Podcast Episode 10: That Time I Discovered My Wires Were Crossed

For her entire life, Jen knew she processed the world differently. The vivid colors. The physical sensations tied to a voice. The uncanny ability to see the architecture of a problem before anyone else even realized something was wrong. But for decades, this profound intuition was dismissed, misdiagnosed, or simply chalked up to being "special"—leaving her searching for answers while navigating a reality no one else could see.

 This episode is about the moment the puzzle pieces finally snap into place. From a surprisingly profound Zoom call on a regular Tuesday afternoon to a dive into her own extraordinary family lineage, Jen receives a framework that changes everything. And as she uncovers the truth about her own wiring, she must also confront the unsettling reality of a man who claims to read others but refuses to examine himself.

 Sometimes, the most shocking revelations don't come with fireworks—they arrive quietly, confirming what you knew all along. This is the episode where the lifelong mystery gets a name. That Time I Discovered My Wires Were Crossed — a story about unexpected diagnoses, setting boundaries, and realizing that seeing things differently isn't a flaw; it's a superpower.

Talk Nerdy To Me® - Episode 10 Transcript

EP. 10 - That Time I Discovered My Wires Were Crossed

My diagnosis process felt like one of those cheesy infomercials. But wait, there's more. 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 continued the Zoom session with my therapist. With certain voices, I can isolate the words from the tone, and it creates this response in my body. It's like head-to-toe chills. I don't really know how else to describe it, but it's how I fall asleep to Unsolved Mysteries almost every night. Robert Stack's voice does something physically to my body. Well, I mean, technically speaking, I stopped watching it for almost a year after my neighbor's murder. I was listening to it when he was shot. I thought it was the TV, but again, I was only focused on the voice. It has such a very visceral and physical effect on me. You can see when it's happening.

In other instances, tones can lead to smells or tastes, like a Thin Mint Girl Scout cookie. Imagine someone talking and their tone of voice pings your brain with the memory of that exact taste. My mouth will even water or get dry.

Sitting there on the Zoom call, Jen went over sensation after sensation, things she had experienced her entire life but had never realized were different from everyone else's. She had always believed these experiences were simply what made her unique or creative. Without a doubt, it was one of the most intimate moments of her life. She even surprised herself by finding the words to describe an experience she had never been able to fully articulate.

Her therapist could then tell that Jen was getting a concerned look on her face. "Don't worry, you're not mentally ill, but you have advanced visual and intellectual capabilities. It actually explains a lot about how perceptive you are. I wouldn't even call you perceptive. You're like an archer with an arrow. When you hit, it's a bullseye. What I want you to hear is this: nothing about who you are is changing. What's changing is your understanding of yourself. You have always processed information this way. You just didn't have the language for it, and that gap between what you were experiencing and what you could explain is exactly where the loneliness and the frustration live."

"Look at that surveillance footage. You are picking up on something that is right in front of Jeff's face, and he cannot see it. That is not a small thing. That is your nervous system doing something extraordinary completely on its own without any effort on your part. And the fact that this, a gang stalking of all things, is what finally brought it to the surface, that you essentially discovered you see auras because someone was following you? I have been doing this work for a long time, and I genuinely do not have the words for how remarkable that is."

"It's shocking how that never came up in conversation. And again, I think auras, I think color, not the cookie cutter shape around people that acts as a fingerprint. Does this have anything to do with me being born dead?"

"What do you mean you were born dead?"

"I knew I had a traumatic birth, but I found out in my dad's wedding speech how bad it actually was. I was born a one on what they call the Apgar scale, which measures the healthiness of a baby when it's born. To give you frame of reference, zero is dead. The doctor was about to tell my dad to prepare my mom when all of a sudden I started to scream. They brought in a crash team, and he said it was so surreal to just know I was born and then have six other people come out of nowhere and all gather over me. He joked that I came into this world and commanded attention. He then said moments later as my mom held me, she cried, saying, and I quote, 'This one's different.'"

