David Bloomberg and Spencer G. Watson dissect the "explicit paradox"—where overemphasizing traits (like intelligence or compliance) backfires, sparking skepticism—from Survivor’s "always right" persona to Vancouver’s Super Good Deal Restaurant, whose name undermined authenticity. They link it to catfishing scams, especially crypto fraudsters using forced details and fake wealth claims, and a PAC named People Who Play by the Rules exposed for election violations and racist propaganda. Bloomberg’s Twitter backlash over political views revealed how suppression amplifies scrutiny, mirroring the Streisand effect, while his podcast name—Truth Unrestricted—rejects weaponized "truth" branding, arguing real transparency demands accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with David Bloomberg.
How are you doing, David?
I'm doing great.
Unless I shouldn't be saying that I'm doing great.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say that I'm doing great, or if I say that, that means I'm not great.
Yeah, there's a lot of layers to what we're going to talk about today.
And on a re-listen, you'll understand exactly why David said that very strange thing there.
First, I'm going to mention that I keep forgetting and I have to remember.
Please, all feedback for this podcast gets sent to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Anything at all, you don't like it, you do like it.
You want to tell me how I suck.
You want to say we got something wrong or something right.
Absolutely.
All that stuff goes to that email address.
It's easy to remember if you remember the name of the podcast.
Back to the show.
So, can't they, if they want to tell you you suck, can't they just go on Twitter and do that?
Sure, they can.
Yeah, I'm Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
I'm, I'm, if you listen to this and you don't know that I'm on Twitter at all, then you can go there and you can see all the things I get up to there.
Um, if yeah, if you want to just go on Twitter and tell me I suck, you can go ahead and do that too.
That's perfectly legitimate criticism.
It's, I'm, I must say, if that's the only thing you're going to say, it's not very coherent.
But no, but you'll, that's all you have to say.
That's fine.
Yeah.
You'll probably try to get them into a conversation still.
So you're very good about that.
Maybe, maybe.
I do try to draw these things out.
So let's try to draw this out into a longer conversation.
Yeah.
So today's episode is about a thing that I call the explicit paradox.
Now, that alone is not going to be enough for people to go, oh, yes, of course, I've heard about this and absolutely know what you're talking about.
That's definitely true.
Yes.
No one else can see this, but we do have cameras on us right now.
And David Bloomberg is nodding his head to agree that it doesn't make any sense to him right away.
So this is my job today: I need to explain what the explicit paradox is to you.
And in doing so, hopefully, other people also get it.
So the explicit paradox occurs in social settings where someone appears to be trying too hard to get a point across.
And in doing so, something sort of stands out and is odd.
And instead of making you feel more like that thing is true, you feel instead that it's less likely to be true.
So let me sort of provide some examples here.
And maybe that will put this into perspective.
Okay.
So let's say you had someone who was intelligent.
Like I don't go around saying that I'm intelligent, but if I on this podcast started to work in things about my intellect and my intelligence to try to hammer it in, you would immediately, and not just you, everyone else would immediately start to think, oh, that's that's really weird how he keeps circling back to this intelligence thing.
It's first of all, must think it's really important to him.
And secondly, it's really important that other people understand that it's true.
And thirdly, I'm not even sure it is true anymore because all I have is his word that he's intelligent.
And I just have to take his, you know, like, wow, he just keeps mentioning it over and over again, hoping that we get it somehow.
But as soon as you try too hard and be too explicit about it, that's what I mean, is that it becomes less true.
What's your first take on this?
I feel like you're personally attacking me here.
Oh, because, you know, my whole survivor podcast shtick is that I'm always right.
And, you know, I'm, and so, I mean, I, for those who watch my podcast on video, there's literally a sign which comes from the back of my co-host sweatshirt that says, David, you're right.
And so, you know, that's, that's the whole shtick.
And that's actually, you know, it's an exaggerated character, obviously, that I play, but it's also based on kind of an exaggerated character of my own life and that I did at work.
My boss, when we were still on good terms, used to make a joke.
She and I would be alone in the room and I'd say something and she'd be like, you're the smartest man in the room.
Obviously, since I said she, you can, you know, but of course, when she made that joke, when other women were in the room, they didn't get it.
They didn't immediately catch the man part.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's funny that I have this, you know, this sort of thing because, yeah, I don't say it always seriously.
And in fact, I actually have something of a it's difficult to talk myself up in other situations, like when I used to do job interviews.
Yeah, job interviews are very difficult for this.
This is actually comes up in job interviews, but people never mention this.
But it is a thing about job interviews that's like you are meant to talk yourself up.
Right.
But a lot of people are uncomfortable with that, or they think they come off as maybe some version of cheesy or inauthentic in some way.
And I think this is what they're experiencing in that is they're they're experiencing the reverse side of this.
They're worried less about what the other person thinks about their whatever properties they're trying to get across in a job interview and more about just their social awareness in that moment.
Yeah.
And that was something, like I said, when I did job interviews, I've been on both sides.
And when I was the interviewee, it was hard to say, well, here's all the great things I did in my last position.
But then when I was the interviewer, I was like, okay, you have to tell me all the great things you've done.
Because otherwise, I can't be intelligent.
Yes.
So tell me that you're intelligent without using the word intelligent.
Right, right.
I don't know.
I don't know how big of a Star Trek fan you are, but there is a race in Star Trek.
It started in Next Generation.
It's carried through to Lower Decks and some of the others.
They're called the PacLed.
Yeah, the Pacled.
And they are smart.
Yes, exactly.
Things to make us go.
Yes.
We are smart.
And it's very clear they are not smart.
That's amazing.
I totally forgot about the PacLeds.
Wow.
But they are a good example of this.
As soon as they say they're smart, you go, well, are you sure about that?
Yeah.
You just had to tell me that you were smart instead of just demonstrating it.
Yeah.
Right.
And this is some of the same people I think of when I see on Twitter people who have in their bios critical thinker.
And now the thing is, I've actually considered myself a critical thinker for a long time before the phrase became, you know, associated with other like a buzzword.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Buzz phrase, I guess.
Right.
And so it's somewhat offensive to me to see people calling themselves that when they are clearly anything but that.
Yeah.
