Category: podcast

In real or fictional criminal interrogation scenes, you’ve probably seen the approach where police barge in and confront the suspect with the evidence, trying to get them to crack and give a confession. In this talk, Maria Hartwig and Christian Cory explain why that doesn’t work well, and why a strategic use of evidence (SUE) approach, involving planning out the reveal of evidence, gets much better results. Maria is a well known researcher and trainer of criminal interviewing, and Christian is a 26 year law enforcement veteran. I talk to them about their and others’ attempts to promote more science-based approaches to interviewing and interrogation. They are Co-Directors at the Aletheia Project (project-aletheia.org), which brings together researchers and law enforcement practitioners to improve interview techniques.

We talk about their view that “old school” interrogations are built around a misguided “confession obsession,” why bad ideas and exaggerated claims about nonverbel behavior and lie detection are so persistent and popular, and the downsides of deceiving suspects about evidence. We talk about what the science really says about micro-expressions, the uses of the polygraph, and we explore why people seem so drawn to false, exaggerated ideas about reading behavior.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Resources related to or mentioned in our talk:

• Article about Project Aletheia’s goals
• Maria Hartwig on LinkedIn
• Christian Cory on LinkedIn
• 2008 Hartwig and Granhag paper on difficulties of deception-detection in interrogation setting, and discussion of strategic use of evidence (SUE) approach
• 2014 Hartwig, Granhag, and Luke paper on the strategic use of evidence
• Maria Hartwig article “No, you can’t really tell if someone is lying from their facial expressions”

TRANSCRIPT

(some of transcript is AI generated and so will contain errors)

Maria Hartwig: ” it’s such a persistent delusion that we can read body language… There’s no nonverbal signal of deception… Cues to deception are faint at best.”

Maria Hartwig: “ There has never been an empirical demonstration even of the existence of microexpressions. Uh, there has been no demonstration that they’re indicators of deception, again, they barely seem to exist.”

Maria Hartwig: “ You have to be, uh, quite well-versed in the scientific literature, uh, to know that the– that so many of these claims are untrue. Ironically, people are truth biased, so they’re inclined, they’re credulous, uh, and- I don’t think it occurs to people that a book written by a former law enforcement professional would just be full of shit.”

Zach Elwood: Hi, I’m Zach Elwood, host of the People Who Read People podcast, which you can learn more about at behavior-podcast.com. You just heard some clips from my talk with Maria Hartwig and Christian Cory, both of whom work on promoting better techniques in law-enforcement-related interviews and interrogations. If you’re on LinkedIn, you might like following Maria and Christian there as they are often sharing interesting observations about interrogation ideas, deception, nonverbal behavior, and more. Christian and Maria are co-Directors of Project Aletheia, which is an effort to bridge the gap between the science and practice of interviewing and interrogation by bringing researchers and practitioners together. Maria represents the research side of things, while Christian, as a former police officer, represents the practitioner side. You can sign up to get updates about Project Aletheia on the project’s site, which is at https://project-aletheia.org/. Aletheia is spelled ALETHEIA. 

In TV shows and movies, you’ve probably many times seen the police interrogation approach where police barge in and confront the suspect with all their evidence, trying to get them to crack and give a confession. In this talk, Maria and Christian explain why that doesn’t work well, and why a framework called the strategic use of evidence, or SUE, gets much better results. We also talk about their views on why focusing excessively on getting confessions is counterproductive. I get their thoughts on the immense amount of pseudoscience and bullshit in the nonverbal behavior-reading space, and we talk about why there is such an enormous hunger for that bullshit. We talk about micro-expressions and what’s the deal with those things, and we touch on quite a few other topics.  

A little bit more about Maria Hartwig: She’s Co-Founder and Co-Director of Project Aletheia. She is a Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she has been on the faculty since 2006. Her scientific expertise is in the psychology of interrogation and the related topic of the psychology of deception. She has produced significant amounts of research, partly with the support of and in collaboration with various government agencies and entities, including law enforcement, the Department of Defense, and the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG)… 

A little bit about Christian Cory: He recently retired after more than 26 years with the Wichita Police Department, where he served as Commander of the Crimes Against Persons Bureau. Over the course of his career, he worked in Homicide, Sex Crimes, and the Gang/Felony Assault Unit, and led the department’s Crisis Negotiation Team. He holds a B.S. in Criminology from Kansas State University and an M.A. in Forensic Psychology from the University of North Dakota. Today, Cory is the Co-Director of Project Aletheia and a Visiting Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he advocates nationally for ethical, effective, and science-based interview practices. 

Okay here’s the talk with Christian Cory and Maria Hartwig. 

Zach Elwood: this might be kind of a broad question to start with, but, uh, what do you see as the, the biggest, uh, areas where practitioners are doing, um, known bad or counterproductive practices that you’re trying to, to remedy?

What do you– What, what, what comes to top of mind for things you see as some of the worst and most common practices, would you say? 

Christian Cory: Well, I think, I think we need to start there with the most, most common. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Christian Cory: Because when I came on, there was one way to interview people, there was one way to interrogate folks, and we have to remember that this is not about malice.

That’s the training we were given. And, uh, we’re again told, “Hey, this is the best practices. Do this.” Now, what a lot of practitioners will tell you is, “This doesn’t feel right. I don’t like how this goes. I don’t wanna be, uh, doing some of these things. I wanna interview my way.” And I think that just that intuition there is where a lot of what is science-based, what we put under the umbrella of science-based interviewing is.

And again, w- I think there’s some misnomers from the past about a confession being the lone, uh, hallmark of a case or the lone metric of an interrogation, when in fact that’s not true at all. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Christian Cory: And, uh, it kind of limits the scope. So when we look at our history, we have to understand that and that it is gonna be a kind of winning of the hearts and minds, but also winning it with what the research is showing us and, and redefining what it is and what success means.

Success can’t be a c- only a confession because case after case, detectives will tell you, “Hey, I didn’t get a confession. This guy wasn’t gonna confess.” Okay, so then what do we look at? 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Christian Cory: Um, so I th- I think we have to go back and redefine what it is just based on the history and just the, the amount of poor training that is out there, and that’s, that’s one of the biggest, uh, issues now is we, we still have these trainers coming in and, and reinforcing these ideas that are just not how people communicate with each other.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Maria, I’m curious on that same topic, I mean, if I had to guess, I would say some of the, some of the things, the main things you’re trying to correct are, for example, yeah, o- overly aggressive approaches, um, the focus on, you know, getting the confession, which seems to be, could be related to the overly aggressive approaches, and then also the, the focus on non-verbal behavior I know is often a, um, you know, often a topic.

But I’m curious what comes to mind for you for the, that same, that same question of what the most common and, and counterproductive approaches are? 

Maria Hartwig: Yeah. Uh, the, I’d say the confession obsession. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: Um, I’m not saying much, anything much differently from Christian here, but, uh, the notion that the primary goal of an interrogation is to get a confession and that A non-confession outcome, uh, anything other than a non-confession, anything other than a confession outcome, uh, i- is a bad one or a failure that we have to move away from.

Um, there’s overwhelming evidence that the science-based techniques that are not actively confession-seeking, they yield as many confessions as techniques that are designed to elicit confessions. Mm. So, uh, we tend to put, uh, the… Another term for science-based interviewing is information gathering, uh, interviews, where the objective then is information.

Um, and if you carry out, uh, an interview, interrogation, I’m using those terms slightly interchangeably. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: Um, if you conduct an interview in line with science-based practices, again, your chance of getting a confession, if that is your objective, um, is equally high. Mm-hmm. So you do not lose anything at all by moving from the confession-oriented, uh, old school pseudoscientific tactics to the science-based ones.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. And am I understanding correctly that it’s, it’s basically about shifting from seeking confession to seeking, uh, drawing information out of people? Um- Yes … is that, is that a correct synopsis? In, 

Maria Hartwig: yeah. In, in- Yeah … information is the chief currency of an investigation. So to maximize the amount of information, quantity and quality of information is the goal.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Um, I’m curious, I mean, I, I’ve read a lot, including from your, both of your LinkedIn posts, that the, uh, strategic use of evidence is a big part of this. Uh, Kori, would you care to talk about what the, you know, most up-to-date thinking is about, um, you know, summarize what the, what the strategy is for the slow release of, of information?

Christian Cory: Yeah. Well, and y- again, you have to go back. You look at the history and how you’re taught to, to use evidence, and this is a big one ’cause in seminars and speaking across the country, um, I, I poll the crowd, and this is– I– If those conferences allow me to poll people, I do have some numbers, but a lot of people have never heard about the strategic use of evidence, which is a crime in of itself because, um, we- when we talk about the confession obsession, how do we use evidence in our interviews?

Sometimes we’re supposed to, uh, use it to overcome objections, um, but somet- sometimes it’s used as a shortcut. “Hey, I wanna get right to it. We got this guy dead to rights.” What- whatever, whatever my thinking is. But when we contaminate those statements with the evidence, we’re allowing someone that could be adaptable to that to come up with an explanation where they couldn’t before.

And SU is sometimes reduced to a late disclosure tactic, which it is not whatsoever. You’re missing bigger investigative points when it comes down to better questioning, planning for your interview, because when we have evidence, we have to know what that evidence says exactly if we’re gonna challenge points.

