Spencer and Jeff explore trust as a subjective, unequal process—governments and billionaires like Bezos easily trust the powerless, while ordinary individuals face asymmetric control and corruption, breeding mistrust. Reality-denying ideologies (QAnon, anti-vaxxers) flourish amid the widest wealth gap since WWII, exploiting systemic failures without evidence. Studies link poverty to cognitive decline, not just ignorance, and Spencer warns confirmation bias fuels blind distrust of elites, mirroring flawed conspiracy logic. The powerful’s exploitation, from bought media to abuse, demands scrutiny beyond simplistic narratives. [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 Spencer, your host.
I'm here today with Jeff.
How are you doing, Jeff?
Not too bad, buddy.
How about you?
Pretty good.
Right at the top of the show here, we're going to mention again that anyone who wants to make any comments, any thoughts they have on the podcast, anything they notice that we got wrong, they want to take us to task on that, you send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
So today we're going to get back into something that we mentioned once a long time ago on the podcast.
I think it was in episode two.
Yeah, it was very early in.
Yeah, I want to get back into it again because to me, it's very important and it has a lot of aspects relating to a lot of things.
It's a many tentacled beast.
It's the concept of trust.
Trust is one of these things that everyone feels that they know.
Everyone feels sort of that they have a good idea how trust works.
And, you know, everyone's trusting people and they understand who they trust and why they trust them.
And but sometimes when you ask people about trust, if they can really define trust, they don't, you know, they haven't really thought about how to put this into words.
It's one of those words that's, or not words, it's one of those concepts that's so ubiquitous in our lives that we don't really think too much about it.
It's just sort of there.
Yeah, it's a simple binary state.
You either trust somebody or you don't.
Right.
Yeah.
So looking in the way back machine, back to when we talked about this before, I define trust.
My personal definition of trust is as a two-step process.
It's a subjective experience in the mind of one person.
And it's two steps.
Both are subjective beliefs.
The first is a belief when you're going to trust.
The first thing you have to do is you have to believe that you know something about the decisions that another person is going to make.
And the other person would be the person that you're ostensibly going to trust.
And the second thing is that you have to also believe that whatever those decisions are, they're going to be useful for you.
Useful or like I presume beneficial or bare minimum doing no harm.
Yes.
In this way, this definition, one thing I like about it is that it defines mechanically how it is that a selfish creature would go about working with another creature.
Because if we were just merely selfish, we couldn't really work with anyone else.
If it was only ever about only us and we were the only ones who really existed, you're never trusting anyone and you're never working with anyone.
This is essentially how lizards live, right?
They don't, they're not pack animals.
They're not pack creatures.
They gather to mate, but even that is a one-time event.
As I understand how lizards do this, they fight with each other just for the opportunity to do it.
And it's just one time they do it and they're done.
They're gone looking for another like another opportunity after that.
And they don't ever work together.
They're never trusting other lizards.
And a lot of creatures in the wild actually work like this.
Mammals and birds distinctly act differently.
We, you know, many mammals trust other mammals of their own species.
And that this is the way in which we're different than this.
And this method, this, this sort of two-step process, this exactly defines how selfish mammals would go about engaging in social relationships in which they have to rely and trust another individual to actually do things for them.
And it also defines they have to get the other person to trust them and they have to do things.
They have to act in such a way that the other entity would believe that they would benefit from this relationship as well.
And so this is, of course, just how trust works.
And that's great.
But this two subjective beliefs that work in concert almost guarantee that if you have two creatures of any kind that are going to trust each other, they almost definitely have a different level of trust for each other.
I've read a lot of different definitions of trust over the years.
And one of them sort of implies that the trust is a mutual thing that both are feeling.
And this doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
First of all, you can trust a football player on a team that you've never met.
And that football player doesn't trust you at all.
You can bet money on whether that quarterback is going to throw X number of yards in a game.
Yeah, but by the, sorry to interrupt, but by the same token, that football player would have a great deal of trust for the other players on his line.
And that would be a situation of absolute mutual trust bred from weeks and months of practicing together.
Right.
But the point is that you as a person could trust that one player and that one player wouldn't know you at all.
So it's not like there's any kind of mutual trust occurring.
That football player doesn't even know you exist.
Oh, no, for sure.
