The Influence Of Identity And Mind Reading

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We’re going to talk about the Influence of Identity and Mind Reading. Bill, that title fascinates me right off the bat. I would love for you to share with us what we’re going to explore in this journey.

Thanks for having me, Tom. The influencing and how truth gets influence is that if I have an identity about something, if I’m holding a certain set of beliefs, real or imagined, I’ve invested in that. I’ve invested my thought, I’ve invested time, I invested my energy into that belief or that identity. What winds up happening is that I am not going to be filtering things from a broader perspective. I am going to be funneling it through that identity, that limited truth because my team is so important to me. It’s more important than the truth of what the team said or did. That thing lands like a thud because you can feel it. “Bill, what do you mean by that?” If I’m on a sports team and I’m going to advocate that it’s okay for my team if there’s a mistake made. I’m not going to go with integrity and truth. The referee made the call and it’s not my fault that the referee made the call or didn’t make the call. It’s not true though. The truth is that they broke the rule and you didn’t get caught, there was no recourse for the thing that you didn’t caught even though it was there for everyone to see. The person that was supposed to make the call didn’t make the call.

Let’s use an example of that. I have one in mind, in Sports One, the NFC Championship Game in football. It was the New Orleans Saints and LA Chargers and there was a clear blatant pass interference violation that was game-changing as New Orleans was about to score, go up way ahead and win the game. No official called it even though officials were looking at it the whole time. The whole league since then has admitted it was a bad call to the point where now they’re going to start slowing down games even more and reviewing pass interference calls with video to see, was it a passive interference or was it not? Did the referee make a human error? I’m sure for the Rams fans they’re like, “The referee made the call. What can we do? We went to the Super Bowl.” For New Orleans Saints fans, they were like, “We were completely robbed.”

A great example of this is, “This is what I’m seeing. I am now going to justify that. I am going to put it in the place of, “It’s a part of the game.” If we look at that from a criminal place or from a legal place and you’re seeing the videotape and you’re looking at it but the team is still saying, “There’s nothing happening here. It’s not a big deal. It’s not that much of things. That other team is lying over there.” When it comes to a place of criminality or a line or a law has been crossed, and one team is saying, “No, there’s no collusion, no obstruction.” They say that over and over again, the team is going to go, “Yes, there’s none.” The other side does it too. If it happened to the other side, we would be mad too. That’s the way it’s been because you know Benghazi.

That is very difficult because you’re putting somebody on the stand for eleven hours or twelve hours like they did with Hillary Clinton. They put her on the stand for twelve hours. They grilled her on Benghazi just to get one soundbite. Once they got the one soundbite, they ran it over and over again. I am going to amplify the language mistake you made to show that you’re the wrong or bad person because you’re not a part of my team’s identity. Instead of, “What’s good for America,” it’s, “I want to capture the micro message that I can amplify to keep my team’s identity reinforced and solidified so that you can’t take or steal one of my sheep. I’m going to keep my sheep on my side.” The mind-reading part of it is that I am going to think that this person should know that the other side broke the rule and this is the recourse. The problem is that the legal system gets to be like you said in your example with the Rams and the Saints, the game gets to be slowed down. That is where we’re experiencing in the system. Everything is being slowed down. We’re not going to let you see the evidence. We’re going to trickle the evidence to you and we’re going to keep the messaging.

The messaging is trying to be, “Let’s investigate the investigators.” That was the real crime in this instead of continuing to peel back the onion and expose the actual evidence within The Mueller Report.

Four people died in Benghazi and we are going to keep the lens on that for years because there must’ve been some failure by this administration and by this specific person. They went through it and they won. What did they win? Erosion. They eroded her truth.

They eroded her leadership, qualities and abilities because she’s the head of the State Department. She must have done something wrong. Meanwhile, there are 200 US embassies around the world. The idea that she would specifically know on any given day what the situation is and what’s going on and everyone is unrealistic for any person to know.

This was hard because with the first part of The Mueller Report, with the intensive systematic exposure that Americans faced with the Russians using social media and using one of our primary values as a country, freedom of speech as a weapon against us, that’s what happened. This is freedom of speech. They would like to do freedom of speech. They don’t want to control their internet. They want their internet to be open and we’re going to take advantage of that. They won’t allow all of their marginal groups to have a voice. We’re going to take those marginal groups. We’re going to take a third of them and get them to start believing a certain narrative, hijack that narrative and marginalize them. We’re going to have religious groups visit the Soviet Union and treat them well so they have a favorable opinion of the Soviet Union. We’re going to take Christian religious people and have them visit 2010 or ‘11, ‘12 and ‘13 and we’re going to start a simple narrative.

Politicians are affecting and impacting the mindset that's exposed to the belief structures that are vulnerable in our voting booth.

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“The Soviet Union is good, Hillary Clinton is bad, Donald Trump is good.” We’re going to have them hear that message and we’re going to keep that message because that is the team that’s most susceptible to adjusting their perception and perspective and we’re going to increase the proportion of that message. Keep that message going, even though that party message has been, “Soviet Union is bad, communist bad, we’re going to amplify the socialists bad instead.” Even though communists and socialism are the same, and here’s the Russian. It’s the narrowing of that identity, the reinforcing of that identity. The First Amendment Freedom of Speech is so valuable to us than for it to be weaponized against us has been very challenging for us as Americans.



It allows freedom of speech to say, “Freedom of speech gets you to throw human rights under the bus. Respect for life by certain people, we’re not going to respect their life. We’re going to respect the birth process, but we’re not going to respect the voice at the other end that shows up.” This one is tough because the influence of identity and the mind-reading that takes place is that because it’s my team, I don’t have to question. I’ve bought the Jersey, I am the LA Rams fan that gets to go to the Super Bowl because of a referee’s bad call.

I bet largely close to half of the United States because their team won is thinking, “Maybe freedom of speech has been weaponized, but freedom of speech is one of our core fundamental values and you’re going to live by it. No matter what good or bad, that’s that.” The other half of the country is like, “Freedom of speech is being weaponized and this is incredibly dangerous for America.” You have half the country may be thinking, “We have to have some limitations on freedom of speech.” I’m sure if the tables were turned and freedom of speech were weaponized and Hillary Clinton became president, the other half of the country would be all up in arms about constitutionally what does this mean? That freedom of speech has been weaponized, hijacked. There is really a bias, isn’t there? 

Yes. The tough part about it is for me, as a communications specialist, not to get hijacked because I can get hijacked going like, “Pick a side.” I’m not going to pick a side. I’m going to be compassionate to it. If you are being sent and fed a message, that’s reinforcing your bias. I’m not going to call you stupid then. I’m not going to call you idiot. I’m going to say you value the team that you voted for. You value the respect that rich people get in America. You value that people are lucky enough to get money even by inheritance gets to keep their money and it doesn’t get to go to taxes because their father worked hard at it. We’re smart enough to use the system.

Even if they broke the rules to get the wealth that they did, you would like fairness to look like they get to keep it and it doesn’t get to go into the common pool of the United States. They get to keep it because that’s what fairness and respect look like. One of the religious beliefs is if you have received wealth, God has blessed you. That’s a belief. If you are a wealthy person of affluence, that means God is favoring you, not that you stole the money to get there. I’m not looking at that because a big part of tithing and getting into the flow of the natural contribution of money inside a religious mindset, let’s not make it wrong that there’s something too when you’re generous with money. Your brain gets to see money as more of an energetic flow. It’s easier to give and receive money instead of contract money. That doesn’t go well. It also gets to say, “Here’s what your 10%, 15%, 20% tithing looks like.” Isn’t tithing and taxing the same thing because it’s contributing the greater good?

Maybe one is voluntary and one is mandatory.

The perception and perspective, the proportion is, “We’re not sure when God is going to reward you with that, but you’re going to get rewarded. We’re not sure.” It doesn’t have to be just Christian. This is good karma. Our belief structures are so wired. We don’t want to rewrite those. That’s why when we’re talking with another person, we’re already starting to mind read and waiting for them to say a word that is a label so we can put them into a box and minimalize the conversation. It’s easier to understand when it’s a smaller conversation. It’s harder to understand or do something adult by dealing with the level of complexity. If we put money here, it’s going to help this amount of people, but there are a few people that will take advantage of that.