"The honest answer is that the research is still catching up to what synesthetes have been experiencing their whole lives, so I want to be careful not to overstate what we know. What we can say with reasonable confidence is that synesthesia is hereditary. It runs in families. It shows up more frequently in women, and it has a particularly strong overlap with autism, which in your case checks every box. But here's where it gets interesting. You don't have to be born with it. There are documented cases of people developing synesthesia after a traumatic brain injury, a TBI. The working theory is that the injury disrupts the usual boundaries between sensory pathways, and suddenly inputs that were always separate start bleeding into each other. The wires get crossed essentially in the same way yours were crossed from birth, just through a different route."

"And then there are psychedelics. This one is harder to study for obvious reasons, but the experiential overlap is significant enough that researchers take it seriously. What psychedelics appear to do temporarily is dissolve those same sensory boundaries. People report seeing sound, tasting color, feeling music as texture. For most people, that fades. But in some cases, particularly with repeated use, those pathways can remain more permeable than they were before. So when you told me about the S&M club and the acid you didn't know you were taking and the colored letters appearing in front of your eyes, that wasn't just a drug reaction. That was your synesthesia being turned all the way up. You already had the wiring. The psychedelic just blew the fuse box wide open."

As a PSA to listeners, be careful when accepting candy from new friends who were previously strangers. I knew my friends and I were taking something to enhance our experience, but I was not told that something was acid. I get to now say I accidentally took acid at Bar Sinister in Hollywood and saw the lyrics to the song Kiss by Prince appear in front of my face as I was being hogtied by a dom named Phoenix. Full story for another podcast.

Jen was impressed that she noted that story in her notes. Processing what the doctor was actually saying, Jen knew she had felt this way her whole life. That part wasn't a surprise. What was a surprise was finally having a framework for it. And the hereditary piece? That fit. Jen came from two historically influential families, movers and shakers, both sides. The kind of lineage where the wiring for something like this wouldn't exactly come out of nowhere.

In her lifetime alone, Jen found out that her Uncle Art was the priest who counseled Jimmy Hoffa's wife when Jimmy Hoffa went missing. And her grandfather was personal friends with Benjamin Guinness, aka Ben with the big glasses, aka the third Earl of Ivy. He came to her childhood home in West Hartford, Connecticut.

"A few years back, I was sitting with my parents and Jeff. We had gotten completely lost trying to find my nephew's birthday party, which honestly tracks. And somewhere between wrong turns, I casually mentioned that I'm going after the Guinness World Record for the claw machine. Not a joke. I had recently discovered I'm exceptionally good at it. My best is four animals on five dollars, and I also got 16 animals in under two hours, all in machines I had never played before. I had to call Jeff to come pick me up from Circus Circus in Las Vegas because I was drawing too much of a crowd. And not even just the kids, like parents as well. They were all like, 'How are you doing this?' It was very strange. I actually caught so many that I needed a garbage bag since my backpack was completely overflowed."

"I was mid-story when my father cut in. 'If anyone ever asks,' he said completely unprompted, 'say you know Ben, Lord Ivy. He was your grandfather's good friend. When your grandfather would visit Dublin, Ben would send cars for him, and he even came to our house for dinner.' And just like that, we had gone from claw machines in Las Vegas to my grandfather being chauffeured around Dublin by a lord, which in my family is a completely normal Sunday afternoon. Confused and captivated, I responded logically with, 'How did you say grace?' As a family, we say the same grace before our meal at dinnertime. Bless us, O Lord, for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord, amen. Did Ben say, 'Bless us, O me, for these thy gifts'? And also, who's gonna ask me about him? I'm technically going after two records. I hope this doesn't disqualify me."

But there were other doors the doctor had just opened. In 2012, Jen was struck in the head with a brick, a random act of violence, the kind of thing that changes a person in ways that don't always show up on a scan. And over the years, she had done her share of exploring. Psychedelics, yes, but also plant medicines shared by indigenous elders, medicines with names she could barely pronounce and didn't try to. She had approached all of it with the same curiosity she brought to everything else. Seriously, carefully, and with the quiet understanding that some knowledge doesn't come from a book. Any one of those three doors, heredity, the brick, the medicines, could explain it. The more likely answer was that all three had a hand in it.

