878: Body Language | Skeptical Sunday

22:28Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, I think Malcolm and I talked about this a bit in episode 256 a while back. So it seems that body language can lead us into all kinds of traps if we rely on it too heavily, but can it actually be helpful in catching criminals as well? Here's one statistic around its limitation. The National Registry of Exonerations estimates between 2 % and 10 % of individuals in US prisons are innocent. Oh, yikes. That's a lot. I mean, even just one person's a travesty. So between 46 ,000 and 230 ,000 innocent people currently serving prison terms.

23:08If detectives and judges could ascertain a lot from body language, then no innocent person would ever see the inside of a prison cell. That communications professor, Tim Levine, that I mentioned earlier, he does experiments where he sets students a trivia test with a cash prize. He assigns them a partner, but the partner is actually working for Tim, unbeknown to the students. Halfway through the test, the instructor leaves the room, and the partner who is working off of a script suggests that the student cheat at the test with them. 30 % of the people doing this test decide to cheat for the cash prize.

23:43Now, afterwards, Levine interviews them to see if they'll admit to cheating. Now, Malcolm Gladwell spent a day watching these videos and said he had absolutely no idea from watching the videos which of the students were honest about whether they cheated and which were hiding something. Levine showed the videos to many other people to see if they could guess correctly. And people guessed rightly on average 56 % of the time. So a little more than a coin toss, right? Maybe not no innocent person would ever see the inside of a prison cell because there's all these weird incentives and sometimes police or prosecutors are just like, I don't care if he's guilty or not.

24:15Let's throw him in prison because I got to up my percentage or I don't like the guy. Being able to tell if somebody was guilty, it's a little bit more than a coin toss. fine. So it seems like body language maybe has a tiny minute, almost influence. Maybe it gives away something. But wait a minute. These were not actually experts who were judging. They were just Malcolm Gladwell and a bunch of other people like me just sitting there watching videos. Did Tim Levine actually get experts to look at these same videos? Yes, he got police officers, judges, therapists, people in all different lines of professional work, but the accuracy didn't improve at all.

24:51That's because he didn't have anybody who's been watching a crap load of YouTube. Look at this. Have you met the YouTube body language experts? They would have nailed this. 97 out of 100. They would have got it in a second, but they weren't there. Those are the only experts that would have gotten it immediately. But the apparent experts, aside from the YouTube experts, are no better than the general public, despite what those TV shows and YouTube channels about detectives and all these things with a knack for knowing might want us to believe. Just for those who are maybe not able to pick up on the sarcasm here, the YouTube body language expert is not actually an expert in anything.

25:25Okay, so does that mean that the concept of body language needs to be entirely scrapped? As you said, 56 % is better than a coin toss, although other researchers have found it more like 54%. So we're getting a little bit lower there. I think that slight advantage can give detectives clues about lines of questioning to pursue. Former Guantanamo Bay interrogator Lina Sisko did this pretty effectively. She used to hook prisoners up to a lie detector, except it wasn't even a real lie detector. It was just an old Game Boy. She would draw up potential terrorist plots on a whiteboard and point to certain theories before asking the prisoner to give a yes or a no answer.

26:04She took clues from the body language of the prisoners to ascertain whether they might be lying, and then she manually made the Game Boy light up whenever she suspected that the information they had given was false. She said it was remarkably effective because prisoners, believing they had been caught in a lie, then went on to spill the beans. So that's quite impressive. It's a nice little deception there. So it feels like you're debunking body language as something that we can really rely on, but it can come in handy, which reminds me on episode 773 with human behavior expert, Dr. David Lieberman, he said, you gather facts and then you introduce a piece of evidence that's not true, but could maybe be true.

26:48And then you watch how your suspect handles it. So his example was, oh, there's a water main break and traffic was backed up for hours. It must have taken you a while to get out. And maybe that's why you're late or weren't there. And then the suspect has a big problem because if they weren't there in the traffic jam, they won't know how to respond. so they're going to have to guess. But they'll do the one thing that everybody lying about a story does, which is hesitate. Yeah, I think that's pretty similar to what the Guantanamo detective was doing as well. So body language is most powerful when you're in control of the situation, when you can introduce surprising elements and catch people off guard.

