Spencer, David Bloomberg, and Jeff debate platforming fringe views in Free Speech Part 3, rejecting unchecked amplification like Kanye on Alex Jones but weighing direct challenges—e.g., dismantling flat-Earth claims via Jenga-like questioning. David warns even modest engagement risks legitimizing demagogues (like Dr. Drew Pinsky’s anti-vax stunts), while Spencer hesitates, citing potential to expose misinformation. Listeners are invited to critique the approach at truthunrestricted@gmail.com, leaving the door open for future engagement despite skepticism from guests. [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.
I'm back again for part three with David Bloomberg and Jeff.
Hey, buddy.
This is the previous two parts we've just recorded just a few minutes before this.
And I don't know exactly how much time there will be when they release.
But if you're listening to them and you get to this part and you haven't watched, listen to the other two parts, maybe go back and have a listen to those because it'll make a lot more sense as to what we're talking about.
I'm sure we'll refer heavily to the things we've already said when we say the things we're about to say now.
May even refer to stuff that wound up on the editing room floor, State, for the extended director's cut.
That's right.
I'm sure I'll have a lot of notes when I go to do this.
Really complicated setup here.
So just remember to preferentially censor Jeff.
No, I do it every time.
Yeah.
That's my instinct.
Censor Jeff.
Punch up, not down.
All right.
So this of the three will be the first part was why we want to have free speech and all the good things about it.
The second part was why we would want to limit it.
There were four general ideas we went through.
And part three, my idea was to just generally now talk about what we should do about this.
And let me be the first to say.
Okay.
So I have some ideas, but I'll leave them to the end because first, I want Spencer to give his ideas so I can tell him how wrong he is.
No, no, that makes sense.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
So us three in this conversation, and I believe most of the people who will listen to this podcast are not going to be the variety of person that we generally call legislators who are in charge of making the rules, writing them up so that the society can follow them.
With that in mind, what Jeff says is right.
Big shrug, right?
What are we supposed to do?
Yeah, we don't make the rules, but we have, we are people who live in a society.
We live in a world.
We interact with people and we can live our lives and we can encourage other people to live their lives in a better way as well.
So what are we going to do?
We have social interactions to guide our lives and to help other people guide their lives.
Here's what I propose for a start is that it's very hard to write a rule in the law about something like hate speech, for example.
But in your everyday life, you can talk to someone.
If someone is acting in a way that's racist or is marginalizing a group, whatever, you can say, hey, look, dude, that ain't cool.
Come on now.
Like, this is 2023 now.
What are you doing?
I mean, you might not say exactly that, but you might at least push back some, preferably very strong.
But even if it's a little push, all those little pushes add up.
When a person's in a social environment where they're trying to talk bad about garden gnomes and someone say, hey, look, man, those garden gnomes, they have good tips.
Okay.
Like right at the top of their little hats.
Gardens got to grow.
You know what I mean?
Like garden gnomes got a purpose.
Like they got feelings too.
And, you know, all those little pushes, all those little pushbacks, they all help.
They all help to limit hate speech.
And some people are going to call that a lack of free speech.
We already covered that in part two.
Go back and listen to it.
Part four.
You're not required to listen to every crank idea that anyone else comes up with.
You're just not required to do that.
When you're on Twitter, if you don't like and you don't want to interact with someone, you can just silence them.
The technology is there.
All the technology that allows these ideas to get pushed out at scale also allow people to limit them.
If there was a social media platform that didn't do that, I'm sure it would immediately fall over because you just can't have a platform that works that way.
It's well, yeah, actually, just to jump in, there's a new social media site called Post.
And this was in the post, I don't think this is why they called it this, but it was in the post-Elon Musk takeover.
And they got up and running while still in beta and did not have a mute or block function.
And even though there was much stricter social censorship, I'll call it.
And the people who came there tended to be much more unified in their opinions.
One of the largest requests of the people creating the software were: you gotta create, you gotta get that mute working.
You gotta get that block working.
So, yes, it absolutely supports what you're saying there.
Yeah.
So, our social interactions, like the episodes I put out of this podcast, are almost all about factors that affect our social engagement.
They're all things that will happen, and you'll experience them in everyday life.
And improving our social lives is the thing, is the way to improve our lives.
Like, that's the real improvement.
For most of us in the Western world, that's true.
Our health care is already pretty damn good.
You know, we complain about our politicians, and in some cases, they seem a little tyrannical, or in some cases, maybe more so, more than a little.
But we also have methods of pushing back on that and preventing it.
And we still have in most of the other places around those people, rational people that don't encourage them or refuse to participate.
And so, it's up to us to just tell them they're wrong and vote them out.
Right.
And so, our social lives are the part that need to improve, that need to get better.
That's the way that we can make ourselves better and the world better.
You know, not having racism in our everyday conversation.
That would be great.
I mean, I'm not, you know, I'll admit, like, there's probably some people that I work with who listen to this, and I don't know what they'll think of this when they hear it, but I don't always like things that I hear when I'm like at work.
There's racist things that work.
There is.
And I don't always push back on that as hard as I could either.
It's not an easy thing to do.
So, no, it's not.
Yeah, I'm not.
When I come up here, I'm not trying to admonish people for not, you know, towing the line properly on the whatever they want to call it, woke agenda or whatever, because it's not about being woke.
It's not about being any label.
It's just about being a human and understanding that all the other people are just humans.
And even when they get wrong, they're just humans, right?
So, yeah, they're going to talk.
They're going to have free speech.
We're going to listen to them and then we're going to disagree with them if we disagree with them.
And what's more useful than merely disagreeing with them, what's more useful than merely telling someone they're wrong, is telling them why they're wrong, educating yourself on the issue, knowing the ins and outs a little bit, knowing what they're talking about so that you can say, you know what?
I think you're wrong about that.
And here's why.
And you have a much more productive conversation about it.
That's what free speech is really about, to challenge the bad ideas in our world.
So that's where I want to start this off.
I want to start it off with social engagement, everyday conversations, how you actually talk to people in these social spaces.
And I worry that we've lost Jeff again because usually he haven't.
No, all right.
Okay.
All right.
All right.
Good.
He just said his piece.
He's like, shrugged.
That's it.
You know, you were just, I didn't want to, I never want to interrupt a guy in mid-soaps.
Yeah.
Mid-soap box.
I'm going to have a one episode of the podcast called Mid-Soapbox.
It's going to be great.
