Gun Sales Stoke Fears: Marketing Success by the Gun Lobby

The Worst Case Scenario That Could Happen After The Presidential Election Results, Part 2

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 16:59:44 GMT

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The Presidential election is right around the corner. With it is the fate of the United States America. What would happen if Joe Biden wins? How about when Donald Trump wins? Picking up from the previous episode’s discussion, Bill Stierle and Tom take us into the second part of the worst-case scenario that could happen depending on the election’s result, particularly between the election day and January 20th 2021. They brainstorm the possible things that could happen and what each side would do or say regarding the results. They also tap into what is going to happen across multiple levels—from national to state.

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Last time, we set up that we would talk about the continuation or the next step in the worst-case scenario, which is what happens between election day and January 20th, 2021, depending on who wins. What's the worst thing that would happen if Joe Biden wins? What's the worst thing that could happen if Donald Trump wins? There is a lot of concern out there among people about this. I'm seeing it, I'm hearing it from people I talked to on both sides, the speculation of what's going to happen if one of the other wins. It would be good to talk through that and figure out what might be the worst-case scenario?

The thing that's nice about this discussion, Tom, is that this is right in my wheelhouse for things that I get called in to do in my professional life, which is there is this mayor or police chief that has this city. During the city council meeting, they have constituents that come in and they're angry because there's an important vote and it doesn't go your way. The constituents are walking in angry, but they're not using great language. The constituents come back and they become angry again. What I do is I plan for these things so that I know not only brainstorm what the person is going to say or do, and what is the worst situation of what they're going to deliver next and not how I'm going to respond logistically.

A lot of times, the police know how to respond logistically. They don't know how to respond language-wise. They don't know what to say or do next. Even though the election is going to teach us something about how divided we are as a nation and how polarized we are, it will teach us something about the numbers of people on both sides. What it will not do is it will not teach us the path of restoration. There's no preparation for restoration, but there's certainly not the language of restoration at the moment. There's the language of being adversarial. If Joe Biden gets less, then you're going to lose your suburbs, “I saved your suburbs for you.” He has evidence for that. He set it up so that housing can't be integrated. Government money can't put in housing in certain neighborhoods.

He's calling, “I saved your suburbs,” and there's this little thing of truth to it, but all you did was divide us even further. You're kicking it down the road that somebody else has to make the hard adult decision later about how do you get a democratic nation to collaborate and cooperate together when you have people that don't see each other and don't interact with each other so they don't know how the separation is going to be. That's a big part.

The main thing is to have a deeper conversation because whether or not we're a nation of peace and fight for that or a nation of war and fight for that, we've got to have a deeper conversation. With all that said, preparation is going to be the key. What do you think might be the worst thing that Donald Trump might say? We'll brainstorm about this because this is where the rubber meets the road. Think of a sentence. He says what and then I’ll give a response to that sentence.

Especially if Donald Trump loses, obviously this is the scenario. What does Donald Trump say if he loses? What would Joe Biden say if he loses? If Donald Trump loses, the concern is he's going to play up his greatest hits of the election was rigged.

The election is rigged. For all those people reading, I'm using a hand gesture as a puppet right now.

I send you some sock puppets. You need real puppets when you do this.

You’ve got to have a sentence to say back to it other than, “No, it wasn't.” That is not an effective sentence, but here's the effective response sentence, “Mr. President, you feel doubtful about fairness and you want to make sure that there is fairness that takes place in the election.” “Yes.” What happened there in that language response is I’ve just made the president accountable. You want to make sure that fairness takes place. Is that correct? He agreed to make fairness take place. “Mr. President, what are the steps are you taking to meet the need for fairness in the election? What steps did you take to make sure that fairness took place?”

His nature is to fall back on uncertainty and say, “I don't know. We're looking at it. We've got people looking at it. We'll see what happens.”

What the election will not do is teach us the path of restoration.

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You’ve got to call them out on doubtful and skeptical, “You feel doubtful and skeptical that your people will be able to find out how to make the election fair and you would like them to research and come up with a plan to make things fair. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

Notice how you're stepping into it, but he's not taking the action to meet the need. He's complaining about the idea of fairness not taking place.

Who's going to be there, Bill, to say this to the president? It's left up to who? The White House Press Corps? Who would step up and do that?

The Press Corps has got go up. Republicans can have good talking points here if they'd like to get back into the game. They can have some great talking points here. The Republicans can say things in a very safe way, “The president is complaining about fairness and I want fairness too as a Republican. It’ll be interesting to see.” They start their off-ramp because then they get to say after the election, “There was some research done and there was fairness in that place. I was able to check into it and there was fairness. I was able to check in because there was no evidence of anything having to do with fairness that wasn't met.”

They need their off-ramp and they need to have a deeper conversation with themselves and be ready for a deeper empathetic, compassionate and powerful statement to take place to deal with the language of marketing and sales. No one is beating him and marketing sales at all still. Rallies are still working. He's still selling the same stuff. It’s all sizzle, there’s no steak. Those poor people, they don't know what's coming in their direction. They have no idea.

They're still being sold this situation that they believe that he's their savior and he's going to win. They haven't even considered what happens if he doesn't win. There's going to be a lot of very angry people who are his base who are showing up to the rallies that he's still doing in the midst of another COVID surge. There's going to be a lot of people who are very unhappy no matter who wins. That's part of the worst-case scenario. People are wondering what people are going to do when Donald Trump loses. If he doesn't accept the results. He's going to fight it if there are states that are close and that there's maybe a legal basis to say, “Were all the votes counted? Was it done properly?”

At some point the worst-case scenario is not what Donald Trump might say, but what Donald Trump will have a very hard time saying, and I don't think it's in his nature. Do you remember in 2000 after the Supreme Court ruled, what did Al Gore do? He went on television and he said, “I disagree with the Supreme Court's decision. I disagree with what's happened here. I accept it.” He gave an address to the nation and he said he accepts the results of the election. My worst-case scenario is Donald Trump doesn't have the maturity and the thought to put America first to do that and concede.

That’s a worst-case scenario. He says the sentence, “I don't concede until every vote is counted.” That's the way a bankruptcy hearing is held. It's long, it's slow. It's drawn out. Everybody is scrapping for a percentage of the dollar they've lost. It's in the courts. It takes forever 1, 2, 3 years. He's been here before about losing. He's lost many times. The thing that he does though is he runs out the clock by positioning anything between a no response to an adversarial response. What that buys him is people getting exhausted and paying to get him to go away so that they can close it. They go like, “I am too rich to care.” This is an investor let's say in a casino. I'm making up a sentence.

“I am too rich care to care if I’m only to get $0.50 or $0.25 on the dollar. I want peace and peace looks like I’ll take $0.25 on the dollar, so I can get this whole situation behind me. Quite frankly, he's a bad investment. It's a bad investment. I got sold on this. I'm ready to cut my losses.” What large wealth allows you to do is go like, “It could have been a lot worse. Now I'm going to get $0.25. At least I'm not getting a penny with every dollar I lost here.” They're walking out of the thing going like, “It took two years, but at least I got this psychology though with a voter is very different than the psychology of an investor.”

The investor can cut and run, the voter can’t. They did their vote. They're stuck with the lost square in their dining room table during Thanksgiving where no one is going to talk about anything political this Thanksgiving, otherwise, the whole thing will go south. It's not people are going to walk on eggshells. What winds up happening is that there's not a healthy conversation about the disappointment or the healthy conversation about the values that are necessary. All the people are talking about is the division. They're not talking about the restoration. It is disheartening because the nation divided needs to become indivisible. The Donald Trump voter, if he loses, has to come to some form of reconciliation about the loss of their vote. The Republicans that's backed him have to come to some resolution.

The president, whether or not he comes to a resolution is not important. What's important is our psychology in dealing with him. That's where it's got to stick as a nation. This is if he loses. If he wins, then the other side has to go through that scenario and that's preparation for, “Worst case scenario, what am I going to say when Donald Trump wins?” How do you be a good loser? He's not shaking hands with Joe Biden.

We got a glimpse of what that might look like at the Town Hall interview when Joe Biden was on with George Stephanopoulos, the same night that Donald Trump was on with Savannah Guthrie. That was supposed to be the second debate that never happened. George Stephanopoulos asked Joe Biden, “What will it say about you if you lose this election?” He says, “He might say I'm not a very good candidate.” That was the probably off the top of his head little thing where it's personal, but then he reflected. He said something I thought powerful. Instead of answering the question, “What would it mean if you lose?” I thought this was pretty astute.

I'm paraphrasing here, “What I hope it does not mean is that we're as divided a nation as Donald Trump would have us believe we are.” There were a couple more things he put in there, but essentially that was the message. I hope it doesn't mean that America essentially is as bad off as Donald Trump would have us believe we are. I thought that was well said, but it doesn't leave us in a happy rosy scenario going forward of restoration. It leaves us in this pit of despair.

What it does mean is that Americans can be promised things. I'm going to be Joe Biden for a second, “What it does mean is that Americans can be sold the promise of things and are left with the empty emptiness of not having that thing delivered that they've been promised. Americans have gotten used to promises being made that have not been fulfilled.” That's more what it means. We’re not as rigorous as we are in our citizenship. We're not paying attention to, “Is this person getting something done?” We're paying attention. “How does this person make me feel?” Either scared or confident. That's what each one of those marketing and sales sentences that Donald Trump gives is, “I am going to scare you. I'm going to make you feel confident. I saved the suburbs. Aren't you glad that I saved the suburbs?”

You’re like, “The suburbs weren't under threat. You saved the suburbs. There's nothing going on.” It's the disconnection that the listener or the follower is not quite fully paying attention to because they're caught with the enthusiasm of an unreal fallacy or bias presented to them and then they're agreeing to it. They're allowing their emotions to go along for the ride. “They were going to put a housing project in my backyard.” They said, “No, they were trying to create some fair housing in the inner city. That's what it was looking for. Something to get the homeless people off the street, to start a transition to somebody, to care for themselves and make it a little bit more affordable so they can work at a low wage and still be able to afford housing.” It's a little upsetting but it's more in alignment with what's happening.

Bill, I know we didn't talk about this and maybe this is premature. Maybe it's a discussion for a whole other episode coming up. If Donald Trump loses the election and eventually accepts the reality, which it probably will be the Republicans that are still in power in the Senate and maybe in the house that helps nudge him off his own off-ramp. Get them there, with their language and how they talk about it. Do you see President Donald Trump attending the inauguration of Joe Biden in that display of peaceful transition of power?

Only if there's a benefit for him to be there.

I don't think it's ever happened before that a president like Jimmy Carter on his way out, like George Herbert Walker on his way out was not at the inauguration of the president that beat them in the election.

A part of his brand is the conflict fighter and the one that gets to be known as the person. He'll get a better media uptick if he doesn't show because they'll cover that he's not showing. Can you imagine if they don't cover that he doesn't show?

No, I can’t imagine that.

No one is going to talk about anything political this Thanksgiving; otherwise, the whole thing will go south.

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The challenge is that he's going to steal the recognition, the respect and the acknowledgment away from Joe Biden at the end and the media is going to take the bait. The problem with a needs-based narrative is you know what the good reason why they do it. The answer is that they can say it in passing and go like, “I'm going to pretend on the media. Watch this,” to get unsettled. Any of you, media people, reading out there, stick it into your read list. It will sound like this, “Former President Donald Trump has chosen not to attend to meet his need for respect and recognition that his need for fairness wasn't met or his need for respect is being met. He's looking to make a statement at this moment where respecting Joe Biden and his willingness to stand up and take the mantle for our nation and our leadership.”

The pivot has got to be clean that the recognition and acknowledgment. We're going to give them a sentence or two of recognition acknowledgment on the way out, but not allow the energy to take away from Joe Biden. That's what has been happening or what happens with a strong mindset of marketing and sales. They can't get off the crack cocaine of being seen and being heard. It's a label, it's a diagnosis. I want the reader to know how important a need is when it hasn't been met in our childhood, while we're growing up in our adulthood. Respect and recognition is something you wheeled and good branding is about that. Do you respect Coca-Cola? Do you respect Pepsi? There are four brands and you respect every one of those brands because they're solid and stable. Nobody has taken on the giant. No one's trying to launch a new soda company. It’s the same as Donald Trump, “No one's going to take me on because I'm big. I have this brand. This brand is unshakeable.” We'll see in the next year to see how shakeable the brand is.

We're talking probably a little bit more about what happens if Donald Trump loses then if Donald Trump wins. What do you think the worst-case scenario is? We only barely touched on it. In the interest of a communications show, we need to try to give a little equal time. Honestly, I have this question mark in my head. What is the worst-case scenario if Donald Trump wins? What Joe Biden could say or do? I guess I don't see him doing that.

I think the worst-case scenario is that people will protest. They will make their voice heard and they'll be the loyal opposition, but the opposition will be more resistant. It won't be as cooperative. The worst thing that's going to happen to the nation is the left becomes less cooperative and willing to agree. They'll start fighting battles where they need to fight battles in the state legislatures. They'll go down the list so that they're making change. There are only certain things that can happen at the national level. The state-level is where a lot of the work is done regarding change. If you want to get change to take place, you do it at the state level with the governors and things like that. The state is standing there going like, “The federal government makes me do it.” The federal government goes, “I can't make you do it.” That's what's happening in Michigan. Gretchen Whitmer is going like, “Make me not do it.” Donald Trump's going, “I'm going to make you do it.” It's like you're fighting that battle and she's taken some punches, but she's learning how to swing back now.

Wasn't that interesting? As you're saying that, it occurred to me that maybe the worst-case scenario, if Donald Trump wins, doesn't come from Joe Biden. The worst-case scenario of Donald Trump wins comes from Donald Trump. He hasn't done it so far. Why do we think he's going to try to unite this nation and bring the two sides together? He's going to continue to further divide us.

As time goes by, there's a certain moment in the time where there's a disdain for the bad boys of the group. The bad boys eventually go away. In the NFL, the Raiders were the bad boys. Right now, they're the Las Vegas Raiders and they're bad-boy image of cheap shots and the way they used to do it. I'm thinking about the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s of the Raiders of going clothes lining guys. They get a penalty and intimidation and stuff like that. That's not a part of their brand because that brand tarnishes pretty good. You still get the people that are interested in the mystique of that brand, but the front office going like, “We have that brand over here, but we're running a clean ship over here and it's a pirate ship, but it's a clean one.”

The worst-case scenario on Donald Trump's side is that if Joe Biden loses, certain groups of people have been mobilizing for over these things will start realizing, “How can I fight with this? How can I gain civic thing?” There's literally going to be more and more of grassroots swinging back to. That's what the Republicans did in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. They grassrooted it. They started working their magic at the local level and they started capturing the hearts, minds, souls. They’re districting their way and start winning the small battles to go the way they needed to. It's a way politics works. You've got to get the person to vote for you, whether what you're offering them is true or not.

The interesting thing is in terms of a campaign, the campaign has not been going well for Donald Trump clearly. He hasn't been able to get the messaging across he wanted because he got Coronavirus. A lot of things have happened in the polls if you believe the polls. There've been a lot of good articles that said the polls are a lot more accurate than people think they are. They even weren't all that inaccurate in 2016 either. That's a whole other discussion, but the point is that things have not been going well for Donald Trump in the election. There are Republican senators who are not up for re-election that are starting to distance themselves from the president, even candidates that are vulnerable. Republican Senate candidates running for re-election are now fearful that them being tied so closely to Donald Trump is hurting them in their home districts.

You've got a lot of Republicans starting to speak out. One of the most notable ones was Republican Ben Sasse from Nebraska in a leaked town hall recording with his constituents. He was talking very negatively about Donald Trump saying that Republicans are preparing for a bloodbath at this election. The interesting thing is that there's a very realistic chance that Republicans like Ben Sasse and others that are left behind to deal with the wake of Donald Trump, the rough seas or whatever you want to call it metaphorically. They're going to be the adults in the room that try to give the President an offer and help push him into the sunset to accept the election and all that. What's more interesting to me is what do those people do if Donald Trump wins? Do they suddenly reverse course and now they're going to be supportive of the President again? The things that some of them are saying right now are pretty hard to come back from.

There's going to be some trouble because a lot of the primary values that used to be underneath the large are Republican fiscal conservative, standing for a constitution, certain values, rule of law, all of those different things. Their promises have become more and more hollow. It gives an opportunity for Democrats to step in and pull some of those values back onto their side. What happens is the Republicans say, “You didn't do those values.” The Democrats could always say they promise those values, but they didn't do those values so your vote wasn't well spent last time. That’s the common political way to talk about it.

The deeper conversation is what does justice look like? What does fairness look like? What does equality look like? Immediately our conversation got deeper quick and all I did was put four words in the root. What does equanimity look like? How do we create fairness on Wall Street and also create fairness on Main Street? What does that look like? The promise of it is that this is what it looks like. This worst-case scenario too looks like we've got to get back to how do you respond to the worst-case scenarios? I take people through charts of this. Here are the ten worst-case scenarios.

What are you going to say or do if this thing shows up? You can't be mad. You've got to have a sentence ready to respond to it because you've practiced it and you can stand there and take it. That is something that's valuable to do that. The way to think about this next time is because we do have another debate coming up. My request is for the readers is to watch and listen for the way that each of the candidates approach it. You'll notice that each candidate is looking to make a point. I hope somebody tells Joe Biden that it's not about policy.

Don't talk about policy ever again between now and the election. You can talk about what respect looks like. You can talk about what integrity looks like. You could talk about what trust looks like. This is what trust looks like to me. It doesn't look like that to him, but it looks like that to me. Here's what consistency looks like. Consistency doesn't look like that. I'm a straight shooter guy. He's mixed messages. He looks like he's a straight shooter guy, but he's not a straight shooter guy. He's a mixed messages guy. Even that little small narrative for Joe Biden to do, “I’m this guy, he's that guy. He sounds like he's a straight shooter guy, but he's a mixed messages guy. Do you want mixed messages guy for the next four years or would you like a straight shooter guy?”

That's a pretty good narrative that would play well because there's been enough experience people have had with his mixed messages on Coronavirus alone that it's obvious to most people.

Watch this one. “He's not flip-flop guy. We used to have a lot of flip-flop guys. Lindsey Graham is more flip-flop guy, but this guy here is a mixed messages guy.” Notice he's literally saying it's like, “It's not that I haven't grown or changed my narrative from 30 years ago to now. That's called maturity. He's not a maturity guy. I'm a maturity guy. He's the responsive guy. He's the reactive guy. Do you want the more reactive guy or do you want the stable guy?”

How brilliant would that be? In one quick statement there, Joe Biden could take the complete wind out of the sails of anybody trying to pin him on something he did in the Senate 30 years ago like the Crime Bill or whatever. Have them focus on what everyone needs now, which is stability, certainty and leadership, all these things that Joe Biden exudes.

You could literally go a step into it. It's like, “I’ll take my lumps for a decision that I made 30 years ago that I didn't have the awareness of the impact and I’ll own that. I'm not going to be flip-flop guy like this guy is that doesn’t take accountability and ownership of it.” All of a sudden it's like, “I’ll take that leader. I'm not taking that leader.” This is a good way to stick this landing. Get some strong mental preparation about what to say that's going to stick, not a policy about a plan. On the third debate, everybody said Hillary Clinton won and she talked about a plan. In the end, people didn't care about a plan in comparison to the guy that was promising the sparkly, sizzly, shiny steak that they could take a bite out. Of course, it wasn't there but they still don't know it.

We need to rush this to the Joe Biden debate prep team.

That's what we're talking about right there. Thanks a lot for providing the support. Let's look forward to next time to see how well they did communication-wise on the stage. Donald Trump can say and do some things to literally pivot and promise a pivot. If he gets elected, “I can promise this and we didn't get it done, but we're in the process of it. It's coming.” He's already doing it, “It's coming. It's going to be over. The thing is coming. I have the thing.”

He definitely is trying to sell that the virus is like, “Turn the corner,” which it hasn't. Bill, thank you.

Thanks, Tom.

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Gun Sales Stoke Fears: Marketing Success by the Gun Lobby

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 11:35:45 GMT

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The gun lobby only wants the best for their biases. They don't want their gun taken away so they're going to cheer on, even the most outrageous of bills. Politicians are actually thinking about militarizing schools and the amount of resources you need to do that is not even doable. Join Bill Stierle as he and Tom give their perspective on the tragic event that happened in Texas. Gun laws and policies need to change and it's up to the politics to do that. Exactly 17,199 deaths that have happened this year were through gun shootings. Something needs to change.

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Watch the episode here

Gun Sales Stoke Fears: Marketing Success by the Gun Lobby

As we are having this session, the nation is in shock and mourning. Shock is the best word for the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There have been roughly 220 mass shootings in the United States in 2022. We are not even through the end of the month. Twenty-one of those has been school shootings. This is dominating the news cycle and the consciousness of everyone in America. Whether you are pro-gun rights or not, everybody is shocked and horrified. I cannot even begin to put proper context on all that. You and I have been talking about this in preparation for this episode. It is a gigantic topic, but there are some things we can talk about around it that would be meaningful in shows like this.

One of the biggest problems in communication is how we have an honest discussion about our emotions when they come up, and our emotions are activated by our needs. What has happened is how you get the need for protection or safety, as well as the need for choice met regarding the gun owner and the people's belief about what choice looks like. The title of the show is Purchasing Truth, which is using language and communication to get your point across to be able to get something to stick to rise above in marketing and sales, to be rising above in the political discourse so that you can get the thing that you are passionate about to be able to stick inside the mindset of the voter or purchaser.

"Politics is about purchasing votes through the activation of beliefs." That is the best quote I can come up with. You are trying to get somebody to vote by activating their belief or bias, so they become a part of your tribe and vote for you. It is important from the First Amendment place to speak up about the difficulty to allow people to say different points of view, and be able to fight for the thing that is best for the nation versus the thing that is best for the individual.

All of a sudden, it is unsettling because one of the common messages is that we are fiercely independent people who get to choose whatever we want to do and get to say what everyone wants to say. It is important for people to say what they need to say because that is how you can become passionate about something.

Until you become passionate, it is how you can start to heal. It is how you can make sense of things in your mind.

There have been roughly 21 mass shootings in the United States in 2022. And, we are not even through the end of May...

As soon as you do not talk about things or as soon as you rely too heavily on rules or no talk or no speech, then you got the Russia shutdown thing that takes place where nobody can speak up because you cannot even get the population to say what it needs to say. All of a sudden, the constriction takes place. It is a challenge to balance being passionate about something that equates to the loss of life. Having an assault rifle being available to the choice of every American is not what the Second Amendment was written for. It says it right in there, "Well-regulated militia," that means the rules are well-regulated. We are not well-regulated. We are not living up to the constitution.

A lot of things have been all over the media since the shooting took place. One of the things that have been amplified is how Texas has a law that allows anyone over eighteen years old to be able to carry a firearm openly in public without even being licensed. I was thinking, "That is regulated?" That was not in alignment with my idea of being well-regulated.

As soon as you split the belief and then activate one part of the belief, which is, "I get the freedom to own a gun on an individual basis." That is not the best way to go about things because that is not well-regulated.

You mentioned politics at the top, and I found it ironic. Here is what we see every time there is one of these shootings. You have the people that want more gun regulation amplifying that message saying, "Now is the time. It is way past the time. We should have done this already." You have those that are in favor of gun owner rights or gun rights in general, saying, "Now is not the time to be political about this. Now is not the time for us to play politics with this issue because everybody is in shock, and the emotions are so raw."

I find that statement ironic because of the mere fact that Ted Cruz did it, as did many people on the right side of the aisle, more Conservatives are saying, "Now is not the time to be political about this." The reality is even those elected officials are saying, "Now is not the time to make this political," in fact, is a political statement. They are making it political by saying that. I found that ironic.

I appreciate what you are saying because that is one way to purchase truth. It is called using shame and guilt as a way to shut down an honest discussion about a policy issue. It's the same as Beto O'Rourke talking to the governor in an open forum and somebody trying to yell at him, "You made this political. You are making this as a political stunt." The answer is that this is a policy problem. It is not a political problem. Politics is about policy. I am talking about policy here as a citizen. If it were a political stunt, then there would be other things going on here, but what is going on here is that this guy up here has a terrible policy that is killing kids.

That is the problem. It is a policy problem. We are talking about a policy problem here, are we not? No, we are trying to mourn the loss of children in this setting and having an open discussion about it. If you are having an open discussion about it, let's talk about changing the policy. Would anybody be willing to stand up here? Can I hear somebody support me on the policy change that none of us here in this room like kids getting killed by assault weapons? Can anybody say, "Vote for this," and the whole room would erupt in applause? The minority holding on to the belief bias that was put in their head by gun advocates go like, "I have been duped too. I do not like this." Anybody that is not applauding now is okay with what just happened here.

We have to admit Beto O'Rourke, at that moment, acts and makes a political stunt out of that because he was clearly out of order for whatever presentation or hearing or meeting was going on there. He disrupted it on purpose to make a point and to get attention. I agree with you, Bill. He could have used certain language that would have purchased that truth away and hijacked that hearing.

He ended up being escorted out by the officers for disrupting the meeting but had the full attention of the media. No longer was the media interested in whatever was going on inside the room. He gave a very impassioned speech answering questions to the media that highlighted how big a problem this was. He accomplished his goal at that moment. He could have done it better.

That would be a different discussion. He purchased the truth about the real discussion. The real discussion is that the people that were mourning while the shooting took place, Beto O'Rourke canceled all of his political events that he had scheduled. He had all this, "I am going to be on this show." He was doing this, and he canceled all of these and flew back to Texas from New York. In contrast, the governor went to a fundraiser the night after. He did not go to the memorial service of the people that got shot. He went to a fundraiser.

Politics is about purchasing votes through the activation of beliefs...

You think about the contrast of characters there. It is like, "I am staying on focus with my voters. I am going to go to this fundraising event instead of going where Beto O'Rourke was. I am going to go to the memorial service." The contrast is that, "How does one lead and one govern?" It is a delight to be in a nation where you and I get to have this conversation, and we get to put it out to the world and something that not every nation or every individual gets from the planet. Our nation provides us with this through the First Amendment.

There are going to be people who could be mad about my point on your point of view, but the alternative turns into all kinds of funny memes. You have seen some comedy pieces come up that we are going like, "What are we left with then?" We are left with somebody trying to white-knuckle tragic events instead of facing and making clean policies about how to prevent tragic events.

I mentioned part of it, the unfortunate cliché, upfront of these situations. People who are in alignment with the Second Amendment, unfettered access to guns, tend to say, "Now is not the time to make this political." When one of these shootings happens and then often says, "We need to be giving our thoughts and prayers to the families that have lost loved ones." While certainly, we all need to do that, and the right thing to do is to be thinking about them. On the one hand of that, that is just a portion of what we should be doing personally. On the side and opposition, they keep calling for more gun rights and gun restrictions.

A lot of memes and cartoons come out. There is one in particular from the StarTribune that I saw. I do not know that it is trying to be funny, but it is trying to eliminate something that we may not be amplified enough. It is certainly, if not amusing, at least shocking enough to get attention. The meme says up the top, "Thoughts and prayers." "Thoughts" on the left, "prayers" on the right.

There is a caricature of a representative in our government. He has a briefcase on the floor beside his feet that says GOP on it. It is clearly intended to be a Republican representative. He is standing there with his eyes closed, holding his hands together in prayer. Also, on the ground next to his briefcase is a newspaper with the headline, "School shooting," on it. You understand what this meme is about.

There are two bubbles, one underneath "thoughts" and one underneath "prayers." The bubbles are coming out from each side of his head like this is this representative's thoughts and prayers. The thought is, "Let's see what is the absolute least I can do on this issue?" It is what is implied. The prayer is, "God, let this blow over soon." They are hunkering down, trying not to do anything but appear sympathetic. Thoughts and prayers go out to people which those people need a lot of support, especially if they have lost someone. I cannot even imagine. As a parent, the most horrific thing you could ever experience in life is to lose a child, especially so violently.

Thoughts and prayers are something that people can do at a distance that is safe. I do not have to fly to Texas. I can have a thought and a prayer towards Texas. I can have a thought and a prayer towards a tsunami killing people in Japan. I can have a thought and a prayer about the Uyghurs in China. I can have a thought and a prayer about the people in Ukraine. There are a lot of thoughts and prayers to go around because I am in a bubble in my place. I am helpless and hopeless about dealing with those bigger things. It means that I care, but I cannot take action about it.

When a politician says it and then does not take a protective and a public service action to change policy, that is when the phrase or the idea of hypocrite comes in. You are saying a thought and prayer, but you are the person that is in the position to prevent that thing, the 17,199 deaths that have happened through shooting in 2022. We are halfway there.

That is just in America?

Yes. Regrettably, the way messaging works is all you have to do is purchase the person's belief and bias to agree with you. The person does not want to change their belief. They do not want to change their bias, but what happens if their belief in bias is wrong? A well-regulated militia is where the truth is. The belief and bias are that the Second Amendment means that any person can own any gun. That is not what the Second Amendment says.

The gun lobby's interpretation of the second amendment is one of the greatest frauds...

Bill, I am thinking back to some past episodes we have done and discussions we have had. I appreciate what you are saying. You are speaking the truth of what the Second Amendment says. To use your own words, at some point, the facts do not matter here. What message is being amplified is, "Americans, you are going to lose your rights." If you give an inch on the constitution, we are no longer America. It is a slippery slope argument. If we put any regulation on guns, then we are betraying the constitution, and this is not America anymore. I am over-exaggerating this a bit. No one is going to listen to a lesson about what the real intent of the Second Amendment is.

They are not going to listen to the lesson because the emotion and the belief have been hijacked a bit. It does not matter the fact that the Conservative Supreme Court of Justice, Warren Burger, said, "The gun lobby's interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest frauds." He said, "I repeat the word fraud on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." He is calling the narrative of the Second Amendment. He said, "The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that the state's Armies and the militia would be maintained for the defense of the state."

The guns are for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen the unfettered right to have any weapon he or she desires. That fact you are reading bounces off the brain of the readers, saying, "No, that is not what it means." They have been marketed and sold that message, like you said, Tom. It is going to bounce off their brain. The truth does not land. The fact that this person is stating what the law is, is being discarded.

That is why a meme like this is important. It amplifies a message. It has us look at a different way. It sinks in. There is another one that I read that was a statement that was being critical of the 50 senators and congress who are Republicans. Even though 90% of Americans want more regulation on firearms to help protect the citizens of the country from gun violence, they are blocked because of the powerful gun lobby.

That is supporting their campaigns. They will not even entertain the idea of passing legislation or even considering legislation that is going to be in alignment with the 90% of Americans that want it. The statement that was made is one that catches your attention. I read those 50 senators care more about protecting embryos than they do 10-year-olds at school.

It's very unsettling. Where does the battle get won here for truth? More importantly, when a person's belief and bias get to be advocated for by the powers that be, and the powers that be are not accountable for the good of the nation, they are only accountable for the values of their constituents at the local level. There are some problems. A local problem is different than a national problem. It is like, "This is a local problem here." What would it be like because there is already counter-programming already taking place in mass media for Sean Hannity getting on and spelling out his plan?

Sean Hannity spelled out a plan about how they could arm the teachers, arm the principals, get retired law enforcement, get the retired military to volunteer to work at the school, and only have one exit going in and going out of a school and militarize a school setting. The numbers are not there to get it done. The ability to run such a program called militarizing or protecting schools from these kinds of situations is so not feasible. It is just as not feasible as putting a border wall for immigrants from one part of the Pacific, all the way to the Atlantic, all the way through to the Gulf of Mexico along the Mexican border.

It is not realistic, cost-effective, or financially viable to do that idea, but that is okay. The person that is listening to it says, "I am in agreement with that bias. My bias is I do not want anybody to take my guns away, so therefore, the environment has to change to me and my bias." Rather than, "The environment does not have to change to your bias, we would want to buy your gun back." The alternative narrative is, "We do not want as many assault rifles to take place."

I heard those messages being amplified by many people on Fox News. The naivety of the argument. Especially our schools here in California are all open air. There is not one entrance into a typical elementary school. There are about twenty different entrances because each classroom is its own separated thing with a door to the outside.

You are going to have twenty volunteers. You are going to be able to get enough volunteers who are willing to carry a gun and stand at the side of a school all day and protect them. It is unrealistic. Are you going to create a border wall around the entire school property? It is not a realistic solution. The idea that you are going to get enough volunteers to do it, so you do not have to pay them, I do not think there are enough retired military or police willing to do that.

The biggest challenge humans have is not having a safe place to talk about putting things into perspective...

It is very challenging. There is a battle for perspective. My request or my creative idea to purchase truth back is for some Democrat that has the courage and languaging skills to promote a bill called the Protect School Children for America Act. It is spelling out a multibillion-dollar project to fund the protection of the schools. Out of the start of 2022, there have been school shootings. That is clear enough to make concerted efforts to protect children. How much is it going to cost? How are you going to run it? Immediately, it will fall apart. It falls apart because the argument is not there, that it is feasible, doable and cost-effective. There are other ways to solve or, at least, take a step toward that problem.

If a Democrat brought that bill forward and then got Republicans to engage in it, the Republicans would eventually abandon the idea because they were going to say, "It costs too much. We cannot afford that." The budget-conscious, fiscally responsible Republicans, which traditionally has been one of their absolute bedrock principles, are not going to want to deficit spend enough to do what it would take to protect all the schools in America. It could amplify that that is not the solution.

You want to create the absurdity of the experience. It makes the promise and the hollowness of, "You are not doing anything other than saying something that will not work." You got to tether out. You and I both have children, and they say nutty things. They say things that do not work. The main thing is not to get into an argument with something that does not work, to pull the thing out of them that does not work and says, "I see that you are using some creativity around that thing," and then, "I wonder how that is going to work." You are practicing good thinking with them.

You are tethering out the illusion and the ability. "You are six years old, and you want to go to the pub? Let's go to the pub. You want to go to the pub?" It is like, "Mom, I want to go to the pub." There is a great short video of a little Irish girl that is six years old that wants to go to the pun. It is a very funny meme, a short video on TikTok. The challenge we have as human beings is that we do not have a safe place to talk about putting things into perspective. How much will it cost to protect every school? How much staffing would you need? How much training would you need? You do not even want to buy crayons for teachers. How are you going to buy guns for teachers?

That is going to eliminate the absurdity of the suggestion. There are so many communication challenges around this issue, Bill. We could spend days on it and talking about it. I appreciate your perspective. What we have been able to accomplish in this episode is at least putting some perspective on some of the challenges and hopefully can convince some people to think about it differently.

Safety, protection, how do you balance that with freedom and choice? How do we deal with the mourning now that is necessary? The action that is required to do something that is going to make a policy change, move beyond thoughts and prayers, and move to change in policy. That is where we got to stick the landing. Change the policy.

It is very much needed. That is painfully obvious.

Thanks, everybody. There is more to come. This is a big issue. It is important to discuss it and get multiple points of view out so that we can find an answer to prevent this tragedy from taking place.

Thanks, Bill.

The Real Motives Of The Buffalo Shooter: Freedom Of Speech And The Grey Areas Of Truth

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 19:00:00 GMT

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A recent tragedy occurred with the suspect now being dubbed as “The Buffalo Shooter.” What were the motives behind this live-streamed attack on civilians? Bill Stierle and Tom dissect the “The Great White Replacement” surrounding the issues and dive deeper into the real motives of “The Buffalo Shooter.” Was it an act bred from a basic need of respect? How does this reflect on our freedom of speech? What are the grey areas of the truth and why is it important for us to talk about them? Get into an insightful conversation with Bill and Tom by tuning in.

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The Real Motives Of The Buffalo Shooter: Freedom Of Speech And The Grey Areas Of Truth

In this episode, we are going to have a little discussion about the motives behind the Buffalo mass shooting. We have to call him suspect at this point. He has been arrested. He's in custody. He was live-streaming this whole thing on social media. I understand, Twitch, which is a gaming social media platform. It was taken down, obviously, but not before he live-streamed it, which is pretty horrific in itself.

He published a 190 pages manifesto or something like that. It's not that hard to see into his motivations, and one of the big ones is the idea or a conspiracy theory of the Great White Replacement. There’s a lot of scary amplification happening. What I think the whole concept is fear. It's fear-based. Isn’t it, Bill?

Fear is the emotion. There is what need of ours is causing the fear. Whenever we talk about motive, Tom, we talked about this on our show is that every behavior, every human action can be summarized into one sentence. Nobody says or does anything unless a need of theirs is being met. They are pursuing a need. The shooter is pursuing the need for identity. With that is the presumed need for getting respect, and with that, the presumed need for being heard. That's why the manifesto comes out the way it does.

It's because, “I need to be heard about how much pain I'm in, and I'm writing about it, and then I'm going to take an action about it. After I do that, I'm going to get recognition and respect because I'm talking about what's painful to me and taking an action towards others to let them carry the amount of pain. I'm in fear. You are going to be in fear too.” It's really hard to hold on to that truth because our brain wants to click on a very simple thought. They are crazy. We want to label and diagnose them but we can't do that. As soon as you label and diagnose them, you are now off the hook but you haven't done anything about the problem.

As soon as you call them a psychopath, you are off the hook. If you haven't done anything about the problem, how are human beings getting hooked or baited to take a violent action to get respect, recognition, and acknowledgment? How are they doing that? We've got to be careful not to let psychological labels fall into this.

Don't let our rational mind take over to try to justify, explain or try to understand it. I don't understand anything. It's a weird thing to say, but understanding is overrated here. I want to do something about the motive, which is how do we, as a nation, get the need for respect met in different ways other than killing other people?

You have to deal with the grey areas of truth.

It's interesting. It's a little different from where I thought you were gone with that but getting their need for respect met though, that need exists as a result of some message that they've heard and started to form a belief around which, in this case, we are saying is the Great Replacement . Not to do it complete justice, unfortunately, but for the sake of time, is this concept that the Jewish community is somehow going to replace us.

The minorities and people that are not like me.

That they are going to replace the majority with and in this case, the majority of being viewed by this guy and we have to admit in reality is White men in this country. There are a lot of different things that they fear being replaced by but one of them is third-world voters coming in and replacing them. It's like, “Does the Jewish community have that much power?” If you think about it rationally, I'm not so sure that it's something they are doing or that they even could do it if they wanted to do it.

This is a funny discussion because you did what I said that people do, which is I'm trying to understand this. It doesn't make any sense to me, and you are exactly right. Our brain walks us down the path, Tom. Thank you very much for doing that. It’s like, “This doesn't make any sense. Why would a woman vote for somebody that doesn't respect women?” It's because it meets the need for validation or even identity of authoritarian men get to tell women what to do. There are women that have the belief that men get to tell women what to do because it's in the scripture and multiple scriptures, not just in Christian but it's also in Islam.

Judaism has its own set of man authority kind of energy in it. We've got to pay attention to what is that thing? Why do people pursue these things? It’s because I don't want to change the way I'm thinking. I don't want to adjust my beliefs. I don't want to lose the stability and the certainty that I had growing up or that my religion gives me. I don't want to lose that. People cling to things that are older and don't fit our ethical, legal or even moral ethics. To take somebody else's choice away doesn't really stand for the thing that we are saying that we stand for.

Interestingly, I went down the same path as what you are talking about. In my own mind, I wasn't trying to explain it to myself or justify it. I was trying to get to what is the root cause of this concept of the Great Replacement because it's being amplified, and people are believing it. I was shocked that people are believing it, although I shouldn't be because it's a message that's getting amplified daily on American television, even by Tucker Carlson.

That's the way to think about it, Tom. I appreciate you circling back to that because it allows us to soberly stare at what Tucker Carlson is doing with his TV show getting eyeballs, ratings, and those kinds of people with those advertisers on there. Also, selling because that's the way that system is built. You are not on the air if you don't have good ratings, then you better say things that are going to get you good ratings because that's the kind of show that you have to get good ratings.

He's amplifying a conspiracy that is whipping up people to fear that result that conspiracy theory will speak toward and then getting them to take action to solve a problem or meet their needs, as you are saying. To meet their needs to solve a problem that doesn't exist is mind-boggling.

What it does is it engages a person's belief structure. It validates them where they are. “This is my identity. I'm losing my identity, therefore I'm losing my country.” Donald Trump easily stepped into that. “You better fight like hell or you are going to lose your country.” The thing that they were fighting for was the idea that they were going to be replaced, and this is our house, and we get to walk through it because we want everybody to know that White people are still in charge.

It's a little unsettling when I say it so flat like that because I'm not honoring how important our needs are as human beings, that my need for respect, your need for respect, and somebody that was in the insurrections need for respect is the same respect. We have different strategies to get them met.

One person might try to do it through money. One person might try to do it through service. One person might do it by marching through the Capitol building to try to stop a belief they think is wrong, and that's still an okay motive. It's not legal, it's not truthful but it's a motive. It’s not giving anybody permission here to do terrible things. I am giving us permission to talk about it openly so that at least we know what the ghosts we are that we are fighting because it's like swinging at something you can't see.

That's a very interesting phrase, “The ghost that we are fighting,” which implies that it's not truthful what you just said. Why is it that more people don't have a need to seek the truth to verify that what is getting them so upset is rooted in fact rather than in what's the opposite?

Freedom of speech means we’ve got to be able to talk about things.

They are going to believe something that's not there. There are two specific reasons. Number one is validation and certainty. When I can believe something, I don't have to question. I don't have to think beyond my Black and White beliefs. I'm okay because this belief has served me. My parents taught me this belief. I'm getting reinforced this belief by Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham. I'm going to be supported by my beliefs people. I don't have to think beyond the belief because the truth is too much work.

It’s because the truth is too much work. It’s unsettling. You have to deal with the gray areas of truth. The gray area of truth is that as soon as you rob somebody of the need for choice, you are robbing your own need for choice because you just lost choice as a thing but you are not, and then you might lose privacy with that because you lost choice. You might lose your ability to make decisions because you lost choice and privacy. Now, you just lost your decisions.

If we made that an excerpt of this episode and put it on social media, people might think you are talking about the draft opinion in the Supreme Court to overturn Jane Roe v Henry Wade because they're equating that decision that at the time of recording this, hasn't come down yet, but we have only had the draft opinion. We are all thinking it's probably going to follow the draft opinion but they are equating this loss of choice over abortion with a lack of privacy on other things. That decision will be a slippery slope for other decisions that we'll lose privacy for people, in general, in our country. You were talking about it in this narrower field and topic but the same thing applies there. I know we didn't intend to take this episode that way.

The perfect question that you asked is, “What's the impact of a messaging like this?” The First Amendment Freedom of Speech, if you put losing the person's choice ahead of the speech, what happens is that you wind up losing speech later because you will lose speech, “I'm not going to be heard.” “Shut up. We know what the rule is. We get to execute you because the rule is like this.” You are taking the constitution, and when you reorder it, it doesn't work as well because the Freedom of Speech is we've got to be able to talk about things in the gray areas, where one person believes this thing and another person believes these things.

If you are not allowed to talk about the gray areas, you get Authoritarian Rule of Law, heavy police states, and communists. The authoritarian moves to the front of the list because I can kill, shoot or lock up anybody I want to. It becomes more the way the country works rather than people getting to say what they want, and we get to talk through the gray areas of being an adult. Not allow the government to be our parent, enforce rules, and give us a twenty-year time out in jail.

Is this whole reason that these needs exist, these feelings exist that rise out of the concept of the Great Replacement, which when you think about it, fits right into the pole Make America Great Again narrative of just people wanting to stay where they are comfortable?

I want to stay in a belief structure that I have lived by, validated, and I think is moral. It’s because I have a few sets of beliefs that are easy for me to follow and because it gives me a sense of identity and autonomy in my own small world. I don't have to think about the impact of my vote on somebody in a major city because my small town is the way I would like to see the world. Therefore, my values need to be over there in that city.

You live where you live, and we want you to live where you live because that allows you to live where you live but you can't influence the life in another part of the United States, which we can start dropping the united now. We call ourselves the States of America. We are just the states. We are not the United States where the States of America. Do you see how dangerous that is?

It's very dangerous, and it seems to me that what's happening with what clearly is a great divide in this country that's getting worse is the majority of Americans are not pursuing a more perfect union. You've got the struggle between those that want to leave things the way they are, and I to suppose, in general, if you are somebody that's experiencing the privilege of being White and/or being in the majority, you are wanting to live it the way it is because you are pretty happy. That's good.

If you are among all the people that are not benefiting from anything like that, you want to enact change. This is a big struggle between keeping things away from they are or even turning the clock back and making them more the way they were. Also, making change and progress to make things more equitable, it seems.

The equitability is tough. It's weird how this is mirroring the 1920s. It's our version of the upset but 100 years later, we are doing the same things that we fought through in the 1920s.

It took us as a country until pretty much the late 1940s to come out of it after a World War and all this conflict.

America allows you to speak your opinion, but it doesn't stand for that.

We sat on the sidelines. It’s weird to watch. World War I was us sitting on the sidelines. The US sat on the sidelines for most of World War I, just like we are sitting on the sidelines with Ukraine. We are doing it in that way, and then it was over sanctions of Germany that caused World War II.

We are doing the same thing to Russia now.

You are drawing the lines the way I'm drawing them. It's a wider view now. There are plenty of people that history will say, “This is not the same.” They are getting trapped and what we are saying is they are trying to figure it out and understand and look to try to make things match but the bigger issue is how do we get respect? How do we get an identity? The Republicans are trying to get an identity. The Democrats are fighting to try to hold on to a certain identity of America. The challenge is that we've got to remember that human beings are simple. We pursue needs, and there are people that are pursuing needs at the expense of other people.

That's common. People do that but if we don't talk about what needs they are trying to get met, we will not be able to dismantle it. We will not be able to reduce the tension. We can't because we are not able to see past right, wrong, good, and bad thinking because that's the way adolescents think. Right, wrong, good or bad, it's not fair unless I take all the marbles. You are going to get people not to want to play the game.

Now, that's important. You get people not wanting to play the game is called a flat middle-class. They don't want to play the game anymore. It's like, “What's the use?” “I will punch the clock and live in this small place. I'm not going to play the game until now, all of a sudden, I'm losing things. I'm pissed, and I'm ready to revolt, get angry,” and all that other stuff because you are taking all the marbles. You are bullying people while you are doing it. You are not figuring out a way to create middle-class equity that can actually cause a pretty strong 100 years of stability.

It seems what Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, who are on the same team, are doing is trying to let everybody know who's to blame for how they are feeling and to get them to be more on their team.

Where we can stick the landing here, Tom, because it's important to keep these things in nice listenable packets is that courage. We need the courage to speak up but also the courage to take the heat. Liz Cheney did that. She tweeted out the quote that you mentioned that the Republicans need to speak out against White supremacy.

That's what she said exactly. Actually, even more than that, the GOP leadership has enabled White nationalism, White Supremacy, and antisemitism. She's calling them out. She is trying to have them look at history. Basically, she says, “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse.” Republican leaders, in particular, she's saying, must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them. She's talking about the Tucker Carlsons and the Donald Trumps of the world and all the people following him or spewing this stuff.

They don't have the courage to stare at the person in place, “America doesn't stand for that. America allows you to speak your opinion but it doesn't stand for that.” Your opinion doesn't get to the move to the front of the list because that's not what we stand for. You can fight for that cause. You can meet because you believe that cause but we got to watch it because that's not what America stands for. We need to have the courage to do that and say, “I can hear your belief that you have a belief that a White person has more rights than other Americans do than a minority does or a person of color does but that's not what we are standing for here. That's not what the United States stands for.”

That kind of level of courage is tough because if I'm saying this same rhetoric that I said in many other countries, I would be in jail. I couldn't say that I couldn't talk against the state, and people don't quite get that. We have a better line than most other nations do. Our line is, “I could talk but I can't act violently against others because there's a loss for that.”

Bill, I appreciate that. Thank you so much for putting a bow on that one and wrapping it up. That's very helpful.

Thanks a lot, Tom. It's great doing this.

Important Links

Great Replacement - Article
https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=dskVval50AE

The Double Standard of Accountability and the Fall of Nobility in America

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 19:00:00 GMT

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One of the biggest challenges faced by our country today is accountability. Be it from celebrities or politicians, there is a range of issues that need to be discussed and dealt with. Bill Stierle and Tom sit down to discuss what it is that creates such conflict and dissonance in the morals and values that we uphold as a nation. Why does a double standard exist? Why are laws enforced for others and excused for some? Listen in for a thought-provoking discussion on nobility and restoration of values in America.

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The Double Standard of Accountability and the Fall of Nobility in America

Bill, there are a lot of things happening in our world both in the US and abroad that are bringing some interesting perspective to how we think, especially in America, about our elected representatives as well as our royalty in America, mostly the Hollywood stars. There are some interesting things to look at and talk about in terms of not only communication but also situational ethics, biases and things like that, which would be useful to talk about. What do you think?

Tom, the biggest challenge that bubbles up in front of us is accountability. How does accountability look or show up? That's important. How do we communicate accountability through the various things that people say and do and with that accountability take that step in the direction that allows us to pick a higher form of integrity and the ability to say something but still be passionate about it and not flame to the place of anger? How do we step into a place of taking the high road with certain situations and stuff and go from there?

The high road is certainly something. It seems to be all too often, the road less traveled. The other aspect is that in America, we seem to hold our TV personalities, actors and actresses more accountable for their actions than we do our elected officials. It seems the elected officials get an off-ramp if they say, "They knew this about me and elected me anyway." That's a license to go on and do whatever that thing is that we find not acceptable and we're not willing to live with as a country if it's an actor.

I appreciate the accountability of celebrities is different than the accountability of politicians. One of the things that we have come through is what happens when you blur the line between a celebrity and a politician? What did Ronald Reagan do? Ronald Reagan did a job of blending those two and was able to transition, build the respect, the recognition, the voice or the point of view that he developed as an actor and brought into the political sphere. It's fine.

Donald Trump did it in his way. He changed the line in which this accountability and respect thing that celebrities, actors and people that are in the public eye. What does it mean? We're seeing that play out. We will know how that plays out with Dr. Mehmet Oz in the upcoming election and see how that's going to work. A lot of times when something bad takes place, how do you put it behind us? I've heard that on several things. "Will Smith got ten years away from the Oscars. He can't present and attend. That's the payment and punishment." They didn't put them in jail but they put him in professional jail.

It has some professional consequences. Quite honestly, this is a good example of America as a whole or the powers that be at least in Hollywood for fear of backlash among potential consumers of their products in Hollywood imposing some consequences on Will Smith. In reality, he's going to pay a very heavy price for his actions. Will he be rehabilitated and come out of this? I don't think this is Pete Rose. He's probably in jail for the rest of his life for betting on baseball. That may be another good example of holding our people accountable.

The high road certainly seems to be, all too often, the road less travelled.

We hold our celebrities as royalty in America. We hold actors and sports figures to a higher level of accountability than we do our elected representatives. It's so strange. Another one is Brian Williams of NBC News. He stretched the truth and embellished an experience while reporting in a war zone. He lost the NBC nightly news anchor position for that. That's before the era of Trumpism and before Donald Trump even decided to run for president.

I remember a relative of mine when I'm having a debate with him saying, "Hopefully, Brian Williams will be back." He should never be back. He lied. That was the big thing he told me. We cannot tolerate that as a country. We ended up electing Donald Trump to be a president who lied habitually. I don't think that's a stretch of the truth but somehow because he was elected, that makes it okay.

It's very troublesome because of our identity politics. Human beings want to root for a team and be on the side. It creates a form of certainty and stability for us. It stabilizes our world. If we go back 100 years and we're sitting in 1922 rather than 2022, the world is in a very precarious place. They were dealing with a pandemic. We're dealing with a pandemic.

They were dealing with World War I. We are dealing with a war that hopefully doesn't escalate into another war on top of the war, which is what happened last time. You don't want a country to collapse because they can't hold themselves together and then they have to fight. That's what human beings do when they look like that they would have no way out.

This is very problematic because we've got to figure out how we can get an off-ramp to get out of the current circumstance that we're in with Ukraine with a nuclear power without tilting it all the way across without a road back. Will Smith is facing a 10-year road back or 5-year at best. Vladimir Putin and Russia are facing a twenty-year road back minimally because how do you re-establish trust unless they turn on the dime against him and the rest of the folks at the top?

All of a sudden, it's like, "Are you going to clean the house or not?" That's what the rest of the world is going to say, "Are you going to clean house with people?" Are London and England going to be accountable for being the money laundering capital of the world? Are they going to be held accountable for laundering Russians' money? Are they going to do it?

Our little topic about nobility here is strange but we've got to figure out the word noble and wrestle with that. Is it noble that Will Smith slapped somebody for someone telling a joke about his wife's hair and therefore, by an extension her medical condition and his respect somehow? A switch got flipped on his protection and he went over to slap somebody.

There are hundreds if not thousands and maybe even one million people in Russia that would say, "It's okay. I hope Vladimir Putin launches a nuclear missile at those Ukrainians." There are one million people that are going to justify that team Russia is okay with that action. We're sitting here going like, "Can we possibly get ahold of our compassionate mind to not go there?"

The problem with the situation with Russia and Ukraine is that we have a very different perspective than the Russian people as a whole because the dissemination of information in Russia is tightly controlled. The average Russian citizen does not have the ability to see things from our perspective outside of Russia looking at Ukraine.

It's a very different situation. They don't see the problem with what Vladimir Putin is doing and that he does need to be removed from power and replaced. That's probably the fastest path to rehabilitation in the world order of things. Russia has defaulted on some of its foreign debt. That is a line that's catastrophic economically for Russia.

What happened to Germany at the end of World War I is that we crushed their economy. That allowed the next level of tyrants to show up. The challenge is when an aggressor starts down that path. A lot of times, people think that having compassion and empathy for Vladimir Putin is an attempt to save or rehabilitate him. That is not the action. The action is how you do the protective use of force.

Compassion gives us an off-ramp. How would have America been different if we arrested Osama bin Laden rather than kill him and brought him to trial? How might have that gone better if we do not take our grievances out by killing people? We take our grievances out through the long arm of the law. We use the protective use of force. We don't shut the person up by killing him. We do it by having a place for him so he does not harm others.

The accountability of celebrities is different than the accountability of politicians.

That's what the protective use of force is. Some people don’t belong in prison and some people should never be let out of prison. Why are we not applying that standard? We don't. We let people out of prison that need to stay there and hold people in prison that don't belong there. What real nobility looks like is to know where that line is.

That's what nobility should stand for, not who's got the biggest pocketbook and the greatest popularity or who has the best bloodline. That's who you give the money to. It's very unsettling because regrettably, our culture hasn't fully wrestled with this thing about respect, recognition, self-worth and identity in reference to the word nobility. It's not based on ethics anymore or values.

It seems there are a lot of situational ethics. We end up holding our American royalty of actors and sports stars to a higher standard than we do our elected representatives. It almost should be the opposite or they're held to similar standards. It's frustrating that it doesn't take place.

All that's left in the media with Will Smith is, "Let's put it behind us. We need to talk about the war in Ukraine. It got knocked out of the news cycle. The slap got knocked off the war in Ukraine. Let's get by that. We've got better things to talk about because we have people dying over here." Some news media are pivoting right away at it. Will Smith is on the slog to get back his status, respect and recognition and rebuild his box office deliverable, which he has lost.

He has lost it. There have been at least two different movie projects that he was proud of that have been canceled. Maybe someday they will come back but he's paying a very heavy price in the court of public opinion.

That's where the concept of cancel culture sits. We're trying to cancel culture instead of it being a noble culture of accountability. Isn't that interesting? I pivoted and gave everybody the off-ramp.

It's a noble culture of accountability. You're saying that taking responsibility and accountability for your actions is a noble thing.

What would it have been like if Will Smith and Chris Rock sat across from him? Some news media try this. Remember the Barbara Walter interviews where people get to say, "You did a bad thing." The person got to come on and say, "I did a bad thing." He's going to love that I'm bringing this up. There's Hugh Grant. There's a list of folks like that. The accountability is that he had to go on a politely called apology tour. He had to go to all the different talk shows to restore it.

I'm sure Will Smith will eventually do the same thing. He's going to have to.

In this culture, the apology tour does not have the same bang for the bucket it used to have. Now it's like, "He's not authentic that he did that thing." Let's do a one-up here. How about O.J. Simpson going on an apology tour? He can't because of the ability to restore that. He got on one Twitter post and said, "I'm back." The universe exploded.

For O.J. Simpson, with the pendulum of wrongdoing and accountability he's being held to swung so far to one side, he couldn't get it to go back.

Murder is a clear thing. Even though Donald Trump said, "I could shoot somebody," that would be the line. Everything up to that line is okay. That's the culture that we're dealing with. Let's turn the dial towards the restoration of respect and integrity. How would that happen? Will Smith sits across from Chris Rock. They have a conversation about what happened between the two of them is endemic to society and how Will Smith's emotions got the best of him. He took an action that affected respect, safety, protection and civil discourse.

There’s definitely a double standard of accountability going on.

If Will Smith and Chris Rock did that if they were willing to get together even with some facilitator or moderator, have that discussion and make it public, it would go a long way toward repairing Will Smith's brand damage that has occurred here and his career. It reminds me of the Barack Obama administration. Do you remember when there was a clash between a police officer and a Harvard professor in Cambridge, Massachusetts?

The president made what I would think is a similar emotional reaction from the podium at The White House calling the actions of the police offers stupid. He used the word, "The officer acted stupidly," or something like that. That ended up being an inappropriate thing to say. What did the president do to repair his brand damage and try to bring restoration to the whole thing? He had the two gentlemen come to The White House and have a discussion together. It's an interesting thing that happened. This was resolved. Everybody understood each other a little better and everybody moved forward.

There's closure. Getting those moments to slow down and having a civil discussion on the backend of a tragic moment can make a big difference. How does our society do that? We don't do it anymore. We let both media biospheres get polluted with new beliefs, biases and opinions. It's a rating machine or a click machine towards engagement of money being spent instead of going, "How do we go into a place of restoration? What does it take to have restoration?"

Isn't that interesting, Bill? I'm coming back to something you said with accountability. Think about the inherent accountability that exists with the Will Smith situation. Will Smith is not going to be able to come out into public, promote any future movie on any late-night talk show or do anything in public without being asked about this incident until he addresses it. There is an accountability that inherently is going to happen whether he wants to do it or not.

If he goes out anywhere in public, he's on any red carpet or whatever it might be that he's in public, he is going to be asked about this incident. He cannot avoid it. Unless he addresses it, that's always going to be hanging out there. That accountability doesn't exist elsewhere though, especially if you think about Mitch McConnell. We're not going to vote on Merrick Garland because this is an election year. We're going to wait for the people to have a say in who should pick the next Supreme Court nominee. The next president will do it.

That worked for him when President Barack Obama was in office but then when President Donald Trump was in office and you have Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying on a much shorter timeframe before an election where there would be a new president, it's like, "This is better for us. We're going to win. Our team wants to win. We're going to fill that spot so we win." There is a lack of accountability for the integrity of what you established as rules here. There are no rules. He gets away with it. That's a very different situation but there's a double standard of accountability going on.

In the political world, it is turned a little bit into, "I'm going to break the rules. Make me accountable." There's very strong energy about that. "I'm going to protect my side no matter what." Loyalty has moved ahead of nobility. It's upsetting. Loyalty has a certain bandwidth. It's important to say, "I'm going to have your back and fight with you unless what?"

It seems loyalty has moved ahead of the rule of law in many cases because you've got lots of high-level administration officials from the Donald Trump administration ignoring subpoenas to testify before Congress. They're saying, "Make me."

Those folks that are doing the make-me sentence are out of integrity not in a place of respect and recognition. One of the things that we can continue the discussion about here is restoration. How do we restore nobility and truth to where it needs to be towards the top of those lists of ethics and values? How do you fight for truth the same way you fight for identity? Let identity and truth sit next to each other rather than saying, "My identity and loyalty are ahead of the truth."

That's where it is. These values are on the scale. Is it the scale of truth or accountability? I wonder if there's a new scale.

The scale has changed. Sportsmanship is, "Our side won. Good luck with that next time." Sportsmanship says, "That's too bad for your side. It did go our way," instead of, "We won." Can you imagine a group of kids going to the other side? The ref makes a bad call and a group of five-year-olds starts screaming and says, "We won." Everybody knows that the ref made a bad call or was biased. What would the parents do? They're outraged but would they do anything? Now, they would be yelling at the kids in a bullying way. We have to lot to do to reorder things like respect and recognition.

To me, that is such an epiphany.

It's almost like the reordering of values. That might be our next episode.

Loyalty has moved ahead of nobility.

Maybe that's something we need to get to here because it does seem that there has been an evolutionary shift in values in America, for sure and maybe to an extent worldwide with certain things. We should talk about what we know best, which is America. It's important that we point that out, highlight it, learn from it and see if there's a communication path forward to have some restoration of the order of values.

This is a great conversation, Tom. This is a good one.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I look forward to the next one.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Russia-Ukraine Invasion: Seeking Out the Truth

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 19:00:00 GMT

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With the rising conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, why is it that the people of Russia don't see the truth? How is Putin controlling the message so comfortably? Fake news has always been a hot topic of discussion because it can amplify people's biases. News media outlets have so much power in today's world. They can shape a nation and its beliefs. Join Bill Stierle as he and Tom go over Ukraine and the truth perspective. They also talk about freedom of speech and how the truth exists, you just have to seek it out. Start believing in what is true today!

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Russia-Ukraine Invasion: Seeking Out the Truth

Bill, I think that as we're preparing for this episode, the phrase we've talked about in the past, truth perspective, resonated and there are several things that, in some ways, are shocking that are making us think about truth perspective and talking about it now on this show. There are maybe some aspects of it that are not so shocking at the same time. I think it's time for a little scary and honesty about truth perspective. What do you think?

I agree, Tom. A lot of times, we start these shows up and we frame the issue, then get to the answer towards the end of the show. I want to start with the answer at the beginning this time if that's okay. I think that having a level of empathy and compassion for the liars might be a good place to start because when somebody is lying about something or somebody is trying to promote an alternative point of view and the listener of that lie doesn't have time or the ability to get out of or check the lie that's being sent to them, they take it as a truth.

I was particularly taken by an interview of Russian citizens on the street where, "What do you think about those Ukrainians? Are you on Vladimir Putin with this?” “They're violent. Those Ukrainians are aggressive. They're Nazis.” It was seven interviews in a row of different Russians talking about how bad and dangerous the Ukrainians were.

I had to slow my brain down because it started becoming defensive and protective of, “That's not the truth.” I had to go, “For these people, it is.” I had to like take a half step back. It's like, “No, this is their truth. Their brains have been imprinted with something like my brain has been imprinted by something.” The importance of this is that your brain can be paid to and buy into any imprint you want to take in.

As you told me about this video, which I hadn't seen, by the way, for our audience, we have this YouTube video . You could go check it out and see these Russian citizens on the street. It's like on-the-street reporting. It's not quite like Jaywalking used to be from Jay Leno's show, but it is a reporter on the street.

Also, similar.

Your brain can be paid to and buy into any input you choose it to take in.

It wasn't a comedy, but it was some reporter going on the street to document the unfiltered impression of these Russian citizens. As you were telling me about that, I'm thinking, "That's happening now?” On the one hand, I was surprised, then I remember news reporting that I saw about the big news at this time as we’re recording this is that Russian forces have pulled back from the outskirts of Kyiv in Ukraine. Ukrainians have either pushed them back, taking it back, whatever you want to say, but Ukrainian forces are now in control of the neighborhoods, the areas around Kyiv.

As they've gone back into there and see how many Ukrainian civilians have died and their bodies are littering the streets. There are some mass graves they've discovered. It seems to be the indiscriminate killing of Ukrainian civilians. Is that a military target? Anyway, the world is seeing these images now. These images are in all the world outside of Russia.

I wonder how much of these images are being broadcast inside a country like China, as well that very much controls the state media that people are watching. I'll come back to an example of that. I'm thinking about how these people are so oblivious when it's so obvious to the rest of the world what's happening here, and then I'm like, “No, it's not that shocking. This is Russia we're talking about. Vladimir Putin controls the state media and the narrative.”

If we had 24/7 or 3 or 5 or 7 stations that were like Fox News, that's what started to happen. There's Fox News and there's more extreme beyond Fox News, the OANs and others.

Newsmax.

All these other verticals are waiting for people with extreme views to be amplified. They have viewership and gravity, not to use a better word than that, but you get this attraction to the belief and the bias that fits what you think is true rather than the pursuit of, “My mind is getting hijacked here a little bit.” It's almost like we need a refresher course for children to question everything, teach them how to find things, and teach them how the internet got some great advantages.

Within a couple of seconds, I was able to pull up that YouTube video of Russians on the street. I was like, "I had that.” I saw that days ago and instantaneously, it was there for me by doing the search. At the same time, all I got to do was change a few keywords and I got a completely different story about how the Ukrainians are aggressive. I'm going to like, “It's not showing itself on the map that way.” It isn't. It's not showing itself.

It is scary, Bill, how people's biases reinforce the things they consume and how their beliefs are formed. For you and me, a generation of people that grew up reading George Orwell's 1984 in high school and learning about controlling all the messaging and all that, it’s easy for us to have the perspective and the belief that it's not a stretch at all that Vladimir Putin's controlling the media and these people believe whatever they're being told. Their information is being suppressed. What is it? Vladimir Putin has forbidden state media from calling it a war in Ukraine and instead of calling it a special military action.

You got to name it the right thing. Everybody was up in arms when Donald Trump said, "That was brilliant what he called it.” He called it that, “We're in there. We're going to be peacekeepers.” Everyone was going like, “Donald Trump, what are you doing? It's brilliant.” What people missed is that it was correct. Donald Trump said something correct. It was brilliant that he messaged people in something that their brains could find acceptable. Do you see how weird that is?

Brilliant is maybe an unfortunate choice of words, but you're right.

It's brilliant from the marketing world because it has stickability to it.

No, I'm in agreement with you, Bill.

People's biases reinforce the things they consume and how their beliefs are formed.

I wanted our audience to get that too.

I think maybe another way to label it would be sinister or evil.

You could do sinister or evil on this one. He tricked his population into the engagement of beliefs that he had laid down for 22 years. That's where the perspective is adjusted.

All Russian citizens have been going way back in the history of our show. In one of the foundational episodes, we talked about the concept of tapping the elephant brain with messages over and over again, then it will stick. Over 22 years of Vladimir Putin being in charge, the same messaging has been reinforced. It reminds me. I haven't done this in quite a while for a number of reasons. Part of it is my business dynamics changing then the pandemic.

I used to travel a lot in Mainland China and spent a lot of time there. You can get CNN International on the TV in pretty much any hotel room in China. However, once in a while, when a certain story comes on, all of a sudden, the TV goes black. At first, I’m like, “Is something wrong with the signals on the TV?” It comes back after whatever story was about to be aired is off.

It's because the state in China is censoring the information that is being broadcast on their television stations. Anything that they deem not in alignment with the narrative that China wants its citizens to be exposed to, they block. You can imagine when that stuff happens. The truth has a hard time coming out.

The reinforced talking points were the thing that was shocking to me with watching the Russian man on the street, women on the street being that the Ukrainians were the aggressors, that they were Nazis. That Ukraine is not a real country. It came out of the person's mouth. I'm going like, “What have they been doing for years?” The agreement was that they could become a real country by giving up their nukes. That was the whole thing, that their sovereignty would be this.

Every country has got to at least have 1 to 5 nukes to prevent themselves from being evaded by a crazy guy. Let alone getting the crazy guy to be in charge of the nukes and he looked like a reasonable guy in the beginning, but now, he's a crazy guy at the end. That brings us into things like term limits and not having somebody to be in charge for their entire life.

Also, then you can go down the rabbit hole of supposedly Vladimir Putin's being elected. However, the elections in Russia are tightly controlled. He is essentially a dictator and authoritarian. Obviously, he controls the messaging and is able to stay in power. Anyway, it's in some ways disheartening but, at the same time, not all that shocking to see how truth suffers in that environment and doesn't see the light of day. What's scary, Bill, some scary honesty here, is that even in the United States, which is a society that has freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, we see messages being broadcast to people that are doing the same thing that's happening to these Russian citizens on the street.

On this show, we have shown clips of comedians like Jordan Klepper and different celebrities and interviewing people on the street and checking their facts, checking their imprinting, checking their beliefs. Samantha Bee is another one that goes out and interviews people and all of her team goes out and asks these questions.

They’re putting together these beliefs and editing it for humor, which creates the separation because it's like, "They're crazy people over there.” It serves their show, but you could see how that easily could be it serves the state to believe. It serves a certain politician to believe this and those beliefs and biases and fallacies, all you got to do is get a saturation of them. The extreme information can land on a person's head that is not true and that's unsettling.

We keep seeing the pendulum of truth getting swung way off-center. There was an article I saw where there was a Donald Trump rally that happened. A US Republican representative from Michigan was so wanting to meet the former President Donald Trump's needs for acknowledgment, recognition and to show him loyalty that she falsely boasted to this crowd of adoring Donald Trump fans.

Ten thousand people were sitting right there.

Truth is there if people want to seek it out.

She said President Donald Trump is the one that ordered the raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Seriously, she said that, “Donald Trump caught Osama bin Laden.” Anybody with a smartphone and Google, for those people that were too young and weren't there, didn't remember seeing the news when it happened, it's very easy to see when that happened, just the date of it and realize, “That was when Barack Obama was President.”

It's not like when it was Barack Obama was President just before Donald Trump took office. No, it was in Obama's first term as President in 2011 or early in 2012. Still, it was before he was reelected. The truth is there if people want to seek it out. To me, that was so shocking that someone would make a claim of something so obvious to disprove.

The term fake news has done great damage to us because fake news is anything that is not in alignment with my bias, my fallacy or my fixed belief. If it's not aligned with it, I get to call it fake news and I get to be right. There are images of news that do and do have a rating of fakeness to it. That's not what the brain does with it. The brain creates doubt and skepticism with it. It creates a feeling of doubt or skepticism about the elements of truth.

It's hard to fight for the truth and go like, “I could see your point of view over there. I can have some compassion and empathy for how your beliefs are sitting there.” The scary honesty that brings bad news early is that belief bias doesn't have evidence around it. We have evidence around those. Those pieces of evidence are accepted. Is it okay to question evidence? Yeah. There are people that go back and retry court cases on evidence and overturn those court cases because the evidence was not collected or there was another piece of evidence that showed that the person wasn't there. It's okay to re-examine things that we agreed upon truth.

It's okay to re-examine it. This episode is not about ignoring our willingness to poke a stick at any form of information that has been fed on the right or the left. It's an encouragement to keep doing that and don't let your brain settle on certain biases and fallacies that need to be adjusted. I think that you had mentioned that there was a researcher that had done some research on Fox News and NBC. That thing is worth talking about now as we're coming through this episode because we have to check in with ourselves.

There was a university study done and some articles came out about it in April 2022. The study was done in September 2020, so a couple of months before the presidential election in the United States. The university study paid a large group of Fox News watchers $15 an hour to watch CNN for seven hours a week during specific times a day. They couldn't cherry-pick different times a day to watch it. They had to watch it at certain times a day and they did this for a month, essentially, four weeks straight.

What they found is that these people that were regular Fox News watchers and had their own beliefs, and biases that were formed by Fox News weren't being shown certain types of information. Fox ends up amplifying certain news and minimizing other news. They said that after watching CNN, after doing this study, they were more likely to believe that people suffer from long COVID, for example. They were more likely to believe that many foreign countries did a better job than the US of controlling the virus.

They were more likely to support voting by mail and less likely to believe that supporters of then candidate Joe Biden were happy when police officers got shot. That, to me, was a very telling one. There were also less likely to say it's more important for the president to focus on containing violent protestors than on the Coronavirus and the last chart or one, they were also a lot less likely to agree that if Joe Biden were elected, we'll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.

You can see a lot of the narratives and messaging that Fox News was feeding their viewers was forming a lot of biases that then when they were required to or incentivized enough by paying them to watch a different information source that the pendulum swings back from that extreme and they're less likely to believe a lot of those. Things that are, I would say, don't have the strongest alignment with truth.

That's the hard part about it. Tom, the reinforcement always brings me back to World War II when Dwight Eisenhower, I believe, came upon the Nazi concentration camp and saw all the deaths and everything. He said, "Photographers, I want hundreds of thousands of pictures. Take pictures of all this stuff.” In the nearby town, he had the military line all the citizens up and march them through the camp so they could see it.

It's like we're creating evidence and people to have firsthand experiences of reality. Not reality kept over here, but reality kept in perspective of this thing. Where is that moment going to take place for not just the Russian citizens that need to march through Mariupol or the outskirts of Kyiv or all those things? Where are you going to get that moment where those people have been indoctrinated into a belief structure?

It doesn't mean that you and I are sitting with 100% of the truth. We're taking those images and we're taking those stories as truth. Now, are those stories being lifted and amplified a certain way? Yeah, but it's so many of the images that are coming out. It's all of these different pieces of evidence that are accumulating that allows our brain to say, “It's happening,” even though we are not seeing it firsthand.

However, to a person that has been propagandized that their beliefs, bias and fallacies have been reinforced, a lot of times, it takes that saturating moment and will these images get through or are they going to be discarded as fake news inside the loyal Russian believer? It's unsettling to say the loyal Russian believers are going to reject those things because the word fake has permeated inside our lexicon as a word that anything that now equals anything that's outside our bias, beliefs and fallacies. That's the scary honesty that we're sitting with it.

Restricting the information is the easiest way to purchase truth.

It is scary, honestly, but I think you're right, Bill. If you look at World War II, we all grew up learning of this history after it's all over. Adolf Hitler was an aggressor and kept taking over other countries, expanding his territory. Ultimately, Japan attacked the United States and brought us into the war. We're fighting back to try to liberate these countries that they've taken over.

I don't think at the time during the war, everybody even understood how bad the extermination of Jews was until the end when it gets revealed. Even we maybe didn't understand the full scope of it. It's scary on the one hand. On the other hand, it's helpful to understand how people's beliefs are formed and restricting the information is the easiest way to purchase truth. That's part of a big problem of what we're facing now with Russia and this Ukraine crisis. The rest of the world can see it where they have a free flow of information. The average Russian citizen is not seeing it.

They aren't and that's the thing too. It's very painful. It's going to be a very painful ten years for the Russian people. Even the oligarchs are calling him a dictator now. There are all the oligarchs who say, “It's not that. He's just a dictator and we're all following the line.” They call them that. Anybody that crosses the person, their life is threatened and/or eliminated. It's that you can't speak truth to power. Now, we have our own problems about people not speaking truth to power but speaking belief talking points to power. We have a different kind of problem, which causes the erosion of truth to take place.

In our next episode, what we could do is how do we create a visionary future where truth gets to be rated and has a point of scale and has a life perspective to it that says, "You're right. It’d be nice if everybody followed what you said,” but that's not a democracy. It's okay that sometimes you got to make a decision and make a mistake, then make another decision and make a mistake, then things get better. That's another way to do it, but you can, as a democracy, work with that. At least there is progress or a willingness to collaborate and cooperate and come up with the best ideas. We are in a very unique time, Tom. That's for sure. Who would have known?

Scary honesty is the right way to think about it.

Tom, thanks a million. Thanks, everybody, for reading. Until the next episode, keep your eyes open for ways you can speak truth to people in a safe way.

Thanks, Bill.

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Defining Freedom from a Patriotic Perspective

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 18:58:21 GMT

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Many words change meaning as time passes. Bill Stierle and Tom choose a word with an oversaturated meaning and focus their discussion on defining freedom. The duo talks about freedom from a patriotic perspective, emphasizing how it slowly veers away from individual rights and privacy. They explain how freedom becomes synonymous with liberty because of setting aside accountability and long-term consequences. Tom also shares how some establishments forced him to pay only using credit cards, opening his eyes to how simple systems can take away one's freedom to make choices.

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Defining Freedom from a Patriotic Perspective

Bill, it’s important that we talk about defining a couple of terms that are being used by different people in different ways depending on their perspectives. The key one is freedom.

I’m glad we’re talking about this. One of the things that’s tough in the world of communication is that we realize that words are made up. We have our definitions of things. People take the different definitions in the way words mean things, and then sometimes, over time, words change their definition. Some of them even lose their meaning. The word neurotic is not even a diagnosis. It’s just a word that’s dangling out there that doesn’t have a solid meaning. Eventually, the word ego might fall into that category because people are using it for about everything.

The word freedom is being used by certain people that are not sure. If we’re talking about freedom, what are those things? Most certainly, we’re struggling with the word liberty. What does that one mean when one group can march on the capital and another person says, “It’s liberty for you to do it, but not liberty for you to break in and hurt somebody else.” That’s not liberty, especially because that’s not the primary rule that we agreed upon, which was the peaceful transfer of power.

I don’t think the average American understands the definition of the word liberty.

We don’t. It’s almost like it’s conditional. Let’s take a look at liberty.

We hear about liberty in our history classes. Everybody learned it in revolutionary times. It is as valid as it ever was. The definition of liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views. It makes sense why the US constitution established certain kinds of freedoms of speech, religion, and other things because liberty was something that the colonists in America had left their homelands for a better way of life. Certainly, oppressive restrictions imposed by authority are a tough one.

It is because we have authority that’s based on a set of religious and moral principles. That is what we’re going to govern everybody from this point of view, but we’re not going to do anything about the societal consequences of those things. How much money will it take? How do we keep from going on? It’s very challenging to be in our time because some of the battles that we fought many years ago are coming back and need to be fought from a perspective. Meanwhile, the person that has been fighting the battle has been entrenched in saying, “We’re going to put the right judges on so we can have it our way. Since you had the right judges to get it your way, we’re going to have the right judges on our side,” and that’s been the movement of things.

The consequence of the word liberty is that when we can’t use liberty with no relationship to freedom because you don’t have freedom if you don’t have liberty. That’s a little problematic. Are we moving more towards that society that looks over your shoulder all the time? If you're not doing anything wrong and you have nothing to worry about except for technical problems, bad angles, appearances, and perspectives of, “This is what it means when you hand it in that thing,” it doesn't. We’ve lost that ability to be compassionate or have the awareness that we’re trying to catch the wrongdoers. Who’s going to be the next group of wrongdoers? Whoever doesn’t fit our view of whatever moralistic thing is that of the person in charge, it’s not necessarily what a human right is. It’s hard.

This is tough. Let’s a couple of the last words of the National Anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner. It says, “Land of the free and home of the brave.” Freedom itself means different things depending on your perspective.

Who’s going to speak for freedom? Who’s going to hold on to that patriotic perspective? That’s the thing that’s upsetting. It’s becoming a patriotic perspective, not a value. I will have the freedom to choose the world the way I want it to choose. We don’t have a wider view of freedom. We’re getting a more narrow view of freedom.

What is it going to be like during The Star-Spangled Banner during a sports game when all the women take a knee? They’re not standing. They’re taking a knee because what are the commentators going to do when all the women take the knee during the National Anthem? It’s going to say, “I have the freedom perspective.”

This is why they’re not going to put that while you’re editing their point of view, then you’re going to choose because you don’t want to worry about the ratings. You don’t want to have the hard discussion about, “You took a group of people’s freedoms away. They don’t get to choose that because you’re setting a new law precedent for that to take place.”

It is upsetting that freedom is only seen from a patriotic perspective instead of one's right to choose.

No one likes to talk about abortion. It’s too dangerous and too hard to discuss because it’s a part of our life. The birth process is all a part of why we’re all here as human beings so it’s hard to talk about. If you got to talk about sex, you have to talk about the biology of it, which is also hard to talk about, or the spirituality of sex because there are a lot of different views. I don’t know if you noticed, but there are a lot of different views about the way people see and use their bodies for intimacy and sexuality. The question then is, how are we going to speak about freedom when we’re limiting it and liberty? We’re not doing those things. We’re in a very challenging position.

People are passionate about this perspective on both sides. The Democrats and the Republicans have the issues they’re looking for freedom on. Freedom doesn’t seem to mean any one thing necessarily. It depends on your perspective.

I’m glad you mentioned that because if the Democrats were talking about freedom while they want the ease in voting and more ability to make choices, they’re better about privacy issues and about, “What am I going to do with my body? I want everybody in charge of their own body,” which is a libertarian thing. For Republicans, they’re like, “I want the freedom to use guns, taxes, immigration, and religion. I like it when an authoritarian makes the decisions for me, but only my type of authoritarian, not your type of authoritarian. I would like a strong father figure that is angry but might not be truthful all the time. I don’t want the other guy that is angry about stuff that I don’t agree with.”

Accountability in the word liberty is the casualty of this discussion. We can’t have a true discussion about the impact because we’re avoiding the long-term consequence. We’ve got to look at the long-term consequence of, “Does the state want to take responsibility for the long-term consequence of a woman who doesn’t want to have a child? Are they going to put a full-out, robust adoption system in place?”

Think about what I said. Are they going to put a robust adoption system in place for children who weren’t aborted but are now alive in the world, and the state will take over because they respect life and they want life to take place? The state is like, “You had sex with somebody you don’t want, but we’ve got a child because we believe that all life is precious. Therefore, we are going to put our money where our mouth is.” That’s one thing that is not taking place.

Generally, those that are advocates of restricting or eliminating abortion are also aligned with not wanting to spend money on social programs to support that child once the child is here in the world, or the mother who needs to care for the child is not providing support for childcare so the mother can work and be a productive member of society. There are all sorts of different things. This gets very complex.

Freedom, from an oppressive law, if that’s your perspective, makes abortion illegal because you believe every life is precious and should come into the world. You would think you’re supportive of taking care of that life or supporting that mother and that child to the full extent possible once they’re here in the world. That doesn’t seem to happen.

What’s going to be a fair price for an adoption? What is the capitalist version of adoption? We’re going to set up businesses that are going to handle the excess people, the 3,500 abortions that happen in Mississippi, for example, per year. They can’t do abortions anymore, so they have 3,500 children. You got to care and feed for them. How much are you going to buy and sell those children for? Look at how crass I am. Did you see how it shifted into buying and selling children? If the state is not going to do it, is capitalism going to do it?

Has anybody seen the profit margin on a human being? It gets weird because the expectation in the mindset of liberty and freedom is that God is going to provide liberty and freedom. The person is going like, “There’s no economics for this.” There’s a good reason why the nation doesn’t have a lot of adoption and orphanages around the nation because we don’t have a lot of orphans. We don’t have a lot of full-term children that are “unwanted.” It’s hard stuff.

We don’t have a social service network and a foster care industry that’s vibrant, loving, caring, and fully supportive or the health services that go with it. We’re in a bit of a bind on this one. It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out, but when we do speak the truth with this and we purchase truth back, this is a gray area for adults. This is not an impulse that we then pray about. How will we face this one and put our social what’s-best-for-the-nation-hat on? It’s a very complex thing. Also, when you think about it, it trickles to all the different choices that we can lose. As our society changes, is the disparity going to continue between the rich people that have access to the system and the poor people that don’t have access to the system?

That’s a very good point. It reminds me of an experience that I had. It comes to this issue of choice in a different way and also of the danger of creating a bigger divide between those that have means and opportunity and those that don’t. Is it okay If I share that with you and our audience?

Yeah. I’m interested in the story. It sounds like you had an experience here.

It is quite difficult to speak about freedom when liberty is limited.

Within 36 hours, I had an experience at two different retail establishments. Both were food service establishments. One was in an airport as I was traveling, and one in my hometown where I went to pay for the food that I was buying with cash, and I was refused. Shockingly, my perspective was, “You don’t take cash?” They said, “No. We only take a debit card or credit card only.” I was like, “Really?” I was shocked.

Especially the one in the airport, the amount I was buying was $19.99. I handed them a $20 bill, and they said, “We don’t accept cash. We can’t make a change.” I was like, “I don’t need the change. I don’t need the penny back. You can have the $20 bill.” They were like, “We don’t accept cash.” They tried to tell me that it’s an airport policy that none of the establishments within the airport accept cash, which I knew was not truthful or wasn’t in alignment with the truth because I had purchased the water I wanted at an establishment earlier and paid cash. They were very happy to accept my cash. It made me annoyed and angry at that time.

I have the means. I have credit cards and debit cards. I could pay that way, but I wanted to use my cash and they wouldn’t accept it. I was very displeased with that, to put it mildly. That was the first time. The second time was in my hometown. I was going to buy what was a rather expensive ice tea at an establishment. It was $4.55.

It’s such a small amount of money, so I was like, “I’ll use some cash.” They wouldn’t accept cash at this restaurant either. They were like, “You have to use a credit or debit card.” I started to get angrier as I saw this cash tip jar on the counter that the serving staff was all too happy to accept a tip in cash. I was so annoyed that they wouldn’t accept cash for my purchase. Do you think I put a tip in the tip jar? No. I did not feel generous in that moment to give them a tip for their service.

I was thinking about this. As a patron or as a person, my choice was taken away for how I wanted to make payment. I started looking at it from a technical perspective. On every printed dollar bill in the United States, there’s a statement that says, “Legal tender for all debts, public and private.” I’m like, “We’re in America. I should be free to pay however I want to pay.”

I’m a business owner too. From that perspective, I’d be like, “However a customer wants to pay us, I will gladly accept their payment whatever method they prefer to pay.” I understand it when you make an online purchase. You can’t stuff cash through the computer, so there are some situations where the way you choose to purchase limits the ways you can pay.

I was trying to put myself in the perspective of somebody who has gone bankrupt or somebody who is down on their luck financially and is homeless. Since they don’t have an address, they may not be able to get a bank account and have a debit card or a cell phone account. A lot of homeless people struggle with a situation where you’ve got to have a permanent address to do certain things.

How would that hurt our society to not allow people to pay with cash? There are people that have cash as their only means of paying for something. This is going to create a bigger divide in this country and only increase the challenges that we face. I got more and more annoyed and enraged with this whole situation. I was ranting to some of my friends saying, “This is America. Unless we’re going to outlaw cash currency period and make everything electronic, then every business should be required to accept cash as a form of payment as long as you’re there in person physically to make a purchase and not phoning it in or doing something on the internet.”

If we do eliminate cash, then we need to provide the ability for all citizens to participate in the economy, and that brings the problem to the belief structure of Americans, which is there’s a group of Americans that do not like the concept of handouts. They think that the government should let everybody figure it out, but not if you’re taking away freedom and liberty from an authoritarian mindset. You can’t do both of those things. It’s hard to do both.

What cash provides is privacy and access for people in poverty to take this piece of tender and buy one meal. To be able to do that, how is the homeless person going to buy a meal when they don’t have cash? They become more dependent upon the generosity of the systems to get themselves out of the situation that they’re in.

Here’s the weird part about it. The more cash is not used by everyone, the more it’s used in the underground world, and that’s called laundering cash. We go through an experience of people in Russia laundering cash from illegal things and banks in London and in the United States where it was like, “You’re laundering cash. I’ll take your cash. It’s Russian money? You can buy this condo in Trump Tower or wherever you want to buy it.”

It’s not just him. It’s the entire system that’s not doing scary honesty about how these points of equity, equality, freedom, and liberty exist. You’ve got to fight for it. What are we going to stand for as a collective group? How are we going to talk about this in a compassionate and empathetic way to go, “I can see you want that.” We got to go for the good of society versus what the minority wants. We need to go towards what society and our world are moving towards.

Liberty is hurt the most when everyone avoids talking about long-term consequences of what you are doing today.

I read something else. This is a quick little thing to add. Cash is not easy for our government to continue to make, especially coins. I read it costs more to make a penny than a penny is worth, and at times, it goes the other way, like a nickel because of the amount of actual nickel metal. A lot of times, a nickel costs $0.08 for the government to make.

Cash isn’t easy, but it is an equalizer in terms of what it should be and the freedom to pay for anything you need to. People talk about moving to a cashless society. I think that is going to be a real challenge to freedom and the ability for many, unfortunately, disadvantaged people in our country to be able to achieve the pursuit of happiness.

Also, let alone the world economy, which is built around the tender physical exchange of something not necessarily in a technologically-integrated world. The press towards that separation without mindful thinking of what it means to bring everybody along is upsetting for all of us.

I like this idea of the cash issue not being a good one to think about and talk about freedom because it is free from politics. As we were talking about, the word freedom is defined in different ways. What does freedom mean to you and me? It depends very much on your perspective and maybe your individual values. It doesn’t have a global definition, but the issue of having cash or not, one more of us can understand the complexities of that positively and negatively.

It’s a politically safe ground to talk through privacy. While I’m doing something privately, I prefer to pay in cash and have it not recorded anywhere.

Do I want that digital footprint of everything that I’ve done to exist? I might not.

If I go into Target with my credit card, everything that I purchased is assigned to that, including my phone number and my email. They’re tracking data, and then they’re putting those advertisements in front of me.

There’s that whole issue of privacy, but I’ll give you an even simpler one that a lot of people can relate to. When I’m going to buy my wife a gift for her birthday, my wife sees all the bills. I don’t have a credit card or a bank account that she doesn’t know or have access to. I like that because I don’t like to pay the bills and she does all that. That’s my benefit.

The tough part is if I want to buy something that’s a surprise for her birthday, I would want to use cash and go pay for something so that there is no trail and there is this element of surprise that’s real when I give it to her. I know people might think, “Only people that are doing nefarious things or not doing things they shouldn’t do would need cash,” and that’s not true at all. Privacy can be on a very practical level like a surprise on someone’s birthday.

Abortion is not in the constitution, and neither is privacy, so we have some problems coming up. A “conservative” or authoritarian person can take a SWOT at that angle of things to crank down on privacy pieces. There are people that say, “Constitution is everything.” That is a written document. It does have some good tenets in it that we want to follow through, but we are also a modern and developing society that has got to wrestle with our nature of how we can be hijacked into losing things like freedom and liberty. We do not know it.

We don’t know that we’re losing freedom, liberty, and accountability. People are not paying for things when they do something wrong because accountability is not evenly distributed throughout society. It’s like, “Who’s got the most money gets to pay for whatever accountability they want to do?” Is that the way this is going?

It could also be the freedom from accountability they might be looking for. That’s a tough one, too. There are so many things to think about and discuss.

This is a rich discussion about it. The thing that I’m hoping the audience will get to is this is what an adult does to wrestle with concepts like this. We get narrowed into this V-shape discussion of right, wrong, good, and bad instead of like, “There are nuances here. What’s best for now? Let’s go that way. What’s best for the group? Maybe that would resort to voting.” We have a lot more to talk about in this area for sure.

I enjoyed this discussion. Thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody.

Understanding Domination Paradigm through the Roe v Wade Leak

Tue, 10 May 2022 15:23:01 GMT

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Politico published a leaked draft ruling of the US Supreme Court that overturns the landmark Roe v Wade decision protecting women's right to abortion. This brings Bill Stierle and Tom's discussion towards the domination paradigm. The two discuss how people of authority tend to overpower others, killing individualism and one's ability to decide for themselves. Bill and Tom talk about how conservatism in the United States is slowly turning into power play and how the domination paradigm applies to other current events, primarily the Russia-Ukraine War.

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Watch the episode here

Understanding Domination Paradigm through the Roe v Wade Leak

We've had an earth-shattering moment that occurred. There's a leaked draft decision from the Supreme Court of the United States that indicates that the court has already voted to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing a woman's right to an abortion. There are so many things that come to mind that our show deals with a lot in terms of communication. It's hard to ignore. I don't know where this is going to go, but let's talk about it.

I appreciate that. When you mentioned it to me, I had already gone to bed so I didn't hear about it. When you were telling me this, I was thinking to myself, "How do you be compassionate and empathetic to both sides of this equation?" A lot of times in communication, we want to bring empathy, care and compassion towards both points of view.

Both points of view are fighting for two very different things. One is allowing an individual to make a choice for themselves as, "This is my body. This is my pregnancy. I don't want to do this pregnancy," for multiple sets of reasons. This other person is saying, "We all got here through this life thing. We value life. We need to pay attention to and engage in life in a healthy way. As soon as you get pregnant that is a divine being that you are bringing into this world. My spirituality says that it has to be protected. That's got to be number one on the list."

Immediately, we've got two different points of view to talk about. You and I do the best we can to talk through difficult, ethical, and moral values on the show. We do our best to bring both points of view, even though our points of view might be skewed in one direction. We do our best to step towards the middle, which is how do you become an empathetic person to a woman now that once enacted, she has to meet her need for choice in a different way by leaving the country or doing something illegal. That's what she's got to do. That is her new choice. The law and the government are not going to support a person making a decision over their own body.

United States values everything except for pregnancy. It's weird for a nation to have such a duality, but it is what it is.

To have a point of clarity, this decision doesn't make abortion illegal countrywide. It was overturned as a constitutional right. Each state can decide on its own. We're returning to the 1960s as it was when the State of New York had it legal. Close to about half the states, as of now, it would be legal. A lot of women who live in the deep south of Texas, Louisiana or Florida are maybe not going to be able to afford to travel to New York, California, or somewhere where they know they can get the care they need and have control over their own lives. There's going to be a financial barrier. You have a job and you can't take a week off to go travel to another state to get this done. It's going to set women back from one perspective for half a century.

I appreciate you putting that into perspective because we like to think that in our modern age, choice is something that we value in the United States, except for pregnancy. It's a weird way for a nation to have duality, but guess what we have in our nation. We have a nation of duality. You win this battle, but the question is, "Do they now lose the war on many other issues?" The firestorm that may start or may not start from this issue is, "Oh, yeah, you're taking choices. Well, I'm showing up to vote because this is something that either I was glad that I went through. If I didn't have that choice my whole life would have been trapped, stuck with or brought in that direction. As a young person, a twenty-year-old, I would have lost my choice and that would have brought my life in a completely different direction."

The hard part about it is for men and their part. We do our best to support women in their decisions, even though we might not agree with their decisions. A lot of times, we supported that sometimes at the expense of our own choices. Many men are in that supportive place. Some men are not in that supportive place. Clearly, at this moment, men are not in the supportive place of going like, "We think we get to have a say on that." We have to see what that bigger impact is going to be. Are women going to come out to vote during the midterms now? There's a little bit of energy around that now, even in the ‘24 election.

I would be very surprised if that wasn't a huge part of the motivation of whoever leaked this document from the Supreme Court because had they not leaked it now at the very beginning of May 2022, this decision would have come out in late June or July from the Supreme Court. That was the expectation. They've got at least 2 to 3 more months for this thing to rally, women and like-minded men around the country, to realize how little control they have over their future unless they come out and vote.

I'm sure that's a huge part of the motivation to whip up the Democrats but women, in general, to take action. It's pretty typical in a midterm-election season like this of 2022 for the party that holds the White House and maybe controls Congress, In this case, it's all three, to not be motivated to come out and vote. The opposition usually turns out in greater numbers. This may very well be a rallying cry that backs that trend.

I would see that as something that we'll have to observe as it unfolds. It's something that we don't know how the nation will go. There are a lot of people that think from their belief structure that this is the way that it should be. This is a moralistic vote on this issue. We're going to let the states do that. Every state gets to have whatever their moralistic decisions inside that state get to be for women's rights. That causes people to move if they can or be suppressed if they can't.

I watched a long interview of the people that have exited Russia and moved to Georgia because they were going like, "I can't live in that country anymore." Many times, the person-in-charge or the authoritarian says, "Good riddance. You don't believe what I do. You don't believe the things I stand-in. We don't want you here anymore because you have wrong thinking. You must be in agreement." They are making up a negative message about the person that has left. Instead of going like, "They have a right here. We need to provide some space for all different people."

There are two different paradigms that sit here. There's a thing called a domination paradigm and a partnership paradigm. I have this little book about choice. There are two different pages. One has one belief in it and another has another belief in it. There's a little paragraph about it. What do you believe? This is a great example of those two different things. There's a partnership paradigm. What does mean to be in partnership with another human being? What does it mean to have a domination paradigm? It means there's a little bit of authority over another person.

Men do their best to support women in their decisions, even though they do not fully agree with them. A lot of times, men provide support at the expense of their own choices.

For example, in the partnership paradigm, there's cooperation with others even if you don't believe in what they believe in. It is a part of the practice. They believe that the value of that relationship, that life matters and that we thrive together in a relationship. It is more cooperative and collaborative. We might disagree, but we're not necessarily going to kill each other. We're not going to be at odds with each other. This cooperation paradigm that sits around partnership can make a big difference.

The domination paradigm sits in a very different place. It lives around authority over another person, “I know what's best and because I know what’s best, I'm making a decision for you." They believe that power and sovereignty are granted to a few in order to create safety and order for all. That's a little bit more like what we're seeing in Russia right now. We're not seeing a cooperative paradigm.

We're seeing a power over, "I'm in charge. I have sovereignty. I get to wipe out this other country or city. All I got to do is wipe out the city because I am safe from the invading hordes. This is one way to make it safe. I get to wipe out that thing and all the people that live in it. I don't care if I rebuild it at all." That mindset asks that as an authoritarian, I'm aware without supervision that our well-being is threatened by self-seeking individualism. America is built on rugged individualism, isn't it?

It is. To me, the domination paradigm is the authoritarian playbook or mantra. Whereas the partnership paradigm, the cooperation is supposed to be a lot more about what America is about. It's very interesting having these opposing views on choice from your book. It's quite something. I appreciate that. There are so many things that come to mind. I have to say empathy is not the first one that comes to mind for me.

No, it doesn't. It's going to get you fired up. I'm not empathizing for all the years that Roe v. Wade has been the law of the land. People who believe that life is sacred and there is a spiritual and a moralistic reason why people should not have an abortion have been suffering for years from their viewpoint. This is something that's wrong. It has been very difficult for them to square choices.

As soon as you say to them, "You're going to lose other choices too." They go, "No, I'm not. It's never going to go that far." It's like, "Didn't you see what just happened to this other group? There are other things that may come in your direction too.” If you allow the domination paradigm to stay in place, it gives the power to the few over the needs of the many. As soon as you start taking votes away, as soon as you start further redlining and doing these other things, it's really hard. You may want to figure out a way to get a healthy version of that for each side gets to win some time rather than, "My way. My decisions," because it is for the greater good of things and it is better than yours. You're not fostering individualism.

It is very hard. It also shines a light on some things that are pretty disheartening about the Supreme Court of the United States that's not supposed to be a politically motivated body. Each of those conservative justices on the court, some more directly than others but in their own way, told the Senate when they were having their confirmation hearings that Roe v. Wade was settled law.

I can't help but see that they lied to the Senate hearings. They lied to those senators to say that they understood that Roe v. Wade is settled law. The most recent one, Amy Coney Barrett said specifically that she has not been brought there as a justice of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. That's not what she is planning to do and not her goal. It's one of the very first things that she is a part of here as a sitting Supreme Court justice. To me, this is open season on court precedent. There's nothing that we can consider being settled law. The Supreme Court is proving that it's as political as any other branch of government.

The domination paradigm lives around having authority over another person. It is the core belief that power and sovereignty are granted to a few to create safety and order for all.

It's very difficult. You and I got into a discussion and brought up slavery as one of those things. Every country’s development, opportunity and regression, the world, America, Hungary and Russia, we're struggling with what the word conservative means. Conservative doesn't mean power over, that the need for the few gets to make decisions over the need for the many. That's not what conservative means, but they're making it mean that.

If I scare this person enough about their safety issues, they will hand over their power to me. You and I have talked many times about how certain forms of media are all about scaring people to vote and give up their power. They don't even know that they're giving up their individualism by voting that way. If you vote this way, you give up your individualism. If you overturn an election, you are giving up your individualism because you're saying one person gets to run the ship for their entire life. You're going to give that up, "It's much stabler that way because then I don't have to talk about difficult issues because my guy is in charge."

There are 76% of Russians right now that believe that Vladimir Putin is doing the right thing because they're fighting a very difficult war over there because the belief and biases are in place that he can do no wrong. Why? Because they kept being told the same thing over and over again. Instead of, "They are a country that was friendly to you that you shared history and families with." There's a lot of death over there now. You don't know about it yet, but you will over the next years. You don't know about it as it is going on. You're going to be pissed, but it's too late then because the person that you love died because you believe this other guy. It's really hard. Americans have these moments of reckoning and this is a good example of a moment of reckoning.

I think it's going to be a big one. This one goes down in history no matter what plays out from this point forward as an absolute watershed moment in one way or another. It has to be. Historians are likening it to the 1857 Dred Scott decision regarding slavery that declared both Black Americans had no rights that a White man was bound to respect and that Congress had no power to prohibit human enslavement in its states and territories. That was only four years or so before the Civil War broke out. This is a serious moment.

This is as big as that. The only thing that's different and this is where we can stick the landing on this particular show is that the slavery piece was economic. The states were going like, "Don't mess with our economy of slavery. Don't mess with our economy."

What is this decision then? It's more moralistic. Is that the idea or is it power over?

There's a power over, "I'm going to create stability around women, I can have the power." This is a long discussion about moralistic and who gets to make the rules. We collectively get to make the rules. There are a lot of things in this nation that we believe collectively one way, but the law is written in the other way. There are a lot of things that the majority do not agree on. Generally, people respect that we can tolerate some of these things. I don't think this one is one that the nation tolerates, but that's because I'm more individualistic and I don't want my choices taken away. I most certainly don't want the choices taken away from women. That is not my thing.

I'm in agreement. It's going to shine a light on a lot of ways that those choices may not exist in other areas. It's just that there hasn't been enough light shined on that. This may be the beginning of the scale tipping in the other direction as we look back on this moment in history. It has been interesting. There are lots of different things to talk about and unpack more as we go forward here with the show.

It's a good discussion. Thanks a million. Thanks, everybody for reading. Feel free to leave comments and let us know what you think.

Thanks, everyone.

Important Links

https://www.Politico.com/News/2022/05/02/Supreme-Court-Abortion-Draft-Opinion-00029473

How Speaking up on Social Media is Making America Stupid

Tue, 19 Apr 2022 06:17:10 GMT

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Is America stupid? That’s the question Bill Stierle and Tom try to answer as they dissect an article by Jonathan Haidt . Yes, more people are now speaking up but on the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of discourse going on. Bill and Tom then also dive deep into how this divisiveness and lack of debate and civil discourse is only amplified by social media. How does our language impact our message? How can we elevate our communication for learning and turn social media into a platform for the exchange of ideas instead of clash?

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How Speaking up on Social Media is Making America Stupid

Bill, there's so much going on in our society here in America, especially about social media. It seems the timing of things is quite interesting. Elon Musk looks like he's on a path to purchasing Twitter. There's a lot of speculation as to what that means. At the same time, a very interesting article in the Atlantic came out from Jonathan Haidt that talks about largely what social media has done to America. There are so many things to discuss here.

There are great topics to start with this that we are going through an extraordinary revolution about communication and how communication is moved. Our limbic brains are not meant to process this amount of information all at once all the time. It's not meant to do this rate of things. Flipping through whether it's TikTok or little videos that you're watching or if you're flipping through Tinder for dates for God’s sake, it's too much choice to process. It affects a primary need of ours as human beings’ stability that is based on a healthy choice.

It's the same as food. How many different kinds of choices? I can drive down a street right down here near my block. I will never get to eat at every one of these different places. There are five different pizza shops. I got to pick one and then I stick with it or do I go with a brand because it delivers? It's tough for us as human beings. I'm glad you brought up the Elon Musk thing because that one has to do with how that is going to impact. If he's in charge of communication, what will he do? What influence will he have on that company in how they communicate? Different people think he's going to do different things on it. All of a sudden, we're into tribalism again.

That is the thing that I see, not just reading these articles like the Jonathan Haidt article on The Atlantic which is getting a huge amount of traction and attention. This isn't just because he's on a PR tour. That always helps but this article has gotten more reads and shares than anything on The Atlantic in a very long time. It struck a nerve.

Social media very clearly is giving people a place where it's feeding people's biases and they more easily find people that reinforce their beliefs without challenging them. He talks about America becoming more stupid because of this, which is a very interesting choice of words because we're not fostering any civil discourse or debate to learn.

It's more of a team sport cheering on and trash-talking each other on the other side oversimplifying it to an extent. I was shocked. We have someone on Facebook, which you and I both know and are connected with on social media, posting a question about the Elon Musk thing. “Do you think this is a good thing that a billionaire would buy this platform or not?” It’s an open-ended question and he did not expect the tsunami of comments but the comments were very much for or against.

It was very black and white thinking. There wasn't any civil. Any is too extreme. There was a very limited civil discourse and debate. More opinions like either praising Donald Trump that he's going to save the platform or vilifying him that he's going to destroy it. None of the people commenting truly have any knowledge to know one way or the other what Elon Musk is thinking. It's disheartening to see that there's a lack of that civil discourse and I hesitate to use the word and you may put me in the penalty box for this one, Bill but intelligent discussion. I don't know if that's the right word to use.

I appreciate you using the word intelligent at this point because it's an interesting word. It goes right in the face of the three world perspectives that human beings have got to get ahold of. We do have certain biases that cause us to be stable. We think that we're intelligent with our bias because we can validate the bias. We can think we're intelligent because we can validate the fallacy. That's number two.

