Truth Unrestricted, hosted by Spencer and Jeff, tackles confirmation bias—amplified by Facebook’s $100B+ ad-driven echo chambers and Google’s algorithmic reinforcement of flawed beliefs—while outlining five strict rules: no hyperbole (e.g., "110% effort"), zero name-calling (even if referencing Trump), relentless questioning of assumptions, prioritizing ideas over authority figures like Einstein, and avoiding Hitler comparisons. Their weekly episodes aim to fact-check claims neutrally, reject binary thinking, and redefine terms like racism or leadership, arguing that open inquiry—not opposition—deepens understanding, despite modern discourse’s lack of civility. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the first episode of the podcast we're calling Truth Unrestricted.
That may change as we go.
We'll see.
But right now, that's what it's being called.
And we're going to tell everyone what the hell we're doing here.
I'm here with my good friend Jeff.
I'm Spencer.
How you doing, Jeff?
Thank you for having me, good sir.
I'm just getting over the dreaded COVID, so my voice isn't 100% just yet.
But how'd that go for you?
Oh, you know, it's.
No, I don't, thankfully.
Yeah, well, for me, it was just as bad as very bad flu.
And hopefully it's getting better every day.
And hopefully another couple of days and I'll be out of the box.
Till then, I'm locked in my room.
Loads of fun.
Anyway, so what the hell are we doing on this podcast?
We want to talk about this world that we're in and the fact that we have ourselves, you know, like this is how I explain to other people when I'm explaining this.
Is it, you know, the zeitgeist is this, you know, ethereal thing, just the collection of ideas that are in society is kind of the zeitgeist, right?
It's just kind of the collection, right?
So we don't have one zeitgeist.
It's almost like we have two distinct zeitgeists in our society, except that that's not even true either.
We have everyone really has their own zeitgeist now.
Thanks to the social media, you know, whirlwind we're all in, everyone has their own set of unique set of facts.
And some of those are very close to what other people have, but everyone has their own now.
And it's, it's getting to be an increasing level of madness in this thing when you talk to anyone about this stuff because they'll feel even more certain every day that what they think is true.
And, you know, they never question it.
And, you know, you can't make any progress.
Well, it's because it's because it's so easy to get access to a plethora of information on any topic to feed confirmation bias.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Confirmation bias is a thing that's going to come up a lot in this on this podcast.
So that's it's and what we have with our search engines and our Facebook feeds and Twitter feeds and all of that is a essentially a giant confirmation bias engine that is just working, you know, a machine learning computer that's working to find out what you like and give you more of it and, you know, confirm all the things that you already feel you know, even if they're wrong.
Yep.
And put you in nice, comfortable little echo chambers where you can all preach the same common philosophy to your tribe.
And everyone who's listening to this says, yeah, all those other people, they have that.
I got to say, everyone has it.
Everyone has these biases that are being confirmed and you have to work really hard to.
So that's what we're going to talk about here is trying to break past that and take individual things and pull them apart.
So before I get too deep into any of the meat and tattoos of that, this is just an introduction.
We have, I have some rules of engagement for this podcast.
Rules of engagement, ways that I intend to carry on these conversations.
So some simple rules.
First rule, no hyperbole.
Everyone loves to say that they're putting in 110% effort.
No one actually puts in more than 100% of their effort.
I'll be honest, if we get into anything philosophical, I'm really going to struggle.
A lot of people will, yes.
And other people have seen something a million times.
Yeah, I know.
But it's the point now where everyone just goes to a bigger number to double and triple confirm the thing that they're doing.
And it becomes like the childhood game of, you know, my dad's bigger than your dad.
And we have to stick to, you know, things.
Oh, that's fair.
I do.
That's fair.
It's part of our lexicon to the point where most people, like you, haven't even thought about the way in which you're doing it.
And you get immediately annoyed whenever I point it out.
But nevertheless, in this space, I'm going to try to point it out and, you know, tone it down.
And we try to stick to like grounded things.
So that's the first one.
The second rule is no name calling and no insults.
And I don't really mean like just between like the people having a conversation, like me and you.
I mean, like subjects of the conversation as well.
Like, yeah, yeah.
There's a refer to ex-president Donald Trump as, you know, that orange bloated or a mystery.
Pumpkinheaded.
Yeah.
Those we don't.
Yeah.
That's no need to, if you don't have actual substantial things to complain about, then you shouldn't be embellishing them with other insults.
It's not necessary.
It's you see that all the time on forums everywhere on the internet, and it bothers me a lot.
And we're just not going to do it here.
This is the next rule, the big rule really for me.
Nothing is sacrosanct and everything can be questioned.
Including this list of rules.
Yes, of course.
I can justify every rule.
Of course.
Yeah.
And absolutely, that's good.
That's why I have you here because you will call me on things that I'm not focusing on well enough or not justifying well enough or whatever.
Like it's, you know, absolutely.
And that's, that's going to be a thing that's, well, it's probably the thing that's going to get us annoying.
Like on an episodic basis, we're basically going to like pick a piece of our social world.
Our social world and pick it apart.
Yeah.
That's ideally, ideally in a debate style format where we could take contrary positions and argue our cases.
Sure.
But not, you know, or just more of a neutral philosophical exploration, we might find ourselves on the opposite side and let's just see what that looks like.
Oh, yeah.
When we're on the opposite side, that's that'd be great.
But what I would encourage everyone to do is try to look at the opposite side of their own view.
Like a fundamental question that everyone should ask themselves is, how do I know the things that I know?
You know, I ask myself that all the time.
How do I know the things that I know?
There's things that I'm sure about.
And I think to myself, how is it that I'm so sure about this thing?
There's, you know, and I come to some surprising conclusions to myself sometimes.
And sometimes I actually come to the conclusion that I can't support that with anything.
I don't actually know that I know it.
I don't, you know, it's not a, you know, I can't find anything that really supports it.
And then I have to put it in the maybe category.
And, you know, it might be something I like, but that's too bad if it's not something I can support with facts that I could point to other people that, you know, it's not a thing that's true.
It's, and that's how science works.
It doesn't matter who said a thing.
If it's just, you know, if it's not really true, it's not really true.
Well, and I do, I do appreciate both the scientific approach and the lost art of civil debate because I see far too little of both of those things in most public discourse.
Yeah.
And like, as you know, I was very active in my local labor movement for a number of years.
And like, I just, I ground my teeth sometimes at union meetings when I heard like that sort of hyperbolic rhetoric.
And, and, you know, it's anyways, you're probably going to have an entire episode about tribalism, right?
So I guess we could discuss that there.
But like, it's, it's sort of a good backdrop for like justification for the purpose of this list, right?
These are, these are definitely behaviors we don't want to slip into because it's things we're going to be criticizing.
Yeah.
So another rule that I have in my everyday thinking that I'm definitely going to institute here is that there's a sort of idea in the world today that the natural things, things that occur naturally, are all good and well.
And that, you know, we should always look to the natural world as an example of how to live and how to, you know, like the world's, you know, the natural world is in balance.
The good old days when Homo sapiens lived to age 30.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, and like that, that that's the law of the jungle and like, yeah, that's how it works.
And that, and that they're all in balance.
And you really, that the jungle is not in balance.
Well, it is in balance, but it's not because of anything good that's happening there.
There is so many things that would be considered, you know, crimes against humanity happening in the jungle, you know, between the animals that, you know, and we, if we are humans who are living above that, we need to not look at that as the reverence.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I always find it rather rather humorous when people try to simultaneously defend the position of being like all for the natural and also pacifists.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or vegans.
Yeah.
Because the natural world is incredibly unfair and incredibly violent.
What mankind brings to the table is our intelligence and ability of civility.
So the next rule is that ideas are more important than whoever communicates them.
And really.
I'm all over that.
Yeah.
I mean, this is the thing everyone says, you know, oh, well, you know, you know, so-and-so, you know, famous person said this, Einstein said this or whatever.
And it's supposed to have much more weight.
And then sometimes you look it up and it's not even from Einstein.
It's yeah, don't believe everything you see on the internet.
But also, if it made sense, why would it matter?
Yeah.
And along with this rule is that no one is inherently wrong.
No one is wrong just because of who they are.
You know, Hitler wasn't wrong because he was Hitler.
He was wrong because he was wrong.
You know, and Churchill wasn't on the right side because his name was Churchill.
He was on the right side because he did the right things.
Is, you know, and so I mean this is just one example, but that's, you know, you get the idea.
No one is wrong just because their name is thing x and and right, along with all those things.
Another thing I need to, you know, I really like to get across to everyone, is that no one is stupid.
Everyone thinks.
A lot of people, I think, are um, self-conscious about the things they think.
You know they're, they're a little gun shy about mentioning the things that they think and that they, you know, but oftentimes i've been able to talk to people and get them to really open up and, you know, say a lot of really deep and intelligent things once they're confident that what they're saying is going to be heard and accepted.
And and you know everyone is doing that we all have a meat computer that's running actually pretty good, generally speaking.
Some of us have uh, you know the wrong facts to work with.
Oh, that reminds me.
There's a um, there's a stand-up comedian I can't remember who.
Um, he did a routine on uh as part of his routine about how like, you know how like, working class Americans have a generally accepted reputation of being, you know, dummy oakles.
Yeah um, he made the point about like, ask any working class American about you know his favorite, the statistics of his favorite team, or the roster of his favorite team or most hated team in his favorite sporting league, and that person will dazzle you with their ability at like, photographic factual memorization.
