Spencer and David Bloomberg dissect fandom’s paradoxes, from reality TV’s curated personas—like a NASA engineer feigning ignorance on Survivor—to backlash against contestants whose off-screen politics (e.g., QAnon support, anti-LGBTQ+ votes) clash with fan expectations. They debate whether deeper celebrity knowledge, even flawed, risks distorting reality, citing John Hinckley Jr.’s obsession with Jodie Foster or a Survivor player’s deleted Trump conspiracy tweets. The episode questions fandom’s illusion of intimacy, where screen familiarity replaces truth, and challenges its elevation myth, urging listeners to weigh its impact at truthunrestricted@gmail.com while navigating their own platform dilemmas. [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.
And I'm back again today with David Bloomberg.
How you doing, David?
Good, good.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm good.
I was away for a while and I'm back.
I didn't attempt to do any podcast episodes while I was really, really busy because I felt it would just be just a poor effort.
So I decided to wait until I was less busy.
Now I can come back with the regular sort of schedule, if I can call it that.
Sort of every Sunday.
Usually every two out of every three Sundays, I have an episode.
Well, all your fans were missing you.
All my fans, all my fans.
Yeah.
Well, we'll see if I still have fans.
No sign of them yet, really, but that's okay.
Today we are going to talk about fandom, like the state of being a fan.
Oh, not a not a dumb fan.
Fandom.
Fandom, not a dumb fandom.
Okay.
Fandom.
Yeah.
And this isn't a pitch for anyone to become a fan of this particular podcast.
You still make your own choices.
This is mostly about helping people make better choices, really, more than anything else.
But when I think about this, like I, these episodes, people will take an episode like fandom and they'll just kind of think about it.
And most people just think, well, what are you possibly going to talk about?
So I will like sit and think on this, usually when I'm driving, and I'll kind of come up with different aspects of it and I'll write them all down.
And this is more or less what I came up with.
So we are in our current incarnation humans that have evolved over time as social creatures.
In other words, we're meant to talk to others of our own kind, however we determine that, and work with them to exist in our world.
We've done this for so long now.
And all of our closest animal relatives are also social creatures.
They're right down the line.
Nearly all mammals are social creatures as an animal kingdom, I think is the biological separation there.
Mammals are a kingdom.
And so when I think about that, I think about the fact that for probably you can think of it as the amount of time we've been speaking in language, and that must have been a couple million years, two to three-ish is what they think at the current moment.
And then more so as we spoke more, we are accustomed to speaking face to face, to looking at someone and talking to them, and maybe just listening to people.
But the communication is more strongly landing when you can look at someone, when you look into their face, look into their eyes, and they speak to you and you speak to them.
And that's an aspect of this that I want to start with.
Because when I look at, you know, mass media has only really been around for about 100 years or so.
Radio started about 120 years ago.
didn't become really popular until, I don't know, the 1920s, sometime after World War I.
So about 100 years, television started, you know, World War II kind of timeframe and became much more popular after that.
And that's when we were seeing the things, not just listening to them.
And that's when this whole thing became distorted.
So that's only been a couple generations, not nearly enough. on an evolutionary time scale to do anything.
And certainly there's been so many other weird factors in there that it's not, you know, there's not one thing that's going to change the thing.
But so most of our evolution has been social relationships, looking face-to-face at someone while they're relaying information to you.
And then suddenly we have this change, which is still people looking, you know, you're looking at a person while they're relaying information to you, but they don't know you at all.
This is a unidirectional relationship.
So it breaks contact in this way somehow.
So I want to start there with this.
And I just throw this idea at you, David, and just see what you think right off the top of my take on this, that starting with the social evolution.
Well, I guess, I mean, I agree with what you said.
And yeah, I mean, it makes sense that over all the time that we have evolved, you know, face-to-face for the vast majority of that time was the only way to communicate.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, sure, you know, at one point there were, you know, written letters and eventually, you know, going from there.
But for a very long time, face-to-face was literally the only way to communicate.
And even today, you will still see issues with people who are communicating not face-to-face.
I mean, how many of us at work or, you know, not at work have gotten an email and you read it and you're like, I don't know if they're serious or joking.
Yeah.
You know, and there's no way to tell.
Is that sarcasm?
Is it not sarcasm?
