Hidden True Crime - Beyond the Veil: The Closing of the Daybellian Mind

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

This week we conclude our exploration of the three major psychological elements that led to Chad Daybell’s crimes through an examination of closed-mindedness and uncritical acceptance of paranormal phenomenon- both of which played a significant role in forming his cult and failing to curtail his murderous path. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Our Sponsors:* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Acorns: https://acorns.com/HIDDENTRUECRIME* Check out Armoire and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.armoire.style* Check out Effecty and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://www.effecty.com* Check out Happy Mammoth and use my code HIDDENTRUECRIME for a great deal: https://happymammoth.comSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/hidden-a-true-crime-podcast1836/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See Verizon.com for details. Hidden. A true crime podcast. A forensic psychologist and a journalist explore the hidden motives behind unthinkable crimes while examining our deepest fears along the way. Here's one of my new favorite characters, because this is how people think I've had. Hearleson in the movie 2012, and that's how my relatives honestly think that's how I've acted the last five years. But he was right.

to survive through these trials that are coming, and that's the whole reason you're here. I know that the spirit has guided you and prompted you that you have a role to play. And so it might be by baby steps, but you're going to get there eventually. You can do it. That was Chad Daybell, you just heard. And this is Hidden, a true crime podcast. I'm host Lori Matthias. And this is Dr. John Matthias.

Before Chad Daybell was known to the world. because of this case. He was known to the Mormon or LDS Prepper World and would be a speaker at these prepper conferences. Prepper meaning believing that the end of the world was coming and he would talk about being prepared. That clip from Chad Daybell was referencing the 2012 movie 2012. Chad is referring to a conspiracy theorist end of the world type character

named Charlie Frost played by Woody Harrelson. A fictional character. character. A fictional character, right. It's a, it's a fictional character in a fictional movie with a fictional outcome, and yet, Chad Deval acts as if it's real. Not only real, but he acts as if he's right. He says that Woody Harrelson was right in the movie. Everyone made fun of him, but he was right. He was right, right. His takeaway from that moment, apparently, was not that this is total fiction, but that the character that people compare him to was right, that the world was coming to an end. Let's listen to that one more time.

Here's one of my new favorite characters, because this is how people think I act. There's Woody Harrelson in the movie 2012, and that's how my relatives honestly think that's how I've acted the last five years. But he was right. But in reality, prepare ourselves to survive through these trials that are coming. and that's the whole reason you're here. I know that the spirit has guided you and prompted you that you have a role to play. And so it might be by baby steps,

but you're going to get there eventually. You can do it. This week's episode is about closed-mindedness. Being right is not consistent with being open, especially when you're referencing a fictional character from a fictional movie with a fictional outcome. But before we begin the episode, we do want to just say thank you.

We have received more downloads than we had anticipated. We're very excited because we want to keep doing this. We've received great feedback. We're working on that feedback and we're working to perfect our podcasting formula. So stick with us. And I also just want to say this. Your reviews have been wonderful to read, especially for John. Most of you don't know, but John is the introvert of all introverts, which is funny because he's married to an extrovert.

I'm like an introverted extrovert. but John couldn't be more introverted and he's essentially just been sort of hiding his whole life. I'm just lucky I found him. This is new territory for John and I convinced him to do this. You're going to keep going, right, John? You're not going to go back into hiding. I'm not going to go back to my cave. Thank you all for the support and the comments.

It's encouraging. I think it'll definitely keep us going. You know, my world typically is a district attorney, a defense attorney, and a judge. judge and maybe a probation officer here and there. I tend to deal with a very small group of people most of the time. And I spend probably 85% of my time writing reports and analyzing data and working from home. So it's a great job for me because it plays to my strengths, which are to write and think and analyze and think about crime and not having to, you know, not having to be around a ton of people. He doesn't have any work party scheduled. It's like the best job ever. There's no micromanaging.

It's been a privilege to have the opportunity to do this. I'm glad Lauren talked me into it. As Lauren reminds me, I think that maybe I don't have a lot to share, but Lauren assures me and some of your comments assure me that there's some knowledge I can share. I'm quite happy to do that if there's some benefit to it. Most people I think they're listening have listened to our other episodes. If not, I would recommend that. We are still setting the foundation with three factors.

I think of it like a three-legged stool. There's three legs on that stool. they hold the stool up, and those provide the foundation that supports our analysis of Chad Daybell's crimes. The first leg we've talked about, which is this denial of being human, the second leg we talked about last week, which was in secure attachment, and the third leg we'll talk about today is the variable of closed-mindedness. Today, I want to talk about how this factor of closed-mindedness comes into play with Chad Dayball and his eventual crimes. In our last podcast, I talked about insecure attachment and secure attachment. And one of the things I talked about related to attachment was the idea that children or toddlers begin to form mental maps or they're sometimes called internal working models.

Psychologists and psychological researchers have all kinds of names for these. They call them scripts. They call them schemas. They call them internal working models. They call them mental maps. They call them mindsets. It can be a little confusing, but in general I prefer to use the term mental maps because I think it's very descriptive.

If you think about the brain like a map, I think that's kind of a useful analogy because you can think that a lot of roads already formed and the same thing with the brain, a lot of connections get wired. And the older we get, the more difficult it is to add a new road or add a new connection. So I think as children, when we're forming those attachments, those maps are forming and the roads are changing, and it's a map that's very much under construction. And then as we develop and the wiring our brain becomes more solidified,

that map becomes much more stable and much more difficult to change. If we're thinking about this idea of closed-mindedness, it's important to start with mental maps. So what are the variables that allow us to form our mental maps? The first one I think I've alluded to last week in terms of attachment, but the broader variable there is the family. It's not just the caregiver that's developing that intimate relationship with a very, very young child or infant. It's also the larger family culture that's playing a massive role in developing those mental maps. If we're thinking about this in terms of Chad Debo, I think it's interesting to look at his family and to look at his family culture.

