Russia-Ukraine Invasion: Seeking Out the Truth
Subscribe Today!
With the rising conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, why is it that the people of Russia don't see the truth? How is Putin controlling the message so comfortably? Fake news has always been a hot topic of discussion because it can amplify people's biases. News media outlets have so much power in today's world. They can shape a nation and its beliefs. Join Bill Stierle as he and Tom go over Ukraine and the truth perspective. They also talk about freedom of speech and how the truth exists, you just have to seek it out. Start believing in what is true today!
---
Watch the episode here
Russia-Ukraine Invasion: Seeking Out the Truth
Bill, I think that as we're preparing for this episode, the phrase we've talked about in the past, truth perspective, resonated and there are several things that, in some ways, are shocking that are making us think about truth perspective and talking about it now on this show. There are maybe some aspects of it that are not so shocking at the same time. I think it's time for a little scary and honesty about truth perspective. What do you think?
I agree, Tom. A lot of times, we start these shows up and we frame the issue, then get to the answer towards the end of the show. I want to start with the answer at the beginning this time if that's okay. I think that having a level of empathy and compassion for the liars might be a good place to start because when somebody is lying about something or somebody is trying to promote an alternative point of view and the listener of that lie doesn't have time or the ability to get out of or check the lie that's being sent to them, they take it as a truth.
I was particularly taken by an interview of Russian citizens on the street where, "What do you think about those Ukrainians? Are you on Vladimir Putin with this?” “They're violent. Those Ukrainians are aggressive. They're Nazis.” It was seven interviews in a row of different Russians talking about how bad and dangerous the Ukrainians were.
I had to slow my brain down because it started becoming defensive and protective of, “That's not the truth.” I had to go, “For these people, it is.” I had to like take a half step back. It's like, “No, this is their truth. Their brains have been imprinted with something like my brain has been imprinted by something.” The importance of this is that your brain can be paid to and buy into any imprint you want to take in.
As you told me about this video, which I hadn't seen, by the way, for our audience, we have this YouTube video. You could go check it out and see these Russian citizens on the street. It's like on-the-street reporting. It's not quite like Jaywalking used to be from Jay Leno's show, but it is a reporter on the street.
Also, similar.
It wasn't a comedy, but it was some reporter going on the street to document the unfiltered impression of these Russian citizens. As you were telling me about that, I'm thinking, "That's happening now?” On the one hand, I was surprised, then I remember news reporting that I saw about the big news at this time as we’re recording this is that Russian forces have pulled back from the outskirts of Kyiv in Ukraine. Ukrainians have either pushed them back, taking it back, whatever you want to say, but Ukrainian forces are now in control of the neighborhoods, the areas around Kyiv.
As they've gone back into there and see how many Ukrainian civilians have died and their bodies are littering the streets. There are some mass graves they've discovered. It seems to be the indiscriminate killing of Ukrainian civilians. Is that a military target? Anyway, the world is seeing these images now. These images are in all the world outside of Russia.
I wonder how much of these images are being broadcast inside a country like China, as well that very much controls the state media that people are watching. I'll come back to an example of that. I'm thinking about how these people are so oblivious when it's so obvious to the rest of the world what's happening here, and then I'm like, “No, it's not that shocking. This is Russia we're talking about. Vladimir Putin controls the state media and the narrative.”
If we had 24/7 or 3 or 5 or 7 stations that were like Fox News, that's what started to happen. There's Fox News and there's more extreme beyond Fox News, the OANs and others.
Newsmax.
All these other verticals are waiting for people with extreme views to be amplified. They have viewership and gravity, not to use a better word than that, but you get this attraction to the belief and the bias that fits what you think is true rather than the pursuit of, “My mind is getting hijacked here a little bit.” It's almost like we need a refresher course for children to question everything, teach them how to find things, and teach them how the internet got some great advantages.
Within a couple of seconds, I was able to pull up that YouTube video of Russians on the street. I was like, "I had that.” I saw that days ago and instantaneously, it was there for me by doing the search. At the same time, all I got to do was change a few keywords and I got a completely different story about how the Ukrainians are aggressive. I'm going to like, “It's not showing itself on the map that way.” It isn't. It's not showing itself.
It is scary, Bill, how people's biases reinforce the things they consume and how their beliefs are formed. For you and me, a generation of people that grew up reading George Orwell's 1984 in high school and learning about controlling all the messaging and all that, it’s easy for us to have the perspective and the belief that it's not a stretch at all that Vladimir Putin's controlling the media and these people believe whatever they're being told. Their information is being suppressed. What is it? Vladimir Putin has forbidden state media from calling it a war in Ukraine and instead of calling it a special military action.
You got to name it the right thing. Everybody was up in arms when Donald Trump said, "That was brilliant what he called it.” He called it that, “We're in there. We're going to be peacekeepers.” Everyone was going like, “Donald Trump, what are you doing? It's brilliant.” What people missed is that it was correct. Donald Trump said something correct. It was brilliant that he messaged people in something that their brains could find acceptable. Do you see how weird that is?
