughes: 19.

Merlin O’Brecht: Yeah. That was, so that was, so that was still at the very beginning of the journey.

Chase Hughes: Oh yeah.

Merlin O’Brecht: So then, and that was still when you were doing the deckhand work.

Chase Hughes: Yep.

Merlin O’Brecht: And so when you start doing the detaining job, whatever you’re doing there, you’ve already now got a fascination in psychology. You’ve already got some pretty key skills in terms of understanding human beings and human behavior and even understanding influence a little bit.

So you’re probably starting to, I would imagine, look at everything that’s going on as the depend situation from a lens that maybe most people aren’t.

Chase Hughes: Absolutely. And I’m trying to use those things as much as I can. And they were very successful. Extremely successful. And they’re not even the level of NCI one, like our, the primary course of ncis.

Wow. It’s not even that level. And it was like, you are the king of this detaining facility. You’ve got all of these tricks and tactics and stuff, and they were just so basic. Wow.

Kent Clizbe: What, what is the hell are you talking

Zach Elwood: about?

Kent Clizbe: Yeah.

Zach Elwood: It’s, and and again, all this stuff is so ambiguous. He’s like, I saw through the Matrix I was doing amazing things, but he is, it is like, what were you doing?

What was so amazing? It, nothing you’ve described sounds impressive. It just sounds like psychotic or drug induced or something. Yeah. It,

Kent Clizbe: it’s, it’s a dude on drugs. So then, then in, in this, the only experience that he shares in this, uh, in, in the life story is his, his interviewer. Ask him, can, can you share any experience, uh, about, you know, be your behavioral expertise or give mind control?

Zach Elwood: Give us something.

Kent Clizbe: Give us something. He goes, well, um, I’ll tell you one story.

Chase Hughes: So in, uh, Kauai, there’s a mall, like a big outdoor mall. It’s called Ala one Mall. Yeah, it’s huge. It’s, it’s beautiful. It, in this mall, there were two separate Abercrombie and Fitch stores.

Merlin O’Brecht: Okay,

Chase Hughes: there’s a men’s store and a women’s store, right?

Uh, I 20 something years old, young kid go and get a night job at nights and weekends working at the Women’s Abercrombie store. Uh, and that is where I practice a lot of this behavior stuff and behavior profiling and, and influence and persuasion stuff. And that was where I kind of got a lot of like the anxiety that anybody, when they start learning, especially that the influence stuff, they start learning some of these methods and they’re like, well, I won’t say that out loud, but like, right.

I, I need to be in a really, really low stake situation. That’s the place where I got all of that out of my system. Uh, so it was the perfect probing ground for me anyway. And I loved doing that. Even if we’re, you know, like standing shirtless of. Front of the store during the holidays or whatever. Uh, we, I could still, there was someone there.

There’s always someone there and they’re, they’re paid to just stand there. You know, it was, it was the perfect scenario for me to start working on some of this stuff and just kind of piecing some of these pieces together that I’ve been wondering about.

Kent Clizbe: And that’s it. That’s it. He, he, he doesn’t say, he doesn’t say, you know, exactly what he was doing.

He doesn’t say what the results were. It’s just, and, and now I, I didn’t know about, uh, the, the timeline of the pickup bullshit, but obviously that’s what he’s describing here. He was going to pick up girls in this Abercrombie and Fitch Women’s store, and it worked. Whatever it is. He was doing work and he decides that it’s behavior profiling, influence, persuasion, and I guess, I guess you could call it that, you know, the pickup artist is kinda bullshit.

Uh, but that, that’s it. That in his life story, that this is his only be, besides the one, the guy, the big guy on the beach when he had a surge of empathy and it changed his life. And he went to Abercrombie and Fitch women’s store. That’s, and did something.

Zach Elwood: That was an

Kent Clizbe: amazing story. Yeah, that’s, that was a perfect proving ground for him.

So that’s, that’s Chase Hughes, uh, life and how, nothing, there’s nothing in it to the, he has no expertise. Uh, developed externally. He has no job related training. There’s nothing in his background in the military that has anything to do with mind control, brainwashing behavior any more than any other jail guard has, is, is a behavior expert.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I mean, it’s nice of him to put out the information to help us, you know, support what we already knew, to put out his own information on that. Um, and then, you know, there were, we’re not even getting into the many ridiculous things. He still claims about his abilities to mind read and brainwash people in a few seconds, like he talked about on Joe Rogan.

Chase Hughes: I, I mean, I may the number one guy in the country on the mind control stuff. There are step-by-step programs they have for creating a mentor candidate.

Joe Rogan: Okay. Like, what’s step one? How do you know when you can get a guy to be a mentor and candidate?

Zach Elwood: Stuff that’s clearly. Completely fantasy, and we’re not even getting into him selling vitamin supplements and claiming these vitamin supplements were used by the armed forces and, you know, just bullshit.

Just the amount of, immense amount of bullshit he spread and continues to spread about all sorts of things. So it’s like he can try to manage this thing, you know, try to put out his own version of it and speak in ambiguous ways. But I mean, the only people he is fooling are people that are already kind of, kind of got down the Chase hug fan rabbit hole at this point.

Yeah,

Kent Clizbe: I, I, I gave up a long time ago trying to analyze why people fall for Con Men, because this guy’s a con man.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: He’s, he’s full of shit. He makes claims that are total bullshit. He implies that he has background and expertise that he doesn’t have, but people fall for it. Yeah. And, and I study cons. I study scams.

I got scammed when I, a couple times when I was young. And you know, I’ve, I’ve been kind, so I know that people get conned for different reasons, but everybody’s different. And I gave up trying to figure out why people fall for the con. All I can do is, is provide a glimpse at reality, uh, of, of the conman.

Here’s what his claims are, here’s the actual background of this guy. Here’s my professional assessment of where his claims come from. And then you gotta use that yourself. If you’re a potential victim, you gotta use this information I’m providing you to make your own decision. Am I gonna give this guy $10,000 to go eat peyote mushrooms and chant in Mexico and change my life?

Or am I gonna. Do something productive of my life. It’s up to you. I don’t know why people fall for this.

Zach Elwood: I mean, the un the unfortunate thing is a lot of the people that get into this are vulnerable people. Like I’ve shared with you some messages that came to me, people thinking that my site was Chase Hughes, very emotionally, psychologically, vulnerable people, several people.

And then I’ve heard people have sent me stories about their family members or, or friends who are emotionally vulnerable and been kind of treating, uh, chase. I mean, chase clearly wants to become some sort of guru, uh, cult leader personality. Now he’s doing all these videos about how we live in a simulation and you can control it and, you know, that just all this kind of stuff you would see from a, you know, a wild cult leader.

So the sad thing is a lot of people that get drawn into this are just emotionally vulnerable and they’re the most at risk for like, spending way too much and having their minds warped and yeah, it’s, it’s sad. Really. Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: And that’s who. Con men are looking for, they’re looking for a weak point. Mm-hmm.

And you just, you throw out enough stuff to enough people and you’ll find the, the weak points there.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Kent Clizbe: So good. You’re doing a great job, Zach. I sure hope that, uh, that people will hear this and take heed and avoid this conman.

Zach Elwood: So that was really only scratching the surface of Chase Hughes Origins and his rise to fame.

We didn’t even get into the tale of how he came to work with the Behavior Panel, the show that was the main factor in his rise to online popularity whose members teamed with him, despite his many obvious red flags in a video, the Behavior Panel released talking about their origins, Mark Bowden had admitted to wanting to partner with Chase, despite there being almost nothing about Chase online.

And again, despite Chase climbing for years on his website to be well known and famous for his work.

Mark Bowden: Well, I didn’t know Chase at the time because Chase wasn’t kind of out there at the time. You were still I

Chase Hughes: was active duty

Mark Bowden: You were still active duty at the, at the time. So nobody knew that you were, you were around at at the time.

Um. When the guy who was buying his dinner had had said, you guys should get together. I kind of searched around the internet and I found a video of you and I found a video of you you’d gone to, I think it was Colgate. Was it Colgate?

Chase Hughes: Yeah. Colgate University.

Mark Bowden: Colgate University. And you were coming out of Colgate University and you’d been doing some research there, um, into

Chase Hughes: MK Ultra.

Mark Bowden: Yeah. And, and you were talking about the cubic feet of documents that you, you’d, you’d been through and you were saying some names of some people that I recognize and not everybody would really recognize. Yeah. And you were talking about their documents in Cubic feet. And I instantly went

Chase Hughes: 36.

Mark Bowden: Oh, this guy is, um, is serious.

Like this is a serious person.

Zach Elwood: So Mark can’t find anything about this guy who claims to be a behavior and psychology expert, but what the hell Chase looked like he was doing smart stuff. After all, clearly only true intellectuals are able to talk about the volume of documents. This, I think, says a lot about Mark Bowden and about the Behavior Panel in general.

They are, like Chase, unethical and irresponsible. They clearly don’t care about the truth about body, language and behavior, just as they clearly don’t care about partnering with and promoting a con artist. It also says a lot that when I tried to bring this to the attention of the behavior panel members back in 2024, when I first released my first Chase Hughes episode, I was insulted by Mark Bowden several times on LinkedIn who accused me of just trying to promote myself.

The other members only ignored me as I expected them to in the first place. I think Mark Bowden lashing out at me is perhaps a sign that he has some internal conflict and guilt about his initial decision to partner with Chase Hughes and help him achieve popularity and exploit vulnerable people. Now, apparently the YouTube money train is rolling and it’s just too good to get off.

Sad stuff. In a future video, I might step through that behavior panel origin video and do what they do. See if I can find a few interesting clues and tidbits in their statements and behavior.

I’ll leave you with a clip from an interview that Chase Hughes did in January of 2022 with Theresa Carpenter, who has a military focused podcast and who actually knew Chase a bit during the Navy.

I think it might give some psychological insight into the immense fear that motivates Chase and other grandiose serial liars like him. Or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it’s just another story, another distraction, another lie.

Theresa Carpenter: And then as you were transitioning out of the Navy, you started this path into entrepreneurship.

Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Chase Hughes: I did. I wanted to, I had a moment that, uh, changed my life when I was a young kid in the military and I was like. I had to be 19 years old. And when you’re 19, you’re, you know, you’re in the Navy, a master chief is like the god, God Yes. Of the, of the entire ship.

Marc the Beginning host: Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes: And like flawless Oh yeah. Doesn’t make mistakes. Uh, mostly because they did, they do set a pretty good example. They do. And so we had a master chief on, uh, on the ship when I was young. He retired and two weeks later, uh, you know, I assumed he’s gonna go, I’m young, right. So I’m thinking he’s gonna go be the CEO of like Southwest Airlines.

Right. Or like, he’s gonna go like, run the country somehow. Right. Because he’s, he’s a master chief and two weeks later I see him organizing CDs in Circuit City.

Joe Rogan: Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes: Back when we had Circuit City.

Joe Rogan: Right.

Chase Hughes: And he was wearing a Navy veteran like ball cap and. I didn’t go up to him because I was kind of embarrassed for him.

I’m sure he had plenty of money, like tons to do.

Theresa Carpenter: Mm-hmm.

Chase Hughes: Um, but I lost sleep over that. I literally lost sleep and I was terrified most of my career that the Navy would be the best thing that I had ever done. And then once I got out, then my days, you know mm-hmm. Would be over, like my life would. Right.

You know, my biggest achievements were behind me at that point. Right. And that was my biggest fear. So I started like 10 years before I left the Navy, I started building this stuff and I was obsessed with human behavior. So I just started doing as much as I possibly could to manufacture content and do as much I wanted to outwork every psychology researcher in the United States, and I wanted to do more research than anybody and figure things out that hadn’t been figured out before.

Theresa Carpenter: And you did that.

Zach Elwood: Music by small skies.

The Epstein file release has resulted in many people losing their minds: engaging in moral panic, filtering for worst-case interpretations of so many things; having hysterical overreactions. In this episode, I take a look at some of this hysteria. Using a video from the political influencer Kyle Kulinski, who has 2.5M subscribers on YouTube, as a case study, I examine how ambiguous snippets—like an audio clip of people talking about killing deer and crashing a boat—get instantly interpreted by Kyle and others as some sort of evidence that might point to murder. Why are smart, influential people speaking with absolute certainty about what pixelated photos and ambiguous recordings and emails tell us? Why are people claiming to find evidence of cannibalism in the files? And what does all this say about our toxic political polarization problems, and our tendency to assume the worst when our perceived enemies are involved? If you’re concerned about paranoid, conspiracy-minded thinking, and how that ties into our political divides, this episode will help you understand why emotional reasoning is so rampant, and why it’s important to fight against it, when we see others doing it, and within ourselves — not just for the sake of society, but for our own mental health.  

A transcript is below.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

(Transcripts are automatically generated and do contain errors.)

Kyle Kulinksi: No, it really does appear to be a shadow government of pedophile, billionaire elites that run the world. And they’re sadists. Some of them are into torture, some of them are into cannibalism. They are actually part of a clique, a club, a fraternity, and they keep humans like pets and do the most sadistic things imaginable to them.

Zach Elwood: So this will be a video examining some Epstein file hysteria. I think it’s clear that there are many people just losing their minds about the Epstein files and just thinking very badly and emotionally interpreting everything through the worst case filter, most pessimistic filter of what happened. And this includes some pretty popular and, uh, I’d say even some pretty smart people that, uh, you would expect.

More from, and to be clear, I should say here, nothing I am examining here is to deny that terrible things were done by Epstein and others. This is not what this video is about. It’s not any sort of defense of Epstein or his friends. And I don’t pretend to be any sort of expert on what happened with Epstein.

I haven’t even followed the Epstein news that much. That’s not what this video is about. It’s not really about. The Epstein case, it’s about people’s reactions to the case and there’s just clearly many people engaging in hysterical moral panic ways to this case and just plain dumb ways. Uh, and in turn, those people are spreading hysteria and misinformation to others, and it’s actually an ink in many cases, impacting people’s mental health.

Um, making them be overly paranoid and just reaching catastrophizing views of what’s happening, about what is happening in the world. Um, so you can see, you know, some of this stuff ties into some of the extreme things that happened with, um, extreme beliefs with Pizzagate a few years ago. It’s just more happening now with, um, more liberal democrat associated people.

Um, I mean, it was happening then too with an assorted variety of people, but it’s happening more now with, um, liberal associated people just because now Trump, you know, focusing on Epstein is more associated with, um, you know, Trump now. So you have more anti-Trump connotations, which gets more people into the mix.

One reason I’m interested in these topics is because I’ve examined, um, conflict and polarization dynamics in my work, um, my books and with this podcast. Uh, these things tie into our overly pessimistic views of other people. They quote other side and how that relates to how it shifts our thinking based on our emotions and such.

Um, so yeah, I’ll talk more about that in a bit. But one thing I want to focus on here is a video that, the video that made me want to make this episode was this video by, um, Kyle Kalinski, who has a show called Secular Talk, and he had this. YouTube channel or YouTube video that came across my feed. I don’t follow him.

Uh, the name of his YouTube video was Kill Them and Dispose Them. In quotes, we found the worst Epstein viles. The worst is in all caps, as is Kill them and dispose them. So that got my attention. I I wanted to see what that was about. First lemme back up and say, Kyle Kalinski is a pretty. A popular content maker.

He’s known for being, um, you know, progressive activist. His, his YouTube channel has, um, 2.1 million subscribers. The video I just talked about had 566,000 views. He’s been around for a while, since 2008. Pretty influential. You know, that’s why the things I’m gonna say about just how dumb his thinking is and emotional, his thinking is.

It is significant. I mean, this is a good example of, um, of just how bad a lot of these political commentators are these days, and I didn’t know much about Kyle until recently, but you can regularly hear him just speaking about, you know, the quote other side about conservatives as if they’re all the same, as if they’re all motivated by the, the worst possible, um, motivations, you know, which ties into the my polarization related work.

Yeah, he criticized the Never Trump movement. He discouraged people, praising Republicans who criticize Trump stating that establishment Republicans want Trump to do every single thing he’s doing, minus the mean tweets. You know, just, I think that’s a, gets into the polarization dynamics of, uh, worst case thinking about the entire other side and failure to distinguish between different approaches amongst your quote enemies and so on.

Another interesting thing about Kyle. I should mention this. He’s a, he’s the husband of Crystal Ball, who is a political commentator herself. She’s on a pretty popular show called Breaking Points. You might have heard of it. Okay.

Kyle Kulinksi: So the Epstein file scandal keeps getting darker and darker and more and more disturbing.

And the coverup is probably the most pathetic and sad coverup I think I’ve ever seen in my life. It is definitely amateur hour. This is Bush League stuff. Um, now they’re coming out and saying, that’s it. Alright. We released everything that we got. That’s, we got.

Zach Elwood: All right. I’m gonna skip ahead to where he.

And he’s talking about the failure to release the documents, which I actually agree with him. I, I think there’s legitimate views on the, the failure of, uh, to, to release the documents. They’ve only released like 2% of the documents and it’s been very haphazard. I don’t disagree with a lot of that, but let’s get to him talking about this specific clip.

Remember, this is a, I want to video title. We found the worst Epstein files

Kyle Kulinksi: and their language is a global criminal enterprise doing crimes against humanity, which sounds very similar to what I’ve told you. It’s a shadow government of moneyed interests, a cabal of pedophile, greatist, billionaire sadists who really run the world and view you and me as subhuman.

And I’ve never been more convinced in my life that class politics is is a factual truth. It’s an objective truth. That class politics is, is the end all, be all that extreme wealth rots your soul and turns you into a demonic entity based on what these people were doing. Alright? But you gotta,

Zach Elwood: okay.

Demonic entities, uh, people who are amazingly evil, who won’t, don’t think of you as subhuman. Okay? What’s, what’s Kyle gonna look at to back up these pretty incendiary claims?

Kyle Kulinksi: Epstein files a audio file of a woman saying kill them and dispose of the bodies. Huh? So this is on the Justice Department website, and I’m gonna play some of it for you here.

Let’s listen.

Epstein employee: No, you called me after the fact. You didn’t call me when the fucking boat crashed. No one called me. Let’s get that straight. Happened. We tried to, to hold out. I got the message from you. Midnight. Did it happen at midnight? No. Did anybody think to call me and say they’re gonna use the boat?

Come get some dead fucking Derrick. No. No. Right. No, you’re right. And now we’re dealing with this shit. Look at the boat. Look at the man’s boat. This is bullshit. No, that’s a nightmare. You are the head electrician. You like one of the head landscapers. I finally got you a gig as a boat captain, and this is the bullshit I’m dealing with.

This is bullshit. All y’all know better than this shit. This man is livid right now with us.

I mean, I don’t even know what the, I’m so fucking cross right now. Right? This fuck makes no sense. Oh, I

especially after we had good success.

This, this is just completely, completely, this makes absolutely no sense. This is, I pissed off about, told both of these guys. I said, do you want these? Dare you wait for the morning. And then all of a sudden, but that was the plan to kill them, wait till daylight and then we dispose of them properly. And then, and then I get these calls and this, and this bullshit happened.

This is the man’s crew boat bad enough. You don’t have another boat. You don’t have another boat. What are we gonna use a barge? How much money is that gonna cost us to run a staff back and forth on a damn barge? Then

Kyle Kulinksi: think about how what they’re saying here makes no sense. So they keep talking about a boat, a boat, a boat.

Like there was some sort of a boat crash. So you hear that and you go, okay, maybe they’re, maybe they’re talking about a boat crash, right? But then they go, they start talking about a deer. They go. The deer. The deer. Like there’s a problem with the deer. Well, if it’s a boat crash, how the fuck can a boat crash?

Kill a deer. Right? That that makes absolutely no sense. And then they go kill it and dispose of the bodies. Kill ’em, and dispose of the bodies. What? So, you know, I mean steel manning them, it’s like, I guess they’re talking about maybe there was some sort of an accident with a car hitting a deer and the car is damaged and that pissed off Jeffrey Epstein and they’re saying, kill the deer and dispose of the body.

