Truth, Expertise And The Tenets Of Trust
Subscribe Today!
One of the most insidious things people can do with power is the ability to use “expert” authority to sway the masses to their version of the truth. This is certainly the case with the viral video of doctors in lab coats talking about Coronavirus and making claims that there is a cure for it and that there is no need to wear masks – contrary to what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other experts are saying. The video quickly became viral hours after release and Donald Trump even shared several versions of it on Twitter. The video was taken down from every major platform for spreading misinformation – to the consternation of some people, specifically Trump’s hardline supporters. Why were these “experts’” opinions squashed? Why was their “expertise” repressed? Bill Stierle and Tom anchor this episode’s discussion on this burning issue.
---
Bill, it’s interesting to see what’s happening with social media and with the propagation of “facts and experts” in particular. I want to set up for our readers the impetus for this video went viral on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. It was purported to be a panel of doctors in lab coats on the steps of the Supreme Court, talking about the virus. It was a counter message to what the CDC is saying and all the experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx that, “No one needs to wear masks and there is a cure for the virus.” It’s hydroxychloroquine and Azithromax, which is antibiotic along with Zinc. It was sharing this message well. That video got taken down by every platform. It wasn’t one platform that was an outlier. This video was deemed to have violated the policies of all the platforms and they took it down.
A lot of people are upset about this because they are like, “How can these doctors’ opinion be squashed? How can these doctors sharing their experience violate community standards?” All of them found that this particular video was perpetrating what they would call false information that they were saying it didn’t violate community standards, but they’re saying that there’s a cure. Those claims run contrary to multiple studies and scientific studies that say that, “It’s not a cure. There is no cure. This was false information.” They all took it down. The bigger question is who’s an expert and who’s not?
How do you get to be the person whose weight gets to count more than other people’s weight? Your expertise has risen to the place of the above opinion. It has a solid ground to stand on based on facts, research, skill and the things that you’re saying can be proved. That means whatever you’re saying can be duplicated. There is enough evidence behind what you’re selling to validate that what you’re selling has worth. The hard part about expertise is that with the internet, what has happened is there’s been a unique experience of because you posted something on your Facebook, all of a sudden you get a boost that these people like me, therefore, it’s true. That’s a problem with truth that it boosts because you’re following is saying yes to you. You wrote something wise down, that made meaning to another person that created an agreement. We’re having a little bit of trouble with truth because what winds up getting hijacked along with the truth is trust. I’m extending trust to a person in a lab coat because what they’re telling me is that 4 out of 5 doctors and 4 out of 5 dentists say that this thing does this thing, and the person looks pretty official in that lab coat. I’m going to trust the lab coat and my truth might not be in alignment with truth.
That’s the thing that keeps getting me, Bill, is there’s a difference between belief, opinion and truth especially when it comes to expertise. It was Malcolm Gladwell who said, “You’re an expert after you have spent 10,000 hours doing something again and again.”
There’s a certain expertise.
Experience and expertise come from similar roots here. When I’m going to have major surgery, I want to know that the doctor has done it thousands of times before.
How many surgeries have you done? What’s your track record on this thing? What are some of the things you learned about this? How do you know what’s going on inside my body in order to do heart surgery or shoulder surgery or hernia mesh? What expertise do you have?
There’s a reason they call medical businesses a practice a lot of the time. These doctors are practicing and building up their 10,000 hours and then hopefully, serving people long after they have 10,000 hours of practice.
It’s interesting the word practice is fundamental. It’s a Tee-ball player that’s learning how to play baseball. They’re five years old. They stick the ball on the tee. They swing at this ball that’s sitting there and trying to get these two little arms of a five-year-old to swing a bat, to hit a ball that’s sitting right there in front of them. To keep their eye on the ball and let the bat make contact with the ball and let it go in a direction that is going to be put the ball in play. That’s the first part of a practice. The sentence, “Practice makes perfect,” is not a strong sentence. Perfect practice makes perfect.