I saw a tweet today and I wasn't thinking about it in terms of this podcast.
So I didn't write down who said it.
And now, you know, try searching Twitter for critical thinker.
Good luck.
And it said, if you're going to call yourself a critical thinker, you need to be appropriately critical of people on either side, whether you agree with them or disagree with them.
And the biggest thing that a critical thinker should be is critical of their own thoughts.
Yeah.
So most people, and it's not 100%.
And I honestly don't remember exactly what I have in my own Twitter bio.
If you just say in your Twitter bio, I am a critical thinker, it probably means you're a right-wing nut job.
That's the code right now.
Not 100%, but that is the code right now because people are using it to say, see, I'm critically thinking about these vaccines and masks and all these other things.
And it's like, no, you're just using that buzzword.
And to go back to your topic, no, you're not a critical thinker and you don't even know what it means.
In fact, I have to mention that in this moment, I'm feeling personally attacked, David, because I don't know if you remember or even looked ever, but my Twitter bio is one word only.
Guess which word it is?
Critical.
Thinker.
Ah, damn it.
I had a 50-50 shot, too.
Some people have attempted to point it out as a mocking term, like, oh, really?
You're thinking all that much, are you?
And okay, well, you know, prove that I'm not, right?
But that's, I'm determined to leave it as just one word because I think if there was only one word that described me, that would be it, would be just constantly thinking.
And that's not saying that the thoughts I have are better than anyone else's.
They're just pretty relentless.
That's all.
Oh, they're better than a lot of people's, trust me.
Well, we'll see.
That's me saying it.
So I'm allowed to say it all.
Okay, yeah, right, right.
So I have a couple of the concepts that I'd like to compare this against, compare and contrast this idea against.
One is the uncanny valley.
Are you familiar with the uncanny valley effect?
I am not.
Okay.
So that's good.
I get to say it out loud.
Oh, good.
Because I'm in the audience.
A good podcast guest might have looked that up ahead of time.
No, no, no, that's, I have no problem with this.
So the uncanny valley effect is usually described in relation to animation, but is a lot very close related to art and artistic renderings of people's faces.
Because in your life, you get a good view of a lot of people's faces, what they really look like.
And in our art, and of course, in our animations now, we're attempting to mimic human expression and human movements and what humans look like.
And so you get sort of a gradation from the extreme, the first attempts at this, which were recognizable as humans.
It was recognizable that the artist was attempting to show us humans in their art.
And as they get, you know, we have photographs, which are nearly perfect replications of humans and their faces.
And then we have, as the artist approaches the replication ability of photographs, they get marginally closer.
And they, at first, they start to get closer and you begin to more and more recognize a human in what they're creating in their art.
But as you get very, very close, it becomes less real.
And that's what they mean by uncanny valley is that as you get very, very close to being exactly like a human in your art, artistic portrayal of a human face, it becomes less real to the viewer.
So you'll see robots, like animations of robots and this sort of thing now that it, well, especially now, that are attempting to mimic human expression.
And, you know, you've probably seen movies where this is the case, where you believe Bart Simpson is more human than some of the creatures that are attempting to actually be really like actual humans.
Because Bart Simpson, even though he's less, you know, the features of Bart Simpson are less like a human.
As you get really, really close, maybe it's hard to say exactly what it is.
The eyes seem a little too off, or it's hard to even say exactly what it is.
Might have to be a real artist to know to point them out, but to your experience it's usually that oh, it just seems off in some way, like it's just obviously not a human and it just turns me off in this weird way.
It's it's, and that's what they mean by uncanny valley.
It's it's as you approach, you get better, and then you get this little dip just before you reach this perfect replication of a human.
So is this related then, to like in?
I'm sure it's been in various movies, but in particular in the Star Wars movies, where they tried to bring back some of the previous characters but because they were either too old or had passed on, they used computer animation, like with Leia and Uh, Luke.
The first time we saw Luke on the Mandalorian, when it was clearly off and you were like that was you know and, and sometimes it's like you would have just been better off not even doing that.
When it's just enough off to make you notice for sure yeah, that's exactly what it is.
When it's just, it's very, very close and it's so close you probably like, like I mentioned, you probably won't be able to really put your finger on exactly what it is, because it's just somewhere in the back of your brain where it's doing all the many, many calculations of recognizing human faces, something just seems a little bit off.
It's sort of in your deep in the intuition somewhere and you're just I don't know.
Something just seems wrong with that and that's exactly what we talk about.
That's.
That's a thing that's mentioned a lot in robotics.
As they make uh, robots that are approaching human likeness, is that they they're right now they're in the uncanny valley.
They're, they're close enough to being like a human, but not perfectly like a human.
That they're.
They're less human like than like.
I don't know what kind of a of a robot would be like this uh, in in fiction um C3po yeah yeah C3po, you might be more thinking that he's somewhere deep inside like you than the, the robot that's attempting very, very close to be very, very similar to a human, but not quite.
And and they don't really know exactly why that occurs either it's this weird thing inside our brains where you get this really close and you get this dip in likability and empathy for the robot it's.
It's very, very strange.
So in comparing it with the Uncanny valley, we get this idea that you know, say very, very closely that you are a thing that you have.
This property makes people think less like you have it, rather than more.
I have another um situation that i'd like to compare against, just because I think it's fun.
Uh, there's a thing that we call the Streisand effect.
You're probably very familiar with that one, right?
Yes yes, the Streisand effect is so-called because someone said something mean about Barbara Streisand once upon a time and she tried very, very hard to get people to stop saying it.
But all of her attempts to get people to stop saying it just drew more and more attention to that thing, and it had the opposite effect.
Is what she wanted?
She wanted people to just shut up about it and, of course, she won't shut up about it.
So that's the only thing anyone talks about.
When they talked about Barbara Streisand, it's been so Long that I can't remember exactly what it was that she was upset about.
But the Streisand effect lives on nonetheless.
Attempting to actually explicitly get people to not say a thing that's negative about you just draws more and more attention to it.
And what do you think about this as a comparison or contrasting effect for this?
Does it make sense?
I'm not sure exactly how it goes along with the uncanny valley effect.
Well, I guess it does because you're trying to make it closer to human, but you're going the opposite way before you get there.
