Spencer’s This Podcast rejects the internet’s weaponization of "truth," arguing objective reality exists beyond subjective narratives, despite confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance distorting perceptions. He critiques factions manipulating alternative facts—like $6B+ in partisan media influence—to polarize society, warning tribalism over logic fuels long-term collapse. Compassionately confronting false beliefs, not shaming them, is key to restoring shared understanding, he insists, urging listeners to amplify the show as a counter to fragmentation. The goal: dismantle engineered unreality before it erases common ground entirely. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm your regular host, Spencer.
Today's episode will be a little different in that there won't be a guest and it is entirely scripted.
I want to talk about this podcast and its content.
First, it has a strange name.
Sounds slightly pretentious and oddly familiar to anyone who spends a lot of time looking through Reddit threads and watching conspiracy videos on YouTube.
This is by design.
Words have meanings because of how we use them.
On the internet, the word truth is slowly having its meaning eroded.
Nearly every time I see it on the internet, I become more and more certain that the maker of the content is attempting to mislead me.
Naming my content with the word truth prominent in the title is my way of pushing down on the other side of the scale.
We need to use this word for its actual meaning, or we will lose sight entirely of what is and what isn't actually true.
Second, I want to talk about the nature of the truth and how it relates to the topics I present and how I present them.
Whenever I think about doing an episode, I zoom right out on the concept.
I try to pull myself back as far as I can from it to see where it fits in the wider world around us.
I try to consider all aspects of it and where it fits in the wider context of ideas.
When you zoom in very, very close to something, it is possible to cut away or ignore enough of the context to reinterpret it as something completely different than it really is.
It is possible to create your own reality that includes this as a known fact, even when this doesn't match with objective reality.
Third, my goal is to produce a series of thoughts that are completely compatible with objective reality.
I don't want to distort anything toward a preconceived set of ideas.
I don't want my personal biases to interfere with what I'm doing here, even though there will be times when those biases peek through the mist.
Objective reality is the goal.
When we look at a deeply divided electorate with hundreds of different people supporting hundreds of different explanations of what is actually happening, it is very difficult to know what to do.
In that environment, sometimes we give up on ever knowing what to do.
Sometimes we even give up on the idea of ever knowing what is real.
In that environment, objective reality is the only fair judge.
I don't appreciate a world where we congregate into separate social groups that have drastically different interpretations of what constitutes objective reality.
Only one objective reality exists.
While it is possible that some things will not be completely known to a person, this does not give any such person the right to create the unknown portion from whole cloth.
Too many times in history, this has occurred.
When we learn more about the nature of our reality, and this knowledge conflicts with the fictional explanation previously put forward, we experience in our society a new political battle.
The internet has greatly accelerated and degenerated this effect.
Cognitive dissonance and the Dunning-Kruger effect have mixed dangerously with the increased availability of information to encourage people to create whole new fictional realities.
In doing so, they unfortunately forfeit their own rights to observable fact and participation in the actual world.
Worse than that, political engineers have seized the reins of this dangerous misinformation machine to garner support for their factions and their goals.
Looking at our world now, I cannot but worry that misinformation and the distortion of reality could actually triumph over objective reality.
I cannot stand by and idly watch this occur.
As a great poet once said, I will not go quietly into that dark night.
But I do not go forth in this to grab hold of one side of the tug of war rope to rest it firmly to one side of the political spectrum.
It is my intention to ease the strain of the various hands that are pulling on that rope.
The zealotry of both sides has made this situation into a dangerous political machine, and it is this machine that must be dismantled.
We cannot continue to move ourselves into our separate virtual spaces and congratulate each other on how smart we are to not be diverted the way the others have been.
Even those who consider themselves righteous in this fight need to look across at the other side and realize that it is populated by humans, especially those who consider themselves the most righteous must do so.
Everyone who believes in a different version of reality than the one you hold in your mind has come to that idea by some means.
There is a reason they believe the thing they believe.
We need to understand those reasons.