You’ve got to be concentrating on not doing the same thing over and over again, but doing something over and over again and perfecting the practice. Tom, you and I can make scrambled eggs, but it doesn’t mean that the scrambled eggs are going to taste as good as some of these other chefs that have perfected or worked on perfecting this amount of salt, these eggs, these other spices or ingredients in order to get the flavor to show up like that, then they’re an expert. A chef is a person that has the expertise. Their culinary practice has brought them somewhere.
Watch all these things I’ll get to put right after that. Somebody that is a minister has a spiritual practice. It doesn’t mean they’re any good at it, they’re just practicing the thing. An attorney that gets the thing in their twenties and they hung a sign outside. They’ve started their attorney practice, their legal practice has begun. With the doctor, they had to sign out and then you extend trust as they start their practice and they’re 25 or 30. They might be a good and smart surgeon, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve perfected their practice in surgery.
The same thing happens with attorneys. When I started in business, I was 27 or 28 years old with my first business. I wish I knew everything I knew now about business back then in the late ’90s because that’s when I was starting out. Like any business, I had to hire an attorney. You have to have an attorney on your team to do things in business. The attorney I hired was my age. He was about 27, 28 at the time. I knew I was getting an attorney that did not have a lot of experience. I also was paying a rate that was much lower than I would be paying for somebody with a lot of experience. I knew I had trade outs and I knew, at least he’s been educated in the law. There are other people at his firm with more experience if he needs to lean on them. This is a good fit for me in business to pay this lower rate, to have at least some legal people on my side. Now, I pay a lot more for an attorney, somebody that has an awful lot of experience because I don’t want to gamble. I want more certainty.
You’re paying for their time. There are three tenets of trust when we get into this. The three tenets of trust is, does the person have knowledge? There’s knowledge in two pieces. Knowledge can be through a degree, but thinking about my degree when I got it and the different degrees that I have gives me a slice of knowledge. Am I practicing gaining knowledge in that area of communication? Yeah, I’m reading all the time. I read a wonderful book about tyranny. We’re going to talk about that next step episode or so because it’s about how language creates tyranny.
As a communication show pursuing truth, I better know something about how language causes tyranny if I’m going to sit here and have some experience and claim expertise. At least I’m holding down my version of the truth. You could say, “That book was written by a professor.” As if the non-professor has some expertise that is greater than the professor does. The internet is allowed a person to consistently learn and develop a practice of reading, not a practice of quality learning or relying on quality sources. It’s unsettling.
The first tenet is knowledge. It’s got two prongs to it. Do I have some degree of expertise or knowledge? The second one is, “Am I a person that’s consistently learning in my field? Am I doing that?” That person I’m going to extend trust to. I am going to look at that expertise and say, “There’s some truth to it because what have you done?” A lot of professions have continuing education things to do to keep your certification, degree or diploma valid. You have to do X number per year of continuing education, or otherwise, you can’t keep this thing that we gave you. You have to lose it.
Number two is experience. Is the person on the court playing the game or are they in the stands yelling at the professional player? Just because you’re in the stands does not give you experience at being on the court. You could be in the stands, but your voice is not one that counts more than the person that’s been on the court. Experience has to do, have you played the game? Have you coached the game and while you were there, were any good at it? Did you win anything?
Just because I fly 150,000 miles a year around the world, it doesn’t mean I can fly the plane or land the plane if there was a problem.
Tom, do you have experience of flying though, don’t you? The answer is, “No, I’m sorry. I’m not putting Tom behind that thing.
No, I have experience riding on the plane. I know how to do that.
You started the thing with the 10,000 hours to get this thing, but you also have the intention of pursuing a perfect practice and/or the intention of that your practice is going to be upon your knowledge that your experience is going to stack. On the internet, because you put somebody in a lab coat and you show a video, it doesn’t mean the truth is there. It means that there is observable. A group of people in lab coats talking about something that looks official that they’re hijacking the person’s belief and the person’s bias.
Those people in that video may well have their own belief that a combination of hydroxychloroquine, Zinc and azithromycin is a cure. One thing we can all agree on anybody reading this, and if I were trying to empathy that anybody who believes in that, we can all understand that Coronavirus is fairly new on this Earth, at least our experience with it, that COVID-19 virus. There has not been a lot of time for anybody to have 10,000 hours of experience with it, or for there to have been all major studies complete that. Any studies that have been done suggest that they’re not saying these things aren’t secure, but there’s not enough evidence to say that they are a cure. The whole idea of experience and long experience with something if there hasn’t been enough time on this Earth to determine conclusively many things about this virus, let alone that this combination of three things as a cure.
