Rob Long Returns! the stoic flywheel, negative human rights, and the dichotomies game

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] The more strength you have, the more faith you can have, right? So like, if the idea is that you are, you can place bets on things, right? So you can risk having a loss, which is ultimately what you have to do to build things, right? Hi everyone, I am Oliver Crow, a second grade student and aspiring YouTuber, and you're listening to the Vance Crowe podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. I have another interview with my good friend, Rob. Long, if you have not heard the first interview, I would highly recommend going back and watching that because some of the concepts that we talk about during this interview reference some of that material. If not, this is actually a far better conversation than we had the first time we get into talking about several books that we liked, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Moby Dick, and other pieces of literature. We talk about stoicism, we talk about dichotomies, we talk about all kinds of interesting things. And Rob has been a very strong force in my life, and it is really a great opportunity for me to be able to share this with you because it's a conversation that's difficult to figure out exactly how to have. But if you're the type of person that likes these kind of conversations, I can tell you that many conversations like them are going on in the Articulate Ventures network. So if you are interested in meeting people that think deeply about things, share ideas that are not like mine, but are their own, and they're willing and able to expand on them and talk about them more deeply, I would highly recommend you think about joining the Articulate Ventures network.

Vance Crowe [00:01:40] You can find it at Network dot Articulate Ventures. Thanks, and I hope you enjoy this interview with my man, Rob Long. Rob Long, welcome back to the podcast. It's great to be back Vance. You know, like we said last time, it's an unusual experience to interview somebody that you're really close friends with because you've gotta keep this thing dynamic and having us talk about something that's new and interesting. But you and I spend a great deal of time talking about stuff. So it's, it's a battle to try and be at that right there at that edge of chaos. But one thing that you and I have talked about recently, but I think there's still miles to go, is that in the book club, we just read Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And even though we had an hour and a half long discussion with a group of about 15 or 17 people, it feels like there was miles and miles to go in that conversation. Yeah, no, I, I agree with you. That was a really engaging conversation and also simultaneously not enough. Boy, what, where to start here to, to pull a thread out of this. I would say that I, I think almost everyone, or at least you and a couple other folks had the experience of having started to read that book at some point earlier in their lives and not really getting it or, you know, enjoying the reading. And I thought the, one of the enjoyable points that came out of this was the idea that when you're ready, you just enjoy every moment of the book, and you're not, you're not reading it to get to the end or to get to a particular spot in the book.

Vance Crowe [00:03:23] For those who don't know, it takes place. It's, it's essentially a, a, a discursion of, of a, a journey across the country from Minnesota out to California that a father and a son, and then this other married couple take on two motorcycles and they drive. And kind of the idea is that as you go along the journey with them, the narrator who is the father in this story is telling you about the son and about his past experiences and kind of introducing some concepts of philosophy. And it's, it's a really, it's a really good format. One thing I I likened it to is kind of a, a heart of darkness where there's this journey where you go along with the protagonist and you go up the river, you know, and things get crazier and crazier as you go. And, and, but you still feel, you kind of identify with what's going on because you're actually going on the journey with them in the story, which is also itself a metaphor for just reading the story. Like you're, you're going on a journey, but all the way that it, ultimately this cache is out is having subjective first person experiences with the characters involved, right? So you're kind of going on this trip and you have the same experiences they do. And so, you know, hopefully if it's written well, you're in a position to, you know, to be able to understand their emotions, to be able to understand what's going on and root for the resolution of the story in a way that's, that's enjoyable to you. Ultimately.

Vance Crowe [00:04:54] This is, boy, I, there's a, there's a lot to untangle here, but I'm not gonna go into the philosophical parts of it so much. Well, I think that the, the part of the book that makes it at first somewhat difficult is that it switches between almost three different stories that are interwoven in between them, right? Where it's the experience of going on the road trip, then this story about this philosophical concepts that he's trying to untangle and explain. And many of them, if you've had any kind of background in philosophy, they're things that you've touched, but never in this subjective way where it's not, I dunno, my experience of philosophy was the philosophy professor presenting something that was so difficult to untangle that you just relented. And were like, all right, well, you just tell me what this means and then we'll go through it. And he actually has the opposite where he, he's using motorcycle maintenance as a way to describe philosophy and then also his backstory. And I, I think that most people find that some portion of that, the part of the story, whether it's the narrative of being on the motorcycle or the philosophy part, is more enjoyable than the other. And so even if you get tangled up in one part and find it boring or find it something kind of tedious, the other parts pull you through. And I think that was like the magic of the way that the author wrote the book. Yeah, I mean, as a, as a way of understanding philosophy, like the book doesn't set out to teach you philosophy necessarily, right? It has a, a point, an opinion that it wants to express, but at the same time, you know, when you are whatever, in your early twenties, late teens going through university and you're learning about Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, there's very little concreteness to that.