So I guess that does make sense.
And yeah, it also, you know, it does come up a lot, the Streisand effect is people, you know, try, you know, they sue to try to, for example, the misinformation and disinformation people have been known to sue those who point out when they're saying false things.
Well, the lawsuit just draws more attention to them.
There was actually a situation here where I live, and it's been made into multiple news show specials and other things.
But a man had this perfect, in his mind, plan to kill his wife and blame a taxi/slash limo driver.
Okay.
And everything went down.
The cops and the district attorney immediately bought it.
You know, that it was self-defense on his part, that this guy had come in, bashed his wife in the head with a hammer, and then he shot the guy.
Right.
Even though there were discrepancies, they bought it right away.
Well, he was so convinced at how well he had done in this that he then later sued the limousine company.
So he was going to try and make money off of it also.
Double down.
Yeah, good.
And I'm not sure the exact process, if there was still people investigating or not, but you know, that drew more attention to it.
That drew more investigation to it because you're going back towards court to say, oh, no, they did this.
And now you have to prove it again.
And they're going to fight it.
And so he is now, you know, serving life plus, I don't know what, because he eventually got caught.
And then while he was in jail, he tried to set up a hit on the judge.
And so, yeah, he just was so sure of how smart he was and how certain he was he was going to get away with it that he just kept pushing and drawing more attention to himself.
Yeah, that brings up another thought I had about this is that we have an expression.
I believe it comes from Shakespeare.
The lady doth protest too much.
Yes, yes, that's exactly right.
When someone is innocent and they are appear to be working too hard to show their innocence explicitly, sometimes we get the idea that they're not innocent because of that.
Yeah.
And this one is, this is a tough one because if someone accuses you of something and you proclaim your innocence, what do you think?
And like you said, right, what's your, what's your option?
Do you, if you just sit there, then they're like, oh, look, he's not defending himself.
He's guilty.
If you defend yourself too much, so there's this fine line, I guess, that you have to walk.
And it comes up in real life.
And it comes up a lot in games like Mafia and Werewolf or on TV shows that I frequently cover, like Traitors recently, other strategic social games like Survivor and Big Brother.
Like, you know, in mafia and werewolf and traitors, someone will, they'll just be going along, going along, and they, they're probably one of the good guys.
And then someone will accuse them and they'll be like, how could you accuse me?
And they'll get upset and they'll defend themselves.
They'll be like, see, see, that proves it.
There you go.
Yeah.
They're obviously the bad guy.
Right.
And so I actually saw a recent interview or heard a recent interview with someone from one of the traitors shows.
And yeah, that's what they were using while they were on the show.
It was like, oh, if this person suddenly started doing this, then we thought that they were one of the bad guys.
And it's like, no, you can't use that.
And I've had it happen to me in mafia games where, you know, you try to defend yourself and people are like, nope, see, the more you defend yourself, the worse it is.
Yeah, that's.
Well, that was part of the whole communist scare with McCarthyism was the more you protested against being a communist, the more he accused you of being communist because you protested, which is an obvious fallacy, right?
Right, right.
I don't think that, I mean, there's no real good way to determine from someone's reaction in that situation.
You know, we, it actually came up on Survivor as we're recording it, just the, well, it was in the second episode where someone had stolen something and another player was trying to figure out, okay, who stole it based on body language.
Except you can't really do that.
And he ended up picking the wrong person.
Now, it also so happens the person that he picked was the person he wanted to vote out.
So maybe it was coincidence.
Maybe he was already thinking that way.
But yeah, I mean, that's the thing about reading body language.
And I'm sure there are many people who, you know, proclaim their expertise in it, but it's not all that it's cracked up to be, just like reading the response of someone who's accused is not.
And it comes up, I watch a lot of murder mystery type shows, whether they're American, British, whatever.
And of course, even though those are, you know, dramas, not real life, you, you see the same thing.
You know, some cop will be like, oh, did you see the way the husband react?
He's clearly guilty.
And then another cop will say, well, different people react in different ways.
And so you all, I mean, it's a frequent interplay in these different shows.
Yeah.
And I think I like that you just veered us into the fictional because the next thing I like to compare this to is a concept in screenwriting.
Now, I've never dabbled in screenwriting, but I used to relentlessly watch the director's commentaries on DVDs.
I found them really interesting.
Not a lot of other people did, but I did.
So thank you for the time that we had them.
But when you have dialogue in a motion picture, movies are meant to show you a lot about what's going on by what's on the screen.
And a long time ago, we used to make movies where this was the case, where you had to really be like an active watcher of the program of the movie in order to understand everything that was going on, because so many little details were happening in the little moments.
And that was telling a lot of the story.
Whereas now, most plot lines are hammered in by the dialogue.
You can just listen to it as almost like a radio play, and it will tell you everything.
And when you have dialogue where a person is, one person is explaining to another person what is happening, that's a thing that they call exposition.
And it's considered to be by some poor screenwriting.
So once upon a time, I only ever watched one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
It was the first one, but I did watch all the director's commentary details and everything else.
And the screenwriter, I haven't been able to find a source that corroborated this anywhere because all the searches for Johnny Depp now only return things about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.
And this was 20 years ago.
Yeah.
But on the director's commentary, I remember distinctly that the screenwriter was talking about his experiences working with Johnny Depp.
And in my memory of that, Johnny Depp had written in his contract the right to not have any exposition in his lines, such that he had the power to go back to the screenwriter.
He'd get the, you know, the dialogue for what they were going to do the next day.
He had the ability to go to the screenwriter and demand that he rewrite the dialogue for individual scenes to remove the exposition from his lines only, which I thought was, to me, blew my mind.
I mean, I was like, wow, like that, you can just do that.
And he said, yeah, it was, it was incredibly frustrating.
And he tried to, the screenwriters explained that he would try to hide little bits of it in there, but he said, no, Johnny Depp was very clever.
He knew, he knew when that was happening.
He'd come back and say, no, no, no, right here.
You got to change this.
You got to change this.
And you'd have to rewrite the whole scene just to, you know, and it, and so you get, I mean, I've never re-watched the Pirates of the Caribbean movies since then.
But with that in mind, I would be interested to note, you know, because as I understood it, almost all the exposition then fell on Orlando Bloom's character, which must have been a real drag for him.
