936: Why Most People Fall for Fake News

Brian Nichols  0:03  
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 you

well, Hey there folks, Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols Show brought to you from, yes, our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in sunny Eastern Indiana, cold Eastern Indiana, we got snow. What the heck I moved out here from Philadelphia thinking I was getting out of the snow, but alas, more snow. Literally got like feet of snow here. But anyways, we're not here for the the weather report. We're here to have some pretty fun conversations that leave you educated, enlightened and informed. And today's conversation, of course, sticking in the spirit of education, enlightening and informing. We have one. Eric Jorgensen joining us here on The Brian Nichols Show, Eric, welcome to the program. How you doing? Good man. Thanks for having me. Absolutely great to have you in the show. Looking forward to digging into all things messaging, communication business and hey, maybe even some Liberty stuff here and there. But before we do that, Eric, I always love for my audience to get to know who my guests are. So do us a favor. Introduce yourself here to The Brian Nichols Show audience. And how did you find yourself in the world of, I guess, media doing all this whole messaging and communication thing, but from from the high up rafters for us lowly people to understand how the heck you got

Speaker 1  1:45  
there. Oh, please. I've just been the following curiosity with intensity for most of my career. I was very lucky to, like, grow up in a small business family in Michigan, so I sort of it was normal to me to be an entrepreneur and run a business and do that kind of stuff. So I've been selling candy out of my locker, and like hustling since I was a kid, dropped out of college, I joined a startup, moved to San Francisco for a while, did the venture back startup thing, and I've been writing and blogging, and that turned into writing a book, and then writing books turned into running a publishing company. And been doing some startup investing and helping people tell their stories is mostly what I get to focus on these days, still writing some books on my own and helping people put together their

Brian Nichols  2:31  
own, telling some stories right there, right and I had our good buddy Matt Kibbe on the show back oh, what like a year and a half ago or so, and the thing we focused on during that episode was the way we tell stories and how that helps people see things they usually wouldn't see, right? Like, it's one thing to sit there and like, if I were to pull out a facts and figures sheet, I sell contact center stuff for my day job, if I were to bring out a contact center sheet and start reading off stats and figures about how great mine is relative to the competition, and I'm going to see I'm going to see eyes closed, I'm going to hear snoring, because this stuff is boring. But if I tell a story about how we brought a contact center solution to a credit union, and how that changed the credit union's ability not just to help service their members, but it helped them start making revenue projections like they never expected, it's a different story to tell. So there's so much value in the art of storytelling. What's some of the stuff that you've uncovered over the years? I mean, you're telling all these great stories. You must have found some secret sauce out there that. Well, it's like the bedrock of good stories. What have you found?

Speaker 1  3:38  
I find that the simplest, most fundamental thing is just it's easy for people to lose sight of which is keeping the reader at the center, keeping the listener at the center, keeping the customer at the center. In your case, the example that you just gave like it's so easy to go in thinking about what you want someone to hear or what you think they should know, instead of understanding the situation that they're in, the problem that they're trying to solve, their actual problem, and how you can tell a story that takes them from the place they're at to the place that they're trying to get and shows them what to do and how to help. And if you can be the one to help them so much the better. But if you go in with that mindset of seeking to understand where they're at and help them go through a transformation, you can have a compelling story from that person's point of view.

Brian Nichols  4:23  
It's like, we stay in the show here. Meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. I love it. Um, well, let's talk about one book that you, you wrote, and help me with the last name here, the almanac of naval is it? Ravikant? Yeah. Ravikant. Okay, so, so tell us about this book, because I know you know, I was doing some digging into this book, it really speaks to how we uncover happiness, right? And digging into it's not just the stuff, like the dollars and cents stuff. It's not just the physical things that are in our life, but there's a lot of stuff that's more intrinsic when we're looking at happiness. Could you paint that picture for us a little bit?

