847: How Fiction Can Change Minds (Without Being Preachy!)

Brian Nichols  0:29  
Instead of focusing 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. Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols, here on The Brian Nichols Show. And thank you for joining us on of course, another fun filled episode. I am as always your humble host. Live from our party. Oh, Miracle Studios here in lovely Western Indiana. The Brian Nichols Show is powered by amp America, folks, if you're tired of the corporate media bias, it will please just turn it off, stop bashing your head against the proverbial wall, head over to amp america.com Get all the news you need to know without the corporate media buff, buff bias or fluff. There we go. It's a new one. Also, The Brian Nichols Show is supported by our good friends over at cardio miracle. Now, folks, I've been using cardio miracle for about a year. And I'm just blown away. Cardio miracle is literally the best heart health supplement in the world. Now I'm not the only one saying that there's literally 10s of 1000s of other folks out there who are saying the exact same thing. So what is cardio miracle. So I had a family history of high blood pressure and with that cardiovascular disease, and I thought, Oh, I guess this is my life, high blood pressure. Yay, thanks, Mom and Dad. But alas, I started using cardio miracle. And I was blown away all it took was two months, two months to start seeing benefits, I saw my blood pressure go from being consistently 140 over 90 or above and higher. Going down to your traditional 120s over 80s My resting heart rate went from being low 70s to mid 50s. I've seen I've had a better pump at the gym, I'm sleeping better. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So I know that there are 10s of 1000s of folks out there who are already on board. Heck, here in The Brian Nichols Show audience, we got hundreds of you folks who are already jumping on and experiencing the cardio miracle difference for yourselves. And if you're sitting there listening, you're thinking, Brian, this just sounds too good to be true. Have no fear. First of all, you got nothing to fear because everyone 100% money back guarantee. So boom, that's awesome. But also, we're gonna go ahead and give you a little sentence on and that's a special discount 15% off your order if you use code TBNS at checkout, so head to the show notes, head to the video description, wherever it is that you're consuming the content content today. Click that link, it'll bring you over to our friends at cardio miracle. And go ahead make sure you use not only help put your heart in a better spot but also I promise if you do so your heart will in fact Thank you. All right, so your hearts gonna thank you but about about your brain, you know, when we're talking about being able to effectively tell stories and build culture, right? And I know my brain I sit there sometimes racking it at night thinking, well, how can we build effective culture? Now granted, I like to read but I really don't read a lot of fiction. I like watching Fiction, but I've never really read a lot of fiction. I mean, I think the last real fiction book I read was Harry Potter. Oh, God, we might have said that out loud. But yeah, I just don't really read fiction that much. And yet, fiction is an absolutely great way to build culture. We think about all the times you hear people you know, quoting Star Wars are quoting Star Trek or Lord of the Rings. And what if there was something of culture that we could start to reference in the novel space? And would that be able to not just build culture but help expand our reach far and wide? So to discuss that and more, join us here on The Brian Nichols Show. He's getting a brand new award or either he's a nominated for a brand new award, talking all about literary excellence, the Prometheus award. Devon Erickson, welcome here, The Brian Nichols Show how you doing? Oh, pretty

Devon Eriksen  4:02  
good. Pretty good. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Nichols  4:05  
Great to have you on looking forward to discussing all things storytelling, writing some books and building some culture. But Devin, do us a favor. Before we dig into all of that. Introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show audience and where did you find yourself not just writing stories, but specifically with a libertarian bentonite?

Devon Eriksen  4:22  
Well, I'm Devon Erickson. I am a libertarian, and I write stories. And all stories come from, who the author is and how he sees the world. So obviously, it's going to be a libertarian story. And, you know, a lot of fiction nowadays has has a message, you know, the, the author's going to sort of beat you over the head with this idea of this is this is what I want you to think and And I don't see stories that way. And I don't think they're effective that way. And after all, if you if you go out and you read some of the stuff that the Manhattan Big Five are putting out nowadays you can, you can very clearly see what they're trying to get you to think and believe and like and dislike, and it's kind of obnoxious. And it's not persuasive in any way. The way that fiction works to persuade is not by telling you what to think, but by giving you new things to think about. So, we we create characters, we create situations, and we allow people to see the world through our eyes, or through the eyes of the characters we have come up with, and that that allows them to consider possibilities that they maybe hadn't considered before. And then they decide what they think about it. So it's not the proselytization of a worldview. It's the introduction of a worldview.