He had much less character development.
It just had to keep explaining to the audience and the other characters what's happening now, you know, like a narrator.
Yeah.
So what's your thought about this?
You deal with more screenwriting type things in your other podcast experience, probably, I would imagine, right?
All right.
Well, now I will start talking about what my thoughts are on exposition.
I will set up the situation for you.
Yeah.
And therefore, you will understand it.
No, but what's happening now is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I see this a lot or notice it the most in like the newest I particularly noticed it in CSI Vegas, which is the reboot of you know CN5.
Yeah.
Where you'll have two experts talking to each other and one will say to the other, well, the reason that we're able to get fingerprints off of this is because blah, This person standing next to you is just as much of an expert as you are.
You don't need to explain to them why it is, but they find these little ways to wedge it in there, as you said, to explain it to the audience.
Now, I think the best job of doing that, perhaps, was the original, the older versions of Doctor Who.
Oh, so in Doctor Who.
Well, you've only got like 50 years to catch up on, probably more.
So just dedicate like four years.
Yeah.
So the doctor was a time traveler and always the smartest person in the room.
And he, at that time, he more recently was a she for a few seasons, but he would always have a companion who was not as smart as him.
And therefore, he would explain to that companion what was going on.
What was really happening was he was explaining it to us as we're watching.
Right.
But that was why I remember reading this years and years ago.
That was why he always had to have a companion who wasn't as smart as he was.
Because if you had someone who was as smart as he was, it made it more difficult.
And from time to time, they would throw in a very intelligent companion, and they would have to change things around a little bit.
But of course, even if you had like a very intelligent companion, he was still literally from the race time lords, you know?
And so obviously they knew a bit more about just about everything than everyone else.
And so, but yeah, there was a lot of that exposition that was used to explain, you know, just what was going on, but not directing it to the audience.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the Sherlock Holmes Dr. Watson dynamic, right?
You have the very smart character, and then the other character that's explicitly in Sherlock Holmes books was meant to write the story of Sherlock Holmes.
And so was kind of writing everything down as a note-taker, sort of.
And yeah, that whole dynamic there has been, it's almost a trope now, right?
Of the smart character and the new character, and they're experiencing it and getting told what's going on and then telling us.
Right.
And the problem is in some of these CSI scenes, you don't have that.
I mean, they have one person who's a little newer or whatever, but yeah, it comes off much more awkward when you have two experts talking to each other and saying things.
They'll be like, well, as you know, it's like, well, as they know, then why are you telling them?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let me ask you this.
How does this link back to the explicit paradox?
Well, in exposition, you're being very explicit about what's happening.
And it sort of almost, I mean, when I watch a lot of these, it sort of takes me out of the moment.
That's why a lot of the media I watch now, I'm not that much of an active watcher anymore.
I don't need to be.
And trying to do it just bores me to death because it's just, they're just hammering away on the plot points so much.
Because I think maybe they think the audience is stupid.
I'm not sure what they're thinking.
I think that I think that it's, this is my own just thought right now.
I think it's the opposite.
I think that they know if you're watching TV, you may also be looking at your phone.
You may also be doing housework.
You may and the distraction factor.
Right.
And this is why I find it difficult to personally watch anything with subtitles.
There are people who have told me that there are, you know, some great movies and they're German and they're subtitled, but it's okay.
You'll love it.
No, I won't.
No, I won't because I find that I cannot sit and watch something with that much full attention where I have to literally read each and every word.
And sometimes I'll get caught.
I'll be watching a show and, you know, maybe it's a British show and they'll have some Russian show up and they'll keep them speaking in Russian.
And I'll be like, oh, wait, I have to put my phone down now and I have to actually pay attention to what's on the screen or else I'm not going to understand what's going on.
So I think they're doing it knowing that a lot of people are like that.
And now you're turning into that because of what they've done.
That's a deadly cycle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What a wonderful, what a strange and wonderful world we live in.
But yeah, it's to me, it's not necessarily the exact same, but I thought it was an interesting point of comparison, the idea that in explicit dialogue in our media, we are seeing something that's similar to that.
And that I notice something similar to that effect.
But I noticed another thing that I think I'll still hit on here.
We'll have time, I think, in this podcast is you're in charge.
If you determine we have time, we have time.
I noticed that I think in a sly way, much less like an explicit thing that makes it less true, but in a way that we're seeing this a lot happen in comedy, in that when you're seeing this explicit paradox in comedy, it's not a situation where a person is not socially aware or whatever of their insecurity and what they really like to get across.
It's much more like the thing that's meant to sort of subtly point towards the joke instead of hammering you with the joke.
So I was watching a college humor video the other day.
I think it had something to do with they have a series of videos of CEOs of companies that are meant to do warning videos or whatever, don't do this or don't do that, something stupid.
And I think they had one about the tide pods being eaten or whatever.
And they had this guy and he's on there and he's like, don't, don't eat the soap.
Don't eat the soap.
And he's reading the lines that they're preparing for him.
And they're all stupid, you know, like they're all things that are meant to make the soap sound delicious.
It's like, why, why are you writing this for me?
But he also had at one point, he had a box of soap.
He's like, this is what it should look like.
It shouldn't look like a candy.
And he's look at this.
And then it's a box and it has on there written on there, normal soap on the box.
And then he actually points it out.
He's like, and why did you make it like this?
Why did you have it say normal soap?
I know I asked for normal soap, but I didn't even mean the box to say normal soap.
And of course, no one sells normal soap.
Why would you sell normal soap?
But if you walked through a store and saw a box that said normal soap, what would you think about that?
You'd be like, that's weird.
Why not just soap?
Why not just call it soap?
Why do you have to try to make it more like just soap and call it normal soap?
Like I used to live in a city I used to live in.
This is kind of the reason why the example I had in my life that first made me thought about this idea.
A long, long time ago, I lived in Vancouver, Canada.
And where I lived was a restaurant just a few blocks from me.
There was a restaurant called the Super Good Deal Restaurant.
That was the name of the restaurant, Super Good Deal Restaurant.
I wish I'd taken a picture of it.
I don't think it exists anymore.
Deals were too good.
Yeah.
