Jack Butcher on Why the Pandemic Is Exposing Bullshit Jobs and Information Bubbles

Vance Crowe [00:00:03] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe Podcast,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:00:10] Jack Butcher, welcome to the podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:13] Thanks, Vance. Good to be here.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:00:15] So Jack, you are not on video right now because your bandwidth is so far down. But I wanted to have you on the podcast because you are an extraordinary person out on social media. You have become a sort of stoic poet and artist that has taken concepts of stoicism and put them into a visual medium that really blows people away and captures them to have discipline in times of need. And I think there's probably no time on earth right now than people need to have discipline. So I am grateful that you're here today.

Vance Crowe [00:00:49] Thank you very much for having me.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:00:51] So, Jack, tell us a little bit about your background. Where, where are you right now and, and kinda what's going on with your work and, and how Coronavirus is impacting you?

Vance Crowe [00:01:02] Yeah, so I am in Brooklyn, New York, which for anybody listening to this, probably aware that this is close to the epicenter, at least in, in the States. So there's a lot of talk of what's happening with Coronavirus in and around where I am. There's been, I'm, I'm in a building of about a hundred apartments, I think. So again, the reason why I'm not on video at the moment, everybody in my building, I assume almost everybody is working from home. So doing their thing over webcam and Skype and things of that nature. And yeah, I've been inside for two weeks. I think at this point we've got a, a dog, so we're, we're taking him out a couple times a day, being careful with that, but essentially been inside for a couple of weeks, which is, you know, it's got its unique challenges, but it hasn't been, hasn't been unbearable just yet.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:01:59] So talk about your, how you came to know Coronavirus was gonna be a big deal. Was this, I mean, if you've been in for two weeks, that's longer than the norm. So what made you shelter before other

Vance Crowe [00:02:11] People? Yeah, the, definitely the Twitter verse for sure. So I have, you know, the type of people that I've curated my feed around on Twitter, I think they're all either, they, they, a lot of 'em deal in risk, I think. So VCs and mathematicians and all of those characters that make a living from understanding risk, were kind of sounding the alarm bells on this thing a lot earlier than the, I I also, I don't have any traditional media in my house particularly. I don't have a TV license or anything like that, so I don't watch TV necessarily, but just learned really early on, even way back in January and started to sort of bring out to my wife, like, this thing is something pretty wild going on. And, you know, when I first heard of it, I was kind of, honestly, last week of January maybe, I started thinking, I need to think about what it's gonna look like if we're stuck in the apartment for a couple of weeks. Did consider, you know, maybe even getting outta New York for a few weeks, but decided in the end to, to stick around and just stock up and try and make as little contact with the outside world as we could for the, for the, the point in time where I thought it was gonna make a big difference. And at this point, just so many conflicting narratives and so many different stories and ways to perceive what's going on that we just sort of, you know, ended up just doing as much as we can to stay inside until we get a clearer picture of what's going on, honestly.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:03:45] Yeah, I mean we were in pretty much the same way and, and in international relations they always have this phrase that says, where you stand on an issue is determined by where you sit and meaning what is your job. And for a while there, my job has been for years to travel around the country, really North America and give talks. And I realized after watching my several people on Twitter, that I was basing my, my belief on what was gonna happen with coronavirus, with how it would impact my business as opposed to stripping away all the details and saying, no, no, what's what's really going on here and what's the best way to prepare?

Vance Crowe [00:04:26] Right, right. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's been true of, of, of my work too. So there's a couple aspects to what I do that have been affected by, I have corporate clients that are in the event that have, you know, changed their timelines for delivering certain projects and things of that nature. Work with the automotive industry, which obviously has been massively impacted by supply chain issues and things, things out of their control, like across continents. And, and even on the, on the smaller project side, the, the visualized value project, which is, you know, pretty much the description you gave in the intro, this idea of building a brand that helps people navigate the world and visualize these certain different concepts. There's, there's definitely, there's definitely an impact to what we sell in times like this. 'cause just the, the outlook of people changes slightly and, you know, people's priorities shift to preservation and survival mode as opposed to, you know, what you might class as a, a luxury purchase or, you know, something that you, something outside of the, or sorry, sorry, something higher up the Maslow's pyramid, shall we say?

Coronavirus Perspective [00:05:46] Yeah, I mean, what, what, what is considered a need to have changes when you're faced with a pandemic. I noticed last night I've been trying to watch mainstream news because it's really valuable to me to know what are millions of people hearing about this disease. And I think maybe the most shocking thing that I've noticed, because I haven't watched TV in probably five years, maybe 10 years, I don't know, but is the commercials and how some of them haven't adapted. So all their commercials seem completely disjointed from society. You see people shaking hands or hugging or, and it feels weird

Vance Crowe [00:06:20] Lobster. Yeah. And

Coronavirus Perspective [00:06:22] Then you have the other ones that have reacted, like I saw a Ford commercial where they were like, don't worry, you can buy a car and you know, the first three months you don't even have to worry about those payments and we'll pick up the next three months. So you have six months of no payments, and by the way, now you can buy the car pretty much all online and you're like, whoa, that is a big shift from the car, the car dealership model that we have in the US here. And that's people

Vance Crowe [00:06:47] Adapting

Coronavirus Perspective [00:06:47] To change what purchases people are making.