Like, absolutely.
You can have one side of trust, but you can also have mutual and mutually beneficial trust.
You can, but even then, I would argue that it's a different level of trust being experienced by each person in each of those trust relationships.
It's almost never going to be perfectly balanced.
In fact, this is almost how we see true love.
You know, when we think about perfect relationships, it's two people and they are trusting each other so completely that their level of trust sentences.
Yeah, yeah.
Their level of trust is then, you know, perfect and they're both trusting each other to the same degree because it's absolutely 100% trust all the way.
Okay, maybe, but you know, that's a pie in the sky notion, I think.
I think it's an ideal that we look for.
I don't know if we reach it that often.
Well, I mean, like, I would, I would cede the point absolutely that you're always going to have, or not always, you will frequently have disparate levels of trust in any relationship or between any two individuals.
But I think that's born more of the very subjective nature of trust and the tremendous uniqueness of each individual psyche than anything else.
Like finding two snowflakes kind of thing.
I think functionally, there's plenty of relationships out there, romantic or otherwise, that demonstrate a level of mutual and functionally balanced trust.
Like Like not perfectly, not exactly, not scientifically identical and mirrored, but functionally balanced.
Sure.
And they just want to work.
Yeah.
And the other point is that it would be so difficult to prove that any of them are balanced because we don't really have a.
Because it's so subjective.
Yeah.
We don't really have a number value that we can measure and point to as this thing.
But because there is this.
In every one of these relationships, a trust imbalance, we then come to another conclusion, which is that when you have two entities that are very different in their properties who are entering into some kind of trust relationship with each other, the trust imbalance can be highly variant.
And this is what I mean.
When you get properties like power and knowledge, which in the two gated definition of trust that I've defined, the one being that you know something about the decisions and that those decisions will be useful for you, power and knowledge themselves are two properties that are very, very intricately linked there.
So therefore, when you have a lot of power and a lot of knowledge, it's very easy for you to trust the entity that you have power over and knowledge about.
But if then the other entity has very little power compared to you and very little knowledge about you, then it's much more difficult for them to trust you.
Maybe I should beat around the bush.
I should stop beating around the bush and I should just describe what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about trusting the government or just the powerful people in our society in general.
It's a lot easier for Jeff Bezos to trust me than it is for me to trust Jeff Bezos.
First of all, Jeff Bezos needs almost nothing from me.
He's going to sell me things and he's going to trust that the money I send in is real money that he can use then to, you know, go into space again or whatever.
And I need to trust that all the products I buy are actually going to be delivered, which by the way, today I had one that didn't get delivered.
And thank you for that, Jeff Bezos.
Yeah, it went to another house.
Grats to them.
So when I have to trust the government, the government has a lot of ways to trust me because they have systems in place to know where I live and how to find me.
If they ever need to find me, they have, if I ever break the law, they have a executive branch, you know, the police that can come and track me down.
They have a very powerful system, bureaucracy, institution that can do a great many things.
And it's so large that even those different parts of it don't necessarily know what each other's doing.
But all in all, to me, it's just this great, powerful megalith that I have to deal with all the time, the government.
And it's very difficult for me to trust them because they tell me almost nothing about what they're really doing.
I have to hear it second and third hand from the media.
And it's also difficult for me to trust the media sometimes.
All the roots that the knowledge has to come to me about the government and what they're doing are questionable.
And if they ever need me for anything, well, they just have to ask for it.
Really, they just say, this is what the taxes are.
This is your part in society.
These are the rules.
You have to do these things.
This is all part of it.
I know you didn't decide that this is what you're doing, but this is your new curfew.
These are your new travel restrictions.
Yeah.
And so it's much more difficult for me to trust the government than it is for the government to trust me.
If I ever decide to not pay my taxes, how far will that go?
They will find me toothsuite, right?
And they will just send the bill.
And if I still refuse to pay it, they'll just keep adding that bill up.
And then they'll slowly chip away other things.
Oh, now you can't get a mortgage.
Now you can't get that.
And then garnish your wages or whatever.
They will do all these things because they've set the thing in place so that they can.
And in some ways, you need that to have a civil society.
But in other ways, it just makes it much more difficult for me to trust them.
