Podcast Episode 7: That Time a Human Lie Detector Presented a Black Parachute & a Loaded Gun

For most of her life, Jen believed she understood why she experienced the world differently. She noticed patterns, documented everything, and trusted what she could see, even when no one else seemed to see it. Then she met a man who claimed he could read what people never said aloud.

What begins as a series of intense, repetitive sessions slowly becomes something far more personal. Every answer is tested. Every expression feels exposed. And somewhere between a childhood diary, a blurred set of credentials, and a late-night internet search, Jen begins to realize that the mystery in front of her may not be the one she thought she was solving.

Sometimes the most unsettling truth is the one that explains everything.

Episode 7: “That Time a Human Lie Detector Presented a Black Parachute & a Loaded Gun ” is a story about perception, identity, and what happens when the person trained to see through everyone else turns his attention toward you.

Talk Nerdy To Me® - Episode 7 Transcript

That Time a Human Lie Detector Presented a Black Parachute & a Loaded Gun

 Welcome to Talk Nerdy to Me. This is the unbelievably true story. Once you hear it, you may never experience your own life in the same way.

I met the Human Lie Detector through my husband, who was introduced to him through someone who was in the inner circle at his work. Despite the ridiculousness of someone saying they are a human lie detector, I had no reason to doubt him. Quite the opposite. I was actually obsessed with the show Lie to Me and figured he was just another Dr. Cal Lightman type.

NARRATOR: The television series Lie to Me follows Dr. Cal Lightman, a deception expert who studies microexpressions, body language, and other nonverbal leaks to identify emotions people may be trying to conceal. For Jen, the show became the only available reference point for understanding what was happening during her recorded sessions with the Human Lie Detector. As he repeated the same questions in slightly different ways, she imagined a Lie to Me-style operation taking place behind the scenes, with every movement of her face being reviewed for inconsistencies. The correlation was not that her experience unfolded exactly like a television drama, but that both centered on the same unsettling premise: spoken answers are only one source of information, and the body may reveal something else. What Jen had watched as entertainment was beginning to resemble the method being applied to her in real life.

My sessions were, to put it mildly, an endurance test. For two relentless hours, I was asked questions like, "How was your day today?" I would answer. Then ten minutes or so later, he would circle back and say, "Your day today, what was it like?" The differences were subtle, but my answers stayed the same. Over and over and over.

"I have incredibly detailed notes," I insisted. "Texts, eyewitness reports, cards from the police, photographs, and video of the people involved. All of the witnesses are credible and extremely accomplished, too." I love how much of a forever hype woman I am for my friends.

I couldn't see any equipment in his setup suggesting that I was being recorded separately, but I wasn't willing to take the chance. For all I knew, his brain was the machine, processing every expression and reaction in real time. And who was I to question how someone else's mind worked? I know how detailed and analytical I am. I am downright psychic in terms of what I know I can predict in people. That is, outside of the pattern prediction I held, which is what got me here in the first place.

To understand exactly how detail-oriented I've always been, here is a diary entry I wrote when I was just nine years old:

Today was a stinky day. First, we left our hotel early in the morning. Then we hit the road. Next, we stopped at a college. The college was St. Mary's. After, we ate at a restaurant in Gettysburg. It was called The Plaza. There, I had a bowl of chili. It was good. Next, we went to a pretzel stand. I had a pretzel. It was good. Then we went to our hotel. We slept and watched TV. Then, about three hours later, we went to dinner. We ate dinner at The Plaza. There, I had chili. Then something happened when I went to the bathroom. It was stuck. I waited twenty-five minutes and nobody came in. Then my grandmother came in. While I was stuck in there, it reminded me of the time they left me in a store for ten minutes. Jen!

NARRATOR: Jen documents events in sequence, preserving the smallest details and grounding her memories in what she saw, heard, and felt. The language is simple, but the emotions are not. Beneath the concrete observations is a child trying to understand security, abandonment, and the connection between what had happened before and what she was feeling in that moment. Even then, Jen was not editing her experience to make it more comfortable for someone else. She recorded what happened as she understood it, with directness, specificity, and emotional honesty.

All these years later, that same instinct followed me into the sessions with the Human Lie Detector. I spoke the way I had written at nine years old: sequentially, concretely, and with an almost relentless attention to detail. The diary did not prove that every interpretation I made was correct, but it revealed something important about how I processed my experiences. Long before I understood body language, I had already developed a habit of documenting what I observed and speaking what I believed to be true. Sitting across from a man trained to detect inconsistencies, I returned to that same foundation. My wording might change, the question might change, but my truth did not.

NARRATOR: During the first month, Jen did most of the talking. By the second, the dynamic began to shift. The Human Lie Detector started revealing more about himself, his background, and the personal cost of experiencing the world differently. He described himself as a cowboy and presented himself as the consummate good guy, someone whose unusual abilities had left him isolated and burdened by what he could see in others. Parts of his story felt familiar to Jen, who had always known she was different, too. Even so, she found it unusual that he was spending so much of a session she was paying for talking about himself. She assumed it was part of his process, another layer of an assessment she did not yet understand, and decided to follow his lead.

He then asked Jen about where she went to school.

"I didn't. I finished high school too early. I was only sixteen, and considering where I wanted to go in life didn't require a degree, I didn't see the point."

"You didn't go to school at all?" he asked.

"I worked for a year, and then I moved to New York City at seventeen. I studied at the Actors Studio, the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute for a year, and then studied at Groundlings when I moved to LA. They're the opposite methods, but I liked how well-rounded that made me."

"Yet you're not an actor."

"Oh, no. But you can't go to school for being a producer. You just have to produce. I had my first computer company at age eight, so I knew tech could always be my fallback. Hilarious how everything merged, and it gave me a unique skill set. I did love learning about body language and applications for it on stage and screen. Growing up, I was obsessed with the book What Every Body is Saying by Joe Navarro. It helped me a lot in dating, and so much so that as a dating blogger, I would regularly give my copy to girlfriends struggling to understand what the person they were dating was actually saying. It really is a game changer once you understand it."

"I used to host a theater group at my home," he replied. "We would write, produce, and film a piece in under eight hours. Then we would spend the next eight watching and analyzing it."

NARRATOR: Having trained at two of the most highly regarded acting schools in the country, if not the world, Jen immediately recognized that something was off. In her experience, recording was reserved for commercial acting classes, where reviewing playback served a specific purpose. His story did not align with what she had experienced.

NARRATOR: He then returned to Jen's earlier comments about body language and began showing her around his home, eventually directing her attention to the credentials documenting his expertise in reading nonverbal leaks. There was only one problem. His background blur was still turned on. Jen could tell that something was hanging behind him, but she could not read a single word of it.

This is so weird, she thought, careful not to say it aloud. He was working from home, answering his own phone, and conducting sessions over video. But it was COVID, she reminded herself. In-person appointments were not exactly an option. Still, another question entered her mind. Shouldn't he already be able to see her confusion written across her face?

Three months into our session, on October 24th, 2021, I came across something on Quora that caught my attention. The headline read, "Do INTJs often have autism spectrum disorder? I'm an INTJ and was professionally diagnosed as having ASD. I'm wondering about others."

I'm an INTJ female. Wait, what? I also sound a lot like these traits as well. I then called my mom.

"Hey, when I was in school, did they ever like screen me for autism?"

"No, they didn't test for it on girls back when you were in school."

"Wait, what?" I had always assumed that I had been tested at some point.

"Why do you think you're autistic?"

NARRATOR: Jen didn't answer. Instead, she opened Google and typed some version of female autism test into the search bar. The results only raised more questions. The DSM-5, a term she had never heard before, was published in 2013 and consolidated several previously separate diagnoses under autism spectrum disorder. Autism was not new, but research and screening had long focused on its presentation in boys, making many women easier to overlook. Jen did not yet understand the history. She only knew that the descriptions on her screen felt uncomfortably familiar.

I had always known how to describe myself. I was a proud INTJ. In the language of Myers-Briggs, that meant I was introverted, intuitive, thinking, and judging. It was a neat four-letter explanation for why I preferred solitude, analyzed situations relentlessly, valued directness over comfort, and demanded structure. For years, it gave me a socially acceptable reason for feeling fundamentally different. INTJs make up only about two to three percent of the population, and only around one percent of women are estimated to identify as INTJ. I wasn't broken. I was just rare. At least that's what I believed.

NARRATOR: But as she continued her research, the boundaries of that four-letter explanation began to blur. The traits she had always attributed to her personality type were showing up on clinical screening tools for autism. The overlap was striking, but the underlying mechanisms were entirely different. Take her need for solitude. An INTJ might prefer time alone because it supports concentration and independence. But for an undiagnosed autistic woman, solitude isn't just a preference. It is a necessity for recovery. It is the only way to regulate after the exhaustion of masking, the strain of consciously monitoring conversations, or the overwhelming weight of sensory input. One is a choice. The other is survival.

I've been told my entire life that I have no tact, a quality people either seem to love or viscerally despise. For years, I attributed my directness to being an INTJ. I valued accuracy over social cushioning and saw little reason to bury the truth beneath unnecessary language. But as I learned more about autism in women, I began to question whether bluntness was always a choice. Maybe I relied on explicit language because vague hints, emotional subtext, and the unspoken rules of conversation were harder for me to decode. An INTJ may choose to be concise. An autistic woman may communicate that way even when she desperately wants to understand what everybody else seems to grasp without being told. The words may sound the same, but the reason behind them can be entirely different.

NARRATOR: Perhaps the most significant difference was the functional cost. Being highly analytical, skeptical, and organized does not establish a neurodevelopmental condition. But when those traits are accompanied by a lifelong pattern of sensory sensitivities, extreme distress over unexpected changes, and the exhausting conscious effort required to mimic socially acceptable behavior, the picture changes. Jen's INTJ identity wasn't necessarily false. It just wasn't the complete story. It described how her mind worked when she was regulated, but it could not explain the profound effort required to exist in a world built for someone else.