Brian Nichols  6:02  
I like the you're not telling them what to think. But you're giving them new things to think about. That's such a fascinating way to approach this. And you know, I'm thinking to contemporary stories we all probably know and love Star Wars Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, you go through all the the classics that are out there, and it definitely it does that right? Like I'm thinking back to here, I'll just, you know, I was a big Harry Potter fan back in the day bigger Star Wars fan, just for folks not ready to make fun of me in the audience there. But looking at Harry Potter, right, like Dolores Umbridge is the representation of why you should hate government schools. Because she went she was the Ministry of Magic going to a private school in Hogwarts and saying, well, the government has decided that what's being taught at Hogwarts isn't considered good. So we're going to not just go in and put the curriculum in place, we're going to have an arbiter of the state be the one to put these different, you know, ways of teaching into curriculum, and you just you tell somebody, do you like school choice or not? Or do you like government schools or not? And they're going to have their own answer. But when you present it in a story that is fictionalized, but it helps you see things in a different way that frankly, you would never see it before. I mean, how awesome is that right, Devin, that you can help make people look at a situation and put themselves in a different perspective than they would if it was their everyday normal life. And I think I just saw a post over on social media. It's like when you see the rebels in Star Wars, you're on the side of the rebels, when you see the the guys and Lord of rings that are fighting against the you know, the Sauron for the ring, wherever it is, you're on the side of the good guys like but when you see in real life, you look at the rebels as the bad guys. So where's that disconnect happening? Why don't we see some folks embrace ideas in the world of fiction, but don't it doesn't seem to carry over to the world of real life? Well,

Devon Eriksen  7:48  
we always, we always sympathize with ourselves. And so when we see from someone's point of view, they partially become us, and we partially become them. So to use your example of this sort of character who was created to be both officious and incompetent, you have a lot say, for example of parents thinking about, you know, oh, government school, you know, private school, do I want to homeschool my children, and they consider that from the perspective of an adult. But if they read this character in Harry Potter, and they kind of realize what's being talked about, then they're able to see this sort of bureaucratic government school attitude, from the perspective not of themselves, but of their child. How does my child experience a government school, you know, all of a sudden, you're being, you're being told things that don't make sense. And you're being punished for objecting, you're being punished for using your critical thinking skills. And speaking, honestly. And that's what government school is like. But parents can forget that. So we take the fiction, and we show that from the perspective of a child. And that is, that is how minds get changed. Not Oh, this is what you should think. But this is how something looks to other people.

Brian Nichols  9:32  
By the way, what's this word? Empathy, right? We teach this all the time. You have to be able to meet people where they're at walk in their shoes, whatever the terminology is, but it doesn't matter how much it matters to you. It matters how much it matters to them.

Devon Eriksen  9:44  
Yeah, and empathy doesn't mean compassion, right doesn't mean feeling sorry for someone. They can be doing horrendously evil things, and they need to be shot down like a dog in the street. But Empathy means Understanding what someone thinks and why they think it, understanding what's going on in their head. And that's always appropriate, even with horrendously evil people, because if we wish to oppose them, we have to understand how they work. So I think a lot of the time, we tend to default, to sympathizing with whoever we empathize with the most. And that's why it's important to really understand why people believe what they do on all sides of an issue. So we can choose that which makes the most sense to us. Instead of simply going with, you know, oh, I'm going to reflexively sympathize with whoever's opinion I have had the most exposure to, and that's kind of how I wrote theft of fire, which my agent will give me odd looks if I don't hold it up periodically. So there you go. available wherever books are sold. I write it about some people who, you know, they may they may be haven't made the best decisions in life, and you're seeing the world from the viewpoint of one of them. And this other character enters his life. And she's not very nice. She's, she's, she's kind of an antagonist. And then, as the story develops, you get to see why everyone in the story is the way they are, and how they can make better choices. I tend to think there's three fundamental kinds of story. Oh,

Brian Nichols  11:52  
tell us about that. Because that was right, where we're going next anyways, was the idea of storytelling, helping change people's minds or helping tell not just values that we hold, but why we hold them. So tell us about them?

Devon Eriksen  12:03  
Well, you can separate stories in lots of ways. But one of the ways you can separate stories is sort of looking at the three pillars of American politics you have, you have the sort of progressive kind of leftist types. And you have these sort of traditional conservatives who are who are very into the values of the past and preserving them. And then you have libertarians, whose ideals involve maximizing individual control over your own destiny. And I find that the, the conservative story is sort of organized along the lines of, we can't have nice things, because there are bad people over there outside our culture, and we must defeat them. And often, the Chosen One must defeat them. And then the leftist story is we can't have nice things because there are selfish people within our culture. And we must root them out and destroy them together in a big mob. And then there's the libertarian story. And the libertarian story kind of goes, we can't have nice things, because we are fallible people and we made some really bad choices. Here's how we make better ones and improve the world.

Brian Nichols  13:40  
All right, Devin, I have another follow up for you. Because I hear this a lot from libertarians, you know, we have the best ideas, If only more and more people just heard those ideas. Right? Well, let me ask you this. Devin. Where is it that libertarians simply regurgitating libertarian ism libertarian ideas falls on deaf ears and where can storytelling help fill those gaps? Well,

Devon Eriksen  14:04  
people aren't interested in philosophy. You know, you pretty much have to be one of these sort of high IQ, very intellectualized academic sort of people to really care about this process of sitting around all day, debating with other intellectuals about what is truth and what is the good and what is the best form of society. Most people aren't interested in that they're too busy thinking about what is going to happen to me tomorrow. And where philosophies can really fail to connect with most people, you know, with with the average person, not necessarily less intelligent but less intellectual, less inclined to mental obstruct. sections is, is this idea of vision. Vision doesn't mean a bunch of abstract ideas about how a society should be, it means a concrete idea of what the future is going to look like, according to your plans. So what somebody needs to what you need to answer, if you want somebody to change their mind about something, if you want them to do something, if you want to take action, is, how will the world be different for them? If they do things differently? And how will that be better for them?

Brian Nichols  15:40  
So what you just articulated, by the way, Deb, and I teach this in sales, coaching, sell futures, not features, right? And that I think it paints this picture so perfectly, because people really don't care. And you mentioned it, people don't care about philosophy, they don't care about the isms, right? People are living in their everyday, everyday life, they have their own distractions, they have their own priorities. So when we're able to instead of preaching deism, and instead preach the outcome, especially that's an outcome that resonates to the person we're talking to, man, I think I'm gonna have a much better shot of getting their attention and getting those ears to pay attention and listen to me, versus if I'm on the street corner, you know, screaming about Rothbard and screaming about go through through the different isms of libertarianism, non aggression, you know, the nap, we go through all of it, right, but like, this is where we'll actually have success is not throwing the book at somebody, but rather telling the story of what this solution does, from an outcome perspective and telling that story painting that picture. Yes,

Devon Eriksen  16:45  
all of these abstractions, like the non Aggression Principle, are things that we have come up with, to sort of organize and classify how we intend to achieve results. But people get in love with this process of organizing things, and they start failing to talk about the results. You know, you, you talk about, oh, the Fed, you talk about, you know, global central banks controlling the money supply. And you're not saying if you're not saying to people, your money should not buy less than less every year, it should buy more and more, every year, the prices of everything should go down. You should be able to earn money, just by sticking it in a mattress and waiting because suddenly it's worth more. And that's what happens if you have a fixed supply of currency, representing an economy that grows forever, all of a sudden, your your money is worth more. So you know, you keep getting raises that don't match inflation, we shouldn't have inflation, we should have deflation. Our plan is to have deflation.

Brian Nichols  18:11  
But that doesn't sound as good Devon that means that I'm not gonna get a salary increase every year.

Devon Eriksen  18:15  
It means you can buy more stuff with what you have now.

Brian Nichols  18:20  
It's been a while though, like and this is the part that it is so frustrating as a libertarian is that we see this stuff and we're like, come on man, but your average person I hate to use the term Normie but like they are normies they they live the life of just your average person they go to the government school, they go to the university they follow the course that has been laid out before them you graduate college you get your your dead end job as an entry level you know, whatever, you you start to earn some monies or paying off some some bills, you get your home, like this is like everybody does this, right? This is the steps I'm supposed to take. And you don't really question things. You're just going based on what everybody else is doing. i How many times I heard this, well, I shouldn't I need to go to college. All my classmates are going to college. I mean, this is literally like our parents used to do like, well, if Timmy and his friends were gonna jump off the bridge, would you do it too? And to your point, right, like we were supposed to and our our relatives used to do this, they would put the money under the mattress because it shouldn't be worth more. And then oh, what did we do? We got rid of the gold standard, we you know, 1971 we started just artificially increasing our currency we just see all of a sudden, everything exponentially getting more and more expensive and don't have the, I guess the self awareness to take a step back and ask the very necessary question. Why? Why is this happening? And that right there, right? This is where storytelling can help answer those questions because we can. I'm going to turn this to you Devin. Maybe there's a way you can talk about inflation. Or maybe there's a way you can talk about debasing our currencies in a way that in fiction, you can do it that helps people see things other than just saying, here's why inflation is bad. So, here's why printing more money is bad, like this paints the picture and helps paint the picture of an outcome as well versus just the, this is good or this is bad?

Devon Eriksen  20:08  
Well, it's, it's really even more abstract than that it's it's, this is how your life could be, you know, this is, this is what you could do. See, the reason people are reluctant to embrace these kinds of visions is that it can be very terrifying to step outside your comfort zone to step outside of what you're used to. And to be willing to make that step, you can't just be hoping you'll be okay, you have to be hopeful and excited about something you might get. So you know, you can sit there and explain to people about money supply, and their money should be worth more and more every year. But also you can, you can do something less intellectual, you can tell them the story of an exciting future, you know, you can have this, this future where, okay, this guy describes himself as poor, but he, he was running his own little company, he has his own spacecraft is flying around with a full machine shop and all the necessities of life, but he's, you know, his notion of poverty is completely different than the notion of poverty we have today. And, you know, capitalism has always done that. For us. It's it's changed the definition of poverty to, you know, what would have been absurd wealth, a generation or two go, but you can, you can paint these exciting futures that you get to have with free minds, and free markets and free technological development, not being held back by this kind of bureaucracy. And I think people become dependent on that, which is normal for them, because that's what's safe. So you tell a story about that, which is not normal for them. And you tell them how it could be normal. You tell them what, you know, what their life could be, like.

Brian Nichols  22:23  
I like the idea to of using fiction to help paint the picture of what things were like or could have been like, for context right? There. I think there's a misconception. And you actually hinted at this, people nowadays you say, would you rather live as a poor person today, or a rich person 500 years ago, almost everybody's like, Oh, I want to be the rich person 500 years ago with zero context that that puts them below poverty level here today.

Devon Eriksen  22:51  
And I'm dying of tuberculosis. Exactly. Right. Yeah, you probably smell

Brian Nichols  22:55  
because you have like the IQ, you know, or whatever the IQ of the day was, but like going through fiction, and being able to paint that picture, and give the context, even though it might not be historically factual or whatever it may be. But like giving perception that is lost in the modern confines of the 21st century where you know, I need anything, I could probably have it in a matter of minutes right? You know, you need to order something go on your Amazon you to grab something from the store, run downtown, like all these little miss like a really their comfort situations

Devon Eriksen  23:30  
why older people are more into this. Yes. You know, you get my tell

Brian Nichols  23:34  
us about that. Because I see that a lot like my grandma. She reads fiction books all the time. And I've been like Grandma, what's up? Tell me tell me more about this.

Devon Eriksen  23:40  
Yeah, you get my age, you've lived through historical changes, right? You've lived through different eras, where different technology where there were different states of technology, and that shaped the culture in different ways. You know, you talk to young people, younger people. And they've never lived in a world without an internet. And they say, oh, social media sites are so bad that you don't understand what the world was like, before the internet. The internet changed the very definition of intelligence. It used to be that being smart meant you knew a whole bunch of facts. And if you didn't know, some particular fact that you needed to know you were stuck. You had to go look up some giant set of encyclopedias, which would never go into enough detail because it had to cover everything. Or you would have to go find an expert. Well, how do you do that?

Look in the phone book? What are you gonna do? You're stuck, by the way,

Brian Nichols  24:44  
about knowledge. I was just talking about SEO back before the days of computers. So for folks out there playing the home game and listening along today. If you ever go like Go ask your grandma for the old phonebook, I guarantee she probably has it in the bottom drawer still open it up to the A's and just just go through and count how many triple A office furniture a triple A car dealership triple A double a single leg because that's how it used to work. If you wanted your name at the top of the list, you started with a triple A or double