And one of the things that seems apparent from his family is that it's a relatively closed family. It's a closed family system. And what I mean by that is there's fairly strict boundaries that the family has a very specific set of beliefs that they reinforce. In this case, probably fairly traditional or maybe more than traditional. An extreme Mormonism. Extreme Mormonism. In Chad's family, it appeared to be a very religious family, a very strict, religious family that had very tight boundaries about what was allowed into the system and what was

allowed out of the system, very tight boundaries around what probably could be discussed in the family and how it could be discussed. What that means essentially is that a family like Chad's is closed in the sense that they regulate information coming in and out of the system. The tighter that information is regulated, typically the more those family beliefs are going to get reinforced. So in this case, If the family has similar beliefs that Chad later developed and amplified over time, what's happening is that the system is reinforcing those beliefs and it's not letting them get challenged at all because it's not letting any outside information in. A family culture that's very strict and very closed, in some ways very incestuous in the sense that

secrets often exist among the family that are never going to be shared, knowledge or intergenerational family events are typically also hidden and not going to be shared. There's just a number of things going on in these types of families that will reinforce, in some cases they'll reinforce very irrational beliefs. I believe Chad came from this type of family. And also, we haven't talked about this much, but it appears that Lori did too. So it's not surprising. Lori Balladebao was Chad's mistress, now wife.

That's what we know. She's also behind bars. It was her children that went missing. And right, we have learned that Lori came from this type of family. Right, and so it's not surprising. And a lot of my work, one of the things I've observed over the years is that people from similar family cultures tend to find each other. So it's not surprising.

I think that Lori came from a very closed, incestuous-type family system, and she found someone who came from a similar type system with a similar set of beliefs. What occurs in these types of families also is that once these beliefs are reinforced, forced, the family culture anticipates that family members will uphold these beliefs and support these beliefs. In fact, there's a family therapist by the name of Borsamenei Negei who's argued that close families expect a great deal of loyalty around the same beliefs. And if you think about that, children whose survival depends upon being accepted by their families are almost always going

to exhibit some loyalty towards their parents, otherwise they'll get rejected. So the very system they rely on for survival is now telling them, if you don't believe these things, we're going to reject you. The beliefs become reinforced in that context. Children don't want to get rejected, even if these beliefs are completely irrational, even if the family, for example, believes that the earth is flat, reinforces that belief and sends the message that if you don't believe the earth is flat, then you're not going to be a part of this family. The child's going to believe that. It's similar with any type of belief. So this is probably the primary way. that children, they start shutting down, they become more close-minded.

They don't let outside information affect their decisions or their beliefs. And so these beliefs become entrenched. It's not always the family's fault, though, right? I've met some close-minded people or people I thought were closed-minded. And from what I could tell, their family didn't seem super extreme. Chad's brother actually came out with a statement during the investigation, pleading for Chad to cooperate with the impeachment. investigation and also saying that he and Chad had very differing beliefs. After JJ and

Tiley's bodies were discovered in Chad's yard, Chad's parents released a statement full of empathy and sympathy and not defending their son in any way. It's not the family's fault that Chad did this. Right. It's not the family's fault, but I'm looking at how do we create the conditions for someone to be closed-minded? I think the major variable is the family culture. The other variable, which you just alluded to, so you're a step ahead of me here, is genetic, that there's a lot of research now in personality psychology supporting what's called the five-factor model of personality. The five just quickly, we use a acronym to remember the five factors of ocean. O stands for openness to experience. C is conscientiousness. E is extroversion. A is agreeableness, and N stands for neuroticism.

Each of the five factors would be considered traits, meaning that in some sense they're heritable, they're genetic, there's a biological component. They don't vary. You're born with them. And one of those is openness to experience. And I think that's, in this case, I think that's a really critical one. Because, yes, I think you can have someone who's, for example,

who's high in openness to experience. Maybe they're born into a family culture that's very rigid and closed. and because they're high on openness to experience, they're probably going to find ways to challenge those beliefs. But if you have a family culture that's fairly strict and rigid and shut down, and then you're low on openness to experience, which I'm quite sure Chad Dable is. I can agree with that, and I'm not a psychologist.

I've read his books. That's enough. Right, yeah. His vocabulary alone, which is highly correlated with openness to experience, by the way, would suggest that he's low. on this variable or trait. So I think it's the combination. It's the combination of the family culture and how the family culture operates

and whether they're closed. And then there's this more genetic component of openness to experience that interacts with that family culture and leads us either towards questioning some of those beliefs or shutting any type of challenges to those beliefs down. I'm always interested in the Nature v. Nurture debate. John knows this. I'm always asking the nature versus nurture questions. How much of openness to

experience is genetic? Yeah, that's a great question. I think there's no clear answer to that, but generally speaking, it's probably around 30 to 50 percent. Let's say probably 50 percent is genetic. And actually, there's another component to openness to experience, which is important to mention, and that's intelligence. We know that intelligence is also heritable or genetically based to a very large extent, at least 50%. And again, that makes sense because I've read his books. Chad's books. He was an author who took his doomsday preaching into the world of religious books.

He wrote what, over 20 of them. And John and I have taken the time to read quite a few of them. Openness to Experience can be explained probably with the 50% genetic component. And then, interestingly enough, intelligence is also highly correlated with open. to experience. In fact, intelligence explains about 30% of openness to experience. So what you're saying is that Chad Debel is stupid. That's not exactly a clinical description of the situation. I think that a psychologist might be inclined to say that he's below average cognitive functioning. Maybe that's the way I would say it. I'll take a middle ground way to say it. Low IQ. We'll settle on that. In terms of forming our

mental maps, family culture, and one of the five factors, openness to experience, play really important roles in determining whether our mental maps are going to be more open or closed. Carol Dweck, who's a psychologist at Stanford, has done a lot of research on what she calls mindset. She essentially says there's two types of mindsets. Her research, by the way, has been picked up a lot by athletes, by CEOs. It's been picked up in the performance psychology arena. The reason that's true is because she divides mindsets into fixed versus growth mindsets. You've probably heard some of this. The basic idea is that with a growth mindset, someone with a growth mindset believes that effort leads to improvement. So even if you perceive

intelligence to be fixed, if you have a growth mindset, you believe that with enough effort, you can grow and learn in spite of the fact that perhaps intelligence is limited. With a fixed mindset, you don't believe that. You believe that no amount of effort is going to change things, that the world is exactly as it is, so why try? I think this is related to some of the ideas we're talking about here, but I'm looking a little bit more broadly than Dweck's research at the idea that mental maps consist of values and beliefs and knowledge and skills and just about everything that we can fit into memory. Generally speaking, I like Dweck's idea of fixed versus growth. in terms of thinking about mental maps as well.

I think mental maps tend to be open or closed. That by the time we're roughly 25, 26, we either have an open mental map or a closed mental map. And the family culture, the trade of openness to experience will play a massive role in that. And then there's something else that comes into play, which is really, really important in terms of understanding Chad Debo.

And that's what's called confirmation bias. Confirmation bias was described by the psychologist, Scott Lillianfield, who's done a lot of research. He's an experimental psychologist. Lillianfield has described confirmation bias as, quote, the mother of all biases. Psychologists have talked about hindsight bias, loss aversion. There's so many biases that people have picked up on. But confirmation bias has to be one of the biggest. And the idea behind confirmation bias is essentially that once our beliefs are fixed, that we seek information that confirms those beliefs.

And we fail to find information, disparate information that can challenge those beliefs. I remember in grad school, I had to read some of the work of a psychologist by the name of Carl Weike. Carl Weike taught at Harvard, better known for his work in organizational psychology,

and in grad school, I actually minored in organizational psychology with some emphasis on leadership. One of the things I love that Weik said, you know, I remembered it from the moment I heard it, is Weik used to say, we all are familiar with the terms of, term seeing is believing. But Weike reversed that and he would say all the time, no, seeing is not

believing. People do not see the world and adapt their beliefs to the world or to information. They believe first. The real term should be believing is seen. And that's essentially what confirmation bias is that our beliefs are the filter through which we see the world. Our mental maps are the filter through which we see the world. And those determine how we see things, not the evidence. So if he believes the world is ending, nothing can convince him otherwise if he has decided that the world is coming to an end. Exactly. I've mentioned you've read Chad's books. Do you have any good examples from his books to kind of show his close-mindedness? Well, I'm glad you asked. Oh, he has his book open to a page. This is a quote from Chad's book, page 58. And the title of this

little subsection is, quote, there's more to life than Utah Valley. And this is his autobiography, because he has written fictions. This is his autobiography. This is his autobiography. He's talking about a period in his life after his mission. He was searched. So he must have been around 20. 21, 22. His Mormon mission for those that aren't LDS. A two-year Mormon mission, he went to New Jersey, and he's just come back from that and he's going to BYU. So Chad says, I dated a nice girl a few times that I'd met in my communications 101 class, but we didn't really click. She was from Florida. And our final date, she said, sorry, but you need to get out and see the world. There's more to life than Utah Valley. Chad says, I was slightly offended. I mean, I'd been to Disneyland three times with my family, and one time I'd walked about a mile into Tijuana, Mexico. Is this his attempt at humor now at this point? The thing is, is it's real.

Right. This is really him in his autobiography. Chad goes on. Then there was the trip to the Four Corners Monument where I'd stood in four different states at the same time. What did she mean I hadn't seen the world? I was about to find out. Oh, what happens next? Oh, you know what? That was before his mission. What he was about to find out was going on his mission. and New Jersey was what taught him to see the world. It's interesting that around the age of 21, he's going on a date with someone who says, man, you are really shut down.

You need to go see the world because I don't think Disneyland qualifies as worldly experience. Well, she was from Florida, those Floridians. Right. Well, she should have been impressed by his trips to Disney World then. What's interesting about this is not only does he disregard that feedback by trying to mock it, but he implies that by going on his mission, he grew up.

He became worldly. If you read the book closely, you'll find out that he didn't grow up on his mission. He went to Trenton. He was in, as he puts it, hard parts of Trenton. He was in, but the reality is all he does during his mission is he filters everything through this closed mindset of ghosts, and paranormal experiences, some of these apartment complexes that he visits and preaches in are haunted, people are haunted, people are possessed by the devil. I mean, this is not someone who's learning from the environment. This is someone who's clearly bringing their biases into the

situation. And he's going on his mission believing he has all the answers. He's not going with the open mind to learn from others. In reading his autobiography, you realize that this is the reason the Book of Mormon musical exists. Right, right, exactly. That was about Chad Daybell going to New Jersey. Right, except I think Chad Daybell, his beliefs were probably so extreme even then, that the Book of Mormon wouldn't come close to doing justice to how close-minded he was. So let me talk a little bit about confirmation bias.

