David Bloomberg, a retired engineer manager with 30 years in government air quality projects and host of Why Blank Lost, dissects dishonesty—from childhood "white lies" to partisan politics where candidates like [Senate Race Candidate] lie repeatedly yet retain near-even support due to ideological loyalty. In reality TV, deception thrives as players manipulate trust (e.g., police officer [Name]’s wins on Big Brother and Survivor) to secure dwindling resources, with even subtle lies exposed through behavior and body language. His podcast’s seven analytical rules reveal how structural incentives reward dishonesty, mirroring society’s broader erosion of truth when advantage outweighs accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
I have a special guest today.
I will allow him to introduce himself now.
Hi, I'm David Bloomberg.
In my professional life, I'm a recently retired engineer manager who spent over 30 years in government improving the air quality of my state.
But I'm probably better known in the podcast and social media world for being the host of Why Blank Lost, which is a podcast on the Rob Has a Podcast Network.
And it takes a methodical look at why each person was voted out of Survivor or Big Brother.
But I've been covering all of reality TV since the beginning of Survivor, so all the way back.
I used to have a popular website years ago, and then just moved into podcasting after a hiatus of taking the website down.
Other than that, in things that could be pertinent here, I am what I call a scientific skeptic.
Got to take back the skeptic name or hold on to the skeptic name.
And over the years, have been involved in looking at how anti-science, pseudoscience, et cetera, have impacted society and the media.
So kind of wrapping it all up, one thing that all these have in common is I've encountered both purposeful lying and spreading of untruths, even if the person doesn't know it's lying.
But I know we're here to discuss the reality TV aspect of lying.
Right.
So that I hadn't actually introduced the topic yet, but that's okay.
It's no problem.
The topic today will be dishonesty in general.
We usually think of lying first when we think of this.
But I actually think that when I say something is lying, I call it voicing a lie.
You have to speak in order to lie.
But you can be dishonest in many, many ways.
Generally, I would say that dishonesty first is withholding information that is pertinent to the current thing, consciously withholding it.
And then a lie would be when you substitute an untruth for an expected answer.
Like if someone expects you to say something and then you say something to them that is untrue, that is then a lie.
And that's the topic for today.
I have you on for a couple of reasons.
I watch Survivor and Big Brother, and I ran into your content through looking for more information on that stuff.
I really enjoy your rules, your, is it seven rules?
Yeah, seven rules, one, well, two appendices.
They're rules that I developed over the years, literally since the first season of Survivor, that players should follow in order to win.
And so it runs from the most important rule, which is to scheme and plot, and then just goes through various other things.
Of course, after scheming and plotting, the second rule is don't scheme and plot too much.
And then it goes through, and that's the path we follow when we're explaining why someone was voted out of one of these shows.
And I find that to be, to me anyway, a delightful analytical approach, an attempt to see things more generally instead of a more specific to each incident sort of approach.
And I thought that was would fit very well for the things that I do here.
And then also your bountiful knowledge of these two games, which to me give us a, it's like a useful set of experiments.
human experiments on human subjects that is socially acceptable to do, first of all.
I don't have to, you know, trap anyone and bring them to an island and treat them this way.
Someone else is already doing that and they're doing it willingly.
And that's all great.
I don't have to lock anyone in a house and, you know, become an evil villain to do these things to the big brother contestants.
And that's useful.
Also, what's what I find useful about this in this context of looking at dishonesty is that very often when we see players being deceptive in these games, we generally are in on the deception.
We generally know what it is they're attempting to be deceptive about.
And that gives us a sort of a powerful lens through which to look at dishonesty in general.
And we, you know, the many, many various ways of this happening are interesting as well.
That's mostly why I wanted you on this podcast to talk about this topic in particular, because I think that you would have an interesting view of this, especially from the angle of the Big Brother and Survivor games.
And you mentioned in the time we spent talking yesterday, you mentioned also that there's another game that I think you are very familiar with that, of course, I didn't even think about.
But poker, of course, is rife with dishonesty.
And I believe I've seen on your Twitter feed that you pay attention to a fair number of that, that action.
And so really we should start from the top about why do people lie?
Why do people do this?
I mean, we're capable of it.
On this podcast, I've said that we have a mechanism inside us where we have an internal monologue and we have an external self that we're wanting to portray to other people.
