Up the Graph: Ideas and technology that will be everywhere in 2 years

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] Okay, so today I'm gonna play another talk that I was invited to give at the American Farm Bureau Fusion Conference. This was a breakout session that I delivered to about 70 people, but it was just 30 minutes after I had delivered the Changing Minds talk that I played last week to a huge ballroom when I was out there in Denver, Colorado. And this talk I wrote about a week before the event, my goal was to get people talking and thinking about technology that may seem far away, but that I would guess in about two years, much of what I'm gonna talk about is gonna be so commonplace that people are gonna be like, yeah, we always knew that it was gonna be this way. So if you're a longtime listener to the podcast, I'm sure you've heard me talk about almost all of this before, but the cool thing is that this is gonna be more in depth. It's gonna be a level of detail that I don't always get to get into when I'm talking to another guest. And I did wanna say one of the reasons that I've been playing some of the talks lately is because I am just wrapping up travel season. I've been in Canada, I've been in Wisconsin, Mississippi, Iowa, Arkansas, all over. Even more than that. Those are just the ones I can think of. And when we're not giving talks, when I'm not running around, I'm doing more Legacy Interviews than we've ever done before. It is really incredible how much we've been recording and how much we've been editing. And I just couldn't pile more podcasts onto Sean and ask them to get those done when we're trying to get people back their interviews so they can watch it when they have family get togethers coming up this spring.

Vance Crowe [00:01:32] So I have this talk, I have a couple more recorded. We'll see you guys have been giving great feedback about this. I feel a little self-conscious about posting my talks, but I'm glad to do it and, and so I hope you enjoy this. And if you do, let me know in the comments or just send me a DM on X. I'm gonna go to the talk in just a moment. But just as a reminder, it is only a few weeks away from Mother's Day and Legacy Interviews has over the years, been one of those amazing gifts that people give to Mother's Day. And people have told me, you know, mom cried when she got it. She was so moved by this. And you know, I just got off the phone with a guy, he said something funny, I thought I'd share it with you. He said, you know, I really want both my parents to do this. I, I love him, but my dad is the one that I'm not so sure he's gonna be keen on doing this. But if I give it to my mom for Mother's Day for both of them, there's no way he'll say no. And I know that when he comes in and does the interview, that he's gonna love it and he's gonna be glad he did it. And so I can use Mother's Day as my excuse for getting dad in here. And maybe that's your parents. Maybe that's how you think. Maybe you need one that needs a little bit more pull one that's a little bit more excited. But I can tell you even the people that walk in with their arms crossed and their eyebrow furrowed 'cause they don't know exactly why we would do this or who they're talking to or what's the value of this, everybody walks away feeling like, wow, I have not had a chance to talk about my life to reflect on those things in so long that this was a wonderful gift.

Vance Crowe [00:03:05] And not only will they have this profound experience, but four weeks later you'll be able to watch it together as a family. And it is a really moving experience. So if you're interested, go to Legacy Interviews dot com, fill out the contact form and you and I can have a conversation about, you know, what you want to capture. And you know, if you'd rather just call directly, call (314) 866-2991. Either me or somebody from my team will answer that phone and we will have a lot of information for you about what works, how does it work, what, what's the process like? And we'd love to make it all happen to for you. Alright, let's head on to this talk called Going Up the graph from the American Farm Bureau Fusion Conference.

Guest [00:03:48] And his presence here is really important to me 'cause the first time I saw Vance speak was 10 years ago. We just figured out that it was at an American Farm Bureau event. So since that time I've been following him a bit, listening to his podcast and his present as they have shifted. He has an, an incredible background in things like World Bank in Monsanto and and an immense amount of information that he's going to be sharing with us today due today. But this is a a real treat 'cause he's been a wonderful presenter for us for a number of years. So thank you for being here today there.