27:26Then, having monitored the suspect beforehand, you might spot subtle differences that allow you to continue down a certain path and catch them in a lie. But body language in and of itself, I think, is overestimated in society. I think the reason I wanted to cast a skeptical eye over it is because it has become such a huge part of our culture now. Celebrity gossip columns are filled with so-called body behavior analysts. We talk about Meghan Markle and how she might have looked at Harry a certain way all the time. I have people emailing me all the time to suggest that my guests were lying on the podcast because they looked to the left or to the right.

28:03And that was the creative side of the brain or something like that. So it means that they were fabricating events. And it's like, you don't even know which way the camera is mirrored. So they were probably looking in the opposite direction to what you think they were. So that's just total nonsense. I remember a former friend of mine was like really into this. I think it was called eye accessing cues. And it's up into the right, you're creating something in your brain, but then you looked left. So you're using your logical faculties to create the story. And then you go back up right because you're creating the next part of the story and it's just such a complete load of crap and it's oh he did it the opposite way because he's left-handed so his brain halves are now switched and it's like what are you freaking talking about and I get this stuff too either because I looked up or down or left or right or the guest did and yeah it happened a ton with Amanda Knox they were like oh she's looking upward all the time she was seated really close to I think an iMac which has the camera at the top of the computer and so she's looking up at the screen and then she would look up at the camera and then be like, screw it.

29:01I'm going to look at Jordan because he's on the screen. And they're just going, oh, wait, look at her eyes moving in this very unnatural way. And the reason she was seated that way is because we needed better lighting. We needed her to be in a weird room with better acoustics. So she put the computer up on a shelf and the shelf wasn't where she normally worked. It's just all of this is, of course, lost on the self-appointed body language experts who decided that she was just making everything up because of her eyes, because of her body language. And also bear in mind, this is edited. So like some stuff is take two and she's just saying it differently.

29:30And look how relaxed she was when she said this and how not relaxed she was when she said that. She had to say that four times because the internet wasn't working. It's just complete BS. What I conclude from that is that Amanda Knox needs to invest in a teleprompter. I think that's not a bad idea. Or like some acoustic panels for the room that she's comfortable in. When I spoke to her, she did have all that and it might've been after you did. So I think she does have it all. Some success has come from this. To cover up her lies. Anyway, so then you've got really popular YouTube channels like the Behavior Panel.

30:01You go on their page and the trailer is like, Megan and Harry gave away a lot more than they intended in their Netflix special. I was about to go into an American accent there and I didn't. I stopped myself. I've got nothing against the Behavior Panel. They seem nice and they probably do know a lot more than most of us about body language. But this kind of analysis is very attractive to viewers because it's creating a narrative that's enticing. Look how Harry looks back to the camera here. It's a sign of how he wasn't supporting Meghan in what she said. And you're like, maybe that's plausible.

30:30That could be true. In fact, it seems like it probably is true, but it might not be. Harry might also have been thinking in that moment about the older woman that he lost his virginity to behind the stables. Is that true? Is that a real thing? Yeah, that's a real thing. I read his book, Spare, to spare you the horror of having to read it yourself. And you know what? He's actually been accused of basically doxing her. Well, yeah. Because he went into quite a lot of detail so she was easily recognizable. I've got into the whole gossip now just from talking about Harry and Meghan for a second. It seems like you wouldn't want to be that person because people are going to be like, you're a pedophile.

31:07Well, no, he was old enough, but also no matter how you slice it, that doesn't look good. Yeah, she's supposed to be at work. She was working for Prince Charles at the time, King Charles now, on grooming. And that was her, I'm not kidding, that was her title. Her title was a groomer. She was a groomer. How on brand for Prince Charles to have hired her anyway. She was a groomer. She groomed horses, of course, and had a canoodling with Prince Harry behind the stables. And he just goes into so much detail. I'm not going to go into a whole rant about them now, but for somebody who complains about press intrusion to then give up so much private detail about everybody he's encountered in his life in this book.

31:42Anyway, the point I was making was on the behavior channel and all these channels, we don't know what they were really thinking. And as you said before, especially in the Netflix documentary, it might be like the fourth take, the fifth take. They look different each time. So we have no idea of really knowing what he's thinking. Also, when you're editing something, you put stuff where you want it as the editor. I've done commercials, for example, or like online content for AT &T. And they'll take something where I make a joke or a comment about something that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about in that moment.

