Farm Software CEO Goes Free, AI Kills SaaS Apps, and Faith vs Geography in American Religion

Vance Crowe [00:00:12] Welcome to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. This today is gonna be a live stream with Shay Foulk. I have been out of the podcasting saddle for quite some time, and what I wanted to do was bring back the depth of conversation I could have when I talk with really intelligent people about things all across the spectrum. And my first deep encounter with Shay was he invited me to his big conference that they put on, and it was going on in January down in Arizona. And I had been going through extreme pain in my neck and shoulder. I was on opioids and I quit taking them for the, about 12 hours before giving this talk, gave a talk and went really well. Got off the stage, took my pain meds, and then watched Shay go up and do his talk. And up until this point, I had always been like, yeah, Shay's a good dude. He's like a nice guy. I, I like him. He seems to be organized, but he stood up and talked about his military experience, of which I knew nothing at all about, and thus put me on this incredible rollercoaster ride, making me really humbled to realize like I'd actually been talking with a guy that's super legitimate, has a lot of really interesting things to say. And now that I'm getting back in the saddle for the podcast, I thought I want to have a good conversation with Shay. So here he is. Shay, welcome to the podcast.

Shay Foulk [00:01:37] Well, thank you for that introduction. How's it feel to be back in the saddle?

Vance Crowe [00:01:42] It's great. I really, really miss the podcast. And I think the biggest reason why I miss it is because as, as you know, when you podcast all of your friends, everybody that you're close with gets to hear what's going on. You're all talking about the same thing, and it really speeds up having great conversations with people you, you care about. So I'm excited to have this conversation, which I think will probably, what we're gonna talk about today might be a little bit controversial and I think it's gonna kick up some, some interesting discussions in my regular world, and I think it might in yours as well.

Shay Foulk [00:02:15] Yeah. Did you, I gotta ask, did you take a break because of like the health stuff that you had going on? Or did you just need a break or kind of, and why'd you step away?

Vance Crowe [00:02:24] I was definitely knowing that I had been cutting into my, my family time. You know, like I was, I was like, Hey, I could either do more work and be away from my kids or I could take a pause. But when I got super sick, I basically was like, Hey, if I have any extra time, I'm gonna be using AI and I'm just going to kick ass with it to make my life a lot easier. And after four months of doing a ton of work, my business is in a place that I never imagined possible, and now I'm able to like, use that extra time both to spend with my F family and then to talk to my, to talk to my buddy Shay and, and publish a podcast on it.

Shay Foulk [00:03:00] I love it, man. Glad to have you back.

Vance Crowe [00:03:02] Well, so you have been vibe coding and doing all kinds of crazy disruption. Talk about the, the crazy chance that you guys have taken with your app and what's been going on with that.

Shay Foulk [00:03:15] Yeah, I appreciate the, the lead up on that. So that, you know, go back to January of 2026 at the conference I had co-presented with Scott Kowski around ai, how to use it in the farm, kind of what we had been doing, what I had been doing with some of the Ag View Solutions tools that we had built over time to make 'em easier to use, make some of our team flow dynamics a little bit better. And my brother Mac and cousin Sam were at the conference and we talked immediately afterwards and they said, Hey, I really think that now is a good time to change this into a software. And so to go back from a, his historical standpoint, the profit manager legacy tool started getting developed in 1994 on DOS with my stepdad, Chris Barron, who's the founder of Ag View Solutions. He changed that into Excel and then spent seven to eight years kind of developing it, making it better based on what former feedback told him, launched the consulting side of it in 2013 more formally. And then I entered the business in 2019. And so that, you know, it, it went through many, many iterations and different versions over time, but always focused on the consulting, the tool itself. We charged for the tool, but with the tool, you got service, you got support, lifetime purchase, you know, you own it for life. So that in itself was a little bit different. But what we decided from the conference time in January to when Mac and Sam decided to take it into a software, what I asked them to do is I said, Mac, I want you to develop what you think farm Profit Manager should look like as a software.

Shay Foulk [00:04:54] And Sam, I want you to develop what you think it should look like. And then we opened both of 'em up, we put our heads together, we decided what the best version would look like moving forward, and that's what we started iterating off of. So mind you, they're, they're full-time college.

Vance Crowe [00:05:07] Can I, can I jump in and like, I, I think for the description you're giving here is for an audience that's somewhat familiar with what you guys are doing. But if you, if we were to zoom the camera lens back to people that don't know very much at all about ag, your family had been running a business that was consulting, helping farms get way better. And they do it in this like incredibly unique way of bringing people together in peer groups and they have them have these deep conversations where they really open up their kimonos and show everything that's going on with them, have like really in-depth discussions. And as a part of doing the consulting, they were given this software that your father-in-law had built starting from back in the day when it was Excel, where it was like brutal hard work to build something that people could use. And then they've built it over the years and just made it better and better and better. But it was only for the consulting people. And you came along and were like, Hey guys, I think we ought to do some changes to this. And not only should we make these changes to this app that we give to our, the people that pay us to do consulting and do this really deep dive peer group stuff, what I think we should do is open it up to the, to the crazy wider world. And this is no small thing. 'cause your father-in-law was like, this is one of our crown jewels. How is the conversation to convince somebody of your father-in-law's age that you should, he should let go of this thing that has been so valuable and put it into the world?

Shay Foulk [00:06:40] Yep. So, and Chris is my stepdad. Stepdad,

Vance Crowe [00:06:43] I'm sorry.

Shay Foulk [00:06:44] Oh, you're good. So Chris is Chris, you know, built over time what, what the tool had become. And so we had 30 years of foundation and you know, if it were up to him because he's got a heart of gold, he would give it away for free and or, you know, that's, that's what he wanted to do. But, you know, my mom came into the business and she's like, Hey, this is a ton of time, a ton of value. You're giving people everything and helping them make decisions and having a high impact on their business long term. You know, we need, we need to charge for this. And, and rightfully, rightfully so, but the, the focus was on the consulting piece. And so what I realized when we got to this point where it's like, hey, you know, it's time to make it into a software. The AI tools are here to do it right, to do it well, to make sure that we have a phenomenal product. What I proposed to the team was, I think we need to make it completely free the tool, you know, and so people can go in and dial in their cost of production in an hour or two with power that they've never experienced in most cases, whether they were doing it by hand or by Excel or not doing it at all. But my, my methodology behind that was I wanna give people the tools to succeed. So when they get some of the financial stuff figured out, the cost of production and, and some of the things that like stress 'em out day in and day out, then they can focus on the bigger things. They can focus on succession planning, they can focus on how do they grow, they can focus on collaborative opportunities with the neighbor. And so I, you know, I, and, and the team took a big ga gamble by saying, Hey, we're not going to charge for the tool itself, but instead we are going to rely on the fact that people seek connection, that people want advisors, and that people want people as a part of their team who have experience, who have been there, who have done that.

Shay Foulk [00:08:30] And when we open up our target market audience to the United States, we have the ability to put ourselves in front of people and say, Hey, you're not on an island. You're not out there alone trying to figure out how to do succession planning or how to grow your farm operation. There are advisors like us that can come in that truly deeply care about you and your family and your business and, and how can we help you? And so that's the gamble that we took.

Vance Crowe [00:08:57] And you guys released it and people started putting real information in there. What, like how did that go? I, I've seen a number 1 million show up.

Shay Foulk [00:09:07] Yeah. So we kicked out some beta access version middle of March to some of our clients, got some really good feedback. And then we rolled out some beta access codes at the end of March, April 1st, we kind of did a formal, Hey, let's open this thing up. And from April 1st to April 10th, we had a million acres enrolled in the system. And I would say less than 30% of that is current clients that we had that had made the conversion from legacy profit manager to farm profit manager. And so that gave me the confidence and gave me the verification that people wanted this. They want a low cost, no cost tool to help make better decisions in their operation. And, and from like a business standpoint, it's always been a long turn time from what I would call like a conversion cycle from the first time someone hears me, here's Chris, here's about ag view solutions to when they might hire us. You know, they hear us on our podcast, they hear us on this conversation, they see us at a speaking event, or they're referred from a neighbor, it might be 2, 3, 4 years before they're at the point where they say, I, you know, I need to reach out to those guys 'cause I think they're the ones that would be the best fit for my business that I would trust with the decisions that we're making. And so, you know, we, we might not see an uptick in anything here for a couple, two, three years, but it was, it was the outlook to say, one, the timing is right.

Shay Foulk [00:10:44] And my personal opinion with the synthetic intelligence tools that are out there is a year ago was too early and a year from now is too late. You know, I think the time is right now for what we did. And so transparently, I pushed our team a little bit harder on that than they were comfortable with from the development to the launch date. And now I've taken a step, I've taken my foot off the gas pedal and said, okay, I feel like we're where we need to be and not from a product development side, but more so, and, and we'll get into this on the military, but if I have 30 to 40% of the information, I'm gonna make a decision. And whoa. And a lot of people,

Vance Crowe [00:11:24] A lot of people wait till 80, 90%.

Shay Foulk [00:11:26] Yeah. They want 90 or more. And, and I think on our team, and they, you know, they'll kick me and yell at me for, for saying this, but on our team, most, most of them are that way. And I think I'm uniquely positioned or uniquely qualified as a member of the team to say, look, we need to do this now and here's why. And guess what, if we're wrong, then we're gonna adapt and we're gonna make a change. And, but, but I don't think we were wrong. I think the timing was absolutely right.

