Free Speech Part 1 features Spencer, Jeff, and David Bloomberg—first-time collaborators—debating its purpose, framing it as essential for discarding harmful ideas, yet critiquing modern distortions like Elon Musk’s Twitter amplifying misinformation via bots. David cites pre-1920 U.S. laws jailing dissenters (up to 20 years) and Florida’s governor excluding critics, while Jeff argues free speech is the only check on government power beyond physical force. They dismiss "sunlight as disinfectant" in today’s polarized media, where platforms like Alex Jones offer misleading exposure and mainstream outlets avoid challenging dominant narratives, leaving disempowered media unable to scrutinize ideas effectively. [Automatically generated summary]
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host.
And I'm here today, extra special series of episodes today.
I have both Jeff and David Bloomberg.
How are you guys doing?
Happy birthday.
How about you?
Yeah, great.
So I cleverly arranged for Jeff and David to never have met or spoken before today.
So there's no way this is going to get awkward at all.
Great.
That out of the way.
Part of the master plan.
Yes, there's always a great master plan, I promise.
So the master plan of the day is we're going to talk about free speech.
I was convinced, rightfully so, to not try to do this in one episode.
So we're going to try to do this in, we're not going to try.
We're going to do this in three episodes, full stop.
And that's just how it's going to be.
So for anyone listening, come home.
Listen to him bossing us around.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I can already hear the wheels turning in Jeff's head to be like, how can I throw a wrench into this gear?
So I'll explain how this is going to work for anyone who's listening.
Inevitably, you'll be listening in the future because we don't record live.
It's going to be three episodes.
It'll be, we're going to try to break it up into three succinct, separate portions of the concept to talk through the concept of free speech.
Because being succinct and short-winded is something that we're known for.
Oh, yeah.
In my editing space, that's you see the things that land on the cutting room floor.
So the first of these, we're going to talk about why we even want this.
I feel like strongly that you need to have the full articulated case for it before you start talking about why you would ever stop it, which is what episode two is going to be about.
What situations would you limit it?
Where would you want to stop free speech?
Like, what's going on there?
It's not an absolute freedom.
And then episode three will be pretty much just what are we going to do now?
We have, we have it, we limit it.
And then how do we live our lives after that point?
It's possible that that might be either the shortest or the longest episode.
We will find out.
So free speech.
Do you want us to jump in and just start talking?
That's what free speech is.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
So like I say, why do we even want this as a as a freedom?
I mean, this is a real question.
It seems really obvious because we've lived our entire lives with it.
But in our two nations, Canada and the U.S., we have people who come to our countries from other countries that don't really have this.
And this is so this is kind of seen as one of the golden standards for freedom of a society is the actual freedom to speak, to say things that counter other people's speech.
And I think that one of the most important things of this is exactly that, that we have a central idea.
We should have a central idea that ideas themselves are not only very, very important to us because they govern almost everything about how we live.
Very long ago, we stopped living just by what we could kill and eat, but by the different ideas that we could live by.
And those ideas, in order to make them better, they need to be challenged because bad ideas we need to not live by.
And those ideas need to be challenged and improved.
And the only way to do that is to speak against them with better ideas, preferably, or even just to point out why they're bad.
That's also useful.
So anyone have any first thoughts on this, first takes on the idea that we need free speech because we need to challenge other ideas?
Well, I think, Yeah, well, exactly, because like free speech is one of our most basic freedoms that we enjoy as a people, because one of the abilities we have that sets us above the animal kingdom is an improved ability to cooperate on an ever larger scale.
And that cooperation requires, you know, intelligence, articulation, and communication.
And if you start choking that off, you're basically shutting off the taps on human growth and human ingenuity.
You are limiting what our future looks like, for sure.
Well, and also significantly limiting a person's personal freedoms.
Like imagine if you were capable of completely, well, I mean, it was done frequently in ancient times, like they didn't call it blacklisting, but like ostracizing someone, where basically someone was dead to the village.
Nobody would acknowledge that they existed, communicate with them, talk with them in any way whatsoever, give them anything that resembled any kind of aid.