I mean, I think that emojis, you know, were invented in large part because of that.
I mean, I come from the day where you would add a colon dash parenthesis to, you know, add your smiley face and to show I'm joking.
And for a while, you know, it was even there were some people who looked down on that and said, well, if you can't convey your emotions without that, then you're just a poor writer.
But now, you know, those people are very few and far between.
But so, yeah, and then you go on to other, you know, social media where you have, in many cases, fewer characters or something like that, and you don't even know the person.
And it's like, is this person joking or not?
Is this a parody?
Is this person serious?
There are some accounts on Twitter.
I still don't know if they're serious or not.
I have looked at them over and over again.
I still can't tell.
And, you know, I mean, maybe they are parodies and they're just such good ones that that's the outcome.
But there are other people who are essentially self-parodies and they don't realize that they look ridiculous.
But to bring it back to, you know, the communication aspect of things, yeah, without having that face-to-face, without seeing the person, you just often, often can't tell about them.
And I think that, you know, that continues into probably where you're going next, which is it's even worse if it's, like you said, the unidirectional.
We see someone on a screen.
We only see that small portion of them.
Yeah.
And I, you know, I want to wrangle this in quickly toward actual fandom because I don't want to get too far off track.
We would never do that.
It never happened on this podcast.
So when I think about this one directional social interaction, I mean, already it's not an interaction, not in a traditional sense.
And that's, that's the point.
It's mimicking an interaction.
It's making the people who are viewing feel as though they're part of a conversation that they're not really a part of.
And so when you see people, like let's imagine, let's try to imagine a world where we didn't know anything about any of the people that appeared on screen.
There was only movies and TV shows, and there was no interviews or any additional information about any of them.
You know, we might ask, would anyone become a fan of any of the people that are appearing on screen if we didn't interview them and know anything about their lives?
I think right away, when I ask myself this question, I think, well, I think we would, because some people, first of all, not to make this too shallow, but some people are more attractive than others.
You know, and I use the Audrey Hepburn example.
If we saw a series of movies from the 40s and 50s and some of them had Audrey Hepburn in them, some portion of us might very well think to ourselves, I'd like to see more of the movies that have that person in them because she's just so beautiful, you know, and she plays different characters in each one.
And I don't really care which character she plays.
I just like that she's more beautiful than the other characters.
And that's just the reaction I have when I see Audrey Hepburn.
And I think it's a reaction that a lot of people had when they saw Audrey Hepburn.
She was a beautiful woman.
And some people have said that, even have said that she was the most beautiful woman.
I'm not sure I'd go quite that far myself, but I think she was a very beautiful woman.
And I think it does create in me anyway and a desire to say that, you know, at some point, I might have considered myself a fan of Audrey Hepburn.
I think she died before I ever even really knew who she was, really.
But that doesn't really matter.
So already we get, you know, this idea, like you don't, you probably don't think of yourself as a fan of any of the people who read you the news.
But if you preferred to have the news read to you by some people versus others, then that kind of skews that and kind of tells the tale, doesn't it?
That you, you know, you, if you prefer one, you're kind of more like a fan of them, right?
What do you think of this?
Yeah, I mean, I think in the older days, there, you know, people were a fan of Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, you know, Tom Brokaw.
Now, they were more than just, I think, news readers back in those days.
They were producers and they were.
Yeah, they were more involved in the news as opposed to just reading whatever was put on the screen in front of them.
But yeah, I think that there were fans of that.
And, you know, I think that there were certainly fans of movies in the early days before we had the vast access to knowledge about people when the studios could control what you knew about someone.
Yeah.
You know, and fully controlled it.
So if someone was known, some, you know, some woman was known to play the role of the innocent in lots of movies.
Well, they made sure you didn't find out about the fact that she was dating multiple people in real life.
Right.
If someone was the manly gunslinger in movies, they found out or they made sure you didn't find out that he was gay.
Rock Hudson.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the Rock Hudson effect right there.
They carefully tailored everything that could be known about him, even though he didn't seem to even work that hard at disguising the fact that he was gay.
But they could tailor that back then.
There wasn't the additional, you know, people factor of everyone having access to nearly everything that's available.
Right.
Yeah.