So yeah, that's where I want to start.
What do you guys think?
Anyone want to pick this up?
I mean, it's you're right in that it's very difficult.
I've had it come up with certain family members.
I've had it come up with co-workers.
And it's difficult depending on what your position is.
So, for example, at the beginning or fairly early in COVID, I had one employee say to me, and again, I worked for government, he listens to right-wing radio all day.
Now, he's not your typical, you know, fully right-wing person, but he believes a lot of what he hears.
And he made a comment to me downplaying COVID.
And I just shut him down.
You know, I said, I said, no, we are, we are not having this conversation.
You need to pay attention to some, you know, actual information.
I, I talked about some of that information, but I said, you know, as your boss, I am not having this conversation with you.
And I also know for a fact he had brought up like religion once before to one of his employees who made that person feel very uncomfortable because she was an atheist.
Another case, I had an employee who I didn't really know much about him, except he was older and seemed to be somewhat religious.
And he brought up just out of the blue in a telephone conversation, what's with all these people putting pronouns in their emails?
That's ridiculous.
And I just cut him off.
I was like, we are not having this conversation because what was I going to do?
Try to educate him.
You know, like I said, he was my employee.
I could get in trouble for trying to, you know, give political, what could be seen or what he could claim were political viewpoints on the matter, even though he brought it up.
Yeah.
And so, you know, I have had those things happen.
There are other people who I do have, you know, I mean, most of them were employees, some were co-workers who we did have by the nature of working in government.
You have political conversations and they're open, they're two-way conversations, and you can talk about these things like rational human beings.
And those are good.
But when you get to the other side, to the wing, you don't know how to handle those.
And again, I mentioned, you know, it's happened in my family too.
I mean, I don't have the stereotypical far right wing uncle at Thanksgiving situation, but I do have the person I refer to as my conspiracy cousin, who suddenly went down a far right rabbit hole on Facebook, you know, and I at first tried having discussions with her because she and I, while we hadn't been close particularly, we had been getting closer through social media.
It had been doing what it was supposed to do.
You know, we were actually fighting against anti-vaxxers together.
And then all of a sudden, she's like believing everything that Trump tells her and everything that Fox News tells her and everything else.
And I didn't realize it at first.
I tried to have these conversations with her and she would just fight back viciously and her friends would jump on me.
And then this other guy who I didn't even know who he was was jumping on me.
And it turned out the other guy who I didn't know who he was was her husband using a pseudonym so he wouldn't get in trouble at work for all his far right wing views.
And so at that point, after a discussion amongst some of my other family members, I just decided to disengage because it was going nowhere and it could cause problems with some of the other relatives.
If they felt they had to pick a side, it could cause other family problems.
So I, you know, I still sometimes see what she posts on Facebook.
I haven't blocked her.
She hasn't blocked me, but I don't engage with her at all.
And I think that's the thing.
There has to be this.
I know this is a very long-winded couple of stories, but there are sometimes you can push back.
Sometimes you can have the discussion.
And sometimes you just have to give it up.
Well, I mean, this, what I've come to understand about this general set of misinformation environment that's available now is that it's not winnable in like a single sitting.
It's, uh, I think I'm going to borrow a phrase that came from Brent Lee, actually.
He told me this is that, I mean, he was the gentleman who was a conspiracist for 15 years and eventually came to understand that it was just, in his words, bollocks.
And he said that it's like Jenga.
It's like when you're in that space, you're pulling blocks from the bottom of the thing to put to the top.
And every time there's a new thing that comes out, you have to twist and turn.
You have to pull another block out, you put it on top, and eventually it gets too tall and eventually it falls over.
But if you're not challenged, if you're not exposed to the right ideas enough, you're never forced to take any blocks out of the bottom to put it on top, to build your tower higher.
You're never forced to do that.
And so it takes longer to fall.
It might take forever to fall.
Right.
And in his place, it just took in order to keep moving the goalposts and moving the reality in his mind to fit the new data he was getting, it just became untenable in his mind.
And then it was sort of gone.
And he was like, wait a minute.
Yeah.
You have to be willing to play Jenga, you know, or, you know, in his case, he was willing to have on his side to play that.
Everything that is said to some of these people, it doesn't matter.
Like there is a wall that is put up that is stronger than any of the walls we discussed in the last part, and they're not going to listen to you.
You know, to go back to my conspiracy cousin, anything I brought up, well, here is this piece that tells you, you know, you say that it was election fraud, but here's this piece.
Oh, that comes from the MSM.
Yeah.
Tainted source.
Yeah.
Right.
Here's this piece from Snopes doing fact checking.
Fact checking.
That's not real.
Snopes isn't real.
That's just an arm of the liberal media.
If everything you believe walls off anything anyone can say, there's literally you cannot make any moves to go back to the Jenga game.
They won't even let me take a piece out.
And they've surrounded themselves.
Like I said, her husband went so far as to change his name on Facebook.
Well, who's going to win this?
Her husband and all her close friends or her cousin over here on social media.
Well, I think you're making a point here, too, is that your cousin has built a social space in which it's perfectly safe to hold all these notions.
And that's the thing that's reinforcing it.
So in that space, surrounded by other people that are like-minded, that are going to reassure her of all the things that she feels are true.
You know, she's not really playing Jenga.
I don't know what she's playing, but it's not Jenga.
Right.
Because the model of the world she's built is still tenable.
It still fits because what she, what I think is really happening to a lot of people is what they're really trying to do is fit in socially.
The shape of the world needs to fit their social atmosphere rather than make the social atmosphere fit the shape of the world.
That's why you get clusters of people that are like this and why people who are, let's say, let's say someone is a reality denier of some type and they none of the people at work know about what they believe or whatever.
This is the thing that came out when COVID came out.
I didn't know that there were other people who were very vaccine hesitant that I worked with until COVID came out and people had to kind of show their cards in that.
And, you know, we're not supposed to say, but we obviously know when we work on a site, we have to go work on another site and it's owned by another company and they'll they'll say everyone's got to be vaccinated.
It's our camp.
It's our site.
Everyone who comes here is vaccinated.
And we say, oh, you know, Mark over there.
Again, I don't know anyone named Mark, so I use Mark as a thing.
Mark over there can't go work for those guys.
And everyone kind of lets the thing hang.
Why can't Mark work for them?
Oh, wait.
It's because I'm vaccinated.
Right.
And, you know, you're not going to give them a hard time about it because we're humans and we just want to get along.
