The Deductionist Podcast

Hannah Fry went through every past season of The Traitors looking for statistical patterns, then got recruited as a traitor herself. Maths can predict human behaviour across a crowd with unnerving precision. Point it at one person and the predictions fall apart, for reasons chaos theory explains.

In this episode:
• Why crowds behave like equations, from Hannah Fry's London riots model to the near repeat burglary effect
• How ...

The evidence in a romance scam is all there in writing. Every message, every apology, every “be careful, there are scammers on here” sits in the chat log like a frozen crime scene. Dr Elisabeth Carter, criminologist and forensic linguist, reads those crime scenes line by line, by hand, and she joins Ben Cardall and Bob Pointer to show exactly how the crime is built.

Most people picture a romance scam as a lonely pension...

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 t...

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.

L...

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 ca...

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 ...

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 Machiavelliani...

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
&...

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 rig...

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 tact...

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 inflecti...

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 instructio...

"Only 3 left." "Offer ends tonight." Your brain doesn't ask if it's true, it just reacts. This episode breaks down exactly why manufactured scarcity works and how to spot it before it spots you.

In this episode:
- The real psychology behind scarcity and loss aversion (Kahneman, Cialdini)
- Why "limited time" and "limited quantity" hit different parts of the brain
- How investigators encounter manufactured urgency inside in...

Poker tells made Zachary Elwood's name, then made him a skeptic of his own industry. Zachary Elwood, host of the People Who Read People podcast and author of the Reading Poker Tells trilogy.

Join us as dig into what years of high stakes poker actually proved about deception, why most popular body language advice collapses under scrutiny, and how a game with instant feedback taught him to distrust claims the rest of the field still ...

Cains Jawbone is a 1934 literary puzzle by Edward Powys Mathers, pen name Torquemada. 100 pages of dense prose, six murders, six murderers, printed deliberately out of order with no map, no key, and no instructions. The number of possible arrangements is 9.3 followed by 157 zeros. Only four people in history have solved it correctly.

This is Episode 1. I'm a licensed private investigator, trained mentalist, and memory competitor, a...

Trust is not something you give. It is something that gets taken, using documented mechanisms, before you have processed a single piece of evidence. Ben Cardall and Bob Pointer map the full architecture of manufactured likeability: the Halo Effect, affinity bias, the chameleon effect, the Liking Principle, and the mere exposure effect. Then they show you how to audit your own responses and spot engineered rapport in real interactio...

Lie detection has been the wrong goal all along. Mark Anderson spent decades in law enforcement, and his conclusion is blunt: the mindset you carry into an interview matters more than any signal you think you're reading off someone's face.
In this episode:

Why curiosity over certainty is an operational principle, not a motivational slogan, and what it actually changes in practice

The lie detection problem: why watching for behav...

Most people think critical thinking means finding the right answer faster. Kent Axell has spent a career proving it means knowing exactly which doors you're closing behind yourself, and why that distinction changes everything from a Las Vegas stage to a jury room.
In this episode:

Why magicians develop critical thinking skills that investigators and analysts rarely get trained in

The assumption gradient: where useful belief ends...

Pete Rushmore built a business, hit the metrics that were supposed to mean something, and felt nothing. Not because he failed. Because the vision he was chasing was answering a question he'd never actually asked.

This episode follows the performance trifecta he developed out of that realisation: direction, skills, energy, and why energy is the foundation even though it's the last thing anyone looks at.

Motivational mapping, self-de...