And it always struck me as funny to walk by and I'd see this name of this restaurant, the Super Good Deal Restaurant.
And I just shook my head every time.
And I thought to myself that to me, what I thought was happening, and I never was able to see for sure, but I think was happening was it was someone who'd come to Canada from another country and they got a little lost in the translations of what would be effective advertising and what wouldn't be based on what would have been effective in their country, maybe, and what was effective in Canada.
And so in the translation of what they thought would be a good restaurant name where they were from, they named it that here.
And that's what they came up with was the Super Good Deal Restaurant.
And I never did eat there.
I never went there.
I just didn't say they had good food.
They just was a good deal and everything.
And I was like, yeah, but I just, something about trying to hammer in the point about it being a good deal makes me think maybe it's not right.
And all of this leads me to another thought that I just had yesterday about all this is that, and this might, forgive me if this is a personal question for you, David.
Okay.
You've been on the internet for a very long time.
That is a personal question.
Well, that's not the question.
That's the segue to the question.
But have you ever had anyone attempt to catfish you?
Not to my knowledge.
Okay.
I mean, I've gotten a number of friend requests or so, not like a real attempt or anything like that.
Well, I mean, I think that eventually, you know, it would have been like, you know, on Instagram, you're, you know, these super busty.
Right.
You're young women who suddenly want to, you know, send me private messages.
Yeah, right.
And it's like, okay, the odds that you are real are about zero.
And even if you were, I'm not interested.
So, right.
But, you know, so yes, I guess probably that would be stage one of an attempted catfish.
And if I had responded, they would have gone from there.
Right.
They would have begun the conversation to right.
Yeah.
Since I just block and report that, you know, it doesn't go any further than that.
Right.
Yeah.
Um, I have had in my life a few different times where someone was attempting to, and maybe that's just my luck, bad luck.
I never did fall for any.
But I was going to say, you're so you're saying you're better looking than me?
Is that no?
I don't think that has anything to do with it.
Um, if anything, probably I, I mean, trying to put myself in the mindset of someone who's attempting to catfish someone, uh, they might try to pick someone who looks lonely more than anything else.
So if anything, maybe I looked lonely in whatever picture I had at the time.
Uh, a few of these were attempts that were made on Skype back when Skype was a thing.
But very often, I would notice what was wrong and what was wrong was happening because they were trying to make something they were trying too hard to make something pushed into the conversation or appear true or whatever it was.
And that to me sort of broke the barrier of the explicit paradox when they were trying to make something, you know, wedge something sideways into the conversation too hard or whatever, that brought my attention too much toward it and went, oh, that's weird.
Why would they just mention that in the blue or whatever it was?
Like that's, and then I would come to realize that, oh, this person is not really authentically who they say they are.
And that's what was sort of causing me to realize that someone was probably attempting to catfish me, which was usually a conclusion I came to after I sort of left the conversation and went moved on.
I'm like, oh, what do I think was going on there?
And it was just super weird.
And then I'm like, oh, maybe they were trying, you know, I'd heard about this thing.
Maybe they were trying that.
And so to me, that's a, it's almost like a difference between a person who's not good at grifting and a person who's maybe better at grifting is that a person who's better at grifting would avoid that.
I mean, in this way, I'm sort of teaching people to be better grifters.
Well, yeah.
And that's the thing within the, you know, the realm of the confidence man.
You know, conman stands for confidence.
And it's because they gained your confidence.
And it, and they did it in such a way that in some cases, it would actually be your idea to do something.
Like they wouldn't say, give me $10,000 to help my grandma.
They'd spend a certain amount of time becoming close to you and then start telling you about how they can't afford to help their grandma.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Until you seemingly came up with the idea yourself.
Now, these are still going on.
And there are some who can afford to spend the time on a long-term grift like that.
And you will see it.
There's still a lot of them, unfortunately, going on, usually international, usually targeting older, like you said, more lonely people.
And, you know, it's that exact type of scam, a sweetheart scam.
Right.
And, you know, you think, you, the victim, think you're helping this person who you've gotten to know and you believe you're in love with.
And suddenly something has happened and you, you need to help them.
And then the money just keeps building and building because once you started, it just keeps going from there.
Yeah.
But there's also, I think, another class in the internet now that were, you know, they just send out 10 million messages.
And it only takes one or two people.
I mean, it costs them nothing to send it out, you know, and say, you know, my boss is a Nigerian prince and he wants to, you know, give you his money.
It doesn't take much.
You know, the return on investment is almost infinite because if anyone responds, then you're good.
And so they can afford to be pushier in that regard to get it done quickly.
And then if it doesn't work, they just turn around and move on to the next person.
So I guess the criminal has to balance which type of criminal they want to be.
You know, do they want to hit lots of people quickly and see who they can hook?
Or do they want to slow play it in the hopes of a bigger payout down the line?
Yeah.
But the explicit paradox was, generally speaking, how I came to realize that something was amiss, was that something was attempting to be pushed too hard and it was inauthentic in that moment.
And it was, oh, okay, well, that's off.
That's not right there.
Right.
And this is my moment for a public service announcement, actually, because there is a new form of this catfishing scam.
Traditionally, the catfishing scam was to obviously pretend to be someone you're not.
In many cases, it was a beautiful younger woman who was interested in someone who's lonely, a man who's lonely, usually a man, not always, but usually.
And this is the sort of traditional catfish.
And that eventually along the way, the young damsel in distress would show the moment that they're in distress.
They need a certain thing.
They need some money to get them out of a jam.
And then that's how the money starts.
But the new version has a twist to it that's dangerous and will fall off a lot of the radar for a lot of people.
And that is that these catfishers are pretending to be independently wealthy and don't need your money, and that they're independently wealthy because they've made their money on cryptocurrency.
And then they say, oh, yeah, why do you work so much?
You can just make all your money on crypto.
It's fine.
Blah, blah, blah.
I just lay around the pool all day.
Look at me.
I'm hot and young and beautiful.
I do whatever the hell I want.
And that's for people who aren't very well educated on how crypto works.
By the way, those people are the target.
It can be very effective.
And then they direct them to the place where they use to make all their money, which is a website that is purporting to be an exchange for cryptocurrency.