Number three, we can reinforce the bias and the fallacy to generate a stable belief with no evidence. Why? We just know it's so. The word bias, fallacy and our limiting beliefs, people don't like to poke at. They don't because it causes us to question our reality, as well as what we stand for. It's easier to stand and support that person that's confident and wrong rather than to say, “Maybe this person is not telling me the truth.” That is the wedge that an authoritarian, a fascist or a leader is trying to get the country or a company to go in a direction that they want. With that type of communication, all it's doing is reinforcing where the person is, not trying to engage what's best.

This may be happening in many ways all over the world but I'm not going to comment on that because I don't have enough experience of people's views in other countries. I'm seeing more of what's happening here in the United States of America. It seems that people are not interested to learn the truth. They seem that they're more interested in or comfortable taking a position on something, digging in their heels and being like, “I'm with that guy. I'm on his team. This is my opinion. Everyone else is wrong and I'm right.” They're not interested in having a discussion to learn. Is this true or not?

It’s disheartening to see that there’s a lack of that civil discourse and a certain level of thoughtful and intelligent discussion.

They want simplicity and create pockets of certainty. All of a sudden, I'm having flashbacks here. Let’s say I go into a different state or city and I say the following sentence. “I grew up in Florida.” “You're one of those Florida men.” “I live in California for over 30 years.” “You're one of those California people.” “I went to college in Kansas.” "You're from Kansas.” I gave three different locations and it immediately activated inside your brain some supposed evidence about the way I think. All of a sudden, what I got to do is stick something on there.

I vacationed in Bali. What does that mean? I scraped together some nickels, flew there and had my birthday. Do you see what I mean? It's either inside people’s worldview, not inside their worldview or has gained a little bit of information about so what happens is they are ready to put me in a box. “Florida man, California man, Kansas City man, a vacationer in Bali, he must be rich.” We have no control of the narrative.

The only way to get control of the narrative is to come back to a base language of speaking from our values, which are things like fairness or what does consideration, cooperation and mutual respect look like? How can we gain equity here? All of a sudden, with all of those terms that I said, the conversation changed. It's like, “He's interested in what I'm interested in. I'm interested in fairness.”

I've obliterated time and space by changing my word choice. What's fun about doing this show is that we're trying to get people to know choosing a language shift and a word choice. If a company wants to focus on efficiency because they haven't been efficient very much to save a couple of dollars, that might be a common value that the company chooses to go after.

All of a sudden, things start to go better because they're paying attention to a value that they can all stand by. You can't get there from biases, fallacies and limiting beliefs, by using labels and diagnoses or from criticism, defensiveness, contempt and withdrawal. Our society is in that other tragic language place. What's so nice about the article is it goes into that a little bit.

It highlights the challenge of modern social media. It is a challenging space. It is not serving as much as the free exchange of ideas and this debate. It is more of just a place for people to hang out with people that support things you already believe. It's not meant to challenge what many of us are thinking or to help us learn from each other. That's not what the algorithms are reinforced to do.

It's reinforced to either stoke your fears about something or your beliefs about something. They don't feed you things that intentionally challenge your view. Bill, at one point, I forgot if we talked about this in an episode or you and I talked about it but there was this study done where they took a significant number of FOX viewers and paid them to watch CNN. As people were forced because they were being paid and that motivated them to be willing to do what was asked of them, they viewed CNN for some time. I'm talking like certain hours a day for weeks.

The thoughts were challenged. They were forced to be exposed to other messages and it changed some of their thinking because they weren't just sitting in this place of team reinforcement of messages. Nothing is forcing people to do that. If we're not curious to learn, this is why Jonathan Haidt says that America over the years has gotten more stupid. Drawing a parallel to the rise of social media platforms and doing this, it's scary. To me, it also explains why.

What happened in Washington, DC on the January 6th Committee on the insurrection is that Kevin McCarthy is the House Minority Leader, the number one Republican in the house. He has repeatedly said that he never thought about asking Donald Trump to resign and all those sorts of things. He specifically has come out making statements himself verbally and in writing that he didn't do certain things.

He didn't talk to Donald Trump about this but didn't say to other Republicans, “Enough is enough. We're not going to follow Donald Trump anymore. We need to push him out of the party.” A recording comes out that is a fact. He didn't challenge. He said that it was a fake tape. Nobody seems to be caring as much as you would expect that we have proof.

The only way to get control of the narrative is to come back to a base language of speaking from our values.

Even he, when asked about it, quickly flexes it and puts more attention on the Southern border crisis pivoting, which as a communication tactic may be good for him but it's amazing even when we have facts and proof, it doesn't seem to get people's attention as much as what gets their attention or things that reinforce their beliefs, which social media is doing.

The new narrative is that if you don't own what you said, then you leave it to others to interpret. A reporter one time when a person goes into a deflective sentence says, “Lions, tigers and bears are also coming across the border. We got to put a mode up to prevent the alligators from coming out over the border. I'm glad you and the senators are down here to keep alligators from coming across the border and create extraordinary nonsense to put a spotlight on the craziness of the distraction language.” I love that.

That is my funny communication self talking but the most powerful way to do it is to go, “You are scared of immigrants. Your party is interested in not letting any more immigrants come in here. You don't want any more immigrants to come into the country. I wonder what's going to happen to our workforce because of your choice about keeping immigrants. More Americans are going to have to do lower-wage jobs. Is that what you're looking for?”

Can you imagine if a reporter attempted that?

Go like, "It's good because then you can suppress the wages and keep the minimum wage down so people can’t make a living here. You could choose to do this and we don't have a steady flow of immigrants that want the opportunity of being an American and work at a lower wage job. It seems like you want to cut out the workforce that's coming in to help certain companies. You're not interested in the new workforce. You want Americans to do lower pay jobs and keep that lower. Is that what you're asking for? That's why you want a wall up? That's what it does.”

This is the reporter getting in the game of challenge. Why cable news is exploded is because regular news people are just reporting what the person is saying, not calling the person to task about what they're saying. When you said the word intelligence, that's what's happening. The person is reinforcing beliefs and biases and that's what all the politician is doing. There is a crisis on the border as if there's a huge crisis.

There is a problem down there. I'm not naive and have rose-colored glasses. There are problems when you either constrict immigration or work with the process of people coming and healthily going across the border. There is a big problem with demonizing immigrants. We're in a very challenging situation because of the way things are being communicated.

That is the point, Bill. Not only does there seem to be a lack of curiosity, in general, among our society to seek the truth or a lack of curiosity to seek it or expand your thinking on things, consider their perspectives and arrive at what you believe is true. We see this in social media. Social media is not helping it because it plays into our biases and beliefs. It amplifies them and gets people more enraged because that keeps people's attention on social media.

They want more eyeballs to stay in the app and spend more time. They don't go to other places. How do you do that? You reinforce your beliefs. You either feel comfortable or get more enraged and all these sorts of things. This whole Kevin McCarthy thing is so interesting to me because it was a bombshell.

We're getting to a place where integrity may be a word that ends up needing to get removed from the English dictionary because politician like this is not being held to account for the things that they say. They're not being held to be responsible for having integrity. It's like, “It doesn't matter.” He said this thing back on January 6th, 7th or 8th, 2021 and it's recorded. We can all hear it. He's been saying something very different ever since. It shows you that he’s not interested in being accountable for anything. He's interested in whatever he needs to do to get more people to be on his side at any given moment, leaning whichever way the wind blows.

Even when we have actual fact and prove it doesn't seem to get people's attention as much as what gets their attention or things that reinforce their beliefs, which social media is doing.

The word accountable falls away because of loyalty to a party or team like, “This is the brand I'm fighting for and this is where it's sticking. I don't want to shift.” The Republicans had a chance to keep their party alive. The chance that they had was to let Donald Trump know that he didn't have the votes to overcome. “You're going to be impeached. There's nothing I can do about it. You've pissed off enough of the Republicans. There's enough walking across the line. I can't hold it together. You've got to resign or you're going to get thrown out. Do you want to get thrown out or would you rather just resign?” Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy never had the courage to deliver that message and say, “We don't have the votes.”

Donald Trump would say, “Who? I'll call every one of them and ruin every one of them.” They didn't keep their lists tight. They needed to have it be a number that was too big for him to overcome. He would have fallen like a star that shoot meteorite and burned up in the atmosphere but they didn't take that course. They said, "It's going to fade naturally. I want to keep my peeps together and stay after the muckety-muck of overtly gerrymandering and changing the voting rules.”

Immediately it's going like, “As part of America, we're not supposed to be doing that.” It's almost like the slingshot to go back to having people standing for that next set of values, whether it's mutual respect and being able to have healthy relationships with Republicans and Democrats together. Newt Gingrich in 1994 when the Republicans were coming discouraged people from moving to DC because then their families would have gotten to know each other like the wives of each party and the families. It would humanize the other side. “They're the same as us.” No, he's the first person that started the process of the separation between the US.

Trying to keep the teams separate and not getting to know each other, not having relationships, mutual understanding and respect.

He disrupted the social ties and all of a sudden, it's us versus them, instead of what a collaborative experience looked like. You've got to be able to stay in a relationship and go, "That was a good thing. I don't agree with it but the two wives like each other. Sometimes I'm going to vote with them and sometimes I'm not going to vote with them.” That's the thing that's challenging and problematic.

There's a lot to talk about in this area. One of the things we can pull a thread on next time is how you restore accountability in the process and how to step into accountability in a new way with the language of compassion and empathy. What does that do when you ask somebody, “I'd like mutual respect between the two of us?” You have to have a safe, vibrant and intelligent discussion about what respect would look like because screaming at each other sure isn't going to get us there.

I'd like to continue that discussion, Bill. It ties in to not only each of us individually with the people we interact with but also, it comes back to this whole question of social media, Twitter, Elon Musk and what happens with that type of platform going forward. It all relates to our government and how we are going to hold our leaders accountable for being truthful and all that. Thanks so much, Bill.

Thanks, everybody.

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Jonathan Haidt - Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

Why Trump is Better than Putin with Making Marketing Messages Stick

Tue, 29 Mar 2022 07:00:02 GMT

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Marketing your message as a politician is key. This is the reason why Donald Trump was able to get 74 million people to vote for him. Trump knows his message and he's been refining it through every rally. Whether you like it or not, Trump is better at making messages stick than Putin. Join Bill Stierle as he and Tom talk about brand messaging in politics. They go through the Russian invasion of Ukraine and how Putin's narrative differs from Trump's. Learn how Trump crafts his messaging and how to stand up to it.

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Watch the episode here

Why Trump is Better than Putin with Making Marketing Messages Stick

Bill, there is an awful lot going on in the world, especially with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. From a communications perspective, it's very interesting to see the narrative that is being fed to the Russian people on Russian state TV as different from what the rest of the world is seeing. There's a very stark difference between the two. Russian state TV has been ordered they can't call it a war. Journalists are limited in how they can refer to it. They have to call it this special military action unless the state approves of some other narratives.

There's a big difference between most of the rest of the world, certainly the United States, with the freedom of the press. There was this interesting moment that we saw on Russian state TV live broadcast. A worker at that station was standing up and holding a sign in protest saying, "Stop the war. Don't believe the propaganda. The state is lying." I'm paraphrasing but that's what was said. That woman has been arrested but she posted a video about it before doing this protest. This was planned. It's an interesting departure point to talk about communication in this context.

Tom, it's a great example of how we create an impact in communication. Here's a protestor that brings up a sign and is able to get her message out to people that are not getting one side of a message. In America, we get two sides of a message or a counter side to the message. What winds up happening is it's the buyer beware. It's okay for half-truths, lies, partial truths, and perspective truths to be sold so the buyer needs to be aware that that's what it is.

In a controlled media setting, there's one form of truth. You're not allowing the listeners' ears to move too far away from the truth that you're putting in front of them. You're keeping the fence around the cattle, sheep, goats, or whatever animal you want to put in there. All you've got to do is corral those people's ears by whatever barking dog you want to put in there. There are different kinds of dogs, scare tactics, prods, electric shocks, or 3 to 15-year prison sentences for speaking up. Those are all containment items getting canceled as containing things.

You better not say something a little bit controversial because it's going to affect your income. Ask Colin Kaepernick about this one. If you say something, you're trying to figure out what's the best way to use your ability to speak up as an American and be an advocate for this thing regarding police violence. That's the challenge we have in an open society versus Russia in a closed society. Both of them are controlling the limbic brain differently.

It's a weird way to say it. We have this elephant at the back of our brains. We have a little man at the top that's a writer. The messages are coming in. The writer gets confused and the elephant sits down into what they already believe, or the writer or the elephant gets scared about whatever the latest barking dog is. The elephants cannot herd together to do a stampede because you're picking different energies off one at a time. A little bit of what we have as a problem in communication is whatever the latest barking dog is. How long is that barking dog going to last? It's tough.

In America, you get two sides to a message. Whereas in a controlled media setting, there's only one form of truth.

It is very troubling. In Russia, it's reported that the internet has been clamped down. There has been this order released to all the news outlets about how they can and cannot talk about what's happening in Ukraine. A lot of the social media platforms like Instagram have been shut down in Russia. The lines of communication have been shut off, most of the normal ones.

What we're hearing is that aside from somebody who has access like an employee of Russian state TV getting up and doing something in a live broadcast that no one can stop her from doing for a moment, for 10 or 15 seconds, before somebody drags her off the set. The only other way that we have been hearing or what has been reported as messages that are getting through is through direct text messages from people outside Russia to people inside Russia letting them know what's happening out here, but that's not a widely broadcast means of communication.

It's very difficult to get that to spread out. How big is your text list? 100, 200, 1,000 or 3,000 people receive your text. I have a wonderful marketer. She keeps texting me about the latest program that she does. I know that I'm 1 of 10,000 people at least because that's the focus that she got herself into early on. With all that said, it's the activation of bias to see what we already believe to be true. I'm only seeing what I already believe to be true.

Over the years, Vladimir Putin has been doing a brilliant job of keeping his message, "Europe wants this. The enemies are in the West. Here's a story that proves that point of view. Here's another story that proves that point of view." In bias, there's not much nuance. There's like, "I have a clear enemy over there and a clear hero on my side. I'm in the right because the West is going to attack us."

Meanwhile, the West is doing its best to live by treaties. I'm very clear about when America has gone across those lines too, and has made their set of mistakes and things, and has paid different kinds of consequences that Russia's style is paying for. That is a part of the bias and the experience that I have, that you have, and that the United States has about right, wrong, good and bad.

We struggle with our set of biases. What's the casualty here? The casualty is things like open-mindedness, flexibility, creativity, innovation and change. Those are all the casualties of a Vladimir Putin-style narrative. Donald Trump is better than Vladimir Putin at this because he's using messaging and those kinds of barking dogs to control his thinkers into believing things that aren't fully true. By doing that and by staying at that message that he perceives as a winning formula for him or his Republican Party, they have to be fed that bias.

Over the years, they have been funneling themselves for their objectives. The only problem is their objectives are against some very primary values called cooperation, collaboration, and the ability to make a good business deal and both sides win. They are not in that space. One way to think about it is that Donald Trump is on one side of this narrative and Vladimir Putin is on the other side. They're both trying to win the messaging war.

That's an interesting thought. Donald Trump at one point called Vladimir Putin a genius and got a lot of attention for that. I would argue that Donald Trump is much more brilliant and skilled at marketing and communication in getting his message out and his sheep to follow him than Vladimir Putin is. Vladimir Putin has certain controls and mechanisms that Donald Trump doesn't have in America. Vladimir Putin has the ability to pull these levers of communication and require state media to report the story he wants them to, to express the bias, and to certainly prevent any counter messages from being communicated officially.

Officially, the control person has to work within certain limitations. A freedom person like Donald Trump has to work within situations and continue to step across the line to see how far they can get a hold of as Donald Trump does. Vladimir Putin is doing the same thing. He's stepping across the line to see how far he can go. He's 20 miles from the Polish border.

All he needed to do is get one of his planes and say, "I was bombing this thing. Your guys came across to get me." It’s not, "My guys did this." Whatever happens on the border with Poland is that incursion, "What are you going to do? Now what?" Bill Maher said one time, "Make me. I'm a liar. Make me have integrity, ethics, morals and values. I'm going to do whatever I want and see it." The guardrails on good behavior and the adult behavior at those levels are not as strong as they used to be years ago.

Vladimir Putin has very few guardrails that are going to impact him. Certainly, the world community is sanctioning him and speaking out against him, but he keeps all that noise outside of his borders at least to a great extent. If at least five million people or more don't get out and protest in the streets against Vladimir Putin in Moscow or in multiple cities around the country, Vladimir Putin is not going to care and be impacted by the noise outside his borders. That's one of the big differences. To me, that's what says that Donald Trump is a much more effective and brilliant marketer than Vladimir Putin because he was able to get 74 million people to vote for him. He doesn't have any of those powers to limit any opposition speech in the United States.

There's the brand damage that happens with Democrats that they have been launching for years, "They're communists. They're socialists," or whatever negative bias messaging on Democrats that you want to put on there. The Democrats, not all of them, get stuck here. They're fighting the brand message instead of establishing their message of, "This is the kind of person I am."

Democrats are fighting the brand message instead of establishing their own message.

"There's a bunch of other people that are Democrats that might be voting for me that might have other beliefs about this, but as my style of democracy or as a Democrat, this is what I'm fighting for. I'm fighting for these kinds of things, not to ignore the conservative narrative but to include the conservative narrative. Is this thing going to have values to it?"

The word regulation should be something that the Republicans should own. What I mean by that is that it's all about making sure that the money is spent well, that people are protected, and that there's a good amount of protection that goes with your workers, your business and the environment. That's all conservative values. What does that do on the Democrat side? The Republicans go, "It's business. There are too many regulations and taxes."

It's like, "What's going on here?" It's protection and conservative values to protect people. I'm interested in working with people. You can honor that one businessperson that does that or you can honor the people that are voting for you to serve them. It's very tough to see that Donald Trump does have more skill and is better than Vladimir Putin at marketing messages that stick.

These marketing messages stick because he tests them more often. That's what the rallies are for. It's to test marketing messages. His rambling is all about testing to see where he can get the latest chatter. I was reading an article. It's like, "He's rambling. He said this thing." I'm going, "He's not rambling. He's testing.” He's finding out which phrase and waiting for his marketing brain to come up.

That's why he said, "What he has done is brilliant." It’s not, "Vladimir Putin is brilliant.” It’s, “What Vladimir Putin did was brilliant."

He created a limited message that said, "We are saving these Russians that are under attack on the East side of the country because the Ukrainians are bad to these people." They're Russian speakers. This is all about a limited thing. Vladimir Putin is trying to hold that message in because he doesn't want the word war to go on. It's a special military.

It's interesting that Vladimir Putin knows that if he called it a war and if he were unapologetically brutal in saying, "We are Russia. Ukraine should be a part of Russia. We're going in to take it back," his own people would not be happy with that. They would potentially rise up against him. There may be some guardrails somewhere out there among the people. That's why he's using the powers that he has to control the narrative and make sure that it does not come back and bite him in the ass.

There are many in our government in the United States that have criticized President Donald Trump for being too cozy with Vladimir Putin, for giving him too much praise, calling him a genius, and siding with him against our intelligence agencies in all this. That happened through his administration. Even more traditional Republicans who sometimes Donald Trump might call RINOs are baffled at how Donald Trump is portraying that he's cozying up to Vladimir Putin, praising him, and all this stuff.

It occurred to me, wouldn't it be quite interesting to see a savvy US journalist who wants to interview Donald Trump and pitch him the idea of talking about Vladimir Putin and bringing out his message about Vladimir Putin and what he thinks about him? You could feed into Donald Trump's need for acknowledgment, self-worth, and all this by asking him questions.

Take him down the road of, "You're a much more brilliant marketer than Vladimir Putin. Here's why." Have that be completely truthful but you would feed into Donald Trump's ego. He would be loving you and he would be wanting to talk more about it. You could lead him down a path pretty easily into being transparent about how he uses communication to manipulate the sheep and get them to follow him, corral them, and get them to walk out a plank of admitting what he does.

It might sound like this from communication because our show has got to land on some solution about how to get out of this. The way to take care of a carnival barker or somebody that's selling, marketing, and promoting all the time is to repeat back what the carnival barker is saying and acknowledge what the carnival barker is saying as true.

It would sound like, "Donald Trump, it's amazing how skillful you are at marketing messages and how much you're better than Vladimir Putin because you're doing it in a free society whereas his only strategy is doing it in a controlled society where he has to keep his messages. I admire that about you. It is something that I see that you're skilled about."

Donald Trump is going to speak. He will go, "That's one of the things that happen. You've got to be able to connect to the people." He's going to ramble and look for a sentence that's going to meet his need for respect and recognition. That's what he does to puff himself up as the decision-maker. You go back and feed him another spoon of food, "I respect the way you've run your campaign that all of these millions of people voted for you. Isn't what you've done magical? You are such a great messenger."

A politician says what they need to do, and then says more in order to step over your constituents.

He says, "My message connects, resonates with the people, and gets people in. These are all the people that believe that. Look at that. There are so many people. Joe Biden has hardly any people at his rallies." It's because he didn't need to have people in his rallies. Let's stay after the solution. The solution then is, "Could you share with us some of the ways that you're a better messenger than Vladimir Putin?"

He says, "The thing I do and look at is this. People say, admire, and recognize that about me." All of a sudden, he's on the plank of self-recognition and acknowledgment ahead of the truth. It's self-identity ahead of the truth. All of a sudden, he is the frontman of his own circus. That's the thing that people get. He's running a circus. Look at all the people he had in his cabinet. There was a circus over there. All these crazy people are the circus. It's all the misfits.

You could get Donald Trump to peel back his own curtain behind what he does. It would be a way to reveal the truth of how Donald Trump operates and communicates. It might get a lot of people to open their eyes to realize they have been the rats being led out of the town by the Pied Piper.

It's very hard for the follower to be weaned off of that level of dopamine, adrenaline, cortisol, serotonin, and the up and down that he keeps them on because there's the up of enraged, and then the bitterness and the exasperation about the other side, "I feel better because at least this guy speaks a message that's familiar to my beliefs, biases and fallacies about what he's going to do for me."

That's regrettably where it sits. It's hard to see where the Republican Party is going to go because they don't have another messenger that's strong. Nikki Haley is not strong. Ted Cruz is not strong. He's a prosecutor. Every time I listened to him do a speech, I'm going, "He's an attorney. He's prosecuting and trying to make and score points to get the other person to say something. That person is on the stand. He's using his attorney skills and beating up the witness."

That's what he's doing. He's beating up the witness. Who's the jury? That's the voters. You're interested in getting the voters to vote for you by beating up the witness. That's why Donald Trump can get elected ahead of Ted Cruz because Donald Trump is the marketer guy. He's not the attorney guy. It's weird. They're politicians but they're not statesmen.

A statesman is somebody that says what you need to do to get elected and then serve the people. That's a statesman. A politician says what you need to do and then says more to move up the chain even if you're stepping over and running over your constituents. It's like, "Who are those people? I just need to get them to vote for me next time around so I don't get voted out." That's the politician through and through.

It will be interesting. As the war goes on and as we figure out how to stick the landing here, we've got to get our message to break the spell or curse of this messaging. It's one of the things that we're finding as a society hard to do. We're doing that. We can talk more about that as the war goes on because there's plenty of messaging that's taking place.

It's going to be very interesting. There's some interesting messaging going on too from Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine. That's another thing that might be interesting to talk about in the future. He's being held as quite a great example of a leader and what leadership looks like. It's all because of his communication in the midst of this war.

He has been measured and adult-like, but adult-like is when you don't like your parents when they give you honest messages, "You have to pay for your bills, grow up, and do the dishes." You don't want to listen to the parent but he's the parent in this one.

He may be. Bill, thanks so much. I appreciate the discussion. It's very thought-provoking.

Thanks, everybody.

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Getting Past the Rear View Mirror of Governance

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 19:00:00 GMT

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For the past several years, the United States has governed its people from a Rear View Mirror. Instead of calling for progress, politicians have been inviting everyone to go back and reclaim something familiar (and comfortable) from the past. Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how to go beyond this tragic leadership style and pay more attention to ushering a better future. They present campaign slogans of US Presidents that summarize either their past-minded or forward-looking administrations. The two also talk about how the current media narrative dampens Russian aggression in its ongoing war with Ukraine and the impact of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's leadership style on this conflict.

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Watch the episode here

Getting Past the Rear View Mirror of Governance

There is a lot going on in the world internationally, especially with Russia's attack on Ukraine. As you and I have been talking and thinking about the situation, there are a few things that are coming to the forefront of our minds that we can share with our audience. Some of those things are around tragic leadership. To set the table for this episode, what we can conclude and what we want to share with our audience is that our leaders, not only now but even for the last five-ish years in the US anyway, have been governing through the rearview mirror. That's a very interesting concept that's a departure from what we have had in recent decades. Let's start with tragic leadership and start this discussion.

This is a toughy because tragic leadership is you look for where the vote is or where the person's mindset is, and you keep validating that. It's a very limbic brain stimulus. I want to tell the person to keep buying Cheerios or Coca-Cola or Pepsi over and over again. I want to tell them messages that they are familiar with. It's rearview mirror messaging. You tell the person where they have been and how much better it was where they were rather than where they are going. People get scared about where they are going, especially with the speed at which change is taking place. Change is tough for the brain because you've got to dump all beliefs and you have to adopt a new mindset.

As business owners, you and I know that we need to change, and then change again, and then change our way, and then change our messaging and leadership. Trust a new person and then train a new person. It's a never-ending part of the change. The tragic leadership focuses on a past-minded memory or validation. This is interesting because the leader is trying to message to stimulate and create a connection to something that was in the past.

Make America great again is something that is in the past. I know that America is great. I remembered when I was growing up, I said the Pledge of Allegiance and I felt good in the classroom when I was eight years old because a word, a phrase or some things made me feel a sense of loyalty, commitment or identity to the United States as I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands.

All of a sudden we are into a past narrative, make America great again. Russia has that same narrative about their past, their loyalty, and their greatness. They remember when they were great and they remember when they were not so great, and then they want to want to be great. They want to feel the same way they did when they were growing up. It's unsettling, especially because the world has changed since then.

Vladimir Putin remembers the USSR and all the satellite states like Romania, Ukraine, and all these different countries that were once part of the USSR but are no longer and are these independent states. He's feeling threatened by NATO and he's like, “I want to get back to what it was and I want more buffer between us and Europe and the rest of the world.” That's leading from the rearview mirror and trying to get back to something that he perceives that lost.

It’s the perception of loss. What people don't understand, because this is a communication show, is that message or the buffer zone is a 5 or 6 on a scale of 1 to 10. It's not as high as identity or respect, which is more like a 9 or 10 on the scale in his mind. The messaging is not proportional and people will go after that because that makes sense. It's hard to restore somebody's respect and identity when the person has respect and identity about the past. How do you do that? You can't go back and say, “Do you want the USSR to come back and you want all these states back? Let's go talk to them. Maybe they want to come back to you.”

The answer is, “We are not going to go back to you guys.” It’s the train has left the station thing. He’s like, “Wait a minute. I'm going to make you go back to the way we were through oppression and dictatorship. We are not going to let people protest and all that stuff. We are not doing that.” The challenge then and what needs to take place is that you need to talk about the glory of the history, and then also set the vision for where Russia is going next.

If you have an economy that is monolithic, which is a petrol state, as people talk about it, their identity needs to be spoken about in a broader perspective because they have a vibrant middle-class. They have a vibrant thing. They are not just taking money and buying people's stuff. They are taking money and doing this because then everybody is not participating in the range of human expression, which is called the diverse economy, and they don't have one.

Tragic leadership pushes people to be nervous, anxious, worried, and scared about opposing ideas and things they don't understand..

Leaning on the glory of the USSR and what does it take to create that honoring of all the good things that Russia stand and stood for, all the values of respect, strength, persistence, discipline and stability, all those wonderful values that we have as human beings, acknowledge that that was a part of your past, and it is a part of your future. Look at their tennis player and all these people that are representative of their achievements in space.

If they are not getting credit or credibility for the things that their scientists and people have done, what winds up happening is that they are fighting for a very limited identity called the conquers. That's not a good identity to have because then you live into that identity of that type of person instead of building a diverse economy and stuff.

It remains to be seen what's going to happen. There are a lot of uncertainties around it right now, but the things in the economy in Russia are not looking very good. I don't want to get off too much on the details of the conflict itself. There are some very interesting things to realize about America in this as well, and you mentioned make America great.

I'm not going to put this all on the Donald Trump administration, although they certainly led from the rearview mirror in spades. I was thinking about this having seen the highlights of President Joe Biden's first state of the union address. Remembering back to him on the campaign trail, the major slogan that he sells America on to vote for him is restoring the soul of America. That is no less a rearview mirror theme.

It's very challenging to talk about the soul because there's a spiritual element to it. It's hard to go and it almost would have worked better as restoring America's values. I would have gone simpler. Values first. Respect, truth, trust, cooperation and collaboration, we are doing those. I would have gone after values and handed it to them.

Instead, it was more of a pissing contest between one rearview mirror vision and another. There were enough people tired of the one from Donald Trump and more people voted for the one from Joe Biden. What was opening to me, Bill, as we thought about all the previous administrations going back to Ronald Reagan even. Barack Obama was about hope and change. That's not a rearview mirror message. That's a future, set the vision, forward-thinking. Bill Clinton was bouncing the budget. What was his theme song from Fleetwood Mac? I think it’s, “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow.”

He had a very forward-looking theme. Even Ronald Reagan’s government spending is bad. His vision was a future vision, whether you are good with it or not of changing the American government to being less dominant in our country. It wasn't trying to get back to something in the '50s. In fact, it was a change away from that or a future vision.

JFK was the moonshot. He set the vision, “We are going to go take a man to the moon and restore him safely to Earth.” Even FDR, you go back to the early 20th century and the New Deal. These are all future vision setting things. There's a big distinction and a shift that has taken place here since 2015 and 2016 in the idea of governing from the rearview mirror. It may not even be an idea of theirs, but it is what the last two administrations are doing.

If you think even further about JFK, it's like, "Don't ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." That's inspiring because you are saying, "I'm not going to take the take out. I'm going to see what I can do for my country and what is my individual engagement.” Whereas, make America great again, turns into a handout world. It's when things were easier. When things were easier is when you had enough money to buy stuff. When did you have enough to buy stuff? When we were working and spending money on the products and there was a building of the middle-class. If we want to do that, let's do that.

When this was happening, the government spent time building the middle-class and they did some short-term/long-term goals about building the middle-class to a certain level so that we can have that level of affluence. You had enough money and you could buy stuff. You could have enough money for a two-week vacation. You only have one job to be able to have that, and then you had a personal life in the evening.

You were able to watch some TV, and your kids are going to school, and there are no tons of pressure on you. There's enough on you to keep you in the motivation of what it takes to run a capitalist system because you got to have some things to strive for. Countries that have more things given to them sometimes go like, “I don't find that as valuable because I have already had that given to me.”

We are pesky creatures. We have to have both the front part of our brain engaged to say, “Here are some of our attributes that we need to see.” The back part of our brain is going like, "We have stability. We have some safety here. We have some predictability. I know what's going to happen with my budget over the next months 2, 3 and 4. I'm not as much living paycheck to paycheck. I'm not as much doing that. I do have some consistency in my world and I'm not as nervous, anxious, worried or scared."

Tragic leadership pushes on those things. It says, “You need to be nervous, anxious, worried and scared about the other side, those Democrats and Republicans,” instead of going, “I love the Republicans. They are interested in creating a balanced budget and creating stability and certainty. They would like a system at the border that would be fair and equitable, and we need to build them one of those things. It's not a wall but let's build a system that does work.”

You just amplify what they want to achieve and serve up a real solution. At the same time, you peed on the fact that the reality is the wall isn't going to do it, in a nice way.

Any Republican that mentions the wall, I would literally say, "How did that work for Russia and East Germany? Did that wall work? Didn't Reagan say, 'Tear the wall down?' Do we need to build a wall in order to tear it down? Is that what we are doing here? How about if we do something different?”

The other wall that you could point to that makes walls look decidedly ancient solution to a modern problem is looking at the Great Wall of China.

Let's build one like the Great Wall of China. Let's see if we can build one like that. How well is that used?

Is that effective today?

Instead of being dumped in the past, focus on working from where you are now and move forward. Simply going back to what you once were is not a good idea...

I don't think that that's effective today.

It’s a monument.

It was a wall because they didn't have any planes to get over it. Illegal immigration, 60% of it is because people fly over. Only 20% of it is by foot. What are you building the wall for? That's not effective.

Speaking of China, it’s interesting to think about the Communist Party in China and leader Xi Jinping, they also have a rearview mirror style of leadership in terms of wanting to bring Taiwan back into China. They are wanting to get more control over Hong Kong. There's this concept of one China that's everything. These independent states that are struggling and fighting to remain independent do not want to go back to the way things were under Chinese rule.

There's that make China great again and restore it all to one. It's interesting to think about the leadership style that all of these different leaders have. Shockingly, it has happened here in the United States with both different parties in the last two administrations. It's happening in more authoritarian regimes or undemocratic regimes, for sure. That's very illuminating to me.

I appreciate that insight. The diversity element of the United States is problematic with that one identity. I can empathize with and see the point. Did you ever see the clip of the White Nationalist guy saying, "I love Vladimir Putin?" There's a clip out there. There was a rally that’s like, “How about Russia? Let's give some love to Russia.” This was a White nationalist who was doing this.

I haven’t seen that.

I will find that clip. He was admiring Russia because of its one race. He's in the mindset that's a White nation. He's literally admiring that one identity and stuff, and then he was admiring China because it was one race. Those people are staying in that one race and one identity. That's a limbic brain mindset, which is I am going to look at a person that looks like me, and therefore, I feel good about myself because I don't have to think of other human beings taking other forms. There's this whole diversity of the way human beings look. We look a lot different in different parts of the world.

The part of the limbic brain that's very unsettling is that it's a very tribal hunter-gatherer. This is our group of 35 people that are roaming around and trying to be in the world somehow. That mindset is that if there's anything that's outside that loyalty and certainty, it's outside the way I think. Therefore, it's very hard for me to see them as humans because they are not like I am.

It does take a stretch to walk through a crowd of people at a concert that does not look like you because there's a part of our mind that goes, “Not like us is dangerous,” instead of “Not like us is accepting, tolerant, appreciative and curious.” It's unsettling. We got to watch how our brain is taking the message, and then also not walk by on how to use that to create community and to create a sense of connection, appreciation and delight when we are in the world.

Let's come back to the conflict in Ukraine for a moment because when we talk about governing from the rearview mirror, we see what's happening over there. There are all these tragedies going on with all the Ukrainian people and mass exodus from the country, and then some of them are fighting for their Homeland and lives. It's interesting to see what the media is doing and how they are covering this. I think you have some thoughts on that.

I think that the media keeps walking by opportunities. The opportunities they walk by is that his brain or thinking needs recognition, respect and acknowledgement. The frustration that he has had of not being able to walk forward his country into the modern world, he has had some trouble there. One of the off-ramps that's available to media is to help the world know the value of Russia and why this is tragic so that the Russian people see that we see their value. Therefore, we don't like your guy but we like your values and what you've stood for. Your culture has conviction, art, ballet, discipline and athletism. You've got such a wonderful history to say, "This is what you guys went through. That was a tough thing to go through. This is what came out of that. This is what we went through as a country. This is what another country goes through."

Ukraine has that same thing. This is the Ukrainian culture that is being overrun by this. All of a sudden, it's the pride and restoration. You are helping the country and the person to look at the past as what it is a collection of good and bad things, but we are going to focus on what the brand goodness is rather than the things that are lost. This is where we were, but this is where we are now. It's weird to say that Kyiv came first, and Moscow came second. It's hard to say that this was here.

If you look at Russian history, this other part of the world was more developed and Moscow was farmlands while Kyiv was a city. It's getting us to have a perspective and honor the perspective of this is the way that history looks. This is how to honor it. The off rank ramp is how do we help ourselves with a positive perspective of these two countries so that we can start to say, "Why are we doing all this?"

When we damp in the past-oriented get back to where my ideal was, instead of going, “We are going to honor the entire process of this. Can we work together where we are now? Where we are now is you are not going to get us to go back to that other thing that we once were. We are not going to do that.”

It's a very interesting idea of helping highlight the identity of a country or a culture and gives them respect in a positive way. As a means to not only highlight or give respect to them but then have the obvious contrast with the tragedy going on right now, is that who you want to be?

Is that who you want to be? Is that who Russia wants to be? You are dampening the aggression and you are dampening the will of the aggressor. You go like, “Do you want to be a country?” They are talking about Russia as a pariah state like North Korea and Iran. They are talking about them in that category. It's like, “What are you doing?”

That's unfortunate. We are seeing stories and obviously, there are a lot of stories yet to unfold. There are a lot of uncertainties but we are seeing stories of Russian soldiers driving vehicles and Ukrainians standing in front of them. The Russians like, “I'm not going to run over you people.” Even reports of Russian soldiers who didn't think they were being sent to invade a country, but doing some peacekeeping, exercises or something else.

When you listen to politicians, find out how much of their messaging is about the vision for the future or if they are only talking how great they are in the past....

It seems like they had no idea they were going to be shot at. That's at least the latest messaging that I have received. You and I know how propaganda works. We have got a small piece of message, and then we pass on that message as if it's true. There is a truth that only certain people knew that we were going in and certain soldiers did not necessarily know the full vision of things, and what are we supposed to do.

It's very difficult. It's very hard to realize that leadership forgets to give a clear message, and then also the values that are supporting that message. That's one of the things that Volodymyr Zelenskyy is doing. We are not going. We are going to be here. We are fighting for our identity and our culture, and we need some help to protect ourselves. That message is translating throughout the world. We are not moving. I am not leaving here. I'm staying here.

He's a heck of an example of leadership.

He's standing for the value of identity instead of meeting his own need for safety. He is standing for the need for respect and protection. As a person that is saying, “This is something that I'm going to lay my life down for. Their people are going to hunt for me.” There is a one-piece of media that I digested that some Chechen rebels came in and the Ukrainians caught up before they got in. There was a team of assassins and stuff.

It's that high need to say, “This is what my conviction and discipline is. I am fighting for this country. These people elected me to do it and that's the job." The job is not to take sniper shots on social media about what the other side isn't doing. It would have never happened if I was here. You had no idea that he's been prepared for eight years for this. That's the indicator right now. It is that Vladimir Putin has been planning for this for eight years.

Ever since he took over Crimea.

He's been planning for this. He's been trying to Bulletproof himself from sanctions.

How has that worked out? I'm not so sure this is going to end up the way he wanted to. I know it's still early and everything isn't settled here. It certainly looks like there are some very heavy consequences for Vladimir Putin himself and the oligarchs in Russia. The Russian people as a whole are going to pay for this because the economic sanctions are going to negatively impact the leaders at the top first, but every citizen of that country.

There's going to be a point and I don't know if there is a point here because Ukraine saw this coming because they wanted to get into NATO. The powers that be around NATO were going, “If we let them in, Russia is going to do something terrible.” The answer is they did something terrible. They have done it. Whereas, if that was there already or that was in place, then it would have been something that would be a step forward to protecting them.

What is the end game? Everyone is asking what is the end game here. It's hard to say if it's going to get worse, which it's going to get somewhat or extremely worse. A part of me is saying that a little future-oriented, and then another part of me says, “Will the people in the military say that we are not going to do this? That is disobeying laws, commands, and certain things that have been established. If there are 6,000 people that have been arrested for protests, how many people does it take to overflow that system? Is it going to be 300,000 people protesting, trying to get erased? What are you going to do to arrest all these people?

Where are you going to put them all? Does it take the 300,000, the 500,000 mark of going like, "Go and arrest me? Where are you going to put us all?" That's a little dangerous too because there are some countries that are good at rallying up a lot of people and keeping them engaged for a long time. It's very difficult to see how this is going to shake out because it can escalate from the outside, from World War III to internal implosions.

Will it be an internal implosion or will the economic and diplomacy side of things succeed in pulling back and not being willing to accept the consequences the rest of the world is rallied together? It's pretty amazing when you see Switzerland that's pretty neutral. Sweden and Finland, these states that have always loved to line up against Russia. The whole world is coming together here to say, "This is not acceptable, and we are not going to sit by and take it." It’s interesting to see what happens. I appreciate thinking about how all the biggest countries in the world are leading from the rearview mirror. That to me was eye-opening.

A very important to notice is that when you listen to politicians or leaders, you want to listen to how much are they messaging toward the mission or the vision that's happening in the future, and how much are they talking about how great they have been in the past? It's not to say the past narrative isn't valuable. I'm very happy to sing The Star-Spangled Banner. I know that it's from the past. I can appreciate those men and women at the time that fight was going on and our flag was still there.

The history is very important but the history is in the past.

That courage and ability to stand for something needs to translate to this moment. What am I standing for at this moment in reference to my country? What level of my commitment am I going to take towards it for making sure that we are looking at both the needs of the individual, but also the needs of the community city, state and country? It's like we have to look at that. I want my individual freedom, but not at the expense of somebody else's life, property or business. I'm interested in balancing those things, but I'm not interested in getting my needs met at this hyper-competition pace.

Not at the expense of others.

It leaves us at a good place here to say there is an off-ramp for Vladimir Putin, which has to do with a combination of his past narrative with the vision that Russia is going to be. Right now there is no future vision that's viable with the current course. There needs to be a new vision to say, "What is the new relationship going to be between Ukraine and Russia now not as a subservient state?" If it's like that, they are in for 5, 10 or 20 years of occupation.

How many years did we spend in Afghanistan? How did that go? Way too many. We tried so much to hand things off to say, “Come into the modern world here,” but it was too much for their limbic brains to do. Some human beings cannot move, and the rest of the world is going to move. It's going to leave them behind, but it's a little tough like that.

Thanks so much. I appreciate your perspective and discussing this with me.

Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it.

Dissecting America’s Crisis on Upholding Integrity

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 14:52:42 GMT

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When the UK Parliament found out that PM Boris Johnson ignored lockdown rules by attending several parties, they were ready to kick him out of office. In just one pivotal event, the British government did something most US politicians would not even try: upholding integrity. Bill Stierle and Tom look into recent events that reveal America’s problem in seeking and standing up for the truth. They talk about how Donald Trump’s unceasing campaign for the Big Lie influences how people embrace integrity. Bill and Tom also emphasize why freedom of expression must never set aside accountability and fairness.

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Watch the episode here

Dissecting America’s Crisis on Upholding Integrity

There is some very interesting news that came out of Great Britain. We need to understand it to take a good look in contrast to what is happening in the United States. I am going to please read this news. The news is, “In Great Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the country's Conservative Party faced a serious challenge to his government when a report revealed ‘failures of leadership and judgment’ by Boris Johnson attending twelve parties that ignored the country's strict lockdown roles. Boris Johnson downplayed the events, but they have been confirmed and even much of his party appears ready to abandon him.”

This is the important part, “Appalled that he considered himself above the law, one member of parliament said, ‘Honesty and decency matters.’” I am reading this and I’m like, “That is refreshing, that honesty and decency still matter somewhere in a democracy.” Great Britain is at the point where they are ready to throw out their Prime Minister because he hasn’t been honest. That level of being held accountable for lack of integrity and not being in alignment with the law is something we are not seeing a whole lot in America.

How do you be compassionate to somebody who is trying to raise money to go to these events and do things? Also, on the other side, he is not in integrity with his words or what his government is standing for, called protecting each other through safety measures versus, “I am free to do whatever I want to do over here. These rules only apply to the masses. It does not apply to me or the elites.” We have our version of that here. The people at Fox can be 95% or 97% vaccinated inside their experience, yet they can go on air and talk badly about vaccinations. That is not congruent integrity-wise. The message is not congruent with what their behavior is.

Human beings promise things they can’t keep. Have you ever promised something to your kid that you could not do? “We will leave here in 5 minutes,” and then it is 1 hour later. “Dad, you said we are going to leave. I have been waiting here.” Human beings have to do something around integrity when we got stuff coming out of our mouths. Integrity is a unique need because it has two parts to it. The first part is that whatever comes out of our mouth, our feet do. If I say I am going to do it, I am going to do it. That is part one.

Part two is unless a greater need shows up that knocks the first need out. I could say, “I am going to drive over to my friends. I will be there at 5:00,” but my tire gets flat and then I got to spend a couple of hours fixing my tire. That is what a person would say is a reasonable reason why the need for integrity could not be met. There is a scale of what is reasonable and what is not. “I had to take care of these other things.” There is a scale here and a lying piece on one side of it. Here is the thing, “My dog ate my homework.” You are not in integrity because you said you would bring me the thing. That is not in alignment with truth.

A person with integrity walks the talk. Whatever comes out of your mouth, your feet do.

The problem of America is that in our messaging, we are on the lower end of the integrity piece. We can change from moment to moment. There’s nobody to hold accountability throughout the field of time. Somebody can say, “I am not for gay marriage,” at the beginning and then two years later say, “After thinking about that, I am for gay marriage.” Barack Obama did that.

There is a difference. Integrity can be pushed too far at some point. It is when politicians are like, “I have always said this and believed that.” It is like, “I do not care if you have always believed that if there is a good reason why. You have done more research and learned more about the subject and now that you are more informed, your position has changed on it. I do not think that is a character flaw.”

When you are a Mitch McConnell leading the Senate and you will not allow Merrick Garland to have a hearing with President Barack Obama where he nominated him for the Supreme Court when a Supreme Court Justice died, it’s almost a year until there is another election and Mitch McConnell says, “There is a rule. We are not going to have a hearing on a Supreme Court Justice in an election year.” When it comes time under a Republican president, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies, he says, “We are going to fill that spot within six weeks.” There is a difference in integrity that is very situational and about winning and very much out of integrity where there was no good reason other than, “I want to do that and win.”

The very unsettling thing is that a group of people can do measured things that are not aligned with integrity. If I want to create brand damage or image damage on a person, I can take them to court over and over again. I could create all kinds of damage to their identity, brand, trust and then all of a sudden, after a while, it’s like, “Did the person do anything or was responsible for that person’s situation?” That is the Hillary Clinton-Benghazi smear campaign for a year and a half. It is like, “How is she responsible for that over there under her watch?”

She is concentrating on these other things and this thing like, “Would I as a visionary outsider see that that would be a problem?” I also can see that there are blind spots that people have that don’t see things coming. This is a good example of a blind spot, “It is 9/11. Were there any signals ahead of time that something different could have been happening at that embassy so this thing could not have taken place?”

The need for integrity also has its set of limits to it because of the scaling. There is indeed accountability, but it is not 70%. It was 10% or 20% accountability. When a politician flips on a major value that they made over the years, I can understand the morals of Bill Clinton being taken on by a younger Lindsey Graham.

All of a sudden, as soon as his guy is worse than the other guy was, it is not a big deal because, in the field of time between those two points in time, our society has changed a bunch. It makes sense that more freedom of expression is more available and moralistic and ethical things have fallen by the wayside a lot for several years. Even though I don’t agree with the change, the change is still in the range of perspectives. How do we get off of the crack cocaine of society and outrage and return to some of the core values that would make a big difference for us?

Tom, you and I like integrity and truth. We like the concept of mutual respect, not just respect for one person, one person's point of view or one person saying something. We would like mutual respect to show up. “I respect your opinion. Tell me more. How did you come to that? What was your foundation for that? What does that look like?” We discuss honesty after discussing what the information is or their truth perspective. You have to put the word perspective behind the word truth to work. You have got to do it.

This is our truth perspective. Ninety-seven percent of vaccines do this. Three percent of the perspective says there is some wiggle room because science is always evolving. That is why the number has this 3% because we do not know why this other 3 % happens. It is unknown, but these are the numbers we know. This is what we are measuring. Regrettably, truth has a long haul up the mountain than honesty does. Honesty is a little easier than truth is.

In America, truth does not seem to matter all that much in many ways or situations. We are nowhere in the neighborhood of honesty and integrity in general. There are notable exceptions. What is interesting to me about the Great Britain story is it strikes me how much easier it is in their system to throw out the Prime Minister. They can get a majority of members of parliament to have a vote of no confidence and then you get somebody out.

You have a new vote amongst your parliament and install a new Prime Minister. Their governance system is very different, whereas we had a president of the United States who lied about the pressure he was putting on Ukraine. We get the recording of the call and the transcript showing he was out of integrity with what he said and that he had lied.

It is not a character flaw to change your position on a certain issue once you become more informed.

He was not in alignment with the rule of law as to what he could do. Look at the high bar it takes to remove a president in the United States. You got to go through the impeachment process. That is about partisan politics. “Who is your guy? Who is not your guy?” Ultimately, in the Senate, there are not enough people. We moved off of loyalty to then say integrity, honesty and decency matter.

It is in the rule of law. With that identity partisan politics piece that plays out, I am not saying both sides don’t do partisan identity politics. That’s what is happening. They do that. It is where are our values and needs going to be set up. This is what integrity would look like. Donald Trump held a rally that said, “I am being honest with you. I did those things and look what happened. They are trying to pass a bill that proves that Mike Pence could have done XYZ.”

The answer is there is no rule or law about that because there was a belief in the past that Americans were going to trust what the vote counters were going to count and the legal system. We have many people in America that do not trust the legal system and that is where the damage is. The legal system has damage to it, so what do you do when the legal system has damage? You create new laws to make it so that the legal system does not have as much wiggle room in it because you’ve got to legislate things like integrity, truth and respect.

You are legislating stuff that we used to go like, “We are doing the peaceful transfer of power and extending trust. We are going to be honest about election laws. We are not going to be prohibitive with election laws.” That is what is happening. There is a movement of prohibiting, limiting or making it only these certain ways and the states get to decide on what those certain ways are. In other words, “That means that state gets to discriminate against their people.” I do not think that is the United States.

It remains to be seen what will happen there, but Congress is looking at the Electoral Count Act, which is the law that they are looking to put some more guard rails up there to prevent what they realized could have so easily happened. Had Mike Pence put loyalty to Donald Trump above loyalty to democracy, America and our rule of law, it could have happened. Donald Trump spoke and he said, “They found out that Mike Pence could have done it.”

He could have doesn’t mean he should have and it’s the right thing to do. It does not mean that would have been in alignment with honesty, integrity and the law. Could he have done it? He could have. The other thing that is mind-boggling that came out of that speech from Donald Trump is he is talking about how if he runs, which you got to love the uncertainty there, Bill.

He is the best sales marketing person ever. He can sell anything he wants, whether it is vodka or steaks. It is unsettling that he needs the next thing to sell. He doesn’t have any bandwidth to sell anything, so he keeps selling the thing that is in front of him, which is the big lie.

He is selling himself to remain on the front page of every newspaper and journalist website in the country as often. He is like, “If I run and win, all these people who attacked Capitol, who were treated very unfairly,” and here is where he brings fairness into it, all these 750 people that have been charged with a crime for January 6, 2021, need fairness, he says, “I might pardon them all. We will have a lot of pardons.” He is undercutting the rule of law saying, “They have been treated unfairly.” There is an accountability piece for people's actions. The need is not being met there if you do that.

Let’s talk about that specifically. This is very important regarding the First Amendment, the right to freedom of speech. Freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want because we want the ideas out in front of us. We do not want people to push them inside and go around the rule of law. We would like it in front, know where people stand, and express themselves fully. When they are expressing themselves, we want to weigh in on that value in that field of time. You go back in the field of time, years and years ago, there are a lot of horrific things that were legal, the low-hanging fruit of slavery until they weren’t.

That means society is saying, “We have freedom of speech and you have the freedom to do what you want, but you don’t necessarily get to take another person's right away while you are doing that freedom of speech.” If there is a law that is in place that says, “You can say what you want, but if what you want is running up against the law, you could be in trouble.” That is what took place within his speech. He walked into the bear trap and stepped on it. He says, “This is justified. I believe I can get out of this bear trap.” The defiance and the open admission have been something that sits in the freedom of speech category and running up against the rule of law, which is problematic.

He is setting himself up as being above the law.

Honesty is ahead of the truth.

The counter-message has got to not go after the truth of what you said. The counter language message is to dampen the accusation. We want freedom of speech. We don’t want the guy to shut up. It is better not to censor but have some wisdom to say with our modern way that you can access every human being through a Twitter account. There is a little bit of challenge about getting the message out, which is called a modern problem.

You had to go through newspapers and editorial boards before. You had to do all these other things to get your need for expression. People would do that. They would set up their printing presses and print whatever they wanted to. They advertise and promote if it was inside the law. “Somebody bought your snake oil. Great. You sold some snake oil.” If snake oil kills people, then there is a law for that. It is problematic. If you know it is going to kill somebody, there is also a law for that. Ask Big Pharma. They are having some trouble with this one. What do I mean that we got to dampen the accusation? Say any one of the sentences that Donald Trump said at his rally. Give me one of those.

He says, “All these people that have been charged with a crime for January 6, 2021, are being treated very unfairly.”

I am going to be a broadcaster that is on an opinion show or a politician that has an open mic that is listening to that sentence. Here is my dampening compassionate message to what he said. “It seems like the ex-President is feeling confused and needs clarity on whether or not the election was counted fairly. The people in the insurrection are going to be treated fairly. He is not liking the rule of law that there is to be the counting of votes. He does not like that rule. Americans need to speak up when they do not like things.”

“I am feeling a little bit unsettled because, in honesty, we have looked at the accusations and the things that were brought to court. We weren’t able to find the level of truth that the ex-President is talking about. We found some truth, but we found very small amounts of truth, not enough to rise to the level of the accusation. A person needs to express themselves, but also important for the listener to know that that person is not in alignment with what the truth of the count was.”

Notice how this conversation got flat. It got a little boring almost, but that’s what has to happen with an accusation. You can’t say, “He is lying. He is a grifter. He is going to ruin the nation.” You can't go there. You have to dampen the accusation with compassionate language so that you can honor the person's need to express themselves because that is the First Amendment. You want to be able to be compassionate. They are opening their mouth but also, to be honest. Honesty is ahead of the truth.

Do the same thing with the idea that those people that are charged with a crime for January 6, 2021, for storming the Capitol were treated unfairly.

“The ex-president has thought and is making a statement that they are being treated unfairly. He feels enthusiastic about the point of view and tries to encourage people to fight for their nation, to be loyal to him and the nation the way he sees it. There is a disappointment that is showing up here because the rule of law stated that the votes were to be counted and the legal remedies to stop the votes from being counted had been exhausted.”

“When he encouraged people to go to the Capitol and fight like hell and they went over the line of fighting like hell with their voices and they turned it physical does not meet the need for protection, safety and peaceful transfer of power. Even if the person believes that an election was stolen and sold that the election was stolen, it doesn’t mean that they can physically take that action during a peaceful transfer of power.” Notice it dampened. Fairness under the law looks like this.

It looks like people that commit violence and break other laws. Even if you think laws weren’t broken, votes weren’t properly counted, and there needs to be accountability, you are excused from breaking other laws trying to have your voice heard.

You can get your voice heard, stand outside the Capitol building and yell as much as you want. You can demonstrate even as horrific as you’d like. You can put a gallow out there and wave a flag all you can. The only thing that you can't do is hurt people or damage property. If we watch you do that, there are some laws for that. That is what fairness looks like. There are some laws, both federal and state laws, that you can't cross and do certain things at the expense of others.

An accusation is only a possibility. It is not a truth.

If you do, there are consequences for your actions.

By him promising that he will pardon them is meeting the need for loyalty and the need to protect them. We may notice that he had a lot of chances to pardon a lot of people on the way out and he only gave it to a few. Only the ones he pardoned were the ones that gave him the most exposure, coverage and had the next level of loyalty. All these different court cases could come up and he gets reelected.

From the rule of law, he can use the law to his advantage and absolve himself and others. “Who is going to make me do it?” All of a sudden, we are on a course to that authoritarian and oligarchy experience where rich people run all the things. Everyone else has to eat crow because of it. We are in a precarious place because we have a messenger who knows how to sell and market to people at the expense of truth. That is problematic.

To return to where we started, it’s in stark contrast to what we are seeing play out in parliament and Great Britain. There is more concern for integrity, honesty and decency. We are lacking a lot of that in America. That is disheartening.

There is a way out and that is the good part. The way out is how to stand up, message and counter-message a person with a strength of voice, the one that gets their messages to stick through accusation. It becomes a believable thing because an accusation is a possibility. It is not the truth.

That is a profound realization that I don’t think enough people have.

The accusation can be taken as truth. “Hillary Clinton’s server.” As soon as I said that, people shifted into that mindset. What does the need for privacy and protection look like? Were there some laws broken? Some things have some gray areas and wiggly spots to them. Was it a “lock her up” moment? No, but it did cause damage. It did skew the truth of what it takes to communicate and keep these different parts of her life separate.

“Here is your public service life and political life. You got to keep those separate. Here is your fundraising. You got to keep that separate from that one. If you do not keep that separate, there is a law against that.” There is more to come on this. The next time that we are together, Tom, the thing that we could take a look at is what is the way out? How do we message our way out of this situation and get back to the healthy narratives that we need to take place in the environment?

That would be nice. We need more of that. Bill, thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.

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Toilets, Taxes & Truth: Mazars Versus Trump and the Importance of Documentation

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 12:30:06 GMT

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In light of recent news surrounding Mazars’ termination of their relationship with the Trump organization, many now question the eligibility of decades worth of documentation. Donald Trump’s previous statements on the ineffectiveness of American toilets when it comes to flushing have also resurfaced and are being interpreted in a new light. Was Trump flushing documents down the drain? In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom unpack the news and share their thoughts on this revelation regarding the previous presidency. What are the next moves for both sides? Will the Trump organization turn this into a marketing opportunity? How will this affect Republicans and Democrats? What can we do to uphold the Record-Keeping act with better integrity? Answer these questions as you listen to their discussion.

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Toilets, Taxes & Truth: Mazars Versus Trump and the Importance of Documentation

Bill, I’ve got to tell you my head is spinning with all of the news that is going on. It's all about toilets, taxes, and truth. There’s so much to talk about. They are related in many ways in terms of communication.

Also, privacy and loyalty. We don't have to talk much about the setup because the rest of the news media is going to cover the setup. Let's drive down the center of the freeway here and keep our eyeballs up on how to communicate through a conversation about toilets, and how the need for accuracy and clarity regarding history means that whatever document that's created inside a government is recorded and placed in a spot for posterity.

That is good record keeping. There's not a lot of wiggle room about not good recordkeeping regarding government or business. Regarding our personal life, take your papers out of the backyard and burn them if you can get away with stuff because our free society allows a certain amount of flexibility that people are not watching over you 24/7.

There's no personal Recordkeeping Act that says, “You can't burn your own documents and erase your own videos.” It’s the National Recordkeeping Act that is at issue here with Donald Trump and the revelation from this book that's going to be coming out among other things that he would routinely tear up papers that were drafts of speeches, tweets, and all sorts of things. As president of the United States, the law says you are not allowed to do that.

You are not allowed to tear things up or flush things down the toilet.

I can hear Donald Trump's supporters saying, “That's ridiculous. He's going to tear things up.” I could see people rationalizing like, “The good speech that he gives, you don't want to have. The bad speech will be news out there. Why wouldn't you let him tear them up?” The thing is, Donald Trump knew before becoming president that there is this law, the National Recordkeeping Act because I saw him give a speech talking about it regarding Hillary Clinton and her 30,000 emails that she should have known better. There is this National Recordkeeping Act as Secretary of State that anything for the administration has to be preserved. He's on record in a pre-president speech or campaign speech saying he was well aware of the Recordkeeping Act.

Somebody can know about something and somebody can be an advocate for something. It’s a weird thing to say. The need for respect, self-worth or identity says, “This is for everyone else except for me.” Our brain will create this wobbly logic. Our mindset and language will allow us to justify because we are in the right. Why are we in the right? Why would the brain do such a thing and not take accountability?

Remember that what creates Teflon and what creates people not sticking is a listener's predisposition for their beliefs and biases. It prevents things from sticking.

It all comes down to one word, which is protection. We are like, “I want to protect myself worth, my identity, and my brand by making it about something other than me.” How do you speak to it? It seems like the president is having trouble with toilets, so he blames the toilets for not being able to flush fifteen times on national news. He's blaming a toilet for not doing what he would like it to do, which is flush papers. There's something wrong with the toilets.

This blew my mind. For our readers, there’s so much to understand. Bill remembered this from a couple of years ago with President Donald Trump in the office where he is on national TV multiple times complaining about the 1.6 gallons per flush toilets that don't flush and that we are wasting more water having to flush 10 or 15 times. Now that this revelation of Donald Trump dripping up documents and flushing them to try to destroy them has come out, that rant of his on national TV multiple times about this important problem that needs to be solved with our water in America. We don't have toilets that are doing the job right the first time makes so much sense.

He is transparent with his communication. If you watch the Anderson Cooper video , he is making fun of the craziness but the news media is not attaching it to the truth, which the truth is he was flushing documents that he did not want to be read with toilets, and blaming the toilets and sewage system for not being effective.

I'm sure the late-night comedians at the time like Anderson Cooper has this ridiculous skit that he does. The late-night comedians were also having a field there with this making fun of how big of a bowel movement does this guy has that he needs this industrial-strength toilet to get rid of it in one flush. There wasn’t anybody that considered there's something else going on there.

Can you imagine the White House staff at the time when he goes on TV with one of these rants from the Oval Office or wherever else he was in the White House saying this is a serious problem and we are going to have people look into it because you have to flush 10 or 15 times to get things to flush? That's not right. Can you imagine the staff thinking, “When they find out he's flushing official documents, what is that going to mean?” They are worried that the real story probably would come out.

What to do about it? They used to say that Ronald Reagan was a Teflon-coated President because nothing would stick to him, and then they would say Bill Clinton was a Teflon-coated President because nothing would stick to him. They figured out how to get things to stick to Hillary Clinton. For Donald Trump, you could throw anything but nothing is going to stick to him.

He’s slippery. They are supposed to be. Even when the Recordkeeping Act is so serious that even if there are conversations the president is having with people, there's supposed to be a stenographer that is present to document it. Donald Trump was notorious for trying to have conversations without the stenographer present. It’s not that the president shouldn't be able to have completely private conversations. They have to have completely private conversations at times.

The thing to remember too is that, what creates Teflon? What creates people not sticking the listener's predisposition for their beliefs and biases so it prevents things from sticking? He gets through the first impeachment, and that gives him permission to do the second. He then does the second and gets impeached twice. The ten Republicans or whatever the number was for senators that could have voted to impeach and not have this person in the field of view because he can't run again. We are moving on. They had an off-ramp that would have been fine.

Their voters aren't going anywhere but in their minds, they think, “If we convict this guy, we become unpopular.” You don't become unpopular because your people have no place else to vote. They can't vote Democrats because you did such a good job of damaging their brand that they’ve still got to vote with you even though they could be mad that you voted their favorite guy out, the TV star. There’s some disappointment that the Profiles in Courage weren't sitting there to go like, “What is the long-term benefit for our party instead of the short-term benefit? We’ve got to hang in there with this guy and think we can make it work.” They still think they can make it work with him but they can’t.

It is amazing. Every day, there's another story coming out negative that you would think would cause more brand damage to Donald Trump and his organization. Let's go to taxes for a moment because that's another thing that's happened. The Trump Organization has an accounting firm, and I'm talking huge accounting firm because you can imagine how complex The Trump Organization taxes are. We have all been hearing about these taxes since before he was the president. He wouldn't release them because they were on audit and all that stuff.

The accounting firm, Mazars , one of the major national US top accounting firms, sent a letter to The Trump Organization's Chief Financial Officer on February 9th, 2022, and that letter came to light a few days later when Attorney General Letitia James for the Southern District of New York that's investigating The Trump Organization, filed new court documents to explain why she wanted to get Donald Trump and his adult children under oath. That's why this all came out.

The Mazars letter told The Trump Organization that Donald Trump's financial statements from the years 2011 to 2020 could not be relied upon to be accurate and that it should tell anyone relying on those documents, banks, for example, that they were not reliable. It went on to say that there was now a non-waivable conflict of interest with The Trump Organization that meant Mazars was not able to provide new work products for the organization.

This is one of the largest accounting firms in the country firing The Trump Organization as a client, saying they are not going to work for them anymore. That's huge news. You would think it devastated The Trump Organization. I certainly thought it devastated The Trump Organization when I read it, and then, you were like, “Maybe not so much.”

The Trump organization tried to spin this letter as a complete and total exoneration.

That's the challenge. It would have been damaging if it didn't give them an additional legal spin to spin it back in their direction of what had been damaging. The challenge with writing things legally is that you are writing things so that they don't get exposure to it because if they get exposure and get involved in a countersuit, they can't support the district attorney.

There's nothing in the letter to allow The Trump Organization to countersue the accounting firm for defamation. There's nothing fully in there. The Trump Organization probably will file. They will start badmouthing Mazars like, “They are a terrible accounting firm. They aren't the best anyway. We don't know why we went with them.” What they are going to do is they are going to start trying to shift the brand damage to Mazars.

It's going to be, “This organization is not very good.” They are going to start taking a stick and start swinging it at Mazars so that the damage does not hit on to The Trump Organization because it's the shiny hotel that’s painted in gold and it’s the best place ever. What does this letter mean? You had mentioned that George Conway had mentioned some of those things. It might help our audience to get a hold of what that truth is to get us away from the biases and the different beliefs that are projected in our direction.

Lawyer George Conway is the husband of Kellyanne Conway who's was in the Donald Trump administration for quite a while. He interpreted the letter for non-lawyers in a series of tweets. He said, “Decision regarding the financial statements equals they are false because you lied. The totality of the circumstances equals the district attorney is serious about this going after to The Trump Organization,” and then this, “Non-waivable conflict of interest equals we are now on the team district attorney,” and the last one is, “Not able to provide new work product equals sorry, we are not going to jail for you, Trump Organization.”

That's what George Conway put out, which is probably pretty darn accurate. You make the real point that that's George Conway’s practical interpretation of what's behind the letter but Mazars didn't say that. Had they come out and said any of those things like, “You lied,” then they would find themselves on the other side of a defamation suit in a hurry.

George Conway went all the way to this extreme, and then, Mazars was already on this other extreme here saying, “We are not going to get countersuit. We are not going to get this. We are not going to deal with that level of litigation because we don't want to pay these guys any money. We are just going to try to see if we can dismiss them by firing and telling them we can't deliver the quality of work that we would like to deliver. We are going to try to get out of this thing because it's such a mess.” The next thing is that if they come out and be a point on, then all of a sudden, that's what they get.

George Conway could say it over here and then people can call him a rhino. They would be like, “He's a Never Trumper. That’s why he's trying to be this way. He's not our identity,” because even though he's married to somebody that supports that identity, he's not that identity. On the other side of the fence, what is a letter that Mazars could have written that also could have been a little bit more on point yet compassionate for the activities that Donald Trump and the organization did? How can you write a compassionate letter and still not get sued?

That is what’s called in Bill Stierle’s mediation world as you want to step into the uncomfortable. You’ve got to step into saying, “The Trump Organization was looking to secure cashflow for the organization, so they chose to report these numbers. They were also looking to support the organizations’ net worth by reporting these numbers.” What you do is you are stepping into the good reason why they did it, and then The Trump Organization would say, “These are the good reasons why we did it,” not knowing that they are walking down the admission of the illegal activity.

They are slowly walking off the plank of the ship.

Regrettably, what they wrote was legally sound and protective but it didn't allow us to get to what the truth was by stepping into it. It’s not as harsh as George Conway did but compassionately to, “It seems like they took advantage of these laws and everybody gave them a week and a nod, and let them do it. We are not going to represent them because our need for integrity,” what's missing in that is, “Our need for integrity as an organization will not allow us to work with them.” Can you imagine if the word integrity was in that letter? It would be like, “As an organization, our need for integrity will not allow us to support this client.”

It would be an interesting way to backhandedly say The Trump Organization lied without saying it, because you are saying, “Our need for integrity will not allow us to do this.” We are not saying that they did anything specific but them saying that would be quite something. The Trump Organization latched on to that letter and some statements within it. I thought this was laughable. I thought it was crazy. You said, “No, that makes some sense,” when you heard about it but I was like, “The Trump Organization tried to spin this letter as a complete and total exoneration.”

The amplification of perception and perspective is something that you've got to also step into. It seems like The Trump Organization would like to see this one point they put out as an exoneration. Regrettably, we feel doubtful and skeptical that that is the range of errors that are inside their reporting. Notice that I'm taking a bucket of water and putting it on. I created the emotion that I would like the reader to experience.

We feel doubtful and skeptical that this one truth they are pointing out will line up or match with the other truths that we found that are not in alignment with our need for integrity or staying in alignment with the Tax Code. Notice that I introduced something, which is staying in alignment with the Tax Code. I didn't say you broke the rule. It's just not in alignment with the Tax Code. You can't get defamation because were they in alignment with the Tax Code? They weren’t.

That’s also very hard to prove either way, which gives Mazars an out, as one NBC legal analyst put it, Orwellian doublespeak, with The Trump Organization trying to say that Mazars said they have not concluded that the various financial statements as a whole contained material discrepancy and that the work Mazars performed in accordance with professional standards that they did that. You have often said to me that out of 20 statements in a letter like this, there could be 19 of them that could be negative and potentially dangerous. The Trump Organization will latch onto the one that's complimentary and amplify that to diminish the impact of the rest.

The communication challenge is that Trump uses every law case as a marketing opportunity. Every time he is in the news, he will amplify and point out the partial truth that is in that accusation.

The amplification is an order to capture and corral biases and beliefs of team Donald Trump, the MAGA Movement, and the new identity of the Republicans, which is, “I'm trying to keep the people I want in my tent, and I don't want to lose that 20%.” This distraction that we are sitting with, and this is going to sound so upsetting, can lull to sleep the voters from the Democratic party to say, “Why do I need to vote? Clearly, this guy is lying and there's no way the Republicans are going to ever vote for this guy during the midterms or any of their people during the midterms. Look at all the lies.”

The belief that they have is no one is going to vote for these people. The belief that would be very helpful for them to engage in is it's a dog fight, and they need to show up and be amplified. That is where the thing is that they need to be on full-out press and go on like, “Firing Mazars is helping the Republican vote.” The reason why is because the faithful are going to defend their leader. They are coming out in droves to defend him against Mazars and everyone else voting. Isn’t this the most unsettling thing?

It's completely unsettling. It’s bizarre.

It's the way the limbic brain works. It’s like, “I am going to protect my identity and point of view. I'm going to protect the thing and person that I have invested in that has lifted my spirits and caused me to fight against the wrong and deal with those evil people on the other side that want to waste money.” Why don't we talk about wasting money instead of that other thing? If you go to a city and distribute T-shirts about a pro football team for free and everybody is wearing the same T-shirt, that didn't cost anything. What it bought was loyalty, inspiration, and engagement.

This is what Mitch McConnell and Republicans are fighting against. They are so sick of all this drama, theater, and these revelations that keep coming out. This whole thing about Donald Trump flushing the documents down the toilet is not helping Mitch McConnell. He's fighting against this. He's trying to get establishment-type Republicans and not Donald Trump loyalists to run in districts around the country, and they are not doing it. He's losing that battle.

On the one hand, from a certain perspective, it’s shocking. It's interesting to hear your perspective but it makes sense because it's about loyalty. It's about, “He's your guy.” The funniest thing that I have seen that shows how far we have come in this country, and I mentioned in this episode about Donald Trump speaking on television as he's campaigning for president back in 2015. Going all out on Hillary Clinton for the 30,000 emails that were gone and talking about the national archives Recordkeeping Act that she should know.

Her husband was president, and she was Secretary of State. He was like, “You have to preserve all your records. You can't just delete your emails.” He knew the law, and now, he and all his supporters are going to try to excuse him ripping up draft documents and flushing them down the toilet. Hillary Clinton is trolling Donald Trump. She's got these hats and coffee mugs that say, “But Her Emails.” She's on social media trolling him and trying to label him as a hypocrite. It's funny but it’s not going to work.

What would work is a hat that says, “Really, integrity counts?” It's the counter-message of the value he's running over. Also, a red hat with, “Recordkeeping or have you had enough fairness yet? Have you had enough respect yet?” The communication challenge is that he uses every law case as a marketing opportunity. Every time he is in the news, he is going to amplify and point out the partial truth that is in that accusation that it's not true because then he gets to amplify the marketing message.

It would probably be more effective if Hillary Clinton put on a hat that said, “Make America flush again,” because Donald Trump has made such a big issue about the water and the toilets, and now we know why. I'm sure the Republicans are like, “How are we going to win with all this craziness going on and with our party divided?” There is quite a divide within their party.

It's not enough to affect the local things yet. I feel curious because this creates so much diffusion in this short attention span world that we are talking about toilets, recordkeeping, and national archives, and their bias is like, “Sometimes my toilet gets stuck, too.” That's their bias. They are saying, “I agree with the president. There's not enough water that allows the toilet to be flushed,” and they are not even seeing the importance of recordkeeping because it's not in their worldview.

It is a flat Earth mindset. It's like, “This is the only way I could see the world because this is all I can see the world as.” We’ve got to remember that that point of view still needs empathy to it because it's their point of view. It's like the guy can't do anything wrong because he's rich, successful, confident, bully, and gets what he wants.

I do think it's important to understand that because understanding that is the only way to cut through it all. Thank you for that. I appreciate it.

This one is important. If we take a moment to communicate in a way that gets us back to our primary values of integrity and respect for America. Respect for what it means to have one vote per one person, how to create equality under the law and, “These are the laws we agree to and want to stick with, and if some of the laws are bad, we want to rewrite those to get back to this mutual respect and fairness that we all share here in America,” it will go a lot better. That's the hope that we can get the North Star back up, so we can start watching it and start steering the ship in the right direction.

That would be great. Thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody.

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The Puppet Master: How Manipulation is Used in Media

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 19:00:04 GMT

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In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the Netflix docu-series, “The Puppet Master.” Specifically, they dissect the methods of manipulation the “ultimate conman” used to explain the events that led to his eventual release after his arrest. The two elaborate further on how the media uses language and communication to manipulate its audiences. They cite the recent incident between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz as a prime albeit more nuanced example. Tune in for an interesting conversation that tackles how news outlets are now putting emphasis on high ratings versus integrity.

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Watch the episode here

The Puppet Master: How Manipulation is Used in Media

Bill, it is amazing sometimes to see how some people are able to influence others to the point of complete alternate reality. That would be a great thing to talk about. I know we have a few examples to cite here and refer to.

It is such an interesting thing because manipulation is a word that has a very strong vibration to it. The vibration of the word is that somebody is doing something to another person at that person's expense and then creates a victim on the other side. The safest and most effective way to talk about manipulation is the loss of choice. The person loses choice. Does it realize that the other person is benefiting from that person's loss of choice?

It is because this is a language show that we need to learn how to catch ourselves using words. I will keep framing the word choice right after the word manipulation so that it does not grab the energy and take it into blaming and helplessness because that is what winds up happening with certain words. For example, people will say the phrase, "I felt manipulated by." That is not a true sentence because being manipulated is not a feeling. It is a mental construction of what somebody is doing to us or doing to a person.

As somebody that listens as a mediator and listens to people communicate, when somebody says, "I felt manipulated by that boyfriend or girlfriend. That person is such a manipulator," they have no idea that when they are saying it in that way, they are giving up their advocacy and choice. As soon as you blame others, what happens is you are molecularly tied to that person through the word manipulation. You do not know that is what is happening. People say, "No, I am not." The answer is you are defending them now.

How did you do that? If you say, "No, I am not," and you are not even looking at the power of language, you think you can override your subconscious mind and logical mind and things that can do that. Have you ever been in your own body and walked through a kitchen with a plate full of cookies? Your subconscious mind will take hold of you at any time. That is the challenge with manipulation and messaging. You watched a TV show about that. Tell the readers a little bit about that because that was fascinating. I have not seen it yet but I am looking forward to it.

Manipulation is the loss of choice.

It came out here in January 2022. It is a Netflix docuseries with three episodes. It is not that long and not even three full hours' worth of content. It is an amazing true story shared in this documentary called The Puppet Master. The phrase puppet master is the person pulling the strings of the marionette and controlling the situation. I will try and sum it up pretty quickly. It is a man in Great Britain beginning in his late teens or about twenty years old at college using his skills in language and manipulation. As you watch this story, it is about the loss of choice of these people that are his victims.

It is starting in the early '90s and then stretching through even nowadays. There are several different key stories that the documentary takes you through him manipulating at different times 2 or 3 different groups of people and individuals. You learn as the investigation happens. Eventually, the guy is caught in the early 2000s, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in the UK. He appeals that conviction, wins, and is still out doing the same thing he has been doing, which has been bilking millions of dollars from his victims and not just money.

If this was a con artist taking money from people, that is one thing. This is someone who has been manipulating person after person and these poor people for ten years, not having control over their own lives. I know this may sound hard to believe to our readers. It is like, "Who can do that? Who can make someone do things against their will for a period of ten years or more, person after person and victim after victim?" It is so shocking and sad at the same time, which is why it makes for a good documentary and television.

From the outside, you are observing it and seeing, "How could this person believe or let this person do this?" When there is the investment of, "I care about this other person. This person needs my help. I am loyal to this person. I love this person. This person said this and this is meaningful to me," the puppet master or the person that is in that position is using language similar to putting bait on a fish hook.

What they do with language is they throw it in front of the person, "They did not bite on that sentence. They bit on that sentence. I am going to give this person those kinds of sentences because they are going to bite on that sentence. They will do what I would like them to do." They are using that sentence as bait on the hook. That person says, "Something my father never gave me was the acknowledgment that I need. This is what my mom never gave me. It is the encouragement that I needed." He figures out which one to use.

This is where it gets a little bit dicey because this is happening in different levels from the range of pathology, which is where this person is doing it at the extreme expense of others, to modestly motivate somebody to do something, like a football coach on a football team trying to get his players to play harder and saying things to inspire them to do well.

The light version is, "Could you bring me that dish from the sink and put it in the dishwasher? It would make a difference." The person/child is not giving up their choice. You are trying to give them a good reason to take their cereal dish from the table and put it in the dishwasher because that is what responsibility is. You want to give them a good reason.

Is that manipulation or a moment of accountability? It is a moment of accountability, but you can see now that there is a range from the way I have described that. Where does society step in and say, "Where does the line of pathology step in?" If a court is putting this person in prison for life and some court goes, "This person is a danger to others," and through some legal technicality, this person gets off, is out and is ripping off people, did the law of the land protect its people?

You are going to love this one. This one is going to blow your communications mind. Keep in mind this person was tried and convicted. The conviction was overturned in the British Court of Law. It is British Law, which I do not understand. I am not even a lawyer in the United States. Certainly, from a lot of things, we tend to understand our laws in the US of what is legal and what is not. It becomes more complicated in another country.

He was convicted under a law, which was something about false imprisonment over people that he had manipulated and was keeping under his control. His attorneys argued that the people that were his purported victims were free to leave at any time. He was not locking them up in a room, chaining them to a radiator in the room, and physically restraining them. They were free to go at any time. Therefore, he was not guilty of this false imprisonment.

This is what we are talking about in this show. Communication and words can be weaponized and be as powerful to restrain someone as physical restraints can. It is because of the way the law was written and people were not physically restrained that he got off after spending a few years in jail. This appeal took a while. He gets back out and goes right back to what he had been doing that got him in legal and criminal justice trouble in the first place. It is mind-blowing.

Manipulated is not a feeling, it’s a mental construction of what somebody is doing to a person.

The laws are to protect people and individual rights. If those people want to be taken advantage of, what does society do to protect them? There is a whole bunch of people on the planet that goes like, "That is too bad. If they are so 'weak-minded,' why does the law have to protect weak-minded people?" There are no ethics or morals to that.

You are going to start to push one of my buttons. Weak-minded people know ethics or morals. To me, there is not a very big leap from what this puppet master did to his people. I know our readers are not going to understand the details of this until they watch this Netflix docuseries. We are talking about verbal manipulation to the extreme. I do not see a big difference between that and what Tucker Carlson did on his show to Ted Cruz after he was berated by Tucker Carlson for saying on the Senate floor that the January 6th, 2021 mob and insurrectionists were terrorists. That word set Tucker Carlson off. He was abusive on his own show to Ted Cruz like an abusive parent would be, it seemed.

He did not know what to do. He went to apologize and did this. He became weak. It was the new version of Lindsey Graham's flip-flopping of, "I am this, then I am not." You are being as moldy as a piece of clay. All you got to do is squish this, and then you are disjointed over there. It is very tough because people do not understand that language has a vibration to it. There is physics to it. If I use words, the vibration of the word hits your ear like it is hitting these readers. The vibration then changes the physiology of the person so that the physiology then adjusts to the word. Tom, you have favorite ice cream. What is your favorite ice cream?

For me, it is Ben & Jerry's Strawberry Cheesecake.

As soon as we start talking about Ben & Jerry's Strawberry Cheesecake, then that strawberry cheesecake is like this and that, notice how the vibration of Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz is out. Your cells started changing. Your physiology started to lighten up. You felt delighted about this cheesecake because I am talking about a different vibrational thought. The vibration changed inside your body by changing the topic to ice cream.

One of the things that are happening in media, especially polarized media, is that the person keeps coming back to that negative message. They want to hear the doom and gloom, "If it bleeds, it leads. If it is more egregious, I am going to listen to it." What happens is we, as listeners, say, "Does the end justify the mean?" The end for messaging is engagement at any cost.

It is not just engagement at any cost. Sticking with Tucker Carlson is engagement at any cost but it is also engagement to serve a purpose for a specific agenda. It does come back to this manipulation word you used. We have, in a court proceeding, Tucker Carlson being defended in court. His own lawyers argued to the judge successfully that the things that Tucker Carlson says on his show, no "reasonable" person would believe what Tucker Carlson says on his own show is true.

That is a shocking and scary honesty coming out of a courtroom that says, "Tucker Carlson is a form of puppet master himself," and to an extent, many of the shows on the Fox News network. I am going to get a lot of pushback on that. This is scary. You use the word propaganda a lot on this show. It seems we are right there in our media.

News to be sold as a product of entertainment is something that we and many businessmen have realized is valuable property. You can sell news as entertainment. The funny part of our society has moved to the emphasis on when something has a high rating. It means that it is valuable and right. It is valuable to the advertisers but it is not valuable to the listeners and the country. It is valuable to the messenger because that is engagement. Former President Donald Trump would say, "Look at CNN ratings. They are boring. They have low ratings."

They have low ratings because they are not trying to sell and message as much as other entertainment-first and news-second. They are doing news and facts first, trying to keep the engaged person to come to the next show, and staying away from too much language of enticement. The language of enticement keeps the listener coming back. Both sides are doing it. They are trying to keep the viewer on the show, so they keep listening. They are trying to keep them hooked. I can listen to Rachel Maddow and go, "This is what she is doing. She has her form of outrage, upset, and this."

In communication, words can be weaponized and be as powerful to restrain someone as physical restraints can.

There is no better example than Rachel Maddow promoting the show on, "We finally have a version of Donald Trump's taxes." Everyone was watching her. In every break, she says, "Come back. More will be revealed." By the end of the show, even everybody watching was going like, "There was nothing revealed other than you kept me coming back to wait more than reveal." All she did was another small version of outrage throughout the entire show. It is like, "The laws are written that way. He got away with it. That is the way he positioned it and that was pretty smart and interesting."

If somebody is in the place of being unethical, then nobody challenges the person because there is a backlash to do it. People do not like it when you take down a person of wealth and affluence because there are so many people that look up to the person of wealth and affluence as being a model, "It is only until you get to the Bernie Madoff guys. That is the reason why the economy crashed." That was one guy doing one thing. All the other people around that story got away with stealing money from other people because those stories were not as sexy or enticing. What he did was clearly criminal. What they did was play by the broken rules and steal from people.

The whole movie The Big Short shines a light on exactly this type of thing. The entire mortgage and financial system of America were on the brink and almost came crashing down to kill our economy. Only one person at one company out of all that ever was even prosecuted and saw some jail time. You have all these people.

The biggest one that I remember in all that is the bond credit agencies like Moody's that were putting their stamp of approval on these completely junkie bad risk investments, rating them as an A, AA, or AAA rating and saying, "These are safe investments." They admitted, "If we do not rate them as A, then our customers are going to go down to the next rating agency and have them do it. We lose the business." They admitted they were falsifying these garbage funds or groups of mortgages as being good. The whole system fed on itself and collapsed.

Watching that movie is bringing up a lot of emotions for me because of the amount of money I lost because of that. When you are not playing in those fears and do not have an awareness of that thing, it is similar to The Puppet Master, where we are being messaged that what we are doing is right and good, and we are on top of things. Meanwhile, there is the manipulation/the lack of choice. Notice I am going right back to the word choice because the choice is the spotlight language-wise to melt the manipulator.

This is where I come back to Ted Cruz in that episode of Tucker Carlson's show where he is not buying Ted Cruz's response.

If I was coaching Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson would have gone into him, then I would go, "Ted Cruz could have become presidential at that moment." He could have whipped up on that, took Tucker Carlson's viewership, and put it on the head and you go, "Tucker Carlson, you want to call it this. I called it an insurrection because that definition looks like this.

There are a lot of Americans that have the truth that it is this. They voted this way. A lot of Americans believe what you do and vote this other way. To be honest with you, there were some people that died and were inflamed there. That was violence. People came to the Capitol with weapons. Do you want me to ignore that truth or would you like me to keep the party in line and apologize to you? Is that what you would like to do?"

What winds up happening is Tucker Carlson's viewership would take a hit because Ted Cruz would be peeling back the curtain a little bit. Tucker Carlson's viewership has other places to go but not too far because they have already invested in the bait that Tucker Carlson puts in the water. Rachel Maddow puts a different bait in the water to get people to follow her messaging and have that version of an enraged listener.

News is entertainment. Society has moved the emphasis on when something has a high rating, that means it’s valuable. It’s valuable to the advertisers, but it’s not valuable to the listener.

We are trying to keep eyeballs in a society that has, through the internet, diversified its listening platform and viewership. The people at the top are grasping for attention from the latest tweet and outrage. We are very much in a volatile situation. That is where people who can use language to build loyalty thrive at the expense of others.

That is exactly what Tucker Carlson did. He made Ted Cruz bend on his knee and kiss his ring through the language he used, berating and manipulating him. It was sad to see. Instead, as you suggest, Ted Cruz could have become very presidential at that moment, schooled Tucker Carlson, and won over a huge amount of his listeners.

He could have stood there and gone, "This is the way I do it." He could have even gone down and said, "It was not the best choice of words." Tucker Carlson called him on that, and then he submitted again.

He admitted, "What I said was sloppy. I did not mean it."

That is to keep the base he has from turning on him instead of realizing that there are people who are going to turn on him. That pot of gold is four feet away from what he needs to do to get elected. I am not suggesting I would like to see him be elected because these situational ethics and mindset are not what I would like to see in leadership. I would like to see in leadership people that can have an adult response to difficult problems.

At the same time, on this show, you and I call up both sides on their communication tragedies, debacles, and errors.

Joe Biden has his problems. Elizabeth Warren has hers. Bernie Sanders has his problems. All of them have problems with language because what they are doing is, like Donald Trump, they try messages similar to a fisherman changing lures to see which thing is going to bite. Donald Trump was great at doing it on stage. He would try this message, spin this message and come back to this other message. He would come back to messages that would get him cheers. He is not chaotic. He is a person that is testing engagement like, "What voltage do I get out of this? What cheers do I have out of this?" He is testing the vibrational energy of messaging.

I can see that with Donald Trump. Bill, I appreciate how you are able to show our readers and me, and I hope our readers appreciate it too, how you are willing to even show Ted Cruz and/or his people what he could have done to come out of this apology and repair reputation. He views his reputation repair interview on Tucker Carlson as how he could have turned it around, been strong, been the leader, and come out of it looking like he is the adult in the room, not Tucker Carlson. Maybe he would have gotten more people to say that Ted Cruz has got integrity in standing up for what he said.

At least he is pushing back. Tucker Carlson minimized his degrees and academic achievements on air. It is like, "You allowed this guy to take it away. You are a scholar. You are this and that."

It is like, "You were a Supreme Court candidate at one point. You are a lawyer." It completely took him down. He played to his audience, put out more propaganda at Ted Cruz's expense, and manipulated his viewers.

Ted Cruz can still go on stage, bring his new version of a tackle box of language and test something else in the environment. People will be there to bite the bait of word selection that he puts in front of them to vibrationally feel better. Everyone is looking for their strawberry cheesecake ice cream from a political point of view. They are looking for messages aligned with their bias, beliefs, certainty, habits and are familiar with. That is why a fishing lure looks like a fish.

People don’t like it when you take down a person of wealth and affluence, because there’s so many people that look up to that person as a model.

It is plastic, but it looks like a fish that they would normally buy. That is the way the language is being used, "How can I get somebody to engage with me where I can get them on the hook, cultivate, and build loyalty from that moment? I have got that person on the hook. They are going to vote for me every time." That is why with incumbents, once you win once, it is hard to get you out because the messaging has got to be so much counter to what you have accumulated.

Whether it is a Democrat or Republican, they are in that fight because all you got to do is take a whole bunch of money and then counter-message somebody to get them out of the seat. This is one of the problems that we are living in and living through in our society. It is going to be interesting to see what is coming up because the fight is going to be on integrity and what does the cold civil war look like. People are worried about the skirmishes.

I was listening to an interview. We will bring this up next time. You cannot have one Army against the other Army in the United States. You can have these skirmishes. Unless the law becomes a little more robust against violence and there is a little bit more public accountability for language, what winds up happening is the fight is on, "Are we going to live with the integrity of the rule of law? Are we going to bolster the rule of law to have integrity? Are we not going to do that and do something different, like have a strong man or autocracy where for the next ten years, you got to suffer from this leader that is on the top and ripping people off, and we are not voting for anything?"

Apathy shows up next because the votes are already rigged and people believe the votes are rigged. There is no accountability at the local level. The willingness to hold integrity in place is not there anymore in regards to voting. That is a little bit about where things are because that is a longer discussion about what is going to take place. What we can pick up next time is how we maintain integrity through the cold civil war.

That maybe gets us further away from the puppet masters that are out there. That is part of that.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Thanks, Bill.

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The Long Arm of The Law: Lessons from the Expert in Avoiding Accountability

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 14:23:02 GMT

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Most of us want to win and get all the things we want. We want to be able to say what we want to say. But what happens when your opinion steps on another person’s beliefs? What happens if you don't look at it as an opportunity to step up and into integrity but as an opportunity to win? Listen in as Bill Stierle and Tom discuss what happens to society when money evades accountability.

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The Long Arm of The Law: Lessons from the Expert in Avoiding Accountability

In this episode, we're going to share with our audience some lessons from the expert in avoiding accountability and being responsible. Our readers may be wondering who that expert is so Bill, help us. Who's the expert we’re learning from?

You're trying to figure out their world and looking to make your way. You want to win and get all the things that you want. You don't want to lose your choice. You want to be able to say what you want to say. Accountability means that you also got to realize that you stepped on somebody else's toe and that there is an ethic, moral or integrity piece that you got to go like, “I went too far on that.”

What happens if you don't look at it as an opportunity to step up into integrity but you look at it as an opportunity to win like, “If I stay at whatever thing I'm saying or doing, I will tire the other side out?” If we take to study experts not doing accountability, they have a line on a scale that I am not going to be accountable or responsible at all or I'm going to take the full responsibility and be a thing like a public servant. I'm going to be a person that works as a volunteer and a person that takes action towards something that I care about. There is a scale.

What does it take to get to the expert and learn lessons on how to not take accountability? The first thing that a person would need to do is create a narrative that they're right and justified for not being accountable like, “I’m not going to do that. Who cares? That person's a loser. I could beat the system. I will figure out how to beat the system.” The biggest challenge has to do with the belief frame that we have. It's called the long arm of the law.

I would have called it a cliché. It’s one of those phrases we probably have heard since our early youth days.

What that phrase means is that you can break the rule once or twice. You can win once or twice at the expense of what is written or agreed upon civilly, morally and criminally but if you get caught and there’s a breadcrumb or a track, it's called a record of you breaking the agreed-upon rules or laws. The long arm of the law is going to get you because it's going to be building evidence that you've done that.

What happens in a society when you can avoid accountability by paying more money and you've got plenty of it to pay so you might as well take it in a wheelbarrow and wheel it all over to the other person and then go back to doing what you want to do and not be accountable or responsible at all? That is one of the situations and circumstances that we're in.

Accountability is not high on the radar list because the long arm of the law means that the law is running the marathon where the marketer is running the sprint. I'm interested in creating a new message to distract from the old message that I gave that distract from the next message and then I can call that, “I've changed my mind,” and/or, “I didn't say that. That's not what I meant there. You didn't hear me fully right back then.” The lesson and the expertise in avoiding accountability are that I get to treat language as an illusion, not as an instrument of accountability.

For a language and communications show, that's a big quote right there.

Accountability means realizing that you stepped on somebody else's toe.

I treat it as an illusion. I'm using language in smoke and mirrors. This is not like Democrats don't have their version of it or Republicans aren't pressing the edge of the version of that. They’re like, “There is nothing to look at here. This is political.” It's not. When you use language to get people to motivate to do something, they do something terrible and then say, “We did mean that because we have a belief that's not validated in truth and we're going to keep saying that.”

The weird thing about the long arm of the law is that is the arm something that has muscle and is strong or is it a weakling arm? It doesn't have a lot of muscle and it's not very strong. That is something also to think about because what's happening is you can rewrite the laws to be weak so the long arm of the law can’t help you. Welcome to the fight for civil rights or voting rights. The laws are being written so that they are weaker and can't be applied.

Weaker is one way to look at it or the laws can be written in such a way to appear like they're providing safety and protection for something when there's an ulterior motive or purpose.

It’s the language of illusion. I'm saving an illusion that mail-in drop boxes lead to fraud. I said a sentence because somebody could take a lot of ballots, dump them into the box personally and somebody can open that box and ignore that there are illegal ballots in the box as if that is happening. I don't think so because there's an accountability piece there or there’s supposed to be, at least. If there wasn't an accountability piece, I would be the first person to say, “Who did not count that box correct? What volunteer or what person did that thing?”

You can also be like, “Who didn't verify that each vote came in from a registered voter or was matched up with a signature?” There are many different checks and balances there. This is very interesting because we often, on this show, talk about how language can be or maybe should be used to reveal the truth and then we're talking about how language is almost weaponized to avoid accountability, integrity and having to take responsibility for your actions.

The sentence called, “Many people say it's true,” is not a sentence of evidence. It's a sentence of belief, bias or confirmation that something is wrong here because it's not the way I would like to believe it to be true. Did you see how I had to corkscrew my mouth around that? I couldn't even barely get around it. It was hard to do. Somebody doesn't believe the way I believe and I'm listening to my leader who doesn't believe the way I believe.

He said, “Look at Pennsylvania where I was the head and all of a sudden, by midnight, I was behind. There has to be voter fraud,” instead of the places that needed to be counted had a higher volume than the places that had low volume and they were counted first. They have more efficiency because they have more volunteers, more people counting in those rural areas and the vote was going in one direction, whereas in these cities, not much so. They don't have as many people counting the votes because the number of votes comes in in such an accelerated fashion all at once so removing the boxes is not the issue.

I’ve been trying to be humorous at the outset of this episode. The expert that we can learn from in avoiding accountability and being responsible is former President Donald Trump or at least one of the experts we can learn from.

I could've jumped into that answer early but I resisted the bait because the foundation of avoiding accountability and the person that you can learn best about avoiding accountability is a 6 to 15-year-old. Those little human beings do the same thing.

My seven-year-old does it all the time. I’m like, “Why is this cereal bowl left here in the living room and not in the kitchen sink?” He’s like, “I didn't do it.” It’s an immediate reaction. I’m like, “Nobody asked if you did it. Why is it here?”

The blaming and shaming language uses criticism and defensiveness, sprinkled with all ranges of denial in it.

The 7-year-old, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, 17-year-old, 21-year-old or 25-year-old has got to do a bit of lying to prop up their world and decision-making or lack of it. They got to prop up their actions to protect themselves. They’re not going to admit to it. This is why you don't lock up your seven-year-old or punish them as often as you could. This is why you don't give them a seven-year sentence for leaving a bowl in the living room but aren't you teaching them non-accountability for their actions and also reinforcing their strategy of becoming a very defensive person that does what they want, tries to sneak around, do it and not take accountability? Aren't you fostering that? What kind of parent are you?

Parenting is a challenge. We make our best efforts but seriously, some events are big news or earth-shattering. The Supreme Court decided that they are not going to stop the national archives from releasing the records that the January 6th Committee has been seeking from The White House and it was overwhelming. I read it was about an 8 to 1 with only Clarence Thomas dissenting.

First of all, it legitimizes the January 6th Committee and what they're trying to do. It legitimizes the subpoena power of the House of Representatives that it does have teeth that you may not want there to be accountability for whatever you said, the phone calls you had or whatever documents were created but there will be accountability. It's not political because Donald Trump's Supreme Court that the three justices he put on there did not vote his way on this.

It's a great truth that's no help. He has already planted the crop and the seeds on the field and has tested the name rhino. He has done that already so he has already got Republicans in name only going as a counter-marketing narrative to people who are Republicans that don't agree with him. He has already got that ground laid. His next thing is going to go after the Supreme Court and say to them, “You are rhinos.” He's going to turn on all the people that voted that are there because he needs somewhere between 3 to 5 messages that are directed in the general area of the Supreme Court so that his followers stay with him. It's about weakening the long arm of the law.

He's an expert in all the messaging around it. He's done it his whole life to avoid accountability and responsibility and he's continuing that.

The damage is honesty or truth through exaggeration. You and I exaggerate in the past to make the story that we're telling ourselves true in small, medium and large ways like, “This is the right answer,” but it’s not. Go ask somebody that knows the answer because we're trying to get through our day and make adjustments. It’s the same thing with taxes or any other self-reporting mechanism that takes integrity, honesty and straightforwardness to doing your taxes on your own and then get your tax person to do this.

A lot of times, the tax person does not ask the question and does not become an advocate for you because if they give a piece of advice, they might be stepping over the line. For their integrity, you cannot tell them you did XYZ or you're doing it this way because it's out of the alignment of the tax code and then they're accountable for the long arm of the law. Did you see how that one works? When it came down to Donald Trump exaggerating and doubling the size of the penthouse, you and I could say, “It is right there on the tax return.” It is an exaggeration, a doubling or it crossed the line towards defrauding the state of tax money.

Also, defrauding the banking system for a loan that you got based on the value of that property. Not to be picky, this is the blue side of me but he tripled the size of the penthouse on the forms so you took a 3,000 square foot apartment and made it 10,000 square feet. That's a felony when you lie on loan applications. I don't know what it is for the tax code. It's probably a felony also if it’s proven you're convicted.

All of a sudden, it's like, “I’m sorry. It was a clerical error. I don't know who did that. Allen Weisselberg did it.” Accountability has a strong relationship to blame and shame. I don't know if you have noticed but he blames and shames a lot of people.

It's always somebody else's fault. Everybody who works for him is the best person or people until they're not or until they're no longer in alignment with him. “It's entirely their fault. They're a loser and low class. They were never any good.”

The lessons from the expert are to use blaming and shaming language, criticism and defensiveness. When you use defensiveness, sprinkle in all ranges of denial in it. Keep going after the denial and then shift the accountability to, “Many people are saying this is true and they have the evidence. My taxes are being audited. I can't turn in my tax returns for the election.” For 4 or 5 years, we’ve heard that. Who's doing the audit?

In the ultimate irony, I'm calling it that and we'll see if that sticks here but former President Donald Trump, four years of being President, avoided accountability for his actions on several lawsuits because he was President. The Justice Department said, “The president can't be sued for anything civilly. If it's anything criminal, it has to be done through Congress and impeachment because it's a distraction to him doing his job. You have to wait to sue him until after his presidency.”

When you notice a mistake, change the judgmental language into observational language.

He's the former President and is being sued civilly. The Attorney General of New York has come out and said, “We have evidence. He and two of his adult children fudge the numbers here to meet their purposes both ways, to increase the value of their real estate holdings, get more loans and decrease the value to avoid taxes. They were playing it both ways.” The issue of executive privilege, the Supreme Court has said, “Sorry, the National Archives can’t release the documents.”

The day that both of those decisions came down or those things made news, the same day in the ultimate irony of avoiding accountability, not taking responsibility or facing the music if you will, that's what my dad would say is he announced that he is running for president in 2024 so that he can, again, label all this as a political witch hunt and hoping he will be able to drag out the legal process enough that when he's president again, that will stay as illegal actions against him. You were talking about weakening the long arm of the law. Isn't that the ultimate weakening of the long arm of the law?

Yes. You're going to use the system against the system to avoid responsibility and accountability. Integrity is about winning the game using the rules that are in place and then changing the rules to continue to win the game. That is what is not front and center. What's front and center is, “Look at this terrible person doing these things.” Why don't we strengthen the arm of the law so that it meets our ethics and values as a country and then we're able to rebrand ourselves to go, “We came across this guy and this guy took advantage of this system?” Nobody challenged this system until this guy took advantage of the system. We need to not weaken the things to make it easier for the guy or the next guy to gain the system but we want to strengthen the long arm of the law so that if you want to get into this, you're doing time. It’s not going to be three years. It's going to be eighteen months and you're going to show up.

We're going to shorten the accountability. We're not going to allow a lawyer to drag it out to raise their fees to XYZ. The judges need to say, “Counselor, you're going to lose. I'm going to write against you if you try to drag this out. This is not a drag-out jotty. This is, “Bring your evidence. You've got this amount of time to do it. If you don't have it then I am favoring that I am going to write the thing on the other side.” Propaganda creates a lot of damage here and Donald Trump knows this. He says, “Say that we're recounting the votes and that there are irregularities.”

The big part of this show is what do you say to this to stop it? How do you stop this? Let's see if we can get our brain back on how do you listen to the message of somebody avoiding accountability and then change your message so they create accountability. Give them an out so they can still hold onto their self-worth and respect but still be accountable.

Let's use your daughter as an example. I'm going to do Bill Stierle Parenting 101. Step one, when you are noticing a mistake, change the judgmental language into observational language. Instead of, “Who left the bowl in the living room,” you say, “When I see the bowl on the table,” then shift it to a request to meet a need, “Would you be willing to carry that bowl to the sink at this time?” What happens is the person is a little stuck because you're not saying they did something wrong. You're telling a present moment action like, “You left it there. Human beings leave things there all the time.” Your old accountability was to bring it thereafter. Your new accountability is to bring it there now.

By asking if they'd be willing to do that now, it puts them in the place of thinking about, “Am I willing to do it or am I not willing to do that? Do I want to be that person that's not willing to do it?” They get a chance to think about what type of person do they want to be. They can say, “It may be better off for me with dad and mom if I comply and be willing to move the bowl now.” It probably does more to reframe their thinking about responsibility than trying to immediately hold them accountable and point out something that they perhaps didn't do properly before.

The person, as we’ve experienced nationally too is going to want to deny. They’re going to want to justify, blame or assign the mistake to somebody else when you know that no one else is there. You’re the only one that left the bowl there. You're sitting with the truth. This is where the long arm of the law has some problems where we need to create a relationship with integrity, which might sound like this. If they say, “I didn't do it,” that means that they're still trying to protect themselves from something they didn't need to protect themselves from. They're trying to get away from a punishment that's not coming. Say, “I hear that you didn't have your bowl,” even though they're lying to us, “Would you be willing to support me by bringing the bowl? It’s helpful for the family. It helps to keep our place clean so you bring the bowl.”

What does fairness look like in the law? How does fairness work with a person that has a lot of money?

All of a sudden, they're doing it for you. They're not doing it because they're getting punished. They're doing it from a place of internal motivation. With the condition that's out there whether it's Republicans that believe one thing or Democrats that believe the other thing, there still is an amount of empathy and accountability that's needed for certain things that people say or do. Holding the person accountable is voting the person out of office but if you do a good job of tribalizing and make the other side a worse demon then the voter has to vote for the person that doesn't have integrity because the other person is evil. They’re like, “My person lies but that person's evil.”

They're doing whatever they can to fight the evil people. That’s what's turning out. We're in a very precarious place of unwinding ourselves from, “I've met a Republican and a Democrat. When I'm meeting with them, they might have some beliefs that I don't agree about but I can make it safe to talk about beliefs that I don't agree about and explore the good reasons why they voted in the way they did because they can't vote in the other way. They're weighing certain issues. I want this person because this person stands for a single-issue vote person.” That’s what’s happening to us. We’re singling issue votes.

If I want more Democrats to put out on the ballot, I'm going to put legalized marijuana. I get more voters out because I put that on the ballot and then they happen to check the boxes about these people that don't know anything about. They have no idea who they're voting for. They're voting for that issue. All I got to do is pollute or populate the ballots with issues that they are interested in getting done. I'll put anti-abortion laws, not to get the abortion thing going but to bring out my voter. That's the person that's most likely to do that.

Notice that integrity, accountability and responsibility are not about having a healthy dialogue about the government taking choice away from its citizens, which is what an anti-abortion law does. They would say it is taking the choice away from the unborn child but what about their choice? The healthy dialogue is to say, “Do you lean towards the choice of the mother or the choice of the child?” She gave up her choice. "I don't think that's fully true. Other elements are going into that choice.

To re-establish and get people to be more empathetic and compassionate is to understand that we can be mad at the way our language has put us into this spot but there's also creating a healthy dialogue around accountability, responsibility, integrity, what does fairness look like in the law and how does fairness work with a person that has a lot of money. Fairness might not look that way. If a company pollutes something and it costs $250 million to clean it up but the fine is $10 million then the government has to foot the rest of it back and the company gets to take the profit. That's not fair. They made a choice that caused a consequence.

Accountability, long arm of the law or the short arm of the law. The law can't reach it because you keep weakening the law. That's the condition that we're in. The next thing we could take a look at the next time we get together might be a way to how to have integrity at the relationship between the different issues that we have like the environment, the political system, the criminal system and the civil system. It opens up so much integrity around those various systems. There's work to be done there.

I'd love to talk more about integrity. The other thing we can talk about there is I'm not so sure that Americans, in general, care too much about integrity. I don't see people being upset about it. It'll be very interesting to talk about it.

The need for integrity needs reset. There's got to be something when somebody says something that they're held accountable for. It's hard because we justify our means all the time. We fly spy planes over other countries. Does that meet their need for privacy? No.

I'm sure we always deny that we're doing it, which is not meeting a need for integrity. This will be an interesting ethics and civics discussion in a lot of ways.

Thanks, Tom.

Thanks, Bill.

Take care.

Differentiating Interpretation From Fact: Unpacking A Viral Vaccine Meme

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 12:21:54 GMT

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A picture is worth a thousand words or, in this case, a thousand interpretations. Recently, a viral Facebook meme illustrating vaccine requirements for employees made its round on the internet. For today's episode, Bill Stierle and Tom share their two cents on the matter. They unpack the messaging behind the post and discuss how and why such varying and divisive opinions came up from a single image. Join them for an insightful conversation on interpretation versus fact and freedom and independence versus consideration for others.

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Watch the episode here

Differentiating Interpretation From Fact: Unpacking A Viral Vaccine Meme

Bill, I got motivated and I'm trying to find a way to put some emphasis on this without making it positive or negative because I think there are so many ways to look at this. I got motivated or maybe I got somehow a fire lit under me to talk about a particular meme that was circulated on Facebook, at least that's where I first saw it. When I looked at it, I'm like, “That's a very interesting meme.” It's definitely something that's here and now in our society that a lot of people are wrestling with. I had a certain perspective as a business owner that I wanted to comment on the meme and I did. What I was shocked by is how other people saw it.

A lot of times, Tom, people see images or memes and how could they do anything different than read it from their perspective, beliefs, bias and information. That's the challenge. If I extend somebody that trust to another person and they tell me something's bad, I don't go there because I'm trusting them. I believe it's bad but I haven't looked at the thing myself. There are several things in the environment that are being written about and decided upon at the government level that doesn't being decided at that level because of the belief or bias or confirmation that this thing is bad when it's not bad.

It's written in a way to have the person engage in the image, which is what you brought forward here is an image in regards to vaccines. How do we on a communication show empathize with an image? Train our brain to create perspective and perception with this image rather than saying, “This is what it means.” We needed to check our internal world to say, “We're putting some interpretation on this.” It's not a bad thing but it's also something that we can catch on our site that we are escalating. It's not the images escalating it. Our belief or bias is escalating things.

I certainly experienced that. Although at the time, maybe I didn't fully understand what was happening.

You knew something was up. Your internal world knew something was up and you are like, “What does this thing mean?” That's called, “Hats off to you,” is that your observational mind is getting better. That's a good thing. That's what that is.

When people see images or memes, how could they do anything different than read it from their perspective, beliefs, bias, and information?

I hope so. I certainly try to approach things from that place of observation first. As we've learned back in the truth scale, observation is the closest on the scale of truth. It's very high up on the truth scale. Let me for our readers paint a mental picture here for them. This meme is a graphic image like a cartoon, if you want to call it that. Those of you who are reading can check this image out at the blogpost to PurchasingTruth.com .

It is a drawn image of what I would call a chasm or think of it as a canyon. Basically, there's this place that a person is standing on the edge of, it could be a cliff or only 10 or 12 feet off the ground. It’s hard to see because the image is cut off. The idea is you'd need a bridge to cross from one side to the other. There's a gap in the earth that is there that no one could walk across or jump across.

There's a person there holding a briefcase, bent over and a couple of little lines or hashes drawn around his head so it looks like the person is maybe exasperated. There's a gap. On the other side of the gap is a big signpost that says “job” and that same-looking briefcase underneath the job. Some money on the other side of that sign of the job. There’s a line coming down from the top with what looks like a fishhook holding the money.

What the bridge is across the chasm is a hypodermic needle, an obviously enlarged one. It's bigger than the person. The implication is to get the vaccine and walk across the vaccine to get to their job. There are texts of thought that say, “No one should have to cross this bridge. NO ONE.” A person with who I'm connected on Facebook, it was somebody I’m associated with back in my high school days although I don't know the person very well. I had to look that up. Was I in high school with this person? I saw this meme and I was like, “That's very interesting.”

That's the way I approach it. I looked at this meme and what it said. They're saying, “No one should have to get a vaccine in order to have a job or to do their job.” There are a few different ways you could interpret this. On its face, meaning looking plainly at what it says. I decided I'm going to make a comment as a business owner because while it says, “No one should have to cross this bridge.” While I agreed, no one should have to. I thought I would offer some perspective as a business owner who employs a lot of people that there are other things to consider. There may be some good reasons why an employer requires a vaccine for their employees or certainly certain jobs within their company.

It’s easier to jump to something that you’ve validated in the past to be true.

Maybe it doesn't have to be every job within their company but certain jobs. I thought I'd offer some perspective and I did. I preface it by saying, “I'm not making a political statement. This isn't meant to be a political post. I'm purely offering some thoughts from the perspective of a business owner. For the most part, there was a real civil discussion and debate that took place amongst people commenting on this but still, some things surprised me.

I was shocked at how some people reacted to not only this meme but to what I wrote. Bill, I want your serious thoughts on this because you have an incredible perspective to offer. Let me say, I had so many people comment on this post saying the government should never require a vaccine for people to do their job. It's like, “Okay, I hear you. I would try to empathize with them.” I didn't see this meme as having anything to do with government mandates over vaccines. Honestly, I didn't. From my perspective, there's nothing in this meme that says anything about the government.

The word government is not on this thing. There's nothing. That's a great example, Tom. It's activating a belief, bias and perception. The perceptions activated that the government is putting the needle there. The government has made a mandate but that's not what this thing is about. This is you've got to cross this threshold of vaccination to have these other things. That's the perception now. That's what the picture showed.

There's none in its words or the cartoon. Is there anything here about the government doing anything? When people would comment about the government mandating things, we were right in the middle during this time. The Joe Biden administration had issued an executive order for OSHA, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, to require any company with more than 100 employees to mandate their employees get the vaccine or the government was mandating it.

This was being challenged and going through the courts so the decision had not yet come down as a lot of this debate is going on. We know the Supreme Court ended up ruling against the Joe Biden administration from the OSHA perspective that they thought it was the bridge too far for the government to require any company with 100 employees.

That is a big discussion point right there. You've got two things, individual freedoms and the collective good of the nation. The collective good of the nation also needs to consider individual rights. At the same time, they also got to realize that as soon as you meet some individual rights, you lose the collective good of the nation. Those are the things. Here's the bad news. The bad news is they picked individual rights over the collective good of the nation.

That means there's nobody protecting the greater good. Let that sink for a second. The protection of the greater good is not what the court does. In the past, we've gotten ourselves into trouble here. During the AIDS epidemic, there were decisions made in the same way where people picked money over a person's life. That's what they did.

They said, “We're not going to vote for the greater good and test the blood banks. We're not going to do that because it's going to cost too much.” It’s what they did. It costs lives. How many? Thousands. That's problematic because it's a health issue. I'm bugged by this because I lost a sibling in that. In our condition, this picture is saying, “This individual is required to meet the needs of the greater good.” The way it's set up is, “Your job and financial security is going to be threatened because we need the greater good to be taken care of.”

The facts, when in the face of a person's perception that they're holding on to, are not as important as fighting for their thing.

Notice how I'm looking at the picture very differently than the person that has the mandate. Now we're ready to take a look at what those different needs are on both sides. A child will look at this and have a snap decision, a person that is not exploring, the perception of this is going to jump to a bias. It's easier to jump to something that you validated in the past to be true or somebody that you trust. It's easier to pick that than it is to do what you and I are doing is critically looking at the picture. I'm ready for the next piece of it.

The Supreme Court, while on the one hand, denied or ruled against the Joe Biden administration from the perspective of OSHA. Having this mandate apply to all companies with so many employees, they did allow the mandate to go forward that the Joe Biden administration required for healthcare and hospital workers and things like that. There was a partial victory and a partial loss for both sides in this debate. That's the information that the news on its face.

You used the word with me that this meme activated things in the viewers of the Facebook post. I am trying to empathize with their needs and my comments back and forth and have a civil discussion about it, which we did have a civil discussion and empathize with their needs. One person said to me, “Tom, I saw this meme as the government requiring vaccines.” That's why they were coming together. I said, “I can appreciate that. Thanks for letting me know.”

I didn't see how anywhere in this meme it was talking about the government. My comments are not about a government mandate. They're about an individual company. By the way, Bill, we should say just for the record that individual private companies are allowed to mandate that their employees take the vaccines. I had somebody say to me in a comment that it was unconstitutional. I had to break the bad news to them in an empathetic way, “I hear that you'd like me to hear that a private company requiring vaccines is unconstitutional. Is that right?” They said, “Yes.”

I explained to them, “That's not the case.” Private companies are allowed to do anything but constitutional challenges have been only about the government making a mandate of some kind like this, not individual companies. The airlines are the biggest example like United Airlines and American Airlines have absolutely issued a company-wide mandate. Their employees need to be vaccinated or they lose their jobs.

A police department in New York City did the same thing. Even though that's a local government agency, they made that decision on their own. Many companies have and that is legal and constitutional. Putting that out there as a fact, although I realized, Bill, as I'm having this civil discussion/debate with other people over Facebook, even though the facts are on my side, the facts didn't matter very much to them.

In the face of a person's perception that they're holding on to, it's not as much important as fighting for the thing I know. If I fight for the thing I know, I have more stability in my world and more certainty. I've made a decision about this.” The influencers, media, politicians and various different leaders are trying to solidify the perception and the belief early in trying to get something to stick, to keep the person on their side.

If you want your freedom, you’ve got to pay a tax for it. If you want your independence, you’ve got to pay a tax for it, because then we're creating money so that when you become sick, we have money to pay for your illness.

Former President Donald Trump goes on to the stage and does a thing called test marketing. He says a sentence and looks to see how many people cheer for it. He then comes back and says it in a different way and then sees if they cheer for it. He is testing the tone and the impulse of what the audience is listening to in order to increase loyalty, engagement and the thing. That's why he would say, “Ron DeSantis is boring.” Why? Because Ron is copying something rather than testing something.

He's a marketing and salesperson. The people don't know that the president is a marketing and salesperson. He's not necessarily a civic leader. A civic leader is somebody different than what he is. He's not a civic leader. He is a marketing and sales expert that uses a language to market and sell. He was on TV and kept doing marketing and sales messaging. That's what he did. It's all about getting his brand, image and products to be purchased. A large part of it has to do with his own respect and recognition that he gets mad at the expense of others and his own self-worth that he's trying to fill. Part of it is all of that.

With this picture, to pivot back to the picture, if the bias or the imprint has been laid in that government mandate is the image, that phrase gets associated with this picture. Government mandate means that freedom is lost instead of government mandate is a civil protective recommendation/demand on society called, “Let's not kill our fellow Americans by exposing them to these viruses.” This is problematic.

There are two things that you said that I would help to put a little emphasis on. The first thing is you're saying that the person who views the meme if they've been hearing, “Government mandate,” even though this meme on its face says nothing about a government mandate. It doesn't even imply anything about government mandate. From my perspective, an objective viewing place, this meme has nothing to do with a government mandate.

However, that doesn't matter. Many people that saw it, this “requirement” to get a vaccine to have their job is they're concerned about big brother, the government mandating it, and the idea of a government mandating it. As we were in the middle of this Supreme Court battle/review of the Joe Biden administration's mandates, a lot of people are activated by that. They go and comment in a very unhappy way back to me about this because of the government mandating it and the constitutional issues and saying, “You know how the Supreme Court's going to rule on this, Tom,” whatever or things like that.

I found it very interesting and all I was trying to do to is say, “Everyone, I understand an individual's desire to not be required to have a vaccine to have their job. I can understand the personal freedom argument and concerns. All I was trying to do is give them a little perspective of the consequences to a business owner for an employee who decides not to get vaccinated especially for jobs that require them to go out into the field and be with other people and get potentially exposed to the virus. If they get sick and hospitalized, there's a whole host of consequences for the company to that individual person's choice to not get vaccinated. That's all I was trying to put perspective on. Something else you said there, Bill, I think is quite important to talk about.

To pick up on that important thing to talk about, it has to do with motivation. What is the motivation for this thing? I can change the meaning of this picture with two words.

That was the thing I wanted to bring up. You got it right there. Let's be honest about this meme. This meme has a bias or the author of the meme.

I want to change the meaning first. The thing it says is, “No one should have to cross this bridge. NO ONE.” Watch this one, “No one should have had to cross this bridge, early testing to keep the virus out of the nation.” Notice it's no one should have had to have. We needed to protect ourselves earlier, do contact tracing and get ahold of a national illness so it didn't wreck our economy. No one should have had to because we're stuck having to do this or doing this. The image of the person going, like, “Where were the civil servants? Where were the people to protect us from this disease?” The answer was denying it was real. It was going to have a major impact. That's what they were doing. How do we know this? I don't know, news footage, 500 people a day are dying.

We’ve got to do a better job as both observers and as speakers to see what the needs are on both sides of the issue. If the facts are in the information that come in, lean towards one of those two things.

It's even more than that. It's like 1,500 people are dying a day. Is it down?

It was down a little bit. What does that mean to us? At this point, 878,000 people have died. We're getting close to one million. I don't know if we're going to get our free sub at the end of this thing or whatever. We're sitting at a place where we need to motivate the population now to overcome marketing and branding and being sold that this is not real or this is not a big deal. We need to overcome this with a lot of early childhood parenting strategies. If you do this, you get that. Bribing people, deal-making, trying to give a discount and gifts for people to take the things. We're doing very early childhood parenting strategies. By the way, that doesn't work all that well.

The other side doesn’t work well either. The province of Quebec, Canada has put a mandate over all their citizens that if you don't get vaccinated, you have to pay a tax. They're saying, “We're not going to pay. The government isn't going to foot the bill for all you people continuing to get sick who aren't getting vaccinated. You are going to have a tax by this date if you don't get vaccinated. That’s different. I forget what you call that in terms of the parent. That's the parent that's going to institute strong punishment.

It's a carrot and a stick technique. You’re taxed on the vax. If you don't do it, we aren't paying for your healthcare and you've got to pay it.

It scared the heck out of people. As soon as they did issue that requirement in Quebec, the appointments for a vaccination shot way up.

The Americans are going like, “Yeah, I'm going to be defiant.” The reason why Americans can do that is that the healthcare burden is on the person anyways. The insurance purchasing and stuff like that are on them anyways. It's like, “I guess you could mandate it. I'm going to take advantage of the broken system anyway. If I'm sick, I'll show up there. They'll treat me anyway and I won't pay for it. Because there is no gift already of healthcare that’s available, we don't have the stick option as much have.

The national healthcare like they have in Canada makes it probably a harder argument that compulsory vaccines or you're going to pay a tax is maybe more tolerable as an idea without revolt.

If you want your freedom, you got to pay a tax for it. If you want your independence, you got to pay a tax for it because then we're creating money so that when you become sick, we have money to pay for your illness. That's what the tax is for. You're not doing it.

Bill, back to the meme or the cartoon. Definitely, this is drawn and put out by someone who has a perspective that no one should be required to have a vaccine to have their job, regardless of whether it's a government mandate. What's missing perspective-wise and I found this interesting. We were talking about this and you were saying, “We could write on the syringe a few words for the good reason why a company might require it.” Some of that you've mentioned like protection of others and getting to a more stable economy more quickly, things like that.

Let's clean that up. There are different needs sitting on both sides of this issue. One of the needs has to do with the need for freedom and independence, as well as I get to have a choice about what happens with my body and my medical issues. That's on one side. This choice, freedom, independence and hyper individuality is what America provides us. The other side of the narrative has to do with consideration for others and protection for self. You take the vaccine and there are different ways to choose. My son says, “I am taking the vaccine because I do not want to get anybody else sick. I also don't want to be in the hospital. I am not doing XYZ because I'm choosing.”

He's twenty years old and that was his choice. He didn't say, “I'm a rugged individual. I'm a young person. I can get it and get it over with.” He's not saying that. He's saying, “I don't want to be a spreader and one of the unlucky persons to be in the hospital with a ventilator.” Notice how he's working through it. He's picking the set of needs. As we’re looking at this picture, do we pick it that this is about the loss of freedom for the person? Do we pick it as here's what a civic duty looks like? Here's what consideration for others. Here's what to get back to normal looks like.

We've got to do some things and speak our way out of the cold civil war to create places where we're in agreement and then we can work together, not all or none.

All of that stuff could be written around the syringe area. It could be written as freedom, choice. You could put literally all the words that are necessary for the decision because it's not just one motive to get you across to take the vaccination. It's here are some things on this side. You get your freedom and independence. On the other side, you get financial security and stability with the job. In between that is caring for other or civic or social duty. That's what the syringes and the representation of now. There are going to be people that are going to argue the vaccines don't so and so.

The vaccines don’t work. I have some of that too. The vaccines have been proven to be effective some people were trying to say.

They have not proven to be effective in preventing the disease but they have been effective at mitigating death. That is what's missing in the narrative. People want the “all or none” thing.

It’s a lot easier decision than if it's an all-or-nothing proposition.

This one is sorry, the medicine's not that good but medicine in preparation for you dying, we can do that part. That's what this vaccine does. We have not gotten rid of smallpox or polio or some of these other things. I think I'm wrong about polio. We have certain diseases we have not eliminated but there are certain diseases that we have.

The measles outbreak at Disneyland several years ago is one example. Measles is something that we definitely, as a country, have mitigated. We've made it not a serious health threat because pretty much every child in the United States or grows up here is required to have that vaccine in order to go to school at some point. Lots of people travel to Disneyland from outside of the country and other places. Anyway, there ended up being this measles outbreak and we all saw how fast things spread like wildfire among people who were not vaccinated.

There's another thing that this meme doesn't do. I would, for business owners everywhere, like to mention on its face it says, “No one should have to cross this bridge to get a vaccine in order to have their job.” I'm in agreement with that as a business owner. No one should have to do that. This is America. You don't have to. If you don't want to be vaccinated, you don't have to work for a company that requires a vaccine. There are plenty of companies that have jobs out there that don't have vaccine requirements.

You, as an employee, have a choice to go get another job somewhere else. I know that may be easier said than done for some people. I don't mean that to be completely callous. I'm sure some people love the job they've had for decades and don't want to leave and go to another company. I get all that. In terms of the strict requirement, it's not a requirement. The other thing that's problematic for me about this meme, interestingly nobody in this Facebook post commented on it.

I thought they would because I thought it was a little troubling about the meme is the idea that the money is on a fishhook on a line almost as if to imply that when you cross the bridge and go to your job, you get the vaccine to have your job then the company might still yank the money away after you've done that. There are some troubling things about the money on the hook that I don't think is helpful. I think it would've made more sense to have a basket of money on the other side, sitting there for you and you do your job, you get the money and no one's location of the money being yanked away from you. Nobody commented on that. That isn't what activated anybody.

It activated you.

I'm prepared to deal with the fallout of that as an employer. I was prepared for somebody that challenged me on that and no one did. I didn't write the meme but here I am saying, “There's another perspective,” but there are many perspectives. What I appreciate about this meme is that it's very thought-provoking. I still now will say it was a very healthy debate and discussion among people on Facebook. For the most part, they're all having a civil discussion and being mutually respectful. It didn't descend into blaming, shaming, name-calling and all sorts of other stuff. I was appreciative and pleased with that.

The thing I think that we can stick the landing on here is that we've got to do a better job as both observers and speakers to see what the needs on both sides of the issue are. If the facts are in the information that comes in, lean towards one of those two things. We need to let go of or we're not going to get that thing that we think is most valuable. If we're in the place of commitment and loyalty to something and we want the need for freedom of choice but we want commitment and choice. People are making that decision all the time to make those things work together. Whether it's a family member, marriage, relationship or partnership, you don't get all the freedoms you used to have when you were single, when you're married.

You've got to choose which needs you're picking, integrity or commitment. You're picking those. Until the person says, “I don't want to do the commitment anymore. You don't want to do the commitment anymore. Part of the commitment was important to me.” That's the challenge. It’s a great discussion. I'm delighted that you brought it, Tom, because it helps us with the challenge that we're going to have as we're entering the cold civil war that we're in.

We've got to do some things and speak our way out of the cold civil war to create places where we agree and we can work together. Not all or none, you're this and you're that. That means that we can't even have an agreement at all, which is where our nation is wedging itself to. It doesn't need to be there.

That sounds like we're teeing up some good discussions coming up for future episodes there.

If any of you readers need support to work through these difficult issues, feel free to reach out to us. We'll be glad to support you more.

Bill, thanks very much. I appreciate your time. It was a lot of fun.

Thanks.

Spreading Like Wildfire: Fighting Misinformation with Empathy

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 12:19:58 GMT

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How do you communicate with someone who has different views from you? How do you find empathy and wade through those difficult conversations? In any business, misinformation is a make-or-break thing. Most believe that, “The customer is always right,” but does that mean that the customer's truth supersedes reality? In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom share their insights on the spread of misinformation across different industries, especially in politics. Listen in as Bill and Tom tackle what has become of our beliefs and how to cultivate empathy and compassion amidst skepticism.

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Watch the episode here

Spreading Like Wildfire: Fighting Misinformation with Empathy

Our anniversary, January 6th, brings up a lot of things to think and be concerned about regarding language and communication. Before we get into some of that, we wanted to talk about something not as controversial, nonetheless, very relevant, regarding how people have perspectives. I had a very difficult conversation with a customer of my company that was so shocking. This customer had established beliefs that certain things about websites are true that are quite simply not true. To me, it was as if this customer was looking in the sky at 12:00 noon and seeing that bright spot of light in the sky and saying that is the moon when it is the sun and saying to me, “Isn’t the customer always right?”

It is putting me in a very difficult position because, at that moment, the customer was not right. Telling the customer that the customer is not right is not helpful in that situation. It was always a very difficult conversation. It took all of my language and communication skills to get this customer off the ledge of jumping off a cliff and ending our business relationship, which wouldn’t have been good for either one of us. The perspective was shocking in terms of how far away from the truth it was.

How do you communicate with somebody who looks up and sees the sun and calls it the moon? Even closer to perspective, they might even look at the moon and say it is made out of cheese or there is a secret moon base up there. There are different beliefs and experiences that human beings bring into their consciousness through language. There was no communication anywhere on the planet about aliens flying on an alien ship that looked like a disk until the 1950s.

The 1950s was the first time news media had that this looked like a saucer in the sky. From then on, people started reporting dreams and started saying, “I was picked up with a disk.” Before that, no one ever reported a disk in the sky. Why is it that a word, phrase, or belief gets into our culture or planet as a human being? What winds up happening is we start speaking and dreaming about it and making it real, but there is a problem with that because we spread our thoughts and beliefs very similar to the common cold or Coronavirus. It seems like it is easy to spread, whereas other diseases are not as easy to spread.

The disease of misinformation or disinformation, depending on what information is, has spread like wildfire.

The spread of a wildfire is a great belief because we have a metaphor about things, and then you realize that any image associated with the behavior gets more traction, which is called good marketing. If somebody in the 1970s says the phrase, “The customer is always right,” as a form of customer service, that means the customer’s truth supersedes reality. Your customer had some beliefs about the internet, websites, marketing, or what podcasting was going to do for them, and they were sure fighting for it.

The disease of misinformation or disinformation is spreading like wildfire.

What you didn’t do in reference to the thing that you should have been doing and they are slugging it out in their head, and it’s taking them down a well-worn thought path starting with the fuse. Beliefs are like a fuse towards a stick of dynamite. It’s like she has a belief that the customer is always right. There is no self-reflection in that. If I have to believe the customers are right, I get to be a spoiled 4-year-old as an adult or a ranting 12-year-old as a congressman. A belief has that, and with complex issues like America. A phrase called “Make America great again,” can stick, or, “Stop the steal,” or, “The big lie.”

This is the tough thing that we thought was threatening our democracy in 2021 as this interaction happened, and people were driven to take action in the form of violence to stop counting votes. Even though there are over 700 people that have been prosecuted, are in the process of being prosecuted, have been convicted, a combination of all, this movement continues to grow. I was looking at the statistics in the news that in 2021. Less than a majority of Republicans believed that the election had been stolen, and Donald Trump won the election. In 2022, 75% of Republicans believe the election was stomped. This thing has grown.

You keep the messaging going and the voter to take, “The customer is always right,” to the phrase, “The voter is always right.” You don’t have to change the voter’s belief. You got to get the voter to vote for you. Your job as a politician or newscaster is not to inform the consumer about accurate facts. It’s to get advertising revenue. That is the job. A person says the ratings on CNN are terrible because people don’t want to watch the truth and deal with a complex issue. Who wants to watch some of the shows that CNN puts up 24/7 covered by whoever is speaking of wherever? It’s like you are capturing this person, and it gets boring because there is a realization that the person is not saying anything, the person is not able to make a point, and I voted for an illusion. This person is ranting, and I can’t listen to this person rant.

There is a lot of ranting and opinion in this 24-hour news world we live in. I agree with what you said about that accurate reporting of the news and the facts is a lost art, from the point of observation of me looking at a lot of news. The former CEO of Theranos, this company in Silicon Valley, was revolutionary. Elizabeth Holmes was considered the next Steve Jobs. There is a whole HBO documentary on it. You have to see which about the Silicon Valley startup, which was valued at about $9 billion in its heyday, and it was all built on a lie.

This company supposedly had developed technology to do all your blood analysis from the prick of a finger and a drop of blood instead of having to go in and put your arm and have them take vials of blood for all these different tests. It all ended up being a fraud and a charade. Very famous people like George Schultz, Former Secretary of State, and Warren Buffett invested in the company. Many big people invested. She has been on trial. This whole thing came crashing. It’s a wonderful documentary.

I’m interested from a business perspective. She has been on trial for wire fraud and all sorts of other frauds of investors. The verdict came down. Back to the point of news reporting, it made the news that she was convicted on a couple of accounts. She was acquitted on some accounts, and on some accounts, the jury couldn’t reach a decision, but the news did not report some basic facts like when she is going to be sentenced and what is the likely amount of jail time she is going to get.

You often hear these things in news reports, but the news did not care to report that. They wanted to report that she was guilty and that these famous people who invested in the company were defrauded. They leave these other useful facts on the sidelines. There is a casualty of the sensational part of the story. Something you said about the media reporting and not always reporting all the facts triggered something and reminded me because I was talking about that before.

If I’m looking at this from a business perspective, it’s better from a financial perspective for the media not to give all of the answers so they can drag out the story. I’m trained to take a half step back and empathize with the media, “Shall I give the listener all of the answers and get to closure because that’s what they need? Shall I give them this much and then say tune in tomorrow, and I’ll give you a little more?” They are withholding the resolution or truth either because they are hiding it or drawing it out. They would rather draw it out. Certain media outlets would rather draw it out than get it to a solution because they can get more coverage that way and fill more time. Certain media outlets would rather not deal with it because it is too complex for their listener.

That is part of why they don’t provide all the information that they would have in Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather’s day. Maybe they would have when it’s not a 24-hour news cycle, and you are watching only half an hour of news in the evening, and you are not going get it until the next day. Let’s come back to January 6th because it was very interesting in the run-up to this anniversary. I did see another piece on CNN, some video reporting where this correspondent and, ironically, the reporter is Irish or of various heritage. He has a nice thick accent, but he always goes into the lion’s den of Donald Trump rallies and Donald Trump supporters, not in a comedic way the way Jordan Klepper does, but in a serious way, trying to ask questions and see what people’s truth is.

There's no truth because there's no trust.

He asks Donald Trump supporters, trying to get them to admit Donald Trump didn’t win the election. He talked to about ten people in this interview. It’s fair to say 90% have all said, “Donald Trump won the election. Joe Biden didn’t win the election.” At the very end, someone looked at it from more of a rational place. She was more of a supporter of Donald Trump and his policies but, “We should move on and admit that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. I’m not here about the 2020 election. I’m here about the next election and to support the candidate I want.” There was a perspective more aligned with the truth of what happened in the 2020 election, where most Trump supporters or Republicans have been polled. Seventy-five percent of the people in that poll said they believe the election was stolen and Donald Trump won in 2020.

The new head of the elections in Maricopa County, who was elected in 2020, finally buried or ended this issue that all the reviews and the cyber ninja stuff have been done. Their final report on the 2020 election said there was no fraud. The only thing that they found is that 50 votes were accidentally tabulated twice by a young election worker who made an honest mistake. That’s it. Joe Biden won Arizona by more than 10,000 votes. They debunked everything. They reviewed it all and said, “There is no fraud. Joe Biden won in Arizona.” None of these Donald Trump supporters or Republicans that have been polled are paying attention to that. It doesn’t get any perspective in their minds.

There is no truth because there is no trust.

They were in a dangerous place in America because of this if both sides cannot agree that our election systems are sound, have integrity, and the answer to the truth about elections is to count the votes. That is the foundation of our nation.

The hard part about it is because so much of a person’s mindset if we adjust the metaphor a little bit and then get to a solution is what to do about it. In a football or basketball game, you can see if the person made the basket or scored the touchdown on the screen or live. You can watch it take place. At the end of the game, half of the fans, the ones who are for the team that lost, feel disappointed, and half of the fans are delighted because their team won that game. The idea is to be good about losing.

We lost because they had a stronger message, more skill, and talent. One of our guys fell. The ref made a bad call, but that is a part of the game. The 50 votes are that the ref made one bad call, not the ref made one bad call, which means that the whole game should be thrown out and replayed. Think about how that would work in the NFL. I’m a Saints fan. I’m going to go, “Play the game again. I want the game played. Recount the game. Fire the ref. Change the ref that is going to call the game in my favor.” That is the mindset that is being cultivated. The problem is the cultivation of the mind.

Let’s figure out if we could get away from this. How do you give compassion and empathy to somebody feeling the simplest feeling of all, disappointment? How do you give empathy to them? How do you console that person? The person feels disappointment and then has a judgment. The judgment is that, “Our team should have won. We have better players. We have better policies. I don’t like the policies of the person that won.”

“I don’t like the policy of the state that allowed people to vote by mail.” They have a belief that that is not fair.

They are voting by mail, which means there can be fraud in the mail system. This has been gone over and over again about the systems that are taken out. The other side is going to listen to me and go like, “You believe a false narrative.” How do we know that there is no monkey business going on? That needs empathy to it. It doesn’t need problem-solving to it. You would trust in your elections. It sounds like you would be a person who would need to go and experience what trust looks like by seeing how the voting process is doing and being a good citizen by being a part of the vote-counting team. “Would you be willing to be a part?” “It’s rigged.” “Why don’t you go check it then?” “I trust Sean Hannity. I trust these people. They are telling me it’s rigged.” “Why don’t you go check? Why don’t you do what you can?”

That doubt and skepticism that has been sown into voting by mail have been from a marketing perspective done masterfully, even before the 2020 election, either within the context of the 2016 election or 2018 midterms in the run-up before 2020. There were two senators from Oregon, one Republican, and one Democrat. I remember the interview where they were talking about, “What we have done in our organization is a model for the nation, every registered citizen eligible to vote, gets a ballot in the mail and they all vote. The system works incredibly well. You can find if there is fraud by checking the votes that come in against the list of voter registration, and it’s so easy to do.”

Eventually, California went the same way as we got into the pandemic. It didn’t happen right away. Since the pandemic, every registered voter in California gets a ballot. You can mail it in or carry it into the polling place, vote, turn it in, and vote on the machine if you want to. All of this stuff should be apolitical and nonpartisan. The Republicans, especially Donald Trump and his team and supporters and many supporters in the National Office of the House of Representatives and senators are all jumping on this bandwagon. “We need to make sure every vote counts and there is integrity in the voting system,” which is sowing seeds of doubt that there is no integrity in the voting system and casting doubt on the results of the 2020 election.

Accurate reporting of the news and the facts is a lost art.

It is a non-story, and how you cover a non-story because it doesn’t make you any money. A story makes you money. A non-story doesn’t make you money. A fact does not sell well because otherwise, you and I can stare at the moon and go like, “That is the moon up there. The moon has these features to it. That’s what is in the moon.” What sells is that, “There is an alien base on the dark side of the moon, and it’s only been uncovered by these hazy-looking pictures. The moon is hollow, and there is a base inside the moon's dark side. You can see some spaceships flying off of it if you look hard enough.” Without any evidence, I polluted our minds with a story about the moon and there is a base on the other side of it that is hollow.

When your guy lost the election and didn’t want to leave the White House and uses all of this disinformation of election fraud, he whips everybody up into a violent mob that does what happened in 2020.

Concede and try again next time, but what he is doing is he is stirring it up and bringing that thing there. He gets more mileage out of canceling something than he does about doing something. He gets more impressions. They were going to counter the program.

He was going to have some event.

They did in Mar-a-Lago and said, “We are going to cancel it.” He did that to him to hold the media by the nostrils. He is yanking the media around by the nostrils, going like, “We are going to do something in Arizona.” All of a sudden, they are going to do something in Arizona. It’s moving to the next marketing opportunity and trying to build momentum that way. What is going to happen in Arizona is something we got to see because that is where more will be revealed. There is no more that is going to be revealed. I feel concerned because this leaves their devoted followers, and it’s good to be a devoted fan. Many teams in the NFL have never made it to the Super Bowl.

I feel disappointment and sadness about how the need for truth and trust can’t be met because of doubt and skepticism. Those two molecules dominate this space. Where we can stick the landing here is that the person needing empathy about how the need for truth and trust is not met and then doing something about truth and trust. It is a part of the feeling that many Americans feel that they are invigorating is the feeling of helplessness about their circumstances. They are helpless about the experiment because the world, economy, workplace, our behaviors, and habits are changing, not just because of the economy, pandemic, and various influences from the world.

People are going, “I want to shrink back to something I know. I want the 1950s and 1960s to be back again. I want that sweet spot between 1953 and 1963. I want that thing. That was when America was great again. There was the racist thing and social unrest that came after that, but I want that experience of post-World War II when we could feel good about we did something good because the truth was that there was a fascist regime that killed millions of people.

We were on the side of fighting for, and the sacrifice was one of respect, honor, and loyalty to country and loyalty to an ideal.” We can talk more about how we, as a nation, restore respect for the things we do well and pride in the things that we contribute that add value to ourselves and others. We have to get back to leading, and this is not leading. This is not leadership. This style of leadership doesn’t go anywhere.

It is bringing us closer to offertorium.

That style of leadership has a whole other set of problems that looks good to start, but it gets worse as it goes. There is plenty of history to look at this. It’s not like I’m making this up. It doesn’t go as well there. It goes better when people collaborate, cooperate and participate. It goes better when there is a common agreement on facts and a common set of rules and laws that apply evenly to others. We are not getting on multiple levels.

There is more to come on this as we go forward.

It is having compassion and empathy for the person that bought into the marketing and sales. Politics has become very financially valuable for news outlets. You make more money out of conflict than you do out of honesty. It’s better to stretch the truth rather than stand for the truth. It’s something we got to get back to, and that is my hope.

Thanks very much. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Important Links:

Elizabeth Holmes – Article

Conspiracy vs. Transparency: Finding Truth in Misinformation

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 19:00:04 GMT

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With everything going on in the news, it’s hard to pinpoint which ones are true. Bill Stierle and Tom talk about the mounds of misinformation presented to the world today. Most of the people around us have different belief systems. What’s worse is, nobody wants to admit that they’re wrong. Listen in as Tom and Bill share how important it is to filter through misinformation at the height of the pandemic.

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Watch the episode here

Conspiracy vs. Transparency: Finding Truth in Misinformation

It has become clear to me from my little perspective that there are such varying perspectives on the COVID situation in our country. It has become very clear to me in the discussions with some of my close friends and my experience being in another state that there are two very different worlds Americans are living in now. We don’t understand each other as well as we could. I have seen this firsthand with a more conservative person asking questions like, “Why all the testing,” because where they live, it is not a part of their daily concern or lives. It isn’t impacting them it seems.

That’s the hard part. How do you start with a compassionate and empathetic response rather than an explanation, informational or problem-solving response? How do you start with a compassionate and empathetic response to somebody just generally trying to reach out for information? That is one of the problems that we are facing. The biggest problem outside of COVID is how do we deal with and separate the mounds of information that is available to us? It is too much for our brains to process and find a stable thread of certainty. Think how difficult that sentence is.

I don’t know if there is one.

CDC changes its guidelines based on the best facts they have when changing the guidelines. It’s not that they don’t know what they are talking about. They are changing it on the facts. That is the idea. In the past, there was a push to get them to be more political and they pushed back saying, "We are not going to make a political piece out of this. We are going to follow a thread of numbers, facts and reporting information." Whether it’s to talk about COVID or other subjects, it’s very difficult. It sounds like you had some interaction with people who were reaching out to people on the internet to find out what their take was on COVID testing.

Misinformation: The health care workers are exhausted and mentally unstable because of everything they're seeing on a daily basis.

I have very close friends I have been friends with for years since grade school. There are five of us and we communicate daily. We have a Facebook Messenger group. It is a private group for us to communicate with. It started before the pandemic. We connected a lot during the pandemic as we were all on lockdown. Several of us have been talking about buying at-home or rapid testing kits. A lot of us have been buying them. Some of us live on the East Coast, West Coast, and the one in particular lives in Texas. The one from Texas said, “I’m genuinely curious. I’m not trying to be Barbie, but why all the concern over testing?” He lives in South Texas and COVID is not a thing there or the perception is it’s not a thing.

Certain parts of the country and cities have limited impact. Their hospitals aren’t that full. They are not having a high death rate in their county or hospital. It’s barely reaching the radar screen.

There are other states where the hospitals are being overrun. The healthcare workers are exhausted and mentally unstable because of everything they are seeing on a daily basis. Understandably so, that is not a criticism. Different people within the group were explaining, “My mother is elderly. My father is elderly. My grandson who is too young to be vaccinated is asthmatic. My mother-in-law had breast cancer surgery.” Many people wanted to have some safety and protection for their family members or themselves, being one of them is asthmatic as an adult, and getting COVID. They may be compromised in some way even if vaccinated.

Having the testing and knowing that it’s safe to gather with family members on Christmas or New Year’s or not. Certain members of the family tested positive over the holidays, and so they did not get together with extended family for wanting to make sure they were protecting their family members and not putting them at risk. This was the perspective that the majority of us in the chat group expressed in a very civil and respectful way to our friend who lives in Texas. The friend who lives in Texas was appreciative of understanding that because he didn’t have that perspective.

I appreciate you bringing up the word perspective. Our perspective and perception have limitations to us as human beings because one of the things that we quest for is certainty. We also quest for predictability. From that, we quest for safety. Truth is after those. We are not looking for truth first. We are not trying to figure out which truth is best. We are not doing that. Truth can be situational. Ask any 7-year-old or 15-year-old, “I went out because I'm connecting with my friends, so what if there is alcohol at the party, drugs or driving in a car. I am doing it because I'm connecting with my friends. How could you as a parent, prevent me from connecting with my friends?” The truth is not even on the list.

There are mounds of information available that it has become too much for the brain to process and find a stable thread of certainty.

I’m going like, “I’m going for safety and protection for you.” “I was safe.” Regrettably, our adult mind has not matured into a perspective for many people. We don’t have a perspective of what our emotions are following. Our emotions are following things like certainty, stability and protection. Some people are driven by choice, freedom or identity. Ask anybody that puts a sports jersey on. They are driven by identity, “Go Chiefs. Go Rams. Go Chargers. Go Steelers.” They are driven by the identity of the team and any other team is the enemy.

Who won the latest game is how I feel that week. I watched the Monday Night Football Game. The poor Browns lost to the Steelers. They had a rough season. They lost, but in 2021, they kicked the Steelers butt in the playoffs instead of back end in the first quarter but nobody remembers that. Why aren’t they getting credit for that game? It’s because this game was the most important for the home team Steelers. In 2021, it was the Browns gloating. In 2022, it’s not because of injuries and the offensive line. I’m dragging our discussion into a sports analysis.

In the political analysis, how do we talk about having protection and consideration of others regarding a health crisis? Whereas another group is going like, “I want freedom and choice to go to whatever restaurant I want. I don’t want to wear a mask and get vaccinated.” Some people are in the act of defiance because of their need for freedom and choice. Some people are in the act of, “I don’t have truth if it works and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, so I’m not taking it because it only works 90% of the time.” That logic always gets me a little bit because this is not full logic.

I don’t understand how people can be so dismissive of others and not understand that wearing a mask in a public situation may protect other people from getting sick. I couldn’t understand some of that logic or the disbelief and some people saying, “Coronavirus is a control mechanism of the Democrats to control our lives to have power.” You have explained to me the needs of this other side and how to have compassion for them and that was illuminating for me.

Misinformation: People are invested in an identity and belief structure that has been built up inside them that has a very small-sized truth to it.

I could have compassion for that person that says the sentence, “The Democrats are controlling this thing.” They are invested into an identity and a belief structure that has been built up inside them that has either a very smaller or a medium-sized truth to it as many things do, but it’s not fully the big picture. The big picture is that people are sick and dying. What kind of people? People who are older, obese, sick with pre-existing conditions. Those people are vulnerable. Certain kids are vulnerable. The ones that have those respiratory asthmatic things. One of my clients who has an asthmatic kid is terrified because their kid could be in that hospital on a respirator.

They go, "I'm not losing my seven-year-old." He gets pissed at anyone that brings up things like, "You are going to put my seven-year-old at risk because you don't want to wear a mask? Is that what you are doing over there?" "Yeah, but it doesn't matter." "You are still going to put my seven-year-old at risk?" He gets on fire on this. His perception and perspective are based on the awareness and consciousness of him sitting with the thing he could lose that is precious to him. The other person is not sitting with that.

What is interesting to me is you are helping me see that the person who is very cavalier about COVID or very dismissive who is maybe anti-vaccine or certainly anti-mask, and not taking this the way others do is because they have a different need. I didn’t understand that need. They are placing that need above the value of someone else’s health.

“That need is not in my top 10 or top 5, therefore, I don’t care about that need.”

The need has not anything to do with health and safety on its face. It’s a different kind of protection.

Human beings will protect and fight for an idea or identity to death. People will raise a flag because they value it and fight to the death because of that flag. They are going to do it because they value it. There are people who have fought for abortion rights and trying to overturn those to the death, and have caused death to others through exercising their beliefs and value about a woman’s right to choose because they are fighting for the baby’s right to choose and they are valuing life. It’s a hard discussion to have. How do you value life? When is murder a murder? That is where they come from.

It is one of the most difficult debates in human existence in America that continues over time.

There are so many things that human beings are not required to process on a daily basis. From a governmental or business standpoint, why tell them? They are going to be upset and they can’t do anything about it. You and I were talking beforehand about the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Thirteen days before there were missiles launched between Cuba, Russia and America, how are we going to pull this off and avoid this whole missile thing? How are we going to do that?

Some people are in the place and the act of divine defiance because their need for freedom is a choice.

The public had no awareness.

They had no awareness or consciousness that it was going on. Is that a conspiracy? Was there transparency? The answer is, "Why?" "So they could be ready." "Ready for what?" "So the nuclear bomb doesn't land on their head." It's very difficult. It's how do we keep our rational mindset around and go like, "It's not a good choice. It's the Cubans, Russians and Americans getting together and going like, “We are going to take a pass on being violent to each other. We are going to trust that America is not going to invade or overturn us as they tried before," which is what the Cubans needed to do.

They tried it and it didn’t work or they didn’t try hard enough when they did it.

What is the fight for? How can we get the fight to take place in an above-the-board fashion? America has had a good run of trying to work through its issues. This is the problem of our generation. One of them is how do we deal with the pandemic? That is one of the problems that we have.

It was quite something to me when I realized that there is an awful lot of Americans that place that protection of an idea, identity or value of freedom or independence, not wanting to have a mandate put on them. They are protecting themselves from those things at the expense of other people’s health. That was unsettling to me. When you understand where their need is coming from, at least it helps you understand why. It doesn’t make me happy that they are doing it.

It is not a happy choice because it is not in the spirit of collaboration and cooperation. It is unsettling, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Why is that sentence not in front of us on a daily basis? Can we remember that thing? Let’s go and remember that. Any politician who wants to take that up and say, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Bring on your conflict. Any politician that would like to step into that arena and claim that sentence as their own and say, “I’ll debate anybody on your Democratic or Republican values. Bring it right in front of us. I’m happy to talk about it because united we stand, divided we fall.”

We need to find some form of commonplace not, "I'm right. You're wrong. Shut up." That is where we are. The answer is a lot of folks are in that space. It is one of the struggles we have as a nation because we don't deal with mistakes well. Mistakes move into a category of guilt and shame way too early, instead of it being a mistake. It's like, "You just made a mistake. You don't have to feel guilt or shame about it." How about disappointment? I feel disappointed that I didn’t pick you up, rather than guilt and shame that I didn’t pick you up. Does it need to escalate all the way through?

That is one of the challenges. We have escalated our language. We have lost perspective and perception about how to deal with differences and upsets. We don’t have a perspective on that. Our politicians are under-skilled on both sides of the aisle. They are under-skilled about communicating differences and navigating through the experience. Having a little bit of honesty and start to get back where we can have a gentle trust that this group of scientists at the CDC are doing their best to set some guidelines based on some facts they are gathering and that they may change those guidelines as things get better.

Misinformation: A person that's very cavalier or very dismissive about COVID does not take things the same way others do because they have different needs and they don’t understand that need, and they're placing that need above the value of someone else's.

Not because they lied to us, they didn’t have the information a few months or the information changed or the virus changed. We are trusting the scientists who measure the virus. It’s a stretch for things like certainty and trust. They struggle there. Whether it’s in business, politics or personal life, the gentle adjustment of our perception and perspective can make a difference.

Something else that we talked about is the CDC changing their guidelines on how long you should isolate if you have been exposed from 10 to 5 days. From a certain perspective, people can say, “They are changing the guidelines based on the good information they have now. The information they had in the past was different. It required ten days. Now, either the state of the coronavirus variant or better data now from years of dealing with this virus, they say, “You only need to isolate for five days.” That is one perspective. The other perspective is, “The government doesn’t know what they are doing. They should have had these five days all along. They have been making us do ten days. We can’t trust them. We don’t even need to isolate at all.”

That is a perfect example of that mindset of, “We can’t trust this group of people. We can’t trust the government.” That disarray is the unraveling of certainty and trust that creates division. Once you start down the path of creating the division, all of a sudden, people look like enemies that are not enemies. They look like they are fighting for something, but they don’t agree with 90% of the things that you don’t agree with.

It is very difficult to battle that. The truth doesn’t matter at some point there.

You are undermining confidence in creating doubt and skepticism for short-term gain. In sales and marketing, if you create doubt and skepticism inside the listener, they will stop purchasing one product and start purchasing another product because they start to trust this other product. If I create doubt and skepticism about Democrats because they weren’t able to move the needle on some issues, and this other person promises you they are going to move the issue because they are a businessman, they are going to mix it up, “I’m outside the system. I know how to run these things. I have a big company.”

The answer is you are out of your element, but the person believes it. People believe and still believe that Donald Trump is a great leader. We have to have empathy and compassion for that belief because he sold it to them. This is not political. There are all kinds of folks. Is Nancy Pelosi the strongest messenger that we can have as human beings? No. Does she miss a third of the time? Yes. Is she sympathetic to others? Yes. Is she empathetic? No. That part is hard.

As a communication show, there is some hope. When we start adjusting our perception and perspective, we gain more awareness and consciousness about how to respond to people that are upset. Also, how to deal with some of these difficult issues, which is how do we care for each other by wearing a mask in social settings? Let that sentence live in social settings. No one is making you do anything other than you choosing to care for others.

That is a nice way to frame it because then the person thinks, “I have the freedom to not wear a mask, but if I don’t wear it, I don’t care for you. I’m essentially an asshole.”

Human beings will protect and fight for an idea to death. People will protect and fight to the death for an identity.

I know one thing for sure that I’m coming out of the pandemic with, whether I get COVID or not. In the future, whenever I get a cold, I will be wearing a mask until that cold is over. Hands down, I know that is true because I’m going to consider others. Before the pandemic, I don’t give a shit. I’m walking around sniffing and my whole house gets sick with a cold. What the hell am I doing that for? What I know now is that I want to consider the well-being of my family. They do not have to get this cold and go through what I did. To build their immunity? Why? Let them catch a cold on their own if they happen to get it. At least I’m doing my part for the protection and consideration of their wellbeing. I’m going to stay home more often if I have a cold. I will wear a mask at the grocery store if I have a cold.

It is going to create a new normal. I’m thinking about my children in middle school and grade school. I’m like, “Where is your mask? You got to bring it to where we are going.” It is not even, “I don’t want to wear a mask.” Now it is like, “Okay, mask. I got it.” It’s like putting on your seatbelt.

It is going to turn into a seatbelt situation to prevent colds, outbreaks and stuff like that. There are certain cold viruses that are less contagious that will not survive because human beings are doing their part to protect the spread of it in a city or in a work environment. There are certain countries that do a great job about, “You are sick. Stay home. You don’t come to work and infect everybody at work.”

Some other countries like Germany have that mindset. They are going like, “You are sick. You come back with a doctor’s letter. If you are cleared, then we are letting you back in this place because otherwise, you are not getting this whole place sick and then you are going to kill our productivity of the business.” How about that as a standard? “You stay homesick,” is what your manager will say to you. “You are sick,” not “You are sick. You are making it up to take a mental health day.” Stay home.

This is a way to consider this topic about how do we listen and process the amount of information. It’s to be able to talk through it like this and stick the landing on what need are we going for and how can we best make a decision from that perspective. Also, have empathy and compassion for the other person’s position. That will go better.

It allows us to have a civil discourse, an adult conversation and not hate each other. That is what we need more of in America, where people live and work.

Let’s see if we can dial down the outrage.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Purchasing Truth: A Look Behind the Scenes

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 19:00:04 GMT

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Bill Stierle and Tom get into tons of in-depth discussions about various topics to prepare for the Purchasing Truth podcast. Sometimes, they are so compelled with their conversations behind the scenes that they wish they had the record button on. And they did that with one of their brainstorming sessions. Listen to this jam-packed discussion from December 2021 that is simply too good not to share, giving you a sneak peek of how they produce just a single episode. Bill and Tom talk about why most Americans are unhappy with how the Biden Administration is handling the economy despite being the strongest in the world today. They also dive into the division caused by the Big Lie, explaining how it will continue to thrive if people disregard logical reasoning in favor of emotional impact.

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Watch the episode here

Purchasing Truth: A Look Behind the Scenes

Bill and I often have sessions where we meet and discuss potential subjects for upcoming episodes. We keep a running Google Doc of all sorts of notes and links to videos, articles, and things that we think are relevant or might make a good subject for an episode of the show. Oftentimes when we have these sessions, we are not recording actual content for our episode at the time. However, a lot of times at the end of these sessions, Bill or I will say, “I wish we had the record button on during this conversation because there was some good stuff there. We could use it in an episode.”

In December 2021, Bill and I had one of these sessions and I said to Bill at the time, “I’m going to put the record button on. Let’s see what happens but this is not necessarily going to be an episode we will air.” We had our conversation and discussed many events and topics of the time, and how they relate to language and communication, and whether they were a good example, an example of a communication apocalypse or tragedy. On one session, we decided that there’s a lot of good stuff we talked about in here, and I bet our reader would be interested to read and see a peek behind the curtain, if you will, or see behind the scenes of what goes into the making of an episode of the show.

That’s what we decided we were going to do in this episode. It’s entirely unfiltered. There’s a lot we discussed as potential subjects. There are some things that maybe you have heard us say in an episode or two since this was recorded, or honestly, a bunch of things that ever made the cut to be a formal episode. That doesn't mean they weren't good topics to discuss. It just means that for us, it didn't gel into something that we thought made sense as an episode on its own but there are easily 4 or 5 different key subjects and areas of interest that we talk about in this behind the scenes.

It's interesting, worthwhile, and valuable information for you to read how we talk about it, what we think, what we kick around and brainstorm, or what might become or might not become an episode of the show but regardless of whether the subjects made it or not, it's good content. If you are a regular to this show, you are going to enjoy it. I hope you do and so does Bill. Please provide feedback at your convenience at PurchasingTruth.com . We would love to hear about it.

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Bill, in the last episode , The Music Man was the theme and we talked about marketing messages. One of the things that stick in my mind, how bad the Democrats are at propagating marketing messages.

I stand for this. Everybody come and join me. This is something that's really important.

I read something that relates to that. I want to share it with you and have a little discussion about it. Maybe we can make something out of this as a follow-up episode. I will try and get through it quickly but there’s a bit here and it’s important to go through some of it. This is something I read by Heather Cox Richardson who’s that historian we both know. This is interesting, and this is fact-based. Do you know how sometimes we talk about the facts that don't always matter? This is actually going to be a good example of that.

“Here we are coming into the end of 2021, and all the indicators except for just a couple are very strong. The US economy is doing well. According to Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, which are media outlets that talk a lot about the facts and the economy, both are reporting that US economic output has jumped more than 7% in the last three months of 2021. The overall growth for 2021 should end up at about 6%. An economist predicted the growth to be around 4% in 2022. These are the highest growth numbers the US has seen in decades is what she writes here. China’s growth from the same period of 2021 will be 4%, and the European Union, the Eurozone, will grow at only 2% for 2021. That’s how the US is outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century so far.”

That was written by Matthew Winkler in Bloomberg. With good reason, America's economy improved more in Joe Biden's first twelve months than any president during the past several years. I want to read a few more things and then get your thoughts here. In February 2021, Joe Biden's first month in office, the jobless rate was 6.2%. Now, it has dropped to 4.2%. They say the Joe Biden administration has created so many jobs. I would say many jobs have been created during the Joe Biden administration. 4.1 million jobs more were created in the twelve years of the Donald Trump and George W. Bush administrations combined.

That fact is a toughie. This is really hard. When the reader has no frame of reference of there having been so many jobs created, it’s because they have been doing the same job. Their worldview is, “I’m doing this. I’m staying in my lane.” When they hear something like that, it’s not sellable. It's very hard to sell that. They are like, “The job increases in technology, I’m not in technology. The job increases in healthcare, I'm not in healthcare. The job increase is in finance, I'm not in finance.”

You are getting into a little bit of a why. There’s a bigger why too but you are right on.

Similar to The Music Man, the worldview of the reader has to be considered. What's the worldview of the reader? The reader is like, “We are in retail.” The nation moved to the retail space for a good period, and retail is dying because we were forced into the retail business. We were forced out of manufacturing, we were forced into retail and customer service. We were in manufacturing, but now, we are over here into this other space. The middle, middle-lower class or the Midwest is all being forced by the economy out of things that are familiar to them, and they are pissed about it. The habit brain or the safekeeping brain wants things to save the same familiar.

That’s why the slogan Make America Great Again works. It’s a habit of experiencing something that is familiar to me. It’s familiar because it applies to my world. That person that’s reading and has the red hat on, what they are doing is they are telling the person, “Appeal to my habit brain. Appeal to something that's familiar to me. What's familiar to me is a domineering father. What’s familiar to me is a carnival barker. What's familiar to me is the Midwest should look like this.”

Behind The Scenes: The habit brain protects the things it is most familiar with. That’s why the slogan Make America Great Again works. It is familiar to many and applies to their world.

It’s great that you buy a farm but if you can’t put a crop on it and sell it for a price without paying the mortgage of the farm, then what the heck am I doing on this farm? The person leaves, a big ag buys the farm, and they scuttle the house and have somebody come out there, pick up the corn, plant the corn, let nature water it, and come back up and pick it up later.

This is good. This is the kind of conversation I want to have but there are a few more facts I want to give you. I know we always say that facts don't matter. This is going to show that.

Facts are always a great starting place to find out where the heart is. The fact is in the head. The need is in the heart.

I do want to come back to why do people feel the way they feel. This gets to why the marketing messages are important again, so let me go on. Aside from the jobs, wages in America are growing at about 4% a year compared with less than 1% a year in the European Union. As worker shortages are happening, strikes at places like John Deere and Kellogg’s are pushing wages up, and also states have been increasing minimum wages. Here are a couple more facts. The American Rescue Plan passed by Democrats in March 2021 cut child poverty in half putting $66 billion into 36 million house households. Also, more than 4.6 million Americans who were not previously insured, meaning health insurance, have gotten healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act bringing the total covered in the US to 13.6 million.

Here are a few more facts. When Joe Biden took over, 46% of schools were open. Now, the rate is about 99%. Here's the bottom line. The American economy but all of those measures is the strongest it has been in decades. The US is leading the world in economic growth. Here's a question that Heather Cox Richardson poses and what would be interesting for us to talk about. “Why on Earth do 54% of Americans disapprove of Joe Biden's handling of the economy?” This is according to a CNN SSRS poll that was released. She cites part of it comes from inflation, which in November 2021 was 6.8%. It’s the highest in years but inflation is high around the whole world as we adjust to a post-pandemic reopening.

Gas prices, which created an outcry have come down significantly. It has fallen below $3 a gallon at twelves states, and it's $0.25 a gallon in the last couple of months. Inventories of gas are back up and prices are coming down. Respondents to the poll also said they were upset by disruptions in the supply chain. We have talked sometimes about how that's a big issue. The much-hyped fear that supply chain crunches would keep packages from being delivered on time for the holidays has proved to be misguided with 99% of packages arriving on time.

A significant improvement over 2020 and even 2019 reflects that companies have built more warehouse space and expanded delivery hours. What's very interesting is 63% of poll respondents to the CNN SSRS poll said that the nation's economy is in poor shape. With all the economic news, it’s good. Admittedly, a couple of indicators causes people to be concerned about the idea of inflation and maybe the very reality of inflation and the supply chain that is so much in the news every day but still, the American economy is the best it has been in decades but all other measurable and meaningful measurements.

This is from the CNN SSRS poll. 63% of the respondents said the nation's economy is in poor shape, and 57% of them say the economic news they have heard has been mostly bad. Only 19% say they are hearing goodness about the economy. How people think about the country depends on the stories they hear about it. To me, that is the story. It relates to what we were talking about with the music man.

I’m scared about pool playing. I’m scared about children playing pool in the pool halls because that is the road to ruin and that means the nation is going to hell. Somebody could come to my door. If I’m easily scared, they could sell me insurance and I could pay them money for the insurance in case a meteor hits my house. I can scare somebody into believing a meteor is going to hit somebody’s house. It’s funny but is the meteor going to hit the house? It’s cultivating. How do you cultivate certainty or uncertainty? If you think about the three steps of the sales process it's, creates reward, anticipation, uncertainty, and then the personal buy. Those are the three levels of doping me. You've got to create.

Every day in my sales process with prospects for my business, it works.

You want to be heard in the world. You want your message out there. You would like to create an impact. Getting this party or marketing to take place is one element that’s going to make a difference. You are like, “You don't have to write a blog. We write the blog for you because we would take the transcript and turn it into a thing, and that allows the Google engine to find you on the internet.” All that magical stuff that you do in your company is the same thing the media is doing in relationship to the government. It has become an interesting angle that the marketplace has opened. It's the marketplace of outrage. How can I find something that I can be outraged about? I can't do it about XYZ but I can do it about the government.

If you think about that strategy of, “I'm just going to get eyeballs at any cost,” it's like me and you buying a jackhammer, coming to the middle of our house, and starting to chisel out the concrete in our living room. They are like, “Why are you doing that?” We would be like, “There might be a water leak underneath there because the supply chain is down 1%.” How many people are really actually affected by the supply chain drop? They are not as many as one may think.

They may be affected by it but it's less obvious. It’s not like people can’t get toilet paper. Do you remember back when the pandemic first started and people couldn’t get toilet paper because everybody was hoarding? That was a more real concern, although a short-term one.

Who would have known toilet paper was the first thing off the shelf? Who would have known people want to make sure they can wipe their butt for the next 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 months? They are like, “At least I’ve got my closet filled with toilet paper.” That’s the danger. The danger is that the habit brain that wants this one thing stable. It’s like, “I want toilet paper to stabilize this one thing.” Look at the thing they picked. The population picked toilet paper because that is one of the essential elements that people can see that they can’t live without.

Human beings have a part of their body that’s an adult, but how they define words keeps them young.

If you keep scaring people that government is bad or XYZ and you don’t know anything about how government works, then what winds up happening is that you are mad at the made-up unicorn instead of being honest about, “Is this elected official really advocating for me, the nation or my state? Is this person that I elected or voted for advocating for just a few people in my state or are they advocating for somebody else’s state?” Their states and their state representatives can be bought that way. Their donation is coming in from another state.

What’s interesting is the stuff we are talking about with the economy and how people’s perception is about the economy. Read those articles in The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. These publications pretty much report the hard facts about the economy. Did you see in the news when Joe Manchin came out and said he’s not going to support the Build Back Better Act? One of the big rating agencies that rate the economic outlook for the United States all of a sudden reduced the future economic outlook for the United States.

Here we have the reporting economic indicators. What has been happening is very strong in that sense. When it became clear that Manchin says he’s a no vote on this bill, that’s bad for the US economy. We are reducing our forecast for the economy significantly. My point is these guys are not political in there. They really look at the facts in what the administration is going to do for the economy. Is it good or bad for the economy? Forget the rhetoric about what you believe is good for the economy or not.

This is when I do put my hands on my head and go like, “My God.” Let's look at why it didn't work. The Democrats come in with this really big thing, the $3.5 trillion thing. They are going to make this big FDR movement of things. They are like, “This is the new deal. We are coming in. We need to do something bold. We are going to pay for it with taxes. We are paying it for taxes with the rich. That’s what we are doing. We are taking rich people's money and we are going to build the infrastructure. They have plenty of it. We are moving it out of their coffers, into the government's coffers, and we are going to build bridges and do all this other nice stuff that we need to do for the future of America.”

Rich people don't like hearing this but this is what we are doing. We are taking the rich person's money, we are going to put it in the coffers and spend it, whether spending it wisely or in a place, what we are going to do is do a thing called spending. The government is going to do a thing called spending. We are going to spend rich people’s money because there are not many rich people that are going to say, “Let me build that bridge for you in Kentucky because I want my name on a bridge.” There could be a way that you could package it that way if you have the right music man or the right marketing person in place. It would be a rich person.

Bernie Sanders tried that. Healthcare could be paid by one rich person who would like their name on healthcare. He floated that. There were no takers. This is a great example of how trickle-down doesn't work. There was no rich person that said, “I'm going to fund healthcare for all the poor people in the United States. All the people that are uninsured, I, as a very rich person, will pay for all of their medical expenses.” Think about that. All it would take is one billionaire to do that and no one showed up.

I'm surprised the Kennedys’ didn't show up and do that. There are plenty of billionaires that are more on the left and the right.

There’s also a good reason why you don’t want one billionaire to do that because then, all of a sudden, it outs the other billionaires about not doing anything but it also doesn't do what the United States is supposed to do, which is don't let anybody become a king. Don't let anybody become a lord. Don't let anybody rule over this level of people. We need to get the money out of the generational wealth that traps those human beings or those animals in a mindset of entitlement. The entitlement is up at the top and not at the bottom.

I had a somewhat sinister thought. Can you imagine if the Sackler family had stood up and said they want to give that $1 billion to try to repair their damaged reputation from all the opioid crisis? This is the family that owned Purdue Pharma.

They could have done it.

They would have tried to whitewash, greenwash, or repair, and show that they are doing something to support people's health. That would take the wind right out of so many of the lawsuits, which by the way, the reason this is on my mind is that a judge threw out a settlement offer in one of the states of the Sackler family because they felt it was not meeting the need for fairness for all the damage caused. I don't want to go off too far on that but I love where you are going with that healthcare. These all relate in some ways, which is pretty damn interesting. Let's talk about the big lie that the election was stolen.

Before you do the big lie, let me tie a bow on the last part.

Do that.

Why didn’t the big-spending package fly? Why didn’t it work? The reason why it didn't work is because of one word. The word is trust. That is trust that this was going to make a difference or that this is going to help our nation repair, restore or make a difference. This is what this new deal is going to turn the tables in these environments. In a lot of parts of our society, it made an extraordinary difference. It made a huge difference because it allowed other businesses to build upon the foundation that the new deal provided. It provided a middle-class and the ability to have all of Main Street grow and prosper because all of these jobs were trickled out into different parts of the nation.

Behind The Scenes: No rich person took the challenge to fund the entire US healthcare system. It will make other billionaires feel like they are not doing something, and it contradicts the idea of not letting anybody rule over all.

That's the thing. The trust in Joe Biden, the Democrats, and the government, those three trusts have not been rebuilt. It looks like the Republicans are the only responsible people left. To the voter, it looks like they are the people that are not going to spend and keep the spending from being crazy. $3 trillion is crazy. $1 trillion is crazy. Why is it crazy? In my household, I’m living paycheck to paycheck, and any $500 expense that comes along, I’m going to get crushed by. I had that experience. The engine light goes on, I go in there, and the person said, “You’ve got to replace your catalytic converter.”

That’s $1,000, isn't it?

It was $3,000 for two catalytic converters and the repair. I was like, “You guys are nuts. I will drive it for four more months and not go on any long trips before I'm giving you $3,000.” If I have the $3,000 or if I'm ready to pop for it, I’m a rich person. I send it in, the car gets fixed, so why do I care what they charge me? Forget about the folks that are poor, they’ve just got to keep driving it with the engine light on. They’ve got to do that or get their friend.

I’m on this Nextdoor site and I was laughing. A post came on, and it said, “My catalytic converter was stolen from my car last night.” I was sad but laughing. I thought I was living in a safe neighborhood. It’s within a 3-mile radius. I was thinking in my head, “Try not to laugh too hard, please.” My fairness noggin goes up and says, “I could steal my own catalytic converter and file for insurance,” but then I’m like, “That’s insurance fraud. I don't think I want to do that”

That’s some kind of a felony.

With all of that thinking that you and I are laughing about is where the line is between something that's ethical and something that's criminal. That's where the lions get lost a little bit. When we look at things like election fraud and some of the other things you were talking about, that’s what we are fighting with. It’s that trust in cooperation. Bad things are going to happen. People are going to steal catalytic converters if they are $2,000 or $3,000 to get repaired. They are going to steal because the thief has nowhere to go to get money in the economy to make $3,000 or $1,000 that quickly.

They don’t have money to repair their car to be able to maybe get to work. That's the underpaying job for that paycheck-to-paycheck thing.

That's right. This infrastructure bill, the Build Back Better one, which is going to continue to help the economy, ties back into that ascension of, “How do you create a vibrant economy?” That $3.5 trillion or even the $1.7 trillion would at least move the needle of stability and certainty out to 3 to 5 years.

When you look at the poverty situation, the people have already been lifted out of poverty by what has been done, which is now ending.

Now, I’m going to do hindsight 2020. Hindsight 2020 would sound like this. A series of Democratic lawmakers, the ones that are higher in the trust category or that are a little bit clearer, have more distance from the criminal folks. If you let Bernie Sanders sell a trusted piece or if Bernie Sanders was the trust person, he needed to lead with the word trust, or the congressmen or senators that in the trust category needed to claim the trust pace. Hindsight 2020 will pass a series of small bills that get put up. Some of them fail and some of them go by. For example, if I was running the show, you needed to build momentum to restore trust in government.

You think the big number is an obstacle and there's no trust for that big amount of money being spent but if you piece it out like, “This thing, that thing. Is this worth spending the smaller amount of money on? Is this other thing worth spending the smaller amount of money on?” It’s hard to deny it.

What happens is the Republicans are a little bit screwed on this because then they are voting down a child healthcare piece.

They can't say, “It’s because of this other thing that's packed in the bill.”

It was just one small little thing with one small little price. Put it up, whether you have the votes or not. Let it fail. Don't think they are going to run against it because you now have something to run that they are obstructionist. They don't care about this because that Senator voted against this. They don't care about this because that congressperson voted against that. Clearly, they don't care about these nine things. What they will find if they would have done it that way instead of the FDR or the new deal is it becomes a momentum builder going into 2022 or 2024.

Until somebody empathizes with the loser, the Big Lie will never go away.

It’s a momentum builder of, “At least we are doing something. They are not putting anything up. We are trying to get the government to work and they are not. They are using the strategy of saying no in everything. It doesn't look like they are interested in governing. Why are you voting for them again? They are not governing. They don't have any other ideas. All they are doing is voting against progress. They didn't really want progress in America. They are not interested in growth in America. Look at the things that they did not vote for.”

When you peel it out there, what you do is you create the energy that's necessary for the single-issue voter to vote for you because I'm the single-issue voter. You may not like 1 of these 7 or 10 things that were voted upon and voted down but there was one of those things that you did like and that you didn't get because your guy, your side or your gal voted it down because it happened to be Democratic and you were Republican. You voted for them to do something, and now, I can't vote for that guy anymore because they are voting down anything that's Democrat. They are not thinking through and doing this. You really undermine the obstructionist.

That would be nice because that has been happening with Mitch McConnell through the entire Barrack Obama administration, and then still even to this day. This whole story with Joe Manchin with the Build Back Better Bill, I don't think the final chapter has been written. This is one more step in the negotiation quite honestly.

The headlines are pretty interesting. Mitch McConnell is courting Joe Manchin to switch to become a Republican, which changed the entire balance of the Senate. I don't think that's going to happen either but I think the final chapter has been written here. We will see what happens. See how I threw that uncertainty in there.

It's very hard for Joe Biden to get some wins. The reason why is he’s such a cooperative and collaborative person and really works on friendships and considerations. Lindsey Graham said it best, “He's the nicest man. There's nothing I can say.” That's the interview of Lindsey Graham talking highly about Joe Biden years ago. He is the greatest guy ever. He's that guy, but the challenge is that's not the music man. That's not the person that knows how to get enthusiastic.

He's not selling or marketing, which is all that Donald Trump does quite honestly, with all that he did. There’s one more topic I want to go over here in consideration for our episodes. It’s coming back to the big lie because there are a couple of interesting things here going on. When you mentioned talking about passing little pieces of the Build Back Better Bill and not the whole thing, there's something that relates at the end here. It’s chipping away at the big lie. Interestingly, we have seen for the first time.

Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was subpoenaed by the January 6 committee to testify and provide information. He filed a request for a restraining order against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a temporary injunction against the subpoena from the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack.

When we were talking about this, a US District Judge of Tampa Bay, Florida denied Michael Flynn's request noting that his lawyers had not followed the correct procedure. A legal analyst named Tara Canfield pointed out that so many others launched by Donald Trump loyalists, Flynn's lawsuit was not an actual legal argument but part of the false narrative that Donald Trump and his loyalists are being persecuted by Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi who stole the election. It was the same strategy behind the 60 more lawsuits after the election that failed.

Here's where it gets interesting. Douglas Frank, an associate of Donald Trump loyalist, My Pillow Founder Mike Lindell, have pressed claims across the country and told the staff of the Ohio Secretary of State's Office, his name is Frank LaRose, a Republican, that he was launching lawsuits across the country. He said that LaRose's office, the Secretary of State's Office in Ohio, had better cooperate. He's warning them.

Here's the quote, “I'm warning you that I have been going around the country. We are starting lawsuits everywhere.” That's one quote. According to the Washington Post's website with three authors there, Amy Gardner, Emma Brown, and Josh Dawsey, there's a recording posted there. This is attributed to the same guy, Douglas Frank, the My Pillow loyalist. He said, “I want you guys to be allies, not opponents. I want you to be on our team. I'm warning you.” This guy was called for firing squads for anyone found guilty of treason by turning a blind eye to the massive election fraud that took place in 2020. This guy is living the big lie bigger than anybody .

Juxtaposed to that, we continue to learn about the reality of the effort to overturn the election with what's being uncovered by the January 6 committee. I'm not going to read a whole bunch of more details. Here, I'm going to get to what I'm trying to get to with you. For the first time in an interview, quite casually when talking about his border wall rather than about the election of 2020 itself, Donald Trump undercut the big lie altogether himself. His quote says, “We built almost 500 miles of wall. Had we won the election, it would be completed by now.”

He’s unbelievable.

He’s perpetuating the big lie, and at the same time this is the first time Donald Trump is recorded saying, “Had we won the election.” He is usually, as a brilliant marketer and salesman, very consistent to never ever admit he lost the election.

That truth that you just said or mentioned actually doesn't count. This is bad news.

Behind The Scenes: If you keep scaring people that the government is bad while not knowing how it actually works, you are just creating a made-up unicorn to be mad about.

Why? Is it because he’s on a technicality because what he should have said was, “Were we still in the White House,” then he could say, “I'm not admitting I lost but I am not in the White House anymore,” is that the type of thing you are saying?

That would be accurate.

You are saying there's enough wiggle room in that statement.

It’s tons.

That’s interesting.

This is not about you. This is about the reader.

It’s about convincing the reader and the masses of Americans who believe in this stuff.

They believe that a wall works. He's just reselling the idea. He will get millions of dollars of advertising for that misspeaking that he did.

Back to that, any press is good press.

Any crisis is good press, so he will get millions of dollars of airtime about his lame wall that is a waste of money.

The Democrats are so bad at doing the same thing in the other direction.

The thing that needs to take place on the other side is how do you get somebody in the place of integrity? Think about how difficult this is. How do you talk a twelve-year-old into integrity?

It's very difficult. I will tell you that.

We can go on for a long time. Human beings have a part of their body that's an adult but the way they define words keeps them young. I'm not calling them immature. The definition is it keeps their mindset young. It keeps their mindset in a 2, 15 or 7-year-old mindset. It keeps their mind young. If you have fairness as an important need for you but you are defining that fairness as, “I'm stronger than you. I will get all your marbles, take all of them and go home,” because strength rules and that's what's fair in the world.

People will always be diverse. Everyone struggles and supports each other in different ways.

The belief about fairness is defined by the definition. It's not equitable. It is not legal to steal somebody else's marbles but fairness means strength is going to do it or more money is fairness. It's the same thing as a company polluting. If I pollute a river and it costs me more money to clean it up, then I will pay the legal fee. I don't want to clean it up because it's an economic truth. It's not a moral or ethical truth.

If they know about it beforehand, then that's really problematic because that shows intention. It shows I purposely polluted the river. Therefore, that means that there needs to be a criminal thing but what winds up happening is that person doesn't go to jail. They just have to pay a fine to stay out of jail. If they've got enough money to do that, then they can stay out. Welcome to Donald Trump's career.

All I’ve got to do is feed the legal system money to tie and gum up the system. This whole thing you did with the filing lawsuits are looking to gum up the system. As lady justice is famous for, she's blind, she's going to look at it and see what's on both scales. It takes time to weigh stuff. Meanwhile, they are breaking the scale.

It sounds like what you are saying is that even though there have been 60 lawsuits about election fraud, only one of those lawsuits had a small ruling that was somewhat in favor of who filed it. The vast majority have thrown out and gotten nothing. This guy, Douglas Frank, who's telling the Ohio Secretary of State, filing lawsuits everywhere. Even though another 50 or 60 lawsuits might be filed that they again lose and get thrown out of court, that doesn't matter because they are keeping the big lie and the hope of it alive.

They are going to keep it alive all the way to 2024. We have three more years of the big lie until somebody empathizes with the loser, then the big lie will start to go away.

What’s the antidote to the big lie? Hit me with it.

The big lie is empathizing with somebody’s loss. America hates to lose.

Somebody loses every election. We have to face that, don't we?

We barely admit that we lose a war. We barely admit that we lost to Vietnam.

Also, we pulled out of Afghanistan. The way people are seeing, “Finally, it's over now,” the perspective on that is changing.

They are all going back to the thirteenth century. That’s fantastic. We don't have to deal with them until they get weapons of mass destruction, and then we have to deal with them. The antidote is, how do you become compassionate and empathetic for somebody that has voted for and is supporting the big lie? You empathize how their need for truth and trust hasn't been met with the government.

You empathize with how important it is for people to be loyal to each other. That if you vote for somebody, you stick with somebody. You empathize with how you appreciate the identity of a fighter. You see Donald Trump as a fighter. You would wish somebody would fight for you, and you see Donald Trump as somebody that's fighting for you.

You are like, “He’s good for America. He's a fighter. He fires people. He says what he wants. I would really like a straight shooter.” They are like, “Would you like a straight shooter in the government?” You are like, “Yes. I would like somebody that would do something on my behalf to make a difference for me and my family,” then they are like, “Would you like somebody to make a difference for you and your family but what would that look like?”

You are like, “I need help with my bills.” They are like, “What might that look like?” You are like, “I don't want to pay medical bills.” They are like, “You don't want to pay medical bills. I wonder what that would look like. We could set up a medical program for you. Wouldn’t that be an interesting thing?” You are like, “I like it. Who are you again?”

Behind The Scenes: It is easy to cultivate distrust about the 2020 Election results when the listener has never worked at a polling place.

What you are talking about though is having a continued conversation that probes deeper with a person. How do you do it if you are a political opponent of the big lie? You can’t engage like that. You have to do it in a rhetorical sense, don’t you?

You do not. You’ve got to change your vocabulary. Do not talk about an issue. Talk about value. You talk about what respect looks like and let them come to the table with what respect looks like to them. You talk about a value. You don't talk about what you are going to do for them because then all of a sudden, they are influenced by the music men or women on the other side telling them that you are a bad person. They start evaluating you on your values or what needs you are standing for rather than on your policy. They start looking at you as a person rather than as an enemy

You are saying if you empathize with them and start bringing it to needs, the needs cut through the talking points and the rhetoric. It sounds like to the point where they get stuck looking bad, they are not in alignment with meeting a need. Is that what you are saying?

Yes, and that you are fighting for what their need is. You are not fighting the enemy image.

They probably can agree on a need much more than having a pissing contest over the solution.

I can agree with the sanctity of life and how important life is. As a right to lifer would say to me, “When does life begin?” For them, it begins at conception for a lot of that. That is the way it looks to them biologically because there is a divine spirit and there is something that is coming in with that event and attraction. It was something that was meant to happen to put these people together.

There’s divine something that the person needs to go through. We don't know what God's will is or whatever their construct is but I can agree that I like my life, my kids, my family, my friends, and their kids and their family. I can agree that life is a pretty good thing, and I like the diversity of people. That diversity of people has to do with thinking about all the different diversity of people.

Isn’t it interesting how people struggle in different ways and don't struggle in different ways? Isn’t it interesting how people support each other and don't support each other, and how that's problematic and how that’s not problematic? I'm in the dance of life. Are not I in the dance of life? I can agree with that. At the same time, who's the person that gets to choose that? With that choice, we want every human being or at least every American, to be able to exercise choice and not let anybody get in the way of their choices because if you lose one choice, who's the person that gets to pick which choice you get to have or don't have?

Texas did this legal thing about abortion, and then California counters that with a choice of, “I get to sue the gun manufacturers if there is a mass shooting in our state.” All of a sudden, California is going, “We don't want that gun restriction to take place.” Congratulations. We just figured out a way to do it. Thank you, Texas, for showing us how to get around. Until you talk about what the value is, the issue can't be stared at in a way that it's healthy. It's adversarial. It's very difficult.

There are a bunch of topics we can consider, and some pretty juicy ones.

There are some pieces to pull out and stay around. It’s interesting to be a part of the process of the discovery of how human beings make a decision on their emotions or their logic. Emotions always win over logic. It's a 1:10 ratio.

Maybe that's the big, secondary lesson. When you think about it, a lot of what's going on, and the last time we were talking about the big lie, you’ve got the January 6 committee in the House doing the logic piece. We are going to find the facts. We are going to see who was responsible and what everybody did. We are going to uncover the truth. That's the logic.

The opponents of that who are propagating the idea that the election was stolen or that there was rampant voter fraud, that's the emotional piece, and it is winning, don't you think? It didn't win at the polls because when you count the votes at the polls, that's a logical piece. The people either voted for one or voted for another. Also, Congress said, “You certify the votes, and the next guy is elected.”

Donald Trump was like, “Look at all the number of people. Look at how many people I’ve got out to vote. Look at how many people are behind our cause.” It was just not the same number. He’s technically right.

Don’t talk about voting fraud unless you have evidence to bring to a court of law.

More people voted for him in that election that voted for anybody in the history of elections except for Joe Biden in the same election.

It's very hard for the reader to discern that and go, “We didn't have enough votes to get it done.” I really enjoy what the person responsible for the vote count in Georgia said.

Is it Brad Raffensperger?

Yes. He said, “We went through these votes and counted them three times. All of the Republican down ballots won, and the president did not win. The reason why the president didn't win is that those people that were voting did not vote for either president. They left it blank. If he would have had the people that left it blank vote for him, he would have won Georgia. That thing that I said had not been amplified.

It hasn't because I wasn't even aware of it.

There were 250,000 votes that were left blank.

Joe Biden only won by a little over 11,000 votes or is it 25,000?

This is so searchable. It's right there. What’s so wild about this is the belief narrative can be easily skewed. It’s such a technical job to count every single person and check that it’s easy to cultivate distrust because the reader has never worked at a polling place. They were never held accountable for integrity in the polling place that one person votes. It’s so important that if you are a poll worker and caught doing this, it's a bad thing but people don't have that level at it.

If you don't know how polling works, then volunteer to work at a polling center and you will learn that the managers there keep track of every vote. If you are a Republican and believe that there was massive voting fraud, then you volunteer in the next election and be a part of the integrity team to make sure every vote is counted. It’s not just your vote but every vote is counted, and you be the person of integrity. If you are not a person that's willing to work at a polling place and you are going to say that there were millions of votes, then you are now on the next team to vote and we are going to hold you accountable to make sure that you do your civic duty.

If Democrats came out and said, “If you are a Republican now and you are saying that there was a fraud, you are to work at a polling place and be accountable for your votes. You will work underneath the managers and the people at that voting place. Otherwise, don't talk about voting fraud unless you have evidence or unless you can bring that evidence into court.” Look at how challenging I am. That's a Democratic message.

I don't know what to call it but there's an interesting way to deal with the skepticism over the integrity of the vote. Let's put all the Republicans in charge locally of counting the vote and signing off that the vote was accurate at that local level, then when it comes up to the whole state level, it goes back down to, “Who's had an eye on this and verified it all the way through?” Are you going to say you counted it right or are you going to lie about it?

The thing that news media could do better is, and this is something that the news media does, instead of ranting on Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham or the rest of the folks on that side, they would say the following sentence, “They never worked a day in their life at the polling place. They have never counted votes. They have never even been to a voting place. They don't even know what it takes. They have never interviewed the voting places.”

There can be complete exposé done by the news media promoting that voter truth is taking place. What that would do is put a face on the people counting those votes. They would be like, “I’m the person that was responsible for counting the votes in this thing. This is how we certified it. This is how I train my volunteers. This is what they need to do. This is the amount of hours the volunteers put in.” If you are an American and you are saying that there was voter fraud, then you are required to work at a voting place next time. If you are saying there's voter fraud, then show up. Let's see what you can do. Can you count votes better? Put up or shut up.

Personally, I like that. All the stuff going on around the state legislature is about being able to declare the vote of a state inaccurately and send their own electors appointed by the state legislature, forget all that crap. Make them be the ones to verify the votes at the local level, and then you solve all this voter integrity problem right there.

Behind The Scenes: The January 6 Committee is doing the logic piece, working to uncover the truth using the facts. Meanwhile, the ones propagating the idea that the election was stolen fight using an emotional piece, and it is winning.

At one point, we were going to blow up. We were trying to go, “Let's just go to the popular vote or join the popular vote and get rid of the electoral college.” This whole thing that's happening with voter fraud is the quickest way to get rid of the electorals.

To get rid of the electoral college, go with popular votes.

The end game here is that they are going to crash the system that has allowed Republicans to get elected.

That’s the thing. Much of the system is to their advantage because they are a party that is dwindling in numbers just by sheer population and demographic growth. They need the systems to remain in control.

This has been great.

I had a lot of fun.

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The Dangers of Americans’ Addiction to Fast Food Language

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 14:45:03 GMT

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Human beings are easily affected by the fast food word salad that marketers, politicians and media use, and Americans are no different. We are addicted to cheap, "fast food" language in place of healthier language, and remain unaware that fast food language is designed to outrage and indoctrinate. Join in the conversation as Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how CNN, Fox News, and other media outlets litter the truth with their opinions until the listeners are left grappling in the dark because they can no longer distinguish what are facts and what are opinions. We need to pay attention to what our leaders are saying and how close it is to the truth. Tune in to recalibrate your thinking closer to the truth!

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Watch the episode here

The Dangers of Americans’ Addiction to Fast Food Language

There are so many things going on. I want to let our readers know that this is the beginning of a multi-episode discussion of this concept of what the American public is being fed in terms of language and messaging and how it is hijacking an awful lot of people.

I appreciate the messaging where our words are like fast food. Human beings like to think. We like to challenge and participate in everything from entrepreneurs creating a new idea and bringing it to the market. Even a person in a big company, as a part of manufacturing, look for efficiencies and how they can get their job to be more effective and make better decisions to get their teams to work more cooperatively. Foods are the words that feed our brains. It feeds our thinking. It gives us a chance to create tension and the intention to wake up in the morning.

If we're not working up in the morning with a good intention, it doesn't go well. You and I are tired, and we need some rest. We do this show early in the morning, and people don't know that, but they will pick it up once in a while that we feel tired, and we needed rest because this is our intention. We're waking up and trying to connect, contribute and provide new insight about how to provide empathy and compassion to tragic actions, words and phrases that people are using.

The weird part about this is that the news media is stuck in the same thing, which is they got to use the right words to capture viewership. If they don't use the right words to capture viewership, no one is going to watch them. It's not as challenging. It's too soft. They’ve got to have this unfiltered quality to it, which is the lead for the S.E. Cupp show that you shared with us, if you will be willing to share with everybody about that clip and some of the things you were bringing to me and watch it.

S.E. Cupp is a CNN employee. I don't know her title, but she got some segments in their show a lot. She has a weekly segment called S.E. Cupp Unfiltered , where she's giving her take on something and her opinion. It’s fairly its opinion. What she's doing is calling out what you have referred to as a fast-food diet of language.

What a large portion of the American people has been sold in terms of not just the big lie of the election in 2020, but the big lie of truth. They're selling these things as truth that are not true. What she's talking about in reference to the text messages that have come out by the January 6th 2021 committee and about how a lot of the Fox News personalities of Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and others were texting the Chief of Staff in the White House during the insurrection and telling him what to tell the President that it needs to stop.

They're trying to encourage the Chief of Staff, Mark Randall Meadows, to convince the President needs to come out, make a statement, get this to stop, and this has gone too far. Those same personalities have been selling on television the opposites. The big lie of what she's talking about is the people that are so loyal to Former President Donald Trump are so indoctrinated in the big lie, going to realize that they have been had. That's what she says.

The hard part about this discussion is that it has to do with the word hope. Hope is a powerful word, phrase, concept, biological and stimulating word. I feel hope that my president, values and the things that I see as right with the world are going to be promoted in the world. Donald Trump presented hope through strength, “If somebody crosses me, I'm going to fire them. If somebody is not loyal, I'm going to fire them.”

There's the hope that that leader will do things in the best interest of the country. That's the hope that S.E. Cupp is asking for something that’s not available to the listeners of Donald Trump. It's not available. The reason why there's biochemistry that is blocking them from listening to anything other than the big lie is because the leader keeps saying that Michael Richard Pence needed to do the right thing, where there was no right thing for him to do. Michael Richard Pence did the right thing.

The former president has been selling that wrong thing. He's still selling it nowadays.

We'll sometimes be powerless in the face of unreal thoughts.

People are putting it up on media for everybody to see, "Michael Richard Pence should have done the right thing.” It's like, “Are you going to keep drawing a target on Michael Richard Pence now?” You would think that Michael Richard Pence would finally stand up, but he can't. He can't say, “The president is completely wrong on this. No matter how much you love him, and I know how much I care about him. He is a great leader. He's like my father.” Michael Richard Pence can't go into his own stuff. It's a weird thing, but he can't look at his own shadow. One of the hardest parts about this is that human beings get stuck on this.

What was eye-opening about S.E. Cupp’s Unfiltered piece as she points out that not only is the former president still selling all this and perpetuating the idea that the election was stolen from him. You often say the facts don't matter because people believe what they believe, but the facts support that Donald Trump lost the election, and Joe Biden won. What she's pointing out is it's clear from these text messages on January 6th, 2021 when these Fox News personalities to Mark Randall Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff, that they knew that this was a mob of Donald Trump supporters attacking the Capitol and was trying to get the president to stop it because they knew he incited them to do it.

What she also points out is these same Fox News personalities and the Fox News network in general, continue to support the idea that Mike Pence didn't do the right thing, that they sow seeds of doubt in the election integrity, that there was all voter fraud and all this stuff. What she points out, which is very sobering and some scary honesty, is for the people that are watching those personalities and network and believing all this messaging that those Fox News personalities don't even believe what they're selling, that they knew the difference and they're sowing seeds of doubt like, “The insurrection is member of Antifa.” Anything other than loyal Donald Trump supporters.

It's very difficult to say, “You're right on target with what you're saying, but it's not going to stick.” That's the hard part about this discussion. It’s very difficult when a group of people is stuck with delusions. I'm not saying that the left doesn't have its set of delusions because it most certainly does. This is not a right-left conversation, but this is a discussion on how does the brain gets hijacked. That's what the discussion is.

When the brain wants to believe something, it goes all in because it only has the language to go all in. It doesn't have time. As soon as fight, flight and free situation comes up, it goes in that direction and anchors it. It will deny all reality. There's a quote from Carl Jung that says, “It's greater than all physical dangers are tremendous effects of a delusionary idea will carry it. The delusionary idea carries it because it's going to go over reality. It's going to blind consciousness.” He's talking post-World War II.

You’ve got to think of it that way too. He's going like, “This is how we got stuck.” Our vaulted reasoning and undoubted rest will sometimes utterly be powerless in the face of unreal thoughts. This is Carl Jung talking about that same problem. The problem is our consciousness gobbles this stuff up through word salad. The word salad is what is Hannity is saying. Donald Trump knows what the target is. The target is eyeballs. That's the target. The target is, “Look at that guy's ratings. That guy's ratings are nothing. That guy's ratings is something.” All he's looking about is, “How can I change the ratings with the things that I'm sharing with people?”

All the news stations are guilty. These Fox News, CNN, NBC and Newsmax, all of them are guilty of stoking outrage because outrage keeps eyeballs engaged. That's what has been happening. In this example, Fox News has been doing is instead of broadcasting outrage at the fact that the president incited a mob to attack the Capitol, they express outrage that organizations like Antifa and others that they don't agree with would sponsor a false flag operation and pretend to be Donald Trump supporters attacking the Capitol.

They're looking for word salad to spin it in the direction. Whether right or left, the one is super dark and apocalyptic, and the other is utopian. Both of the fringes have both of those things. The anti-vaxxer has its super dark and an apocalyptic thing. It also has this utopian thing. The right also has the super dark and apocalyptic thing, and it also has the utopian thing called a Christian nation or one nation under God, which is a Christian nation. That's their utopian. The right has its utopian, and it's dark and apocalyptic, and the left has its dark and apocalyptic that, “You're taking away my freedom thing,” and the utopian, “If we get along and talk, it's going to be okay. If we just stay in this together, we'll be fine.”

What's missing is we need to face hard issues that are called facing the shadow. It sounds like this. We have been living for 40 years with an infrastructure that has crumbled over the last many years. That's a hard decision to face. In order to do that, we need to pay for it. In order to pay for it, we need to do it the same way we paid for it last time, which was to tax the rich extensively. That's how we did it many years ago. The tax rate was 90%, 70% and 60% on the wealthiest Americans. That's what it was. With that money, we built roads, the middle class, Medicare and things with the money from the rich. That's what we did. We chose to build things with money from the rich.

Opponents of this would call that socialism.

They're calling it socialism, but it is collective participation and the greater good, not socialism where everything gets wiped out. America has a hybrid. Part of our system is capitalist and socialist. It's capitalists and the socialist part props up the capitalist part. How do we know this? We bailed out bankers as if bankers needed money. We're going to give money to bankers so they will lend it to the people. Did they lend to the people? No. They redid their ATMs and got themselves more bonuses.

Our worldview has got to embrace the things that we do wrong and are unjust. The incarceration rate, rehabilitation system, and workforce development, what are we doing? Nothing. We have a very limited workforce development. Other countries have layers of workforce development. We don't have more workforce development. Those are some problematic and big things that we need to face.

The tough part is facing it. To circle back to how she kept closed, her segment is, “When are the people going to realize they have been had?” To me, that is a tough question.

The thing is, you can't tell them they have been had. Their pride, respect, recognition and self-worth will not admit that they have been had. What you will do is replace it with a new and more valuable thought. You've got to replace it. You can't overwrite it because they have too much investment. Through time, they will experience the backlash of truth. Do you remember that time when you were 30 or 25 years old, and you did that thing that was junky, but you felt it was good that you did that thing that you did? Do you remember that thing that you did? I'm making up a story. I don't know what the thing is, but in his brain, he's thinking about that. Have you noticed that you've given yourself a pass on that thing that you did that was a junky thing that you thought, “That wasn't a good thing that I did, but I'm glad I didn't do that thing again?”

The other thing that is a good example is married couples go through this a lot when their spouse does something junky, but you are married, and you're going to be loyal and supportive of your spouse. Even if you wouldn't have done or wished that your spouse didn't do that thing, you're going to back them up because that's what people do. That's the tough part. People feel that they invested their vote and themselves in a choice to support a political leader candidate. They're not going to wake up because they have invested so much. If they flip 180 degrees, they have to admit that they made a bad choice and they were wrong. They need an off-ramp.

We’ve got to give them an off-ramp. S.E. Cupp is missing this. When will the followers of the big lie going to realize that they're being had, that the people they trusted and adored don't even believe what they are saying or selling? They're not even believing it. There are mouthpieces of media. There are people that are advocates.

Whether they have a direct feed right to the top is problematic because that is a type of propaganda we don't want. We want investigative journalism to say, “Here's the pros and cons of the Build Back Better plan.” That's what I would like the media to do. Stay in your lane. Here are the pros and cons of it. Don't say bad and good. One side takes one, and one side on the other. I don't want the media to do that.

Don't judge and give an opinion. Just report. The news cycle is so full of opinion.

I'm telling you what is not there. If you want to land on the fact, you've got to land on the fact. It's very difficult. What media has cultivated is they can make money at weaving in opinion. We didn't do that in the past. We kept it separate. The big part of it is we need to face that, as human beings, we are affected by word salad. We have a fast food diet of words and a fast food type from our restaurants. It's upsetting me to say this, but it's better to use $0.05, $0.10 or $0.25 words, rather than some of the words that S.E. Cupp used, which were $50, $250 and $5 words. He can't use those words because the person's brain will not believe it or even understand it.

It doesn't land and receive as easily as the more simple language.

We need to pay attention to what our leaders are saying and how close it is to the truth.

The type of words you’ve got to use is salt and sugar. Nobody wants to eat vegetables. Our next show is vegetable language. Can we get a healthier diet? The problem is that a healthy diet is expensive. You’ve got to pay a little bit more for healthy food. What winds up happening is that words, people who inspire like football coaches, when we hear a great monologue in a movie, we listen to a great poem or a corporate leader inspires us. We say, “I'm going to work for this person. I would like to work in this company culture. I would like to be in this experience right here. This is what I would like to do and have the experience.”

When a corporate leader turns to a politician, the politician has to use the same set of words. As we have mentioned on this show many times, “Make America great again.” Great is the $0.25 word. Again is a $0.10 word. Again to what? To the 1950s? When was America great again? It was 1950 through 1963. Is that the time period we’re going to go back to? The world has changed since then. We're not the same people dealing with the same problems. We have a different set of problems. We didn't even have a catalytic converter on a car back then to take out the pollutants.

We didn't know that it was a thing until it became a real thing called Los Angeles smog, people choking, and getting sick from it. Our way to approach this from a language perspective is to realize that we're going to have corporate leaders that inspire but also lie. We're going to have politicians that inspire that also lie. We also got to realize that part of it is a sales pitch to raise our dopamine, cortisol and adrenaline, get us to fight, be loyal and dedicated.

One of the biggest things that are happening now is the souring of loyalty. Those people that were loyal to Donald Trump, and he sent them from where all the safety features were and sent them to the thing. There were no permits and protection for that area, and he sent those people down there. He came up with that. Part of it is unconscious and spontaneous. Go down there and make your voices known. It's like, “There's no sense of consequence.”

Followed by, “You've got to fight like hell. If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.” That's a pretty extraordinary message.

You are not going to have a country no more.

The country was the biggest word in that.

What happens is like, “There's a set of Big Mac sandwiches down there. They're for free.” It's funny. All of a sudden, there’s the image in my head of Donald Trump. Maybe we should put this picture of all the cheeseburgers in front like that. That's him. Those are the words that he uses. He's only using those words because those words are going to be consumed more easily by the listeners. This is a communication show. Look at how you shook your head there. If I'm empathizing with you, it's disheartening because look at how the truth landed on you going surprised. Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Tucker Carlson do it. They're all using words in the form of outrage with the same sandwiches.

Fast food language is designed to outrage and indoctrinate.

They want the eyeball with them because they're getting paid by their viewership. If you think about it, it's like the latest guy on Fox that left, Chris Wallace. He's going like, “I can't stay here. I can't listen to these people who are the last rat off the ship.” It's not the belief structure. The way it is being promoted is the problem.

I enjoy having a break in my car because it allows me to stop. My break is the conservative part of my car. The gas is the liberal part of the car. It gets us to go someplace. The foot on the brake gets us to be cautious and safe and not overspend. Gas gets us to go someplace, do big things, figure out where the innovation is, create new markets, and become a world leader through thoughts and innovation.

Are we saying that organizations like Fox News and CNN are all guilty of this? They're all built of cars with accelerators and almost no breaks.

If you think about what has happened from the voting perspective, money is the problem here too. If you didn't fund the politicians through Citizens United and gave everybody running an office the same amount of money to spend, a lot of this will go away. They have to vote for what the people voted them for to get elected in their districts, and then they would have to be responsible, not to the donor, but the voter. That's a broken part of the system. It's tough for us to talk about it because we're using more money to buy more fast food.

If you think about Mitchell McConnell and the Republicans, when Barack Obama was in office, it was all about, “No.” It's all foot on the brake, “You cannot make any decisions without us.” They sat, reached across, and put their foot on the brake of what was voted for. We voted for that guy even though you were saying no to him. We still voted for him because he had his words, inspiration and the direction we were looking for him to get. This is where we are in business, sales and marketing, to pay attention to it.

In politics, we need to pay attention to what our leaders are saying, how close to the truth it is, and take ownership of how we are buying things. There are things about the people that we love we don't like, but we're still loyal to them. We’ve got to get these folks back in the American car before it gets wrecked and realize what the role we play. This is the advocacy that we do. We vote this way, and there shouldn't be an outrage about it.

Also, to hopefully realize that we have these things called elections. We've already set up pretty darn good systems to do that. After all, we've been doing it for so many years. The result of the election, if it doesn't go your way, it doesn't mean it was stolen. That's the tough thing.

It's hard to trust the system when one of the mistakes that the Republicans made was to try to make the system wrong and bad. They made the system and the Democrats wrong and bad. What they didn't know by doing that language strategy is they were going to lose their own freedoms along the way. They had no idea about that.

It's very unconscious because the dopamine, cortisol and the belief that is generated by those molecules create a conviction towards a limited mindset. As soon as you do that, all the folks that have that limited mindset are going to come out, march, and carry torches. That’s what they do. It inspires them to say, “You're a part of my limited mindset, and I am going in your direction,” instead of staying in the shadows or, “We're addressing the shadow.” We need to address our own shadow more. I hope we get to it.

It's hard to look in the mirror, isn't it?

It is. This has been a great time. It’s a good discussion.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Folks, we'll be back next time. Thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody.

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Truth and The Music Man

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 13:53:42 GMT

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Truth is often the enemy of the music man. Truth exposes the cracks in the marketing message of political pundits, yet why are we leery of the truth? Bill Stierle and co-host Tom look at how people can choose to believe in a marketing message couched in familiar terms, even when it is in opposition to what is true. We take an unflinching look at how Donald Trump uses marketing and engagement to stoke the public opinion despite a losing legal battle and why people are often convinced by his message. Take a dive with Bill and Tom as they explore truth in modern times.

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Watch the episode here

Truth and The Music Man

Last time, we talked about outrage, fast-food language and things like that. Many things are happening that are making me think about marketing messages, getting messages to stick, what works, what doesn't, and the irony of some of those messages. Let's start there because I think it will be very intriguing and informative for our readers.

One of the things that our readers like to know about is how do we get communication to stick? How do we make it so that the reader is going to be like, “Tell me more, I'm a little more interested. How can I buy this thing now? What? I can afford it, but there are three easy payments? Maybe I can do it that way. I can put on a credit card? I can mortgage my house for this? That's fantastic. I can have the thing I want that I can't afford. I can have it now.”

Marketing messages and messages of engagement are necessary tools inside a capitalist system that needs to maintain relevance. It needs to eat more food. That food is ears, eyes, intention and impression. Anything to get engagement very much turns into The Music Man show or the Broadway show of, “Here's this town.” You brought up The Simpsons episode, and if you could tell people about that. Even the original The Music Man is a big part of this, which a lot of people don't know that musical, which dates us, but that’s the whole thing.

The Music Man is a story about a marketing and salesperson who descends on this unsuspecting Western Town. It's a setback in the Railroad Era. He's trying to sell and make money in this town. You don't even realize as you're watching it because it's a light-hearted, lot of songs and musical. It’s a fun experience watching this musical. There are a couple of different movies. There's the original version and a newer one that Matthew Broderick was the star of. He stirs up outrage in this town, over the youth, all their children, as they're growing up. This youth and how they're being corrupted, and he fabricates this concern that wasn't even there about playing pool in the pool hall, and that's the root of all their evil. The idea is to stir up outrage so that they will believe him in and buy whatever he's selling.

There was a modern take on this episode of The Simpsons. Can you believe The Simpsons is more than 30 years old? That show is still running. It's amazing. There was an episode called The Monorail, which is loosely based on The Music Man concept, where the salesman comes to town, stirs up outrage, and then convinces the entire town. They need to all contribute, dig deep into their pockets and pay for this monorail, which is somehow going to save them from whatever it is that he was telling them is their problem.

Donald Trump is losing in the court of law, but he is not losing in the court of public opinion. He's gaining strength by marketing messaging.

Before you know it, there's this song that is done like a musical where the entire cast of The Simpsons, the entire town, is singing and cheering for this monorail. That episode was written by Conan O'Brien before there was a late-night host. It's like their parodies and making fun of something very real that happens in America and in other places too, but all we know is America because that's where we are. That outrage and marketing messages and getting messages to stick is how you become the Pied Piper.

The hard part about this is that there's a line that ethical people take. They go like, “We're going to push this, but we're not going to cross this line,” and then there are lines that unethical people put, which is, “I will lie until I get the level of enrollment I need.” You can then send out a flyer to every American or German citizen and get them to believe anything you want through, “Saturation. Stay after it.” The idea of a political attack on a person, if Donald Trump plays a victim than anything that he's done wrong, he can be put in the category of a political attack. Whereas if anything, Hillary Clinton has done wrong. It's a political attack too. If we take a look at and comparison of an email server and the private texting that was going on between everybody, it's worse than that whole email server thing is.

Talking about unsecured, text messages are the least secure way to send messages.