Vance Crowe [00:06:42] I feel like that that comes out of most of those classes. And it's, it's nice to be able to tie it to, you know, characters in the story and be able to think of people relating to these concepts, which is really something that, you know, your mind can get purchased on as, as human characters interacting with one another. Whereas these kind of ethereal concepts, you know, you can say yes, intellectually, I understand that, you know, Platonism is about, you know, these ideas, the world of, of ideas and not physical reality and top down, you know, concepts. But how do you cache that out in terms of interacting with, with actual other human beings? And I felt like the, the dichotomy that he describes is ultimately the way that it really, really does that, right? So he describes romantic and classic style individuals where folks who are romantic tend to favor aesthetics or emotional harmony, things like this. Artists, yeah. Pe basically people who appreciate you used the word groovy, right? It was written in the early seventies, I think. Whereas classic is more of your kind of platonic top-down, you know, order, looking for classifying things and hierarchies and how to, how to interact in that sense. And like, it's not meant to say that everyone is either one or the other category, but just as a way to kind of think of people on a continuum.

Vance Crowe [00:08:15] It, it helps you to interact and understand with people and kind of makes it real, you know, concrete. Well, one of the things that you and I have done for years, and I think we kind of touched on this the last time we spoke, was is this concept of dichotomies and the game that we play, which is somebody discovering two values or ideas that are separate and distinct from one another. And yet they are, I i, I don't know. And it's, it's very difficult for me to be able to wrap my mind around the, the words to be able to describe this, but the one that's the most obvious to me, or the one that I use the most commonly is order and chaos, order being all the things that you know and understand and can navigate and chaos being everything that you don't. And, and so all new things come from chaos. It's easy to think of chaos as being all bad or all evil, but it's just that's where the things that you don't understand and order being the things that are already in your life and trying to find the balance between those two things. Because if you're always in chaos, you're in total anarchy and you, you, you can't survive there and too much order being tyranny, you know, too much wrought upon you, but you can extrapolate this game out and play it and find all sorts of other dichotomies, which is kind of a fun way to look at the world. Yeah. And, and actually I've been kind of collecting examples of dichotomies and at first I thought, oh, this is going great, this is really enjoyable. I've kind of branching out and figuring these things out. But I've come to believe that all of the ones that I found are actually just versions of the order and chaos dichotomy.

Vance Crowe [00:09:50] Like literally all of them are just a subspecies of that. You know, a fun one to talk about is infinity and infinitesimal, right? So like, if you can picture a a one dimensional, you know, a line, a number line, and you have zero right in the middle, and the further you go away from zero, the closer you get to infinity, right? So infinity is just going out as far away as you can go. An infinitesimal is going as close to zero as you can go without ever actually getting there. So, you know, you can just continually and continually add decimal places, you know, 0.0, 0, 0, 0, 0, you know, on in to infinity until you, you know, get all the way down to the very last quantity. That is not zero. But there's nothing smaller than that. And ultimately, I think of those as there's, you know, how to put this, so basically the infinite decimal, there is an infinite amount of those all strewn throughout the nu the number line. Like you can't go anywhere without passing an infinite amount of those infinite decimals, but there's only, you know, one or two infinities depending on how you think about that, right? A positive and negative one. So, so why, why is that then just a derivation of order and chaos? Because to me those are, it's still a dichotomy. It's an interesting one to dichotomy, say, how small can you get Yeah. Versus how, you know, infinitely large. But it doesn't quite map to that.

Vance Crowe [00:11:21] That's the same as order and chaos. I would say that the infinity is ultimately, well, so this is the thing, it's all, it's all entirely subjective, right? Like we're just grabbing these things out of the air and they can mean whatever we, we want them to mean. In one sense, you could say that, you know, the infinitesimal is perfect order because it's like, you know, infinitely small, frozen, solid, tiny thing that doesn't go anywhere or do anything. And infinity is something you can never actually achieve, right? It's a, it's just like striving out into the distance forever, which seems pretty chaotic to me. Like it's perfect snug home versus as far as you can go away from home. Yeah. And like, I was trying to think of other dichotomies. It's funny when you get put on the spot like this, it's a little bit like, tell me a joke. And you're like, oh, I don't know how to do that. But we've done this many, many, many times and, and in fact, like started cataloging them in your yeah. Archetypal website. Well, okay, so let's try another one. So versus is, right, we talked about that a little bit, defining those terms last time. And, and like, I wanna, I, I wanna express again that these are very like, poetic concepts, right? It's not meant to say this is the hard truth and you must accept this dichotomy, right? But that ought is order, right? And there's one idea that you have about the way things ought to be, but the way things actually are is almost impossible to ever actually know, right?

Vance Crowe [00:13:01] There's the, the full detail of the universe is exquisite and infinite, right? So there's this kind of dissent into chaos when you zoom into things and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in. You just start, you know, going into chaos and, and before long you get down to a plank length or something like this. And we don't even know what happens if there is anything to say about beneath that, oh, that's super interesting 'cause I would've reversed those and said that is, is the order part of that because is describes the way something is. But to your point, you know, like it's very, very difficult to ever nail down a fact that is true no matter what. And that, and that ought is the chaos because you can pull from any number of, of ways to look at the world and say, well, it's the, the, the way the world ought to be. But this actually brings up one of my favorite conversations that we have ever had, which is about the concept that there's a group out there called the skeptics. And for people that aren't familiar with this tribe of people, the skeptics fancy themselves to be people that debunk pseudoscience, or at least that's kind of the more colloquial, you know, new wave skeptics. And they, they really spend a lot of time going around and saying, well, those people are anti-vaxxers, and let's go find the science that shows that vaccines don't cause autism. And we're just gonna hit you with as many papers as we can and show you why that's wrong.