Speaker 1  4:57  
Yeah, I think naval does a very good. Job of showing us, in particular, the most important thing to realize is that happiness is a skill that can be learned like you are not born with some fixed level of happiness that you're just stuck with forever. There are happiness is made of skills that you can acquire and train yourself and practice and improve over time. And you know, I'm still surprised at how many people this book is resonating with, and how you know that we're now sold a million and a half copies like that blows my mind. But it shouldn't really, because pursuing wealth and pursuing happiness are two of the most fundamental and universal quests that humans are on. And so if you find someone who is like speaking articulately about it at the level of like principles, not tactics, that those principles apply to everybody who's trying to make those improvements in their life, then you're going to have something that's resonating with I truly believe almost a human being on the planet can pick this book up and get something useful from

Brian Nichols  5:55  
it. Who was naval? What? Like? What was his story? Naval is

Speaker 1  5:59  
a very interesting story. You talk about people going through transformations, like he's an American Dream story. You know, he immigrated to the United States when he was from India, when he was nine or 10 years old, single parent household like New York, kind of tough upbringing, but clearly a man of an eight talent. And so he tested into an Advanced High School, and that helped him get into Dartmouth. And then that helped him. He had kind of an interesting first 10 years in Silicon Valley where he was like, doing different engineering jobs and doing different startups, and nothing really took off. And then something did take off, and it got acquired, and it went public, but he got screwed by like, the investors and the CEOs and so, or the CEO, which was his co founder, and so he had to sue them to get what he was rightfully owed. It was like a brutal first few decades, but he was persistent, and he turned that negative experience into an advantage. And so he started blogging about the game theory of venture capital and what the investors know that the founders don't. And then that email list turned into beginning of Angel List, which is now like an $8 billion company. That is how many of the investments and employees and companies are run. It's like the platform layer of a lot of Silicon Valley. And along the way, he's invested in hundreds of startups. He was early to crypto, Uber Twitter Postmates, like notion, a ton of these companies that are now wildly successful, and so, as much as anyone is self made in this country, which I think is a little bit of a misnomer, you know, is an incredible story of the American dream. And this book is just a collection, really, of, in his own words, everything that I've learned from following his career since, you know, for the last 15 years. And I think there's a lot in there that's useful, not just in how he built his companies and how he made money, but the realization that he had that once he is, you know, made hundreds of millions of dollars, and is, like, weird, I'm not happy. I thought that would do it, and then going on this whole other quest to be, like, all right, I'm smart, I'm rich, like, how do I become happy? And pursuing that as a very deliberate thing, and what he learned and what he shares along the way. So

Brian Nichols  8:11  
it's interesting. We hear this story of naval and a lot of Americans grow up with this idea of the American dream, right? And a lot of foreigners do too, right? They grow up and they hear of what what could be, and yet, I don't know what it is, Eric, whenever I look at the average American, and I'm going to generalize here for the sake of conversation, but when I hear from the average American, it just feels that most people are either they're like, honestly depressed, because that's not the right word. Maybe disheartened. They're they're just, they're not satisfied. There's just something missing. And again, keeping the generalization here for the second conversation, when I talk to a lot of folks who are in America that were born overseas, right? I just, I see the exact opposite. I see excitement. I see opportunity in their eyes. I see the motivation, the ambition. So I guess I look at the story of naval and a lot of other folks who naval represents in this generalized conversation, and I just I wonder, what is it? Is it that we grow up in America as natural born Americans, kind of, like, almost numb to the success of what it comes from being an American citizen, to other folks who they've seen the other side of the fence, right? They've seen that the grass, in fact, is, is not so green where they're from, and is actually very green over here in America. Like, is it a matter of perspective? Is it context, or is it something else?

Speaker 1  9:44  
I think you could divide this up a bunch of different ways, depending on who specifically you're speaking with. I think there's a lot of loss of I agree that, like a lot of recent immigrants, see America with much bright. Eyes than a lot of Americans, and it's because they have some incredible, incredibly negative experience, in many cases, with where they're from, and see America as the solution to those. I think it's easy for Americans to perhaps get disillusioned by the media and all the negative talk about America and like, there's a lot of, I think, kind of pernicious, like, self hatred among, like Western culture. We're being, like, told that what we're doing isn't awesome, when, in fact, we're awesome, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a very weird, negative, destructive perspective, like we should always be examining ways in which we might be able to do better. But I don't think, I don't think like tearing down Western culture as it exists today is like a particularly wise thing to do. I think the people doing that tend to not have either global context or historical context or both, and they just lack appreciation for everything that has been accomplished and how far we've come. That's not to say there's not a lot of improvements to be made. That's not to say that there aren't, you know, unfortunate outcomes in, like a democratic, capitalist civilization that we are in Tao but there's a lot of that critique is rarely in the form of like an improvement of the existing system. It's usually just a disrespect for the existing system that I think is a fundamentally important thing to have. You