This happens today in cults.
They call it this fellowship.
Yeah.
But in older, more rustic times and in more perhaps rustic communities, that ostracism carries a very real threat of possible death, right?
Like the ability to communicate with fellow members of your society is at many levels needed for survival.
Certainly more so then.
But even now, I mean, even if you were going to leave one group and go to another group, you would still need to be able to communicate with the other group.
None of us live completely solo, much as some of us brag that we do.
Every one of us relies on the rest of society in some way to provide things to trade with at the very least.
What's your take on this, David?
Well, you know, it's interesting that you're talking about it as if it's obvious that, you know, free speech should be for these things, because as I was looking into, you know, I think it's safe to say none of the three of us here are lawyers.
I'm not 100% sure of that for Jeff, but I'm pretty sure.
Oh, no, no.
And but I was, you know, looking into some research just to prepare for the podcast, nothing deep, but less than 100 years ago in the United States of America, you could be thrown in jail for saying we should not go to war.
The draft is bad.
Yeah.
You could be thrown in jail for like 20 years for saying that.
And so while we may take it for granted now, there are probably still a few people who were alive when that was happening.
You know, and if we look at, you know, some of the concepts of free speech and like you should be able to teach history.
You should be able to read books.
You should be able to talk about the various topics that are important in education.
Well, you know, you don't have to go to a third world country to find places where that's not happening.
You just have to go to Florida.
And so it's, you know, lots of people talk about free speech.
And even I would say the governor of Florida would say he's all in favor of it and then take away the freedoms.
That's yeah.
Well, I mean, there's an important distinction there that like freedom of speech in many venues really only means freedom of speech for those who agree with the people who are in power.
But that really drills down to the core of why freedom of speech is so goddamn important.
Right.
Like number one, you need to have the ability to question your government.
You need to have the ability to openly question the actions of the people that you have elected as leaders, because otherwise, how are they going to be held accountable for their actions?
Like A free and open media is really the only check and balance, as much as the gun nuts would love to think that their collection of assault rifles and their gun safes at home is what's keeping the U.S. government with drones and nukes and smart missiles honest with the people that they rule.
No, it's the public's perception of the government as presented to them by a free and open media.
Yeah.
Information is still the most important commodity we have and it's not close.
No.
Which is why misinformation is the thing that will most likely cause the worst outcome for our society because anything that can contaminate our most important commodity is necessarily degrading our most important product.
I mean, ideas, when I say that ideas are the most important thing to us as humans, I really do mean that.
The idea to make fires and use those flames to ward off animals was the first most important idea we ever had.
And since then, they've only gotten bigger.
The idea to use tools to, you know, the idea to arrange ourselves in marriages such that we could have societies that were larger than just, you know, one alpha male and several females.
And I mean, all of these ideas were not coming to us really that naturally.
We chose to do these things and behave in these ways.
The idea to have a democracy at all where the people actually get a direct choice for who is going to be in charge for a limited amount of time.
We laud the Greeks for this.
We all recognize at the same time that they did it in a way that wasn't that great.
You know, they had slaves and women didn't vote and all that stuff.
But the idea itself was important and it was important to not just do the way the Greeks did it, but do it in a better way.
And the only way to do it in a better way was to challenge all the ways that they did it and to not just throw it out entirely because, oh, they did it wrong.
Never use that idea.
Go back to emperors, you know, was to take that idea and improve it, to challenge the things that were bad about it and make that idea a better idea, a better collection of ideas.
And you can't do that unless you can talk.
I mean, you can't do that unless you're allowed to talk.
And that felt like a lot of things said there.
Yeah, I mean, I get these things in my head and I don't plan them in advance.
I plan a bunch of things in advance and then I get another thing that's not part of that.
And then it just comes all out all at once.
But like the idea is, I think that you're pushing towards is like we need a free and open exchange of ideas so that they can be openly and dispassionately critiqued on their merits by the collective.
And unless we have a free and open exchange of ideas, that's not going to happen.
Yeah.
I mean, when I look at ideas, each idea, like if you're able to carve away the context of every idea and have no memory of anything, every idea on its own seems great.
