 From Cafe Vivillionville in Lafayette, we're out to lunch with Professor of Finance and Director of the award-winning Birken Road Reports, Peter Raschutti. It's business, a Catiana style. Hi, I'm Peter Raschutti. Welcome to Out to Lunch. There are a few things that we all value because this is a show about business. You might expect me to be referring to gold, oil, or appreciating home prices. While those are all important elements of the economy, even more important are the qualities of truth and trust. For the economy and everyday life to function, we have to believe the people we're doing business with are telling us the truth. We have to trust the people who work for us and with us. Equally importantly, we want to believe in and trust politicians and the media. Marie Santani started out in the media. Marie is an award-winning journalist and news anchor in Lafayette before starting up her own business. Santani Communications is a media company whose clients are predominantly political candidates and elected officials. Marie, welcome to Out to Lunch. Thank you, Peter. I'm so glad to be here. Ed Roy also started out in media. If you grew up in Lafayette, you probably know him simply as the weatherman. What you might not know is that Ed has been an intelligence provider to the CIA and an FBI hostage negotiator. Today, Ed is the CEO of Global Data Fusion, a company with a revolutionary new take on the lie detector. Ed, welcome to Out to Lunch. Thank you, Peter. But is it really good? It really is. Let me look at my eyes. While Ed works at getting the truth from other people and Marie works at communicating it, Tess Brunet works on getting at the truth about herself and communicating it through songs. Now, Ed, most of us are familiar with the traditional lie detector from movies and TV. It's a mysterious looking box that someone gets wired up to. And as a result of the answers that person gives to questions, a needle jumps around, a piece of paper, and a trained technician translates the resultant wiggly lines as truth or lies. Your next generation of this is called I Detect, spelled I, E-Y-E. As I understand it, I sit in front of a computer. The computer, not a person, asks me questions and the computer determines whether I'm telling the truth by looking into my eyes. Is this right? That is absolutely correct. It's called ocular motor detection. And there are a couple of scientists out in Utah, Kirchner and Raskin, who are the fathers of the computerization of polygraphs. And as you know, the polygraph is still the absolute staple of the intelligence community up in Washington and anywhere in the world. And most of the government agencies, well, this is the next generation of that. It turns out that with this technology, and these guys have been fooling with this, if you will, for the last 10 years or so, it's been vetted very, very rigorously in the psychology community, in the psychological community, in the journals and wherever else. And it turns out that I Detect, right out of the box, is as accurate as a polygraph, which is about 85% accurate. Now, if you use I Detect in concert with polygraph, use it as a successive hurdle, then the accuracy rate goes up to about 98%. No way. So if you're really having to vet somebody that may be in a very high position of trust, like maybe a bodyguard for the President of the United States or a cashier at Kroger's, I don't know. But somebody that really needs to be squeaky clean, this is the way with successive hurdles to do it. But this is the new technology, and just a quick thumbnail comparison with a polygraph to train an examiner, you're looking at about 10 weeks of intensive study to train an operator for I Detect. We're looking at about four hours because there's no subjectivity. What happens is, the tests are graded in the cloud by a computer algorithm. So it's standardized. It is based on the theory that two lie takes more cognitive effort. And when you have more cognitive effort, it shows up in the pupils of your eyes. And we actually measure the pupils of the eye 60 times a second. And we can tell whether you're being truthful or not. Wow, the size of the pupil. The size of the pupil, that's right. We've shown this up in the intelligence community circles up in Washington, D.C. And the thing that impressed me the most was a guy from State Department went nuts over this. He realized that you could suddenly screen masquerading. And one of these I Detect tests takes about 30 or 40 minutes compared to a polygraph, which takes about two hours, two and a half hours. We could actually mass screen anybody that's applying for a visa into the United States, for example, a Syrian refugee, and tell you within 30 minutes if they're a terrorist or have terrorist ties. Is it being adapted? Sometimes adaptation is slow on new technology. Is it, are people excited? Well, actually it is. Yeah, we have actually right now 240 different tests. And there is varied as testing for whether or not someone's a terrorist or sympathetic to the terrorist, whether or not they've stolen from the enterprise that they work for, and different levels of over $250, over $500 worth of valuables, even to the point