And then if we really wanna talk about credibility assessment, that’s how you really assess credibility and you can go testify to in court versus, uh, your eyes are looking the wrong way or, uh, microexpressions are, are drifting to the east or something that day. Whatever it is, uh, that’s not stuff… And, and I’m– Right now I’m batting 1,000% over the last two years.

No one is raising their hand saying, “Yeah, we’re testifying to this stuff in court about credibility.” But everybody testifies to a contradictory statement, two things that can’t be true at the same time. I wasn’t there and there’s your DNA, or there– I wasn’t at the Quickie Mart. Yep, there you are on camera.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Christian Cory: And it helps leverage those interviews for more information. Mm-hmm. Um, just quick anecdotally, we had a, a large case. The interviewers went in, did a nice long hour and a half interview, nothing. They went in and used the SU technique. We worked on an evidence disclosure plan because the detective had said, “Ah, I’ve never had luck with SU.”

I was like, “Well, let’s try this again.” We went in there and instead of disclosing the evidence right away and saying like, “Oh yeah, well, I’ve got you here,” and creating a situation like that, it was just simply leverage for more information even prior to the actual disclosure of that information. Hmm. And that, that extended the life of that interview and more information is better than less information every single time 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, the, uh, I mean, I watch a good amount of interrogation videos on YouTube.

I’m interested in that. And ever since I learned about the, the Sue ideas, when I watch these interrogations, it, it does stand out to me. The– Some people will just barge in there and be like, “We got this evidence on you,” which s- yeah, and now that I’ve, I realize this idea, it’s like, yeah, that seems very counterproductive in, in multiple ways even because, yeah, it prevents you from being able to get information out of them that might conflict and then make them feel uncomfortable and more likely to tell you things, and it also puts them on defense more.

You know, there’s like multiple reasons it seems bad. Uh, would you agree with that synopsis, Maria? 

Maria Hartwig: I would absolutely agree with that synopsis, and, um, I’m glad that you now have that reaction because it, it, it is one of those things once you understand why that’s not wise, uh, every damn TV show- Yeah. … and also, uh, so often in, in, uh, in real life too.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, the throwing evidence at people, uh, before they’ve had a chance to provide an account is bad for at least two reasons. Um, the first one is that you’re helping the guilty suspect create a plausible narrative that accounts for the evidence that I suppose now you have to go and investigate whether that is true or not.

Um, so you’re giving, uh, guilty people, uh, an upper hand. You had an upper hand, uh, in knowing things that the suspect didn’t, but now you don’t because now they know as much as you do. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: The second, uh, reason why it’s not a good idea, uh, it’s unfair to, uh, I would argue, to innocent suspects to deprive them of the opportunity to explain, uh, the evidence.

Um, so- If, um, when we have, uh, conducted experimental studies, uh, on the Sue technique, um, where we know with 100% certainty, uh, that this statement is false and this one is true, which we rarely do in real life, the universal pattern when evidence is disclosed early is that liars and truth-tellers or gu- guilty and innocent suspects both give some sort of plausible, um, explanation for the evidence and you can’t tell them apart.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: I, I think what underlies the impulse to disclose evidence is k- kind of, “Ha, I got you. Uh, now you’re gonna confess.” Hmm. Except when has that ever happened? Uh- Mm-hmm. 

Zach Elwood: Or, or like Christian mentioned, it’s like a shortcut too. It’s like, “We’re in a hurry, let’s cut to the chase.” 

Maria Hartwig: Yes. Yeah, yeah. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, 

Maria Hartwig: and I- I, evidence disclosure is sometimes done, uh, when the person doesn’t know what else to do.

Uh, there’s a term called evidence s- s- stimulation, which essentially is just, “I’m not sure how to get Zachary to say something, so I’m going to throw some evidence at him.” Mm-hmm. Uh, n- not thoughtful. Um- Mm-hmm Thank you, Christian, for pointing out, uh, that reducing, uh, the Sue technique to just late disclosure is, um, is flattening the concept.

Uh, it’s strategic use of evidence. It’s the questions that you ask when a s- suspect is in a state of uncertainty or ignorance about what information the interviewer has. 

Zach Elwood: A- a- and it does seem like, correct me if I’m wrong, but it does seem like a big part of the, uh, why it can yield, uh, confessions is it, is it really by, by m- having people make their statements and then they get caught in various contradictions, it does really ramp up the stress that they’re feeling too, and makes…

It seems like, I gather that it makes them more likely to feel like, “Oh, I’ve trapped myself in these various statements and I, I just gotta give up now,” kind of thing. 

Maria Hartwig: Yes. We have, uh, not conducted any scientific studies on the production of confessions after a, a Sue interview, primarily because, uh, uh, well, I, I’m, I confess I’m not particularly interested in confessions.

And I think the at- uh, the attempt to get confessions m- m- might be inherently bordering on the problematic. But- 

Zach Elwood: Hmm … 

Maria Hartwig: uh, I think you’re absolutely right that there is a

There’s a likelihood, uh, again, we haven’t measured it, but that a person after an interview where they have trapped themselves, um, that they will actually confess. Uh, the biggest predictor of whether somebody will confess or not is the perceived strength of the evidence against them. So after a Sue interview, um, the s- the guilty suspect who have told lies to contradict the evidence, they face not only the evidence but also their own statement, which is conflicting with the evidence.

So yes, I think if you want to get your confession, uh, a Sue, um, interview probably prepares pretty well for that. 

Zach Elwood: And, and Christian, uh, I’m curious, would you agree that another benefit of the strategic use of evidence is that it, uh, makes it less likely that you’ll get somebody in a false confession because you’re keeping s- the evidence that you have from them longer, so they’re less likely…

You’re, they’re more likely to, uh, or less likely to say details about the case that only the guilty person would say if I’m, if I’m getting another, if I’m, if I’m gathering that that’s another benefit theoretically? 

Christian Cory: Yeah. Well, and the gold standard of the Sue technique would be to have something where you, you have an uncontaminated statement.

You haven’t messed up your statement by feeding information that you want from the person and then getting them to reflect it back to you. But then it’s already corroborated with your evidence. Their, their story’s l- legitimate. Uh, you have something to test it with or leverage it for more information.

And it should also be noted that at this time in history, we’ve never– detectives, investigators have never had more evidence, but we’re supposed to still treat it like we did 70 years ago? Uh, that doesn’t work for me. You can’t tell me there hasn’t been an upgrade. And now they have more opportunities to use the Sue technique, more opportunities to actually test credibility that they can testify to.

And because, uh, Maria brought it up, uh, and you have to remember, lying is, is information that tells you something when you know it’s, uh, not factual, if it’s contradictory to the evidence, and juries don’t like liars either. We’re gonna, if you never confess, we’re gonna show you that video. Uh, they’re, they both can’t be true.

There’s physical evidence. Physical evidence can’t lie to us. So, uh, we gotta remember that’s, that’s gotta be part of your interviewing strategy. You can’t just hear the first lie, call somebody a liar. It might get redacted in your state anyway as being prejudicial, and then, uh, power forward as if you won something.

Uh, take it in as information, make the judgments, go back later and ask them to talk about the contradiction. Sometimes, especially if it’s a statement to statement contradiction, they may just have to clear something up for you as the investigator. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Um, Maria, what, uh, what does the science, um, and research, research say, or maybe just your own thoughts also about, um, deceptive approaches of, uh, you know, saying something or implying something untrue to suspects to get information out of them or get a confession?

I imagine that goes along with, you know, your, your views on the overstated importance of confession, but curious what you would say to that. 

Maria Hartwig: Yeah. And so you can take, uh, a pragmatic a- approach to it. Uh, does it work? Uh, well, uh, you, you’ll have to define what you mean with, uh, does it work. Uh, does it work, uh, to tell lies about evidence, for example, to induce confessions?

Yes. It, uh, increases the probability that a statement will be a confession, but this is true for both, uh, innocent and guilty people. So the use of false evidence, uh, ploys, uh decrease the diagnosticity of a confession expressed differently, um, and l- put more simply, um, it increases the risk for false confessions.

Mm. So from a, again, assuming that we don’t want false confessions, which I don’t think we do, um, from, from a practical point of view, it’s not a good idea. Uh, I also think that there’s an ethical component, uh, where, uh, it’s, it’s unpalatable notion, uh, that, mm, the police are, are allowed to, uh, make up stuff.

Um, again, especially when we know that it has harmful effects. 

Zach Elwood: Mm. 

Maria Hartwig: Uh, so I s- they are a big part of the legacy tactic sh- package. Um, but I, again, numerous reasons why I think you, you really shouldn’t do that. Um, Christian, what do you- 

Zach Elwood: Oh, and I, I might, I might add something here too. Christian, I’m curious, would you agree with, uh, the idea that another, um, downside of using deception in those cases is that you risk really harming the rapport?

Like if they know that if you say it’s something that they know is false, that seems like another even just a practical, uh, bad outcome of, of using deceptive information, especially if you’re not sure of it. 

Christian Cory: Right. Well- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah … 

Christian Cory: you’re taking a risk too because if you’re talking to somebody that’s guilty, uh, or somebody that knows a scene better than you or something, you, they may really, you may verify to them that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Zach Elwood: Exactly. That’s what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. 

