Precision & Instinct

Every case has a body, a mystery, and no confession. Precision and Instinct is a true crime debate show built around two hosts who never agree. Eli Marchetti argues the hard evidence — what can actually be proven. Simone Valdez argues the pattern — what the evidence is too careful to say out loud. There is no narrator telling you what to think, and no tidy resolution. Just two sides of every case, argued out in full, and you decide who is right. Each episode takes on a real, unresolved case — from an unidentified man found dead on an Australian beach with a coded poem in his pocket, to the real exorcism that inspired a horror classic, to the oldest unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. Every case gets the same treatment: hard evidence versus pattern and instinct, argued out completely, no verdict handed to you. The case files. Every episode has a companion page at precisionandinstinct.com with the full case in writing and the source list behind it, where every claim is marked confirmed, disputed, or single-source. Listen first, then check our work. https://rss.com/podcasts/precision-instinct/voicemail/ New episodes weekly. SIMONE VALDEZ grew up two blocks from the water in Santa Barbara, in a family of storytellers who trusted their gut long before they trusted the news. Her grandmother read coffee grounds; her mother ran a small business on instinct alone and never once went under. Simone inherited both the skepticism of outsiders and the conviction that some truths show up in a room before they show up on paper. She spent her twenties as a behavioral researcher, then a private investigator's assistant, chasing the parts of a case that never made it into the official report — the pause before an answer, the detail nobody thought to ask about. She has an unshakeable belief that people tell you who they are, if you're willing to actually watch. Precision and Instinct lets her finally say out loud what she's been thinking the whole time. ELI MARCHETTI was raised in a house where dinner conversations doubled as cross-examinations. The son of a Cook County paralegal and a high school chemistry teacher, he spent his childhood summers on the South Side of Chicago, where he learned early that a good story and a true one are rarely the same thing. He studied journalism before switching, halfway through, to statistics — a decision his mother still brings up. Before turning his attention to cold cases and unsolved mysteries, Eli spent the better part of a decade fact-checking for a Midwest newsroom, where he developed a reputation for being the last person in the building willing to sign off on a headline. He now lives by one rule: if it can't be documented, it isn't true yet — it's just a good guess wearing a suit. Precision and Instinct is his first venture into audio, though friends say he's been cross-examining people for free his whole life. The hosts are fictional characters created by Verb Editorial, with AI-generated voices designed specifically for each one. Each episode is researched and written with AI assistance, then fact-checked, edited, and produced by a human team.