where we can tell if somebody is doping for an athletic competition. Really? Yeah, and the tests are available in English, Spanish, and now Arabic. There goes the urine sample. Yeah. God, that was seemed like such a staple. I had most of my money invested in those companies. Ed, I've got to ask you, once you started explaining this product, it seemed like there was even more and more markets. So you're just thinking up, just sitting here. Yeah, now there's one really inhibition to the market, and that is in 88, I think it was Senator Hatch up in Washington passed something called the Employee Protection, Employee Polygraph Protection Act. So we are not concentrating on the private sector. We're concentrating on the government sector, because those people are not affected by the EPPA. So we can actually test folks that are applying for jobs in law enforcement, that are working at airports that have positions of trust in the government, as opposed to screening applicants for private sector companies. Those are really kind of off limits now. How about this, though? You and Marie together ask politicians questions and see if they're lying about their responses. Well, I think the obvious would be that if they aren't, that would be news. That would be newsworthy. That's highly newsworthy. All right, Marie. So you test them, then I can figure out what to do with them. Exactly. I got to ask you this, Ed. Now that you've been doing this with your own special lie detector, is it just a quantitative thing, or do you think now that you have a better feel for people when they're lying? You know, this technology is so new, even for us, that no, not yet. And I believe that what we're going to see with eye detections, it's so quick to do, and it's so easy to do through a mass of people, that I think we're going to see it foster this new kind of ethic in companies and in organizations. You know what part got me the most was that correlation coefficient part, that basically you're picking up what the polygraph is leaving out. Exactly. That's pretty amazing. We're raising the baseline. It's not practical to polygraph large groups of people because it's, number one, subjective. Number two, slightly invasive because of all the equipment. We've got nothing that touches the person we're doing. They just read questions and answer true or false questions. And it's so easy to do that one person can actually do 16 of these tests per day. Wow, or you could multiply it by a factor of four if they were using four different workstations. So all of a sudden you can mass screen people to tell whether they're truthful or deceptive. And I think that's going to make a big difference, a huge difference. And I've got to ask you, how did you get affiliated with this in Lafayette? You know, life is serendipitous, Peter. The guy that does our polygraph exams at the investigative agency, Edward Emedy, went to- Because you're really a private detector, deceptive in real life. Exactly. Yes. And we do applicant screening for companies. That's where we touch the business world mostly. But Casey Valer went for his annual recertification as a polygraph examiner. And he came back and he said, man, I don't know what it is, but he said there's a buzz going on in the polygraph community about this new technology. And I started looking into it. We were able to partner with the company Converis that is bringing this technology out. It's already been out, by the way, for two years in Latin America and the rest of South and Central America because they didn't have the inhibition of the EPPA, the Polygraph Protection Act. So it's being used and it's anticipated that this year, the federalists, the police in Mexico will do about 50,000 of these tests. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to ferret out the conspirators, the people that are put there to interact with the agency on behalf of a drug cartel, people like this. It's been used in Columbia to screen some of the candidates for officers in their military. There you go, there you go, right? That might be something you do before you agree to go to work for these people. I would be nice to know some things up front. That would be really... Marie, Ed, Tess, and one way or another, all of you are involved in the public record. Marie, you're helping create the public record. Ed, you're making sure members of the public are truthful when they go on record and Tess, you're selling the public records. In all seriousness, you're all involved in businesses that interface with the public in very, very different ways. It's been great to meet you. This has been fun, fascinating and informative. Thank you all for taking the time to join me today and onto lunch. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, very much. And this chicken is delicious. Oh, good. We get here early and cook. It's amazing. My guests that are out to lunch today have been Marie Santani, the owner of Santani Communications. Ed Roy, CEO of Global Data Fusion and Tess Bernay, singer, songwriter, and co-owner of Line Up Records. You can find out more about Marie's politics, Ed's lies, and Tess's vinyl by following the links on our websites, krbs.org.