A Seed of Doubt Can Purchase the Truth
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A seed of doubt can purchase the truth. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the right-wing website, Revolve, and how it implied that the FBI planned the January 6th attack. It planted skepticism by posing multiple questions to the readers. In doing so, it leads readers away from knowing whether the accusation is true or not and instead makes you focus on the hypothetical. Didn’t we see this in the early 2000s when the auto industry conspired to put out messaging that planted seeds of doubt into people's minds about electric vehicles, and they managed to kill the budding industry? Join in the conversation and be vigilant regarding doubt and skepticism.
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Bill, we've got something to talk about.
This is a good thing as to how does truth work in reference to the messaging and regarding marketing a message. I want to get a certain point of view that moves out there whether it's a business or it's a political point of view that you want to keep some engagement around. The tools of marketing and branding are important so that the message sticks. Human beings got to get a message to stick and get a person to enlist on that message. It doesn't matter the message just so you can get it to stick. It's unsettling but at least we're facing it the way we face it.
This one is unsettling. I'm going to try to set the table here. I'll try to keep it short. There was an article posted on an admittedly right-wing website called Revolver, which that site called a seismic expose and was carefully worded, they were careful how they say it but they were trying to say that the FBI played a role in the January 6, 2021 attack, meaning a role in orchestrating it and planning it. The article was careful in how it purchased truth. It kept using questions that it would pose to the reader.
That's a strong strategy if you ask a question. Attorneys use that same strategy too in the case of the law. They're going to ask a question to a witness. Even if the witness says, "No," the jury heard the question and that's the thing that's causing doubt and skepticism inside the person. We want the person not to focus on the answer whether it's true or not, we're trying to get them to focus on the hypothetical. It’s very valuable in business and politics to watch out for how our integrity can shift between what is true and what you're trying to get the person to believe or follow, maybe something that they've been hesitant around. With that said, there's more to come. The FBI had a part in it. What kind of part in the word planning is tough? Maybe we might know 1 thing or 2 about what the FBI might want to say about this. Do they have a part in planning? Let's see what happens next because this is big.
This gets unsettling because what the article talks about is many of the indictments of some of the 450 or 500 people who were arrested after the Capitol riot/insurrection name in their indictments an unindicted co-conspirator, somebody who has yet to be charged. They're not naming in that indictment for a particular reason. This article makes the incorrect assumption that an unindicted co-conspirator or that the unindicted co-conspirators across all of these are government agents of the FBI perhaps other agencies. The reality is federal agents may well be installed undercover in some of these groups like The Oath Keepers and The Proud Boys but that does not mean the typical legal language used in indictments that an unindicted co-conspirator is a government agent. This article uses questions carefully where they use say, “If it turns out to be true,” they use an if question. They set the table for doubt by saying that these unindicted co-conspirators might be government agents. If it turns out that. It feeds into the confirmation bias of a reader that's likely to align with their beliefs.
Let's set that one up for the readers language-wise. Let's suppose a person has a belief that there are bad cops or bad FBI people and another person has the belief that FBI is following their legal rights or their legal rules to investigate or be in a plant inside an organization. If you take an example like a cartel or something like that and an FBI person goes into that cartel and as a part of that group, they probably break 1 law or 2 while they're in there with the group so that they can be believable that they are a person that the person says, "This person is a part of us because they broke a crime with us. They're a part of our crime." The person is gathering evidence but also might be breaking crimes in order to gather evidence. The person might not be leading it. They're allowing the other people to take the leadership but they're in there for the "greater good." It gets unsettling because some groups think that they're in the right by the belief they are having. You put an FBI person in there. The deep state is watching us. All of our biases, beliefs and fallacies about the government that is going to take over is true because they put one of their people in our group. It's unsettling because the broader truth is not spoken about. The FBI statement talked about that. It's like, “You don't know the legal ramifications of what we have to go through in order to implant somebody in that group.”
The other thing that happens is because the FBI rightly so does not comment on active investigations or indictments that are going through the justice process, you've got this article making a statement of the FBI, not coming out and denying it.
They can't do it because it's in process. They can't say, "Here's our buddy, Joe. He was there for a few years. What he found out were these seventeen things." I know we haven’t gone to court already yet and we haven't made that in front of the things. Now that we've come out and said that and we defended ourselves, we ruined the court case that we were trying to convict the person that was going to do a bad thing, everything from premeditated vandalism to premeditated bank robberies to premeditated murder. We can't use that because we're trying to protect, market and promote our agency as being good and telling the truth. You can't tell the truth or get people to tell the truth. Nowadays, you almost got to get them into court but if you pollute the minds and the atmosphere with a language of speculation then truth becomes a casualty. Accountability becomes a casualty, too.
