David Bloomberg explores how imperfect information games—like poker, The Traders, and Survivor—rely on strategy over luck, where hidden knowledge (e.g., private hands or traitor roles) dictates success. In poker, he lost pocket aces to a weak 7-4 offsuit due to early bluffing, proving that perception trumps raw strength. The Traders’ UK version thrives on asymmetric info, unlike celebrity-heavy earlier seasons, while Survivor demands masterful deception to avoid "tall poppy" scrutiny until the final jury vote. Bloomberg’s analysis reveals that manipulating others’ understanding of information—not just outsmarting them—is the key to dominance in these high-stakes social puzzles. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that will be about some very important things on another episode, but not this episode, because we just want to goof around with some game stuff today.
Wait, is this new information that you haven't told me?
Yes, that's right.
It's information that was known to me, but not to you.
Oh, man.
Yes.
I hate it when that happens.
Well, it happens all the time, and we're going to get into it right now.
So game theory is an area of mathematics that is super fun, but most people who kind of study it casually don't think it is.
It's things that mathematicians like, but most of the people, you know, it seems cool.
And then they start to read it and they go, uh.
But it should be fun because it really, it has almost no numbers.
And that's the thing that most people hate about math is it has all these numbers in the way and they have to worry about their arithmetic skills and all that stuff.
Well, and letters.
Game theory has, well, and symbols and all that.
Symbols and you can have symbols in game theory, but you don't need them for most stuff.
It's mostly like theory about logic.
And so I think it's great.
And of course, you, as your internet fame is, is you deal with games.
Yes.
And they're almost all strategy-related games.
Yes, we should probably mention who I am.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
I assumed everyone would know who you are.
You know who you are, and I don't know who you are.
See, we were leaving the audience without full information.
That's right.
So, of course, I'm here today with David Bloomberg, a well-known voice on this podcast, podcaster of reality television, particularly Survivor.
The game, not everyone is into Survivor, but that's okay.
He also plays poker.
I don't, what level do you play poker at semi-professionally?
Oh, no, is that just hobby level, but you know, making money.
Serious hobby level.
Okay.
Yes.
Serious hobby level, we'll call it.
I think if you make money, you're professional at it, David.
I think that's the, isn't that?
No, and, you know, I really didn't, I didn't make any money on it, you know, because, you know, just in case anyone from any tax agency is, I actually didn't make any money.
Oh, yeah, I broke dead even.
Well, good for you.
That's according to the gambler, that's the goal.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Getting no one to hold them.
No one to fold them.
Know when to walk away.
Know when to run.
Right.
And no one.
Have you ever had to run away?
No.
I have played at card room.
I did have to run away one time.
Oh, there was, I was, we were, we were playing a game that maybe wasn't recognized by the laws of the land.
And the owner of the room heard that something was coming.
And so we were in the middle of a tournament, which a tournament should be perfectly legal.
But we were in the middle of a tournament.
And I remember very vividly as the owner of the location suddenly came walking down the hallway saying, everyone wants to be somewhere else right now.
And there was no question.
Every single person who was there knew exactly what that meant.
Where they'd rather be at that moment.
Wow.
Yes.
And as we got to the parking lot and got in our cars, a whole bunch of sheriffs cars were coming in, lights and sirens.
Now, they didn't stop anyone.
They did question a couple people who were not smart enough to leave.
But their main goal was to rouse the room, just shut the game.
Stop it.
Stop the complaints coming in from other people who were there because it wasn't the card game that was the problem.
It was the people hanging out outside and bothering other nearby businesses, apartments, and even a church.
You can't bother churches, not in the U.S.
Yeah, I heard that.
Yeah.
So, but, you know, that was the one time I did have to have to run.
There were other situations where some people in rooms that I had been in had to run because, you know, someone tried to rob the room.
And, but, you know, I believe that.
These are all the issues.
They call that breakage.
It's the thing that happens.
You just deal with it.
Yeah.
Sometimes the room gets robbed.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So brief introduction to game theory for anyone who's listening who doesn't understand that there is an entire vocabulary around this.
So let's get into it.
Strategy games, really, are just games in which the decisions that players make can affect the outcome.
Now, it seems at first that that's all games, right?
But some games are not strategy games.
Some games are just skill games.
So you can look at, you know, the Olympics.
