In Episode 30 of Fool Me Twice, comedian Bradford Oakes and former detective Steve Van Aperen explore how easily people can be influenced, misled, or persuaded by polls, social behaviour and poorly framed questions. The conversation begins lightheartedly, with Steve recovering from having a wisdom tooth removed and the pair exchanging painful and funny dental stories.

The discussion then turns to the Australian Logie Awards and comedian Tom Gleeson’s successful campaign to win the Gold Logie. His campaign demonstrated how an apparently democratic voting system could be manipulated when people were able to vote repeatedly. Rather than proving who was genuinely the most popular television personality, the system could simply reward whoever generated the greatest number of votes. This becomes the starting point for a wider discussion about political polling, television ratings and surveys.

Bradford and Steve question whether polls are truly representative when the sample sizes, methodology and wording of questions are not always transparent. They discuss political elections in Australia, Britain and the United States where widely reported polling failed to predict the eventual result. Steve emphasises that the way a question is framed can strongly influence an answer, particularly when questions are ambiguous, leading or contain assumptions.

One of the episode’s funniest examples is the story about putting out the bins. In Australia, residents commonly put their rubbish bins outside the night before collection. One person puts a bin out, a neighbour sees it and assumes it must be bin night, then several more neighbours copy them. Soon the whole street has bins outside simply because everyone assumes somebody else knows something they do not. Steve describes this as a form of social influence, demonstrating how quickly behaviour can spread without anyone checking the original information.

Steve Van Aperen also draws on his experience as an investigator. He explains that good investigators do not simply accuse people or rely on nervous behaviour as proof of guilt. Instead, they ask open questions, gather evidence and examine whether a person’s account remains consistent. Fabricated stories can unravel because liars must continually remember invented details, while genuine memories often contain richer contextual and sensory information.

Ultimately, Bradford Oakes and Steve Van Aperen encourage listeners to question polls, statistics and persuasive claims rather than accepting them at face value. Their message is simple: examine the questions, methodology and evidence, and never assume it is bin night just because your neighbour has put the bins out.

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