Vance Crowe [00:06:51] That's, that is phenomenal. Yeah, I think I've been somewhat geared to operate independently of human contact for quite a while now. So worked either outta my apartment or out of a small office in the city, which essentially is a, you know, is an, a dress and a place to just change routine. But all of the, all of the interactions that I have with clients and customers are remote for the most part. So it's been interesting to see how, I think, I'm not sure how, how much of this narrative you've been exposed to, but it's just so funny coming from the corporate world, how much of what I used to do was sort of role playing in a sense. You're sort of like running around performing tasks that have very little value. It's just like, it's a bizarre like x-ray onto who's actually doing stuff, who's producing stuff, who's responsible for making things happen, and who's just sort of showing up and logging into meetings and, you know, making sure that they're

Coronavirus Perspective [00:07:57] Mean. I, I have thought this for I, did you ever read that account where the guy talked about bullshit jobs and about how I

Vance Crowe [00:08:04] Did, I did I, I forget the guy's name, but it was a great,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:08:07] Yeah. And he was basically saying, you know, we think automation is only coming for factory workers, but really in reality it's come for all these office workers who it used to take 40 hours a week to do their job, but now that you have email and instant communication, those jobs aren't as needed. And I think that this pandemic is gonna lay that bare because there are, there are a lot of people that can work from home, but there are a lot of people that their services are not really needed and so they're not doing anything at all at home.

Vance Crowe [00:08:36] Yeah, I think the whole, this has been like a theme of some of the stuff I've been exploring for the last couple weeks. This whole idea of proof of work is like brought to every field in a moment like this. It's like you have to put forward proof for what you're capable of. I think even in the medical community, even more that's even more highlighted right now is like, if you can come up with a solution quickly and prove that it works, then we'll get it where it needs to go. Now I think that thesis, that way of thinking is, is gonna sort of trickle into every aspect of industry. It's just, there's, there's very, it's very difficult to hide when you are, you know, when your team is distributed and you sort of assign responsibilities. Somebody has to do this, somebody has to make this happen. And it's just, it just adds a whole lot more accountability and transparency. And I think you're right. There's gonna be a, an enormous change in how work is done and how people, you know, how people have to develop skills and like, create value at, at its core. I think that's what it's about.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:09:49] Yeah. And I, I how the, the people that I, so I heard the other day somebody really worried about being bored during this coronavirus and it made me almost like lose my mind because I was like bored. I have never been in my entire life because everything was laid clear about what your priorities have to be right now. And you think about the people that are saying, Hey, I'm laid off. I'm gonna go home and watch Netflix for hours and hours and hours, versus the guy that figures out I'm gonna figure out some kind of project, some kind of skill to build,

Vance Crowe [00:10:22] I'm

Coronavirus Perspective [00:10:22] Gonna get on skills share, I'm gonna learn. But I think there are gonna be a lot of people that wait 2, 3, 4 weeks before they start jumping in and learning the new skills.

Vance Crowe [00:10:32] Yeah. And, and yeah, you're gonna come out on the other side of this and that contrast is just getting dialed up every single day. The the longer you wait, the, because this is kind of creating this massive amount of competition at the same exact time. You know, so even these small increments of progress that are getting made by people that you know, are a candidate for what you do, like you're fallen behind by not this, this just this idea of privilege that you've got this position that you sort of show up to and money appears in your account every couple of weeks. The, the, what was the, I think it's a EB quote. It's like there are three addictions that, like the three most dangerous addictions in in the humans are carbohydrates, heroin, and a monthly salary. You heard that one?

Coronavirus Perspective [00:11:25] No, it's probably true shit.

Vance Crowe [00:11:28] Yeah. Just the complacency that that puts on you and I, I've been there, I'm not criticizing anyone in specifically, but it's just the, the mental shift that you make when you know you're on a payroll and you just expect your, you know, your, your plan to be laid out for you or the initiative that you need to take to be dictated to you. That's all gonna change. Yeah, I think that,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:11:52] I mean, I think, and I'm sure you, I I've seen stuff that you've put up that's about this. So for people that don't know, Jack has, he puts out this constant stream on his own Twitter feed Jack Butcher, but then he also has this Twitter feed visualize value, but then he has also started a community of people that he's getting together regularly. And Jack, you wouldn't know this, but I have two very good friends, two young guys that I really respect. Michael and Joseph Ring the Ring Brothers, and they joined your group and they have said extremely positive things about what you're doing. And for me, those two guys are some of the hardest working people in America. They're running a feedlot. Their, their parents died when they were very young. They figured out how to do bootstraps. So if they respect what you're putting together there, it's, it's really valuable. But that leads me to my point of you, you gotta be out there solving problems because if you were not solving somebody else's problem, one, you're not creating value. But then two, that is how you decide what skills you need to learn. It's like, Hey, I'm gonna try and solve this problem that somebody else has that they're gonna be willing to pay me for, but I don't know how. So now I've gotta figure it out. That's where skill building really happens.