And this creates a mechanism with which we could lie.
Without that mechanism, we really, we can't lie at all.
If there's no difference between what we think and what we say, obviously we would say everything that's the truth.
And the only way to be deceptive would be to not speak, which to me is just, you know, all animals, they say all animals are deceptive, but most of these animals are just, you know, camouflaging and trying to hide.
Right.
And these are very simple forms of dishonesty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what do you think?
Why, why do people lie?
That's a, wow, that's a deep question.
I mean, in general, it is to gain some sort of advantage or to avoid some sort of disadvantage.
And I go back to the, you know, even to the little white lies, you know, the olden days when we only had home phones and I was a kid and I would come home from school or otherwise be home alone because my parents weren't home.
And I was told, answer the phone, but say, you know, mom or dad is in the shower.
Right.
Because you don't want to tell whoever might be on the other end.
Here's a kid home alone.
Right.
And so I wasn't doing it to gain any sort of advantage.
I wasn't trying to pull something over on someone.
It was to prevent a disadvantage.
Right.
And so there's those little white lies that, like I said, started in childhood.
And then it goes all the way to today's politics where literally there are some candidates who will just blatantly lie to get an advantage and they don't care who knows it.
Yes.
There's actually, to my view, there's entire subsections of our population that are not attempting to, I mean, there's an expression about lying that what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive and that the you have to remember all the lies you tell in order to maintain them, in order to keep them consistent with each other.
But there's a lot of people now who aren't even bothering to do that.
They aren't even bothering to try to keep the current thing that they're lying about consistent with the previous thing they're lying about.
And so we're in an interesting space.
I've sort of always known, you know, I think anyone who's known a reasonably large number of people will at least know of one that just sort of lie just to do it and lie when the truth will do.
But even then, those people who, you know, some people might say they suffer from a psychological illness of some kind.
But even them, the shape of their lies from moment to moment still has a direction and a potential goal that could be potentially understood.
It's not usually just chaos that they mean to create.
It's usually something that's self-aggrandizing or something that elevates them in some way.
I mean, there's a lot of what might be called bullshitters who just exaggerate their own accounts to some higher end because, I mean, even if the account is extraordinary all on its own without embellishment, they will still push the envelope higher and higher, perhaps sometimes higher and higher each time they tell.
We get the adage of the fisherman, every time he tells about the fish he caught, it's larger and larger each time.
And this is a part of our world now where we have people who are part of what I call reality denying ideologies that are just, they're not bothering to track what thing they lied about previously and whether the new thing fits with that.
They're just putting out some new falsehood, some new thing.
And the thing that's consistent about it isn't what they're saying.
And so to try to track those lies and prove why they're wrong is a useless game, I think, because they don't even care.
The game for them seems to be more like just coming up with something that makes the opposing side to them, whatever that opposing side is in the moment, just seem wrong in this exact moment right now.
And then hope that enough people aren't tracking it for long enough.
Their attention span isn't long enough to bother to see that it doesn't match with the rest of history, the rest of recent history, all of that.
What do you think of these reality denying ideologies that I've described?
What do you think of their thrust as far as lying goes and the fact that they just don't seem to care if they're consistent?
Well, yeah, it's interesting.
There's one particular Senate race right now where one candidate has been lying consistently.
Every word he says is a lie, pretty much.
And you're still looking at it and it's still almost a 50-50 vote because the people in his party want someone of that party to win.
And they literally don't care that he couldn't can't put together a sentence.
And he certainly can't put together a sentence without lying.
And it becomes that the ideology, I want to say trumps everything, but that wasn't my intent to use.
There's no pun intended there.
But, you know, that's the situation that we're facing.
Like you want to believe that people can say, how can I vote for this person who lies as easily as he breathes?
But they will.
They will do it.
I say they, some group of, some subgroup of people will do it because they care more about the ideology than they do about the truth.
Right.
And that's this comes up to another aspect of this that I have on my list of ideas to cover in this episode is that we generally see or look at dishonesty as a, as having a negative social value.
As soon as a person is known to be deceptive, we don't trust them as much as we might have, we might have otherwise.
In games like Survivor and Big Brother, the game itself is structured around what might be called a dwindling set of resources.
