526: How is this BLIND Musician Making Liberty FUN Again!? (w/ Shawn Osborne)

Brian Nichols  0:04  
The focus on winning arguments we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. Wow. Attorney there is right right here on The Brian Nichols Show. Thank you for joining us. I am as always your humble hope it's different type of episode today not only are we taking a day off on Friday, yesterday I went to the beach I'm sorry for those of you who are used to our traditional Friday episodes but yours truly took a day and yeah I really enjoyed up there in Gary Indiana Lake Michigan basically becomes a gigantic ocean because you see literally no land you look out because it's so large so that was fun. But uh yeah I apologize for that but hey don't don't worry we have a great episode still in store for you but yeah, just a little day late here on Saturday but first before we go ahead and get to this very special libertarian musician in his awesome story we're gonna go ahead and talk about today's episode sponsor and that is the expat money summit 2022 head the Brian Nichols show.com forward slash expat and grab your free Yes, I said free virtual tickets to this amazing summit taking place November 7 through 11th. Five days 30 expert speakers join us for a week and I promise you will reap the benefits for generations. McHale Thorpe, the founder of the expat money show and host of this year's expat money summit 2022 We'll be joining us virtually November 7 through the 11th one more time Brian Nichols show.com. Forward slash expat and get your free tickets today. All right, folks. Going back to today's episode, we have a very special musician because not only is he bringing the world of music to the world of liberty, but he's doing so through a very creative lens. Sean Osborne Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. How are you?

Shawn Osborne  1:56  
Pretty good man. How's it going? Brian?

Brian Nichols  1:57  
Doing well Sean, thank you for joining us. I'm so excited to have you on today's episode because you are not only are Bringing lots of joy to folks through the the magical power that is music, but you also are doing so through a Liberty lens. And oh, by the way, you're doing so blind talk to, uh, Sean, about your story, especially in here in the liberty movement.

Shawn Osborne  2:18  
You know, I'm a longtime libertarian, you know, I got active about 2019, you know, sometimes around that vicinity, but, you know, voted libertarian for a long time. And as a musician, the thing that really pushed me I was one of those people, I was really anti war growing up and stuff like that anti war on drugs. But the thing that really sent me off that, you know, I voted Democrat when I was younger, unfortunately, the thing that sent me towards the Libertarian Party was I'll show my age here, but it was the PMRC you know, all the censorship that was going on in the 90s. With Tipper Gore and stuff like that, it just, it outraged me. And I'm even more outraged now that so many musicians don't stand up for free speech, you know, it seems like a lot of them just either shut up about it, they don't talk about it, they don't talk about any of the anything Liberty related, you know, and I feel as though we're not really represented in music, and I wanted to make sure that I was wanted to make music with a with a meaning. So I really want to, I want to have that face of I want to I want to take away the power of the left, and what the grass they have on music and art and stuff like that and dash that. And I want to make Liberty fun. You know, it's gotta be fun, you know, people you want to have some music to listen to. And that kind of thing. Music. The last interview I saw with Michael Heiser and Ron Paul, the last thing Ron Paul said was music is vital to any revolution. And I bet went through the roof. I was like, get that I couldn't agree more.

Brian Nichols  3:55  
I can't agree more myself. I was super involved in music when I was growing up from anything in the world of chorus, you know, to concert band to just playing music on my own piano guitar. I like to sing so all that fun stuff, I get it music. It's a different language almost. But it kind of transcends all languages, right? Like you can hear a good song. And regardless of even if there are no lyrics, right, you can still appreciate it for the work that it is. And I would love to hear how you find the means of expression through music impacts you and I would also be very interested to hear through your context and your perspective, frankly, as being someone who is blind because for you, audio is so much more of a sense that you rely on versus you know, we have all of our other senses plus sight. So I would dare say and correct me if I'm wrong here, Shawn, but not only is music, you know, a very important means of expressing yourself personally, but I'd also dare to assume that it's also a very personal to you In the way that you interact with the world,

Shawn Osborne  5:02  
yeah, you know, music is, it's, it's, it's the way I feel best about expressing myself. What I do is I like patterns. So I like that's one of the things I love about music. So I like to personally find a really good chord progression. Thank, you know, as far as lyrics go, I like to, I would say, I like when I teach music, I when I teach people to write music, the thing I tell them is think about what you want to say. And then think of a cooler way to say it, you know, when you try to fit it into to a cool, catchy, hopefully, framework, and that's kind of how I look at it. You know, you might use a phrase or something that's common in like, say, the liberty movement. You know, I have a song on my new album called Don't tread on me. You know, that's, that's pretty simple to understand. So, you know, there I didn't have to do as much work mentally to write the song. You know, some of the stuff just comes right to you. Other songs I've had, I had one song from my first album called The Hollenbeck blues, I love to smoke my weed. And I had a hell of a time with that song because it was personal, you know, I woke up with a cop's gun in my face. And I was mad about it. I wanted to write a song about it. And that one took a little longer for me to get out because it was very personal for me. And I wanted to make sure I got to say exactly how I felt about it. And also making an entertaining entertaining song. So I guess every every path every every song is different in that sense. Plus, I do a lot of different styles. I grew up I'm a metalhead. But I do I do right now is what I'm doing mostly as traditional folk style. Think of Woody Guthrie minus the communism.

Brian Nichols  6:50  
That's, that's one way to describe music. I don't think I've ever heard the words uttered. And dare I say, I don't think we'll ever hear uttered again. But that's fantastic. No, Shawn, that's and let's talk about music itself, because you've been doing this for a while. And I love and you talked about the type of music blues folks, folk, but what's the reception been from an audience that maybe isn't usually overtly open to a Liberty message, it kind of hit the progressive nature. And we saw that you go back to the 60s, especially when folk music really took the country by storm. It, it married this very progressive, but also anti war message and in the two kind of went hand in hand together. But it seems that the folk message tended to be more towards that hippie, progressive side of things. So what's the response been from an audience that tends to lean progressive with a Liberty based folk music?

Shawn Osborne  7:42  
You know, I was really surprised, you know, the, when I first started dealing, because I'm, I'm not a singer, I'm a guitarist, I play a lot of instruments. But I consider myself a guitarist, and I started singing out of necessity, because I didn't know anybody else that wanted to do this with me. So I started writing songs. You know, and I guess in 2005, is when I really started writing folk tunes. And I decided my girlfriend's from over in Claremont, California, and they have the Claremont folk center over there. And they have an open mic over there. So I thought, Oh, I'm gonna go over there and play a couple of songs. I had one, just basically bashing the two party system called wake up. And I had another one about the TSA. And the TSA was kind of more where I'm just making fun of a little bit more of a lighthearted song than the other one. And I wanted to come out and just hit everybody with the wake up, you know what the hell's wrong with you kind of song first, my girlfriend talked me out of it. She said, Don't go out and play the more fun song first. And I fought her on it. At first, I was like, No, I want to go I want to I want to go bash people, because I hate the two parties. And the more I thought that she was right, you know, over with the fun song first, and then hit him with that. And it's very progressive over there. And I was I was very surprised at the, at the message or not the message, I mean, that the way they received the message, I was I was really happy about it. Now, I think they probably wouldn't like my probe den song. But you know, but that's that. I would say, by and large people agree with it, as you know, even progressives, I think they see the same problems as us. I just think they have the exact wrong answer to it. Yeah,

Brian Nichols  9:21  
well, and we talked about this a lot in the show right is that's why it's so important to offer solutions to the problems we see to either a make the government solution almost irrelevant by nature, or be to help get us so far. It had that or I'm sorry to help get Liberty ideas so far ahead, and then to restrict back the power of the government back to what it was supposed to be, which was if we're gonna look at the federal government, it was supposed to be a very loosely organized federal entity to to keep the original 13 colonies together for mostly it was from a defensive stamp. Point. And yet we've now gotten to the point that Washington DC controls pretty much everything. So you do see that that would be the other alternative. And if we can get a progressive friends and I have a, you know, a friend from college, she was a few years behind me. And she was just as progressive as they come, she would look at, you know, often side with folks, much the folks we don't like like the Bernie Sanders folks of the worlds right the AOCs. And recently, she messaged me, and this is years later that she has started to realize that government itself, just because they're echoing the same problems that they see, right, and we see this in sales a lot, too, is that you'll have multiple different solutions to the same problem. The problem is, is that when the people in government who have continuously gone back and forth between the red team and blue team, keep seeing the same problems, keep giving their solutions, but those solutions don't work at all, then there naturally comes an inclination to start looking elsewhere. And she found herself a few years later looking elsewhere. And it just happened to be that her boyfriend is now going from a GOP to libertarian. So she's kind of watching him go through the journey, she and she's like, well, maybe I should consider this too. And seeing her go down that pathway and start to questions, things that she used to believe it's helping her not only see other points of view, but it gives me hope to see that as long as we continue to be consistent, we continue to be authentic in our real, our true selves with our real solutions that we firmly believe in, then just when the time comes when the timing is right, that person that is open to our message will in fact receive the message and it almost sounds religious when you're I speak about like that. But I mean, at the end of the day, are we not in the game of trying to win hearts and minds?

Shawn Osborne  11:53  
Yeah, you know, music is a great way to plant that seed. And sometimes a seed has to lay there wild for it comes and rains on it, and brings it up out of the ground. You know, and I really feel that that's, that's, that's one of the powers of music is to be able to plant that seed in a fun, catchy way. Like I have a song called tax man. And you know, there's a history going back, you know, to play the middle ages of people talking shit about the tax man. And you know, I play that I do a folk singing group up here at Griffith Park with a bunch of senior citizens. That's actually how I ran into folk music. You know, they, I was teaching guitar up there and piano and they asked me, it's like, Hey, can you do this? And I was like, Sure, sure I can do it. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And they gave me a bunch of songs by Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, and I was like, oh, you know, Bob Dylan, it's like, all these songs are cool, you know, like, all this anti war music and stuff, but I could really live without the socialist crap. You know. And then I thought, Okay, I'm gonna, that's when I decided I was gonna start writing some stuff. Once I got into it saw how much I liked it. But I liked that idea, build a plant that seed and make it fun.

Brian Nichols  12:54  
Yeah, you have to make it fun, right? And I'm very happy. Your girlfriend said what she did, because you're going to win a lot more folks over, as you said, with the fun stuff. And I mean, think about it from a sales perspective. And I know I always go back to the sales perspective. But we have a lot of folks here in the business, entrepreneurial world who this this correlates is if you approach a customer. And you You lead in with saying, you know, not only is your solution in place, causing your problem, but you're part of the problem in keeping to embrace this solution, they're going to look to somebody else who's trying to make them feel better. So what we want to do is say, Hey, listen, we get it, you were you were duped by the red team and blue team. And guess what, it's not your fault. It's not your fault, make them feel comforted and understood, because a lot of us came to this movement, either from the left or from the right, mostly from the right, if we're going to be completely honest, but there are definitely a lot of folks who do come from the left. So let's make sure that we're open and empathetic with with what we've experienced. But also understand that it, we likely had the same story. And we were in the same position they were at the end of it, that is the definition of empathy is to put yourself in someone else's shoes, what better way to do that than to quite literally tell our story and tell them Hey, it's okay, look where I am today. It's not your fault. We can take you from where you are and get you to a better, better spot. And by the way, along the way, if we embrace the solutions that we're talking about and bring to the table, things that you've seen as problems are objectively going to get better.