Vance Crowe [00:13:03] Absolutely. Yeah. And the, I think one of the common traits of the people that have joined that community is they've kind of got that idea has clicked in their mind, you know, it's like they're on the journey to develop, like work backwards from the solution. And I think we've had the luxury for a long time of not having to do that. You just can kind of say, you know, I'm a, I have this skill, or I call myself this and I, the onus is on everybody else to come and find me and give me something to do. That's not the way the world is gonna look after this is gonna be, you know, the people who lead with solutions and the people that can, you know, prescribe and solve problems that exist and frame problems in a way that make people understand why they exist and how they get fixed are the people that are gonna do well at the end of this. But like, just that whole, that whole, it's like a, you know, you could talk about bubbles in the context of finance, but there's also like bubbles in the context of skill and culture and all that, all of those things that have just been overvalued for so long that when we get, you know, you have this moment of contrast where you just, like everything you thought was the way the world worked is is just flipped on its head. And that changes the, the relationship you have with, with all of your employees, with your clients. And it just makes you look at things a lot differently.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:14:35] Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I noticed is that this pandemic, so I've been talking about how it, it, you have an emergency like this and it kicks open the doors of the Overton window. So ideas that were radical or even unthinkable a week ago are now being floated, right? Like certain countries have dealt with, we have prisoners and we're afraid they're gonna get coronavirus. We don't, we can't leave them in there to die or to riot, so let's let them out. If you had told people a week ago that that was gonna happen, it it, it would've blown their minds. But that same thing is exactly what's going to happen with the new work environment. And as much as the government is trying to pump money in to preserve the system as it was, that's gone. It doesn't matter how much, how much money you put into the system, things will radically change. Let's say you bail out the airline industry, there's no way they're going to bring their employees back in the same way that they were before.

Vance Crowe [00:15:28] Agreed. Yeah. And, and I think it's like a firmware reset in people's brains, right? The, the customer behavior and like the way people, the people's model of the world has just changed and there's no, there's no walking that back. There's no like package or posturing that can change like people's experience in in that moment from, you know, understanding the world working this way to experiencing it that way. Like there's always that possibility and there's even, you know, the possibility you would consider even more extreme events in the future. Like this is a primer for all of those things that could potentially happen as well. As well as it is like a sort of an alarm of how fragile a lot of systems were already.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:16:17] Yeah. My, my, so I, I worked for Monsanto for many years and when I came to Monsanto I was very suspicious of large scale agriculture. But then when I was involved in it, when I would go to large scale feedlots or large scale agriculture, I saw the beauty and the really the majesty that, that is large scale agriculture for civilization. But now facing this pandemic, I realized, wait a second, there is a yin and a yang. And if you, what you sacrifice in order to have efficiency is localization and diversification. You don't wanna make that trade off all the way to one. 'cause either one of those two things is too far into extreme. And I had definitely gone to the bigger is better extreme and, and it was a mistake. I'm having to reevaluate that in a deep way now.

Vance Crowe [00:17:09] Wow. Yeah, that's, I mean, true of industries that I've worked in as well. I think, you know, less providing less of an essential function to society. I started my career in advertising and essentially the bigger the company, the less effective it was. That's a pretty solid rule of thumb. And like I now, you know, company of one and have had radically more success and traction in, in just really honing in on a single problem to solve and building, building reputation around solving that problem in the same way that, you know, I think small businesses have great relationships with their like physical small businesses. Sorry. Like, you know, if you are supplying food to a small community, you have an incredible relationship with their community and people start to understand and respect the, the work that goes into it. And yeah, I think I, I think, you know, net positive in the long run, it's painful, painful process. But I think there's also something great about this moment that if I were, I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of myself 10 years ago. The idea that choosing a career when there's, when there's this kind of fabricated version of, of like a bulletproof economy or just this idea of like making things as big and as globally dissipated as possible.

Vance Crowe [00:18:48] Like there's a whole generation of people that just took jobs they didn't care about for that reason. Is that you tracking with that?

Coronavirus Perspective [00:18:55] Oh yeah. A hundred thought. I mean, like, I know the experience of going out to be an entrepreneur. I've done it twice. And the first time I did it because I just, I was kind of frustrated with the way corporations worked and, and I just, I didn't know what to do. So I was, I went out on my own. But the second time I had a path for me inside of corporate America. But it became clear to me after having seen the, the leadership or how, how the overall structure was. Your job may be more secure in the sense that you're gonna get two weeks notice before you get laid off. But that's all the more secure it is and everything else is an illusion. The company has every reason to convince you that, you know, we are a family and we're gonna be together. We, that's not true. And so being out, being an entrepreneur is a level of risk, but it's actually not that much more of a risk than being for a corporation. 'cause I now

Vance Crowe [00:19:47] Yeah.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:19:47] Don't have to wait for somebody else to tell me whether I'm employed or not. I'm, I'm out solving problems and if I can get somebody to pay me, bang, I'm on board.