And they teach them how to log in and do all the things they need to do to send the money to buy the crypto.
And then the website, the exchange, just makes claims about their investment.
And the claims are always that it's going up.
It's never going down.
And in some cases, they're not even following the actual value of the cryptocurrency that they're claiming to be.
And eventually you get to a point, they string you along even more, encourage you to invest more before it goes even higher or whatever they do.
And once a person wants to get their money out, then they claim that you have to pay the taxes first.
You have to pay in to pay the taxes before we can release these funds.
So it's a double scam.
And because it's not a damsel in distress, because it's not a person that's tugging at your heartstrings, it has a completely different, a completely different profile than most of the things that would set up a person's radar involving these scams.
So I don't normally do a lot of this public service announcement work.
So apologies to anyone if this seems out of place in this podcast, but I just felt that it was important to put out in every space because if anyone you knew was had ever fallen prey to this, they would be especially embarrassed and possibly way worse off by having had a lot of their money stolen.
So spread the word.
Yeah.
And, you know, I it is a newer version of a scam.
Yeah.
But as someone else once said, there is no new thing under the sun.
So it's a version of other scams.
You know, there were lottery scams years for years that have been similar.
Oh, you won this, you won the Nigerian lotto, the Russian lotto, whatever it is.
Yeah.
Maybe you don't even remember entering it, but you got a free entry for it because you bought something.
And now to collect your prizes, yeah, you have to pay the taxes on it.
Yeah.
And so it's just, yeah, using crypto is the hot new thing.
But anything like that is going to, you know, it all goes back to the same type of scam.
And yeah, the explicit paradox can come into effect when, I guess, when a scam is poorly done.
Yeah.
And they're good.
It's hard to detect.
When a screen writing is good, it's hard to tell how you came across knowing all the things, right?
Right, right.
And, but, but like you said, you were able to determine when something was a scam because of the, you know, they were basically saying, right.
But again, if, you know, not that we're here to give pointers, but if you're a good scammer, you're not that obvious.
And you get them to give you the money.
They say, oh, is there any, you know, you know, the crypto went down.
Yeah.
And so I, you know, and then the person, well, I've heard you should buy on the dips.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
This would be a good time for you to deposit another $20,000.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, and it just keeps going from there.
If, you know, for the people who are good scammers, they avoid this.
They're not going to say, look at how great I am.
They're going to definitely, you know, kind of pull back in that regard and let you say it to them.
Yeah.
I mean, like I said, it's, it's like we're teaching grifters how to grift better, but the knowledge that would make a person a better grifter in other hands would protect people against those grifts.
Yes.
And believe me, they already know how to grift.
Yeah.
They're not listening to this podcast for pointers.
No, no, it's also not in the show notes to advertise it either.
Well, maybe it should be more listeners, you know.
Yeah, yeah, every listener will count.
Every list of their accounts.
Yeah, that's right.
Bernie Madoff listened to my podcast back in the day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Look how good he was at this thing.
Oh, man.
Okay.
Well, I think I've exhausted all the material I have for this.
All right.
And on that, we'll leave it a high note.
All right.
Sounds good.
Until next time, David.
Bye.
Okay.
All right.
Addendum to the episode.
We are back a couple of days after the first little bit that we recorded.
And as happens sometimes with the topics we have, is that something happens that we experience in our lives that reminds us of a thing we just talked about.
And it's kind of strange.
And I kind of like doing this right now.
I mean, we've never done this before, but I kind of like doing this because that's what I want to do.
I mean, I want these concepts to people to listen to them and then compare them with their own experiences to see whether I'm out to lunch, whether it's not really a thing, or if it's something you experience.
I mean, I, you know, so this is an instance where a real experience happened that reminded David at least of things we talked about.
So we're just going to add this on to the end of the episode and away we go.
So tell us about it, David.
So actually, yeah, there were two things.
There was one literally hours after you and I recorded, and something came through on Twitter about a PAC, that's a political action committee.
It's actually a super PAC in this case that was being charged or there were complaints filed against it for violating election rules.
And the name of this PAC is People Who Play by the Rules.
And so going by, you know, what you said about the explicit paradox, you see the name and it makes you immediately wonder: like, do they, if you have to call yourselves people who play by the rules, do you really play by the rules?
One might wonder if they picked the name on purpose to make it make people think that you don't need to check us.
We're playing by the rules.
Yeah, I mean, it's a typical Republican tactic to call yourself something, you know, great.
Like you, you say you're fighting for liberty when you're actually fighting to take it away, that sort of thing.
Right.
Yeah.
And in this case, so people who play by the rules is a mostly, if not solely, Illinois super PAC.
It's run by a guy named Dan Proft.
And Dan Proft is a Chicago radio host, political operative, and failed conservative governor candidate.
And this PAC is primarily funded by Richard Uline.
I think I pronounced that right, who the Chicago Tribune described as an ultra-conservative billionaire mega donor.
And this guy dumped tens and tens of millions of dollars into the campaign of the failed Republican candidate for Illinois governor, or rather into this PAC, which advocated for the failed Republican candidate, who was super far right.
Right.
Now, the Illinois Democratic Party has filed several complaints with the State Board of Elections.
The one that drew, I was going to say my attention, but it actually drew both of our attention because I had retweeted or quote tweeted this, and you jumped in and said, Oh, if only we had seen this.
And then you realized that in a later tweet, I tagged you and said, If only we had seen this.
But yeah, the latest one alleged that Dan Proft failed to disclose a small amount of contribution to the PAC, $1.2 million.
Yeah.
I mean, he could fail to disclose that into my checkbook and be fine.
And for a small amount, he did.
There are no laws against that.
In addition, he could even do it in Canadian funds.
It would save him a lot of money.
Yeah.
So the State Board of Elections also, in February, took the first step to probe whether the PAC illegally colluded with the Republican candidate.
So I guess the way they do it, there was a hearing examiner who looked into it, and the hearing examiner found that justifiable grounds existed with some basis in fact to believe it happened.
And the state board agreed with what the hearing examiner said.
And the reason this is a problem is Illinois state law bans super PACs from working in cooperation, consultation, or concert with any candidate or authorized committee or agent of such committee.
So, you know, I have to figure that PACs are always working with the candidates with just a wink and a nod.