Here’s the scary honesty. You and I are bringing that opinion forward. There are people that are doctors that could read this and say, “What are these two yahoos saying about it not being at? What evidence are they moving off of in order to get that?” That one is the one that’s tough because at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, there were drugs that they were trying to throw at people with AIDS. The media was trying to not go too far back then. They had a sense of restraint and research to go like, “We can’t start promoting something that’s not a fit until some more research came in.” Part of our nation is trying to find something that is going to be helpful and is going to provide some prevention for this unique virus. You and I are sitting midway up in the stands or maybe a little closer to the front, but we are not in the front row of this game. By the way, the people in the front row of any NBA basketball cannot leave that seat and walk onto that court. They can claim, “Because I was closer, I saw how someone did the behind back pass and allowed the other player to dunk, but they can’t do it.”
Let’s say it this way, two of the most famous basketball fans that I can think of, you wouldn’t put Jack Nicholson or Spike Lee on the court to score for you, right?
Right. They have their 10,000 hours of watching, but they don’t have the 10,000 hours of playing. They don’t have the perfect practice that goes along with that 10,000 hours of playing and their experience is not necessarily the truth about what it takes to be an NBA player by sitting on the sideline. The idea around experiences, my experience is truth therefore, my experience is a fact. Our internet is allowing that sentence to exist. That’s problematic for truth because it doesn’t allow the third step to come in. It doesn’t allow us to have any wisdom. All of a sudden, the readers are going to be quiet, “We’re not getting wisdom.” The answer is, “No, we’re not getting you wisdom.” What we are doing is getting little tidbits of knowledge and tidbits of the proposed experience. “I don’t know, just take this drug.” There’s no wisdom in that.
What did the president say?
“What have you got to lose? Take it.” The wisdom is it doesn’t work fully. It is a shot in the dark. It is a gamble. It is, “Here’s this basketball and there are miraculous shots that can be made both professionally and unprofessionally by a person throwing a ball at half court or three-quarters court or the length of the court and the ball goes in.” There’s no wisdom in throwing that shot all the time. That’s not a wise shot.
It involves a lot of luck. That’s the difference. That’s why there have been studies on this hydroxychloroquine that show that it creates heart arrhythmias and elevates liver enzymes that are not helpful and can be dangerous. I’m sure there are some doctors who were taking a shot because somebody is sick. They’re about to die. They’re trying to do anything they can for this patient. I admire that. If that patient is on death’s door, why not take a shot? In that situation, there may be nothing to lose, but if somebody happens to improve, it may be that the results happen.
They’re rallying for other factors, they’re rallying by other factors and they had something else happening inside their body. Their body’s immune system clicked on in a way and they bounce back. It wasn’t the drug. It was the will to live as if this hasn’t happened a bazillion times in the human experience. A person comes back miraculously from cancer, even though they are right at death’s door. Why? The will to live can activate the immune system to fight for the body. Everything else outside of it has a little bit of superfluous nature to it because of the body’s working. The three tenets though of trust, knowledge, experience and wisdom are also the three tenets that are necessary for self-worth. My knowledge, experience and wisdom bring some worth to me. I can get paid on those three levels. Your attorney that you hired, the young guy, you are paying them for knowledge, not necessarily experience and wisdom. Now the attorney you hire has the knowledge and some experience and more wisdom, whether they have enough wisdom or not, that is problematic. You don’t know the scope of their perception or perspective.
That is troubling that the same things that would be indicators of expertise are also requirements for self-worth.
If a person doesn’t have self-worth, they don’t have knowledge, experience and wisdom. They can sell trust me and you can push in their direction that they have those three things, but they don’t.
