A talk with Eric Robinson, a recently retired Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and former pastor, about what actually works in real-world interrogations—and what doesn’t. Eric is the author of a soon-to-be-published book with the working title Irreverend: From Saving Souls To Chasing Sinners In The FBI. Drawing on 24 years in the FBI, in this talk Eric explains why techniques like friendliness and rapport are so powerful, discusses the use of silence to induce information-sharing, and talks about the importance of asking only a single question at a time. Eric also explains why he thinks nonverbal “body language” cues are not useful in law enforcement and interrogation settings. Other topics include: the reasons why so many people talk at length to police, despite it being so well known that you should ask for a lawyer; the downsides and risks of deceiving people to try to get information and confessions; some body language ideas discussed in Joe Navarro’s books; Eric’s opinions on the lie detector; and more.
A transcript is below.
Episode links:
- YouTube (includes video)
- Apple Podcasts
- Spotify
Related resources:
- A talk with David Zulawski, who specializes in interrogations
- A talk with Mark McClish about finding hidden meaning in spoken/written words
- A talk with deception detection researcher Tim Levine on the non-helpfulness of body language to determine lies
- A talk with Tim Levine about eye-direction (also includes me talking about difference between behavior/tells in games vs non-game scenarios)
TRANSCRIPT
(Transcripts are generated automatically and will contain errors.)
Eric Robinson: The one that I learned along the way, coming from a young agent and then seeing how interrogations go, was not to interrupt silence….I found that asking a question and then just sitting. it feels awkward… And then I realized. Oh, if I feel bad, this guy’s gonna feel terrible… Oh, that’s great. Let’s use that. And so I would just sit there because the question remains. I asked you when was the first time that you met the victim? You’re sitting, you’re sitting, you’re sitting, and I’m sitting, I’m sitting. Mm-hmm. And you have to do something with that question…
Zach Elwood: That was Eric Robinson, a recently retired FBI agent, talking about some interrogation strategies he’s found effective. Eric is the author of a book that will be published later this year about his career in the FBI, which has the working title Irreverend: From Saving Souls To Chasing Sinners In The FBI. The title Irreverend is a play off the word irreverent, and is making reference to Eric’s career as a pastor prior to joining the FBI. The book was a good read, full of many stories, some disturbing and some funny, and all of them interesting. When the book comes out, I’ll be sure to mention it on this podcast.
I learned about Eric when I was talking to his wife, Becky Robinson, who has a marketing company called Weaving Influence and who I was consulting for help on promoting my books. Becky also happens to be a co-author of the book Beyond the Politics of Contempt, whose other co-authors, Doug and Beth, I recently interviewed for this podcast. Becky mentioned her husband was retiring from the FBI and had written a book, and here we are.
Topics we discuss include:
- The differences between FBI work and general law enforcement work
- What Eric has found most useful when it comes to interrogations and information-gathering
- The importance of asking one question at a time, and avoiding multiple questions
- The importance of being friendly and non-threatening in maximizing the chances people will talk to you
- The reasons why so many people talk at length to police, despite it being so well known that you should ask for a lawyer
- The reasons why Eric sees very little use for reading and analyzing nonverbal behavior in law enforcement and interrogation work
- The downsides and risks of deceiving people to try to get information and confessions
- The usefulness of the lie detector
Along the way, Eric discusses several interesting scenarios from his career.
We spend a good amount of time here talking about nonverbal behavior and the difficulty of getting practical use out of that in real-world, high-stakes scenarios. I’m going to be focusing on this for the podcast in upcoming episodes, so if this interests you, please hit Subscribe where you listen to this. I’ll be talking to a former CIA operative about nonverbal behavior, another FBI agent who is quite well known, a professional negotiator, and more.
Here’s a bit more about Eric’s career:
He spent a dozen years in Christian ministry, and that included pastoring a Baptist church in Western New York. In 2002, he changed careers to join the FBI, where he served for 24 years, investigating drugs, gangs, crimes against children, organized crime, and counterterrorism, among others. Eric was a firearms instructor, tactical instructor, fit instructor, and spent 15 years as a SWAT operator and Breacher. Married to his wife, Becky for 33 years, they have three children and reside in SE Michigan.
Ok, here’s the talk with Eric Robinson:
Zach: Hi Eric. Thanks for joining me.
Eric: Pleasure to be here.
Zach: Yeah, I really enjoyed your book, uh, found it very enjoyable. Read lots of interesting stories and observations from your career. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what led to you wanting to write that book, write that book. What was that journey like?
Eric: Sure. I am a week into retirement after 24 years in the FBI and was looking to consider what’s next in my life. My wife Becky, who runs a marketing and publishing company said, you should write a book. And I said, absolutely. But, uh, after all these years, I’d never written down anecdotes or stories. Always had wanted to do that.
And so Becky gave me a book that said, well, here’s how you write a book. And I read it and one of the things suggested is. Probably to plot things out first. So I sat down at the computer to plot out what a book might look like and thought, well, let me, let me, let me start with the beginning and just went from there.
So I didn’t end up graphing it out, I just started typing.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: And literally it, the, the base of it was five weekends and I would spend all day typing and I’d tell Becky, oh, I’m at 10,000 words. And she’d say, how are you at 10,000 words? I said, I don’t know. It’s just coming.
Zach: And yeah, the stories are just flowing.
Right?
Eric: They do. And it’s very natural because if, if we’re sitting around, uh, after an op or search warrant or we’re waiting on an informant to show up. Agents start telling stories, Hey, you remember that time that, uh, you got caught doing this? And then the guy came out and people just start telling stories.
And for us, like, we’ll chuckle and laugh, but I can easily take myself out of that and think, actually that’s, that’s pretty cool. Mm-hmm. So through 24 years I got to do some cool things and enjoyed exposing on them, just giving information of what happened, what I went through, and some of the lessons learned from that over the years.
Zach: Yeah. And as you point out in your book too, the, the fact that you often do kind of, um, retrospective analysis after cases, that was kind of the structure of your book too, to, to go into, you know, what you learned and looking back on what happened kind of thing.
Eric: Yes. Uh, that’s something that we’ve done for a long time.
I’ve been on the SWAT team for about 15 years, and we do an after action, which is just a review of what did we do well, what did we do poor, what do we need to keep, what do we need to throw away? How can we handle this better? And over the years as well, my investigative squad began taking that on. Look, we just arrested somebody.
Uh, how was this set up? What did we do well? What, what mistakes did we make? And so those after actions are what I placed in the book then of, well, here’s a, here’s a funny story. Here’s something I thought was interesting. Here’s a few other related anecdotes. And now. What did we get out of this? And what I try to do in the book as well is I, I feel like I come from a bit of a unique experience where I spent 10, 11 years in ministry.
I left a Baptist church last preached April, 2002, uh, in Easter. And then the next week I was in Quantico, Virginia at the FBI Academy. And then the week after that I preached again because they didn’t have a chaplain and they knew, uh, I could do that. So
Zach: mm-hmm.
Eric: That’s a bit of a unique position. I had not met anyone who came from a full-time ministry position through my 24 years, so
Zach: mm-hmm.
Eric: Though many people are religious. Uh, that was a little bit. So tried to connect that to my background as a pastor too.
Zach: When I was started asking you questions, one of the topics that came up that I realized I part partly why I wasn’t asking the best questions, was the differences you pointed out between, um, FBI work and regular, uh, law enforcement work.