And I think a lot of people haven't really thought about this, but that's a thing that's in their minds, that it's very difficult to trust the government.
They haven't done this, all this extra work, all this math and the additional definition of the concept of trust just to exactly build the building blocks in the way I have.
But I think a lot of people get it.
They get that same conclusion just by their own thoughts.
Yeah, I don't trust the government.
I don't know anyone who trusts the government.
Even people who are in government don't trust the government.
Probably especially people who are in the government don't trust the government.
And I look at this situation and this is the thing I'm thinking about is that this came up on the podcast a few weeks ago when I was doing an interview with Lydia Green is the idea that we have many different, what I call reality denying ideologies of many different flavors.
I keep a list of them and it slowly grows as I learn about more different unique.
But we're talking like flat earthers, chemtrails, anti-vaxxers, all that kind of stuff.
Yeah, right.
And it might seem from the outside view that all of these ideologies all come from the same basket, like they're cousins who all come from the same incestuous family.
Maybe I should just say family, not incestuous family, but they're all, it seems like they're all heavily related.
Let's just put it that way, because they all seem to have many similarities between themselves.
They all beat the same conspiracy drum.
Well, in a lot of ways, it's true.
And so it looks to us from the outside, like maybe they're all coming up with different ideas from the same set of ideas, branching out from there and then making variations on that same theme.
But I'm not convinced that that's true.
Here's why I don't think that's true.
I think that they are individual sets of ideas and those sets of ideas all led to one central theme.
So think about a flat earther.
In order to believe that the earth is flat and really believe it, and you're going to make a model of the world in your mind, knowing that the earth is flat and that many, many people, the vast majority of other people will not agree with you.
You sort of have to believe that many of those people are willfully lying to you, that they know the truth, that the world is flat, but that they will never admit it because of something else.
And the only way to make those conflicting things seem to make sense is to believe that there's a global conspiracy that's running it all.
Okay.
And I think that's true of all the individual reality denying ideologies is that in order to believe that each of these individual things is true, you have to believe that there is a global conspiracy running it because that's the only thing that will make it make sense.
Well, yeah, but that's like charlatanism or demagoguery 101, right?
Like if you want to sell snake oil, the first thing you need to do is explain to the public why the snake oil hasn't already been readily available for years.
And it's because the big nasty government is trying to keep it from you.
If you want to sell, you know, that the earth is flat when there's empirical scientific evidence to the contrary, you need to sell your first, especially with how we have access to so much more information at our fingertips now than ever before.
And fact-checking is really easy.
The first thing you have to do is discredit and debunk the people who hold. differing opinions than yours or the people who are preaching a different message than yours.
And conspiracy theory is a panacea to that because you can sweep anything into a conspiracy theory, right?
Once you get to that place, yes.
That's my point is that it wasn't that they all came from one basket.
It's not like they're all eggs from one basket.
No, they're just all beaten.
They're just all playing the same tune.
Like they've all got their own pile of horseshit that they want to sell, but they're all, they're all reaching for the same bottle of perfume to cover up the smell.
Right.
So that's what my idea is now is that all these separate flavors of reality denying ideology are like separate, they're all like the same weed.
Each one, even though they all have a separate name, they're all just one species of weed in the garden.
And for some reason, now in our world today, the growing conditions for that particular weed are very good, which is why we have so many people who are willing to believe these things.
There's conditions in our world that are leading a larger number of people to believe them.
And that's what it really is, I think.
So then I ask the question, what is in the soil in our garden that's leading to all of these weeds now showing up?
What is in our environment that is producing the conditions for this particular type of weed to grow so extensively?
I would say, like first and foremost on the list, the largest wealth gap in human history since the run-up to the Second World War.
I think the wealth gap itself now is worse than it's ever been in history.
Yeah.
Because we've had more wealth to pile up in one spot.
Even in places like at times in history where it was particularly egregious in France before the French Revolution was fairly bad, but they still didn't have so much money available that they could really get it piled up into so few people as to be that much further above the average peasant.
They were still very powerful compared to the average peasant in France at the time.
And we all know what happened there.
But, you know, now that add several zeros onto that and the magnitude of the difference is just, it boggles the mind, really.
Well, and we, and we see the numbers trotted out on popular media all the time.
Like, and it's getting worse.
Yeah.
Bezos and the rest of the billionaires usually earn what iron in a year by like the first 17 minutes of January 1st or something like that of the year.
But yeah, like setting aside issues of inflation and everything else, I think that we're at a point where we're kind of back to the same spot we've been at a few times before.
And typically in the past, when we got to this spot, one of a handful of things happened.
Either the government gets overthrown or we have a great big war.
And those seem to be the only two things that can sort of reset the clock.
And then we come out on the far side of that.
And generally, either enough wealth has been squandered at war that the tables are a little more balanced, or the offending people in power have been beheaded and replaced with people more friendly to the majority.
And there's a better balance of wealth and power for a while.
Right.
So, like, I think that, like, hands down, that is the number one cause.
There's a, oh, I'm going to paraphrase it badly because I'm only just remembering scraps of it.
But there was an article that I read quite some time ago that talked about the link between poverty and intelligence.
And what it talked about is like, you know, the age-old sort of bootstrapping ideology is, well, dumb people are poor because they're dumb, right?
Because they don't have the intelligence or the gumption to be successful entrepreneurs or to successfully manage their money.
So, and it's, it's, it's why, particularly in American culture, like people tend to really look down on the poor because they feel like in a meritocracy sort of system, if you're poor, it's your fault.
The illusion that it is a meritocracy.
Yeah, for sure.
I won't argue that point at all, but it's what they call it.
Under a meritocracy, if you're poor, it's because you've failed and you failed because you're stupid.
Or lazy or both.
Yep.
Some guys got together and gathered some data on a couple different fronts to explore the thesis that maybe you're not poor because you're dumb.
Maybe you're dumb because you're poor.
And they studied two groups.
One was Native American Indian Band that they stumbled across statistically in their research.
This was native reservation in the States that historically had been very poor.
There was high degrees of alcoholism, high degrees of abuse, high degrees of high school dropout, like all the social ills that come with poverty.
And also like jarringly low IQ scores across the board.
And then this band, I guess, I think it was based in Nevada, but they ended up as many American reserves do, striking a deal to open some casinos.
And the entire Indian Reserve was the beneficiary of a sudden tremendous influx of wealth.
Like everybody was basically immediately rocketed to middle class.
And yes, there were cases of excess and tragic stories of, you know, people squandering this newfound wealth and killing themselves in car crashes or whatever.
But by and large, like they touched back many years later and took another dip in the statistics pool.
And like all of the markers, social markers of poverty were down, like way less crime, way less drug addiction, way less abuse, and IQ scores had climbed across the board.
They also did a study, and this was the more poignant of the two, I thought.
They found an, I believe it was in India, rural agrarian culture, fishing village, where like they make the absolute lion's share of their wealth and harvest in like a three-week period of the year during this one big run.
And they gave all the locals IQ tests and noted like a, I can't remember what it was, but it was a double digit spread between the average citizen's IQ, like three to four weeks after the big harvest payday, and that same citizen's IQ six to eight months later when all the reserve cash is run out and they're on social assistance and scraping by.
So I think the fertile soil that we're dealing with for these conspiracy theories is ignorance bred from poverty.
There's more people out there that are desperate or in desperate straits financially or socially because of this tremendous disparity of wealth and power that we have now.
And when you're that, when you're that desperate, everything is just a day-to-day survival decision and you're in survival mode the entire time.
So of course you're not going to make calm, rational, informed decisions if every decision is a life or death decision to you.
Well, I don't think it's quite as extreme as that.
I think that from what I can tell, many of the people who kind of, as they say, go down the rabbit hole into these conspiracies, they don't appear to be lacking intelligence.
And that's part of the reason why I'm looking to other things.
When from the outside's perspective, from the outside perspective, it's easy to just dismiss them all as, well, that's the rabble.
That's the stupid in our society.
And we apologize for them and then we move on.
But I don't think that's nearly true at all.
I think that, in fact, having a higher IQ makes you more likely to slip into that place.
But I think that it's not even nearly the only factor.
I think that mistrust of the people on the higher end of our world is a big part of it, because that's also a big part of every one of these conspiracy hypotheses is that the global elite are not to be trusted.
That's pretty much universal.