It's anything to get engagement. All of Donald Trump's lawsuits are more about getting engagement to show that he is going to fight and counter-message the lawsuit. Even if he loses, it's money well spent. That's the thing that I want our readers to know. Even if somebody loses a lawsuit, it's money well spent as a marketing ploy that you can then say, “The course didn’t find for me, but they didn't look at all the evidence. They didn't weigh in my favor but that's because they didn't see X, Y and Z. You can buy my condo because they had it out for me.”

The person pulls off a criminal thing, “They have it out for me.” If you stay after the message and the person likes you, they'll believe you that somebody else has it out for them because there is an outside element. A lawsuit to gain a political advantage is something Donald Trump used in 1973 when they countersued the City of New York. It's marketing to the place of outrage that is, “What do we do about it? How do you counter-message that?”

I'd love to know that because clearly, Donald Trump's opponents are very bad at it. If you want to look at it for a moment in terms of Democrats and Republicans, the Republicans are much better at marketing messages, getting eyeballs and messages to stick to the Democrats. The Democrats are trying to sit in the place of moral high ground. Nobody cares in terms of what people are hearing and talking about. Like you were saying what these lawsuits with Donald Trump, he's been losing every little battle along the way with judges ruling against him, whether it's releasing of his taxes.

That validation that you're doing gives you confidence. It also gives the left confidence. He's losing every battle, but he's not. That's not the war.

The difference is what battle are you, or is Donald Trump fighting?

He's losing in the Court of Law, but he is not losing the court of public opinion. He's gaining strength by marketing messaging.

The same thing is happening with the subpoena over records in the January 6 Committee that the courts keep ruling against Donald Trump and saying, “No executive privilege resides with the current president, not you,” but all he's doing is like, “I don't care what they're saying.” He is dominating the headlines with his messaging.

It's weird. They pour the foundation and he puts the false building on top of it. The foundation is a lie, but now all of a sudden, you're looking, “There are walls here. There's a roof on it. It's made out of sticks, but who cares? That's the best building ever. It's tough.” All they've got to do is find an angle that they can play into and play off of. They will lean into it just to get the false marketing message of outreach.

I didn't realize it as we talked about setting up this episode of what we're going to talk about. We're talking about the metaphor of The Music Man. I didn't realize at that time that Donald Trump is the Music Man. It's obvious to me now, but at the time, it was more tough thinking about marketing messages, getting them to stick and all that. No. He's the one who has come into the town. He's the outsider coming in, tells everyone what's wrong with their lives. There's about rage and whatever he wants to sell you as a solution is what most people are going to get on board with.

Here's the million-dollar idea for anybody that wants to counter-program. I can see it now. The Lincoln Project puts out a video of a digitally replaced The Music Man with Donald Trump's being the Music Man does all those different messages.

Maybe they change the lyrics to modernize it to be whatever one of his actual battles.

You could do six different versions of that, of the different things. What will happen is I think it's like we're under a spell and curse of the pro and the con that goes with marketing, promotion and messaging. The spell is getting you to believe something for you to fall asleep enough in order to have loyalty. The curse is something that's going to scare the crap out of you, so that it moves you into inaction against something that's of your own accord if something of your own values.

If I tell somebody that Obamacare is good for them, but I tell them it's bad for them enough because I don't want to be known as one of those takers, but then gets cancer. They don't have the money to buy. There's no medical insurance for them, but they voted against their interest. The curses and spells work like that, and it's language-based. That's the thing to grab the whole of here.

It's interesting because I think if we stick with this curses and spells thing for a moment, and we think back to 2020, the virus is new, Donald Trump is talking about Operation Warp Speed, getting the vaccine created that's going to get us out of it and then he's not actually really selling the vaccine once it comes out.

“No. You can do it if you want to do it. Why do you have to do it? We're independent American.” By doing that, what does it mean to lose 800,000 lives? If you're a public servant. If you're going into government because it's about public service, you're serving the public and you have the opportunity to keep on message, even though it's not popular because it's in the best interest and it's a part of public service, that's hard.

The music man mindset is like a football coach that's inspiring a team to lose a game so they have the first draft pick. It's not a good model.

Joe Biden is not the same kind of Music Man. It’s not that he can’t do that. He's a very informal person, interpersonal and he got the touchy-feely thing going. He does care for others, but that's not the trumpeter of the person saying a message that's adversarial every day during the Donald Trump administration. It was like, “What is the guy going to say next?” He made politics a game show. It's hard to break America out of that to go, “Government is not supposed to be a game show. It's a public service that we report on and appreciate it’s there.”

He's gotten us to stare at the floor at the foundation and saying, “The foundation is cracked.” “No, it's not crack.” “Yes, it's cracked.” “We can fix it later.” “Let's fix it now.” Do you see how dizzying that is? To break that, that’s one of the things we get to is, how do you talk about what does integrity, mutual respect and growth look like? What does it take to build a coalition or a cooperative group of decision-makers that doesn't rebuild the mansion but realizes that we've got to do something about our infrastructure? We've put it off too long in a lot of ways. We're struggling because The Music Man mindset is like a football coach that's inspiring a team to lose a game, so they have the first draft pick. It's not a good model.

That does not feel like what it is. Donald Trump put us in such turmoil as a country for five years, including when he was running. Highlight controversial, always talking outrage. It was like a game show. It wasn't meeting people's need for basic support and stability. Joe Biden was the candidate that was the opposite of that. The people who wanted to get off the roller coaster, but once they get off the rollercoaster, it may be pretty boring and not as exciting. It's not going to grab their attention button.

That’s why his approval rating is so low and boring because who wants to stare at cement and concrete drying? When Donald Trump is promising that you're going to put speckles in it and it's going to be the best cement ever, and you won't believe what will happen to this cement. Even though you're calling it five years, it's six with the insurrection.

He is still dominating headlines.

It's going to be seven with his legal cases, and then it's going to be another two years on whether or not he's going to run in 2024. We’re on the fast-food diet of language. We're being marketed in such a way that we're pounded and exasperated. Can't we just get somebody with integrity that can send a clean message in order to get to a place to talk to angry people that have been sent a message that wasn't truthful and wasn't honest?

What's sad is the Democrats and the Joe Biden administration, whoever you want to call out on the side that is not getting messages to stick, can get some skills, can hire some consultants, can learn what they don't know if they just had an awareness of how much this is killing what they're trying to do in serving people. They don't get it. They need someone to help manage their communications and messages.

More to come on how we get those messages up for. It's getting mutual respect, integrity, a common unity around the word America. What that America stands for and getting people to engage in the process of collaboration and cooperation in a new way, which is important.

Thank you for that. I appreciate it.

Thanks, everyone.

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How We Can Prevent The Cutting Down Of The Tree Of Democracy

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 11:09:59 GMT

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So many things are happening that are changing norms and expectations, especially in our current political climate. We see these things slowly chipping away the tree of democracy every day. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the big D of democracy in America, how it is being cut down, and how to prevent its destruction. When people try to hold onto things from the past and monopolize our democracy, we move farther away from its true essence—which is about inclusion. Bill and Tom go further and provide examples, tapping into the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the censure of Paul Gosar, the impassioned speech of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more. Join them as they search for Democracy's healing truth.

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Watch the episode here

How We Can Prevent The Cutting Down Of The Tree Of Democracy

Welcome back to the show. Bill, we have been talking for a while now about the subject that I think is time to bring it out to our audience. We were talking about cutting down the tree of democracy and, eventually, how to prevent it. I think we both see an awful lot of communication out there in our elected representatives that every day, it seems like there is something new, and it breaks another norm or expectation that has existed. We see things that are treading dangerously close to harming democracy overall.

We will talk about this in this episode. It may be a recurring theme in some upcoming episodes as we talk about things that might be chipping away or cutting at that tree of democracy. I have a departure planned for us on this, but I want to give you an opportunity. Is there something about this that you would like to say before we get into maybe something specific?

It reminds me of the story, The Giving Tree , where the tree gives. The little kid grows up, but he keeps coming back to the tree, and the tree keeps giving him things. The tree is like, “Here are my leaves. Here are my branches. Here are my small branches. Here are my larger branches. Here is my stock,” and all of a sudden, the tree has left with the stump.

It is all he’s got left, so how do you grow something in water versus how do you use it until it is completely gone and all you are is an old person sitting on a stump? The nice part of The Giving Tree is the tree and the kid’s life span match each other, but when it comes to a thing like a planet, a nation, or an ideal, it doesn’t go like that.

It’s got to go beyond just one lifetime. There is no monopoly on length in which a nation or a group of ideals last. We have got several hundreds of the complete civilizations that have come and gone, like Aztec, Egyptian, Roman Empire, time of the Greeks, or the English Empire. We have got time and human beings. Democracy is one that is passing through. It is almost like you can set all the different belief structures right next to each other and dress them up in costumes, and there would be the Statue of Liberty or Uncle Sam sitting in at the end and going like, “Who’s going to be the next thing that’s coming after democracy?”

It’s a little weird to talk about, but we do. There is a group of human beings that like to keep things the same. They want to have kings and queens. They want to be in the civil war. They want to have an experience of having a fundamentalist religion be a part of the political makeup, and they want their place to have those kinds of beliefs and systems only. That is one of those things that can cut down the tree of democracy because democracy is more about the inclusion of multiple ideals and beliefs rather than just a handful or one ideal and belief.

As soon as somebody says, “This is a Christian nation is founded on Christian principles,” all of a sudden, it goes in that direction because there have been many of the founding fathers that did not have that as a part of it. That is a good place to start. We have a tree, four different kinds of axes, and we can start chopping it down anytime you want. You have read some things about this too.

There is no monopoly on length in which a nation or a group of ideals last.

There are many things that have happened that we can point to. What I want to start with is something I have read. It starts to get at what is chopping away at the tree of democracy. In April 2021, Nathaniel Rakich of FiveThirtyEight.com , which represents the number of electors in the electoral colleges, noted that of the 293 Republicans who were serving in the Senate and House on January 20th, 2017, the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration when he first became president. A full 132 or 45% of those Republicans are either no longer in Congress or have announced their retirement or resignation at this point, and they’re under pressure from former President Donald Trump.

The party continues to radicalize with Firebrands like Lauren Boebert from Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia, Matt Gaetz from Florida, and Paul Gosar, gaining a lot of influence. Here is where we get at the tree of democracy getting chipped away. Republican leadership has refused to call out Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado. You have probably seen in the news what she had said for her Islamophobic statements.

Her colleague Representative Ilhan Omar of the Democrat from Minnesota is suggesting she was a terrorist. This is right on the heels of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican from California, for his support for Representative Paul Gosar, the Republican from Arizona, after he released the video of that anime showing him killing Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and also taking swings at President Joe Biden.

What this indicates is that Kevin McCarthy has lost control of his caucus or is afraid of it, or both. This is, I think, a really important thing to talk about the tree of democracy starting to be chopped down. We were in a two-party system still in the United States. If you’ve got a party where its leaders can't stand up for a certain set of ideals and say something is wrong, even though not illegal, they censured Paul Gosar. Clearly, the House said, “This kind of behavior is not acceptable.”

If you have somebody like Kevin McCarthy, who was the leader of his party that has no ability to control his caucus or doesn’t want to, we have sunk to a new low in this country. Being a Republican is more about a loyalty test to being a Republican than it is being loyal to the big A that you and I talk about of America, or the big D of democracy. In this case, it’s the tree of democracy. That is what I wanted to share with you and start to talk about.

I appreciate that. We have all kinds of rules and laws about violence in the workplace. We have all kinds of guidelines and things that say, “Here is acceptable behavior and here are things that are not acceptable.” Freedom of speech is you get to say anything you want at any time to anyone fully, but it is not that because there used to be social norms that say, “We were not going to tolerate that language in this company, this House, or these things.” There used to be some sense of what respectful and accepting language looks like. If you are going to argue, you need to pick words and phrases that are going to make your point and still be respectful to the other side.

A lot of name-callings have now moved to the front of the list because name-calling will get more eyeballs than respectful communication between colleagues. We can see the problem with labels and diagnoses in name-calling because it is damaging the person, the democracy, and the ability to have a civil discussion about what it means to be in the loyal opposition and what it means to fight for these values that we stand for. That is one of those axes that we have got to set down. Stop labeling and stop the name-calling. Don’t use those marketing tools. You’ve got to get your message to stick in a different way than just calling a person a name, calling them a terrorist, or demonstrating physical and violent thoughts about the person.

I thought it was interesting. If our audience hasn’t heard it or seen it, but I know you have, there was a very impassioned and I thought quite free from the rhetoric of speech from the House Floor by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was before Paul Gosar was censured where she said something that was very telling. She said, “When did it become acceptable for a member of Congress or a Representative to the United States to say that violent hate speech is acceptable as long as that Representative claims a lack of meaning?”

I thought that was very well told. She said that they would put out this video showing one Representative of Congress killing another. That’s what’s depicted in the video, then the Representative said, “This doesn’t mean what you think it means. I didn’t mean that.” It's like the Inigo Montoya defense. The Representative then claims a lack of meaning, even though on its face, it depicts that. It shows where we have devolved to in one big way within our Representative. It is not about the ideals of a party or ideals for America. It is about winning.

The next question is what to do about it. Could she have done something differently? Was there a place to a reparative narrative, at the same time, doing an honest narrative?

The facts don’t matter if it doesn’t stick.

She was doing scary honesty and calling it out for what it really is, which oftentimes, we have said that the facts don’t matter if it doesn’t stick. I thought her speech was very well done, but it didn’t stick as much as the animated video.

The animated video got more play and people are like, “What was the kerfuffle about?” Others would be like, “She said something nice.” It should be that, but it’s too late because the message came out in a stick at the level of violence that he has towards another person in Congress. Human beings have violent thoughts about each other.

We feel angry, and we want to think that violence towards another person is going to help us feel better, but it doesn’t. It creates a temporary relief of the anger that we have, then immediately after that, there is a rapid decline of payoff. It’s like, “I beat that enemy, but I’m still facing these fifteen others.” What good was that? You are going to be thinking, “Could there have been a different way than I did which might not have been as costly?”

The outrage only gets you so far is what I’m hearing from you.

It’s a very quick-burning fire. It’s like putting a newspaper in a bonfire. It’s up and gone right away. That is what anger does. It doesn’t last long. Even in war, the way to get to a person is to talk to the person and ask them to stop shooting you. People think, “That doesn’t work. You got to shoot the person,” but no. You can ask them.

It’s like, “How about if we skip this whole violence against each other? We’re up for this, and we’re here at this point. It looks like we’re here for this, but we’d really like this other thing to take place. Why don’t we talk about it and not kill each other? How about that?” As we learned in Iraq, that worked better. They stopped killing us by getting them to work, providing money and stability, and getting it to work better.

What could Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have done differently in that speech to make something stick better to get the point across that this is not acceptable behavior for a member of Congress?

It is going to be unsettling for people to hear this, but it is empathy and compassion for the person that put that video out. She should be like, “Congressman Paul Gosar, it’s clear that you don’t like me. You don’t like the ideals that I stand for. I’m guessing you’re feeling pretty angry and furious to put out such a video. The people that are watching the video and then having humor about that don’t extend respect to me as a fellow American.”

“Even though, at this moment, I am going to choose to extend respect to you. You were elected by your people to represent them. Is this what they want to hear from you? Is this your best messaging about what you’re going to do for them in your district? What I’m choosing to do in my district is to be able to provide funding wealth for all middle-class, even in your state of Arizona.”

“I want to vote for your constituents to get them the things they need to better their world. It seems like you’re communicating a message of anger and violence because I’m doing that. I’m trying to make America better, but it seems like you’re in pain because your belief is that Democrats spend too much. How about if we’re trying to repair things that are long-lasting and need to be repaired? How about if we find common ground between the two of us?”

“Instead of sending violence to each other, why don’t you co-sponsor a bill with me about something that is going to work for your district? Why don’t you try that instead of the video? We might find that I’ll be willing to listen to you. How about collaboration and cooperation instead of trying to score points with the fringe and the people in your party that is taking shots at me? You might find that it might be more like a statesman. We might have tried that path.”

By doing that, she would be more of the adult in the room. She’s got to be twenty years younger than him. That’s got to make him look really bad without saying, “Representative Paul Gosar, you are a bad person.”

It’s like the whole anime thing. Even in the anime world, the way the world is set up is very anti-democratic or very fascist. The whole anime world is not something that you want to be a part of, and to make her or Joe Biden the big monster they’re attacking and doing that to democracy. They’re saying that this way of thinking is junky, and then meanwhile, it’s a head-shaker because we do so many things that are community-oriented that the Republicans want to keep.

Firemen, policemen, civil servants, local government, we’re funding all kinds of “socialist/communist kind of things” of what is good for the collective view, but most people don’t know that there needs to be a very kind handshake between capitalism and socialism. They need to handshake with each other to make our system work best, not to have the two of them fight with each other. That is completely not in any narrative that I have seen at all because those two narratives need to help each other.

We feel angry, and we want to think that violence towards another person is going to help us feel better, but it doesn’t.

Free speech is all over the place. People are going to burn leaders and effigy, but that’s common people or the average people. For one Representative of Congress to propagate a message of him killing another member of Congress, that crossed the line. It takes me back to the Kathy Griffin controversy during Donald Trump’s administration where she’s a comedian, and she tried to make a joke of holding Donald Trump’s severed head up and took a photograph with it. She was just a comedian, and look what happened to her. Her career pretty much ended at that point because that was too far.

All of a sudden, a member of Congress does pretty much the same thing. He didn’t kill the president, but he did swing swords at the president. I still wonder if Paul Gosar got a visit from the Secret Service. Anybody who makes any threat veiled or otherwise against the president, I’m sure they get a visit from the national security apparatus of this country.

They want to make sure that the threat is not something that’s real or that’s going to grow, and they will prosecute that. The notice that the line that they went and tested was it’s okay to go after this person, but they didn’t go all the way after having him fight and win a battle with Joe Biden. They didn’t do that in the anime because that would have brought that next level. How can you let somebody get away with that? The answer is we can’t let people get away with or not have some civil norms about how we talk and express things to each other inside certain settings.

Inside other settings where you’re in your private place of being in your house, you can be furious and threaten people. Americans allow people to talk to each other pretty violently in a lot of ways, but then there’s domestic violence that goes into that direction, then there are people screaming at each other and parents screaming at their kids. A lot of that is pretty junky language that people use towards each other. Without some constraint, it becomes very difficult.

There are some interesting ironies or contradictions because Congress has its own set of rules. In some cases, we find there really aren’t a lot of rules for our elected representatives where if you worked at any company of a certain size that has policies that are in alignment with the law, you’re an employee and you put out an anime video about killing another employee of the company, you would be fired on the spot and be out of the company. There would be no hearing or due process. They would just fire you.

It would not be congressmen speaking in Congress on your behalf, which there were congressmen that speaking on Paul Gosar’s behalf. They were arguing it's free speech, but this is a workplace issue.

It is a workplace issue, but there are other issues too. What was shocking to me about this whole episode is that the Leader of the Republican caucus in the House, Kevin McCarthy, couldn’t bring himself to say that what Paul Gosar did was wrong. Only two Republicans in the House of Representatives voted with the Democrats to censure Paul Gosar.

That was Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, and that probably comes as no great surprise to a lot of people because they are the two Republicans that are trying to fight for, dare I say, truth and seeking truth with what happened on January 6, 2021, being members of the select committee in the House. I think that when we get to this point where our elected representatives can’t agree on things that are acceptable and not, or what’s right and wrong, at least at some level, that tree of democracy is getting chopped at pretty damn good.

I think that you’re swirling around the thing that’s needed to be talked about, which is how there’s misinformation about your rights as an American. It’s the misinformation that you can say and do anything you want. It clicks to another thing that can work towards that violence that shows up, which is like the Old Testament justice. It’s an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Does that mean that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets to make an anime video about killing Paul Gosar now? Where would the outrage be if she had done that thing because he had violence towards her, and it’s just fair that she gets to do a violent video towards him?

That’s one way to look at it.

That’s what fairness says. Fairness says equal. It says, “You do something bad. I get to do something bad to you.” That is where the race to the bottom is.

It’s like two wrongs make a right. Is that what we are doing now?

That’s right. There we go. Is that what we’re doing now or are we going to do that? She did not go to that place. She just said, “Here is where we are. Are we going to do this in this House? When would it be okay to do this, and when would it be okay not to speak up?” The challenge there is that many voters don’t have time. They’re so busy working, keeping their head above water, making money, and struggling in the middle class or the lower middle class. All they need are moments of doubt and skepticism about the other person and that my site is winning because they said this funny/violent thing towards the person that I’ve been taught not to like.

Truth is not just a point of view. It’s also the perspective of many points of view.

It’s the person. It is not the values, ideals, or what the person is doing for me because an infrastructure bill that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to vote for is going to help people that don’t like her. They’re going to benefit from her vote, even to say in an unsettling way, the person they elected is voting against that bill. Therefore, it’s against the people that it’s going to help the most in their own district.

It’s very unsettling that our perception is one of those branches, limbs, or trunks. That is getting cut down because all we need is doubt and skepticism about the other team that they’re doing something wrong by voting on an overdue spending bill that we needed to do sometime around years ago. We’re years behind on that. We’ve been living off our great-great-grandparents and the wealthy of that generations tax burden of 70%, 80%, and 90% in order to build such a wonderful infrastructure that we didn’t have in place to take a freeway from one side of the nation to the other side of the nation so we could get around and not take forever to get there.

That’s all Dwight Eisenhower, which was a Republican, did. It was to build the infrastructure that was needed in order to get from one side of the nation, to free those cities in the Midwest, so they could travel and get to someplace. It’s a little unsettling that it takes a little bit of perspective, and that’s one of the things that truth really struggles with.

Truth is not just a point of view. It’s also the perspective of many points of view. We see a part of the truth, so we don’t get our brains isolated in our blinders or in our identity of, “The Republican person that I voted for voted for their right.” It is not what’s right for us locally and what’s right for the nation, so it is very important to see what it is.

This is going to be an even more unsettling bill that we are so far through the looking glass, and this tribal almost team sports behavior is going on in our elected representatives in Washington. There was a Republican representative Congress from Alabama who, after that infrastructure bill was passed, tweeted about all the money coming back to Alabama because of this infrastructure bill that’s going to repair bridges, roads, and how wonderful it was. He was touting it as an achievement of success, and then he voted against it. It’s unbelievable.

What you were saying about what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could have said from the floor about cooperation and collaboration rings true, but it seems now in Washington, nothing gets passed that’s truly bi-partisan. They get one or two Republicans to cross the aisle and vote with the Democrats, and they call bi-partisan. To me, that’s barely bi-partisan. The country would very much appreciate representatives who voted for things they need that are going to help their constituents in their districts, even if you have to cooperate with someone from the other team. Now, that’s viewed as toxic in our nation.

The money won’t allow them to do it. You can’t vote with the people because you have got to vote for where you can raise the most money with. That’s the way you’ve got to talk. You’ve got to talk about where the primary donor is funding you. That’s where you’ve got to talk, whether it’s a corporation or an individual.

Our system of money then has corrupted our political or governing dynamic and made it nearly impossible for our representatives to cooperate.

They can and they used to vote across all the time when the money was involved, but as soon as the money got involved, they got them free of that but it also handcuffed them to spend most of their time going to fundraisers to fundraise for the next election to keep themselves in office. That is something that’s very unsettling. We have got to watch how our language is used because the way we were speaking and thinking about politics and holding our nation together the way we were doing it is not supporting our way of being more collaborative, more cooperative, and more compassionate to each other.

Look at the issue of homelessness and say, “We don’t need that here in the United States because we’re rich enough to cover homelessness. Here are some steps we can take in order to do that. Here’s what we need about hunger. We do not need to be hungry here. We have plenty of food being thrown out. We make a lot of food.”

It doesn’t mean to make it and throw it out. Make it, sell it, take the rest of it, feed the other people that need the food, help them relieve the burden, and take away food scarcity. You take away food scarcity, you don’t have people feeling worried and scared, and they feel more confident about their next day because they know there are food around. Let’s face the things we can face. We don’t need those things.

It seems the money in our system is another thing that’s chopping away at the tree of democracy. It’s preventing, it seems, collaboration and cooperation from taking place, and even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had spoken from the podium the way you suggested, it would have been a message that stuck much better.

That’s what we need. We need messages that stick, and that then all of a sudden helps her and help the system look at what is wrong and then able to create a new point of view. The next time you and I visit, we can go down this path of how to be more powerful and use passion instead of anger when we were speaking about things because that’s the thing that’s going to allow stuff to stick more rather than using images and messages of violence. They don’t stick well.

That sounds good. We need more messages to stick, that’s for sure.

More to come, Tom. Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Thanks, Bill.

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The Truth About Media Exposure: How Integrity Is The Price Some Pay

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 19:00:10 GMT

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Putting a controversial message out into the world is an easy way to attract lots of media exposure and name recognition. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how some politicians say ridiculous things in their attempts to garner the attention of going viral. These people are willing to sacrifice their integrity in order to increase the likelihood that you will recognize their name and vote for them. Ted Cruz attacking Big Bird is an example of someone attempting to use controversy for his own advantage. That’s not what America needs: We need somebody who cares about integrity and accountability and is a good person who actually wants to help America. Don’t miss this episode!

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The Truth About Media Exposure: How Integrity Is The Price Some Pay

Bill, I'm interested to talk with you about media exposure, the truth behind it and what the real goal is of people that it may seem counterintuitive at first that getting exposure for something that on its face might make you look bad is still the point and more important than what that bad news might be.

This is such a difficult discussion take. In our last episode, we focused on how do we get branding works, exposure and how does a company do a better job of getting their product or service in front of people. A lot of times, the negative exposure will rise to the top of the equation or to the view, even though it’s, “I'm going to get enough eyeballs to get my name recognition high.”

There was a joke that Bill Maher made one time that says, “Kylie Jenner made her millions of dollars and has not done a sex tape.” It was funny to the audience because many people get their eyeballs by that and then all of a sudden, they're at that status of exposure or that status of popularity and things. It's like, “That's a tough way to get exposure.” Bad news or even controversial news, even if it's stupid, irrelevant or even damaging, is still okay.

That's disappointing in some ways, but it's true. Depending on your goal, especially for political candidates, national office, what you need more than anything is name recognition.

The goal is to be seen.

It doesn’t matter what you are known for. When we see some people being amplified by the media and you might think, “That's not good for him,” maybe not so fast. Being amplified by the media accomplishes that goal of name recognition. That may be the ultimate goal of a lot of people.

For example, if Al Franken would have given a huge, hard pushback about his picture as a professional comedian, getting a bunch of soldiers to laugh by taking that picture, this is not to justify the picture or the intent, but all of a sudden it's like if that picture was handled the way Donald Trump or some of these other characters, it's like, “I was at there. I did that. I'm a comedian. That's my job. I was making people laugh. It was poor taste, but it does not have anything to do with the integrity I have as a US senator. I have integrity. I'll take my lumps on this because I was a professional comedian then. I was not thinking about running for office and being a person that holds integrity. Integrity is a moment-by-moment thing. It is not something that I should be held accountable for a way back then fully and clearly.”

All of a sudden, the Brett Kavanaugh thing comes up. It's like, “I was a fifteen-year-old.” Clearly, accountability didn't work with that traumatic thing that he caused that woman. It seems like it's okay for the court, but it's not okay for democrats or the senator. This is where people are going to give us pushback because we're creating a conflict. The conflict is, “What are you going to stand for? What are you going to make words and actions mean? Is it something that you're going to be trialed in the Court of Public Opinion or the criminal court? Which one of those things are you going to be trialed in?”

The prime example of the last few years is the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump on the bus with Billy Bush. Clearly, that was trialed in the Court of Public Opinion. The reality is we've talked about before in debate Hillary Clinton could have.

Integrity is a moment-by-moment decision.

One line gives her the presidency. That's not what we need. We don't need a fifteen-year-old being a president. Are you going to be a locker room guy when you're a president? Is that the kind of guy you're going to be? Is that the level of respect that it's okay to joke about women's genitals like that? If she raises her level of forcefulness here, whatever he says next that digs back about her husband, she then gets to counter that by saying, “I have him in line. He and I have worked it out. How about you? Have you worked out your stuff from the past?”

Do you know how powerful that would have been? What she is saying is she has gotten a former elected president in line. What kind of power does that put on her, that she has the power to get him in line?

“That's why I'm more qualified for this job than you are. I know how to have a long conversation with somebody rather than talk in soundbites. I string together 3 or 4 sentences that become press coverage.” “Hillary Clinton said this.” What does that get her? Votes. She shouldn't even have to travel anywhere because the press travels.

One of the weird things about TV and our current media environment is that if something goes viral, it goes viral. It sets somebody's career up. It sells somebody's books. It puts somebody on Oprah just because you do this one viral thing. You get to move to the top of the list because people want to see the thing that went viral that everybody else is looking at.

It's a weird environment. The question is, “How do I get my name recognition? How do I get more exposure? When I get that exposure, what am I going to do with this? What are the new ways I can get exposure?” Think how dark this one is, “If I get exposure by rejecting vaccines, if I get name exposure, so 100, 1,000, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 people die in my state. I don't care. I'm just getting exposure. I'm okay with that.” These are unnamed people. These, “I'm not held accountable for that. All I'm accountable for is getting a person’s limbic brain to agree with me. I got to get their validated point of view to say, ‘Your name is something I will vote for because you stand for something similar that I do.’”

It's unsettling because politicians know how expensive it is to buy an ad on TV, to pay for clicks on the internet, to advertise in newspapers when you can find them. People still read them, but it takes a lot to get that group of people. You need to be there because there are still people that read newspapers and don't want to see them. They want to read it. It's faster. I don't want to sit around and watch my cell phone.

It is faster and honestly seems much more effective. The interesting thing is it doesn't matter for the most part. Obviously, somewhere out there, there's a line that if you cross, it might be the third rail and you get in trouble, but we seem to be pushing that line further and further off in the distance. The goalposts keep getting moved as to where that line is. Putting some message out there that's controversial is such an easy way to get all the media to give you this free exposure and get that name recognition.

That’s what somebody running for national office is always trying to do. We've seen politicians do this every week. We have an example related to this vaccine issue that I want to share with our audience. Ted Cruz came out and attacked Big Bird and so the other Republicans. Ted Cruz is the ringleader. He's the tallest voice at the microphone who's trying to use this controversy and he's doing it masterfully. I was telling you before we started this episode, Donald Trump is probably like, “Ted Cruz is getting more media exposure than me because of this.”

What's next, “What did he say now,” thing that's going to take place? He ran a presidency on shock and awe of, “What is this guy going to say next?” It was a traumatic and exciting time. It would have been an exciting time if he would have been in alignment with things that were valuable to the United States, but he didn't do it for that motive.

He stayed close to what his brand is, which is, “How can I keep in front of the press and get acknowledgment and recognition to go in my what and my way?” Congratulations. You are going to be known for the person who, by getting elected, gave a huge tax break to rich people. That's what you've known for. He was only one vote away from bringing the healthcare system getting rid of things. He would have been known for that.

If not, for the late Senator John McCain.

He said, “There are too many of my people that are going to get crushed by this,” but he still voted for the thing.

Let's return to the Ted Cruz here. I have to admit, I originally thought, “What a blender?” He stepped on a landmine and self-inflicted a wound. Big Bird is this beloved character who, by the way, has been supportive of vaccines for children since 1972. I'm one of those first generations that were raised on Sesame Street. It started six months or so before I was born. I grew up with Sesame Street and so each of my kids. We all love Big Bird among all the other Sesame characters.

When somebody like Ted Cruz attacks Big Bird, we're like, “Really?” It may seem puzzling and we may think, “That guy doesn't have any understanding of what he was doing and who was attacking.” However, the school of Bill Stierle has taught me that, in fact, Ted Cruz knows exactly what he's doing, and he's writing this controversy all the way to the advertising bank.

What's important here is that the politicians have got to start taking money, capital or resources out of the advertising bank, “I've got to create the shock and awe that Donald Trump did so I can get name being seen.” Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis are in the front line of things. They are the possible 2024. They're just getting themselves ready for 2024. That's what the two people are doing. They're the ones that are ahead because the brand damage has been done in the Republican mindset and voters about Democrats being bad.

There's not so much in the swing voters, but in the Republican base, the words socialism and communism have been spraypainted on the democratic chart on the imagery. That's what this group wants to do instead of thinking of the party of doing more towards civil rights, equality, and trying to create balance in society by holding a middle class in place.

They're not being thought of in that way. They're thought of as, “You just want to take taxes and waste money spending.” It's like, “Have you ever seen a Republican president spend things? Do you need that much military from the thought or the idea?” There are 48 aircraft carriers, and we have 24 of them in the world.

The thing is, people don't pay attention to that stuff, but what they do pay attention to is Ted Cruz attacking Big Bird and who Ted Cruz is.

The fact doesn't matter. They're not seeing where their money is being spent and who's getting it. They're yelling about Big Bird. It's like, “That's all your party's got?” It's troublesome because when one party steps all the way off the truth and integrity train, it's hard for them to run after the truth and integrity train.

How are they going to take a step back towards science? Think about how difficult that is. They can't take a step back towards science. They've got to maintain the path of getting the level of eyeballs. Chuck Grassley said, “I’ll be silly not to take the endorsement of President Donald Trump because the voters are with him. I'm where the voters are.”

The integrity left the Republican station years ago. This is true. All the established Republicans, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsey Graham, are the primary case in point. They've changed their positions on pretty much everything they've needed to stay in alignment with whatever the Republican base believes at the time. Their integrity means nothing anymore in certainly in the Republican party.

Unfortunately, the Democrats, who at times do try to stay in integrity, those are the facts that don't matter. People aren't paying attention to that. Certainly not the other side and not all the swing voters. If you're a Republican politician, you're trying to stay, be the king of the mountain, which is what they're all trying to do is climb to the top and be the king of the mountain, you insult somebody like Big Bird, and you entice all the media, not just the right-wing media.

I'm sure that Fox News and Newsmax were talking about it too, but NBC, CBS, all the other media and the late-night comedians. That's the video that we have in the blog post from The Late Night With Stephen Colbert. He did a great little musical number at the beginning, which I thought was hilarious. I was laughing hard when I watched that. I was thrilled when I found it on YouTube. I was enjoying that moment saying, “Ted Cruz is such an idiot,” until we talked.

Learn how to take the truth and make truth a home run.

That's not what it was for. It's not Tom Cruise is an idiot. Tom Cruise got millions of dollars of free advertisement for name recognition against Ron DeSantis. Keep your eye on the ball. The ball is Ron DeSantis has been getting eyeballs because he's been talking against vaccines and killing people in his state. The dark way to look at it is he is not a public servant. He's in a public servant position. Is anybody want to have any outrage about this? He is elected to a public servant and he is killing the people that elected him. It's a dark moment.

I saw a stat about that. To put a number on it, and I know the facts don't matter, but there was a report that came out in counties across the United States where there are more people that believe in the vaccine, that only 7.8 people per 100,000 have died from the Coronavirus. In counties where people are not getting the vaccine or not believing in it, it's 25 people per 100,000. They've been studying and seeing it along party lines and party affiliations.

You're talking about counties where there are more blue counties than red counties. This is the reality of America, but you would think life and death would be something that people care the most about. These Republican governors like Ron DeSantis are advocating against mass mandates in schools, vaccines and all sorts of things that are purely health and safety measures. Because people are listening to them, people are dying.

If there was a hit-and-run car accident that killed somebody, the car drives away, the police would be all over that to find the car that hit this person and that person got killed. There would be a man who saw a lottery charge or whatever the charge would be for killing somebody, running and all the charges that would go with it. How are we going to hold these government officials accountable when 40% to 45% is okay with a hit and run person because it's their party or person on their team?

“The person is Republican and I voted for him, so he gets a pass. He's on my team and I'm going to give them a pass.” If somebody has less of our name recognition and there's not a certain loyalty or belovedness behind or enjoyment in watching this public figure, we're not going to give him a pass. If there is a certain amount of joy in watching this person, this is how Donald Trump got elected. There was joy in watching him being the big boss and running The Apprentice. There were millions of people that loved The Apprentice.

“I was a fan. I watched that show.”

We're waiting to see who anticipation. It's all sales, reward, anticipation, uncertainty, “Who is going to get fired this week? What is the good reason why Donald Trump can say, ‘You are fired?’” Donald Trump comes up with the reason. Not to put them in too much in the same boat, but Simon Cowell on American Idol, “I didn't like that. You weren't good. It was average. It didn't take me there. It wasn't extraordinary. Your performance was this.” The other judges are going like, “Are you going to be kind?” He goes like, “No. I'm just being truthful from my viewpoint.” People say, “I can respect that. It’s his viewpoint. I might not like it, but at least he is able to speak up without impunity.” No one will give him pushback because he's above.

He's not name-calling. He's just being honest. He was not kind, rude and disrespectful for the effort. He's still been speaking his truth. I would never say that because what would people say if I said that? Can you imagine you sitting in the Simon Cowell thing or you come against Big Bird? Everybody goes, “Stay away from Tom at a party. There's Tom spinning his Big Bird propaganda narrative. Keep Tom's children away from my children.”

The hard part about it is what does a party do? What does an individual do when they step so far off the truth and integrity train? They can't run to catch up with it. Is that what the nation is going to do overall? Are we going to completely step off of the truth and the integrity train and not be a people of nonaccountability? Are we going to be a nation that's not accountable? I feel disheartened, but we're not. We don't regulate plastics to keep them out of the ocean. We do a military base and leave all the ammunition and stuff behind and don't clean up after ourselves.

We are not a nation of strong we pretend that we are. We're not a strong nation of integrity. We do not pay for mistakes fully. We let other people pay for mistakes. That's our climate problem. Can integrity and accountability come back up and means something again in politics? I don't know. I'm feeling a little doubtful, skeptical and hesitant about who is going to be accountable.

I'm doubtful and skeptical about that as well and because of my experience with you about language and communication, I'm like, “The Democrats are bad at marketing. They're so bad at doing exactly the things that Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis are doing and Donald Trump has done for years in terms of getting the eyeballs and getting people to be aware of them to like them, regardless of the fact.” I've been thinking, “We need somebody who does care about integrity, accountability and is a good person who wants to help America, who also is just an incredibly shrewd, brilliant marketer because if you're not that you're not going to win in America.”

If you don't create a series of moments that lift you above the others. Barack Obama had a series of moments that lifted him above Hillary Clinton. His first moment is, “Why are we concentrating on Iraq? Why are we not doing this in Afghanistan? That's where the terrorists were.” Everybody's going like, “Yes.” Everybody else was trying to follow him, then he pivoted again, stayed above the media. They kept carving, “This is what Barack said this time. This is what Obama said this time.” All of a sudden, Hillary Clinton started falling.

Look what happened to his Republican opponent in the general election. When John McCain did not get off of the integrity train. He's on that debate and the woman says, “He's a Muslim. I can't vote for him.” John McCain could have let that hang out there and not have contradicted. He not have agreed with it out, but let that moment hang there to wonder and then develop their own doubt and skepticism, “He's a Muslim? I didn't know that.” John McCain could have just stayed away from it, instead he went after truth and integrity and said, “No. He's not a Muslim. He's somebody that I happen to disagree with on policy.” John McCain lost the election right there.

People's limbic brains want to be validated that they're right. It's like trying to have an argument with your parent. It's like they're dealing with their experiences from the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s. They're in that those experiences and past things. All you got to do is put something in front of them that's familiar to that and they're going to say, “That's true.” It's like, “No, it's not. I have a cell phone. I can look it up. I can find fifteen examples of that. True and false.” It doesn't say it that way. We do have a bit to go here.

If people just remember that to do the best you can, if you're a business owner or a politician to weave as much integrity and truth in, as you can, and try to make that the impacting item, learn how to take the truth and make truth a home run, learn how to make integrity a home run, swing for the fence with it. When you do, you will have those moments where you rise above your opponent. Try not to take the opposite, which is a way to get walked and try to get walked enough.

All of a sudden, you get on base enough and your name's out there. You don't have any integrity, truth or respect, but you got the votes. It's going to be interesting to see this next run over 2022. As we come up to the midterms, it's going to be interesting to see the campaigns. It'll give us a ton to talk about. As well as look at ways that we can be more creative and have a greater impact on our own media imprint.

It will certainly be something to watch. I look forward to that.

Thanks a million, Tom.

Thanks, Bill.

Thanks, everybody.

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How Brand Memory Affects Conflict And Decision Making

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 19:00:09 GMT

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Certain things are immediately recognizable—McDonalds, the Marlboro Man, the Coca-Cola logo. The power of brand memory and recognition keeps these at the forefront of our minds, and it's often the same for politicians and other known personalities who have built their brands. So, how does recognizing a brand change how we respond? In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss and analyze how brand recognition works and how it affects our conflict resolution and decision-making skills. Listen for more great insights from our hosts as they go about finding the truth about branding.

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How Brand Memory Affects Conflict And Decision Making

We're going to talk about brand impressions and how they stick in the brain. There are so many great examples of this. I'm excited to talk to you about this, Bill.

The way that brand imprints on our brain, whether it's a business, political candidate or political party, you want to get your message out about how can you sell whatever product that you're trying to get to the marketplace to help others. Getting our brand, image or product established inside our client or customer's mind is essential. Companies spend a lot of money on this stuff to make sure it sticks.

Certainly, there are lots of brands we all know. We know their logos instantly. We hear their names that have an impression in our brain as to what that brand product is or what they stand for. As you said, companies spend billions of dollars every year to establish those brand impressions, don't they?

The way it works is that there's this brand memory or knowledge that we have about this brand. What happens is when we go to make a decision, we might not buy the brand for us but we'll buy the brand for others. For example, if you and I are hosting or doing a party, we might not go to the store to buy Coca-Cola, Pepsi or any other soda brand or spray. If we have the thought that somebody at the party might ask for it, it's coming off the shelf. That's what brand memory knowledge does.

What brand loyalty is that, "I am going to buy it because it's an accepted piece in our society." Think about how much a brand spends to be an item that's purchased on the 4th of July, the hot dog brand, the bun and all the predictable sodas. You and I can go to 100 or 1,000 different parties and all the food and drinks will be the same.

It's probably Ball Park Franks or something like that. I remember even the last time. We had you and your family over to our house. I was like, "I got to get Sprite because I know that Bill's son likes Sprite." We don't drink soda at all. We never have soda in the house. "Am I looking to go buy the cheaper off-brand one?" No, I'm going to get the one.

It's easy as the personal feel of relief or delight. The same thing happens with alcohol around the holiday. Do you have the kind that you know that your guests are going to want to enjoy? You're going to buy that. That's why all the alcohol commercials are about ready to hit us before the Christmas season. We're going to see alcohol, jewelry, and all of those items to make a difference. It's important and valuable to recognize the importance of, "Every kiss begins with K." If you find a brand line that sticks and if it sticks in a person's brain, then you've been able to keep that thing that made you feel good in front of you. It's the Make America Great party.

To own or establish a brand is to put an image and literally make sure it sticks to the brain.

This very thing we're talking about is why Donald Trump defeated all the other Republicans that he was running against in the primaries in 2015 and 2016. There's a combination of reasons but it's also largely why he won the presidency. This Make America Great Again slogan became a brand. It was, "Whether you liked it or hated it, everybody knew it." Everybody who sees a red hat with any writing on it, even if it's too far away and you can't read the words, everybody thinks it says, "Make America Great Again."

That's when, "Is this element a brand damage piece?" Here's the weird part about it. Even if we look at Coca-Cola as something that, "Coca-Cola will dissolve the rust off of nuts and bolts, if you want to clean the grease off of nuts and bolts, that's a pretty good thing. We can clean the grease off of nuts and bolts by using Coca-Cola," and you see a picture of that, it still doesn't mean that you're not going to buy Coca-Cola and drink it. That's the way even though the acidic quality, damage to your body or amount of sugar in it, your brain overrides it even though it's not healthy for your body.

It's the same with a cigarette, "I want to be known as a cool person. I'm going to smoke a cigarette and I'm doing this with cigarettes." It's not until there was a significant amount of brand damage towards, "If you want to do cancer, cancer and cigarettes are hooked together." They had to go after cigarettes and recognize, "Not only that it could cause cancer, but they also made it addictive. They put stuff in it so that it makes the brain come back to it."

Even though that's all very true, the brands associated with cigarettes, the biggest one that I remember is either Marlboro or Camel. Camel had all these great ad campaigns at one point and created a character that was a likable character but the Marlboro man was this cool cowboy. A movie called Breaking Away that Dennis Quaid played a role in that, I remember him driving in that role by a billboard that has the Marlboro man on his horse and riding. He is smoking a cigarette as he is driving. He sees the Marlboro man and salutes him as he is driving by. Talk about a brand impression.

To hear that it's coming out of your brain, all of those things are in alignment with that literal myth of the American cowboy. It's the myth of what the cowboy was. The West was settled more by women that were prostitutes than cowboys were. That's more of what the truth is. I bet you didn't even know that factoid. In fact, the first state that let women vote was the state that had the most brothels in it because the women had the most political power in it. They say, "We're voting. Forget about you, guys. You'll be lucky. Don't cross the women." It was Montana but I'm not sure.

It's fascinating how a brand will stick. The Marlboro man conquered the test. How about the Pony Express? The Pony Express, "We deliver. Here's the image of the cowboy, letter and delivery." The company was only around for a year and a half or some short amount of time. They only existed for this in the microsecond but the brand is like, "The Pony Express was the fastest thing ever. It's a way to get things." To own or establish a brand is to put that image and make sure it sticks to the brain. The same way as you brand a cattle with a hot iron is the same thing that happens to the brain. It lands on there.

If there is thought by a Democrat that you are going to change somebody off the brand because you had a liar, cheater, philanderer or misogynist, the brand has not been damaged. It's just been chipped away and recrafted to be okay with those sets of values. It's okay to call and try to damage the other brand with socialism and communism, and they want to give everything away. What people don't understand is there's still a core need that is not being addressed by both parties. The coordinate is fairness.

We're not in a fair and equitable society. How could we be because both sides are yelling at others about not being fair? "You're not fair because you're giving things away or taking money away from rich people." They're still not building an equitable society or things because cooperation and collaboration are not as sexy as a winner or loser. That dynamic of a winner or loser is something that our brain appeals to more than collaboration and cooperation because we don't have to.

This is why the Republicans are succeeding even as fractured as they are, even though a lot of them will privately say they don't want Donald Trump. The old senator running for re-election who had spoken up against Donald Trump now, he accepted Donald Trump's endorsement and he spoke from the stage. I remember when he said, "I would be a fool not to accept the endorsement of the most popular guy."

It's Chuck Grassley. He goes, "I would be a fool not to accept this because these are people that are in my party. I'll take the endorsement from the president." The idea of ethics, integrity or that person's brand is going to affect that he looks at the polling number and goes like, "I'm taking the polling number. I'm going to stay in this place. I'm not losing my position for this. I'm not opening up."

“I’m not going to lose it for any principle.” What he is doing is leaning in the direction. The wind of his party is blowing and leaving the things that he said in the past and the things that he has stood for behind. He is standing for whatever that guy or followers say or want. That to me is so disheartening that integrity is not mattering for anything but it shows you again not to get off on that issue too much. The brand is that strong. The Democrats are bad at branding or rebranding themselves. They don't get it and they're not getting enough support to try to do the same thing, which is unfortunate.

How do you take a message like Stronger Together and you're trying to create an inclusive message as a national candidate? That's Hillary Clinton's slogan, “Stronger Together.” Stronger Together versus Make America Great Again, one is a college adult mindset. The other one is like a twelfth grader, "Make America Great Again."

It's like, "I want to make it great the way it was in the 1950s." If you wanted to make it great like the 1950s and what happened in the 1950s was the rebuilding of the middle-class and the extensive pressure to build infrastructure throughout the United States, why? Dwight Eisenhower goes, "I can't get across the United States without freeways. I'm putting freeways in."

We're not in a fair and equitable society because both sides are yelling at others about not being fair.

Nobody thinks about what's behind it, though. It's a bit of a power-over message, a victor message or a winning message.

A winning message is, "I've got to get my brand, slogan, and identity to stack inside the view of the voter going like this." When Barack Obama went through, he had a wonderful artist that put one word underneath his name, which was Hope. People go like, "I can buy hope." When it gets in, it's hard to get hope when you've got another group going like, "We're going to pee all over your hope thing right there. We're going to fight you on everything and try to stall you out," and they did.

They stalled the medical stuff out for a year in talks that they didn't move at all and then the Democrats go like, "They're not. They're stalling. We got to pass it." Whereas if they came in six months, passed it, moved on, and passed another thing, they went into it like, "We're going to do a collaborative piece." They're doing the same thing again.

It's weird to say this. This is when having an older president who has a history of the way it was. The way the government worked is people were jumping across the aisle all the time. The way votes were going is to jump off over the things but the money doesn't allow that to take place anymore. You can't jump across the aisle because the money won't be there on your side. They'll be looking for another candidate who won't jump across the aisle and vote for the other thing.

It's amazing how the brand imprint shows up and all it needs to do is to have something catchy enough to stick on the person's brain. The thing to take home from this discussion is that there are certain parts of the brain that light up and then all of a sudden, that brand is imprinted. What winds up happening is the company that has the brand can recraft or create a new slogan that sticks.

For example, McDonald's was, "Millions sold and a burger as well. I want to go to the place that has millions sold." Now, it's Lovin' It. I've got the jingle in my head. Why? It’s because I've heard it 40 million times. It's carved a place in my brain that I can even hum the notes. All I got to do is hear a couple of the notes in order and I will finish the jingle.

The thing is, the branding makes you feel like something is what they want you to feel it is, even if it's not what they say it is. That's the brilliance of marketing and branding. It's unfortunate that the American voter is taken in by the branding. For instance, the former president has branded the 2020 election as completely fraudulent, "Stop the steal," saying it was stolen. He has branded that and half the country believes it.

It's very disheartening because when you go after something from a binary true-false place, the damage that's being done to the brand becomes significant. Donald Trump did the same thing with the USFL. He goes, "Those other team owners." All he did was have a way to spend money, make money and take money from investors and people that were in on it and going like, "I want to follow this guy. This guy seems like he knows what he is doing."

That's what a good/great branding mindset does is build loyalty. There's no mistake that the word loyalty is one of Donald Trump's main words, "Are you a loyal person?" Once the word RINO shows up, Republicans In Name Only, he has branded a certain group of his party that now is different and disenfranchised except for the go-along-with. They have to go along with the direct.

Once they are no longer loyal, they are RINO and dead to him.

He can keep saying things that aren't true. We call it getting away with it, but it's not getting away with it. He says things to reinforce the brand that he knows what he is talking about, which he doesn't, but he is confident that he knows what he is talking about. He is selling it as, "This is the greatest thing ever. I'm the greatest thing that ever happened to the Republican Party. I did more in the administration than most presidents have ever done." The facts are not important at all.

The thing is, the Democrats are arguing the facts. The Republicans like Liz Cheney that aren't buying into what Donald Trump is selling, are arguing the facts. That's a hard argument. Even the two impeachment trials argued the facts. Did he get impeached? He got impeached, but he didn't get convicted. It's disheartening but again, it's the power of the brand.

When you go after something from a binary true-false place, the damage that's being done to the brand becomes significant.

We should mention one other brand issue, which is so big these days, which is Facebook. They had this brand that has been established since about 2004 or 2005. They are experiencing a lot of brand damage in the media because of some things their platform does that aren't good. They decided to rebrand not the app but the company, Meta, which you may think that's an odd name. I don't want to debate the merits of that name, but they picked this name, created a logo, and announced it to the world.

They got some egg on their face because there's a company in Arizona that filed a trademark application for Meta in the same category of business. For those of you that don't understand Trademark Law, I can have the brand name in one category of goods or service and you can have it in another but this company is in computers and software and the like. They filed it in that category and started using it in November 2020. Now, Facebook either looks very bad because they didn't do their homework. They wouldn't have rolled this out.

Surprisingly, they didn't buy the name first and go find out who has the trademark first before they did it. It's weird but the brand is going to get a lift because of the conflict. It's a weird way that the brain works. There are more discussions about the conflict. Now, the beneficiary is going to be the company that owns the brand. They can if they're smart enough to use it as a marketing piece. It's going to cost them $20 million but what happens is the news media is going to easily pay for the $20 million in broadcasting the conflict.

What probably was a blunder that Facebook messed up on could prove to be a marketing boon because everybody is talking about Meta.

It's like, "Who was given a crap about it other than now the news media is going to pick it up and literally spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars of ad time covering the story about the mistake?" Donald Trump is correct on this. It's like, "Keep poking the bear with bad information and the bear will keep swatting at you." That's the thing that the media doesn't get.

This is where it gets tricky because the media has a split-schism setting it with Fox and all those other channels now that if the other media doesn't cover it in giving any oxygen, then the rest of the public doesn't see it's going on. What they need to do is treat it like his announcements are no big deal instead of training how awful it is. All of the cable news people make this mistake, "Look how awful it is." It's like, "Here he goes again. Look at the clown." They've got to treat it for what it is, "This is another branding opportunity. This is another moment where he can create conflict. This is where it goes."

One of the things that we can talk about is the perspective of two different truths. We can talk about that next time of how to take advantage of what the brain does with branding, and then apply it to business or politics and say, "How can we get our message to stick even if it's a negative message or a fall down?"

That would be very helpful because everybody wants to get their message to stick, don't they?

That's correct. That's one of the things that both you and I do. What we are trying to get the message out to others is we work with people in order to get that message to stick inside a person's brain, which is an important thing to do because you got to get people to do what you're doing. There's more to come, Tom.

Thank you so much, Bill.

Thanks a lot, Tom.

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Corporate Patriotism: Marco Rubio’s Challenge to Business Leaders in America

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:00:03 GMT

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Is corporate America becoming less patriotic by identifying as a “citizen of the world”? In today’s episode, Bill Stierle and Tom share their thoughts on Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s “inflammatory” piece for The American Conservative discussing a Marxist revolution in corporate America. The op-ed contains claims against this shift which paints all corporate leaders as anti-American. The two ponder on the intent and implications of Rubio’s statements and share their take on the new generation's perspective on politics. Tune in as they dissect the piece and expound with their own take on the matter.

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Watch the Episode Here

Corporate Patriotism: Marco Rubio’s Challenge to Business Leaders in America

Bill, my jaw is still dropping after reading an interesting piece of communication published in a conservative publication, The American Conservative by Marco Rubio, the Republican Senator from Florida. I need to quote a couple of things he said, but I'm interested in talking with you about this as a communication piece.

How do you read something, and even though it's activating you as a reader, how do you have some compassion or opinion for the writer and get some understanding about what the motive is, but also to see who does it serve? That's important, too, Tom. It seems like he said some stuff that was a little inflammatory, at least.

I'm going to read a couple of quotes here. First, he called Corporate America the instrument of anti-American ideologies. He accused Wall Street of devoting hundreds of billions of dollars to advance corporate propaganda that promotes Marxist tactics. He wants to require that the leadership of large companies be subject to strict scrutiny and legal liability when they abuse their corporate privilege by pushing wasteful anti-American nonsense. Interesting choice of words there.

Let me follow up with one more shocking quote. He warned readers of the current Marxist Cultural Revolution among our corporate elite said that the ultimate way to stop them is to replace them with a new generation of business leaders who consider themselves Americans, not citizens of the world. He is trying to separate being American from being a world citizen. I don't know if Corporate America is going to take to that too well. We have a global economy more and more, and so many American companies are doing business overseas. My jaw kept dropping as I read this. He's going for the America first message again.

We need accountable people on both sides.

If I'm being empathetic and compassionate to him, he feels worried and anxious about certain values being spoken by corporate leaders. They are leaders and we've had many corporate leaders have opinions about their views about the way their values run. Past America was a big tent like that. It would allow conservative leaders to speak in a conservative way and liberal leaders lead in a liberal way. Their companies would have customers who would participate in purchasing products from conservative companies as well as liberal companies.

Some leaders are more vocal about that. Some leaders are not as vocal about that. They'll pick their messaging and their PR is right down the middle. They say, “That's about this. We believe this.” Stuff like that in there. In this case, for a politician to write a piece that says, “Here's what loyalty looks like. Loyalty looks like having a factory in America.” “It does? Does loyalty also look like being legally required to make as much money for this shareholder as possible?”

That means I need to put my factory in another place because I can't make as much money as possible for my shareholder unless I put my factory in another place. Tell me how you want it both ways because the shareholder is the one that I'm working for here. I’m paying you like the politicians to keep my regulations low and my taxes low. I'm also making sure I'm working the numbers for my shareholders.

It's hard for the truth to be spoken through an article. It's more of an inflammatory piece. It's something that I'm going to get the limbic brain of my voter to get mad about. I'm voting for Marco Rubio because he is a pro-American first and that slogan is something my former president ran and won on. I'm going to see if I can take a run out of that. If I judge and criticize a business leader about that, then I'm going to create the loyalty or investment inside that. Does that make some sense that he's trying to amplify loyalty towards America but only giving a slice of the truth?

What was shocking to me is that he casts American business and leaders as all being dressed in the same suit. He classifies them as one. That's quite a leap in my mind. I know there's a Republican political reaction to Corporate America saying, “They're not going to donate to Republican candidates who participated in any way in the January 6th, 2021 insurrection.” This probably is somewhat of a reaction to that.

That's a part of it too. The hardest part about this is accountability. Where does integrity land? There are two places where integrity has got to land. It's going to land either on, we're going to have integrity with the law and we're going to prosecute people who break the law or we're going to prosecute people in the world of public opinion and we're going to send them packing. That person cannot work anymore and they're stuck wherever they are in their career or until they retire or they're living their life in isolation.

Richard Nixon got caught with both the letter of the law, we don't have enough votes for you, and the Court of Public Opinion. After he left, I don't think I heard one thing out of Richard Nixon forever after that. What happened is that the public opinion and the Court of Law both came down on the person that did something wrong. What happens if you only have one or the other do it? You can impeach the president twice, but in the Court of Public Opinion, he shouldn't have been impeached because the Russian thing was a hoax, and there wasn't an insurrection. He didn't incite violence.

It was up for the people. The people came there. We got to stay on this narrative that's a winner because these people believe the vote. I am not a vote counter. I am a trust extender. I'm extending trust to the poll workers, people in charge, vote counters, and the system. Even if there's message over message not to trust the system, but there are people that their limbic brain is going like, “There's a real danger here because the people I voted for is telling me there is a problem. I'm going to believe them because they're my leader.” If they're ambiguous or darn right saying, “I believe that there was voter fraud.” The politician isn't wrong. There is minor voting fraud. They will find a voter to. There are people that will try to vote twice.

It is much easier to sell outrage and distrust.

They vote for their deceased parent or spouse. It happens on such a small scale. It's not something that can tip an election.

At this point, it's not in that space. Until people don't trust it anymore, then we've got a problem. What happens is the rumor, the situation or circumstances is like, “I don't trust the system now.” That's where it gets dangerous. Are we going to trust the system? That's the fire that is being played with right now. That's hard and we need accountable people on both sides to go like, “This is where the truth is falling on this.”

What we need is some cooperation, Bill. Let's look at Arizona for a second. The state-appointed workers, the poll workers, the secretary of state, and the people whose job is to count the votes. They did their job and counted it once. There was some concern that the count had been altered. They counted it the third time and got the same results. There's no cooperation and trust in the system. The Republicans in Arizona decided, “We want to do our own audit.”

They hired a third-party company to do an audit and eventually got the same results. Any of the variations went in Joe Biden's favor after their audit. It's interesting. There was so much moving toward, “We got to count the votes. We got to find the problem. We got to find out who really won.” It's much easier to sell that outrage and distrust than it is.

It is because if you're in a silo of public opinion and you're listening to this one message, it keeps activating the same belief, bias, and structure. What winds up happening is that the person has a buy-in and is not willing to listen to the other one, and then it becomes easy to name-call, label, diagnose, judge, and criticize a person rather than to listen and be empathetic and be compassionate to how the person has been bought and sold into this place. This is not even political. Whether it's a Democratic view, a Republican view set, a jihadist view set or a religious view set, it's hard to shake a person of their belief and their bias because they've heard it over and over again.

To be able to tolerate ambiguity is hard. Shall I do an eye for an eye or shall I do turn the other cheek? Which one shall I do? The listener is saying, “It depends.” “Depends on what?” “Are you doing an Old Testament piece or are you doing a New Testament piece? Which one are you going to pick?” A person might say, “I'm doing the Old Testament piece.”

The person needs to know that fairness looks like if you did this at this cost, our legal system leans a little that way. We will call those conservative judges. If it's turned the other cheek, then it's, “You've done this twice. It costs us more to keep you in jail than it is out. We're going to give you another chance, but you better not be here again or else 25 to life.”

You're a liberal judge. We don't do a good job of that simple binary thing I did there. It's a simple binary thing. Are you going to pick this harshly? This person did a felony. They stole a candy bar, 25 to life. Are we doing that? That's what the voters voted for. The voters are voting on their bias. They're not voting on the practicality. For God's sake, it's a candy bar, public service police, and other items rather than paying for this person and putting this person in jail that's going to cost us upward of $30,000, $40,000, and $50,000 a year to house the person over a candy bar.

Social media is a player in the world of public opinion now.

Bill, doesn't it end up a lot of time, though? You made an example of potentially a liberal judge and those different decisions, but don't we often see that it doesn't even fall on those lines that it falls along whether the person accused is on your team or not? Is it your guy or a woman?

If you give Hillary Clinton a pass on this, if you give off the mistakes that she made, if you give Colin Powell a pass on the mistakes that he made, or you give Bill Clinton and George W. Bush a pass on this, it’s unsettling. It depends on who's team it is that you're giving a pass on it because, “I liked the person because they looked like us. They believe the way I did. I voted for them. I'm going to give them the pass because they're saying the same thing that the other guy did.” Marco Rubio is staying down that thread that Donald Trump has established as a “winner” for his state. He's got to do reelection. He's going to be in a tough one.

The Democrat is not going to win and call your county Naples, Florida because that's one of the richest counties in the United States and other counties are not like that. They’re voting their interests. They don't want a person in there that's a big tax person because I moved to this state because it was a low tax state to retire, sit on the beach and live in the warm weather. That’s what I did. I want to retire here and keep all my money while I do that.

It's not a judgment. Money is not a bad thing. The money to meet the need for stability for the middle-class might be something that the people of affluence may want to think about because that helps them to have a stable thing. Who wants to read about all this noise, worry about XYZ, and get scared by things we don't need to be scared about? There's a lot of great things that are happening in the world and good areas of peace.

A good example of getting a pass could be what we see presidents do a lot of the time by pardoning people. You have your Rule of Law piece, which is very conservative law and order. It could be considered. It's not universally in your example. You have somebody like Colonel Michael Flynn, who was pardoned. He lied to the FBI. He admitted it and the president pardons him. A lot of people will follow the president thinking, “He wasn't guilty of anything big.”

The reality is, “He was guilty of it. He could have been up for treason. The judge was a little light on him.” The president gave him a pardon because it was the turn the other cheek. “We're going to let the person go because he's on our team and we're not doing the Rule of Law with him.”

Who was the other guy that he pardoned who has the tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back?

Roger Stone.

This election, we need to get off the narrative of who's the enemy today, who's the enemy this week, who's the enemy, because that’s the narrative we’re in.

He got to the point of being convicted. Michael Flynn hadn't been sentenced yet or convicted. He had confessed, I guess, to lying to the FBI, but in terms of Roger Stone, he was convicted. Either was already sentenced or was awaiting sentencing. It's the same thing. It depends on your perspective. That's why, to me, this whole Marco Rubio op-ed was so shocking because he paints Corporate America with this broad brush as all being the leaders of Corporate America are almost anti-American, is what he's saying.

As if he has the measuring stick for what a good American is. He's looking to make it very binary. It's not to say that there aren't elements of the Democratic Party that do that, but where the leading narrative is missing is, “Are we going to return to a nation that's going to be collaborative and cooperative? Are we going to start going back, start to reboot, or reestablish collaboration and cooperation? Somebody has got to do it.”

The only collaboration and cooperation that's taking place between Joe Biden and Joe Manchin. That's it. He's going like, “I want your vote and you're not going to go for any spending, but I am going to go for this. Here's what I'm going to get past and manage. I don't want any more new debt and spending.” If Joe Manchin walks it up to the line and then doesn't vote for it, that will change the 2022 election.

I'll tell you the heated talk is going more in that direction. Joe Manchin keeps saying, “I'm not agreeing to this and that.” It would be interesting to see what happens here.

I feel energized about getting people to be accountable to see if the rule of law is going to stand up for certain things that we've people have voted for and agreed upon. I feel curious about social media because social media is a player in the world of public opinion, especially Facebook. It’s a little bit on the rocks because all of a sudden, it's like, “I'm not going to Facebook again.” Its business model is going to need to readjust itself, which the owner is jumping on in a Meta way.

We want to keep setting the intention of collaboration and cooperation to come back because that's what the two-party system is about. Other democracies have a three-party or five-party system. They have a lot of different groups fighting for their point of view and try to get their point of view to the front of the list.

If you're doing it that way, then you've got to stand for certain things that the majority wants to hear and also be a good person. The good person part becomes a little bit more sensitive, and the tribalism drops. That's the thing that we're up to. We've got to get off the narrative of who's the enemy now? Who's the enemy this week? Who's the enemy this election? We've got to get off of that narrative because that's the narrative we're on.

It is, and a lot of people are on it because it sells better.

More to come in future episodes, but getting collaboration and cooperation to the front of the list can make a difference to not look at our fellow Americans as an enemy, but look at it as, “How can I collaborate and meet with you on the places? You can still hold your beliefs, but I'm okay with it. This is what I believe in, and this is what you believe in,” then it gets better.

It would. Bill, thanks very much. I appreciate your insights.

Thanks, everybody, for reading. More to come.

Important Links:

The American Conservative - We Need Corporate Patriotism To Defeat American Marxism

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Political Marketing 101: Why Today’s Politicians are Sending a Damaging Message

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 19:00:09 GMT

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A lot of politicians these days need to go back to school and take a communication class. The amount of damaging messages being passed around in political marketing is increasing daily, and damaging political careers. To succeed in politics, and in life, you have to learn how to properly send a message so that your people will stay loyal to you. Learn more about political marketing and messaging with your host Bill Stierle. Join Bill and Tom as they discuss what recently happened at the Ted Cruz and Merrick Garland hearing. Listen to their takes on it today!

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Watch the episode here

Political Marketing 101: Why Today’s Politicians are Sending a Damaging Message

We are seeing some communication blunders. I think some of our politicians need to go back to remedial communication.

The tactic is, “How do I get somebody to vote for me?” It's the same thing for business and buying a product, “How do I get somebody to buy my product? I can get somebody to buy my product to push on the pain point.” That's the business part of it. In politics, it has some similarities to it, “I'm going to push on the pain point but I'm going to make the other side accountable for the pain. I'm going to activate the pain. Therefore, I don't care if I'm giving a positive or a negative message. One thing is for sure, if I give the negative message and populate a negative soundbite as many times as possible, it's going to override the positive message.”

That's the hard part about this political marketing that we're experiencing. This marketing of the message is there has got to be some kind of fresh brand marketing of the person, good or bad, in the environment so that the loyalty stays with the person. Ted Cruz has a great chance of being a president in the United States. His messaging is already appealing to loyal Republicans. People have the belief that he's this because he's that. They give him a pass out a lot of mistakes or questionable points of view.

Like going to Mexico when your state is out of power.

He’s like, “It's a little cold here. I think I'm going to fly to Mexico. My kids are whining. Because they are whining and I'm a person of affluence, I can fly there.” A voter will give them a pass on that like, “Isn’t he a public servant?” The Dunning-Kruger effect is in play here because the person thinks they are a political force because their vote counts, but they don't actually see that they are just loading up damaging messages about the other side. They are not looking at their own needs or how that works. They are just looking at, “I don't want this other party.” That's what the voter regrettably is not seeing, that Capitalism has made critical thinking soft.

Capitalism has made critical thinking soft.

“I am believing if I buy this product for X price, my life will be better,” and it is for about whatever time the product is this thing, until the product falls apart and you have to buy another one of them. I have anticipation that this thing that I'm purchasing has value, and it does. You and I have bought things that have been outside our budget or have been outside our things because we're looking for progress, growth or support. We're buying from that position. Where it shows up in business and politics is you can take one word and create negative soundbites around it. All of a sudden, that's a problem because your brain won't be able to tell what the truth is. It can't tell the difference, regrettably.

You brought up Ted Cruz. He was in the news as he often is because of a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting. Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, was there. Ted Cruz and another Republican senator took the opportunity to try to create soundbites to market to their voters. I'm going to quickly set the table here. I don't want to get too much in the weeds, but I have an article and a video for this episode that our audience can check out to look at it more deeply. There have been lots of protests at school boards around the country. The National School Boards Association wrote a letter which the Republican party has taken issue with where they used some language in there that said that some of these people that are attacking members of school boards are domestic terrorists. They had to walk that statement back and apologize for it.

They are trying to protect school board members because school board members have been under attack in this country. The National School Boards Association had written to the Joe Biden administration for support with the FBI in helping to protect school board members. Merrick Garland wrote a letter that was offering support to the local law enforcement with Federal law enforcement from the FBI. Ted Cruz was trying to get also Merrick Garland in the Senate Judiciary Committee meeting to apologize for what he wrote, as if Merrick Garland had somehow called citizens domestic terrorists in what he wrote which of course, he had not.

There were two tragedies that occurred. One is by Ted Cruz where he is trying to get a sound soundbite for Fox News, Newsmax or wherever his voters are going to be hearing it, which is that he's asking Merrick Garland to resign and apologize for what he wrote. That was over the top because it wasn't in alignment with any truth. Merrick Garland was not going to agree with him.

I appreciate you introducing this because politics is about damaging the messenger. When we damage the messenger, we can get market share and loyalty. For example, and this is a true story, if I'm Papa John's Pizza and I put a commercial of my delivery cars next to Pizza Huts delivery cars, and my national advertising campaign is, “Better ingredients, better pizza,” and I'm putting their logo next to my logo. The Pizza Hut people said, “That's not true. We're going to court.” That case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Here's what the Supreme Court said, “It’s up to the buyer whether it's better ingredients, better pizza. We are not going to legislate the word better.” The people from Pizza Hut are going like, “Our ingredients are better. We use this quality. We use this organic. They don't use that. Ours is clearly better. They are not doing a truthful sentence.” “We are not going to legislate.”

The Supreme Court decided they were not going to be the arbiters of what is better. They viewed it as subjective and up to the consumers.

The only win out of it is that Papa John's could not use Pizza Hut’s logo in their advertising. From that moment on, the logo wasn't there, but the impression is still living inside the human being, “This type of pizza is better than this type of pizza.” Pizza Hut is going to counter with its various different marketing campaigns and was not able to do a retaliatory piece. In politics, you can do retaliation against a party name.

“The Democrats or the Republicans are trying to destroy our nation.” You can do that type of narrative over a period of years, but that's not a peaceful democratic way to run a nation. You can't run it from an adversarial place, and there's no arbiter now. How does it weigh violent language against itself? It’s having a hard time doing it. We're going to see cases like this. You cannot have freedom of speech and violence to another person exist in the same space. “I'm going to kill you” is not a healthy sentence to allow somebody to use and hide or stay under freedom of speech.

Politics is about damaging the messenger.

Freedom of speech is an interesting thing because that came up in discussion with Ted Cruz and Merrick Garland at this hearing where Ted Cruz is accusing Merrick Garland of writing this letter to the National School Boards Association and offering support from a law enforcement perspective. He didn't use any of the same kind of language that the school board did, claiming that school board members were being attacked by domestic terrorists. Ted Cruz is trying to hang that around Merrick Garland's neck.

I appreciate you going back to the truth. All of a sudden, I'm going, “That's a great truth that you're saying.” It's about, “I'm trying to damage the guy's name. I'm trying to damage Merrick Garland.” This is a problem too. Mitch McConnell damaged Merrick Garland's name. Merrick Garland is a center-right guy. He's not a center-left guy, and he's most certainly not a left guy. Barack Obama is putting him up because he's 50/50.

He thinks he's going to get approved easily, that the Republican should want to.

Instead, McConnell stonewalls him and then does brand damage on Merrick Garland's name. He’s like, “We're not going to approve him because he's on their team.” Everyone is looking around and goes, “This guy's not on their team at all. He is a centrist. He's right in the middle.” Look at how slow he is in getting out in front of the public now. He's not great at leading. He doesn't know how much of his job is marketing and messaging. He's doesn't know that he has to market and message this in a way that will stick with people, not stay after what you did which was, “I wish the senators would quote me exactly.”

That’s what Merrick Garland said. He said, “I wish you had used my actual words when talking about what I said.” Merrick Garland is being very much a lawyer who looks at things as right or wrong, yes or no, and black or white.

He is at a marketing street fight and he doesn't know it.

He didn't help himself in that discussion by sticking to the truth. As you have often said, truth does not always matter. Even though Merrick Garland was correct, he could have handled that with Ted Cruz much differently.

I'm going to pretend I'm Merrick Garland, and we might as well give him a little bit of coaching here. It might sound something like this, “I can appreciate Senator Ted Cruz being able to speak freely and create a message about the freedom of speech. I really think the freedom of speech is also very important like Senator Ted Cruz and others that will be talking about how important freedom of speech is for those people that are there. What we're talking about is the need for safety and protection for people who are threatened. We need to have safety and protection because the threats have become larger. Everybody may notice that people are responding in a more violent and threatening way. What we're going to do is we're going to provide school boards protection for the people who are threatened. If you do not threaten someone, you're going to be fine. Please continue with your freedom of speech, but if you are going to say something threatening, we will take a step in order to protect other people because that's the nation that we stand for, and that's what the legal system is for.”

Can you imagine if he did anything like that? Ted Cruz would have been stopped dead in his tracks, and that would have become the soundbite that gets amplified instead of Ted Cruz trying to get the soundbite of, “You should resign.”

Watch this, “I appreciate the thought of him asking me to resign but I feel torn. I'm not sure if the Senator is clear about what my job is. My job is about protection and safety as well as making sure that the freedom of speech stays intact. I need to fight the freedom of speech for both people. Although the Senator would like the freedom of speech just to be for one side, my job is to make sure I'm an advocate for the same thing. I'm wondering why he's not advocating for the same thing. Freedom of speech is very important for all people in America, don’t you think?” That little don't you think was a little snarky. I would tend not to do it.

I could do the same thing on the right or the left. This is not a right or left thing. If you want to advocate for something and you want to stay in balance with something with a balanced narrative, you've got to change demands into requests, if you would like that to take place. “I demand that he resign.” “I hear that you're requesting me to resign.” The word demand has a very short shelf life. Try it with your kid or your spouse. You'll get it once but you will pay for it later.

That's one of the things that the Republicans are not getting. You can't keep lighting a firecracker on a stick of dynamite all the time because it creates shell shock and shrapnel. People are tired of it. Because they're tired of it, what ends up happening is the person that is speaking from a grounded place, but yet in a place of strength will pull those swing voters over to the side.

Barack Obama did it. He pulled all the swing voters onto his side. The loyalists are going to be loyalists, but the swing voters are what makes the election move. You’ve got to generally set it reasonable, accountable, and somebody that has everyone's best interest in mind. If you keep doing the style of politics that's being done, it's not a very strong long-term play.

There's one more example that I want to bring in for this episode which is a little bit humorous but there's a real good lesson in it. There was a reporter that was chasing after Representative Mo Brook at the Capitol Building. He was literally chasing him down a flight of stairs trying to ask him a question and clearly, Representative Mo Brooks wanted nothing to do with answering the question. There's a video of it. It was on Late Night with Seth Meyers. He made fun of it, which is funny in many ways when you look at it, but there's a lesson here.

You could do it both ways. It could be a lesson for the representative in Congress and also for the reporter who clearly is not going to get this guy to engage him in a serious way with the tactic that he uses. Representative Mo Brooks had come out, endorsed and was in support of the candidacy of Roy Moore in Alabama. This is a very troubling figure that has gotten in all sorts of trouble for many things, especially with underage girls. He was always a troubled candidate.

The reporter is trying to ask him if he still supports or regrets his support for Roy Moore. He's trying to pin him down and get an answer on this, which he's never going to get. He chases him down the stairs. They're running down this flight of stairs in the Capitol, and he keeps saying the same thing over and over. What does Mo Brooks say in response, and this is more to your marketing point of view because he's trying to answer with a marketing message that's not only trying to deflect from the question he's being asked, but also to amplify this marketing message.

He says, “I believe the Democrats will do great damage to our country on a myriad of issues.” As they're going down the staircase round and round multiple times, the reporter keeps asking the same question. Mo Brooks keeps giving that exact same answer. It was almost like a mantra if you were meditating. It was surreal.

I felt the reporter for not doing a better job. He could have gotten Mo Brooks to willingly stop running down the stairs had he said something different. I think Mo Brooks could have also said something that would have more successfully deflected from the question he was being answered and put it to rest. It's obvious when you're running down the stairs. That's not a position of strength dealing with an issue. That isn't going to go away.

You cannot have freedom of speech and violence against another person exist in the same space.

Both sides of it. The first side of it is Mo Brooks doing what his job is which is, “I am going to throw a rock at Democrats and I'm going to take a moment to damage them and their message. I want to do some brand damage on the word Democrat. I don't want the issue. Even if the issue will help my voter, I still need to damage the word, Democrats. We need to damage it by painting them into the thing that I want to paint them into."

By doing that brand damage, all they need to do is report a talking point that their side can use, “Look at how he's fighting for you who voted for him. He's a fighter. We want more fighters.” It’s the same thing with Marjorie Taylor Greene. She's a fighter and an instigator. It’s the same thing with Donald Trump. He's a fighter and an instigator. He's going to mix things up. What the voter doesn't understand when you're voting for that type of person is that brand damage starts to leak from the party to the country.

America has some brand damage. “America's democracy is messy,” is what General Mark Milley said to the Chinese. He said, “We're fine. This is the problem that we have with democratic governments. Democracy is a little messy sometimes,” to try to give them reassurance because their cultural belief is speaking up is messy. They have oppression on speaking up. They are trying to manage the message before it comes out of the person's mouth. “You better not speak up or we're going to put you away.” This one is, “We allow people to speak up and things will settle down after it.” That's the way we do it.

From the reporter’s standpoint, the reporter is pursuing truth but look at how truth is running away from him. He is not getting any truth at all. He's trying to get that this guy is supporting Roy Moore. That’s not what's happening. He's supporting an R. He’s supporting a vote. He just wants an R, whoever the R is.

For Mitch McConnell, it’s the same thing, “I need an R in the seat that's voting for the things I want to vote for. I want the R in the seat. I don't want the D in the seat because the D is not voting for me. I don't want to talk to the D. I want R in the seat. It's so much easier if I have R in the seat. If I have R in the seat and my Rs are all voting for me, then I can get things done the way I would like them done. I can prevent the other guy from getting the things that he or she would like done.”

This challenge about this political marketing 101 is, “I am going to exercise brand damage on truth, on reality and on the other side to get the votes that I need. I want to keep my sheep in my own stable. I don't want them to go wander off. I'm going to keep a common message.” Fairness is a twelve-year-old need. Remember the last time you ever talked about fairness? You were twelve, “It’s not fair.”

I hear it from my 12-year-old and 7-year-old every week.

They are trying to wrestle with the concept of fairness. The problem is that a lot of voters are wrestling with the concept of fairness. It's very hard for a working person to experience that fairness. It’s that somebody that has less money and less opportunity to them is getting help because we are trying to bring them up into a vibrant part of a capitalist style of economy.

If they don't have any money to spend and they're on the street, they are not helping our economy at all. They are not a purchaser. I need people to purchase stuff to make economies work, houses, apartments, picture frames, cars and computers. We're really in the political space. You can't run politics like cannibal capitalism. We can't eat the system, which is what is happening. We're cannibalizing our brand respect. We can't eat ourselves here. That's what we're looking in. That's the thing that's very upsetting.

It seems that if people had better awareness of how to communicate more effectively, this would be a much different country we're living in now.

Our affluence would be off the hook. That’s the thing there. When there is a strong social program, the trickle-up that takes place is nutty. If you think about the 1940s and 1950s, it's all about building the middle class and making sure the middle class has strength so it can buy things. That's what you want. If they can pay taxes and buy things, that strength is the trickle up. There's more coming. What’s important in all that's taking place now is that there's an activation of the limbic brain to get votes for the short-term. They have been doing it very strongly for many years. It’s brand damage, then vote for us, "You don't want those other guys. You want us. We're more excited over here doing brand damage.”

Like you've said before, “It's not my job to do the right thing. It's my job to get them to vote for me.”

It's not my job to correct the truth. It's not my job to educate the voter. It's their job to sort through my BS. It's hard. It’s this idea of how do we get a healthy discussion about fairness to take place and put fairness in the perspective that it needs to be put. If something is not in the place of fairness, then the other person, whether it's business or politics, will not come back if they get a sense of, “This wasn't fair. I don't want to participate in this way.” That's the thing to put our arms around. It’s to have one of those different kinds of experiences.

Thanks very much for that. I enjoyed it.

Thanks a lot.

Important Links:

Video – Greene, Gosar and Brooks Face Growing Scrutiny For Jan. 6 Insurrection: A Closer Look
Article – GOP Senators Erupt At Garland In Heated Hearing. Cooper Says They Misrepresent The Facts

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Loyalty, Identity and Recognition: The Side Effect of Beliefs

Tue, 19 Oct 2021 10:04:55 GMT

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Everyone has beliefs that are part of their personal viewpoint. Identity and belief are often tied together, and people will die for their beliefs. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how beliefs affect our worldview, especially in today’s COVID-19 world. Tom talks about his experiences with other parents at his daughter’s schools and how their beliefs led many to oppose the mask mandates. Bill analyzes why people struggle with change and why our beliefs cause us to stop changing and growing. Listen in to Tom and Bill’s insights and see where you stand in these issues.

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Watch the episode here

Loyalty, Identity and Recognition: The Side Effect of Beliefs

Bill, I'm very interested to talk with you. I probably could use a little support because I've had some challenging conversations with other parents at my daughter's elementary school. That showed me how hard it is to get people to move off their beliefs especially regarding COVID, mask-wearing, the vaccine. A lot of us in our country, regardless of which side of the issue you're on, are dealing with this.

This is the side effect of having a belief. The side effect is that I don't want to give it up. Human beings struggle with change because there's a part of our mind that says, “I want to grow. I want to learn. I want to do something new.” There's this other part of our mind that says, “I need a foot on the brake. I need to slow down. I'm not going to question that belief. I'm not going to change.” The unsettling part of this is that we get to choose when we want to stop changing and growing.

We get to say, “Enough is enough. I'm not going to change anymore. I'm going to stick with what I got. I'm going to enjoy my days. I'm going to move through life from this moment on.” This is a moment I had with my dad when he was about 83. From 83 to 90, he did not work on a computer. He says, “I'm not going to learn that. I'm not going to do it. It's too hard. It's too much. It's nice but I would rather go through my day this way.” There was fixing a bench, painting this thing or things he could do that he didn't have to think as much. He didn't have to get on the internet and deal with XYZ situation on a computer.

He stopped changing. Our beliefs will narrow us pretty quickly so that we are not open to an alternative point of view because it's too much work and upsetting to change the belief about gay marriage. To put something in front of us, some people go like, “Yeah,” or to change the belief about interracial marriage. That would have been back then but there are all kinds of challenges with that particular topic.

People will die for their beliefs when their self-worth and their belief become the same thing.

I picked some low-hanging fruit. One person can believe one thing and another person can believe another thing. The difficulty it is to have that narrative, it sounds like you ran into one of those buzzsaws with this parent. It sounds like it was one of those things that caused a little bit of a challenge because as you ran into this, the parent brought back that belief or whatever belief that they were bringing. They were like, “This is the belief and this is the way I'm dealing with this belief. Your belief or that belief, we shouldn't be going through this because my belief’s right.”

It was exactly that type of thing. It's interesting. Our entire school district and my city requires every student and teacher to wear masks in school. Our kids are all masked in school. As all those parents that are dropping their kids off, I'm talking like first graders, kindergarteners, second graders, that's the age level that I'm dealing with here. Our kids are all masked and going into school. All the parents who are not yet willing to let these kids walk to school by themselves were all there, waiting for the bell to ring and the kids to go in.

Three-quarters of the parents are masked in that situation. Even though I don't like to wear a mask myself, but my second grader is required to and I don't want to explain to her, “Daddy, why are you wearing a mask when I need to wear one?” I'm wearing a mask. Even on that level, it's important. You're also protecting each other as adults but there are parents that do not wear masks. He’s one of them. He's a very friendly guy. I've gotten to know him.

I like him until we talked about COVID, the vaccines and mask-wearing. It was shocking to me because he mentioned he works for a pharmaceutical company. He's trying to tell me that COVID isn't a real thing and it's not a health emergency. Eventually, it went down to the point of, “The mRNA vaccines change your DNA.” I almost lost it at that point. I'm like, “This is not going to end well.” Although, I tried to give him empathy to have a discussion about this. He is solidified in his beliefs.

There are two feelings that are tough that are fighting inside of him. It is angry and the feeling of scared. Scared is not about the virus as much. Scared is about having to shift his belief or the piece of evidence. A person gets scared by a thought. People scare themselves with thoughts. We know that. People say, “It's just the thought.” Your body can't tell the difference. If I start talking about the spider that's crawling up your shoulder now, your thought will cause you to turn even though you know it's a joke.

If I say, “You missed it. It went down your back,” your mind is trying to grapple with the truth, “Is it real? Is it imagining?” It's a funny thing that we're on a show about purchasing truth. By the way, spider cancel clear. There are no spiders there. We need to clear the thought to cancel it and then clear it. We want that narrative to end. As Napoleon Bonaparte would say, “People die for medals.” They die for the belief of recognition or respect. People die for the belief to win the medal. Even after they're dead, they're going like, “My parents will remember me and they'll get this medal about me.”

“They'll remember that I died because I was loyal to France, America, to this and that. They'll remember me because. I want to leave that legacy, that impression. I want my life to have meaning for that belief.” As soon as I go down that path, there are people that will fight over a product in a store to injure somebody else and even kill somebody else over a product. That's called product loyalty. “I love this product and there are only a few of them on the shelf. I'm willing to stand in line at an Apple store waiting.” That's loyalty and a belief.

I’m guilty of that one.

If you take in an Apple line waiting for the thing, and your parent has the belief about the vaccine, you can see the gripping of those beliefs. On the business side, it's a product piece. On the health side, it's the, “This is what I know. This is the information that I've been fed, spooned, whatever real or imagined.” I'm not saying that the people on the pro-vaccine side have not exaggerated, not necessarily the truth but their narrative about how bad it is to try to get people to say, “It may be dangerous.” A lot of times, the person's belief won't change until they have a firsthand experience of that. We were talking about one of our colleagues, as soon as he had a firsthand experience of COVID, he canceled all of his events.

He flipped from being someone who wasn't that worried about it and wasn't taking it as much of a serious health emergency. When he got COVID, it was the worst illness he'd ever battled in his life. Fortunately, he survived it. All of a sudden he's like, “We need to cancel our events. We're not going to have another event until after people can be vaccinated.”

He went right down, flopped over and stuff like that. The thing I feel exasperated about is it's not until there's that defining moment or picture or celebrity that is high enough on the food chain to make a difference. For AIDS, it was Rock Hudson and Magic Johnson. As soon as the two celebrities started fighting the battle, one died and one living, as soon as that started showing up. Why was the NBA's shut down so dramatic?

It’s because of what happened with Magic Johnson and AIDS. It was so dramatic, it's like, “We have experience here.” Mark Cuban's phone call at the floor, “The season has been canceled? There are no more live games?” As the owner, he's going like, “Huh?” The league just pulled the trigger on your team. “What the hell happened?” The reason why it was so dramatic is the experience from the past had already a belief experience around it of, “This is bad. We know what happened to us last time. We have a historical memory of that.” Tom, we have a picture of smallpox. That image is so dramatic.

That image is incredibly dramatic. It highlights the power of vaccines in a way that's very apparent. This is a website about the history of vaccines and it shows a picture of a boy who's vaccinated for smallpox and one that isn't and they both got smallpox. The vaccine didn't prevent the boy from getting smallpox but he got 2 or 3 pox on his body. Compared to the boy without the vaccine that is completely overwhelmed and devastated. You can't even count. There are thousands of pox on his body.

The thing about that picture is it'll scare a mother in a heartbeat that, “There's no question. My kid is going to be vaccinated.” We do not have that type of imprint for children to get vaccinated at the moment. It's not until somebody takes on the branding messaging of, “Here, all the children that have died and this is the experience of their parents.”

It's hard. The perception is not the same with COVID. I don't know why that is because this parent also kept arguing with me. I was talking to him about the news that had come out that 1 in 500 people, it's a little under technically, like 1 in 498, in the United States, have died of COVID. That, to me, puts an interesting perspective on it. There are 500 people in my little neighborhood right here. 1 in 500 has died of COVID.

This parent doesn't believe the Johns Hopkins numbers and then starts into the, “What about as I'm about? They're saying everybody who died of anything but happened to have COVID died of COVID.” He started chipping away at trying to minimize the number of people that have died. For some reason, the image of somebody on a ventilator is not as powerful.

That person is in the throes of being saved. It's not the level of doubt. When a person gets on a ventilator, this is a great thing about beliefs, the missing message is that the belief is that once the ventilator is in, the person's going to make it. The only problem is that that's not what has been happening.

The numbers are if you go on a ventilator, your chances of surviving it go down.

If you are on a ventilator, are you conscious? Are you intubated? Are you awake?

If you go on a ventilator, some people do survive it but the vast majority of people, it's a last-ditch effort to save their lives to prolong it. If you get to the point where you need to be on a ventilator, you're not in a good place. It's like that radio host we talked about, Valentine, who didn't make it.

He did not think that COVID-19 was a serious health danger as it was until he got it through his brother. We talked about it on the show before, started putting the message out there, “Everybody should get the vaccine. You do not want to get this sick. Hopefully, I'm going to make it.” Regrettably, he didn't make it. He went on the ventilator and he died, never came out.

The initial numbers were 66% then they reduced to 61% to be discharged. It shifted to 49%. It's a 50/50 chance.

50/50, do I want to flip a coin?

Getting back to our beliefs, have some problems with it because that's what truth is about. If we can get caught down the numerical rabbit hole but then we're not empathetic to your parent. Your parent is not going to believe the 50%. They're not going to say, “Bill's uncle died. What was his secondary infection? Didn't that killed him?” I’m going like, “His secondary infection is he was 85.” “He was 85. He lived a long life.” It's like, “Screw you.”

He was likely to die from the flu too. Why should we count it as a COVID death?

As Napoleon would say, “People die for medals.” They die for the belief of recognition or respect.

There's some annoyance here. All of a sudden, you start talking about apples and then suddenly switched it to oranges. All a belief does this need to be reinforced by a collective group. It's unsettling but I have beliefs about things just as you do. It doesn't make my beliefs better than yours, Tom, or than this other person's beliefs who happens to have a story narrative in their human experience as we do. Are we going to argue and fight over which computer is better than another computer? Tom, I have an Android phone and you have an Apple phone. There are people who will scream and yell about how bad Android is versus what Apple phone is but that's not what's happening.

They're both perfectly good phones.

We're fighting for a belief, loyalty and an identity that goes with buying which phone. All of a sudden, it's not about COVID anymore. It's about what the brain does with the belief and how it reinforces that. If I'm a marketing person or a branding person, and I'm not paying intention to the beliefs or the limiting beliefs of the listener, I'm not going to be a very good marketer or a brand or person that sells.

Your business accelerated by trying to assist people to allow their beliefs to grow and being an extraordinary podcaster. They stepped into their new identity and you helped them get there. The good thing about beliefs is that I have a vision and a belief. I can be something as a podcaster and you help them get there. How magical is that? Now they're broadening their audience. They get to good people and they grow their business and all that magical stuff about what exposure meets at the same time.

If I want to do brand damage towards something, I can look at Republicans and Democrats as an adversary. All I got to do is start slinging mud at the other side, instead of being in a collaborative cooperative way that my belief is a little more over here and your belief is a little bit more over there and we're both going to disagree about how that's going to work. We're going to keep slinging mud at each other. There are a lot of problems.

We see it happening a lot with the school mass debates. Jordan Klepper did a piece where he shined a light on that. It does show these beliefs that people have about the masks and that they haven't done any research or homework. They would prefer their kids not wear a mask. They think it's bad for you. It's clear when you give someone empathy, you talk to them about it and you try to get them to give you the evidence or the good reason why but you've empathized with them. They don't have anything. That's what I was struggling with this parent who's trying to tell me that the vaccines alter your DNA.

Let me pretend I'm you. At that moment, you did your best, you said some things in there and you feel free to jump in with the things you said too. Here are some of the things that come off the top of my mind. I'm going to use his name as John. I don't know what his name is. John, you're angry. Your experience of the truth and the things you've read is that it affects the DNA. Is that what you've read and research? Is that correct? He would need to say yes because it’s in alignment with his belief. Angry is his feeling. His need his truth. I’m backing up the things that he read or the things that he's believed. I'm not interested in exposing his belief at first. I want him to do it.

That's how it would be more effective if he comes to his own conclusion.

It sounds like that you're sitting with some pretty good research being from the pharmaceutical industry and you've compared this disease with other’s diseases. Is that correct? Yes. I'm getting him to say yes to his beliefs because he's already saying yes to his beliefs. He's already looking to reinforce. He has the thought that I'm in agreement with him, which turns me into an ally to listen to his pain, not to change his direction. He's going to change his direction or not in the field of time.

Notice I'm not attached to change his direction. I'm just attached to hearing the person where they are. Somebody can empathize with me, “Bill, do you have some confidence and beliefs the two vaccine shots that you got have worked?” I'm extending trust with the research that I've seen or with the numbers that I'm looking at. That's what I'm looking to do. I’m extending trust towards science and those scientists. That's what I'm doing. I might be wrong with that trust that I extended to them but I'm extending it to them because I'm not doing that work.

They are, that's their profession. “I have all these other scientists that say something different.” You're noticing some other research there that doesn't seem like it's in alignment with the majority of scientists but you can be discovering an anomaly. There have been many times that people look at and discover the long-term effect of leading gasoline. The long-term effect of cigarette smoking. “You're right. Scientists don't necessarily tell the truth the whole time.”

It's okay for you to have some doubt and skepticism because there is evidence on your side that says that scientists don't tell the truth all the time. They, like other human beings, can be bought and sold to say different things. I'm leaning in this direction but I can see how you're leaning in that direction right now, as I would prefer a little more certainty and trust in my world. You're getting certainty and trust with the information that you have. “I'm curious about how this whole thing is going to play out too because I don't think any of us want to wear masks.” John, have a good day.

I would think it would be helpful if we could get someone like that to follow the messaging that they're hearing, seeing and reading. Follow those breadcrumbs to see how much truth there is behind them.

You are, by planting the seed. The thing is that you're expecting the tree to grow or the plant to grow too quickly. It doesn't quite work that way. The belief has invested energy. It's trying to get somebody to diet, “I have too much investment in my pizza. I have too much investment in my carbs or my sugar.” There's a good reason why they don't put the daily amount of sugar on a package because they're not interested in meeting the need for truth.

Who's going to buy a package that says 220% of the recommended sugar daily requirement, who's going to buy that product if the truth is on it? They know that if you're buying a soda that has 24 grams and it's 200% of the recommended daily requirement of sugar, they're going to like, “I don't want to drink that much sugar.”

They don't want to unsell people from buying and drinking their product.

This is the problem. To stick the landing on this is that our brains look to validate things. My self-worth and my belief become the same thing. My identity and my belief, my version of the truth becomes the same thing. My self-worth is now invested. These are the people that are fighting on the planes and the people that are yelling at them on the planes. People will die for their beliefs. Not to open up the rabbit hole as with the first person inside the Capitol that got shot. She died for her belief.

It was based on information. Her belief was agitated and brought in the front of the thing. I have a great deal of confidence. If there was stronger evidence inside the court of fraudulent voting, there's a problem that the court probably would have picked it up. We all would have been watching that unfold. How did that take place? Our beliefs can be done in a good way or follow a good thread but also can support an untruth and it can get reinforced.

The circumstance is that we're not having a compassionate and healthy and empathetic discussion about where did that belief come from, how did it get started and I can see how you believe that way. You’re trying to advocate for your view of truth. I'm sitting over here with my view of truth. This is where I would like to see the world. This is where you would like to see the world. Energized discussion, Tom.

That was very helpful. At least it allows us to have discussions where we're not wanting to come to blows and punch each other in the face. I appreciate that. If it can plant a seed and have somebody question their own belief then maybe that's the victory we're talking about.

He would be willing to have a second conversation with you. With the empathy that you gave him, he's going to see you as someone relatively safe to vent his pain. That'll give you another bite of the cake. That's what it does. Thanks for everything. I appreciate it.

Thanks for your help.

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It's All About The Eyeballs: How Engagement Drives Discourse

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 21:00:03 GMT

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Engagement has always been the currency for creating anything, be it content, product, service, news, etc. Without eyeballs, there is no profit. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how this concept has become detrimental to how we frame our news, drive discourse, and make money. Everyone wants to see the car wreck. But are these large companies and media outlets stepping over the line? Keep your ears glued as Bill and Tom tackle the Facebook whistleblower, Newsmax, and how businesses value engagement and profit over purchasing truth.

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Watch the episode here

It's All About The Eyeballs: How Engagement Drives Discourse

Bill, I'm excited to talk about the subject. We have quite a few good examples to discuss regarding how it's all about the eyeballs and marketing messaging in terms of what we're seeing a lot in our media and in our social media discourse.

Tom, to make this as exciting as possible because most people in business know that in marketing, you've got to get eyeballs to look at your product or service. In sales, you've got to get them to engage or consume the product in order for it to work. The function of business is how do I get somebody to buy my product or service? If it's not enticing enough, there's another product or service that says, “Me next.” You and I have both been to carnivals. We've walked down past booth over the booth of, “Shall I get this stuffed animal? How about this stuffed animal?” The question is that do I need another stuffed animal?

No, there is something about that stuffed animal. Your brain is trying to pick the right stuffed animal. Is it by the cups? Is it by the shooting gallery? Is it by the basketball throw? Is it by the beanbag toss? We're trying to engage our experience of life. A big part of the experience of life has to do with how our emotions are moved by things. A big part of my practice in business and helping people communicate better is how can you get a message so that people listen to you? If you're going to make it exciting then you've got to figure out a way to do that or otherwise, you won't get eyeballs. That's a big part of our discussion is how do you get the eyeballs?

When does a company step over the line? When does an organization or individuals step over that line and go like, “You're getting eyeballs but it's at the expense of a value and a long-term business strategy.” It’s a good talk. I'm looking forward to mixing it up a little bit here because Facebook is having some problems. Certain media outlets are having some problems with stepping over the line and then stepping back. It's like, “We didn't mean to shut down that department.” We definitely have some problems.

I think that Facebook is a real prime example now of this. It's certainly in the headlines because of the whistleblower, Frances Haugen , who's been on 60 Minutes and other things. It's quite shocking to learn that, according to her and all these documents that she's released, Facebook was putting their profits ahead of the safety of having safe conversations ahead of the disinformation that people are trying to propagate. They said, “The eyeballs of all this information leading up after the election, certainly, are more important to their bottom line, their profits than making sure that we're policing this disinformation.”

It's unsettling. There's a choice. You and I have talked about this that businesses make choices. It's sometimes better for the business to pay the fine rather than to clean up the toxic spill. It's better. It doesn't cost as much. It's less expensive for them to fix the pipe ahead of time and to pay the fine when the pipe breaks. You figure that there would be that integrity, ethics and things. Tom, you and I have let remodeling projects go and it comes around to bite us because the pipe breaks.

Businesses make choices, and it’s sometimes better for them to pay the fine rather than clean up the toxic spill.

You and I have let things go regarding the car and then the car breaks down. It costs twice as much. The worst one though is we've made choices regarding our health choices and ignored certain health situations and that has come back to cost more or be more painful and those kinds of things. As animals, we forget that we have a brain that is picking and choosing things that are not in our best interest.

They aren't for the long run. That is going to be a big challenge over the next 30 years. I think the next 30 years are going to be tough for us as human beings because we've got to face things like plastic in the ocean and the number of pollutants that we throw around on the planet. How are we going to process these things?

We're seeing that on the California coast right now with another big oil spill due to a pipeline. Not that this is our subject but I have a theory as to why that pipeline broke. They haven’t figured it out yet but there are so many containerships sitting off the West Coast, the Port of Los Angeles waiting to be unloaded because of the whole shipping infrastructure problem. I think an anchor from one of those ships likely caught the pipeline and broke it but they haven't identified it yet.

Anyway, environmental problem, I couldn't help but throw that in there. What's challenging about Facebook is that more so than any other company, I think even more directly so than media outlets, although I think we can't let them off the hook. We're going to come around to talk about them in this episode too. For Facebook, the product that they are engaged in producing is the engagement of people. It is the eyeballs of people.

If they don't have eyeballs of people on their platform, they don't make any money. They have put fostering that engagement, good or bad, as what they need to do. When you allow misinformation and disinformation to be spread on your platform, it keeps more people's eyes engaged on the platform for longer and you make more money.

There has been an overreach when I am choosing to inflame because it is a part of my business revenue model. I'm choosing to do that. Because there is a certain group of people that want to buy this thing that I'm selling. There are people that are still smoking cigarettes even though it doesn't meet their need for health. There is the challenge here that it is up to the consumer, the buyer, to shut off the cashflow. The company is saying it is not our responsibility what these other human animals do. There isn't that level of accountability until it shows up on their doorstep.

Until you get called into Congress for a hearing or something.

It has been a challenge, which is interesting to see how Congress is going to do this one. The defiance piece makes me come in and be accountable, make me accountable for what I'm saying in front of the Senate for this. Instead of, “This speech, I'm giving is going to give me way more eyeballs if it's inflammatory. My voters are not going to hold me accountable because once I get in, I have name recognition, there's nothing to get me out of here. All I got to do is keep my numbers up to such an extent.

People that are on my team are forgiving.” It's like, “They're forgiving. I had this mistake. I’m forgiving because it's my party. I'm still going to vote in that direction even though this person did this and this is.” It’s like, “You polluted this. You broke these ethics. You didn't do this.” It's problematic and troublesome to watch what the brain does to, “I am loyal to my team.” It was very hard.

We're seeing that play out in our Congress and politics right now but let's not get too distracted with that at the moment. It’s a different set of eyeballs. Maybe we'll tend to come back around to that. I even wondered, as a business owner, is it legal for her to take tens of thousands of documents from Facebook? Apparently, as a legal matter because Facebook is a public company and the SEC is the regulating body there. It’s absolutely legal because, as a public company, Facebook is supposed to disclose things voluntarily. If the whistleblower reveals they didn't properly disclose things for the good of their investors and public awareness then it's definitely going to be more of a problem for Facebook than it is for Frances Haugen. I'll tell you that. It's become clear.

It's very interesting that they had this civics integrity committee or project internally that she was a part of. She was hired in 2019. I guess in the interest of not impacting a free and fair election, they did more at Facebook to try to reduce the amount of disinformation on their platform leading up to the election. Once election day came in 2020, they flipped the switch. All of a sudden, “We're going to allow disinformation again. The election is over. No harm, no foul.” We saw the consequences of that in terms of getting so many people riled up to the point that they executed an insurrection on our capital, government and process of the peaceful transfer of power.

It’s the power of media and messaging. If you're getting more money by getting people to look at you, it's very similar to you and me driving down the freeway. There's a car wreck with ambulances up ahead. Everyone is slowing down to look at the car wreck. This style of, “We need to create another car wreck now in order to get the eyeballs, to get everybody to look down our way, to look at the latest car wreck that we made.”

It is up to the consumer to shut off the cash flow.

It's who is going to make the next car wreck. It's not about driving safely on the freeway anymore of media or the stream of media. There are no guardrails and it's a mountain road. It's a great example, Tom, of taking the guardrails off. We're going to open the stream of cars and the cars are coming up this hill and they're driving. They're going to like, “What did somebody say?” Everybody's trying to drive out this thing.

It's like, “The bus is going to go off the road here if we keep trying to, ‘Yeah, let's all go here.’” The problem with the insurrection is that it's one thing to speak up about an injustice but it's also to being inflamed with the limbic part of the brain running towards that experience of going, “I got to see what this car wreck is. I'm going to support what I believe is true and that's why I'm showing up here.” That's the thing that's hard. Once the media or identity find something that works then they're going to keep doing it until we're tired of looking at the car wreck.

People can't help but look at the car wreck. That's why the car wreck is on the other side of the freeway. It's not even on your side. There's nothing impeding the flow of traffic on your side. I'm from New England. We used to call that rubbernecking because you stretch your neck to look over at the other side. When I lived in the Midwest, they called it gawkers. I don't know what it is in California. I don't even think because I don't commute out here.