Vance Crowe [00:14:34] But it's not necessarily who the skeptics, you know, of, of the, the more ancient definition were, but this kind of is what the definition of it is now. And the, and these people really CC come along and, and are pretty harsh about things like they've decided that GMOs are safe. So anybody that doesn't think GMOs are safe, they're idiots, and let's show them why using science. But this led us to a conversation about ought and is regarding the skeptics that really opened my eyes to, to where their folly really is. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that they bring in, they've like many problems that we described that they smuggle in aughts into what they're, what they're dis, you know, expounding on to the detriment of their cause. And ultimately the one aught that I think that you can permit and still be part of the skeptics is that you, you ought to know what is right. So knowing what's going on, or at least trying to, to some degree as best you can, is kind of the, the concept of it seems to me of what it means to be a skeptic in, in the modern sense as you put it, right? Not the philosophic skeptics, but that you ought to know what is, you shouldn't just pass on hearsay and rumors and things like this that you should want to back your knowledge of the world with some sort of, you know, some sort of evidence or, or reasoning behind what you believe rather than just, you know, the ghosts live in the trees and we worship the trees or something, you know, who knows whatever kind of thing you wanna pick out of the air there.

Vance Crowe [00:16:13] Well, and that comes from the concept of hues, guillotine. This is kind of where, where we came up with this concept from. So hues, guillotine being, you can't derive an ought from an is meaning just because you have a scientific fact and you can say, okay, we know that this is true, this causes this. Then you shouldn't from that be able to then say, well then therefore, X, y, z and we talked about this before, like, let's imagine that you came to conclusive evidence that climate change is caused by human activity. That is all that you can say. That is what is true. If, if we imagine that scenario being, you know, verifiable, but just because you say that is true does not mean that then therefore we ought to do X, Y, z. And hu guillotine is trying to cut that off and say, don't try and derive aughts from is, and that gets to the, the point that you made before, which is a clever turn of phrase, the value smuggling. Yeah. Right. So let's see here, the, yeah, ultimately hues, guillotine is, it's just a fact, right? It's saying that these are two different categories and they don't mix. Like you can know facts about the world, but they don't tell you anything about how the world should be, right? Like, it should be different than it is right now, according to what, right? The only kind of concept that we can get around this is to say that that is a subjective preference of an individual that, you know, I would prefer that, you know, there be more light in here or there'd be, you know, beautiful window behind me or something like that.

Vance Crowe [00:17:51] That's, that's fine, that's a preference that I can hold, but I can't, I can't discern that preference based on the facts of the universe, right? Like, what is my purpose for this room? Well, that purpose is an ought, you know, I mean, we can kind of, some people would suggest that, that there, in fact, you can, and they, one term that they use, which I really like the term, and I don't, I don't want to throw the whole term in the trash, but that's human flourishing to say that that is the definition of the way things ought to be to facilitate human flourishing. The problem is, is that there's not one definition of human flourishing. I think we all have some kind of idea, and they're not, like, I totally accept the point that we're not all gonna come up with entirely different concepts. There will be lots of overlap, such as minimizing pain and suffering and, you know, having, having, you know, ease to do, to do the things that we would like to do and not spend time on, on, you know, drudgery. But let me, well, human suffering or of the, the human flourishing, those are the things that, that pave the way for concepts like the public good that we should do this for this ideal of human flourishing. And then all these aughts get smuggled into this. And I remember having this revelation when I was in graduate school and people started talking about, you know, one thing that should be a human right is access to water.

Vance Crowe [00:19:27] And on its face you're like, okay, that makes total sense. People need water. It should not be made that they can't have this water. But as soon as you start saying that there's a right there and you use it because we all already agree that human flourishing is what we're all after, or some, something like that, then you start like having to deal with the reality that water can be a scarce resource, or the ability to move it from one place to another requires work. And as soon as you do that, now you're starting to use force into the world to say the way that things should be that are different than the way that they are. And once you've accepted and you say, well, we already agree that human flourishing is the thing that needs to happen, then we should already agree that water is a human right and therefore, therefore, therefore on down the line. And I think that it, for a very long time in my youth, that part had not been something that I had realized that the, in order to be able to change and is to a, a preference requires like effort. And that effort requires calories to be eaten and, and fuel to be burned. And all of these things require work that requires somebody to make a preference to add order to that chaos. Yeah, I mean, I, in my mind, the formulation of human rights that go, that goes into positive things. And I don't mean like, you know, happy things, but like, you know, you have, you should have access to healthcare, housing, running water, what, what have you, all of these things, those are, you know, positive suggestions.

Vance Crowe [00:21:07] They all imply a duty on the rest of humanity to supply that to you, right? And it doesn't, it doesn't ever imply what happens if you don't obtain this for yourself, even though you had the opportunity to, like, you took your money and you spent it on a fast car instead of having healthcare, right? Like, whatever that is. Like, we, we don't have any way of, of, of, of rationalizing this. And ultimately the, I think the place that you end up with is that negative formulations of human rights make more sense. Like the right to be free from interference, the right to be free from, you know, harm people coming into you and taking you, taking over your stuff, right? Like, this is what private property is all about. It draws a line and says inside of here, you don't have any rights, as opposed to, I'm sitting right here and I have a right that someone will show up and bring this positive thing to me. So it's a lot easier to understand. And I think in terms of like, you know, even zooming out from there, a, a book that's I think a lot of folks in the network and and listeners here have probably read or heard of is Victor Frankel's Man's Search For Meaning. And one of my favorite lines in there, I just kind of came across this again, where he points out that asking what is the meaning of life? And by that I think is also an analogy to what, what is human flourishing, right? It's, it's probably attaining your, your meaning it as close as you can is like asking what is the best chess move, right?

Vance Crowe [00:22:42] And there's no answer to that question. It's like, well, I, it depends on what's going on in the game that you're playing right now. You know, like the the best move in game A could be the worst move in game B, and it's totally out of context, and it's not an answerable question generally, right? Just like what is the meaning of life is not an answerable question that someone can just say, oh, the meaning of life is 42, right? Like, that's the classic joke that everybody gives, but it's something that you have to find for yourself. And, you know, Viktor Frankl has got a pretty good lead on, I think where, where that goes, Holy shit. Is that what the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe was saying when that, because isn't that where the, the number 42, the joke out of that is that, that that's the, I, you Know, that's a good question. I I don't re it's been a long time since I've read that book and I probably wouldn't have picked up that meaning of it when I read it. It's been so, I was so young when I did, I so thoroughly hated that book that I can't even begin to describe it. Yeah. And if that is Actually where some of that meaning was, is that, is that about subjectivity is just like what you make of it? That is Douglas Adams is a smart guy. You should, you should, I mean, like, whether you like his books, like you're feel entirely entitled to your opinion, right? Like, I desperately dislike the gripes of The Grapes of Wrath, right? But there's, we all have books like this for various reasons, but he's definitely a smart guy, so it's possible that that meaning is in there.

Vance Crowe [00:24:16] And, and he's also very sarcastic and humorous, I would say. But Theism Sarcasm you read that book is, was, you know, you made a point about the zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance during the book club that really struck me. And it was, when I first started reading that book, I, I didn't, I wasn't distracted. I had tons of time. And so I would pick it up and I'd read 10 pages and I read 15 pages. I read it out loud to my baby. I would just, I really enjoyed it. And then I got to the point where I got involved with another book, and I loved that book so much that I put off for two weeks reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And then all of a sudden I had a deadline and it was almost like being back in college where I'm like, I gotta get this chapter done. I gotta get this done, I gotta do this. And so any of the joy that came from that journey was then stripped out. So I was very clearly thinking, oh, the first half of the book was way better than the second half of the book. But when you made the point of like, hey, you read this for the subjective enjoyment of reading the book, then if you strip that part out and it becomes a, a duty a task on you, it's not, it's not gonna be fun. Just like if you view maintenance of your motorcycle as being a punishment, then you're gonna hate it, it's gonna be awful. But if you view it as a part of the ownership of the thing or the value that you derive from, from having this motorcycle, it changes the whole situation. Yeah. I, I like that point a lot. And like, I, I definitely had that situation. I think most people can identify with this having to go through school and, you know, having to read books in order to, to earn your grades, you know, that I, I see a, a pathway of, you know, books that I'm not convinced Ethan from is worth anyone's time.

Vance Crowe [00:26:00] I don't think it's, I'm not, I'm, I'm probably not gonna listen if you want to say it te it's not. But Moby Dick on the other hand, was also a book that I had to read and suffered through and was like, you know, okay, well let's get through this. But came back to later in my life, seeing it come up in various contexts and I thought, okay, I like reading now I'm gonna go ahead and give this a shot. And it's, it's among my, my top favorites, you know, of all time. Oh, I had the exact same experience. And, and I would say the other thing besides the time pressure that goes on with school is that you have a teacher that has a study guide and your reading of that book has to map to that study guide. And if it doesn't, if you don't see undertones of homosexual erotica inside of Moby Dick, then you weren't reading it correctly and not taking the right meaning from it. And I like, that was something, those are absolutely in there, by the way. Bother me. What's that? Those are absolutely in there, by the way. Well, I'm saying like, if that's the highlight fundamental point, point, not that's a problem, right? You're pushing through it. It's, it's a fascinating part of the story. Quig and Ishmael, my only point was if, if that's what the discussion has to be about, as opposed to the way that a, a book discussion can come from two friends sitting down, and we've talked about Moby Dick many times, and that was not required for us to be able to have a discussion. And it's probably just the nature of trying to get a group of 25 students ushered through, you know, literature.

Vance Crowe [00:27:35] Yeah. And, and not necessarily some evil plot, but yet just, just, it does make it so the experience of reading books is just like the experience of exercising that you get. If, if the only exercise you ever got was from PE then you hate exercise. No, absolutely. The, at the start, at the outset, your goal is to extract, like you said, the lessons that the teacher expects you to learn so that you can then, you know, make those points on the exam and, you know, get the lesson that you were supposed to. And there's like, it's like intellectual subjugation, right? Like, I'm not, you know, I, we still need to have schools and stuff. I don't have a better idea of how to educate people, but I see this trap and how it works. And I can tell you that that's how I felt for sure. And then I was just not interested in having the ideas that the teacher wanted me to have, right? Whereas if you're reading for yourself, I came across this phrase the other day, it was like the work of reading or the labor of reading something like that. And it, the way it was explained, it was like, if you're just reading mindlessly like, like mental chewing gum, that you're wasting your time, that the point of reading is to be getting something out of what you're doing, not to just be passing the time. You know? And I, I totally, totally agree with that. And if you have your own set of ideas and interests and, you know, potential avenues that you could benefit from reading something while you're, you're, you're reading through and you're like, oh yeah, I'm gonna take a note about this and you're excitedly writing something down because you don't wanna forget it and then review that when you're done reading, like this is the whole point, incorporating it into what you're doing.