There are very little strategy involved in any of the Olympic games.
A couple, well, you know, basketball or whatever sports, but running, if you're going to run, you're pretty much just running.
The 100-meter dash is not a strategy.
The 100-meter dash, yes, but a marathon, there's strategy in how to save your energy and when you want to do it.
And, you know, biking events, there's strategy in terms of drafting from your fellow competitors.
You know, even Winter Olympics games, you know, in speed skating and things like that.
So when I think of a game that has no decisions at all that will affect the outcome, I think of snakes and ladders.
That's what I was thinking of, except we call it shoots and ladders, but yes.
Okay.
Yeah, right.
Is it because you don't like snakes?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It'd have to be snakes.
It's because that's what it's called here.
The game is called shoots and ladders.
You probably got snakes and ladders from the British.
That makes sense.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
They're a bunch of snakes.
And then, of course, the U.S. wanted to rename it because they rename all the British things.
Snakes are scary.
You don't want kids being scared of the game.
Yeah, I guess.
And also, let's face it, you slide down a chute.
You don't slide down a snake.
It did seem weird to slide down a snake as a kid when I played that game.
Yeah.
But I quickly realized I only played it a couple times because it was immediately boring to me.
I realized that there was nothing I could do to make the game work in my favor.
Much like Candyland.
I never played Candyland.
Candyland is the same.
I mean, it's a game for toddlers, basically, where you flip over a card and you move to that space.
There's no thought involved.
And it's, yeah, it's like chutes and ladders.
Another game that has no player decisions involved is war, classic card game war, where you just flip the card over whoever's highest and also no decisions at all made in that game by players.
They even made a song about that.
War.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It just wastes a lot of time, which in the era of the 80s, before we had the internet, that made sense to just give kids a deck of cards and have them, you know, spend the entire day playing war.
If you wanted to spend more time, just give them three or four decks.
But really, it's silly.
Yeah.
So strategy games are just about decisions.
And if you can make a better decision, then you will have a better outcome.
And that's the whole point.
So this isn't the only way in which these games are divided up.
So what I really want to talk about is the notion of how information is used in games.
So there's a distinction in game theory for what's called perfect and imperfect information games.
Perfect information is when both players have all the information.
So they have the same information, but they have all the information.
That's a unique distinction.
So chess is the classic perfect information game.
All the pieces are on the board.
The board is visible to all players at all times.
Everyone has access to all the information that they need to make a move.
So it's only strategy that's determining any outcome here.
Yeah.
And simpler would be tic-tac-toe.
Tic-tac-toe is also a perfect information game.
They're not, you'll notice in these games, they're turn-based.
So who goes first has an advantage.
Right.
They're not perfectly even as far as advantages go, but each player does have the same information.
Right.
So then we get into imperfect information games.
Generally speaking, most games are in the imperfect information category where there are things that are unknown to the players.
But even here, we have a division.
We have one time where you have uniform imperfection.
So this is a game where both players have information, but they all have the same information.
So I'm going to pull up Monopoly as a game where this is the case.
The board is known to all players.
There are cards, chance and community chess that are overturned.
You don't know what order they're coming in or what's going to happen there.
And there's also dice to roll and you don't know what the dice is going to roll for each player.
Maybe you don't.
I do.
Do you?
Really?
So it brings me to the point is that Monopoly would be a completely different game if, and follow me here, if instead of rolling the dice for each turn, before you started the game, you just rolled the dice like 200 times in a row and wrote down all the numbers in a sequence and then just used them in that sequence as you went.
And you knew what your next role and your next 20 roles were going to be as you went.
And of course, that would be a different game if you knew what your roles were, but not the other players' roles.
And if they knew what their roles were and not yours, versus if you both knew what each other's roles were.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
You could look ahead and say, oh, I'm going to play.
Right.
And you could plan when they're going to land on your property.
Right.
So that just that information, you know, making that information available versus unavailable changes the whole game.
And Monopoly is, you know, the board would be the exact same.
The amount of money you get as you cross go would be the exact same.
But the entire way that you look at the game would be completely changed just with this very small change in who has the information and who doesn't.
Right.
Right.
So this is a very important aspect to the idea of playing games, to the idea of using strategies to advantage.