One of the more interesting studies, psychological studies early on about confirmation bias, was done by Jennifer Crocker, who was at Northwestern at the time. Professor Crocker took about 60 students. She asked them several questions, and then she provided them with some information to see how they assessed those questions. The questions were simple. They were related to tennis. And so what she wanted to know essentially was if she told a group of students that

tennis players had worked out the day before a major tennis student. match. And in one case, they had worked out hard and then they'd lost. In the second condition, they worked out hard and they won. How would students evaluate the statistics and the information she gave them to attempt to confirm that opinion? In other words, she was providing them with information related to a question about tennis players' performance. And she wanted to see whether there would be any biases in terms of evaluating the information. So what she found without question was that when the students were asked if there was a relationship between tennis players working out and losing, that they almost always found information

that supported that. And if she asked, is there a relationship between tennis players working out hard and winning the next day, students then found all the information they needed to support that. even though there was a ton of information that contradicted that position or that opinion, she found that confirmation bias was strongly in play. The most amazing thing about this experiment, the subjects in her experiment could care less about tennis. They had no investment in the outcome.

They were indifferent to whether somebody worked out and won or lost a tennis match. And she toast tennis because it was the most innocuous subject she could think of. So even though these students had no investment in tennis whatsoever, they confirmed the opinion that she initially expressed. That was the thing that really stood out here, was the fact that people seemed to exhibit a bias towards information that's slightly biased to begin with. Another important element to confirmation bias

that's highly relevant to Chad Daybell to this case is the fact that there's confirmation bias a great deal and people that tend to lean towards the, the paranormal or people that tend to believe more in paranormal events. People that tend to gravitate towards the paranormal look for information that confirms their view. They ignore information that doesn't. One of the other research findings about the paranormal that psychologists have found is

something called illusory pattern perception. And that is people who tend to gravitate towards the paranormal tend to perceive patterns that don't exist. One of my favorite examples of this was a statistical analysis conducted by one of my favorite research psychologist Thomas Gillivich, who teaches at Cornell in 1985, and it's called the hot hand phenomenon. And what Gillovich looked at was when basketball players, professional and college basketball players, they're playing, and they make two or three baskets in a row, there's this general assumption that they're hot, that they're on a streak. And you'll see this

confirmed on the teams. If you're watching a Utah Jazz game, teams will often see a player that they think is hot because he's made several shots in a row, and they'll try to get the ball to him or her if it's the WMBA. And the belief is, once you've made several shots in a row, that you'll continue to do so. Gilevich evaluated whether players that had made several shots in a row were more likely to make the next shot in a sequence. And what he found was, without question, any particular shot after a series of baskets that were made was about 50-50.

In other words, there was no greater probability that someone would make the next shot. after a series successful shots. Gileovich challenged this idea that players get hot or streaky by showing without questions statistically that they're not. There's no such thing as a hot hand. It's an illusion. What about Kobe? Even Kobe.

Even LeBron. If you look at LeBron, for example, has about a 50% field goal percentage. If you just take any random shot that LeBron puts up, there's about a 50% chance he's going to make it. I'm Googling that right now, just to. see, hold on, he's right. LeBron. Oh my gosh, 50% of all shot. This has been really persistently controversial because people absolutely refuse to believe that players

don't get on hot streaks. And the reason for that, according to Gilevich, is because people have very deep preconceptions and theories about basketball players and how they operate. And they have very deep preconceptions about the fact that talented players, players and confident players like Rabon James have hot streaks. There's no question about it. That's how they see the world. Just now when you looked up LeBron James and saw that he only shoots 50%. I shouldn't say only. Put me in the NBA, I'm going to shoot 1% if I'm lucky. But still, it's LeBron. I would have expected more. Right. 50% is a good number. It clearly takes a tremendous amount of talent to play in the NBA and shoot 50%. But that doesn't change the fact

that one of the greatest players ever to play the game, if not the greatest, doesn't get on hot streaks. He might make two or three or four shots in a row, but believe it or not, the evidence says that LeBron James or Steph Curry or whoever, they don't have hot streaks, that the probability of them making a basket time after time is 50-50. People do not accept the fact.

They refuse to believe that that's not true. I had to just look at Michael Jordan, too, 52%. People just refuse to accept the evidence. How is this relevant to Chad Daybel and the paranormal? Somebody like Chad Daybell is much more likely to see patterns that don't exist. Chad Daibald not only believes in the hot hand, he is a massive fan of the hot hand. Chad Debo sees patterns that don't exist. If he gets up in the morning and he sees a crow sitting on the fence, that's an omen for the rest of the day.

That's true. That little bit of interview that I put in last week with Chad Daibel, he's talking about a ghost. And he's also talking very matter-of-factly to the interviewer, like the interviewer completely agrees with him that they're a ghost. But he has seen patterns in the ghost behavior. Surely this is the ghost. And then this was parked in front of my office and of course it's the ghost. Of course it's Eddie. How could it not be Eddie?

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That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com. Can you tell us one story from the book? Sure. One that definitely sticks in people's mind involves a man named Eddie. He was kind of a homeless man in Springville. I don't give his last name because people might know him. He was buried right next to my office. And when, well, about four days after his burial, I think he stuck around.

Because I started having locks picked here and there. we had a lock on our compound door. We'd keep the backhoe. And I would check it every night. But once Eddie had passed away, and it started opening every night. And then another lock on a shed nearby, he had actually unlocked and hung about two feet above the door.

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It's time to go to the light, Eddie. And he gave one last ditch effort, I guess. guess the next morning I found the garbage can shoved in front of my door. The locks were all opened again and finally I just was quite stern with him and said go to the light. It's time to move on. And that stopped the lock picking. John Martin Fisher is a philosopher who I think provides a really interesting distinction in very simple terms between intuitive and analytical thinking. What Fisher says is that we often use stories to make sense of the world, to find meaning in the world. And we use facts and evidence to evaluate the world.

This is the distinction between analytical thinking and intuitive thinking. Storytelling forms the basis of most of our intuitions and meanings attributed to the world, whereas evidence and facts are often the way we analyze the world from a more rational, analytical perspective. And maybe that helps us make sense of Chad Daybell to some degree because his book and his books, his fiction and his autobiography are often nothing but intuitions or stories or attempts to make meaning of the world. There's almost no analytical thinking whatsoever. One example of this is when Chad is driving along the Snake River and he looks out and he sees a campsite along the river and he recognizes that as the same as a vision or visions he's had over the last. year or two and he sees that as confirmation of the new Jerusalem that's coming. Obviously, if you and I are in the car with Chad Daybell in that moment, we're not going to see tense, but he sees tense. This is complete intuition. This is based on no evidence whatsoever. There's no attempt to analyze that. There's no attempt to step back and say, are these visions real? What basis do I have for believing that this vision is going to come true? None of this has anything to do with analytical thinking. People who are stronger in analytical thinking and evaluating evidence and facts are less likely to believe in the paranormal.

And Chad does have a reason, though, for believing in his visions. He tells everyone that he had a near-death experience. And that is why his visions are real. Because when he had two, he had multiple. Multiple, multiple near-death experiences. I remember that. Which, I just remember one because the one was so weird. When I think of near-death experiences, I think of a scene out of a scene out of a.

the ER and someone on their deathbed. But his near-death experience was jumping off a cliff with a bunch of friends and he was underwater and then he came buck up and all as well. But while he was underwater, something happened. And his veil, as he called it, was opened up. And thus he could hear, or actually, what did he say? His near-death experience is important because it gives him the authority to say that his visions are real, that he has connected with the other side of the veil, which by the

way is the name of this season in our podcast, Beyond the Val. The reason we call it Beyond the Vail is because page 178 of Chad's autobiography. He says, the most common question I receive is what parts of your books are based on what you've seen in vision and what parts did you make up. The short answer is, I don't fictionalize any of the events portrayed. I'm really not that creative. Let me describe how my writing process occurs. My torn veil allows information to be downloaded into my brain from the other side. The scenes I am shown are real events that will happen, but it is my job to fit them into the lives of the fictional families in my novels.

That is why his visions are real, because after his near-death experience, he decided they came to him or were downloaded. He used the word downloaded, right? Did I just hear that downloaded into his veil? Right. I think he said they're downloaded from the other side of the veil. He's literally connecting with God, taking that information,

and putting it in his books for all of us mere mortals to enjoy. For those who aren't Mormon or LDS and don't understand, this is very Mormon lingo. The veil in Mormon doctrine has great meaning. LDS people believe that we lived before we were born. It's not just the afterlife we talk about, but we also talk about the pre-existence. And the reason that we don't remember the pre-existence, we believe, is because of the veil,

that there was a veil placed in between us and heaven so that we do not remember what it was like to live before we were born. So Chad is literally saying he doesn't have that veil. He knows everything. He remembers what it was like before this life and he knows after and he knows what's to come. It's a pretty crazy thing to say if you understand what he is saying. Talk about confirmation bias. I mean, he's literally saying that all the information he's getting has been preordained and it's been received from God.

And therefore, that information cannot possibly be fallible or wrong, right? Isn't that what he's saying? That's exactly what he's saying. By grabbing information beyond the veil, Tad Debel is infallible and he's directly connected to God. So let's get back to this variable of closed-mindedness. I can't imagine a more rigid mental map than pulling information from beyond the the veil that's apparently already determined.

We know this because he believes the end of the world is going to occur on July 22nd. Yeah, this month, by the way. So everyone, get ready. If you are a Chad Deba believer, which there are a couple out there still. Still, we'll get to them later in another episode. But get ready, July 22nd. Right. So actually, it's a little disappointing that we only have a couple more episodes of this

podcast before we say goodbye to everyone on July 22nd. until we sign off because Chad Dayball, his visions are undoubtedly going to come to pass because they come directly from God. Right. And since he has his rating scale, which we've talked about in every episode, and that came about through emails, the police released these emails that Chad wrote to Lori explaining his rating system. He would label people darker light. We are surely dark. Oprah's the darkest, I believe, out there, according to Chad Daybell. Was Oprah on his rating scale? Yeah, Oprah was on his rating scale.

Really? Yeah, as well as the victim. Do we know why Oprah? No. No, we'll ask her next episode. We'll see if she wants to weigh in. Right. Okay, yeah, you call her.

On a sad note, as we've explained, the victim, Tiley, Tyley, was rated dark and we know what happened to her. That's how literal the scale is. This isn't, you know, a game you're playing in elementary school. He is literally taking this. darkness rating scale and judging people. So my point is because Chad knows the world is going to end on July 22nd and because we know he'd surely rate is dark, goodbye everyone. We will probably be sealed away

forever, but it has been a nice last few weeks. We hope you've enjoyed these very few podcasts we've been able to produce until the world comes to an end, just like it did in the fictional movie 2012 that Chad bases his conspiracy theories upon. Also, I'm in too. When it comes to you and I and our different personalities, I'm intuitive, more intuitive than you. Does that mean you're going to kill me? Well, that's what I'm wondering. You know, I'm hearing you say that intuitive people believe in the paranormal and more obscure things. And I'm thinking, I really like our marriage because I'm more intuitive than you are.