Like a baseball fan in America can spout a string of numeric statistics that would challenge some physicists.
Yeah sure yeah, so yeah, i'm all over that.
No one is stupid but, like you say, lots of people have access to bad information and garbage increasingly.
So now yeah, so the last rule on my list of rules and i'm not going to guarantee that there won't be more rules made eventually um, is that um, we're going to avoid uh, invoking Godwin's Law, which means we're going to avoid uh, mentioning Hitler and Nazi Germany in reference to uh, things are oh, that's like it's as bad as Hitler or that's.
As you know, in my opinion, the only person who was really as bad as Hitler was Hitler.
The only people who were as bad as the Nazis were the Nazis, and trying to, you know, endlessly create illusions and and comparisons to them is just more hyperbole in disguise, really.
So yeah, we're gonna try to avoid that here and uh, if I have guests and they go there then, then i'll have to rein them in and it'll be up to me.
I feel like I feel like I need to bring up the fact that, in mentioning your previous point about ideas being more important than the person who communicates them, you already broke the rule about not mentioning Hitler.
So I guess that's your one guinea, so I get one.
How's that?
You can rewind and listen if you want to.
Man, you've already.
You've already dropped the h-bomb once.
Uh well, I did it before I put the rule in place.
Whatever, let's move on.
Yes sir, all right, so my primary goal here is to unravel confirmation bias above all else.
Everyone has confirmation bias.
I have confirmation bias.
Everyone who is a expert in confirmation bias has confirmation bias.
They all have to work consciously to avoid it.
If you're not aware that it's there, it's like a poker table.
What they say about poker, what the experts say is that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you are the sucker.
If you can't spot your own confirmation bias, you're in the middle of it.
You are well into it.
You are so deep in.
Yeah.
So that's the first main goal.
Another one that kind of goes hand in hand with it, really, but is that there's a lot of deeply held assumptions in our world.
And they, you know, I have always questioned these my whole life.
It's, it drives everyone in my life nuts, my wife, especially.
And I have a rule in my life that traditions need a purpose.
And if the purpose is no longer served, then you should consider no longer following the tradition.
Yeah.
You know, what can happen is that some traditions can accumulate extra purposes along the way.
And so its initial purpose might not be there, but it might have some other thing that it's doing now, like serving your community or something like that.
But in general, you know, traditions, you know, they don't always need to be there.
Some people say, oh, it's a tradition.
We got to do it.
It's a tradition.
Well, just because it's a tradition doesn't mean you need to go ahead and do it.
Traditionally, we were cool with slavery.
We tend to evolve as a species, I hope.
So yeah, I'm all over that.
So, you know, some people will get uncomfortable when you take a deeply held belief of theirs and you just dive right into it and you pull it apart.
They think that you're destroying it somehow.
If you pull apart a belief and then you reconstruct it and you come up with the same thing that everyone always had, you still haven't wasted your time.
You know, you've essentially done a grade 10 science experiment where you question gravity and if you did it right, you came up with, you know, acceleration is 9.8 meters a second squared.
You've reaffirmed that everything is well with the world.
But if you didn't come up with the right thing, well, then maybe, you know, you should reconsider, you know, the thing that you're thinking.
If you can't deconstruct your own thing and then reconstruct it from parts, then maybe it's not even really there.
We're going to try to have anti-adversarial discussion.
We try to disagree amicably.
I'm going to try that.
I would like that to be the case.
That's not a thing that happens much anymore.
I think you could devote an entire episode to lamenting the death of civil debate in Western society.
That was like, I loved debate club in high school, man.
There's nothing I like more than finding meeting someone with whom I disagree on a topic, who can intelligently defend their standpoint and intelligently deconstruct mine.
That's like intellectual tennis, it's so much fun.
But like, everybody gets so emotionally invested in what they believe is their facts now that, like uh, an argument against it is considered a personal attack.
Yeah right yeah, and then, and then you need a safe space right, because you were personally attacked.
Yeah, we'll get to that.
Let's not do that in episode one.
We'll call it an episode three thing, maybe.
Okay um yeah, so i'd like to be able to give uh voice to uh I, I like i'd be, I i'd like to think i'm the kind of person that can um, point out a flaw in my own argument and and I encourage everyone to do that same thing where your argument is weak, you should know where it's weak.
If there's something that you know, some fact in the world that doesn't support your point of view, you should look at that thing and not avoid it and not and you know, i've seen people who retweet, you know, resend memes on facebook and they know that they're false and they don't care and then ask them why and they say oh yeah, but that it supports my okay, this is making okay.
So, like and I, we were talk, we were talking about goals and, like you you, you express this as a willingness to give voice to untruths that support my own personal views.
But we're coming out on the con side of that right, like that's not something we want to do.
Um, like that's you're, you're suggesting that as one of our rules of engagement or goals for this that um, anything we bring to the table as supporting evidence must be open to rigorous fact checking.
Yes yeah yeah, but this is like you know, people will are now in this space where they are willingly and knowingly recommendating falsehoods simply because they lean harder on their side of the political spectrum.
And I, I need to point these out.
I need to like, even if it's a thing that doesn't support my own personal political view, I have to be able to point it out as an untruth and say like, look this, you know i'm, I might even enjoy if this was true, but it's just not.
And you need to.
You know like, this has to be a thing that we are able to do as a society.
We're able to point to these things and say look, they're just not true, even if they'd be great if they were.
They're just not true.
And uh, I I wrote a uh thing on this on facebook once.
My next kind of goal is to take an anti-absolutist stance.
I wrote this great thing once about, about a um, there They're being an absolute enemy, and that everyone has their absolute enemy now.
They're being fed this thing.
It was kind of one of the ideas that led to this podcast, but that everyone has, you know, and you most of the things you're told are now preceded with the side of the spectrum they're supposed to be on.
You know, so you know, if they're told about a legislation, they almost always put who put the legislation in.
Oh, you know, Obama put this legislation in.
Oh, you know, Harper put this legislation in.
You know, and you're almost always supposed to interpret your, you know, based on who put it in, who, who legislated it.
And that's not, well, that's not supposed to be the case.
You're supposed to evaluate these things based on their own merit individually, of absent of whoever put them in.
But show me the last common Democratic citizen who has read a bill before it becomes law.
Well, now the bills are obscenely long almost because they don't want anyone to read them, which is also another thing that doesn't need to be and yet is.
And but yeah, things don't have to be in an absolutist position.
We're never in a, if you're not with me, you're against me space.
And, you know, I don't think anyone else should be either.
We're all in this together.
You know.
One goal that I have dear to my heart for this podcast is to start to develop what I call proper and useful definitions for things that we, you know, terms we use every day.
Mostly, you know, the number one for me is trust.
For me, trust is the concept that defines every social interaction we have.
But all kinds of other things, intuition, racism, leadership.
I mean, these are words we use all the time, but given different contexts, they can kind of mean different things sometimes.
But almost everyone has a different definition of intuition.
I almost guarantee it.
Almost no one can, you know, if you told 10 different people to just write down a definition of that and then you compared them, you'd be like, wow, like that's, and the same would be true for trust and probably definitely true for racism.
And if you ask 10 random people to define leadership, well, you know, like, but when we talk about these things, these are very important things.
We need to be able to have sort of a, you know, a way to talk about them where we're, I mean, that's why I'm an agreement on common agreement on common definitions and terms.
Sure.
Yeah.
So, like most, most contracts and legal documents start with a preamble that's like, hey, when we say this word, this here precisely is what we mean when we say this word.
And when we say this word, we mean precisely this and nothing other than this.
So yeah, yeah, I dig that.
So although that, that like deconstructing those terms would be an episode in and of itself.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I think it's going to be episode two, actually.
And we're going to try to not swear that much.
We'll see.
We'll see how that works.
I will do my best.
It does not work very well.
I'm also a person who swears in his everyday life all the time, but I'd like this to be a podcast.
Someone could, like I said, a podcast, someone could be playing in their car while they're driving their kids to school and feel okay.
You know what I mean?
No worse than an average radio station or whatever.
Can say with 110% certainty that I will be more guilty of fucking swearing than I will of hyperbole.
Yeah, right.
You found that button and then you push it.
I got it out of my system.
We'll call that page card.
Yeah, right.
All right.
So, um, generally speaking, there's an idea in the world that questioning a thing is the same thing as opposing that thing.
And that idea needs to go away.
At least it needs to go away in the conversations on this podcast.
Yeah.
Like 100%.
If we can't ask questions about a thing, we can't ever learn more about it.
And never will our understanding increase.
So obviously, we'll need to ask some sometimes very pointed or even some seemingly obtuse questions about some topics.
That's a thing that'll happen.
And we have to be able to do that as a society, not just us on this podcast.
And, you know, that's part of the thing for me where nothing is absolutely sacrosanct.
There's nothing that's sacrosanct.
There's nothing, you know, if you want to talk about racism, then we should just talk about racism.
And it also, in that context, and everything I've said here today, it shouldn't matter what our color of skin is or what our background is or where we're from in the world.
It could be that we don't have enough facts based on our life experiences.
That may be.
But there's a line from an Aerosmith song that comes to mind.
If you can judge a wise man by the color of his skin, then Mr., you're a better man than I.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So basically, that's what we're going to be about here.
And this is episode one.
I think we'll wrap it up here and call it good.
All right.
Fair play.
And we're going to try for one of these every week.