Vance Crowe [00:11:54] Well, what I think is amazing, so one of my buddies showed his screen one time to me and he was like, Hey, you see every one of these apps on this screen, this is a $10,000 subscription I'm using each one of those represents 10 k going out the door. And it's for managing feed rations, it's for doing different types of bookkeeping. It's for all the things that that need to get done to run an operation. And of course, I'm the same way. I've got all these subscriptions for different things to run my business and you're like, I, if I have a person do it, that's gonna cost me way more than 20 bucks a month or whatever that is, 200 bucks a month. But if I keep paying for these subscriptions that just keeps sucking the life out of my business, well, AI comes along and now all of a sudden you can vibe code, you know, 60, 70, 80% of what that app was doing. And for, for anybody that doesn't know vibe coding, all it is is you're talking to an AI in a natural language and it is able to spin up the thing that you want. Now there's downsides to using vibe coding and it's not always like the most stable, blah blah, blah, but when you do get it right, you're like, I am never paying that subscription ever again. And you just start going hunting for what subscriptions can you get rid of in your life. And that is going to happen, you know, like it is, it's not gonna be like, Hey, the young plucky upstart that's a techie kid on your farm is gonna go work in Silicon Valley. He's gonna come work in your farm and if you give them the freedom to vibe code, you know, any type of of work that you're doing on computers to set up systems, those are all gonna get obliterated.

Vance Crowe [00:13:35] So for me, you are facilitating the, the death of the ag app that's sucking money out of the system.

Shay Foulk [00:13:43] You know, I had texted you Sometime between the conference and kind of when we were real heavy thinking about launching and I said, Hey, I think software as a service is dead. And I knew that you were doing all sorts of, you know, AI stuff, open claw, you know, some of those things internally, and I don't remember your exact response, it was at least hell yeah, but maybe something more expletive that, and, and it just, every person that I felt had a forward thinking outlook and, and I would maybe even the bleeding edge right now, I wouldn't even say leading edge, but maybe even the bleeding edge right now. Every person that I talked to is like, yes, absolutely. And so I recognize that with the AI stuff, it's probably 5% of people that are using it at a very high capacity. And so you have this long tail of others that will adopt it. And you know, I had someone the other day say, you have people that are gonna build things. You have people that are gonna buy things and you got people that are gonna ignore things. And it, particularly when it comes to the AI stuff, you can only ignore it for so long, no long, no different than you could only ignore, you know, touchscreen cell phones for so long before they became these amazing machines. But if people aren't going to build it, they're either going to buy it or they're gonna be users of it. And, and so from a business management standpoint, from a farm standpoint, people can go out and build pheno. I mean, you can build anything you want, basically anything that you can think of the subscriptions, you want a custom CRM, you want a custom accounting system, you can do all that, but a lot of people aren't going to, and a lot of people in the ag community aren't going to do that.

Shay Foulk [00:15:22] And so again, doubling down, not only on how we charge for our services, but also, you know, having the trusted expertise of 30 years of experience in the field, we wanted to lean on the fact that hey, we have the ability to do it. And, and transparently, we had had our clients ask us for a software for five years or more and we shied away from it. One, because it was super expensive at the time, and two, we didn't have the brain capacity to do it. I was getting more involved with the actual consulting, learning the processes, developing our procedures, bringing other consultants into the team. I did not want to spend my time doing software development. And so when Mac and Sam came to us and they were like, Hey, we think this is awesome, we'd love to do it. It's like, great, take it and run with it, and then we will provide the expertise and the back end of how it should function and how it should operate. And you know, they, they really sank their teeth into it. The other, the other thing I wanna mention too is like vibe coding also has a bad connotation. And so it's, it's a very simple process of the amazing things that these tools can do. But when you start stacking some of these tools and intelligence features everything from code auditing to security parameters to database backups to where and how it's pulling information, how does it aggregate and anonymize information, which is things that we're able to do on the backend. It's a very complex thing. And so when people hear vibe coding, it's like, we didn't just take this and build an app because we thought it was a cool idea.

Shay Foulk [00:16:59] We took it because this is what we've been doing for 30 years and said, now is the time for it to be an application of software easy to use for people. And I mean, there's, there's plumbing companies listening to this that can do that. There are, you know, B2B transactional businesses, hiring businesses, equipment dealerships, the, the sky is the limit. And I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:17:23] It's cool. It's, it's so incredible. I I I think the best analogy for ai, particularly this kind of vibe coating is magic carpet, right? Like you can all of a sudden climb on this thing and have it go anywhere you want up, down, sideways, left, right, as fast as you want to go. But the ultimate thing is that you pick out problems that you have. Like I, so for example, for years and years people have said, I would love to take your interest based communications class Vance, but my company's not doing it. Can you offer it as an individual? And I was like, I just can't, I can't manage selling, you know, tickets to this thing and getting people in the information that they need to make the experience really good. I can't manage, you know, the backend stuff. Like, it's just too many things to do. I'm not gonna do it. Well, once AI came up, I was like, all right, ai, I want you to build a place where people can go and it will describe what the interest based communications class is. Now I want you to create a new place where people can sign up for it now, create the credit card processing, use this system that I already use. Now when they get in there, have that put them into a, a records management system. So that way I have their email and their contact now start writing them emails that tell them about where to get, how is, you know, where to get the hotel, what's gonna go on and, and on and on and on. And you start making something that is so much better than what I would've made had I been doing it on my own. Being like, all right, email me if you want to come take this class and I'll email you back. Now you have like a place for people to go to upload a bio page and for people to meet the other people in the class.

Vance Crowe [00:18:59] And so you're able to do things that you're like, I would've had to have paid some company or some person 40, 50, $60,000 to do this. And instead I got it done in an afternoon and it's better than I would've ever asked another person to create for me. And so yeah, vibe coding is getting a bad rep, but what it's gonna do is make it so all the things that we always dreamed we could do on a computer, it's all possible by anybody that is willing to just sit down and figure out how to ask the AI how to build these things.

Shay Foulk [00:19:33] So now what I want to ask you as a follow up, since you've done that interest based communications course, which was phenomenal, I heard we had a lot of people that attended the conference go, how do you think about, you know, what you built there? Is it easy to replicate if you were to do another event or do you have a foundation built underneath of it in order to replicate? Talk me through talk the listeners through that. I guess.

Vance Crowe [00:19:59] So this is a great question. I actually had a really good conversation with my former business partner the other day, just this morning, Benjamin Anderson. And he said, okay, here's, here's the thing. If you ask ai, hey, I'm gonna put some math into you, I'm gonna give you an equation, I want you to gimme the answer back. The AI is now taking that math and it's doing, it's taking it to its black box, it's doing a calculation and it's coming back to you and bringing you the answer. And you're like, I don't know if that's the right answer. I think it's the right answer, probably the right answer. But the problem is, if you ask it the same question again, it will go to the black box and come back. And if it comes back with a different answer, you don't know why. And so the way to build with AI is not to say, here, I'm gonna give you some numbers, give me an answer back. It's to say, Hey, I want you to build this equation, write this equation. And I want you to be very clear for how you, you know what this equation is in there. You don't even need to know everything that's in the equation, but show me what that equation would be to do that math. Now hold that, that's a skill that, that mathematical formula that you're using now, every time I ask you, Hey, I want you to do some calculation, don't go do it in the black box, do it in my equation and it'll bring back the same answer. And if it brings back a different answer, then you go and say, you weren't referencing the skill that I made. And that's true of everything. So now if I'm building for my website, my signup sheet, I don't want to just be like, Hey, go build this. Because if I ask it to build it again, it's gonna build something different. What I wanna do is to say, when you build a website for me, this is what needs to happen.

Vance Crowe [00:21:33] These, this is what goes on and these are the different parts that are in it. And then from there you get the how done. And once the how is done, it can replicate it over and over again. But I have to admit, the first 50 things I built, I built like the dumping numbers into it and it gave me back a black box and it would work one time, but then the next time I went to do it, I'd be like, you, you know that, that whole, if you find yourself giving yourself permission to yell at your ai, you should really be just yelling at yourself for not being clear with what it needs. And that took me a little while 'cause I had fun yelling at the ai and then I realized, oh actually you idiot, it's you.

Shay Foulk [00:22:10] So I, I had a, a hunch that you had experienced the same thing and I experienced the same thing. And so version 2.0 of synthetic intelligence tool users, for those of you that have listened, we're trying to save you time and pain and whatever by, you know, some coaching of saying build out the foundation, be descriptive, you know, like you referenced with the formula. That's a phenomenal way because that's exactly what we had to do within Farm Profit Manager of now you're accessing the same processes every single time. If the process is wrong or the process is wrong, you notice that when you're building it. And when we go to preview, when we go to test it before we push out any updates or push out any changes and, and it's so rapid from the feedback that we're getting from support tickets, from actually feature requests that people are pushing to us. And so now, and, and I'll give away a secret here, but not really. Crowdsourcing is a phenomenal way to get the best ideas out there. It's no different than being in a peer group setting. It's no different than if you get 20 people in your community together to solve a problem. You're going to come up with solutions and items and topics that you would never think of. And so when we're getting in 30, 40, 50 different feature requests, we can prioritize that Chris and I with the experience and the, and the consulting team with Andy, Joe and Jeremy, they're all looking at that and saying, yes, this is a great idea.

Shay Foulk [00:23:45] This one can wait a little bit longer. And then that's something that's either gonna take too long or it's a very low priority compared to the other items here. So now we're pushing out the best ideas at the fastest rate instead of, you know, feature one came in, let's do feature one and now feature two. And I, and I think Chris put this a really good way, go back to 1996. From 1996 to 2003, he spent seven years getting farmer feedback to develop Legacy profit Manager into what it was for the last, you know, 15, 20 years. And he said, what you guys have done and will do what I did in seven years, you're gonna do in seven months because of the feedback and the iteration. You know? And, and I think that was just a, a great insight.

Vance Crowe [00:24:35] So speaking on helping people and then I wanna move beyond AI 'cause we've got a lot of other stuff to talk about, but this is fun for me to talk with somebody else that's way in the weeds, right? It's like you're, you're using this thing and you go to talk to people that aren't in the thing and you're like, I just wish you could talk with me about this. But the, the key thing that I learned about AI was using what's known as GitHub. And here's the thing, you create some code, you create some skill, you create some equation. And if you leave that code inside of wherever you're using, I use Claude 'cause it seems to be the best one. If you leave it there, then Claude is the only one that gets access to it. But GitHub is like a library where you, it's just a giant bookshelf and on that bookshelf, each shelf can be like, Hey, these are the types of skills that you need to know for Farm Pro. You know, the, for our web app, this is for our website, this is all the skills around our processes, then you can start building those skills, the how thing. And that's like a book that's up there and you just pull it out and it should use it, if you wanna update it, it pulls the, the book down and then it, it pulls the page out that you were using that you need to make an edit to. It makes the edit and then you update it. If for some reason something went wrong there, you just go, Hey, go use the version before this one. And it just, it, 'cause it keeps a record of it by having this record and this like library system, it makes it so what you're making is so much more durable as opposed to what I was doing, which was, it was just, they call it A-A-J-S-O-N blob.