We need to put in effort against this dangerous separation in our society that allows the most dangerous beliefs to exist.
We need to begin occupying the spaces in which those beliefs flourish uncontested, and we need to begin speaking openly in those spaces.
It is of the utmost importance that when we speak in those spaces, we are polite, kind, humble.
We do not approach people with opposing beliefs with a haughty, my reality is better than your reality mindset.
We do not berate anyone for anything they believe.
None of the people who hold separate beliefs lack intellect.
Stop congratulating yourselves on how well you have understood reality.
Start reaching out to others to understand theirs.
Get them to justify their set of beliefs.
Refute them politely with facts, preferably repeatedly observable facts.
And if they respond with insults and zealotry, merely let them.
Do not respond in kind.
It is the nature of the honorable that we must put ourselves and our reputations on the line.
To be honorable is to expose yourself to some harm in the hope that you can achieve something greater.
The honorable always have a disadvantage in the direct conflict of this kind because they refuse to engage in an unfair manner.
But the honorable gain a great advantage in the larger political field in that they will gain support.
It is only through embracing an honorable approach that one can gain the respect of both their allies and their opponents.
By steering my collection of thoughts toward objective reality, I leave both political extremes behind.
To the people inhabiting those extreme positions, it looks like I am being too fair to the opposing position.
I have been accused of both siding.
For anyone who isn't familiar with this term, it means that in an effort to appear neutral, a person might treat both sides of an issue with seemingly equal weight.
To hockey fans, this is a lot like when the referees call a legitimate penalty in the playoffs and then feel compelled to find a penalty to put on the other team so that the refs themselves can't be accused of deciding the outcome of an important game.
But the accusation that I am both siding something because I haven't condemned one side as demonic is unfair and polarizing.
There are people in the world who have terrible ideas and policies, and they are masquerading as reasonable people by taking a hands-off approach to critical issues.
What most people hear in that statement is that this is a behavior of terrible people, and they are terrible.
But what most people should remember is that the reason why they act this way, why they pretend to be hands-off and neutral about subjects that we absolutely know they are not truly neutral about, is because this is something reasonable people do.
And the act of being a reasonable person should not be vilified or tainted by the actions of terrible people.
The fact that this makes it all the more difficult to tell the reasonable people from the terrible people is not a reason for reasonable people to move themselves from positions of reasonability and further towards extreme positions.
This fact does make it more difficult to see people's true intentions.
Sorry about that.
But reasonable people aren't at fault for that either.
Terrible people are.
The proper response for reasonable people in this scenario isn't to shift their positions to more extreme positions.
The proper response is to double down on reason.
Consciously think about your actual positions, beliefs, ideas, biases, and conclusions.
Don't vilify someone for getting something wrong, but don't give them a pass on those things either.
Discuss rationally and openly in a public space where your ideas can be vetted, contradicted, challenged, and potentially defeated.
If your idea is so weak that it can't stand up to scrutiny, then you shouldn't make important decisions with that idea in mind.
Accusing people of both siding when they have not yet joined one of the extreme camps is an absolutist position.
Whether you understand it or not, you are saying that I have to be either all in with you or I am against you.
This is an idea that draws tribalist lines in our political sphere.
It discourages people from having centrist positions.
It strongly encourages people to become one or the other.
Leaving the political spectrum alone as separate camps that never talk to each other ensures that confirmation bias will rule in every camp.
It ensures that every separate group will come to separate conclusions about the nature of the world.
It ensures that the populace will have a lack of unity.
As long as we believe that everyone around us needs to be either entirely for us or they are against us, we ensure that we will never have enough clout to accomplish the larger goals.
Another thing that has deeply disheartened me in the last few years is what I see as a willingness for people to embrace unreality.
Alternative facts have become a thing in our world that is strangling the truth.
In World War II, when bombers traveled from Britain to Germany to bomb factories, they would have to pass over anti-aircraft guns.
During night raids, these guns would be aimed with the assistance of radar.
