#ATCF: Sunburns, Smells, & Long Term Thinking

Vance Crowe [00:00:03] Hello, I'm Samuel Hughes. I'm a policy reformer from the United Kingdom and you're listening to the Advance Curve podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. We're gonna take a little pause and I'm gonna do an as the Crow Flies episode in part because we haven't had a chance to sit down and just talk, just you and me for quite some time. And another reason is that the Legacy Interviews have become so busy that my editors are really weighed down. So I thought rather than have them edit another podcast, that I would just sit down and just record audio, just you and me sitting down talking about some of the things I've been thinking about lately now. It's been great news that Legacy Interviews have been growing so much. In fact, right now as we speak, I have a director of videography on his way to Legacy Interviews. We have taken on a new person and his name is Sean Thon. He's a really interesting guy. He makes movies and he agreed to come work with Legacy Interviews because he sees that there is a really powerful medium for telling stories, for telling stories for an audience that is really, really small. But the people that are watching these videos love them so deeply that it is an entirely different way of thinking about film. So I'm really excited to be welcoming Sean on, I'm sure after we get him settled, we'll have him on the podcast and you can see why I selected him to be the guy to take us to the next level because he has a love of movies, he is a really caring and genuine person and frankly, he knows more about video than I will ever know, and I'm really excited that he's gonna be joining.

Vance Crowe [00:01:45] Alright, so what I wanna talk about today is some of my thoughts on time. I actually spend a great deal of my attention thinking about time in part because if you're a long time listener to the podcast, you know I have two little girls and I am constantly in this tension of wanting to build for their future, but also wanting to be present for them. Right now I have this kind of ever present thinking about am I doing enough with them? Am I paying attention? Is this flower blooming right now? And I'll miss it. And I've really changed my whole life to be able to spend as much of my attention with those girls and my wife as I possibly can while also building a business up. So in this I, I've been kind of approaching time from a bunch of different angles and I had a couple of thoughts that I was driving into work today and I realized that might be kind of fun for me to share with you. One of which came from my friend Kate Crosby. So many of you know that Kate is this amazing geneticists that also understands the physics of light. In fact, I think maybe the best way that you could describe who Kate is is she is a light philosopher. Now that might seem totally insane to you. You might be like, what in the world is he talking about? But Kate has a very special understanding about the visible light spectrum and how it is that plants grow and what are they doing when they interact with light. And I will have her on the podcast. I know right now she's been working on some major secret, really super interesting projects when she can talk about 'em.

Vance Crowe [00:03:22] I am so excited to bring some of her new ways of thinking to the world. But one of the things that Kate and I were talking about a few weeks ago was something that I think would've changed the way I behaved when I was a young person. When I was a young person and it was summertime, I was the first one to be working with my shirt off. I was always wearing shorts. I was never interested in wearing sunscreen. I was looking for any excuse I possibly could have to be exposed to sun because yes, as an Irish kid I was gonna burn. But I have some weird condition where after I burn one time really hard, then I have this great tan and I loved it and it made me look vibrant and fresh and a part of our culture. Just that like, hey, this person's outside all the time and it didn't really matter how many threats of cancer you gave me or you know, this is really gonna be bad for you. Or even the pain itself of a sunburn. But I was talking with Kate the other day and she made a really interesting point that I had never thought of. She said, you know, Vance, time is light. Light is time. That's exactly how we as humans understand what's going on around us. And, and really it's the way we mark time, right? The speed of light. And I couldn't possibly do her philosophy justice here, but one of the things she pointed out was the reason that you get a sunburn from ultraviolet light is that those are the highest energy beams. They are the waves that are going the fastest. And in fact, what it means is if you are exposed to ultraviolet light, you are exposed to a lot more light waves than you are if you are in the middle of the afternoon or you're sitting in the shade because those light waves that are reaching you are coming at a much slower frequency.

Vance Crowe [00:05:08] So she pointed out that when you are getting a sunburn, when you're out in the summertime, your skin is actually literally experiencing time faster than it would if you were sitting somewhere not in the sun. And this is why when people are exposed to so much sun, you you, you don't wear sunscreen, you aren't covering yourself up, you aren't being conscious of it. It's why their skin looks so old as they age. And you know what? It's because their skin is older. It has been exposed to more rays of light and therefore it is aged faster. Now I am sure Kate is pulling her hair out saying, Vance, you're not describing this correctly. I tried and you've bumbled around and messed it up. But all I know is that analogy works for me. It is a lot more valuable to me to make sure that I do not age so I can be around for my children, for the things I'm building, for the trees I'm planting for the meaning I'm trying to create in the things that I do, the communities I'm involved in. And so thinking, not that I can endure a sunburn and it's not gonna hurt that bad, or trying to avoid the fear or the dread of, oh, maybe I'll get cancer 'cause it seems like almost anything could give you cancer. The idea of avoiding aging too quickly is one that I can wrap my mind around. Now I know that many of the listeners are people that work outside right now. They, whether it's you have a garden or a farm or you're just a person that loves hiking, I think that maybe this metaphor might do you some good too.

Vance Crowe [00:06:44] So while this isn't a public service announcement, I am, I'm not, you know, I don't really have any purpose other than this idea really resonated with me and I thought it would with you. A sunburn is really an exposure to to too much time and things are slipping by more quickly. Speaking of which, the other day I had a really profound experience and I wanted to tell you about it because I think you might find this experience valuable as well. Listeners of the podcast, remember that I had a man named John Lanius on the podcast. John is a very interesting executive that has spent his life studying both martial arts and the arts of incense. He has a deep knowledge of it. And after we did our podcast together, we started talking about, Hey man, I have some extra space. Would you ever wanna put on one of these incense experiences in my space? And so now we've done two of these and I wanted to tell you about the one that I just experienced this last weekend. We move all the furniture out of my extra office and we put a circle of chairs in the center of the circle is John with a table. Now the table projects a PowerPoint on the wall so that that way you can read what the name of the incense is that you're about to experience. And everybody kind of gathers and gets some tea and talks with one another. Everybody was strangers to me except for John. I didn't know anybody that came. And so you're just kind of milling about, you don't really know what's about to happen. And then you take your seats and John starts talking. Now, right from the very beginning you start getting a waft of something.

Vance Crowe [00:08:18] You're like, wait, what, what, what was that? And then all of a sudden I am instantly transported back to of all places Catholic church. And he asked the question, where are you right now? What are you, what are you guys imagining? And many people in the room were like, I feel like I'm in church right now. And he was like, yes, that's because we're burning frankincense. Now as the wafted over me more and more, I started to say, well this is actually way better than anything I ever smelled in church. And he said, yes, because in the Catholic church, you know, they've gotta do this in, in, in mass and maybe they aren't using the finest of of incenses. So that's what we're going to go through today. So then he progresses through this entire experience and he starts taking one away and then putting another one on and you watch the mood of the other people around you rise and then fall. So we get really excited and kind of giggly and people are joking and they're much more boisterous or they're throwing out answers when he asks questions. And then he would take that one away and put another one in and it would be calming and it would really settle out the room. In the meantime, he's handing pieces of incense that can move throughout the room. People can pick it up and hold it in their hands. It's not burning. So they're getting to like smell the resin or the little piece of wood. It's really an amazing experience because you get to smell just like a, a hint of what's about to happen, but when it gets heated up, it just the right temperature and it fills the room. You watch it kind of have this almost, I don't know, magical hold over you.

Vance Crowe [00:09:54] Now the reason I'm telling you about this is because if you are anywhere in the St. Louis region on June 24th, you should consider trying to get tickets for this next experience. This was unlike anything I had ever done before. It was not like any movie or taking my wife out to dinner. It's not like going to a play. There's just nothing quite like this experience. And the only way you can have it is to actually be in the room. There's no replication for it. You know, smell is not something we can replicate in vr and there's something really important and hard to get your hands around that. But this incense puts you in this present moment so that you are having an experience. And it really kept me focused on right there in this present moment, I have a thousand things going on just like you do. But because I was in this space and all these smells are coming around and they are truly indescribable, some of them smell somewhat familiar like something I've ever smelled before. And some of them he's describing, well, this was burned deep in the temple when people would come in to, to make a sacrifice or to be a a part of a community. And it was just such a powerful experience that I really hope that I can share it with you if you're interested. I'm gonna leave John's email below I, I don't even know if he still has tickets it, but if he does, and you are in town on June 24th from two to 4:00 PM come bring your partner, your spouse, bring somebody you want to impress because this is one of those things that you really cannot imagine what it will be like until you do it.

Vance Crowe [00:11:35] And I love that. I love that incense is one of those things that gives you a sense of time and place and being in the present. And I just wanted to share that with you. Okay, so now we've talked about Kate's experience of time faster. We've talked about John's experience of the moment in the present. And now I want to talk about distant time thinking. I wanna talk about something that is difficult to wrap your mind around but is fun to play with as an idea. And this is the thought experiment of what if you were asked to make sure that spent nuclear fuel rods could be buried and and kept away from society and civilization for a hundred thousand years. Now at first you may think, oh, this is pretty easy, right? I would just find a mountain, dig really deep in, bury it down there, cover it over, voila, we're done. But you start thinking about, well, if there's enough nuclear material in there, you could have really sensitive equipment that would say, ah, there's nuclear material down there, let's go get it. Right? So what if you don't want people to find this? What if by finding it they risk getting radiation on themselves, or even worse, maybe they get it out into the environment and it spreads out. And now all of a sudden the environment which was once a wonderful, beautiful habitable place is now covered in nuclear waste. How is it that you would keep people from this thing? Well, you might think, well, what I would do is I would just write danger, or I would put some kind of a symbol up there that would tell people to stay away, but think about a hundred thousand years.

Vance Crowe [00:13:10] Hey, heck, don't even think of a hundred thousand. Think of a thousand years or even 500 or maybe even a hundred years from now. Think about how different culture will be. And you only have to look backwards in order to understand just how different the future could be. Because if you try and read English from a hundred years ago or 200 years ago, it is really difficult to do. And so if you try and imagine a thousand years from now, think about how quickly the English language changes, how quickly it evolves. I mean that's one of its superpowers is that the English language is so adaptable, it's so easy to maneuver that it allows us to capture all these new things going on in the future. But it also has to leave things behind in its wake. So if you were trying to imagine you would write something in English that's already a foregone conclusion that won't be around. Now you could think, well, let me try and use a language that doesn't change as often. So like Mandarin Chinese has been around for hundreds, thousands of years, and you can still go back and read old scrolls from the the Mandarin Times, and they still make sense today, but a thousand years from now, 10,000 years from now, are you so certain that the writing there, plus if you encountered Mandarin Chinese, would that mean anything at all to you? Maybe it would mean somebody if you knew how to find what language it was and you were able to find a translator. But again, this does not make it foolproof. It makes it very easy for people to walk past that. Now you might think, well, maybe I'll put some symbols up there, right?

Vance Crowe [00:14:41] Maybe I'll show a a stick figure of a human throwing up or getting really sick. But now I want you to think about the hieroglyphics on the Egyptian pyramids. You have to imagine that the people that were carving and painting those on the walls of these tombs, they had to imagine that this is obvious. This clearly means this and this and this. And but how much could we read those? So now imagine a few thousand years in the future, those hieroglyphics are gonna be really hard to understand. Now to mention the fact that it's entirely possible that they had big warnings on those pyramids saying, do not enter here. This is sacred space. Or there is something terrible that will happen to you. And we just walk right past that because human beings are inherently curious. We want to know. And if somebody says there's something in there that you're not supposed to see, they are drawn to this. We want to find out what's inside there. So I think that this is a fun experiment because it challenges you to think of what could I do that would communicate something long into the distant future? It's funny because the more you think about it, the more you say, oh, I might actually do the exact opposite of what I want here. So for example, if you start putting up, you know, barbed wire or giant concrete spikes, again that signals, Hey, there's booby traps here. There must be something really valuable down there. Maybe you could try and create some tradition, or I've heard it said that you could create a priesthood that would pass these messages on, but how many of the messages of the different faiths have been messed up and passed along like telephone so that they would be almost meaningless many years into the future?

Vance Crowe [00:16:23] This is something that I think is just fun to think about because it challenges what you know and what you think about will be true in the future. One of the ways that it's relevant to me and to Legacy Interviews is I've often thought, how will you make sure that this video that I'm giving to clients that contains their loved ones sharing stories and ideas and things that they wanna make sure future generations know about so that that way those future generations can understand where they came from in their history? How do you make sure this actually gets passed on? When we first started doing these, we only had like a Google Cloud link and a YouTube link, and that's great for the present moment. If you wanna watch mom and dad or grandma and grandpa share their stories, this works awesome. You can gather everybody around a tv, you can click it on everybody watches and it's great. But now what if you, after you've watched it, want to preserve it? So this led us on a quest that we had to figure out, well, it's not gonna be USB drives because they go away in 15 years. It's not gonna be a DVD because they actually degrade in 30 years. And so we were looking all over for different solutions, and I think I've talked before that we found this solution called an mdi. And an MDIs is actually created by scientists from Brigham Young University who were working on behalf of the Mormons trying to digitize genealogical records. And they were trying to say, look, we wanna make sure whatever we digitize we can keep long into the future. And so these scientists actually took technology that is a Blu-ray, DVD, but instead of making it out of normal material, they made it out of a porcelain type material.

Vance Crowe [00:17:59] And so now they have discs that will last for over a thousand years. And this has been tested by the Department of Defense and the Department of Defense said, yes, this is of all the technology that we've publicly analyzed, this is the one. So that's what we're doing. We're burning those videos onto M discs so they can last for hundreds, maybe even a thousand years. And as long as you can get access to a Blu-ray DVD player, you'll be able to watch it. Now you may be saying, well, I got rid of my own Blu-ray, DVD, I don't have a DVD player in my house. But the Mormons and the DOD have talked about this becoming the archive grade. This is going to be the standard. And we always make the joke that either the DOD or the Mormon church will be around in a few hundred years. One of those two is going to remain. And so this is our best choice for getting these videos into the future. But now we have a different problem, right? How do you make sure that this DVD that's in a little jewel case, keeping it safe, how do you make sure that it doesn't get thrown into a junk drawer or a box and people forget about it and don't remember what it was? So what we decided to do was to go down the path of trying to find a box, something that would make it so you would never want to get rid of it. And as we explored this, we used metal boxes that maybe had kind of fancy or ornate things on it, or they had a a portrait on the inside. We discovered that actually this is going to cause a burden, right? Imagine that this is one of those things that gets stuck on your shelf way back in, in a storage closet, and you think, well, we're gonna get it later, and then people lose its meaning.

Vance Crowe [00:19:38] But then we came to the realization that there is one thing that gets passed on in our culture. And in many western cultures for generations, you may have one in your family or you maybe you've heard of one that was passed down in your family, and that is the family bible. That's because when people would buy family Bibles back in the day, they would get really high quality material. A family Bible would be made out of leather, it would be bound in this very special way. They wouldn't cut any corners. There would be no glued together pages instead of binding them. It was a really highly crafted piece. And these family heirlooms were able to be passed down because they were so beautiful. They were a book, they could easily be stored on a shelf and everyone knew what they were. So once we started to transcribe the interviews to be able to make it so if somebody interviews all day, they can transfer that into an autobiography made into a single day when I got my hands on it, which I, I have right here, I'm holding it. All of a sudden an idea dawned on me, what if not only would you take this autobiography, this book, the written words that you had of your family passing down wisdom that would be valuable to them. But what if you could make the book itself, the box that contained the DVD? Now, we could have just done this as a very simple, Hey, there's a little envelope in the back and you slide the DVT in there.

Vance Crowe [00:21:09] But we didn't feel like that was deep. It didn't feel like heirloom quality. So we actually worked with our bible binding company, one of the only ones remaining in the United States, and we invested in some r and d. And what we came up with was what I think of as a really ingenious solution. In the front of the book, you have the entire interview. It's written out, you can read it so easily. And then in between next you have photographs. So if people do interviews with us, they can actually send us JPEGs of some of their favorite artwork or family photographs, and we will upload that into the book. So you have beautiful writing, then photographs, and then at the very back of the book, we've glued together pages and we've gotten a special die cut and we have cut out a slot that exactly fits the case for the M disc. It's kind of clever. It looks like one of those guns that people used to cut out a little slot so they could sneak a gun through with a book, but instead it carries your DVD. So now if you were to have this book, you would be able to put it on your shelf. You would know that this is an heirloom quality book because of the way that it feels and the way that it looks, and even really the way that it smells. And in the back of the book hidden away for some time in the future, you would have that DVD and you would be able to pull it out and share it with your family so that they could see what grandma and granddad looked or maybe great, great grandmama and granddad looked.

Vance Crowe [00:22:47] I'm really excited about this. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time. This has been a major leap forward and I'm really excited about it. So that is it for me talking about Legacy Interviews and time. I am so grateful that you tune in. I, I'm excited. We have a couple of really interesting interviews coming up. There's a man named Dave Helen, who is a construction worker and a mountain climber. So he is, he builds really nice homes and has his own company. And then in his free time he goes climbing in Switzerland and Mexico and all kinds of crazy places. We had a great conversation about work ethic and how ideas and values are passed on. And then coming right up, I have Zach Smith, the stock cropper farmer that many of you have probably heard of. He is one of those guys that is trying to figure out how do you take the industrialized agriculture system and how do you bring humanity back to it? How do you make different things grow within the rows? How do you get away from this monocropping system and do something truly beautiful and that makes the land better and the food better as well? So we've got some really interesting interviews coming up. I'm excited for you to meet Sean Theon, our new director of videography, and I'm really excited to keep these things going. So thanks so much for tuning in and we'll be back next week with an interview.