Shawn Osborne  14:35  
Yeah, you know, one of the things that I tell people sometimes, you know, I'll say, Yeah, you know what, I'll talk to somebody that's kind of heading in this direction. I said, Yeah, I stood where you were once, you know, where my first time I voted was in 88. And I, you know, I was one of the people that believed you had to vote for the two party system and I voted for Dukakis when I could have voted for Ron Paul's a libertarian. I'm still upset about that, you know, that you know, No, just the fact that I fell into that trap and I try to point people away from that as much as possible because I just may I just find it terribly annoying to this day oops

Brian Nichols  15:18  
there we go my bad you know you gotta do Shawn is now only through music there's a horn honking outside you know I love having just random horns honking on a Saturday it's always fun he's been truck over here. There you go yeah, see where we are all having all sorts of fun audio issues have but one thing we can do beyond audio is to give people some visual visual tools to help sell liberty and if you're able to see here folks on my shirt and shop I'll tell you it's the hey google overthrow the government don't listen to that I actually have one of these guys it's gonna be like what was wrong and we can go ahead and overthrow the government don't do that. Don't do that. Don't say it to yours and I apologize if I made yours do that. But you can go ahead and grab it you're awesome. Hey, trigger word overthrow the government shirt over at Brian Nichols show.com forward slash shop I'm gonna share my screen here folks you can grab yes your version of the Hey trigger word overthrow the government I'm not going to say it again. So don't break anybody's anybody's brains but also we have so many other awesome things you can grab from our fun students not systems posters. We have our trust the experts mug I love this one is one of our our top selling mugs are don't hurt people don't take people's stuff bumper stickers, our flag Yeah, the fun students not systems flag. And then also I love this one zip codes shouldn't determine education. We've also got our great series here from Dr. Adrian bidjan. Freedom is nature freedom is science. So folks if you like some of the stuff we have here, like look at this are don't nuke me brochure. I mean, by the way that is gonna be going into the vault here at the end of the month. So make sure you grab that Oh, and look what I'm wearing. I got my good ideas don't require a forced snapback. You can see that right here. And watch this ready for anybody here on YouTube. If you go ahead, we're going to add this to cart and then you just go right here to where is it? Place your order. I agree to the Terms and Conditions you'll see why. Because when you get to the checkout, you're gonna go ahead and use code TB and s and of course a my computer just decided to just not actually let us do this. Oh, there we go. Yeah, so you're gonna go here, use code TBS at checkout, apparently getting to these. And then boom, discount applied. So yeah, folks, if you want to go ahead and get your libertarian swag head to Brian show.com forward slash shop, check out the proud libertarian shop. And by the way, this code TBMs works not just at The Brian Nichols Show store, but it works at every store on the prowl libertarian shop. So go ahead, check it out. There's so many great libertarian affiliates and partners that we go ahead and work with over a proud libertarian and shout out to the amazing team over a proud libertarian they are doing amazing, amazing work. Alright, Sean, enough about me talking about my store over at proud libertarian. Let's talk about music again. Because you have a network and it is the Liberty blues net work W E, RK talk to us about that network? And what kind of shows are on that network? What would people come to expect? If they would go ahead and check it out?

Shawn Osborne  18:30  
You know, it's funny, you mentioned that, you know, on the podcast, it's actually spelled W O RK and you know, I had a blind fail. And I saved it as w e. R K for some reason on Facebook. So that was a total blind fail. So I'm learning to switch that. But yeah, so I decided, you know, what, I originally was just one podcast I just had with my progressive friends, Bernie Sanders, and I would get together and drink beer, and just talk about politics. And, you know, that grew into I started talking to a couple of my friends, John and Steve in Indiana. And, you know, John's a defense attorney, and Steve's a school teacher, I thought, Oh, well, we'll talk about a little bit of politics from a Midwestern point of view or more national kind of thing, you know, more libertarian leaning. And then I have another podcast about libertarian, Los Angeles, just about more or less what's going on over here. I do have people on from around the country to talk about, like, their activism and stuff, you know, so I can, you know, kind of get ideas from other people, things we can do out here. That kind of stuff. So, it's just just, uh, you know, three different three totally different podcasts. You know, the, oh, the model for the progressive libertarian walk into a bar was sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't, but we always drink beer. Again, you know, stay in with the idea of keeping it fun.