Christian Cory: Yeah. And if you’re gonna lie to them, that’s, you’re certainly gonna damage your rapport. They c- they can’t trust you. It’s, it’s part of an, uh, it’s not the, it’s a relationship in the interview room, not like our personal relationships, but, but there’s certainly a relationship there and you’re gonna destroy that.

Uh, the other problem is, is you put yourself in that, put yourself in that scenario. Why are you lying about evidence to get a confession? And that goes back to what we were talking about, the confession obsession, is that if I have to have a confession to, to win the case, right? Is, is it provable another way?

Wha- uh, if, if the answer is yes, then I’m just getting a confession for what? Just for vanity reasons so that they can’t have an appeal? So I don’t know what it is. Right. If we can already win that case. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I realize, yeah. It’s 

Christian Cory: risky. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. You, I realized you were mentioning something slightly different than I mentioned.

Yeah. It’s like the, the harm to the rapport, that’s, that’s one dimension. And then yeah, you were saying it can actually make them realize that you don’t know what you’re talking about and make them more comfortable that they can keep quiet and yeah. So two different, yeah, I realize that that was two different ideas there.

Uh, just wanted to clarify that. Um, would, would you both agree that the polygraph, the, the main use of the polygraph is basically as a, as a tool of intimidation? I’m curious what you both think of that. That, that’s how it occurs to me because I’m like, it’s, we know it’s far from 100%, but I’m curious, would you agree it’s mainly used as a cudgel to get information out of people?

Maria? 

Maria Hartwig: I think mainly might be an overstatement. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: Uh, is, is the polygraph used as part of the confession-obsessed package of techniques? Yes. Uh, and sometimes people are told that they failed the polygraph when they didn’t. I don’t think that’s the polygraph’s fault. I think that’s, again, an issue with the systemic, uh, a systemic issue with- Yeah

these, uh, old school techniques. Um- 

Zach Elwood: Like the more deceptive, uh, use I’ve seen of it where someone… The, the polygraph examiner basically says like, “I know you were lying,” you know, like 100%- 

Maria Hartwig: Yes … 

Zach Elwood: kind of framing of like, “We know based on that alone that you’re lying,” that kind of deceptive use. Yeah. 

Maria Hartwig: It’s, again, it can be used as, as part of the, a wide set of ruses.

Mm-hmm. The polygraph isn’t a monolithic thing. Uh, as I’m sure you know, there are multiple kinds of polygraph tests, different test protocols for different purposes based on different logics. So, um, I would, uh, possibly take up all of the time, uh, describing, uh, the complexities of the polygraph. Um- 

Christian Cory: Hmm … 

Maria Hartwig: it, it’s just very hard to say anything general about the polygraph test because there’s s- dif- different kinds of tests that rest on different, uh, premises and use different, uh, questions.

So- Hmm … uh, but do I, do I agree that it is, uh, uh, used, uh, to induce confessions? Absolutely. Hmm. Uh, especially, uh, the false feedback that- Hmm … you f- you failed. Mm-hmm. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, Christian, would– Do you think, um… I know it’s a broad, as Maria mentioned, it’s a broad topic that we could spend a long time on, but do you think, uh, polygraphs have their place in, um, science-based, uh, interrogation and, and investigation work?

Christian Cory: Well, I think they have their place in investigations. Um, but y- like Maria said, if it’s, if it’s just a, if it’s a ruse, then I would agree with the question that, uh, yeah, if they’re gonna fail this no matter what and we’re gonna drive for a confession in this case, then, um, it’s, it’s like you said, a cudgel- 

Zach Elwood: Hmm

Christian Cory: for that. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Um, I wanted to pivot to the, um, the behavior, the non-verbal behavior especially aspect. And as you both know that I’ve devoted a good amount of time on this podcast to talking about some of the, uh, bad and downright egregiously, uh, wrong and distorted information that people share about using non-verbal behavior.

And I think in my view, it can range all the way from well-meaning and kind of understandable uses of it to just straight up charlatan claims about like what you can do with, uh, you know, non-verbal things in the interrogation room or elsewhere. But, uh, I’m curious what, uh, what, what comes to mind for what you’re combating with the Aletheia project and with your work in general, Maria, uh, on that, uh, on that use of non-verbal behavior in, in, uh, law enforcement interrogation settings?

Maria Hartwig: It’s a consistent, uh, and chronic beast to grapple with, um, and it’s a constant fight. Uh, um, what I w- what I mean with fight here is There is, there are so many, uh, training programs, uh, people, books, uh, that claim to be, um, informative about nonverbal behavior and deception. Uh, so it’s a, a, a game of Whac-A-Mole in, in, in some sense.

Uh, this, this pseudoscience is highly problematic. Hmm. Uh, it– nonverbal behavior draws, uh, attention away from what’s more important, which is the content of the statement. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: Mm-hmm. And, I mean, I, I– there’s so much, uh, that could be said about this, but- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. It’s a big, uh, big… Obviously, we could spend many, many days on this, yeah.

Maria Hartwig: Yes. Uh, I think the one point I wanna make, I’m happy to answer more questions, of course, but, uh, I think one of the reasons why it’s such a persistent, uh, uh, delusion that we can read, um, body language in, uh, an inherently sci- pseudoscientific term, um, we want to believe that. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: Um, it, uh, makes us feel good, I think- Hmm

uh, to think that If somebody’s lying, it’s going to show and, uh, the lies are going to be detectable. It fits with our notion of the world as being a fair and just place. Uh, so the idea that somebody can tell you an awful lie straight to your face and you can’t tell, uh, it’s not an idea that we’re comfortable with, even if it’s true.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I think the other main, uh, distorted, uh, thinking that, that leads to people wanting to embrace these ideas is, you know, we all know that people in everyday life can behave in anxious ways, so the thinking goes like, “Oh, well, maybe we can read these anxious behaviors and they can tell us something in these interrogation settings or whatever.”

But I think the fundamental flaw there, and I’m curious if you agree, Kristian, the fundamental flaw is th- is that these are au- already high-stakes, tension-producing scenarios. So there’s an assortment of reasons whether they’re anxious throughout or whether they get anxious about a specific question.

There’s all sorts of reasons why somebody who’s innocent and has nothing to hide or may not, in any case, may not be the, uh, the per- person they’re looking for can have reason to be anxious. I think that’s the fundamental flaw because you often hear people defending these ideas saying like, “Well, we’re not claiming that we’re reading them lying.

We’re, we’re claiming that we’re gonna use their anxiety in some way to, to, to, to deduce what they’re thinking, which may include lying,” right? But I think the fundamental flaw is like there’s just so many reasons somebody can be anxious in these high-stakes settings. But I’m curious if you agree with that, Kristian.

Christian Cory: Well, yeah. I remember a time a detective came out of the interview room and, uh, another- he’s approached by somebody else who was watching the interview and said, “You know, she crossed her arms right when you brought up…” And he goes, “Yeah, ’cause it’s absolutely freezing in there.” And he, he just walked off.

And, uh, we had a, we had a couple interview rooms that were never comfortable for the season. Um, but, but what is it, right? And, uh, just a kind of a fun, fun fact about me, uh, I don’t know if you know this, but I have the same batting average as many Major League, uh, hitters when I was growing up, right? It’s like, well, 

Zach Elwood: why 

Christian Cory: didn’t you 

Zach Elwood: get- Is this a lie?

I’m just kidding. 

Christian Cory: No. 

Zach Elwood: I thought I was, I thought I was supposed to deduce a lie or something. Oh, 

Christian Cory: man. 

Zach Elwood: I’m just, I’m just kidding. 

Christian Cory: You detected it. You detected it 100%, right? 

Zach Elwood: No. 

Christian Cory: But, but you detected it. Um, what’s the difference between myself and these really great hitters? Why wasn’t I called up to the majors?

Well, the difference is, is we kept, uh, Major League Baseball kept tri- track of how many times these guys missed, right? And there’s the problem. It’s always, “Hey, I got a cue. I, I, I found a liar and found out later and, and, and, uh, I was right.” But you never talk about the times you miss. 

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Christian Cory: And that’s, that’s, that’s one of those things is like, well, are you near perfect?

Well, almost perfect. But what’s your, what’s your base rate on insert the cue here? 

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Christian Cory: Uh, ’cause we’re told by these lie wizards that they’re near perfect, and then they’ll train us how to be near perfect or whatever. In- insert your authority there. I used to be a homicide detective. I was from a three-letter government agency.

I, uh- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm … was, you know, you insert what- whatever appeal from authority you want there But nobody keeps track of their misses. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. 

Christian Cory: And nobody, nobody has any idea what their batting average is, and that’s, that’s the thing. Now, I said my batting average earlier was 1,000. When I ask people, I said, “How– who is testifying to this stuff in court?”

And nobody raises their hand. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Christian Cory: Uh- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I think, I think, uh- I 

Christian Cory: just- 

Zach Elwood: Oh, go ahead. 

Christian Cory: I j- I just don’t see it as informative, and I would ask, you know, my, my detectives that if you wanna go to this training, are you able to do an evidence disclosure plan? Do you know how to ask, uh, elicit free narratives?

Do you know how to ask neutral questions? Uh, what are your objectives for this interview? Have you fully planned? But then you’re gonna go in there and look for microexpressions or neuro-linguistic programming? 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. 

Christian Cory: It lines rarely a yes/no proposition, so. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I mean, I think, uh, the thing that stands out to me, uh, I was recently rereading Navarro’s first book, the one that, you know, got– was his main one that he sold a lot of copies.

