Shelby and David Bloomberg explore how poker’s bluffing mirrors real-life deception, like Pam Hemphill’s contradictory claims about January 6th—denying involvement while admitting it was "okay," with deleted footage contradicting her. Bloomberg compares this to unreadable poker players who lie constantly, forcing others to ignore narratives entirely. Shelby critiques media exploitation of Hemphill’s case for partisan agendas, stressing honesty and verification amid political disinformation on X (Twitter) and Blue Sky. [Automatically generated summary]
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Time to shuffle up and deal.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, okay.
Yeah.
You got to play poker.
Yes.
We're going to call poker right now.
I've got my poker hat.
I've got my poker shirt.
I've got my poker room.
We're going to talk about playing poker.
And in fact, not really about the cards, more about the thing that the people do when they play poker, because I think this is how this is related to how everyone imagines poker is played.
And we're going to find out from David Bloomberg, noted, though not professional poker player.
Nobody.
More about this.
So the topic today is about how poker relates to life.
And the obvious way poker relates to life is about deception, the thing we call bluffing in poker, right?
The practice of doing this.
Which I never do.
Never.
Of course.
Never.
And you're not lying now.
Nope.
Because why would you?
Nope.
So the way I construct this in my head, when I look at people and I observe and I catch on that they're lying, but they are insisting that they're telling the truth.
The way I imagine in my head is that they have constructed a world in which they imagine that they are the only ones who can see the truth of what they're saying and that no one else can understand that they're lying because no one else can see their truth, right?
What's real?
You're literally describing some people I've played poker against, yes.
Right.
So in poker, this becomes more than just analogy, becomes real.
I mean, you have cards in front of you and you are ostensibly the only one who can see those cards in the ideal form of the game.
You are the only one who can see them.
So you can imagine that you're the only one that knows what those cards are.
And therefore, you can say anything you like about those cards.
They're good cards.
They're bad cards.
They're red cards.
They're black cards.
They're small cards, large cards, whatever.
You can say whatever you want about them because no one knows about what those cards are except for you.
And I think that's sort of the mental construction that other people use when they are lying in real life, when they're attempting to maintain a lie that other people are calling them on, which is also taking from poker.
When you make someone show their cards, you're calling them, right?
So the nomenclature is also going back and forth.
And I can't tell if calling was used because of poker or it's used in poker because it was called.
I can't tell.
But the language is very, very obviously blurring the lines between poker and real life in this scenario.
So tell us a little bit about bluffing in poker, David.
I never do it.
Oh, so you're not the guy to ask because you don't know how it works.
But other people have tried to bluff you and you've called them on it, right?
Successfully every time.
That's true.
Right.
Yes, when I, you know, I don't play poker so much anymore, but yes, when I played, I maintained a image that I did not bluff, which is a good image to have if you want to occasionally bluff.
People need to trust that you're not bluffing.
Right.
Yeah, right.
Right.
So you, I would imagine as you get better at poker, more experienced, you probably bluff less because you want to.
make people believe that you're not bluffing.
No, because there's the other way around.
There are some people all the time that no one can possibly know the truth.
Exactly.
And so they bluff a lot.
And then someone gets tired of it and calls them down when they have a real hand.
Right.
So this leads to kind of to real life in that we have situations where people will almost never lie.
And then the one time they do, everyone believes it because that person never lies, right?
They've demonstrated a pattern of behavior and then gone against that pattern of behavior and people are confused by that.
And then the other side, which is that someone just, you know, blurs the lines between truth and reality all the time so that you can never know what they're really doing.
And then they might trick you into, you know, betting against them when they have the real cards, right?
Yeah.
And so it's, you know, I mean, there's some boy who cried wolf in there, except when they finally cry wolf and it's real, the wolf is coming after you, not after them, you know.
So, so, yeah, it's, it's, you know, I mean, there's a reason that the game has maintained its popularity for all this time.