Maybe you could talk a little bit for, for people that don’t understand those differences, what are the, the Major D differences between FBI and, and general law enforcement?
Eric: Certainly, uh. Law enforcement, the police on the street typically do policing, which is you see something suspicious down the road, or there’s a car accident or there’s a break in, and the police come to clean up that problem, which might be just a quick investigation, gathering details, and then coming back to a prosecutor to say, here’s what we’ve got.
Um, do you wanna prosecute this? Um, are we finding someone, so for the most part, police, many times just get thrown something. Here you go. You need to solve this. And even if it’s a detective or an investigation that carries on for some period of time, they’re much more at a need to clear those cases. So even if someone is looking into.
A long-term investigation, their long-term is much different than the FBI. So an FBI investigation comes from, uh, informant work, from complaints, from tips. Might even come from a newspaper where you look at it and think, that seems suspicious, but our long-term investigations can last years. I had one that lasted probably five years, and I was doing other investigations along the way too, so we have time to build cases to work on digging out the route.
I had worked drug cases early in my career and that entails not grabbing somebody off the street doing a dope deal. It involves doing a dope deal. Pulling, they got off the street and now working up the chain to suppliers eventually. So that might mean taking some, uh, doing a drug deal, ripping the drugs, sending the guy back on the street, and then writing a title three or a wiretap on that person’s phone until we hear who the next guy is.
And we move up from there and do more deals, pinching more people along the way. Mm-hmm. And that takes months and months. Uh, it takes a lot of labor. A wiretap is very manpower intensive, and I sat on many of them. And it takes an entire squad of agents. So typically your local law enforcement just doesn’t have the time or manpower to f find out who major suppliers are, who don’t even live in their area.
Their job is to try to get rid of that guy. Right there. Who’s selling drugs on the corner? Let’s get rid of him and deal with the next problem that comes up.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Is another major difference generally, that you, you tend to more often know who the, who the bad guys are. You already have that sense and you’re more building stronger cases and getting more information about other people and, and such compared to general law enforcement.
Eric: Absolutely. So many times local law enforcement will be thrown into a scene and have to make a decision on who’s the aggressor here, who’s at fault. Um, for us, I have a case on this known subject. Through the investigation, I very well may find other individuals who are involved. I worked white collar cases, financial cases for a while, and that begins with this person seeming to have stolen money from investors.
And then throughout the investigation finding out, oh, here’s attorneys who are involved. Here’s an accountant who’s involved. How involved are they? Did they know what was going on? Can I prove it? And so through the subpoenas, through interviews, through bank records, now we’re gonna find out more who else is involved in this?
Is it just the one man who had stolen money or are others complicit in this too? So we have that time and we, we work more comprehensive investigations. So for the most part, the FBI has more patience and the ability to do that. So
Zach: Right.
Eric: We hit a case, it’s higher profile because we spent nine months on it.
Zach: Is it also true, would you say that it’s less about getting confessions than about gathering information? It seems like a lot of the general law enforcement work is, is about. Getting confessions and seems like that would be less true for FBI. Is that, is that right?
Eric: It is. Obviously everyone, if you have a confession, you’ve, you’ve sealed a coffin.
So not only do I have this case on you, but you’ve admitted Yes, I did that. So in doing that, we’re done. That gets presented to the defense attorney and he looks at it, and now he’s just looking to make a deal. So everyone in a post arrest interrogation is looking for some type of confession, but also if it doesn’t come, we’ve, we’ve got all the evidence we need.
So I, I’ve been there on dope cases where I’ve sat for two hours trying to elicit a confession from a drug dealer who just refused to do it and he, he, he didn’t mind talking, but in no way would he admit to what he’s done and. Brought up crazy stories of explanations, what these statements were that he was making on the phone.
And ultimately I just ended the interrogation because it wasn’t going to happen and I now I’m just wasting my time. So.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: Yeah. When we come to arrest the FBI has you dead to rights, could lose a case, but the confession is just the topping.
Zach: Yeah. I, I want to ask you a few questions about interrogations.
I’m very in, interested in, in interrogations as clearly are many people, the interrogation videos are so popular on YouTube. You know, you, you probably know that. Uh, so one, one question I have, I often wonder this is, uh, why do you think suspects so often talk to police? You know, you see all these popular videos of, of various people talking to police and giving information to police.
In, in all of these interrogation videos. And it, and it’s, it’s surprising to me just because you so often hear in culture, in, even in pop culture, about how, you know, you should ask for a lawyer immediately, don’t talk to police, it’s bad to talk to police, but yet you so often see people, uh, engaging in these long, drawn out discussions with police in the interrogation scenes.
And I’m curious, what do you think helps explain that? Uh, what, what do you think the major factors are there? And then also I’m, I’m curious, maybe, maybe it’s a distorted view because obviously we only see the cases on YouTube and such where they are talking to police for an extended period of time. So those might actually be the outliers.
I don’t, I don’t really know.
Eric: Well, two things with that. The, the second question first, I, I think what you see on YouTube is. The bullseye effect where, um, somebody shoots an arrow into a side of a barn and then draws a bullseye around it. So absolutely, you can point out, this did work. This is a person who spoke because why do you wanna watch a video where a guy just obfuscates for for hours?
So yeah, we’re gonna show you the ones at work
Zach: or immediately a or immediately ask for a lawyer. That, that was kind of my, that was kind of my joke where I was like, I, I wanted to create, uh, my joke was I wanted to create a YouTube channel about like genius criminals, and it would just be short videos of them immediately asking for, for a lawyer.
But yeah, it’s a, theres a, there, there’s a big selection bias and like what we see on, uh, the shows and such. Yeah.
Eric: Right. Those would just be reels. Just a 15 second, I want an attorney. And then you play the music out
Zach: masterminds.
Eric: Exactly. But, but the reason that people who are guilty and they know they’re guilty, it’s not somebody who’s.
You know, just a suspect. But this is someone that we know is guilty and everyone in the room does the reason they talk. And this is something that I always try to utilize, is that they need control. Uh, so if you imagine I walk into your house with 10 of my friends and we have guns, and we set you down, and I simply say, you’re under arrest for this charge.
Let’s go do, do you want to know anything you, you need, you need to, you have this feeling where you need to find out what’s happening to you. And, and I would use that often. We had a case once where we were executing a search warrant and we’re looking to gather more details that could charge, uh, a white supremacist who hated police, hated the government, and here we were, the government coming into his workplace.
And I really wasn’t sure if he was going to talk to us because he had no reason to want to. But I began with telling him, well, right now my colleagues are at your house, your family’s fine. And they’re executing a search warrant. I’m sure you have questions, but if you’d like to talk about this and learn more about what you might be facing, I’m gonna read you your rights and if you’d like to talk more, you can waive those.
So at the very least, he wants to know what’s going on. And then once we’re engaged, and though I’m engaged in an interrogation, from his point of view, it’s, it’s just a conversation.
Zach: Right.
Eric: And I wanna bring it forward that way. I want the subject to feel like we’re talking
Zach: It’s low stakes. Yeah.
Eric: He’s asking me for information.
I’m giving it to him. Uh, I’m not threatening him. I’m not. Challenging everything that he says. And what’s more on building rapport? So this individual liked guns. I like guns. So I’m talking to him about hunting that he did with his father when he was young. What platform does he use? You know, what type of rifle and what does he have decked out on that.