I, what is it? “What Everybody Is Saying.” “

Christian Cory: What Everybody Is Saying.” 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I was, I’m, uh, I like to focus on what are the, what are the practical anecdotes that you can pull. What are, what are people saying that you can actually do, right? And when you look at a lot of these, these works from people, I just…

There’s, like, a lack of, like, where, where did you actually apply this? Because you would think if it was actually useful, you would have, like, a smorgasbord of, uh, anecdotes to pull from, like, very specific examples. But the fact is, you don’t really have that. You have, like, a few, like, to me, claims, a few, a handful of claims about, like, amazing things that were done.

But, like, when you actually think about those examples, it’s like there’s a number of reasons why you wouldn’t use those approaches and, like, most people wouldn’t be good at reading those amazing, you know, examples that they give. So just to say, yeah, the… I’m always focused on, yeah, where, where are the practical anecdotes?

They– You would think if this was so powerful, they would be all over the place, and you just don’t see those specific anecdotes. But, um, that’s just my observation. But I, I wanted to ask- Or this, this is what I think a lot, and I’m curious to get both of your takes on it. I think the other reason that these things can be hard to talk about and why people can perceive a lot more stuff in the non-verbal, a lot, a lot more importance in the non-verbal area, is because I think it’s fundamentally hard for people to separate the non-verbal behavior from the content of what people are saying.

So, for example, say you’re an interrogator, you’re talking to someone, and their story doesn’t add up, you know, getting back to what they say is the most important thing. And so their story’s not adding up, and along with that, you’re, you’re noticing some non-verbal anxie- clues of anxiety, right? And, uh, and so I think that leads some people, some practitioners to think like, “Oh, they were acting so strange,” like, “I noticed that they were acting so strange.”

But I think the thing is, if you replaced what they said with much more reasonable and non-suspicious content, and you only had their non-verbal, I don’t think those people, the practitioners wouldn’t clue into the non-verbal as much e- because they’d be thinking like, “Well, their story makes sense, so, uh, you know, uh, uh, maybe they were just nervous.”

And so the fact that, you know, they’re basically combining the meta level of all of these different things, including what they say, which, you know, I think we’d agree that’s the most important thing, and it, and it’s leading them to falsely perceive that, “Oh, there’s something to this non-verbal stuff because I’m– when I do get suspicious of people, I’m noticing these other things that, that are in the mix,” right?

But I’m curious what you think of that, Maria, as far as the difficulty that even the practitioners, the, the law enforcement professionals can… The reasons why they can think like, “Oh, there is a lot to this non-verbal stuff. I see it all the time when I see signs of anxiety.”

Maria Hartwig: Non– There’s– It’s very hard to be silent non-verbally, so there’s always something to interpret, um, and there’s always something to project something on. Uh, non-verbal behavior is highly ambiguous. Uh, words, uh, as opposed to body language in, in ordinary language, words have more or less fixed meaning. If I say car, you know what I mean.

If I do that, you don’t know what that means. So, uh, non-verbal behavior is always present, um, meaning, uh, it, it– you can, again, always, uh, form a judgment based on it. Um, and if you subscribe to these beliefs, which many, many people do, that, uh, non-verbal behavior, uh, tells us, uh, the truth, um, then again, there’s an ongoing stream of this behavior that you can interpret, uh, to your heart’s content.

Uh- Related to Christian’s point about batting averages and, and counting misses, uh, in reality, that there’s no ground truth. We do not know in a given case whether that statement was deceptive or not. Um, so I think, uh

I think you’re being too kind when you’re, uh, suggesting that it’s, that p- uh, an, uh, an im-im-implausible or, or f- uh, funky story will influence people to think that the body language nonverbal behavior is also dubious. If anything, I think Nonverbal impressions drive perceptions of the statement. 

Zach Elwood: Oh, yeah. 

Maria Hartwig: I think, yeah.

And if, if you’re a believer in- 

Zach Elwood: Right … 

Maria Hartwig: uh, in that human beings, uh, can be read. Now, uh, uh, we read people all the time, um, try to infer, uh, how they feel, uh, what they’re thinking, et cetera, on an ongoing basis in, in social life. Um, and we’re not completely, uh, operating, um, at chance level when it comes to reading others, but consistently we, uh, we vastly overestimate our ability to read, uh, nonverbal behavior.

Zach Elwood: Especially in high stakes. There’s a big difference between our social situations versus like a high stakes anxiety producing situation. Yes. Yeah, yeah. 

Maria Hartwig: There, there is. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, the, the real issue with, uh, deception and nonverbal behavior is that there is no signal of deception. There’s no verb- nonverbal signal- Mm.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm … 

Maria Hartwig: of deception. 

Zach Elwood: It’s not a language. Yeah. It’s not a, it’s not a body language. 

Maria Hartwig: It’s not a language. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, uh, there is nothing there to detect. 

Zach Elwood: Mm. 

Maria Hartwig: Cues to deception, uh, are faint at best. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Um, Christian, I’m curious, uh, I mean, when I, when I’m thinking of, uh, when I’ve gotten in conversations about this, including with law enforcement professionals, I, it seems to me like s- say people, say an interrogator does get…

‘Cause we all know that everyone’s gonna make their reads of, you know, what someone is thinking. Uh, in, in practice, they’re all gonna direct their, uh, line of questions in various ways depending on how the conversation goes. But, um, if we were thinking of like the, the most you could do with nonverbal behavior, like if you, if you thought about how if there was a, a useful, uh, use of it, a practical use of it, it tend, it seems to me that the u- the main use it could occasionally be used for is like, I asked a question and somebody suddenly seemed much more nervous, and so you ask a few more questions.

That seems to me to be like maybe the, the limit of what you could do with it. But I’m curious, i- is that, is that what you would see as like the upper theoretical band on somebody actually using it? You know, just, and not, not reaching a con- a firm conclusion about anything, but just asking a few more questions.

Christian Cory: Yeah, that’s usually the out. Quite frankly, that’s usually the out a lot of these instructors use when they’re teaching. Um, well, I just do a tad, then I ask more questions. It’s, it’s signaling something. But I would say that there’s a lot. I’ve had interdiction guys come up and talk to me about this while they’re teaching body language here, and I had a guy once that was nervous and then– or I had a guy in the interview room and he was Do an XYZ.

Think about all the other data points you have. You have their route of travel, you have that the plates don’t match, you have that the story couldn’t make sense with what you know. But I think we come back to body language and, and put so mu- there’s so much information there that, uh, um, it’s gotta be true.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. It’s like a sexy, it’s a sexy topic that gets all this attention when we know, I mean, most people know that all the information is, is, uh, or, you know, all the useful information is, is elsewhere. Yeah. 

Christian Cory: Yeah. I was, uh, I tell Marie, she’s heard me say it a million times, I think it’s more of a lesson in, in business school than it is in psychology.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Christian Cory: How to, how to sell classes and how to sell, uh- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Because it is a sexy, in-demand topic. I mean, I think that’s, you know, that, that’s what accounts for so much of it, all the– I mean, I see all these low-quality books on Amazon that have a bunch of sales and, I mean, there’s a huge demand for it.

I, even, what comes to mind is I, I was looking at, uh, Amazon reviews on Tim Levine’s book about, you know, his, his book on deception detection, which is great, “Duped.” Uh, and they’re you know, one of the one-star reviews is, like, somebody angry about the book. They’re, you know, they’re like, “All these people writing all of these, you know, these law enforcement people saying there’s so much to behavior.

They can’t be wrong. I’ll listen to the, uh, practitioners, you know, doing the, the actual work.” But, which I think it helps explain why there is so much demand because there is this perception that somewhere someone’s doing amazing things with this, uh, with this nonverbal stuff, you know, that even, even if the examples of what’s happening are few and far between.

But there is this wide perception, and people wanna think that they can get that special skill for whatever, you know, uh, application. Yeah. 

Christian Cory: Yeah. I’d, I’d- I don’t know, and, and, and we’re supposed to apply it to situations where we’re gonna change somebody’s life. We have to get it right. We have to put it in affidavits.

I don’t see it going into affidavits. And, um, I, I, again, like you said, it comes down to, hey, we, we wanna prescribe more to it. We wanna have this skill, uh, because people are always like, “Oh, you’re a cop. You know how to read liars.” You just end up dealing with a lot of liars, I think, but we all do on a daily basis.

And, uh, I, I just, yeah, I just think it’s– we like the idea of it more than it’s actually useful. 

Zach Elwood: Well, to your– When I interviewed, uh, I mean, I’ve interviewed a few law enforcement people who said basically, like, they never used, you know, behavior in, i-in a way that made a difference in interrogation. And Eric Robinson, a retired FBI guy I interviewed, he, he said even in the cases, like even in extreme cases where you very much can get a read that something is going on, it’s like, what is the use of that?

Because you still have to get the information, right? He g- he gave an example of showing a picture to someone, and, and this guy basically, like, bowed his head in an extreme way, and then that’s an extreme reaction. And it’s like, even if you were sure that that meant a lot, it’s like, what do you do with that?