Brian Nichols  11:31  
brought up something, and I want to go back to it. You mentioned the corporate media, the old school mainstream media, right? And, by the way, peek behind the curtain before we hit the record button, you were mentioning how you saw the preview for the show. And you're like, Oh, I saw some libertarian themes. I like it and I love that. You like it. But like, I mean libertarians, right? We, we almost exist in spite of the efforts of the corporate media. Because if you were to go into the corporate media, you only hear two sides of the same coin, right? Like you hear that the left team and the right team, and that's it, black and white. There is no gray. Whereas I look at libertarians, by and large, we are the epitome, we are the dictionary definition of gray, because there is a lot of nuance. But when you look at the corporate media, and let's talk about them, because they are what the storytellers that tell us what's happening in our world. What are some of the tactics that you see the corporate media utilize when we're going back to storytelling? But maybe they're not using it for the best of intentions. Maybe they're using it for more nefarious purposes. Do you see some of those recurring themes there with the the old school, traditional media?

Speaker 1  12:40  
Yeah, the book I wrote on biology, the anthology of biology that followed on, the almanac of all is like biology is very articulate about these things and shines a great light on them. And there's a whole section in the book about truth and the different, the fundamental misalignment that traditional media has with truth. I think in some cases it's intentionally manipulative. I think in some cases, the truth is just secondary to a commercial outcome or a political goal. I think some people are just well intentioned and incorrect within that system. And I think there's, I think it was full of good people, sometimes doing their best. They're not full, but like, 90% full of like, good people that you'd be proud to have at your Thanksgiving table. But it's a it is a challenged system. And to your point, like the popular narrative is rarely the productive narrative. And I think some of the luster and respect for the you know, the fourth estate in past decades is perhaps being over leveraged in the current in the current situation, but biology is more, much more articulate about it than I am. But it doesn't take digging too deep. You know, if you read like the Gray Lady winks to see some of the historical mistakes. Intentionally or not, that like mainstream media has made to just make you second guess it. And that's not to say that, like independent media and every podcaster is going to be correct either. Like, there's no easy answer to what is the truth? Like, that's something we're all working on all the time, and everyone's got their version of the truth and their perspective on the truth what should be and what is so. I don't mean to say that it's an easy problem, and I think the share of people that are truly evil is pretty low, but I think developing your own critical thinking skills and your own truth sensor and your own checking mechanisms and remembering that you can choose, as you point out, like not red, blue, but secret option C, and evaluating all of the individual beliefs in a bundle and being sure that you don't end up just like on one unthinking track, is a really important life skill. Like your outcomes are determined. Your outcomes in life are determined by your ability to filter good information from bad. And I think there's a lot of people very deliberately attempting to manipulate that. And you've got to learn to do the work and take the responsibility yourself.