And those resources, at the end of the day, really are the places in the game.
They're removed one chair at a time, like musical chairs.
And of course, the game is to not be the one without a chair at the end of each round.
And that's all you have to be.
You don't have to be first.
You just have to not be last.
And in these sorts of situations, this might come to something that I think of as to why people lie.
It's almost always because of some level of selfishness.
When we have a world in which any two people's interests conflict, we're going to have, it's very difficult for them to coexist without some level of deception because each of them gets some amount of gain from withholding something from the other person.
You get two people playing a game of chess or two teams playing football.
And, you know, hiding your playbook is useful to keep your play unknown versus the other team so that they are less able to counter it when that time is to do that play.
And this is always true.
In these games of Survivor and Big Brother, they're structured specifically so that players have to compete for the resources, the remaining seats and be not the one removed.
And so they pretty much have to be dishonest at some level.
There's been a lot of players who've attempted to be, play what's called an honest game or what they sometimes call maybe an ethical game where they're morally better somehow.
They're honorable in some way that the other players aren't.
And this is a thing they try to communicate and try to play towards.
And it almost always includes some additional level of honesty.
But really what they're trying to be is more trustworthy.
Being trustworthy is useful because people will believe you when you tell them things.
But that just means they'll believe you when you lie about them too, right?
Right, exactly.
Yeah.
The people who have come into survivor and said, because there was one this season.
And, you know, spoiler alert, it's early in the season and they're out already.
They, you know, she came in and said, well, I'm, I'm, you know, going to play an honest game.
And by the time she got to her exit interviews, she said, yeah, it's not possible to play an honest game.
You can't do it.
It handcuffed me.
I could not do it.
It would be like, you know, going to a poker game and saying, I'm not going to bluff.
I am just going to bet according to what I have in my hand.
Well, you're going to lose, you know, because people will always know what you have.
And that's what happens on Survivor as well.
It's the opposite of the real world that, you know, I was just talking about the Senate campaign where people, where I'm astonished that more people aren't against the person that's lying.
But then you go to the reality TV world and you will find me saying, yes, this person did a great job of lying.
And, you know, that's where those two rules that I mentioned, scheme and plot, but don't scheme and plot too much.
That's where they come into play is you want to lie just the right amount, but you don't want to overdo it.
And that's, you know, can be a difficult balance because there have been some players who come in and they say, I am going to lie to everyone but you.
And the you, of course, is whoever it is they happen to be talking about or talking to at that moment.
And they say the same thing to multiple people.
And so that one person, or rather those multiple people, think, oh, he's being honest with me, but he's lying to those people.
So we're good.
But of course, only one of those people, or two max, if it's a final three situation on survivor, is, you know, actually getting the truth.
The rest are being lied to.
And the really good players can work their way through a game that way.
But it's tough because if any of the others talk, they find out, wait, he's telling you that he's being honest with you also.
And if they're smart enough, you know, they put two and two together and realize that person is lying too much, even for this game.
Right.
I was just thinking as you were mentioning playing poker without bluffing, what an interesting way to play poker would be to, as you get each hand, to just announce to the players what cards you're holding.
Yeah.
Because how much of a game would that be?
They're holding their cards.
They're not going to tell you what their cards are.
As soon as you don't tell them what your cards are, you're still being some level of dishonest.
You're just being the same level of dishonest as every other player on the table who's also not telling you what their cards are.
But you're right that these games, we need to have these players, once they're pitted against each other, they have to be deceptive with each other.
Another aspect of dishonesty that I was thinking about as I was coming up with this, the idea for this episode is that every deception is an attempt to influence the decision of another person without fail.
Even in the extreme case where there isn't a purpose for the lie, where it's just chaos, the chaos is still something that is presumably desired by the person who's just putting out a random lie.
The ability to have some kind of power is, I think, part of the core thought behind each deception we make.
If you think someone's going to make, you know, zig when they come to a decision point and you'd rather they zag and you think you can influence them to zag instead of zig, you might withhold some information or tell them an open lie to get them to decide some other way.
I can't even think of a situation where that wouldn't be true.
Can you think of one?
No, no.
I mean, even without openly lying, there are ways to mold a person's decision.