Brilliant is maybe an unfortunate choice of words, but you're right.
It's brilliant from the marketing world because it has stickability to it.
No, I'm in agreement with you, Bill.
I wanted our audience to get that too.
I think maybe another way to label it would be sinister or evil.
You could do sinister or evil on this one. He tricked his population into the engagement of beliefs that he had laid down for 22 years. That's where the perspective is adjusted.
All Russian citizens have been going way back in the history of our show. In one of the foundational episodes, we talked about the concept of tapping the elephant brain with messages over and over again, then it will stick. Over 22 years of Vladimir Putin being in charge, the same messaging has been reinforced. It reminds me. I haven't done this in quite a while for a number of reasons. Part of it is my business dynamics changing then the pandemic.
I used to travel a lot in Mainland China and spent a lot of time there. You can get CNN International on the TV in pretty much any hotel room in China. However, once in a while, when a certain story comes on, all of a sudden, the TV goes black. At first, I’m like, “Is something wrong with the signals on the TV?” It comes back after whatever story was about to be aired is off.
It's because the state in China is censoring the information that is being broadcast on their television stations. Anything that they deem not in alignment with the narrative that China wants its citizens to be exposed to, they block. You can imagine when that stuff happens. The truth has a hard time coming out.
The reinforced talking points were the thing that was shocking to me with watching the Russian man on the street, women on the street being that the Ukrainians were the aggressors, that they were Nazis. That Ukraine is not a real country. It came out of the person's mouth. I'm going like, “What have they been doing for years?” The agreement was that they could become a real country by giving up their nukes. That was the whole thing, that their sovereignty would be this.
Every country has got to at least have 1 to 5 nukes to prevent themselves from being evaded by a crazy guy. Let alone getting the crazy guy to be in charge of the nukes and he looked like a reasonable guy in the beginning, but now, he's a crazy guy at the end. That brings us into things like term limits and not having somebody to be in charge for their entire life.
Also, then you can go down the rabbit hole of supposedly Vladimir Putin's being elected. However, the elections in Russia are tightly controlled. He is essentially a dictator and authoritarian. Obviously, he controls the messaging and is able to stay in power. Anyway, it's in some ways disheartening but, at the same time, not all that shocking to see how truth suffers in that environment and doesn't see the light of day. What's scary, Bill, some scary honesty here, is that even in the United States, which is a society that has freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, we see messages being broadcast to people that are doing the same thing that's happening to these Russian citizens on the street.
On this show, we have shown clips of comedians like Jordan Klepper and different celebrities and interviewing people on the street and checking their facts, checking their imprinting, checking their beliefs. Samantha Bee is another one that goes out and interviews people and all of her team goes out and asks these questions.
They’re putting together these beliefs and editing it for humor, which creates the separation because it's like, "They're crazy people over there.” It serves their show, but you could see how that easily could be it serves the state to believe. It serves a certain politician to believe this and those beliefs and biases and fallacies, all you got to do is get a saturation of them. The extreme information can land on a person's head that is not true and that's unsettling.
We keep seeing the pendulum of truth getting swung way off-center. There was an article I saw where there was a Donald Trump rally that happened. A US Republican representative from Michigan was so wanting to meet the former President Donald Trump's needs for acknowledgment, recognition and to show him loyalty that she falsely boasted to this crowd of adoring Donald Trump fans.
Ten thousand people were sitting right there.
She said President Donald Trump is the one that ordered the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Seriously, she said that, “Donald Trump caught Osama bin Laden.” Anybody with a smartphone and Google, for those people that were too young and weren't there, didn't remember seeing the news when it happened, it's very easy to see when that happened, just the date of it and realize, “That was when Barack Obama was President.”
It's not like when it was Barack Obama was President just before Donald Trump took office. No, it was in Obama's first term as President in 2011 or early in 2012. Still, it was before he was reelected. The truth is there if people want to seek it out. To me, that was so shocking that someone would make a claim of something so obvious to disprove.
The term fake news has done great damage to us because fake news is anything that is not in alignment with my bias, my fallacy or my fixed belief. If it's not aligned with it, I get to call it fake news and I get to be right. There are images of news that do and do have a rating of fakeness to it. That's not what the brain does with it. The brain creates doubt and skepticism with it. It creates a feeling of doubt or skepticism about the elements of truth.
It's hard to fight for the truth and go like, “I could see your point of view over there. I can have some compassion and empathy for how your beliefs are sitting there.” The scary honesty that brings bad news early is that belief bias doesn't have evidence around it. We have evidence around those. Those pieces of evidence are accepted. Is it okay to question evidence? Yeah. There are people that go back and retry court cases on evidence and overturn those court cases because the evidence was not collected or there was another piece of evidence that showed that the person wasn't there. It's okay to re-examine things that we agreed upon truth.