The bodies. I don’t know. I, when you get the repeated references to the boat and then they talk about deer and then they go kill them and dispose of the body. I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m, I’m still, this is, I’m just giving you a little taste here of what’s to come because these files actually get,

Zach Elwood: so, um, yeah.

So this is, this is how Kyle leads, we found the worst Epstein files. This is the way he leads with, I mean. Playing that video, listening to that video, I immediately, it did not sound like any, uh, murderous crime, that being committed. It sounded like a completely banal situation involving dead deer in a boat.

Now, is it a little bit hard to understand without knowing the specifics? Of course it is, and that’s why people are paying attention to it. That’s, you know, it’s, it’s vagueness is why people are paying attention to it. But the interaction, the way they’re talking, the specifics, I immediately just found it almost certainly to be something banal.

Uh, and then after listening it to it a couple times, it sounds like there were some workers who were supposed to kill some deer wait until morning to dispose of the bodies, but they instead took the boat late at night and ended up hurting, uh, damaging the boat. Now Kyle’s acting like that’s some crazy story, but you know, you have to remember this is an island environment, right?

Like, so, um. Jeffrey Epstein’s Island is an island called Little St. James was, which is part of the US Virgin I Virgin Islands. And, uh, you can find very easily that they have a big deer problem there. There’s, they were introduced and they run rampant. They’re only predators are wild dogs, cars, there’s deer everywhere.

And they apparently regularly have to, uh. Kill them and get rid of them because they are such a nuisance. So when you know that the idea that there were these deer that needed to be killed, maybe they were causing trouble, maybe they were injured, who knows what? Easy to imagine how that conversation.

Plays out. You know, maybe some workers were disobeying orders because they wanted to kill the deer and take the meat for themselves. You know, who knows? Uh, we don’t know. But listening to it, even once, it seemed likely to me that it was a completely banal incident. And, uh, you know, does Kyle really believe that this deer related audio is the worst of the Epstein files and worthy of inclusion in such a category?

And where are they making this video about? Is there an element for Kyle. Wanting to lean into sensationalism for clicks and attention to increase his YouTube views. Is that perhaps related to a tendency he has to do this kind of thing for other political topics when it comes to worst case, uh, framings of the quote, other side and such?

I don’t pretend to know the answers to what goes on in Kyle’s mind. I just know this is amazingly stupid stuff. So, uh, let’s look at later in the video. He goes, he starts going through images from the Epstein file release, and, and these are images as you’ll see. Well, if you’re listening on audio and not watching the YouTube video, these are images where they’ve been pixelated and where the faces have been blurred, uh, have been blacked out.

But Kyle says that he could, he’s, he confidently states that he thinks some of these images are of underage girls. So let’s watch Kyle watch these. Look at these images.

Kyle Kulinksi: This is the stuff of nightmares, y’all. This is the stuff of nightmares, okay? But still, now I’m gonna give you a warning. Everything we talked about at this point is disturbing.

This is perhaps even more disturbing because it deals with redacted pictures, but pictures nonetheless. But here are some of the things that people have dug up in the Epstein files within the past week or so, and uh, I’m giving you a warning again, you might not wanna see this one, but let me go ahead and show you.

Okay. Pam Bondy saw this photo, one of many from the Epstein files, yet declared there was no evidence of crimes. She now says the DOJ has released all the files even though we have seen only 50% of the files. And by the way, that’s outdated. Apparently it’s only 2% of the files we’ve seen. She is a, a pedophile protector covering up for these despicable perpetrators.

And this picture, ladies and gentlemen, it is redacted. It is a little bit pixelated, but it very clearly shows what is almost certainly an underage girl sitting on a toilet. Performing some sort of sex act on a guy. Okay? And we also happen to find, again, warning, if you don’t wanna see this, there’s a bunch of disturbing stuff here.

This stuff in the Epstein files. Alright? A lot of it is

Zach Elwood: now for people who are listening to this on audio. Uh, none of the pictures Kyle shows in any way to me. Making me confident that of anybody’s age in these photos. Like I, I would not be able to guess anyone’s age in these photos, and yet Kyle is able to confidently claim that he’s almost certain that it shows underage people, you know, similar to the, the boat audio.

It, it’s just so fundamentally dumb. Like you can easily find women that look quite young who are older. B, he seems to be basing that first thing on the fact that she’s in like a school girl uniform, but that doesn’t mean anything. Uh, people can dress in different clothes and then, you know, these are, these are pixelated images with the faces hidden.

Um. Again, I’ll, I’ll just, I’ll just keep playing this, but it’s just so fundamentally such a good example of the kind of level of thinking that Kyle Kalinsky and so many other people are doing, and not just on Epstein files, but this is the kind of thinking that goes on for politics. These are people influencing political discourse, and this is the, this is the kind of thing that political polarization gives rise to, like more emotional thinking, worst case framings of people we don’t like, et cetera, et cetera.

It’s just at a fundamental level, it’s dumb. And you know, toxic polarization, toxic conflict makes us dumber. It gives more support to people like Kyle Kolinsky, who in turn make other people more angry, more rage filled, et cetera. Let me keep playing this

Kyle Kulinksi: super pixelated, and a lot of it is redacted, but you can get the general gist of what’s going on here.

Some of these things, it looks like they may be, uh, you know, adults, but there’s clear examples here, maybe three or four different examples where the pictures are clearly it’s kids, it’s children.

Zach Elwood: He says clearly, but nothing about any of those images are clear at all.

Kyle Kulinksi: They’re underage and they’re naked and or involved in different sex acts.

So I’m gonna walk you through this here, as you can see, super redacted, but you get the sense some of them are fully redacted. My guess is that’s just flat out CS a and it’s undeniable. Um, but as I keep scrolling here, this one is clearly somebody beed over. Um, this one, you can’t tell the ages of this one, but we’re gonna keep going and you’ll see.

Somebody’s private parts here. Um, very pixelated, but clearly somebody maybe underage, maybe not,

Zach Elwood: maybe underage, maybe not. There’s literally nothing in this photo that you would ever make a guess about age.

Kyle Kulinksi: Showing their breasts. And you know, again, I, it looks like what the DOJ did is they, they hyper pixelated it to try to really obscure it, and then they also redacted on top of it.

I don’t think that in the original files, these pictures were this pixelated. Right. Um, unless what they did is they, you know, these pictures were like around his house and they zoomed in from afar, which I doubt it that we’ve, they’ve done that with other parts of the files. I don’t think they did that here.

I think this is just, it was. Not pixelated and not redacted and they try to pixelate it and redact it. But as I scroll here again, what you’re gonna win is, this is one that I think is for sure underage. This picture right here, thi this one to me looks for sure under,

Zach Elwood: uh, again, there’s nothing about this photo that would make me certain or even confident that this person was underage.

I would say if Kyle is so certain based on these, the slim information of who’s underage and who’s not, I’d say we need to look into his computers. That was just a joke. That’s the kind of thing that Kyle might say about somebody else. I, I am completely kidding. I think he’s just emotionally reasoning here.

Kyle Kulinksi: It just doesn’t give me adult vibes the way that this one is standing there for sure. I think that’s an underage, an underage one. All right. I’m gonna keep going here. This one also looks potentially underage. Um,

Zach Elwood: anyway, I’m gonna stop it there. You get the idea. It’s just a lot of supposition based on not much information, which is kind of Kyle’s mo I think in, in many cases.

And there was actually a couple weeks ago in the New York Times, there was an article about, uh, government publishing dozens of new photos in the Epstein files. Uh, these were unredacted. They showed young women, possibly teenagers, but you know, even in this case, even with the photos shown, it said the people in the photos appeared to be young, although it was unclear whether they were minors.

This is just to emphasize even when the faces are shown and when the images are not pixelated, it can be hard to tell the age of people, right? But somehow Kyle’s very certain about who’s underage from these redacted pixelated, uh, face hidden images, right? And so you can get a sense of how people are reacting, reacting to this stuff in general.

Um, reading the YouTube comments for Kyle’s and other people’s, uh, videos on this kind of stuff, this shit is absolutely appalling. Um. Burn the system down. It doesn’t deserve to exist. The system deserves to collapse. There needs to be a revolution. Now, no one freaks out like that over deer. They’re talking about murder.

We are at the tip of the iceberg on how dark this is. There was even some stuff about, uh, David Ick, I don’t know if you know, well, I can’t find it now, but there was some comment earlier that was re referencing. David Ick, who was the guy. Who known for, uh, promoting the, um, the lizard people, uh, idea that there’s Satanic or evil lizard people rolling us.

Somebody said, uh, I guess maybe the comment was deleted. The comment had re previously said, David Ick warned us about this evil, uh, or this elite satanic sick. Over 30 years ago, he is vindicated. So just to say there’s lots of people losing their minds over this stuff, and Kyle can be seen as a key contributor to ramping up people’s paranoia and fear and just outsized fear completely out of, uh, the realm of what should be the view of these things.

In the, in the YouTube comments, you had a lot of people saying, why isn’t the, why aren’t the mainstream media covering this? They’re all complicit. They’re in on this. Um, and I think it should be obvious that. Mainstream respected news outlets are not covering this stuff because it’s just a lot of supposition.

I mean, there’s so many things people are running with that are based on such little information, and yet you have so many people jumping to paranoid conclusions like that. The media’s in on it, that everybody’s in on it. Everybody’s, you know, covering up the obvious things that Kyle and others are talking about in my own work on, um, polarization.

I have, uh, do my books diffusing American anger and how Contempt destroys democracy. I wrote, I write about how polarization makes us more paranoid and conspiracy minded. We start to see more and more connections between the quote bad guys and, uh, makes us hate each other or hate other people more. Be more fearful of other people that in turn increases our paranoia.

So there’s this feedback mechanism between, uh, paranoia and polarization, self-fulfilling self-perpetuating cycle. And we just see so much of this worst case thinking around us. And as I talk about in my books and on the podcast, sometimes this is sort of the underlying primary engine for how toxic conflict gets worse.