And I'm thinking so. No, I think it's, I think that's my example was to point out how he's intuitive to the extreme. You're also analytical. I think it's a question of balance. And I think you would agree. I'm not strictly analytical. I mean... True.

And you're right. I have the analytical journalist background, so maybe I won't kill you. I think it's a question of balance. Being analytical, intuitive, and incorporating both sides of the brain, some have talked about it in terms of right brain and left brain. I won't get into that. But the basic idea is that when we're completely lopsided and we filter everything through our intuitions and stories and meaning and divination.

you know, the pendulum divination. Oh, yeah, get into that one. I don't know if we should get near that. You want more Chad Daybell stories? Yeah, why don't you talk about the pendulum? Yeah, so according to quite a few people now, we've learned that at these prepper conferences and they would get together for their little social after hours,

Chad would often be around a group of people and pull out a necklace and swing it. If this is sounding familiar, I also played this game in second grade. He would take this. necklace and he would swing it and tell these people, they were more often women, that they had lived in another life, perhaps the 1800s. He's told a couple different women that they were Joan of Arc in another life after swinging this necklace back and forth. Some people were celebrities. Some people were Joan of Arc. So he would use that second grade game to get

people's attention at these social hours. Prepper events. Yeah, the prepper events. I mean, I'll be honest, if someone came to me and said, hey, you were Joan of Arc in a past life, I might, you know, listen, because I think I would like to be her. Right. He's playing on people's vulnerabilities, their desire to feel special. Right. I would never be taken by someone coming up to me and hitting on me by saying, hey, I think we were married in a past life, which is what he also did. Right. Not just married, but married 20 times, right? Right. Right. What he told Lori? That's what got Lori's attention that she had been married to Chad in a past life. Yeah. And what Lauren's...

talking about is called pendulum divination. It's actually a really archaic idea. There's been some speculation that even cave paintings, petroglyphs, as old as five, six thousand years, depict some pendulum divination or pendulum dowsing, I guess is the other way to describe it. But it was a very popular practice in the Middle Ages, which doesn't surprise me at all because it seems like Chad's belief system is appropriate for the Middle Ages. We're talking about closed-mindedness. And I think I've talked about mental maps being extremely rigid and closed and the relationship between that and believing in paranormal or having more paranormal leanings. I've talked about how a more rigid mental map typically involves more use of confirmation bias. The big question is how do you go from extreme rigidity to murder?

Right. That's the real question we're looking at. Because there are many people I know that are rigid and they wouldn't be murderers. Yeah, some of them are even in our own families. Right. So. Have you ever had a Thanksgiving dinner that didn't go well? They're probably in yours.

Right. It was probably because of a closed mental map or rigid mental map. I'm not implying that anyone with rigidity or rigid mental map is going to go out and kill people. Again, like I talked about last week, at some level it becomes a risk factor. And I think in this case, it's a particularly. important risk factor because we're talking about something that's cult-like or verges on the cult-like. And in a closed system with a cult leader like Chad with a very closed mental map, I think there's much more probability of violence occurring within that system. And why is that?

His belief system in and of itself has some propensity towards violence. Okay. Right. When you start judging people on a scale of one to ten, or whatever it is. And when you start perceiving no difference between the living and the dead, when you start believing that the world's going to come to an end, and therefore death has no real meaning or impact, these things start adding up.

As to why exactly these murders happen, we're going to talk about that more next week. We're going to get much more into the specifics. I think we have some really interesting ideas about that, but this closed-minded idea comes into play because essentially once this train is off the tracks, there's no way of stopping it, right? Like you combine this belief system with this train that's derailed and heading down the cliff.

There's nobody that can come into this system and say, wait a minute, what about this evidence? Or what about this? Or, hey, these are just kids. Why would you want to kill them? There's no information that's going to stop or impede this train from falling off the cliff. Which is really interesting because there is going around a train dream. that Chad wrote down. That's very telling about this moment when he decided that the prophet of the LDS Church was wrong.

And we are calling it the train dream. I'm telling this to John. I don't think John knows about this. No, I've never heard of the train dream. Tell me more. Tell me more. This train dream starts with Chad saying he envisioned a coal train and that he got on the coal train. And he wrote this on the avow site.

A vow is one of the preper sites. and this was in a place where you had to pay to get in and he wrote this. It's been circulating. He gets on the train and he sees other LDS Mormon authors on the train with him. And he realizes that they have the answers. And then he sees the prophet and the apostles. And he's realizing that they do not know any longer what is happening, but that the LDS authors do understand.

And then it goes on, I will find it and I will post it for people to see. And so this derailed train is figurative in in Chad's mind as well. Or literal, I guess I should say in Chad's mind. Right. So this metaphor of the train coming off the tracks, I think that is a good fit for this idea of closed mind in this. I really think that Chad was so fixated on the outcome of his visions, which was the New Jerusalem, which was the new world, that whatever got in his way or whatever information or evidence contradicted it, he was not going to stop. If that entailed murder, then so be it. Then it didn't matter.

Again, getting back to confirmation bias, getting back to paranormal beliefs, all of this ties together. There was no information that was going to change his mind in any sense, even if that information was compelling. There are neighbors who, until the children's bodies were found in Chad's front yard, stood by him and said, absolutely not. No way. No way he's a good man. I believe him. Could you have seen this before it happened? Could you have seen the derail train?

if you had spent enough time with him? I think it depends on how much he disclosed to me. If he was comfortable with me and he saw me as being a part of the inner circle and he was really, really opening it up about what he felt was going to occur. Notice how he said felt, not thought, because he's not analytical.

I think if he disclosed at some deep level what was going on, I think it would have had a lot of concerns. I think next week we're going to get more into the specifics. We're going to talk about sacrifice and some other things that I think are really unique to this case. But for now, I think the idea of closed-mindedness is important. It takes us a long way in terms of building that three-legged stool. So with all this talk, what I'm hearing and what I'm

understanding is that being open is healthy. Well, I should say it's a personal belief of mind to stay open. And as we get older, it is harder. How would you share with us a way that we can all work on staying open? Sometimes when I think about openness, I like to think about a famous experiment from 2007 that was conducted by Gene Weingarten from the Washington Post, who asked the famous violinist Joshua Bell to go down into the DC metro station early in the morning during the commuter time and play as violin, his strativarius violin, of all things, of five, I don't know, six million dollar violin. He's taking down into the metro station, and he's playing. Here it is.

The experiment looked at how many people during their morning commutes would stop and listen to Joshua Bell. Only seven people stopped. There were well over a thousand people that walked by Joshua Bell. Why, if we hear something extraordinary, why don't we take a few minutes to stop and listen? Why is it that we pass by Joshua Bell all the time? Some of it is we're just not open to it. We're closed. Some of you might also be familiar with one of the...

the most famous recent psychological experiments called the Invisible Gorilla, which essentially is a researcher took a group of people passing a ball around. Some of them were dressed in white, some of them were dressed in black. The researcher asked the subjects to count the number of passes that were occurring among the subject who were wearing white shirts. And during this entire passing process, a gorilla, a person dressed in a gorilla suit, walks into the middle of the arena where these passes are occurring. He thumps his chest for a few seconds. and he walks out. And I don't remember how many subjects they were, but the result of the experiment was that 50% of the people did not see the gorilla at all. In fact, they didn't even recall that there was a gorilla. And the reason that they didn't see the gorilla is something called inattentional blindness, which is they were so focused on counting the passes that they couldn't see the gorilla. And I think you have something similar here with Joshua Wabell. People are so focused on their morning commute and what they have to do at work and the fact that they're going to run into a micromanaging boss. or whatever it is.

Or that they're in a hurry. That they're in a hurry, right? They're running late. They're just, they don't care. That Joshua Bell is playing this beautiful melody right in front of them. It's inattentional blindness. Intentional blindness is also a form of closed-mindedness, right? You have limited amount of attention to devote to anything.

And you're not going to devote some of that attention to Joshua Bell. You're going to devote it towards survival and getting to work. I think that's another facet of course. closed-minded this that we didn't mention. There's also, like the hot hand, there's also this idea that Joshua Bell was not up on stage. He was not recognized or known in the subway. He was just another guy. He was just another busker playing the violin with his case open, looking for a few dollars. And so the context wasn't there. People didn't recognize him. People have this preconception, like the hot hand. You think that LeBron James gets on a hot streak.

But in reality, he doesn't. It's true here, too. You have this preconception that Joshua Bell, the most famous or one of the most famous violinists in the world, doesn't play in the metro station in the morning for money. He's rich. He owns an $8 million violin. He doesn't need to play in the metro. What would he be doing there?

If I knew who that was and I had the right context and I knew that this was an exceptional violinist, then I'd probably be more likely to stop. Theories and preconceptions about people create biases. terms of what we're willing to pay attention to and what we're willing to listen to. So people aren't stopping because they don't have the attention and because they're closed. They're closed to the notion that Joshua Bell could be playing in the subway at seven in the morning or six in the morning because that's not consistent with my mental map. I think there's some great lessons from the Joshua Bell experiment.

Since Joshua Bell descended into the metro station in 2007, I've often thought a lot about this experiment in its meaning. And one of the analogies I like to make now is that Joshua Bell playing the violin in the subway was a lot like the Sirens in the Odyssey that were singing to Odysseus. And stay with me because this is going to be. We're with you. Even for me, we're going to dig deep here a little bit. So hang in there. The sirens sing a song to wayward travelers that essentially was a recognition. of all their pain and all their suffering, and it was a recognition of all the meaning

that they had found in their lives. In other words, the siren song is a moment of perfect transcendence. It's a moment of wholeness. It's a moment of completion. It's the moment that we all seek. It's that moment of perfection, right? And the reason why nobody survives when they listen to the sirens sing their songs

is because all of us are drawn, to those moments of transcendence. We can't resist them. And so that's why Odysseus gets tied to the mast. Odysseus gets tied to the mast because he too, like all the previous people that have listened to the siren songs, would navigate his ship to the shore,

and he too would die like everyone else had heard the siren song. But Odysseus, being the curious person he is and the open person he is, he knows this. So he takes precautions, he ties himself to the mast, and he does something that no other, human being has ever done, he listens to the siren song of absolute beautiful transcendence,

and he survives it because he's tied to the mast. And his crew have their ears plugged with wax, so they don't hear the song that's not compelling to them. But here's the part, here's the part, I think, that gets really interesting with the sirens. And that is, Odysseus makes a choice to hear the siren song, knowing that this moment of perfect wholeness and transcendence. is something he can never experience again. The lesson to me, and few people talk about this, but this is what I've thought about over the years, the lesson to me is, think about that.

He's experienced this perfect moment. He will never have that again, ever, with another human being. The takeaway from that, to me, is that Odysseus will now live his life with a profound longing. Odysseus understands that to be human means that we're torn, that there's no such thing as perfect transcendence all the time. We're torn. We're ripped apart.

We long for those profound moments of transcendence. And yes, there are moments of beauty. We have moments of it, but it's not enduring. The lesson is Odysseus has to come to terms of the fact that he's human, that to be human means that we're torn, but he's also experienced this tremendous profound moment of transcendence. Let's go back to Joshua Bell. Joshua Bell in the subway.

is playing this Stradivarius. It's otherworldly. It's beautiful. I think for the commuters to stop and take a few moments to listen to Joshua Bell means at some level to recognize a moment of transcendence.

To recognize that moment and then to move on to the rest of your day, to go to work and to create some purchase orders and be bossed around by some crazy boss lacks any type of perfection or wholeness. other words, I think the people didn't stop because if they would have stopped and experienced that moment, it means that they would have spent the rest of the day or maybe weeks in complete disappointment. They would have spent the rest of the day disappointed. They would have experienced

that moment, and I think there would have been a profound longing for something else. I think it would have brought home the fact that we human beings are imperfect and that were torn, and then in some ways these perfect moments of transcendence are a reminder of that. So I think my take on this is a little different in the sense that that Joshua Bell moment is a moment we yearn for, but in some sense we also avoid it. One of the most interesting parts of the Joshua Bell experiment to me was the fact that of the seven people that stopped to listen to him, one of them was a three-year-old. And as a father of the soon-to-be three-year-old who wants or has talked about of

violin cake and or a centipede cake. Or a trumpet cake or a scorpion cake. Right. The Joshua Bell experiment has really taken on some new meaning for me because I knew there was a three-year-old that stopped. And the three-year-old, you know, you can see it in the video. The three-year-old, he stops with his dad. He's just amazed and transfixed by Joshua Bell and the violin.

He obviously doesn't understand it, but he understand that there's something profound happening, something beautiful. And the three-old, without preconceptions, the three-year-old doesn't care who that is. He just cares that this is something beautiful. The three-year-old wants to hear that. And I feel like that's the lesson is if we operate in the world without preconceptions about the New Jerusalem or pendulum divination, if we look for these moments of transcendence, like a three-year-old, in Buddhism, there's a phrase about operating with beginner's mind or child's mind. And I feel like that three-year-old watching Joshua Bell is the perfect embodiment of approaching the world without preconception, approaching the world as if the sirens are singing all the time, as if each moment is a

transcendent moment, as if we can find some measure of wholeness in the moment without having to worry about getting yelled at by our boss or going to work or whether we're going to be late for work. Those things in the grand scheme of things don't matter that much. I think the idea of just stopping and taking the time, even if it's a few seconds, to listen to Joshua Bell, and even though we're going to have a lot of disappointment and a lot of longing, because we can't find those moments all the time,

I think it's so important to try to find those moments and experience those moments, like a child, like our son, like our three-year-old. And I love that that a three-year-old stopped. What's the lesson in terms of crime? What's the lesson from Joshua Bell and these moments of transcendence in terms of Chad Daybell? I think the lesson to me is because Chad Debel was so close-minded and so shut down and his mental map was so rigid.

The lesson to me is Chad Debel tried to create those moments of transcendence that would be enduring. He tried to control those moments of transcendence. He wanted credit for those moments of transcendence. In other words, Chad Debel was trying to do something that was impossible to do. Joshua Bell and the Sirens teach us, we can only have moments of transcendence. perfection without being reminded of our humanness. And what Chad Dayball tried to do was to make that enduring. He wanted transcendence that would occur every single moment of every single day,

and he wanted to be acknowledged for it, and he wanted to control it. He wanted the immortality of creating this new Jerusalem that would be like having Joshua Bell on repeat all the time. He wanted to create this new Jerusalem where the transcendence would be the defining feature of our existence rather than our limitations. I think this actually brings me full circle to our first podcast about our denial of being human that I think hopefully some of you can see that close-mindedness and a denial of being human have some relationship. The more rigid and closed we are to information, there's some hyper-mindedness. There's some high probability that we're also going to shut down to the fact that we have limitations and that we're human and that that permeates our lives. Something about close-mindedness that you mentioned too is it's about control.

People who are closed want control in the world. They want to know what's going to happen when it's going to happen and why it's going to happen. It reminded me of a quote that I love. And so I just looked it up. It's by George Saunders, who I also love because he reminds me of you, his writing. He's a Princeton graduate, just like you. But he says about being open-minded, don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused.

Anything is possible. Stay open forever. So open it hurts. And then open up some more until the day you die. World without end. Amen. Yeah, I love that. You know, I've ended the last couple of podcasts with an aspiration for our listeners.

And I think if I had an aspiration for today, it would be to open your heart. heart as much as possible and to approach the world with a child's mind. Well sad. Just like our child, who, by the way, will be turning three the day before the world ends. Right. So we want to have some kind of a massive end of the world, pre-apocalyptic blowout bash for her child with, of course, either a centipede cake or a violin cake or a digger cake. We're still deciding.

Or just a creepy crawler bug cake. If you guys happen to be passing by and you have nothing to do. do the day before the world ends, drop by and grab a piece of cake because we really want to do something special knowing that we have 24 hours left on the planet. Knowing that, we will undoubtedly keep a seat open for you. Always. And please share with your friends that we have a seat open for them as well because we want to be able to keep sharing, keep doing these podcasts, and it means so much to hear you listening and letting us know what you think. Until next week. Stay open. Stay open. And good night. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding group A.

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