Rebuilding Trust When Your Industry Is Under Attack

Crisis communication speakers handle acute scandals. Vance handles the other problem: chronic distrust, the industry that is permanently mistrusted rather than momentarily in crisis. Agriculture, energy, pharma, and now AI companies live in this condition, and almost nobody speaks from inside the experience.

At Monsanto he stood between the world's most attacked brand and the public that attacked it. He learned how PR firms manufacture fear, why education is how to think while propaganda is what to think, and what actually moves people who have already decided you are the villain. Audiences under attack recognize him as one of their own within minutes.

In his own words

“And it was in that moment that I knew for certain that the science is not enough. That there are men and women that will come and stand on boxes. And if they have a more compelling story than you do, it does not matter if you have the evidence. It doesn't matter if you know what the correct answer is, or at least the better answer, it doesn't matter because their story will outcompete yours and people will buy their snake oil.”

“It's not just there that men and women come and stand on boxes. It's everywhere where the information is complex. Anywhere where you have to use science to be able to explain to people how things work, what decision they ought to make. They are in hyper competition with men and women that will come and stand on boxes and sell snake oil.”

“When I got done I realized, wait a second, if you get this job, if they give it to you, then you get to run around and find out if they're as evil as everybody says that they are. You can go write the greatest tell all book of all time, but if you're wrong, well then that's actually the greatest like mind loop you've ever gone through in your life because you went from thinking these people are pure evil and they're not from what I see. So why is it before I came in here that I deeply believed with everything that I had that they were, and that's when you start saying like, what other things do I know with a hundred percent certainty like I did with this about the rest of the world?”

“Well, who does this hurt? Well, it hurts everybody making steel plows, everybody making giant engines and it doesn't just like kind of hurt their bottom line. It radically changes the entire way that the agricultural system in the western world works. So there is now billions of dollars at stake. And so they start playing the game where they say, well, it's not us, but we did happen to fund a group of people that really hate your way of doing things. And so you're playing this mimetic warfare.”

“The gelman amnesia effect, I think is one of the most fascinating concepts. If you're reading something in the New York Times about a subject you know a lot about, I'm in agriculture, right? I read it and I'm like, this author doesn't know anything. But then you turn the page and you get to a subject that you don't know anything about, and you're like, oh, that's interesting. Look what they're doing in the Ukraine. And now we've figured out the government has figured out how to take that, weaponize it on a grand scale so that we're always in this hypertension about everything.”

Tested against real rooms

Vance has argued this material with, among others:

• Kaspar Pavilanskas, guerrilla social media marketer (February 2021)
• Alex Kaschuta, host of the Subversive podcast (April 2022)
• Dr. Brittany Kennedy, small animal veterinarian (February 2020)
• Tim Hammerich, host of the Future of Agriculture podcast (August 2025)

Common questions

Our industry is constantly attacked in the media and our members feel hated. What does Vance offer a convention audience?

Recognition first, then tools. He has stood where your members stand. The talk explains the machinery of manufactured outrage, why defensive facts backfire, and the communication moves that work with a distrustful public.

Is this a PR consultant talk?

No. Vance is not selling a crisis playbook. He tells the story of holding the line inside the most distrusted company in America and turns it into principles any leader in a contested industry can use.

Which industries book this?

Agriculture and food, energy, pharmaceuticals, technology and AI, and any association whose members feel permanently on trial in public.