We view and talk about them with more and more discussed and worst case framings. The kind of thing Kyle Kalinski does on his show about conservatives, for example. They in turn see us as more moral and dangerous and threatening, leading them to do the same to us, and so on and so on. And I think there’s even a level of not caring at some level, even though we know that we and others on our.

Side, maybe doing this kind of thing. I mean, we see this with a lot of political stuff too. When you tell somebody, Hey, that thing you just said is not true. You’re spreading very distorted and ultra pessimistic ideas, and you’re just straight up spreading untrue things. There will be some people, and I’ve encountered this myself, some people will just be like, who cares?

They’re bad. They’ve done bad things, so who cares if we exaggerate the bad things they’ve done? Uh, why are you defending them? You must be on their side or something. Uh, but hopefully it’s clear that my motive is just to try to get people to think better and not fall prey to the Kyle Kalinsky of the world and to fight back against hysteria, hysteria and emotional thinking.

And you should wanna do that, uh, not just for the sake of society. Society. You should wanna do that for your own mental health because it’s, it’s not pleasant to constantly be filtering everything through the worst possible framing. Getting back to his video.

Kyle Kulinksi: Two, for example, there’s evidence of deep connections with, uh, Russian intelligence as well.

And so the thing that’s perhaps the most mind boggling to people is that no, it really does appear to be a shadow government of pedophile, billionaire elites that run the world. And they’re sadists. Some of them are into torture, some of them are into cannibalism. Um, they are actually part of a clique, a club, a fraternity.

And they at, while they run the world, they. Keep humans like pets and do the most sadistic things imaginable to them. Okay?

Zach Elwood: They’re cannibals. They keep humans like pets. I, I got curious about the, the cannibal thing. Um, I was reading about, you know, New York Times had a good article about new wave of speculation, AI generated hoaxes bad, just bad information.

If I search for, um. There is including speculation about code words for pedophilia and cannibalism. Uh, some of the things people are examining are just plain false images and documents. Oh, yeah. There, there are various weird typos or, or like, um, badly formatted text in the documents. So there’s one reference to a, what seems like a 9-year-old, but it’s because the one had been somehow replaced maybe in some sort of.

Uh, automatic text recognition scan or something that a 19-year-old had had been, uh, converted to the equal mark sign for the one. So it says equal sign 9-year-old, just to say there’s all these, uh, you know, there’s so much data that people are primed, uh, to see what they wanna see as somebody they quoted said, if you have already decided who the bad guys are or what is really happening, then informational overload makes your life easier because you have so much raw material to work with.

And then the cannibalism thing specifically, Snopes had a good, uh, breakdown of one of the key things where people were thinking that cannibalism had occurred, these references to the word jerky in the, uh, in Epstein’s files and, and emails. Apparently Epstein was just actually a huge meat jerky fan. Um, so Snopes writes about this, where people are jumping into conclusions about this, this word.

They even interviewed a guy who worked for Epstein, who made food, who said that Epstein, uh, was known for just really liking beef jerky from, uh, high, like high end beef jerky. Um, so again, you know, as with the filtering for worst case interpretations, everything, the, the, the deer boat audio again. So again, uh, even though I’ve said multiple times that I’m not defending Epstein and not even, uh, getting into.

You know, my views of the overall thing of what, what was done, I’m just examining, uh, specific forms of bad thinking. And even though I’ve said that multiple times, I, I think, I still think, assuming, you know, anybody, uh, many people listen to this or, or watch this on YouTube or whatever, uh, I still think some people will be like, why are you defending Jeffrey Epstein?

But hopefully it’s clearer that I’m just calling for more nuance, better thinking, uh, even for, you know, your own sake. This ties into how toxic conflict works. Again, it’s polarization gets worse through all these various feedback mechanisms. Uh, the pressures it puts on, on us to, uh, go along with the crowd, right?

So there, there’s pressures against me, for example, examining the nuance here because so many people will put pressure on me and, and criticize me for, you know, wanting to. Uh, think better on these things, that there’s a pressure with polarization on both sides to, for when people try to inject nuance in thinking, uh, to say like, Hey, I think your views on the other side are wrong, distorted.

I think you’re taking too pe pessimistic and too catastrophizing, uh, stance on things about. Them. There’s many people that will push back on that for, for, in various ways. And so the, the people that are wanna draw attention and nuance and want people to see the, the better versions of, you know, their opponents, the, the better, um, aspects of them.

Those people get drowned out. And there’s just various feedback mechanisms at work for why the more polarized and emotional people get more attention, which then in turn drives more. Polarized and emotional people on the other side and so on and so on. So, I don’t know. I think, uh, it’s just important to work against these kinds of emotional forms of thinking wherever we find them.

It’s just good for society. It’s good for you as somebody who cares about truth and, uh, building a better future. So, yeah, hope people enjoyed this.

Many view the fact that they are here, experiencing the world, as something insanely improbable… but what if it were instead entirely inevitable? The philosopher Arnold Zuboff walks us through a mind-bending argument, which he calls universalism (aka open individualism), where the improbability of your existence vanishes. It doesn’t matter which sperm met which egg, or how your ancestors got together, or how anything at all in the past unfolded, because wherever there is first-person experience, there is the same “I.” Zuboff’s new book, Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity, features a foreword by Thomas Nagel (author of “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”), who says that many will view the claim as “incredible, even outrageous” — but says it is too well argued to be ignored and an “important contribution.” We discuss why Zuboff sees universalism as resolving many of the core quandaries of consciousness that are puzzled over, and why he’s entirely certain it’s the right view. Other topics include: how universalism ties into views of a multiverse and the anthropic principle; how it ties into ideas of religion and a higher power, and more. If you’ve ever lain awake at night wrestling with the sheer weirdness of being alive at all, you’ll want to listen to this episode.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources mentioned or related to this talk:

• Wikipedia entry on Open Individualism
• Arnold Zuboff’s book Finding Myself
• Zuboff’s ask-me-anything on Reddit about universalism
• Zuboff’s paper One Self: The Logic of Experience, and associated reddit thread
• Zuboff’s university page featuring his publications
• My previous episode on this topic with Joe Kern, author of The Odds of Existing
• Arnold talks to philosopher Richard Brown
• Related concept: Wikipedia entry for the “vertiginous question,” aka, “Why am I me and not someone else?”

TRANSCRIPT

(transcript is generated automatically and will contain errors)

Arnold Zuboff: So your own conception, there were, on average, 200 million sperm cells competing to get to the egg, if any of the others but the one that did get to the egg, in the usual view, you would never have existed. There’d be no experience. You’d be eternally blank. 

Zach: You’ve never have escaped the abyss. 

Arnold: But now consider your conception couldn’t have occurred unless your mother and father had been conceived and let’s say one in 200 million for each of them. For those three conceptions to have gone right for you to exist in the usual view, it’s one in eight septillion, right? 24 zeros or something? So that’s pretty bad. But of course your grandparents had to have been conceived first for your parents. Could have been one or 200 million of those multiplied and then we haven’t even got started yet. Whereas, in the universalism, it didn’t matter what sperm cells hit, what eggs, it was going to be you.

Zach Elwood: That was the philosopher Arnold Zuboff, talking about what he calls universalism, which is the view that we’re essentially all the same person – the same first-person “I” experience. 

Another way to put this: as Arnold was explaining, in the quote “normal” view of things, people view it as astronomically improbable that we would exist – that our first-person experience would exist at all. But in the view of universalism, it is entirely inevitable that you or I, our first-person experience, would exist, simply because there is only one I, and wherever there is first-person experience, that universal I will be present. 

Now, of course, if you’re new to these ideas, this will probably sound quite crazy to you. It definitely did to me at first. But you should know that there are some smart and non-crazy people who believe this, and the more you dig into these ideas, as I did, you’ll find that they make a lot of sense, and help resolve some serious quandaries about consciousness that philosophers have been puzzling over for a long time. 

Arnold is the author of the recently published book “Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.” The foreword of that book is written by the respected philosopher Thomas Nagel, who you might know of from his often-referenced paper “What is it like to be a bat?” I’ll read a little bit from Nagel’s foreword:

Zuboff proposes and defends with creative philosophical arguments a radically original conception of the mind, according to which the distinction between selves – between me and you, for example – is an illusion. There is only one subject of consciousness; it is the subject of all consciousness, and it is equivalent to the first-person immediacy shared by all conscious experience. The separate bundles of experience in the lives of distinct conscious organisms do not have separate subjects, but share a universal quality of subjective immediacy, which it is easy for each of us to mistake for a unique individual “I” in our own case. 

End quote 

Nagel goes on to write: 

Both the conclusion and the argument will certainly seem incredible, even outrageous, to many readers, but the whole is presented with such care and skill that it should be regarded as an important contribution even by those who are not persuaded. The relation of the mind to the world is so mysterious that it is not philosophically reasonable to dismiss any view, however radical, out of hand.  

End quote 

This idea that we are all manifestations of the same first-person experience is also known as open individualism, and it’s a concept I explored a few months ago in my talk with Joe Kern, author of The Odds of You Existing. 

Now, if you’re like me when I first heard of these ideas, you’ll have a lot of objections that spring to mind. Rest assured that your objections and skepticism is addressed and considered by the people thinking about these ideas. This talk will of course only be a rough introduction to these ideas, and it’s hard to talk off the cuff about these ideas, as they are so contrary to our normal ways of speaking – at least I find it difficult to talk about and keep my ideas clear; our normal language is just tough to navigate, I find.

In this talk with Arnold, we also talk about ideas about a multiverse, we talk about why the laws of our universe seems so precisely configured for complex life, we talk about God, souls, and higher powers, we talk about societal implications of people believing in universalism, I talk about laying awake at night thinking about the sheer strangeness of existence and tough existential questions, which I’ve done a good amount of — and maybe you’ve done that, too. I hope this talk serves to get you interested in the topic, and maybe you’ll read Arnold’s book or other writings on the topic. 

Ok, here’s the talk with Arnold Zuboff, author of “Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.”

Zach: Hi, Arnold, thanks for joining me.

Arnold: It’s a great pleasure.

