POLITICS | LIE DETECTING | LISTENING SKILLS
An Easy And Useful Way To Detect If Someone Is Telling You Lies
Use your ears, and don’t let manipulators’ song and dance numbers fool you.
Imagine a dimly lit control room of a recording studio.
Rows of little LEDs illuminate the mixing console, and you see through the tilted window the actor in the studio with headphones on, looking intensively at the script on the stand in front of microphones.
Microphones look like meerkats waiting to spot danger. They are tense and ready to capture any sound.
The sound engineer leans forward, pushes the channels open for microphones, and the director gets taut and focused. It’s the last day of recording a radio play; the scene is the actor’s most complex and emotionally charged challenge, and he is nervous.
He coughs, bites his lip, and moves closer to the mic, and then the director’s voice comes to his ears: –” OK, take one, action please.” The sweat on his forehead gleams like hot frost.
The recording begins.
But after just a few lines, the director shouts to the control mic: –” Cut. You need to find the right thought. You are not on a stage where you can fool me with your moves”.
Silence.
Long silence.
We can see the tears coming from the corner of the actor’s eyes. He keeps his eyes shut with all his strength. He doesn’t want to look at anything, see anything but just survive. He is at his wit’s end.
Then the director suddenly shouts to the control mic: “And action.”
The meerkats stiffen, and the lines from the actor’s soft but deep voice penetrate the dim control room with meaning and magic. The director whispers to the sound engineer, his eyes closed: –”Lift it a bit, just a bit, to get it to the close-up”.
The voice fills the control room. The hair at the back of my neck stands up like soldiers at the trench before the last attack. The goosebumps make my arms chilly, and I can hardly breathe.
– “And cut! It’s in the can. Brilliant take. Did you get it all in, Harri?” asks the director from the sound engineer and then shouts to the actor. — “Jukka, you can come here and listen to it now. Fantastic take. I call it a day”.
What happened and why?
One of my scriptwriting heroes, the late Jussi Kylätasku, gave us drama students a Studia Generalia lecture in 1980 at the University of Tampere. I still remember it like yesterday.
He was the most famous radio play writer in Finland and a genius. I was lucky to work with him on many projects and admired his sense of drama and what a voice can do.
He said in his lecture to the wide-eyed young audience: –”With the audio, you can get closer to another person than with any other medium — maybe except with a penis.”
A mother’s heartbeat is the first sound we hear. If that sound beat is comforting and steady, the baby in the womb senses the tranquillity of her mother.
What if the sounds that come from the outside world are that of war, fear and agony? Sounds matter more than we think because they belong to a much deeper level of our consciousness than intellect.
Our ears are the most accurate lie detectors — if we learn to use and trust them properly.
With the advances in digital technologies, we sometimes forget that we have ears. Everything is on our faces: our eyes suck all, and the vistas are there to deceive us. We are watching too much shit and listening too little to the pleasing sounds of the bees of our friends’ thoughts that go from idea to idea collecting honey.
So, how did I learn to build my beehive of thoughts and get some honey? And also avoid the fake bees.
Back to the studio and the year 1982.
I had been an assistant director to Väinö Vainio already almost a year at the Finnish Broadcasting company’s Radio Theatre.
The event I described led us to a local pub, and when Jukka, the actor, and the sound engineer Harri had left, Väinö and I continued with a few more beers. After completing the long and complex play, it was time to celebrate a little before the arduous editing process could start.
We did that quite often. Those were the days. I have apologised to my liver profoundly for the foolishness of my taste for beer.
– “Tell me, Väinö, what was going on there,” I asked.– “I was sure that Jukka would shit in his pants”.
And then, I got one of the most outstanding pieces of advice about detecting lies.
– “Jukka knew that he was lying, and he knew that I knew”, said Väinö. — “He tried the tricks he learned at the theatre school. Fool me with the facial expressions, posture and some gestures. I am too old a fart to that kind of play. I keep my eyes closed every time I need to know if something is real, if there is a raw and genuine emotion or clear thought — or if the actor is just trying to cheat me and get away with cheap lies”.
After that moment, I have always remembered to close my eyes when I suspect somebody is trying to pull my leg or manipulate me or others. I listen, and I can detect the lie. Most often, at least.
Back to the future.
When I was listening to PM Jacinda Ardern’s announcement of her resignation, I closed my eyes. I watched the video with my ears open and my eyes shut.
She was genuine. She didn’t lie.
Then I did the same treatment to another politician who spoke about Ardern’s resignation. He was polite, considerate and pleasant. But my ears told me he could hardly hold his high horses at the stable and wait for the better moment to blow his horn.
Our ears are wonderful organs. Use them. Learn to spot a lie and truth by listening carefully.
How to do it?
Start training your ears with YouTube videos. Don’t watch them, but listen to the people talking.
Start with Donald Trump. He is the most accessible training ground because everything he says seems to be a lie. He is a juicy testy bed because his way of using his voice is distinctive and easy to analyse. Another is Putin. His soft and arrogant speech pattern is telling if you let it tell what is behind those murmurs.
Then move on to listen to Ukraine’s president Zelensky, for example, his speech to the US Congress. You can hear the difference between genuine thoughts and camouflage lies. Zelensky has no time to lie. He speaks his truth with genuine tones.
If you listen to those guys, you can start recognising speech patterns, tones, intonation and rhythm that reveals when they want to mislead you.
You can also listen to the famous Churchill speech on May 13, 1940. Compare that to Hitler’s speech. It’s revealing.
After you have trained your ears, you can spot the manipulators easier. It is not foolproof — but if you are not a fool, there is a chance that you will not be hoodwinked as easily as before.
The recipe for better listening.
In summary, you should follow this simple process to become a lie detector with your ears.
- Train your ears with YouTube by listening, not watching, videos that you know the speaker has not told the truth.
- Start recognising patterns. Whenever a lie comes out, something in the tone, intonation, pauses or timing will tell your ear that the speaker is now entering the unverified territory.
- Apply at any meeting or conversation. If you have trained your ears well, you can use your ears like magnifying glasses: 5–10 second eyes closed examination can tell you more than enough to verify which kind of pull the speaker tries to apply to your leg. You can do it so that nobody even realises you are exposing them.
It’s like Väinö Vainio taught me: keep your ears open and eyes closed, and nobody can trick you with mediocre acting. Not even well-trained politicians.
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