And there is definitely some amount of, you know, real life in there in terms of, you know, how you, how you deal with people and how you deal with someone who is bluffing a lot.
And also, like you said, people who construct this reality in their minds.
I have known players who will get so pissed off when you call down their bluff.
And they're like, how could you do that?
You're so dumb.
I was obviously making it clear that I had a flush on that board.
You're so stupid to not see that.
And it's like, you're insulting me and calling me dumb because I saw through your charade.
See, I see that as a bully tactic, right?
A person who attempts to make it socially uncomfortable to engage in a way that leads to an advantage.
I mean, that could be it with some people, but the people I'm talking about, they truly were upset.
Like they thought that you were just a terrible player.
They had convinced themselves that their lie had been successful.
Exactly.
What they forgot about was I've played against you for the past two years and I know how you play.
You know, or even if I haven't played against you, I've played against people like you.
I have seen you play.
I have seen this before.
And just because you are trying to paint this picture doesn't mean I'm going to accept it.
And so, yes, you know, you can convince yourself that your lie has been believed and get mad when someone doesn't.
Yeah, I mean, I picture this as in my head, the simple, like the first, not even really simple, but the first layer, if you will, of the model that you make in your mind of this, I have hair flying around the room because of all the cats that I've so flagrantly been showing on camera.
Weeks ago, last time.
Weeks ago, yeah, the last time I still haven't vacuumed my room.
The first layer is the simple like pattern of behavior that we already mentioned, that a person might look at you, see many, many hands that you do, and see that you're never bluffing.
But then the next layer, and then convince themselves that you're not new time because you never did bluff on the last 20 times.
And then the next layer is a different pattern of behavior that's more about what they're doing when they bluff and trying to catch on to that pattern, right?
Or when it's the reverse, when a person's always bluffing, what they're doing when they're not bluffing to try to catch that extra layer, right?
So that probably factors into your play and probably something you didn't catch on right away, but it did eventually, I imagine, if you're in any way successful in poker, right?
I mean, as far as anyone from the IRS listening is concerned, no, I was never successful at poker.
So it was just tokens, then you turned them in at the end of the tournament and then you walked away with no money.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, there were some people, there's always going to be some people who just you could never figure out.
And, you know, every time you thought you had them pegged, they would do something opposite.
And so some of them were good players.
Some of them were just, you know, difficult because of however, you know, they played compared to you.
And so, you know, the best thing to do in that situation is not play with them.
You know, is to avoid them.
If you can't beat them, don't play them.
Exactly.
And so, but yeah.
With other people, there were definitely ways to catch on.
You know, there were some people who you knew it didn't matter what hand they had.
If you pushed hard enough, they were going to fold.
Right.
There were other people who you knew they were never going to fold.
So if you had a good hand, keep betting.
You're not going to scare them off.
Don't worry about it.
Just keep betting.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, yeah, it's just a matter of how you handle them.
I mean, and you know, again, it goes to real life.
How do you handle people in real life?
Everybody's a little different.
You know, you have to approach everyone a little bit differently.
Hopefully you aren't lying to them all the time, but sometimes people are lying to us.
I feel like this is a good segue into a piece of media that I have permission to show on this podcast and channel, YouTube channel.
It's a YouTube video.
I should set this up a little bit so that it's a little less of a non-sequitur.
The person in this video is a person whose name some people might recognize and other people won't.
But it's a person named Pam Hemphill.
Pam Hempill was a person at January 6th who was indicted and even went to prison.
I'm not sure how long her sentence was.
It wasn't that long, like maybe a year or something.
But she'd go to prison and she served her entire sentence and then she got out of prison.
And after that, she claimed to be reformed.
And it was a big deal.
She's elderly.
She's now in her 70s.
I think even at the time, she might have been late 60s.
I don't know her exact age.
But she's not young.
And so this was a sort of a novelty item for some media people who agreed to put her on their network.
Media people on the left who were eager to show how foolhardy the January 6th people were.
And some people have attempted to point out that maybe not everything this person says is on the up and up.
Maybe they aren't really reformed.
Maybe they're only saying these things because they understand they're what you want to hear.
Yeah.
So Pam Hempill recorded her own footage of the event.
And this footage, part of this video was taken on January 5th, the night before, because there was also a crowd the night before.
It wasn't as large.
It wasn't as noteworthy and violent.
But she was there.
And this was part of the evidence that was used against her.
She deleted the video or attempted to delete the video, but the way the internet works is you can pretty much always get this stuff back.
Yeah, I think it's a good idea.
I'm not a lawyer, but I think most lawyers would tell you, don't video record yourself committing a crime.
It's just not a good idea.
Yes.
So we're going to see this video is clips of interspersed of her making statements after the fact alongside footage of what she took and things she said while she took that video footage.
So people can see her lying and how we know it's a lie.
We'll see how she does.
So let's bring this up and hit play.
I don't think we're going to listen to the whole thing.
And guess what?
It was the Idaho State Police Officer that shattered that glass.
It's auto video.
There's proof.
I wasn't involved in that at all.
Only videotaping.
Because I have a code and everybody knows it.
I don't push cups.
I don't push gates.
I don't break glasses.
I don't get violent.
And I don't encourage it.
Let's go.
So this is her on the night.
Just push.
I don't have anything.
What you got to do is push.
And I'm just on the other side, videotaping.
I wasn't even involved in it.
And guess what?
It was the Idaho State Police Officer that shattered that glass.
It's auto video.
There's proof.
I wasn't involved in that at all.
They're voicing, we just push.
No, I'm serious.
Why can't they let media in there?
Oh, yeah.
You guys don't push.
We push and voice.
Listen to the entire thing.
It's four minutes long, but I don't think we need to put the entire thing on here.
You get the idea.
And the link will be in the show notes.
You can go to that and watch the whole thing if you like.
Her protestations against this.
I mean, for clarity purposes.
Yeah.
Was that interview from after jail when she said she's reformed or from before jail?
I think it tells me right here, maybe.
I think it was after she had gotten out of jail.
There was someone was recording her and it's a video called Pam's Side of the Reporters story.
And that was from January of 2023.
So I believe in 2023, she was already finished her sentence.
But she is protesting against saying essentially that she didn't do these things.
She didn't encourage anyone.
She didn't, you know, if she thought anyone would believe it, she would say she didn't even attend, probably.
But she's making lies according to what she thinks the audience might know or believe.
And she knows something of what really happened.
So this is a direct reflection here.
She has cards.
There was a video she thought she had got it successfully deleted so that no one could know what part she was playing in this.
And that therefore she would be free to tell whatever, make whatever lie up about this and just say, no, I didn't do those things.
I was wrongly accused or I was treated unfairly.
But then, of course, the video shows she's right there.
She's telling people to push.
So how we go about finding out that someone's lying, I think is a problem, right?
Like what do you think?
Like, this also comes up a lot in reality TV.
People are sure someone's telling the truth or they're sure that there's a lie.
And very often we see them being wrong.
Oh, yeah.
It's difficult to say.
It's probably 50-50 down the line as to whether they're right or wrong about this stuff.
Before we get into that, I guess I'm still a little bit confused on this whole situation here, not knowing her story.
Oh, if she's saying, if she's supposedly reformed and said what was done was wrong, why is she still lying about what she did?
Well, I'm very confused about that.
I don't think she ever meant to be, I mean, this is part of the that space where a person gets to where they say, I didn't do it, but just in case you think I did it, it was okay to have done.
But then if it wasn't okay to have done, I've definitely reformed and I'm okay now.
I mean, to me, this is a strange information space in a person's mind where you'll get people who say that COVID was not real, but that it was made by the Chinese.
And those two ideas shouldn't coexist, but they do.
People who have other contradictions in their sets of beliefs about things, right?
