Category: podcast

I talk with Jackie Miller, host of the podcast “Out of Crazy Town: Your Guide to Divorcing a Narcissist.” Jackie shares her personal story of escaping a coercively controlling, psychologically abusive marriage—and how that led her to try to help others navigating similar nightmarish situations. We talk about how these relationships evolve from subtle manipulation into abusive domination and control; and we talk about the mind-bending psychology of narcissistic abuse—projection, gaslighting, smear campaigns, and the delusional self-justifications that make these people so hard to understand. Jackie also describes why victims often seem “crazy” to outsiders, how abusers weaponize children and the legal system, and why staying calm in the face of harassment can be the most powerful defense.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Related resources:

• Episode about the spectrum of narcissism
• Episode about the narcissistic abuse in Bad Vegan
• Paper on how narcissism may lead to poor memory
• Behavioral indicators of good and bad relationships

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcript is done automatically, and will contain errors.)

Jackie Miller: “And after a relationship with a a disordered person like this, you end up this shell of yourself. And I’m thinking, how did I start out this really successful, independent, um, owned my own home, was a, you know, climbing the corporate ladder, making a lot of money. How’d I go from that to 16 and a half years later? I don’t have my name on one bank account. I don’t have access to one penny.”

Welcome to the People Who Read People podcast, hosted by me, Zachary Elwood. In this episode, I talk with Jackie Miller, host of the podcast “Out of Crazy Town: Your Guide to Divorcing a Narcissist,” about her personal experience in a psychologically abusive marriage and the insights she’s gained helping others leave highly narcissistic and abusive partners. She created her podcast to give people practical advice on surviving post-separation abuse—which is when controlling individuals escalate their behavior after their partner leaves them, using legal, financial, and emotional abuse and manipulation. 

Topics we discuss include: the various ways toxically narcissistic people respond to being left by their parnters, which can include smear campaigns, stalking behaviors, stealing email and phone accounts and devices, trying to turn the kids against the other parent, legal harassment of various sorts, and more. We talk about the common patterns of behavior and thinking malignant narcissists have: their inability to ever admit fault, their obsessive need to control narratives, and their patterns of projection—accusing others of the bad things that they themselves have done and are doing. We also talk about psychological factors: what motivates these people to try to make their own partners’ and children’s lives a living hell? What makes such people so weak that they can’t bear looking inward and always must be lashing out at others? It’s admittedly very hard to understand; but we should try to understand it, as it helps us recognize such personalities and deal with them. 

You can learn more about Jackie Miller at her website https://www.jackiemillercoaching.com/. Or search for ‘out of crazy town’ on youtube or other podcast platforms; I’ve listened to quite a few of her episodes and there are some really good and helpful talks in there for people dealing with such abuse. 

Narcissism as a label is so overused these days; the word gets thrown around way too much; but there are clearly some people who are highly narcissistic and who, as a group, show many common and predictable behaviors. If you enjoy this talk, I think you’d like a previous episode where I talk with Craig Malkin, author of the bestselling book Rethinking Narcissism. That was a popular episode, as we delved into the nuance of narcissism; from the more healthy and normal forms to the more toxic, malignant forms.

If you like this podcast, please subscribe to it on the platform you listen or watch on, and please share episodes. The podcast has been doing pretty well these days; a typical episode is getting between 7,000 to 8,000 listens in the first month of release on audio platforms, and some episodes get quite a bit more views on youtube. Getting more listeners is the main way I’m incentivized to work on new episodes and keep this going. If you’ve enjoyed listening, sharing episodes and subscribing are the best ways you can encourage me to work on it more. 

Okay, here’s the talk with Jackie Miller….

Zach: Hi Jackie. Thanks for joining me. 

Jackie: Hi, how are you? I’m so glad to be here. 

Zach: Yeah, thank you. I’m, I’m good. Uh, so maybe we could start with. Uh, how did you start your podcast? What led you to that? 

Jackie: Absolutely. Uh, so I have a podcast called Out of Crazy Town, your Guide to Divorcing A Narcissist.

And that’s because I divorced one and, um, I, I named it that and used that word because it’s just widely recognizable now. But it’s basically about divorcing individuals who are pathological, um, and very disordered and. They [00:01:00] just end up in a, a level of conflict you can’t even imagine. And, and, um, I know that you had mentioned this e even in our written correspondence, but we use high conflict all the time to describe these divorces.

I. And that’s not really what they are. There’s one disordered individual causing 99.999% of the problems, and the other person just wants it to stop, but they can keep the damage, the chaos going for a very long time, and it’s terrifying. And when I got into the family court system, I couldn’t. Believe what happened.

I couldn’t have ever guessed what the, those court professionals think or how they approach things. Um, there are so many pitfalls that just the average person doesn’t understand until you get into that system. And, and attorneys can do their best, but they, you know, you can’t sit with them all day long and, uh, you know, have them explain everything to you.

That’s too expensive. And, um, you sound [00:02:00] crazy sometimes when you’re trying to tell people. What’s going on. They just, they can’t believe it. And, you know, eventually their eyes glaze over. And so I thought, you know, I have to create a resource that people can go to and get information, you know, that’s a little bit legal, a little bit mental health, a little bit, you know, real world and, and just hear what other people have gone through.

And so that’s why I started my podcast. 

Zach: Yeah. That’s what stood out to me. I was, when I was searching online for this kind of thing, your, um, your work definitely stood out. It didn’t seem like there were many other people. Doing what you do. Try to, trying to help people. Oh, sorry. Trying to help people through those situations.

So that’s, um, yeah. Very good. You’re doing that. Um, do you want, do you wanna talk a little bit about, I don’t know if you want to, if you talk about this, but do you wanna talk about your story? Uh, yeah. In a little bit more detail if, if you’re willing. Sure, 

Jackie: sure. So I was married for 16 and a half years and, uh, I often say that.

After about three years, I knew I was in trouble. Um, but I knew that [00:03:00] leaving him was going to be a nightmare. And we had two children right away. And, uh, I just thought I can’t. For me, it was my personal decision and everybody’s situation is different. I couldn’t fathom leaving before they could really talk and articulate themselves and know they’re at his house probably 50% of the time.

Because most states love 50 50 regardless of what the other parent, you know, the other parents. Like if, you know, we have a saying, if, if you have a pulse, you’re a great parent in the family court system, so. It, I, I, I, it took me a long time to muster not only the courage, but there was a lot of financial control and financial abuse, frankly.

And I had no access to any money after 16 and a half years of marriage. And there was plenty of money. I had no access. My name was on nothing. And you, for people that go through something like this, um, part of the reason I started the podcast as well is I wanted to let. [00:04:00] People know, I wanted to validate them, that you can be this really intelligent, outgoing, successful individual.

And after a relationship with a a disordered person like this, you end up this former shell of yourself. And I’m thinking, how did I start out this really successful, independent, um, owned my own home, was a, you know, climbing the corporate ladder, making a lot of money. How’d I go from that to 16 and a half years later?

I don’t have my name on one bank account. I don’t have access to one penny. Nothing is in my name, like, and it was a deliberate, slow, insidious. You know, um, exercise of control over me over time, that included isolation and financial control that you don’t see happening in real time. And it’s not until you look back that you realize, oh my gosh, this is how I ended up here.

And so, because I went through that and then when I entered the family court system, you, you may [00:05:00] be experiencing abuse in your marriage. But once you leave what’s called post-separation abuse kicks in and that person has lost control over you in the normal ways that they had control when you were under the same roof.

So now that they have to pick up different tools. And to sort of try to continue to maintain that control and abuse of you. And so it turns into legal abuse. It turns into financial abuse using different tools. It turns into, you know, weaponizing the children. So they pick up these other tools to continue the control and abuse.

And there is literally a wheel now called the posts post separation abuse wheel that you can look up and see all of the tools, um, even if the person wasn’t necessarily. A stalker during the relationship. Many of them pick up stocking tools because. They don’t know what’s going on and they need information to control the narrative.

They need information to continue the smear campaigns. [00:06:00] They need information to be able to manipulate you better in court and manipulate the way people think about you. So they very often will engage in, um, you know, higher sort of elevated stalking mm-hmm. Uh, practices to try to maintain that control and gain information about you.

Zach: Right? Yeah. Uh, yeah. It just seems like thinking about these cases. It seems like there’s so many, uh, aspects that are demoralizing that, you know, like you said, can make you feel like a shell of yourself. I mean, there’s the fact that it just, it, it’s so, uh. It’s so demoralizing and, and, uh, crazy making that someone would do these things.

That’s, that’s the one aspect that knowing that someone who theoretically is supposed to be, you know, care about you would do these things or anyone really would do ’em. It’s disturbing. Uh, and then b it’s like knowing that, you know, beating yourself up a little bit, maybe thinking like, how did I let this happen as a part of it too, even though, you know.

[00:07:00] That shouldn’t be a part of it, but it just seems like there’s multiple areas that can make you just really feel like, who am I? Like how did I get to this? Place a absolutely life. Yeah, absolutely. 

Jackie: And depending on, on the dynamics too and the relationship, you know, and I meant kind of hinted to this earlier in mine, I was afraid to then create a situation where my children were alone with him and not have, you know, any coping skills or just be, you know, defenseless if, you know, he becomes volatile or you know, they just start really.

Saying bad things about you and, and putting the kids really in the middle and forcing them to choose and like, you know, just have these loyalty conflicts, you know, between parents and that’s a whole nother dynamic. But the, the coercive control, which is a word I didn’t have, you know, until well after my.

Uh, divorce, uh, that term really didn’t exist in everyday conversation, so I didn’t understand, for instance, why he wouldn’t blatantly say I [00:08:00] couldn’t go out with my friends. But if I, I look back over the relationship, he let me know so many different ways that if I went out for a glass of wine with my friends, I was gonna pay for it, right?

Uh, there’d be days of silent treatment. There would be. Um, underhanded comments to, while we’re out with friends about, you know, I just go party all the time and I don’t take care of my kids. Like things that just are blatantly not true. But I would have to suffer death by a thousand paper cuts if I did something like go out and have a glass of wine with my friends.

And so I would very often make plans, and then at the 11th hour when I was supposed to leave, I would call them and back out. Because I couldn’t, I was too afraid to tell him. Mm-hmm. I was walking down in know downtown three blocks and I’d be back in two hours. Like, you know, we all deserve a little alone time, you know?

And to hang out with our friends. That’s a very healthy thing to do. But that was the coercive control. Could I point to a time that he said, you are not allowed to go out with your friends? No, I couldn’t. Right. But, but [00:09:00] now I understand the slow insidious control, you know, that was happening and the modalities, he used to exact that control.

Zach: And it seems like in a lot of cases those things ramp up, especially at the point when somebody actually leaves, that’s when it reaches a whole new level or, or before that. Uh, I mean that’s, that’s when it, and, and maybe that’s a good segue into, maybe you could talk about. Some of the people that reach out to you for consulting or, or stories you hear about?

I think, I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding some of the, how common this stuff is and, uh, and just how bad it is. Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the stories of clients you’ve had or, or, or people you’ve consulted for. 

Jackie: Sure. Uh, you know, it really runs the entire gamut of, I’ve had clients that have endured a lot of physical abuse, um, but they’re still dealing with a court system that says that that’s a, it’s ignorant.

I. On domestic violence, and [00:10:00] b, it’s willing, willful ignorance. We don’t want to deal with it, in other words. Um, so they will say things like, well, he may have been hitting you, but he wasn’t hitting the kids. So he can have 50 50 or she can, you know, and it happens both ways. You know, she may have been doing these awful things, um, but she wasn’t doing them to the kids.

And I, I personally believe if you’re abusing. The parent of your children, you’re abusing your children. How are your children supposed to function healthily and it it, you know, have a healthy mental health? When they know, even if it’s instinctual and they haven’t witnessed it, they instinctually know that one of their parents is abusing the other parent.

It’s, it’s abuse by proxy. It just is. There’s, there’s no argument for it. But in the family court system, again, if you have a pulse, you’re a good parent. So yes, that parent gets the children. And how terrifying is that? Because sometimes the, you know, the, the one child becomes the new target. In your absence, [00:11:00] um, you know, and then you watch the other dynamics play out where there’s a scapegoat and a golden child and you see them pitting the children against each other.

And so you’ve worked so hard to have your children have this wonderful lifelong friendship and sibling relationship because, you know, you know, once you’re gone, that’s all they’re gonna have in the world, you know? And you, that was for me. I really want my kids to be close. I want them to be able to talk about anything and rely on each other.

And I saw dynamics at play where a wedge was trying to be driven between the two of ’em, um, by making one scapegoat and one a golden child. And so there’s so many dynamics, um, that I see that my clients come to me with, even though that was an example of I gave myself, they’ll be dealing with those kinds of things.

They’ll be dealing with the, um, we had $10 million in the bank when I filed for bankruptcy, and he has stopped all the money. Blocked it off and, and no one’s doing anything. I’ve already paid my attorney $25,000 and nothing’s happened yet. I hear that story all the time, like, how can [00:12:00] this be technically?

Is he allowed or is she allowed to block all the money? No, they’re not. But by the time it gets in front of a judge and you have a hearing and you jump through all the hoops of the one attorney’s supposed to ask the other attorney nicely, but then your attorney needs a $20,000 retainer and now they need another 10,000 by the time you get there.

Where you get to tell on them or her, you know, to somebody who matters, who can actually make a court order, a lot of time can pass. Mm-hmm. And you can spend a lot of money. And so we, I spend a lot of time strategizing with clients on how do we get from A to B, the, you know, the quickest. It’s not gonna be easy, there’s gonna be a lot of potholes.

How do we save the most money? What are some tips and tricks that we can come up with? You know, and, um, so again, I’ve seen everything from physical abuse, cops being called, you know, restraining orders 

Zach: to devices, uh, being stolen and spied on that, that kinda stuff. Yeah. 

Jackie: Oh, absolutely. I, my daughter found a military grade [00:13:00] GPS tracker in my car.

I. Um, you know, and I was just like, what? So that, you know, and yes, laptops being stolen and Yeah, absolutely. P phones being stolen and Oh, ob 

Zach: obsessively, uh, contacting every, you know, all the contacts that people know to try to ruin the other person’s reputation, that kind of thing. 

Jackie: Absolutely. So one of the spokes on the abuse wheel is this, you know, the smear campaigns.

Mm-hmm. And the reasons for that are a, you know, it helps them control the narrative. Um, b it. It helps it isolate you If they can get everyone to be thinking against you and see, it’s to just show you that they can. Yeah. And it’s very scary. But the, the interesting thing about the smear campaigns is I.

Most of my clients will find, and I found they started much earlier in the relationship and you didn’t even know about it. So it was a, a comment behind your back when you’re out with friends, like, oh, she’s got really drunk again. You know, or, or you know when that never happens, or, oh, [00:14:00] you know, when they’ve been feeding you wine all night and you’re like, oh mom, look at my husband or wife being so nice.

Keeps up and getting me drinks. Alright, sure. I’ll have another one. God, they never act like this. This is great. Well, it’s intentional. To, you know, so you get a little more drunk than usual, and then they look over at their friend and they’re like, oh God, this is what I deal with all the time. So it’s, you know, it’s, but it’s mind blowing Yeah.

To think someone’s been doing that. 

Zach: Yeah. Well that’s, that 

Jackie: the relationship, let alone after 

Zach: that is really the, you know, the, it is really mind blowing. Like some of this stuff, I mean, listening to the stories on your podcast or the, you know, the people I know, uh, it is pretty mind blowing in terms of like.

This is really cr like, it’s really hard to wrap your mind around like, you know, in, in, in the same way that a lot of personality disorders are. It’s really hard to wrap your mind around, well why would they do this and why would they do this over years? These are people that are the only people, the main people in their life, and that’s how they treat them.

You [00:15:00] know, it’s, it’s really, it is really hard to, to wrap your mind around, I think. I think that’s actually getting into, you know, why sometimes these people. Can get away with this or convince other people that they’re, that they have valid points because it is so hard to believe some of this stuff, right?

It’s like, you know, you, you’d hear somebody say this, my ex or my current husband has done all these crazy things to me. And you know, at some level I think a lot of people who have, who don’t know about these things are thinking like. That that sounds completely wacky. Can that really be true? You know, and so they’re thinking like, there’s gotta be more to this story here, right?

I think that’s what accounts for some of the power some of these people have maybe in court or even just talking to other people. But I’m curious what you, what you think about that. 

Jackie: Absolutely. One thing I see, one tactic is that they will create a story that’s so outrageous. It has to be true. And, you know, and no matter how much, the more you defend yourself, the more [00:16:00] guilty you look at it.

And, but so I, I’ve seen that happen. Well, they’re just come up with something that’s just so, like, you know, I didn’t tell anybody about this, but this is what was going on. And you’re just like, wait, what? Um, just completely outta left field. So there’s that. And then there is, you know, some of the more subtle manipulations.

But I, again, going back to the mind blowing, most of our brains don’t work like this. We don’t have this inherent, just really instinctual ability to manipulate. All the time. And they, 

Zach: and desire. And desire to constantly, constantly 

Jackie: manipulate it would be exhausting. Oh, I know. That’s what strikes me for 

Zach: It would, yes.

It seems exhausting. I can’t even imagine, you know, living like that Yeah. Would seem 

Jackie: exhausting. But it’s instinctual. They, they, they just have, they see these openings and that is why I believe, and again, I’m, I’m not a PhD, but I. Believe that that is why. Um, and I’ve had this described to me this way, like in the diagnostic, you know, [00:17:00] manual where they, they identify personality disorders, which narcissism falls under one of them, but the cluster B personality disorders, these individuals basically wake up every day and decide to behave this way.

They do not have a mental illness. It’s not, you know, so there’s not, a psychiatrist isn’t necessarily gonna be able to prescribe a medication like for schizophrenia to make it better. These are disordered individuals, but the reason they can stick them in a diagnostic manual is because they all displace similar behaviors.

Right. That’s the crazy thing. Yeah. Yeah. So it looks like they’re all following the same script, even though they’ve never met each other. They’re not related. They didn’t grow up in the same family. They all use similar tactics. So it is a personality disorder, um, but it’s not a mental illness and it’s a, it’s an interesting nuance to sort of consider.

Zach: Yeah, I mean it’s, I think there’s a lot of nuance there. ’cause it’s like, I think it’s some level, these [00:18:00] people really can’t control it. Like they, you know, it’s, and in many cases it’s been instilled in them in some way since they were. Kids even. But I think there is something there, like I think the, the main thing we can say is like, if you don’t want to get help, you’re not gonna get help.

And these people. Do not want to get help. Like, you know, 

Jackie: they, they do not wanna get help. And, and it, that is a really good point because, and I dunno if you’ve heard of Dr. Peter Salerno, but he has a book called The Nature and Nurture of Narcissism. And he does talk about how there are a lot of clinical studies that you can have two children, you can pop one out that, you know, uh, it’s just kind, loving.

Empathetic and the other one will come out with kind of predisposition to have some of these traits. So, so he does see a nature side of that. Um, but you’re right, they don’t want help. They don’t get help, they don’t get better usually. Um, they don’t improve. And so it’s. It’s, and, and you had mentioned something too in your writing about just this super fragile ego, you know, and they, they have to [00:19:00] just sort of protect that at all costs.

So they can cannot take blame for anything. It’s, you rarely ever hear the word, I’m sorry. And if you do, it’s a manipulation to get something. 

Zach: Yeah. And I think, yeah, to talk to you more about, I wanna talk to you more about that because it’s like, to me, and obviously I’m not the only person who thinks this, but.

It really seems like the fact that these people will never self-examine the fact that they will never say, I’m sorry, the fact that they will never admit blame, and they so often project everything on everyone else. I mean, I think that’s key to understanding their fragility because at some level they find it so hard to self-examine something that everybody, you know, most of us find easy to do.

For whatever reason, you know, nature, nurture combination. They, they find it so hard to be honest with themselves and to self examine and they have some instinctual desire to always be casting all the blame on everyone else and, and seeing everyone else’s enemies. But I think that’s, you know, I’m curious if you have any [00:20:00] thoughts.

I know neither of us are psychologists. Sure. With all your experience, I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about what drives, you know, the, these kinds of behaviors. 

Jackie: Yeah, it’s, and you’re absolutely right, the victim. Mentality. And, and, and that’s the, you know, usually the, at the crux of, say the smear campaigns or you know, when you read these declarations that they write for court in family court, I mean everything is victim, victim, victim.

In fact, I often will tell clients like, Hey, look. They’ll usually get some early wins in family court because the judge is like, whoa. You know, they’re writing all these outrageous things in their declarations and they’re the victim. They’re the victim. Um, it’s a chip away mentality in family court. It is a or, or just when you’re dealing with these folks in general, even if court’s gone, um, and you’re in the aftermath dealing with co-parenting or whatnot, but it is this chip away mentality.

It’s a marathon. Hold on tight. Stay the course. I will often say to, um, you know, point out [00:21:00] behaviors. Obviously we never label anyone because most of us aren’t qualified to do that, but just point out concerning behaviors and don’t play the victim. It’s okay to point out things that they’re doing, but eventually.

Though that will start to be really contrasted, like whether it’s in your declarations or things that are happening in the court system, it will start to become apparent like, wow, this person, it’s always, always poor me. And they, they’re all doing it to me and they’re all, you know, and it, it will eventually.

Come to light. But it’s very scary in the beginning because they do get early wins in the family court system because they, they come out just, they come outta the gate, come out swinging, just swinging. I mean, and you’re like, whoa, I just thought we could talk about this and go to mediation and maybe work it out, you know?

And, and next thing you know, you know, you’re being accused of all these outrageous things. But yeah, the victim, oh, the victim card 

Zach: is heavily played and that’s part of the mind blowing nature of it is like the never admitting any fault is kind of like the mind [00:22:00] blowing thing too. ’cause it’s like. It’s just, I think for most of us, it’s, it’s just such a, a minor thing to admit like, Hey, maybe I played a role in this.

Maybe I did something wrong. You know? But for people that just are completely, they cannot do that. They, they, they’re not capable of that. It, it, it is so painful for them to even think that other people. You know, might be that, that, that they themselves, maybe, or other people are, are seeing them in a negative light is, is so painful that for them, they just combat it, you know?

Uh, tooth and nail or whatever. Yeah, 

Jackie: absolutely. They, yeah, they, they, they need everyone on their side. Um, it’s just a, um, gosh, there was something that I was gonna say. Darn it. Uh, it’s a horrible coping me mechanism. It is. Oh, what I was going to say is in two, they know your buttons. I mean, part of, early on in the relationship, what they were doing, um, was.

Information gathering. So what felt like, oh my gosh, they ask a lot of questions [00:23:00] about me and they really want to know a lot about me. And it’s very scary. ’cause you go out to try to date again and you’re like, how do I discern between someone who’s just trying to get to know me and someone who’s information gathering?

Yeah. Why do they wanna know that? Yeah. Um, but they are, they have minds like still traps when it comes to information about you so that they can pull it up later and use it against you. And so. There. I always say, you know, look for the themes that they pick. Like I, I bet you could pick a theme that this person constantly said about you.

Um, mine before I got divorced was like, I can’t handle anything. I’m stupid. Like, I can’t even handle like getting the kids to the right birthday parties on time. I can’t, how come I don’t have that date? Right. How do I have that thing wrong? I’m thinking, like I said, it was a super high functioning adult before I met you.

Like. How could this be true? But it was a narrative that kept being beaten to my head over time, and I started to adopt that narrative myself. Um, and then post, um, you know, separation and after the divorce had gone on so long, the one button [00:24:00] he knew would get me is he would say, you spent the kids’ college.

You know my, on that divorce, you’re the one that drug it out. You’re the one. I mean, oh my God, I was not the one that drug it out. 

Zach: Right? And 

Jackie: even I have to, I have to fight the temptation right now. Not to tell the whole story to defend myself, but it was, he, they know what button to push that’s really gonna get to you.

And so. Just sort of trying to be aware that that’s what’s happening. That’s the dynamic that’s playing and not fall for it is a really big hill to sort of climb and overcome. But it’s a really important one if you can do it. If you could stop and breathe and not react. Mm. And just be like, okay, they’re playing that cart again because they know they’re gonna get mileage out of it.

And I’m gonna start spinning right now. Right. If you can sort of shut that down in any way, shape or form by taking a breath, not responding, changing your response, shortening your response to not give them the fuel they’re [00:25:00] looking for. Right. I always give that advice ’cause they know exactly what they’re doing and what buttons to put, buttons to push.

Zach: And as you say on your podcast, as you and others say. Trying to not be over reactive in the legal and custody setting is very important too, because people will often perceive that in and wrong in, in, uh, ways that don’t help you. So you, it pays to be calm and not be reactive and you know, and how you respond.

Yeah. 

Jackie: Yeah. It really does. And I’ll even say like, visually look at your messages to each other. If there’s a ranting for seven paragraphs. And then you respond for two, and then they ran for seven more paragraphs and you respond for two. Just on visual. If I’m a judge that’s not reading all this, I’m kind of flipping through it.

I’m already like, just visually like, okay, that’s, you know, I see what’s going on here. He’s crazy, but I see what’s going on here. Yeah. Like, like, oh my God, this is, this person’s a lot. Yeah. At the very minimum, this person’s a lot. So I’m like, you know, just start with that. 

Zach: I think another, uh.

Counterintuitive weird thing [00:26:00] about these kind of dynamics is, you know, some of these people will seem like, you’d be like, well, they clearly, they treat their spouse this way. They clearly hate their spouse. And they may even sometimes say like, you know, I don’t want to be with you, and these kinds of things.

And on the surface they hate them, but on the, on another level, they really need them. Like they need that control, like. The control of another person is what gives them some sense of like existential stability or something. So when, when, you know, and I’ve heard this, you know, from, from people, from stories where you know that the, the abused person leaves and, and is surprised that the person fights so hard to control them and or keep them, or, you know, try to control the situation and not let them go.

And it’s, but it’s like at some level. They really wanted that, uh, that, that, that relationship as toxic as it was, was what gave them major stability in their life for, for a lot of these people, it seems, seems like to me, [00:27:00] but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on that. 

Jackie: Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it is about control and it’s almost like I work so hard to get you into this, you know, submissive shell of yourself, state, how dare you leave?

Or, you know, or, or even if I treated you so badly and told you to get out, you weren’t really supposed to leave, you know, because I control you. And it is quite literally their fuel, their oxygen. That’s how I look at it. And so by. When you leave, you, they’re, they’ve lost their oxygen. 

Zach: Is that, is that, is that when you say that’s their, this might be going too far, but is that, is this like their version of love for these people?

Like that’s the only kind of love they, they might be able to know. Do you think? I. 

Jackie: Uh, I guess, yeah, if we wanna try to label it that, you know, I have a hard time, I mean, putting the word on it, but Yeah, no, it’s in, in their minds 

Zach: though. And, and it’s, 

Jackie: yeah. Let me put it this way. It’s the way they have a relationship.

Yes. Yeah. So, so what we thought was love, you know, we got into this person and we maybe [00:28:00] married them or whatever, you know, we thought we were committed for life, or for at least for a very long time. Yeah, we would call that we did that because of love and theirs is just for control 

Zach: and it’s not love.

Yeah. Don’t get me wrong, but it’s like it might be the only way that they can like connect to other person, at least how the way they are now. Yeah. 

Jackie: It’s the only way they can connect to the other person. And the other thing that I say is, it’s interesting in these relationships, they very often pick.

Intelligent, attractive, articulate, you know, uh, creative types that A, it makes them look good. Mm-hmm. And BI say a lot of ’em, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them, it helps make them acceptable to society, um, where they wouldn’t have been on that level on their own. Because you will hear often like, oh my God, he was so nicer.

She was so nice. And then, yeah, I like their spouse. They’re okay, but, but they wouldn’t have been, you know, invited all these places or done, you know, it’s, it’s really one, you know. Wherever they’re being invited eventually. It’s usually ’cause the nice, the nice part of the mm-hmm. Of, you know, of the couple, but [00:29:00] they also are very good at putting on the mask.

Zach: Right, right. So a lot of them are very good at acting and, and manipulating and putting on an act. Yeah. Uhhuh. Mm-hmm. Uh, so that 

Jackie: if you do leave you, you, you know, everyone’s like, oh, I’m so surprised. He or she was charming, so nice, so I don’t get it. Yeah, 

Zach: yeah. But the, uh, it’s complicated. One thing I thought was a practical tip in one of your podcasts was talking about how, because you know, the words, uh, the, the word narcissism is so overused these days.

Like, you have so many people that will just like, toss it around at the drop of a hat. Like, they don’t like something, somebody does their work and they’re like, they’re a narcissist. You know? But I think, um, you know, learning about. Real, very narcissistic people will, uh, maybe help you not use that word.

Uh, a, a as, as loosely as some people do. But the practical tip though, in one of your episodes was, uh. Talking about, uh, how when it comes to talking in, in legal custody settings, you know, it’s good to avoid that word. [00:30:00] I think somebody said to avoid the word abuse too, and just describe what the people are like.

Describe what their behaviors and actions were like, and so to avoid the perception that you’re trying to like label them and, and manipulate other people’s perceptions basically. 

Jackie: Right. Absolutely. It’s, uh, it’s definitely a rule in court that, that we don’t label anyone. And yes, you describe the behaviors, uh, and I know in one episode you’re right, that was about custody evaluations.

Um, the guest had whi, which has been really valuable for a lot of my clients is, is explaining the progression of things. So when we started out, um. You know, this person is so sweet, so charming, um, you know, really outgoing, really good at their job, really da, da da. So describe all the things that a judge or an evaluator or somebody else is going to see when they meet them, because that’s the face the mask they’re going to have on.

And then they’ll say like, oh, yes. Right? That’s what I see. They’re, you know, they’re, they’re funny, they’re hilarious. Like they’re, they’re really good at cracking jokes. They put me at ease when I’m with them. And then I [00:31:00] was really saddened and surprised when. All of a sudden, you know, I wasn’t allowed to go out with my friends and, um, the, you know, I started calling me really, really bad names in front of the children, um, through a vase at my head once and in, you know, and describing the behavior.

So you don’t have to say abuse and you don’t have to say. Narcissist or you know, how, you know, you’re saying I was being controlled, I was being isolated. There were physical, you know, times that they were physical. Um, there are times that they’re, you know, they’re doing things in front of the kids that is not good.

Not good parenting, not healthy, not safe. So you’re just able, you’re set the stage and then you’re able to describe all those behaviors. Without throwing out any labels. Now I do have to say in the comfort of our own home, talking with our friends, listening to a podcast, I think labels are great. I think it’s feels good to read about something that you’re experiencing and then have someone give it a name.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I know a doctor Diverso Romney is, is really big on that and she [00:32:00] has a book. Um, it’s not you. And I completely agree with her. Like I remember it was 2:00 AM when I stumbled on Tina Sweeten’s book. Um, and she described everything in my marriage is, is what she had went through. And then she, you know, said that he, I think, believed her ex was officially diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

But I remember just. Feeling this relief, like, oh, this is a thing, this me. Yeah, there’s all the patterns, 

Zach: there’s all the behaviors. Here’s the 

Jackie: pattern. Somebody else went through this and the, and there’s a name for it. So I think it’s very therapeutic and validating to be able to study it and read it and understand what the names are.

But then, yep. When you’re in the family court system or is anywhere that don’t, yeah, don’t, don’t diagnose it. Don’t use it yourself. Describe the behaviors that’s gonna, what’s gonna get you. Mm-hmm. Um, you know what you need. 

Zach: Yeah. I’m curious if you have any stories about, or observations about projection, because it’s such a cliche that narcissists, uh, narcissistic personalities [00:33:00] will project things about themselves on other people.

It’s almost like I hear that and, and in a similar way as people too, sometimes too loosely. Throw the narcissism label around. I also hear people say, too often say, uh oh, they’re projecting where I’m like, um, I don’t think they’re projecting, but it, but it is really a thing. And when you actually see some of these things close up, like a specific, uh, you know, case I was telling you about in other many other cases, there, there is this thing or a very real projection thing where the things that are, that they’ve done wrong, they will.

Accuse the other person of, they’ll accuse other people of like, you know, say it’s drinking or drugs. The other, if they have a problem, they’ll accuse the other person of having that problem. If they, if they’ve had many affairs, they’ll accuse the other person of having many affairs and at, and at some level it’s like, it’s not, it seems it just a, not even a, a strategy.

It’s, it’s a, it’s a genuine, [00:34:00] like I really. At some level, some of these people really do believe these things in a, in an obsessive, obsessive way. The more, the more obsessive ones. But there is this thing that, that happens with this projecting. But I’m curious if you’ve heard many stories or, or do you have any observations about that?

Jackie: Yeah, no, it. It does happen all the time. I see what you’re saying. I mean, I think a, sometimes they use it as a strategy. If I beat them to the punch, you know, and say it first, then when they say it about me, it’d be like, oh, well, well great. So you’re right. Right. I’m doing it too. So I think in, in lots of times in the court system, we’ll seem ’em try to beat you to the punch by accusing you of at first.

Um. Two, it’s just, it’s a level of gaslighting that will absolutely make you crazy. So it is a very useful tool to gaslight you, to get you to react and then see I. Right. See, I told, so I, I believe it’s a, it’s a heavily used strategy in that manner, and then I think you’re absolutely right [00:35:00] that some of them, like, I’ll take the cheating for instance.

They do it so often and they’re so promiscuous, and whether they’ve lied to themselves to make themselves feel better or they, they have always believed it or what they’re like, everybody. Right. That’s the, everybody’s, everyone’s doing it cheating. Like there, there’s no such thing as a marriage that doesn’t, there’s no such thing as a guide that hasn’t, there’s no such thing, and I have seen that play out before too.

And I’m like, no, I, they really believe it. Yeah. They really believe that literally every neighbor is doing each other. Mm-hmm. And every like. They actually believe it. They actually believe that if I go take tennis lessons, that I will be sleeping with the tennis instructor. They believe it. Mm-hmm. And so I, I, you know, I think both can be true.

Yeah. It’s a spectrum. Spectrum. It’s, it’s to, it’s a spectrum. That’s what I was gonna say. It’s a strategy sometimes, and sometimes it’s complete delusion. 

Zach: And I think it could be, yeah. It’s, and it’s, it can be hard to tell which is, which is in some of these cases, yeah. Hard to tell, which is, which I think in some cases they might not even really know.

Like they might be like. I, I’m [00:36:00] paranoid that everyone is doing these things against me. Yeah. And I want it to be true, so I’ll say it and believe it. Right. There’s, I think, I think especially for the less functional or the, the more, the less mentally well examples. 

Jackie: Yeah. 

Zach: There is this case. I mean, ’cause there’s studies that show that really pathologically narcissistic people have a hard time with memory.

They have a hard time, you know, distinguishing. Past reality from, from, from fiction that they’ve created. Like that’s a real Yeah. Thing. And I think at some level some of these people just want to believe something so much. They basically believe it. You know, they, they. They just, I will it into exist existence.

Jackie: The false narrative is, is safer for whatever reason. It’s, it’s, it’s safer to my, you know, my, my, the shell of false self that I’ve built to think that you’re cheating to, it’s safer to, um, yeah. Whatever the reason is. I, I completely agree. Yeah. It’s a spectrum, but, um, it, yeah, yeah, either way it’s, it’s just, it’s crazy making you write for the other person [00:37:00] on the other end.

Well, that’s why your, 

Zach: that’s why your podcast is aptly named. 

Jackie: Yeah, it, it really is. Like I, I had a friend that I was in a book club with at the time, and she was so excited I was doing this. I wake up one morning to a text on my phone and she, I think it was a text or an email, and she’d taken a screenshot of, she’d like been up for hours, scribbling all these possible podcast names, and they were like in the corner and then written this way, written that way in circles around ’em, and this one underlined and that one.

I just, this one stuck out. She’s the one that named it. And I’m like, oh my God, this is absolutely brilliant. And I always get, I always get comments about it. So I have to give a credit, credit to my friend. And 

Zach: it’s, it’s called, uh, what was it out of, out of Crazy Town? Was it Out of Crazy Town? 

Jackie: Yeah. 

Zach: Right.

Jackie: Yeah. 

Zach: I didn’t actually send you this beforehand, but just something I was thinking about before we met. I, so something I’ve long thought about, more toxic people. Narcissistic or just toxic in general. It seems like a lot of them in my experience.

Uh, had, you know, had toxic, uh, parents or, or main parent than one main parent, the themselves, which led to them having some of those traits. And I think another factor there is I think some of those people, uh, some of the more toxic people never were able to examine the bad things that their parents did to them.

Parent or both parents, so that they kind of still put their. A parent that mistreated them on some sort of pedestal, which, which prevents them from ever [00:39:00] like examining the bad aspects of that relationship. And I think the healthier people are able to be like, oh, I didn’t like these things that this parent did.

Um, so I’m able to process it and examine it and not do those things myself maybe. But I think for a lot of the people that have the worst outcomes. In this area. I think a lot of them still at some level want to please their, you know, toxic parent. But it, this, this, you know, I’m not a psychologist, obviously this, this is just my own kind of working theory, but I’m curious if there’s anything in there.

Um, do you have any observations about that? And no problem if not. 

Jackie: Yeah, no. It’s, my, my experience is basically your experience. Um, that is that. Uh, the people that I’ve dealt with in my life that probably have a personality disorder or cluster B personality disorder did have some pretty decent dysfunction going on, um, in their family.

And, and yeah, there’s like a, a, a parent dynamic there. Usually [00:40:00] that’s, um, you know, that just was really harmful for whatever reason. Or just, or just a really unhealthy bond or relationship or, you know, um, I did do a blog post on, um. You know, narcissistic men and their mothers, not because they’re all that way, but it happens enough that you can write a blog about it.

Right? And, um, it, there’s, you know, often some enmeshment, and again, I know we can’t just put a blanket, you know, label on all of this, but there’s definitely patterns that can be identified. And, but that at the same time, that’s also why I called out Dr. P um, Peter Sonos book, because. He does point out that there is a lot of, are there a lot of studies where, you know, there’s a, could be a genetic component and basically the argument is like, so if you know, you stick two kids in a family and they grow up very similar, you know, but one emerges with these extremely narcissistic traits and the other one’s, you know, a compassionate, empathic person.

How is that? You know? And so that’s why they’re kinda looking, you know, at some of the more genetic based studies, I [00:41:00] guess is the best way to say it. But by and large. Yeah, I, I mean, my experience is, your experience is that I, and I often will see like narcissistic family systems, you know, I’ll see a, I’ll see a, a mom and a sister and a brother, you know, or three brothers and a dad, you know, so it’s, and, and it.

I’m not qualified to examine what’s going on there, but right there you will. I did another blog called, did You Marry Into a Narcissistic Family? ’cause oh my gosh, sometimes they will grab hold of the sweet people pleaser, you know? Um, and I don’t mean to label all of us that way, but that’s what I was, and they’ll, the whole family will eat you alive, 

Zach: right?

There’s, there’re gonna be dynamics of manipulation and, um. Yeah. Harassment, manipulation, boundary, boundary stepping, just people that have unhealthy ways of engaging and that, you know, we’re not gonna solve the nature nurture thing on this podcast. Right. But like those, those kinds of dynamics I.

Obviously not [00:42:00] everybody comes out of that, uh, extremely narcissistic, but those kinds of dynamics can make somebody, you know, start seeing those things as like, oh, well this is just how you behave with people. 

Jackie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why, you know, why does one person grow up in a really dysfunctional family and think to themself, I’m never gonna do that to my kids.

Right. I’m going to be the, you know, I’m gonna do way better than that, and then the other person repeats it. Exactly. Yeah. It’s hard to say, but 

Zach: yeah. I think there’s, I think there’s like pathways you can go down, like, you know, if we, if we completely remove the. The nature aspect, you know, not, not to say it’s not true, but I do think there’s like pathways that it’s kinda like chaos theory.

Like you start dripping down one side of the mountain or another and like yeah, the, the, the, the personality traits start compounding and such, so, you know, that’s, that’s just how I think of it in terms of like, it’s, it start going down one path and, um, I do too. I think that’s, it’s hard to, and, and if you start doing, I think it in general, if you start behaving in bad.

Unhealthy ways [00:43:00] you continually start to justify those things, which has an impact on your current personality and so on and so on. So you, you continually kind of like can spiral down to worse behaviors because you’re for sure it’s a 

Jackie: dark hole that it’s very difficult to climb out from. And even what, what you were saying something earlier that made it come to mind often there’s a huge component of lying among these, you know, disordered individuals.

And you’re right, they. And I think that that disengagement from reality and what’s going on is because they truly lie so much they can’t remember their lies. And then Right. It, it’s not even about remembering the lies anymore. It’s just I’m gonna make up the reality wherever I am, in front of whoever I’m standing in front of, and I am going to believe it.

Yeah. Because that’s been my pattern for so long. Whatever comes outta my mouth is the reality. Yeah. And I, I don’t care if it is raining right now, I’m gonna tell you it’s not. Yeah. 

Zach: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, it is really the, the tangled web wee weave thing where it’s like you start constructing so many lies and deceptions around you.

At some level, it’s, you’re just living in a [00:44:00] web of, you know, unreality. Right. So you might as well just say, you know. And that if you’re in that spot, you know, just say whatever you want. Right? 

Jackie: And you have to almost believe that you’re the smartest person in the room because you’ve, you’ve now become so manipulative and so able to twist people’s realities.

You become so good at it that you now start to believe that you are the smartest person in the room no matter where you go. ’cause I can convince them that the sky is purple and that it’s not raining when it is. 

Zach: And even because I’ve done it before. And even when you fail at convincing them, you’ll just tell yourself, I’m still a genius.

’cause you know, you’re used to. Telling yourself whatever. I’ll still go home 

Jackie: and tell myself that they, that they bought it and I’m a genius or, or they’re, or there are 

Zach: morons for not believing it. Yeah. It’s like, uh, well this has been great, Jackie. I appreciate it. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?

Jackie: You know, I just want folks out there that are going through these hard times to know that it, it does come to an end. I don’t wanna say it gets better because they get better because they don’t. But my big, [00:45:00] um, hill that I want to die on is that extract yourselves from them. Any way possible. So even if you’re going through the divorce, like minimize your contact.

It, you know, if you have to communicate, uh, you know, I have this joke, like if it, it was a paragraph. See if you can get it down to a sentence. If it’s a sentence, see if you can get it down to a word. If it’s a word, see if you can get it down to a thumbs up. Um, like the, any way that you can cut them off from access to you and attention from you is, and again, I know that that’s, there’s a million different scenarios, um, to talk through, but.

If, if at all, at all possible, do that because you are their supply and they need to be cut off from, from your attention, from using you as a supply and move on to another one. 

Zach: Thanks. That’s great. Yeah. Uh, really appreciate you joining me and thanks for your efforts and work. 

Jackie: Thank you so much for having me.

I really enjoyed it.

This episode is a reshare from Chris Shelton’s Speaking of Cults podcast; the original episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEHXmfhMG88.

Can you really tell who’s lying just by watching their body language? Are there any practical takeaways you can reliably and regularly get from studying nonverbal behavior in interrogation/interview settings? In this episode, I, Zach Elwood, author of some well known books on poker tells/behavior, talk to Chris Shelton, host of Speaking of Cults. We take a hard look at the booming industry of self-proclaimed “body language experts,” behavior-based deception detection, and viral behavioral analyses of interrogation videos (popular on YouTube). We unpack why confident claims about blinks, posture, eye direction, and micro-movements are often misleading, how pseudoscience sneaks into true crime media and even law enforcement, and why innocent people can easily be anxious and seem suspicious under pressure. We talk about alleged behavior experts who spread bad information (including Chase Hughes, the Behavior Panel, and Jack Brown). We discuss if there are realistic uses of body language in interrogation and other real-world settings, and what that might look like. If you’ve ever found yourself persuaded by a self-proclaimed “behavior expert,” this talk might change how you think about body language.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Related episodes:

• Questioning if body language is useful for detecting deception, with deception detection researcher Tim Levine
• On the idea that eye direction can reveal thought processes and/or deception
• A deep dive on NLP (neuro-linguistic programming), which is the foundation for many faux behavior experts’ ideas
• The many lies of alleged behavior/influence expert Chase Hughes

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcript is done automatically and will contain errors.)

Chris Shelton: “Do I know what that facial expression means? No, you don’t. You don’t. You can only guess, but we crave certainty. We want it so bad. And so when somebody comes along and says, well, I know all about it. See, I’ve studied this for years. See, and I know that when that man raises his right eyebrow, it means something different than when he raises his left eyebrow.”

“This is just one break point of where I look at these guys doing these analyses and I, I, I, I don’t have years of background in this, but I know what I know about psychology and I see the conclusions these guys make, and I’m like. Oh, please shut up.”

Zach Elwood: “They’re basically ringing blood from a stone. There’s almost no information there—but they’ll find all sorts of meaning in it.”

That’s a clip from Chris Shelton’s Speaking of Cults podcast, on which I recently appeared as a guest. We were talking about the bad, irresponsible information spread by alleged behavior experts, who claim you can get strong, reliable, and practically useful information in interrogation and interview contexts from reading people’s body language. So I’ll be resharing this episode on my own podcast channel. If you want to see the original, you can go to speakingofcults.com or to the Speaking of Cults youtube channel. 

This will be one of a few episodes I’m doing focused on the immense amount of bullshit in the alleged “behavior expert” space. I have another episode coming out with an ex-CIA operative soon, talking about the con artist Chase Hughes, and about the general uselessness of using nonverbal behavior in interrogation and espionage-related fieldwork. That talk includes discussions of Paul Ekman, and of micro-expressions.

I have another couple episodes coming out with retired FBI agents, one a quite well known one who you might have heard of, to talk about these topics. 

I have another episode coming out where I’ll be talking to a professional negotiator for their thoughts on nonverbal behavior. 

Just to say that I have decided to really focus on this for a bit, talking to people who work in high stakes situations, asking them about what they see as nonsense and what they see as realistic when it comes to making use of body language. 

Also, I should say that this is the second time I’ve appeared on Chris’s Speaking of Cults podcast. The first one was a deep dive on NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, and the nonsense and pseudoscience in that area. NLP is a foundational aspect of many alleged “behavior experts,” so if you really want to understand this area well you should understand NLP well, and that’s a good video for jumping into the topic. 

I’ll also say that if you like these talks, you should look at the couple interviews I’ve had with Tim Levine, the respected deception detection researcher. 

In this talk with Chris, we discuss: 

• The huge variability and ambiguity in human behavior
• Alleged behavior experts, like those on The Behavior Panel, and the bad, irresponsible information they spread
• The misleading idea that you just need to quote “baseline” someone’s behavior
• My own views on the major differences between game scenarios and real-world, non-game scenarios
• The negative outcomes that can result when people wrongly think they can reliably tell truth from lies based on reading body language 

Okay, here’s my talk with Chris Shelton on his Speaking of Cults podcast…

Chris Shelton: [00:00:00] The speaking of Cult podcast is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from it is at the user’s own risk. The views, information, or opinions expressed by the host and guests are solely those of the individuals involved and do not constitute medical or other professional advice.

Hello, and welcome to the Speaking of Cults podcast. This is Chris Shelton, your host. Thank you very much for joining me again this week. I am very happy to have your viewership and your support. We are, as you know, a, a podcast that dives into the subjects of cults, coercive control, destructive behavior, and you know, the kind of abusive stuff that people get up to with each other.

And we try to shed a light on either abusive organizations or activities [00:01:00] and how these things can be measures of, or reflective of, you know, extreme behavior. Like people just kind of taking things too far, going to, taking a belief, taking a belief set, taking a group, and just kind of dialing it all up to 11 and doing bad things.

As a result, human beings definitely have a tendency to go, uh, too much of a good thing or take a bad thing and, and, and really blow it up. But either way. You know, we, we end up in bad places and one of the ways that we like to look at things on this podcast is to break down behavior and what is behavior driven by what motivates behavior?

Hell, I’ve put a whole psychological model together where I dare to think that I might have some answers as to what drives people to do what they do, you know, in terms of emotions and morality and, and you know, and things like that. But. There’s a difference between trying to like categorize or broadly, you know, look at [00:02:00] behavior and then making claims about human beings that are unfounded, untested, and really do not, people just have no business making these claims, but they have no compunction in doing so anyway.

And so we get this broad field of pseudoscience and we talked a couple weeks ago with Zach Ellison about, or sorry. Say that again. We talked a few weeks ago with Zach Elwood about neurolinguistic programming and Chase Hughes, one of the Grifters, now I’ve just used that word very liberally here, um, in this pseudoscience space of human behavior and, and sort of this idea of deception detection and body language is a whole other thing that Chase has sort of put himself into this world of people who put themselves out there on YouTube mainly.

And in the written, they, they write books, they make videos, they do classes and workshops, and [00:03:00] they, and they present themselves as experts in something that is not really. Something you can be an expert in. If I kind of put my go all the way out on the limb here and really like put these people in their place because there’s no science, their body language analysis is haphazard.

Guesswork is kind of what the science tells us when studies and research get done on this. It doesn’t turn out good for the Chase Hughes of the world, but that doesn’t stop him and other people from forming what they call a behavior panel and getting together and sort of mutually reinforcing each other’s language and ideas around body language analysis.

And they’ll come up with terms and language like turling and baselines and, and this sort of language and jargon enters into it that makes it seem as though it’s, again, [00:04:00] legitimate science and that there’s these concepts that are, that are researched and that people have done a lot of work on this and, and really figured out the percentages and how people act, and that these are universal human principles.

People in Cambodia or in Malaysia or in South Africa are gonna respond the same way as people in Montana. Like really, you know, one of the things you learn in psychology very quickly is how incredibly different people are culture to culture. So, but that doesn’t stop these guys from making these very generalized claims.

So I thought, let’s do a show about this. It is right up against, um, its deception and even coercion when we talk about how law enforcement and, um, regulatory bodies start using this analysis information, this pseudoscience that’s pedaled to them as though this is how they should make decisions to hire and fire [00:05:00] people decisions about whether somebody is innocent or guilty of serious crimes and whether or not they should, you know, be in jail or not.

So these decisions and this data has very large consequences beyond individuals. There’s societal implications to this work and. Therefore it has a, a degree of danger that could even touch your life. Who’s watching this right now through no fault of your own. So all that being said as this big intro here, Zach.

Hi, welcome back to my show and thank you very much for agreeing to be part of this. This is kind of the topic that you really got into this whole thing with the body language tells and kind of through poker games, right? That was kind of how you got into this whole thing. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Hey Chris. Uh, good to be back.

Thanks for inviting me back. Uh, yeah. I got into this world, like went down the whole rabbit hole eventually, you [00:06:00] know, ending up with the Chase Hughes and behavior panel stuff that we talked about last time. But how I initially got into the space was I used to be a professional poker player and I wrote some, uh, well-known books on poker.

Tells my first book got translated into eight languages total. A couple of those were me doing it, but six other people, uh, publishers published it in other languages. Lots of people called it, you know, the best book on the subject. Uh, I got very good reviews from, you know, both amateurs and very experienced players.

I’ve consulted for World Series of Poker, main event, final table players. I’m consulting for a high stakes player right now. So just to say that was what got me into the, uh, behavior space was my interest in interest in psychology and behavior. And I think, uh, yeah, the interesting thing we could, depending on which way, which direction you want to go, is like, I, as you know, as I’ve discussed on your show, there are, there are many people in this, you know, [00:07:00] kind of like what I call pop behavior space.

These people on YouTube, like Chase Hughes and the Behavior Panel and many other people who just say clearly false things about what you can do with behavior. And that that’s in the realm of like just speaking a about clear, about just plain false things. And then also. Exaggerating things that are realistic or, or known or supported, but acting as if you can do amazing things and reach amazing conclusions with them, you know, and the, one of the main ways that manifest is watching, you know, like interrogation footage or interview footage and, you know, having so much to say about every few seconds about some minor, you know, eye blink rate or some minor way that they move their hands on their legs or what have you.

So it manifests as all these things that are just plain false and exaggerated and don’t have basis in, in real science or, or just lack common sense when you get down to some of these things. And, and then you have a [00:08:00] lot of people that are eating that up because it, it basically functions as a kind of glorified, you know, pseudoscientific gossip, uh, kind of, uh, you know, content where people are just like examining.

Behaviors of criminals or examining behaviors of famous people and using those to kind of like bolster their, you know, views that, oh, I knew Meghan Markle no good, and she’s a liar and a deceiver, blah, blah, blah. You know, just kind of using these things as kind of like a, a glorified, uh, pseudoscientific seeming, uh, or scientific seeming, you know, gossip and celebrity gossip and true crime, you know, kind of content.

And that’s, yeah, I think that’s one of the main ways that kind of junk plays out. But then as you say, some of those ideas have drifted into real, uh, you know, spaces like police work and, and such with the NLP kind of ideas and things like that. But it’s all kind of related in, in terms of like exaggerating what you can do with these things.

Yeah. 

Chris Shelton: Very much so, and it’s the, and let’s be [00:09:00] clear that it’s the exaggeration that I take exception to. It’s not the fact that somebody can’t guess or look at somebody else and, and, and have some estimation based on, you know, their knowledge of this individual or the situation in the context. And it come to some ideas about what’s going on in this person’s head or what this withholding or knowing or knowing about or something like that.

We make assumptions and we do this thing, you know, called, um, you know, the heuristics, right? We, we have a, we have a little bit of information and we have to, you know, from that try to figure things out, right? And we use these measurements, these, these, these estimations, these ideas of, okay, well the guy’s wearing a lab coat.

Zach Elwood: Well, maybe he’s probably kind of scientific, 

Chris Shelton: right? Or there’s something formal, or there’s something proper, or there’s where these words come out, right, of like, what would we think of somebody who’s wearing a lab coat versus somebody who’s not the, the, these are called [00:10:00] biases or assumptions or, you know, guesses of, and this is just how our mind works all the time.

There’s nothing wrong with this. There’s nothing weird about it. We’re not gonna educate ourselves out of it. This is how brains work. But because they work this way, we have two, we have a couple little factors that kind of get in the way of our lives, right? Uncertainty is a big one, right? But do I know what that lab coat means?

Do I know what those words mean? Do I know what that facial expression means? No, you don’t. You don’t. You can only guess, but we crave certainty. We want it so bad. And so when somebody comes along and says, well, I know all about it. See, I’ve studied this for years. See, and I know that when that man raises his right eyebrow, it means something different than when he raises his left eyebrow.

It is that granular of analysis of body reactions during conversations, during speeches, [00:11:00] during, uh, trials, during job interviews, during interrogations. And these are almost always unusual, stressful situations where we’re gonna see unusual behavior from people. Right. But they’re guided or they’re, they’re judged as though these are normal situations.

This is just one break point of where I look at these guys doing these analyses and I, I, I, I don’t have years of background in this, but I know what I know about psychology and I see the conclusions these guys make, and I’m like. Oh, please shut up. You have no, I mean, 

Zach Elwood: they’re, I, they’re just, to me, they’re just ringing blood from a stone basically.

There’s like, there’s like no information there, but they’ll find all sorts of information, 

Chris Shelton: right? Yes, that’s right. And it’s, and, and I’m only making this big, I’m only monologuing here because I’m trying to make this point that it is the certainty which, which they deliver it that sells this stuff to people.

Because we all walk around knowing, we’re just guessing. You know, we don’t know if Amber [00:12:00] heard really, you know, did what she did to Johnny Depp. We just know that this is what these guys said about each other in the trial. Right. And so some people are like, but I want her to be the, the, the good person.

And other people are like, no, I know she’s the bitch. Right. And both of them will read into the behavior they see. They’ll 

Zach Elwood: filter. Yeah. They’ll 

Chris Shelton: filter for 

Zach Elwood: what they wanna see. Yeah, 

Chris Shelton: exactly what they want to see. So there is this other thing called, we call that confirmation bias. It’s when you’re using your perceptions to confirm that something you want to think is true, is true.

We do this all the time. We talk about it on the channel all the time. ’cause it’s a great way to get people into cults and it’s a great way to fool people. Right. And this is one of the things that, that, that gets a lot of traction in the body language analysis space. Right. Is I, this is one of the reasons why I think, but we’re, we’re probably jumping to the.

So the conclusions before getting through some of the stuff here, but in terms of [00:13:00] describing it, uh, you know, I was really amazed watching some examples of this. I’ve seen clips now from Australian News, from uh, BBC, from Newsmax, from Fox News, from various news agencies as well as behavior panel videos from these YouTubers and individual YouTubers who are talking to TMZ or other celebrity media and offering these deep, very certain, this is the thing I watched over and over and over again with these guys, is they are selling these, uh, conclusions or judgements about these people.

And I was really shocked ’cause I expected it to be a little bit more generalized. So they could get away with it easier, but these people were not, I mean, they were making claims that, you know, they have no business making about people. Could you talk about that a little bit, just as far as like what, what you’ve seen too and, and where this, how this developed?

Zach Elwood: Uh, I [00:14:00] mean, it is shock. Yeah. I, I agree. It is shocking. I mean, it’s the, it’s the certainty and it’s the straight up exaggeration of credentials, right? Like, so for example, the behavior panel people, like, they just called themselves the best behavior experts in the world. Like, they use that to describe their channel.

It’s like there’s no, they have no, no reason to, to, to, to describe themselves as such, right? Like, look at Chase Hughes. We, we examined all of his lies about his past. He’s a clear con artist. He’s a clear serial liar. And I have no problem saying that. Like, ’cause I know I’ll never be taken to court for that.

Or if I did, I would win. Like I have no problem calling him a clear con artist, but. Him, he calls himself, you know, the best in the world. And he, uh, the, the behavior panel promotes that group as the best behavior experts in the world, which gives them this veneer of respectability and credibility. I mean, I could just as easily call myself, you know, the best behavior in the world.

Like it would hold as much credibility as them calling themselves that, right? [00:15:00] Uh, so yeah. And then you look at these examples and it is amazing to me that these people get on TV shows. Like I, I, I think it really speaks, you know, to the desperation for content that is out there, which is a big part of this, why these people get attention, why they succeed at, at these these things.

Because there is such a desperation from news shows and other shows. To just produce content and to Brutus content. That seems exciting. Right? So for example, 

Chris Shelton: oh, I gotta say, I gotta say real fast just to, just to, just to throw this in here. I mean the, the watching the endless parade of TMZ, Meghan Markle, prince Harry critiques by these people, I mean, these are, this is a, a, a whole organization with way too much time on its hands as far as I’m concerned.

Zach Elwood: And a lot of this behavior stuff is, is right in the same area because it’s just basically filling the demand for people to watch stuff about true crime or watch stuff about celebrities, right? So, yeah, I mean, one of the first. [00:16:00] Grifters and, and, uh, liars in the behavior space, behavior bullshitter as I called him when I made a, a article about him was this guy named Jack Brown, Dr.

Jack Brown. I think his doctorate was in ophthalmology or something, but he, he presented himself as a, uh, a doctor, you know, and he gave his behavior work more credibility. And I was amazed to find that despite the obvious bullshit in the same way that chase u’s stuff is obviously bullshit. Like you look at the Jack Brown stuff and it’s like, this is ridiculous.

Like, speaking of granular stuff, like he would, one of the reasons he got so popular was because he was always criticizing Republicans. And so it tied into a political. Uh, some people’s political views. Right. We see 

Chris Shelton: that too. That’s right. 

Zach Elwood: Right. That ha that happens too. On, on, you know, for both sides.

That’s right. So he, he was, Jack Brown was doing this stuff where he was like, I could tell by Trump’s uh, constriction in his pupils that he is some sort of cocaine or other and pH addicts. And it was just like completely, he would show these closeups of his [00:17:00] pupils and it was like, this is based on absolutely nothing.

Right. Like that’s, and he would go into all these, he has all these details, detailed reads, like he said at one point that he thought the pipe bomber that was caught on video during January 6th showed signs of being Marjorie Taylor Green based on his read of the, uh, of the, of the behavior and the way they, that, that the person walked All this crazy stuff.

Right. Yeah. Just to say it was completely nuts and like none of it was based on, he just said clearly false things about eye direction. That’s a common thing that we talked about for NLP. Yeah. For example. And despite all this. He was on, uh, CNN talking to Anderson Cooper about stuff. And I think that was his biggest, luckily, I think that was his biggest, uh, you know, media win.

And I think I had something to do with that because I put out an article that it was like the first thing that came up for if you search for Jack Brown behavior, and I put an article down, I think I kind of like stymied his attempts to get popular basically in the same way. I think I might’ve helped do that for Chase Hughes.

Uh, but [00:18:00] it’s just kind of amazing, the granular things that they will go into where you’re like, how can people, you know, and most people I think, know how complex psychology and behavior are and how complex the world is. So like, most people, I think bulk at hearing like, I’m gonna take this tiny bit of information and make all these deductions from it.

Right? Because we all know in real life, you know, we can reach some deductions about other people, but we know it’s pretty hard because there’s so many factors that govern their behavior and so many un. Unseen things that might explain why they’re feeling, how they’re feeling or how why they act, what, how they act.

So it is, it’s kind of amazing that they will go into these really granular things that just, I think most, you know, reasonable people bulk at that and, and realize that that’s a sham. But for the people that are, I think not as, don’t have that filter. They’re, they’re, they’re, they’ll absorb all that.

That’s right. And that’s, and because of these people present themselves as being, you know, the best in the world and it’s based on science and blah, blah, blah, a lot of people just absorb all that. [00:19:00] And, and their filters are down for just absorbing a bunch of nonsense and fill, filling their heads with nonsense, basically.

Chris Shelton: V, very much so, and unfortunately we deal with a bit of a culture lag in, in actual science versus what, you know, the, the cultural public awareness of science. And so for example, you get, these guys get a lot of traction talking about, you know, the lizard brain and you know, the, the, the, the, you know, the referring to systems of the brain as though, you know, there’s this old idea and, um, and it’s, and it’s, I get where it comes from.

It’s completely understandable that, that people have this idea, it was talked about for years. So it’s not like, you know, that, that they’re idiots for thinking this. I’m not in any way implying that. I’m saying people do the best they can with the knowledge that they’re given. And a lot of people have been given for a lot of years this idea that the brain is sort of like this lizard brain with layers built on top of it.

And, and, and they talk about the brain that way. And [00:20:00] it’s just one example that’s that’s on my mind right now. ’cause I watched this video earlier today about this stuff. MCAP and Yeah, exactly. Muse Cab. She did a great breakdown on this and yeah, 

Zach Elwood: her uh, if people are curious, it was called, I debunked everybody language expert on YouTube and 

Chris Shelton: yeah, there’s link to it, but I’m putting a link to it.

Yeah. ’cause I thought it was so damn good. Um, and it, um, but my point is that people don’t know that science moved on from that. That’s not how scientists, neuroscientists or psychologists or neuropsychiatrist think about the brain. It’s an integrated organ that evolved as a whole entity. It’s not something that evolved to a certain point.

And then nature just came and slapped some shit on top of it, and now we can think better. It. That’s not how evolution works. And, and by the way, evolutionary psychology is a whole nother area where, you know, we, we, we, we’ll probably have done another show I’ll have to do in the future on that one, but point is that, um, people take what they learned in school or what they [00:21:00] think they know about this stuff and these guys come along and confirm, oh yeah, you’re right, because look right, this is the lizard brain thing going right there.

There it is. There it is. And they show you an example. And a picture is worth a thousand words. So when people see a guy, you know, at a being, being interrogated in a police station, hunched over looking pretty bad. That’s all they see is that little clip. Well, obviously 

Zach Elwood: the 

Chris Shelton: guy’s guilty. Well, yeah. Look, he’s all hunched over.

I mean, obviously he’s the, the literally the weight of his guilt is pushing him down into the table, right? Like this, like people can start thinking this way. No, he, he’s been in that room for 15 straight hours. I’d like to see what you would look like after being in that little room for 15 straight hours.

Right? But we’re gonna take this little tiny clip and we’re gonna tell you all about how guilty this guy is because of his body posture, right. In an out of context way’s 

Zach Elwood: where he knows he is been accused [00:22:00] and he is stressed out and he knows he is suspect. And yeah, I think, uh, I mean, getting back to the, the overall point, it’s like, I think really when you, you people just need to understand there are so many factors involved in why people behave, how they do.

It’s a, it’s immensely complex. And anybody who’s. I, I’ve watched a lot of interrogation footage because it’s something that interests me, and I’m interested in those, those, uh, those videos where they are talking to somebody who’s innocent. But that person has done some things that do seem suspect and strange, and you’re like, why did they do that?

It doesn’t make any sense. And like that kind of stuff would lead you, you know, wrongly to think, oh, this person, you know, then, then that gets into the content of what they say too, which is another important distinction too. But I think even for like behavior of like somebody acting just purely behavioral, like acting stressed, like as you pointed out earlier, they are in a very, uh, stress stressful environment, right?

Like, and then that’s also [00:23:00] true of many of these situations where behavior so-called experts are analyzing, you know, like high stakes interviews by, of celebrities or whatever it may be. Like there’s many reasons for somebody to behave in ways that seem stressed out or unusual or whatever it is. You know, you, I mean, you put me in front of a high stakes.

Situation I’d probably behave in, in all sorts of ways that I, I, I think people would think we’re weird. And that’s under, you know, that’s completely common for people to do those things that you, afterwards you’re like, why did they do that? I, I have no, you know, it doesn’t make any sense, but those are the kind of situations these people are in, whether it’s interrogations, whether it’s, you know, interviews, whether it’s, you know, political situations or what have you.

I think that’s what we really need to understand is like, there’s just so many things going on that that can impact somebody’s behavior and make them uncomfortable about a question. And maybe their discomfort isn’t even about that question, but something related to it. Or, you know, they’re thinking about something else suddenly that they, they’re thinking about.

That’s not even related to that question. So just [00:24:00] say there’s, there’s just so much complexity. Um, but yeah, I think. Wherever you want to go from, from, from that which direction? 

Chris Shelton: Well, yeah. I mean, it, it’s a, it’s a layer cake and there’s just a lot going on with us. And to pretend that you can take one layer of that and determine the big picture, maybe, maybe.

To say you can do that a hundred percent of the time, even 90% of the time with certainty. I mean, this is where there it gets a little ridiculous. And I wanted to ask you about something because it seems that one of the things that is used to give this an air of legitimacy is this idea of a baseline.

This is something that’s talked about a lot, this emotional baseline. I’m gonna observe this individual and I’m gonna see their baseline, and then I will note the differences from that baseline. Well, that baseline concept is itself interesting. You can make it make sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s a true thing.

I don’t know that human beings have a baseline emotional [00:25:00] state. In Scientology, we used to have this concept of a chronic tone level, you know, the average emotional state that a person is in most of the time. Uh, he is a chronic angry, right? You go up to the guy, he is always angry or you know, they’re always sad, or they’re always this or they’re always that.

Since when is any human being always anything, we generalize these things, but the fact of the matter is reality doesn’t agree with any of that. We can be anything mood wise at any moment depending on context. So, um, so to make these broad statements and then assert that they’re simply true, ’cause I said so is itself kind of a problem in this space?

The other problem I see in this space that is sort of this accepted sort of foundational thing is that there is some list somewhere, or some paper must have been written somewhere that I can’t find that, that lists or describes what normal human behavior is in a [00:26:00] police interrogation or in a job interview, or in a celebrity interview or at a funeral.

All these places where these analysts have a heyday breaking down the behavior of Meghan Markle or Prince Harry. And, and, and thinking because he is tapping a piece of paper on his leg or he is, you know, or he is a little, a little nervous or he is, you know, doing something with his hands. This means exact behavior, A, B, c, because, and this is how they phrase it.

