What Earns Trust? - RFK Jr vs. Dr Hotez, Lab-Grown Meat | Ep 8

Trust Factor with Rob Greenlee focuses on all aspects to building human trust in online communications.

In this week's show, how is trust earned and how trust is aligned with truth. New this week, I'm going to cover some top news headlines from last week that will challenge our perception of trust. As examples. So Rob Greenlee here again. Thank you for joining me here back on the show. I appreciate you spending time and joining me here. I appreciate it so much. The trust factor in our lives is essential and profoundly impacts our happiness, security, and safety. So the information all around us needs to be evaluated based on our gut filter, our feeling of authenticity, believability, shown experience on the part of someone that's trying to get trust, and thinking about conflicts of interest as a backdrop to all new and controversial data or basic information. So trust building is the number one factor really in all of our lives right now. So what I'm gonna do with this show, I'm gonna take it in a new direction to some degree, and I'm trying new things. I'm experimenting with different formats. And so bear with me and let's head down this new direction. This week, I wanna cover some news from last week that are topics that raise or lower our levels of trust based on the evidence-based rationale, common sense-based perceived truths, right? So as we think about the things that we hear in our world around us, in the news headlines, what passes a test of rational common sense and perceived truth? And one example that I wanted to show today was a fairly significant breaking story that happened basically around the Joe Rogan podcast. So what I'm going to do is pull that— there's an article that appeared on this topic that basically it was RFK Jr., who's a presidential candidate, he basically went on the Joe Rogan podcast and he delivered an in-depth overview of vaccines and childhood kind of injuries and various diseases that he talked about on the podcast. So what this sparked was a desire on the part of some online— Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and others— to, to challenge a person who is out there known as an expert in, in vaccines. His name is Peter Hotez, and Joe Rogan threw it out that he would offer him $100,000 to come on his podcast with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who's running for president, to talk about all of the issues around misinformation, of accurate and truth, just I think generally, but more focused on the theories around what's happening with the COVID treatments and the efficacies and the safety of the treatments that has happened. And there's this tension that exists between all these parties, whether it be Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, and a few others who were bidding up to $2.6 million to donate to a charity if Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist, would come on the Joe Rogan podcast. And my comment on this is really, as it relates to trust, is that do you think, and if you've had a chance to actually look at this article or look at the tweets that have gone on around this and the topics, if you happen to watch the conversation that Joe Rogan had with RFK Jr., I'm throwing it out to you to say, what passes your trust test on this? Do you think Peter Hotez declining, because so far he's declined this offer of all this money to go to a charity, to come on the Joe Rogan podcast and talk about all these issues and clear the air of sorts. And I'm all in favor of everyone getting together and talking about this stuff. I'm not saying this because there's a certain kind of agenda that I'm trying to push forward. I think there are other ways of looking at this. There's a variety of different ways of looking at this, and one thing that builds trust is when all parties that disagree get together and talk about an issue and bring evidence and bring confirmation that we can all come together. And do you think that this effort on the part of Joe Rogan and the decline of Peter Hotez, which is a— who is a vaccine expert, to come on and talk about this and try and debunk some of the things that RFK Jr. has stated on the podcast about the efficacy of the COVID treatments. Do you trust Peter that he's being truthful here? He's trustworthy as an authority? Or even, is he accurate to, to even face being on this program and being challenged with his thoughts? And does that put him in a less than credible light when everybody else wants to talk about these issues, that he doesn't appear to be willing to do that? So what do you think? Why don't you put it in the comments if you happen to take a position on this, or think that we should just blindly trust Peter Hotez, that he's got his scientific basis for his position here, and that RFK just doesn't, doesn't have the facts. I know I want to find out what's— what the truth is here, and what is what I can believe and what I can trust. So yeah, just give me your comments and your thoughts on this, and would love to hear your thoughts on this. I— if you even followed it or not, I'd be really curious. Let's move on to the next topic. So what I wanted to talk about was the— I'll, I'll share the screen again and you can see this screenshot. The, the USDA has— here, it's coming up on the screen. The USDA has approved its first lab-grown meat. In the US. So I don't know if all of you saw the headlines on this, but scientists and food safety experts, I guess, are still not sold on it. I guess the US Department of Agriculture last Wednesday approved the sale of lab-grown meat for the first time and giving two California-based food technology startups the green light to make and sell chicken grown in a lab. From animal cells. So that's the main story here. Do we want to trust that the food companies and science can actually healthily replicate meat for all of us to concern, for all of us to consume under the perception that maybe, maybe it's not good for our climate or our planet to have livestock, and maybe it's unethical to kill animals in the sake of food. So I can see all the arguments for this and why we might want to move this direction. There's concerns about general cruelty to animals, but the big question is, do you trust that this increasing move towards food companies in making lab-grown replacement meat— this has been going on for a long time. There's the Impossible Burger that's been around for a long time that's also based on lab-grown meat, but they're claiming that this is real meat because it's based on animal cells. We'll have to see on that. Is that going to be as healthy as— for human beings— as grass-fed meat, which is what I consume? Is— I consume mostly as much grass-fed meat as I can. Because it's generally known that there's more nutrients in that meat that generally is more like grain-fed or corn-fed, typically doesn't have the nutrient profile to be as good for the human body. So, you know, until there's more tests, and this is a common thread that's going on here, that all these, whether it be treatments for viruses or lab-grown meat, we need to verify. And and trust that these things are healthy for our bodies and that it's not gonna cause more problems than we're trying to solve. And the last question that I wanna pose on this article too is, do you trust that the increasing kind of decisions on the part of the USDA are valid? These type of decisions we're gonna see increasingly from the FDA and from the USDA. Do we trust them when much of their funding comes from either the food industry or Big Pharma? It gets back to, is it, is it reasonable to think that maybe there's some influence there that may be going on because of the funding that's coming in from, in this case, the food industry or the pharmaceutical industry into these regulatory agencies? That maybe there's some influence going on there. And I think it raises question on lots of fronts on that side. So I wanted to give credit, as you've seen on the screen, The Defender is the website that I'm pulling some of these stories from because they're raising some, just some valid questions about the things and a lot of the changes that are being contemplated in the world. And This is one of the big reasons why I think trust is such a big issue. So let me knock down that article and we can move on here. So after this, I kind of wanna make a, take a break. I do have a sponsor of this program and it's StreamYard, which I'm actually using to produce this show. So I wanted to play a little message from them and then we can come back and then we can resume talking about the topic that I wanna wrap the show off with at the end. So here we go. So StreamYard is a leading live video and local high-quality audio recording service, taking your content to the next level. Now you can effortlessly produce low-cost audio and video podcasts, perfect for YouTube podcasting as well as social media platforms. So head over to streamyard.com/RobG and give it a try. Rob G is my personal promo code. So when you sign up for a free trial, you can get a lifetime discount to the StreamYard and start creating content right away. So you can either do it live or recorded. So thank you so much. So this podcast is available as an audio podcast too. So you can go to Apple Podcasts or you can go to Google Podcasts. Spotify and pick this show up. And if you are watching this on YouTube, you can certainly subscribe on YouTube. So I certainly would, would encourage you to do that. It helps the algorithm and helps make this show found by more viewers and not so much listeners, but I guess viewers. So in the next segment that I wanted to talk about here is our kind of trust factor topics of the week. Those are two concepts that I wanted to share here, and one is how is trust earned, and trust is aligned with truth. So we have these kind of similar topics, but in really indeed pondering how trust is earned can be a pretty, pretty valuable exercise in all of our lives. And as we just ran through in the earlier parts of the show, I think it's good fodder or good kind of like material to apply some of these concepts to and how we think about trust and truth. So those kind of run together in a lot of ways, but, and plus I do know that we've talked a little bit in past episodes about earning trust, but let's run through them again as a backdrop to the overall topic. Of the alignment of truth and trust. So I would say that trust is often built through consistent and reliable actions that basically align with one's words and one's actions and the intentions that we have. It basically involves being provable, honest, keeping promises, and demonstrating competence and expertise in a particular area or topic. This gets back to the earlier things that we were talking about too. Are those companies and those individuals, are they really verifiable in what they're doing? Are they demonstrating competence? Are they, if they're an expertise in their area, that's terrific. But are the things that they're saying provable? Do you feel like they're honest and they're keeping their promises? So And sometimes what people do, what people say, don't always align perfectly with those things. But, but building trust also requires active listening and having some empathy and understanding. These qualities contribute to understanding and establishing meaningful connections with other people in your lives and larger communities and things like that. So Ultimately, trust is a gradual process that grows over time, so takes consistent effort and builds over time as people observe and experience the reliability and the integrity of others in their lives. Trust is closely aligned with truth, so truthfulness is a fundamental element in building and maintaining trust. So we all have to work hard to be as truthful. And I'm not an idealist on this. I know that there are times, and it's unfortunate that this is the case, but there are times that we aren't always 100% truthful. Agree that I think if you're thinking about this, you're probably thinking, I can't always be 100% truthful 100% all the time because that might be hurtful to others, and I sympathize with that, but it is a fundamental element to building and maintaining trust with others that they have a perception that you're truthful and that you're communicating in a way that is trustworthy, and I think that's the way to take away from it because people all of us have thoughts that are not— that if we shared them, they would be honest and they would be truthful, but they would also be harmful. And so I think we have to balance truth with some degree harm. Now, most truths are not harmful, but there are some that can be. So When someone consistently tells the truth, or at least