That has to be there because that's the only way their worldview makes sense is if all the people who are quote unquote in charge are lying to us about the nature of thing X that they care about, whatever thing X is, it could be the shape of the earth, the safety of vaccines, the whatever the hell QAnon was supposed to do, the storm, whatever.
All of those things, that's universal in all of them.
But I think that that weed wouldn't grow if it didn't have the soil of mistrust to grow in.
And I think that's where it is, is that trust and balance is always going to occur.
It's easier for the powerful to trust the less powerful and very difficult for the less powerful to trust the powerful.
And the greater that difference gets, the more likely we're going to have more of this.
And that's, that's where I think it is.
That's incredible mistrust.
You could also make the argument that like mistrust of the powerful is at an all-time high, not because of intrinsic psychological or sociological factors directly tied to balance of power, but just because the people in power actually can't be trusted.
Right?
Like when I'm not like before.
I'm not advocating that we just start trusting them.
No, no, no, no.
But like my let me see if I can rephrase.
Sure.
We have a plethora of examples in front of us of reasons to despise and mistrust the wealthy and the 1% in the world.
Right.
And that's not propaganda.
Like these are easily verifiable facts on the on the excesses and lack of humanity evident in the billionaire class.
So I think it runs the risk of it runs the risk of watering down a very real issue.
of inequal distribution of wealth by saying, oh, well, it's just natural not to trust somebody because they're more wealthy or more powerful.
It's like, no, it's, it's natural not to trust somebody because when they get that much more wealthy and that much more powerful, they just turn into monsters eventually.
And there's, there's nothing redeemable about them.
I know we said we weren't going to deal in absolutes.
It's late.
I'm feeling crumby.
But like, you understand my point, right?
I think we've had a cast in the past or we've discussed it as a possible subject for one of like discussing the billionaire capitalist class and like what it takes to become one.
Yeah.
Right.
Like, you know, someone like Bezos or Musk, there's a tremendous amount of compartmentalization and suppression of basic human ethics and decency that both of those men have had to exercise to get where they are because they make decisions with the stroke of a pen on a daily that affect hundreds of thousands of lives for the worst.
So I think people are entirely justified in not trusting them.
And it's not because of, you know, an esoteric psychological concept of like trust being tied to power.
It's because they're actually abusing their power.
Well, that's.
We have billionaires that are like actually like purchasing media outlets to spread their propaganda that are buying politicians to pass policies that make them more wealthy.
I don't mean to take away from that point because I think that's a very salient and present, good point to make.
But my point is that even if they were all very good people and lovely and all they wanted to do was just walk their dogs every day and smoke cigars.
I don't know why I picked those two examples as good things, whatever I picked them.
It still would be incredibly difficult to trust them based on the difference in money and power.
Even if they were incredibly nice and good people, like every story I've ever heard of an actual person who actually met Tom Cruise says he's an incredibly great and nice and gracious guy.
Yeah, but we just love to hate that guy.
Yeah, because he's on the more powerful end of all kinds of things.
No, and because he's an abusive Scientologist.
Well, every celebrity I know who's who's gracious or as is reported, is said to be very gracious is still more difficult for us to trust because they're on the more powerful end of everything.
And it might be that some people trust them just out of blind love for celebrity and some people do that.
They will, you know, yeah.
But in the end, you know, if they loved one celebrity to a mindless degree, there'd be some other celebrity of equal value that they wouldn't trust because they didn't love them as much.
And it would be just as difficult and they might be just as nice to everyone.
There's billionaires who didn't have to trod upon people.
And we have some very good examples of this.
Authors who sold their books to make movies and made billions of dollars on it.
And they don't appear to have had to trod on anyone to make those billions of dollars.
People who've made video games and sold sold Minecraft for almost $2.5 billion.
And all he did was make a video game.
And it made everyone incredibly happy to play it.
And it didn't really hurt anyone's life.
And he's a billionaire.
However, it's still more difficult for me to trust him because he has so many more ways to influence the world that I don't.
If it were just, you know, if it were ever a situation between me and him, it would be much easier for him to trust me, much more difficult for me to trust him because he has so many more ways to influence every decision if he really wanted to.
He doesn't appear to have attempted to change any decisions at all, but he could if he wanted to, and I can't.
And that makes it much more difficult for me to ever trust him if we ever had to be in that scenario.