Every idea, the idea to eat worms seems great until you have other options and you have, you know what I mean?
Like every idea seems great when you don't have anything else in your life, which is how most people in the misinformation world carve away the context on all the stuff and say, no, none of that stuff matters.
Focus on this one little thing and the whole thing should be decided on this one little thing.
Well, that's not how the world works.
The world is a huge thing attached to that little thing.
You have to include all those contexts in order to know that your idea is a good idea.
The idea to eat worms is a terrible idea because we have all kinds of other food that are so much better and better for us than worms.
I don't know.
Worms are high protein, low fat.
Well, when the economy or when the economy, when the climate crashes, I'm sure we will be eating worms.
It will be an option on the table then because it'll be hard to grow other vegetables.
But until then, meat and vegetables are better.
Yeah.
So you were, you were talking about the open and free, you were both talking about the open and free exchange of ideas.
And I know something that we often talk about, whether here or on Twitter or elsewhere, is the adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Yes, I have said this myself at times, sometimes to my detriment.
Yeah.
Right.
And so I want to say that in theory, that's a great idea.
And when I was younger, I used to be a huge proponent of this idea.
You know, just let everyone talk.
It'll sort itself out.
The best ideas will win.
And then I grew up.
And, you know, I don't even mean grew up.
I mean, I was probably in my, you know, 20s at the time, but, and, and I, I grew less idealistic.
You grew some more wisdom, probably, right?
Yes, more wisdom.
And, you know, on top of that, we've seen how technology has changed.
You're not just two people debating in the town square.
You're debating against, you know, the Russian government and its several thousand bots.
And, you know, those other voices can just overpower.
And it doesn't work as well when, you know, you can let the sunlight in, but there's someone else who is guiding how it goes.
We see what's happened on Twitter just since Elon Musk took over and he let back on the Nazis, the racists, and every other kind of horrible person.
And, you know, studies showed shortly after that how use of racist terms and other attacks immediately went up.
And these ideas aren't just limited to Twitter.
They spread to the rest of society.
They make it easier for these types of people to come out of the woodwork.
You know, that was something to leave Twitter for a moment.
There was something that was said when Trump came into power was, well, where were all these racists hiding?
Well, they weren't.
Or rather, were there new ones?
No, they were hiding.
But he came out and said things that made it more okay for these types of people to be who they were.
Yeah, he removed some of the social constriction against that, right?
Right.
And I'm going to go ahead and raise my hand and call foul.
Most of what we're discussing right now belongs within the parameters of episode two.
Well, I mean, it's, it's, this part is kind of where it kind of is, it's a gray area between where it goes from this first idea to the second.
I mean, what David's saying is right, that the most important function of free speech is to challenge the ideas of the powerful people.
I mean, this goes to my definition of trust in a lot of ways, because when a person has no voice, let's make the example extreme because I like extreme examples.
Let's say they are a gnome that lives in your basement and never talks to anyone but you, and they have the most insane ideas.
You're not really worried about that gnome because you know that they don't talk to anyone but you.
And if you don't communicate those ideas to anyone else, those ideas are never polluting any other space, right?
So once that gnome gets on Twitter, suddenly you have a whole different scenario.
They're saying all kinds of crazy things and you don't even know who's listening.
You might look, oh, well, you know, that they have followers, they have engagement, they have all these numbers, they have numbers of likes of different tweets.
And, you know, some of the crazier ideas, you might think to yourself, if you're not looking at it, you might think to yourself, wow, those crazier ideas are probably, you know, not getting a lot of likes.
But his ideas on gardening, because he's a garden gnome, are probably really good, you know.
I mean, he's probably got really good ideas there, and you know, home and garden channel, whatever follows him, whatever it is.
And you're thinking, oh, if you're not looking, it's easy to say to fool yourself and think, oh, that gnome, he's probably just giving out gardening tips.
And every once in a while, he says something racist, and everyone just kind of ignores that because he gives such a talk about all those goddamn trolls.
Yeah, such good gardening tips that you're like, oh, you know, he's old and he's racist, but you know, he life is a good pleasure.
If we could just get rid of all the trolls, yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
But once you go there and you look that all of his anti-vax tweets are getting them many more likes than any of the gardening tips, and you're like, oh, well, that wasn't what I expected.
Why are there so many people who think it's a good idea to do this instead of that?
I think it was Sasha Baron Cohen who got very passionate on this theme many years ago.
And I heard a buzz phrase that he fired out at an interview or a TED talk on the subject where he said, Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.
Yeah.
The idea that if you, yes, you have the right to express whatever idea you want, but you do not have the constitutional right to put your lips up to the internet megaphone so the whole world can hear that stupid thought.
Right.
And that actually, I was like, is he reading my notes?
Because you're, first of all, you're right that there is a lot of overlap between this part and the second part of the podcast.
And I have told Spencer that.
I'm like, good luck unthreading this.
But the thing is that the whole free speech sunlight thing has come up just recently.
Facebook and Instagram let Trump back on and following Twitter and having done so.
And the excuse that they used included the statement that the public should be able to hear what politicians are saying so they can make informed choices.
And there are a number of problems with this, with the primary one being that just because Trump wasn't on Facebook doesn't mean the public can't hear from him.
And, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are under no obligation to provide him or anyone else with a platform.
And, you know, like you said, you know, free speech is not free reach.
If you come into my house, whether you're a garden gnome or just a regular person, and you start spouting BS, I will insist that you leave.
You have no right to stay.
You have no right to come back.
And anyone who suggests that social media needs to have these people on, I get, you know, the next step is, well, then every news organization always has to cover these people whenever he has a, you know, someone has a press conference or wants to speak.
And, well, they don't.
The news organizations, you know, for better or for worse, they choose how they cover things, who they cover.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be any news anymore because every local school board candidate could say, I demand to be on CNN and you must cover me because otherwise you're censoring me.
Yeah, but one of one of the other, and because we're still on the pro side, episode one Here, I'll play devil's advocate here.
Like, one of the problems with we'll call it conventional media, like pre-social media, internet, everybody has access to that great big megaphone.
Sort of what we see is you know, the dirty word mainstream media.
We, as information consumers, as a people, generally quit putting as much faith in mainstream media some time ago because it became very apparent again some time ago that most of those mainstream media outlets were owned by people with particular interests, and so they would only run stories that serve those particular interests and only give audience to people who serve those interests.
Now, I'm not trying to hijack this thing and turn it into like a Marxist episode or anything like that.
Um, but it does sort of reaffirm the point that, like, when your free and open media is privately owned media companies who decide what they want to air based on what serves the interests of the people they serve, the public isn't served when the people those media outlets serve is not the public, if that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so, a lot of us, a lot of us saw the internet as like the panacea for that.
Like, we can have access to complete and unfettered raw information from all angles, and no filters are going to get put between it and us.
We're just going to see nothing but everyone's personal, raw, honest truth, completely unedited, uh, completely unsmothered.
And what a shit show it has turned into.
Yeah, I mean, that's what Elon Musk has said: is that Twitter is your best source of news and information because we don't limit it.
But he does, I mean, not only does he limit it, but it's, you know, like I was saying earlier, there's all, you know, thousands of bots and thousands of real people who are just real crazy.
And, you know, to get to your point also about who owns all these things, well, I was just talking about Musk, Zuckerberg, Rupert Murdoch.
Direct TV is now owned or at least controlled by a private equity firm.
You know, this is not Thomas Paine with his printing press putting out pamphlets.
And it leads to all sorts of decisions.
And it's not even just the network because recently, DirecTV dropped Newsmax, which is one of the larger far-right supposed news networks.
And last year, Direct TV dropped OANN, which was, I think, even more right-wing.
And Verizon also dropped them, causing that network to lose most of its viewers.
Now, was it censorship?
Was it them taking away their freedom of speech?
No, in that case, it was companies deciding what to carry.
And it turned out, at least as it has been, as I have seen it portrayed, it was mostly driven by economics because the networks wanted carriage fees, fees from DirecTV and Verizon instead of just relying on ads.
And DirecTV said, to heck with you, bye.
And I do think that it also had to do with who they were: that, you know, who controls DirecTV now.
It's not ATT anymore.
It's this private equity group.
And they're like, do we want to be associated with these people?
And they're demanding money?
Okay, well, that gives us a good reason to get rid of them.
So freedom of speech just has so many of these intricacies involved that it ranges from, like you said, Jeff, the shit show of completely unfettered, anyone can say anything, to having a few rich individuals deciding what we see and when we see it.
And there has to be a medium in there.
And that's, you know, I'm sure that we'll get to more of that in the third part, but that's.
I don't know.
I'm kind of thinking by the time we get to the third part, what we're going to arrive at is a great big shrug of the shoulders.
No spoilers.
No spoilers.
So I'm going to, I'm going to do my little bit here to transition into part two because it's obvious that we want to go there.
So I do have one more thing that I wanted to say in this section.
So I don't know when.
Go ahead now.
Now it's good.
Yeah.
So the other problem besides completely open social media being a shit show is the bigger problem.
And this is not some new brainiac idea that I had.
It's pretty well known.
Going back to what I was saying about Trump on social media, he had previously used social media as a key part of his strategy in his attempted coup.
He revved people up with his election lies, stolen election lies, and basically incited a mob.
And I mean, that's the reason, the main reason, the primary reason that was given for those social media companies booting him.
And so it's not just a situation where more sunlight can help solve the problem there, because there was plenty of sunlight about why the election wasn't stolen.
And there are still people today who think it was because what Trump said.
But like, the only issue there is the context of it, right?
Like, and sorry if this pisses off anybody that's a fan of the man, I think it should be apparent to anyone who's watched even one of these episodes.
Nobody here likes Donald Trump.
I've tried to stay neutral for the record.
Yeah, you've tried.
You've tried.
I admit that you've tried.
You've failed, but you've tried.
But that story, David, is a horrifying story only because it was an attempted coup by a demagogue who obviously had no real interest in better serving the people who he was trying to take over the rule of, right?
But like, imagine how many lives would have been saved in the American Revolution if Paul Revere could have just tweeted that the British were coming.
Right?
Like, like social media, social media has been proven social media and unfettered access to social media.
And we may be getting into the deep weeds here a little bit.
But it's been proven to be like a very necessary means of oppressed peoples to organize and overcome their oppressors in countries and cultures where we see a great deal of, what am I looking for, censorship through more conventional means.
They tried to turn off the internet during the Arab Spring, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the effort to keep those messages going was a big part of how it turned out to be less disastrous.
And Elon Musk, that great big bad guy that we all love to beat on, he did actually supply Ukraine with free and limitless satellite internet for at least the first big chunk of the war to aid their coordination efforts against the Russian invasion.
Until he then turned it off for a while when.
Because somebody said something that slighted him.
Yes.
I never said the man was the same.
Right.
Yeah.
Yet another example of free speech.
Yeah.
And you're right.
It has been used in that way by oppressed people when the oppressors have not been able to turn it off.
I mean, there are certain things that you cannot do on social media or the internet in places like China because the Chinese government has said, no, you can't do that.
And they've forced the companies to block that access.
And if Twitter was around when Paul Revere was tweeting, you know, then the British would have probably flooded Twitter with thousands of bots saying this Paul Revere guy is crazy.
You should do your own research.
Look outside your windows.
Do you see any red coats?
No.
Trust the science there.
Yeah.
No, they would say, trust your instinct.
Yes.
And, you know, would we do that?
No, that's preposterous.
So I'm going to wrap this up for episode one here.
We do say there is an expression in our world, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
David already brought it up.
And I want to touch on this point to move us into the next part.
So what we really mean, what this metaphor really means is the idea, however, not actually fully true, that sunlight will help to reduce bacteria.
What it really does is dry up water so the bacteria can't grow.
But that's what it really does is mold can't grow in the sunlight, in the direct sun.
There's a lot of things that get a lot cleaner when they're just exposed to the sunlight.
