How to Change a Belief: Truth and Communication Today
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Deeply-held beliefs are often what cause divisions between people. What does it take to change a belief? We discuss this question as Bill Stierle and Tom talk about the power of belief structures, especially in today’s pandemic world. They discuss how our cherished beliefs are constructed and how a belief can be challenged and, ultimately, changed. Tune in for another thought-provoking discussion from Bill and Tom.
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How to Change a Belief: Truth and Communication Today
We have a very interesting thing happening in our country. There's a news story that's being blown up. It's getting a ton of propagation. It is being shared, replayed and published by every media outlet. That's of the radio host, Phil Valentine, who's a Conservative talk radio host. He has been somebody who has downplayed the vaccine and made fun of the vaccine, mocked the vaccine, not has been a supporter of people getting the vaccine. Now, he has COVID and is very badly hospitalized in a critical condition, and he's changed his tune. There are a great many interesting things to observe and talk about with this.
I appreciate this topic, Tom, because when we as communicators in our modern world looking to get the message out of the things that we value our brand recognition or message, we want to find our fans, build a fan base, increase our eyeballs online and get the number of clicks that we need. We need to inspire and engage people. Our advertisers stay close, our products move off the shelf and we are engaged in powerful messaging. This show takes various different topics both in business and politics about how things are messaged. Here, the media is promoting messaging. The messaging is around a person that had this one point of view, the viewpoint about vaccines over here and then they are now promoting this other viewpoint.
A lot of times, people don't change their viewpoint unless they are facing or experiencing the crisis in front of them. That's hard. The crisis is in front of them, then all of a sudden, they are dealing with the crisis, whether it's business or politics. It's that impression, loyalty, the connection that a person is looking for. Now, we are watching the media taking and trying to find a foothold into the non-vax world. Here's somebody that promoted non-vaccination or choice of an individual over the public good. Now they are saying it's in the public good and it's a better choice to be on this side versus that side.
It comes down to, what does it take to admit that your belief is wrong? What does it take to change your narrative? Instead of buying this hamburger, buy this hamburger. Instead of buying this product, buy this product. Being a vaxxer to a non-vaxxer back to a vaxxer. We are peculiar creatures and we do run by our vocabulary. The software that runs a human being is the words that come out of our mouth and we've got to remember that that's how we work. If you've got something coming out of your mouth, your body is in tune or tuning to the thing that you are saying and it's a little unsettling.
With all that monologue that I gave, it's a very funny monologue but in business and politics, we've also got to get used to how the messages come in. There's so much to look at the media communication around this, that it's a great idea to talk about it. What are some of the things that you have come across regarding Phil Valentine and some of the things that the media has done to cover and make this person's change of heart stick?
It's the change of heart that is so rare still, regrettably, in America nowadays that is why this is newsworthy. Maybe newsworthy is an understatement. This thing is being blown up. We have included one interview with Phil Valentine’s brother because Phil Valentine is in the hospital. He's only able to communicate in a very limited capacity with his family but his brother Phil Valentine is bringing his message out to the world and being interviewed by everybody.
In the video that we show, I don't think the reporter did a skillful job in interviewing him but at the same time, Phil Valentine’s brother did come out and say some very specific things. The reporter tried to pin him down because Phil Valentine had mocked the vaccine and lined it up with big government being bad. He made a parody of The Beatles song Taxman calling it Vaxman.
There are a lot of things that if you look into Phil Valentine a little bit, you will see what he said about the vaccine. He was no proponent of taking the vaccine. He was very much in this camp of, “I'm healthy. Why do I need to take it?” He's not super young. He's in one of the higher risk groups by his age. He felt he was somewhat bulletproof or, dare I say, immune to this virus without having the vaccine. Now he's gotten pneumonia in the hospital.
Apparently, if you trust what his brother says, he is trying to let his audience in the world know this is serious, get the vaccine. His tune has changed. His brother, while faced with, “Phil Valentine has done this and done that,” had said, “Yes, he has and he regrets.” He’s basically saying that Phil Valentine regrets what he said in the past. He's urging everybody to get the vaccine, that you don't need to get as sick as he has. He’s trying to do the right thing. He's finally seen that maybe the Earth is round and it's not flat.
