Hidden True Crime - What Lori Daybell Reveals Without Realizing—Psychologist Reacts | Nate Eaton Interview

Episode Date: July 5, 2025

Lori Daybell speaks yet again—and Dr. John is breaking down every moment. In this episode, we dive into Lori’s jailhouse interview with East Idaho News’ Nate Eaton and uncover the disturbing psychological patterns behind her words, tone, and body language. What does Lori reveal without realizing it? A lot.. About Hidden True Crime: What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a criminal psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Nate Eaton did the interview, reporter Nate Eaton. And for those new to hidden true crime, I am a journalist. Dr. John is a criminal psychologist. And I hope that you can help us break down what we saw this week when it comes to Lori. She was, all I noticed is she was kind of an angry elf. But what are your thoughts? Yeah. So this is the, by my count, this is the fifth interview that she's done.

And so I think it's fair to say that this is the same person we've been talking about and seen for years. Nothing's really changed here. I do think there were some similarities here with the interview that Keith Morrison did in the sense that she was very combative with. Keith. I think she was somewhat combative here with Nate. What's interesting too is that, you know, with Keith, one of the things she said to Keith Morrison a few times was Keith, I thought we were friends. Keith, right? She kept bringing up the friendship thing. And you see a version of that here, by the way, with Nate Eaton. And that is, you know, she starts the interview. And one of the things she says is, well, you're LDS.

Right. The implication being that you have the same belief system as I do. So this is going to take us right into this idea of manipulation. You know, she's trying to disempower him right from the start by saying, well, you're LDS. And she does this repeatedly throughout the interview, by the way. So she says, she also says at one point, something to the effect of, I'm going to get the exact quote here wrong, but she says something the effect of, these are the last days.

You believe that, right, Nate? You believe that. And it's clear here that Nate and Lori had been talking for some time. I don't know how long, but there's definitely been some communication. So it seems to me that statement, maybe that observation by Lori

comes out of some communication they've had. But, you know, she really throws it out there that Nate, he doesn't really respond, but that Nate somehow agrees that these are the last days. Somehow, I don't know if they talked about that or, but again, the goal is the same. The goal is that if you believe what I believe, then you can't really challenge me. The goal here is to really disempower Nate and to kind of put him on the defensive and, you know, to get him to agree with her.

And so, by the way, which was one of her goals with Keith Morrison, that she, she kept saying, come on, Keith, like, you don't see this? Like, it's the same dynamic. She really wants to sell these people, Keith and Nate in particular. She really, Brianna to some degree, she really wants to sell them on her worldview. And she wants to draw them into this belief system and she wants some agreement. So ultimately what she wants is validation. During the interview, she says, she calls Nate Judas. And she says, she doesn't quite say that he's Judas, but she said, something like,

I almost thought you were Judas. And again, the implication is that if he doesn't agree, Nate being LDS, according to Lori, that if he doesn't agree precisely with her belief system, then he's somehow betraying her, right? It's all the same, it's all the same dynamic. She does a version of this with Keith Morrison too, as I said, that kind of the friendship thing.

Come on, Keith. She said, come on, come on, Keith. I thought I knew you. We're friends, Keith. Like, I thought I knew you. what are you doing? Of course you should agree with me. You're just not looking at the evidence, Keith. It's the same dynamic, except clearly with Nate,

I think there's been more communication. There's been more interaction. And so I think she feels like by challenging Nate on the LDS component and challenging him on the last days and kind of saying, you know, I know you agree with me here, Nate, she's really disempowering him. She's trying to disarm him and to get him not to be confrontational. And, of course, that didn't work.

He was plenty confrontational. But I think that's the strategy. If we think of Lori, and we talked about this a lot over the years of someone who's manipulative, you see that element in play here. And you see it right from the start with this whole idea of, well, you're LDS, right? And the underlying message she's sending there is you can't disagree with me. Okay. going to be on, we're going to be on the same page here.

And then if he does disagree, then he's a Judas, which she says later. So it's interesting to look at those little subtleties that might be easy to miss and kind of to see how those fit in this interview and how they fit with kind of the perception of her and her worldview and her desire to really, manipulate and to try to get Keith and Nate to kind of sway them to move to her beliefs or her side so that she feels better. She feels validated. Interesting. What about when she sort of flirts with him too and he walks in and she says, how old do you think I look? And he said 52. And you know, she said, oh, you do your research and And then, you know, she said, everybody thinks I like 25. I mean, what was that about?

Was that her flattering herself? I think it's the same dynamic. Okay. It's kind of trying to set the tone for the interview when, you know, again, she's trying to make this easier for herself. She's trying to, what she doesn't want necessarily, and you saw this with Keith, we saw this with Keith quite a bit, is this whole confrontational approach to the interview.

