Keaton Krueger; Fasting, Genetics, Telepresence, Surveillance | Vance Crowe Podcast.

About this episode

Keaton Kruger, an early podcast connection made through Twitter, joins Vance for a wide-ranging conversation that moves through intermittent fasting and time-restricted eating, personal genetic testing (23andMe, Promethease, Rhonda Patrick's curated reports), and then pivots hard into surveillance: China's WeChat-based COVID contact tracing color codes and the hiring of hundreds of thousands of American contact tracers. Vance calls the scale of pandemic-era government spending and behavioral control the most Orwellian thing of his lifetime, framing it through Stewart Brand's pace-layering model — the idea that COVID responses reached down into the "culture" layer, which normally moves far slower than fashion or commerce, with unpredictable downstream effects. The conversation closes on telepresence and production craft (sound as the most underrated element of video quality) and then VR, with Keaton describing an article about Epic Games, Unreal Engine, The Mandalorian's volumetric stage production, and Fortnite's in-game concerts, prompting Vance's prediction that VR's spatial sound proximity will fundamentally change remote human interaction.

“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.”

“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... Most of the time the reason your photo doesn't look good is it either has too much light or not enough.”

“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.”

Key moments

• Keaton explains how a Twitter exchange about Vance's diet before a speaking conference became their first real connection point.
• Both describe committing to a fixed number of attempts (six weeks of fasting, five podcast episodes) before judging whether a new habit works.
• Keaton describes three-day fasts as "terrifying" and primal, connecting food scarcity to evolutionary survival of ancestors who endured feast-and-famine cycles.
• Vance raises a sibling's objection to genetic testing over exposing relatives' DNA data without consent (trust).
• Keaton describes China's WeChat-based COVID color-code system (red/yellow) that blocks train access based on proximity to infected people.
• Vance calls the U.S. contact-tracing hiring push (300,000+ people) the most Orwellian thing in his lifetime and criticizes the incomprehensible scale of pandemic spending (institutions).
• Vance introduces Stewart Brand's pace-layering framework, arguing COVID policy reached into the slow-moving "culture" layer with destabilizing, hard-to-predict effects.
• late ~52-63%: Extended discussion of video/audio production craft — sound sync tolerance, lighting basics, and Vance's early podcasting mistakes with a 30-minute camera limit (craft).
• Vance predicts VR's spatial sound proximity (whispering to someone nearby without others hearing) will revolutionize telepresence and change what it means to interact with other humans (windows).

Notable quotes

“It is not possible for the human brain to comprehend $6 trillion. None of this makes sense to me. And I think it is only a dystopian future that it leads to.”

“The biggest thing that VR has that this system doesn't... is sound proximity.”

“The three day thing was terrifying... it feels primal really.”

“Most of the time the reason your photo doesn't look good is it either has too much light or not enough.”

Predictions made in this episode

• VR's spatial sound proximity (hearing people more quietly as you move away, whispering privately to someone nearby) will revolutionize telepresence and fundamentally change what it feels like to interact with other humans remotely.