But suddenly I know Mark is, you know, vaccine hesitant now.
And I go, okay, well, that's interesting.
It never came up in conversation before.
And so a lot of the people who are like that, who are kind of solo, they often have a different, we're calling it now box, right?
That you put yourself in.
You have yourself in an idea box that you a closed space in which like an echo chamber that you're, you know, you're saying things and they're all coming back to you.
Everyone's saying all the same things together.
You're chanting in tongues and you're chanting in unison in tongues for some reason that no one understands.
And it all makes sense to the people who are chanting in tongues.
Okay.
But as soon as you step out of that space, chanting in tongues isn't going to mean anything to the other people.
And so you have to mimic them.
You have to pretend like you're one of them.
And so I think most of those people just want to feel like they're right and they want to feel like they fit in.
And that's just it.
So in those places, I mean, I haven't cracked the whole code there yet on how to do that.
But what I know for sure is that drawing the lines harder is not going to do it.
Jeff hasn't said anything in a long time and I'm worried.
Oh, just listen, buddy.
Just listen.
All right.
All right.
Well, as long as you get a chance, I don't want to impinge on your free speech here.
People are going to think later I censored you from the episode or something.
Well, perhaps because you guys have been explicitly talking about censoring me every episode.
So we created a social environment in which you were discouraged from speaking.
Yeah.
You spoke earlier, mid-soapbox, about something along the lines of not going there because it's in our in.
We're human and we just want to get along yeah, and and I would not argue that.
But maybe show shine a brighter light on the the darker side of that, which is like a lot of social media is not really free speech because it's got this sort of echo chamber construct to it.
Oh yeah definitely, and what a lot of people want out of interaction with social media is to experience that vicarious thrill of being right by reading about a zinger that somebody who agrees with us got off against somebody that we know is a designated villain because they don't agree with us.
Yeah like, social media feeds are clogged full of cheering, all that virtue signaling garbage.
Um, check out this super ignorant thing that, this super ignorant person who is the bad guy because he doesn't believe as we believe.
Check out the stupid thing that he said and then check out the super awesome retort.
I got in on him.
He was so owned.
Yeah, if I ever want to, you know some good comedy.
All I got to do is go to this person's particular feed Feed and just look at the garbage they post.
Yeah, things like that.
Yeah.
So, like, that's that's sort of the biggest bugbear that we're fighting against in this what now?
What do we do about it now?
Because social media really isn't creating what we would have thought of as the unfettered, wide open exchange of ideas avenue of pure free speech that we were pining for back in episode one, three and a half goddamn hours ago.
It's turned into just, and we touched on it on the episode on tribalism.
It's it's just turned into this ideological circle jerk.
And yes, everybody here in this cast generally leans more towards the left politically.
And so the people that we generally are vilifying are the more alt-right kooks.
But it bears repeating that there's some pretty hair-brained, far-left-wing ideas out there as well.
And there's little echo chamber bubbles of these wing nuts just as active.
We just don't hear as much about them because, you know, the ideas they're pining towards is like, wouldn't it be great if, you know, there was no possessions and we all just got along.
It's crazy.
It's crazy, but it's not an idea that's capable of causing any harm.
Yeah.
The John Lennon version of, yeah.
My point is, we don't have any sunlight here.
Social media doesn't present any sunlight because it is, it is algorithmically designed to divert, cordon us off so that we're only speaking with people who think like we think.
And you also have, did you do an episode like on straight up on the issue of wedge issues or is it just a medium?
You and I did an episode on wedge issues.
You and I did it.
Yes.
I think that episode we had to do it twice, actually, because the first time we argued so much, it was garbage.
Oh, we did.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
I forgot about that.
Wait, wedge, the podcast on wedge issues was a wedge issue?
It was.
It was.
In and of itself.
It's still bitter.
It was as meta as it could get.
Oh, yeah.
So, like, when we're in this sort of heavily politicized culture war social environment where everything becomes a wedge issue.
And so your stance on an issue becomes immediately tied to your societal identity.
We can't have meaningful discussions on any of it.
We can't drag ideas into the light when the only purpose of discussing the idea is to figure out whether you're red or blue.
Yeah, that's that pulling away from the more reasonable position has been happening a lot.
And I, it's hard to put your thumb on the pulse of a thing that's not a like a single body, but it looks almost like there's some people who are stubbornly sticking to the middle regardless, who are just saying, you know what?
All you guys are screwed.
I'm just going to stay right here in the middle.
But they're still peeling a couple away here and there.
And I, I, before I kind of started this podcast and before I got deeper into this mind space of all the many, many people that are working on this on the misinformation side and strictly against the misinformation side, it looked from my view like the middle was emptying.
Like it was a magnet on each side and it was just pulling in one direction or the other and it was just slowly pulling like emptying the middle.
Everyone had to pick a more and more extreme view.
But now that I'm closer in, it looks like it maybe was never quite that or maybe just isn't like that anymore.
Difficult to say for sure.
But it looks like there's some people that are stubbornly claiming the middle ground, the decidedly middle.
I don't know if they're better than any of the people who pick the opposite, you know, left or right or whatever.
I don't know that.
But it looks like there is a bunch of people in the middle that are just, some of them are still confused.
They don't always have all the right info because even when they look for the right info, sometimes they still get the wrong info.
The misinformation is rampant.
It is so loud.
It is so bright and flashy.
It is the Las Vegas right now of neon lights everywhere trying to blind you and confuse you.
So you just keep plugging the machine full of money.
And that's where I sit.
That's where I sit.
And I want to work on a way to make that less bad.
I don't think I have a superhero cape where I can save the world in any way, but I don't think this is a job for someone who wears a cape.
I don't think there's a single hero that's going to fix this.
I think that it's going to take a concerted effort from a lot of people who all just stubbornly refuse to succumb to unreality in the end.
Because there's no way for it to be taken care of legislatively that does not expose us to a significant exposure of a very real curtailment of freedoms that we absolutely have to hang on to.
Yeah.
The idea of having a quote unquote ministry of truth is a bad idea.
Even if you call it something else, it's just a bad idea.
Really bad idea.
It's not useful.
And I think that in some ways, generously, admittedly, some of the legislatures who are perhaps proposing a thing like that have the right idea in mind.
But go back to my episode about current benevolent overlords.
It might be that you give someone this power in the effort to save some calamity, but you're allowing then someone else to inherit that power.
And even if you think the current owner of that power has good intentions, the next owner of that power might not.
So it's not really a good idea.
It's just not something that we should allow.
It's never an idea to legislate more restrictions on freedoms, regardless of who's in power and regardless of what the justification is for it.
I mean, the pattern that we typically see is if it's, you know, righties in power.
And I think it's as an aside for those who aren't aware of the thing on either side of the border.
In the United States, we define red as the bad guys.
They're the bad guy red Republicans and the good guy Democrats are blue.
And yet you just, you cross into Canada and the absolute opposite is true.
The Conservative Party of Canada, their party colors are blue.
And the Liberal Party of Canada, which is a centrist party originally, ideologically, that's what they were founded on, but now they're leaning very hard left because that's where the popular vote is.
I had a very intelligent history and social studies professor in high school by the name of Mr. Pettit, who always put it most succinctly in saying in Canada, we have three parties.
We have the conservatives who represent right-wing interests, and we have the NDP who represent left-wing interests, and we have the liberals who represent whatever interests will get them elected that day.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Today.
Introduction to Canadian politics.
Yes.
Yeah.
Theoretically, ideologically, the left is red and the right is blue.
And the inverse is true down south, which makes it very, very awkward when you try to both audiences.
But, you know, when you have the pattern we've seen is when right-wing governments are in power, the thing that we need to be afraid of is people of other races and cultures on other continents, and we need to protect ourselves from their ideology.
And so, and, you know, from actual physical harm by terrorists.
So we need to take away our freedoms, but it's just to keep you safe.
And then that government steps out and the new government steps in.
And now it's, well, we need to be afraid of these diseases.
So we're just going to curtail your freedoms a little bit more, but it's for your own protection.
Like, regardless of what the excuse is, regardless of what the justification is, it's never a good idea to let the person that you put in power with your vote take more of your freedom away because eventually the last freedom you're going to have left is your ability to vote for that person and then it'll be gone too and then you're not in a democracy anymore.
Yeah.
Sorry, that was sorry.
I just looked down.
I saw a huge soapbox under me.
I'm sorry.
That's okay.
We could go into a very, a very, very long debate about that.
I mean, sounds like a whole lot of people.
I think that there's a false equivalency there, a gigantic false equivalency there.
But that would take us forever to dig our way through.
Because when you look at it, right now in the U.S., otherwise known as the South to you, there's only one party that is trying to restrict voting.
And there's one party that is trying to enhance voting.
True.
And even to get back, Spencer, to some things you said, even what we call the middle in the U.S., I have been told by many, that's like the right wing in Europe.
In Canada.
Okay.
And so the way it's defined is very, very different.
And the other thing is, you know, you talked about whatever party your liberal party being for whatever will get them elected.
If we look at Republicans who are ostensibly conservatives, but then support a coup, which is not at all conservative.
It is not constitutional.
And the people, the Republicans, the hardcore Republicans who stand up and say, I am not supporting this man.
I am not supporting this.
They get censured and thrown out of the party and unelected because they did not support party over country.
And so I don't even know how I started on this rant or where I'm going with it, except that it was just to say, I passed the conscient with the soapbox, obviously.
Yes.
No, just to say that what sometimes what parties say they stand for and what they actually stand for are two different things.
And what I see quite often with Republicans is their goal is to get elected and to maintain power.
Now, others may say that's the same for Democrats.
And I think most politicians, their goal is to get elected and stay elected.
But there are a few who don't.
I just see it in Republicans right now more.
Like I said, Democrats are not going out trying to restrict the freedom to vote, the right to vote.
So if we, you know, circle back, although we've gone long and far from the topic of this particular podcast, you know, to freedom of speech and what do we do about it, I think that for that aspect, you have to exercise your right to vote and you have to exercise your own free speech to point these things out.
The question is how much good it does to these echo chambers.
But there is that, what you called the middle.
They swing back and forth and they determine that fairly small percentage determines the outcome of any given election and in some cases, any, you know, the way the whole country goes.
And those are the people who need to be reached one way or the other.
So that's why, you know, Jeff, you talked about when Republicans are in power, it's, you know, you fear, you know, the outsiders, the immigrants, and all these things.
And I think I agree with that, but they will come up with other things.
They will also, it's other outsiders that they fear.
It's those gay people.
It's those trans people.
It's those, you know, whatever they can cause fear, whatever they can use to cause fear in that middle ground.
And I agree with you entirely, buddy, but like I'm sorry, I can't draw a box around that and say that is behavior that is exclusively exhibited by the Republican Party in the United States of America.
Like using fear as a justification to restrict public freedoms has been used by pretty much every Western government that I've seen.
Yeah, I'm talking about right now what I've been seeing most recently, I guess.
And I know that to some extent, I have seen it work.
I have seen, you know, some of the people that I talked about earlier, some of my coworkers who are, you know, I could have reasonable conversations with.
And, you know, there was one of them in particular who, you know, he was, I would call him in the middle, left-leaning, but in the middle.
But he started to buy into some of the anti-very far left wing stuff.
And he's like, wow, they're doing this.
There's no way I'm going to vote for that.
And it's like, okay, but is that really what's going to happen?
And so the right wing was doing a better job at that moment in trying to pull over those people in the middle.
Joe Biden wants to take away your gas stove.
Right.
Right.
Perfect example.
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, that's the best example because that is the most ridiculous series of events that led to that.
They are, first of all, no, there was no one who said, or no one of significance who said, let's ban gas stoves.
There was certainly no one who said, we're going to make you throw out your gas stove if you already have it.
And the third thing is they are fighting for the right to give their children asthma, you know?
And so it's like, what are you actually fighting for?
And I say this as someone who has a gas stove, but someone, some Republican media organization said, this is a wedge issue.
We're going to use this.
And if you judge by social media, it's working.
Now, do I think that will continue into the next round of elections?
No.
No one's going to remember gas stoves in the next round of elections.
But it's just one of those things that they keep hammering away with.
You know, if you don't fear that we're taking away your guns, well, then fear that we're taking away your stove.
But of course, now we've once again gone off on a massive tangent and Spencer probably wants us to come back.
I feel like I would like to get this episode back on track here to the topic we had.
Yeah.
Hell teach it to have me and Jeff on the same podcast.
Yeah, well, I guess it's part of the shrug, right?
It's like, well, shrug, what are you going to talk about?
Well, yeah, it's always politics.
Yeah.