You know, Keith was, Keith seemed really put off. There's a lot, you know, there's a lot of the Keith Morrison interview that wasn't shown. Much of it wasn't shown. But, you know, we know from talking to Keith that it was very difficult and abrasive. And he just wasn't going to, you know,

he wasn't going to accept her belief system. And I think, I think Nate also comes in here wanting to kind of challenge her and ask some questions that have been on people's minds for a long time. So her strategy doesn't really seem to work, although, you know, her answers, I think, are pretty predictable. I mean, this is someone, we know what she's going to say. Right. You know, when Nate says, did you kill Joe Ryan?

I mean, she's not going to be like, oh, yeah, of course I did. Yeah, let's go to trial on that one too, right? Right. Clearly, you got me. You got me. Yeah, you got me. I'm over. Like, let's do one more of these.

You know, those types of questions are obviously kind of a dead end. You know, I think, I think Keith, actually, Keith kind of said it best when we talked Keith about it and when he said that interviewing hers a fool's errand right like you can't win like whatever you say or do she's going to maintain her delusion

she's going to maintain her belief system and there's really you're not going to change her perspective so with a lot of these interviews including Brianna I think of all the interviews I think Colby was probably the one interviewer who

who was a little softer, and I think Colby really listened. He tried to listen to his mother, and he tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. And as you and I know, he was quite emotional. And I think Colby wanted to be confrontational. I just don't feel like he thought it would get him very far. Right. He was just trying to listen and get answers. He was just trying to listen.

And, you know, that's basically in these types of interviews. So, you know, as you know, you've dropped me off at many jails in prisons over the years, you know, that I talk about in interviews that there's really a few approaches you can take. One is to really just listen and try to join the person's world, kind of try to enter that person's worldview and kind of maneuver around in that worldview and really try to understand them. And then, you know, for me to write report that approaches, the person from from their perspective. And the other approach is just to, if somebody's in denial or denying something very

seriously and I'm not getting any information or someone isn't getting much information to the other is just to confront them and to say, I don't believe you. You know, you're lying. This is not what the evidence says. Clearly you committed these offenses, right? And somehow to kind of try to break through defense mechanisms that way, although I've learned over the years, my approach tends to be the first approach that I tend to get more miles, more mileage from just not disagreeing and kind of trying to enter their world. And by the way,

when I do that, if you can really enter someone's world and their perspective and you can have a little empathy for them, I think you can then maneuver within that space, within that world to to confront them. You know, you do it, you do it in a subtle way, but once you kind of understand that world, then you want to kind of, you kind of want to push some of the edges and you kind of want, right, you, so, so that's kind of my approach typically. It's, it's not to just hammer someone, someone over the head with, with questions that I'm pretty clear. They're not going to answer, you know, if I, if I say to a sex offender, for example, I know you did this, I don't believe you, and they're in denial, it's just, all it's going to do is push them away.

So what do you do then? Just, I guess, empathy is what you just said. How do you give them empathy? By, as I said, just I try to, you know, I get into their childhood. I try to understand them as much as possible and try to see how they could have done what they did. And then within that framework, to find some areas where I might be able to get some information that they typically wouldn't give me or that they might, you know, that might allow them to relax their defenses a little bit. You know, the difference between what I do and what Nate Eaton and Keith Morrison are doing here or Brianna is I have hours to do that. So, you know, I have time on my side. I can, I can take five, six hours if necessary. I can come back another day if necessary, right? I can, I can, I can,

really tried to enter somebody's psyche more fully. And I don't have to rush. I don't have to, you know, I don't have a time limit. So, I mean, I do ultimately, but, but I have more time. I'm not given 30 minutes, which is really a really difficult task. And so I think, as Keith told us, you know, they had 20 minutes. Right. 20 minutes is barely enough to even warm up. So for me, 20 minutes. I definitely think that was the pressure that Nate was feeling too. Yeah. Agreed.

It's hard. And Brianna, too. You know, Brianna talked to us about it, that, you know, she, it's when you have a limited amount of time and you want to know and ask a lot of questions, you know, you really have to pick your battles and really kind of be strategic. And so I think all the people that have interviewed her have kind of been up against it. And it's been a challenge for all of them. And I think all of them did a good job, given what they had and given the time constraints.

And they all help this understand Lori a little better. I agree. I agree. Have you been looking for a natural way to relieve aches and discomfort? The CBD gummies from cornbread hemp are formulated to work with your body, not against it. I struggle with migraines and have been using CBD as a way to help naturally treat them on days they are really bad. Cornbread hemp's organic CBD Gummies are made to help you feel better

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angry with Nate. Was that just essentially she has nothing to lose? So she's laying it all out there. I don't know if I'd use the term sweet with Brianna. I think she was I think Brianna was more confrontational the second time. I think the first time she was a little softer. So I think they were all, except for Colby, I think they were all fairly confrontational to some degree.

I think with Nate, I think she, you know, by kind of trying to draw him into the LDS world and the LDS comment at the beginning, I think her expectation was that he would not be confrontational. And then when he comes out of the blocks in a confrontational manner, her and she's not getting the questions she wants or expects, then I think she's becoming angry because you've got a clash of expectations. You've got, right, you've got, on the one hand, you have Nate,

and this would apply to Keith and Brianna as well. You have these interviewers that want the truth. They want, right, they've got evidence. And their goal is to really hopefully break through her defenses. with this evidence and they want to arrive at some conclusion that nobody's arrived at, which is to get her to kind of tell the truth about what happened, right? But then, so that's their expectation. And then the expectation of Lori is that they'll believe her.