And so that situation will always be present in all of these scenarios.
And it will get worse as there's a greater difference between the powerful and the less, the more powerful and the less powerful.
And that's before you start counting in the fact that you properly point out, which is that many of these people are making terrible decisions that are absolutely things we should question.
In addition to that, they're potentially full-on psychopaths who, you know, we don't know what else they're doing.
Or it could be that we think they're, you know, we're much more likely to believe they're psychopaths because of the already existing difficulty it is for us to trust someone who's so powerful.
Did I lose you?
No, no, you didn't lose me.
Not at all.
Yeah.
I just like we were sort of expanding upon why is the soil so fertile?
Yeah.
And I think one of the reasons why the soil is so fertile right now is not as directly related to this sort of inverse relationship between disparity of wealth and trust as it is due to like actual, palpable, verifiable facts that we can point to that show us how corrupt the wealthy is and show us how they have bought the government.
Like most Western democracies are significantly swayed by the billionaire class, if not outright bought and paid for at a bare minimum, significantly influenced.
Look at the tax structure in any Western world today compared to like the 1950s.
True.
In any Western country today, rather, compared to the 1950s.
Like the wealthy have been lobbying the government for decades successfully to shift the burden of paying for society onto the working class and off of their shoulders so they can get richer.
True.
And that's just the tip of the friggin iceberg, man.
Like we don't even need to get into like labor rights and levels of exploitation that have taken place to make billionaires more billions.
And again, we live in an information age now where all of this information is very easy to come by.
So like the billionaire class is mistrusted today more than ever because they've given us so many fucking reasons to mistrust them, right?
Not just the fact that they're richer, but also like a long list of heinous deeds.
And so like circling back to the fertile soil issue, it's really, it becomes far easier to believe in a conspiracy theory today because a conspiracy theory at its root is people who we are supposed to trust to make decisions for the betterment of all of us, I.e.
Government, are being controlled by a small group of people to serve only that small group of people's interest.
That's sort of like the core argument of most conspiracy theories.
Regardless of what the topic is, the government or big Pharma, or big science, or whoever the decision makers have been bought and paid for by lizard men and can't be trusted right yeah, like you can hop on your computer and find half a dozen actual examples of that in a 15 minute search yeah, so of course it's really easy to believe.
If I believe that, you know, the billionaire class, like I said, purchases media outlets to spread propaganda to further their goals, that they bribe government officials to make tax laws more favorable to them and erode labor rights to make the working class that work for them take less for their wage.
It's not as much of a stretch for me to believe that, you know, they're suppressing the knowledge.
that the earth is flat or they've put something funky in this vaccine right, right?
So to people who are listening to this, if you imagine that someone somewhere is listening to a flat earth podcast and they're enthusiastically nodding along to all of the so-called arguments being made there about how they high five each other, and they know for sure that the earth is flat and all of these things.
That's probably definitely happening right now.
Think about this every time, when we were talking about how easy it is to mistrust the powerful, or or all the reasons why we shouldn't trust the very powerful in our society, and you were nodding along and we were talking about all the reasons, and we say they're out there and you don't even need to see those reasons yourself.
You just nod right along because you're absolutely certain they're true, without ever having to see them, in the same way that the flat earther doesn't have to see all those reasons themselves.
They just nod right along because they're like, yep, i'm rare with you.
I i'm taking notes on that same story.
I living it.
You are in that same space.
You are believing that all these things are true without having to see any proof of it, because it makes perfect sense to you that the, the powerful, are doing terrible things and are out to get you, and that's you have experienced part of the reason why the soil for this is so fertile.
Um, trust me, when you really look at what some of the elite are doing, you'll see all the terrible things.
I guarantee it, and I think you should look yourself, because everyone should look at that.
But if you didn't even need to see it before, you nodded along Enthusiastically, you know, exactly why a flat earther nods along enthusiastically when they listen to their own dogma, that they get put in front of them.
And that's some way that's part of this whole problem: is that we are all we don't even need to be convinced of some things.
We believe they were true before anyone told us, and then we're not looking at anything that tells us anything otherwise, or even sometimes not even looking at the thing that would tell us that that's true.
And that's part of our bigger problem: we're not looking at these things, anyways.