For example, if I do a welfare play, if I help a poor person, there’s a certain amount of poor people that will take advantage of that system and create a belief or even a tragedy by stealing money and not doing anything for the handout I gave them. There are certain homeless people that will take the handout and stay right exactly where they are because their belief structure is, “I made it through now. I’ll wait for the next handout. It’s much harder to face my demons and make my own money than it is to take the handout I got.” I’m not saying everybody’s like that. Do you see how this whole thing affects our truth?

It does, even the word handout may be a bias label a little bit too.

That is a shiny lure that went into the water, as soon as they say handout, I got a whole bunch of entitlement. People go and after that lure and going like, “That’s a handout.” I guess the good Samaritan was a socialist. The good Samaritan needed to walk by the person that was beaten up and robbed on the road and not help them. Is that where you’re going next? “No, you’re supposed to help.” “Which person? You can’t help all of them. Who do you help?” “The white people. The black person that’s been beaten up on the side, you don’t help that person.” The bias and the belief structures that are in our own mind easily get hijacked. Truth gets hijacked because all you got to do is stick a label in there. Republican Congressman Justin Amash said, “Here’s the obstruction and I read through this. This is what it means to obstruct. This is breaking of the law. This is what that law looks like. I would vote for impeachment even though I’m a Republican. I’m breaking with the belief structure and I’m going to go after that. I’m going to do a town hall meeting and I’m going to talk about that openly to the people that voted for me.”

As he talked about it openly, there were people in the audience that got pissed, “You are saying something against our team. You’re saying something against our identity. I voted for you. You vote for him. You support him no matter what.” He broke some rules.

That’s obstruction. You’re supposed to go to jail for that. This is what impeachment looks like. Am I going to pick the rule and what I took an oath to or am I going to stay with the identity of the team and ignore the bad referee call? Am I going to point out the referee that made the mistake or clouds the issue? He pointed out the referee. He said, “The attorney general, as the referee, is making the wrong call and also use legalese to distract everybody from the bad call so that our team will feel better about itself or even get hijacked.” We need compassion and empathy for that process, not judgment and criticism. You and I can start throwing stones at this and go like, “They’re wrong. It’s not helpful to put them out as wrong, Tom.”

Did Justin Amash use any compassion or empathy as he’s documenting town hall or did he fall into the trap of arguing facts?



He fell into arguing facts. He needed to use a little more compassion and empathy when he was in the front of the room. He might’ve best be led with, “I felt torn about this. Part of me wants to stay with the identity of our team, but another part of me wants to advocate for the truth about what obstruction means. Part of me felt confused at the beginning until I met my need for clarity and when I had clarity that was clear. What winds up happening is I couldn’t stand by the bad call.” That’s compassion and empathy for the people in his room. What winds up happening if you do not do the compassion and empathy and say, “This is the rule that’s been broken,” then you’re an LA Rams fan that is saying, “That was a bad call and the Saints should have went to the Super Bowl instead of our team and I’m sticking to that. The Rams are in the Super Bowl, I’m going to cheer for the Rams. The Saints are back there but I’m not going to argue with it. Donald Trump won and our team won even though they had the referees and they had the cameras focused on this other thing.”

In a sense, what Justin Amash did is he ripped the Band-Aid off of the whole situation in a non-empathetic way, in a very fact-based way. What we’ve talked about that the news media, the commentators or the journalists who are reporting on a lot of these things tend to try to use facts to try to change beliefs. That’s not always the most effective. It’s rarely the most effective way to do it. He ended up shocking all these people. They’re like, “Who are you? Are we through the looking glass or are we over the rainbow? What happened here? The news programs I watch are telling me everything’s fine. There’s nothing in The Mueller Report. Why are you here messing everything up?”

Why are you messing up my perception? Why are you messing up my perspective? My team is great. It’s good. My identity is good. My vote was for Donald Trump. Donald Trump is still doing that with John Dean testimony.

He was the first witness to go before Congress and eliminate that the president was not doing the right thing. 

John Dean was the attorney for Richard Nixon. He said, “No, I’m not doing that. I am not going to cover it up. I’m not going to break it. I’m not going to do this. I am saying something illegal happened here and I’m going to be on the right side of history.” Justin Amash is on the right side of history for the rules. There was a press conference with President Donald Trump that we want to have compassion for President Donald Trump here. He’s trying and struggling to meet the need for respect, acknowledgment and recognition. Those are his needs and self-worth by saying, “John Dean was a loser. He was disbarred.” That’s true. He was disbarred. He was wrong. He wasn’t loyal to Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon committed a crime. There’s a point where loyalty ends.

When somebody crosses that line, the need for loyalty has to go out and the need for justice has to come in. The need for identity has to go out and the need for truth or fairness needs to come in. They have to swap.

If you do an amplification on Benghazi and you proportionalize Benghazi as Hillary Clinton and the State Department needed to do more to protect those poor people, that might be the truth. The embassies needed to do more. There was amplification in that environment that it wasn’t safe for Americans. Did they have the evidence that that was taking place? Did they do enough? It thuds and says, “They did pretty well. They could have done this and this.” Hindside is 20/20 and Hillary Clinton said in her testimonial that got amplified, “Whatever, that didn’t matter.” As soon as she said that, they had their soundbite. They took it and they stuck it underneath her saying “Whatever, that didn’t matter,” and took it out of context, put it under her name so that her identity gets to be associated with a message that’s called hijacking truth. That is a purchasing truth moment. “I am going to purchase it and I’m going to do a very tragic thing called brand slaughter.”

It's okay if you're using the system to help everybody but it's not okay if you're helping yourself.

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I’m going to slaughter her brand with a repeated message of her being this or being this and that. I’m going to use it in the First Amendment as a weapon. The Second Amendment right to bear arms has no ability to stand up with the first weapon, freedom of speech. That’s the thing to be weaponized. You hijack the people that are fighting for the Second Amendment and then use the Second Amendment against and the First Amendment and put those two together and now you know exactly where the Russians are attacking. They don’t need to put troops on the shore. They don’t need to launch a sub. Our military is ten times larger than their military. We know where their subs are. We have all kinds of stuff at the bottom of the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean to see where their subs are.



Their silos are going through the internet.

Just like missiles, all they’re doing is they are affecting and impacting the mindset that’s exposed to the belief structures that are vulnerable in our voting booth.

Bill, to come back talking about Donald Trump attacking John Dean and trying to say that, “I do not think this means what you think it means,” to quote Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride. Trying to distract from the reality of someone who was there in the Watergate saga saying, “What’s going on is worse.” What is it going to take to change the minds of the people that it’s going to take to do anything about this short of waiting until the 2020 Election? If this impeachment thing is going to happen and it may be inevitable that it’s going to happen, even though that’s a process that argues facts and is not the best way to achieve movement on this. Don’t you have to change the minds of the Republicans, both in the house and the Senate, that would be needed to impeach the president and remove him from office? 

We’re in big trouble because of the amount of saturation that’s been taken place, the hijacking of truth, the purchasing truth through these messages have polluted one of the identities of the teams. It’s not to say that other identities or other processes in our environment get polluted. Marketing, branding and sales are a big part of the saturation that has made the American mind very soft. It’s soft because it doesn’t have the ability to discern. You and I are having a discussion about discernment. When an identity politics or when an ideology gets solidified, discernment drops off. We’ve got some problems with oil. We have some problems with the environment. We have some problems with human rights. We have problems with food. We have problems, but you can’t get to a discussion about the problems unless you empathize with the person’s belief structure in a compassionate way to start.

As soon as you play the “got you” game, “I got your belief is false,” and pointed them and saying this belief is false, that was pass interference. That is a mistake that needs to be punished or not rewarded. They don’t get the reward, they don’t get to go ahead.

We’ve got some problems. We need a superhero protective shield and get some listening tricks to take place so we can hear past the chatter. That’s what we need next. Empathy is the quickest way to get there. The word empathy as it’s sitting here, as soon as I put the word empathy in front of everybody, we got some big problems. People don’t have a very solid definition of empathy or even know how to do it. As soon as I launched that, everybody’s unsettled. If I’m going to purchase truth back, I need to have compassion for the belief that the person already has. I make sure that I bring a conscious intention about the need that they’re going for.

President Donald Trump is having a little trouble with respect. He’s having trouble with his own self-worth and his own recognition and acknowledgment. For somebody to have so much money and to lose so much money, to still have so much money, be able to lose so much money, be able to use the tools and tactics that has caused him to lose so much money at the expense of Americans and no one being able to talk about that issue straight about how he’s met his need for respect. How he’s met his need for recognition, self-worth and identity at the expense of the country, at the expense of America, is a sobering message. Sober is important here because we don’t have very much emotional sobriety. We have emotional reactivity. We are an addict to messaging. Our beliefs are hijacking us. It’s detrimental to our values.

In the next eighteen months or so, I don’t see all these politicians in Washington suddenly understanding empathy and changing how they speak about the president deal with each other.

I know you feel doubtful and skeptical about getting truth and trust to penetrate the marketplace. Is that correct?

A compassionate advocate is utilizing the system in order to meet your needs.

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No, they can’t even hear the truth. She then, later on, went on to Fox News and started spitting the same thing. When she went on Fox News, she said, “The room was filled with Democrats.” I went, “No, they weren’t.”



This was one of the attendees of the town hall? Her reaction to Justin Amash’s illuminating truth was that she went on Fox News and said the room was full of Democrats. In Grand Rapids, Michigan?

That’s correct.

I got news for everybody out there. I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was born and raised in New England and then moved to Michigan for business. I lived there with my family. I’ll tell you what, you could not put a room of Democrats that big together in Grand Rapids, Michigan unless you imported them from somewhere else. 

As you’re going after that truth, there are people saying, “That’s what they did. They brought them in buses from the city and they brought them in.” Meanwhile, we’re back in the same spitting match of it. Empathy penetrates that. “You feel furious and you would rather me have voted for what President Donald Trump was standing for, rather than to vote for the truth. Is that what you would have liked?” That person would have to say yes. You can get your second empathy guess which would sound like, “I also hear you feel angry because you would like me to meet the need for respect for the president ahead of the need for justice.” She would have had to say yes because that’s where she was going next. How do I know this is true? On Fox News, what they did was to amplify and proportionalize the person’s perspective, the person’s perception and adjusted the lens or perspective and hijacked the narrative saying, “That’s what happened there. There was a room full of Democrats that were supporting Justin Amash.” He said, “I don’t think that was true.”

I could have made a much more compassionate statement than I did before.

What you did was the most magical thing that you could’ve ever done. You illustrated the lure in the water. You illustrated the pursuit and the belief that whether it’s Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, or whether it is any of the other candidates that are moving up the poll. If they’re going to make their moments, their moment has to come from the place of empathy and compassion for how the freedom of speech and the person’s identity is not wrong. It’s just been hijacked. It’s not wrong to value loyalty. It’s not wrong to value respect. It’s not wrong to value a person’s acknowledgments and recognitions or how our value in the United States that wealth is the most important value to see that God supports that person. That’s a strong belief that people have.

It’s not wrong to believe that God is supporting President Donald Trump because he’s rich, his family was rich or that God is behind him because God is a part of wealth and abundance. God is abundant, and that’s what God wants for us if we follow him. That’s not a bad belief. It’s just been a belief that’s been hijacked, that’s been allowed to say, “My team gets to make mistakes. Your team doesn’t. My team gets to be held to a different standard. Your team doesn’t.” If Bill Maher was to say the sentence, “Why do the Republicans get a pass on the mistakes?” They get a pass because they do a better job of keeping their beliefs and the people that believe the way they do messaged in a way that doesn’t allow their side to consider that there might be other creative ways to solve a solution. Rather than what’s being propagated, promoted, proportionalized and rewarded by holding a belief structure that is not true. It’s unsettling.

They get rewarded for that belief structure because people believe the way I do. This is my team. I have the hat. I have the LA Rams jersey. I have the New Orleans Saints jersey. I have the New England Patriots jersey. My team is better than you, therefore God loves the Patriots better than anybody. There are a skilled mindset and a skillset of coaching that’s going on there as well as a skillset of talent that is on that team that they are able to do the best they can in this game called football, whether you like it or not. The main thing for our audiences to stay tuned next time is how do you implant messages that are compassionate and empathetic to somebody that is saying the most horrific false things in your direction. How do you actually face that, not with criticism, not with judgment, not with defensiveness? Not with contempt, not with minimalization by withdrawing all those people, not with labeling diagnosis. Don’t go there if a candidate does not go there.