And because a normal person or a normally you would see this kind of behavior. And so there’s this, there’s this idea that there’s this standard somewhere of how people are supposed to act in these different situations. And I thought I’d bring that up early on here ’cause I wanted to ask you about it and what you’ve seen with that.

Where does that idea come from? They all fall back to it and everybody accepts it and you’re like. [00:27:00] Who, who said normal people act like that? Where is that coming from? 

Zach Elwood: Well, I think, uh, to, to, to your start of the baseline thing, like I’ve written and talked about that before in some mm-hmm. My videos, I, there’s, there’s two levels of difficulties there.

As you say, it’s hard to even know what anyone’s personal baseline is. Like, for example, I’ll, I’ll wake up some days and feel pretty down and low energy and not even understand why other days I feel high energy and confident and such don’t really know why. And then even during an activity that that feeling can change.

Like, I might start out one way and end up the other way. So just say, yeah, they, even the idea of personal baselines can be very difficult. There’s, there’s all kinds of factors. Um, then you’ve got on top of that, like theoretically. Yeah. I think the idea of baselining is good. So for example, in poker, I’ve done a lot of an analysis of poker players on video.

And that’s a, that’s very different though, because it’s a very formal environment where they’re doing repeatable actions. It’s a, you know, that we can get into that later. The difference between like games and [00:28:00] sports Yeah. With very formalized environments, with very particular actions versus like a real world scenario where you’re just loosely talking and you can do anything you want.

And there’s, there’s not really any constraints and there’s no specific actions you’re taking. Right. It’s a very different environment. Yeah. So theoretically though, the idea of baselining is good. Like if you, but, but to get a meaningful baseline for some, a specific person Right. Like that in a scientific way to, to map out like, oh, they do these kinds of things in these scenarios this many times.

I mean, that, as we’ve said, that’s such a complex area. So to try to do that scientifically to me, would take like dozens if not hundreds of hours. Right. Like it’s just an that’s undertaking. So, 

Chris Shelton: yes, exactly. 

Zach Elwood: So if you could do it at all, that’s, you know, that’s even assuming you could do it, but to, to, but for these people that pretend like, oh, you know, you gotta get a baseline in an interview or a baseline in this interrogation.

It’s like you’ve only got such a small sample size to work with. And, and do you mean to tell me that you’re [00:29:00] mapping out precisely like what they’re doing and you know, precisely what all the factors are in that situation that led them to a, a do that one behavior. Like the idea that you can do that kind of baselining on the fly in some sort of like several minute or even several hour scenario is, is ludicrous to me for the, you know, sheer complexity of it that we discussed.

That’s right. Uh, but yeah, that’s, that’s what gets me about the baselining. To me it’s a way to cover up the fact that it is so ambiguous and low practical use, but by saying like, there, there’s a couple benefits to this baselining thing to, to saying that because it’s makes them seem. More credible because a lot of people will balk at a lot of these things.

So by saying you gotta get a baseline first, it makes it seem more credible. Credible. But also for the people that take their classes and their content, when those people find that they can’t actually do anything useful with the content that they’ve consumed, they’ll be like, oh, I guess I didn’t get enough baseline.

Or I guess I don’t know how to baseline properly. [00:30:00] So it puts the idea in people’s minds, it’s like a fallback for, for, uh, putting it in people’s minds that consume this so they can blame themselves instead of blaming the people that gave them this information. So it serves a very valuable practice, and that’s why you’ll hear it so often when they discuss these behaviors, they’re, they’ll always throw in these things like, well, you gotta get a baseline first.

As if, as if that gets them off the hook for the bad information they’re spreading. Right. 

Chris Shelton: Uh, there’s a really good analysis of that. Thank you. I, I couldn’t agree more. And I, and, and then this additional point, I think it’s a really, really, really important one, and I think it’s one that goes over the heads of almost everybody watching this crap.

And I, and I, and when it hit me, I was kind of like, oh my God. Right? Which is the point I just made, which is that, you know, you address the baseline thing, but then there’s this other aspect, right? Which is Yeah, yeah. This assumed idea that we all know what a normal innocent person is going to do, and then we take that baseline, that comparative that is completely [00:31:00] imaginary.

People just make this idea up. Well, if I were in that situation and I were innocent, I wouldn’t look like that dude. Reality check right? To any human being watching this, I’m sorry, but I’ve, you know. You don’t know what you are going to do in a situation that is high stakes until you’re in it. Mm-hmm.

Because the way you think right now, lemme just make this really super easy, right? Because the way you think right now is you’re in a calm, rational place where you have time and no threat. Nobody’s pointing a spear at you, and you get to think through all the things you get to think through right now about what you think you would do in that situation.

But when that situation comes around and adrenaline is pumping in your veins and, and you’re not thinking straight, you’re not gonna [00:32:00] remember anything you’re thinking right now. Yeah. We know this, this is studied beha. We, we know this. Right? So, so we are the ones who keep screwing it up by making these unfounded, egotistical assumptions that we know what a normal person would do.

Right. So that’s my bottom line on that, but I wanted to get your take on that. Yeah, 

Zach Elwood: yeah. I mean, I, I, I agree. I think, you know, to give us spec some specific specificity, uh, screw that up, but, you know, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Uh, to give, to give some specifics to it. I, I can think of, you know, I’ve watched a good amount of interrogation footage, like I said, and, you know, I do think there are certain patterns that show up, like kind of meta-level patterns of behavior that are useful at.

Uh, that, that are correlated with, you know, guilt or innocence in certain situations. And we could talk about, you know, why I think that and how sure it fits alongside, you know, what I’ve said so far and my skepticism about specific behaviors and deception detection. But I will say there’s plenty of examples for people [00:33:00] that have, have watched a lot of interrogation footage and our interest in that and are, and are not, you know, don’t have major cognitive biases around what they’re trying to see.

I mean, there’s plenty of examples you can find where people, uh, guilty or innocent people acted in ways that seemed quite suspicious. You know, like for example, somebody’s close relative was, was killed. And they act in a very calm demeanor, which most people would be like, how can that, that seems very suspicious.

Why, why would he act that way? Most people would be very distraught or at least showing signs of immense anxiety. But, you know, someone can. Act in those ways. And that can be how some people react to immense, uh, stress and anxiety is just to kind of shut down and act calm. Right. So just to say there can be various things like that where, you know, yeah, like you said, what’s normal is very hard to define for a general population, even if, even if, you know, police officers, interrogators may have some, you know, [00:34:00] justified inkling about what is more common when, but when we get down to it, you know, it’s the certainty we’re talking about here, right?

It’s the, it’s the immense certainty that people can have. That is the problem, not, not the inklings that can develop from, you know, doing a lot of specific work or being in the field, doing a lot of specific work, whatever it is. So, yes, we’re talking about the certainty. Yeah. 

Chris Shelton: Well, very much so. Because I wanna be clear that there is, there is such a thing as experience and there is such a thing as working with people and there is such a thing as, you know, reading people’s.

Body language for, for, for lack of a better term, right. The way they move. And 

Zach Elwood: general de general deductions too. It’s like we do that every day. Yeah. About, oh, they said this and they said this while they were doing this. We’re reaching some deduction. Like they’re uncomfortable or they don’t wanna talk about that.

Or, you know, we’re, we’re reaching those conclusions every day. And I think that, I think the main difference is most of us know that we’re often wrong, you know, about, about those deductions that we can reach or, you know, and so we shouldn’t be overly certain about it. And, and that’s where, yeah, that’s where we’re get getting into the certainty part of it to, 

Chris Shelton: well, for sure.

That is definitely my [00:35:00] primary criticism with this. The other point that I think needs to be made about this exact point though, is that there is no. Person who is able to separate their pure observation of somebody’s body language from their other perceptions and observations of the language the person has used, the way they talk, when they talk, when they don’t talk, when they, when they, you know, yes.

How they stand, how they sit, how they posture, how they move. All of these things on top of where the person lives, what their background is, what their educational level is, what who, what culture they’re from. All of these things are in the mind of the interrogator coming together to form a picture of an estimation of this person in front of them.

You cannot, there is no human being who can credibly and reliably separate out [00:36:00] just the body language part of this. 

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

Chris Shelton: And decide accordingly. Right. We c we integrate all of this together. Mm-hmm. So it’s a little ingen, you know, disingenuous for somebody to go, oh, the body language tells me when, in fact, it’s a combination of all of these things, if we’re being honest.

And those are the things that give you that experiential advantage. ’cause you’re putting mm-hmm. All of this stuff together. 

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Chris Shelton: You know, 

Zach Elwood: and usually, I think it’s mainly about the, for the, for the people that are experienced and actually have reliable, you know, useful deductions. Sometimes I think it’s mainly about the content.

Right. It’s mainly about what people are saying. Yeah. I think they might, I think sometimes they, as you say that they sometimes may be getting confused about like, which is which, because I think exactly a lot of, a lot of times it all rolls up and they’re like. Oh no, the behavior is very useful, but they, they might not be distinguishing between [00:37:00] like, oh, it was what somebody was saying or not saying, coupled with that person, you know, looking up uncomfortable and, and the fact that the person looked uncomfortable was actually very minor and in context there, or like completely meaningless compared to like the things the person was actually saying.

Which gets back to what I often say is like the verbal, the statement analysis or, you know, just analyzing what people are saying or not saying in their stories is so much more meaningful than focusing on the non the, the nonverbal behavior. To me it’s like, you know, it, it’s, it’s such a huge difference in importance to me.

Like the nonverbal is just so low importance to me. Yeah, 

Chris Shelton: exactly. And in fact, studies that were done on this, and there have been studies done on this and meta studies done on this, indicate that if you turn the sound off. Just to back up exactly what you just said. You take a trained interrogator. You take, you take people who supposedly know what they’re doing and you show them with the sound turned off somebody in an interrogation room and with body language alone.

[00:38:00] Right. Can you tell, this guy’s lying? Can you tell this person’s guilty less than half the time? These skilled interrogators on body language alone? And that tells you something. Right? That’s the kind of 

Zach Elwood: science they, and they did better. They did better when they, uh, turned 

Chris Shelton: the sound on when 

Zach Elwood: they heard, yeah.

Yeah, 

Chris Shelton: that’s right. 

Zach Elwood: Yeah, 

Chris Shelton: exactly. In fact, you could turn the vol, you could turn the video off and turn only the sound on. 

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Chris Shelton: And by sound alone, they were getting 64% accuracy versus 

Zach Elwood: Right 

Chris Shelton: less than 50, 

Zach Elwood: which makes sense. It’s like, as we’ve talked about, it’s like the behavior stuff. The nonverbal behavior is so complex and so many spots are ambiguous.

But what people say contains a lot of information. Like that’s, that is literally like where we get most of our meaning from in life is words, right? Like, so the idea that you’re gonna get some. You know, a much more information from the, the nonverbals and the verbals is, is to me, um, you know, 

Chris Shelton: that seems to be the point where of departure for me too.

It seems to be a point where they’ve taken a, a mole hill and turned [00:39:00] it into a mountain. Yeah. Statistically, right. Statistically speaking, we know, again, through studies and research on this with controls, put in that through body language reading alone. You know, you are, you’re, you’re we’re talking about a difference of less than 1% of accuracy in determining whether somebody is.

Telling a lie or telling the truth when body, you know, as far as what, how much of a contributing factor is the body language analysis in determining the accuracy of a liar? Well, it turns out it’s like one, 1% or less. You know, when you, once you do all the math and break it all down. Did I read that right or am I misunderstanding what I read?

Zach Elwood: Oh, I can’t remember that exactly. But I was gonna say, if you wanted to talk about the deception detection research, you know, specifically, and, uh, yeah, I, I could talk a little bit about that if you want. Please regale me. Yeah, I think, I think that’s, uh, when I was going through, you know, preparing for this, I’d been wanting to put some of these thoughts in order.

And I think the, the rea I, I think so often people are talking past each [00:40:00] other because it’s like, yeah, there is no, when you talk about deception detection, especially in the research setting, you’re talking specifically about getting people to say a lie or say a truth, and getting people to make guesses about reading that.

And when it comes to that, like it seems pretty clear to me. That there is no, that there’s evidence against the idea that there are general, uh, non-verbal behavior markers that we, that, that will make, uh, you know, that, that are tied to, to lying significantly tied to lying. So Tim Levine, uh, I think, I think he pronounces it.

Tim Levine, I’ve interviewed him for my podcast. He’s a well-known deception detection researcher, and he has written papers and talks about, uh, how there’s no good evidence for general behavioral markers for deception detection. 

Chris Shelton: Right. 

Zach Elwood: And I, I believe that, but you know how that maps over to me working on poker tales and believing that there’s, you know, many people would think like, how can you believe that?

And also believe that there’s valuable poker tells or valuable other, uh, tells and, you [00:41:00] know, interesting reading spots in interrogations or games or sports or whatever. So the way I map it out, well, not just me, uh, the, the way to map it out I believe is. Recognizing that, you know, for example, let’s take poker.

There’s no, all the, all the tells that I and other people use in poker are not about deception detection. They’re not, we’re not, we’re not like getting a read that we think somebody is lying or telling the truth. We’re getting reads about level of relaxation or level of, uh, how much alertness someone is paying to their cards or to the board or whatever, these kinds of things.

And the, these are not about deception because the person is not just, you know, in a, like, in a research setting. And it has no, has no analogy to someone just saying something and you reading whether they’re telling the truth or telling a lie. It, it does. So it, this, this lets us see the distinction between like, oh, we’re getting, we’re getting clues about how they might be feeling.

Now, you know, me getting, making a read in poker, there’s some general population things. That I have [00:42:00] no problem basing decisions on because I know that they’re so common in the general population. And, uh, and there’s also, you know, things that I think are lo much lower liability where I’d like to see it present a few times before I base a big decision on that, you know, player specific reads.

Uh, so this, and I think the similar, similar things are in other, uh, games and sports environments, but I think the important thing is recognizing that games and sports and these kind of formalized competitive environments where there’s repeatable actions and you do specific things like there’s no correlation.

Uh, analogy between that and real world non-game scenarios where you’re just talking to people, right? There’s, there’s not like specific things you have to do. There’s not specific turns you take. There’s not specific physical actions you have to do. You know, for example, in like in, in soccer, you might, you know, you can get reads maybe that someone’s looking a certain direction and gonna kick that way or something like that, right?

There’s, there’s not that kind of thing. This, this, uh, physical turn base kind of thing in, uh, real world scenario. So it’s [00:43:00] much more open-ended, it’s much more dynamic. And that to me is the big distinction about why these things are so much more useful in games and sports than in real world scenarios.

And the other big difference is that. You know, to make a, uh, there’s so many small decisions you make in, in games and sports, and even if it’s not highly reliable, you’re so often in close spots, like you’re so often in 50 50 spots that could go either way in poker and in other games. So if you think a reed is like, even like 60%, you know, above chance or more, that, that’s like a, that can be a huge edge in spots where you’re 50 50 to, you know, you, you’re not really sure which way to go.

Right. So, uh, just to say it’s a, these scenarios are very different, which is what gets into me thinking, you know, me working on poker towels while saying I all, there’s so much bullshit on these other, you know, real world scenario, uh, behavior expert, uh, things people say. Uh, so that, I think that helps map out the, the area a little bit more.

But also I think [00:44:00] it also helps us understand, you know, when people like, uh, ’cause Joe Navarro talks about this in his book, the FBI guy who I have some problems with some of the things he does in the behavior space, but I think he’s much more. Uh, much more, uh, credible and respectable than, you know, the, the behavior panel people of the world.

Because Joe Navarro will say like, yeah, there’s not evidence of, uh, you know, no good evidence that there’s, uh, specific behaviors tied to deception detection. But he’s also saying, well, you’re just getting, you know, reads about, uh, likelihood of what someone is feeling at any given moment, which is, you know, defensible.

Getting back to people, having a lot of experience, uh, interviewing a lot of people, they may get reads Again, I think the problem is when it gets into this high certainty areas, because I think a, a, a good practitioner, whether in poker tells or in interrogation scenarios, a good practitioner knows that there prob, you know, often could be wrong because we’re just talking like, you know, things that increase, things, increase likelihood a bit about what someone is feeling.

They also [00:45:00] know that there could be many reasons for why that person is feeling that way. So, you know, I think that most. I think when it comes to defending what people do with behavior and interrogation kind of settings, I think the main thing that to me, the most useful and, and uh, reasonable way to use it, is just when they get an inkling that likes, oh, I asked this question and this person seemed uncomfortable, so maybe I’ll follow it up with a few more questions.

I won’t, like, reach some grand conclusions. Uh, so there’s that, that kind of thing. But then there’s also like the metalevel thing of like an interrogator, like we said, using all these things, like not just nonverbal behavior, but the whole multitude of how a person has acted in a setting, right? That’s, that’s like a whole meta-level analysis of like what they’ve said.

How they’ve said it, how the pauses, they, maybe they’ve, you know, done various things throughout that has made this person to form a picture. And I think often they may be, like we said, they may be focusing too much on the [00:46:00] behavior part and not realizing that their meta level picture is mostly about the content of what that person has said in the, the, the, maybe the, the unusual mannerisms they had.

Like they, you know, like one extreme example is, you know, suspects who act like they’re crying, but there’s no tears or, uh, you know, uh, liquid coming out. Right? That’s, that’s weird. So just to say that there can be these metal level, uh, you know, more extreme things that rise to give a a, an interrogator a picture of what’s happened.

And to, to tie that, you know, to, to, to tie that to the nonverbal behavior, like specific granular examples is a mistake because that person has built up that read over, you know, using a lot of data points and things that are not even related to, to nonverbal behavior. So I think that’s, uh. That’s kind of how I mapped out the territory of like meeting in the middle in terms of like, yes, there are some things that I think can be useful for, for people that are skilled practitioners.

They, some of those things may be just [00:47:00] getting a read of somebody being uncomfortable and maybe that helps them, you know, ask a few more questions about something. I don’t know, but mm-hmm. But I think the, the main thing we can say is like, even if that’s true. The, the main thing we’re talking about that the, the main bad thing is when those things get into more highly certain areas where you use a few behavioral things, like a cop using a few nonverbal behavior things to be like, oh, this person’s guilty, and I know that now, you know, that’s, I think that’s where all the bad stuff happens.

And then, then you’ve got the, these behavior experts, you know, so-called experts. Spreading such kind of high certainty ideas to other people, which is, has a just a general, you know, filling people’s heads with, uh, bad ideas and leading them to, you know, more cog co confirmation bias and hate of celebrities and, you know, these kinds of 

Chris Shelton: things.

Oh, it’s, uh, it’s, it just constantly used to rile people up. But I think that it really is dangerous when we enter into the interrogation context. And the, and it’s a, it’s a little old chicken and egg. I’m [00:48:00] not really sure which is, uh, I, I mean, I think obviously cops were around before these grifters were, but I think that the idea that, you know, that there are these techniques or ways of making police work easier, whether it’s reading bumps on heads, uh, you know, or whether it’s, you know, measuring, you know, finger nails or something, or know.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. 

Chris Shelton: What’s that? 

Zach Elwood: We want easy answers for, for 

Chris Shelton: understandable reasons. Exactly. Have reasons. Yeah. There have been people peddling these ideas to the police for a very long time, and when they have the, you know, the air of science to it and they start using jargon and science, sciencey concepts or ideas or things that people think are sciencey, then they get a lot more traction in that world, in that law enforcement world than you might imagine.

People think, you know, oh, this stuff gets, you know, side checked and fact checked and this and that. No, it doesn’t. No it doesn’t. These guys take it on in the police forces and sheriff’s office all over the [00:49:00] United States. These guys take this stuff on because they’re looking for easier ways to get their job done and, and if some expert comes along and says, well, I know how to do it.

’cause I used to interrogate people in the military and I’ve interrogated people, you know, like to Chase Hughes, you know, this guy is just so in disingenuous. He, he, you know, he says things that he’s never done and. Puts out there that, that he has this experience. He doesn’t have to sell these techniques and ideas, which have no credibility, but they believe they do because of the packaging.

And so, so that little round robin thing tends to be going on and on and on in law enforcement for quite some time. Mm-hmm. And I wanted to, um, say that we need to be aware of that fact because Right. We should be as citizens who are, who are at the receiving end of this stuff. You know, I do think we should be pushing back on that a bit.

Zach Elwood: Luckily, uh, and I will say, yeah, there is this kind of, uh, snowball effect like Chase Hughes getting [00:50:00] on, you know, one, one podcast appearance leads to another podcast host. That’s right. Believing that he is more credible. It has the same effect, and it can have the same effect in, you know, police or law enforcement organizations where you get one gig, like say, chase gets invited to one small department somewhere.

Um, and this is, I think this has happened, you know, with many people, not just single all Chase, but you get one invite invited to one small organization, then you use that in your, on your resume, it looks, it looks legitimate to some other organization, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, but yeah, the, um, oh yeah, what I, I think I lost my, 

Chris Shelton: I mean, this is how the false memory folks got around.

By the way, the whole repressed memory thing from the, remember the whole Satanic panic thing in the eighties and all the repressed memory stuff from the eighties, that’s how it got to law enforcement was the same drill. It was experts coming along. Oh, I’ll tell y’all about it. And then these law enforcement guys looking like complete idiots when they start repeating.

What these people have told them and taught them, and then they come up with felt false confessions. People are in jail who [00:51:00] shouldn’t be. And, and it really does have these downstream consequences. You know, 

Zach Elwood: I do think, uh, yeah, I think we talked about this a little bit last time. I, I’m not really sure. I, I don’t, on the plus side, IWI do think that law enforcement in general these days, most of them understand that these things are mostly debunked.

You know, there’s been a lot of coverage of like, the TSA program that yielded no results. That got, you know, that got some headlines. Uh, I think there is more examination and awareness that those things, you know, I think, I think a lot of this stuff goes through cycles where in different formats, right?

It’s like there can be cycles of thinking like. Back, you know, back in the eighties or nineties, I think it was like, oh, can we use these NLP concepts for, uh, that’s 

Chris Shelton: right, 

Zach Elwood: that’s right. You know, for policing, you know, now it’s like you, they were using, uh, ekman’s, you know, stuff that, oh my God, formed that.

And some of it has overlaps, but just to say there’s these rounds of like, oh, can we use this system? You know, and, and, [00:52:00] and maybe, and some of the systems, I mean, some of the theoretical systems might have some value, but, you know, just theoretically like, not to say there’s specific ones that I, I, I don’t know if there are specific ones, but just to say like, I can imagine versions that could have value, but I think that, I think there’s always this, you know, demand for these systems.

Like, you know, we need to, we need to solve this problem of the border checking or this flight stuff. Yes. Or whatever, you know, flights ’cause of nine 11, you know, there’s a demand for like, what can we do? So who out there has ideas that we could run with, and so, so that we can show that we’re doing something right.

I think, I think a lot of it’s just proving. That we’re doing something and showing that we’re taking the problem serious. Like, and then, then when it doesn’t work out, they can say like, well, you know, at least we threw some money at it and we, we tried to do something Right. Which, which is under understandable kind of thing, you know, as long as we’re not running with, uh, really bad ideas.

But yeah, I, I do think there’s, on the plus side, I will say, I think a lot of, I think most, uh, you know, serious, educated [00:53:00] cops and, um. Mil military type people understand that these things are, you know, have, have dubious or, or low use, you know, for the most part, despite what the chase use of the world say that acts as if you military and, uh, PSYOPs people are using all these advanced things to read and control people’s mind, you know, leaving that bullshit aside.

You know, I think most people, oh 

Chris Shelton: yeah, no, let’s, yeah, screw the conspiracy crap, but it’s just, yeah, no, the real world effects of this stuff are bad enough. We don’t have to go conspiratorial. I, um, you know, and I’m pretty down on this, you know, and I, and I, and I look at the negative consequences of it. And I, and I think I’m, I, I, you know, I think I have good reasons to, to get down on these guys, but at the same time, I understand that they are trying to, as you say, there’s a, this is a, you know, every few decades, there’s another thing, right?

And, and when it comes to, let’s, let’s talk about this for a second. ’cause this goes back to also to, um, some of my education and coercive control when I was reading papers on police interrogation and the history of it. And, and I, and I did quite a dive on it, [00:54:00] and as part of my, my learning. And so, you know, the third degree beating, taking people into the back of the, of, of the, of the precinct and beating them up.

Standard procedure. That’s how you did law enforcement for a very long time. Then the Reed technique came in ’cause people got sick and tired of, of, of pe, police brutality. And that became a thing. And public outcry and injustice, uh, as tons and tons of racial injustice with that. And so we come over to the Reed technique, which is now we’re gonna apply that same level of physical pressure, but we’re gonna turn it into the psychological arena and we’re gonna use coercive methods, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, stuff like that, isolate you in a room for hours.

You can get false confessions that way and stuff too. All of this I recognize, is coming from a place where you’re doing work that is really, really hard. Finding criminals [00:55:00] and getting them to say that they were criminals is hard work. I don’t, yeah, it sounds real hard when you put it 

Zach Elwood: that way. 

Chris Shelton: Yeah. I don’t pretend it’s easy.

Right. It’s a job that has a lot of trauma and a lot of not nonsense, connected with it. I recognize that. Right. In the desperation to either meet the quotas, get the job done, enact justice, whatever the motivation is, you know, people’s logical fallacies and deficiencies are gonna come out and, and when they go in this direction, right, people’s lives are ruined.

Um, you know, seemingly, I mean, a, a person’s life can be destroyed overnight because of this nonsense. So that’s why I stress that it is nonsense. But I, but I, I say all that because I really wanna make it clear. I don’t think of police as a bunch of bad guys or ignorant boobs or nonsensical people, but I do wanna recognize that they’re just as [00:56:00] fallible as anybody else, too.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Have you seen, I was just thinking of that documentary, American Nightmare. Have you seen that by chance? Mm, it’s about this, it’s about this, uh, murder. Uh, well, actually it was a kidnapping, uh, and it’s really convoluted because you start, you start out thinking. Uh, that her boyfriend did it because of how it goes down and you start thinking, oh, somebody else did it.

And, but it also involves cops to, uh, reaching conclusions too quickly about who’s guilty and such. It was a really good documentary. It’s on Netflix. That’s, but yeah, there, I think it gets back to this, you know, this certainty idea of what we’ve been talking about. That’s, that’s, and I think, you know, there are, there are these abusive, unfair things that happen.

I mean, especially like the whole, the whole lie detector thing is very, a very, the lie, the lie detector, everybody knows, well, I mean, most people know that it’s not useful, you know, it, it doesn’t, it’s not reliable. Most people know that. Uh, but it’s, the main way it’s used is just as an intimidation technique.

Right? 

Chris Shelton: Yeah. 

Zach Elwood: [00:57:00] Which, you know, I, and I’ll claim to be an expert on the. Or have even strong opinions on the ethics of that. But some of the instances I’ve seen where they talk about, they just deceptively lie to people and say, oh, we know you’re guilty from that lie detector. That to me seems, uh, you know, I’m okay with some of like, you know, I, I, I can understand why there’s an inclination to use ambiguous language and kind of imply things that aren’t there to get the job done, to get a confession.

Some of that makes some sense to me, especially with some safeguards, you know, like ensuring you’re getting information that only the murderer or the, the, the criminal will know. That’s like a big safeguard that they do a lot, is trying to get them to say something that, you know, will ensure that they’re not, don’t have the wrong person, but, you know, getting straight, straight up lying to people and saying that, you know, the, uh, lie detector’s infallible.

We know that you’re guilty now. Like that is, that just straight up seems abusive to me. So there’s other [00:58:00] things. In that realm that I think are, 

Chris Shelton: yeah, 

Zach Elwood: just quite, quite unethical, even in the context of like, I know what they’re trying to do and I know why they, like we said, it’s a hard job. We know they’re in tough spots.

They’re trying to solve murders that, or even find missing people that might still be alive, you know, these kinds of things. Uh, so yeah, it’s a tough thing, but there are definitely some things in those areas that stand out to me as, as quite bad practices. And I think some of the worst stuff happens like that, that, uh, documentary I mentioned American Nightmare.

Yeah. Some of the worst stuff happens when you have police that wrongly reach overly confident views of who’s guilty. That’s right. And that ends up like dictating how they go about the case. Right. Because, you know, with, uh, they, they, they should, they should be willing to know that in many of those situations things can point in different directions than they know.

Right. And especially like that’s even just talking about. Evidence, like real evidence, [00:59:00] but let alone, like not if you’re talking about, be reaching certainty about someone’s non-verbal behavior, that is just absurd. And that should, you know, that should, that should never be, never happen, you know? 

Chris Shelton: Well, and that’s the thing that really bringing it back to the behavior panel now, right?

And these guys, right, these are people who really, it really is entertainment. I mean, if we’re gonna really categorize this somewhere, it really should be categorized that way. I, 

Zach Elwood: they might even have a, they might even have a disclaimer. ’cause I know like Chase Hughes and his books would put like, this is for entertainment purposes or something like that.

Chris Shelton: Right? 

Zach Elwood: So they, if they’re, if they’re being smart, they really should they, and they might have it. I haven’t watched enough of their shows to remember if. Do do 

Chris Shelton: have that. 

Zach Elwood: Right. 

Chris Shelton: Well, you know, obviously, I mean obviously if you’re watching this podcast, you know, I have an intro that says, Hey look, this is professional advice.

Don’t, you know, don’t run with this. Well that’s ’cause I need to protect myself. Right. And I, you know, I wanna make sure the audience understands that, you know, this is two guys talking, um, it’s 

Zach Elwood: opinions. Yeah. 

Chris Shelton: And they don’t do that though. And that’s one of the things that [01:00:00] really bugs me about their work is maybe they do bury a disclosure, you know, uh, say in the fine print, but they really don’t lead their shows with that.

And they don’t present as though what they’re offering are opinions. They offer it, you know, they offer it up as though it’s scientific fact and they throw these, you know, jargony words around and, and know that that will. Kind of muddy the issue enough with people, um, that they can kinda get away with it.

And it is, it bugs me that these guys do that. And you know, if we can just think of it as entertainment. I know that’s kind of funny and Oh, print, you know, Megan is at it again. Oh, look at that. You know, today she didn’t wear any makeup. What does that mean? Oh, well, clearly it means they’re about to get a divorce.

I mean, if people want to think that, fine. Right. But when it ha, like I said, I, I bring it to those real world consequences ’cause they happen so often that I, I think it’s, it’s not just entertainment, it’s not just silly. Laugh it off goofiness. You know? I think that there are, I think there’s, there’s a good reason to be talking about this 

Zach Elwood: and also bullying [01:01:00] online.

You know, I mean, there’s, there’s people like, um, oh, what’s her name? Who got accused of murder in the other country? I, I always forget her name, but the, uh Oh, 

Chris Shelton: right. The, uh, Italian. Yes. Yes. 

Zach Elwood: Uh, Amanda Knox. I mean, like people, yeah. Amanda Knox, uh, and other, and other people. Like, there’s people that. Are just normal people that wind up in these situations.

And even just, I’m just talking about celebrities too, where you have people analyzing their behavior in irresponsible ways. I mean, this stuff leads to just straight up bullying and hate from a large number of, of people when you, when you’re acting like, oh, I can confidently read that They’re, you know, they might have some psychopathic tendencies, or they, that’s a sign of them withholding something and these, these kinds of silly things.

So I think, you know, I mean, Amanda Knox is a good example. I mean, she and you and, and, and, uh, she, she’s experienced a lot of hate Yeah. And stressful situations because of the ways people reacted to her, the public reacted to her and [01:02:00] various media. Um, but yeah, that these things have real world effects. I mean, just imagine that you were an innocent person who wound up on one of these.

Interrogation or interview police interview videos. And everyone thought, you know, people were reading your body language in wrong ways. Imagine how you’d feel. And everybody’s like, I know he is a piece of shit. You know, kill him. You know, like, just imagine that’s, that’s a pretty maddening thing. And you have people doing this about so many videos where they just know so little about the situation and, you know, but, but that doesn’t stop people these days from just lashing out online.

And that has real impacts to people, you know, people, you know, become depressed and maybe, you know, even kill themselves over that kind of stuff, you know? 

Chris Shelton: Well, there’s, there are consequences. And, um, and I, and I, and I just don’t want people running around thinking they know more than they do. It’s, it’s because, it’s, because it’s, this is hard enough.

This work is hard enough. Helping people is hard. Working with people is hard. Working with people who have stress and trauma is significantly harder. And [01:03:00] working with people who have stress and trauma, when a criminal act has been committed is even harder. So I know that, you know, we’re, like I said, we’re looking and these guys are just looking for any, any help they can get.

But, um, but some help is better than others. And, you know, and, and, and, and on that note, just to kind of put it there for the audience, in case you all don’t know, you know, this to the level that we look into it, you know, the UK right now, uh, is actually doing a whole new system that is not the Reed technique in terms of police interrogations.

They’ve, they’ve kind of changed up their game in terms of how they go about interrogating and talking to people and treat it more as a data collection rather than a, uh, I’m gonna beat you into submission so that you tell me what I want to hear. It’s okay. What do you have to tell me? And let’s explore this and let’s investigate this, which is kind of what you imagine police have been doing the whole time, but kind of not really.

So the more you look into this, the more kind of like, wow, it really kind of becomes in, in some ways. Okay. So moving on [01:04:00] from cops and robbers and crime and all of that kind of stuff. And, and by the way, I, I, I do think the, the lie detector, uh, comparative or bringing that up earlier was a, was a great point because it’s kind of exactly the right and wrong of this.

If you know about lie detector, we’ve talked about lie detectors a lot, right? And one of the things about lie detectors is that, is that in the hands of an amateur or in the eyes of an amateur, it is a yes no device. And in the hands of a trained professional who uses it as a, in their job, when you hear polygraph operators interviewed, it’s not a binary yes no device.

It’s a device that is, is helps you go down a trail of questioning, uh. W with movements that may or may not indicate something, and so it, it’s an investigative kind of thing. In that sense, I think body language could be useful and interesting as a guide, maybe to a skilled interrogator, [01:05:00] but to assume or think that any of these points are binary yes nos, this means this a hundred percent of the time because I said so.

I think that really is the bottom line of where we lose the plot with this whole subject. Having 

Zach Elwood: said that, I just meant, and many of the things are just straight up false, like the I direction, you know? Yes. Giving clues. We should, we should also say like many of these things are just straight up silly and have no evidence, you know?

Chris Shelton: That’s fine. Yeah, but I, but I kind of tend to go in that place in terms of wrapping this up as sort of like, 

Zach Elwood: yeah, 

Chris Shelton: it’s not all throw it in the trash, but, right. 

Zach Elwood: Exactly. Exactly. 

Chris Shelton: If you don’t have the right look at this, if you don’t have the right attitude about this, you are gonna make massively stupid mistakes.

Sorry, 

Zach Elwood: I didn’t, people, I didn’t mean to screw up your, uh, outro your, your 

Chris Shelton: wrap. No, no, you’re fine. You’re good. So anyway, so that’s, those were some of the thoughts I had on that. So, um, did, what were your sort of, now that I’ve said all that in my conclusion, what are your sort of, uh, [01:06:00] overall sort of, uh, thoughts about this?

Zach Elwood: Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I actually wanna write something up because, you know, you, you, you asking me to. Come on. The show was getting me to think through some of these ideas more and I was gonna write something up about it. So maybe I’ll share that later. But I did, I did. I do think the main thing is, you know, for people interested in this stuff, just stay skeptical.

Like I think it’s okay, it’s, it’s good to be interested in behavior. I think there’s a lot of interesting things, especially like the statement analysis things. I think those are interesting about analyzing, like the patterns that people have in their speech and such. 

Chris Shelton: Yes. 

Zach Elwood: And uh, I think there’s a lot of interesting things in behavior.

I just think people need to be very skeptical of these people that are claiming to have all these answers. And basically like ringing blood from a stone is how I view it as like taking something that might be a few interesting things to talk about and like trying to get all this amazing information out of it.

You should be very skeptical when people try to do that thing. That kind of thing. Yeah. 

Chris Shelton: Absolutely. All right. Well I want to thank you very much, Zach, for taking the time to appear on my show today with me [01:07:00] and, and responding to my invite. Um, and I hope that, uh, we will have cause do this again, because I really do enjoy talking to you and, and your, and your take on this stuff and the way you kind of, you know, take a measured look at it and, and you’re looking at the pros and the cons.

And that to me that’s always great. ’cause I love it when people will also check me with positivity, you know, check my negativity with some of their positivity too. I really appreciate that. ’cause sometimes I know I can be a little down on Oh, it’s all bad. It’s all bad. Well, it’s not all bad, so. 

Zach Elwood: Well thanks Chris.

No, I appreciate it and thanks for having me on. 

Chris Shelton: You bet. Alright, folks out there, thanks for coming around, listening to us, uh, Gabon and Madre about all this. I know debunking videos are not, you know, uh, enticing and wonderful, but they are necessary, uh, in this space. And so I hope that this was useful and formative and, you know, mildly entertaining this week.

And I will see you guys next week. Bye-bye.

Aemula is a new kind of media platform that’s trying to tackle a big problem: the fact that the structure of our news media leads to various outcomes that amplify toxic polarization. (Sign up for free at aemula.com.)

Instead of the usual “engagement = more exposure” logic, Aemula flips the incentives. You read an article, then you tap a simple Support or Disagree button — and those signals build a living map of Aemula’s community: a 3D social network graph showing how readers, writers, and articles relate without slapping on ill-defined partisan labels like left and right – labels that often unintentionally amplify us-vs-them, team-based thinking. 

Aemula creator Don Templeman and I get into:

• Why left/right-type labels can be a misleading way to understand beliefs or categorize content
• How Aemula uses social network analysis to map out relationships and ideological groupings in an objective, data-driven way 
• How Aemula’s social network can help define a sort of ideological center, and how promoting content from the widely supported regions of the network can help reduce polarization 
• How the blockchain aspect of Aemula makes it self-governing and therefore infinitely scalable  
• How Aemula’s approach could matter even more in an AI world, where chatbots and LLMs need better sources than “Reddit + Wikipedia”

If you’ve ever felt like the incentives of the media ecosystem seem destined to drive us further apart — I think you’ll appreciate learning about Don’s paradigm-shifting approach to the news. 

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video, recommended)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

TRANSCRIPT

Don Templeman: “So we’ve created this explore page, which shows this perspective map, which is essentially showing how you relate to all the other users on the platform, articles, and authors that wrote them. So as you’ll see here, I’m this blue, white, blue dot and our authors on the platform are these orange dots and the dark gray dots are articles. And you’ll see other like white dots that represent other users. But this is a 3D graph that shows where you fall relative to these other authors and users in the space. And the reason we do this in a 3D map is we don’t want to try to collapse everything into just a left versus right thinking, because we are trying to reverse polarization. And what we find is you can find points of consensus between users that you may not typically agree with on everything, but you may share some close views on some perspectives. And we can use that to map out and find communities of ideologies and determine what are the best articles to recommend people to open new lines of communication between these different communities on the platform. So this is really a visual representation of how we go out and find articles that we think you’ll like.”

Zach Elwood: That was Don Templeman explaining some basics of content recommendation for his new blockchain-based journalism platform Aemula.com; that’s AEMULA.com. You can sign up for free for Aemula, and I recommend that you do, and hope that you do. 
Aemula is a new kind of media platform that’s trying to tackle a big problem: the fact that the structure of our news media leads to various outcomes that amplify toxic polarization.

Instead of the usual “engagement = more exposure” logic, Aemula flips the incentives. You read an article, then you tap a simple Support or Disagree button — and those signals build a living map of Aemula’s community: a 3D social network graph showing how readers, writers, and articles relate without slapping on ill-defined partisan labels like left and right – labels that often unintentionally amplify us-vs-them, team-based thinking. 

Don and I get into:

• Why left/right-type labels can be a misleading way to understand beliefs or categorize content
• How Aemula uses social network analysis to map out relationships and ideological groupings in an objective, data-driven way 
• How Aemula’s social network can help define a sort of ideological center, and how promoting content from the widely supported regions of the network can help reduce polarization 
• How the blockchain aspect of Aemula makes it self-governing and therefore infinitely scalable  
• How Aemula’s approach could matter even more in an AI world, where chatbots and LLMs need better sources than “Reddit + Wikipedia”

If you’ve ever felt like the incentives of the media ecosystem seem destined to drive us further apart — I think you’ll appreciate learning about Don’s paradigm-shifting approach to the news. 

A quick note: if you’re listening to this and not watching it, this episode might be rather weak, due to this being a visual-focused episode. If this topic interests you, I recommend watching this on youtube: my youtube is at youtube.com/peoplewhoreadpeoplepodcast. 

I myself have been working on reducing toxic political polarization for more than five years. I’m the author of two books on polarization, which you can learn about at www.american-anger.com. I’m quite skeptical about our ability to reduce toxic polarization, as I see it as the result of so many nested and self-reinforcing cycles of contempt and anger. There are only a few ideas I’ve seen that have excited me and made me think: here’s something that is capable of shifting things in a big way; of changing the underlying social incentives in ways that reduce us-vs-them contempt and anger instead of amplifying it. And there are also few paradigm-shifting ideas I’ve seen that have the potential to actually be used by a lot of people and scale up and create big changes; some ideas seem good but require top-down enforcement to be implemented, whereas Don’s project is user-focused; a private market product that gives people what they want while also incentivizing better behaviors. 

I think Don Templeman’s Aemula project is a great idea. I think it’s revolutionary, and paradigm-shifting, and I think Don is a very smart person. I hope he succeeds in getting lots of funding to build out Aemula. This is why I personally hope you will take a look at Aemula and sign up for it. It’s just possible it might be the future of how news and journalism is done. You’ll maybe look back one day and think, it was cool to be in on the ground floor when this thing first got rolling. 

If anything I’ve said has intrigued you a bit, and piqued your curiosity, I hope you watch this episode of Don explaining how Aemula works.  

And speaking of media companies having incentives to promote fringe, extreme, and polarizing content, the last episode of my podcast was an examination of the paranoid and insane content that Instagram has been promoting to me and others. If you’re curious about that, it was an episode I uploaded only to youtube due to it being so visual. You can find that on my youtube at youtube.com/peoplewhoreadpeoplepodcast. 

Okay, here’s the talk with Don Templeman, founder of Aemula.com.

00:00:03 – Zach Elwood: Hey, Don, thanks for joining me again.

00:00:04 – Don Templeman: Zach, yeah, thanks for having me back on.

00:00:07 – Zach Elwood: I appreciate it. Yeah, I’m really interested in the work you do. So I thought maybe we could start with you walking through the Aemula login process and what you see there and then talking about the social network analysis and graph kind of stuff.

00:00:26 – Don Templeman: Yeah, happy to give an overview. I just requested to share screen.

00:00:31 – Zach Elwood: Okay, it should be able to do it now.

00:00:32 – Don Templeman: Perfect. I’ll pull it up and just start from the beginning. If people go to aemula.com, hit our landing page, and you can click start reading to sign in. If you don’t have an account, you just type in your email and we’ll create an account for you. I know a lot of people, they don’t like entering emails when they’re creating new accounts, but we actually don’t store emails on our end. So it just creates a hash. We won’t send you marketing materials or anything. It just takes a few seconds to set up. And what you’re met with here is a front page that’s curated just for you. Obviously, if it’s your first time on the platform, we’ll show you some high quality articles for you to get started. But importantly, the core of what we’re doing is trying to support independent journalism. So all of the articles you see, they’re published independently by the writers. They’re owned by the writers. They’re stored and served on a peer to peer network. So nothing is coming from our servers. and they’re recommended to you through an open source community governed algorithm because we’re trying to remain as neutral as possible as a platform just to give writers the tools to publish and report and readers the ability to have one subscription to access all the information on the platform. And the basic functionality is you go in, you read articles and at the bottom of each article, there’s just this little support or disagree button And after you read, you can determine if you want to support the author or disagree with them. And what we can do is we can link that to create a connection between you and that article and our system. And so as you begin to read and interact with articles, we can understand roughly what your point of view is, whom you typically agree with, and we can start to make recommendations that are close to your beliefs while still promoting articles that are more moderate or more widely supported by diverse user sets. which is how we determine quality. And this front page, it’s meant to just be like a quick, simple way for you to get in, read some articles that we think you’ll like, but we wanna give users more control to freely explore the articles on the platform and freely discover new writers and new perspectives. So we’ve created this explore page, which shows this perspective map, which is essentially showing how you relate to all the other users on the platform, articles, and authors that wrote them. So as you’ll see here, I’m this blue, white, blue dot and our authors on the platform are these orange dots and the dark gray dots are articles. And you’ll see other like white dots that represent other users. But this is a 3D graph that shows where you fall relative to these other authors and users in the space. And the reason we do this in a 3D map is we don’t want to try to collapse everything into just a left versus right thinking, because we are trying to reverse polarization. And what we find is you can find points of consensus between users that you may not typically agree with on everything, but you may share some close views on some perspectives. And we can use that to map out and find communities of ideologies and determine what are the best articles to recommend people to open new lines of communication between these different communities on the platform. So this is really a visual representation of how we go out and find articles that we think you’ll like, but rather than relying on our ranking, you can go in, you can find articles on here and you can say, I think this is you. Yeah. Zach Elwood can find one of your articles, click on it and I can read it directly from there. So not having to rely on pure recommendations that come from your front page, if that all makes sense.

00:04:14 – Zach Elwood: Yeah. And that’s, uh, and it’s pretty early, obviously in Aemula’s, um, Aemula’s just started, so it’s not there’s not very many things on there. But as it grows, you know, I think you were saying as it grows, you would expect to see some mapping reflecting like the polarization in society where you would, you know, assuming you’ve got a standard sample size of the American population, you probably see a grouping eventually of like these two clusters of, because of the related stances on issues that people on both quote sides have, but it’s too early to see that because it’s just starting out, right? Absolutely, yeah.

00:05:05 – Don Templeman

We have a few hundred users, a few hundred articles, and just over a dozen publications on the platform. Within the Explorer page, I will note that this is just my local community. So these are people that are close to me. Obviously, I interact with the platform a lot, so this does represent a large portion of it. But we also have this separate perspective map, which shows you all of Aemula, so you can see roughly where you fall relative to everyone. And the reason we do that is we don’t want someone to go and just find opposing points of view and try to disagree with them to demote them in the process. We want people to interact and explore their immediate communities and beliefs and articles that we think are likely to support, likely to agree with, and not just go out and try to find competing points of view from the get-go. But we do want to show everyone roughly where they fall. And going back to left versus right thinking, like obviously as we start to grow the platform and it is more representative of everyone’s ideologies, we would expect to see some filtering into left versus right clusters. but we want to avoid having to label things as left or right or keep it that simplistic. So this is why it’s in like this three-dimensional space. And we don’t actually know what on here is left or right, because we as a platform wanna remain verifiably neutral. And one way to do that is say, we actually don’t know what the underlying content of these articles are. We don’t know the ideologies of the underlying users on the platform. All we know is their public address, their account number, and we know the address of the article, and we can map it out just based on everyone’s relationships and how they’ve interacted on the platform so that no one can point to us and say, oh, you’re pushing a specific narrative, you’re platforming specific writers. We can say we actually don’t have any insight into that, and it’s all just generated based on how the community’s operating and interacting.

00:07:01 – Zach Elwood

Right. You’re using transparent algorithms that are value-free in how the handle content it’s just using a transparent constant algorithm is the goal and you’re not getting into yeah that you and i’ve talked about this on the on the last call about this on the last episode and i’ve had episodes about the illusions of the left right spectrum how there can be there’s a lot of a lot of critique that the left right spectrum is an illusion and also a a conflict amplifying illusion because it kind of the the the embedded nature of talking about our political divides as a left-right spectrum can itself be very false and also just get people thinking in these left-right terms. That can help explain why there’s this filtering for everything being part of this monolithic left-right But that’s the great thing about what you’re doing and social network analysis in general, because it’s because it’s value free and label free, right? You’re not getting into, you know, trying to determine what makes something quote left or right or all these kinds of labels. Yeah, exactly.

00:08:19 – Don Templeman

So that’s it’s overly simplistic. So you start to over categorize things in the left versus right. And then people get into the thinking of, oh, I identify on the right or I identify on the left. if you show me something that’s labeled as being from the opposing point of view i’ll automatically discredit it just because i know it comes from the other team and i don’t want to support anything they’re doing but when you actually start to look at underlying beliefs you’ll find that there’s a lot more nuance there and there’s a lot more complexity so some people may disagree on a wide array of things but have a lot of agreement on a certain topic and so what we want to do is be able to make it as easy as possible for those people to start communicating open up new lines of dialogue to be able to understand some of those other perspectives that they may disagree on, just so they can start to have the conversation, start to see information from other people. Because the way that we currently discover information with traditional publications or on social media, you’re normally only finding stuff that’s within your immediate cluster, stuff that the publication thinks you’ll like, or stuff that the algorithms on social media think you’ll like. And so you just get further and further reinforced into your current beliefs. And we want to do the opposite. We want to reverse those forces by mapping everyone out in one holistic space and saying, you can start to discover these new perspectives that are around you in these different communities, just so you can start to get a better sense of the world around you.

00:09:46 – Zach Elwood

Yeah. For people that are curious about the idea that the left-right spectrum is an illusion, I’d say it check out the book, The Myth of Left and Right, and check out maybe an episode that I did where I interviewed the co-author of that book. Yeah. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, have you seen interesting patterns in the clustering so far of Aemula? Do you have any interesting observations about what you’ve seen in the behavior?

00:10:15 – Don Templeman

A lot of our early writers are people like yourself that understand what our mission is. and they’re writing from an inherently centrist depolarizing perspective. So even though we do have some clusters of information here, it is still so early that all of these people are roughly in what we would call the center. But we have seen interesting interactions on the platform just with the recent contest that we ran with our $5,000 essay contest. So as users were coming on and trying to support the writers that were sharing those essays on other platforms, they’re coming in as new users and starting to interact. So you can see like with your article here, a lot of support there and some support where it’s a few readers largely supporting one writer’s piece of work. So we started to see some behavior like that, which we would expect to see more of at scale. But for the time being, I would say it’s too early to start doing some of the more interesting things that we can do with this type of structure and these types of algorithms. because you really do need a lot more data to start more accurately reflecting the ideologies of the population so that we can start doing some more interesting things.

00:11:30 – Zach Elwood

Can you talk a little bit about the concept of like the gravity or how more connected ideas clustered more towards the middle of the graph, that kind of thing?

00:11:43 – Don Templeman

Yeah. So what we want to support in our way of reversing polarization is if you map everyone out, you can see that There’s some clusters here that are more on the fringes and a lot of users here in the middle that are interacting with a wide diversity of authors. So we want to promote authors that can write an article that gets diverse support from multiple different ideological communities in our graph, because that indicates to us that they’re making strong arguments. They’re presenting factual information. People are willing to interact and engage with their content. Whereas someone who may be more on the fringes and getting a lot of traction from some small group of people. If we were just using pure engagement metrics, we would say, Oh, they’re getting a lot of reads. They’re getting a lot of eyes. If we were trying to sell advertisements, that’s a very valuable person. So we would try to promote them more. But the thing is that typically happens when you look at traditional social media with people sharing inflammatory content, that’s from a more radical ideology. And that’s the opposite of what we want to support. So by mapping everything out in this 3d space, we can start to say like, This is the center of our community. This is where we want to start to draw more eyes and more attention. So for people on the fringes, when they join the platform, we have information that is relevant to their beliefs. They’re willing to engage with it. They can start reading and interacting on the platform. And then over time, we can slowly show them articles that are closer and closer to that center. And the way that we’re able to determine what the center is, is every time there is a connection made between a reader and an article, it creates these little edges. You can see if I zoom in all these little connections. And essentially what we do is those have a gravity about them. So if I’m supporting a lot of your articles and making a lot more of those connections, we’ll grow closer and closer together in this 3D space. And we can use that gravity to determine who’s getting a lot of connections from a lot of different perspectives. because that’ll pull them in closer to the center. And if someone isn’t getting a lot of diverse attention, they’ll be drifting off further on the side. So it’s more like natural way of using that gravity force to see who is being pulled into the center, who’s more on the fringe, how can we start to promote articles to people on the fringes to pull them in and which articles would be the most impactful that that person would likely agree with and actually be able to interact with, but will also move them closer to the center. And that’s really the underlying basis of how we drive our recommendation algorithms.

00:14:24 – Zach Elwood

Yeah. And you briefly mentioned this, but this is basically the opposite in terms of how a lot of content recommendation algorithms work on social media and such where, for example, people might have heard about these uh, like on YouTube where you, you express interest in one thing and it, and it shows you something like get you down a rabbit hole of like more extreme and conspiracy minded content because it’s, you know, that’s, that is a, uh, a valid way to get people more engaged, but especially like the ramping up the emotionality of it too. Uh, but yeah, what you’re trying to do is, give people what they want, but also move them a little bit in the, in the opposite direction of going down some like really fringe rabbit hole. Right.

00:15:14 – Don Templeman

Exactly.

00:15:16 – Zach Elwood

And it is not just discovery.

00:15:18 – Don Templeman

We’re also trying to change the incentives of how the content is actually produced because when you’re on a platform like YouTube or on X or really any traditional social media, you’re trying to optimize for the incentives that are at play in those ecosystems. So if what is being rewarded by the algorithm is some clickbait thumbnail headline that gets a lot of inflammatory people arguing in the comments, you’ll start to create content that aligns with that. It’s audience capture.

00:15:47 – Zach Elwood

It’s you’re trying to… Yeah, it’s self-reinforcing cycle. Exactly.

00:15:51 – Don Templeman

And you can’t blame the creators in that context because they’re trying to maximize their earnings on the platform. They’re trying to maximize their views. They’re trying to spread their message as wide as possible. So if that’s what the platforms are incentivizing, that’s where you would expect the content to… That’s where the system leads.

00:16:09 – Zach Elwood

The system naturally leads that way. Yeah.

00:16:12 – Don Templeman

Exactly. And that’s… The deterioration of content quality that you see on a lot of platforms where they’ll just start out and people will speak so highly of like, oh, look at how this platform is creating all of this new content that you can’t find on other platforms. Writers are able to freely express themselves, but then as they grow and those incentives become more prevalent, you start to see deterioration collapsing back towards that. I’m just trying to gamify the algorithm to maximize my exposure. And that’s what we’re seeing now with Substack. where Substack started as like the cultural engine of change, inviting a lot of independent writers who are now free to write and own their own perspectives. And there was a lot of great content on the platform, but as they’ve grown and they’ve implemented traditional social media style algorithms with their notes feature, releasing the Substack app, a lot of these writers are now trying to play the Substack game of how do I get the most subscribers? And that’s leading towards more what they style headlines, people writing about very similar topics that are being promoted well in algorithm. And that’s, if you look at people talking about Substack and their opinions on it, some people are starting to leave because they’re seeing that occur on the platform, but really that’ll occur on any platform, unless you change the underlying incentive structure. So where we are promoting content, that’s high quality, getting diverse acceptance from across our user base. we’ll start to incentivize writers who, if they’re trying to gamify our algorithm, they’ll start writing higher quality content that is more widely appealing to more people. And that’s what gets promoted. That’s what gets more monetization on the platform. So we’ll be able to reverse that trend where if you start to try to gamify our algorithm, it actually increases the quality of content over time.

00:17:58 – Zach Elwood

Yeah. I mean, you’re talking about shifting a paradigm that’s kind of unquestioned and is the dominant. There’s just no, basically nobody else really questioning that the basic paradigm and you’re trying to shift the whole underlying paradigm of incentives. Yeah. And make it infinitely scalable at the same time. Yeah.

00:18:19 – Don Templeman

Yeah. And I would say a lot of people realize that this is happening. A lot of people feel like content quality degradation. A lot of people realize that when the incentives are forcing clickbait style like short form content that’s how content is going to go but when you remove those incentives or change them like we’re trying to do a lot of the creators like this is what they would prefer to be doing if given the freedom to actually be able to create that style of content so it’s more just a factor if you start to switch those incentives you can start to let people write more freely share what they’re actually wanting to create and over time that’ll be able to increase content quality.

00:19:03 – Zach Elwood

Do you want to share anything else about the visuals of the graph? I was going to ask you some kind of like broader questions about social networks, but I don’t know if you wanted to mention anything else you want to highlight there.

00:19:15 – Don Templeman

No, I think it’s, if people are listening and want to check out the platform, like if you go in and you start to interact with algorithms, you can play around with it yourself and always happy to hear feedback from people as they start to interact with it.

00:19:28 – Zach Elwood

No, it is really cool to play around with. And I, I’ll enjoy seeing it grow over time and see what patterns develop. I think that’s one of the interesting things about the, the social network graphing is, is seeing the patterns and how those map over to a societal patterns, you know, and, and how that, how that’ll grow. Yeah. Um, yeah. So yeah, the, and maybe you could talk a little bit about how that social network graph is a implementation that many social networks network platforms use and where that idea comes from. Obviously, you didn’t create that. You’re using it and harnessing the idea. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the social network analysis idea in general.

00:20:12 – Don Templeman

Yeah, I think it goes back to really the start of the internet and the start of the web in general. I believe it was Tim Berners-Lee when creating the initial form of the internet in the form of the World Wide Web, talking about the semantic web and how You could have context from how websites and servers are all interconnected. And that idea was really built on through networking in the early stages of the internet. And I think popularized by early social media platforms like Facebook as they started to grow. But it really is just like an intuitive way to think about relationships of people and content online. So it is just saying like, if I… post something on Facebook and you like it, then there’s a connection that we have made where you like to post that I’ve made. And it’s just a very intuitive way to start thinking about networks. But the other reason they’re used so prevalently, especially on the internet, is because it creates these social graphs, which are a whole field of mathematics with graph theory and information theory. So it makes them easy to study. And what it allows you to do is start to gain insights on user behavior and how information is flowing through networks, purely from just interactions on the platform, which is really why we’re starting to leverage and use it. But it is used widely across a whole array of different use cases. So obviously in social networks, we’re using it as a recommendation algorithm, which like Netflix uses their recommendation algorithm based on a social graph like this, just interactions of content you’re consuming and what they think you’d like. But it also can go into kind of like wider fields where it’s fraud detection with banks. They use similar technology to determine fraud, epidemiology and contact tracing, which I think a lot of people became familiar with during COVID uses similar technology. Also Google maps and Uber and Finding direct routes places use similar technology, but all different sources of data. So it is widely used. They’ve become pretty efficient. And all we’re doing is using that same technology, but changing where we’re implementing it and the incentives that we’re putting behind it to try to create something that hasn’t been done before. I think you’re muted.

00:22:51 – Zach Elwood

Yeah, yeah, sorry. I’m muted because of these damn sirens. I’ll cut this out, obviously. Do you have any idea what direction we should go in next?

00:23:02 – Don Templeman

I liked those decentralized, centralized graph diagrams you had. I actually have a little whiteboard thing on my computer where it had a similar… image. So if you want to talk about that and like how networks are formed, I can talk about like information theory. I can share my screen again.

00:23:28 – Zach Elwood

Sure. Do you want to just keep talking about it or do you want me to queue it up with a specific question, you think? Because if you had an idea, like what would I ask to queue that up, you think?

00:23:42 – Don Templeman

If you say like, oh, I was just pulling up some like images of network analysis or something, I can key into it from there.

00:23:50 – Zach Elwood

I think. Um, actually, why don’t you just, uh, why don’t you just start talking and I’ll, and like creating a, like starting a new topic. And I’ll, I think, I think it’ll be a seamless edit if you’re just like, I want to show you these, you know, things on my computer. I think that’ll work.

00:24:07 – Don Templeman

Yeah.

00:24:08 – Zach Elwood

Yeah.

00:24:10 – Don Templeman

Okay. So I saw that you pulled up some images there of network analysis and, um, I think that segues nicely into some of the concepts that we’re working with and some research that we’re doing at Angular that we’re trying to publish on how you can structure information networks and how that can actually make them more resistant to polarization and misinformation to create higher quality information environments. I actually have very similar graphs that I have on like a whiteboard on my computer.

00:24:41 – Zach Elwood

Oh yeah, let’s see that, yeah.

00:24:43 – Don Templeman

If I share my screen. So this is similar to what you just pulled up on different ways that you can structure information networks. And the current way that most social media platforms and actually how we naturally coordinate as people in societies is what’s called preferential attachment. So there are people that have significant influence that a lot of people follow. And a lot of clusters form where people different people who follow these like influencers or power users may not necessarily communicate with people that are in or power users or followers of another influencer. And through this preferential attachment, it actually creates the most complex information network possible. So while it is natural and easy to form, it’s actually one of the worst ways that you can form an information network if you’re trying to promote high quality content and everyone having access to the most information as possible. So this is like, if you were to think about it, it could be like traditional publications where you subscribe to a specific newspaper and like this newspaper has some subscribers, this newspaper has some subscribers, or it can be like on Substack where a large writer comes on board and they have their own subscribers that follow them, but it’s all relatively just jointed. And the reason that it is so complex is because there’s, multiple centers of influence that all are able to influence their own followers, but there’s not communication across those followers. So there’s two different ways that you can try to structure an information network that are more stable. And one of them is fully centralized. So this is like, if you think of how news was shared early on in the development of newspapers at the start, but also kind of like more prevalently as propaganda, where there is one information center and it distributes information to all of the users or all the people in a community. So while this is very simplistic and it is stable, there is one consensus truth that everyone is agreeing on. Everyone’s working on the same information.

00:26:50 – Zach Elwood

Like having just a few broadcast networks, you know, up until the 80s, you know, between the, yeah, like 19, you know, 1980s or something like that, like this monolithic… Distribution, yeah.

00:27:05 – Don Templeman

Yeah. And that’s why back then there was, I trust in the news. Everyone felt like they could operate and have communication with people of different ideologies because you were all working off of the same information source.

00:27:18 – Zach Elwood

Mostly. Much more than we are now. Yeah.

00:27:20 – Don Templeman

Much more than we are now. But obviously there’s problems with centralization where there’s really only one point of view and there’s a lot of control over that point of view. So there’s a lot of incentive to skew that into… trying to use it for securing power for whoever is the person that is sharing that information. So this doesn’t necessarily result in the highest quality content or people having the most access to the widest amount of information, but it is much more stable for people being able to agree with each other. The other option is fully decentralized where everyone can communicate with everyone individually. And this is what has only recently become possible to do at scale because With a subscription news service, really news needs to rely on subscription. So there is stable revenue. So you have the ability to go out and do longer form investigative reporting processes. It is an expensive process to do high quality reporting. So you need to rely on subscription revenue, but you can’t really do that. You previously or prior to 2024, you couldn’t really do that just due to technical limitations, because as a subscriber, you need to just pay revenue. one subscription and then be in the network and everyone can work and operate seamlessly together. What we saw with subscription models in the past was closer to this preferential attachment where you’re subscribing to one publication, you’re subscribing to one writer, and that’s really like where you get your information from. When you decentralize the network, information flows more freely and people are able to communicate across different, there’s different paths for information to take across the network. And it is, more stable and resilient to people trying to put influence into the network. Whereas with preferential attachment, there’s really only a few power players that are really controlling the narrative. That can’t really happen in a decentralized information environment, which is why we’re building Amul with that type of technology is because we want to create an as open as possible of an information environment for people to communicate freely. And it creates the shortest path of information directly from the source to the reader. So there’s as little outside influence as possible over the information you’re seeing. And you can individually trust that the person is a credible source, which we can get into reputations and how you determine credibility. But that’s really the core of what made this technology possible now is we have that ability to work in this trustless system, but everyone can still trust that the quality is there. You don’t have to rely on trusted intermediaries like publications in the past so we can avoid this preferential attachment problem.

00:30:04 – Zach Elwood

And am I understanding correctly when you say it’s something that is only recently possible, that’s because of the blockchain technology and the ability to do these smart contracts where you set something up to operate and it enforces those rules? Am I understanding that correctly?

00:30:23 – Don Templeman

Exactly. So in the past, decentralized information networks were more akin to villages or people where your immediate community, everyone is able to communicate with each other freely. As we started to grow societies to larger scales, you really had to figure out a way to be able to communicate across long distances or with people that you’re not personally acquainted with. Because the process of news inherently is hearing information from a stranger. So something that you didn’t directly experience, you’re hearing it from someone who did. And once you kind of grow out of like 100 to 200 people in your immediate community, you’re really having to figure out like, how can I trust that this information is accurate and true? And How do I know if I want to incorporate that into my worldview? Which is why we moved into preferential attachment where these publications are saying, we are trusted intermediaries. We have a track record of reporting quality journalism. You can subscribe to us and you can trust that even though it’s coming from strangers that you don’t know, we’re vetting it and making sure it’s all credible information. Since the 1970s, those institutions have started to lose trust. And there’s a lot of reasons that go into why, but if we wanna try to rebuild that trust, we really need to go back to that decentralized architecture where everyone’s communicating freely. But if you want to do that at societal scale, it comes down to the problem of how can I trust a stranger? How can I trust that the information they’re sharing is credible? So on social media, we’ve had the ability to communicate as decentralized as possible by being able to communicate with anyone online. We just didn’t know if they’re a bot account, if they’re from some foreign actor. These are all things that have happened and influenced our news cycles in the past. And that’s one of the core issues with misinformation and finding news on social media is there is all of that inherent mistrust where you can’t really know what someone is sharing or if it’s true, which is why social networks also fall into preferential attachment where When you first join a platform, it gives you like, here are some accounts you should follow and you follow them. And then those become the centers of influence. Those are the people that you’re largely filtering a lot of your content through, but you know that like, I trust them. They’re strongly followed account. A lot of people agree with what they’re saying. So I’ll use that as my trusted source of information. But if we want people to be able to operate at scale in a decentralized manner, they really need to be able to trust individually this person has a reputation and has credibility. And now that we have blockchain technology where we can tie reputations to individual people, we can do proof of personhood on chain. We can say I’m verified. I’m not a bot. I’m not a foreign actor. I’m a real person. I have my credibility and track record. We can store that all immutably on chain. So it’s given us all of these tools to allow these trustless systems where I don’t necessarily need to know you, I don’t need to know who follows you, but I know that you have a reputation on the platform. So I know that I can trust that what you’re saying is credible.

00:33:38 – Zach Elwood

Yeah, maybe we can talk a little bit more about judging reliability and such in a bit, but I was thinking when you were showing the middle diagram about how people affect other people. It made me think of one of my favorite talks for the podcast was with Michael Macy, a researcher who’s done some really good work on polarization-related topics. One of his studies was about what he calls opinion cascades, which is how major opinion makers shift the perspectives of other people. He studied how we tend to think, getting back to the myth of the left and right divide where we to put all these different stances on issues into this like spectrum of left and right and leading to this illusory clustering of you know of labeling uh stances and such he he was showing how the the opinion cascades research research showed how influential opinion makers like say for example trump like how trump would uh react to a new issue like covert for example would greatly influence our resulting polarization, right? Like, so we, we tend to, but we tend to confabulate reasons after the fact for why this stance on an issue is related to left or related to right or liberal or conservative or such. But so much of it is actually due to these chance outcomes of like, which way is an influential person in this, you know, in one side or another going to go on, on a new issue. And then, that the opinion cascades kind of follow after that. Right. Um, and there’s just, you know, a lot of chaos in the system too, but yeah, getting, getting to the idea that, uh, what you’re trying to do is basically trying to combat the, the emotion and kind of like team-based reasoning that results from like the usual ways of social are, are, are instinctual operations of how we interact with other people and how our emotions and, team-based affiliations can guide our judgments. And basically you’re trying to create this system that is pushing against that and try to make a more reasonable, less biased, less team-based, less emotional outcome, I think. Yeah.