You know, when, for example, if, you know, when I was working and if there were multiple options, like, okay, the agency could do this or it could do that.
Well, when I present my summary of the situation to the higher management, the director of the agency, I can word things in different ways, even without lying, just to make the one that I want sound better than the other way.
You know, something as simple as listing it first, having more pros for that one, not listing all the pros for the other one.
Oh, wait a minute.
But if you leave out information, aren't you being dishonest in some way?
That's true.
That's true.
So there is, yeah, there is an element of lying if you leave something out, but there are ways to do it without.
I mean, you can even just, like I said, just the way you list it, the way you explain it.
Sure.
All of those things can be done to try to get someone who maybe isn't as familiar with the situation to lean in a certain direction.
Not that I ever would have done such a thing, of course.
Right.
Of course.
I would never accuse you of it.
Just like I would never bluff in poker, right?
Unless they expect you to bluff, in which case it might be useful to not bluff in that situation.
That's right.
That's right.
But yeah, I mean, that's where this whole, again, difference between the real world and games comes into play.
And the interesting thing is, to me, is when there are people who come onto the games, even beyond the ones we were just talking about a little while ago, who say, well, I'm going to be totally honest, there are other people who come onto these games and say, well, I want to play with integrity and support other people with integrity.
And it's all about honor.
And, you know, they have to be here for the right reasons.
Well, it's a game.
So the right reason is to win.
Right.
And, you know, looking at other games, we never see a football announcer indignantly proclaim, I can't believe the other team lied and said they were going to punt it and lined up in punt formation, but then they faked it and got a first down.
You know, no, they get applauded for their, for their cleverness.
And, you know, when you think about other games, baseball, okay, pitching in baseball is entirely based on lying.
Right.
Because the pitcher is trying to fool the batter so the batter can't hit the ball.
He sometimes throws a fastball, sometimes a changeup, sometimes a curveball, et cetera.
Sometimes he'll throw it high and outside, sometimes low and inside.
Nobody complains that the pitcher is being mean or lacks honor, you know, because he's not throwing every pitch as a lob right down the middle.
Yeah, and that's a good point is that there are some socially acceptable lies, dishonesties that we have in our world.
And where we draw the line on that, you know, which ones are in the socially acceptable category and which ones aren't can sometimes be a weird thing.
I do think you're right that we should be careful about electing people to office who are regularly deceptive.
That seems like a poor choice.
I think the people who are still supporting and when they're deceptive feel that they know something about that deception and maybe they're in on it somehow or whatever.
They think they still know that that politician's decisions when they're in office will still be useful for them.
Yes.
I think it's definitely that last part, that even if they're being lied to, it's kind of like the person I was talking about in the game.
Well, they're lying here, but they're being truthful to me about how they're going to vote.
So when that person gets to the Senate, they will vote to pass the laws that I want.
They will vote to put in the judges that I want.
So it doesn't matter if they lied about what they did for a living or how many kids they have or anything else.
That doesn't matter to them as long as they believe that person will toe the line when it comes to the policy issues that are important to them.
Yeah, it's about the goal.
Right.
And that's, you know, why you saw people who you wouldn't think supporting certain candidates.
It's like, wait, how is this person with this set of beliefs supporting this particular candidate who clearly doesn't share that set of beliefs?
Oh, it's because they will vote that way.
And to bring it back to the game aspect, the reality TV aspect, I do think that the two, although they have their overlaps, like I just mentioned, I do think that, you know, we just need to separate out what is a game versus what is real life.
And sometimes I think politics gets gamified.
You know, we will all, people will stay up late on election night watching as the count comes in and it's like a horse race.
Like it can, like it can affect the outcome.
Right.
Well, it's the same thing if I'm sitting at home cheering on a baseball game.
Yeah.
You know, I can't affect the outcome by yelling at my TV set, but I still do.
Yeah.
There were times where I recorded football games and watched them and I still yelled at the TV set, even though the game had already been.
The game is over.
It's already been decided.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I do think that some politics has become gamified in that way.
And, you know, I personally prefer to see my lying on reality television and games.
Yeah, that's because who wins the football game doesn't determine the course of your state or province or nation or other political unit, right?
It's, it's not really consequential for that.
But who becomes the set of leaders that are deciding everything for real over you, that really does matter.
