Podcast Episode 5: That Time I Met A Human Lie Detector

When every option narrows to one — disappear — Jen does what she's always done. She refuses. Armed with new information and a growing list of people willing to help, she follows a thread that leads her to one of the most credible truth detectors in the country. But getting answers isn't as simple as asking the right questions. Sometimes the person you trust to find the truth is hiding one of their own. This is the episode where Jen stops running, starts hunting, and discovers that the line between protector and predator isn't always visible — until it's too late.

Talk Nerdy To Me® - Episode 5 Transcript

The Human Lie Detector

He sold me on his military-grade training, claiming he was handing me a loaded gun. It was a total load of bull. Months of sessions and nearly ten thousand dollars later, I finally discovered who this human lie detector really was. A man who pulled a teenage girl off of a reservation school bus and told her she could just disappear. And that's not speculation. That's exactly what a federal officer testified under oath in 1989.

Welcome to Talk Nerdy To Me. This is the unbelievably true life story of Jen Friel, and a warning to those listening. Once you hear it, you may never experience your own life in the same way.

There's a moment in every impossible situation where you have to decide: do you disappear or do you dig in?

Jen had just been told by someone she trusted that the only way to truly protect herself was to vanish completely. Leave no trace. And sitting there, processing those words, she felt something she hadn't expected. Not fear. Fury. Because disappearing meant letting them win, and she wasn't built for that.

This is the episode where Jen stops running and starts hunting.

How Desperate Things Had Become

To understand how I ended up turning down military-grade training from a human lie detector, you first have to understand just how desperate things had become.

The shaman, of course, was right. Posting about my experience didn't just help my mental state. It actually brought to light new information, which I immediately handed over to the police and to my investigator.

The investigator later told Jen that the CEO had been released from prison in Thailand.

"What does that mean?" she asked.

"It means he could still be behind it, or he might not be. Either way, doesn't change what's happening to you."

That's when Jen started to question him. Not his instincts — he'd gotten further than anyone else — but his technical literacy.

It was only logical that my phone had been compromised with some kind of tracker. The harassment was too structured, too perfectly dispatched, and that's the very thing that tipped me off in the first place that this was happening. I was able to recognize the pattern.

I then thought back to my days working in cellular activation right before smartphones. I remembered a specific device called Cellebrite. My clients were indirect agents — they were the third-party Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint kiosks you'd see in the middle of a mall. To close a sale, they relied on this machine to port a customer's contacts from their old phone to the new one. Without the device, people had to manually type in all of their contacts, which was such a nightmare that most people just went straight to the corporate stores instead. It seems laughable now, but that single device was the crux to a lot of people's businesses.

So what if the diagnostic program or the equipment the investigator was using was outdated? What if he was looking with old eyes at a new problem?

All I knew was that whoever was tracking me wasn't sophisticated. I'd been surrounded by idiots long enough to be sure of that. They were exploiting something simple — some technical loophole, something basic, something overlooked. That's all I knew.

The Last Resort

Jen told her husband about her concerns just as he said he had one more card to play.

Back in 2019, when the first investigator suggested she'd been lying, her husband had gone back to his boss for another number — just in case it was needed. Spoiler alert: it was needed.

His boss made something clear. This wasn't just another guy. This was the guy. The one who extracts you from whatever you're in. A last resort. The kind of person you don't call unless every other option is gone.

"Here," he said. "Take this number. Write it down. You'll need a burner phone to call him, but I'll let him know I gave it to you."

Casually people throw around phrases like, "Oh yeah, just get a burner phone," as if I automatically know how to do that. Even working in cellular activations, I had no idea. And that's exactly why when I was standing in Best Buy near the spy shop in the Valley, I didn't purchase one. I didn't know where the access point was. If I pay by credit card, for example, does that expose something? What type of phone do I even get? I'm assuming it should never be connected to the internet, but what happens if it does? I have so many questions.

They then got the instructions on how to properly purchase a burner phone — use cash, look for a specific type of phone — and not wanting to make a pivotal mistake, Jen bought multiple versions as backups.

Cash in hand, standing at the register in CVS, the cashier looked at them and flippantly asked if they were about to rob a bank or commit some form of crime.

"If I told you," Jen said, laughing, "I'd have to kill you." She enjoyed the brief moment of release from an otherwise surreal and seemingly unrelenting life experience.

One in Ten Million

To my continued surprise, when I went to activate the burner, I had to provide an address — specifically a zip code for my location tied to 911 services. In 1999, the government passed the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act, which reinforced that all wireless phones, including prepaid, must be able to reach emergency services. That requirement has never gone away.

But not knowing what to do, as this part was left out of the instructions, I quickly remembered and used my childhood zip code. One, because I knew it by heart, and two, because I hadn't been back there in two decades.

My first call on my burner phone was to my parents. I wanted to make sure everything worked correctly and that I wasn't gonna accidentally expose information on whoever this other investigator was.

My dad looked down at his phone and was stunned. The first three digits were, of course, our old area code. The next three digits matched exactly the middle digits of his own number, and the last four? They were the exact last four digits of my brother's cell phone number.

Jen chose the area code. That part was her call. But everything after it? Randomly generated.

So think about that for a second. The odds of the next three digits matching her father's number — one in 1,000. The odds of the final four matching her brother's — one in 10,000. Together, you're at one in 10 million. And even that undersells it, because not every prefix is active in a given area code, which pushes those odds even further into the impossible.

Which was great, because at least I was consistent on the "something else" part. At least the odds match the unbelievability of the feeling. I also don't know why I don't play the lottery more. Synchronicities like this happen to me all the time.

Go Off the Grid

Jen called the investigator from outside a restaurant in a place she'd never been before. They spoke for over half an hour, line item by line item, going through every area of her exposure — every device, every account, every vulnerability.

And his conclusion? It was chilling.

He told her the only way to truly protect herself was to go off the grid completely. Erase her social media, erase her life's work digitally, get rid of her phone, no credit cards, nothing traceable.

"Based on everything you've told me, you are in a very dangerous situation with people who have no regard for your wellbeing and no fear of consequences."

I sat there on the phone processing what that meant. Everything I had done and worked for — my literal life's work — would be erased.

I profusely thanked the investigator for his time, hung up the burner phone, and walked back over to our table where Jeff was waiting.

"I don't know how to say what I'm going to say, so I'm just gonna say it. I've been advised to go entirely off the grid."

Even just saying those words infuriated me. It also made me wonder — does that mean that he has to go off the grid too? I forgot to ask.

Jeff then said, "You have to look at each bit of information from the perspective of the person giving it. The investigator is trained to protect people at all costs, but what's your gut telling you?"

Jen didn't hesitate.

"I need to profile the person behind this. Less about the why and more about the who."

She refused to believe that going off the grid was her only option. She didn't want to hide. She wanted to understand, and understanding meant finding a name — which brought her to something she'd stumbled across during one of many late-night rabbit holes in the middle of a pandemic.

Clearview AI

If you haven't heard of it, you need to.

Clearview is a facial recognition company that scraped billions of photos from the internet — from your Facebook, from your Instagram, LinkedIn, news articles — anywhere your face has ever appeared online, and built a massive searchable database. Law enforcement agencies, private companies, and governments can upload a photo of anyone and instantly pull matches. We're talking over 40 billion images collected without anyone's consent.

The company has been fined, banned, and investigated by governments around the world — from Canada to Australia to the European Union — for violating privacy laws, and yet it's still operating, still selling access, still expanding. It's the kind of technology that turns every photo you've ever been tagged in into a permanent searchable record of your existence.

To this day, Jen has the photos of the people who were stalking her on that cruise, and her theory was simple. If she could get access to the platform or find someone who already had access, she could identify at least one of them — one face, one name — and from there, she could trace who hired them.

So I started digging. I searched Crunchbase. I searched LinkedIn. I was looking for anyone I might know at the company, any connection, any way in. And I either do know someone there and they don't wanna publicly admit it, or I don't.

Then I had another idea. I searched for open positions at the company. We were still in the middle of a pandemic, and clearly, I had an enormous amount of time on my hands. Maybe I could just get hired, get inside, and get access that way. But I couldn't make that logic work. There were too many variables, too many steps between me and an answer, so I let that thread go — at least for now.

The Profiler

Jeff then remembered someone he had interviewed a few years back for a ghostwriting gig. He said the man was a profiler. He's profiled multiple presidents and serial killers. He said he works for intelligence agencies.

He gave Jen the number, and she called to speak to him. To her surprise, he answered his own phone. She told him she wanted to hire him to profile the personality of the person behind the stalking. She told him she'd gotten shockingly good at predicting the behavior of people she didn't know, but she needed an expert.

She spent 30 minutes speaking her truth. She walked him through everything she had been through, every detail, every dead end. She told him she'd been advised to go off the grid entirely, but she needed to know there were no other options first.

They arranged a time to meet, but before they hung up, he gave her instructions.

"If you are in any danger," he said, "use this code word."

"Another effing code word?" I thought but didn't say out loud. What happens if I combine the two words accidentally? Does a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle emerge from the sewer instead of some professional apparently there to help me? And who do I give these code words to? 911? I'm assuming I'd be calling his number, but what if he's sleeping or scuba diving? I was so confused but willing to go along with whatever this next step was.

She let the reality of it wash over her. His voice, his instructions — they replayed in her head as she started to cry. Not out of fear. Out of relief.

The Sessions

Their first official session began a few days later. It wasn't the standard Zoom experience everyone had grown accustomed to during COVID. Instead, it was on a specific program in an undisclosed location over a firewall-protected Ethernet connection.

For two hours, she went into heartbreaking detail about what she and Jeff had experienced. She presented her detailed notes, texts, eyewitness reports, police cards, photos, and video of the people involved.

And for two hours, the profiler asked me varying degrees of the exact same questions positioned just ever so differently. He would ask me about an incident, and then about ten minutes later, ask about it again in a slightly different way. It was very subtle, but my answers were exactly the same — over and over and over and over.

At the time, I didn't fully understand why he was doing this. I thought it was just his method of profiling to get a complete picture by circling back, approaching it from different angles. When the session ended, I was completely drained. Two hours of reliving some of the worst years of my life, answering the same questions from every conceivable angle, was exhausting.

I walked over to Jeff, who took one look at me and asked how it went.

"I'd be tired too after a two-hour session with a human lie detector," he said.

She froze.

"Wait, what?"

"That's what he does," Jeff said. "That's how he profiles people. When I interviewed him, he told me his ability is legally registered in a court of law to determine whether someone is lying. Just him. No machine, no polygraph. Him. That's how highly regarded his opinion is."

And there it was. The person she had just spent two hours pouring her entire story into — every detail, every fear, every instinct she'd been told to doubt — was one of the most credible human truth detectors on the planet. She hadn't just found an expert. She'd found someone who would know, beyond any reasonable doubt, whether she was telling the truth.

Bingo.

The Truth Is the Weapon

Jeff asked me what my next steps were, and I said, "Another session at the same time next week." I then yet again retold my truth the exact same way for the second time, like the first time never happened.

By the end of the second session, Jen still didn't have a name. She didn't have a profile. She didn't have the piece of paper she'd been hoping for — the one that would say definitively, "This is the personality type you are dealing with." The roadmap she had imagined walking out with simply didn't exist.

What she had instead was something harder to quantify. She felt worn out. She also felt better. For the first time, she had said everything out loud to someone who was trained to listen, trained to assess, and something in that had shifted.

Clearly, this wasn't the outcome I had hoped for. A literal piece of paper saying, "This is the person who is behind your stalking," would have been really nice. I had come looking for answers and found myself unexpectedly in trauma therapy. I felt so helpless without a protocol or a clear next step, except for, of course, the scheduled session for the following week.

Jen didn't find the profile. She didn't find the name. What she found was harder to see and harder to shake.

Telling the truth — the same truth, over and over, without flinching, without backing down — that is the weapon.

She came in looking for a shortcut. She got something slower, something that hurt more, something real.

The sessions aren't done, and this story is far from over.

Next, Jen pulls back the curtain on the human lie detector and exposes the truth in his web of lies.