Like, you already probably had evidence to pursue him as a suspect anyway, right? So it’s like, what, what, what good do-does that do? You’re not gonna put it in court that he bowed his head or whatever it is, you know? So it’s like even in the, e-even in those cases where it makes you confident, it’s like, how often do you not also have a bunch of evidence pointing in, you know, a good amount of evidence pointing that direction, you’re, you’re pursuing that anyway.

So that’s, that’s what occurs to me. But, uh, I don’t know if you have anything to respond to that, Maria, before we go on. Y- 

Maria Hartwig: I, uh, earlier you said that, um, I, I totally agree it’s very sexy and everybody, uh, likes it, and the notion that if I buy this book, I too can be, um, an expert in this stuff. Uh, but and then you said even though, uh, we know that it most of it’s, uh, junk.

Uh, I, I think most of us don’t. 

Zach Elwood: Right. Yeah. 

Maria Hartwig: Uh, the You, you have to be, uh, quite well-versed in the scientific literature, uh, to know that the– that so many of these claims are untrue. Um, ironically, people are truth biased, so they’re inclined, they’re credulous, uh, and- 

Zach Elwood: That’s a 

Maria Hartwig: good point. Yes. Um, so I don’t think it, uh, occurs to people that, uh, a book written by a former law enforcement professional would just be full of shit.

Zach Elwood: Right. And multiple books, you know, and multiple YouTube channels, multiple books of so-called experts, you know, the best- Yeah … behavior experts in the planet on the behavior panel, you know. Uh, yeah, there is this truth bias thing. I, I mean, I see it all the time in the comments when I’ve done my work on behavior panel and Chase Hughes related content.

People are like: “Wait, not all, all these people can’t be, you know, telling us lies about these things,” you know? Like, there is this very major truth bias aspect. Uh, I should– I wanted to ask you, Maria, because the reason I initially wanted to talk to you was about your, uh, your work on microexpressions and your views on microexpressions.

So maybe you could summarize your view. Uh, uh, I, I was– Even when I first learned about them years ago, I was skeptical because they flew in the face of my own understanding of, uh, people’s behavior. But I’m curious if you can summarize your view on microexpressions and if there is anything there, and if there’s any practical use of studying them.

Maria Hartwig: I can sum, I can do that, that very quickly. Uh, there is nothing there. Uh, there has never been an empirical demonstration even of the existence of microexpressions. Uh, there has been no demonstration that They’re indicators of deception, again, the, because, m- m- that they barely seem to exist. Mm-hmm. Um, now, uh, I haven’t conducted much, uh, research, uh, or any research on microexpressions other than evaluate, uh, Ekman’s microexpression training tool, uh, where, uh, participants watched.

They were either received this training or not, and they viewed, uh, a variety of lies and truths, some of them very high stake, uh, some of them laboratory, uh, derived. Uh, no effect. Um, uh, I haven’t studied, uh, microexpressions ’cause I just… There’s no reason to think- Mm-hmm … that they, that they exist. Mm-hmm.

And again, the, the little empirical data there is, uh, suggests it’s, to the extent that they exist, extremely low base rate phenomenon. Right. Right. So, um- 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. There was one major study that, uh… I know there was a few studies, but there was one major study in particular, I can’t remember who it was or when it was, but there was one major study that basically said, “Yeah, couldn’t find any, any significant correlation with anything with the microexpressions.”

Are 

Maria Hartwig: you thinking of Porter and TenBrink? 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, that’s the one. Yeah. The logical 

Maria Hartwig: science. Yes. Uh, so if I recall correctly, they analyzed 647 frames, uh, and found 14 partial. They found zero full-blown microexpressions out of those, uh, uh, 600 something. Um, and 14 partial microexpressions occurring either in the lower half or the upper half, but n- none of these full-blown, um, full-fledged expressions that Ekman, uh, was talking about.

And they occurred with the same frequency when people were displaying ge- genuinely what they felt. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So- Mm-hmm … to the extent that they even exist, they’re not associated w- only with deception. It’s- Right. 

Zach Elwood: Right … 

Maria Hartwig: um, meaningless, uh, facial twitches that, again, attract attention away from what’s more im- important, which is- Mm-hmm

the, the statement. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. I’m curious. Yeah, on that front, I mean, I, I often, when people ask me, because I worked on Poker Tells and because I do this podcast, I often get people asking me, “Like, what, what’s the best-” uh, work on behavior. And I honestly, I was thinking about that recently. I was like, aside from like Tim Levine’s book, “Duped,” I don’t, I don’t really recommend anything when it comes to like general reading behavior, but I’m, uh, kind of books.

I just don’t– I think so many of them are bad. They’re written by people with, uh, incentives to sell you some, uh, distorted and exaggerated information. But I’m curious on, on deducing, uh, learnings that we might get from what people say, do either of you have, uh, recommendations on resources or books that relate to, you know, reading, uh, tr- trying to put some deductions together about what people are saying or what they’re not saying?

Does anything come to mind in that realm for you?

Maria Hartwig: There’s a very good book called “Mindwise” by Nicholas Epley. 

Zach Elwood: Hmm. 

Maria Hartwig: Uh, that is a popular scientific overview of, um, a vast literature on reading people. Hmm. Uh, it’s very good, very, uh, uh, it’s anchored i- in science ’cause- Hmm … Epley is a scientist. 

Zach Elwood: Nice. 

Maria Hartwig: Uh, that’s a very, very good, uh, overview of, uh, the extent to which we can’t read each other.

Zach Elwood: A quick note about something kind of funny and also very irritating to me. I recorded this talk with Maria and Christian weeks ago and just now happened to look up the book Maria recommended, titled Mindwise. I found out that that book has the same cover concept that I’d been working on the last few weeks for my own work-in-progress book, which will be titled Read People For Real. The concept involves the old illusion where two face silhouettes are on the left and right facing inward to each other, creating a vase-looking object between them. I’d had the idea to create the face silhouette color to be the exact same shade as the background color on Amazon, so as to create an interesting effect, and that book Mindwise also did the same thing. Anway, I just wanted to share this publicly, in case people saw my public posts the last few weeks and thought that I’d stolen the idea from Mindwise. I guess the lesson here is that if you’re creating a book cover, do a lot of research on what’s already been done; I tried to do that by looking at a bunch of books, but I maybe should have looked even more. It would have been nice if I had immediately checked out Mindwise a few weeks ago when Maria mentioned it; I would have maybe saved myself weeks of thinking about this, and paying more $1300 in design work. Still a chance i might use the design, but not feeling as good about it. Anyway back to the talk. 

Zach Elwood: Mm. Mm-hmm. Do you have any, uh, recommendations on that front that come to mind, Christian? 

Christian Cory: No, I think mine would be more in the realm of, of interviewing and, and getting the statement out there, um, uh, not specifically on non-verbals. I, I don’t even think it should be in the same literature as, like, interview and interrogation, but it’s been placed there and we’ve been– Now we have to deal with it.

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Christian Cory: Um, and, uh, so yeah, that’d be mine. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Um, well this has been great. I, I appreciate both of you coming on here. Um, it was very interesting, and I think people will like this. Uh, do you wanna, any of you, uh, either of you wanna say anything else before we wrap up? 

Maria Hartwig: Join Project Aletheia 

Christian Cory: Hmm. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I’ll share the website, uh, make sure people have that, uh, share that prominently on the, on the episode.

Yeah. 

Christian Cory: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, uh, one of the thing we advocate for is we, we wanna get these science-based interviewing techniques in the hand of practitioners today. Uh, because what we’re told to believe, whether it’s about non-verbals or how we interview and interrogate, uh, folks, is we have to believe that we can- we can’t have an– we haven’t had an upgrade for well over 50 years, and we can’t have an upgrade ’cause the old ways are still good.

And the final point I’ll make is it’s not just about false confessions. A lot of these same techniques, and I’ve written about this, are turned onto victims, the credibility assessments. Uh, so you’re having false recantations as well, um, whether or not a witness has credibility. So it, it, it has effects across, um, interviewing.

Hmm. And, uh, I think that’s where it’s just so problematic in that, uh, this is not how we should be interviewing folks. 

Zach Elwood: Okay. Thank 

Maria Hartwig: you both. And it’s connected to that. Sorry, one last point. 

Zach Elwood: No, go ahead. Yeah. 

Maria Hartwig: Um, Christian mentioned false confessions. They’re the worst, uh, possible outcome. Um, but, uh, short of that, uh, there’s so many problems with these old techniques, the legacy techniques generating false information, um, just corrupting the quality of the investigation.

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.

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 false-gurus (e.g., Teal Swan, Keith Raniere, L Ron Hubbard, many more). 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 short essay about this topic, go here (I put that piece only on Aemula because I recommend people sign up for Aemula and support them; learn why).

TRANSCRIPT

Zach Elwood: What you’ll learn in this video will shock and disturb you…

(Chase Hughes clips…)

Dr. Phil: “I’m talking to Chase Hughes. You’ve looked at how a lot of these psy-ops that have been used in the military, have been used to break down uh the enemy in times of war, are actually being used for pretty clandestine ways to influence what’s going on in American society today.”

Shawn Ryan: “Kirk was just assassinated… So, I mean, is that a psy-op? Is the Epstein thing a psy-op? Ukraine? China?”

Chase Hughes: “All psy-ops.”

Chase Hughes on Joe Rogan: “it gets deeper… there are step-by-step programs they

have for creating a Manchurian candidate”

Chase Hughes: “the CIA is on record creating manchurian candidates that can assassinate quote american officials.”