it feels like they're telling the truth, and acts in a truthful manner, it does establish a foundation of trust. Provable trustfulness creates confidence, but it's also something that we all have to be pragmatic about. We all have to have a balance, and trust is often eroded When there is a provable breach of trust, so this is the other end of the spectrum, right? Honesty can be disclosed in a less than truthful way, right? The truth comes out, as the concept goes, and trust can be either broken or it can be just chipped away, right? So they're small little things that chip away at trust, those can accumulate over time as well to give suspicion, and people have to kind of walk carefully around truthfulness as well because of that. But when something is provable as a breach of trust, such as dishonesty or deception, which is— I'll think about— we're all human, these things happen. People don't always say the truth about things in their lives, and there's a lot of situations in the world in general now that one could interpret. And this gets back to some of the things we were talking about earlier in the program. There is a, there is a possibility of deception when someone has something to hide or there is an agenda, or there's a certain kind of narrative, or there's a certain kind of— maybe it's just a basic— it's an opinion that someone has that may be perceived as a deception or a dishonest opinion. So these are complicated issues, and I know I've been very kind of black and white about them in earlier episodes, but I do want to get into the kind of the gray area of these topics too. And try and figure out ways that I can be more balanced about it, but yet also very clear about them. And it's also— there's another twist to this too. When truthfulness is upheld and demonstrated consistently, it strengthens and begets more trust, and it reinforces the belief that one can rely on the words and actions of others. So what it has is a culmination effect, or it has a steamroller effect. So if you can surround yourself with people or organizations, or maybe in this case it would be country or a world where we felt like we, we could honestly believe everything that's said to us, whether it be our family or our organization that we work for or our government or some sort of kind of global government, it would be great if there was some consistency of putting it out there that— and provable evidence that we can trust what's being pushed, especially when a lot of these things that we're seeing in our world today could be perceived as very transformational or major changes. It's like this topic I've been talking about, about AI. There is so much uncertainty and so much feeling of not being able to trust what we're being told about this technology, or we're just not getting the whole story, or it's not being explained to us really in a way that is helpful for us to lower our anxiety about what's happening in the world. So that's my hope, and that's why I'm trying to draw some clarity on this as well, and I did get some comments and show feedback from episode 7 where I did talk a lot about the mistrust of artificial intelligence and how that is a challenge for all of us. So Livestream Universe, thank you, Ross. His comment was such a well-balanced overview of AI. Thank you, Ross. I appreciate that. I'm doing the best I can. It's a complicated topic and I would I'm planning on digging in even deeper into this as I move into this kind of next phase of trying to work through the process and try and share, you know, this topic that I'm covering more from a trying to apply it to the real world and apply it to things that we're seeing in the news or things that we're seeing in changes in our world as a, as hopefully a filter to ask the question, ask the right questions about whether trust exists in those changes. And then another comment was from Rebecca Gunter. She comments, the spectrum of the potential impacts of errors is profound. AI is consequential, right? How do we know what's real? I think, Rebecca, that's a terrific question, and that's one of the opportunities of AI, and that's one of the challenges to us as humans as we contemplate the expansive power and the abilities of the artificial intelligence technology to invent and create and replicate and to make what we may perceive as life or the representation of life become artificial. And that raises all sorts of complex issues of trust. And are, and at the end of the day, are we going to see this technology be increasingly integrated into the human experience, which is going to challenge all of us. If this technology gets embedded into our brains or increasingly we're with our smartphones, we're becoming part of a a global technology collective of sorts, interconnected beings with currently with autonomous independent thought that are contributing to a, a global network that is increasingly being captured and rolled up. And we're going to see that data that we're putting into this collective network kind of coalesce into potentially a new kind of life form. And are we going to trust what comes from that? So I'm gonna wrap up this episode for this week. This was another venture into another format and another kind of show concept. And I appreciate you hanging with me on this. Please give me feedback on this, and I'm going to continue to work hard to try and get better and to improve the show. And dive into topics that you care about as well. And I, like I said, thank you for joining me here in episode 8 of this series. And definitely look for me over on YouTube. So we're also increasingly putting this show out over on another platform called Rumble. So you'll start to see shows over on that kind of YouTube replacement platform. So we'll see that to some degree, some video creators are increasingly putting video out on that alternative viewing platform called Rumble. So if you have any interest in checking out some of the content over there as well, I think it's a, it's a good idea as well. But keep following here on YouTube. I am contemplating trying to do this live on Monday mornings. So that, that may be the next thing that you see from me is this program Thank you so much for being here with me, and, and I hope you come back and check out the show again. So thank you.

Trust Factor with Rob Greenlee focuses on all aspects to building human trust in online communications.