Disruptive Technologies, and How to Respond. Vance Crowe addresses the Arizona Farm Bureau.

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] Now don't think that I'm standing up here bragging that I do Brazilian jiujitsu because two weeks ago I went against a 14-year-old boy that weighed less than a hundred pounds and he drug me to the ground and wrapped his legs around my neck until I asked him, please stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. This is the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Normally I sit across the table from an expert and we talk about how they mastered a subject. However, this week I'm going to do something a little bit different. This week I'm going to play in its entirety a speech that I delivered to the Arizona Farm Bureau at their annual convention in Phoenix, Arizona. I am delighted that the Arizona Farm Bureau invited me in to come give a talk about how to think about disruption and how it can impact your industry. You'll hear me talk about in this speech how advanced Arizona farmers are and why they need to be prepared to go out into the chaos and see new ideas that they might not ordinarily become exposed to. We'll talk about concepts like the Overton window and ideas about how you can make sure that your network holds people within it that can help you have a new way of thinking about things that you might not automatically agree with. I am so grateful to the Arizona Farm Bureau for allowing me to put this out, not only for their members that weren't able to make it to the annual convention, but really to the whole world. So without further ado, enjoy the podcast and I'll see you on the other side.

Vance Crowe [00:01:31] We've asked fans to speak just today about disruptive technology and how to turn challenges in our disordered world into proactive successes. So please help me welcome Mr. Vance Crow. Thank you. So six months ago I was contacted by Julie Murphy and she said, I have a really exciting group of people that I think you may have something that you could talk with about with them about. And at first I felt this sense of tremendous excitement. So we ended up getting on a phone call with Philip and he was talking with us about, you know, the fact that Arizona is always having new technology added to the farms that they're running and and your operations. And so at first I felt this sense of real excitement, and then I got off the phone with Julie and Philip and realized I had just been asked to come talk to the most advanced farmers, probably in the entire world about technology and how to use it. And I realized that may just be the most difficult talk I've ever agreed to give. So here we are. And for the last six months I have been thinking about this talk. And I would say definitely not a week has gone by that I have not thought about this, that I haven't cranked on the slides a little bit, that I haven't changed something.

Vance Crowe [00:03:09] And in fact, I waited all the way until the very last minute to hand in my slides because I've kept making tiny, tiny changes. And that's because I realize how important a talk like this is with a room of people like you. The people in this room, whether you're in insurance or you're in an operation or you're working with the Arizona Farm Bureau, you are at the precipice at the very point where the most important thing in the world happens, the thing that ties together all of civilization, you grow food and specifically you grow 90% of the salad vegetables that will be eaten throughout the entire winter when the rest of the country is frozen and cold and has no access to food. So anything that I can offer that might help you think about how to respond and react to disruptive technology, well that is a way that I can make to change the world, to make a big difference in how the future will be. And I think that's very important. So in order to do this, in order to fulfill the goal of having a very good conversation with some of the most advanced farmers in the world, I'm gonna give a talk that's a little bit different than probably anything you've seen before. We're gonna talk about philosophy, we're gonna talk about sociology, and we're even gonna talk about Brazilian jiujitsu. So buckle in 'cause we're about to do something a little bit different. I had seen this symbol for many, many years.

Vance Crowe [00:04:44] Every single person in this room knows what this is. The symbol is yin and yang. But I don't know how much you in this room have ever thought about, what does this symbol mean? What is this really all about? I used to think that the white represented good and the black represented bad, and these were the two opposing forces out in the world. And that's true. This symbol carries that meaning, but that's the lowest resolution of what this symbol is all about. And actually, this symbol carries meaning that is deep and actually resides in every single one of us. And I don't mean in a religious sense, I mean it actually describes a concept that determines who we are and what we do out in the world. I happened to come across a, a clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson, and he explained this symbol in a very different way than I had ever heard before. He said, when you look at this symbol, you should not see it just as opposing black and white, good and evil, but instead look at the white as order everything that you understand in the world and chaos being everything that you don't understand in the world. Now, let's think about this for a moment because it actually is a very, there's a very clear connection between who you are and what you do. And this symbol, the order part is your regular life. It is the people that you already know how to interact with.

Vance Crowe [00:06:18] It's when you walk into a room and you know how to behave and be able to fit in with the new group or how you go to an activity. And you've done it so many times that you know exactly how it works. But the black, the chaos that is all of the unknown, the things that you don't understand, the things that seem foreign, the things that seem scary. But the interesting thing about this diagram, the way this is really saying is if you go too much on either one of these two polls on the ordered side or on the disordered side, bad things happen right? On the chaos side, if you get out there and all you are doing is exposing yourself constantly to new things and going into places that you don't understand how they work, well, that's complete anarchy. That's where there are no rules, or at least you don't know how to facilitate yourself through those situations. So it might be easy to say, well then I'm gonna stay on the white side, the ordered side, the part of life where I already know how everything works. However, everyone in this room is familiar with what happens when you have too much order, when you don't allow things to change, when you have too much order, you begin to develop into a tyranny to where things are not allowed to change. And so where you get locked into your old ways of thinking and the world keeps moving on, but you're locked in there. I think that this symbol is actually one that describes Arizona agriculture at an extremely profound level because you all, someone, some of you have done it yourselves as first generation farmers, or some of you as ancient ancestors, been here for several generations, came to the desert where everything was chaos.

Vance Crowe [00:08:12] There was no order to it other than what animals could, could e out in the life, whether they were serpents or some types of really small rodents. But nothing productive was here. It wasn't until farmers came to this land and figured out, wait a second, we can take the wild things that are growing and put them in straight lines and we can organize ourselves to manage our water and how we handle all of the attributes that go along with farming. We can do that and we can make something grow here. Where before it was just sage, breast and dust. So that's a very important thing. You all in your careers, in the field that you are in fall perfectly under order and chaos. And if you're selling insurance, you know deeply what this means. You are helping people be prepared for order when chaos, which will inevitably come, does eventually come for you. Now, I'm going to be making the case that it is deeply, deeply important that every single one of you take it upon yourselves to find a way to leave the ordered the things that you know and get out into the chaos. And I wanna give you an example of a time when I did that. Sometimes when you go out into the chaos, you won't know you're doing it until it's already there. You heard in my biography that I was one of those people that kind of bounced around in life, right?

Vance Crowe [00:09:43] I was clearly, we college kid that had no idea what he wanted to be when he grew up. And so I just bounced around. I ran a camp for inner city kids. I was a deckhand on a ship. I joined the US Peace Corps. I ended up coming back and working in public radio in Mendocino, California. Do any of you know where Mendocino California is? This is the place that people that think Berkeley is too conservative, they move up there. And I was working in their radio station. So it was really weird. I ended up going on to diplomacy school because I thought I wanted to go back to Africa where I had been as a Peace Corps volunteer. I ended up going and working at the World Bank, and I got to the World Bank, which was what I thought was the pinnacle of life. I thought, this is the place that I can go and do good in the world. And I realized that it was not at all the organization that I thought it was. And so my dreams were shattered. I had been traveling all around looking for what I could do that would make a difference in the world, and I couldn't find it. But fortunately, I met my wife, who was an aerospace engineer that decided she no longer wanted to work for Lockheed Martin. So she decided she wanted to become a physical therapist, which then brings us to the very weird place of St. Louis, Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri happens to house one of the best physical therapy programs in the world. So my wife, she was gonna go there. So we moved there and I started my own communications company. I didn't know what to do.

Vance Crowe [00:11:14] I was just kind of ambling in the ground. I didn't know I, I didn't know how to make a difference in the world. But I started this company and I ran it for two years, and the company started doing pretty well. And one day, a friend that I had made in St. Louis sent me an application for a job that I thought was hilarious. The director of millennial engagement for Monsanto, it's okay to laugh. I laughed at the title two and I came to apply for it. And in this moment when I see this application for this job, I realize that this would be a pretty fun thing to do. I had no interest in actually getting the job. But you can imagine all those different places that I was at throughout my life, you know, the Peace Corps, public Radio, diplomacy School, all of the people and all of the different groups that I'd ever been involved with absolutely knew that Monsanto was evil, right? This was the dark place. And so I thought if I apply, maybe I'll get an interview. And who doesn't wanna see inside of North Korea? So I take the I, I apply for the job. Lo and behold, they, they say, Hey, we'd love to have you come in and interview for this job. And I'm thinking, this is great. So I go to drive to the appointment. You can imagine I'm telling my wife about how much fun I'm about to have by wasting about a half of my day going and interviewing for a job I don't want, but we're kind of laughing and having a good time. And I get in the car and I drive to the Monsanto campus, and I had never been there before.

Vance Crowe [00:12:48] Anybody in here ever been to the Monsanto campus? Raise your hand. Okay, so for those of you that have not, what I was imagining when I thought I was coming to Monsanto was that I was going to come upon a building that was 80 stories tall, and there were dark storm clouds around it, and everybody was wearing matrix style sunglasses and black suits. So I was excited. And then when I pull onto the campus and I see that it's actually a two story, kind of looks like a college campus with fountains. And the woman that greeted me at the door had a ponytail and was wearing a sweater. You can imagine I was a little disappointed, but not to ruin the moment, I now get to go into the interview process. And at Monsanto, they take interviewing very seriously. I wasn't just walking in for one interview. I had seven hours of interviews panel after panel after panel, which was fantastic because if you have ever applied for a job that you don't want, it's about as much fun as you can have because you can say whatever you want and it doesn't matter. So they would ask me a question like, what's your management style? What time do you like to come into work? And I'd be like, I'd give them an answer to it. And then I would say, why are you spreading GMOs into society when people don't want 'em? Or why is it that you are allowing fertilizer to go into the Gulf of Mexico and kill off all the good fish that are there?

Vance Crowe [00:14:21] Why are you allowing Indian farmers to become so indebted to you that they'll commit suicide? You see, I was having fun there, but I was doing something real. I thought that I was going into the chaos and pushing back on this giant monster, and I was having fun doing it, but it was real. The stakes were real. And so I get done with all of the interviews, and the woman with the sweater and the ponytail comes back into the room and she looks at me and she says, do you have any questions for us now that we're done with the interviews? And I looked at her and I kind of smiled and I said, yeah, I got a question for you. You're hiring a person to be the director of millennial engagement to go out and represent your company that everyone hates. How are you gonna train this person to do this job? And she paused, and what she said next changed my life. She said, well, whoever we hire for this job, we'll train them differently based on what their skills are and what their interests are. And since you've been so curious, I think what I would do is I would write a list of 50 people from throughout the company, chemists, geneticists, breeders, farmers, attorneys, and I'll have you go talk with each one of them for an hour. And after you're done with your list of 50 people, then we'll sit down and we'll have a conversation. We'll figure out what you do and don't know, and then I'll write you another list of 50 people.

Vance Crowe [00:15:56] In this moment, I realized she was handing me something that I don't think she understood how valuable it could be to a person like me. You see, what they were gonna do is they were gonna let me run around this company and ask anyone anything that I wanted. And clearly I was going to take advantage of that. And I was going to discover one of two things. Either they are as evil as everyone thinks that they are, in which case then I'm gonna go out and write the greatest tell all book of all time or I was wrong. And that they are not a part of making evil in the world. That they're actually a part of advancing food in a civilization that is growing food, more bountifully than we ever have in the history of time. And yet no one knows about it and no one knows how to stop consumers from being afraid. And so I took that job and the biggest problem that I had now was that I was going back home and I had to explain to my wife why I went from not wanting that job to now really wanting this job, but that's the exact experience that every single one of you have had. Is it about Monsanto or going to apply for a job that you didn't want? No, but you know about those moments when you walked into the chaos, when you walked into a place you didn't know and you didn't understand. And because you did something truly great came out of it, it changed the trajectory of your life and truly the trajectory of the lives of all of the people that you come in contact with.

Vance Crowe [00:17:38] So I wanna talk more about this because what I'm actually proposing is that all of you in Arizona get really good at surfing on the edge of chaos. And what I mean by that is this, the edge of chaos is the point right in between the ordered and the chaos. That is the moment in your life when you are being exposed to things that you started to understand. You kind of get it, you're, you're there and your mind and your attention are fully wrapped on it. Think about the moment, some of you are spreadsheet junkies, you've been on a spreadsheet, you're pushing the edges of what's possible and you're having a great time and time just floats away. Or maybe you're the type of person that loves working on your tractor and, and every time you do it, you get lost in it. You get so engrossed in what you're doing and you're having to focus all of your attention on what you're doing, that it pushes you to forget what's going on around you. That's the edge of chaos. That's the moment when you have pushed yourself all the way out to where you're learning new things, but you're using the capabilities that you already have. And that is the joy of being a black belt. It is the experience of knowing and having an expertise that is so deep that you can get lost in your work, that you can hit that point of flow and attention that makes life joyful. It's why it's so exciting to talk with the most advanced farmers in the world.

Vance Crowe [00:19:13] You are all black belts in farming, and that is giving you an opportunity to live right on that edge of chaos, that most people, they don't have that experience, they don't get that joy of knowing what it is to be fully engaged in their expertise. So today we're gonna talk about three things, tribes disruption and surfing. And this will all relate to how to react to these new disruptive technologies that are all around you. Whether this is new computer programs that people wanna sell you or new products like, like plant-based meat that are coming out. How should you think about these things? What should you expose yourself to? How should you be prepared for what this coming change is? So first, where do new ideas come from? This is an important question because you all know that ideas don't just start from nothing. They start somewhere. And knowing where the genesis, where these ideas begin can help you figure out, am I close enough to where these ideas are coming out of the ground? When I was at Monsanto, this was a very important question to me because I had believed very deeply that not only was Monsanto evil, but so was all of large ag. And as I went through my list after list of 50 people, my entire mind was changed and blown. You know, we, we are doing this more bountifully than ever before. Human civilization is thriving, not dying. So why do I have this idea that things are bad?

Vance Crowe [00:20:49] And so I spent years looking into where do ideas come from? Because if you can figure that out, you can trace them to the source. And we came up with this thing we call the, well actually graph, the well actually graph marks how ideas flow into society. Now, you in the back might not be able to see this, but on the vertical axis you have value. And on the horizontal axis, you have the number of people that know something. So I'll put this in context. Imagine that you are hacking away through the genome of cotton and you figure out a way to put BT into it so insects can no longer eat that cotton. The value of knowing that idea is really high. But the number of people that know about that idea or are using that idea is really, really low. And so if you think about it, and if we were to zoom the camera lens back, we don't just have to be talking about genetically engineered cotton. We could be talking about any discrete piece of information like a stock tip, right? As more and more people begin to hear about that idea, the value of it goes down as more people hear about it, right? If you're trading off of stock tips that you heard on CNN, you're probably a little bit behind the market, right? And so I often mark this point right here, this point right here on the graph, way down the graph, is when I get a phone call from my mother who says, Vance Vance, I was watching CNN or Fox or M-S-N-B-C. And she says, I heard this thing about farming to my mother.

Vance Crowe [00:22:21] CNN is the cutting edge, right? Fox is where news is happening, but we all know that if you waited to make your agriculture decisions until they agreed that it was the right way to go, you'd be waiting forever. And one time I was giving this presentation inside of the company and an old grain trader kind of laughed and he stands up and he takes the marker outta my hand. And he goes, you know what, Vance, you're right, Monsanto. Here at Monsanto, we see that these ideas take so long to get down the graph and we wait until here to get them done, draws it all the way out. He actually drew to the end of the dry erase marker. And so our goal was to figure out how do you get up that graph? How do you move that way so that that way you can get to the ideas before they've spread out into society when their value is really high. And we mark this point right here. This point right here on the graph is something that many of you might be this person at parties, you know when you're standing around and everybody's talking about whatever is going on in the news of the day, and there's always that one person that's listening to what everybody's saying, and they wait for a pause in the conversation, and then they go, well, actually, and then they jump in and tell you whatever it is that they knew about that subject. The well actually point is the person that is just at that edge between where new information is created and how it starts getting disseminated out into the world.

Vance Crowe [00:23:53] So that's not high enough up for us. We wanted to figure out how do you get all the way up the graph? And this led us to a concept that we call the tribes. And this is how do I people cluster together to know what they know? And as a good millennial, so much of my research as the director of millennial engagement for Monsanto was done on YouTube, which is how I found this guy right here. This man right here is named Yosha Bach, and he is an artificial intelligence researcher out of formerly MIT. But now he works at a place called Singularity University. And what he's doing is he's standing up in front of a group of people after he's done 10 years of research. Now what he's trying to do, what all artificial intelligence people are trying to do is they're trying to get computers to think like human beings. But if you're gonna get computers to think like human beings, you first have to know how do human beings think? How do they know what they know? So I found this video on YouTube and I'm watching Yosha Bach up there, this very like kind of nerdy computer guy. And he's standing up at this podium and he says, after 10 years of research, we have discovered that human beings know hardly anything at all, which seems like a paradox, right? I flew here on a plane, we are all looking at our phones and being able to send messages around the world at the faster than the speed of light.

Vance Crowe [00:25:26] How is it possible that you can say human beings know hardly anything at all? And he says, well, human beings aren't actually designed to know very much. We're designed to know one or two things very deeply, and we can trade on that. That's how we add value to our, to our group of people. But that everything else that we know is not actually about getting the right answer. It's about getting the normative answer. Human beings are designed to find out what answer lets me get along with other people that I wanna get along with our tribe. So you can imagine that there are people, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna put a few Twitter handles up here. I love Twitter. If you're looking for people to add some chaos and new ideas into your Twitter handle, pull your phone out right now, it won't offend me and follow people like this. This one is at Plin, P-L-I-N-Z. And so this presents an interesting concept because tribes are self-selecting group of individuals that share the same norms of behavior. They know how to act, right? This is the ordered side of things. We know how to behave. We follow the same news outlets, we have the same heroes, we have the same beliefs on who can be trusted, and we also share comedy. One of the things that I often point out is if you wanna know whether you're in a tribe or out of a tribe, it's listen to their comedians and see if you think what they're saying is funny.

Vance Crowe [00:27:02] Because if you don't, it means you're not in the tribe because people in a tribe understand. And what you're pointing out when you're doing comedy is you're pointing out things that we understand that those others don't. That's why it's funny to us. Tribes hold knowledge that other people don't have. And this is one of those realizations that is very difficult for us to believe in because it's very easy for us to say, my tribe holds the truth, we know the right way. But in fact, other tribes may not have all the right answers, but they've certainly figured out something, something that allows them to cluster together something that allows them to share beliefs together. So it's important to recognize not just that your tribe functions this way, but so do others. And it's easy to also think about us in these really large terms. You know, at Monsanto, as soon as we started talking about this tribal concept, they were like, you're right, we agree and we are focused on the ag tribe, but that is not high enough fidelity. That's just like when you say the order and and the black and the white are good and evil. Yes, that's true, but it's not really clear. It's not deep enough because we all know every single person in this room knows that there are actually tribes within this room and within all of agriculture, the ag tribe is actually filled with different tribes. And I went on Twitter a few weeks ago, a few days ago, and asked, Hey, what are the tribes in agriculture?

Vance Crowe [00:28:37] And these are just a handful of the ones I came up with. Low population mafia, R calf, grain haulers, pattern tilers, grain marketers, irrigators. I probably am offending some of the people in this room by not naming your tribe. There's so many of them out there though. But it's important to recognize that this is what's going on. Every time you get to a tribe that is tighter and tighter, that means there are fewer and fewer things that they agree with other people around them on. And it's good to realize just how small of a tribe you might be in. The difference between most agriculture in here is many of you in order to be involved in the Farm Bureau, have given up some of your tribal affiliations with your tight things. And you've said, I'm gonna come to here. I'm gonna hear what other people say. I'm gonna hear what their ideas are. I just watched it in the delegate room. That's truly profound. Most tribes don't have a convening organization or a place they can come that allows them to break out of their individual tribes and form a coalition. But it's also good to recognize that there are lots and lots of other tribes out there. And each one of them, as soon as you name those guys, you should know that it's actually a whole bunch of tiny tribes all put together on here. It's difficult to see, but I have the simple living tribes, people like Michael Pollen or Vanana Shiva or Joel Sale that say we should be doing farming in this more bucolic way. They may or may not be right or wrong, but there are people that are following them and tribes that cluster around this. And these people get ideas in the same way that you do from the plea people that are up the graph.

Vance Crowe [00:30:12] So why is it that we lose sight of the wave? We're we're going out, we're trying to surf on the edge of chaos. Why is it that there are some technologies that we encounter that we were not prepared for at all, that we thought wasn't gonna be a big deal that we kind of rejected out of hand only to find out years later that that was actually a really good idea? In fact, I'm sure there are people in this room that thought Twitter or YouTube or podcasts were silly only to find out years later. Wait a second, there's a lot here that's valuable and I've been missing it this whole time. So I wanna talk about why is it that we lose sight of the wave? None of us wants to, we want to be up on things, we want to know what's coming. We want to be aware of what might disrupt our own businesses. So why do we lose sight of it? Well, the first thing that I would say is we are the average of the people we spend the most time with. There's a famous speaker, Jim Rome, who used to talk about you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And I think that's probably about right. But now in today's highly networked world, you can see a lot more connect and communicate with a lot more than just five people. So it's important to think about what is the average of the people that I'm spending time with? Are they exposing me to new ideas or am I just in a tribe that's insulated and only thinks about the things that I already knew? So I want you to ask yourself a question. How often am I exposed to ideas that I don't agree with?

Vance Crowe [00:31:50] Really think about that for a second because there's a concept that I think is worth thinking about. And I've actually already had with Sherry Saylor conversations about what is acceptable to think about and talk about and what's not. So we're gonna talk about a concept about about how often you're ex, we're gonna talk about a concept called the Overton Window. And the Overton window is the idea of what ideas are you allowed and are accepted in our communities. So on the poll, you can see there are some ideas that are popular. A whole bunch of people really like 'em, right? And then you get a little bit further out from that and you say, most of us don't agree with this idea, but it's sensible. I can still understand it, right? And in your mind right now, you could be thinking about changes to cannabis laws or clean meat or synthetic beef, any of these ideas or new computer systems or new ways of buying and selling your seeds. At first, some of these ideas start off as just being acceptable or radical even, or unthinkable. I was actually talking today with some people about the medical cannabis industry here in Arizona. And I would imagine that if you went back 10 or 15 years, maybe even just five years, there were a lot of people that would've said medical cannabis growing in Arizona was an unthinkable idea. And now it's something that people accept, or at least they acknowledge is okay, it's in the world today.

Vance Crowe [00:33:26] And that's what's describing this thing called the Overton Window. The Overton window is what is the block of areas of ideas that are acceptable to here? And the interesting thing is, the Overton window is actually has two poles on it. There are the people on the top that are maybe like we should have synthetic beat or cannabis everywhere. And there are people that think we should absolutely reject it and completely throw it out. They're on both sides of that Overton window. And right smack in the middle is where policy is. This is where, hey, everybody can come together and we can agree that these are the ideas that that we're gonna put into society. Now the funny thing is, and actually just by watching the trade delegation yesterday, the the woman come up here and talk all about how the Trump administration has been handling trade free trade with Mexico and Canada and China. People, events like Trump being elected shift the Overton window and it can go up or down. So ideas that were not acceptable before are now acceptable in being able to be heard. So this brings up another interesting concept in that, has anybody in this room ever heard of a man named Nassim Talib? Nassim Talib is a mathematician and philosopher that absolutely despises genetic engineering, Monsanto and is no fan of me.

Vance Crowe [00:34:57] But I often find that the smartest thing that you can do when you have critics is go read what they write. And I found this idea that I think is actually quite profound, and I'm sure you've seen it in your everyday life. It's the concept of who is it that ships that Overton window? And what Nassim Tale says is the most intolerant win the dictatorship of the minority. In this paper, he describes something that all of us have seen called the intransigent minority. The intransigent minority could be described like this. Imagine that you are bringing brownies to a PT, a bake sale, and you know that you brought your brownies and you went to the store and bought Betty Crocker, and you've put it out there, and now you're gonna sell those. And somebody comes walking in another parent and they say, do those have GMOs in them? Then get them out of here. And they demand and they slam on the table and they stomp around and they say, I will not accept this. This is not allowed. The next time you go to bring brownies, you're standing at the store. Now this is a little bit different for this group because you may just do it, but a lot of people wouldn't. But you're standing in the aisles and you're thinking, I could just buy the GMO version, or if I pay another dollar 50, then I can get the non GMO version and I won't have Betty yelling at me. It's gonna cost me a dollar 50 to not have Betty yell at me.

Vance Crowe [00:36:28] I'm gonna pay it. And this is why the intransigent minority wins and actually they become their ideas. The ones that they push into society are the ones that become our culture. Those are the ones that are stretching on the edges of that Overton window saying what is and isn't allowed. Now, this is not meant to me to describe to you, you should become the intransigent minority, but it is a good way for you to think about how do we stop ideas? Or is it even possible to stop ideas when there are people out there that are going to push them so hard that eventually society will stretch what they think? You need to figure out where you belong on this order and chaos. This how will we stop these new ideas? So how do you bring back value from the chaos? See, this is interesting, right? We were talking at the very beginning about how if you just stay on the order side, you have a, you have a tyranny, you don't, nothing can change. So you every once in a while have to go out into the chaos and find new ideas. You have to find things that you don't already agree with. So how do you do that productively? How do you do it consistently? So I wanna finish with a few ideas that should be practical for everyone in this room. The first is, and I would actually encourage anybody that can pull out a pen, write it on your program, write this down. Where do I right now hear ideas that I don't agree with?

Vance Crowe [00:38:01] Where do I specifically choose to go hear ideas I don't agree with? And I would make the case that if you write these down, you may start to struggle because I'm not describing where do you go to hear ideas, where someone else describes to you how dumb those other people are for agreeing with this. But that's most of talk radio, isn't it? It's most of the news. They pick a side and then they talk about how dumb the other side is. But where do you go to hear ideas that you don't already agree with? Because if you're not going to a place where you hear ideas that you disagree with, then you have no exposure to the ideas that will disrupt you. It is deeply important that you find places where you can discover ideas that you don't agree with. And I would make the case that right now, every person involved in agriculture and even people that are outside of agriculture might do well to listen to the Ag Uncensored podcast. Is anybody in here familiar with this podcast? This is done by a cattle rancher in Texa, Oklahoma named Jared McDaniel. And he has specifically designed an entire podcast to have conversations with people that he doesn't agree with, that he doesn't think that their way of doing things is right. And in the last month, he did something that I think no other major media outlet has done that that I'd seen, and that's that he had a hour and a half conversation with the National Cattlemen's and the cattle.

Vance Crowe [00:39:39] What's that? US cattle and us cattlemen and our calf. Now, if you listen to all three of those podcasts, I assure you there is no way around it. You will find and hear something that you do not agree with. But that is the power of having access to things like podcasts. You can now hear ideas that you don't agree with different perspectives and hear them in a long form. So you now can start having these ideas be a part of what you think, or at least they allow you to strengthen the ideas that you already have. Now, next thing, what are you doing right now specifically to test your beliefs? So many of you have ideas on how many seeds should we be putting in this row? What's the optimal amount? And many times the things that you are believing in is because somebody that was selling you those seeds told you that, or they showed you the test data that they have, or that this is the way that dad always did it, or the way that our company has always done it. What are you doing to test your ideas? When I was preparing for this talk about two months ago, I was talking with a very good friend of mine. He's actually a whiz kid from Stanford University as a PhD in physics. And we met when he was working at the Climate Corporation, he was designing very, very sophisticated nitrogen trials. And what he told me really surprised me. He said, we don't actually know very much about nitrogen science has not learned very much about it.

Vance Crowe [00:41:12] And he became obsessed with figuring out how can I test the things that we believe? And eventually, once Bear bought Monsanto, he decided, I'm gonna go out and I am going to try and create software that will allow farmers to test their, their seed placement, to test their nitrogen use, to test all of the things that they they do on their fields and do scientifically valid tests. So technology is coming along that will allow you to test your beliefs on a way that most people have never done. He actually just put this website up. And it's very interesting to go look at, to see, Hey, maybe I should be testing my own products, the things that I already believe. And the more technology comes on that allows you to test your beliefs, the better it is for you. Now, I'm gonna actually wait about 30 seconds after I ask you to do this. I want you to write down who are the five people that you spend the most time with? But before you start, I want you to think about how many hours you spend listening to talk radio or which podcast you listen to, or what television you're watching because those people are also included in your average. Your brain doesn't have any way to distinguish where you got ideas from, whether they were somebody in your regular life or somebody that you see as an apparition on television or somebody you hear on the radio. So go ahead, write down who are the five people that you spend the most time with, okay?

Vance Crowe [00:42:59] You're getting a little rowdy, so it seems like you're back. I already made the case that I think that you should include in the people that you're watching on television and that you're interacting with on podcasts. How many people in this room listen to a podcast at least once a week? Big, but not all. There are a lot of you in here that are thinking, Hey, podcasts aren't for me. I don't understand what that's all about. But I would make the case that podcasts allow you to increase the average of the people that you spend the most time with. I don't think it should supplant all of the people that you interact with, but when you are listening to a podcast, you should ask yourself, do I want this information, these ideas, this person to be a part of the average of the of the people that I spend time with? I started a podcast and I interviewed this man right here. Does anyone in this room know who Dr. Fred Perla is? Besides a Monsanto scientist, anyone? He has actually had probably the biggest mark on the cotton industry of maybe any scientist in the world. This is the scientist that actually helped lead the team to put BT Cotton in. In fact, I've heard it said before that if you're wearing just regular cotton clothes, there's almost no room you could go into in the United States, or really the western world that was not in some way modified by Fred or his team.

Vance Crowe [00:44:31] That's profound. And that is what I try to bring on a podcast like this is conversations with people that have discovered and created and done new things. When you're thinking about what will I listen to on the airwaves or what's out there with podcasts, there is no end to the access of the people that are doing fascinating things and talking about how did they do it? Because once you learn how they do it, then you too can do it yourself. But I don't want this to go too far. I am not proposing that technology is the answer to all of our problems or that we don't sometimes get into some bad places when we're only using technology. In fact, I was talking with Sherry Sailor's husband, who that's how he describes himself. So he made a point that was so good that last night I had a dream about it. And I was really glad I hadn't handed in my PowerPoint yet because it allowed me to add something to it. Agriculture has a unique advantage in the way that you raise your families because you are in a specific place. You know the cardinal directions, you can orient yourself around your land and around your neighbor's land. But this is a skill that it is almost unimaginable, but it is being lost in the world.

Vance Crowe [00:46:03] I discovered about three months ago that I was struggling to navigate my way around a town I'd lived in for almost a decade. Why? Because all I ever do is watch that little box, and I don't pick up my head and I don't look around at what's going on. I don't create the landmarks of the old grocery store or of the field that's so weedy or of the mountains which don't exist in St. Louis. But I was, I was realizing that I had lost my sense of place. And that is why you can't rely too much on technology. Yes, disruption's going to come and you should increase the, the num, the average of the people that you're around by using technology and using it to test your ideas. But don't become so lost in it that you live in a city for a decade and you don't know how to get around. If any of you have children in this room, you give them a great gift by helping learn, helping them to learn how to orient with maps that are physical and paper. And by looking around them. Because at the end of the day, the most important thing, the most important relationships, the most important work all happens right where you are in the location and the place that you are. And technology will never disrupt that. And so I'm gonna finish off by asking you a question. Think about that chaos, right, that I talked to you about. When somebody imagines themself, maybe you imagine yourself as mastering a skill.

Vance Crowe [00:47:41] Maybe it's something to do with your, your ranch or your farm. Maybe it's, I really wish I knew how to operate that specific type of computer software. Or maybe it's something totally different. Maybe you said, I've always wanted to be a chess player and I never learned, or I want to run and I actually want to be a runner. You have to first ask yourself, what is it that I want to master and why? Is it because in order to push yourself to get out into the chaos, you have to have a deep reason. But if you do, then you get to go master a new skill. That's what I did. A few months ago. I decided that I was gonna start learning how to do Brazilian jiujitsu, which is a type of grappling. Now, don't think that I'm standing up here bragging that I do Brazilian jiujitsu because two weeks ago I went against a 14-year-old boy that weighed less than a hundred pounds, and he drug me to the ground and wrapped his legs around my neck until I asked him, please stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. But in order to get your black belt, you have to have the mentality of a white belt. I'm a white belt in Juujitsu. I'm a white belt in many, many things. Some of the things, I'm a black belt in just like you. But if you rely only on the things that you are already a black belt on, then that's it. You don't learn any new skills. You don't meet new people. You don't get to try new things.

Vance Crowe [00:49:13] So that is the value of coming to a conference like this. You get to come and bring your expertise, but also bring the mentality of a white belt, which the mentality of a white belt is. I know I'm going to show up and I'm gonna start doing something, and in doing it, I'm gonna look foolish and I'm not gonna know how it works and everybody's gonna be better than me at it. But the only people that become masters of a skill are those that were able to have the mentality of a white belt and be prepared and okay with looking foolish. And so goes it with disruptive technology. When you see something coming, go play with it. Go interact with it. Go find people that are big advocates of it and ask them to tell you again and again and again how it works until it clicks with you. You don't have to agree with it, but you should understand why other people are adopting it because that will change everything about your life. If you can learn how to go into the chaos and then surf on it on your way back to make your farm, to make your insurance business, to make the farm bureau better. So thank you so much for having me here. I hope that this was valuable and it helps you think about some of these disruptive technologies that are coming, coming that you're gonna be hearing more about tonight. Thank you. Well, that's gonna do it for this week's podcast. Thank you so much to the Arizona Farm Bureau for the invitation and for being so willing to share this with the world.

Vance Crowe [00:50:46] I wanna give a particular shout out to Julie Murphy, who has been an important figure in my life, both when I was working at Monsanto and then afterwards, and I can give no higher praise to a communicator. She's an extraordinary writer. She's always open to new ideas, and she's always supportive and helping you to figure out how can I do something better than even I thought I could do. So thank you so much to Julie Murphy. If you'd like to learn more about Arizona agriculture, you can always follow the Arizona Farm Bureau Twitter page, and also check out Julie Murphy, who is at Cotton Aggie to finish out. If you are interested in me giving a talk like this at your organization, don't hesitate to head to my website, vance crow.com, where you can fill out a form that will let me know the day and the type of talk you're thinking about. It is a super simple form and it'll get us into a conversation about how we can work together. Thank you so much for listening. And tune in on Friday for another episode of As the Crow Flies. Ah.