And we’re engaged in that. And we’re also now talking about some of the threats that he was making online towards Obama, Pelosi and Biden. And what did he mean by those? And I’m trying to. Give him the sense that I’m on his side in, in as much as I can, because here comes the FBI and he hates the FBI. And I tell him ahead of time, look, just like your boss tells you what you have to do, we have a job to do.
Department of Justice tells us we need to come and address these statements you’ve been making against political figures,
Zach: right.
Eric: We have to do this. So
Zach: making it very impersonal. Yeah. You’re not, you’re not invested. Yeah.
Eric: I I I’m not the bad person.
Zach: Yeah. Yeah.
Eric: I’m, I’m just an instrument and I’m playing to his perception of the government manipulating people anyway.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: And yes, I am being manipulative as I’m doing this, but I’m trying to bring this conversation to a place that’s as normal as anything else that he’s had.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: And what’s more, he’s been online saying these hateful things and there’s no change. Well now the government’s in his office. And maybe he can do something now.
He can speak directly to these people that he hates. Right? And tell them what he means and say, yes, I meant that to threaten this person’s life. Of course I did because this guy is a traitor, because he needs to be hanged and I’m looking for avenues. Fortunately, he bit on all of them.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: To tell me and gain some control, find some purpose in all the things that he is always said.
Now he has an outlet. But to your question, uh, if when I come to him and I say, look, we’re executing a search warrant at your house, just wanna let you know that, and then walked out, I mean, that would fry your brain. So if you can imagine how that is giving someone a chance to have some. Bit of control over their lives that we just came and disrupted is very appealing to almost everyone,
Zach: right?
It seems like there’s a number, can be a number of factors. It’s also, I, I get the sense I could be wrong, and then there’s also the selection bias aspect. But sometimes it seems like, um, there there’s a sense that yeah, they’re trying to control, they’re trying to manipulate and, and they, and they think that to ask for a lawyer immediately would seem guilty.
So some of them have a inflated sense of how much they can control it. So they’re in their minds, they’re like, well, I’m gonna act really innocent and act and try to act like somebody would who wouldn’t ask for a lawyer. And maybe I can manage it and deflect them enough, or they don’t like go down the route of looking at me more.
But I, I, I don’t know what you think of that.
Eric: Uh, well, uh, I’ll tell you, if, if somebody does ask for a lawyer, I immediately do think they’re guilty. It it, it’s how it is. I, right.
Zach: I,
Eric: I’ve, I’ve interrogated lawyers. Or interviewed lawyers and they bring a lawyer in with them. And that second lawyer is just a totem.
It’s, it’s just a, it’s a, it’s a rabbit’s foot for them to rub. Because if, if I talk to you, if I came to your house and I said, I’m doing this investigation on a company used to be part of, so there’s maybe a slight implication that you could be guilty, or at least you think that I might think you’re guilty.
You are smart enough, you should be to know what you should say and what you shouldn’t. And, and as I sit there interviewing a lawyer and his lawyer’s right there, the second lawyer just sits.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: Now, part of how I would put people at ease too, is I tell them the truth, which is, if at any time you feel like ending this discussion, we can do that.
If at any time you don’t wanna answer a question, I’d prefer if you just say, I don’t want to answer that, as opposed to telling me a lie. And now we’re setting up an expectation of honesty. And at the same time, if I ask you a question, Zach, and it seems to implicate you, and you say, I’d prefer not to answer that, you know, oh, I’ve just told him I’m probably guilty of that.
So now you’re going to just keep talking. So yeah, the idea of asking for an attorney, you’re right. You look guilty. And I think that is a part of people thinking they. Might.
Zach: Right. They can avoid that by going the opposite way.
Eric: Yeah.
Zach: Yeah. Yeah.
Eric: So,
Zach: and then they end up, then they end up just saying way too much sometimes, which is what we see on the YouTube channels and such, but Yeah, they don’t always do that.
Yeah.
Eric: Which is what we see. And, and, and Zach, I’m, I’m gonna make a wild assumption, not knowing you well, but you’re probably smarter than you. You know, you’re on the, uh, other, you’re not at the hump of the bell curve that you’re likely smarter than most. And most of the criminals that we encounter are not, uh, also when we have arrested them or are executing a search warrant, it, we’re not doing this.
So you and I are talking, and this is calm. Their heart rate is flying. They’re, they’re trying to think of these things while answering my question. So they’re thrown off too. They’re at a disadvantage. And so if I try to keep this as a normal conversation, that perception. Or
Zach: lowers their guard. Yeah.
Eric: They, they’re, they’re willing to take that because they’ve got so much going on right now, they’re just going to accept that Yep.
This is just a conversation and it’s normal.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Totally. Yeah. No, it makes sense. I mean, and that, and it helps explain why the lower aggression techniques are so effective in general. You know, you that it’s kinda like the Yeah. The, the more you push people, the more likely they are to clam up and go the opposite way and Yeah.
Eric: Oh, absolutely.
Zach: Yeah.
Eric: And I’ve, I’ve never come to a place where I’ve ever used aggression on someone or played bad cop ba, bad cop just shuts ’em up and bad cop comes when I’m fighting with a guy to put handcuffs on. That’s it. But in an interrogation, it’s, it’s all rapport, rapport building, iso empathy, all those things that, all those things that work when you’re on a date trying to impress somebody.
It’s, it’s the same.
Zach: Right. Um, do you have any, uh. Any lesser known, um, strategies that you’d care to share about interrogation and techniques that you think are effective that may be, uh, lesser known by general audiences?
Eric: I don’t think it’s anything special. I, I feel like I had a positive method of interrogating and it, the FBI teaches interrogation methods.
If you asked any agent who’s been in over 10 years, what they learned, they’re not gonna remember anything. Um, if you’re a good conversationalist. You’re likely going to be good at interrogations too. Mm-hmm. Because that’s going to draw people out. The same things that you do on your podcast to draw people out are the same things that you would use if you have someone in front of you that you think is guilty of a crime and draws ’em out.
The the one that I learned along the way, coming from a young agent and then seeing how interrogations go, was not to interrupt silence. And I found myself asking a question, often asking, uh, a compound question, do you remember where you were on this night? And was there anyone with you? And can you explain why people might have said they saw you there?
So here, here’s a compound question. What, like, how can I take the third part first?
Zach: Yeah.
Eric: It
Zach: mu it muddles the muddy, muddies the water about what they even say. Yeah. What, what are they replying to Exactly. Yeah,
Eric: absolutely. Oh, and, and if you did that, that would be a poor interview technique as well.
Zach: Right.
Eric: But I would have subjects pause to answer, and they’re trying to think through the best way that they can answer this as truthfully as they want to. Because people naturally want to be truthful. Even if they’re trying to be deceptive, they want to hang onto some type of truth. And they would pause, and then I would break in and ask another question.
Which completely negates all the questions I had before. And now they don’t have to deal with that.
Zach: Right.
Eric: And now, and now I come back with something else. They’re off the
Zach: hook. Yeah. They, they’re like, oh, great, I can move on to something else. Yeah,
Eric: exactly. And even if that question is a, a better one, now we have, now we’ve gotta backtrack to get the other.
So
Zach: yeah,
Eric: I found that asking a question and then just sitting, and people don’t realize how awkward it is unless they have a friend who’s like this, where if you ask a question and the person sits there for just five seconds, not answering
Zach: five seconds is a long time. Yeah. It feel, it feels really awkward.
Yeah,
Eric: it feels awkward.
Zach: Yeah.
Eric: And so I felt awkward. I felt the stress of the situation, and so I was looking for a way to relieve that for myself. And then I realized. Oh, if I, if I feel bad, this guy’s gonna feel terrible.
Zach: Yeah.
Eric: Oh, that’s great. Let’s use that. And so I would just sit there because the question remains.
Mm-hmm. I asked you when was the first time that you met the victim? You’re sitting, you’re sitting, you’re sitting, and I’m sitting, I’m sitting. Mm-hmm. And you have to do something with that question.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: And I’ve sat for 30 seconds waiting for an answer. And that is, that’s hard to do. Mm-hmm. But that shows the subject, they, they need to address this one way or another.
And so that silence, that pausing, not interrupting myself, not interrupting them, uh, was one of the things that I learned
Zach: to be
Eric: effective. And,
Zach: and related to that, I think you also talk about this in your book is. At the end of their response too. So to leave that room also. ’cause sometimes they’ll, they’ll start adding more stuff to the end too.
Maybe you could, I think you talk about that in your book too, right? Maybe.
Eric: Maybe. But, but because,
Zach: because sometimes there’s an awkwardness when they have answered somewhat and, but they, they clearly, or, or you get a sense that maybe there’s more to say and you leave them some more room and they keep going.
Eric: Absolutely. Yeah. I, my silence suggests that you’ve, you need to say more. So Yes. Asking, uh, when did you first meet the victim? Now we pause. We pause. I’m not sure. Well, I’m not gonna respond to that.
Zach: Yeah.
Eric: It may have been 2010. Still waiting. No way. It, it was 2012. ’cause I remember it was after college and, and it.
I’m letting them work that through. And then if they’re saying things that I know are wrong, I’m gonna let them finish until I can confront them with, well, by my understanding and talk, talking to the victim. They say it was 2010 and they remember because of this. How do you respond to that? Oh, okay. And then let it go again.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I think, uh, to your point about these are just, some of these things are just general, uh, information gathering techniques, no matter what line of work you’re in. When I was, uh, I have a video film degree and I started out in commercial video production, which involved a lot of interviewing of, of people.
Um, and I pretty quickly learned there too, where, you know, it, it was a, making sure your questions were muddled, b giving them a lot of space to respond, including, you know, sometimes the most valuable stuff from a production, um, standpoint was, was when you. Ask them a question, they would respond and then you would give them a few seconds pause to say more.
And sometimes they would come out with some of the best, most emotional things because there was this like kind of awkward pause and they were kind of like thinking, should I say more here? And then they would come out with something a little bit more heartfelt almost. And that often happened. And I think, yeah, I think, I think it ties into, to so many of these, these areas where giving people, people a little space to breathe and maybe feel a little bit of tiny bit of discomfort or a lot of discomfort can kind of get them to cough up something, something valuable sometimes, you know?
Eric: Well, and some of that, I came to realize it, it’s, it’s almost stepping out of being an agent and being in the front yard and looking at, wow, this is what’s going on. I, I came to realize that, oh my goodness, like unexpectedly, a dozen people just broke down this person’s door and pointed guns and. There is, we, we have just shown the, the greatest amount of power that they’ve ever experienced.
So I am in control, and so I’m, I’m going to, I’m going to use that, I’m going to recognize that they are in this a jumbled mind fried situation. You, we, here we are, waking them from bed with lasers pointed at them, whatever it might be, and that is something that I can use. So as we’ve thrown them off, I, I don’t need to show I’m in power.
I don’t need to yell, I don’t need to make demands. We just, we just did that by breaking in your door or coming to you, grabbing you in the streets, you know, on your way to your car. We have just shown the power that’s there, and so I’m recognizing that and letting that underlying. Stream play through, right?
As we now conduct the interrogation.
Zach: It’s almost like a built-in bad cop, good cop dynamic by the show of force almost gently.
Eric: It is. And, and again, even if it’s, and I’ve arrested people this way of like just coming alongside them with a couple of us, grabbing them by the arm gently and saying, with the FBI, you’re under arrest.
Just that like again, you imagine coming outta targets and walk into your vehicle and somebody says, Hey, you’re under arrest. That it’s shattering. It’s, you’re just thinking, I can’t wait to eat these honey nut cheerios when I get home. And all of a sudden your life is different.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, does anything else, um, anything else come to mind for lesser known interrogation techniques?
You care to share
Eric: the I. One of the more significant things, as, as you and I have talked offline, is the basic, the basic way that an interrogation works. For the FBI typically is, uh, two people. Two agents or a task force officer, and an agent with one being the main interrogator, the main questioner. The other taking notes or just making observations, keeping a mental track of what avenue you’re going on, and then what we may have discussed prior that I’m getting away from that this, this secondary person can remember and bring back later.
But without interruption, letting one person just have that straight line of thought, if I’m doing this, I’m asking you this, then this, then this, knowing I’m trying to get to here and, and I’ve been there where. I start asking questions and the other person jumps in with a great idea, wonderful question, but has nothing to do with my line.
And now we’re off of that. And so just having one person do that interrogation while the other is there to keep tabs of where this is going. Maybe taking note where, oh, he says he had a blue Pontiac, we need to come back to that.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eric: But letting the, the primary person go along the way. So that’s the setup.
It’s, um, we, we may do it videotaped in an office. We may most often do it in a kit in the subject’s kitchen, wherever we feel like we can get the, the best out of this. And it’s, it’s not the two-way glass. It’s not someone. Watching each little bit of behavior and, and considering what that means. It is really just a one-on-one with another person there to support without it being too much of a show of force to, um, make them ill at ease while they’re answering the questions too.
Zach: And speaking of working with the, the partner, you talked a bit about, uh, in the book you, you wrote about, um, some little signals you can have with your partner. For example, like the instance of your partner jumping in with a question you’d rather not have them jump in with you. Can you like put, you know, touch their, touch their knee or something like little signals, let ’em know, like, hey, hold off on that kind of thing.
And there’s some of those, those kind of communications that go on Right?
Eric: There is a bit, for the most part, when I’m going to be primary interrogator, I’ve done homework, I have, I, I very literally almost have, um. A presentation ready where I have an idea of what route I’m taking. I’ve got the facts and I’ve got the idea.
And, and now I’m talking through that with my partner too. So, so we’re on board with each other ahead of time. And in this case, you know, my partner had jumped in and it was in a, in a situation where the subject was just, each time I’d ask a question would go, and it was long. And so my partner was jumping in, I placed my hand on his knee.
Uh, any other occasion if I had done that, they’re gonna send me to hr. But this time we’d worked it out that, Hey, let, let’s come back to the way we go. But we don’t have too many signals that, that we use along the way.
Zach: Mm.
Eric: It’s, it’s, it’s really very practical. Mm-hmm. So I hope people aren’t really bored as they were looking for amazing secrets from the FBI, because for the most part it’s, it’s really just.
Trying to win an audience with somebody. Mm-hmm.
Zach: Rapport or getting them to talk, making suddenly them at ease.
Eric: Yeah. I mean, it’s very manipulative, but on the surface it’s just the same thing that we’re doing right now and having a conversation and you don’t even realize I’ve gotten you to admit to so many things that you’d be
Zach: Yeah, I, yeah.
I’m, I’m now, I’m, now I’m worried I’m gonna clam up. I’m gonna ask for my, uh, podcast attorney to join us. Um, so I, I, I was curious, one thing I’m curious about, um, I mean this ties into my behavior, nonverbal interests. It’s, it can be hard to get a handle on. Um, and I’m sure they don’t, you know, advertise this either, but I’m curious what the general, uh, principles and, and, uh, trainings are that, uh, FBI agents go through to learn about interrogation techniques.
And maybe it’s quite minimal. Maybe, maybe it’s mostly like you’re, you’re learning on the job and you know, learning it as you go and you’re learning directly from the people you work with to start and, but I’m, but, but I’m curious, are there recurring. Or a lot of upfront trainings related to like, here’s all these interrogation techniques.
We’re, we’re gonna teach you that kind of thing.
Eric: At Quantico, they teach interrogation techniques, uh, much of it being rapport, building minimization, um, giving subjects and out like, oh, it it, you
Zach: Right. You were, you were emotional. Uh, you, it’s understandable you were upset. These kinds
Eric: of things. Yeah. Ab anything that allows them to say yes.
Zach: Right.
Eric: But as you said, it is, it’s on the job. Um, any training that I got was from practice observation and then reading books on my own to, to consider, okay, this might be something useful to do. So someone who’s good will sit in as much as they can. With a senior agent to watch them and observe, take notes, even do an after action from that.
Why did you ask this? What was your thinking? Um, and I think the bureau is just fortunate that they hire good people who are fairly intelligent. And so by and large, just by circumstance, most of the folks who come in are pretty good at what they do. They have an ability to communicate anyway. Part of the process to hire involves a period of it.
It’s almost an interrogation of the applicant of, tell us a time you did this. And it’s 15 different questions of, give us an example when and if you can’t speak well to that, if you can’t think on your feet, then. You’re probably not getting hired.
Zach: Mm.
Eric: So much of it is just the experience that you’re gonna learn along the way.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Well, and I, I could be off base on this, but one thing that it strikes me in that, in that area is there’s theoretically an incentive to, for the FBI or any law enforcement agency, to not give too much hard and, uh, hard guidelines or hard requirements, uh, about these kinds of things because the more you make it a formal, kind of like, here, you must do this, this, and this, or you should do this, this, and this, it’s kind of harder to defend all those various rules.
And, and, uh, you, you, you can theoretically face more pushback. Like if, you know, the, the, if it gets leaked that, that these are the official trainings for interrogation, right. There’s theoretically more things you have to defend versus, you know, let’s let our agents, let’s let, let’s let our, um. Officers and agents learn from each other about what the, you know, most valuable techniques are and not be too, like these are all, you know, hard guidelines for how you should do it.
Um, but I, I could be off base on that, but it, it, it strikes me in terms of sometimes, sometimes there’s been these controversial things that get out about like, oh, they’re training on this, or they’re training on this. And it seems like the, the more you can reduce all the granular trainings, the, the less likely you are to face, you know, controversial, uh, you know, objections about what you’re doing basically.
Eric: Well, and you may be right, I’m haven’t been part of the decision making process, so I don’t know. But also it’s, it, it’s, it’s subjective, right? So if you gave me, this is what you need to do in an interrogation, but that doesn’t fit my personality, then well. What’s to say that this manner is the best.
Zach: Right?
It is so much of it. So much of the, the granular things are, are, are subjective and it needs to fit. You need to be comfortable with it. To, to do it. Yeah.
Eric: Absolutely.
Zach: Yeah.
Eric: Which, which goes to one of the discussions we had offline was dealing with, uh, deception. So whether I feel comfortable with deception, and this is one where I feel absolutely anybody, any police officer can lie as much as they want to, to get whatever they want from that lie.
I’ve never lied in an interrogation because if someone is lying to get somewhere, I, I simply wanna know, what value are you thinking you’re getting from this? So if that was part of what the FBI says, like emphasize reuses and deception to. Find out how people react. Well, as soon as I say Zach, we’ve got your DNA on the weapon and you know that we don’t
Zach: Yeah, exactly.
Eric: Yeah. By something, I have no credibility.
Zach: Right.
Eric: Anything that I say, now, I, I’ve got a solid case against you. But now when I tell you, well, we got back the bank records and we can see money moving from this person to you, you’re like, how do I know that? Mm-hmm. So I’ve, I’ve never used deception because I can’t see the, the value I had.
We arrested a guy once when I was a new agent and another new agent told him that we had satellites trained on them, and that’s how we knew there was gonna be a drug deal. And I thought that is the stupidest, like, this guy’s gotta be very, very dumb to believe that we’ve got. Access to satellites and we care about some Latin King drunk dealer in Chicago.
Mm-hmm. And that struck me early, that if there’s value, I’ll do it
Zach: right.
Eric: But I’ve never come across a situation where I considered, yeah, it might be useful if I use some type of ruse in this situation.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, that’s a really good point. Yeah. You don’t know what they know. You don’t know how it’s gonna make you seem less credible depending on what they know.
I was curious how, what are your views of the, the polygraph and I mean, my, I I’ll say, I’ll say what my perception is. It mainly seems to be a, a tool used to, you know, for intimidation purposes because it’s not, you know, obviously not admissible in court.
But, uh, I’m curious for your take on it and maybe your take on how the views of polygraph have, have shifted over your years in the FBI.
Eric: Well, I, I think you and I probably have the same idea of polygraphs. I just have seen it used successfully, o obviously because being on the inside. So polygraph is a regular tool that the FBI uses most often in, uh, child sexual abuse cases.
Because if we have an individual whos, uh, downloading child pornography, child sexual abuse material. We want to know if there has been hands-on events and we want to find victims. So I’ve seen the polygraph used many times and it’s, uh, I listened to your, uh, episode, um, talking about polygraphs and I liken polygraphs to they, they are a tool.
It’s, it’s like a gun. If I put the gun in the hand of an officer who is just and honest, then it is a tool to get bad people to comply. If I put the gun in the hand of an officer who is wild and corrupt and untrained, then it, it’s could be dangerous. So the FBI uses POLYGRAPHERS regularly. They’re well-trained and they are are best interrogators.
So they are tr trained well to interrogate
Zach: Mm.
Eric: But also they’ve got enhanced tools. So I can use this polygraph to give me a suggestion where you may be telling lies or trying to hide something and I’m gonna use that to root it out. And depending on how you, as the bad guy accept this, this might influence you.
Mm-hmm. I have seen, I arrested a man who had sexually abused a 13-year-old boy. We interviewed him at his house. He had continually denied any involvement. And then our polygrapher said, well, how about if you come downtown for a polygraph? And the next thing I know here he is admitting to things even the young boy had not told us.
So it, it can be very useful. And I definitely understand there’s situations where it has been used to abuse as well. Um,
Zach: yeah. But it sounds like you, you, you, you would say it gets a, a bad rap, which is kind of my, I I’ve, I’ve often wondered that like it’s, you know, it’s really hard for me from the outside to know how it’s being used by practitioners and such, but I, I have often thought like I could, I could understand because it is, even if it’s far from a hundred percent reliable, obviously.
Eric: Yep.
Zach: It’s, it, you you’re saying because it is accurate enough, um, you know, by and large, you know, it’s, it’s significantly above, um, you know, uh, random, uh, chance obviously. So the fact that it, a, it is fairly reliable to detect lies for general population and then even if it does, you know, get things wrong and that, but then b.
In concert with a skilled, uh, interrogator and practitioner, that it can be used as a useful tool to be like, Hey, uh, you, you, you, you should, you should, uh, allow for that. Let’s dig into that more. And they follow up. And so, yeah. I mean, I get your, I get your point and I can, I’ve often wondered that, ’cause it’s really hard for me to understand the, the nuance of how it’s being used.
’cause that’s a good, it’s a good point to hear your observation. Yeah.
Eric: Well, for me it’s, um, I was not a sniper, uh, for our SWAT team, but I have shot a sniper rifle and if the sniper set me up and said, here you go, get down there, and you, it’s, it know, whatever, it’s all worked out. I can, I can hit targets as well as they can, but I don’t know how to do the complications and all the mathematics for it and how the rifle is set up.
So if you gave me a polygraph and I started working on you, you know, maybe I’d do okay, but without that training. That the polygraphers have, I, I know to trust our guys fairly well. Mm-hmm. That being said, I had a colleague who was coming through to apply to the FBI, very, very close person to me, and they failed, or they had questionable results on drug use.
And I said, I talked to the polygrapher and I said, what are the chances that you might’ve made a mistake here? He goes, maybe you don’t know your friend as well as you think. And I thought, no, I, I do. There’s zero chance this person has done drugs and you’ve made a mistake. So I know they, they don’t, they’re not perfect.
Zach: Right.
Eric: So when you say getting a bad rap, I don’t think they get a bad rap. I think they get a fair rap.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: They’re just not as understood that here’s how they can be used with someone who is confident and not abusive.
Zach: Right. Yeah. I think, and I, I, I’ve had a few of these conversations for the podcast where.
I, I think, uh, there can be overly pessimistic views about this or about, you know, the use of nonverbal behavior in law enforcement scenarios, because I think, I mean, I think the worst case scenarios are when someone uses the results of a polygraph or their vibe about somebody’s nonverbal behavior or something to reach like an, an extremely certain conclusion.
But if you’re only using that as a tool to investigate further and you know that, you know, these things are just tools that can be fallible, then you’re not, then you’re avoiding the, the bad things because you’re, you’re using them and, and being like, well, if you’re, you know, if you’re using a polygraph to interrogate, you know, somebody who may have molested children or, or whatever, uh, if you’re getting information out of them, that, that you can then verify is correct, and that is, that is a good use of it.
And, and, and it was a meaningful. Use of it, but you know, on, on the, on the opposite end of if you’re using it to like, reach overly certain conclusions that then go in the face of evidence, that’s a bad use of it. Right. But just to say it’s a, like a lot of things, it’s a, it’s a nuanced area. Yeah.
Eric: Well, and this is much like your question about, uh, why do bad people sit down to speak with officers post-arrest?
Why are they willing to talk if I’m polygraphing you and I say, it looks here like you’re lying and I have a very good friend who’s a polygrapher. Like, if you wanna stick to it and go, I’m not lying. Okay.
Zach: Yeah. That’s kind of the end of it. Yeah.
Eric: That’s the end of it. Yeah. Like, I can’t put that in. I, I, I, I can’t charge you with that.
So, right. If, if I wanna lie on a polygraph and you call me on it, I’ll just go, Nope. Tell ’em the truth.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: And we can sit there as long as we want. Yeah. Or,
Zach: but if they, if they start volunteering information, then yeah. That’s then, so, you know, that’s great. Yeah,
Eric: absolutely.
Zach: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good, it’s a good point because yeah.
I, it’s a, it’s a nuance I think is often lost with a lot of things. There’s so many binary views of, of things these days in general. Yeah. Um, so yeah. Let, I was gonna ask you, um, uh, sorry, I’m looking at my notes here. Um, I had an idea, I’m try to remember what I was gonna say.
Well, maybe we can, uh, maybe we can pivot to the, the nonverbal behavior aspect. I mean, that’s one, been one focus of my show and especially the last year or so, I’ve, I’ve been more focused on a lot of the, um. Exaggerated or just plain wrong information about behavior that, um, sometimes is used in law enforcement, but then also is just the source of a lot of, um, you know, general life advice things about how to use or exploit, uh, nonverbal behavior.
So I’m, I’m curious, uh, can you think of, uh, you know, what, what are your, what are your views on that area in the law enforcement space? Are there, are there times that, you know, you, you’ve, you’ve based major decisions on things in the nonverbal body language sphere?
Eric: Boy, I, I would think anybody who bases major decisions on body language is making a huge mistake.
So I have never run into. An FBI agent who has said that they use that. It’s not to say that some don’t, but I’ve never met one. I’ve never done it myself. As, as I set up the interrogation scenario for you. It’s me. I’m a primary interrogator, and then my colleague who is scribbling notes and trying to remember things.
There’s no space for in the moment watching what’s going on. Moreover, if I can’t testify to it or put it in an affidavit, it just has zero value. I, I won’t say zero value. It has very small value, so I cannot write in an affidavit when asked, did you kill your wife? He looked down into the left. That, that doesn’t do that.
Doesn’t do anything. If, if at all, if there’s anything, it would be something I just tuck back and think, well, let me come back to that. ’cause that was a little odd that he did that. I had a, uh, friend in college who was a super nice guy, and we would talk, and whenever he talked, like he’ll, I’ll talk to him and he’ll look at me.
But as soon as he started talking, he never gave eye contact. It was a, it was an odd tick that he had, but he would never give eye contact when he was talking to anyone. And God forbid, something terrible happens to his wife where she dies strangely, because that guy is gonna be a suspect. But I, I don’t know your life.
I like, maybe I would trust that I know how my wife reacts to questions, but body movements. Micro movements, I would never trust, I would trust much more, uh, verbal and trying to keep a sense of that. For example, I asked an individual once, like, uh, have you ever done this? And their answer was, I typically do this, this, and that, which didn’t answer the question.
So trying to tell the truth, which is, yes, I typically do this, but your question about this event, I didn’t. But it is true that I typically do that instead watching, listening for those rather than micro signs mm-hmm. Of behavior. There’s no space for it.
Zach: Yeah. I mean, and and by verbal you mean the content of what the actual communication people are saying?
I mean, that’s, that’s what I, when people have asked me, because I. Because I do this podcast because I’m interested in, I’ve done work on poker tells. I often get people asking me, oh, what nonverbal body language stuff should I focus on in everyday life? And I, my general answer is, you shouldn’t really focus on that.
You should focus on what people are actually saying because what people actually say, I think it’s very different in games and sports because there’s like little clues you can pick up and it’s a very formalized environment, but in real world non-game scenarios, my stuck answer is exactly what you related to what you said, where it’s like you’d be much better off spending your mental efforts thinking about what people say and what they don’t say.
Yes. Like are they avoiding the question? Are they, did they not answer what you asked? Or do they seem to do, do things not add up at this meta level for their stories? You know? So just to say that there’s a, an abundance of information there and then you have like all this ambiguity and variety and the body language would, so to me it’s like to spend.
A significant amount of time on the body language is just a huge mistake in any kind of high stakes situation. Real world, non non-game, I mean, yeah.
Eric: Well, well even take it to game, obviously in poker it’s all about lying, but, and trying to hide things from your opponents, but to what degree, even if you feel like you have a pretty good idea of poker tells, and you have a half million dollars to bet on this, do you really trust it that well, and, and then it comes to objective facts, which is this person may be lying, but their hand is still better than yours, so mm-hmm.
Tho those little, yeah. There
Zach: can be a lot of ambiguity even. And, and to be clear, like, yeah, I would agree because in my, in my work, I often emphasize that there’s a lot of ambiguity and you might only use a poker towel to sway a decision in like a couple times in like an eight hour session or something.
Zach: A quick note here: I have a lot of thoughts on why nonverbal behavior is much more useful in game scenarios than in real-world, non-game scenarios. I see them as entirely different scenarios for a few reasons – one reason is that there are much more granular, discrete actions and goals in games (for example, physically trying to score a goal, or making a bet) whereas those discrete events are not present in non-game, real-world scenarios. Also, because many game-scenarios are often so close in terms of advantage, even a small clue, even if far from 100% reliable, can bring an advantage; and that has little correlation to non-game scenarios. Also, contrary to what Eric said here, in poker there is no lying; a bluff is not the same as a lie; and getting a clue to whether someone is bluffing or not is not about deception detection but just about sensing variations in relaxation and tension and such. The various differences present are why I think behavioral information is much more actionable in games and sports, and yet mostly non-actionable in non-game scenarios. I’ll probably soon do an episode and write-up about my thoughts on that. I talked about that in a previous episode from 2025 with deception detection researcher Tim Levine, if you wanted to hear more thoughts on that. But, to Eric’s point here; yes, behavior even in game and sports scenarios is still often still quite hard to read; there is still a lot of ambiguity; that is something I stress in my own poker tells work; and that fact is especially true the more experienced the player is. But it’s also true that making practical use of such things is just much much more hard in non-game, real-world scenarios than it is in games. And while I’m on subject I’ll mention that I wrote a book titled Verbal Poker Tells, and I think that verbal aspects, the things people actually say in poker or other games, are also just so much more meaningful and reliable as clues than nonverbal aspects; so that’s true across the board. Ok i’ll get off my poker tells high horse now and get back to the talk…
Eric: Well, and, I’ve seen for example, uh, Chris Watts who had killed his family in Colorado, and people go back to the video and say, look at this, see how he’s not crying?
And, and, and, and his is kind of a bad example ’cause it’s, it’s fairly egregious and you can see Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty bad. And yet they still had to get a confession. Just looking like you’re guilty doesn’t help. But I don’t know Chris Watts, I don’t, I don’t know how somebody deals with a tragedy like that.
I don’t know. Why are you not crying? I,
Zach: and I, and I would say for, I
Eric: would cry,
Zach: I would say for Chris Watts. I mean that, that’s a good thing to bring up because I actually did, you know, speaking of like verbal. Patterns. I actually wrote a piece on Chris Watts about the, the verbal, like what he actually said.
But, and, and I think it can be hard to separate those two things from the non-verbal behavior because you watch, you watch somebody like Chris Watt, which as you say was, I, I think, I also think it’s a rather egregious behavior when you, uh, when you add up all of the things, right? When you add up the, the, the way he reacted in various spots, you add up the things he said at a meta level.
I think, I think it, it, it can be hard to separate the, um, the nonverbal from like what act, the, the meta level things of how people are responding, what they say. Uh, so just to say, I, I think it can be hard. A lot of people might be like, oh, he, this person acted strangely in some nonverbal way. But if you took away, like, did they really act strangely?
Like if, if you had replaced what they said with more reasonable. Things would you have really drawn attention to the nonverbal. Right. So that’s just to say, I, I, I think it can be hard to separate those fears, which, which helps explain I think why some law enforcement or other people might watch an interrogation, uh, footage or do an interrogation.
They’re like, he’s acting weird. But it’s like, I I Is the weird part about the nonverbal, or is it mainly about the, the ways somebody’s responding. Right. It’s like, yeah. It’s, it’s hard to separate sometimes.
Eric: Well, and so here’s a case with Chris Watts and the investigators still have to find the bodies, get a confession.
So, you know, and his girlfriend, you know, tells thing, so Right. They still need the
Zach: information. Yeah. You
Eric: still need to prove,
Zach: you still
Eric: to
Zach: prove it. Right.
Eric: And it, it, it’s a, it’s a bad example ’cause he’s the husband and that’s always the first you look at. But if he was the neighbor and you look at that like you, an investigator can’t make that.
So strong of an influence that now I, I’ve blocked out other possibilities. I’m so biased that this is my guy. ’cause look at that, that I’m ignoring or dismissing other evidence along the way.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Because I, I mean, I, oh, go ahead. Yeah.
Eric: Well, to your question about like, so law enforcement, behavioral analysis and listening to the words is one thing, but even bringing this up as to going on a date and trying to read people or your boss, it’s, it’s so negative.
So in law enforcement, I’m, I’m trying to determine if this person is a killer, if this person’s a drug dealer, if they’ve stolen money, I think people tell the truth. So if I’m trying to read you as we talk, why, why am I, why am I so. Cynical that I want to see if you’re lying to me or what your true intentions are.
If I wanna see what your true intentions are, I’d say, Hey, Zach, you mentioned this. Can you tell me more about it? Hey, look at that. Look at that. Some
Zach: actual, some actual words to analyze. Right,
Eric: right, right.
Zach: Yeah, you were a
Eric: little vague. Can you expand on that?
Zach: Right, totally. No, that, that’s where it gets into, like, don’t, don’t waste your efforts delving into that stuff.
Focus on asking questions and interpreting responses. Right. Like, yeah. Um, and to your point too about the, you know, the Chris Watt thing, it’s like, uh, like it’s, it’s basically never gonna happen where you’re gonna base a major decision in a law enforcement scenario based on some nonverbal stuff. Like, usually if in the cases where you think somebody is acting weird in some nonverbal, you know, body language way, I, I would say.
Almost all the time you have some sort of evidence to act on, like you there, there’s a story not adding up or you have some physical evidence or whatever it may be like. So the idea that yeah, like you said, you have to get the evidence and, and usually you’re gonna have more to, a lot more to go on than any sort of body language thing.
So yeah.
Eric: At at the very best it is a, it’s a clue. It’s,
Zach: yeah. It, it inter it can be interesting.
Eric: Sure. And, and the, the one example I can ever think of where body language played into a discussion I was having, we had an investigation into John Burge who was a police commander in Chicago in the seventies and eighties.
And he and those with him were accused of regularly torturing subjects, almost exclusively black males. So we had one of the subject victims who told about how. Burge and his men beat him, got a confession, and then took a picture of him in a lineup. After that, he then spoke to the Cook County prosecutor, who then took down his confession as was the process, and I asked him, is there any way that this prosecutor could not have noticed your condition?
He said, absolutely not. I could hardly stand. I was bleeding. I was clearly beaten. So we had a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of him in a lineup, and the Assistant United States attorney and I then flew to speak with this former Cook County prosecutor, who at the time was working in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, ironically, and when we confronted him, showed him the picture.
And I asked him if he remembered this. He was holding up the, the, the fo he was hiding behind it.
Zach: Mm.
Eric: He wasn’t looking at it. He was hiding behind it and very clearly was lying to us.
Zach: Mm.
Eric: And then we walked away and that was it. Because I can’t charge you with hiding behind a picture.
Zach: Right. You can’t charge Yeah.
You can’t charge somebody with just reacting in some suspicious way to something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well that, that, that’s a good segue to, I mean, I recently reread Joe Navarro’s book, um, what everybody, what Everybody is saying, and he’s a former FBI agent, but I reread it with a focus on, you know, what are the things in this book that are actually practically useful.
And, um, he starts, and I’ll say. I found very little in the book that I would think would be practically useful. There was only not even that many examples from law enforcement. Um, like I, things I would actually like sway a decision in, in law enforcement, even in that book. But he, the, the, the things that stood out as being theoretically the most useful or practically useful were the, were this idea similar to what you said, where Joe, uh, or maybe it was other, somebody else going through a list of items to a suspect where the first thing he opens his book with is going through a list of murder weapons and getting a nonverbal reaction to a specific murder weapon.
And then there’s another example he gives later in the book of going through a list of associates and seeing someone react to a specific one. Uh, but I would think, I mean, I, I, I’m skeptical. As to how useful that is in practice for the reason you mentioned. It’s like if they don’t, if they don’t continue talking, there’s, there’s nothing you can do.
And then b how useful is that anyway? I I, I would predict that if you actually studied that with a lot of people, you might get a lot of false positives, especially if you’re talking more subtle behaviors. Like your example was quite, it sounded like it was quite extreme, but just to say, and then another reason I’m skeptical is like, if that was so valuable, I would think it would be trained as a technique in the FBI and you would’ve heard about that kind of like, well, let’s go through a list of items and see how people react to get information.
But I’m curious, yeah. What, what are your thoughts on all, everything I just said there?
Eric: Yeah. So the only thing I would say, so if I show you a murder weapon and you respond oddly again, that’s just a cue to me. Mm-hmm. So now all the rest of it is Zach. Uh, I noticed you flinched when I showed you that. Tell me why that might be.
And, and you could lie to me and I can, but it’s, it’s still gonna be verbal. I’m gonna come back and I’m gonna drill down. Uh,
Zach: right.
Eric: One of the things that often police officers are, are taught is the read technique. And I sat in on a read class when I was probably one year in the bureau just to learn some investigative techniques, and their methods are to start with a factual basis.
And then second is behavioral analysis, which is just god awful because I, I’m not a human lie detector though anything that comes through with that I really shouldn’t put any weight on. But then everything that follows there is like setting a pattern for my interrogation, dismissing your denials. And, and this is if I believe you two, possibly or likely be the subject.
But if I dismiss your denials or your claims of innocence, I’m missing out on what might be useful.
Zach: Hmm.
Eric: So if I say, Zach, I believe you killed your neighbor on December 8th, and you say, no, no, I, I didn’t. And I, and I stop you, and I don’t listen. Well, if you tell me, well, I was at the Steelers game and I’ve got ticket stubs, and I took pictures on my phone that has metadata.
Like, well, okay, well that’s gonna help me instead of shutting you down repeatedly. And if you, if I shut you down and I don’t listen, and we don’t have the conversation, if you, if you say I’m not guilty, and I say You are guilty, and here’s why. But if you say, I’m not guilty, and I let you, and I say, well, please explain to me why you’re not guilty and I’m open, I’m curious, rather than shutting down, you say.
Well, I’m not guilty because he came at me first with a knife. Well, now I have you admitting to it, but we can let a jury determine whether or not you are guilty. But the idea of shutting people down of using these behavioral techniques to lock into a belief are gonna get you down the wrong path. And I’ll emphasize one more time.
The, the, the openness and the curiosity and the listening, that’s the method that I’m going to get. I’m gonna get good information from, even if you start lying to me, I’m getting good information.
Zach: Yeah. The, um, made me think of, you know, the example in Joe Navarro’s book of going through like the list of murder weapons.
And then as you say. Getting any value on that Depends on if that person will really follow up and talk. So it almost seems like if you were gonna use that method, you might as well just like fake it and read them a list of murder weapons and be like, and, and just claim to have seen something which is getting into the highly deceptive, you know, losing uh,
Eric: right
Zach: report territory.
If you were just gonna be like, oh, I saw you react when I said candle. You know, when I read candlestick, like if they’re guilty, maybe they’ll give you something. Um, but then you all, then you risk, you know, losing rapport in such way if you, if you do that, you know, wrongly, or, or, or, or, you know, I, I guess it all depends on, it seems like a lot of it can tie down to like, is this a person that’s going to easily break under interrogation in the first place, you know?
Eric: Yeah. Well, and, and, and I don’t want that either. The difference is, again, with the FBII, I. I had a defense attorney question me once. He said, you, you were telling witnesses that my subject was guilty. I was on the stand for this before he was even charged. And I said, yeah, I don’t investigate people that I don’t think are guilty.
If I find out they’re not guilty, I stop investigating him. So coming into this, I, I have an advantage where I pretty much know that you are guilty. Um, that allows me, I
mean,
Zach: especially in the FBI as you’re
Eric: right.
Zach: You know, you not compared to general law enforcement. Yeah. Yeah.
Eric: And that allows me to maybe lock in more to these, this isn’t true, you’re lying to me.
But if, if I’m just out there throwing things out, now the problem is I, I’m biasing the path I’m going on. If, if I’m not curious and open and I’ve locked into, I’m gonna get a confession out of you. I might.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: And then it might be false. And that should be the last thing. That I want.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Were there, um, I know you had mentioned the Reed Technique trainings in the FBI.
Is that something you’ve seen change over the years? Um, ’cause I know, you know, there’s been more criticisms of things in the reed technique area. I’m just curious, have you seen that change over the years?
Eric: Uh, I don’t know that I really say I’ve seen a change, but when I was offered this opportunity in the Chicago Field Division, it was maybe 2003 or four.
And I’ve never come across another opportunity. It’s not one that I pay attention to. So it might be something they’ve gotten away from, there’ve been a lot more criticism about it since then. What we have seen is, uh, the FBI developed what’s called a fly team. And so these are agents who fly to different locations to interview high value subjects who’ve been captured.
And they have methods that they’ve gone through that, uh, are along the lines of ISOM and rapport building and empathy and openness. It’s, it’s like these guys really should start their own dating app because everything about the FBI investigative tools are the same kind of things you’re trying to win a date over for.
I am curious about what you have to say rather than shutting you down, which is contrary to the read. I am letting you talk instead of controlling the conversation.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: I am, uh, giving you the appearance of, um. Agency where I ask you to sit where you want, and um, I speak to you in terms that show that I care.
Like, that must have been difficult growing up that way. I can imagine that would be hard.
Zach: Mm-hmm.
Eric: So all of this, it’s the same thing that I do if I’m on a date and I’m trying to impress somebody.
Zach: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Eric: And, and that’s manipulative too. So this also is, but it’s to bring the person to a comfortable level where they feel like they can make a confession.
If, if I get to a place where you feel comfortable enough that you want to tell me what’s true, that’s what I’m looking for. Mm-hmm.
Zach: That.
Eric: Ultimately, you don’t think we’re at odds? I’ve given you a great opportunity to get things off your chest or to make things right?
Zach: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And not only is it more effective, you, you don’t have the perception or, you know, it’s very unlikely you run into false confessions in that type of en environment too, so,
Eric: right.