Vance Crowe [00:26:16] I was building this stuff and it was just writing, alright, instruction one right here. And then instruction two went right underneath it and then instruction three. And I would say, Hey, on instruction four, don't listen to instruction two. And it would remember that, or it wouldn't remember that, whatever. But in, at the end of the day, it was way, way too complicated. And that's when my buddies were like, yeah, you idiot, you, there are principles here that you can use from coding. And one of them is GitHub repositories.

Shay Foulk [00:26:42] And, and what I was looking at here is, is I asked Mac to help me visualize that. And so we put together the visualization of how our backend and front end of our systems work. And so we use Claude Code as the base, it goes to GitHub, GitHub goes to, it gets pulled into Vercel, Vercel has Supabase as the backend. And then at any point we can kind of publish from there. And so, you know, I, for, for a new person listening to that, that doesn't mean anything other than think of this interconnected web of expert resources that you have available instantly. It makes it easy to navigate, it makes it easy to make those changes. And so, you know, today we had a, a meeting as a team and, and, and this speaks more to just the speed at which businesses are now able to make adjustments. I said, Hey, Mac always wants me to say, Hey, what features do you hate? You know, I I don't care about the things that you like that much. What do you hate? And that's what we need to fix first. And I said, well, when you put in a basis contract and you put in a 10 cent basis, it shows this 0.1, it doesn't put the, the zero at the end. That's stupid. I don't wanna look at that. And he's like, oh, okay, that's easy. And then he goes in and he makes this adjustment and GitHub and he refiles that book with the page in it and then boom, it's fixed. I mean right now across the platform because it's reading from that same bookshelf that book that page.

Vance Crowe [00:28:06] So here's, here's another, I could do this all day. I could get totally sucked into this. I learned about mermaid graphs. Are you familiar with these? Yep.

Shay Foulk [00:28:15] This

Vance Crowe [00:28:15] Was like, so mind blowing you go to build this thing that's like, alright, so now if somebody calls me for a legacy interview, that call is, is transcribed and then the things that we discuss all get pulled into it. So like, or if I was doing a speech, right? Like, hey, we're doing the speech, it's gonna be in Lake Geneva, it's gonna be on these dates, this is the type of topic we're talking about. And then it, it transcribes the conversation and then it puts it in a summary just like it would if we were on an online thing and then it adds it to my customer records management and then it does like next thing, next thing, next thing. And sometimes you can get lost in how much this thing is doing and you, you just be like, it just, I can just keep adding automations. But you can ask for a mermaid graph and it will show the if then it's a flow chart. And it's just unbelievable how you can find the problems with your equation by having it print out a mermaid graph. And these are all those things that I'm like, if somebody would've told me on day one, I could have saved days or weeks of work had I known about GitHub and mermaid graphs?

Shay Foulk [00:29:21] Yeah. Oh that's awesome. And, and again, let's not get sucked into that, but I think that, I think the biggest message that I would say is, you know, from being in the weeds with these tools, one, they can be very disruptive if you want 'em to be, you know, wherever you choose to point your barrel, that's where your trajectory can go. And, and if you choose to dedicate it and learn and give it time, especially with the speed at which these systems are getting easier and easier to use, if you wanna be disruptive, you can be disruptive. And then, you know, the other thing that I would say is if people are listening that have not done much with it, my recommendation is just stop Googling things. Start using these AI tools. When you get into the AI tool, start asking it to do things based off the information that you're asking it and then just start testing and say, hey, build this, hey build this, hey build this for 20 bucks a month or whatever. Even at just the basic version you can do crazy, crazy amounts,

Vance Crowe [00:30:20] But that's the key. So if you're a cheap ass farmer like Jay Curtis, then what he'll do is like try and piece together the free one and then be like, no, the stupid thing doesn't work. And you're like, well why don't you pay a little money and see if the paid version works. And then all of a sudden you're like, oh, now I'm a wizard and I can make things fly in the air and, and you know, swoop around and do crazy things. So I'm like, pay the money. The Claude right now for me is, is the best payment of money. But alright, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do a hard non-sequitur 'cause this is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. So I don't know what you see on your X feed, but when I go to XI am being fed a huge amount of, have you seen how many people are becoming Catholic? Lots of people are becoming Catholic. It's growing. There's more people searching for church right now than OnlyFans. And the first thought that comes as, as what is known as a cradle Catholic, i I was born and raised in the, in the system is that new Catholics are extremely literal. So they come into Catholicism and they're like, we are gonna be the most hardcore conservative, we are gonna be so literal on the Bible. And all the cradle Catholics, all the long-term Catholics are always like, this always happens to the newbies. They get sucked into the, the literal thing. But you are, you are not Catholic. Are you seeing the same, the same Twitter feed that I'm feeling that, you know, church and Catholicism are exploding or is this something that's just my, my algorithm spoonfeeding me?

Shay Foulk [00:31:57] Well I, I see pieces of it and I would say the algorithms probably definitely got honed in on you for whatever reason on that. But you know, from the Charlie Kirk assassination I think is the biggest surgeon resurgence or you know, maybe increase in that as well as, you know, the, the spin or the narrative around even like the issues that are occurring in Iran right now and the tyranny of that regime. The idea that there are, you know, a million or more underground practicing Christians in that area, there is huge opportunities for Christianity in many forms to express itself and has maybe seen that significant resurgence that you said from the Google search engines or whatever as a result of that. And I think we can talk, we, you know, we could dialogue on the good things and the bad things behind that. As far as Catholicism in particular, I would say that I have not seen as much targeted on that, but maybe that's because I'm not Catholic.

Vance Crowe [00:33:03] I mean that's, that's a great thing. The Charlie Kirk thing that's interesting because I have been saying for the last couple of years and my friends, some of them have pushed back on me. I've been like, churches coming back in a big way, man, I, I see people at my church, I haven't seen a long time. I myself am being much more regular about it. It's coming back. You think Charlie Kirk was a catalyst or just a, that's when people started noticing. What do you think?

Shay Foulk [00:33:29] I think he was the fuel on the, on the catalyst. I think the, I think the spark was probably there and, and the reason, the reason I think that is because he was so well spoken and we are exiting a period from COVID I when we had suppression of rights, suppression of freedom of speech suppression of these items that people have taken the scales off their eyes and they're like, holy shit, what just happened? And now you have someone that is assassinated that had and represented the voice of the people and even those that didn't know who Charlie Kirk was when they go back and listen to his videos because he spoke a lot on Christianity and he put himself in a place that was open discussion and you know, however you feel about him personally, that those are the videos that are representative. So I think what's happening maybe is there's a subconscious association with the voice, the differentiator from perceived tyranny was killed. And so we are going to flock to the things that he represented, which was the freedom of speech, the ability to communicate well and Christianity. And maybe that was part of the resurgence there. That's my personal feelings on that.

Vance Crowe [00:34:59] It could be, I mean like he definitely, when I talk with older people, that is definitely their perspective. Like when I, when I'm talking with people, I, I just went to the farm credit board meeting and several of them will talk about Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk. It's not something that's talked about in my circles, but like my, I don't, I don't know that my circles are, are representative of very much, but it's certainly a big, a big movement now and in my own world as Catholicism is having this big resurgence there. It's a funny thing to be talking about theology now, or at least the way people approach. And like I was saying before, long-term Catholics are not literalists. They they do not view the Bible literally. They don't, they don't view things in this very black and white way. They view it more symbolic. And I I often say, you know, the big difference between Catholics and Protestants is that Catholics view things symbolically and Protestants view things literally, but the new entrance into Catholicism, they are hyped up on fire, let's go. And the and the reading that they take with the bring with them is literalism. Is this what happens in Protestantism? Do, are the newest converts the most literal? Or is, is this a different a approach because Protestantism is already more literal than Catholics?

Shay Foulk [00:36:27] I, I'm gonna come back to your question 'cause it's a, it's a great question and you and I were talking about it the other day, so I'll come back to it. But talk to me real quick about, okay, you said you were a cradle Catholic and have seen that transformation from, oh, you know, this always happens, they come in as literal. Why, why is that? Tell me why you think, why is that?

Vance Crowe [00:36:45] Okay, that's a fair question. I think it comes from two reasons. I think first of all, the, if you're a convert to Catholicism, generally you came from a Protestant background and the Protestants are more literal. So you're bringing your way or your people's way or what you kind of heard. The other thing is I think that literalism is the easiest way to be a true believer. And when you come in and you're new, like everything is new, it is exciting and it's easy to view things in black and white terms. I I just read this thing right here. It's very obvious what it says and what it means, and I'm going to apply that exactly. And what I think happens over time is people begin to realize like, well actually the way you read that, depending on how you approach it, where you're coming from, how it's all working, the literalism that you perceive you are bringing to it may be just one angle or one facet of the way to read that. And I think it takes time to let go of literalism to, to go to sim symbolism.

Shay Foulk [00:37:53] So to answer your question, thank you for the background on that. When I, when I visualize it, I look at I'm Presbyterian and was raised Lutheran, and so I look at that Protestant Protestantism maybe in the middle of the spectrum, just if I were to visualize it. And then on one end you have Catholicism and then on the other end you have like Baptist, apostolic, Christian, you know, and that's how I kind of think about the wavelengths. And maybe that's just my, you know, my experience from growing up in the Midwest. And so what's interesting is when you have a fundamentalist outlook versus a evangelical outlook. So everything in the Bible is exactly true. It was exactly six days on creation, it was exact, you know, a man named Adam, a woman named Eve, you know, every exact interpretation of the word, the inspired word of God. I think that literalism is in contrast with what you're referring to from the Catholicism outlook, which is bible plus tradition plus hierarchy. And so what I, what I've seen personally is we have seen members in, in our congregation that have left maybe Apostolic Christian or Baptist or whatever, be whatever because of maybe some of the more strict like, you know, only men as leaders in the congregation or you know, whatever, you know, think men and I Amish, you know, some of the more strict aspects of of following those rules.