And so you're right that fandom as a concept, I think it gets bigger when we can peek behind that curtain, when you can interview, like in addition to having the movies with Audrey Hepburn, if you can also interview her and ask her questions about her life and make, you know, give the audience the illusion that they know her.
And that it's still an illusion that they know her.
Oh, yeah.
It was an illusion that we knew anything about Rock Hudson, really, too.
Right.
Right.
And it's, yeah, it's an illusion even to, you know, you move up to more modern day actors.
You know, I mean, we have found out the hard way that many actors aren't who they appeared to be.
You know, Mel Gibson.
Yeah.
You know, if he hadn't gone on some drunken tirades, we probably would view him a lot differently and certainly in a better light.
Damn, Mel, keep it together.
Yeah.
And I mean, even in the past, you know, few years, there have been a number of actors and actresses who, you know, I had good opinions of, not based on anything I knew about them in reality, but just because I liked the characters they played or the way they played them.
And then they would come out and, you know, in favor of Trump or as COVID deniers or anti-vaxxers or whatever.
And it's just like, wow, I really never want to see you again because now I have this in my head every time, you know, you're on my screen.
Yeah, the taking on of political motives for many of these is a thing that's done more and more.
It didn't used to be.
I remember being younger in high school and knowing, you know, being a fan of several rock and roll bands, for example.
And every once in a while, someone would say something bad about someone that I, whose music I enjoyed.
And I would just tell them, I don't hang out with them.
Like, I just listen to their music.
Their music doesn't make me more like them.
And, you know, the extreme in the 80s and 90s was that some of these artists were said to be Satanists or whatever.
That was a part of the Satanic Panic was kind of happening in a lot of places.
And I would listen to artists and I would, it never made me feel like I was more satanic.
Well, you weren't listening to them backwards.
That's why.
Well, yeah.
But I point out that I don't think anyone else was either.
So it's a really weird thing to say.
Oh, if you listen to it backwards, like, oh, did you try that?
Yeah.
How did you do that?
How did you listen to it backwards?
Yeah.
And so, you know, I would listen to, oh, yeah, Axel Rose is terrible.
He trashed a hotel room and he ended a concert early and he said bad things about Metallica or whatever.
And I'm like, I don't care because I'm not Metallica.
So I don't care if he said bad words about, you know, like I don't hang out with him on the weekends.
You know what I mean?
Like, like what he does on his spare time doesn't bother me.
I just listen to the music and that's it.
But now this isn't the kind of discourse we have about artists now.
Now it's more about whether or not they really, whether or not they are taking on the right political goals in some in a lot of cases.
And it almost becomes a vote for that political thing.
And it's, and it's a way, it's a way that politics has kind of invaded fandom in general.
And how we got there is this incredible, complicated mishmash of cancel culture and politics really transmitting from every spot and every political engineer in the world trying to get, you know, a bigger volume coming out from their point of view, right?
If they can find an artist who will say that gun control is terrible, they're going to try to put the microphone in front of them and get them to say that, right?
I mean, so yeah, I mean, I would, I would, I think I'd argue that somewhat because there are a lot of us who don't want to, I mean, by if I have already purchased, and I know that, you know, this is obviously a sign of two older people talking here when we talk about CD music.
Yeah.
But if I've already purchased, you know, the CD and given the money to the band.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, then I find out that they, you know, have some view that I don't like.
Well, it's too late.
I've already given them my money.
I can listen or not listen.
But if I find out, you know, and it's the same way with actors.
If I find out that you have a certain view that I don't like, I don't want to give you money.
I don't want to give Tom Cruise money because it's just going to go to his cult.
No.
You know, I don't want to give Mel Gibson money.
Did I enjoy, you know, the movies he was in before?
Yes, I did.
But I don't want to give him any more money.
I don't want to give certain bands or musicians or et cetera money.
I don't want to give certain restaurants or stores money.
I don't think it's cancel culture.
It's consequences.
Well, yeah, but that's that's it's not really cancel culture, but it's it's this idea that there, you're right, that there are consequences, capitalistic consequences for what's happening.
And that that has stemmed like the first examples of people trying to do that were from cancel culture, was from the idea that if you participate in an artist's work, you are giving them greater clout and money to silence voices of dissent.
And that's, that's wrong, right?
I mean, that the most extreme examples were, of course, Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.
