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Sept. 14, 2021

321: Lessons Learned From Chocolate Cake (feat. Jeremy Todd)

What lessons can we learn from chocolate cake?

What lessons can we learn from chocolate cake?

 

Jeremy Todd returns for another Sales Solo to answer that very question! Also, what if you're responsible for your failures...? And what if that's actually a good thing?

 

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Transcript

Brian  
We can become great at doing the the things that we do well the things that we focus on like I'm I think our audience is great at selling Liberty I think we have been amazing at doing that. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show Your source for common sense politics on the we are libertarians network as a sales and marketing executive in the greater telecommunications cybersecurity industry. Brian works with C level executives to help them future proof their company's infrastructure for an uncertain future. And in each episode, Brian takes that experience and applies it to the Liberty movement, you start to ask questions that pique his interest and get him to feel like okay, this guy's actually got something that maybe you can help me out. And then in your asking him questions and trying to uncover the real problems build that natural trust. I know it wasn't a monologue there, man.

Unknown Speaker  
Instead of focusing on simply winning arguments or being right, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and their application in the world of politics, showing you how to ask better questions, tell better stories, and ultimately change people's minds. And now, your host, Brian Nichols.

Brian  
Well, Happy Thursday there, folks, Brian Nichols here on The Brian Nichols Show. Thank you for joining us on another fun filled episode. Now, of course, I am your humble host. But today we are back in store for our sales solo shorts say that 10 times fast. I Darya Jeremy Todd, he returns to the program, and I promise it is going to be a good one. So strap in. And with that being said, I'm gonna show Jeremy Todd here on The Brian Nichols Show.

Jeremy Todd  
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to The Brian Nichols Show. I am your host this morning, Jeremy Todd, and I want to take a moment to put in talk about a tool. And that's exactly what this is, is a tool in your tool belt of persuasion. Now. The ideology I'm going to go through here is not perfect. It is not ideal. It doesn't uphold every libertarian value. What this is, is a tool for when you find yourself in conversations where someone generally has chosen safety over liberty, they just don't value liberty the same way that you do. And they believe people should sacrifice liberty in order to protect them, or their safety. And that, you know, can't relate definitely not anything like that going on in 2021. This is a form of the dirty word compromise that will at least allow you to walk away from the table with having planted the ideas of the importance of liberty in their minds. But also showing that a world that remains libertarian in its structure can ultimately lead to the outcomes that they want. But voluntarily. So we're going to talk about something called libertarian paternalism. And I know off the top of your head that does not necessarily make a lot of sense. Are we talking about the paternal state? Well, businesses can practice libertarian paternalism. Individuals can practice libertarian paternalism. And it can actually end as actually impacted public policy in a lot of different ways. So what is it libertarian paternalism is the idea that it is both possible and legitimate for private institutions like businesses and public institutions like government entities to affect behavior, while also respecting someone's individual freedom of choice. So, a couple of rules when it comes to libertarian paternalism. This is the ability to use small changes in environment, small changes in in the way things that are presented to us And that in no way remove an individual's freedom to choose.

And also in no way can participate in coercion. And that word gets thrown around a lot. So let me define coercion for you. Court coercion is not persuasion. coercion is not what we talk about here. coercion is the practice of persuading someone to do something by using a force of threat by using force or threat. So, this mandate that Joe Biden released on AWS last Thursday, a week ago now, that is coercion, you will do this or we will punish you. There's a threat tied to that, that is not libertarian paternalism. Some would say, oh, it preserves choice. You, you get your you can test or you can get the vaccine and nothing will happen. Okay, but how do you go about getting people to do that? And it is through coercion and force. It was a threat, do this or else that is not libertarian paternalism. So libertarian paternalism is it always protects an individual's right to choose freely. Number two, it does not use coercion in any way, shape, or fashion. Number three, it has to be very inexpensive. So no, no 14 $100 checks here. In libertarian paternalism, that doesn't work. You can't just spend a lot of money and pay people to do your bidding. That does not fall in what is defined is libertarian paternalism. So those are three elements. And so then you take a look back and you go, Okay, well, how can we influence behavior in those ways, and it talks a lot about in this it's it's called libertarian paternalism. It's the ideology. nudge theory is what's behind. And we'll get into nudges here in a minute. But they talked about choice architecture. So what if, instead of and this is this is to, again, compromise with the people who don't value liberty or don't see liberty the same way you do? What if we organize choices, in a way so that more people, an overwhelming majority of people selected, the choice of doing the right thing. When those instances exist, were doing the right thing is pretty clear and easy to determine. So choice architecture, comes to a lot of things. Well, us being a free market bunch, we believe that more choices is good. But that's not always the case. There is a piece in there where people have choice overload. Oh, I'll go back for an example for you. So I started out my sales professional career selling Cutco kitchen knives in and part of that was that you had to, you know, go do this presentation in people's homes and compare it to their own knives. Well, I show up with a litany of different knives, a specialized knife for every tool, everything from a knife for flying your salmon to a giant, a giant meat cleaver, all the way down to tiny precise hooked paring knives that did specialty things. And the sales reps who got very, very excited about all the different knives would present them all to the customer and go Which one do you like and they'd go Oh, you liked them all. You did a good job. Okay, okay. Which ones do you want to buy? Oh, I don't know. We just simply can't decide. They've been overwhelmed.