I had been in therapy for over 20 years at this point. I had even 5150'd myself, meaning I was a danger to myself or to others, in 2007. Not a single mental health professional figured this out. 20 years, that time alone, forget the money, although believe me, I'm not forgetting the money. And not one trained person thought to mention this or consider it as potentially an option for the way that I was feeling. I had extreme lightheadedness. I had fainting and dizzy spells. I've had two different types of seizures that happened at the same time, the whirlpool and then the convulsing. When I had an MRI, my results came back as unremarkable. I corrected the doctor and said, look again, because I'm actually quite remarkable.

I spent almost 10 grand on the basic Bob, aka he wishes he was a human lie detector. That's two extinctions in terms of the 5k the private investigator told me about, and almost two cruises with the gang stalkers in tow. How? How could I have slipped through the cracks so matter-of-factly?

And here's the thing about a diagnosis like this. Oh my God, I'm getting teared up about it. There's a grief that comes with it that nobody warns you about. And you can only truly understand how deep it cuts when you experience it for yourself. Up until that Zoom call, I was special. And I put that in air quotes because special is undefined. It's its own category. It's a feeling more than a fact. And feelings you can hold loosely. But a label? A label is specific. A label has edges. It tells you exactly what box you're in and exactly how the box works. And as much as I had spent my whole life knowing I was different, there is something unexpectedly heavy about having that difference handed to you back in terms of clinical terms. Knowing you have an X factor is one thing. But when it gets solved on a Zoom call, no less, you can't help but wish it wasn't so anticlimactic. I think I expected a revelation to feel bigger somehow. Not like just a regular Tuesday afternoon with bad lighting and sometimes a frozen screen.

Before the session closed, Jen brought up the human lie detector, aka Basic Bob, as she had now decided to call him, a nickname that required no further explanation. She told her therapist she had stopped working with him after discovering he had been involved in a kidnapping a few decades back. The doctor's expression shifted.

"Wait, you were working with the guy involved in the kidnapping in Thailand?"

"No," Jen said. "Different kidnapping. Different instance entirely. This one happened a while ago." She let that land, then kept going.

She told her about the training program, about how, despite being sold as a group effort, Basic Bob had made it very clear, very early, that his intention was to isolate her. About how he had pushed to have her come to his house. About the emails, the ones where she could never quite tell if she was corresponding with him or with his wife. The responses shifting in tone and cadence in ways that didn't add up.

That was when the doctor stopped her. "What you are describing are serious ethical violations." Not a question, a statement. Her jaw dropped as she admitted she had never heard of anything quite like it. Jen thought, "Well, now we're both in the same boat." She didn't say it out loud, but she thought it.

When Jeff came home, he immediately saw the distant, shocked, grieving, yet confident look on Jen's face. "Well," I said, "it's true. Remember when I said murder is the subplot in our lives right now? I forgot to even mention in therapy that I was just interviewed for 41 minutes in the murder investigation. Oh, and I have something called synesthesia."

Autism is what makes me think in systems. It's how I can engineer something from nothing, why my brain goes straight to the architecture of a problem before most people have even identified there is a problem. Synesthesia is why our apartment looks so cool, which, for the record, is epically cool and also a little unhinged, and I stand by every single decision because to me, they all make sense.

"My senses are crossed," Jen explained. "They always have been. I just had no idea."

Jeff looked around, taking it all in, and then looked back at her. "So what about your clothes?" he asked. "Is that the autism or the synesthesia?"

Jen didn't even blink. "That," I told him, "is because of me, and you're welcome."

Still in shock, but feeling grounded enough, Jen then decided it was time to email Basic Bob declining participation in his program. Her email went out on February 3rd, 2022, at 5:38 PM.

"Last week, I found out that Basic Bob was named in the actions of the US Civil Rights Commission report referencing his involvement in the kidnapping of a young girl. I was deeply disturbed by what I read, and as a result, will not be pursuing training. In terms of the website, it's all yours. I changed the password, as I was the one to set it. The bill is paid until January of next year, and Squarespace walks you through step by step on how to transfer it here."

On February 4th, 2022, at 2:42 PM, he sent this. His email began with the word NO in all caps.

"No action was ever taken against me, not for anything I did on behalf of that family, not for anything I did on behalf of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. You can make an allegation about anyone, about anything. People do it all the time, but no action was ever taken against me. The people I worked for got their child back. All ended well. I was paid for the work I performed. My total fee was $1. I still have the bill. I kept it. It took me nearly a year of my life to help return that girl to her family, nearly a year. A major broadcast network covered the story reasonably well, I thought. You might want to look it up. I am sorry to lose your contact. Regarding the girl who was kidnapped, I got her returned to her adoptive parents. They thank me for it regularly. We are still in close contact to this day. I wish you well in your next adventure. All the best."