So this for me is a very important thing.
There's one thing that we haven't touched on very much that's been mentioned a lot in other spaces about the topic of free speech, which is the idea of platforming.
So, you know, there's been people who have been protested against when they go to speak at some venues because it's been said that you're platforming them.
You know, and I'm not saying platforming in a weird way because I think it's a thing that doesn't happen.
It definitely does happen.
Platforming is when you allow someone to speak unhindered about their idea.
It's when you're not shining the harsh glare of what might be called sunlight on them to scour away the bad parts of their idea.
You're just sort of shining a flashlight on them and letting people see it and not showing them the whole thing because they show the rosiest part of their own view in that, right?
And that's platforming, just allowing them to speak and not really challenging them.
And that's what we see with politicians who are only going on interviews with the sort of favorable interviewer, right?
And that's what we see when we get people with very dangerous ideas that are going on stage and they're just being allowed to talk with no one else and no one challenges them on any of their ideas.
No one questions them, says, are you sure that's really true?
I mean, that's what we see when we see Kanye going on Alex Jones and he just rambles on about all the incredible things he goes on about.
And Alex Jones just kind of nervously says, can we change the topic?
That's not that, that's platforming.
That's not challenging anything.
I'm going to disagree with you in advance, but I'll save it till you're done.
Oh, okay.
Thank you.
So what I would like to do is I would like to not platform, but challenge some of these ideas.
I would like to have some people on this podcast that have opinions that maybe are starkly contrasted by my own opinion on things and maybe have some wild ideas.
I want to be prepared for them.
I want to challenge their view.
I want to, in essence, I want to drag them into the light.
And I'm not going to change them.
But if someone listens and is confused about a thing and is not sure about a part of it and they see more of the real truth about a real idea, that's the point.
That's the real point.
It's not about sort of convincing the person I might have on.
And I don't want to have the real, really rapidly crazy people on, but I do want to find some people who have some of the more, what might be called marginal views and just bring them on and ask them, why do you think this is true?
What do you think is happening here?
How does this really work?
Build the world in your mind and show that to me.
Show me what the entire world would look like if that was true.
Like make them not just have the one part of their idea, but like the whole idea and how the rest of the world fits in context to that.
And then challenge all those things and point, you know, preferably point out some things that are wrong about that.
But that's what I'd like to do because I don't think we can afford to be squeamish about this.
Like I don't think we can just sit with our people.
We can, we can only talk to the people who agree with us and we can, you know, we can talk about how those people over there are all kind of some version of crazy and we got the good ideas.
We have to expose our ideas to all the challenges as well.
That's the only real way.
Ideas are a constant title fight every night, you know, knockdown, drag out fight every time.
You put them out there, they put their ideas in, you put them in the middle of the ring and you go at it.
But that's part of the point is that I want to challenge the ideas.
I don't really want to challenge the individuals, just their ideas.
The ideas are the important part.
I'm not important.
Maybe some of the words I use might resonate, go back out in the world, and they'll be important as ideas that communicate.
Me as a personality, I'm just one guy.
I'm not that important, really.
And at the end of the day, I'm just one thing.
But the society as a whole and the ideas that it holds to be true, that's the important thing.
So that's really what I want to talk about as far as what should we do about it, because that's what I intend to do about it.
I intend to use my free speech here.
And again, I pay for a service to host this podcast and they hold it for me and let other people listen to it.
And they're not obligated to do it.
They have entered into a contract where I pay them and they can end that contract anytime.
And if they decide that they don't want to do that.
And so I am, you know, I'm not that careful.
I don't think that my ideas are so crazy that I need to be that careful.
But I want to bring some people on whose ideas are a little bit more extreme.
And I want to challenge those ideas.
And I want to know what you two think of that, because in a way, I've dragged you both into this.
And, you know, where I'm headed with it, you know, you're both on the generally on the acknowledgement.
Yeah, it's your podcast.
You can do what you want with it.
But if it becomes a thing you don't like, then you won't support it, right?
So, you know, I'm coming to you guys with this.
My audience will also listen to it, but you guys first and say, like, you know, this is a thing that I'm looking to do.
And I want to know your thoughts on whether you think I'd be, it'd be a stupid thing because I'm just platforming, or if it's a good idea because of this, or if it'll only work because of a certain way.
I mean, I right now in this moment think that sunshine is the best disinfectant, even still.
But I'm not so married to that idea that I can't leave it behind if the right argument comes along.
So make that argument now or think of it in two weeks and come up with it.
You know what I mean?
There's no time limit.
But if you can think of it now, sunshine is the best disinfectant, but like it has to be applied.
Well, yeah.
And the thing you're shining light on needs to be willing to step into the sunlight.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, like the tribalism that we have, thanks to the social media machine and the politicization of everything is we're not even comfortable sharing our ideas anymore unless we're either protesting the establishment or talking to our friends about how the establishment is wrong.
But we never, we never find, go out and find peers and engage in logical discourse with them because if they believe differently than us, they're automatically vilified by us and their ideas need to be purged and disinfected by the purity of our sunlight.
So like there's an implied arrogance there that would you'd find it really difficult to find somebody from an opposing camp who would come onto your show.
I think you think this way because you're not on Twitter.
That's fair.
Truthfully, I think there's a viewpoint here that you're not getting.
I listen to people the last two nights, I've listened to a guy named Dr. Ian Copeland.
Shout out to Dr. Ian Copeland if he ever hears this, but he holds a thing on Twitter called a space where he and several people he knows all collectively host a space where they, he is a PhD in genetics and they talk about vaccines and they challenge people to come on and speak about the reasons why they think vaccines are bad.
And people go on and try to go toe to toe with a PhD in genetics about vaccines.
It boggles my mind, but they do it.
It's unbelievable.
They did their own research.
Yeah.
And he just tells them he's, you know, if anyone wants to check this out, I encourage them to do it.
You know, if you have the time and it's all at the right time and you want to listen, he doesn't pull any punches.
I mean, he's not polite the way I am.
Right.
And, you know, I don't, you know, it's not the way I would do it, but I don't have the right to tell him how he should do his own space.
I listen to it and I think it's incredible, just mind-boggling that people even show up because they'll show up and they'll make a claim and they say, okay, go get that claim.
And they'll try to say it and say, no, no, no, that's not how this works.
Go get the claim.
Go get the proof of what you say.
You made a claim.
Go prove it.
Come back and read the proof to me and we'll go through it.
And sometimes they try to talk.
He's like, no, and they'll just silence them, moving on, you know, and he has another guy that's helping them and keeping track of the people that are going to get their proof and what they're, you know, and they go through it and they challenge these live.
And of course, he's got a PhD in genetics and he has a couple people who I don't know what their qualifications are.
One of them is a practicing doctor.
And I don't know what the other, I don't know them well enough to know what they have, but they're obviously very intelligent.
I've heard them speak.
And they're just going through these and they're live debunking them.
It's unbelievable to me that anyone shows up at all.
But apparently he's been doing this for months.
And I mean, yeah.
Yeah.
I suspect it's a combination of the people haven't listened to the previous things and that there are people out there who just think they know everything because they did their own research and they're not prepared for that.
But a couple of things.
One, to what Jeff was saying and then what you were saying, Spencer, about not being on Twitter.
There is a lot of, for lack of a better term, tribalism on Twitter, but I have also had good conversations on Twitter.
I wouldn't stay there if there were no good conversations.
Yeah, right.
They may be fewer and further between, but yeah, I have had conversations where someone will come to me and say, why do you do this?
And I'll, you know, say, well, it's because of this, this, and this.
And Spencer, you and I talked about this on a previous episode, where there are some people where I can rapidly identify them as trolls and I cut them off, whereas you are much more patient and you don't identify them as trolls necessarily until a little bit of back and forth has occurred.
But there are people who I think really are asking true questions, not the ones who are jacking off, just asking questions.
And so I do think those can occur.
Now, do I think those can occur in the way you're talking about?
So this is where I'm going to borrow that soapbox and climb onto it.
Sure.
It's all yours.
So you made a joke near the beginning of the second part of this podcast when Jeff said he disagreed with you.
And you said, well, Jeff should start his own podcast if he wanted to disagree with you.
Yeah.
And I agree with you then.
I don't agree with you now.
Okay.
And recognizing that then for us was only like an hour ago.
Sure.
So you want to, you know, put people on the podcast with other ideas, things that I would call bad ideas.
And, you know, as you were saying, well, some people would call this platforming them and would disagree.
You know, this is an audio only podcast, so you couldn't see me nodding when you were saying that.
But yeah, these people already have their own platforms.
Yeah.
We don't need to give them more.
We don't need to give them more light that is not true sunlight.
I think that you are being a bit idealistic and thinking that you can challenge them the way because these types of people know how to use a debate format, a podcast format, whatever, to spread their BS.
We're not talking about the jokers who go on that Twitter space that you're talking about.
I mean, there's all sorts of that spreading of BS that we have talked about.
There is a reason that anti-vaxxers, creationists, all those types repeatedly try to goad scientists into debates.
And that's because they know they can spout their nonsense and the real scientists won't be able to keep up.
Again, because of Brandolini's law, the bullshit asymmetry principle.
I have seen it so many times in years past.
And just for context, you had said something about fighting against this and what can we do and everything.
For context, I have been fighting against nonsense to one extent or another for more than three decades.
Okay.
I have written about it.
I have been on radio shows about it.
I, you know, have participated in various other things.
And so I have seen when creationists would fool a knowledgeable scientist to debate them and then destroy them in the debate, even though the scientific evidence doesn't support them, because they would spout things that the scientist wasn't prepared for.
You said a few minutes ago, you wanted to be prepared for this person.
You will never be fully prepared because whatever you prepare for, they can go somewhere else.
So if a creationist gets an expert biologist to debate, they will bring up astronomy and geology.
And I think we even talked about this in another podcast.
And that biologist won't know about the speed of light in a vacuum necessarily.
And so they just throw all these things out there and there's no way to keep up.
The same is true of anti-vaxxers now.
There is one particular tech millionaire, not Elon Musk, whose Twitter account is 90% attacked on doctors and demands that they debate him or else that proves they're wrong.
You actually just a day or two ago had an interaction with this person.
And he knows he can't prove what he's saying through the actual scientific process.
But that is the only place the debate should be.
Science is not determined in a debate.
Science is not determined in a court of law.
Science is determined through the scientific process.
It's not democratic.
Right.
Doesn't matter if most people believe it's true.
It could still be wrong.
Right.
And so if you are asking me, which it appears you were, well, I am.
Should you bring someone like that onto the podcast?
Not only would I say no, not only would I say strongly no, I would say hell no.
As in, I don't want to be associated with someone like that.
They can go on their own BS podcast.
They can go on Joe Rogan.
They should not be on podcasts that will legitimize them.
There is a reason that the vast, vast majority of science communication podcasts, magazines, whatever, don't bring on those who spread anti-science.
There are plenty of places for them to go spout their nonsense.
And there's no reason to give them even a shred of credibility by allowing them to associate their name with a pro-science podcast or other platform.
Plus, you don't necessarily know that you're going to have the outcome that you desire because the person that you're debating with is entering the debate already planning on fighting dirty.
I don't know if you're familiar with the show Young Sheldon.
Yes.
So there was an episode, my son loves the show.
There was an episode we watched recently where he wanted to run for, I believe, class president or school student president.
And I can't remember what the platform was, but there was like a deficiency in the school that he wanted tended to.
And he figured his best chance to lobby for it was as class president.
So he, you know, being, you know, Sheldon, he took the most expeditious route and put together a succinct and tight campaign package based on things he thought the students would be interested in.
And he got totally destroyed by the grade 10 cheerleader that ran against him because when they had their debate in front of the students, Sheldon went first and he talked about all of his, you know, ponderous and administrative points on things he would fix up about the school.
And she got up there and said, you know what I love?
I love football.
And of course, everybody hoots and haulers and roars and loves.
Did you know that Sheldon Cooper not only doesn't like football, but he has called football a sport of oaths?
Well, I don't think any of you are oaths.
I love football.
You know what else I love?
God.
And everybody hoots and hauls.
Did you know that Sheldon Cooper is an atheist?
It's perhaps a bit of a broad comic point, but it does make the point that the person you're bringing into the ring isn't necessarily someone who's interested in a free and open exchange of ideas.
If the person you're talking with is an actual charlatan, an actual demagogue, you're not going to get anywhere meaningful.
If, however, the person you're dealing with is someone who's just bought some of the bunk, who's actually searching for answers out there, I don't see your paths crossing with them.
I don't see that being the kind of person who would find himself at your door.