32:12And they'll just move it. And it's because it's entertaining or it's funny or they'll add a bunch of us laughing. And we're laughing about eating the stale cookies at the shoot. And they'll put that after somebody's joke that nobody laughed at. That laugh was, that looks fake. They must've been cued to do that because it's a big overreaction compared to the joke. And that wasn't even the same thing. Or they must all really think this person is high status because look at how much they're laughing at his joke. and nobody laughed at that joke, actually. It went over everyone's head or they thought it was dumb and it didn't really come through.

32:42So they added the laugh later on and you can read literally nothing from that because it's constructed. So yeah, none of that makes any sense. That's the thing. So he could have been thinking, as I say, about that older woman or just about anything else. Right, yeah, like his earnings per second for that Netflix documentary. I think they got$100 million for that. The problem with that is we don't know what Harry's typical body language looks like when he's sitting at home with Megan. We only see him on TV. I do know the behavior panel guys, they're great guys, and all of them in person. I also know that they are hamming stuff like this up for YouTube because that's what makes for great TV.

33:19Nuance doesn't have the same effect, just like we talked about with Friends, the TV show. You don't want to go, this could mean 20 different things or nothing at all. No, I want you to say this means she's lying because that's what makes me interested in your video. Going back to that episode I did with Dr. David Lieberman, It appears that a lot of actual experts find the popular YouTubers to be pretty misleading, a little bit sensationalist, because we're not seeing what is. We're only seeing a projection of our wants, securities, and needs. And that's a direct quote or a direct-ish paraphrase from Dr.

33:51Lieberman. It's a basic confirmation bias and projection. We see what we want to see. He goes on to say, the fact that somebody's arms are folded or scratching their nose doesn't mean anything in and of itself. You'll get false readings time and time again. And the timestamp for this is in the show notes if people are interested in going and listening to that exact quote from the show. I remember Dr. Lieberman also spoke of sophisticated and unsophisticated liars. So a small child, yeah, maybe they're gonna look down or look away when they lie, but adults, we've figured this out by age 10 or 12.

34:23You really have to sit with somebody for a long time and observe them to see how their behavior differs. You get a baseline on somebody, and that's why your mom pretty much always knows when you're full of crap, but your teachers, the principal in middle school, she has no idea, but I could never have pulled off the same lie to my parents. Yeah, I was just thinking now, it's why it's so funny sometimes, not in a cruel way, but to watch children when they've been caught lying, because I guess they haven't quite learned the societal ways of behaving at that point. And it's really funny to look back and see they don't know how to hide it.

34:53You even get that with dogs when dogs look quite guilty and it's really cute to see them looking guilty curled up in the corner because they know they did a naughty thing. And I suppose the humor in that comes from They don't yet know what we know. It's that dramatic irony, that Shakespearean thing. But of course, yeah, it's no surprise that another detection tool we use but can't rely on, the lie detector, works exactly the same way as body language. You can't just spring a lie detector on someone and get to work because they'll be nervous compared to normal or might have trained themselves to stay calm under pressure.

35:22You need to sit with them for a long time beforehand to get a sense of their usual heart rate, blood pressure, and sweat. Only then can you get a better sense of whether lying provokes slight changes that the polygraph can show. Even then, polygraphs are only 80 to 90 percent accurate. So if you relied on polygraphs and you tested 100 ,000 people in a year, you could be sending 10 to 20 ,000 innocent people to prison. And while faking a polygraph test is not as simple as putting a stone in your shoe or whatever, people can practice to fake polygraph tests. That's what Defense Intelligence Agency senior analyst Anna Montes did to pass a lie detector in the States when she was secretly working as a double agent for the Cubans.

36:04She just practiced doing the lie detector so many times that she trained herself to no longer show signs of nerves when it came time for the real thing. Body behavior, despite the numbers we can apply for each facial gesture and movement, is even less of an accurate science than polygraph testing. So I don't want to completely poo body language. If you look at, for example, the Chris Watts case where he murdered his wife and kids, when he's appealing for their safe return, he looks incredibly guilty. And body language experts have explained why. His voice doesn't show any despair. He's swaying.

36:39His volume drops. He has a double-handed hand shrug. He uses too many I statements. And I have to admit, it seems right. He does look incredibly guilty. But I just wonder how much of this is obvious now with hindsight and confirmation bias When you don't already know the outcome, it seems like an expert would have to observe a suspect for a very long time to get a sense of their normal habits before making any guesses. And they would be guesses about what they might be hiding. Remembering that episode you did with David Lieberman, he spoke of what I'd call a sort of Schrodinger's irony, and you called it the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that makes us sound very clever, because you'll get much more accurate readings from body language when the suspect believes they are unobserved.