So her expectation is that nobody understands her, right, that miracles are on their way. She kept saying that. You know, you've got this expectation that you have someone in the, this delusional world who wants you to enter that world and to inhabit that world and to believe her. And so that that's what's going on. With all of these interviews, you have this clash of expectations and you have this clash of worldviews and you have this clash of beliefs, right? And evidence. You know, what is, what does evidence mean? So you've got, you have different interpretations of the same facts, wildly different interpretations.

and we'll talk about that in a little bit as to why that's true. At the end of this interview, one of the first things I thought, this is what I would call anachronistic. So anachronistic, when I say that something is anachronistic, or this is like an anachronism, I mean essentially the idea that you have someone basically out of place and out of time. You have someone with a belief system that doesn't pertain to the world today. So I think the more I see Loring action, the more I realize that this is someone who would be quite content living 2,500 years ago.

And in many ways, that's the anachronism. She thinks she is still, that that world still exists today. Interesting. So apparently when she turns on a car, when she, when she, you know, when she, when she, when she drives her car, turns on her microwave, I guess she thinks that a bunch of invisible spirits. spirits are driving the car, you know, that they're responsible for the motor and they're responsible for the microwave, right? Like, that's anachronistic. Okay.

The reason the world is the same today as it was 2000 years ago is because a lot of changes have happened in 2000 years. We have microwaves now, and we didn't 2,000 years ago because of science. Right. And we know that we can operate a microwave and fix it because it's not being driven by spirits. Right. But in Lori's worldview, and by the world, we'll get into this a little more, because I'm going to talk a little bit about madness. When I summarize a lot of what's going on with Lori, I think we're going to talk about what I would call madness, which today, I guess the other term for that would be insanity, although I'm a little hesitant to use that because insanity is a legal term, whereas madness is more of a broader term to talk about unreason, what's called.

it unreason. So you have you have someone who who thinks they're living, you know, 2,500 years ago. Yeah. Even though even though they're experiencing all the modern conveniences that most of us are accustomed to like refrigerators and microwaves and cars, which which we have because of technology and computers and cell phones, right? Like, it, it, her belief isn't consistent with those elements of her world. Right. Okay. Right.

So, and we'll talk, I want to talk about that more towards the end in terms of when I kind of summarize this idea of madness and how it applies to Lori. And how it applies in general, I think, in civilization and how that's relevant. I'll get back into this. But before I do that, you know, there's a few. I don't want to get into the too much, too many of the details. I want to kind of zoom out a little bit in terms of interpreting this interview. Okay.

But, you know, there's just some of the questions and the answers are clearly, there's, not only they do not fit the evidence, but there's something, if we're talking about, so historically the definition of madness would be something like unreason, that a human being that's not reasonable, a human being that doesn't have the capacity to reason enough or to think well enough to fit into society and to be a part of the community, right? That no matter what evidence you present to this person,

they can't reason enough to make sense of it. Right. That's Lori. That's Lori, right. And so you have, with all of these interviews, you have kind of this clash between reason and unreasoned. And, you know, there's a sociologist by the name of Andrew Skull. Skull is spelled S-C-U-L-L who's done tremendous research on the history of madness. And I'll talk a little bit more about some of his work later, but kind of how we see madness through the different periods of human history. And it's really fascinating.

But one of the commonalities is this idea of unreason. And, you know, you and I have talked about this a lot, that when it comes to like personality disorders, for example, one of the telltale clues about whether you're dealing with someone with the personality disorder is whether you can reason with them. Okay. Right. Someone with the personality disorder is unreasonable no matter what. They're unwilling to budge from their perspective and their worldview.

They're unwilling to look at evidence. They're unreasonable. And so in that sense, like someone with a personality disorder would kind of fit this idea of madness in many ways. Because there's no reasoning with someone who's completely unreasonable, right? There's no reasoning with someone who's mad. Right. And I think one of the common patterns we see in all these interviews is this idea of Keith Morrison and Nate Eaton, and Brianna all trying to reason with someone who is not reasonable and is incapable of reasoning

and assessing evidence, right? And so that kind of leads back to this idea of, and again, I don't want to use the term insanity, but it leads back to this idea of that this is not normal, that this is madness in some sense, in the sense that it's completely irrational and unreasonable. And again, but if you think about it from Lori's perspective and you go back to this idea of anachronistic or anachronism, to her it's perfectly reasonable. Because she's living in a time and an error and she's thinking in a time and error when 2,000 years ago, when this would have made perfect sense. Okay. Right. And so, and that's part of this, I think. That's a big part of this is it's, it's, if you, if she could time travel and go back 2,000 years, you know, we know that, right, she, Chad and Lori believe that they walked with Jesus and some of their past lives, right? So the problem is that we're not living 2,000 years ago now. Right. And some of those beliefs, some of those.