The only people I can see responding to your call, frankly, would be charlatans and demagogues looking to backdoor more press time for themselves.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, that's literally the next line from my notes was they don't play fair.
Yeah.
Well, you know, and I have, you know, a couple more examples.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Drew, okay.
He, you know, he's a media personality, but he's also a doctor and he proclaims himself to be a doctor right there in the title.
He has become anti-vax recently.
He has been falling by the BS spread by others.
He even posted when the football player fell dead on the field, basically, you know, before he was revived.
He even tweeted, oh, another one died suddenly, which is anti-vax code.
He had on his show a science promoter who has a PhD in molecular biology.
He covers bad science.
He makes good science accessible.
And the topic was the question: is Dr. Drew anti-vax?
Okay.
He had him on the show.
Now, I have not listened to this, but afterwards, the scientist who I now follow on Twitter, I have not heard of him before.
I found him through this, you know, some interactions on Twitter.
He thought that they had a very good and calm and reasonable discussion.
So how did Dr. Drew handle it?
He blocked the guy on Twitter and then hid that episode.
He deleted it from his Twitter timeline.
Yeah.
Like, so you have a reasonable conversation where you're answering the question and Dr. Drew's like, oh, I can't have that kid out there.
That is not playing fair.
That is the level of intellectual dishonesty that you are dealing with.
Another doctor recently, Dr. David Grimes, recently tweeted that well-meaning people often suggest debating anti-vaccine figures, but noted it's a mistake.
He said, quote, debates create an illusion that evidence-free crank positions are equivalent to overwhelming scientific evidence.
Even if they lose that illusory, illiasori, whatever.
Illusory.
Illusory.
Thank you.
Legitimacy and platform is a win for cranks.
It is entirely possible and important to refute anti-vaccine conspiracy theory without boosting their signal.
But debating vaccine safety or efficacy is like debating the bloody existence of Greenland.
Facts aren't up for debate, but a bad faith actor will try to abuse that.
And then Dr. Nick Tiller replied, I very much agree.
Also in that kind of debate, the two parties are playing by different rules, logic and evidence versus irrational pseudoscience, analogous to playing soccer against a team that uses their hands.
So, and these are not things I went searching for.
These are things that came up just within the past few days on Twitter that I noticed and went, ooh, I'm going to save that for when Spencer brings this up.
Yeah.
Well, good.
Those are all really good arguments.
And I, I, I mean, I, I do have a lot to think about, right?
I mean, this, this might be a thing, this might be a situation in which I'm naive, where it's a bad idea.
I, you know, need to see it to, or, you know, feel it to know, maybe, but I, you're right.
I do have to be careful.
Like it's not, it's not any kind of simple thing.
And I don't know exactly how I'd want to do it.
For me personally, I would feel most comfortable challenging a flat earther because I'm most comfortable with the set of facts surrounding the shape of the planet.
I could do that blindfolded with both hands cut off, right?
I mean, it's personally.
You don't have to go that far.
Well, no, I won't, but you know, I could tie them behind my back.
How dare you?
Yeah.
as far as that goes, I mean, I'm as comfortable with that as, for example, Dr. Ian Copeland is with the genetics of COVID.
And so, you know, that's, you know, for me, that's the one that I would first want to try to drag more into the light is this idea.
I don't think anyone that listens to this podcast is in any way confused about the shape of the earth.
But that might be a thing where I get my feet wet on this and either learn a sharp lesson on just how you can't talk to crazy or whatever else I learned there, maybe.
And I might try it with little steps, like just a Twitter space or something, just to see what's out there and what goes.
I don't know.
It's just something I've been thinking about.
I'm not, like I said, I'm not sold on it.
I do have, I still have a long list of episodes to do that are just like these individual topics.
So, you know, I'm not out of ideas of other things to do here.
But it seems to me that when I started this, I started it in part because other people in this idea space, from my perspective, I hadn't dived really closely in Twitter yet to see many of the other people who are in this.
It looked like there was a lot of people who had a large reputation to lose.
And in those situations, you are exactly right.
Dead on inviting a crank on to talk about anti-vax was just platforming them.
And that's not the right way to do it.
You have to be able to hold their feet to a real fire to show what's going on here.
You have to cook that meat to get rid of the bacteria.
But what I thought when I made this was that there weren't enough people who didn't have a big reputation to lose.
There weren't enough foot soldiers, it seemed to me at the time.
Now I see that there are a bunch of foot soldiers and they are locked in, you know, regular combat.
I see people like the real truther on Twitter.
That guy is doing the real fight, right?
I mean, he's he's open those spaces too and talking to people.
And Dr. Ian Copeland, like I mentioned a couple of times already, these people are getting right down into the trench.
And I admire that.
And in some ways, I came up with this idea because I was looking at the things they were doing and going, wow, that's really amazing.
You know, maybe, maybe I should try something like that.
I don't know, but maybe you're right.
Maybe I shouldn't.
Maybe I shouldn't.
But from my perspective, I don't think I'm so big that I'm platforming them.
But I do think it's an important thing to do.
Even if I don't do it this way or put them right on the podcast or whatever, I do think that we need to roll up our sleeves, get down in that trench, work a shovel to dig it deeper, whatever metaphor you want to use to show that we're, you know, we're the people on the front line who have to do this.
And not only for the ideas that I show and challenge on my thing, but also encourage other people to do the same, to learn the right set of facts so that they can counter those conversations when they're in their workplace, when they are in everyday conversation with their relatives, because I think all of those conversations are important.
And if I'm not willing to do them, then how can I ever expect anyone else to also be willing to do them?
Right.
I mean, that's part of what I think too, is that if I'm not willing to be, for lack of a better term, some kind of role model in this, then how can I ever expect anyone else to emulate and also in those little ways, in those little social ways, push back on these ideas and at the very least, shine some of the light.
And I'm like, well, I think the Earth is flat, but why is it that you can actually watch the sun dip below the horizon?
It doesn't just kind of disappear in the sky, right?
I mean, ask those little questions and get the people to really focus on that stuff.
Why do you think every other body in our solar system is round and obviously a sphere when the earth isn't?
Like ask those little questions, pull that little block out of the Jenga thing and put it on top and make them balance it, right?
And it's, I mentioned it before to you, David, and in the last podcast we did.
We are Lilipushins in this.
We all have to go out and throw our little rope over the monster and hope that everyone else also is doing the same, right?
And tack this thing down.
And that's the only way that we beat this is if we're all in there working at it.
Well, right.
But and to that, I agree with everything you've said in that regard.
And I think that, yes, doing, you know, doing this podcast, doing whatever we can do, talking on Twitter, you know, refuting points, that is the answer.
Amplifying the voices of those who are incorrect, not giving the platform, however small the platform, to those who are spreading misinformation or disinformation.
You want to shine light, then shine the real sunlight.
I see enough of the bullshitters.
I don't need them on good podcasts or TV shows or journal articles or whatever.
That is part of the problem of Elon Musk bringing them all back to Twitter to spread their crap after they had been banned for spreading their dangerous crap.
And earlier you said maybe you're naive.
I don't know if naive is the right word or idealistic.
Like you feel that you can talk someone into this game of Jenga.
And there have been times when I thought I could too, go back to my conspiracy cousin, you know, but I couldn't.
I can't.
I don't know that I will ever have a reasonable conversation with her again.
And is that sad?
Yes.
Other people have had it with their own parents, you know, their own closer relatives.
I'm lucky that that has not happened to me.
But I do think it's a little idealistic to think you can get someone like that on the podcast and heck away at them until they see the light.
You know, even for flat earthers, every question that you brought up, I am certain they have an answer for.
I don't know what those answers are because flat earth is not something I have paid much attention to, but I am certain they will have very glib responses to whatever you bring up because they've been fed those glib responses.
And so I just.
I am going to raise my hand and request the conch, please.
Go ahead.
David makes excellent points, but they are points based on a logical fallacy that every guest you're going to have on your show is a practiced and polished demagogue or a completely brainwashed foot soldier of said demagogue no longer capable of independent thought.
And any audience with you is going to give them access to the megaphone of social media and regardless of the outcome of the debate, going to help solidify their mistruths somehow.
Those situations could absolutely come to pass if those are the people that you had on your show.
There are, however, lots of people out there who are just looking for truth.
We call these people moderates.
And I think there's like David said, like, or I think, Spencer, you, you brought it up earlier in this episode or perhaps the last one.
The last three and a half hours are starting to kind of blur together now.
It doesn't matter.
Previously, previously, this idea of like the magnets at the polls.
There's plenty of people out there that I think are open-minded enough to be open to new ideas through a venue of debate.
If you're interested in changing minds, absolutely debate with as many people who want to debate with you as possible.
I think eventually you might hit the point where you have to start thinking about the dangers of platforming.
But due to the fact that the platform that you offer is sufficiently modest, I don't think it presents enough of an ethical quandary for you at this point.
Should you be able to entice someone from one of the conspiracy camps onto the show to debate with you?
Are you naive?
Quite possibly.
But I don't think.
I don't agree with David that you should just shut the idea down because of what might happen as a consequence.
Because refusing to engage with someone who disagrees with you is quite frankly weakness.
And it's something that we're trying to avoid.
Like the one thing that drew me to participating in this series with you from the very beginning was the sort of founding idea that we as a culture have lost the ability to rationally debate.
We can't, as a people anymore, it seems in the Western world, disagree with someone on what is now an overwhelming list of politically charged subjects.
We can't disagree with someone without also feeling cultural pull to hate or vilify that person.
And when that happens, it's really difficult to debate with them because we want to move into the realm of personal attacks.
And we can scroll back and see evidence of that all over the episodes we've just been recording.
We've all taken our pot shots.
In jest, right?
You guys were kidding when you said that about me?
No, I'm not talking.
Yes, absolutely.
We've lost the ability to intelligently debate.
And it's gotten so bad that now these crazy fringe ideas are making them way back up out of the woodwork.
And we're like, I thought we settled this like 100 years ago.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't engage on it.
It just means we've let it go for so long.
It's gotten this bad.
We need to engage on it even more.
Yeah.
We should never be afraid to defend our position.
I think that the argument that when it's something that's considered settled, there should not be open media covered debate on it because that adds legitimacy to an argument that shouldn't have any legitimacy brought to it at all.
I disagree with that.
I think that ideas need to be challenged, even if they are ideas that have been accepted for a tremendously long time.
Okay.
Yeah.
The one thing, Jeff, that I will, well, maybe a couple of things that I will respond to there.
I am not suggesting refusing to engage.
And I think this goes back to what Spencer said about you not being on Twitter.
We engage plenty, but there's a difference between engaging and using one's own platform.
And so I'm not going to, for example, to go back to the Twitter example, I'm not going to retweet everyone who says something crazy to me in response.
I will engage with them or I may block them, depending on how bad they are.
But that doesn't mean I am under any obligation to use my platform to further them.
And I think that's what we're talking about here.
No, obligation, of course not.
Yeah.
No, nobody should ever feel obligated.
He was asking, do you think it's a good idea?
And I think, yes, it is.
Okay.
And I will still say, no, it's not.
Okay.
You know, for that reason, again, they have their own, they get their ideas out plenty, too much.
And you're right.
There are certain things that come up over and over again.
It is called, and now I'm... Gisgala?
Pardon?
Is it Gish Gallup?
No, Gish Gallup is what I talked about earlier, where they just throw a bunch of stuff at you.
It's the, God, I hate it when I can't think of something.
It's the machine where you keep pounding the whack-a-mole.
Yeah, whack-a-mole.
That's exactly what it is.
It's the whack-a-mole theory.
So that mole may go down for 10 years, but you better believe it's going to pop up again.
It doesn't matter how much it's been debunked.
There are things coming up now, without going into all the details, that were literally debunked by a nine-year-old science experiment that was published in a medical journal.
And it's coming up again now, 20 years later.
So, I mean, I think we need to wrap this up because I think we're well over time.
Shocked.
Shocked.
I'm not yet, like, I haven't made any decisions.
you know, I sent you guys what I was going to say about that and you had a chance to prepare your arguments and I've heard them.
I haven't made a final decision and I might, you know, I still don't know what I'm going to do.
But it is something I've considered in the past, something I'm kind of considering now.
And I'm not fully swayed one way or the other just yet.
I still have a lot of things I got to I got to think about on.
So in the meantime, I think we will leave free speech exactly where it is in with the big old shrug.
We haven't determined anything for definite one way or the other, which is exactly how we end almost every episode.
People can decide for themselves based on what we say.
If you think that we're wrong about anything that we've said in any of these episodes, send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
Detail exactly why we're wrong about whatever.
And if Spencer decides to platform you, you will make it onto the show.