This is a contradiction.
It definitely is.
It's not a coherent story.
It's not a coherent collection of beliefs, but I think sometimes she imagines she's telling a different story to a different audience.
Other podcasts have gone into greater detail on Pam Hampal.
But she's a person that some people have believed and have gotten behind and therefore has become a divisive figure among people who are behind for what is she doing?
Well, because they're supportive of her having been reformed.
They're happy that this person...
What's she doing with that?
where she's trying to get attention, she's trying to get...
Like, I mean, is she speaking out against Trump now, or is she...
Uh...
You know, not very loudly.
I think I just don't understand the point.
That's what I'm missing here.
Well, what her point is, or what my point is in bringing her up?
No, the point of people who would, like you said, get behind her.
Like, who cares?
She's some woman who got convicted.
Right, but some people want to push their own political agenda, right?
They want to push back against the idea that January 6th could happen again.
They want to push back against the people who did January 6th.
I mean, some of those people have noble goals, and some of them also don't have noble goals and are just grifters.
I mean, there's all kinds of manner of people on all sides of the spectrum here.
But some of them attempt to use her as a token saying, oh, look at this, this elderly woman taken advantage of by unreality who's who came to believe all these things about Trump and is now definitely 100% reformed is on our side.
Now she's going to push back against Trump.
You know, they're going to blare that as loud as possible.
I mean, Pam Hempel has been on CNN.
And that's a thing that a lot of people note.
We should trust her because she's been on CNN.
That's not a reason to trust a person.
That's just a reason to think that CNN hasn't done their homework, which in many cases they haven't, actually.
Right.
So, you know, in Pam Hempale's case, there are other people looking to use her story to boost a political idea or to further their own grift or what have you, all manner of thing there.
And I think she's also trying to grift it as well.
I mean, in some cases, she is talking to people who, I mean, I know people that I've have worked with and am currently working with on pushing back against unreality who were for a time confused by Pam Hempel, spoke to her very shortly after she got out of prison and were impressed by her story, but then later had to go back on that and say, well, now I'm not sure.
Now that I've seen other things, I have to maybe change my mind about that.
And I'm sorry that I even put any oxygen into that fire.
And so we have, you know, how you get to reality can't just be waving a flag behind a person that, oh, yeah, yeah, but the story of Pam Hempil shows that these people, because she's not a good example of any of that stuff.
She's lying to, you know, lying sometimes when the truth will do, right?
Which is the worst kind of liar because you're never going to know.
Like in the case of what you probably see in poker sometimes is someone who'll bluff when there's no need to bluff or whatever, right?
They'll bluff just to confuse the other players they're working with so that a future bluff will work better, right?
Or a future time where they're not bluffing will work better.
And so that's when you have to stop trusting anything that they try to communicate to you, right?
Which is probably where you come to in some games where you stop trying to read a person at all and just play the cards, right?
Like you said, there's some players you just try to not play against at all because you're going to try to read them and it's not going to work very well at all, right?
Like, you know, Pam Hempil is, I think, a grifter.
And I think I have evidence to show that she's a grifter.
She's not honest.
She's not on the up and up.
And other people have also tried to point that out as well.
Some people don't want to have to look at all the layers of the thing.
They don't want to see how the sausage is made.
They just want the political outcome they want.
So they just kind of throw things around.
That's a big reason why we have a problem with unreality as it is now, because, you know, you get people who want to push a vending machine over and they don't care that other people are trying to push back the other side, right?
Like, they just want what's inside the machine.
They don't care how they get it.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, Pam Hampille's collection of beliefs are very confusing because she's not honest.
She's not an honest person.
She's just not.
But if all you saw was just her single video here, her single protestation against the overreaches of a, you know, enthusiastic state that wants to, you know, punish people who were tangentially related, but maybe not even doing anything at January 6th, you might believe her.
You might easily believe her until you saw more of that.
I mean, right?
You know, if that was all you saw was her, as an elderly woman, saying, ah, you know, this was definitely a very terrible thing they did to me.
Yeah, you might.
I probably wouldn't just because.
Well, you're more skeptical.
Yeah.
I'm more skeptical, but a lot of people aren't as skeptical as we are.
Right.
And they might, you know, say, oh, that's terrible that that happened to that elderly woman and it shouldn't happen.
Right.
And there's other factors that need to be looked at.
Yeah.
I have to admit, I still don't understand the point of her, but, you know.
Yeah.
But going back to what you had asked, on, you know, the topic that we frequently discuss, reality TV, you get, obviously, there's a lot of lying and deception.
Yeah.
And with it comes a lot of people coming in and saying, I will be able to detect every lie.
I can read body language.
I can do this.
I can do that.
Yeah.
they can't i mean even the most you know good editors of those shows immediately show that juxtaposed immediately with them not being able to detect a lie yeah every time Every time.
I mean, even the so-called FBI body language experts, you know, I read some of their stuff and I'm like, yeah, I don't know about that.
Yeah.
Do I think it's possible in some cases?
Yes.
There was just a season of Mr. Beast had a TV show on Amazon Prime called Beast Games.
And at the end, it came down to two players.
Spoiler alert here, people.
Two players who coincidentally started out standing right next to each other when the game started with a thousand people.
And the final game was one player had to hide a check for $10 million in a round of briefcases, 10 briefcases, and the other one had to figure out where it was.
And you would think this would happen.
You know, it would go back and forth before you'd eventually get it.
Well, the guy who got it got it in one guess.
Okay.
Because he was able to read her.
Yeah, well.
Because he was talking to her.
And like I said, they have spent weeks together now at this point.
Okay.
And I think that you can tell that he could pick up on a read.
Like she got pushier when he said he started doing some trick things.
Like he said, like even though they were just in a room, he asked a question.
She answered.
He's like, what?
I couldn't hear you.
And then she got like kind of pushy back.
Like, can you hear me?
Should I come closer?
And I think he was able to read some of that behavior like she was putting it on.
And I also think that like one of her side gigs was a professional wrestler.
So I think he could tell some of that persona coming out.
So, yes, he was able to, whether by sheer luck or I think by reading her, you know, he got it in one guess, which astonished everybody.
But that is not the norm.
No.
Most people who go on reality television, they're like, I can tell, I can tell.
And they can't.
And, I mean, there are certain things that, yeah, if someone does, you're probably like, that's awful odd that they're behaving that way.
But mostly, no, different people react differently to everything.
Yeah.
And so the idea that you can read a person, especially a person that you maybe just met within the last few days or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And especially if you're reading them and saying, oh, they're definitely telling me the truth.
I mean, I think catching someone in a lie is either is easier than verifying someone is telling the truth.
Yeah.
And there's another level to that too, though, right?
It's there, there's an ability to, I mean, supposedly, fictitiously, maybe somewhere in our intuitive minds, there's some mechanisms that are meant to try to find lies.
And there undoubtedly is a mechanism.
How good it is is the real question.
Also, how you translate that to the conscious part of your mind is in neuroscience is still trying to figure out.
But so there's how well you lie and then how well you detect a lie.
And then I need a third hand because I need to represent how well you hide whether or not you've detected a lie.
Because as you're lying, you're trying to read another person to see how well they have, whether or not they have seen through your lie.
And so the ability to see through a lie without giving away that you've just seen through their lie is another sort of skill that's in this space, you know what I mean?
Like in reality TV and in poker, you would get a direct ability to have an advantage on that.
If you caught someone lying to you, but you were able to not let them know that you're lying to them, you can gain an advantage in that, in that maybe you can figure out when they're lying such a way that they don't know that you know.
Right.
You know, how much of that goes into poker and bluffing and how that fits together.
I mean, poker is pretty easy.
You know, I don't believe you, I call or I raise.
You know, I mean, it's right.
Now, it's still a determination of if I call you, does it mean I have seen through your lie or I'm just being stubborn?
Like, are you going to try on the next card?
Are you going to try to bluff me again?
Some bluffs take two or three rounds to get through.
Yeah.
You know, if I raise you, I could believe that you were bluffing and therefore be bluffing you back.
Yeah.
I still might have crap cards, but I believe you have crap cards.
And your crap cards may be better than mine, but I'm still going to bluff back at you because you don't know what I have.
My bluff might be better and you don't know what I have.
I have, yeah, I have knowledge that you don't have.
Yeah.
And so it's, you know, it's fairly, well, I say it's fairly obvious, but then I brought up all those other things.
You know, at the end of the hand, it's pretty obvious.
You know one way or the other at the end of the hand.
So if you bet and one person folds, the other person who won the hand, they're under, are they under an obligation to show what they know?
So in order to know for sure whether they're bluffing, you would have to stay to the end of the hand.
Or be playing on a television table where it's shown.
Yeah.
Yeah, but the player, like we, when we watch it on TV, we see their hands because there's a little camera down there, but the players don't get to see their hands.
Sorry, I meant the live television camera.
Like there are some games that are telecast live or usually like 20 to 30 minutes behind.
Oh, yeah, okay.
And then you could find out.
And then you can like have friends after the telecast and be like, hey, remember 20 minutes ago when you folded?
Yeah, he was bluffing.
Yeah, right.
Then you go into the whole cycle of things of the player you're playing against knows that you just saw that hand.
Yeah, yeah.
I know that you know that you know that you were bluffing.
Yeah.
So it just, you know, levels everything up.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I think that's good.
That's a good episode.
We can end that on that.
We talked about lies.
We talked about Pam Hemp Hill and how things can get confusing there.
Yeah.
And you shouldn't just assume that people are telling you the truth.
You should check.
The only real way is to have other evidence with which to show.
So first of all, people should start living their lives such that their lives are going along with that extra evidence.
So it's easy to show because it's useful to you to have other people understand that you're telling the truth and being able to just show them.
This is what I did.
This is how it happened.
That's the objectively real thing that both of us can see and everyone else who comes by can also view to show that that's really real.
Be honest, people.
Just be honest.
Or am I telling you that so that when I bluff, you'll buy it?
Exactly.
No, I'm going to just have it be objectively available because even when I bluff, you'd be able to know because the evidence is I can detect lies.
I can detect lies wherever I go.
Yes.
Good.
Good.
We're going to use that in a future episode.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, with that, we'll sign off.
If anyone has any questions, comments, complaints, concerns about this podcast, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And where can people find you, David?
The easiest way is to find me on Linktree, which is linktree slash David Bloomberg with a dot before the EE and the URL there.
You can find me more directly on Blue Sky as at David Bloomberg.
And since we mentioned reality TV, you can find my reality TV videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok is at David Bloomberg TV.
You will probably not find me at a poker table these days.
I just haven't, you know, when the world shut down, I kind of stopped and was playing online for a while, a little while, but I, quite frankly, found it dull.
And so I haven't really gotten back into it.
Even though, like, you know, this shirt, I won from a company, I think, on a Twitter drawing, you know, and this hat, which actually has the signatures of three World Series of Poker winners on it, I won from a poker podcast drawing.
So I've got this poker gear.
And, You know, I just haven't been playing lately.
Well, maybe someday in the future you get back into it.
All that retirement time that you spend podcasting instead.
Yes, yes.
Commenting on poker rather than playing it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, this podcast can be found now on YouTube at Spencer G. Watson is my account there.
And Twitter, I'm Spencer G. Watson.
And Blue Sky, I'm Spencer Watson.
So you can find me on those platforms.
No one goes to threads.
No one is serious.
Give it up.
Meta, really?
Says the guy who's on X. That's where the front line of the battlefield is for the reality war.