As soon as we built houses in our world, we had to begin cleaning them much better because the sun wasn't reaching those corners.
So that's the idea behind this very old adage that just exposing things to the sun will make them more clean.
But we have an idea that any exposure is the same as this disinfecting power.
So I will bring it up.
We had a month ago or so, I don't know exactly how when, we had a fairly deranged rap star in, I believe his name is now Ye, but I still generally refer to him as Kanye because everyone knows who I'm talking about when I say Kanye.
Is it Ye?
I thought it was Ye.
I don't know.
I don't keep up enough with that world to know for sure how to, you know.
So he was on Alex Jones and we saw some of this happen.
It didn't, you know, for most of us, it didn't happen live because we weren't, we don't watch Alex Jones live, but I think it was just live.
It wasn't like he recorded it in advance.
And then I think he does most of his thing really live.
And this is a real example of the fact that, you know, it should be pointed out, this isn't what we mean when we say that sunlight is the best disinfectant because Alex Jones was not challenging any of the ideas that Kanye was putting into that space.
Not in any way at all.
He, if you watch the video, he was nervous.
He wanted to change the subject, but at no point did he attempt to tell Kanye that these were bad ideas, that they were false, that he didn't support them.
He didn't challenge them at all.
It didn't even say something simple like, are you sure that's true?
What makes you think that that's true?
Those would be challenges of those ideas, but he didn't do any of those things.
Those questions aren't allowed on Alex Jones.
No, of course not.
Yeah.
Only when he knows the answers in advance and they're going to say the thing he wants them to say, in which case they're rehearsed.
But guys like Alex Jones are not providing sunlight to anything.
And in fact, this is a, Alex Jones is a more extreme example of a thing we're seeing much more often in our, what might be called conventional media spaces in that many of the talking heads are not really challenging the powerful people the way they should be.
You can watch, I'm going to find the video somewhere.
I saw it once and I'm going to find it.
You can watch old interviews with people like Ayn Rand.
I watched this great one where she was interviewed and someone really put the screws to her and she still was smart enough to slide away to the left or the right or whichever direction she was going at that time.
But still, it was an, right.
It was an example of the fact that we used to take popular people and really challenge the ideas that they were putting into their dangerous novels and other written things.
And we don't really do that anymore.
It's not what we do.
And because the reason why that's happening is there's a lot of reasons.
Politicians are probably very purposefully avoiding having their ideas harshly challenged, which means they're just staying out of the sunlight.
They're keeping their ideas safely and comfortably in darkness to grow the bad part.
And we need to get past that as a society.
We need to get our media empowered enough to challenge the politicians again.
And it's not happening with the alternative media.
Let me tell you that right now.
It's just not happening.
The Alex Joneses of the world are not really challenging anyone, really.
And neither are the others that are obviously pushed toward one side.
They would love to challenge the guy on the opposite side, but they're not challenging the guy on their side.
And that's the real problem that we have with all of that media is that it has the ability to say and do the things it needs to do.
We have the First Amendment in the United States.
We have Section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that allow for this, but they're disempowered.
They're weakened to the point where they have to kind of tow a line.
They have to pick a side in order to have any footing at all.
And that's where we are in that space.
We have to get away from that somehow.
So yeah, sunlight, I still think, I'm going to put my foot down stubbornly, that sunlight is still the best disinfectant until we get another one.
Well, sunlight is an excellent disinfectant, but what you also need with that light is airflow.
Well, I understand the metaphor, maybe.
But what you really need is it to not be candlelight masquerading as sunlight, which is really what Alex Jones is doing.
He's pretending to shine light on things.
And it's not really the kind of light you need that really disinfects anything.
No, and yeah, that's that's kind of the thing I was I was working towards with my hand-twisted metaphor as well is like mainstream media and even a lot of the alternative internet media.
You only interview people from your camp and you only give favorable interviews because the culture war is everything.
Yeah.
And that's, well, there's a lot of other topics we've already done on this podcast that are wrapped up in that with tribalism and virtue signaling and a lot of other things.