This article is a good example of how a seed of doubt started to purchase truth but then it went to a whole another level. This story caught fire. It was published on the website and then it got picked up by Fox News in a big way especially the opinion host like Tucker Carlson. He ran with this thing, took what was a seed of doubt and propagated the story as if it's true to their viewers. He devoted more than twelve minutes to it on his show and made incredible statements. He said FBI operatives were organizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He made that as a statement that they were doing it, which the article said, "If it turns out that some of these unindicted co-conspirators were FBI agents then that would mean they played a role in this." When it gets to Fox News and Tucker Carlson, somehow that question cease to exist at that point.
The speculation starts to get gravity and some groundedness to it. People are saying, "If it turns out to be that." They're going to pose that question as a shiny lure to get somebody that is loyal, that has a bias either on the right side or the left. This is not a right, left thing. This is how do you get people to do something that that they don't know anything about? In the 1990s when we introduced the concept called the designated driver, that wasn't a thing. There wasn't a thing called the designated driver but for the greater good, there was a propagated message. Deliberately propagated throughout media, put in TV shows the message of, "This is what a designated driver is." If you go out with your friends, one of your friends is the one that's driving and they're not going to drink. The other four friends can have as much fun and be plastered as much but they're in the passenger seat. The designated driver is the person that's not drinking. That concept was not a concept in the '80s, whenever it started.
It's in the '70s. Maybe it started to be suggested in the mid-'80s as I remember those times. As I was a young adult coming up to drive in the mid to late '80s, we talked about designated drivers. By the time you got to the '90s, it's a common thing on a television show like Seinfeld, somebody would talk about, "Who's driving? I'm not drinking."
I asked the question on Google, "When did designated driver begin?" It says 1998, which is a little surprising to me.
That seems late to me.
It's the Wikipedia thing. “What is a designated driver? Why is it important?” It launched in late '88. The greater good of the messaging was the truth is that people were dying based on alcohol-related driving accidents. I want to reduce that. How I reduce that is I got to get sober. I cannot go straight at the issue. This is a message for both Democrats and marketing executives alike. This is the same thing. If you are trying to get somebody to do something, trying to confront it straight with facts, does not work.
Do you need to emphasize that point, Bill? People need to pay attention. That's huge.
Every marketer is going to turn over, even the marketing gurus and the in the past will turnover in their grave. Features and benefits are not as valuable as you think they are. You can go in and talk about as many features and benefits as you like but unless you're talking about the most important need of the buyer, they won't overcome it. They're going to have doubt and skepticism about, "Is this feature and benefit going to work for me? Am I just being sold a feature and benefit that won't turn out or I don't even need that feature and benefit?" That's the unsettling part of this process, Tom. If the person's bias or fallacy is knocking them out, all you need is a little message that has a microcosm of truth in it because that's what the initial article said. It says, "FBI may have been in the things." The thing is they were in the Capitol building as plants but that doesn't mean that they were hurting a police officer.
They may have been there. These articles aren't even claiming that they were. By the time it got to Tucker Carlson, it went from a question to what appear to be statements of fact by Tucker Carlson. This is what gets so unsettling. It goes from, "If it turns out that these unindicted co-conspirators were FBI agents then it means this other stuff." Tucker Carlson got through it. He says, "FBI operatives that rioted on January 6, 2021." Another one they captioned at the bottom of the screen as Tucker Carlson was talking read, "Law enforcement officers participated in January 6th, 2021," which to me on its face is they did. They were protecting the Capitol. Law enforcement officers did participate during those things but that's not what Tucker Carlson was implying and talking about. He's saying they participated as active rioters.
I appreciate the lawyers for Fox putting that benign statement underneath. In a court of law, they can say it was written that way to talk about the police officers who were there that were participating in it. They can do that in a court of law because it's so vague. It's not specific but even though, the host is talking about this. The bias and the imprint are important. Tom, you've developed products in the past. If you could put guaranteed underneath the label of a certain product and people say, "It's guaranteed," they sent money back or whatever the slogan is underneath it, it doesn't mean the person's going to take advantage or it's going to be real. It is a boost narrative to the belief that this product or service is going to do what you think it's going to do and what you are hoping it's going to do. The buyer beware, the listener beware and the viewer beware has got to move to the front of our consciousness because we're getting pelted. The thing I've been railing about, I'm holding up my cell phone here is that this thing is a slot machine for a person's dopamine. I am listening for the latest bell and click, things or the latest title. Here, Tucker Carlson, any messaging, or somebody from the left can do similar things. Let's do Andrew Cuomo, "I'm not going anywhere. I'm not leaving. I'm not resigning because of this thing." He endured the cycle whether or not he gets elected the next time around because of that, then there is a problem with it. How do we see, adjust or work with truth?