Shay Foulk [00:39:27] And also people from the Catholicism, which is very hard to escape Catholicism by the way. And I say escape, not like in a bad way, but growing up as a cradle Catholic. And when I think about the family members that I grew up with that were Catholic, it's a very, if you have a difference of opinion or a change of heart or a change of beliefs, leaving that Catholic system is very, very different than I would say any of these other systems. Is that a fair statement?

Vance Crowe [00:39:55] Oh yeah. I mean I've, I've said it on this show before. If you, if you go to Catholic church from birth to six, you like, you could never really leave it. You like there's such an imprint there and I always describe like going to other churches feels like it's Fisher-Price and, and like, it's like this is like pretending like going to church, but it's not really church because, and frankly we shouldn't be doing this 'cause you're the only way you're supposed to do it is this way. Now when I say that, I don't mean any offense by it. I am not not trying to evangelize anyone, I'm just saying that to the Catholics, you walk into a Protestant church and you're like, we're gonna get in trouble. We're not, you're not supposed to do it that way. There's a way to do it and there's a way not to do it and you guys are the way to do it. You're not supposed to do it.

Shay Foulk [00:40:43] And and what I find fascinating about that is when you go back to, you know, call it Protestantism or you know, some of the, some of the other side of the spectrum, it's like, let's go to the Bible. Did Jesus do that? And, and you know, was it, it's fascinating from the difference in the Catholicism and, and, and why, you know, I think people like that and, and I think that's the, one of the biggest draws to the Catholic outlooks is we have tradition, we have hierarchy, we have, you know, you do it this way and then this is the outcome and, and you know, you receive grace and you're saved and you do your works and you know, it's like, it's, it's something that makes a lot more sense to people as opposed to maybe the other end of the spectrum of do you have a relationship with and no one loved Jesus Christ, you know? And

Vance Crowe [00:41:34] Which like the, the idea of having a personal relationship with Jesus, Catholics ported that idea in like the eighties and nineties a little bit because there were so many Protestants that were doing it. But this is not really a part of Catholicism like that personal relationship and really like the directness that Protestants have with like, we're gonna read the word of the Bible and the, the Bible being like, that's what we're doing. And Catholics like in, in Catholic mass you have two, they call 'em liturgies. You have two, you have one which is liturgy of the word, which is where they're reading first they read the Old Testament, then they read New Testament, but not gospels. So anything written by, you know, Paul or any of the revelations, any of those later books. And then you have the reading of the gospels, which can only be done by the deacon or the priest. Then you finish that section and now you move to the Eucharist, which is like the last supper sharing the, the bread and the communion. And there this one has some Bible stuff in it, but not, not really. A lot of it is like tradition.

Shay Foulk [00:42:45] And, and I'm, you know, I'm smiling because, you know, from how I was raised is, you know, tell me where in the Bible it says that only a deacon or a priest can read the gospels. And, and so that's where the pushback comes in of where is this tradition and why, why is it this way? And you know, so the outsider looking in looks at the Catholicism and says, where is this make believe structure coming from? And there's thousands of years, I mean literally more than a millennia of tradition that dates back to why it is the way that it is. But when you go back to the intent of is, is this what the inspired word of God says? Is this what the scriptures say? Is this what Jesus's intent was? That's where the conversations I think get really interesting.

Vance Crowe [00:43:35] Yeah, because like I think to the Catholic, the symbolism and the like, well we kind of understand this and we kind of don't and there's a mystery here and, and we're okay, we're comfortable with that mystery. Whereas the Protestants are like, no, this we are doing the literal, like what is, what is it? So the symbolism and literalism come into conflict with one another. I I don't think always, I'm not saying there's nothing symbolic in there. You know, you go into Protestant churches and they have things that are regularly in a, a Presbyterian church that you would see across Presbyterian churches that you might not say was like, Hey, can you find the exact spot in the Bible where that's at? Like kind of you, you know what I mean?

Shay Foulk [00:44:21] Well, and you know, I was thinking about this recently when I was looking back through some of the historical information. So our, our church for reference here where we attend in, in Illinois, we call it the White Church on the Prairie. And it was, you know, put up in the, in the mid 18 hundreds of Scottish descendants that had immigrated to the area. And so, you know, through and through Presbyterians, I guess you would say, and when you look at some of the records from the 1930s, 1940s, as they made adjustments to the church and new things that they put in, you know, they talked about like the communion table and the communion table was set and it's, and it's this many inches wide and this many inches long and this many inches tall. And I think there were some things that they were pulling outta the Old Testament in order to, you know, draw some correlations and some symbolism that was involved there. But outside of that it's not, there's not that many more symbols or maybe some of those traditions that is held closely within Catholicism. So, you know, I find that fascinating too. I your comment is well taken there on, there are things that you just walk into any church, I think any church building, any community, any congregation, you're like, oh, that's, that's different. And there's reasons why.

Vance Crowe [00:45:41] So what I wanna do is roll through my, like understanding of the history of Christianity as relates to the like how Christians came into the United States. And I'm only bringing this up now, like I'm gonna just talk at you for a second to be able to get this out and then we can discuss it and people can freak out and tell me this is all wrong, but so you have the main branch of what is now Roman Catholic, or at least that's what they say. And there was a schism within Christianity and it was between Roman denominated or eastern orthodoxy. And the orthodoxy went towards actually more symbolism. They were saying, look, the Rome is trying to say there is one pope, there's one guy in the, in the top. And the Romans would say, yes, that's right because the reading from the Bible is Peter, you are my rock and upon which I will build my church. And that was the structure to get the Pope. Whereas the Orthodox group, the Greek Orthodox, what that has now become that they were, hey, actually we represent the apostles, there should be more people, we should do consensus of people coming together to figure out how do we express the teachings of Christ and, and put forward the, the belief system. And so the first hard fork was when you had the difference between Greek Orthodoxy and the Roman Catholic church. And then you go forward another 500 years and Luther breaks off from the Catholic church saying, Hey, wait a second, there's a whole bunch of things you guys are calling symbolic, like plenary indulgences and, and the ownership of things.

Vance Crowe [00:47:22] This is not the way I'm gonna put this up there. He want, he intended to be a priest but was claimed to be a heretic and now there's a new branch Lutheranism. As soon as Lutheranism breaks off, now you have the, the Calvinist break off because they were like, look, we don't still want to have the, the symbolism that the Lutherans are doing. We want to go to a literal bible and the Calvinist break off and say we are, this is gonna be way less adorned, way less hierarchy. Give people the ability to read the Bible, let, let them do interpretations. Ministers do not have special powers or special abilities to read the gospel at the, and and then move forward through Europe. You have a whole bunch of problems. And the Anglican church breaks off because they're like, Hey, we no longer want to have the Catholic church tell us what to do and, and be in charge of our, our our politics. So we're gonna have Catholic church, but it's not going to be connected with Rome. So that's the Anglican church, the Scottish learn from the Calvinists that you can have this literalism, they break off and create the Presbyterian or what is known as Presbyterian. And then the large scale pressure that was put on by the Anglican church, the Catholic church, the Greek Orthodox went to push Protestants, largely pushing the ones that were in Germany, Switzerland, France. There's a giant, if you wanna look up, the craziest story in all of Protestant and Christianity, as far as I'm concerned, is the St.

Vance Crowe [00:48:55] George massacre and the wedding of the century. But that all the sudden, these people that are Protestants, that are literalists, that are, that are I think saying let's keep a lot closer to the Bible, they leave Europe and they go to the United States and with them, they bring these ideas of predestination, literalism in the Bible, working hard community. And that becomes the foundation of the philosophical ideas that you have from Rome on things like Republican democracy, but also Protestantism, which then breaks into the United States and the whole New England area is settled by Protestants and then that, that pushes out into the rest of the United States. So I'm gonna stop there.

Shay Foulk [00:49:42] So I, I wanna follow up real quick though. So then how did Catholicism make its way into the United States? Talk through that pathway.

Vance Crowe [00:49:49] The, I, so there was a small spot in Maryland where they were starting to bring over Catholics that were, i i I believe of like the Spanish and, and French. There was a little bit coming up from the French settlements in Louisiana. But the way that Catholicism got big in the United States, and this is just Vance's reading of history, somebody with e modicum, Moura understanding would be better is 1850s. There's a, there's a potato blight in in Ireland. They're like, oh my gosh, we gotta get outta here. We need to go somewhere where there's food. And the Protestants were like, Hey, this is fine now we've got cheap labor and we've got people that can, can be doing a ton of the work, coal mining, housekeeping, all this stuff that they were transcending above. And there was, and the same was true of the Italians. They came over, they had craftsmanship, they were brought over and, and as a function of being completely ostracized from the regular mainstream power sources, the Irish Catholics and the Italian Catholics became very insulated and then became their own political groups that Irish Catholic and Italian Catholics are their, they can go to the same churches now. But like my, my, I have a, my mother's uncle, so my great uncle was a priest, he was an Irish Catholic priest that upset the bishop. So the bishop punished him by putting him in an Italian Catholic church. And so there is a branch of Catholicism, you've got the Irish Catholics and you've got the Italian Catholics in America, but they're two different forces.

Vance Crowe [00:51:26] But then when looked at as a whole, they were kind of a counter pressure to the Protestants and it took them, you know, a hundred years to come out from being the, at the bottom of the, the barrel.

Shay Foulk [00:51:36] So in the meantime, we still have Eastern Orthodox. That is from my understanding still, primarily You think some of the Baltic states, as you move up into the northeast, you know Russia, you know, some of those areas, what's your, what's your thoughts or your outlook on like the Eastern orthodoxy?