37:23then you can look at a few things. For example, Lieberman told you that someone who stands with a more liberal posture, we might be more confident. And if someone is slumped over, perhaps they're less positive. Interesting, right? So these are indicators that somebody is confident in their story, which might give us an indicator about whether a person is being honest or deceitful in a particular moment, right? Of course, that's really helpful for detectives and FBI agents, and of course, the common person. It's useful to get a sense of whether your partner or your husband, your wife is lying to you, for example.

37:56But what about body language that gives away somebody's personality? Are there signs of narcissists and predators that would be good for us to be able to spot somehow? Yeah, to research this, I went back and re-listened to episode 135 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with retired FBI agent, Joe Navarro, really great episode. And he wrote the dictionary of body language because he found that women would call psychologists to ask about the suspicious behavior of their husbands. And the response would be, do you have insurance? The person in charge of their insurance was the husband. So Navarro wanted to write this book to warn people about the common body language signs of narcissism and psychopathy to look out for.

38:34That's right. So what kind of things should we look out for? Firstly, start documenting abusive, predatory, and toxic traits. Email yourself the behaviors that you are observing, partly because months down the line, you'll have forgotten half the things they've done to you. And also because it will help when you do go to the authorities, and it will help with defining the kind of abuser you're dealing with. There are all sorts of behaviors to look out for in malignant narcissists, such as rage as opposed to anger. Rage being totally out of proportion compared to anger. But if we're to zone in on body language alone, it seems to be about using your intuition.

39:11Navarro recalls being dropped off as a child by a coach and he recalls the coach touching his knee a couple of times and something about it he just felt was way off. He credits his limbic system, the automated part of the brain, with realizing this, and he decided never to get in the car with that man again. Years later, he heard all sorts of rumors that man had been abusing children. Listen to the limbic system and don't hesitate to say, I'm getting out of the car.

39:41You're looking down, left, to the right, up, and to the side, which means you should probably support the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. back. Once again, thank you so much for listening and supporting the sponsors. All the deals, discount codes, fancy URLs are all in one place. Jordanharbinger.com slash deals or use the AI search bot on the website to search for any promo code anywhere on this show. Consider supporting those who support us. Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. It's interesting. When I was a kid, I used to stand in my driveway and write down the license plates of every car that went by because, I don't know, I got in my head the idea that if you had someone's license plate, the police would need it later.

40:22And I was like, I'll just track everyone's license plate. So I used to write in this book with magic markers, every license plate. And I remember I would stand out there with my friend and do this. And we would be playing in the driveway until a car went by and we'd like run and get the paper. My friend, Tim, who I'm still really good friends with. And one day this crappy car was driving through the neighborhood, which it looked really out of place. And I remember being like, huh, that's weird. It looks like my cousin's car. My cousin was probably like 16. And this is a grown man in the car. He looked unkempt.

40:48I thought that was weird. And he was driving slowly and he stopped at the end of our driveway and goes, hi kids, do you know where Schroeder school is? Which actually was a school that was really near my house, but I didn't go there because I was on the edge of a district and blah, blah, blah. That's not where I went to elementary school. And I said, what's your name? And he paused and he goes, what? And I said, what's your name? And he pauses and goes, Gus. And I was like, I don't know anyone named Gus. And also I remember the pause being very weird. So me and my friend, we ran in the house. We said, hold on, we're going to ask my mom.

41:23She knows how to get to the school. We ran in the house, told my mom, there's a guy outside asking where the school is. And she was like, holy crap. She runs out of the house. Dude's gone. So obviously he didn't really need directions. Also who asks two five-year-old kids, six-year-old kids, seven, whatever, how old we were for directions to an elementary school, definitely a kidnapper. And I remember the pause. I remember the car. I remember his haircut was weird. And I remember Gus sounded like a made up name, even though it totally could have not been. The hesitation was so freaking weird. That was a sliding doors moment for you, I suppose.

41:56What's that mean? I've never heard that term. Sliding doors. There's a film called, I think, sliding doors. I think it's called that anyway. Might be called something else. Gwyneth Paltrow. It splits into two when she's about to get on the train the film does so then you see what happens when she gets on the train and then you also every like few minutes it goes back to the story where she didn't quite make it through the doors and the sliding doors moment is like your life could have been totally different if you had just like that slight thing had changed or a lot shorter potentially a lot shorter that was very odd because obviously this guy was a kidnappy kind of guy and what happens when a stranger kidnaps kids is far different than what happens when a family member kidnaps kids oh my god navarro would say, I imagine that Gus showed some of the body behavior signs that suggest he may be a predator.

