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Hello Edwin Endicott!
I have recently discovered your broadcast and find your work to be quite high quality despite the relatively small scale of your project. I would love to invite you for a phone interview with The Foundation Chronicles an up-and-coming newsletter dedicated to giving smaller creators and entrepreneurs like you a voice!
Please respond if you are interested with a date and time for us to meet!
Looking forward to your response
Val Parsons
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Hello Edwin!
Just watched your most recent broadcast. Good stuff! Would love to pick your brain for an hour or two sometime! Just give a date and time for an over-the-phone interview! No need to meet in person just want to give you a chance to reach a larger audience!
Hope to hear back soon
Val Parsons
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Hello Edwin
Just wondering if you’ve heard about the most recent article published by The Foundation Chronicles! We’ve interviewed over a dozen hopeful entrepreneurs and creators hoping to expand their consumer base! Our interviewees have already started to receive the attention of the public! You could be in the next one to get a chance to stand out from your peers! We get dozens of calls every week so you’ll have to be quick if you want to get a chance for an interview!
Don’t miss out on this opportunity
Val Parsons
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Hello
Not sure if you’ve gotten my emails yet but I hope this finds you well. I wanted to tell you more about The Foundation Chronicles. We’re a small company of a few dozen dedicated people working tirelessly to bring the truth to the world. We want everyone to able to see those overlooked by the headlines and the big channels. We know what it’s like to work yourself to the bone only to receive the bare minimum for your efforts. We want people like you to have the opportunity to get a head’s start into the wider world of media.
Please reach out if you would like to know more
Val Parsons
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Hi
Just wondering if you were interested in an interview with us! We know how busy life gets but we hope you get a chance to respond! Please provide a date and time for an interview.
Val Parsons
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Hello Archivist,
I must admit that I’m disappointed at the lack of response. You seem like a promising young soul, destined for bigger things. I can see that you seem to currently be going through a rough patch, and I admire your dedication to the broadcast despite the hardship you’re going through. To be honest, I see some of myself in you. A boundless sense of curiosity, an insatiable thirst to know more, an almost desperate hunger for the Truth.
I want to help you. I want you to become the best version of yourself. So, I’ve provided a Statement below for you. I know you like those.
I suppose it would be best to start with the context. Perhaps not the gripping way to tell my story, but I suspect that you would prefer something more chronological.
I grew up alone.
My father was a paranoid man. We were constantly on the move, from city to city, country to country, always running from something only he could see over his shoulder. He never told me what it was we were running from. What it was that made him scared enough to add an extra lock to the door for each new house. Two, then three, then four, then more and more. The highest he went was twenty-one. I never stopped keeping count.
He wouldn’t let me leave the house for the first twelve years of my life. He would bring me books and newspapers and magazines to entertain myself with while he was gone. He was gone a lot. They became my only window to the outside world, my only companions in a run-down shack filled with traps that only I and my father knew about. My upbringing was one of isolation and danger. I knew nothing else, save for what was in my books. I never particularly cared for fiction. What use is a story if it has no anchor in reality? I much preferred stories about people who lived and breathed as I did. I loved biographies about scientists and politicians and entertainers. I loved old news stories about some scandal or tragedy that happened while I locked away. I loved the mundane drama of someone the public adored.
I think I admired them, in a way. Or envied. They were seen by hundreds, thousand, millions, billions of people every day. Their stories would outlast themselves, even the smallest detail laid out for the world to consume. A person could live half a world away from another and still be able to hold a conversation about this person or that one. They undeniably existed. I wanted that. I yearned to exist, to be observed and known and judged by countless eyes, by souls I would never even meet in my lifetime.
I knew it would be a bad idea to run away. Even if I did manage to escape whichever fortress my father had turned the place into, I didn’t know how to survive outside. I didn’t know how to find food, how to get money, how to talk to people. I would be completely helpless, and my father told me enough times about what happens to helpless children in a world as cruel as ours.
It was a month before my thirteenth birthday when he left. I could feel it in my stomach. His once handsome face, now aged with terror, was tired and sad. Empty. He had given up hope. He walked out the front door for the last time at five in the morning. I walked out one minute past midnight the following day.
I followed the road, hoping to find something. I walked for what must have been hours, because my feet were blistered and the sky was lightening when I finally found a small shop. I stared through the windows, hungrily eyeing the bread on the shelves, until a man entered from the back. He startled when he saw me. I suppose I must have looked rather wild, tired and hungry and pained, as I desperately pressed my face against the glass.
I’ll skip over the next ten years of my life. It was a tedious and aimless story, drifting from place to place, trying to find something and never managing to fill the hole in me. I got much better at finding jobs. Once I learned the rules, it was easy to use them to my advantage. I started working for a newspaper in France when I was in my early twenties. I thrived there. I learned the rules and never stopped living by them. It was a temple to Truth, and I become a loyal servant to it.
You see, Truth and Fact are not the same thing. A Fact is something one can measure. It has a surety to it, built off the backs of scientists and researchers since the first man learned how to count the stars. A Fact is a Fact, an undeniable axiom that only skeptics and fools question.
But tell me, when does a Fact become Truth? If a room is about twenty degrees, that is a Fact. You can measure it and it will always be so, unless your measurement is faulty. But one man comments on how warm it is, while another complains about how chilly he feels. Who is telling the Truth?
The one with the most convincing argument, of course.
The world is not built on Facts. It’s built on Truth. After all, can one really Know what is True? Facts are what we measure, yet our measurements change over the ages. We make neat labels and comfortable little boxes for what we observe, and if changing the Facts to fit the box doesn’t work, we simply change the boxes. Our realities are limited to what we perceive. And every person lives in their own personal reality.
The Truth is what the people believe it to be. One can scream the Facts until their throat is raw and never convince everyone that the world is not as they perceive it. People are stubbornly set in their Truths, because no one wants to live a Lie. And it’s this that makes a Truth so easy to manipulate.
If you know what to say, and how to say it, its easy to convince people of what you want them to believe. People will listen to what they want to hear. They want to feel safe in their reality. They want to feel secure in their correctness. To be Wrong is frightening, so they deny the very possibility. A Fact unheard is worthless. A Truth rejected holds no power.
The world is shaped by Truth. And the Truth is far more malleable then many like to believe. To control the Truth, is to control the world.
My job is to control the Truth.
I collect Knowledge, I catalog the Facts, and then I use them to create a Story. I take pleasure in hunting down the right person to wring a Story out of. I enjoy picking apart their brains and turning the pieces around to see how they connect.
The best Lie is one the smallest one. Once you’ve decided what you want the people to believe, you pick out the right Facts to spin your Truth. You make sure to fill your story with as much Truth as you need. And then fill the gaps with something more grey. You let your audience fill in the blanks, because then it turns the Story from your narrative into theirs. They become attached to the narrative in their heads. And you slowly create, layer by layer, a new reality.
I hope you enjoy this small meal, Archivist. Consider it a treat from me.
V.P.