Zach: Pleasure is all mine. Maybe we could start with when it comes to open individualism or universalism, as you call it, maybe you could talk about what your focus has been, as obviously, there can be different areas to focus on within this philosophy.

Arnold: Yeah, there are a couple ways I might like to introduce it. One way is to ask a question or make a statement first. There are loads and loads of conscious things in the world. The question is, how do you know which one you are? And first, let’s consider whether you have a checklist of facts about yourself and you’re searching among them, making little checks—oh, yeah, right parents. No, I don’t think you do that. You do something much simpler than that. You just find that you’re the “one” whose experience is first person in character and is immediate in your face.

Zach: Yeah, you’re the one thinking I am here right now.

Arnold: Yeah. It’s here, mine, now, and the pains hurt in a way they don’t if they’re someone else’s. And that’s immediate. I use the word immediacy a lot to indicate all of this. This is the basis of two crucial things being present in the world. Your presence in the world is by way of this first person kind of experience. Without that, there wouldn’t be anything that was you. There’d be no reason to count anything as you if you didn’t have that. So, that’s how you find yourself. Then the objective facts about the thing that you think you are constrained into being, they’re like after thoughts.

Zach: The various contents and details about your life. Yeah, it’s separate from the first person ‘I am here’ perspective. Yeah.

Arnold: That’s right. This immediacy I’m talking about is the general character of it. The details could be changed in so many ways with this same general character applying. And it’s the experience of having that that’s at the heart of what I’m talking about. Another way I have of introducing my particular approach to this is to say that the usual view that all of us believe almost all of the time, the usual view needs to be reversed. Okay? So my view, which I call universalism, is a reversal of the usual view. The usual view says that I am a particular thing with a lot of objective facts attaching to that, some of them being essential to me and some of them are less essential, but I am that one thing. And if something’s going to belong to me and be mine, it has to belong to that thing. For example, a hat. The usual view says if an experience is mine as opposed to someone else’s, it’s because it belongs to this thing that is me. The reversal of the usual view that interests me is to think instead that there’s something about the experience that makes it mine. And what makes an experience mine is this very character of immediacy first-person nature-subjective center of everything. That’s what makes an experience mine. And then whatever might be having the experience or whatever thing might be having experience has to be me. If the experience is mine, carrying presence in the world and self interest within it, then whatever the hell thing is having, it is me. I speak in the book about what the dog is and what the tail is.

Zach: Right. In the traditional view, you’ve got these ideas of entities, these selves or these entities, and these things have various attributes. And one of those attributes is having a first-person perspective. But what you’re saying, you’re flipping it around and saying anything having to do with self or me is just about that first person experience. That’s the primacy. That is the important thing and not the rest of the things, and that experience is the same across all the entities. It’s the same manifestation of an experience.

Arnold: Yeah, that’s what it is for an experience being mine, and that’s what rules here. In the usual view, the body of the dog is a particular thing. And it’s argued that it’s a physical thing or mental thing that’s more important, but it’s being a particular thing in the world that’s me. And then the tail being wagged by that dog is the experience being mine. In my view, the body of the dog is the experience being mine, which is determined solely by this character of immediacy, and then the tail that is being wagged by that dog is whatever thing that happens to be me.

Zach: When it comes to trying to explain this to a lay audience, because I think these concepts are so hard for people to quickly wrap their minds around them, but I’m curious what you think about this. When I’ve tried to explain it to people who are new to the idea, I’ve basically said, “In the traditional view, it’s very unlikely that we exist. We experience ourselves as being incredibly unlikely. Like, what are the chances I’m experiencing this now? What are the chances I am here?” But in your view and the universalism view, it’s viewing yourself and your experience right now as inevitable because no matter what or no matter where that sense of self and that sense of I came into being, it would be having that experience and it would be thinking like, “Wow, it’s incredible that I’m here,” but it’s inevitable that you are here because you are a manifestation of the same I experience. I think it’s that flip between seeing something as very unlikely to seeing something as inevitable that, I think, helps make the connection for the audience.

Arnold: Oh, that’s great. What you’re saying is great. But you’ve really leapt ahead.

Zach: Yeah, I’ve leapt ahead. I think why I did that was to try to—for people that are maybe completely lost—to maybe help them see it from a… We can come back to that. But maybe let me…

Arnold: No, no, no. Let me do it.

Zach: Sure, sure. I like to think in terms of what’s the elevator pitch to somebody completely new to this.

Arnold: Yeah, okay. I mean, the elevator has already arrived and I’m still talking about your experience—uncontroversially—your experience having immediacy. Right? What you’ve correctly indicated here is that if you find yourself in the world as “the one” whose experience is immediate first person, you can quickly come to realize that, in fact, there isn’t just one conscious thing in the world whose experience is immediate and first person in character. In fact, anything worth calling experience would have exactly that character in it, that same general character that picks out which one you are. Now, what universalism does very quickly say is that this means that there are a lot of tails being wagged by that experience that’s mine. All the things that have experience are just tails latching onto that. All of it is equally mine since that’s the thing that makes the experience mine, and there’s nothing else involved in it. All of it is equally mine. 

Now what happens, and this is key to understanding the whole business, what happens quite naturally is this, the contents of experience are cut off from each other. Why? Because experience comes about in different brains in these distinct conscious things. So in each, it seems as though the only experience that has the character making it mine is the experience involving that particular content. And because of that, it seems that my experience being mine and the experience of being me is limited to, first of all, that content, and then to the thing whose content it is. But that’s a mistake. I am there in all the experience because that involves something so simple, something universal to experience. But it inevitably seems to me, in each case of me, that this is the only one. Because the content is not integrated.

Zach: I think that’s where most people would lose you because they’re like, “Well, how could it be that we are separate but the same?” And I think your analogy about the book and, you know, like a story can be in multiple books and be the same story, I think that analogy—and maybe you have other analogies to help explain it—but I think that’s where a lot of people would be like, “Well, how can we be separate? What does it even mean to be the same thing if we’re separate?”

Arnold: Well, you know what might be particularly useful as a first step in attacking that is to think of brain bisection.

Zach: Yeah, that’s one of your first stories and that’s maybe how you got started on this whole journey back in the day. Oh no, you got started on switching the brains out, not the brain bisection.

Arnold: Yeah, yeah.

Zach: But go ahead with the brain bisection.

Arnold: Okay, let me wheel in brain bisection here. There was an actual operation done on people suffering from epilepsy that involved cutting the bridge of nerves between the two hemispheres of the brain. It’s called the corpus callosum. It was cut because it would prevent seizures from moving from one hemisphere to the other. At the time it was caught, as I understand it, it was thought the thing only kept the brain from sagging, so no great loss in cutting. But then it was realized later that most of the integration of the activities of the hemispheres was carried through the corpus callosum and communicated through it. So experiments were done with the split brain patients, in which information was carefully isolated in the way it came in so that it would only go to one hemisphere or the other. And what was discovered, I think quite unsurprisingly, though shockingly, was that these people could have non-integrated contents in their experience. In each hemisphere, there’d be content that was not available to the other. Right? So it would be like the situation I described among all these conscious things, a failure of integration across them for contents.

Zach: For people, we might say, “Yeah, these experiments were really wild—the gizonica research—where, basically they blocked something in the middle, so one eye is looking at one thing and one eye is looking at another. And they found that one eye might see something and know it was there, one part of the brain would see something and know it was there and answer correctly, you know, like check a box or something based on what they were seeing, but the other side wouldn’t know it was there and would confabulate reasons why they checked that box. It was just really mind blowing, to most people, mind blowing about you could be experiencing something and know something, but the other half wouldn’t know and would even make up reasons for why that happened, which gets into our our ability to how the brain probably works a lot of time as we’re we’re making up stories for why we do things even if we might not even know why we did things sometimes. It kind of gets into that realm too. But just to say, it was a really fascinating research.

Arnold: It was, and a lot of philosophers have had to look at that. What’s extremely useful, I think, is a certain thought experiment based on this that I like to use. Parfit first suggested something like this. Imagine I had a button I could press that was connected to a device adjacent to my corpus callosum, and that if I press the button an anesthetic would be injected into the corpus callosum, shutting it down temporarily, right? So you could have that same effect of mutually excluding experiential contents in each hemisphere. 

And so I tell a specific story like that where there’s a great concert you want to listen to tonight, but there’s some dreary audio studying you have to do. And if you plug the sound of the concert into the right ear, which communicates directly with the right hemisphere of the brain, and the audio dreary studying into the left ear, which directly communicates with left hemisphere, and press the button before these things start, they won’t interfere with each other. There’ll be two extremely different things going on.

Zach: Two streams of consciousness.

Arnold: Yeah. Yeah, enjoying a wonderful concert and doing this dreary studying. Of course, I asked the question of, what kind of evening will you have? This question is one that has troubled a lot of philosophers. Let me tell you what I think is going on here. If, instead, we had anesthetized one of the hemispheres and done the same thing with the remaining hemisphere, there’d be no doubt in our minds that I’d continue on into that experience in the non-anesthetized hemisphere. So I’d have the experience of the concert, or I’d have the experience of the studying. And it would be me. It’s crazy to think that it would stop being me. 

Now, in this case where we’ve anesthetized the corpus callosum, we’ve got both of them going on. How could either of them stop being me just because something’s going on over on the other side? That seems crazy. And what emphasizes this further is when the anesthetic wears off and the hemispheres can communicate fine with each other again, I will remember, “Oh, yeah, I was listening to this great concert. Oh dear, yeah, I was struggling through the audio stuff.” I will remember each of those experiences as having been mine. What will make the memories of them having been mine? They’ll be first person. They’ll be immediate in the memory of them. They were both mine. It can’t be the case that remembering both of them and integrating the memories like that is retroactively making them both mine, it’s simply revealing that they were both mine, but neither had the information at the time that the other was going on.

