Truth And Time
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When it comes to finding out the truth, one has to have the willingness and the time to research to find out where an issue sits. On today’s podcast, Bill Stierle and Tom talk about truth and time. It’s become increasingly shocking how a lot of people are forming biases without checking on the source of information. Bill and Tom observe how people don’t seem to want to do that much work to determine or care as much about finding out if something is really true because it takes time to confirm. Tune in to this episode to learn the importance of verifying the truth so you can do a better job of getting out of some of the beliefs that are locking you down.
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Bill and I have been talking about what we’re going to discuss. We’re going to talk about truth and time. You’re going to find this to be a very interesting subject. Bill, why don’t you lead us down the path here?
Tom, you and I know how communication is being used. This is a communications show. How is it being used to hijack a person’s thinking? The word, hijack, is a little unsettling to even hear as a label or diagnosis, but it’s to direct a person to confirm their bias, to create a world that a person can live in that other people think and believe the same things they do. We’ve seen it on Facebook. We’ve seen it on social media. Somebody posted, “If any of the people that are friends here are Democrats, please unfriend me.” A person said that, “Please unfriend me.” I’m thinking she just wants more of the bubble. She just wants more people to be in that space, in that environment. There’s no time or no willingness to find truth or perspective or perception or take the time to do a little research to say, “Where is the issue sitting?” No, they don’t want to do that. They want to confirm the experience. That’s where it gets unsettled.
They’re preferring stories and information that confirms their biases. It’s interesting, a common Facebook friend, yours and mine, made a post that speaks to this. I’m paraphrasing. His name is Shane. I’m not going to out him here because I didn’t ask his permission. He posted that he’s been off Facebook for a while and he was seeking some peace from all of the large volume of posts that are made, as he says it, “That clings to demonstratively false information or misinformation with tenuous underpinnings at best or even outright lies.”
He’s saying it’s shocking to him that more people are not first doing just a little bit of checking on the source of the information or where it’s coming from. Is it true or not? If it tends to confirm their biases, they’re all too quick to share it, repost it, like it, comment on it. He’s disappointed in that. I can understand his feelings, but my assessment of it is people don’t want to do that much work to determine. If they see something that they agree with. Do they care as much about finding out if it’s true? I don’t think so.
Even some of the sources that are more reliable than other sources, whether it’s PolitiFact, Snopes or whatever, “Liar, liar pants on fire,” is the worst rating you can get. What winds up happening in the face of that validation piece, people will say, “That’s their bias.” It’s like, “No, it’s the truth in the middle of the argument. It’s not the experience. The brain wants to find things that it’s familiar with rather than things that are outside of its view set. We did a whole show or two on, what does it take to move the Overton window? It is this window of perception towards your point of view. That’s the thing that’s unsettling is that you’ve got to have time to see, “Is this good for the country or is it good for one person? Is it good for one company or is it good for one industry?” That’s at least a little bit of my thought around that.
It may not be that apparent when looking at the title of this episode, Truth and Time, that time is not an ally of truth. Time is almost an enemy of truth in many ways. You’ve got to put time into finding out if something is true. We all should be striving to do that before we all too quickly repost things. The Commander-in-Chief, the occupant of the Oval Office right now is as guilty of this as anybody. He’s gotten in hot water in the eyes of at least half of America, many times by re-tweeting something that ends up not being in alignment with truth. There’s an outrage, people complain, his staff points it out to him and he just deletes the tweet if that’s the case. He never apologizes or accepts responsibility. He tries to erase it.
“I didn’t say that. When did I send it? No. It was a long time ago.” “Mr. President, it was yesterday.” The new cycle has already moved. They’re onto this now. This is what everybody’s talking about. I’m just going to weigh in on this and watch all the mice scurry when I do that. “Look at that, they just wait in this.” It’s like the elephant brain being tapped. If I want to have my higher function thinking through the process of the scientific method, you have to measure it. You need a peer to review it and do the same experiment to see if they got the same result to validate what you proved to be true. This is something that’s unsettling, Tom, that I’m going to share with you is the funding to validate a scientific study is a non-existent.