And I mean, Bill Cosby, we know now, had multiple PR firms that were whose entire job for him was to find people, radio hosts, even like individuals who were in any way connected to any media that was ever badmouthing him and then silence them.
That was their entire job.
And we didn't know that, you know, how would we know that?
It's, you know, as fans of Bill Cosby, which I was once upon a time.
Right.
Yeah.
How would I possibly know that?
Right.
But knowing that now, you know, this is, I realize I have to make a different choice in relation to the work of Bill Cosby, right?
It doesn't matter whether I enjoyed it once upon a time or was a fan of his.
I have to not be now.
Yeah.
Haven't been for some time.
Right.
That's not a decision I can't do this week.
Just in case anyone was wondering, that was late to the table here.
Just a little.
Just a little late.
Yeah.
A little late to the Bill Cosby train.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, you know, we have a lot more, you know, fans have a lot more access to that information now.
And some in the entertainment field manage to stay completely apolitical.
You know, they just, they just avoid it like the plague.
Some don't.
You know, I was reading just earlier this week, and I don't know who it was because I don't know the names of female country singers, but one did a show in Tennessee and spoke out against the recent anti-trans laws that they've passed.
And I'm thinking you're at a country western show in Tennessee, not usually the most receptive if I'm going to be a little bit, what's the word here, cliche, you know, but she felt strongly enough that, you know, she was speaking out against it.
And good for her.
There have been other country stars who have done that in the past.
And sometimes their audience and radio stations and others really hate them for it.
Yes, that's yes, that's who I was just going to say.
The Dixie Chicks were among the earlier ones.
And so, you know, it's, it's difficult, but they, you know, they speak out and they say what's important to them.
And I know that, you know, we're probably going to get to, you know, this in a little bit, but, you know, I am by no means an entertainer of that level, but I have a survivor podcast and I have a Twitter following.
It's not a huge Twitter following.
Many people would say it's not even a big Twitter following.
But I will talk about Survivor and Big Brother and reality TV there.
But I will also talk about politics and science and pseudoscience and other things like that there.
And for that reason, I have a smaller Twitter following than some other people who do survivor podcasting, who either split off their views into different accounts or, you know, don't aren't as vocal.
And although there are some who are like me, you know, vocal and have, you know, as many or more.
So it really just depends.
But the point is, I have had people say to me before, you're just a survivor guy.
You should shut up about gun control or about vaccines or about Republicans or whatever.
And it's like, no, screw you.
You know, it's, you know, this is my Twitter account.
I'm going to say what I say.
And it, you know, predated my survivor podcasting.
It did not predate my survivor writing.
But, you know, these people were to some extent fans of my podcast.
And on my podcast, I never discussed those things because we're just talking about survivor.
Yeah.
And they thought that they go to my Twitter account and see the same thing and then got upset and decided that they could tell me what to talk about.
And so, you know, I, to a very small percentage compared to, you know, like, you know, real entertainers, I have seen some of that myself.
Yeah.
So I have this.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but I've done some reading on the basics.
And I have this.
I was going to say you stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Not last night, but I have before.
But one of the basic concepts in neuroscience is the idea that everything in your mind is a model.
And all the people that you feel that you know are also just models of those people that are inside your brain.
And I beat this drum a little bit.
It's not really a drum.
I shouldn't say that.
I mention this a fair amount because it's an idea that intrigues me.
And when I apply it to all sorts of things, it helps me to understand them in a lot of ways.
So when as an audience member, you are watching a person who is charismatic on the screen.
They're probably attractive.
They engage in a certain way.
Maybe it's maybe I'm a teenager still and it was Arnold Schwarzenegger.
And I, you know, for various reasons, I, you know, identified with a lot of the characters he played for whatever those reasons are.
Because you were big, muscly.
You were big and muscly when you were in the world.
Or maybe I wanted to be, right?
You know, as a teenager, skinny little teeny, I'm like, oh, how great would that be, right?
But I was a fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger at that time in the 90s.
And I was able to create a model of Arnold Schwarzenegger in my brain.
I didn't think that at the time.
Looking back, I realize I was doing it now.
But because it's possible to have a model of someone in your brain, it's also possible to create imaginary scenarios in which that person appears.
I have no idea how often other people do this.