It's okay to re-examine it. This episode is not about ignoring our willingness to poke a stick at any form of information that has been fed on the right or the left. It's an encouragement to keep doing that and don't let your brain settle on certain biases and fallacies that need to be adjusted. I think that you had mentioned that there was a researcher that had done some research on Fox News and NBC. That thing is worth talking about now as we're coming through this episode because we have to check in with ourselves.
There was a university study done and some articles came out about it in April 2022. The study was done in September 2020, so a couple of months before the presidential election in the United States. The university study paid a large group of Fox News watchers $15 an hour to watch CNN for seven hours a week during specific times a day. They couldn't cherry-pick different times a day to watch it. They had to watch it at certain times a day and they did this for a month, essentially, four weeks straight.
What they found is that these people that were regular Fox News watchers and had their own beliefs, and biases that were formed by Fox News weren't being shown certain types of information. Fox ends up amplifying certain news and minimizing other news. They said that after watching CNN, after doing this study, they were more likely to believe that people suffer from long COVID, for example. They were more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the US of controlling the virus.
They were more likely to support voting by mail and less likely to believe that supporters of then candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers got shot. That, to me, was a very telling one. There were also less likely to say it's more important for the president to focus on containing violent protestors than on the Coronavirus and the last chart or one, they were also a lot less likely to agree that if Joe Biden were elected, we'll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.
You can see a lot of the narratives and messaging that Fox News was feeding their viewers was forming a lot of biases that then when they were required to or incentivized enough by paying them to watch a different information source that the pendulum swings back from that extreme and they're less likely to believe a lot of those. Things that are, I would say, don't have the strongest alignment with truth.
That's the hard part about it. Tom, the reinforcement always brings me back to World War II when Dwight Eisenhower, I believe, came upon the Nazi concentration camp and saw all the deaths and everything. He said, "Photographers, I want hundreds of thousands of pictures. Take pictures of all this stuff.” In the nearby town, he had the military line all the citizens up and march them through the camp so they could see it.
It's like we're creating evidence and people to have firsthand experiences of reality. Not reality kept over here, but reality kept in perspective of this thing. Where is that moment going to take place for not just the Russian citizens that need to march through Mariupol or the outskirts of Kyiv or all those things? Where are you going to get that moment where those people have been indoctrinated into a belief structure?
It doesn't mean that you and I are sitting with 100% of the truth. We're taking those images and we're taking those stories as truth. Now, are those stories being lifted and amplified a certain way? Yeah, but it's so many of the images that are coming out. It's all of these different pieces of evidence that are accumulating that allows our brain to say, “It's happening,” even though we are not seeing it firsthand.
However, to a person that has been propagandized that their beliefs, bias and fallacies have been reinforced, a lot of times, it takes that saturating moment and will these images get through or are they going to be discarded as fake news inside the loyal Russian believer? It's unsettling to say the loyal Russian believers are going to reject those things because the word fake has permeated inside our lexicon as a word that anything that now equals anything that's outside our bias, beliefs and fallacies. That's the scary honesty that we're sitting with it.
It is scary, honestly, but I think you're right, Bill. If you look at World War II, we all grew up learning of this history after it's all over. Adolf Hitler was an aggressor and kept taking over other countries, expanding his territory. Ultimately, Japan attacked the United States and brought us into the war. We're fighting back to try to liberate these countries that they've taken over.
I don't think at the time during the war, everybody even understood how bad the extermination of Jews was until the end when it gets revealed. Even we maybe didn't understand the full scope of it. It's scary on the one hand. On the other hand, it's helpful to understand how people's beliefs are formed and restricting the information is the easiest way to purchase truth. That's part of a big problem of what we're facing now with Russia and this Ukraine crisis. The rest of the world can see it where they have a free flow of information. The average Russian citizen is not seeing it.
They aren't and that's the thing too. It's very painful. It's going to be a very painful ten years for the Russian people. Even the oligarchs are calling him a dictator now. There are all the oligarchs who say, “It's not that. He's just a dictator and we're all following the line.” They call them that. Anybody that crosses the person, their life is threatened and/or eliminated. It's that you can't speak truth to power. Now, we have our own problems about people not speaking truth to power but speaking belief talking points to power. We have a different kind of problem, which causes the erosion of truth to take place.
In our next episode, what we could do is how do we create a visionary future where truth gets to be rated and has a point of scale and has a life perspective to it that says, "You're right. It’d be nice if everybody followed what you said,” but that's not a democracy. It's okay that sometimes you got to make a decision and make a mistake, then make another decision and make a mistake, then things get better. That's another way to do it, but you can, as a democracy, work with that. At least there is progress or a willingness to collaborate and cooperate and come up with the best ideas. We are in a very unique time, Tom. That's for sure. Who would have known?
Scary honesty is the right way to think about it.
Tom, thanks a million. Thanks, everybody, for reading. Until the next episode, keep your eyes open for ways you can speak truth to people in a safe way.
Thanks, Bill.
Important Links
