Liar Liar by Adam Shand

I grew up around damaged children. These were kids who had fallen through all the cracks of the services provided to help, until they eventually ended up at the nonprofit my parents worked for. Some of these kids lived with our family, we went on holiday with them every year, and they were a normal part of my childhood. Occasionally crazy shit would happen, but it never involved me and I always felt safe around them.

As an adult, and especially as a manager, one of the hard lessons I had to learn was that my tolerance for unusual behaviour is extremely high. By the time someone's behaviour is making me consciously uncomfortable, others have been extremely uncomfortable for a while.

I have worked with some very damaged adults (on a couple of occasions, dangerously so). They often gravitated towards me, I suspect because I was tolerant of their strangeness. Over time, I discovered that some of them were also compulsive liars and manipulators.

There’s a particular feeling of being in a relationship (of any kind) with someone who compulsively lies and manipulates. I had to develop my sense for this through a series of unpleasant experiences. I’ve sometimes wondered if there's a way to help others recognise these behaviours without having to learn the hard way.

Driving home from Taupō last week, I listened to an episode of Darknet Diaries (a podcast about hackers and internet crime). This was a follow-up to a 2018 episode where the host was trying to figure out who was the original author of a piece of hacking software.

The host arranged for both of the people who claimed to be the author to join him for a discussion. It quickly became apparent that Greg, who claimed to be the author in 2018, was not in fact the author. Listening to Greg navigate the conversation was fascinating. His behaviour triggered all my warning signs indicating that someone is a compulsive liar and manipulator.

If you haven’t had this experience yet and want to try and pre-train your mind to recognise this, I recommend listening to the podcast. These things in particular stood out to me about Greg’s behaviour:

• His extremely poor judgement in joining the call with the actual author
• How he constantly changes his claims even when they contradict each other
• That he calls back at the end with a new story that reframes his behaviour in a positive light

If you listen, I’d be really curious about your thoughts. Was it useful? What else did you notice? How do you think you’d recognise this in the future?

Update May '25: After some helpful comments, I've changed "expert" liar and manipulator to "compulsive."  I think that better describes the behaviour I'm talking about. Expert implies a higher degree of skill and intentionality than what I'm talking about.