So I might be exposing myself here.
But I create essentially conversations with other people in my brain all the time.
It's how I kind of imagine, you know, I come up with notes for this podcast, and this is one of the things I do when I'm trying to do this.
I try to imagine what a conversation about it might be like and then put those things down.
It's obviously the model I have of each person is wrong, as everyone's model of everyone else is not accurate.
So I can't fully predict all the things you're going to say, David.
I'm sorry.
I can't.
It's not possible.
Or ESP isn't working.
Well, that's because it doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist.
Yeah, that's right.
But having that model is part of how we do predictions about what other people are going to do and say and everything else.
I mean, that's an essential part of our mind and our brain.
And pretty much everyone has this.
Even the people we consider to be not smart still have this.
But that ability to imagine those scenarios, that's essentially the building blocks of pure fantasy.
And you can come up with all kinds of fantasy scenarios in which those famous people appear.
And by the way, you know, those people get no creative license over how you use them and your models.
Sorry, just how that works.
If you want to kill them, if you want to have sex with them, if you, you know, that's just how it goes.
They don't get any say in how that works.
Some of them might like to, but it doesn't work that way.
I think that this fandom as it appears now, where we have a much greater ability to see people who we want to be look up to or be fans of and much greater ability to know more about them.
It creates, again, an illusion in our minds that we know that we have a better model of them, that we know more about them, that we can create better fantasies and include them.
And I think that's a new distortion in our sort of social space that, you know, the more of this mass media we have and the more ability we have to learn these things about people and all the little tidbits all add up, you know, the better our ability to, in our own minds, even distort reality and engage on that fan level.
It's good as a fan, but I don't know that it's good for us as people.
And that's kind of one of the central questions I have about this thing here today is that, what do you think of this idea that being able to get more of this information and create a better model and feel like we know them more when we don't, is that a problem for us as humans?
What's your thought?
I don't think it's a problem.
I think it's just something that is.
You know, it's kind of like if you do think it's a problem, it's kind of like, you know, old man yelling at clouds situation.
At this point, this is the way the situation is.
I personally prefer to have more information over ignorance.
You know, I know ignorance is bliss, but, you know, if there's a movie star who is funneling money to a cult, I kind of want to know that so that I don't give them more money for their cult.
If there's someone on Survivor who's a racist bigot, but comes across on screen as being a likable, rootable character, I kind of want to know so that I don't root for them and perpetuate what's going on behind the scenes.
Okay.
Those are situations where you're learning more to avoid supporting a person who's unlikable to you.
What about scenarios where you learn more about them and you just like them more?
Like you like you aren't potentially, but what I'm thinking here is that in the same way that, for example, a proliferation of guns will inevitably end with more guns in the hands of the wrong people,
a proliferation of information about celebrities will tend to get that information in the minds of people who aren't as perhaps not as stable as your mind is.
And those people are creating more fantasy scenarios with that information.
And, you know, maybe there's a scenario where these people are just pure mentally ill anyway, and they would always be mentally ill.
But I'm thinking that the scenario we're creating with our mass media and our social media is sort of adding water to the slope, if you will.
I think people already were thinking that way.
I mean, John Hinckley Jr., he didn't have social media.
He didn't have all the information.
And yet he was convinced that he could win over a movie star by killing Ronald Reagan.
Well, you know, and so, you know, even in the days where the studios controlled all the media, people still had ideas about what each of those stars were like.
And I mean, they were the wrong ideas in some cases, but they still created their own stories in their heads about, you know, what someone would be like if only they could meet them.
And, you know, I mean, that's where it goes back to the old saying, never meet your heroes.
You know, now it's never read your heroes' tweets.
Sorry to all the fans of Roseanne Barr.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
So it's just, it's easier to find out the real information, but there was always information out there.
Whether it was correct or not was a different matter.
Right.
So the last sort of angle on this that I have is the reality TV angle.
Reality TV makes a whole new twist for this because all the other people who are on TV aren't really playing themselves.
Even I think I would argue the news producers who aren't playing a fictional character aren't really themselves when they're just on, you know, Walter Cronkite isn't really being authentically himself when he's just reading the news.
And if that was really himself, then I'm sure dinner parties with him were super boring.