Vance Crowe [00:51:55] Well, I think when you go look at Eastern Orthodoxy, what you find is they are even more symbolic than the Roman Catholics. So the Roman Catholics are somewhere in this like, yeah, we're somewhat symbolic, we're somewhat literal. The Eastern Orthodoxy is much more about consensus. And the way that we find consensus is that we believe in this kind of symbolism and things kind of work this way. But the thing that you can do with Eastern Orthodoxy that was harder with the Roman Catholics, at least in this more modern age, is they grafted better into the political systems. So Eastern Orthodoxy in Russia is deeply embedded into their political system in a way that Catholicism was until about 150, 200 years ago. And the Pope is its own power center, but it is not integrated into the royalty in the same way. And Eastern Orthodoxy I think is growing in the United States, but it will never be, I, I think our language and things don't allow for the level of symbolism of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Shay Foulk [00:52:58] So when I was deployed in 24 to 25, I would, I had a lot of time, especially in the evenings with the time change. I was like trying to run businesses and do stuff here, back at home, nine hours difference. And so if I was up and couldn't sleep, just get on Google Maps and go to go to Bosnia, go to some of those other Romania, some of those areas into Russia and, and pull up your Google Maps photos section and find the churches. And when you go find the church, you wanna talk about symbolism. And for those of you that grew up Catholic and you got the painted windows and you got the, you know, the, the large paintings and everything else, and then you open up an Eastern Orthodox Church in Romania and you are just like, what is going on? And interestingly enough, I don't, I don't know what the pathway would've been on this, but you know, we, I I, I had an opportunity in college to go to Costa Rica and do some traveling around there. And, and so many of their churches are the same way from a symbolic outlook, and I think primarily Roman Catholic descent, but man, just a huge amount of, of symbolism. And then you walk into our Presbyterian church and we have stained glass colored windows with names of the founders of the church, and, you know, that's about it. And, and across on the wall. And, and so to, to get back to your question around, I think you were asking like Presbyterianism today and, and maybe like how that split occurred and, and where we're at today.

Shay Foulk [00:54:38] Is that correct?

Vance Crowe [00:54:39] Yeah. And, and literalism just take it anywhere. It doesn't matter to me.

Shay Foulk [00:54:43] You know, one thing that we were looking at recently within our church and, and, you know, to be, to be careful of the situation, I, I'm not gonna name anything in particular, but you know, there was just an issue that came up around interpretations of the Bible. And, and so that whole hierarchy or map that you mapped out there, which I physically drew out, just to keep track of it, it's interesting because it all goes back to Christ. And when we think about the division that is occurring between Lutherans and Presbyterians or Catholics, and, and when I say division, I just mean differences in beliefs. Essentially. Some of these things are societal and cultural differences that are minutia in comparison to first principles. You know, so these first principles are where the divisions occur between the denominations of, well, I believe that the Bible is the sole source of God's inspired word and nothing to do with hierarchy or the, you know, historical traditions like Catholicism does. Okay? That's a first principle. But when you get into the interdenominational differences, so when you look at like our Presbyterian church is with the ECO order, there's the pc, there's the P-C-U-S-A, there's, you know, four or five other denominations within Presbyterianism, now you start looking at second and third order effects of your, your personal beliefs almost as opposed to the beliefs of Jesus or the teachings in the Bible.

Shay Foulk [00:56:25] And so when you start looking at a literal interpretation or a fundamentalist outlook as opposed to an evangelical outlook saying, or, you know, saying, Hey, I believe everything that is intended in the Bible, as opposed to there is a literal 24 hour day and it was, the world was literally created within 24 hour or 6 24 hour days. That's what I think is fascinating between the different interpretations. I really like what you said about the language side of things, because when we think of how many times the, the Bible has been translated from original language, original stories, especially when you get back into the Old Testament and even, you know, Genesis in particular, there's a huge amount that we don't know and a huge amount that is inferred there. And it's just interesting to see how the different denominations and the different belief systems have taken those things and adapted them based on what they, what they believe or, or what they think that they should believe.

Vance Crowe [00:57:26] So you've used a term that to me they are, they're the same and I cannot distinguish between them, but you've said it twice. So I think there's a distinction there for you, evangelical or fundamentalists to, to the Catholic, they're all extreme in some way. Can you differentiate between those two?

Shay Foulk [00:57:48] No, probably not to the extent that I should. So what, what's your interpretation?

Vance Crowe [00:57:52] I, I guess, I don't know. I mean, evangelical is like, to me it's the people that are trying to convert you, right? Like, hey, I'm, we're gonna try and do things and we're gonna, evangelical seems excited to me. We're gonna have a, a celebration where there's loud music and maybe instruments and excited and fun and we're gonna, we're gonna hype things up and fundamentalists maybe being more like, look at, this is the exact word we're doing this right here, this, this particular passage. But I have no that, that's just like my very, very limited understanding.

Shay Foulk [00:58:27] I think this is where we should bring an expert in on the next interview that you have.

Vance Crowe [00:58:32] And, and

Shay Foulk [00:58:32] What I think is interesting though, to tie it back to like my roots and what I do in agriculture, I think for people to consider how those moves have impacted where your family has arrived. So, you know, you talked about, sorry, I'm drawing a blank. The, the wedding.

Vance Crowe [00:58:51] Oh yeah. The, the wedding of the century. The St. George Massacre. St. George,

Shay Foulk [00:58:54] St. George Massacre. Thank you. Or you look at the potato famine, or you look at the persecutions throughout history that caused movements of people literally for families to pick up and move, to go to the United States, to take their agrarian base and move to other parts of the world for how our families ended up where we are today. For me to grow up in northeast Iowa as a Lutheran of German descent, and then for me to marry a woman from northern Illinois whose family has Scottish and French heritage that came here as Presbyterians, that's worth exploring. And we're so quick to forget the history of how we got to where we are 150 years ago.

Vance Crowe [00:59:41] Dude, you just gave me the like, so I, this is actually something I think a lot about and I, I actually think many of our theological debates are actually geographic debates and they're actually genetic debates. I think. Like if this is my wild hypothesis and I would love to have somebody prove me wrong or prove me right, but the further north you go, right, the more that your society has to be organized in order that you can maximize sunshine when it's there to be able to live through the cold winters. The, the more Mediterranean you are or the more tropical you are, the way more flexible you can be. You can have your understanding of time and when you show up to things and when do we get things done can be much, much slower. Whereas when you are going to the more northern latitudes, it's gotta be, we do things at this time and we do it in this way because we do not have the time, we don't have the flexibility to be able to get around that. And you think about, you know, why did Martin Luther do so well in Germany? Well, it could be that there were German princes, the story that's been told, but I think it likely has to do with these, were much more literally oriented people. These were people that didn't have the luxury that you had of the Roman Mediterranean. Like, yeah, we kind of do things this way or we kind of do things that way. And so the, the demand that you be a literalist came from generations of breeding that the people that were more literal, they lived through the winter and the people that were more symbolic, they died off.

Vance Crowe [01:01:21] Whereas when you're in this southern latitude, something different is going on. And then you map that from when they left the Europe and came over to the New world and they settled in areas. That's why you have, you know, the, the Protestants stretching throughout Minnesota, South Dakota, I, I mean we could look at geography, but the where, what do you think of this concept

Shay Foulk [01:01:44] I survival is what I wrote down there. And you know, when you have that survival, the methodical outlook of regimented procedure, and this is what works and this is why we do it. I was, I was actually just typing up an article, talking through where we are in agriculture today is we have gotten into this monotony, I'm gonna come back, but we have gotten into this monotony of row crop production, corn and soybeans, low economic returns. And we are so scared to do things different because we're surviving and our instinct is to survive. And if we are surviving and we know that we need to go out, I was in the, I was in the tractor doing some field cultivating when I was thinking about this. We know there's weeds in the field. I need to go out there and I need to till it up and I need to kill the weeds because that's what I have to do to survive in order to get a good crop in. And in order to get a good crop in, I have to grow and I have to do this and I have to kill all the other weeds with spray. And then I gotta go out and I gotta harvest it and it's gotta be timely and then I gotta work it up again because that's my survival instinct. It's like it leaves no room for differentiation. But we live in a time of abundance and prosperity. And so historically, again, going back a hundred, maybe even a hundred years ago, but 150, 200 years ago when a lot of these movements were occurring to different agrarian societies in the world being moved due to persecution or opportunities particularly to the United States.

Shay Foulk [01:03:16] Certainly the geographical outline there. But what I think about today is now you live in an air conditioned, heated, you know, tour bus that can go anywhere and do anything and you know, there's more wealth than there's ever been in the world, relatively speaking. How does that affect our beliefs and does it create a movement from what you're saying? You know, which is interesting because now you have all these people that are interested in Catholicism that have a more literal outlook, but there's no fundamentalist survival requirement of them. So why is that, or what does that look like moving forward? Do we move away from that regimented outlook and, and the, maybe it's the tradition that people are being drawn to. I don't know. I I think that's fascinating to think about what this looks like 150 years from now because of that.

Vance Crowe [01:04:05] Well, so, you know, one of the things that anthropologists, sociologists, they, they've, you probably heard of this term, the Dunbar number. So the Dunbar number is the number of social relationships that you can keep up with at any level of sophistication. And it's about 150 families. So that's like, how many people can you be like, Hey, I know her mom and I knew her cousins and I, I know what's going on in their lives. And it turns out, if you go look at these churches, right? Most parishes didn't have more than 120 to 150 families. And I would say that's probably true of your churches, my churches. But one of the reasons that the people needed those churches is you would go on Sunday, you couldn't connect with people when their cell phones or even their phones. I mean, shoot, I mean my Legacy Interviews, when I record people talking, they talked about how when they were kids, they didn't hate going to church, they went to church. 'cause that was the only time they saw other people outside of their family. And like then you'd see people, you'd, the kids are going to Sunday school, the parents, maybe they're having a bible study or a coffee and donuts or a whatever. They're, they're mixing together. But as we moved into a more commercialized society, as we move to one where you can share ideas much easier, you can hear new ideas somewhere else, all of a sudden this like, why would I regularly go to this place? And then the social bonds breakdown and then you're left. You only have the option, I'm gonna trust the government.