Right.
There's another aspect of this that I was thinking about that I'd like to just go over quick.
When I started, I didn't start watching Survivor and Big Brother when they first started.
I started watching about 12 years ago when my wife, she didn't insist, but she strongly encouraged me to follow along and watch it with her.
And I thought that it would be easy for these players to get away with telling untruths.
And that's not the case.
And at first, I was a little surprised by this, but then eventually I sort of thought about it more.
And I think I kind of got it, which is that we usually look at lying like it's easy to do.
And it really isn't.
Things like moment-to-moment lies to people that you maybe aren't going to see again or whatever, these sorts of things are much easier than when you have to live with the person and coexist with them all the time.
And they are looking to read you for all the little tells that might be there.
I mean, a poker game, good poker players can see someone's tell within an hour or so, probably.
And the game might last for an evening.
But in these games, you're with these people all day long for days at a time.
Big Brother, you're in there for months and you get really strong indications of what they're doing, not just when they're speaking to you, but in all the other moments, how friendly they are with you, how much they, how comfortable they feel when they speak to you versus another person, and how much time they spend with each person.
All of these things add up to. a large amount of information that most of these players probably aren't even conscious of.
It's probably happening on an intuitive level for a lot of them.
But whenever I see someone do what's called a hinky vote, where they make a plan for who's going to get voted off, and then the votes come in and they're read out and they can see.
This doesn't happen much on Survivor.
I think partly because there's too many other factors with the immunity idols being used or whatever, that you can't really do this.
But with Big Brother, it's simple because there's only two players who could be voted off.
And there's no saving one the last minute by the time you're voting.
So you get some players who decide they're going to slip a vote for the other side just to add some chaos.
But I don't know that I've ever really seen this work for anyone.
It's always been found out very, very quickly, even when I thought it shouldn't be, even when it's the first vote and there's 13 votes or something all coming in and one of them is wrong.
It's 12 to 1 or something.
And all the players are like, well, who voted the other way?
Where did the hinky vote come from?
And everyone seems to know.
I mean, on the show, it seems to be immediately.
And probably if you're watching the live feeds, it's probably within an hour or so.
It doesn't take long for everyone to sort of figure it out, compare notes.
Everyone asks everyone.
Everyone says that they didn't do it.
And pretty much everyone knows right away who did the hinky vote.
And the hinky vote often doesn't even matter.
It doesn't even do anything other than make people question people, but almost no one gets away with it.
And that's an interesting thing to me that lying is not actually very easy, especially when it's consequential, especially when people are watching for it.
It's very, very difficult.
People who dabble in conspiracy hypothesis will use lying as a catch-all for explaining how it is that so many people are all involved in something.
You know, oh, you know, Hillary had this person killed and she just had the Secret Service cover it up or whatever.
And they're all just sort of lying and acting like they're not a part of it and blah, blah, blah.
The skill they're attributing to these people is an immense skill.
If you're going to look at spies or undercover police officers, the level of skill they would have to have to convince people that they're surrounded by all the time that they are who they say they are, it must be immense.
It must be an incredible amount of training and skill that's required because ordinary people seem to be almost completely lacking this skill.
What are your thoughts on this?
The idea that lying just is incredibly difficult to pull off.
Yeah.
And I think you got to what I was thinking right at the end there, which is it's difficult to pull off for most people.
And your average big brother player, many of them are not the cream of the crop in many different ways, let's just say.
And lying is certainly among them.
And so, yeah, they come in and they're like, aha, I'm going to throw in a hinky vote and get this person in trouble.
Except it makes no sense.
They have not strategically thought it through.
It doesn't affect anything and nobody cares.
And you're just looking silly at the end.
But there are other times when a good liar can turn things around.
And they do that by pitting people against each other or just, like I said, some people can flat out lie.
I mean, that's why we have criminals.
I mean, I used to be for a brief time part of an organization that's mostly police officers that deal with con artists.
And the people you see there, they, I mean, criminal after criminal, they just are flat out liars.
And I think probably con artists are more practiced at lying than yes, your average murderer, but that's just take.
Yes, exactly.
And so, so, yes, most of the people who go to these games do find it more difficult to lie.
And we hear that time and time again, even the big fans.