But we have reality TV where it appears that the people who are on shows like Survivor and Big Brother are just people, are just playing themselves.
And, you know, they're certainly not working with a script.
They're not scripted.
That's why it's unscripted television.
But in some cases, they're still playing a character or an angle or what have you for the sake of television.
And the reasons why that are still many and varied, but it's still not necessarily themselves.
But they do feel like more like real people in a lot of cases.
And I would also argue that in some ways, this has caused scripted television to change because compared to the reality TV characters, just people being themselves or playing up for the camera, that when you watch Survivor and then the next show you had on was a scripted TV show,
the characters on the scripted TV show just seemed more like cardboard cutouts way back in the year 2000 or whenever this first started.
And so they've gone, they've worked really hard to add a lot of depth to the characters on real television, scripted television, I should say, not real television.
And that's been good for everyone as well, because for a time, especially in the 80s, was terrible.
The characters were just awful.
They were just so one-dimensional.
I mean, yeah, sometimes I prefer the fewer dimensions.
There are times when I'm watching, you know, I'm watching a mystery or a cop show or something like that.
I just want them to solve the crime.
I don't want to know about, you know, that this guy is divorced and having troubles at home and going through a midlife crisis and, you know, it turns out has a child with another woman.
Just solve the damn mystery.
You know, Hercule Pra Ro never had to have those layers.
Yeah.
So sometimes I think it goes a little too far.
And I don't, I find that I'm not necessarily aligned with the mainstream in that viewpoint.
But yeah, when it comes to reality television, especially in the early time frame, there still were people in character slots.
Okay, here's the cranky old man.
Here's the cute young girl archetype.
Here's the, you know, the comedian archetype.
And so.
Yeah.
Rob used to have one episode in each survivor season where someone came on.
I can't remember the name of the person.
I forgive me, maybe you remember, but he had that laid out as all the character types and he'd grouped them.
And that was a fun episode.
I always liked that one.
Yeah, there were a couple of them and they both had to had to stop pretty much because the character type started skewing too far.
Skewing.
Yeah.
And by the way, the Rob that you're talking about, for people who don't know, is Rob Sestern, you know, of Rob's podcast.
And so, so yeah.
And even with reality television, of course, we see only a portion of what is actually occurring out there on most shows.
A show like Big Brother, and I should clarify US Big Brother now because Canadian Big Brother stopped doing this as of this season that just ended.
They have live feeds.
And so Sometimes you will find out that the person who is portrayed on the show as a nice guy is actually a racist a-hole, but they just didn't show it on TV, but you saw it on the live feeds.
Yeah, uh, Canadian Big Brother recently stopped showing live feeds, potentially in part for that reason.
Um, and uh, Canadians are a bunch of racist assholes, yeah, they want to shield yes, yeah, um, or rather, maybe their sponsors do, but most of them you get a produced version, you know, like Survivor.
One episode, you know, used to cover three days, and you know, so you're getting 45 minutes of content for three days, and a lot of that content is running through challenges.
So, um, you know, you can hide a lot, and some people also purposely play a character.
Um, you know, there's on this season, there is a uh a kid, a college kid who is a you know, NASA engineering student, but he's out there pretending to be a little clueless sometimes.
You know, there are scenes of him going, oh, I just don't know what's going on when we know full well he does.
Not only does he know, he's directing what's going on sometimes.
Yeah, and so you know, sometimes there's that, and sometimes they're trying to hide a part of themselves.
Um, it came out after one season, uh, a little while, a few years ago, that someone had been going around throwing around the N-word.
Obviously, they didn't show this, and gradually more and more information came out, and it was clear that this person was a popular returning player, and a lot of people couldn't believe it.
No, he wouldn't do that.
And then eventually, as you know, the Trump years came and QAnon and MAGA, this person was very, very far right wing.
And so, he went from being the rootable, uh, you know, oh, look at him, he's such a nice guy to, oh, look at him.
And there have been a few people like that on Survivor.
Um, there was a winner who he had shown to people who knew him on Facebook, had shown some political leanings, but that was before he played.
Then he got out there and he became kind of a different sort of person.
And he had a sentimental journey, a sentimental story.
And he ended up winning.
And then after winning, he left his job as a defense attorney, became a prosecutor.
Then he started supporting what I would call some troublesome candidates, local candidates.
