Fourth-Generation Cattle Rancher on Bitcoin, Boomer Wealth Collapse, and Reading the Land

Michael Ring [00:00:01] As you get more successful, there's always something else that is shiny and to go after. And he, he equates it to women. He, he's like, there's always this woman in a red dress that comes by and distracts you. And the thing about being successful is that not only are there more women in the red dress going by, but they're also more attractive. And so you, you have to, it gets so much harder to say no to all these business opportunities. And so, like, I'm in a similar position already where I've spent the last year saying yes to like as much as it was feasible to do. And now I'm to the point where I have more repair work than I can do. We have cow stuff to do and we're building out some work. We're probably not, we, we would probably like to build out like the equipment operating stuff, like the light excavating winter, commercial snow removal. And now I have to start saying, okay, we're gonna pick a direction a little bit. We're gonna scale it back. And like this idea about the residency program, like I absolutely have to scale some of those things back if I wanna do that. And yeah, it's just, it's so much harder to say no. Especially when the, the opportunities get better when people just show up at your shop with, with, you know, a hundred plus an hour work all the time and, and your phone's ringing. Like it's hard to turn that down.

Michael Ring [00:01:32] Constantly

Vance Crowe [00:01:34] Is, but is the issue, maybe your prices aren't high enough, right? That you have too much work?

Michael Ring [00:01:39] Yeah, maybe. But also there is, there is a point at like, no, that's probably fair because if you did just charge more, you would get less phone calls. But I'm also taking care of a lot of people I know and I'm like on par with a lot of the other shops and I tell them like, I have other work to do before I will get to you with my farming and stuff. So it's not always faster either, but they're just bringing it to me. I get a lot of weird problems, things that people are like, I don't know where to take this, you know? But there's still people that I wanna look after because they, a lot of them do a lot of things for me too. By, by far.

Vance Crowe [00:02:20] Yeah. That's the challenge of like, if people are hiring you because of your relationship, then you have like an added dimension in the negotiation about price. Like for me with speaking, right? Like it really comes down to what is the market rate and how busy am I and how unique is this thing? But then there's sometimes where you're like, I really do wanna go give this talk 'cause I like this group. Or I think that, you know, this is a person that was supportive of me years ago when things weren't good, but like, if I don't charge a high enough price, then I end up leaving my family or I'm gone. And I think like this is one of the new and hardest things about being a dad, which is like, it's very easy for culture to be like, oh, you should spend as much time as you can with your kids. Well, if I do that now, then I'm not building for the future and if I am, but I don't want to not be around for them. So like, it's this constant tension about, are my prices high enough? Am I doing this for my kids? It's not just like a, like an ego thing of how much money can I make? It's, it's like all these weird things you have to keep

Michael Ring [00:03:26] Juggling opportunity costs, right? Yeah, opportunity cost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that I am going to keep having to say no to things and it's going to keep being harder. And I know I can do better with what I have though. Like, it's not just that I have finite time and I'm filling it. Like I actually could work harder and I know it, and I could be more present and impactful with my kids in the same time. And I know it.

Vance Crowe [00:04:00] When you say you could work harder, what do you mean?

Michael Ring [00:04:04] I think that as I, Paul Graham has a good essay about this, about working hard and basically he just says that if you're a young person and you're working hard then, and I don't remember all of this, so I'm, I'm really paraphrasing here, but he says, if you're a young person and you think you're working hard, just know that you don't know what working hard is yet. You don't know what you don't know and you have to keep looking for it. And some of that, in my case also has to do with, I've built a lot of infrastructure in the last year or two years and there's all kinds of systems that I have to put in place. And once they're in place, then I can run 'em way harder. But right now I'm still like in my way through it, trying to figure it out and until I get 'em running more smoothly, then I'm, I'm giving up efficiency by far. And then I could just be more earnest. I, I know I could,

Vance Crowe [00:05:03] There's something about the hard work that's difficult in mental work or like sales work because it used to be like when I worked for a paving company, you know, like you, you just keep working, you keep lifting blocks, you keep shoveling things, you are working in this hotter weather. So like working harder was a very simple equation. You knew exactly what it meant to work harder. And like with mental work, this, it's not that way. It's like, it's not easy to say that working harder is better or like, I, I don't know.

Michael Ring [00:05:36] Yeah, I have definitely run into that, especially with writing where you're like, I know that the only way I'm gonna get better output of this project right now is if I go lay on the floor for 10 minutes and take a nap and it's gonna completely reset everything and then I'm gonna crank this out in 20 minutes instead of two hours and then I'll be done with it and I can walk away from it.

Vance Crowe [00:06:00] How has writing been for you, your new substack?

Michael Ring [00:06:04] I don't think I'm very good at it yet, but I think I've gotten a lot of really good feedback both on what the writing is and how I can improve. And so I always appreciate notes about it. It's been cool because it's not just about sharing the ideas with an audience, it's about actually taking the time for me to spend time organizing those ideas for me and, and fleshing them out and like figuring out what I believe and, and being able to explain it to someone else means that I find the gaps in it that, that I previously didn't realize were there. Or at least some of them it makes me less, less, I have less cognitive dissonance around some things.

Vance Crowe [00:06:47] Okay. I'm gonna break in here. Just to give a little bit of context. We are in a conversation with a guy named Michael Ring. Michael has been a good friend of mine for nearly a decade now. He raises cattle, he's a writer. He even invites people out to his farm to give them a chance to get away from the stresses of regular life and talk about some of the exciting things that they want to work on and explore in their lives. So you're getting to hear Michael and I who don't normally get to talk. We both have three kids, we're married, we run businesses, and because he stopped by, I decided like, let's turn on the cameras and just have a conversation. So I'm really glad that you can be here for it. Michael writes on a, on a substack that he calls Ring Family Agriculture. And he actually is the guy that I buy probably 90% of my beef from. And it just has to do with the way they raise their animals with how they butcher them and just, I love it and it's, it's a great product and I love it. I don't know if he's selling it or not, but it's what I feed my family and I thought that that might give you some context for this conversation. Of all the people that I could buy meat from, Michael and his brother Joseph, are the ones I choose to buy from most of the time. So we're gonna get back to that conversation in just a moment. But I wanted to talk about a class that I've been delivering that has become really popular. It's called Interest-Based Communications. And I wrote this class because my former business partner, Benjamin Anderson, started a biotech firm, started hiring scientists and people to come work for him.

Vance Crowe [00:08:23] And he said, man, will you create a class that would distill the things that I learned while I was working with you? And so I did, and this class basically starts off with the fundamental foundation of interest-based negotiating. How can I give you what you want and need so that you'll be much more willing to give me what I want and need? But then the class expands and it teaches communication skills, like how do you introduce yourself so that somebody else is gonna be interested and they ask good questions and you get to really put your best foot forward. Then we go into having better conversations. How do you ask questions that get people to want to open up to be excited to tell you things? Then we talk about conflict and how do you handle it when you find yourself in opposition to somebody else? And then we have an entire session on negotiations in the wild, what goes on inside of an organization when you're negotiating with a person and they represent some larger picture. How can you make sure you're thinking about this so that you effectively get through what you need to get through? If you are interested in having me deliver this course to your organization, to your company, then go to vancecrowe.com and fill out the contact form. This has been a new thing that I've just started recently doing after I did it for Benjamin, a hedge fund here in St. Louis hired me to teach it to their employees that were traders and accountants and and salespeople. And then I had an animal ag company invite me out to their sales meeting out in Kansas City and have, now I'm going to be addressing, you know, a bunch of veterinarians and salespeople and people working in the warehouse because all of us negotiate, all of us have to figure out how do we get what we want and need, but how do we do it without having all this kind of roughneck conflict that we don't want to have.

Vance Crowe [00:10:19] So it's been a fascinating class and if you're interested, go to vancecrowe.com to find out more. Alright, let's get back to that interview with Michael Ring. Yeah, I mean, you're writing about some pretty personal things. I've several times opened this up like in the morning and I'm like, just kinda groggy and I'm like, oh, Michael ring posted something. So I start flipping through it and then I'm like, whoa, this is, this is something you can't just stumble upon just anywhere. Did you set out to be like, I'm going to, to open up these deeply personal things, the death of my parents,

Michael Ring [00:10:53] You know, some of that, there's certain elements of that that I do keep personal for sure, but I think a lot of people don't realize the degree to which that was really public for me, even from a young age, if I was like 10 years old, I would've people at church like asking how I was doing and how the living situation was and you know, all that kind of stuff. And my parents were really well known in the community and they, to this day, I will still have people come up every year to me and say things like, I still think about your parents all the time that, and they'll be like, I didn't even know 'em that well. I wish I was better friends with them. And that's, that's a heck of a legacy to live up to, I guess. But I've, the things that I try to share there are things that I'm comfortable still sharing and that I've, I've kind of worked through and I think are beneficial to other people. I think if I have, if I have a level of, of love for the topic and love for other people that I'm sharing it with, and I'm fine with some of that information being out there, then I, I'm good with it As far as like why I've chosen to share some of those things specifically, it has been because of situations that I've run into in real life.

Michael Ring [00:12:32] And I just was prompted to write that. Like, I, I wrote that one piece about navigating grief as a young person that I think you're referencing because I was on a call, I was actually hauling a tractor for someone and the, the owner of the tractor was with me and she got this call that her son had died in a car crash. Like she's just receiving this news when she's with me in the truck. And the son lived with her and had a 13-year-old daughter. And so, you know, we're, we're still a half an hour from home at this point, and she's just like, I'm not home i'll to the person on the phone, I'll, you know, I'll deal with it when I get back. So, you know, we, we have this half hour conversation on our way home about like, okay, she's gonna have to go to the school and pick up the daughter and tell her what happened. She has an appointment a couple hours later at the coroner's office and this like, we're just like working through this on the fly. And so when I, when I was prompted to write this, and this is only about a month ago, like that, that was the reason behind it. And so it was just really relatable. I could just pull those things out and say, I'm gonna give this to you and I hope it's valuable to you. And it, it made it just kind of flow out. Like I think I probably only wrote that in a couple hours and I hope I can keep doing that in a, in a way that's helpful to people.

Vance Crowe [00:14:08] Yeah. In my experience, the, the only wisdom worth passing down is wisdom that you earned. Right? And like, it sounds like you, well, I know you earned your own wisdom and then you were able to pass that down. How did the rest of that car ride go?

