Fasting, Genetic Testing, COVID Surveillance, and VR's Future Impact on Human Connection

Vance Crowe [00:00:03] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast, Keaton Kruger, welcome to the podcast.

Keaton Kruger [00:00:12] Thanks for the opportunity, Vance. I'm looking forward to the conversation. I'm excited to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:00:16] You know, you're one of the people that has resulted as a part of the podcast. I don't believe we knew each other or knew very each other very well until I started running this podcast and now you've become like a constant fixture in my life.

Keaton Kruger [00:00:30] I, the podcast is probably our primary connection point. I, I think, if I remember correctly, the initial connection point, I don't remember how I started following you, but it was, it was a, it was a match made in Twitter where you asked me a question about the way I eat because you were getting ready to go to a baking conference or something. But I don't remember how we initially connected.

Vance Crowe [00:00:52] I remember it's exactly, that's right. Because you have been one of those people that's been a strong proponent of the keto diet. And I have actually been around nutritionists that are, that have studied the keto diet and they were very, very negative on people just jumping into it and doing it because just as a quick primer on keto, you are trying to take your body to getting so few carbohydrates that it gets into the phase where it's really efficient at burning protein and fat. And this diet was first discovered when people were figuring out how can we cure epilepsy without medicine? And so the dieticians are saying, Hey, this is not something to be messed around with. But you a guy. I really like respect. I like the way you were talking about it. You were out there talking positively about the keto diet, so I wanted to know what you knew about dieting that I didn't know.

Keaton Kruger [00:01:41] I think that's it. And it's, I don't know if you wanna break into that right now, but my thoughts on that, it, it is more nuanced and I think, I mean, I'm guessing what probably sparked your interest as I, I started doing some longer term fasting and I put a little bit of it out on social media. Well, not really much for putting stuff out on social media at least, especially not at that time. And it created some, at that point, I don't, it seems more mainstream now, but I may be jaded by the people that I interact with. But it seemed like it was pretty mind blowing to people that I just decided not to eat for three days on a regular basis. And, you know, the ketogenic thing, I have a lot of thoughts there. It, it's more nuanced than that there, because I don't eat a strict ketogenic diet. But it's a useful tool in my mind for a lot of people. But I also think a lot of people call it the ketogenic diet and they're not actually, it's not actually ketogenic, but that doesn't mean it's not good and it's not helpful.

Vance Crowe [00:02:32] Yeah, I do remember the fasting part of it because just a couple of years ago, maybe a year and a half ago, if anybody had ever told me, you're gonna fast for more than 24 hours, I would be like, I, you know, you're trying to get me to join some kind of cult or what, you know, like, what is this weirdness? But then I did it, and it's not something I like doing all the time, but I realize this fear I have of being hungry is a ridiculous fear. It's, it's one that, that I have access to food all the time and being in control of when I eat, not based on what my emotion is, made a huge difference to me.

Keaton Kruger [00:03:04] Yeah. And primarily if I'm an advocate of anything, it's probably fasting. That's been the most impactful thing I've started doing. How

Vance Crowe [00:03:12] Did you get into it?

Keaton Kruger [00:03:14] That's a, i I tend not to be a person that looks back, so I gotta, I'll piece together the best story I can get. I tend to be a, a believer in looking forward mostly all the time. I mean, so I, I, I wasn't, I moved into a healthy lifestyle later on in life, mid twenties through college. I, I I yin and yanged. I lost a lot of weight as a a kid. I was pretty heavy and I lost a bunch of weight when I got a job in high school and then put something back on in college like you would, and then there was a spark where somebody that I was spending a lot of time with got me started exercising. And it kind of just slowly evolved and evolved and evolved. And I can't really remember specifically how I got introduced to the concept of fasting. It probably had something to do with me being in search of health information in a way that allowed me to like approach health, not from a fearful perspective, but from like a proactive perspective. The, the way I became less fearful of getting sick was basically learning enough information that I kind of could do a risk assessment. So that's a long intro, but

Vance Crowe [00:04:17] Were you afraid of getting sick?

Keaton Kruger [00:04:19] I think, yeah, I think so. I think I, I definitely had some like hypochondriac tendencies. I have a, an anxious personality that's pretty managed pretty well. I think most times actually it feels managed as well as it has ever. And it's been that way for a while. At some point you wonder if you've lost that personality or if it's just something you're good at managing Now. I don't know that answer. I don't know if I wanna go back and test it, but, so I don't

Vance Crowe [00:04:43] Remember that. I mean, I think that's the challenge with like, when you transcend certain parts of your life, the behaviors that you had, you're always looking back being like, did I actually transcend it? Do I have the habits and the thought patterns that allow me to not be worried about it? Or do I need to be on guard? 'cause you know, Satan's coming to get me and take me back to being bad at my habits. I think that's why running became so much more consistent for me was that I realized like, Hey, this did a lot of good in my life and day in and day out. I never really know what that goodness is. But over the long term, as long as I keep this habit up, other things in my life go, well,

Keaton Kruger [00:05:20] I think sometimes it's good to let, let the armor crack a I'm actually in a point where with my diet, where let the armor crack a little bit just to see, so the, the circle all the way back to the fasting thing, it's happened at some point on some podcast somewhere. It probably has a lot to do with Peter Attia and his initial, he was on Tim Ferris probably like six or eight years ago for the first time. And then I started following him. And I, I've be begun to follow him as well as Rhonda Patrick. And if you, you're in the podcast world, you've probably heard those two people. And I just dug deeper and deeper and one day I just decided like, this fasting thing seems to have some merit. What's the, the worst that could happen? I'm just not gonna eat for 24 hours. So I did that and it was probably at the same time when I was thinking about if you're gonna do something, do it six times at least, or do it enough times that you're, you can't quit, you commit to so much. So I said, I'm gonna do this for six weeks. I'm gonna not eat for one day for six weeks, one day a week for six weeks and see what happens.

Vance Crowe [00:06:16] I if I'm, I'm a total believer in that, right? Like I, I think like if you try something once it doesn't work, you'll never know, yeah,

Keaton Kruger [00:06:22] Did

Vance Crowe [00:06:22] I have a bad day? Did I have a good day? Whatever. But if you're like, hey, like the podcast for me, it started off by being like, I wanna see what it takes to record five interviews.

Keaton Kruger [00:06:31] I remember you saying that. I mean, I I think that was one of the points where I connected you. I was like, that's that's my approach, man. Like you have to, you committed to a certain amount to give it time.

Vance Crowe [00:06:39] Yeah. And like the, the reason is because you get about halfway in or maybe maybe even three quarters of the way in and you're like, all right, I kind of got this. I I know what it is, I'm not gonna finish it. And that's actually when most things fall off. Not even when it initially gets hard. When it initially gets hard, you're like, Ooh, look, I can have my full attention on it. Yeah. It's when you do master it and, and you start being like, well, can I let this armor crack? 'cause I know how to do it. What happens next?

Keaton Kruger [00:07:06] And, and so the, the, to get to the land, this fasting flame, I, I did the once a week and that was pretty easy. And at the same time was getting some information about like intermittent fasting is what I used to call it. Now it's called, I call it time restricted eating 'cause I think it's a more appropriate term. So I stopped eating breakfast and I started condensing my eating window. That's been pretty consistent for four or five years now that my eating window's basically noon to seven, sometimes 10 to eight. I mean, I want people to understand if they hear me talk about this. So like, I'm not some, I I'm not the like Jocko willink rigid person. Like it moves a little bit, but I restricted my eating window. And the third wave I i, I put in was I decided to take to the next level. So I started doing these three or four day fasts quarterly and I had some good he health benefits or some good physiological outcomes there. I started, I got a blood meter, I started taking my glucose and ketone levels and I found that it takes a long time to get into ke ketosis. So I guess that's what I think about the ketogenic diet. A lot of people are eating a healthier low carb diet, but they're probably not ketogenic. If you actually take your blood and test it, it takes me three days to get to ketosis of not eating anything. I have other people that have done it that get there a little bit faster. But that's nothing to take away from the fact that for most people, reducing carbs in my opinion at some level is it's probably a good starting point to get yourself reset. Now, I will say at the end of my, my, my philosophy on diet as of now at this point in my life, I've started to add in some fruits.

Keaton Kruger [00:08:37] We don't eat nearly as clean as we used to. We've had, I mean, I can tell when I eat stuff that I'm not supposed to and like it eventually builds off. I, you don't have to be, I don't think you have to be as rigid, but I think sometimes you have to be that rigid to start out with, to get yourself in the right mindset.

Vance Crowe [00:08:50] I agree completely. Which is why I think when I was talking with a bunch of dieticians, I used to get really, really annoyed with them because they would be sitting there saying, Hey, diets don't work. You shouldn't be a restrictive diet. Those don't work. They don't last. And I, I think that they're missing a fundamental component of human psychology, which is you have to have a feeling of forward momentum oftentimes by keeping yourself from something in order to understand it, in order to get your balance and be like, all right, what happens if I lean into this thing and then I prepare my body to react in this way? Maybe then I can crack the armor and I'm, and I, I'm not constantly in that place where if I go over to a friend's house or I'm at a restaurant, I just have to make everybody bend over backwards. But like you're trying to get to that place where you're saying, I am okay with the control. I am exerting over myself and I don't need to use all of my mental capacity to hang onto that control.

Keaton Kruger [00:09:45] Yeah. That I like that I part of it. What, how's this feel to you? Like, I mean, part of it's like I feel like you had to get to a point where you were proud enough of what you've done that, or that you're proud enough of what you've done. You felt good enough about what you did that you could sense when you were fall, when you were getting to a place you didn't want to be. Again, I think at some point you have to somehow get yourself to a point where you're happy or happy enough that you know what it's like to be there. And then if you start to fall off of that, you, you are better able to react. But if you never, ever get to a point where you're like content or happy with whatever change you're trying to make, it's hard to know how good it feels. So like, you sometimes don't know if you're missing. I don't know if that, I've never tried that before. This is brand new. But like, I

Vance Crowe [00:10:26] Mean I think that that it's that it's that you can't go half-assed onto the edge of chaos. And the edge of chaos is like, am I going far enough where I could fall down? You know, am I trying something Yeah. That I'm not already comfortable with. And if you're like, Hey, I don't ever wanna fail, so I'm not gonna make decisions about restrictions 'cause I might not meet it or am I not meet it or might not, that is not the way to get up on the edge. Now I'm, I'm, I also am a big believer that you can't, very, very few people in this world can have David Goggin's level of

Keaton Kruger [00:10:57] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:10:57] Of self sacrifice, constantly pushing yourself into this terrible dungeon and have that not affect the rest of their life.

Keaton Kruger [00:11:05] Well,

Vance Crowe [00:11:06] Well go ahead.

Keaton Kruger [00:11:07] I don't know Mr. Goggins, but sometimes I think I say that guy's intense. That guy's crazy intense. And I think about like at some point I wonder if he has like an addictive personality to the point where the, the addiction, he ha I mean he has to have something, right? So he, the the, his addiction is this intensity. Like some people just need the intensity and they don't feel comfortable without it. I, I find that I can have short bouts of inten intensity like that, but I, I can't, I can't FI can't force myself to live in that at that level of intensity. I think you have much more intensity than I do and the ability to live there. I can do like sprints of intensity, but I can't do, I'm not as good at these long term I intense games, which is part of the reason why I'm probably a better generalist than I am a specialist. 'cause I just don't have the intensity to drive all the way through.

Vance Crowe [00:11:49] Well, it's interesting,

Keaton Kruger [00:11:49] Which I did sometimes

Vance Crowe [00:11:50] As you're talking about that. Like, I remember when I, so when I was, when first went to college, I didn't drink at all. I didn't, I didn't, I didn't drink in high school. Like I was, I was around friends, very similar friends

Keaton Kruger [00:11:58] That were cool, very similar drinking, very.

Vance Crowe [00:12:00] But when I went to college and I finally did start drinking about the second semester of my freshman year, I did that with the same level of intensity that I do everything else. So I went from being like basically a straight edge kid. I wasn't straight edge, but like, you know, not, not getting into trouble, not, and then all of a sudden partying all the time and, and really going all out. And I, I have to wonder if I don't see that in Goggins a little bit. Like if it's not like, hey, if he was gonna be a partier, he would be the biggest, wildest, craziest partier in the world. And if he's gonna be a marathon runner, he is gonna be the best marathon runner in the whole world. And for me, life is just easier when I bring that level of intensity. Yeah. But the problem is you can't stack that level of intensity on top of itself. So that's why you have to integrate it into your life and not rely on passion or excitement or enthusiasm.

Keaton Kruger [00:12:52] Yeah, I don't, I I would feel remiss if I didn't close this diet conversation. A lot of my, my friends, especially colleagues know a lot about what I do. I, I think the, the key thing that I would say with that around fasting, just to close this out, is for me, knowing my personality, i, I wasn't gonna hold well to those super strict restrictions. 'cause I'm, I don't have that dig David Goggin's like ability to, to for self sacrifice. But I do think that, you know, fasting's pretty simple and I think that's something that, you know, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet, so this is not medical advice. But you know, for me it was simple. And for a lot of people they're like, should I try it or not? I'm like, well, like it's not that hard, just try not to eat for a day. And if you fail, like you fail. But I mean, or a question again lot is like, well how do I start fasting? I'm like, well stop eating, I guess. I mean it's not that hard and it, it's a pretty low impact thing, but it has had huge outcomes. Like just the mental shift is so powerful. So,

Vance Crowe [00:13:47] Well you're dealing with fear, right? Like everybody knows

Keaton Kruger [00:13:50] It's terrify.

Vance Crowe [00:13:51] It's exactly what you're saying. They're saying like, but I might be hungry. You know, like, I might actually have to suffer. And I remember for me thinking like, well maybe I'll be mean to my wife or maybe I'll be crabby at work or maybe I'll, you know, you start thinking about all these things that, that you're holding together by feeding your caloric desires and you're like, wait a second, maybe I should push on these limits here. Maybe I should be able to be hungry and not have it bleed from the inside into the outside world where it impacts other people. That might be a good skill to have. The

Keaton Kruger [00:14:23] The three day thing was terrifying. And I think that it, it's somewhat like, it feels primal really. I mean if you think about like you, you're, we probably weren't a species that evolved to be fed all the time. We're probably closer to that than we were a thousand years ago. 'cause we've been fed primarily all the time. But our species evolved not being in a constant fed state. So there's something to be learned or gained by going into a non-ED state because I mean, part of the reason we got here today is a lot of people before is probably were able to better survive. And then, I mean those of us that, that that have ancestors were the ancestors that won. And a lot of those ancestors probably went through some times of pretty big feasts and pretty big famines. So at some point, to me it feels a little bit like just connecting to a more primal version of myself.

Vance Crowe [00:15:13] Yeah. And I think that there's that primal, this comes out when you find another person that has also fasted and people mock the conversations about what diet conversations. But the reason people have diet conversations, 'cause we are thinking about food all the time. All

Keaton Kruger [00:15:27] The time. I was,

Vance Crowe [00:15:28] And if you're not eating, then if you're not actually eating, then your brain is being like, Hey, should you eat? Hey, I'm gonna grab your attention here. Maybe you should eat. And what I think most of us do before you ever try fasting or start putting yourself on restrictions is that you listen to that emotion that instead of being bored or instead of focusing on something, you're like, oh, I, I feel something. Maybe it's hunger. And until I got this sensation under control, I, I would say my life was distracted by hunger and I never even could name it. It hunger was an emotion that I didn't even have a word for.

Keaton Kruger [00:16:05] Mine probably still is. I, I think I thought probably not too long ago, like, I wonder how much of my time I spend thinking about what I'm gonna eat next. It's a lot. Like I just, one day I started just like marking it down a little bit and it's a lot. It's still a lot. I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:16:16] How much time do you spend preparing your food at this point?

Keaton Kruger [00:16:20] We're, we're, we're in June of 2020. So we're post COVID. We're June, right?

Vance Crowe [00:16:25] Yeah.

Keaton Kruger [00:16:25] Yeah. That's, that's, that's post COVID world. I don't even know what month we're in. So where we spend a lot of time preparing. We, we have a, primarily for lunch, we have a smoothie that takes a little bit of time to prepare. But I would guess we spend two hours a day cooking and cleaning up. Oh wow. At least.

Vance Crowe [00:16:41] Wow. And is your breakfast, are you still on that time restricted?

Keaton Kruger [00:16:45] Yeah, so we don't eat, we don't eat breakfast. I mean another thing is, is we have, the world doesn't know, but I, I have a wife and a couple kids, so you know, kids take time to clean up after and stuff like that. But I mean, we, we cook a lot.

Vance Crowe [00:16:57] Do your kids eat breakfast?

Keaton Kruger [00:16:59] Yes. I've thought about that. Like what am I gonna do at some point? Like I, I just suspect they'll probably ask enough questions as to why mom and dad don't eat breakfast and they do that we can have a conversation about it. I think that, you know, kids are a different, like they're much different physiologically, biologically than we are. So I think that they probably,

Vance Crowe [00:17:19] Well they're burning through calories. Well they, they don't have the

Keaton Kruger [00:17:22] Food. Well they're selecting food.

Vance Crowe [00:17:23] Yeah. At

Keaton Kruger [00:17:23] Least at the age of mine are like, they don't overeat. I have no ability to stop eating. If it's there, I'm gonna eat at all. So, you know, fasting is a way to work against that a that addiction probably. But they don't have that. Like my, our our son, like if he's done eating, he is not eating. Sometimes he eats a lot, sometimes he doesn't need anything.

Vance Crowe [00:17:39] Oh, that's really interesting. I wonder if somewhere along our, our lines of training we move from, hey, you should eat the way you feel versus Hey, you've gotta eat now. 'cause now's the time we're gonna eat. We're gonna be,

Keaton Kruger [00:17:52] I know people that can do that. People that can eat just eat enough till they feel full is like a, it's like a superpower that I have no ability to even comprehend how you would do that. Like I, I don't, I don't have, I don't get it. I know people that do that and like they, they're just like, I'm done eating. I'm full mind blowing to me. Like I'm looking,

Vance Crowe [00:18:08] I I haven't fasted in a while. But I, I remember realizing partway through that I was spending more time working because I didn't get up and go

Keaton Kruger [00:18:17] Get

Vance Crowe [00:18:18] Something to drink or something to eat. And I, one of the things that I, I really felt like was really important was cutting out things that tasted sweet. So you can have like diet sodas and you can have, you know, basically diet sodas or those waters that you can mix liquid into. And I realized when I drink those things I am more hungry more often. I don't know the physiological reason. Yeah,

Keaton Kruger [00:18:40] I would say that's probably true. No, but

Vance Crowe [00:18:42] The sweet taste always drives me to want more,

Keaton Kruger [00:18:45] More. And then, and there's there's, there's, I mean there's different polymorphisms genetically that make you prefer sweet over salty. I actually just ran a report on our genetic test yesterday for a different reason and I saw a new line that was in there about like, you know, do you prefer sweet over salty? And our mine was like in the middle. But that was interesting 'cause there are people that have like this clearly that the, the the, the sugar addiction is one thing. Like you can, you can get there where you prefer it. But there's also the salt side of the equation where I, I know people like love super salty snacks. I'm like, yeah, they're all right but I don't know how you eat a pound of them. So, so

Vance Crowe [00:19:19] Genetic testing, how in the world did you get into looking at your family's own genetics and what that says for your taste preferences?

Keaton Kruger [00:19:27] I feel like I'm above my pay grade here for sure. Just human curiosity. So I found out I could

Vance Crowe [00:19:35] Do it.

Keaton Kruger [00:19:35] I found out through Rhonda Patrick that you could get like an ancestry or 23 and Me kit, you could have your genetics test and you can download that raw data and you can upload it into, at that point there was a few places. One was called Promethease, it's been since acquired, but at that point it was like a, it was a nonprofit. It would give you all of your snips and everything that your genetic test told you and everything. A single snip associated with it. And it wasn't like, I don't know who the audience was, it was a little terrifying to do that also 'cause you don't know what you're gonna find. Right? But I did that once and then I got through it. And then more recently I think that Rhonda Patrick has a, as a supporter of her podcast, you can get access to her version of the genetic report where basically she, she curates it, it find hers more useful. Like it's much more useful to have hers. 'cause basically it gives you the snips and what they mean and also a little bit of interpretation. I mean, I'm sure she has some risk and wants to be right on the edge of like, this is not medical recommendations, right? Because you know, you can have three SNPs that say you're, you could, you have three SNPs that say you're at risk of some terrible outcome and then you have three other SNPs that say the exact opposite that you're better prepared to not have that outcome. So like it's, it's GBE right? The way I use it personally is, is at least if I know what some of, I mean I think of like a corn plant frankly 'cause that's the world I grew up in. But like, like if I know at least what some of the downside risks are for this corn hybrid, I can be better about either putting it into places where it's not gonna be, where those downside risks aren't gonna be exposed.

Keaton Kruger [00:21:16] Or two, if I know what some of the downside risks of that corn hybrid are out at the beginning of the season, there's things I can probably do in within the environment to better manage that downside risk. And I kind of think about myself the same way now that I have some idea of what some of the biggest downside risks are. What can I do now to help prevent those from expressing themselves later on?

Vance Crowe [00:21:36] Are you, did you sequence your kids and are you looking at their

Keaton Kruger [00:21:40] Sequence? No, we haven't. We have not. That's a whole different question. Like fundamentally like I do, do, do I need to know that? I mean I, we, we took the, we did the tests that are recommended when they're kids. Like, and when they're babies. We did all that testing because I, but like, I mean my wife and I both did it, but maybe, maybe they don't want to know. Like I, I'm not a doctor. I don't know if there's great outcomes that, I mean

Vance Crowe [00:22:05] It could be great outcomes. Yeah, one of the, one of the,

Keaton Kruger [00:22:06] I just don't dunno, I don't know. I've thought about that. Like I don't dunno how to decide if, if I would wanna do that for them or if I wanted 'em to make their own decision on their own when they're of able ability.

Vance Crowe [00:22:14] One of the most interesting genetics conversations I ever had actually happened before I came to Monsanto and I was talking with a guy named Jarret Glasscock who, who runs this interesting genetics company here in here in St. Louis. And he was actually one of the very first people to sequence human genomes as like a private company and they sequenced Ozzy Osborne. And so we were talking about that. He used to have to have a cut, a cardboard cut out of Ozzy Osborne at his lab. He's just a, he's a, Jared's a cool guy. So I'm talking to him and I'm like, oh, well what did you find out when you got your sequenced? And he was like, oh man, I would never get sequenced. And I was like, what? Like you're the genetics guy, why not? And he was like, well, I mean, you don't know what you're gonna find in there. Yeah. And you might find that you've got a ticking time bomb that is, you know, gonna, you know, your heart's gonna explode in 10 years and or and, and we don't know that for certain, but it's a signal that tells us it might happen. And I was like, well that way you could prevent it. You could do all these things. He's like, you should be doing that anyway. If, if what you do is you find this stuff out, now you've got that in the back of your head. Hey, I may die from this. Or Hey, my spouse may die from this. He's like, I think it's a Pandora's box. What do you, what do you say to that?

Keaton Kruger [00:23:29] It is a Pandora's box. I, I remember having very similar emotions when we first did this and I did it first. And you know, from my, my personality, like I discussed earlier, like it, it's, it's helpful for me to, to understand the downside risks and maybe there's some changes that I've met, not maybe I'm certain there's changes I've made in my life that are better for my health outcomes. In response to that, we were fortunate, I don't think either of us found anything that was egregious least scary, the scary outcomes or outcomes that we likely could have as assumed were gonna be there anyway, just based on family history. So it's not like these are like, I mean well I mean at some point, like I, I think from my perspective it was, was helpful to know, well it's, it's true, right? Like the risks that you probably think you have, you have and you, you can do the things to manage against it. But in the absence of the information, I, I mean i it holds water. For some people it may be terrifying. For me, it was really helpful once I got over the bridge and did it because I, I could understand at least one I was always feared of. I, I, I mean anxiety is somewhat a feel fear of the unknown, right? So at least I know now, right? I mean there's a lot of things that I could have thought were gonna be big concerns. It still could be big concerns because the science isn't clear and it's always changing, but they're probably not as big a concern. So why spend time worrying about those? I don't know. I don't, I, I can understand what he's saying, but I think that's, it feels shortsighted to me.

Vance Crowe [00:24:54] Well I, so I think there's a, a couple of weird directions we could go and I'm interested to e either one for you is one is, I had a sibling, so I'm in the middle of seven. I had a sibling when they found out that I did not just one genetic test, I did two, I did the Nat Geo one that shows you where your family come, came out of Africa. And then I did another one that was 23 in me to find out a lot more health cases. And this sibling expressed that they were pretty upset with me and my parents for having done it because they were like, you know, you're revealing to the world if somebody wants to grab that and, and she doesn't know very much about imputations, but she knows enough to know you can find out a whole lot about a, a sibling based on you and your parents. What do you think about protecting family members from having their genomes open

Keaton Kruger [00:25:43] Up? Yeah, that it's, it's a great question. I mean it's the, it's the argument of can you put the genie back in the bottle? Like at some point we have this technology and it's there and there's some clear risks. Like, I mean there's potential security risks. I mean if somebody has an information, especially a health provider that, or a health insurer, they could really change the way that they do insurance. And I think that, and it's no different than like what's on your, you know, you're on your phone. Like they clear, I know all sorts of people know where I'm at all the time, but I don't want to know, I don't want them to know. I would prefer that they didn't, you know, I work in a space where we, we think about digitally engaging customers using, using the technology that's there, but sometimes that stuff feels a bit uncomfortable. I guess the re the way I I I reason with it is it's really hard for us to put things back in the bottle and our species doesn't have a great history of putting things back in the bottle. It's sometimes we can control things that are dangerous to us as a species really well. But there's only a few cases where that's worked long term.

Vance Crowe [00:26:48] Like what?

Keaton Kruger [00:26:48] That may not work.

Vance Crowe [00:26:49] What can you name one

Keaton Kruger [00:26:50] Like maybe nuclear

Vance Crowe [00:26:51] Nuclear

Keaton Kruger [00:26:51] Weapons. Nuclear weapons. That's the first one that I've thought of. Like, well so far we've done a good job of of, of containing that. That's a whole different thing. I mean that that part of that has to do with the, it's not widely available, right? Like the people that have the ability to use nuclear weapons are a, a pretty small handful of people in the whole scheme of things. I think if a bunch of people had a bunch of nuclear weapons, we probably wouldn't have controlled it by now. 'cause we've just been fortunate the people that have been in control have been of sound enough mind that they haven't used them. Right. But I think that in general, we don't do well at policing ourselves or at, at managing. It just seems, I logic, like, I don't know, I, I dunno how to get the thought through.

Vance Crowe [00:27:34] Well, when I think about the, the security implications of genetics, there was an experience I had not very long before coronavirus shut all the travel down, but I'm walking through an airport and I've got loads of time. 'cause I think I was traveling from somewhere and I way overestimated how much time I would need. So I'm, I'm there and one of the salespeople for those clear, those you know Yeah.

Keaton Kruger [00:27:54] Like this little

Vance Crowe [00:27:55] Panel and you can put your eye up to it and you put your fingerprints on it and they were like, Hey, do you wanna do this? This means you won't even have to go talk to another person. You just walk right through. Yeah.

Keaton Kruger [00:28:04] And

Vance Crowe [00:28:05] I was like, oh, I love this. Tell me a little bit more about it. And they're like, oh, all you have to do is have your eye scanned and then your fingerprints and then it's, you know, then you can just go through. And I, I like, I would love the convenience of it. I have no illusions that I am any less imperil of having my civil rights taken away by a, by a security guard that's being paid minimum wage in the TSA line. But it felt really weird to be, you know, paying money to have somebody else have a scan of my eye. What are, what are your thoughts on like the biometric screening and the, and the value and the danger there? Have you seen those? Are you familiar with those things?

Keaton Kruger [00:28:50] Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. That my, my, my brain was going in a a probably in a parallel trajectory as you were starting that conversation about something else. I was thinking it was very relevant to this. And I'm trying to combine those two in my head. It, I mean there's clear clearly risks on a personal level. Like every piece of information you give up, you never get back. And I, I find it easy for me to think about those things and to maybe sometimes be anti-technology or things that take away my personal liberty or make me less able to be, you know, more, make me more on the radar. But then I also think about like you think, look at the way, look at the way China's handling this COVID thing. Like everybody, this is my version of the story, but everybody in China has WeChat and everybody has WeChat. And basically they don't just use WeChat to communicate, they use it for everything. It's their personal like wallet. So everybody has a QR code. You, you scan that and apparently it's pretty well integrated. I've not been to China, I don't know. And they're, they're basically what they're doing is now they tie that to yourself. And if you have a, if you're near somebody, if you were near somebody that has a COVID diagnosis, they label you as either red or yellow. So red has to do with the proximity you were at any time to that person that has a COVID diagnosis. And then yellow is, I don't remember how they break the break, but basically if you were by somebody that was red that has been tested, you are now in the at risk category.

Keaton Kruger [00:30:25] And if you scan your barcode, it won't let you on the train because you're in the second degree of separation, which is mind blowing. But here's, here's the, here's the thing that I think people, it's easy for me to react that way. Here's a piece that's interesting that I thought about when I was mowing. I was on lawnmower when I heard this part, this conversation that doesn't even seem odd to them. So at some point, like I think everybody thinks they're so much more important to the world than they actually are that a bunch of people could probably, I mean find what we're doing. But are you high enough on the radar to even matter? I don't know. I don't know how to move through that. But it's interesting how like that's normal to them. It sounds like I have no reason to believe this person was lying. I don't have any way to prove that they're

Vance Crowe [00:31:06] Great. Well, I mean I hear about these people getting hired to be contact tracers and to me, this is the most orwellian thing that has ever happened in my lifetime. We are hiring, I believe it was the last time I saw it was like 300,000 people. That's more than a quarter of a million people. There are cities that are not that large that their entire job is going to be to doing this tracking of this disease. And I, I see no evidence and in fact I would even struggle if it were actually the black plague to say we should, we should pay people to track other Americans based on what their habits

Keaton Kruger [00:31:43] Are.

Vance Crowe [00:31:44] It's seems that

Keaton Kruger [00:31:44] Makes me more uncomfortable to me

Vance Crowe [00:31:45] To be

Keaton Kruger [00:31:45] Very, very

Vance Crowe [00:31:46] Uncomfortable.

Keaton Kruger [00:31:47] Sorry, I I was verbalizing what I was trying to think in my head. Sometimes I do that. Yeah. That, that actually makes me more uncomfortable than the China thing. Like I think I'd rather have the technical solution do it so it doesn't mess it up,

Vance Crowe [00:31:58] Right? Oh, I don't, I don't want either.

Keaton Kruger [00:32:00] I don't want, I don't want human error added into it. If I've had to be forced to go through one of those baptisms and think I'd rather be baptized by the technology than the humans managing it. 'cause I know what humans will do. They'll mess it up and they'll use it for their own personal gain.

Vance Crowe [00:32:10] We're only gonna be able to contain this. And, and I know we're an interconnected world, we're a globalized world. People travel internationally. You're gonna have people in Beijing, San Paulo and New York within the matter of a day. So I understand that you have to have some international level of connectivity and understanding about how this disease is moving. But it would appear to me that we are prepared to completely cover people's faces so they no longer are able to express their emotions. We're going to, to hire hundreds of thousands of people to track these other, you know, where this disease is spreading. And we're, we're willing to say that we, it is possible to spend literally unimaginable amounts of money. It is not possible for the human brain to comprehend $6 trillion. None of this make makes sense to me. And I think it is only a dystopian future that it leads to. I don't think I'm normally a pessimist. I just think that the last few months have made me much more wary about these gigantic government interventions, these global government interventions. I don't want anything to do with it.

Keaton Kruger [00:33:18] We've talked about this a lot. I don't, I like the, the, my reaction to that is that that solve sounds very logical and feels uncomfortable and, and seems believable. And I don't like, it doesn't feel great to me also, but I also always try to keep the lens in, in the back of my mind of is it are, are we living history or does it just feel like we're living history right now because we're in the middle of it, right? Like, have things been better or worse? And we just didn't have the ability to know it was that bad. I always try to think that way.

Vance Crowe [00:33:49] Well I was jogging this morning and my wife and I were, and and I looked up and I saw this, there are these giant billboards around in St. Louis, and it's a very sophisticated, sleek woman standing just with her photo. And then right next to it it says harassed at work hashtag me too jungle law. Right? And so it is like a scary kind of like, you know, if you've been harassed jungle law, we'll come in here. And, and so I was looking at that this morning and being like, man, it seems like a lifetime ago that me too Yeah. Was burning the world down and that you were watching major media moguls and all these people go away. People aren't talking about me too at all. And so I have to wonder if maybe this is just the next,

Keaton Kruger [00:34:35] The next

Vance Crowe [00:34:36] Chapter in the soap opera that we're in and that this is really just this giant play that we're being entertained by while we go along with our regular lives.

Keaton Kruger [00:34:44] There's a lot of people that are thinking like you're thinking also. So I have to help that I have to, I I have to hope that the species will continue to adapt and evolve and the, the world is different and it's gonna be different. But we've always been able to figure it out before, up until now. I mean, at some point I suppose our species won't, but like so far we figured it out. So I think that

Vance Crowe [00:35:03] Yeah, but when

Keaton Kruger [00:35:03] That's, I still have, but

Vance Crowe [00:35:04] When you figure it out, when you say figure it out, you're like, people have met it out there conflict through violence. And that has always been the way, and I, what I look at right now is the, there is not very much violence going on right now. There's protesters and police and they clash, but you're not watching the police pull out guns and just blow those people away. And you're not seeing protestors throw motov cocktails into crowds of people to kill them. But eventually, if you have one group that says we're gonna take as much area as we can until somebody stops us, you will, if that unstoppable force is going to run into an immovable object and one of them is going to be proven correct, because both cannot exist at the same time. And it appears to me that it doesn't look like everybody is prepared that that's the direction this goes in. Maybe everybody is, but I see

Keaton Kruger [00:35:56] Many, are they aware more

Vance Crowe [00:35:58] Violence being added on? I don't

Keaton Kruger [00:35:59] And some people are. I I think about that. That's interesting. So at some point, maybe this is a good test for our ability as a, as a group. I'm talking as an in, as a group of humans to figure out how far we've evolved or how far we, we we believe we've evolved in this direction and we have had, we're, we're in a very, we've been in a very peaceful time and still relatively speaking, very peaceful in the world. We know it can be unpeaceful or there can be unrest. I just, I wonder, I mean I know a lot of good people that, that I like my most important contacts are all over the board on what's going on in the world right now. So what I think is like, there's something going on. It feels like history is moving faster than it was, but I'm not so pessimistic, I guess yet to think that we won't figure out a way to have a, a more optimal outcome because of it. I don't have any idea what happens.

Vance Crowe [00:36:51] I think the thing that gets me about all of this, or the thing that's made me the most uncomfortable comes from a concept called pace layering where it, it was a concept pioneered by Stewart Brand who basically was saying, look, the world operates as circles inside of each other and the circle at the very base moves the slowest and then just outside of that, it moves a little faster. The circle at the core is nature. Then outside of that you have culture, then governance, then infrastructure, then commerce, then fashion, right? And on that, on the fashion side, by the time you get to that outer ring, that circle is moving really, really fast. That is a gear that is going and it's changing directions. It's going up and down With coronavirus, we went all the way down beyond the government layer. We actually went into the cultural layer and started monkeying around with that. We started saying, we're gonna cover up people's faces and we're gonna make it. So you can't shake hands, you cannot come in contact with human beings. And to me, once you start messing around with that layer, the way that it spins, you have no idea how much impact it's going to throw into those layers that are above it. But I don't think it's a stable society. I think it is a very unstable society. When you start messing around with layers deeper than fashion and commerce.

Keaton Kruger [00:38:09] Do you feel like that's permanent? Like do you feel like that that will change, that that layer is a permanent change? Or is that a temporary change?

Vance Crowe [00:38:17] Well I think, I think, I think there's probably been very few times in human history where we've gone two months where we're saying do not come in contact with your neighbors. You know, I, I have a little niece see her all the time. And then during coronavirus we went about a month and a half where we didn't see her. And then when we finally did, she had been so conditioned to, to break the habit that this little joyful child has, which was to go up and hug everyone, which is to like cower and be afraid. Now I think she's going to overcome that.

Keaton Kruger [00:38:45] Her parents do a better job than we do then. 'cause our, our boys can't, like, they haven't adapted, I'll tell you that much. It's hard with the kids

Vance Crowe [00:38:52] And some parents are gonna be way harsher on their enforcement of it and others. And same thing with teachers and same thing with being at church. And same thing like what, we're not, we're not talking about any one single handshake that people are missing. We're talking about thousands of handshakes and thousands of suspicious looks and and will I be in the same room as somebody breathing free air or not? This, these are much deeper than just two month questions or two and a half month questions because the res, the residual components of them will remain. And, and we didn't come to these conclusions slowly and over time we came there as fast as we possibly could get there. Error.

Keaton Kruger [00:39:33] I understand what you're saying. Here's where I'm at as I process this. I, I don't think two months is all that long and I don't, I don't feel like I, I've structurally changed. So the, the only experience I have is my end of one experience. What I think is gonna happen, my outcome is like, I don't necessarily love the fact that I don't love it at all. Most people probably don't. What I think is my ability to assess risk has evolved personally. So now I'm, I believe that we'll probably go back to a point that felt a lot like what it used to feel like. But what I think is gonna be different for me personally is I'll have a better level of appreciation for things that, at least for the short term, that didn't seem like something you should even be aware of. I mean, I can do my work completely virtually, but I find myself, and I used to really like that. I mean that was one of the best benefits of what I did is I was a virtual, I could do it virtually, but now I'm like, I I I really hope I can find a reason to make this not completely virtual forever because it, I would like to interact with some people outside of this. Like, so I think that's gonna be my outcome probably assuming these eventually go back to normal is like I'm gonna yearn for them to go back to normal. So I'm gonna try to make 'em feel more normal, but I'm probably gonna have a better appreciation for things that I probably didn't even think about before.

Vance Crowe [00:40:54] I think the biggest change for me is I got to see what do my friends, what do my neighbors, what do my community members family, how do they react in crisis? And it was almost like we got a test run of like, all right, let's imagine asteroids on its way. Nuclear bomb is on its way. How are we going to respond? And you got to find out who's Johnny on the spot. Like with good thinking, thinking ahead. Who's somebody that is melting down with the panic and just wants it to stop? Who's the person that's gonna show up and be like, Hey, I had some extra stuff and I wanted to give it to you. I i, to me, while I think it could be a painful experience because you find out that some of the relationships you thought were gonna be really important during the, during a crisis aren't, it is damn good to know who is in your whale pod. Who in your tribe is gonna be sticking up their hand to be like, Hey listen, let's go this way. I've got some ideas because I think that was laid bare in this experience

Keaton Kruger [00:41:53] That's, and I, I know you, you felt like you, you were a good intellectual like friend of mine and I think you had, you had the crisis hits you personally in your, your pod more than hit my pod. So it was really good and I think that's all like it was good for me to see that. It probably made me think about things in a different way. I think everything you said is true. I also think that personally like I'm gonna be way better prepared if something else happens like this or even not like this than I would've been if this would not have happened. Because what it helped me realize is the, the line between this is a vance crow thing for sure. The line between order and chaos is very thin and

Vance Crowe [00:42:33] Oh yeah,

Keaton Kruger [00:42:34] I don't think we've, at least my personal experience didn't fall in the chaos, but I can see how close it can get and how quickly it can go to chaos if, if things would've changed just a little bit different. So I think that I'm gonna be way better prepared to one, prevent that from happening. 'cause I can do the things to ensure that it doesn't. And two know that it could happen and if it does be prepared to adapt and prevail.

Vance Crowe [00:43:00] Yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, I heard the other day somebody made an observation, coronavirus showed us all, what do people want to do when they have time back to themselves, right? Like it was no more a question of like, I mean granted if people wanted to be doing social things, they couldn't be doing those,

Keaton Kruger [00:43:18] But

Vance Crowe [00:43:18] Now all of a sudden you gave everybody back, let's just say an hour and a half in their day, let's just cut out their average commute or whatever it was. Now you get to decide if somebody is given an extra hour and a half of time, 90 minutes, what are they doing with that time? How, how are they progressing forward? That was a really interesting thing for me to observe as well. And, and in some ways I did not as well as I thought I would. And in other ways I was like, man, I can get myself into a routine when I have a lot of good time

Keaton Kruger [00:43:45] That you can do that, you can do that is what else is on your mind today, Vance? Anything else

Vance Crowe [00:43:50] That's, well, I'm looking over. You have, you have quite a cool telepresence here. So I'm, I'm putting on a class tomorrow for a client who has hired me to say, hey, we finally come to the realization that video is going to be the way we're gonna connect with a lot of our customers long into the future. So we're going to invest in teaching our people. How do you set up a camera so that it looks good? What is lighting? How, how should you con concern about sound? And I often say focus on sound first and then, and then worry about the way you look. And so I've been hyperfocused on this 'cause I've been building this class for about a month now,

Keaton Kruger [00:44:28] And

Vance Crowe [00:44:28] Now I'm looking at your set and I love what you've done here, man, I think you have a good thing going. How did you think through your spot here?

Keaton Kruger [00:44:36] You're, you're seeing option B. So, but like, I think I'll talk about, so this spot here is is my wife and I recently moved back to her family farm, built a house and the house is mostly done, but we haven't really decorated it all that much. So the, the initial reason I chose this spot is it's the only piece that looks a little bit, it's, it looks pretty well put together and there's not like kid toys everywhere. So I typically do it on our deck, which 'cause I moved my hand that way is that way, but the wind was too much and the sound wasn't good. So I think one thing that a lot of people, it's pretty simple to do it. I don't do it all the time. I probably should do it more, but like just do a sound check beforehand. So that's nice because it, it, it kind of shows you like the, the fact that we live in this rural area is a big part of our identity and it wasn't, we used to live in a metro area and so that's an easy backdrop for us. But now internally, I, I'm not prepared actually this is the, the only space I could find that I could get good lighting with some supplemental lighting. I've got something in the background that isn't just a white wall. So, you know, we've got the, the turntable and, and music and like we kind of have this, we and ag industry. We're in a very conservative group and my wife and I kinda have this, we have this love for music and this, hippies is not the right word, but this little counter-cultural mindset to most people wouldn't seem that way, but to the world that we spend our time in. So you get some nods to that. It's just a good backdrop. I think I'm looking forward to, once I complete my actual personal office, I would not have done this initially, but now I'm, I'm actually going to finish the office with the intention of it being something that's good for virtual engagement, not only from an audio perspective, but a video perspective also.

Keaton Kruger [00:46:15] And I don't know exactly how to do that. Mans and I were chatting a little bit before the call here about that before we started talking and started recording. 'cause I, I'm gonna look to him for some expertise here. He's spent a lot more time thinking about this than I have and he clearly he isn't a course on it even so.

Vance Crowe [00:46:28] Well, it's, it's so interesting. So I have been doing all of these podcasts and most of the time the people that are willing to do a podcast are savvy enough to know how to hook up a webcam and do some of this stuff. But I have been on a couple of board calls and professional calls and you see people that are clearly spending a thousand dollars on a suit or $500 on a suit, right? And in order to look good when they're in person and then they go to get on these video calls and they're setting their telephone in their cup holder in their car while they keep moving and, and, you know, working as though they were on a speakerphone. And you realize like people genuinely do not know how to, to make it better. And they, and they really haven't even thought like there is both an art and a science. And if you learn these principles, it doesn't matter what space you're in, you

Keaton Kruger [00:47:15] Can

Vance Crowe [00:47:15] Figure it out. But I've been very surprised. I thought people would naturally figure it out. And now I'm realizing, no, the reason that you figure it out is because you have an interest in how does light work or how does sound bounce around a room, those kinds of things.

Keaton Kruger [00:47:28] You, I mean, I think about like, there's a lot of people that, we've got these phones that have phenomenal cameras in 'em and some people can take beautiful pictures with these phones and some people take terrible pictures with these phones. And I fall on each side of the spectrum. I think at some point it, it, it's gonna correlate directly with your understanding of just photography. And I have enough interest in that to have played with it, to know I'm not great at it, but I kinda know the tenants of it. And I've worked between our, our love of live music and I did spend a little time working for a DJ in a, a previous life in high school. Like you don't have to have a lot to have enough awareness to be good or better at it. I don't know if good's the right word, but I think

Vance Crowe [00:48:11] A

Keaton Kruger [00:48:11] Lot of people don't even have the tools. They don't even have the tools to even understand that to some people it really matters. And to some other people it doesn't matter at all. So they definitely aren't gonna pick up on it. Me and you might notice that stuff all the time.

Vance Crowe [00:48:22] The, the basics of it, like I think most people, what they think is the reason that I don't look good is because I haven't spent enough money. And one of the things that you learn really early on as you're trying to get better is 80% of looking and sounding good can be done with whatever you have around your house. Most of the time the reason your photo doesn't look good is it either has too much light or not enough. And on video cameras, it's almost always not enough light. And, and once you start like getting those kind of principles in, and then you start saying, well, is it good to have light in front of me or to the side of me or above me? Or how does all that work? You get a few principles down and all of a sudden you can make yourself look like you're wearing a thousand dollars suit, be while you're wearing a t-shirt.

Keaton Kruger [00:49:06] It's like if you're ever on a a stage, if you've ever been on a stage and you understand how much the up, how bright the uplighting is, like actually here, like there's lights just beaming at me. And if I look that way, I'd have to have sunglasses on. They're, they're not directly in my face, but like, you don't understand how much uplighting it takes. But if you're ever on a stage when they're setting up a stage for production and you get under the lights, you realize that it is, it doesn't look like that as in the audience. But, but there's a huge, I mean, you get the contrast as the audience 'cause you're usually dark and they're usually lit, but it's almost, it's almost painful till your eyes adjust, at least for me on a stage because of the uplighting. And I think that,

Vance Crowe [00:49:47] Well I think that,

Keaton Kruger [00:49:48] But for me it's important. I think it's really important. I think there's more people like me and you than people realize. It's very distracting for me, if I go to anywhere, like the first thing I do, if we go to like the church we go to, they, they have a, a more contemporary service. Or if I go to a concert, the first thing I'm doing is I'm looking at the audio setup, trying to figure out what they did and how they did it. And you know, as they're producing the show, I'm trying for some, my wife always says like, why are you looking at the, the sound guys? But I'm just trying to figure out what, what in the world they're doing. 'cause these things are, the people don't even realize are going on, are making the experience for you and you don't even know it.

Vance Crowe [00:50:25] Oh, a hundred percent. That's my, my, so I believe that people should quit thinking of it. Like, Hey, I'm doing a video call and they should instead say, I am full telepresence. I am creating an experience that when you look at your computer screen, you are coming into MySpace. And the, the experience of being in MySpace is more than just how do I look? How is the front of me lit? How is the back? Or what does my background look like? It's actually, what does it sound like to be in my telepresence space? Like what is it, what is that whole holistic thing? And and sound is one of those things that people way underestimate. You know, if the, if the sound get gets off between the visual and the audio, I think it's a little more than a 40th of a second. Your brain can fix that. As long as it's faster than that, your brain will sync those two things up. I

Keaton Kruger [00:51:16] Don't know if my brain can,

Vance Crowe [00:51:17] But if you get off by just a little bit, your brain can't sync it. And when the audio and the video are off, it, it like gives you like a headache because you just can't handle it. And I think that people really underestimate how much of their telepresence is impacted by how clear is their sound.

Keaton Kruger [00:51:34] Everybody kinda has to be their own like mini live production manager really, if you wanna do this. Well, a good example of this is just an example, but one example that I I found really interesting that I, I think, you know, my, my wife, I shared it with her and she, she thought it was interesting, I, I believe was so we go to this, this church that has this contemporary service and it's really well produced. They have really good producers that did, did live music. And when you watch the video stream, they have a beautiful video stream. It's really high quality. They have a good audio stream, it doesn't drop, but they're, you don't get the final production on top of the audio. So these people that are phenomenal artists and they're phenomenal artists, period. But they don't sound nearly as good on the video or they didn't initially. And I think they weren't do, they didn't have that last layer of processing. And my wife as a vocalist didn't re probably doesn't realize 'cause she only hears herself through the monitors. How much that would, that changes it like that last level of production go a long ways. And that can go, like, I think that can bring a a, a performance from, you know, just a a, a good singer to something that just, it makes you feel like you're, you know, you're, you're completely in an experience. It goes from just a watching somebody do performance to you being a part of the experience. And some of that's done with production. There's also some phenomenal artists that can just plow crate straight through that production value and not need it. I don't,

Vance Crowe [00:52:56] The hardest

Keaton Kruger [00:52:57] Part

Vance Crowe [00:52:58] Of this whole of putting the whole podcast together for me by far is cleaning up the sound. Because what I end up doing is record the video and the audio separate and then I clean up the audio and I run it through some systems to, to make buzz go away and make sure, sure that if your volume is different from my volume, that it can all be equalized. And then I sew it back to the video. And you know, sometimes I try and get lazy and I'd be like, oh, I bet I can sneak this one past Keaton had pretty good audio. Maybe I can. And it, when you know what you're listening for, all of a sudden you can't help but hear the mistakes. And that's why I'm always telling people like when the, the mistakes become clear, when you become aware of what's going on with sound and people go out and they buy like a really good microphone because they're like, oh, the way that I'll increase my sound, the way that I'll get better is I'm gonna go buy this a hundred dollars microphone. But what they don't realize is that microphone is actually more sensitive. So the problems that you had before are now hugely amplified. Yeah. Because it's so much more simple that because it's because it's so much more sophisticated. Yep. So I'm always telling people like, focus on learning about sound. How does echo work before you ever go buy equipment.

Keaton Kruger [00:54:10] Yeah, that makes sense. One thing I noticed in your pos co podcast, I don't know if you changed it, so I may be, but I noticed when you first started your, the, just the total volume level on your podcast was lower than almost all other podcasts. So I like when I, when I had my cheap earbuds in, I could never, never get, maybe I shouldn't give you cri it's not criticism, it's just not a discussion on, on your podcast was like, I I would turn it up and I couldn't get the volume I needed to. Oh, that's,

Vance Crowe [00:54:36] This is, and

Keaton Kruger [00:54:37] It seems like it's gone up if you increase the total volume level of your podcast or have, I just stopped noticing it. But I do notice on some podcasts, the most well produced ones typically have a higher level baseline audio than some of the other ones. And I think it's probably to compensate for like my little cheap earbuds. 'cause when I'm thinking, when I'm listening to podcasts, I'm not thinking about like, I don't need the best audio quality, I just need to hear the, the voice. I sometimes can't get it high enough. If I'm on like computer speakers or TV speakers, it's fine. But sometimes on those cheap earphones it seems like you need to have a higher level of audio general.

Vance Crowe [00:55:10] When I first started the podcast, I had a Blue Yeti, you know, USB microphone that it'd had for a while. And I would try and just set that microphone in the center of the table and I'd have me and the other person using the same microphone. And the challenge was, if I have a naturally loud voice, if they have a quieter voice, I had no way to fix that. I had to go through and fix it individually. So every single time somebody

Keaton Kruger [00:55:37] Took a

Vance Crowe [00:55:37] Pause to speak, I would have to like mess around at the eq. And when I started, I had a camera that would allow me to record in 4K, which is what I really wanted. But I didn't read the fine print and the camera I bought would only go stay on for 30 minutes. And so at the end of 30 minutes I would have to lean over, restart the camera and then keep the conversation going, which means that I would have to titch the audio and the video together. So I had tons of time. I was, I I wasn't very busy. I didn't have very many clients. I didn't know what I was doing. But those experiences are what helped me understand like, hey, if I have an echo in here, it's gonna take me hours to fix it. So I better fix it before the echo ever gets in there. And that's the kind of learning that you get when you just start. And that's another big part about telepresence. You, you, you're not gonna fix everything, just fix one thing at a time and just keep getting better and better.

Keaton Kruger [00:56:28] So there, there you go. Vance Crowe, podcast listener world, you, you know, know two things. One, you know that the amount of effort Vance puts into this is, is at the high level. And I think that's part of the reason everybody connects so well with it. 'cause it is really well produced and you don't even notice the fact that that's part of the reason that his podcast feels the way it is. And I think the other thing is, is I haven't taken the course so I will not give the course. Like, I don't know, I don't know what the course is good or bad. It probably is good, but I think it's something people could think about, especially if we're gonna work in this virtual world a little bit longer. And I am the first to say that when I'm in my normal nine to five, I don't always do it. But there are calls where I do try to do it and you know, I think it's, it, it's interesting. I know that we've all, you've talked a lot about VR and I know if you can break into that today, but I've been thinking a lot about that. Like what happens if, how does VR move into the world? And I read an interesting,

Vance Crowe [00:57:27] I'll tell you, I know I've got, I know exactly how it's gonna be. The, the biggest thing that VR has that this system doesn't, that zoom's Skype, WebEx, none of those things have is sound proximity. And this is the, this is the thing that makes it so a comedian can't just do a live show. Because normally what happens in a live show, and this has been since Greek Roman, you know, times somebody would be down on the stage and they would project their voice out to other people and they would have the center of it. So their voice was allowed to be louder than everyone else's. And if a person sitting next to 'em decided to turn and whisper to the person right next to them, the whole place couldn't hear it. But on a zoom call, everyone's microphone is the same.

Keaton Kruger [00:58:13] Yeah. And so

Vance Crowe [00:58:14] There's no way for you to whisper to another person. So it keeps you out of the frame of like, we're close and other people are far away. But when you put on the virtual reality headset, what happens when you go to a conference room or you're around other people is if you're standing right next to them, you can hear them really clearly. And the further you walk away, the quieter and quieter that they are, I

Keaton Kruger [00:58:36] Had no idea. And so

Vance Crowe [00:58:37] You can have it where you can turn to a person that's right next to you whisper and only the people right next to you can hear it and other people can't. And that sound proximity is going to revolutionize the telepresence thing because now you're gonna be able to do the thing that you wanna do, have side conversations while paying attention to a larger, more sophisticated group.

Keaton Kruger [00:58:59] That's fascinating that, that actually layers right on top of the, the thought that I had about this the other day because Vance is a big proponent of this is gonna change the world. And I've been trying to process like I'm not, I'm, I don't have a lot of experience what what this means. And I read an article that was about Epic games or the Epic company I think is the name of the company, is do you know who this company is? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:23] Isn't that who makes Grand Theft Auto?

Keaton Kruger [00:59:24] Who makes Fortnite? Yeah. So yeah, that that, but that was made Fortnite. But like the, the argue, the the argument was how this company could potentially position themselves to revolutionize and to basically own the future of media in the future of our interactions. And it's a long, long, long article, but a few of the tenets, it's like eight parts. It's more like a short novel, not novel short book. It, a few of the tenets that I didn't realize is one, they created this game engine called Unreal Engine, which is one of the co the, the two like main game engines I believe to create games on. So like game companies don't typically build their own engines, the biggest ones do, but a lot of game developers don't. So they can build on this engine and the, they have an interesting cost to access model that it's very different than the others. But the thing that really made me what blow my mind first was they showed how they can use VR in, in a layered approach. So the the Star Wars movie, I'm not a Star Wars guy, but they had the, I think it's called the Mandalorian, is that correct?

Vance Crowe [01:00:27] It was

Keaton Kruger [01:00:27] Like a, i it's a mini series they put alongside Star Wars and the way they filmed that was actually like full, full life vr. So they basically built these worlds using this high-end game engine with Epic and then they built this giant dome in a warehouse and the people would actually act out the movie or the scenes in this dome. But this dome is completely like all encompassing. So you walk into the dome and you are now in the world and they interact as full humans and there's, there's no green screens. Like they're actually

Vance Crowe [01:01:01] This exists, what you're describing exists right now. I have actually used this. Yeah,

Keaton Kruger [01:01:05] Yeah. That's so

Vance Crowe [01:01:06] In my basement, right? So you don't even need a large, all you need is a large open space that you can make dark and it doesn't have to be perfectly dark.

Keaton Kruger [01:01:14] So how did you do it then? I, this, this doesn't seem like this is gonna end at the same point, but I wanna hear what you did. 'cause it may,

Vance Crowe [01:01:18] So in, in this video game that you play on your VR headset, You stand in a room and you take your pointer, which has a laser that you can only see when you have the VR headset on. Then you draw a circle on the floor and then you step inside of that circle and everything that's in there now becomes a part of your world. So if I wanna walk over to a cabinet, as long as I have 10 feet to walk over to that cabinet, I can, otherwise I can use my joystick to move myself forward and backwards. Now when you interact with the Star Wars characters, they are real life size because it compares you, how tall are you to that other person? So when you first encounter Darth Vader, he comes up really close to you, you have to look up at him and it gives you the sensation of being small.

Keaton Kruger [01:02:04] This is,

Vance Crowe [01:02:04] Yeah, go ahead.

Keaton Kruger [01:02:05] This is a little different than that. That's actually, that's probably the second point. I was the two, the two main takeaways, the first one to try to finish this out, it's even different then. So basically what they would do is they had this giant dome and they would project, I don't know how they projected it, the the virtual world onto the dome and then full like you as a human would walk in with no gear on and you would be interacting in this world. And they had the cameras set up in there also, like the, the whole production actually, basically what they did is they could bring in these completely different environments and record in the same studio and they said it takes about an hour to switch the set. So basically they would move from to take everything down and restart the whole system back up. They could move from like New Zealand to the other places. And these people, rather than having, you know, the actors acting on a green screen and then them putting the world in behind it, they were act actually acting it out and they were recording the actors plus the virtual reality world around them. So they were actually recording the world as the actors were in it, in vr instead of recording the actors and adding the VR into it. Which I was like, that's that's interesting. That seems like a shift. 'cause then they were talking about how they could layer the two so you could use the, the, the typical post-processing or, or production they did on top of it, but they're actually recording it there. So I thought that was interesting. The other thing they talked about was Fortnite, and I don't know much about Fortnite. I'm not a big gamer. I used to be in, I gave that part of my life up, but they talked about these concerts that they're having in Fortnite that aren't actually really live concerts, but they feel live.

Keaton Kruger [01:03:41] So they've done two or three of these now. They've had millions of people attend these concert concerts with their friends in the game. So like, it's not actually live because they don't have the capacity to have a million people in the same environment at the same time. But it feels like, because all the people that you interact with are in this watching this person at this, this, this performer at the concert. And there's more to it. I don't wanna take too much time, more time thinking about it. But as I dug through it, I'm like, oh my, like I can see how potentially some of these virtual, this virtual world could begin to feel like a normal human interaction because they're moving not only, I, I don't know how to put it. I don't, I don't. It's it's not a

Vance Crowe [01:04:23] Complete Well I mean I, it's fascinating

Keaton Kruger [01:04:24] To me.

Vance Crowe [01:04:24] That's all

Keaton Kruger [01:04:25] I got. I think,

Vance Crowe [01:04:25] I think that the, the way that this ends up impacting human beings is going to come at different speeds. So kids, like you're describing Fortnite, like they aren't even going to know what it was like to not have an avatar that represents you in some digital world and being able to bounce from entire universe to entirely different universe. And if you're coming to a class like the one I'm I'm putting on, you're not gonna be at the cutting edge. You're actually trying to keep up with these young people that are gonna live and build in an entire world. And if you're not gonna go play video games with kids, then the, you gotta start putting these headphones, you've gotta start doing them because there are entire worlds, there are entire conversations in interactions with two people that have never met that, as far as I can tell, it feels damn real when you're in that VR headset and, and, and people can be like, well it's not real. Lemme tell you why. And it doesn't, it's not da da da. But I'm telling you the experience of being a human being is going to change because of this VR stuff. So anyway. Well we can, I actually have to wrap. It

Keaton Kruger [01:05:31] Has before. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:05:34] Well I, I gotta wrap up. So I, because this has been a great conversation, but I just wanna make the point that if people are interested, I think in late July I was planning in mid July, but late July, I'm gonna hold a virtual reality conference and I don't have a bunch of plans just yet. I'm just, whoever can get their hands on a VR headset, I'll try and figure out an experience that people can have over an hour or two and we'll all just get there. We'll try it out and we'll experience it. I think you should try and get your hands on a, on an Oculus VR headset and we'll try and make that happen.

Keaton Kruger [01:06:03] I will, I will try to make it happen. I've thought a lot, I've thought about a lot about that and I think it's, it's a good experience. I I think my closing thought today will be is that this conversation, it's, it's uncomfortable and there's been a few points where like, it it's, it's uncomfortable because I, I can say I don't know and I think you don't know either. I think the interest thing about that VR piece to close out is like if you, if I reflect on there's things that I had that were just default in my world that I'm sure my parents didn't have. And I think sometimes as you approach the scary side of the world's changing and it's falling outta control, try to reflect back and think about all the things that probably felt that way to the generation before you that just seemed normal to you. And you may be a little bit more optimistic that, oh, we figured it out this long as the species, I'm still pretty pro the species and I think we'll figure it out going forward.

Vance Crowe [01:06:50] Yeah, agreed. And that the world that we are imagining is absolutely not the world that will be there because there's no way to predict how things will come.

Keaton Kruger [01:06:58] Vance, I appreciate the opportunity. I've been a long time listener. First time caller, you are a, I have see people all the time that see me interacting and say, I really like what he's doing. So thanks what for what you're doing. And keep up and keep putting the effort in 'cause it's great.

Vance Crowe [01:07:10] Oh man, I can tell you that you are an example for what I think a lot of people ought to do, which is you, you meet people out on Twitter, you ask them questions, you push on what they're saying, you're always respectful. And I find that our conversations can be like, frustrating for me at first 'cause I'm like, no, I have this other point that I wanna shove down your throat, but you push on me. And I, I think that that's the best part about these kinda long form podcasts, Twitter, having conversations with people in the virtual world. Like, let's have clashes, let's get together and push on our ideas some more. If anybody is interested in signing up for that virtual reality conference, just go to my website, Vance Crowe dot com and a popup will be there. Just enter your website and I'll send you some information about it. So Keaton, thank you so much for joining me. If people wanted to find you on Twitter, how would they do that?

Keaton Kruger [01:07:59] I believe it's at Keaton dot Krueger, but I don't really, I should checked that. What was it called? Put it in the show notes. I'm sure you will. I'll

Vance Crowe [01:08:05] Throw it in the

Keaton Kruger [01:08:05] Show notes. I'm always looking for the way things are different than what I think they are, so I'm sure there's some interesting people out there that could engage with me. So I, I

Vance Crowe [01:08:14] Enjoy it. Oh, that'd be great. Thanks

Keaton Kruger [01:08:15] Brother.

Vance Crowe [01:08:15] We will have you back on. We should have done this a long time ago.