And then he got himself elected as a state rep, where, you know, recently he was voting for bigoted anti-LGBTQ plus bills.
And as soon as he did that, almost the entire survivor community came out against him very forcefully, such that after the governor of the state,
who was a Democrat, vetoed the bill, the Republican House and Senate overrode the veto, and they had so many votes that he abstained, probably so that, you know, he hasn't spoken on this, so I'm making a judgment.
Probably so he wouldn't have to vote in favor of it again and get all the backlash again.
Now, it wasn't a very good hiding.
You know, we all knew what he was doing.
You know, he had to, he had to drop out of some of his social media.
Some of the people who had called him friends called him out.
You know, and this was just a very different side than the person that we saw winning survivor because he went back to his life and was the person that he was.
And there, you know, there have been a number of players like this.
There's, there was a player who was shown as, oh, you know, fun kookie player.
And she was also brought back.
And yeah, she was a little out there, but shown in a fun way.
Well, then she was out on Twitter spreading conspiracies and falsehoods and worshiping Trump.
And, you know, during the you may remember or you may not, during one of the Trump-Biden debates, there was a right-wing conspiracy sent around with a picture that supposedly showed Biden had a microphone wire showing on his suit.
That's been a common, you know.
Yeah, this was clearly candidates for a long time.
Right.
And this was clearly debunked as it was a wrinkle in his suit.
It was very, very obvious.
And besides, why would he be wearing a wire?
You know, these days, why would you be wearing a wired anything?
But, but aside, so she posted this.
I responded to her and said, no, if you see, here's where you can find that debunked.
She deleted her post and then blocked me, which was like, okay, fine, I'm wrong about this, but I don't want you telling me I'm wrong about anything else.
Yeah, right.
And so, yeah, there's it's you know, it's difficult.
We don't know these people, even though they are on so-called reality TV.
And, you know, sometimes the people who play the quote-unquote villains are very nice people.
And, and, you know, the people who seem to be nice, not so much in real life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I'm glad you caught my little moment there where I referred to Rob Sestranino as though I know him, which I don't actually know him.
I've just seen him on my computer screen many times, refer to him in conversation with other people sometimes as though I know him, which I don't.
I've never, I've never spoken to the man.
I've, I've, I mean, not close enough to that world where I've, you know, yeah.
But interesting though, right?
That I didn't even catch that.
I didn't even realize I had done that until you pointed it out.
Yeah.
And I wasn't even thinking about that way, but you're right.
And I've seen a lot of those stories of people who listen to so much of a podcaster that they'll start to refer to them by name.
You know, they'll say to their spouse, oh, well, Rob said.
And the first couple of times the spouse will be like, Rob, who?
And then after a while, they just realize, oh, oh, yeah, Rob.
I mean, I do know Rob.
I actually realized that as of a few days ago, I've known Rob for 20 years on and off.
But still, it's, you know, it is different because, like I said earlier, I sometimes have the same sort of situation where, like, I went to some gatherings.
They'll have gatherings for podcast fans.
They'll have gatherings to watch survivor episodes, things like that.
And when I have gone there in the past, I find that I have some fans.
And it's a very hard thing to wrap my head around Because I am a fan of you know survivor and some of the players, and some of those players have become friends, and but there are other people who are fans of me, and some of them we have become friends as well.
And uh, so, um, you know, I remember one time we were at one gathering, and I was just kind of wandering around, and I bumped into someone who knew me from the podcast, and she was like, Oh my god, I can't believe I'm talking to you.
Hold on, I have to call my sister, she's a fan of you too.
And, you know, it was you know, like I said, it's sometimes hard to wrap my head around that you know, I have this impact too.
Uh, on again, a much smaller scale, but for that concentrated group, you know, it's it's there, and um, and so I'm sure that for someone who only has heard me on the podcast, seen me on the podcast, and then they stumble on my Twitter account, I'm sure that they have a model in their minds about what I believe or how I should act.
And those are the people who then respond to me and say, You're wrong, and you should stick to survivor.
Because nobody listens to a podcast and agrees with something like, Let's say they agree with what I say about survivor.
I think that they may presume I am therefore going to agree with them on lots of other things, right?
And so, especially since my podcast is about thinking logically, going step by step, things like that.
So, I'm sure in their minds, I would also agree with them that logically their politics are correct.
And it's probably shocking to them when I don't.
But no, you know, sometimes it doesn't work that way.
I mean, there are a lot of people on there who I have met, who I've interacted with, who do share my, you know, political opinions, my beliefs about other things.
And so, there's a large group who do.
And then there are others who don't, and they come on and they just, you know, like you were saying, it kind of breaks the model.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, I'm going to wrap this up here, but I just right now in this moment, I thought of something that we've been talking around, but we haven't mentioned directly, which is the concept that there's an idea that when you're a fan of someone or something, you are elevating it, which you are.
I mean, this, that's the real reason why when someone does something deplorable, you would want to cease being a fan of them, yeah, because of that elevation.
But there's an illusion happening there as well, which is that because you're elevating the entity that you're a fan of, that that entity is then higher than you somehow on like a hierarchical scale or whatever.
So, like, you might look down on someone if they're a fan of someone that seems like they should be on the lower level rather than a higher.
Like, some people might make a comment.
You could imagine someone making a comment: if Justin Bieber was a fan of some artist who'd sold very few records or something like that, some fans might mock Justin Bieber or the situation somehow because of the relative weird status level elevation.
I mean, there is this weird factor here that's, you know, I agree that being a fan of someone or something, like a company, I say something because I'm a fan of Marvel as a series of comics and as a concept of a, you know, and so it's, it's possible to be a fan of a thing in that case, right?
And being a fan of it does elevate it.
And the more fans it have, the more elevated it gets.
But in the way that this doesn't jive directly with logistics, it doesn't really make me lesser than the thing I'm a fan of or the person I'm a fan of, right?
So it has this virtual effect that's not that can't be quantified because you can lift someone.
It doesn't seem to make sense.
You could lift someone up, but then still not be lesser than them.
And that's a concept that I think a lot of people have trouble with because it does seem very paradoxical if they're higher up, but that's just a metaphor that we use to refer to it.
They're not actually higher up in any way.
We're all just people on this planet.
You know what I mean?
None of us is lesser in any way, really.
Like some of them are lesser.
Well, yeah, but there might be something that they did to push them down.
It's not that, you know, I'm a fan of Axel Rose.
Right.
Me and many other people have worked to metaphorically elevate him, but he's not really in any way better than me, really.
I mean, money, but that's not the same thing.
They are better at certain things.
He's better at music than me.
Right, exactly.
They may be better at music.
They may be better at acting.
They may be better at, you know, playing survivor.
Right, but they're not better at being a person.
Not really.
Right.
They're, you know, I'm not a lower person because than Axel Rose because I'm a fan of his.
It doesn't scale down that way in this weird.
So it's possible that Axel Rose is a fan of, you know, small musician X, and it's not that they're higher than Axel Rose.
That's not how the whole thing stacks together.
And this, the metaphorical way that we refer to this in this way with words like elevation, that appears to give this hierarchical view.
And it's not really true.
It's not true at all.
Yeah, you do elevate someone by being a fan of them, but that doesn't make you lesser than them because they're elevated in that way.
Yeah.
I mean, I have, you know, there are survivor players who have told me they are fans of my podcast.
We're fans before, we're fans after.
And at the same time, I am fans of them on the show.
Right.
So, you know, it would be an infinite loop if elevated.
Each one stacking on top of the other to be.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's just, you know, different ways of thinking about things and looking at things.
Yeah.
So I think I'm going to invite everyone else to, if you have a strong opinion about whether or not you think fandom itself as a social concept in our world is potentially harmful.
Or if you don't think you think I'm wrong about that, you agree with David that it's not harmful.
It's just a thing that happens and c'est la vie, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And you can follow me on Twitter.
I'm Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.
I don't go much to the other social media apps to do other things, not yet.
And I'm at David Bloomberg.
And I do go to lots of the other social media apps, but that's, you know, the main one you'll find me discussing things is still Twitter, despite Elon Musk, who I am not a fan of.
And yet I still use Twitter.
There's, I mean, there are some people who, not to derail you here as you're trying to end the podcast, but there are some people who have told me I'm wrong to continue using Twitter because of Elon Musk and I'm giving money to him.
You know, and so that's probably a whole other episode.