Michael Ring [00:14:24] You know, that was an interesting one because that lady, she's a retired local one 50 union bulldozer operator, and she lost a kid, one of her sons in the late nineties. And so she, we had this whole conversation about like what she went through and what this time would be like that would potentially be different. And she talked about how she read about the five stages of grief, she called it. And I, I have looked through some of the literature on that as well. And yeah, I don't know, it was just, it, it was, I I, I relate to her really well because she, she was very like, we have to get through this. We're just gonna, we're gonna focus on this and be strong for those people around us. And we'll just, she knew that she could work through this eventually on her own, and it was important to do that. But right now she had a job to do and so we could both just be like, all right, we see each other, we're just gonna keep going.

Vance Crowe [00:15:35] Yeah. And the parallel in your own life was that you lost one parent and then lost another one. Were you better able to handle the second one? No,

Michael Ring [00:15:46] No. It was worse. Yeah. Well, I mean, like, I felt very alone because, so my, my dad passed when I was seven. He got diagnosed with stage four cancer on September 11th, 2001. Yeah. And so he only lasts a couple months after that. And then it was, there was, I'm the oldest of four, the youngest was very young at that point, I think maybe under a year old when he was diagnosed. And, and then my mom, I think that was really hard on her. And she, I don't know if it was a contributing factor because I'm told it was somewhat genetic, but she had a, a heart problem and, and her heart basically screwed up and killed her two years later. And yeah, that was definitely a lot harder for me just because of the, okay, then you're thrown into all this other stuff, like you don't have this stable home life. And mine was more stable than it could have been because I had a lot of immediate family around, or extended family. But yeah, I, I, I definitely benefited significantly by the fact that my mom had become good friends with the grief counselor from hospice when my dad died. And so she was around already. She just showed up at the house after that. And so I did get to spend some time with her. I probably should have spent some time with some other people too. But as far as like, going forward from that, I, I felt pretty alone.

Michael Ring [00:17:22] And like I didn't know how to deal with a lot of those things from like, okay, like both of my parents are gone. This is like really bad. Right? And we were, so, I was the oldest of four at that time when my mom passed. The youngest would've been about three. And just, we were just the four ring orphans living in the woods in a cabin. And we'd have different extended family members come stay with us for different amounts of time for a while until our aunt and uncle decided to move in with us. And then they had three kids. So there was nine of us that lived there for about a decade, which was just chaos by the way. I know you, you kind of relate to this 'cause you're from a big family and ours, I think it was more so just because of all that other stuff that was going on. And then we also had kids that were overlapping ages. And so it just, a lot of the times it was just my aunt was doing great if she got everybody fed and clothed and maybe give the kids a bath once or twice a week, maybe do some laundry, you know. And so I think that was, it was really hard on a lot of, on all of us for, for the, the second one, just because there was so many life changes.

Vance Crowe [00:18:39] I mean, to, to make a family pop up that fast would be so difficult mixing together things, at least when you're in middle of seven, they just get added. Maybe it's one every year, but you're adding on. But to like suddenly be responsible for all of these people, and now I know as a father of three, all of those kids are aching for attention. They need it, they need not just clothes and food but like direction and to keep from killing each other. And you're going through grief while you're at this incredibly low amount of attention. What, what did you write in your substack that you think could help somebody else guiding a, a kid through grief?

Michael Ring [00:19:21] Well, there's 10 things and I'm not gonna remember all of them. So I actually concentrated more on what it's like to be an individual and the coming of age stuff while grieving, it wasn't just dealing with the grief, right? And so I, I concentrated on things like if you can make sure that you understand the people around you and then create boundaries around that, around your emotions in a way that you can maintain. Because a boundary has to be something that you can maintain regardless of whether someone else is respecting it. Otherwise, it, it's not a boundary that's useful. I talked about valuing yourself quite a bit because, you know, I think with, with younger kids, if they're not getting enough attention, a lot of times they act out for sure. That's a pretty obvious stereotype. And so if you can, if you can become a person that you can build an identity around yourself that you're confident in, and you can project that out and not, I'm not saying you have to be like extroverted and stuff, but if you're just, if if you're a confident person and, and you have identity around respecting yourself, I would say then you're gonna do a lot better than if you are trying to get the world to love you to make up for that.

Vance Crowe [00:21:01] What identity did you cultivate?

Michael Ring [00:21:07] I was just busy a lot, but I did have a lot of identity around farming and being busy with that stuff because I, like I said, like I had it better than a lot of kids that would get thrown into foster care or something. Even despite all the other things that I've, I've had to deal with. I am a fourth generation agriculturalist to work on the same road, black Hawk Road in Oregon, Illinois. And I got my first cow when I was six. I got, my first word was tractor. As silly as that might be, I got a cell phone when I was eleven, ten, eleven because I could then be left in a tractor in a field alone away from home. And so I, I was generally just kept really busy with a lot of that. And so I, yeah, I think that was a lot of it. And, and then, I don't know, I just, I, I feel like when you're that small still, I had quite a bit of responsibility, but at the same time you are still in that childlike, you don't have a great picture of the world yet, kind of whimsical place a little bit. So I don't, I don't know,

Vance Crowe [00:22:36] When did you pick up your mechanical skills?

Michael Ring [00:22:42] It took a long time and I, I'm sure I have a long ways to go, but, so I worked through, I kind of exhibited cattle all over when I was in my teens and I had a great time doing that. I was involved in a lot of youth leadership organizations for that. And I would highly recommend that to anyone, especially homeschooled kids. I was homeschooled all the way through until college. And so I had, I was always around a lot of heavy equipment and it always needed to be worked on, whether it was just maintenance or whatever, you know, you're greasing and checking oil and stuff every single day. It's not like a car where you look at it every 3000 miles. And so I'd always, I'd always had a background in that a little bit. And I knew that if I wanted to be involved in agriculture in a, in a meaningful way, like at scale, I was gonna have to be around a lot of heavy equipment. And so I, I had kind of a penchant for tinkering with things. And so when I was done with my youth leadership stuff and showing cattle, I started in college with diesel power technology at Kishwaukee College, which is by DeKalb, Illinois, Malta. And, and it's a great program. And then I went from there and I worked at Deere for a while as a mechanic. And I, I think it's, it's something that unless you're gonna pay a lot of money for, if you're gonna own equipment, you're, you're going to have to get pretty big in scale before you can get away from working on yourself, working on things yourself to save money, just whether you want to or not.

Michael Ring [00:24:22] Like there's a lot of days where I'm like, I really don't want to have to be the one to work on this, but it's worth so much to do it myself versus farming it out. So it's definitely a thing by necessity. But what kind of scaled, the other stuff that I think you're referring to where I just tinker with all kind all kinds of stuff is that I spent about 10 years after I left deer working with my family farming. And when I was doing that, it was on an operation that was a couple thousand head custom feed yard, a couple thousand acres of row crops where we grew all the feed for the cattle, a hay and whatever. And there was, there's about six locations of buildings and all of them have a, well, and a lot of 'em have houses with furnaces and stuff. And so I ended up spending those 10 years kind of in a sandbox of learning where I would, I would just, I have to deal with all these problems that were three phase electrical motors for grain bins or air conditioning, HVAC stuff or diesel engines or whatever. And rather than farming a lot of that stuff out, I would just try and figure out how to do it because I, at a young age, I kind of became pretty autodidactic like self-taught for things because I had pretty good teachers for my schooling, for homeschooling. But on the farm stuff, the, the old guys there aren't that great at teaching stuff.

Michael Ring [00:25:55] And so I, I would just figure stuff out on my own. And so I just took that and I was like, okay. I started seeing, seeing patterns in how I worked on stuff that, it translated a lot between industries, whether it was the plumbing in a house or the, the fluid systems on a tractor. They, they use similar pieces, but they're much different, say pressure ratings or manufacturing processes or whatever. But I started to see that all these things, like underlying it is all just physics, right? And so if you can take enough of the pieces that are interconnected processes, so like if you learn all of the different types of threads of bolts and fasteners and hydraulic fittings and pipe fittings and stuff, you can, you can take something from one area and you can apply it in other areas. And so once I saw that, I was like, oh, this is, I can, I can learn anything, which is, it's a little dunning kruger there, right? But it, it really is quite a bit that way. And so, so the way I think about knowledge in general is actually around this now where, okay, so little, little, little story that you probably don't remember, but we've talked about talking before.

Michael Ring [00:27:32] There's this guy in France that created interchangeable parts, all right? And as with many advances in technology, it involved weapons. So this guy in France, he came up with a way to make interchangeable parts, and we don't think about this, but that was not always the case, right? If you, if you broke a spoke in a wheel, you had to take it to a shop and they would make the spoke for that wheel. Now we just say all that parts are interchangeable, you just go to the store and you get one, you put it on. So this guy, he made 50 guns and he took them and he showed them to a bunch of French officials and said, okay, I'm gonna take all these apart, pick any of the pieces outta here, make a gun out of it. And it blew their minds that you could do this. Okay? And that combined with the process of manufacturing processes is actually how I think about knowledge in general. Where, you know, if you have a, if you have a manufacturing company and you say, okay, I'm gonna take all these processes and I'm gonna put 'em in the right order and we're gonna put loose materials in one side and we're gonna get a product out the other. So you have, you bend a piece of steel, you weld a piece of steel, you paint it, you bolt it together out the other side comes a machine, right? It's 'cause you put all the pieces of knowledge in the right order, right? And so it's the same thing with all the systems that we work with when we're repairing things or we're building things like that hydraulic wall I built for the shop.

Michael Ring [00:29:07] Like that's combining fluid power systems with a building, right? So yeah, I think that's the general thesis of how I think about mechanics.

Vance Crowe [00:29:18] One of my goals with my kids and my neighborhood is we have a neighborhood where it's got a closed loop. Yeah.

Michael Ring [00:29:25] And so

Vance Crowe [00:29:26] I've always wanted to do this Grand Prix of go-karts, okay?

Michael Ring [00:29:29] And

Vance Crowe [00:29:30] I know that all my neighbors are just gonna go out and buy their kids a go-kart. But what I wanna do is work with my kids to build our own go-kart. And I know this is gonna require me to do some metal bending and some a little bit of welding and I've gotta do some small engine stuff. And then I've gotta figure out, and I was around it a little bit as a kid, all of these things, but never did them, you know, on my own. What would be the path that you would think I could, I should start to go down if in three years I need to have a go-kart,

Michael Ring [00:30:04] I would buy a junk one and take it apart.

Vance Crowe [00:30:06] Okay.

Michael Ring [00:30:08] I would start there. 'cause then you'll see all the components and like how they go together and stuff, but it's not so much that it's a cheat code for you, so you're like, well maybe we could just fix this one up. You know what I mean?

Vance Crowe [00:30:18] I like that the taking apart is definitely one of those things that if you've already seen it put together, even if you can't put it all the way back together, you at least are like, I, I remember taking apart these things. I remember when when you walked me through changing out the battery in my truck and you were like, you could just change it. And I'm like, oh yeah, I guess I could. But like, these are things that like by the, by being the one to take it apart, putting the new one in is like a cinch, you know, you know what it is. So, but you don't have to do it from zero.