Shawn Ryan: “Do you think we’re in a false reality?”

Chase: “I think this is a simulation. “while you are in the DMT state, you get to close to the wall and you can see code that looks kind of like alien writing…”

Chase: “This is reality being replaced layer by layer. There are six layers and you’ve only seen the first one.”

Chase: “There’s a reason that you wake up with dread and blame yourself for it. It was designed.” 

Chase: “That is the program running.”

Chase: “Fear is the easiest way to control human beings.”

Zach Elwood: What you’ll learn in this video will shock and disturb you. Not because it exposes some secret, sinister government program. Not because it reveals some hidden psychological warfare system. But because it shows something much simpler.

It shows how paranoia is manufactured. It shows how a person can build influence and gain millions of followers by cultivating and spreading fear and paranoia. And make a lot of money in the process…

The disturbing thing about this is just how simple the equation is: Many of us are anxious, for understandable reasons. Just as many people have always been anxious. Our fear makes us easy to manipulate.

This video is about a man named Chase Hughes. 

[clips of different podcast hosts mentioning Chase Hughes name… “the great Chase Hughes”]

But it’s about something much bigger than one person. It is about how modern cult leaders operate. How narcissistic gurus build power. How they make the world, and the people in it, seem alien and terrifying.

And how they position themselves as the solution. The key to the puzzle. Because once someone convinces you the world is full of hidden manipulation… that dark forces are shaping everything around you… And that reality itself is false… You’ll probably want to follow the person who claims to see through it all… who sees through the false, and threatening system around us. The one who can help guide you through this terrifying maze. 

And that’s where the con begins.

So let’s look at how deceptive gurus try to manipulate you in the modern age…

Step One: Establish Authority

If you want to manipulate people… You first need them to look up to you. You need status. You need authority. You need mystique. That is true of cult leaders. And it’s true of con men. And many of these people share the same basic problem: They desperately want widespread admiration. But they haven’t done anything to earn that admiration. 

So they manufacture it. They lie.  They inflate their life stories. They exaggerate their experience. They claim to have amazing knowledge… mysterious powers. 

[Chase Hughes quote about reading everything about people… having a super power…]

Narcissistic con artists and cult leaders often lie… but they’ll more often use ambiguous language to deceive… they’ll imply things that are not technically false… But are deeply misleading.

For example… Chase Hughes claims his behavior and psychology related work is “Trusted by elite military teams”… “Trusted by CIA operatives.”

On the surface, that sounds official. But note its ambiguity.

There’s no evidence his behavior and influence-related ideas have been used in any official capacity by military or government organizations. In fact, there’s much evidence against that claim. 

[Chase Hughes answering question about getting deep into behavior and psychology work professionally: “I wouldn’t say it was ever in a professional way…”]

Maybe a few military people bought his products. Maybe a single CIA employee once attended a seminar. That might be enough for Chase, if he was pressured in a legal setting, to say “see, my work was used and ‘trusted by’ such people.” 

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 the US Army which is the Special Operations Command. I’ve trained a lot of the US Navy leaders nowadays.”

Again… The deceptive impression Chase seeks to create is that he did psychology- or behavior-related work with those agencies. But Chase was a Navy quartermaster; someone dealing with ship operations and equipment.  But if pressed… he might say “I did sometimes work with intel officers and other such people.” Maybe he even trained some group on something related to ship navigation or equipment. 

Chase’s pattern of deception about his life and products goes back years. In 2008, Chase was trying to fool people into thinking his vitamin supplements were technologically advanced and widely used… 

[quote from his old Redshift vitamin supplement website claiming it was used by “all branches of armed forces”]

Maybe Chase had a few friends in different armed forces branches take his vitamin supplement, so he could say “see, I wasn’t lying; it is used by all branches of the armed forces” Or maybe it was just a straight-up lie. 

But in any case, ambiguous language is a con man’s best friend. And ambiguity is constant in Chase Hughes’ storytelling. 

He refers to military work. Psychological operations. Intelligence environments. Dangerous situations. Life-and-death scenarios. But the descriptions are vague. Hard to pin down.

[Morgan Nelson clip saying that Chase is a black beret, a special forces member, and an intelligence expert, with Chase talking about the dangers of his work]

[Chase Hughes life story interview, where he says none of his deployments were combat deployments]

One convenient thing about claiming intelligence work. Espionage. Classified operations. Is that it’s all…Secret. By definition. 

Do you know about the case of Wayne Simmons? Simmons was a guest on Fox News for more than a decade, claiming to be a CIA operative and intel expert. But he was a fraud. 

[Wayne Simmons clip of some sort…Include info about him being on Fox News for years]

Even those who suspected Simmons was a liar may have wondered, “maybe I can’t find details about him working with the CIA because his work was just so secret.”

Sometimes the claims are so vague and ambiguous that you are left doing the work.  You fill in the blanks. You imagine something elite. Something impressive. 

[clip from Chase talking about how ambiguous language: “And the more vague I am with some details, the more you’re going to insert your own details into what I’m selling, or pitching”]

And of course, in many cases, the claims are simply false. 

[Chase’s claims of being a neuroscientist, and having studied post-grad at Harvard and Duke]

This is especially true for Chase’s early claims,  when his quest for attention and fame was more desperate and less careful. 

[onscreen text: various false claims from Chase’s early site:

Claims: “his behavioral analysis of political debates and televised crime testimonies have become the new benchmark for over 29 United States media outlets.”

“The Behavioral Table of Elements … is being employed by government and corporate agencies nationwide, including the US government and FBI.”

“His published works on cult victim deprogramming and neurology-based hypnosis have changed the way many forensic and psychiatric practitioners conduct business.”]

One of the many areas he lies about is what’s possible with reading behavior and influencing others. He makes grandiose claims that fly in the face of basic facts of psychology and behavior.   

[clip of Chase claiming he has a “superpower” of reading people]

This episode won’t be a full cataloging of Chase’s many lies and exaggerations.  If you’re interested in more detail about his deceptions, go to whoischasehughes.com and look at the links there.

Do you know who Frank Abagnale is? His memoir was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s movie Catch Me If You Can.

Many people still believe this story is real. A brilliant con artist. A master manipulator. A good guy who never really hurt anyone. 

So the legend goes. 

But those are all lies. Frank Abagnale was not a genius fraudster. He was a small-time criminal whose crimes were not impressive. The truth is that he simply made up large swaths of his life. Bald-faced lies.

The truth about Abagnale’s life and his many lies are detailed in the 2020 book The Greatest Hoax on Earth. Yes, Frank Abagnale was a successful con artist; he conned people into believing he was an amazing con artist.

Most people just trust that people are who they say they are. This is how Abagnale succeeded in this con.  Deception researcher Tim Levine calls this the Truth Default Theory. By default… we believe… unless we have a good reason not to.  We’re just not used to people who lie so directly to us about so many things; we don’t have good defenses for it.  

And once popularity is established, the con and lies become even harder to dislodge. For example, because Steven Spielberg made a movie based on Abagnale’s life, many assume the story must be real. Surely someone like Spielberg would have vetted such claims before making a movie, right?

But the truth is, many people don’t vet.

In the same way, popular podcasts like Joe Rogan and Diary of a CEO have promoted Chase Hughes without seeming to care about his many lies. Also, many people seem more focused on getting clicks and attention with exciting content; the truth seems to take a backseat. Maybe that was a factor in Spielberg’s decision, too; I don’t know. 

What this means that if you can fool a few influential people, and get them to promote you… You can borrow credibility… at scale. You can start building the snowball of influence, and get that ball rolling. And that will convince others, who convince others, and so on and so on…

[clips of Chase Hughes on Diary of a CEO, and Joe Rogan…]

Keith Raniere, of NXIVM, knew all about borrowed authority. 

[clip from documentary The Vow about his impressive feats and abilities]

Most of his claims of impressive accomplishments were complete fiction. Raniere tried very hard to arrange an audience with the Dalai Lama. He knew that proximity to respected figures helps establish credibility. It didn’t matter what the Dalai Lama actually thought about Keith; the association would be worth its weight in gold. 

L. Ron Hubbard did the same thing. He exaggerated his military story. He painted himself as a heroic, accomplished war hero. But that was completely false. 

[clip from documentary Going Clear about his lies about military accomplishments, and his major mistakes in military]

Then he wrapped Scientology in military and naval imagery. Icons and symbols associated with seriousness and respect. Because appearance matters. Image matters. And for many people…The image is enough.

As Frank Abagnale shows us, once an impressive story spreads… It sticks. Even when the con artists’ many lies are exposed…The myth, the legend, can be firmly planted and hard to dislodge. 

And the con artist keeps running…trying to stay one step ahead of the truth. 

Step Two: Seem Deep and Wise

If you want to be perceived as an all-knowing guru…
You must appear to possess hidden knowledge.

But first… You just need to know some things. You don’t really need to know much. Just enough to sound competent. And the truth is: that’s a very low bar.

Any self-respecting con artist…can read a few Wikipedia pages. Pick up a few terms. A few basic facts. And suddenly… to someone who doesn’t know that domain… they can sound like an expert.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth… It’s just very easy to impress people. It’s easy to say things that sound impressive. It’s even easy to do things that make people think you are impressive. 

This is especially the case for wide-open areas like psychology, where sometimes someone just talking to someone else about their problems can lead to improvements… or at least seem in the short term to lead to improvements.  

[clip of Chase Hughes trainer Kisma Orbovich, kismaawake.com, praising Chase’s Avery program as possibly one of the greatest transformational tools in the world]

This is also the case for philosophy and spirituality, where there are just so many ideas and concepts and observations one can talk about… so many things one can say that can sound wise… or at least wise enough… 

The placebo effect plays a big role here, too; if we think someone is powerful and wise, we will sometimes fool ourselves into believing they have helped us in major ways…. 

[clips from The Deep End,  praising Teal Swan]

And once you see this basic fact, that it’s just easy to impress people, So many cons and frauds start to make more sense. Seeming smart and wise is the easy part. Impressing people is the easy part. The more difficult parts of becoming a faux guru come next…

If your ideas could be explained simply… if they could be contained in a short pamphlet… Nobody would need you. So you make the ideas seem complex. You stretch them out. You layer in terminology. Your own philosophy, your own frameworks… your own acronyms…

[clips of various models and acronyms from Chase Hughes, including acronyms from his pick-up artist book The Passport]

Those last two quotes come from Chase’s 2007 pick-up artist book The Passport. 

All these intricate-sounding concepts can easily sound advanced and sophisticated to people. But if you slow down, and think about what’s actually being said…You’ll notice that many of the ideas are extremely simple. But the simple ideas are wrapped in deep-sounding language

[Chase Hughes: “So there may be a benefit to spending time with nature, but I think there’s a deep and pathological flaw in that way of thinking. We are viewing ourselves as separate from nature to begin with.”]

Sometimes wise-sounding words, when examined closely, contain little to no meaning at all. Gordon Pennycook and colleagues studied what they called pseudo-profound bullshit. They showed people sentences that sounded deep… but were actually meaningless. Things like: “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.” Just impressive-sounding words arranged into a sentence. In those studies, many people rated those statements as profound.

“Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” That was from a social media post by spiritual guru Depak Chopra. 

There are many other angles to this. Did you know that research found that merely including a brain scan image can make people think that something is smarter and more credible?  

We can be easily tricked into perceiving something as smart and wise, no matter how mundane or confusing or pseudo-deep it really is…

Chase Hughes: “In the mind, we suffer the elements of hidden psychopathy. Our bodies go through the same decay into a similar state of disease. And I call this biopathy. Biopathy just reflects any species that’s adrift from their origin. It forfeits the innate wisdom of biology. It’s a term that just the word itself just kind of captures the profound loss of an unspoken language. It’s maybe the primal dialogue between DNA and the earth.”

Clip: “Wow, that’s really deep, jamie…”

If you want to seem deep and wise, it helps to talk a lot. Hours of lectures. Endless explanations. When someone talks confidently for long enough…They can start to feel like an authority. The truth is that, if someone just acts confidently and talks a lot, many of us will seem them as legitimate and competent. In today’s digital age, a spiritual leader’s sermons mainly happen online. YouTube videos. Podcasts. Live streams for the leader’s “inner circle”

An aspiring cult leader aimed to constantly release material…Over and over.

[clip: Chase talking about, if he were a cult leader, he’d aim to produce regular content to regularly create dopamine in audience]

And now there are new tools to help one seem deep. AI can generate long, deep-sounding scripts… In seconds. The tools available to con artists and aspiring gurus… Have never been more powerful.

[Chase: Since I was like ten, I’ve been obsessed with ancient texts. And I do mean obsessed. I read them and still read them like people read data reports. I compare all the versions and the translations, line by line comparisons… These are texts written thousands of miles apart, thousands of years apart with no way to influence each other. And yet somewhere between the lines, they’re all whispering the exact same message.”]

Step Three: Cultivate Fear

Now here’s the important part. If you watch a few Chase Hughes videos, a pattern quickly emerges. The world is filled with hidden manipulation. Everything is psychological warfare. So-called psy-ops surround us. Many newsworthy events around us, maybe even most, are secretly engineered.

[example clips]

On top of that, the nefarious people secretly in control are using mind control tactics…They’re brainwashing people…. 

[clips of Chase claiming widespread brainwashing and Manchurian candidate killers]

It doesn’t really matter… that there is no evidence for such assertions. What matters is that it sounds credible and scary. And if someone claims a background in military intelligence and psy-ops, such stories can seem credible.  There’s no evidence programs like MK-Ultra did anything impressive. Those operations were often immoral and creepy, yes, but they were ineffective in their attempts at gaining control of the human mind; 

[clip from historian Stephen Kinzer, about how there’s no evidence of MK Ultra mind control experiments being effective]

You might be thinking: “We don’t know… maybe such things are possible. Maybe someone somewhere did amazing mind control things and we haven’t learned about it yet. ” That may be true. All sorts of things might be possible.  But possibility is not evidence.

And it’s not a reason to believe specific claims— especially from someone with a history of deception.

And here’s the most important part:  once you start to believe these wild and false stories of mind control and psy-ops and manchurian candidates are true…. It becomes easier to believe That Chase Hughes can do such things… The crazier his claims about the world are… The more credible his grandiose claims about his mysterious abilities become…

All the psy-op and brainwashing stuff is scary enough. But it gets even scarier. The guru informs us that we’re living in a simulation. 

[clips about world being a simulation]

And this is not a metaphor…

[Chase: “This is not a metaphor”]

So many things around us, even things that would seem to most people quite banal and ordinary, are evidence of us living in a terrifying false world. 

Chase Hughes: “How is Walmart a simulation?… It’s not just a supermarket. It’s what this book refers to as a hypermarket. Everything becomes a sign. Everything’s a representation of something else. The produce is clean. It’s uniform. It almost appears artificial. You go to a farmers market, vegetables don’t look like that. So what’s natural is made into something simulated to reconstruct our expectations. But why do we have that expectation? Because we saw it in the media which was a simulation of that thing.”

[scary images of produce… twilight zone music….]

Chase Hughes: “So Disney World serves to camouflage that the rest of the world is also a stage. It’s also artificial. If you ask a random person to draw a picture of a princess, what will they draw? That’s our definition of real. That’s in your head. You define what a princess is based on a simulation…”

[Golden Girls: “ooh, I’m shaking”]

And it gets deeper. Even reality itself is false. The guru confidently proclaims that he has seen beyond the Matrix we reside in. 

[clips about Chase Hughes hanging out with Danny Goler and doing DMT and claiming to see code that shows we’re in a simulation]

[clip from Diary of a CEO, with Chase saying that dreams may be one level of reality, this is another, and the higher level is what you see on DMT]

It’s one thing to believe we might be in a simulation; obviously, that’s an idea, it’s a possibility. 

It’s another thing to claim to know it, and claim that you yourself have definitely seen beyond it. But such claims align with other grandiose and scary views that Chase trafficks in; whether we’re talking psy-ops, brainwashing, the news media, Walmart, Disney World, pretty much everything… the entire world is a false front, an illusion… where we are being controlled and manipulated by mysterious entities. 

Chase Hughes: “Psychedelics can really just rewire someone’s brain so fast.”

Step Four: Become the Savior

As they seek to manufacture authority and nurture paranoia and fear…. The aspiring guru positions themselves as the solution. They are the spiritual guide… the modern day shaman.  The only person who truly understands the confusing, often terrifying reality around us  

[Teal Swan quote about mental epidemics, people feeling lost, and waking up to unconsciousness]

In Chase Hughes’ content, that message appears repeatedly. He has rare, amazing insight into psychology and influence. He can decode and predict human behavior in a nearly god-like way. He is unrivaled in his understanding of all psychological ideas. He sees beyond the false reality around us. He can help people navigate the confusion and become more happy and real versions of themselves. He can help people escape the evil Matrix. 

[example quotes from his videos]

He also knows how to heal major diseases. He claims to have made unique breakthroughs using his own regimen of various drugs and compounds… which includes melatonin suppositories, methylene blue… and psilocybin, which is the active compound found in hallucinogenic mushrooms. He encourages his inner circle to take psychedelics, and also serves as a guide for them as they take their psychedelic journey

He is truly all-knowing, a master of all realms. 

Once people come to see him as a true spiritual guru… A new dynamic emerges. Trust. Love. Eventually dependence. The people feel an overwhelming urge to seek out the guru’s wisdom, to be close to him. 

This pull is strongest for the most vulnerable among us, those who have suffered the most….

[Teal Swan: “How many of you are depressed?” Many raise their hands]

As those in pain and those seeking secret knowledge strive to get close to the guru… The transformation is complete… A false prophet is born.

Step Five: Love Bomb

Another classic cult tactic. Love bombing. This is when leaders flood their followers with warmth, praise, and reassurance. They tell people they are special. That they are good. That they are noticing deep things. That they are close to the truth. That they are loved as they are. All this creates a bond.

In traditional cults this would often happen in person. Online, it happens through language. You can see versions of it in Chase Hughes’ content.

• “You are complete”
• “You were never missing something. You were taught to forget.”
• “You were never fully erased, only hidden.”
• “Here’s the truth they cannot delete. Behind that fog, you are still in there.”
• “Your real life is still here. It’s waiting for you under the noise.”

He seeks to communicate: The world out there and the people in it are scary and corrupt, seeking to control you. But unlike them, I care about you. I see you as real, as complete, as good. With me, you are safe. I am on your side. I care about you. I love you. 

