Language To Restore Truth

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We’re going to talk about truth and bulletproofing integrity. We set up that we needed to try to restore integrity after we talked about bulletproofing yourself from certain kinds of language and how to diffuse things. We somehow got back to some restoration. I would love to hear what you have to say about that.



There are some good pieces of information. How do you get language to assist you to get messages to stick so they land in such a way that it becomes memorable as well as inspires emotion inside the person or the listener? If we’re creating a vision behind a specific word or narrative, that can go a long way. Let’s take for example the word loyalty. It’s an important word that many institutions run off of, specifically the military. If a person or a candidate claims one word as his own, loyalty, the people that are hooked into that anchor word or that value are going to say to themselves, “This person has loyal people around him. They’re the best loyal people around him.” Nobody is somebody that creates and has millions or billions of dollars that don’t have loyal talented people around him.

“I’m a loyal person and I joined the military because of loyalty.” Notice the words are associative. You and I have spoken in the past about biases and language or belief fallacies. This is in that group. If a candidate was to create a moment of separation and they wanted to know how to do that, it would be a good idea to learn how to build a vision around a certain value or word and start working it. In the news, there’s this pesky thing called impeachment that’s coming up. I’m calling it pesky from the position of how the Republicans and the President are dealing with it. “This is pesky,” and it’s sticking. The reason why it’s sticking is that as soon as you meet the need for choice and independence, “I want to call my shots.” I want to talk to world leaders because they’re at my level. I believe my self-worth and respect is I’m at that level because I did get elected.

You better have some other values to be able to be on the phone call as well as getting the inclusion, play nice with others and work with people. Don’t rely on your decision-making because you have the best brain. Notice how that particular quip made you laugh because it was meeting my need for humor and your need for true humor. The truth is a little bit off. Doesn’t the breast brain know to ask the best people to use the smartest people because they know where their vulnerability is about not knowing about something and that’s problematic?

There is some truth to such a kind of statement. The President even made in a tweet about the Turkey thing. He has pulled out the American soldiers or ordered them not to engage and help the Kurds defend themselves. He said something to the effect of, “If Turkey takes advantage of the situation, and I will use my magnificent brain to an extent.” I forget exactly. It was to destroy their economy. The way he did it was a self-aggrandizing statement and that’s why I chuckled when you said that. 

It didn’t make it. His tweet didn’t make any difference. He had the permission and because he has a sense that the leader of Turkey has a sense that his people are loyal and he’s not going to go back on his words. He’s got his commitment to do that and he tweeted his commitment to do that. I am going to launch no matter what he says next. As soon as somebody makes a deal, you’ve got to be ready for blowback unless the other person is already agreeing with the deal first. Tom, have you ever tried to make a deal with one of your kids?

Sure.

They either didn’t live up to the deal or if they did, they made you pay for it?

Yes.

Things don’t go well when you do deals. In fact, inside my house, our standing rule with all of my kids is we don’t make deals. In my family, I do not make deals. We will make an agreement that both of us have worked out. It’s not until you’re fully in agreement that we are working the deal as we’re doing it but we are not starting into the, “If you do this, you will get that.” When a person designs that, you will get short-term compliance but you will get long-term suffering.

The need for integrity that's built around bulletproofing it means that you’ve got to set a vision that's unshakeable.

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What I found as a parent is if you make that deal, the kid takes the deal because they want what they get but they never deliver what they promise to later. They don’t understand the consequence of making the deal.



They don’t. He tries to make a deal with Ukraine. The guy goes, “I’m not sure about that.” He starts running the clock out. They find out that he made the deal. He’s got to give the money over with no agreement.

He had to do it.

He had to do it because you can’t do a short-term arm-twist. If you are not in the space to be able to play the long game, you’re going to pay for it and regrettably with Turkey. We’re up to eight people’s lives that have died like that. We’ve got an entire community, city moving for their lives.

They’ve been abandoned.

They’ve got to uproot all those families, all those kids. They’ve got to get out of there. They’ve got to go out of there because that’s getting resettled and reclaimed by Turkey. It’s the area that Isis took over and that the Kurds were occupying with us to get rid of Isis. It’s going to be resettled with Syria and Turkey. People from Syria, people from Turkey and create a “buffer zone.” Meanwhile, the Kurds are going like, “This was our land to begin with. Because there’s oil underneath us, you’re going to reclaim it?” There’s oil underneath it.