00:35:59 – Don Templeman

Yeah, exactly. And opinion cascades is a good way to put it. There’s a lot of interesting research around it, but when you have that preferential attachment, it only takes a few steps and a few people to strongly influence large groups. So the way that people describe systems that are structured in this way with preferential attachment is that they’re in a state of criticality where they can very quickly change perspectives of a large portion of the graph or a large portion of the network. And that’s like one of the interesting examples of it is if you think of like the six degrees of freedom thing, if you’ve heard it where it’s like, you’re only six connections separated from anyone else on earth. And that’s because there are these strong, like centers of influence or people who know a lot of other people and have a lot of influence over those people. And so that’s research that’s been done that like that is how we have structured our society where we are only a few steps away from large portions of the population. And that in an information environment makes it very difficult to find stability because one or a few people’s opinion shift can start to shift and influence large portions of that network. So more resilient ways to structure it, where it’s decentralized, where you’re communicating more closely and more frequently with people that are around you, but everyone is able to freely move and shift their own opinions and their own opinions have kind of more weight and the overall like emergent traits of the entire system. Because if you look at preferential attachment, a lot of the like collective ideology of the network is influenced by the opinions of those few small centers of influence. If you look at a centralized network, the main like perspectives of the entire network align with whoever that centralized point of like centralized news sources, but with a decentralized system, the overall perspective of the network more accurately reflects everyone’s individual beliefs because it is this average consensus of how everyone is interacting and kind of perceiving each other and understanding the world around them and coming up with their own views all independently rather than being influenced by these large opinion cascades.

00:38:18 – Zach Elwood

Do you want to talk about the AI aspect of this work? You and I have talked a little bit about how this plays into LLM AI tools using content. Do you want to talk a little bit about that or would you rather talk about the… you know, how to judge reliability and accuracy using this kind of model, which would you rather, the direction would you rather go on? We can go on both.

00:38:50 – Don Templeman

I’m happy to talk about both of them. Yeah, we can talk about the AI a little bit, because that might be interesting to people, yeah. Yeah, so with AI, obviously, if we’re focused on trying to create resilient information networks and to determine better ways for people to discover news, a big portion and like a new player in that space is AI and LLMs and specifically people discovering information through chatting with LLMs. That’s a growing portion of how people discover new information. And we’ve seen that with like Google search usage has gone down and more people are using open AI or perplexity or cloud or any of these tools to chat, to discover information. So in trying to think of how we play into that ecosystem, A lot of new sources are trying to leverage AI as their ability to find and discover information. But we want to take a different point of view because we do believe that you still need to rely on real people doing the hard work of reporting and discovering new information to actually make sure that LLMs have accurate up-to-date information because since the training cutoff for a lot of LLMs, if they want to have some opinion or provide information real-time relevant events, they need to go out to some third-party source to be able to pull in the information, cite it, and use it in their response to the user. So if more people are discovering information that way, we want to make that process as robust as possible. But currently, when an LLM is asked a question that needs to go out to some third-party source, 40% of the time it cites Reddit, 20% of the time it cites Wikipedia, And the rest of the time it’s trying to cite stuff that it’s able to find online because they really need large data sets. And the only places those exist are really in Reddit and Wikipedia. And while Wikipedia as a source over time becomes more and more credible for real time news on current breaking events, what LLM companies have found is they really need to rely on professional newsrooms. So we’ve seen this trend of, It’s just under $3 billion of spend that’s been committed to licensing content from professional newsrooms to LLM AI research labs for them to be able to license and access content that’s produced out of a professional newsroom. So that’s deals between like OpenAI and the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, Amazon and New York Times. There’s all of these massive deals where they’re trying to get access to this high quality information because That’s really the differentiator between these models and how people choose to use them is which one can give me the best information. The problem is if you’re relying on traditional publications as your source of news, you’re still falling into all of the traps that we’re trying to solve with polarization in media, distrust in media, all of the reasons why how those companies are structured. results in audience capture and them including their own biases.

00:41:56 – Zach Elwood

Bubbles of thinking, biases, yeah.

00:41:59 – Don Templeman

Exactly. So what we’re able to do is we can take all of the benefits that we’re creating for our information environments and make them accessible to AIs if they need to go out and reference some real-time event that’s currently being reported on. And the reason that we’re able to do it so easily is one, Since we are decentralized, an LLM company can come in and make a licensing agreement at the protocol level. So they don’t have to go out and try to find all of the independent individual writers and make individual agreements with all of them. They can just say, we want access to all of Aemula’s content. And then each individual writer on our platform can determine if they want to license their content or not. So everyone still independently owns all of their work. We have record of everyone’s ownership. LLMs, if they want to come in and cite something that one of the writers on the platform has published, that writer can determine if they want to license it. And then that writer gets paid when their information is accessed. Because a lot of the time, currently when writers publish independently, if it’s through their own site, if it’s on Substack, that can still get parsed by an LLM and cited and used in their responses. But that writer never sees any value that came from the use of their work in an LLM response. So we want to make sure that everyone is always paid for the work that they produce. And through our protocol, we can say, if you elect not to license your content, we can protect it so it’s actually not discoverable by LLMs, so it can’t accidentally be licensed. But if you do want to license it, you’ll get paid every time an AI actually accesses it. So it’s a lot more robust for the independent writers. it’s a lot more efficient for the LLM providers because they don’t have to make all these bespoke deals across newsrooms. It’s just one ecosystem that they can plug into all of our information’s in a standardized format. It’s easy to parse and it’s actually stored and structured and how LLMs think. So if you think back to the explore map that we showed of all the articles and 3d space without getting into too much detail, When LLMs, when you’re prompting them and they’re trying to generate a response, they are relating words and trying to figure out what to respond with based on how closely words relate in three-dimensional space, it’s called vector space. And that’s a whole separate category, but you can kind of abstract that away and have a conceptual vector space where an LLM can go in and say, I want to answer something on this topic. It can find that topic. within our information map and determine what is the best article here. It can plug into our credibility ratings, rank what it wants to respond with, license that content directly from the writer, and use it and cite it in its answer to an end user. So it makes the whole LLM information discovery process significantly more robust for the end users that are discovering information through chatting with LLMs. And it’s a lot better for the writers because they actually get paid when their content’s used.

00:45:08 – Zach Elwood

Yeah, I was thinking, I mean, getting back to the idea of how you can create algorithmic approaches to judge accuracy and reliability of news sources and such, it seems like there’s a lot of value in coming up with some approach that uses the social network analysis to say like, oh, this source, this person is creating content that appeals to a lot of different clusters of thought and that a lot of people across a lot of different clusters of thought, appreciate. And it seems like, I mean, A, that’s valuable for people in general, but it also seems especially valuable for these AI, LLM agents that are trying to find non-controversial and agreed-upon information. It seems like that’s a way to theoretically do that that doesn’t involve humans doing fact-checking, which leads to various biases, too. I mean, it’s still going to be hard no matter what, but it seems like that’s… using this kind of algorithmic objective approach in some way leads to some really good outcomes of like these statements and these works appeal to a broad range of people.

00:46:24 – Don Templeman

Yeah. And that’s when you’re dealing with AI and LLMs, like the scale of the data really matters. Like you need a lot of information for them to come up with good answers. And so when you’re dealing with that type of scale, you, have to rely on algorithms at some point. Like you can’t have some massive army of fact checkers going through and trying to check the credibility of all the sources.

00:46:49 – Zach Elwood

Right. Yeah. It’s way too much time. Yeah.

00:46:52 – Don Templeman

So we need that scalable process for determined credibility. And we’re able to do that through that social network analysis where we can say, if a post is getting a lot of diverse support from people with different ideologies, we know that that is likely a high quality source of information. On top of that, We have newsroom tools for writers so they can go through a peer editorial process if they want more people to offer feedback on a piece that they’re about to publish. And we can say that if they’ve gone through that process, it’s also likely higher quality. We can give them access to research and analysis tools, data sources, tip networks, credentialing, like all of these tools that they can use. And as they implement them into their reporting, we can increase that quality metric of what we perceive that quality to be. And then we also have individual reputations for readers and writers. So if a writer is getting a lot of support from users with high reputations, then we know that they also likely have a high reputation and we can build their reputation into those quality scores. And looking at everything holistically, you can start to come up with credibility rankings for not only authors, but also individual articles and use that to allow LLM responses to easily discover what is likely the highest quality source that I can find for this specific topic, but also it can allow it to start to adjust its responses based on who’s asking the question. So if I have an annual account, it knows roughly where I fall relative to some of the sources it’s trying to find for me. It can give me a source that is closer to my beliefs that I’m more likely to agree with. rather than giving me some source that may be from an opposing point of view, where I’ll ask the question, immediately discredit it and say, like, I disagree with this take, like there’s bias in how the LLM was coded, there’s bias in the training data and then discredit it and either prompt my way into getting it to say the answers I want it to say, or going out and trying to find a different source of information to support my point of view. Like really, if we’re trying to optimize for providing the best answers to the users, there’s not one answer that is best for all users. You can start to gear it so it’s the best answer for that specific user to better understand what concept they’re trying to understand.

00:49:15 – Zach Elwood

Yeah, because at the end of the day, you have to worry about customer satisfaction and so do the AI. You and everybody, it’s like no matter what our wishes and goals are about how these things work. Like you have to give people what they want at the end of the day. And you, you can’t give them like, you know, if somebody’s using Grok and they’re like, Elon Musk is a, Grok’s telling you Elon Musk is a genius and all these recent things where it was praising Elon Musk with these weird responses. It’s like, if you’re doing too many weird things that don’t appeal to your customer base, they won’t want to use your product. Right. So you, you do want to give them what they want while also, you know, aiming for, accuracy and responsible implementations and stuff. But yeah, you want to give people what they want. Yeah. Exactly.

00:50:03 – Don Templeman

And then that becomes a fragmented environment in and of itself, where if I like what Grok is telling me about Elon, then I’d start using Grok more. And then Grok is my source of information. And that likely differs pretty drastically from someone who’s using Anthropics Cloud or or chat GPT, so people start to work out a different information environments and you would expect as they get access to wider and wider information sources, hopefully the LLMs kind of converge on some general consensus where they all have similar answers, but there is a wide divergence currently on the types of answers that they give. And so if you only use the ones that you like, it goes back into that same problem.

00:50:44 – Zach Elwood

Polarization cycle.

00:50:45 – Don Templeman

Yeah. Yeah. Everyone’s only going to work in the information environments that they want to engage with.

00:50:49 – Zach Elwood

And that’s kind of how the polarization works. It creates these two spheres of like, there’s different schools, there’s different kinds of companies, there’s different, you know, circles of various types of, you know, there’s different churches, there’s different, you know, so yeah, it’s like, yeah, you’re trying to break out of this entire paradigm and create entirely new paradigm and incentives, which is awesome. That’s why I’m so excited about your project. And I just haven’t seen anyone else doing stuff that I think is really trying to break these fundamental paradigms in a way that you are. So I think that’s great. Anything else you want to talk about? Because I think we’ve covered a good amount of stuff. Do you want to throw in anything else interesting before we go?

00:51:36 – Don Templeman

No, I mean, I appreciate the support of our mission and what we’re trying to do uh obviously a long way to go it relies on scale and we have a cold start problem where we need content and readers and really these things always start to work once you have large scale right so we do have a long way to go it’s a challenge work in concept but uh kind of going back to like giving people what they want like we don’t want to try to act against human nature. We want to be able to make it as natural of a process as possible to happen. So that’s why we’re so focused on being fully open, fully transparent, everyone operating independently, owning all of their own work, everyone communicating independently. Those mechanisms only work if people are actively involved in them. So that’s why we want to use human readable algorithms for all of our algorithms so that people can actually go in, read them, understand what they’re doing and start to have a say in the process because it is all community governed. People can vote on how they want to see things change. So whereas some platforms like X have open sourced their algorithms, a large portion of it is through AI where it’s this black box where no one understands it and it takes real technical expertise to go in and understand how it’s operating. So like that’s not a community governed process if no one’s able to actually understand it. So that just goes to show like, we need people actively on the platform, participating in it, helping kind of go through those iteration cycles to make everything better and start to actually align with our missions. But overall, like really excited to get people on the platform, start to hear their feedback, start to see how we can improve, but hope a lot of these ideas resonate with people and obviously always willing to share more information, help answer more questions on anything that may not have been clear.

00:53:39 – Zach Elwood

Yeah. How, how can people, if people are listening to this and they’re excited and, or even just interested, how can they support you? What are the different ways, like from a regular person, you know, a non influential person versus like, say somebody wants to invest a bunch of money from that scale. Yeah.

00:53:58 – Don Templeman

So yeah, The easiest way is just going to amyla.com, creating an account. Like I said, it’s a pretty lightweight process. We’re not going to start emailing you a bunch of marketing materials. It’s just to prove that you own an email address because you do own the account. It’s able to hold money for you. So like you need to have some recovery mechanism, but we actually don’t have any ownership over that. So join the platform, start to mess around. You get a free trial. So it doesn’t cost anything. You don’t have to put your card in or anything. But if you do like it and you’re enjoying what you’re reading, start a subscription. Any subscription goes a long way at this point as we’re starting to build up our subscription pool so it’s better and more attractive economics for the writers on the platform so we can actually reward them for all of the great work that they’re doing. If you are writing, we need content. We want to be able to support your work. So you can publish directly on the Aemula app or you can go – link your Substack if you’re already writing on Substack, and that’ll automatically cross post anything that you’re publishing on Substack anytime that you publish. You retain full ownership of your work. You earn from our paid subscribers at the end of every month. So there really is no downside. You can stop at any time if you don’t want to do it. And then from there, just following us, providing feedback, starting to interact and be active in our process of iterating and improving the platform. but really just creating an account and going in and starting to play around with things is the best way to get involved.

00:55:32 – Zach Elwood

Awesome. Okay. This has been great, Don. I’ll let you go and thanks for joining me and best of luck on the project.

00:55:39 – Don Templeman

Yeah. Thank you so much.

For many people, Trump represents a uniquely dangerous figure in American history. But what if the contemptuous, maximally pessimistic ways many people talk about Trump and Republicans help put more “wind in the sails” of polarized, polarizing leaders like Trump? Similarly, do excessive contempt and overly pessimistic framings from Republicans help create more support for divisive, us-vs-them approaches by Democrats? Is America in a self-reinforcing feedback loop of contempt and anger?

In this talk for Richard Davies’ series How Do We Fix it? (www.howdowefixit.me) Zachary Elwood argues that excessive contempt for each other is the problem underlying all other political discord and democracy-erosion problems. He and Richard discuss how liberal contempt for conservatives can create a feedback loop that empowers highly antagonistic and us-vs-them leaders, why our worst-case caricatures of the other side are so tempting and yet so wrong, and why changing how we talk about the “other side” can make us more persuasive and effective and not, as many people believe, weaker.

If you want to learn more, or if (like many people), you’re skeptical about these ideas, learn more at american-anger.com.

Episode links:

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• YouTube

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcript is automatically generated and contains errors)

my views of Trump have not changed my, how I speak and how I think about, uh, people who have voted for him have changed a lot because I think it’s [00:01:00] the tendency of conflict is for so many people to see the other side as, as this monolith. And so we end up seeing the entire other side as boiling down to the worst people on that side. /end quote

That was a snippet from a talk I had a few weeks ago with Richard Davies, for his show How do we fix it? That series is focused on reporting on the work and actions of Braver Angels— the nation’s largest cross-partisan volunteer-led movement to bridge the partisan divide. You can learn more about the show at https://www.howdowefixit.me. 

This will be a reshare of that talk I had with Richard. One of Richard’s main questions to me is: why did I write a book aimed at liberals about the importance of working to reduce toxic polarization and contempt? In the view of many Democratic-leaning and anti-Trump Americans, the problem is simply Trump and Republicans; the implication that there might be things for them to work on to reduce toxicity and political discord can upset people. But as I argue in my book, anyone who wants to reduce toxic, us-vs-them ways of engaging should be curious to know how we got to this highly polarized moment in time, and not be content to settle for simplistic “it’s all their fault” narratives; they must be brave enough to examine polarizing behaviors and tendencies on quote “their side” of the conflict – even if they think the “other side” is worse. 

I also talk about my own personal journey from someone who used to regularly post insulting, contemptuous posts about Trump voters on social media, to someone who now sees reducing toxic polarization as the most important endeavor of all, not just for America, but for the world. If you dislike highly antagonistic, highly us-vs-them ways of engaging, you must see that contempt is what puts the wind in the sails of highly polarized and polarizing people like Trump. And I talk about how one can do work on depolarization even while pursuing one’s own political goals; and how taking such approaches actually helps, not hinders, one’s political activism.

If you like this talk, check out my Substack on polarization topics, which you can find at defusingamericananger.substack.com. I have more than 1300 subscribers on there. One of my most popular pieces in the last few months was a piece entitled, “8 tips for activists who want to reduce polarization.” You can read some positive reviews my books have gotten at my site american-anger.com. One review I was proud of comes from Dan F. Stone, polarization researcher and author of the book Undue Hate. Dan said, “Elwood is one of the wisest voices on the topic of toxic polarization. His writing is clear, thoughtful, and well-researched… America needs its citizens to listen to Zach.”

Okay here’s my talk with Richard Davies, for his podcast How Do We Fix It? 

Richard: [00:00:00] We’re talking again about political polarization, which I think is a bigger crisis than global warming rapid changes in AI or exploding levels of public debt. Now, why would I say that? Because we have to come together to solve our problems and polarization prevents this from happening. You might have seen a recent poll that says More than 60% of Americans around two thirds now think the country is so politically divided, we can’t solve the nation’s problems.

This compares with half the population who thought that five years ago. Americans know our crisis of division is getting worse. We’re gonna discuss that with Zachary Elwood,

Zach: my views of Trump have not changed my, how I speak and how I think about, uh, people who have voted for him have changed a lot because I think it’s [00:01:00] the tendency of conflict is for so many people to see the other side as, as this monolith. And so we end up seeing the entire other side as boiling down to the worst people on that side.

Richard: Our show is about fixes. Yeah. How to make the world a better place. How do we fix it? How do we fix it? Hi, I am Richard Davies back again, and the author I’m about to speak with. Said this and I quote, we don’t just disagree on issues. We increasingly view our political adversaries as immoral, deluded, and dangerous.

Our fear and contempt affect our stances on issues making us more hardened in our views and less willing to compromise. I’m Richard Davies, and the author I’m about to speak with said that he’s Zachary Elwood, who has written two books on toxic [00:02:00] polarization. The first was Diffusing American Anger. We’re about to discuss his latest, how Contempt destroys Democracy.

Now, this book is not written for all Americans, but instead for liberals and progressives, people who for the most part, loath our president. Did political liberals and progressives play a role in ensuring Donald Trump’s election? We discussed this provocative thought and more, including misperceptions about what conservatives really believe and why it is so hard to criticize our own side.

Here’s our conversation. Zachary Elwood, welcome to How Do We Fix It? Hi Richard. Thanks for having me. So, my first and, and most obvious question, why write this book for liberals for the left and not for everyone? 

Zach: It’s definitely a case of, I think everyone needs to hear these messages, but I also think we [00:03:00] need to put these ideas into, uh, persuasive arguments for specific audiences.

So me being on the more liberal anti-Trump side. I thought I was better suited to 

Richard: write for that audience. I think some liberals may be surprised that you’re targeting this book at them, right? Because they think so many of my friends who are liberals think, uh, that people who support Trump or are ignorant or stupid and that they’re not the problem.

Um, it’s, it’s the other side. 

Zach: Right? And I think that’s, that’s part of the argument I’m making is that I think we have to. Think about how we might be contributing to increasing toxicity, even if we think the quote other side is bad. The nature of conflict is that people on both sides will always, or generally think the other side is, is much worse, and that becomes an excuse to not examine our behavior.

So yeah, my book [00:04:00] was definitely an appeal. To try to get liberal anti-Trump people to see how they might be contributing and, and think about those things. 

Richard: So do you think that liberal anti-Trump people are contributing to the problem of polarization? 

Zach: I do, yes. And I would also point to liberal and progressive people who have made those arguments, including writing entire books about that topic.

And I do like to emphasize. I think because a lot of people will hear that and think, oh, you’re saying both sides are the same? But I think it’s very important for this work for reducing toxicity to point out that you can think the other side is worse, while also acknowledging we’re in a self-reinforcing, uh, cycle that where both sides do contribute and, and help build each other’s narratives of, and 

Richard: you have an interesting backstory because you used to be.

Part of the problem, 

Zach: right? Yeah. I, uh, pre 2, 20 20, I was quite, you know, you could say polarized. Uh, I spent a good amount of [00:05:00] time online on social media lashing out and venting my anger and, uh, disgust at Trump, making, you know, insulting moral judgments about people that had, uh, you know, voted for him and kind of like lumping in the entire other side.

As this overall bad or ignorant or stupid or whatever group. And I think that’s kind of the fundamental driver of, of polarization, of toxic conflict is so many people. Issuing, uh, thinking about and issuing statements about the other side as if they’re this monolithic mass of bad people, which just ramps up the, the divides more.

Richard: So many liberals and progressives, uh, think that, uh, it’s obvious that Trump’s motives are malicious and authoritarian. What are they missing? Maybe not about Trump, but about Trump’s supporters. 

Zach: Yeah, I think it’s very important to separate leaders from the people that vote for them. My views of Trump have not changed my [00:06:00] how I speak and how I think about, uh, people who have voted for him have changed a lot because I think it’s the tendency of conflict is for so many people.

To see the other side as, as this monolith. And so we end up seeing the entire other side as boiling down to the worst people on that side. And, and then you can see examples of this all the time where always so many people are, are picking out like the worst and most rude and, and most antisocial behaviors on the other side and, and applying it to the entire other side.

You know, you can see this with, uh. The, like, the horrible comments about, uh, Charlie Kirk’s murder, for example. You know that this tells us everything about liberals, or you can see it on the liberal side for various things about the right. You know, if you’re someone who, like me, thinks Trump is very bad, it’s very important to see that he is a, uh, his, his election, his support comes from decades of increasing hostility, partisan hostility on both sides.[00:07:00] 

Toxic conflict by its nature creates a more support for, uh, us versus them divisive 

Richard: approaches. One of the strongest points you make is that contempt for the other side is like a feedback loop. They say nasty things about us, we say mean things about them, and the vicious cycle just gets worse and worse.

Mm-hmm. 

Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think, uh, uh, a lot of. People who study conflict talk about the self-reinforcing cycles, including even in personal interpersonal dynamics of how, you know, we can, we often bring out the worst in other people by. They, they do something bad. Our reaction to it confirms to them that, uh, we are the malicious, aggressive ones.

They, they have a lower opinion of us. They speak in more toxic ways. But if you can start seeing how many people do contribute to the toxicity. And help drive it. I think that’s an important first step for winding it back. 

Richard: One thing I’ve learned [00:08:00] recently, and your book certainly reinforced this, is that by focusing so much outrage on Trump, by liberals.

That that’s actually strengthened him. It’s helped him with his supporters because the more angry one side is at their opponent, the more that the people who voted for Trump go, well, we better rally around our 

Zach: guy. Right? The ways that we can approach conflict can help build support for our enemies. Uh, and I.

I’ve written a good amount about this on my substack also about the interesting ways in which how we respond, uh, to things can actually help create and strengthen the very things we dislike. And I think that’s an very important thing to see about, uh, toxic conflict. Yeah. 

Richard: Okay. So how do our distorted views of the other side ramp [00:09:00] up?

Our divides make 

Zach: things worse. When you see the other side as uniformly bad, when you see their motivations, their goals on so many different topics as uniformly bad or even evil, it becomes very hard to compromise because you’re, there’s multiple pressures internally and externally. Group pressures of even if you wanted to compromise, you have to contend with the very angry people on your side who do not want to compromise and are very angry at you ever.

Compromising. So just to say there’s this buildup of, of incentives where the, that there becomes more and more pressures to take more US versus them and team-based approaches because there’s inner and outer pressures. And even if somebody, uh, wanted to take better approaches, they’re at the whims of the group dynamics.

You know, if, if they took approaches the group didn’t like, they’ll be, they’ll lose power, right. So. We tend to think of the leaders and the media as having all this power, but you have to also factor in, there’s this group [00:10:00] dynamic of they’re, they’re at, they’re, they’re getting affected by all the people around them too.

Right. It’s not, it’s not a simple case of certain people have power and other people don’t. It’s this group dynamic. Yeah. 

Richard: There’s a lot of data that’s been produced, many polls, a lot of research about how polarized we are. One finding that you cite, which is just shocking, is that 72% of Republicans think Democrats are immoral and, uh, not very different.

Uh, 63% of Democrats say the same thing about Republicans. That in other words, you know, and this, this is, might be higher now. Yeah, it may be. This was, this was a Pew research poll taken several years ago. 

Zach: I think the really interesting thing is seeing how those kinds of surveys have grown, you know, the, those that dislike, that hostility, the, the very negative, [00:11:00] pessimistic views of the quote other side.

Seeing how that has ramped up over the past, you know, 20 years. I think noticing or thinking about how we got there and seeing how it’s a long building problem as part of seeing our divides, our toxicity. From kind of a bird’s eye, big picture view because I think so many of us are in the moment about the things that are outraging us to unwind this.

I think more of us need to start taking a step back and being like, how did we get here and how did those, if you can start understanding the factors that led us here, then you’re in a better position to speak in different ways, even as you pursue your goals and these kinds of things. 

Richard: Well, that invites the question, how did we get here?

Zach: Yeah. Well that’s a big, that that’s a big one. Uh, I don’t, I don’t pretend to know all the factors, but Yeah. Well, well, it hasn’t just happened, right? It hasn’t just happened because of Trump. No, definitely. Yeah. I think that’s also, you know, speaking of ways, I mean, there’s all sorts of ways that so many of us, uh, contribute to our divides, but I think.

When you, when we act as if Trump, you know, our divide [00:12:00] started with Trump, you know, there’s, there’s plenty of evidence and data showing that hostility, partisan hostility was, was increasing over the years. I think people that are on the liberal side, the anti-Trump side, if they’re genuinely curious about that, I think they do have to look at the point of view.

That our polarization, our divides did mean that many conservatives felt belittled and mocked and not understood at all by liberal mainstream media. And, and that’s, and liberal mainstream media and entertainment and news and including academia. All these cultural institutions, the way that conservative associated views were treated in those places made them feel, uh, very mocked, very belittled.

And it’s understandable. I mean, you can read. Uh, Erica Edison’s book Beyond Contempt, and she’s a, you know, she’s a progressive liberal person and she talks about this problem 

Richard: well, but liberals would, would counter that by saying, look, who has all the power? [00:13:00] Right? It’s Republicans, they control the, the branches, the main branches of government.

They control the house and the Senate, the White House, but you point out. That when it comes to cultural power, TV networks, many mainstream media outlets mm-hmm. They tend to lean left. Mm-hmm. And so culturally, universities as well. Mm-hmm. Um, many large corporations that had DEI initiatives, liberals still have plenty of cultural power.

Zach: To me, it’s a big idea that I don’t see many people talk about too often, that groups in conflict. We’ll always have different traits, you know, so, so one way to see this is, you can imagine the way that the rage and frustration of a blue, mostly blue collar group will play out much differently than the rage and frustrations of a more highly educated and higher socioeconomic class.

And that’s just to [00:14:00] say we often try to compare the groups as if they’re equal. And we use that to score points. Like, you know, liberals will say. Uh, there’s no democratic equivalent of Trump, you know, and they’ll use that to score points and say, oh, clearly the whole problem is, is Trump and Republicans and Republicans are doing similar things.

They’ll pick out things that are true of Democrats that are not true of Republicans and say, oh, this shows us that this is all they’re fault. But I think it is important to recognize the, the cultural power of, of liberal associated ideas. Dominating, you know, huge swaths of entertainment media, of, of news media, of, of, uh, academia, of even the corporate settings that, that can make conservative people, uh, feel very much under threat, especially when you get into the cancel culture thing that was, you know, very prevalent a few years ago.

But I think, yeah, it’s important to see that regardless of the political power. The cultural [00:15:00] power plays a big role, and I think the argument can be made that liberals have much more power in the, in the sense, in the, in the ways that really mattered in everyday life to, uh, to a lot of people. And it’s a factor that might explain why, uh, Republicans were more okay with a, an, an aggressive figure like Trump.

Richard: A couple of years ago here on how do we fix it? We did a podcast with Kate Carney of More In Common, which is an organization that researches polarization and looks at how to build a more united resilient society, not only in America, but but overseas. More in common found that both liberals and conservatives have major misconceptions about the other side.

Do you have a few examples of that? Where are liberals wrong about 

Zach: conservatives? Yeah, more in common is great. The, um, they did research on what they call the perception gaps, and they have a [00:16:00] great site. Both sides just generally see the other side as, as holding much more extreme views than they do. Uh, I mean, one major one to dig into is, you know, the amount of, uh, racism that, that liberals perceive on the right, and there’s one of the gaps.

Perception gaps was about immigration, where liberals thought that, uh, a cer you know, a, a large percentage of Republicans would disagree with the statement. Immigration can be a valuable asset to society, something like this. But it was a, a large percentage of Republicans did agree that well done immigration can be a good thing, right?

Like, but, but to liberals, that was a very, something that they would perceive as hardly any Republicans saying the, these kinds of gaps. This is, how do We 

Richard: fix it? I’m Richard Davies, and we’re hearing from Zachary Elwood, the author of How Contempt Destroys Democracy. He has a website that’s well worth visiting.

Its [00:17:00] american anger.com. We have a link to it on our podcast show page. The vast majority of Americans know we’re polarized and they believe that the these divisions are destructive. Why is it. This crisis is ignored by both sides and, and often by the media, right? No, 

Zach: it’s that. That is a very interesting thing.

So often you’ll see articles and op-eds about polarization. It’s not really talking about the things you and I have talked about. It’s mainly about just talking about our divides generally, or it’s. Talking about the other side as being the root of the polarization of the divides. When you start to understand how conflict works and why it’s so hard to, uh, get over why it’s so hard to resolve, I think it makes sense that it’s so little talked about because in order to talk about the things you and I have talked about, about how there can be.

[00:18:00] Contributions to the self-reinforcing conflict. In order to talk about that, I think at a mature and helpful level, it requires self-examination. So, uh, group examination of your own side. It’s just very hard to talk about that because you end up getting scared that people, your allies are going to attack you.

So I think it’s a fundamental thing about conflict. That makes it hard to resolve because the conflict makes it hard to even talk about resolving the conflict. I mean, that’s why I got into this work is because I looked around and why aren’t more people in the mainstream media, journalists, pundits, politicians, why aren’t they talking about these things that, uh, polarization and conflict researchers have talked about and, and know about conflict?

Right? So I just saw my role as helping to share some of these ideas that I think. More people should talk about, but it’s just so hard to talk about. As you probably know, it’s, it’s so easy to get. You know, pushback from people and even internally to not want to think about these [00:19:00] things. 

Richard: Yeah. Most of my friends are liberals and it’s hard at say, you know, uh, having dinner with somebody or, or just chatting with somebody to go, yeah.

But. There is a reason why people on the other side think that way. Yeah. That’s 

Zach: really uncomfortable. Yeah. I’ve lost a, I’ve lost a good amount of friends and I’ve been at some uncomfortable dinner parties with, you know, liberal, uh, friends and acquaintances where Yeah. You, you don’t really, it can be very hard to have these conversations 

Richard: if they think you’re the skunk in the room.

Yeah. 

Zach: But, you know. Yeah. And, and similarly that, you know, that that dynamic is happening on the right too, where, you know, there there’s a, there’s less room for having a. Less and less room for having nuanced conversations. You are not asking this to be 

Richard: more moderate, are you? 

Zach: No, I, yeah, I think that’s a, that is a, a common misunderstanding, which I think gets in the way of, of, of this work because.

I, my stance is that you have to separate the dimensions of what we believe. You have to separate [00:20:00] that from how we engage with other people. Right. And so you could view it as moderate in this. I’m advocating for maybe moderately in how you engage with other people, but not in your beliefs. That’s, that’s a very important distinction.

Richard: Most of our recent. Episodes on How Do We Fix it? Have been about the work of Braver Angels, which is a nationwide campaign that brings together liberals and conservatives in the same room and, and I’ve been to some of those, yeah. Organizes, debates and has branches across the country. Why is the work of Braver Angels and other groups in this depolarization space important?

Zach: I think there, there’s several ways it’s important. One is just getting a sense of what people. On the quote other side actually believe, which I think so often is we have distorted ideas about, and then, yeah, there’s various things that, uh, braver Angels does, uh, that I think are helpful exercises. And I actually talked to the co-founder of Braver Angels, [00:21:00] uh, bill Dougherty, who’s a, uh, a couple’s, uh, therapist.

And we talked about some of the, the processes, the exercises they do in Braver Angels. One of them involves. What they call the fishbowl exercise, which is having one political side listen to the other political group criticize themselves about what they are not doing so well and that actually humanizes both sides to each other.

And there’s actually an very interesting study about how that works. ’cause a lot of people’s instinct and conflict is to not criticize their own side, but actually criticizing your own side actually makes your group more human and more, you actually lower. Uh, the toxicity and the pushback on the other side by having more nuance and pushback on your own side, which is completely counterintuitive to how a lot of people think of conflict.

I think so, yeah. There’s many things that, uh. Braver angels and the these groups do that I think are very helpful for seeing the path out of these, these toxic dynamics. So 

Richard: one of [00:22:00] the, uh, leading lights in Braver angels is Monica Guzman, who wrote a book, uh, I think it’s called, uh, I, I never thought of it that way.

And there’s some wonderful tips in that book and from Monica about how to. Listen to and understand your relatives, people who you’re very fond of, who may have completely different political views mm-hmm. Than you have. 

Zach: Mm-hmm. Yes. Monica was a, uh, is a liberal Democrat voter, and her parents were, uh, Hispanic, uh, pro-Trump voters.

So that, yeah, she had some interesting stories in there about, you know, I think that would be relevant for, uh. Good learnings for, uh, liberal audience who, who are interested in depolarization. 

Richard: I think, I think you’ve, you’ve hinted at this, but, but I think that if more liberals and especially more democratic party leaders [00:23:00] examined their own role in toxic polarization, it could make them stronger.

Not weaker. 

Zach: Right. And I do, I do think that is such a, getting back to some of these fundamental instincts that we have that just lead us to ramp up toxic conflict more. I do think there is this instinct that people have, and I, and so often I hear it, people in the depolarization space hear it, that they think, oh, embracing these ideas will make us weaker.

They’ll make us lose more. But I think that’s just a completely. Wrong instinct on these areas. I think it, thinking about these things helps you. Understand who you’re talking to more. You don’t have distorted views of them, you, you’re more able to talk to them. You’re more able to persuade them. You’re more able to even reach compromises that might make more people happy.

Richard: And do you agree with the statement that toxic polarization is really the number one political crisis in America, that it’s holding up progress on so [00:24:00] many things? 

Zach: Yeah, I’m probably an outlier, but I think it’s the number one human problem because I think. This problem has been with us forever. Our inability to deal with toxic conflict.

And unless we’re able, uh, to get some pockets of, of understanding about how we approach this problem, it’s just such a dangerous problem, especially as you know, we’re gonna have increasingly dangerous weapons that are capable of. Wiping out more and more people so that it only takes like a small fight of some sort to be, be increasingly dangerous.

For one example, you might have somebody making a disease in their lab in a few years, right? So the more toxic conflict we have in the world, I, I think these things like AI and, uh, gl uh, global warming, I think pale in comparison to these threats about toxic conflict combined with more and more advanced weaponry of whatever sort.

Richard: Talk a little bit about your personal journey. You’ve clearly [00:25:00] moved towards a view that toxic polarization is a real crisis, and that was not something that you felt, say, 10 years ago. 

Zach: Yeah. Or even, or even, uh, since, yeah, 2019 I was insulting, uh, Trump supporters on online. So yeah, a pretty, a pretty quick journey for me.

Maybe what turned you around? I mean, it was a combination of things. I think I started thinking about how people perceived my words, like I drove away some friends, you know, on uh, social media. I lost some friends by my behavior and I started thinking. These are common ways, uh, uh, conflicts, progress and what they bring out in people.

Richard: Can you think of a specific example of where somebody who was a friend is no longer a friend? What was it that you said? 

Zach: One, one of the things I said, uh, on Facebook, you know, and this was I think a lot of people. Do this, they’re just venting, right? It [00:26:00] doesn’t necessarily reflect what they believe, but, uh, one of the things I said was after Trump had got elected in 2016.

I said something like, uh oh, I hope as, you know, air Force One crashes or something like that. You know, I would say, you know, that’s probably one of the worst thing that, that might be the worst thing I said. But I was often like, venting like this in a very childish way, you know, looking back, uh, so a friend of the family, pretty good friend who, uh, I’d, who had once let me, you know, stay in their house for several weeks when I was in between, uh, moves, uh, moving to Portland, Oregon.

He saw that and he was like, oh, why don’t you go to, you know, Canada? You guys discussed me. You know, they, so, uh, I lost that friendship. 

Richard: What else can we personally do to try and bring us back from the edge here? The 

Zach: cliff edge. I mean, I think one of the only things we [00:27:00] can do is think about our own personal behavior because there’s little else we can control in this.

You know, we’re just individuals, most of us with without much power. Uh, but I do think we have more power than we often think. I think our instincts often in these situations is to think that we don’t have power and that the power is somewhere out there, you know, by these politicians or with this media conglomerates.

But I do think it’s important to see that. How we treat each other, the ways that leaders speak, the, the, the approaches that media companies take. Those are all, they’re driven by the buildup of all these interactions that all of us have every day, right? Like we form the culture every day that by how the millions of us treat each other and what we tolerate.

Richard: Let me end this podcast. The way Ezra Klein ends his podcasts, when he asks guests to recommend three books, they think [00:28:00] will, will, will be, uh, worth reading. So what do you think people should, uh, should, should look at to perhaps change their mind or influence their behavior on this? Well, it’d be a bit.

Maybe too 

Zach: self-promotional to mention book, book, book. It would be, but, but, but that’s, you know, that’s, I would, I 

Richard: would recommend that. Yes. That’s why I wrote it, 

Zach: you know, I was like, I think it’ll, I wanted it to be the, the OneStop shop for especially liberal audiences who are concerned about these things or even skeptical of them.

I’ll give a few of my favorites. Um, I think, um, Taylor Dotson’s book, the Divide. Is very good. And that’s one of the better books on American polarization. And it talks about arrogance, especially in the, the views on both. You can hear these narratives on both sides about how, uh, we are the correct ones and.

Science and evidence shows this, [00:29:00] and they are the diluted ones, and there’s just this arrogance that gets promoted and ramp getting back to that self-reinforcing cycle. And both, both sides have different ways of framing that. Uh, but I thought that he, his, it was a very good examination of that, that aspect.

I’m a big fan of Robert Ali’s book Sustaining Democracy. It was so good that I, it was actually trying to accomplish a lot of the things I was trying to. Do with my book and I, if I had read his book earlier, I might have just not written my book. So I wanted to throw that in there as a nod to him. He has some very good, and he, he’s a, uh.

He, he, he’s at Vanderbilt. He’s like a teacher of political philosophy, something like that. But some very good arguments in there for people who are skeptical about some of the things I’ve said on, in this, in this podcast. Uh, 

Richard: well thank you very much for joining us, Zachary Elwood. Thanks for sure, the real honor to be invited.

And that’s our show. Zachary Ellwood most recent book is How Contempt Destroys Democracy. His website is american [00:30:00] anger.com. I’m Richard Davies, host of How Do We Fix It? The podcast with a question mark at the end of the title. Our producer is the most excellent Miranda Schafer. As always, thanks for listening.

Zach: That was a talk with Richard Davies, which was a reshare of an episode from his series How Do We Fix It? I’m Zach Elwood, author of Defusing American Anger and How Contempt Destroys Democracy. 

If you enjoyed this talk, or even if you’re skeptical about the ideas in it, I’d ask that you check out my work. Toxic political polarization is a hugely important and dangerous problem, and I think you should want to learn about different ways of looking at the problem. Because, let’s face it, the existing ways of thinking about and combating the problem just aren’t working. And I explain in my books why the typical ways of approaching these problems, our instinctual approaches, just don’t work, and why the standard approaches tend to add more fuel to the polarization fire. 

Thanks for listening. 

I talk with journalist Ellen Huet, whose new book Empire of Orgasm digs into the strange origins and evolution of Nicole Daedone and OneTaste, and goes into more detail than the Netflix documentary, which was titled Orgasm Inc. We talk about where OneTaste’s orgasmic meditation practices actually came from, how Daedone built a movement around it, and how that movement shifted into something far more high-control and ultimately criminal. Topics discussed include: What counts as coercion when adults voluntarily join a group they can technically leave at any time? Where’s the line between unconventional lifestyle experimentation and exploitation? We talk about Nicole’s appeal, why people found her so compelling, and why charisma often has more to do with the listener than the speaker. And we discuss the paradox that makes groups like this so powerful: people can experience genuine benefits and connection at the very same time that harmful dynamics are unfolding.

The YouTube video contains timestamps with links to specific topics.

A transcript is below.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Resources related to this talk:

• Ellen Huet’s website
• LA Times review of Ellen’s Empire of Orgasm
• Netflix’s documentary on OneTaste: Orgasm, Inc.

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcript is generated by machine and will contain errors.)

Zach: Hi, I’m Zach Elwood and this is the People Who Read People podcast, a podcast about psychology and behavior. That was a snippet from my talk with Ellen Huet about her book that just came out this week: Empire of Orgasm: Sex, Power, and the Downfall of a Wellness Cult. Her book covers the story of One Taste, the organization created by Nicole Daedone that centered on their practice of Orgasmic Meditation. They were a big deal for a while; Nicole was promoted by people like Theo Von, Tim Ferris, and Gwyneth Paltrow. But then they got in trouble: after an FBI investigation, Nicole and her business partner Rachel Cherwitz were recently found guilty of forced labor conspiracy. 

As you heard, Ellen’s book starts out with a bang, so to speak — absolutely no pun intended. And I think the book is a great read. Even after watching the Netflix documentary about OneTaste, the book really drew me in; it was very interesting getting more information about how Nicole Daedone got her start; the people and organizations that gave her the inspiration to create a wellness organization centered around sex. It’s a wild ride. 

In this talk, I ask Ellen for her thoughts about some psychology-related aspects of Nicole and OneTaste: what Nicole’s personality was like; what helps explain her charisma; what separates more cult- groups from less cult-like groups. Ellen and I also talk about the positive aspects of OneTaste and other alleged cults; what positive teachings are they offering to people that people are responding to? 

Also, I want to say that OneTaste, like many alleged cults, does raise tough questions that often come up in such situations: When adults voluntarily join a group and can technically leave at any time, how do we determine what crosses the line into coercion or illegality? How do we distinguish between unconventional lifestyle choices and exploitation—especially when a group’s belief system reframes discomfort, sacrifice, and even humiliation as spiritual growth? It’s easy for us so-called “normal” people to form quick opinions about what’s too far; and what’s unethical, and what’s illegal; but groups like OneTaste can raise some tough-to-answer questions; they can make us question our assumptions about what’s too far. And I think it’s possible to see the toughness of some of those questions even if you also think OneTaste deserved to be dissolved and their leaders punished. 

Just a note that this episode is on youtube, and I’ll have quick links in the video description to specific questions and topics in the video.  

If you like this episode, learn more about the People Who Read People podcast at behavior-podcast.com. Please hit subscribe on youtube or whatever platform you’re listening on; I’d greatly appreciate it. 

Okay here’s the talk with Ellen Huet, author of Empire of Orgasm. 

Zach: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Hi Ellen. Thanks for joining me.

Ellen: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Zach: Yeah, so your book, um, I just, I actually just started reading it. A few days ago, and it’s, uh, very interesting, like much more interesting than I thought, thought it would be, because I had seen the, I watched the Netflix documentary a few days before that.

Mm-hmm. And I thought I knew what to expect. But you, you delving into the backstory of how Nicole got to, you know, got to be the person she was and the various groups she was involved in. Yeah. It was really hard. That was a hard to put down [00:02:00] book, honestly. I, so I give, and it, the writing was, yeah. I thought the writing was very good.

So

Ellen: thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Yeah. Um, yeah, of course. For those who have seen Orgasm Inc. On Netflix, you’ll recognize my face in there. I’m kind of like the narrator of, um, the film. But yeah, the book, empire of Orgasm really tries to do a comprehensive story, not just of. Nicole and her backstory and how she came to build one taste, but also the intricacies of everything that happened once the company was up and thriving, and then leading all the way up to, um, current day, which, uh, as we know ends with a federal criminal trial and a conviction for Nicole and her second in command, Rachel.

So it’s, it’s the whole sweep.

Zach: Um, real quick, Ellen, uh, or a note that, uh, is it possible for you to turn your, um, mic, uh, setting up a little bit on your side? Like your, um, it’s just a little low. Oh, like

Ellen: the gain? Um,

Zach: yeah. Or, or like the, the basic fundamental setting Yeah. Gain, I guess. Would,

Ellen: that is

Zach: if’s any sort a great

Ellen: question.

Zach: Um, and it might even be in like your [00:03:00] computer settings, like I know there’s a little, sometimes have the slider

Ellen: if you’re able to hear, there’s a little dial at the bottom, which I wonder if that

Zach: it’s either gain or it’s, uh,

Ellen: does that change anything? Is that better?

Zach: I think that might be better. Yeah.

Ellen: How’s this? Now I’m seeing it’s

Zach: either gain or it’s your headphones. Yeah. Um,

Ellen: um, keep

Zach: talking.

Ellen: What’s it? Yeah, it’s, um, so what’s funny is I changed this little, like thing at the bottom and what it actually seemed to do was turn up the volume on your voice to me, but if it’s also helping with the gain

Zach: Oh, I’m not sure if it is.

I, I, I think it might not be, but Okay. Actually, if it’s hard to figure out, it’s not a big deal. ’cause I think it’s, it’s, it’s decent audio. It’s, uh, I can just boost it in post, so it’s not a big deal, but, uh

Ellen: Okay, great.

Zach: If you don’t see an obvious way to adjust it, it’s cool.

Ellen: Um, I gotta say I don’t, but yeah.

Zach: Okay. Cool. We’ll, we’ll keep going.

Ellen: Cool. I’ll

Zach: try to

Ellen: project

Zach: Oh yeah, that’s, that’s cool. I think it’s fine. Yeah. Uh, so I’ll, I’ll start off with the second question. Uh, sure. Where I was gonna keep going there. Um, one second. Lemme just try to remember what I [00:04:00] was talking about. Uh, yeah, the, uh, we were talking about the, yeah.

The, how it got started. Yeah. That was the, uh, watching the documentary, that was the big question that I had, was. You know, where did Nicole come from and what about her backstory was, was true? And, uh, yeah, maybe you could talk a little bit about the, I think, I think that would interest people a lot the, the groups that she was involved in that led up to her learning these, these techniques or getting the ideas for these, these techniques.

And maybe you could, uh, it, it wasn’t clear to me too did she, did she act as if that her ideas were her own and that she hadn’t gotten these ideas from these previous groups? That wasn’t, that part wasn’t clear to me either.

Ellen: Yeah. So, you know, just as a, as a basic overview, you know, Nicole Deone is the founder and creator of, of OneTaste, which was this wellness company that popularized a practice called [00:05:00] Orgasmic Meditation, which is a 15 minute partnered clitoral stroking mindfulness practice.

And it’s true that she learned a very similar clitoral stroking. Meditative practice from two other groups that preceded one taste. I don’t think she would’ve ever outright denied that she got inspiration from these other groups. But of course, for a lot of people who ended up joining One taste or learning about orgasmic meditation, they, they really didn’t know that she had actually studied this somewhere else.

She would often tell this origin story that she went to a party, met a Buddhist monk, and that this monk offered to show her a sexuality practice, which was this stroking practice. And she was then so inspired by the experience that she decided she felt a calling to bring orgasmic meditation to the world.

So what happened in actuality is, um, something kind of similar to that, like she did. Meet a man. Um, he had been a student at one or maybe both of these [00:06:00] predecessor groups. Um, one of them is called Morehouse or More University, which was started in the late sixties in the East Bay, so near San Francisco, but still maybe like an hour away.

And then there was a spinoff group from that called the Welcomed Consensus that also was sort of based in San Francisco, but also had a compound, uh, up north in California near the Oregon border, where they also studied more intensely. And both of these groups called their clitoral stroking practice, deliberate orgasm, and it was a little bit more freewheeling than orgasmic meditation.

So one of the most important things Nicole did, I think she was very savvy for it, was she learned in this practice, decided she wanted to start her own group and her own business, most importantly, in which she was the leader and the, the founder of this and, um, decided to rebrand it. First by calling it orgasmic meditation, uh, which, you know, kind of makes it seem a little bit more like a spiritual practice.

And also with this very convenient acronym, OM or om, which of course [00:07:00] evokes, you know, kind of like an ancient, ancient tradition. And then she also put in these rules and boundaries around the practice, such as it’s 15 minutes. Exactly. Um, you know, people are gonna stay as clothed as possible while doing it.

The man is fully clothed, the woman is only naked from the waist down. Um, people are gonna use gloves and lube, and there’s gonna be all these sort of, um, prescriptions about how the practice is done in an attempt to make it feel as safe and palatable as possible to the average person. So she really was focused on, you know, she took this inspiration from somewhere else and then decided to make it as clean, kind of squeaky clean as possible with her as the leader.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Another interesting detail, uh, that the person who taught her that, that she met, who. The, uh, who I think she kind of referred to sometimes as a Buddhist monk in her telling, uh, I saw that he also has like a, he’s also some sort of, uh, relationship and, uh, sexual coach of some sort

Ellen: of Yes, that’s right.

Yeah. His name is Erwan Davon and he [00:08:00] and his now wife run a sort of sexuality workshop business. Um, and yeah, he had been, so he’s, yeah, he’s still in the business. He was involved with Nicole both, um, as a romantic partner. That’s what I’ve been told. Romantic partner as well as like business partner, um, for a short period of time.

And then they had kind of a split. He went off and did his own thing. But he is apparently, you know, according to my reporting, he is the person who was mm-hmm. Originally introduced Nicole to this practice.

Zach: Yeah. The, um, yeah, it was real, uh, really, really interesting reading about where she came from and got these ideas when I was thinking about how to.

What kind of questions to ask for this talk? I was thinking about focusing on, like, as you say in your book, you know, there’s, there’s no firm line that separates, like a cult from a non cult. It’s a, it’s a spectrum and, you know mm-hmm. Some things are more culty than others. But when I was thinking about, you know, what would make, what, what are the traits that makes, [00:09:00] uh, that would make one taste be seen as a cult?

You know, one of the things is I think that, that cult leaders often have in common, or like faux gurus, they, they try to present ideas as if the ideas are very unique to them, and they’re the source of the, the wisdom. As opposed to saying, you know, if somebody was gonna do a more, uh, you know, open and transparent, uh, attempt to communicate whatever ideas you would say, like, oh, here are the where, where, here’s where I got the ideas from and, uh, here’s, here’s the backstory of where they came from and where I accumulated these ideas as opposed to, as opposed to.

The inclination to be like, I’m the source of all of these things. Mm-hmm. And I am the person that put these together. And I think you see for Nicole, and for a lot of people that might be called more culty, you can see them trying to act as if they have all of the, the wisdom themselves that you have to, to come to, uh, for, for, for the wisdom.

I’m curious if you would you agree that’s one aspect that is a little bit more

Ellen: I [00:10:00] definitely agree that, yeah, that is a char, you know, of course, different cult experts have, have compiled their own lists of what they think make, um, you know, are the characteristics of a cult or a high demand group. Um, it’s true that one of them is the classic, the charismatic leader who promises to have found some special or divine knowledge that gives them access to enlightenment, broadly defined, that then their followers can get access to through them and through following their, their, their work.

And I would say Nicole, you know, she would often make a show of. Picking bits and pieces of wisdom from different, uh, traditions like Kabbalah or Theosophy or Christianity or, or these kinds of things, um, Buddhism frequently. And, um, you know, I think she did, she did at least like, make gestures at this idea that she was pulling from different traditions.

But what she also did, um, was position herself as, you know, uniquely gifted and able to [00:11:00] access, um, this orgasmic energy that one taste was all focused on. So within one taste, they actually redefined the word orgasm to no longer mean the moment of climax, but rather orgasm with a capital. O means this kind of catchall spiritual energy.

Um, I’ve heard people, you know, former one taste members compare it to almost the force from Star Wars or this idea of Qi or this, this kind of life energy, erotic life energy that runs within you. And. You know, through certain, uh, you know, basically Nicole positioned herself implicitly and explicitly as someone who was especially tapped into that source of energy.

And I think that is what people, that is a way in which she mimicked that criterion in which the leader presents himself as having special or divine knowledge.

Zach: Yeah, it’s like the, I mean, some of it’s, some of mentioning the other various religions and spiritualities is kind of like an, an appeal to authority where it’s like I’m tapped into [00:12:00] all these things that all of these various other things are related to.

Uh, but the, you, maybe that’s a good segue into the, what you start your book out with, which is probably like one of the stranger, you know, um, kind of situations where it starts out with her genitals being stroked in front of a room full of, you know, people that she invited, including theoretical investors and such.

And there was, there’s also, you know, so she’s doing that up there in front of the room and. They’re inviting people to talk about their feelings when she is doing that, and

Ellen: mm-hmm.

Zach: They invite people up to touch her as if she’s radiating some special energy. So that, I mean, that, that scene in the, in the documentary, which was my first exposure to this story, when that ca when that scene came up, I was like, whoa, this is a lot more weird than I, than I thought it would be.

Yeah. Because there’s something very narcissistic about, to me about doing this in front of people. Like I can imagine a more, like, if I imagined a more, um, you know, [00:13:00] spiritual aspect to such a group, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t involve doing this in, in front of people and like, you know, this, this kind of performance.

Uh, and that to me, like stood out as one of the strange things to about it, where it’s like, it’s one thing to do these things and believe it’s worthwhile. It’s another thing to do them in front of people and for, you know, to put on some, basically a show. And I’m curious what you think of that like. That, that to me really communicated like an element of narcissism that she, and especially her doing it for, like bringing people to, to showcase how amazing this was.

It, it, it struck me as quite, uh, exhibitionist, I guess.

Ellen: Hmm. Well, personally, I’ll be careful about using the word narcissist. Like, you know, I’m, I’m not a psychologist, so I’ll, I’ll stay away from that. But I do think, you know, yes, this scene of the demonstration where Nicole is being stroked, um, in front of this kind of VIP crowd, in this beautiful home instance in beach, like this is how the [00:14:00] book opens.

And the reason I chose that is because I think it is one of the most striking images that you can remember about how one taste was operating. And I, I would look at it slightly differently. I think when they do a demo like that, what they’re trying to convey is a few things. First of all, that, like I mentioned earlier, that Nicole does have.

Access to this special power. Like that to me is the unspoken part of why they would bring people up one by one to touch her leg while she’s being stroked. It’s because this idea that like she’s channeling some powerful erotic life force and like, this is how you’re gonna get close to it and witness it.

Um, I think my sense is of course, from an outside perspective, it, it might look totally bananas. Like, like, like if you were not in the realm of thinking about orgasmic meditation and, and all this stuff, you might look at the scene and think like, this is crazy. But [00:15:00] my sense from talking to people who were there from watching videos of this, from talking to people who were really enmeshed in that world is that it felt almost reverent.

This idea that something happening, whatever was happening in that room was very serious and, and very powerful. Um, and so I think, you know, it, it was something. Something really special. And that, that is also what I wanted to con convey that kind of, um, tension between how the outside world would view it as, as opposed to someone who was really enmeshed in that world.

Mm-hmm. Um, and yeah, I think, you know, they believed so strongly in the power of capital O orgasm that they were like, this is the way to show people. And then there’s one more wrinkle to it, which is that, you know, in the book we get into some of the mentorship relationships that Nicole had with, with previous, um, people who had previously led other orgasm focused communities.

One of them is this man named Ray Veder Linein. And what’s so interesting [00:16:00] is in my reporting, I found this document that kinda collects some of the lessons that he tried to show Nicole. And one of them talks about how much of a showstopper it is to have a live demonstration of orgasm. And she’s following that playbook, you know, like, it, it is also a piece of practical advice that she got.

From people who had been in similar positions before, which is that this kind of demonstration blows people away. And so they would consistently, you know, one taste would consistently do live demonstrations of a woman being stroked, you know, receiving some sort of stroking, similar to orgasmic meditation.

They would do that in their introductory classes. They would do that at special events. Um, you know, in 2013 and 2014 when One Taste hosted these enormous orgasm conferences in San Francisco, um, by that point Nicole was more of the stroker rather than the Strokey. But, you know, at the Regency Center, which is this big event space in San Francisco in 2013, they did a big om demonstration on stage.

You know, hundreds of people watching [00:17:00] Nicole stroke, one of her associates. And, uh, I think they know that it’s a powerful experience. And so you see this scene come up again and again throughout the book because it’s.

Zach: Yeah.

Ellen: So shocking. Yeah.

Zach: Yeah. It’s like, it’s a shocking thing. And there, it’s almost like a power move in, in the sense that it’s so, so shocking and to do it so confidently, it kind of messes with people’s minds, right?

Because you’re like, who would do this? And what are they, what, what are they doing and what do they know? You know,

Ellen: they must know something that they,

Zach: that

Ellen: I don’t know. Yeah.

Zach: You might start thinking of that, like, and, and, and just the pure confidence of it, you know, the, uh, it, it, it would blow some people away.

They’d be very affected by that. So I can see how it would be a very affecting, you know, in one way or another, uh, performance.

Ellen: Mm-hmm.

Zach: Uh, yeah. I’m curious too about the, um, when it comes to what One taste and Nicole got in trouble for, my understanding is that it was pretty much solely about the financial exploitation.

Am I, am I right in that? Like if it, my, my rough understanding is if it wasn’t for the [00:18:00] financial exploitation, they, they would be fine right now. Is that accurate?

Ellen: I don’t think that’s accurate. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, if you’re talking specifically about the. Criminal case. Mm-hmm. Then, um, I’ll try to, I’ll try to not get too caught in the weeds, but basically the, in 2023, federal prosecutors charged Nicole and her second in command Rachel Hurwitz with forced labor conspiracy.

That is a federal crime. Um, the short version of the explanation is that, uh, hold on just a second. The short version of the explanation is that conspiracy means more than one person, um, scheming together to commit a crime. And then forced labor has somewhat complicated meaning, but it basically means like obtaining someone’s labor through unlawful means, which might look something like, um, threats of harm or serious harm.

Um, serious harm can be defined as psychological, physical, financial, reputational, [00:19:00] you know, it’s, it’s, it’s quite broadly defined. So in the trial, what they showed, yes, it did include. Prosecutors alleging that Nicole and Rachel had schemed to, um, get their workers to work for low or no pay. But it also included, um, to be clear, it also included the allegations that they had used serious harm in order to do so, and things that fell under serious harm included, like psychological manipulation, um, instances of sexual abuse instances in, in, in which they tried to like, um, get yeah, pressure people to do certain acts, some of which were sexual, some of which were not.

So it’s a little complicated, but mm-hmm. I think suffice to say that the prosecutors alleged that there was both financial harm as well as sexual and other non-financial harm, kind of the whole range. Um, and that they presented that as like enough evidence to charge them with forced labor conspiracy.

Zach: I guess I’m curious though.

It just was really [00:20:00] surprising to me that. Uh, that they would, considering that they seem to be making good amount of money, like what, you know, and, and considering that if they had paid their workers better, that would’ve probably undercut a lot of the charges against them and, you know, treated their, their workers more fairly.

I’m just kind of curious, you know, is it surprising to you that if were, or were maybe, maybe my question is, were they doing as financially well as it seemed, or was it, you know, could they have easily paid their workers more? Is that your understanding?

Ellen: It’s complicated. In the early years of one taste, they were not doing so well financially, and this is actually a key part of what ended up coming at the trial.

But basically in the early years of OneTaste, so this is, you know, the mid two thousands into the like early 2010s, OneTaste was bringing in some money. Their main revenue source was selling courses and intensive workshops to students who wanted to learn both. Orgasmic [00:21:00] meditation and kinda the, the Ohm Life philosophy.

But they were often in the red. You know, they were not, um, they were not turning a profit. They were losing money each month. And the way that they managed to support themselves was by getting financial support and loans, essentially from a man named Reese Jones, who was a venture capitalist in San Francisco, um, who was also Nicole’s boyfriend.

Like he met her through one taste and became her boyfriend. And he had enough money, you know, he had sold a company to Motorola several years in previous for something like $200 million. And so he had some money and he was happy to. Lend money to one taste. Um, this was all discussed in great detail at the trial and also something that’s supported by all of the reporting that I’ve done so far is he would give money to one taste And in exchange he received sexual favors from one taste employees.

So that often looked like [00:22:00] birthday scenes that he received, um, around the time of his birthday or throughout the year where OneTaste employees would put on these elaborate scenes sometimes with BDSM elements or theatrical elements in which, um, they would all come together and kind of do like a performance, like an immersive theater performance for Mr.

Jones. And that did sometimes involve sex. And then, um, he also had a string of handlers, so a series of women who were involved in one taste, who spent various amounts of time, um, being his sort of sexual. Assistant

Zach: liaison. Yeah.

Ellen: Yes. Um, so at times they would live with him in his house. Um, and there are women who testified about being asked to take on this role and being asked to service him sexually every day as part of that role.

They also did housework and would like walk his dog and things like that. Um, and what’s complicated about this is that [00:23:00] it was also seen as a position of honor to be asked to take this role. At least that is what women who had served in this role told me when I interviewed them. And so you can imagine how this is complicated, right?

Like if you are really emotionally all in into the mission of one taste and their mission was to spread orgasmic meditation and spread orgasm to the world, um, then you might be, you might feel like, okay, it’s part of my job to sexually service the investor of this company that is helping keep us afloat.

Correct. Um, and that is often, uh, that to my understanding, again, based on my reporting, that’s my understanding of, of, of what went on. So it was a very complicated situation. Later on, they did actually end up paying back their loans to this man, and then they turned instead to selling more and more courses, um, and more and more expensive courses, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars to their customers in order to keep the business afloat.

Um, they did end up bringing in over the years, you know, tens of millions of dollars in [00:24:00] revenue. But based on my reporting, they were not always, you know, they were often spending a lot on operational expenses. So your main question of like, you know, were they making tons of profit? I think based on my reporting, actually no.

I mean, they were keeping the business afloat. They were profitable starting from around 2013 and onward. Um, but the truth is yes, many people testified and many people told me in my interviews that they were not paid that much for their work. That they were often were expected or socially pressured to.

Give their labor for free

Zach: mm-hmm.

Ellen: As part of the mission.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: And so, um, yeah, it’s not clear to me that they could have just paid people more and fixed this problem makes more,

Zach: it makes it make more sense, I think because yeah, the, that was my initial thought was like, Hey, you could have avoided a lot of trouble probably by just treating people better.

But I think, yeah, it’s not

Ellen: quite that simple. Yeah.

Zach: Yeah. Not quite that. And yeah, there’s incentives to, yeah. That they had obvious incentives to, uh, cut corners in that regard. Yeah. [00:25:00]

Ellen: And look, it’s not, it’s not so different from any startup that was also happening in San Francisco at the time. Of course, there’s some things that were different, but, you know, a lot of startups are struggling to become profitable.

They, you know, they’re trying to

Zach: mm-hmm.

Ellen: Just show growth. Um, and, and that’s what I found so interesting about one taste in the context of San Francisco in the, in the 2010s is like. Of course they were different from a lot of other startups, but there’s also some similarities. It’s like they were really trying to get by.

Mm-hmm. And you know, in my day job at Bloomberg News, I, I covered startups, I covered tech. Like this is very much, that’s my bread and butter. And so like, I loved seeing how this company was the overlap. Yeah. In many ways it was different, but in a lot of ways it, it was actually just kind of like another startup were very, a bit of a strange one were Yeah.

Zach: Sexual entrepreneurs. They, they had a, you know, a new sexual product were basically Yeah. Or sexual slash spiritual or, you know, whatever. Yeah.

Ellen: Wellness, sexual wellness, you know.

Zach: Yeah. Yeah. Um, the, the other thing that, uh, strikes me as, [00:26:00] you know, being on the, on the more cult-like spectrum is, you know, when you’ve got, uh, and I’m sure you know, cult, uh, experts talk about this too, uh, but the idea that, uh, you know, leaders, uh, groups.

Will say, oh, our, our system, our, our set of beliefs is kind of a cure all for any problem you have. Right. And you had in the, in the documentary, and I’m sure in your book, I didn’t finish your book, but, uh, I, I, I saw people, um, I, I’d learned that people would say, like, if they were having problems in the group, uh, depression, anxiety, whatever problems they would be told like, oh, you’re not oming enough.

You just need to own more. You know, and I, I think that’s a, that’s kind of a, a common red flag where the group’s, uh, practices are, are treated as if like, well, you just need to do our practices more. Mm-hmm. That, that’ll solve every problem you have.

Ellen: Yeah, absolutely. A, a and a, a common, I think one of the ways one cult expert framed it is, yeah, it’s like an overarching belief [00:27:00] system.

So this idea that, like this practice orgasmic meditation, which they say will help you tap into, again, your capital O orgasm, your erotic energy, you know, within one taste. I heard. From, you know, both from their own promotional materials as well as from people who spoke to me about their experience. I heard a range of claims, you know, not just the basics, like, oh, it’ll help you improve your sex life and your relationships, give you more intimacy and connection in your life, but also help you tap into your desire.

It’ll give you more physical energy. Like often, you know, there were many former members who told me, you know, they worked such, um, long hours, you know, often from like seven in the morning to like midnight and it’s like running events and stuff for one taste that they often felt sleep deprived, but they were told, Hey, like you should be Ming more.

That’s how you’re gonna get more energy, that this practice is an energy source. Um, and at various points on one Tastes website, they had testimonials where people were saying things like, one taste secured my depression, one taste helped manage my Crohn’s disease. One [00:28:00] taste helped me find God, one taste helped me.

You know, it, it was like it again, similar to maybe some of these other wellness cures, you’re totally right. It, it was positioned as like. The answer to a wide range of things. Um, and you’re totally correct that, uh, that is usually something that should raise, um, suspicions or, or concerns for, for people.

Zach: Right? Yeah. Um, sorry, one second. Lemme look at my notes here.

Ellen: Take your time.

Zach: Oh, do you know, um, I, I was curious, do you know the relationship between what Nicole and the people she learned such things from these, these various, you know, long, uh, genital stroking practices? Mm-hmm.

Ellen: What,

Zach: what is the relationship between those and just tantric sex as a, as a practice? Do you know the relationship there?

Ellen: Yeah, I’ll be, I’m just gonna give a lot of caveats here, which is that tantra is [00:29:00] a very, like, complex and um, uh, just like a very complex world that I just know enough to know that I don’t know it well enough to, to say. Um, and, and, and that in fact, a lot of what my, my understanding is a lot of what people think of as tantra might actually be more accurately described as neo toran, I think within the wor mm-hmm.

There’s a lot of people who, um, would like to make that distinction. In general.

Zach: There’s a lot of complexity, just

Ellen: like, yeah, I would say

Zach: just like Buddhism or any kind

of

Ellen: totally, so

Zach: large school, there’s all these,

Ellen: understandably, and I think that, you know, people who are experts in tantra might feel like that’s a reductive.