Nothing that follows is a clinical assessment. It is Jen's interpretation drawn from the words he chose and the ones he did not. And in her opinion, his response is a case study in how a certain kind of person processes accountability, one that reveals more than any denial ever could.

The first thing to notice is what he leads with. Not an explanation, not context, clearly not remorse. The opening sentence is a legal shield. "No action was ever taken against me." In psychology, this is called exculpation by absence of consequence. The logic is, because I was not punished, I did nothing wrong. This is not a moral argument. It's a bureaucratic one. It tells you immediately that his internal compass is oriented toward institutional outcomes, not ethical ones.

The $1 bill is doing a great deal of work in this response. It is offered as proof of selflessness. He kept it as a memento, implying the act was noble rather than mercenary. But the detail is also a deflection. It reframes a federal arrest on sovereign tribal land as an act of charity. The fee becomes the story rather than the child pulled off a school bus.

The language around the girl is the most revealing part. He refers to her as being kidnapped, in quotes, a word that reframes a legally settled custody order as a crime, and his intervention as a rescue. He says the family thanks him on a regular basis, and that they still maintain close contact. This is not incidental. It's a man who has constructed a complete alternative narrative in which he is the hero, the legal system was the villain, and the child was saved. There is no version of events in his account in which he did anything that requires reflection.

What this says about the human lie detector is that he is someone who has spent a long time reading other people and very little time examining himself. The professional identity built around detecting deception in others appears to have made him genuinely incapable of recognizing it in his own account.

The closing line, "Sorry to lose our contact. I wish you well in your next adventure," is the finishing touch. It is warm, dismissive, and utterly unbothered, the posture of a man who has never once considered that he might owe anyone an answer.

A few weeks later, Jen followed up with another email, this time to the Oracle.

"Good afternoon. I wanted to let you know a few weeks back I found out some information on Basic Bob that was concerning. I hadn't Googled him, as I was introduced through someone I trust and respect, who I didn't know also hadn't Googled him. What came up was a mention from the actions of the US Civil Rights Commission highlighting his involvement in the kidnapping of a young girl. I was very uncomfortable with what I read, and as a result, will not be continuing training. I was also a bit concerned when he mentioned to me that I needed to only talk to him, not even you or his wife. It felt like an isolation tactic that was a big red flag, especially considering his wife is the one who makes appointments, and I was told this would be a collaborative experience with you. I have read yours and your partner's pieces and really believe in the work you're doing. Let me know if there's anything I can do or help with, or if you have any recommended reading. Joe Navarro, whose books I adore and got me into body language in the first place, has an online course I'll be taking just to learn the basics. I also found out last week I have a condition called synesthesia, which is why I see shapes around people. Wonderful discoveries all around. All the best."

"Good morning, Jen. Thanks for letting me know. Too bad it is working out like this for you. I understand your discomfort. I train people online in this method myself. You could follow my certification training program individually online with me if you would like. It would be an opportunity for you to learn the method. You learn analyzing the seven different communication types, their needs, strengths, and pitfalls in communicating, and how the interaction between the types takes place. Secondly, you could learn to look deeper into yourself, which provides you with insight in yourself and more effectiveness in your communication with others. I can explain the possibilities over Skype if you like."

Jen did not schedule the call. She had come to understand that birds of a feather flock together, and all she wanted was to put distance between herself and anything Basic Bob had ever touched. For months afterward, she would notice the searches on her blog, different variations of his name showing up again and again, checking, making sure she had not said anything.

Their final communication ended on September 19th, 2022, when Jen got an email from a company called Alignable. It read, "Hi, Friel. It's the wife of Basic Bob. I'd like to be able to refer customers to you, so I've added you to my network on Alignable, a site exclusively for business owners to network with each other. Accept my invitation? Note: This invite expires in 24 hours."

Jen gladly let it expire.

And in the next episode, Jen reaches out to her personal hero, Joe Navarro, and to her continued surprise, he replied back.