[Chase quotes…]

• “Love is the only thing that’s real.” 
• “Love you, take care.” 
• “Love you, take care…”
• “One love.” 
• “Love ya”

Step Six: Always. Be. Closing

The deceptive guru will almost always be trying to get you into the funnel and sell you something.
Courses. Workshops. Training programs. Exclusive hangouts. Retreats. And these offerings are often expensive. Sometimes thousands of dollars. Sometimes tens of thousands. [clips of Hughes’ resort offering]

The money is nice. But it’s not the real goal. The real goal… is to be adored. To be seen as exceptional. Because there’s an emptiness inside. Living in the real world, for some people, can feel claustrophobic and terrifying. Being their actual ordinary self is too depressing, too stagnant; it feels like death. So they search for validation in dream worlds… worlds in which they’re an amazing genius, worshipped by all.

They seek what has been called… narcissistic supply. They desperately need people who embrace and reflect back to them their grandiose delusions. 

And actually, the money isn’t just a nice perk; it’s a powerful part of the strategy. Because once people pay…They tend to commit. Once people invest…They’re more likely to believe. The more is invested–whether that’s an investment of money, or just substantial time and attention–
the harder it is to step back. The harder it is to admit… “I was wrong.” Invested customers lean in. And rationalize. And defend. Even as the red flags grow. 

That’s how people get stuck in such strange and dangerous funnels… traps that seem so obvious from the outside. The deeper in they go… the harder it can be to tell what’s real. 

The Irony of Paranoia

There is a deep irony in all of this. Fear of manipulation can make you easier to manipulate. Fear of control can make you easier to control. If you start to believe that dark, all-powerful systems are controlling reality… You may become desperate for someone who claims to understand the system. You may run straight toward the person creating the fear in the first place. That is the trap.

And this basic idea is used by many gurus and leaders in what is called the “conspirituality” category: people who mix superficially positive seeming spiritual ideas with conspiracy-minded, paranoid thinking. 

These people are plentiful; again, it’s easy to see why; the world is especially stressful these days; we have a hard time understanding the people and events around us; so many things seem alien and threatening. In our modern, highly mediated environment, we have an understandable craving for authenticity and realness. This is fertile ground for both spiritual and paranoid content.  

But the truth of the world is far less dramatic and scary.  Nobody is “in charge.” The world is not run by a tiny group of people enacting flawless psychological plans. The world is messy. Fragmented. Chaotic. Often incompetent. Governments and institutions, and the people in them, are clumsy. People disagree constantly.

People who do shady things… Struggle to keep them secret. Even small conspiracies fall apart. Leaks. Mistakes. Disagreements. In the modern world, recording and monitoring of all sorts are ubiquitous, making it even harder than in the past to get away with things.  It’s hard enough to coordinate even a small plot… Now imagine trying to coordinate something massive. Involving many people. It’s far harder than people think.

Sure, some plots happen; there are always people plotting, but nothing close to the scale and success rate as people like Chase would have you believe.  

But the paranoid view… feels good. It’s emotionally satisfying. It turns chaos… Into a dramatic story. It turns complexity… Into good versus evil. It makes you feel like you see the truth. Like you’re one of the few… Who really understands what’s going on. And it’s easy to look around and think… “Everyone else are being sheep. They’re so easily fooled.”

But sometimes when you think everyone else are being sheep, you’re the one being the sheep; you’re the one embracing a story that feels satisfying and that’s widely embraced by many people, but that is false and naive.

The truth is much simpler and more banal. The world is just a bunch of people…Doing people things.

The Real Psychological Operation

The real psy-op isn’t some huge malicious system. It’s not some shadowy mastermind group creating a false reality around you. It’s much closer than that. The call is coming from inside the house. 

It’s the false expert content. The paranoid content. The guru content.

The formula is simple: 

• Claim special knowledge.
• Amplify fear.
• Present yourself as the solution.

It’s not a secret intelligence program. It’s a sales funnel. And, for those unfortunate enough to be pulled in closer and closer to the guru’s orbit… his inner circle, it’s a manipulation funnel. A funnel of control. A funnel of chaos and disorder. 

[planets spiraling around a black hole]

Critical Quotes About Chase

Many people have reached out to me with stories about their negative dealings with Chase Hughes. I’ll include a few relevant quotes here. These people all wanted to remain anonymous, mainly because they were afraid of Chase or his acolytes taking vindictive actions against them. 

The following quote comes from a former member of Chase’s inner circle: 

[“Chase profits from blatantly toying with very vulnerable people. His manipulations have psychologically and financially hurt people and that deserves to be answered for in court. It’s a full-fledged cult. Ironically, he is the dark and warped manipulator that he warns against!”

The next quote is also from a former inner circle member:

‘“Chase aims to get vulnerable people to purchase over-priced courses. Some people have paid $20,000 dollars and more to become so-called ‘masters of tradecraft.’ It’s appalling. He and certain members of his team are emotional vampires that not only suck the soul out of people in need, but suck the money out of their pockets, too.”

The following quote comes from someone who purchased an expensive course from Chase:

“I fell for one of Chase Hughes’s fraudulent schemes—the ‘Avery’ program, where unlicensed coaches pose as ‘clinicians’ complete with white coats and medical intake forms. My assigned coach even suggested I take ketamine! Vulnerable people are being coerced into believing that rebranded, decades-old NLP and TRE techniques are some sort of ‘cure’ for complex psychiatric problems. When I complained about the $50,000 program being essentially worthless, a bait-and-switch, I was targeted with bullying, and they tried to use the service agreement I’d signed to silence me. I fought back and got my money back. If you’ve been financially wronged by Chase Hughes, don’t be intimidated. Demand your money back and, if it makes sense, report it to your bank as ‘fraudulent inducement’. File a formal complaint with the Virginia Office of the Attorney General (OAG). If necessary, speak to a Virginia consumer law firm. Remember that NDAs don’t protect wrongdoing and illegal activity. He’s afraid of legal scrutiny. I don’t often use the word ‘evil’ but what happened here borders on it.”

If you’ve seen the documentary Bad Vegan, you know of Sarma Melngailis. Sarma ran into major life problems when she fell under the sway of a manipulative abuser. I interviewed Sarma for this podcast. She wrote the following: 

“For a documentary project, I was looking for an expert on the subject of manipulation and abuse at the hands of narcissists, or psychopaths. At first, Chase seemed perfect. After a little research, I realized he wasn’t who he said he was, and seemed to perhaps be manipulating and exploiting people himself. As someone who usually trusts what people say, this was scary, and another reminder to be careful what we take at face value.”

I’ll add that I myself have gotten dozens of emails from people trying to reach Chase Hughes. This is because I set up a site whoischasehughes.com, and some people mistakenly think that site is owned by Chase.  Many of the messages I’ve gotten are from people in emotional distress; people who are seeking out Chase in desperation because they don’t know where else to turn. I’ll continue to add people’s quotes to the whoischasehughes.com site. If you want to leave your own public thoughts about Chase, there’s an active reddit thread that I recommend for that, and that’s linked from whoischasehughes.com. 

About this video

Hi, I’m Zach Elwood. A few notes about this video. 

I put more effort into the production of this than I usually do. I tried to imitate the flashy style that Chase Hughes uses. Now it wasn’t as good as Chase’s, of course; I don’t have the budget or the team of acolytes that he does, but I tried to make it a bit more engaging. 

And this is another point about this: High production values can create an aura of truth. They can make ideas feel stronger. Many people will see sleek production values and think, maybe just unconsciously, ‘this guy has resources for a fancy production; he must be legitimate.’ Again, it’s all about establishing authority, as Chase will tell you. 

Unlike Chase Hughes, I don’t have much to sell.  I do have books on political polarization that I think relate to this topic. You can learn about them at american-anger.com. 

With my work on toxic polarization, I try to show that the toxic political conflict and extreme thinking around us doesn’t come from evil masterminds secretly trying to divide us, but that it’s a result of ordinary and easy-to-understand aspects of human psychology, where group dynamics lead to more and more team-based thinking, and distorted, overly pessimistic views of each other, and so on. When you see start seeing things this way, you will also see that paranoid views of the world, like those Chase Hughes and others promote, can seem superficially depolarizing but in reality, ironically, they’re actually conflict-amplifying, in making people more pessimistic and more paranoid; all that pessimism and paranoid then gets channeled into the usual politically polarized ways. Anger and fear and us-vs-them mindsets are amplified, not reduced.  

The psychology-focused view of the world and our divides that I share in my books is admittedly not as exciting as the paranoid views promoted by Chase and others, but it has the benefit of being true. And seeing the world in that way also happens to be much better for your mental health. So if you want a less paranoid and more true and human view of the world, check out the work I’ve done about us-vs-them thinking at american-anger.com.

I’d love to hear what you think of this style of video. If you’d like to see more videos like this — on social dynamics, manipulative rhetoric, and modern guru culture — let me know. Maybe you have some ideas on topics to cover. 

Ok, thanks for watching. Stay skeptical out there. And watch out for Evergreen Girls.

[voice-over reads details about Chase’s “Evergreen Girls” program, https://web.archive.org/web/20160115183948/http://www.ellipsisbehavior.com/dangerous-girls.html ]

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.