Zach: In the same way that you or I don’t have the information that is available—

Arnold: Exactly. Exactly. So what it is is there’s an illusion created—a powerful illusion in either hemisphere while it’s having its experience—that anything that was experiencing anything else at this time couldn’t be me. I’m walled off metaphysically from it. Different self, different whatever. It’s a very powerful illusion. What I call the principle you discover in thinking about this is the irrelevance of objective simultaneity. I talked before about if just one was anesthetized, you could do it a different way. In fact, this is something that’s actually been done called the water test. You could anesthetize one hemisphere and give it the remaining one—the concert experience—then reverse it so that next there would be the experience of the studying, but at different objective times, they would both be remembered in exactly the same way as when the corpus callosum was anesthetized and they happened at the same time. The objective time of these events is irrelevant to what they represent to you subjectively. They are both yours and can’t help but be yours. And my claim, looking back at what I said earlier, is that the only thing making it mine for this subject is the immediacy of the experience.

Zach: Yeah, one of the powerful things about the universalism idea is that it helps make sense of these various quandaries that philosophers have struggled over. Like you mentioned you had a really good passage in your book talking about how there’s basically this desire or impulse to preserve some sort of idea of self amongst the various other philosophical views. For example, the idea that identity is defined as some continuity of psychological content or experiences, which is more in the par fit view, it doesn’t matter where it is, it matters what it is, basically the content. And then there’s the view that, no, identity matters based on the body it’s or the brain it’s in… This biological continuity. But in both cases, there’s an impulse to preserve some sort of separate identities of some sort. But open individualism or universalism is resolving that by saying, “Well, those are all unnecessary because these different first-person experiences are the same thing.” So it resolves all the quandaries like, “Am I this person? If I get in a teleporter and make a copy of myself, if I split my brain?” Universalism is saying those are resolved because they don’t really matter, and yourself is all the same and your first-person experience is all the same.

Arnold: That’s right. If you’re trying to trace what you are in all these specific ways, not knowing whether you want to follow the psychological pattern or you’re more interested in the thing that’s having the psychological states, the result is a mess. Let me say something about what I think the two positions are—the two very basic positions in the classic debate about personal identity. This is the question in the traditional debate: What makes a future person remain me, so that any pains it has are mine and are going to be mine in the future, so that I don’t sympathize with them, but I am concerned about them in terms of self-interest?

Zach: Yeah, that’s the practical discussion. It’s like, “Am I the same person? Am I that same identity I was when I was younger? Am I the same identity I am when I’m older?” That’s kind of like the practical impulse of the question.

Arnold: Yeah. Or, will those pains hurt for me instead of somebody else? And the two usual answers have been—they’re both attractive—it depends on the identity of a thing. There’s a particular thing I am, and its continuing identity into the future determines whether the pains had by the thing, you know… Well, it makes the pains had by the thing be mine, right? If it’s continuing into the future, that’s where I’m going to be located, wherever that is. And the thing could be an immaterial soul, like for Descartes, or it could be a body, or more particularly, the brain—as for many philosophers since the 20th century. 

But the opposing view is one that was started by Locke, and the view is this: that no, it’s not the identity of the thing that’s having the pain or whatever; it’s whether the pain is part of a mental process continuing on. So that process in certain puzzle cases might be continued into a distinct mental substance, or more recently, into a distinct brain. Right? The memories and anticipations that are in your mind would somehow magically or in some science fiction way, continue on in a different thing. And according to that side of the debate, that would be you. The pains would be yours if that mental process was continuing on.

Zach: Right, which is kind of Parfit’s view, at least in reasons and persons. Right?

Arnold: Yes, except that he complicates it. He’s also what I call a naturalist. He thinks we make a mistake in our ordinary way of thinking about this, and he wants to drop that our identity is all or nothing. That’s a crucial part of what he is saying, right? Locke is more purely a philosopher. I mean, he is in the tradition of Locke in that he emphasizes completely the mental side of it. And I’m not sure why. I don’t think he ever argues for it. But he introduces this new sophistication of getting rid of anything from it that doesn’t seem natural, so he ends up with a strange kind of hybrid position. It actually has something perhaps in common with Buddhism. Now, getting back to the traditional, classic debate, the point I was making was that the whole focus of it is on this continuation into the future. Strangely, they never asked themselves what made a particular body or particular mental process mine to begin with.

Zach: Yeah, let me read that paragraph of yours, just for the audience here, because I really like this paragraph. You said, “Note also that in this old debate on personal identity, all that is questioned is which condition preserves me. The debate ignores completely the primary question: which is what made a mental substance or a brain or a psychological process be mine instead of somebody else’s in the first place? Only universalism answers that question.”

Arnold: Yeah, that’s right. And then I point out this particularly bad… When you look at psychological continuity, [chuckles] it’s carrying on from some past state that at the beginning had no psychological continuity.

Zach: It goes through when you’re a baby or a child. It goes through immense changes, right?

Arnold: Yeah. So, how the hell… You know, what are you even talking about continuing? And and my answer is—I think this is a good illustration what you meant by cutting through all this mess—my answer is, “Yeah, any of those baby experience or experiences in the womb had immediacy and were therefore mine, and that it’s continued in a mental process, that’s not important.” Each side of that debate made its most powerful point against the other side when it said, “Hey, you could still have the ‘it’ be mine, without your thing. In the case of psychological continuity as the supposed criterion of personal identity, they’d say, “Can’t you imagine being shifted over into a different thing and continuing thinking of yourself as yourself, the way Locke emphasized?”

Zach: Both sides can attack each other, and universalisms over on this side saying like, “Well, those are both strengthening my argument.” Right?

Arnold: Exactly. Because there was a very powerful argument against psychological continuity, which is, I could be the one having amnesia.

Zach: Yeah, I don’t find that argument. Both, as you say, they both have various weaknesses when you think about these various…

Arnold: Where they’re weak is where they’re trying to restrict the other one. Where they’re strong is where they say, “As long as you’ve got the psychological process continuing—doesn’t matter which thing it’s in—as long as you got the thing there, it doesn’t matter what’s happening with the psychological process.” But you put those together, and it’s universalism.

Zach: I feel like you would say it’s an Occam’s razor approach with all the, you know… Maybe that’s a good pivot to you’re known for the probability arguments, probably most of all, the various awakenings in rooms and those ideas. Maybe you could talk a bit about why you focus so much on that. I think some people have a hard time understanding why you see that as so conclusive. In some of the Reddit threads and discussions you’ve had, I’ve seen people not really understand that the probability argument in context with the first person experience is such a conclusive or very conclusive point. Maybe you could talk a bit about that.

Arnold: Let’s move to that. There’s an analogy to the argument I’m going to use to establish universalism that I call the hotel inference. There’s a hotel with countless rooms. I don’t want to say infinite rooms. I don’t want to get into… [crosstalk]

Zach: Billions? Trillions?

Arnold: No, it’s more. Let’s say countless rooms. We’ve got all the rooms we ever need.

Zach: Now, am I ruining it by saying that analogizes to the idea that we’re one of countless senses of self that could exist? But anyway, I might be getting ahead of that. But that’s the analogy. Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah. Well, maybe it’s not quite as direct as that analogy.

Zach: Oh, yeah. Sorry, keep going with the setup. Yeah, sorry.

Arnold: Okay. So in each of these countless rooms, there is a single induced sleeper—someone who’s made to be sleeping. One of two games is about to be played; what I call the easy game, and what I call the hard game. For each of these sleepers, there is a coin that is going to be tossed a thousand times. Now, in the hard game, each sleeper has been assigned a list of heads, tails, heads, tails. A thousand-long list of random heads and tails. That’s that sleeper’s list. It’s like a security code for that sleeper. And the coin in that room is going to be tossed a thousand times. That sleeper will only be awakened if every single random toss of the fair coin matches what’s in that sleeper’s list. If even one flip goes wrong, he’ll sleep forever. He’ll never be awakened. This is happening for each of these countless sleepers. This is where countless becomes useful. Because there are countless rooms, there will be some that are awakened. And extremely rare, there may even be quite a few. But it’s a hard game because it’s extremely hard for any particular player to be awakened. In the easy game, they’ve got the coins there. There’s no assigned list, no security code, but they do in each room toss a coin a thousand times. But it doesn’t matter, all the sleepers will be awakened in the easy game.

Now here’s the inference that interests me. Imagine you are a player in this and your eyes open, you’re awakened, and you understand these conditions. Can you have some kind of interesting thing to say about whether the hard or the easy game was played? And my answer is definitely yes. If the hard game was played, something incredibly improbable had to happen before you could have been awakened. So, you know, it’s immensely improbable that you awaken by way of the hard game. Whereas if the easy game was played, easy! Fine. So you can know, not only that it was immensely more probable that the easy game was played, but for all practical purposes, you could know that it was played. Now there will be these occasional winners of the hard game. Really rare, right?

Zach: Astronomically rare.

Arnold: Astronomically rare. If they’re rational, they’ll win before the easy game was played and be wrong about that conclusion. Right in the reasoning, there’s nothing else they could rationally think, but they’d be wrong about which game was played. But you don’t have to worry that you’re one of those because it’d be so improbable you’d be awake to be making the mistake.

Zach: People probably get the analogy, but this maps over to the usual view that we are astronomically rare, right? Like you often hear people like Dawkins talked about this in one of his books. Joe Kern, when I had him on, he had some of Dawkin’s views—the traditional view—that it is astronomically rare that all of these things would have happened to lead to me being here. My ancestors had to couple in just the right ways, a sperm and an egg needed to combine in just the right ways… That’s the normal view that, somehow it’s these magical astronomically ridiculous chances that I am here now. But the easy game in your thought experiment is saying, “Well, the fact that I am here now is easily explained if I am always going to be the one here experiencing it now.”

Arnold: There are all kinds of things that had to happen for you to come into existence, on the usual view.

Zach: And it’s not even possible to draw the lines on where those things would be. But the normal view is like everything from the start of the universe to the coupling of the egg and the sperm, maybe even some things after that, had to come together in just the right way.

Arnold: I’m very glad you say that. That’s a great background. But what I do is I focus on the conceptions involved so I can get a mathematical handle on it.

Zach: Right. Even just focusing on the conception is mathematically astronomically ridiculous.