beliefs and elements of what would have been true that aren't as true now. And a perfect example of that is visions. Yeah, that's true. She is very certain of her visions. The visions, right. And so, you know, again, 25, I mean, and if we're, if we go back to the Old Testament, so much of the Old Testament has its foundations in these very types of things. It has these foundations and visions, right? And prophets, prophets had visions and they talk to God and right. And that made perfect sense back then. Moses and the Ten Commandments, right? He, he, he has this vision of God. I mean, to him. Someone would say that he can encounters God. And then he gets, the God gives him the Ten Commandments, which kind of set the law for that time. But again,

things have changed over the years, right? We don't think. of visions the same way. We think of visions differently today. We think of visions as more like dreamlike states or daydreams or right imagination. Not these literal, literal. Not these literal messages from God. And so it's a very different, again, you're you're taking this idea from thousands of years ago, 2000 years, and you're changing the context. Yes. The context is changing, completely, but not for them, not for Chad, not for Lori. The context, nothing ever changed. So you can, you can have the, in the history of human beings, you can have the Renaissance, and then you can have the Enlightenment, then you could have the industrial evolution,

like you can have all of these advances in terms of thinking and technology and science. And apparently, Lori just thinks that none of that happened, right? That, like, even though we're adding things like cars, like, you know, we go from horses to cars and we have micro, we're in iPhones. None of that matters to her. None of that affects her world. Yeah. Yeah.

Nothing. Nothing. Right. Nothing. Right. And so I think that's, looking at the bigger picture, I think that's, that was one of my first takeaways here. This felt very, I had a better sense of this.

this anachronistic perspective that Laurie has and how clear that is. There's another thing. So I'll talk about some of the most interesting elements of the interview that I found. Yeah. I think the most interesting part of the interview was this idea of this movie that Lori brings up, Evan Almighty. Yeah, yeah. And what it's doubly fascinating. There's a lot of reasons why, by the way.

But what was really interesting to me is that she apparently wrote before this interview, she wrote Nate and said, you've got to watch this movie because this will explain everything. So she's giving Nate this homework assignment of what. And apparently, I think maybe I watched some of this movie years ago. I don't remember when it came out. I remember watching some of it. And I thought it was like so, I like Steve Correll. I like the actors.

I like Morgan Freeman. I'm like, let's give this a shot. I think I lasted maybe 30 minutes. I'm like, this is so stupid. It's not a great one. And it's a comedy,

right? It's, you know, I don't know, maybe it had some moments. I mean, I don't, it wasn't for me.

We're hurting all of the, all of the Bruce Almighty fans right now. Oh, well, this is, this isn't Bruce Almighty. This is Evan Almighty. No,

Evan. I thought that didn't sound right. I was like, why was I think in Bruce? I think Bruce was the first one. I don't know. I think there's two of these. I think this is the second one. Anyway, she gives Nate this assignment and she says, basically,

look, you need to watch this thing. And when you watch it, you'll understand it. It all makes sense. And then she talks about, she brings it up repeatedly, or at least a few times. And the second time she brings it up, she says, do you remember the scene? And I didn't watch it first.

to do, I couldn't force myself to watch it before doing this. So you'll have to forgive me on that. But, um, we forgive you. And maybe, you know, maybe I should give it another chance. Maybe, maybe I'm being too harsh here. But apparently there's a scene where this reporter is skeptical of the flood. You know, so it's, it's an reenactment of the flood and Noah's Ark, right? And this, this guy, Evan is, I believe, a politician and he starts building an arc and he starts collecting animals and everybody thinks he's crazy and then the flood happens and he's proven to be correct right and kind of the theme of the movie is that we need to surrender to god and this larger purpose and trust in god right and so obviously that's a big theme from this interview that's one of lorry's biggest themes

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Absolutely. This is true of Twilight. We know from talking to Colby that she's obsessed or was obsessed with Twilight. We know that Chad talked about Marvel characters all the time. They talked about like portals from Marvel movies. I mean, I don't know what. you know, it's so absurd. Yeah, it is.

At some level to treat a movie and then to tell me, Nate, basically, you're like the reporter that, you know, is going to see the light when the flood happens and the truth is revealed, right? This is fiction, Lori. No. This is like, this is not, this is meant to be entertainment. This is not meant to teach life lessons. I mean, there might be some life lessons here, but, but that's really not.

It's not scripture. This is a rotten tomatoes review of whatever. It's a screenplay. Yeah. Which, by the way, Lori says in the interview, this is an interesting moment. When you talk about scripture, she says that she tells Nate that the Lord told her in 2017 that she would be like Job. And so she's been right, everything that's been going on. She's writing a book. She's been writing it all down. She says, quote, I've been writing it all down for posterity.