Brian Nichols  19:53  
Well, we're, I'm gonna give a little sneak behind the curtain here. We do have a new sponsor that's gonna be joining This year on the network and is a great wine sponsor. So for anybody who maybe is gluten intolerant like yours truly, and it's truly gluten intolerant, not like the, you know, the Oh yeah, I have an allergy like, no, no, I actually have an hour. It's celiac disease, it sucks. But also, I don't drink anymore to just candidly. And back when I did drink, though, I was a big fan of wine. So we have a new wine sponsor here, and The Brian Nichols Show will be debuting them very, very soon. But of course, you're gonna get a special discount with TBS at checkout there as well. So we'll talk about that in the future. But Sean, thank you for joining us on the program. I want folks to go ahead and not only be able to enjoy your music, but continue to support you so where can go folks go ahead find you and continue the conversation?

Shawn Osborne  20:45  
Yeah, let you talk about marketing so I'm not a terribly good self promoter. I'm I'm a little bit of an introvert. So I tend to not self promote enough you get most of them. Oh, my musics available. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Google, I think the only place on that is on his Pandora. But I would appreciate it. If people searched for me there, maybe they'll finally put me on there. You know, that's, that's, I think, pretty much every place else you can listen to it. You know, like I said, my first out of my latest album is called the Liberty or Liberty blues. It's called free people. And I actually have the song that the the last song on the album is called, take human action, I donated all the royalties to the California Mises caucus, I thought it was a great way for people to give, if they like for me, I'm a poor musician. So I don't have a lot of money to donate. But it's an easy way for people to give to a charity or something like that, or political group. The more people listen, the more they the more they give, and you don't have to spend a dime. You know, I have a charity album that I did the same thing for you. I want to give the royalties to Children's Hospital and the Wounded Warriors project and things like that. So I thought it was a fun way to you know, get people to listen to the music, hold me up in the algorithms, and, you know, kind of get the music out there. So people can listen to it, enjoy it. And you know, spread the plant those seeds of liberty places and show that that you don't need the government to help out people can help out and do things.

Brian Nichols  22:19  
I love it. Shawn, thank you for all you're doing. Because yes, we do have a big battle and winning hearts and minds. It is true. And actually, I talked about this on the last episode. So for folks who are interested in checking that out, I'm actually gonna go ahead and share that here on screen for folks here one second. We talked about messaging, because messaging matters, right. And I was talking about why we will continue we libertarians to lose the battle of hearts and minds if we continue to talk about the things that we care about instead of meeting people on the issues that they care about. So for anyone who's interested for especially our audio listener, I'll go ahead and include that in the show notes. So all you got to do is click The Brian Nichols Show. artwork in your podcast catcher. It'll bring you right to today's episode. All links are available, including all of Sean's links for social media. But also you can go ahead and check out the Liberty blues network actually network, I guess network if you're on Facebook until Sean goes ahead and NABS that, and then for our YouTube listener, well hey, thank you for watching. Make sure you hit subscribe and ding that little bell there. So you're not missing a single time. We have an episode go live like our Saturday episode here today. And if you missed our episode, last week on Friday, I said last week, oh my goodness, it's messing me up Thursday. My brain just broke on Thursday I talked about Yeah, the messaging matters. I'll include that link right here. I guess it is for you YouTube listener. I'll see you over there. But folks, thank you for joining us on today's episode. With that being said it's Brian Nichols signing off for Sean Osborne. We'll see you next week.

Unknown Speaker  23:49  
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