I think even the person that was most recently voted out, as of the time we're recording this, said she had been a fan for the whole series, all, you know, she'd been watching for 22 years.
And even she found it difficult to lie because it's not something she does in her daily life.
But there were people that I work with who I believe did lie as just a matter of course.
And sometimes they would get caught.
And usually there weren't any repercussions.
They were just, okay, you were caught.
Don't do that again.
And it's hard sometimes to fire someone just for telling a lie, if it's not something huge, you know, like, oh, I stole money or something like that.
They were, they were smaller lies, like, oh, they were going to get in trouble because they hadn't finished this project.
So when I ask, where is this project now?
They respond back to me and say, I'm waiting on an answer from Joe.
Okay.
Well, they didn't expect me to follow up with Joe.
I follow up with Joe and I found out, oh, that person just asked Joe five minutes ago.
So what they said was technically true.
They're waiting on an answer.
They left out the part, but I just asked five minutes ago instead of three weeks ago when you assigned this to me.
Yeah.
But it was easy for that person to do that, just to protect themselves in their eyes.
And I think that you just have a spectrum of how easy it is for someone to lie.
And I think you're going to have that on reality TV as well, that the people who often make it to the end, they know how to lie better.
And even if the lie is as simple as you're safe, you're not going home today, if they can use that to their advantage, then they can keep moving forward.
And it's, you know, it's different than the person who can't and has to turn away or avoid them.
You know, again, the same person who I was talking about who was voted out most recently, she identified that someone else on the tribe just would not talk to her her last day there.
And she realized it's because he didn't want to lie to her.
He couldn't lie to her.
But he also didn't want to tell her the truth.
So he just avoided her.
Well, by my definition, it's still a lie, but, or a dishonesty, rather.
Yeah.
One thought I had was that one might wonder what would happen if a CIA agent ever made their way onto one of these programs, Survivor or Big Brother, if they would really do much better than anyone else, considering they're likely to be well trained in how to get away with lying.
Well, for all we know, there has been because I mean, we do know that there have been police officers who have done very well.
There's one who was actually undercover for a while.
And he did very well.
And yeah, one on Big Brother, one who won twice on Survivor.
And his second win afterwards, he talked about how he not just used lying, but body language and other strategies to make people feel a certain way.
Right.
Well, that's.
That's part of how most of the lies get detected, I think, is with body language.
The intuitive part of your brain is examining all the little things you do.
And even if you aren't conscious of the fact that your brain is analyzing it, it is.
And you get some impression that this person isn't telling you everything.
Sometimes it's hard to even pinpoint what it is you heard or saw or whatever that led you to that, but you still have that idea.
And that's, that's interesting to me that we have this extra layer that we're not even in the conscious part of our brain that's doing all these extra things.
And that's interesting that he's purposely trying to mimic those things with body language that are communicating something to other players.
That's fascinating.
Yeah.
Now, you have to be careful too, because sometimes your brain will overreact.
Again, as we saw with the most recent person voted out, there was a lot of interpretation going on and not all of it was necessarily correct because everybody has their own viewpoint.
And she was right that someone else was hiding something from her, but she was wrong about what that person was hiding.
And so she thought, oh, this person's coming after me.
That's what they're hiding.
But that wasn't it at all until she made them do that because of how things changed.
All right.
Well, I think we'll wrap this up here.
All right.
That's anything else you wanted to plug or say or?
No, just if people find the idea of looking at survivor and when it's in season, Big Brother, through that methodological viewpoint, interesting.
Again, it is the Why Blank Lost podcast.
It is on the Rob has a podcast network, specifically the reality TV RehapUps, and that is R-H-A-P-Ups.
And I do that podcast with Jessica Lewis, who was a player on Survivor several years ago.
So we each week, we just go through and look at why each player lost.
Yeah.
To me, it's a nice little extra layer to the game that's easy to digest, easier to digest than the many, many hours of other content.
Yeah.
And, you know, what we do is we go beyond just what we see on TV.
We look at the interviews.
We look at what's happened.
You know, we take notes throughout the whole season.
So something that happened in episode one might end up being important in episode eight, but maybe not everybody remembers that.
Right.
And, you know, just we use those other aspects as well, because a lot of times what they put on TV is to make it easy for the average viewer.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that's what really happened.