Vance Crowe [01:05:37] And it's, to your point, COVID, I think COVID was the big, you know, catalyst towards Christianity. It's like, oh wait a second, if we mediate all of our relationships through the government, this doesn't work. 'cause they don't actually care about us. There is no Dunbar number inside of the government because it always wants to centralize power.

Shay Foulk [01:05:57] Hmm. I I gotta ask you, I I love that take by the way. I think that's a great synopsis of what happened. You probably talk a lot more about that, but I gotta ask you a personal question. So, you know, you had mentioned growing up as a cradle Catholic, and then I, I've gotten the impression just from our conversations that maybe it's been more of a, a recent resurgence for you back into, back into faith or back into exploring things there. I'm, I'm curious a little bit about around that and then what stands out to you from Catholicism? From when I, when I look at it, the, the hierarchy and the tradition and maybe not as close of a, a relationship with Christ as opposed to, you know, what I, what I experience or what I grew up with of a very personal relationship with Christ and less hierarchy and tradition.

Vance Crowe [01:06:53] Yeah. I mean, I don't know if anybody cares to hear my personal story, but I'm happy to share it. It's like the, the, I grew up, you know, Catholic and, and just kinda like, okay, I have an extraordinary ability to remember bible stories since I was a little, little kid. Stories just resonate with me. It makes sense why I do Legacy Interviews. I hear a story, it's sticky. So I was very good at church. And then when I went to high school, I got involved in a group called Teens Encounter Christ, which was a Catholic organization and it was really good. And I was very on fire. And then I went away to college and I had some experiences where I was like, Hey, wait a second, if you didn't, I, I ran into, there was this time when I rode a bus and I used to see this old black woman get on this bus. She had boarded at like five in the morning. She could barely walk. And she was going to a hospital. And I got to talking with her and she told me about how her son was a drug addict and she had all these problems and she was working. And then she would say things like, but this would be terrible if I didn't have the good Lord to help me and I know he's gonna pay me back in the future. And I remember being there being like, this is a trick to get you to go do the shitty work that nobody wants to do. That they've told you that your shitty life that you're enduring is worthwhile because you have Jesus. And so I took that in my very 20 something year old mind to mean like, if I can't find meaning in what you're doing, therefore there isn't meaning. And so I spent the next 15 years, maybe 10 years being like, I don't know, there's no real value to me learning about God, talking about God, you know, finding anything about this.

Vance Crowe [01:08:33] When I had kids and my wife wanted to start taking them to church. We got married in the Catholic church 'cause she wanted to, and, and I didn't take communion, but we got married there and then we baptized our kids and I was willing to stand there, but it was her choice. But one of the things I started to realize was on Sunday morning, I did not feel together with my family. Whereas when on Sunday morning in my home where I grew up, I felt very together with my family. My dad would play music. We ate a certain way, we got all together on the timing because we, instead of everybody waking up in the morning and going in different directions, now when we wake up in the morning to do church, you eat together, you get dressed together, you do something special with one another, and then you go and you sit in church and as much as it's difficult to catch your kids, to stay quiet and to not cry and to not need to go to the use of the potty, I went because I realized it was a synchronizing mechanism. Everyone could get in sync and we could have a better Sunday and a better family. But then as I start doing this more and more, I'm like, oh yeah, I remember there's a value to doing reconciliation. There really is a value to thinking about what are your sins and saying them out loud, oh, there's a value to having these prayers that you aren't thinking about the individual words that you're trying to please Jesus with. Instead, you are saying something that is deep and meaningful and you are studying what is it that that prayer am I committing to?

Vance Crowe [01:10:06] And having this discussion over and over and over again brought a lot of value to me. And so I do not evangelize for anybody else, but I know for me, when I go do these things, my life is better. And it has brought me to a place where I'm like, I'm very open that my belief about that woman's value and her meaning was really self-centered and missed a bigger point that she was probably right. That her life was actually a lot better because of her belief in God.

Shay Foulk [01:10:37] I I love the the thank you for sharing that, by the way. I love the self-awareness around that. It, it took you 15 years to realize maybe why or, or what do you think that that time in your life? And I'm, I'm just genuinely curious 'cause you know, there's a lot of research out there that says that men's brains aren't fully formed until they're 26. I think my wife thinks it's like 36 probably, but, You know, very, very malleable. And college is a very different time. A lot of new, new ideas, new encounters, people outside of your, you know, your Dunbar number that you're used to experiencing life with. What would you, what would you say to someone that is maybe in their early twenties, or maybe they're 57 that's listening to this, that maybe has not had that perception or has maybe not realized that, oh, this is why I felt the way that I did. Is it just taking time to go back and, and think through why you believe the things that you do or why you feel about things the way that you do? 'cause and and the reason I bring that up is there's things that I've had to take some introspection on recently that I have like a visceral reaction to whatever it may be. And if I just take a beat and take time, like a couple days and think about why, why do I really feel that way? Like what happened, what triggered in my life? You know, was it the lady on the bus that I talked to and saw, or what was it?

Shay Foulk [01:12:08] So what, what would your encouragement be for people to think about how they experience life and how they, how they think about things?

Vance Crowe [01:12:20] I don't know that this is exactly answering your question, but I can tell you, I, I, I think I said this at the Ag View solutions conference when I was kind of telling people like, I'm in a lot of pain. I'm going through this shingles thing and I have all this neck pain. The thing that I would tell my younger self is you will be humbled. And I know right now, like you think, hey, life is going well for me, this is great. And look how easy things are. Or even if things aren't going well thing, you know, and you're, you're feeling not good, no matter what, you will be humbled and humility is the thing that will force you to change in ways that are better for you. And the shitty part is that's like being humbled sucks. Mm.

Shay Foulk [01:13:07] It's

Vance Crowe [01:13:07] Like, you know, if you're up, it knocks you down. If you're down, all of a sudden you can't feel so bad for yourself because you've been humbled and now all of a sudden you realize like, actually I do have it better than I thought. And I think that the relationship with God, the best example is like he chose to endure all these things that were incredibly humbling, rode an ass into, into Jerusalem, you know, forced to carry across and like stumbled and staggered as he's being whipped and all of these things. And he chose that humbling because something better came from it. And like when I recognize that symbolism in the church and in what it's teaching and in myself, it's a terrifying and gratifying thing, I guess all at once.

Shay Foulk [01:14:02] Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I i one

Vance Crowe [01:14:04] What about, I mean I I I have a question for you. Yeah. So you are an elder in your church

Shay Foulk [01:14:10] Recently,

Vance Crowe [01:14:11] Okay? Is that how, how do you become an elder? You put your hand up and you run for it. How do you, how do you keep yourself humble when you, the one that's in charge ran?

Shay Foulk [01:14:20] I ran for the door, they tackled me and said, no, you're an elder. No, I'm just kidding. So essentially within the presbytery you have, you have a session which is comprised of members of the church that are elders that have been ordained, essentially selected by the church as being, you know, a leader in the church. Someone that stands on good principles, someone that is willing to teach and preach and, and educate while also recognizing, and I think this is an important distinction, is that we are not perfect. We are, we are changing, we are learning, we are developing our relationship with Christ. And and I think that's something just from a, a more recent personal experience too within the church is so are the people that are the leaders of the church, you know, the, the ministers of the church. You cannot expect that person that stands at the pulpit to be Christ because they are not, we are all sinners, we are all inadequate in some way. And so, you know, I say that because the human fallibility that's out there, none of us are infallible. And so going back to the elder portion, as we were navigating some of the challenges here recently in our church, I think they reached out because of one, the relative youth, I'm 32, young family, have been a member of the church for five years, six years now.

Shay Foulk [01:15:56] And also kind of what I do on the, you know, consulting side of the business, working with people, navigating difficult conversations, leadership from from that, but also from the military and just kind of how I was raised throughout life is the ability to have someone step up and lead and take charge and not be afraid to voice their opinion. So that was the move into being recognized as an elder of a church. And I, and I take that very seriously, probably, probably as serious or more serious than maybe any other position that I have held over time because of the weight and responsibility that that bears for our church congregation, for the family, for my family, and for our community and the impact that we have. So yeah, that's been, that's been a recent change here and we have a lot of work ahead of us too that I think is gonna be interesting to navigate.

Vance Crowe [01:16:56] So you said something interesting that, or you said a bunch of things that were interesting, but one in particular was like the weight of the, of the leadership position you're in. That said in the context of there was a time in your life where you got dressed up in serious combat equipment, carried large guns around and went with groups of men and like, you know, shot other people. Did, did, did, you know, jumps into places that are incredibly dangerous. Those seem, you know, one is like, I'm an elder of the church, I'm, and then this other one is like, I'm, I'm in battle, I'm killing people. I'm, I'm along with other men and trying to protect them. Do you, do you really feel that weight difference?

Shay Foulk [01:17:47] Yeah, for sure. And and I think because of, you know, I don't wanna say like the perceived spiritual warfare, but when I think about what are the most important things in life at that point in time when I was in my kit with my rifle and we were, you know, getting off a helicopter to go kill or capture some terrible person, that was the most important thing that I was doing at that moment in time. But the big picture here is if I had died on a mission, I knew Christ and I had a relationship with the, you know, in and with the kingdom of God. And most people will never experience that. And so the, the most important thing is still your relationship with Christ and your salvation and the eternal, the eternal salvation that comes through the relationship with Jesus Christ. And so, yes, I take that very seriously because where we meet and, you know, congregate and come together as a church community in worship of God and to help them develop their relationship with God and to, you know, hopefully help lead them towards salvation again, through, through all the beliefs that we have within the Presbyterian work, not by anything that we do. That's very, that's very important and, and there is a tremendous amount of weight that the things that I say and do could affect someone's relationship with the church or with the community or you know, how, how they handle their beliefs with their family and with their children.