So I’m gonna, I’m gonna say I’m sure there are similar, um, principles, but I don’t know them specifically well enough to say. But it is true that like one taste, you know, orgasmic meditation, some of the. Some of the things that are interesting about orgasmic meditation are that the practice is meant to be goalless.

So within those 15 minutes of stroking, the only goal is for both the stroker and the [00:30:00] strokey to feel the sensations in their body. You’re not trying to get anywhere. There is no particular like outcome that you are trying to be held to. And I think that for a lot of people, that’s the first time they’ve ever experienced sexual touch with another person, where there wasn’t this unspoken sense of, I need to perform, I need to get to this place.

I need to make sure that he feels good too. So for a lot of people, you know, I don’t wanna undersell the fact that I think the experience of orgasmic meditation was, um, revelatory for a lot of people who experienced it the first time. For, for women who might have struggled to have, um, climax, which by some studies is 10 to 15% of American women, for men who might feel performance anxiety about certain things during sex, feeling unsure about how to pleasure a woman.

All these things like. I think a reason that orgasmic meditation was so appealing is because those are things that people are worried about or have stress about or, or, or want to find a different way to connect where they don’t need to be concerned about that.

Zach: Right.

Ellen: But it’s hard to [00:31:00] talk about. So when, when this, when this solution comes where they offer like, Hey, here’s this 15 minute thing.

You can do it with a partner, but you could also do it with anyone. And when it’s over, you don’t owe the guy anything. You don’t owe him a handshake, a hug, your phone number, whatever.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: Um, it’s

Zach: empowering and

Ellen: extremely empowering might

Zach: help you deal with some issues and Yeah, a

Ellen: hundred percent. And so in, in that sense, in the sense that it is sexual connection, but with a more mindful and just like a different approach to it, um, I think for a lot of people, yeah, they, they, they might, it just might open doors in their mind where they think like, wow, I could experience something like this.

I didn’t know that that was possible.

Zach: Yeah. I think you’re, you’re getting at something that’s hard to talk about where. So I, once I worked for an NLP trainer for mm-hmm. Like six months, I was never into it, but I took it mainly because I thought it’d be make for some interesting stories. And so I went down the NLP, you know, rabbit hole of learning about what these people were doing.

And, and I’ve talked about it from my podcast where there’s a [00:32:00] lot of exploitative, manipulative, just playing bullshit stuff and even dangerous stuff. But, you know, there, there are elements to it that make sense for why people have positive experiences. And I’ve talked about that on my podcast, where it’s like, you can see how specific people are using it in exploitative and manipulative ways, while also seeing what it is that is helping people with various things and why they do report having, you know, very positive experiences and why they keep coming back and maybe even get exploited financially by these people.

You know? So it’s like you, you can see both. It’s possible to see both sides of, of that coin, that there can be good things in the mix that help people while, yeah,

Ellen: I would go so far as to say that every. Every semis, successsful cult has a lesson at the center of it that’s extremely valuable. Mm-hmm. Good.

Otherwise

Zach: that’s

Ellen: good. Yeah. Why would anyone join? Like it? That’s good point. You know, you probably would never get off the ground. And so, you know, again, I’ll be careful about like labeling anything as [00:33:00] cult or not cult as we talk about in the book. I think they exist on a spectrum. Mm-hmm. But one taste is, is no exception to this.

I think one taste, of course, so many people have told me about harmful experiences that they had in and around the group. And I spoke to many people who were like, it really changed my sex life. It really lit up my relationships. It, it taught me things about myself that I had never understood before. I believe all of these things.

Mm-hmm.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: And you know, the structure of orgasmic meditation, I can see, and I’ve seen many examples and been told many times about how it was, um, you know, how it was abused, but the structure of orgasmic meditation, there’s a lot of wisdom in there. And that’s why people, you know, it’s, it’s not rocket science.

It’s like that’s why people were drawn to it because it was offering something that they couldn’t find somewhere else.

Zach: Right. You can imagine a, a healthier, uh, you know, less, less high control environment than, you know, one taste had. You can, you can imagine a different version of it. At least I can that had [00:34:00] different properties.

Yeah. Would, would, would have much fewer people reporting that they were, you know, manipulated and, and coerced and such. Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. What’s interesting is just orgasmic meditation has up until now not really had a life separate from one taste. Mm-hmm. And so there are former one taste members who have expressed to me this sadness that the practice never really got a chance to maybe be its own thing, separate from this group that where, you know, where they might attribute more, you know, these former members might attribute more harm to the dynamics of the group and less to the practice, but.

For all intents and purposes, because those two were so intertwined, it’s, it’s hard to separate them.

Zach: Yeah. There’s gonna be a branding issue for, um, yeah. For anybody that attempts to follow in the footsteps, um, is, I was curious when you, uh, when you first started writing your article, uh, were you surprised, surprised that, uh, when you, when the [00:35:00] article came out and you finished it, were you surprised that there hadn’t been coverage, negative coverage of the group before that?

Ellen: Yes and no. You know, there had been a lot of coverage of OneTaste. In the past, you know, they, they were actually quite, uh, you know, of course it’s kind of a fringe practice, so it’s, it’s always been a little bit, um, on, on the edges, but it was fairly mainstream. You know, Nicole spoke on stage at a Gwyneth Paltrow Goup Health Conference in 2017.

The practice was basically endorsed by Gwyneth Paltrow. There was a whole chapter on it in Tim Ferriss’s book, the Four Hour Body, even Klo Kardashian talked about how she thinks orgasmic meditation is great. And, um,

Zach: yeah, she went a lot of, she was on a lot of pretty big shows about it and, you know, Theon and all these kind of shows.

Ellen: Yeah. Theo Von has studied orgasmic meditation. That’s my favorite one. Um, favorite. He’s so funny of when he talks about it. He got bit by a dog or something when he went over to Strokes, um, someone at her house. Um, anyway, and [00:36:00]

Zach: Okay.

Ellen: You know, orgasmic meditation was discussed on the Today Show. Like again, it was, you know, um.

You know, and I think Maria Shriver was the, the person who had reported on that. So it, it is just like, it had reached pretty famous people. It had gotten a lot of mainstream coverage. Um, and, and the coverage about it had generally been, you know, every once in a while the stories would mention like, oh, maybe there are some weird things that happen here.

But it was never the focus of a story. And in general, people I think somewhat understandably were just interested in like, what is orgasmic meditation?

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: What are the benefits? How does it work? Like where did it come from? Mm-hmm. There are so many interesting and worthy questions to ask about it that I’m not actually surprised that people didn’t get further and ask like, well, what actually happens inside the company?

Um

Zach: mm-hmm.

Ellen: And the only reason that I ended up writing about them is because, you know, one taste actually reached out to me. To try to pitch me on a story about them. This was back in 2017 again, I was covering startups at the time. They were like, this is a fast-growing [00:37:00] woman-led wellness startup. And I decided to po I had heard about them before I decided to like poke around a little and ended up finding someone who had, had a pretty bad experience with one taste.

And that was the first that I had really heard of this. After talking to that, that person, I was like, okay, I gotta find out more. Found other people, heard their experiences, and it just kind of snowballed from there. But I think I also could have easily just ended up writing kind of a, a story that didn’t touch on that.

You know, it, I think as a reporter, you, you just sometimes happen to ask the right questions and, and, and end up somewhere that you didn’t expect.

Zach: Yeah. And I, I do kind of wonder if I feel like some of the, some of the shady people out there that, uh, specifically like this. Con artists that I talk about on my podcast, chase Hughes.

He gets, he’s been on Joe Rogan and he’s been on these various big shows. Uh, these people don’t seem to be interested in vetting the fact that this [00:38:00] guy has told so many lies about his career, his experiences, what he’s done, that the grandiose claims he makes, that nobody, you know, nobody who’s an expert on psychology behavior, behavior believes are possible like brainwashing and mind controlling people.

But it strikes me that for show hosts, there can be an element of like, this is an exciting thing that will get clicks. Um, I, I want to showcase something that will get clicks for me and get attention. It’s an, it’s an interesting idea. Like regardless of, even if they believe it or not, there can be kind of a pressure to, you know, talk about something that’s pretty edgy.

And I do kind of wonder if that might have played a role in, in her getting so much. Attention these days where it’s like everyone’s competing for attention. It’s like, oh, I’ll have on this, you know, I’ll talk about or have on this person who’s doing this really strange, uh, sexual, you know, meditation practice because I know it’s gonna get clicks.

Like, whether, whether I’m into it or not. It, you know, it, it’s gonna get some attention, right. So [00:39:00] I ju I just wonder if that’s a factor.

Ellen: I think of course one taste in orgasmic meditation got attention for many years because it was such an unusual premise. Um, you know, as a journalist, I think I, I feel a lot of, uh, understanding for someone who.

For, you know, doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to be able to look into every, in, you know, to investigate every person that they have on their show. Like, I also

Zach: recognized that, and there wasn’t, there was no journalism e even out there was, there weren’t, there weren’t articles like yours out there. Yeah.

You have to

Ellen: even

Zach: investigate. Yeah.

Ellen: You know, to be, to be totally fair, it’s like,

Zach: yeah,

Ellen: it took me many, many months to write that first story. Right? Totally. I probably worked on it, it for six months and not everyone has that time and energy. Like, I’m very grateful to my editors, um, at Bloomberg News who were like, sure, you think there’s a story here?

Like, go for it. Um, you can spend time researching it. Like, unless you’re in a situation that can support that kind [00:40:00] of work. I never begrudge someone for not having, you know Yeah. Turned over every rock. That stuff takes time and like Yeah. You know, any investigative journalist can tell you that, like mm-hmm.

That is why hard, you know, like. This, that is why investigative journalism is so expensive. It it, it really is. And I think, you know, we don’t need to get into a soapbox about that, but like, if people want to have that kind of reporting in the world, they need to understand that it takes time, energy, money, and resources.

Zach: There’s a real lack of it these days. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It’s hard. It’s expensive and Yeah. Takes, takes time. And it’s important. Uh, yeah. I was curious, uh, I mean, one thing that stood out to me watching the documentary was, uh, you know, I’m not, as you say I’m not a psychologist either, but talking about Nicole’s backstory, when she was talking about her father who’d been convicted multiple times of, uh, child sexual abuse, she was saying something like, uh, you know, she viewed him at some [00:41:00] point in her life when she was younger, viewed him even knowing he’d done those things.

She viewed him as someone who was sort of. Uh, such a special person that the normal rules didn’t apply to him. So she was like coming up with a, a narrative where like, he wasn’t, he wasn’t just a disgusting, uh, you know, sexual abuser. He was just such an interesting person that, that the normal rules couldn’t apply to him.

That, that he transcended these normal rules. And I, I kind of get an inkling of like how she might, you know, you might be able to apply those same kind of ideas to yourself, you know, if you, uh, if you view yourself as like not a, not, not governed by the usual rules that you’re in possession of, you know, such, such great wisdom that you’re such a special person, you know, in, in, in these typical kind of narcissistic ways you can start, you could make similar excuses for yourself.

And I, I just thought that was an interesting insight into how she was, she seemed like, uh, and also you write about how she, you know, her, part [00:42:00] of her healing from her. Uh, sexual abuse from her, from her father Wa was her saying like, oh, she, she had instigated the sexual abuse. Yeah. She took responsibility for it also.

So that was another interesting element where she was, she was clearly kind of grappling with these, these ideas, um, that seemed to have a lot of influence into how she, how, how, how her philosophy and, and, uh, personality turned out. But I, you know, not to get too, uh, as you, as you said about yourself, I’m not a psychologist either, but I, I found that those, those various things very meaningful about her past, you know, a

Ellen: hundred percent.

I mean, I, I, I think I’ll, I’ll caveat all of this by saying like, this is, of course, I, I think this is maybe the, one of the most sensitive parts of the book was the part where I really wanted to try to get a better understanding of what was Nicole’s relationship to her father, who, as you said, yes, convicted of child sexual abuse.

Um. Uh, once and then was actually, [00:43:00] uh, charged and arrested for it a, a second time, and actually died in custody, uh, pretty soon after that. So he, I wanted to understand what was her relationship with her father, what exactly, I mean, you can never really know, but trying to get more answers about what, what happened between the two of them, and then how had that experience shaped everything in her life that came after, which, you know, she has spoken about in various ways.

Sometimes the story has shifted over the years. I wanted to do my own reporting, and I think the truth is it’s like this is extremely complicated, extremely sensitive territory, and I really tried to treat it with care and responsibility in the book and essentially in other places. Nicole has been very.

Careful about what she said about her father publicly. You know, she has often said that, um, you know, he was convicted of child sexual abuse. She has at various times said that he never behaved inappropriately toward her. Um, she has at times wouldn’t been asked [00:44:00] about the question of what happened between her and her father.

She has side stepped it, um, and of course has, has woven her father’s crimes into her life story regardless of, you know, what happened specifically between them. So she has, you know, the, she has spoken openly about the fact that he’s been convicted of these crimes and that his death kind of sparked her exploration, you know, as she puts it.

She had seen the poisonous side of sexuality through her father’s life and was determined to show that sexuality also had the power to heal in equal measure. And people were often drawn, you know, people who joined one taste were drawn to the fact that she had been so up close with. This, this dark experience.

Um, and, and that they felt, I think, seen by her and, and that that was something that felt reassuring to them. And there were also people I know because they told me, they looked at her and thought, oh, this is someone who has experienced something pretty traumatic potentially. She seems to have figured out her sexuality regardless.

And that’s [00:45:00] inspiring to me. I would like to be like her. Mm-hmm. I would like to do these things that she has said that she’d done because maybe it will make me feel more at peace with my sexual history. A lot of people who had joined one Taste might have experienced trauma or assault in the past, um, or might have just had complicated relationships about sex.

Mm-hmm. So in doing some reporting about her and her relationship to her father, you know, what I found was she had at various times earlier when she was maybe like less in the limelight, told people yes. That she had been, um, sexually abused by her father and also that she told people later on. That she had instigated it, that she had actually wanted it on some level.

And to be clear, the story that she tells is one in which she was very young when this happened, you know, under 10. And if you talk to child sexual abuse experts and researchers, they will say that generally this sometimes happens where [00:46:00] the victims of this type of abuse will in an, in an attempt to feel a sense of agency and control over something really terrible, they will think that it was something that they wanted.

And again, I’m gonna not tread any further because it’s just, it’s really complicated and delicate. But I think understanding that she might have had an, a desire to see her father not as a bad figure, is a really important part of maybe trying to un understand. How she works.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: And she has, of course, as you said, it’s in the book, it’s in the documentary.

She has talked about her father as being not a bad person, but someone who, I won’t get the quote exactly right, but someone who was like, so expansive that he, he didn’t really mesh well with the arbitrary laws of the third dimension, but instead was like, you know, um, you know, he, she saw him as a fourth dimensional being, and of course the fourth dimension is a place where she [00:47:00] kind of talks about the regular rules of the physical plane, like not applying.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ellen: And of course, what you point out is so true now Nicole is currently in jail in Brooklyn, awaiting sentencing. She could face up to 20 years in prison. She’s been convicted of a very serious federal crime. And it’s really hard not to see the parallel there to, to not see that her father once sat in a very similar spot.

And I think. You know, I just, I think that is just kind of enough to, to point out, um, and, and to see that there has been this pattern that on some level has been repeated. Um, I think mm-hmm. Feels to me like a very complex and poignant aspect of this story.

Zach: Yeah. The, um, ’cause I don’t think, from what I’ve seen, she hasn’t really expressed any regret for things she’s done.

I mean, I think there was even some quote, I can’t remember if it was from [00:48:00] her or Rachel, where it was something like, we’re, we’re gonna be sleeping well in ourselves tonight, unlike the people that put us here who won’t be sleeping well the rest of their life, or something like that. I can’t remember.

That was her, or, yeah,

Ellen: I was total, so that, that was something that comes up actually at the end of a piece in the New Yorker about Nicole and her trial. It is something that, to the best of my recollection, she wrote from. Jail and was then passed on to the reporter who then quoted it at the very end. So for those who are curious, they can go and look at it.

Hmm. That is also how I interpreted the quote. It was a bit, it wasn’t a hundred percent clear to me. And Nicole is a very skilled communicator in the sense that I think she can be, if it’s hard for you to totally understand what she’s saying, I believe that she’s doing that intentionally and that she is like playing with

Zach: Yeah.

Ellen: Your understanding of it. But it is, it is true that I, [00:49:00] to, to my understanding, I don’t think she has made, um, you know, her, her legal team has vowed to appeal, uh, right. The conviction’s.

Zach: She’s not Yeah. She’s not saying she’s sorry for any specific things that I’ve seen. Yeah. Yeah. Um, well, and also they, another, a thing that struck me about her experiences and why she would, you know, it makes sense that with her experiences and her pain, um, from.

Assuming from her father that that happened to her, which seems quite likely, or at least even if he, even if he didn’t do it, it seems like a, probably a, a, a toxic upbringing in some regard. Um, however that happened, um, it seems like her, her dealing with those issues, it, it makes sense that she would be drawn to the power of the sexual empowerment aspects of the, um, you know, the deliberate, uh, orgasm or the orgasmic meditation, whatever you wanna call [00:50:00] it.

It seems like it would make sense to her that she would find a lot of empowerment in those things, or that she would be more prone to find empowerment. And maybe she, you know, she thinks because it’s so powerful to me, it’s gonna be powerful to everybody else. Whereas maybe there’s a function of like, well, there’s specific reasons why it’s so powerful to her.

Right? It’s like, because she had these. These issues she dealt with around sex and, and the, and the potential or probable abuse. And it’s like, there, there are certain people for whom these practices probably are much more empowering or meaningful than, than other people who don’t have those issues. Is, is kind of how that struck me.

Where, you know, it’s, the world’s a complex place. Like what, what works for one, what is meaningful for, for one person isn’t gonna be meaningful for the other other person. They’ll be like, why are you, why are you finding this so, so meaningful? Right. And that’s what struck me about her. It’s like, and, and her experience is describing, [00:51:00] you know, her first experience with that guy she met, who showed her the practice in the early two thousands and was really life changing for her.

Like she was apparently gonna go into the, uh, you know, become a nun or something, and then changed her mind. But it kind of made sense to me that, you know, people that were, that had more issues around that would be more likely to, uh. You know, to find those experiences highly meaningful and, and keep going down the rabbit hole of what they might mean.

Ellen: Yeah. I mean, I think you’re right. And I would also add more to that. Of course, Nicole seems to have had a particular life story that made sexuality be a focus for her, a lens by which she understood herself, a lens by which she understood other people and the, and, and the relationships of people around her.

That being said, part of what I think made one taste so compelling is that sex connection, intimacy. These are things that every human [00:52:00] yearns for on some level. Most everyone, of course, for a complicated species, there’s always exceptions and there are certainly people for whom they’re like, this doesn’t interest me at all.

But I think if, if people are honest with themselves, like, this is a, this is a place in life, like your sexuality is a place in life where. It does tap into a deep part of yourself that you probably have unspoken questions about things that you just feel like, you know, it, it, and, and it’s not just that it’s this deep yearning that many people experience, but also that it’s a place where there aren’t that many places where you can go to get guidance on it.

Like it is not something that people speak about that openly. It can be hard to find a community where people are dedicated to like exploring this or understanding it on some level. So I think you’re right that for various people this like is more or less of a draw,

Zach: especially. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellen: And especially if you’ve had like complex experiences with your sexuality in the past, of course.

Mm-hmm.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: But I think, you know,

Zach: [00:53:00] there’s

Ellen: a broad

Zach: draw you’re

Ellen: saying. Yeah. One thing observed in, in talking to one taste is I certainly don’t wanna make it seem like. Everyone who joined had some sort of no Yeah. Complex history. In fact, many people were just normal people Yeah. Who like, wanted to improve their, the sex life of their marriage, or like mm-hmm.

Didn’t really understand how to connect with people, um, of the opposite sex and, and, and wanted to improve that, like mm-hmm. You know, you remember for sure at the time in the two thousands, like pickup artistry was really big, but there were a lot of men who like went to that thinking it would help them, and they were like, I don’t like the vibe of this.

And they ended up at one taste instead. Like, people are looking for connection, sex and relationships is one of our core needs. And so, you know, I would argue that like yeah. People, people were drawn to what the promise was. They may have thought that like yeah, they may have experienced the cla the A class or two and been like, it’s not for me.

But I think what they’re promising to fix is something that actually a lot of people are looking for.

Zach: No, totally. Yeah. I, I, I, I agree with that. Yeah. I wasn’t, I wasn’t saying it was not, I, I agree. It’s a broad appeal mm-hmm. [00:54:00] For various different. Reasons. I mean, especially these days when so many people suffer from loneliness and, and Totally.

You know, the modern world can be quite isolating. Yeah. Uh,

Ellen: well, I think, I think that, you know, however you wanna define a cult, cults are, we’re more vulnerable to them now than ever. I

Zach: agree.

Ellen: Because people are lonely. They don’t know how to connect, they don’t, they, you know, they are being socially isolated.

And I think that people sense that that’s not good for them. And, and, and when, uh, you know, one of the things that Colts often promise and can deliver on is a sense of belonging, community purpose. Like when someone has that void in their life, they are more vulnerable to that. And I think, you know, kind of in a, in a COVID era, we, you know, that is, that is something that’s just happening more and more.

Zach: Are you okay for a few more minutes?

Ellen: Sure.

Zach: Okay. I was curious what you thought of about the, uh, charisma of Nicole, because I’m [00:55:00] curious about what people mean by charisma in general. Because so often when people say like, such and such person is charismatic, I’m like, really? Are they like, I, they’re confident.

Sure. And like, but I’m, I’m kind of curious what often, what people mean by charismatic and I’m, I’m curious, do you have thoughts on, you know, uh, Nicole’s power to, uh, draw people in? Do you see it as just a matter of like stating beliefs confidently? We, we, how do you define the, uh, the charisma element and what draws people in there?

Ellen: Definitely, I, I mean, early on in my reporting process, I had an interesting conversation with, um, Dr. Yya Lalich, who is a cult expert, cult researcher, um, who’s written books on this topic. And she told me something that I’ll always remember, which is that she chooses to see charisma not as a quality inherent to the person, but a quality inherent to the relationship between two people.

So car charisma exists between [00:56:00] charisma exists in a relationship. It is not sense in inherently, like in a person, which helps explain why. Of course, there are people out there who look at such and such person and think, my God, that’s the most charismatic man I’ve ever met. Other people look at ’em and like, what are you talking about?

Zach: What do you care? What,

Ellen: what veil, va, you know, the veil has been lifted. They see right through it. Right. And so that framing really helped me understand.

Zach: That makes sense. Yeah.

Ellen: What it means when someone says she’s so charismatic, what they’re saying is she’s charismatic to me. Mm-hmm. And that is often a reflection of.

What am I, you know, in this example where, let’s say I’m saying that about Nicole because I’ve met her, you know, because this is hypothetical. It’s like, you know, I met her, she really charmed me. That kind of thing. What I’m really saying is what she was saying resonates with me. Mm-hmm. What I’m looking for is something that she is offering.

I’m impressed by her, I admire her. You know, it’s like all those things.

Zach: Her

Ellen: way of

Zach: being, even just her, her

Ellen: way of presenting

Zach: herself, something

Ellen: clicked. It’s like, you know, it’s, it’s like art and the artist, right? Like what really exists is the experience between the two.

Zach: [00:57:00] Yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. And certain things that Nicole did really appealed to certain people.

And so in the book there’s all these examples of people who, who met her and that she just seemed to promise something. You know, there’s this woman, Allison, who describes sitting down next to Nicole and, and locking eyes with her and being like, oh my God, who is this person? I’m so drawn to her, I can’t even explain why.

And Nicole seems to be like beaming her this message, which is like Allison had been sort of this like lonely person and Nicole seemed to be making her feel immediately like, if you come with me, like you are not gonna be lonely anymore. Mm-hmm.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: Um, Nicole would also make these promises to people explicitly and implicitly, which is basically that like, if you come with me, you’re gonna have an exciting life.

Zach: Right?

Ellen: Like the guy that she ended up co-founding One Taste with Rob Kendell, um, you know, people have described this scene to me in which Nicole basically lures Rob and his wife away from the welcome consensus one of these previous groups by promising them like, I’m gonna build this amazing [00:58:00] game and you can like be part of it if you come with me and like, I’m gonna offer you a crazy life.

It’s gonna be wild, it’s gonna be exciting. Mm-hmm. And the thing is, people want that. It’s like

adventure.

Ellen: Yeah. They want adventure. Yeah. People want adventure. People want, you know, even many years later, I talked to someone who, who joined one tasting in part, he, he kind of thought it was maybe a cult, but he was also like, I don’t know, it seems exciting.

Like, I wanna do something like that. I wanna test myself. I wanna see what I, what I discover. So, you know, Nicole would make these certain promises, which is like, you’re gonna, like, you’re gonna have fun with me. You’re gonna like explore stuff, you know, I’m gonna make you feel part of something.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: Um, but she also just had, you know, she’s also just good.

She’s good with people. She like knows how to charm and, you know, I won’t give away too much about it, but basically at the end of the book, there’s a scene in which I meet Nicole for the first time in person. And of course by this, by this point, I have spent so many. Hours, days, weeks, months, studying her, spoken to people who knew her, spoken to people [00:59:00] who like studied with her and were married to her and like, did drugs with her.

All these things. Watched, you know, many hours of videos of her lecturing. I just felt like I had this understanding of her. But, um, I meet her for the first time in a courthouse in New York, um, because she had shown up for like a kind of a routine hearing, and she immediately spots me and calls out to me and is like, hi, Ellen.

Smiles and Waves comes. I mean, what a move, right? And comes over to me. Mm-hmm. A very short, yeah, very short conversation. And then, you know, I, of course, when the trial happened, it’s like I would see her every day in the, in the courtroom. You know, we weren’t really talking, but, you know, I would watch her and she’s just, she’s just good at this.

She’s very aware of how people see her. She’s really good at knowing. Someone described once to me that sometimes having a conversation with her, she could come to you and immediately. Find that thing about you that is special to you that most other people don’t notice and like immediately see it. It was as if she like walked into your house, took [01:00:00] a look at your living room, and spotted the one thing on your shelf that was actually most special to you.

That like most people never look at and be like, wow, that’s beautiful. And so people, you know, and of course I think she also probably tried that with people and it didn’t land and that it just doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t work. But for those for whom it does land, I think that is kind of how charisma works is it’s almost stronger if it doesn’t work with everyone.

And Nicole would say, you know, she also enjoyed saying kind of provocative things. Um, you know, making kind of like hot takes about, uh, like men and women’s relationships or sexuality and this kind of thing. And sometimes people would be shocked and maybe if they didn’t like it, it would turn them off from her.

But for those for whom it landed, I think it would draw them closer. ’cause they’d be like, oh, she’s willing to say the brave truths that other people, um.

Zach: Right.

Ellen: Aren’t afraid to say, you know, then, then they would look at her and think she’s bold. Um, she’s got, she’s got a vision that connects with me.

Zach: Yeah.

Reading your book, uh, I mean the, the early part of her, [01:01:00] her career and life where learning about the people around her, and it seemed like so much had to do with this excitement aspect, you know, including in the welcomed community where people would describe, you know, the outside world was boring. You, you know, in, in here.

Even if there were some bad things, it was really exciting. You were on the forefront of something that was unlike, you know, things that so many people, the muggles on the outside were experiencing or whatever. And I, and I think that seems to play a role in so many of these kinds of groups where, you know, it’s the excitement that, uh, you do, whether, whether you don’t know where you’re going, but you know, it’s some exciting thing that nobody or hardly anybody else is experiencing.

And that, that alone can make up for a lot, I think.

Ellen: Yeah. And it also keeps people staying longer than they would otherwise. Right. Like, if you believe that if you’re gonna leave this group, your life outside is gonna be unfulfilling, boring, sad, you’re gonna be back with these people who are like asleep.

Mm-hmm. And don’t see the like [01:02:00] magic in the world. You’re gonna wanna stay, even if you’re like, I don’t know, this is like, this is feeling kind of hard or it’s not working for me. Like, you’ll be scared. You wanna be, yeah. You’ll be scared of leaving. And I think, um, you know, yeah. The truth. Excuse me. Um, yeah, the truth is people, people do wanna lead an exciting life.

And I think for a lot of groups like this, high demand groups or cults, if you wanna call it that, joining does feel exciting ’cause you’ve found these cool new friends and you’ve got a new mission and it’s like you’re part of this community. And I, that’s part of why, you know, one of the takeaways I hope people take away from Empire of Orgasm is this idea that.

Joining a cult. It’s not this thing that only other, you know, it’s not this like other thing, like, only other people would do this. It’s like, well, the desires that are bringing people to that point are desires that you and I all share. It’s like, yeah, we wanna feel adventure, we wanna feel part of something.

We wanna feel purpose, we [01:03:00] wanna be connected to other people.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Ellen: Um, cults offer all of those things. That’s why the, you know, a cult as a concept is actually like a quite, um, steady thing in human history. It’s like, because

Zach: mm-hmm. Yeah. They’re just groups of, of people pursuing something.

Ellen: And what’s interesting is they adapt with a time.

So what a cult look like 50 years ago is gonna be different from what it looks like today. Mm-hmm. And, um, but they, it’s, it’s, it’s almost like this, yeah. This like virus that like adapts and like, continues to stay strong. It’s like, it is, it is something that is a reflection of human nature. So I think mm-hmm.

In many ways, as long as humans are around, they’re, they’re gonna be around too.

Zach: Yeah. And I think I, I do think there’s something, you know, for some people on the more, you know, um, narcissistic side there, it can be hard to distinguish when they’re being deceptive and manipulative versus like, just being true believers, right?

Like, it can be, so sometimes you, you [01:04:00] think, oh, this person’s clearly being deceptive and manipulative, and it’s like, no, maybe in their mind they’re, they really believe that, you know, for whatever variety of reasons that they’re acting in a completely rational way and they’re in their mind like they’re a true believer of X, Y, z, uh, beliefs, or they believe like, in their mind Yeah,

Ellen: I, I would posit that in their mind they think they’re helping people.

Zach: Right.

Ellen: Exactly. So many, yeah, I think that’s,

Zach: I think that’s,

Ellen: yeah. I mean very, you know, of course this has been said before, but I think very few people wake up mm-hmm. And think like, haha can’t wait to do evil today.

Zach: Right.

Ellen: No one thinks that. Um, and, and that doesn’t mean that harm doesn’t get done. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t.

Um, you know, harmful, exploitative, or abusive things that happen. It’s like people, but people don’t think of themselves as hurting other people. They think that they’re helping,

Zach: right? Yeah.

Ellen: They’re doing good or they’re, they’re, they’re pursuing some sort of mission. And so, um,

Zach: yeah.

Ellen: Yeah. That’s why it’s, I think that’s part of it as well.

Zach: That’s why such a, yeah. It’s, it’s a human, just a human gets down to these, these basic human interactions about how we interact with [01:05:00] others. Yeah. Uh, well thank you so much for this, Ellen. I, I love the book and I haven’t finished it. I’m, I’m still reading it. Uh, but do you want to talk about anything else you’re, uh, you’re working on these days before we go?

Ellen: Yeah, I mean, I, I am just, you know, I’m a tech reporter at, at Bloomberg News, so one of my current interests is writing about like, uh, human uh, relationships between humans and AI chatbots. And so like, understanding psychol, like psychol, like, sorry. One of my interests right now is writing about the relationship between humans and AI chatbots and how that’s shaping us psychologically, societally, like that’s an interest of mine.

Um, and surprisingly there are some. Parallels between that and cults and just understanding like what draws people in. What does it mean to be so invested in a relationship with a chat bot that you are isolated from your friends and family, or that you’re drawn away from that

Zach: Mm

Ellen: um, feeling, feeling connected to this thing that is not, maybe doesn’t have your best interests at heart, maybe has no interests at heart because it’s not human.

Um, and [01:06:00] that has been interesting. Um, so, you know, probably by the time this podcast airs, um, there might be a story out from me about that. Um, so keep an eye out for it, but in general, yeah. I think for anyone who’s interested in psychology, cults manipulation, the story of one taste, kind of how sex can get wrapped up in all of this.

Yeah. I highly recommend my, my new book, empire of Orgasm should be out November 18th.

Zach: Okay. Thanks a lot.

Ellen: Thank you so much for having me.

Zach: Alright.

Many people think there are telltale signs of lying — shifty eyes, nervous fidgeting, maybe a quick smile — that can give someone away to trained observers. But according to decades of research, that’s a myth. Still, some scientists push back on that consensus. A recent paper by well-known researcher David Matsumoto (of the company Humintell) argues that combinations of nonverbal cues might actually reveal deception. In this episode, I talk with deception researcher Tim Levine, author of Duped and creator of truth-default theory, about whether that claim holds up — and what the science says about our ability to read lies using behavior.

Below is a transcript and related resources.

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources related to this talk:

• Previous talks with Tim:
  • First talk: Questioning if body language is useful for detecting deception
  • Second talk: On eye-direction myths
• Matsumato’s paper defending nonverbal behavior as useful for deception detection
• 2014 Hartwig and Bond paper discussing using multiple behaviors to detect deception
• Tim Levine’s 2018 paper reconciling findings on behavioral cues as useful vs what meta-analysis says
• Tim Levine’s recent work on using AI to detect deception in statements
• If you’re curious how I can work on poker tells but be skeptical about the use of nonverbal behavior for deception detection, that is discussed in my first talk with Tim and in this episode, too

TRANSCRIPT

(transcripts contain errors; this one was automatically generated)

Zach Elwood: [00:00:00] Many people think that there exist reliable nonverbal behavioral cues that can help detect deception and tell liars from truth tellers. But as I’ve covered on this podcast several times in the past, there’s no evidence for that. Not when we’re talking about practically useful reads of deception or truth telling in a general population.

And when we’re leaving aside person specific reads. I was scrolling through LinkedIn recently, and I saw a post by David Matsumoto, who’s a well-known behavior researcher and the head of human tell. A company that says that they can help you, quote, master the skills to read behavior, decode, motivation, and lead high stakes conversations, whether you’re hiring, interviewing, negotiating, or managing teams.

End quote. In this LinkedIn post of his, he shared a paper that he’d co-written [00:01:00] titled Behavioral Indicators of Deception and Associated Mental States Scientific Myths and Realities. In that paper, they pushed back on the consensus view that there are no non-verbal behavioral cues useful for detecting deception.

I’ll read from the abstract that paper. We suggest a reconsideration of broad and sweeping claims that research has demonstrated that nonverbal behavior are not indicators of deception. We reexamine several methodological characteristics of a seminal meta-analysis that is often cited as non-evidence and caution the field from drawing over generalized conclusions about the role of nonverbal behavior.

As indicators of deception based on that reexamination. The gist of the paper was that while single nonverbal [00:02:00] behaviors haven’t been showed to be useful, there’s evidence that shows that combinations of multiple nonverbal behaviors may be highly reliable at the end of the paper. They mentioned their conflict of interest saying the authors are employees of human tell.

A company that engages in research and training related to behavioral indicators of mental states and deception. This got me interested in digging into this topic more. Is there actually evidence that combinations of non-verbal behavior are useful for detecting deception? I had not heard that. If so, what were these combinations?

What’s the scientific evidence? I’ve talked to Tim Levi a couple previous times for this podcast. Tim is a highly respected researcher on deception detection. I’ll read a little from his website, which [email protected]. His expertise involves the topics of lying and deception, [00:03:00] truth default theory, interpersonal communication skills, credibility assessment, and enhancement interrogation.

Persuasion slash influence and social scientific research methods. He’s the author of the book, duped Truth Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. And my first talk with Tim was about the ideas in that book, focusing on his truth default theory topics Tim and I discuss in this talk include, is it true that combinations of nonverbal behavioral cues can help us detect deception?

The fact that so many papers finding certain behaviors correlated with deception or truth telling have failed to replicate. Are micro expressions a thing? Are they actually useful? If you’re interested in serious researched views on behavior and not, the bullshit takes on behavior that are so popular these days on various YouTube channels, I think you’ll enjoy [00:04:00] this talk.

If you like this talk, I think you’d like the other couple talks that I had with Tim about behavior and deception detection. Also, just wanna say sorry about my noisy audio. I recently moved to New York City and don’t have a great audio set up, so that’s definitely made my audio much worse than it used to be.

Okay, here’s the talk with Tim Levi. Hi Tim. Thanks for joining me again.

Tim Levine: Happy to be here. Nice to see you.

Zach Elwood: Nice to see you again. Uh, so yeah, the reason I had reached out to you was I happened to see this study by David Matsumoto basically kind of defending the idea that, um, you know, pushing back on the idea that nonverbal behavior, uh, is not a.

Useful tool for detecting deception. And I got the gist of it seemed to be that he was saying, some studies seemed to show that uh, maybe using multiple nonverbal behaviors could be more useful than [00:05:00] using, you know, a single nonverbal behavior. Uh, but I’m curious overall, what were your thoughts on that paper and the overall ideas in it?

Tim Levine: Uh, so first, uh, let’s not call it study. Let’s call it a, a paper. A a paper or an essay, or a commentary or, uh, you know, an argument. Um, so it’s, it’s no new data. Uh, but I think you, uh, you framed the, uh, claim, uh, pretty well. Um, maybe. We could give a more generous conclusion to them that, um, maybe the verdict’s not in yet.

Um, so maybe there’s, you know, a lot of findings that, uh, seem to suggest that nonverbal behaviors in particular aren’t very [00:06:00] useful in deception detection. Uh, but it might be that if studies were done differently. Uh, then more supply supportive findings, uh, might emerge. And, uh, while I think that’s counterfactual at this current point in time, uh, it is true.

You never know what the next finding’s gonna, next study’s gonna find or next finding’s gonna find.

Zach Elwood: Right? It was basically just a, basically just saying it’s possible that. If you link together multiple nonverbal behaviors, which, you know, which makes sense, like in theory if, uh, you know, more, more information, more data about someone could theoretically lead you to better conclusions.

Right. But I’m curious. Yeah. What are your, what are your thoughts on that with your knowledge of the field? About what ’cause, because they mentioned some previous studies and meta analysis that. [00:07:00] They said, seemed to show that, you know, there was one that they mentioned, what was it? The, um, Harwick and Bond 2014, I believe.

Yeah. Harwick and Bond. Yeah. What, what are your thoughts on that and their, the idea that, I guess the quote was something, what was the quota? It was like, uh, that the lies can be detected with 70% accuracy. I had a hard time parsing what they meant by that ’cause it seemed kind of theoretical to me.

Tim Levine: Uh, yeah, that is a, uh, that is a true finding and it might actually be a little higher than 72%.

Um, but let me, let me, this is gonna take like

Zach Elwood: a lot of unpack. Yeah. I, I get, I think there’s a lot of unpacking, which is, I found it hard to understand what exactly they were saying with my, you know, not great. Um. Parsing of academic papers and such.

Tim Levine: Yeah, so the um, harwick and bond study was a meta-analysis.

So a meta-analysis is a, uh, study of studies [00:08:00] and they were, um, looking at, um, how diagnostic cues were, so there weren’t any humans in the equation, right? It was if you do statistical modeling based on observed behaviors. How good could your algorithm be? Right? So imagine, uh, we’re on camera right now, so in modern technology, we could, uh, have cameras capturing all our facial movements and mapping those dynamically over time.

Right. And we could use machine learning, um, to map what we’re saying onto our facial expressions, theoretically, right? And then the algorithm could test if your blinking rates are faster when you’re listening than when you’re talking, for example.[00:09:00]

And it might be that in any given segment of communication, these things would appear. Diagnostic of listening versus talking.

Zach Elwood: I guess I’m confused. How could they put a number on it that exactly, that 70% number approximately, that they chose.

Tim Levine: Uh, there is a, uh, statistic called, um, multiple discrim analysis.

And if you’ve ever heard of regression, it’s kind of like regression, but it’s predicting a, a dichotomous outcome. So what you’re doing is you’re putting in enough of a bunch of predictors and then you’re waiting them to maximize predictability, and then what you can do is do a classification. Based on that, it was invented, uh, by my understanding is by, uh, anthropologists, physical anthropologists who were trying to [00:10:00] predict what kind of animals came from a discovered bone.

So if you know, like this characteristic of the bone and this characteristic of the bone and this characteristic of the bone, what probability is it that it’s this dinosaur versus this dinosaur? Um, but, but the plot thickets.

Okay. Uh, and I, I actually, um, I should be able to pull the year off. I actually wrote a paper, uh, based on this ’cause there’s these two apparently really super inconsistent findings. There’s the famous Apollo etal 2003 meta-analysis of qs, which about and analyze cues individually. And that meta-analysis found that most, the vast majority of cues don’t have any diagnostic value.

Uh, the ones that do their diagnostic value is statistically relevant, but practically, um, useless.

Zach Elwood: Right. [00:11:00] Um,

Tim Levine: very low.

Zach Elwood: Like meaning that they’re, they’re statistically significant, but the usefulness, even if, even if that’s true, the usefulness is extremely low

Tim Levine: in, in any given communication. Yeah. This is, they would be useful in classifying large numbers of people.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: At rates better than chance.

Zach Elwood: And also we should, it might be worth mentioning to the 2003 study you mentioned the meta-analysis was a big part of what the paper we started out talking about, the matsu motto. Uh, one was push Yes. Pushing back on that because the 2003, uh, paper was largely what people point to when they say non-verbal behaviors aren’t a good correlation with deception detection.

Yeah.

Tim Levine: And they are right that you can’t, you shouldn’t be looking at nonverbal behaviors individually. Uh, and, you know, my whole work on demeanor points to this, that behaviors, you know, it’s, it’s global impressions that influence judgments and not specific behaviors. So there’s really strong [00:12:00] evidence for problems with looking at QS individually.

So, so in the DePalo study, they looked at individual cues and the effects over studies, right? So if you’re testing. I don’t know, um, how many details there are in a statement. Uh, the finding is that on average, uh, honest people have higher number of details. Honest things tend to have higher number of details than deceptive things, at least given in the type of scenarios that have been tested in the study, right?

So that you test that d that difference in details or in blanks or in eye gaze, study over study. And, um, what the Apollo analysis shows that some studies find one thing and some findings are incredibly mixed. And when you average them out, the more times a given Q has been [00:13:00] studied,

uh, the more it tends to have averaged zero. No diagnosticity.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. So even if it

Tim Levine: starts

Zach Elwood: out in the previous study showing like

Tim Levine: something

Zach Elwood: useful about it, it tends to revert down to

Tim Levine: the, yeah, the media. And it doesn’t just get smaller. In order to revert to zero, it has to flip signs, right?

So it has to be diagnostic and then anti diagnostic. And when you average those, it comes to zero, right? So a nonverbal behavior might mean one thing. In a given instance of communication and the exact opposite thing in the next,

Zach Elwood: and when you say it means something, are you saying it could, it was, it was theoretically actually a good predictor within that situation.

But

Tim Levine: not,

Zach Elwood: yes, later.

Tim Levine: Yeah.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: But the unit of analysis, so to speak, in the DePalo [00:14:00] uh, study was the individual queue that was studied over time.

So in the Harwick and Bond, the unit of analysis was the individual study. So they looked at studies that studied some number of cues, right? And they found that in virtually all Q studies find support. For some kid, it doesn’t mean it’s the same cue, but they find effects for some kid. Because they’re studying, like a lot of these are studying like 10, 20 different things.

And in almost every study one pops, or two pops or three pops. So what they find is there’s really, really big Q effects at the level of the individual study. If you study those same cues over time, you find those effects go away, but you only see that when you [00:15:00] study the same cue. The Harwick and bond study is inq.

Yeah. Right, so, so this creates a paradox. So how is it that individual studies are always finding effects, but those effects never replicate when you follow up on them? Right. So in the bond, uh, heart wing bond. I might have mistakenly said Bond and de Paulo. That’s a different one. Um, the Hartwick and Bond multiple Q study, the one we’re talking about, um, they’re just tracking the biggest effects in individual studies and then averaging those effects, but they’re not tracking which Q was being diagnostic there.

Right? And so when you look at the average diagnostic in studies that study multiple Q, it’s better than 70%. Because all Q studies pretty much find support, [00:16:00] right? And if there’s publication bias in the literature and there’s a bias towards publishing studies to find support, then people are right. So, right.

Presumably they’re, they’re testing all these different variables, right? They’re finding one that pops. And in the heart, we, and Bond, it wasn’t mult. Multiple Qs weren’t that much better than single Qs.

Zach Elwood: Mm, mm-hmm. Right.

Tim Levine: Okay. So the, the, the multiple Q effect was a 0.5. The single Q effect was a 0.4.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: This is in neo correlation. So 80% of the effect is be driven by one q Mm. But we know from the DePalo data that that one Q isn’t reliable across studies.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Tim Levine: Right. So what this means is there’s, if you are, this lets people cherry pick studies. ’cause you can find support for anything, right? And this is why it’s so important to replicate [00:17:00] research and look across studies and look at the pattern,

Zach Elwood: right?

So this, um. This study, the one we’re, we’re talking about the, um, Hartwig and Bond one. Mm-hmm. That, that, um, Matsumoto references the using more than one mm-hmm. Nonverbal behavior. You’re saying They’re basically just using the most rosy, optimistic picture and not factoring in the fact that those results, you know, when you actually do more work on each of those things that pop, those, those things tend to revert to.

Meaningless or near meaningless. So yeah, it’s a distorted view of they’re, they’re taking a very rosy picture of what you can do with that data, and it’s not reflecting the reality of, of, of, of how weak those things actually are. Yeah.

Tim Levine: Yeah. But I think we should be more generous because it’s, it’s easy to see a finding, right.

And go, oh, you know, and especially if that finding [00:18:00] fits, um, what you wish were true. Right. And it is legit. They’re not quoting the study wrong. What they are doing though is they’re leaving context out,

Zach Elwood: right?

Tim Levine: And there’s an even bigger context they’re leaving out here, which is if you dig into the findings deeper.

So, um, it’s Maso and Wilson start out their argument. Um, by using a form of argument I would call, I’ll blame the methods. Right, and the argument goes, if only the studies were done differently and had these different methodological features, then surely the data would support, right? So in the Hartwig and Bond study, they tested what are called moderators or these various methodological culprits.

That are proposed in the Matsumoto and Wilson paper, and what they find is [00:19:00] there’s always large Q facts, whether lies are high stakes or low stakes, or regardless of all of these things. So it doesn’t matter how many cues you’re looking at, it doesn’t matter whether it’s high stakes or low stakes. Q studies, individual cue studies find big effects, right?

So there’s, if you dig into the, into the details of their analysis, right? There’s actually findings in that paper that undercut, uh, their argument.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Can you, can, can you summarize that in like a layman’s terms, uh, for, because I, I think that might be it. It’s, it might be, uh, hard to understand all that you said.

Maybe you could summarize it in a couple languages about how to, how it undercuts it.

Tim Levine: Yeah. So hypothetical example, let’s say we thought that, um, eye blinks were [00:20:00] only diagnostic. In employment interviews and not interpersonal lives.

Okay. And, um, all the studies had been, the argument is all the studies were done in interpersonal lies. So if only you had done them in employment lies, you would’ve seen the effect. But the studies included in bond, uh, hartwig and bond’s meta-analysis include both types. Right. That’s what you’re saying.

And the findings are the same either way.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. So they’re trying to criticize the methods, but yet regardless

Tim Levine: of the

Zach Elwood: methods, there

Tim Levine: are spikes. The studies that they’re later gonna support in support of their claim actually tested that and found that didn’t matter.

Zach Elwood: Right. Right.

Tim Levine: And that undercuts the argument of the paper,

Zach Elwood: which is a, which is an interesting thing about the the stakes thing because some people will say.

If the, if only the stakes were higher and more like real life situations, you’d be catching more. [00:21:00]

Tim Levine: Yeah.

Zach Elwood: Correlations or imbalances and such.

Tim Levine: And this is an incredibly plausible

Zach Elwood: mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: Argument.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: It goes back to the original ekman stuff. And, uh, and people believe this, people buy this. Um, you know, but it makes, it makes great intuitive sense.

Zach Elwood: Right. It’s also interesting though, that you can think of another logical thing where it’s like. Theoretically the lower stake situations would be more likely to find imbalances because the liars in the high stakes situations have more incentive to act like the non liars, right? Yeah. So you, you can kind of reason edit both ways, you know,

Tim Levine: or, or maybe there’s even more sophisticated ones.

The type of people who put them in themselves in the situations where there’s high stake cases, right. Are the people who are the better sorts, better bluffers sort. Right, right. Because if I can’t bluff, I don’t play poker.

Zach Elwood: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then there’s, there’s also things like, you know, people have [00:22:00] talked about, oh, are college students good?

Uh, yeah. Examples of general population people, are they the, you know, fitting people to study? So there, yeah, there, there, there is all this

Tim Levine: discussion. There’s a million

Zach Elwood: methodologies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right,

Tim Levine: right. And it, it always runs into this as I, as I describe it in my book, duped, the circular argument where you didn’t find what.

I think you should have.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Tim Levine: Therefore, you didn’t do your study right.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Tim Levine: I know you didn’t do your study Right. Because you didn’t find what I thought you were gonna find.

Zach Elwood: Right. Which is a problem with so many

Tim Levine: Yeah.

Zach Elwood: Theories and the theory of, you know, firm believers of, of ideas who, yeah.

Tim Levine: And, and of this, for your listeners of this means.

That the conclusions from the research might completely turn around in the next 10 years.

Zach Elwood: Right,

Tim Levine: right. We never know what the next study’s gonna find until we do it. [00:23:00] Right. And there, there might be something that’s been overlooked. Somebody might have been, you know, I’ve made my whole career on finding things other people have overlooked.

Right. And turning over those stones and going, look what we found. Um, so, you know, we, you know, I don’t, I don’t know that the next time I turn over a stone, anything’s gonna be there. Right. And I certainly don’t have any kind of superpower or lock on being the one who

Zach Elwood: mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: You know, uh, can find stuff.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: So

Zach Elwood: you’re just looking at what comes up. Yeah.

Tim Levine: Yeah, yeah. You know. Nature is what nature is, right. How we look at it. Things definitely shape how we understand them. Right? And until we do something we don’t know.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And, and there, I mean, there’s, with all this AI, machine learning stuff, there are theoretically or things that might be found.

I mean, I, I interviewed someone, I don’t [00:24:00] know if you, you probably saw about this, this, uh, study by Dino Levy and his team that. Uh, use some machine learning stuff to monitor facial muscles and claim to have a 73% deception detection de uh, rate.

Tim Levine: Oh, this is right. I note that this is exactly what Hartwig and Bond will say will happen.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: And it doesn’t matter what you’re looking at. Right. Use the machine learning stuff to look at any package of variables. On average, you’re gonna get 73% accuracy. And it doesn’t matter what the content is, it doesn’t matter what the variables are. Right. It’s, it seems like you always get that.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I, when I interviewed him and looked at that study, I, I, I’ll admit I was, I, I didn’t find it very convincing that it, it was gonna be replicatable or anything, you know, and especially, it seemed kind of iffy with what exactly the machine learning was doing, because some of these things are kind of.

A little black boxes. [00:25:00] Like it wasn’t clear to me what the, you know, the algorithm was even detecting. ’cause it seemed, and I, it might, you know, it could theoretically have been him, not me, not understanding it, but it seemed like I had a hard time even understanding what he had said that the, the algorithm had, had even detected.

So, uh, yeah, just to say, I’m like,

Tim Levine: probably

Zach Elwood: like you

Tim Levine: are, I’m skeptical

Zach Elwood: whether a lot of these things would, would replicate. Yeah.

Tim Levine: Yeah. And that there’s a word for that and it’s called cross validation. So let’s take it in a completely different context. Imagine Amazon was trying to model our purchase behavior,

um, and there’s all kinds of things that are going on on the page, right? When we look at something and they know whether we click by or not. Right, so they could have their AI or their machine learning start plotting [00:26:00] out with what features of the page get us to click and what don’t.

Okay, so they get that algorithm. Now, let’s say we took that algorithm and applied it to new customers with new projects. How well does it do in predicting that’s cross validation,

Zach Elwood: right? Right to, to ensure you’re not just getting noise and random randomness spikes.

Tim Levine: Yeah. So here’s another example. When I did my demeanor work, and for the listeners who don’t know this is on how cues aren’t in isolation.

People present things and behaviors all are presented in a package, and these packages are all inter correlated. Uh, so I came up with a set of 11 behaviors that. Um, and impressions that seem to predict really well, uh, whether somebody’s gonna be believed or disbelieved. [00:27:00] Those are completely independent of whether they’re lying, lying or not, right?

But we know who gets believed and who doesn’t, and, and they’re basically being friendly, confident, uh, and outgoing. Right. Whereas people who are anxious or awkward, um, tend not to be believed related to your truth. Default theory. Yeah. Related to truth. Yeah. And, and these things, you know, so I, I documented that these 11 particular behaviors and impressions, um, seem to be the believability quotient.

So I had these, so what I did is I collected a whole different sample. Of truth tellers and liars coded those for these behaviors. Had a whole different sample of participants. Rate them for honesty. Had a whole different sample of people, judge them for these behaviors, and then showed that the judgments of the behaviors [00:28:00] predicted the judgments of honesty with these separate groups of people on a whole new set of communicators.

Right. Right. Cross validation and, and cross validation. And when I did that, then I went, oh, I think I’m onto something. But until I did that, we would never know if the findings were induced syncratic to that particular, you know, samples or coders or method.

Zach Elwood: Right,

Tim Levine: right.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. ’cause some of the, yeah. So is it your view, am I understanding it right, that.

When they, when they get these spikes that, you know, don’t replicate these findings, uh, correlations, do you think in some of these situations they actually were, the things that they found actually were good predictors for that specific situation and set of, set of factors of whatever sort? Like if they had ran that same situation multiple times, even some, [00:29:00] some of the findings might be related to that, that specific.

Situation and the types of people in it or things like this? Or do you think most of it is entirely just kind of random spikes? If that makes sense, if that, if that question

Tim Levine: makes sense. I think all of the above.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. It’s a, it’s a mix. Yeah.

Tim Levine: Um, so I did a study, uh, kind of way, way back, uh, in two, oh, uh, 2 0 5, where I was trying to, um, uh, to train people, um, to read nonverbal behaviors and then see if this would make them more accurate.

And I, of course, predicted that it wouldn’t. Um, but the, the gimmick of the study, uh, was including a, uh, placebo control. So I, I, one group of people were assigned to read that the best met analysis of the time behaviors that was Zuckerman et all in 81, they were trained to do the behaviors that, that were the most diagnostic from that meta-analysis.[00:30:00]

Um, and that kind of got overturned by DePalo in 2003, but I trained him on that. And then I, another group got trained on five behaviors that should have no validity from that meta-analysis. And then the third, the control group didn’t get any training at. And in the first study, what we found is the people who got trained in the nothing cues did the best, and the people who got trained in the valid cues did the worst with the control group in the middle, which is absolutely befuddling.

So then what we did is we went to the particular truth tellers and liars and coded the, the nonverbal cues we were training. And we found that for those particular samples, the things that weren’t diagnostic and meta-analysis actually were diagnostic, and the things that were diagnostic and the research weren’t.[00:31:00]

So then we went back and trained to do things that were person, message, situation specific. And we found when we trained to do that, it made people 2% better. It improved them from 56% to 58%. Um, but in that coding, what I learned is within a situation which was constant, there were big differences between people.

And they’re also within people distances between utterance and utterance. Right. So what might be diagnostic in one snippet might not be in the next, and this is a real complicated combination of person, situation and variability, not only across people, but within people.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: Because [00:32:00] people just aren’t that constant, you know?

Zach Elwood: Right.

Tim Levine: It, you know, if we were coding your number of blinks during this interview, you’re not blinking at a set rate.

Zach Elwood: Right.

Tim Levine: Right. Depending on where we snip the tape.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: We’re gonna find you going. Right. And me going like this.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: Um.

Zach Elwood: We’re very complex. Yeah.

Tim Levine: Yeah. So the way I think about it, so I tend to think Q findings are real in the sense that they are real in the data that showed them, right.

They are not at all robust. That is, they don’t extend very well. Within person to different situations, um, across people, even from moment to moment. Um, so cues are, as I think of them, ephemeral, and this is why it’s easy if I’m selling you on a lie [00:33:00] detecting method, that I can point to cue examples where they work because you can see cues in everyday communication.

Right. And if you pick situations in which they actually, your preferred queue actually works, right? Then you can show great examples on video. But the trouble is those things tend not to extend. They might flip and do the exact opposite thing in the next instance.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Um, so if I had to summarize your view of.

Matsumoto argument. The paper we started talking out, talking about at the beginning. Uh, I, I’d imagine your view is basically like, yeah, theoretically there’s, you know, you, you could, there, there could be some findings in future that, uh, are replicatable and show that more than multiple nonverbal cues might [00:34:00] be highly correlated with deception.

But you just, we haven’t seen anything like that. There’s no. There’s no specific evidence for anything like that.

Tim Levine: A little bit more subtle. There’s lots of evidence for that. There’s not a lot of evidence that holds up across, right. There’s evidence studies in, in very kind of predictable, reliable ways.

Zach Elwood: Gotcha. Okay.

Tim Levine: Um, so at the level of the individual study Yes, absolutely. At the across studies in ways that, um. I am really comfortable relying on, not yet, but I agree with them that the verdicts sh is not, and it shouldn’t be, um, entirely in yet because, you know, if he just, oh, this is a dead end and nobody researches it anymore, we’ll never know if it really should have been a dead end.

Right. So, [00:35:00] I, I, you know, I, I try not to, um. Uh, I think people can test whatever hypotheses they want, and I think it’s good that there’s difference of views and people are pursuing different things. And I think in the long run, this is gonna put us in a lot better scientific position than we would be if there was just one orthodoxy, uh, and everybody had to follow it.

Zach Elwood: Um. Yeah. Yeah, I

Tim Levine: know that’s, that’s not hugely satisfying.

Zach Elwood: Well, just, just from a, uh, like a logical perspective, it seems, you know, when you think about, I mean, humans can control their behavior a lot. So if, if there, if there was some say it came out that there was some. Major combination of behaviors that were known to be, you know, decently tied to deception.

It would just become that most, the word we get around and people would try not to do those things. Sort of like, we know that liars don’t wanna do various things that [00:36:00] they think are tied to deception, right? Like, so there’s, you know, just to say humans are. Very complex. If there’s something we can do to, you know, adjust our behavior to help ourselves, we, we will.

So it makes you think like, if there is, if there are gonna be reliable signs of deception, they would’ve to be things that you couldn’t control, you know? But even in that realm, like, you know. Heartbeat and these kinds of, you know, uh, Galvan skin response and stuff. Even that stuff, you know, we know isn’t reliable because you can get excited for various reasons and get nervous for various reasons.

So just to say, I, you know, there’s various reasons I’m, I’m, um, not to say like you, I’m open-minded that they could find some combination that’s, you know, for general

Tim Levine: populations. Yeah. But I’m, but I’m in clearly camp skeptical.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Clearly

Tim Levine: about the, about the Q thing. And if I was. When I’m investing in what I’m gonna put my time and effort to in my lab, um, [00:37:00] I’m not trying to save, uh, cues.

Um, you know, I’m, I’m investing my, uh, my time and energy, um, in, in different directions. So, you know, I, I, I, I, I think people can invest in whatever they want. Um, um, but, but that’s not. I, I think there’s enough of a, a data story out there to suggest that, um, uh, different paths are gonna be more fruitful.

Zach Elwood: Um, we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want, but.

Do you, do you have any thoughts on, you know, I mean, Matama is, you know, clearly tied to this company that he is the head of Human Tell, which sells courses on, you know, getting people mm-hmm. Uh, better at reading people and corporate or personal, you know, situations basically. So, you know, and as he says in his study, you know, his, his papers that he puts out.

Tim Levine: Yeah.

Zach Elwood: [00:38:00] Uh, he, you know, that’s a, obviously a conflict of interest, but I’m curious, do you have anything to say about that and understand that’s not, you know, something we need to get into?

Tim Levine: Um, my interactions with, uh, David have been like, super positive. Um, he’s done like some really cool studies, like with blind athletes and stuff.

I, I think he’s done some, uh, really good science. I think, uh, um, the conflict of interests are always a concern, but he, he seems to be very open about disclosing those, um. So, um,

yeah, that, that’s,

Zach Elwood: I noticed Sonas site, the Human Tell site. I was just looking at the Human

Tim Levine: Tell site. Oh. The other thing is, um, you know, he’s a, he’s an Eckman protege, right? I know. State Collaborate. Yeah. There’s some.[00:39:00]

Zach Elwood: We’ve talked about Eckman before on a

Tim Levine: previous episode. Yeah. And, and so in kind of academics, um, a good rule of thumb is don’t speak badly about other people’s advisors, um, or mentors. Uh, ’cause you know. Yeah, just like you wouldn’t wanna say bad things about people’s parents or, you know, favorite, uh, sports stars or, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s okay to, um, to have a viewpoint and, um, yeah,

Zach Elwood: and I, it,

Tim Levine: it’s, it’s, it is good that those things are disclosed.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. And I’ll put it, uh, I’ll probably put in a note about the previous episode of people that are curious about. Our previous discussions about this, but, um, I’m curious while I have you here, I I, I had been thinking about the micro expressions thing recently and I’m, I’m a big skeptic about the, the micro expressions and the usefulness of them.

Do you, do you have a, are, are there, uh, I assume your [00:40:00] would be a pretty big skeptic too, but is there a, a study that you’d point to or a favorite study or two that shows, uh, skepticism why skepticism is warranted about the micro expressions?

Tim Levine: Uh, not ones that I could pull the sites to, uh, off the top of my head.

Zach Elwood: Or do you

Tim Levine: have, maybe

Zach Elwood: just share your thoughts on the, the overall I idea of their practicality, practical use.

Tim Levine: Um, my understanding is, um,

there’s some debate on whether microexpressions are a thing or not, um, but at least some people. Some of the times seem to do micro expressions, um, saying that this, they mean this or they mean that. Um, outside of maybe revealing a particular motion, [00:41:00] I think is probably pretty tricky. Um, I, I think most of the researchers right now.

I’m pretty skeptical about microexpressions. I think now that machine learning’s good enough to do facial recognition and track microexpressions. I think that, um, we’re gonna see a whole bunch of studies, uh, applying that methodology to find just what Hartwig and Bond found about every queue is that, um.

They can, they’re diagnostic of something. Um, whether or not that something holds up over time is a different story.

Zach Elwood: Yeah, I’d say I, I, I’ve thought about them a good amount when I learned about them, and I mean, I’ve, I look for them in poker. Never found any real use for, for them. If anything, I find that.[00:42:00]

The little expressions are the opposite because in a competitive situation, you know mm-hmm. There’s actually an, an instinct for somebody to act the reverse of what they are. Right. So if you see tiny signs of somebody looking uncertain or worried, you know, who’s, who’s made a big bet that that’s actually like highly correlated with them being relaxed and strong.

So just to say and, and, but, but I think that that’s an interesting thing because it kind of maps over to some writing I’ve seen on. Like microexpressions and deception detection and interrogations and such, where I think there’s some study that found that, uh, that truth tellers actually are more likely to have signs of contempt and these kinds of things that most people would associate with liars.

But there’s, there’s, there’s like different ways to look at it because you can, you can make up logical. Reasons why they would be present for liars and truth tellers because truth tellers are more relaxed. So they might be more willing to let their contempt and other negative emotions [00:43:00] show, you know, or you might reason it the other way and say, liars are more likely to, you know, just to say there can be many ways to try to explain findings of, of whatever sort.

Right. So, but I, I’ll say, yeah, I, I’ve long been skeptical about microexpressions ’cause I, you know, if they were something I would’ve expected to. Find, uh, you know, see, see more of them in, in poker basically. But I, I just, I, I don’t, haven’t made use of them basically. So, yeah. Thanks for, thanks for that. Uh,

Tim Levine: you know, a good place to test them, uh, might be in amateur poker.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Yeah, I think the, uh, well, I do think, I, I do think the,

Tim Levine: you know, really novice poker players

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: Maybe might be a fun.

Zach Elwood: Although I, I do, I do think, uh, yeah, we could, we, we could talk about this for a while ’cause you and I have talked about, I’ve, I’ve talked

Tim Levine: about, I’m not saying that they would be diagnostic

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: But you might see a lot more variability. [00:44:00] Um,

Zach Elwood: yeah. The, the interesting thing about the poker and, and other formal kind of competitive game and sit situations is that there’s this assumed. You know, assumed competitive environment. So people are more likely to try to put on, they’re not even, they’re not, they’re not even necessarily trying to, to deceive.

It’s like an instinctual thing to put on the opposite of what they are. Mm-hmm. You know, in a game environment, which to me has no correlation to like interrogations or real world interviews. ’cause there’s not a competitive, directly competitive situation where you’re trying to get somebody to do a specific thing.

Right. So it’s a very, it’s a very, uh, yeah. I think it’s interesting how different this, the, the, the, the areas are between a fully competitive spot versus, you know, a non-competitive real world spot. But yeah. Uh, so do I, I was curious. I’ll, I’ll let you go shortly, but I was curious, do you wanna share any other, uh.

Interesting things. You’re, you’re working on these days projects? [00:45:00]

Tim Levine: Um, no, I think there’s probably a bunch, uh, in the works. Um, but right now they’re, um, sufficiently, uh, underdeveloped, uh, to be ready for, uh, public, uh, broadcast. Although I do have a, uh. A recent paper with, uh, Dave Markowitz outta Michigan State on asking, uh, AI to try to detect deception.

Oh, interesting. Okay. What’s the name of that? And it was, uh, it’s, uh, so it’s published in a Journal of Communication and David Markowitz. You’re asking a dyslexic how to spell. Um, well, what’s

Zach Elwood: the, uh, pap is there if, can they find it online or can I link to it?

Tim Levine: Uh, you probably can or I can send it to you.

Zach Elwood: Okay. I’ll put

Tim Levine: it in the show

Zach Elwood: notes for this. Yeah.

Tim Levine: Uh, but this was a, uh, a video platform, uh, that could, uh, listen to audio and watch video.

Zach Elwood: Okay. Interesting.

Tim Levine: And the finding was it was, uh, more biased, [00:46:00] um, than humans.

Zach Elwood: Hmm. Okay. I wanna read this. Wow. It sounds interesting.

Tim Levine: So it was more context dependent. Um, than humans were, but in, in kind of very stereotypically biased ways.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: Cool. I, I wanna read that. Um, yeah. I’ll have to remember the, uh, uh, send it to you.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: Um, so that’s, um, that’s kind of my big most recently published work. Very cool. Um, that, that I think will get some traction.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. Then I have a feeling there’s gonna be a lot of interesting AI related, uh,

Tim Levine: yeah.

Studies and papers, but we wanna be super careful with the results of that paper because AI technology’s changing daily. Right. So the, you know, findings are very much tied to one particular platform at one particular point in time. That

Zach Elwood: that is true.

Tim Levine: Yeah. Um,

Zach Elwood: uh, yeah. Things are changing so rapidly. Yeah.

Uh. So, uh, for people that are interested in your [00:47:00] work that like this talk, uh, what’s the best way? Is there a book of yours you’d recommend, uh, them getting started with?

Tim Levine: Uh, yeah. I have one book on the topic. It’s called, uh, duped.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: Um, truthful Theory and the Social Science of Lining Deception. Uh, that is, um, it’s an academic press book, so it’s, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a little.

Um, nerdy.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm.

Tim Levine: Um, but it’s nothing, um, you know, that, that people can’t work through.

Zach Elwood: Yeah. I found

Tim Levine: it quite, quite weird. I would, I would tell ’em to read, read the reviews on amazon.com. They’re super informative.

Zach Elwood: Hmm.

Tim Levine: So, you know, all, all the academics say. This is so easy to read. This is right. And, and some of the non-academics are like numbers.

Zach Elwood: I found it, for what it’s worth, I found it quite readable. And I think, you know, for those kind of books, if pe you can always, you can always skim over the really heavy stuff and get to the more [00:48:00] explanatory things if you want

Tim Levine: to read a book like that. And even, and even when there are numbers, I I, there’s text in there that tells you what all the numbers mean.

Zach Elwood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, well thanks Tim. This has been great. Thanks again

Tim Levine: for, uh oh. It’s always a pleasure, Zach.

Zach Elwood: Yeah.

Tim Levine: Thanks for, uh, thanks for reaching out.

Zach Elwood: Thank you. Yeah,

Tim Levine: and always nice to talk to you. And I, I hadn’t seen the, uh, Matia Moto and Wilson article until you pointed it to me, so

Zach Elwood: Oh,

Tim Levine: nice. Yeah.

Glad I could. I was, that’s always good to keep up on the literature.

Zach Elwood: Nice. Glad I could help a little bit. Okay, thanks a lot. That was a talk with Tim Levine. I am Zach Elwood, and this has been the People Who Read People Podcasts. You can learn more about [email protected]. Thanks for listening. Music by small skies.

You’ve probably heard of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). It’s a popular thing. It’s the foundation for the work of popular life/business coach Tony Robbins, and there are many other popular trainers and “gurus” who have used NLP ideas as the basis for their work. The con artist Chase Hughes (whose many lies and unethical behaviors I’ve examined on this podcast) is one such false guru with NLP origins.

This is a reshare of an episode of Chris Shelton’s “Speaking of Cults” YouTube show, which he invited me on as a guest. Chris and I talk about: the history and origins of NLP and the ideas it contains; the good and the bad in NLP; my own experiences working for 6 months in the NLP industry; how people like Chase Hughes and other obvious charlatans succeed at gaining popularity (e.g., Chase Hughes being promoted by Joe Rogan and Dr. Phil); how Joe Rogan’s and Chase Hughes’ popularity relate to political polarization; and more. 

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Related resources:

• The original episode on Chris’s Speaking of Cults show
• Chris Shelton’s book on Scientology

TRANSCRIPT

(transcript is done by voice-to-text program and contains many errors)

Have you heard of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, also known as NLP? Chances are you’ve probably heard about it. It’s a quite popular thing. NLP is the conceptual framework behind Tony Robbins and a slew of other popular people in the motivational seminar world. There’s a chance you may have wondered “What’s the deal with this NLP stuff? Is it legitimate? Or is it bullshit? Are some parts of it legitimate and some not?”

I myself have worked in the NLP world; for six months in 2008 I worked for a fairly well known NLP trainer. I took the job knowing that it would be a strange and interesting experience, and would likely give me some good stories. It did result in me experiencing a lot of strange and interesting and just plain weird things. It also resulted in me going down the rabbithole of what this whole NLP thing was. I wanted to understand this very strange and often downright creepy world I suddenly found myself in.  

I’m Zach Elwood and this is the People Who Read People podcast, a podcast aimed at better understanding the people around us, and better understanding ourselves. A few weeks ago I was invited on Chris Shelton’s podcast, which is called Speaking of Cults. Chris is a former Scientologist; he was actually raised in that world and was in that world for 25 years. Chris has a book titled Scientology: A to Xenu. Now for his podcast he examines cult-like phenomena in various areas of society. 

Chris read and/or watched a few of my episodes exposing the con artist and wannabe guru Chase Hughes: Chase is a rather obvious charlatan who has told many easily disprovable lies and exaggerations about his career and experiences, and made and continues to make comically absurd claims about what’s possible with hypnosis and mind control; I knew Chase was almost certainly a charlatan when I first heard him speak for like a minute on Jordan Harbinger’s podcast. 

And yet Chase has succeeded in getting on some popular shows and podcasts, like Joe Rogan’s, and Diary of a CEO, and Dr. Phil’s online show, and more. He’s been promoted by some big names and gets millions of views. Over the past few months he’s been leaning more into the spiritual, metaphysical, all-knowing guru realm with his content. And from the reports people currently or formerly in his inner circle send me, and based on the fawning adoration you can find from various people online, Chase does seem to be establishing a cult-like following. My personal opinion, based on various reports people have sent me, is that we’ll one day hear in the news some strange and troubling things about Chase Hughes. I don’t think it will end well, is what I’m saying. 

So Chris wanted to talk to me about Chase Hughes, and about Chase’s neuro-linguistic programming origins, and more widely about the NLP world and what NLP is all about, and how Chase’s work ties into other NLP or NLP-adjacent trainers and false gurus. We also talk about the good and bad of NLP: I talk about some of the more positive things I saw in it, which helps explain why people can report genuinely positive experiences about going to those seminars and getting these types of trainings. 

Until Chris did this episode, as far as I know I’ve been the only person to cover the con artistry and lies of Chase Hughes. You would think Dr. Phil and Joe Rogan and the popular Diary of a CEO podcast promoting an obvious liar and charlatan to millions of people would be bigger news, worthy of at least one article somewhere. But I think the fact that no one else has covered this says a lot about where we are as a society; there is just so much bullshit and nonsense around us, and so many people promoting so many dumb ideas and people, that this stuff, as weird and surprising as it is, doesn’t even register. And of course news organizations are in a tough spot these days; there’s less money than ever for investigative journalism, and there’s just so much more important seeming things in the world of politics to cover. Chris and I at the end of our talk get on the topic of political polarization, and how Joe Rogan’s popularity and Chase’s popularity might relate to that topic. 

So this will be a reshare of Chris’s October 11th episode, which was titled 

Speaking of Cults…Chase Hughes and the NLP Grift with Zach Elwood

. If you like this talk, you might like Chris’s podcast; again, it’s on YouTube and titled Speaking of Cults. 

Okay here’s the episode: 

Chris: [00:00:00] The speaking of Cult podcast is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from it is at the user’s own risk. The views, information, or opinions expressed by the host and guests are solely those of the individuals involved and do not constitute medical or other professional advice.

Have you ever watched a mesmerizing self-help seminar, read a book that promised to unlock the secrets of your mind or seen an online ad for a course in covert persuasion? It’s a multimillion dollar industry built on a single seductive promise that there’s a hidden system to control your life, your success, and even the people around you.

But what are the roots [00:01:00] of that promise? It leads us back to the 1970s in the invention of neurolinguistic programming, NLP by Richard Bandler and John Grindr. They claim to have cracked the code of human excellence, but from the very beginning, it was a theory heavy on anecdote and light on real science.

Despite being consistently debunked as pseudoscience, NLP became a perfect vehicle for entrepreneurs of influence. It created a playbook. A playbook that was masterfully used by Tony Robbins, who trained with the founders, repackaged their ideas into his own system, and built a billion dollar empire on mass seminars and motivational entertainment.

And that same playbook is being used today by a new generation of gurus. They’ve swapped the giant arenas for YouTube channels and online courses, but the core grift is the same. [00:02:00] Selling the illusion of psychological expertise to a world hungry for easy answers. One of these modern figures is Chase Hughes.

He claims to be a bestselling author, but that description is so vague, it doesn’t mean anything. He’s been featured on major media platforms and he sells high price trainings on what he calls behavioral analysis. He uses the slick language of a behavioral psychologist without seeming to have any professional experience or training to back it up.

So when you pull on that thread, the entire tapestry unravels his credentials appear to be manufactured. His past includes ventures into the world of pickup artistry. His so-called science is a remix of those same old debunked NLP principles lacking any of the peer reviewed validation that real psychology demands.

So how does this decades old grift keep evolving? [00:03:00] How do figures like Hughes build their credibility and who is most at risk of being exploited by their claims? Today we’re gonna pull back the curtain on the entire industry. I’m speaking with Zach Elwood, the researcher who has been meticulously investigating Chase Hughes, exposing the lies and tracing them right back to the well-established playbook of Pseudoscientific entrepreneurship.

This is a deep dive into how the legacy of NLP fuels modern manipulation and how we can learn to be more critical consumers. Now, here’s Zach Ellwood. Okay. Hi Zach. Welcome to my show, and thank you very much for agreeing to be here with me today. Hey, Chris, honored to be here. Thank you. Yeah, I, I, I, um, it’s very funny to me how I have sort of dived into this today, be how we’ve arrived here today because [00:04:00] for, for a number of years, people have thrown at me the relationship between the CIA and Scientology.

And there are you, you probably don’t even know or need to know. I mean, there are just so many weird conspiracy theories in the ex cult world about cults that people have been involved in. And they start drawing comparisons between, you know, government and this and that and, you know, various things. And, and Scientology has been the subject of a great deal of conspiracy theories.

And it was always something that I sort of, um, dismiss out of hand because as you point out, uh, in your own videos, and, uh, you know, we both end up quoting Carl Sagan, right? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and no one ever really brings any real evidence. They just, you know, connect these in dots of insinuation between the CIA and, you know, mind control.

And then, oh, well, groups like Scientology, they do mind control. So it all must be one big [00:05:00] thing, right? Yeah. And. And so this has been thrown at me a number of times, but, but Chase Hughes is somebody out there who made a very specific claim about the connection between the CIA and Scientology, and that’s how he came into my space.

I had never even heard of this guy. And you know, you see videos here and there and stuff like that, but I never really paid a lot of attention. And this claim comes along and I took him at his word that this is a behavioral expert, somebody kind, maybe he, you know, the way he talks, he infers, he maybe worked for the CIA at one point or contracted with them or something.

There’s all these insinuations and I just kind of, he’s on Joe Rogan, he is on, yeah, he’s on Rogan. He gets on these big podcasts. So I figured this is a legit guy and he is just making this really sort of, you know, fantastical claim. And so I took it apart and realized, no, he’s not just somebody who knows what he is talking about, making [00:06:00] one false claim.

He, he’s really lying. Threw his teeth about this connection. Banking on the fact that most people don’t know enough about Scientology to deep on what he just said, but I do. So I was like, wait a minute. And that opened the door to, well, who is this guy? And the more I looked into him, the more I found your work coming up because you have done some championship work debunking this guy, and I watched your videos on this and, and, and, you know, track the links and was like, oh my God, this is a whole other form of grift.

So we’re talking today because I have been skirting around the subject of neurolinguistic programming for years. Without ever really diving into it. And, um, and now I have this opportunity with you, uh, to do so, and now comment on not only Chase Hughes, but this entire sort of semi industry that sort of sits, I, I think [00:07:00] adjacent to the Manosphere really, you know, online and, and sort of sells people this bill of goods about how easy it is to crack the code of human behavior and, and sort of manipulation and covert control of people.

And it all sort of feeds into this basket of I’m just trying to get a leg up by controlling and manipulating other people without them knowing I’m doing that. And that’s, this whole sort of chase is one part of this whole industry of people going back to Tony Robbins and the neurolinguistic programming people.

Uh, and this goes all the way back to the, you know, late seventies and 1980s. Mm-hmm. So ancient history in some people’s minds, but not mine. Yeah. 

Zach: The E the EST. There was the EST, there was transformational seminars. Yes. Various sorts. Yeah. There were, there was all those things started back in the Yeah, the seventies.

Chris: Oh, seventies was a wild time for that stuff. So, um, so, so, so now, uh, maybe [00:08:00] so having introed all of that, right? So let’s start, let’s start off with, uh, just a little bit of who you are and, and how you came into this whole thing. ’cause that’s how I came into this conversation today. What, what’s your general background and, um, approach to how you ended up making videos debunking Chase Hughes?

Zach: Yeah, it’s a twisted long and twisted road, uh, windy road, I guess. Not twisted. Um, sounds bad. Yeah. Twisted a little bit. A twisted road. Yeah. So my, my path to it was I used to play poker for a living. Um, that led to me writing some poker, tells books, uh, how to read people. I’ve always been interested in psychology.

Psychology. That was the one of the reasons I was interested in poker from a young age. Um, but then even apart from that, uh, well, yeah, there’s two paths to it because the poker stuff led to me creating the general [00:09:00] mainstream Psychology and Behavior podcast. So that’s one element of it. But then also back in 2008, uh, back when, you know, the recession hit, I was having a hard time finding work and I went to, I got a job working for this NLP, uh, seminar trainer guy for like six months.

So I got an inside, uh, view of this world, which to me. I just found really fascinating. Uh, I went down the rabbit hole of like, what the heck is this stuff? ’cause I knew I almost didn’t take the job ’cause I knew it was gonna be wacky. Uh, but that’s why I took, that’s why I ended up taking it. I was like, well, you know, I don’t plan on doing it for a long time.

There’s not many jobs out there. I’ll work for this guy for, you know, a few months, and I get some good stories out of it. So, but yeah. And while I was there I did a lot of research about what the heck are the, all these ideas, what’s going on with this stuff? And I always wanted to write something, you know, longer form like an article or maybe even a book about it, but it never got around to it.

But then, so the later [00:10:00] when I had written my poker books and started doing my podcast. Uh, that, that led to me being more aware of this behavior and psychology grift going on, uh, just by studying, you know, what to do for my podcast. I was like, who are all these? What is all this stuff? You know, uh, behavior panel, uh, chase Hughes of various other people, hypnotist kind of people.

Um, so that led to me corresponding with, you know, actual legitimate behavior psychology researchers, including some people I’ve had on my podcast. And so I’ve kept in the loop about, you know, what they’re saying about these guys, and we correspond about them sometimes. And so that, that kind of makes me feel like I’m, you know, even, even though I, I’m just an amateur psychologist myself, you know, self-taught, um, it makes me feel good that I correspond with these people who know more about it and, you know, draw my attention to, to specific things that are completely outlandish and absurd.

So, yeah, that’s a, that’s a, a long story short how I [00:11:00] got into doing this. And specifically for the Chase Hughes, I listened to him on a podcast briefly on Jordan Harbinger, and I immediately, like, heard many red flags within like the first minute where I was like, this is very strange. Like, I don’t, I, I gotta look into the sky.

So then like a few months later, I finally looked into him and it was so much more thrifty and con artisty than I ever imagined. Like, I, I just expected to find like exaggerations like. I didn’t expect to find the, just the abundance of unethical behavior and li and just exaggerations about his, you know, uh, career and his accomplishments on like every, every facet of everything he’d done just full of, you know, exaggeration on lies.

So, uh, that was a doozy. That was really eyeopening, but it was also eyeopening seeing how nobody really pushes back on this stuff. Like in the world that he’s in, like the behavior panel show that he’s in and these various people that he associates with, nobody pushes back. Nobody. Nobody cares that you can look up and find the many things [00:12:00] he’s lied about, you know, see the ridiculous claims he’s made on his website.

Uh, fact check them. You know, nobody seems to be interested in vetting and which explains why it’s kind of a snowball effect. He basically has gotten famous. Internet famous by appearing on podcasts. So he goes from one podcast to another and it ke he keeps leveling up because it eventually gets to where Joe Rogan’s like, oh, he’s been on Diary of a CEO podcast.

He’s been on these other podcasts. They must have vetted him. He must be legitimate. And they just, I think they just invite him on without even vetting him, because you can, you know, you can easily find my work drawing attention to as many lies and ridiculous things. Uh, but I think, you know, that, that helps explain how easy it is to fool people these days.

Because, you know, my, my work is buried under the results of all the podcasts and stuff he’s done. If you look for Chase Hughes, it’s, you know, they, it’s easy to win the, the SEO battles online. And, and if you win the SEO battles, the, the, the, the actual fact checking, you know, especially for more online famous [00:13:00] people, uh, you know, the amount of stuff, interviews he’s done way outweighs like the fact checking stuff, right?

So that’ll help, that helps explain, like even in the internet age, you know, it’s very easy to fool people and create a, a, a false front of. Expertise basically. Yeah, 

Chris: absolutely. It’s, it’s really this, I mean, people have asked me if El Ron Hubbard would be able to pull off Scientology now with the internet.

And I have to say, well, yes, of course he would, because it’s not because of how clever he is. Mm-hmm. And it’s not because the information wouldn’t be there to find, but because people just don’t look mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. They literally just won’t pick up the keyboard and type in the words. And it would take you 60 seconds if you, if you just typed in Chase Hughes debunk.

Mm-hmm. Or you know, neurolinguistic programming debunk or reviews or fact check or anything. Right. You could find this information. It’s not hard to [00:14:00] find Now you went above and beyond because you even pulled out, you know, the way back machine stuff to go back to his earlier websites and really dig up the stuff that he’s been trying to cleanse from the internet, his old pickup artist days and get a woman, you know, all over you in an hour, you know, back when he was, uh, did you ever find out what it was?

Uh, just ’cause, just ’cause I’m curious, did you ever find out what it was he actually did in the military? 

Zach: Oh yeah. Well, yeah. Multiple people have told me that he’s, um, a quarter, he was a quartermaster in the Navy, uh, which is basically like ship operations and maintenance kind of stuff. 

Chris: Right. I knew it was something like that.

I knew it had to be something like that. Yeah. There’s 

Zach: no, no evidence that he’s, and he, and he is very careful these days to be very vague about his wording of it. He wants to imply that he did some intelligence or psychology related thing, right? So you gotta, you really gotta watch the ambiguous language, right?

Like where like, so even including things like I have trained, [00:15:00] uh, Navy Seals that could apply to like literally one Navy seal that came to one of his like, classes, right? That’s like, that’s ambigu. You really gotta watch the ambiguous language, right? 

Chris: That’s right. Oh, completely. And this is, this is exactly how Hubbard G drifted.

I mean it’s the, the con is the con is the con, right? It’s all about telling. It, it what Hubbard even actually documented it in Scientology materials when he said, you tell an acceptable truth. You, you tell the truth. The person is, is willing to accept rather than the actual facts. And so, you know, Hubbard Flunks out of, uh, one of the first classes on atomic and molecular phenomenon school at university, which he flunked out of entirely.

Didn’t even get through university. But then later on. I was a member of the first class on atomic and molecular, you know, fission. Right? And he claims to be a nuclear [00:16:00] physicist, a nuclear engineer in the 1950s when, you know, you’d have to dig up his class records and who’s gonna do that in 1950 to fact check him, right?

Yeah. So, so they count on the laziness and the inability of people to go look and, and back up their claims, right? Yeah. 

Zach: And to your point, to your point too, and we, we will probably, we could talk about this more, but to your point about like, it doesn’t require any special skill. All it requires is the, the, the personality type to make extreme claims and extreme lies.

And really it comes down to just people mainly being gullible and not fact checking, right? Like, it doesn’t, it, there, there’s not many other explanations needed because it really, it just, it is obviously easy to fool people because most people just are, are pretty gullible. A lot of people don’t know about the subject matter.

And then al also add on the top to the cult, you know, kind of aspect too. A lot of people just aren’t doing well emotionally, psychologically, [00:17:00] so they’re, they may be like, e especially desiring these, these things, you know, whether it’s a cult or like mastery of some domain, you know, they, you can easily fall prey to like really wanting to believe these things, which gets into the people that are especially needy and vulnerable.

Who really want to go down, they, they want to go down this rabbit hole. Right. For whatever reason. Yeah. 

Chris: Her, I, I, I could not agree more. I, I, I could not agree with more, with everything you just said. The way I’ve framed it has been for, for a few years now, is I have framed it as, you know, people need to, people are going to fulfill or try to fulfill their emotional needs.

And that’s what’s driving their behavior. It’s not about cognition and thinking the facts through, and I’m gonna line up my facts like Domino’s, and they’re all gonna lead me in this direction. That’s not how we go through life. We, we go through life trying to fulfill emotional needs. And a lot of people right now, um, you know, in the last many decades, we have seen from [00:18:00] the seventies, eighties, nineties, we can, we can almost classify these decades by, um, the amount of desperation that people have felt over individual finances, job insecurity, wage inequality, familial or relationship difficulties.

You know, a a a growing population creating more and more anxiety and depression and, and angst. You know, with, with, uh, with various social factors. It’s, it’s easy to see why people feel more pressure now or feel under the, the weight of, of, of uncertainty and misunderstanding and not, not having, uh, you know, a stability in their life.

Um, you know, jobs are, are, are not exactly a dime a dozen and, and people, uh, need to work. Um, you know, prices going up just up and up and up and up and, and kids and mental instability. I mean, there’s just this laundry list of things that [00:19:00] people feel. Their lives are out of their control. Yeah. Life is stressful.

Yeah. Very stressful. Yeah. And exactly. It all adds up to stress. And so when people like El Ron Hubbard or Tony Robbins or Chase Hughes, you know, or Joe Rogan is a spokesperson for these people, right? Or platformer for these people, puts them up there and says, these people know what they’re talking about.

They have answers, they have solutions. Well, people are hungry for easy answers and quick solutions to very difficult problems they have. And they don’t particularly want to hear. No, it’s hard. No behaviors are, no. Now figuring things out is hard. Yeah. And so it’s easy to see why they reject us. They 

Zach: want confident.

Yeah. They want confident wise men. You know, we want, we want wise men. We’re, we’re lacking in, we are lacking in like people who espouse wisdom and you know, gurus of, uh, real gurus of whatever sort. So we, you know, [00:20:00] people desire that. Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah. They do. They do. And it makes sense why they would go for it.

Right. We don’t have to. Uh, think of them as stupid idiots, you know? Right. Totally. Yeah. It’s, you know, really smart people will fall for this stuff because they have emotions. Yeah, no, for sure. Emotional needs. Right. So I am really curious, I, you know, that work you did, uh, I’ve read, of course, you know, you, you said you were gonna work for this guy who does NLP workshops and seminars and Yeah.

You’re gonna have some stories. And you did, you definitely have some stories. What was, uh, well first off, how would you, from your direct experience and your research and studies since then, how would you describe NLP Neurolinguistic programming? You know, what it is, what it promises, and what, what, what actually is it, what does it, what do people learn when they’re learning?

NLP? 

Zach: Yeah. I think, uh, no matter how I approach summarizing that, I think there’ll be different [00:21:00] legitimate views on it, because it is such a wide area to try to summarize, which is part of the challenge. Like, when people go to, you know, debunk it or, or be skeptical about it, there’s always somebody that, that, that’s like, well, that’s not what MLP is.

You’re, you know, you’re, you’re attacking a part of it that’s not the full picture of NLP. Right. So that’s just to say it, it can be hard to summarize it because it is a sprawling thing. Right. But, you know, by and large, it’s in a, it’s at a collection of, I, I view it as just the collection of ideas and. Uh, thinking that arose around the title of NLP and that’s like a hodgepodge of things.

Like NLP started, as you said, with, uh, Bandler and gr grinder. Grinder, I can’t remember how he says his name, but the two main guys back in the, in the seventies. And, um, it was mainly a way to, well, it started out as a way to like model, uh, exceptional people who had done exceptional, uh, therapy work for one thing, but it was also related to [00:22:00] just like high, high practicality, high uh, efficiency and, and, uh, mastery of various things.

But to some of their main focus was on these, uh, therapists that were known for getting really good results. Like, um, what’s his name? Milton, um, Erickson. The, uh, right person known for, yeah. And they, they, they, they studied his, like hypnotic approaches. Um, there’s a, there’s various other things in the, in the mix too, but it, it, it, it related a lot to, uh, modes of thinking.

Like, you know, there’s, there’s, you know, one of the key ideas is like, some people have modes of thinking more related to tactile things. Some people have modes of thinking more related to, uh, you know, visual or audio. Um, that’s one of the key things. And then that ties into like the eye, uh, eye def direction thing where you can get clues about what someone’s thinking based on where they look.

That’s another area of it. [00:23:00] Uh, these were things, and, you know, these were things that were not meant to be exploitative, at least how they initially framed it. It was related to therapy and, and helping people and such, which is, you know, another reason people do go to these NLP events. It’s not all exploitative people.

It’s people who legitimately, they, they, they are seeking, like, you know, help in their therapy practices or things like this, or teaching or whatever it may be. So there’s two elements to it. It’s like you can have the more educational helping people aspect, or you can have the like, oh, I want to get secrets that help me exploit people.

You know? Um, so there was always, there’s always been, uh, those two sides of it where it’s like, oh, by understanding other people, uh, understanding their patterns and, and reading them and, uh, and being able to influence them because that’s the other side of the coin. So it’s like understanding, you know, how people are thinking based on these kind of ideas about how they use language, where they look their, their modes of thinking.

The, the other side of that is the, is the, how do I [00:24:00] influence people with that knowledge I have? How do I use like, language to influence them based on my knowledge of, of how they’re thinking, right? And it, it includes, uh, and over the years, NLP has grown and changed because, you know, what was there in the beginning, wasn’t there?

Later it shifted, you know, based on how all these different NLP people did their training and their seminars. Uh, but a big part of it came to be, you know, the, the seminars are what, what is called transformational or experiential, what they’ll, they will keep you there many days, right? Like several days in a row and it’s packed, filled that activity, so you get very little sleep.

So it kind of has some, you know, and they do unusual psychology, uh, related exercises in there. Like, you know, one that I was present for was like staring into each other’s eyes for a long time. So it kind of creates these unusual feelings in people, which, uh, makes them theoretically more bonded to the experiment experience, you know, and, uh, makes people have these [00:25:00] unusual experiences.

So there’s a slew of things in there, which is why it’s hard to define or, you know, precisely say what NLP is. Because for example, like sometimes I’ll, you know, if you talk about NLP, uh, the, uh, the claims about reading people based on the eye contact, uh, eye direction stuff, some people, some NLP defenders will say like, no, that wasn’t initially in, you know, Bandler and Grinder’s work.

They talked about, you know, it wasn’t, it was a clue, but wasn’t that meaningful. And it, you know, so they’ll, they’ll defend it by saying like, well, that wasn’t in the original stuff, and that’s just some practitioners who are making grant claims, et cetera, et cetera. So that’s just to give you a sense of like.

But people who try to defend it will often try to like nitpick things about, uh, that, that’s not really NLP or NLP is more nuanced than that. Uh, but by and large, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a tough space to define. But to me, you know, when you look at people who have done the work, uh, debunking or studying these [00:26:00] NLP associated ideas, just by and large, uh, you know, none of the NLP associated ideas hold up under scrutiny, uh, in, in scientific study or, uh, and then there’s, I should say there’s also the NLP trainers and practitioners do bring in various real and respected ideas too.

So it’s a right in the, in the context of their training, you know, it can be a hodgepodge of like, could just completely ridiculous ideas that no legitimate, you know, researchers respect at all and you know, other things that are more legitimate. So that, that helps explain why it’s so easy to. Or why it’s, it can be so persuasive be to people because you’re bringing in a lot of good ideas too.

And, and like, that makes it hard to debunk too, because people who take those trainings, they’re like, no, that was legitimate. I looked that up and I’m like, yeah, there’s legitimate things in the mix. But by and large, the NLP things have been thoroughly debunked and there’s no evidence [00:27:00] for them. There’s, you know, evidence against a lot of it.

So just to say for people that are, that really wanna believe it, or for people that have gone down the rabbit hole of like believing these are. Powerful ideas. There’s all sorts of mechanisms that they use to defend it. Uh, and I’ve named a few of them, but, um, I hope that gives a, a sense of the, the sprawl of it and, and what’s involved though.

Chris: Absolutely. Thank you for all of that because it’s, um, it is made complicated. It’s made more complicated than it really is in an effort to disperse attention, I think. And yeah, try to keep the semblance of No, no, there’s something here. Even if this doesn’t quite, or this doesn’t quite, there’s something here, there’s something the right as this idea, and it’s this sort of eternal hope.

I think that we’re trying to crack the code of, you know, some simple this, you know, control panel or lever system or something to be [00:28:00] able to manipulate or control ourselves and other people. Some people are coming into this, you know, looking at trying to solve their own problems too. It’s not just about, you know, you know, twirling their mustaches and 

Zach: Yeah.

And to, to your, to your point, I’ll throw in, you know, it’s the main goal of these people that promote these ideas, like people like. Chase Hughes. I mean, the main goal, whether it’s NLP related or not, their goal is to communicate mastery that you need them to help unlock, right? Like they’ll, they’ll use various tools at their disposal.

It doesn’t have to be NLP, it can be, you know, military intelligence or whatever other things are in the mix for people. But the main goal is to establish a sense that you really need this person’s wisdom and their amazing insights. Right? And, uh, I mean, that explains why, that explains why in the NLP world, all the nl, you know, the NLP trainers will all have their various flavors and even trademark names of this stuff, right?

Like, so, you know, there, there’s a lot of [00:29:00] use of the word neuro because it, you know, there’s neurolinguistic program programming, but it also makes it sound like some sort of scientific thing, right? 

Chris: I 

Zach: have my neuro strategies, my neuro methods, my neuro whatever, it, but, but it also puts a, a, a spin on it, like a, a personal spin.

Like, these are my trademarked ideas you have to come to me for. Right. But, and, and to your point too, it’s, we should recognize that a lot of these people really believe this stuff. Like the, the NLP trainer that I worked for, he really believed that, you know, these were amazing things that he himself, like, had amazing control over, over everybody in his orbit.

Like he really believed that he was helping people. I at least I think he did. Uh, so it’s just to say these, yeah, these aren’t, like you say, these aren’t our, like, aren’t all like villainous people sitting around, like just, uh, thinking about how to. Exploit and manipulate people. A lot of them truly believe, you know, like the NLP trainer I worked for, he would tell this story about like how he didn’t believe he was really anything special until everybody started telling him he was, [00:30:00] and told him how great he was at doing the NLP stuff.

And he was like, oh, I must be a real genius of this stuff, you know? So that was kind of how he went down the. The rabbit hole, like, so just to say, yeah, it, it’s good to recognize, you know, have empathy even when we think people are wrong. Um, and then some people are just clearly much more unethical on the un unethical side.

But it’s a, it’s a mix of people, right? 

Chris: That’s right. That’s exactly right. And it, it’s, yeah, it’s, uh, uh, you know, when I was a Scientologist, it was the same deal. I thought I had my, my hand on the top of this, you know, this mastery of this, of this technology as they called it, that would enable me to be able to help people to a degree that nothing else could.

And, and so. Sure, I’ll sit for hours in a chair and stare at somebody else, or have other people do that to each other. This, this is right outta Scientology stuff, and you produce what’s called the Ganzfeld Effect. You know, you get these hallucinations and, you know, you can have auditory and visual hallucinations, you can have all kinds of trance induction, all kinds of crazy [00:31:00] stuff happen.

Just sit and staring at somebody else in the eyes, and it gets people feeling giddy, and it gets them feeling nervous, and it gets them all a flutter. And, you know, because they’re sitting there having to focus their attention on another person in front of them, which they don’t normally do. And so it’s a new novel effect.

Uh, that’s something I haven’t felt before. So therefore, the feelings I’m feeling must be special and new and different, even though, no, literally, almost everybody’s gonna feel that way. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, for under understandable, explainable reasons, but because we’re gonna, that, I’ve always said that, that, that, that one of the biggest superpowers, one of the powers that, that these guys have is they’re the first to arrive with an interpretation of this phenomena.

So their interpretation is the one that’s going to win, right? If I tell you, you know, sit in this chair for two hours and stare at somebody else, and don’t blink and don’t fidget, and don’t move around. Don’t, don’t get up. Don’t [00:32:00] laugh. Don’t do anything. Don’t let yourself get triggered. Just sit there and be there and just do it.

The person starts feeling like they’re hallucinating, you know, seeing themselves from outside their body. And I go, yep, you popped outta your body, you’re exterior. That proves you are an immortal spiritual being. Right. I’ve now to a Scientologist. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. With the Ganzfeld effect, uh, it, you know, it’s a psychological principle, but I can, I can, and I don’t even know about it.

Mm-hmm. I just know as a Scientologist, I didn’t know about that till after I left. Right, right. I just knew that if I could do that right here was my interpretation, and it’s the interpretation of this phenomena that has so much power for people. 

Zach: And I, and I will throw in there too, uh, I think an important part of this is, you know, I I, I try to, when I was working for this guy years ago, I, my takeaway was that there are, like I was saying, there are good ideas in the mix and, [00:33:00] uh, for a lot of people that come to those seminars, that can be their first exposure to some of these psychology ideas.

Like, for example, you know, a big, a big thing in the NLP world is reframing the meaning of experiences, right? Mm-hmm. Which is actually a very wise thing because, you know, we, we can, we have, we do have the power to look at experiences in all sorts of different ways and getting over, you know, trauma and psychological emotional pain.

You know, a big part of that is reframing the meaning of that. Right? That’s 

Chris: right. So that, 

Zach: that, that is a meaningful concept. And they, and you know, the guy I worked for and, and NLP people in, in general. Like, uh, Tony Robbins, you know, that’s a big part of what he does. It’s all about the reframing. It’s an important concept.

And a lot of people that do go, that go to these events, even if there’s a lot of bullshit in the mix, they do come away with some ideas that they probably haven’t considered before and could theoretically be life changing. So that’s why I like, I do like to be fair and say some people do get legitimate insights and important takeaways from these [00:34:00] things, and that doesn’t bother me.

I think the, the thing that’s bad is the, is when the per the trainer acts as if they’re the person that you have to go for the, for these things, and then is charging like a ridiculous amount of money to, you know, do these trainings where it’s like you’re not, you know, you’re, you’re not, you’re not taking that much knowledge where, and you know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the putting themselves on a pedestal where they’re the, they’re the guru, right?

Is, is where the problem comes in. It’s not the, you know, and then it’s also throwing in a bunch of hot, you know, bunch of bullshit that’s theoretically harmful to people too. But if it was just like the things that were, you know, like reframing or some of these legitimate things that they will cover in, in their trainings, you know, that part’s all well and good.

And I can, and that’s why I say it’s understandable why you will have people that might be watching this. So he’ll be like, I had a very meaningful, good experience at one of these seminars. And, and, and that’s fine. I think that’s. It’s totally legitimate and, and, uh, I’m not saying that’s not possible, so I just want to throw that in there.

Yeah, [00:35:00] 

Chris: absolutely. Absolutely. It’s the, like I said, it’s the interpretation of the event and, and what you’re walking away with. If you’re walking away, you know, that, that this proves something that it doesn’t really prove. Then, you know, there’s a cognitive and, and real world problem there. You, you’re, you’re walking around living a lie 

Zach: and you might get taken for a lot of money, theoretically.

Exactly. 

Chris: Yeah, exactly. Uh, and that’s Scientology in a nutshell, right there. You know, they, they sell you a lie right from the get go. And if they can get you, if they can get that hook and get that emotional commitment, and then they’ll start working on you and working on you, and it’s this, you know, gradual change over time and all that time, you’re given a money hand over fist and, and you’re being taken for a ride, right?

Because there’s nothing at the end of this road that makes you a different person in any substantial or basic or fundamental way than the person who you were when you started. You, you’re gonna be the same person, you know, [00:36:00] uh, you’re just gonna have been lied to and put through the ringer a number of times and jump through a number of hoops that you really didn’t have to.

And that’s, and that’s where I get a little, that’s where my blood boils, is when people are, are taken advantage of like that. Um, you know, like I was so, it’s, it’s understandable. I think motivated me for a long time to, to dig this stuff up. Um, and yeah, NLP was an interest is interesting. Uh, the one other thing I wanna say about the origin story of it, maybe you can confirm this, I’m not, I don’t know.

Is that, uh, Bandler and Grindr Grinder? Grinder? Uh, yeah. I don’t know how to pronounce those either. I’ve only read the man’s name, but they were trying to do the scientific research, peer review process, do the standard research process back in the seventies with these ideas and they ideas sound so cool.

That you kind of wish [00:37:00] they were true. Wouldn’t it be awesome if every time you were talking to someone and they look down into the left, that means, oh, they’re accessing their visual memory right now. Right. And I can know that about them and that will tell me something about them that can assist me either therapeutically or can assist me to manipulate them or whatever.

Wouldn’t it be cool? Yeah. You know, wouldn’t it be cool if every time you meet somebody who talks like, oh, I see that. Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, I, yeah, I can, I can visualize that. If they’re talking like that, that means they’re a visual thinker. And so if you use visual metaphor back at them, you can subtly manipulate them.

Wouldn’t that be awesome? If it was, wouldn’t that be cool? 

Zach: Right. Totally. No, no, you’re right. It’s like that, that, I think that’s the draw of a lot of bullshit ideas in [00:38:00] general. It’s like, wouldn’t this would be so cool if, if this thing was were true? Right. And that’s the, the big draw. And uh, yeah. The other interesting thing, there’s all sorts of things to say about NLP, but.

You know, going back to the origins of NLP, it came about at a time when there was all this like brain asymmetry and symmetry studies going on, which very much influence how NLP played out and like the eye direction and, you know, modes of thought kind of thing. Which, which is interesting. But, you know, you go back and look at those studies, a lot of that stuff was just, you know, a, it was like a lot of vague studies, a lot of the studies even that, a lot of the studies that even found stuff, you know, couldn’t be reproduced that.

So it was like, but the, there was a lot of interest in, in that stuff back then. And, and I think there was this kind of like the sixties and seventies were, you know, kind of this, a lot of people were thinking like, we’re full, we’re really gonna unlock the secrets of the brain now that we’ve got these tools to study the brain, you know, closely with all the, you know, imaging, uh, things we have.

And I think there was this [00:39:00] kind of excitement about like, we’re really gonna, we’re so close to figuring it out. Like, you know, we’re gonna know that somebody’s using, you know, this part of their brain and it means they’re this kind of personality or whatever, you know, there, I think there was just a lot of excitement.

’cause it helps explain, like when I went back and looked at all the research, there was all this like brain, you know, asymmetry and like, you know what, trying to fi figure out what kind of words people were using that, this kind of stuff. Uh, so there was that excitement, which I think. Clearly didn’t pan out.

Um, you know, from that, from that point, no, that’s exactly 

Chris: right. Is, is people get excited about these ideas and unfortunately, um, to finish the thought, wa was, uh, ’cause because I think you’re absolutely right. I think, I think you’re absolutely right about everything you just said there, because this whole split brain studies and the, you know, all this stuff was really exciting stuff in the seventies and eighties and people really thought they were, you know, getting a grip on some things.

And sure enough, this is the path of progression and discovery that we need, and there are gonna be alleys people go down that don’t develop [00:40:00] into something. But the mistake that band or, and Grinder made and that, and the thing that kind of upset me about those two was they went, okay, well the peer review is showing that this stuff ain’t really flying.

Like this isn’t really universally true stuff. Well, we’re so excited about it and we’re so sure it’s true. If I, if I remember this right, okay, we’re just gonna take this directly to the public and we’re, you know, the whole science thing. Yeah. You know, we’re just gonna go this direction. And so they just kind of shooed the research trail and started doing seminars and workshops and stuff like that because that was the thing to do in the seventies and eighties.

Arenas were being filled up by all kinds of people from Bill Gothard to, you know, Tony Robbins types. Yeah. And. Now it’s online, now, it’s now it’s the online community. You don’t have, you know, you still have conventions and you know, grant Cardone out there who’s also in this space, you know, from a Scientology Grift angle.

Um, you know, they’ll fill up convention centers, but they’re [00:41:00] really, you know, online is where this stuff really, really thrives. Yeah. So, um, so I just sort of see it as this progression of ideas you’re referring and you’re, what you were referring to earlier, I think was the human potential movement that was, um, big through the sixties and seventies.

And, and that’s where, you know, you get asked and, you know, which turns into Landmark Forum and, you know, that’s where NNLP comes in and, and really kind of landed as it kind of landed into this human potential movement. But it was more of a social movement rather than a scientific movement by this point.

And this is where the grift really came into play, I think. Mm-hmm. Um, and so we, and, and so I think that’s the origin story, or at least the fundamental sort of, you know, framework of the origin story of this stuff. So if we go through the greed is good eighties into the, you know, the, the, the grunge of the nineties and the [00:42:00] internet coming into play.

Now we have a whole new field for these people to play in. Right? A whole new sandbox, uh, in the two thousands with social media taking off. And these people able to make a name for themselves, you know, band or, and Grindr are kind of names of the past now, but you know, now we have our Chase Hughes and we still have Tony Robbins crawling around.

What, who else do you see in this space? If we wanna name names or talk about types of people or types of grift, what, what else do you see emerging from what NLP has turned into? 

Zach: Well, it’s a good question. I, I, I actually haven’t studied it that much. Like I went down the Chase Hugs rabbit hole and that led me to see a, you know, see a few other people in that area.

Uh, yeah, I do, I do think there’s, you know, his, you know, his compatriots on the behavior panel, um, right. Those 

Chris: guys who are those people? 

Zach: They’re, I mean, the fact that they, the fact alone that they, uh, chose to [00:43:00] partner with Chase Hughes, I mean, I think tells you a lot about who they are, but according to them, they’re the number one, four, the, the four best behavior experts in the world, you know, but don’t ask them to, uh, come up with any qualifications for that.

That’s just what they call themselves, right? So there, there, there’s all sorts of these guys who, you know, and there is a huge incentive to, you know, there’s a lot of money involved in this stuff. It’s like these guys get millions of views on YouTube and that translates to. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, right?

Chris: Yeah. 

Zach: Big money. Yeah, big money for that. And, uh, so it’s clear there’s an incentive. So it’s like, you know, but you watch these behavior panel shows and it’s like they’re just spouting a lot of, like ambigu, some, some okay. Ideas, some, uh, mostly just bad and ambiguous and things go other way many different ways.

Ideas, like, you know, and I’ve, and I, there, there, I thought about doing a breakdown of like a specific video of theirs to show like just how ambiguous and, uh, kind of meaningless these ideas are. But you watch these shows and you’re like, [00:44:00] okay, they’ve said a lot of things about what could theoretically be, but what does it all mean in the end?

Like it, you know, there, it’s just a lot of kind of wishy-washy ideas. But, and then also, you know, a lot of the, the people that do this kind of work, they’re more likely to have like opinion, uh, really high, uh, really confident opinions. The more clear it is that someone was guilty or lied or whatever it is, right?

So that’s another element of this, like, yeah, it’s very easy after the fact. Like to know that, you know, for example, Chris Watts was a, a very guilty, uh, acted, very guilt guiltily. That was the guy who killed his, you know, wife and, uh, children. A well-known case that people examined his behavior. But that’s just to say there’s.

There gonna be situations where like, you know, you’re not going too far out on a, uh, a, you know, a, a plank, a, a dangerous plank to be confident about somebody’s opinion, uh, somebody’s behaviors. Uh, but there’s, so there’s a lot of these behavior people. Um, there’s, you know, there’s also the hypnotists and [00:45:00] influence kind of people, like the doing studying the Chase Hughes stuff led me to see that there was like NLP and hypnosis associated people that would like, praise Chase Hughes and Chase Hughes would praise them.

Like there was, yeah, it was kind of like this, there’s this whole underworld where they, like, they never pushed back on each other’s obvious flaws. They only just say, these guys are amazing, right? Like, nothing, nothing, uh, untoward to see about this, these people’s, uh, you know, claims of, of expertise. So there’s a whole like, ecosystem where they all drum each other up because it’s, it, it’s to their best interest.

Like, it’s not in the, the, the behavior panel. People know all about Chase Hughes, many lies and exaggerations, and I’ve told them, you know, directly, and they’ll just be like, oh, you’re just jealous. You’re just a hater, blah, blah, blah. They don’t, they don’t care to actually address these things. And like, people that will, will write me being like, I can’t believe that these people won’t address these obvious, you know, lies and unethical behaviors.

And I’m like, well, if they did that, they would have to address many [00:46:00] unethical things that they themselves have done. And why did they partner with Chase, who in the first place? So they have, there’s no incentive for these people who have. You know, in this ecosystem to, to examine these things. But to your question about like specific people, I really, I wish I, I wish I had more time ’cause it is kind of fun to, you know, make videos about these guys.

But yeah, it was kind of random that I went down to chase, use Rabbit Hole. It was just such an egregious case. That was why I made several videos about it, because I think even in this world, like he was a, you know, a very egregious, uh, case about, you know, lying and exaggerating. Um, but yeah, there’s, there is a, there, there’s a large ecosystem and then you have to kind of separate the, you know, we’re just telling you to analyze, you know, we’re, we’re claiming that we can analyze this behavior versus like, we’re gonna get you to influence and manipulate other people.

You know, which Chase straddles both those, those worlds. But it’s a, they can be very separate worlds. Um, and yeah, I think that’s kind of a, I, I don’t, I don’t know too much about the, all the [00:47:00] specific players these days. 

Chris: No, no, that’s fine. I appreciate the, the overview though, and especially the commentary about the ecosystem.

’cause I was gonna bring that up and I’m glad you did. Um, because there is this sort of mutual supportive system that, that goes on in this YouTube space or in this real world space because we are talking about people who are not just making videos on YouTube. They are going out and doing and getting paid quite well to go do business seminars and train recruiters, train negotiators, train, you know, MBA level people in how to do their jobs better.

And these people, as business people are relying on the expertise of Chase Hughes to be who he says he is because they’re taking what he says and they’re applying it in their day to day when they’re doing negotiations and important work that is gonna matter. And if they’re taking nonsense and trying to use it in the real world, you’re gonna [00:48:00] have the same effect or same reason or same.

Consequences as if you were to take Scientology into your business. And what happens when people do that? Businesses collapse. That’s what happens there. Are there, there people lose their jobs over this stuff? There are, there are. This can be disastrous when you’re trying to take, you know, ideas like, oh yes, I’m gonna watch his eyes and I’m gonna watch what direction they go in.

You know? Or I’m gonna use certain language in a certain way and I know I’m going to get this result. And it’s easy in a training, it’s easy in a training to find all the examples of how this is gonna work until you hit the real world where the rubber meets the road and suddenly you’re in front of somebody who ain’t acting the way Chase said they would.

Now what are you gonna do? 

Zach: Yeah. I, I think the, uh, you’re not the in one interesting thing about that is that I think one of the not obvious harms of this stuff is, is, is related to that. [00:49:00] Where a lot of people that watch like the behavior panel or take, you know, chase hugs classes, they start thinking that they really can read people accurately.

And mainly it’s just, it, it just serves as a way to like. Amplify their own biases, because basically what they’ll do is, you know, and, and I can show you, I can show you many examples of this where like, behavior panel fans will be like looking at a video in like the Facebook group, the fan, the fan group of behavior panel, and they’ll be like, I know she’s lying based on this one random, you know, ambiguous thing.

And like, yeah. So basically everyone’s just using these like half-baked ideas they’ll get from these people and, and it’s just another filter for making them feel confident to express what they want to believe anyway. So it’s like, I know she’s a, you know, a horrible person. I, I know that, um, you know, this royalty member’s a piece of shit because I, you know, she did this one small behavior, right?

And then like, you know, like a lot of things, people will forget when they’re wrong about something. And a lot of things are just like personality [00:50:00] things anyway. They’re like things they’ll never know. So they’re like, I, that’s, that tells me she’s being devious. I just don’t like her now, you know, even more.

Uh, so there’s all the, there’s, it just makes people dumber basically because they’ve been, their heads have been filled with all these like confident, like things that are just not possible to do in the real world. Like get confident reads of people, whether they’re lying or withholding information or what their state of mind is when they’re telling you something like.

You know, the, the, these are, it’s just a pipe dream that you can do that confidently all the time. Like sure, sometimes I have reads about stuff that I could back up with, you know, uh, a list of things. But it’s like, that’s a very rare thing to be able to reach that level of confidence. And even, even the things you’re highly confident about will be like, you know, not that confident.

So, um, so it’s just to say, yeah, these things are harmful in, in multiple ways that are, that are not really obvious. And I think that’s, that’s, that’s one of the, the worst things is just putting all these. Bad ideas out there. And I think it even, you know, it, it plays into [00:51:00] the political polarization sphere too, where people are watching like videos that, uh, you know, that the behavior panel is analyzed of political people and they’re like, oh yeah, I know that that person’s a, a piece of shit ’cause they did X, Y, Z and it’s like.

It’s just reinforcing what they wanted to believe anyway about various political figures and various, you know, celebrities. So yeah, it’s kind of an insidious, kind of a dumbing down of things, you know, 

Chris: there, I, I could not agree more. I mean, you bring in confirmation bias and that, and you’re nailing it.

And it’s, and it’s, and it is a lot more of that than people are, are, are able to recognize in themselves. This is, this is why I’m always going on at a mad rate about, you know, look, if you really wanna navigate life, uh, critical thinking and emotional intelligence are the, are the tools you have to have in, in the holsters on you.

You know, that you’re walking around with you. You’ve, you’ve got to take these things to a high level for yourself, which means discipline and practice and using this stuff over and over and over. It’s not just knowing a few logical fallacies [00:52:00] or knowing a little bit about how people are emotionally driven.

It’s really understanding yourself and other people from these core ideas. And that’s, that’s where you’ll understand the nuance and you’ll see how much nuance there is. Like, for example, okay, you, you have written books about poker, uh, tells and, and reading people that way. And I don’t imagine for a second that you have some superpower that you can sit at a table with six strangers you’ve never met and be able to wipe the table with them because you’re such a great person at Poker Tells right.

I imagine that that is, that, that’s the first thing I’m thinking is, no, you’re not, you don’t have a superpower and you’re not gonna do that. And I don’t have that expectation. Right. But there are so many poor schleps out there who do. Yeah. And it, and it would be easy for you to use that expectation and feed that confirmation bias.

Right, right. I imagine it’s not [00:53:00] that way ’cause of the nature of the work you do. So how would you describe that? How 

Zach: do you talk about that? Totally. And that, that, that’s actually what makes me so frustrated about this topic. ’cause it’s like I, I went outta my way to write in such a careful way about poker, and then you, you know, it’s like, it’s a game.

And, uh, then you got these people making grand claims about real world stuff and, you know, and I’m just like, I, that, that bugs me. Yeah. ’cause to your point, it’s like, yes, I, that’s what people have said they liked about my books. It’s one of the reasons they like my work is because I’m being very, I’m not saying I, I, I’m, I’m, I’m actually saying, I very, I say very specifically, even the best reader of tells to my knowledge is only using this maybe like, you know, a few times a session to like, and sometimes it’s just swinging a decision that was, you know, very close and goes one way or the other.

It’s not like you’re highly confident of it. It’s like you might go one way or another based on, you know, it’s the, it’s the only information I have to, to, to act on. Uh, so yeah, I’m very careful to say, thi this is a rare thing you may [00:54:00] rely on, uh. It’s true that like less skilled players will have more obvious tells.

You know, it’s, it’s true that the more skilled you are, the less likely you are to get a tell a read from somebody. Uh, so I, I was always very careful to be very responsible how, how I see it, which is like, plays into why I’m so frustrated with these people. Basically, you know, just saying the most outlandish and extreme things about real world things that could impact real world, uh, scenarios, interrogations or interviews or whatever.

Uh, so yeah, and, and I will say too, like when people ask me, you know, what, what kind of behavior stuff, you know, real world behavior stuff, do you recommend? I do think there’s some very good work about verbal statement analysis, which I think is, you know, if you, if you’re interested in reading, people focus on the verbal stuff because that’s where people are actually trying to communicate to you.

They’re using their words, right? So like, I just do not, I, I, I would much recommend reading books like, um, I know You are lying by, [00:55:00] uh, mark ish who I’ve interviewed for my podcast, which is about analyzing statements because statements contain a lot of meaning, and there’s a lot of ways people will try to misdirect your attention in statements and try to do various things with their statements.

You can get so much more information out of that versus like trying to read nonverbal behavior because nonverbal behavior. Is quite hard to read. Like, other than like some very simple stuff like, oh, this person’s nervous, but okay, what does nervous mean? It could be, you know, for many different reasons.

Right. That’s fine. Uh, so yeah, I’ll throw that in there for people that like, wanna know what I find really valuable. And then, and that’s, I wrote Verbal Poker Towels, which was kind of like my take on. Um, I was inspired by Mark Cher’s book about statement analysis and like real world scenarios. So I wrote a book that was analyzing statements that poker players make.

And that was actually like, I think that’s, I’m not, obviously I’m biased, but I do think it’s like one of the best poker books out there because it, I learned so much, uh, writing the book and researching it over like, you know, I, I worked [00:56:00] full time on it basically for almost eight months. It was like my big project and, uh, I learned a lot doing it.

And then just to say, there’s a lot of information in people’s statements, like people, because that’s where they’re trying to manipulate you. Right. That’s where they’re, that’s where they’re trying to get you to do certain things. Uh, and you can find a lot of like information in there, right? 

Chris: Yeah, absolutely.

I, I love that because I, you know, what drove me crazy? What drove me absolutely mad, I was absolutely fascinated with it at first until I realized the limitations and how people were taking it and running and making such hyperbolic, exaggerated claims with micro expressions. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh, I just wanted to start shooting people.

Zach: I want, I want ha I actually have been wanting to do an episode on that because Yeah, I mean that and Ec Paul Eckman in general, like the, there’s a lot of, I’ll just say it’s a lot of BS and exaggeration in the Eckman sphere. Yeah. And I have a, I had a recent podcast where we talked about that. I had a interview with Tim Levi, [00:57:00] who’s a deception, uh, researcher.

And we talked about, you know, a lot, a lot of people know that Ekman’s stuff is like, a lot of, it’s not backed up by, by science, but that kind of relates to the importance of the microexpressions, which yeah, I, I still, I would like to do a deep dive on Microexpressions. ’cause there’s a lot, there’s a lot.

Definitely a lot to say there. Yeah, 

Chris: yeah, absolutely. And it, and it ’cause it, because you gotta, you, you have to, you have got to bring in and appreciate cultural language, geographical, um, ethnic, you know, there, there, there’s so many foundational things that make us who we are and influence how we act and how we see the world.

And you know, one of the things that was most illuminating to me, uh, along, uh, uh, in the path of learning that for myself was learning how multilingual people, um, just to throw this out there as a, as a, as a almost random fact, but it’s so interesting is how [00:58:00] multilingual people actually switch how they think.

When they switch from one language to another. Mm-hmm. It’s not just a matter of saying, of translating the words in your head and then saying them, you actually switch into a different way of thinking. You talk to somebody who’s multilingual and they’ll, they’ll, you can talk about this with them. They’ll, they’ll tell you about it.

You know, uh, I, I, and I first ran into this with bilingual, trilingual people from, you know, Germany or France or, or, uh, Belgium and, and, and ended up having very deep conversations about this. Not just once I, I’ve talked, I’ve talked to a number of people about this because I found it so interesting. Like, what do you mean you think differently?

And they go, oh yeah, no, you, you, you, you’re, you’re, it’s almost like you have to bring in a whole different value system. Not just words, but all these other concepts and ideas and, and significances come into play when you’re switching the language mode. And [00:59:00] I was like, really? And they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it, and it, and it really, I was talking to a Canadian who, you know, who speaks Canadian, French Canadian, and he was like, yeah, yeah. It’s hard for me to translate this over into English. ’cause it’s not just words, it’s these other things. Right. You know, and the structure of the language. Yeah. 

Zach: Yeah. And which actually that’s a, that NLP, uh, I think they, they talked a lot about the structure of the language, which, you know, they Yeah.

Just to say, yeah. There, there’s some, there’s some good ideas in the NLP. Uh, yeah, exactly. 

Chris: And, and you, and you talking about how, you know, paying attention to people’s language really tells you a lot more about who you’re talking to. I could not agree more because, but only if you are paying attention to it from the point of view.

As far as I’m as, as my, my take on it is it tells, it informs you how they see things, right. In how they tell you about stuff. 

Zach: Yeah. It’s no more, it’s no more mysterious than like Yeah. They’re, they’re, you’re getting a glimpse of the review [01:00:00] of the world. Right. It’s just communication. It’s just communication at the end of the day.

Yeah. And, and, and there can be exaggerated claims about what you can get from that, and there can be legitimate claims about what you might get from that. But yeah, by and large people are hard to read, I think, and, and, and I would say hard to influence unless they’re like. You know, in certain moments when they’re vulnerable or if they’re emotionally vulnerable.

Right. Like a lot of the, a lot, a lot of the like cult and influence type stuff is like mainly relying on people that might be quite emotionally vulnerable. So it doesn’t actually take that much to influence some people, right? 

Chris: That’s right, that’s right. Well, that’s what cult recruitment is all about, is if they are not in a vulnerable state, getting them into a vulnerable state, they, they can actually be pushed there.

Right? They don’t just walk into the, you know, the Church of Scientology or you know, the, uh, the, you know, the forum workshop and are already like all torn up inside. Right. You can push ’em there. And that’s what that, for example, in Scientology, that’s what that personality [01:01:00] test is designed to do. It confuses you a little bit.

It, it, it, it gets you all stirred up on a bunch of stuff that is really kind of innocuous, weird questions, but they’re not. It, it, it stirs stuff up. And then, and then in that, in that kind of, not necessarily agitated, it’s not even at that level, it’s just, it’s just stirs some things up. 

Zach: It’s, it’s like, it’s like the equivalent of staring in each other’s eyes, but like just a different, different form.

Yeah, 

Chris: that’s right. It’s just a little bit of confusion, a little bit of like, why am I answering these questions? What is this? And then you sit down with somebody who’s now presented to you as an authority figure, and I’m gonna sit here and tell you about your scientific test. That’s all graphed out here, and you are gonna tell me all about yourself.

And now we’re doing a warm reading rather than a full on cold reading like they do with, you know, when you walk into a psychic or something, you get in a cold reading here, it’s warm because you are feeding information to the test evaluator and well, and they’re, and they have a very specific set of goals in mind for that conversation.

[01:02:00] And, and, uh, getting you signed up is always at the end of it. 

Zach: Oh, quick, quick, quick aside. You might find it. Yeah, it’s interesting. Like back in, uh, it was probably like 2006, I was in Vancouver, BC. I think it was when I went to a Scientology place and just did a test for fun. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I wasn’t, I, I was just doing it for fun.

I wanted to get the, the experience and then like 15 years later, my parents, they, I, I don’t remember even giving them my information. I don’t think I would’ve written it down. But then like 15 years later, my parents got something from the Church of Scientology addressed to me, and I was like, I don’t, yeah.

So just to say, yeah, they, they keep track of people. Yeah. 

Chris: Oh, they never, uh, let me say this again to the audience out there in case it’s the first time you’re at my channel. Never give Scientology your personal contact information because they will skip, trace you for the rest of your life. They will follow you no matter where you go and send you information and mailings and keep up with that.

It, they, they [01:03:00] got nothing else to do all day. I, I tell you. Uh, it’s wild. Yeah. Never give them your address. I, I don’t know any other organization that is as dedicated to tracking and sending you mailings as the Church of Scientology. 

Zach: Very passionate. 

Chris: Very passionate. Yeah. So, um, okay. Now let’s get back to the, 

Zach: so sorry to dis sorry to distract you.

Chris: No, no, no, no. You’re, you’re, you’re awesome. I’m the one who, who gets all derailed all the time. Um, okay. What else could we say about this? Yeah, I’m calling it, you know, sort of there, there’s an entrepreneurship of influence. I mentioned in the intro there’s, you know, there’s this sort of dark psychology space that is sort of created.

I see it just sort, sort of graphically as, as if you have this kind of, you know, the ecosphere of the internet podcast world or the pod world, uh, or the influencer world, you have different areas or sections of this. And Rogan, of course, is, is a huge [01:04:00] influence in this space, just through sheer numbers and, and, and around him, he’s created this thing that we sort of call this manosphere, right?

And, and, and, and the dark areas of this manosphere involve, you know, the, the, the, the, the men for equal rights people, right? The men’s rights movement, the incel folks. And then you get these influence folks, these people who are, oh yeah, we’re gonna sell you the tricks to not having to be the victim of society and women and your job and women and you know, and your life and women.

And you know, it’s always all about, you know, being victimized by women, right? So, so there’s this whole little space there, and then there’s these people who are grifting on that space. That’s how I see it. That’s how I kind of model it in my head is like, there’s this sphere or section or slice of the internet where these guys kind of live.

How do you see it or how do you think about it? Is that. 

Zach: Yeah. Um, [01:05:00] I think it’s, uh, I mean, it’s hard for me to break it down exactly that clean, but I know, I know you’re just speaking generally too, but Yeah, 

Chris: I 

Zach: think, I think what happens is because I’ve, I’ve done a good amount of work on political polarization too.

Mm-hmm. Um, and the thing that strikes me is there, there is this, you know, for Joe Rogan in this kind of sphere of things, it’s kind of like they’re attracted to anything that’s kind of like anti, you know, liberal mainstream associated, right? Yeah. So it’s like you, even, even cha like if you had somebody that just questioned some major thing that, you know, was some liberal, uh, view associated mainstream thing, they would get invited on the show because it’s attractive to kind of like knock holes in this, uh, the liberal mainstream, you know, uh, network of ideas.

And I, and I see Chase playing, you know, that this is an aspect to Chase Hughes and, and some other people where. Uh, you know, he, one of the things he does is spreads [01:06:00] these ideas that, like the government is running these complex PSYOPs on people. Like he spread these completely nonsense ideas and he, he uses his fake, you know, his fake, uh, military intelligence.

The, the idea that he, uh, the, the perception or the, the implication that he was involved in military intelligence, he helps sell these really paranoid conspiracy theories about like, Hey, I think the government’s doing these, these wacky wild things and, you know, playing psychological games on the public.

Uh, so that’s part of it too, because Joe Rogan’s kind of tied, and, and I don’t, at that level, I don’t even see it necessarily as, um, you know, political related because there is this love of like conspiracy theories in general. You know, conspiracy theories are popular on the right and the left, just different, can be different kinds.

And, you know, regardless of who we think is worse, it’s just a very popular thing. And so you have, Joe Rogan especially, is drawn to these like more conspiracy minded [01:07:00] things like coverups and, you know, that’s one of the reasons he wanted to talk to, uh, chase Hughes. ’cause Chase Hughes did a video. They got really popular about the New Jersey drones being, uh, government PSYOPs, military PSYOPs.

Oh, did he? Yeah. It was just completely nonsense. I made a, I made a video. Of 

Chris: course he did. Yeah, 

Zach: of course. Because you can’t disprove it. Exactly. That’s the great thing about all these conspiracy theories you can spout off about ’em and no one’s ever gonna disprove you. No. And even if they somehow did, like, there’d still be, you know, there’s, there’s plenty of room for, for, for doubt.

Even when you, you, your, your worldview is completely disproven. So that’s the great thing about the conspiracy theories. Right. And Joe Rogan loves a lot of these weird, you know, magical thinking, conspiracy theories, you know? Um, so I think that, you know, the, the, there is this, like, the thing I see too is like political polarization has resulted in a lot of people just viewing it, viewing the act of debunking or skepticism itself as a liberal associated thing, right?

Like, I think that’s a, that’s something I haven’t really seen discussed, [01:08:00] but I’ve experienced this personally when I go into something that’s completely not political related, like, you know, debunking Chase Hughes, for example, examining his lies and exaggerations. I’ve seen people respond as if I’m talking about political things, which I think is a clue to how many people are like, oh, you’re trying to cancel him.

That’s a liberal thing, right? So even the act of criticism itself has become, for some people politically polarized. Yeah. Which, which for, for a lot of people means that their doors are more wide open to absurd beliefs because they, they, they’ve gotten to the point where people trying to tell them that they’re being, you know, lied to.

By somebody with a long history of lies. Like even that in out of a political context, they now associate with political, you know, views. Right? So I think that helps us ex explain why people in like Joe Rogan’s listenership are, they have their minds wide open to absorb a lot of wacky and ridiculous ideas [01:09:00] because the, the methods for, for, uh, adequately debunking them, those people are getting them to be skeptical of them are now themselves in doubt.

So you’ve just, you know, and that’s not to say like, I, I I think we’ve all, you know, many people can behave in team-based ways for their team and such and, and be be more open to ideas than they should be. But I do think like people like Rogan and people in that sphere have really helped, you know, amplify that.

Because like, why wouldn’t Joe Rogan have vetted Chase Hughes? Why didn’t he care that he had this long string of like, easily disprovable claims about his expertise and his unethical, his various unethical behaviors. It’s like to, at some level, Joe Rogan himself thinks like that, like debunking people is like, you know, maybe we gotta give everybody a, a fair listen to.

Right? That’s kind of like a lot of people’s ideas, like, just hear ’em out. It’s like, well, why do you wanna listen to somebody, somebody who’s has a long rep sheet of. Telling obvious lies and exaggerations about [01:10:00] themselves. Like there’s plenty of people to listen to. I’m all, I’m all for being open-minded, but there’s risks and bad things that come when you’re just give everybody a platform.

Right. So That’s right. But yeah, I think that, I think that helps explain why some people are just like, no, you’re trying to cancel him. Canceling is bad. Uh, you know, 

Chris: so, no, you’re, you’re making a great point. You’re so spot on with that. There’s a, there’s a tradition that has actually developed in the United States specifically around the feeding of disinformation to a hungry public.

And it goes back to the eighties with the, uh, the creation of CNN, the 24 hour news cycle and Oprah Winfrey. Um, who, you know, there was the talk show format, the daily talk show format and you know, and I can’t speak to the seventies because the seventies had talk shows and variety shows, but infor, but they became more informational in format in the eighties.

And, you know, [01:11:00] Donahue flips over into Oprah, you know, and she comes out of this tradition and then she platforms people. Just like everything you just said about Joe Rogan applies completely to Oprah, uh, when she platforms Dr. Oz and, you know, Mr. Phil and these other people. Right. I don’t even call him Dr.

Phil. ’cause fuck that guy. And, and Dr. Phil had on chase and promoted him, and of course, exactly right. It’s the continuation of this. Yeah. You know, this ecosphere survives because these grifters grift on each other. Yeah. And feed each other. And, and the, and the lack of, see, for them in their world, the, the lack of vetting is a feature, not a bug, because it allows them to bring in exactly as you described.

Whoa. Let’s just hear him out. Let’s just hear what he has to say. Well, when you’re presenting that information as an irresponsible educator, um, whi, which I use the term very loosely, but it applies when you, when you’re an [01:12:00] irresponsible educator or you have no real moral foundations on whether objective truth is important or not, then you foist that off on millions of people who are not bringing their critical thinking skills.

And you are Oprah or Rogan, who by the sheer fact of having a big audience has created authority for yourself, you are biasing a bunch of people to accept bullshit. You’re not just giving it a fair shake, you are feeding it to people Yeah. With your authority. And this is where Oprah really has so much to answer for and so does Rogan.

Yeah. You know, because of the irresponsibility of their, of their position. 

Zach: Yeah. Um, and I think to so much of this just depends on people that are hungry for content too. It’s like they’re desperate to fill the empty airwaves. Right. So they’re like. How can I continue to get clicks? I have to keep bringing on some kind of sensational people [01:13:00] to keep my audience up and get the clicks going, oh, this, this guy talks about brainwashing and military PSYOPs.

I’ll bring him on it. Who cares if it’s a little, uh, you know, sketchy And maybe he is been debunked. He’s still, you know, let’s hear him out. Maybe he is got some, you know, he’s got some interesting ideas to listen to and, you know, and I’ll get a lot of clicks out of it at the same time. So. 

Chris: Exactly. And before it was clicks, it was Nielsen ratings and views and ad.

It’s all about those advertiser money. Um, it’s sad that we live in a consumer driven world where this is how content is determined. ’cause it’s entirely possible that, you know, and, and of course many, many times to give a fair shake. Oprah and Rogan have brought on completely legitimate people and had very interesting conversations with them and shared all kinds of stuff.

But as you mentioned, you know, controversy is what really sells and, and impacts on people. This, this is not new thinking. I understand, but it’s just part of the conversation. So I kind of have to put [01:14:00] it there. Not to mention I get so jacked about. 

Zach: Yeah, no, it’s just a new, it’s new, it’s new format. It’s new media.

Yeah, it’s, 

Chris: that’s right. 

Zach: And so much media, that’s the thing. It’s, there’s just so much content now. Yeah, 

Chris: that’s right. There were two other things I wanted to, to, to throw your way here, um, that I thought you might have interesting takes on. First is, I think. That there is something that we sort of, um, we talk about reasons and motivations for people accepting pseudoscience and nonsense and running with it.

And they’re all legit, right? You know, the, the, the, the attention economy, give it to me now. Short attention span theater. I, I have these problems. I don’t have a lot of time to research. So, you know, so give it to me quick and hopefully that will, you know, turn my life around or gimme some tools or whatever.

And, and if it’s NLP, great. If it’s Scientology, great, whatever it is, I don’t care. I just want it to work. And so we understand why people [01:15:00] would feed into that. But there’s another thing going on, which you mentioned with the divisiveness, and that is an underlying sentiment of massive levels of distrust in our institutions.

Um, and this has been a generational evolution. I think, uh, and I look at it strictly through an American lens that we, I think the same could be applied. Uh, I think the same, you know, template could be applied to Britain or to Europe, or to China or to any other country. Australia, certainly where the governments let them down.

Over and over and over again. Political figures have taken too much advantage. There have been scandals, there have been this, there’s been that, there have been systemic injustices that have been talked about. Um, you know, this, this whole woke thing is literally comes out of the recognition of [01:16:00] systemic injustice.

That’s where it comes from. And, and the idea that that’s not a true thing is ludicrous to any serious person. But the whole anti woke thing, you know, you bring the culture wars into this to try to fight it, but really what we’re talking about is distrust. And when people distrust educational institutions, academic institutions, government institutions, they go alt, they go looking for answers somewhere else that they can trust.

Mm-hmm. And this grift and this whole grift community, I think exists because of that distrust. What do you think about that? 

Zach: Yeah. Well, um, yeah, and I, and, and I to, not to, uh, promote my book, but if people are interested in what I write about polarization, you can look at my website, american anger.com, because I, yeah.

Distrust and I would say contempt for each other. You know, there’s, I, I, I think there’s a lot of real things to be upset about in society. Yep. And there’s also [01:17:00] just a natural dynamic that happens where, you know, polarization, toxic conflict makes people, you know, hate the other side more than they should, and they.

Not just hate them, but also become more afraid of them, become more pessimistic about what they are doing, you know? Yeah. So I think there’s all these levels of like, yes, there and there, and there’s many real things to build grievances on, because it’s very easy to build all sorts of narratives depending on what you focus on, right?

Like you can build all sorts of narratives. So we, we, we go through this toxic conflict thing where we’re building more and more pessimistic views of each other, which makes us more scared, more, uh, more angry, more contemptuous. We filter everything through those new views, and we find more evidence for our existing contempt and anger.

Uh, so yeah, I, I do think there’s this process by which there’s a fracturing, you know, that happens to any highly polarized nation where there comes to be like two, two, you know, institutions or systems of like, content and, um, [01:18:00] even like, you know, school schools or content creation or schools of thought or, uh, media, you know, obviously media.

But, um, yeah, I do think that the, the fracturing and the, and the distrust and the contempt all lead to, you know, WW when you’re, when you’re more polarized or, or when you’re more angry and, uh, you know, polarized in the sense of political narratives in general, like leaving aside, you know, which side is worse or these kinds of things, that it just becomes more easy when you’re, when you’re in a highly emotional state, you’re concerned, you’re, you’re angry, you’re, you’re scared.

It becomes easier to consume things that. Tie into that angry narrative and lead you down the rabbit hole of getting even angrier and more scared. So I think there’s all these things that work at, at work that relate to these channels of dumb, basically dumb content. Right. And yeah. Um, we’ve been focusing on specific ones, but I think there’s, there’s channels of like, you know, far left [01:19:00] thought I’ll call it, or, you know, liberal associated thought where people can behave in very emotional and, and team-based ways too.

Absolutely. So I think, you know, and regardless of which side, you know, any viewer perceives as at worse, as worse, I think it’s important to see like the human element of that where like emotions lead us to be more, uh, more dumb in, in, in, in some sense, you know, in, in a basic sense of the word to, to go down these rabbit holes where we go through confirmation bias of various sorts and we, we seek out things that align with our, our views, you know?

So, yeah, 

Chris: I don’t know. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, which side is, uh, is always worse. The, the other side. That’s right. That’s right. It’s a hundred percent true. A hundred percent of the time. 

Zach: Yeah. I like to speak very carefully because I, I, I’ve, I’ve written these polarization books and trying to convince every one of the importance of the idea.

So I always like to try to work in, you know, depolarized uh, framings of the problem. Right. So 

Chris: abs and I [01:20:00] appreciate that because I, I want to do the exact same thing. I brought up the, the woke thing as, as an example of where it came from. But believe me when I tell you that, you know, during summer 2020, I was quite irate with the left and a lot of the nonsense going on.

Uh, I was in 

Zach: Portland, so I Yeah. Oh, you 

Chris: were in Portland. Oh, 

Zach: man. Yeah. So I, I lived there at the time, so I Whoa. Yeah. Had a bird’s eye or a close view of things. Yeah. It made me understand, it made me, it gave me a better sense of what conservatives were angry about for one thing. That’s right. 

Chris: That’s right.

I think that distrust thing is something that’s generational. I, I think it’s been around long enough and I, and I, and specifically since, uh, since we have brought up the m the, the, the, um, you know, government conspiracies and stuff that I think it’s worth commenting on this separately, uh, or, or in a little bit more detail, which is that people have.

Very good reasons to have this [01:21:00] distrust. I, I don’t want to paint a picture here that there’s all these delusional people and if they would just put their faith back in the institutions, everything would be great. I really don’t want to paint with such a simplistic brush. And so I want, so I, so I have to use my words here and say, let’s be clear that, you know, from the sixties forward, fifties forward, if we go back to McCarthyism, we have tons of reasons, a laundry list of reasons to, to validly and openly distrust our government.

Mm-hmm. From McCarthyism to, you know, the JFK assassinations to the Martin Luther King investigations and what the FBI was getting up to fighting the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties. The FBI was a fucking little terrorist organization during the sixties when it came to fighting the civil rights movement, let’s just call it what it was.

The j Edgar Hoover was a, was a nut, and he ran this little terrorist group with federal funding and it was horrible. What they, what, what happened [01:22:00] then? The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The, the cultural revolution, the STA nation 

Zach: MK Ultra stuff, wacky and, and that, 

Chris: and then that, then MK Ultra gets revealed, and that’s of course a hundred percent in my world.

And MK Ultra is a horror show of Civil liberty violations and human rights violations perpetuated. On American soil by an institution, the CIA, that has no mandate to operate in America in any way, shape or form. And yet we’re doing human experimentations on unwitting citizens, uh, in lots of places, in lots of ways.

So many ways we don’t even know because they literally destroyed all the records, rather than fess up to the congressional investigations that revealed all of this. The only reason we know what happened in MK Ultra is ’cause they literally kept the receipts. It’s the invoices and receipts that we have [01:23:00] that tell us what they did.

That’s all we got. Mm-hmm. And that is so scary. And the reveals of it were so scary. And then we have, you know, PS op, um, SI investigations actually carried out. They really did it. They really looked into whether remote viewing was a thing. They, they, they, they experimented on some Scientologists, but they had their, you know, the Ingo Swan, they had his cooperation.

My point is that society has had some points of degradation and the government hasn’t been there. I mean, Nixon, Vietnam, I mean, holy cow, right? All these things. Then the government deregulation in the eighties, neoliberal economic policies, creating wealth inequality. There’s a lot of reasons for that distrust to exist that are 100% valid, right.

Yeah. So that I believe, is what feeds the validity of that. The fact that you can’t argue with those events [01:24:00] feeds the idea, well, shit, if the CIA is willing to engage in human experimentation on American citizens, on American soil, well then surely they might develop mind control techniques using Scientology.

Right, right. You know, it’s like, 

Zach: there, there’s a bad leap of logic there where it’s like, it’s like, I, I see that a lot. We’re, we’re out, we’re, I’ll talk about something and they’re like, we, well, this other thing happens, so like this is plausible. I’m like, sure, theoretically it’s plausible, but what evidence do you have?

Like, I, there’s many things that are plausible, but 

Chris: That’s 

Zach: right. And I do think it’s important. Yeah. It’s like, it’s important to recognize two things can be true. Like there’s many reasons to have, you know, to view the government or, or, or, or to come up with any. Narrative about any human endeavor that’s very negative.

’cause like any human endeavor is, uh, in general, are filled with all sorts of horrible things, right? So it’s very easy to be pessimistic and, uh, [01:25:00] distrustful of all sorts of things, I think. But then you have to recognize too, like, it’s also possible to be like way too pessimistic and distrustful where you’re not, you know, you’re, you’re leaping to conclusions that don’t have, you know, good validity to them.

And I think, I think, I think it’s important, but that’s a very hard line to thread where you can acknowledge both things and see that like, you know, sometimes we’ll be led down. Overly pessimistic and dark things, especially when it comes to like a perceived enemy. Like them, they’re this, this, this shadowy group is behind something, right?

It’s, it’s all, it’s all them. The, these evil people, right? That I think that’s where you get led down these, these very bad, uh. Paths that are, that are dangerous and even self-destructive. Yeah, 

Chris: absolutely. And I, I really, really believe that while we can talk about logical fallacies and good critical thinking and even emotional intelligence and the individual factors that drive people, if we don’t acknowledge that these truths are out there, that, that the government has done horrible things that has, [01:26:00] that has created a massive level of distrust in the citizenry, and they have good reason to be looking for the truth.

And there are things people want to believe, as we’ve talked about, you know, simple answers to complex questions like human behavior or how can I hire the right person at my job? Or how do I negotiate this deal? These are complicated processes and people want the cheat code, they want to get right to the hack and get right to the thing, right?

Mm-hmm. And, and this is where these grifters really find their sweet spot, is in these gray areas where things are a little nebulous, things are a little, well, it’s, it’s a little wishy washy. You have plausible, you know, it’s plausible. It’s pla I mean it’s plausible. The CIA took Hubbard’s material and put it in their interrogation manual.

It, it’s not really, but not until you know all the facts. It, does it become implausible? Right. Right. It’s 

Zach: possible and then 

Chris: possible. Yeah, that’s right. And so [01:27:00] people writing on that. Yeah, that’s right. But I believe it’s that, I believe that that sentiment of distrust is so built in and so strong in our nation now, that it has been the thing that has kind of emotionally opened the door to that to create that gray area that these guys live in.

Yeah. And if it wasn’t that, it would be something else. I mean, if, you know, it’s not like. Con men are not always gonna be around, but it’s just worth talking about it. It’s 

Zach: a self re Yeah. I do see a lot of this stuff is like self-reinforcing cycles. You know, it, um, they, all these things are, are, are related.

They, they, they feed into each other. You know, you, you, you, you start to hate the other side more. You’re more paranoid about them. You’re more likely to be believe conspiracy theories, which in turn makes you more angry and scared of them, et cetera, et cetera. That’s right. You know, it’s like, yeah. 

Chris: Yeah.

’cause once you find out the CIA a has done stuff in America, you’re kinda like, well, shit, they’ll just do anything, won’t they? Yeah. You know, and, and I gotta admit, I I, I got [01:28:00] big chips on my shoulder about that ’cause you know? Yeah, 

Zach: yeah. There’s, like you say, it’s, it’s important to be able to recognize horrible things have happened and then also still try to demand, um, high, high, high bar for believing uh, things currently.

Right? 

Chris: That’s right. Um, 

Zach: yeah, 

Chris: it’s a tough one. It’s a tough one. 

Zach: It’s the, and you, the Epstein stuff definitely didn’t, didn’t, that’s not, that’s not helping any, uh, conspiracy thinking, you know? 

Chris: Not at all. Because, ’cause you understand. And it was actually really quite something for me, even myself, to hit up against that.

’cause of course, I, I, I know the entire history of QAN and, and the four chan roots of it and all of that stuff. And yet, and you go, yeah, that’s all, you know, kids making up stories and it’s nonsense and it’s this and it’s that. But then you realize, no, wait a minute, there there is a stray of pedophiles.

You know, there is something going on here. Yeah. But is it this, you know, government wide thing? Of course. Right? That’s the it’s not, [01:29:00] come on. Yeah. I don’t, 

Zach: that’s a, that’s a perfect example of where people will be like, something bad is going on here. And I’ll use that as a reason to believe like the whole smorgasbord of bad stuff, right?

Chris: That’s right. That’s right. And before they know it, they’re down the flat earth rabbit hole. I mean it, you know, and, and, and at the end of the day, it’s all Lucifer. So, um, which is fascinating, by the way, on Flat Earth. That’s where it all goes to with Satan’s. 

Zach: Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah. Yeah. 

Chris: It’s, it’s 90%, but about 95% religiously driven.

Zach: Oh, geez. I didn’t even know that. 

Chris: Yeah. Speaking of, um, there was another thing I wanted to bring up that I thought, I almost fell out of my chair when I learned this, and so I had to bring this up with you or to you. Um, chase Hughes suffers from temporal lobe epilepsy.

Um, do you want me to comment on that? Well, the reason I bring it up. Is very specific. And, and I don’t know that you’re gonna be familiar with this, which I think you’re gonna love hearing this. Okay. So temporal lobe epilepsy is the [01:30:00] most common form of epilepsy that’s out there. It’s a complicated subject.

And I am not a medical professional. So I am not commenting on this to say with certainty that this is what’s going on with Chase. But he has admitted openly and made videos and in fact, drifted off the fact that he is got TLE, you know, this brain damage and he makes this whole video and is selling this, you know, some kind of blue supplement or something, um, blue.

Yeah. Which really kind of just, of course he did. But here’s the thing about TLE that I think you might, uh, uh, that I don’t know if you know, we, I’ve done two podcasts in the past with, uh, uh, with a man, Dr. Yuval, who has forwarded a theory that El Ron Hubbard suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. Hmm. And in fact, it is a, it is a growing.

Thought in the, in, in certain people in the ex cult space, myself, John Atac, um, Yuval and others that TLE, [01:31:00] uh, and epilepsy has for a long, long, long time, way preceding my lifetime, been called the religious disease. There’s a, there’s a religious component of extreme religious belief that tends to accompany certain forms or instances of epilepsy.

And El Ron Hubbard certainly had religious megalomania. Mm-hmm. Uh, as part of his feature set. But there’s a sub thing I wanted to talk to you about, which I didn’t know if you knew about, connected to TLE, which is called Gwan Syndrome. And it’s a group of behavioral phenomena evident in some people with TLE.

Not everybody who has TLE has suffers Gwan syndrome, but it’s an interesting thing to look at when looking for motivation or why would these guys be acting the way they’re acting? Um, because it didn it, it got Gwin [01:32:00] syndrome brings a certain phenomenon in the play that are just interesting. You just go, really?

That could be why he’s that way. Hmm. And it doesn’t justify any. Con it doesn’t make it okay. Right. It’s just interesting. Geen Syndrome brings about certain phenomena, five primary changes. Hypergraphia, which is writing a lot, like a lot, a lot. You, you, you express yourself in a lot of words. Uh, you write a lot.

El Ron Hubbard is one of the most prolific authors to have ever lived. Hypergraph is, is what we call that. I almost fell out of my chair when I downloaded Chase’s ellipsis manual and saw that it was 1400 pages long. I was like, holy shit man. I, I knew you had this book put together, but [01:33:00] Jesus, that’s a big book.

That’s Madam Watsky style writing. That’s huge. That’s El Ron Hubbard style writing. That’s hypergraphia. I went, huh. Right. So when I’m learning as TLE and I see that and I go, oh, that’s interesting. And there’s another aspect of it, which I wanted to ask you about in your deep dives on Chase Hyper religiosity.

Hmm. Some individuals may exhibit hyper religiosity that doesn’t have to be there. But I’m wondering if it is characterized by increased, usually intense religious feelings and philosophical interests and partial epilepsy. Patients experience frequent auras in, uh, and they get these, when they experience a temporal lobe, epilepsy seizure, it doesn’t look like a grand mal seizure.

They’re not flopping around on the ground. They go off [01:34:00] into some other place. It kind of looks like they skipped for a minute or something, but to them they might have gone off to some place and been there for a year. That’s, that’s what he says. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of spiritual or religious experience or a metaphysical, if they’re not religious, they may equate it to a metaphysical kind of experience.

Yeah. I don’t know if Chase has ever discussed anything like that, but it can, it can create extreme atheism as well as extreme religiosity, but it’s, it’s around that area of thinking. There’s grandiose, very exaggerated thinking. Right. 

Zach: Well, yeah, I think he is into that. Like he, he’s doing a lot of, uh, you know, spiritual kind of like, you know, uh, talking about psychedelics and stuff too, uh, talking about spiritual stuff.

But I will say, like I, I haven’t, I haven’t watched a lot of his, you know, content. I, [01:35:00] I, I watch specific things he’s made. I will say too, like the guy has lied so much about so many things. Like, I would have to be shown a respected doctor’s paperwork to believe he has that disease and, you know, got it. He could have that disease.

I’m not saying he does or doesn’t not, I’m just saying when someone has lied about so many things, I, I don’t, uh, and there there’s also is an element of more narcissistic people claiming, uh, thinking, being more, uh, hypochondriac in nature. So, 

Chris: fair enough. 

Zach: I just think, yeah. Yeah. He could, I’m not saying he doesn’t to be clear, uh, you know, uh, I, I’m just saying when somebody has said as many lies as you, as you said, it’s good to take things with a big grain of salt until you can prove it.

Yeah, 

Chris: yeah. Absolutely. Fortunately, you know, he is someone who could get brain scans and we could prove that. Yeah. Uh, I have wondered about Warner Earhart, the, the founder of EST as someone who [01:36:00] may also, you know, suffer from this condition. It’s, once you see it, you start thinking, huh. It’s thought Edgar Gowan Poe may have suffered from this condition.

Certainly John the Baptist is his big, you know, moment on the road, you know, with the light and everything. It’s kinda like, eh, 

Zach: well, maybe, yeah. I mean, it’s possible. Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah. There’s, it certainly is interesting to, to, to have it as a, as a potential explanation for what would cause someone to be this way.

Zach: Yeah. You know? Yeah. It’s, it can be very hard to understand, um, some people’s way of being, because even just on a, you know, even on, just on the level, like, it seems like a very stressful way to live to me. But, uh, you know, that’s a, um, it’s an interesting way, way to, to, to live. And, um, yeah, it’s, it’s very hard for me to understand a lot of people these days.

Chris: It’s [01:37:00] hard. It is hard, and it’s, and it’s hard to get your head around the fact that someone can grift and yet believe in their grift. Yes. You know? Yeah. And yet I’ll put out there that I think my, my, I, I’m thinking, I’m, I, I’m wondering aloud when I say stuff like this is still a forming sort of theory, I guess you could say.

I, if I dare call it that, um. Knowing what I know about my own experience and, and the experience of so many other people in the Church of Scientology and, and other cult, ex cult members that I’ve interviewed over the years, the power of belief and determination to enact those beliefs to make a better world can look so much like narcissism because you’re so determined and you’re so sure you’re right, and you’re, and you’re willing to [01:38:00] adopt and ends justify the means mentality to achieve your goals.

Right. That it can look like a narcissistic, self-centered megalomaniac expression, but you’re really just so much on a crusade, right? You know that from the outside it can look like that. And I’m not, and I’m not, again, this is not an effort on my part to mitigate responsibility. Explain it away. You know, I, I did horrible things when I was in Scientology.

I’m not a narcissist, but I was certainly a determined crusader. 

Zach: Yeah. No, I think that’s an, yeah, no, I think that’s an important distinction. When I interviewed somebody from my podcast about, uh, psychopathy, we got on the topic of how there can be, you know, there, there’s so much simplistic thinking in a lot of these realms where it’s like, yeah, if you’re a true, if you really believe something and you’re a true believer in a crusader, you are gonna act in ways that seem.

You know, that seem or are sociopathic or narcissistic, you know, there can, [01:39:00] there can be many factors involved in bad behavior in general, but yeah, I think there is, there’s too often a tendency to just be like, oh, they’re a narcissist. They’re a sociopath. What? Whatever it is. Yeah, 

Chris: that’s right. And given the different forms of narcissism, I mean, maybe it could be classified as a kind of narcissism.

’cause you do also have benign narcissistic behavior and, you know, there’s various categories and boxes that people are creating for this to try to, and, and at the end of the day, these are just words to try to explain behavior. But yeah, it’s, um, I find it interesting. So I wanted to throw it at you to see what you thought about those things and, and that, that there’s, yeah, that’s interesting.

Yeah. 

Zach: No, I think it’s, yeah, I mean, a big part of my podcast work is examining some things that people approach with two simplistic, you know, a lens and trying to see that there can be many factors at work. And you know, that just because somebody behaves badly doesn’t make them necessarily just, you know, a narcissist or a psychopath or whatever, you know, uh, [01:40:00] see, trying to see the nuance and not just like embracing our simplistic labels because they make us feel good is, I think is, is important and related to what, what we’re talking about too.

Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. What are you, what are your take? And you know, you’ve written books on this now. You’ve certainly have done some wonderful podcast articles, podcasts and articles. Um, you, you really go outta your way to get it all written out too and stuff, which I really appreciate. It’s, it’s really wonderful diving into your stuff.

Zach: I need, I need, I need to really present the Chase Hughes stuff specifically because I got so many people coming to me being like, Hey, you’re just, you’re just angry. You’re just jealous. So I was like, I need to really put this in a really easy to summarize thing, which I don’t think, I still don’t think it could, isn’t the best form, but hopefully I, I think most people read it and thank me, you know, that’s by and not, you know, 90 plus percent of people, uh, know what’s going on when they read, you know, the summary of, of Chase Hughes.

But I still get people being like, that’s just a bunch of things. That’s just a, he [01:41:00] was just doing a fake it till you make it approach. That’s just normal stuff. I’m like, um, if you think that’s normal, like I just, I I I wouldn’t wanna trust you with any business or personal decisions, but, you know, no accounting for ethics.

Uh, 

Chris: no, no, there isn’t. And it’s really, it’s, it’s the, that distrust factor I think really messes with people’s morality and willingness to compromise morality, you know? 

Zach: Yeah. There’s a, there’s a lot of suspending of judgment if, you know, if somebody is per, if you like somebody or, you know, there’s a lot of like.

You know, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt kind of stuff. Yeah, 

Chris: that’s right. Fundamental attribution, error reign, supreme, uh, you know, that, that I’ll, I’ll give myself a pass where I’ll judge others more harshly, kind of, kind of, uh, fallacy, right? It’s, it’s just lives so large in this, in this space.

Do use, beyond what we’ve discussed is, are there other factors at play, do you think [01:42:00] behind the, the, the motivation of people to, to lift up the, these folks like, like Chase Hughes? 

Zach: Um, I’m sure there are, but I feel like we’ve touched on some of the major ones. You know, the 

Chris: basic stuff. Yeah. 

Zach: I think, I think, uh, you know, distrusting or wanting to knock the establishment or, or some, or some disliked, you know, group or system is, is a big part.

And then you’ve got the wanting to get clicks and attention part of it. Um, yeah, I think those are, those are some of the two major ones. Yeah. Yeah. Two of the, two of the major ones for sure. Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah, I think so too. I, I, I, I, I’ll bring, I’ll throw one other thing into the mix and then maybe we can move toward wrapping up.

I, I, I have, I’ve loved having this talk with you today. It’s been really nice. Thank you. Me too. Yeah. Thank you for doing this. Um, I, I, I was impressed by, uh, a podcast I saw when I was doing, uh, you know, the, the thing in Scientology that they have that bypasses a lot of the need for watching people’s eyes and paying attention [01:43:00] to their body language and stuff, is they have this e-meter.

Right. And this thing is famous, right? Or infamous. And it is really just one third of a lie detector. And, and, and that’s it. That’s all it is. It’s just measuring skin resistance. And I’ve done, in doing all the research that I did, and it took me, uh, way longer than it should have. But I, I really wanted to be thorough, um, to debunk it.

I did a whole video debunking this thing, uh, for, you know, that I hope ex Scientologists at least will watch ’cause they’re the most vested in believing that this thing works. Even after they leave Scientology, they still think it works. And there’s the, the, the, the amount of indoctrination in Scientology around this device and the round of mythic lore surrounding it is incredible.

It’s, it, it’s not a minor part of Scientology. So it bypasses the need for a lot of this, you know, more micro expression tuned psychology, right? Because you [01:44:00] just have the meter and the ni and the needle goes and there it is. And, okay, tell me what you just thought of. ’cause you’re clearly got an answer to this question I just asked you.

’cause it reacted, you know, that’s about the simplicity of how it works there. And I watched a, um, CIA, I think it was a CI or FBI, uh, uh, polygraph operator. Talk on a podcast, she’d been retired, now she does it in the business world or whatever. And she spoke much, much, much more intelligently about the efficacy of this device.

The, the, of the, of the polygraph, not the, she wasn’t talking about the meter, but about the polygraph in general and how you would actually use it in the real world versus what you see on Maury Povich or what you see on, you know, TV or whatever. Uh, with the sensationalistic, you know, we put your fiance on a lie detector and guess what?

You know, you’re fucked. That, that’s, that’s that, that’s never good. I guess I’m bringing this up to demonstrate that, [01:45:00] um, she spoke with so much nuance. Mm. Mm-hmm. You, you get a reaction to something all, you know, there’s a reaction. Mm-hmm. You do not know in any way, shape or form as a polygraph operator why it reacted the way that it did.

And to assume you do would be a mistake. Right. And this is a pro level, did it for decades, person doing that work. Right. And that’s where I think we get a recognition that it’s that, that, that we can move past the pseudoscience a little bit when we have somebody able to talk with nuance that way. With like, Hey, look, it’s not, there are no certain answers here.

This is a window. This is an opportunity for me to get this person to talk. Maybe there’s something to expose or maybe they just had, you know, a stomach ache right now, right? I, I don’t know yet. Mm-hmm. But people just want that [01:46:00] No, it certainty lied. You know, like they just want that fast thing. Right?

That’s where the nuance disappears. Yeah. The desire for certainty. 

Zach: Yeah. I think, um, I, I, I, I, long ago, I, years ago I had an idea for a, a, a book that would just be about how the desire for certainty, you know, is like our core human, uh, weakness and problem, you know, because at lead we, we just, the existential, you know, angst and anxiety of living in an uncertain world where, you know, it’s hard to find meaning, and we doubt the meanings of things, and we are always searching for meaning.

It’s like we’re always looking for things that we can grasp onto that are, that are certain that we know, right? And that’s like, I, I, I just think that’s such a base level, like thing that explains so much bad human behavior. You know, malignant, uh, behavior, malicious psych, psychopathic behavior, narcissistic behavior.

It’s like we really crave the certainty [01:47:00] about ourselves in the world. And so we are drawn to these, grasping onto these things that give us some sense of solidity and. We that we’re, you know, maybe that we’re above other people or that we know better than other people, or that we have the secret that other people don’t, or that we’ve finally latched onto the meaning that will make sense of this crazy world, you know?

So, um, yeah. I do think so much of that comes down to like, we really, we really wanna know things because it is comforting to know things. Yeah, 

Chris: yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Well, after you’ve, after all the stuff you’ve read and studied at this, ’cause you’ve done deep dives just like I have on this stuff for years now.

What’s, what’s your basic takeaway about people reading, if you were going to sort of summarize it or put it into some easy to understand principles? 

Zach: Well, I think, uh, hard to sum up, but I, I think, uh, like I said, the, I think the verbal stuff is so much more, uh, verbal statements, you know, statement [01:48:00] analysis is so much more important than, uh, and meaningful and reliable than, than, uh, studying, uh, nonverbal, you know, body language.

Um, I do think there are things you can pick out. I mean, I, I think the, one of my big things which I have been meaning to make a podcast about is the difference between more formal environments like games and sports and, you know, more open-ended things like real world situations like interrogations or interviews or, you know, that when you get into situations where there’s a more formal thing going on where.

Say, there’s a very clear dynamic where like, you wanna win this poker hand and there’s certain things you must do in the poker hand in the context of that poker hand. And there’s certain feelings that often arise that are very polarized, right? It’s like you’re either you, you know, you’re bluffing or you know you’re gonna win often, you know, um, or near certainly know you’re gonna win.

Uh, so there, there’s very polarized ranges of emotion that, and, and you’re, and you’re doing a very specific [01:49:00] activity that, that does not map over at all to like an interrogation or an interview or real world scenarios where you could be having a range of different motivations, a range of different emotions, and you’re not nearly in this polarized state where you’re like bluffing or not bluffing.

So it’s just to say the, the context matters a lot for these kinds of things, and that’s helps explain why. You know, I wrote books about poker tells, and I believe you can find a lot of information there. And yet I’m extremely skeptical about people that claim you can get all this information out of real world situations, right?

So the context, I think, and, and the environment is very important for figuring out if you can deduce, um, reliable or uh, reliable information from behavior of, of whatever sort. So I think that’s very important. And you know, a lot of people are confused by that. They’re like, oh, you wrote books on poker tells you have to be into all this other stuff that people are, you know, uh, claiming you can get from stuff.

I’m like, no. Like in most real world situations, I [01:50:00] find it very hard to know what people are, are thinking or what their goals are, other than like, a lot of, there’s a lot of obvious stuff that goes on, right? Like, you know, in poker, in any game, just as in the real world, sometimes there’s very bad players, right?

Like, you can, you can sometimes get a sense like watching the interrogation. You can tell, you know, like somebody’s like a very unskilled criminal and they’re giving a lot of information away by how they act or, you know, how they behave or how they speak. Uh, you’re like, this guy’s clearly guilty. Like, there’s clearly like unskilled and skilled practitioners.

But when it comes to like most real world scenarios, it’s very hard to get reliable information about what somebody’s thinking because people are just good at deceiving you, right? They’re, they’re good at, they’re, most people are pretty good at distracting you from what they don’t wanna tell you. Or, uh, you know, most people are pretty good at acting nonchalant when they’re actually nervous.

You know, Mo most people are pretty good at these things. So to, to think that you could easily get, you know, reliable information, like clear cut information about like, [01:51:00] what somebody’s telling you in a interview, uh, or, you know, a political speech or whatever it may be. It’s, it’s quite hard. Uh, you know, o other than the, the, but that is to say that there’s still a lot of information you can get, but most of it’s in like the words that people use, right?

Like a politician is asked a question and they deflect from it and they clearly don’t want to answer it. Why? Why don’t they want to answer? That could be for many reasons, right? We don’t know if it’s because they’re have something to hide or they’re uncomfortable, they wanna talk about something else.

But a lot of the things that we can deduce are like quite surface level things that a lot of people just deduce every day about other people, right? So a, a lot of the most meaningful stuff is just like due to critical thinking about like, what is this person trying to do? And like to delve into all this, like, wishy-washy body language stuff is like missing the abundance of information we have about people.

That’s right there. On the surface that we could be like, well, why didn’t he answer that question when he was asked? Or, or why did he use this language to de why did he use this [01:52:00] ambiguous language to describe something when he could have u used more specific language? Or why did he not directly deny his involvement?

Why did he use ambiguous language to, to, to, to deny it? There’s all this stuff that we could be actually using our intellect to examine that’s much more reliable than, uh, you know, where somebody was looking when they spoke or if they looked a little nervous, you know, like who I, I’m nervous most of the time.

I would get, you know, I get interviewed in any, any situation, like, what does it, what does it mean, you know? Uh, so yeah, that’s kind of my rough summary. 

Chris: Yeah. That actually brings to mind one other thing, um, which was, I’m a little disturbed by this, and maybe you can comment on it more than, more than I know about the proclivity or the, the sort of.

The fact that not only are corporate negotiators or recruiters getting involved in this stuff, but so is law enforcement and has been for quite some time [01:53:00] looking for ways to read people, to understand people, to get answers outta people. I think there are very few people in this world more motivated to try to learn all the hacks and shortcuts to the human mind than law enforcement.

And I’m talking about police, I’m talking about, you know, FBI, all of it, right? And we hear endless stories about behavioral analysis and behavior profiling. Um, which the FBI was incredibly reluctant to get into back in the day because, you know, uh, just, you know, uh, assuming people were evil and the criminal mind as J Edgar Hoover likes to talk about, uh, was a very popular meme back before behavioral analysis and understanding people became a thing.

Um, so now they are readily adopting. Chase you stuff, you know, like they’ll, they’ll go to these seminars and, and workshops and learn this stuff too. What am I, right? Am I off base with this? Uh, this is my [01:54:00] understanding of what’s going on. 

Zach: Well, uh, I don’t really, I think it’s hard to say like, how many people are into this stuff, right?

Like 

Chris: mm-hmm. 

Zach: Because it’s not clear to me like how many people are paying Chase Hughes for his guidance, right? Like, okay. Um, so I think it’s important to, you know, keep in mind that it’s hard to say who’s using this really. Uh, I think one time Chase said, chase said recently, he, he was asked that question about who comes to his, you know, who, who gets his one-on-one training or, or, or in-person training kind of stuff.

And he said something like, I think it was like business people and, uh, therapists or something. It, it, I don’t, I’m, I’m not even sure he mentioned, uh, law enforcement or anything like that. Oh, I thought he had, 

Chris: maybe I’m misread. 

Zach: I mean, he, he, he definitely mentions, he definitely says that they use him.

Mm-hmm. He definitely says that. But when he was asked specifically about who comes to his trainings kind of question. 

Chris: Mm. 

Zach: So it just made me think like, [01:55:00] mm, there’s a, there’s a doubt about who, who exactly is coming and how many of them, right? Like, we don’t have in, we don’t have insight into, into that really.

Uh, but to your point, you know, I do think, uh, law enforcement has become. You know, in, in the sense that they’ve, they’ve had a lot of, there’s been a lot of negative articles about them using, you know, uh, debunked or un untrustworthy process behavior, right. Reading processes. The, so they, some, some departments have faced, uh, pushback for using these kind of like wishy-washy behavior reading, uh, processes.

So I think there, on the plus side, I think there, there can be at least for the, like more, you know, established, reputable kind of places. There’s more, I think there’s more cognizance of like, we, we don’t want to get bad press by like embracing some training. I do, I do think it more often happens that individuals are, are going off and getting the training on their own, right.

Because they’ve, they, they’ve thought like, oh, this, this could be cool. Um, but yeah, as far as like, I haven’t really [01:56:00] seen, you know, evidence recently of, of, of law enforcement embracing these ideas at like a department kind of level. But I could be wrong. I haven’t, I haven’t delved into it. Um, yeah, 

Chris: yeah, no, I haven’t seen it at the departmental level either.

I’ve just been concerned because all the way, going back to the Satanic panic days, the grifters who were pushing satanic cells and cults exist in every town and they’re, they’re hiding in every barn and don’t, you know. Right. And, and I saw so much media. Of sheriffs and county. Yeah. You know, and state and city level troopers all the way back to then.

And I’m not, yeah. I’m not just drawing, connecting those dots, but from that time forward, I’ve seen these, you know, pseudo psychological methodologies you could say, sort of insinuate themselves in and [01:57:00] out of these law enforcement agencies over the years. For sure. And I’ve always kind of bookmarked it a little bit like, oh, that’s, that’s not right.

That’s not good. 

Zach: Yeah. There’s, there’s plenty of, there’s plenty of, yeah, there’s plenty of evidence and write-ups about departments using the NLP kind of ideas, you know? Yeah. Like the, the eye direction and, and these kinds of things. And also, like, there’s, yeah, there’s other, there’s some other behavioral wishy-washy stuff that’s been covered from time to time.

Uh, but yeah, it, it, I think it, it is a problem. I think, uh, I think, I think it’s, I I definitely cannot say how big a problem it is these days. Uh, but I do think, yeah, it’s, I, I think the other nice thing, uh, positive thing too is, and I’ve covered this a little bit in one of my episodes, where it’s like, I, I think as long as like there’s all sorts of theoretical ideas people can learn, right?

Like that, that have, you know, low to high meaning or, or proof. I, I, I think, I think that’s not, [01:58:00] it’s not necessarily a problem for, for officers. If we’re talking about individual officers to go off and learn this stuff, not department level. I, I, I think it, in practice, it’s not as big a problem as it might be because I think a, in practice how it happens is like they’re just compiling a lot of theoretical ideas and in practice it doesn’t actually play out to be meaningful because they really, they still have to like, get evidence for pursuing someone as a suspect.

So like, if it plays a role at all, it’s, it’s, it’s usually in like these minor things, like, like how often do they have a suspect where they, you know, how often are, are cops pursuing a suspect that they don’t have like actual evidence on? Right. So I, I think it, it usually doesn’t play out where they’re like accusing them based on a body language thing and that like, I know you did it.

You know? I, I don’t think it plays out like that. I, I think it’s more just like for the people that embrace it. It’s like, I think it could play out that way, don’t get me wrong, but I think for a lot of people it’s like they’re, they’re just perusing all [01:59:00] these ideas and then like, it, it actually doesn’t really play a role because most of the people who learn that stuff just know it’s like, could be true, it could be reliable, but they don’t have much, you know, it’s not like they have like high confidence and they’re gonna base like some important police decision on it.

So that’s, that’s just to say like, some things could be bad, but I also think the way it plays out in practice, even, even for people that believe a lot of weird stuff, it doesn’t actually play that bigger role when it comes down to the actual procedures they follow. Yeah, 

Chris: fair enough. Fair enough. Well, I wanted to bring it up as a point because it’s, it’s, it’s in, it’s a series of individuals in our country.

There’s only so many thousands of police officers, and yet those people hold an inordinate amount of power in their hands and literally the power of life and death. And so their split second decisions or how they interpret the world matters in a significant way to all of our general health and wellbeing.

And so this is why when stories of cop abuse come up, they’re so incendiary because [02:00:00] we’ve put so much power in those people and they, they’re the ones who get to walk around openly with guns and we don’t even look twice. Right? 

Zach: Yeah. 

Chris: And, and 

Zach: I, I definitely don’t wanna downplay it. It’s like, like I said before, I think that’s the insidious harm of a lot of this stuff because a lot of people will use it to just.

Basically engage in confirmation bias where they’re like, oh, I saw him look this way now. I know, you know, now I know he’s, he’s guilty. So, I mean, I to say, I, I, I do think that that is a danger for a lot of these wishy-washy ideas of various sorts where they’re, some cops may just be like, oh, now I’m extra certain in my read that they’re guilty.

Right. 

Chris: That exa ’cause that’s gonna make them double down on extracting a forced confession, for example. For sure. 

Zach: Yeah. Or abuse. Yeah. A forced confession. Yeah. Various ways. Yeah. Various ways of a, a abusing someone who shouldn’t be like Yeah. Roughly interrogated or, 

Chris: that’s right. That’s right. 

Zach: But yeah, Uhhuh, it’s, it’s a thing.

I, I just, I just think, um, on the plus side, I think, [02:01:00] I think, uh, it, it may not be, it may not play out as often. There might be a reason you don’t often hear about the behavioral stuff playing a role Yeah. In these things. Yeah. 

Chris: Fair enough. No, no, you’re, and you’re absolutely right. And I, and I don’t wanna overstate the case.

I, I really just wanted to bring the subject up because I have concerns and yes, I’m the first to admit that some of those concerns are, um, from ignorance. And I, and I own that. Um, ’cause I don’t know exactly precisely the training programs of, of all the cops. They, they have lots of them. But when these grifters get into those spaces and they do that, that, I have no question about that.

Yeah. They’re not helping the situation at all. Right. And we, and it’s just something that people don’t think about too much. ’cause we talk almost exclusively about the public, the general public who fall or the vulnerable and emotional, vulnerable public or the senior citizens or the religious extremists.

And we kind of categorize these victims as, you know, sort of in these different [02:02:00] groups that, that are not cops. We, we think of the authority figures as kind of above this and, you know, they would never fall for this and Oh no, they’re just as human and please understand that they definitely fall for it.

Zach: Yeah, for sure. 

Chris: You know? 

Zach: No, they, they definitely, uh, yeah, it would be, it would be good to know. I think the one interesting thing about Chase is like, the one official thing I could find him involved in like a depart at a department level was like some small, like, it was like something to do with some like small naval, uh, legal or law enforcement thing.

But that was like the only thing I could find where somebody had embraced him at some department level. And even then, it wasn’t even clear what he did. It was just like somebody mentioned him as if like he had maybe come to some event. So yeah. Just to say it’s, it’s hard to get an insight into like where these people are getting their, their hooks into various places.

Yeah, 

Chris: that’s right. It comes up in weird, surprising ways. And you, and you’re, and you’re, sometimes you’re really shocked at, at, at where stuff happens. I’m, I, I, I [02:03:00] am I just to, just to put the cherry on top of this and we can wrap it up. Um, there was a, um, there was some movie and, and Adam, uh, driver was in it.

It was about the, um, enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA a or that the military were using at Abu Gabi and Guantanamo and, and various places. And of course, I am rabid against any form of an, of what so-called enhanced interrogation, meaning torture. Um, that, that it is the euphemism. They acknowledge it as such.

This has been as subject to congressional hearings. And in fact, the, the report that some of these congressional, uh, investigators got, they made this movie about, and the, and the, and the, the, the, the, the torture methodology, you could say that they were adopting was coming from a couple private contractors.

It wasn’t even developed internally. It was, they hired out for it and these guys came in and said, oh yeah, here’s what you do, da da da da, and here’s all these. Then they have this [02:04:00] whole array of procedures that were guaranteed to extract information from people and it, and this was torture. And so, um, so even there, you know, these, who are these private contractors?

Well, a couple of idiots. That’s obviously who they were. And, and they sold, you know, this bill of goods that we can extract the goods from people if we hurt them enough in, in enough creative interesting ways. And that’s just not, and we now know that doesn’t work either. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Even down to the, even down to beating on people.

And you still can’t be sure they’re telling you the truth. Right. Which was the classic problem. I, I thought of it because we, when we were talking about the police, the, the third degree used to be official police policy until human rights activists put a stop to it. And then psychological warfare became the way to extract information from criminals or potential criminals.

And that’s why this has so much appeal in that world. I think. So [02:05:00] just like I said, it’s not my main line, but it’s just something I wanna 

Zach: Yeah, no, it’s, yeah. No, it’s good to be, yeah. We, you definitely wanna be skeptical about the ideas that are getting in these institutions and divisions of various sorts.

Yeah. 

Chris: Yeah. Exactly. Now, getting back to you, ’cause I wanna wrap this up and I want to, um, give you a chance to. Talk some more. Okay. Because I’m, I’m dominating this conversation. Oh. Um, what, what other, what other things do you or are you going to be looking into now? You’ve mentioned a few things you wanna do some podcasts on.

Uh, where, where are you going with your work now? ’cause you’re, you, you’re so adjacent to so much of what I do and I’m, I’m just, I’m absolutely, I, I just love your work, so Oh, thanks. Just wanna know. Yeah, I wanna, I wanna connect people with you and what you’re doing. 

Zach: Oh, thank it. It means a lot. I mean, I don’t, I don’t get that many people telling me that, so it definitely means a lot.

Um, yeah, I, uh, well, I, I just recently moved to New York and started a new relationship and a new job, so I, I don’t have that [02:06:00] much free time these days, you know? Uh, a 

Chris: lot more. 

Zach: Yeah. I mean, yeah. And the, and the podcast obviously takes some, some effort. Uh, so I’m kind of struggling with that. Um, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with that ’cause Yeah, it’s, it’s hard to juggle all the things I got going on right now.

Chris: Alright. 

Zach: Uh, but yeah, I don’t have any, I don’t have any firm plans. Um. But if you’re, if you, if you’re curious, you can follow my [email protected] if anyone’s curious about that. But yeah, sorry, I don’t have any specific plans right now. Now it’s just struggling, struggling to get by and, you know, figure out what to do with myself.

Chris: I hear you. I’m in the same boat. Um, this is, this is what I love to do, but it’s hard to do it. Um, so thank you very much for coming on my show, Zach. I really appreciate it. 

Zach: Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it. It is honored to be asked. 

Chris: Yeah. Uh, you, you, like I said, you do good work. [02:07:00] Uh, behavior podcast.com.

Link is in the description section below folks, so you can check that out down there. Uh, and if you’re listening to this on an audio only podcast version, the link is also in the description section for this podcast today. So, um, you can check out, uh, his podcast and his YouTube channel, and I encourage you to do so.

Um, it’s just the kind of stuff I like watching, you know, a methodical, uh, systematic deep dive into nonsense. And let’s take it apart and thanks. And, and some wonderful look at, you know, like I try to do like deep dives with professionals. Like, let’s really talk about this. Let’s talk about hypnotism, let’s talk about neuroscience.

Let’s my detector, let’s talk about behavioral analysis, right? Yeah. 

Zach: Lie detector. I got a polygraph one on there. Yeah. Ah, 

Chris: yeah. Love it. All this stuff. So, um, it’s [02:08:00] complicated folks. Sorry. Didn’t make the rules. It’s just how it is. It’s, it, it’s not, it’s not easy to understand. Um, but boy is it fun. Okay, on that happy note, thank you very much for coming around and watching us babble on to mad right about all of this.

Very much appreciate your viewership and support out there and, uh, hope that I will see you again next week. Bye-bye.

I recently wrote a piece about political polarization for the site, The Liberal Patriot, titled “It’s all the other side’s fault.” That piece included some ideas I think are very important for understanding toxic conflict, but that are rarely discussed. For example, I think group differences are an important aspect of conflict; groups in conflict will always have various differences, and those differences mean that rage and fear will manifest in very different ways. These differences make it easy for people in both groups to find bad or extreme aspects about the quote “other side” that aren’t present for their own side. This in turn aids people in both groups in finding what seems like compelling, persuasive evidence that the toxic conflict they’re in is “all the other side’s fault.” No matter what your politics are, I think it’s important to understand conflict dynamics; when we lack a good understanding of how conflict works, we’ll tend to act in ways that further inflame and amplify the conflict — ironically, we’ll often act in ways that give more power and strength to our most angry and contemptuous opponents. 

You can find The Liberal Patriot at liberalpatriot.com. This piece of mine was published September 19th 2025. If this topic interests you, you might like checking out that piece because it has quite a few resources linked from it. Here is the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• YouTube

What if your consciousness, your self-awareness, isn’t unique at all—but the very same “I” that exists in everyone, everywhere? What if you and I—and everyone—are essentially the same person? In this episode, I talk with Joe Kern, author of “The Odds of Existing: On Open Individualism and the Illusion of Death” about Open Individualism: the radical view that there is only a single subject of consciousness, which is shared by all aware beings. Put another way: instead of seeing your odds of existing—your odds of being self-aware at this moment—as being extremely low, it’s a view of your existence as inevitable, because wherever there is a conscious being, your awareness must be present.

Joe and I explore the logic of this idea, how it challenges our assumptions about identity and existence, common objections to the idea, and what it implies about death. Other topics discussed: religion, the idea of souls, free will, and the multiverse. Joe’s website is at applebutterdreams.wordpress.com. 

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

Resources mentioned in this talk, or related/recommended: 

• Joe Kern’s website, featuring his book The Odds of Existing: On Open Individualism and the Illusion of Death
  • His posts on the TV show Severence
• Wikipedia entry on Open Individualism
• Arnold Zuboff’s paper One Self: The Logic of Experience, and associated reddit thread
  • Zuboff’s Ask-me-anything on Reddit
• Daniel Kolak’s book I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations of Global Ethics
  • A reddit thread about that book
• Derek Parfit’s famous book Reasons and Persons, which contains ideas and thought experiments often referenced in work on consciousness and Open Individualism 
• Iacopo Vettori’s work on Open Individualism
• The site of Mineta Oliver (née Jurášková), a.k.a. Edralis, where she writes about what she calls “Awareness Monism”
• Related concept: Wikipedia entry for the “vertiginous question,” aka, “Why am I me and not someone else?”
  • Reddit thread on the vertiginous question 

An episode of mine: What it’s like to live without a belief in free will

TRANSCRIPT

(All transcripts will contain errors)

Zach Elwood: What if I told you there are some very smart people who believe that every person who exists, who has ever existed, is essentially the same person? If you aren’t already familiar with this concept, your instinct is probably to dismiss this as a crazy idea. That was my reaction when I first heard about the idea. But the more I delved into this idea, and read the logical and philosophical arguments for it, the more I came to see that this wasn’t some kooky New Age type idea. It’s an idea with a lot of logical points supporting it, and it’s an idea that resolves a lot of the perplexing and confusing aspects of consciousness and existence that many thinkers have puzzled over. It also happens to dovetail with ideas about consciousness found in Buddhist thought. 

This idea goes by different names. The most common name for this idea is Open Individualism, coined by Daniel Kolak, who is perhaps the person most well known for this idea. He’s a philosopher and the author of a book titled I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics. Another name for this idea is Universalism, coined by Arnold Zuboff, who is also well known for promoting this view. Arnold is known for a 1990 paper on this topic titled “One Self: The Logic of Experience.” He also has a book coming out titled “Finding Myself: BEYOND THE FALSE BOUNDARIES OF PERSONAL IDENTITY.” 

I’ll read from the foreword of that book, written by the well known philosopher Thomas Nagel: 

Zuboff proposes and defends with creative philosophical arguments a radically original conception of the mind, according to which the distinction between selves – between me and you, for example – is an illusion. There is only one subject of consciousness; it is the subject of all consciousness, and it is equivalent to the first-person immediacy shared by all conscious experience. The separate bundles of experience in the lives of distinct conscious organisms do not have separate subjects, but share a universal quality of subjective immediacy, which it is easy for each of us to mistake for a unique individual “I” in our own case. 

End quote 

So that’s a pretty succinct summary of what the idea is about, although of course if this idea is new to you, there will be much more to say before you grasp it. 

Nagel goes on to say: 

Both the conclusion and the argument will certainly seem incredible, even outrageous, to many readers, but the whole is presented with such care and skill that it should be regarded as an important contribution even by those who are not persuaded. The relation of the mind to the world is so mysterious that it is not philosophically reasonable to dismiss any view, however radical, out of hand.  

End quote 

I wanted to start out emphasizing that there are some serious and respected thinkers who explore and believe this idea, to help show that it is far less kooky than you may at first be inclined to suppose. Thinking it’s kooky is entirely natural; paradigm-shifting views will all sound pretty kooky at first; they may even strike us as threatening and angering, too, in various ways.   

In this episode, I’ll talk to Joe Kern, who writes about Open Individualism on his blog, and in his book The Odds of Existing. Joe is not as well known as the philosophers I’ve mentioned, but he has been thinking about these ideas for a long time, and I think he has some strong and I think highly accessible writings on this topic. If you’re a fan of the TV show Severance, you can find some pieces by Joe that tie in Severance to Open Individualism. You can find Joe’s site at https://applebutterdreams.wordpress.com. Also, you can get a free copy of Joe’s book on his site. 

Joe’s work has focused on what I see as a strong angle of attack for demonstrating this idea to people. In the quote ”normal” view of what we are as people, many people see their own existence, their sense of being present in the world, of “being here now,” as something that happened against all odds; as something hugely improbable and unlikely. In this view of things, some unthinkably huge number of factors had to align just right for you — your sense of awareness, your current consciousness — to have existed. Often, this is imagined as maybe the right egg and the right sperm coming together in just the right way at the right time to produce you: the consciousness listening to these words right now. 

But what exactly were the factors that led to producing your current self-consciousness? If it was related to the egg and the sperm combining in just the right way, does this mean that if the egg and the sperm had been completely the same, the same material, but there’d been a slightly different few molecules in the egg or the sperm, you’d be an entirely different you hearing this? A different self? Or if the same egg and sperm were combined, just a little bit later, you’d be a different person? How exactly would all these factors work? And would that view of things mean that there are an infinite number of first-person perspectives waiting in the wings, and if something slightly shifts, an entirely different first-person perspective manifests? 

And, related to this, does this mean if something had gone slightly differently in your past, like your parents moving to another country, that that version of you would still have the same sense of self; that it’d still be you, the person hearing these words now, present in that other version of you? In what way is that other, parallel-universe version of yourself any different than just another person, a person in another body, leading an entirely different life? 

In Joe’s book, he walks through the logic of these things and shows that it doesn’t make sense to think of our inner consciousness as improbable. When you think deeply about it, there are no logical factors to find that could be seen to explain why you would have a sense that “you are here” in this universe but, in a slightly different universe, have an entirely different “I” experience. Instead of seeing our first-person experience as improbable, it makes more sense to see our first-person experience as inevitable: that anywhere there is a conscious entity, that same “I am here” sensation will exist; in other words, you will exist wherever a conscious being exists. And this means that we are all manifestations of the same first-person experience; the same I. 

Now you may be thinking of various objections to this; I know I did. But rest assured that the people thinking about these things have talked about your objections and have made strong responses to them. For example, you may be thinking, “Any sentient creature that arises in the universe, no matter how improbable its existence is, must always develop and have its own sense of self; that is not mysterious at all” Joe and I talk about that in our talk, along with other objections. 

I’ll say that, as far as I know, this is the first recorded conversation about Open Individualism. At least neither Joe nor I were aware of another one. I think it’s extremely hard to talk about these ideas. Our language, which relies on a “normal” paradigm of what people are, isn’t well suited to the rather unusual and counterintuitive ideas we’re discussing. There are all sorts of ways to get confused, whether when talking about these ideas, or hearing them, and especially if you’re new to them. One area of confusion is the difference between the content of someone’s life — someone’s traits and experiences, what’s in their brains — and the first-person, “I am here” sensation; the I feeling, or pure awareness – what Joe will refer to as the empty self. It’s easy for us to conflate and confuse these two dimensions; we’re used to thinking about both concepts when we talk about ourselves and about what it means to be a person. But for the purposes of this talk, you should try to separate the content of people’s lives from what we’re talking about: which is simply the first-person awareness; the sense that “I exist right now.”

I mention the difficulty of talking about these topics so that, if at some point in this talk you think Joe or I aren’t being articulate, I hope you aren’t turned off from considering this idea. ** Joe and I were both worried about this; Joe more than I because he has a book on it, and is afraid of representing Open Individualism badly. I think Joe does a good job, and I think I do an okay job, but I just wanted to emphasize the difficulty of talking about this topic, and I hope if you are a bit intrigued you’ll check out the resources and writings on this. On my website behavior-podcast.com, on the page for this episode, I’ll include links to resources by the people who have written about this concept, and include links to some interesting reddit threads about it. 

Along the way in this talk, Joe and I discuss religion, the idea of souls, fear of death and annihilation, existentialism, free will, Daniel Dennett, Derek Parfitt, and the multiverse.  

Okay here’s the talk with Joe Kern…

Zach: Okay. Hi Joe, thanks for joining me.

Zach: Hi Joe, thanks for joining me.

Joe: Oh, thank you. It’s really great to be here.

Zach: It’s a pleasure to talk to myself about these ideas. You know, talk to… Sorry, that was a really bad attempt at some open individualism humor. Talking to myself. I could have planned that joke out a little bit better. [chuckles]

Joe: Oh yeah yeah. That’s all right. I think everybody that comes to this makes a few of those jokes at the beginning, and then everybody just stops right away. They’re like, “This isn’t going to go any further. That’s good enough.”

Zach: It’s definitely too niche a subject to joke around. Nobody will know what you’re talking about. Maybe we could start with how… I’m curious how you found yourself in such a niche area. How did you find yourself to this area?

Joe: Yeah, it was entirely my own obsession, and not finding the answers in existing philosophy or theories. And so I just kind of found my way to my own answer. The question I was trying to answer was, when I was young, I grew up a Christian. You could call it fundamentalist, evangelical. My family was quite thoughtful and intellectual, so I don’t want to give the impression of the stereotype of those words. But I was a Christian, I believed in heaven and hell, I believed I had a soul or was a soul, and that when I died, that soul was going to go to heaven. And that mostly seemed all well and good to me. Then I went to a Christian college, started out even as a Bible major, intending to go into the ministry like my grandfather did. And then toward the end of my college—uh, took me six years to do undergrad—the last two years, I started to doubt my faith. The first seeds of doubt were really about the social issues like homosexuality and women being allowed to speak and lead in church. I just found myself, after a time, not being able to really accept those teachings anymore. I did it first, but then I was like, “Nah, it doesn’t seem right.”

So, I kind of lost my faith over those issues. Once I realized I could make my own choices about that—I just didn’t believe homosexuality was wrong, and so I made that choice. Whatever the Bible said, I made that choice. Once I made that choice, I realized I was free to choose about everything; what facts I believed and what morality I believed. So, that kind of led to my loss of faith. But along with the loss of faith, I lost the belief in heaven and a soul, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the idea of annihilation and death. It just terrified me. I’ve been speaking to people about this for 20 years. A lot of people have different things that they fear in death. So, I understand now that my concern isn’t the only concern that people have, but this was my concern. Just ceasing to exist. Not being anywhere ever, for all eternity. It’s really uncanny. It’s hard to even fathom, in the same way that it’s hard to fathom what it was like not existing before you were born. Right? Both of those things…non-existence is completely hard to fathom and also kind of terrifying. 

I was thinking about this and… Let’s see, what happened next? Yeah, I didn’t like that idea. I was kind of holding on to the idea that I might still be a soul even if I didn’t believe in God, or specifically the Christian God or something that might be like a universal soul or something. I was holding on to that idea. And then I was doing more reading and got more into science. Actually, I was a science education major in college, and I was still kind of doubting evolution. Even after I stopped being a Christian, I still doubted evolution a bit. And I met a friend who turned me on to Richard Dawkins, and he started me on…have you read Dawkins?

Zach: Yeah, and you also quote some Dawkins in your book. Right?

Joe: Yeah, that’s right. Have you read The Selfish Gene?

Zach: I have not. No.

Joe: You have not. Okay. I started out with Climbing Mount Improbable, which is a great underrated book of his. It convinced me evolution was true. And then my friend had me read The Selfish Gene, which I read a few years later. It absolutely devastated me. The Selfish Gene really devastated my worldview. I was still holding on to wanting to believe in a soul, and I read The Selfish Gene and it’s this whole theory about how the replicator molecules are the entire reason that any life exists, you know? It started out as just bare replicator molecules. You read chapter two of The Selfish Gene, which I recommend to everybody; it’s a short mind-blowing chapter. So, just these bare replicator molecules. It’s like an algorithmic thing. Just the fact that the molecule that replicates itself more than the others is more successful. It’s like a tautology. It’s like saying that the person that runs fastest in the race wins the race—gets there first. The molecule that replicates itself more has more copies of itself around. And that process, according to Dawkins, which I agree with—I believe—is the entire reason that life exists, including human beings. He ends that chapter two, you know, he uses this contentious language, “We are the robots. Inside of us are the replicator molecules and we are the robots doing their bidding.”

Zach: We’re the carrier for these things that are…

Joe: Exactly. And so I ended that book just like, “Oh, that’s what my existence is! Evolution, this is my existence. This is why I exist. It’s just because of this.” I was depressed for a couple of days, and I was thinking about it, and then I sort of launched back to a thought. I remember I had this thought when I was five years old. I remember I looked over at my brother sitting in the kitchen as he was talking to my mother, and it just struck me all of a sudden, like, “Why is he him and I am me? Why not the other way around? Why am I not him and him me? Or why was I born as this person and not somebody else?” And I started to think maybe there’s a key in that thought to why this… Even though I totally agree with Dawkins’ theory of evolution—selfish gene theory—that thought grabbed me as something like-

Zach: The mystery.

Joe: Yeah, the mystery. The way I formulated it to myself was, evolution reaches down through the eons and creates this genetic person that becomes you. That explains why the human being Joe Kern exists, but it doesn’t explain why I exist. It doesn’t explain why I-

Zach: The ‘I’. The ‘I’ feeling.

Joe: Yeah. You could have a million or infinite number of copies of this human being with the same DNA that’s not me, and this one’s me. And so the thought I gave myself at the time—because, again, I was worried about annihilation and death, and I wanted to believe I was a soul—was, “how do I know I will cease to exist when I die, when I don’t know what caused me to exist in the first place?” So, I held on to that. Then I started doing research. I started reading about consciousness, I read… First was Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind, and then Dennett, his biggest critic, Consciousness Explained. And then after that came Parfit. I found Parfit through Dennett. He quoted him at the end. I’ve read a bunch of other things since then, but those are still the big three in my mind.

So I spent about five years thinking I was writing a theory about the soul, you know, trying to prove that the soul must exist because of this uncanny, strange thought, like, “Why am I me and not somebody else? Evolution doesn’t explain why I exist.” After reading a lot about consciousness and personal identity, which is what Parfit wrote about, I decided I really can’t believe in the soul anymore, either. That was really depressing, another depressing moment, and yet I still had these same thoughts about…

Zach: There’s still something mysterious and wild going on here.

Joe: Yeah. Why do I exist? Souls, I think, are actually conceptually incoherent. And not everybody who believes in open individualism thinks this. This is my thought. I have specific reasons for thinking that, but I feel like souls are conceptually incoherent, and Dennett and Parfit both were big parts of me just being inundated by the evidence against souls, spirits, and that kind of thing. So I decided I just can’t believe that anymore. And then again, I had a few—I don’t know, it could have been longer than a few days—moments of depression and time of depression, like, “Oh man, not only am I not a soul anymore, but what I’ve been working on for these five years or whatever and so excited about might be nothing.” And then the thought just popped into my head—what I now call open individualism, I hadn’t thought of it before—and I was like, “What if I am not just me, but all people?” I still talk to myself about it this way, and the way I first thought of it was like a materialist reincarnation. Reincarnation without souls; the materialist, physicalist, naturalist universe but my life doesn’t end now. When Joe Kern dies, ‘I’ become other people.

That flooded into my mind and I had a few moments—and this is interesting, other people that have come to open individualism have talked about having the same kind of mystical-almost experience. The thought flooded into my mind, and I had some days of just sitting in a park looking at an ant and just being like, “Oh, I’m that ant.” You know, that kind of thing. I had the thoughts and then I was like, “I can’t think that, that’s ridiculous. I’m a hard-line materialist now. That’s a ridiculous New-Agey kind of thought. I can’t think that thought.” But then I started to think of the kind of arguments that I could make that would be strict materialist analytic philosophy, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, arguments. That’s what the sorites argument in the fourth chapter of the book is. And then I was like, “Oh, wow!” So I talked myself into it, spent a couple of years writing, and convinced myself that, yeah, this is absolutely true.

Now, at the time, I didn’t know anybody else who believed this. I thought it’s surely possible. I hadn’t known anybody else so, but it did feel like a discovery that I had made myself and I’d written my entire argument for it, and only after that did I discover—when I published a first draft of it—I found someone who’s now a friend of mine, Iacopo Vettori, who had also written some of his own ideas about open individualism. He told me that it’s called open individualism, this philosopher named Daniel Kolak has coined this term. He invited me to a Facebook group, and then that’s… So yeah, it started out as me finding it on my own and then I found other people who believed it who came at it from their own different angles.

Zach: I think what drives, in general, the interest in what we are, you know, what drives people like Parfit to write his book, or you to go down that path, that fear or that interest in what we are and what happens to us… I’ll say, too, what drove me to be really interested in this was this fear of not just death, because I feel like that didn’t directly bother me, but I started getting these thoughts about, “Oh, what if I am one of these series people? What if I’m just flashing in and out of existence?” That kind of idea about the self, right? The empty individualism kind of ideas. It felt to me like an advanced fear of death. It was, like, “This is even worse than the fear of death. I’m dying every second, theoretically.” Right? So just to say, I think a lot of us are led down these paths by the interest and the fear of, will we continue existing, or what happens to us in the next moment or when we die, or whatever it is.

Joe: When did you first have that thought? Because you mentioned that before in your notes. That was a big moment for you, that thought of just dying every second. Did you read that in Parfit and that’s what gave you the idea?

Zach: No. Like a lot of these things, it’s hard to know how it came to be. But I remember 10 plus years ago, I was thinking about these things where I’m like—and I can’t remember if I read it. I must have read some consciousness related stuff that led me down that path probably.

Joe: Have you read Dennett or Chalmers?

Zach: Yeah, I’ve read Dennet. I read Dennet 10 plus years ago, so I’m sure one of those things led me down that path. But it just strikes me that when it comes to all this philosophical work, so much of it is about us thinking about what’s going to happen to us and what are we. It comes down to these existential fears about trying to figure this stuff out to set our own minds at ease.

Joe: It is interesting because there’s some people that have argued for open individualism from an ethical standpoint. And I think this is the direction Kolak comes from. And I know there’s some other people… I think Magnus Vinding, I’m remembering the name, he writes a lot about ethics and he takes open individualism as a reason to believe in a certain ethical idea or certain morality.

Zach: Treating others as yourself. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah. And in Kolak, I don’t see anything about… By the way, I told you my whole story, and that should explain why I’m not qualified to talk about anybody else’s ideas about open individualism. I know a bit about it, but I don’t want to speak for anybody because I really know my theory well and I don’t know anybody else’s theories that well. But I can say that I don’t remember seeing anything in Kolak about fear of death or fear of annihilation. He seemed to really be focusing more on, you know… I feel like the ethical consequences of open individualism are pretty obvious. It’s going to make you want to treat everybody as though they’re yourself. You’re just going to treat people better and care more about the wellbeing of all other conscious beings.

Zach: Yeah, you have a pretty good… You’ve been talking about this for a while. I’m curious if you had to give your thirty-second to minute kind of elevator pitch. I think you have a pretty good summary of this on your website, but do you want to talk about… Maybe you can run with that.

Joe: Yeah. So, my brother asked me for an elevator pitch last summer, and I’ve been avoiding talking about this for years because I got tired of hearing myself talk about it. Obviously, we’re recording now so this is a good time to do it again. But yeah, just kind of ruining parties and things, and cornering people. But my brother asked me and I demurred, and then he asked me again and I’m like, “All right.” And I heard myself speaking for like five minutes straight and just talking a big jumble of twisty stuff that I know he didn’t understand, and as it’s going on, I’m thinking, “See, this is why I don’t like talking about it.” Because I don’t know how to explain everything. The point is I don’t know how to explain everything about my argument it quickly. But that conversation made me think, “Okay, he’s right. I should have an elevator pitch.” 

So I think I can come at it from three angles. Number one, you can start with the conclusion. Open individualism is the idea that we are all one self. There’s not a new self created at the birth of a human being or the coming into consciousness of a human being. We’re all the same self. And so I still stick to my original idea about it—materialist reincarnation. When you die, you become other people. You’re eventually all other people. There’s a science fiction story called “The Egg” by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. He has this short story that became viral back in 2010; somebody made a comic about it. It’s that same idea and a lot of people might know that. Andy Weir’s idea is that you’re a soul and God is pushing you toward further improvement. You’re a soul that is all conscious beings through time, eventuality. You’re all conscious beings and God is pushing you to perfection. So my version of open individualism: no God, no soul. You are all other people. There’s not the Buddhist idea of karma or anything. It’s just youare all other people.

So that’s the conclusion. I think a lot of people who believe open individualism won’t like the idea of reincarnation, and that’s fair enough. A lot of people want to talk about “You are all people right now. It’s not like you just jump to other people when you die.” And I think that’s fair enough. But for me, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around that idea. I experience myself as traveling through time in one direction, and that’s the only way I can do it. But happy for all the people that can sort of wrap their brain around the idea of you actually just are all people right now. 

Now, that’s the conclusion. For my personal approach to it, there’s two ways I can start with. Number one, I can ask people if they’ve ever had that thought that I had when I was five. You ever wonder, “Why am I me and not somebody else?” There’s a lot more questions you can ask along that same line.

Zach: Like how unlikely it is for me to be here.

Joe: Yeah. The question of, “Why was I even a possibility to exist at the beginning of the universe, rather than not?” Again, the creation of a certain human being with certain DNA from certain parents doesn’t explain that. Because genetically identical people, even if you’re not identical twins split from a zygote, it’s still conceivable that they could exist.

Zach: We should remind people that we’re talking about the ‘I’ feeling. We’re not talking about specific people and traits. We’re talking about the internal feeling of being present and of existing. The ‘I’ feeling. I just wanted to emphasize that.

Joe: Yeah, thanks. I guess there’s another part of this. There’s the perfect doppelgänger thought experiment I do that tries to isolate that ‘I’ feeling, but maybe we can get to that later. So you can start with that question. The thing I find is when I ask people that question, a lot of people have had that thought. And it’s pretty common for young people to have it. I cannot remember who wrote the paper, but there was a book he quoted of… There’s a novel [A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes] where there’s a little girl named Emily, seven or 10, who has the same realization. One day she’s playing and all of the sudden she looks down and it’s like, “Oh, here I am. And now I’m stuck with this now for the rest of my life. What am I doing here now, here?”

Zach: Why am I here? Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, I’m not being articulate about it, the novel was quite good. Yeah, that’s one way I can… It’s not really a pitch in the idea, but telling people what I’m talking about. And a lot of people recognize that idea, like, “Oh yeah, I’ve had that same thought!” That might be a hook to get people into the way I’m thinking. But a lot of people have never had that thought and don’t understand what it’s about. And again, fair enough. So then the third way I might say it is, have you ever thought about what are the odds of you existing? What are the chances of you having come in to exist? People think about this a lot. What are the chances your parents meeting? That one sperm and that one ovum had to join. If it had been any other sperm, you wouldn’t exist. This combination of DNA had to come into existence. That’s another way into it, and you think, “Yeah, boy, I’m really amazed at how long the odds are that I came into existence, and yet I did. That’s shocking and I feel so lucky.” My point is—in everything I’ve written—is that it doesn’t make any sense. You can’t think about the odds of you existing. You might be able to jump ahead and see how open individualism solves that. If you are all people, then you exist, no matter what consciousnesses exists.

Zach: I think the strength of you focusing on that, specifically it’s like when you start thinking about… Because, as you say, most people imagine there’s some factors in the past. All these factors had to align for my ‘I’ feeling to exist right now. All these factors, whether it was when the sperm and the egg met up, or the ancestors, or whatever it is, but then as you break down in your book, it’s like when you actually think through logically, what was the defining thing that would have led to this ‘I’ feeling now? You’re left with an idea that, “Oh, if I had replaced the smallest amount of the egg with a little bit of different matter, would that have led to a completely different ‘I’? And you start breaking down the sorites argument of why would a slight difference in all these factors have led to a completely different ‘I’? You start realizing, “Oh, maybe the most efficient answer is that the ‘I’ that I’m feeling now was inevitable, and if the ‘I’ that I’m feeling now was inevitable, then I am everyone. That’s the logical steps that you walk through. And I really like that approach because I had come at it from different angles and somehow I had never really even thought about the common thought that, “Oh, it’s really rare for me to exist, and all these factors had to align,” which is interesting, because I think in open individualism, you can arrive at these things from different angles by examining different parts. You know, there’s different Parfit-like thought experiments.

I did like your focus because I think that makes it accessible to a lot of people who are like, “Oh, yeah. When you start thinking about it, yeah, why would this specific combination of factors and all these things have led to my specific feeling of ‘I’? It also gets into questions like, if you had moved somewhere else when you were a kid, would you still be the same ‘I’ feeling you are now? It starts breaking up the idea that your ‘I’ feeling is the product of all these factors. And then you start thinking, “Oh, the much more efficient answer is that I am going to always exist wherever there’s a conscious being.” I did like that approach.

Joe: That idea of would I exist if… If I had been adopted by a family in—I’m in Japan now, let’s say South Korea. If I’d been adopted by a family in South Korea right after I was born, raised in South Korea, speaking Korean, and Joe Kern was still alive there then—this body was still alive there then—would I exist as that person? The content of my life would be completely different, but would I exist as that person? My intuition is that, yeah, I’m going to exist. Once that sperm and egg join in the zygote and then it creates a human being, I’m going to be wherever that object and the things that grew from that object are in the world. I’m going to be there. That’s kind of the hook for me. The longer I think about this and think about my approach to it, I realize that that’s my essential hook. It’s like if you believe that you would be in South Korea right now under those circumstances, you believe you’re a completely different person—content, language, everything about your life is completely different, but you still exist. It’s not the same as if you had died right after you were born—then you’d think, “Oh, I wouldn’t exist anywhere. I’d be nobody nowhere.” If you think you’d be in South Korea right now, then my argument, through many steps, is that then you should also believe that you would be anybody else. Even if a different sperm and egg had joined, then you’d be that person. And that leads to open individualism.

Zach: Right, you’re using the instincts that we have about ourselves in different situations to apply to everybody in different situations.

Joe: Some people do not believe that they would be in South Korea right now if that happened. They think that’s a different person. I wouldn’t exist. Maybe they think they wouldn’t exist in the same way that they wouldn’t exist as if they had died when they were young. I think that belief is kind of like empty individualist, but a lot of people don’t know that term and they wouldn’t call themselves that. But yeah, if you don’t believe you’d be in South Korea right now under those circumstances, then my argument will have much less power for you—

Zach: That instinct might not work, but other parts of the argument may work. There are people listening to this who—almost everybody, this will be new to if they made it this far—there’s so many objections that spring up, right? Like the defenses of the normal way of seeing people. One of the objections would be, “How can we be the same people? We’re in different bodies. I have no knowledge or awareness of things happening to people in these other bodies.” I think that’s one key objection, but I think the main overcoming of that objection is there’s lots of things in your own life that you have no memory of or no direct awareness of. Like, you lived when you were a kid or even a year ago, and there’s experiences you had that aren’t really available to you now. So just to say that the various objections that people will bring up, you and other people have addressed in various ways as ways to overcome… Because it is such an outlandish thing to say… 

Joe: It is outlandish.

Zach: …we’re all the same person. Everyone’s like, “What the hell are you talking about?” But I do like to emphasize, people who are curious about this, there’s many people who have worked through the objections. And at the end of the day, it requires a different way to see what we are. But when you think it through, it’s not like a crazy, magical idea. When you actually think it through, it’s like, “Oh, maybe this is just how the world works.”

Joe: I guess it’s not really a factual claim. It’s certainly not an empirical claim. Because it doesn’t really change anything. You know? You die, you die. But it’s like I look at it now… I think when I first thought of it, I thought I had solved all the problems of the world and was like, “Oh, this is just the facts of the world, I need to tell everybody.” Other people have had this experience too. Physicist Freeman Dyson talks about this in his memoir, which I learned from Kolak’s book. But now I think of it as this is an option of a way to think about yourself. It’s not just like a New Agey kind of dream option. If you fancy yourself the kind of person who really likes rigorous, logical, reductive arguments, this is an option. If you have… I’ll say it from my point of view… If you’ve come along this journey of coming to conclude, due to science and philosophy and whatnot, that maybe you’re an atheist now, there’s no God, there are no souls, and you don’t like the idea of annihilation in death, this is a way to think about existence in a different way that can make you less afraid of death.

Zach: I do think it solves so many of the problems of consciousness and self. I was reading Zuboff’s book that he sent me…

Joe: Which book was that, by the way?

Zach: I think it was Finding Myself. I don’t think it’s published yet, maybe.

Joe: Okay.

Zach: But in the intro, he basically says something like, “I think there’s many arguments in favor of open individualism, and basically none in the other ways of thinking about self and identity. I think he makes a compelling point. It just solves so many of the weird paradoxes when you start thinking through the thought experiments and stuff.

Joe: That question I started out with when I was five—why am I me and not somebody else—there’s a term for that. It’s called the vertiginous question.

Zach: Yeah, I was going to mention that.

Joe: Yeah, there’s a Wikipedia page for it so I think that’s what it’s going to be called. I’m fine with that. There’s a philosopher named—I don’t know how to pronounce his name, I think it’s Benj Hellie who coined the term. He wrote a paper so he coined the term. It’s on Wikipedia. I call them the enigmas of existence, in what I’ve written. It’s a far more pretentious name, but it does fit the fact that they’re enigmas. It seems like something that needs a solution. And I found open individualism solves those enigmas. Empty individualism, which is another kind of belief, also solves them. But I don’t know if we want to go… It’s a bit harder to talk about.

Zach: We can mention that briefly, because I kind of feel like it’s two sides of the same coin. And I will say, when you were talking about Parfit, I read Parfit’s Reasons and Persons and I was left with this sense of, yeah, but you’re not really explaining… It didn’t really explain much to me. It almost just explained away things. But it didn’t really explain… And I was kind of left… I think you mentioned it too, where it was an unsatisfying conclusion I thought he had because he basically was saying, “Oh, well, somebody is myself if they’ve got all my attributes. And if I don’t exist anymore, it’s the same…” He basically wouldn’t mind going through the teleporter or being recreated. But that was kind of unsatisfying, because it’s like, in a way that I think open individualism solves more. Because it’s like, “Oh, well, if we’re all the same, then that solves that riddle of like…” Well, yeah, it’s a very unsatisfying thing to say, “Oh, you can destroy me, but recreate me somewhere else.” I’m probably not explaining it well, but it just seemed like I was left wanting more from why he wouldn’t care about being destroyed and recreated somewhere else with all the same attributes, which I think open individualism solves that paradox.

Joe: I really wrestled with Parfit for a long time. He was one of the first things I read early on, and I had a similar reaction to him as with Dawkins’ Selfish Gene. I just found myself bulldozed into being forced to believe a lot of things I didn’t want to believe. I consider The Selfish Gene and the third part of Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit to be the two most influential things I’ve ever read, and I agree with almost everything Parfit said. It took me a long time to decide that I felt free enough to disagree with some of the things he said because it’s a masterful book, you know? I think I disagree now with Parfit when he says that… Oh, shoot. I feel like this might be a bit too in the weeds but I guess I’ll push forward. So, Parfit says sometimes identity is indeterminate, but I feel like he equivocates identity with existence. And I read that when I first read it, like, “Oh, sometimes whether or not you exist is indeterminate.” And I just thought, yeeah…

Zach: Yeah, it was something based on if there’s another copy of you or something like that.

Joe: Yeah. I felt like I kind of have to accept this. This guy’s such a great… Like, everything else is so airtight, you know? But I lived with that for a long time, and I think that maybe if people talk about personal identity and then they make that equivalent of existence, I try to separate those two ideas. Parfit concludes personal identity is not what matters, and so maybe we come together on this, like it’s not what matters. And then when he gets into the fourth part, he makes his famous non-identity problem about like the actions we perform now are going to affect who exists in the future, and so there’s an extra element to our moral actions now like around global warming or things like that.

So, I feel like Parfit argues for empty individualism in part three and then reverts to closed individualism in part four with the nonidentity problem. This whole thing I talk about with the odds of existing and everything, that presumes a closed individualist idea of existence. That’s kind of the standard idea that most people have. Like, you know, this human being comes into existence—we now know from a sperm and an ovum—a human being comes into existence, you just exist as that person for that duration, and when that human being dies, you cease to exist. A new self is created at that moment—a new empty self is the term I like to use now—is created at that moment and then it dies and then you’re done. You’re gone forever.

Zach: Yeah, I thought so many things that I was left unsatisfied in Parfit’s book are just made complete sense of with open individualism. But so much of his arguments map over to open individualism. It’s like if he had just looked at it a slightly different way, he would be an open individualist.

Joe: Exactly. I’ll say a few things about that that I do know. Daniel Kolak, in his book I Am You, published in 2004, coined the terms open individualism, empty individualism, and closed individualism. Kolak himself also says empty individualism and open individualism are very close together. They’re both basically true and it’s just a matter of how you think about it. Right?

Zach: Right. Glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. I was looking back at Kolak a couple of days ago trying to prepare for this and I discovered I could not find an actual definition of what Kolak means by empty individualism. As far as I understand it, it’s just whatever Parfit argued for in part three of Reasons and Persons. That’s empty individualism. I take it to be the really austere view that consciousness just comes into existence whenever matter of the appropriate organization comes into existence. In our case, probably we can attribute it to our brains. Consciousness comes into existence when matter organizes. If it just popped into existence right now, you’d have a conscious being for a few moments. You know? That’s kind of what I take empty individualism to be at its ground level. It’s just that idea.

Zach: It’s a bunch of disjointed moments of existence. It’s almost like you could view it as consciousness is an illusion because it’s just a bunch of moments of coming into being. Yeah.

Joe: I guess at ground it is the idea that there’s nothing else to that. There’s like no… Parfit calls it a ‘further fact’ in Reasons and Persons. There’s no further fact to it than that. There’s nothing in the universe that would be a self that continues to exist through time. It’s just consciousness exists in this moment because this brain exists.

Zach: It is a very similar view because it’s… To me, it’s very similar. I can see how similar it is because that’s kind of how I view open individualism, except it’s like the glass half full, glass half empty. As you say in your book, even if that’s true, even if we are a series of disjointed moments of selves or whatever, it’s like we still attain everything we want. What more could you want? You couldn’t imagine another world where all these things…that you wouldn’t be getting what you wanted out of. So even if the empty individualism or open individualism of us being a bunch of series of moments, we’re still getting what we want. Right?

Joe: Yeah. Yeah, the thing you want obtains. I came through reading Parfit, again had a period of depression of how austere that is. But at the end of the day, you read his theory and then at the end of the day you think, “Wait, what have I lost? I still have everything that I always thought I had in existence. I still exist now.” I retreat to the Cartesianism of—Descartes—of the one thing I can’t doubt is that I exist right now. I didn’t lose that. I also didn’t lose the fact that, to me, I still existed when I was five. I have memories when I was five. I existed then. I haven’t lost anything. And again, this is how empty individualism and open individualism are basically two ways of looking at the same set of facts. They’re not really in conflict, they’re just a matter of interpretation. 

Oh, one thing I wanted to say is that Kolak’s argument for open individualism, Parfit read the manuscript, and provided a bunch of comments on it. I don’t know what those comments were—

Zach: They’d be cool to see.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. Maybe Parfit thought the same thing. He didn’t tell Kolak to change the whole book, it’s garbage, you know? So maybe Parfit thought the same thing. Like, this is a different way of looking at the same thing that I argue for. I always wonder if Parfit accepted the label empty individualist for himself, or if he just kind of like…

Zach: Mmmm. Like so many of these philosophical things, it’s like life in general, it’s so easy to take the same idea and look at it very depressingly or look at it positively. I feel like that’s true for so many ideas in general, and it’s like in this case, it definitely seems to be the case where it’s like, yeah, you could use it to be an extremely depressing stark view of the world. But as you argue in your book, everything is still there that we want there to be there in terms of our sense of self seeming to continue over time and us having memories and seeming to be a person. So… Oh, go ahead.

Joe: This thing you talked about of being… I learned it from part three of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit’s book, which, by the way, anybody can read, I think. It doesn’t require any prior philosophical knowledge. You don’t even have to read the first two parts of the book, which are about ethics, I think. I’ve never read them. Part three, anybody can read that if you’ve read any kind of popular science or something. Anyway, what I want to say is I found that idea that you mentioned earlier about becoming a new person every minute or every second or whatever. I found that in Parfit, and that’s one of the arguments that made me—

Zach: The series person. Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, the series person. That’s one of the arguments that lessened my ability to believe in the soul—kind of dropped my credence for belief in the soul. Because if you think about it all happening once every day when you go to sleep, you might be scared. By the way, did you read chapter five of my book? It’s not included in the main manuscript; it’s an addition. It’s okay if you didn’t. It’s fine.

Zach: I may have, I can’t remember.

Joe: Okay. It’s a separate document.

Zach: I think I might have read that. Yeah.

Joe: Okay, I just reread it. I hadn’t read it in years. I just reread it and didn’t even remember—a great example of this—I didn’t remember writing it. I didn’t remember having these thoughts, and I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, this makes sense.” So if your body’s going to be disillusioned… Disillusioned? Dissolved. No, that’s macabre.

Zach: Destroyed.

Joe: Yeah, destroyed in your sleep and a brand new body that’s the exact same mental content and exactly the same is going to wake up in the morning… You know, you think, “Well, if this body is destroyed, I’m going to die, and it’ll be a different person in the morning,” then you think, “Well, boy, that might be really scary.” But then if you crank the time span down to, what if that’s what happens every second? Or what if me and you—this is back to the thought about my brother, why am I me and not him—what if our empty self—empty self, by the way, is just the raw point of view, not including content like the content of your mind. We have pretty good evidence that the entire content of our minds are physically embodied in our brains. But we still have this idea of an empty self. And so what if our empty selves just swapped every second, would you notice that? If you think it will happen every hour, you might think, “Oh, I’d notice that. I’m going to be over there for that hour. I’m going to be over there where you are for that hour, and you’re going to be over here. And then in another hour, I’m going to come back over here. I’m going to have all to have all the content of your mind. I’m going to think I’m you at that moment. And then when I come back here, I’m going to think I’m me, but I’m going to be here and not there.” But then you think about what if that happened every second, or every 10th of a second, or every microsecond, you would just experience being this human being at that point. If it’s changing that often. And then you realize, “Well…” Yeah. So, what have you lost if you think about… It’s what you were talking about with Parfit: what have you really lost when you accept everything? You still have everything you thought you had in the first place.

Zach: Yeah, I did read that section of your book. Actually, I had pasted a part of that section into something as a good explanation. But I was going to say when I was talking about the fears I had where I was laying awake at 3:00 in the morning, imagining myself flashing in and out of existence every moment and a new self being created, I came to see that when I’m reading more about open individualism and your work too. I came to see that as, “Well, it’s kind of ridiculous to imagine all of these different selves waiting in the wings to be created and a new self coming into existence every moment.” Open individualism makes more sense there because it’s like, well, it’s much more efficient explanation to just have them all be the same self coming into existence. Right? And if that’s true for me in that scenario, then that would be the same self coming into existence for other people. That made a lot more sense of my fears and it put my fears in context of like… Well, a), I always thought your point was true: Regardless of all these fears, everything still attains for me. I still perceive myself as a persistent being over time, I still have these memories, etc, etc. So, worrying too much about it is kind of… No matter what the truth is, too much worry is unproductive. Open individualism did make a lot of sense to me because when it came to the efficiency of just imagining all this string of new selves coming into being is kind of silly when you think about it. It’s related to your points in your work of imagining, like, “Oh, if the sperm had slightly connected in a different way, a new self would have come into being. Where are all these selves coming from?”

Joe: Where are all these selves coming from, yeah.

Zach: Where’s this repository? Some people would be like, “Well, those are the souls waiting to come into existence.” But leaving aside those kind of views, yeah.

Joe: My ultimate knockdown argument, for myself, against… why I couldn’t believe in the soul anymore—this was a big part of it, this series-person thing that’s like, what are all these souls coming into existence? And what difference would it make? But the thing for me was I had this thought—and I’ve told this to people several times over the years, I don’t know if anybody’s ever understood what I’m trying to say, but I still think it’s a good thought—it’s like, if you can imagine God creating souls, and he’s going to create you, he’s going to create Joe Kern, he’s going to create me… What could he be thinking about in order to create a soul that is me rather than someone else? If you take out all the characteristics of me, you know, the genes, the whatever, the content of my mind—

Zach: Just the sense of self.

Joe: Yeah. From an objective standpoint, to somebody outside, what could he think about to create the self that was just me and nobody else? You know? That’s my…

Zach: Yeah, what would it be? There’s nothing distinguishing. It’s just the feeling of ‘I am here.’ Yeah, right.

Joe: And when you talk about an infinite number of possible selves coming into existence, it brings that thought out starkly. There’s no end to the number of ‘I’s. If you believe the closed individualist idea that we’re each separate selves that come into existence and then cease to exist, then there’s no end to the number of those that could be created.

Zach: I think another common objection for people that are new to these ideas and haven’t looked into it much, a common objection to this is basically “you guys are overthinking it. Every creature that comes into existence will necessarily have their own subjective sense of ‘I’, their own sense of self.” I think that’s the most common objection. And I see that when it comes to the vertiginous question threads online, people are like, “You guys don’t get it. There’s no mystery. When there’s an entity that comes into being, it has its own sense of self, and there’s nothing mysterious about it.” I have my own thought and I can tell it, but I’m curious if you want to give a thought about that.

Joe: Yeah, I think that’s the most cogent criticism of my idea of open individualism, and it’s the one I’ve wrestled with the most, kind of led me to a lot of the more in-the-weeds arguments that I’ve made. Chapter three of the book would be that section. I come back to using that idea of, if you had been raised in South Korea, would you be there now? I can’t really reconstruct my argument off the top of my head, but every time I reread it, I become reconvinced. So I think it must be good. [chuckles] Have you seen the TV show Severance?

Zach: Yeah.

Joe: Okay, love that show. Just watched it for the first time two months ago and it’s got me rethinking my whole theory more than anything has in a long time. I still believe my conclusions, but it’s got me rethinking it. And I’ve written some blog posts about my reactions to the show Severance. Anybody who’s seen Severance can read those blog posts, and it’s probably the best introduction I’ve written to the way I think about these issues. 

Zach: I read some of that, yeah.

Joe: If you haven’t seen Severance, you can read them, but I don’t recommend it because I love the show so much and I don’t want to spoil any of it. So just watch the first three episodes of Severance and then you can read the blog post. But yeah, Severance got me thinking about this. This isn’t going to necessarily be a very coherent thought, but just… Derek Parfit talks about what it takes for a person to continue to exist. And this is what the entire study of personal identity is about: what it takes for a person to continue to exist. And this idea that anytime matter forms into the right form, then there’s consciousness. And so there’s consciousness here, there’s consciousness here, and then the only reason that those two consciousnesses think they’re the same person is because there’s a string of memories from one to the other. I think that’s the empty individualism. That’s what Parfit argues for. That’s the empty individualist idea. That’s the most austere, “Those are just the facts. There’s nothing else.” And I think that’s true. Those are the facts. There is nothing else. It’s just memory.

I was rereading Dennett [Consciousness Explained] this past year, and I don’t understand his argument for the pure physicalist explanation of consciousness, but I think he’s right that it is, but I don’t understand exactly why he thinks it is. But I think a big part of his argument is that consciousness is a memory of things that the animal has already done. There’s those studies, like, you think you’re making a choice but actually the choice was made, and then by the time you think you’ve made it, the body already made the choice. And the choice doesn’t become conscious until microseconds later or whatever. That’s like all of consciousness. There’s all this stimulus coming in and it’s all being entered into your nervous system, but you’re only aware of one bit of it at a time, and it’s really external factors or your own mind that triggers you of which part to be aware of. It’s a bit of a tangent. [Chuckles] Consciousness… What was I talking about?

Zach: Well, we started out by saying the objection that, “Hey, you guys are overthinking it.”

Joe: Okay. So, the entire study of personal identity is about what it takes for someone to be the same person through time, right? But nobody ever—

Zach: Yeah, being that persists over time. That’s the normal view of self.

Joe: And nobody else has ever talked about the origins. What I obsess about. I understand it’s a strange thing to be obsessed about for a lifetime, sperm and eggs, but that’s what the belief is, and so that’s what I talk about; the sperm and the ovum joining the origins, what makes a person come into existence in the first place? And I think Parfit walks back a bit on what he concludes in part three, and when he talks in part four about origins. He even says, you know… His phrasing is much better, much more eloquent, much more careful, but basically, that you must believe you would not exist if that sperm and ovum hadn’t joined. Even in a footnote, he says there’s lots of questions we can have about identity through time, but surely no one questions this fact that you wouldn’t exist unless the sperm and ovum joined.

Zach: Open individualism was too much of a crazy thing for him to think of.

Joe: And so to answer, it’s not really a direct answer to that objection that yes, every—I call it the everyone is someone viewpoint—every conscious being is going to be someone. It’s going to have that sense of self. That’s just a basic, easy fact to see. But it doesn’t answer the counterfactual questions of like, “If the world had gone differently, in what situations do I place myself there? Am I there? And in what situations am I not there? What situations do I exist? What situations do I not exist? It’s kind of a roundabout argument against that, but that’s the thought that I return to every time.

Zach: Yeah, I think so many of the objections that people instinctually have are basically manifestations about the normal view… They represent the normal view that we are these things, these beings that have a beginning and an end and then persist over time. So somebody who says something like, “Well, it’s very simple. When a creature comes into existence, it has a point of view. It has a sense of self.” But they don’t realize that that’s just a manifestation of the view that it’s very simple in the sense that there’s this persistent being over time. Because, like you say, you and me or open individualists are not denying that a creature has to have a sense of self, right? An entity has a sense of self. But when you actually dig into the complexity of it and think about it, there’s not the idea that it’s this persistent creature over time. This being over time is what we’re talking about. It’s what we’re debating. And so the objection that an entity has to have a sense of self and it’s very simple, it’s not really solving anything. It’s saying what we also believe. But they believe it’s a good objection because I think they’re seeing it under the hood. It’s like there’s this persistent being over time. So I think their objection is actually representing something under the hood that they’re not even realizing that their objection contains, which is the normal view of closed individualism. Because you and I or anybody espousing these views wouldn’t deny that a creature that comes into existence almost certainly has to have a feeling of ‘I’. We’re not denying that. We’re trying to get at what is that feeling of ‘I’ that is there, right? That’s hard to talk about, but hopefully—

Joe: Yeah, a lot of this is hard to talk about.

Zach: Oh, it’s all extremely hard to talk about. Yeah.

Joe: And I think… What are we? We’re about an hour in now, and I think the whole concept we’re talking about is the empty self idea, right? And we’ve never even talked about what that is. Some people have no idea what that is. Some people are going to kind of have an intuitive idea of it, which is how I came at it. In the first chapter of what I wrote, the perfect doppelgänger thought experiment is this idea of being replaced by an exact copy of me, but that isn’t me. So you can imagine someone sitting next to you right now that is genetically identical to you and as similar as possible to you, but it’s a different person. If you die, you’re gone. That person keeps existing. If they die, you stay here, that person ceases to exist. Their subjective self ceases to exist. And then you can imagine like, okay, so then just make yourself disappear. You never existed. And that person is exactly in your place, atom-for-atom, exactly moving through the universe exactly as you have your entire life and has lived your exact same life the exact same way you have, but is not you. You never existed. That’s how I isolate the idea of the empty self. At first, I framed it as this is what I mean when I say ‘I exist.’ It’s like the thing that exists in this universe but doesn’t exist in the other universe where he replaces me is what I mean when I say ‘I exist.’ If we can, just for the sake of argument, say that everything is atom-for-atom identical in that other universe as in this one, then that’s what I mean when I say ‘I exist.’ And I use that just to talk about what I mean when I’m talking about my existence, to avoid confusion.

Zach: Because there is a lot of confusion. I really like your explanation of drawing out the important distinction between the ‘I’, the feeling of existing, and the traits that we have as humans.

Joe: Yeah, the content.

Zach: The content. Right. Because, like you say, even very smart people… like you start out with Dawkins. And I agree with you, it’s like he seemed to be conflating the two in ways that just don’t make sense, but that represents the normal view that most people have of conflating those kind of ideas.

Joe: Yeah, the empty self and content is how I describe it. The two things people think they’re talking about when they say ‘I exist.’ For the Dawkins quote, it’s from Unweaving the Rainbow, the very first part. He states, more eloquently than anybody, this idea that you wouldn’t exist but for the existence of these gametes joining—the sperm and egg joining. I’ve got to say, it’s the only point I’ve ever disagreed with Dawkins on before, was that one. But I think he states this common belief very eloquently, and that’s the belief that I think is wrong.

Zach: It really gets into this instinctual feeling that it’s such a natural thing to think, because I think we all instinctually know it’s very strange for us to be here. By which I mean it’s very strange for me to be experiencing this. We all sense that instinctually, and so we look for reasons why that strangeness must exist, and we say, “Oh, it must have been the chance encounters of all these things that happened.” Right? It’s understandable why Dawkins and so many people, that that’s the instinctual view. Because we’re looking for an explanation of like, we know that it’s weird for us to to be here. So we’re like, “Oh, it must have been all this…” But getting back to your ideas, it’s like once you start examining, it’s like, “So you’re telling me that everything in the entire universe had to precisely align, and the egg and the sperm had… And all my ancestors had to do all this stuff, and all these things had to line up, and the correct egg and sperm had to meet in exactly the right way for, as you say the empty self, or the feeling of ‘I’ to exist.” When you start examining that idea, it kind of breaks down, which gets you more into the open individualism way of seeing things.

Joe: Yeah, that’s a good summary. That’s good.

Zach: I was going to see what you thought of this. Another way I was thinking of it the other day to try to explain it to someone, I would say, “Another way to see this is I am no more myself in the next moment than I am you in the next moment.” That gets into maybe what you were saying about, it’s hard to imagine ourselves being the same sense of self across the board at the same time. But that’s a way I was thinking of explaining it, where if we were all series people, in a way, it’s like it helps explain how we could all be this communal kind of manifestation of the empty self or the ‘I’ feeling.

Joe: I think it’s similar to a thought I had early on. As I was in the middle of arguing myself into open individualism, I think I had a similar thought. There’s nothing more I can articulate about it than what you said. This is kind of what Parfit does, too, when he talks about if we loosen the connections between myself now and Joe Kern in the past or Joe Kern in the future, if we loosen those connections, then it also takes down the barriers between me and other people. 

Zach: Right.

Joe: And Parfit almost ends with the open individualism conclusion at the end of part three when he talks about—this is one of the most famous passages of that section of the book—about how he used to envision himself as in a tunnel on a journey that was just going to end. And now the walls of that tunnel have fallen away and things are more… When I first read that before I ever thought of open individualism, this was four years before I even thought such an idea was possible, it confused me a bit because it seemed like he had just argued this really—

Zach: Nihilistic view.

Joe: Nihilistic, dismal view about… There’s a better word I’m thinking of, but yeah. 

Zach: Dark.

Joe: The dark view that we are nothing at all. And then he ends with this. Again, I took him at his word that this is how he felt, because I had tremendous respect for him after reading the entire part three. So I took him at his word that this is how he felt, but I had to think a long time about why would you feel that way? After everything you just argued about the self and personal identity and existence, why would that argument make you feel more open to the world and other people and everything? I think I understand it now. I don’t think I can articulate it at all, but I think I understand it.

Zach: Yeah, it gets into the relationship of the so-called empty individualism and the open individualism. Because, yeah, I think he probably did see many of the things we’re talking about. He was just coming at it from a different angle that sounded kind of depressing the way he explained it. But I think he did… If I had to guess, I think he did see many of these points that we’re talking about. It’s like the glass half full, glass half empty kind of thing.

Joe: We’ve got to get Daniel Kolak to release his Derek Parfit notes. I’d love to read them.

Zach: When the world eventually embraces open individualism, that’ll be some of the founding mythology or documents of… [chuckles]

Joe: Yeah, I agree. To be clear, I mean the notes Derek Parfit wrote about Kolak’s manuscript.

Zach: Right, yeah, Kolak’s book. Yeah, totally. That would be really interesting to see. Yeah, that would be foundational. 

Maybe I can pivot over to one of the reasons I’ve always found these kinds of ideas—I’ve been drawn to them, and I would include in there ideas about doubting free will and going down those rabbit holes—I think it’s just because I’ve always had this instinctual, I don’t know, maybe call it low self-esteem in the sense that I see myself as… I think it’s tempting to reach for kind of egotistical ideas of what we are as people, and that we are some persistent entity that has a beginning and end. That we’re this consistent thing. I’ve always been drawn to the views or the ideas where I’m just an unfolding of some processes. I’m just a cog in some machine that I don’t understand. I’m an unfolding of physical or other processes that I don’t understand. So I think I’ve always been drawn to these things because I didn’t think—

Joe: When you say drawn, they’re comforting or depressing?

Zach: No. Well, neither maybe. Maybe depressing. I’ve always struggled with depression and anxiety so I might be drawn to them for a low self-esteem reason. But however I come to them, they make sense to me because I can’t help but see that we tend to overemphasize our amount of control in the world. Like our specialness. We have a tendency to think that we’re special, that we are in control of things, you know? So I’ve always been interested in these things that knock holes in that because it’s like getting back to the… What is it? The Copernicus thing of we would assume that the sun’s orbiting us and it doesn’t come naturally to us too. We tend to think that we’re the center of the world. 

So just to say, I think a lot of these ideas. They can be very counterintuitive, but they can contain a lot of logic and power when you look at them. And then when you start examining them more, they’re not nearly as depressing as they seem at first. 

For example, I would say that about free will too. I think a lot of people are disheartened by the idea that we might not have free will, and I actually think there’s a lot of magic even in that idea, because that means if I don’t have free will, I’m still here experiencing all these things, which is an amazing thing even if I don’t have free will. That means I’m animated by something that is beyond me, right? That’s an amazing idea, too. So just to say, I think a lot of these ideas go against our instincts, but they can be very interesting and non-depressing and even positive to examine.

Joe: Have you ever heard… I think it was Wittgenstein that said it. I don’t know that much about the history of philosophy, but this is just a quote that anybody could have heard. I know it as well as  anybody. It was that people used to think that the Sun orbited the Earth because that’s what it looks like, but they never asked the question, “What would it look like to us if the Earth orbited the Sun?”

Zach: Thinking about how it can manifest the same ways.

Joe: Yeah. Our first impression of how things are, that’s what it looks like. But then you think about what other version of reality would look exactly the same to us from our perspective? I guess that’s the point. 

Okay, so you’re talking about accepting lack of free will, for example. My whole life has been a series of coming to accept things about the universe and myself that I didn’t want to. Number one was Dawkins selfish gene theory.” Number two was Parfit, his tearing down of self, identity, the soul. Number three was eventually the soul, which I think Dennett and a lot of other philosophers really helped. And then the whole thing about the Earth orbiting the Sun, that had already happened before me so I’d already grew up accepting that. But you can see how if you grew up thinking that the Earth was the center of the universe, it can make you depressed. It really messes up your view of your place in the universe and can make you really depressed. And so in my lifetime, I’ve gone through these steps: the selfish gene theory, lack of a soul, and I came through on the other side. Oh, and then lack of free will, that was another big one for me. That can be depressing. I just find that every existential thing that comes up to me like that that makes me really depressed for a short period or a long period, eventually, I just come to accept it from one way or another. Open individualism I came up with in order to deal with the lack of a soul. That’s the only one I ever solved. All the other ones, I just accepted. Lack of free will, I just accepted. And I thought I’d come to all of them. I thought I’d come to every single, “What new fact about reality is going to disturb me next?” I thought I had ended that. I’m like, “Great. I understand reality now and I feel pretty good about it, so life is all right.” And then recently, I finally—

Zach: Oh no. You stumbled across something—

Joe: Another one. I finally became convinced that the quantum multiverse is the correct view of quantum mechanics.

Zach: Oh! I’ve believed that for a long time. We have that in common.

Joe: Did that ever depress you?

Zach: No, no more than the free will. But we should talk about that another time. Maybe we’ll continue that offline. [chuckles]

Joe: Yeah I’ll just tell you real quick my reaction. Yeah, so I read David Deutsch’s first book, Fabric of Reality. Beginning of Infinity is more famous, I like Fabric of Reality better. And I was basically convinced by his argument for about twenty to thirty perc… I was convinced of his argument, but I didn’t feel like I had to think about it too hard. And then I started listening to Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast. He’s a big multiverse, Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics guy. After about two straight years listening to him, it just hit me one day. It’s like, “All right, Joe, you can’t ignore this anymore. The quantum multiverse is probably true.” And it just made me so anxious and depressed for a while.

Zach: Oh, we should talk about that.

Joe: I was just thinking about, I don’t know why, but my grandmother came into my mind. My father’s mother. My grandfather passed away in the mid-2000s, and I got to know my grandmother after he passed away. My grandfather was a preacher. Everybody said I’m so much like him my whole life so I always just focused on my grandfather. Maybe it’s kind of like, you know, male-male female-female thing might do it. But then I got to know my grandmother, and I don’t know why, but I just had this thought about—and I really enjoyed my time with her, she’s just an amazing person—I just had this thought like, “So, all that time we’re spending together,” and this could be with anybody you’re thinking about, “it wasn’t just a persistent ‘us’ spending time together, it’s like we branched a thousand times every second. And so I felt like I lost my garden. There’s a lot of different ways there can be multiverses in physics, you know? There can be infinite space. An infinite number of copies of this world exists in infinite space, infinite time, whatever. At least in those cases, I’m still here now, and this is all there is. And I have my garden that I can tend to. And I can make this space as good as I can for myself and for everybody. But the quantum multiverse, if even this space is splitting millions of times or thousands of times every second and I have no access to any other of my selves or any of your other selves, then I’ve lost the garden to tend to, and it’s like, “Well, what’s the point of caring about anything now? I can’t even tend to my own garden.” But somehow…

Zach: I think you’ll get over that.

Joe: I did. Yeah, I did. I had to take a vacation right away. Timing worked out. I went on vacation. “I can’t sit at home and think about this anymore.” And then I finally just kind of accepted it. I still don’t like it. I still hope it’s not true, but I just kind of accepted it. “All right, that’s what reality is…”

Zach: Yeah, we’ll talk more about that later. I was going to end on something… Oh, I wanted to say we should end on the idea that… If anyone’s still listening, they might think these are all very convoluted, complex ideas. Another simple solution to these mysteries is the one that maybe we do have souls. Maybe there is something special to us. Or maybe there’s some mysterious process by which we are these consistent beings over time. I just want to throw in that, like, even though I talk about this and I talk about free will on the podcast, it’s not that I’m certain of all these ideas I talk about. It’s more like, I think when it comes to logically thinking through things, these are valid theories about how things are. But at the end of the day, I find existence so mysterious and strange that even if I found out that there was a God and a soul, it wouldn’t surprise me that much because I do find all this stuff so astoundingly strange. I just wanted to throw that in. I wanted to throw that in there because I think a lot of times when people talk about these kinds of ideas, people think, “Oh, this guy’s a hundred percent believer in this.” I don’t a hundred percent believe in anything. These are ideas that I find really compelling from a logical perspective. But I just want to throw that in there and get your take.

Joe: It’s epistemic humility. That’s something I try to have about everything, and I have it about this. I feel pretty strongly atheistic. I’m pretty strongly an atheist now, and that was after reading The Selfish Gene, which I read before Dawkins had published The God Delusion. So I didn’t become an atheist because of his arguments against religion, it was The Selfish Gene. I’m pretty strongly atheist, I told you I don’t believe in souls or spirits. I have my reasons for that and I mentioned some of them here. But I want to say that open individualism as a whole, some people who argue for it, Arnold Zuboff in particular, is not anti-soul, as far as I understand his view. I have another friend that I speak with a lot, Mineta Jurášková, also goes by Edralis online, she also says she still believes that souls are possible. But they still believe this universal self idea of open individualism. They just think that it’s not necessarily purely materialistic theory. My version of it is, but it isn’t necessarily. Another thing I should say about Zuboff is that he uses his own word for it “universalism.” He doesn’t use the word “open individualism,” that’s Daniel Kolak’s word. But Zuboff and Kolak are both professional philosophers who have published peer-reviewed work on this idea of universalism in Zuboff’s case and open individualism in Kolak’s case.

Zach: Yeah, I was going to put that in the intro, there’s some real heavyweights… Just to convince people, like, “Hey, it’s not just you and me. It’s some other very smart people who have gotten peer-reviewed things out there. Yeah. I’m just curious if you somehow found out that there was a higher power and there were souls, how shocked would you be on a scale of one to ten? [chuckles]

Joe: How shocked would I be?

Zach: Would it be… How atheistic are you?

Joe: I haven’t thought of that. Actually, I don’t know, maybe not so shocked.

Zach: Because you’ve got humility.

Joe: It depends on how recently I read Richard Dawkins. If I’ve just read Richard Dawkins, I might be really shocked, because I find that guy really compelling and convincing. But in the end, I still find… So, I was a Christian, and I’m still nostalgic for those times sometimes, and I still find that comforting, those beliefs. The community was comforting, for sure. I still find the beliefs comforting. So I still think, actually, that would be nice if that was true. I don’t know. I can’t really answer how shocked I would be. Maybe I would be really shocked, but I think I’m kind of open to…

Zach: Yeah, you have the epistemic humility.

Joe: Yeah, epistemic humility. Because I keep discovering new things that I’m either forced to believe or that I am happy to believe, but new beliefs as I go along, it keeps me thinking, “Well, there still must be a lot that I don’t know, and there may be some reasons around the corner that jump out at me to make me believe something different than I believe right now.”

Zach: Well, I think you’re a lot like me because I’ve spent a lot of sleepless nights just laying in bed in the middle of the night thinking through things that really bother me, like, what happens at the edges of the universe? You know, these kinds of ideas that things are you’re never going to get an answer for.

Joe: I remember me and my brother talking about that when I was like six. Like, time. When did time start? What happened before the start of time? What happens on the other side of the edge of the universe?

Zach: Yeah, I think we have that in common. We like to make ourselves uncomfortable.

Joe: Yeah. Do you still experience depression around those big existential kind of questions, or is that something you’ve kind of…

Zach: Interestingly, I think it’s lessened. I still have anxiety and issues about various things, but the big question things, I think, have lessened. And I think that’s related to thinking through some of these things and also reading existential psychology books. My favorite book I recommend to people is Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom. It’s my favorite book. So I think as time’s gone on, I’ve been less stressed by these big questions. I’m more stressed by more mundane everyday things.

Joe: Yeah, me too.

Zach: Yeah. I think it’s gotten better. How about you? You’ve mainly found peace with it.

Joe: Yeah. Like I said, everything that comes at me, eventually, I find a way to accept it. I didn’t think I was going to ever get comfortable with this quantum multiverse thing, but now I don’t think about it that much anymore.

Zach: Maybe that’s a future episode, and we can talk about that, the psychological implications of dealing with the multiverse.

Joe: Yeah. [chuckles]

Zach: Well, I really appreciate it, Joe. Thanks for taking the time.

Joe: It’s been a blast. I’ve really loved this. Thank you.

The documentary “Bad Vegan” was about Sarma Melngailis’s nightmarish journey from successful New York City restaurant owner to Rikers inmate jailed for stealing millions. How did this happen? Sarma was the victim of a narcissistic con man named Anthony Strangis, who manipulated her into believing (or semi-believing) a number of wild, delusional ideas (like that he might be a non-human being with immense, other-worldly powers). He used this strange hold over her to persuade her to give him large amounts of money (much of which he blew at casinos).

I talk to Sarma about her experiences. We talk about: what led to her being so emotionally vulnerable that someone like Strangis could manipulate her; the factors that can lead someone to believe things that most people see as clearly ridiculous lies; why she dislikes the “Bad Vegan” documentary maker for his editing choices; the huge emotional challenge of trying to rebuild and stay positive after such nightmarish, debilitating events; her new book “The Girl With the Duck Tattoo.”

Episode links:

• YouTube (includes video)
• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify

TRANSCRIPT

(Transcripts are automatic and will contain errors!)

Sarma Melngailis: “Once he got money out of me, which initially was, oh, let me just borrow this money for this crazy emergency, I’ll pay you right back. Once he got that initial chunk of money out of me, then he is got a hook in me. Right. Because I’m always gonna want it back.

So I, I had resolved, I’m not gonna see this guy again. Like he, this is not right. Something’s, you know, not right. He was able to get back in because he’d say, oh, I’m gonna bring you that money back. I got it and cash, I’m gonna –

Zach Elwood: It creates a tie to him.

Sarma: Right. And then he would do his mind sorcery on me and somehow he would maybe give me back some money, but then he’d get more money out of me. And then I’m in deeper and then you’re in deeper. And then it becomes, you know, they get you in a situation, you’re more and more and more compromised and the loss is bigger and bigger and bigger.

“There are people who, if you let them into your life, are capable of targeted and elaborately thought-out cruelty — the kind we’d like to think happens only in psychological horror films. These people are real, and they are out there in droves. They will study you, figure out your worst-case scenario, and turn it into a plan for a nightmare specifically tailored to you. They will then go to great lengths to make this nightmare your reality.
In the end, it will often appear to have been your fault. The wreckage will be yours alone to repair, while they slip away to find their next target.”

That was from the introduction of The Girl with the Duck Tattoo, a memoir by Sarma Melngailis. You may be familiar with her story, because it was the subject of a popular documentary titled Bad Vegan.

Here’s my copy of the book (if you’re watching this on Youtube, you can see it anyway). I recently moved to New York City so I was able to meet up with Sarma and get a signed copy. She wrote to me “To Zach, with you in exposing con artists, scammers, sociopaths.” I appreciate that, Sarma.

If you didn’t see the Bad Vegan movie or otherwise don’t know Sarma’s story, I’ll read from a Netflix article Olivia Harrison that summarized the quite wild and weird events the movie covered:

“The new docuseries “Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.” tells the story of Melngailis and the rise and fall of her raw food restaurant, NYC’s Pure Food and Wine. A big part of the narrative is the relationship Melngailis had with Anthony Strangis, a man she met online who told her that he could, among other things, make her precious pup, Leon, immortal.
In the series, Sarma recounts that when she first met Strangis, he quickly recognized how special Leon was to her and realized he could use this attachment to his advantage. Sarma says that this meant that Strangis gradually convinced her that he was not, in fact, a human, but rather existed in an eternal, ethereal realm that could eventually become their shared “happily ever after,” and that Leon could come, too.
According to Sarma’s journal entries from that time, Strangis didn’t just promise immortality to Leon, he also promised her a stake in the power, influence and wealth he had gained as a result of passing all the tests he took to become a higher being. All Sarma needed to do in order to share in the bounty was wire him money to prove her loyalty both to him and the others — “the family” — who could turn Leon immortal.
The kind of intense, psychologically damaging relationship that Melngailis and Strangis had can lead people to believe things that sound, frankly, unbelievable. According to Sarma, this means that she believed her life — and Leon’s — would be in danger if she didn’t send Strangis money. If Sarma didn’t prove herself to Strangis, she stood to lose everything. If she did? She would ascend to what Strangis promised was her fated role as queen, where she’d be accompanied by her beloved dog, forever by her side. Although all this might sound like the most transparent lie in the world to many of us (no matter how much we want our pets to live for decades and decades), in the words of Seinfeld’s George Costanza, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
End quote

Sarma’s story ended with her being arrested, wracking up millions in debt, her restaurant closing, and her being sued by investors. Her mother was also exploited by Anthony Strangis; her mother ended up having sent $400,000 to Strangis before it was all over.

There was also a big media sensation, which was amplified by the fact that Strangis and her were arrested due to him ordering a pizza. A lot of the media buzz was about a vegan being caught by ordering a non-vegan pizza. But this was false clickbait; Sarma hadn’t ordered or eaten the pizza. Strangis and her were staying in separate rooms and ordered food separately. This is just to say that many people, in the media and just in the general public, reacted in rather mean, unfeeling ways about the story; that is something we will talk about.

Personally, I think it’s quite clear that Sarma was manipulated and going through some very tough times emotionally at that time, which made her vulnerable to exploitation. One point that makes that pretty clear is that she got absolutely nothing out of the money that was stolen; she attained no benefit, there seemed to be no end goal for her; at the end she just seemed to be emotionally burned out and tagging along with Strangis as he roamed the countryside staying in hotels. Sarma was hardly doing anything, while Anthony Strangis, aka Anthony Knight, burned through an amazing amount of money at various casinos, and buying lavish items. He was quite clearly the manipulative pathological liar, and to me, she was quite clearly the one being manipulated. I think watching the documentary makes that pretty clear, too, even as I also think the movie was quite irresponsible and unethical in some areas (something Sarma and I will talk about).

If you’re someone who feels for Sarma’s story, you could show her some support by buying her book and leaving it a review on Amazon. It’s also just a very interesting read, and I do respect Sarma for her transparency and bravery in sharing a story that many people would rather just forget and never want to talk about. I agree with her that it helps to share such things; it may help other people avoid being taken in by narcissistic abuse and toxic con men. The truth is there are a lot of twisted, toxic people around us, even as few of them rise to the extreme level of delusion and manipulation as Anthony Strangis, aka Anthony Knight.

In this interview, Sarma and I discuss: the psychological and emotional issues that led to her vulnerability; we talk about how it is that people can go down such delusional and unwell paths, even as it can seem so obvious from the outside that they are embracing completely crazy and absurd beliefs; we talk about her beef with the Bad Vegan documentary, and why she sees the director as having made some unethical choices; we talk about the difficulty of carrying on with life now now, living with the fact that she has hurt a lot of people, including people close to her, and that she owes an absurd lot of money.

Okay here’s the talk with Sarma Melngailis…

Zach: Hi Sarma. Thanks for joining me.

Sarma: Hi. Really, it’s good to be here.

Zach: Yeah. Thanks for doing this. I know, uh, like we’ve talked about, I know it’s probably hard to talk about, uh, such hard things that have happened to you, so I really appreciate you taking the time and being willing to do that and uh, yeah.

Thanks.

Sarma: Well, this feels easy ’cause I’ve been doing a lot of podcasts, um, for my book lately, but we’ve, um, we’ve spoken before and corresponded a bunch back and forth, so it feels kind of like, I mean, I do, I already know you, so this is easy and fun.

Zach: Yeah. And this is pretty, um, you know, low rent podcasts, so not much pressure, uh, to perform for my small audience.

So that must be a easier, easier feeling to

Sarma: No, I bet. I bet you have. I, I bet you have a, um, I bet you have a very smart audience, which I like. Well,

Zach: thank you th thank you for that. Um, okay, so yeah, maybe we could start with, uh, how we, how we got into contact. Yeah. And, um, I, [00:08:00] I could, yeah, you basically, uh, people who listen to my podcast know I’ve done some work on Chase Hughes, this guy who, um, has.

You know, as a sort of a, a guru of behavior and influence and manipulation. But, um, yeah, that’s how, that’s how you got in contact with me.

Sarma: And I, I was fascinated with Chase Hughes initially, uh, after hearing him on the diary of a CEO podcast and as, as one would logically assume that they had done vetting and whatnot.

But I, I was intrigued because, you know, as you know, there’s a lot of conversation online about how to influence people. Um, and of course without them knowing that that’s what you’re doing, that’s the whole point. And all of this behavior analysis, and I find it fascinating in the context of my own story and what happened to me, which involves this colossal manipulation, which very few people understand because they think, you know, you’re reasonably intelligent.

You went to a good school, worked on Wall Street, yada, yada, how [00:09:00] could you be, be. You know, air quotes brainwashed by some guy, or how could you have believed him? So I’m very fascinated in that whole field of, you know, mind control and mind manipulation and the tactics that are used. And I was interested in him potentially.

Being somebody to comment on a, a new docuseries that I’m working on. And so I started, uh, and actually I was about to reach out to him, but I started doing some digging and I came across your YouTube videos and then went, you know, I watched them all in their entirety. I forget you made some joke that made me like, spit out my beverage laugh.

Zach: Oh, was it the inner circle? Um, you know, his inner circle one about? I think

Sarma: so. I think, I think a butthole was involved in the joke, which of course is gonna make me laugh.

Zach: Yeah. That was a, yeah. Now I have to explain that. Now that I said it, it was, it was, it was about his inner circle of people, but it was in, it was in relation to him, uh, recommending people put, uh, melatonin suppositories, you know, [00:10:00] in their butt.

So that was right there, there was, it made sense either way. You had to be there.

Sarma: Yeah, exactly. Whatever it was, it like made me spit my beverage, which I appreciated. And, um, um, I, I just, I appreciated that you did such a deep dive and did all this really thorough work on that, because what’s fascinating about that situation is that, and this is very common, it happens with cult leaders too, where they almost tell you what they’re doing and then they’re doing the thing right to you at the same time.

Zach: Right.

Sarma: And so then you never suspect that he’s doing it to you because he is teaching you about it. Mm-hmm.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: Right. It just, it’s like, oh, it’s weird. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I, I think I recall you did, in one of those videos, you, there was some really good explanation about how people go to. You know, these sort of, um, [00:11:00] you know, when people, I, I don’t know why I’m blanking on like what the word is, these events, right?

Where these people sell tickets to events, maybe transformational,

Zach: experiential, Tony Robbins.

Sarma: Yeah. And, and that people go and they come away and they feel like their life has changed. But there’s something psychological going on where it’s very easy to sort of convince yourself that you feel changed.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: Because that’s what you would, I don’t know. Anyway, I I really appreciated all of that, um, insight. Yeah. That was the,

Zach: uh, that was the video about the NLP neurolinguistic programming element to Chase, which a lot of these people in these spaces have this NLP background, and it ties into the Tony Robbins seminars and the long multi-day seminars.

And, you know, speaking of that stuff, you know, I think the, as you and I have talked about, the, the good thing about, um, if there’s any good thing to come out of your experience, it’s, uh, being able to try to educate people about, you know, these kinds of manipulations, especially people that. May be, you know, to, to people who may be especially vulnerable and, you know, just [00:12:00] drawing more attention to this kind of like weird delusional narcissistic abuse type scenarios, which are a lot more common than people know.

You know, until you run across people, you know, until you experience or, or know people that experience these kind of things, you don’t really realize how common these kinds of things are. Right.

Sarma: And, and most people aren’t talking about it either because most people are, you know, humiliated. If, if I hadn’t been the, the subject of tabloid articles and then a whole big Netflix special, it’s not like if I met somebody at a party, I would blurt out that like, by the way, I was taken advantage of by this.

Mm-hmm. You know, big slob of a con artist and

Zach: mm-hmm. You

Sarma: know, he made me believe crazy things. Like, you wouldn’t go around saying that. It’s, it’s humiliating. And I’ve heard from, I mean, I, I’ve heard from tons and tons of women who have PhDs, even in clinical psychology, and they’ve been completely manipulated.

And I’ve heard from a lot of men too, who tragically tell me, I’ve, I’ve heard this a number of times, where they tell me that [00:13:00] you’re, you know, aside from the, the people immediately involved, he’s like, you’re the first person I’ve told. You know, they don’t

Zach: mm-hmm.

Sarma: They just don’t talk about it at all because it’s completely humiliating and probably a, a sort of a different, sort of a layer on that for men to mm-hmm.

To be, have been manipulated. Um,

Zach: yeah, I think there’s, and there’s also the, uh. People are afraid of getting sued, like way overly afraid of getting sued too. So I also feel like there’s this element of people being afraid to talk about their experiences for that reason. They’re like, oh, that, you know, which is a, which is a legitimate fear.

’cause some of the same kind of narcissistic people will like do litigation abuse, you know, even at a, even at a self-destructive level where you’re like, you know, so that is a legitimate fear. But I, I think there’s multiple levels why people are, you know, afraid to talk about this stuff. So we don’t get a sense of just how common this kind of stuff is.

Yeah.

Sarma: And, and that it, it happens to very bright people who’ve usually accomplished a lot. And, um, [00:14:00] yeah, it’s, it’s more common than people realize.

Zach: Yeah. I’ve been listening to, um, this podcast, uh, out of crazy Town, about, um, basically people going through, um. Narcissistic, you know, uh, post-separation abuse, you know, post-divorce kind of abuse, and some really interesting stories on there.

Um, yeah, I was gonna say, uh, I, I was gonna switch topics and ask you about, you know, your, your, uh, your book. You just got your, your book out and wanted to say, uh oh. Yeah. And I’ve got it right here for people watching on nice video. The Girl with the, the duck tattoo. Does it, does it feel good? Oh, you have one too.

What a, what a coincidence. No, just kidding. Right? Imagine that. Um, thank, and thank you for that book, by the way. Um, and I was just gonna ask how does it feel good to be done? I, I know how, you know, daunting and, and tiring it is to get a book out there, but especially for your, you know, very personal and, um.

Hard to share things. I imagine it was even more, uh, exhausting.

Sarma: Yeah, it, it feels, I mean, it feels really good. It felt really [00:15:00] good when I, you know, finishing the draft finally. ’cause it it something that I worked on for years and somehow just going over the draft and the proofing and the copy editing and again and again was, it was grueling because the story is kind of harrowing and reliving it is gut wrenching.

Um, but I mean, the, the first half of the book is more fun. You know, I have more fun stories. There’s a chapter about, you know, getting to know Alec Baldwin. There’s chapters about opening the restaurant and growing the business that ultimately was destroyed. But, um, the first half was, was a lot more fun to write.

And, uh, you know, and the second half really takes you through what happened, I think in a very. Uh, you know, because I, I was able to recover a lot of our digital conversations as well as a journal of mine was recovered. So I incorporate a lot of that material and along the [00:16:00] way I am reflecting and analyzing throughout the book and the comment that I get most often from people that really, like, I can’t hear it enough, I love it, is people tell me all the time.

Uh, you know, like, oh, I started reading it and I can’t put it down. Oh my God, I can’t put it down. It’s, I love hearing that and mm-hmm. Also, ’cause it’s a long book, so, but it, the, the chapters are short and it moves quickly and I think it’s easy to read. ’cause I, you know, I tried to keep it moving and, um, and I, as you know, in the beginning I jumped back and forth a bit in time.

So in the opening scene, I’m throwing up a small town, Tennessee jail, having just been arrested and, you know, and then I get extradited to New York, to Rikers and then I, you know, would jump immediately back to sort of the height of the glamorous time at the restaurant and my life and knowing, meeting all these people and mm-hmm.

So I go back and forth. So it kind of keeps it keeps it moving.

Zach: Yeah. That, as somebody who recently moved to New York City, it’s been [00:17:00] interesting reading your book for that reason too. Just seeing some of the New York, you know, era, uh, area stories. I, it’s

Sarma: always fun to read a, a book about any place that you’re very familiar with.

So it’s. I enjoy, like if I give, if given two options of books, novels, or memoirs to read, I’d rather read one that takes place in New York versus one that takes place in say, Chicago, where I’ve, I’ve never spent any time.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. The, uh, the book is, is very interesting. And, um, yeah, I was gonna say, uh, oh, let’s, let’s talk about, uh, sorry, I’m jumping from topic to topic.

Sure. I wanted to ask you about, uh, your major, uh, a lot, a lot of people watching this may have seen the Bad Vegan, uh, documentary. Maybe we can touch briefly on what your major grievance with that documentary was. I know you’ve written a very good, uh, blog post. You had written a very good blog post about your grievance with the documentary, which I found very, uh, persuasive.

You know, I, I think you, you make very good points. Maybe you could talk about the, uh, the thing that really bugged you, which is like the last bit of the documentary.

Sarma: Yeah. I mean, there were a couple of the, you know, there are things along the way that what, what the [00:19:00] director did. Was a sort of evil genius on his part because he, he manipulated the story and he edited things in a way where he kind of along the way has some plausible deniability.

Um, but, you know, there were some things in the middle where the way it was edited, it makes me look not good. Um, for example, when I talk about why I ended up marrying this guy, he kind of completely cuts out the story and makes it seem as if I married him for money when there was all this other stuff that happened in between and that wasn’t it at all.

And so that sort of is another thing that would get the viewer to go, oh, she married the guy for money, you know, so that, that’s sort of setting me up. Um, but the most egregious thing was at the end where they, uh, the series, if somebody hasn’t seen it, the series starts out with me on the phone with this guy, the, the guy who was my, my tormentor.

And I’m clearly. Playing a role. Shane Fox. Yes. Or that’s Mr.

Zach: Fox as we Right. His fake [00:20:00] name. But that’s how you refer to him, his fake name. Yeah. Yeah.

Sarma: And um, and, and then it shows me hanging up the phone, and then I say to the camera that I would never normally ever record somebody without their knowledge.

Um, and I think I say, but that motherfucker fuck him like so clearly, and hopefully it’s okay that I curse, but clearly I’m doing this to try in some way just to, it’s even if it’s in the small way to get back at him in some way. Right. And get, and get

Zach: him to admit something or say something incriminating or something.

And,

Sarma: and I’m of course being a very agreeable, accommodating person. I’m also trying to help the, the, the, you know, quote, documentary get material. And so I, I offered to make, you know, I, we discussed making phone calls. I said, yes, I’ll do it. And there are other phone calls that I made that weren’t on camera, but I was using an app, which the director gave me or told me what, how to use it.

I was using an app, um. To record it and from just a regular cell phone conversation. So I had [00:21:00] I think one or two calls like that, that I’d recorded for the series as well. And at the very end of the, the series, they air a segment of one of those calls, but they do in a way that makes it look like I was caught on a hot mic.

And they air in a very deceptive context. But then on, and then on top of that they moved my words around. So, you know, if he like, basically they take apart where I might have said the like yes somewhere else when I really said no. And they moved the yes over to replace where I said no. Oh

Zach: geez.

Sarma: Um, and I mean, it was bad enough just airing a phone call like that out of context because Yeah, out of context.

Yeah. They have me laughing and they’re not sitting there, there, there’s not something underneath it saying Samra was playing a role here to get, you know, this guy Anthony Strange just to say cuckoo stuff on the phone. Yeah. They air it and then people think that after everything that happened, I’m like joking around and laughing with this guy.

Yeah, no, totally. No, it’s,

Zach: it, it [00:22:00] struck me. I mean, so often when I watch documentaries, I mean, these are the kind of reasons I basically don’t trust any media. I see like a documentary because so often there’s some, they’re trying to create some exciting narrative and you could see the motivation for them to want to end on some kind of like mysterious note of like, is she still being controlled by him?

Does she still love him? You know, they, they wanted to end on this kind of note. I felt like. At the, at the, you know, leaving aside that context is, is hugely irresponsible for, to me, you know, and I thought that even watching it at the time, because I thought, oh, why would she be talking to him? She probably was like talking to him to get information for, you know, some sort of Right.

A lot Get ’em to get ’em to admit something or, you know, that was my thought at the time. And like, but I can see how a lot of people would just be like, oh, you know, the surface level that like, she still is having pleasant conversations with ’em and that’s really irresponsible to me.

Sarma: Well, I mean, but even worse is all the people.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard variations of this, you know, I was, I was, I felt bad for you the whole time until I got to the end and realized you were [00:23:00] in on. Yeah. Which logically doesn’t even make sense, but, you know, nowadays people,

Zach: yeah,

Sarma: they’re watching it while they’re doing the dishes or they’re watching it while they’re fiddling on their iPhone and they’re not paying that close attention.

Maybe they watched the first episode a week ago, so they don’t even remember the first part. Either way, it was clearly deliberately misleading and yeah, that’s, there’s a, that’s a problem. There’s a docuseries, I think it was called The Jinx with, uh, Robert Durst, where at the end he’s caught on a hot mic.

And that, I believe, I never saw it, but I was told that, that, uh, when that documentary or docuseries came out, it, it created a huge buzz and everybody was talking about it. So it seems like this director wanted to do the same thing. Yeah. Um, really, I think, yeah, it was

Zach: Irresponsible

Sarma: Revealed himself to be, I think it was more than irresponsible.

I think, you know, I, I think there are certain types of people out there that lack empathy. And there are words for people like that. And I think he’s one of them.

Note: This is just a little note that I added after this episode went out. I wanted to point out that, despite Sarma’s strong dislike of the documentary, I will say that after watching it, I thought Sarma was clearly a victim. And I’d add that two people I watched it with thought the same thing. So I just wanted to point that out, as something in the documentary’s favor. For Sarma, of course this is a hugely serious and personal matter – how her story is depicted. And I think she makes valid points; especially about how audience members who aren’t that savvy about psychology or who are prone to snap judgments can arrive at very distorted views based on choices made by the filmmaker. So I do agree with her that the documentary should have been more careful and responsible and explicit about some things.  But because in this talk with Sarma I largely supported her in her criticism of the documentary, I wanted to add in this note that I think most people did come away thinking that Sarma was the victim. I don’t pretend to know what was in the mind of the documentary filmmaker, so I kind of regret using the word ‘unethical’ at several points in this talk, as I don’t know his side of the story, and its possible he’d be able to defend himself. Okay, back to the talk. 

Zach: I have a friend who, you know, he, he’s told me, he’s like, I don’t, I won’t even watch documentaries even anymore because there’s always some narrative and it’s so hard.

You, you basically have to go afterwards and do the research yourself to even see what happens for a lot of these documents. Yeah. It’s like, it’s like Ken

Sarma: Burns should be on some kind of, like, you need to, you, you ought to, I made the argument in the essay I wrote online that there should be a new category called Docu.

Mm-hmm.

Zach: Mm-hmm. Like, don’t

Sarma: call it a documentary. And, and maybe there needs to be somebody, like, some kind of, I don’t know. I just brought up Ken Burns. ’cause he’s like the, the original documentarian that, you know, it’s like somebody should have to go, okay, this is legit.

Zach: Yeah. They do some, some organization rating documentaries, like in

Sarma: order to be called a documentary.

Yeah. You have to qualify and you have to,

Zach: that’s a good idea for a rating. Your fact

Sarma: checking has to pan out.

Zach: Yeah. Yeah. No, I like that. There’s just so much bias in a lot of these shows. Yeah. Looking back now with the, uh, benefit of more hindsight about how you met Mr. Fox and how he was able to manipulate you [00:25:00] and worm his way into your life, what, what do you see as the major, uh, you know, clearly you were emotionally vulnerable at the time, and, and what do you see as the, as the major factors at that time to that, that led you to be so vulnerable that he, he could, you know, get it work his way into your life?

Sarma: Um, I, I think that these people tend to find their targets exactly the way that cults usually find people very often on the other side, you know, at a time of transition. So I think cults are known for very often grabbing kids off college campuses when they’re in a brand new setting. They’re on their own for the first time.

They’re, they’re maybe like, they haven’t attached themselves to any group yet, so they’re, they’re in this somewhat vulnerable state. And for me, I had. Broken up from a, a very healthy, good relationship. I certainly had a dysfunctional one before that, but I’d been in this good relationship. I was heartbroken for the first time.

[00:26:00] And, um, and just feeling overwhelmed and overworked and wanting some kind of relief. And either way, these people are very, very skilled at what they do and, uh, and, and they know how to target people and, you know, get them mm-hmm. Know what things to say, what buttons to push, and how to reel people in and get them.

Zach: Yeah. It struck me that the, you know, the, the, the isolation, the, um, you know, the, the heartbreak, the isolation, the, the loneliness. And then, I mean, correct me if, if I’m off base here, but mm-hmm. Your description of, you know, going through the thing with, um. Matthew Kenny and how stressful that was. And then also like the debt that was involved in the Yeah.

The exploitation. You had already been basically exploited, you know, hugely, already, hugely emotionally and financially by that situation. And, uh, I mean, I I, I just imagine like the [00:27:00] stress of running the businesses, the, the loneliness slash heartbreak, the fact that you had this debt and abuse pre from the previous relationship.

I mean, man, that just, that just seems like a, a recipe for being extremely vulnerable and, um, yeah, I’m, I’m, I’m curious if you agree with all that.

Sarma: Yeah, definitely. And, and I think there’s certain things about me that kind of generally exist that make me a good target, which is that I am by nature, uh.

Introverted, even though, you know, therefore being in the restaurant, having to sort of schmooze with guests and talk to lots of people and be on socially. I mean, it was fun at times, but it was also completely wiped me out in a way that I didn’t even understand at the time. Certain things about me and the way that I’m wired, that that would make me especially exhausted and [00:28:00] drained.

And it was always often very confusing to me back then because I thought, I exercise, I eat the best food. I eat so healthy. I eat so clean. I wasn’t like, I mean back then I, I drank socially, but not a lot. I don’t drink at all hardly. Basically. I don’t drink at all now, but I, you know, I’m taking the supplements, I’m doing all these things right, and yet would be really exhausted and probably had a, probably had.

Most of my life was sort of level of depression too that never really went addressed or not really diagnosed or addressed. And I think when you’re that busy and there’s that much going on, you’re not, you know, I certainly wasn’t meditating and reflecting on my life and thinking about myself and my, my own emotional vulnerabilities or triggers, or I just wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, [00:29:00] mm-hmm.

Zach: Yeah, I, I, I do think the, um, I mean my, my view of, you know, when it comes to mental struggles and. Delusions and, you know, unwell pathways we can go down. I do think, you know, the loneliness and isolation is at the root of pretty much all of that is, is my view when it comes to that.

Yeah.

Sarma: Well and and what they do once they get in, you know, once these people get to you is they deliberately isolate you from your close contact. So if you’re already have a tendency to be kind of an introvert, it’s

Zach: compounding. Yeah.

Sarma: It’s that much easier to isolate you. ’cause they’re not, you know, it’s not like I had a gaggle of girlfriends that I hung out with all the time that were all up in my business all the time.

So it was easier. And then, you know, I also wasn’t aware at the time, but I, I subsequently, I mean one of the really interesting, totally unexpected things that happened after Bad Vegan came out, you know, amidst the fire hose of half, um, [00:30:00] you know, this sort of really. Angry, brutal comments coming at me, whether they just yell, like, call, calling me stupid, or, oh my God, you’re a criminal.

You are in on it. You should be ashamed of yourself. You hurt all these people. And, and then also getting a lot of sympathy from people who did, did understand what happened. Uh, there were, there was like also amidst that there was this steady trickle of people telling me that, asking me if I’d ever been evaluated or diagnosed with autism one or Asperger’s.

And they were people telling me that they’d been, this was coming from people that had themselves been diagnosed at some point in their lives, but very often late in life. And recognizing those qualities through the docuseries or the show, I call it the show. I don’t like to call it a documentary. So recognizing those things in me and reaching out to ask me about that.

So many people said that, that I eventually did go for a very [00:31:00] extensive evaluation and then got that diagnosis, which was another factor that was useful in helping me understand how I would be more likely to, I was more easily manipulated, say than I don’t know, the next person over potentially. Mm-hmm.

Just because of that, having that type of wiring, it’s almost as if my, I just, my default setting is to take people at face value. So, you know, I just remember when I was younger and kind of throughout life, sometimes not quite getting people’s jokes or. Sarcasm, which is weird because I employ sarcasm as well as hyperbole.

Liberally, sometimes just, but sometimes not quite. Getting it when people are not, not, and being able to accurately interpret somebody’s intentions and very often getting myself into trouble. Sometimes just a bit of [00:32:00] uncomfortable, harmless trouble where I’m just too open or, you know, somebody would approach me and instead of throwing up a wall and telling somebody to fuck off and go away, I’m, I’m sort of open and nice and I’ll respond, and then maybe I get myself into a bit of trouble.

So, either way, it, it just was another factor that seems to me relevant and I think based on what I’ve learned as about that having, being somebody who would get that diagnosis. And I think a lot of people would, and it’s, you know, a spectrum. That’s why they call it being on the spectrum. But it also turns out that.

Those qualities are qualities that I admire most in other people. And I feel safest with other people who I think have those qualities because there’s a, there’s like a no bullshit thing, you know, somebody might be a little awkwardly blunt or a little bit socially awkward, but there’s no manipulation or bullshit.

You know, there’s no passive aggressiveness, there’s no something else [00:33:00] going on. Um, you know, they’re pretending to be, it’s,

Zach: yeah. Yeah. I can, it’s very

Sarma: reassuring to know that mean, that’s why I feel most comfortable around people like that.

Zach: You know, I think if you have that personality type, it’s, it’s also, you know, it, and you talk about this in your.

In your writing, uh, you know, if you’re very, if you have that personality type, it’s really hard. It puts you more at risk of being exploited because it’s just really hard for you to understand the kind of deceptive, you know, narcissistic mind that will just lie about literally everything. Right. It’s like it becomes that much harder to, uh, wrap your head around that and makes you more, more, more vulnerable a bit.

Um,

Sarma: yeah. Yeah. And, and also interestingly, I mean, it’s interesting that it happened to me with that relationship with Matthew, which I write about in the book.

Zach: That’s a wild story in itself. Yeah,

Sarma: right. I mean, what’s so interesting is at, you know, that that story is even wilder than what I was able to write in the book.

[00:34:00] I tried to cut it down and, and keep it as short as I could. It’s just a couple of short chapters. But after that happened, um, I, I felt like, I think I must have had a feeling like. People don’t get struck by lightning twice. And so it’s not gonna happen to me again. So I wasn’t, I hadn’t, there wasn’t enough written about this stuff.

I didn’t know enough about it. And now I, I really make the point to tell people that if it’s happened to you before, don’t think it’s that now, now you know, it’s not gonna happen to you again. No. You need to really stop and analyze and go forth and be extremely cautious. Extremely cautious. Because I, you know, it’s happened to me multiple times and I’ve heard from a lot of people who’ve reached out to me that it happens to them mm-hmm.

Zach: More than once.

Sarma: Mm-hmm. And sometimes in, not even, uh, like a personal, romantic relationship, but in a, in a business context business. Mm-hmm. Or, you know, it [00:35:00] could be a colleague at work or even a friend that mm-hmm.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: Takes advantage of you in a certain way.

Zach: So, yeah. The, uh, you, you touched on this briefly, but, uh, I, I wanted to talk about people’s lack of empathy for this, because I do think.

There is this element of the experiences that you’ve gone through are just really hard for pretty much almost everyone to understand because A, I think you’ve got the fact that in general, people just have a really hard time understanding mental struggles and in general, like, you know, yeah. Depression, anxiety, these kinds of things.

So people at a base level are, are generally, you know, unempathetic or lack of understanding these kinds of things. And then on, you’ve got on top of that how combining, you know, anxiety, depression with being in the orbit of somebody who’s a, you know, narcissistic abuser, uh, can really ramp up the craziness and take that to the next level.

So, and, and a lot of, you know, so you’ve got the fact that hardly, you know, most people can be [00:36:00] unempathetic or, or not understanding about the, the depression and anxiety. And then you’ve got the fact that hardly anyone has, you know, very few people have dealt with the kinds of. Abuse and manipulation that you’ve dealt with, and that that adds another level of people just really having a hard time wrapping their, their minds around how your, your mind, your mind can get warped and manipulated in ways that, you know, strike other people who aren’t having those problems or that that manipulation.

It strikes them as like, well, how couldn’t she see this? She, you know, and, and then they’re, they become very judgemental. Uh, so I just think it’s this unfortunate thing where, you know, I, I, I just think the, there’s a really huge lack of, of, of empathy and then. You add in the, the internet, you know, culture we have where people are witnessing this stuff from afar and just making snap judgements about you and about many other people, which leads to the, you know, just a, just a real lack of, uh, empathy for you and mean messages to you and these kinds of things.

And cur curious if you agree with all that. [00:37:00]

Sarma: Yeah, and I mean, another failing of, of bad vegan, I mean, the title itself was

Zach: exploitative. Yeah,

Sarma: yeah. And, and I thought that, of course, I just thought, well, first of all, I just never anticipated they would, that it was gonna be such a betrayal, like could not have imagined, but they, at my urging or I helped.

Get a, you know, the leading psychologist in this field of what’s known as Coercive Control. The man who actually wrote the book on coercive control, this Dr. Evan Stark, who sadly passed away since, but they spent a, an entire day interviewing him. They spent an entire day interviewing this other guy, um, named Hoyt Richards, who’s this really lovely person, a Princeton graduate, was a male model who was sucked into this cult for 10 years.

Totally understands my situation, I understand him. And both of those interviews I was told were really good and really useful, really compelling. And Dr. Evan Stark had said if I had [00:38:00] had any involvement in her case, she never would’ve gone to jail.

Zach: Hmm.

Sarma: And they didn’t use any of that. So there was a zero explanation of what I think is the most fascinating part of these stories.

Yeah. Is how, yeah. How does somebody who, yeah. Whatever has all these credentials and this background and is clearly not a dodo, how does somebody get manipulated like this? I find that fascinating. And they didn’t include any of that, and that’s will be much of the focus of the next docuseries that I’m working on.

I love how we can hear the thunder through my Yeah. Headphones and I can also hear it through you. So it’s like this cool thunder echo is happening. Yeah. This

Zach: is really adding, you know, adding, it’s a good vibe. Yeah. Some good vibes, some good, uh, mood to the, to the interview. Um, um, yeah. But,

Sarma: but I also, I agree it, it’s, it is similar to the way that people who’ve never experienced any struggles with depression, and I frankly, have a hard, you know, like if somebody’s told me they’ve never been depressed at all in their life, or [00:39:00] struggled or questioned reality or, you know, I, I’m like, who are you?

Zach: I have a hard time. How do you even

Sarma: relate to somebody like that? And I, I’ve written a lot of. I probably have snippets of unpublished blog posts and substack posts all over the place. And I’ve written some about depression, but not as boldly as I would want to. But I really, I feel, I really feel for people because I’ve been through a lot of it myself too.

Mm-hmm. But

Zach: it does make you more empathetic. Yeah. That’s, that’s one nice thing about the suffering. Yeah.

Sarma: And, and it’s just, it’s really agonizing and isolating because you might feel like the way that you feel is, and I might’ve written this somewhere, it feels to you like you’re walking around and there’s blood shooting out your eyeballs, and it’s that level of pain that if people knew that, that’s what you felt like they would all rush.

[00:40:00] Oh my God, how can we help you? What can we do? But they can’t see that. And so you’re walking around feeling that level of pain, but nobody sees it and they’re just ignoring it because they don’t know. And if you tried to express it, they’d be like, what? What do you mean? You know? And it’s just very, I find it very painful that it’s so hard for people to talk about.

And so often people are discouraged from expressing it because when you do, it’s seen very often as weakness. Like, oh, just, you know, get it together or get up. Right, right. Go, go do some yoga. Like get your shit together. They don’t understand, um,

Zach: yeah, what

Sarma: an impact it can have.

Zach: Um, that was, that was another, yeah, that was another big failing of the documentary, uh, unethical thing I think of like, they should have had more about how these things happen in there for sure.

Like, yeah. That, that, that really stood out.

Sarma: They, they also, um, you know, now that I know more about the process. I shouldn’t have been thrown in that interview chair for 12 [00:41:00] hours without any support, without anybody who’s informed about these types of things. Without an advocate, without somebody there.

Zach: Yeah. Um,

Sarma: and it was two interviews. They were a year apart, even though I’m back in the same dress. I can tell which part is from which interview, but both days were really long days. And the first very first interview I did, it was a 12 hour day. And it wasn’t until the end of that day that they asked me, there’s a whole really icky sexual abuse component to what happened.

And there’s a rather explicit chapter about it in the latter half of the book. And I was asked about it at the end of that 12 hour day. And of course, that’s when I break down finally and start to cry and, you know, explained and answer the questions about what happened. And I’m thinking, I was told afterwards that it was really compelling and everybody gave me hugs afterwards and.

Uh, you know, it was very, really painful to do that. [00:42:00] And so I was really surprised I was stealing myself to be embarrassed that I was ugly crying on this Netflix show. Right. I’m thinking, oh my God, I’m gonna be like ugly crying and that’s gonna be embarrassing. But then instead, when I saw it for the first time, they just cut it out completely, which cut it out as if it never happened.

And again, if they’d left that in the viewer wouldn’t have then been able to conclude, oh, she was in on it. ’cause at that point they would’ve gone, oh my God, this is horrific.

Zach: Yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good example of how one little choice can cause change the perceptions of the audience in such a big way.

Like, you know, without that, without any crying like that in the movie, you come across as cold and maybe calculating Yes, but with even a little crying, which is changes perceptions completely. Right?

Sarma: Yeah. I mean, I, I, that’s another thing that people have commented as sort of comment to this sort is, um.

You know, it’s a little bit spectrum to come across as unemotional and I, yeah. I [00:43:00] can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say, you took no, you, you expressed no remorse in that. You showed no remorse in that show. And I’m like, you have no idea how horrifically bad I feel and felt and what’s going on inside.

But just because I come across as a bit cold and

Zach: Yeah. You

Sarma: know, I’m not showing that much the, the types of emotion that people would expect. Yeah. And, and again, also it was edited, you know, I mean. Probably 20 hours of footage and he’s selectively grabbing what he wants. And there were parts where, I mean, I don’t wanna turn this into a bitch session about Chris Smith, the director, but also, you know, fuck that dude.

Too late for

Zach: that. No,

Sarma: just kidding. Yeah, exactly. No, it’s,

Zach: it’s fine. It’s fine. But,

Sarma: but I mean, it’s, people are

Zach: curious. They’ve seen the movie, they wanna hear, there’s like,

Sarma: there’s very subtle, like I give him credit for being kind of a genius because there’s parts where I can’t prove that [00:44:00] he like the, where I know he moved my words around.

I can prove, because I made the recording, I have the original, I can show that he edited what I really said and what he showed. But the interview that they recorded when I’m, you know, on camera with all the lights in the chairs, um, in the chair, uh, there’s places where, you know, he asks me a question and I say, I don’t remember or.

I’ve worked with another director who’s like, can tell you can tell when something’s edit a certain, my point is I think there’s little subtle things he did, and there are places where I say I don’t remember, which is genuine because anybody, if anybody’s been through a sort of mind bending traumatic thing where you’ve been dissociated in a state of fear and you’re not, you’re, it would be weird if you remembered everything.

Mm-hmm. Like, you’re not gonna remember stuff. You

Zach: were in a bad

Sarma: place. Yeah. So that was a very normal response to say, I don’t remember, but [00:45:00] he, it would be presented in a way that made it look like I was lying, or, or I didn’t wanna say something and then well just the,

Zach: oh, go on.

Sarma: And then there was just one part where, one part where he asks me why I fired a particular person and I don’t wanna say anything negative.

I’m not gonna reveal something. So I, in that moment I was like, um, I don’t really remember. ’cause I, I was put on this, like, I, I didn’t wanna say anything negative about somebody or reveal anything. Um, so anyway, whatever.

Zach: Right. Yeah. Then it made you look like, oh, she, she fired that person for completely unethical reasons.

’cause, or, or she, she’s feigning that she can’t remember. Yeah, she’s, yeah. Uh, that kind of thing. Yeah. Uh, just, you know, just at the base level of like the, the documentary’s name alone tells you what kind of documentary it will be. I mean, bad vegan is a very exploitative choosing of a name to me. I thought that even before watching it, because I was like, this, this name has, you know, the vegan aspect really has nothing to do with your story.

It’s just a, [00:46:00] a way to, to entice people about, there was a bad vegan, vegans are so morally superior. This was a bad vegan. But I’m sure he could, you know, he can justify it in the sense that like. He’s just choosing it to get eyeballs on it. Right. But like to me it’s, to me it’s a, it’s an, it’s another unethical choice.

Sarma: Yeah. Well I also thought, I mean, I didn’t love the title, but I thought, okay, I get it. They wanna entice people to watch it. Yeah. And my thinking was that because the tabloids had been, because the tabloids had made me look really bad.

Zach: All the pizza stuff.

Sarma: That

Zach: false pizza stuff. Yeah.

Sarma: Right, exactly. The tabloids had made me look bad that it, it, my thinking was that, and I think I was even told this, that, you know, the title is gonna be bad vegan, but of course the whole point is you’re not.

And so that’s, that’s the reveal in the story is that I’m not the bad vegan, but the tabloids portrayed me to be. And um, and you know, either way it, it’s, even when I do podcast interviews and I talk about this stuff, [00:47:00] inevitably there’s people in the comments that are like, oh, she’s good at making herself the victim.

She’s not taking your responsibility and. That’s where I just, I can’t force anybody to read my book, but if somebody wants to read my book and then make accusations or come at me for something,

Zach: yeah, I think you,

Sarma: like I can back up everything in my book. I have all the receipts for everything. I mean,

Zach: you’re, you’re, you and I are kind of like, because I think we’re both overs shares like you.

Yes. I feel like you don’t, I think you, you hold no, uh, you know, you’re, you try to be as I do believe you try to be as transparent as you can, even when it, you know, hurts the perception of you. Yeah. Which I, I really respect that. ’cause that’s something I try to do. You know, I’ve talked about my mental struggles and on this podcast, and I want it to do a episode about my, my wife leaving me, which I might get out one of these days.

But just to say I do, I respect your, um, I do sense. When you’re in your previous blog work and your book now, I do feel like you are saying, [00:48:00] trying your best to say, here’s. How it went down and even to your own detriment, you know, like you’re, you’re not, you’re not dodging responsibility, you’re just trying to understand how it happened to you.

Sarma: Yeah. And actually, what, what’s really interesting, and I is still something that I’m sort of fascinated by what the response might be from anybody who really studies this kind of thing. But I include, as I said, a lot of original dialogue between him and me that I was able to recover digitally and in so many places, I’m pushing back at him and insulting him.

And that at least is a part that I think provides some little bits of comic relief for people. ’cause people will tell me that they’re reading it and they’re really stressed out, and then I’ll lob some ridiculous insults back at him. But my point is that a, a friend of mine said, you know, I’m not sure you wanna include all this stuff where you’re, you’re pushing back on him so hard because it doesn’t really make sense.

You know it.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: It’s hard to reconcile how you were manipulated when you’re calling him. [00:49:00] You know, a liar. And I had to qualify too, like it’s somewhere. I was like, I don’t, I have enormous amounts of sympathy for people who are challenged with their weight. I’ve never found it easy to remain the weight that I am.

And so I have enormous amounts of sympathy for that. But because this guy, while I was with him, gained so much weight and made it seem like he was doing it on purpose for this bizarre series of tests he was putting through the meat suit.

Zach: Yeah.

Sarma: That so many of my insults are like calling him a fat fuck.

And some of them are anyway, so I’m making the, but the point is that it seems you’re willing to put it out there. I don’t, I don’t appear like a person being manipulated when I’m calling him a fat liar or, or making fun of him. And then, but, but what’s so fascinating about that, I, I mean, I included it because it is very fascinating part of the story and

Zach: it’s true.

Yeah. And you’re, you were even at the risk of it changing, you know, not being optimal for your perception, you’re willing to put it out there. And that’s respectable to me because. I wanted to say more about that, [00:50:00] but go ahead.

Sarma: Well, what’s interesting is it really all I could recover is a, is that portion of our digital correspondence.

It would be amazing if somehow miraculously every interaction with him I had is on camera. Which, you know, if Chase and those people are right, and we really are living in the Matrix, maybe there is a camera Oh yeah. Maybe we can download it from, we can download it, it from the

Zach: matrix later. Yeah. We’ll just

Sarma: take DMT and get the red lasers.

Yeah. And we’ll exactly go to see what happened, but Totally. So yeah, so maybe at some point I will get the video footage, um, in which case that would be fascinating to me because that’s where I think. All that mind fucky happened where, ’cause I’m pushing back at him, I’m pushing back at him, and then, and then our conversation ends and based, and then I know that he came home or what, or whatever happened.

He’s either calls me on the phone or he’s in my presence. And then I’ll, according to my records, you know, the following day or a few hours later, I [00:51:00] send him a wire for some obscene amount of money that he was pushing me for. And I had been pushing back on him in writing. But then somehow when he’s in person, when he’s gets to me in person, then the thing that he wanted me to do, he gets me to do.

And I don’t really know how he did that because I don’t remember it. And also, I don’t have that camera footage. Uh, you know, I don’t have that stuff recorded.

Zach: Yeah. I think the, uh, I mean, I think what you’re, some of what you’re saying relates to people’s lack of understanding of how complex these kinds of situations are.

Like for example. Just because you push back on something doesn’t mean that you’re not being manipulated, right? Like there’s a very, even even someone who’s having a full blown delusion, they don’t necessarily fully believe their own delusions. It’s kinda like, is this world true? Is this narrative true?

Is it not true? They’re, they’re testing it, they’re like living part in it and part out of it. So that’s just to say like, you pushing back on things doesn’t, doesn’t take away from the fact that you could be also believing or semi believing in other things. [00:52:00] There’s a complex thing there about delusions and like, weird, magical thinking, right?

Like when you, when you examine like, you know, extremely narcissistic, malignant, narcissistic people, like, you know, the guy I was telling you about in, in, in my, yeah, in my world, it’s like, it’s really hard to, even for an individual to separate, like, do they really believe this stuff? Are they, are they lying or do they not?

Are they not even sure where the lines are drawn? So that’s just to say for you, being manipulated. You’re, you’re like, at any stage, you’re kind of like semi buying into things. You’re buying into some things, questioning others. So just you pushing back does not, you know, it may look bad and it leads to people who are unaware of that complexity to be like, oh, she’s questioning it.

Therefore she must, you know, she, she isn’t a sap. She must have been questioning everything. She didn’t really fall for it. She must be in on it. But that, I think it just gets back to most people’s, you know, unfamiliarity with how complex these psychological manipulation situations are. Yeah. And,

Sarma: and what they do is they, they create, I mean, there’s an intense amount of fear and confusion, [00:53:00] which is, I think confusion is a really important element.

Confusion. Yeah. You’re like, what’s going on? Yeah. Able to manipulate somebody. Yeah. And I, as I write throughout this whole situation, it’s not the Netflix show and some articles that were written. Sort of exploited this idea that he made me believe my dog would live forever and therefore I must be cuckoo.

But, you know, he didn’t make me believe all of these things necessarily. He just kept me in this state of absolute confusion. And also, you know, I am very open-minded, I guess you would say spiritually, right? So I, I, I had this experience adopting my dog that a lot of people will say this. And so it’s not, it doesn’t make me by default D Lulu, but when I got my dog, it.

I, I never felt this before. I’d never felt propelled by some force beyond me. It [00:54:00] was like this dog, I wasn’t trying to get a dog. You know, there’s a short chapter on adopting Leon. And originally I was trying to convince Alec Baldwin to adopt a dog. And that’s why I was looking at dogs. And this one dog struck me and I forwarded it to Alec and I was like, oh, this is the dog.

You have to get this dog. I don’t, this dog. And then he wasn’t interested in getting a dog. And I got obsessed with this one dog. And I, I had not been thinking that in any, there was no scenario where I was thinking of adopting a dog, but this one dog got stuck in my head and I was crying and I had to go see him.

And like, I, it’s hard to explain, but I felt like. I had no choice, no matter how irrational it was for me, being a really busy person running my own business. I lived in my office with other people with tons of inventory, computer cords everywhere. Me adopting a five month old pit bull was not a rational thing to do, but I had no choice.

It was like I had to go get this dog. [00:55:00] And I wrote about that experience very openly on my website in a blog post. And so he knew that, and so he knew how to kind of get in my head using that and all of the other things that I was very open about online. Yeah, like using like,

Zach: uh, indicators of the universe, giving you signs kind of Yes.

Things. Yeah.

Sarma: Yes.

Zach: Yeah. Which I was gonna ask you that too. You, it seems like, uh, in the, in the documentary and, um, you know, sometimes in your, in your book you talked about, uh, sometimes you felt like there were certain signs from the universe adding up, you know, you talked about. Feeling like, uh, Alec Baldwin met his partner at your restaurant, so maybe it was fitting that you might meet your partner through Baldwin, through the Twitter association or a realtor that handled, that seemed to have handled, uh, Mr.

Fox’s stuff also handled Baldwin’s. But I think, uh, you know, one thing thing that stood out to me, and I’m curious if you agree, is, you know, when we’re, when we’re stressed out and like basically existentially stressed out and we’re like looking for meaning to

Sarma: yes.

Zach: Clinging onto that, it can be very tempting to be like, well, I don’t know what I’m [00:56:00] doing, or, you know, what I should be doing and I’m stressed out about that.

And it’s, I think it’s very tempting. ’cause I’ve, I’ve gone through this too. It’s like, uh, you, you start looking for like, well I want, I want someone to tell me what to do. I want the universe to tell me what to do. So you start looking for signs about how should I live my life? Or where should I direct

Sarma: Right.

My attention. Right. And like where you’re looking, you can usually find something and you

Zach: can find something. Yeah. Yeah. And

Sarma: there’s actually a quote in my book. From Andrew Huberman that stood, you know, I, I include it in my book. Something he said on a podcast once that stood out to me and I wrote it down and included where he said, the more, uh, I’m paraphrasing, but the more intense fear.

And I think he says, a human or animal experiences. I don’t know how you would know if an animal was, basically says, the more, the more intense the fear you’re experiencing, the more prone you are to delusional thinking.

Zach: Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Um, so it makes sense. Yeah.

Sarma: I’m paraphrasing. I have the exact quote in my book, but that’s also why.

These people will go to great [00:57:00] lengths to keep you in a state of fear, overwhelm, confusion, exhaustion, and, and so it’s just, you’re already completely worn down and then it’s that much easier for them to wear you down and wear you down and wear you down until you go fine.

Zach: Right? Like

Sarma: fine, okay, fine. We will get married.

Like that’s, he just wore me down and convinced me that there was some reason we had to get married and I would be protected and blah. And I was like, ah, fine. Like, right,

Zach: you’re destroying, you’re constantly discerning ’cause creating so much

Sarma: stress that the only what ends up happening is you feel like the only way to relieve this tension that feels increasingly unbearable is to just go, okay, fine, I’ll send you that wire that you’re promising is the last wire ever.

And then I’ll get it all back. Like, okay, fine, I’ll just do it. And then you get relief. Um, but of course you’re just digging your own grave that much deeper.

Zach: Well, the thing that struck me there too was, uh, you know, reading your. Uh, book yesterday, [00:58:00] and you talk about it in a documentary, I think too, uh, there’s this element.

I think the thing that’s hard for people to, another thing that’s hard for people to understand is with these kinds of situations, you know, whether it’s somebody, you know, being delusional on their own or, or being manipulated in such ways, it’s, it’s like there’s, there’s like a compounding thing where you go down these pathways.

Like once you, once you live through or involve yourself with one kind of crazy thing, it changes your perception of yourself. It changes your, you know, you’re, and, and you’re kind of invested in it too. You know, it’s like you, you mentioned being, uh, like having financial investment. I think in, I think it was in the Matthew Kenny thing and how that led to a situation where you felt like you’re investing in it, so you have to keep going.

But there’s also, there can also be like emotional investment, like you’ve gone this far. So it’s like you’re more open to keep going further. And there’s also like a cognitive dis dissonance thing where it’s like. Once you have gone through such things and you have been involved in some crazy things, [00:59:00] it’s like it’s hard to turn that around because that would involve like having to create a narrative where you were so wrong and, and, and, uh, that, that requires a lot of strength because you have to basically be like, oh, everything I’ve done for the past, you know, months or years has been completely false and I’ve been completely misled.

And that’s, so it’s kinda like this compounding thing where you get led on this pathway and you, it’s hard to get out of that pathway once you start going down it, which I think is true for manipulation, but I think it’s just also a true thing about how we can go down like delusional pathways on our own, where we’re like, start being like, well, once we do and think this, we’re more open to this other thing and et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

Sarma: Yeah. And, and there’s just the idea that he’s, you know, he, once he got money out of me, which initially was, oh, let me just borrow this money for this crazy emergency, I’ll pay your right back. Once he got that initial. Chunk of money out of me, then he is got a hook in me. Right. Because I’m always gonna want it back.

So I, I had [01:00:00] resolved, I’m not gonna see this guy again. Like he, this is not right. Something’s, you know, but Right. He was able to get back in because he’d say, oh, I’m gonna bring you that money back. I got it and cash, I’m gonna, it creates a tie. Just tie his, it, it creates

Zach: a tie to him. Yeah.

Sarma: Right. And then he would do his mind sorcery on me and somehow he would maybe give me back some money, but then he’d get more money out of me.

And then I’m in deeper and then you’re in deeper. And then it becomes, you know, they get you in a situation, you’re more and more and more compromised and the loss is bigger and bigger and bigger. Right. But they’re promising that it’s all gonna be turned around and then some.

Zach: Yeah.

Sarma: So in order, you know, they set you, they put you in this impossible trap because for you to go, you know what, you must be full of shit.

You’re a con artist, therefore you have to accept that I am a colossal fool. I recklessly gave this guy so much money, which now I’m gonna have to accept that loss. Yeah. I’ll never see it back.

Zach: Yeah. I’ll have to just accept it it off. I’ll never get it back. Yeah.

Sarma: And I don’t [01:01:00] know how to explain it to anybody, so it’s gonna be humiliating.

And I really want what he keeps promising me, and I’m never gonna get answers. So I’m gonna have to live with the fact that he’s gonna claim that I screwed it all up. And if I just stuck out a little bit longer, this magical utopia that he keeps talking about is gonna come to a fruition like that I missed out.

So it’s this combination of wanting the answer and the explanation is what you’re kind of holding out for and the

Zach: happy ending of some sort. Yeah. And

Sarma: and not wanting to, not wanting to accept and face this big humiliating loss. So psychologically, you’re just gonna be inclined to keep. To keep going. And, and every, you know, all along the way, as you, as you’ll see when you get into the second half of the book, it’s like this one more, just this one more wire.

And then it’s all over. It’s all over and all it’s all gonna come back and this is all gonna make sense. And he would say things to me like, you’re gonna feel like a [01:02:00] big giant asshole when, when you, when you see what’s really happening here. Mm-hmm. As if

Zach: mm-hmm.

Sarma: And I’m going, well wait, what does that mean really?

And I don’t understand what that means, and I wa

Zach: Right.

Sarma: So yeah. I mean it’s complex.

Zach: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s very complex and mean. And meanwhile, meanwhile, his involvement, your involvement with him is making you more distant from your other support, you know, support system and, and people. And you’re becoming more and more, more isolated.

And they

Sarma: create, they create secrecy. I mean, it’s like, uh, any, you know, it’s like any child molester is gonna say, oh, this, this is our special relationship. You can’t talk to anybody about it. It’s just between you and I. Like, anytime somebody creates, it’s, our secret creates a, a level of, of secrecy. Uh, that’s, you know mm-hmm.

That’s, that’s kind of another red flag.

Zach: Yeah. And the, and the tie in, uh, there’s a tie in there with, makes me think of the, the gambling poker world, which I’m pretty familiar with from being an ex poker player. There’s instances where people will, you know, come out and say, this, this poker player owes me like a million dollars.

Right. And they’ll be [01:03:00] like, and, and, and how could the people will be like, how could you be so stupid to have loaned this guy money? But it’s a similar thing where, where they started out loaning him, you know, some smaller amount and then, you know, it kept compounding like the way you said, where they were, had to face this decision of like, well, if I cut ties with him and call them out, I’m not, I’m never gonna get it.

I’m not gonna get my money back. And, and also there, there, there might be an element of like, I’m an idiot, you know? So it’s like there is this emotional and financial incentive to be like. Oh, maybe if I just, you know, give him a little bit more and we stay in contact, maybe he’ll be good for it. But then it just keeps adding up and eventually it leads to them, you know, telling people publicly and facing that they’re never gonna get the money back and they can out them and everyone’s like you, why were you such an idiot?

What is wrong with you? And these are, you know, these can be very smart people, obviously. Yeah. Uh, so there is some, there’s some similarities that, that map over to just financial debts in general and

Sarma: Yeah. Or, you know, you got, you got

Zach: emotional stuff next year or not selling

Sarma: a declining stock.

Zach: Hmm. Yeah.

Right. Your emotions get involved and you, there is, yeah. There’s a, the thing where you don’t wanna take

Sarma: [01:04:00] the loss, so you just, but it keeps going down.

Zach: They say in poker, yeah, don’t throw good money after bad. But when you’re in that situation, it can be very hard to, you know, you do, you do instinctually feel like, well, I want to keep throwing money at this, at the, at this thing.

Right.

Sarma: You wanna get it back.

Zach: Yeah. Um, so I want, I wanted to ask you, um, you know, uh, obviously the, uh, you ended up owing a lot of. Money, and that’s obviously a really hard thing to deal with. And, um, and you’ve been through a lot of hard things and dealt with some horrible people. Um, how do you, how, how do you, what, what, what brings you hope and, um, do with the, with regards to the financial debt?

I imagine it’s like you just have to view it as like, it’s almost like imaginary in a sense because there’s like, it’s so hard to dig your way out of it, so you just have to accept that that’s, I guess, bankruptcy, uh, helps in, in that sense too. But it’s like, it’s [01:05:00] such a hole. It’s like, I’m curious how you, how you deal with that, that, that, that reality.

I

Sarma: think, and I’m very aware sometimes that a, a level of dissociation is almost necessary.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: Sometimes. Mm-hmm. And, and I’m also very aware of the stress of everything, including recent events. Making me susceptible to wanting to believe that there’s some greater purpose here, or like I’m being te you know, I’m very, I’m very aware of my own tendency to wanna clinging on to certain beliefs.

Right. Um, you know, I came back here to rebuild my business in the same space, which is available. And a lot of things went a bit sideways in a way that really does feel like, okay, that it, it’s, it hasn’t been the right time yet. And you know, when you get that feeling where something not working out, you feel like you were [01:06:00] protected because if it had worked out, you would’ve gotten stuck into another bad situation.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: Um, I, I mean, I’m aware I, I feel some of that now, but it’s, it’s stressful because there’s all of the debt from what happened and then. Since moving back here, I’ve just racked up credit card debt. People are like, how do you live in New York? Well, I, I’m, it’s painful. And I would leave if I wasn’t, I mean, I’m at a point where I need to make certain decisions and figure out what’s, whether I’m gonna move forward with certain things or not.

And if not, then I need to get outta here and go live in a cabin somewhere. Um, but it is very stressful. And sometimes a certain level of deliberate dissociation is, is just useful in terms of getting up and continuing to function every day. Because there’s certainly a lot of days where I don’t wanna get up and I don’t wanna function.

[01:07:00] And, um, you know, I, I, I, I think people don’t, I mean, there’s.

I feel like this rainstorm is providing, is providing like a, a, an atmosphere that’s spinning. Sorry. It gets so

Zach: dark,

Sarma: but I literally

Zach: and metaphorically. Yeah.

Sarma: Right. And I, I’m, I don’t know if this is gonna be audible to your audience, but the noise of the rain, I can

Zach: hear it

Sarma: on my end is pretty loud. So maybe it adds, maybe it’s like adding a cool vibe to this whole conversation.

But what I was gonna say is that I think, um,

yeah, I, I mean I feel pretty, I in a lot of pain a lot of the time and a lot of times I do think, I don’t, I don’t want to be here. I’m done. I’m exhausted, but I am always gonna keep up, keep getting up and keep up alive.

Zach: Yeah.

Sarma: Working towards. [01:08:00] If, if the, if I didn’t owe people money, it would almost be more dangerous because then I might be more likely to just be like, yeah, I’m out.

But because I owe people money even more recently. And, um,

one of the qualities, it’s giving you some sort of

Zach: motivation, even if it’s a negative motivation. Yeah.

Sarma: And, and, and one of the qualities that these people exploit very often in cults too, is they want people who work their asses off. They want people who aren’t gonna give up who are very determined. Yeah.

And I’m one of those people, people that’s like, I’m not gonna give up. I’m gonna keep going. I’m gonna keep getting up, I’m gonna keep, you know, I’m always gonna work my butt off at whatever it is, um, that’s in front of me. So, you know, I’m still here for it. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not really painful in the meantime.

And that I don’t sit there and, you know. Think about what if I, you know, had an easy exit? I mean, I, [01:09:00] I think, I think it, it ought to be easier for people to talk about that without Oh yeah. The threat of somebody, you know, coming in white coats to cart me off. Uh, because I, that’s precisely why people don’t talk about feeling that way is ’cause, you know, somebody’s gonna call

Zach: and they’re afraid.

I think people are afraid of sharing such things too, because it makes other people weird in interacting with you. Right? Like, I was gonna, I was gonna share something about my wife leaving me and how I went through some mental turmoil about that for an episode. And, you know, I was gonna talk about how there’s like many incentives to not talk about that, right?

Like, other people can just view you as weird for oversharing and feel weird that you’ve expressed such vulnerability and it can impact how you interact with other people, you know? And so I think there’s multiple levels of why people don’t do things like that. But, um. I did wanna say thank you for, uh, sharing that because I think, I think a lot of people feel that way, you know, for, [01:10:00] for things that have happened to them, including things that are, you know, much less horrible than your, than than what you’ve dealt with.

I think there’s a lot of people struggling with, you know, how do I, how do I make my way in this world when it seems so tough? You know? So, um, yeah.

Sarma: I think another reason why people don’t talk about it so much is very often the, the response, especially with people that you’re very close to, because the response can be so gut wrenchingly devastating when, you know, if you say something around family or whatnot, you’ll get shot down with like, oh, you don’t mean that.

And, and Right, they, they brush it away invalidated, right? Like, oh, you don’t mean that. Don’t say that. Oh, you’d never do that. Or, um, like, oh, you couldn’t. You would dev, think of how many people would be devastated if you did that, which is also hard to hear because it basically implies that you could be in such extreme pain.

The [01:11:00] extreme pain that you’re in doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is that you don’t upset everybody else. So you gotta just suck it up and it’s not very helpful pain.

Zach: Yeah. That’s not a very helpful thing. It’s, yeah,

Sarma: it’s like all it does is it’s more painful to hear those things. Right. And so people tend to keep it to themselves.

Zach: No, totally. Yeah. I mean, getting back to the lack of empathy people have about, you know, mental health issues and suicide and stuff. It’s like, you know, people are dealing with very hard, painful things, and that’s, you know. I think there’s just a lack of empathy for how hard life can be to deal with, like you and I, you know, like you were saying, it’s like it’s hard for people that have never dealt with that to understand like people like you and I, it’s hard for you and I to understand people that say they’ve never dealt with those things.

So the, it goes both ways, but yeah, I do, I do think it’s the more, the, the more empathy we can have for just how hard life is to deal with the, the, the better things are. Yeah.

Sarma: Yeah. And it, and it’s, it’s funny because I’m very aware that like [01:12:00] very often I have to, I talk myself into, you know, I think, okay, I’m healthy, I’m, I, you know, I’m, I’m not homeless.

I’m not in a war zone. Mm-hmm. All my limbs are attached.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: Like, I’m, I’m bright. I, I have support systems. I, there’s all these options. I have a platform I have. A bunch of follower, like, I have all this opportunity and all these good things going for me, and, you know, including being very health, like I’m, I’m healthy.

So I’ll sit there and say like, what, you know, like, what’s wrong with you? Stop feeling so bad. But as everybody who’s felt that, you know, really badly knows it’s not, you know, it’s not about that. Right. Um, or, you know, that only helps so much. And that’s another thing people will say is, oh, you have so much to be grateful for and you should just work on your gratitude lists.

I’m like, yeah. I write the fucking gratitude lists every, every day and still wanna die. Sorry. That only goes, that only

Zach: goes so, [01:13:00] so far. Yeah. That’s, um, I, I mean it’s what, it’s what you must do, but it’s like, it’s still, it’s not easy. All of that stuff, it’s not easy to do helps,

Sarma: but it’s not gonna solve the underlying issue.

And so I think having a lot of, um, you know, taking the time to really look into. Your underlying stuff is, is useful. And, um, kind of digging deep and digging out all that emotional stuff is useful.

Zach: Yeah. I will say, I mean, one thing, I mean, I’ve dealt with a lot of mental struggles in my life. Like, I’ll say, you know, I’ve talked about this in the podcast, like I dropped out of college due to some, you know, basically a nervous breakdown kind of scenario.

And for most, you know, like I’d say like most of my twenties and thirties, I’d say like most of my twenties, part of my thirties, I felt like, you know, if I could push a button to, to kill myself, I, yeah, I would’ve, you know, I, that’s how I felt. Um, I do think there’s something about like, living [01:14:00] through really tough experiences like that, that, um, you know, if you can, if you can get through them, if you can, if you can, uh, process them, it, it makes you more appreciative of things that really matter, I think, and, uh, makes you a real more.

Down to earth person and also a more empathetic person, and it makes you really appre, you know, it makes you appreciative of the, of the things that, that go well in life. There is, there is that side like, but I’m not, but you know, clearly like getting, getting to that point past the pain is like the hard part, right?

I’m not like saying this is good that this happens. I’m just saying like, if once you get through it, I, I think you’ll, you know,

Sarma: I also, I also think there’s a tendency, I mean, I think there’s a strong correlation with, and I’m struggling with like, how to say this without sounding like I’m, I’m, I’m complimenting me and you, but I’m thereby probably also complimenting most of your listeners, which is, I think that, I mean, have you ever seen like a super depressed person who was just also [01:15:00] not bright?

I think that if you, if you have a certain level of thoughtfulness and I, I call it thoughtfulness, but a certain level of thoughtfulness and. Basic intelligence and inquisitiveness about the world, it’s almost inevitable that you’re gonna at some point struggle with depression because kind of how could you not in this strange and confusing, tragic world that we live in, which is also beautiful.

And I mean, it’s why so many creative people have also struggled with depression. But my point is, at least we’re not dodos, but you know what I mean? You know what I’m trying to say? It’s like I think that a lot of very thoughtful people Sure. Struggle with these things. Yeah. And I would at some point in life

Zach: and I would add, yeah, I, I think, um, I mean, I think you’re, you know, I think, I think people in general struggle, but I think it plays out in different ways, right?

Like if you’re a less intelligent person, it might play out in more like [01:16:00] clearly self-destructive ways, whereas like, you know, you might just do something completely. I think it helps explain a lot of like really outlandish or violent or weird things you hear about. For some people where it, it just to say, I think the thing, the things that you’ll struggle with and how you’ll function with it play out and can play out in very different ways.

Whereas like people that are more thoughtful and introspective, it will play out and, you know, also more thoughtful of introspective ways and Yeah.

Sarma: And being, you know, the opposite of the, the sort of sociopathic, malignant narcissist. The more you’re on the other end of that spectrum mm-hmm. Where you’re high in empathy, which is you blame yourself for everything.

Zach: Yeah, yeah.

Sarma: But also when you’re just, you know, all these things are correlated, like getting that diagnosis, being high on the empathy scale, I score super high on the, you know, are you a highly sensitive person? Quizzes, you know, yes. I, I’m not like a most of those questions, I’m a hell [01:17:00] yes. So I think being a, a kind of a sensitive, thoughtful person.

Um, it, it almost makes it inevitable that you’re gonna at least go through some periods or bouts of depression question. Yeah. Because you do more, you do

Zach: more, you do more introspection, more, more aiming at like, what’s wrong with me and you kind of things. Yeah. Feeling

Sarma: right. And also just feeling, feeling the tragedy of things.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And, and feeling more sensitive, feeling it deeply. Yeah. So,

Zach: yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. Yeah. Uh, well thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I know, um, it’s hard to talk about, but I do hope that you, uh, find all the positives in life and, you know, see that, um, there’s, uh, you know, there, there, there are good things and um,

Sarma: yeah, there, there, there is that sort of, I mean, it’s a bit cliche and it’s sometimes annoying when people say, you know, the whole, like, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

Zach: Yeah. That’s [01:18:00] such a, that’s such a cliche. It’s a massive, because it might kill you. Massive cliche.

Sarma: Right. But it might, it’s like it’s, but at the same time, there is an element of, of, uh, of like, yeah, I got through some pretty intense stuff,

Zach: right. Sometimes

Sarma: people read my book and they say, I can’t, I don’t understand how you’re still standing.

And they don’t even know what I went through subsequently or what I’m going through now. But there is, you’ve been through a lot of shit of like, of, of, of, you know, I think that I’m the kind of person now that you would want me on your team because I’m, I’m gonna stand up and like, I’m gonna keep getting up.

Zach: Mm-hmm.

Sarma: If you knock down, you’ve through. So I’m gonna keep getting up, I’m gonna keep getting up, I’m gonna keep getting up and, and I, and I think I’m, you know, I certainly know how to handle myself better and better and I’m, and I’m a lot wiser, so, you know, I, ideally I can rebuild with that foundation.

Zach: No, it is, it is really impressive that what you’ve been through and that you’re, you know, you’re still, um.

Maintaining [01:19:00] a, a work ethic and a, and a positive attitude or, and trying to, it’s, you’ve been through a lot. It’s quite, um, it’s, it’s quite sad. And I, I feel for you. Um, do you wanna mention anything else about what you’re working on? Obviously you’ve got your, your book. Do you wanna promote anything else?

Sarma: Um, I’m writing more on Substack now and a combination of, yeah, I mean, very open stuff. And I’m also writing a bit about what’s been going on in the last couple of years. And I’m mostly on Instagram. I do answer all my dms for the most part, unless people are creepy. But, um, yeah, I’m on Instagram and I’m open to connecting to people that way.

And I love hearing from people who are reading my book. It’s, it’s one of the, I mean, the, it’s hard to explain how it feels. It really feels like. I feel honored when people read my book. That’s the only way I know how to [01:20:00] explain it. And, um, and especially, and then also I, I, I didn’t go through a big publisher, which we’ve talked about, and you know all about that.

It’s, it’s a very different story. You’re giving away so much control, but on the flip side, it’s harder to promote the book and there’s a lot of, um, I dunno if stigma’s the right word, but there’s like this assumption, especially among the people who are part of big publishing that. If you didn’t go through a big publisher, that means you tried and you weren’t able to, and it’s like, no, that’s not the case.

You know? Yeah. Um, but, but it is harder to, you know, promote the book initially. And, um, but I, I mean, I’m really glad I did it the way that I did it. I don’t think they would ever have let me include a lot of the stuff that I included, or they would’ve made me shorten it and it, it wouldn’t be the book that it is if I had gone through a big publisher.

But, um, I did make a website for the book where like, if people want a, a signed copy or they wanna get it from the [01:21:00] printer and not Amazon, which also is really much better for me, or if they wanna get it from Amazon, it’s all of those links are there. And, um, what’s the site? And then it’s just the title of the book, the Girl, the duck tattoo to.com.

And, um, and I’m on Instagram and I’m on Substack. And because I’m the only person in the world with my name, I’m easy to find. So,

Zach: yeah. I was gonna say, you’re, yeah, you’re a very good writer and you’ve done a lot of writing on your, um. Your previous, uh, blogs and such. And yeah, you’re very strong writer in my humble opinion.

Sarma: Thank you.

Zach: Okay, well thanks Sarma. This has been great. Uh, I really appreciate you, uh, sharing all these things and uh, yeah, best of luck with everything.

Sarma: Yeah, thanks.

In the summer of 2024, I went on a five-day solo retreat in the mountains of New Mexico. It was the first time I’d ever really committed to meditation, and to my surprise it turned out to be a deeply meaningful and lasting experience. In this episode, I talk about what led me to try it, what those days of fasting, solitude, and meditation were actually like, and the unexpected effects I noticed afterward in my everyday life. I also share some of the doubts and anxieties I carried into the experience, why meditation had always felt out of reach for me, and why this retreat nevertheless managed to shift something fundamental in how I relate to myself and to stress.

Episode links:

• YouTube
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Related resources and recommendations:

• My episode with Brian Koppelman, where he talks about his experiences with transcendental meditation
• Alan Watts’ book The Way of Zen
• A playlist of Alan Watts’ lecture clips
• Sam Harris talks about how meditation helps

TRANSCRIPT

About a year ago, I went on a 5-day solo retreat in the mountains of New Mexico, where I meditated several hours a day. It turned out to be a life changing experience, which was definitely something I did not expect; so I wanted to share about it here. I’ve had a few friends ask me about it and what I did on that trip, and I kept telling people I’d eventually talk about it on a podcast episode, so I’m finally getting around to that. 

That trip was basically the first time I’d really meditated. I’d tried half-heartedly over the years a few times, for a few minutes at a time, but I had never really focused on meditating, and never done it for more than a day in a row. I’d always liked the idea of meditation, and I’ve always been interested in Buddhist philosophies and practices, since I was young. Part of the reason for me having a bit of a mental block for that is due to some experiences I had when I was younger: back when I was struggling with some mental issues and dropped out of college due to those struggles. Part of the manifestation of my mental unwellness back then was me being a bit obsessed with Eastern and Buddhist philosophies; I thought I was possibly reaching some state of transcendence. I was also smoking too much marijuana, which definitely does not help you when you’re depressed and anxious. There are studies showing links between marijuana use and psychotic/delusional types of experiences. I talk more about those experiences in a previous episode. But those experiences were why I had a bit of anxiety when it came to trying to meditate; I would have associations with that unhappy and stressful and strange period of my life, and obviously anxiety like that isn’t really condusive to the relaxing state you want to achieve in meditation. And I’d also add that in general I’ve always been a highly anxious person, so meditation doesn’t come easy to people like that, even subtracting my early experiences. 

There were a few recent factors that led to me wanting to try meditating more seriously. 

The main one was a talk I had for this podcast in February of last year with Brian Koppelman, the creator of the poker movie Rounders, and the show Billions, and other shows and movies. He talked about his life changing experiences with transcendental meditation. His personal story of how meditation had hugely reduced his anxiety got me thinking, “I need to try this.” I’ll play the clip from that episode where Brian talks about this. I debated including the long clip from that episode but in the end I decided to include it because it was what got me down this path, so I figured it might be persuasive to you, too. But if you want to skip ahead to my experiences, just keep skipping until you hear only me and not Brian. 

Zach: Do you mind if I ask you about transcendental meditation?

Brian: I’m totally happy. I love talking about it. Yep.

Zach: I know that you’re a big proponent of that and I was wondering, if you explained it to a lay audience, how would you pitch it? What are the benefits that you get from it?

Brian: Like Tim Ferriss says, I think he said something along these lines– I’m paraphrasing, I’m not quoting him– that it might be the thing that is most in common among the guests that he’s had on his show is that they do some form of meditation. I think I started meditating in 2011. And I want to say this succinctly. For me, the benefit is it reduced the physical manifestations of anxiety by something like 80% or 85%.

Zach: Wow.

Brian: One of the things is that when people want to sell stuff, they’ll say it makes your anxiety disappear. And we as human beings go, “Well, that’s bullshit.” Because nothing can. Because we’re humans and we know we’re mortal, so we have anxiety. But it just made the physical manifestations– the stomach or the heart– suddenly quickly. A month in, that stuff just went… The [line] just went way down on it. And that alone is enough. Then clarity of thought, peacefulness, sense of wellbeing. Look, I’m talking about lifting, but I’ve always been someone who exercises a lot. And part of why I started lifting and stuff is because as you get older, if you let yourself stay out of shape and you still play sports really hard, you can just hurt yourself all the time. And if you’re fat like I was, it’s just bad. So I had to start. Then you throw the cardio piece and you’re like, “Well, I got to do the other thing too.” So exercise has always been meditative, too, for me. I can get to that sort of alpha state that they call it, you know? Meditation is 20 minutes. The way I do it, Translated Meditation TM, there’s a book by David Lynch, the great filmmaker, the book is called “Catching the Big Fish” and he talks about it in a way that I find incredibly compelling. But essentially, you’re repeating a nonsense word to yourself quietly in your brain for 20 minutes twice a day. It’s very easy and it’s very calming. I just feel better doing it. I had a lot of questions going in. I had read all the sort of negative things about TM and I was very aware of it, I had very clear rules for myself about the ways in which I would engage. I would go take these lessons and then that’s the extent of my involvement. And it’s been, by the way, the extent. I’ve never gone on some retreat or thing. It’s just that I find this technique useful. And I’m just always after. It’s hard being a person, and so whatever makes being a person a little bit easier, I’ll take it. It goes back to the thing I said about mortality. We understand people are fragile, that means the people you love are fragile. And that stuff scary sometimes. So, anything that’ll help I’m interested in. Exercise is a huge one. Walking, not just as exercise, but walking is really helpful. Journaling is helpful, I think. And I think translated meditation, for me, is just very useful.

Zach: The form of the meditation, is it always the same? So, it’s 20 minutes of repeating the mantra and it doesn’t vary from that?

Brian: But the thing is, when you learn TM, it’s not rigid. You’re not forcing yourself to say this mantra over and over again. You’re allowing this mantra to surface and you’re kind of engaging with it. And then sometimes your thoughts come in. It’s like other meditation you’ve heard of. Your thoughts come in and then your thoughts move out and the mantra resurfaces. It’s just being in that space. And I’ll say I will not play. I do the morning meditation every single day in my life. I haven’t missed one since 2011. And I’d say I do the one in the afternoon 70% or 80% of the time, depends on the period. Right now I’m in a period of time where I’m doing it every day, but sometimes life makes it hard to the second one. But I will never play poker at night without doing this. Never. It’s a zero for me. Maybe I did it twice. And I just know. Like, I will meditate this afternoon before I go play poker tonight, for sure. And that will be useful. It will reset me in a way. It doesn’t mean I’m going to win, by the way. I could still lose.

Zach: And you said it’s something you say internally, you don’t say it out loud? Is that right?

Brian: Correct. You never say it out loud.

Zach: Is your mantra a secret? Or can you say what it is?

Brian: No, you don’t say what it is. And the reason is, you don’t want to attach anything to it. Really it’s a word sound noise. You don’t want to attach someone’s reaction. You don’t want to attach that moment. It really is just something to break the cycle of the pattern of thoughts.

Zach: You don’t want association.

Brian: No, you don’t want any. And no one knows it. In fact, because it’s like some state secret. It’s not special, it’s just because it keeps it pristine.

Zach: Do you have your own thoughts on what the mechanism is by how it helps you? Is it basically like… Because you said these other thoughts come in and you basically are able to kind of brush them aside, do you think it kind of sets you up to be more easily able to brush aside things?

Brian: Yeah, I don’t know. I was reading a book– this is not translated, this is a way to get to the answer– I was reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, he’s this amazing Buddhist. He had this phrase that he said he repeated to himself and he found it very useful. And I’ve done this not as TM, because it’s not TM, but I’ve done this sometimes to go to bed at night if I somehow am not able to fall asleep and my thoughts racing. He says, “I am not my body. I’m not even my mind.” By repeating that to himself, not out loud, it’s a reminder in a way that the thoughts you think aren’t necessarily valid. We all have thought things that we didn’t put into action or that turned out to be wrong, right? So just reminding yourself, yeah, you might feel a twinge in your knee, but you are not the twinge in your knee. It’s useful. Anything to create a tiny bit of separation from the thoughts that kind of own us most of the time and our essential nature, anyway that we can sort of separate those slightly, I think has tremendous benefit. And I think TM, though I don’t know, I really don’t know the answer to this, but what it feels like to me is that there’s probably a cycle of counterproductive thoughts that we all have. Who knows where they’re from? Who knows when we took them on? Whether they’re worries, fears, self-criticism, whatever the thing is, the mantra has a way of like if that thing is a circle that’s just going and going, maybe the mantra just kind of takes us somewhere else away from that and breaks it so that you have a minute to just have some peace.

Zach: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s like breaking the rumination or the ruts that we get into our normal—

Brian: Yeah, exactly right. Ruts. People should look at— I mean, there’s a lot of EEG studies and stuff, brainwave studies, and they’re doing more and more. There’s a lot of science now on this question. I was even reading recently… Recently, I put into two different AI engines a bunch of questions about meditation and the various forms, and about what the science said. And I was really prepared to be told that it’s all been debunked, but it just hasn’t been. The science really stands up for its benefits and you can just find that out. That’s just out there, people looking at the brainwaves and stuff.

Zach: Yeah. And like you said, there’s some understandable mechanisms by which you can see it helping you. And it’s now like some things you hear about you’re like, “That makes no sense.” You can see the logic there. 

As soon as Brian said it had reduced his anxiety by like 80%, I decided I needed to get into it and give it a try. 

** 

Another factor there was that I was going through some hard things in my personal life. When i talked to Brian last year, my wife was in the process of leaving me; she had left once, suddenly, a year earlier, and then had come back a few months later and we were trying to work things out, but it wasn’t looking good, and I did not think it was going to work out. So I was more anxious and emotionally fragile than I’d been for a long time. (And I actually have an episode I’ve written about some of my struggles during that time, with the hopes that it might help other people dealing with similar struggles, but I am still sitting on it to make sure I feel good about sharing it, as it is so personal.)

So a few weeks after the Koppelman talk, on a road trip with my wife, we listened to some of David Lynch’s book Catching the Big Fish. I didn’t really like it and didn’t listen to much of it. I couldn’t relate to Lynch saying he had an immediate feeling of immense joy when trying transcendental meditation. I still can’t relate to that now. Everyone is different, of course, but his description of his experiences made it clear that he and I were very different people, and I didn’t get much out of his descriptions. I mention that just in case it’s interesting for anyone who has listened to that and had a similar reaction, and maybe because of that thought that meditation wasn’t for them. 

In August of last year, I went to a place called the Lama Foundation in the mountains of Taos, New Mexico. I used to live in Albuerquerque, and I’d been there a couple times before. My wife had once had a three day solitary retreat there, what they call a hermitage, and she had enjoyed it. The Lama Foundation’s main claim to fame is that it was where Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, wrote the well known book Be Here Now. I’m not a fan of that book; I found it quite silly, to be honest. I’m skeptical of almost all metaphysical and spiritual writings, and that specific book I found to be especially silly. Basically it involves Alpert doing a bunch of psychedelics, and traveling to India, and believing he’s witnessed amazing, magical acts, but he’s also doing so many drugs he’s an extremely unreliable narrator about what’s real and what’s not. But leaving aside any metaphysical or spiritual beliefs, the Lama Foundation is just a great property, and they have these two hermitage cabins there, where you can spend your days uninterrupted, without seeing anyone else if you don’t want to, and they bring you foods you request and leave them in a box where you can get them. The area is just very beautiful and surreal and intense-seeming, also; especially at night when the sun is setting and the light is a bit strange and the old fire-charred snags look other worldly; it does put you in a spiritual frame of mind, I think.  

I’ll just give you a description of some of my decisions I made on that trip, regarding how I approached trying to have a meaningful meditation experience. 

First, I decided to fast for four days. I’d fasted for five days before, years before. I’d also read about the idea that fasting puts you in a state more conducive to spiritual practice and inward focus. I had observed that myself when I fasted before; there was an interesting mental state, where things felt more intense, but calm. It might just be light headedness, I don’t know, but I do think there is something to that. 

I also decided to practice a mix of transcendental meditation, with the mantra repetition, and just breath-mindfulness meditation: breathing and focusing on your breath. I printed out some instructions and tips for both of these kinds of meditations to bring with me. 

Another decision I made was to not have any devices or books with me. The only things I took with me to the cabin were a few articles of clothing, and a pen and some paper. I locked up my computer and phone at the Lama Foundation lodge. 

My general schedule while there was something like this: 

Wake up when the sun rose, which was around 6am. 

Try some meditation for an hour or so

Go for a long walk on the mountain trails or on the long winding roads near the foundation 

Try meditation for another hour around noon or afternoon

Walk around some more

Try meditation again for an hour

I also made the decision to not read much or write much. The first three days I didn’t read or write anything. I was trying to embrace pure experience as much as I could. I broke from that the fourth adn fifth day, writing down some observations I’d had, and reading some books they had in the cabin (including some of Be Here Now). 

One thing I struggled with was my back. I’ve never been very good at sitting in the traditional meditation position. I often just sat in a straight backed chair they had in the cabin, and this was my usual position. As many people will tell you, you can meditate in any position.  I mention this in case anyone thinks that you need to be in a certain position. The important thing is that you’re comfortable. Although you shouldn’t be too comfortable as then you might just end up falling asleep. 

For most of the time there, I felt like I wasn’t meditating correctly, that I wasn’t quote “doing it right.” I was having the often described experience of trying to clear my mind and just observe and be, but constantly having the usual trains of thoughts and random observations and random thoughts about tasks I needed to do, all those things flood my mind. But as I learned from my own experiences and from reading more later, it’s important to embrace the idea that there is no “doing it right.” That one should try to recognize that you are entering the process; that you are trying to observe experience, trying to calm your mind. One should try to not add insult to injury by thinking that one is not doing it right; one should try to embrace the idea that you are just learning about yourself and about your existence. 

And I think once you start having an experience that you are part of the universe, that kind of cliche, it becomes easier to forgive yourself for not “doing it right,” or missteps you seemingly have. 

[Alan Watts clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mimR10eAlPk]

That was a clip of Alan Watts talking about how he views the nature of meditation and its importance. After my meditation experiences, I became a big Alan Watts fan. His book The Way of Zen is great. If you’re curious about more resource recommendations, I’ve put some on the entry for this episode at my podcast site behavior-podcast.com.

So in the first few days of the retreat, I had a few minor positive feelings, moments that felt meaningful. Some of that enjoyment was in the form of just having more time to think, to be free from the usual things, like tasks and phone messages and internet stuff. Some of that was just the ability to let my mind wonder and think of more meaningful, existential things. Some of it was intellectual; logical aspects of Buddhist-related thought, about the fact that I am a part of the universe, and the universe is a part of me, and that I am a part of the universe unfolding. Some of the positive experiences were feelings of peace and connection, even as they were interspersed with feelings of frustration, doubts about what I was doing; skepticism that I was just too desperate to have a meaningful experience, which maybe is self-defeating. 

On the fourth day, I had a highly meaningful feeling after I’d been meditating in the afternoon about an hour. For a few minutes, I felt filled with a glowing, peaceful feeling, a feeling that everything was right with the world and me, that I was tapped into something meaningful. I finally understood what people were talking about when they talked about the peacefulness and joy of meditation. 

A little later that day, and the fifth day, I had less intense but still peaceful and nice iterations of that. It was all enough to make me feel like I’d at least tasted and touched what people mean when they praise meditation. I had had the experiences that would be enough to lead me to want to do it more, and to go down that path.  

But these experiences weren’t life-changing. What I consider life changing was noticing how I felt when I left and got back to my regular life. It felt like a huge weight had lifted from me. It felt like there had been a heavy, anxiety-producing weight on my heart, around my heart, and that now I felt light. Something i wrote a few weeks after the experience was that I felt that my heart had been encased in some protective armor; that the things that usually bothered me and caused me pain were not reaching me now. I’m talking everything from very small things, like loud sounds that might usually make me jumpy and lead to anxious thoughts, to more major things, like the stuff going on with my wife and in my work. 

And this was entirely unexpected. It was surprising enough to me that I’d even had the joyful, intense experiences I’d had a few times during the retreat. I was entirely prepared for the retreat to be just me mainly feeling frustrated, like I wasn’t able to meditate like others were. I definitely didn’t expect such a relatively small set of experiences to translate to such a big change in mood and feeling. And again, it’s possible that the two things weren’t directly connected; it’s possible I could have had the long-lasting effect of the meditation without ever experiencing the joyful, blissful state; I don’t really know. 

And it’s been a quite lasting change. It has faded a bit, especially because I haven’t kept up the meditation, due to a lot of changes in my life, including my wife finally leaving me, me starting a new relationship, my moving to New York City, my starting a new job, and more. So it’s a little hard to track my state of mind across all these recent changes, and what’s due to what, but I do think that that experience changed me in a fundamental, lasting way. 

I should mention that it’s not like all my anxiety is removed. I don’t want to paint a too rosy portrait of my life or what the meditation did for me. I’m still often a quite anxious person, just as I always have been, and that’s something I want to work on more. I want to meditate more, for one thing. But in major ways the anxiety is decreased. So I had a similar experience to Koppelman; I’m not sure if it was 80% like he said, but it was significant. I think the meditation experience built some stronger mental foundations; gave me a better base of calmness from which to operate and to which I can partly return.  

For anyone who wants to try something like this, I’ll now list a few tips and observations I had, which might serve to help you. 

• Again, don’t worry too much about the position you’re in. If a cross-legged or lotus position makes you uncomfortable, get a comfortable straight-backed chair. 
• Try not to beat yourself up with thoughts that you’re not doing it right, or that you’re somehow ill suited to practicing meditation. This is normal. Keep trying to return to what you’re trying to do, depending on your meditation style you’ve chosen. Keep trying to return to observing your breath, or observing your thoughts. It’s entirely natural to have all sorts of intrusive thoughts; I would think that even the best practitioner of meditation would still occasionally have random thoughts. You are there to learn about how your mind works, and to observe it, so as to understand yourself and existence better. 
• If you’re really having trouble just being, and have a lot of intrusive thoughts that are bugging you, i think it’s okay to just let them go like that for a while. If you can’t beat them, let them go on for a while. No one’s grading you; and sometimes letting them go on for a while is what is necessary for you to work them out of your system. I think this is especially true for people new to this way of being. 

I feel that my positive experience was partly just about being free to think my own thoughts and connect with myself again. For me, how I live my life, my daily life is often just a parade of various tasks I’ve set myself to do; things to get through. That often includes even recreational activities, like reading a book or watching a show; even those more recreational things can start to feel like more assignments, a laundry list of things to do. So even apart from my meditation experience, there was something very calming and grounding on that trip in just being able to let my mind wander, to not be activity -focused, to just feel free to sit and do nothing and day dream. And that was also an important learning for me; that I need to make more time for just being, and try not to feel pressured to always fill my time up. 

I also had a sense of my experience fusing different parts of myself, of bringing them more in alignment with each other. Most of us are living such hectic lives, that I think there can be little time to let all your experiences and thoughts meld; there’s not enough time for processing. So I think just sitting and being, meditating or not, ** is time your mind spends compiling and fusing all the various thoughts and motivations and goals you have, and coupling them more tightly. During my trip, I had the sensation of my scattered inner multitude of voices coalescing in a stronger, more stable, more calm configuration. 

Another interesting part of this is just how easy it’s been for me to go from having such an amazing experience and being very excited about meditating, to basically not meditating at all. This is partly because of so many things going on in my life, as I’ve said, but it’s still kind of astounding to me. I haven’t had many experiences that amazed me, and this was one, and yet now I’m back to living as if that amazing experience didn’t happen; you’d think having such an amazing experience, you’d want to continue down that path, keep pursuing it; keep chasing the dragon. I tell myself almost every day: I need to make more time for the meditation, I tell myself, okay, tomorrow, I’ll get up early and do it for a few minutes, and really start doing it every day. But then the next day rolls around and I’m exhausted and just want to sleep or rest a few more minutes before work. Plus there’s the knowledge that it’s not that an immediately exciting endeavor; I will have moments of joy occasionally doing it, but that’s mostly not my experience doing it. It’s a practice I think is valuable, especially with the reduction in anxiety, but the payoffs are more long term. Put another way; I experienced a magical thing, but the magic of it isn’t directly obvious or available to me; I’m still not even sure what factors led to it being a magical experience. So that’s another factor for me failing to keep it up even though I want to keep it up.  

But maybe for now, it’s enough for me to know it happened, that it did help me in some long term way, and that it’s there when I want or need to return to it. 

Have you had an interesting experience with meditation? Feel free to reach out to me at behavior-podcast.com and let me know about it. 

Again, I’ve got some book and other resource recommendations for you on the topic of meditation; you can find those on the entry page for this episode, on my site behavior-podcast.com. 

A 2023 talk with Craig Malkin, author of the book Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists, in which he explains that narcissism is a spectrum. It’s healthy and normal to have some positive and grandiose illusions about your place in the world, as long as those illusions don’t become pathologically unhealthy and toxic.

Topics discussed: the spectrum of narcissism, ranging from more normal forms of narcissism to pathological, malignant, dangerous forms; common misconceptions about narcissism; existential and psychological factors that can lead to more malignantly narcissistic traits and behaviors; the phenomenon of people overzealously labeling others narcissists; the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (the basis of many people’s understanding of narcissism) and how it works.

For a transcript and other resources about this interview, see the original episode entry.

Episode links:

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• Spotify