What the best salespeople did is they took those knives and they they bunched them into sets and they sold the customer on. Okay, we have three options of sets. We have this big set of knives. We have this medium sized set of knives and we have the small set of knives. So rather than a customer facing literally hundreds of even 1000s of choices, which knives they could pick and go through. we simplified it being the experts and went down to one, two, or three. That is a form of libertarian paternalism and a form of good choice architecture. In that, you still get the outcome and result that is desirable for both parties. But you simplified the process. And by simplifying the process, everybody won. And that's an idea when it comes to reducing choice overload. Another is default. It is an overwhelming number of people who simply accept whatever the default settings are on things. Could you imagine if you had to go through and select the settings on your computer, every, like, when you buy a new computer, you have to choose every single, now you just go with the default. And then if there's something you don't like, you go change it. So by changing the defaults, you can change the outcomes. So for example, a great one for this is automatic enrollment, and employee 401k. Now, there are I know it was in the past that you had to proactively go and designate a certain percentage of your income be contributed to your company's 401k. And they would match it up to certain benefits. And what they found is that there were a lot of people who didn't necessarily immediately enroll. And that goes into the next issue in choice architecture is that that high time preference kind of deal, where we tend to say, a positive outcome today is worth it, if even if there's a negative outcome tomorrow. Sound familiar? So if we change the default, and somebody's choice, and they are automatically enrolled in the company's 401k plan at the maximum percentage, at the end of the year, they will have actually made 1000s of dollars more due to company contributions matching an interest. Everybody went. And so those are some examples of how you can set up options in a way that allows people to make it very easy to make a good choice in what is a free world? Because just like that 401k example you could you absolutely you're free to go set that to zero. That's that's your choice. But it's about setting it up so that and this is something that you can have and think creatively about with conversations. When it comes to your friends, so great example. And this is this, these are a few passive ones. What if we were able to largely eliminate we're going to talk about a libertarians favorite subject here. What if we were able to largely eliminate traffic tickets in police from the roads? What if you could ensure that people drove safely on roads, you could eliminate the speed limit? See as a libertarian the the thing is, I don't actually like the problem I have with a speed limit isn't driving at a certain speed. I don't I don't I if there were no speed limit, I wouldn't be driving 110 to McDonald's, okay. It's really stupid. We all have the ability to make wise smart decisions. But there are people that we are trying to persuade who believe that other people will just just drive however fast and endanger other people's lives on the road. Okay.

So what is a libertarian paternalism solution? Well, we already have a great example of libertarian paternalism solution See, I get to spend a week in Haiti and you know what they don't have on their roads, lines. They don't have any lines on the road. It's absolutely insane. People are coming at you going left going right all over the place. So a very simple libertarian paternalism is live. On the road, giving you a guide and a direction on where to be where not to be something as simple as that can reduce negative consequences. Well, how do you keep people from speeding? Well, you can change the road surface, can look in technologies of there are different ones where, and they've tested this before, I believe, where you space, horizontal lines on the road a certain distance away from each other. And so you maintain that you keep a gap of that. So imagine horizontal lines placed every 100 feet, 200 feet. And people will naturally keep that distance between them and the car in front of them. See, there are a lot of things that we don't get creative about solving in society. And instead we infringe on people's liberties, we waste we threaten them with violence, we lock them in a cage, all because we won't be creative, or we're worried about the one in a million, who will, you know, kind of buck the system and be an outlaw. Well, I got news for you that person is they're not really interested in your laws either. So anyway, that that's a that's a quick intro, I want to give you guys some some of my favorite examples on libertarian paternalism. And so those lines on the road, the default of setting your 401k up to automatically invest. Those are what's called nudges. And so creating nudges in the way people act, when we're kind of on autopilot to guide people to do the right thing can can lead to positive outcomes. So the one that is most famous is that there was an airport in 2009, and Amsterdam. And the airport installed little tiny stickers of houseflies on the men's journal. And so, bellows, we had something to aim at when we walked up to the urinal, and they say reduce spillage. And cleanups needs by 80%. Something that's a great example of libertarian paternalism, you get people to behave, behave in a certain way that is good for everyone. By doing something very small. That helps another one a store, pay and save, they placed green arrows on the floor from the entrance to the vegetable and fresh food aisle and they let that run for a couple months. And they found that nine out of 10 times customers followed them started there, and their sales of fresh produce skyrocketed. This happens to you a lot on menus. So they'll draw the attention of your eye by boxing something or changing the font on a product. But there's also something called the decoy effect, or otherwise known as the anchoring effect. And so what what they will do is at a restaurant, they'll put a very, very high priced item in a section. So think of it as like a porterhouse. And it's twice as much as the ribeye. That's one step down. Well, the rib is actually the, the the product that they want to sell you it's the one they're going to make the most profit off of. And so they up mark the porterhouse so high, that people still feel like they're buying something very expensive on the menu when it comes to the ribeye steak. But it's because but they don't feel like they're being flashy or anything because it's being compared to that. Putting smaller trash cans next to larger recycling cans, people are more likely to put their recyclables in the recycling bin.

just naturally because it's bigger. Being able to size down so if you're trying to get people to eat healthier, and maybe you make a larger profit margin as a company this way, but McDonald's had a lot of success asking people would you like to supersize that? Well, studies have shown that you actually get a very similar response by asking the opposite. Do you want to downsize them? So there are a lot of ways that we can be creative and create the outcomes that authoritarians are, are very normie. Friends, lean on authoritarians, because authoritarians promised to deliver these things, when in reality, there are very creative answers through libertarian paternalism to solve these problems. Now, listen, I don't believe this is the end all solution. But if it takes somebody that we are working on, somebody that we've built rapport with somebody that we're trying to influence to buy this message of human freedom and liberty, presenting creative solutions that say, you know, look, here's a great way that you wouldn't have to depend on the violence, or the threat of violence that the state brings to the table. Yet you could get and create a better society that you desire. So go explore behavioral economics, choice architecture, libertarian paternalism, put it in your weapons cache. Let's go set the world free. Thank you so much. Trust the

Brian  
experts. We're all in this together. If it saves one life, raise your hand if you heard any of those tiresome phrases over the past year and a half. I know my hand is currently raised millions of people across dozens of industries were labeled on essential and forced the lockdown with livelihoods and futures crushed in an instant and as government has continued to expand its power and leverage fear to turn neighbor against neighbor a group of filmmakers have taken a stand and are determined to help set the record straight on the importance of following the actual science of the pandemic. Follow the science on lockdowns and liberty from the sound mind create a group is a brand new docu series highlighting the stories of those negatively impacted over the past year and a half by ineffective government policies enacted in the name of following the science with noted experts like Nick Hudson from panda the pandemic data analytics organization healthcare policy advisors like Scott Atlas and telling stories of business owners families and just your average everyday person harmed by these government mandates follow the science on lockdowns and liberty has given us a chance to make sure the true stories of the pandemic are cool. So please help us at the Brian show in supporting the sound mind creative group with noted figures in the Liberty movement like Dr. Tom Woods donating 1000s of their own dollars to this project. You know just how important this project is. So head The Brian Nichols show.com forward slash follow the science to donate and catch their brand new trailer to the docu series one more time that's Brian Nichols Show calm for slash follow the science alrighty folks, that's gonna wrap up our one on one with Jeremy Todd and I say one on one it was obviously a one on one with you the audience and I hope you got as much value as I did I always find that we we've all learned something as a team here whenever we have our one on ones with the audience so thank you Jeremy for helping us out this week with your sales solo shorts again 10 times fast he sent it to me by the way this is a really cool thing go to the website Brian Nichols Show calm you can actually leave us a voicemail there on the sidelines, say sidelines you can tie played football and then watching a lot of football there on the the sidebar go ahead click the little microphone button. You can leave us a voicemail if you say sales short Solo Solo short sales are where the hell we said earlier. I don't know I might go ahead and pick you to get a free bumper sticker. How about that? You don't hurt people don't take people's stuff. bumper sticker. I like it. Why not? So with that being said, folks, if you enjoy the episode, please do us a favor, share today's episode. Also make sure you tag Jeremy and give me a tag as well. At v. Nichols Liberty coming up here on Friday, Todd at Kenyon from panda the pandemic data and analytics organization joins the program to answer that question that we just got to answer it and analysis. He starts with us asking it are the hospital numbers for COVID inflated? Well, we're gonna dig into some articles and Well, the answer in short, is yes. So make sure you hit that subscribe button so you're not missing our awesome episode airing tomorrow. And that being said, it's Brian Nichols signing off. You're on The Brian Nichols Show for Jeremy Todd. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Brian Nichols Show. Find more episodes at Brian Nichols show.com. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe. Want to help us reach more people? Give the show a five star review and tell your friends to subscribe to find us at Brian Nichols show.com and download the show on Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow me on social media at V. Nichols liberty and consider donating to the show at Brian Nichols show.com forward slash support. The Brian Nichols Show is supported by viewers like you. Thank you to our patrons Darryl Smith, Morris Stanley, Mike olema, Mitchell megabits, Cody Johns Creek d'acosta, and the we're libertarians network.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai