Conscious Repository Interview with Vance Crowe

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] I think that in a lot of ways money is time. It's just a mark of when you are spending your time doing something valuable for other people, which is why I despise inflation. I despise the printing of money. It's the federal government taking my time and your time. And they're saying, well, we can from thin air, just print time. But you can't print time. That's, that's a lie. I am Caleb Zi, a precision ag specialist living in Aurora, South Dakota, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today we're gonna do something radically different. I'm not going to host the Vance Grow Podcast today. Instead, what I'm going to do is air an interview that I was on with Ben Anderson. Ben Anderson was the co-founder of Legacy Interviews and he's since gone on to do some other really interesting work. But along with that work, he's decided to host a podcast called Conscious Repository. Ben has sat down with just a couple of guests. I was his second one, and he's deciding to put out these ideas and conversations with people not once a week, not even necessarily once a month, but only when he has the time to have a great conversation. So we sat down to do an interview and I loved the conversation and we heard back from a few mutual friends that it was one of the best conversations they'd ever heard me have because I opened up in ways that I don't normally when I'm hosting the podcast. So we're going to air Ben's episode of Conscious Repository, both as a way for you to get to know some of my backstory a little more, but also so you know about this fantastic podcast and so that we can support Ben Anderson.

Vance Crowe [00:01:38] We're gonna get to that in just a moment, but I wanna talk a little bit about how Legacy Interviews is evolving. A few weeks ago we had somebody call up and say, Hey, we want you to interview mom and dad and it happens to be at the same time when the whole family is in town. So we want you to capture some of the family members and friends telling stories about our mom and dad and then put that into its own separate little video so that not only do we capture their stories, but that they know what we love and care and wanna remember about them. So what we've decided to do is try out making three of these in the upcoming summer where we will travel to the guests, we'll record a fantastic legacy interview either with an individual or a couple, and then we'll spend a day recording the family members and friends that surround the family. We'll also capture a little bit of the footage of your home or maybe your farm, whatever it is that you would like to make sure we capture to catch that rich historical family stories and everything that goes along with it. If you're interested in being one of the first three families to try this service out, then you can contact me directly Vance at Legacy Interviews dot com and we can set up a time to talk about what your family might be interested in when we could do it and if this'll work out. Alright. Right. We're gonna head to the interview with my friend Ben Anderson, recording Conscious Repository. Vance, what is the most important decision you ever made?

Vance Crowe [00:03:11] That was the hardest to explain. Yeah. Marrying my wife, I think, I think that most of the people that knew me at that time, it was a shocking decision. I had just finished graduate school, I had gotten like a really prestigious, pretty well-paying job. I was moving to Washington DC and so like it was gonna be my chance to be a full-blown adult with money and you know, all this potential and in this exciting place. And I was maybe there for two weeks when I met her and I was completely hooked and way, way beyond rationality, like way beyond anything I'd ever been before. And, and so like when my friends heard that I was shopping for a ring, there was like a panic among them, not because they had anything wrong with Anne, but they were like, what's your hurry? Why are you doing this? And I was like, I had no question in my mind that it was the right decision. How long were you two together before you decided that it was time to propose? We got engaged after we'd been dating for six months and probably I'd been dating her for four months by the time I started like looking for a ring. So at that point I was pretty confident. So four months maybe, probably even less than that. What would've been impossible for you to know about yourself if not for being with Anne? Oh, you know, I think that, so my wife is the exact opposite of me and, and like I think a lot of people think that and say that, but like I am a communications person and my wife is an aerospace engineer turned physical therapist, I'm a big picture, let's dream about things.

Vance Crowe [00:04:53] And she is like, I cannot get, I can't move one single step further until I get this detail sorted out. And I think that I always thought that I liked being around the other people that were creatives like me, but with my wife I started to realize like actually literally all of my friends are this way. Like all of my friends, everyone that I spend time with, everyone that I really, really respect are way more highly conscientious, very detail oriented, you know, will go back to the same issue over and over and over again until they clear it up. And so to me Anne revealed something about who I cared about, who I was drawn to that I'd never seen before, even though if you looked back on all of my friendships, most of them had been that way Whenever only the second time that I had met you was the day that you found out you were having a daughter and now you have two daughters. What is different about how you perceive the world now having raised two girls to the ages that they are now that you didn't know about the world before having daughters? Yeah, so they're three and one now, or like three and a half and one and a half they'll tell you. And the day that you were with me when I found that out, like was a profound one because my wife and I had been trying to have kids for years at that point. We had run into, I had some medical issues, we think my wife maybe did. You know, when you, when you're trying to get pregnant, you don't actually know is it that person or is it me?

Vance Crowe [00:06:27] Is it something I did in the past? Is it something genetic? Is it something is inherent? Are we doing something wrong? And so when you're so focused on trying to have children and you can't, it basically blunts everything else out. Like, like you may maybe are going through your life but you're focused on it. So I remember for me, when I was trying to have kids, I remember my, my parents had invested into this like ancestry stuff and that my dad was like, oh Vance, you gotta see this. And he was like pulling out photos and wanted to talk about like his parents and his grandparents. And I was totally alienated by this. I was like, I don't really want to hear about this, I don't really want to talk about this. Because I was starting to feel that pressure of, well what if I can't have kids and what if the only thing that I am in this world is the end of the line, like the the terminal part of the, of the branch. And, and so the reverse then happens, right? Once you have children, then you have this like unexplainable connection to the future where you're not like, oh, at least I'm not like, oh I need to go solve climate change. But I am like, well I'm, the stone is going to go further than just how far I can throw it. So like what is my strategy for being able to make it so this next person that's gonna take the stone and throw it further and, and what do I invest in and and what's the value of my time all becomes very, very different.

Vance Crowe [00:08:02] And those are the kinds of things that like they're running in the background of your mind that change how, like what what you view in front of you, what's a tool, what's an obstacle? All of those things change once you go from not having any children to having children. Was it always a given to you that you would have kids eventually? Or was that unclear for you as like a young man like you might or you might not and it will be what it will be? Yeah, I mean I had a very, very Peter Pan kind of understanding of this. I like, I grew up in a, in a family of, of seven kids. So I was around kids all the time. It wasn't that big of a deal to me. It was kinda like, ah, when you wanna have kids you just decide to, and then when I went on to college and you know, I think a lot of times when young men are successful early or when they, I dunno, success is like a very nebulous term. I don't mean like I was making a lot of money, but I was able to go anywhere and do anything that I wanted. I traveled on ships and traveled all over the world and you start to be like, I don't know, that's only gonna hold me back from these things. I, it is just not on the top of my list. And then after I got married, my wife and I were together for a while and like I said, she's super detail oriented, so she's like, all right, well if we have kids then we gotta start thinking about who's taking them to school, you know, two years from now, you know, something that doesn't even exist. And I'm like, I don't have time for that. Like I've gotta get stuff done now. And, and I remember having a conversation with our, our shared friend Rob Long, where I was like, yeah, I don't know if I'm gonna have kids, right?

Vance Crowe [00:09:35] I look back on that conversation, I can remember exactly where I was and what we were doing and I think like who was that person that thought that because who I am is so clearly defined by being a father? Yeah, it's interesting. I remember a very similar thing where I'm in the backseat of a car with my grandparents and my dad and I say, and I'm young too, I'm like maybe younger than 15 years old. And I say something similar like it's not a given that I'm gonna have kids and I think that I like it. That turned into a thing that was almost a headbutt in the sense that my grandparents couldn't understand why I would've been thinking this way. And my dad was like, you know, our situation wasn't perfect. Like our relationship with our dad was great, but there's other stuff there. And he was like, it would be a shame to miss out on this experience. I just think that you have a, maybe Peter Pan would be the way to put it. Like you have a Peter Pan way of the rest of your life and how it will go if you don't have this experience. And I'm glad we're talking about this because you talk about the concept of memetic desire, right? Which is like, you know, we see what we want and we determine what we want from seeing other people want things out in the world where it's like, I see you raising your daughter in these sorts of things. And I say that to say that I had little to none of that desire to have kids at all until spending as much time as we spent together during the early stages of starting to work together. And it really has changed my life. And like I'm, I'm curious like how would your life be different now or even like in 10 years if you didn't have kids?

Vance Crowe [00:11:13] That's like a very tough question to a answer. You know, I would probably have a lot more money. I don't know that my wife and I would have that close of a relationship. You know, I, I don't actually know what a marriage is without children, particularly once you've crossed the bridge to say like, we are not having children. And one of the, the biggest things, I talk about this all the time on my own podcast, every chance I get is when you're younger you hear like, oh, there's this thing called a biological clock and nobody, nobody, like, they kinda like, ah, but we can do stuff with science and oh it, like it's all gonna work out. But I really didn't understand like, no, there are, there are actual natural laws here that you cannot defy. And, and so like when my wife and I started struggling to have kids, all of a sudden that clock switched off on in my mind of like, I don't know how many years my wife has left that she would even be able to carry a child, but like you can get to a point where that you just can't go back anymore. And so I thought a lot back then about what would life be like and I certainly didn't have any like, well I'll divorce my wife or I'll I'll leave or something. But it would definitely be like I wouldn't live in a city like St. Louis, which is really designed around people being connected with their families. I probably would've gone one of two paths, which would be like, try and be a really exceptional uncle and, and have that role or I would've gone the opposite of like, I'm gonna go live in as many exotic places that I can extensively to try and fill the void of not having the thing that I think is deeply intrinsically human, the need to be apparent.

Vance Crowe [00:12:57] You mentioned being in Washington, DC briefly before where you met your wife. What, what were you doing there before you came to St. Louis? So I went to graduate school to study negotiations in a, in a school outside of New York City. And afterwards I got one of the rare opportunities to go work at the World Bank. And so for people that don't know the World Bank is an international organization, it's the cousin to the un. So the UN decides we wanna cut illiteracy in half in Sub-Saharan Africa. That's just like a prognostication. But then they start saying, okay, well the way that we're gonna do this is that we need to build more schools and those schools need to have electricity and if you're gonna have electricity then you need to have a hydroelectric dam or you need to have some generation. So we're gonna give you a loan for that hydroelectric dam and we're gonna fly people in that are engineers because you know, some Sub-Saharan African country maybe doesn't have hydroelectric dam builders. And, and so I went to work at this place where the World Bank gives that money and has that knowledge and tries to work together. Or at least that would be their positioning. That's the way they would describe it. And I was working in senior leadership, like I helped manage meetings where all of the country directors and sector directors and the president and the boards of directors all came together to have their meetings. So I got to see like, what does leadership think? How are they working? And it was an interesting job.

Vance Crowe [00:14:30] What would the average citizen not know about how their leaders are making decisions that, you know, from having had the opportunity to be in those rooms? Well I went to the World Bank as like a dream come true, right? So I had just finished graduate school and I got like, they, they were the very first people to do like all the diversity requirements on like, we're, we're gonna have so many people from these Asian countries and you're going to only so many black people and so many white people. And so it was very, very rare that I got a ticket in to work there. And then once, so it was a dream of mine and I was thinking the whole time I'd been living my life up till this point, I kept thinking, oh, the reason that my efforts in the Peace Corps didn't change the world is 'cause the Peace Corps is not big enough, right? Or the, the reason that these other things that you're working on to try and make a difference in the world don't work is 'cause there's not enough money or you don't have enough power. And so the World Bank, that's it. That's the top of that mountain. And I got there and I realized that actually centralized power is a horrible thing and these bureaucratic organizations are, you know, nothing but a collection, a marketplace for corruption and, and whether or not every single person is engaged in that corruption, I don't think that's true. 'cause I think there are a lot of people that go there to work and, and are, you know, engaged by the mission. But the leaders are not there to accomplish things for the World Bank. They are there to accomplish things for the country that sent them there.

Vance Crowe [00:16:02] And there are people from 162 different countries and they are all playing games and doing these politics. And, and what I ultimately saw by working in the these like meetings where you'd get to see these country directors and the president come together is that the sector directors would be like, well everything would work fine if those country directors weren't getting in our way. And the country directors would say, well this would work just we would be able to get all this done if the president wasn't stopping us from doing what we need. And he would get up there and say, well it's the managing directors. And then the managing directors would say, no, it's actually the sector directors that aren't doing it. And so everybody's pointing fingers at why they can't do anything and no one is steering the ship and the people that are steering the ship are not steering it based on like, how can we get those hydroelectric dams built so we can get some electricity so those schools can have reading lights so kids can learn. That's not it at all. It's like how can we exert our geopolitical influence in this very, very centralized system. People inside of an organization like that can't possibly be thinking inside of their heads or knowing that they're, what you would say is corrupt, right? A marketplace of corruption. What is the nature of the beast that makes them be in the position that makes someone like you who's maybe more lucid to those types of social patterns, perceive them as corrupt that makes them justify for themselves being in those positions, making decisions in that sort of way? Like what's the story in their head? Everybody's the hero of their own story, right? What's the story that they're telling in their heads that makes them justify working in the ways that you're describing that you perceive as corrupt?

Vance Crowe [00:17:39] Oh, that's a good question. I mean, probably similar to the story that I had, which was, you know, there's something keeping these countries down. There's a reason why people living in Africa or Southeast Asia don't have money. And a lot of it is that, you know, their government doesn't have X and if we could just get that injected into their country, then we would be able to solve that. And so those people are honestly very focused on their one thing. The the challenge becomes like they don't actually have any control or any power over the decisions that they're making. And one of the things that you notice when you go to large bureaucracies is that very power is so distributed within their bureaucracy that no one controls anything. You go to meetings in effect to be able to say like, well why don't we make this decision later? I have to go back and ask if it's okay if I do that. And then you're going back and not asking the person that's pulling the, the strings, you're asking the person that's gonna go ask another person that's gonna go ask another person. And it it, so decisions are never made by the individuals, the boots on the ground. And I think when I started to realize that because of the position I was sitting in, in the World Bank, I wasn't just at the bottom of the organization, I was actually at the top and I saw that like literally none of those people had power to be able to make their own decisions. And so where were these decisions being made from? How did this all get sorted out? And I think that it was just a very unique time for me that I could see what other people didn't get to see that they always imagined that behind those doors that people in leadership positions know what they're doing and they have control and they, and they don't.

Vance Crowe [00:19:25] What made you the odd duck in those rooms? What's different about your moral reasoning or the way that you spot these types of patterns in these groups that made you reflect on it to enough of a degree that you eventually left, right? Like you left the World Bank. What's different about you and why did you leave? I am like a very odd combination of like personality traits, right? If they're all dials on a, on a switchboard, I'm like really enthusiastic. I'm highly emotional. So I'm like, I can get excited. I, and I can tell a lot of these things 'cause I can see it on my children, but I am very much this way. And so that makes me a communicator. I like connecting with people. But I have this one switch that's flipped in a very weird way that most communicators don't have is that on a scale of zero to a hundred for disagree ability or for agreeability, I'm a one, right? I am extremely disagreeable and meaning that like I don't have a problem with you and I having conflict for me that conflict has, it doesn't emotionally weigh on me or it does if if like there's something that needs to be said, but like I don't want to move forward until like we've declared what's going on here. And I found very quickly in a bureaucracy, this does not fit. Bureaucracies are designed for people that are highly agreeable and if you are a highly disagreeable person, you get pushed out into the periphery. And so I was in a communications role where my job was to like get people to get along, get people to share things, and then at the same time I'm like really disagreeable.

Vance Crowe [00:21:00] So when I had a question of why I would pursue it and I think that that that's always kind of made me a little bit different than other people I'm around. What are your friendships? Like, how does this change the types of people that you surround yourself and choose to spend time with outside of work? Well, I don't know, I'd probably turn that back around on you. Like I think that most of my friends are driven by some internal voice and that that internal ver voice makes us get along better rather than cause us conflict. And I think a lot of the other people I'm around have conflict with a lot of other people, but I don't, maybe you'd be able to describe it better. Yeah. So for context, right? You and I spend a sizable amount of time together for the better part of three years. We worked together on a number of different things. I got involved in, started A business together. Yeah, yeah. Started a business together. The room that we're in now, I'd like to give you an opportunity and a little bit to talk about what you do here, but as far as, yeah, Vance and Ben spend a lot of time together. The thing that I think that I perceive in your social group, like I tell the story sometimes to like other people who know me, I'm like, I never felt like I had imposter syndrome for the longest time. And like I, you know, did the thing where I started a business at 19 and would get in rooms that I might otherwise have had no business being in. But in Ben's head, I never had the feeling like of imposter syndrome. Like I shouldn't be in this room or I shouldn't be in this room until I started hanging out with Vance Crowe and his friends because I was like, oh my goodness, these people are lucid to the games that people are playing to get ahead in society and choosing not to play those games anyways based on whatever moral frameworks they might be subscribed to or different values that they had come to that might be more broadly categorized as conservative and like, yeah, the, the exposure to the types of people that you surround yourself with was one of many things that I got from my relationship with you that changed my life.

Vance Crowe [00:23:08] But I wanna dig into the voice that you mentioned in terms of like that voice in your peer group that kind of keeps everybody on the same page. What is that and what do you think is going on there? Because it's not that everybody has the same goal defined in like high fidelity, like you want to achieve this or Rob wants to achieve this or whoever wants to achieve a different thing. What is that voice and why does it keep your peer group on the same page? Yeah, so I think the voice you're referring to is what we kind of described as the Damon. So this is not my term, this is like gta, this is several philosophers that are describing something that everybody feels everybody, every single person on earth except for Jared Holst. We one time talked about this, but I think he may, he may have it, but just describe it differently. But the voice, the way that I would describe it is you're having an internal dialogue with yourself, right? You're like talking about should I do this, should I do that? And you're talking to someone, who is it that you're talking to, right? Well, it's myself, right? But if you really break it down and you're like, well, who's responding back? Or, or when I get really worked up and I'm like, you know, rehashing the argument that I just had with my friend or my spouse or whatever, who am I performing that for? Right? It's for myself. Well that self is somehow like inside of you and you could say, well there's a lot of different selves. I have all these different voices, or I have one i's kind of hard to distill and until, but the most important thing is until you name it, like you don't really have an awareness that most of what we think of as thinking is really an emotional conversation with you're having with this inner self that I think is the Damon.

Vance Crowe [00:24:57] And I, I would say one of the selection pressures for people that I spend time with that regularly or wanna be around is that they are driven by this voice, whether they call it the demon that's not important, but they, they have some sort of a voice and that voice like, I don't want to overinflate it. It's not like it's impenetrable. It's not like it can't be, you know, guide you down a path that could be, you know, troublesome. But like when you're listening to it and you're aware of it, you're able to do things in the world that you, you wouldn't naturally because otherwise you're caught up by the, the thing you described before, mimetic desire, not what is it that I want me and my Damon, but what is it that other people want? Oh, I want that too because then I can know I have some kind of prestige or social status by, by achieving it. How closely related is the idea of the Damon to what most people might call intuition? Are they similar? Are they the same thing? Yeah, I think probably that's indistinguishable, right? At least for me. One of the things I mentioned Jared Holst not having a voice and, and it, that actually comes from a conversation that he and I had. Jared is a, a very successful businessman. He is an an attorney, he does a lot with real estate and I really enjoy talking to Jared because we have very different perspectives, but have many of the same values, which is, it is very rare to have that. But with Jared, one time I was asking him like, Hey, do you know about this thing? Like the voice of resistance, Right?

Vance Crowe [00:26:27] Which Steven Prescott talks about in his book, the voice of resistance is like, hey, you start working out and you're like, Hey, I'm gonna work out every day this week. So the first day you get up and you feel great about it, even day two you're like, look how great I am. I, I did two days of working out. And then on the third day there's that voice that's like, you know, you really ought to be more careful. You don't wanna work out too much. You might get hurt, or oh, you know, it'd be better for you to get sleep than it would be for you to work too hard. Now that voice of resistance, I was saying, Jared, you're incredibly successful and very disciplined about getting your exercise in. How do you deal with the voice of resistance? And he says, well, I don't, I don't have one, right? And I'm like, what do you mean you don't have a voice of resistance? Like I just, I just, when I decide to do something, I just go do it. And so for me that that really struck me. I actually created like a wedge between me and him because I was like, something's not right with a person that doesn't have this voice. But over time I've come to realize like, no, he is, I, it's not that he does or doesn't have that voice, it's he has intuition. That intuition guides him in the same way that my voice guides me. And so they're probably very similar if not the same thing just put to a different word. But it's kind of, intuition is probably best described as the voice of inside of you getting ideas into your decision making path to help you, to help guide you along the way. Something that's probably deeper than just regular logic would get you. What would be an example of a time that you felt so strongly called to listen to that voice that it was like actively against what you would've rationalized to be like your self-interests, whether that was like a moral draw in this direction or the intuitive draw to do this thing or this business or whatever.

Vance Crowe [00:28:16] Is there an example that comes to your mind for that? Yeah, so I worked as the director of millennial engagement for Monsanto. And this was a great job. This like, people really hated Monsanto. They thought that they were an evil company. And I was invited to be like, all right, we as a company, Monsanto, believe that our products are good and that what we're doing is a valuable thing to the world. Our our customers agree they like us. And so I got to take these two traits that I have that are kind of rare, you know, communications and a love of talking with people and crazy high in disagree ability. So I could go and, and be in a room where people were gonna try and shout me down or try and, you know, get in a disagreement with me. So this is a great job and I did this for several years and eventually Monsanto was bought out and I had a chance really to leave the company. And the way that they would have you leave is they would say, we wanna support whatever you're gonna do next. We're gonna write you a sizable check. And that sizable check will set you up. You probably won't have to work for a year or two years, maybe longer, but you just have to sign this thing that says you'll never say anything negative about the company or your work. And, and so like logic and intuition would say, well, just sign it because you don't have anything negative to say about them. I don't have anything negative to say. I, I don't, there's not like, I was not waiting for some opportunity to jump out and be like, surprise, I knew all these things and I just never told you.

Vance Crowe [00:29:48] But it just really didn't feel good. There was like an intuition that said, if you sign this, you are saying forever, you will not say something negative about them. And like, even though I rationally knew that I could accept that it would be totally morally acceptable, it would be valuable to my family. There was something about ever signing a form that would block me from being able to say what I wanted and to be able to always say no. The reason I'm saying this to you now is not because I was paid 10 years ago, not to say something bad, but because this is what I really believe. And that was like a very, very difficult decision because I was leaping out into the unknown and that money would've made that leap a lot easier. Yeah. As I hear you say that, like I'm, I'm thinking of a time, there was a group that I wanted to be associated with and like I had applied two or three years in a row to like be a fellow or something like this. And then I got invited to speak at one of their events. And so I went and gave the talk and then it was recorded and it went out and it was like, here, you know, so and so organization fellow Benjamin Anderson gives this talk. And I had to write the organizers and I was like, I'm not a fellow. Like we need to, we need to rectify the way that this is being presented. And there was something similar there because I had an an exchange with my last guest actually I sif. And he was like, it's in your interests to be perceived as associated with this group. And I was like, yeah, it is now, but there's something off about the way that that laid out that made me not want to continue being associated with that group.

Vance Crowe [00:31:30] And the way that I've post rationalized it is that to me, like allowing yourself to wear that flag. I mean the values of that group can change over time, you know what I mean? And so I didn't want to be tethered to a thing that I would not be in control of in the future. And what I think I'm hearing you say is something similar in the sense of you don't have anything negative to say about Monsanto right now, but if in the future you do, you don't want to be tied to a contract or some chunk of money that you took 10 years in the past that would make you be tied to a certain path that you're not in alignment with later. But it's interesting you said like you don't, you joined Monsanto and they were a good company and you enjoyed that position. I've heard you tell the story, you did not perceive this on the way in, you actually were opposed to the idea of working there. Like, like tell that tale and why did you decide to take the position with Monsanto? Yeah, so I was, when I moved to St. Louis, my wife and I had left Washington DC I had hated working at the World Bank. She had been an aerospace engineer and decided like, I don't actually get to do engineering. I'm spending my day doing like spreadsheets and there's not real engineering that's available to me right now. So she decided to become a physical therapist. So we moved to St. Louis 'cause they have a great physical therapy program here. And I start my own company and my company does, okay, like I'm, I am doing communications, I don't really know what I'm doing, I just didn't wanna work for somebody after my bad experience at the World Bank. And after a few years I got an invitation to interview at Monsanto for this, you know, job director of millennial engagement.

Vance Crowe [00:33:05] And my wife is over the moon about this. 'cause she's like, Hey, this would be a steady income. You don't have to be an entrepreneur anymore, why don't you go do it? And I'm like, I have literally no interest in this because if you think about my career path, which was I was in the US Peace Corps, I was at the World Bank, I worked in community public radio, like I'd done all these things and if there's one thread that runs through all of them, it is that everybody, everybody, everybody knew that Monsanto was evil. So I ended up being like, well if it'll make my wife happy to go to this interview, fine. Also, like I'm gonna go and who doesn't want to see inside of North Korea, right? Like I'll, if I took the interview, I'll get to go check out the place on the inside. And so I went there and I pulled onto campus and I was immediately disappointed because what I was imagining was that I was going to pull up to an 80 story building where dark storm clouds were all around it and that everybody would be wearing black suits and matrix style sunglasses. And I pull onto this campus and it's like, you know, two story buildings and a fountain and it looks like a college campus. And the person that greets me at the front door, his name is Holly, and she has a ponytail and is wearing a sweater. And so like, I'm like, well, you know, this is disappointing. And I go in to do the interview and they had about seven hours worth of interviews, so seven different panels that I had to do. And I don't know if you've ever interviewed for a job that you don't want, but it is about as much fun as you can possibly have because you can say anything that you want.

Vance Crowe [00:34:37] And so they're asking me questions like, you know, what's your preferred management style? And I, I'd answer, well, I like to get into work early and you know, da da da da and why are you causing Indian farmers to commit suicide? And so then they'd like answer my question and then ask me more about management. And every single time I'd ask 'em questions like, why are you suing farmers? Why are you allowing all this pollution to go into the Gulf of Mexico? And the whole time they answer my questions genuinely with interesting things I'd never heard before. And I get all the way through to the end of the interview, still not really having any interest in the job. And the woman, Holly came back in and she sits across the table from me and she's like, okay, we've just done these panels of interviews, you know, they're very, very thorough on who they were gonna hire for this job. And so she says, do you have any last questions for me? And I said, yeah, you're hiring for this director of millennial engagement, you know, you've never had anybody do this and people hate this company. How are you gonna train a person to do this job? And Holly kind of paused and then she said, well, you know, whoever we hire, we are very big on training people based on what their skillset is. And since you've been so curious, I think is the way I would describe that, then what I think I would do is I would line up a list of 50 people from throughout the company, chemists, breeders, geneticists, farmers attorneys, and I have you sit down and talk with each one of them for an hour. And then when you get done with that list of 50 people, you and I will sit down and we'll figure out what you do and don't know, and then I'll write you another list of 50 people to go talk with until you feel ready to go out and talk about the company.

Vance Crowe [00:36:14] And in this moment, like a light bulb went off in my head, I was like, these people are insane. They have no idea what I could do. Because if I can run around and ask anyone anything that I want, I am going to discover if there's anything nefarious going on. And if I do discover that anything nefarious is going on, well then I'm gonna go write the greatest tell all book of all time from inside Monsanto. And then another idea creeped into my mind, which is, but even if I'm wrong, even if there's nothing nefarious going on, well then maybe you've just stumbled upon one of the most important communications problems in the history of modern civilization, which is you're growing food more bountifully than you ever have before. And yet people are afraid and angry about where their food is coming from. So I am going to get to go inside and discover one of these two truths. And so I went from not wanting the job to being like, this is the job of a lifetime. And I ended up getting the job and taking it and, and having a, a wild experience learning all about how food is actually produced in this country, how the regulations work, how the FDA and EPA work and really like our, the, the very core inner working of the American economy is agriculture. And I got, I got to explore it and really got to, you know, build a relationship into it. What do urbanites not understand about rural communities? Hmm. I'll take the baton for one minute.

Vance Crowe [00:37:45] I'll say something that I've heard you describe in the past, and it's that, you know, that people think that farmers are these country bumpkin people that are, you know, rolling around and tending to their crops, but really they've got these quarter million dollar offices that they're sitting in all day, which is, they're tractors that are pegged to their satellites and they're zigzagging across thousands of acres of beautiful farmland in the middle or the coastal United States or wherever, right? And many, many of those people, the people who listen to your podcast right, are inside of there all day and they're, they're consuming information and they're looking at what's going on outside of their locale in the world. And like, these are, these are smart, capable people. And that's like, I I, I recall I've gone to a couple of these events with you sometimes and I've, I've grown to have a respect and a perception that I didn't have. And I, I came from a town of like 10, 20,000 people, which isn't super, super small, but small enough that like, you know, farmers and you see farmland in rural Missouri and like you get this class of character and the first thing that I did when I got outta high school was right. I beelined it to Denver and I crashed and burned out there. And that's what landed me back out in St. Louis. But yeah, back to you. What's, what's something else that people in urban communities don't understand about the way that rural systems work? I think that people in urban environments don't understand that people living in the countryside are living in high trust environments. And it actually changes who you can be as a person because in a, in a place like a city, you are among hundreds, thousands, millions of people.

Vance Crowe [00:39:22] And so many of your interactions are transactional, right? If you don't take this table at the restaurant, there's somebody else that's going to, you're gonna encounter so many people and you're gonna benefit from having these highly networked communities where you can meet lots of people and have ideas move really quickly. But what you don't get out of that is high trust. So you have to be showing your worth, you know, day in and day out. It's very, very quick. Whereas in the rural communities, these people see each other over and over and over again. Not only do you know the parents of that kid you met, you also probably know their cousins, you know, who they're all related to you. You can drive past an like a, a fabrication building and you can know 80% of the people working inside of there. And the effect of that is you can behave differently with those people because you are going to have so many repeated interactions with them that you can build networks that allow you to do things that people can't do in cities or can't do very easily. And I think that we are watching right now in our modern society, the difference or what happens over time when you have really fast efficient networks in cities that allow you to, you know, make ideas move really quickly. And when you have people that are living in much slower but much higher trust networks, they end up desiring different things. They end up having different things that they can pursue and I think they have a different richness or quality to their lives.

Vance Crowe [00:41:01] A mutual friend of ours and I have been talking a lot about how you can expedite the process of building a high trust network. Not that we have a high time preference to have one immediately, but one of the things we've came to in saying this is that there's, there's the facet of spending time together, but then we've kind of identified two other things that factor into the degree of trust that can be built amongst the types of networks that we're talking about over a given span of time. And one of those things is the intentionality of how you show up. Like if you come into the room and you know, we know what we're doing every time we get together, then that's something that factors into the degree of trust that's built up over a given period of time. That's different from if you just went to the bar or the movies or to grab lunch once a week for, you know, a year straight. So there's that. And then the second one that's interesting that we're starting to play with is changing the environment where you meet. Because if you meet, like I said at the restaurant or the bar or the basement or wherever, and you're switching that up and maybe it's this concert hall or maybe we're going camping this weekend or something like this, putting the high trust group in different settings being something that can also increase the rate at which sort of trust is built amongst that group. I'm curious because I borrow from your wisdom in thinking about a lot of these things, like is it, is it something that's worth thinking about, for lack of a better term, trying to expedite that process given the, the reason we are thinking about expediting is because we live in a chaotic world and we see the importance of having high trust networks, but to you like either a, what are the ways that you would think about expediting the process of building trust amongst groups of people like you're talking about, or b is that sort of a fool's errand and that you shouldn't be trying to rush something like that?

Vance Crowe [00:42:57] So I think that you are onto something about like how can we facilitate the, you know, more high trust situations? And I think that the reason you're having to build it from scratch is because a lot of our social technologies, the rotary clubs and the the various organizations that people used to just join in order to get those, they're not necessarily adapted to today's current environment. But I think that I learned something really valuable when I was living in, in Africa, in Kenya, when somebody gets sick or somebody dies, you go to say Poe, so you go to their home. And I one time went to a, a funeral and I was really in a big rush. I didn't have that much time and I was like, I, I needed to go. And I went with my friend Daniel, and we make this long, long trip to get to this funeral and, and we go in there and we're there to say Poe, but I think we're gonna walk up to the widow and we're gonna say, oh, Poe, you know, I'm sorry for your loss, right? And, but we didn't, we went over and sat with a bunch of men and we drank tea and I was like, I, I think I had some kind of intestinal problem or whatever, but I'm, I'm like drinking these cups of tea thinking that like, when I get it all the way empty and Daniel can hear that clink of my cup on the, on the table, that he's gonna say, okay, it's time for us to get up and go. But really what I was doing is I was signaling to the little girl that was responsible for filling up everybody's tea to bring me more tea.

Vance Crowe [00:44:31] So I'm like drinking this tea, I'm hyper caffeinated, I've got this intestinal challenge, I don't want to be there. And I'm like, finally Daniel and I get up to leave and we don't go over to the widow, we, we, we just walk out to leave. So I'm like, Daniel, what do you, what are we doing here man? Like we gotta go say Poe. We didn't say Poe. And he's like, he looks at me like I'm crazy. And so we keep walking and like we get to this place where we're gonna have to walk down this thing, this valley. And I'm like, Hey man, we like did not go say Poe, I didn't come all the way out here, waste all this time to not say Poe. And he's like, thinks I'm totally crazy and he starts walking down the valley. So now I'm like stomping around. I'm in my early twenties so I'm like impetuous and you know, prone to emotion. I'm jacked up on caffeine and we're walking and I end up tripping over this branch and Daniel turns around and he says, po pana, so it means, hey Poe, Poe means go slowly slow down. Right? And that hit me like a ton of bricks that the word Poe, meaning, I'm sorry, is also Poe Poe meaning slowly. And what Daniel had done was really the only thing you can do when somebody sad is that he went and he spent time with them. He wasn't there to like accomplish something or get a checkbox done. He was, when somebody is sick or they're, you know, somebody's died or you have some grieving process, the only thing you can give people that is of any value at all is your time.

Vance Crowe [00:46:05] And being slow with somebody is far better than any words that you could say for them. And that really helped me to understand in a really deep way that high trust societies can only be built by using time and spending it together and finding as many environments as you can will enable that, that time and that trust to, to kind of go hand in hand. But there is no way to accelerate the time. You just, you have to spend it with people. When did you start valuing time more than money? I think that in a lot of ways money is time and that it, it's just a mark of when you are spending your time doing something valuable for other people, which is why I despise inflation. I despise the printing of money because it's the federal government taking my time and your time and the time of all these people that are in hotels cleaning them and digging rocks out of the ground to do things. And they're saying, well, we can from thin air, just print time, but you can't print time. That that's, that's a lie. And so what they're actually doing is they're stealing time straight out of whatever wealth people have accumulated in US dollars or Canadian dollars or whatever that is. And so I don't know that I value time more than money, but I am hyper aware of the value of my time and really, really hyper aware of the most valuable thing that I have, which is my attention and where I wanna spend that attention.

Vance Crowe [00:47:45] Do I wanna spend it on things that are helping me accumulate more value or time or am I spending that value and time because I'm doing something that, you know has meaning to me? If needing to spend your time doing things of value to others was no longer part of the equation that you had to factor in, how, how would you spend most of your time? What are the problems that you'd solve or would you spend it with your family? So the question you're asking is like, if you didn't have to worry about money Yeah. What, what would you do? I'd probably be doing pretty much exactly what I'm doing right now. I think like I run a business and I have people that work for me or with me and right now it is very, very important to me that they all be secure 'cause they have gi they are giving me their time and their attention and their skills. And so I spend a lot of time trying to secure that and make sure that it can propagate as well as make it valuable for my own family, right? Can we make enough money to pie the things that we need and get my children educated so they can have skills that make their time more valuable? And if I didn't have to worry about that, I would probably just go bigger on what I'm doing. I would probably continue to give my employees the tools that they need to do their work better because we are really in the business of making beautiful art. And I would probably make it so that my wife didn't have to stretch as much to take care of our kids and things like that.

Vance Crowe [00:49:16] Like I think I would use money to make things easier for me to do more of what I'm doing right now. Which is, which is what we're in your space really. This is where you do the Vance Crow podcast and this is also where you do something called Legacy Interviews. Why did you slash we start that business around two years ago, what underlying problem is being solved in the world by creating these pieces of art with families? And yeah, talk, talk more about what is it that gives you that internal drive to make it the thing that you would do independent of if it was tethered to money? So Legacy Interviews is a service where I record the life stories of individuals and couples so that future generations have the opportunity to know their family history. And when you and I started this, it started as like a total accident, right? I had, we had the podcast, you were helping me all the time with that, you were the producer of it and we developed listeners that like loved it. And so one time I had a listener stop by the house to drop off a book and he had a son with him, six years old. The son heard my voice and his eyes get really big and he's like, oh my gosh, like you're the guy on the radio. And so I was like, oh, do you wanna do, do you wanna go record a podcast? And this kid lit up. So we go downstairs and I have a photo of it in the other room and the, and the kid sits down across from me and his legs are dangling off the end of the chair and turn off on the lights and the cameras and he is got his headphones on and he answers questions like he's on 60 Minutes or meet the press, right?

Vance Crowe [00:50:53] He's like totally engaged in this and I'm asking him questions that a 6-year-old could answer, which are like, what do you think your dad does all day at work? Or who's your best friend? Or what do you wish mom let you eat more of? And he's gives them these great, really serious answers, you know, takes it very seriously. We finish up the interview, I edit it, I send it to his dad, you know, just for fun. And his dad calls me up a couple weeks later and is like, Hey man, the other day I was at a party and we were playing this game and a question came up in the game. If your house were on fire and you could only grab one thing, what would it be? He was like, I knew instantly it would be the interview you did with my son and he's like, I think it's because one, if I had asked him those questions, he wouldn't have answered them the same way. And two, I can't go back and get that again. That that is like the most valuable thing that I own. I think you really ought to consider this. You ought to do something with this. So I went out on the podcast, I think actually at your suggestion and was like, Hey, it's three months before Christmas if anybody Wants me. Yeah. We made a landing page and we were like, we've got 10 of these to sell before Christmas. There's 10 spots Now. Yeah, we've got so many done. We, we couldn't even get 'em all done before Christmas. And that's when I was like, wow, there's a demand here. People want to capture their family stories. And so we got into this and I thought it was gonna be really easy because like, oh, if this beginning thing was easy, then this will all be easy. But what I came to realize is that modern society has radically changed not just the lives of young people, but of older people too.

Vance Crowe [00:52:32] So it used to be that families lived so much closer together that as granddad or grandma were taking care of kids, they would be telling them stories about when they were young and they'd be talking about like lessons that they've learned. And we can obviously see the value that that is for the child, right? You hear these stories and you get to pull wisdom out of it so that you don't make the same mistakes of about vices or you observe things about the world that's more clear because you've had somebody give you guidance. It's very clear that young people that know their family stories are in a much better position. But the thing that I didn't know until I'd done this for a couple of years now, is that the act of telling your story, the being the older person that talks about what was it like when I was young? What, who were my parents friends with? What did I spend money on? What, what challenges did I have in my work? By going back and looking back in your life and telling those stories, you're actually oftentimes revisiting a memory that you didn't know that you had. And we need to do that because as we are moving from the stage of our lives where we are the highly productive, you and I are both in the highly productive time. We don't have time to stop and think and you know, talk with like everybody about our, our memories. We gotta get stuff done. But when you hit a certain age, you need to let go of being the to do highly productive person and you wanna move to being the wise person. And I believe that that transformation happens as you tell stories.

Vance Crowe [00:54:03] And so for me, one of the biggest values of this business has been helping people have an opportunity to unlock some of those stories and tell them so that they can let go of being that hyper-productive person and become the wise person. And the, what I've found from the clients that we have is that when you get done doing your Legacy Interviews, it doesn't actually stop you telling stories. It actually begins because you start to see grandparents being like, oh, my kids and grandkids do wanna know these stories. And by doing that, you're facilitating a movement that I think has become kind of stagnated in our culture, Which is what movement, The movement that in order to move from being a productive person to being a wise person, you have to tell your stories. I don't think we are telling stories. I think older people are oftentimes in retirement communities or living far away from their kids and they just don't have that chance. And this is a way to facilitate that in an important way. Other than the podcast, where do you tell your stories so that you can internalize the wisdom that you're coming to from your experiences? Or is it the podcast is the outlet? I actually, probably my children, you know, my, my, my daughter, I, I never, I didn't, I didn't realize that this would happen, that like, when she started to realize that I was a little boy, this made her completely fascinated about like, tell me about when you were a little boy. And I've come to realize that there's a lot of information I can convey to her that sits better with her, that she understands more intuitively when I tell it to her in the format of a story about me or a story about, you know, uncle Dan or about, you know, aunt Kelly.

Vance Crowe [00:55:44] And so we do a lot of storytelling at my house and a lot of it's prompted by my little girls wanting to know all about, tell me when you were a little boy. I wanna talk a little bit about negotiation with you because, so you bought me out of this business in May of last year, and I tell the story, you made that as easy as it could have possibly been. In fact, I remember coming in and like there was an opportunity I had and there was a version of it where it lasts three days and there was a version where I go pursue this opportunity for a month and almost immediately after that you're like, Ben, would you take it as aggressive or would you take it as a relief if I offered to buy you out of the business we're working on together. And I had been to some degree, and turmoil might be a strong word, but I'd been in conflict, I was like, I definitely wanna take advantage of this and go do this thing for upwards of a month, but I'm also definitely, you know, own half of a business that I'm running with this person that I wanna see successful and I believe in what we're doing. And you know, I cocked my head and I said, I think that I would take that as a relief. And you slammed the table and you said, well then let's find a way to do that. That makes us both feel great. I've learned a lot about negotiation from you and I'm queuing it up because I know you're working on it. You've got a book in the works on some of the things that the, the pieces of wisdom. Talk about what makes the way that you negotiate and come to solutions with the people in your life different from other, other negotiation systems.

Vance Crowe [00:57:24] Well, negotiations is my favorite thing to talk about. And I had a chance when I was in graduate school to study under a Chinese professor named Xang won. And he taught me basically a philosophy and then that philosophy permeated into negotiations. And really it was, it's about interest. So I'm an interest based negotiator and my goal is to deeply understand first what am I interested in? What is it that I actually want in a situation? And what is it that you actually want? And when I say that, like it seems intuitive, like, well obviously you know, I get what you want and get the other, but, but the reality is, most of the time when we negotiate, what we do is we have this argument in our, in our brain of like, how much can I get? And then I'm gonna put my position out to you and I'm gonna see, does he accept my position? Does he need me to come back? Do we need to compromise? And we don't actually sit down and think about what is the optimal solution that we can arrive at that both you and I are delighted with what's happened. And so, so this then kind of propagates the situation you and I are in are really in every situation is that when you find like, Hey, I need something from this person first you have to stop yourself and you have to say, why do I need this? Like, what is it that's important about this? And then you need to think about, well, what is important with the other person? And, and the example that I always give super simple is I talk about, let's say there's an orange sitting here in between the two of us and I say, Hey, I want that orange.

Vance Crowe [00:58:58] And you say, I, I want that orange too, right? Well, what are the solutions that we could have to be able to, to have that orange, right? Well you could get the orange and I could get nothing. I could get the orange, you could get nothing. Or we could do what everybody always says is the most fair thing to do, which is cut the orange in half, right? You take half and I take half to the interest based negotiator. That's a failure by just splitting the orange. I, I didn't want half the orange. I said, I want the orange, right? And you said you want the orange. So we've both, while we've got half of what we want, we both got half not what we wanted. So the interest based negotiator starts from the position of, well, why do I want the orange? And then I want to know why you want the orange. So imagine in this scenario, if we found out like, well you're really thirsty and I'm making essential oils. Well now we've just come up with the perfect solution because now we can find out, well you can have all that juice, you squeeze it out and then give me the peels. 'cause all I want is the peel out of that to be able to get the essential oils out of it. And so had we known that we both could have gotten a hundred percent of what we wanted. Now in interest based negotiations, oftentimes you could say, well, what if we were both thirsty, right? Like, what, what would we do then? Well then we would wanna say like, alright, well what could we together do with this orange that might be able to solve that we're thirsty? Are we only thirsty for orange juice? Or would us having this orange here allow us to go trade somebody else or get, make the situation broader? And so this philosophy is one that once you internalize it, once you actually believe in interest based negotiating and you are comfortable enough with the dialogue going on in your brain that you can trust that you're always gonna get slowed down to be like, wait, wait, wait.

Vance Crowe [01:00:41] What is it that I actually want? Not not what do I think I can get? And how can I help you discover and discuss what it is that you want? Then doors open up for you. The possibilities of of what you can achieve in life become almost indescribable. And so then you spend the rest of your time not worrying about how can I become a better interest based negotiator, but how can I get better at helping you realize what it is that you actually want and be able to articulate it so that that way I can meet what you need. And so that way you'll give me what I need. I just heard you describe this and it added something to the way that, so for as a sidebar, people who are listening will, some people who are listening will for sure be like, oh my gosh, I've heard Ben give this riff before. Except usually when I know I'm gonna give this riff in a situation, I make sure that I'm drinking a negroni or an old fashioned so that I have the orange peel in there. And I'm like, what you didn't realize person across the table for me is that I wanted the peel to make negronis and you were hungry. Right? But going back to what I just heard you say, that added a new layer to this for me just now, is the idea of you can layer this out and view it as like a positive sum game. And what I mean by that is you said like, if we're both thirsty, like that is the, that is the counter argument. Like, if we're both hungry or we're both thirsty, or we both wanna make negronis or whatever, we can look at the assets we have and we can zoom out and we can say, how can we use the assets that we have in order to still get what we both want? And yeah, like that's, that's a realization that I'm coming to just now as I've heard you describe that.

Vance Crowe [01:02:14] Well, and once you really start seeing this, like you start realizing like most of the time we get caught up in like these tiny positions that are just on this one thing. But like you can open it wide open, like, you know, as a part of our discussion when we were doing negotiations, it could be like, well hey man, I really want to start a podcast and if I get out of the business, I'm not gonna be able to do that. But you don't consciously think that, right? You're like, you're just like it, because most of the time the things that you desire are a jumbled mess inside of you. And so getting people to talk about what it is that they want helps you discover like, oh wait a second, there are ways that we could work together that we didn't even know were possible and now we may actually come out with a better solution than than just that orange. Maybe now we're selling a house or something, you know, maybe we're working on another business together. So it's very important to get out of the mindset of I want that thing. And really get into the mindset of why do I want what I want and why does this other person want what they want? And don't guess find out. There's one more thing I want to talk about with you before we kind of wrap up. And it's a, a framework you created while you were at Monsanto and it's the, the up the graph strategy for changing public opinion and disseminating information and understanding how people who are down the graph get the information that they do. Talk about this, maybe give some examples of how you implemented this at Monsanto and how you continue to think about this framework.

Vance Crowe [01:03:47] So the up the graph strategy came from the very beginning when I was working at Monsanto and I was like, why is it that everyone knows that Monsanto is evil? Why did I know that all the way down in my soul? And so I started to try and figure out, with the help of other very smart people, where do ideas come from? Like how, how do you discover something new? How do you come to know or believe something? And basically what we came away with is that you can kind of track where ideas come from and how they, they filter out into society. So let's imagine you have a graph on the y axis. You have the value of an idea, and on the X axi you have the number of people that know that idea. So let take for example, you're hacking away through the genome of corn and ping, you discover something totally new and novel. The value of knowing that idea is really high, but the number of people that know that idea is very low. But now let's take it away from just that. Let's zoom the camera lens out and say, well, what if we weren't talking about, you know, A GMO? What if we're talking about any piece of information like a stock tip, right? So you imagine that as more and more people find out about that stock tip, the value of that information goes down, the ability to use it as more and more people hear about it. And I always describe like when I would get a phone call from my mother and she would say, Vance Vance, I was watching CNN or M-S-N-B-C or Fox and I heard this thing about GMOs to my mother.

Vance Crowe [01:05:21] That idea is where, you know, cutting edge, right? That that's like where news happens. But you know, one time I was giving this presentation in a, in a grain trader one time heard me describing this, and he said, we know that if you're getting your stock tips from CNN or Fox, you're way too far behind. And Monsanto or other large organizations, they wait until ideas are way further out to, to be able to interact with them. So as the director of millennial engagement, my job was to figure out where should I go along this graph of where people are hearing ideas to be able to interact with them. Because the further that you wait to go down that graph, you're hitting more people, but the amount of money or resources that it takes to make a blip there is really high. 'cause on, if you're talking about CNN, you're not just talking about GMOs, you're talking about people that want to make sure that my mom knows that Tide is the most great laundry detergent or you know, that she should buy this car. So we started going up that graph, right? So maybe the wired or vice or you know, Reddit or any of these things. And what you notice is as you go up that graph, the audiences get smaller and smaller, but the depth with which people wanna know things gets deeper and deeper. So we always mark on that, on that point, you eventually go up high enough under that graph and there's that point where, you know, when you're at a party and everybody's sitting around like talking about the news of the day, and there's always that one guy that's sitting there waiting for a break in the conversation, and then he goes, well, actually, and then he tells you what he knows and it's usually he got that information from somewhere else so he knows just a little bit more than everybody else.

Vance Crowe [01:06:57] So he gets to be the person that then tells everybody what, what the real thing is. So my goal was as director of millennial engagement was to get above that well actually guy to try and go to places where new ideas were starting and where they were getting put out into the world. And that would be a much better place to try and find people that could change their opinion on things like GMOs or the value of pesticides. And then once we had this idea, you start looking around and you realize like, wait a second, this is actually how all ideas distribute out into the world. And so we kind of named it the well actually graph and, and it's been very helpful to me to, to try and figure out why people believe what they believe. What is one of the ideas you've come across sort of in the ecosystems that you've been a part of and an idea that you've come across that you think is one of the most important things? It's an up the graph idea that maybe most people don't live by. The most important up the graph idea I ever stumbled upon was Bitcoin. I mean like, and when I found it in 2013, right? 2012 maybe very, very few people knew about it. I certainly wasn't first there were other people that had been around for four or five years at that point. But when I stumbled upon it, it, it became very clear to me that one day that idea would go down the graph, right? That that idea would be understood and appreciated by more people. And so getting on an idea that's up the graph, you know, requires that you have a, a good grip because people are gonna come along and tell you it's not gonna work and it's going to, you know, fail and here's all the reasons why.

Vance Crowe [01:08:38] And so, but as we've watched that idea move further and further down the graph, you realize like there's a lot of value. It could be financial or even psychological that comes from being on an idea early. Now for every one of those good ones, there's a bad idea that you get on that you think is gonna go down the graph and it really just stays in its small little tribe that came up with this idea. But Bitcoin successfully moved from, you know, crypto hacker punks to people that are, you know, investing in, in the stock market. So it, it's definitely gone down the graph, although it's got a long, long, long way to go down the graph. What's the difference between Bitcoin and crypto? Oh, so the difference between Bitcoin and crypto is that Bitcoin is the only real one. It it's the only one that you can actually say, I have faith in this. And the reason that you can have faith in it is because of its immaculate conception, right? Most of the other cryptos or shit coins that are out there, they have somebody sitting behind the scenes that can change that code and that can issue you some, some, you know, e or some whatever, you know, crazy coin. And then they try and distribute it out to other people. These are just like Ponzi schemes for the most part. Whereas Bitcoin, the white paper came out, then the, the mining started to become available and anyone that knew about that idea, the further up the graph they were could start mining it and has equal access to it. There's nobody that had like a secret stash before anybody else could get them.

Vance Crowe [01:10:11] You can't reissue them, you can't change the transactions. And a lot of that comes from the very core thing that makes Bitcoin valuable, which is that there are only ever going to be 21 million of them. And the, that 21 million that that hardened supply number is a huge game changer because it, it created actual digital scarcity, meaning that everything else that we know in the digital world, a photograph, you know, the ones and zeros on your bank account, those can be flipped on and made infinite for almost no cost at all. But bitcoin's not that way. The, the, through the mining and the decentralization of how the system works, all 21 million Bitcoin are completely unique and can never be replicated by anybody else. And they are distributed openly so that anybody that believes in the idea can buy them at whatever their price is. And that's what makes them so different. And I always say, you are going to get to buy Bitcoin at the price you deserve. How do you plan for things that you can't control? Tell me more. What do you mean about that? I mean, you could think of a specific situation or like you can't control the things that are happening at large and say our government, for example, the reason this question came to mind is because Bitcoin is an asset that exists that like, we can't control. You talked about like the printing press and these sorts of things and the, the tendency for governments to inflate currency, that's something that we can't control, but Bitcoin is a tool that gives us a way to hedge against the thing that we can't control.

Vance Crowe [01:11:54] And so I guess that would be one answer to that specific situation. But curious more generally, like how, like say there was a, a situation in you live in the county and the county, the way that decisions were being made, whether it pertained to COVID or education or something that mattered to you, but outside of you going up and showing up and voting, I mean you talk about there's the three different strategies you have, right? Like you can exit, you can, you can speak up or like Loyalty, voice and exit. Yeah, loyalty, voice and exit, right? That's, that's kind of what I'm getting at is like how, how do you, how do you act in the face of something that you can't just grab it and change it in the way that you think that it should be per your values? So I had kind of two different answers for this. On, on the one hand I was gonna talk about like, now that I'm a business owner and a father, like I have sleepless nights and when I need to be able to get back to sleep, I go sit down and write out everything I'm thinking. And that takes it from me having that discussion with my Damon inside of my head to being out on paper. And that allows me to go to sleep. But if you think about these like, things that are bigger than me, I am a collector of interesting people and a lot of the things that happened around COVID, which I didn't have control over my government doing things I didn't agree with, I leaned on my network and I tried to build my network as as strong as I could. I wasn't trying to build it fast and as resiliently as I could. So I, for example, did my best to take every single person that I knew that was really interesting and try and connect them with every other person that I thought that they might have a shared connection with.

Vance Crowe [01:13:35] And the result of this is a network where ideas flow across it, it's much more resilient. It's a group of guys that, and, and women that, that know each other, that that offer each other opportunities that figure out how to solve problems. So very quickly as the world was shutting down, you know, we were able to get beef deliveries and we were able to have people coming and arguing different points of view. And when we were thinking about the vaccine, like people that had various different perspectives, but that all brought something to the table. And I think, like I've always described that in a, in a disaster or in a, in a big problem situation, my role outside of doing whatever physical labor I need to do will be to collect people that can figure out together how to solve something larger than themselves. Why are you so drawn to this mission? It's likely because like, this is what I am, I'm, I'm so deeply curious about what other people think and about why they think that way. And I'm so disagreeable that I will get past the like, you know, the niceties that people have and I wanna really understand what's going on with them. And when I discover something really interesting about somebody else, I'm like somebody that's discovered treasure and I want to tell other people that I like and trust and care about, about this treasure that I found. And so it's hard for me to describe it any other way than like, it's like me sharing, it's like me, you know, being able to distribute this thing that I love.

Vance Crowe [01:15:11] And I think that's, the podcast has really given me a lot of that it's been actually made it so, you know, I went most of my life where I would collect a new friend, you know, a hardcore good friend like once every four years, right? And then as you get older, those friends have friends that are their quality or better. And then you have the, I had the podcast, which then because of the way that the subject matter works and, and you know, the, the quality of the conversations, you now started to digitize this. So now I have other people that contact me out of the blue that I end up becoming close with, and that is outside of my family. Probably the most valuable asset that I have is the inner connections between my friends Advance to close out, where are you going next? What's gonna be different in your life? How will you have made a difference one year, three or five years out on whatever timescale feels right to you? A and then B, how can people get in touch with you? Where can they listen to you? Where can they learn more about Legacy Interviews? So where am I going next? Is I'm in the beautiful position of being able to do what I'm doing. So I am not trying to change very much, I'm just trying to do what we do better. And like, so a year from now, the art that we make with Legacy Interviews where we're interviewing people to tell these stories, it's gonna get better. Not only is my team getting better, like how they make the editing look how all the cameras, but like my questions get better and my ability to engage people gets better.

Vance Crowe [01:16:48] So with that and my family, like I just want to do that more. And then as far as how people can get ahold of me, the podcast is just called the Vance Crow podcast and that's where I interview people that I think are interesting and, and Legacy Interviews dot com is where you can go to find out about this service that we offer. Cool. Well, Vance, I can genuinely say that you're someone who has changed my life in a number of ways and I'm grateful to have been able to have this conversation to put you on the other side of the interview. Yeah, man, this has been fun. It's, it's, it's good to see you doing, doing what you do best, which I think is asking people deep questions and, and, and being curious about them enough to really be conscientious about how you spend time with them and how you make sure that time is valuable. So thanks for wanting to do this.