Michael Ring [00:30:51] Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, I don't know that I've had many original ideas in my whole life. I've just taken all these other pieces and I just put 'em together in different ways.

Vance Crowe [00:31:03] Yeah, I mean, I think I talk about this, I've been doing some writing myself and there's a group of people out there that I call pattern spotters. And without going like too deep into it, there are a lot of people that you find that are highly logical, right? They, they like take something apart or they understand that, you know, if A plus B equals C, then C you know, minus B equals A, these kinds of logic things. But there's a certain kind of logical person that can take information and extrapolate it out into other kinds of information and then they can grab, like you were saying, different pieces or different parts of their knowledge and combine it to create something totally new. And I think that pattern spotting is actually the mark of real intelligence. Can you see something that is right for everybody, available for everyone, but you're the one that puts it all together. The what what we really want around us. Somebody like Elon Musk is an extraordinary pattern spotter that's able to not necessarily create from zero, like an artist with a blank white page, but instead to be like, I'm gonna take this piece and this piece and combine them together to be something far greater than what it started out as.

Michael Ring [00:32:24] Yeah. I, that that does seem like a lot of the ideas in society that we're seeing are just combinations of that, even, even in any kind of innovation we're seeing. And it's really very seldom that we find true innovation. Where do you think true innovation comes from then?

Vance Crowe [00:32:47] Yeah, I don't, I don't know what that, that they would necessarily need to be different, right? Like something from zero to a new thing, you know, maybe like a solar sale, but those we have to step on things to get to the next thing. So I don't know that you can, innovation or creativity in and of itself, I don't know, is a kind of energy that I think is is is the thing we call God, or it's what we call inspiration or a muse or whatever. There is an energy that occurs in creativity that once you've felt it, it's, it's, it's something that, you know, I can't create the, I can't generate this without finding or discovering or pushing something new together.

Michael Ring [00:33:36] You know, it's funny, this is something that I've been taking a little bit of a foray into this year when I've been considering having people visit me more often. Because what I'm really trying to do is prompt people to be able to tap into creativity by putting them in a different place and creating a new perspective for them. So I've been inviting people to come visit me at Sylmore, which is where I live. And the reason I've been doing that is just so I, I mean, some of it is just that way. I get exposure to novelty without leaving home, Right? I get to stay home with my family more. But also, like, there's actually really interesting people that I like to help that even if I can't solve their problems, maybe I can facilitate them solving their own problems, right? And yeah, I think just taking time away and sticking yourself in an environment that's different will, will prompt new things from you. And something I like to do with that is have conversations with people in a way that you can just be really non-judgmental about. So like, think about if you had somebody that you could just say all your intrusive thoughts to, and you knew they wouldn't judge you, and I'm not saying this is, this is theoretical here, right? So it's not truly maybe possible, but it would be really close.

Michael Ring [00:35:09] So if you could just say, okay, I'm gonna tell this person, I'm just gonna dump my brain out and it's gonna let me, it's kinda like journaling, right? Except it's verbal and it just, it would probably depend on the, the style of thinking you primarily work best with. So if you, if you're able to just like explain to somebody your problems with a business or with a, with a situation that you're dealing with, with some partners, whatever, and it was a person who was there being extremely attentive, they're, they're paying attention to you deeply and they aren't just trying to come up with an answer for you. They're just trying to help you get it all out and then they can maybe mirror it back to you or they can like pick out something like the tiniest choices game. Like, I see this one little thing you put in there, what's that about? Right? And like you might have not even realized that you said it, that's often how it goes, right? But I think that's really valuable too, like the combination of, okay, I'm in a new place that's giving me new perspective because virtually everyone that visits me is getting a new perspective. There's 0.3% of the population that has my job right in, in the cattle industry. So, and then also go along with that you can have these conversations with them. It's, it seems to be really helpful to people.

Vance Crowe [00:36:39] Yeah, I mean, you're speaking my language, right? Like this is, I I, I discovered this through Legacy Interviews that people will have spent 65, 70 years engaged with all the people that they are around them, but they never get a chance to talk about something that's gone on in their mind. And when they finally get a chance to say it out loud, they realize things about stuff that they've believed or thought that they knew or felt that you can, you can see it written on their face like, I didn't even know that happened, or I didn't realize that this led to that or, and it, it's like, so providing a space for a person mid-career or somebody that's trying to, to break through something, I think is, is an awesome thing. Who's taken you up on it? What type of people?

Michael Ring [00:37:33] Well, I, I honestly, I haven't done it in person that much. And the people that I have also have had like other projects that I've wanted to work with them on. So it hasn't been like just that, but I really enjoy, like Benjamin Anderson's sent a couple of his people from his lab to me this spring and had a good time. And I mean, I guess you're probably one of those people too. You've, you've come and visit me, so along with a few other people that came with you.

Vance Crowe [00:38:08] So before we turned on the microphones, we were talking about the fact that you and I have been experiencing parenthood at almost the exact same intervals. Like we were both in the hospital, our wives were both having babies at the like, literally the exact same time. Yeah,

Michael Ring [00:38:24] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:38:25] How's it going?

Michael Ring [00:38:28] I think that kids are great. I think they're a ton of fun. And if you can frame raising kids in a way that's like this fun problem to figure out where you're just like, I know there's a reason you're doing this and if I do the right thing that like you're just trying to get attention in this way, and if I can, if I can cater to it a little bit this way, then you're gonna light up and, and then like be a, be a little angel and like give me this laugh or whatever. And things like kids testing you. I think a lot of people get really frustrated when they get tested by their kids, but really what they're doing is they're trying to find the, the limits so they can conform to them. A lot of times, I mean, I think there's some hellens out there.

Vance Crowe [00:39:24] Yeah. I don't know what kind of kids you have. They're not looking to conform to them well,

Michael Ring [00:39:28] But they're gonna find

Vance Crowe [00:39:29] Them. And so

Michael Ring [00:39:30] If you can see 'em and you can see like this like instinctual drive to just find the very limit of what you're okay with putting up with. And if you put the guardrail in the right spot where it's way more fun if you spend time on that, if you really put meaningful effort into saying like, no, this is the limit of how you can act about these things. Like you can come up and you can poke me, you can act like you're gonna tickle me, but you can't like punch me in the face right then. Like you can, you can see in real time how those things make your kids into great little companions. The thing is they never end like that, that there's always something new that you're trying to like, okay, dial in the limit on this all the time, but like the more you do it, I, I just really enjoy spending time with my kids now that I, that I, I don't know, I think they're reasonably well adjusted.

Vance Crowe [00:40:25] How do you think about respect in your home as far as like the way they should treat you as the father or your wife as the mother?

Michael Ring [00:40:35] Yeah, I think that's one of those things where kids keep pushing when they, they're like, no, I don't like to eat this for dinner or whatever. And they'll like keep saying, no, I'm not gonna eat it. No, I'm not gonna eat it. But I do like to let some of that stuff happen because they'll, if they do keep pushing, I want them to be comfortable pushing back a little, like a decent amount really. Because they'll, they'll teach you things with that. They'll teach you stuff all the time about like, oh, that actually okay, that milk, I thought I gave you a fresh bottle, but really you found that somewhere and it's, it needs to be changed out or what, you know, like they're giving you information that's actually useful. They're not always just disrespecting you. So it's, it's making sure that that's the case. And I don't quite know how you do that without, if you wanna be really strict with them, you know, I, I they're teaching me stuff all the time from their input. So what do you think?

Vance Crowe [00:41:41] Yeah, it's something that I think about a lot. Like table manners for example, are, are something that we have instituted. And it was funny because my wife, like, I'll be correcting my daughters about like, hey, we always put our napkin on our lap and my wife would be like, oh gosh, I forget about this and put her, you know, like, because it's not like when we were a couple we did this right? Like we had table manners, but like instituting how do we talk with one another? We have a way that we start every meal, we have a way that we ask for them to get down and, and like on the one hand I sometimes feel like, man, you're being strict. Is this for your ego? Are you sure it's not just like you want this because you saw this on television that this is the right way? And then in other parts of me, I'm like, this is the way that you create order so that you can scale on other things that you need. And so there's like a, there's definitely a tension between, you know, wanting them to institute like a level of di wanting to institute a level of discipline upon them, but then also wanting that to be disciplined that enables them on some other domain that maybe doesn't pay off right away.

Michael Ring [00:42:56] Yeah, yeah. The, there's a lot of that where you're like, you have to reflect on your own upbringing and be like, okay, I see how this benefited me so I know it'll pay off in the long run and I should do it. Which kind of goes back to like, we just compare what worked and what didn't work to our own childhoods, and that's kind of what we're going off of.

Vance Crowe [00:43:14] Yeah. I ask people that all the time in Legacy Interviews. Did you know, when you think about your parenting, were you trying to be like your parents or were trying to be different? And people often have very nuanced and interesting answers, but they've often not thought about it explicitly.

Michael Ring [00:43:31] Yeah. It's crazy how much stuff that we run off of just implicit or emotion, emotional motivations on all that stuff. That, and I think that between adults as well in our whole lives, there's so many things that we don't say out loud.

Vance Crowe [00:43:48] Yeah, I mean I, one of the things I've been grappling with is my wife and I were talking about how among pattern spotters among like highly logical people, they think of me as a great and excellent communicator, right? Like really works well. They want feedback on like, how can I frame this? But then when I'm talking with like normies or emotional people, like I am way too direct. I'm like intimidatingly direct and like, it didn't dawn on me until my wife like pointed this out. Like there are some people Vance that like, they don't think you're a great communicator and you start thinking like, okay, why is this like I, because I don't think for most of my life that was the case, that the, that the incredibly logical direct people thought of me as a great communicator. I think it would've been the other thing. Anyway, I'm, I'm just working through this because it's been something that I've had to, you know, I have employees that are creatives and they're, they're like, you know, they're artistic and they're more gentle and they don't say things directly. And I've had to like really think about the way that I communicate because the way that I communicate with my friends and with the people that I'm maybe engaged in, in, in other ways, this doesn't work there.

Michael Ring [00:45:07] Okay. So I have two things and the one is, do you feel like for the people that are more emotional based and not direct verbal, they have like this negative bias towards all that, like verbalizing their emotions and I don't know, I think that's way more common in society than being direct. And I don't know what that comes from. It's like part of culture.

Vance Crowe [00:45:37] Say more

Michael Ring [00:45:38] That, that was basically a question for you. I don't really,

Vance Crowe [00:45:41] I don't think I understand the question.