She says, quote, this will be real good scripture reading in the future. Think about that. She sees everything that's happening here. She sees as scripture. Wow. You and I, years ago, we hypothesized that everything Chab was writing, he sees as scripture. Now she sees, now she sees her writing surrounding all these murders and all this tragedy. she sees this as inevitably a part of scripture in the future.

You're right. Wow. But she can't distinguish, again, she can't distinguish fact from fiction in the sense that she doesn't understand how this movie of an Almighty is a comedy. It's not only fiction. It's like it's meant to be funny. It's not meant to be a serious look at how human, beings function in the world. It's not even a drama. It's a comedy. Not even a drama, right.

It's not even a drama. And I've talked about this before, but this brings me back to this idea of what psychologists sometimes call fantasy-proneness. And fantasy-proneness is, it applies to people. It's the idea that some people really, that they become more immersed in fantasy and the imagination than a typical person. But it's also related to this notion that some people struggle to separate fact from fiction. And back in 1981, there were a couple of psychologists

named Wilson and Barber who came up with this thing they called the FPP or the fantasy-prone personality. And I remember, you know, in graduate's we talked about this a little bit. It never really got any traction in terms of finding its way into like the DSM or, you know, it was something that was researched a little bit, but the research isn't clear cut. But their hypothesis or one of their hypotheses was that a fantasy-prone personality person is really more prone to hallucinations, and they're more prone to maybe even schizophrenia,

or maybe some of the dissociative disorders. In fact, current research is more consistent with the idea that people that are fantasy prone tend to move in the direction of dissociative symptoms. And maybe in some extremes they move in the direction of dissociative disorders. So like multiple personality disorder or DID dissociative identity disorder would be something in that arena. Depersonalization would be in that arena. But dissociative symptoms are different than the disorders in the sense that disassociative symptoms essentially mean that we detach from reality to some degree.

Okay. And I think we see that a lot with Lori. So this idea of fantasy-proneness is interesting here because, you know, the other issue with fantasy-prone individuals, people that, and clearly Lori seems to, at this category is they have trouble. There's something called source monitoring or source memory, which is that when we experience an event, typically we know, like, we'll have, our memories are all imperfect,

but when we experience an event, we'll encode it in a certain way with certain details and certain contexts that help us remember and it makes sense of it. And there's certain details that allow us to know that that event happened. And there's certain, there's certain salient features of certain events that allow us to know not only that it happened, but it's real. And fantasy prone individuals tend to struggle more, or some research suggests, not all, some suggests that fantasy prone people, they tend to struggle more with source memories and source monitoring, which makes sense, right? because if you can't, if Lori doesn't understand the source of some of her memories and experiences,

or maybe not even Lori, just someone in general, then they're going to have a much more difficult time. Remember, you know, kind of trying to tease out what's real and what's not. Right. Okay. Was that something? Was that a movie? Like, for example, you might ask, if you struggle with kind of source memories, you might say, well, was that movie something? Was that real or was that something I experienced? Interesting.

And there's even some research associating kind of source monitoring or source memory issues with thought disorder such as schizophrenia, maybe delusions too, right? So Lori's kind of moving into this terrain and I think one of the most interesting elements

of this interview was this idea that that Lori sees this movie as being true and sees it as being instructive enough that she's asking Nate to watch it so that she can then give him a life lesson about when they, you know, if you saw that movie someday you're going to understand that the reporter who was apparently floating down the river during the flood

who had an epithinal moment and understood that Evan, I guess, that Evan was right, that he needed to trust God, or, you know, that the reporter apparently needed to trust God more and to believe that the flood was coming, right? And so there's this idea of surrendering to God. Yeah. And so I think that tells us a lot. Like, just that alone, which if you look at this interview and you're just looking for actual content at what it means, I think it's very easy to overlook the importance of this movie and how it really helps us understand Lori even more.

It's a simple reference she's making, but it's loaded with connotations in terms of understanding her. And it ties us back to some of the stuff that Colby talked about, Twilight, and all these fictional books that they've read and how Chad's fiction could now be seen as scripture. right, that Lori love Chad's work. She loved Julie Rose work. And you have this real blurring with Lori and Chad, I think too, to some degree, between fiction and fact.

And so that was a very important moment to me, that this Evan Almighty reference. And even though it was kind of a small part of this interview, I think it really provides. a lot of insight into who she is. That's interesting. Yeah, I can see that. That actually helped me make a lot of sense into her. Let's talk about another pivotal moment in this interview. Okay.

That I think, that I think, again, can really help us understand Lori even more. And that is, towards the end, Nate asks her, if she has any remorse. Yeah, he does. Any regrets? Any regrets? Okay, right. Well, he says regrets and she kind of, I think she kind of, she doesn't really give him a good answer.

And then he says, I think he clarifies and says something like, did you experience any remorse for what you did? And here's what she says. And again, I'm not going to get this exactly right, but this is the gist of what she says. says, none of the people you mentioned were victims. So the people he mentioned were Brandon, Tammy Daybell, right? Tiley, Jane, Jay, right, just about all the people murdered.