Vance Crowe [00:19:54] Yeah. I'm gonna have to follow up with the, the guy that I heard this from because I can't remember his name, but it was, it was put eloquently, I think on a podcast somewhere. It's a guy, I think it was a, I think he was a venture investor and he said entrepreneurship is actually risk reduction. You know, we're in the business of reducing risk, whether that's, you know, for ourselves or for the people that we're solving problems for. So it's an interesting reframe on entrepreneurship and my experience of it honestly has been that same thing in just a sense of, you know, you have a sense of security as a, as a member of a massive corporation that you have a fat salary and you know, consistency and when it's delivered. But I would, I would argue now that after having put some time into like publicly investing in, you know, putting yourself out there and showcasing the problems that you are capable of solving builds this like complete like a much more robust audience and like career over the long term. I'm pretty confident at this point that I have enough connections to enough people that, you know, even if I stopped today, there's like so much equity in the relationships I've built over the last year that I don't worry about, you know, getting work for the next X period of time. It's like people view it as a risk to be sort of building up this, this audience or this brand around their name, outside of their corporate connection or whatever it might be.

Vance Crowe [00:21:30] And I think in a lot of cases it's discouraged, you know, when you have that tie to company X, you don't go and put yourself out there and build an independent relationship.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:21:41] Yeah. They don't, with an audience that's you're, you're a part of a corporation, the corporate body, the corp like, but not your body. They don't, they don't want your brand. Right. Unless you're the ceo. Even then opinions,

Vance Crowe [00:21:52] Opinions are not that, opinions are not that of my employer. That little bio disclaimer

Coronavirus Perspective [00:21:58] For a while there, I had the thing in there, the, the tweets are endorsed by my employer. Right, right,

Vance Crowe [00:22:06] Right. Yeah. Yeah. I, yeah, it's so funny. I just like, there's something interesting about all the different social networks. One observation that I made over the last year or so is if you, you see people on LinkedIn for example, which is essentially a corporate social network and the, like, the conversations are so much different from something like a Twitter, right? Where you have this completely open network of people that, for the most part, at least in the way my feed is constructed, are representing themselves or representing a business that has given them the keys to say whatever they wanna say. It's, it's pretty stark difference. And I think a lot of people when they go out and try and generate business for themselves, if they start on the other that, you know, you start on either side, the outcome is, is drastically different because the way people think and the environments that they're conditioned to, you know, perform in are so different. I have a, like an interesting anecdote, I won't name any names from the last week or so where I was approached to help on a project that like these corporate agencies were like trying to come together to build something to help small business in this time of need, right? And in like in application, they don't have the skillset, the experience, the like processes in place to do anything useful.

Vance Crowe [00:23:39] Honestly, you'd be better off just cutting a check to somebody who knows what they're doing. And it's just, it's fa it's really fascinating and like you, you are like, I think this will be, you know, as unfortunate as the circumstances are, hopefully this will be a catalyst for people to find something to work on that is, you know, that has them solving problems. By definition it's like you can't really, you can't really survive as a business or a product or a service independently if you don't solve problems. But you can, you can coast along for 20 years either a business of at scale doing pretty much nothing. Those days are over, I would imagine or close to.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:24:27] Yeah, I think so. There's a guy on Twitter that I started following that is believes that the whole internet marketing, the, the click through rates and the amount that people are paying for ads is driven by, by millions if not billions of bots. And he has been fascinating to watch because if he's correct, there are armies of people at PR companies inside of corporations that are sitting there trying to get clicks doing whatever they can to get the, the thumbs up for the social media posts on, you know, for their corporate pages. And in effect, all they're doing is digging a hole and then filling it back in every single day because their work Yeah. Doesn't mean anything. And, and it's a certain kind of torture because I did a job to pay for graduate school. I was offered an assistantship where they paid for all of my graduate school if I did this media relations job, which in effect was to decide how much was it worth that we got this mention in the New York Times and this mention in the, in the star ledger. And if, if it was this many column mentions, then how much would that cost in advertising? So now we can relate getting our professors in the newspaper with making money. So all day long for 20 hours a week, I would calculate by column inch how much that would be worth for advertising to write a report that somebody thumbed through for maybe 20 seconds and then threw away. And they gave me a graduate education for it.

Vance Crowe [00:25:58] Oh my God. It's incredible, honestly, there just like, and there is just, I mean, if the American economy or the global economy even was a pie chart, the amount of people that are thumbing through papers and that pie chart is not an insignificant chunk and producing content that is, or producing following processes that have no sort of bearing on the end result. It's just, it's just the incredible amount of bloat and it's just fascinating to see like where this money will end up that, you know, we're sort of directing at the problem. But, you know, I'm, I would love to be a fly on the wall in some of those conversations now. Like people must be realizing the

Coronavirus Perspective [00:26:43] Dead. Would you, I mean, I think that's, that I think that is realizing the darkest shadow that people have, which is they have known in the back of their minds for a very long time that what they were doing wasn't valuable, but they didn't wanna face it. And, and I mean like I know for me at those times in my life when I was like, I have to face this, it meant you were giving up something that felt certain for an uncertain future. I think those, I think the being a fly on the wall in there is like, is like going down into the fiery pits of hell and most people won't look at it until the they're shoved into it.

Vance Crowe [00:27:20] Yeah, yeah. I would be uncomfortable. You're right. It's, I think, yeah, I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be tough for a lot of people because they're just, the way they think is, is sort of, has just been warped by the interface that they have with the, like the, their contribution or their like yeah. Their contribution to the problem is not clear to them, you know, that or even the problem that they're solving is not clear to, I've occupied roles in big businesses where I'm like, what am I actually responsible for? For here, there's a great, another great tale quote. I mean he's like, he's been a big character in this, but he says like, it's very hard to bullshit your way through life when you have a p and l.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:28:11] That's right. Amen. Yeah. And

Vance Crowe [00:28:13] It's like most, most people, like in a, in a corporation of a scale over, you know, a couple hundred people just are not, there's no tangible like KPI for what they're up to, you know, it's like there's no measure, there's no, there's no way to, to get a sense of what a good quarter looks like versus a bad quarter or whatever else it is you're measuring. Like I think people, we've, we've sort of moved away from that idea of, you know, scrutiny being a constructive tool and I think we've had the luxury of not being able to look at it for so long for, you know, again, I'm not an economist, but for many reasons, you know, inflated money supply or easy lending or just like I, a couple of years ago I was walking around New York and we, my wife and I went into this store and it was a, a, a shop that sold sofas with USB chargers in it, in them, it was like IKEA sofas with USB charges in them that came in like three sizes or something. And I was like, what the hell is going on? How has somebody said, yeah, I'll cut a hundred million dollars check to fund this business. It seems like it's a sustainable and brilliant idea. It was nuts. I was like, there's, there has to be, you know,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:29:31] Too much money floating after too few goods.

Vance Crowe [00:29:34] Yeah. It has to be 20, like for every, like even for every decent idea, there's like 15, 20 versions of it to the point where you're just like, like how does this make any sense? How is this a sustainable way to to, to go about like building, you know, a better version of what we have right now? Maybe like even this, even a moment like this in culture, it's like you start thinking about the things that are essential to our survival food and medicine and you know, like the things that, someone actually asked a question yesterday on one of the Twitter posts I put up that said like, what do you think of Mark Zuckerberg's move fast and break things? It's like, yeah, you know, depends what you're breaking, right? The idea of like if you're building a bridge or you're developing a like medical product, then move fast and break things is a pretty terrible way

Coronavirus Perspective [00:30:32] To think. That's right. That's right. You know, one of the things that I, that I have come to in the last few months about when I'm interacting with people, whether or not they have a bullshit job for me often comes down to is this a person that can do the negotiations? So, you know, if somebody hires me to do consulting or to do speaking, the question becomes like, okay, if my price isn't one that they're immediately already authorized to d to deal with, then how hard is it for them to negotiate? And one of the things that I've come to the realization of is the people that negotiate creatively are the ones that if they don't already have authority, they are the ones on the path to being giving authority because they're able to think through problems. I think you'll appreciate this. So I decided like I want, my wife is pregnant and I want to be able to have a steady supply of meat. I don't wanna wait till my grocery store has the hours I'm available to go to or anything like that. So

Vance Crowe [00:31:35] Sure.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:31:35] I've been decided like I'm gonna use alternative like local suppliers of meat. Well, one of my groups, the Arizona cattle producers decided they asked me to come give a talk and my price was way off of what their budget was. Right? But over time we came to the, to the conclusion, Hey, you guys have a lot of beef more than you have money.

Vance Crowe [00:31:58] Nice.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:31:59] And I have a need for beef more than I need money right now. How about every you guys send me beef every, I was originally saying month, they said two weeks and write a letter of who, whose farm that came from and tell me about it so that by the time the speech rolls around, you will have paid me in that meat. And I will know more about Arizona cattle, the person that was running that negotiation with me. I would let her run any business I've seen. She was better than, you know, and like, and, and that's the scenario where she dealt herself in, she's just a lowly person in the, in the chain,

Vance Crowe [00:32:34] But

Coronavirus Perspective [00:32:35] Dealt herself a much bigger hand because she was willing and able to figure out a creative negotiation.

Vance Crowe [00:32:41] Yeah. I, and I think like for so long, the, the businesses that sort of make that or introduce opacity to like the mechanics and the dollars and cents of how the business works, that's where all the redundancy comes in. That's where you get the bloat in, in my experience, like the more connected somebody going back to the p and l point, the more connected somebody is to how, you know, X happens and where money goes to and from gives you an understanding of how the business works, allows you to like, contribute to those conversations and do things more efficiently and build better relationships and just think creatively because, you know, ultimately you're trying to turn this into something that, you know, everybody wins from. We deliver a great solution and we make a good living doing it. But so, so many, like such a huge percentage of a lot of businesses now just have no exposure to how the business works. I think, you know, smaller businesses obviously do a better job of that, but you've just been shielded from the economy that you are participating in even as an employee of a business. And this, these why these kind of events just like completely blow your mind apart.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:33:55] Yeah. Because the further you are away from where money is coming in the door, the more your job is political and it doesn't necessarily mean that you are political. You may just be a pawn with somebody and then you take this situation and it shakes up the whole world so much that what was up and down and who is important. You know, your manager might have been a really political animal that really benefited you. Right. But if they weren't delivering value, they're not gonna survive.

Vance Crowe [00:34:20] Yeah.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:34:21] But I think that the, I

Vance Crowe [00:34:22] Mean it's,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:34:22] Oh, go ahead.

Vance Crowe [00:34:24] Yeah, I I I was just gonna echo what you're saying. I think the, yeah, the, those hard decisions will come down to like who, you know, the justification of keeping someone versus losing someone is gonna be ha you know, as brutal as it sounds like, what are they worth? I think there's another great article I'll send to you. I think the example that they use is like, you know, a lot of people sort of swimming around like trying to find their purpose and they're frustrated that, you know, they don't feel like what they do align, what they do aligns with what they care about, things of that nature. And the example they use is like, the reason you're stuck and unfulfilled and frustrated is because you don't do anything useful. You're not useful. Like if there's somebody like in the street having a heart attack, who's valuable in that situation, the doctor, not the person who like has a, you know, an idea of

Coronavirus Perspective [00:35:20] A million followers Yeah. What

Vance Crowe [00:35:21] They're all about. Yeah. Yeah. It just not helpful. So it, like utility, I wrote something yesterday, I was like, this, the, this moment in time is sorting utility from futility. So all of these things that people have pursued for, like essentially, you know, they've seen somebody else be successful at something or they've, you know, they're looking at the sort of end frame of something and trying to, trying to emulate it without like reverse engineering the result they provide. Like, you just end up in this loop of futile activity. And I think that creates more frustration than honestly just sitting around and trying to figure it out. You know, don't, what's the manga quote? Don't just, don't just do something stand there.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:36:07] I think that the most hopeful thing out of this whole conversation that we have though is that the reset button just got hit. And by the way, you just got a one month, you know Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:18] Block

Coronavirus Perspective [00:36:19] Of time that you can do whatever you want with it. And everyone has the same 24 hours, everybody has the same lockdown. Now you may have different scenarios that you're coming into it, but there is a chance for you to go looking for problems in a way that you've never looked for them before. And if you find one that you're uniquely capable of solving, bingo, you're now back in the game. You've just dealt yourself back into the global economy of which, you know, something is going to come from the ashes. Some people are gonna be successful.

Vance Crowe [00:36:50] Yeah. And it feels like the, the, this kind of this divide that's happening in the middle where there is x amount number, like hundreds of thousands of jobs going to mega corp and you know, this other opportunity on the smaller side for you to like go hyper specific and dial in that one problem that you solve feels like the middle ground is the place that's gonna get most disruptive. They're sound like, I don't really know, we don't really know what we're about. We can do a bit of this, a bit of that. Like, it feels like this is gonna, this is kind of a catalyst for sorting you into one of the two buckets. Like go and work for Amazon or go and, you know, build something very specific that you can help business X or problem X be overcome.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:37:39] So I've got one more question for you, but before I go to that question, I want to give you a chance to invite people to, to your communities or how can people find more of your content? Because what you are doing, I know has helped me, and I know I, I mean, Jack, I would say that you, this, this podcast was one that I could go around and tell e every single one of my friends that I was gonna do and I got back a fuck Yeah. With lots of exclamation points because people love what you're doing. So how can people find you and, and yeah. Get involved with the communities that you're putting together.

Vance Crowe [00:38:14] Awesome. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to give a little plug. There's a couple ways. So Twitter, me personally is Twitter, Jack Butcher and visualize value. The project you're referring to is just twitter.com/visualize value.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:38:29] I have your book right up right above my head right there. I don't know if you can see

Vance Crowe [00:38:32] It. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Yeah, thank you. And you can, if you follow those couple of pages, there's a, a post fairly frequently about the community, but essentially there's a couple products that that, that support the visualized value brand. One is a, a, a planner called the Daily Manifest, which is a accompanied by this community access. So if you, if you, you get the planner, you get access to the community, we have weekly calls and you know, we can go back and forth and, and try and help people figure out what their, you know, what they're gonna, especially in this time, what they're gonna emerge doing and how they can get more specific and prove their ability to solve problems and all those good things. Essentially, I'm trying to help people get on the track that I found through all of this experimentation that led to the creation of visualized value, which I look at as this, this execution of all of the things that I've learned in these very different and disparate situations compiled into this thing that, you know, I uniquely enjoy and is like, provides utility to a lot of people, hopefully.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:39:39] Well, I mean, I know that every time I, I need something to focus me, I go look at some of your Seneca quotes or Marcus Aurelius or whoever else. So I, I love it. So my, my final question, and you're not allowed to dodge it, I, a lot of people try and dodge this question because

Vance Crowe [00:39:56] It's

Coronavirus Perspective [00:39:56] So difficult. What is the world gonna look like in two weeks?

Vance Crowe [00:40:03] In two weeks? I think, I think there's, yeah, I, I don't know if this is a dodge, but it goes one of two ways I think. I think there'll be like a, I I was reading a couple studies last night, I dunno if you saw the Oxford University study that said 50% of the UK already has coronavirus. Have you seen that one yet? No.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:40:29] Uhuh

Vance Crowe [00:40:30] It came out late last night. So I think there'll either be like a total reversal, so kind of back to normal, this was like overblown panic and like the economic fallout will just continue as if, you know, the same thing happened. But I think that there'll be like an overcorrection in behavior or I think, you know, we're, we're wearing masks for, you know, it's a criminal offense to not be wearing a mask in public. Those are my two options.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:41:01] Wow, okay. All right. That's, that's, that's an interesting assessment. Well, Jack Butcher, I know you are a very busy guy. Oh, I wanted to, I'm sorry, before we leave, you had mentioned something about WeWork on Twitter.

Vance Crowe [00:41:16] Oh yeah, yeah.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:41:16] And I wanted to ask you about that because I'm reading things on Twitter about it, but I'd like to get it straight from user experience. What's going on there?

Vance Crowe [00:41:24] Yeah, so I have a space in a downtown WeWork office in New York. And y you know, the governor of New York, Cuomo's been saying for, I don't know, a couple of weeks at this point or 10 days at this point, like shelter in place, non-essential businesses do not go into work. Like a hundred percent of non-essential businesses should be working from home right now to curtail the spread of this thing. And we work as sort of c like, you know, all, every single bus, every single company that I do business with on a recurring basis has basically reached out and said, Hey, we pause your membership, like you're not gonna pay for a service. You can't access, thank you very much for being a customer, et cetera, et cetera. We work took the opposite stance and basically said, we have essential business going on at WeWork so we're not closing. And you know, by definition that sits a little weirdly with me. WeWork is essentially a, you know, a wifi connection and a coffee machine. There's not like a distribution infrastructure or there's no business that operates out of WeWork that couldn't operate as a distributed team, just by definition of the, the,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:42:37] The nature of the business. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:42:39] The nature of the business and what it provides, you know, it's just a, a mailing address, a room and a desk. So, you know, obviously WeWork's been in some financial trouble for some time as it's been covered in depth by a lot of smart people. And it feels to me like this is just a, you know, it's a death sentence for them and it feels like they're just doing everything in their power to just sort of scoop up the last few dollars. And, you know, they basically responded and said, well, you like the building's open, if you want to go in, there's, none of our staff are gonna be there. So they've, they've taken their staff out of the, out of the mix, but there was a, a memo that got leaked yesterday where they offered to pay their staff a hundred bucks a day to go in, which is, I mean, it's just kind of an insane situation where, and this is another good example I think of,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:43:29] I don't, man, that doesn't seem so insane to me. Like I, I, I don't know, like, just just to, from what I read, I watched, I read the New York Times article and, and like they're a business and they're trying to keep people coming in. If you, if I, I don't mean to be impolite here, Jack, I'm just, I'm just curious, curious to push on the edge. Like I'm,

Vance Crowe [00:43:50] I'm, I wanna hear it, I

Coronavirus Perspective [00:43:51] Wanna hear it. Like, if if they, if you have a subscription service with them, right? That, that you're using an office and it's month to month or over the year, if you don't like the way that they're handling it, just cancel. Maybe you're not allowed to, I don't know. But the offering people

Vance Crowe [00:44:06] Money

Coronavirus Perspective [00:44:06] To come in is like hazard pay, right? Like, I don't know.

Vance Crowe [00:44:10] Yeah, no, I get, I mean, I get it from like a fundamental like yeah, incentive structure makes sense. I think the, the problematic part is like, the guidance that's been given is like any, any, any gathering of 10 people or more is problematic, right? Right. And those buildings, and the way that they're, like, the way that their offices are set up are these huge communal spaces where if people did follow that guidance, essentially they would be like going directly against whatever the, okay,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:44:49] Whatever

Vance Crowe [00:44:49] The guidance from CDC or the governor or whatever. It's like you guys aren't exempt from the rules that everybody else is following. That's the problem I have with it. It's like, I would love to, you know, have kept access to the office, but just it feels like their, their defense is to, is to say that our essential businesses are operating out of WeWork, and I just don't buy that. I think like, just by its very definition, like it's a bunch of people on laptops that are, you know, conducting business remotely. And I don't know, I think I, I think there would've been a, there could have been a better response where like, if you really cared about that and you had a, you know, had a intention to keep numbers low and just have a sense of who's gonna be coming in and out, but there's not, there is none of that. There's no like, there's no, like how many businesses and how many people are gonna be coming in and out of these locations. It's just purely like, Hey, our policy is we're gonna keep charging you. Sorry. I just don't think it's been very thoughtful response. And I think like, it's probably because they, the, you know, the alarm bell is going off in the engine room and they're just like, well, why not? Just, you know, oh

Coronavirus Perspective [00:46:02] Yeah. I mean these, all these VCs started just, just like the, the overblown corporations, these VC funded or gigantic IPO funded businesses that don't have the infrastructure behind them. They're grabbing every dollar they can because they, they're in the hole. I, I think the essential services system that we have going on, like in St. Louis, I believe it's going to cause social strife because I, I'm a, I'm really reluctant to have these shelter in place things like, in a place like New York, maybe you have to, I, I don't know. I like using the force of law to suspend the First amendment is really dangerous. I think maybe it's needed, I don't know, I don't have to make those decisions, but the fact that they're giving some people exemptions and not others. So some people are gonna be sitting in their house watching their savings get burned in a furnace while other people are going out and making money in services that clearly are not essential. Or at least you could make a really strong argument, this is gonna cause social di divisiveness and eventually the government is gonna be called to either ignore the law that they just created or enforce it, which is probably worse.

Vance Crowe [00:47:15] Yeah. And I think, like, I think what's overlooked and what is like a really difficult calculation to make, because this is a first of its kind event is obviously there as fallout either way, right? And I think people have simplified this argument, so like, oh, you, you know, you, you are making a decision that is, you know, just kind of putting the value on a human life, but either decision you make is, is essentially making that, you know, is essentially committing to that on either side of the issue is, do you know what I mean? If you saying hundred

Coronavirus Perspective [00:47:52] Percent Yeah, stop.

Vance Crowe [00:47:53] Yeah.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:47:53] And I think the

Vance Crowe [00:47:54] Economy from running people are gonna be in like, some pretty massive trouble in the same way that stay in your house. People are gonna be in massive trouble. And I just don't think people are, you know, and I, I'm not qualified to comment on the ripple effect of, of that in either circumstance, but it, you can't ignore one for the other.

Coronavirus Perspective [00:48:13] I, I think you're exactly right. And the, the, I think the greatest danger to individuals right now is not only the thing that we discussed where it's like, hey, use this time to build yourself something valuable. But then the other thing is that people are gonna get into troughs of information where they just keep hearing the same sources, they look different, they're on different channels, or they're from different social media posts, but they're the same thing over and over and over again. So you begin to believe that that is what everybody else already knows, and that it is because you've seen it so many times. Absolutely true. And there's no way against it. And that's the challenge with public health. You've gotta beat it into people's heads that they need to take it seriously. But if you beat it too far into their heads, you start changing what the nature of what they know to be true and that this gets really weird.

Vance Crowe [00:49:08] Yeah. I'm, yeah, it's, it's a fascinating time to be living through for sure. And like this, this probably, you know, I think election and political cycles was this huge like catalyst for examining, like, who can say what and what's true and what isn't. And something like this is just an even more stark example of like just how chaotic it gets and how different people interpret these things. Like I have conversations with some, like different people in my network, and like, the difference in what they believe to be true and who they believe to be responsible is just so massive. And we've all sort of curated our own echo chamber to some extent. You know, nobody is, nobody is able to even find information that is completely without bias. And you've, you know, every, all of the different mental models that you've accrued as an individual change the way you interpret it too. So it's just, it's just,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:50:10] Yeah. And if you don't have somebody in your network that you really respect, but you completely disagree with you, you're effed in this situation because that means you're in, you're, you're, you're in an information trough and you can't get out of it. So you've gotta find those people that you're like, damnit, you're totally wrong. But I do respect you, so I'm gonna keep it.

Vance Crowe [00:50:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Coronavirus Perspective [00:50:29] Yeah. Jack, I could keep talking all day, but man, I, I wanna let you go, but thank you so much and stay safe in New York. If things heat up, I'll have you back on again to tell us what's going on in New York.

Vance Crowe [00:50:40] Alright, thanks Vince, I appreciate it. Thanks

Coronavirus Perspective [00:50:42] Jack, to you.