So uniform, like I say, uniform imperfect, uniform, imperfect information games are ones in which both players or perhaps all players in the case of Monopoly have Not all the information, but they all have the same information.
By the way, a very old game that's exactly like this is backgammon.
Same idea.
You get a lot of, it's a lot of strategy in backgammon, but you don't, it's hard to implement exactly because you don't know what your role is going to be.
Good backgammon players try to put themselves in positions where they can use any role to get an advantage, but that's more difficult.
That's very advanced, right?
Right.
So then we get into the non-uniform imperfect information games, which is where when I pointed out Monopoly, where everyone has the same information, but you don't know it all, when we pointed out the point where they roll all the dice in advance and each one has access to their own roles, but not the opponent's roles, that would be non-uniform, imperfect information because each player has different information just to themselves.
So by the way, this is also where poker is, right?
You have, you know what your cards are and you don't know what the opponent's cards are.
You're left to try to try to find out in some other way what their cards might be like.
Right.
And the strategy you use to find that out is a big part of the game.
In fact, for people in the upper leagues, it's the entire game.
It's not even related to the cards.
It's just related to their ability to properly read the other player and confuse the other player in trying to read them.
Yes.
Right.
And of course, I don't play poker.
I've played it probably five times total in my whole life and only twice after 20 years old.
So I know kind of, I'm not even sure I could exactly determine the order of the rank of the hands.
Well, then we should definitely play.
Oh, right.
Absolutely.
Not today, another day, but sure, David, we will play.
Definitely.
Well, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll do that.
Yeah.
But it's not about the cards, right?
So it shouldn't matter.
I mean, it's still about the cards, but it's also, you know, if you don't know what you're actually, sometimes people who don't know what they're doing, it's the most difficult people to play against.
Right.
I've discussed this somewhere.
I don't remember where, but possibly on here.
But sometimes people, newer players, will think that they have a really strong hand when it's not.
Right.
And they will be putting off a read that they are really strong.
Yeah.
And you'll be sitting there going.
You'll be fooled by it.
Right.
Yeah.
And you'll be like, oh, they must have a really strong hand.
And then you fold and they triumphantly turn something over that you could have beaten because it's not like two pair.
Yeah.
And so it is a situation where, yeah, you know, sometimes people like that, they're successful for a little while before they become unsuccessful.
Right.
And unfortunately, that's a really bad path for people, I can tell you.
Well, it's, it just sort of like a temporary boost that as soon as you try to average it out over a large number of, say, rolls of the dice over a much longer time frame, you know, you might get temporarily lucky too.
But that's the worst.
I mean, I have seen it, depending on your personality, the worst thing that can happen to some people is to get lucky early in poker because then they keep playing that way.
Yeah.
You know, like there was right.
I remember very clearly there was a guy who came in.
He was pretty new and he was the type who would play any two cards almost.
And, you know, there were times, again, I vividly remember I had Pocket Aces, best starting hand in Texas Hold him.
And he had 7-4 offsuit.
One of the worst.
And we somehow ended up all in.
He was, I don't know, trying to push me out or something.
And he won because even pocket aces against a random hand has an 81% chance of winning, which means a 19% chance of losing.
And he won.
And this was the way he played.
And he got lucky early.
And then his luck ran out.
Yeah.
And he went through all his money.
And then he borrowed money.
And then he decided to stop by and play poker when he was supposed to be running the cash from the business he worked at to the bank.
And he played with that money and he lost that money.
And then he lost his job.
And yeah, he even had a tattoo on his arm that said, make good decisions.
And clearly he did not look at his forearm often enough.
But he's not the only one.
I have seen people go on a run of good luck early and play bad and not understand that it was just luck and end up worse for the wear than if they had just started and realized, oh, this is a bad way to play.
Yeah.
If the sum total of your good decisions is to put a tattoo on your arm that says make good decisions, then that's, yeah, it has to extend past that.
Right.
So we have another aspect to how information and strategy coincide in games in that some games allow for cooperation between players and some just don't.
So poker, to the very best of my knowledge, doesn't have a cooperation level.
It shouldn't.
I have been in games where people were illegally cooperating.
Right.
That's called cheating.
Right.
Okay.
So, yeah, right.
So like even within the confines of the game, it doesn't really try to, it's not anyone's interest to both be betting into the same player to try to up the thing for another player or something.
It's not really that useful, is it?