Here's the thing, Bill. I agree with you that to an extent both sides do this. They're certainly capable of doing it. There are other things that are completely apolitical ala the designated driver campaign that can purchase truth in this way to achieve an end goal. Bill, I don't see the Democrats and other news media that are believed to be more left-leaning doing it very well. They could be purchasing truth much more so to achieve their goals. I don't think they're as good as the right-wing political and opinion news machine. Am I wrong? Is that a bias on my part that I'm missing it?
You're not. I'm going to say something neurologically that's very unsettling. There are messages that are designed to hit the front part of the brain. They have a lot of logic in them. They have a future-thinking piece. There are messages that are designed for the limbic part of the brain. All it cares about is create an emotion based on a long-term habit or belief. Limbic messages are ones that move the body into doubt, skepticism, fight, flight and freeze. This message up here is, "Come into our store. You might get the thing that you need." Once the door is open and that's called the lead line, this is for all of you marketers out there, I want the lead line to hit the front part of the brain logically or it's interesting, innovative or new. The secondary messages are, "Does it create a belief or tap into an existing belief? Does it create enough emotion?" This is why innovations, things that make something extraordinary that could be a game-changer takes a few years to make it to the marketplace. The belief structure of the buyer is not in the place to buy it. It's the weirdest thing ever. Even though you and I can take a moment and rant about the need for truth and the need for integrity not being met about the way, this message is a limbic message. It is less a message just to get the fish on the hook. It is a dog treat to get the dog to roll over. How do I get my pet bird, a macaw, to talk? Give it a treat. It's limbic messaging. The front part of your brain is screaming like, "What the heck is that?"
I can see some parallels in history for years especially with the messaging around electric cars, which in the early 2000s the State of California forced the issue on automakers to make so many cars that were zero emissions by a certain time. GM reluctantly bought into it or at least agreed to it. You created the GM EV1, which was wildly popular with the people that used it but the auto industry conspired to put out messaging that put all sorts of doubt and skepticism into the electric vehicle and they managed to kill it. We talked about a documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car? In 2021, electric cars especially if you're in California but in many states in the union are becoming much more common, not only acceptable but people are realizing there are a lot of benefits of them. As their prices come down, people are going to go to them especially when we in California have over $4 a gallon of gas again.
The various different economics and things that take place in reference to products and services in a capitalist society. Tom, you and I are not going out to buy CDs anymore, VHS tapes. Products come and go. The gasoline car, its time is dwindling. How fast the gasoline car dwindles is going to be how quickly the electric car, the airplane car or the helicopter car, whatever meets the need for transportation, the Jetson vehicle, those things are very interesting stuff.
That's what's important. That's why I mentioned the electric car. It really comes back to marketing and getting the acceptance of it. We mentioned the Ford F-150 that announced that it's going electric. They've done all sorts of research. This was a great marketing demonstration when they had one electric Ford F-150 towing ten double-decker railroad cars full of 42 gasoline F-150s. Marketing messages can be used to purchase truth. It's not necessarily a bad thing in some situations.
Your job is to get your product or service into the marketplace. You're trying to get numbers to show up. You have a marketing piece, a sales piece then a purchase piece. All those things have got to have a streamline to them. My marketing message of this electric truck pulling those other trucks is, "The belief that you had about the strength of an electric car has a new truth to it." The electric truck has strength. That message is going to be accepted by the early adopters. The visionaries are going to go like, "I'll take that because my value set is I want to do something about the environment so I'm going to go this way. I'm interested in that."
Ford F-150 was not playing the environmental card here. They were playing the power of the vehicle because that's what people respond to more or the majority of the market that buys pickup trucks is not concerned as much about the environment as their need for utility and power.
All of a sudden, my creative marketing brain says, "What would it be like if the electric vehicle F-150 and the gasoline vehicle F-150 had a race?" We are competing against ourselves. What's the difference? It's gas and electric.
They should have the pickup truck games or something.
Instead of The Hunger Games, the big OC.
Instead of American Ninja Warrior where you got people going through all these physical obstacles, put the trucks through the paces.
This is how we can make changes. It's an interesting message but they're gasping on their message. That's a part of the problem in our political environment, too. The message can be popular. What happens is that if you don't have a new message and a message of outrage regrettably on the right. There is a message of outrage on the left too as it's not going fast enough to where I believe it should go. We can take a breath and realize that you and I are doing our small part to put a spotlight on the challenges to get the word out and keep the sheep in your own corral. It's a weird way to say it but it is a piece that we're going to continue to explore and go through as truth takes a little bit of a beating. It took a lot of beating over the years and then is amplified through the internet, phone and all the other ways that we're getting information. We got more to talk about, Tom.
Bill, thank you for that. I appreciate it. I hope our readers did too.
Thanks.
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