Bill, we’re seeing some things play out in our domestic politics where the President is browbeating Republican senators to be loyal to him. He’s threatening them with the fear of his wrath if they don’t remain loyal. Help me understand how you know that plays out.

The need for integrity if I were a Republican senator is I would build a coalition around the word integrity. We need to hold integrity for the office because this rule says this one thing. The President might disagree and that’s what makes it good for a good debate.

The President might even call us out on loyalty and loyalty to the party. I felt disheartened to let the President know that the need for integrity and our oath of office was to the United States. Our party is representing certain values. The value of integrity is in the Republican Party and we’re going to go with that ahead of the word loyalty. Loyalty is not ahead of integrity in this case.

Bill, you make that sound so easy. You did seem so obvious and clear when you say us and it’s likely, These Republican senators, they’ve never wanted to follow Donald Trump. They’ve never liked him. They have gotten in line.

He’s a marketer and a seller with low integrity. All they have to do is to pick the highest value that he is running over with the truck. They can’t pick truth because what happens is he populates and he has an entire media arm that populates alternative facts/quarter partial and truths/partial narratives. If they’re going to reclaim their party, the Republicans, they’ve got to pick a value that’s going to work, which would be integrity for your oath. You can get a shot at it but you have to then put that in alignment and you need to reduce loyalty for a party and increase integrity for the oath of office. That’s what certain Democrats are doing that are in swing states. They’re doing that.

It's never about facts or truth. It's about positioning a message to illicit enrolment. The enrolment that the President won on is loyalty.

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The whole Ukraine episode put an arrow through that concept.



He can’t go back and say to his base, “I did what I was going to do. I said I was going to start pulling troops back.” Not unilaterally and not in collaboration and cooperation with leadership. Those things are where he is exposed. All the leading candidates could say, “The President is doing what he said, but he’s doing it at the expense of the lives of our allies.” They are all in a position to say, “He is doing what he said regarding the wall and funding for the wall.” Claim his space. “He’s doing what he said but it’s at the expense of the military. It’s at the expense of safety. It’s an overcompensation for. He’s overdoing what’s needed there, yet he’s willing to sacrifice these other lives. We want to go with allies and friendships and wars we don’t want to fight.”

All of the candidates, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, any one of them could pick up my narrative and pound the truth. Not just a portion of the truth, but the truth that he is doing what he’s saying, he’s doing in the run-up to his elections. He is also doing all the strategies that he used in the last election. We’ve got to take our hat off for them. He hasn’t moved off-message much. Do we want to continue with the same message moving forward? If you would like to continue with the same message of only getting partial things and having somebody calling the shots without collaborating with others, the people are in place, maybe he would like to move to the front lines. Maybe he would like to be doing that. I’m feeling doubtful that people are going to take America seriously for the next four years, other countries because they’re not. How are they feeling? Curious. How do they feel? Doubtful and skeptical about his leadership. It’s never about facts. It’s never about truth. It’s never about facts. It’s about positioning a message to illicit enrollment.

The enrollment that he won on is loyalty. That’s the enrollment. He enrolled people to make America great again by being loyal to America and to me. “I have the most loyal, best and smartest people. They’re loyal people to me.” The inventory of that truth is not true but they are accomplished people. Paul Manafort is an accomplished person. He’s able to negotiate millions of dollars. He was able to get people to pay for all kinds of things that he would like them to pay for including his salary. To balance meeting the needs for self-versus the needs for others are lost on him. Yes, you can talk about the different salaries, different book deals and the different ways that people throw money at people in the office because they advocate respect. It doesn’t mean that it’s truthful. One of the things that have happened at the same time as all this impeachment stuff is going on is that one of the people in the Nixon administration was getting the American freedom medal, Edwin Meese.

I didn’t see that in the news.

He is to Donald Trump is to William Barr as Richard Nixon was to Edwin Meese. He was running the legal office the way William Barr is running the DOJ. Edwin Meese was running the DOJ at the time. Not only covering things up but also taking money from different people along the way. It’s the same characters and he pointed to William Barr and he goes, “I know what you’re going through because I went through the same thing.” Of course, he went through the same thing he was doing the same kinds of things that William Barr was doing.

Is that freedom medal decision the President’s alone to give?

It must be. All of him and all of the people that are cut out of that same cloth are all in wherever that medal was being given. They’re all standing there smiling because they’re all cut from the same cloth of, “They do dirty tricks on their side and we do dirty tricks on our side and we’re justified in it.” This gets us down to this whole belief bias of what the word loyalty means? What does the word truth mean? I’m okay with a human being making a mistake if they can do some scary honesty around it and restore integrity. I am not okay to act as the punitive god to say, “You made that mistake, therefore you’re going to suffer in hell for the rest of your life.” Even with Donald Trump that can have compassion and empathy for his words and actions and the tragic way that he gets respect, acknowledgment. It’s the tragic way he bolsters self-worth because it’s not about doing.

If he doesn’t watch it, he’s going to tragically be tainted as an impeached president and he doesn’t want that. That idea bothers him, to be put on the same level proportionally as Bill Clinton and maybe worse. Bill Clinton got in trouble for doing things that Donald Trump had done in his personal life when before he was president but not for Bill Clinton. He didn’t get impeached for anything having to do with the decisions he made his president and the actions he took dealing with other countries and things like that.

I see the big difference between both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Both of them did a better job of compartmentalizing their mindsets in their work life. Donald Trump does not compartmentalize anything, he lets off on Twitter and he’s jumping from here to here. It’s like a teenager or a twenty-year-old. You send them to college and they have no ability to consider their needs and reference to others. They become the kid that the dean is going like, “I have this rich kid here. If I get rid of him, I lose the donor money. If I keep him and try to keep some container around him to hold him here for four years, it’s financially viable for the school.

We can save and get a new library built or get a new whatever built, a new business building.” It’s so unsettling the endowment piece to it.

We as a nation, not as a Republican or a Democrat, have to reclaim and reset the word “integrity.”

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There wouldn’t be even early on. Another thing that’s getting conflated and it’s not having a solid line between the two of them is, “Is it criminal or is it ethical?” They keep leading those lines together, so what happens is the things are so unethical but don’t rise to the place of the criminal. Donald Trump and the Republicans say, “It’s not criminal but it is completely unethical to do it.”



It is enough of a reason to be removed from office, I would think. I’m not a judge.

If a person breaks and becomes unethical in a business, it’s not necessarily going to crush the business. They just had an unethical moment, which they might have to pay for. I did one of these mediations where the company had to pay I don’t know $7.5 million for an unethical thing. It wasn’t criminal but it was unethical and the court case got started because it was unethical.

It certainly had a serious consequence for it.

It had a serious consequence but it didn’t take down the company. They went public within two years of that mediation. One of the things that are happening in our governmental narrative is those things are being hooked together where the office of ethics is going crazy and it hasn’t risen into the level of, “Ethics is over here, integrity is over here, respect is over here and stealing something is over here.” We didn’t steal something in and no harm, no foul. The damage is done here regarding respect, ethics and integrity.

I remember all sorts of ethics violations of certain members of Congress, the House, the Senate, and the people being removed from office or being forced to resign because of it. We’re so far through the looking glass that the Republicans certainly would have us believe that unless it’s breaking the letter of the law, it doesn’t matter.

Unless it breaks the letter of the law, what happens is the ethics of things have been pushed close to the criminality line. What winds up happening is I can have a strong wreckage of past and I can run for president because this guy has pushed that entire line so close. That affair with a porn star, that’s been done before. Cheating on the wife, that’s okay. We could still elect you. You can start setting the laws and the rules for the rest of us even though your ethical lines are low. For example, the one-state legislator or governor or something turned to the reporter and said, “I’m going to throw you off this balcony if you keep asking me that question.” That was somebody in New Jersey or New York.

He got out ousted for ethical or maybe financial violations.

Ethics and then he ran again and they were going to give him a pass, “You’re giving him a pass? This guy said to another human being, ‘I’m going to throw you off the balcony if you keep asking me that question.’” That’s right on the edge of criminality, to threaten somebody with death if you don’t be quiet?

That’s not in alignment with the reporter.

A person with a religious belief always thinks that their God is on their side.

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They can’t live that way. They go like, “I can’t do that.” They are opposite of what Ellen DeGeneres is trying to go for, which is, “At least I’m in the room with the person and I’m talking with the person.” There might be something I say or do or somebody that likes President George W. Bush and realizes that they like me as a gay person. They’ll go like, “If he can like a gay person, I can like a gay person because I like President George W. Bush so then I can like a gay person because he likes them. I like Ellen DeGeneres. She’s funny. I don’t agree with their politics but I can do that.” There are different kinds of micro winds that are going on and it might not fit the person’s belief bias, trauma, or the tragedy that he has inflicted upon his decision-making has resulted in. Rather than inflicted upon resulted in by the decisions that he made when he was in the office. It’s difficult.



It’s difficult. Ellen DeGeneres’ an example. In some ways, John McCain was an example and there are probably many others we can pick and choose that would try to find common ground with people that they disagreed with. There’s not enough of that and what we said, “Do you ever look at C-Span and somebody’s speaking on the floor of the Senate or the house? Whenever a Democrat is there, there are no Republicans in the room. When a Republican is speaking, there are no Democrats in the room and that is not productive.” At least Ellen DeGeneres and George W. Bush are being in the same room and talking with each other and finding some things they can agree on. That’s the hope. That’s some of the restorations that we need in America, isn’t it, Bill?

Yes, it is. That’s the tour in 2021, which is the Truth Restoration tour. It’s okay to restore truth to a more stable place than it is. It’s not stable and it costs lives that don’t need to. It costs relationships that it doesn’t need to. It’s affecting families. I have a family mediation coming up like that. It’s affecting families because you can’t do Thanksgiving together as a family because of it.

I see that happening. I see that is difficult and I’m interested. You mentioned to me this mediation you’re going to be doing with a family that is being divided because of politics. I’m hoping after that you might be able to anonymously share some of what happened as a case study.

I have many families and many stories that I have that are similar to these belief biases that are getting in the way, fixed validation patterns, fallacies that they have about one side or the other. It’s partially true but it’s not fully true. We need to get a healthy narrative as well as take a look at loyalty is an important need as a human being but it is not the only need. If it’s running over things like integrity, collaboration or cooperation, which are high-functioning needs or needs for mutual respect, then it’s problematic because you can’t have a concept called bipartisan unless there is the framework of mutual respect that’s showing up.

You reminded me, I’m not so sure that our elected officials understand what bipartisan means. They use it in a different way than it’s meant to be. It means, “The bill wasn’t passed by only Democrats or only Republicans therefore, it was bipartisan.” I don’t know if that’s true. It should be more bipartisan issues.

Try to have a bipartisan discussion with your daughter about ice cream, try it. Try to have a bipartisan thing about ice cream. No, ice cream sits out there and what winds up happening is the way the system is currently being run and set up as adversarial, no one’s getting ice cream. The ice cream is melting as Mitch McConnell would say, “It’s the graveyard of bills being passed by Congress. He called it a graveyard. “This is where bills come to die because I’m going to stonewall everything that comes in this direction.”

Not even going to have a vote on anything unless he knows it’s going to pass the way he wants it to. To me, people don’t talk about it and they don’t debate.

Even when he brought something to Donald Trump to sign for the wall and also Mitch knows that this is problematic with his guy. He doesn’t know if the guy’s going to turn on and he did. Miller talked to Donald Trump and said, “Don’t you sign that thing. It’s not what you promised and it’s not enough. You’ve got to hold out for more.” They figured out how to take the money out of the Pentagon or the military budget, which they overfunded which is a whole another problem anyway. There’s a lot of truth going on here.

Bill, I enjoy all these episodes because there’s always some lesson to be learned and a tool that can be used. That’s great but this one I’m going to remember for a lot longer because you illuminated some things about the President that I knew but I didn’t understand it in the right way. This compartmentalization in his mind that he cannot do is a fundamental trait. It’s fundamental to him in his core and it is never going to change.