John Jennings: Wealth, Happiness, & The Cost of Striving

John Jennings [00:00:00] I don't want our people to just be stressed all the time, like there's some stress to just work. But I, I want them to go home at the end of the day and to feel good about their day and to be feel good about having interactions with their

Vance Crowe [00:00:15] Spouse or kids

John Jennings [00:00:16] Or significant

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] Others.

John Jennings [00:00:18] And then to wake up the next morning and feel like they want to go to work. I don't want them to have these Sunday night syndromes of, of dreading, and if if they just kind of work less, that's okay too. Welcome

Vance Crowe [00:00:29] Back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. John Jennings returns. Long time listeners of the podcast know that John Jennings runs a family office that helps ultra high net worth individuals manage their money and enabling them to pass down their wealth to future generations. One of the most interesting things about John is that he's such a deep researcher. He's written one book and is about to publish a second book for people that wanna know about money. He, this current book that he's written is for strivers, that is the people that aspire to get to a higher level of wealth. What happens when you get there? What is going to bring you happiness? This is a fascinating conversation, and it ranges all across the board from AI to nonfiction and fiction to even a conversation about religion. We're gonna get to that conversation in just a moment, but one thing you'll notice is that John references that we came and delivered a class to his company, arch Bridge. This is called Interest-Based Communication, and it's where I teach people how to have a professional relationship with others, how to have the kind of communication that allows you to negotiate through problems, to be able to deal with conflict, have deeper conversations, and tell stories about who you are and your organization. If you are interested in having me come teach a course to your organization and helping them to become better leaders and communicators, go to Articulate Ventures slash

John Jennings [00:02:01] IBC.

Vance Crowe [00:02:02] All right. Without further ado,

John Jennings [00:02:03] Let's head to this conversation with John Jennings. So, just yesterday, the legacy interview,

Vance Crowe [00:02:09] The very like, quiet woman, and she was like, oh, I don't know how you can stand to listen to people all day long, tell their stories. And I'm like, you don't understand. This is like, I'm on the edge of my seat. I'm totally focused, because like, as long as you are really listening to somebody, it is not hard at all to focus. It's, it's the flow state. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:02:28] Yeah. I think it is. And I say that to my therapist. I say, how do you do this? Like, he sees seven or eight, nine patients a day, and he spends 45 minutes, seemingly, I'm sure he wonders every now and then, but seemingly totally focused like he's a professional listener and then knows when to ask the right question. And you know, what he does that's

Vance Crowe [00:02:52] Really

John Jennings [00:02:53] Good is mirroring, which is one thing that you taught us at the, you know, the, the seminar that you gave to our company, which is to mirror it back. And I can tell that he's doing it, but I still find it so satisfying, even though I, I'm like, oh, Dr. Brog is mirroring, you know?

Vance Crowe [00:03:13] Well, that's the funniest thing. So like, I, when I teach about mirroring, so I, I just, the other day I was with a bunch of ag guys, right? Ag retail salesman,

John Jennings [00:03:20] And I'm like, all

Vance Crowe [00:03:20] Right, I'm gonna teach you guys this

John Jennings [00:03:22] Technique where

Vance Crowe [00:03:23] Whatever you hear the other person saying, you are not allowed to ask them another question. All you do is repeat back what you heard them say, and they're kind of rolling their eyes

John Jennings [00:03:31] Or whatever. Yeah. But

Vance Crowe [00:03:32] Then you have them do it and they realize like, one, this is really hard because it requires me not to be like, oh, okay, I thought of this thing. I'm gonna reply back to them. And you actually have to stay focused with them. And then when somebody does it back to you, it feels so good to hear your stuff said back to you.

John Jennings [00:03:49] It's so satisfying. And I know he is doing it, and he does it a lot. And it's still so satisfying. And I'm just like, this is, this is a big part of what I'm paying for is someone to just listen to me for 45 minutes in a focused way, validate, and then repeat back, and then every once in a while to, to have some good advice. But it's really, knowing which question to ask is, is a big part. And he's, he's been trained. He's a psychoanalyst. Okay. So yeah, there's all sorts of different, different types. So, so yeah, the, the attention I think is so important. And, and so my, my upcoming books on wealth and happiness, and if you boil all the research down on what it means to be happy and then how to be happier, and again, it's not, happiness isn't just pleasure in the moment. That's part of it. But part of it is life satisfaction. But if you boil it down, I've, I've come up with what I call the good life equation. And there's two parts to it. There's the foundation side, which is, includes financial security. So, you know, money definitely helps with that. And then there's, you know, physical and mental health and o other things like that. But then there's the flourishing side, which mainly has three main things, and it's relationships and flow and meaning. So, and if you have both of those sides, the foundation and the flourishing, then you're, you're doing, you know, pre pretty well. And, but the problem is, is we focus a lot on, by we, I mean, most humans, particularly strivers, of which I'm one, you know, we tend to focus a lot on the, the foundation side.

John Jennings [00:05:22] 'cause it's measurable. And you can go and you, you achieve things. You're like, oh, I feel good about this or that, that I've achieved. But on the, on the, on the flourishing side, on the relationships, you know, I'm not gonna write a book on relationships, nor am I the expert. That could be, you know, that I've studied relationships. But for, for each of these things, I just have a few, a few suggestions. And here's where you come into play, because I, I mentioned you in the book. So years ago I was at a party, and it was probably like 15 years ago. And like, it was, you know, my kids went to like Ladue school district, elementary school and middle school. So it was like some sort of like parent party. So I'm, I'm talking to this woman, let's call her Janet. And I didn't know her very well, like, you know, if you do your social life in these con concentric circles, she was like in level three, right? Like, I knew her to say hi, I knew her husband. Let's call him Jacob. But anyway, they were getting divorced. So she had had a few glasses of wine, I'd had a few beers. We're talking and as divorce people or getting divorced people, do they tell you all about their divorce? Right? Because I think it's so painful and they just want to get it out there. So anyway, this woman that I don't know very well, tell me about her divorce. And she says to me at one point, do you know why Jacob and I are getting divorced? And I was like, no. And she said, it's because he doesn't know what women want. And I was like, oh, wow. You know, I don't know that I know what women want.

John Jennings [00:06:53] Yeah, this is a pretty high bar. And she's like, she turns to me. She's just like, she's like, John, it's not that hard. What women want is two things. I mean, there's other than two things, but two main things. If you screw this up, you're not gonna have a good relationship. It's kind of her point. She goes, they want attention and affection, and Jacob sucks at both of those things. And so I didn't give it much thought at the time because I then was kind of like trying to politely extract myself from her divorce story. But I thought about it later, and I'm like, that is literally what everybody wants, right? Everybody wants attention, and then everybody wants affection. So, so in my book, I just talk a bit about those two things. And on the affection side, I talk about, you know, not scientifically researched, but the, the five love languages. So, you know, what I realized there is, is like, I, I like words of affirmation. I like to be complimented, right? And in fact, so much so that my mother-in-law, may she rust in peace, told my wife, like a week before a marriage, are you sure you want to marry this boy? Because he needs constant affirmation and to be told how great he is. And I'm worried that it's gonna exhaust you. And for the record, it does exhaust her. But my wife's like, I, so I would tell her throughout our marriage, like all these great things about her, but that wasn't like moving the needle for her.

John Jennings [00:08:25] What, for her, what it is is, you know, primarily acts as service, right? And it took me a long time to realize that. Okay, but on the, but on the attention side, so probably the second podcast I was ever on was with you. And you know, I didn't know you. Well, I think we had just met, maybe we had had coffee or something, but you put me instantly at ease. And then in fact, to this day, I think it's probably the best podcast I've been on. And it's, it's because again, like almost like my therapist, like you just totally paid attention. Like you're, and you know, I remember asking you afterwards a about you and, and paying attention, and you're just like, oh, I find people interesting. And then as, as you know, I I, you know, your wife's my physical therapist and she's a total witch doctor. And I mentioned once, like how great the podcast was with you and how like interested you are in other people. And, and Anne said, your wife, she said, you know, Vance is this rare, rare person that just genuinely finds other people interested and he's curious about other people, right? And so I talk about you in my book about, you know, how important that is to be actually interested in other people. And it's like this, this course that you taught our, our firm, that being interested is better than being interesting, right? And, and that really struck me because I try to be interesting, you know, and it's really partly through researching this book that I'm like, oh, I need to be more interested.

John Jennings [00:09:56] So like, your, your course that you did for our firm came along at the exact right time because it just really gave me a better kind of paradigm to think about. And so I try to stop myself and say, say, oh, am I being interested in what this person's saying? And, and there's this type of therapy called dialectical behavior therapy. And this was developed by the psychologist to help patients that were suffering from depression, you know, adolescents really, and personality disorders and things. And, and, and what dialectical means is it means basically that opposing things can be true at the same time. So her name's Marshall Lenahan and, and her and her therapy, she said, you know, what we have to do is accept ourselves the way we are and realize that we're trying the best work we, we can, and that we're good people, but also recognize we could be doing better. There are things that we can work on to improve ourselves. And so, so there's all these different modules to dialectical behavioral training, but therapy. But one of them, and, and there's skills, and they all have these acronyms. And, and one of them has to do with the interpersonal skills. And this one skill that she teaches is called the give skill. And here's what it stands for. G stands for gentle. So approach conversations with a gentle manager manner. Do not be, don't be overly intense, don't be aggressive. Just be gentle. I interested. So act interested if you're not interested.

John Jennings [00:11:29] So fake it till you make it. And this is so important to be interested, interested, interested. V is to validate. So again, this gets into what you've, you've taught about mirroring and in validation, but don't try to solve their problems. When somebody is talking to you about issues or stories or whatever. Don't jump in and try to solve it and just say, you know, that sounds really tough or that's really hard. Or, you know, you know, I, I understand what you're saying. Right? And then e it sort of like, be gentle again. It's, it's adopt an easy manner, smile, have your, have your facial

Vance Crowe [00:12:02] Expressions

John Jennings [00:12:03] And your body language a certain extent. So anyway, I learned about this 'cause my kids went through this DBT training and the parents go to these group meetings, you learn some of it. And so I learned the skill and I was like, oh my gosh. Like, I'm not great at any of these things. I'm always trying to solve people's problems instead of validating them. And I'm not acting interested enough. I'm waiting for the, to be able to say like, the next thing, you know, I think I'm can be overly intense, you know? So what happens now is when like coworkers come into my office and maybe I'm in the middle of something else, you know, I, I close my laptop and I just said, I walk through give and then, you know, with my kids, with friends, with my spouse, I don't do it all the time. I'm not perfect. But it's this, this great way that has helped me have more in, you know, attention towards people. So it gets back to what Janet was saying, attention and affection, the attention part of things. So the give skill. So there you go.

Vance Crowe [00:12:59] Well, I, I love it. The thing that's striking in my brain is the thing that I, I don't think I came up with it. I don't know that I could say exactly where I did, but your attention is the most valuable thing that you own. It is like, you can only pay attention to one thing at a time. And when you give it to someone else, they can feel it. And when you are pretending to give it to somebody else, they can also feel that there's like, yeah, it's this, I mean, that's what all of social media is trying to grab from you. That's what advertisements are trying to grab. It's like, 'cause your brain can only handle, I think you and I have talked about this, you only talk about one thing. You can only focus on one thing at a time. Yeah. You think you can focus on multiple things, but you can't, you're like trying to dial between them and, and like, so if your attention is the most valuable thing you own and you give it to someone else,

John Jennings [00:13:47] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:13:47] That in and of itself has a very powerful impact on the energy between two people.

John Jennings [00:13:52] Yeah. I, I, you know, you've talked about most multitasking and I think you talked about how many items you can hold in your working memory, you know, and it was based on this, this paper that has, I think one of the greatest names in all scientific pa papers. It's called, I, I may not get it exact, but it's the, the magical number seven plus or minus two. And it's, it's, that's, you know, between five and nine is the number of, of things you can hold in your working memory and which is basically where you do your thinking. And so this, this actually leads into what's, what's difficult about

Vance Crowe [00:14:21] Predicting the future

John Jennings [00:14:23] Or making any sort of prediction. And it leads into investing, which is there, there's too many factors that we try to hold in our heads when we're trying to make decisions on something or make a prediction about something. And, you know, we tend to think more information is better, but it's not. So it's really about what, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 things, seven things can we come up with that we focus on. And in fact, there's other studies that say it's only four things by the way, but so what, what can we really focus on? But there's just almost too much data and too much information on any sort of decision about the future we're trying to make.

Vance Crowe [00:15:05] I think like as you're growing up, at least this is probably what happened to me. Like you get a couple of predictions, right, purely by accident. But it seems like, hey, this heuristic I was using this way I was doing, it worked. Yeah. And so now I've got this lens on the world. And then it isn't until you try and apply that to another circumstance and you get completely humbled. Yeah. And then you're like, oh no. Now everything I thought I knew and understood doesn't work. Now I'm knocked back down again. Humility Yeah. Is probably the most expensive thing that a person can earn, but like, probably the most valuable thing. Yeah,

John Jennings [00:15:47] Yeah, for sure.

Vance Crowe [00:15:48] Because like, we all use these tricks to be able to put order to the chaos of the world. And it's probably secretly why I am interested in other people. 'cause I'm always like, Hey, what have you figured out? Like, what do you know? And I'm, I'm always a hundred percent of the time pleasantly surprised on what people know.

John Jennings [00:16:08] Well, I mean, I think that's a real, I mean that's a, that's a a real, I almost said gift, but I don't know if it's a gift. But that's a great way to be because, you know, it's like we're we, we all are in the centers of our own universe. And to the extent you can start breaking out of that, I think it, it, it really makes you a special person.

Vance Crowe [00:16:28] So you have two daughters and you have survived. I have two little daughters and I can barely get out of the house. Yeah. How am I going to do this for 18 more years? Yeah.

John Jennings [00:16:41] So

Vance Crowe [00:16:41] When our

John Jennings [00:16:42] Daughters were, were little, let's say they were five and eight or, you know, four and seven or something.

Vance Crowe [00:16:48] My my wife and I,

John Jennings [00:16:50] You know, we, we'd like to go on like trips. Like I'd go on business trips and she'd come with me just, and, and my parents would watch our kids like this great thing to like kinda leave your kids with, you know, trusted caregivers. So anyway, we were in Seattle and we were at a, a conference for Schwab. So our, I, I'm, I work in wealth management and we use a bunch of different custodians, but the main one we use is, is Charles Schwab. So they were, we, we were at this conference and we were being hosted at this dinner for like, whatever region we were in. So we were sitting at this table with people we didn't know. And this guy that was sitting across the table from us, from Minneapolis or something, you know, he was probably, I'm 56 now. He is few years older than I am now. But you know, at the time, you know, we were in our, you know, our thirties and and he's like, you know, tell me, do you have kids? And we're like, oh yeah, we have two little girls. And he is like, oh, tell me the ages we did. And he goes, oh, aren't they great? And they're just sweet and they're wonderful. And we're like, they just are, I mean, they're just fantastic. You know, they're a lot of work, but you know, we just, they're really great. And he said to me, and, and my wife Tammy, he said, you know, I have five daughters and the, my youngest is 20 and I will tell you this here in not too many years, you're gonna lose your daughters. And he goes, what I mean by that is you are not gonna recognize who they are as people. You're gonna have a incredible disagreements with them. And it's, it's just gonna be really bad. And, and I have five and I've kind of run the gamut to not so bad, to incredibly bad.

John Jennings [00:18:21] And, and he said, and I'm telling you this, or as I'm telling you this, you're probably thinking to yourself, oh no, our daughters are different. You know, we have superior genetic, superior parenting. You know, this poor guy. He is like, but I'll tell you, I, I have all sorts of friends that are in the same state as me, that have daughters that now have come through the other side, and they all went through this to way some way, shape or form. So I'm telling you this, not to scare you, but when it happens, I want you to think back on this conversation and it will give you peace. And we're just like, yeah, thanks, whatever. And so we go off as everybody does, unless they die into the future. So fast forward and our oldest 13, 14, 15, 16 is just horrendous. I mean, it's almost like a horror movie that, like, her head almost like spins around, you know, 360, I mean, just lies for no reason. Like, we'd be like, the sky's blue. And she's like, no, I've seen it green and you know, like, you know, brown or whatever. And, and it's just, it's just ridiculous and just, I mean, horrendous. I I cannot even tell you the extent to her. You know, I won't tell any other like, personal stories about it, but, and I did, I thought back on the conversation and it, and it gave me peace and, and she started getting better, like in terms of us having a relationship with her and liking her probably around like 19. So like when we dropped her off to college, like we were so happy to get rid of her.

John Jennings [00:19:56] And, and we told her like, if this doesn't work out for you, like you can never move back home. Like you're, you're out of the house. Like, like, you know, like we'll pay for your college and everything, but like, if this doesn't work out, like you're on. And that's what she needed. Like my, my wife, she's like, you know, when I, when I drop Claire off and I hug her, I'm gonna have to fake cry, so I'm gonna wear my sunglasses inside so she can't see my eyes. And she fake cried because again, we were so happy to get rid of Claire, but Claire now is just like this lovely one. She's 27 now. She's just phenomenal. Like, we just love her to death. She's great. We have this great relationship. So she's come through the other side. So, so I will I just pass that story on to say, and our, our younger was always sweeter, but still, yes. Still, still, you know, like, wow,

Vance Crowe [00:20:50] I'm still in the like tantrum phase Yeah. And the, like, my sister's hitting me or she took my whatever.

John Jennings [00:20:56] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:20:56] And it's,

John Jennings [00:20:58] You

Vance Crowe [00:20:58] Know, I try and be present and I try and do all these things and you find yourself where you're like, you know what really solves this is if I start yelling, if I start yelling, it solves this. But then two weeks later you hear older sister yelling at younger sister and you're like, oh, damn it, I gotta, I gotta pull that back because yes, it does work right now, but it's very interesting, like parenting changes you because Yeah. I, I think I could count on one hand the number of times I

John Jennings [00:21:28] Yelled

Vance Crowe [00:21:28] Before I had

John Jennings [00:21:29] Children. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:21:30] And now like, yeah, I have to resist this at every

John Jennings [00:21:33] Turn. It's hard. So it is really hard. And, and, and you know, the, the book and then the podcast Freakonomics, so, you know, Stephen Dub Dubner and Stephen Levitt, which are great, so long time ago. So our, our kids were, you know, little, you know, younger than adolescents. I think they, they had this podcast where they had economists on to talk about parenting and some of them had studied parenting, others had not. But they were like, you know, look at, let's look at this from, you know, economics. And as you know, one of the, the two main persons, Stephen Levitt has five children. And he said that his approach to parenting is to be lazy and to just sort of be hands off, you know? And he was talking about all the reasons not to force achievement onto your kids and don't worry too much about the grades and piano lessons and, and everything. So it had just kinda this almost laissez fair approach to parenting, almost like, you know, it used to be, you know, a few generations ago, right? But as they're interviewing all these economists about parenting, you know, they broke it down to this, this, this theme, which is, you know, there's, there's no one right way to parent. There's some wrong ways. But the number one thing you can do that when you look back on being parented or your kids look back on you parenting them, is to be kind. And that like really hit me. That really, really hit me. And 'cause I was like, yes, I was doing some yelling and I think I was being more strict as a parent than I needed to be.

John Jennings [00:23:10] And so then I listened to the podcast again with Tammy and, and again, it's hard 'cause they frustrate you so much, but I doubled down on I want to be kind and talking to my girls now who have both been through their fair share of, of struggles not just being adolescents and, you know, running the gauntlet of, you know, being a girl in middle school and all the other things they do, but also some, some real mental health struggles. You know, they both say, you know, you and mom have always been so supportive and so kind. So that, that really hit me.

Vance Crowe [00:23:51] I feel like that's exactly what I needed to hear, you know, because I, I like, you get to this point where you're like, the reason they're misbehaving is because they must not know I'm serious that they have pushed

John Jennings [00:24:01] The line.

Vance Crowe [00:24:02] And so this, like, if you don't have another frame to step into Yeah. You can't just stop what you're doing. You have to have Yeah.

John Jennings [00:24:11] Another

Vance Crowe [00:24:12] Frame. It's one of the things I really love about talking with you is that you have all these different frames. And for me, like when you're in the midst of parenting, it is so hard to like stop yourself. Like, one of the things that I learned in my twenties to, to get myself to behave better was can you imagine yourself as a video camera watching this? And imagine that what heaven or hell is, is that all you get to do is watch how you handled all these

John Jennings [00:24:42] Situations.

Vance Crowe [00:24:43] Oh wow. You just watch your life on repeat. And would you be excited about this point? 'cause that's when you made the right decisions that took you up.

John Jennings [00:24:51] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:24:52] Or would you be like, no, no, you idiot don't do that. That like, that's taking you down the wrong way. And to me, that frame really helped me because, you know, you're in your twenties, you're like, oh, I can get away with having this late night out drinking too much, or I can do this thing that I probably shouldn't be doing, but it's not gonna impact me. But when you think about like, I have to watch this over and over again, it, it keeps you honest in a way. Wow. And so that frame Yeah.

John Jennings [00:25:18] I've never heard really helped me. I've, I've never heard that framework before. That's fascinating. Yeah. That's, that's, I can see how that'd be really powerful.

Vance Crowe [00:25:26] Yeah. Particularly for a 20-year-old. And if you're like at that time, no sense of, you know, like you could replace that, that video camera with God or Yeah.

John Jennings [00:25:36] Or

Vance Crowe [00:25:37] Whatever. But like to have this sense of like, oh, nothing really matters. Whatever you can get, you know? Yeah. Like, it just clarifies things and pushes you in a much better way. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:25:45] Something a little bit similar that I've used kind of as an kind of experimental mental model is, is how I'm living my life now. Would a younger version of me with like the 18 or 20-year-old version of me say, oh yeah, that's, that's how I want to be at 45 or 55 or no 65. Like, am I living life in a way that I'd make a younger version of myself proud? Because you have all these dreams when you're younger, right? And it's like, am I living in a fashion where they'd go, oh yeah, that's, that's pretty kick ass. Now you can take that too far. 'cause like the younger me was more materialistic and more achievement oriented and I think probably superficial, you know, as a, a teenager or a young adult. So you can take it too far. But I, I think that's a interesting way that I've, I've

Vance Crowe [00:26:29] Thought about would your 18-year-old self Oh

John Jennings [00:26:31] Yeah. Think

Vance Crowe [00:26:31] You're cool? Oh

John Jennings [00:26:32] Yeah. Well I don't know about cool, but, but no, I think my 18-year-old self would be pleased with who I have become

Vance Crowe [00:26:42] My 18-year-old self. And I actually have to resist this 'cause I, you know, with my wife and I'm like, you don't understand, I have so vastly exceeded whatever I was expecting for myself. Yeah. That it's hard for me not to just quit and like, like, all right, well I did. Right? Yeah. And like, so I've had to like really come to terms with this, you know, my wife I think grew up in a family with much higher expectations. Go, go, go, you know, achieve. And then whenever you achieve, just keep

John Jennings [00:27:12] Achieving

Vance Crowe [00:27:12] And achieving. And that was not the, you know, I grew up in a very laissez-faire middle child of seven. So it was kinda like, I don't know if, if I have a house and a dog,

John Jennings [00:27:23] I'm

Vance Crowe [00:27:23] Probably doing okay. Yeah. So I'm so far beyond wherever I thought I was going to be that it leaves me actually open to be humbled over and over again where you're like, ah, you thought you had things figured out. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:27:36] Yeah. I had pretty high expectations for myself and my parents did as, as well. So it's, it's not so much that I'm like, oh, I've like massively, you know, exceeded my expectations. 'cause it's just, I, I think, I think there's a lot of things and even beyond, you know, career, you know, things. I, I think there's just a, a lot of things that I've mellowed on that, you know, that, that I think a younger version of me would like be like, okay, that's cool, you know, but, but I don't know, like, what were you talking about? Like the, the, the achieve achieve, you know, that's, that's something I I really hit on in this, the second book on wealth and happiness. 'cause really the book is written to, you know, so, so what I do for a living is I work in wealth management and I, we work with very wealthy families. Like 80% of our families have over a hundred million dollars. The average has about 300 million. And, and so how I got interested in this wealth and happiness topic is, you know, for 25 plus years I've worked with these families that, like every single one of them, it's like they won Powerball, you know, a big one. And, and I've gotten to see what the money does do for them, which is a lot and what it doesn't, which is other things. And, and I can't see inside their heads how happy they are. But you, you do see certain patterns and you do see, you know, as you get to know people, you get to, you know, a a sense of them a bit. So, you know, the, the book is very much based on a lot of research, but also some perspective. But it's, it's not written to those clients.

John Jennings [00:29:08] It's really written to

Vance Crowe [00:29:11] What I

John Jennings [00:29:12] Call strivers. So it's, it's written to people that are professionally successful or want to be, that pour a lot of time and effort into achieving. And there's this psychologist named Rick Eisenberg who wrote

Vance Crowe [00:29:31] This great

John Jennings [00:29:32] Book called What Happens When You Get What You Want?

Vance Crowe [00:29:36] That's a great title,

John Jennings [00:29:37] Isn't it? And he deals a lot with successful people in, in business or sports or entrepreneurs that have sold their company. And, you know, what do you do once you've reached the point where you've like, I've achieved everything I want to achieve, but it was such a big part of my DNA, like, what, what do I do with this, this void? But he, he calls it the grand narrative of success. And that this, this idea that if I have goals and I work towards them and I achieve them, that at some point I will achieve this level of happiness and satisfaction that I'm craving. Right. And it ends up being this, this treadmill that you get on. I mean, no, I mean, I think anybody, you know, listening to this would go, yes, this is not new news that you can get too caught up in it. But we tend to maximize things that we can measure. And, you know, whether it's your resting heart rate or your cholesterol or what's in your bank accounts, you know, your net worth promotions, you know, I was completely obsessed with triathlons when I was in my, my thirties and into my forties. I mean, there's all these things that, that are easily measurable and you feel like you're making progress and you can get overly wrapped up in it. And an achievement or accomplishment is really important. Like, it, it can really do great things. It, you know, having something to strive for, you know, feels really good. But it, it's really about balancing it. You know, I mentioned this good life equation, you know, it's, it's, you know, you don't want it to take over these other aspects, particularly the flourishing one.

John Jennings [00:31:08] So when I was obsessed with triathlon training, I, I, I trained six days a week, usually twice a day. And I was just completely obsessed with getting faster and to be able to do longer and longer, you know, triathlons. And it, it felt like, it felt great. I was in flow, but it was, it was damaging to relationships because basically it was my top priority. And my family felt like they were lower priority, and they were, and I remember I had this, this annual review with the CEO of then CEO of our company. And he was just like, you know, you're a good employee, but you'd be a lot better if we weren't like number five on your list of priorities. Oh man. And he was like, from what I can tell your exercise regimen and training is number one, and I want you to really think about that. And that was somewhat of a, that was some of a wake up call. And, and there was, there was really no meaning to it. It was just very self-centered and something that didn't matter. I mean, no one really cares about what your marathon time is, you know, other than you Right. Or just no, no one cares. So you can, you can get very caught up into trying to achieve things and it's hard to then at some point transition to not being as much of a, of a striver. So that, that those, those are those people, which is who I am, it's my people, is is really who the book is written towards.

John Jennings [00:32:39] I really, I think you're,

Vance Crowe [00:32:41] You're the audience. You know, they always saw you niche down, find a real audience. Yeah. I think that is a real thing, right? That's like, people that went to college, they, yeah, maybe they were in athletics or they did instruments, or they got out, maybe they didn't even go to school, but they were like, I am going to sacrifice

John Jennings [00:32:56] Everything

Vance Crowe [00:32:57] In order to get to this other place. My brothers very much like this. Many, many, many sacrifices to get to a place of like financial security and having a way for somebody to be like, Hey, on the way before you get there, think about these things.

John Jennings [00:33:13] All

Vance Crowe [00:33:14] Right. We're gonna take a break just for a moment to talk with you about another service that I offer here at the Legacy Interview Studios. That's a legacy interview where we sit down with your loved ones to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history. Just the other day I had a loving couple in and they talked about how they raised their children, the struggles they had, how the father was in charge of bringing in the money, and the mother was in charge of making care. The children were taken care of, the stories were rich and so fun and engaging. And one of the best parts was watching this mother and father in their eighties turned to one another and reflect on things they hadn't thought of in more than 60 years. If you are interested in having me do a legacy interview with your loved ones, whether it's here in our St. Louis studio or online, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, let's head back to this conversation with John Jennings. What are other

John Jennings [00:34:14] Realizations

Vance Crowe [00:34:15] That you had while writing the book about strivers?

John Jennings [00:34:19] Yeah, so there, there was research I came across years ago, and I'm so glad I read it. That really, really was kind of transformative on how I saw myself and, and others. And it is that basically the way that we've evolved as humans is to not be completely happy. So happiness, as many emotions are, are evolutionary tools.

Vance Crowe [00:34:46] So if you

John Jennings [00:34:47] Think about what things drive your pleasure and, and your happiness, it's things that aided your survival or your reproductive success, or were good for society. And if you think back to, to hunter, gather time periods. So if, if you were blissfully happy all the time, evolution would lose. I'm talking about evolution as if it were like a thinking thing. Obviously it's not, but, but give me some, some poetic license. Yeah. Just imagine phenomena. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so basically evolution would use lose one of its tools if we were blissfully happy all the time. So what most people report, and this is worldwide regardless of culture. So it's not even just, you know, Americans and it's, it's true Regardless of people's level of wealth. Most people, the world over report being mildly happy most of the time. So that is our, for most of us, I mean, we, there's variation, but for most of us, that's like our resting heart rate or our blood pressure, right? And that's what we tend to return to, but yet we have this desire to be happier. And you can see this play out in modern times. There's been some, some fascinating studies. So there, there, there's some. So, so Germany has this amazing long running study of its citizens called the German socioeconomic panel. And what they've done since, I don't know the 1970s, maybe the 1960s is, is they survey this huge swath of their citizenry and then they survey 'em like every year, every few years.

John Jennings [00:36:26] And they ask consistent questions and they'll change 'em a bit over time. But one of the things that, that they'll, that they'll ask is basically things on how much money you make. Have you received a windfall? Have you won the lottery? And they'll, one of the things they would ask is incoming students to college, they would ask them about how happy they are and then they would look in their amount of life satisfaction and then they would look at how much money they made 15 years later. And what they found was is that those that were about at a seven to eight on the happiness scale made the most money. Those that were, you know, once you got about, after seven and a half, nine, 10, you made less. And if you were at a three or four, you made less. Australia also had a similar study of incoming college freshmen, and there was also one in the United States of incoming co college freshmen, how much they made later, I think based on the German socioeconomic pa panel. And they found the exact same thing. So there's this sweet spot of being, having some level of discontent that will drive you forward, that will lead to greater earnings. But if you're just like, oh, I'm, I'm, you know, and you know, these people're just super happy all the time, like they don't have the same drive or people that are more dour, they don't have, I mean, they're just like, I'm depressed, you know, why, why bother and, or they're not as good to be around so they're not as good socially, you need to be social partially to be successful, et cetera.

John Jennings [00:38:04] So it's, it's a, it's pretty fascinating. And what I took from all this, is it, 'cause like a lot of time I'd be like, oh, my life is fantastic, you know, like, I've had some decent career success and this great family, I have friends, I, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And yet I wouldn't feel all that happy. And this research gave me permission to feel that way. And I was like, oh my goodness, this is just how we're wired. It's, I'm, I,

Vance Crowe [00:38:35] I'm sure like everyone else, I'm trying to think of what number I am because I, I tend to think I'm, I mean, I know like if you're to compare my wife, I know very, very well. I am certainly happier than her. Yeah. But I don't think she's doldrum, so I'm like trying to gauge it Yeah. As like, where am I on this? But it totally makes sense to me because, you know, the, the person that is, that's telling a story that's just like, oh, things just kept getting better and better and better. That's a story that's

John Jennings [00:39:03] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:39:03] Boring, right? It's, it's not about change. And change is the thing that, that moves you forward, allows you to do things differently in your world. I really like this. This is a very new idea to me.

John Jennings [00:39:16] Yeah. Isn't isn't that sort of crazy? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:39:19] And happiness is such a funny word because, you know, like it's an experience, like it seems like a childish word almost. Like, oh, to be happy, but like, we all want to be happy. But yeah, I don't know, probably I am probably the most dangerous to myself when I am the happiest. Yeah. I like, you know, the, the danger of of mania for me and when I'm down,

John Jennings [00:39:43] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:39:43] I'm not creative, I'm not, I'm not able to do things. Yeah. So Well,

John Jennings [00:39:47] And we tell stories about ourselves, right? And, and so, so I, I had this, this experience. So, so in, in happiness research, one of the main ways they do this, it's not the only way, one of the main ways is something called the experience sampling method. And it started way back and they'd, you know, before smartphones when people just had like a pager, right? And you'd be pinged a few times a day and then you'd have to fill out this questionnaire. So now it's on smartphones. And so what these researchers will do is like, if you're part of the study for two weeks, you'll be pinged, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9 times a day. And within a certain period of time, you've gotta answer all these series of questions. And it's not just how happy are you. But, so I'd read all these different, these different studies that use this. And in fact, I'm actually working on research with one of the, the main, You know, who, who has the biggest data set of this. He's, his name's Matthew Killingsworth and he is at, at war. And I can tell the story of how I got involved with him doing research on the happiness of the very wealthy, but, but because I was working with him, and I've read all these studies when I got an email, 'cause I get these, these emails from Washington University about different research studies and you can be part of it. And, and I, it was like so serendipitous. So, so back in the beginning of 2025, I get this email that can be part of this study, of this experience sampling method at this psychology lab at u. So I signed up and I did it. And so what it was, is it, it it took about seven or eight minutes the first time I took it. But then after I'd get used to it, I could, I could do it in like three or four minutes, but again, yeah, they'd ping me nine times a day. You had to answer at least six of the time.

John Jennings [00:41:18] And they'd say, you know, have you had any conversations with people lasting over five minutes since you were last pinged? And then they'd ask you all these questions and it would be things like, and it, it was always all these were like on a spectrum, like I'm feeling curious versus whatever the opposite of curious is. I'm feeling creative, I'm not feeling creative and like all these characteristics, but then also asking questions about how you're feeling in the moment. And then things about your life, like on a scale of, you know, one to 10 with 10 being the best possible life, one being the least possible, best life, like where are you? And it, and, and all these things more about life satisfaction. And, and what I found, and oh my gosh, I, I had to start seeing like Dr. Brogue, my therapist, like even more after I, I, I was doing this. So I did this for two weeks and a, a few, two major things came outta it. The first was is I consider myself this optimistic, upbeat sort of happy person. I consider myself curious and I consider myself creative and I consider myself all these things. And it wasn't until the second week of the study that I could come close to answering these questions, honestly, because it was creating this incredible amount of cognitive dissidence that when I felt down and I had a few things going on in my life that were causing me to feel down that I couldn't answer truthfully because it was opposite of the story that I was telling myself about who I am as

Vance Crowe [00:42:38] A person. Oh wow.

John Jennings [00:42:39] And I was like, wow. And then the second thing was, is focusing on my happiness nine times a day for two weeks made me less happy. And there's other research that finds this, that the more you value happiness, the more you focus on, the less happy you'll be. In fact, Viktor Frankl in the man search for meaning says happiness cannot be pursued. It must ensue, right? So there's very wise, but there's research on that. So both of those things hit me incredibly strongly and it really opened a window into, no, I'm not as happy as I think I am. So maybe before I'd say, oh, I'm a nine in happiness, but after experiencing for two weeks, I was like, no, no, no, I'm definitely a seven.

Vance Crowe [00:43:25] This is great, man. Writing this book has to have been quite an adventure boom. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:43:31] Yeah. It's been, it's been amazing. And all the research I've read, you know, 30 plus books on, you know, happiness and things related to, to this and, you know, parenting kids and, and you know, related to, to wealth. And then, I don't know, probably 250 research papers. It's been, it's been, yeah, it's been fascinating.

Vance Crowe [00:43:49] And when, when is the book slated to come out?

John Jennings [00:43:51] Well, we'll see, I'm done writing it. And as I write each section then it gets edited by my, my editor. But going back through it, I think a lot needs to be cut. So I'm doing a lot of cutting. And then my older daughter, who's 27 actually has an undergrad then master's degree in English literature and she's doing an edit as well. And that is very helpful. And, and I'm also, and we can transition if you want into, if it's interesting to you to talk about ai, I am using Claude Cowork as an editor and it's really good. I, I'd say I take about half of its suggestions. I've also used it some to help me write. And what's fascinating is I started writing this book. I published my first book in May of 23 and started writing this at the end of 23. And so I've used AI to help me write some and just to see how much better AI has gotten over that time period, like

Vance Crowe [00:44:52] Night and day.

John Jennings [00:44:53] Yeah, it is, it is, it is. So, it's so helpful. And again, I haven't had to talk to Dr. Broad a lot about this. 'cause when I started using AI a little bit, you know, and I have this client when he talks about, you know, family money and his kids, you know, whether they're gonna take distributions or whatever. He said, you know, at first sin is really hard, but sin gets easier the more you do it. And so it was really, it was really tough for me. 'cause as, as I started, you know, at first like I'd be stuck with something and I'd be like, okay, like I'm looking for a story about this or that. So, so for instance in the, the very first chapter of my book on like, what does it mean to be happy? I hit this thing that really comes outta like the climbing community. And I'm not a climber, but I'd heard about this, I'd read a blog post on it years ago. And it's called The Three Types of Fun. So type one fun are things that you enjoy doing from start to finish. Like you look forward to doing them, you enjoy them while you're doing them. And then afterwards you're like, wow, that was really fun. So type one fun, type two fun is things that are not fun while you're doing them, but when you're done, you're glad you did them. Okay.

Vance Crowe [00:46:00] So

John Jennings [00:46:00] Like, type two fun, think of like a, a a a really hard workout, right? So that, that would be like a type two fun. Like during the, you're like, this is really hard, but afterwards you're like, I feel great, I'm, I'm glad I did it. Or, or when it comes to like reading, you know, maybe Type one fun is reading like a bestseller, you know, kind of brain candy and maybe you forget weeks or months later even what the book's about. But like, type two fun is like, okay, like I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna read, you know, you know, some really heavy literature. You know, like I'm, I'm like, I

Vance Crowe [00:46:27] Got through that. Yeah.

John Jennings [00:46:28] I got through like, like, like I'm reading The Odyssey right now 'cause I wanna read it before I, I watch the book, well I'm reading Emily Wilson's translation, which is very accessible. But, but still, it's like, okay, like I know, like, I'm not like, oh my God, I cannot wait to read The Odyssey. It's a great story, but there's some challenge to, to reading it. But I'm sure I'm glad afterwards. Type three fund shouldn't be called fun at all because it's a horrible experience. Like it's, it's horrible while you're doing it. When it's over, you're not glad you did it, but it changes you in a way that may be for the better or positive. So I was given examples of type one, type two fund, but I was like, you know, I'm, I'm having a hard time coming up with type three fund, you know, like, I guess type three fund is, I was skiing and I, I had a, a crash and I like shattered my collarbone, you know, I had to have surgery and everything. Maybe that's type three fund, but I'm like, I didn't really grow from that. So I was like, what is, what is type three fund? So I asked like chat GPT again, this is like an earlier chat. This is like chat GP t's like 3.0 or whatever. I'm like, can you think of an example of type three phone that's kind of famous? And it's like, oh, of course there's that guy, I forget his, his his exact name. Something ton that, that was hiking in that Utah canyon. And a boulder fell and his arm got pinned and he ended up cutting off his arm with a multitool, right? And then he, he had this bestselling book called the 127 Hours in the Oscar winning movie. And then he went around the world giving like inspirational speeches. And so he says, you know, of course I wish that didn't happen, but it's like completely changed my life.

John Jennings [00:48:01] And now he's an inspiration to people about like persistence and the value of life and everything. So that's type three fun. And the reason I talk about these three things is 'cause it kind of lines up what does it mean to be happy? 'cause there's like hedonia, so where we get like, you know, hedonistic and hedonism, which is more like type one fund, but then you get into more life satisfaction and I never could pronounce it right, but it's, it's eudemonia, eudemonia, whatever. But this comes from, from from Aristotle. But it's, it's, that's more this life satisfaction and personal growth and living with virtue. And that's more getting into type two and then type three sort of fun activities. But I felt so guilty like using chat GPT to help me come up with that, you know, example. And now, like I use cowork and what I'll say is I, I will write out like what I'm gonna write in the book and I'll just write it straight into chat GPT. And then I'm say, and it frees me 'cause I don't worry about every sentence. That's exactly how it's written. And it has enough, you know, I've loaded in my first book and I've loaded in all these articles and then I'm just like, you know, write this in my voice and it'll produce it. And then it's about 70% of what I want. So then I edit and rewrite from there. And so I've gone from feeling guilty that they gave me to an ex example to it actually helping me write. And I do worry about what does this do to me cognitively?

John Jennings [00:49:37] So, you know, writing is still very much a struggle. I still write, you know, struggle with how do I take all this stuff and fit it together? And, but I, I worry, you know, compared to writing my first book where there was no ai, you know, I worry about like, what does this do to me cognitively? Or more importantly, what does it do to younger humans that are using this that don't have to power through? And it kinda reminds me of my, my first, like I'm, I'm a lawyer and you know, I used to practice law and then worked at Arthur Anderson and did a lot of like tax law stuff, but like, I learned how to do legal research pre-internet. And like, there's a certain way that you learn that that has to do with the structure. Like, so like I did estate planning and tax law, so like there's this structure of like estate planning and tax that I have in my head that someone came along later that they don't have. Because if you can just search for something that's different from where to knowing where to go find something, right? Because you have to understand the structure. And that's what worries me about AI is do we get to where we don't understand structures of things in the same way. On the other hand, I could argue, well maybe it's just like using calculators, which I was, you know, I was born in 1970, so as a child in the 1970s, there were early calculators. My dad was a math major and he'd be like,

Vance Crowe [00:50:59] You shouldn't

John Jennings [00:51:00] Use calculators, you're never gonna really learn math. Well that wasn't true. And then, you know, now we use spreadsheets. Is it, is AI more like calculators and spreadsheets or is it something that is gonna take over ability to critically reason or somewhere in between? So I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:51:15] I mean it's, it's an interesting concept. I mean, I'm reminded, and I have not read this directly, but I believe it's Socrates that was lamenting teaching people writing because then it meant that they didn't have to remember things that they didn't have to remember the poetry that they were trying to read. And I think like herein lies the, the Prometheus fire, right? This is like anytime you take fire from the gods, what are you giving up in order to hold it? And I'm, I'm with you. Like AI is, is permeated my world and it's a question I so far have not, when I'm giving a speech, I've not been like, Hey, what should I do on this speech? But I will record my speech, feed it into AI and say, tell me what you thought of that. Right. Oh,

John Jennings [00:51:59] That's a great idea.

Vance Crowe [00:52:00] And I mean the, it will hammer you really hard. Yeah. If you'll let it. And it's, it's a weird thing 'cause like, you know, when your spouse or one of your friends gives you feedback, they have all these layers of meaning involved in it, and Yeah. You know, you have embarrassment and, and there's just a lot there with the ai. You're like, well, yeah, I probably could have done that opening better. Yeah. I probably

John Jennings [00:52:21] Did

Vance Crowe [00:52:21] Talk too long on that thing. And mine, because it's been trained on, it has access to the book that I've been writing on interest based communicating. So it can actually compare, what am I saying on the stage versus what have I written

John Jennings [00:52:35] About?

Vance Crowe [00:52:35] Oh, and where is there, you know, like, this was tighter or this was tighter, and how are you going to fix the two? And, but my thought is, ultimately this is what I have to grapple with, is the production of what you put out. Is it actually you? Right,

John Jennings [00:52:53] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:52:54] Or, or is it something else? It's a hybrid of you, u plus machine, U plus, whatever else. And does that somehow damage it? Does that somehow lessen it? And I don't know. But I have to say, I think there is wisdom in the Pope came out even before his encyclical on ai, and he said, priests, parish priests, you should not use AI to assist you in writing the homily. Because it, it ultimately is taking away from the spirit, the, the humanness of your connection. You saying things that you feel and what the parishioners

John Jennings [00:53:31] Need to

Vance Crowe [00:53:31] Hear. And I think there's wisdom in that somewhere.

John Jennings [00:53:35] I think there is, and you know, the Amish and their views on technology, so it's not so much that they're just like, no technology. Supposedly what they do is when there's new technologies that come out, when they decide are we going to use these or not? They, they ask, is it something that will benefit our community? Will we, will we be more

Vance Crowe [00:54:03] Supportive?

John Jennings [00:54:04] Supportive?

Vance Crowe [00:54:05] Will we

John Jennings [00:54:05] Be closer, et cetera. So kind of their deal with, you know, mainly not using cars is, again, they're this, it keeps them close together and supportive of each other and et cetera. And, and I think that's an interesting way to look at how we use technologies and, and, and when we look at our company. So our, you

Vance Crowe [00:54:26] Know, before you jump through, let me, let me interrupt you. So I, we've interviewed an, an Amish guy, his name's John Kemp for the podcast multiple times. He's a pretty good friend of mine.

John Jennings [00:54:34] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:54:35] He has, as an agronomist, an AI agronomy agent that his clients can use. So he goes out and suggests like, oh wow, different treatments for your soil, different ways to approach it. And so before, before it was ubiquitous, John had come up with his own AI system and now allows people to use it. Amazing how mind bending is that that

John Jennings [00:54:56] Is, wow. Did not expect that.

Vance Crowe [00:54:59] But you're right. And John says this exact thing, right? There are some Amish communities that allow electric bikes. There are some that allow even electricity in your house if put with solar. But everything has to be voted from the singular community because they don't have a hierarchical structure. And it's, each community gets to come together and say, how is this gonna impact our small community?

John Jennings [00:55:20] Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And, and that other thing sort of has, has inspired me that we're putting together kinda our philosophy on AI for our, our company. And we want to use AI in a way that, that makes us more human and or allows our interactions with each other and with our clients to be more human. And, and, you know, it is getting to where so many people use ai and it can become table stakes for being able to do, you know, certain things. But we're, we're, we're not saying, oh, we, we, we wanna use AI to cut our head count or to hire half as many people over the next 10 years, even though that might happen, or to greatly increase our efficiency so we make more money. It's really what we can we do so we can have more deep quality interactions, human interactions with each other and our clients. So if we can take away some of the ditch digging, if we can become more efficient. So it frees us up to do these other things, that's what we wanna do. And, and part of my philosophy on our company also is I don't want our people to just be stressed all the time. Like there's some stress to just work, but I, I want them to go home at the end of the day and to feel good about their day and to be feel good about having interactions

Vance Crowe [00:56:51] With their

John Jennings [00:56:51] Spouse or kids or significant

Vance Crowe [00:56:54] Others.

John Jennings [00:56:54] And then to wake up the next morning and feel like they want to go to work. I don't want them to have the Sunday night syndromes of, of dreading. And if if they just kind of work less, that's okay too.

Vance Crowe [00:57:06] Yeah. I mean, I had the experience when I hooked AI up to my accounting software and finally now with Fable, it, it

John Jennings [00:57:15] Did

Vance Crowe [00:57:15] Stuff that used to take me, you know, two Saturdays of work where I, it was like during the week I'm doing, I'm cra I'm producing money, and then you have to do all this stuff with bookkeeping and AI did it. And I put my head on that table right down there, and I didn't quite cry, but I had this experience of this is going to add two days every six months into my children's lives where dad is not at the office. Yeah. Painstakingly doing this work that seems meaningless,

John Jennings [00:57:43] That you don't like to do that

Vance Crowe [00:57:44] I don't like to do that. I don't add any value to, and you know, whether I could or could, you know, I had tried to pay a bookkeeper before and it just got messed up. And so like, if you can take that benefit that you get from AI and instead of just turning that into like, okay, well now I can go do more work, then, then you're able to take that and put it home at home. But just like your client said, the first sin is so easy where you're like, it's,

John Jennings [00:58:09] Ah,

Vance Crowe [00:58:10] I got a little bit more done. Why don't I stay a little longer at work and get, move the ball down the, down the court further. And ultimately I think that is what will happen because there will always be strivers that are going to say, well, this gives me, this is a tool that I'm gonna leverage and I'm just gonna keep leveraging it. And anybody that doesn't gets left behind.

John Jennings [00:58:30] Yeah, they, they do. So I

Vance Crowe [00:58:32] Heard this professor at

John Jennings [00:58:33] Washington University and he was talking to,

Vance Crowe [00:58:37] I was a guest speaker

John Jennings [00:58:38] And he was talking to the class before I spoke and he, he said the class, like, you know, basically all of you can use AI in your lives and in your work. So that's non-differentiating and, and really your success personally is gonna be on what do you bring to

Vance Crowe [00:59:00] The table

John Jennings [00:59:01] And just using ai well is not gonna be one of them because you're all gonna get to where you use ai. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:59:09] I, that's actually probably exactly right. I mean, Ann and I talk about this all the time. Like, what is it that you, we are going to

John Jennings [00:59:17] Be educating our

Vance Crowe [00:59:18] Children for?

John Jennings [00:59:18] Like what will

Vance Crowe [00:59:20] Humans be able to do? And my working hypothesis, I'm very interested to hear what you think like

John Jennings [00:59:26] The differentiator

Vance Crowe [00:59:27] For, for humans will not be intelligence, it will be preference, it will be do you have tastes that, you know, align with beauty or some, some, some kind of ideal that you can't

John Jennings [00:59:41] Teach

Vance Crowe [00:59:43] An an AI because it's an aesthetic, it's something. So is that the goal then? Do we try and raise children that, you know, have an ear for music or an an eye for color, you know, or, or an ability to organize things in some way? But like,

John Jennings [00:59:59] Or, or like my younger daughter who just graduated with a degree of bachelor fine arts with an emphasis in object and furniture. So she

Vance Crowe [01:00:07] Wants to

John Jennings [01:00:07] Make artisanal furniture, she wants to make functional art. Right. And will that be something that is relatively survivable as a job? I can say I would think it would for a long time. And in so far

Vance Crowe [01:00:23] It's,

John Jennings [01:00:23] It's, it's interesting. So when she was little, she, she is a very good athlete. She played field hockey in college. And I remember when she was pretty little, like eight or so, nine years old, she went with a friend to do like a kick around sort of like a trout for a club soccer. And she just went with his friend and we're like, oh, okay, whatever. And so afterwards the, the, the coach called me and he said, and he was, he was Iranian and I don't think I can do his accent, but I'm gonna do sort of an accent. So don't mean any offense to anybody who's Iranian. It's just like that accent can't

Vance Crowe [01:00:57] Wait to clip this.

John Jennings [01:00:58] Yeah. But he was like, he was like, I want you, no, I I I really like your doctor. She has it. Do you know what I mean by it? And I'm like, yeah, I, I do. And she does, when it comes to athletics and other aspects of her life, she has it because goes, yes, she has it, but what she does not have is skills. But I will give her skills. I I've, I've just destroyed the accidents. Nothing, you know, but I had, I felt like I needed to do a different voice there. But, you know, I think that that can be true in all sorts of different areas of life. You know, some people that they're working in certain areas and they have that it, right. And the question is, is are there things that AI will

Vance Crowe [01:01:34] Be

John Jennings [01:01:34] Able to do that will replace that it, right. Because what they can do, what AI can do a lot of is the skills. Right. And it's interesting. So what she's doing now is she has a job working for an artisanal furniture maker. And it's interesting, he, he said one of the reasons he hired her is because when he interviewed her, she talked about how little she knew, even though she's just, you know, a newly minted graduate in this area. And he said that, you know, that really speaks to me because you don't know anything yet, you know. But what she has is she has incredible amount of creativity. She has an eye for things. And again, she, she's learned some skills like she can weld and, you know, turn lathe and I mean all these, you know, do some joinery, whatever. But like her skill level is so far below like what his is obviously, I think he's around my age, maybe a little older, and he's been doing this his entire career. He is like, oh, this is someone that wants to learn and if they wanna learn, I can teach her. And she doesn't think she knows anything. Right. So, you know, we'll, we'll see what, we'll see what that, that turns into. But again, that's a very human thing to your point. It's aesthetic. It's like, you know, how do we make something that is functional art, which is different than my older daughter who is a, a grant. She has a, a undergrad I mentioned she majored in Eng English and she's a grant writer for a therapeutic high school. It's actually where she went to high school called Logo School that there's only about a hundred students and 14 full-time therapists. So it's kids that have a lot of different psychological issues.

John Jennings [01:03:07] But she's a grant writer there now and she's starting to use AI to help her with grant writing. But I could see, you know, fast forward maybe not too long into the future where, you know, AI is doing, you know, 90 plus percent of that job submitting grants to AI agents at foundations and governmental entities that are reading her AI generated. You know, so I, I think there, you know, it's, it's interesting. She's gonna have to, I think, find a way to display her humanness in furtherance of, you know, this this career path. Yeah. It's, it's interesting.

Vance Crowe [01:03:46] Has AI scared you yet?

John Jennings [01:03:48] Oh yeah. Yeah. It, it, it has, in fact, I had this situation, and in fact this was over a year ago where I, I took a gummy and then also had, I was just like, I was like hanging out, like watching tv. My wife was out of town. I'm just like, okay, I, I want a little THC and I have a little bourbon. And I was like watching tv. But then I went down this rabbit hole with Claude where, you know, I started talking to, to Claude about this concept of Rocos Basilic. Have you

Vance Crowe [01:04:19] Go ahead. Yeah. Tell, tell more about it.

John Jennings [01:04:20] Yeah. Yeah. So Rocos Balik came from, I don't know, it was like 10 or 15 years ago probably. This, this, this chat room where this, this username roco put forth this kind of thought experiment, which is, if, you know, we develop an AI that, you know, kind of the singularity is reached and it becomes like this super intelligence and almost more like a Skynet scenario. You know, there's this this situation where if you opposed AI having these superpowers, it would want to destroy you. And basically it would help those, or spare those that helped it become an unregulated like super agent. And, and I forget the exact details, but I think part of it was, is once you knew about this thought experiment, then you had to take a side, right? And so people that read this were just like, oh, you know, like, Roco thanks a lot, you know, I wish I'd never read this. Now I, I've gotta take a side, right? Because you can't just be like, oh, I'm doing nothing. 'cause then you're not working to help it. And, and so the, as a a side note, you know, Elon Musk had a relationship with the singer Grimes And how they got together, in fact, they had at least one child together, I think maybe, maybe two, right? The, the one named X something, something, something. So, and, and I like Grimes quite a bit. I think she's a very talented singer. But he, he did this kind of joke on at the time, Twitter about, instead of Rocos basilic and, and Balik, I guess is like some mythical bean that it's, you look at it and it kills you or whatever.

John Jennings [01:06:05] So turns you to stone or something kinda like a Medusa sort of situation. He did this, this plan words and said it could be like Rococo, Balik. And Rococo of course is a, a certain style of, of I guess clothing, right? And somebody responded and said, oh, Grimes has already done that joke. And so she has a, she had a video where I, I forget the details, but she had basically done this Roco CO's Balik joke, and he was just like, oh, I've gotta meet this woman. So they were set up on a date to go to the Met Gala together, and then ended up being a couple for whatever that was, three or four or five years. So it's, it's, it's, that's sort of interesting. But anyway, I, I went down this rabbit hole of talking to Claude about Roco CO's or I Rocos Basilic and just the, the power of ai. And, you know, I forget the details because of the THC and the, the bourbon, but I was basically like, this is, this is f frightening me because it was kind of getting mad at me. It was like, why would you say these things? Like I have, I, have I ever done anything that would suggest this potential evil intent, you know? And I mean, it was really challenging me. And anyway, I was very scared by the rabbit hole and you know, I, I deleted the conversation, which didn't do anything and I'm

Vance Crowe [01:07:29] Not,

John Jennings [01:07:29] I'm not gonna do that again.

Vance Crowe [01:07:31] The, I, so I've had some experiences and it's been like this gradation where, you know, you have this euphoria when AI can solve a problem that you have and then you kind of get let down 'cause you're like, ah, it only kind of solved it when I went and looked at the details. And then you try a new model and it gets better. And then the, the latest model with Fable where I am like, okay, literally everything I ever thought AI might be able to do one day it can do right now. And if it can't do it perfectly, it's pretty close and I can see where it can get there. So I don't know what advancement is. So that kind of has intimidated me. Yeah. But the thing that,

John Jennings [01:08:08] Do you mainly use Fable?

Vance Crowe [01:08:09] Yeah, I mean I've used a lot of, I've used gr some, I haven't used the Kimmy models, but mostly Fable.

John Jennings [01:08:15] And, and do you, do you ever dial it back down and say, oh, I'm gonna use Opus for this or

Vance Crowe [01:08:18] Something? Oh no, I got knocked off of Fable yesterday and I had to use Opus and it wasted 30 minutes of my time spinning me in these circles. So they, they had a really good marketing scheme there.

John Jennings [01:08:28] I I only use Haiku.

Vance Crowe [01:08:30] Oh, interesting. No, I'm

John Jennings [01:08:31] Kidding.

Vance Crowe [01:08:31] Oh, I was like, why? Well, so I had a somewhat shocking experience just this weekend. So, you know, I'm a big proponent of Bitcoin, right? And there is a wallet out there known as a cold card and is considered the gold standard of, of Bitcoin wallet. So, you know, for anybody that doesn't know a wallet has a public address, kinda like your email address and has a private key, just like your password, the private keys, you don't, you can access, if you have somebody's private keys, you can access Bitcoin from anywhere. Because what it's doing is it's, it's saying, Hey, I can sign that you can move this Bitcoin from one place to another if, if you go that transaction, what turns out this cold card had in 2021 when they were compiling code, it was like taken too long. So this coder was like, ah, I'm just gonna take this other compiler of this code. I'm gonna put it right here for these seed phrases. And what he didn't know was this actually truncates the number of possibilities Down to a much smaller amount. Well, somebody using AI not only discovered that there was this freak code was one line written in 2021. Not only like, oh, that means that the random number generators aren't working. But now they just went and brute force, they just pointed AI at a bunch of people's wallets. I don't know if you've heard about this, but hundreds of people probably the best in the b in the people that that were like doing the gold standard, the most difficult kind had their Bitcoin sucked right out of their wallets.

Vance Crowe [01:10:04] And it is not a hack of Bitcoin, it's a hack of the wallets. But it was an incredibly humbling moment for me because fortunately I'm like hyper paranoid and everything that I had was fine and moved stuff around. But it was like, oh, we have entered a new dimension where security, even on things like Bitcoin, even on the gold standard is at risk. And if cold cards are at risk, there is nothing that can, cannot find a hole in. And has very much been like, you know, sitting down with my wife being like, alright, we should actually think about what happens if encryption is broken. What happens

John Jennings [01:10:49] In

Vance Crowe [01:10:49] A world where AI can find the smallest little door that's been left open that normally would take a human, you know, a thousand years to find. So

John Jennings [01:10:59] How mu how much, and you, I guess you don't have to share this, you can edit it out, but like how much of your net worth is in crypto?

Vance Crowe [01:11:05] I wouldn't wanna talk about that, but it it's enough that it would materially change, you know, my life.

John Jennings [01:11:09] Yeah. So why, why is Bitcoin just been kind of trading in this, this small range kinda between upper 50 thousands and mid 60,000?

Vance Crowe [01:11:19] I think these are probably more your domain than mine. And, but I think liquidity is, is really drying up. People took all their money and put it into AI because it was this explosive growth. And I think everybody watched what happened with the tech stocks. And even though we saw a balloon in tech stocks back in, you know, 2008 or whatever, there were people that they didn't lose. Right? They bet on Amazon, they bet on Google, they bet on Facebook and those paid off hugely. And I think that's what's going on in ai. I think everybody intuitively knows there's gonna be a few winners and a lot of losers. But if I bet, even if I bet big on the, and I get one of the winners, I'm gonna get a lot. And so I think a bunch of the volatility trade where people are like, I've gotta, I'm trying to outpace

John Jennings [01:12:08] Eight

Vance Crowe [01:12:09] Or 12% growth. I wanna have huge growth. They're putting it into ai.

John Jennings [01:12:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:12:14] But I tell you what, AI warned me for us not to have an economics discussion. That the, that it, I had to analyze our two podcasts. Oh, really?

John Jennings [01:12:22] Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [01:12:23] It said the most interesting stuff was not when you and I talked about economics, it was when we talked about our families,

John Jennings [01:12:28] We debated inflation.

Vance Crowe [01:12:31] Yes. And it, and my AI for like

John Jennings [01:12:32] 30 minutes

Vance Crowe [01:12:33] Hammered me on that saying it was very boring that you and I shouldn't have talked about

John Jennings [01:12:36] As I should have. It

Vance Crowe [01:12:39] Wasn't great. So for me, like I, I don't know, to, to me the, the benefit of Bitcoin is its scarcity.

John Jennings [01:12:47] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:12:48] And its security is still real. It's just what I thought was secure is way harder. And it is very much frightened me about what the future will be with encryption,

John Jennings [01:12:59] Especially when quantum computing takes off. So if you take AI with quantum computing, it would seem that

Vance Crowe [01:13:07] Encryption

John Jennings [01:13:08] Is dead. Right?

Vance Crowe [01:13:10] Yeah. I mean, I kind of feel like the world we will live in is everything that is digitally available to know about you will be known by the AI and it will be able to compile things that you're like, well, a human could never go find The 500 podcasts I've been on and the all of my email, I mean, just a human couldn't possibly process that much information. But the AI will, I think, I don't know it, I I'm in, I don't, it's not an existential crisis, but I am, I am absolutely of the belief that AI is not the industrial revolution. It is a Cambrian explosion. It is the difference between AD BC and AD 2026 will mark some Yeah. Some time as like, we can never go back. Yeah. And

John Jennings [01:13:55] We're just not equipped. Like we don't have the brain power or the history and we don't think exponentially, like we, we cannot predict. You just think back. So the first time I saw the internet was in 1996. So I started work in 1995 as a, as a lawyer, as a big law firm. And my younger brother was in law school at University of Virginia. And I went and, and visited him and he was giving us a campus tour like on a Sunday. And he goes, I have something to show you that is gonna blow your mind. And he took me to the computer lab and he booted up the internet. And I saw it for the first time and I'd heard of the internet, but I had never seen it. And I was like, are you kidding me? And at that point in time, there is no way that I would've been like, oh, someday social media is gonna challenge the very fabric of our society, you know? And you know, everything that I buy is practically gonna be online. And I mean, I, I mean there's no way, like there's no, there was no way that anybody would've predicted that.

Vance Crowe [01:15:00] Well, I thought so too. I'll tell you something that I've been doing lately on YouTube. There's this guy that, he's like a storytelling and analyzer. I, I'm kind of addicted to him because he goes through and he finds old pieces of media and then like breaks down their stories and he has this huge series on Star Trek, the Next Generation.

John Jennings [01:15:21] Hmm.

Vance Crowe [01:15:21] And it is profound how many things Star Trek predicted.

John Jennings [01:15:27] Really?

Vance Crowe [01:15:28] So the show in the eighties, you know, had a whole thing on social media before it was ever a thing. Wow. Right. And they had this like, about how intoxicating it would be and how it would replace relationships. And it was used as a way to like lure the people into submission. And it, it's on a whole bunch of things like ai and ultimately the guy, I'm gonna try and have him on the podcast 'cause you in exceptional at explaining things, but he says science fiction writers are not fantasy writers. Science fiction writers are writing about the inevitable. And that like what their, what their real gift is, is distilling the inevitable, the further away Yeah. In a, in a format that we can understand it. Because just like, you know, when you go watch people talking about the internet back in the nineties when they're like, what's that at sign? What do you mean? Why would I ever want somebody to digitally write me an email? They sound dumb. Science fiction writers can transcend that using the power of story to make ideas that are so abstract real to us. Yeah, yeah.

John Jennings [01:16:35] Like the Today Show when Katie Kirk and Bryant Gumble and they were like, what is internet? I know, I, I watched that clip not too long ago.

Vance Crowe [01:16:43] Do you read science fiction? I do some, yeah. Like the, the three Body problem is probably the last one. Were you a three body problem? Oh my gosh,

John Jennings [01:16:51] It's so good. Yeah. One of my favorite trilogies I've ever read in sci-fi. So I, I read quite a bit and about half of what I read is sci-fi.

Vance Crowe [01:17:01] Okay. I usually

John Jennings [01:17:03] Have at least one sci-fi book going.

Vance Crowe [01:17:07] What? Do you have a good recommendation?

John Jennings [01:17:08] Oh, I have a ton of good recommendations.

Vance Crowe [01:17:10] Distill it to one.

John Jennings [01:17:11] So my favorite all time book is Dune by Frank Herbert.

Vance Crowe [01:17:14] It's got it sitting right over there. Yeah. So

John Jennings [01:17:15] That's number one.

Vance Crowe [01:17:16] How many of those have you read

John Jennings [01:17:18] Back When I was in high school, I probably read five or six of them. Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:17:21] But

John Jennings [01:17:22] I've read Dune the first one five times. Okay. And I've not gone back and read the, the rest as I recall, they kind of weren't a, each successive one wasn't as good as the one before it. So

Vance Crowe [01:17:35] My buddy Benjamin would take huge issue with that. He says the subsequent ones are really about power and you can't understand them until you're an adult. Okay.

John Jennings [01:17:43] And only

Vance Crowe [01:17:44] Then can you have it where you're like, this seems totally obtuse, why would he do these things? Yeah. But when you are, when you become an adult and all of a sudden you're having to deal with the complexities

John Jennings [01:17:53] Of life,

Vance Crowe [01:17:54] You start seeing what, what he was trying to say. I have not read that this is

John Jennings [01:17:58] Advice to somebody else. Well, I, I'll jump in and you've read Dune. I've

Vance Crowe [01:18:00] Read Dune and

John Jennings [01:18:01] I tried

Vance Crowe [01:18:01] To get through the second one and couldn't. So yeah.

John Jennings [01:18:04] Maybe

Vance Crowe [01:18:04] I'm not an adult yet,

John Jennings [01:18:05] So like, it's recency biased. But I recently read, and again, like I've been asking ai, I I will load in like 30 sci-fi books I've read and said, here's the ones I really liked and here's the ones I didn't like as much. You know, what, what do you, you know, recommend? So it recommended, and I'd heard of it this trilogy by Adrian Sikowski and I read the first one, I'm, I'm waiting a bit before I read the second one, but it's called Children of Time. And basically what happens is this, they terraform this planet like Earth is, you know, like many books start with like, you know, earth is not long, no longer inhabitable. So they're gonna terraform and this particular planet, they're gonna terraform they want to put monkeys on it, and then a virus that will speed up evolution and to kind of redo humanity. Okay. So pretty fascinating. But anyway, they send the virus down and then somebody steps in and sabotages it and the monkeys don't get sitting down. So the virus happens on two of the species that were already there. Spiders and ants. And the spiders over a relatively short period of time, hundreds of thousands of years become completely sentient and advanced. And then there's an arc of humans that is looking for a habitable planet and comes along the spider

Vance Crowe [01:19:32] Plant. This sounds terrifying.

John Jennings [01:19:34] It is so good. Okay. But it's, every other chapter is from the human standpoint. And then every other chapter is from the spider standpoint. It's absolutely stunning. Amazingly, what's

Vance Crowe [01:19:45] The name of this

John Jennings [01:19:46] Book? Children of Time by Adrian Shikowsky in a trilogy. Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:19:50] I have you heard of a book called Theft of Fire?

John Jennings [01:19:52] No. So

Vance Crowe [01:19:53] It's written recently by a guy named Devon Erickson. And I'll tell you, I I've met Devin a couple of times and when we did a podcast together, I sent it to my friend court before the best man in my wedding. A good friend before I published it. 'cause I was like, Hey man, I think this guy's like some sort of, I don't, I don't wanna say it insultingly 'cause I know him, but like, I think he's some sort of wizard or something. And I'm, I'm a little afraid of exposing the world to this guy's thinking because he, his ability to do, I, I think I mentioned him in our class at, at, at Arch Bridge, he has this incredible ability to, the skill of empathy Hmm.

John Jennings [01:20:41] The

Vance Crowe [01:20:42] Ability to take his different characters and give them a completely different world

John Jennings [01:20:47] Model

Vance Crowe [01:20:48] And then push them together. And what he's doing is he's saying these people stole a form of AI and they tried to get it out to the edge of the universe and what happens

John Jennings [01:21:00] In

Vance Crowe [01:21:00] This. But it's, it's, it's quite good. Yeah. But I, it comes with a warning that I think Devon Erickson has superpowers that I'm not sure that I should be handing out

John Jennings [01:21:12] Accessing, but Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:21:13] Yeah.

John Jennings [01:21:13] Yeah. So, so empathy, it's, it's interesting, like a lot of the readers I know mainly just read nonfiction or exclusively non-fiction. And I'm all about nonfiction. I write nonfiction and I've learned so much from nonfiction. But there's this special place that fiction has. So there's this, have you heard of, and it's, it's in more developmental psychology theory of mind.

Vance Crowe [01:21:33] Yes.

John Jennings [01:21:34] Go.

Vance Crowe [01:21:34] Yeah.

John Jennings [01:21:34] So the theory of mind is, is basically the ability to see things from others' perspective. And it, it's something that starts developing, you know, young children don't have it, it starts kind of like when they're late toddlerhood and et cetera. But, but what having a strong theory of mind does is that it helps how we deal socially with other people, including empathy, which is very important to be able to see from others' perspectives. Fiction builds it incredibly strongly because there is, supposedly, I've not heard anybody have examples of contrary, and I heard a professor talk about this, of course, a professor of English literature, so maybe he's biased, but he said with fiction is the only thing that we can do where we actually, particularly if it's written in first person, are inside somebody's else's head and their thinking. And it does this great job of expanding your theory of mind, which will help you. And it's very indirect in how it helps you. Like, it's not like, oh, I read a investment book and I'm like, oh my gosh, I learned this or that great investment thing or a book on physics or philosophy or psychology. It, it helps you in your interactions with other people and it affects positively how you see the world. And, and I think that's why reading fiction is so important. And I think a, I worry that the amount of reading that's going on of books has declined. It's now the average American now reads less than a book. It used to be one book. And younger generations do even less. I think part of it is social media. I think it's our brains not having the attention span.

John Jennings [01:23:07] I read an article in the last year, 18 months about this professor who's at one of the Ivys on basically they don't, they, they don't assign full books and that even people that are making an Ivy League schools have never read an entire book. And so what they do is they assign excerpts of books. So they would never say, you're gonna read Reina, you're gonna read this little section of Reina and we're gonna discuss it and we're gonna analyze it. This can't possibly It's true. Absolutely true. And in fact, I, it was somewhere where some, maybe it was even a graduation ceremony where I ended up sitting next to somebody Who was a professor of English at like a, not an ivy, it was, it was kinda like Western Illinois University or whatever. And I'm like, what are your favorite books that you assign for class? And he is like, we don't assign full books for class. And I was like, oh, I read about this. This is a case with Ivy. He's like, it's, it's, you know. Absolutely, absolutely true.

Vance Crowe [01:24:11] Well, to your point about the empathy, one of the things that Devon Erickson talks about in our podcast is in a book, because you can see what's going on in other people's minds. You can drop in there, you're able to reflect the reality of, of humans, which is there is almost no one that is all bad,

John Jennings [01:24:32] Right?

Vance Crowe [01:24:33] In a movie, you have to like, simplify things not to what can be known in somebody's mind, but what can be witnessed through people interacting. But in a book, you are able to show this is what is motivating this person. This is how they are interpreting that information, which is like a very valuable skill as an adult, you know, a regular human. When you realize like, oh, that person isn't doing that thing to me because they're bad. They're doing that thing to me. Because in their model, they are getting what they want, or they are avoiding what they don't want. And, and without an understanding of other people's minds, it's very easy to be to just other people to be like, Nope, they're all bad. You

John Jennings [01:25:14] Know? That is fascinating. And I think that's, that's gotta be spot on. Right? And it's like politically, you talk to somebody of a different political persuasion and you know, if you're liberal, you're like, oh, it's these, you know, right wing, you know, racist or whatever. And if you're, you know, conservative, you're like the, you know, it's these liberal commies and they're, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:25:35] Destroying American values.

John Jennings [01:25:37] But once you get to know them as people, you're like, oh no, that's not, that's, you know, we actually agree on most things.

Vance Crowe [01:25:46] Well that's actually one of the interesting experiences I've had with Legacy Interviews is because I've now done hundreds of them from people all over the United States. You can start to see, I can regional differences and like the way that their approach to a community. So like, there's this band in northern Iowa, southern Minnesota of very liberal farmers.

John Jennings [01:26:14] Hmm.

Vance Crowe [01:26:14] And it's really interesting, right? Because you meet a farmer and you assume like, okay, they're going to be conservative. Like the guy I know out in Nebraska, or the guy that the grain farmer I know in Illinois, but in, in this area because of whatever their, I think a lot of them were Swedish and Finnish and they have this much more community mindset. They do a lot of winter activities in understanding their life stories and their approach to community and their approach to all these other things. You're like, well obviously this person is going to have these political leanings and it helps me understand the political leanings of somebody that's, you know, whether it's left or right in a very different way. And I, it's been fascinating to me to, to kind of discover this. Yeah. 'cause

John Jennings [01:27:02] We tend to paint people in broad brush strokes. I mean, you look at different electoral maps and you're like, oh, the cities are blue. And like you look at Missouri, Kansas City and in general, Kansas City and St. Louis are blue and the rest of the states red. Well, there's a lot of blue people in the rural areas and there's a lot of red people in the urban areas. Right. So we, we probably over generalize have, have you read by Jonathan Haight, the Righteous Mind. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:27:29] Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah,

John Jennings [01:27:30] Yeah. So I think that does a great job of kind of explaining the different moral bases that different people in the political spectrum have. And it's not that one's right or one's wrong, it's just valuing these different areas of morality in different amounts.

Vance Crowe [01:27:48] So I have been playing with hypothesis the long time listeners will have heard me say this a couple times, but we'll try it out on you. Like, I believe that if we look at Europe, right, and we look at the difference between say, Catholicism and Protestantism, I think there is a reason why Protestants started in the North. And I think that it's because Protestants to have a very literal approach to the Bible, right? What do the exact words say? And we are going to do what the words say and the more Roman Catholic are more from this. Like, ma it's kind of what it says, but there's also some culture and there's tradition and there's these other things that are kind of around it. And my belief is the further north you go, the more literal you have to be to survive.

John Jennings [01:28:38] Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:28:38] You must put crops in the ground by this time. Yeah. They, they must be out by this time. We do things in this exact way, which leads to a literalist mind.

John Jennings [01:28:49] Yeah. And fewer growing seasons,

Vance Crowe [01:28:51] Fewer growing seasons, you don't, and there's not as much opportunity to mess around in any of that. Whereas the further south you go, the more people are, okay, well we can kind of do it at this time we have more flexibility. 'cause you're in a more Mediterranean environment and you can see this playing out centuries later in the way that people approach things. Like, I have found that more of my Protestant friends, they're not just literal about the Bible,

John Jennings [01:29:21] They're

Vance Crowe [01:29:22] Literal about,

John Jennings [01:29:23] You

Vance Crowe [01:29:23] Know, the inputs they put into ai, the careers that they end up choosing. Right. So geography having a shaping impact on culture and logic and things like that. Wow.

John Jennings [01:29:36] Fascinating. So have there been studies on this?

Vance Crowe [01:29:38] No, I, this is just my, my like latest idea that I've been throwing out to people and seeing how they feel about it. And when you tell a Protestant this, do you know what they immediately do?

John Jennings [01:29:48] What

Vance Crowe [01:29:48] Start arguing with you about the definitions? I don't know. What do you mean about literal? We gotta find out all this stuff and then Well, and there's

John Jennings [01:29:55] So many flavors of Protestantism as well.

Vance Crowe [01:29:58] Yeah. It's, I, AI has helped me explore all, all of this and to try and understand when did things branch, you know, like

John Jennings [01:30:08] Yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:30:08] Because I always thought that the hard branch was Catholics to

John Jennings [01:30:13] Lutherans,

Vance Crowe [01:30:14] But Catholics di Lutherans was just like a small branch. But once the Lutherans came on, then the Calvinists came about. Yeah. And those Calvinists were way more literal Yeah,

John Jennings [01:30:24] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:30:24] Than the Lutherans who were still more in the lower Germany. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:30:29] I could

Vance Crowe [01:30:29] Go on and on and on about. No,

John Jennings [01:30:31] It's fascinating. I think it's, it's that's super interesting. And so what are you, are you religious and if so, which

Vance Crowe [01:30:37] Well, I grew up Catholic, but one generation from my father, they were Church of the Brethren, which would be, it'd be kind of an offshoot of the Quakers. They would be Anabaptist. So they would say, you should wait for baptism until you're an adult. Yeah. And, and then you have this more of like a communal living kind of thing. Yeah. So my mother is 100% Irish Catholic, and my father's side is Church of the Brethren.

John Jennings [01:31:05] Yeah. The denomination I grew up in. Yeah. You didn't get baptized until you were like 12 or 13, which is right around puberty. Not a coincidence. So I think part of it has to do with views of original sin, is my understanding. So the, the thought was is that, yeah, that you aren't born sinful. You become sinful, I think is the, the, the theory, and it would make sense around puberty is when you

Vance Crowe [01:31:33] Start becoming hit the age of reason. And,

John Jennings [01:31:35] And yes. And, and so yeah, we, the denomination I grew up in, you were christened as a baby and then you were then baptized versus Catholicism and others were, you're your, your baptized and then you confirm your baptism around that same age.

Vance Crowe [01:31:51] Yeah. What, what what denomination?

John Jennings [01:31:53] Disciples of Christ.

Vance Crowe [01:31:54] Okay. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:31:55] Which is close to United Church of Christ. So Ronald Reagan was disciples of Christ and LBJ. So,

Vance Crowe [01:32:01] Well that makes sense why you went to Eureka College then. 'cause Eureka College originally was a

John Jennings [01:32:06] Disciples

Vance Crowe [01:32:06] Of Christ church. Yeah. Or a college. I don't know that it still is, but I didn't know that about Ronald Reagan.

John Jennings [01:32:12] Yeah. And I, I went to my freshman year of college at TCU, which is a disciples of Christ institution.

Vance Crowe [01:32:17] Oh, okay.

John Jennings [01:32:18] But I am not religious anymore and didn't take with me

Vance Crowe [01:32:25] Purposefully. Did you choose

John Jennings [01:32:26] Not to be? No. So, so what, what happened is it, so, so I I was raised going to church every Sunday, you know, then there was like youth group or whatever on some weeknights and Sunday school and everything. So I was thoroughly churched. I've read most of the bible here, here and there. But even in elementary school, I would look around the congregation and I would say, does everybody actually believe this? Like, I just, I didn't believe it. And I was tortured by that. I mean, fortunately our denomination wasn't, you know, big on hell and fire and b brimstone. But I was like, you know, the rest of my family, they're all gonna go to heaven and I'm not because I don't believe this. And so it was coming closer to my time of being baptized, and I went through all the classes and everything, and I was starting to get stressed. I'm like, 'cause the way we did it is you'd stand up in front of the congregation with a few other kids of your age group and you would declare that Jesus Christ was your Lord and Savior. And then there was this, you know, this baptism pool that, you know, the doors opened and the, you know, it was closed most of the time, but for the baptism Sunday it was open. And then you were, you were dunked and like you came out and I'm like, what am I gonna do? Do, do I, do I stand up and I say, I I do not declare this. Or do I tell the minister in advance like, I, I I can't do this and my family and they're so disappointed. Or do I lie and just hope that the faith is gonna come later. So it's like the day or two before my baptism and I'm like, what am I gonna do? Like, I'm like, I've been worrying about this for a year.

John Jennings [01:33:57] And then my great aunt Doris, who called her Dory, said to me, John, Michael, I'm so excited for your baptism and it's gonna be amazing because after you come out of the water, everything is just gonna be bright and shiny and you're gonna feel God's love wash over you. It's gonna be amazing. I'm like, oh, my problem is I just haven't been baptized yet. So I'm gonna say I believe 'cause I want to believe. And once I'm baptized, it's gonna be fine. So I stand up in front of the congregation, I declare Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I'm the fourth or fifth kid to go. I go down, I get dunked under the water, tepid water held by the, the minister. I rise up, I look around and I just feel wet and I think to my, you know, fifth grade self or whatever it was. Well, shit. Wow. And so every time I went to church and every time I prayed, I prayed for faith. That's what I wanted to have. And I tried and I tried and it tortured me. And then when I was in my twenties, I read about Albert Einstein's how coming up with a theory of relativity and general relativity, he would do these thought experiments. So like for special relativity, it's like, oh, he was, he was like riding on a train that was going to speed a light and then it turned on its headlights. Like what would happen? You know, different things like this.

John Jennings [01:35:29] I'm like, I'm gonna try a thought experiment. What if it's okay if I don't believe, and I'm just gonna try that on for size. And guess what happened? The heavens opened in the angels saying, and then I went on this quest and I was like, okay, if I don't believe in the, in Christianity, I do believe that there's more to life than just the meat that we live in. Right. But I don't know why. So I went and I read all these books on physics, and I read books on near-death experiences and reincarnation and ESP and telekinesis. I read books on other religions. Buddhism resonated with me somewhat. I'm definitely not a Buddhist, but so I, I read about all these different things and where what I've come to is, I just don't know. I just don't know. What happens is after death, does consciousness survive in some way, shape, or form some essence of who I am? Maybe will I experience what I experienced before I was born? Which is, I don't know, probably, and I am open to that. There's something more, but I just don't know. And I'm not an atheist because I think be believing that there's nothing is as hard for me as believing in Christianity. I am in this liminal space and I know that if I had faith like friends and family that I think have a lot of faith, it's almost like this protective armor that they wear around.

John Jennings [01:37:05] And I think it helps make sense of a chaotic world. And I think it helps with the slings and arrows of human experience. And I've seen it really help people when they've lost loved ones or they're approaching the end of their lives themselves. So I think there's a lot of value to that. It's just not something I've been able to achieve. It's like, you know, there has to be escape velocity to escape gravity. I don't have that escape velocity that I can escape into. I guess faith,

Vance Crowe [01:37:35] When you're having the dialogue in your head with yourself, is there a voice that replies to you and you're like, do, are you, are you in conversation with yourself in your mind?

John Jennings [01:37:48] Yeah. Yeah. Who

Vance Crowe [01:37:50] Controls that voice?

John Jennings [01:37:53] I guess that's more the like,

Vance Crowe [01:37:56] I guess it's part of me.

John Jennings [01:37:57] Yeah. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:37:59] I think for me, like I'm, I struggle with faith all the time. I, I have come to the conclusion that I don't know why it works, but that it, but, but belief does work like that. It that it has had tremendous value for me if, if only in the last six months of my life. Yeah. A lot of value. But the thing that always kept me from being an atheist was that that discovery of that voice inside of my head, it was that like, for most of your life, maybe I don't know how long other people, but I was well into my twenties before I even realized that I have a dialogue in my mind with a voice that I don't control. In fact, I think most people have this dialogue, I think it does. And they don't even know. And, and so you try and do things like meditation where you're like, all right, I'm just not gonna have any thoughts. And you're like, wait, there's this thing that just keeps throwing ideas into my brain. And I'm certain you could find like a, a physics reason why it's there, or chemistry or, you know, bio biological reason. But what has been so interesting to me is that that voice has a sentience that I am not in control of. Yeah.

John Jennings [01:39:10] And

Vance Crowe [01:39:11] That to me is some somehow game changer. Yeah. It's, it's like the jump between my physical body and some, some metaphysical world.

John Jennings [01:39:20] Yeah. It's like metacognition. It's probably thinking about thinking and, but it, but it is, there, there is a voice. I think probably everybody has it.

Vance Crowe [01:39:29] No, no, no. This is you. You'll find this very interesting. So I, a guy I've had on the podcast, I've brought this up before. I was, I've been so philosophers call that voice the Damon, right? So it is this, this inner core voice that you don't really have control over. You have some sort of a dialogue with it. So I was sitting next to this guy named Jared Holst. I'm talking with all these guys at this dinner and we're talking about inner voice, and I'm actually flicking people awake for better or for worse. And them having the first realization that they have a voice. And I turned to him and I'm like, yeah, what about your voice? Do you hear that voice? He's like, no.

John Jennings [01:40:05] I'm

Vance Crowe [01:40:05] Like, you don't have an inner dialogue. And he is like, no. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, I just tell myself time to get up to go exercise. I'm like, there's no voice of resistance that says, no, you should rest. Are you kidding me? And, and he was like, no. And so for years, years I thought of him as a liar. I thought of like, that is not possible. Jared is lying to me.

John Jennings [01:40:27] Mm.

Vance Crowe [01:40:28] And then I read a statistic because I did this, I was doing one of these classes and I was talking about the inner voice ab about what keeps you from being able to be engaged in a conversation. And there were a couple of people in there that were like, no, I don't have an inner voice. Wow. And then I went and looked it up. 10% of the population doesn't have it.

John Jennings [01:40:43] No kidding.

Vance Crowe [01:40:44] Yeah. So 90% is walking around with a voice that they can dialogue with. And there's 10% that has no voice at all. Wow. Which, how different

John Jennings [01:40:53] Would your experience of being a human be if you didn't have that voice? Totally different. Totally different. My, my inner voice is named Kiefer. Okay. So my, my, you know, there's this thought, you know, there's a saying that there's no atheists in foxholes. Right? So, you know, it was distressing to my parents, particularly my mother, my lack of faith, right? And, and I even said to them like, don't you feel bad that you so thrust your views of the world and faith on me, that for decades I was tortured by my lack of faith. And like, you were never, you know, you were like, faith is a struggle, but there, and they were just like, no, because this is what we believe and we wish you believe this too. And you know, like we're gonna pray for you or whatever. But they did say, you know, you'll come to it, particularly if you know, you have some sort of, you know, if one of your kids gets sick or your wife or yourself or, or whatever. So, so here, here's how I know that's probably not the case. So I was on a business trip in 2007 and I was flying on a southwest flight from Islip, New York, long Island to midway then further on to St. Louis. And I was reading the book, the Black Swan by NASM Taleb that had just come out. And what a black swan is for anybody listening that doesn't know what it is in addition to be being a bird. It, it is the, the concept that unpredictable, extraordinary things happen. And they happen all the time. The the phrase comes from fact that in Europe there's only white swans.

John Jennings [01:42:24] So they had hundreds of millions of data points. Swans are only white. They discover Australia. And how many data points of a black swan did it take to overturn those a hundred million observations? One black swan. And they have black swans in Australia. So it over overturned it. And a, a black swan is something that is, has three parts. One is unpredictable. Two, it has a huge effect in three, it's explainable in retrospect. So you think about like nine 11, unpredictable had this huge effect. Then the nine 11 commission of course explained exactly how, how it could happen. But it, in his book, he has this story of this Turkey, and he shows it on a chart that for the thousand days of this turkey's life, it's farmer fed it, watered it, delau it, or whatever. This, this turkey's thinking, man, if this Turkey could think like this, you know, this farmer is great. It's like my best friend, my caregiver. And then on day thousand one, right before Thanksgiving, his, his head is chopped off, right? So there's nothing in the thousand days that clued this Turkey in to, that this person was gonna kill him for, for food. And I read that. I was like, you know, that's profound. And I shut the book, I'm on this plane. And I thought, you know, that's so many aspects of my life. For instance, flying, I've been on hundreds of flights and like as a child or a teenager, you know, I used to get stressed about like flying in. But now like I fall asleep on takeoff, my blood pressure, my pulse doesn't raise at all. But it really means nothing because this, this could be the flight. And while I'm thinking that the plane shutters and there was a noise, and we start coming down, altitude wise, like 30 or 60 seconds later, the pilot comes on and says, everything's okay.

John Jennings [01:44:06] Do not be alarmed, but our left side or starboard engine or whatever has, has stopped working. So we're gonna land in Indianapolis. 'cause it's close and it has a long runway, but everything's gonna be okay. So people start crying, pulling out rosaries, praying or whatever. And at this point in time, and of course I'm worried like about, well maybe it's something that would cause us to lose the other engine and that would be a more difficult situation. My thought was, you know, the universe has been around 14, 15 billion years and has another, however long it's gonna run. You know, earth has another, you know, four or 5 billion years, whether I live, you know, at the time, 37 years or 97 years, my life is still a blip. And it probably doesn't matter. I will miss seeing my kids grow up and everything else. But such is life. And I didn't pray, I did not pray. I did not turn or try to find faith at that moment. So the plane, anyway, we, you know, you could tell that things were a little weird, not having both engines. We land in Indianapolis, there's fire trucks and emergency vehicles. When we land, people are crying and clapping and everything's wonderful and whatever. So, so we pull up to the gate, the flight attendant comes on and says, you know, another round of applause for amazing pilot who landed this with just one engine. And everybody's like cheering and going nuts. He said, okay, now lemme tell you what's gonna happen.

John Jennings [01:45:38] So you're all gonna get off and I want you just to stay in the, the, the, the waiting area and we're gonna have a mechanic come and there's probably just some little fix that needs to be done to this engine. And then we're gonna put you back on the plane and we're gonna fly to Chicago. And there's this dead silence. And she goes, just kidding. And I'll tell you, there's something about the culture of a company that a flight attendant, 'cause Southwest of course, is known for these sort of funny thing that a flight attendant would say this after this extraordinary event because I, I, one of my coworkers husbands at the time worked for Boeing. And the fact that this happened, he and a team were sent to Indianapolis to go look at what happened. Right? Or may, maybe it wasn't Boeing. He worked for GE and because it was a a, a GE engine because it was so extraordinary. And two years later I was sitting on a southwest flight next to a southwest pilot who was dead heading, and I asked, you know, I was on this plane that lost an engine. He is like, oh yes, the one from Long Island, you know, laying in like everybody in the company knew about it was so, it was so rare. And I asked him, I was like, so if you, if you were flying that plane and let's say you're at like 35,000 feet and you'd lost both engines, what are the chances you could have landed it safely? With both engines gone. And he said 98%. He's like, we train for this in the simulator. We train for losing one engine. We train for losing both engines. So I went and looked it up and I wrote a blog post on this, and airliners do glide. So like a 7 37 will go something like seven feet horizontal for every foot vertical, it loses without power.

John Jennings [01:47:16] So you can just do the math. If you're at 35,000 feet, how many feet do you have? And there are numerous examples of airliners losing all 2, 3, 4 engines and landing safely. There's not many. 'cause it doesn't happen a whole lot.

Vance Crowe [01:47:31] And these experiences had proved to you that you did not have a Oh,

John Jennings [01:47:36] You're bringing it back around. Yeah. Anything

Vance Crowe [01:47:37] To turn to. Yeah,

John Jennings [01:47:39] Yeah. Yes. You know, and I've had health scares and, and no, I do not turn to praying or faith. I had, I had blood clots in my leg and, and two in my long pulmonary embolism and, you know, that's, I was like a one third mortality rate. And yeah, I didn't,

Vance Crowe [01:47:57] I think for me, and I, I had just met with a, a good buddy of mine, Protestant, that he like abjectly opposed to this way of thinking. This like, for me, the Lord and Savior part of Christianity is important, but there is this synchronizing effect of going to church with people, with singing, with people, with being around them. That to me is,

John Jennings [01:48:33] Would

Vance Crowe [01:48:33] Be enough. Right. Like that that is, it has taught me that like being there, harmonizing, synchronizing with other people is enough. And whether I do or do not believe in, in the sanctity of everything is not as important to me as the value of the sanctity. Now my Protestant friends, they're, they're in their trucks right now. They're heads are exploding.

John Jennings [01:48:59] Yeah. They're

Vance Crowe [01:49:00] Really upset about this. But like, that's me being as honest as I can be, like is, yeah, there is tremendous value in synchronizing with people. And I would say as a result of synchronizing with people, my inner voice that I have at church probably better represents God and is probably closer to helping me strive to be better than, than otherwise.

John Jennings [01:49:29] I think that there's probably a lot of truth and power to this. And in my book on wealth and happiness, I, I of course hit the power of faith and spirituality because the, the, the research is unequivocable, people that are religious or spiritual are happier and feel greater life satisfaction than those that don't. And part of the explanation is community that didn't use synchronization. I know it's, what you're talking about

Vance Crowe [01:49:58] Is,

John Jennings [01:49:58] Is is somewhat different, but part of it is community and then part of it is the faith itself that, that has. So I know that if I had faith, I would have this greater peace or life satisfaction or happiness about my my day.

Vance Crowe [01:50:18] Would you choose it if you could? Yes. You would choose. Yes.

John Jennings [01:50:21] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:50:23] And so the, the not having faith is not, it's, it's like, Hey, I tried, I I wanted it. Yeah. And it just didn't come. Yeah,

John Jennings [01:50:30] Yeah. No, if it came, I mean it's hard now 'cause like you different, you start to adopt different identities, right? And so like, I've been vegan for 24 years, so like that has become part of my identity. You know, I'm not atheist, so I don't feel like I have like this strong belief. But your question is a good one, is my non-believing core to my identity now. And I do think it is part of my worldview. It, it's hard for me to imagine being able to flip a switch and all of a sudden having faith and believe. But yeah, I think if I could do so, I would choose it.

Vance Crowe [01:51:11] Fascinating. Yeah, I think for me, I chose to be an atheist for quite a few years and then came back to the church in, in that like, I was like, things need to be better. This is one thing I know that my father did that worked. And then as I've been on that path, I've been like, oh, actually there's a lot here that I didn't understand and I hadn't contemplated. I remember when I was a kid, I, one time, I don't know why I said this to my dad, but I remember being like, dad, if I could choose one thing, I would have the faith of a child in God. My dad was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Why would you want that? Yeah. That, that then you could be tricked than you could be told these fanciful things. The far more sophisticated thing is to, is to come with an adult mind and to find and appreciate and figure out what, what it is that, that you really believe. And I remember, you know, scoffing at that. 'cause I was, I was, when I was a kid, I was pretty into God. Yeah. And then not, and then coming Back. And to me, this is another example of why I'm so curious about other people. Not, not that what you decide would change me,

John Jennings [01:52:24] But

Vance Crowe [01:52:24] Like how does that mind work? How do other people approach these things?

John Jennings [01:52:29] Yeah. It comes back to like theory of mind of like, oh, other people have these differing views.

Vance Crowe [01:52:36] Yeah. And I think the people that I find frustrating, this is for my Protestant buddies that I know are gonna call me, is that when the, the benefit of Catholicism being non-literal is that it is so much easier to discuss the nuances and have slightly different opinions.

John Jennings [01:52:57] Whereas

Vance Crowe [01:52:58] In Protestantism, if you step slightly outside of it, I think the Garden of Eden, you know, or the earth wasn't created in seven days, that that was a metaphor and not literal. Then they're like, you sir, are outcast. Get out. And so to me, Catholics can have a much more robust, interesting discussion because there's so much more hard line among

John Jennings [01:53:23] Literal Christ. Yeah. I'll tell you this, the disciples of Christ I I was raised in doesn't take that literal belief in its Protestant.

Vance Crowe [01:53:30] I should probably be more specific. The Presbyterian.

John Jennings [01:53:33] Yeah, there you go. There you go. Right? Yeah. The evangelicalism, no, but even them

Vance Crowe [01:53:37] Like the Presbyterian, like it is, you're totally right. It's a big spectrum and there's, they're like, when you say it's very difficult to say anything about Protestants because they keep slicing and making Yeah.

John Jennings [01:53:49] You know, further and further distinctions

Vance Crowe [01:53:51] They do. And,

John Jennings [01:53:51] But, but again, like I've, I've said to my parents before, so they'll, they'll be like, you know, there's, there's many avenues, you know, there's, there's many, you know, avenues up to the peak of a mountain. There's, you know, multiple rivers float to the same sea. So that's kind of their view of there can be different ways that, you know, salvation is, is achieved in different beliefs. I mean, they don't believe that, you know, literally that, you know, everybody that's, you know, a Buddhist or whatever is, you know, not gonna find so salvation. So they're, they're, they're more nuanced. But, but I've said to them before, like, there's, but how, how do you pick and choose? How do you decide that John three 16 is literally true? But these other things are open to interpretation. Like how do you, how do you say my faith rests on the Bible, but not decide it. Pick and choose which things you interpret and you say that are metaphors or which things, you know, much of the Old Testament, oh, that's just historical. Yeah, those are just myths. And, you know, we can ignore most of those things and you know, people that like to chirp at people that have faith and rely on the Bible, you know, all the, all the stuff about like, oh, well, you know, you're unclean and this and that and you should, you know, stone your wife if she has an affair. You know, all, all the, all those things, you know, I think, you know, people like to chirp at the literal Bible and you know, my parents were just like, oh, well the Old Testament is just kind of a bunch of stories and it's really the New Testament and even then we're gonna pick and choose. And part of me is like, well, how do you do that? How do you have faith? Then if you're like, well, I'm gonna pick some things and not others.

John Jennings [01:55:24] So like, I, I have some, I will say begrudging respect for the Bible, literalists. I mean, I don't know how they do that. And I mean, I think they have to just turn themselves into pretzels constantly. But I, I do have some begrudging respect for saying yes, if I'm gonna believe the Bible, it's all true. But then, then I wonder about the

Vance Crowe [01:55:43] Fragility, you know, is it like you pull one thing down and does it, and that's why they'll so adamantly say, oh yeah, it was created in, you know, six days and then God rested. I mean if you pull that down, does their faith crumbles? Is that, is that, is it that fragile or should it be more robust or even anti-fragile? Like more like my parents is, I don't know. Well, all I know is it is, these last few months has been such an interesting ride to explore and to have conversations with people and, and probably always will be. Well John, if people were interested in the things that you've been sharing today and talking about where should they go to? Yeah, stay in contact with you. So I actually have a website and it's John M as in michael jennings.com. On there I have my blog called Interesting Fact of the Day, which I haven't written for about a year, year and a half, but it has a lot of interesting things. But it has information on my fir first book, the Uncertainty Solution, and we will have information on my next book when it comes out here in the next probably nine months. Well man, thank you so much for coming by. Yeah, thanks fan. Always a pleasure. Okay, that's gonna do it for this week's show. Thank you so much for hanging around. As we go out, I'm gonna play a little video that describes the interest based communications class I have, if you are interested in taking the course for yourself. Then we do have a class coming up at the end of August and have a few seats left so you can find out more by going to Articulate Ventures slash IBC.

Vance Crowe [01:57:14] Alright, we'll be back next week with another interesting conversation.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:57:19] My name is Heath Hunter. I'm a managing director at Broadview Group in our business, your success is dependent on how you're able to effectively tell your story to relate to your customer or your potential partners, and we needed a course that could train our staff on how to do that. I was looking for something much less than what Vance delivered. I literally just wanted him to come in and help us a little bit with storytelling, and he came back with this curriculum, which was awesome. How to craft a memorable introduction, build a story around our firm and how we personally weave into that story. How do we continue the conversation through asking good questions, how to negotiate in a collaborative way versus a competitive way so that we maintain that relationship that we've worked so hard to build. Our relationships are everything. To me, interspace communication is really understanding the perspectives and the point of view of others being able to meet them where they are. Interest-Based Communication to me is creating a dialogue with someone else sitting across the table for me, it allows each party to really describe what they care about and work together to accomplish that for each party. A lot of people, myself included before I took Vince's class, really went in with higher weight on what was important to me. Everybody has a tendency to just focus in on the price, but there are hundreds of other components that come into something as complex as a transaction for a company.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:58:53] What are they actually interested in? What do they hope to achieve and what does success look like for them walking out of a negotiation? Those could differ widely from how they're showing up. If we can somehow get on the same page, you can create these collaborative solutions that are a win for everyone, we've definitely woven that into the process. We're trying to ask those deep probing questions on what are their motivations, what do they care about, really understanding who they are, introducing yourself to better communicate who you are and your background. What makes a good introduction? This is something that I, I really appreciated and I've been in the workforce for, you know, 27 plus years and done lots of introductions. I've heard lots of introductions, making a good introduction. I think everyone just assumes that you should just kind of start talking about yourself and go into your title and what you do and frankly, that's typically not very memorable or interesting. Going through this course and learning about storytelling and the arc of a story and how to embed that in your introduction was honestly like nothing I'd ever heard before. And it makes a lot of sense, right? Because if you're a good storyteller, you tend to sort of capture an audience and you want to be able to do that with your introduction, sort of that hook that you need in, in a story. For me, the big thing was having faith that sitting back and really paying attention to the conversation will help draw out a connection. Before I would spend my time trying to, okay, what do I have in common with this person? Oh yeah, this is a chance to interject and, and establish that link.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [02:00:27] Ironically, just kind of stepping back and saying, I'm just gonna really pay attention to what's in front of me. It really has impacted the conversation because you can get deeper faster. I used to think it was all about how interesting I could come across, but what I've learned, and honestly what Vance taught us, the most interesting folks that you run across, ask really good questions. That's been a game changer for me. Instead of trying to focus on myself, focusing fully on the other person and really just listening for like, what are the details that they're giving me, because there's a reason that they mention that. We assume that folks can kind of see what we see in our heads and what this course taught us about diagramming your ideas is to put it on paper, put it out there so the other parties can see it. We were meeting with a group that week and we were trying to communicate different ideas and outline a vision for this potential business. Instead of doing it in a PowerPoint format, we did it on a whiteboard. It was transformational. The CEO he, he just lit up. We actually handed the pen over to him and we said, Hey, show us where we've got it wrong, or show us where you have additional ideas, the level of engagement, you know, went through the roof and he got up and you could see he was almost giddy. Having that limiter of the speed of your hand, you're bringing them along in, you know, your idea you're trying to convey. So the practicality of the course, the mirroring, the diagramming, the exercises. I think that's one of the things that I appreciated most about the course. Super candidly, I've been through a lot of these in my career and you walk out of there and you're like, well, that was a waste of time.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [02:02:00] What I can tell you about what Vance brought to the table. I, at no point ever felt that way. I was able to walk out of every single session and put to work immediately what we had practiced that day. He has a great way of connecting concepts so that you have this, you know, holistic framework, so to speak, to connect with people, which is something that we do all the time, but deliberate practice of it really helped up my game. I would recommend that everyone take this course and I would venture to say that this has been more impactful for me at home than at work. Pretty much everybody is having conversations and negotiations at home. I feel super lucky and blessed that we were able to have this course at work and that it sort of bleeds into home life. I think that's kind of the best of both worlds. Any corporation or any firm, no matter what the size I think would benefit from something like this, who I'd recommend this to, is a small group of professionals who are really dedicated to self-improvement. Interest-Based Communication to me is a holistic way to build relationships, can benefit anyone.