Nobody wants to spend any time doing the second experiment or the third experiment to validate to see if what this person just said to the news media. Let me give an example of that. Chocolate reduces heart disease. Chocolate can increase your intimacy chances. Chocolate wine can help the heart. Those are things that made it into the news media, but there was no time to find out if they were true. Here’s what the research said. They cherry-picked it so this little bit of sexy information marketing and branding goes on top of the article. The news media picks it up and says, “This one scientist says that this takes place. Scientists says this.”
Scientists don’t say this. This one person did an experiment that wasn’t validated. You didn’t take the time to check it out. It’s like, “We still get calls around that.” There was a TV station that came and checked in about it. It’s very unsettling. There’s no time for the rigor of truth. The rigor of truth takes a little bit of us to take time and to check into where the truth lies. Is it just a bias that we’re doing or is it something that is a reality? It’s exasperating. As you can see, my voice is moving into exasperation because it’s hard to empathize with that.
It makes sense though since it takes time to confirm if something is true or not. People don’t generally take them out of time. It’s easy to see how truth can get hijacked and how marketing messages can stick. They activate something in the brain that you either identify with or you’re vehemently opposed to one way or the other. You react to it, but reacting is not in alignment with the truth either.
Let’s do a quick gift for all of our audience so we can stick the landing here. We need to communicate our way back to truth. Let’s get some tools on our side. Two important emotions that are needed right away. Curious and skeptical. You need that both. I feel curious about what’s being said. I feel skeptical about what’s being said. You need them both because curious puts you in the place of an observer. I feel curious about the BS I just heard. I’m not going to inflame myself around it. This is a communication show. I just worked myself up. You just worked ourselves up. Notice our fuel in our body just got depleted.
It does because as soon as you get on a rant, we get depleted. Our nervous systems were not built for the speed in which information is coming to us. Let me give a great example of this one. Even though this is still happening now, remember in the distant past when the mail would come in the mailbox and there be this a big packet of things. There were little mailers, little coupons and promotions in one envelope. I would watch my mom and my dad flip through these things. They would keep some things and throw out what they didn’t want. Next week, there was going to be another one of these things. Pull it out, throw it out. Every day in the news media, our inboxes, our email things, on Twitter, on Facebook, we are having that same envelope every two hours.
You’ve got to sort through what you need and what you don’t. There’s no time to buy or think about anything because you’re sorting through. Shane, “I’ve taken a break from social media. I’ve only looked at the things that are important communications to me,” is saying, “I’m taking a diet from being over-stimulated and over-mailered, branded to, marketed to and sold.” This is what the cannibal capitalism looks and feels like that we’re in right now. It’s how do I gobble up as much as I can. Can I get there first? We’re all exhausted. We’re tired of our government doing it to us. I’m thinking about myself and my peers. We’re exhausted. It doesn’t even matter who the other candidate is. I want this guy out of here because I am tired of hearing him front and center. Is he going away or are people going? No. Who’s the next loudmouth is going to come along and do something like this?
Let’s get ourselves out of this. Step one, observe. Step two, if you’re applying curiosity or skepticism. Let’s reduce the conflict. Is it the need for information? Is this information going to provide me support or is it designed to inflame me? I feel curious. Is this valuable or is it just going to trigger or design to trigger a belief or my emotion? Second, skeptical. Does it meet my need for trust on the way to truth? Am I trusting the source? Am I trusting the researcher? Is this a thoughtful piece or is the person just giving me the soundbite? Some of the comedians are doing a better job right now because they get the twenty-minute show, our show. They get time to do research and make it funny, make it digestible and promote a perspective. They’re the new news media. It’s weird that I’m sharing that with you.
For a long time, a lot of these comedy shows have been responsible for giving more unvarnished news and truth than a lot of the official news networks and shows. Jon Stewart was always credited with that. If you got in a room with him and you wanted to have a debate about any issues, he wasn’t a mouthpiece behind the desk or the microphone on these shows. He knew his stuff. That’s why he’s gone to Congress to advocate, for instance, on behalf of the first responders from 9/11 and all that stuff.
It’s very powerful when you get somebody looking at things deeply, taking the time to find the truth. We’ve got to do a better job of picking the need that’s going to serve us rather than getting reacted. I reposted a piece on Facebook. Delightfully, Facebook put a little note saying this video edit, even though it was good, was an American person talking about the map creating racism. The name of the person that was reposting this was called Foot Soapbox. It’s a Russian propaganda piece. After I post it, I’m like, “I’m not taking this down.” I am going to comment that this is a Russian propaganda piece even though it’s got truth to it. It’s been edited to support racial divisions in the United States, check-in and use curiosity and make sure that your body doesn’t get inflamed about this.
Also realize that on a scale of 1 to 10, they’re trying to divide us. It’s an eight on them trying to divide us. They’re trying to stoke racial division. This is what this thing is for. It was amazing, the feedback. It was like, “You called the system out on itself.” I’m like, “That’s what you do when you want to talk about truth. You’ve got to say, ‘This is where it’s coming from.’” Even though the content was pretty good, the motive was very dark and very shadowy. It was to divide us. I put it in there going like, “This is a device.” If anybody is sharing that, which a couple of people did, they went and put their comments in. It says, “This is good, but this is also let them know that people are trying to divide us out there.” We are going to do it. We’ve got to do a better job of observing. We just got to do a better job of naming the feelings that are going to help us and then get to the needs that are doing. When you hear this example, Tom, what kind of comes up inside you? We’ve got to slow down to capture or recapture truth.
You have to slow down. You have to be considerate of not only the fact that people have a lot of biases one way or the other, but that we have been manipulated to divide us. That’s what I think people forget. When you mentioned that we get to the point where it doesn’t matter if they’re Democrat or Republican, we want to get this guy out type of thing. There’s a lot of very strong messages coming out in support of that. More and more people that are lifelong Republicans coming out about this with Donald Trump. We know and we’ve talked about the Lincoln Project. There’s another group of Republicans that started a new super PAC.
They’re doing the same thing. They’re former George W. Bush administration and campaign officials that launched a nice super PAC called 43 Alumni for Biden, 43 being 43rd President George W. Bush. They are looking to unite and mobilize the community of historically Republican voters who are dismayed and disappointed with the damage to our nation by the Donald Trump presidency. They are not just advocating that Donald Trump is bad. They’re saying, “Please vote for Joe Biden because we need to get rid of Donald Trump.”
They’re putting America over the party. They’re putting party over loyalty to one individual that’s hijacked the party. That’s heartening to see. I’m hoping that messages from them, because some of the ones from the Lincoln Project have been very powerful. It’s not feeding into confirmation bias, but doing a good job of eliminating certain truths or at least getting people to consider some different beliefs and maybe get out of some of those beliefs that are locking them down. It’s very exciting for me to see. It helps cut across this truth and time thing a little bit.
All these different short videos that they’re doing to condense information to market and promote the truth about, “Here’s what he’s doing, here’s the impact.” It’s a counter-marketing spin. People that are fans of Donald Trump, they’re going to follow him because they’re so invested in how they feel when they listen to him. They don’t know that these small messages have gotten into them purchasing him as the leader of truth, instead of, “I’m not sure if that’s fully true because he keeps changing things.” The virus didn’t go away. We’re the leader of the disaster. We’re leading that. We are number one. We are great again. We’re great at not having a government that supports us all. Next time, Tom, to stick the landing here a little bit, for our audience is be ready to train your mind to be more in the position of observation. Be able to check-in and what your needs are and check your emotions also. That might get us there going forward.
That would be a difficult thing for a lot of people to do, but very worthwhile to discuss.
More to come on how to do that. Thanks.
Thanks, Bill.
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