But I guess there were like allegedly a bunch of text messages to support it this time.
And so they were already investigating that.
This PAC also has done other things, like just before the election, a different major Chicago newspaper accused them of distributing signs and leaflets attempting to keep black voters from the polls.
Oh, classic.
Yes, the guy I mentioned, Dan Proft, he created fake newspapers that were mailed out across Illinois.
I got at least one or two of these myself.
And they were actually campaign ads, but they were made to look like little local newspapers.
And within them, they'd had articles attacking the Democratic governor, his family, even falsely claiming photo.
There were photos of the governor's high school age daughter when they weren't even her.
And the papers were accused of publishing incendiary racist stories about accused criminals who would supposedly be released into suburban communities.
The paper also printed a false claim by a state's attorney who claimed that the reforms in an act that was passed would bring, quote, the end of days.
Wow.
So like it got so bad that the Illinois Press Association had to come out and say, look, this is not a member.
This company's paper are not actually news.
Don't come to us with this.
These, you know, now are sending newspapers that are actually ads against the rules.
Well, I guess technically not, but I wouldn't exactly call it playing by the rules.
And just to cap it off, I saw this.
The associate editor of the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, Journal of Regulatory Compliance, went so far as to say in an editorial, Richard Ulin is a wannabe oligarch enabled by political operatives such as Dan Proft, seeking to expand the influence of billionaires in politics, reflecting the undemocratic political structures of autocracies like Russia.
So, yeah, needless to say, by naming it people who play by the rules, they have pretty much acted absolutely opposite to that and fall directly into the way you have described the explicit paradox.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's almost like you'd see that title and be like, let's audit this one.
Yeah.
Why wouldn't you at this point?
You see, like, oh, they're obviously trying to really express strongly that they're playing by the rules.
And that's the only evidence we have of that.
Why don't we check that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So what was the second instance that you were?
So the second instance is related to the Streisand effect.
Yeah.
And really was a perfect example of it and happened, you know, a couple days after we recorded.
So what happened was there was, without going into too much deal, there was a big blow up in the survivor community, the survivor fan community.
And, you know, I've mentioned before, I do a survivor podcast.
And so I posted some political views related to this blowup.
Was actually fairly mild.
But one person who apparently has been a longtime listener to my survivor podcast responded to me and said, You shouldn't be speaking your political views.
You're a survivor podcaster and you're hurting the brand and tagged the overall podcast because my podcast is part of a much larger network.
Yeah.
Right.
And so I pointed out to this person that my podcast, that other podcast, is completely non-political.
And my, you know, Twitter account is my own.
And it has one has nothing to do with the other.
I can say what I want and I'm not going to stop saying it just for that reason.
Well, he didn't like that.
So after a couple more back and forth in which he did things like accusing me of basically, you know, not being very smart and saying I didn't know what I was talking about.
And so then I pointed him to sources and also used his own logic against him.
And rather than responding to any of that, he went back and basically tattled again, going to the Twitter address of the podcast overall, tagging other people and like my podcast partner as well, and saying, you know, David Bloomberg is harming you by doing these things.
He's attacked me.
He's called me names, all these things.
Now, mind you, everything that I said was public and, you know, available.
But on Twitter, for those who may not know, if I'm talking to someone, if I'm replying to someone, you only see it if you follow both of us.
Yeah.
Unless you make a specific effort to go into all my posts and replies.
Yeah.
So a relatively few people saw my responses to him showing that he was wrong.
Very few, I would think, because I don't think very many people follow him.
He has a minimal Twitter appearance.
Not that there's anything wrong with his profile.
Right.
He's much smaller than you in those terms and in intelligence, I would say.
But when he started tagging all these other people and I started responding, well, that meant a lot more people could see.
Yeah.
Because a lot more people who follow me also follow my podcast partner, also follow the network overall.
And so these people suddenly see posts from me, tweets from me, and they're like, what's going on here?
We should look into it.
And so they follow it.
They look at what he said.
They look at what I've said.
They go back to the previous tweets.
And basically, it comes down 100% against him.
So he has drawn attention to himself.
Yeah.
And suddenly he has people from all over replying to him, questioning him, telling him he's wrong, telling him that I'm right to the point that he went back, deleted most of his old tweets and slinked away.
Right.
In an effort to essentially bully you into silence, he completely backfired and drew way more attention to.
Right.
Well, that's the strong aspect.
Yeah, exactly.
Drew all this negative attention to himself that he never would have had if he would have just kept it between me and him or better yet, just shut up.
Don't tell people that they're not allowed to speak their mind, you know, on their own thing.
He knows that you don't work for the show, right?
I mean, I work for them and that I do a podcast on their network.
Oh, well, you do other podcasts for the RHAP network, but you don't work for the survivor show.
Right.
Yeah.
And he didn't tag survivor.
He tagged the podcast network.
And there have been instances where, you know, one or two podcasters in the past have said or done things and are no longer podcasting.
But the things that they said or did were not just having a different political opinion.
And the other thing is, the really funny thing is, I wasn't the only podcaster talking about this.
Right.
Like a lot of them were.
So why he picked me, I don't know.
Maybe he doesn't listen or didn't listen to the other ones.
He claims he's not going to listen to mine anymore.
Fine, whatever.
But the funniest part was him thinking that this network, filled with people who tend to skew towards the more liberal side of things, would get mad at me for saying something pro-liberal.
And it's not even pro-liberal.
It's pro-human rights.
It's what it was.
Yeah.
Right.
And so, like, yeah.
Like the, you know, like the podcast network is going to say, no, David, you're not allowed to say that.
When so many other people were saying that.
Yeah.
And so it was, it was just such a strange move on his part.
That, like I said, he somehow got it into his head.
And you are a witness to some of this, I think.
He got it into his head that he was going to one-up me and he was going to, you know, that people were just going to take his word for it that I was attacking him.
And it's like, just look at the tweets.
I, there's nothing that I said that could have been possibly construed as an attack.
Yeah, it's, it's very strange.
I mean, I, I think there's a, a similar thing that has happened at some points with comedians who have said political things.