I then found two online tests, one which produced a spiky looking graph, which confused me. The other, which I related to more, was more direct, which obviously I related to that more.

NARRATOR: The online Autism Spectrum Quotient consisted of 50 questions. Jen scored 44, a high screening score indicating that she reported many traits associated with autism. It was not a diagnosis, nor did it measure where she fell on the spectrum, but it suggested that a comprehensive evaluation could be warranted. Her responses revealed a broader pattern involving social communication, intense interests, attention switching, a need for predictability, imagination, and heightened attention to detail. The test could not explain when those traits began, how they affected her life, or whether another condition might account for them. But after 36 years of assuming everyone kind of experienced the world as she did, Jen was staring at a result that suggested otherwise.

Do you know how long I've waited to hear this phrase? Perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery, Jen. Only the mystery is me. I'm the mystery. Wow. Talk about a plot twist. I have to tell the Human Lie Detector.

NARRATOR: At their next session, Jen brought her findings to the Human Lie Detector. She showed him the research she had collected, explained the traits she recognized in herself, and presented her autism spectrum quotient score of forty-four out of fifty. She approached it the same way she approached everything else, with documentation, patterns, and as much supporting evidence as she could gather.

"Wow, that doesn't surprise me at all," he said. "Looking at this paperwork and your score, of course you are autistic. It's clear as day."

"You can see it too?"

"Oh my God, this just makes so much sense. Wow. I mean, it's shocking, but it's like, when you see it all on paper, I mean, this is just so validating."

"Of course. It's right here," he said. "Listen, I haven't ever offered this before. In fact, you are the only person in the United States whom I have offered this to. I teach a program that is military-grade training on non-verbal leaks. Based on everything I am seeing here, it makes perfect sense for you to also go into this program. There's a reason why I haven't offered this course here to anyone in the States. I didn't find anyone who was a right fit. I didn't even think I could find someone until I met you. It's a long and difficult process. It may impact your marriage, friends, family. I want you to really think about this before saying yes."

"I understand. Man, this is a lot to take in."

NARRATOR: The next week, after careful consideration, Jen told the Human Lie Detector she wanted to pursue training.

"Why do you want to go into training?"

A valid question, one I didn't have a prompted answer for. How do you explain a lifelong perception that suddenly, inexplicably has a name? I knew my worth. I knew what I was capable of. I had for a long time been an asset to either police or victims. I stepped up during a murder investigation of my friend and was asked to be a lot of people's emergency contact when my other friend's body was found in a separate but related instance. I had earned the respect of others, including law enforcement, but also for myself. I have an unparalleled knack for being in the right place at the right time or a really, really bad place, but still managing to help out in some way.

NARRATOR: The doctor, though impressed, remained elusive. He spoke of transformation, of an irreversible change.

"You're one of the most remarkable students I have had, but training is different," he said. "Training is me giving you a black parachute and throwing you out of a plane, saying, 'Figure your way out.' At the end of the program, I can do that for you, and you will succeed. There's no going back to the way you were before."

NARRATOR: A black parachute. The image was stark, terrifying, yet exhilarating. For thirty-six years, Jen's reality had been different. What was a little more change? But the Human Lie Detector wasn't convinced.

"Let's chat next week," he said, leaving Jen with the distinct feeling of a challenge, a test of her mental fortitude.

I wasn't going to be deterred. I channeled my inner Charlotte York from when she was trying to become a Jew, scheduling call after call, sometimes getting results, other times leaving a voicemail. I then saw his outdated flash-based website, a clear opportunity. I offered to rebrand him to bring him into the modern age. Line item by line item, I laid out the engineering, the business model, and the deliverables. It took months of back and forth, but eventually a new site was brought into the world.

"You have a real talent at helping people, and you know how to make websites look good," he told me.

"Thank you," I replied. "And I'd really like to put those skills to work helping others with the formal training."

"I think you're ready. Let's touch base after the holidays. Are you sure you want to do this?"

I had only been this certain three times before. When I married my husband, when I started Talk Nerdy to Me, and when I became Buster Brown's forever dog mama. My body was registering fear, but my mind had already reached its conclusion. Fear did not change what I knew. It only sharpened it.

Then the Human Lie Detector dropped another bombshell.

"You're going to be handed a loaded gun. It is my job to make sure you know how to clean the gun, store it, use it, and take care of it."

NARRATOR: A loaded gun. The black parachute. The metaphors were intensifying, the weight of the responsibility becoming palpable. And then, the final hurdle. One Jen definitely didn't see coming. So ask yourself, if someone finally gave a name to the way your mind worked, then offered you the chance to turn it into something powerful, how far would you go to prove you were ready? Jen had made her decision, but it was no longer hers alone. In the next episode, she is brought before a committee of strangers whose decision will determine whether her training begins or ends before it ever starts.