Arnold: It’s so great. And I have a lot of fun with it in the book. In your own conception, there were 200 million sperm cells competing to get to the egg. If any of the others but the one that did got to the egg, on the usual view, you would never have existed. You’d be eternally blank. It’d be a potential brother or sister born instead.

Zach: You would never have escaped the abyss.

Arnold: Never. So that’s pretty bad already. But maybe one in 200 million, maybe I got really lucky. But now consider your conception couldn’t have occurred unless your mother and father had been conceived. And let’s say one in 200 million for each of them, for those three conceptions to have gone right for you to exist on the usual view, it’s one in eight septillion. Is that twenty four zeros or something? So that’s pretty bad. But of course, your grandparents had to have been conceived first, or your parents could have been one in 200 million of those multiplied. And then we haven’t even got started yet. Whereas in universalism, it didn’t matter what sperm cells hit what eggs, it was going to be you because of the immediacy of experience. That’s all that’s involved in it being you.

Zach: I think a lot of people would say… That’s what I would have said a year or two or a few years ago. I think the main argument people would make is like, yeah, from that angle, the fact that I am here is very improbable. But what if that’s just the way the world works, and every being that comes into being has a separate first person experience, and that’s just the way it works. And then once that happens, they will reach faulty conclusions about how unlikely it is? Yeah, what would you say to that?

Arnold: That’s why the hotel inference is so handy here. Because in the hotel inference, we’ve got winners. And those winners are wrong in inferring the easy game was played and everyone was awakened. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t infer that. Suppose the usual view is right, and I do exist in this miraculous, incredible…

Zach: Like give a soul kind of idea, yeah.

Arnold: Well, souls can be dealt with the same way. Universalism sets itself against any view that says that I am just one particular thing of a sort.

Zach: I shouldn’t have mentioned soul, that’s getting into a whole different thing. I just meant like a different first person.

Arnold: Even people who believe that souls are kind of deposited in the body, they think that the sperm cell lottery goes on. They don’t think all those souls exist as human beings.

Zach: Correct me if I’m wrong but I think you would say it’s one thing to say if the odds are astronomically long, someone’s got to exist or somebody comes into his existence. It’s another thing to find yourself in that first person experience.

Arnold: Exactly.

Zach: I think that’s what gets to me about this when I’ve thought about this. I mean, it is so astronomically ridiculous that I would be here experiencing this. And then you added the fact too, of like, once you get into the idea of, “Well, am I even the same sense of self from moment to moment?” There’s the series kind of questions which have sometimes bugged me late at night. I used to lay awake thinking am I continually sprung into existence and immediately go out of existence every moment? Well, that makes it even more ridiculous because who is this new me that is randomly being created every second too? That’s like an extra level of astronomically ridiculous odds. What are all these “me’s” that are coming into existence? And you start thinking, well, universalism resolves that because it’s saying it’s all the same manifestation of me.

Arnold: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly. Those conditions are even tougher in Buddhism, where there’s only a momentary self and it’s distinct from all the other momentary selves. Boy, is it tightly defined. You know? At least in the usual view, you got a bit of flexibility there in what you are…

Zach: Because there’s this underlying instinctual assumption that we do exist over time, right? But if you cut that away, then you just have all these senses of self springing into existence, whether it’s other people’s selves or it’s our own self. So then it’s like, where are all these senses of self coming from? It kind of boggles the mind that there would just be this abyss of selves and then these various selves are just springing into existence. Universalism does help resolve that.

Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. Let me say one more thing about what universalism is like that’s kind of related to what we’ve been discussing. Universalism is a really minimal claim.

Zach: Right. It’s not some grand spiritual, you know, making claims about we’re all the same spiritual being or anything like that.

Arnold: Yeah. I mean, people might be tempted to turn it into that because they’re used to thinking integration defines who I am. So, maybe Zuboff saying it’s all integrated, you know, some common mind or something. No, nothing like that. My whole point is that integration is irrelevant to whether an experience is mine or not. Here’s the minimal character of it. I can allow the world to be exactly like what any one of many many varieties of usual views would have. Right? With different views of what consciousness is, different views of whether there is integration beyond ahead… I’m not interested in that insofar as I’m talking about universalism. It’s neutral regarding all of that. So, what is it I am saying? 

One way of representing it would be this. Let’s say we have a line, and on the left end of the line, you’ve got all kinds of incidental things to whether something is you. Like wearing a blue shirt, most people would agree it’d be a weird view to think that I exist with my self interest—my presence in the world—only so long as I wear a blue shirt. If I change into a red shirt, I’m not here anymore. Now let’s move to the right on this line towards more substantive-seeming things. Like having a body composed of certain atoms, or put in the sperm cell lottery… We could emphasize mental side of it, or emphasize the physical identity of body or the brain… All those things are sort of in a middle area. And that’s where most views of personal identity are. Actually, the Buddhist view is way over on the left here with incidental things, because its slightest change in experience is someone else’s. Now we’ve slid over to more generous views of what can be you.

And what are we sliding over here? It’s the line separating what’s inessential from what’s essential. Way over on the right side of the line is a very abstract, general thing—the immediacy of experience. I am not quibbling about what any of the stuff is on this line. I’m just saying that the line between what’s essential and inessential should be slid all the way over to the right and come to rest under immediacy of experience. All the rest is like a blue shirt. It’s all inessential to whether it’s me, right? And that’s why they all have probability problems and universalism does not. And as you say, Buddhism is way over on the left.

Zach: When I was watching that talk of yours with Professor Brown—I can’t remember his first name—there’s also this view that you’re you’re making some claim about what the self is, or something he seemed to be caught up on. He was basically saying, “Well, I don’t believe in the self in a Buddhist or nihilistic way that everything is an illusion.” But I think people can get caught up in your ideas that they think you’re making some claims that there’s some self. All you’re saying is, it’s this first person experience. And he didn’t seem to be denying that, but it does seem like some people can have an obstacle to even admitting that there is a first person experience. And even if you think the ongoing continual self is an illusion or something—kind of like in a Descartes way—I don’t think you can deny that. Like, something is having an experience here. That’s all you’re saying it is.

Arnold: It’s all I’m saying.

Zach: Do you get a sense that he was kind of balking it, like he was like, “Well, I think it’s an illusion,” and you’re saying, well, you don’t disagree that there is an experience being had, right? Something is happening here. But I think it’s interesting because there can be this very nihilistic pushback to even admitting that there’s an experience being had, right?

Arnold: Yeah, all kinds of views in philosophy, that’s for sure. [laughs]

Zach: And with all these ideas, it’s easy to talk past each other because the language we end up using can be so different and the concepts are so non-intuitive. So it’s understandable that there’s various difficulties in communicating about it.

Arnold: I don’t know, maybe I’ve got across that. I think there’s something special about universalism. I think it’s unlike any other philosophical view I know in that…

Zach: Because you resolve so many quandaries, in your view, and resolve several major quandaries. Right?

Arnold: And there’s nothing brought in that really should be controversial. There’s immediacy that’s there. Maybe eliminative materialism doesn’t have it. I don’t know. But it has to be a pretty strange view not to have that in there somewhere.

Zach: Some listeners of this will have seen or listened to a previous episode where I talked to Joe Kern, who has a book called The Odds of Existing. His focus is on… There’s a lot of overlap, but his focus is on- Oh, there it is!

Arnold: He just sent it to me.

Zach: Oh, me too. Yeah, he sent it to me. So his intuitive focus is to focus on when you get down to the—as you call it—the sperm cell lottery when you actually examine, like, well, what would logically make sense? Like, switching out minute parts of the sperm or the egg, would that really result in a different I? These kinds of questions. And when you really start to examine the logic of it, it’s really hard to have a logical point where something starts being a separate self or stops being the same self. So he’s kind of examining the physical arguments of this astronomically slim view of ‘you’ slash I existing. And if I had to say what I think you and Joe Kern… The similarity I see is that you’re both arguing trying to logically examine these usual boundaries that we think of separating oneself from another. 

You’re both attacking these various logical boundaries. He’s attacking this idea that there’s these different physical combinations that would lead to different selves, or even, like we have a different experience our life goes a different way when we’re young and those kinds of things. There’s similar ideas where people might think, oh, these are different people and these are different selves. He’s attacking those foundations. You’re attacking a different foundation of switching out parts of the brain, or whatever. You’re also much more focused on this first-person perspective idea, whereas he’s more talking about these, you know, you could do it from a distance even of like, are these different selves? But I think you’re both attacking these foundations that most people would intuitively think lead to different selves and you’re both saying, “Well, when you really start to look at these things in different ways, there’s not any clear definition of when a new self would have come into being and an old self would have been left behind.

Arnold: But there’s a very important factor here, and I’m not sure how he scores on this. I’m not interested in simply saying there’s just one person. What’s important to me is that it’s you. Right? Because there being just one person could be as bad as the Buddhism thing. It could make things worse than the usual view because at least in the usual view, you got a lot of chances for you to come into existence. But if there’s only one person, why are you that person?

Zach: Yeah, you’re very focused on the ‘me’, the I aspect, the first-person aspect.

Arnold: Exactly, that’s the whole thing that matters here. Not how many there are, but where you are. And your existence is really easy in universalism, because it’s the youness I’m talking about. It’s what makes it you. So I’m not interested so much in breaking down the boundaries between so that it’s all the same person, I’m interested in who the person is.

Zach: I want to move on to the anthropic principle and how universalism is related to that. And I’ll say personally, I myself have long believed that there must be many universes of some sort that all have different physical properties. Whether that’s the quantum many worlds theory, whether that’s infinite worlds in space, whatever it may be, because the basic idea that for me to exist, obviously the universe has to be finely calibrated for me to exist. And what are the chances that we live in the one single universe that would lead to that? In the same way that it’s astronomically improbable that I would be here fundamentally like we talked about from that astronomical chance perspective, it’s also similarly or even more improbable that we would live in the one universe with all these physical properties arranged. And a quick point about this is the fact that we even have gravity, right? If gravity was to pull too much, or if it never pulled at all, the universe would never lead to any sort of combinations of things. So just to say—and you go into this in your book about the nuclear strong forces at atomic level—there’s all these things that are calibrated. 

Another example is just the fact there is an abundance of different types of materials. You can imagine a universe where there was just one type of material, in which case, probably nothing would ever be even created at all. So just to say, there’s all these things that are perfectly calibrated to have life exist, which to me, leaving aside creator god type scenarios and if we’re talking pure logic, to me, that is a no brainer that there must be many worlds with many different physical properties, however those are being created. So that’s kind of to me maybe why universalism and open individualism was intuitively attractive, because I’d already embraced this idea of reaching for something to help explain these astronomically slim circumstances. But I’m curious how you tie in the universalism to the anthropic principle there.

Arnold: Yeah, that’s great. I know that without universalism tied together with something like a multiverse, you cannot explain the anthropic principle in the sort of way you’re talking about. Right? It’s essential to explaining the laws of physics. Now, when I was an undergraduate back in the 60s, I read an article on the anthropic principle by a guy named Tennant who had a religious explanation of it. I remember in 1968 it suddenly occurred to me that if matter was actually very protean in character, existing according to different laws—and let’s call them again, countless forms or countless distinct universes…

Zach: Countless hotel rooms with different physical properties in each one.

Arnold: It’s very closely related to the hotel. If that were the case, then it could be probable that there’d be one or more universes that just happened to be at the right levels of forces, the right sizes of particles and so on, so that life could come about and eventually consciousness could come about. And then here’s the thing. There are now many physicists who think this way. And then what they say is this—and try to notice the problem with it—they say, “And of course, we would have to be in one where all those laws were fine tuned for the existence of life and consciousness. We couldn’t be in any universe where that wasn’t the case.” And then some of them leave it there. And I, when I first thought of this, left it there. But my excuse is I was already thinking about personal identity in this very fluid way. It was 1961 when I came up with this thought experiment of exchanging quarters of brains, and I’d be in both things. It was loose enough for me so that I could be in this anthropic universe that happened to come up. But anyone who believes in anything like the usual view is not helped at all by there being all these universes occurring where it finally becomes probable there’s at least one anthropic one. They’re not helped at all.

Zach: You’re saying they’re not helped because it just becomes so much more astronomically improbable or…

Arnold: Well, because nothing would make it your universe. You being in the anthropic one would be the same kind of look as if there were only one kind of physical world. It doesn’t help at all. I tell this story in the book where, when I came to University College London in 1974—you know, I’m an American, raised in Connecticut, and I came here to University College London to teach philosophy in 1974 and they had new people. There were three people joining that year and they each gave talks to the faculty. And there was a guest there from the States, a logician named Robert Stallmaker, who was quite young like me back then, and I gave a talk where I argued that there must be many universes of different sorts and so on to make it finally probable that there was one that had these laws that we could live in. 

And he talked to me for a long time after, and he was absolutely right in attacking what I was saying. And he used a wonderful analogy to make his point. Suppose I was playing an extremely difficult game of Russian roulette, where five of the six chambers have bullets in them, and you have to do it a hundred times and spin it around, your survival is pretty unlikely there. But you found you survived. And then you said to yourself, there must have been lots of games of Russian roulette like that being played, because if there were enough, there’d be winners. So that explains my winning. It doesn’t. What would explain it is if I would automatically be whisked to the place where all the chambers were empty.

Zach: That you exist in all the places in all the scenarios.

Arnold: No, let’s put it this way. That I exist where it’s successful. Or I have this analogy I use in the book, there’s an enormous roulette wheel with zillions of spaces along it, and this one ball is going to roll around land somewhere. And there’s only one space where a particular sleeper would be awakened. So I’m sleeping. I’m in induced sleeping like the hotel case. I wake up and it’s explained to me that only this ball falling into that space would have them wake me, otherwise I’d sleep forever. I’m just dumbfounded against, you know, whoever heard of such luck? Okay, then let’s change this to there being lots of roulette wheels on each of them. There’s the one space which represents anthropic physical laws that the ball could land in. But let’s say there’s a distinct sleeper attached to each wheel, right? Because in the usual view of personal identity, even if there was someone just like me, even in this universe but somewhere else, it’d be a mere duplicate. It wouldn’t be me. And certainly in another universe, it wouldn’t be me.

Zach: That’s an interesting… Yeah, I think I’ve been having trouble understanding how you’re tying those two ideas together. But yeah, when you start talking about, say, there was an exact duplicate of yourself in many worlds, why would one be you and one not, right? That’s where you’re getting at.

Arnold: Or rather, what I’m saying is I’ve already established that they would all be equally me.

Zach: Yeah, I guess I’m having trouble tying into anthropic things.

Arnold: I automatically find myself wherever there’s consciousness. It’s the lubricant that you need, along with the many universes, to make this work so that I’m there. I’m not stuck with one Russian roulette game. I can take advantage of any of them where I win. I am actually there.

Zach: You are always there. Yeah.

Arnold: Yeah. Otherwise, the other universes don’t help in explaining the anthropic principle. So in other words, what I’m saying is to have a thorough understanding of physics, you need universalism packaged together with a multiverse. That gives you that your universe will be anthropic. Without universalism, it doesn’t work. It’s just as bad as there being only one physical world. Someone would be in an anthropic universe. So it is like the hotel. It’s just an extension of the argument for universalism.

Zach: A small note here. I’ll be honest and say that I don’t fully understand Arnold’s arguments here. It seems like he’s just adding to the statistical improbability argument. I feel I’m missing why he thinks it is a separate form of argument. But I’ve struggled with grasping a few ideas and points in this area that I later did understand. So I wanted to keep this in here and just note my own confusion. I’d say, if you want to try to understand Arnold’s points, of course you should read his new book, Finding Myself.

Okay, back to the talk.

I wanted to pivot to how certain would you say you are that universalism is the true state of things? If you somehow knew for certain that it wasn’t true, what do you think the most likely explanation would be?

Arnold: It’s the only game in town, as I sometimes say in the book. Yeah, it is.

Zach: So you would say you’re basically near a hundred percent certain?

Arnold: Yeah, I’m a hundred percent certain. I’m a hundred percent certain. I mean, it’s the hotel inference.

Zach: Another question I like to ask people in general is, you know, some people watching this—if they made it this far—would be saying, “Well, it’s simple. God gives us a soul, we each have our own souls, the religious view, right? And to me, I’ll say that I find existence in the universe so mind blowing and strange and unlikely in the first place that it would be hard for me to be that surprised about any of the many ideas there are that explain us being here. Which is to say I guess I’m not strongly atheistic. Like, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that even though it would mainly push the questions back further, I wouldn’t be shocked to find out there was some sort of higher power or creator. But I’d like to ask you, how strongly atheistic are you? Do you leave open some smidgen of where there could be some sort of higher power?

Arnold: Universalism is entirely neutral in regard to that. It’s got that covered. There’s a section in my book where I look at what I call the Somebody Up There Likes Me version of the usual view, where you had a special favor from God. I’m not in the least in my book on universalism attacking the possibility of there being God. But that he would select you for existence is just as improbable as you being selected purely by the sperm cell lottery, which presumably he fixes if he wants someone… [laughs]

Zach: Yeah, it’s rigged or something.

Arnold: Yeah, he wants you. And furthermore, not even a twin of you.

Zach: He wants your very special sense of self to exist.

Arnold: That’s right. That’s right, because it’s just like all the others. [laughs] So, of course, he singles out you.

Zach: Right. The same questions apply, and I think you would also say, theoretically, universalism could coexist with any religion because I can imagine a Christian take on this where it’s like, “See, we’re all the same. We’re all manifestations of God, or whatever.” You can imagine it combining with other things because it doesn’t directly, you know, interfere with…

Arnold: Well, you will be God. If God’s mind includes consciousness with immediacy, you would be God. If God was wise enough and knowledgeable enough, he’d know he was all these beings he was fooling around with. So actually, that has an interesting effect on the problem of evil. Because the problem of evil is how would he allow all this suffering? Instead, it just becomes a puzzle. Why does he want to subject himself to all this suffering?

Zach: I think you and I are kind of on the same page in thinking that universalism, if more people embrace it, would be a good thing in terms of people seeing themselves and other people and seeing other people in themselves or vice versa, just recognizing that we’re all dealing with the same manifestation of experience. I think it would lead to people being more empathetic and less morally righteous.

Arnold: Yeah, yeah. Not even empathetic, just be self interested not to cause yourself—

Zach: I would say even theoretically, embracing like, “Oh, this could be possible,” even leads to more empathy in a lighter form even if you didn’t go all the way.

Arnold: It also does away with the fear of death as annihilation.

Zach: Yeah, in some sense, it’s comforting too because it’s saying that in some sense, death is an illusion. Because we will always be here experiencing things wherever there is a consciousness. So there can be various nice things about it, although I think some people would say… I think it’s possible, with any philosophy, to implement it in such a way that it becomes a dangerous implementation.

Arnold: Sure. But why would you want to do that? You’d just be hurting yourself.

Zach: Yeah, exactly. Although I think some people might say like, “Oh, imagine some dystopian version of this where the people in power say that death doesn’t matter, so it doesn’t matter if people die that much, etc, etc.” But that, that, to me, is kind of a way from how I think most people would interpret this. But yeah, I’m curious for your thoughts on how you see this as a positive force.

Arnold: Sure. Oh, also, it throws a monkey wrench into retribution.

Zach: You can still want to punish people for practical reasons, but it gets rid of this idea that someone must be punished because they’ve, you know, they must suffer because they’ve done a bad thing.

Arnold: Yeah, the victim and the perpetrator are the same person, so causing more pain to the victim.

Zach: Can you imagine a future society where universalism is kind of like a secular religion and it leads to better things happening?

Arnold: I can imagine it, and I really hope for it. I keep emphasizing the simplicity of it. It really is not a complicated thing at all. It simplifies everything. It’s so easy to bear in mind. It’s got a great thing to go against, which is this illusion that there are distinct selves, distinct eyes, but it’s so powerful in itself as a thought that I think it actually could moderate a lot of bad stuff that comes about on account of the illusion.

Zach: That was a talk with the philosopher Arnold Zuboff, author of the book, Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal Identity.