That’s what a lot of people were upset about when this video got taken down of these people in lab coats on the Supreme Court is that, “How can their experience be quashed? What they have to say be bad?” They made claims that there is a cure and you don’t need to wear masks. Those statements are not in alignment with the truth so much so. Even what I said before, which is that none of us have enough experience with this virus to know everything about it and to be experts there is enough experience with aspects of the virus. There have been studies that do say that these things are not a cure. These different social media platforms cannot allow that message, which was black and white.” There is a cure here it is. Don’t wear masks. It’s not necessary.” It violated their community standards and they had to pull it down.
Over the first part of this thing, we’ve laid out this foundation regarding expertise. There are the knowledge, experience and wisdom piece to it. Why then are people getting hijacked and arguing with things like masks and medication or creating a counter-story about, “This is the deep state, this QAnon, this is whatever conspiracy thing that we did.” Why are they doing it? Let’s do something helpful here. How do you have empathy for that person that their truth has been purchased from them because they’ve pushed, this person got elected or this person is rich? Therefore, they must have knowledge, experience and wisdom. How do you measure these things?
If you’re measuring wisdom, you listen to what the person says and ask yourself the question, “Was that a wise thing that person said?” If the answer is, “No, that was not wise.” You do not try to fight or justify because that person is on your side. You then claim your identity back from that person and say, “That doesn’t meet my conservative values and my need for truth.” Instead of saying, “He’s a Republican and I’m a Republican, therefore, it must be a wise thing. There must be some truth to it.” “No, there’s no truth to it at all.”
There’s no wisdom. There’s not any experience. The person clearly doesn’t have the knowledge about how this test works or how this other thing works. They don’t know that there’s a cognitive decline test. It’s not a test that proves you’re a stable genius. That’s not the test. The test is not a stable genius. If Donald Trump pulled off a Mensa test and pulled off an IQ of whatever demonstrates that he has the ability to have knowledge. It does not mean the person with the high test score has the experience on the court and has the ability to have perspective in order to be a leader. They don’t have that. We both know that there are smart people that tote to have the experience or wisdom to be leaders all over the place. It’s like, “What is this person doing in this spot?” They might have some attributes, but they do not have knowledge and/or experience and/or wisdom.
This is what’s missing when there is a Senate Hearing they get caught in the knowledge and experience box, but they don’t get to the wisdom box, “Do you have the wisdom to run this position?” They’re going like, “Wisdom? I was a big donor. That’s why I’m running this thing. I don’t have any wisdom.” “What’s the range of your experience?” They’ll try to find something to amplify in the first two because they happen to have money, power or they came from a good family that was a big donor. I’m making some stuff up but all of the things that I said have a strong truth to it is that we have people that are in charge that don’t have wisdom.
We do, no question.
How am I going to put Ben Carson in charge of the Housing when he has knowledge and a degree, but not in housing? Experience, limited and wisdom, not much in housing. He’s smart enough to read, but he is way behind on his ability to get on the court and play. He’s in the nosebleed seats for housing. That’s the way we’ve got to start thinking about this. Instead of letting the party’s identity make the pick, you want your civil servants to have some knowledge and experience. They’ve got to have all three in order to make an impact in a distance.
When it comes to things like infectious diseases, there’s a reason why Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, these people were put on this task force because they’ve got decades upon decades of experience. They have all those three components, knowledge, experience and wisdom from well over 10,000 hours of practice. That’s why they are the ones that were appointed to help guide the country on this.
Here’s the unsettling sentence as if we don’t have another one of these suckers, if a person has perspective, they also have a part in their consciousness as there as a part of the wisdom that they’re humble to know that they don’t know. They’re humble enough to say, “I don’t know. We don’t know enough about that.” This causes the need for certainty not to be met for people who are scared, which then causes them to feel doubt instead of still extending trust through the experience of doubt. It’s because, “I have doubt, I’m going to the person that’s confident, not the person that is wise.”
That’s why people have latched on to Donald Trump saying, “It’s going to go away on its own.”
That’s why they’re pushing truth in that direction. He says it out loud. It’s not like there’s any mystery. He says, “Eventually, I’m going to be right.” You’re in the stands and your team is going to win. They’re going to have a good game. You’re going to enjoy the experience of being in the bleachers, but you have no business on the court. You can’t make the pass. You can’t make the shot. You can’t get your body in the positions. You’re not fast, tall, and smart enough. It’s not a wisdom sentence. That’s his experience. “I’ll get fired from this job, I can file bankruptcy and have so much money. It’s not going to touch my lifestyle at all.”
He can run out the clock. His confidence is built upon having the truth, being able to be purchased because of the belief that somebody that has money is a smart person, that belief bias and that fallacy is in place. I believe that because he’s confident that he owns knowledge, experience and wisdom. His inflated self-worth and identity inflates my self-worth and identity. It’s not true, but that doesn’t matter in the voting booth. I’m not pursuing truth.
That’s the scary part that while you can’t become a doctor without studying and practicing to a set of standards, that where then you have earned the credential of MD, of Doctor, at least even before having 10,000 hours of practice out there in the real world. When it comes to our elected officials and appointments around the world of ambassadorships and all things. The ambassadorships are easier. You have to be a friend of the person that gets to choose and maybe a donor. If you’re running for office, Senate, House or Governorship, or the President of the United States, all you’ve got to do is convince enough people to vote for you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an expert or not. That’s scary how we’ve set up our system in that way.
Some people are up to making the transition to gain knowledge, experience and wisdom. My favorite example of this one is Shirley Temple as the child actress. She got married, Shirley Temple Black, and she got promoted in politics to be an ambassador. I don’t remember where she was an ambassador. That is lost on me. What happens is what she used to say is, “The little girl got me here. It was up for the adults to allow me to stay here.” What she did is work her butt off to gain the knowledge, experience and wisdom. She stayed there in those positions. No one moved her because she was darn good at it. She figured out the role and stepped into it.
Don’t get me wrong. Experts have to come from somewhere. You could be good at becoming an expert in something even later in life, but you have to apply yourself. You have to buckle down. You have to want to become that expert. You have to gain that knowledge, experience and wisdom. I agree. It can happen. Many of us are not naive to think that somebody who’s never been president before is going to be a great president on day one or month one or year one of their presidency. It takes time. You’ve got to experience the realities of the job before you get good at it.
Diana in Czechoslovakia.
That’s where she was?
Yeah. You don’t have to do some work in order to get the position. A lot of people could argue about Betsy DeVos, but she’s not broadening her perspective. They’re gaining wisdom. She’s promoting an ideology and a mindset about education, not to look at education as a profit center. It’s like, “I’m going to work my way to vouchers so that all types of education go in this direction.” It’s unsettling, but that’s what she’s going to do.
It’s unsettling because a lot of her beliefs and vision for education are nearly not so much in alignment with public education in and of itself. That’s the irony of her situation.
Twenty years as a diplomat.
If you're running for office, all you have to do is convince enough people to vote for you. It doesn't matter if you're an expert or not.
CLICK TO TWEET
Shirley Temple Black, twenty years?
Twenty-five years.
You gain a lot of knowledge, wisdom and experience doing that.
You’ve got to pay attention to get your butt on the court. It’s one thing to get there and buy the seat for the front row and then say, “You’re in,” but when you’re on the court, you’ve got to start playing on the court. Many people crash there, they have one term there that are there for three years. They don’t have the ability to stay in it and they tap out. Sarah Palin is a great example of that. She got there. She got elected and then she tapped out after two years of the Alaska position that she was in.
She resigned from being governor, didn’t she in Alaska?
Yeah, she tapped out.
She also hasn’t stayed in political issues, passionate about it and wanted to serve. She would still be serving. Coming back to Shirley Temple Black, you’re right that most ambassadors like that who was appointed to that position more because of who they are than what they knew are there no more than 4 to 8 years. When the administration changes, a new guard comes in, it’s like, “I’m not extending her anymore favors because she’s not my person.” The only way to me, she stays in the game is if she demonstrated the ability, passion and she was effective. Twenty-five years of doing that, it is going to spin multiple administrations.
That’s the thing to roll our talk around expertise on this is that, “You could get tapped in to go in and you can go in there.” The question is, can you hang and expand into the person that is gaining knowledge as you go? Using your experience to build a perfect practice and then having the wisdom to say, “I don’t know.” A lot of the great athletes, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods is the one that always gets me to say after he finished the season, he started with a new coach to see if he can improve his stroke in a different way. It’s like, “You had a huge year. What are you doing? Retrying to retool your stroke?” He’s looking for perfect practice. He’s trying to make sure the lean is this way. The body position is this way could you got to keep tuning the physical instrument in athletics.
The same is in politics is you’ve got to tune into what’s there and try to adapt inside that environment. When things are the way they are, it’s hard to maintain a solid truth of the experience. It’s difficult because self-worth, identity and politics get in the way. We’re not pursuing truth, we’re pursuing the win and that allows cheating to take place. It was happening. All of a sudden, it changes quickly. One of the things that’s nice about this episode about Purchasing Truth regarding expertise is we’ve got to move beyond the hope or the faith. We’ve got to move into the implementation of restoring truth and trust from a position of being solid.
You’ve got to get back to there. There are some people on the Republican side that are moving in that direction, going like, “We can’t have the marketer in charge and chief running this. We cannot have the brander-in-chief running this. We’ve got to rebuild and rebuild the party based on some solid principles.” Personal accountability has to go back at the front of the Republican platform in order to make the small republican, the big Republican because right now they’re doing small republican stuff. They are not doing big Republican things. That’s disheartening.
It’s why we have many Republicans are more and more speaking out against the president and advocating for Joe Biden, The Lincoln Project being one. A big organization doing that and making a lot of noise. There’s another group that I read. It’s these three brothers that have created another advocacy and creating ads and videos.
That’s the challenge is that when the truth is hung around hope and faith is great starters, “I have faith and hope in this.” They’re the thing that starts the power of the intention. If we’re not building in or restoring, “Is this person a person of knowledge, experience, humility regarding and has wisdom?” This is the reason why the sentence Donald Trump has no empathy. He doesn’t have empathy because he doesn’t pursue wisdom. In order to pursue wisdom, you have to be humble. In order to be humble, you have to share respect or to share respect you got to be able to stand on the stage and be okay with what your role is, not to be the be-all-end-all. The only person speaking, where are the doctors? They’re in the back. Why are they not out here? That’s not a wise thing to do to be the only person talking.
You talk about hope and faith. It’s one of my mantras in business. I would admit it’s in business and a lot of ways in my life is hope is not a strategy. Hope is not a plan. I’m not saying I never hope for things, but I hope for things that in reality, I have no control over. My point is hope’s not a strategy. If you want a certain outcome to be achieved, you can’t hope. You got to take action and make it happen. That’s how I feel in the business. By the way, I did find it’s called MeidasTouch. This is the three brothers who are doing similar things for The Lincoln Project.
I appreciate this conversation, Tom. Taking out the spin regarding expertise and when you’re looking at something, if you’re somebody that’s reading this blog or letting a little bit of this communication, wisdom come out and go in a direction. I don’t know everything about communication, but the thing that I do know is that I put my 10,000 hours in. I have sat in the room in high conflict mediations. I’ve got some experience and knowledge about this. I’ve studied and got mentored and got some knowledge about some things. Wisdom allows you to have the experience to say, “This is where I have something to offer in reference to the thing that’s not being offered, which is truth.” I would like that back again please in the political environment.
The reason why there’s humor in this is because I’m adjusting my expectations to the environment. I’ve got to contribute to what my role is until my role is, I’ve moved from the stands closer to the front of the court to get on the court. That’s a part of what our wisdom, knowledge and experience gets you. It should get you a shot. You get on the court. You get to run around a little bit and you get to help people a little bit to adjust it. You only get so much of a season that you get on the court and then you turn your ankle. They tap you in, somebody else comes in. They want somebody else because somebody else has greater wisdom, knowledge and experience than you do. You go onto your next role and your next identity and you’ve got to then make some changes there and put your new 10,000 hours in. That’s a part of self-development anyways. Tom, thanks a lot for this. This has been a lot of fun. I’m looking forward to the next one that’s for sure.
Thanks so much, Bill. I’ve enjoyed it.
Thanks.
Important Links:
- MeidasTouch
- The Lincoln Project
- https://www.CNN.com/2020/07/28/tech/facebook-youtube-coronavirus/index.html
- https://En.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Temple
- https://LincolnProject.us/
- https://MeidasTouch.com/
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
