The Deductionist Podcast

Spotting lying, we are told is just Somebody freeze framed a grieving parent's face, announced "duping delight" to four million followers, and the comment section returned a verdict before the police did. The lie detection science says that person was running on a coin flip with a ring light. Ben Cardall and former senior detective Bob Pointer take the microexpressions truth apart, then rebuild what the research says about how to tell if someone is lying without guessing.

In this episode:
- Why watching Lie to Me made viewers worse at recognising honest people
- The 2 percent problem: how rarely microexpressions appear, and why they show up on truth tellers too
- What the research on murderers' televised pleas found, and why it cannot convict anyone from one clip
- The 54 percent wall: 24,483 judges, and why cops, judges and psychiatrists score like students
- The 900 million dollar airport programme that never caught a threat
- What Ekman got right, including the Othello error most of his fans have never heard of
- How to tell if someone is lying with methods that move accuracy: Strategic Use of Evidence, verifiable detail and cognitive load

If you have ever been certain about a face, watch this before you decide you know how to tell if someone is lying.

Tags: how to tell if someone is lying, lie detection science, microexpressions truth, microexpressions, Paul Ekman, deception detection, true crime analysis, body language myths, Aldert Vrij, strategic use of evidence, investigative interviewing, Deductionist Podcast

Many a true word is spoken in jest and only some of them from Sherlock. Except on page eighteen of Cain's Jawbone, where it isn't. One word has been swapped, and I read straight past it three times.

This is episode five of my live attempt to solve Cain's Jawbone, the 1934 literary murder puzzle by Torquemada. A hundred pages printed out of order, six murders, six killers, and a solution only a handful of people have ever cracked.

Last episode was three ways to hide a body in a sentence. This one opens the second drawer.

His toolkit. The anti-proverb, the namesake and the mock-heroic. Three techniques Torquemada uses on pages 11 to 20, and every one of them works by looking completely ordinary. I am not sure that Sherlock would have taken this long to solve it but I am doing the best I can haha

My toolkit. The concordance, the anachronism test and stylometry. Three methods built to catch exactly that, borrowed from 13th century friars, a Renaissance forgery hunter, and the statisticians who unmasked J.K. Rowling's pen name.

Along the way you'll get the Moses illusion, a garden cricket in full medieval armour, a nickname for Alexander that made me very excited for all of ten minutes, and the line on page eighteen that tells you what the six killers will look like.

Then I'll tell you where the solve actually stands.

No spoilers. Not now, not when I finish, not ever. If you're solving it yourself, everything here is technique, not answers.

Sources mentioned
Wolfgang Mieder on the anti-proverb (1982)
Thomas Erickson and Mark Mattson, the Moses illusion (1981)
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock
Hugh of Saint-Cher's Bible concordance (c. 1230)
Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine (1440)
Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace, Inference and Disputed Authorship (1964)
Patrick Juola and Peter Millican, the Robert Galbraith analysis (2013)

If you've spotted something I've missed, tell me in the comments. Spoiler-free, please. I'll check it against the ledger.

#cainsjawbone #reallifesherlock #truecrime #puzzle #torquemada #sherlock

Cain's Jawbone is a 1934 literary puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers, pen name Torquemada. 100 scrambled pages, six murders, no key, no instructions, and only four verified solutions in ninety years.

In a bid to live up to the the Real Life Sherlock title I have been given. Professionally, on stage, on camera, that name is the whole premise, read people, catch what others miss, work it out before anyone else does. This book does not care what I go by. 20 pages in, and it's taken longer than I'd like to admit for the method to start paying off. But it finally is.

Every detail I've checked has turned out to be doing real work, real quotations, real history, real legal language buried in places it shouldn't be. And one name keeps turning up in completely different rooms of this book, wearing a completely different mood each time. I'm not telling you the name. I'm not telling you the pages. But I'll tell you the book rewards suspicion, and I've stopped trusting anyone in it, including the narrator.

This episode also opens the actual toolkit, the real literary techniques a book like this uses to hide things in plain sight, so you can start spotting them yourself before I say another word.

No spoilers. Not when I finish, not ever. Every viewer gets the same blank page I got, including the Real Life Sherlock.

Follow along. This is going to take a while.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
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MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#sherlockholmes #cainsjawbone #puzzle

Ai is here and David Clarke spent his career catching fraudsters, first as a City of London Police Fraud Squad chief, then building the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau from the ground up. Now he's watching artificial intelligence industrialise the exact crime he built his life around stopping. This conversation is about what happens when the con artist never sleeps, never runs out of voices, and gets smarter every week.

In this episode:

David explains how AI has moved fraud from mass blast scams to attacks personalised to the individual victim, and why that shift is the one nobody's prepared for. He walks through why he calls the current fraud landscape the worst he's seen in 45 years, official statistics included, and where those statistics are quietly undercounting the real damage. He breaks down AMLiss, the tool he built to catch red flags buried inside multilingual contracts and business communications before they become a problem. He makes the case that expecting ordinary people to spot deepfake fraud on their own is naive, and lays out what should replace that expectation instead. He pitches his "Digital Fortress" concept, a nationwide system linking banks, telecoms, and law enforcement against AI driven crime, and argues for who should be running it. He talks through what actually changes moving from fraud squad detective to corporate chief security officer. And he gives the one tell that gives away an AI run scam before the money ever moves.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #ai #guildhawk

Your best performer might be running on narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy, and the org chart rewards it. This is the Dark Triad without the textbook, applied to the office and the relationships you can't just walk away from.

In this episode:
- What the Dark Triad actually is, and what it isn't (it's not a diagnosis)
- The difference between admiration seeking and rivalrous narcissism at work
- Why Machiavellianism plays the long game across quarters, not meetings
- Corporate psychopathy: the B Scan and why charm is the tell, not the alibi
- The halo effect and why confident people get away with it
- A validated fast-read method (Dirty Dozen scale) and how to use it responsibly
- The organisational cost data behind toxic leadership traits

If you work with people, you work with this. Listen before your next performance review.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #darktriad #psychology

You didn't choose that option. Something built the room you chose it in, and it built the room before you walked in.

In this episode:
– What choice architecture actually is and why nudge theory changed behavioural economics
– The organ donation study that proves a default can move outcomes by 75 percentage points
– Why AI personalisation turned nudge theory from a blunt tool into an individual weapon
– The decoy effect and how a bad third option sells the expensive one
– Dark patterns: where legitimate nudging becomes manipulation, and where regulators are already drawing the line
– The sunlight test for telling the difference
– A practical audit method for finding hidden defaults in your own forms and processes

If you've ever felt like you chose something and couldn't say why, this is the episode that explains it.

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #nudgetheory #psychology

I have been called a Real Life Sherlock by many folks I respect within Law Enforcement. Cain's Jawbone is the puzzle that gets to decide if that's actually earned. In 1942 a crossword got too easy, so the Daily Telegraph built one vicious enough to recruit five strangers into Bletchley Park without their knowledge. Cain's Jawbone runs the same test, except the Laurence Sterne Trust holds a verified solution, so every page I get right or wrong actually means something.

In this episode:

The true story of the 1942 Telegraph crossword that became a Bletchley Park recruitment filter

Why Cain's Jawbone sits in that same category, not in Masquerade's or Cicada 3301's

What happens when the Real Life Sherlock reputation gets thrown at a puzzle that's beaten almost everyone who's tried it

Real material lifted straight into the fiction: Defoe, Whitman, Shakespeare, Conrad, a Jacobite execution, an Egyptian cigarette brand down to the exact sizing

Arthur Conan Doyle turning up four separate times, including a dummy bell rope built exactly like the murder weapon in The Speckled Band
Evidence the narrator changes page to page, and what two possible voices sound like so far

Ten pages down, ninety to go, and why the narrator insisting they're out of their depth might be the actual lie

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #cainsjawbone #murdermystery

Everyone thinks close protection is the suit, the earpiece, the guy scanning a crowd like he's in a Statham film. It isn't. It's advance work nobody sees, a plan already three versions deep before the principal arrives, and hundreds of hours of nothing happening on purpose.

Jim Wenzel joins The Deductionist Podcast with Behavioural Intelligence to break down what close protection actually is: proactive prevention, not reactive tactics. We cover the POLAR framework (positioning, observable behaviour, location, access, risk), why "boring is best" is the real measure of success, why training for decisions beats training for drills, and why the principal should never pay for the protector's ego.

If you've ever wondered what separates someone who can read a room from someone who can act on what they've read, this is the episode.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #closeprotection #deduction

Sherlock built his method on reading behaviour before anyone spoke a word. Turns out marriages run on the same evidence. Sue Palmer Cole, the divorce doctor and founder of the Divorce Academy, joins Ben and Bob to break down what actually predicts whether a relationship survives, and it isn't compatibility. It's adaptability, communication style and how a couple handles conflict when it shows up.

Sue walks through the real inflection points: the affair risk window during early parenthood, the brain rewiring that hits women in perimenopause, and why two thirds of divorces are instigated by women between 45 and 55. John Gottman's five to one ratio gets a mention, as does the difference between a couple leaning into a relationship versus leaning out of it.

If you've ever wondered why some marriages adapt and others just accumulate silence, this one's for you.

Divorce doctor: https://www.divorce-doctor.com/meet-the-divorce-doctor/

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

Before you can solve the world's hardest literary puzzle, you need to understand who built it and why.

Edward Powys Mathers was a Persian poetry translator who spent thirteen years setting cryptic crosswords for the Observer under a pseudonym borrowed from history's most enthusiastic torturer. In 1934 he published Cain's Jawbone, a 100-page murder mystery with its pages deliberately scrambled, the numbers removed, and no instructions beyond the implication that a correct order exists. Two people solved it within a year. Then it went quiet for eight decades.

In 2020, comedian and crossword compiler John Finnemore became the fourth person in history to crack it, spending four months of lockdown underlining nearly every sentence before finding the breakthrough that made the architecture visible. He swore to keep the solution secret.

He has.

This episode profiles the man who built the trap and the man who finally beat it, then I walk into chapter two of the puzzle live on camera.

Four correct solutions in ninety years. I'm attempting the fifth in public.
Solving Cain's Jawbone is a real-time investigation into the most difficult literary puzzle ever published. New episodes as the case develops.

Access the free tier or go deeper with exclusive paid challenges:

https://www.omniscient-insights.com/axiom
https://www.omniscient-insights.com/community-home

MERCH -- https://the-deductionist.myspreadshop.co.uk/all
E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#cainsjawbone #murdermystery #puzzle #truecrime