Shay Foulk [01:19:31] So yes, I, you know, I, I take that very seriously and I, I think that my time, so in within session you serve three years and you can do two back to back terms on the session. But once you're ordained as an elder, you are an elder in the church for life. You know, that is a commitment to, to the congregation and to the community for life. I think that my role over the next three years or six years, whatever the length of term is, that's the most important thing that I can do at that time. And frankly, I was not ready to be asked to be an elder of the church, probably for selfish reasons because I'm still in the National Guard and, and it's a significant time commitment kind of throughout the year. And so I wanted to make sure that I was able to dedicate my time, my resources, my mental energy to the position at hand, and I was gonna wait until 2027 to do that. But they said, Hey, this is what we're going through, you know, we, we would really like to ask you to be on session and to be an elder within the community. So that was a, that was a, a big thing

Vance Crowe [01:20:36] As, as an elder. So are you making like doctrine, interpretations? Are you, are you participating in hey, this is what the bible literally means? Or are you, is it mostly around like, Hey, we gotta hire a lawn keeper and we gotta make sure that the, the grass is getting mowed and oh by the way, we gotta put in a new HVAC system so we gotta raise some money?

Shay Foulk [01:21:02] I would say it's below doctrine and including above and all of what you just said there from the mowing and everything. So within, no, from a doctrinal standpoint, let me answer that question first. From a doctrinal standpoint, it is, there are tenants within Presbyterianism and within our ECO denomination of tenants that we affirm and tenants that we believe the Westminster confession, you know, there's a list of like six or seven of 'em, the apostles creed, you know, in any of these documents that we say, similar to what you were saying, you know, these prayers that we believe that we recite that have purpose and meaning and intent behind them. We have those doctrinal outlooks and we have a polity and within the ECO and a polity that lays out this is what we believe and this is why we believe it. Now what's interesting that you bring that up is one of the discussions within our church or, or some of the issues that we've been facing recently is here is what it means to be a Presbyterian or here, here's what it means to be reformed, here's what it means to be within a Protestant, within Presbyterianism, within this denomination, you know, so these are the beliefs that have been set out as a result of where we are today. But then when you have people that come from different backgrounds, from Lutheran, from ac, from Baptist, from Catholic, from whatever else that are attending your church, one of the things that maybe has not been done as well over time as it should be is, okay, what does it mean to be a member of this church?

Shay Foulk [01:22:42] What does this church believe and why do we believe it? And when you put a group of people together that maybe don't have those same understandings and same opinions, when a controversial topic comes up, now you have division and there's no alignment of understanding within that. And I think this is important for anybody that's listening for any denomination, any congregation, or really any business or leadership outlook is if you don't have common ground understanding of what you believe and why, you know, core values, mission, whatever else you will realize division. And if you are not proactive about those things, you're gonna burn a lot more time, a lot more resources, a lot more mental energy on the backend to deal with that. So no, not doctrinal outlook and decision making. What I would say though, when I say below that, in between it is helping people foster their relationship with Christ. It is helping them have these types of conversations and work through what does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to be a Presbyterian? You know, this happened in my life. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the difficulties that we realize as humans with those conversations and making sure that you have, you know, maybe mission, maybe outreach, maybe sharing the gospel. There's a lot of different things that come with being an elder in the church to include serving on the session. So think of the session as like, like the board, you know, with farm credit that you referenced, you're making decisions for a period of time as a leader that's been recognized within the church, within the community.

Shay Foulk [01:24:17] So that, hey, we need to get new steps poured on the mats that we now have a renter in and the lawn needs mode, here's the contractor, oh by the way, the well pump went out. Okay, you're gonna take care of that. All of those things are included and at a, at a scale that's, you know, relatively small for a, a rural church community, but no less important.

Vance Crowe [01:24:41] So one of the observations that I have about Protestants, and this is that, okay, the LGBTQI plus right, becomes a joke among people because they're like, oh, they just keep adding more letters, right? The letter people as, as Dave Chappelle would say, but the reason that they're doing that is because there's so much literal interpretation. Well, there is a difference between being gay and being a lesbian, you know, like, because gay may just mean two men and we wanna differentiate between two men that are together versus two women that are together and then bisexual means this other thing and on down. And the reason that there keeps being more and more groups is the more that you take things literally, the infinitely that it will be divided, right? Is is like every time there is something to be interpreted where two people or two groups could get on one side of it, you're just gonna continue to fractionate. And that it just keeps opening up wider and wider and wider in a way that yes, Catholics have, the parishioners themselves have no responsibility over interpreting how things go other than for themselves or for their families. But there's also very little divides. Now of course there are different orders and there's local control and parishes and blah blah blah, but it's different than what I interpret with the Presbyterians. Are you guys, because of your literal approach to the way things work, are the, are your documents these like, hey, these set of things that we've agreed to follow is that inherently going to create splits because there's gonna be people that I believe, I believe in the Westminster thing, but not this other thing and will it fractionate forever?

Shay Foulk [01:26:32] I wanna go back real quick to the conversation that we had about how do you, again, escape isn't the right word, so people don't throw things at me, but how do you escape Catholicism? And it's like, well you don't because this is what we believe and this is why we believe and there's no other way. And so, you know, your example of referring to like the LGBTQ plus whatever community, what those really are is definers and defining what we believe in, why we believe it. And so I think if I were to say I'm a Christian, and you would say, well, you're a Christian, but maybe we don't believe the exact same things, the the definers that are occurring throughout the Protestants and why we continue to see what you would refer to as like the fractionalization or, or the differences even even recently within the, the Presbyterian or like our church community, we decided we did not want to be a part of the P-C-U-S-A, which is one of the denominational outlooks because of the beliefs that they held. Well that's not what our church believes. And so we want to have a definer, we are ECO Presbyterians. And now since this most recent issue came up, it's like, well, are we ECO or are we, you know, so you're, you're constantly searching for the definition. What I, what I would say, or maybe what came to mind right there is I bet within Catholics there's a lot more differences in beliefs. If you all came into the same room and said, well what do you believe or what do you believe or what do you believe? It's just maybe they have not presented themselves the opportunity to express that they believe things differently or have ever felt comfortable saying that because of how they were raised and because of that structure that they were in.

Shay Foulk [01:28:11] So does it, does it become a never ending outlook of fractionalization? Maybe, but I think probably what that actually is alluding to is you as an individual can have a relationship with Christ and you as an individual may have different beliefs on different subjects, how you arrive there, what you follow as your basis from the, the doctrinal outlooks and, and these, the doctrinal outlooks, particularly for presbyterianism, the tenets of faith that we affirm, these are historical congregation or historical meetings that happened, you know, a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago. So it's not like, hey, we got together in 2023 and we decided we're not doing this anymore. The most recent would be like a denominational outlook, like ECO, which would be like 2020 probably. But that was more so like how do you choose to worship as a church body and what do you believe as opposed to those foundational doctrinal tenets. So that is a lot of words to say, yes, there is probably continued fractionalization as we move forward. But is that wrong or do I think that that's an incorrect approach? No, I don't think it probably is.

Vance Crowe [01:29:32] Yeah, I mean to me the, the very interesting thing about the Catholics is, you know, you have these doctrinal differences that you're talking about, and then the popes along with the cardinals get together for, you know, a synod, you know, where they, they make a decision and then the parishioners, they do not have a role in this. This is, this is not, they don't petition, they don't, they don't get to like put forward their ideas and then what ha can happen is you can have a revision of whatever creed you're doing. You know, the, the big one with the Catholics is that happened, it's, you know, for people that were cradle Catholics, you grew up saying this one way, and then they change one tiny word, right? And you're like, and you know, in, what is it in in con, I don't remember, but like, like all the Catholics that grew up this way, they stumble over that word over and over again even though that change was made 10 years ago because it was just this tiny consubstantial with the father. That's, that's the word. They started using the word consubstantial. Well, the parishioners didn't have a choice. And if you don't agree with that change, what are you gonna do? Hard fork, the Catholic church? No, you're, you know, like you're not gonna create a new branch that's like, no, we don't say consubstantial, we say, you know, in, in accordance with the father. Right? Like that just doesn't happen.

Shay Foulk [01:30:54] So what happens then, that, this is what's fascinating to me is then do they make the leap to the Protestant or do they not? You know, I mean

Vance Crowe [01:31:03] For the, for the most part, I would say just like Bitcoin, you can hard, hard fork and create a new alt coin. You can create a new Bitcoin, but everybody else is going to be saying consubstantial. And so the, the thing that you are getting, you know, the, the Catholics are always told, you know, Catholicism means universal and ultimately you give over your evaluation of whether or not that's correct or not to the priesthood. So that that way you still have, you are still responsible for your soul. You are still responsible for, you know, getting forgiveness and going to reconciliation and, and, but these doctrinal like changes or choices, these are not consequential to you as an individual. Just keep following and you will arrive at the, at the correct position, which to to are protestants gotta be like, what do you mean we want it to be literal, we wanna know what does it say right there? And, and the Catholics are like, I don't know, they'll let us know.

Shay Foulk [01:32:09] Well, alright, I'm gonna let, I'm gonna let that one go. I do. So one thing that's interesting, like bigger picture on that though is when you look at, and, and the reason that I think we will continue to see this fractionalization or, or you know, differences over time is because time has a way of changing things, it changes what we remember, it changes what we believe it, the cultural context changes around it and you know, to bring it full circle to like the AI stuff is within our church. You know, Ethan, Ethan who you know, and I know probably will listen to this had we've built out or he has built out like a essentially a model A GPT for the church. And like I've used it to upload our polity and to ask questions and to make sure like as we're navigating that we're doing this the right way. Imagine if you had a GPT or you know, an LLM designed specifically for everything that was in the Vatican. How would that change how you interpreted things over time? Would you still have a fork or do you, or do you just have, do you just have a channel?