Vance Crowe [00:29:11] And I think the, the, actually the book club does a really good job of that because I feel like no, nobody expects that there's a right set of ideas that you're gonna show up to the discussion with, right? Like you're, you have your own ideas and the value is that you can somehow attach an interesting perspective and communicated to other people who are, who have read the book now because you both have shared this experience. Yeah. And, and, and one of the tactics, or some of the things that you taught me that I have now put into all of the books that I'm reading is I used to highlight and underline things thinking like, oh, I'll go back and I'll read those underlined phrases. But now if I underline something that's only an indication that it probably should get written down in my index card for every book that I have, I have an index card and I went out and bought like nice index cards and they're the right size and I got a good pin for it. And then I write down the lines that are valuable to me, and I've already found myself going back to the book that I have, and I just keep that index card in the book, pulling it out, and I have my own summary. I don't need spark notes for it, and I don't need to thumb through being like, where was that, that thing? And the act of writing it down commits it to my memory in, in a different way than reading does. And I have a pretty strong memory for what I read, but this brought it to a whole different level. And the only way that I could get there was for me to say, I'm not reading to finish the book, I'm reading to extract as much out of this as I can.

Vance Crowe [00:30:43] And that, that requires that you get over the idea that finishing the book is the object of the reading. Yeah, I, I agree with that. And I also, I see the, the value of reading the physical, you know, paste and page edition, whatever you want to call it, of a book rather, as opposed to listening to the book or reading it on say a Kindle or something like that. At least for me, I have a physical memory and my mind has a model of kind of where I'm at in the book when I've encountered things. And if I think about a particular scene or, or a, a line or something, I can almost always remember what side of the fold it was on, whether it was at the top or the bottom or, you know, the beginning or ending of a chapter or something like that. And there's kind of like this, it's like a, you know, A-A-G-P-U card, like in a computer that you can use to accelerate various processes that if you use this medium to ingest the book, you, you al you get this extra index that you can use to reference it. And that, that's certainly very valuable to me. Yeah. The, the holding of a book for me, I, I sometimes will do audio books just as I'm running a lot or I'm doing some other things, but I've decided that there's a certain category of books that I wanna do that for. And it's probably more like chewing gum or more, like, I don't quite have the time to watch this on a movie, but I'd like to have it, you know, the the enjoying experience. But if there's something I'm trying to deeply pull out, I, I read it, one of the most fun things I've done is to have read the book and then do the audio book or vice versa, because then it's like committing in a whole different way in my memory.

Vance Crowe [00:32:28] And it's not the same as watching a movie, you know, like it's, I I think this is probably an obvious statement to you, but it's worth it. Bears repeating, like, the reason reading a book is so much more enjoyable than watching a movie is that in a movie, they do all the work for you, whatever the buildings are, whatever the rolling green grass, you see it as a literal representation. But when you're reading it, you're reading the rolling green grass, you're now integrating your understanding what, what color green, what does it mean to be rolling? Have I ever seen hills like that before? And you are the, the author is using their words to paint a picture in your mind that you are a part of. And th this really embracing that was one of the, the things that I didn't have many advantages as a young person, but the, once I fully embrace the fact that I could have these ideas painted into my brain and I could get into this dance, it made reading one of those things that was natural, almost like breathing for me. That's awesome. When you, when you describe that I, and kind of the process of going back and forth between the different mediums, there are media that it actually recalled to mind my experiences with the current book club book The Hobbit. So my first encounter there was that this was clearly some kind of cultural phenomenon that I had no knowledge of a long time ago. You know, I don't know, it's 30 years ago, 20 years ago, something like that. 20. And so I came across this audio book recording of it in which the, it, it's actually recorded from a record that was produced in the sixties.

Vance Crowe [00:34:05] And it's this guy who's like reading it like a storybook and he individually does kind of different voices for the different characters, but it's still the same person. So it's not as jarring as the like typical radio play style thing that they do sometimes, which I don't generally like. And so I listened to that and I, I just listened to that endlessly when I was, you know, at this age of my life and I was, you know, doing other things and just to that in the background. And then at some point, obviously the light flipped on and I thought, well why, why the heck don't I actually just go read this book? So I did. And when I read the book, it was like coming home, it was a joy, it was so wonderful because I had already loved these characters from his physical, you know, audio instantiation of them. But I didn't really feel like I knew all the, everything that was gonna happen. 'cause it was an abridged version of this book. So I was just, that was one of my happiest moments reading a book was that, reading that for the first time. I don't think it's necessarily the best book in the entire universe. I just really enjoyed the way that it came to me. Well, eight pages in, or no 18 pages in. 'cause I, I received the book just last night and I started reading it to my, my baby this afternoon. And that is an incredibly easy book to read out loud. The way that it is written, it is almost as though it is written for the storyteller because the way that the sentences are set up, you know, who's speaking basically within the first two or three words of each sentence. So you can flip between voices.

Vance Crowe [00:35:37] And for me, I have my, my audience of one completely captivated. I'm holding her and I get to read this, and that is the perfect book. It's, it's already got me decided that the books that I will read to my child will not be the little teeny tiny picture books. It's gonna be these deep, long chapter books that have been Lindy, they've been around for a long time in order that, that you select books that are easy to read, like the ones that have been passed on. Yeah. I mean, and that's like, I think we've kind of gotten away like the, the sheer volume of writing that's available to us now, if you're always picking up the newest thing, I feel like you're selecting for novelty, which is an interesting, you know, pursuit in itself. But quality is also an interesting pursuit. And I feel like you, it's hard to beat Tolkien as far as, you know, word choice. Like he was a linguist, you know, knew all of these, you know, ancient languages, Welsh and Gaelic and, you know, old Norris and these crazy languages and like, just, I mean, you could say that he stole these concepts and turned the various characters in his book from these ideas. But at the same time it's, it's incredibly valuable to be able to think of like the, you know, the elves are kind of the, the Gaelic people and there's, you know, the, the, the hobbits are like, you know, the Irish I think generally is the consideration there, you know, and the dwarves or the Scots Scotsman, you know, it's, it's funny. So you, you made me think of this when you were talking about Gaelic and Welsh.

Vance Crowe [00:37:12] There's a family story in mine about an uncle that was using Gaelic, and he's like, my, my great uncle or my great great uncle, the story doesn't really matter, but it also reminded me of a tweet that I saw by Balaji earlier this week about read only culture. And I like, I think that I've gotten part of the meaning of this, but I think that there's probably more to be pulled out. But essentially what he was saying is, as you hand down culture from one generation to the next, if you do it as read only where the, the child is not fully embraced into that culture, they aren't dealing with it day in and day out, then there is no way that they can pass it on. And you use the example of imagine growing up in a family that, that's Spanish speaking, where you hear your parents speaking in Spanish, but you yourself do not speak Spanish, then there's virtually no chance that you will pass that Spanish speaking onto your children. And this has really like, bent my mind in a, in a very interesting way, because that's a hundred percent true. Like this story of this Gaelic dictionary is deep in my family, but I have no knowledge. I could maybe pick Gaelic out of, you know, five other languages, but I couldn't distinguish it. I couldn't name a single word. And I, I think there's something really important to distill out of this concept of read only culture. Yeah, I think a good example of that would be Catholicism, at least for me.

Vance Crowe [00:38:44] You know, like I was, I, I received it as a child and there's no, there's nothing that you're going to do to change Catholicism, right? Like it's been around for 2000 years. It's pretty, it's pretty subtle at this point. And it just, at some point I was just, I, I had no interest in it, right? Like I, I, I felt like the people around me, the, the joke that I like to make is that there're religious and not spiritual, right? They're doing all these things by rote and that they don't care about it really. They're not moved by it. But I do think you can do the extreme opposite of that, which is to be hyper spiritual, but not religious at all and not have any kind of discipline or order to what you're doing. But then you end up, you know, I don't know, handling snakes or something, you know, there's, there's kinds of, well that's like a romanticism, right? It's like that's whatever the novelty that that passes by you, you say, oh, that feels good, or that feels connected with God or Gaia or whatever. And, and because it doesn't have an ideal, some form that you are trying to live to, it means that you're just shapeless and formless. And so I, I think that, you know, that I think the complaint that many people in our age would have about the Catholic church is that it's so ordered and so rigid and there is no place for that change. That how do you write yourself into it? The most you can do is take the traditions that come outside of church, you know, we have brunch afterwards or, or this is the way we celebrate Christmas.

Vance Crowe [00:40:19] And that being the part of the culture that you have the, the participation in the writing of it to be able to pass on. And that's something I'm super concerned with right now. Like, how is it that I find the traditions or pass on or create, and I'm not even sure what that is, such that you create order for a family that they can then fill in the, the substantive parts, the parts that make you the, the experience rich, but not be, not just be handed down some other thought, you know, some vessel to fill up. And I don't know what this balance is. So, you know, I right now am trying to go to mass in order that I can see what of these traditions should I bring into my life because it's deeply important to me that I not only hand down read only culture to my child. Well, yeah. Right? If you want them to get the, the read only part, which I think is, you know, not inherently wrong, that you have to do so much effort to keep it alive by surrounding it, by weaving it into your lives so that it is relevant to them in some ways, so that they would feel like there was a loss if church just disappeared and we stopped doing that. Right? Like that they would like, I, I just, at some point I, you know, having gone through Catholic grade school and catholic high school, I've probably been to 10,000 masses throughout my life, or I don't even know, I've never done the math, but I could probably figure it out.

Vance Crowe [00:41:52] It's kind of like I, I just didn't have anything else to gain from it. But I do wanna point out that I made a note here that this is, this is the, the dichotomy we were looking for. It's religious versus spiritual and that religious is order and spiritual is chaos. Yeah. That, I mean, and that's the benefit. That's the, you, you shouldn't be all one or the other. That's the beauty of that dichotomy thing, because it does give you a way to spot when you've found something that to go to either one of the extremes is, is not a good place to be. And trying to find that balance between the two is likely, although not always, I mean, if you're talking about infinity and infinitesimal, that there's not necessarily directing you where to go, but like we talk about that concept of surfing on the edge of chaos, right? Where you're just enough in the chaos that you can find these new things, but you're still on a platform of ordered and what you know and understand. And that actually brings up a concept that you've talked about, about, about the stronger that you are, the more that you get to be able to push out in, into the world that you get to go explore more. Yeah. If you have, the more strength you have, the more faith you can have, right? So like, if the idea is that you are, you can place bets on things, right? So you can risk having a loss, which is ultimately what you have to do to build things, right? Like if you look at, you know, the strategy of being a nomad, you know, raider or something versus a farmer, you know, go back 10,000 years or something.

Vance Crowe [00:43:30] What are the, what's going on here that, that as a raider, you can just run around and take stuff from people and yeah, you might get killed, but you know, you can, if you don't get food from this group, like they successfully defend themselves or they don't even have any, you just go to the next group and take from them. But if you're a farmer, it's like you're putting your bets on this one thing here, and you better be right about that, otherwise you're gonna die, right? So you have to be part of a, of a community where you're, you're kind of shifting the risk out, you know, a a across the, spreading it out across the whole group there. And ultimately it's, it, the, the balance is how, how to figure this out, right? So the stronger you are, the more you can put out there and have a better, I'm not finding purchase on this. I, well, I mean, I see what you're saying, like the, there, like the Raider farmer example is a difficult one because as you get a better community or as you farm, you end up being able to accumulate more resources. But if we think about it as the entrepreneur with no money in their bank account versus the entrepreneur with a hundred thousand dollars, right? So a hundred thousand dollars means, hey, if this thing doesn't go at the way that I planned, I can still get food, I can still have shelter, I can still do the bare minimums, and I don't have to flail around and I don't have to lay it all on the line for this one thing. And I think in popular culture, they're like, Hey, you really gotta be hungry.

Vance Crowe [00:45:03] You really gotta want it. But in order to build big things, things that are complicated, you are going to have points where it doesn't make sense or you can't figure it out. And you do need to have strength in order that you can get through the, the Dunning Kruger, you know, valley of despair where you don't know where you're going next. And the more strength you have, the longer you can walk through that valley of despair. Yeah. The, the physical strength is a good, is actually a good analogy too. If you imagine yourself walking around in your community, whatever, that literally every individual that you encounter, you know, may have murderous intentions to come up to you and kill you, right? But you have, you feel safe enough that we have police and, and there's other human beings around that aren't crazy, et cetera. That this really isn't that much of a worry. So you're not, you know, you know, pulling a knife on somebody who starts coming close to you, like back off Ben, back off to get away from here. You know, you can, you can have faith in those people. The stronger you are, in fact, the more strength that you believe that you have, which is, you know, the, the more, and, you know, opening you can be to, to strangers and, and other folks, you know, and, and just pushing that out to, as an analogy to all these other areas. So this kind of edges towards a thing that you and I have been working on or talking about for a very long time, which is stoicism, and the, the concept of not allowing your emotions to guide you and to have kind of ideals.

Vance Crowe [00:46:40] So this goes to the romanticism and cl, classicism, cl classicism, classicism, classicism. Whereas on the classicism you can have ideals that you, you go towards, you know, things that you, that guide your decision as opposed to your hedonistic desires or the emotions that come up. When, when you think about stoicism and this concept that you've brought up before the stoic flywheel, how do you, how do you describe that? Well, this kind of is in, you know, the conversation that we had last time where we talked about virtues. Those are the ideals that I'm saying like, these are the a priority things that we're saying are good. So wisdom, courage, justice and temperance, right? Temperance being, you know, being even keeled and not being ruled by your emotions, not, not that you necessarily abstain from alcohol, right? And the stoic flywheel is something that I was inspired to kind of elucidate a bit on after reading the book Flow by Mihai Chi sent Mihai, which is a Hungarian psychologist who is actually still alive. I'm shocked now, I'm kind of, you know, in my forties. And I'm, I'm always shocked to find that people who wrote books before I was born are still alive. And that's wonderful. But in any case, flow is this concept of basically that you have a balance between challenge and skill and that there's kind of a straight line balance between those two.

Vance Crowe [00:48:21] And if you have too much challenge, you're gonna have anxiety and it's not productive. And if you've got more skill than you have challenge, you're gonna be bored. And so the idea is to kind of maintain some balance between challenge and skill as you go along. And I felt like this is a pretty cool concept, and it would be neat to, to try to generalize this. And I was reading a lot of stoicism at the time, and kind of the thing that precipitated out of this was this concept that wisdom is the ability to make good decisions, to choose the right action, right? And I kind of read this as making plans for selves or, or for yourself and deciding what, what you should do, right? Like you can look at your life and say, I'd like to be better, you know, in the following ways. I'd like to lose weight, I'd like to get in shape, I'd like to improve my job, I'd like to, you know, get married and have kids or what have you, any kind of goal that you have. And I feel like you can decide what is the right thing to do with the wisdom that you have. And that's, that's step one. And then step two is actually doing that, what you said, right? So if you said, all right, I need to limit my calorie intake, I need to start jogging, I need to do all these other things, well then you can actually use your courage and temperance to get that done, right? And I kind of compress those together and call it self-discipline. But either way, I think it, it, it all makes, makes sense enough. And once you have done that, then the third step is transcendence.

Vance Crowe [00:49:52] So you, you look back on this and say, okay, this was my plan and I engaged in this plan in this way, and I, I was, I, I used courage and I actually did what I said I was gonna do. And here was the outcome. Now what, what does that tell me about the world based on the plan that I made and the outcome that I got? Either it validated the wisdom that I had initially, or maybe it was different in some way and I need to update that, right? So it's this loop that you go through where when you accomplish one thing, you use the outcome of that previous accomplishment to then feed back and increase your wisdom so that you can make continuously better decisions and better decision and better decisions. And you can apply it fractally, you know, down to the tiniest system detail or zoom out to your entire life and think about things. Well, and this, you know, the, the term that gets thrown around now because of Jordan Peterson is clean up your room. Sure. And oftentimes that's used as a, as a way to say, Hey, before you go hold signs up and yell at other people about how they should change, you should clean up your room first. But also when you really think about it and you have that concept of temperance, this is the thing that I, I am, I don't think I'm uniquely suffer from this. I think a lot of people do. You decide, Hey, I wanna make some changes in my life and you decide I'm gonna make 50 changes all at once because I'm going to be a totally different person. And as soon as you get into day two or day three, and you have either the anxiety about it or the boredom because you're, you're, you're trying to change so much that it becomes overwhelming that then the whole thing falls apart.

Vance Crowe [00:51:31] But if you start with, I'm gonna try and make my bed every day for a week, and that being the only thing that I'm focused on, now you've got that block and you can put that in and then stand on top of it. And once I started to have that idea, it, it helped me, that concept of temperance when I'm deciding I need to change things, that was really, really helpful. And I think one of the biggest ones happened to me two years ago, I think was when I did my first sober October. And that was the first time that I'd ever been like, all right, I'm not going to have any alcohol. And, and like, since I was 21 years old, hell, since I was probably 19 years old, I don't think I'd ever gone more than a few days without having a drink. And that doesn't mean I was, you know, falling down drunk all the time. But it was like a fundamental part. And having that block that I just was able to be like, I know I can go a month without it. And not only that, but look what I discovered through that. What else can I then build on? And I think that those are important things to challenge yourself to, without going so far as being like, now I'm gonna totally radically transform. I'm gonna get my finances in order, I'm gonna eat right. I'm gonna clean everything up. Yeah. That's an important way to, to get that stoic flywheel going. 'cause once it starts going, there's no end to the number of improvements you can make. That sounds like, that definitely sounds like wisdom to me and a point to make about this. And I, I, I think we maybe hit upon this last time, but that you can, you can recognize something as being wise and it can actually be, you know, good advice, but until it really make sense to you in the first person until you have done it and done the transcendence part of looking back on actions that you took that were physical things in your life that you can incorporate into your mind.

Vance Crowe [00:53:26] I don't think you can really appreciate wisdom, you know, like that, that it's, it's, it has to be a first person. You did it yourself, kind of a story, right? Like, how many people heard Jordan Peterson, Peterson talk about cleaning a room and then just didn't do that, right? Like, did, did, did they get wise from hearing that? I would say not. You know? Yeah. And that's goes with the term that you and I talk about all the time. Beware of unearned wisdom, right? Because that can mean both. Like, hey, somebody has told you this thing, and you now acted out in the world as though you, you learned it. But I, but when you add in that first person thing, it's like saying, if, if you try and apply the lessons to the world without actually experiencing them and looking back and saying, what if that was valuable? You may be stringing. Well, this is, this goes all the way back to our rights conversation. Right? So rights, I think, oftentimes are unearned wisdom. When, when there, when there are people saying that we ought to have a right to water, and then you go out and fight like hell for it. But not thinking about what are all of the things that need to go along with that and truly, deeply understanding it. So those positive rights that, that, that young people take on is a form of unearned wisdom. Yeah. Or the book conversation, right? Like that your, that your fir your first person experience of reading the book and your mind painting the pictures of all of the things that you have seen previously. Your idea of the rolling Green Hills versus anything else, right.

Vance Crowe [00:55:01] Is the, it it kind of feels like the difference between a movie and a book there. Like, like you were describing, like the movie is the unearned wisdom. It's like, you know, it looks cool. It's nice. Oh wow. But, but then the reading the book is like really getting in there and making your mind crank on the ideas. That is a, a damn good idea to end on. Man, that was really, this was great. You know, I, I appreciate you taking a, a little bit of time in your evening to sit down and try and record these. You know, it's one of these things that I've been thinking a lot about the podcast on the moments when I think about it as like, Hey, I wanna make sure we're getting lots of listeners and da da da da. It changes my, my thinking and when I just sit here and have a conversation with you. And I think it's taken us a long time to be able to hit the flow state. But it's a, it's a great experience. And even if nobody else listens to it, it's a valuable thing for us to just have and, and have an archive of. I'm gonna be really disappointed if nobody else listens to it. You all listening, you better be listening. Well, Rob, long thanks for joining me on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Vance. It was a good time.