42:40The point is you used your intuition and this guy was odd. Something didn't add up. Other typical things to look out for include too much familiarity, violating space, controlling your space and time, touching you. Navarro thinks of Bernie Madoff. He didn't have to show them a copy of the files, taking advantage of his friends. Bernie Madoff, yeah, he was a financial scammer who created a Ponzi scheme where he would take an investment and he would show fake returns. And if anybody needed a little bit of money, he would pay that person out with other new money that he got from scamming new investors.

43:17And he showed these above average returns, nothing crazy, but over time it was like, wow, this guy never misses. And it turned out to be a big scam that ran for, I think, decades. There you go. Because he was overconfident, he didn't have to show people a copy of the files or anything like that. He was overly friendly. Sometimes you just have to know a lot of things about somebody. So Navarro, again, he told Wired, there's a great video online where he talks to Wired about finding a spy because the spy was holding flowers upside down. That's how they hold them in Eastern Europe. But he also checks eyes, Navarro does, to see if they're red or indicate a lack of sleep.

43:55The same with the forehead. Hands on waist, he thinks, can be a little bit territorial, that kind of thing. I don't remember the flowers thing, but that sounds interesting. What is that all about? Upside down, flowers. Never heard of that. Yeah, Navarro was tasked with finding out if somebody was a spy, and while monitoring footage of him, saw him holding flowers, and noticed that he held them not upwards, as an American or most Westerners would do, you know, from the stalk with the flowers, the petals at the top, but with the stalks high up and the flowers down. And that's apparently typical of Eastern Europeans.

44:26When When Navarro interviewed him, he said, we caught you. It was the flowers. And the guy at that point admitted that he was the spy because he just knows those are the kinds of things that are such big giveaways. So sometimes it just helps to just know something about a different culture. You know what this reminds me of, dude? Have you seen Inglourious Bastards? Remember the long scene where the Nazis are talking and they're talking with an American officer? It's this really tense scene. And the way that he counted with his fingers, he was like, that's an American or that's a Nazi. I can't remember who gets caught.

44:55But you count differently because in America, we don't use our thumb for one. We use our pointer finger for one. And in Germany, I don't know how it is in the UK. You use your thumb for one, two, three. You do it totally differently. Watching that movie played with my head a bit because I remember afterwards thinking, well, how do I do it? Do I even know how to count? What do I do with these fingers and stuff? That's why it's such a good tell, right? Because the guy probably went, I don't know. I'm not going to think about how I'm going to hold a frigging bouquet of flowers. He just did it the way he always did it growing up.

45:23and since he grew up in whatever, Czechoslovakia, they were upside down. Yeah, there you go. I love that. That's that point about being unobserved when somebody feels that they are unobserved or in this case is unaware of the thing that somebody is observing about you, the way you hold your flowers, the way you put your fingers up. But yeah, the whole thing, body language is not an exact science, but that's the best we can really do for now. There is talk, and I find this quite exciting and scary, of mind reading in the future, which is pretty scary. But there are these amazing YouTube videos by Professor Jack Gallant and Yale Dean Dr.

45:55Marvin Chun, where they use fMRI scans to show on a screen what a patient is thinking. And you can actually see the video footage of like their dreams and thoughts. Dr. Chun explained to me on my podcast that it's a bit primitive right now. And that's because fMRI scanners can only go so deep. They can't yet isolate individual neurons. But once we develop a scanner that can go deeper into the brain, we might be able to actually really read in real time what people are thinking. It's funny you mention this. We just did a show on this with Nita Farahani, and she talked about how brain-machine interfaces aren't going to be something that you need implanted in your skull.

46:35It's going to be something that, you know how you walk through a metal detector at the airport? It could be as simple as that, or it could be as simple as aiming a device at somebody, like how we can listen to sound in a room by aiming a laser at a window. That's really down the pipe. Right now, you might have to wear a watch or a headband, and it's primitive, but in 10 or 20 years, it could be you're just walking in the airport and they can see that you're a terrorist because they can see what you're thinking. It's only a matter of time. So then all this body language stuff won't matter at all, or at least for law enforcement, because they'll be able to put you in a room and go, we know that you can see the dead body in your head right now, and so you were there, and so you're under arrest, and that's it.

47:11And it'll be evidence, and you won't even have to say anything. But it's about as fascinating as it is horrifying. We talked about this on the show as well. with Nita Farahani, it's like a real life minority report. And then you got to decide whether to put people in prison for thought crime, which again, very Orwellian, not as Orwellian as face crime, or maybe it is the same level of Orwellian-ness. But if you know somebody who really wants to murder somebody else, what do you think? You just let them do it? We knew that was going to happen, but we had to wait until it did. The future is really just a confusing mess.

47:40Going back to body language, we know it's very difficult to read and that we can't tell too much from it right now. But FBI agents and other experts still kind of do use it for whatever advantage they can get from it. What kind of things are they looking out for besides upside down flowers? Besides upside down flowers, sounds like a radio head song or something. It does. Veteran FBI agent Mark Bouton, a writer of How to Spot Lies like the FBI, looks out for a bunch of signs of deception in the people that he interrogates. Again, he emphasizes that it's important to look out for signs beforehand while you make small talk to see what their usual, their baseline reactions are.

48:20One sign is eyes darting back and forward when a suspect feels uncomfortable. That's apparently an indicator the suspect is looking for ways to avoid answering the question in a way that'll get him or her in trouble. Rapid blinking is another. So Bhutan says to watch out for people blinking five or six times in succession. That seems a little cartoonish, some of this stuff. Surely we're all thinking, all right, don't dart your eyes back and forward. Don't blink seven times before giving an answer. And maybe you can control it sometimes, maybe not all the time. But for God's sake, wouldn't you relax a little bit?

48:53Take a frigging Valium before you go in there. Yeah. And it seems impossible to just go off of those indicators. To make matters worse, people with conditions like Parkinson's blink slower. Other conditions like schizophrenia make you blink at a faster rate. So there's so much to consider. Bouton also claims that right-handed people often look to the right, right-handed people also look down and to their right when lying about smells or sensations. It's all very hard to prove, but seems to be part of the FBI handbook, so you'd think it has some use. And then there's language without the body, so the words we use.

49:29Some of this gets a little wishy-washy, and we get into the realms of French psychologist Jacques Lacan. He believes our words unconsciously reveal our secrets. And I'm a So I'm fascinated by this stuff. I found this great website by psychoanalyst Owen Hewittson devoted to Lacan. And Hewittson uses Lacan's methods to analyze the victory speech of Lance Armstrong before he was caught and disqualified for doping. This is the cyclist. And he notes that Armstrong apologizes three times when he says, for the people who don't believe in cycling, the cynics and the skeptics, I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry you can't dream big.

50:08And I'm sorry you don't believe. There are no secrets. And it turns out, spoiler alert, there were some secrets. Yes, he had good reason to be sorry. It's why he kept saying sorry if we're to go along with the Lacan theory because he was actually guilty that he was doping. Now, that's a little psychological and theoretical. But Dr. Lieberman, going back to him, he speaks of how interrogators might use our choice of words to catch us out. We'll use personal pronouns like I, me, and my when we're taking ownership of something with integrity, but distance ourselves from those pronouns when we feel on less steady ground.

50:46These are all things to look out for, and when combined with body language analysis and a long study of the suspect's normal or unobserved behavior, it might give us some clues. It must be kind of a thrill too to be able to learn to use these observations and then actually spot them in the field, actually grilling someone, just totally sure that they're lying. And then they conjure up some lie about a smell or whatever, and they're looking down, they're looking to the right. As long as we account for any confirmation biases and we're careful not to mount an entire case based on body language alone, which I would imagine is easy to do from a legal perspective because you need more evidence than that.

51:22But tough. Once the police decide you're guilty, they're just going to start looking for evidence to corroborate that. Oh, absolutely. And I agree. I can't think of much that's more satisfying. Then you've got this big plan and you see someone look a certain way and you're like, aha, now I know they did it. And I wonder if that's why confirmation bias is such a concern. You've learned all this body language stuff for years and you feel like you can see exactly what you learned, the fruits of your labor in the people you're interviewing. It probably is quite thrilling and exciting. And you can see how it might lead to overzealous agents discounting some of the more boring physical evidence in favor of this psychological body language stuff.

52:00Face touching, pursed lips, excessive sweating, blushing and shaking one's head while talking are some of the other signs that detectives look out for. Should we try it out on you? Sure. Okay, so is your name Jordan? Yes. Okay, so that's your normal face. I mean, unfortunately, yes. Okay, do you respect and love your listeners? Of course I do. Oh, was that the slightest hint of rouge I see creeping across that handsome face? Of course, I'm just kidding. I think body language is undoubtedly a thing, a real thing with real consequences in the world. And there's that marketing philosophy where you can never predict how one person is going to act, but you can often predict how many will act.

52:43Humans in great numbers tend to be quite predictable, which is why some of these body language tells are relevant. But when you pluck one person from the crowd, the prediction becomes extremely difficult. Right, it's just a little higher than a coin to us. But in any case, I'd still recommend not blinking or looking to the right while you read out your sponsors today. A Jordan Harbinger poker face is incoming for the sponsor breaks. Thanks, Andrew, for that journey into the truth about body language on today's Skeptical Sunday. It looks like the rise in courses supposedly teaching body language is leading to a rise in people who watch these courses and then think that they're experts in it.

53:19And so I think it's good to be able to give that concept of body language and basically mind reading a healthy dose of skepticism. Thank you all for listening. any suggestions for future Skeptical Sunday, feel free to fire them at me, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Give me your thoughts. A link to the show notes for the episode can be found at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And you can find Andrew Gold on his podcast, On the Edge with Andrew Gold, anywhere you get your podcasts. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

53:51My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on this show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love, and if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who needs to hear it, maybe somebody who believes all the body language stuff they see on YouTube. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

54:22Hey, all, quick favor here. We pour our heart and soul into finding the best sponsors for the show. I hear feedback from you all the time about the sponsors. It is quite challenging behind the scenes, and your support means the world to us and helps keep us going. We need your help completing a survey at jordanharbinger.com slash survey. For the first 150 participants, we're offering a$10 digital Amazon gift card. It's our small way of thanking you for your time. Your feedback about our sponsors is really crucial to the show. It only takes a few minutes to help us, and it won't cost you a thing.

54:51After finishing the survey, you drop your email into the little box there. The first 150 people are going to get$10 from Amazon delivered straight to their inbox. Just head over to jordanharbinger.com slash survey. Your support for our show and our sponsors is truly appreciated, and we can't thank you enough, but we'll sure try with$10. Here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Chase Manhattan bank robbery. I'm a second negotiator on the phone. Hugh McGowan is the commander of the NYPD team. He puts me on the phone. He takes this guy off. He says, you're up. You're next.

55:22This is what I want you to do. You're just going to take over the phone and say, you're talking to me. And we're going to do it really abruptly. My point is to get a hostage out, which is what the hostage negotiator is supposed to do. And somebody hands me a note and says, ask him if he wants to come out. That was somebody that was listening. My friend, Jamie, Jamie Cedeno. Jamie's sitting there and something in Jamie's instincts is telling him that this guy wants to come out more than anything else. He just hears it and he writes Ask him if he wants to come out I see a note popping in front of my face So I go Do you want to come out?

55:58And there's a little silence on the other end of the line And the guy says I don't know how I'd do that Which is a great big giant yes Yeah Everybody goes like holy cow okay Get him out of there I'm talking I'm talking I'm talking again Probably about I don't know maybe half an hour later Another note comes in my hand I don't know where it's from. As it turns out, it's from Jamie again. And the note says, tell him you'll meet him outside. And I say to him, how about this? How about if I meet you out front of the bank? And he goes, yeah, I'm ready to end this shit. I get out there. I get on the PA.

56:34I start talking to him. So I say, hi, it's Chris. I'm out here. Standard operating procedure is to barricade the exit from the outside so bad guy suddenly doesn't run away. So SWAT has barricaded the bank from the outside, which everyone has forgotten. So I'm trying to talk this guy out the door. We don't know how many bad guys are inside. We don't know how they're going to react. We don't know how they're going to start shooting. We don't know what the hell's going to happen. He comes to the door. Oh, God. That was because he rattles the door. Everybody's like, ah! He's nervous, right? I mean, no crap.

57:11I'm trapped in here now. Yeah, on the opposite, we go, nah, what do we do? We forgot to unlock the door. And our bad guy is kind of like, oh, you want to play games with me, huh? For more from FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss, including negotiation and persuasion tips, along with a few crazy stories, check out episode 165 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

57:39This episode is sponsored in part by Conspirituality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation. Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspirituality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic dive deep into how this stuff spreads from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

58:11An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspirituality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics. Find Conspirituality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.