People can't help but look at it. I think Facebook knows this. In fact, they know that if you see something that's not in alignment with your beliefs and it's going to get you riled up and push your buttons. By the same token, you see something that is in alignment with your beliefs and it seems outrageous about what the other side is doing. You're going to stay more engaged and, “By the way, here's an ad for something. Wouldn't you like to buy it?”

The more ads people see, the more likely they are to buy something or even if they don't buy something, here's the thing, Facebook makes money because of these ads, they get paid when they put the ad in front of your eyeballs whether you buy something or not. They're a $1 trillion company. I didn't realize that until all this news about the whistleblower came out to a $1 trillion company. That shows you that it's not about power in terms of Facebook. It's about dollars and cents. It's about profits and they're hooked on the drug of making that money. Without government regulation, this is probably not going to stop.

It’s very challenging to get people to look away from that car wreck. My eyeball is attracted to this. This is what I want to see. This is what I'm clicking. The reason why I'm clicking this is because I feel better by doing the click and having an engagement. This engagement with me, this platform and will Facebook take a hit? How much off of a trillion does taking a hit mean? Does it mean losing $1 billion? Is that enough? The answer is no.

I don't think it does. Coincidentally, the day after the 60 Minutes interview aired with the whistleblower, Facebook had an outage across their entire network for about six hours. Their stock went down 5% to 7% during that time, which is because of the outage. Here's some scary honesty. Their stock went down because of the outage, not because of the news of the whistleblower. I saw a funny meme.

It had a meme of Mark Zuckerberg basically saying, “You try to drag us into Congress and give this whistleblower news again. Do you see what I'm going to do? I'm going to put everybody in Facebook timeout.” It’s saying that they shut it down as a consequence, which I don't believe is true. I think that's just a funny meme. Let's pivot on the eyeballs. Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla of social media, for sure but there's plenty of other news outlets where they're in the business of getting eyeballs as well.

That's a big part of it. The mechanism inside the brain is how do you get the brain to purchase something and get things to engage. There are three distinct steps in that messaging. For those of you who are on the business or the political side of this, it's like, “How do you get a reward to show up?” Even the car wreck has a reward to it. It has to do with, “My need for safety is being met. That person's need for safety is not being met. My need for health is being met. That person's need for health is not being met. My need for financial security is being met. That person's need for financial security is not being met.”

This is the essential element of a drama. If I'm on TV, I want to make sure a drama takes place. It's the difference between how much money does a documentary makes versus how much money does Mission Impossible makes or James Bond. It has to do with the number of body counts. How many people have died? What is the trick? What is the interest? I have more tension in a drama. How do they do all those things in 90 minutes? It’s magical. Jumping out of a plane and doing this in a 90-minute movie that seems like that they have an entire life in a 90-minute movie.

It’s like, “They're not doing all that stuff in 90 minutes. It takes a little while to jump out of the plane. It would take a day.” In the movie, it does. It’s like, “In 30 seconds, you’re doing this and you land. You're in the courtyard and you're at that romantic dinner.” There's a little bit of time transition that goes on here. With that, whatever the value is, it needs to be juiced with anticipation. What's going to happen next?

As soon as you're done the car wreck, driving by the car wreck, there is a physiological letdown, a relief that takes place. Not because you're not in the car wreck. It's like the excitement, the anticipation of, “I'm coming up to this.” It's very hard in media not to look away from whatever's being spoken on Newsmax or whatever's being spoken on some of these other programs. It doesn't even matter what program.

People can’t help but look at the car wreck.

They're all hooking right before the commercial break. There is a hook sentence, “When we come back, we will and who knows what's going to happen on the other side?” They're trying to get the viewer to stay on the hook through anticipation to get to the other side. The worst one of these experiences was when Rachel Maddow brought out Donald Trump's first old taxes. That show was a train wreck because there was nothing there and all she could do was a hook. It’s troublesome. “When you back come back, we'll see this,” and there was nothing there on the other side.

When she got into trying to have to explain what about these taxes was so concerning, it's like, “Forget it.” She lost it. The viewership went down. It didn't pay off. There's a good example that we've seen reasonably on Newsmax that we have observed. I want to share with our audience. Newsmax was trying to shine a light on a car wreck, which then didn't work out the way they wanted to. They turned it into a 100-car pileup that they manufactured. It got not only a lot of eyeballs on their own network but every other media outlet talking about this at the same time. It's a good example of getting those eyeballs. Do you remember what it was?

It was the one with the veteran.

It was an interview with a US-Afghanistan war veteran. It was during the whole Afghanistan withdrawal that was going on, which is the car wreck to start. The Afghanistan withdrawal was very controversial. The Newsmax host is interviewing this veteran and trying to get the veteran to agree with the host. He's trying to get them to agree with him that the Joe Biden administration cut it on a whole lot better here. That's putting it nicely. They basically are trying to make it look like the Joe Biden administration is at fault for this thing going so poorly and being a train wreck.

The Iraq war veteran was interested in speaking the truth and not propagating a predetermined narrative. While he agreed that the Joe Biden administration could have done some things differently, he also said, “Any of us veterans who have been there knowing what's been going on and how this has been handled.” What he did is he started to very respectfully criticize Donald Trump as well. Not trying to let the anchor of the program put all the blame on the Joe Biden administrators and say, “The Donald Trump administration deserves a share of this too.”

The Newsmax host took serious offense to that and blew this up again, which I'm equating with the 100-car pileup. He went off and got angry, ranted and yelled at his producer to cut off the guest. “You're not going to criticize Donald Trump on my program. You're not going to impugn Donald Trump.” The reaction was out of proportion with the respectful discussion or comment and criticism that this Afghanistan war veteran was providing.

That's a part of it. There's got to be somebody that is the EMT at the car wreck. There's got to be somebody that’s the fireman there to give CPR. There's got to be a breath that takes place where there's some healing that goes on, at least, for the veterans that are watching too. You cut off the veteran. You go like, “Here we go again. This person is even cutting us off. We thought this person was a person.” All of a sudden, they're going like, “Why are they cutting my fellow veteran off? He was just saying X, Y, Z.”

They're listening and going like, “I don't like how he's not respecting his guest. He is not pursuing truth.” Like Facebook, large media outlets are not tethered by truth anymore. The consequence is so small. It's like a blip on things. It's very hard. As a nation now, we're okay with 700,000 deaths of fellow Americans unless it's an attack on a building with a plane that only kills 370,000. Now, I'm doing a numbers game with 9/11. Both things are bad but the proportion of the outrage is problematic. We're not in a state of thinking unity. How do you unify against the virus?

This is a great example. Don't you think the Twin Towers falling is the biggest car wreck event that people could see that shocked, galvanized and got them all on the same side of this issue? “Who's attacking us? We need to get to the bottom of this.” When you hear the number in the abstract, 700,000 people have died over the course of a year and a half or more now, you don't see it the same way even though it's all over every news program. Stories about hospitals being filled and stories of people that have died. It should be a car wreck. It should be the 100-car pileup times 1,000.

Now we've got a real problem. If you think about it, the way you framed it, Tom, is that imagine you and me going down the freeway and every mile we see another car wreck. Who wants to look at that? It's like every mile, we're going to see another car wreck. I don't want to see a car wreck every mile. Eventually, there is a certain form of numbness that takes place. If the number of people that have died and it takes 1,000 people a day.

One time, it was consistent around 1,000 people a day. Now the US is around 700 people a day. Every four days, there's another 9/11 death, do you think that we would unify behind that? Unify but it's something you can't see. It's not a visual that the media can play over and over again. There's not a concerted effort regrettably. There's not a conservative effort of, “Here's the way a virus works. Here's how to stop a virus. Here's what a virus does next. Here's what a virus does. We got to do this. We got to collaborate and cooperate.” There's not a collaborative cooperative narrative.

There is an outrage narrative on both sides. The outrage narrative is going like, “Look at that car wreck. Those other people are creating that car wreck. No, there's no car wreck. Don't look at the car wreck. There's no car wreck over there. That car wreck is made up. There's nothing we can do to stop that car wreck. Wait a minute, there's a car wreck over here and you're responsible you anti-vaxxer.”

Large media outlets are not tethered by truth anymore because the consequences are so small it’s like a blip on things.

Instead of going, like, “We're not looking at the car wreck. We're going to practice safe driving. Here's what we're doing. Here are the success stories, what we're doing and what happened. This is one city that has gotten in front of the virus. Here's an individual that got this. Here's what happened to this individual that got COVID and crystals in her lungs. They have scar tissue and this is what happened. She used to be an Olympic athlete and having a hard time breathing now.”

That is the story that would be healthier for us to put forward as a collaborative cooperative country rather than ranting on different styles of news coverage. It's hard to look away from the car wreck when the car wreck is what people are drawn to. If it bleeds, it leads. That's the thing that's the most important. We have a bit to go into being able to communicate passes and having a lot of empathy and compassion for awareness for what the strategy that they're using.

As well as going like, “Yeah, financial security is important for those companies. What are we going to pick as a people or a nation? How are we going to spend our money with this?” We have a bit to go because anger does sell. Rant becomes the story. It is easier to look at distractions and deceptions. Whatever the next lead is, it becomes the next car wreck that's going to be around the corner, turning at 5:00, turning at 8:00, turning at 7:00.

That’s true. For example, that Newsmax story they're an online outlet only. They're not broadcast on traditional television channels. That whole rant over this issue and cutting off the veteran became controversial in and of itself so much so that every other news outlet in existence pretty much had a story about the rant. I don't even remember the name of the veteran but I remember that it was a Newsmax anchor. You know how they say, “No press is bad press.” Newsmax knows that.

“It's only a fender bender.” “There's an ambulance.” “They have the person of the gurney. I got to see that.” “I watched the person. They're working on giving them life support. I got to see the life support thing.”

“There are flames. The car is on fire.”

The scary honesty is that the profit motives are not in alignment with a healthy discourse.

“There's a fire over there. I better stay away from that.” Our human body is interested in life and life is about emotions. Our emotions are about how do we turn them up and turn them on. There would not be an entertainment business without capturing eyeballs and creating drama that's not real on TV. Halloween is about creating the moment of fear in an unreal place and way. Scaring people is a part of the emotional jolt up and hijacking the limbic brain is a part of that.

What we do is try to focus on reducing the emotion and creating the motivation that works in order to make a difference in the business and the political world to get a message that's going to stick and be more inspirational rather than detrimental to the greater cause of collaboration and having a thing called the United States versus the divided states. Some people want to do the divided states. That's not a strong narrative. Even if it's profitable, it's not a strong narrative.

That's the scary honesty is that the profit motives are not in alignment with a healthy discourse and a healthy nation.

Let's put gates and checkpoints at every freeway around the State of Texas. The mindset is not playing out the end game of the division. It's a short-term solution but it is not a long-term play.

We have a lot to work on in this country. Don’t we, Bill?

We do. Communication can get us there especially talking about things. Even though Tom, you and I have an opinion, talking about things openly like this allows us to bring points of view in and be able to keep an open narrative safe. Also, empathize with the people that do want to look at the car wreck because they are looking to validate things like identity, belonging and acceptance. They're looking to focusing on their point of view and it might not be yours but that's what they're focusing on. Tom, thanks for this. Thanks for reading. I look forward to connecting with you next time.

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The Chain of Command in Truth: A Dive into Peril

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 19:00:03 GMT

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Have you ever wondered what happened during the events that happened on January 6 and thereafter? Where does the truth stand when it comes to the attack on the Capitol? Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the truth and the chain of command in the government by diving deep into Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, Peril. They discuss all sorts of different perspectives on the book, including the revelations that came out after January 6th and the insurrection that happened during the transition from former president Donald Trump to President Joe Biden. Tune into this episode and learn valuable insights to ponder on and help you understand the truth behind the chain of command in the government and the key people that affect it, be they from inside or outside of the rule of law.

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Watch the episode here

The Chain of Command in Truth: A Dive into Peril

We've got quite some interesting topic to discuss that has different perspectives that are going to be fun to talk about. The departure point is the new book that Robert Woodward is a part of named Peril and the revelations that came out of that with General Mark Milley. Being concerned with January 6th, 2021, with President Donald Trump and the insurrection that was incited. To then be speaking directly with Chinese military leaders and also with Nancy Pelosi about what are we going to do if this guy all of a sudden tries to start a war, like a classic wag the dog sort of thing.

"I'm going to start a war to distract from this thing I'm trying to do insurrection-wise to make sure the vote was not certified or whatever." It's interesting to see that a general would put what I'm sure he thought was country over party and concern about international relations and how the Chinese might react. It's interesting to think about how we did it because we have the transcripts. We know what he said and, more importantly, Bill, from your perspective what he didn't say that he could have said.

The big part of the show is how do you communicate better, more effectively and have more impact. When you're trying to give reassurance or comfort to somebody, you also are trying to meet multiple objectives/multiple needs at the same time. How do you do loyalty or sit in the chain of command and at the same time as doing protection and safety for the nation, for your troops, for the folks and not to put them in harm's way, unless it's absolutely positively necessary? People could say, “It's not General Mark Milley's call to do that. The President is allowed to put people in harm's way any time he wants them to."

There's a dark government, a cabal of people making decisions outside the rule of law.

That one's a little tough because we're looking for a level of integrity and a level of protection. Also, a level of accountability and integrity with the role in the identity of the President and the role in the identity of General Mark Milley. It's difficult because the chain of command, in truth, means that I'm trying to meet the need for safety for my troops by meeting the need for reassurance to the Chinese general at the same time as following the integrity and the chain of command. How do I do all those at once?

The word lie tries to creep its way in here but what needs to be creeping in here is the word choice. How do you get the choice to take place? Tom, it always brings me back to the court scene in A Few Good Men. It's like why were there two orders. Why was the order because he was not safe and I was transferring them off? Are there people that follow orders?

If you told him that then this would have been true and you told them that then that would have been true. How come you had to give two orders? The general, in that case, was caught between two positions. In this case, we have another general caught in two positions and the order wasn't given but the reassurance was given that if there was such an order, we would let you know so you can protect your people and we can protect our people. The order that's being given is not from a safe person the way I think. All of a sudden, General Mark Milley’s in trouble the way of how does he get to make the call?

That is where our government currently is. The need for integrity and protection is not fully met. They're walking a gray line between loyalty to a person, loyalty to a nation, to America or to the oath that they took to follow the chain of command. Employees sign this away when they come in for their job interviews. They've got to sign a loyalty to not to sell company secrets, not to give away the company's database or steal the company's database because it's the company's and it doesn't matter. They sign the paper.

I actually think in Corporate America, this kind of action is where somebody who's not the CEO of the company makes a decision and withholds information. The CEO does what they think is best, despite a leader. That type of thing probably happens a lot more. I've seen it happen in Corporate America. It's quite another thing when you're talking about the country, nuclear weapons and international affairs. I know that General Mark Milley did what he believed was the right thing to do. He was going to protect the country, the nation, the citizens. He's on the military, not putting them in harm's way necessarily.

If an order came through from President Trump that was inconsistent with what he believed was the right thing to do, he talked about doing it. He didn't actually do it. There is a distinction there. I don't know if you can have treason for thoughts or is it a treasonous act to talk to somebody about something you would do in a hypothetical situation. Maybe it is.

To give a little bit of awareness to people, President Donald Trump didn't put out the bribe to the Ukrainians. Did he? He was talking about it generally as a favor I liked for you to do for me. It's hard because it depends on the perspective or the lens you're looking for here. It's what two different human beings version of the greater good? There are some laws that are written about both people's actions. Yet, as soon as you start talking about enforcing the action for Trump or enforcing the action for General Mark Milley, you've got to be able to talk to how to enforce the action for both. Is that what's going to happen to General Mark Milley or not? All of a sudden, this thing shows up because there are always secrets that a family has, a community has, a business has or a country has.

This leans into the narrative of, there's a dark government, a cabal of people that are making decisions that are outside the rule of law. We don't expose the things that the NSA, the CIA or the FBI, all the things that they say or do in order to get the answers that they're looking for or the actions that they'd like to take place. We're not looking at that. It's not to say we're supposed to or not supposed to have that level of transparency because it's like telling children about a difficult thing that adults do. You are not telling them everything that adult does. It would fry their brain. "You're telling me what? There are people that get married to many people? There are people that go to parties that have XYZ elements in it?" We could think about that scope of exposure. It destabilizes a government, company, family, community, religion or practice.

The scope of exposure can destabilize a government.

These things that have happened, decidedly we could say, have had contributed to destabilizing our government. You brought up the Ukraine call with President Donald Trump and interestingly, it was Alexander Vindman who was the whistleblower. He came out and said, “What the President did was wrong.” President Donald Trump was impeached over it, acquitted eventually and then President Donald Trump retaliated against Alexander Vindman and fired him. He forced him to out of the military. Here we have General Mark Milley, who has had conversations with foreign leaders and even Nancy Pelosi about what-if scenarios. He probably had to know at the time what he was doing. He could be dismissed for it. He could be fired. Don't you think he probably knew it? He said, “I don't care. This is worth it. I'm going to protect the nation.”

I think he went the other way with it. He stepped into the narrative of his most powerful sentences. "Don't you think there's going to be a retaliation?" He goes, “This is the United States of America. Right matters.” When Alexander Vindman said right matters and then got fired for it, that that type of damage towards our nation was difficult, as well as sending a signal to all the other whistleblowers, "If you want to bring it on, be ready for the level of the consequence of losing your job." It's one thing not to get protection in a business because you can't as much. A person fires you for unjust causes, for blowing the whistle or whatever and the business goes on, mops it up a little bit and keeps on polluting just fine.

It goes back to the old way of doing bad things to the environment or whatever. You want to shrug your shoulders and say, “That's the way businesses.” The mindset is, "How's this going to affect the bottom line? I don't have to clean it up or I don't have to pay for cleaning it up. I throw trash all the time and I'm making XYZ amount in it. It'll cost me another 15 cents on a dollar to clean it up. I'm not going to do it." The level of accountability can have a low consequence to it. Alexander Vindman thought, “I'm untouchable because this is the United States of America.” He learned, experienced and his brother did, who is ancillary to the thing. He got fired for no reason.

Why are you firing him? He was not even in the same department. That type of retaliation in the United States has been done for a long time. Now, President Joseph Biden said, “I trust General Mark Milley.” He didn't say anything else. After the hearing, there are going to be people asking for him to resign at that hearing. He'll say no and they're going to be stuck because the sentence, "Makes me leave. How are you going to make me," it's something that Bill Maher used to say. It's like, “I'm going to do whatever I want. Make me.” It has this 6, 11 or 12-year-old quality of defiance. It's very young. You used to have six-year-olds. You know what that's like. “Make me go to bed.” Regrettably, we need more adult nuanced voices to be able to talk to and at these experiences because we know.

I want to ask you a question, Bill. I'm sure at the time we can find interviews with President Joseph Biden as a candidate in 2019 as the whole Ukraine scandal is going down and the first impeachment trial is going down, talking about how Trump broke the law and he should be impeached. Alexander Vindman was an honorable loyal to America and coming forward with telling the truth. Do you think that President Joseph Biden, by saying, "I trust General Mark Milley, I have faith in General Mark Milley," is taking himself out of alignment with the chain of command and the rule of law? I know he's the President and he can do what he wants now in this regard but is he on the right side of the issue in terms of a military officer that goes around the chain of command?

He didn't put any wiggliness in his words. There's a consequence to that. "I trust General Mark Milley," means that I have confidence in him and in his ability as a general to “Do the right thing.” I'm going to give President Joseph Biden a couple of sentences here. Wouldn't it have been interesting for President Joseph Biden to have said, “During that time, our nation was in great peril? We have been split along issues many times and anytime the military stands up for protection safety for our troops, I'm going to trust that person.” He now didn't say, “I trust General Mark Milley. He's implied he's on my side.” It's like, “Any person that is observing the level of conflict that was taking it at that time. I'm going to pick the person and trust the person who's going to bring a nation to peace and stability ahead of somebody that is going to bring the nation into conflict. I'm picking that person. I trust General Mark Milley.”

Notice how I cut off the edge of it because I'm empathizing with the decision-maker at the moment. The decision-maker is experiencing instability, not safety, not confidence in trust and leadership and he's picking safety and protection for others ahead of the chain of command. We don't want the person to do that all the time but in this time, he actually could've put a shade on the President if he wanted to. As an adult, these decisions are very hard. I think I called somebody a non-adult.

It's dealing with the decision-making and the mindset of different people as they pursue different needs, Tom, that makes the biggest difference. I did a session with an executive where this executive is learning how to communicate so they can become a better leader. They were given a message from their leadership that wasn't going to make them any money. It was to appease somebody else and it was going to cost the company a lot of money. The guy was going like, “Why am I doing this thing? It's not valuable.” Empathy and compassion say, “Here's the good reason why that person's making that junky choice.”

I think if there were more empathy and compassion, perhaps in some of these calls, which by the way, the calls between General Mark Milley and the Chinese general were recorded and transcribed or has conversation with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. If empathy and compassion were used, that actually could have preemptively lowered the temperature on this whole issue once it came out. That's something that, unfortunately, I think a lot of military leaders whose needs are more about loyalty and these other things. They're not empathetic.

Our leadership is not in a physical conflict that costs lives. There's not going to be action or an overreaction in our country.

They're more sympathetic than they are empathetic, that's for sure. The empathetic sentence would be like this, “Madam Speaker, I hear that you're saying that he's crazy.” If he would've said that after the first time she said it, she would not have said it again. She wouldn't have said, “You know he's crazy.” She literally said the sentence crazy 3 or 4 times in the transcript. General Mark Milley could have caught her off from that by saying, “Madam Speaker, you'd like me to hear that he's crazy.” Now, watch how I'm going to turn this into an empathy sentence. “You're feeling worried and scared. You want to make sure that our troops and our people are protected. Is that correct?”

She would have then said yes and not have said the next three lines about crazy. She wouldn't have because he heard her and he empathized with her feeling scared about stability and protection for people. All of a sudden, you see that on the transcript. You're looking at General Mark Milley not as somebody that's agreeing with Speaker Nancy Pelosi but actually empathizing with her. His internal world might be, “You're right. I've watched him. He said way too many crazy things.” He might have that chatter in his mind but on paper, you're not seeing that. What you're seeing on paper is, “I am committed to the safety and protection for our troops. I am interested in making sure that there are actions only taken that are only to be taken in alignment with the legal things.”

He could have gone right down the path of empathy, going like, “I feel concerned about the need for integrity and making sure that safety is taking place. No, I'm slipping in the primary need for integrity. I want to make sure that there's loyalty to the troops and loyalty to our nation and for the values that we stand for.” That's another line of empathy that looks great on paper. All of a sudden, it's a weird thing to say but that transcript comes up, people turn right again. It's like, “How about General Mark Milley for President? He's a heck of a leader because look at how grounded he is in the face of conflict, in the face of this situation, the circumstance."

What do you think that General Mark Milley might have said to Chinese General Li Zuocheng? It's interesting when they're talking. "The Chinese leadership was stunned and disoriented by the televised images of the attack on the American legislature," is the quote. General Mark Milley says, “Things may look unsteady but that's the nature of democracy, generally. We are 100% steady. Everything is fine but democracy can be sloppy sometimes.” Interesting.

It's an interesting explanation, sympathy and metaphor for that experience. What empathy might've looked like is, "I imagine from your side and your leadership might be feeling a little bit anxious and are calling me for reassurance and trust that the government and the military are stable over here. Is that correct?" The Chinese general would have said, “Yes.” Now you've reduced the emotional load inside the other general. All of a sudden, you can give the next line of empathy was which is, "Is there something that I can say or do so that you know that there is stability here in the United States? There isn't going to be a reaction/overreaction to the election that we went through." Let the Chinese person ask for the thing rather than offer what he offered.

General Mark Milley volunteered, "I'll give you a warning."

I'll give you a warning of this coming. No, if they would've said to them and it was on the transcript that the transcript said, “I want to make sure that our leadership is not in a physical conflict that costs lives and that there's not going to be action or an overreaction on our country.” All of a sudden, it would show the Chinese that they have the same concerns that we do regarding the protection of life and best interests and the need for order. They focus on order and structure and good behavior too. The way they do it is not the same as the way we do it. The way they do things or the way they change things around is not fully the way we do things. Truth and respect have different perspectives there.

We want to pay attention to what is our best language that we can use to deescalate a situation yet stay firm to our values, loyalty to the country, service, respect towards the country and the rule of law. How do we honor people getting to say whatever they want to say and be able to speak back in an effective way when they do say something pretty junky or awful? That's what this is all about. How do we say better things at our companies, our families, in our world so that the escalation stays low?

I certainly think that there are many ways our society, in general, here in the United States, is in need of more of that.

We got to do more of how do we focus on how do we protect ourselves and make sure that we get safety in our environment, which we're currently working on with the health crisis. I think that's something we probably could pick up next time. How do you talk through the health crisis? 1 in 500 people have died of COVID in the United States or something close to that.

That is according to John Hopkins University, who's been keeping the numbers since the beginning, the official numbers. That is true. Let's do that next time. That's a great thing we can tee up because I think it's not theoretical for people in the abstract like, “These are leaders in government that are doing these things and whatever.” In my mind, as Ross Perot used to say, “This one's where the rubber meets the road.” This one is relatable to every American because we're all dealing with COVID. Is it as bad as they say it is? Is it not? Is the vaccine safe? Is it not? Do we need to wear masks in schools are not? The whole thing, everybody's dealing with these things. It's a good thing to address next time.

More to come on that, Tom and any assistance that anybody needs regarding communicating through difficult situations, feel free to reach out.

I would especially like to add to that, Bill, if you're on a school board for instance or you're trying to advocate for your position to a school board. That's happening all over the country and people could use some language and messaging assistance, I would think.

It is a thing. Thanks for reading. Thanks, Tom, for helping. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Bill.

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Communicating Truth Past Bias And Hubris: The Anti-Vaccination Movement

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 17:29:53 GMT

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The current anti-vaccination movement depends on certainty and bias that leads to hubris. How do you effectively communicate truth to change their minds? In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how certainty breeds bias and hubris. They talk about communication and how we need to communicate the truth better if we want to sway the thinking of others. Tune in for more insights from Bill and Tom as they wade through current events in search of truth.

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Communicating Truth Past Bias And Hubris: The Anti-Vaccination Movement

We want to talk about something I think is very relevant to everyone in the United States because we're all dealing with COVID-19. There's a very interesting illuminating video that Bill found and shared with me about The Science of Anti-Vaccination . I want to make it clear here. It talks about the science and data of people that are not getting vaccinated. Why? It leads us to understand why people from the beliefs they do are more afraid of getting vaccinated than not.

Tom, I'm so glad we're talking about this because this is taking it out of the political piece, but bring it into brain science, motivation, communication piece, and whether you’re talking about difficult messaging. What we look to face is how do you talk about difficult things? One of the difficult things to talk about is how collectively our beliefs and bias run us. Tom, you and I have talked about the flat Earth mindset on here many times.

When people think and talk about the flat Earth mindset, the people that believe the world is round laugh at the person that has that bias and belief. The trouble with that is you're laughing, but can you individually prove that the Earth is round? That answer is, “No, go ahead and try to explain it.” Everybody got like, “No it's round. There are facts there that know that.” “Go ahead. Tell me which ones.” The pushback that you will get is around how do you prove your own beliefs or biases.

This is where it becomes difficult about how the brain traps us into certain forms of certainty. I have certainty about this thing, whereas we're listening to the voices of others. To use a political thing, it is, “Read the transcript. Have you read this transcript?” “No.” “Do you want other people to read the transcript?” “Yes.” That is, a person listens to another person's point of view and realizes that there is this backdoor with a skeleton key that you can go into somebody else's brain and put in a micro message.

This micro message grows and becomes a seed, plant, then tree or becomes a pile of weeds in the person's brain that says the government is ineffective. Government is this and that. All of a sudden, people don't believe in government and go like, “I want my guy to fix government.” That's not so good. Your guide doesn't believe in government. They want to take the government down. They want to stall the government.

One of the difficult things to talk about is how collectively our beliefs and biases run us.

They're there for their respect and recognition. They're not there to change the government. They're there to throw sand in the gears because when they do, you keep reelecting them. It's a little weird that our belief structures can get hijacked in that way. There's the challenge. How do you have an honest discussion when somebody is digging their heels in on a bias and beliefs? Tom, you’ve got plenty of examples of people digging in their heels that we've watched overtime of the things like that.

I certainly am experiencing this and trying to communicate with people, not to battle with them but to try to get people to do what you suggested to do their research, not just agree with an article they read because it happens to be in alignment with their biases but to look at the source material. It's like what you were saying, “Read the transcript.” People are saying, “Everybody should read the transcript.”

People say this all the time, “You should read the transcript. Have you read the transcript? No, but I've heard from others that have read the transcript. You haven't read it yourself. No, but everybody should read the transcript. Yes.” The same thing is true. This is what I think people don't realize. Every article is written out there has source material cited as to where they based the information on, or if they don't, it's an opinion piece and that's from the writer's mind.

Those things are not marked that way. It’s something that's written. All they've got to do is put in the sentence some people say or from what I've researched and their opinion piece gets to be assumed based in some fact. Where is the range of that? It's one thing to call science on saying, “This is the peer-reviewed stuff.” That's one thing to call science on that. Those people are reviewing that are ignoring another set of data over here.

If it's 90% over here or 80%, 70% or 60% over here and there are other pieces of information here, that's called good science is a good curiosity to find those other things. We're in a very tough place because people are not slowing down to spend time. We're not slowing down to spend the money on how do we handle the bigger issue, which is the virus of misinformation. We got two viruses and both of them are playing off of each other.

The COVID virus benefits from the virus of language and belief. One of the things that are tough about this video is it says, “People don't want to be accountable for making a mistake.” When they hear one piece of message about a bad story or, reaction to a vaccine, they'd rather take their chances with either nature or God and say, “It's probably not going to affect me. Therefore, I'm not going to take the vaccine. I'm going to be careful.”

I rationalize that. If there is a religious spin to it, then it’s, “God will protect me. I have to believe that.” There's power in belief in the immune system and having a strength of conviction that our body does do better when we are in a positive and elevated state. It wants to live, pray, and do those things. The immune system is better, but it's not immune. The greatest failure that has taken place here is that people aren't aware of how viruses work.

There hasn't been any widespread public campaign to put the various different little videos together that are necessary to say, “Here's how the virus works. Here's how this thing goes. Here's what happens in a room of people.” It's going to be very unsettling even to think about this thought coming out of my head, but we need an animated, childlike, very young style of video to make an impression about how to protect. What does the protection of a mask do? It has to be very simple and very young because that's the thing that will penetrate, not the high-level discussion about immunology.

We need the schoolhouse rock of vaccination and masks. It sounds like.

That's the way to think about it.

It makes sense that our president, who is not the marketer in chief, the previous president was. They're not marketing. They're not selling this the way it should be. To me, the most fascinating part of this video, The Science of Anti-Vaccination, illuminated something that was not obvious. You mentioned people don't want to be accountable. It's not that people are being irresponsible and not wanting to take responsibility for something. It's just human nature.

Humans think if I decide to take the vaccine or I decide to have my child, who's more than twelve years old, take the vaccine and there's some negative consequence that comes of it like they get sick and have a bad reaction, I've heard of some people who have myocarditis sometimes as a reaction where they have inflammation around the heart for a period of time. The person who made that decision for themselves or their child to take the vaccine doesn't want to live with that consequence. It was their own action that took it. It was self-inflicted. This was the big part that I didn't get until I saw this video.

Whereas if you decide, “I'm not going to take the vaccine. If I get ill or sick, then it was Mother Nature, it was God's will, or it was meant to be, then it's not my fault.” It's somehow easier for them to accept the consequences of something that's not their fault. It’s something that in their mind makeup would be directly their fault.

I don't want to be in that spot where a decision I made was a mistake, which means that as a collective, one of the problems that we're having right now is that we're making a mistake critical. If you make a small, medium, or big mistake, you're going to feel so much guilt and shame that you made a mistake. I don't want to be in the place of I made a mistake, and it was the wrong one, in my kid, myself or somebody else got sick.

Once you know something, it shifts into a category of certainty. Then this thing called hubris comes up.

I want to be the person that puts my head in the sand, avoids it, or comes up with a bias to protect it. One of the quotes that I've posted around was, “I’m the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” Now that's a Socrates quote, but the problem is we don't have that as a general mindset right now. We don't have, “I'm wise because I don't know.” If you don't know something, your mind is going to stay open to curiosity. Once you know something mentally, it shifts into a category of certainty. This pesky thing called hubris comes up.

My belief is real and valid. That's a problem because hubris then looks like, “I believe that guy. Therefore, I can take action because that guy hinted at or told me to, ‘Let's march down there to the White House and let our voices to be known.’” It's a divisive piece. It’s challenging because they're literally hijacking the certainty principle of the way the brain wants to know that I'm okay in the world. It feeds into a lot of very old patterns of trust the king, your father, and your mother. I'm not accountable. My mom and my dad are going to take care of it. The hubris part of it is that the confidence about the truth is extraordinarily tilting.

It seems way out of proportion. It is quite something where people go from a fear of maybe self-inflicting some consequence to then this hubris. It seems to go pretty quickly. We're seeing it a lot at school board meetings across the country. Hubris, to be clear, is excessive pride or self-confidence. It’s the technical definition. We see people advocating and demanding that their children be allowed to go to public school unmasked.

That's very problematic, especially when you go from, “I don't want to have the vaccine because I fear a negative consequence, and that might be my fault.” That's what that video eliminates, among many other things. I recommend people check out that nine-minute video because it's purely science-based. There's no political agenda in it.

You get to the point where people are taking that belief and going so far as not to realize that, in fact, by not wearing a mask if they're un-vaccinated, not only are they putting themselves at great harm but they're putting others at great harm and causing new variants to be made, which may harm all of us. It has a counterproductive impact on what they were trying to protect themselves from with their belief.

How we've got in here regarding hubris? Partly from a military standpoint, we know that by withdrawing from Afghanistan, the hubris of going in there and saying, “We're strong and we can hurt you. You need to listen to us and change your ways.” The person says, “My beliefs, bias, and religion say you don't belong here because we're now going to fight you, come around and keep the pressure on.”

The challenge is that hubris does meet certain needs. It needs certainty and the need for respect because I could speak from a place of strength. I can get recognition. I can stand up at a school board meeting. If that's not available to most people, acknowledge it. It was great that you were able to stand up there. You got the acknowledgment from your peers that believe in the same things. That creates the tribe mentality. Your self-worth and your identity is, “This is my tribe.”

These are the people that believe the same way that I do. You get to say, “I own that seed and that thing.” You are a collective part of ownership and you get to say what you can say, but as far as what you're fighting for and what you're working for is, “We're working on a health issue. We're not working on a freedom issue here.” Freedoms are great just so that they don't kill other people. That's a part of that mindset. Our brain will bounce between various different beliefs and biases and confuse itself.

We're going to click back to the thing that we have some certainty on. The certainty that people have faith in various different religions. They have certainty about things. If I pray and do these things, I am a person of good. There's wonderful confidence that comes with that and a wonderful place. This is not an argument about whether religion or spirituality is good or bad or anything. It's what the conviction of the individual is. They have a conviction and that conviction creates hubris. It creates pride and confidence. That's good until it runs into the numbers.

Until it runs into existing at the expense of others, isn’t that right?

Right, it’s at the expense of others and then the numbers. The reason why I use the word numbers is if they're right, if masks don't help, why did the numbers not show that? Why is the South all red and other places that wear masks, the numbers aren't there? The numbers need to be there. There's a lot of people that don't like math. They have such an aversion to math that they will say, “Those numbers are made up.”

Every article written has source material cited as to where they based the information on. If they don't, it's an opinion piece.

They immediately say like, “We're measuring things here. We can't stop the process of measuring something.” If we let go of that, if we stop measuring things, we take a step into naivete, ignorance, and unawareness. There was a quote inside that video about ignorance as a feature. This is a very difficult discussion. I know we're going to stick the landing here. Ignorance is a feature because it allows us to open up to creativity and curiosity. It also is a detractor because it allows us to go down a path that narrows our ability to have an open discussion. Ignorance is like a toggle switch all of a sudden.

It's a feature, but it also is, “If you're not making the changes, guess what happens?” Your way of thinking doesn't hold up and stays there. All of a sudden, there's a serious consequence to that. It's the waking up of a college student that comes out of college and realizes they've got to take a beginning job. They think they're going to get $100,000 or $500,000 out of the gate. The high school student says, “I don't need this.” They're flipping burgers because that's the only spot. Manufacturing and trades are down, and they're not as needed as much. It's unsettling because the environment then says, “Yeah, guess what?”

In that environment, Mother Nature, if you will, the virus running unchecked is having a say.

Hubris kills integrity and accountability. You can't hold somebody accountable for what they say when they're in a place of excessive confidence. They're holding a belief or bias. There's no argument. There is empathy as the remedy. You can empathize with them and you can slow-walk them to awareness. That's a part of what I get hired to do is to write empathy and compassionate sentences to get them there.

I want everybody to know, I hold up my mirror in the morning and go like, “What biases and beliefs are running right now in your head that is preventing you from doing X, Y, and Z?” I look at my list of things that my mind narrows and it needs to expand. That's the thing that is troublesome. The other thing that's troublesome about hubris is it's very hard to hold somebody accountable for what they say.

We're noticing that in our environment. This person said this thing. They're accountable, but they said it in a confident way and a different way. The greatest example of this is Lindsey Graham saying, “I'm going to do it this way and now I'm going to do it this way. I'm confident. The people voted for me in here and I've got enough money to stay.”

Integrity goes out the window, and surprisingly, it’s not called out on people.

It's one thing to say something to get the vote that you need to do the action you're doing, but it's another thing to be in the office, be in a place and then drop the integrity before you come into the office, and going like, “I'm trying to stay alive here. I'm trying to get reelected. I'm going to make the decisions here that are going to get me the most donors.” We're in a very skewed place right now. Our confidence level is in a place that’s going like, “You won that battle, but you're losing the longer war.”

When hubris takes us down the path, you get things like Afghanistan or abortion rights being whittled away. You get stuff like that. You took choice away from half of the voters. Not all half but do you think a good part of the voters now is going to be mad about that? We will definitely see between now and the next election.

It’s a very valuable conversation here. I know that in this show, we want to be able to speak honestly about it. I am interested in the discussion of how we can talk and keep our need for identity and respect up high, but also include discussions about truth based on things like numbers. Where are these numbers taking place? What are these realities here? Being able to check our own beliefs and biases and question those myself and others, we got to check those.

I think a big important step in being able to do that and to communicate better with others is to have an understanding of why people form the beliefs they do, which started us off. I really appreciate this discussion. Thanks so much, Bill.

Thanks a lot, Tom. I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody.

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Think Before You Speak: Words Matter and Influence the Way People Think

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 19:00:03 GMT

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Words matter. The words that are coming out of your mouth, your parent's mouth, the President's mouth: They all matter, and they impact people. The huge anti-vax issue in the United States is a good example of this. People are being influenced in their behavior and health because of what a few individuals say about the vaccine. Things would go better if people would be more careful with what they say because the truth is in the ears of the listener. Whatever you hear, it will actually be up to you to believe or not. Join your hosts Bill Stierle and Tom as they talk about the power of words. Learn how the COVID situation isn't going to change if the narrative keeps going this way. Learn how to be informed and to believe in the narrative that serves you today.

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Think Before You Speak: Words Matter and Influence the Way People Think

Bill, we're going to talk about something that needs to be talked about. It's present in all of our episodes in some ways but it's important to really address it. Do the words we speak really matter? It's a big topic but it does sure seems like a lot of the words many of us are speaking don't matter.

This is a tough one. I know that we can do several episodes around truth regarding this. It’s because this is a conflict resolution communication show for both business, politics, personal lives and how we exist as human beings, it's understanding how to grapple, wrestle and struggle with the perception concept and reality of words making a difference. It's an important thing in our current day and age. The truth is in the ears of the beholder and it's unsettling to even say that.

It's unsettling to hear it too.

The truth is in the ears of the beholder. If the beholder believes as the Taliban does then their ears are hearing it through that filter. If it's hearing from the government that was there that was being supported by the US then it was going to be there in that space. A lot of times, human beings work better under crisis anyways. If you had a better plan for your future, would you take it?

If I had a better plan for a better future, yes, I might.

You might but do you?

Do you mean you always take action with that one? It's a different question.

It's like in that neighbourhood. If I'm not speaking and thinking in the way of that then it's hard for me to live into it. I have to use our words do matter because our words are influencing our things like thoughts and thoughts influence our physiology. Our physiology influences our actions. We need to think again and facilitate our way into picking better words, "Think again. What's my next better thought? What do I need next? What would make my life wonderful?" It's an important question because it keeps us in front of what may be our highest ideal is instead of our limiting belief, that the words that are in my head that are influencing our perspective and perception.

The Taliban, let's discuss that briefly. I don't want to go down a huge rabbit hole because we could spend a bunch of episodes just talking about what's going on in Afghanistan. One example that supports Words Matter is the fact that, when it became clear, the Taliban took over Afghanistan and the government that the US put in place rolled over and collapsed. The leader left the country.

Truth is in the ears of the beholder.

The Republican National Party took off of their website information and language words about touting the negotiation that President Donald Trump had done with the Taliban to bring this two-decade-old war to an end. They felt, "I would imagine that those words might hurt them and they matter in that way. Therefore, let's take them off our website and we're not going to talk about that. We negotiated the end of this thing."

The way that messaging works is, "I just want people to remember the smallest thing, not to investigate the bigger issue. I put it in place and they couldn't do anything about it. If I would have stayed there, I could have won with the Taliban but I didn't want to kill a million people." Those are all sentences that meet the need for respect but also create the alternative message that "I could have done something but I chose not to because I'm a good guy."

Words do matter. There is a truth to it but it's also a human rights problem, compassion problem or even an optics problem. You go in and do something that causes a lot of death, loss or money. It's not going to look good to the general voting public. You want to take it only as far as you can and then you want to stretch it a little further than that. That's a little bit of the environment that we're in. It's, "What does it take to win?" Not, "What does it take to be right or truthful?" Truthful and right are behind winning.

What does it take to be compassionate? What does it take to make sure we don't abandon women and children? There are all sorts of things there. On the other flip side of the Republican Party taking language off their website, I thought it was interesting seeing President Joe Biden take ownership of the exit from Afghanistan saying, "The buck stops with me." It has been a long time since we've had a president take responsibility for his actions and own them.

He said, "I wasn't asking the right questions. I wasn't focusing fully on this. I was trusting others to do it. I did not give them enough power and money. I did not make those things available." It's hard about that because if he starts doing that decision-making when he comes into office in January 2021, whenever after the swearing-in ceremony, the first thing he does is allocate money for the withdraw of Afghanistan's that people's heads swirl and it becomes red meat for the opposition.

Words and actions matter. He didn't pick that first. He picked the pandemic and the vaccines first. We're just doing one thing. In fact, it was a little stunning. There was, "What is President Joe Biden going to do about transgender?" He goes, "He is focusing on the pandemic. Back off." He is not doing that one. That's not on the top of the list. The top of the list is pandemic and vaccination.

The reality is that the Donald Trump administration set the timetable for this withdrawal from Afghanistan for May of 2021. Sadly, had Joe Biden let that date stand and all this craziness happens, it's much easier to say, "We were stuck with that agreement by the previous administration. This is on Donald Trump's hands," but because he extended it several months and then this exit is still tragically not well done, you would think, "Why did you extend it? Didn't you plan during this time?" That's unfortunate.

Here's why words make a difference. Why words make a difference is we're talking about the truth of the mistakes that the Joe Biden administration made in the messaging and images. If Joe Biden would have come out at the beginning and said, "I want everybody to know at the start of this, this is going to be messy. We were focusing on the pandemic. We were not focusing on this. We are making our next best efforts as I have pivoted and chose to pivot now working towards Afghanistan." All of those pictures would have already been preset but he didn't say that. He said, "The government is not going to fall. We have time to get out. We're dealing with the issues. All the Americans will get out." He was giving a Donald Trumpian message of reassurance. I compared Joe Biden to Donald Trump.

He was setting a rosy scenario vision.

Luckily, it's not that adults can't do that and pivot. Tom, have you ever made something lighter for your kids before you brought them the bad news a week or two later? You're going to say, "I think we can get to Disneyland in two weeks." Two weeks come by, "I've got some bad news. We can't go this month. It needs to be in two more months." The kids go like, "What?" That's why words make a difference. It's like, "Can you be in truth and integrity all the time? Is our natural tendency to be optimistic, positive or in rosy-colored glasses to talk about things?" There are several things I can give former President Donald Trump a pass on by him saying something to be optimistic and supportive to calm people down but also going, "You went too far or little. I wouldn't see why you gave the rosy message but not the strongest language play." Words do make a difference.

Let's take another example of where words make a difference and some of the consequences of certain types of words and how they make a difference. We mentioned briefly in a past episode about Phil Valentine , who is a conservative radio show host. He was vocal about not being supportive of the vaccine. It wasn't that he was completely anti-vax. It was just that he was being in his opinion of it.

He picked the edge that his audience wants to listen to. That's what he did. He said, "I got to be on one side or the other. I'm picking this thing. I'm going to write a mockery song about vaccines and it's going to be catchy. I'm going to get a lot of hits, plays and viral." We could go on YouTube and see how many listens or views that video has gotten. That's called the range of influences because that's where his advertisers were looking to pay him.

He gets a lot of ears listening to his radio show and a lot of eyeballs on his videos.

That is of interest to an advertiser. There is a real dollar at making up something and doing it.

The real impact of his words, for example, he was vocal in saying he wasn't going to get the vaccine. He thought he had about a 1% chance of catching COVID. Those words to me are problematic on their face. What does a 1% chance mean? Do you have a chance of getting COVID from 1 out of every 100 people you come in contact with?

It's interesting to think about what that word means but it's certainly proportionalized to say, "There's a very low chance of me getting COVID." He gets COVID and ends up in the hospital so severely sick. He quickly realized, "My words do have an impact. I need to come out and tell people they should get the vaccine because they don't want this experience that I'm having in the hospital."

There are people that are seeing the impact now. Do his words make a difference now that he has passed? Will society weigh those words at or more than the vaccination song?

People are always thinking about what it takes to win instead of what it takes to be right.

I don't know that it will. More people heard the song or saw the video because it was controversial at that time and it got a lot of attention because of that. More people saw it and more people's beliefs were solidified in not getting the vaccine or people that may have been on the fence who were like, "I guess I'm not going to get the vaccine because he said, ‘There's such a little chance of getting it.’" He was casting doubt and skepticism on the vaccine and that played into his conservative audience biases. Those words were very powerful at that time.

His brother though, as he was in the hospital, in some ways, gets a lot more attention because, let's face it. Phil Valentine's radio show is a Tennessee local radio. It has syndicated other stations but this guy was not Howard Stern or maybe even Joe Rogan in the podcast world. He is not on Fox News with a national audience every day but he has got some audience.

His brother then goes on and gets on every national TV show on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and all these different outlets saying, "My brother wants me to help share the message. Everybody should get a vaccine. When he gets back on the air, he is going to tell you this himself." A lot of us heard that message who never knew who Phil Valentine was before this such issue. Unfortunately, he has died of COVID-19. He never got out of the hospital to deliver that message so he never got to speak those words that might have made a bigger difference.

It's not a Rock Hudson or Magic Johnson moment. It's not, "We have an elite athlete that got this that has to live with the damage to his immune system, he might die over it or there are the number of deaths that took place." It's unsettling to even ask the question about how the AIDS epidemic was handled versus the Coronavirus epidemic and the Ebola epidemic. Those were all handled very differently. We were all on the Ebola thing. There was one case that got on our shore. We fought the battle there.

The whole point of going to Afghanistan or Iraq was to fight terrorism in their country, not to allow it to come to our country. That's not what the former president did. He did not try to fight it in their country. He tried to cost-cut, "We don't need all those people. Fire all those people. What do you do with all that research and preventative strategy from the virus? We don't need that."

Are you talking about the pandemic response team at The White House?

Yes. "What do you need that for?" There's no mindset to take a look at it so the thing came to our shore. It says 630,000, 640,000 people have passed on the Coronavirus.

Maybe people do have an understanding that words they say matter because they know if they say something, they could stick their foot and mouth and get in trouble. People don't understand it enough to study it, get some skill and learn how to make your words really have the impact and matter the way you want them to.

The truth doesn't matter when it comes to beliefs, perspectives and perceptions. To have a scale of things, watch how weird this gets quickly. In the mid-'80s and late '80s, the AIDS epidemic started. Until now, 700,000 people. When it really got going was in the '90s. That's 30 to 35 years, roughly speaking. In one year, 630,000 people in the United States have died of Coronavirus. That's the difference.

Both of those viruses spread and were transmitted differently. One is through sexuality and/or blood transfusions. The other one is through common cold like every day breathing in the same environment. It's not a fair comparison because of the transmission rate but the intention is problematic. The effort to preventive care for our fellow Americans is not in the same mindset and space. Do you think the pandemic would have been different if it just killed children under the age of six?

Our responses would be completely different. All these parents that are anti-mask probably would have been like, "Everybody is wearing a mask." It's because it has impacted everyone in the country. It's very different. If it was only about the children, parents have a much easier time making a decision for their children. It wouldn't be seen as much as an American issue of freedom.

It probably would be similar to how it was with polio in the 1950s. Polio impacted children more. There were adults but disproportionately, it impacted children the most. Interestingly, the most notable adult polio patient was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although it wasn't talked about very much. You never saw him in a wheelchair. They were careful. He had not to be on television every day.

Fast forward, it's many years since he took office. Now, we have the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who is in a wheelchair every day and that hasn't been an issue. It shows how much certain things have changed. Back to polio, when that vaccine became available in the 1950s, every parent in America lined their kids up to get that vaccine because they didn't want their child to be crippled for life and made their kids get the vaccine. It was not an issue of, "I want the freedom not to take the vaccine. I want the freedom to be able to catch polio."

Let's take a look at the need for trust and truth together when we look at words. If I get a sheet of paper, how do I know this sheet of paper has words that are truthful on it versus this other sheet of paper that has truthful on it? How do I know which one of those is? It's a little hard because I'm looking to read this thing to see, "How much does it fit my beliefs, knowledge and wisdom?"

If I read a sheet of paper from the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, on the US statistics on HIV, a CDC fact sheet on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, how much weight of truth do I get on those numbers? I got to trust the researchers that they're counting the number and reporting because they're required to report that stuff. The hospitals are required so that we can keep track of those things. I looked at the CDC fact sheet for the Coronavirus. I'm looking through a belief structure that has been polluted with other disinformation and less effective information.

We can easily turn this to our personal life and business life as, "This is the data that's being reported by our marketing team and sales team. This is the market research that was done that proves that this chair is the best chair ever," but who is reporting that data? Are we getting the words and information that we need as well as the need for trust so that we can make a decision based on truth? That's unsettling very quickly because it's in the eyes and the ears of the beholder whether or not it's counted as truthful or not.

You bring up an interesting reality that most of us face every day. If I'm looking at two pieces of paper and written words on them, I probably make a judgment at the moment as to whether I believe the information or not. Is there any empirical evidence to make me know that one is truthful and another is not or they're both truthful or both are not? Probably not.

If it is a government document and then it has credentials from the Centers for Disease Control, maybe that raises my level of belief or trust in the information, as long as I don't have a specific distrust of that organization. Clearly, a lot of work went into it. I can only speak for myself. If I read something and I was like, "That's interesting. I wonder how true that is," I think that in my mind. I will go to the source material usually or do more research and figure out, "Is there further evidence to support what this paper says?" Not everybody does that.

Public health should not be a battleground for politicians to use.

There's not a secondary question. It's either reject or accept. That one is hard because the reject or accept is based on our already preset bias, belief or even fallacy that we've created about reality. For example, if we take a look at Herman Cain's death of COVID from the Donald Trump rally, do we then try to corkscrew? If I'm a Republican voter, do I corkscrew my belief in saying, "He could have got it someplace else. He could have got it before he came there. It wasn't the rally that created the experience?" Those things might be true but you're missing the greater truth. Someone died of Coronavirus and either spread it too or got it from that event.

We're talking about this Oklahoma rally in 2020 that was much hyped and notable because the K-pop fans signed up with so many registrants. They thought they were going to have an overflow of attendees to the event but it didn't happen. I'm putting some context for our readers on what that event was because we talked about that way back on an episode .

The main thing here is that if we look at concepts in our words mattering, mediation and communication, we need to hold a mirror up to ourselves and ask if we're coming in with a bias and be compassionate to our own beliefs that have got us to this stage of the game. At the same time, we've also got to choose our language forward.

As a person that has the same age as Phil Valentine, do I choose a vaccine or not based on a belief that somebody else is telling me? Do I corkscrew my rationale and say, "I have a good immune system. I'm probably going to be okay. It's rare?” It's like going into a casino and thinking, "In this table, I like that dealer. They smiled at me.” They usually don't but, “They were dressed nice and they looked good. I had luck there the last time I was there."

We can corkscrew our consciousness into all kinds of beliefs, biases and fallacies in a second, "Is Greg Abbott going to get out of the hospital because of the special medicine that he has received that is not fully available to the general population?" That's unsettling because there's a truth in what I said. It's not a full reality. Some hospitals have those special medicines, some do not. Some have greater access to it, some do not. Some doctors don't even know about it. Some do.

It's hard to stay updated when you're in like, "We have this new weapon but I'm in a battle right now. I just need something to choose." We're in a hard spot, is what we are. A part of the truth, which is upsetting, even having it come out of my mouth is the virus is going to do its part to change and become stable and adaptive inside the environment. No one wants to say the following sentence, "There's a couple of different versions of the AIDS virus." "It's just one thing." It's like, "It's not."

Most Americans and most people with even basic knowledge of Coronavirus in the world know that there are different variants. If they learned how different variants emerge or are created, it's because the virus takes hold in people's bodies and learns how to be better at what the virus is trying to do and that is to attack. Viruses change and mutate. What people don't seem to know or care about is that, "If we don't get the vast majority of the population vaccinated, there are going to be more variants. Look how bad this Delta thing is."

Our bodies are making changes towards things. How often do you need to get a vaccination or a booster for the tetanus virus?

My memory says once every ten years.

That means that either our immunity is going down or the virus is changing.

You're not invincible in perpetuity.

There is a process of change. It's like, "How often do you need to upgrade your computer?" 3 to 5 years because the thing is evolving and changing. We're not taught that as a part of health science. It's a little unsettling but that's one of the problems that we're in. The promotion of a wedge issue that has to do with public health is not the space. That should not be a battleground for politicians to use.

We're seeing this play out in Florida especially where the governor has aligned himself with freedom and individual rights at the expense of health science. There's quite a battle going on with counties in Florida in school districts who are wanting to and, in some cases, defying the governor's Executive Order to say that, "You cannot have a mask mandate to mandate masks in schools especially in the elementary schools where children are too young to get vaccines." This is a battle that's very unsettling because the governor is choosing something purely political and ideological at the expense of basic human health, safety and protection from the virus.

There's a certain amount of courage that's needed. It's called creating an alternative narrative. The courage that's needed is the many primaries. Our show is not just about complaining about something. It's about exposing something and then coming up with a solution. The solution is you got to create an alternative narrative that has an impact on the person but also creates the opportunity for the person to live what that value set is.

For example, if the travel industry or other different businesses of note said, "We're not going to do business in the State of Florida over the next year until they clean up their public health issue." Notice I gave it a period of time, "We're not doing business over the next year until they clean up their public health issue." Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, any brand that has notability and even the coalition of those brands can put extreme pressure on the travel industry for Florida. The conference and hotels, we're not doing business there.

They're not going to lose all their business just the way the nation is divided but they're going to lose over 50% of it because that's the way the nation split. The hotels in Orlando and the theme parks won't like it. You got to cut it. All of a sudden the decision, "We can't run our life here," and then people start migrating out of Florida because there's no work there.

I don't know what percentage of people are avoiding travel to Florida but I did it. I was supposed to travel to Florida on business again. I'm fully vaccinated but for other reasons because Florida has become the hottest of hotspots in the United States. I have a child too young to get the vaccine and I decided, "This is not worth my risk. Even though I'm protected, I could carry it back or bring it back to her." I canceled that trip. It has definitely got to be happening.

For it to have an overt influence or impact, it has got to be more of a public place. It's the same as the Rock Hudson or the Magic Johnson coming on and saying, "I got this thing over here." It's like, "Yikes." It's problematic and unsettling. At one point, the scary honesty is that however somebody corkscrews their belief and rationale into it, it's unsettling because they're not doing truth by numbers. I said that to another person who was like, "Why am I vaccinated? It's because of the numbers. The numbers are telling me that 92% of people that are vaccinated don't go to the hospital. I'm taking that odd.” That’s the number.

The truth literally doesn't matter when it comes to beliefs, perspectives, and perceptions.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens because there have been a lot of vaccine skeptics. I wonder if they had been using this as an out or if they really believe it. We're going to find out pretty soon because what they've been saying is, "I'm not taking the vaccine because it's not fully approved by the FDA. It's only under this Emergency Use Authorization."

Now, according to The New York Times, the FDA is set to give full regulatory approval to the Pfizer Coronavirus vaccine. If that happens, I wonder if we're all of a sudden going to see another surge in people saying, "It's approved. I feel it's safe. I'm not a guinea pig. I'm going to go get the vaccine." It will be interesting to see.

That will be interesting to see because it meets the need for trust and certainty, which is a very powerful need that causes people to be motivated to move into action.

What's sad, Bill, is that we're not seeing people who have cared for their fellow Americans. There's definitely much more of an outcry and vocal advocacy it seems for personal freedom than there is to care for your fellow American. It's more of me, a selfish perspective versus we, the greater good perspective for attitude.

That's the thing. You showed me the video of the father in Tennessee that was talking about the mask on his kid. He has got a kindergartener.

It's a five-year-old who he is sending to school in a mask in Tennessee, a state that is not overwhelmingly in support of masks. I'm saying that facetiously. In fact, there's quite a movement to not wear masks.

His daughter gets it, "I'm putting on a mask because I'm caring for others." He says in the school board meeting, "I understand why some adults don't get this concept. My five-year-old gets the concept. We put a mask on because we care for others. That's in the Bible. That whole freedom and independence thing you guys are working on isn't but that caring for others is. I'm making a joke about it because both of them are important, freedom and independence. Expressing yourself fully allows me to speak up."

At the same time, people are feeling scared, worried and anxious about their health and their freedoms and choices. That's the hard part about this. You want people to be voluntarily doing this because they care for others not because the government told them to. You shouldn't need that next level of rebellion. It's like, "Because the government told you to, you're not doing it?" The government is strongly recommending it.

Where was all the outcry from people when the government told them they have to wear a seatbelt when they drive? That's a law. Correct me if I'm wrong, Bill. In every state in the union, the same thing happened with Motorcycle Helmet Laws. There may be 1 or 2 states in the whole union that don't have that but at one point, none of them had it. Where's the outcry of freedom for that? It wasn't to the level, even though I know there was some of it for the Helmet Law.

The Seatbelt Law is less so. People get angry if they get pulled over for that and get a ticket but they're not trying to make a huge issue of this, "My rights are being oppressed. America is no longer free." This vaccine is very similar and probably even has a more direct impact on the health and safety of others. Whereas if you don't wear a seatbelt and you get in a car accident, you're probably going to kill yourself. You may not kill others because of not wearing the seatbelt itself.

I appreciate your example because it immediately gets me thinking about headrests behind the seat of the car because that saves 5,000 lives of broken necks.

Also, other injuries too. I've heard people say, "Why is there a headrest in my car? If I rest my head back, get comfortable and go to sleep, I'm not going to drive at all." That's not its purpose. It's called the headrest but it's easier to call the headrest than to call it a whiplash protection device. It's when you break, lean forward and there's this backlash where your head snaps back. If you look at any car from the '50s and even early '60s that didn't have them, antique and beautiful cars, "I would love to have that car," I don't know that I would drive that car a whole lot without having that.

That's the point. Now, you can do it in retrospect. I'm thinking about it creatively as my marketing brain is coming into here, it's that if the vaccine's narrative shifted to, "A vaccine is like an airbag in the car. You take the vaccine so that in case you run into the virus, the vaccine goes off and provides you protection so you don't go to the hospital and die. If you don't have a vaccine, it's like not having an airbag in the car. The chances of you going through the windshield, hitting your head and having more damage, hurting your neck or dying is higher. It's more like an airbag. Doesn't it make sense to have an airbag through the vaccine?"

If that message was populated in the person's belief, it's getting it to be associated with something they already know rather than being peeled off as a political piece based on freedom, independence and identity, which it isn't. It's like, "We're just trying to provide protection." It doesn't mean you're not going to get hurt.

It doesn't mean you're not going to get sick if you get the vaccine. You might get sick but I'm not going to end up in the hospital and I'm not going to die.

There are messaging problems. To tip my hat to people that write in about this show, somebody said, "Bill, you're pro-vaccine. We don't have the long-term consequences." I'm thinking to myself, "Yes but we also don't have the long-term consequences of an airbag." When they first came out, we never had the long-term consequences. They had to adjust the airbags at the beginning because they were too strong coming out too soon.

We had to adjust because a child died because they were in the front seat. They had to have a warning, "Don't put a kid under twelve in your front seat because the airbag, if it goes off, the kid is too small and the airbag will hurt them. It will kill them if you put them there. They got to be in the back seat." There is a learning process as human beings do something new. It's just, "What are the numbers showing us? Where is that going to take us?" Having a solution is creating an alternative narrative that is going to be away from the separate political narrative that's taking place.

I appreciate your example of the airbag. I understand people's skepticism about a vaccine that was created in such a very short period of time and has not had a decade of testing. I completely understand and respect that but if you do dig into it in detail, you'll find all the numbers that exist. Remember, there are more numbers being tallied every day around this vaccine. We had a surge in vaccines. There was another day where we had more than one million people vaccinated in this country.

You can corkscrew your consciousness into all kinds of beliefs, biases, and fallacies in a second.

From not only all the trials that were done before, even the Emergency Use Authorization but now the numbers of people that are not going into the hospital who had the vaccine, are supporting these vaccines in the right direction. If you also do some research on why they were able to develop these mRNA vaccines, in particular, the Moderna and Pfizer, if you look into why they were able to do that so quickly, you realize these vaccines were in development for more than a decade. It's just not specifically tuned to COVID-19. There is a lot more history than you might have been led to believe.

One of the things is individualism versus cooperation. It's something as a topic we can pick up next time because our individualism and cooperation have to do one thing. The way our truth meter hooks to either a cooperation narrative or an individualism narrative can be helpful for us personally. Are we more tilting towards cooperation or individualism? Tilting towards cooperation, we might say, "Who are the people that are closest to us that need support?" We make a decision in that direction. If we're tilting towards individualism, it's like, "They got to take care of themselves and it's up to them in their world."

There's a personal, business and government piece to it because all those things have got to collaborate with each other. They can't be done in isolation, although that's the way it has been done in the past. Now, we've got to upgrade the way we think, do things and make our changes. We need to adapt to the language of our current environment because words do make a difference.

Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Always know, anything we talked about and referenced, you can get at PurchasingTruth.com .

Thanks for reading. It has been a great show. I appreciate it.

Thanks, Bill.

Important links

Phil Valentine - Past Episode
YouTube – Phil Valentine Vaxman
Episode - Past Episode
Video – Dad Delivers Passionate Speech Defending Masks in Schools.

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How the Media Structures News: Disinformation vs. Misinformation

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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Is the media tailoring the news to misinform or disinform? In today’s episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how information is being portrayed in light of the recent events with Florida’s COVID surge and the decision not to implement mask mandates. Information is all around us and is something that constantly circulates. But whether or not the information we receive and give out is truthful is harder to discern. Bill and Tom dissect the difference between misinformation and disinformation using statements made by public officials in recent news as prime examples. They also discuss the importance of structure and narrative and how it can create distance from the truth if done poorly, whether strategically or not. Keep your ears glued to hear more about their views on what’s happening and the media’s responsibility in spreading information.

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How the Media Structures News: Disinformation vs. Misinformation

We decided we want to put some definition on two terms that are being thrown around left and right in the media and in all kinds of reporting, written, video and audio. Put some definition on it, try to understand it and discuss some examples. That is the difference between misinformation and disinformation. I almost feel like these words have been used interchangeably and that's not very helpful.

One of the hardest parts about our discussion is going to be doing some scary honesty about people that don't want to admit mistakes, talk about things that go wrong or there's something they don't have, something they're bad at or something they don't have skill at. They'd rather pump themselves up and say, "I can do that. I have that thing. I didn't make that mistake. I didn't spill the milk." Misinformation and disinformation are practiced/hard baked into our way of doing things because if you can't face the truth safely, then you learn strategies of disinformation.

This is not about politics or just about business. This is about family and human interaction. Even though our show has a political piece to it, this has to do with, "What do you say or how can you make mistakes not be catastrophic?" On a sports team, we're forgiving of, we don't like it when a player makes a penalty at the wrong time but because we're loyal to the team, we learn how to get over it and say, "That player is just doing the best they can on our team," rather than just saying, "Get rid of them. Cut them."

If they keep doing it, you might do it but we're trying to work with the skill and the mastery of the player. Regrettably, the window of being able to talk about disinformation, misinformation and making mistakes is tiny. You do it and social media will jump all over us. That's why I'm excited to talk about it because it's not just about how politicians can't tell the truth but it's like there's no room to do it.

What occurred to me as you're saying that is on the disinformation side of things and we haven't defined it yet, we're getting there, there would seem to me to be a scale of disinformation, almost like we have the truth scale that we've talked about. There are levels of disinformation. For instance, loyalty to family. How are things at the family? Everything's great.

There's going to be a level of disinformation that, "We're not going to reveal that we have a couple of problems going on in our family. They're private. They're family stuff but to the world, we're going to say, everything's great." In fact, in business, that's one of the early lessons I was taught too, especially a company that is a rival, a competitor or to anybody you interact within business. "How's business?" "Better than good." That was one response that I always thought. "Better than good or businesses great." Even if business isn't great, you don't want to get a rumor mill going out there that, "That business is struggling. They're having trouble." There's some disinformation that's the little white lie equivalent maybe.

You're still positioning yourself for confidence, strength and command. I've got this little ship of mine, this business, whatever level I'm playing in. I'm doing good about housework. It works fine. There is this range of information, disinformation and misinformation that you're not going to disclose the range of truth because that's one of the challenges. It winds up happening both in business, politics and our personal life. "My truth is this. The good reason why I took the car was because and I didn't ask you because you might have said no. That's the truth."

That’s the I-would-rather-apologize-than-ask-permission strategy.

I have seen that done in business, in politics and in personal life, all three. There's the disinformation and information in regards to that and the ownership. A disinformation getting back to the definition is using unknowingness to keep a person distracted. It's loyal and reinforcing towards a false belief. I'm going to give information over here. Ron DeSantis did that. There's a problem with immigrants in the law at the thing because of Florida's COVID thing and the answer is, "That's 1,000 miles away and it's really not true but the disinformation is that the last president got elected on demonizing immigrants. I'm going to do the same thing." That's disinformation.

Are there problems with our immigration laws? Yes. Is there a path to citizenship that is viable in our country? No. As soon as you solve one of those things, it doesn't give a party or a group something to rally their voters on. For example, when Ronald Reagan started the clean slate with immigrants and said, "Everybody that's here, you're now Americans. We're all starting from things." That was a Republican that led all immigrants up to that point in and said, "We're going to process you. You're now part of the family. We're bringing you into the fold." The next, it didn't give them an ability to run on. "We're doing something about the immigrants because we solve the problems."

When a group or an individual picks a certain set of values or needs over truth, it doesn’t tend to go well.

They solved one problem but didn't prepare for the perpetual problem that's continuous.

They did not. Disinformation plays into that.

I liked your example of Florida around the census. To put it a little simpler for our readers, he said, "Our problem with the surge in COVID infections in Florida is because the Joe Biden administration is just letting anybody through the border and these immigrants are coming over the border with COVID. That's why we have COVID in Florida."

That's a good talking point for his base because Reddit plays into the same thing that Donald Trump ran on and got to The White House on but the reality of that border is over in Texas way around the Gulf. Is everybody coming across from Mexico in boats to Florida? I know there are a few people doing that from Cuba but not really. Not only that but if you peel back the onion, you'll find out that the Joe Biden administration, in fact, especially because of COVID is turning away adults at the border. They're only letting unaccompanied children in.

If you look at the stats of how many of them have COVID, it's very low and the protocols for what to do with them if they do have COVID is very strict. None of those people coming in in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico are getting to Florida. That is disinformation because Ron DeSantis is stripping away context. With the daily wire, he's taking partial truths of some immigrants coming across the border have COVID. There's a partial truth there but then saying they're coming to Florida and they're the cause of our COVID surge, that is on the truth scale pretty far down away from truth.

There's going to be a scaling of things. Observation is the closest you can be to truth, then evaluation, judgment, labels, criticism, blame and shame. All of those things are as far away from truth as you can get.

He was in the blame and shame area saying it's the Joe Biden administration's fault that we have this surge in Florida.

It's like you're not doing your part in relationship to science, you and your citizens aren't doing your part for social responsibility. You would like to tout freedom, independence and choice as the values that you are portraying at the expense of person's life, wellness and healing. It's very unsettling. That leads us into what's the definition then for misinformation.

Misinformation as a definition is that there is the person has the fixed belief already in their head and is ignorant of the truth. All you got to do is drip a little breadcrumb in front of them and they'll get on the path. Coming back to our premise at the beginning, whether it's politics or business, nobody wants to admit a mistake. A few years back, Toyota had a problem with their cars and it caused deaths. They needed to get through that problem with truth, fixing, recalls and integrity. The owner admitted, "We had a problem. I apologize. We're going to fix it and look to restore our brand."

That's the path to take. Take your lumps early. Don't keep taking a stick hitting your head overhead and go like, "No. We're not wrong. We're great. We're the best party ever." It's like, "You're not." By the way, you're doing brand damage to Republicans because they're leaving. They can't vote. They'll sit out because you aren't providing something that's energized and vital to your voters to come back out and vote for. You're not in that space.

With the Toyota, the thing is that you use an apology but you're backing apologies up with actions that are trustworthy. Not you're just giving an apology, moving on and then not holding the next person accountable. Defending and fighting for a person, company and party or a sports team, all go into that same, "Too bad. I apologize. That was a mistake." You're not backing it up with truth.

Misinformation can resolve from somebody just being ignorant of the facts or the truths. There are a couple of good examples of that. One of which does not mean to be political, although it involves a political figure but it's an example that is helpful. I've seen this happen with a few other people as well. A reporter asked Marjorie Taylor Greene, Representative to the House of Representatives from Georgia, if she'd had the COVID-19 vaccine. It's a pretty fair question for a reporter to ask. It wasn't meant to be a gotcha question. Just a matter of fact, "Are you vaccinated?"

I would think if she's not vaccinated, she would be proudly saying she's not vaccinated or if she is vaccinated, also just making it more of a matter of fact. She says to the reporter, "Why are you trying to violate my HIPAA rights?" Rather to answer the question, she attacks the questioner and throws the word HIPAA rights out there, the phrase and avoids answering the question.

As soon as you mess with truth, you mess with trust.

Unfortunately, what that revealed is that Marjorie Taylor Greene, US House of Representatives, is ignorant of what the HIPAA law does and means because it doesn't say, "Me, as an individual, person, you as an individual person or her as an individual person can't answer a question of whether they have received the COVID vaccine or not." I'm over simplifying it but what it does is says, "A health care provider, worker, doctor, a doctor's office and such cannot disclose your personal health records or information without your permission, the patient."

It's a patient bill of rights of sorts. Certainly, the HIPAA laws don't prevent you, the patient or the individual, from disclosing your own medical history, facts or anything like that. Marjorie Taylor Greene intentionally was misleading in answering that question. I don't think that she was intentionally giving false information. I think she just didn't know. She was ignorant of it. That's a big difference. Misinformation is more when you make a statement that is incorrect but not necessarily with the intent to deceive but disinformation involves intent in trying to propagate a partial truth or use a partial truth to your advantage to achieve some other goal.

It's to cover something that has to do with our uneasiness with mistakes, our inability to have integrity, to fall on the sword and to be in alignment with truth instead of being alignment or propagating. I did that but you had it coming. It's like, "You did this but it's not my fault. I did this but here are the good reasons why I did this." Suddenly they're like, "I did this thing and it was out of integrity. It's part of who I am but it doesn't make it right. People were uncomfortable."

To pick on somebody else, this is where Governor Andrew Cuomo's getting himself into trouble. He's saying, "I'm this type of affectionate person." He needs to go further than that. "I am this affectionate type of person.” People feel uncomfortable with that. They have filed a complaint about their uncomfortableness about my physical affection towards them. As a person who had that affection with others, that Italian nature of mine and this, I could see how that level of physical touch affects others, as well as the things, the comments that I've made that went too far.

I will take ownership of those comments and those things. "I've taken those eleven complaints because there are eleven pretty solid ones. These are valid. Those people's point of view, their truth about touch, physical stuff and comments that I've said and done were unprofessional of me. Those people get to complain. Not those people need to give me a pass because I'm a touchy person."

Approaching it from a place of taking accountability for something would have been maybe better than to try to say the Inigo Montoya defense, which is, "I don't think this means what you think it means."

It's the disinformation information. It's like, "I'm not sure if that word inconceivable means the word inconceivable."

Bill and I having a little fun here, readers. We're referencing the movie, The Princess Bride. There's this character that keeps using this word inconceivable at all sorts of times. If you haven't seen the movie, I'm sure a lot of you have. At times when it doesn't fit, finally this character, Inigo Montoya looks at this character and says, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

That's a good way of talking about what is becoming the debacle in the New York governor's mansion. It's disappointing and disheartening because for a governor that was seen as a model of leadership years ago, managing the crisis of COVID 19 and one of the biggest states in the country, he and his people, whoever's left around him, are doing a horrible job of managing this other crisis of personal behavior and character.

When a group or an individual picks a certain set of values or needs over truth, it doesn't tend to go well. You need to set truth next to it. It's like we have this COVID surge and this messaging here next to it is a partial truth but we're still talking about the truth of what I did and what's happening, if you talk about what's happening honestly. Even Ron DeSantis could do a better job of this. "We are the state with the highest infection rates and that's impacting our hospitals." Start there.

Admit some facts that you can't deny anyway.

At least he's telling the truth. "We believe the economy is more important than these viruses." All of a sudden, you're picking a side. Other people would say, "This virus is not going to affect me until it does affect me, it's not affecting me. We're building immunity up to the virus by allowing a certain set of population to die." It is a choice when you don't have medicine.

All roads do come back to empathy and compassion.

I don't know if that's going to be a long-term or a good choice.

It's not a great sale but it is a choice that they're making. That's also the Democrats argument. Anybody that's running against Ron DeSantis or Marco Rubio got to go after that with the very simple sentence. It's clear what they're choosing. They're choosing the death of their citizens over, setting aside of medical proven numbers for the economy and for the belief that independence, choice, freedom from any kind of control is what they're interested in the state of Florida. It's not the safest place I'd like to be but it is what they're choosing.

I agree with you for a long time and maybe still. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has been choosing the economy over the health and safety first but most lately because schools are starting to back up and people are going back to schools, he's taking a different choice and that's interesting. He's saying he's lining up with freedom for parents to choose whether their children wear a mask or not over mask mandates. In fact, it's gone to the point of issuing an executive order that says, "Schools cannot issue a mask mandate." I don't think that's going to work out very well long-term for the governor the way things are going.

There have been several principals that are on the news that say the following sentence. They go, "Schools are run by adults. When my adults get sick, I can't run my school. I can't have kids come in here and infecting my adults because my adults run my school. I've already had two custodians die over this. I am not putting two more people's lives in jeopardy when I've lost two adults. I can't run my school. I have to hire two custodians that want to come to a school.

They're not going to come to a school that's unmasked. I now have an employment problem." If that principal had that narrative and then just cap it off with, "I could see what the governor is going for. He's going for freedom and independence for Americans to choose. Not in my school. It's not a good fit for us because I need adults to run my school. I need to protect my adults."

That's one way to go. The other way to go would also be we need to meet the needs of health, safety and protection for all the students attending the school. Meeting the need for freedom at the expense of people's health and safety is not something that we're interested in doing.

That would be something to follow up with. We've got to be able to stick the landing here because there's got to be some solution to this. If somebody speaks to a misinformation or disinformation, creating an alternative narrative by going like, "Here's a complex issue that cannot be distracted or misinformed. We've got to face it straight and making it honest, direct and having compassion towards what that choice is."

I have compassion for the state and businesses in Florida. I have relatives in Florida. They have businesses. I don't want their businesses to shut down and then have to receive more money from the federal government in six months. Their governor is going to face all these evictions and things like that because he wants to say, "Too bad. Go back to work. Take your chances. You don't have to wear a mask and neither does anybody else." It's so short-sighted.

What you and I do once in a while is that we make light or fun of it to show how that kind of thinking has that short-sightedness to it. It's going like, "You've got that other thing and we could see that it's costing your people's lives. We need to talk to the people, have them wear masks and have conviction inside the floor." It's not until the people of Florida face down their fellow citizens and go like, "I got a sick person at home. A family member of mine died of COVID." "Get out of this store. You can take your independence, individuality and choice. You can stay at home and do that, not in public around me." Americans are not in the place because we don't like confrontation except if that brings up a bigger issue. Except for foreign wars, we're okay with that.

Let's not go down that rabbit hole. I've seen a lot of different memes or infographics circulating social media saying, "You are an American and you have certain freedoms." Certainly, you are free to not wear a mask if you don't want to but that doesn't mean you can wear it coming into my restaurant, going into that store or all these other things because each individual private business can make its own rules about those things. To me, it's interesting that Ron DeSantis has picking freedom of parents to make decisions. He's tried to take a stand of individual rights over at the expense of the needs of the greater population of the community.

It's unsettling because a big part of why Florida works the way it does is low taxes and people can retire there but at the same time, they're going to retire there just to get sick with COVID and die. You're messing with the bigger elements of the economy when you do it that way.

Especially with tourism, it is one of the number one drivers of the economy in Florida with Disney, Universal, cruise ships, all the beaches, the coastline and hotels all over the entire state. It's travel and tourism. This is huge.

There are three cruise ships that I know of that are getting dismantled, torn apart, broken apart because it's cheaper to scrap them than it is to keep them running for 2022. Carnival Cruise sent three ships to be broken. That's the economic consequence. All of those ships with all of that furniture and all of those different things are better if they're in parts than if they're staying because it's more cost-effective. The industry is going to wait and see when they can rebuild the ships to build it back. Their whole industry has been set back two years, minimally. They're 3, 4, 5 years before they become viable. As soon as you mess with truth, you mess with trust.

I like what you're saying about creating an alternate narrative that's compassionate to the needs of whoever is creating the disinformation or misinformation. You can also make fun of it or you can be compassionate toward it. Bill, all roads do come back to empathy and compassion. We talked about this a lot in terms of effective communication.

The people at Toyota didn't want to make a product that happened to kill somebody because the car shut off, the steering went out and the person is going 30 miles an hour, hit something and then the person died. They don't want to make that product but at the same time is that we've got to have compassionate towards a person that's thinking in a way that has a tragic consequence that causes that level of disconnect with the truth instead of facing the mistake and the truth.

It's more about how media applies to this and what can be done in media and social media in order to turn the tide because we've got to turn the tide but also not lose our freedom of expression. When a piece of misinformation or disinformation comes up, we've got to face it in a brand new way. We'll talk about that more next time.

Sounds good, Bill. Thanks so much.

Thanks, everybody.

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Tribalism In Business And Politics: What Happens When Team Loyalty Comes Before Truth

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 11:00:02 GMT

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The tribalism and loyalty of people to their “teams” is one of the issues plaguing us, stopping rational discourse in business and politics. Many place loyalty before truth and this causes division in America. In this episode, Tom and Bill Stierle discuss how team loyalty is causing damage to Team America. We hear about the testimony of Capitol Police on the events of January 6 ^th , and the unfortunate response of several Fox News anchors. Bill and Tom talk about accountability, identity and why we need to place these aside in favor of the American identity. Tune in for thought-provoking conversation as only Bill and Tom can deliver.

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Tribalism In Business And Politics: What Happens When Team Loyalty Comes Before Truth

Bill, we are getting a lesson right now as a nation in what it is to be loyal and to have your identity tied to a group. A lot of us have our identity wrapped up in a sports team. I keep dropping my jaw at things that we're seeing happening in this country. If you think about it in terms of the loyalty that people have to a sports team, you can start to understand a little better.

This is a difficult day because whether it's in business, politics, family dynamic, any upset that can take place in a business or a product recall, the company doesn't want to talk about a product recall because it's going to affect trust with their brand. “I don't want to talk about this. I want to make this as small as possible. I am going to do and stay in the place of reducing that upset because I need my customers to remain loyal and to continue to purchase my product.” Tom, you're a Red Sox fan.

I am a lifelong Rex Sox fan.

I believe you just went to an Angels game wearing your Red Sox.

Yes, in June or maybe it was early July 2021 when the Red Sox came to Anaheim. I'm there. My whole family is there. We’re ducked out in our Red Sox gear, so was half the stadium.

We, as a nation are not workin g in community building anymore; we're not building community at the local level.

I hope the readers are noticing how loyalty and identity jumped in. Well done, Tom. That's the thing. I don't think anybody hit you over the head with an Angels’ flag or yelled at you in a way like, “Go home. You've betrayed us. What's wrong with you for being in the stadium? This is our stadium. This is our house. You don't belong here.” Nobody yelled at you like that. Did they, Tom?

No, they didn't. I don't know if friendly is the right word, but there’s the typical razzing of the other side like, “Red Sox suck, Angels suck,” or whatever. We have different cheers that everybody in the crowd is like, “Let's go, Red Sox.” Of course, the Angels have the same cheer for them. There's all that stuff going on. As I'm walking shoulder-to-shoulder into the stadium, out of the stadium, waiting in line to get a beer or something, there is no serious animosity or attacking that I've ever experienced. I've been doing this for many years at Angel Stadium.

No one sprayed you with bear spray or pepper spray or hit you with a stick?

No.

It's a strange narrative that you and I are starting down. The narrative that has to do with identity, loyalty or even self-worth can be rooted through whatever label, identity or sports team that we can fight for. We scream at the top of our lungs when our guy makes the shot or our gal scores the goal. We are in a place of loyalty towards the people of our team.

I think about how much I was raised as a boy to be a Red Sox fan. I was born in the city of Boston literally and raised in New England. I moved to California quite some time ago and I'm not going back. There was a lot of my identity that is lined up with the Red Sox, and there are years when they're horrible. My father-in-law who's a Yankee fan lets me have it. There probably is a line somewhere, but it would take a lot to move me off of being a Red Sox fan.

There might be a lot for you to be disgusted with your father-in-law because he's a Yankee fan. In other words, it doesn't serve you or him because you're married to his daughter. It doesn't serve you to have a vile opinion of him because he's a Yankee fan. Imagine those identities that are done from a sports perspective in reference to Democrats and Republicans.

All of a sudden, things changed very quickly on this show. The identity of something also fits into the identity of America as having two different opinions about the way things work or the better way things work, and who is going to win the message. Here's the weird part about this. The Red Sox are not storming the Major League baseball offices and trying to take down the Commissioner of Baseball or the Vice President, in case the Commissioner is not there, or the board members, or the players union. They're not storming against that.

They've got to figure out how to meet the good of the entire whole versus their own upset about what took place. The New Orleans Saints can be as mad as they want during a playoff when there is past interference play about them not going to the Super Bowl because that's over. The Rams are over at that. I'm sitting in the Ram side fence but yet I have a Drew Brees fandom that goes on.

I'm upset about that, but I'm not storming the NFL or the Kent in Ohio, trying to break in and say, “They don't deserve to have the playoffs, therefore, so on and so forth.” This is a very important discussion about identity, loyalty, self-worth, community and connection. When we, as a nation, are not working in community building anymore, we're not building community at the local level. We’re not doing news at the local level. We're not supporting that. We're just supporting the bigger news places, which is problematic. When it becomes very top-heavy, it becomes a challenge to deal with one type of identity, labeling, judging, criticizing, and diagnosing another point of view at the expense of truth. It’s hard.

It has been very difficult for this issue. That's why I appreciate having the discussion about the sports teams because it helps us understand a little bit why some people are behaving the way they're behaving. When we see these four witnesses at the House Select Committee on January 6th, 2021, giving sworn testimony of their experiences, they were there, they were in it, they were injured defending the Capitol, protecting all of the members of the House and the Senate, all of Congress. They give this moving testimony. It was a perspective that we haven't heard directly from people who were there in quite this way before. We've seen video clips of all sorts of videos that were shot, but we hear this testimony and it’s like this is serious and riveting stuff. It’s the two Capitol police officers and two DC Metro police officers I think.

You get a different perspective on America when you see how we're viewed by people in other countries.

They're representing the other 140 that were injured and the other 600 of them that were in there holding the ground to protect the lives of both the Congress and the Senators inside the building. They were protecting the leadership.

They were protecting the very function of our government, the United of America, to affect the peaceful transition of power of a duly elected leader.

When we get to the loyalty of a sports team, the rule could be broken. Somebody doesn't necessarily die over it. If the Red Sox lose a bunch of games this season, it's not at that level of you and your loyalty to them. You're not going to feel good about the team. You're going to shake your head and want the leadership and the coaches to play better. You want the front office to hire better people. There can be that one mistake that loses them a critical game. Even though they've made all of these wonderful things, there was this one mistake.

All of a sudden, it's like, “We're going to fire that guy and get rid of the person that made a mistake.” Meanwhile, they are one of the best players. They go on to the other team and help them win a pennant. One of the things that we've got to work with as human beings is that, are we standing for the right identity when we get entrenched in a team of mindset versus a collective good mindset or what's the collective good for the nation is?

Instead of going like, “No, my team is so important. I am not interested in things like truth, integrity and fairness. I'm interested in the vote and the win because if I get my people in, I get what I believe is going to be better for the nation.” Not necessarily what's better for the nation, “I believe it is going to be better.” That is unsettling. Is it going to be better to do this thing?

Here we are. You and I are talking about truth and loyalty to the sports team mindset in both business and politics. It's unsettling but after watching a TV show that I don't like, I may consider not buying their product ever again and making sure that if my children are interested in buying that product because they've advertised on this show, I'm going to dissuade them. They're more loyal to me than the company that is paying for an opinion that's not mine. Do you see how tricky this is? Notice how much override I have to do. I have to build the case like, “Here's where my identity has drawn the line.”

That's the thing that happens all the time. People make their own decisions as to where they're going to draw the line. If they're supportive of what a television show or a television network is saying, and when there are sponsors on that show like, “Am I going to help that company and buy their product so they can continue to support this show?” People would make some decisions and this can affect business. It's very interesting to see what's happened in this regard because on the one hand in business, we see that Fox News is putting on “pause” their business relationship with the MyPillow company. Their ads are not running on Fox News anymore.

I'm not a regular Fox News watcher but I understand that these ads have been a staple on Fox News for some time. His company has gotten a lot of sales because of advertising on Fox News. The Business Fox News has drawn a line and said, “This guy, who's saying President Trump is going to be reinstated on August 13th, 2021, that's a bridge too far for us. We don't want to be viewed as being in alignment with that. We're not going to accept your advertising dollars. We're not going to run your commercials. We're going to pause for a while.”

The feeling of shock, the feeling of outrage, is a series of bu ttons that you get to push as a communicator.

“We can't be in a relationship with you because of that.” Notice they're picking the greater loyalty to the bigger advertisers than he is. We can keep taking money from the MyPillow guy, but it's at the expense of the longer-term play because he's starting to sound and becoming a leader for a voice that is outside our narrative we do not want to be associated with. Tom, have you ever noticed that some Red Sox fans are crazier than you are?

Sure.

That's a little bit of this thing. It's like, "Yeah, I see you crazy guy yelling or screaming, but could you back that off a little bit? You're affecting my identity and the hat that I'm wearing because you're wearing that hat that I'm wearing." This is a little bit of what's happening in both politics and businesses. You got to be careful what hat you're putting on. Now you're responsible for all the behaviors of the people wearing that hat. The Make-America-Great-Again hat being worn in certain public places and cities is not the strongest choice because now you're wearing your identity for something that has a great deal of conflict.

At the same time, there are 73 million people that voted for that hat. There are 80 million something that voted for the other hat. Wearing a Joe Biden-Kamala Harris hat in a city that voted against that has a bit of volatility to it because we are going to storm the Major League baseball offices. We're going to storm the thing because our way is one that we get to yell at you for your way. Meanwhile, the American hat is nowhere to be found. In the America piece, there's nothing to be built. It's a little weird to say, but if you try to wear the America hat over to other nations, you'll now start getting pushbacks.

You’ll get a different kind of pushback because people in other countries have very different opinions about Americans than most Americans realize. If more Americans traveled outside the country, which no one knows how to do these days right now, but I've traveled around the world quite a bit in business, not since the pandemic started, but certainly for decades before that, you’ll get a different perspective on America when you see how we're viewed by people in other countries. That's a bigger subject maybe for another day but you do get some perspective.

That’s correct because they and their team have a different hat. The identity, the loyalty, the self-worth, and the qualities of who I am because I am with this other group. You can judge and criticize whether it's North Korea or whatever country it is, thinking like, "They live there. What team do they have? That's the only team and the only leader they have." There is not a healthy discourse in that particular country because a healthy discourse goes, "I'm sorry, you're not on the team because we don't want a two-party identity here. We don't want open discussion. We don't want that. We want to have this other style of leadership."

We give an example of the sports team loyalty in business with Fox making this decision about the MyPillow company. Let's talk about loyalty in politics. We already mentioned before, we had four witnesses testifying in the House Select Committee regarding January 6th, 2021. After that testimony, you and I saw what the Fox News opinion hosts did to meet their need for loyalty to their team being the Republican Party.

The brand loyalty is, “We're fighters. We're going to fight for this. We are going to take a look at what took place and minimize that person's experience.” The feeling of shock and outrage is a series of needs buttons that you get to push as a communicator. We don't respect these people and things because they're Democrats. You and I both know if we're sitting at a Red Sox-Angels game, I can still respect the best player on the Angels’ team even though I'm rooting for them. I'm just hoping that player doesn't do good in this game.

It doesn't affect my team, but I still appreciate that person's talent. I may cheer against that person's talent to see if I can get him to rattle, and maybe he won't play as well. That's the fun or the entertainment of owning what my identity is and stepping into that. Imagine that at a larger level and the damage is done to brand America. You can see where this is not a good thing when I'm pulling my energy into that space. It’s very challenging.

Maybe I shouldn't be and I didn’t see all of them. You may have seen more than me, but I was shocked when I saw one of the Fox opinion hosts, Laura Ingraham, try to minimize the testimony of these Capitol police officers. She doesn't know their politics. I think one of them even said, “They're apolitical.” They're not defending only Democrats or Republicans. They're there to protect the Capitol and everyone there. It was probably not a wise idea for these Fox opinion hosts to attack these witnesses because of their political affiliation. What do they do? They belittle them. Laura Ingraham gave them an award and it was like a drama award saying, “What a good actor you are? Getting up there and crying in the witness chair,” or whatever. It's like, “Are you kidding me?”

There's footage of this guy in the crowd and getting hit with a stick. You could have some empathy to put yourself in their place if you were fighting for the nation as you said you're going to. You're in that place and your job is to protect both the Democrats and the Republicans that are in that building. Here's one thing that spurred this talk a little bit. One of the officers, to try to have a rational moment with the crowd says, “I voted for Joe Biden. Does my vote not count?”

Rationalizing and explaining to a person that feels angry doesn't work. It's like sitting next to the Angel fans that have engaged in the process of defeat the enemy at all costs. You look at that Angels fan and saying, “You guys stink,” or whatever. The guy had too much to drink or has bought into the narrative that his self-worth or his identity is so invested in the Angels that he throws a beer in your face, and then hits you over the head with whatever hard instrument he has available. You're going like, “Oh my gosh.” This is where that line gets crossed that the identity and the disconnect take place.

How far is Fox news going to go? How far are these hosts going to go because of their loyalty to this one guy and to this party?

To me, it was shocking. I've wondered, “Fox News is doing that.” When we talk about team loyalty, it makes sense.

We can empathize with it. We can say, “Oh my gosh, this makes sense. This is the good reason why they don't want their viewers to go anywhere. They want their viewers to stay put.” What are their viewers used to? It’s us ranting against the other side? What are we going to do with this very difficult situation? Instead, if they were a news person who had some form of integrity towards America, another human being or the institution of journalism, then they would be this, but they are not those people.

Those are not that show. That show might as be as fictional as science fiction. It's allowed to be that way. It’s allowed to create an alternative reality. They get to beam into an event in a situation, and then they get to beam out and say, “We were visiting. There is no damage because we're allowed to do that. We're not held accountable.”

Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson are not under oath.

That's what the insurrection is about. It’s tying a person's message to such an extent that it motivates another person to do violence or harm to another person. All the people at the Donald Trump rally before they march to the things, there were things that were said that crossed the line in volatility, “We are demonstrating.” All of the different people could have completely played the line they needed to play. They could not have said that next level of, “We need to storm and take this thing back. We're going to walk down there and I'm going to be leading you there.” He didn't lead anybody there. All he did was words said, “I will lead you there.”

Also, “I'm going with you.” He said things that led people to believe it.

“I’m going with you.” “I better go. He's going to be at the front coming in, isn't he?” No, he's not.

A lot of the people we've heard quoted within the Capitol saying, "Donald Trump sent us." I wondered when I saw Laura Ingraham give this fake award for a drama to these Capitol police officers or one, in particular, I was like, "How far is Fox News going to go? How far are these hosts going to go because of their loyalty to this one guy and this party?”

It's a great question. How far would you go as a Red Sox fan? Notice that you have a line and a drop-off, “I am not going to kill another fan from another team.”

I'm not going to hurt anybody. In some ways, it would take an awful lot to move me off of my loyalty to my team but there is a line. I am not going to remain loyal at the expense of somebody else's personal safety or health, something like that. When you think about team loyalty, there is one other example of this team loyalty that is very appropriate and shows you how people in America are struggling with this. It comes out of a report out of St. Louis, Missouri, which is, “Midwestern, a very conservative part of the country, voted for Donald Trump.”

What this shows you is that not only team loyalty has been largely responsible for why a lot of people in America have not gotten the COVID-19 vaccine. A report came out of St. Louis that people are getting vaccines in private because they don't want to come out and admit to their friends, family and team that they're getting the vaccine, despite all of the talking points that are not supportive of the vaccine on their team identity. If you're going to the point where you're so loyal to your team, you don't want to admit you've gotten the vaccine, but your need for personal safety and health is so strong that you're going to do it in a covert way, I'm all for you getting the vaccine however you do it. That's a wow moment for me.

That's one of the challenges with a shame-based narrative. A language pattern that's inside a person's identity says, “I can't cross the greater group.” For example, if I am saying to myself, “I do not like Tucker Carlson. I do not like Sean Hannity. I do not like Laura Ingraham.” As a purchaser or as a choice, I can go on to the list of their advertisers and say, “See all these people? I'm writing them all a letter and letting them know that my loyalty to their company and their brand has been moved away. I am finding a new loyalty with a new company. I am leaving your brand forever as well as my children. I am letting them know because I have conviction in the money you're spending even though I can empathize with the 73 million customers that you can get over there by advertising with that group. I want to let you know that you lost the loyalty of one of your customers. The loyalty has changed.”

“I will not buy AT&T or Honda.” All of a sudden, I'm down with a list. “I'm not buying them because you've crossed the Brand America identity because you're supporting a group that is emphasizing division. I'm not going there with my products or services. I'm not purchasing that.” This is where the healthier dialogue exists. Is this good for America? Yes. The conversation about who has the best batting average or where do I put the bridge in this state or this state, that's a collective infrastructure challenge. Shall I build a new bridge in Texas or shall I build a new bridge in Iowa? As the United States of America, we do them both because both bridges need to be fixed. We don't want either of our fellow citizens to have something that could hurt them or will not serve us as a greater nation if it wasn't fixed.

Infrastructure is a great example because we see that moving through Congress in the most bipartisan fashion that we've seen anything moved through Congress in quite some time, where seventeen Republicans in the Senate have voted to advance a bipartisan infrastructure bill that's $1.2 billion big. There are things we, as Americans, all agree on that we need for the good of all of us. It's heartening to see that, at least at this point moving forward. I think that's a very positive thing.

These are things that we can discuss moving forward. This whole idea of truth and the loyalty in a sports team, in business and politics. We have to be careful what hat we're wearing, but also realize the collective hat of capitalism that runs a certain part of our economy, and the collective hat of cooperation that looks like funding police, firemen and infrastructure. Those are the dance between more of a social spend versus a capitalist or a growth spend. It’s very different, but we've got to get used to those two hats and find a way to fit those on our heads too.

They should do, Bill. I appreciate this discussion. It's been very helpful for me and hopefully, also for our readers.

Thanks, everybody. If you need more information about how to be empathetic in a most difficult situation, these are things that we work on. This is something that's a big part of my profession, so feel free to reach out.

It’s PurchasingTruth.com . Thanks, everybody. We'll be back next time.

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How to Change a Belief: Truth and Communication Today

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 19:00:07 GMT

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Deeply-held beliefs are often what cause divisions between people. What does it take to change a belief? We discuss this question as Bill Stierle and Tom talk about the power of belief structures, especially in today’s pandemic world. They discuss how our cherished beliefs are constructed and how a belief can be challenged and, ultimately, changed. Tune in for another thought-provoking discussion from Bill and Tom.

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How to Change a Belief: Truth and Communication Today

We have a very interesting thing happening in our country. There's a news story that's being blown up. It's getting a ton of propagation. It is being shared, replayed and published by every media outlet. That's of the radio host, Phil Valentine, who's a Conservative talk radio host. He has been somebody who has downplayed the vaccine and made fun of the vaccine, mocked the vaccine, not has been a supporter of people getting the vaccine. Now, he has COVID and is very badly hospitalized in a critical condition, and he's changed his tune. There are a great many interesting things to observe and talk about with this.

I appreciate this topic, Tom, because when we as communicators in our modern world looking to get the message out of the things that we value our brand recognition or message, we want to find our fans, build a fan base, increase our eyeballs online and get the number of clicks that we need. We need to inspire and engage people. Our advertisers stay close, our products move off the shelf and we are engaged in powerful messaging. This show takes various different topics both in business and politics about how things are messaged. Here, the media is promoting messaging. The messaging is around a person that had this one point of view, the viewpoint about vaccines over here and then they are now promoting this other viewpoint.

A lot of times, people don't change their viewpoint unless they are facing or experiencing the crisis in front of them. That's hard. The crisis is in front of them, then all of a sudden, they are dealing with the crisis, whether it's business or politics. It's that impression, loyalty, the connection that a person is looking for. Now, we are watching the media taking and trying to find a foothold into the non-vax world. Here's somebody that promoted non-vaccination or choice of an individual over the public good. Now they are saying it's in the public good and it's a better choice to be on this side versus that side.

It comes down to, what does it take to admit that your belief is wrong? What does it take to change your narrative? Instead of buying this hamburger, buy this hamburger. Instead of buying this product, buy this product. Being a vaxxer to a non-vaxxer back to a vaxxer. We are peculiar creatures and we do run by our vocabulary. The software that runs a human being is the words that come out of our mouth and we've got to remember that that's how we work. If you've got something coming out of your mouth, your body is in tune or tuning to the thing that you are saying and it's a little unsettling.

With all that monologue that I gave, it's a very funny monologue but in business and politics, we've also got to get used to how the messages come in. There's so much to look at the media communication around this, that it's a great idea to talk about it. What are some of the things that you have come across regarding Phil Valentine and some of the things that the media has done to cover and make this person's change of heart stick?

It's the change of heart that is so rare still, regrettably, in America nowadays that is why this is newsworthy. Maybe newsworthy is an understatement. This thing is being blown up. We have included one interview with Phil Valentine’s brother because Phil Valentine is in the hospital. He's only able to communicate in a very limited capacity with his family but his brother Phil Valentine is bringing his message out to the world and being interviewed by everybody.

In the video that we show, I don't think the reporter did a skillful job in interviewing him but at the same time, Phil Valentine’s brother did come out and say some very specific things. The reporter tried to pin him down because Phil Valentine had mocked the vaccine and lined it up with big government being bad. He made a parody of The Beatles song Taxman calling it Vaxman.

It doesn't take much to keep somebody going down the same railroad track that they're already going down..

There are a lot of things that if you look into Phil Valentine a little bit, you will see what he said about the vaccine. He was no proponent of taking the vaccine. He was very much in this camp of, “I'm healthy. Why do I need to take it?” He's not super young. He's in one of the higher risk groups by his age. He felt he was somewhat bulletproof or, dare I say, immune to this virus without having the vaccine. Now he's gotten pneumonia in the hospital.

Apparently, if you trust what his brother says, he is trying to let his audience in the world know this is serious, get the vaccine. His tune has changed. His brother, while faced with, “Phil Valentine has done this and done that,” had said, “Yes, he has and he regrets.” He’s basically saying that Phil Valentine regrets what he said in the past. He's urging everybody to get the vaccine, that you don't need to get as sick as he has. He’s trying to do the right thing. He's finally seen that maybe the Earth is round and it's not flat.

I appreciate that because when somebody is invested and has done a thing called decided for, when I cast a vote for a person if a voter has spent some time to say, “This is the person, the party that best represents my values. This other party from 'the things I've heard,'" there are messages. If I was visiting from another planet listening to the things that are being said about the Democrats I said, “Who would vote for that party? It seems like they don't want people to be independent, and they don't want people to have their freedom and choices. They want people to be socialism and communism.”

In other words, the people's belief structure has that name has had a bunch of things tied to it that aren't fully true. There are elements of it but not the full range of how the party even governs. The problem with the belief is that when it gets solidified or codified is that you don't want to change your belief. You don't want to re-examine it.

All the messenger needs to do from the media is keep pressing on the same button to keep you loyal even if the button is not fully true or only partially true. It doesn't take much to keep somebody going down the same railroad track that they are already going down. That's the thing that's in trouble. I always call it the belief railroad switching’s station. Once a person is down this other track, it's hard to get them to switch back over to, “What is the real destiny we need to go? Where does this go?” If you are down this track, then you have to deny an insurrection.

You have to deny that I was the person that was responsible that, “These people did this of their own free will.” No, they did not because they were sent there with five direct messages from a stage. "This is combat. You need to be strong and you need to take it back. These people stole this thing from you.” All you need is a set of five simple messages from a stage, and because the person's belief structure has already been entrenched, stand back and stand by, it doesn't take much because the person's belief structure is already on the railroad track.

I appreciate the railroad track metaphor, Bill. That's very helpful to understand how hard it is to move someone off their beliefs. You and I have talked about in past episodes when is there going to be somebody's well-known enough who dies of COVID? When's it going to be somebody meaningful enough to change people's minds, to change their beliefs and get them to take the vaccine? There was hope with the way that how this event of Phil Valentine being critically ill in the hospital with COVID that maybe he's one that's on the way. He's not maybe the nationally known celebrity but he maybe has a lot of listeners and followers, and this might have a bigger impact.

I did some research on him and I can't find any hard data on how many listeners or followers he has. It was shocking to me that I couldn't find anything. Apart from that, there are so many different publications that have picked up the current story that literally the first 7, 8 pages of google search are all the same thing, just in a different location.

In this time, how hard is it to find truth when truth has already been purchased? The unsettling thing is, what is truth been purchased by? It has been purchased by the Google algorithm regurgitating the same 7, 10 or 3 stories and it's the same click, and you are going like, “I can't get there. How many pages of stuff?" It's worse than a stack of books on a library shelf to find out what piece of information do I need from the shelf to actually find it. It’s like, “I almost want to give up on this. I don't have time to find that piece of information to validate or not validate my point.”

It is a tough moment in the field of time for us because to get the railroad track or the railroad switching station, the little arm that pulls down, the track goes to the other side, whatever it is, it's got to have the weight and the strength to pull it over to this other thing. It doesn't have to be a person like Rock Hudson did for AIDS. He did more to help AIDS research, move it back to a scientific narrative, get it out of the political narrative and moved it right over because the public, care, love, loyalty brand impression of Rock Hudson was this macho guy being taken out by this disease.

Similarly, Magic Johnson was forced to retire because he got it too. These were iconic figures in America and it changed people's perspective. You would think that at some point here, somebody is going to get it and die from COVID-19 that's a big name. Sometimes I start to believe that, and other times I'm thinking, “All the famous people and all the Representatives from the states, all the Governors and all the famous people have all been vaccinated. They just don't talk about being vaccinated. They are being real quiet about it."