Brian Nichols  15:08  
So I know we're like, what, five years almost removed from this, but I want to go all the way back to 2020 when COVID hit right because this right here, this conversation we're having. You were called a conspiracy theorist in April of 2020, if you even said, Do your own research, think critically, like approach things with a little bit more. You know what nuance and maybe not taking everything at face value that's being promoted through the corporate media. And you know, I look at my my brothers and sisters on all sides of the political aisle, and you go back to COVID. I saw so many of them just turn off that critical thinking receptor. And it was, it was very evident to me that they turned off that critical thinking for two reasons. One, because they were afraid, right? And I think that that's obvious. We were all kind of like, What the hell is happening here? The world's shutting down and being told two weeks, the slow the spread was turned into two months, which turned into two years. If you were in a blue city like you saw that happen firsthand. But then on the other side of the aisle, I think there was also a top down narrative, and I'm not sure, like, I'm not gonna point fingers at folks and say this is what the motivating factors were, but it definitely feels like there was some type of attempt to control narratives, be they true or not right, for the sake of maintaining control, maintaining order, and you fast forward to where we are today. Eric and I look at the world as it is that that narrative and that approach to pushing forward, whether it's narratives or ideas, even though in 2020 it was resoundingly accepted because of those factors we mentioned. I look at where we are today, and it feels like that that has been almost the exact opposite of what we're seeing now. Now it feels like more and more folks are saying, Okay, I don't I don't trust this media. This is the media that told me that Joe Biden up until the night of the debate with Trump, that he was, you know, behind closed doors. He's really bright. He leads all these meetings. He's putting these 40 year old whippersnappers in their place. Then, all sudden, see the Emperor, in fact, does not have any clothes. And I think that broke a lot of people, the COVID narratives that broke a lot of people. And you go through the different things that have happened over the past four years, five years, a lot of people have stopped trusting and have started instead saying, I'm going to start doing some digging myself. So I say all that we look at where folks were five years ago to where they are today. Do you feel going into five years from now, when we're recording together in 2030 Eric, do you feel that we're going to continue seeing people embrace this critical thinking, embrace this? Yeah, I hear what you're saying, but let me you trust but verify. Or do you think we're going to see a reversion back to this more old school corporate media, one entity, one voice, they're the ones telling you what the truth is versus what we are able to discuss and debate and actually have a yin to the yang of different ideas.

Speaker 1  18:18  
I think it's dangerous to assume that just because you're getting your information from outside the mainstream media, that you're necessarily critically thinking like there's a lot of people that that traded like a non filtered belief of one megaphone from non filtered belief of another megaphone. And the fundamental the thing that you really need to focus on is the number of people who are equipped, both like mentally and constitutionally, to evaluate all of the facts, no matter where they come from, and arrive at their own conclusion and then Spread them again, right? Like it is very pushing people like destroying the trust of the institution and then sending them out into the wild with a bunch of other people who are manipulating them for very different reasons, and who may or may not even have the fact checking mechanisms in place that the mainstream media does, is not a better solution, and the we just need a truth seeking mechanism like these people, like a lot of people, who are dissenting or dissenting, not from a place of, well, I read the scientific literature and it disagrees with the mainstream narrative, but From a sense of, like, a default distrust of whoever said the thing in the first place, and they just start assuming the opposite, like, that's not productive either. I think the most disheartening thing is, like, how politicized anything gets, almost instantly, even matters of like life and death and public health, like the. Was the most disheartening thing to me about that, like you want to believe there's a bunch of people doing their best to save the most lives possible, and people are just using it for political jockeying for political advantage in power almost instantly, and still are like five years later. And that's that just shows a level of, I was gonna say, immaturity, but it's actually just, like a disrespect for the goal of the civilization, which is to, like, make the most people's lives better. And as the intensity of the like, disagreements ramps up, it gets much harder and harder to remember that that's actually the goal.

Brian Nichols  20:47  
Yeah, that's fair. Um, let me, I was kind of thinking of a response there. Um, so let me, I'm not challenging. I'm more so I'm digging a little more contextual here. So like when we look at where we are today, um, and right now, you know, here's a perfect example, Facebook, right? Facebook went from a model where you had the, I'm gonna say the word trusted very loosely, but the trusted experts, the fact checkers, right? That if you posted something that didn't fit, that you would get a little notice on your your account, and it would say you're sharing in, you know, false information. We're gonna hide this post. And then people's accounts got throttled. You saw people lose their accounts right during COVID specifically. I mean this really, when it like it all just ramped up to an 11. And then you, you look where we are today, Facebook is now getting rid of all these fact checkers, right? And what they're doing is they're going towards what we saw Elon Musk implement over on X, a more community standards approach where you have community notes and it's not one person saying this is true or this is false, but adding context, your original post exists. You can retweet it, share it. You're not getting throttled for one way or another, but now underneath your post, there is additional context, and this is something that Mark Zuckerberg is saying they're going to implement over at Facebook. Do you see maybe this? Let's call it like the bottom up way of addressing what is considered truth versus not truth, or at the very least, trying to create some, some battle lines, right of like this, this is how we're going to approach this, this issue versus some arbitrary, you know, third party who's just going to come down with a iron ax or iron AX, iron hammer, I don't know. And just like, nuke your account because you said something wrong. Do you think we're on a path towards making things more trustworthy, or maybe the opposite way, or something else? No, I think community notes is

Speaker 1  22:49  
definitely progress over like a hidden, centralized censorship system. I mean, censorship seems easy to defend when it seems really, really clear what the truth is, and that any non truth is harmful. I think that's actually vanishingly rare a situation in real life, and that a decentralized like, ground up approach to finding truth is is great and like, that's something civilization should always be engaged in, and community notes, at least, from what I've seen and heard, is a much better system than a centralized fact checking like de amplify, hide posts, Ban account kind of thing. That's not to say there shouldn't still be things that are banned, but like, I think community notes is definitely progress. Do

Brian Nichols  23:41  
you think here's a follow up to that? Do you think there's a way that we could take that model and apply it to our health institutions? And the reason, like my question is being asked that way, Eric, because again, going back to 2020 a lot of these three letter organizations, the EPA, the CDC, right, the FDA, the NIH, they got so many black eyes right because they weren't either telling the full truth. They were telling half truths, or in some instances, call it a lie, call it false, whatever it may be, you know, not fully context, whatever we want to say, but then things that were presented as fact turning out not to be true. Is there a way? Do you think that we could bring this, this almost community notes, perspective, this, this, this energy, to these bureaucracies, to these, these supposed trusted public health institutions and other institutions, and other institutions, by the way, right? Whether that's the FBI, the CIA, the NSA passed the public health because a lot of those institutions have also lost health or lost trust from the mainstream public

Speaker 1  24:51  
Yeah. I mean, I think each institution is going to be roughly its own case, like I don't think the community notes should run the NSA that. Be a pretty tough case to make. That would be

Brian Nichols  25:01  
fun, that'd be interesting,

Speaker 1  25:02  
or the FBI, but I do think there are you're getting at from the reverse. I think getting at one of the really important issues, which is like regulatory capture of scientific institutions like that is particularly pernicious and deadly to society. We saw it in the like in smoking. We see it now in food. There should be really extreme public personal accountability for whether it's leaders or the scientists who, for any reason, have like, personally benefited from allowing public health to be damaged to such a degree if they knowingly engaged in misleading people or fudging the truth, or anything like the food pyramid, the scientific studies things like that. There are so many people like in that whole stack that are culpable that it's difficult to, like, send somebody to jail as a result. But like, It's beginning to look like there are some people who really did some knowingly evil things in that stack. And that's just that is very, very different than, hey, for some period of months we had very little information, and we had to make quick decisions. And we were wrong, but we did our best, and there needs to be, like, a very big sorting mechanism. And I think a lot of people that have issues with the trust of these institutions, like, let's do a lot of sorting and understand who the really, who the like, malicious intent individuals are, and, like, put them on the stand, and who the people are who are like, man, you know, we did our best, but we've we fucked it up, and we're sorry, and this is why, and this is what happened, and we'll try to get it right next time. And this is what we learned. Like, I think that's totally okay. Nobody's no institution, no organization is going to be perfect, but like running that process to your to your point, publicly and clearly and with transparency does help us all improve. And going back to the goal of like civilization, while our goal should be pursuit of truth and the maximum, the best outcomes for the broadest number of people, not, you know, advancement of a political party, and is it just a tough set this system that the incentives are all around like, never admit any fault of any kind, you know, I'd like to see a return to kind of decency and respect for the institution and its goals over, you know, the party and its short term goals on Both, I mean, and

Brian Nichols  27:41  
by the way, to my father in law, who I know is watching today. This is, this is he always asked me, like, Brian, why are you still so fixated on COVID, and you just, you hit the nail on the head right there in your answer, right? Because nobody's admitting that they fucked up. And like that is the underlying, like, bedrock foundation of trust is when you fuck up being able to acknowledge Hey, we fucked up. And I wouldn't even be so upset if it wasn't the fact that people are like, just doubling down. And I'm like, Good grief, guys, that's that's destroying trust. And I know for half the audience who's like, how did we get to COVID today? I'll tell you how, because messaging right? Messaging matters. And when we go back to what we were talking about before, right, like how you present your ideas, how you present your messaging, how you communicate to other folks. For all the folks who are doing this stuff on the I say the good side, but like the folks who are trying to speak truth, who are trying to wake people up to, you know, bad things that are happening in our world. On the flip side, there are very bad people out there, and that's just, that's reality. There are evil people, there are bad people, and they, too will use these tools. They will use these tactics of messaging communication to manipulate and to persuade people to the other side. And it's important for us not just to have a good message, but also to be able to identify when other folks are doing this exact same thing, but for nefarious purposes.

Speaker 1  29:07  
Yeah, I think learning to read beyond the headlines. You know, biology has a good line about, you know, understanding why a story was written is more important than what's in the story. And so when you see a headline asking yourself, you know who wrote it and why? Understand who owns what pieces of media, remembering that like the journalists don't actually control their headlines, like the editor has to write the headlines, and that they're writing the headline usually for maximum clicks or maximum rage baiting is basically like the topic du jour and gets a bunch of clicks, and that's how they make money, and that's a really unfortunate thing. So it's very scissor statements. They're called, like, intentionally divisive statements that just like, induce people to fight. You know your attention is being is. Under Attack basically at all times, and people are trying to manipulate it, usually with fear. And there is, you know, so much good news in the world, like we are so much better off than we have ever been, basically at any point in history, by any, almost every meaningful, important metric that it's just easy to lose sight of when all you see is doom and gloom and headlines and scissor statements and rage bait. But like, please, please, learn to appreciate how far we've come and everything that we've done and how many good things are coming, and stay focused on the positive, and try not to fight with strangers on the internet, because it's not good for you and it's not good for them, and it's not getting any of us anywhere. Not getting any of us anywhere you can engage in truth by being both honest and kind at the same time

Brian Nichols  30:47  
here, here, I have one more question for you before that question, though, I have a quick little thought, we're talking about messaging, and when we're talking about messaging, when it comes to, like, sales or just getting somebody to make a buying, buying, very loosely, saying the word buying, buying decision, right? I think back to one of my sales mentors. He was a, he calls himself a recovering Mormon, and he did his missions and such, and he was one of their top guys when they'd come to, like getting people to convert to Mormon, Mormonism, church. What the hell they call it Mormonism? Yeah. I guess it's Mormonism, yeah. And he would always say, whenever you talk to somebody he was trying to convert, you would always have the the conversation go one of two ways. Are you looking forward to going to heaven, or are you afraid of going to hell? Right? And it goes back to in sales, hope of gain, fear of loss. And when you see that those are, those are usually the two main decisions that are the buying decisions we'll look at from an emotional standpoint. Is this going to help me get something new or help me accomplish something better, or is this going to prevent me from getting hurt? Is this going to help me avoid, you know, the nasties, and if you start to apply that to looking at how people are messaging to you, are they leading with hope of gain, or are they trying to get you to make a decision based on fear of loss? It just becomes more obvious when this kind of stuff happens. And with that, let's flip over to your media entity, scribe media. So obviously you guys are doing nothing but good things over there. Talk to us about scribe media. What is scribe media and what is all the hubbub over there? I heard you got some pretty cool folks that are working for you guys

Speaker 1  32:22  
over there. Yeah, we've got an incredible team. And it like it was founded. This company was founded like, 10 years ago by Tucker Max and Zach O'Brien. And the original vision, which I think is was extremely prescient at the time, and is still the Tucker Max, the Tucker Max, the Tucker Max, okay, yeah, he's one of the best selling authors of all time. I mean, he had for books on the New York Times bestseller list all at the same time, which I think him and Malcolm Gladwell are the only people to ever do. And so what company

Brian Nichols  32:49  
Tucker Max and Malcolm Gladwell?

Speaker 1  32:51  
Right? Great writers. Tucker, like, basically just started getting all these phone calls from his friends about, like, how to write a book, how to position a book, how to market a book, how to market a book, How to publish it. And so he started this business, essentially to serve his friends and help them write books and help them get them out there. And his observation is that, like, traditional publishing is, you know, four big businesses in New York, and so there's actually, like 10 people in New York deciding who gets to publish a book every year. And, like, that's not great. It's not great for society. It's not great for books. It's not great for books. It's not great for the market. It's not great for authors. So he's founded this company to be in really pioneered a whole new category, which is professional publishing. So we do the work of a traditional publisher for a fixed, flat rate, and we give authors full creative freedom, full ownership of their copyright and full financial upside on their books forever. And so we've worked with a whole array of incredible authors and business leaders and thinkers and some people that just want to impact an issue. Some people want to tell their personal stories. Some people want to build credibility in their niche transition careers. Transition out of their career. I saw

Brian Nichols  33:58  
my boy, Dan Sullivan, on there for multiplayer mindset, right? Yeah. I want me some. Dan Sullivan, okay,

Speaker 1  34:02  
yeah, a ton of business leaders, and also some some, like, really important books and memoirs that are just out of kind of the interest of traditional publishing. So we're, we're based in Austin, Texas. We published, I mean, close to 2000 more than 2000 books now. And I truly like I think putting the author the center and giving them the full freedom and the full upside and the full creative control is the future of publishing, and the whole context has changed around traditional publishing, and that's just a very outdated model for the social media Amazon world that we're in today. All right, Eric,

Brian Nichols  34:38  
I just looked at the clock. I already kept you past my 30 minute mark. Sorry. Do us a favor. We're gonna go ahead and bring this episode home, call to actions before we turn things over to you, my call to action for the audience today, besides scanning these QR codes over my lovely right shoulder here, which, by the way, if you want to go ahead and get the best heart health supplement in the world. So cardio miracle, our phenomenal studio sponsor, you're gonna see their little QR code pop up now. There's our good friends, evil CBD, but over my shoulder, just take your phone out, scan the QR code, and you should go ahead and get your discount applied. That's cardio miracle. I don't know why you can't see it. There it is. You can kind of see it, but, yeah, go ahead scan that, folks. That's my one call to action. Number two is when it comes to communication. When it comes to messaging, again, think about the person that's trying to message to you. What's their goal? Is it to get you to make a buying decision based on hope of gain, or is it based on fear of loss? And with that just kind of approach the dialog with or approach the news segment, approach the corporate health entity, whoever it may be, with skepticism, not saying you don't trust them, but back to your point, Eric, what's the motivating factors? Why are they presenting it this way? Why are they saying it this way? Why does this article even exist? Ask yourself those questions. Because if you don't, I swear somebody else will not as well, and we'll end up where we were in 2020 that's my final thoughts and my call to action. Eric, what do you have for us on your

Speaker 1  36:10  
end? My call to action is just to engage positively with the world. You always have the option of whether to leave with lead with a negative story, lead with a complaint, lead with something or lead with appreciation and gratitude and a compliment and appreciation for something that someone has done for you or done before, like some of something is created like we are well fed, well cared for, and sitting in heated rooms in a giant snowstorm because of generations of work by scientists and engineers and laborers and writers that came before us, and we should spend a lot more time being a lot more grateful than most of us are, and it's a happy way to live

Brian Nichols  36:52  
here. Here. Buddy. All right, Eric, this is going to be, I think, part one of a several part conversation. I loved our dialog today. So open invite anytime you want to come back on and folks, please do me a favor. Head down below into the show notes, you can find all the links for Eric, scribe, media and anything you'd want to know about Eric, all there in the show notes, plus all the links if you didn't want to scan the QR codes here links to our studio, studio, studio sponsors down below, cardio miracle, use code TB and S for 15% off your order the best heart health supplement in the world. With that being said, we're gonna go ahead and wrap things up so Brian Nichols signing off for Eric Jorgensen from scribe media. We'll see you next time bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai