Why Liberty Must Come First: Vaccine Mandates, Procrastination Cures, and Inner Voices

Benjamin Anderson [00:00:00] And you aren't giving into mimetic desire. Eventually you like start working your way back down that train. You're like, I do see something that I want. I see something that I want, that my Damon wants me to want and nobody around me wants this thing that I want, but I see it in a way that nobody else can. So I'm willing to give up my money. I'm willing to give up my security. I'm willing. Then you end up working your way back down that chain to the point where it's like, you know, it's, hi, my name is Benjamin Anderson. I'm an entrepreneur living in St. Louis, Missouri, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] Ben Anderson, welcome back to the podcast.

Benjamin Anderson [00:00:35] Always happy to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:00:36] So Ben, you and I were talking offline about, you know, the slow burn that is the coronavirus now. So we had the big wildfires, you know, everything changed and now the environment is changing, but it seems to be at a much deeper hotter, but lower level. And specifically we're talking about vaccine passports. You know, do you have to show a card that says you've been vaccinated in order to participate, either as an employee or going to events like the opera or some sort of fundraisers and masks. And so to begin, just straight As I can ask you, you walk up to a restaurant and they say, mask required proof of vaccination required too. What do you do?

Benjamin Anderson [00:01:22] That's the thing, right? If I walk up to a restaurant and they're communicating upfront to me that these things are acquired, I'm gonna make one of two choices. I'm going to either, you know, whip out the card, put on the mask, blah, blah, blah, right? Or I'm not gonna eat this restaurant. And given my character, I'm probably gonna choose the latter of those two things. I'm gonna prefer the place myself. That just isn't gonna make me adhere to these things that I think are more signaling that we're still participating in this sort of scenario beyond the point of it continuing to be helpful, if that makes sense. Right. Versus like actually continuing to prevent an issue.

Vance Crowe [00:01:59] Do you carry a mask in your car?

Benjamin Anderson [00:02:03] I, I don't have one in my car right now. You know, like the pair of pants I have on right now, I've got one in this back pocket, like my shorts. I'm not like, I'm not carrying masks anymore. I got rid of the masks in the car. Like I've got 'em in like maybe a suit jacket pocket or like a certain pair of pants. But it's like if you, if you want me to wear a mask in your store at this point, have it at the front. You know, you go to Whole Foods, they've got them there, you go to a certain place and they don't have 'em. They tell me, I don't have a mask. This, this happened to me a couple weeks ago. I told you the story, right? Walked in, it was like, I didn't have a mask. It was communicated on the door. Walked in 30, 40 minutes to close whatever. And they're like, sir, you gotta have a mask. You gotta have a mask. I'm like, there's people right over here. Right. And they don't, they don't have the masks on, like, or are we pretending that I need to have this thing on right now? Can I just order or do you actually want me to leave? And it's like, sir, please walk across the street to Whole Foods, buy the mask, come back, and then we can, you know, serve you. And it's like, all right, you know, that's, that's your rule. Then I guess I'll order elsewhere.

Vance Crowe [00:02:58] Yeah, I mean, like for me, I, I will occasionally wear a mask if it is like it. This is the only way that I can get through whatever I've gotta get done without causing my family undue harm. You know, once you have a child taking an extra 20 minutes to run to a different grocery store to pick something else up actually becomes like a big problem. But for the most part, unless you mandate I must wear a mask, I always choose not to wear a mask in the grocery stores. And I really appreciate the, the grocery stores that are like, we recommend that you wear a mask, but you're not required to. And, but you gotta have a certain amount of gumption to walk into a place where everyone else is wearing a mask and you're not. And I think this was a bigger deal a month ago, maybe two months ago

Benjamin Anderson [00:03:41] When

Vance Crowe [00:03:42] You would walk in and you really could be the only person in there. And that's a bizarre feeling. 'cause there's not very many things in our society before this point where it'd be like everyone is doing one thing and you're doing just slightly different thing.

Benjamin Anderson [00:03:54] Yeah, I mean that sound, that sounds right. So the difference between where you live and where I live is you're in the county. And for people who don't know St. Louis, like, you know the county, and you can correct me if I'm wrong. I live in the city and in the city we're still requiring masks as a regulation. Businesses and public spaces and these sorts of things. And where you live in the county, this is not the regulation. So you can go to a grocery store in the county and it will not be a city mandate to have a mask in that space. And if you go to a grocery store that's in St. Louis City, then it's actually a mandate for that business to like have all the posters and the signaling signs up that we require these things here because the city says we need to require them. And I think even, you might be surprised, you know, like I, I live in an area called the Central West End walking up and down the street and it's, it was a lot worse, certainly in the height of COVID and where I, you know, say the story walking in without a mask, that's like, kind of depends on the place sometimes. But in saying this, it's like everywhere requires masks right now, right? But you pop into the restaurant and I'd say like there's probably a, a solid like 20 to 25% of people that are just like, ah, I'm just gonna not do this thing here and I'm gonna see if anybody tells me otherwise, and I'm in that, you know, x percent, that's like, ah, you know, I'm just gonna not do this thing here and see if anybody tells me otherwise. You know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [00:05:09] Yeah. It's really funny. So the other day I was in California and in Sacramento it's pretty much expected. Everywhere you go you wear a mask if you're inside. People weren't really stringent about it, but basically everyone was complying. It wasn't a big deal. We went up to Lake County, which is a much more rural area. We walk into the grocery store and here I had been like, okay, we're in California so therefore I have to wear a mask, right? I just saw what it was like in the capital of Sacramento. So it's gonna be somewhat similar when you go into this Lake County thing. No, no, no, no, no. This was a rural area in California. None of those people were mar wearing masks. And I actually looked like the oddball there. And so it was definitely, I mean you saw the, the a few elderly people, some kind of heavier set people, but for the most part, the weird one was the one wearing the mask. And then you compare that with St. Louis, right? Like, so if I go to the grocery store yesterday, it's really funny 'cause the first couple of times I walked in I was the only one, or it was like me and one other dude and we're kind of looking at each other and nodding like, yeah, we're both not wearing the mask. It's good to see some solidarity. And now you're seeing middle-aged women, you're seeing older men, you're seeing all kinds of people not wear them. And so there's definitely like a tumult because it is a social signal whether you wear that or not. And particularly if you're talking about a grocery store where you're seeing your neighbors. So people are seeing who are you complying with, who are you cooperating with, who are you in line with? And it really does have real symbolism in a place where the pressure is to wear it, but you don't have to.

Benjamin Anderson [00:06:45] Yeah, it's kind of strange, right? How we're setting these precedents now for this disease in a way that we haven't in the past. And that kind of even jumps now to the vaccine passports thing. It's like, are we going to instantiate for this and all, you know, quote unquote new pandemics going forward. Are we going to retroactively be like, oh, well if you didn't get your tetanus shot in fourth grade or whatever. 'cause it's like, it's, it's not an uncommon thing. And all fairness to require certain shots. Like I remember going to school, like public school system, it's like I had to get this shot before you could go to the sixth grade or this shot before you could go to this grade. Like that's fine. Okay, I get that after a certain point. Or like, you know, on job sites and these sorts of things like, hey, did you get your flu shot this season? We can't have you getting our workforce sick. And then half the people are out for the next week. Like, we can't have that. These sorts of things aren't unprecedented. So I'm not like starkly afraid of, you know, the progressive movement towards these things. But like with the things like the vaccine passport, right? Where this is kind of a new precedent that we're setting and the masks where this is a new precedent that we're setting and we're not just easing the things that are meant to alleviate COVID into our old precedent structures. Does that make sense? Right.

Vance Crowe [00:07:53] Yeah. I mean I think that it's, it's an interesting thing to think about how ideas get added to society right now after September 11th. It is completely normal for people to get basically stripped down to their, you know, like whatever their bare clothes are and step inside of a machine where you hold your hands above your head and the machine can literally strip off all of your clothes without, I mean it can see you naked, right? Yeah. So we got to a point where it is completely normal that there be government employees that can literally see you naked if they want or can pat you down and you know, however they do it where they're only using the back of their hands or whatever it used to be. You probably don't even remember this time that would've

Benjamin Anderson [00:08:40] Been three, right?

Vance Crowe [00:08:40] It used to be that you could go to a, you went through some level of screening to get into an airport, but it was nothing like that. Like that's why none of these movies make any sense to you. When people run to see somebody at the gate or they run to, to you know, jump in the arms and stop the person from leaving because now you'd be like, how did you get past TSA, right?

Benjamin Anderson [00:09:00] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:09:00] Well it used to be that you used to be able to do that. We didn't have this level of security, but once you've added it in, I don't think people would fly. Now if they're like, ah, we're just getting rid of TSA, right? Like I think people, I think people would be like, no, how can you do that? We need so much more safety here. And that's the, that's the point of adding these things in. Whether they're masks during a particularly virulent disease being spread or making it so a business or the opera for example, can say, well if you want to come watch the opera here at the, at the Stifel Opera House, you're gonna have to show us proof that you've been vaccinated that, that that will not just stop at this, it will continue on.

Benjamin Anderson [00:09:41] Yeah. So that's, I mean, well you think deeply about culture, right? Like I'd love to hear what you think in terms of, do you think that these are, do you think that we're aggregating niche cases of like, okay, take the TSA example, we wanna instantiate more security here in our airports, or take the COVID example, we wanna instantiate masks and vaccine passports as a norm across the board as well. Are we, you know, seeing multiple different scenarios of these things line up and we're just kind of looking them at a case by case scenario in instantiating these things? Or what sort of pattern do you see in terms of like the broader societal model of thinking that's promoting these sorts of things?

Vance Crowe [00:10:18] You know, I struggle with the people that believe that this is a huge conspiracy, that they think there's a group of people at the top and they are trying to etch away your freedoms so that that way they can stand there and grab all the power. I don't actually think that that's how it happens. My sense is there are a few people that have some really strong ideas about how you can leverage that fear once you have it or what you can do once those rules are applied. But for the most part it's not, it, it's, it's an emergent phenomena. We have this problem, we're gonna give this solution and government solutions can only ever be very blocky. They can't be agile, they can't deal with nuance, right? It's just gonna be very straight edges, very heavy, very lock it in. And as those things stack up, there are people that figure out in this new environment where we have these new giant columns here built around security at the airport or what you can require people to show if they wanna work in an office or whatever these things are, then you figure out, politicians figure out, this is how I can climb to this new hierarchy that's constructed on this new platform. And they take advantage of that. I don't think that they're directing it, but I don't think that makes it any less dangerous. I think it is every bit as dangerous as a giant conspiracy. It's just a conspiracy that emerges as the opportunity presents itself.

Benjamin Anderson [00:11:46] I am 100% behind you on this. I had sent you something a while back where I wrote about something called the Ian Mob kind of thinking along the lines of like, you know, where, where like clamoring for the, who is the person who's making the sorts of decisions that are instantiating the things that we're like seeing happen in society right now? Is there, is it a group of people? Are there, is there an individual, like we don't have like a totalitarian regime that's, you know, these orders are coming down from on on high. They're just kind of the decisions that are being made by amorphous groups in order to make political points. Which is a very, very strange thing. And you know, Kate Crosby any like go back and she was on the podcast like May March or May of last year. I think she had shared something the other day. It was an interview with a guy named Curtis Jarvin who you know, is prolific writer under the alias of mens mold bug for a lot of issues like this. But as you're talking about this, it's, you know, striking these ideas. I heard the other day, 'cause he was talking about what you really do need to be studying here as to why we're making these decisions is the movements of power. You know, we don't actually have kind of a democratic monarchy anymore in terms of like having a president that can make executive decisions, right? And kind of lead as a benevolent dictator in a correct direction anymore. We have the system of checks and balances, which has, has its place, but then it also has its faults, right? Where, you know, we've created funnels to diffuse power out of different areas and you know, kind of slosh it around between different interest groups and it's sloshing around of that power that's really driving the well where it sloshes over here.

Benjamin Anderson [00:13:20] If we promote this ideology, then we can acquire more power. And if it sloshes over here and we're able to, you know, pull on these emotional strings, then we can leverage that to acquire more power. And it's, I don't know, it's a weird deal going to that thing that kind of kicked off this rift that I'm running on here, like with the melia mob. It's this sort of amorphous idea that like we, I don't know. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:13:43] I think that people get in these situations where you're like, in this one circumstance, it's easier for me to just do what I'm asked to do, right? And if I cause waves over this one small thing, it's a way bigger deal than I want it to be. I just want to be able to get past this, so I'm just gonna comply here. And I really struggled. So a couple weeks ago, actually a few months ago, I signed up for a fundraiser and I don't wanna say anything negative about this group at all. They've, they've done a very, they've done right by me, but I signed up for a fundraiser and they were gonna do an outdoor activity as a, as a function of this. And so the group, you know, we raised a little bit of money, we participated in some fundraisers about it, and then we were gonna do the, the activity outside. And a couple days beforehand they sent out an email that said, Hey, in order to participate you have to either show a negative COVI test or you have to bring proof of vaccine. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna participate then, right? Like, because for me, I've been vaccinated. I think vaccines are safe and efficacious. I I, you know, for how long what the overall, you know, impact of them are. I, you know, there's a whole bunch of add-on knock-on effects. I don't really know, you know, but for me they're safe and I would recommend other people take them. I took them as adults that are consenting. There's, we could go into children, that'd be a whole different thing. But when you say, in order to participate in this activity, you must show this vaccine, what you're doing is you are saying, we are in a place made up of a whole bunch of individuals, but we are going to have one solution for this and that solution is going to be implemented by this group and only people that are willing to comply with this are gonna be able to participate.

Vance Crowe [00:15:34] So I wrote him and I tried to say, I love the cause of your organization. I love like how you're working. However, I think that this isolates people for that have reasons that are really good to not take the vaccine that are totally foreign to me. Ones that I don't understand and, and don't get and don't make any sense to me. And, and even ones that might be bad reasons in the short term, but that is the point of having a free society is that we allow people to, to make these choices. And if you are going to make the choice to require them to everyone to participate to have a vaccine card, then I'm not going to be there. And to their credit, they wrote me back and said, look, the reason we're doing this, I don't, you know, actually the head of the organization wrote me back the, the CEO the whole thing and said, hey, the reason we're doing this is because we want to do things in person. We know this is how we raise money for this organization, for this very good cause. And I wanted, I was gonna do pretty much anything I had to do to be able to put it on. And basically one of the ways is we had to have a medical group say, thumbs up, we agree.

Benjamin Anderson [00:16:45] And

Vance Crowe [00:16:45] The only way they would give us the thumbs up is if we put in all of these constraints. And so in order to be able to do it in order, I, I assume in order to have insurance and in order to be a, they said we're gonna go ahead and do it. Now, I don't agree with that. Like I, I think, you know, who's your medical group to be making these assertions? Like this seems like, you know, but yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [00:17:07] Group of

Vance Crowe [00:17:07] Grad, youve gotta have students, some kind of, I don't think it's a bunch of grad students. I think they're probably very, very sophisticated, very well endowed experts. But I think like if you are abdicating your responsibility, you're saying, I don't want to do this, but these medical people are making me do it, and in order for me to get this, I have to do that. Well then I'm gonna give into it. If everyone does that, that's how that column gets built that then can get hijacked by everybody else. So in order to live in a society where we are not stacking on and, and moving towards this mob mentality or the safety mentality, you have to encounter situations and have somebody say, no, I won't participate in it. Now is it right for that guy who's trying to raise money for cancer research to try and take a stand on vaccine passports and what it might cost va you know, cancer patients, I don't know. But for me it was a hundred percent worth it to say no.

Benjamin Anderson [00:18:02] Yeah, these stands kind of have to be weighed on a case by case basis, right? And to give like another story without like doxing, anybody specifically, there was a scenario of young woman I knew where, and to your point where we're putting one solution in place and saying, this is the way, otherwise you can't participate. There's this young woman I know early twenties has had COVID, right? And now it's a rule in the workplace to either have a vaccine or you can't take advantage of working in certain scenarios where you could maybe make a better income or maybe you're even on the track to be fired. You know what I mean? And now she's got this serious decision matrix of do I get this thing that, you know, based off of the, the, you know, and I'm not super termed here, but like based on the science, right? It's like I've had COVID, theoretically I should have the same protection that these vaccines will imbue me with, right? So what is the incentive mechanism for me to get this vaccine other than saying, or other than just being able to participate in these structures that have mandated it, but I'm only assuming additional risk if I was to take this thing right now. So like why is it, why is it a rule? And I guess I'm just talking for the sake of nuance right now, but it's like, yeah, I, I totally agree with what you're saying there. Like this, it, it has to be a case by case deal and to the point of the guy who runs the organization, like he's, he's got mechanisms that he's weighing there that are different than yours and ours there, right? Where it's like, yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:19:29] Yeah. I called my mentor because I was really, I, you know, I call people when I am working through ideas and he's over a hundred years old and he, he was like, well, you know, first things first Vance, the, the first priority is everybody should have is stay alive. So as you're looking around at this COVID thing, what does it mean to stay alive? What, what you know, does it mean protect yourself at all costs? Does it mean, you know, not whatever that means to you. And then the second priority is, is what he said was you have to act on your opinion of what's going on and not someone else's opinion. And I think that that's like a really empowering to hear, right? Because he was basically saying, you are gonna have to know whatever that voice in the back of your head says is the right thing for you to do here and capitulating to the opinions of others. That voice isn't gonna go away. It's not gonna be like, Hey, good job, you went along with what I didn't think that you should do. And instead you went along with what other people thought you should do. And I think that that's a good heuristic and I think that that allows for people to say, you, you know, every situation you encounter, you have to weigh what's going on. And I think at the core you have to have some principles, right? Because if you just say, if, if your principle is I'm going to just get around the obstacle as quickly as possible, well then you might make yourself subject to all of the vaccine passports and all of the mask mandates. If your principle is, it's really important to me that we not lose freedoms that are, that are, you know, important to us, then you've got other factors.

Vance Crowe [00:21:05] And I think that for me to stop and think about what are the principles that I care the most about? And I think the one for me is liberty can never be secondary to anything else. You either have liberty, it is number one, or it's not there. Because if you put safety above liberty, now all of your decisions are driven on protecting people or mitigating risk or all of these things. And then liberty loses its value. And so for me, I'm looking at all of these situations and I'm saying, what can I do that allows me and those around me to pursue as much liberty as possible without giving up and not, that's not to say then to do crazy things that aren't safe, but liberty must be first.

Benjamin Anderson [00:21:50] Yeah. I mean that strikes me as correct, right? We could, we could jump in. This isn't gonna be a novel idea to you, right? But looking at the Soviet Union as a case study in the Alexander Sol Ipsen

Vance Crowe [00:22:00] Solnit

Benjamin Anderson [00:22:01] Jansen story, right? As a case study where, to what you're saying, where the, okay, we're we're putting other incentive mechanisms not by, might not be right, but we're putting other values above liberty, right? Where we want to achieve X as a collective where we want to achieve y as a collective, right? And it's, and I think, you know, if we could jump to empathy is another thing along with safety that is being put in the place of, you know, say X or Y as something that's a, okay, we need to value safety, okay, we need to value empathy as a value of the collective. But whenever you are saying we're going to put safety things like safety, things like empathy, things like, you know, other things in this category above what you're saying, liberty, it inevitably infringes upon the rights of the individual. And yeah, that's, I I think that, I think that that's a serious thing that we should be very conscious of as we're like, all right, like we should, we should take in the information slowly in responsibility and make decisions independently. But we should, we should to your point, be cautious of infringing upon that liberty.

Vance Crowe [00:23:03] Well this is an idea that's talked about a lot now in our circles, but I don't think we've ever talked about it on the podcast, is the concept of chesterton's fence, right? So yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [00:23:11] Imagine

Vance Crowe [00:23:11] You're walking through the woods and you're kind of coming through some brush and then all of a sudden you stumble upon a fence, right? And you're like, oh, this fence shouldn't be here. I was walking here, you know, wouldn't it be nice if this was just a thoroughfare? I should just knock this down, right? Well, the concept is basically like, until you understand why that fence was there, you shouldn't knock it down because there might be aspects of, hey, this marked property in a way that we used to fight over it, but now we know that the fence is there. So we know whose is whose. It might be that hey, that guy that lives over there, he keeps dogs and they're not very friendly. And if you knock that fence down, those dogs will run into your yard. You just have never seen it before. 'cause you've never wandered this way back here. And it could be for who knows how many different reasons. And I think that that's one of the things that the, the continued use of panic to drive decisions where people are like, no, the hospitals are filling up now. No, I'm gonna show you this. One example of a time when a 10-year-old child was supposed to get surgery and they couldn't get it, and therefore we have to act now. And the, and the, the action that we're taking must be applied to everyone across all cases. It's, it's not saying, Hey, wait a second, we have some controls in here. The president can't just make assertions, or, you know, we don't allow the judiciary to start creating laws without having some other branch. Right? Like, you, you have these rules in here.

Vance Crowe [00:24:42] If we discover calmly and rationally that the rules that we have should be taken down, that's okay.

Benjamin Anderson [00:24:49] But

Vance Crowe [00:24:50] Let's not rip 'em out, just assuming that like they're getting in the way of us making panic decisions. Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [00:24:55] Let's knock it down. I love that you brought up Chesterton's fence and I think that first time that I heard this concept was listening to, I know you're familiar with Jordan Peterson, right? And he was talking about Chesterton's fence, sort of similar to how we are now, but as an analogy to, well, the first Amendment, generally speaking, I think voting might have been an issue as well, but it's, it's a serious thing that's worth considering, right? Of like, yeah, don't just, don't just steamroll over what was put in place. A lot like to, to your point, we need to evolve, we need to evolve, we need to progress in a positive direction. But if we're steamrolling in any direction that isn't the present because we don't like the way that the present does, then we should be, yeah, to your point, we just need to be much more cautious there because we could steamroll in the wrong direction if we aren't making those decisions slowly and correctly. And I, I don't remember did the chesterton's fence story, it's like the fence was holding back a beast or something, right? And Chester gets back to the town and the beast comes out and the Townsend ruins and it's like, Chester Chester, my gosh, someone broke the fence in the woods.

Vance Crowe [00:25:55] What, what?

Benjamin Anderson [00:25:57] Whatever

Vance Crowe [00:25:57] Happened? Where

Benjamin Anderson [00:25:58] Were you? And it's like, yeah, you know, you, you never know what we might get rid of in haste to get upon our way and sorely regret when we get back to town, what what we've seen take place. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:26:09] And I think that that, you know, goes along with, if you're trying to think about time, it was really hard for me to think about time that was more than like three to five years out before I had a child,

Benjamin Anderson [00:26:20] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:26:21] Because I was like, ev you know, I I basically every two to three years from when I was 18 years old on I was doing something new and different. So like to plan further out than two years, like I may be in California, oh now I'm in New York. Oh, now I'm in Washington DC So thinking in long-term things wasn't there, but now I've got a child, so I go to plant a tree and I'm thinking about, hey, Violet's gonna be about, you know, about able to climb a tree when she's six or seven. So what tree could I plant that in seven years will be tall enough to be strong enough to hold her weight, but grow fast enough, right? You can think in different timescales. I feel like what's gone on with the rule changes around coronavirus have been thinking about things in maybe one year out. I don't even really think one year out, but I think like most of the things of we've just gotta get this disease gone, you know, we just, we just need it to be, but nobody's saying what is the rate that will declare victory over it, right? When is the time that these things will come off? I remember when we were talking about mask mandates, I was like, all right, well if you're gonna put a mandate on, you have to tell me when we can take 'em off before we put them on, right? If you're gonna do a lockdown, you have to tell me what are the conditions under which we're going be able to, to be allowed out of jail. But so this like ambiguous definition where we're kind of like, we're going to get rid of COVID, right? Like ask people that have a strong opinion about COVID. What

Benjamin Anderson [00:27:50] Does it mean to get rid of COVID? What

Vance Crowe [00:27:51] Does it mean for it to be gone, right? What does it, what does it actually look like? And if people are willing to say, well, I think that it's, you know, a few, you know, a few percentage of people die, you know, every year and we just have this problem. Or if they're like, oh, the hospitals aren't overrun. Like get some things defined because then we can take a look at what choices are you making to exert on people and see if they're worth it in particular. Because what if those things, those decisions that you've made, the the fact that you have to show a card now that proves that you took a, a, a shot that maybe you needed, maybe you didn't, I don't know, to, to go into a bar

Benjamin Anderson [00:28:31] To

Vance Crowe [00:28:31] Go to go participate in a fundraiser. Do you really want that? Are you sure you really want that? Is the trade off to making that happen today worth your children having to show a card everywhere they go? Or your children every time the flu or other viruses start kicking up wearing masks when they go to school? Are you sure this is what you want?

Benjamin Anderson [00:28:53] Yeah. You had shared something the other day that was really interesting. It was like a great framework for thinking this way, I think. And it was a tweet by, I wish I could remember them right, but it was what Decisions are,

Vance Crowe [00:29:04] Oh, Sam Altman Sam, so you, the, there you go, just to get it tight. Like it, it was written by GPT-3, right? So GPT-3 looked at Sam Altman, who runs Y Combinator out in Silicon Valley, and it, and it took his tweets and said, this could be a Sam Altman tweet. And it said, you shouldn't ask yourself, where do I wanna be 10 years from now? You should ask yourself what will I be glad I did 10 years ago, basically 10 years from now? And I think that this is such a good framework. In fact, I've started using it at, for, at the beginning of my day,

Benjamin Anderson [00:29:34] You

Vance Crowe [00:29:34] Know, what am I going to wanna be sitting in my yellow easy chair at the end of the day being glad I did right.

Benjamin Anderson [00:29:40] What,

Vance Crowe [00:29:41] What at the end of of a month am I gonna be really glad that I started today in order that a month from now it, it could happen? I think that's a really good framework to getting people out of the doldrums of, I don't know what the future looks like. And start asking yourself, what should I be working on?

Benjamin Anderson [00:29:57] Yeah, that's exactly right. And I I I love thinking about this more generally in the concept of time, right? Like you brought up time before, like we need to be, we're this, we've eased into this sort of mentality of seeking immediate gratification. We aren't projecting our decisions on that kind of timescale anymore. And I think it was his Peter Teel paradox, you and Lee Cronin kind of talked about this very, very high level then maybe a little bit afterwards, but this idea that, you know, picture, picture yourself at a point in the present on a plane and there's kind of like, you know, there's like a cone in front of you and like that increases in width as it increases like in time going forward from beyond where you're at right now. And the ability that you have to alter your present state in the future, like is very, very limited the closer you are to the present, right? But your ability to alter your state farther and farther out into the present or into the future is the, the breadth of that cone expands. Expands and your possibility space and the center increases. Like if you can, if you can plot a point in the center of that and be like, how long will it take me to get to that point in that cone at X amount of time and start making those decisions now be very, very intentional about the direction that you're choosing. I don't know how many people are doing that anymore. They're like, I want this tomorrow.

Vance Crowe [00:31:17] I think that the hardest thing, and I really have struggled with this, so for podcast listeners, Ben and I are actually building out a podcast studio now. We're gonna move locations. We're really excited about it. And this is the brainchild actually of Travis Liebig, of St. Louis Bank. He was like, man, I really want to help you get this off the ground. I want to take you to a new studio. Let's, let's do this, let's work on this together. And I was excited in the sense of like, yeah, that'll be great, but I have no idea how to get started. And you're like, what the, what the hell do you mean you don't know how to get started, right? I have a podcast studio now, of course I know how to get started, but I waited in this like weird procrastination phase where I was like, oh, I'm thinking should I do it or shouldn't I do it? And I kind of got into this binary way of thinking and I probably wasted a lot of jogging time and sitting time being like, should I or shouldn't I? When in reality the thing that got me going was I was like, okay, I'm going to create a PowerPoint slide that describes my current podcast studio setup and then I'm going to, to just see what happens, right? That's all I don't. And when I actually made a diagram of how my podcast studio was set up, then I could take the dimensions of the room that, that we're gonna be renting and I could say, oh, how would I convert from this thing to that thing? So then I moved into the next stage. And I think that the point that this has brought up for me, because once I learned this trick, I've started doing it with all kinds of things, landscaping around my house. My wife and I are gonna do some renovations.

Vance Crowe [00:32:50] I started seeing some people can have a vision from zero, right? They can just be like, I know where I want to go and I'm just gonna go make that happen. But for a lot of people or people like me, the vision only is enough. Like, I know I need to start blazing this path and I just need to do one thing and then the next step will materialize in front of me. It'll just be like, oh, that's the next thing I should do. Oh, that's the next thing I should do. And so the hardest lesson for me is the way you end procrastination is just to start.

Benjamin Anderson [00:33:24] Yeah. That's, you're, as you're talking through this, you're making me think of you, you might have read, you might have read it there, have you heard of this concept, the difference between map and territory, just broadly speaking, right? So thinking in terms of like the usefulness of maps. I know you're familiar with like, will Wright's talk on like theories of game design like you and Rob talked about at the episode, anybody who might have heard that the podcast, right? Of like the usefulness of a model and the usefulness of a map for plotting territory. Like you need the abstract view of the map. And as you're drawing out a map, you can't draw out, you know, every tree in the forest and you can't draw out every X and Y and Z. You can't get too deep into the details, otherwise you're gonna get lost drawing your map and you never finish. You have to, you have to abstract that model. But then as you are going about plotting a course on that map, like there's tons of different analogies. I'm trying not to get lost, right? But as you start plotting a course of, okay, I'm looking at a map, it's an abstract model of I know where I am now and I know where I want to be now I want to get from here to here. There's a lot of different ways that I can get from here to here. And it's like, oh my gosh, well I could go this way and this way and this way, and maybe we'll drop in the show notes, right? I can't remember the name of the paper to give it credit, but it was just kind of ideating on this concept of exactly what you're saying, right? You need to start walking into the woods and you know, have that map with you as you're walking, know where you're heading. Have that abstract model to what you're saying of like, you, we want finish the podcast studio. That's a great example. We know we wanna be there. We started in that direction doing the PowerPoint, right?

Benjamin Anderson [00:34:55] And we're continuing to progress along that path, but it's like we have that map, you know what I'm

Vance Crowe [00:35:00] Saying? I think that the, the, the thing that's the hardest is you're like, I don't know if I should or shouldn't do this. So like I'm doing some landscaping in my house, I'm super excited about it now. But for years, literally years, I had always been like, man, I wish I was as smart as Thomas Jefferson. Because if you go to Monticello, you see how many things he thought of and how he did this thing over here and how he did that thing over there. And for whatever reason, in my mind, I had always been like, oh, he was just walking along and knew to do that and he knew to do that. But that's not actually how it happens. The benefit of getting older, being in your thirties, being in your forties, getting to your fifties, is if you go look at something and you say, how can I improve this? And how can I reshape it and how can I add something to it? You don't have to have it all done at once, but you can, you can really sit and think about it, but you, until you start writing things down, making it diagram, writing stuff up, you don't realize, one, how much you already know, how much you've already accomplished, how much you've already thought through it. And two, you don't know which gaps you've gotta fill. And a lot of times the gaps when they're just in your head, when you're like, ah, I don't know how I would do that. I don't know, they become overwhelming. Whereas when you get them down and now you've started sorting through them, you can come up with all sorts of new ways to your point of finding that path from point A to point B where you're like, oh, I don't know how I'm gonna get past this section. But now I found a really cool way to connect those two things.

Vance Crowe [00:36:30] And I think the only reason I'm sharing this is because it's been a really big discovery for me. And I used to try and force myself into the format that other people use, which is writing, which I, I journal a lot, I, I, I write a lot, but I found actually, I love doing things in PowerPoint. I like actually having like little graphs and shapes and things like that. And that's opened up a whole new door for me. Like it doesn't have to be that every you, you write out your thoughts in the same way that everybody else does. It's just gotta be the way that works for you.

Benjamin Anderson [00:37:04] Well, so I know, right? So how did diagramming take, let's take your landscaping problem. How did diagramming get you from, I know that I want to have more, you know, unique, intentional shrubbery in my yard over the long term for Violet to the next step, which might have been, you know, what, like how did you diagram from knowing you had that want to getting to the next step? Well,

Vance Crowe [00:37:24] So the only reason I cared about the landscaping was because I have a daughter now. I'm not thinking in two year time spans of like, okay, we've gotta sell this house and go buy another one. Now I'm thinking, hey, I wanna live in this house and Violet and I, every Friday do like a daddy date kind of thing. So she's still one. I throw her in a backpack and we go spend about three hours doing something. And I discovered really early on when it wasn't so cold, when it's cold, I go to the art museum or rainy,

Benjamin Anderson [00:37:52] When

Vance Crowe [00:37:52] It's not cold, I try and go to the botanical gardens and it's amazing to watch what captures the eyes of a child, right? Because everything is so new, she doesn't have the filtering out of anything, right? A sign, you know, a map of the park looks just as colorful and just as wild and out there as the flowers themselves because everything's new to her. But if you go back again and again and again, now all of a sudden you start seeing like, ah, look at her reaction to these sorts of things. Is it sculpture that she likes? Does she like butterflies interacting with it? Does she like these other things? So then I started saying like, okay, well I'm gonna try and add, she really likes butterflies. Like just loses her mind. They could be moths, she doesn't care, right? She's just like, oh my gosh, I see a thing floating from one flower to the next. So I just, I came home and I ripped out my flower beds in front and I planted some butterfly flowers. I was like, I don't know, this is the best chance I have, you know? And once I saw her react to that, now I'm like, okay, what else does she like? So Rob Long gave me some of his family's mint. So they've been growing mint at different houses in the long family for, for several generations. He gave me a little bit of it, and I grow some, well, violet used to see that I would rub my hand on the mint and then, you know, smell my hand and I'd put it in front of her mouth. And that now she goes over and like rubs her hand over the mint and puts it to her nose. And she doesn't really know what she's doing, but she can smell it and you can see her eyes get big. So now I'm like, oh, I like plants that smell and I like plants that bring butterflies.

Vance Crowe [00:39:25] Okay, how can I start integrating these into the house? And then we start talking, you know, her, her mother's like, oh, I really want her to have a, like a swing set and a place to like jump and, you know, go around and I want to be able to sit out here after dinner and watch her. So it probably means it needs to be right there, right? Right. And so, so now you're starting to say, okay, let's put the flowers here, let's put the playground where mom can watch her and we can sit out and, you know, have a drink and, and do that. So you start having all these disparate pieces and then as you write them down, they start coming together. And I think this is true of literally everything that we do when you have to have vision, it doesn't exist ahead of time, is you just have to take these parts and put them together and see how they fit. But for years I just sat and spun my wheels and didn't do any, I mean, I could have been working on this for the last three years and I'm only just now in the last six months really taking off on this.

Benjamin Anderson [00:40:24] Yeah, I hear you. The, the ideation phase can go on forever. And it's kind of like, there's, there's a lot of different places that you can apply that metaphor. Like what jumps to my mind next is like, there's this idea of feature crawl, kind of like if you're a founder and you've started something and you're building something that you want to give to the world to solve a problem or to do something, get into this stage called featured crawl, right? Where you're like, well, I've got it from point A to point B, but if I just spend like two more weeks, I could get this one more thing in there and that's gonna make it better. And then that one more thing and then that one more thing. And it's, it's similar because you're taking actions, right? You're, you're like moving forward, but you're like, I'm, I can't release it yet. I gotta get this one more thing and this one more thing. And then it's like the next thing you know, you've built out something that not nobody wants, but like you've built it out based off of only exclusive your, your vision. And at some point you need to like let that out of the gate that maybe that kind of aligns Well

Vance Crowe [00:41:17] There's a uniqueness to, from the difference of like a product that is, that is like code or hardware, right? You can work on that any time of day you just bring some lights on in your house, you can be warm, you can do whatever. But with plants there's a season, right? There's a seasonality to all of these things. And in a work week, right, you can, if, if I'm trying to work during the rest of the week and I only wanna work on my outside stuff on nights and weekends, right? One of the things that I think is really interesting about doing outside work or doing this landscaping thing is I can't wait forever. If I want to get a clone of that rose, I gotta do it right as the flower it right as it's flowering. If I want to put in new grass, like I need to plant that at the right time. If I want to clear out brush or make trimming. So like there's this weird thing that happens when you're away from nature in that there is no sense of time, time is yours completely man created. But when you're working outside now you have to operate within constraints. And to me, operating within those constraints is like a level of satisfaction or some, some sort of depth of connection with what I'm working on.

Benjamin Anderson [00:42:34] I hear you as you're saying that. And I, I would push back a little bit and saying there's probably different constraints. So like talking about feature crawl, I know when I was in feature crawl and I know what got me outta feature crawl was, I was like, oh shit, if I don't release this and get some money, I'm gonna run outta money and I'm gonna fail. Right? So it's like there were some constraints that certainly existed to like, you know, instill some growth in the process that weren't necessarily time or nature, right?

Vance Crowe [00:42:58] Well, this is how we built the, the VR world. So for people that don't know, Ben and I are part of the the, as the Crow Flies book club, which every month we generally get into a VR little space that we've created and it's an underground bar. The for, for a while we didn't do it because we were like, I don't know how to build a virtual reality world. And then you get in there and you're like, well, I'm just gonna put up some walls. I'm gonna have a cube and we can all go get into it, and then it gets better and better. And then eventually I made it so big that it crashes people's VR headsets and these problems. So we need to go back and redo it. But I understand like the, the challenge of how do you get going enough that you can see something be done but not have the perfection of it or the like, oh, I can keep adding features, keep you from, from being satisfied that it's time to stop that and move on to something else.

Benjamin Anderson [00:43:53] Yeah, I mean that's the edge of chaos. It's hard to like find like there's, I mean it's a subjective thing to draw exactly where that line is. Like how could we have done that with vr? Like how could I have done that with X or how could you have done that in a given scenario maybe with the garden, right? Of like knowing exactly when this is, this is the place where I need to transition from one side to the other. Like it's like you have to oscillate between the two.

Vance Crowe [00:44:14] So we've been talking about a project that it for me is gonna take a long time. I'm gonna throw this out to listeners in case anybody has wild idea. Yeah. So my daughter's name is Violet. And you could do that as the flower or the color, or not just the color. Think of it as being a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, right? So you've kind of got these different ways of, of looking at this violet to ultraviolet. So what I wanna do is create a mural. I've got about an eight and a half foot wall and on the top of the wall at near the ceiling, I want there to be a sun. And I want that sun to somehow be in a relationship to the size of the surface of the sun relative to the earth. Then I want a photon flying off of that sun in I'm, I'm guessing a wave pattern. And I want that to come partway down the wall. And then I want to zoom up on the photon so that you can actually see that wave as the electromagnetic scale. So you have infrared all the way out to ultraviolet. And then within that I want to be able to mark on these different colors. 'cause it'll look like a rainbow, right? And I want it to be all the way across the wall. So every time violet looks, she sees the spectrum of the the light spectrum, right? But then I want to highlight different parts of the light spectrum. And I want to say, so for example, when a plant detects blue light, it knows, hey, the sun is giving us, basically it's full energy right now if you leave all of your pores open and you have respiration, you're gonna get dehydrated and you're gonna shrivel up and die.

Vance Crowe [00:45:52] So a plant, when it detects a whole lot of blue light starts to shut down. But when it sees red light in the morning, it knows, hey, this is the most amount of sunlight I'm gonna be able to get before it gets too hot. So red light means open up, run full steam, run your vascular system, do all these things. 'cause a plant can't move, right? It's gotta react to what is there. So I want to mark within the light spectrum what this does to a plant. Okay? Underneath the electromagnetic spectrum, I wanna see that photon continue to go down to, until it crashes into a single violet that's on the ground. And then I want some other wild flowers around there. Actually wild flowers that'll be, that I'm gonna plant in my backyard. But I wanted to crash into one single violet flower that stands out from all the rest. And then I want to show the process of what's happening when that photon hits the green part of the plant, the photosynthetic part, what's going on to make that reaction occur, that, that the plant is actually able to strip out some energy from that sunlight and turn it into energy for the plant, food for the plant. And then at the base layer underneath the flower, I wanna show what the soil is and the direction of the roots. And I'm gonna get, I'm gonna get an actually accurate representation of the violet's roots. And then I want to have somebody that knows a lot more about soil than I do maybe in Eric Ward or somebody like that to say what are the parts of the soil that we should talk about? And I wanna have some kind of draw out for how is the, the root system bringing nutrients in specifically water, but other nutrients and pulling it in.

Vance Crowe [00:47:27] And then underneath there, I wanna have a little bit of dirt and kind of showing what's going on there. That's the mural that I want my daughter to wake up to every day. And the reason I put it out here, you've heard me explain this several times, is 'cause anybody that wants to contribute to figuring out how to do this, I'm totally down and I'm not sure what we'll do. Will we turn it into an NFT and anybody that contributed can have it for free, or maybe we sell it, I don't know. But I have a vision here, but I myself cannot draw so, or mural or paint or anything. So I've hired a person to give me like a first draft, but I'm going to iterate on this. And if anybody has any other ideas for how to make this like truly stunning, that's what I wanna do.

Benjamin Anderson [00:48:06] Yeah. I picture like, like a photo scape that you can kind of move around maybe like in, in terms of, I know you wanna have it on a mural, and there's a lot of physical space that can be occupied by that to communicate those ideas. But in terms of talking like the digital rendering as well, like, oh, I can zoom around over here and I can zoom around over here. Like, yeah, that's, that's, that's a weak spot of mine though. I wish I could help you out more there, other than kind of bouncing ideas in terms of like the formulations and stuff. I don't have that artistic bend. Like we know that that's like a

Vance Crowe [00:48:33] Well, I just think it's interesting because until I had come up with a podcasting idea of like, oh, I just need to draw the podcast studio on a keynote slide. That was the same problem with this mural. Oh, I gotcha. I had tried to tell my wife about this mural for years. I don't know. I've had this in my, for a year since we named our daughter Violet.

Benjamin Anderson [00:48:53] And

Vance Crowe [00:48:53] It wasn't until I was like, okay, it needs to have this and this and this and this. Now how do those things look, I don't know, an artist is gonna, you know, I'm gonna give you FreeWheel and judgment, but to be able to have an image, see, 'cause it's a funny thing, right? Because I'm, I'm picturing an image, but I don't have a picture of the image. The only thing I can do is hold all of these parts separate. I know I want there to be a sun here. I know I want there to be the electromagnetic wave pattern here. You know, I know I want photosynthesis, but how that looks, how a violet looks, what the size of it is, what the colors are, I can't do any of that. So I have to like, try and describe a thing that I can't actually see unless I break it apart in my mind and say this one thing, this one thing, this one thing, and

Benjamin Anderson [00:49:36] Delegate it out. You said something really interesting the other day that I'd love to hear you maybe talk about a little bit more where you said, like, as you were talking about, you have this picture of that image, but it's, it's amorphous. It's indefinite. You need it to be carried further, you know, elsewhere. You said something along the lines of, you were talking about mimetic desire and you were like, man, is it hard to really think of a desire if you don't, like, it's so easy to just be like, oh, I see what all these other monkeys want, but what does this monkey want? Right? Like, where does that sort of

Vance Crowe [00:50:07] Having a child? And so, so listeners know Ben is basically Uncle Ben at my house. You've met my daughter probably more than anybody else outside of the family. Like Violet sees you all the time, and you and I talk a lot about what am I learning about how human beings think by watching a child start off as close to a blank slate as you can. I don't know how much information was hard coded into the DNA of a of a child, but it's more than zero. I'll tell you that. I don't, I do not believe that children are made with zero knowledge of anything. I, I don't, I mean, I don't know how to describe that, but their

Benjamin Anderson [00:50:41] Surroundings,

Vance Crowe [00:50:41] There are things that Violet does, the behaviors that I watch that her mother has, that I don't think she's ever seen her mother model. So for example, like this morning you were holding Violet, and then when I took her over, she would look at you and like smile and put her head down on my shoulder and give like a very flirty, like I'm being bashful thing. Her mother does that. But I can't imagine a scenario under which she has seen her mother do that because there just wouldn't be an opportunity for it. So that to me seems like there's some qualities of of human children that are just part of your DNA and you know, some little girls do that and some little girls don't do that, right? And I'm sure it's a reinforcing loop, right? The, the girl that has that naturally in her from her DNA gets rewarded for that with smiles and coochie COOs and then does it more, and then it just reinforces it until it becomes really pervasive in their personality. So I think there is a relationship between your DNA and your environment that creates these things. But what I don't think most people think of is we think of like, what is it that I want? You know, and why is it that I want it now as a, you know, like I'm nearly 40. It's so hard for me to parse out things. It's nearly impossible me to figure out like, why is it that I want things? Renee Gerard, the social psychologist, he's fascinating theorist and philosopher, probably like what Carl Jung was five or 10 years ago as far as edgy, like not accepted in society, but had some great ideas.

Vance Crowe [00:52:18] That's Rene Gerard. Rene Gerard named a thing called Mimetic desire. And he's not, it's not meme, MEME, that's meme. He's mimic as in M-I-M-I-C-C. Yeah. So it's memetic desire. And what it is, is he says, we, when we, when we open our eyes and you're a brand new child, you look around the world and there's so much to see that you could not possibly know what is important. And so you don't do that. And in fact, what you do is you look at what is it that the other people around me want? And I should probably want that too. And as like a, as a heuristic, that's probably a good idea. Like, okay, people are now, they, they want these luxury goods, right? So if I go after that luxury good, then maybe I can have status the way that they're striving for status and it all fits together. You could be like, I see that mom and dad, you know, babies love two things right now, phones and remote controls, right? So because they see mom and dad want this thing, they wanna hold it in in their hand. They want to use it. So you can see Violet just go absolutely nuts for her phone. She has no idea what to do with it. But she also loves remote controls like that turn on the fan or turn on the tv. And so why does she want that? Well, if I walked in with a brand new remote and I never touched it and I just set it down in the ground, she would not be interested in it. But if she sees me picking it up and using it and pointing at things, something in her brain kicks off of like, that's really important.

Vance Crowe [00:53:53] If you extend that out into humans, people think like, oh, well that's not me. It is for little kids, but that's not me. But try and figure out something that you want that no one else, you know, has expressed any desire for whatsoever. And it's really hard.

Benjamin Anderson [00:54:11] Yeah. Amen to that. There was something I threw, you know, listeners know we run network called the Articulate Ventures network. And I, I wanna say it was Joseph Ring, one of the Ring brothers had asked something in there that made me think of this concept of like, and like there's the ch the ladder of incentives and it's like, you know, you, you start off and maybe you want security. And once you get security it's like, okay, I've, I want food. Or maybe you, oh,

Vance Crowe [00:54:33] Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [00:54:35] Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But then you get to the top of that, like after you've acquired wealth and like now you've got freedom, right? You reach this stage of freedom of like, I can do whatever I want. I've got, all of my other needs have been met. Like what happens when you're at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? You are looking for those wants. I don't know, it's it's, it's, it's a weird thing. I don't have a great conclusion there.

Vance Crowe [00:54:57] Yeah. I think Maslow's hierarchy of needs got it all wrong because like, and I think that even Maslow himself would say like, I never meant for this to become like the foundation of education and things. 'cause people have taken this concept, which basically exactly as you said, it's a pyramid. You really want safety, and then you want food, and then you want shelter, and then you want love and then you want self-actualization and you want it in that, in that process. And if any one of those base layers breaks down, the other things aren't so important. I would say that is not how we are set up. That may be like how you look at human beings and say this is what they need. Right? They need the love of other people, but that's not gonna keep you warm in a storm. But I think this concept of desiring what it is that other people already desire is not factored into how, how we look at what it is that we want. And I mean, I'm, I'm guilty of it too. Like we made the joke about you, you accidentally buying the generic version of the polo shirt,

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:01] Right? The the, yeah, the, the, there's the Marco Polo and then there's like the US polo team, polo brand, and it's the same stupid polo logo. And my girlfriend had made fun of me because it was like, you know, that's clearly not the Marco Polo. And I'm like, this is the same brand, right? This is, this is the same polo brand. Right. But yeah. That, that's the reason I bought 'em. I was like, oh, that's what a great deal on polo. You know?

Vance Crowe [00:56:22] And then only to find out that the fabric that you were adorning your body with Yeah.

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:27] Was

Vance Crowe [00:56:27] Not the authentic polo people having made that

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:31] Man how my heart dropped and then the shame that I felt the shame Vance. Right.

Vance Crowe [00:56:36] Well, and it's so funny because as much as we're laughing about that, right? Like it's

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:40] A real deal.

Vance Crowe [00:56:41] It's a real deal. And I mean, I don't know about you, but I can remember covering over my shoes with each other when I was wearing Payless shoes and other kids started getting Nikes.

Benjamin Anderson [00:56:51] Oh dude, I returned them. I got Calvin Klein. Are you kidding me? I'm not even, I'm not even joking with you. Yeah, I hear you. But continue with shoes.

Vance Crowe [00:56:59] Well, I mean, I think like, like we, we like to think that we transcend that or, but it's, it's, it's very interesting, right? Because your brain works on what is it that other people desire? And if I can attain what other people desire, then I get status and status matters, right? People with high status eat first, they get the most, they get more opportunities and it becomes a feedback loop. And I, I think it's just a worthy topic because we were hanging out with friends, they were, this is the first time they were meeting Violet and I brought up this concept of mimetic desire and, and they kind laughed at it and were kinda like, yeah, I mean, for a kid that's true. And then I started being like, Hey, if you wanna play with Violet, like you want her to come to you, you don't have to go to her. Just get really interested in a toy

Benjamin Anderson [00:57:46] And

Vance Crowe [00:57:47] That baby will zoom over to you and wanna play with it. And they, like, all of a sudden they stopped chasing Violet around and started getting her to chase them by being really interested in a toy. And I don't think anything changes when you become an adult.

Benjamin Anderson [00:58:02] Yeah. Well I think where that desire comes from that isn't rooted in mimetic desires, like what you referred to a lot as the Damon, right? And that's where I was going with this transcending incentives idea in terms of like, where it became a discussion. The network is like if you're in line with your Damon and you aren't giving into mimetic desire, eventually you like start working your way back down that train. You're like, I do see something that I want, I see something that I want that my Damon wants me to want and nobody around me wants this thing that I want, but I see it in a way that nobody else can. So I'm willing to give up my money. I'm willing to give up my security. I'm willing. Then you end up working your way back down that chain to the point where it's like, you know, it's,

Vance Crowe [00:58:40] That's actually brilliant, man. I mean that's exactly right. And I like, it's so funny, I don't know how many people have told me like, oh, you shouldn't call it the Damon, right? That people think you're schizophrenic if you say you've got a voice in your head. And really I call bullshit on that

Benjamin Anderson [00:58:53] Because

Vance Crowe [00:58:54] Like, if you do not have voices in your head that are saying like, Hey,

Benjamin Anderson [00:58:58] Then you're shutting them out.

Vance Crowe [00:58:59] Yeah.

Benjamin Anderson [00:58:59] And shame on you. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:59:01] Right. Yeah. Like it's, it's exactly right. Like, and, and everybody has these competing, you know, I got Dion Isis in there that's saying like, we should have some more wine. Let's go have some fun. And then I've got these other, I got Jocko Willink being, or David Goggins being like, Hey fatty, get out and run. You're a loser.

Benjamin Anderson [00:59:18] You

Vance Crowe [00:59:18] Know, and you've got all these different competing ones and there's one that seems subservient to not subservient to all the others. That's not correct. In fact, it's probably the easiest to shout out. It's just the one that's like, you know, you, you could do this. Right? The, the, you know, that if you actually gave up these things, you could get there. And that's the one that sometimes you have to go a long period of time without having it. And then sometimes you just have to, like, for me, like I'm gonna just start planting butterfly trees. 'cause I want my, I think, I think my daughter and I should have butterflies, and then it manifests into me becoming a gardener in a way I never, ever imagined I would be.

Benjamin Anderson [01:00:01] Yeah. And it just becomes like, I gotta ask you, what does subservient mean? Like this is a word I don't actually know if you could

Vance Crowe [01:00:06] Oh. So that's like, you know, serving another, you're subordinate, you're, you're, you, you are giving over and doing the deeds of, of, of whatever the thing above you is. It's a hierarchical idea. Gotcha.

Benjamin Anderson [01:00:21] Contextually I assumed it was something along those lines, I just didn't Yeah. You, you never know. Right. But it's, yeah, it's weird. It'll be just kind of in, in the background, not making any noise. And then, you know, you, you gotta kind of start planting some trees. If you want to hear something from, you know, that Damon will stick with the terminology Right. Then you, it's, it's weird. Like you've gotta, you've got, you've gotta prod it.

Vance Crowe [01:00:42] Yeah. I think that's true. And I think basically people want to talk about this, you know, my, my wife kinda rolls her eyes. We were at a wedding the other day and, and you know, I actually, I get to be the minister of a wedding. Yeah. That was kind of fun. I mean by, with no religious affiliation, I do not claim that their wedding is any more divine because I did it. I think they just wanted a, like a, a good introduction to the group. Anyway, so afterwards we're sitting at the dinner, we're having a great time, and I talked to these people that have like totally insane careers jobs that are totally different than anything else. And I'm like, Hey, let's talk about the voice that led you to this thing. And my wife is sitting there being like, she, these people are gonna think you're nuts,

Benjamin Anderson [01:01:23] Man. Don't do the damon bit. Not now.

Vance Crowe [01:01:25] And I tell you what, man, I have never once had somebody be like, oh, I don't want to talk about the deep voice that's deep within me

Benjamin Anderson [01:01:32] That I definitely hear, but I never talk about because no one else will prod me to talk about it. Right.

Vance Crowe [01:01:37] Everybody wants to talk about it because like, we have this entire phenomenological experience, our entire universe, everything we know and understand happens inside of your mind. And most of the time we just pretend like you're a guy with eyes that are looking at me and you're gonna react to some of the things that I'm saying, and I've got this universe in me. But you don't, I don't acknowledge that you have, you know, this going on in you. And as soon as two primates start talking about, Hey, this is a voice I have, this is what it's guiding me to do, boom. They just open up and you start seeing meaning built between the two of you just from sharing the idea that you both have an inner voice that might want entirely different things.

Benjamin Anderson [01:02:17] Yeah. That it's, that's exactly right. Right. 'cause it's the same voice and it's, you know, tell, well, what, what, what, what does your voice want you to want? What, what, what is my voice? Like get Yeah. Having the opportunity to talk about that. It's, I can see how it's like you're, you're cracking open the walnut.

Vance Crowe [01:02:31] Well, and I do these Legacy Interviews, right? And one of the questions that I put in there, and I, people can tell me whether they want me to ask this or not, is tell me about prayer. Right? Because I think in a lot of ways what we're describing when we talk about the voice or whatever, some people hear it as the voice of God. Some people hear it as like one of the many, you know, competing ideas in their brain. But people two generations ago called this conversation that we're talking about the thing that they're called to prayer.

Benjamin Anderson [01:03:02] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:03:02] And to hear people talk about like how long they prayed with no answers. I get that a ton, right? Like women in particular say, after I had my children and after they were between the phase of, of not needing me to, you know, walk and stay upright and them leaving, I knew I had a calling, but I didn't know what it was. Like. I hear that a lot. I, I hear older men talk about like, yeah, I always knew where I, where I wanted to go. The, you know, my prayer always told me I needed to be doing these things, but this is what happened when I didn't pray. Right? And then I got off track and I, I find it so shockingly similar to this concept of the demon, you, I think they must be the same.

Benjamin Anderson [01:03:43] You're 100% correct. And like, you gave me like a shiver bringing that up. I'm reading Brothers Karma of right now, and there's a character and their father's awesome and I'm not devoutly religious, right? But he is going on, you know, one of these long book rifts about the importance of prayer and how you can learn the things that you want to know if you just, you know, have the vulnerability to communicate through prayer. Right. And you'll be surprised whenever you get communication back. And then you can, to what you're saying, where this is very, very similar to this, you know, willingness to open yourself up to talk to the voice in your head. Then you jump back to, we were just talking about Carl Jung, right? He has this concept of automatic authoring or automatic writing where, you know, you read some of his works, he is very much just having a conversation with himself. Ken Wilber is another author, he's post union, like follows a lot of his ideas, like some of his books, the format is like, I'm asking myself a question, I'm answering this question. I think that's really interesting. But you know, anybody who writes or journals and you're like, you're having trouble, like just, it's like the having a trouble starting thing. Ask yourself a question and then answer it and then ask yourself another question. And then you're kind of seeing what, there's like a thread between your questions where you're like, whoa, the, the autonomous sort of generation of these questions in my head, it has a thread and it, my answers, you know, have like a direction that they're heading towards.

Vance Crowe [01:04:59] Gimme an example of a question,

Benjamin Anderson [01:05:02] You know, I dunno, like I have my notebook right here. Just what, what do you see that's giving you, what, what suffering do you see that you want to alleviate? And then just answer that question right? Then how would you go about alleviating that suffering? Right? Oh, well I would, I would do it this way. Oh, well what's the first step? This is the first step. Okay. Why haven't you started? You know, and then you're just, you're on that riff with yourself, right? It's, it's a weird deal. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:05:35] It's amazing to me with doing the Legacy Interviews, how you'll get done and people will say, nobody's ever asked me that.

Benjamin Anderson [01:05:44] And

Vance Crowe [01:05:44] A lot of these things, I would say are some of the most basic questions you could have. Right? Like, it, it could be something like what was something you had to give up in order to be a good parent? You know, that's, that's one people really like answering, but they're like, I never, I never thought about that. And I mean, like the number of men that have told me they had to give up alcohol, I I am, I have been absolutely shocked by the number of grandfathers that have children or grandchildren that absolutely love and adore them that have all said, if I didn't give up alcohol, I I would've been a mess. Like, I mean, like people that you're like, man, that dude is like rock solid. He's always been rock solid. He's always, and they're always like, man, it's, I gave that up and it's the best decision I ever made, but I didn't realize how many old people don't drink.

Benjamin Anderson [01:06:37] Oh, that's gotta be an archetype. You know, like, you know, I had my dad up recently and there was like a riff, we were over dinner where he was talking about, and I, you know, had a killer grandfather, but this is my experience, my grandfather, and I'm not like dosing my grandfather, but he was like, you know, your grandfather like used to drink sometimes, you know what I mean? And it's like, I never saw that side of Andy Anderson. Right. I saw like, this is like the my hero who taught me chess and we go boating and like, it's my dad's dad, my grandma's awesome. Like blah, blah, blah. Right? Yeah. I'm just, I'm jumping off your point there, that that's definitely something where it was like, that was, you know, that another older guy who evidently gave up this vice to be a better person in the latter.

Vance Crowe [01:07:14] Well, and I think about the number of people that made big changes in their life, and then the big change occurred and then there was never like a time, and it wasn't appropriate for them to be like, you know, kids, I used to have a bit of a gambling problem. Right? Right. Or, you know, your mother and I really fought for three or four years about how we were gonna educate you or the like, and so there are things that they're completely comfortable talking about, but they were big decisions that maybe just manifested as a little tiny change that then just like you were describing before about the trajectory. And I, I think it's like, for me, these interviews have been earth shattering because the people that are recording them, they don't, they're not like, oh, somebody's gonna listen to this that, I don't know, from Nebraska or from Newfoundland or something. Right? Like, instead they're, I'm gonna be able to hand this to my children and these are things I want them to know, but then the fact that there's some element of them not scripting it, like I won't, I mean, I would, I guess, but I, I really discourage people from saying, here, ask me these questions

Benjamin Anderson [01:08:21] Because

Vance Crowe [01:08:21] I wanna be able to roam around in there

Benjamin Anderson [01:08:23] Yeah. Riff

Vance Crowe [01:08:23] And

Benjamin Anderson [01:08:24] Well, let's head down the street.

Vance Crowe [01:08:25] Yeah. And because like most of the time people have not been asked about their prayer life or about their, you know, tiny changes. And so they don't know how much they have to say there and, and they've never written it down and it's been an unexplored thing.

Benjamin Anderson [01:08:40] Yeah. And I wouldn't discourage people, like you were just saying those things that people open up about of like, well, we never told the kids like, your mother and I used to fight or talk about this. And as you're saying that, like, I'd, I, I, I'm thinking of my dad because I'm like, I, you know, he was always very, very transparent about these sorts of things and I think it gave me a lot of wisdom really early on where it's almost like I got to learn through his experience in a way that maybe a lot of other parents don't allow because they have too much pride or too much ego. So, you know, dad, as you're listening, I just wanna say thank you and I love you. Right. But, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:09:15] Well I, so as I hear you, I

Benjamin Anderson [01:09:16] Wouldn't discourage people from doing that.

Vance Crowe [01:09:18] As I hear you say that I'm reminded that my parents never fought in front of us. I mean, the amount of control now that we have a daughter and you know, like, but we, you know, you might see the odd like, well Jim, you know, da da da. But like, it was never, it never boiled over into a disagreement. We, I, I cannot tell you, like we were never a time when I was like, oh, dad thinks this and mom thinks that. So on the one hand that creates a childhood that's really good. Right? That's the, you know, rock solid mom and dad are a central unit. The downside to that is I really didn't know how to fight as an adult, right. Because I'd never seen it. Right? Yeah. I just assumed like, I don't know, somebody's in charge here and we get along and, you know, you make decisions generally

Benjamin Anderson [01:10:03] When I scream, I eventually get what I want or some semblance of it, right?

Vance Crowe [01:10:06] And so that was a whole thing that when you get married, you don't realize, hey, the wife is gonna come in with one experience about how you handle problems and the husband's gonna come in with another. And you know, Ann's parents, my wife's parents figured out how to do business together, figured out how to move around, raise like championship children. So they did it one way and my parents did it another. But now you have to meld those two things together and if nobody ever sat you down and was like, Hey, in the heat of passion of you fighting over this thing, if you say what you really wanna say to burn your wife, then you're left with a wife that's been burned.

Benjamin Anderson [01:10:46] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:10:46] Right. And like, maybe won't, don't wanna do that. But I, I, I don't really know how we got on this riff other than to say like there's a whole lot about being an adult that when you see people being successful at it, you think they always knew how to do it. And these Legacy Interviews are showing me they didn't, and the story to learn how they figured this out, the personal family story are the most interesting stories I've ever heard. Like better than any book I could read.

Benjamin Anderson [01:11:14] Yeah. Hearing people tell those stories.

Vance Crowe [01:11:15] Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Anderson [01:11:16] As you're kind of going to the husband and wife kind of coming to, and there's like that whole, like, have you ever seen you, you've seen a movie called Magnolia,

Vance Crowe [01:11:23] Right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [01:11:24] Yeah. I thought this like, there's a lot of things that tell the similar stale, but like the or story, but like one of the themes it seemed to me was breaking these patterns that are instantiated in you from your lineage, right? Where it's like, it's so, so easy for you to just keep behaving and carrying on what you know, but sort of having enough, maybe it's humility, maybe it's vulnerability to be like, fuck if I just broke that pattern, my life would be so much better slash easier, or I would be able to do X or Y or Z Why don't I just, why don't I just do that? You know, then just frogs raining from the sky and all that fun stuff, kudos to the director. But yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:12:03] So you and I have been talking about doing a retreat. So I host very small retreats right now for a small collection of people that I'm really close with. But other people have heard about these retreats and they've said they're interested in them. And, you know, we talk about having a plan or trying to figure out how to do this. We're trying to figure out would there be people that have not been selected as like my, my, you know, group of friends and a group of people that I want to bring together? How do we do that? And I think one of the first things that we do is we say, Hey, if you are a podcast listener and you would be interested in meeting 14 other people that are interested in what we're interested in, come to this retreat, how do you think, what's the next step we do for that Ben?

Benjamin Anderson [01:12:57] Well fuck man, what a great way to kick it off, right? I think the next thing that I would do is put together probably like a three or four question survey and maybe link it in this episode and say, Hey, drop your email if you're one of those people who's interested, maybe a why are you interested? What would you hope to learn? And maybe like a date range or something like that. And that's probably the next thing. And yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:13:19] I like, for me, I think we would do it in the summer, and I think you're exactly right about, you know, what would people get out of it. I, I have a vision for the fact that a lot of people want to talk about the voice in the back of their head and they want to have a group of people that are not in their local community and trying to figure out, when I've run retreats in the past, people have been like, the most valuable thing is hearing all of these other people's experiences. Correct.

Benjamin Anderson [01:13:46] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:13:46] And the role that I generally play is, not that I have any answers, but I have lots of good questions that it's interesting to hear what other people say. So I don't know, we'll put this on the, on the back burner, but, and the show notes, we'll have a link to a webpage and then, and yeah, some, you can fill out a couple questions. So if you're interested and you wanna be a part of this retreat summer of 2022, we'll do that. The other thing that we've been doing a lot of is the Articulate Ventures network. So that's been pretty cool lately.

Benjamin Anderson [01:14:17] Yeah. The, is it 23rd or 28th that we have our annual meeting this month we did it, we had our first sort of, you know, we started the A VN at the beginning of summer last year, I think it was May. And then by September we had kind of worked out some of our kinks, established some patterns like the culture of the group and in September held this, this is what this is and this is what we think it's gonna be for the next 12 months. And we've stuck to a lot of that and we've varied from a lot of it as well. But

Vance Crowe [01:14:44] Yeah, so we talk about things like, hey, each month we've done a monthly shared experience. So we've done sober October, we've done everybody have a bedtime, we've had take one cold shower a day, we've done all these different experiences. And so in September we're gonna come back and say, Hey, how'd that go? We liked some of these, we liked others. Do we want to change it up? Do we want to do different shared experiences? What way can we make that a more cohesive thing? Or Oh, hey, we did the circular firing squads. These have got a lot of people showing up every month we do 'em a couple times a month. Which topics did we like? Which ones should we do more of? So it's pretty fun to be thinking about the world that we had no idea what we were building when we started a VN

Benjamin Anderson [01:15:28] No, we thought we were supplementing the role of something like a Patreon, right? Because didn't wanna just have this place to be like, you know, Vance is, what's your terminology? Like the, the, you make the joke with like the people behind the bus.

Vance Crowe [01:15:43] Oh, zoom busker, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [01:15:44] Yeah. Like the person on Zoom who doesn't turn on the camera, just the voice of God speaking down. Like Vance didn't wanna be the voice of God. We wanted to build a community and like Patreon is where you go to be the voice of God to take like $5 a month to be,

Vance Crowe [01:15:55] Yeah, pay me for these episodes that I'm putting together. Whereas if you do the network, then you can say, look, all I'm doing is carry on in a conversation

Benjamin Anderson [01:16:05] That

Vance Crowe [01:16:05] We can now react to. You can now tell me, oh, if you thought that was interesting, let's talk to this other person. Or hey, these ideas that you're sharing got me working on this project. So for example, today we had somebody throw in, Hey, I gotta consulting agreement. I've been trying to do more consulting with my farm business. What do you think of these two clauses? And then they get people responding back and forth. Like that doesn't have anything at all to do with the podcast or me, but it's a group of people that have built trust.

Benjamin Anderson [01:16:34] They

Vance Crowe [01:16:34] Know what expertise other people have. It's such an, it's so much more powerful than being like a fundraising site to like, let me buy better camera equipment. To be a, to be a network where people get to build, we're gonna do a retreat for the A VN, which is why we made like, hey, maybe we wanna do a retreat for the Articulate Ventures network. Maybe we'll do one if we get enough of a responsive people that listen to the podcast. But like that one, we're gonna have a retreat this year and we're going to like get people together and see each other in person. And it's an exciting time.

Benjamin Anderson [01:17:04] Yeah. You, you think this year or start of next year?

Vance Crowe [01:17:07] 2022. Yeah. So yeah, 2022. We won't get it in this year. I, I, November I have six talks, so I am like completely busted out. Just

Benjamin Anderson [01:17:16] Fucking how great is that man? Right?

Vance Crowe [01:17:17] Yeah, man. Wild, wild times. You know, a lot of great listeners, they listened to the Arkansas, my grandfathers Zachs talk and yeah,

Benjamin Anderson [01:17:25] A couple weeks ago, boom,

Vance Crowe [01:17:26] I started getting all kinds of requests. I started getting some requests for some really interesting new ones. So one of the groups said, look, the, the fight between our agricultural group and people living in the city continues to get hotter. Will you come and talk with us about why do people in the city want to rule the people in the country? Like why are they doing this and what is it that we should do in order to be able to push back on that? So I call it a conflict older than bread. And, and it is because it, when when human beings first started growing grain, you could grow grain and you'd still live in these tribes. But once you figured out that you could put yeast or you could use the natural yeast and then bake that bread and it would rise a little bit, now you could store the, the, the energy from that, from that ground up wheat for a few more days. And that allows people to cluster together. It gives you a reason to build a giant oven so that that way we can all work together. So bread and cities come together and as soon as you have that, now you have a conflict between the people living on the outside of the city that are producing the wheat and the cattle and the milk and the eggs and those things and the people living in the city. And what the people in the city want is very different. Because if you leave all the rules that require you to be successful in the countryside going in the city, then the city will be a wild west crazy place. So how is this manifesting in society and what can you as the agricultural community do to, to live in a modern age where the conflict is as old as bread?

Benjamin Anderson [01:19:05] Yeah. Reading country mouse and city mouse might be a good case study leading up to preparing for that talk, right?

Vance Crowe [01:19:10] Maybe. Alright, Ben, this has been fun. I appreciate you stopping in here. Any final thoughts before we jump off here?

Benjamin Anderson [01:19:21] None come to mind. Keep, keep on listening. Consider joining the A VN and yeah, if you are someone like this that was totally off the cuff, that wasn't like, hey advance, let's mention their retreat thing during the, that was like, I, I'll be whipping up a webpage or something over the next like couple days and by Monday when this comes out we'll have a link to the retreat.

Vance Crowe [01:19:39] Yeah. And if you sign up to come, it's, you're not committing to anything. You're not, you're not doing anything like that. I think it'll probably be about, I don't know, 750 to a thousand dollars at least this first one. We'll see we gotta just work some things out. But if you think that's something you can pay and you're interested in joining to meet other people that have a Damon and want to talk about things and try and build out a community, then let us know and we'll put together one of those retreats.

Benjamin Anderson [01:20:03] Amen.

Vance Crowe [01:20:04] Alright Ben, thanks for coming by.