To counter this, the British began sending one plane all by itself in front of all the bombers to drop long strips of tinfoil by the ton to slowly drift downward in the air over the radar station.
The hope was that this would give the radar station a lot of false readings, far more than they could handle, and would certainly make it difficult to differentiate the positions of actual planes from strips of tinfoil.
In our information space now, disinformation and alternative facts are tinfoil on our radar screens.
Even the ones that are obviously false and seemingly easy to dismiss are a distraction for us during a time when we need fewer distractions to understand and navigate an increasingly complex world.
And in all this, I also find another phenomenon.
There are people who appear to know fact from fiction, but do not care.
They appear to actually prefer the lies and untruths to reality.
There must be many important and complex psychological reasons for this, but the fact that they have the wherewithal to ignore objective reality also tells me that they know that it's there and could someday decide to engage that same wherewithal to reject their alternative facts and come back to objective reality.
And I want that.
I want to have more allies in objective reality.
In all of this, I find a deep lack of sympathy and understanding.
People who inhabit both of the political camps are more than willing to slander and vilify anyone from the opposite side.
For the left to say that the right started this, and they absolutely did, does nothing to exonerate the left for getting dragged right down to that level.
When I see a person who has allowed themselves to be distorted, either by accepting a false narrative of events or by allowing themselves the temporary relief that comes from engaging in zealotry, I feel a great sympathy for those individuals and a great sorrow for the fate of our world.
How is it that otherwise compassionate people could turn to mockery so quickly?
A person who cannot or for whatever reason will not see what is actually true is suffering mental illness and needs help.
And how is anyone going to reach them to help them by mocking them and pushing them away?
This social dynamic causes people to hide their opposing view, to feel shame for it, but it doesn't encourage people to change it.
Clearly.
If it did, we wouldn't be where we are now.
If you were laying siege to a castle and you told everyone inside the walls that they faced certain death once you breached the defenses, they would fight with everything they had and to the last defender.
If instead you told them that you don't hold their aggression against them and that you will treat them with respect and decency should they surrender, then you might just gain the keep without a bloody battle.
People who are embracing unreality are not in danger of losing their lives, but they are in danger of losing their dignity.
And for some people, that is more important.
People who embrace unreality need to have a path back to reality.
They need to know that the forces that warped their view of reality are real forces.
They need to know that they aren't somehow flawed and irredeemable.
They ended up on a path approaching a waterfall because the currents in the river are strong, not because they were too stupid or weak to see the truth.
If there isn't a path for them to come back, they will stay where they are, and we will remain divided.
There is a popular lie being told to us that compassion and logic are incompatible.
Usually it's said that being logical or too logical means that you're not being compassionate or compassionate enough.
The corollary to that is often not said out loud, but is carried on those same shoulders.
In order to be compassionate, you must abandon all logic.
This is a thing that I fight against and I feel must go away.
I see no contradiction between logic and compassion, and I defy anyone to prove to me that they cannot coexist.
Abandoning logic and going with your gut will cause you to lose.
Maybe not right now, but eventually, every time.
And it will cause those around you to lose.
It will allow those who are in an advanced position, those who have advantages, and by the way, those who likely encouraged you to go with your gut in the first place, to win.
They have been winning for quite some time, and they are using their advantages to make winning easier.
So shine a light in the darker corners of the internet.
Remind people that objective reality exists and that the only way to be a part of it is to leave their dark corners.
Or just help me do it.
In all this, I ask you to do one thing, one thing only.
Share this podcast.
I make it for everyone who wants to think.
But I also add that everyone should be a person who wants to think.
Send it to someone you don't talk to anymore because talking to them about their unreal position has become too difficult for you.
Link it to anyone who thinks they have everything all figured out and would like nothing better than to tell me about how I have everything all wrong.
Share it on message boards and Reddit threads and Facebook posts whenever someone is bragging about things that you know are untrue, but you don't want to engage in the back and forth link war that would ensue if you said anything about it.
With this podcast, I want to lift up the truth and make it synonymous with objective reality.