ATCF: Cold Water Showers & A Brave New World

Vance Crowe [00:00:02] As the crow flies on the Bands Crow podcast, welcome Back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. So today on this, as the crow flies, I wanna talk about a brave new world and cold water showers. I've been doing these cold water showers and I've really embraced the experience, and I've heard from so many listeners that they have gotten visions that I feel really confirmed about this. I thought it was just an experience that I was having, but because so many of you have written me and told me about that, we've talked about it a ton in the network, then I realize there's something to this and there's something important. And so as I've gone through the month, I've tried to learn as much as I can while exposing myself to at least 60 seconds, sometimes a hundred seconds of cold water. Now, if you're one of those people that hasn't tried this yet, I wanna tell you a little bit about the experience because you could be like, no, that's dumb. I don't wanna do it. I know what it's like to be cold and I don't, I don't wanna be cold. But there's a lot more going on here. Not only do you get to have this vision of this thing that says, why am I willing to endure this suffering? Will, it must be for this thing. But also while you're inside of that cold water, during those 60 seconds, you begin to realize that you do have control over all of those voices of resistance that are trying to talk you out of doing the thing that you committed to doing. Now, we've talked about the voice of resistance a whole bunch.

Vance Crowe [00:01:35] When when you go to try and start a running habit, you maybe run for a couple of days, but then you've got that little voice that says, ah, your ankle's hurting a little bit. Or, oh, you worked really hard or sleep's more important. And so you start to give up on those commitments because those voices have given you the excuse that you needed to let yourself off the hook. Now, I'm not one of those people that thinks that you should be just battering yourself at all times, but I do think you have to keep yourself in check. And one of the ways that I have found that the cold water showers has impacted me is that there's no getting around this. You either did it or you didn't do it. And if you did it, you did it because you chose to do it. You overcame the voices of resistance and you did something important. And what that does is it makes it that when you go to turn the warm water back on after you've had the water all the way on cold, you don't need the water to be nearly as hot as you did before you started doing cold water showers. You realize that your set point is a different level, and the things that used to make you feel like you were uncomfortable doing now all of a sudden don't seem that bad. And it starts helping you grab that sort of confidence that, yeah, I can overcome whatever the small challenge is in front of me to start fixing the problems that are getting in my way. And so for me, the cold water shower not only has shown me visions, but it's also helped me to see, hey, I should be okay with being uncomfortable because to get things I want, I'm gonna have to move out of my comfort zone.

Vance Crowe [00:03:12] And just yesterday I was listening to a video from the Academy of Ideas. I would highly recommend going to check out that channel. They talk about philosophy and philosophers and how their various ideas fit into current culture. It's very well done. But one of the things that I took away from his conversation about the difference between a brave new world written by Huxley and George Orwell's 1984, was that Huxley believed something totally different than Orwell. Orwell thought that we would be moved to a totalitarian government because we would be forced there. It would be done through surveillance and pain and all sorts of negative things that would push us there. But Huxley had a different point of view. He actually said, no, no, it will be our pleasure that will drive us to a totalitarian dictatorship. It will be that we've had so many things given to us that make life easier, that if somebody says, well, in exchange for keeping it this easy, we're just gonna take away these freedoms. People have been so comfortable for so long that they wouldn't even know how to fight back, that you could flood the entire market with so much reading material, so much information that nobody cares at all what is true or untrue anymore. In fact, nobody even reads books so you don't have to ban them because effectively they're banned when they're lost in an ocean of too much information. And I think that I would've just heard this idea, and it probably would've bounced off of me if I hadn't been doing the cold water showers because the cold water showers keep you awake and they make you realize that you can own, overcome different uncomfortable things to make sure that you achieve the things that you want to achieve.

Vance Crowe [00:04:58] And I think in this day and age, wherever we're at in society, no matter what's going on, our ability to endure the discomfort that is required to keep ourselves free is really important because freedom isn't free. It requires you to get uncomfortable to say things that people don't agree with, to do things that other people don't agree with. And so if you're gonna do that, you have to be prepared to be uncomfortable. And I like to think that the people that are listening to this podcast and are working in places like the Network say one thing we can all agree on is that humans flourish when we're free. So let's make sure that whatever freedoms are necessary, we do the work to pay the price to make sure they stay there. And I think the first step to that is being willing to be uncomfortable. So, so I hope your new year is starting out well. If you have not done a cold water shower, try one. Know that I would love to hear from you. You can always DM me on Twitter about your experience, or you can join the network. And the network has a lot of people that are doing this. They're doing it even more intensely than I am. And they're talking all about it on the Articulate Ventures Network, which you can find by going to network Articulate Ventures. Also, just as a quick aside, if you have a VR headset, we've been doing office hours at usually 3:00 PM Central, and we're doing it for anybody that has a headset. But also, if you'd like to join in, all you have is your computer or your phone, you can join this platform using those. It just won't be the full experience.

Vance Crowe [00:06:28] So if you'd like to kind of get a feel for how VR works, you can try it out there. We're gonna be doing this month's book club on the right, stuff by Tom Wolf in the in the system called Hub. So we're gonna do it, trying to do it in part with virtual reality. So hope you're doing great. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week with more interviews. I hope to see you in the network.