Right. None of the people you mentioned were victims. This is one of the best lines in the whole interview. She says, quote, the judicial system plays up the victim thing pretty big. The judicial system plays up the victim thing pretty big. Wow. Yeah.

Think about that for a minute. So you and I have talked a lot about this idea of criminals lacking empathy and lacking remorse, right? And what that means, it typically for a lot of criminals, and I'm not talking about Lori here, but for a lot of criminals, you can contextualize the lack of empathy and lack of the remorse within the larger picture of, say, antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. And I'm not saying that's true with Lori.

I'm just saying in general, lack of empathy and lack of remorse is consistent with criminality in the sense that criminals don't really, they can't really understand what victims experience. they can't understand how their crimes have repercussions and how they have immense impact. And I think you're seeing that here with Lori. Except, and this is really important. When I thought about this, it started making more sense, right? And I'll explain this in a second. This isn't really, her answer to that question isn't really about remorse.

What it's really about is you've got to look at this large, story, this larger narrative, how she sees the world. You have to step back. Again, I started with this idea of anachronism. We're going to come back to it now. That if you see, from Lori's perspective, if you see the world as apocalyptic, if you see your larger mission as being the goddess of the New Jerusalem, then of course you're not going to have remorse. Of course you're not going to see victims because you're going to see them in the context of the larger story that's determined by God that's fatalistic, right? This story is already written, according to Lori. And now, here's some quotes, by the way, that shows this is how she thinks.

Lori says during this interview, quote, I was foreordained to do this. We're all instruments in the Lord's hands. We need to separate the wheat from the tars. So just to clarify that reference, by the way, it's from Matthew in the New Testament. Separating the wheat from the tars, tar's is spelled T-A-R-E-S.

I've always said wheat and tears. Yeah, I've always said wheat and tears. Tears. Yeah, sorry, tears. It's not a, again, it's anachronistic word. It's not a word. We use, but people that know the Bible would know tears. And tears are weeds.

So when wheat is growing, I had to look this up. I didn't know what a tear was until yesterday. When wheat is growing, apparently, you can't tell the healthy wheat from the weeds. And it takes time. So over time, apparently, you can start to distinguish, over a fair amount of time, you can start distinguishing, you can separate the wheat from the tears. And that's exactly what she's talking about here, is that what she's saying to us is you guys don't know

that the wheat has not been separated from the tears yet. And that she's the wheat, Chad, like all the 144,000, they're the wheat. And the rest of us are the tears, and we're going to be eliminated eventually. but it's going to happen slowly and it's going to happen as she put it in the Lord's time. And so you have this idea that all of this is predetermined. To use her term, it's for ordained. And this is important. This is really important because if you want to understand why she doesn't see victims here,

it's because she sees this story as already having been written. And she knows how the story is going to end. It's going to end with her and Chad, and the second coming happening fairly quickly, presumably, because she says, she tells Nate, you know, this is one of the things she tries to draw on Nate with. These are the last days. You believe that. So she sees the last days as coming quickly.

She talks about the idea that miracles are on the way. This is all related. If you want to know whether Lori believes this, I think it's so clear she believes this. There's no question she believes this. believes this. Yeah, I agree with you. She does believe this. And so although it may seem outrageous for her to say that none of these people were victims and that the judicial system plays up the victim thing pretty big, what she means is there's no victims because this has already been determined. And they have their role. The people that she murdered, they played their role,

whether they were sacrificed. I know it. Because they were evil spirits and, right? And God told them that they had to eliminate them. I mean, you know, that's probably part of the story. Yeah. To her, the story's written. Yeah.

And so I think it might be shocking to some people to say, well, this is someone who lacks remorse. And yes, she does. But she lacks remorse because she doesn't. see, she doesn't see how, how those actions, how those murders had a real impact on real people in the real world today. Now, then, in this world, she doesn't live in this world. No, she lives in a, she lives in a fantasy world that is, in her mind's eye, happening soon, but a fantasy world that's been preordained and therefore a world, in her world,

there's no victims because all of that was meant to be. Right. And I think that's really important. Before I switched to wealth front, my APY was probably zero point one. Like, it was a joke. I was literally getting pennies. Once I switched, chiching. With a wealthfront cash account,

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When you put all these interviews together, I think for me, I come to the obvious conclusion that she not only believes all this, But she believes it to the extent that she has no remorse for all of these murders because they're part of the story that she thinks is unfolding right now that meant that these murders had to happen to get where she needs to be. Yeah. And so when she says things like, here's, I'm just going to read some other things she said. Nate says, and again, I'm taking this, I'm not going to get this exactly right, but. But he says something in effect, it sounds crazy what you're saying. And she says, quote, the narrative has trained the people. Quote, they've been so indoctrinated by the media and their narrative.

And I think what she means, when you step back and think about this, so she's not saying, what she's saying is that she's not, she is, she is disagreeing with the evidence, obviously. But I think when you really consider this, what she's saying is that you people don't understand, again, you people don't understand the larger story that's being told here, which is the story of God and the second coming and the apocalypse and Chad and Lori going to the New Jerusalem. Yep. In getting their rightful due and the rightful place in the New Jerusalem. And that the narrative you guys are telling is just a narrative with,

victims and court systems and evidence. But none of that really has anything to do with the God that they worship and believe in. Because that God doesn't see this as being a big deal in the context of the apocalypse. So when she says that, I mean, yeah, when she disregards all this evidence, it does sound pretty crazy. But not when you see it from the much larger perspective. The media has been indoctrinated, according to her, and this narrative of her being a murderer, gets it all wrong because it doesn't look at that larger apocalyptic vision. It only looks at a world with microwaves and cars and, right, like, again, getting back to this idea of anachronism.

The world she lives in isn't our world. Correct. So that's what she's saying. She says she has another quote I love. This is one of my favorite quotes. She says, Nate says something like, well, a bunch of juries have convicted you guys. I guess he means Chad and Lori. He says four juries have convicted. Lori says the only evidence the state had was the state's evidence. They only showed you what they wanted to show. This is the quote.

Quote, there were facts wrapped around a whole lot of untruth. there were facts. Facts wrapped around a whole lot of untruth. That is pretty good. Yeah. Facts wrapped around a whole lot of untruths. Yeah. I mean, again, like, if you situate facts in the context of a world without microwaves and iPhones,

you know, it's a very different interpret. And that's the world she sees. And so I think all of this seems really crazy and it doesn't make any sense until you start putting the pieces together and situating all of this from her perspective. Yeah. Right. I agree. And so her perspective is one that's, it's hard to understand, obviously. But I think when you start looking at all these interviews and putting the pieces together,

I think this is where it kind of leads me anyway. Thank you. Yeah. That makes sense. I agree with you. Yeah. Wild. All the while she's helping the women in prison because that's her, you know, she was sent to be there with them.

God needed her, the self-importance through the roof. Right. And towards the end of the interview, she says something that effect. She talks about helping the women in prison that have undergone a lot of family tragedies. So family tragedies to her don't have anything to do with evidence and murdering people. It has to do with the fact that these people are misunderstood. Right.

which was interesting, like, that every person she's helping behind bars has to have just had a family tragedy. Right. Like what if they didn't? What if they were guilty of a crime? Would she still help them? You know, why do they have to have a family tragedy? Well, she answers the question. She says that a lot of these women are going to be convicted of family tragedies, which translation means murder, basically.

Quote, until Jesus comes. and he will set everyone free. So apparently she sees a lot of these women and these presumably murderers, they're on death row, many of them according to her, as, you know, victims. Yeah. And that somehow Jesus will come in and save them. Yeah, it's interesting. Well, thank you.

Babe, anything else? I appreciate you coming and sharing your thoughts. I've been wondering. what you've been thinking for a while. So for a while, I mean, it's been like a day, right? A day, a day of you. Yeah, it's been a day since, or maybe a couple of days. I don't, you're, you've been preoccupied. You've been gone, right? What else? Anything else? Just a quick observation. There was a moment when, when Nate asked, why not tell the police,

she's blaming, you know, she's for all of these interviews, she's blamed everything entirely. and she's doing it again here. Not surprisingly, obviously, this is her story, that Tiley was responsible for all of this, although it's completely unclear why that would be true. She's writing about it. Why didn't you just tell the police about Tiley? He says, if Tiley did all this and said all of this in motion,

why not tell the police? And she said she called the police two times in the past, and they never helped her. Right. And so you have, that's a small little nugget, but it's interesting because you have

a little bit of paranoia there. You have kind of this victim mentality again. These are things we've talked about a lot with Lori, but, and you also have, you also kind of have this,

the police are, these authority figures, right? And so you have kind of this anti-authority perspective here, which we've talked about too. We saw this with the judge in Arizona, how she constantly pushed back against the judge and challenged them, right? You've got this underlying current,

this kind of underlying anti-authority, kind of antisocial current beneath a lot of this. Absolutely. Absolutely. Definitely. So I thought that was interesting and worth mentioning. I want to conclude, I'm just going to read, I'm going to read a quick quote here from, this is from, I mentioned Andrew Skull's S-C-U-L-L, not like the human skull. This is from his book, Madness and Civilization, a Cultural History of Insanity.

Fascinating book, by the way. It's really, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, like a 400-page book. It's not, not an easy read, but I want to read this quote from him. This is on page 10. It's in chapter one called Confronting Madness. He says, he starts with insanity. He uses the word insanity here, and again, I prefer the term madness, so I'm going to switch it up here. Okay.

Quote, madness haunts the human imagination. It fascinates and frightens all at once. Few are immune to its terrors. It reminds insistently of how tenuous our own hold on reality may sometimes be. It challenges our sense of the very limits of what it is to be human. I love that quote because I think one of the fascinations with Lori Valo-Daybell has to do with this idea of madness. That this unreason, this belief system that people just can't fathom

that someone could hold in 2025. You know, you have an iPhone and you're texting your friends or whatever. You're browsing the internet. You're looking up where you're going to eat dinner. You're GPSing it. And yet you think that everything is pre-orbitre. ordained and that there's evil spirits that need to be cast out and that people didn't be murdered because the second coming is imminent right like again it's anachronistic it doesn't

fit and i think i think that somebody like lorry living today um i think it's very easy you know and again i don't know i don't people can debate this i think but i think it's very easy to kind of apply this label of madness, if we define that as unreasoned, and that's how it's been defined largely historically, because of that, because of the, the complete lack of context, the anachronism here, that these beliefs are antiquated in many ways. And that's, and I'm not arguing, by the way, that people, a lot of people have different beliefs about religion and God, like, I'm not saying that those aren't valid. I'm just saying that this particular belief system is peculiar and it's out of context.

And it's antiquated. I think that's one of the fascinations here. We're not only just, we're not only fascinated by the craziness of this belief system, I think, but also by just the sheer madness that this person exudes and emanates. And it's sort of like watching a train wreck, right? Like you just can't take your eyes off of this. Right. And so Skull's thing about it fascinates and frightens us all at once.

That's true. Like we're fascinated. And yet there's something terrifying about it. Absolutely. In the sense that in the sense that the question I think many people pose when they look at Lori is, could that happen to me? Could that happen to the people I love? Like, are all of us just kind of one, you know,

one movie, one Evan Almighty movie away from changing our beliefs and like, right, and sort of looking like Lori? And again, you know, Skull says it reminds us insistently of how tenuous our own hold on reality may sometimes be. I think that's part of it too. Making sense of the world in a fairly, you know, comprehensive and understandable way is, difficult. And this world today in 2025, there's so many ways in which this world is completely unfathomable. Right. And so I think many human beings, many of us have this underlying fear that maybe we're not understanding reality in the correct way, or maybe our grasp of reality is tenuous. And that maybe, you know, there's this online fear.

that maybe we're going to lose that, right? And so this idea that, that, to end with this last part from Skull, quote, it challenges our sense of the very limits of what is to be human. That's brilliant. Yeah. Madness really does, it really does push us to the limits of what a human being is. And, you know, are we imaginative creatures, are we empathic creatures? are we creative creatures, are we automaton's, right?

Like, and what does all that mean? If we're any of those things, does that mean we're starting to enter into the arena of madness? I don't know, right? I don't know. I don't know. I think, but I think madness really holds a mirror up to us, and it forces us to examine what it is that human beings are and what it means to accept human beings.

you know, and typically in his skull talks about in all of his writing, all of his books, that oftentimes the mad, the people that have been deemed mad have been sheltered away. Or, you know, they've been warehoused, or they've been harmed,

or they've been murdered, or they write that we don't know what to do with the mad. What do you do with them? What's the best response? Is it to medicate them? Is it to, right? I don't have an answer. You know, he raises all these questions.

Is it like what is, but at bottom of all that is that question of being human. Should we be compassionate to people that we consider mad like Lori, even though they murder people? Like, how do we do with that, right? And so I think I just wanted to end with those thoughts and that quote. Because I think it really, at the end of the day and at the end of this case, and I think, I don't know how much we're going to talk about this case anymore. I think this is it. This could be the last hurrah.

That's the thought I want to leave. with. That madness, which may or may not apply to Lori Valdebel, it really challenges our sense of the very limits of what it means to be human. And I think that's our fascination with this case, or at least mine. It raises so many questions about who we are and what we believe and how that affects us and how it affects our behaviors and how it affects our ability to integrate in the community. And so at the end of the day, that's my last thought on the Debo case. Well, thank you.

Some good thoughts. I appreciate it. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Yeah. And I will see you tomorrow in person. Yes. I can't wait to get you back home. Yep.

I'm going to go hit the portal and come hang out. Yeah. I guess you could hit the portal tonight, but since you're not an anachronism and you live in 2025, you're going to take an airplane instead. Right. I'll see you after I land tomorrow. Okay. Yeah, I'm a safe trip.

I love you too. Okay. Okay. Bye. Before I switched to wealth front, my APY was probably zero point one. Like, it was a joke. I was literally getting pennies. Once I switched, chit-ching.

With a wealthfront cash account, earn up to 4.2% AP. on your cash. The high APY with Wellfront was a clear winner. There are no petty fees. Every month, there's this much that I'm getting an interest and I didn't have to do anything. My money is working hard on its own and I can trust Wellfront is taking care of me. Earn more on your uninvested cash with a Wealthfront cash account. No account fees, no minimums, and no strings attached. Get started today at Wealthfront.com. Clients were paid $1,000 for their testimonials creating a conflict of interest. Outcomes vary. 3.3%. base API Y as of January 30th, 20206 is representative variable and earned on funds swept to program banks.

0.65% new client boosts for three months on up to $150,000. Direct deposit $1,000 a month and fund an investing account for a 0.25% increase. Cash account offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC member FINRA SIPC, not a bank. These and eligibility requirements may apply to certain checking features of the cash account.