Oh, it can be.
I mean, I have been in games where, you know, in a casino where these people have played against each other regularly.
Yeah.
They know each other.
I mean, you get to know people.
You become friends.
And then there was another person who was like an out-of-towner.
And they would, you know, one would bet, you know, like the out-of-towner would bet.
And then the regular would raise.
And then the other regular would re-raise.
And the out-of-towner would be like, wow, okay, they must have really good hands here.
I'm going to fold.
Well, no, it was really just a form of collusion to get the out-of-towner out of the pot.
And sometimes it's intentional.
Sometimes it's not intentional.
I was in a game.
We were out of town, but we went as a group.
We still played against each other, but maybe not as hard as we would in our regular home game.
And so I was sitting there and it just so happened the way we had been seated.
I was next to a friend of mine and someone had bet and he had raised and I re-raised.
And it came back around.
And I think the other person called and he folded.
He folded pocket kings.
Okay.
Again, second best possible hand.
I had pocket aces.
Now, did I tell him that?
No, I did not.
Would I have bet that way anyway?
Yes, I would have.
You don't want to, like I said, you have an 81% chance against one opponent.
Against two random hands, that goes down further.
So you want to try and limit it.
He folded because he knew the way I played.
And he knew that I knew the way he played.
And he knew that I would not, under most circumstances, re-raise him unless I basically had pocket aces.
Right.
Now, the other people at this table didn't know that.
Again, it goes back to imperfect and incomplete information.
Right.
It wasn't intentional collusion.
It was he had certain information about me that the other players didn't have.
So I've seen it both ways, where there's intentional collusion and unintentional just by virtue of knowing people.
Right.
But even in that case, only one of you won the hand, right?
Yes.
Unless you had some kind of agreement to like split your winnings after the game when you drove the players.
We did not.
Right.
There really is no, it doesn't really help anyone to do this.
It's not, it's not that kind of game, right?
Right.
Now, there are people who make those agreements, you know, that they will, they will go to the game.
That's got to be seen as cheating to everyone at the table, I think, right?
Yeah.
Yes, absolutely.
That if they find out, you know, but a lot of times they don't find out because it must be hard to catch.
Right.
I mean, I have been in games where husbands and wives have played against each other, where brothers have played against each other.
You know, now, every time I saw the husband and wife play against each other, they were playing to win.
Yeah.
But you also have to know when they get home at night, they're splitting that money.
That money all belongs to the same couple.
Yeah.
And so in a perfect situation, like if you're in a casino, yeah, maybe don't stick the husband and wife together.
But if you're in a home game and there's only a few tables, sometimes it's hard not to.
Plus, sometimes they just want to sit next to each other.
Yeah.
You know?
So when we talk about survivor, survivor is a game very much that allows for quite a bit of cooperation.
And that cooperation works directly in with the strategy, right?
Survivor has team challenges that are strictly part of the game where you have to cooperate strictly as part of those.
And usually you don't get a large choice as far as who's on your team.
Right.
And there's, you know, voluntary cooperation where you can work together with other people to vote a particular person out.
Right.
And this is a this is a game that's built in my mind anyway.
Whenever I watch it, it's built on this information interplay.
How much you trust other players, how much they trust you.
How much are you going to tell them when you have an advantage, if you don't have an advantage, whether you tell the truth about these things, whether you tell a lie and they can't tell what you're lying about, but they know you're lying, right?
Right.
We talked about this a little bit when we talked about dishonesty, how in games like survivor, this can be very dangerous just to try to lie at all.
And surprisingly few players get away with being dishonest in this way, right?
Yeah, because everybody knows that you're lying about something, that you're likely lying.
Something's off and they get a twinge, right?
And they don't necessarily know what it is you're lying about, but it doesn't matter.
I just mean in going into the game, if you don't know that people are going to lie to you, then you are a fool.
Yeah, they're going to, yeah, you know, um, for sure.
Yeah.
You know, if you rewatch, I just rewatched an old season and one of the winner did not get all the votes at the end because three people were like, you were dishonest and I don't want to vote for you.
And it's like, because in those early seasons, people didn't quite get it yet.
Right.
Or some people didn't quite get it yet.
Now it's a lot more expected.
Now, I'm not going to say everybody subscribes to the same thing, but people know.
It's not a matter of if you're lying to me.
It's when you're lying to me.
Yeah.
But then it can also be, like you said, about specific things.
Like there was, you know, not the most recent season, but the season prior, near the end, a guy was trying to plan this move out.
And he was working with a woman who he had not worked with before because they didn't really trust each other.
And through it, he wasn't going to do anything to hurt her chances, but he was trying to do something to make himself look better.
But she could tell he was lying.
Right.
And she presumed it was going to be something that would negatively affect her.
And therefore, she turned it around and changed up what was happening from what they had discussed.
And as it turned out, they ended up keep, she ended up keeping in the game the person who went on to win.
Whereas if she had gone along with his plan, that person would have been knocked out.
And so, yeah, like you said, sometimes you could tell someone's lying.
You're just not sure what they're lying about.
Yeah.
And so when I think about the meta perspective of this, like the meta thinking thing where you're, you're aware that the other person is being inauthentic and you're trying to react authentically to that.
First of all, you know, a player becomes aware that the other player that they're talking to isn't being totally honest.
But I think in that moment, a player who starts to notice this gives away any advantage by acting in any way as if they don't fully believe them.
Like, I think it's always in their interest to act as though everything they're told is the truth, even if they're not going to believe it.
If someone's going to lie to you, it's better for you to let the person lying to you think that that lie was successful.
Yes.
And so you get a lot of, you know, that adds a whole other layer to this interplay of information that you, you got some information from them.
They told you something.
You understand or you feel strongly that it's not true.
But in pretending like it is true or pretending like you believe them, you deny them additional information about you and what you know.
Right.
And then this goes on down the line, right?
And those turtles go all the way down forever.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, there are definitely times when two people are going at one another and they will sit there at camp and talk about how great it is that they're working together.
And both of them know.
And there was a scene on the great series of scenes on the most recent season where two people had worked together the whole game and then both of them had the idea to get rid of the other one at the same time.
And there were intercut scenes of one saying, well, I'm going to go after her, but I don't think she's coming after me yet.
And then it flipped to her saying, I'm going after him, but I don't think he has thought of coming after me yet.
And meanwhile, they're both lying to each other completely about it.
But yeah, this goes back to something, you know, for people who don't know, I have a series of what I call the rules for winning survivor.
And within one of those rules is what I call the Ghostbusters provision.
Because in Ghostbusters, of course, the famous line is, if somebody asks you if you're a god, you say yes.
That's right.
Okay.
And so my provision is if someone asks if you want to be in an alliance, you say yes.
It doesn't matter if you never want to work with them.
Right.
You say yes, because if you say no, it's like you just said, you're giving them information.
Oh, this person doesn't want to work with me.
Therefore, I must target them.
Yeah.
Don't even say I'll think about it.
Because the minute, I mean, there are some people who, I'm like, well, I didn't want to be dishonest.
So I told them that I would think about it.
No, you say yes.
And then you worry about it later.
Yeah, this isn't a day to the prom.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, you know, these games become very, very interesting when examined in this way, right?
You get, you are looking for information in each time you're talking to them.
And you're also looking to not give any information away.
Right.
And I'm going to throw this in.
It wasn't in the notes, but we're going to go straight to the traitors, actually, because this is a very information game, information-related game, right?
Right.
Well, in theory, for people who aren't very familiar with the traitors, the concept is it's sort of like survivor in that people get removed sort of one at a time, but they're done in a very unique way.
So you'll get- More like the game Mafia, if you've ever played mafia.
Yeah, probably fewer people.
I've never heard of mafia before, but only when I listen to it on the podcast you do.
But essentially, you get 20 people in a game.
You know, some number, usually three, are selected as traitors.
They know who they are and no one else knows who they are.
Right.
So already you have non-uniform, imperfect information.
And then each day, the game doesn't last that long.
It's like one day per episode, but each day, each episode, the entire group of people votes one person out, ostensibly because they're trying to remove a traitor.
Very ostensibly, yes.
Very ostensibly.
Like that's, that's implied by the game.
It's not necessarily what each player does when they do it.
Right.
But the on the surface, surface level, you're saying that you're voting someone out because they're a traitor.
And then after that one person is voted out, ostensibly because they're a traitor or for that reason, the traitors then go on their own to a dark room and they collude together.
They conspire to assassinate one player.
They don't really kill them because this is just television, but they remove them from the game.
Yes.
Right.
And so in the space of the game, when you're a traitor, you're trying to figure out who else thinks you might be a traitor.
And you're probably trying to convince people that other people are traitors.
And when you're not a traitor, you're trying to figure out who the traitors are because all the information you don't know is valuable for you.
But as soon as you know and other people know that you know, that's bad.
So if you know who a traitor is and the trader knows that you know, you're going to get removed by the traders.
Yeah.
So it's a lot about finding out, but not letting anyone know that you found out in a lot of cases.
Right.
And that's a, that's a very interesting set of things.
I don't know.
I haven't watched all the seasons that you have of the show.
They've had seasons in two seasons in Australia, New Zealand, I think is that New Zealand.
Yeah, UK's had several.
US has had two seasons.
Canada had a season.
There's been seasons in other countries that had other languages that I've all, you know, I've never seen.
I don't know if you've seen any, but I haven't seen nearly the number of seasons you have.
So I don't know if they're more interesting than the ones I've seen, which have just been the two U.S. and the one Canadian season.
But I think that we've yet to find a large pool of players that are playing this with these strategies in mind.
We've found some in each season with some success at some of those.
But again, I think it's like what you say about playing poker against someone that doesn't really know how to play is that sometimes you read the wrong thing because they're not really rational actors in this space, right?
Right.
And, you know, the problem with the U.S. version and to a lesser extent in the Canadian version is that they included, for lack of a better term, celebrities.
Minor celebrities usually, but yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it depends on where you are.
I mean, in the second from your angle, they might be a really right celebrity.
Yeah.
Right.
For a survivor player on there for a guy that's followed survivor.
They're a big star.
Right.
Right.
And so, you know, U.S. versions have gone completely to the celebrity version.
Right.
You know, bringing celebrities.
Right.
And there's a definite difference between bringing back people from reality TV who are just on reality TV to be famous, like housewives, or reality TV competition shows.
And we saw this very clear divide in the second season of The Traders, where certain people knew how to play a game and other people did not know how to play a game.
Yeah.
And so, you know, there was that situation.
And I think that, I mean, the reason I want to watch The Traders is to see people play a game.
Yeah.
Good strategy.
Right.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., that's not ever going to happen again.
They're going to bring back celebrities, celebrity people, and let them play and let the drama ensue.
And if there happens to be good gameplay too, well, then yay.
But, you know, the first season, there was good gameplay.
The second season, there was a mix.
And, you know, we'll have to see.
And then you have the UK, which was no celebrities.
And the gameplay was much more interesting to me.
So, yeah, it's, you know, it's an interesting mix there, but it's definitely the situation of, like you said, imperfect information.
Certain people have all the information.
Certain people have none of the information.
And like you said, if you are not a trader and you figure out who a trader is, you don't necessarily want to vote that person out because what happens in the game, and this is an important point to notice, is once traders start going out, they get replaced.
Yeah.
Other people are invited to become traders.
And so, someone who you might have had a perfect read on and know they're not a traitor could suddenly become a traitor.
And now you're back to not having information again.
Yeah.
So, this is why sometimes acting on the information you have is a bad idea because then you have less information.
Yeah.
And the real, the real point is the information.
I mean, I think that's so important to get is that working through your way through that and, like you say, finding out who is a traitor, it would be so important.
But then also not letting anyone know that you know who that is.
So what you might want to do is target someone else that you know isn't a traitor.
Yes.
As being a traitor.
And the best way to do that is to cozy up to the person you know is a traitor and say, hey, you and I can work together.
I know this other person is a traitor when it's someone who's not.
Right.
Because then that person's going to be like, oh, they're on my side and they don't think I'm a traitor.
So this is great.
I'll keep them around.
Yeah.
Which, which might be like even then, you're information exchanging, right?
You're letting them know things about things that you know so that they can use them as a strategy that helps you as well in a symbiotic thing, right?
Right.
I'm hoping that I get a version of the show where I might have to watch some of the UK versions because I've heard they're better, but it would be interesting to see the game played on a level where you get people thinking like this.
Yes.
I think that would be tremendous.
I mean, I do think in Canada and even U.S. season two, there was some of that thinking.
Yeah.
It was just somewhat buried.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, you, you know, there were some players who were shining lights, I thought, in those seasons, but it was difficult to get that through all the other things that were happening, right?
Yes.
Whereas once you get all the players who are acting that way, I think you get something really incredible.
Right.
Right.
And, you know, if anyone wants to hear my thoughts on those seasons, I was on the Tradar podcast, which you were a guest on for the opening episode of the Canadian version.
So that's T-R-A-I-D-A-R, if anyone wants to look that up.
But there's, I mean, there's other situations, I think, where this lack of information and the sharing of information comes back around.
If we go back to Survivor, there's an issue that comes up again and again, which is a player may be trolling much of the game, but they're doing it secretly.
They're in the shadows because in Survivor, if you're seen as gaining too much power, they get rid of you.
They cut down the tall poppies.
And so you want to control the game, but you don't want to be seen as controlling the game.
Until you get to the end, when a jury of the most recently voted out players, usually about eight people, determine who wins.
And at least in theory, they vote based on who played the best game.
In theory, not always the case.
And so the player who was doing the controlling has to figure out a way to convey to that jury that they were, in fact, the secret mastermind.
Yeah.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn't.
It is the toughest balance beam to walk is to control the game, hide that you're controlling the game, and then kind of give that ta-da moment at the end.
Right.
Have them notice it once they're voted off that you were controlling the game.
Right.
And it's all about, you know, information and imperfect information because you're hiding information, but then you want to provide the information.
Yeah.
And it's all a matter of how you manage to do that.
So, of course, we're not going to tell anyone how to do that.
We're still working it out, I think.
We're not here to instruct you how to win Survivor.
We're not going to instruct you how to win Trader.
That's Trader's game or poker.
That's a whole different set of podcasts.
But it is interesting that so many of these things just come down to information, knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know, having some idea how to get the information that you don't know.
I think about that a lot.
A huge amount.
It informs a lot of the little things that I put on this podcast in other ways that don't involve games.
Well, and also what information is actually pertinent, what's important.
Yeah.
Because you can know lots of information that has nothing to do with anything.
Like there's another game called The Circle.
It's on Netflix.
And it is based on all the interaction is done by text.
So these people live in separate apartments and they interact with each other only by text.
And they have profiles.
It's like social media.
But the profile can be real, could be fake.
And so the fake ones, you know, known as catfishing, for many of its first few seasons, whether it's because production encouraged it or because people just thought this way, a lot of time was spent like, I want to find the catfish.
I want to vote out the catfish.
I got to get rid of the catfish.
And it doesn't matter.
What matters is the relationships you make.
I don't care if you're a woman pretending to be a man, a man pretending to be a woman, someone pretending to be their own son.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is that you make relationships with those people who will keep you around in the game and will rate you high enough to win at the end.
And so if you're doing that with a catfish, who cares?
Yeah.
And in this most recent season, some, they had more players who, you know, strategy type players who understood that.
But in early seasons, it was dominated by catfish this and catfish that.
It's like, it's just not important.
Even if you had perfect information and knew who the catfish was, it doesn't matter.
Right.
Yeah.
So I think we did a real nice intro to, you know, the barest fraction of a thing going on with game theory.
It's much, much more complicated than what we did here.
It was just a couple of introduction to a couple of terms, but it was fun to talk about in relation to games that we actually deal with.
Yes.
So where can people find some of the places where you talk about games?
So you can go to my link tree, which is linktree slash David Bloomberg.
In the URL, there's a dot before the EE and Linktree because that's just the way they do it.
I don't know why.
And From there, there are a number of links, including to my podcasts about Survivor and I think about the traders also, and just various other things.
You can also find me often talking reality TV on places like Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads.
I'm Twitter and Blue Sky.
I'm at David Bloomberg.
I'm Threads.
I'm at David Bloomberg TV.
And that's because it's connected to Instagram.
And I use at David Bloomberg TV on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
And those are all videos about reality TV.
So if you want more, you know, some of them are strategy related.
Some of them are just funny things.
Like TikTok does.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I run this little podcast.
You can send an email with any kind of feedback or anything else related to that, about anything about this episode to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And this is kind of nice, bright little light episode about nothing consequential.
But oftentimes I'm on Twitter arguing about people about actual reality and what things are fake and what things are real at Spencer G. Watson on Twitter.