Devon Eriksen  25:17  
a stack of dead trees. And people, people who are younger, they see the world as this sort of steady, steady state thing, because they've only been in it for 20 years, and they've only been paying attention for about 10. So things haven't changed all that much. So they think, oh, you know, the world is what it is. And we need to argue about how to divide up the economy. And you know, you get 50 years old and you're like, you know, what really changed my life was not all of these political arguments about how to divide up the pie. It was some guy in his basement invented something. And suddenly the world changed. And you start to understand, that's humanity's evolutionary shtick right there. We started out banging the rocks together. And now we're talking on this podcast and recording it. So everyone in the world can see it whenever and wherever they want. And that is a world that did not exist 30 years ago, it just didn't. And so that is that changes your life that changes everything that makes so many problems, you never knew were problems go away. You know, I could not have been an author 30 years ago, I could not have done it. Because, you know, I am a disagreeable curmudgeonly person. And, you know, I'm not going to go suck up to some, you know, Manhattan, lefty, at some publishing agency for permission to distribute my book. And you 30 years ago, that would have been it. That would have been it. There's these gatekeepers, and you have to bow down and I don't bow down. So you know, along comes the internet, along comes ebooks, along comes Amazon, with print on demand. And suddenly these publishers who are saying, oh, you know, this doesn't have representation for left handed me a lot of touch typists or I don't like first person, I want you to rewrite it in third person, or, you know, Can we can we put in like a cute robot character? You know, just just all this stuff? Like, no, no, I've got to do it myself. And so I did it myself. I don't, I don't need these guys holding me back. And, you know, taking some of my hard earned money for doing not much of anything except standing in my way, trying to stand between me and my readers. No, thank you. And technology enabled that technological advancement enabled that, you know, we talk about Amazon as being this big, bad thing. You know, they, they're a big company. And, you know, not everybody in them is so nice, and they do some bad stuff. But they also freed us up from having the entire publishing industry, controlled by people who live in the same 10 blocks of Manhattan. And they all go to the same parties. And they all agree on everything, and they're all basically communists.

Brian Nichols  29:06  
Devin, it's been a great conversation. I've really enjoyed it. I know the audience has enjoyed that. So with that being said, what we want to do for our final thoughts today is let people know where they can get the book theft of fire. Yes, please hold it up for the audience, they can see that beautiful cover, tell us the basic premise of the book, where they can go ahead and purchase it and any other fun things that you want people to be able to take away from today's episode.

Devon Eriksen  29:30  
Well, it's a fun space adventure in a post governmental society that has colonized the solar system. And if you enjoyed reading the classic science fiction of the late 20th century 70s 80s 90s Then this will probably give you some very enjoyable flashbacks. It's available wherever books are sold. We're in libraries. You can special order us from Barnes and Noble you can get you can get it on Amazon You can get it through most of your ebook services, you can get DRM free copies on Smashwords. We literally wherever books are sold. If you would like, I have a website, Devon erickson.com, where you can read the first three chapters to see if it's your cup of tea. And if you like spicy political takes, then you can look me up on Twitter.

Brian Nichols  30:25  
There you go. And we'll include all those links in the show notes. Also a special congratulations Devin, you are one of five finalists for the

Devon Eriksen  30:33  
Yes, congratulations almost forgot to talk about this. Like, I beat Salman Rushdie in a writing contest.

Brian Nichols  30:41  
Put that feather in your cap. But no again, congratulations. It's really cool to see not just you know, a storyteller being able to tell tell their story, but actually get recognized for doing such a great job. So theft of fire link will be in the show notes. Folks, if you want to go ahead and check that out. Please go to the podcast notes here on your podcast catcher go to the show notes video description on YouTube on rumble wherever it may be click the link please go ahead and give Devin some love. Support the book buy the book tell him what your thoughts are and most importantly let them know you heard him here on The Brian Nichols Show. Other than that, please go ahead share the show tag yours truly at be Nichols Liberty you can find me on x.com Facebook as well as on Instagram but was that social media handle again? Devon,

Devon Eriksen  31:23  
Devon Erickson. Easy enough that

Brian Nichols  31:27  
link as well for folks to be easy to find you and for the podcast and the youtube please do us a favor hit that subscribe button. Hit that like button if you're watching the video version of the show. And of course head down below into the comments. We want to hear your thoughts and you read theft of fire yet? If so let us know what your thoughts are or what's your thoughts on using storytelling to help see help people see things in a different way or maybe actually see things for the first time. We want to hear your thoughts. Continue the conversation down below and wherever it is you're consuming your podcast or video today. Whether that's on YouTube on rumble on Apple podcasts is do me a favor, hit subscribe, hit download all unplayed episodes if you're listening to the podcast version, because we have over 845 episodes here of the program, and I guarantee a handful of them should leave you educated, enlightened and informed Devin with that being said Any final thoughts or words here for the eyes before we wrap things up today?

Devon Eriksen  32:20  
Well, thank you very much for having me on. And always try to consider another viewpoint that you haven't seen before.

Brian Nichols  32:32  
Oh, I like that. There you go. Folks. There is your call to action for today's episode beyond going ahead and purchasing theft of fire. With that being said Brian co signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show for Devon Erickson. We'll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai