Hi, blood money listeners. So for this week's extra content, I want to talk about autism.

I want to talk about misconceptions about people who are on the spectrum as it relates to crime,

especially with the massive media coverage of the Nathan Carman case, which was the subject of this week's episode.

So we said in the episode that Nathan has been diagnosed as being on the spectrum. As a child,

he was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. A lot of people have said that when Nathan did these

interviews, a lot of people commented on the fact that he seemed to be flat and he wasn't really

showing emotion. He wasn't showing the expected emotional response

when he was talking about his mother. I just want to unpack that a little bit because I often say

that it is dangerous to judge people based just on their emotional reactions to a tragedy,

especially their emotional reactions in public. And I think that this is the perfect

illustration of this,

because even people who are classified as neurotypical can process shock in a lot of different ways.

Plus, sometimes in a murder investigation or a missing person's investigation, the person being interviewed

will be hiding something, but it might not be that they had anything to do with the murder.

I'm thinking now, for example, of someone who may be having an affair. And so they look like they're

being evasive, but it's not that they're being evasive about committing murder. It's that they're lying about something else.

So there's a lot going on there. You know, we see a lot in the media about these so-called human lie detectors, right?

These people who say that they can look at someone and tell if they're lying.

Well, study after study has totally debunk that.

They actually say that the people who claim to be professional lie spotters are wrong more than 50% of the time.

In some studies, people off the street have done better than the professional lie spotters are wrong more than 50% of the time. In some studies, people off the street have done better than the professional lie spotters. So what I'm getting at here is that anytime we talk about

someone's reactions to something like Nathan Carmen's reactions, I think it's really important

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