Like I remember this happening, this sort of thing happening to Jon Stewart once or twice when he still was on the daily show, where, I mean, there was the particular moment, I don't know if you paid any attention to the daily show or Jon Stewart or any of that, but there was a moment that I remember distinctly in history, and it's talked about a lot, where he went on a little show on CNN called Crossfire and he essentially stared down both of the people that at the time, it was Tucker Carlson and Paul McGala.
And he just told them flat out that they were hurting America with their show and the way they were doing it and what they were doing.
And it was, it was a stark difference from everything else that he was doing because everything else, I mean, he's on, he's on the Comedy Central.
He's on this comedy program and he does news type things and he does it in a comedic way.
And a bunch of people were like, oh, blah, blah, you should just stick to comedy and blah, blah, blah.
And I was like, well, he's a person.
Yeah.
He lives in this world that is affected by the politics.
Right.
So where are we in society if we say that because his job is to do comedy, that he's then somehow not allowed to ever have a political opinion that is non-comedic, right?
And the same thing here.
Why is it that we think that you should not have a real opinion about what in this case, human rights, humanist perception, just because you are fairly well known for doing a program about reality TV?
Like, the reality TV program is about humans, right?
Like, why is it so far removed?
Why is it that you're not allowed to have these opinions?
That seems very strange.
Right.
And in this particular case, it was actually about what a previous winner did because he is now a state representative and he voted for and helped pass a frankly disgusting law.
And so, yeah, I mean, it was all related.
But the other thing is, you know, and I never, if this person had wanted to actually discuss logically things, I would have pointed out to him that I've been discussing politics online for 35 years.
It's not your first story in this, yeah.
Yeah, far longer than Twitter's been around, longer than the web has been around.
I've been discussing it back when computers were connected to each other by modems and it took messages days to travel to each other on what was known as Fidonet.
Bulletins and whatnot.
Yeah.
And as a matter of fact, I was the moderator of the politics group in Fidonet.
But, you know, the thing is, it doesn't matter.
I mean, he's not the first person to tell me I should keep my political opinions to myself and just talk about reality TV.
You know, some people, I mean, most people who find me on Twitter find me because of reality TV.
And I think that the reason that I don't have as many Twitter followers as some other reality TV people is that I use it for other things too.
I talk about reality TV.
I talk about science.
I talk about politics.
I talk about all these different things in one account.
And so some people get offended and leave.
And it's, you know, they don't want to hear their views challenged.
They just want to know about survivor.
Yeah, well, too bad.
Maybe if you stick around, you'll learn something, but they don't want that.
And he clearly did not want that.
It wasn't a matter just that he said he didn't want it.
That was the thing.
He later came back and said, well, David's not open to having a discussion or hearing my view.
And I pointed out you didn't offer your view.
You just told me to shut up.
Yeah.
It wasn't about displaying his view.
It was about silencing yours.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I mean, I know some podcasters have split their accounts.
They have one for discussing other things and one for discussing reality TV.
That must get complicated.
Yeah.
And I figure if you know, I don't know that you and I would have met if it hadn't been for the mixing on my Twitter account.
Yeah.
I probably wouldn't have asked you to come on here because that one of the reasons why I did ask you was because I noticed that you were not shy to talk about some of the political stuff that you were interested in, right?
I mean, that was what I wanted was someone who was, you know, not shy about that stuff, right?
So, you know, and I, I mean, frankly, I was a little surprised when you were like, yeah, absolutely.
And I was like, oh, I thought that might take more convincing, but okay, well, let's do this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To wrap this up, I have one more thing that it was so obvious.
It's one of those things that was so obvious.
I, you know, it's almost too obvious to point out.
It's, it's almost like the meta of the meta here.
But as an addendum to the explicit paradox, the idea that when you're trying to get one particular property across in a conversation or whatever, that you might hit on the point too hard.
And then the audience might think that you're going the opposite way.
For some reason, it didn't occur to me that that is exactly what was happening with a certain word.
And well, actually, a group of words that all have similar meanings that caused me to name my podcast what I called it.
Ah, I insisted on using the word true or truth in the podcast name because on the internet, everywhere I saw a word meaning true or truth, it was becoming increasingly obvious that they were trying very hard to show something that wasn't true and disguise it as the truth.
Kind of like the 9-11 truthers or the moon, the flat earth truthers.
Oh, truthers, all the truthers, right?
Yeah, but I mean, you also have Project Veritas, you have True the Vote, you have Truth Social, right?
That was the social media app, right?
And it was obvious to me that they're trying very hard to display that they're telling the truth, but that's not what they're up to at all.
They just want you to think that.
And because they're trying so hard to hit that button as often as possible, it becomes obvious to me that they're not in any way.
Like, you know, I get less the feeling that they're doing that.
And so I feel that if we use the word truth and true in this way and we allow it to be used in that way, it will lose all of its meaning.
What would a world be like if we couldn't rely on just using the word true and truth to mean the actual truth, right?
We have to have this whole whole separate meaning, a whole other context that's the opposite of its current meaning.
Like, so we kind of like the word, the word literal now means figurative.
Yeah, it literally means, yeah, yeah, yeah, written down.
And yeah, yeah.
Right.
So does that mean that this podcast isn't truth or isn't unrestricted?
No.
It's okay.
All right.
Well, you're showing that you can use those words and mean them.
Yeah, that is what I'm trying to do with this greater part of this project.
Yes, is that you can just be talking the truth.
And the truth is messy and dirty sometimes, and you might not get it right the first time.
And so, speaking of which, if anyone out there thinks we didn't get any of this right, send that email and exactly what we got wrong to truthunrestricted at gmail.com or check it out on Twitter.
I think you mentioned yours earlier in the episode.
If anyone, well, I was going to say, if anyone wants to go back and look at the guy I was talking about, you can check out my Twitter, but you can at least see my responses because he deleted most of his.
But I'm at David Bloomberg.
I did keep, I had a feeling.
Sometimes you get into discussions with people and you just know.
So I screenshot, I took screenshots of most of what he had said.
Right.
But since he just slinked away rather than trying to claim other things, I haven't posted them.
Why bother?
You know, there's just no point.
I mean, there was a literal 100% backlash against him.
And so it's like, I don't need to be the dead horse here.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, I think we'll sign this off and close this time.