Vance Crowe [01:33:16] So this is a very big deal going on in the Catholic church right now. And actually the Pope came out and said, you should be very, very wary of LLMs associated with the Catholicism because there is meaning and nuance that emerges from the discussion, from the analysis, from the reviewing. And so he is holding what's called the synod and, and they're going to get together and talk about what roles should AI play in education and the Catholic universities. But he made a strict, I think, I think all the way to the point of it being an encyclical. I think he said that like, you are not allowed to do this. You are not, priests are not allowed to use AI to generate the homily to, to which is our version of the sermon, right? It's the only ad-libbing that the priests get to do is after the gospels they come up and talk about what did we read? How does this relate to our daily lives? And he said, absolutely not, you're not allowed to use that even to give you like some prep, some good stories, some jokes. Because ultimately what comes out of, of the priest is from this study, from being in concert, from being in prayer. And so it makes me chuckle because it seems to me that the AI and Protestantism could work really well together because of the literalism give me back the exact thing. And with Catholicism they're like, nah, we like it squishy, we want it to be symbolic and we wanna be able to have gray area

Shay Foulk [01:34:50] Where we as the leadership want to be able to make the decisions and make the guidance. And by the way, parishioners, you come along the way.

Vance Crowe [01:34:59] That's,

Shay Foulk [01:35:01] Boy, that's a, yeah, I can see how that would be a, a concern or an an infringement on the ability for your parishioners to, and, and again, I don't, I don't disagree with probably the heart that's behind that of there are nuances, there are interpretation, there's historical context that you have these, you know, however many, you know, couple hundred elders that have 70, 80 years of experience in a lifetime of devotion and dedication to the resources. But now if you, I mean if you had that at your fingertips and the contextual analysis of these artificial intelligence tools to pull from any and all published materials to make informed decisions or to develop your relationship within your, within your faith or with Christ, I mean that's, it's hard to look away from.

Vance Crowe [01:35:50] Well, I mean if, if you end up using AI to be the interpreter of all of this longstanding information that's been created, how would you distinguish between AI and God?

Shay Foulk [01:36:03] How do I distinguish between that, you know, what, what is the, what are the church elders belief telling me to believe and how do I have a proof to go look at the original document that's in the Vatican? I don't,

Vance Crowe [01:36:17] Yeah.

Shay Foulk [01:36:18] You know,

Vance Crowe [01:36:19] Yeah, I mean, and I, I've, I think like the other point I should probably make is like my looseness, like my loosey goosey, this is what Catholics do. I am describing the cultural part of Catholicism as opposed to what are the actual rules here, but like my kind of general loose goosey, like I would say most Irish Catholics and probably most Italian American Catholics would be like, yeah, he's pretty much right there. Yeah, that's, that's pretty much how it goes. But you're, you're right, like the, the criticism that the, the Protestants would have is there's somebody standing between you and God and and you have to like use their interpretation and the Catholics are sitting there saying like, oh, if you use AI then it's standing between you and, and God. And there's, I mean it has it. I I terribly love this conversation. This is awesome for me. This is wonderful. Yeah.

Shay Foulk [01:37:11] Well, and, and what I think about too is again, when I had all this time when we were in Iraq, the ability for me to go and explore what, tell me more about the, you know, I, and I'd taken several religious courses and throughout college and, and had read several books. But tell me more about Islam and tell me more about Christianity and tell me more about the differences and the similarities and, and what are the beliefs and, and where do they, you know, talk to me about the regional and geographical context and, and map out the timelines and show me all that. And to me that was super fascinating and it enforced my beliefs. It didn't, it didn't detract from it. And so yeah, if I have someone standing between me and my relationship with Christ that, you know, that's problematic from the standpoint of look at all the information and tools and resources that I was able to access over a period of a couple months that, you know, in a lifetime before I never would've been able to.

Vance Crowe [01:38:13] I, I, I love this conversation. I, I think that it will go on and on and I did not foresee myself having a, a podcast where theology would come up so deeply. But I'm so glad you were willing to do this with me. Shay, I am, I probably ought to wrap it up today, but we started by talking about your app and what you're doing. Why don't you talk, if people were interested in that, wanna learn more about it, where should they go? What, what would you direct them towards?

Shay Foulk [01:38:44] Well, I, I first wanna say, I hope this is a good jump back into the saddle on the, on the podcasting side. I, it's invigorating. So thank you for the conversation and what I, what I would kinda wrap up on that end is I really think that what people are seeking more now is connection and discussions and being able to have controversial, you know, what do we believe and why do we believe it? And so yeah, thank you for that. But as far as you know, what we're doing on the business side, if people are interested, farm profit manager app, you can go sign up for free, plug in all your farm information. Again, your data's a hundred percent yours, it's secure. You can choose to opt in or opt outta data at any point if you opt in, we're gonna start rolling out some benchmarking features to where you can see if you're a 2000 acre operation in Illinois, how do you compare to other 2000 acre operations in Illinois? So there's a lot of really exciting stuff coming on top of that. We are hoping to have a livestock version roll out late 2026, early 2027 and eventually hopefully expand this thing to an international marketplace so the, the tools get better with time. We appreciate everyone's feedback and and more importantly we want to have an impact at your farm. And, and I hope people see that the heart and intent behind it is to make sure that you are making the best decisions for your farm and in turn you are making the best decisions for your family. And when you think about what is your purpose on why are you involved in agriculture, you know, this is something that we've talked about.

Shay Foulk [01:40:16] I'm in a Christian business leader peer group Vance, it's called Convene. And we talk about kingdom purpose. You know, what is your purpose for why you are here, what is the impact that you're going to have? And when I think about my circles of influence, my circle of influence on the farm is for my family and for my church. And my circle of influence for the seed business is for my community and my circle of influence for the Ag View Solutions stuff is maybe more on a national scale or or beyond. And when I think about my time in the service, that circle of influence and my kingdom purpose is the global impact that I had. E even even just a small piece of it. And so the circle of influence, if you can make better decisions, if you can answer the hard questions, if you can figure out your kingdom purpose within your family, within your business, within your operation and tools like this help you, that's what we want it to be for. And that's why I love how this conversation kind of all came together and, and what our heart and reasoning is behind it. So farm profit manager app.

Vance Crowe [01:41:20] Well thank you so much Shay. You know, I had a chance to sit down with your stepfather, Chris Barron and talk with him about what you guys are doing there. And not only do you guys run bar none, the most intense forward-leaning conference I've ever been to the Ag View Solutions conference, but what Chris was telling me about the peer groups, the depth that they do, what you guys are doing, like I think what you guys have is amazing. I am so glad to have done work with you have gotten to meet a bunch of your people 'cause they came to my interest based communications class. And man, thanks for helping me hop back in the saddle. Thank you so much for coming on.

Shay Foulk [01:41:55] Thanks for having me Vance.

Vance Crowe [01:41:58] Alright, that is going to do it for this week's podcast. I'm so glad to be back here doing this. It's, it's fun. I've clearly had a whole bunch of time to be thinking about ideas and wanting to chat about 'em and to sit down and talk about theology and apps and you know, the way Catholics do things. This is fun and I think I'm gonna be back doing it more. So I really hope that you enjoy, definitely share these with people if you get a chance, make a review about the podcast. I've been outta the game for a while so it would definitely help me if you would get the word out to more people. And then also, if you have ever thought about taking one of my communications classes, I am now offering that on June 1st through third. It will be a three day class. You'll show up on the first day and we will start off teaching negotiations and we will help you tell your story better. Your introduction, how do you meet people at night, we're gonna start doing some practice experiences. We'll give you a chance to really try what you're doing. It'll be a whole encompassing experience. The next day we'll wake up, have a great meeting and work more on conflict and asking deeper better questions. And then finally the third day, we'll we will actually give you a chance to practice presenting things that you really care about. These are professional skills that I think could really help you a lot. And so if you are interested, go to Articulate Ventures slash IBC, Interest-Based Communication.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:43:32] So Articulate Ventures slash IBC and yeah, looking forward to it. I'll be back next week with more. And here's a little bit more about the interest based communications class. Good negotiation is one where both parties walk away slightly disappointed. That was probably my default world model BV before Vance. Well, Vance had a lot of these models that he created. I ingrained a lot of these models so deeply from working with Vance for a long time that I started to recommunicate them to my friends and my friends' eyes had the same sort of light up of understanding of like this is a thing that could help me be more effective in life. Whenever Vance let me know that he was working on sort of putting this into more of a workshop form, I was like, yeah man, I want that for my team. Like now if my first two employees go through this so that we have this shared set of context and a shared set of language that's gonna create value for my team going forward.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:44:26] I wanted to get better at communication myself. I knew I had good ideas in my head that I wanted to be able to communicate to potential investors and I was not super confident in being able to do that before. I thought that negotiation was basically for people in a boardroom, like CEOs, words like shareholder are involved. So I thought that you had to have a lot of resources at your disposal to even care about negotiations. Both people had to lose or both people weren't happy in the end. I found that what you both want is achievable by understanding the needs of the other person more. A Negotiation is really a way to solve a problem that you have. You can rearrange the world in such a way where all parties get something that they're happy with. So you don't need to possess great resources to be involved in a negotiation or to really benefit from knowing how to negotiate. RJ and I initially were two different businesses. It became clear to us over the long term that we would be much more bullish on our shared future if we like found a way to like actually be one entity, one whole working together that required us to have what to many would be very hard conversations because we were both CEOs of our own independently funded businesses. But we were able to have conversations and get to the root of what our actual interests and what our actual skill sets were. Having both people understand this pattern of communication was useful to pull out those tools when we needed them the most in like difficult conversations. It's very helpful to have that quick language to do something more productive than or continue to like misunderstand or whatever.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [01:46:03] Whatever else you're doing. Building relationships isn't just you communicating to the other person, it's also figuring out how to let the other person communicate to you so that they trust you. Getting into a real conversation and and diffusing tensions before you, you know, get to business. A lot of people have a default model where they're like, I wanna raise my own money. I wanna start my own business. I wanna do my own thing. We find that they have specific interests that could help us. We become allies instead of competitors. I guess the course gives you tools to know that you can say the right words to like extract those things out of the ether, put them in your life. Learning interest-based communications from Vance might actually be the single highest leverage skillset that I ever developed before starting this company. I'm by default an introvert. I think that I've developed the ability to interact with people in such a way that it's energizing and it's fun and I look forward to interacting with strangers on a regular basis. You should just take it, do it already. Yeah. I feel like you should just do it like, no, I don't know. I feel like it's life content. It's like definitely fun life content. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing with my life. Interest-based communications did that for me more than anything else that I've learned.