Michael Ring [00:45:42] Okay. Okay. So I can phrase that differently. I think that just as a function of daily life and culture, people don't spend very much time verbalizing their emotions. I think that we typically just feel our emotions and don't do anything about them most of the time. And I think between parents and kids growing up, I see it a lot where you just kinda learn by osmosis, learn by example about how to handle situations with your emotions versus explaining them to your kids.

Vance Crowe [00:46:19] I, so as you're saying this, the thing that comes to mind is I don't know whether we have a good time or a bad time explaining our emotions. I think what we are really bad at is expressing our interests.

Michael Ring [00:46:32] What

Vance Crowe [00:46:32] Is it that we actually want? And and the more that you can say as clearly as your, the more you can communicate what it is that you want. To me, I have learned like, hey, this optimizes for other people to not have to mess around. Like they know this is what Vance wants and I'm going to a ask him for what I want so that, that way we can met this out. And what I'm coming to realize is there are some people that expressing what they want is v is really difficult for them. And I think that this is something that I've clearly worked on. You know, I I think about it a lot. I write about it a lot, I work on it a lot, but it's still something that is not obvious to me. And I think it's because I used to be more like that. I used to either not know what I wanted or to be afraid to say what I wanted and now I am the opposite because I've figured out how much it's helped me. But this creates like dissonance between me and people that are either afraid or don't know what they want.

Michael Ring [00:47:37] Okay, so this leads perfectly into my second thing. So you have given me feedback on a lot of different situations. You and I have known each other for a long time at this point, and we've talked about how we interact with our wives and our kids and all this stuff. And within that, I can see that when you give me or other people feedback, you are choosing how you say it because there's half a dozen or more different pieces of feedback you could give me that are all things you're thinking, but you both choose to give me a certain thing and you choose to articulate it a certain way. So how do you think about communicating with those people that see that you're doing those things?

Vance Crowe [00:48:28] You mean the people that I, I guess which people.

Michael Ring [00:48:32] So I see that you do that and so you have to think, well, I know you don't have to think, but there's the potential for you to think metacognitively about me thinking about you thinking about it. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:48:45] Tell me more. I'm I'm open to where you're going with this. I'm, I'm open to the exploration.

Michael Ring [00:48:49] Okay, I'll, I I'm sorry. I'll try again. So if you're giving me feedback and I'm saying, okay, that's good feedback from Vance, but I know there's a lot of other feedback you were also thinking about giving me, and within the feedback that you did give me, you thought of several different ways to give it to me before you did so and you chose one. So I think about, well why didn't you give me the other ones?

Vance Crowe [00:49:16] Oh, that's interesting. But,

Michael Ring [00:49:18] But this is moreover how you think about me knowing all that stuff.

Vance Crowe [00:49:25] Yeah. Okay. So that's what you mean by like metacognition, right? Yeah. It's not just, what am I thinking? It's what are you thinking and what are you thinking that I'm thinking that you're thinking, which like very quickly gets like weirdly turtles all the way down, but is important. You know, this may be my, one of my creative like strengths or whatever where it's hard to know like, hey, where did that creative idea come from? I don't actually have multiple pieces of feedback to give you. I have the one to give you that I think, hey, this is one that I've thought of. And generally speaking in the spirit of my mentor Peter, I often give people the feedback that I think they would want if they knew that I had to give it. And so like, I am telling you something not to hurt your feelings or not to even change you so that it benefits me. I'm usually saying whatever I think like, oh, Michael would want to know this if he knew that I thought this, not, not because I thought it, but like, you would want to change this or you would would want to understand the way you're doing that is making people feel this way, or the way you're expressing this is, is hampering the thing that I think you want as your outcome. And so my feedback is really fashioned after my mentor who, and and another guy named Curt Wieny, who we both know, who both are extremely good at giving you feedback that you would wanna know if you knew that somebody else had that information for you.

Michael Ring [00:50:57] Hmm, that's interesting. I had no idea where you would go with that. I might have to, I'll re-listen to this and, and see what I think of that. Hmm.

Vance Crowe [00:51:10] But with children and your closest family members, right? Like my wife, when I can get over the ego death that needs to happen when she gives me feedback gives me literally the best feedback in the whole world. But it is a fight for, for me to receive it, right? Like we have a whole process that after I've done it a few times, I now am like, oh, okay, I can try and jump over that part where I'm resisting this. And I'm sure it's the same with your kids. I'm sure your kids have to become resistant in some way to your feedback in order that they can stand up on their own and they aren't like, you know, crippled by, by your feedback and your thoughts and those that don't become resistant to their parents' feedback become their parents' automatons, which is definitely not what you want. Way

Michael Ring [00:51:57] Worse. Yeah, that's interesting that, okay, so the frame, you're saying you have a framework for being like, okay, I am receiving feedback and so I need to consciously open my mind to it and be able to take it in and, and think about it and not just be really resistant to it upfront just because I'm emotional and I don't wanna I don't wanna, you know, be told I'm wrong,

Vance Crowe [00:52:26] Right? Yeah. Or, or even just feel the feelings of being like, if they're right about this now I'm embarrassed because I can think of all the circumstances under which I have screwed this up. Right? So somebody gives you feedback about the way that you interact with you, interacted with another person and you know, very clearly like, well I do that with a whole bunch of other circumstances, so now I'm not just feeling the sting of embarrassment of whatever that one thing is that you're telling me about, but I'm also having to be like, ugh. Right? And like we all know the incredibly horrible feeling of wincing about something you said or did and then, and then seeing it add infinitum into your past.

Michael Ring [00:53:12] Yes, for sure. Yeah. And I, yeah, well I think that's, that's probably it. That definitely hits today because my wife did that to me and I really deserved it like two days ago and I was like, okay, that was, we'll work with that one. But is that something that you came to like primarily through interacting with your wife or is it just something that you brought there?

Vance Crowe [00:53:42] I I came to these realizations about my wife in retrospect. So like, you know, if before I was gonna give a talk, I need to have a sounding board, right? Otherwise you're just saying it to yourself or whatever. And so then when I'm saying it out loud, just like you said, when you're writing down for your blog, you all of a sudden discover your gaps, right? And when I am on, when I'm talking in front of my wife, there's parts where I'll be like, ah, da da da da, you know, like, I'll finish that out. And she'll be like, no, no, like what are the details there? And I'll be like, I, I mean, I've got it, don't worry about it. And she'll be like, no, I want to hear it. And then you realize like, okay, I don't actually have that. And then, or if you have like a transition, this is one thing I'm saying, and now I need to tie it to this other thing I want to talk about. And she'll be like, that transition's terrible. Like, nobody's going to know what you're talking about. She's not telling me it's terrible because she's like, I want to stick a dagger into you. She's being like, let me put a flag here and like, let's work on this. But instead I'm like, oh, you just don't understand and like know the energy and whatever it is. And like eventually I come back down, I'll be like, okay, well what do you want me to do? And then you're like, okay, actually that is better. And then I come to the conclusion like, okay, I can work on it this way and this is what you mean. And then it becomes smoother. And then I'm like, oh, this is great. I'm so glad I made this change. But I have to go through that psychological like hurdles and pain and frustration and all of that.

Michael Ring [00:55:07] Yeah, I, I definitely get that when you're just like, I, I wanna put this in an article so bad and I just, there's nothing around it that you can tie, tie to it with. So yes, resonate strongly. Does your wife read your speeches or is that just like, if you're just like,

Vance Crowe [00:55:24] No, before a speech, like before we're leaving the night before we'll be like chatting and she'll be like, what are you giving to talk about? And I'll be like, ah, you don't worry about it. And then she'll be like, no, let's talk about it. Or sometimes, and this is really when I'm giving new talks, I gotta give it to somebody, right? I gotta share it with somebody. And like in the last year or so, I've given a lot of new talks and this is where I am literally taking an idea that has been an abstract thought in my mind and trying to put it into words that another person not only can understand but can use. Like my talks are, you know, about communications, but the highest praise somebody can give me is that's really practical. I can use that.

Michael Ring [00:56:07] And

Vance Crowe [00:56:08] So to take an abstract idea of something that I just do naturally or I've seen somebody do or something and turn it into a metaphor that can then be practically used and instructions that don't guide somebody off in the wrong path is hard to do.

Michael Ring [00:56:22] You're threading a pretty tight needle there.

Vance Crowe [00:56:23] Yeah.

Michael Ring [00:56:24] Yeah. Man, I, I wish I could hear more of your talks on a, on a, like, I don't know. I wish they were cataloged somewhere a little bit better. 'cause I will go occasionally look up something if I think it's relevant. Joseph's really good at remembering them for some reason, so I just sometimes ask him my twin brother.

Vance Crowe [00:56:47] Well this is nice to hear. I I've been working on writing all these concepts down.

Michael Ring [00:56:53] Really?

Vance Crowe [00:56:54] Yeah. Yeah. And, and AI has been very helpful to me because it transcribes them and then I say like, ask me questions about this. And then because it does, then I'm verbalizing things and if I say it a few times, then I come home and if it's like a good enough idea, then I'm explaining it to my wife and then I write it down. And so it's, AI has been that kind of non-judgmental person for these ideas.

Michael Ring [00:57:20] Do you use, what voice mode do you prefer? If you like, if you're talking to it and do you, do you use that part for this?

Vance Crowe [00:57:27] Yeah, some, but then it always, it always fucking interrupts me.

Michael Ring [00:57:31] Grok is horrible, horrible.

Vance Crowe [00:57:33] I

Michael Ring [00:57:33] Got so mad two days ago and I was trying to do that chat GT's a little better. It's,

Vance Crowe [00:57:38] Yeah, and I use Claude a little bit, but, so now what I actually do is I record things in voice memo. I just like talk to my phone and record it. And then I use the transcription that you can get from your voice memo and I upload the, the, the written thing to my AI and then have it respond, which is like a step I don't want to have to do, but it, it works way better for me to not be interrupted or not to have the idea hijacked or changed in some way.

Michael Ring [00:58:09] Do you, can't you just use like the voice transcription thing on GPT? So

Vance Crowe [00:58:14] You can, it's just tighter this way. Oh, okay. And then I, and then I also have the recording itself.

Michael Ring [00:58:18] Okay. Yeah, no, that's okay. That's very valid. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:58:22] How, how do you use AI right now?

Michael Ring [00:58:27] I, you know, I think all of us have been like, give me this beautiful essay of ideas around this topic and then it's just garbage. So that's not really a super useful way to use it. But I will, I will, I will talk to it a decent amount. 'cause it's, it's decent at giving you feedback on, like, I used it to prep for this a little bit because I, you've worked with me a decent amount at like telling my background story and I've, I've probably like, somewhat frustrated you with how bad it was initially. Like may not that much, but, so I was like, no, I should probably do this. And I spent some time on that last week. I use it as a thesaurus a lot or like, give me five ways to say this and then I'll not use any of 'em, but I'll use a little snippet outta something and it helps me come up with ideas a little faster. I will, I'll, I'll use it for mechanical problems, but if I'm trying to find a part or something that I can't just Google, it's probably pretty obscure and it's probably not gonna win very well anyway.

Vance Crowe [00:59:40] Have you used Grok 4?

Michael Ring [00:59:43] I got it yesterday.

Vance Crowe [00:59:44] Oh shit, man, that thing, it's unbelievable to me.

Michael Ring [00:59:48] Really,

Vance Crowe [00:59:50] Grok 4 is the, like I'm sitting down with my wife after having used it for a couple of days and being like, we need to radically rethink our children's education. We need to really think about where our own businesses and what we're going to be doing in five years is because gr is the thing that like really opened my eyes to like, hey, like this is going to get faster and bigger and way smarter, way faster than I thought it was.

Michael Ring [01:00:22] And how are you applying it?

Vance Crowe [01:00:24] So I, you know, I used Grok 4. I mean, I, I was looking at legal agreements. I was having it have intensely asked me que you know, like I have a group of people that I'm trying to persuade the, on the value long-term of Bitcoin. And it was a, they, they have legal constraints and they have, you know, psychological constraints and rock fours level of discourse with me is as good as if I went out. And if I as as anyone from pattern spottings ability to articulate a great case, I mean, it, it is truly staggering to me. How intelligent is it? It's, it's like something has happened in with Grok four this's probably worth talking about. In the past you used to have people that went to elite institutions and they got elite degrees, a PhD in, in a field from Harvard or MIT or Stanford. And the only way you had access to them was if you either had network connections or money and now everyone can for $30 a month, a dollar a day, essentially get access to whatever information those people had. And those people were in a different class, they had a prestige about them that was that totally different. That's gone now. Now the, now the woman that was picking me up for my enterprise rental car has the same access to the same information and the same ability to digest it and have it be able to ask questions of it and, and be able to mold and shape and do something with that information as people that used to only have access to the elite.

Michael Ring [01:02:15] Okay. So I know when you first, when you had your first kid, you didn't even, even, she didn't watch tv, she didn't know what a TV was. So how are you thinking about introducing that?

Vance Crowe [01:02:27] Yeah, I mean, I'm going as long as I can because I, I think that the thing that will make humans special is probably their taste is, is probably their preferences. It's probably like that they have an opinion about things that wasn't just told to them what their opinion is. You know, the thing about AI is that it can't really say no unless no is programmed into it, whereas a human has choice and that that free will and that, like what are you drawn to? And so I, my children still don't, I mean they've watched very, very minimal, the thing we watch on YouTube is primitive technology. Have you ever seen this? So it's like where a guy goes out into the Australian outback and he makes an el and he makes a hand ax, and then he starts with that hand X chopping down trees and then he like makes bricks and a forge. And now he is like smelting iron, but he didn't do it with tools. Like we watch that on YouTube. But outside of that, that and ballet. So, and the reason that I do this is not because I want little house on the Prairie children. It's because I want their imaginations to run as wild as possible for as long as possible. Because once they become, once they have the auxiliary power of ai, then their brains will atrophy in some important way. And I think they will be different humans. And I want them to be as human, human as they can for as long as they can.

Michael Ring [01:03:57] I very much agree with the, the taste, the aesthetic statement. I mean, I do believe that that is the new most important skill is, is taste and a desire to care about aesthetics. And I, I think we're long overdue for that. I think that as a result of, well, fiat, fiat money devaluation, we just, we don't value a lot of things that in the past would've been such as beautiful architecture or anything low time preference like that. And that I, I think that we are reaching a new age where people will put emphasis on those things, things that are real and hard and valuable. And I, I'm thrilled that that is has potential to happen finally. And like maybe it is catalyzed by AI and Bitcoin. I mean, hey, that's, it seems like there's some potential to

Vance Crowe [01:05:11] Yeah. How do you cultivate an aesthetic in your children?

Michael Ring [01:05:15] I have no idea. I, I mean, I think that we are surrounded by so much beauty that it's easy to miss. And so I think that just stopping and, and showing them some of those things, I guess would be what I would say. And I, I think that I, I love where I live. I think there's a lot of beauty there, even though it's not a, a city or anything. And all we have to do is appreciate where we are as much as we can.

Vance Crowe [01:05:52] Yeah, I, one of the things that's amazing about my oldest daughter is that she has a fashion sense.

Michael Ring [01:06:00] Oh, interesting. And

Vance Crowe [01:06:01] Like my wife and I did not impute this into her, right? Like this is just her, and like this morning for example, she was willing to spend more than 15 minutes like climb, crawling through unfolded clothes and drawers because she had in mind a color of sock that she wanted to wear with a skirt. And I think like, I could not care less about this. Your mother doesn't care about this. She's not trying to attract boys. She just has something in her that wants to be expressed in this way that that, and when she found it, she was like, found it. You know? Got it. That pair of socks goes with that skirt goes with that shirt, and she's not even five years old. And so for me, like I see this and I feel it and I think like, all right, I want her to have exposure to color and I want like her to know about fabrics and I want her to have opinions. I'm not going to tamp it, like fashion's not my gig, but like, I am not gonna tamp this down. I'm going to turn that up as much as I can.

Michael Ring [01:07:05] I will say my daughter does, she does have opinions about that, but it's also not always rational. Like it's like those don't match at all, you know, but she's like, I want, I know I have this and I know I have this and I want it to go together. Or she will ask her mother, like she wants to know those things. And I don't think that was something like, I don't think we really make sure of that. Like we don't impute on her that, that she needs to consider that. It's like she just wants to know how she can like, have those features about her.

Vance Crowe [01:07:41] How is raising girls different than raising boys?

Michael Ring [01:07:43] You know, I am actually glad we had a girl first. They seemed to like, respond to things a lot better. They develop really fast and they're very, very cuddly, very loving. Our, our kids are anyway, whereas our, our little boy, he's, I think he's pretty tame to be honest so far. He's not like a little hellan, but my wife is already like, he's a lot to deal with sometimes, you know, compared to Amelia who will go, you know, play with her dolls and, and go play with her kitten in the garage and just hang out. And it'll be interesting if he gets a little older. Now Joseph has a little boy that he climbs things that I did not know it was possible for a child to climb and then he will fall off of them and it is bad. But he's, he's a little trooper about it too, which makes up for it, I guess. But that was, that was pretty, it, it's a lot more extreme. So you definitely see the, the difference between them for sure. I don't know, you you'll, you'll have an experience I'm sure if you have a little,

Vance Crowe [01:09:04] Even we have a one month old, right? Yeah. And like even there and it's, it may just be in my own head, but it definitely feels like there is an energy difference, right? There is definitely an energy difference when we're at church and the way that people would wave to our little tiny girls versus the way they wave to our little boy, you know, they, like, at that age they look really, really similar. So maybe it's just the way they're dressed or whatever, but like, it feels like there is a tangible difference, an energy difference that like when all this argument is going on about like, oh, you know, boys and girls and are, you know, do we just teach them their, their gender? I don't think so. And we're only one month into this game and I've, you know, my little boy is different than my girls.

Michael Ring [01:09:49] It's so different. It's, yeah, it's so stark. And I mean I get that every kid is different, but like on mass as an average, it's extremely stark. It's very present. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:10:02] That's right.

Michael Ring [01:10:03] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:10:04] So you mentioned Bitcoin and fiat and one of the things that you are into that is like a foreign language to me is, is commodity trading or at least like understanding futures and you're involved in a, in a group of people that get together and talk about this. What does a group of commodity traders get together and talk about?

Michael Ring [01:10:26] Yeah, well, okay, this is the part where I have to really try not to say words people don't know just because it has its own pattern language. And basically my primary involvement in commodity started just because I'm in commodity ag, right? And there's a lot of zeros moving around that you are just a lot of times trying to break even or a little bit more on. And so you really need to hedge risk. And so that's a lot of what farmers are interested in commodity markets for in, in terms of futures and options trading maybe is their hedging risk. They're trying to say, I'm gonna lock in some kind of profit or I'm going to limit the amount I can lose. And so it's a really emotional game because it's more than just number go up. It's, it's all the emotion around sunk cost fallacy or, or losing things as humans that we fixate on way more than we do on the gains. And so I think a big part of it is just focusing on managing your emotions and making smart decisions. And I say that as someone who's done a lot of dumb things in that process and thankfully I haven't really lost that much money at it, especially since a lot of the time I am hedging things. I'm just managing risk.

Michael Ring [01:11:57] I'm not speculating that much. But you know, if you say, if you have, I mean if you have 500 acres, you're, you still have to manage several hundred thousand dollars of risk just on your grain. I mean it,

Vance Crowe [01:12:18] Meaning you're gonna grow that grain corn or soybeans and you could wait until you've harvested it and sell it at whatever price the market gives you that day. Or you could start saying, well I'm gonna sell a little bit of it now while the market's at this price and I'm gonna sell a little bit of it as it goes forward in order that you don't ever lose more than what you, what it put you what it costs to produce it.

Michael Ring [01:12:41] Yeah. And you can do that with things like put contracts where you're saying, okay, I'm gonna give up 10 cents of my margin that I know I'm not gonna get back necessarily. But if I do that and this contract is sitting there, then I know I can't lose more than this much money. 'cause if it does go under that, I'll just execute the contract and then I'll, I'll, I have the option to sell it but not the obligation. Right. And so that, it's kinda like buying insurance, you know, you're giving up a little bit of your profit margin to lock it in and there's a lot of tools that are offered through the government now, especially with insurance price protection with the LRP on cattle that you're able to buy some of those products and they are effectively insurance. Like you're just locking in a limited downside. And I think it, it does work best when you use them une emotionally when you're just, okay, this is a math equation and I'm just doing something responsible. But at the same time, like it's not always like that. Like you're still at the mercy of the markets and you can look back and say, yeah, I should have contracted two years out and now I feel like crap that I didn't, and the price dropped in half and there's nothing you're gonna do about it. Like that happens to people. That's happened to a lot of farmers in the last two years. And so yeah, you mentioned, I'm part of a group that is just a handful of farmers that are interested in that type of thing. And honestly, a lot of what we talk about is, is the emotions around it and them and thoughts around how to be better people on our own and like how, what that brings to us as business people when we're making these decisions.

Michael Ring [01:14:26] And it's a lot of jargon and math and stuff too. It's like I see these patterns and the magic lines and the the ways the market moves relative to whatever, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:14:39] Do you believe in those things? The like the, you know, the technical

Michael Ring [01:14:42] Tarts?

Vance Crowe [01:14:43] Yeah.

Michael Ring [01:14:45] My personal idea there and like take, take this for what it's worth, which is nothing is, I think it's human nature. I think they are a representation of what we think they are. And so like if everybody believes that's what it is, then that's kind of what it is and that's how it works. So if you're just, if, if it's a combination of agreed upon rules along with human behavior and, and you're just modeling what human behavior would do across it, then the emergent phenomena from it are just a product of human behavior, even if it's computer trading their computers designed by people.

Vance Crowe [01:15:26] So let me restate this and see if what you're saying is this, sometimes people will see these charts like a, like some kind of a triangle in the, in the way the

Michael Ring [01:15:36] Red

Vance Crowe [01:15:37] Bars are and the green bars are. And then they'll say, oh, this is coming to like a point and we know that the next thing that's gonna happen is a giant green bar is gonna show up there. And since we all know that this is what happens when that happens and we're gonna buy because we are anticipating that that green bar means the number go up and because I'm doing it and you are doing it and those five people are doing it, or those 5,000 people are doing it, then it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The green bar goes up because everybody saw the signal the, that wasn't necessarily an actual signal, but it kind of was a pattern that people agree on. Is that what you're saying?

Michael Ring [01:16:17] I, yes, I would say that that is a possible option that it could follow, but then, so that is a technical, but the other side of it is a fundamental. So the fundamental side is what is actually happening in the real world. Trump tariffs game's different now. Okay,

Vance Crowe [01:16:41] What does that mean?

Michael Ring [01:16:43] What it means that it's still chaos theory. Like it's okay if in in a vacuum, if you're just looking at the technicals. Yeah, it would probably work that way more so where it's just human nature, but then we have the chaos theory of the world that it throws you a curve ball and if that drastically changes the scenario, that's the thing that it's gonna follow. Now

Vance Crowe [01:17:04] My sense is that the chaos theory is like that's always going on, right? Yeah. Before that it was, you know, war in Ukraine before that, you know, oil embargo or, or you know, people printing money or whatever that is. So to me, I totally uneducated in this and I've never made money or lost money in this world. So I'm only telling you what probably received wisdom is that it's like astrology for commodity dudes, right? Yeah. They're like looking at numbers and, and it's predicting the future, whereas there is no future to be predicted there.

Michael Ring [01:17:39] Yeah. I think a lot of it's still statistics to some extent. Like if it's, if it's doing this thing, then there's a probability that it does this thing next, right? It's, it is still, it, it tends to work out that way. So if you work with the strongest ones, it, I mean just statistically that's just what happens. I don't, I'm not gonna say why the statistics are like that. And then a market can change and become a new market. Like the markets that we have now are very different than the markets we had in the early two thousands. They respond entirely differently for a multitude of factors.

Vance Crowe [01:18:20] And what do you think some of those factors are? Algorithmic trading? Probably one of them.

Michael Ring [01:18:23] Yeah, I'm sure that's one of 'em. But like for example, we have to consider a lot more things, well not really more things, but just things are different now. So like corn market, there's way more acres in South America now than there used to be cattle market. There used to be a bunch of cattle in Brazil that they just turned into grain acres, right? And so we're, we're at this interesting point in the cattle industry where nobody in the world has cattle. It's not that we're low and somebody else is compensating, it's nobody does Australia's trying to build, but they probably won't that much. The dairy herd can't do it 'cause they're way short on replacement heifers. Brazil, like I just said, put a bunch of their acres in crops so they don't have that many cattle. And so like okay, it's a new market.

Vance Crowe [01:19:13] Yeah. What a wild time that just as like the carnivore and paleo craze is at a fever pitch. Mm. There's beef is getting to an all time high and the, you've said this before, like the herd is at an all time low. And when I talk to cow calf operations, they can't produce enough calves fast enough, right? Is it whatever they have is, is, is being sold for pretty high prices. But I was talking to a guy that raises bulls and he said one of the worst markets he's ever been in that like he's his his highest price bulls. You don't agree with that?

Michael Ring [01:19:50] No, I don't. I think it's really dependent on where you are because like the one ranch that I bought a bull from this spring, they sold every extra bull they had. It just, it really, that is seed stock is its own game. It really is. Especially with bulls like way, even even more than replacement heifers. 'cause you only need so many bulls. You a mature bull services 30 cows, right? So you, you need way less of 'em. So bulls is, is a really regional thing and it has to do more with your customer base. Whereas like there's a lot, there's a lot of heifers that got cut back this year. There really is. And I don't know if they're all gonna have homes this fall. I think we probably won't see. So there's the cattle, when

Vance Crowe [01:20:34] You say got kept back, where would they normally go?

Michael Ring [01:20:38] Like they got kept back to breed instead of getting sent to a feed lot. I

Vance Crowe [01:20:41] See. Yeah,

Michael Ring [01:20:42] Yeah. And so, I mean it's so capital intensive right now that it is still hard to keep 'em. And like, I wish I had more of them and I can't make myself like we, we just retained like a third more and I just, I can't really see laying out more capital just because it's a lot of capital to do it.

Vance Crowe [01:21:11] That's because you're raising a cow that's going to have a baby and you've gotta feed her that whole time and you're not making money on her going to be sold to a, to be turned into beef that people eat. You've gotta keep her fed and healthy and and that's the capital that you're putting into her in order to be able to have one more calf next year.

Michael Ring [01:21:33] Yeah, and that's the thing about agriculture in general. It, it usually has lower returns than a lot of other places you can stick money in the world, right? And, and cattle is no exception because you know, if you, if you're developing your own heifers, you breed a cow, they just ate for nine months, they have the calf, we wait a year turn, turn 'em out as a yearling, breed them wait another year to get a calf and then you wait another year to feed the calf out before you get any return on that heifer. If you're fattening her calf out, like that's, that is a heck of a window to pay interest on for a return That is not, I mean, even with today's prices, if you're, if you have a bunch of stuff financed, it doesn't work like you, you have to have cheap rented land. You have to have cheaper equipment if you're gonna finance the cow. You can't, if you, you need land equipment and cows and you can't finance all of 'em, there's no way you have to start with equity somewhere or you have to rent or you have to do something. You have to have some advantage.

Vance Crowe [01:22:43] Okay. I'm gonna take just a couple of moments to break in here. One of the things that I'm doing when I'm not interviewing interesting people like Michael is that I'm conducting Legacy Interviews. This is where I sit down with parents and grandparents and we talk about their life stories. We ask them questions about their childhood, what it was like to grow up when they did, we capture stories about their career, what were the ups and downs when were things that you were planning to work out, didn't work out. And we talk about their marriage and raising children and then we talk about the wisdom that they've learned along the way. And people have loved this interview process. We hear all the time from families that have watched it together and said, I learned so much about my parents, I had no idea. And I'm so glad we got a chance to watch it before they were gone. Because that meant not only could we hear their stories and laugh along with them, but we could ask them more questions. We could discover more about not just them, but about what makes me, me and a lot of my clients, they say, you know, I'm so glad that I captured this because my children are gonna understand me better because they saw what my parents were really like. They heard what my parents did and what they thought about. And I think that's gonna help my kids understand me better. If you're interested in having me record your loved ones telling their life stories, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. All right, let's go back to this interview with Michael Ring. You know, I hadn't thought of this question until now, but you may be one of the best poised people to answer the, the, the thing that I'm always saying that I think that ag land could be demonetized or will be demonetized by Bitcoin.

Vance Crowe [01:24:27] You're one of the few people that both understands ag and understands Bitcoin. What do you think of that? Do you think that Bitcoin is going to take out some of the monetary premium in, in ag land?

Michael Ring [01:24:41] I doubt the statement that I'm the best positioned just because I don't think I'm that smart or knowledgeable about this subject. I think that we will have unprecedented levels of private equity come into farmland and that that will be the only thing, the only thing that staves off falling land prices like we saw in the eighties.

Vance Crowe [01:25:06] I don't know that we're gonna see private equity come in. How a private equity is into run is going to run into a band saw in the next six months. And it is because there is no hedge fund on earth right now that is making better returns than the Bitcoiners none zero. So now they're gonna have to justify all of their expenses that they are all their big salaries, all their fancy offices. They're now going to have to justify why would we do this for you to trade in all these things where you get a 20% return where Bitcoin and gold is getting a hundred percent return.

Michael Ring [01:25:45] I, that is a great point and I guess I hadn't fully considered that. However, I think we still have another 10 years of the older demographic that won't switch as fast and I think they want to stick their money in land at, at a private equity level.

Vance Crowe [01:26:04] Maybe I've got a, I've like, I just, can I just go on this go, this is my, so like I think that, I think we, the boomers are discovering something that is going to, to shock them, which is the amount of money that they've been saving and that they have as wealth is going to be liquidated to pay for their healthcare, which is going to continue to go up and up and up. And one of the ways that they have stored their wealth is in the equity of their house

Michael Ring [01:26:34] And

Vance Crowe [01:26:35] In their stock and portfolio. And no one that is in the younger generations coming up has the money to buy their houses at the prices that they have been told from Zillow and that they've told their financial planner that their house is, and that really what they're gonna get is 60% of whatever that house was worth, which is gonna be nowhere near what they anticipated. And there's going to be so much wealth that evaporates because it was just, it was just paper wealth, it was just written on a spreadsheet. And I think a whole bunch of money is going to dry up. I think the same thing with stocks, right? Like I think unless you continue corporate America where young people are given jobs where they're given a 401k and then that 401k every single week like clockwork turns a bit of their salary into purchasing the stock market, which ultimately became too complicated. So everybody did it in index funds,

Michael Ring [01:27:33] Which

Vance Crowe [01:27:33] That is going to go away. It's, it's going to come to an end because as corporate America doesn't keep these people employed, the boomer's houses are going to go down and there's not going to be people to buy the stock market that there was before. And you're not gonna be able to liquidate it when you need it the most because of your healthcare costs.

Michael Ring [01:27:52] Okay. So I think that a lot of people get to be right given the right timeline because if you, this is something we see in options a lot where if you pick the right time duration, you're right, but a lot of times you don't. And so what you're saying about them liquidating this, that all happens in the next 10, 12, 15 years, right?

Vance Crowe [01:28:17] Yeah, I would, I would say probably faster. I think probably five years, five years I think, I think we're talking five years.

Michael Ring [01:28:22] Okay. So with that in mind, if we keep having inflation to where they see their home prices may even continue to go up. Okay. Maybe,

Vance Crowe [01:28:34] Yeah.

Michael Ring [01:28:34] Because they might still have more zeros, but their buying power is going down. Do you think, how much do you think that's going to affect their realization of what's happening if they're buying power goes down versus their, are they still just gonna run outta money? Doesn't matter. They're gonna run outta money.

Vance Crowe [01:28:51] I I don't, you know, I don't know, five years may as I'm saying this out loud, that may be too fast. But my my point is as the government has to print money in order to be able to meet their financial obligations, the buying power of boomers is going to go away before they realize it.

Michael Ring [01:29:09] Hmm.

Vance Crowe [01:29:09] So they're not going to realize just how much healthcare costs are going to be and they're not going to realize that there's nobody around to be able to buy their houses. And so this, this, their actual, if we, if we were to call it like their actual buying power is going down much, much faster than anybody perceives. And this is why inflation is an actual evil. It's like they're being taxed to death and they don't even know it. And they're looking at young people and they're like, oh, poor young people, but we're really wealthy. But what they don't realize is like, no, actually you're not, you're, you're having all of your wealth sucked away too.

Michael Ring [01:29:49] Yeah. I, the the, the timeline thing is really just the answer. Like that's the unknown I think is like, we can sit here and be like, yeah, this is probably gonna happen and then we just, that would, that would be the part that would make you look like a genius is whether you knew what the timeline was.

Vance Crowe [01:30:08] Yeah. I mean, in taking an options contract and being two weeks, you know, too early means you don't, you don't win anything. You lost it all.

Michael Ring [01:30:15] Yep. Should have rolled, should have rolled forward.

Vance Crowe [01:30:19] What do you think the future of Bitcoin is?

Michael Ring [01:30:24] You've looked at them, I assume you've looked at the math of like, okay, if these highest decile or whatever percentage of people owned this little itty bitty percentage of one Bitcoin divided across all of them, what do you think the price would go to? Have you ever looked at that? In theory,

Vance Crowe [01:30:47] If I have, I couldn't say anything meaningful about it. Okay.

Michael Ring [01:30:53] I've, I've looked at some numbers from a couple family office services, mainly just one. And I mean, it looks pretty good to me because there's, there's a lot more wealthy people with no Bitcoin than you think. And if they jumped on it, I I hope that everyone would be on it too. 'cause it's, it has a lot of potential.

Vance Crowe [01:31:20] So say more plainly what you mean.

Michael Ring [01:31:22] Well, I mean that if you take the top few percent of people that are extremely wealthy in the world, not just in the US in the whole world, and you divide it across the amount of Bitcoin that there is, there's not very much Bitcoin to go around relative to the people that have all the money in the world. So what do you think happens when they decide it's a good idea?

Vance Crowe [01:31:51] Yeah, the price goes crazy. I mean right now there isn't even enough Bitcoin out there remaining for all the people that are current millionaires to have one Bitcoin. And that's like one of those staggering thoughts where you're like, yeah, but they're so rich. And it's like, well there's just, if they, if they, whenever they start running towards the door, there's only so many people that can get through the door.

Michael Ring [01:32:14] Yeah. So like, just from the statistics side of it like that, I think that it's, it has a ton of potential. Like it's, it's unfathomably good potential. And along with that, you know, I've, I've talked to some people that locally that are like, well I think there's other better technologies than Bitcoin that still do the same thing, but they're more efficient. And I really do take kind of the Jack Mallers's approach of like, no, that is the point. Like it's supposed to cost money to mine. It's supposed to be hard to, it's supposed to cost you something for the transaction. That's what helps keep the value in it and it's moving trapped energy. So

Vance Crowe [01:32:56] Yeah, I think that that's the big thing I've been thinking a ton about, which is like, I don't think we have enough, I don't think this is all that profound, but we do not have enough energy to do the things that we want to do because like the AI that we're talking about that is all energy, right? It's super organized energy into complex thought and computation and, and Bitcoin is going to require energy and whatever manufacturing you're trying to bring back or reshore that's going to require energy. And so, you know, un until we start seeing giant towers being built, you know, smokestacks and things like that, we are, we are not preparing for the future. That's, that's the most important thing more important in your city than new skyscrapers going up is likely new, new smokestacks going up.

Michael Ring [01:33:50] Nuclear you mean like

Vance Crowe [01:33:52] Cooling?

Michael Ring [01:33:52] Cooling towers.

Vance Crowe [01:33:53] Cooling towers. Yeah, that's what I mean. Smokestacks.

Michael Ring [01:33:55] Yeah. Which I live,

Vance Crowe [01:33:57] Or coal, I don't care. Do it all. It doesn't matter to me. Whatever it takes to generate energy.

Michael Ring [01:34:01] You know, it's funny, Illinois actually is pretty robust on nuclear and they're really, they've, they've gotten some pretty lucrative offers already at most of the plants in Illinois for data centers next to them. Like they, we thought our light water reactor at Byron was gonna get shut down like 10 years ago and now they're putting a data center right across the road to get power off peak or whatever. And that's gonna revitalize our area. Well extend it like we live in a really nice area, but it's going to extend the, the potential life of that syst that whole deal for who knows how long from that being there and the jobs it's, it's gonna bring in. And we're already, like our base is pretty manufacturing heavy so we have a decent amount of jobs, but that's gonna be a higher tier of, of salary for sure.

Vance Crowe [01:35:04] My conspiracy theory is that this part's not the conspiracy. Like we are going to see energy, electricity rates go up, so everybody's gonna pay more. You're gonna pay more in your lease. You're gonna pay more at your house for your electricity, like you're gonna pay more for electricity. 'cause demand is going up and supply is relatively flat for a long time. But I think suddenly we will no longer see anybody talking about climate change. And I think that's because the climate change operation was funded by people that wanted to constrain the supply of energy. And it was not actually, I mean they, they certainly got people to become ideological about climate change, but the way that that kept getting propagated was by energy companies that wanted to keep the, the supply constrained so that that way prices would stay up. But now we are going to have so much demand that they won't need that anymore. And we will see climate change and the conversation around that be way, way smaller than what are you doing to bring the price of electricity down?

Michael Ring [01:36:12] Do you think that that will, for the ideologically invested people, do you think it will just kind of pivot over to like clean planet stuff?

Vance Crowe [01:36:21] Yeah, maybe. Yeah, probably that. Like, but they, like, there's no way they know anything that that that very many of them, having been somebody that like experienced what really strongly ideological people thought about things like GMOs and pesticides, most of them are just receiving this information and suddenly it's going to be about, you know, energy access and making sure that, I don't even think it'll be about clean nothing. I think it'll be about like, how can we make this more fair and how can we get people more electricity? I think the, the government subsidies into clean energy, that's all going away 'cause there just won't be pressure for it.

Michael Ring [01:37:00] Hmm. Because

Vance Crowe [01:37:01] People are gonna be so concerned about the price of their electric bill because it's going to go through the roof.

Michael Ring [01:37:08] Do you think that, so I've seen a ton of stuff in the last year about like the a16z American dynamism movement or just manufacturing reshoring, anything like that. Hard tech is a big, like a good prominent buzzword right now. And there's a lot of people talking about energy. There's a lot of atomic companies coming online. Do you think that we can outrun that? Like it's obviously gonna be a big deal, you think we'll just grow faster than it won't really be that big of a deal, but it'll be really important and there'll be a lot of it, but it won't be like a, a problem like we'll just fill the demand quickly.

Vance Crowe [01:37:49] You mean for electricity?

Michael Ring [01:37:50] Yes. For ener, yeah. For energy.

Vance Crowe [01:37:52] I don't know how man, like yeah, I don't, I think, I think the demand is going to outstrip the supply and like one thing I think we'll see is whatever legislation has been holding back people from doing stuff, like I think that'll probably go away. I think suddenly a bunch of schools are going to develop nuclear engineering programs. I think

Michael Ring [01:38:14] People

Vance Crowe [01:38:15] That got spent several years on nuclear subs are gonna suddenly have jobs waiting for them in the private sector. 'cause those are the people that, those are the only people running nuclear reactors at, at scale right now are people in nuclear subs. And so there's gonna be

Michael Ring [01:38:32] And the rednecks in my backyard. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:38:34] And you're that's right. But like, there's just not that many people out there. And, and we went for so long without training those people. Entire programs were shut down. So that, but even if you start producing those people, it's just like producing a navy. You can't produce a navy in a generation. It takes three, maybe four generations to create a navy just so you have experience and knowledge and knowhow. I think that's gonna be true of, of electricity and energy, whether it's four generations. I don't think it's quite that long, but it's gonna take time. And, and in the meantime, every single time you are typing a question into grok or speaking to it, it is using an enormous amount of energy. Way more than a light bulb.

Michael Ring [01:39:16] Well I just hope that they don't take my liquid fuels away. I hope that we can, we can keep using those indefinitely in the meantime. You mean

Vance Crowe [01:39:25] Like diesel and gasoline?

Michael Ring [01:39:27] Yeah. Well I, no, I don't, I don't seriously believe that. I just, I I think that, I think we will still have to rely on fossil fuels a lot through this process while we're building all that stuff. It's gonna be incredibly important.

Vance Crowe [01:39:41] I I don't think fossil fuels are going anywhere. I think, I think we're gonna see the return coal. I think I like, I think we like the demand for energy is going to be so high and people in that are, even the people that are renting, they're gonna look at their rentals and they're gonna find out, oh, I'm paying now 10% of my income for electricity. That's when you're gonna see them be like, maybe I don't care so much about climate change because it's, it, I think that's the demand. It's gonna be,

Michael Ring [01:40:12] I'm I'm, I've been getting solar quotes the last two weeks and you're telling me that I should probably

Vance Crowe [01:40:19] Solar's great. Yeah, I mean like, yeah, absolutely. I think solar's gonna be big. I mean I saw, I I I haven't been able to verify this, I tried to look it up that China is starting to do that kind of sci-fi idea where they harvest solar electricity from outside the orbit and then shoot it and then beam it down. These are the things that are gonna happen. That's the only way we'll leapfrog over over coal and, and I don't know that we'll leapfrog over nuclear. Like if, if somebody can find one of those kind of breakthrough technologies, then we will be in a different game. But unless we do something wild like that, we're bringing coals coming back.

Michael Ring [01:40:55] Well there's only, I forget, there's only like 40,000 people that work in the coal industry now. It's pretty small at the moment, so I'm sure they could, I I'm sure there's mines not in use that they could bring back.

Vance Crowe [01:41:06] Yeah, and I now I've seen that the Chinese operate like fully remote coal mines where there are guys living in cities and then they sit in front of these like bank of TVs. Oh

Michael Ring [01:41:16] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:41:17] And they're like controlling like

Michael Ring [01:41:19] Cat stuff.

Vance Crowe [01:41:20] Yeah. And it's amazing.

Michael Ring [01:41:22] Cat has some really cool tech for that. That's, that's come really far in the last decade.

Vance Crowe [01:41:28] Well we got to talk about Bitcoin and my favorite things here at the end. Is there anything, anything we should have brought up?

Michael Ring [01:41:36] Well, I do have one little story about the Damon for you. I know how much you like the Damon and I mean there's, there's plenty of other things we could talk about succession or social technologies, but that's up to you. But do you want to just talk for a second about how you think about the Damon?

Vance Crowe [01:41:57] Yeah, so the Damon is the idea that inside of you or inside of me, I'll just speak from my own personal experience, is that there is a voice that tells you kind of direction, Hey, you should do this. Hey, go in this direction. This is important. And I do not have control over that voice. I don't tell it what to tell me. It is just something that is in me. And I, so it's something that it's hard to describe, you know, is it an actual voice? I I don't believe I'm schizophrenic, right? I'm not, I'm not in, I'm not, it's not like crowding out my other thoughts. In fact, I have to be very cognizant and very patient and like open myself up to this voice. But that voice when I follow it guides me towards possibilities that I would not find if I was just operating in the world normally.

Michael Ring [01:42:55] And is that, does it lead you well or is it, is it like an alchemist type thing where if you follow what you're supposed to then it, it kind of works out as long as you're diligent? Or is it just, here's the motivation you have to figure out how to apply it? Well,

Vance Crowe [01:43:12] Mine has been pretty clear when I have read Carl Jung, I used to go around trying to wake people up to their Damon and he was like, you know, who are you to do this, right? Like, don't do this. And so, I don't know, maybe other people's guides them in the wrong direction or maybe, maybe it gives you ideas and if you're not prepared for those ideas, it can, it can take you in bad places. Mine has guided me towards people that have been very helpful to me. It's guided me towards doing things that I, I probably wouldn't have done if I hadn't had this nagging voice in my mind. But that it ultimately, I look back and think those are some of my most valuable decisions.

Michael Ring [01:43:52] Hmm. Do you know, do you know what the charges were when they actually sentenced Socrates to death?

Vance Crowe [01:44:03] Only something about like misleading kids. I think misleading the youth

Michael Ring [01:44:08] That was part of it. So there's two charges that they were actually able to get to kind of stick. The first one was around corrupting the youth, and that was basically teaching them his methods of reasoning more or less. And then the other one was actually impiety. So impiety at the time. So this is, we gotta frame this just a little, this is in Athens. It's right after the Peloponnesian Wars. And it was a really fragile time where the state had to really think about the social cohesion and being united in terms of their politics. And so this is, this is Greek mythology area, right? So you have the state religion that is the, the word of Zeus and these are the, the way it works and this is what we follow and whatever. And, and so at the time, religion was an extension of the state. It was one and the same. It was how they controlled their populace. This is not a unique idea. This is what we've seen religion used for a lot. And what Socrates was doing was he said that he had this thing called the Damian. And, and it was what he called like a, an angel or a deity or a spirit within himself that was this inner voice. And he was saying it was his intrinsic motivation. It, it brought him towards certain ideas and it helped him develop his, i I don't know if he would say it helped him develop his Socratic method, but he kind of applied his Socratic method to it to like figure stuff out if it was true and whatever.

Michael Ring [01:45:52] And so him saying that and teaching it to people along with this other idea of him saying the gods were ideal forms rather than fallible men. They were, they didn't represent humans. They were, they were like archetypes. They were ideal forms. That along with this idea of a Damian, that is what he was sentenced for because it was him saying, I can think for myself to the state. And so that impiety charge was actually about, I'm, I'm defying the state by thinking, right? And so like today we think that we're so up in arms about free speech then it wasn't even about free speech, it was your ability to have independent thought potentially within yourself. And I think that that's like he was willing to say, no, this is such an important idea that I'm going to yes, I that is what I believe and then I will die because of it. Because I'm saying yes, I do have a Damon within myself. And I, I totally accidentally stumbled across this idea. If you take the, that Damian and Greek and you move to Latin, they, the Romans actually had this idea that they would attribute the same thing to a place. So they would, they would call it a genius for a person was their, was their demotion. And then for a place it was a genius loci, LOCI.

Michael Ring [01:47:26] And I, I was like, oh, that's what we do with land. That's what we do with stewardship is we go to a piece of land, whether it's smore or somewhere else, and we're saying like, what does this land need? What, what does it do best? What is its purpose? And then like it's not always clear like you have to maybe farm it or run it, run cows on it or something. And like you learn all kinds of things about the land that, that you have to figure out how to work with it rather than fight against that voice of what it's telling you. And that is something that I think there's different ways you can develop it, but it has a lot to do with experience and talking to other people that have also learned from the same land and just trying different things and then building intuition around it.

Vance Crowe [01:48:19] I like that a lot. And I also think that that goes probably worthwhile to talk about the, the type of pasturing that you were, that you and I have been talking about because I, this idea would've been completely foreign to me had you not told me about the type of the way that you were running cattle on your land.

Michael Ring [01:48:38] Yeah, and this is, this is my brother's shtick a little bit more, but I can certainly talk about it. You know, naturally in the west, historically, like when the, during like the Lewis and Clark expeditions, they went out there and they found grass that they said they could reach to the side while they were sitting on a horse and they could pull it together and tie it over their lap. It was so dense and so tall in the great plains. And that was, that would be exceptionally fertile land. And I believe the reason that it was able to be that fertile was because of large roaming herds where they would have tremendous amount of weight come by and be concentrated on a certain area and animals would graze there and they would, they would defecate there, they would walk everything in and then everything was trampled. They ate it, they knocked it down, whatever. Okay, now what do they have to do? They have to move again, right? And they can't come back until that has grown up again. So they wouldn't bother. They would, they would have a big wide ranging pattern. They'd go in and not only were they going here and they were eating there, and then they were moving off, they were doing it in tremendous amounts of intensity. And, and that created this natural system that's this symbiotic relationship between the animal that's taking the nutrients off.

Michael Ring [01:50:16] They're eating the plant, they're creating this perfect carbon nitrogen ratio of manure and they're putting it back on and then they're walking it into the ground so that that grass isn't just sitting there and oxidizing away when it dies, it's actually being incorporated back. And then there's a whole bunch of, there's microbes that are in the soil that are then stimulated through that. And so you have a great biome. And so we, we copy that at a much, much smaller scale where we rotate our cattle around and you don't really want them on the same area more than three days to get back into a, a vegetative state. But our rotations are often a few days longer than that just because it's a lot of labor and we are able to get a lot more tonnage off by doing that. And I think that's getting a little bit more common, but there's still a lot of people that don't do it. And so it's kind of low hanging fruit to be more competitive by doing that.

Vance Crowe [01:51:18] What do you mean to get tonnage off of it?

Michael Ring [01:51:20] It grows more grass per year. Yeah, because it, it's if, if a plant is just in the state where it's growing as fast as it can to recover back up when when after it gets eaten off really hard and and beaten down, it's, it's shooting roots down at the same time and it's growing up faster and being in that, i, I believe it's called a vegetative state when it's, when it's growing and then you don't just like let it get there and head out and let it sit, you time it correctly. So you come back for another pass and by resting it not having cows there all the time and you let it grow up, it shoots roots down about the equal amount. And so it actually comes back faster because it has all that root mass down there. Whereas if you have it mowed off like a golf course all the, all the time, all summer, if you have cows in the same area, then it doesn't, it can't jump back. It never gets a rest. And that's why you, you want cows on it for like three days and then you pull 'em off because you want it to get back into that undisturbed growing phase rather than in the stressed being eaten phase or,

Vance Crowe [01:52:33] Or too big. And describe maybe in, in detail when you're talking about that loci, you know, like we, we wanna know what does this land want? You can't just go and apply and apply that theory to everything or are you saying something different here?

Michael Ring [01:52:51] Yeah, so you really have to figure out what it's gonna be able to produce. And so with every, with every piece of land, and this is, this is where we get from, oh that sounds good, kind of woowoo like figure out the stewardship around it with this loci to practical, this sounds a little bit more boring. You have to figure out where you put your cross fences in to be able to be the most cost effective with your cross fence. Well, making a paddock that you can stock in such a way relative to the full size of the pasture, that you're going to be able to create the right density to be able to rotate them on a regular basis. And then also take into consideration we're going to need water access somehow for these animals so they create the right roaming patterns without destroying the land. Like a bunch of operational stuff like that. Does that,

Vance Crowe [01:53:51] Yeah, I think I remember Joseph one time talking about how erosion happens on creeks, not because of grazing animals, but because you don't have them there.

Michael Ring [01:54:00] Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:54:00] Normally you would have grazing animals that would be finding a path to get down to the water and they'd smooth out what, what that area so that the banks would be more gentle sloping. So as water rushes around there, it doesn't cave in parts of the, of the, the creek bed or something like that.

Michael Ring [01:54:18] Yeah, yeah. And, and there's several reasons for that. There's the pushing down the, the root mass and then you have to do, you're doing that cycle, right? So you put the cattle on, but then when you take 'em off after they pushed it in and, and maybe push some fresh seeds into the bed, you rest them, that grass grows up, you create deeper roots to hold the, the dirt, right? And then you're, you're continually adding root mass in those cycles while you're firming the edges, but you cannot over travel it either because it's too much of a, too much of that is a bad thing, right?

Vance Crowe [01:54:57] Yeah. I mean I can see this, I have a creek behind my house and I see like when after Joseph described this to me, I was like, this makes perfect sense because I've never figured out why a creek would ever stay within its banks because right now this thing's just decaying and you're watching these trees get taken out by it, but it's because there's nothing to smooth that out.

Michael Ring [01:55:18] And it, it doesn't, it does depend on the land and you're, you're fighting a losing battle of, I think this is might be something Lyle Benjamin said to me one time, he is like, no, everything's been eroding since it was made there. Like you're never gonna stop it, you're just slowing it down. Right? And so different geographical areas are more extreme or less extreme. And so we're just conserving if you are, if you will, conservation.

Vance Crowe [01:55:47] Well, I'm glad we got to fit that in. I would talk to you all day, but I've gotta get ready for, for another thing. So man, thank you so much for, for stopping in. If people wanted to learn more about Smore or maybe potentially coming out and visiting you to get a mind break, where, where would they go to find out more about that?

Michael Ring [01:56:07] Yeah, I think that the easiest way to find me is probably on X at Ring Family Ag, but there's also ring family agriculture.com and then both of those have links to the Substack. So Yeah, I, I love it when people reach out. Give me new ideas, bring me novelty.

Vance Crowe [01:56:25] Well, all right, man. Thanks for coming by. Thanks

Michael Ring [01:56:27] For having me on. Thank you.