I appreciate that because when somebody is invested and has done a thing called decided for, when I cast a vote for a person if a voter has spent some time to say, “This is the person, the party that best represents my values. This other party from 'the things I've heard,'" there are messages. If I was visiting from another planet listening to the things that are being said about the Democrats I said, “Who would vote for that party? It seems like they don't want people to be independent, and they don't want people to have their freedom and choices. They want people to be socialism and communism.”
In other words, the people's belief structure has that name has had a bunch of things tied to it that aren't fully true. There are elements of it but not the full range of how the party even governs. The problem with the belief is that when it gets solidified or codified is that you don't want to change your belief. You don't want to re-examine it.
All the messenger needs to do from the media is keep pressing on the same button to keep you loyal even if the button is not fully true or only partially true. It doesn't take much to keep somebody going down the same railroad track that they are already going down. That's the thing that's in trouble. I always call it the belief railroad switching’s station. Once a person is down this other track, it's hard to get them to switch back over to, “What is the real destiny we need to go? Where does this go?” If you are down this track, then you have to deny an insurrection.
You have to deny that I was the person that was responsible that, “These people did this of their own free will.” No, they did not because they were sent there with five direct messages from a stage. "This is combat. You need to be strong and you need to take it back. These people stole this thing from you.” All you need is a set of five simple messages from a stage, and because the person's belief structure has already been entrenched, stand back and stand by, it doesn't take much because the person's belief structure is already on the railroad track.
I appreciate the railroad track metaphor, Bill. That's very helpful to understand how hard it is to move someone off their beliefs. You and I have talked about in past episodes when is there going to be somebody's well-known enough who dies of COVID? When's it going to be somebody meaningful enough to change people's minds, to change their beliefs and get them to take the vaccine? There was hope with the way that how this event of Phil Valentine being critically ill in the hospital with COVID that maybe he's one that's on the way. He's not maybe the nationally known celebrity but he maybe has a lot of listeners and followers, and this might have a bigger impact.
I did some research on him and I can't find any hard data on how many listeners or followers he has. It was shocking to me that I couldn't find anything. Apart from that, there are so many different publications that have picked up the current story that literally the first 7, 8 pages of google search are all the same thing, just in a different location.
In this time, how hard is it to find truth when truth has already been purchased? The unsettling thing is, what is truth been purchased by? It has been purchased by the Google algorithm regurgitating the same 7, 10 or 3 stories and it's the same click, and you are going like, “I can't get there. How many pages of stuff?" It's worse than a stack of books on a library shelf to find out what piece of information do I need from the shelf to actually find it. It’s like, “I almost want to give up on this. I don't have time to find that piece of information to validate or not validate my point.”
It is a tough moment in the field of time for us because to get the railroad track or the railroad switching station, the little arm that pulls down, the track goes to the other side, whatever it is, it's got to have the weight and the strength to pull it over to this other thing. It doesn't have to be a person like Rock Hudson did for AIDS. He did more to help AIDS research, move it back to a scientific narrative, get it out of the political narrative and moved it right over because the public, care, love, loyalty brand impression of Rock Hudson was this macho guy being taken out by this disease.
Similarly, Magic Johnson was forced to retire because he got it too. These were iconic figures in America and it changed people's perspective. You would think that at some point here, somebody is going to get it and die from COVID-19 that's a big name. Sometimes I start to believe that, and other times I'm thinking, “All the famous people and all the Representatives from the states, all the Governors and all the famous people have all been vaccinated. They just don't talk about being vaccinated. They are being real quiet about it."
That's the hard part about it because it was a rose-colored glasses message that the last administration put forth. “It's not that big. It's just cold. It's as bad as the cold. It's going to go away, and let's cross our fingers and hope for the best science,” instead of, “The numbers aren't looking very good. This is what we are discovering in Italy." Ignore numbers, ignore science. Our brain wants to amplify our current beliefs. It doesn't want to change the belief. If I already believe that the “numbers” of COVID things are being escalated in a hospital to get the extra $600 from the government or whatever that payoff thing is, I'm going to make that big instead of going like, “That may have happened but it's not the thing.”
The thing is that we have this many people on ventilators. "Could you take a picture of all those people?" "No, we can't. We've got to do the privacy thing." We can't explode people the images of hospital things because every hospital is not inundated with it all the time. It comes in waves, it comes in different moments, in different locations because of an outbreak in that area.
We are having a hard time believing it's true because when we look for evidence, the evidence is over there in these different places. The numbers keep climbing because we are not doing it. It's a very tough time for us to find and to believe the truth because we are so saturated by information through our phones, our computers and the internet. It's hard to get that switching.
That information is in alignment with our biases and beliefs, too. Facebook knows what stories we are reading, what things we like, what we dislike and what we snooze for 30 days. It keeps feeding you more of that messaging that reinforces your belief. It's so hard and it's sad to say this but somebody must be incredibly well known, respected and liked gets this, and dies. Otherwise, the fear is no one is going to believe it until it happens to them.
It has come down to, “My self-worth and identity is invested in a belief because I'm on this one side so I can't be skeptical and doubtful of what my side is saying.” Suddenly, even if Sean Hannity comes and says, “Take the vaccine. I have already been a vaccine person,” and he stepped into it. The challenge is that there have been all these micro messages all the way up to that or even direct messages about how to rile up the viewership. It's like turning a lamp outside of the porch at night. All the flies and all the bugs start flying to the light and they are getting zapped when they get there.
It's a little difficult that in our beliefs, we think that we can discern something. You and I, as business owners, we keep trying to change our belief. Think again, change this belief, change this behavior, change this action, delegate this thing, stop doing that thing, delegate that thing because you can't do that thing and do this other thing you need to do to grow your business because you need to change your belief.
We are literally, as an entrepreneur, trying to switch the switching station to go over there and delegate the stuff over here because that's something someone else has got to do. It's very hard for our brain to do because, as human beings, we are used to doing familiar things, that match our identity, our self-worth and our habit pattern. To be optimistic about this, sometimes it doesn't take much to switch over a belief. One sentence is being done in a new time.
Have you ever had one sentence come in and then you change? It's like, “Yes, I can do that.” You and I have spent a lot of time together. Sometimes you go, “Bill, that sentence that you gave me for the email made a difference. My client turned around instantly. How the hell did you do that sentence?” “I put it in alignment with empathy and compassion for that person. All of a sudden, the person remained your client. They didn't go looking elsewhere. They didn't do something that would have been worse for them because they followed somebody else's bad advice." Our minds are really an interesting thing.
A lot of times, these polarized camps that America is divided into have a hard time understanding each other. When I thought about Phil Valentine and the fact that he only changed his tune when he is facing the biggest health crisis of his life, he is facing death and he changed his mind. It reminded me of this movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, which is a science fiction, apocalyptic movie. If you haven't seen it, it's a pretty good movie. You have to check it out.
There’s this important scene where one of the characters is talking about human nature, human beings. “Only when we are on the brink, do we find the will to change.” That's exactly where Phil Valentine is. That's where he has been. He's on the brink of death. He realizes, “I may not make it.” He, through his brother, is communicating to the world, “Don't be like me.”
I fear that number one, he may not be well known enough. People may not regard him as an authority. It may not have as big an effect even though the media is blowing this thing up. You can't have missed this unless you have not been paying attention to anything in the media or the news. I am concerned it's not enough that most people are going to need to get to their own brink to move their belief enough to say, “Maybe I should give this vaccine a second thought.”
This is a great place to talk. That quote verbatim is, “It's only at the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.” As I read it in triplets, a lot of times, when you read sentences and triplets, it can change the sentence. “It's only on the brink.” When the person is going, “I cannot end my life like this. It's too much to hold on to this. I have to let this go. It is eating up my time. I've got to value my life and myself.” Sometimes it takes a sentence like that, it takes an illness like what he's going through. Sometimes it's a cartoon.
I saw a cartoon, it's a little boy looking at his mom and he goes, “Mom, what's that sore on your arm?” “That's where I’ve got my smallpox vaccine.” “Why don't I have it?” “It’s because it worked.” It's the sacrifice of getting the vaccine to not let the virus have an opportunity to go into somebody else that prevents that kid from getting that vaccine and having those things. The vaccines have improved ad and so on.
People do have adverse reactions to vaccines. That's also a part of the mix because when you are making something for all the different human beings on the planet, everybody is genetic and makeup and different people's physiology take it differently. Another part of our belief structure is unless it's 100%, it’s all not valid. That particular belief is the one that is running a lot of the show. It's not FDA-approved. It's like, “Do you need validation from the FDA?”
To know that it's working? Yes. We talked about this in our episode that literally since February 2021 in Texas, almost all of the deaths of COVID-19 and all the hospitalizations are from people that are vaccinated. There were only 47 people out of 9,000 who’ve got COVID and were hospitalized or died. We talked about that before. The evidence now, honestly, America is the best drug trial that's ever existed for a drug because you have never had such a large sample size for a drug or a vaccine, in this case.
It's so unsettling, too. A cartoon can make a difference. When the Antitrust Laws were coming up, there was a cartoon that said, “The robber barons.” It had a picture of Andrew Carnegie and all those guys, all those different folks. These are all the robber barons. These were pictures of all these rich people, were puppetizing everybody else and call them robber barons. Why does that term not work now? In early 1900, the reason why it would work there is that the word baron was commonly used to talk about European royalty. That's a Baron over there. “This is a robber baron.” "We don't want one of those."
Nowadays, people are like, "A robber baron? What's that?" If you need to explain what it is, it's not going to have the impact.
It has to be in alignment with the belief and the mindset of the person, and then it tends to go better. It's an important time to see what is going to make the impact, how truth can wiggle its way out and get up in front of this. The big part that people don't get about science is you’ve got to measure it. If it doesn't measure, it's not real.
Even that is tough for people to hear sometimes that science has certain constructs around it that don't allow for wiggly thinking. You've got to do it, and then somebody else has to replicate what you said, your hypothesis and your experiment to prove that somebody else's has got to be able to replicate your experiment. That's called a peer review. It's not an opinion.
It's a part of the process that is required to prove that what you did is, in fact, true.
"I followed your procedures and I’ve got the same results you did." That's something the government doesn't fund.
Each individual drug company has to do that and present its findings to the government. There's a whole process there. That’s another rabbit hole.
This has been a great discussion about the railroad switching of our mindset. What's it going to take to get back on the course? We've got the 50% that's over here and then we’ve got the other 50% that's sitting where they are. There's always going to be that 20% that says, “Don't tell me what to do and don't take away my rights.” There’s always going to be that group.
Let me leave you with one last thing of irony here, Bill. This is a hot-button subject that we are not going to talk about it now. It's a subject for another day. I heard on the news that more states are talking about requiring vaccines for certain kinds of workers, state employees, state health workers. Some of them are requiring vaccines or a weekly COVID test if you are going to stay in your job. A man was unhappy about this. The news filmed him. This man said, “What happened to my body, my choice?” He's getting all upset and I'm like, “From your lips to about every woman's ears who don't want the government to tell her what to do with her body."
It’s very troublesome to deal with conflating beliefs, mindsets and messages. It's very difficult. We do have a lot of work to do about the relationship between the collective good and individual rights. I'm glad you brought it up because those are the two things. Here are an individual's rights and here's the collective good, which one are you going to pick? With the pandemic, it's probably a good idea to pick the collective good. With certain things, you may want to go with individual rights and choices. You want to live that way.
That's the way you want to experience this thing. Other people might not like it but that's your choice, your body and that's it but if it's affecting the public good, then that's problematic. Now, your choice is and can have a great impact on others. That's not something that we can do as a growing society. You can't do that one.
It makes it hard for that guy who, if he were a proponent of life as it is in terms of abortion, that he would say, “You can't have control over your own body because of my religious belief or whatever it is about life being a certain thing.” Now, won't you accept us as a society needing you to have a vaccine to save the greater good of society? That's a very hard circle to square.
The tension of the opposite is very clear. I appreciate that. There needs to be empathy towards the individual rights or the independence and the choice of an individual. From time to time, we've got to choose between those two things. It does become very difficult for us human beings because there's a loss in it. I'm not able to get my self-worth, my identity, my choice because it's going to impact others, and we are doing the greater good versus the individual's rights. Tom, good discussion. Thanks, everybody, for reading.
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