That's the hard part about it because it was a rose-colored glasses message that the last administration put forth. “It's not that big. It's just cold. It's as bad as the cold. It's going to go away, and let's cross our fingers and hope for the best science,” instead of, “The numbers aren't looking very good. This is what we are discovering in Italy." Ignore numbers, ignore science. Our brain wants to amplify our current beliefs. It doesn't want to change the belief. If I already believe that the “numbers” of COVID things are being escalated in a hospital to get the extra $600 from the government or whatever that payoff thing is, I'm going to make that big instead of going like, “That may have happened but it's not the thing.”

The thing is that we have this many people on ventilators. "Could you take a picture of all those people?" "No, we can't. We've got to do the privacy thing." We can't explode people the images of hospital things because every hospital is not inundated with it all the time. It comes in waves, it comes in different moments, in different locations because of an outbreak in that area.

It's only at the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.

We are having a hard time believing it's true because when we look for evidence, the evidence is over there in these different places. The numbers keep climbing because we are not doing it. It's a very tough time for us to find and to believe the truth because we are so saturated by information through our phones, our computers and the internet. It's hard to get that switching.

That information is in alignment with our biases and beliefs, too. Facebook knows what stories we are reading, what things we like, what we dislike and what we snooze for 30 days. It keeps feeding you more of that messaging that reinforces your belief. It's so hard and it's sad to say this but somebody must be incredibly well known, respected and liked gets this, and dies. Otherwise, the fear is no one is going to believe it until it happens to them.

It has come down to, “My self-worth and identity is invested in a belief because I'm on this one side so I can't be skeptical and doubtful of what my side is saying.” Suddenly, even if Sean Hannity comes and says, “Take the vaccine. I have already been a vaccine person,” and he stepped into it. The challenge is that there have been all these micro messages all the way up to that or even direct messages about how to rile up the viewership. It's like turning a lamp outside of the porch at night. All the flies and all the bugs start flying to the light and they are getting zapped when they get there.

It's a little difficult that in our beliefs, we think that we can discern something. You and I, as business owners, we keep trying to change our belief. Think again, change this belief, change this behavior, change this action, delegate this thing, stop doing that thing, delegate that thing because you can't do that thing and do this other thing you need to do to grow your business because you need to change your belief.

We are literally, as an entrepreneur, trying to switch the switching station to go over there and delegate the stuff over here because that's something someone else has got to do. It's very hard for our brain to do because, as human beings, we are used to doing familiar things, that match our identity, our self-worth and our habit pattern. To be optimistic about this, sometimes it doesn't take much to switch over a belief. One sentence is being done in a new time.

Have you ever had one sentence come in and then you change? It's like, “Yes, I can do that.” You and I have spent a lot of time together. Sometimes you go, “Bill, that sentence that you gave me for the email made a difference. My client turned around instantly. How the hell did you do that sentence?” “I put it in alignment with empathy and compassion for that person. All of a sudden, the person remained your client. They didn't go looking elsewhere. They didn't do something that would have been worse for them because they followed somebody else's bad advice." Our minds are really an interesting thing.

A lot of times, these polarized camps that America is divided into have a hard time understanding each other. When I thought about Phil Valentine and the fact that he only changed his tune when he is facing the biggest health crisis of his life, he is facing death and he changed his mind. It reminded me of this movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still , which is a science fiction, apocalyptic movie. If you haven't seen it, it's a pretty good movie. You have to check it out.

There’s this important scene where one of the characters is talking about human nature, human beings. “Only when we are on the brink, do we find the will to change.” That's exactly where Phil Valentine is. That's where he has been. He's on the brink of death. He realizes, “I may not make it.” He, through his brother, is communicating to the world, “Don't be like me.”

I fear that number one, he may not be well known enough. People may not regard him as an authority. It may not have as big an effect even though the media is blowing this thing up. You can't have missed this unless you have not been paying attention to anything in the media or the news. I am concerned it's not enough that most people are going to need to get to their own brink to move their belief enough to say, “Maybe I should give this vaccine a second thought.”

This is a great place to talk. That quote verbatim is, “It's only at the brink that people find the will to change. Only at the precipice do we evolve.” As I read it in triplets, a lot of times, when you read sentences and triplets, it can change the sentence. “It's only on the brink.” When the person is going, “I cannot end my life like this. It's too much to hold on to this. I have to let this go. It is eating up my time. I've got to value my life and myself.” Sometimes it takes a sentence like that, it takes an illness like what he's going through. Sometimes it's a cartoon.

I saw a cartoon, it's a little boy looking at his mom and he goes, “Mom, what's that sore on your arm?” “That's where I’ve got my smallpox vaccine.” “Why don't I have it?” “It’s because it worked.” It's the sacrifice of getting the vaccine to not let the virus have an opportunity to go into somebody else that prevents that kid from getting that vaccine and having those things. The vaccines have improved ad and so on.

People do have adverse reactions to vaccines. That's also a part of the mix because when you are making something for all the different human beings on the planet, everybody is genetic and makeup and different people's physiology take it differently. Another part of our belief structure is unless it's 100%, it’s all not valid. That particular belief is the one that is running a lot of the show. It's not FDA-approved. It's like, “Do you need validation from the FDA?”

To know that it's working? Yes. We talked about this in our episode that literally since February 2021 in Texas, almost all of the deaths of COVID-19 and all the hospitalizations are from people that are vaccinated. There were only 47 people out of 9,000 who’ve got COVID and were hospitalized or died. We talked about that before. The evidence now, honestly, America is the best drug trial that's ever existed for a drug because you have never had such a large sample size for a drug or a vaccine, in this case.

Science has certain constructs around it that don't allow for wiggly thinking. You've got to do it.

It's so unsettling, too. A cartoon can make a difference. When the Antitrust Laws were coming up, there was a cartoon that said, “The robber barons.” It had a picture of Andrew Carnegie and all those guys, all those different folks. These are all the robber barons. These were pictures of all these rich people, were puppetizing everybody else and call them robber barons. Why does that term not work now? In early 1900, the reason why it would work there is that the word baron was commonly used to talk about European royalty. That's a Baron over there. “This is a robber baron.” "We don't want one of those."

Nowadays, people are like, "A robber baron? What's that?" If you need to explain what it is, it's not going to have the impact.

It has to be in alignment with the belief and the mindset of the person, and then it tends to go better. It's an important time to see what is going to make the impact, how truth can wiggle its way out and get up in front of this. The big part that people don't get about science is you’ve got to measure it. If it doesn't measure, it's not real.

Even that is tough for people to hear sometimes that science has certain constructs around it that don't allow for wiggly thinking. You've got to do it, and then somebody else has to replicate what you said, your hypothesis and your experiment to prove that somebody else's has got to be able to replicate your experiment. That's called a peer review. It's not an opinion.

It's a part of the process that is required to prove that what you did is, in fact, true.

"I followed your procedures and I’ve got the same results you did." That's something the government doesn't fund.

Each individual drug company has to do that and present its findings to the government. There's a whole process there. That’s another rabbit hole.

This has been a great discussion about the railroad switching of our mindset. What's it going to take to get back on the course? We've got the 50% that's over here and then we’ve got the other 50% that's sitting where they are. There's always going to be that 20% that says, “Don't tell me what to do and don't take away my rights.” There’s always going to be that group.

Let me leave you with one last thing of irony here, Bill. This is a hot-button subject that we are not going to talk about it now. It's a subject for another day. I heard on the news that more states are talking about requiring vaccines for certain kinds of workers, state employees, state health workers. Some of them are requiring vaccines or a weekly COVID test if you are going to stay in your job. A man was unhappy about this. The news filmed him. This man said, “What happened to my body, my choice?” He's getting all upset and I'm like, “From your lips to about every woman's ears who don't want the government to tell her what to do with her body."

It’s very troublesome to deal with conflating beliefs, mindsets and messages. It's very difficult. We do have a lot of work to do about the relationship between the collective good and individual rights. I'm glad you brought it up because those are the two things. Here are an individual's rights and here's the collective good, which one are you going to pick? With the pandemic, it's probably a good idea to pick the collective good. With certain things, you may want to go with individual rights and choices. You want to live that way.

That's the way you want to experience this thing. Other people might not like it but that's your choice, your body and that's it but if it's affecting the public good, then that's problematic. Now, your choice is and can have a great impact on others. That's not something that we can do as a growing society. You can't do that one.

It makes it hard for that guy who, if he were a proponent of life as it is in terms of abortion, that he would say, “You can't have control over your own body because of my religious belief or whatever it is about life being a certain thing.” Now, won't you accept us as a society needing you to have a vaccine to save the greater good of society? That's a very hard circle to square.

The tension of the opposite is very clear. I appreciate that. There needs to be empathy towards the individual rights or the independence and the choice of an individual. From time to time, we've got to choose between those two things. It does become very difficult for us human beings because there's a loss in it. I'm not able to get my self-worth, my identity, my choice because it's going to impact others, and we are doing the greater good versus the individual's rights. Tom, good discussion. Thanks, everybody, for reading.

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The Impact of Spreading Misinformation on the COVID-19 Crisis

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 11:59:18 GMT

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As the world enters the vaccination stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, it now faces a brand new battle: the fight against people spreading misinformation. With all the different beliefs surrounding the vaccine, many people's lives are put at stake. Instead of highlighting why this medical intervention must be prioritized, everything is focused on stirring outrage and sparking heated arguments. Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how some news networks and social media sites deliver partial truth just for the sake of boosting online engagement, even if it means messing with the facts. They also talk about why personal beliefs are so hard to influence or change depending on the people who influence them or the places they get their news from.

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The Impact of Spreading Misinformation on the COVID-19 Crisis

There's a big elephant in the room of misinformation that we're going to take a bit of a dive into.

I appreciate this topic because one of the things that misinformation does is it's counting on appealing to the belief of the person. That's what misinformation counts on. It's saying, “This person is believing this thing.” It's more exciting to believe and talk about unicorns rather than it is to talk about the latest discovery in science. You got to shake your head a little bit about that because wouldn't it be great if we're lifting each other up through the place of, “That person discovered that, I want to figure out how I can discover something that also adds to the dance of life. I want to participate in that.”

That's not what's happening. What happens is there is a judgment towards laziness, scientific rigor, and to be a person that wants to create or work through a struggle to get someplace. It is hard. Anybody that's written a book might have this experience, anybody that's built a business and has dealt with the different challenges over the years of what it takes to do that would know about the struggle. It's a lot easier from the non-struggle place to embrace misinformation quicker than it is to fight for or adjust our belief to the fact that’s true. It's harder to embrace facts because we've invested time in a belief.

Misinformation counts simply on appealing to the belief of the person.

Nothing demonstrates that more in our current culture here in the United States than the COVID vaccine situation, and how these beliefs have been established in a huge part of the US population that they don't need the vaccine or fear that the vaccines are safe or that COVID is real or isn't. Young people think, “It's not going to impact me more. It's an old person's disease,” or whatever their belief is. We're seeing it in how the number of people getting vaccines slowed down to our crawl where all the major big mass vaccination sites in the country were closed. You can get a vaccine, it's pretty easy. You don't even need an appointment now. You could walk up because there's not a lot of demand for people to get them now.

That's a big part of it too. There's an ease in getting it. People are under economic pressure, work pressure to say, “I've now got to do this. I'll wait until tomorrow. I don't need it right away. I'm going to wait to see how the numbers are going to go. I'm going to see where it goes because it was a hoax.” This is unsettling because you take a pandemic and then all of a sudden you stretch it further than it needs to be stretched. I would have liked this to be done in six months if we would have got it through mass testing and contact tracing. It’s very simple stuff, “Has anybody been around you?” Yes. “You need to do something. We need to find anybody else that you've been around or where you've been around so that we can let those people know ahead of it.” That's really problematic.

That didn't happen. In 2020, everybody's looking for vaccines, "When is this going to end?" "When we get the vaccine, we’ll distribute it." They work hard to distribute it in the first half of 2021, and a lot of people get it but not as many as they wanted to. We're at this point where the misinformation was coming very much from where you’d expect it, where a lot of people get their news from like Fox News, Newsmax, OANN and The Daily Wire. People were not trusting the vaccine because of the misinformation that was being spread there. Now we're seeing the result or the evidence of that. The hospitals are filling up again. It's happening all over the country but in a much larger proportion in these states which tend to be more red states where people would be listening to those news sources spreading that misinformation. That's where all cases are. It's 1 in 5, 20% of new cases are in Florida .

That's hard to hear. You can counter that narrative of propaganda that says, “Don't Fauci my state” or whatever, but it's a short-term boost to people trusting you because they voted for you. I'm going to go with my belief that you're telling me the truth. You're telling me this other person is lying or this person is limiting the experience. Meanwhile, what is the worth of human life? All of a sudden, it's not until the person impasses with a certain level or profiles that people take it in and go like, "This is serious. I better pay attention." All of a sudden, everyone’s on the same page.

This is starting to happen across the country on this particular issue about the COVID vaccine. The other shocking piece of data that has come out and is absolutely irrefutable is about the COVID deaths in Texas. Since February 2021, I remember the vaccine was out. People were being vaccinated at that time. In fact, I have good friends in Texas. Texas rolled out the vaccine to people that weren't immunocompromised and younger age groups faster than a lot of states did. I think it’s largely because they didn't have as much demand for the vaccine as other states.

Since February 2021, there have been 8,787 deaths from COVID in the state of Texas. Do you know how many people who died have had the vaccine or were fully vaccinated? It was 43. That means 99.5% of everyone who died due to COVID-19 in Texas from February 8th to July 14th, 2021 were unvaccinated. If you're somebody who had beliefs that have been established through a lot of this misinformation in your sources of news, and then you see those numbers. I can imagine that's a bit of a shock and it makes you question your belief, wouldn't it?

It depends on the size of the belief. If the belief is it's a hoax, then that's a big belief so then I'll discount everything. I'll discount the numbers, the reporting and the doctors. I'm going to question everyone because I was sold a hoax. There was this one thing that's been trending about a doctor in Alabama. This doctor feels sad. She's putting the breathing tubes in a person's lungs so they have enough oxygen so they can breathe. As they're putting it in, the person asked, "Can I get the vaccine?" It's too late for that now. The "It's too late for that now” narrative is troublesome because you had a chance to give your body a chance, and you passed on the chance because you met your need for choice. You met your need for independence. No one's going to tell you what to do, no one's going to force you to do something. All those sentences can be the person's worst enemy.

It's harder to embrace facts because people have been invested so much in a belief.

I can appreciate that a person wants to meet their need for choice and independence. I can also appreciate that people feel scared and fearful about doctors. They feel scared and fearful about vaccines. I felt disheartened about the misinformation that the person that is in that spot is running through their head, “I thought this was a hoax. I thought that it was like a cold.” All they do is rerun the moments of misinformation they've been given that has occupied the place of truth. The cost of truth when this takes place, you can't be honest if you're looking at two different worldviews. You can't be straight with the person because the person is holding onto the worldview.

Because this is a communication show, what do you say or do when somebody saying, “I don't want to take the vaccine?” You got to be able to say something to that person. There are usually two questions that I recommend. Question number one is, “Could you be feeling a little bit more scared or you don't want to take it because there might be something around safety? Could you be feeling doubtful and skeptical because you're struggling with the truth or the trust that you have from the news media?” Get those two things apart from each other because those two things, when they're together, keeps the person not wanting to vaccinate or not wanting to go to the place of protection.

It depends on the circle that you run in. For me, I'm up to fifteen people that are 1 degree or 2 degrees of separation from me who died of COVID, and a new one that came in is sick and in the hospital. It's hard because even though I'm meeting my own need for protection and for physical safety, and I'm extending trust to science, it can be a little bit of a dance. Sometimes they have this prescription and then they take it back because this thing was too strong. It was too much. It had this side effect. It worked but the trials didn't quite give us the thing we wanted, but now we're going to put it in a different form and try it this way instead.” There is a little bit of testing hypothesis in science and it's not a straight certainty. This is where misinformation is fertilized. The fertilization of misinformation is science can't give you 100% certainty, therefore, this other answer might be possible.

That's very interesting and that's where we see a lot of organizations taking a partial truth and removing the context from it to create misinformation. That's very scary.

The news media has its own set of struggles with how to keep its own business shop open, attracting eyeballs and becoming interesting. Scientists have got to put out information, do tests and put hypotheses out. Tom, you may have heard that red wine is an aphrodisiac or it’s good for your heart. The data is spun in a way just to get the tagline, not to promote a full truth. Yet, when it comes to science that has to do with life or death, we've been softened. Our minds have been softened away from rigorous thinking about extending trust. We've been shown crop circles that don't come around anymore because it was a hoax out of England by these two guys, then there were copycat people in different countries that started doing crop circles.

It's unsettling. “They're all rotating in the right direction.” People's brains want to look at the possibility. “Somebody is covering something up. We’re not fully getting the truth.” You just don't like the truth that you're getting because it's not interesting. It's not interesting that a farmer and his son went out at night and made crop circles. It's more interesting that aliens created it.

That's the whole point. It's attention for eyeballs, especially on social media. There's an article that is very comprehensive that was written and published by NPR talking about The Daily Wire. It's very interesting because this is a major source of information news for a lot of people on Facebook. The Daily Wire has become an influence machine. Outrage As A Business Model is the title of the article. It’s how Ben Shapiro who's the founder of The Daily Wire is using Facebook to build an empire because so many people are getting news through Facebook. There's a lot of data in this article about how many people are engaging with this.

The monthly engagement that The Daily Wire has gotten, which is likes, shares and comments is how they define engagement, of nine US news sources on Facebook and five mainstream organizations and four non-mainstream or conservative specific ones. For more than a year, The Daily Wire has gotten more engagement than the five mainstream outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and Fox News. The other ones including The Daily Wire, Breitbart News, TheBlaze, The Western Journal, literally The Daily wire has gotten more engagement than all the other ones combined. It is amazing.

How they're doing it is very interesting. They talk about taking a partial truth and stripping away context. If you strip away enough context, you're going to create outrage and feed into people's biases. You're dominating their attention, but you're also fueling and creating misinformation. The reality of COVID vaccines and the people that are now dying from it all being unvaccinated is one example that is a result of such misinformation being propagated.

It's so huge. Being able to get clicks, likes, engagements, and be able to do that for outrage message is a very limbic brain function. It's engaging the fight, flight and freeze part of the mindset that we have as human beings. Our body is built around protection. Because our brain is built around protection, it would rather protect a belief rather than rewrite the belief to have the truth. Let me give an example of this. One of the common things that I do in communication is to have people change a certain belief. In order for them to change their communication, they got to change this one belief.

Misinformation is fertilized from the hypotheses of science. If there's no sure answer, people try to look for other possibilities.

I asked them right at the beginning, “Would you be willing to change a small belief if it made your life wonderful? It's going to feel uncomfortable to change it, but if you'd be willing to change it, it's going to make a difference. The person then has to say the word yes. If they don't say yes, I ask them, “This is a belief. Would you be willing to do that?” “Yes.” Now that they've made their yes, they've got over the line. Their brain is going to sit with some doubt and skepticism but I know that I'm going to validate it in a new way in a second. Here's the belief I have them changed, that there's no such thing as a good or bad feeling, that there is no such thing as a positive or negative feeling.

This is tough because throughout their childhood, their parent's lives, they were taught, “Feel good, don't feel bad. Think positive, don't think negative.” Now, here's this wacky communication guy going, “There's no such thing as a good or bad feeling, positive or negative feeling.” What replaces that belief is feelings are only indicators that tell you how your body is taking something. This is weird because if you and I think about it, when we woke up this morning, we might have felt tired because our need for rest was not met fully. We didn't have a good night of sleep, or we felt energized because our need for rest was being met. You were feeling thirsty and you met that thirst, and now you feel comfortable. I could do this all day.

A person's feeling or motivation is coming from a need. What winds up happening when you're trying to change a belief, the person's going like, “No, if I change this, I have to change the way I'm thinking. I have to change that that person is pushing my buttons and I don't have any control over it.” That's what outrage is. The person is pushing their buttons and they have their interests in mind. They don't have my interests in mind at all. They're just trying to keep me engaged so that I can be sold to by a sponsor, marketing, advertising and a branding experience. They want to take offline my rational decision-making process. It's keeping the person in either the passenger seat, the back seat or at worst, in the trunk. There are a lot of people in the trunk because they can't make a decision. They go, “I'm in this car and this one media personality is driving it. I'm in the trunk. They're not even in the back seat. They're not even enjoying the ride.

Ask all the 500-plus people that were arrested and filed charges of being picked up from the insurrection. They're not having a happy ride. They're going like, “Isn't Donald Trump going to save me?” He said that one time, “I'll pay the legal expenses.” He says it once and an entire group of people believes, “He'll do it for me.” He’s not paying your legal expenses. He won't even take your phone call. It's very unsettling. Do you feel how unsettled our conversation gets all of a sudden?

I can feel it. It's very interesting to think about feelings are not good or bad, they're just indicators. That changes a lot of things.

It does. Nobody can push you around anymore. Once you have that as a solid ground, it becomes the other person is in pain about something and then they are outraged people. Shapiro is an outraged guy. He's going to say things that are going to affect people's need for respect. It's going to enlist it in loyalty. Loyalty is a very important need for us as human beings. It hooks into survival mechanisms.

People don't even realize it when they're on Facebook that is benefiting from this outrage machine. They're not interested and turning it off because they make all sorts of money based on engagement. The more people engage with posts, the more that feeds into their business model. In fact, the article from NPR goes into a little bit about how Facebook was creating a tool to quantify engagement of posts and some interesting things. They shut it down and decided to stop doing it when they started seeing the results because that was going to mess with their business model.

The thing that’s important for at least people to try to learn and research is that an organization like The Daily Wire does not claim to be a traditional news source. That's not their goal to deliver news or truth. On its About page, the site states very clearly that The Daily Wire does not claim to be without bias and it goes on to say, "We're opinionated, we're noisy and we're having a good time.” What does that tell you about the information that you're getting through something like The Daily Wire?

It’s their need for connection being met at the expense of their population. It is something that they're not interested in having accountability for. If you're keeping engagement to take place and it solidifies a person's belief against their own best interest, it seems like some dark shadowy stuff against their own interest, which means that it prevents them from being for their own interest. There's clearly enough to go around. The challenge is how you get people to believe and participate in that collaborative and cooperative marketplace versus the way that people are believing is, “There's not enough, survival of fittest. I've got to win and in order for me to win big, you got to lose big.” That's a little bit of the problem with truth and the misinformation apparatus. The misinformation apparatus is about building outrage. It's weird to say this from a physiological place, but 74% of a person's hearing stops listening when they're angry. It shuts off their ears. They can't even hear.

Those beliefs are going to be hardened.

The brain is built around protection. It would rather protect a belief rather than rewrite it to have the truth.

The beliefs become hardened because it hits the person's ears. Once it tilts past the experience of aggravated and mad and it goes to the place of anger, they become entrenched. They're looking for the next person that's going to reinforce that belief structure.

That's why this opinion shows on the mainstream media like Fox News. CNN and MSNBC are no different where they have a lot of opinion shows. Those opinion shows are feeding into those biases and they're propagating outrage and a lot of times, creating outrage because that suits their business model. That's why it's so surprising that this week, Sean Hannity came out very vocally seemingly without an ideological agenda to speak very candidly about vaccines stating that he believes in science and in the vaccine. It was surprising to a lot of people to see him say that. I think it's a result of what we were talking about earlier, the numbers coming out of the states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and other states about all the people dying of COVID are unvaccinated. I think he realized that's a lot of the people that listen to him.

The motivation of connection with his audience, his sponsors and the people because if it goes further than this, and he was to stay any longer on the narrative, and businesses would have had to start shutting down again because of his rhetoric, they'll pull and he has no place to go. “You cost us $100,000 or $1 million because of the revenue we lost over the fourth quarter of 2021. We're going to let you have it by never advertising with you again because of the money you cost us. You have some eyeballs over there, but the money and the deaths that you caused because so-and-so died in our organization, they listened to you.” The game of misinformation is tricky because you're trying to get engagement, but you also are causing damage at the same time. That part is tough.

You're getting engagement at the expense now of people's lives and don't forget our economy. Our economy requires people to be moving freely, going to restaurants and engaging in all sorts of activities. You can't do that if everybody's sick and dying. We have to take a step back and have more mass mandates or shutdowns because people aren't getting the vaccine to make this virus disappear because we get herd immunity.

That's the thing that we can look at next. What kind of language narrative is going to be taken? Who has to get sick? Who has to die in order for it to rise to the level of urgency? During the AIDS epidemic, it was Rock Hudson, and then other predominant Hollywood and political types that got sick and died. It’s very challenging for us to take this one on because this one is what this generation’s HIV was in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s.

Thanks so much. I appreciate your insight and having that discussion about misinformation.

I appreciate it, Tom. Thanks, everybody.

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The Demon-Haunted World: Carl Sagan’s Prediction for 2021

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 20:05:57 GMT

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In 1995, an astrophysicist by the name of Carl Sagan wrote a book predicting how the population would continue to pursue truth in a technology-driven world. Unbeknownst to many, his predictions from twenty-five years ago are exactly our reality today. On today’s show, Bill Stierle and Tom break down an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark . They discuss the main points of his prediction and the impact technology and the monopoly of power have on how people find and advocate for truth. Pertinent to this, they also delve into the implications of the billionaire space race and the division in how people are viewing the election fraud controversy. Stay tuned to hear more about Carl Sagan’s unsettling revelation.

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Watch the episode here

The Demon-Haunted World: Carl Sagan’s Prediction for 2021

I'm still blown away, and I know you are too by this quote that we have become aware of by Carl Sagan who was a scholar and astrophysicist, many things that he was. He died in 1995 or 1996. Ten months before he died, he wrote and published a book and there is this profound quote or three sections of a quote where he predicted where we are now in terms of our media, the language of communication, power in the hands of very few people, especially the tech companies.

Me too. When you showed the clip from Brian Williams show, it’s really powerful. Even the title of the book that it comes from was a little upsetting in the sense of how did Carl Sagan get ahold of this truth many years ago, stick it in a book in four paragraphs, and landing right on our current circumstances and our struggle with the truth? The name of the book is The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark . Think about the discussions we're having about science right now like vaccinations. They're holding a candle in the dark but it's like, “No, that's science stuff. We're not following that stuff. We're going to follow something else.” That's problematic because you're not following the measurable truth.

People forget that science is something that you measure. It’s something you see and make a hypothesis about. You test it and you see if it's true. You make an adjustment and new hypothesis. You test that and you keep your eyes open for creativity or alternatives or new ways of thinking. Science is a big thing. It's about measuring and assessing things. That makes a huge difference to allow truth to be something you measure. It doesn't mean that science is right all the time. The hypothesis can come and land in a certain place. The measurements or the way of thinking might not have been strong, and then all of a sudden, a person starts believing it. It's neat that Carl Sagan was able to articulate one of the major struggles that we're having regarding truth these days.

It is shocking to have seen it. So far, I had to read those signs back then and put together quite an intelligent prediction. Let's share that with our readers. This is from Brian Williams 's show on MSNBC, but that's less important than the quote. The book cover is on the left. We're going to read a couple of different sections and Bill and I are going to discuss them. This is the quote from Carl Sagan. He says, "I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time when the United States is a service and information economy, when all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interests can even grasp the issues.”

That’s a good pause point, Tom. For an economy to shift their manufacturing overseas and rightfully so to gain profit, to be more viable, and to bring a wine home to their parent company, to their stockholders and everything like that mindset to go over there, and then to notice that now all of a sudden, the technological power is in the hands of the very few and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues. It becomes common with everything on climate change to the environment to how do you deal with plastics in the ocean, all the different challenges and issues.

From a private standpoint, it's one place, but from a public standpoint, how do you deal with these issues when a common person like you and I are away from those things? The only action we could take is to stop drinking water bottles if we don't want the water bottle to land up in a landfill or the ocean. That's all the influence we have. It’s individually, “I've got to watch my water bottles.” It’s very challenging right now. We're in a challenging time.

“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantative content in the enormously influential media” – Carl Sagan

Let me continue here. I have a feeling if I skipped it, I’m going to drag this. This is going on from the technology in the hands of a very few people and controlled by it, “When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably questioned those in authority, when coaching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes or critical faculties in decline.” This is the kicker, “Unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness.” There's still more of after this but that's another good pause point.

That is a good pause too. Everyone gets to have the credibility of a scientist. People get to question Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci. I'm not saying him as a spokesperson. He might not give everyone all the information all at once because if he did, he might terrify people with his knowledge and information about viruses, what viruses do to the body, and the worst viruses. All the different viruses that he has studied in his entire career. How does somebody get to question that level of authority and be even with him? That's when truth flattens like the flat Earth.

My point of view is the same as a person that's his point of view in his study has been over here. It's so much higher. I would not go to Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci and say, “I read this article on the internet, and what about this interview?” There have been times where people would bring things like that to Anthony Stephen Fauci and go, “I read that study. It was only 27 people that were in that study. This is what they said and this is what they didn't have in their tests. This is why it's not valid because the protocol wasn't followed in science.” I'm going like, “It's literally this quote.”

What's interesting is that Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci has spent his entire career on infectious disease studying mitigation. I forget the exact name of it, but he's been the head of this independent agency for decades back to at least the George Bush administration, George Bush number one, if not back into the Ronald Reagan administration. He's been there forever. You talk about how do you put something up against him in an authority. We've seen a couple of times Senator Rand Paul go toe-to-toe with Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci in hearings. Rand Paul hasn't spent decades studying infectious diseases, but he was a doctor before he became a Senator and Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci is here. Somehow, people are seeing that elevates his credibility to be able to question Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci, even though he hasn't studied infectious diseases for decades. It's disheartening.

It doesn't feel good for you and me to change a belief. It doesn't feel good when we're looking at something, and then all of a sudden, we've got to look at it and go like, “I got to change my belief about this.” My son came to me and he goes, “I walked yesterday, dad, and I got a blister on my toe.” I'll go, “You got a blister? Would you like me to pop it for you?” He goes, “No, you're not supposed to pop them.” I go like, “I've always popped my blisters.” He goes, “No, I read it on the internet. You're not supposed to.” I go like, “Really? I've always popped my blisters. I pop it, put a band-aid on it, put some stuff on it.” He goes, ”No. In two days, the water gets reabsorbed. It prevents infection, so I'm not popping the blister.” I'm thinking, “You're uncomfortable. Pop the blister,” then I went on the internet and going like, “He's right.”

Guess how I feel? Uncomfortable, but my flat Earth mindset is pop the blister. I'm unsettled to this day that I can't contribute wisdom to my son because he can get wisdom and knowledge ahead of me. This is what that quote is doing. We slip into what’s worked before that is not necessarily the best. We keep ourself in darkness because we're not asking ourselves to change our belief. It's unsettling and also very sobering to realize that we've got to do a better job of looking at truth instead of leaning on our beliefs that are not in alignment with truth.

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or my grandchildren’s time” – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

We're in America and these are some struggles we're facing on a grand scale. Not that other countries aren't facing it, but let's keep it focused on America for now. This is the part of this that every American should hold up a mirror to themselves and say, “Is what you're espousing, what you're saying, and what you're believing just what feels good or is it what's true? Do you care enough to research if your beliefs are true, if what feels good to you is true or you want to stay in your happy place where you feel good, and it doesn't matter to you if it's true?

It doesn't matter if it's true. I want to do things that feel comfortable. I'm not interested or pursuing that thing that's going to upset me. That's why this quote and even the next part of this quote is so powerful. We've got to take a look at, question and do our best to adjust ourselves to this way of information overload and marketing intrusion. The marketing intrusion part is the one that's kicking our butt. It's when we see something and then a person that we believe or trust or are loyal to says, “This thing didn't happen the way you think it did.” We start believing the marketing message rather than the thing we see in front of our very eyes. We saw this thing in our eyes. We got a general sense of the truth about what it is, and this marketing person is now going to pound, repeat, say the same thing over and over again just to keep us into that superstition or into that darkness. This is so unsettling. Go ahead and read the next part of this quote.

There are two more parts here and this is really good. Carl Sagan, in 1995 or 1996, was saying, “The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content,” I would put "substantive content" as truth or maybe the facts, “in the enormously influential media. The 30-second soundbites (now down to ten seconds or less, lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

They almost found Bigfoot and I'm picking on something. There may be one day in the world that we find a Proto Man of that size somewhere. People will say, “There, see? We found them,” at the same time. This is believing in things that you can't measure. I like faith, intention and setting our greatest vision and trying to live towards it. There's a certain amount of time we've got to take, measure, stare it down, and apply the balance between creativity and logic, between logic and spirituality, between the ability to be creative, and to follow a to-do list and get stuff done. We've got to build that range of truth, not just to lean on a person's belief or be influenced by a marketer saying something because it's more comfortable, it feels better to listen and agree to that because then, we don't have to question ourselves. It's better to leave the blister on.

I'm still bugged by the sentence. Why? Because for years, taking the blister off or letting the liquid out of it was a strategy and a tactic I would use to provide myself comfort. It’s something my parents taught me and something that was maybe true in science back then. It's pretty good and fascinating to watch how we can change things. A marketer can get further along by purchasing truth away from the listener by repeating whatever message they want to stay on and a road science. Therefore, the title of this book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.

It sounds medieval. It sounds like this was a book that was written in Galileo's time when he was put on the block for the crime of science and looking up the truth, “Do you see these stars moving over through the sky at night? That's because the Earth is round and it's spinning.” “The Earth is not round, it's flat. Kill him.” I'm oversimplifying stuff.

It doesn’t feel good to change a belief.

We have our version of that. Didn't you see a bunch of people go into the Capitol building? That's that thing, “The election was stolen. There's election fraud. There are greater numbers.” They're like, “Let's see how that works in court. Let's bring that back into court.” “No, there are no facts here in court.” Everything gets thrown out but the superstition is still living. The marketing is still working. The brand loyalty towards Donald Trump is still being promoted and there's a group of people not getting off of that. It's just holding the line with that and then looking for any way to not talk about the truth, and use things like distraction, certain half stories, straw man, and red herrings. All the different beliefs, biases, and fallacies that you can put in are in that mix. It is a tough experience.

What winds up happening is if the power is in the hands of the few, the technology, instead of having the United States versus Russia in the space race, you have three billionaires in the space race. This is the thing that bugs me the most and we'll talk about this more in the next episode. When an individual does something, not a country, the energy is way different. It's not we did it and we support it, that we're a part of Richard Branson. We are not a part of Richard Branson's success. That leaves the person having no sense of national pride because he's an English guy. He's a capitalist but it's not something England or America, although it was on American soil and American tax breaks. It had no financial impact on the economy that all this stuff was built on. It’s unbelievable that there's no energetic investment at all.

A lot of very valid criticisms are being levied at these three billionaires for this space race. Think about all the good that money that went into this could be doing in other ways to help our world. Is it worth it to spend? Richard Branson is planning a ticket to be about $250,000 to take a ride in Virgin Galactic and experience three minutes of weightlessness on this flight.

3 to 4 minutes of up and down.

That's for the Virgin Galactic experience. I did the math and that’s 180 seconds. That comes down to a little less than $1,400 per second of weightlessness to experience that. I'm belittling it. I'm sure it was an incredibly awesome experience in many ways but still, it’s the odds to those who can afford it. They tried to mask the idea that it's a ticket for rich people by saying, “They're going to have a lottery and give two people a free ticket, and give average common people the ability to go up and experience it at some point.” Good. That makes it all ideal, doesn't it?

We've got to do a better job of looking at truth instead of leaning on our beliefs that are not in alignment with truth.

It doesn't build loyalty and national pride. I feel more inspired right now about the Olympics because there's the USA. What are the United States athletes going to do compared to other athletes in the world and see who is the best in the world at something, rather than three billionaires going up into outer space? Would I turn down the ticket? Maybe or maybe I would go. That's the problem. It's still about, how do human beings grapple with the truth? Can the marketing and the promotion of something get us away from the things we need to measure and the important issues? Everybody thinks that now that commercial outer space is available to people, the next step is interstellar to save the planet. It’s that pseudo-science piece. It's important to do the work and support to get up there but the collective priorities, we're not concentrating on that much.

That does appear that way. While I do think SpaceX , one of the other billionaire companies that are commercially going into space is a little different from Virgin Galactic because what they've done is privatized going to space and trying to do a better job than the US government and what admittedly, slow bureaucracy could do and had stopped doing. There's a little difference there that it's not just joy rides to space, which VirginGalactic is. Jeff Bezos's company, I forget the name, is working on similar things.

Although, I have to tell you from a marketing message, and it's true but it's humorous. Whenever my wife sees the image of Jeff Bezos’s ship that he's going to be taking going up. She's like, “These billionaire men wanting to go to space, couldn't they have done a better job designing that rocket so it didn't look like a big penis?” Certainly, for at least all the women in the world, it’s not helpful to the marketing message of the goals they're trying to achieve. It makes it seem more these are rich white men that are taking advantage of their money, wealth and privilege to feel big about themselves.

Next time around, let's take a look at marketing and branding. What does it take to flip somebody over to get whatever that item is on the grocery list? What does it take to fully purchase somebody's brain? How much money does it take? How much time and how many repeated messages? As the repeated messages keep going about election fraud with no measurable data, it becomes a way to flatten people's enthusiasm around their own national loyalty, then it's very hard for us to make a collective decision or choice moving forward. More to come on this, Tom. This is a great discussion. I appreciate it.

Thanks. I appreciate it, Bill. Talk to you next time.

Thanks. Bye.

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COVID Vaccine And The Flat Earth Mindset

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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The facts are unequivocal. There is now enough data to suggest that vaccinated people tend NOT to get sick, be hospitalized, or die from COVID-19. But if you’ve been following Purchasing Truth for some time, you would know that there is almost nothing facts can do to change beliefs. Despite the overwhelming evidence we now have, millions of Americans still have that flat earth mindset around COVID and the vaccine. While many beliefs are harmless, this one is far from it. It has serious implications on the nation’s ability to fully recover from the pandemic. What will it take for people to move away from their flat earth mindset and objectively confront the truth? What sort of authority can sway them to abandon their misguided beliefs born out of doubt and skepticism? Bill Stierle and Tom discuss.

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I cannot get out of my mind the numbers that we talked about a little bit in our last episode of the people that are being hospitalized and dying from COVID-19. I can't get out of my head there's now enough data and facts, the truth around people that have been vaccinated and how they're not getting sick, going into the hospital and not dying. The numbers that are overwhelming and saying that the vast majority and in some cases, the entirety of people in the month of June 2021 who died of COVID-19, like for instance in the state of Maryland, all of them are un-vaccinated. Ninety-nine percent of people that are being hospitalized for COVID-19 are un-vaccinated yet we still have people not believing the virus is can impact them.

It's unsettling when we gather facts, information and data, there's a perspective in the world. We've talked about this and I've done a couple of shows on the flat Earth mindset. When a person stands on the Earth and walks around or turns around in a circle, they see the Earth is flat from their perspective. They see that is as true. It is true that their perception and worldview is that the entire Earth, from their perspective, is flat. As they raise up in an airplane, that doesn't help either because the world is bigger and it still looks flat. They could look out and see a slight curve and think to themselves, “Maybe there's something to this round Earth thing.” That's not what a belief does. A belief looks to validate what it's invested in.

When somebody is in a position of authority, when we hand over our consciousness to that authority, we'll tend to believe the authority person. People have given the authority to doctors and some of that has been true and helpful and some have not for different people. Some people have given the authority over to spiritual leaders, some of that has been good and some have not been so good. Somebody people have given up the authority over to the legal system, while some of that is good and some that's not. There's a bit of a round Earth that we need to walk or have a perspective that there are these different perceptions and perspectives that people go through.

How this relates to COVID-19 is important because if a political authority says, “It's not that bad. It's like the cold.” Somebody that is speaking from an authority like somebody that has a radio show and says, “It's not that big. It's like a cold, you're going to get over it. Most people don't die from it. It's not a big deal.” That authority and the authority that we've handed over to the person now has a little bit of trouble because we've handed truth over to someone else. If you've got enough of people to say it, this person of authority says, “By the way, that newscaster person also said it too, once.” They wouldn't allow people to lie on air, would they? Try not to laugh but that's the way some people think. If a person is of status that is higher than them, they will lean or hand authority over to them, which is why the flat Earth mindset and COVID-19 are having a little bit of a dance with themselves. They're dancing together and like, “We may want to look at this at a bigger picture and see what the real thing is.”

Like you zeroed in at the start of the show, in the month of June, these people that were unvaccinated or were the only ones in the hospital, that experience of truth when a flat Earth person says, “There must be some mistake. This is not right because I don't see it that way. The person must be lying.” How did it get to that person's lying when you're the person that's casting the belief in the person's direction? You may be wondering what keeps a lie in place. The thing that keeps somebody's version of the truth that people would call a lie is the molecules that are associated with doubt, skepticism and anger. Those are the ones that keep a belief or a worldview in place. “I'm angry about this. I'm doubtful about this. I'm skeptical about this. I'm not moving off my belief.” We've talked about some different articles but you've also had some other data’s that were interesting. How do you cross that? How do you get the person off the flat Earth mindset that they're sitting with?

You and I have sat on this show many times, there are times when the facts don't matter. We've also talked about how it only takes 51% of a belief to push you over the edge to believing something. It doesn't have to be fully true but here we are with data from the month of June. We're talking from Coast-to-Coast here. Maryland's numbers have been highlighted but even in California, the most populous state, which has twenty million fully vaccinated people in the state, a very infinitesimally small percentage of people that have been vaccinated have been hospitalized with COVID-19. It is such a couple zero fraction of a percent. Compared to the number of people that have died, how many of them have been un-vaccinated versus vaccinated? It is overwhelming. The meter is 99%.

I'm not even citing the facts here because I know the facts don't matter to some people that have doubt and skepticism but we have real numbers. I'll give you one. The CDC has tracked so-called breakthrough cases, which a vaccinated person is hospitalized or dies from COVID-19 and you can say, “They have skewed numbers.” Maybe but they've tallied 879 deaths among vaccinated people, which is a tiny fraction of the more than 600,000 Americans who have died of Coronavirus. I can hear some skeptics out there saying, “Those 600,000 people, a lot of them died before we had a vaccine available.” Nobody was vaccinated back in 2020 at some point but let's take us to the end of 2020, take us to 400,000 people who have died. Even if you take 200,000 people and you have 879 that died who were vaccinated, it's still an infinitesimally small percentage. There's my fact and I'll get off of the fact train there for a minute.

It's a good point because the damage is to truth and trust. The damage is how can I get trust and how can I get the truth so I can make a decision? The feeling of doubt or skepticism in splitting numbers is not talking about the issue. The primary issue is how do you meet the need for protection and safety for people. You figure that would be good to be at the top of the list. Second, how do you provide protection for jobs in an economy where people are more engaged rather than less engaged in the world? We've got a COVID-19 PTSD thing that's showing up that we're not doing anything about, which is, “I don't want to go back to work. I don't want to drive in a car. I want to stay at home at work. I work fine here. The paycheck came the same as it did before. Why do I need to go and sit in an office? I don't like those people in the office anyway. Why am I going in there?”

The protection, the trauma of the potential of being out there. “By the way, I know my boss and he's this way. I don't want to go because he's not a vaccinated type of guy. In fact, he's a person that, as a Republican, voted for Donald Trump. Whatever things that they're saying that when we look at a post-trauma event, you're taking a set of beliefs that used to work one way and now they've worked another way. It's hard to snap them back into reality. It’s hard to snap the belief and behavior back. I got an email from my former office that I rented office space at. “We want you back.” I'm thinking like, “Why go back?” I know you're there. I might rent the room every once in a while but I'm surely not going to put my address there again because I don't need to. Working from home is not a bad or wrong thing to do, the belief shift is going like, “If you can work at home, just work at home. Workspace, home space, you don't have to travel, you got more connection time with your family.” What happened is all of a sudden, I started pitching the belief.

It only takes 51% of the truth to push you over the edge into believing something.

It's very obvious that that belief has shifted in America from the past. I started working at home in 1993. I did have a couple of stints working for other people after that but I remember my own company, 1997, 1998, 1999 into the early 2000s. Before my company needed a physical office space, I was run out of my home, even some employees coming into the home and the number of people that thought I didn't have a real business because I worked in my home. It was interesting. It's like, “We're making $2 million a year here.” It's not a real business because they don't have an office. I don't know. you bring up a good point though. I have a question for you. For people that have this flat Earth mindset about the vaccine for whatever reason, is there any authority that can get through to them? Is there any level of authority that they will heed or listen to?

There is but the order for that authority to get through now, they need empathy for the doubt and skepticism that they're carrying. Like, “It won't work now if Donald Trump comes out and says, “I lost my best friend or I lost one of my family members to COVID. Please go get vaccinated because this is a great loss to me.” That's what it took for Ronald Reagan to do something about AIDS was his close friend Rock Hudson died. He's like, “I'm in a position. I can do something with it.” Forget the optics. “I am now going to take an action step in that direction.” That helped him greatly to be engendered by things. Would it have made a difference if he would have made that decision a year earlier? Yes. My brother might even be alive if you would've made that decision earlier because all of a sudden, it would be national advocacy for an acceptance of, protection of, in research tours.

It's all the goodwill that Joe Biden’s receiving now that he's handling it and he's going like, “This is the way we're going, this is what's working and I'm following the numbers here.” Restoring and getting them to believe it is an authority saying in the past. You might've been feeling doubtful and skeptical or you've been filled doubtful because you've struggled with the truth. You might've felt skeptical because it's been very hard to trust. If that authority said this sentence, “What can I say or do so trust would take place between us?”

That person that's on the flat Earth mindset about COVID would say, “Trust would say if my family doctor said this. Trust would be if my neighbor said this. Trust would be if I read this paper.” They would bring themselves to the decision because now, somebody is talking about the pain that they're experiencing with the feeling of doubt and skepticism. Down skepticism is hard to maintain. It takes a lot of adrenaline and cortisol to do. I'll do it now. “I don't know if that's going to take place. I don't think it's going to happen.” Even as me doing it, my body pulled straight back.

I could imagine if former President Donald Trump would go public saying, “I know a lot of people had doubt and skepticism over these vaccines because they were developed so quickly and every other vaccine that has been out there has taken years to develop. The operation warp speed, this thing got done in less than a year.”

“I appreciate that my administration was able to remove the red tape and the redundancy so that we can produce a safe vaccine in the shortest time possible.” That's what he would say.

Can you imagine before Donald Trump left the office had labeled this vaccine, “The Donald Trump vaccine,” and took some credit for it? Plus, if it was named for him, he'd be all over supporting it and a lot more people would inherently trust it.

The need for respect and recognition is clearly at the front of the list. His need for being seen, heard, staying relevant, connection are needs that he follows. It’s like chumming the water is you're fishing, you're throwing a piece of bait out there, “They're coming.” A person comes. Here's something that's interesting. All the newscasters on the left, if they would empathize with him and push credit recognition and acknowledgment in the way that I did it, more people would get vaccinated and we wouldn't even need a message out of him.

They could do it for him.

They could surrogate empathy for him in order to get them to move.

Wouldn't it be interesting if the media, the reporters on the left did it and they're giving empathy, compassion, praise, even to the former president for whatever he did to contribute to this? Wouldn't the right media at Fox News, Newsmax and OAN need to follow through, wouldn't they need to amplify that?

It gives them the right and off-ramp. I was at a branding marketing meeting and I told the entire group. I go, “You cannot answer the person's question on your display. You've got to provide curiosity and anticipation on the display. Do not get the display to answer their question or otherwise they'll read it and move on. We don't want them to read it and move on. We want them to come in and have a conversation with you.” It's the same thing with the vaccine, we want people to have the experience and imagine what it is like when your body calms down and doesn't need to fight doubt and skepticism.

Think about that. Even if somebody starts creating a meme on social media that, “Thanks to former President Donald Trump for doing this and creating the vaccine or fostering it, allowing it to be created and approved so fast.” That would be one of those little messages that is going to chip away at that doubt and skepticism. “Donald Trump is responsible? “Yes, he is.” “Maybe I want to reconsider that vaccine.” It occurs to me so many people are placing a high level of trust and authority in messages they see on social media because they're in alignment with their beliefs.

Authority can change to be authoritarian when the person steps across the line and grabs respect and recognition. When more pushing authority, the line is, “Here's where the authority comes up to and here's where authoritarianism is on this other side of the line. Now, every message is true from authoritarianism, not this message is important for the country,” and that's when a clean authority messaging looks like. It’s really important.

If Trump had labeled the vaccine “Trump vaccine” and took some credit for it before he left office, more people would inherently trust it.

It's always been that way. A lot of people blame social media for propagating messages and further dividing us. Maybe it has amplified messages because of modern technology.

Siloed messages too. It's one of those things that the algorithms are not bringing in or not rolling through.

In reality, we've always had in the United States, newspapers, magazines, things that do that. Something you said reminded me of one of my favorite movies. I know you know this movie as well, it's called Tucker: The Man and His Dream about Preston Thomas Tucker who created the Tucker automobile in the late 1940s. If you don't know it, should check out that movie. There's this interesting scene based on true events where he had this idea for a car and he's faced all sorts of obstacles in the way of creating it because he was very little and what he wanted to do was a threat to the established auto industry. He had a friend at a magazine and he got an advertorial place there, meaning it wasn't an advertisement, it was more somewhere between an article and an advertisement about this car.

There's this funny scene where a couple of investors who were considering investing in Tucker said, “If he's going to do it, it's going to cost a lot of money because you need to have a complete car, a full working prototype.” The other guy says, “It says so in the magazine.” Therefore, the prototype of the car must exist. The funny part of it is the car was an idea on paper and had not existed at that time but because it said so in the magazine, this level of authority was placed on the magazine as an arbiter of truth in some ways. It was believed by the readers that this already existed. Social media plays that role in many ways.

That's what you and I are embracing on this show. What are the activities that a person does to engender truth to move in their direction rather integritous or not? That's not what the issue is. The issue is can the message be grabbed on by the reader and therefore truth is purchased and moves in their direction a little bit. There's another moment that purchases truth back in the other direction. Until you're staring at what needs you're going for, it's very challenging to have a good beat and a good perspective of truth because if you can't argue both sides then you're not looking for truth and you're not able to do it. I can sit here and argue both sides. I can argue the good reasons why XYZ takes place because the numbers are there.

Kevin McCarthy is working the numbers. He has the belief and some validation that, “I can stay on this line and win these seats, therefore I can secure XYZ.” The other side's got to think on that side. They might have is anger because anger is going to block them from being clearheaded about what's happening and going like, “It's interesting. I guess he has the belief.” I'm going to pretend to pick one of them.

Who are you trying to pretend you are, on the right or the left?

On the left. Pick one of them.

It could be Rachel Maddow.

Rachel Maddow’s not so hard. She’s is like, “It's interesting to see what Kevin McCarthy is going to do by following this narrative of promoting.” He feels confident that he has enough votes on this issue to keep languaging things that way. Rachel Maddow doesn't do it. She does outrage. She doesn't do empathy. She does sympathy, understanding but she doesn't do empathy because empathy flattens dopamine, it reduces the conflict so she won't sound like an enemy but she does. It sounds like a whining empathy. “You won't believe what happened.” I appreciate the form of truth and her followers get worked up in the same way. “Come back. After the break, we're going to do this.” It's like, “I’m tired. I've got other things to spend my adrenaline and cortisol on.” The outrage has a reality to it. I'm not saying that it's all that bad, it's just enlisting somebody away from healing or progress and that's something important to watch out for.

It's very interesting when you break these things down to understand what media is accomplishing or trying to accomplish and what they're not necessarily trying to accomplish somewhat can be disheartening or disappointing sometimes too.

It’s a languaging show. This is about what to say in order to get it to go one way or another way. If I'm advising one group of people, it's different than advising another group. I've got to find out where the greatest pain is and work from that position because wherever the greatest pain is, it’s what you want to work on because it's disheartening that certain group of Americans that think they would like their vote to be counted more than other groups of Americans. That's what they're believing or not believing the equal, “Let's make an accessible ability across the board.” That's a huge change. We've done this cycle before. There's a cycle in which voter suppression was prominent. Now, we're getting in our 2021 version of suppression and exclusion in order to meet the need for protection. There's more to talk about this. The big thing to pull away from now is getting used to how quickly we can get off the flat Earth mindset, see the big picture of it and see if we can stick the landing on that.

That's very much needed in order for the nation to achieve a certain level of safety and protection from the virus.

Restore truth and trust throughout things. It doesn't mean that people aren't going to do junky things in government or out of government. It just means we've got to do a better job of pursuing truth and trust with ourselves, with others and it will go better.

Bill, thanks so much. I appreciate this discussion.

Thanks.

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How Diverse Perspectives And Difficult Conversations Lead To Progress

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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You can’t smooth one surface without creating friction from another, and you can’t create harmony by singing only one note. The same goes for people having conflicting opinions. On today’s show, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how having difficult conversations is the only way to create progress in a path to the truth. They tackle why difficult conversations are getting harder to have and what role social media has played in this dynamic. There is beauty and integrity in a diversity of perspectives, and it is important we embrace and utilize that to progress as a nation.

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Bill, it's time to have a conversation about having difficult conversations. We’ve come out of the 4th of July holiday weekend. A lot of people gathered together. I'm sure a lot of people had different views and opinions. It seems that this is something Americans need to learn how to do. Don't you agree? Otherwise, we're going to get further divided.

That's correct. It's a further divided America. Also, in the workplace, if you're not being able to have difficult conversations with your coworker, or your boss doesn't tell you the truth about stuff, or they start hiding things, they don't tell some people some things and other people other things, and somebody is left out of the loop, these days, the person can go, "I don't think I want to work for this company anymore because they don't have integrity. They're not taking the lead. They're not being honest with me. They've got a serious character flaw." They can even go in that direction.

It is difficult being able to speak up and express ourselves. Social media has amplified this, regrettably. You get to say something and there is limited accountability for saying stuff. Because of that wide audience of people that you're expressing yourself to, you'll find people that support you in that thing you might not want to let out of the bag. All of a sudden they've got, “How many people like what I said?” We are searching and competing for those likes, hearts and moments of affirmation because whether it's the cellphone being a portable slot machine that we're getting a dopamine hit from, our opinions can do the same thing. Social media allows us to express ourselves. It gives an uncontested point of view without or with limited accountability. That is a little bit of that crux of what we're getting worse at having difficult conversations.

Worse at it because a lot of people are avoiding it. Social media helps us avoid it because if I'm tired of seeing their opinion being amplified in front of me over and over again and I don't agree with that person, I can snooze that person for 30 days and not hear from them. If it gets so bad like in the case of a relative, regrettably, I’m like, "I don't want to see any of his posts anymore." I'm not going to unfriend him because he's my relative. I don't want him to see that I've unfriended him but I've had enough of seeing his messages. I can set Facebook to not see any of his posts. Now I'm not having that difficult conversation with someone but I'm having a more pleasant experience when I'm on my social media platform. I'm seeing fewer of those messages I disagree with. That's probably not very helpful, long-term.

As a country that is working on becoming a more perfect union, the idea is to be working on that. We've got to get a relationship between the foot on the gas and the foot on the brake. The foot on the gas is getting progress, growth and capitalism. The foot on the brake is getting safety, whole values straight, be honest with each other, have family values, and be able to have a stable life. It's the balance between those two. You can't crank down on one and the other. In order to do that, you've got to have a difficult conversation. Shall I spend or shall I save? That's a difficult conversation. Within one sentence, I've encapsulated it.

New ParagrShall I set a goal? When I don't reach the goal, how are other people supposed to approach that? Are they supposed to approach it as catastrophic that I didn't meet you reach my goal, or are they going to have a difficult conversation? What are some of the things that are in the way of that goal? How could have that goal taken place? Was that goal a good goal or not? How does that goal that you proposed affect the people that don't want to meet that goal with you? Look at how your body wanted the reaction and go like, "That's a difficult conversation." This group of people does not want to meet that goal. There's nothing we can say or do to make that person meet that goal because it's against whatever that belief is that they're setting with. Whether it's right or wrong, good or bad, they happen to be American and have a belief. They get to have a choice and freedom to execute that even if it's at the expense of others.

Bill, let's put the Coronavirus vaccine front and center with what you said. It is a difficult conversation. I have a very good friend who is a doctor and he is completely anti-vaccine. This doctor also treats me and my family but my family is not anti-vaccine. We sometimes have those difficult conversations. It's not a complete stranger. We know each other so maybe it's not as difficult to have that difficult conversation. I look at the numbers and I'm seeing 98% of new Coronavirus cases are from people that are not vaccinated. This is in the United States. For people that have the vaccine, while there are some breakthrough infections, it's not 100%. By and large, if you have the vaccine, you don't have to worry about Coronavirus anymore.

You don't have to worry about dying from Coronavirus. That is a small little adjustment because you can still get the virus but it will not have a catastrophic experience or hospital experience. It reduced the extreme of it. It doesn't mean it gave you such a boost that you repelled it. We are seeing some of those numbers that there is a repelling going on. Otherwise, we wouldn't have the numbers drop so quickly. It's valuable to go like, "How many people have died in an area?" versus, "They're coming to the hospital and it's not all that bad." That's a significant change and stuff. Your doctor who's anti-vax is latched on and is leaning onto certain experiences, beliefs and hypotheses that he has formulated because he's a scientist. That's what doctors are. They are meant to follow the rules and procedures. With that said, they're also looking for the wellness of their patients and trying to figure out how to get them better. If they see pieces of information that come across their desk, they become open to that new piece of information.

Here's the problem. What happens if I'm a patient and I come in and say, "Doctor, I have a stomachache. I saw this medicine on a commercial. Is this medicine good for me or not?" Who is bringing the medicine to the doctor? The patient is. What is the patient bringing the medicine from? The TV. Who's putting the thing on the TV? The pharmaceutical company. The doctor has already won back from the piece of marketing and branding. Both you and I know there is a range that happens with marketing and branding. All you got to do is be 51% true and the buyer will buy. That's not great. All of a sudden, our information is being dripped with 1/3 truths, 1/2 truths, 3/4 truths, any percentage of truth in between.

With drugs on television, it's very scary to me when I see any commercial. If you watch any live television, which I try not to do. Especially television around the dinner hour, early evening. These things are covered with pharmaceutical advertisements. If you listen to all of the disclaimers they're saying. "It may cause this. It may cause that. Do not use if you are this. Do not use if you are that." I'm like, "The benefit of this drug better be good if I'm going to risk all of those things."

“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” – George Orwell

Somebody that has been having medium to major pain in that area or they think it's an issue, but it really is an issue, the person might say, "I woke up last night. I had a cramp in my calf. It was hard. Where's that anti-cramps stuff?” You're looking for the thing because you don't want to have that painful experience again, "I've taken this before I went to bed and I don't get cramps anymore." That's partially true but it's also partially going, "You change your diet a little bit that day and that stopped your cramping. You didn't work out the way you did, or you're better hydrated and didn't have cramps, or you have more potassium.” I could go down the list. There are other reasons but I created that belief. Having a difficult conversation allows us to have our point of view, and having curiosity and tolerance for another person's point of view at the start. Otherwise, you're doing social media and booting people off. You're kicking them out and going like, “I'm going to block that person. That person's wrong.” It's interesting to see how truth works.

What's happening in America, at least, is captured well by this quote. You have a little meme of a quote from George Orwell. Do you want to share that?

It says, "A further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it," George Orwell. The famous book, Nineteen Eighty-Four , was all about what do you do with truth and how do you do truth and the way that one person would like truth to be done, exercises to be done this way, as well as other things. We're going to watch you through your TV, which is essentially the internet coming things or any 1 of 5 talking devices I have in my house that I can ask any question I want and I can get a form of truth. I notice my skepticism is sitting right there. I can get a form of truth by asking any of the devices. I'm a little scared to mention their names, they'll start talking at me because they're listening for a familiar word that I'm saying like, “What would you like me to research?” They're sitting waiting because I use the word research. We want to get a hold of a truth perspective, which is we start with the information we have and the wisdom, knowledge and experience up to this.

Tom, you and I both know within the short amount of time that there are 90 things on our cellphone that, as older guys, we don't know how to use, where our kids do. Therefore, they're holding a greater truth, efficiency and effectiveness in using the phone. We are not and that's the truth. We could get better skills at that but not without trying to get on the gerbil wheel and trying to run after our own personal and professional development or personal growth. We've got to remain curious and keep adjusting our perspective or otherwise, we're not able to have difficult conversations with people.

George Orwell's quote is right. The more society drifts from truth, the more we'll hate those who speak it. We're seeing this in social media and social media feeds into it. If you hate those who speak a certain truth, you can silence them and not hear them. That's the opposite of having a difficult conversation to try to gain perspective, understand each other, and try to move forward together as Americans in this country, in which we're all here. We have to live with each other. As much as some people might say, "If this person gets elected, I'm going to move to Canada." It is a choice but half of America isn't going to move to Canada every four years. Most of us are going to remain here.

In my business practice, mediation practice, training and facilitation of companies, and training and facilitation of government agencies, I run into this thing all the time. Which is, how are we able to open our mouth and have some space for maybe stepping in the poop a little bit and not going to be nailed for it? This is just an idea or a thought I'm having. Don't jump down my throat too early on this. You may want to think about what the 2nd or the 3rd thing is underneath that. The reason why freedom of speech is so important to us as a country and as human beings is you don't want people to shut up. As soon as they shut up, that entire conversation goes underground.

I want to know where the dangerous people are. The more open communication I get, the better off it is because the people that are going to do harm to others, I want to know where they are. I want social media to be open and expressive. The thing that's missing that I would like to prefer and see is curiosity and empathy for the people that are saying junky things. I'm guessing you're mad and you'd like fairness and health inside the community, equal protection under the law, and fairness in the court system. I want all that stuff above the board because since you don't get that, you get black market communication, which is the way a mob works. I'm going to make deals and create loyalty so you won't tell bad things about me and you won't go to court. It goes under if you can't go get it. The problem is we've got to watch and call out that narrative that is doing that because otherwise, it will not go as well.

It's interesting that we're doing this to ourselves. The whole point of freedom of speech in our constitution is freedom of speech without a repercussion from the government. It's the idea that you can speak out against your government without fear of being put in jail as a dissenter over whatever is happening. We don't have to worry about that freedom of speech in America or being jailed because of our beliefs or what we say about our government. We do have to worry about being silenced on social media and about how others are going to perceive us or we're tuning each other out. The big divide in America is each side we're tuning each other out, only wanting to hear things that reinforce our beliefs because that makes us feel good.

I feel appreciative of you bringing that truth forward. It's like freedom of speech is about speaking up against government leadership. You and I both have worked at jobs that are not in government. It's a private job. The owner might not like what we say and think, “We can't promote him because he said or did this thing.” That's problematic because what the owner doesn't know is if he doesn't allow a healthy discussion with both ideas and bad news, it’s like, “I've discovered something. I'm not going to say anything because if I say something, I'm not going to get promoted.” That's problematic.

It is problematic but it's also perfectly legal. There's nothing that says you get the freedom of speech in your job and you're protected from retribution or whatever. It doesn't work that way.

If you hate those who speak a certain truth, you can silence them and not hear them.

Good owners can manage skilled owners. The ones that I trained can manage a voice of dissent and opposition. They can accept what the person's saying and gently shift it to something that everybody can feel good about, being in a relationship, be able to accept that there are different points of view. This might be a good idea. The way you're expressing yourself is not as helpful as this other way of expressing yourself. I'm not trying to make people behave. I'm trying to get people to communicate to make sure that there’s greater collaboration and cooperation. There's healthy and difficult communication. Two things, healthy and difficult communications. You got to get the healthy part in front of it, which is the arguing about taxes. It's got to be healthy, “This is the good reason why it's this percent. This is a good reason why that's built this way and why we need to change it to that way.” That's a healthy debate over something that's valuable. It’s not, “I'm right, you're wrong, shut up.” That's not healthy for us. Regrettably, we still have that going on.

We have it going on a lot. Let's come back to the Coronavirus vaccine. We started with that being a difficult conversation. It is one of those difficult conversations people are having across America. I'm also seeing the media as not being helpful in fostering healthy conversations. For example, Joe Biden's administration put up the goal of having 70% of Americans who receive at least one dose of the Coronavirus vaccine by July 4th, 2021. That was a good goal especially after the early goal of getting 100 million Americans vaccinated was achieved so quickly. The administration is like, "Let's raise the bar. This is the road to recovery. This is how we're going to get past this thing. Let's set a high goal, 70% by July 4th, 2021."

Despite all the best efforts, they didn't make that goal. That's all that I was hearing and seeing in the media. I don't know about you but this is the message being amplified, "Joe Biden's administration misses their Coronavirus vaccine goal." You'd think, “That's amplified so much. They must have missed it by a mile. It must have been a lot.” To me, that’s the emphasis being put on in the media and they weren't saying it. It's like, "Are you guys burying the lead? How badly did they miss it?" Nobody was saying that. I had to dig and research. It turns out they missed it by 3%, 67%. How much longer is it going to take to get there? I was thinking, “Is it going to take months? Has it slowed down that much?” No, about 2 or 3 weeks and we'll have reached that 70% goal. Are you telling me the media is amplifying this message that Joe Biden's administration missed their Coronavirus vaccination goal, and we're going to be there in a couple of weeks and it was only by 3%?

I got to get a headline to get a click. The brain works that way, Tom. It responds better to negative messages than it does to positive messages. It's like, "We did it.” They’re like, “Great, I don't have to worry about it." No, it's better that they almost got it. We were just about there. The brain says, “You hit your goal. I don't have to get vaccinated. You got through your 70% goal.” People are satisfied when I finished something off but all of a sudden, we're also psychologically flat-footed. You know this too. When we finish a project at work, "Now we can rest a little bit." All of a sudden, three weeks later, "What the hell did I do over the last three weeks? I got so much done before when I had the goal and I hit this thing. Why can't I finish that little, small piece at the end of it that I didn't finish? It's been weeks, months. All I had to do was that little thing to finish it but I didn't.” Why? It’s because I was done and I got it up. It worked perfectly. It came to conclusion.

It wasn't done but my brain psychologically finished it and closed it off. As being so, there's no further action needed to do it. There's no pressure, adrenaline and working. The media amplification, whether it's on purpose or they're being accurate, they set a goal and they didn't do it. If it was on purpose, who's going to blame that? If you're trying to motivate a couple of other people to be a part like, "It's time for me to get vaccinated. Yes, it's time for me to get my second shot.” There are still more people trickling in and then we're going to get to our 70%. The thing is for all of us to have awareness and consciousness of our own psychology, we've got to watch how we talk to ourselves.

Obviously, people can be easily influenced to get in the silo, only listen to certain information and get stuck in that certain information, whether it's Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson. It's hard to tell the difference between the two of them because they're amplifying in the same way. Not that there's something wrong with them or their messages. The way they amplify is to engage, not to bring to a resolution of truth. They're not interested in that. It's not important like they're talking truth. They're talking in order to build loyalty and connection with their program. They're the keeper of real information and they're convinced of it. How are you convinced of it? I have doubts and skepticism about many things that I have in my consciousness. That allows me to adjust my perspective, maintain curiosity, provide support to people in conflict, and have a wonderful sales conversation with somebody.

I almost wonder if the Joe Biden administration would have made a mistake by setting a goal of 65% by July 4th, 2021 and beating it because the media wouldn't be talking about it so much. It almost makes more sense to have a goal you're not going to meet. If I were Jen Psaki in the press corps through the administration, I would probably say, "You're right. We missed it by 3% but had we achieved that goal, you guys wouldn't be talking about it. We did the right thing.” Can you imagine if she flipped it on them like that?

That is a funny flip. Talking about the feeling of disappointment next to the feeling of optimism would have also been helpful in our narrative. We do feel disappointed that we didn't hit 70% because we set a lofty goal for ourselves. Notice I'm making the turn with the word lofty. We did set the bar a bit high. At the same time, we feel optimistic and joyous that we are able to reach that.

Also, make such progress in a short period of time.

I'm going to be Jen Psaki, “I feel curious when we're going to hit the 80% mark.” All of a sudden, she set the new bar and a goal.

Good owners can manage a voice of dissent.

She set a vision and a goal.

She also created uncertainty. We see the dopamine. Human beings chase dopamine around like its candy. Our body would love to get dopamine and serotonin. They want to stay in that space. It's going to pursue our cellphone because it rings and buzzes. It's going to look at email, Facebook or LinkedIn for pieces of information to serve knowledge. It's going to look at videos and news clips because it wants to get the latest hit. It's got to have some kind of reward in the messaging to get us to come in. We got to be baited a bit. We become sloppy pretty quickly sitting on the TV.

The administration could learn something from the marketer-in-chief, former President Donald Trump. The media would probably latch on if Jen Psaki said, “I feel curious about when we're going to hit that percent.” “Is that your new goal? When are you going to achieve that goal? When is the president going to achieve that goal?” “We'll see what happens." That's what she needs to say.

All of a sudden, former President Donald Trump was excellent at putting the three major narratives together. Present a reward, create anticipation and create uncertainty about it. Those are sales and marketing narratives. They are not production narratives or policy narratives. They are not getting anything completed narratives. You don't get stuff done by just talking about those three things. That goes to the people that need to do those things. If you're building a building, then it's the construction people and all the ones that are putting up the new thing. The marketer-in-chief goes, "I can't wait until this building is done. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to have some great features to it. People are going to like this experience of being in this building. It's going to be the best building ever." The marketer-in-chief gets to stay in his lane.

The challenge is, how do we have the difficult conversation that's needed in government? Government is about a series of difficult conversations. Are we going to meet the needs of the few? Are we going to meet the needs of the many? Do we go after supporting a country by getting involved in their war? Are we going to stay back and let them solve their own conflict? Are we going to sell them weapons? Are we not going to sell them weapons? Those are difficult conversations and you got to be ready to stay in the fire in order to do it as well as being compassionate to the person who lost out on their point of view and then it goes better.

It'll be interesting to see where the administration goes next in their messaging. Do they stay more optimistic? Do they pump their foot on the brakes a little bit and say to themselves, "This is what the next marker is for COVID. This is the next thing?" Do they turn their attention away from COVID? Not fully but do they turn it away and say, "Full-out press on other forms of infrastructure. Full-out press on expanding the economy on XYZ?” The economy got to keep pace and start changing with the economy the way China's been changing. They've been taking leaps and bounds. The estimation several years ago is, "It'll take them X about to catch up." That was not a true thought several years ago. They're starting to take certain initiatives. Their deal-making skills are one-sided, but if they provided a little bit more collaboration and cooperation, things would be much better with some of the initiatives they took. There's more difficult communication that you and I are going to get ourselves into, Tom. That's for sure.

I'm sure there are and we need to not avoid it. That's the big message here. Avoiding it is going to prolong our issues. We need to step into it and have those difficult conversations. It's more a matter of learning how to have those difficult conversations. Bill, if anybody is wondering about it, you certainly know how to advise them how to do that.

If anyone needs support with moving through difficult communications, please reach out. We will provide support to get you through those conversations. That's for sure.

Bill, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Thanks, everybody.

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Is CNN Part of the Truth Problem in the Media?

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:07:45 GMT

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Fake news, clickbait, and irresponsible journalism have been common problems in media that have now injected themselves into the norm. When it comes down to who is responsible, it can only fall on the hands of media outlets whose job is writing and disseminating the news. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom dive deep and share their thoughts on how major news outlets are doing their job in portraying the truth and its impact on citizens, especially voters. They highlight Jim Acosta's question to former President Donald Trump and discuss how language and wording affect how news is reported and received.

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I'm pleased to talk about this subject. This may surprise some of our regular readers. A lot of times, we'll call out Fox News, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson on something they're saying that's not in alignment with truth or not helpful but we're going to talk about CNN and how they're a part of the problem, too.

As I support businesses and organizations to communicate better, one of the challenges is that if you put junky language into it, you're not necessarily going to get cooperation and collaboration from the listener. They're going to literally reject and/or boo when you're using a language strategy that isn't helpful. Having the opportunity to say, “We've got to do a better job of communicating to make a difference, not to create a conflict.” That's one of the things that regrettably, a paid news service that's looking for advertisement is looking forward to creating a conflict so they can get eyeballs so that they can pay the bills, stay in business. All of a sudden, you're not getting the level of news that we would like to get and it's not reported that way. It's reported from a place of escalated energy to get the number of eyeballs it needs. That's one of the big problems that CNN and all the news outlets have. They've got to maintain some form of sensationalism in order to keep their eyeballs in place. Regrettably, it's caused some junky tactics to take place.

When I see some of these tactics and actions, it's very disheartening and disappointing to me. I'm not going to paint the entire news organization with the same broad brush. I don't know if it's the producers telling the reporter to do this or the reporter deciding to do it on their own but it appears like they're trying to manufacture news. Manufacturer something that's going to be controversial to get those eyeballs.

If I'm a news producer or a news executive that has been in charge of making sure I am maintaining market share, I got to figure out how to penetrate this now broad landscape of information exchange. I've got to get the viral thing to show up. If I'm not getting X number of people watching this broadcast, what winds up happening is that I can't stay in business because all of a sudden, I'm out in the outer part of the solar system hanging out with the asteroids and there's no warmth out here or no cash either. I've got to create something that's going to create a controversy and/or create an emotional response inside the group that I'm with. Before we got on, you showed me a little clip. If you'd be willing to set that up a little bit, where was that clip taken?

We’ve got to do a better job of communicating to make a difference, not to create a conflict.

The clip with Jim Acosta from CNN. He traveled with the press corps and former President Donald Trump in Texas down to the border of Mexico. He goes to Texas because I also saw some footage of Governor Greg Abbott of Texas seeing him as well. The former president was playing his greatest hits and he was continuing to propagate the big lie. Interestingly, the other people that were there, the audience for Donald Trump's speech, were not Donald Trump supporters. It was members of Congress, especially the House of Representatives, who are in alignment with him. Jim Acosta, when there was a lull toward the end of his speech and what he was saying, decides to shout a question at the former president and asked, “Are you going to apologize for January 6th?” To me, it was very disappointing to see him ask that question in that way but even to ask it at all. There's no way Donald Trump's going to agree with you on, you know what his answer's going to be. You're just trying to make the question itself be the news.

The bad news is still news. It's a little weird to say but this gives the alternate news media a chance to air that thing. That creates us versus them. Who's them? It gets CNN to be known as and it becomes continued to be the demonized fake news narrative instead of going like, “If he doesn't yell anything, it's just Donald Trump standing there and nothing going on except for a couple of word exchanges and he's saying similar things that he said in the past.”

There is a big problem that comes up here. The biggest problem has to do with the word apology. It doesn't work. Even if it's true, if the person is humble, most of the time, people don't go down the path of apology because their identity, their self-worth or their respect is woven up into the choice that they made. Jim Acosta isn't even looking for the question to be answered because if he was, former President Donald Trump would have said, “Looking back, I feel disappointment that those people acted the way they did because it took the focus away from the election stuff that I wanted to talk about because now we're talking about the violence.” Donald Trump could have spun it in his direction if he had those skills.

That's a very big if. We know the former president well enough should know that he's not going to do that. That's I agree he could have turned it around and made it into a victory for himself.

That’s the thing that's missing here, the power of communication. If you're confronted with a challenging question, it's to step through the challenging question, not to step around it. One of the things that have happened many years ago is to do a thing called sidestep the challenging question rather than step through. The challenging question. It’s what I recommend when I do my mediation practice when I do business consulting. Step through the conflict. Don't step around it, bring bad news early, do scary honesty, take the heat, hold the shield up if they're doing a flame thrower and have a compassionate and empathetic response to get back. Apologies rob us of that. Apologies always have power over narrative. Somebody is better than the person that made the mistake.

One of the things that we need to do as human beings is do a better job regarding accountability. You and I know this one. Down the thing, it's not just global warming but it's global pollution to go with the global warming which is having to do with, “I can make this plastic thing but I'm not responsible for nature to reprocess it, it's up to some landfill to do it.” That's a level of balance of nature that we need to get ourselves into because all of a sudden, I feel like I'm coming out of a scene of Wall-E where all the trash is piled up all over the place on the planet. There's a lot of robots putting the trash into the little containers in a stack. Is that the world that we're heading towards? We want to do a better job of languaging and being able to give a question to a leader that they can answer and slow walk into accountability which is something that most people are willing to do, so it's not dangerous and can.

It can help reveal the truth of the person that you're asking a question of without them realizing that you're walking them out the end of a plank. I agree that former President Donald Trump could have answered that question in a way that he could have turned it into a win for him. Wouldn't he love that? I heard he likes to win but he doesn't think that way. He feels like, “You punch me. I'm going to punch you back.” That's his style. Let's say you're Jim Acosta in that situation. For a moment, let's change the circumstance a little bit and say he's not yelling a question in a situation that you're unlikely to get an answer on here, let's say he's been called upon and he's going to ask a question and the former president's paying attention. What would you counsel Jim Acosta to do to restructure that question to start to achieve something beyond getting attention?

The difficulty that's a part of it is that Jim Acosta just needs the emotional reaction because the story was a part around the insurrection but it was really about the way it was framed inside that video clip. These were all the congressmen that avoided voting on the thing.

Bad news is still news.

We need to make sure that our audience understands that.

It is an alternative motive for Jim Acosta doing it. He's trying to shine the light on another truth by creating an inciting incident. It's not flashy enough for the internet, unless you say, “The crowd boos Jim Acosta.” That would be a great highlight. What did Jim Acosta say? Jim Acosta’s doing is the same thing as Tucker Carlson’s doing and the same thing as Donald Trump does.

He was manufacturing news, trying to create some new truth. Let's be clear for our audience, so they understand. This speech at the border took place the same day there was a vote in the US House of Representatives, specifically for creating a house select committee to investigate January 6th. Since the bipartisan effort got killed in the Senate, the House decided they're going to move forward and investigate on their own. All these Republican members of the House avoided voting on it at all. They didn't vote yes or no because they're at the border with Donald Trump.

They don’t have to go on record one way or another. “I wasn't there for that vote.”

“I was dealing with urgent matters that are border,” or I was something.

Our words matter, how integrity works matters. Human beings want trust, integrity and truth-telling. It can’t do but at the same time, a person or a group of people, it's too painful for them to listen to the truth because it's against a fundamental belief that they've invested in. People have invested in the former president. Money, time, energy, spirit, prayers, all of those things they've invested in the former president. It’s because they've invested in, they believe in him. He's able to do it. The messaging is, “Nobody can fix this but me.” It doesn't matter if he did or didn't fix things because the brain needs to believe 51% of it to be true. It needs to be over the middle mark before it says, “I'm all in.” I know that's unsettling but the brain is willing to tolerate 49% of untruth just to create stability for itself. I'm wincing because that means that it's easy to sell soap, razors, food, fast food and whatever stimulus that you put it. It means, “We are not fast food, we are fan food.” All of a sudden, I language a marketing slogan for one of the fast-food restaurants.

People love our food. It doesn't matter that they're taking you away from what it is or if it’s healthy.

We can go down various different marketing and branding messages and it's where the vote is, whether it's the vote or the cash, all I got to do is get that brain to be on the 51% tile side of it and keep reinforcing the 51% that it's true. The brain will naturally move over and it's hard to swing back. It's almost like it's a sad story. The researchers documented this pretty good. That at the end of World War II, as the German soldiers came home, many of them believe that Adolf Hitler never lied to them. You got to sit with that a little bit because that means there was loyalty, respect and the fight for the motherland and fatherland in this case. The commitment to loyalty into an identity and to the vision of the leader. It's also to the product. You and I buy things based on how many imprinted messages that we've received and our brain can't escape it either. It's important for us as human beings to start writing our language that has things that can be helpful.

Our words matter.

Jim Acosta would say instead of, “Are you apologizing?” No. Donald Trump will never answer that question. It's going to get Jim Acosta the eyeballs he wants but it's not necessarily going to help the nation. It’s like, “Is this event helping the nation heal?” He still gets his headline because everyone at the press corps is going to still boo him. Now, it's not about an apology, it's about a forward leading message. People will boo him. “Is this helping the nation heal?” Can you imagine that sentence instead of apologizing? Apologize, in this case is a pass-looking narrative and this is a future-looking narrative based on a need that is valuable to the nation. That helps news because now the conversation is, “He's not interested in healing in the nation.” Also, all the congressmen that are here are not interested in healing in truth for the nation, either.

All of a sudden, he still has the message but there are people who say, “Donald Trump doesn’t have to apologize for anything. He didn't send those people down there. Those are just crazy people.” The people that are saying that are already on the 51% in the believability of it. This is a very unsettling conversation about how language can be used and if we don't do a better job, fake news gets to have more of a lifespan than it already has, which is not good to have because they're telling a story to get eyeballs. Our nation is not in the willingness to take capitalism away from the news.

The news organizations are independent and they have to make a profit or they're not going to be around. That is true and that's problematic in its own way but it's the reality of our capitalistic society.

There are ways to get there, language-wise, at least your closer to integrity and truth. It's not so much Jim Acosta’s fault as much as an unawareness of the problem in it. The problem in it is you're trying to create a power under narrative, which is the same thing that the right does the left does.

That’s what Tucker Carlson does on a daily basis on his show.

He's doing that. Marketing and branding become the primary focus and all you're doing as news media outlets are testing, branding and marketing message to see what else sticks in order to persuade, encourage, capture and list loyalty against the other side. That's not a strong, healthy democracy narrative. I'll give you an opinion but setting an opinion next to an exaggerate and spin as one Fox person said, “He exaggerates and spins, he doesn't lie.” Exaggerates means that you're telling something below 51% and you're spinning it to get it to be above the 51%. That's the way language is being used. We're going to see more blaming, shaming, judgments, criticisms, labels, diagnoses. Both as a nation, a business, a company or as an individual, if we're going to work to reduce the emotional load inside the listener and to have a better discussion of truth, then we can do a better job of getting progress to work on the things we need to work on. We've got some big problems.

We do have some big problems and that was our point from the beginning of this episode. Do we need to waste time getting eyeballs to a story instead of trying to report some news, find some facts or ask some questions that can be answered, that get us closer to the truth? It's disappointing when that doesn't happen.

Saturation branding and saturation marketing work. You say it enough and it works. That's why a lot of Republican voters believe that there are problems with the election. They believe it because they keep hearing the same message. They've got them from the 40% part of the brain believing it up over the 51% and once you keep getting them on the other side of the line, you've got this heard going in the direction that is not inclusive and collaborative.

If we don’t do a better job, fake news gets to have more of a lifespan than it already has.

That's the other problem that we've seen Jim Acosta do in other reporting that he's done. Some of the other, we talked about another CNN reporter about how they go after the fact and they try to combat these 51% and more beliefs with the facts which are never going to work. It's not effective.

You've got to be compassionate to what the person's response is, not counter with a point-counterpoint with a fact that's not helpful. What's helpful is that the person is in a group of people and says, “The voters are in charge.” These voters are not really in charge because they're not on the Supreme Court. The court has the wisdom, knowledge and experience about the Rule of Law. The voter is not enforcing the Rule of Law. In fact, if you left it up to them, they would want somebody to enforce the law on others but not themselves.

That's when a lot of current spinoff problems that we're having right now with various different laws that are being written in order to support the needs of the few over the needs of the many. That's not a good thing. It becomes less and less a stable entity called the nation. We got to recapture that and do a better job recapturing that because restoring respect, identity, acknowledgment and recognition for what the nation does and can do is called honoring the win when it takes place. We'll have to see how the infrastructure bill will sit as it moves forward.

Thanks, Bill Stierle. I appreciate having this conversation and shining a little light on what is some sensational journalism.

Get beyond apologies, get into disappointments and how to transform an apology moment into a moment of healing, progress, and growth. An apology doesn't fully get us there. That's what we pick up with, next is how do we move the needle to get our leaders to language things in a way that it's going to move forward. That'll be more helpful.

Bill Stierle, thanks so much. I look forward to that.

Thanks, everybody.

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Objective Truth vs Subjective Truth

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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Now, more than ever, in a political climate filled with so much division, it is crucial to have the ability to discern what is subjective and what is objective. Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the difference between subjective truth versus objective truth and offer examples in multiple contexts such as business and politics. As people consume more information from various sources, the lines get blurry, and belief often takes precedence over facts. That’s why it’s important to draw the line as you build your own perspective, political or otherwise.

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We're going to discuss objective truth versus subjective truth. I'm looking forward to this discussion because we have many examples that have nothing to do with politics although there are some that come into it but this is something that many of us experience every day in our lives or in our business.

One of the challenges is that how do we do integrity in regards to a thing called accepted social norms. How do you hold somebody accountable for that? The answer is you can't because it's outside something that's either criminal or it's civil. There are these different laws. It's a little challenging because human beings struggle with truth. We struggle with perception and perspective. All you got to do is believe something and it becomes your truth, which can be problematic because as soon as you believe something, it may not be the truth. You may want to, as a human being, hold onto that truth because somebody told you it was true. You've never wanted to fact-check it and never wanted to make an adjustment to it. This is a good topic. There are many instances in businesses where we can get stuck as well as in politics. They get stuck between what something is objective, more fact-oriented or subjective that might be more feeling-oriented. I feel like this is a wrong thing to do versus, "There's a law about this." You've had several different experiences in business like that.

I have and it's an interesting thing for me to think about. I'm happy to share with our readers. I’ll try to keep it relatively easy to understand. In some ways, it restores your faith in the fact that there are certain things that are objective truths that you can count on, especially if we look at things we want in our country and politics. There's been an assault on truth. Can we get to the truth? Is there absolute right or wrong? Not in everything but in some ways there is some certainty. I'm a business owner and we provide services for customers. They pay various different ways, a lot of times, by credit card. Sometimes, you have a customer who, despite your best efforts, feels like they don't feel good about the situation. Even though in that situation I will offer a compromise and a partial refund.

All you have to do is believe something and it becomes your truth.

I had somebody who, despite the fact that we provided about 3 or 4 times the amount of service in what they paid for to try to make them happy. At the end of the day they were stuck and they wanted something that was not in alignment with what they paid for. They had the belief in their mind that they should get something more than what they paid for. That gets to be a difficult situation. I’m trying to have an amicable way to end it, I offer, "We don't agree on this but in the interest of putting this behind us and not having a fight over this, I'll offer you a partial refund of X." This happened. It reminded me of this. This customer refused that. They flat out said, "I demand a complete and full refund," which was not in alignment or proportionality with the service that was provided in good faith.

On your side, it’s fairness too and best efforts. A belief creates an entitlement. The word entitlement is a very difficult word in politics because you're entitled to do something. Tom, you pay insurance. That is money that you're saying to this company, "You're setting the numbers and I'm in agreement that I'm paying you this money. Therefore, if anything comes wrong, something is going to come back." In the world of politics, as soon as we get into Medicare, Medicaid and things like that, that's insurance. People are paying money in and then they're looking for services to come back out. There are some limitations to the number of services like you can't get your plastic surgery or certain things inside that space because it's not in alignment with what is fairness with that insurance policy. It's not an entitlement because it's something that you're exchanging money for a service even though a label and a belief can be put in that way. That's why the subject called objective truth and subjective truth is important because depending on how you cast a word, a phrase, a term, you can shift something that used to be in this objective space over to the subjective place. Everybody goes like, "That's a bad thing." You're going like, "How did it become a bad thing?" There are other examples that it's not that. The fact doesn't matter anymore because the subjective interpretation has taken over as fact.

That is important to understand. Troubling in some ways but it should be reassuring to people that somewhere there is an arbiter of the facts and there are rules you can rely on. In this case, going back to my example as a merchant, the customer had a belief that they were going to get something that wasn't in alignment with what they purchased. We did our best to provide that service in full and in fact did more efforts. To us, we spent way more time than what they paid for but they demand a full refund. What do they do at that point when they don't accept my partial refund? They can go to their credit card company and claim that what they purchased they didn't get and try to do what's called a chargeback or reverse the charges. Within a certain amount of time, the credit card company is there to look after the purchaser and make sure that there's no fraud and stuff like that.

Here's where it gets into objective truth. There are only certain reasons that a credit card holder can say our justification for why they're reversing the charges. It's not like, "With the service that was provided, they didn't do a good job." That's not one that's available. It's not like, "I'm not happy with the result." It's either it was a fraudulent purchase that they didn't ever make in the first place. That's a pretty high bar to me. It's easy to prove that's true or false or the item or service wasn't delivered but this is where it's important. This one is what applied in our case. As long as we can show as a company, we provided service. We're deliverables. The volume and the value of those things are at least in the neighborhood of what was paid for.

The customer was a participant in that exchange with emails and things like that. They showed up, exchange and working with your company in order to reach the end goal that you were hired to do.

We provide this evidence to Visa, MasterCard and American Express. The credit card company is the arbiter of truth and facts in this situation. We provide that evidence not only deliverables but we provide a transcript of Zoom calls, which we have Zoom calls with clients and they're all recorded for everybody's benefit. You say, "This customer participated so if they claim that they'd never intended to make the purchase, that's pretty clear evidence. If they didn't intend to make the purchase, why are they having a conversation with us and engaging in the process?" The Visa and MasterCard, all they look at are, "Did you do work? Did you deliver it? Did they participate? Was the purchase properly made?" There's none of this. "I purchased but they didn't deliver everything they said they would." As a company, you want to be in integrity in trying to provide what you promised you're going to provide but what this objective truth ends up the customer can form in their own mind that they should have gotten something beyond the scope of work and what they paid for.

Honestly, in this case, I felt like we did go above and beyond trying to satisfy them at the end of the day. That's why I offered a partial refund. The credit card company comes back and says, "They intended to make the purchase. You provided service." It's provided service, period, not didn't provide service up to this level that the customer was happy. It's like, "Did you do it or did you not?" It's very black and white thinking on the part of the credit card company. That's where it gets to objective. That, to me, was a good example of this whole issue we're discussing about objective truth versus subjective truth. There are multiple perspectives to look at this from. Mine, as a business owner, has only one perspective. I'm sure as a consumer, you might think, "I paid for this but they should have provided that."

This is where it gets unsettling, the objective truth versus the subjective truth. The thing is that once the services are delivered, the value of the services delivered is decreased. We've talked about this thing before. There's an example in the past that we've used called the Call Girl Principle where the money is paid upfront before the intimacy. Sex Act is a thing because the value decreases after. It wasn't that good. You don't get a refund because it wasn't that good. This is what the value was before. One of the hardest things that we're dealing with within our society is that we're making a purchasing of truth in a certain way. We're then immediately devaluing the truth because it's from a different party, remedially devaluing truth because it's not getting the idea in our mind about what the deliverable is. Even though we're saying, “We don't do this thing. We do this other thing. If you want that other thing, you've got to go to someplace else but we do this part of it well. We don't do this other thing.”

They pay you the money for doing this thing and they go, "What about the other thing?" You say, "I told you I don't do the other thing. I'm not responsible for X, Y and Z. That is a different company that had different services. We don't do that part." "I thought you did. Therefore, I want my money back." "You've only bought this part and you need this part before you get that other part anyway." Regrettably, in a very disheartening and sad place is that the subjective part of it is there's flexibility in thinking that is the subject part of it whereas the logic is going to override the interpersonal thing when it comes down to certain business or political practices. What we're struggling with is the subjective viewpoint. "There were 73 million. Therefore, we need to fight." It's like, "That's not the way it works. 81 million is bigger than 73 million." "Yes but that wasn't the right number." “Votes aren't subjective." "They are. All we've got to do is change the messaging and now they're subjective. We need somebody else to count the votes."

You’ve got to make a choice on how you are going to fight for, advocate, and purchase your truth to make your world work.

You see that the rabbit hole is sitting right there for us to go down. A person that could be reading this can go like, "No but our leaders said there were. Did that go into the fact part of it in the court of law?" "I don't want to look at that that there wasn't any evidence to prove it. I want to keep it alive in the subjective world rather than trying to kill it in the objective world." This is the trouble and the need for truth. The casualty becomes trust. "I don't trust you as a person, the elections, the capitalism, the housing market, the IT, Wall Street, Main Street." Tom, we've got to do some work to restore truth and trust between people. This is where this is. We've got to strengthen this narrative around truth and create laws that we stick to and hold to because there's a reason why they're there.

There is a reason why they're there but unfortunately, often, laws are not enforced equally. The same attention isn't given. You have the whole three strikes and you're out law regarding certain types of offenses that are pretty low level. Three strikes and you go to jail. We're filling up prisons and feeding that private prison industry but then when it gets to white-collar crime, all of the many people contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. In corporate crime, there was one person prosecuted out of all that. It was not in any way the most egregious crime that was committed here. A ton of people got away with an awful lot. The American taxpayer ends up footing the bill to bail out these big companies. Another interesting one where there's a law was the Hatch Act.

That's another one in the political setting that's very simple. You don't use public property and public time to do political stuff. Mix those two things. If you want to do it on your own time then you leave the public property. Go out and leave The White House or wherever. You go out, do your event and then you come back but independently.

You're not supposed to lean on the support of the Federal Government or your official position to do political campaigning and use anything of your office to do that. For instance, The White House is the obvious prop of authority on other things that you're not supposed to do. I remember back in the Bill Clinton administration, Al Gore was, in his capacity as vice president at one point, making some phone calls to request donations from political contributors and did it from his office as the vice president. That would be kicked out, blown up as a huge issue in the media. There was no agency or authority that was the known solution to that to be the police officer to pull Al Gore over and give him a ticket. It was very ambiguous as to what was supposed to happen. There was this law but there was no real mechanism to enforce it.

In TV Speak, they have the TV show Law and Order. There was the law but there was no one to keep the order of things. It's like, "We did this thing but there's no one going to enforce it. There's no one come to. There's no one empowered to arrest a person by breaking one of these political things that we have guardrails." What has happened through time is there has been a stretching of those things that we say, "This is something that we agreed upon." The person goes, "I know you have agreed upon but I don't want to talk about that. The president gets to do what he wants. It's not that big of a deal. It will blow over in the next news cycle, just wait." They never say that sentence. They say, "It wasn't that big a deal." They don't say, "We're going to wait for the news cycle to move so this will go away and those consequences that go with it."

The Hatch Act is a great example of passing a law that tries to establish some guidelines or a guardrail that is trying to govern how our elected officials should act. It sets some boundaries for them but without setting up the consequences. Oftentimes, laws like this don't necessarily establish the consequence. The law has no meaning because this Hatch Act gets discussed in the abstract a lot. "You violated the Hatch Act." Al Gore coined the phrase, "No legal controlling authority to police and enforce it. It becomes this discussion and then it easily descends into different perspectives of truth. It becomes this debate of, “Did he violate the Hatch Act? Did he not violate the Hatch Act? Yes or no?" Fast forward to 2019 when Former President Donald Trump holds a campaign rally on the lawn with The White House as a backdrop, which was a more overt violation of the Hatch Act. At that point, with the sitting Republican President, the Republican is in control of the Senate and no formal process in the Hatch Act to enforce it. What was going to happen? Who's going to enforce it? Former President Donald Trump more blatantly violated it. He's like, "I don't care. I don't think the Hatch Act is important. I don't think it means what you all think it means."

"This is what I want. This is where I want it. This is the one I'm going to do. Go ahead. Make me stop doing what I'm going to do. You can't make me stop what I'm doing." There's this dance between an overt expression and a covert expression. The covert expression is it's going underneath. They're going to do something under the table. If they get caught, they get caught but there's got to be an enforcing body and a way to bring some kind of consequence. Overt thing is it becomes the, "Make me do it. What you're doing is so wrong." It's fundamentally. The money has caused polarization. The fixed belief narrative has caused polarization. Communication is not slowing down as you may have noticed. It's speeding up a bit. It's almost like, "I better pay attention to every spare minute. I better be on some YouTube video that's going to reinforce my beliefs. If I have enough courage, see what the other belief is that's being promoted so I know what to say in reference to that. As a human being, I've got to make my choice and make my best guess about how am I going to fight for an advocate and purchase my own truth to make my world work."

That's where you and I are sitting. That's almost the reason why we started this thing years ago talking about how do we language truth. We can't just keep creating rules for the people that have fewer means and not enforce rules for the people who have enough money to buy their way around the rule. We can't keep doing that over the weekend. That's what winds up happening in the weekend and allows somebody of affluence to slide where somebody that doesn't have the means to protect themselves go to jail instead of walking. We need to take some new steps that balance transparency and secrecy. That balanced a diminished reality and loyalty. We've got to get our reality to match so that our loyalty is not myopic or single-focused because that's what we got. There are things that are being said that are not true. We've got to make sure our loyalty does not cloud the truth of what the person is saying or doing. Not be so quick to jump on a new belief that doesn't serve us. It will be interesting to see what the next piece is going to happen with laws and the news media. How are they going to continue to cover this relationship between objective and subjective truth?

I don't know how they're going to cover it. I'm interested in that as well. It's also important for people to have a better understanding of the difference between objective and subjective truth. It helps each of us individually deal with the things that we face or we're reading about in the media to understand differences. It helps people navigate this world we're living in and all the information that is being thrown at them.

There is a way forward. It looks bleak at this moment on our show. It's like, "How do you deal with this? It's too complex." Most people have withdrawn. They aren't even reading the end of this show. It's like, "This is too hard of a conversation." What makes it valuable is that there is a third way. When we give an empathetic response to both, a black and white thinking perspective as well as a consideration that somebody else's beliefs cause them to take an action that was outside the rule of law then we can have some compassion. For example, if I'm watching somebody that got so energized about their loyalty, they went and marched on January 6, 2021, I need to have some compassion and empathy to realize that person has been influenced by people to get them to do something that was outside the rule of law. Trusting the rule of law, trusting the courts and not thinking it's all topsy-turvy, it isn't. There are many people of integrity that hold the fork down. There are many people that stand there and go, "This is the line I stand for because this is what the law stands for."

We've got some work to do because we keep softening things with collective belief. Seventy-three million people voted for former President Donald Trump. That's the fact that I'm willing to live with. There's the fact that I'm willing to live with Joe Biden got 81 million votes. I'm not willing to live with the phrase massive fraud. It isn't my need for truth or integrity. I can be compassionate to it. I can say, "You've been messaged. People have talked to you. You have a belief that there was a massive fraud. Is that right?" "Yes," the person says. Those are people of leadership and you're loyal to that leadership. They are telling you that there was massive fraud. They're saying that to keep your loyalty. The path of empathy at least allows us to have a discussion about the good reason why I'm on team X versus team Y. They're still human beings, even though I might be in a disagreement with it. I need to be compassionate with the disagreement and then it will go better.

If we have more compassion and empathy, their minds won't boil over to the point where they're willing to be violent and commit acts like the insurrection or the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Unfortunately, Former President Donald Trump was the one who was not only giving them empathy but he's also adding fuel to the fire that got them angry to take action to try to stop the certification of votes.

I'm going to be there with you. It's enough to motivate a loyal person voter to believe that I'm going to be there with you. He wasn't.

Somehow, he's going to protect them from the laws that they're going to break. There's so much that's troubling about all that.

The limbic brain does not sort that stuff out very well. It doesn't say, "You may want to logically think that breaking into this building, even though the president told you may not be your best idea or your best thing." "I can appreciate that. Brain, I can appreciate that you're fired up about this but this is not the way this community or the United States works. It doesn't work quite this way." You're doing something in a way that's opposite of the agreed-upon norms of certification of elections and this stuff. That's what you're against. Tom, to let our readers know, the biggest thing in mediation and communication reducing has to do with stepping into a place where you can listen to both sides, be empathetic and compassionate to the various different beliefs that people have and still not escalate the conflict. That's a good part of my work. Keep it from escalating so that you can have a discussion that you may end up disagreeing with the belief about the way the world is but at the same time, you're acknowledging that I do have a standard. I do have a willingness to allow other human being to voice their beliefs without violence and force.

I would say to have a more healthy discourse and engagement or discussion with somebody that doesn't just evolve into name-calling, blaming, shaming and all these things that are so unproductive.

They're not collaborative or cooperative. That's one of the things that give the United States the strength, collaboration, cooperation. If you don't lean in on those things, instead, you're going to lean in on individualism, identity politics or loyalty for party over nation. It will not go well for us. It becomes which side can get one more vote and then the other side gets fire to the town. That's not our strongest strategy. People are using their words to start the fire. That's not the strongest way that a collaborative, cooperative nation or an active democracy works.

Bill, thank you so much. I appreciate this discussion. It's very helpful to me. I hope it was helpful to our readers as well about objective versus subjective truth.

Tom, thanks a lot. See you next time. We're going to discuss objective truth versus subjective truth. I'm looking forward to this discussion because we have many examples that have nothing to do with politics although there are some that come into it but this is something that many of us experience every day in our lives or in our business.

The customer was a participant in that exchange with emails and things like that. They showed up, exchange and working with your company in order to reach the end goal that you were hired to do.

We’ve got to strengthen the narrative around truth and create laws that we stick to because there’s a reason why they’re there.

I'm going to be there with you. It's enough to motivate a loyal person voter to believe that I'm going to be there with you. He wasn't.

Somehow, he's going to protect them from the laws that they're going to break. There's so much that's troubling about all that.

I would say to have a more healthy discourse and engagement or discussion with somebody that doesn't just evolve into name-calling, blaming, shaming and all these things that are so unproductive.

Bill, thank you so much. I appreciate this discussion. It's very helpful to me. I hope it was helpful to our readers as well about objective versus subjective truth.

Tom, thanks a lot. See you next time.

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A Seed of Doubt Can Purchase the Truth

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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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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Watch the episode here

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.”

A cell phone is a slot machine for a person's dopamine.

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?

Marketing messages can be used to purchase truth.

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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Playing To The Crowd: Dissecting A Reporter's Fight Or Flight Situation

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 12:23:17 GMT

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When people get into a fight or flight situation, truth is sacrificed in favor of comfortable, yet false, positives. Bill Stierle and Tom dissect Gary Tuchman's conversation with Pennsylvania Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano, focusing on the reporter's struggle to control the conversation. They discuss how people go to great lengths to challenge the truth just for the sake of getting one controversial soundbite. Emphasizing the power of compassion and empathy in public perception, they explain how these forces can be used to get out of a tight spot. Bill and Tom also detail how this particular scenario illustrates how the human mind's logical side completely shuts down when overridden by emotions and personal beliefs.

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We've got an interesting topic for you. We're going to talk about truth and how a reporter can disperse the crowd. We have a specific video of a CNN reporter who was engaging at Pennsylvania state lawmaker, who has been elusive to the media. When he finally got him and had an opportunity to ask him some questions, he seemed to do more than ask questions. He seemed to be trying to persuade this person that some of the things that he's been saying are not true. That's where it tries to go off the rails.

It's my need for awareness and skill that the reporter doesn't stay in their lane. They're looking to prove and/or validate and/or elicit a reaction from the congressperson that they're talking to. That person is then doing the same so that somewhere in there, there's going to be a piece of footage that will go viral. This is when the narrative shows up as fake news. When we use communication in order to raise the emotion inside the listener, this is where the problem takes place because fake news becomes an assault on truth. Tom, you and I have had many different experiences and discussions around truth. There's been two graphics that we've used to describe truth in the past.

We'll probably figure out what episodes those were in so people can read those. One of them has to do with truth perspective. I put it on the chart. It's a little bit down on our document there. The truth perspective is that where we look at this cylinder and the cylinder cast two different projections. One observable is a circle and the other observable is a square by the way the light is shining on the cylinder. This is problematic because when we start talking about beliefs and points of view, that's what happens to truth. It gets split between what is the circle version of truth and what is the square version of truth. This is what the reporter got stuck in.

He had an agenda. He did and wanted this person to be clear. We have the video at PurchasingTruth.com for those of you who want to see it. The reporter, who was named Gary Tuchman had a conversation with Pennsylvania Republican State Senator Doug Mastriano. He went into this conversation not just asking a couple of questions, which he did do but very quickly, the state senator felt like, "Wait a second there. You see how you got partisan on that? You started to reveal your bias."

A fight or flight situation freezes the limbic part of the brain, making you more interested in the false positive.

He didn't use that word but the state senator was telling him, "You started to reveal your bias." The reporter kept coming back to him with facts like, "There are 61 lawsuits that have been ruled, and a lot of them by Donald Trump appointed judges that say there was no fraud in the election." That was one fact. He comes out of him with, "What about the Supreme Court ruled on some of these things?" It's another fact. It was very interesting to see how this guy deflected, spun that, and use the crowd around him, Bill. Wasn't that wild?

He did. He looked around and says, "Who is the person that decides upon these things?" The state senator was looking around and goes like, "The people decide." What the problem was is that he said, "Would you like the people decide? Would you like a certain group of nine people or would you rather have nine people that are looking at a common law that were in agreement with? Which one would you like there? The people are voting to get the world to go the way they would like to go." What winds up happening is we're back into this dynamic of, "Is it the circle from the cylinder or is it the square from the cylinder?" Immediately, it causes the cortisol and adrenaline to go up inside all of the listeners. You've got a fight or flight experience that allows the listener to discard all facts coming out of your mouth. That's what it allows them to do.

“You're wrong. We're right. We're right because we believe we're right. We may not have any evidence, but we're looking for it because we have the anticipation that raises dopamine and adrenaline when you say we're looking for.” Tom, we're coming to our house. I know someone has buried treasure in your backyard. The person that used to own your house was a gangster. We found out that possibly there is a suitcase with $100,000 in your backyard. As soon as I say that, even though I made it up on the spot, the anticipation in your body went up, even though your logical brain knows and I even told you that I made it up.

It changed my brain chemistry. I can feel it, Bill. I'm like, "Wouldn't it be great if there was a suitcase with $100,000 in my backyard?" It has an actual physical change in my body.

I made it up on the spot. We have this reporter who does not know what they're doing. They think that their job is to find a got you moment or some film clip where the person is going to meander and look not very powerful. Meanwhile, it's unsettling because the things that they're saying are enlisting the fight, flight, and freeze response. It’s generating and cultivating that through a series of tragic language of, "Here's a reward. Here's anticipation and here's uncertainty." What is the uncertainty? Tom, I have it. Experts have told me. There was a court case revealed that there was a gangster who lived at your house and had $100,000 that they were never able to find. I have it under good advice. There's an important person that said that. If you want to even see this in a big time like the Rudy Giuliani call to the Ukrainian folks, it's loaded with this type of language.

There's a notable person that said there's somebody but we're not quite sure yet. We do have it and if you could bring the announcement. If you can fly the trial balloon for us, we'll keep hitting the balloon up in the air, so everybody keeps looking at the balloon. Meanwhile, we're going to keep everybody in doubt and skepticism and then cause the level of confusion we would like in order to keep voters where we'd like them to be, looking at the truth. You can see unsettling it is. The reason why how the reporter could disperse the crowd is to provide compassion and empathy for all the people that are standing there, even the state senator.

He's a state senator from Pennsylvania. Let me say what the reporter did. After he talks about the Supreme Court, he at one point says, "There's no higher authority than Supreme Court. Who has a higher authority than the Supreme Court?" The state senator turns to the crowd and says, "Who has more power than the Supreme Court?" Everybody around them start saying, "The people do." That was how he started. The reporter made a bigger mistake in saying that, "Take Arizona. There were two recounts in Arizona already and there's one with Cyber Ninjas who's not even an accredited and experienced auditor of things." He wants to try to convince the state senator to agree that Cyber Ninjas is not a credible auditor. What he does, which you'll see in the video, readers, if you go watch it in PurchasingTruth.com , is he says back to the reporter, "You don't want transparency. You don't want another audit." This is where the reporter created that fight and flight reaction.

The reporter did not handle that back very well. The thing that the reporter needed to say is saying, "You would not like transparency." He needed to empathize it themselves. I feel doubtful and skeptical with a group that doesn't have any experience and they don't meet my need for truth because they don't have any experience in doing stuff like this. It's like having a group of high schoolers come in and look at the documents because you would say, "We're going to take a look at their truth." I felt doubtful and skeptical that they would ever come up with an answer that you would be satisfied with. I want the answer that you want to be satisfied with but I also want to have skilled people there. I do want transparency. Thanks for asking. Can you imagine for reporter owns the word transparency? It seems like you didn't like the transparency from the other two votes. You didn't like the outcome there. You would like in your group of people here but rather prefer a different outcome. You're looking for a different outcome. You're not interested in the two audits that took place as a version of truth.

Emotion and habit always win over logic and future thinking.

They would be dumbfounded.

That's the emotion I want. I do not want anger, aggravation, passion, and irritation to be in the environment. I want confused, doubt, and skeptical with their own beliefs. You voted for the other folks to be there and the people in the State of Arizona struggle with trust. This group struggles with trust and it looks like you're going to keep looking around until you find your version of truth.

Take a departure point where that state senator says, "Who does the Supreme Court have to answer to?" That was one of the things he said to his crowd and they say, "The people." How do you emphasize with them?

The reporter has to empathize with the people. A reporter says, "You would like me to hear that the people have the ultimate decision in the voting booth. Is that correct?" “Yes.” "You also have the thought that the people are very good in interpreting the laws that we've agreed upon. Is that correct? That means nine people here can be as good as the Supreme Court. Should we do it that way?" Challenge and step through the belief with empathy and compassion. Challenge and empathize with them.

Not to prove the person wrong, they would say, "I get it. You don't like the outcome. As a CNN reporter, I'm here to report how much you don't like the outcome. I'm interested in hearing how you don't like the outcome." You're asking a group of people to find a different outcome. You would like a different outcome. "How many people would like Donald Trump to be here?" “Yay.” "You would like a different outcome for this." If we had more people that didn't vote your way, then would that be okay? If the other person that you didn't like got there because there were more people that didn't like the way you would like things, would that be okay?

There's no rigor once we moved to the limbic part of the brain, once that fight, flight, or freeze and the ultimate faint and withdraw shows up that people use. We struggle because we want something so badly. We're interested in the false positive because it validates what we think is true. The reporter can disperse the crowd by using language to reduce what is happening in that environment and give the Republican an off-ramp. The Republican needs their off-ramp because he doesn't have one. All he has to do is fight in a certain way to keep the engagement in order to get votes for the people who believe the false positive. It's unsettling. There are little traps, so he has to look right and left. If he wants to keep his job, he can't look right and left and go like, "After this audit, I'm going to accept the results." That's not coming out of his mouth. What's coming out of his mouth is they must have missed something. That starts the entire cycle again.

It starts the uncertainty. That's the fishing lure you throw 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times in the same spot. At the fifth time, the fish comes out and bites that damn lure. The fish is on the hook. This is a problem with messaging that has propaganda feel to it. It's hooking into a person's belief structure and the person can't let go and kick it off the hook because they've already agreed in the illusion of the lure. It's hard not to take the lure because we want it so bad. We've invested so much in the Donald Trump lure. Regrettably, it's artificial. If we look at it as an artificial lure, it makes it easier to see how he's casting the line with sentences. We should do the North Carolina speech that he gave too. He kept casting the lure out with vague and illusionary statements. People were on the hook and they couldn't wriggle off.

This is about where Former President Donald Trump speaking to North Carolina is talking about the Arizona audit and the Georgia audit. We'll see what happens into uncertainty.

If you're a reporter, you cannot combat beliefs with facts.

Some people are saying, "I'll be put back in office." There's no mechanism for that. There might have been a mechanism if the court cases would have found fraud and would have found it at the great level. That's what happened with Gore v. Bush or the Florida vote. Gore said, "For the good of the nation, you go. I'm going to take a step back here. I am not putting all of us through this." That's called the good of the nation. That's taken one for the team. He took one for democracy.

He put democracy over party and his own personal interest. He fought it very far through the Supreme Court. They came down and stopped the recount.

They also stopped the recount in the Florida Republican gal. What was her name?

Pamela Bondi. She was at the time, the Secretary of State.

She's going like, "We're not recounting." It's like, "It was close. You may want to take a look at this and do that." Think about that not recounting at all. Meanwhile, think about this from a truth perspective. Georgia recounted three times. Arizona recounted two times and they still don't believe it. Take a breath on that. They were looking to make sure and they validated the results. The belief and the narrative are overriding truth. It's very unsettling. I know you and I are extending trust that those three recounts and those two recounts were done with high integrity. I know that we're doing that. I know that you and I don't have firsthand knowledge and information.

I know that my belief is saying, "I'm going to give it a push because I'm trusting democracy." I trust the Republicans that counted it in Georgia three times. I trust the recounts in Arizona. I know that I'm extending out on the plank to do that. At the same time, I'm also extending trust to the courts. If 50 of those court cases would have been, "Wait a minute," I would be on that side. I'm extending trust there, too, but it's the same thing. The limbic brain overrides the front part of the brain. Emotion, habit, and belief always wins over logic and future-thinking because that's the way the brain keeps us alive.

Which is exactly why if you're a reporter, you cannot combat beliefs with facts.

You cannot compete. You cannot do it. Even the news reporters, when it got kicked back to them, they did the same thing. They infuriated and gave more talking points. Logic, habit, and beliefs always wins over logic and future-thinking when the person's emotions arise. The logical brain shuts off. The future-oriented brain goes into the tank.

What's scary is some of the reporters who aren't even real reporters like Jordan Klepper does a better job of empathizing with these people than a CNN reporter does.

Klepper does a great job of going like, "Let me see how you do that again. Let me hear that."

I remember when they were talking about, "We need to get to the bottom of what happened there with the thing in the Ukraine." He says, "We should get to the bottom of that." It would be good if there was a trial that they could get to the bottom of that. Maybe even with a judge and the highest judge in the land on the Supreme Court. He's like, "They should do that." The person he's talking to realizes, "You mean the impeachment trial of Donald Trump?"

That's when the person's logic brain and their emotional brain go like, "I'm hijacked with my own beliefs." This is going to be a lot of fun. I want to pick up the sentence, the emotion and habit always wins over logic and future-thinking next time, so you and I can roll up our sleeves a little bit on that. That is something that allows us to talk about the levels of truth a lot easier.

To help people have more productive and healthy conversations about these things and not be name calling, diagnosing, and creating responses in people that are going to resist, that would be ideal. Bill, thank you so much. I look forward to that.

It will be fun. Thanks, Tom.

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Truth and The Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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The January 6th Capitol insurrection was a divisive moment in recent history that has scarred the country’s heart and soul. Changes in society have spurred many to believe in the great replacement conspiracy theory, yet what is it, really? Our host Bill Stierle and his co-host, Tom, discuss the events of January 6th and the surprising results of the research of Mr. Robert Pape on the insurrectionists. Bill and Tom analyze why the events of January 6th happened: Join in as they look at things from a different perspective and share their insights on these events.

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We're going to talk about the January 6th insurrection from a different perspective. We're going to talk about an interesting interview with a researcher named Robert Pape. He did a lot of research that tries to get into the motivation of the January 6th rioters and the communication issues around that, among other things. Bill, maybe you can help set the table here a little more about that.

Tom, one of the reasons why you and I do this thing is that we step into difficult spaces that people will tend not to step into. I've even been encouraged not to take on certain topics because it's like, "Bill, you're going to get people to give you pushback." The answer is that's a little bit part of it. If you're going to be somebody that helps to resolve conflicts, you've got to be able to step into the conflict with some confidence that you can sort out and support both parties during the conflict. There's a certain amount of courage that I and Tom need to cultivate. We might say the "wrong thing" or the thing that is going to cause a little bit of an edge to show up inside our readers. At least we're doing something to contribute towards some form of understanding or clarity or even something positive that can be done with a very tragic situation.

Tom and I got the opportunity to view this interview. This researcher interviewed and researched all of the different people who were arrested and charged with being in the Capitol building during that event. The trigger word is insurrection. That’s the observation. They were in the building fighting through law enforcement to get into the building. I was relieved that there weren't many people that died but I'm deeply saddened that so many people were injured. The people that did die were the ones that were trying to hold to the rule of law, “This is what protection looks like. This is what it's needed to be done here.” What Robert Pape found out was that the predominant demographic number were men between the ages of 35 and 55. They were business owners and CEOs from counties that were mostly blue counties. That was a little unsettling for me because the belief and the bias is, wouldn't it be coming from a red county? No, not necessarily. It's interesting.

I agree with both sides that the assumption for most would come from a red state like Texas or Florida or something. We forget how polar America is. Even in a blue state, Colorado is a blue state. By what, 5% or maybe a little more? Every blue state has a healthy number of red people in it. It may be counterintuitive but it seems logical to me that somebody who is on the red or Republican or conservative side of the political spectrum if they're in a blue state, there might be more things pushing their buttons to have them at a heightened level more so than if they're in a state where they're comfortable and where there are more people like them.

There is a balance between the needs of the few versus the needs of the many.

That's a good way to think about it. It's like, "I am tired of my county voting for or being a part of this way." Even the state of Oregon is going through this right now. A bunch of the counties on the East side of the state goes, "We don't want to be a part of Oregon anymore. We want to be a part of Idaho because that's our tribe. Those are our people. We don't want to be known with the identity of being with these other blue voters along the coast." It's unsettling because people's beliefs, biases and fallacies about their fellow human beings can be faced and talked through with a lot of compassion and empathy for the different viewpoints. Human beings have different viewpoints about stuff. The way democracy works is that you get those two different viewpoints. They do the best they can to have points of collaboration and cooperation about what would be best for the greater good.

What Mr. Robert Pape came up with during his research of those 500-plus people that he interviewed was there’s an inherent belief that each one of them was running in their consciousness that they as a person or as a group were being replaced. He called it the great replacement. If you're a business owner and a CEO, what are you being replaced from? You're an independent thinker. You're working hard as a business owner or a CEO. You're making the most money out of all the people that are working in your shop. You're also possibly getting taxed more than most people inside the shop, probably not from a percentage-wise but an amount-wise. That is unsettling. The problem has to do with, how do you grow a society or an economy so that there's equanimity that can take place. There is a balance between the needs of the few versus the needs of the many.

The communication and exposure of minorities and minority rights may not look like they're getting their fair shake because the saturation of the voice of the minority is we're talking about gays, transgender, African-Americans, Hispanics. All of a sudden, you're talking about these minority groups. The person is hearing the message minority but the fairness thing is a man is making $1 and a woman is making $0.77 or $0.74 on the dollar. Are we looking at the equal? What happened to equality in gender? This group is trying to talk its way up. This group is saying, "You're trying to get more." It's not more. It's trying to get equality, which is something that we as a nation struggle with.

The people that already have the helping hand up the ladder don't think that other people don't have the same helping hand, and they clearly don't, which is upsetting. By Robert Pape capturing this, he's such a good researcher. He did this same research in Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. He's watched what makes people rebel and get invested in their thing. What I was hoping that you and I would get to is give him some solutions because regrettably, on his show, he didn't have any solutions for the great replacement. How do you talk to a person that is stuck in that mindset?

That was the surprising part of the interview and the disappointing part. He's done all this research. He's someone that has a great deal of facts about who these people are, what they may be thinking or concerned about. When he was asked questions repeatedly by the interviewer, he didn't offer any conclusions. He didn't offer any useful solutions or even things that are going to help get toward a solution. He was almost like a computer that it's asked a question and it only gives you the fact of certain things. That was the missed opportunity. Maybe he's a person that focuses so much on the research and the data that he doesn't like to draw conclusions.

It also could be outside of his awareness and consciousness about what to say or do because he doesn't do my job, which is the high conflict mediation part. He doesn't step into the fight. He'll describe the fight. He'll give me the research and say, "You may want to touch on these points here. This is where it's coming from. I don't know how you're going to get through this because it’s a bit of a storm over there.” How do you talk this group off the ledge? They're talking themselves to walk them as well as the country over the ledge towards having a different kind of experience with one key leader and the semblance of democracy. That’s the way Russia and China looks. They have their parliament but they're all in agreement. None of those people is going to speak up against either of those two regimes. Nobody is opening their mouth and saying, "We're doing this but there's a better way." The weird part about it is that there's one thing that I find great about America. We do protect our innovators somewhat with our intellectual property laws. Other countries don't do that. They don't protect it. It's like, "So what? We'll steal your idea and we're going to make it over here cheaper." You know more about this than I do.

No question. America values intellectual property and that type of innovation. America, in general, gives business owners and entrepreneurs very special treatment. If you are in any way a business owner, entrepreneur, investor, anything like that, you get all kinds of special treatment. You get lower taxes as a business when you do research and development, when you invest in intellectual property, when you innovate and create something. You get a monopoly on it for a period of time with a patent. The American system wants the small business owner and the entrepreneur to build businesses. They're willing to give you a pass on a lot of things, a lot of advantages, tax-wise and other ways to do it because they know what business owners and entrepreneurs do is inherently risky. They're taking chances. That always surprised me a little bit about all of these.

A large portion of the rioters on January 6th at the Capitol were business owners and CEOs. I know one of them. You and I each know one of them who was there. We talked about it in a previous episode. One of the things that Trump's followers get upset about is our border, the immigration issue, and not wanting people to come into the country, not to have these open borders. I’ve always found it strange for CEOs and business owners that to somehow slow the volume of people coming into the country would be such an important issue to them. One thing every business needs and one of the goals they're looking for is growth. How do you get more growth, have more people that need to buy things and more people to sell things to? For many US corporations, the more people in this country, the better. That always surprises me that that was one of the hot-button issues for many CEOs.

The fear of, “I'm going to be replaced,” is more a narrative about the need for identity, respect and stability.

Low-cost employment and low-cost workers are other features. They're paying into the system that they're getting nothing out of it. They're paying into it to be here and to have the opportunity because we create opportunities for that to take place. The thing to wrap our noggin around and I'd like the readers to wrap their noggin around is the great replacement, the fear that I'm going to be replaced is more a narrative about the need for identity, respect and stability. I want to slow down change because I don't want change to take place. I want certainty about certain things. I want my version of fairness. My version of fairness might mean that because I'm doing all this work, I don't want to pay taxes. I'm a job creator. The thing is many times, the person is not a job creator at all. They're not interested in helping the entire community or the entire system to work or make a difference. They're not doing that. There isn't enough bandwidth for things that we used to have in the '50s, '60s and even in the '70s like volunteerism. Where is that?

If people are doing two jobs, the water's up to here, and you're trying to tread water, you have no room to volunteer and get back to the community with your time, energy and wisdom. There's no room for it. These folks that are stuck in the idea and the belief of the great replacement, it's in alignment with their belief but is not in alignment with a certain reality of things like equanimity, having enough money to buy things, which will stimulate an economy. You can only press wages down so much before the person goes like, "What's the point?" That becomes unsettling because fairness doesn't look like fairness. Fairness looks like cheating. As soon as you start thinking that, in order to avoid the great replacement, I need to cheat. That's my version of fairness. All of a sudden, we're in the middle of trying to sort through whether or not the election was done or not with the number of votes just because a former leader said it wasn't. We're going to believe him.

There are two different narratives of cheating that are going on in America. You have the former president and the big lie which he started even before the election saying, "If I lose, the election was rigged." After the election, he said the big lie is he won and there was so much voter fraud. That's the only reason that Biden is now president. On the other side of it, you've got the more liberal political spectrum looking at how Republican legislators across the country are passing all these bills regarding voting that are restricting the vote. They're being labeled as cheaters, trying to cheat and prevent people who are not like them from voting so that they can stay in power. These are two different cheating narratives and beliefs going on in America right now. I know people on both sides, polar opposite sides of these things. They each are in disbelief that anybody could see things the opposite way that they do.

I feel disheartened and I know you feel disheartened too about the amount of doubt and skepticism that it takes to cultivate a brain over here. Our brain works in a way that if our need for truth and trust isn't met, we feel doubtful and skeptical. It goes back to one of our earlier episodes about the flat Earth mindset. All you can see is where your eyes can go. Therefore, if I walk outside my house, I can easily make the belief that the world is flat because that's all that my eyes see. All I can see is what is happening in front of me. I don't have a larger view about what is real or not.

When a body creates doubt and skepticism, it'll fight for it. Now, I'm doubtful, skeptical and angry. Why am I angry? My identity is not the way that I grew up in this town. I used to love growing up. As one of the insurrectionists would say, “My town used to be this way, but because of the housing, the immigrants, the number of people here, the economy of this city, I don't like San Francisco. I am going to march from San Francisco to Washington, DC, break in to stop the election because Trump was going to clean all this stuff up and my vote counts.” It does but it's not the same as the other people.

By the way, you may recognize that your city has changed because of the various growth and decay opportunities that have taken place inside the city. It's hard to get the person to realize that there's got to be a relationship between change and stability. There's got to be a relationship between certainty and trust. You got to cultivate that or otherwise, you'll get funneled down into a belief that you can't get your way out of. This conversation is significant. Getting the great replacement back in front of us, it's like what do you say to the person who believes that this city block got taken over and I've been replaced, or my town is not the way it used to be? I don't know, Tom, if you've been back to the house that you grew up in.

The neighborhood is somewhat different. Larger properties have been subdivided into much smaller properties. There are more residents than it used to be and houses are closer together. The demographic makeup of people in the community has changed. That's the reality. That's an inevitable change. Nothing stays the same. It's very interesting because human beings prefer stability. We prefer certainty and constancy, but change always happens. It always happens throughout life. When you're a child or adolescent, we only give them so many new things to be exposed to or be responsible for at a time. Slowly, incrementally over time, as we go through life, more responsibilities are heaped on you and more realities of life. You can't do it all at once or you'd go insane.

That would be unstable if you're going through change after change, or let me make it worse for us, it’s text after text or cell phone after cell phone. We're at a rate of change that is disturbing. Therefore, if I am a person that would like stability, predictability and certainty, would like my identity and self-worth to be the same, you know what I'm doing? I'm putting a hat on. What hat? Make America great again. I want to go backwards to where America used to be. Where was it? When I was a child and my parents had enough money to pay for things because the economy was more friendly to a middle-class person 30 years ago than it is now.

The economy was friendlier to the middle class. That's a true statement. The only problem with it is that people don't believe it. They think that people are lazy and they need to work harder. That's not it. The economy's moved, not the work ethic. The fantasy is that the work ethics move. That's not what's taking place. The amount of value you get for the work that you do has not been equal. It hasn't grown with the economy, the numbers, vote and everything. That's the thing. As soon as you try to go to efficiency and start cutting costs, all of a sudden, the people at the top will tend to be able to make much more than the people at the bottom.

This is always true. The whole thing is unsettling to come to grips with things changing and people want things to be the same.

You and I talk to business owners all the time about how to be present and be ready for change. Start adjusting, build your systems and be ready to change your systems every six months or every year and a half. That was the start of our conversation, “I need to make this change in this business.”

Before we started, I was talking to you about a change I need to make in my business and how to approach that. It always happens. It's inherently unsettling. People don't like change but then other people, the minorities, are wanting to have a little slice of the pie. They don't even want the whole pie. They're not trying to take over the world. They're just trying to get an opportunity.

Fairness, justice, equanimity. Just give me an even shot. Don't put three more bricks in my backpack that I have to carry around because I have a race and a gender that I do.

They're already coming from a country where they had a whole lot more bricks. They're just trying to get a few bricks off of their back here. I'm empathizing with the immigrant here.

I know that we will be able to talk about the great replacement, more solutions for it and how to speak to it so that the person can listen from empathetic and compassionate messages. Have them believe that they're not being replaced. They have the belief that the call to action is one of equality, not one of getting more than what they would like. We're in a turbulent time. That is for sure.

I appreciate this discussion about the great replacement. I like how we're not trying to completely understand that all in one sound bite, in one episode. As I was saying about people growing up, they get a little more understanding or responsibilities or awareness of things that they can handle. Even for me, it's important to set the table of the great replacement here because it ties into so many things that we're going to be talking about in the weeks and months to come.

Thanks for this conversation, Tom. It's been a good one.

I enjoyed it.

Thanks, everybody.

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Integrity and Accountability Under Attack – Do You Believe America Will Care About the Truth Again?

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 11:23:00 GMT

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Taking a look at the government and politics can pull out a lot of dirt. With everything that’s happening in the country right now, do you believe that America will care about the truth again? Bill Stierle and Tom get in a hot discussion about the issues surrounding the country and how disconnected the government and businesses are to integrity and accountability. Both would rather protect the brand name and the company, than to be held accountable for something they didn’t do right. Along with the different areas in society, Bill and Tom believe that we are not learning from past issues and that we’re seeing the same things happen again, people saying and doing something out of alignment with integrity. If all of this continues, what type of values do you think America is trying to step into?

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Watch the episode here

There are many things happening in our country right now that certainly make me question if America really cares about truth or is going to care about the truth. There is a lot to discuss about this and it's very unsettling.

The biggest trouble with what America is stepping into is what values would we like to be at the top of the list? Everybody wants to feel good about the thing they are doing, what they are up, what the country is, their sports teams, their local communities. I feel proud about, inspired about. We tell ourselves a positive narrative story, even though we know that there are mistakes, we tend to not want to talk about or deal with, or even face the mistakes that we make. That is where two important values of ours go onto the bus. Those values are integrity and accountability. Both in business and in government, we need to communicate better about what integrity is going to look like and communicate better about accountability. That accountability is more even than it is because now accountability is clearly not even.

There are multiple examples about how it's not even. For example, if I'm a business and I have been making a product, as I'm making this product, it's discovered that the pollutant or the solvent that I'm using all of a sudden has damaging to the environment. What am I going to do with that solvent? All of a sudden, I got to get rid of it, then I've got to pay for getting rid of a solvent that to be used as a part of my manufacturing, and I now have to get rid of it. It's going to cost me a lot of money to get rid of it, so I dump it over here, and then I dump it over there. All of a sudden, it becomes a Superfund site because the company doesn't have enough money to pay for it. They would rather pay the fines at a lower rate rather than paying how much money it would cost to clean up the thing that they meant. The need for integrity and accountability becomes very difficult when it's a financial security piece.

How does the society carry the burden of that is the government steps in and says, "We are going to take a little bit of money from everybody in taxes to help this company out, even though they made this product, and we are going to help them clean it up in a super fund account?" Not just leave it there to pollute the environment or pollute the land that we have. Some companies, the need for integrity and accountability versus financial security means they put the barrels of DDT and they drag them out into the middle of the ocean. They throw these barrels of DDT off into the Santa Monica Bay or into the Deep Well of Santa Monica. After 40 or 50 years, they start decaying. How do you clean up this mess that has been dumped into the ocean? Again, accountability, integrity and there is nobody around to fix it, no one around to pay for it. Who is going to do it now? "I don't want to. I do now." It's something that we didn't regulate, or we didn't moderate in the past, so now it becomes a huge problem.

The need for integrity and accountability becomes very difficult when it’s a financial security piece.

Both in business and in government, there is a very big trouble with truth because you have to stare truth down a bit and go, "That was us. That was on us. By the way, if we were to fix this, to clean it up, to do something about it, it would bankrupt us, and all these people would be unemployed, or it would cause this company to shut down. I would rather protect the company and protect the brand name than to clean it up and do what I need to do." This is why "Will America Care About Truth Again?" It's important because then when you start telling the truth, and you have to do things like integrity and accountability, which is hard. Some people are having a hard time with truth because they don't want to do accountability and integrity. They don't want to do that. It's very difficult to take a look at it.

We see this in so many different areas of our society. We saw it in Wall Street with the 2008 financial crisis, where you had these big firms that were responsible for getting us into that crisis, selling the mortgage-backed securities that were loans that had terms and gave to people that they shouldn't have given them. When it came down to being accountable for that, it didn't happen. Nobody on Wall Street was held to any standard of integrity or investigation even that you did this and you are going to be responsible. All we were told is, if these big companies go bankrupt, it's going to bring down the whole financial system. Therefore, the government needs to bail them out, but there was no accountability.

I think one single person was charged with a crime during that whole thing. Many people are saying we are headed back down that same path again. Clearly, there is not a sense of integrity or accountability that is happening. We are seeing it in more ways in our government with our politicians and some of the things that are going on regarding truth, integrity, and accountability. The January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol is a big one that we are seeing. There are not a lot of politicians interested in truth.

What I would like to tell the readers is that it's difficult to step into this kind of communication even though I have been encouraged not to get into these kinds of messages. My job is to get myself into these messages. That's the job. The job is how do you step into a difficult message where somebody is going to have a little bit of egg on their face because they said or they did something that was out of alignment with integrity. Someone said or did something that was out of alignment with accountability. One of the things that came out of that experience, the economic downturn, is that accountability and integrity were not held to those executives of those businesses. Now we are seeing the same thing happening in government where accountability, integrity, will it be held with the people that said and did things to allow people to come into the capital and hurt so many law enforcement people.

I empathize with the amount of furiousness and anger that was stirred up about the belief that has been fostered about the election and how angry you could be if you were to believe that fully. Our beliefs drive a lot of our emotions, affect our needs, and cause us to feel angry. The pursuit of what is the best course for civil society to act. If one person in that insurrection, in that group of people, if one person started shooting with any of the bigger rifles, or if they did get a hold of Mike Pence and did take him out, or if Mike Pence walked out there instead, you guys get back. He had the opportunity to do leadership, but it was not safe for him to do leadership.

They weren't going after him because he was the guy that presided over or that was to preside over the certification of the election results.

All President Trump at the time say, "I hope Mike Pence does the right thing." That language pattern, that vibration of the right thing from leadership, is unsettling. It's, I care about this one point of view. I am not necessarily caring about the truth or the greater truths of what it takes to run a country. There are many people that have taken advantage of the goodwill and have lied, cheated, and steeled all those particular words, but at the expense of the nation, there have been many things that we have done just to have been horrific. People are going like, "I got to look the other way on that. I've got to let that go because the greater good is that we have to land on some form of truth and some form of integrity, but we can't go quite that far." That is when it becomes very unsettling. If we don't look at or measure things how many deaths are caused by guns and what are the things to protect ourselves and our fellow Americans from violence, suicide, child injury, we are going to continue to see that the need for choice and freedom with guns is outweighing the need for safety and protection for other Americans.

Some people are having a hard time with truth because they don’t want accountability.

That framing of things helps to say how can we get both rather than saying full-out freedom. If you did full-out freedom, for example, on car safety, there would be a 50% increase of deaths from car accidents if we didn't have all the safety features. People are still going to get in car wrecks. There is not going to die over it. Why? There is an airbag, a seatbelt, a retractable bumper, a cascading front hood where the thing brings in, but it pushes in this way. It pushes right into the middle. What is happens is the person most likely will not be crushed in the middle of this car accident at X miles per hour. If we took the car apart, it would be amazing how many different pieces that would come off the car that is required to be on the car as something that protects the consumer that is inside the car?

I remember having a discussion with my father-in-law. He was talking about the cost of buying a new car and how it has increased so much since the early '70s where he was looking at. It's like the inflation that represents is huge. I said to him, "Certainly, you can compare the value of the dollar now to the value of the dollar then, but if you look at the cars that you bought in the '70s, they didn't have computers in them. They didn't have airbags, antilock brakes. They didn't have backup cameras and LCD screens. They didn't have so many things that they are required to have now that are very good health and safety preservation devices, but they add a lot of costs to the price of a car also."

You can't just look at cars that are so much more expensive now than they were then, and at what percentage of your income is a car, and used to buy that car, maybe with cash and then get alone, now you always have to get along. All those things may be true. We have side curtain airbags. What is that? In 1970, that was a dream. I think Jimmy Carter was the one in the first administration that advocated for research in airbags and started to get those into cars. At the time, that was seen as a pipe dream. Look at the '90s, every car had them.

Car seats for kids, my mom threw a playpen. I swear to God. She did this. A playpen in the back of a red station wagon, that is where she put the baby in a playpen. As if the baby wasn't rolling back and forth in this playpen.

Especially if it's in the way back of a six wagon where these G forces are going this way. My parents had a two-seater Firebird when I was born. There is no place to put a baby in the car. They put me in a child safety seat. Do you know where that child safety seat was? It was on the center console between the two bucket seats, and the Firebird not belted into anything had a front-end accident. I would have been launched through that windshield, maybe in the car seat, but still to think about the perspective and how things have changed.

We need to care about the truth. We need to investigate things. We need to make sure that we do scary honesty. It's not going to be comfortable. Truth isn't particularly comfortable. Some of the things that I used to believe in, I'm going like, I was taken by, I bought the cigarette propaganda, it was not that bad and unsettling. I get to choose what I want. I get to find my things like that part's great, but not great for your own health or your wellbeing. It's challenging because of protection, the identity, the veneer, the respect that all the tobacco companies had at one time. It was the unbreakable wall that you couldn't get the tobacco industry to have any accountability or any integrity until one of them said, "Here is all the research. We are guilty. Let's start paying the things. We will be the first ones in if we get to pay this amount of money and they got to pay in." The last ones are like, "You just started all this stuff." That's what happened. All of those various different economies of that product or that service did not go well. It's difficult for a CEO or a business owner to take that level of accountability and truth when they are going to go like, "This is what's going to do to my shareholders."

I'm remembering now another good analogy to bring into this discussion about truth in business like that, and maybe we could do that before we get into anything in our government because I know that content to be divisive. Do you remember back around the late '90s, this vehicle called the EV1 that GM put out? Because in California, we have most of them, I think. The State of California was encouraged to create vehicles that didn't pollute the environment. If you live in California in the '80s or '90s, there was a whole lot more smog in our skies and a lot more unhealthy air days that they would announce on the news, and then in high school, we wouldn't go out for PE because of the smog alert. That doesn't happen very much now, but the GM came out with this fully electric vehicle called the EV1 in response to the State of California pushing it.

The people loved it that GM would only let you lease it. They wouldn't let you buy it at that time. They had charging stations to say to California made it like our local malls. I remember I lived in Northern California in Pleasanton, California, and our local mall in 2004, 2005, still had some of those charging stations for the EV1, which now are just museum pieces because they won't charge any other electric car. Maybe they have taken them out by now, but when I was there, they still had them. These charging stations were built so people could charge their EV1's. The oil industry conspired with the auto industry to kill the electric car at that time. There is an interesting documentary called Who Killed the Electric Car? That goes into this in detail.

The truth around electric cars was being purchased away by the fossil fuel industry and by the auto industry. Now, fast forward many years, electric cars are real. They are here. Ford announced they are coming out with an electric Ford F-150 truck, which looks amazing in terms of its technical capabilities and specifications as well as its appearance. Did you know that vehicle is the number one selling vehicle in the United States, representing $42 billion worth of automobile sales, one vehicle, the Ford F-150 truck? I have read all about this. It is fascinating.

If that vehicle goes electric, which it's now going, passenger vehicles, even trucks, we are reaching a tipping point, whereas the truth is undeniable, and we are going to see the auto industry or the auto industry shifts. More importantly, the fossil fuel industry is going to wane and be a lot less relevant and not going to be in the same growth mode it has been in for many years. It's some interesting things around truth there that are eliminating. We always say in America, we vote with our wallets. The consumer is going to vote on this and is voting on electric cars. Going in that direction, which is interesting, but we don't have the same kind of relationship with the truth in our politics and government. Do we?

Our beliefs drive a lot of our emotions, affect our needs, and they cause us to feel angry.

The hard part in the government space is that the politician can say something, and it might be true for them, but then they realize that they need to change their point of view somewhere. For example, if Barack Obama gets elected and doesn't do anything about gay marriage, he says, "No, I'm not for that." During his second term, "I am for that." The cost is how we engage in beliefs are if a person has a moral or religious belief regarding gay marriage, and they are not considering that their fellow Americans are in favor of whatever that belief is that they are against, many times, the old belief will stay in place. The old belief stays in place in such a way that people then still want to believe it.

Trickle-down economics is a good example of that. This is what wealthy Americans are going to do when we give them tax money because they know how to handle money. Poor people don't know how to handle money, but rich people do know how to handle money, and this is what they will do with the money that they have, and they trickle the money down through this. Once a belief gets codified and shrunk into a person's brain, it's a branded belief. As soon as I say, Coca Cola, an image will show up in your head, as soon as I say, Pepsi, an image will show up in your head, as soon as I said, Tide detergent. We can go on and on about that, but the brand mapping of the brain has to do with repetitive messaging. They will be a politician in the next five years that will come up and try to resell, repackage, trickle-down economics. They will say, "Yes, it did work." Of course, it worked.

Remember the Trump economy, how good it was? Meanwhile, the numbers weren't there from a trickle-down perspective. It didn't trickle down anywhere unless the company just bought back their shares and was able to do something with their stock prices. That was helpful to a certain group of Americans, but not necessarily the overall America, which is how do you get a functioning capitalist subsystem to be self-sustainable? You have got to get certain things paid for from a public perspective because the private perspective is too expensive to do. We do struggle with truth because we are not very good in dealing with truth in references to beliefs, biases and fallacies, which is something we have talked about in the past. All of a sudden, your brain is clicking off like thirteen different stories.

It's not just the stories. The relationship that our politicians have with the truth is not healthy. They are not interested in the truth. They are interested, it seems, in identity and other values that are not true. If you take, for instance, this whole January 6th attack on the Capitol, this was one of the watershed moments of our country's history. Nothing like this had ever happened before it, and it's very scary. After that, there was probably the most bipartisan call for, "We need to have an investigation," like the 9/11 commission, but then you have people like Representative Andrew Clyde from Georgia who was having to barricade the door in the House chamber during the insurrection. Coming out and saying that he compared the protestors, the insurrectionists on that day at the Capitol, what they were doing to a normal tourist visit. He called it a normal tourist visit. Truth is being purchased away from what happened here by many members of Congress to the point which they don't even want to find out what happened if they think it's going to hurt their team. We can't even agree in the truth of what took place.

All of a sudden, a story came back into my mind about a post-day Major League baseball game that two fan groups got in a fight in a parking lot. It was in the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium. Somebody died over it.

Was that a pre-season game? I think I remember that.

It was after the game. Two groups of loyal fans were fighting and yelling at each other about whatever it was, whatever team lost. If you are angry about something and your adrenaline is up, and you have such an identity and such loyalty to a sports team, you can imagine how, I'm not going to say easily, their brains were hijacked, but I'll do it the other way, which is how passionate the Trump followers were to be there on January 6th to then listen to those speeches by those different people around Trump, and then go do the march. Literally, it was like saying to the sports team, “We know where the referees' houses are. You go and take it out on the referee because the referee is making the wrong call. You got to prevent them from making the wrong call. Therefore, it's time for you to go and do that."

It's like, "Yes. My team can't be cheated out of this. If you don't fight for it, you are going to lose your country." Lose your country? The country is made up of people. You are not losing the country. It's a play into the belief of loss and the uncertainty about the country. It's like, that's not what's happening from a bigger perspective. There are certain things that we choose to do in society that we don't want a private business to be anywhere near. For me personally, private businesses and prisons don't go well together. The numbers are in if I'm looking at truth and numbers and incarcerations and there are some efficiencies, but you're driving profit, you're not looking for the wellbeing of a society of this person coming out. That's not what the function is.

It’s rehabilitation or whatever it might be.

Why would I do that? I'm not getting paid to rehabilitate. I get paid for filling beds and holding people captive here. I wanted them in jail, make a mistake so I can add more to their time. That is not a good formula. We do struggle with integrity and accountability whereas, an identity or protection is the reason why people are going to not face the truth. They are not going to want to do that.

It's scary. A couple of examples to highlight for the readers, which are relevant to this January 6th thing is immediately after that insurrection, we had people like McConnell and McCarthy talking about how bad it was that the president at the time, President Trump, put responsibility for it, then they had the second impeachment trial. They were arguing this impeachment is a waste of time. There are other mechanisms to hold the president accountable and anybody accountable who was responsible for the insurrection on January 6th. They proposed this idea of a bipartisan commission which then was negotiated. McCarthy, in particular, in the House, sent a Republican to the negotiating table with three key demands. One, there is an equal number of Democrats and Republicans on the commission. Two, they all have equal subpoena power, and three, it gets completed before the end of 2021 because the Republicans didn't want it dragging into the next election year.

The Democrats agreed to all of those terms and they have voted on this commission, and the House passed it with 35 Republicans voting for it. McCarthy was not one of them. He has said he doesn't support it. Now coming up with other reasons why he didn't support it. Not having the integrity of, "This is what we, as Republicans won if we are going to agree to of our bipartisan commission." You get that. Now, you don't want the commission, probably because you don't want the light of day to be shed on everything that was behind the insurrection, or don't want the full truth to come out about it. McConnell did the same thing. He is saying he is not going to back it, even though he is the one that said, "There are other means to hold the president accountable or anybody accountable." This lack of integrity and lack of interest in the truth is scary for our country.

Truth isn’t particularly comfortable.

A human being can hold two truths at the same time. The two truths can be completely opposite of each other. The truth is, anytime anybody asks, he will say yes. I did send somebody over there in good faith, and we did do things. We have been trying to do things in a bipartisan way and then dead stop. Why did you say this way? "I just discovered that these other things are also important to me, and we were working, but the Democrats that want to hear those." In other words, I get to move where, and I get to have two different truths, and I get to speak in a way that has two different truths rather than staying for what the bigger truth is. Do you want to testify under oath? McCarthy does not.

How could that guy vote for him being subpoenaed and then having to say, where are you on a phone with President Trump? Yes. Did you ask him to send people? Yes. Did he do it? No. He said he's going to do something better. What did he do better? Hours later, he said, "Go home. We love you." That is what he said next. That is what he did hours later. I'm saying all of this stuff from what I have seen from the news media. I am ready and interested in discovering the deeper truth or the deeper integrity and be ready to rewrite my belief about it. I'm okay with rewriting the story I said, but I need a commission to do that because otherwise, I'm running this story that I'm running.

That is where the danger comes in because other people don't have that story, and they are being influenced by other news, media, and other marks. I'm the person that's copping to it. I don't have any research. I haven't looked at it fully. I am working off of the little bit of truth that I'm holding on to, and I've crafted a story about that. That's what I've done while other people are crafting the opposite story that Mike Pence should have done this, and McCarthy did talk, but he wasn't that urgent on the phone. President Trump didn't think it was all that urgent so he didn't send anybody. They could create it all worked out anyway, and only a couple of people died, and only I'll only 100 people got hurt. It's very unsettling because they are creating a different story.

What you are saying is that they are moving the goalpost. The goalpost was at a certain place when the Democrats agreed to their demands. They say, "That is not enough. I want this," What is unsettling is the lack of integrity because McCarthy was there at the same House of Representatives way back in the Obama administration launched an investigation into Benghazi, that was not a bipartisan commission, that was purely a Republican-led House of Representatives that held hearings and went after that. Why did they say they needed to go after that? Did they need to get to the bottom of it? Because four people died in Libya when the attack on the embassy in Benghazi happened. I heard 5 or 6 people died on January 6th at the Capitol, and they don't want to get to the bottom of that.

Even the name Benghazi brings up pain and suffering for us as a nation because they put us through that exercise. It was looking for, they wound up getting one talking point that they could use from an election standpoint, and it's not proportional. It's not to say Democrats don't have similar strategies to try to get messages to stick because it's a race to brand. Trump is doing something significant right now that everybody needs to be aware of. He is calling old Conservatives rhinos and he is branding people that are fiscally responsible Republicans as outdated Republicans. Those people are no longer viable in the party. That is problematic from a branding standpoint. If the Republicans want to reclaim the idea of conservativism. They can't do it every time he launches the phrase and then cast doubt upon the phrase. He says some people are calling them rhinos, whatever they call them.

That is a sales branding strategy to get the person to anchor that this type of Republican is a bad Republican now and the new type of Republican is this other type of Republican. The one that follows me on leadership and follows this type of mindset and leadership. It’s very challenging for us as a nation. We have got to do a better job of cultivating and anchoring truth in a brand-new way based on solid investigation and then solid messaging about here's what happened, here's why this is important, here's what's going to make a difference for us as a nation, and is this the best thing for the nation. I would wish even the liberal media would say to turn the narrative instead of those bad people. I wish the liberal media would say, "Is this best for the nation?" That's what I would like them to do. I'd say, is this message that America wants to stand for moving forward? Because this is the message that they are delivering.

It’s not the media, but I also think the Democrats. I think the Democrats were doing a terrible job in how they are talking about these things that are happening. There are such opportunities for them to point out the lack of integrity. Is this best for the nation? My goodness, if there was ever a slow pitch, softball served up to the Democrats, it's happened with negotiating in bad faith on what it's been at the end of the day, moving the goalposts on the commission for January 6th among other things.

An empathetic sentence would have been like this because having empathy and compassion to help us reclaim truth is a big part of this show. An empathetic sentence is called state the obvious. It looks like Speaker McCarthy said this and sent this person. "Here is what the agreement was. We feel appreciative and have gratitude that these are the things that we are offering. It was a great step in his direction to be able to take a step regrettably." He might be feeling torn because another part of his constituents is struggling with cooperation and collaboration. He also needs to deliver a different message. Regrettably, he is giving his voters two different messages so that he can cover his basis. We would like to find out what truth would look like. We are hoping that he would go along with the first agreement, but it doesn't seem like that because he is giving another message to the other part of his vote voters that don't like the message of cooperation.

All of a sudden, what happens from the Democrat is you are communicating as a statesman. You are not communicating as a politician. You are saying, "Great job. I'm acknowledging McCarthy for taking the step. I'm acknowledging the person for being in the room. I'm acknowledging the person to make agreements." Clearly, they and their party are trying to message in two different directions so that they can be safe. They can get marketing and messaging to a diverse group inside their party. It's calling them on their strategy in a compassionate way. They are not interested in cooperation, collaboration because they are more interested in protection and identity politics. It's very troublesome because if we are not seeing communication done that way, and we are going to get pushback from, "You guys are picking aside." It's like, "No, we are trying to pick messaging."

We have called out the Democrats on things in the past and we will continue to. I am interested quite honestly, in truth and integrity, and if there is a problem on the left side, I'm going to point that one out too. It's dangerous for us when, as a nation, we can't come together and agree on truth over something, each side is going to spin something their way. After any presidential debate, each side is going to spin it and say, he won, he won, or she won. This is more than that. This is the insurrection of our capital, but this was such a jaw-dropping moment in our history. It is very troubling for our future. The reason we are so divided is that we can't agree on where the truth lies for anything, whether it's QAnon or it's Antifa or whatever these extreme conspiracy theorist groups or other things are. If we can agree on the truth, that is very hard to move forward as a nation.

It's very hard to do that. I feel a general sense of confidence that there are things that both businesses and governments hide from the public. A lot of confidence that there is some business and somewhere there is some government where something I don't like has been hidden from me. It might have been in the best interest of the government, the country, or the society to do that hiding because the beliefs were too fragile to go in and go through. Our beliefs regrettably have a certain amount of stuckness to them. They don't like changing. Changing our beliefs are a tough thing for us to do as human beings.

Changing our beliefs is tough thing for us to do as human beings.

A big part of this discussion is trying to take an adult breath to go. We are not going to know things. New things are going to be discovered. Things that are going to happen, that somebody is developing, that we would say, "I don't know if I like that because I'm too uncomfortable to deal with that. It might be something that I can't get done in my lifetime to fix. Going back, it doesn't sound like a great idea either. I might want to figure out how to entrust and make my point clear to who is going forward. At the same time, realize unless I'm willing to work for and do some things that are helpful for that cause in a nonviolent way. It's something that I may not get in my lifetime and may not do." Human beings don't like that sentence.

No, we don't.

I might not get to that one. I'm going to put up my best narrative to do that in a nonviolent way and try to create as much awareness I can around that, but I may not get that one. It's a big part of the process of learning how to communicate more compassionately and empathetic to both sides, to talk honestly about certain experiences. We have got to do a better job and that's hard.

That's why we are here, to try to talk about language and communication and offer some ways we can communicate better with each other, with people we disagree with. Bill, I appreciate spending this time with you and talking about that. It's one thing to be frustrated about things that are happening, but it's nice to see that when something looks very disheartening, maybe even hopeless at times, Bill Stierle is able to point out, here is how I would say that, here is what I'd talk about that. If people would learn how to do it, we would make more progress. We would be working together more.

The adage, this is going to drive the math people a little bit nutty, but it is 1 plus 1 equal 3. It is, I've got these two people, and they are collaborating, cooperating, and then there's this third thing that shows up. The third thing is where the value is. It's addictive. It doesn't make mathematical sense, but there is something when you get two people together. You are looking at something and you are going like, "Here is the middle ground that gets us to move forward." It makes a big difference.

Thank you, Bill. I have enjoyed that.

Thanks, everybody, for reading. I’m looking forward to the next conversation. We will keep bringing tools, tips, and perspectives forward as we continue down our road towards finding the truth.

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Why Our Emotional Reactions Can Be Problematic When It Comes to Dealing With The Rule Of Law

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 10:12:28 GMT

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How does a person’s emotional reactions relate to dealing with the rule of law? Bill Stierle and Tom discuss what happened in an episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, talking about the incident involving a man who called 911 for assistance in a robbery taking place at his neighbor’s home. They highlight the impact of the man’s emotional reaction to the situation and the 911 operator’s lack of communication skills to deescalate the caller. The caller escalated emotionally and eventually shot and killed the robbers. Bill and Tom discuss this incident in relation to Stand-Your-Ground-Laws that brings perspective into play as to why these laws are problematic, especially in a society where there are so many injuries and deaths due to gun violence.

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Watch the episode here

Bill, you and I each watched Last Week Tonight with John Oliver where he did a whole spot on Stand Your Ground Laws . While we're not necessarily going to dive down that entire rabbit hole, there was something that happened that he raised awareness of a certain context or situation within the Stand Your Ground Law or one application of it or one incident where it was used. That presents an opportunity for us to talk about the need for certain types of people in our society to be educated on how to communicate better.

The hardest part about watching the show for me is when a person works themselves up emotionally, they don't have any self-regulation with their own emotions. What happens is they use words and strategies to try to manage their emotions. Instead of things to reduce the emotion inside the person, it will escalate it into a violent act. This is the reason why we have the number of guns we do but also, we have the number of injuries and deaths because of gun violence. The person is working themselves up to a point where their anger is getting the best of them that it tilts over to a terminal reaction towards the person or the situation that they're angry about. The thing that's upsetting is that simple things of words and phrases, and the ability to apply empathy to a situation can reduce the anger inside the person so that they don't go in and act out in a way that is going to cause that next level of injury or death. There are a lot of examples in the show that you and I were rolling our eyes going like, “How did we get here?”

There are many people featured, but there's a 911 operator who is speaking to someone who's called in about a robbery that's in progress. If that 911 operator had been educated or trained by Bill Stierle in applying empathy, it could have saved two lives. We should talk about this as an example because it's important. I want to acknowledge that 911 operators are trained to do certain things. Now, they're not trained to do certain things.

That's the thing. The 911 operator gets a call, this man is distressed about his neighbor getting robbed. He's calling 911, wanting them to do something. The 911 operator is explaining to him. This is where communication goes the wrong way. The operator is explaining to him, giving him facts, "Sir, don't go out. I want you to be safe. It's just stuff. Don't leave the house, sir." In the show, they said that it was fourteen times he told the guy not to leave his house. The guy left his house and shot the two people in the back for stealing his neighbor's stuff. Is that proportional? When somebody steals stuff, they should lose their life because they're stealing stuff. It's not proportional. It's not under certain laws. Under the Stand Your Ground Law, you can do that because all you've got to do is say, “I was fearful.”

“I was fearful for my life and my safety.”

In this case, he wasn't fearful. He put himself in the fear. He went out of the house. He felt like he should do something. Somehow, he had a belief, a bias or a perspective that it was okay for him to do the judge, the jury and the executioner for the two people that were stealing things. Tom, we have laws on the books for people stealing things, and how many years of jail or when they're convicted. There's a certain proportionality for the mistake or the proactive mistake of stealing other people's stuff. We don't execute people for stealing stuff. At least, I don't know any laws on the books for that one. If you steal somebody's stuff, the thing was so important that you get to lose your life over that.

I don't see that happening very much.

That's not something a judge has in its perspective. Regrettably, the 911 person did not manage the caller's emotion or did not gain the caller’s trust. Justice was going to be served.

We need to acknowledge that the 911 operator was doing what they were trained to do and the best they could.

When a person works themselves up emotionally, they don’t have any self-regulation with their own emotions.

Pretty good from a rational place and from a caller place, he stayed on there and he stayed with it until the guy finally escalated the 911 call. There's no blame or judgment here. The weight of this discussion is on language. That's the challenge. That's what I get hired to do. It’s to train business owners and even governments on, “Here's what to say. This thing works better than this thing.” If the 911 caller says, “Somebody’s robbing my house. I have this new law that I can use,” and that's what he did. “The laws have changed. The law says I can go and shoot these people." The 911 officer goes, “Sir, the police officers are on the way. They're going to be there. Let them handle this. The stuff is not worth taking someone's life over.”

I remember the 911 operator saying, "Stuff is not worth getting hurt over." They're saying you could get hurt if you leave your home and intervene here. The 911 operator, by continuing to say the same thing over and over to this man, "Don't leave your house," unintentionally got that man more worked up and frustrated. He believed that he has the opportunity to protect his neighbor’s stuff or keep these guys from getting away. He believed he knew the law when it comes to Stand Your Ground, which was apparently newly passed in the State of Texas where this took place, and that if he didn't take action, they're going to get away. He got so worked up and he's like, “I don't care what you're saying, 911 operator. I'm taking action.”

When a person can move their rational mind into a place that it's okay for them to execute the world to enact the law the way they see it and you're putting that level of power in each individual citizen, then all of a sudden, the police officers are going there and saying, “You did follow this rule. I can’t arrest you, because even though you shot these two people and you did what our role is as the peacekeepers. You chose to be the person to move things and use the law based on your emotions and the freedom it gives you as an individual to interpret the law the way you would like to interpret the law.” That's when civil society has a little bit of trouble. As soon as you start doing that, then all that needs to take place as a person has to have an emotion. They get to enact capital punishment because they had the emotion of fear.

I know a thing or two about fear. Fear is something that is a very difficult emotion to shake off because as soon as you're scared about something and you move it to a level 7, 8 or 9 inside your body, your body carries that level of adrenaline and cortisol and other molecules of emotion for a long time. You can feel fearful because someone broke into your house, somebody else was in your space and/or you can tell yourself the real story. There was one moment in which somebody else came into my house and took some of my stuff. It doesn't mean it's going to happen tomorrow. I'm going to put two locks on now. I'm going to do some things differently to protect my house even though I've been left with this traumatic moment. The hard part about it is that we're trying to get laws to manage emotion. Tom, that's not a good thing.

I remember hearing in a movie about law school where there's a famous quote that law is reason free or it's supposed to be reason-free. It's really not, especially in this Stand Your Ground Law where it brings perspective into play, which is very problematic. Not to go down that rabbit hole, but I would like to focus on the 911 operator. In that situation, if that 911 operator had had some training in communication, in de-escalation, what could that 911 operator have done to keep that person in their home, which might've saved two lives?

You'd be the person that's about ready to go shoot somebody. You're going to be that guy. Load up in your brain three sentences and we will roleplay three sentences. You're going to call 911 and I'm going to be the guy. I know, as the 911 person, I need some information. I need what's happening and what's the address. I know that I've got what is happening description of the situation because I've got a dispatch and give the officers some information and where to go. That's what I got to do first, so I know that that has come about. You called and you gave me the situation. I fished for the address and I'm ready to say the following sentences, “Sir, officers are on the way.”

“They can't get here fast enough. These people are going to get away with robbing my neighbor.”

“Sir, you want me to make sure the officers are there to protect your neighbor's stuff? Is that correct?”

“Yes, but they're not going to get here in time. I've got a gun and I know the law. I need to stop these people.”

“You have the thought that you'd like to protect your neighbor’s stuff and you want safety for your neighbor stuff and you can do something about it. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“I'm requesting that we let the police officers go ahead and take care of that, but it sounds like that you would like to be supportive to your neighbor. Is that correct?”

“Yes. I don't want these guys to get away with this.”

“You want to make sure that there's justice for your neighbors and you would like the police officers to get there soon. Police officers are on the way. They've been dispatched. They will be there in a timely way, sir. We want to make sure your need for safety is being met too. We want to make sure you're protected just in case they happen to be armed also. We don't want you to get hurt either. We also want to make sure that the police officers do their job and role. Would you be willing to let them do their job?” Give me some pushback.

I don't know what he would say to that. It gets him thinking and slows him down for sure.

I'm hoping that what the readers are getting in this role play is that my empathetic narrative got Tom to say yes 1, 2, 3, 4 times almost. I got Tom to say yes to things. I've built up trust with Tom that I was hearing the issue. You're scared about them leaving. You want to make sure that justice is served. Let police officers do the justice part. You see how important that was all of a sudden to let police officers do the justice part. Let them enact the law. The citizen is looking for justice, fairness and protection of his neighbor's stuff. He sees that something is "morally wrong.” Something legally wrong is taking place. This is not about protecting the robbers. This is about setting a standard in our society that we look for in different situations to be handled by the police.

I feel deeply upset at this moment to think if that was happening in a community of color, the police’s response has a different experience for a community of color. I'm not going to let my bias get in the way that there aren’t different responses from 911, but the de-escalation part of it so that the rule of law doesn’t start to try to do things regarding emotions. We got to be mindful that just because a person's getting worked up, it doesn't give them the ability to step across the line of what the laws on the books are for robbing a house. Robbing a house does not mean the robbers lose their life. It means that the person's robbing the house.

Depending on many factors, if someone's convicted of anywhere from breaking and entering to burglary, they're going to get anywhere from months to a couple of years in prison. They are not going to lose their life over it. The crime on its face isn't going to. The shocking thing about John Oliver's show and I encourage all of our readers to go watch it. We've got the video of this available on YouTube. You can watch the whole thing. There are many problematic issues with this Stand Your Ground Law. The shocking part to me in this particular case is this man in Texas left his own home with his shotgun and shot these two people in the back. They died and according to the law in Texas, he was found to be justified under the Stand Your Ground Law. It is unsettling, to say the least, that these two people who were committing a crime and deserve to be apprehended and meet justice met a different kind of justice that's out of proportion with the crime they were committing.

With simple things of words and phrases and the ability to apply empathy to a situation can reduce the anger inside a person.

It's the reason why our system of law is set up is to create proportionality, and also to create time so that there's evidence that is captured, that there are other things so that it can justify what the action is to take place. A lot of times, when bad things happen, we don't see all perspectives. This one looks a little bit cut and dry and nice and clean but it's not at all. All you’ve got to do is to put a person of color in the role. That's not what happens to that guy. In the Stand Your Ground Law, you're supposed to wait for the police officer. “I used the Stand Your Ground Law.”

It's like, “You're a person of color. We're going to apply the law differently. We're going to see it from a different view set because this is our bias. It doesn't become even quicker." What I like training people to do is how do we talk about safety through disagreements. This person has a disagreement about the way things go and what is the common good and how do we create an even application to whatever the law or situation is. Are people responsible for their own emotions? If you think about what you and I were laughing about earlier about use your words.

As someone that has some pretty young children, even my youngest is seven. It's not that long ago, I remember my kid was a toddler. When she didn't like something, she would swat at it with her hand or hit someone or push someone out of the way. We always tell her, “It's okay. Use your words.” It's an attempt to communicate when you take other kinds of actions. She was struggling with finding the words to express herself and communicate. The same thing we see here applies to a lot of examples in what John Oliver talks about. If you use your words, they can be more powerful than that gun. If you use the right words if you understand the context of the situation and you're that 911 operator, instead of giving a directive, an instruction or an order, "Don't leave your house." The person is not liking that response. They’d say, “You don't understand the situation. You're not here. I have a gun. I can go out and do something here.” He worked that guy up.

It didn't meet his needs and fed into an escalation. I'm not faulting the 911 operator for not doing their job. They have a very difficult job to do. They've got to assess in a split second whether somebody is hurt and needs an ambulance, or there's a fire and they got to get the fire department or they got to send the police. Talk about a complicated job. I've not done that job, so I don't understand that from experience. At the same time, from our perspective, it is easy to see in hindsight that if they also had some training and empathy, they could de-escalate the situation and effectively have prevented two lives from being taken even though it wasn't his fault.

Empathy for the guy that is scared and has a weapon for the guy inside the house is the thing that de-escalates that guy. "You feel scared. You want justice." “Yes, I want justice.” “The police officers will be there to execute justice for you and your neighbor.” That's a line of reassurance. “Would you like some trust that we are going to be there and we're going to catch those people and we're going to do our part?” The guy has worked himself up into such a place that, “I can do something about this. I can act on behalf of the law because I have the new law that protects me for taking lethal action.” It's a lethal action for self-defense. It's not proactive.

It's not a lethal action justified for pursuit. We're not the police and we didn't review all the evidence and they decided that Stand Your Ground applies. If this man's home was being burgled and they're in his home, it’s a much more justifiable case than leaving your home, going outside to protect your neighbor's stuff.

The weird part about this story is that we're coming off of when police raided a home and the guys inside the house, feeling threatened and fearful. He's got a gun and he says, “Don't come in, I have a gun.” The police officer standing out, “We're coming in.” All of a sudden, they're amped up because they hear that there's a gun inside. All of a sudden, a person that's sleeping gets killed because of the violence that some bad person is going to get away with something. That's okay for life to be lost because a bad person's going to get away with something.

You're talking about the no-knock warrants in Atlanta. Breonna Taylor, that one was very troubling. This is the other irony of the Stand Your Ground Law. We're not taking a deep dive into this and we'll leave it up to the readers to go watch that video, watch that whole thing that John Oliver does. With all the scrutiny on policing and when police are justified using force, they're educated and have experience in this. In the Stand Your Ground Law, these people are being held to a lower standard of taking human life. That's based on perspective as long as you either believe that your life's in "danger" or you state that you believed your life was in danger. That one needs some air quotes around it. You can get away with shooting someone taking lethal action wherein situations where even police can't justify taking someone's life in that exact same context. We're scrutinizing police more than the average citizen with a gun with the Stand Your Ground Law. That's very unsettling.

If we're going to stick the landing here, the lawmaker has a huge problem. Voters vote with emotion. They're voting on the basis of their perspective and their perception of safety being met in the environment. Is this lawmaker going to create a law that's going to make my biases, my fallacies into law, so that I have perceived protection from the outside world? The challenge with this is that we need to have more of a compassionate, empathetic response to safety. The quickest way to get safety is to walk away. Yet all of us know that if you're in the kitchen arguing with somebody, walking away could be a tough run because you're trying to make your point about the good reason why you did or didn't do the thing you did.

The person, whoever it is, spouse, child, friend, somebody arguing at a bar or at a restaurant over something, it's not enough to lose somebody's life because you can't manage your emotions. The main thing is to walk away from the argument. It's like, “This argument is getting too heated. It's not worth arguing about this.” That’s not what the fight response does. The fight response says, “I can win. I'm in the right about this.” That's not our strongest play as a human being, because then all of a sudden, we're escalating things into whatever crime that's being done.

Another person can decide that that crime is enough to lose your life over. All of a sudden, we're into The Purge situation. The Purge, it's a movie where nobody's going to be arrested for anybody getting hurt, getting killed on this one day. It's a difficult premise because that's not what we're looking for here. We're not looking for that type of society where every individual gets to act out their own version of justice. That's not where we're supposed to be going here. How do we get equality? How do we face our biases? How do we adjust our perspective and how do we get our body used to walking away from conflict and/or learning some skills how to empathize our way through the conflict?

In many cases, that would prevent an ultimate conflict which can cause loss of life in the example we're showing. That doesn't even have to be that extreme that life is on the table. Getting some training, some education in communication for police, 911 operators, you've done this in those situations or with city governments, even state governments. The Flint water crisis, you dealt with that whole thing. If there's anything that we can do to help raise awareness, that's the thing. It is to help raise awareness for there are better ways to deal with things that can bring about better outcomes and cause less of a mess.

It's so important. We can't keep escalating and thinking that as an individual, they get to be an independent dispenser of law and justice. It's not a strong strategy for a free country to do that. Free has some limitations to it. It's so unsettling to say it because people don't like hearing it. Freedom also means that you've got to look out for the other person's freedom. You've got to nurture their freedom. If you don't nurture their freedom, then they can also have an influence on your freedom. You don't want to get there. You don't want those two things to do that because then all of a sudden it’s like, “It’s look like I'm going to lose on this.” Instead of applying empathy or the strategy of walking away or the strategy of stepping in and through a difficult discussion, then a discussion about how heavy a dog is doesn't have to end a life because that was inside the show. There's an argument in a restaurant about how heavy dogs can get and a guy got shot over it. That's not an argument that somebody should die over about how heavy a dog is, how much a dog weighs. It's not an argument to lose life over.

There are a lot more to learn about this subject. There are also more to learn if you're a business or a local government, a state government, or even some other national politician. There's a lot that can be improved by getting some training. I would encourage any of those types of people to reach out to you, Bill. That's at BillStierle.com or PurchasingTruth.com . We'll get you there.

Thanks a lot, Tom. Thanks, everybody, for reading.

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How Liz Cheney's Advocacy for Truth Shifts Public Perception

Thu, 27 May 2021 19:00:02 GMT

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Republican Liz Cheney is currently on a brave advocacy for truth. Her calling out of Donald Trump and decision to choose a different path from the GOP resulted in her House of Representative ousting. Bill Stierle and Tom delve into this path she currently treads, reflecting how the politician pulls into the spotlight the importance of the rule of law and her work in unraveling the truth amid the messy political rifts. They also touch upon Trump's messaging that continues to put a flawed brand to his own party and the entire country. Bill and Tom also enumerate situations where the public is put under a curse and spell of messages, from the ongoing pandemic to the complicated unrest in Afghanistan.

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Watch the episode here

I'm Tom, along with your host, Bill Stierle. Bill, we talked a lot about curses and spells last time. That was a lot of fun. We can continue that discussion a bit, especially in the context of something that is all over the media, the ouster of Elizabeth Lynne Cheney from her conference leadership position in the House of Representatives. She's advocating for truth, among other things. Let's use that as a departure point.

I appreciate that because when human beings communicate with each other. They're advocating for their point of view, belief, bias, even a fallacy that somebody can create. It's something that human beings have had for a long time. We used to have mythical stories that there would be a king that would put a curse on something and a queen, witch, king, or troll would put the spell, and all those male-type images put the message in. That was the instigator for the story. It was the thing that the story was built around.

The idea with a mythic tale gives us a perspective to see if we're doing the thing because myths and good stories can lead us out of the mess. Facts and information are just points of data in the field of time, whereas a story is something that can translate through time. A person can tell it 100, 700, 1,000, 2,000, or 7,000 years later and it can be as poignant now. We can watch Snow White, look at the seven dwarfs, and think about our emotions going up and down like the seven dwarfs do. That's what that story is about.

How do you manage the emotions? How does a woman manage her emotions? How does a man manage his emotions? How do we deal with these different images? Curses and spells are much a part of that. In media and politics, we're noticing these things. Business, marketing, sales, and branding are all about how's the message sticking? Do we need to create a new message? Do we need to change our message? In one of the first branding messages of McDonald's, millions sold. They used to put the number up on the sign. $1 million, $2 million, $5 million. Every time you drove by, you got like, “I'm a part of changing the number on that sign.” It got to the point where they're over $1 trillion.

I remember when it was $1.5 billion or $2 billion or whatever. At some point, the number becomes meaningless.

They have to change the brand and the brand slogan that goes with the brand. Now, it’s “loving it.” That's the new slogan. The challenge that Elizabeth Lynne Cheney, the Republicans, and the Democrats have is getting messages to stick. One of the magical things that former President Donald Trump would be able to do is he would look at the messages and say, “That message is going to work best. That one is going to stick. This one is going to stick.”

He’d even use his rallies as branding and marketing test cases and see how the crowd would cheer. After he tests it, he goes, “I've tried this message out. Drain the swamp.” I didn't like it at the beginning, but now all of a sudden, I've got some great cheers from that, so I'm using it in all of the things. How do you like it? They’re like, “Drain the swamp.” He's testing branding and marketing in real-time. People don't understand it. That's an enrollment piece. It’s, “I'm enrolling loyalty,” which is a part of the curse. When you're loyal, you're not questioning whether the thing is true or not.

That is true and, at the same time, scary, isn't it?

Correct. If I'm loyal to a person, TV show, network, product, or service, some of that stuff can be great. Also, you'll never notice if you're loyal to a product if they change the ingredients on the product. Both of us can take a breath. All-natural food was when it first came out, but that was too expensive, so we changed it and put artificial things in. Because the brand is associated with all-natural, we get to keep the title but the ingredients are not true anymore.

That's unsettling.

Let me pick on one, Tom's toothpaste.

I think of it as all-natural and not tasting good. Maybe being better for the environment.

It had all of those elements at the beginning until it was bought by a major toothpaste company and they changed the ingredients.

I didn't even know that.

That's what this session is about.

You led me down the path.

That’s called the spell. The spell is that, of course, it’s staying the same but there's a fallacy in that. The thing is not saying the same because the environment has changed. What you thought is true is not fully true. It's partly true. On the box, it's true. There are some of the same ingredients mostly. Remember that sweetener that they had in it before that was all-natural? They tapped that out and used another one that was more cost-effective for the company to produce. The consumer won't know and mind. That's a spell. Curses and spells are important for us to take a look at as the theme. Elizabeth Lynne Cheney goes back to a bedrock principle that she can build upon, “I'm staying with the Constitution and I'm making sure Donald Trump does not sit in the White House again.” In those two simple messages, the first one is curse-free.

She also said under the rule of law.

The rule of law says this, “I'm sticking with that because if we're not sticking with that, we don't have the thing that we've had for the last 250 years. We're going to go back to that and do that thing because that's what I'm standing for. I'm going to make sure that the person that was the representative of this is not there.” Can Elizabeth Lynne Cheney build her brand image and recapture the imagination of the Republican Party in order to go and get other people back in her direction? Can she get the party to steer back more towards the middle and away from the right?

I don't know if she can. She sure is going to try. The irony is that the Republicans who are loyal to Donald Trump in Congress, the word they keep using is fealty to Donald Trump. Is that a condescending term? They're saying they're bowing to him. They're acquiescing to him or something. They're in lockstep with the former president. The irony is they've given her a bigger platform by making such a fuss over removing her as a Republican leader in the conference and in the House because she's on every national program. Everybody wants an interview with her and it's being elevated.

They lifted her profile by the separation analysis. I don't know if it's planned or if it's unconscious. My brain mostly thinks of some of these things as completely unaware and unconscious. They don't know that there is a bigger branding boost for Elizabeth Lynne Cheney, the Cheney mindset, and the Cheney administration. What's going to be the Elizabeth Lynne Cheney Rule of Law? How is Elizabeth Lynne Cheney going to run the country? I'm already starting to brand her without her knowing it on this episode.

Facts and information are just points of data in the field of time, whereas a story is something that can translate through time.

You're branding her as a presidential candidate almost right there.

There are certain things that you can't get traction on the big steal or the big lie. Donald Trump took a run at rebranding the big lie and said, “The big lie is the election was won by President Joe Biden.”

He tried to do that. That didn't seem to stick, did it?

That branding is something that is a little bit like throwing spaghetti on the wall to see if something is going to stick, Tom. For all of those people who are reading from a political standpoint, you can see how this works, but also, those of you need to remember this works for businesses as well as personal identity and how do you rebound from a mistake? If you make a mistake, step in and through it. Don't try to wallpaper over cracked paint. Scrape the paint off first before you put the wallpaper back on it at least and say, “It used to be cracked paint but you can’t tell.” At least do that. The Republicans are struggling with their wallpaper job. They're not cleaning off the garbage that's underneath it.

One of the things that's most shocking that's come out since Elizabeth Lynne Cheney has been removed from her conference leadership position is that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy has said, “No one has ever said that President Joe Biden is not a legitimate president.” He said that. Of course, he was in the Oval Office when he said it because all the leadership was meeting with President Joe Biden. He said, “We're not saying that President Joe Biden isn't the legitimate president.” Everybody watching who has seen him in the media is looking at that with a questioning look, “Really?” He, among others, has been saying exactly the opposite that there's so much fraud, the election was stolen, and among other things, he's trying to paper over. It’s what I'm trying to say.

Something weird in branding, marketing, and messaging time is that you can deliver one message in one bubble, and then you could deliver a counter-message in a different bubble because those bubbles of people aren't talking to each other and don't look at each other's stuff. He can say that to this, and then all of a sudden, they can flop back in a microsecond because one bubble will pick up the message over here and the other bubble will pick it up over here. Because the bubbles are separate, the greater population doesn't see it's happening. Here's a good example. Lindsey Graham, after the insurrection, says, “I went a long way with Donald Trump and this is where the journey ends.”

He did say, “No more.”

Liberal media picked it up and pushed it. He's seen the light and he's now going to be an advocate. He's going to be on the other side of this. In a week, he flies down to Mar-a-Lago. Within a 1, 1.5, 2 weeks or whatever it was, he flew down there and delivered an entire set of messages that could be picked up by Fox and put on. That is counter bubble messaging.

I've heard him saying, “I've determined that the Republican Party is better off with Donald Trump than without Donald Trump.”

That is something that plays wonderfully inside the 73 million people that voted for the former president and it doesn't play in the 81 million but there's no consequence to Lindsey Graham because he's just got to worry about South Carolina and then worry about his national presence. Whether or not somebody calls him a flip flop or not, he's a talking piece that is messaging into various different bubbles and different messages. You and I have done similar things in our businesses. We say, “Here's one vertical I'm going to talk about and I need to talk in that language of IT. Over in this other marketplace, I need to talk in this level of manufacturing with China.” Those are different bubbles of people and they're not necessarily paying attention to each other.

This does happen in business a lot. No question.

The good part of this story with curses and spells is that they can be a curse. The curse is broken and you've got to have enough pressure for the curse to be broken. The stakes have got to be high enough. Right now, the stakes are not high enough yet to break the curse. The spell is something you wake up from.

Would you say that the curse on the Republican Party is in some way Donald Trump's stranglehold over the party still and Elizabeth Lynne Cheney's trying to wake them up from it?

That's right. The Republicans have a tough run to wreak claim loyalty to the party, not loyalty to the person. Many of them will struggle with the word integrity because they don't have that. It's not to say that the Democrats don't have some problems with integrity, too. They have all kinds of certain integrities. There's a list on their side. To break a curse, you’ve got to stare and walk through it. It’s one of the things that Elizabeth Lynne Cheney has started to do. Mitt Romney is too nice and what he needed to do was to stare it down. At that conference, he needed to apply empathy and directness, which is something he didn't do. He walked out there and said, “Everybody knows I'm not a great fan of the last president.” He's going to get booed every single time with a sentence like that, but he could have done this. I would like Mitt Romney to say this because I'm interested in the United States of America. I'm not interested in bipartisan America. That's my advocacy.

When you're loyal, you will not be questioning whether the thing is true or not.

I want Mitt Romney to have a solid conversation with Americans. I'm pretending I'm Mitt Romney. “I stand up in front of you feeling torn because a part of me values these Republican principles. I value this and I value this. I feel torn because another part of me knows that the president did not live up to those values yet. Because he was a Republican, I supported him most of the way. As a person of integrity, I drew the line at.” All of a sudden, he sounds like a presidential candidate. He starts to reclaim and it moves back into a leadership position where you can work with the person.

From what he could have said, his message there is not that far removed from what Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is saying. They're both saying similar things but in different ways.

Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is missing and she hasn't put in her narrative empathy for the Donald Trump supporter. You got to empathize with the people. They put their vote in. They put their bet in on that guy. He did sell a good message. “I'm going to be different. I'm going to be an outsider. I know great people that we can work on this. I can come in and I can have this. We're going to run this more like a business because I am a successful business person.” They bought all of those narratives. The person's personal bias said, “I've been working for a successful business person. Donald Trump is a successful business person. I know what successful business people do because my boss is one of them. Clearly, he's going to be like my boss.” The answer is, “No. He’s not like your boss at all.” He has these other narratives that are regrettably not collaborative or cooperative that's needed inside the political space.

How could Elizabeth Lynne Cheney empathize with that loyal Donald Trump voter with the whole narrative of trying to push Donald Trump out the door? She's gone all in saying, “I'm committed to not letting the former president get anywhere near the Oval Office again.” She's declared war.

Her next sentence is, “I hear you feel angry. You're feeling angry because a part of you would like the former president to tell the truth and be integritous about what the vote was. It's a lot easier for you to believe that your vote was not counted or that other people voted and caused your vote to things. I could see how painful that is because that affects your need for trust and integrity that I'm willing to fight for now.” She's got to get 1/3 of people to move in her direction.

She's pulling loyalty away from Donald Trump and trust in a way and instilling it in herself.

At least she'll know, “I'm going to stand for trust. At least you know I am going to be an advocate to be straight with you and be truthful with you.”

This kind of messaging is how Elizabeth Lynne Cheney can beat back any primary challenge from Donald Trump in Wyoming and get herself reelected.

With the restoration of the Constitution, she could pull out lines out of the Constitution and start advocating. “We need to start working towards this value set because this value set is not being done the way I would like it to be done. This is the way I see this value in the Constitution.” The Constitution is long and it's easy to read.

Bill, ironically, I have a little pamphlet of the Constitution of the United States. It's been sitting on my desk for a while. Somebody gave it to me at an event. I'm a fellow member of the Board of Advisors. I happen to have the Constitution. It’s a quick read. You're right.

The Bill of Rights has a piece to it that works well with it. “These are the changes or additions or the clarifications that we've made along the way. This makes us a better nation because we're working to have a common document that we're in agreement about. This is what it means to have freedom of speech and here are the limitations of the freedom of speech.” That is also dropped. Notice that there's a split of the belief. “I have freedom of speech.” The answer is like, “You do and there are limits to that.”

People don't understand that. They think that means you can say anything you want anytime you want. That wasn't the whole purpose. It was freedom to speak out in opposition to your government without fear of repercussions from a ruler or leadership.

When you split the value of the freedom of speech and take it away, that's when it becomes a spell.

That's a great example. When you split the value of the freedom of speech and you take it away, that's when it becomes a spell. I believe in it but yet, I am not conscious that my belief is this small where I need to stretch my truth to encompass this. It's tough to stare down these things because this is the path forward. Having better-skilled communicators and people that stand and advocate for the fuller advocacy of what that value is.

Curses and spells give us a way to talk about things that we would call half-truths, a point of view, a bias that has limitations to it, or something that is completely from a place of fallacy. Here's an example. The big steal or the big lie. Donald Trump can counter those messages and start putting a spell in. Here's his spell. “When we see what's happening in Arizona, what's going to happen in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and we will see the things that they're going to find.” That's a spell.

Putting people under a spell that the big steal is going to be revealed. Is that right?

That's right. There's a mystery. That's a part of something that you and I talked about bid sellers do. They present a reward, create anticipation, and create uncertainty. We're not sure what they're going to find.

Donald Trump's favorite, greatest hit line, “We'll see what happens.”

That is an uncertainty sentence. That is a calculated metamessage that's in the propaganda space for him.

Precisely to convey the feeling of uncertainty.

Human beings are sensitive. We are sensitive creatures. We're susceptible to our biases, fallacies, and limited beliefs. We're interested in drawing lines from something we know to something we don't know in any way we can get there. We could take a person out of scripture and draw to our current condition somehow. This is why this rule works here. We could take something out of any one of our limiting beliefs and draw it to, “This is why this is true.” It's like, “How did you get there from here?”

If you want to watch this in real-time, start listening to kids. Kids are drawing their version of truth, which is far from the truth. My son will easily say to me, “I worked on my homework. I got most of it done.” I can check online and he did 1 out of 6 assignments. He’s like, “I can play my game now.” They’re going to draw the truth of their freedom and independence in any way they can get there at the expense of integrity, trust, and things like that.

Let's give a few more examples of some curse and spell messages that a lot of people will relate to and help understand the concept a little more.

I appreciate that. For example, you and I talked about recycling at one point in one of the episodes and the concept called Wish Cycling. “I wish that could be recycled.” We throw that in the recycle container. That's an example of a person that is from the left, thinking, “I got to do my part in recycling and this thing will never be recycled.” “They'll pull the metal out of the umbrella.” No, they won't. They’ll just throw out the umbrella because there's not enough value on the metal that goes into that umbrella. It's got to go to the dump and it's over. Wish cycling is example one.

People are interested in drawing lines from something they know to something they don't know.

Another example of a spell was during COVID when the former president said, “The COVID will go away like a miracle.” People felt calm because the word miracle is familiar. You'll see it and it's going to go away. He's meeting the need for reassurance. That's the reward. “I'm getting reassurance now. It's not as scary. My leader told me that it's going to happen this way and it's going to go away. COVID is going to disappear in the spring when it gets hot where you don't have the cold anymore.”

Summer is one of the biggest surges.

We got pummeled because when you're under a spell and you're investing in that belief, you're not looking at the problem honestly. Soon, the numbers will be next to nothing. The COVID numbers will be at zero soon. It's reassuring, but it's not fully truthful about what you're experiencing. If there was a rapid response, doing something actively to move things into action, set up infrastructure, and do all the things that when the government is asked to do, it will do it. President Joe Biden knew where all the levers were and started pulling.

He ramped up that distribution.

He lived an entire life inside the system. It's like you and I knowing where many of the things in our houses are. I know where my silverware is kept. You know where your silverware is kept. You know where to go to get that. President Joe Biden, having lifelong experience in government, knows where all the levers are. He doesn’t have to find it.

What I might say is that I know where the fire extinguisher is in the house. When there's a fire, you need to put it out. You need to know where that fire extinguisher is. Otherwise, you’ve got to get out of the house if the fire happens.

Americans will be a little more hesitant about getting a full outsider in a leadership position without at least doing some time in Congress or Senate before they can do it. You’ve got to also have some chops. It's not like saying Barack Obama had a ton of experience coming in there because he didn't. He was the fresh senator, but at least he knew how to talk to people and how to network because he did that well. He took advice and he kept people from the old administration on even people that caused the problem.

He did for a while.

He’s like, “You cause them. You're going to get us out of here. How did you guys get us in this mess?” “This is what we did.” “I've been working with you for two years. You better be turning this around.” He’s like, “Geez.” Curses and spells are important things to talk about and engage in. We can restore them. A spell can be restored. It's waking up. It's having an awareness of it. It's like having awareness of the problems in Afghanistan and then getting out or Iraq and then getting out. When we got out, of course, there were consequences for getting out. ISIS rises up because we took away the strong man that was holding that thing down and all of a sudden, it’s like, “There are Americans here. They are going to make it right.”

The answer is, “We don't even know how to make things right in your country.” “You’ve got to figure it out.” “Not many are practicing figuring it out.” Welcome to the mess that we have in two other countries that they've got to figure out how to rebuild. The Taliban wants to do things conservatively and now, there's a group of people that don't. How are they going to work together? The whole country can't be conservative like it was.

Too big of a problem for us to solve in this episode. I'll tell you that.

It's a lot of communication that's needed and a lot of belief changes. These curses and spells also work with vaccines. The beliefs about those, how a message can get started, how a message can become a curse, or a message can become a spell. Big Pharma is evil, bad, and crux, doing vaccines to be a moneymaker or going to jack up the prices foreign. It's a challenging thing when we take this unique view of our environment and messaging to pursue truth through the window of curses and spells.

I thought of one more thing. Bill, before we go, I want to ask your thoughts on this because I don't know if you saw this news talking about people reluctant to take vaccines. They're skeptical that they don't work or that they're dangerous. The governor of Ohio, did you see what they did there? They're trying to incentivize the population of Ohio to get vaccines. I don't know if you call this a spell. Certainly, maybe a bribe.

Anybody who gets a vaccine are having a lottery every week. For all the people that got a vaccine, one person's name is going to be pulled out and they get $1 million for five weeks in a row. There's a reward for getting a vaccine. For students under college age, they're doing in that lottery that you get free tuition, room, and board at an Ohio State University or college when you get to that age. They’re giving rewards and incentives for people to get vaccinated. It's a bit controversial and some people are criticizing it. Talk about a spell, “Come get a vaccine and you might get a big reward.”

Incentives are only good for short-term compliance. They don't work for long-term compliance.

It's trying to put some kind of incentive. Usually, incentives are good for short-term compliance. They don't work for long-term compliance. By running it for five weeks, it's like get in and get out. All of a sudden, there are folks that are interested in that gamble and are interested in participating. It adds a little push to get them through the hesitancy and allows a little bit of ability to move forward.

I’d say that might be a spell.

There's a wonderful book called Punished by Rewards that talks about how incentives only work in a short-time thing and they have long-term problems when you use too many incentives. That's another episode for sure. It'll be interesting to see if Elizabeth Lynne Cheney and the Republicans can do a better job of re-cultivating a message that's going to work that's in a greater alignment with truth. It'll be interesting to see how the Democrats do a better job of saying, “Here's the Infrastructure Bill and I know we're throwing other things into the sink that we would like to be cleaned up about.” President Joe Biden has been straightforward in going, “This thing that's going to put women back to work is not an infrastructure thing, but it is an economic thing that will help to rebuild the infrastructure of business.” He knows it's not a rode in a bridge, but it's still an economic impact.

It's a bridge to recovery and moving forward. That's a metaphor, but he makes a good point to put people to work in rebuilding the infrastructure of business. That's brilliant.

That’s the micro message. We're interested in the infrastructure of business, too. Not necessarily brick-and-mortar and rails and roads, but we're interested in rebuilding the business infrastructure. “Have you noticed that the restaurants were closed? We need to rebuild the restaurant industry. This has got to be a part of an infrastructure rebuild.” You and I are coming up with marketing messages and branding messages for the party, which is important. Both of them need it.

Irrespective of politics and ideology, I would be happy to see Elizabeth Lynne Cheney message what she needs to restore, integrity, principles, values, or whatever to the Republican Party. I would be happy if President Joe Biden messages this Infrastructure Bill better because as a businessman myself for growth in America and for prosperity, that would be useful.

Tom, this is a good one. Thanks a lot. This was great. Thanks, everybody, for reading.

Thanks, Bill. I enjoyed it.

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Exploring the Power of Belief Messages in America's Complicated Identity

Tue, 25 May 2021 16:45:02 GMT

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Everyone has their own versions of the truth because of the so-called belief messages. One topic will always be refuted by another because they either believe it so much or are aggressively against it. Sadly, the entire nation is saturated in this kind of messaging, and thus putting America into further political imbalance. Bill Stierle and Tom discuss how belief messages play a significant role in the civil war happening within the Republican Party and its followers. They delve into their still ongoing battle against the supposed election fraud and how this mindset is directly influenced by Donald Trump's political branding. They also look at this on an individual level, talking about how the people's perception of truth is affected by this endless government dispute.

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Watch the episode here

Bill, there's an awful interesting dynamic playing in our government with the power struggle and the infighting within the Republican Party. It's important that we talk about that and try to understand the power of belief messages. At the same time, we need to contrast that and look at the opportunity the Democrats have that they're not taking advantage of with this. It's fascinating.

Communication is important, Tom. One of the biggest challenges that we have is whether you're in business, politics, or personal life, you got to watch the messages that you lay down in front of people. As you lay these messages down, they take them up and you don't know if they're taking the message as something literal, a metaphor, dangerous, something scary or something that you've got to be cautious of. The language messages that come up are ones that we've got to pay attention to because they're activating or solidifying a belief, a habit pattern of thinking. People like to think that they're stronger than their thoughts and that's not the way it works.

Your thoughts are influenced in your body and where you're going in. If I want to get good branding and marketing message out, all I got to do is keep trickling the message out. As human beings, it's the same thing. If you keep trickling the message out, the person gets hooked on that message because they don't want to change their belief. They don't want to move off of it. They won't even question what the belief is. In language and even in psychology, there are two terms for this. One of them is called a curse and another one is called a spell. Two different languages fall into this thing, whether it's a Democrat, Republican, or somebody that is following a certain thought structure.

What ends up happening is that we don't question our beliefs and double-check them. Once the belief is there, it's easier for us to stay in line with the belief because then you'd have to rewrite stuff. You'd have to go out on your own and make your own point of view. That's where language is important for the listener to realize, “Am I being affected by a belief I already have? Is that belief being reinforced because somebody has said it over and over again?” I don't know, Tom. Does Tide laundry detergent clean better than Gain? What do you think?

People like to think that they're stronger than their thoughts, and that's not the way it works.

CLICK TO TWEET

I don't know either. I was thinking about the dishwashing detergent for your dishwasher and they all say, “You don't have to pre-wash any of these dishes. Put them in with all the worst grime and caked-on food and use this one. It'll do better than that one.” I don't know if I believe that.

It's very challenging. As human beings, our message gets fixed. If somebody looks to talk with me about a belief that is opposite of my belief, I know what feelings are going to come up. There are two powerful feelings, doubt and skepticism will come up. My belief is already indicating a truth that I have or that's something I'm already trusting that I'm standing by. As a communicator and as a mediator, as I get into a situation, I've got to understand that the belief bias is in place. A person might be operating from a curse and might be operating from a spell that is, long ago, might have been in their childhood. It might have been an experience that came up in their adult life that defined, “Don't drive down this road. This road is dangerous.”

There are people that don't go back to the city they were born in because when they go around, they'll get reactivated by all the different memories that are from that place. They go back and they're not going to visit their old house. That's tough because as human beings, if we're going to call ourselves free, then we need to free our minds from a limiting belief and question facts. Those are things that you would count on. You count them again. You count them 2 or 3 times and then you say, “We counted these things three times and we are trusting the people that counted those.” We're not listening to the other messages other than the truth of these people and the trust that we have. That's the thing that's being called into question, which is hard for us to live through.

It's being called into question in many different ways. We have a 3rd or 4th recount going on in Arizona, Maricopa County by this independent company who's never recounted election results before called Cyber Ninjas. The Republican Party in Arizona fought to get the right to recount it again the 3rd or 4th time because the Republicans in the state of Arizona don't like the result that came up. They have cast doubt and skepticism on the recount results.

This is all a part of the bigger lie, which is called the Big Lie. Donald Trump started to sow those seeds of doubt and skepticism on election day. Even before election day, he would say, “If we don't win, then there was a fraud.” Afterward, he's like, “There are all kinds of fraud. There was widespread voter fraud.” This is the lie that was perpetuated. That doubt and skepticism that he keeps sowing seem to be something that people latch on to easily.

There is a logic in his messaging and that's what makes a curse or a spell powerful. The logic is by midnight, the votes that were counted were in our favor. By morning, how could the votes be all in the other direction? To the believer, that spell is a spell message. It puts them to sleep and saying, “That makes sense to me.” It makes sense if the easy people vote the counties that are easiest to count get their numbers in first. The counties that have a greater volume and are harder to count because there's such a greater volume, those numbers would come in later. It's not the other way around. The spell says, “I want to trust my messenger because my messenger is in alignment with my beliefs.”

A spell is a verbal poison. It's something that gets in and the person is overtaken by the belief message. To move this back to business for a second in branding and marketing, it's like, “How can I get a Febreze type response out of the population where it's a billion-dollar product? All you've got to do is line the message up with the belief of a clean house smells like this. All I've got to do is make a bed and spray it with Febreze and that bed smells good.” Now you've got a billion-dollar business. I'm talking about a product. The Democrats and Republicans have a product. The challenge is how do you sell, promote, or get that product to stick? It's harder to sell a product that is good than it is a product that's going to prevent danger. It's a weird way to say it but the limbic part of the brain is interested in engaging nervous, anxious, worried and scared more than it is satisfied, calm, peaceful and delighted.

A spell is a verbal poison. It's something that gets in, and the person is overtaken by the belief message.

CLICK TO TWEET

That's why it's easier to sell, “If you don't fight for your rights, you're not going to have a country anymore,” than it is to sell, “We're going to have peace and calm and everybody is going to have a job.” It's easier to play into the fears.

Curses and spells activate that way because what they are doing with a spell is that, “I want to establish a belief that causes inaction. I'm going to be an inactive place.” With the poison, “I'm going to have pent-up resentment and bitterness about the other person that you caused me to do that because it's our identity or our tribe.” Whereas a curse gets a person locked into loyalty. A curse freezes and puts blinders up on a person's mindset. It causes the person to not question, “I'm not going to question what is going on. I'm not questioning that.” That's the hard thing.

If we're going to take a look at a healthy version of the truth, it looks like we've got to walk our way back to a healthy version of the truth. We're not fully engaging a healthy version of truth where one person sits on one side and one person sits on the other side and they say, “Here's what's best for the country. Here's the healthy version of the truth.” It's adversarial. Because it's adversarial, I'm holding my fingers up and they are shooting. I've got to get our mindset to move forward about what does truth and trust look like and break the bad news, the spell and the curse. There are no messages that are breaking the spell or the curse now and nobody is willing to try it.

This is shocking that the former president, Donald Trump, and the Republican leaders in Congress have been selling this big lie and aided by right-winged opinion media hosts. They've been selling this big lie that the election was a fraud since November 2020 or maybe even before that. It has taken root, especially amongst Republican-leaning voters and Donald Trump supporters. You see interviews with these people and they do not believe that the election was fair. They believe it was stolen.

Of course, that led to the journey of the sixth insurrection. That led to many people in the House and the Senate not voting against the certification of the vote on which didn't happen then until January 7th, 2021. Now you've got this continued infighting in the Republican Party from Republicans that do not believe they should be loyal to Donald Trump, who was leading them when they lost the House in 2018 and was leading them when he lost re-election in 2020. They lost the Senate in 2020. Rather than believe they need new leadership, they're trying to cast a spell on everyone. Instead of looking for a new leader, they continue to perpetuate this lie that the election was rigged or it was stolen. That's easier than accepting we need new leadership.

It's easier because no one's capturing the energy that the former president, Donald Trump, has captured. He has shown up as the person that has that strength and that power as a marketer and a brander. I've said many times that he's brilliant at staying on a marketing and branding message and not saying, “The truth is that my facilities are the best in the world. You got to come and play golf at my facilities. Aren’t they great facilities? You got to keep coming. Look at all the famous people that come to my facilities. Don't you want to be over here with my facilities?” He’s ungraded putting the name Donald Trump on stuff and branding and marketing these facilities.

The problem with marketing and branding in that way is that if you go too far past the line, the shine wears off. The veneer wears off, it gets thin after a while and that's where some of his properties are struggling. Some of his things are going, “I don't want to be associated with that. I want us to have our own identity.” Those properties take his name off and they get sold. They get repositioned as a wonderful facility to come down. They read just the perspective to go, “This is a nice place. It's not what that other guy keeps talking about.” For America, it would be a return to certain core principles that we've left behind. That's the path out of this because we do need a path out.

It's hard to see that path because there's a civil war going on within the Republican Party. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has completely established his loyalty to former President Donald Trump. There's going to be a vote in the House about stripping Representative Elizabeth Lynne Cheney of her power in terms of the number three position in the committee and within their conference and all that. You mentioned spells and then curses. It's like Kevin McCarthy and other Republicans are putting a curse on Elizabeth Lynne Cheney because she is not getting in line and showing loyalty to Donald Trump. Instead, she is trying to stand for facts and truth that are not as juicy and people don't seem to be as interested in them, especially when they have some of these established beliefs of this Big Lie. This is a heck of a struggle that's going on there.

The party could snap back, which is an interesting thing with curses and spells because you can wake up from them. That's the point of Cinderella, Snow White, and Fiona. They’re like, “I'm supposed to this and it's going to break the spell.” We could do another whole episode of curses and spells. A curse causes a lot of doubt and skepticism because it affects truth and trust. Whereas a spell creates nervous and scared energy because it's about safety and protection. All a party has to do is keep playing those two things. Language-wise, you can watch the Republicans take turns at doing doubt, skepticism, nervousness, and scared. If you're not observing that, if you're a place of action and reaction of it, even the news media gets swirls about it. It doesn't matter how many times Don Lemon rolls his eyes about it because the curse of the spell stays in place. His viewers like that. It'll keep his ratings up but it's not helpful.

What’s helpful is talking about the cursing spell often and then empathizing and have compassion for the person that's caught with the cursing spell. By the way, it's not like the left doesn't have its version of curses and spells, too, Tom. The vaxxers got their set of problems. There are problems on the left on the belief about certain things, how to solve things and how to get there from here. There are problems being in both of those spots. There are lists of beliefs and biases that are in place that are causing our nation to go back and forth. We've got to remember what a collaborative cooperative nation looks like. You vote, advocate, become a politician until the voting booth is closed, and then you become a statesman. That's what the shift is and that's what's missing.

That's what it used to be. I agree. I remember one of the first meetings in the White House after Obama was inaugurated and John McCain, a senator, is in the room and there was this discussion about how the election is over. It's time to get to work and try to achieve consensus, compromise, or whatever. I've seen that throughout history, I remember, but that's not happening. Bill, it's important to point out the opportunity the Democrats have.

By the way, the Democrats are bad at marketing and selling compared to the Republicans or at least they don't seem to take advantage of trying to market and brand. They could be taking this civil war within the Republican Party and using some of the languages you're using about curses and spells to label all of this doubt and skepticism that they're trying to sow in the minds of the American people and establish these beliefs. If they put Kevin McCarthy talking about Elizabeth Lynne Cheney and the Big Lie or whatever next to spells that he's casting and if you label him, they're under his spell.

They're under Donald Trump's curse.

For that matter, Elizabeth Lynne Cheney did that as part of her defensive position against it.

A curse freezes and puts blinders upon a person's mindset.

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If she gets voted out, the next thing is it looks like the party is under the spell of Donald Trump. It looks like it's going to live underneath that spell and fall under the curse of the old administration. Immediately, she will ascend and they'll go, “What?” They're living with the curse and the spell and they're believing things. They're not facing the facts that they need to face. As an adult, I'm choosing to face the facts. As a kid, they're choosing to follow the Dark Father. If they choose to follow the Dark Father the way he is still in and the way he's violent and allow the country to stay in violence because he can sell violence, he already sold violence once. Those poor people set empathy and compassion. The people that followed him during the insurrection were under a spell and a curse. Because they followed that message, they are facing legal consequences. I feel disheartened and saddened because their justice is going to be held accountable for doing what our former president, Donald Trump, told them to do.

It's a lack of language skills. She and her team should be doing that. What if they then equated that whole thing with Make America Great Again? Also, want to Make America Great Again like Donald Trump did lose the House in 2018, losing the election in 2020, losing the Senate in 2020. You could start to brand Make America Great Again as this curse and spell also and send Donald Trump out to pasture.

It's hard to break a curse. It's hard to get the antidote for a spell. Tom, if I came over to your house and I'm bringing something for a party or something like that, I'm going to go to the grocery store and I'm going to be influenced by a brand that is circulating in my mindset. I'm going to be affected by that. I'm going to bring one of those well-branded items not because it's the best but because it's the one that stuck in my head. There's a belief that it's the best. There's a belief that it's the thing. Why would I buy Budweiser beer when I can buy Modelo, who has a, “We're better together,” message to celebrate the immigrant. I’m buying that one.

I remember one of the biggest images in my mind of that is as a young teenager or preteen and my great uncle comes to visit from California. I was in New York at the time. It's summertime and he opens up this package of ice-cream-popsicle type things dipped in chocolate. I'm expecting a normal Fudgicle or something. He’s like, “No. These Dove bars.” As he's giving it to you, he’s like, “This is the best.” I was like, “Talk about a brand message.” Like you were saying coming to the party, he's the relative from afar and you haven't seen him forever and he's great. He's giving you the best.

The Dove bar, the thick chocolate ice cream and you're going like, “You're right. You are the best uncle ever.” Make America Great Again had that fading narrative. It's going to be a fading narrative. What they do with curses and spells, too, Tom, is they make it a shrine. They make it a worship piece. Curses and spells are at different altars that are showing up. They all have their veneer and their veneer starts falling off after a while and people don't believe it. They're going, “I couldn't believe that but there are not enough people around to believe that with me.” That's the unsettling thing.

It may be too late for Elizabeth Lynne Cheney. I hope that she or her staff reads this and realizes that there is a way to use language and message your way to labeling what's going on as curses and spells and wake the people up.

There's a waking-up, a reckoning both on the left and the right of how they're messaging each other. We're not advocating another set of curses and spells on the left. We’re advocating what is the higher vision of the American brand. How do you clean that off unless the American brand re-establishes itself as unified? The Chinese Ambassador said in the meeting was, “America doesn't have the same credibility that it used to.” As soon as the Joe Biden rep said this, the Chinese guy goes, “You don't have it the way you used to have it.”

That means that we got some international brand problems that are doing it because if they're not going to take us seriously, all of a sudden, it doesn't matter how much that we utilize our force because it becomes, “So what? We’ll outlast you. Welcome to Afghanistan.” “So what? We’ll outlast. Welcome to Iraq. We’ll outlast you because you can't maintain that you're fighting for freedom when you're not.” That's hard for Americans to believe that we've got to keep reinvigorating the things that we can do good in the world and not necessarily the things that pit us against each other, which is not a strong, collaborative and cooperative narrative.

The main thing with curses and spells is whether it's an individual struggling or a company struggling, these messages of the ability to create an identity or a value to bring it back to life like respect, integrity, truth or trust takes a joint pushing the boulder up the hill and saying, “I believe this word conservative but I also believe the definition of conservative. I believe the definition of what progressive means. I want to grow and progress and do what's better or what's best without letting go of something that worked in the past that doesn't work anymore.” We've got to work our language around and be careful about what the curses and spells do because they are a power that is activated by these already inherent belief messages that we've been saturated by. We're not going back. We've got to go forward, somehow. Back is not a viable path to where we were because we don't have that identity that we used to have in the 1950s.

It is a different time and so much has changed. It's been over 70 years since the 1950s.

It was a great identity, driving around in cars, going to the drive-in, starting to dance, doing the jitterbug or whatever the ‘50s music was, the birth of rock and roll and having fun. We need to take a look at where our identity needs to go as a nation and look at that. There’s more about that coming up, Tom because there's a lot to talk about with curses and spells, for sure.

That was helpful. I appreciate that discussion, Bill. It helps put some perspective on some of the languaging and messaging going on. It shows some tragedies of language and some opportunities as well.

Thanks, Tom.

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The Power of Being Controversial: How Political Figures and the Media Use Controversy to Their Advantage

Fri, 07 May 2021 11:15:07 GMT

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Everybody loves an occasional controversy, but they quickly become toxic if left unchecked. Bill Stierle and Tom continue their conversation about the power of acting controversial, this time elaborating on how political commentators’ opinions on politics can leave a rather lingering bitter taste in the mouth of the general public. They also highlight how controversial people, both in politics and media, use their power to their advantage without considering the impact they have on the people they are supposed to be serving. Join them for a healthy discussion on the news media and political figures that is always the talk of the town.

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Watch the episode here

Bill, in our last episode, there was a deeper dive we could have taken into the statements by Tucker Carlson and what we were talking about the power of being controversial. There's a lot more that has come out about it. I would call it a flip-flop. I think you would call it something else, wouldn't you?

Yeah, because it's a duality. A lot of the times, we talked about the concept of, "You were standing over here. You flip-flopped to this other position." Yet many times, these things are not as black and white as you think they are. They're not as polarizing or opposite as we think they are. It’s the need for financial security. The media empire, Tucker Carlson, Jake Tapper or whoever the person are all looking for people to watch them. Because they are all looking for people to watch them, a part of them needs to say or do things in a certain way that brings that population or that group of people towards them. They'll test outrageous things just to see if they can move the needle and gain the eyeballs they need to secure the advertisements that need to be.

If we were to choose as a society, we could make sure that when something is labeled news, it's got to have a 70% index on truth. That will change a lot of shows. It's then not the Laura Ingraham angle, it's the Laura Ingraham opinion. It's the Tucker Carlson opinion. It's the Sean Hannity "The way I see it.” It's like, "Yes, I see it that way.” Other people may see it that way and they make entertainment out of the way they see it. The marketplace will allow that show to stay on as long as people extend connection and respect towards that person. The only problem is when we get to bigger civic issues, what's best for the country, the state and the environment, if somebody has enough opinion, they can opinion us into a bad place. The power of being controversial is that the opinion gets stickability. The thing now has to do with a mask or no mask.

It was shocking to me to see that within two weeks, Tucker Carlson on March 30th, 2021 is saying that the science behind masks is clear and they work. He was making a very factual statement and he was supportive of it. Somehow within the next two weeks, all of a sudden, masks are equated with child abuse. He had a video where his guest was saying, "He's in Austin, Texas, walking down the street in the city without a mask. People are looking at him like he's crazy, doing something wrong or dangerous."

This person said, "It's the other way around. Those people wearing masks are offensive to me. They're outdoors. They have no reason to wear a mask," but then Tucker Carlson took it to another level and said and I’m paraphrasing here, "I would even take the analogy to a stronger place that when I see someone outdoors wearing a mask, that's as offensive to me as somebody walking down the street and exposing themselves.” “Put it away," he said. It's like, "Really? Somebody wearing a mask on the street is as offensive to you as somebody who is exposing themselves?"

If I'm looking for the need for financial security to be mad and I'm trying to get the engagement or the upset in my viewer to say, "I'm seeing something that is bothersome to me." Tucker Carlson and even Rachel Maddow on both sides do and say things. They experience an emotion so the viewer maintains loyalty and connection through the emotion of the need not being met. They're in that place of doing that. They're not equal. We can take and put a scale on how many factual things, near facts, half facts or partial facts that the person is promoting.

The power of being controversial is that the opinion gets stickability.

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I had to do all levels because I always try to think of a needs-based narrative as like you have two scales. They say half thing twice and then it equals out the truth on this side. Do you see how weird this is going to get? It's like you're competing messaging and saturating something so you can sell toxic sludge as an energy drink. You push it large enough in that direction or say, "That environment was better served without the elephants living on it because now we can farm it." It's like, "No, we lost the elephants." Human beings will tend to spin things and rationale into their bias or belief, but they're setting aside the truth. That's unsettling.

It seems some of these opinion hosts change and spin it one way than the other. You called it the duality. It's all about what's going to get them the most attention at the moment.

It's all to activate the feeling inside the viewer because the viewer many times doesn't know what their needs are, the need for choice, independence and loyalty versus the need for health, the need for protection for others, and the need to collaborate. To live in civil society, we have to give and take things. We get everything we always want because otherwise, it's one person's dominating thought. A civil servant or a statesman is a person who says what's best for society and gets rid of the extreme ends. We don't particularly have that as much. We have more politicians and fewer statesmen.

I wish that there was a visual on this. When a person is running for a campaign, they need to have some type of colored scarf. Maybe one side has the scarf on this, but once they get elected, they needed both sides. They would take off the scarf and put on the new scarf to say, "From this moment on, I am going to pick what I think is best for our society and my constituents who voted for me, even though I said I would do something. Sorry, the thing I said that I would help you, I am keeping that in mind but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to do it because it's not for the good of all."

In business, this is valuable too. When we buy a product or service, how many times your customer has way more expectation of what you're going to do than what they signed up for or what the scope of what they paid for, and they completely expand beyond the truth. All of a sudden, you bring to them something that's a reality, "This is the contract. Here are the five items. I've nailed all the five." On the other side, the person is going, "Yes, but I thought I was going to." It’s like, "I would be willing to help you with that, but it's not fully on the contract."

That can tend to happen. It’s what we call scope creep of a service-related product. Despite how clear you are, a lot of times, people will just make it up in their mind what they thought should get. Somehow after the purchase, the scope changes in their mind. They think they should be getting more than what they paid for. Those are difficult conversations to have, but it has to happen. The other thing that's very difficult in customer service that's similar is you have a customer that you need them to make a decision on something and they haven't made a decision on it so you can't move forward. You ask them, "I need to know your decision on this item." They say, "I already made that decision." I was like, "What was that decision?" Some people's communication styles are weird, "I already told you, so you should have that." "I don't have it. I'm looking for it. What’s your decision" They don't tell you. There are all sorts of communication conundrums that we deal with in business.

If we go after it, that communication conundrum would be, "How do you empathize with somebody who's stuck?" My empathy line would be, "You're feeling torn and some confusion about what the best choice is. Part of you wants to choose this and part of you wants to choose that. You're not sure which one to pick." They have to say yes because they are not answering you anyways. You could guess there. A big part of proactive empathy is getting in touch with the thing that is knocking the human being out of making a decision on their behalf. The difference between something moral and ethical and something illegal. You got to see the difference between those things. The only way to get there is to manage or connect to your feelings and needs, as well as the person who you're speaking to because they're disconnected.

It's interesting you talked about the duality to get eyeballs. We're talking about something that Tucker Carlson said one week and then within two weeks, he said another. I see this on customers also where the customer says, "No, I don't want to change the name of my podcast. I want to continue with the name I have. I just want to rebrand it, have a new logo and some of the stuff." We go through it and then a month down the road, we're providing all the stuff and they say, "No, I'm not happy with the name. I want a new name." "Now, you want a new name?" "I always wanted a new name." This becomes the duality, "No. How did you not know? I always wanted a new name." It's not appropriate for me to play back the recording when they said they didn't want a new name. Now, they want a new name. It's like, "We can do that." You still have to empathize with them, "I hear that you're looking for a new name for your podcast. Is that correct?" "Yes," then we move on. The duality sometimes is not just to get eyeballs. Sometimes it's that somebody always needs to be right.

Self-worth as well as emotional safety is a need there that causes people to pick a different truth at a different moment.

That sounds very relevant here.

Let everybody settle out this. If we're holding the space of compassion and empathy, we've got to realize that people are going to pick a different truth in a different moment because multiple truths are going on many times. It's doesn't necessarily need to fall on something. When we get better at picking a different truth at a different time, it's like, "This is the truth I picked based on the information I had. At this moment, this is the truth that I'm picking. I'm picking a different truth at a different time." If Tucker Carlson gets a harder financial hit by this current controversial thing, then there's going to be backtrack silence, licking his wounds, seeing if he can reboot in another place.

Think of it a little bit like this. Pepsi tried this one. They had one of the Kardashians hand a Pepsi can to a police officer who was standing in riot gear. That commercial is a good awareness moment that being controversial could have paid off. There would have been things I would have done differently in the shot to make that work and demonstrate those that could be taking place. At which time, the next march that you have, the police officer would be marching and the crowd would be marching with the Pepsi in front of them. You got shields and you got Pepsi coming out there. I would love to see that image.

Human beings tend to spin things and rationale into their bias or belief, but they’re setting aside the truth.

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If they would have been ready with that gamble and throw that out there, people would have been totally cracked up and were like, "This first moment wasn't supposed to be something poignant. It was supposed to be something silly." You've just taken a controversial moment. You've shifted. Your brand recognition is going like, "That was pretty damn funny." At the same time, it's hard to talk about serious things like violence from the police and how hard it is to do that kind of safekeeping, as well as how hard it is to get Pepsi to get marketing traction. How hard it is for Tucker Carlson to try to solidify his base because he turned on them two weeks earlier when he said, "Masks are this." He got a ton of blowback and he’s like, “Should I be going there?” He turns and comes back on the other side and does something extremely different on the other side.

He’s attacking masks and anybody wearing them, including saying, "Having children wear masks is akin to child abuse." That's the shocking statement, which is getting more eyeballs.

You can interview 50 psychologists and you'll find five who will say, "Kids are much more anxious, nervous, and scared now than they were before the masks." The answer is good because that means their emotions are working correctly. Anxious, nervous, worried and scared is the right feeling sequence when there is a virus that might hurt somebody in your family. The way I described that is the message that's missing for the kid. We're wearing a mask because we're being considerate and protecting others. We're wearing a mask to care for ourselves and our family. We're wearing a mask so that our society can collaboratively work together.

I want to see the PSAs on those. By the way, I wrote somebody's PSA campaign about mask-wearing. How does a parent talk to their kids about masks? "Mommy, I don't want to wear the mask." "Do you feel hesitant and is the mask uncomfortable for you?" "Yes, I don't like it on my face." "You would not like to wear it on your face?" "Yes.” “I would like to not wear it on my face too. Would you be willing to hear what the good reason is why we're doing it?" You then give the message and the good reason. There are three good things.

Can you imagine if somebody like Tucker Carlson had a guest on his show who was not already in alignment with his thinking on this? There have been some but sometimes he shuts them down, especially if they're remote guests, which they pretty much all are. He won't let them speak. One of the videos that we put in the last episode's blog post showed where he was like, "No, you're done," and he has his producer cut him off. If he couldn't cut him off and somebody talks like you did in a reasonable way and say, "Tucker Carlson, are you not interested in providing that protection for your parents or your grandparents from this virus?"

The not-narrative is not as powerful as the power with narrative. Tom, you and I have talked about how language stacks on top of each other. As soon as you do a not-narrative, it's overlapping. To make it clean, it would sound like this, "We all can agree that getting the need for the safety net for our elderly Americans and our Americans who don't have wellness, it might be a good idea to wear masks. If you're not around those kinds of people, you could choose to get your need for freedom met at the expense of the health of others. I think that collectively, we're looking to all get the need for freedom to be restored as quickly as possible, is that correct?”

It's so much better than I started to say it. That's great.

You put the leads out, Tom. This is what's so fun about the show. You and I clean it up on the backend. The new way of thinking about communication is that we've got to do a better job of putting in collaborative narratives versus power-over narratives. The power-over narratives are winning. The reason why the power-over narratives are winning is that the language is set up into an adversarial, "We got to get this. There's a reward here. There's an accomplishment. We're going to go ahead and do that." We're not celebrating the journey as much as we need to. We are acknowledging the reward instead of recognizing what it takes to get the reward.

The way I like to think about it is this. When John F. Kennedy said, "We're going to go to the moon by the end of the decade," that was a lofty goal. He threw a few nickels behind it and NASA started blowing up rockets. Of course, the answer was, "We can't keep blowing up rockets. You guys got to get better at this." The scientists wound up getting better at this. They became more cautious and more safekeeping and more of this, but when you do that, you also lose creativity and innovation along the way because you're not moving it. What we're doing now is Elon Musk is blowing up rockets because he has enough money to test and fail. He got there quicker. If you have the revenue to test and fail, what happens is you can get success.

Now, in this new moment, I'm going to turn that narrative into being controversial. In marketing, people test and fail all the time. Former President Donald Trump used to test and fail until he succeeded with slogans during rallies. In business, it's A/B marketing. “Did this email work better than this email? Did I get their attention? Did I have them open the email? This is posting on social media. Did I get likes? Did I not get likes? My likes went away. They went over here. How did they go over here? How can I get my likes back?"

That does relate to what these opinion shows and hosts are doing.

They're not managing the journey as much as I would like them to because the journey is, how do you create a unified America that can have two people at a picnic or a Thanksgiving dinner and people know when the hell to shut up and remember why the hell they're there at the Thanksgiving dinner? They're there for the family. They're not there to work on their political issues out over a turkey. Regrettably, because there's so much pain about this and people are siloed a little bit, grandpa or uncle who's sitting at the table is going like, "At my age, at my time, you get to say what you want." I was like, "No, I don't think that was true back then. I think everybody came there and people knew when to shut up because they weren't there for that." There are other times to do those narratives, not at Thanksgiving. It was about things that were safer and more benign to talk about like sports and other things like that.

Self-worth as well as emotional safety is a need that causes people to pick a different truth at a different moment.

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With team sports, why is it that we can rib each other? I can trash the Miami Dolphins and you can trash the New England Patriots and we can have fun with that, trying to get each other's GOAT as it were. At the end of it, we can still be friends. Why is it so much more difficult with our politics?

The short answer is because those sports identities are not as fully attached to our self-worth and they're not occupying so much of our identity. Whereas when you're voting, the identity and loyalty piece get escalated. It's very hard to separate the two. As my brother would say, "There are a lot of sensitive people out there and if you become opinionated, they'll just click on, click away and won't buy from you." He's right and that's what happens to certain people on certain TV shows and things like that. The marketplace is saying, "No, I don't want that sitcom. I'm not going to be there. I’m out.” Why? Because there are no advertising dollars. There are no eyeballs there.

There is truth to "Don't be controversial," and then the other side says, "If you aren't controversial, you'll be able to stand out more on your side and there are plenty of customers over there who cares about the customers on the other side." That's why news media has split the way it has. They've polarized because the self-worth and the identity are so close together. Whereas in a sports team, you can take it or leave it and go like, "Is Miami going to put a team together this year? Is Cam Newton going to be the quarterback for the Patriots for more than another year? Is he going to get hurt on the way?" "I don't know. He's over-the-hill. He'll never be Tom Brady."

Television as a medium is a business and they need eyeballs in order to do business. I'm remembering now back to Howard Stern's book, Private Parts , which also was a movie. In the early or mid-'80s, Howard Stern was at the WNBC in New York and he was extremely controversial, pushing the edge of the envelope. When they studied data, when they researched the listeners, they said that people who love him listened for a total of an hour and a half every day. The reason why is they want to hear what he's going to say next. The people who hated him listened for two and a half hours a day. The number one reason they gave for why is they want to hear what he's going to say next. That's why he was called a shock jock. The shock does get attention and eyeballs and that's exactly what a lot of these opinion hosts are doing. I agree it happens on both sides. It happens with the Jake Tappers, the Don Lemons, the Chris Cuomos of the world, as well as the Sean Hannitys, the Tucker Carlsons, and the Laura Ingrahams, right?

That's correct. That's very unsettling because being able to and being mindful of how the listeners’ physiology is working to keep the engagement going is a part of it. Once money got more involved in politics through Citizens United, that's when the salespeople started coming out and more of the polarization took place and more of, "You can't vote across the aisle because your side, your people can't get anything done if you vote across the aisle." That's when the collaboration and cooperation took a nosedive and that's been tough. We will if we're going to get back to it and get the collaboration and cooperation to move to the front of the list again.

People struggle with it because when I say the word collaboration and cooperation, it has got to be emotionally safe for you not to get the thing you want in collaboration and cooperation. It's like, "We're going to go this way. We're going to see if it works and then we're going to go this way if it doesn't." One of the things the voters say when they're with Donald Trump is, "He's a strong leader." Actually, he's a strong messenger that messages an opinion and is okay about changing the message within the next 30 seconds. They like that he's able to talk from both sides and it sounds like he's leading and testing. There's a huge difference between leading and testing.

Like he said on January 6th, 2021, "March down the street. You're going to have to fight like hell if you want to have a country anymore." A couple of hours later, he was putting out a video trying to say, "Everybody, go home” or whatever. He’s changing the message quite a bit from storming the Capitol.

All he just did was take the hornet's nest, put it out there and hit it with the stick. Everybody was hitting with the stick to get the hornets moving. It's not the hornet's fault as much. The hornets aren't thinking. They're going, "Protection, safety, identity, integrity, trust and loyalty." That's what they're doing.

They're reacting to being poked with the stick.

They don't know what their needs are. They just know they feel bad and angry and the leader told them to go get their needs met. The emotion then takes over and then the police officer doesn't look like a human being anymore, "Aren't you voting for? Don't you support the police?" “Not these police. These police are traitors. These police are sworn in. They're not doing their job.” The rational mind is going to pick the thread that validates their identity and stays lock-step with that until they ask themselves the real question, "Is this my identity? Is this the way I would like America to be when I just like to walk down a street and go, "They have a mask. They don't have a mask?" It looks like that group is going for health, safety and cooperation. The other group is going for freedom and choice.

How about that? Live and let live.

"I can see you over there without a mask. If you start walking towards me, I want to let you know I will be walking away from you because I'm working on the safety and cooperation of the nation. You're not working on that, but that's what I'm working on." It's helpful stuff. There is more to come on this, Tom. It's not like it's not going to be controversial. We got to decide, is it going to be a week or a month before we got to do truth and the power of controversial statements? Are we going through a week? We used to not be able to get through a week without having five controversial statements.

Definitely, the temperature has come down in a lot of ways and all media is not necessarily giving oxygen to every controversial statement the way they did when the former president had his Twitter account. We come into our sessions to record and sometimes we're like, "What do we want to talk about now?" It's not so obvious. I think it's a good thing very much.

It allows us to go deeper on issues and for us to be reactive too.

Bill, thanks so much for that.

Thanks, everybody for reading.

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The Impact of the Hailstone Principle in Today's Society

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Tue, 04 May 2021 17:38:17 GMT

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A few words in a catchphrase can gain weight if they are repeated over and over again, gaining momentum, and causing a huge impact once they hit the intended recipient. This hailstone principle is a popular strategy in marketing, allowing businesses to convey their message to the audience without the need for lengthy materials. However, it can be used beyond brand building into influencing population behaviors in other realms. Bill Stierle and Tom go deeply into how many politicians take advantage of the hailstone principle to solidify their movements, ideologies, and platforms. This strategy is evident in the still-roaring battle over claims of fraud in last year's presidential election. Bill and Tom discuss the hailstone principle's effect on government fundraising programs, immigration policies, and the way politicians create their own "branding.”

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Watch the episode here

We're going to talk about the hailstone principle. Can you help eliminate what that means?

I appreciate this, Tom. The hailstone principle is when you take a little thought, a little idea or a little sentence and then you start building layers around it. It's the way a hailstone is formed in a cloud. A particle of dust comes up, it connects inside a raindrop and the raindrop starts to fall to the ground. Before it hits the ground, the wind takes it back up to the top where it gets frozen and then it comes down. It only comes down enough to get wet a little bit more and pick up a little bit more H2O and then gets put back up and then there's another layer frozen on top of it. It keeps coming down and circulated inside the cloud, inside the wind structure. This rotation makes the hailstone bigger until it gets to be golf ball size and then softball-size hailstone. It can make a big difference. A message can be trapped like that in the middle. Whether the message is true or not true, that doesn't matter because when this hailstone hits, you don't want to be outside. If it's your car, a roof, it's going to get damage. Does that make some sense?

It does. If I understand correctly, you're saying that messages can go through a cycle as the dust particles do. It can get repeated over time, go through cycles and the message gets larger and larger. Eventually, it ends up landing somewhere. It started as this speck of dust.

If you have a good message and you start putting wind underneath it, it starts to get the stick and it's a message. Immediately, I'm flashed to the movie Forrest Gump where he’s walking through and this guy wants to write bumper stickers and he steps in some crap. Immediately, it's shit happens. That's the bumper sticker that makes the guy a millionaire. He's running along and the mud goes on his face. The guy hands him a yellow T-shirt and he puts it on. It looks like a happy face. I couldn't sell these things anyway because no one wants to buy yellow. Immediately, there's an image on there and he says, “There's an idea there.” The hailstone principle is similar to that. It's a thought, a concept, an idea that when you get it to stick, it can make a big difference.

Hope was Barack Obama's sticking thing. There's hope coming. To counter that, how's that hope-y, change-y thing going? It's not selling and going well when there is an obstruction piece to it because the change that you would like is not necessarily the change that everybody wants. The same thing with Make America Great Again, it's a little particle. All you got to do is blow hot air and then the hot air carries it up to the cold air. It gets a coat of water and a coat of ice on it. It comes down and then you got to keep blowing it back up again. People still want to keep that thing up there and keep trying to get gravity behind it but other people don't want to do that. Whether it's a marketing message, a political message, a branding message or a sales message, the message has got to have some stick, carry and some momentum. Otherwise, the hail falls to the ground and it melts.

It seems like, I would say, an awful lot of our government messages and messages from our politicians are this micro message that they repeat over and over. They're trying to give it oxygen to lift it up and get it to be coated again with more ice to make it have more impact.

What people don't fully get about Trump's rallies in his speeches when he did them was to drain the swamp with a testing message, Stop the Steal testing message. When you go down the path of only relying upon messages, you can't do that kind of message with certain rainstorms because then you get those big softball-size hails. That would be an example of the insurrection. It would be an example of feeding the message, “If I lose, they cheated.”

I would think the whole Stop the Steal messaging that was going on from the election that started and then kept being repeated is that particle of dust, up in the clouds growing bigger. The insurrection it seems was the hailstorm where everything fell to the ground.

With the hailstone principle, you've got to be careful about marketing and what truth you're putting in there. Click To Tweet

All of a sudden, all those people are left with a melted idea and there's no one to blow air underneath it. It's the same thing that happened in the ‘80s with Ronald Reagan. At the end of it, it was like, “They did an arms deal against what Congress voted on. They figured out how to give money to another country through an illegal form of international things. They gave arms to who? The Iran deal? You guys did that? You took the money and you moved it through here to go there?” That is hard for a person's identity to get a hold of. Your identity is with this party and your party has done something that is against not only the rule of law but also against the best interests of the nation.

We lose our world standing because of the mistake. Watch Americans because they're going to take a capitalist turn on you quickly if you're not watching. The rest of the world is getting a little bit like, “They're doing that. We have these other countries to deal with. Maybe we’ll go there. We have ideas. We can do some things ourselves.” The point of this story is with the hailstone principle, you've got to be careful about marketing messaging and what truth that you're putting in there. When that hailstone does come down, you can make it into a snow cone at least instead of going, “It's this melted thing, a rock, that hit me in the head. I'm left with all this water all over the place.” It's problematic because that's the way language works a little bit.

It's interesting to see how messages like this get repeated, trying to amplify them, trying to get them to stick and how some of the big ones happen like Stop the Steal. The counter to that was the Big Lie. Those are big ones. That’s the ultimate this side versus that side because it's the Democrats nationally versus the Republicans nationally. Honestly, I feel like the Republicans, in our situation, tend to do a better job repeating those messages and getting them to stick.

If the left keeps talking about the Big Lie, the Republicans aren't taking the bait so much. They keep repeating their message about the election that was stolen. All of these laws across the country, they're labeling them as making sure every legal vote counts as if every legal vote didn't count. These are, largely, voter suppression laws. That is what the result of this Stop the Steal repetition of messaging has been since the election. Wouldn’t you agree, Bill?

I am going to keep loyalty and keep the person close because their belief structure is not going to move.” Even though we're talking politics here, it's still the same in business and capitalism. We want to I agree. The vote, it’s like, “I want to create a message in my favor. When I create a message in my favor, keep our product loyal in the front part of the person's mind, whether it's a new type of product, a resource. It could be potatoes, new banking service and it could be how to launch a new technology.

I've got to get that branding message, whatever the branding message, into my key demographic, my key purchaser so that I am able to get it to stick. I've got to keep blowing hot air on it so that it rises to the colder temperatures and it gets a coat of ice on it. When it falls, I got to keep launching it back up. This is why marketing campaigns need to be consistent and have a flow to them. It's not, “Get it out there,” and then somebody is going to show. If you build it, he will come. If you build it, put billboards around it and market around it, people will show up.

It is all about marketing, as we've talked about many times in episodes of this show. That's why Trump was successful at getting elected the first time because he is a good brander and marketer. Like him or don't like him, he's good at that.

He's good at it because whatever the person says, he comes back to the brand message and market. People don't know about that but what they do know about is Trump properties have this list.

Marketing campaigns need to be consistent and have a flow to them. It's not just about getting it out there. Click To Tweet

They're the best.

There are no adult adults to stare it down and go, “It's interesting. The hot air that they blew in my direction is not a fit for me. It's not true.” What the Democrats don't get and the Republicans do such a better job of this is they have painted a picture around the immigrant that is counter to the message of this capitalist nation. The immigrant is bad. The immigrant is the person that comes here, willing to sacrifice their lives and time for their generation so their kids can have a better life. That's what the immigrant is.

The immigrant is the person that says, “I have the determination to be a dishwasher, a waiter, the chef and then the owner of this restaurant. I'm going to bite the dust for my lifetime doing that sequence so that my kid doesn't wash the dishes. He goes right to college and he then manages this. He has this job, skill and this ability. He’s at this income level. I shucked it out here in a restaurant but look at what my kid did. It was worth doing this in comparison to the country that I was in that doesn't have this infrastructure that we do.”

That's the thing that I don't think is talked about enough. That's a message we don't hear enough about. How bad it must be in those birth countries for these people to be willing to sacrifice themselves, their generation, for their kids. Take that risk, make that travel, come into the country however they can to achieve this. It must be pretty darn bad where they were.

It’s bad because of the need for freedom. Bad for the need for expression. Bad because of economics, the possibilities, the ability for people to work in a way that's collaborative or profitable. To better themselves to have the resources that are available and they don't. The tagging on that thing would be a derogatory label called liberal instead of the real thing, the pro-growth party. I rebranded the pro-growth party.

That should be a strong message that resonates for Corporate America and the wealthy class because every economic business and measurement of GDP and our government, succeeded or not, is based on growth. If you don't have growth, you don't have a strong economy. You always need more consumers. You need to have a continuing increase to have growth. We talked about some big messages, Stop the Steal, Big Lie. You have that the immigrant thing is on that level because it's huge in the scope of the country.

There are some other messages and there were some interesting data that we discussed that we read about how members of Congress who make the most noise use this hailstone principle in their orbit or their microclimate to stay with the weather metaphor. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, these people have raised huge amounts of money in the election cycle for your typical member of Congress.

I read the average member of Congress raised about $3 million during a cycle for their reelection. Marjorie Taylor Greene raised about $6 million. Why is that? She's relatively new in Congress. It isn’t even for a whole two-year. She raised about $6 million off of these principal hailstone messages. This is notable even after she was stripped of committee assignments. She had less to do within Congress in terms of serving her district and she spends that time amplifying micro messages and raising money.

Immigrants are not bad people. They just want to sacrifice their lives in a different country so that their kids can have a better life. Click To Tweet

The adult adults stripped her of the position. The adult adult is like if Trump were to talk to Mark Cuban. If Donald Trump said to Mark Cuban, “You got to come and live in Trump Towers. A wealthy person like you, you won't believe what we do at Trump Towers.” Mark would look at him and go, “You're kidding me. It's like I'm not living or buying one of your things.” That's an adult adult looking at somebody that is selling and marketing to them.

People below that income level but have enough money to buy one of the Trump Towers, see it as a step up to come into that location. It's like, “Who do you want to hang around with?” If I'm in the building with a bunch of other wealthy people that are in that same mindset of, “How do I grow and change?” it is a way to lift the hailstone of the person's belief. A belief is a little piece of dirt, many times, inside the center of the hailstone that we keep propping up. It's not fully true but we keep propping it up.

It's interesting that what you're saying is somebody at Donald Trump's economic level may not buy into that marketing message. Somebody who is aspiring to be at that level is going to feed into it more. Bill, that is pretty brilliant because it explains a lot about why Trump has such a loyal base of people that are much lower on the economic or income scale than he is.

There's an aspirational quality, “I want to be to where that person is. He’s successful. He's been able to do it. He knows how to use financial instruments to borrow money. He knows to use other people's monies to do things to leverage the next project that he does, stick a couple of dollars over here for himself, accumulate and lose and let other people lose their money. I'm going to keep the money on my side. I won.” All of those debt instruments, to grow, take an opportunity to make something. Not to make and build something that has a value that can add to the capitalist system, that can add to the vision of the world.

One of my friends who used to own this building, when he sold the building, he said to me, “I wonder what they're going to do with the building now that I'm out.” He added a gym and they turned it into a guitar manufacturing place that sold online guitars. They turned it into something completely different and that was what that building looks like. They took their investment money and they made something. The whole process of good capitalism is that we were able to have the mindset and the ability to be entrepreneurial and take a risk with $1 or $2 and make something. Make something that sticks around for a while and not have that thing that you're buying that doesn't have any stickability to it.

It is interesting to take a look at talking points whether it's the vote, immigrant or the talking point of the economy. The other one that happened was the war. The war in Afghanistan is over. That's an interesting thing. What does that mean to us? Do we still have influence in that space or we don't have any influence in that space? We're another country that moved into that country and provided some stabilization for a time after the initial violence. All those groups in those different parts of the country have got to figure out how they're going to be now that America is gone. What are you going to do?

It's going to be interesting to see what happens there, talking about hanging in uncertainty out there. It became an endless war. We're saying we're not going to continue to be in this country indefinitely. That is interesting. Bill, as interesting as that is, I want to come back and close the loop on this microclimate thing a little bit. I mentioned Jim Jordan. To give you a little perspective, he raised $18 million in the cycle. That is six times the average member of Congress. He's doing it by amplifying these micro messages, repeating this hailstone effect.

One of the things that have brought this to light is former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who has been recording and published his memoirs. He's been critical of members of Congress and the Senate within his party. A lot of times, Bill, you and I justifiably get a little criticism for having our perspective and some of our biases that maybe is a little more on the left side of the aisle. We try to illuminate things for both sides. That's our goal here.

A belief is a little piece of dirt that keeps propping in the middle of the hailstone, but it's not entirely true. Click To Tweet

It's interesting to see John Boehner, a Republican, Speaker of the House, retired admittedly. He's written his memoirs and how much he is shining a light on what he believes is a lack of governing among a lot of these members of his party. They are amplifying messages, making a lot of noise to be controversial and raise a lot of money, which helps keep them in their positions of representatives and senators. They’re in a position to govern but they're more interested, he's saying, in raising money than they are in governing and doing the work they were sent to Congress to do. Marjorie Taylor Greene having committee assignments is a simple example of that. Jim Jordan, on the other hand, is on committees and always one of the loudest voices at the microphone in any of them because he wants those sound bites to go back home.

All they're interested in is getting a sound bite as a speck of dust. The Democrats aren't good at this part of it. The best person is Bernie Sanders, free tuition, free health care. We've got to be like the rest of the developed world. He keeps blowing hot air underneath those messages. Finally, it’s like getting some gravity to it and it's getting some energy to it. Some people might be reading and they’re like, “They're going to take our private thing away.” That's not exactly what's happening. There's going to be a stabilized system that you get to have something on top of it because that's when capitalism works best. Capitalism does not work well at making things that need to be cost-effective. They're not good at that. Capitalism is how do you make things to build on top in a vibrant community and not to pour the concrete. They're not great at that.

I appreciate John Boehner coming out and talking the way he's been because his messages have been critical. Some name-calling and some labels and diagnoses that we'd like to stay away from. When there's a label, diagnosis or a name call that comes in or calling out, it needs to be attached to something specific for it to stick. If it's not specific, if the person's brain cannot identify with it, you don't have a drain the swamp moment. People see a swamp and they know that a swamp is dirty. They know that they can drain a pool, clean the pool and put fresh water in it. Drain the swamp and get rid of the alligators. Alligators and moccasins are dangerous things in a swamp. It's an ecosystem. It's hard.

John Boehner would say all these messages and raising money and not governing are some of the worst swampiest things that are going on in Washington. He also calls out Ted Cruz for the same thing. He's more interested in making a headline and using it to raise money. It often comes out when something happens. Certain members of Congress will use a statement they made, a speech they made or something's happened that's controversial in a fundraising email or letter to raise money immediately and strike while that is the news and try to raise more money.

When you think about the Bernie Sanders of the world, they have been more consistent over time. You mentioned Afghanistan. Bernie Sanders was very much against the war in Afghanistan. He's been advocating that we need to pull out for many years. He'll be the first one to say and he said it, that's one thing that Trump got right. Trump was no fan of foreign wars. He wanted to pull out of Afghanistan as well. Bernie Sanders gave him credit. He’s like, “Trump was right on that one.” Biden has made the right decision to pull out even though some of the news is against all the military advice that Biden is getting, that we shouldn't pull out. He's like, “We're ending this. We're done spending money over there.” They’re going to Bernie Sanders because he's been talking about it for decades.

The difficult part of this and this is a part of where the capitalists in the economy that's built around the military infrastructure. If there's no place to shoot bullets, how are you going to buy new bullets? Wait for that war to settle in. “I need to sell tons, crates of bullets. Where can I sell these crates of bullets because this is what I've made? Now I got to find a market for it. How can I find a market for these bullets? How can I find a market for this tank? How can I find a market for these planes, these ships? How do I find a market for artillery?” How do I find a market for a major industry that is on drawdown? That's an economic problem. It was a political problem but all of a sudden, it turns into an economic problem.

What does that mean? Joe somewhere is going to get laid off because they're not making bullets there. That thing, we don't need as many. We're not producing anything because we're not doing the war the way we used to do the war. It’s not like there are no other places to shoot bullets but they will find new places to shoot bullets. We will find new places to do it. This is the unsettling part of the hailstone effect. There needs to be a place for these different parts to move.

When we get aware of it, we go, “What's the best interest of the country?” Some politicians will say status quo. Why? Because no one got thrown out for staying the same. There’s that group. The other group is going, “I was sent to make a change. My change is breaking things.” That sounds like a hedge fund talk or it's like, “How can I wait for this thing to crash?” Puerto Rico is going through that. The hedge funds are all in there and trying to crash everything.

It's hard because the people and the economies of those countries need a breath of fresh air. They need time to restructure their debt. They need new economies to come in there. It's a hard narrative but at the same time, this communication about the hailstone and about the spec of messaging being lifted is where I'd like to leave our readers with. They can read more about it on the blog post or chase us down if they want to learn more about how to craft that on their own.

It sounds good, Bill. I almost wish that the Schoolhouse Rock people were still making cartoons. They could make one about the hailstone effect.

That's funny. That's true. That would be a strong message. This has been great, Tom. We'll talk to you next time.

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Tucker Carlson and The Power of Controversy

Tue, 04 May 2021 09:50:33 GMT

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Tucker Carlson said “If you see a child wearing a mask, call the police because that’s child abuse.” Who would’ve thought that saying something controversial would actually be considered as a marketing strategy? Tucker Carlson, whether you like it or not, knows how to rile up an audience. Businesses these days would intentionally spout controversial statements just for attention. As the saying goes, “Any press is good press.” Learn how to harness the power of being controversial with your hosts, Tom and Bill Stierle , who are more than ready to tackle some controversial statements.

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In this episode, we're going to talk about the power of being controversial, that there’s power in being controversial. We want to talk about several examples. One that we can't help but lead with here, and it's not all about this person, but this is a good example. Tucker Carlson on Fox News Channel called for his audience to start direct action. He told them to confront people wearing masks, which he said are signs of political obedience. He maintained that 4% of White Americans who call themselves liberal or very liberal have been diagnosed with an actual mental health condition.

He called them aggressors and told supporters, "It's our job to brush them back and restore the society we were born in." This is the real shocking part. He said to call the police immediately if they see children wearing masks and keep calling until someone arrives. He said that it is child abuse and his audience is morally obligated to prevent it. I'm pretty used to hearing shocking things and controversial statements come out of Tucker Carlson's mouth. This one is 8 or 9 on a scale of 10. He is commanding power with his audience through making controversial statements like this.

Many people would want to get on the bandwagon and immediately push back. I want to pull through. What pull through is that you greet statements like this with compassion and empathy. For our audience, they're going like, "What did Bill just say? What do you mean, 'Go after this with empathy and compassion?'" For the people that have listened, we're stuck as human beings getting caught in the effects of branding, marketing and controversial messages.

The ability to apply empathy and compassion for Tucker Carlson's statements is he feels a yearning for America that had simplicity, purity, freedom and ease to it that was before the time of the pandemic, before the time of 600,000 deaths. That's not the time we're in, but he's has a longing for that. "I want the world to be back the way it was. I am going to say and do things to get the world back the way it was. My followers, my believers and the people who are listening to me also want that thing." He is right. I want us not to wear masks. I want the freedom that it used to be. I want the ease and the simplicity of a non-virus world. Whether the listener likes it or not, the biggest problem is the more human beings you have on the planet, the more opportunity is an infectious disease gets to run because it passes from one person to the next person.

The power of a controversial statement allows him to get respect. That's his need to get acknowledgment and purchase truth on his side because I don't want my kids to wear masks either. I don't want them to feel the constrictions of disease either. I don't want them to be the carriers of a disease from one person to the next. It's also for our kids. I want to teach them congruency. It's like following the letter of the law for the good of society.

That's what laws are. They are the same as a mask. It's something that doesn't need to be mandated legally. If we had piles of bodies stacking up in a city, it would not be outside the state's duty to make it mandatory and legal if the numbers were like that. It was like one village in England during the plague, "No one in, no one out of this castle." They didn't get the infection. "I know you want to leave, but if you leave, you cannot come back to this castle. All of us in here are healthy. Everyone out there is not healthy. Whatever is out there, we don't want in here." That's what the mask is. It's the same thing, "I don't want that thing near me, whatever that mysterious thing is."

When somebody is being controversial like this, they're angry because things like independence and freedom have got to be traded for the collective good or the cooperation of the good of others. How a person does it by choosing to wear a mask or choosing not to wear a mask is, "If you want to choose not to wear a mask, I'm going to choose to walk away from you." It's framed differently. It's horrific for a public figure to say, "Call child support for child abuse." That's just the need for protection that wasn't met by the government by allowing the virus to get here, doing some more mitigation pieces, being a little bit stronger on these things, or taking the leadership to stop the thing that needed to be stopped.

What was controversial about the statement is he was reducing it to child abuse to make children wear masks. I got news for Tucker Carlson here. In Southern California, we have kids in school, in-person full-time in the Spring of 2021. The school district requires the children to wear masks to school. If a kid shows up without a mask to school, they give them one. It's a requirement. It's a Federal law that you have to wear a mask on airplanes. Another bit of news is that there was an Alaska State Representative who has been banned from Alaska Airlines because of not complying with the Federal law requiring masks on airplanes. She was treating flight attendants very badly on the airline. The airline said, "That's it. You're banned from the airline."

That Alaska State Senator had to drive from where she lives in Northern Alaska, fourteen hours to Juneau to be able to vote on a law that was up for a vote in the state legislature because she couldn't fly. Up in Alaska, there's only Alaska Airlines and there's nothing else in these remote cities that people live in. This is not a choice for a lot of people in a lot of situations. Tucker Carlson made this controversial and made it sound like he's pitting mask-wearing against freedom. I keep talking about this, Bill, I get worked up about this issue.

Your feeling is right because it doesn't meet your need for truth. You’re doing what our readers are doing. You're going to get worked up about, how could somebody put pressure on social service? How could somebody make the pandemic last longer by creating a controversial statement? The power of making a controversial statement is you're taking a stand for something that you can get other people on the bandwagon about. Some people and followers get on the bandwagon of both people on the right and people on the left. There are people on Don Lemon's bandwagon. Some people used to be on Rush Limbaugh's bandwagon or Glenn Beck's bandwagon.

There's enough revenue there, 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, 4 million people, who will pay money for that controversial statement. These people are speaking up and becoming the lightning rod, which is a part of good branding and marketing. It's a part of the process of getting people to pay attention to me. Tucker Carlson will not have a TV rating unless he has some controversy in his narrative about tree-hugging liberals, the woke people or whatever the branding and marketing phrase that the person is using. The person is just trying to get something to stick. You will see that in outspoken professional athletes. They'll say something. They'll take a knee. Colin Kaepernick took a knee.

That was very controversial at that time, wasn't it?

Yes, in order to make a stand. It was like, "Somebody got to say something about this. I'm saying that. I happen to have a platform. I want to figure out what's the best way to do it. I'm going to take a knee." His best second marketing message as he took a knee is, "I'm praying for the African-Americans who are dying through police violence." If he would have put that next to his kneel, now he's got, "Next to prayer." A brand is taking the knee. A marketing message is a good reason you're doing it for. It's called the branding sandwich. You have a brand message. You have a marketing message and then you reinforce it with a brand message. It's McDonald's coming on first with, "Lovin' it." At the very end, they say, "McDonald's lovin' it." The middle is the marketing piece.

The power of a controversial statement gets respect and acknowledgment.

CLICK TO TWEET

It puts one next to the other so you associate it. If you think about it, it's not too different from what Tucker Carlson did, putting a mask-wearing next to child abuse. He's trying to make mask-wearing seen as bad.

That's the power of being controversial. We're trying to get things to sit next to messaging to sit next to things. You've heard this slogan, "Even bad news is good news."

I've heard, "Any press is good press." That's typical in business. There are exceptions to that. I'm sure Dominion Voting Systems is not going to agree with that statement after what happened in the 2020 election and how they were demonized. That press got so bad that they sued over it.

They have branding problems because as soon as somebody takes a message, sticks it next to a brand and starts painting marketing messages in that direction, then you get into a situation or circumstance regarding Planned Parenthood. Anybody who's driving by a Planned Parenthood building is thinking, "That's the place that does abortions.” Five percent of their work is in women's health and women's care. The medical do medical, but it's not. It does offer that opportunity with as much mindfulness, care and sensitivity as it takes for a woman to make that decision to meet her need for choice. No one likes that experience. It's just this is the person's choice that we're not taking away. It's a hard discussion.

You even see it in things like our commercials on television. You were talking about the GEICO commercial, where they said, "So easy, a caveman can do it." That's pretty controversial. What is that? Let's unpack that one first.

It's good because you're picking on somebody that is extinct. You're being politically incorrect calling a caveman stupid, “So easy.” All of a sudden, they were apologizing and saying, "I didn't know you guys were still around." They were sitting around a lunchroom table and these well-dressed cavemen were sitting there. They were looking at the attorney who was saying, "I didn't know you guys were still around." It became offensive to cavemen because, in that type of controversy, it’s turning messages on their heads because there was nobody around to defend that person. Whereas a certain belief and mindset that was born 200 or 300 years ago would not be able to function well with all the decisions that they would be faced here now because they have no bandwidth and belief structure. You think they were smart people back 200 or 300 years ago, but to push a cell phone in front of them, the belief curve is so steep.

What branding and controversy do is it trickle-feeds into a belief bias, but then inflames one population that gives traction to the message and inflames another one. It lights the fire first and then throws the flame on others. There are going to be people who are going to take Tucker Carlson literally. It's not until there's a direct sentence that is directly accountable, that some attorney may want to try to take Tucker Carlson on again. They've tried to take him on once. They said, "Any reasonable person would know not to listen to him because he is entertainment." That was the message that was made in court to defend Tucker Carlson's free speech. People should know better.

While on the one hand I got so worked up because of the controversial statement he made, I can't believe how shocking it is. What I need to realize is, "This is just Tucker Carlson being Tucker Carlson, trying to get eyeballs to watch a show." He's trying to keep people who are in alignment with his statements and thinking coming back for more because it's so shocking, "It is child abuse." You have people like me who are so shocked at the outrageous statement that I want to pull the plug on my television and not watch it again. It's about the power for him of maintaining eyeballs. In branding and marketing, controversial statements are about trying to get you to remember the brand and get that message to stick, which is very effective when you think about the controversy.

Branding is to get an impression, create a memorable moment, and then let other people know that you're in their group.

It seems that a lot of our politicians who dominate the news are guilty of the same thing. They're all making controversial statements, even if they have to walk them back. Whether it's Mitch McConnell or Jim Jordan making a statement in a hearing, he's one of the biggest.

The Democrats are poor at it because they don't go as controversial. They're picking something that is generally reasonable for a reasonable person to agree upon, yet the other side is going like, "Sorry, we're throwing Molotov cocktails at you," which is a lit bottle of gasoline with a rag at the end of it that's lit. As soon as the bottle breaks, the gasoline blows. That is the power of being controversial. The unsettling part about it is that the government has moved to the place where capitalism has moved its way through money and into the sphere of the place, and the greater good, the public good, the honest good or the truthful good can't necessarily get out there fully on both sides.

I've got an email from one of our audience saying, "Bill, here are some things you need to know about Conservatives. Here are some of the things that are left. Here are some of the money and stuff that's being spent on programs that I don't agree with." He is right. It's like some of those things are on their list. I'm going like, "I probably wouldn't spend for that either." I was like, "Who line their pockets with that one?" If I'm going to buy something, if government keeps moving in the direction of being bought, I'm buying my representative, spokesperson and mouthpiece. I'm not paying for integrity. I'm paying for a mouthpiece. Do you see how unsettling that is?

When you make a mistake, let it go. Don’t fan the flames. Let it go into the past.

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If you take a look at this from the business standpoint, the business has a little more sensitivity. They also struggle with the old school, which means, "Let it go. Don't fan the flames. Let the mistake go into the past." For example, United Airlines has a customer dragged off. Instead of waiting to let the plane know that it can't leave until one person leaves, asking for a volunteer to come from that viewpoint and paying for the person, rather than dragging somebody out of their seat. That's not a good strategy because somebody is going to film it. That goes to our last episode of the cameras are everywhere now.

That has happened in the past. People have been dragged off the planes and nobody knew about it before the age of video. That has happened many times with a drunk person or this person or that person. They were for the good of the other customers who are on the plane. The airline said, "No, we're dragging you off," versus, "No, I bought my tickets." Everything from, "You're wet. You smell. You're this," whatever the reason was, they never had to give a reason before video, but now that's the thing. It's our sensitivity to market responses and then being compassionate for both sides, the people who are losing their choices, as well as the people who are getting their needs met through the process for the greater good.

I don't like it that the economy is shut down. I want to be able to speak from stage, travel, promote and connect with people in the environment to contribute the message. I'm choosing to meet the need for safety and protection, and none of those events is big enough for me to go to. That's the tension of the opposites. That's the biggest problem. More to come on this next time. There are some more messaging to talk about the branding sandwich, its relationship to marketing, and how to better communicate with compassion and empathy, even though somebody says something tragic.

Even in the face of a big controversial statement. Bill, thanks so much.

Thanks, Tom.

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Why Videos Don’t Always Portray the Truth - The George Floyd Effect

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 13:23:10 GMT

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Just because something's on video doesn't mean it is the absolute truth. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the George Floyd incident and how different the outcome would have been if we didn’t have the video footage. In this video-based society we live in, we have different messages coming in from different directions. As a result, our perception and our perspective get skewed depending on the media we’re feeding on. What we need is to have awareness of how videos affect our society. With that in mind, we need to bring our best selves forward at all times.

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Watch the episode here

Bill and I decided we are going to discuss truth and our video-based society. I'm sure it comes as no shock to any of you reading that everyone, practically in America, over the age of 10 or 12 has a video camera in their pocket with their cell phone. In addition to that, police now have body cams that are recording video of pretty much everything they do. It's revealing some things about our society that are in some ways unsettling and important that these things are being revealed. There's an awful lot to break down and discuss here, Bill.

The thing that I'd like to get our readers to focus on is video as a means of communication. How is this message being communicated? We have the verbal audio, radio medium, audiobooks we’re reading, now we have video that's tacked on top of it and is increasing its influence on communication, beliefs, biases and the impact it's going to have on businesses and the society. The police stuff is front and center. It's also trying to figure out how to communicate with truth when we got all these different messages coming in different directions. Our perception and perspective gets skewed because it depends on when you're turning the radio on or watching the video that you're watching, that your perspective and your perception can shift.

There can be one bad customer service experience in a company. If it's broadcasted the right way both video, audio and it picks up as a tweet that then goes viral because it was done by a famous person and that many people pass it on, somehow it became a truth. It wasn't a full truth. It was a customer service experience where one employee did something junky and it has a major impact on that brand or as the company. Specifically, the one that comes to mind is the experience in Starbucks in Philadelphia, which we have talked about in the past. It's important here when we talk about truth and our video-based society because it's moving more to people getting messages and news.

People are turning on the radio at the start of the day and letting it run all day while somebody is in the kitchen or at work. We're digesting information on a video communication, cell phone and then we're recording the same things as it goes too. Tom, we're teeing this up pretty good because we've got to take a look at these different perceptions, perspectives and call it into question about how it is going to impact business, society, policing and many other things. We've got a lot of work mentally to do to make sure that we keep things in perspective, which is where the stick is. How do we keep things in perspective when we are speaking about truth when we see something?

I appreciate that, Bill. There are many perspectives as well. It's important to keep all this in perspective but also to recognize the gravity of certain situations. We've come off of a week where Derek Chauvin, the police officer, was on trial for the murder of George Floyd. There was a 9-minute, 29-second video shot by a bystander of Derek Chauvin having his knee on his neck and tragically ending his life for an alleged crime that didn't deserve for anybody to lose their life over it, for sure. Can you imagine, Bill, if we didn't have that video?

Bias and belief influence the truth.

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If this was many years ago and there was not a video camera in everybody's pocket and their cell phone, there would have been a different trial with likely a different outcome because the police officers involved, the four of them probably would have banded together, defended their actions and minimized what they did to impact the life of George Floyd. The people that were bystanders maybe would have testified and talked about it but we wouldn't have this video. It would have been hard to determine who do you believe here.

We do push a lot of trust, rightfully so, towards the police. We push a lot of integrity towards the police. We are counting on them to get it right, to have that next level of integrity and live by the laws that are on the books. The only trouble is that if you have a group of police officers and they've all got to look for each other's back, the need for supporting, loyalty and community that they need to share with each other because they got to work like a team. They can't think, “If I make a mistake, who's going to report me in?” They got to think like, “We're in the unit. We're staying together like this.” This happens in all kinds of situations in business. This happens by somebody not speaking up. I did a mediation several years back where somebody brought a database in from another company. They got sued over it.

Nobody said anything about it for nine months because it was an advantage. Their intuition was off. In the company setting, this thing can happen all the time. It's the cashier that says no big deal or it's the stalker that says no. We can go down the line of people going like, “I don't want to make a ruffle on this. I don't want to be called out. I don't want to stand up for what's right. I just want to get my paycheck, go ahead because I got to work with these people the next day. I'm not going to stand up here.” Even though there are HR issues all over the place, Tom, it’s difficult to say the truth. There have been people fired over video footage for taking stuff out of a company.

I even remember this incident that we saw took place in New York City in 2020, where there was a young black boy with his father. This woman, all of a sudden, couldn't find her iPhone. She accused this boy of stealing her iPhone. That was unfortunate and a terrible thing to happen to that boy because he didn't steal anything since she accused him of it. The father, what did he do? Turns on his video camera on his cell phone and starts recording it, her behavior, how she treated him. It later turns out that she left her iPhone in the Uber she had been in prior to this incident taking place. There probably was a time before everybody had a video camera in their pocket that she would have accused that boy of stealing whatever it was that she believed was stolen. Police would have been called and they would have looked at that boy differently if the father did not have that video camera to eliminate what she did. The news came out that she later got her phone. It’s a terribly tragic situation. It reveals bias.

The bias and belief influences the truth. Where did these beliefs come from? A lot of times, beliefs come from over messaging. They're not even real. All you got to do is keep messaging the belief. The most famous one is to get women to smoke. They call the cigarette the torches of freedom to get women to smoke because women's rights were coming in and all the suffragettes. It's a trickery of language to put something that I value freedom next to a product when the product doesn’t give you freedom anyways, it affects your health. Those kinds of things are problematic, as well as the story you mentioned is. Here's a woman coming in with a bias. Clearly, the person over there, “That kid stole it.” It couldn't have been, “I forgot it.” It couldn't have been, “Something in my memory.” This is where the video is going to be used and utilized as a broader range to communicate stories and to create impact not necessarily all for good. It's going to be this evidence looks this thing but it's not this thing.

This is our point that led us to talk about this in our show, Bill, is that the technology and our video-based society now is revealing these biases and some of the ugly realities of people's beliefs and how certain people treat other people. It's holding up a mirror to ourselves as a country, as a society in a way that has not been done in the past. I'm talking decades ago and prior. I'm remembering the white woman with her dog in Central Park and there's a black man that she felt was threatening him and she calls 911. That video got her in trouble with dog abuse or animal abuse too a little bit because she's practically choking that dog while she's calling 911. He's like, “I'm threatening you?” I forget what she accused him of but she literally accused him of assaulting her.

He was calm. The video showed and he recorded her. I always tell my kids, “You're always on video. When you're out of your house, you are at school, even walking down the street or you're in a store, you're always on video. Understand that now.” Talk about freedoms and liberties. I'm sure many people don't like the idea that in our video-based society, we're on video all the time. It's amazing to me, people don't have the awareness that they should, that they're almost always on video. Derek Chauvin should have had awareness. He's on video as those bystanders are holding up their phones at him and he continued with what he was doing anyway, shockingly.

There's a fear that goes with it. The awareness has to do with how to bring your best self. Bring your best self, not walk around in fear. Bring your best self is the message instead of being fearful that you're going to get caught. Tom, maybe you have recognized this at one time. We're also human beings too. If you can recognize that we're human beings and we’re going to make mistakes. Is the repercussion going to be catastrophic? In business, it's a brand injury. Is it a brand damage? Is it a brand slaughter? The difference is that what does the company do about it? For example, the Starbucks, what they did after that case where the woman called the police on an African-American sitting and waiting for their person to get there and not ordering anything. All of a sudden, there's this big kerfuffle and the guy's getting handcuffed for waiting in a space. There's nothing defiant going on at all except for a guy waiting in a space. What the Starbucks folks did is they shut down and did team training for a morning. It was a four-hour thing. This is not something we do here.

They want to work here on their laptop, buy one coffee and sit here the whole day? God bless them. They're filling our store and they look like we're providing them a space for them to have a comfortable place to sit, work and be creative. We want creative people to be in our store, not we don't want them to buy coffee all the time. There's something to be mindful that human beings make mistakes and it's going to be shown on video. We've got to also have the compassion and completely clean it, not come back around to say, “Starbucks people, you better buy something at Starbucks or else.” We don't want the negative message to come back and we don't want the video to be shown over and over again. That's not the strongest piece of it either.

This truth in the video-based society is going to be interesting to see how it plays out both in business and the politics that we're seeing with videos of about anything, Ted Cruz going to Cancun or Nancy Pelosi saying the thing that she said. It's like, “Can you have a script writer to work with you a little bit?” All of them struggle with this. This is not biased at all. You are being videotaped. There is the formation of truth that's taking place based on what you're being seen and doing it. Can you stand by that? Is it going to be taken in context or out of context? You've got to have some awareness about that. Bring your best self. Bring compassion and kindness.

I like that message a lot, bring your best self. That's a great way to reframe this because I know a lot of people tend to look at it as there are consequences for not behaving properly and being recorded on video for it. As parents, we tend to err on the side of instilling that fear in our kids to scare them straight to do the right thing. When the message should be, be your best self, bring your best self forward and it won't matter that you're on video. In fact, maybe it'll matter in a positive way because when you're on video, people are going to see how you brought your best self to the situation.

Bring your best self. Don’t walk around in fear.

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That immediately flashes me to during one of the protests. It was in Los Angeles, they were going down the street and this one guy was going to look to break in or vandalize a store. This other protestor stood in front of the door and didn't let him do it passively. She kept putting herself in front of the store. He tried to push her away. She kept coming back. She came back 3 or 4 times in front of the guy saying, “We're protesting here. We're not damaging this store.” That's an example of bringing your best self. She literally saved that store, the store owner and that business $100,000, $200,000. She saved it. Why? She brought her best self. She showed up at a place where it’s like, “Is this junky thing’s going to take place? It's not. I'm going to step in.”

We have been in fear of the press. We have been in fear of newspapers, cartoons, radio articles, TV, phone, internet, cell phones, body cams. There's going to be a fear in how we're going to be recorded, video. Even for you and I, Tom, this is putting our voice out there in the world. There is a fear that somebody could take a snippet and put it somewhere. I may have said that sentence but at the same time, having awareness of that is significant. I've gotten emails of people saying, “You were a little too left on that one. Here's the right part of it. You may want to acknowledge all these facts that are outside the loop.” I appreciate that because it's like, “I would never have seen it that way. I would have never looked at it as that perspective is how much is enough social service? How much is enough instead of people carrying their own weight and being a part of this society in a productive way.” It's literally on both sides of it in the video nowadays is bring us to eliminate these biases and beliefs. There are all kinds of videos, Tom, that we had talked about before that probably can go into the segment pretty cleanly.

Police incidents are front and center in our news and social media existence now, whether it's the video of George Floyd or Daunte Wright from Brooklyn Center, Michigan, who was shot by a police officer who mistook her pistol for her taser. She forgot she had her pistol in her hand. That video reveals she made a terrible mistake. Most people believe that she didn't intend to shoot him with a gun, made a terrible mistake and thought in that moment she had her taser in her hand. There was a moment of heightened tensions and a lot had happened.

She's been charged with manslaughter. It'll be surprising if she's not convicted of manslaughter and serves time. At the same time, the video also provides some other perspective that we have to acknowledge. We have to acknowledge that Daunte Wright, when he was pulled over, I'm not at all speaking about the merits of pulling him over. I know that's going to be looked at whether he should have been pulled over or not. Once they did, they ran his license and plate it and found there was a warrant for his arrest on some other misdemeanor charge. They proceed to start to arrest him.

This is what we have to acknowledge is that Daunte Wright had the ability to bring his best self in that moment and not resist that arrest. I know that's easy to say, Bill, when he at the moment is in this fight, flight and freeze mindset. As he's being arrested, he resists arrest. He wiggles his way out of them attempting to put handcuffs on him and starts to drive away. It's in that moment that he starts to drive away that the officer shoots him. He would be alive if he had not resisted arrest. We have to acknowledge that. There are so many things to acknowledge here. I agree, Bill, that his mindset in that heightened tension situation was probably not one of, “I need to comply or I might lose my life.”

The physiology that takes place. I've demonstrated this many times in lectures. I could take somebody in, start down a tragic narrative and watch them get angry, helpless and compliant. Also, depending on what the person's background is, our language, tone and our experiences cause the person to do fight, flight and freeze. This is for the police officers and the person that they're arresting. The escalation of fear. We never know the experiences of the person from the past. Whereas somebody says a simple sentence, it triggers these entire cascade memories that come forward into this moment. All of a sudden, it's like, “I got to out of here because this is a time when I felt helpless before. I am feeling helpless now. My strategy was run out of the back door of the house to escape my uncle that was angry.” We don't know where the fight, flight and freeze is coming from. This is how observations help.

They're not running from me. They're running from danger. That scenario is hard. That perspective is hard to hear because the police officer then says, “They're running from me. They're running from the law. They're running and they may hurt somebody else. We need to stop them before they do that.” These are the rules and the protocol that go with this. I clearly know the level of difficulty it is to have a rule and then also to be able to shift it to observation versus to preventative judgment action. It's hard to do that because of what is happening physiologically in our bodies. We know that we're going to be watched. The fun part of this, Tom, is you found a video from the movie 1984. Maybe you could set that on the tee. We can stick the landing here because this is where it cumulates into where is our businesses, society and mindset is going because videos are not going away. They're going to be amplified. This is something that we've got to have some awareness about.

Thanks, Bill. I did have an experience where I had a ditch of the moment and I had to go look it up to see if my recollection was correct. On a weekly basis now, for more than 2020, twice a week I participate in a cardio exercise class. It's cardio kickboxing. I love it and enjoy it. It's all done over Zoom. Twice a week for an hour, I set up my computer and I have all my gear for exercising. I'm exercising with a dozen to two dozen other people over Zoom. We can all see each other if we want to, if we have it in gallery mode or we can pin the person who is teaching the class and make them big and you don't see anybody else. I had this déjà vu. I'm like, “I remember a scene from 1984, the movie and the book , which I have both read it as a teenager at some point after I saw the movie.” The main character, he's woken up in the morning. The society portrayed by George Orwell is a totalitarian society and militant.

You're in the military. There's reveille. You will get up now. It's not like you have a choice, “I'll stay sleeping in for another 45 minutes.” You're going to get up now. The first thing you're going to do is some basic exercises. The main character’s standing in front of the TV. There's a person who is running the exercise drills. Quickly, they call out his name and his number, “You're not doing it right. I'll show you.” She demonstrates and then has him again. She says, “You're not doing it right. You must do this.” Somebody’s talking to him through his TV, can see into his home watching what he's doing. This wasn't voluntary. I want to be the first to acknowledge. I've chosen to join this class in Zoom. I want to do it.

No one’s making you comply or conform to the exercise. You're doing it by yourself.

Be the contributor that you want to be.

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I'm in the best shape I've probably been in several years. I choose to do this. I enjoy having the group I'm doing it with, especially during the pandemic because we haven't been able to go into a gym and do it together so we can do it together virtually. In 1984, I had this déjà vu to this. I went and looked at the video and it was pretty much how I remembered. I bet when George Orwell wrote this, he might've thought, “I know this is a real stretch because with television, it's a one-way medium that something's being projected into your home but they can't see what you're doing coming back.” I can imagine the writer thinking about that as well. I can imagine a time when that's going to be different. Here we are. How many devices do each of us have in our home that not only allow us to watch things going on elsewhere but have the ability to see us in our home and what we're doing? We do have some choices.

You and I purchased this video camera to put in our home to transfer energy back and forth and to have conversations. We choose to have different devices in our house. We choose to have our phone talk to us. We choose a lot of that stuff. Many of those things are default saying, “This is cool.” Never looking at the other side of it is like we are given a tad bit of privacy up on this one. We are creating a surface of exposure of saying the wrong thing and doing the wrong thing at the moment as one of my colleagues said as we were talking over Zoom like that.

She goes, “Bill, what you said turned out to this on my text that I was about ready to send. This is what it was about ready to say.” I was going like, “I didn't know it was going to say that because it interpreted it the way it did.” This is that awareness that we need to have and being able to be mindful of our communications. One of the things that is in direct opposition of the way the last several years have went is the amount of silence out of the president and the amount of exposure on social media. It's almost like it's measured like it's more of a freeway than it is this mountainous road that you never know what is going to come out of the leader's mouth.

Getting into a place where we can have a healthy perspective of the expanded role of video exposure in our lives as we move forward. There is an expanded role and not go too far that our messages of conformity dominate the space. We also don't go the other way, which is we’re going to be under surveillance the entire time. China has your social score. They're measuring that. How many times did you jaywalk? We've got to take some points off. As you get high enough, you can't travel. It’s like, “I don't think you want to keep points for those kinds of things.” There are things that people want to keep points for. Our law is like that too. It's got to reach the threshold from, this is something morally you're supposed to do or this is something illegal that you are doing and get the line that's clean between those two things to show up again. You never know when the camera is in the back of the room.

That's the thing, Bill, we all need to take for granted there is a camera in the back of the room. It's pretty naive in 2021 for people to think when they're out in a public space that they're not on camera. It's too easy with everybody having a video camera in their pocket on their phone.

I remember one conference that I went to. They had right when you signed in a release form, “We're going to be filming this. Sign this to have a release. If you choose not to sign it, there are a set of chairs on both sides that the camera will not go to. If you want to keep privacy, you've got to stay towards those areas. That might impact your networking. If you don't mind walking once in a while through this, we're going to be filming this and having an audience experience to do that. We're not going to be going back in our video world and trying to smear out your face.” It’s important to watch the expanded role in the video because it's all around us.

It's here to stay. I don't think it's going to change. Bill, maybe to stick the landing is one of the big messages now is awareness of how video is transforming our society. I love what you said about bringing your best self all the time because your true self is going to be revealed in this video probably at one time or another, mistakes and all, specifically with policing, among many other things.

One of the things too with that, Tom, is that what the police are seeing and the cameras being everywhere. The thing that I always do in and I have more information about this on BillStierle.com in the communication sections that I have there as well as how it applies to business about how you can get your employees to have that bring your best self forward mindset. Be the contributor that you want to be. Be the person that's working on your personal or professional development in the work site and trainings and strategies in order to do that. That’s where this thing is going is that there's an opportunity to have new languaging skills to do better at those kinds of tools.

I appreciate that because I'm always trying to improve my communication skills. I thank you for that, Bill. One last thing that’s important to acknowledge is that just because something's on video doesn't mean it is absolute truth. There are still perspectives. Even looking through that camera lens, it's not an omni perspective. It is one perspective. People can see that in a different way. I want our readers to understand we're not here saying that video is the arbiter of all truth and you better be on your best behavior because the truth will come out. It's one more perspective.

My request is to put it in perspective immediately. On a scale of 1 to 10, I am going to put this at a level five to start. Notice what I did is I put it right in the middle. When we're watching the police officer hold Floyd down, we don't have awareness of what happened before it's at that spot. There's a lot of problems with what he did but we don't know. By starting with the five, you then got to go like, “We've got to work on our own experience of surprise and try not to move it and try to rationalize what's happening.”

You got to start, “This is what I'm seeing. I need some more truth about this before I get pissed off. I am pissed off now. I've got to back it up to see where the truth is landing on this.” That’s what the idea in the court is being done. Here's what happened to him at first in the store. Here's what happened to him when he was first arrested. Here's what happened next. There was a sequence of all the things and then they put it together. Those things are to be done through the court system is to put all of the perspectives together, to broaden that perspective so that we can get a fuller engagement of truth.

That's a great place to leave it, Bill. That's what we're here for, trying to get a fuller engagement with truth.

Thanks, Tom. More to come.

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Injecting Bias Into The Hailstone Principle

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Tue, 27 Apr 2021 09:40:50 GMT

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The previous episode of "Purchasing Truth" taught us how something as small as a speck of dust can expand out of all proportion and become a big, powerful communication hailstone. This is especially true when it comes to the words we speak, particularly when they come from the mouths of influential people. As if things can't get even more out of hand, try injecting some bias into that messaging hailstone, and you'll see how great much trouble it can create. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom tackle the relationship between the hailstone principle and bias. They discuss it in relation to the Derek Chauvin Trial and the communication mess that happened after Representative Maxine Waters talked to reporters about the event. Learn the weight our words hold as they get passed on to others and then they inject their own meaning into them.

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Bill, we talked about the hailstone principle last time. We have a lot to try to talk about because what we've discovered in preparing for this show is that there's also quite a healthy dose of bias that can get injected into the hailstone principle and impact it. We're talking about the Derek Chauvin trial over the accused murder of George Floyd. The case is in the jury's hands. Final arguments happened. Representative Maxine Waters went to Minnesota. She's from California to be clear. She's not from Minnesota but went to California in solidary with the protestors hoping for a guilty verdict and made some statements that then were discussed in the courtroom. What a communication mess this is appearing to be.

It is a communication mess. As our readers may have read in the past, the hailstone principle is when you take a little speck of dust, you coat it with a little bit of water, you blow it up into the upper atmosphere, and it freezes. They calm down, it warms, it gets more water, and it freezes again until it's this big hailstone the size of a softball. This is not a good thing. One of the biggest challenges that we have, both in politics, business, and our personal life, is to make sure that our messages do not get wind underneath and be taken the wrong way to treat them with a great deal of observation, compassion, and empathy versus start putting the layers of judgment, criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and withdraw on top.

That's the layers of language that are currently being put on top of a comment. We can have a discussion about how words can be taken the wrong way, because clearly, what is the wrong way mean? It means that there is a bias, fallacy, point of view, or belief that the person is saying, “This is my belief. I'm fighting for this belief.” You said this. It means that it is a confrontation. It means that is my interpretation is the word confrontation. That's the one that Maxine Waters put in the middle of this. “Stay on the street and be confrontational.”

Our bias, belief structure, and identity want to support the people on our team and in agreement with our value sets.

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Make your voices heard and get more confrontational was the last part she said which from a language and messaging perspective is being amplified.

We listened to the whole clip. Inside the context, her voice tone was level 4, level 5, maybe level 6 at best. She was not standing at a podium yelling, “Do this. You've got to fight for this,” to a crowd ready to fight. She was to a reporter says, “What should the people do if the verdict does not go their way? Stay in the street and be confrontational.” It’s unsettling because it gets more confrontational becomes the speck of dust in the middle of a hailstorm that people are going to focus on. See how we're nitpicking this. As soon as we start cutting it up here a little bit, it almost loses energy. It's the word more and the word confrontational or trial by combat. That's Rudy Giuliani's phrase. Is combat more violent than confrontational? It has a little bit more weight to it. The word combat means something a little bit more specific. Confrontational is a little bit less than that. The tone is important. He was a level 8 or 9 in his delivery. If you look at her tone, which is a little more 5 and 6. There was a lot of other words around it.

Maxine Waters was asked about the trial and what she was doing there in Minnesota. She was talking about, “As a black community, we need to continue to stand up. We need to stay on the streets. We need to continue to fight.” She was talking to a collection of different media outlets with microphones. At first, her statement didn't even mention the word confrontational. Talk it much like John Lewis would have said in the past, “You got to get in some good trouble right and make your voices heard.” The media continued to press her. They were looking for the soundbite. I'm not trying to justify what she said, but if you look at the video and see the context, she said, “We're looking for a guilty verdict. We want to see him convicted of murder. He's guilty of first-degree murder, although he's only charged with second-degree murder. We want to see a guilty verdict of murder.” The media then presses her and says, “What do you think is going to happen if he is not found guilty?” She says, “We need to get more confrontational.” It was one thing that she said in response to that.

It was within three sentences though. There was an explanation around it. Our bias, our point of view, our intention with this communication show is to get it to be where we can look at communication from an observational place. Most people don't have the courage to have this conversation that you and I are having right now. How do you take language and use it to benefit us as human beings? How do we take it to have a discussion on the best thing to say and the thing that is not a good thing to say? Be honest about that was not something that served the message. Probably Kevin McCarthy, the Minority Leader, will likely try to force a House vote to center Maxine Waters. If you think about centering, certain comments, and phrases, does it rise to that thing? For some people, because one side said, it should be centered because the other side said, they get a pass.

Your side gave your side a pass. We're going to give our person a pass. We're going to make an exception for this language because it doesn't rise to the level of centering. The only problem we have is that there's a lot of things that are not arising to the level of centering and punishment or even impeachment. You can have an entire trial about something that you would like to know. People are not supposed to say or do things in that way, no matter how many votes they got. They're not supposed to say and do things like that. That is not something that is healthy for the nation and civil dialogue. That's the thing that, communication-wise, we want to keep in the front of our consciousness, because otherwise, we are getting into the place where we're not advocating for our highest values.

Does it make sense then is that if she says you need to be heard? Whatever it takes, stay on the street to be heard. Make your voices rise, be persistent, and stay on the street. That's the replacement for more confrontational. If a person's used to saying confrontational things and they blurred out another confrontational thing, do we do, “That is Maxine Waters. That's just Donald Trump. That's Mitch McConnell. That's Ted Cruz. That is Nancy Pelosi?” Do we move to a place of acceptance that they don't have the languaging skills?

We can agree that many of them don't have the languaging skills or don't take the time to consider their words enough and have the self-awareness that it would be nice if they had so they don't step on a landmine and self-inflict a wound either on themselves or their cause. Often, they clearly don't have the skills and the self-awareness to do that. How unfortunate is it? As a communication show, we have to acknowledge that there is some similarity between a poor choice of words, then that little soundbite about we need to get more confrontational without the rest of the context that led up to it, without the context of the tone, and she's having a civil conversation because she's not yelling. She's not standing from a podium. She is speaking about at the level I am right now in a group of reporters who are asking her questions.

We have to acknowledge that the words are going to move people to action regardless, in some ways.

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This is where it’s tough because our bias, belief structure, and identity want to support the people on our team and in agreement with our value sets. It’s challenging to realize how sensitive human beings are to the word, tones, and phrase them. The whole thing about the hailstone principle is it escape air, you blowing it up, and you put it up there, it becomes bigger and it becomes a thing where it's not a thing.

What's shocking here is that the judge in the Derek Chauvin trial over the death of George Floyd blew air underneath this speck of dust and shot it up into the atmosphere to make it a bigger hailstone, which is in and of itself pretty shocking. It depends on your perspective, but surprising, maybe disheartening. A judge is supposed to be neutral in this. The defense attorney brought it up after closing arguments in the courtroom. We don't think the jury was present when the statements were made so it would not have biased the jury as long as they're not able to see the news. The defense attorney brought it up and the judge made a comment that is completely inappropriate of a judge.

Even though the jury is out of the room and I'm sure he's going to say, “Based on the Letter of the Law civil justice procedure, and criminal justice procedure, I didn't do anything that was going to taint the jury when I made this comment.” He is on camera. What he's saying is being broadcast to the nation. He said to the defense attorney, “Representative Maxine Waters may have handed you grounds for an appeal.” Maxine Waters’ comments may have handed the defense grounds for an appeal. That communicates to the world that the judge thinks what Maxine Waters said was over the line, inappropriate, not helpful, and somehow potentially taints this entire trial.

The hard part about that message is that when somebody has a bias and a belief structure and an identity that's in favor of one point of view or another. The brain is looking for something to validate its truth. Not the truth. I'm looking for something so this thing that's taking place is not so painful to me. I don't have to question the bigger picture. All I need to do is focus on the get-out-of-jail-free card, the thing that makes my bias and belief to stay in place. I do not have to re-question my belief. Regrettably, it's more about what the brain is looking for. It does take a bit to stay in a place of observation instead of allowing our beliefs and our biases to influence us. The judge is saying and it may have legal accuracy, but it is not something in this place and time to mention.

I'm always the first to say hope is not a strategy and hope is not a plan, but I would hope that a judge who is experienced at being a judge would know better than to stay away from making such an unnecessary comment in their own courtroom. The defense attorney is going to make all kinds of statements and the judge can say, “Are you making a motion? Are you asking me to act on anything or not? No? Time to move on.” Not make a comment like that isn't material to what's going on in the courtroom. The judge revealed his own bias. He's given people that are on the team of the police officer and not on the team of the black community here or whatever team they're on. He gave people something to cling to and has now inflamed that soundbite for Maxine Waters to be something more than it was meant to be.

People look at the phrase and strip away the context from it. It's one thing to have something that's planned in order to rally a group up and to say violent things versus someone walking down the street and saying, “This is what my opinion is with your question.”

She's still in that context. She needs to realize that her words matter, people are going to listen to her, rally, and may decide to be more confrontational because of what she said. I agree with you. There's a difference. As you said, it was maybe level 4 or 5 on the scale of spoken language and violence. We have to acknowledge, as you did before, that there is some similarity to what was said in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 but there is a difference. Rudy Giuliani was one of many speakers. He used trial by combat. President Donald Trump from the podium in a plan speech that was planned and amplified. They wanted people to come to the Capitol to help stop the certification of votes where he's saying, “You've got a fight like hell or you're not going to have a country anymore.” That's a level 8, 9, 10 inflammatory statement to call people to action, which when you look at the context of what Maxine Waters said, it's clearly not the same thing but we have to acknowledge that the words are going to move people to action regardless, in some ways.

It depends if it's in the circle of influence or if you have a camera in front of you, which we all do. You can't walk down the street without getting your picture taken by somebody's cell phone. Somebody can look out the window and take a picture. That’s how accessible and put it out to the world instantly. This is why the hailstone principle is important here. You could walk by, picking up a piece of trash, throw it in the neighbor's trash can off the street, and the neighbor can say, “Stop putting trash in my can.” You’ll be like, “I'm cleaning the street here.”

Where does our bias and our perspective look to the worst of what someone's saying versus the best of what somebody is saying, and then also paying attention to what truth looks regarding voting or the death of a person? This is big stuff. This is a talk that's not going to go away. I appreciate our readers for hanging with this one because this one's a little tough because you got to stay, look, keep your mind in a place of observation, and be compassionate for the loss of life and also the fight for a person's identity which is much a part of a person's bias.

Bill, I appreciate that. This is a great example of the hailstone principle. I also liked that we're not taking too deep a dive in it because there's a lot more to come on this. Even by the time this show publishes, the verdict will have happened in this trial. There's going to be a lot more to talk about. We can pause it until then. I look forward to continuing that conversation. Thanks, Bill.

Thanks, Tom.

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The Impact of the Hailstone Principle in Today's Society

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 14:21:55 GMT

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A few words in a catchphrase can gain weight if they are repeated over and over again, gaining momentum, and causing a huge impact once it hits the intended recipient. This hailstone principle is a popular strategy in marketing, allowing businesses to convey their message to the audience without the need for lengthy materials. However, it can be used beyond just brand building. Bill Stierle and Tom go deep into how the hailstone principle is taken advantage of by many politicians to solidify their movements, ideologies, and platforms. This move is currently significant in the still roaring battle about last year's presidential election fraud. They even look into its effect on government fundraising programs, immigration policies, and the way politicians create their own "branding.”

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We're going to talk about the hailstone principle. Can you help eliminate what that means?

With the hailstone principle, you've got to be careful about marketing and what truth you're putting in there.

I agree. The vote, it’s like, “I want to create a message in my favor. When I create a message in my favor, I am going to keep loyalty and keep the person close because their belief structure is not going to move.” Even though we're talking politics here, it's still the same in business and capitalism. We want to keep our product loyal in the front part of the person's mind, whether it's a new type of product, a resource. It could be potatoes, new banking service and it could be how to launch a new technology.

He's good at it because whatever the person says, he comes back to the brand message and market. People don't know about that but what they do know about is Trump properties have this list.

They're the best.

Marketing campaigns need to be consistent and have a flow to them. It's not just about getting it out there.

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Immigrants are not bad people. They just want to sacrifice their lives in a different country so that their kids can have a better life.

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A belief is a little piece of dirt that keeps propping in the middle of the hailstone, but it's not entirely true.

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It sounds good, Bill. I almost wish that the Schoolhouse Rock people were still making cartoons. They could make one about the hailstone effect.

That's funny. That's true. That would be a strong message. This has been great, Tom. We'll talk to you next time.

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The Two Sides of the Press Conference

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 16:07:02 GMT

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The American press conference is one of the sought-out activities by the general public for its subtle surprises. Every word and punctuation mark from President Joe Biden will be labeled to everyone’s ears. While that sounds collectively obedient, not everyone listens to affirm, it may be that they are waiting for a slip of tongue to amplify and create unexpected tensions from a supposed to be a kind sentence. In this episode, host Bill Stierle and co-host Tom provide a healthy discussion about potential questions and topics to president Biden. Join in the conversation because every topic and response is possible.

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Bill, Joe Biden is having his first official press conference.

It’s coming up.

He’s waited longer than most new presidents to have a press conference. It brings to mind a lot of issues around communication. How will he handle tough questions and what will he say? I’m quite sure he may face some challenges with trying to manage the message and to be effective in the press conference. We don’t even know what he’s going to say, but I like the idea of us talking about what he could say.

Everybody is trying to get their needs met during this thing. If they are an enemy or an adversary of the president, they’re going to look for the mistake or the gaffe, the 1, 2 or 3 items that they want to amplify. There needs to be a chance to be an amplification of wrong or right, good or bad. Whatever the amplification is, if you’re an ally, they’re going to try to reduce the mistake and call it no big deal. The other side says, “No, it is a big deal.” There’s always going to be this throwing weights on their end of the scale to see if they can get the item to stick and be something that they can run against, they can do a TV ad about, they can cut it in a tragic way to paint the character or paint the individual in a way that’s not flattering.

We have a press corps and the White House messaging that shows up. I thought it would be fun, Tom, if you and I would do some communication and see how the White House probably would like it to be handled and maybe how the enemies would like to hear that message. Hopefully, they’ll say it this way so they can run with it, and/or what is the most effective and most compassionate way to say it, which is the third alternative that I’d be happy to provide some influence on and some insight on about how to craft that and where the landmines are in communications. We’re going to walk ourselves into the landmines and see what we can do. What do you think would be a tough question that the press corps would probably ask? There are a lot of new things that have happened. Let’s see if we can get a response. I’ll show you the middle of the road response and then the compassionate response.

Let me try one on here for size. “Mr. President, we’ve now been seeing pictures from the Southern border of seriously overcrowded facilities for immigrants trying to come into this country. What is your administration doing to improve that?”

His response would be, “We’re going to do our best to provide care and support for the people that are showing up at our shores. The facilities are horrific. We need to improve what is happening at the border now.”

People listen to a press conference to try and find mistakes that they want to amplify. Click To Tweet

What he’ll say is, “We need to do better.” Do you think that’s what he’ll say?

It’s going to go down to, “We need to do better.” There are people showing here. We’ve got to treat it like a humanitarian issue, an economic issue and a safety issue, which it is. It’s an economic issue on our side when it gets to what the immigrant does when they get here. What most Americans don’t know and they don’t even want to talk about is that most immigrants are paying into the system at the beginning and getting nothing back. They’re literally sacrificing their life for a better life for their children. The first generation bites the dirt. They literally get bit like zip. They’ve got to live under the radar. There are all kinds of problems and stuff. Let alone, there’s no solid path to immigration because one group is saying, “If I fix the path to immigration, I have nothing to run on as a platform.” We’ve talked about that in the past. Let’s see if we can up Joe Biden’s game a little bit here.

What could he say that would land better and not get him in trouble in some ways?

It might sound like this, “Over our country’s history. We have stood for providing a place for the immigrant to come here and contribute to this country in positive ways. Most immigrants do that. We still need to meet the need for safety and protection for the Americans that are here, including their jobs. The main thing is if a person is willing to commit to American values, economy, capitalism and the growth of the United States, they can work to become an American because that’s been our brand. That is the most important thing America stands for. It’s the ability to come here. We provide a place for you to have freedom and to grow and develop yourself and be a part of the American experience.”

As I’m sticking the landing there, I’m painting the vision of America. It gives little details for somebody to pick on. It’s not a lot to pick on because that’s the vision. Most Americans are having at the back of their mind, “My grandparents or my great grandparents came here.” There are not as many Americans that come here and say, “Because I’ve been here for five generations, therefore, everybody else can’t be here. By the way, we were getting rid of those Indians anyways.” They’re not in any social collective response. They think, “I’m here. I own this because I have the property I bought here. I belong here because I’m an American.”

The challenge is to make sure that Joe Biden does not go into explanation. Explanation is not empathy. It does not create much sympathy. It can create understanding, but when an issue is this emotionally hot, you’ve got to use empathy before you use problem solving or explanation. You’ll get into trouble explaining things because an explanation can be taken apart and cut into, “This is what you said while you were explaining.” Explanations are usually somewhere around 7 or 13 sentences long. Ask your kid this question, “I noticed something spilt over there.” “I didn’t do it. This is the reason why. It wasn’t my fault.” You want to go, “Is my kid a liar or what?” They’re covering.

Explanation will tend to get us into trouble. It’s one of those examples of non-empathetic responses that I have a list of that are going to be a tragic part of this press conference. We’ve got to be ready because the press corps and the White House doesn’t fully know what they’re doing regarding communication expertise. They’re going to be safe. They’re going to say something, but they won’t necessarily get something to stick. It will be flat. What people do is call that political. It’s not political. It is an overcommitment to protection or safety so that there’s no counter-talking points that can be developed by it. What might be another question so we can have a little more fun with it?

nother question might be, “Mr. President, North Korea fired some more missiles. They’re doing more missile tests. What is the United States going to do about that?”He’ll go after the hint of retaliation and/or, “You better watch it because we might do something more to you.” In other words, “Don’t go too far or else.” There will be a little bit of or-else. It won’t be as overt as much as Donald Trump was. Donald Trump was over like, “We’ll bomb you off the face of the Earth.” Within a short time it’s, “I wrote him love letters. We’ve written love letters between the two of us.” Donald Trump did what many branding and marketing people do. He overpromise on the up and then overpromise or over-mitigate on the down, “Here’s what it is. It didn’t do that. I thought it did. That’s not the one I said.” Regrettably, in order to show strength and confidence, one of the things he could do is saying, “The need for safety for Americans and American allies is one of my top priorities.”

He now has the ally piece in it. North Korea is trying to meet their need for protection and safety, not because there’s any specific threat in their direction, but they believe there is one. What I did was call them someone that is illusionary. If I want to reduce them on the world stage, it might sound like this, “North Korea and its leadership gets to decide about how North Korea gets to run their leadership, but at no time do they get to infringe over the safety or the protection of us or our allies. We will treat it as such.” Notice I didn’t threaten, but I did threaten them.

You lay out what they’re allowed to do or maybe what they’re trying to do, and then what’s not going to be allowed, but you didn’t make it me versus him. You made it our allies, we’re not going to allow our safety or protection to be infringed.

We’re going after the need for safety and the need for protection. If he wants to get his own need for recognition met, Joe Biden could also say this, “I’ve been there and done this regarding wars. I know how to make these decisions. I know where the line is. It’s up for them not to cross it. It might be a good idea for them to reconsider.” Notice I added my sales piece of doubt and skepticism in there. I put it in there going like, “He’s crazier than Donald Trump because we don’t know what he’s going to do.” Donald Trump is, “I’m going to bomb the shit of you or I am going to love you and give you a hug and teddy bear, then I still get to get away with what I’m doing over here.” Joe Biden can do a thing called “I’ve been there, done this.”

Not so much as a one-upping because one-upping is not an empathetic or sympathetic way to go, but you want to still hold the need for respect and recognition that, “I see that you have some cards over there, but I have more cards than you do.” Let the person know that you’re open to talking and providing them support in a certain way, but not if they’re going to be at the expense of safety and protection for allies. That’s the way to go. It’s almost like he’s casting doubt on the rocket capabilities out of North Korea to even get there because the allies are what he’s interested in. He’s sending a message to Japan and South Korea that he’s got their back.

Determine the most effective, most compassionate way of delivering the message to avoid landmines in communications. Click To Tweet

He’s not saying his missiles can’t reach the United States. He wasn’t expressing in your answer anything that would suggest that he’s concerned about North Korea being a real threat to the United States. I liked how he could have used the allies as making this about something much bigger than the United States.

The press corps, what else would they ask?

It might be a follow-up question even on this one. “Mr. President, I’m sure you’re aware that there have been over 250 bills proposed in state legislatures around the country since the 2020 election that are aimed at restricting voting rights in one way or another. How do you feel about that? What are you going to be able to do to help get some of the federal voting rights bills that have been passed by the House approved by the Senate?”

“I appreciate both the questions. The first part of the question is that it’s one person, one vote. One legal American voter per vote. I am going to fight for that. I am going to stand for our ability to choose leadership. It is important for states to recognize and to follow what the United States stands for, which is one voter, one vote, and not to put things in the way of that process of choosing leadership. Leadership is to be chosen by the people in every state. The role of the Federal Government is to provide support for that to take place and to do what it can to make that stable, trusting and certainty that that vote is going to come from the person and go and be counted. That’s one of the things that we experienced during this last selection. It was one vote. Even though there was counter-messaging to that, we’re coming to discover that that counter-messaging was an order to create loyalty in a way that was not in alignment with what American stands for. We don’t stand for how to marginalize people. We want to be advocates for how do we work together as people. Would it be better if America worked as a collaborative and come up with the best answer rather than who has the most votes? How about that?”

I’m being a little glib there with my last little comment, but it is a way to advocate for value. Don’t advocate for a process, advocate for the value. This is the value that we’re going for. Joe Biden, don’t get caught in the weeds. Don’t go after any detail of any state. If they ask a specific state question like, “This is what Georgia is doing. What do you think about that?” Georgia ran a fair and even election. They counted their party’s votes. I feel disheartened that they think that they would like to make it less fair.

Wouldn’t it be nice if Joe Biden said something like that? I tend to think that Joe Biden answering that question might drift into blaming and shaming the Republicans for trying to restrict voting.

I would stay out of that mud pit. Don’t even jump in there. It’s interesting to see what the good people of Georgia are going to do to make sure that each of their citizens get the right to vote. It seems like they’re interested in reducing that. I don’t think that meets the need for fairness or integrity of what we stand for as a nation. This is one of the things that the people of Georgia have to fight with their legislators. They have to vocalize that they don’t want it to happen that way. I’m empowering the state people to do that. There are other states that are having similar problems too, and the people in those states need to be heard that it’s one vote for one registered voter. That’s the way this one works because our people choose our leadership. That’s what we do. We live by that. You might not like it but that’s what we choose to do here.

t’s interesting because this question would seem an opportunity not only to talk about what’s happening that’s not in alignment with this American process called democracy, but it’s also an opportunity to cast doubt on the big lie from the 2020 election.You don’t even have to mention the big lie. You’ve got to go like, “This is what’s recorded. We’re starting to notice that play out in the courts right now with the various different lawsuits that are being levied by certain individuals and certain businesses that the need for truth wasn’t met. They’re going to hear it out in the court systems about how truth was not met and how people were trying to get respect and recognition for themselves by not being truthful with the American public. It’s caused us a lot of damage and we’re going to be spending time undoing the damage that was done regarding trust and integrity in our voting. For those people who are looking at it specifically and the people that are on the ground, those are the people that know. This has been tested in the courts. I’m interested if there is widespread voting fraud. I want to make sure that doesn’t place under my watch. This is going to make it harder to be free to vote and express who you wanted as your leader. That doesn’t go so well. It’s not what America stands for. Is it?”

You posed the question back now. That would hang out there in the air. You could hear a pin drop.

When you ask a question back regarding a value, and it radiates through the universe in such a powerful way.

Can we ever get a leader of our country that’s a skilled communicator and knows what they’re doing in this regard? They would rule the world. That’s funny because they’re supposed to be the leader of the free world.

It’s the free world versus the constricted world. The constricted world still has a foothold. The constricted world still has the needs of the few over the needs of the many, instead of the needs of the few being accepted as well as the advocacy for the needs of the many. It’s not the needs of the few over the needs of the many or the needs of the many over the needs of the few. It’s needs of the many, not at the expense of the needs of the few. It’s how you get the balance of those things. If it’s the 1% of wealthy people that would be pissed off at me and say, “The needs of the many over the needs of the few, you’re taking money out of my pocket.” The answer is, we want to make it fair. Also, you were able to be successful within this system. You’re a part of us. This is what the game is.

Here’s the natural follow-up question to that, “Mr. President, are you going to run for re-election in 2024?”

“I am interested in providing this country stability and certainty and be able to provide leadership beyond these four years. I will get to that decision and you will know about that as time goes on. The main thing I’m focusing on is the here and now of America versus my future three years or three and a half years from now.”

That would be a good answer, Bill. That’s the Bill Stierle for sure. I bet you anything he’s going to go somewhere different and give a more direct answer to the question or deflect it and say, “It’s not time to discuss that.” He could do that. He could deflect it, saying, “We’ve just gotten started. We’ll talk about re-election in a few years, maybe.”

An explanation is not empathy. It can create understanding but it does not create sympathy. Click To Tweet

A few small pieces of vocabulary make a big difference, Tom. Certainty, stability, consistency, predictability. Those words add to confidence, then that cultivates trust. We’ll see when we get there, but I’m working on these ones. That is the way this particular administration is rolling. It is very administrative and safe. It’s a little bit like a machine. They’re rolling in here and going like, “This is the way we’re going to roll this thing forward.” The various different institutions used to do a wonderful job of collaborating and cooperating until they started getting carved up, divided up, and people started leaving because they couldn’t take it anymore. Now they’re moving back into more cooperation and collaboration and more effectiveness. It’s going to come back.

It doesn’t mean the individual person or you’re not going to find somebody to complain about that because it might not be the best thing, but it’s the stable thing. We could argue about in any time in the Joe Biden administration if they said, “We can argue about what the best practice is, but right now we’re picking the stable practice.” All of a sudden, everybody shuts up. “Do you want the best practice? Put your skin in the game. Right now, we’re picking the stable process.” Things tend to go better.

I enjoyed that.

There are going to be a couple of these coming up because of the regular press conferences with the press director.

Jen Psaki, the Press Secretary.

She’s pretty good and yet she gets herself into a little bit of trouble because she’ll get stuck in correcting, consoling, explaining a bit too much, fix it narrative or storytelling. She’ll get caught in some languaging patterns that doesn’t serve her or the administration. Mostly she’s been a pretty good straight arrow about answering questions, but a few lines of compassion and empathy woven in and a little bit more visionary leadership messages would be so helpful to our country. It would be so helpful to give us something to stand on. More to come.

Thank you so much, Bill. I’ll talk to you next time.

Take care.

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The Truth About Our Social Responsibility for the Environment

website@sitemodify.com (Website Editor) — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 16:07:01 GMT

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We were taught not to dirty the environment. However, as we proceeded to grow and progress, we gradually slipped from our original promises to our surroundings. Losing our environmental responsibilities has extended our shortcoming to the point that we are no longer in the prevention phase of our cleaning obligations. In this discussion, Bill Stierle and Tom share their viewpoints about preserving the environment and recycling our trash. Many environmental rules have been implemented to lessen our “trashy” crisis, from unique bins to taxing violators. This is never an individual oath, and we need to learn the current situation. Join the discussion and understand all of the aspects we could improve the environment and save what is left for our generation.

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Bill, it’s an interesting topic we decided to cover having to do with truth, accountability and social responsibility around our environment and in particular recyclable plastics.

Tom, the show that we are bouncing off of is the John Oliver show of saying how important it is to gain awareness about what’s happening in the plastic industry. It was something that lit a fire for both of us.

I’ve been paying attention to stories for a long time about how in many communities around the United States, even when we put those recyclable single-use plastic bottles in our municipal recycle bin, we have this belief that either our city or the company that is hired by the city to recycle those plastics is recycling them. Unfortunately, all too often, it seems to not be the case.

Human beings do a great job of telling ourselves a story that we can feel good about it. We don’t want to tell a story that we don’t want to feel good about ourselves about telling it. The phrase that caught me during the show was wish-cycling, “I wish that this thing could be recycled but it can’t be.” John Oliver poked fun at the umbrella. It’s not going to be recycled. If you put it in the recycle bucket, it’s not helping. “I feel good about putting it in the recycle bucket. It’s my contribution. I’m accountable for it.” You and I have said many times on this show that this is a communication show, what need does that promote?

Anything that’s in alignment with the need for self-worth or that I am being collaborative or the need for cooperation that I’m doing my part can hook us into a bias or a belief that we’re doing something good. Meanwhile, we’re not second questioning and checking our own thinking bias as we’re going through stuff. This is where it gets unsettling. People can get trapped in their own belief that they’re doing something but they’re being hijacked a little bit because of whatever the belief bias is that somebody else has put in front of them.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s sad when we peel back the curtain on recycling. I’m a Gen X. I was grown up in this time where we’re all educated about recycling. “We should recycle.” Whether at the time it was newspapers. That was a big issue in the town that I was growing up in. A lot of papers certainly do get recycled. I’ve seen that. As municipal recycling services didn’t exist everywhere, they started to come out with the blue bin or the different colors in different areas. You experience things in your community. You do end up with this belief that we’re recycling things. There are all these numbers on them putting anywhere from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. What did John Oliver say that only 2 of the 7 numbers get recycled? It is unsettling.

Anything that's in alignment with the need for self-worth can hook us into a bias or a belief that we're doing something good. Click To Tweet

I’ve seen stories even earlier on in the pandemic as the economy was taking a hit. There were stories about how China who used to buy a lot of the plastics that are recycled from municipal waste bins in the United States stopped buying them because they didn’t have a use for them anymore. The thing is it wasn’t even then when it was being purchased. It wasn’t all being recycled. A lot of times it was being burned to generate electricity, which certainly is not recycling and that has an environmental impact of a different kind. This is a tricky problem. I don’t know if you’ve experienced it, Bill. If you’ve ever gone and spent any time up in the Seattle, Washington area, the communities around Seattle, Washington, even in the suburbs and all that or outside of it are militant when it comes to their trash, their recycling and their compost.

I’ve never seen municipal waste organizations the way they’ve done it there, where residents get fined if they don’t put things that are compost-appropriate into a compost bin and that gets collected and if they don’t put certain recyclables into that bin. My sister and brother-in-law live there for a few years. When I went and visited, I’m like, “This is seriously advanced household refuse rules that you had to comply with or you get fined.” There are some communities doing a better job of this. Some states are doing a better job than others but clearly, John Oliver shined a light on what is an all too common problem in the United States.

The thing I feel unsettled about as the show is trying to take a look at how we do mentally maintain accountability for our actions, as well as the truths that we tell ourselves that isn’t truth. A lot of times I’ll get asked the question and I go, “That person lied.” They go, “What need did they get met by maintaining or saying that lie?” A lot of times it is things like self-worth, certainty or trust in the belief that they’ve invested in, even though it’s not true. It’s almost like, “I don’t want to do the work to change this belief. I don’t want to do the mental work that I need to do to be honest or more in that this thought I had that I put into my noggin is not a valuable thought as a human being that thinks critically and looks through things.”

The truth is that human beings can be sold things that fit their bias easier than they can be sold the truth. I feel so unsettled to say that because it’s easier to message to somebody’s bias and get them to have an agreement with you and get them to vote your way because you’re feeding them the bias. It’s unsettling to know that we’re that frail of a creature that can be easily taken down a street because we’re not paying attention to the real facts or the person that’s handing us the bias. I want to believe that my recycling is doing a good thing after the show and taking the medicine that only 2% of my action is making a difference. I feel extremely disheartened. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to stop but it still is a part of that being disheartened.

Hopefully, it makes a lot of us so concerned. Certainly, there are times when a single-use plastic container is necessary. When I’m traveling, when you’re out, you’re going through airport security or you’re on a long road trip, it’s not always easy to bring your own reusable containers or have a place to refill for water to hydrate yourself. To use a single-use plastic bottle is common. Some municipalities have good recycle bins available even out in the public areas and some don’t. There’s nothing but trash. One thing I always try to do is even if I’ve got recyclable plastic and I don’t have a place to recycle it, I’ll look for a Starbucks. Starbucks has these waste bins by their exit door that has a compost side, the trash side and a truly recyclable side.

I know they’re going to do something appropriate with it, whether the service they give it to does something with it. We don’t know for sure but it’s not easy to do. At home, it’s so convenient to have one of these 40 packs of mountain spring water that you get at Costco but it makes more sense to find yourself a truly good source of healthy drinking water that you use glass and refill it every time. There are systems that do that but we have been sold it seems. Talk about communication. The beverage industry has done a good marketing job. Haven’t they?

They have sold us that recycling is something that they do and they do well. They pointed out Coca-Cola, “This is our plastic initiative.” We forget. “We thought that we had that handled.” “Sorry, empty promises.” We’re looking into your bias. We only spent this amount to do it but we weren’t doing anything about it. We don’t want to face the numbers. We don’t want to be accountable. We don’t want to have this social responsibility that we need. We are interested in what revenue that we can maintain in our coffers. We don’t want to clean up our mess and our capitalism or taking a ding because the more socially responsible people become, all of a sudden, we’re putting pressure on the marketplace to be socially responsible.

There are groups of people that are good at that. There are people that are going like, “We’re already doing the recycle thing. Look at all the bins. I’m driving down the street. I won’t look at the blue bins the same. I’ll still be taking an active part in recycling, but all of a sudden, it’s on my radar and I can’t unring the bell.” That’s the way we know that we can check in on our beliefs and biases. Once the bell is rung, then we become an advocate for that thing and gather information or take an action towards it, which is huge. We got to figure out how to make things better. Are we going to be a creature that pollutes its own environment until we’re neck high in it? Is that what we’re going to do?

That’s been a big concern of mine since the stay-at-home order started in March 2020 due to the pandemic. I could see that while there was one environmental benefit that was happening certainly noticeable here in Southern California where you and I live, Bill, is the air quality got a lot better because there were much fewer cars on the road. The smog was reduced. You could drive from 1.5 hours South of LA into LA. What normally would take a 1.5 to 2-hour drive on certain days you could get there in 45 minutes. That was a sign that fewer people are on the road. The air was clear. You could see the mountains without the yellow smog. That was great.

I also recognized, “Look at all the personal protective equipment being used and going up in large volumes at hospitals. That’s all going to go to landfill because that’s what they do with a lot of it.” I see the same thing happening with home delivery of food in terms of grocery shopping. Every grocery store is delivering food at home. In our household, we’re like an Amazon family. We’re shopping with Prime and the Whole Foods thing that they bought. There are a couple of different services. I’ve been shocked that for a long time there was this movement across the country.

135 companies are innovating their way and take action and using recycles. Accountability and social responsibility are taking place. Click To Tweet

I would say over the last years, I’ve been doing it at home but certainly in California in years to buy reusable bags and bring them into the grocery store and shop with them and then the pandemic happened. All of a sudden, I wasn’t allowed to bring my reusable bags into Trader Joe’s anymore because they were worried about contamination and people getting sick. They wouldn’t want to expose their workers. They said, “That’s okay. You’re not going to have to buy disposable bags. We’re going to pay for them during the pandemic.” I was like, “I have all these disposable bags that I have to deal with.”

It’s interesting in the beginning during the beta test of Amazon Fresh, which is what it was called in the beginning, delivery service. They would provide you all your delivery in all these reusable bags, Styrofoam inserts for cold things and disposable cold packs. They would pick them back up. All of that packaging, they would pick back up from you. This is going back a few years, Bill, but ever since the Whole Foods acquisition by Amazon and the change to Prime now. It’s no longer called Amazon Fresh. They went back to disposable materials. Decidedly recyclable materials like brown paper bags although some of their insulation materials for cold items are more disposable and less long-term usable. I’ve been putting them in my municipal recycle bin, hoping that they’re actually being recycled but I don’t know if they are. There’s no recycle number on them.

This is where the part of the show where they started talking about wish-cycling. That term wish-cycling, “I’ve caught myself putting in there. I’m not sure about I’m putting it in there because I wish that this was able to be recycled. The show caught me on my bias and my untrue belief.” Is John Oliver’s 2% true? The problem is it’s not 50%. The problem is there are only two.

It also depends on where you live and what’s happening in your area. I do think Seattle area, for one that I have experienced with and I’m sure there are others too, that one is doing a better job than most. I have one little story that’ll be a little more disheartening. We do have an example of something positive happening in this area that we want to share. First, in my part of Southern California, our trash, we have to contract privately with an approved company, which here is waste management for an hour. There are lots of different companies that do this throughout California. It’s generally not your city taxes here that pay for your trash as is the case. I know in a lot of other parts of the country, we pay a quarterly amount of money for our trash recycling and our green waste for our tree, leaves, grass clippings and all that good stuff.

A number of years ago, I used to do a lot of international travel with my business. I used to China for a few weeks at a time. Because I didn’t want my wife to have to deal with the trash so much when I’m gone, I always made sure to get rid of all the trash. Make sure it gets picked up the last possible pickup before I leave for the trip. Maybe she can get away without having to put the cans out on the street for a week or two. I missed the trash. This particular day, it passed my house before I had it all out. I was upset. The recycle truck comes by. There are two different trucks. Trash truck picked up trash. Recycle truck comes to pick up its colored bin.

I talked to the recycle. I say, “Is the trash guy round? Is he close enough? Do you have the ability to radio him? I’m going to be gone for a couple of weeks. I need my trash to be picked up.” He says, “That’s all right. I’ll take care of it for you.” These are the types of trucks that pick up the recycle bin. They lift it up. They turn it upside down on top of the truck and dump it. It’s a large, huge garbage cans size of the thing. He picks up the recycled trash and then he proceeds to grab the actual household trash, do the same thing and dump it in the same truck. That to me peeled back the curtain a bit. It’s like, “These guys aren’t caring so much about keeping their truck purely recyclables that they’re mixing it with trash.” I started to no longer have this belief that all of my stuff was getting recycled as the appearance of recycling by two different trucks handling the two different kinds of material. I would think if it was strictly a problem, he would have said, “Sorry, you missed it.” That’s very disheartening.

When we break our bias, when we shift our belief, when we get a perspective about something that was true and then not true or something that was not true and then true, it’s unsettling. We feel anxious, nervous, worried, scared, upset, irritated and angry because we want to be accountable. We want to be socially responsible. It meets a lot of our needs of ours but at the same time, it doesn’t. We’re looking for and search for a story that makes us feel better. We want to be on the good guy side. Even in the movies, we’re rooting for the good guys. It’s not saying, “The bad guy got shot this time.”

Bill, not all is lost. Interestingly, there are companies and people seeing the problem that exists and doing something to solve it. That’s not wish-cycling. In fact, to illustrate the problem in one state alone in New York in the latest data from 2016. This is a little also sobering, New York residents used more than 23 billion disposable food service items. Talk about the delivery food problem even pre-pandemic. The amount of disposable food service containers and trash generated was huge. It’s only gotten worse in modern times with the advent of Uber Eats, Postmates and all these delivery companies. With the pandemic, their use has gone way up.

A company was founded in 2019 in New York that helps to tackle New York City’s mountain or growing trash. It’s called DeliverZero . The company provides plastic reusable containers to participating restaurants. They’re attacking this from the source of the problem, not trying to get consumers to be motivated, to try to wish-cycle or do something to recycle voluntarily. When customers order from their favorite New York City restaurants via the DeliverZero app or website, their foods are delivered in these recycled plastic containers, which apparently also the material is BPA-free. It’s polypropylene or something like that.

The customers hold onto the containers after their meal and either return them to a delivery courier the next time they order from their app in one of these restaurants. If consumers want to get rid of it sooner when they’re out, they can drop it off at a DeliverZero participating restaurant. You have two choices there. There are over 135 restaurants in three of New York City’s five Boroughs that have joined the program. What they’ve done is made it so that the consumer is motivated to not only order from a restaurant again to keep the cycle going. If they don’t, they’re put on notice through the DeliverZero app that if after six weeks of their initial order, they haven’t placed another order and the materials have not come back that they’re going to be charged $3.25 per food storage box that they used plus tax.

DeliverZero is making money the same way any delivery service does on a commission on the food sale to the restaurant. That’s what Uber Eats, Postmates does and all these places. It’s the same model but they’re giving a reason for people to choose one over another that has a positive environmental impact. Apparently, they’ve grown tremendously and it’s going well. I saw the same Last Week Tonight program you did, Bill. It was disheartened at our beverage industry with all the soda companies, all the bottled water companies and everything else. It does seem that there are some companies that are innovating their way to being more responsible and do something about it.

The story makes me feel good. If there are 135 restaurants that take an action to use recycle, I feel good that the accountability is taking place, that social responsibility is taking place. My preference, my mindset, my belief structure gets to be reinforced rather than the opposite, which is, “I don’t care. I’m throwing it out because it’s more convenient to me.” Hopefully, that will be recycled by somebody. The answer is, “It’s probably not. How can I up my accountability game?” That’s the question that we can ask when we look for truth is, we want to upgrade our accountability around truth, which is to ask the third question. Once you get to the third question, you’re like, “At least I have a little bit more truth about my own belief and my own bias to keep my ability to learn and move through things.” It’s so important to keep questioning ourselves. That’s where accountability takes place.

During the seventies, all the commercials talk about keeping America clean by stop littering. Now it's not enough from a natural resource point of view. Click To Tweet

I hope that over time, we as human beings and as a society in America do learn and make progress on some of these things. I remember as a kid growing up in the ‘70s, all these commercials about, “Keep America Beautiful. Don’t throw trash out of your car when you’re on the freeway, pick it up and put it in a trash bin.” That was one level of responsibility that needed to take place so that we don’t just trash the environment. Now, it’s not enough to put trash where it belongs. From an environmental and natural resource perspective, we’ve got to be more active and participating in being responsible.

To hold the companies that are making the plastic responsible. The big part of it is you’re making something that is going to sit someplace for years or pollute our environment. “We can’t use you as a company. We can’t do that thing.” That’s the thing that’s unsettling. It’s a part of the belief bias that is shattered in my noggin. It’s not all on my shoulders all the time anymore. It needs to be 50%, 60%, 70%, 80%, 90% on the producer of the pollution to clean up the pollution. It is going to impact the cost. That thinking can help us out a little bit. We start moving to, “What am I doing that isn’t accountable?” That can make a difference.

That sounds like a good place to leave this one.

Thanks, everybody.

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