Vance Crowe [00:04:19] Yeah, thank you for having me and thank you for anybody that's coming. This is your second talk today. I really appreciate that. There's no greater honor for a presenter to be either asked back or to to do the second one. A couple weeks ago A FBF reached out and they said, Hey, we have an extra slot and we wanted to know if you wanted, wanted to do it like a second slot. And I said, sure, that'd be great. You know, I'd love that. And they're like, what would you like to talk about? And I told 'em what I wanted to talk about and they said no. And so then I thought about it overnight and I rewrote them and I said, what if I talk about it this way? And they were like, alright, so I'm getting to talk about literally my favorite thing to talk about on earth and it's an exciting thing. And what I hope is that what I'm gonna share with you today is actually gonna make you a little bit uncomfortable. I wanna share with you the sorts of technological ideas and things that are going to happen that you maybe are like, whoa, I didn't know that or I had never heard of that. And if I am successful, I will have found at least one thing that you've not heard of and you can kind of say, alright, I don't really agree with Vance but maybe it'll be this way. And so we're gonna talk about this concept called up the graph. And I'm gonna explain what up the graph is. But first is probably valuable for me to share how I came up with this kind of idea. It wasn't mine alone.

Vance Crowe [00:05:50] I actually worked with a great number of people, but I used to be the director of millennial engagement for Monsanto. People would always ask me like, are you sure you're a millennial? 'cause I was like right at the edge and I used to always talk about, well why do we name generations? What's the purpose behind saying there's millennials and there's Gen X and there's Gen Z. Like what are we doing there? We know people age, right? So what are we talking about? And really the conclusion that I came to about the reason we named Generations is we're actually not naming the people we're naming the culture change that build like a wave and they crash onto the shore of society and it won't become society, but that wave will change the shape of that shoreline. And when I was at Monsanto, my job was to figure out where is that wave going and where can we as a company that has been totally demonized by the broader public and in in an industry that was really strongly disliked, how can we ride on the changing wave of culture? So I had to think about how is it that things change? How does society learn new things? How do they know what they know? And I'm gonna bring that to bear on this conversation about what technologies are going to be impacting you and your members and your own operation. And I think one of the phrases that I think is apropos right now is a phrase that people often talk about in relationship to bankruptcy.

Vance Crowe [00:07:26] Like how did they go bankrupt? Well they went bankrupt gradually then suddenly. And that's actually how technology happens, right? We can see like maybe you've heard of this thing AI and you like kind of heard about it but you never really paid attention. And then all of a sudden everywhere you look, it is everywhere and it is integrated into everything that is when the wave has, is crashing onto the shore. And these things can be kind of hard to see and predict because who knows how technology will, you know, it's like a wildfire, right? Once it starts burning, it burns in all sorts of different directions. It gets combined with different things and it changes and it morphs. So it's very difficult for anybody to say, what will the world be like? How, how will everything work? And I'm not going to make that case that I know anything at all about what will the world be in two years or five years or 10 years. And the further you go away, the harder it would be. But I am gonna say there are some technologies that are almost certain to be a part of whatever that future is. And I think it will benefit you if you can kind of know where these are and how it impacts you. So they asked me to create an overview. We're gonna try and stick to this the best I can. I have to say that this presentation, I have a lot of information here, but if we only get partway through this presentation, that will be okay. I've prioritized the information at the beginning to be I think the most relevant to you, then a little bit more uncomfortable and a little further away from you.

Vance Crowe [00:08:58] And then the stuff at the end, if we get to, it'll just be because I wanna push the envelope and we got there. So we're gonna talk about a little bit about social media and we're gonna talk about tech innovations that can improve maybe your profitability. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about practical ways to keep up with trends in social media. What I really wanna hit on is how do ideas enter society? And that is this idea called up the graph. So when I was working at Monsanto, we had this question, you know, everybody, everybody knew that Monsanto and Modern agriculture was evil. How is that true? How is that possible? How does everyone know this thing? So me and a group of people at Monsanto spent a lot of time talking about how do ideas spread into culture, where do they come from? And we ultimately came up with this graph right here. Has anybody seen me present on this graph before called the, well actually Graph Johnna has, I'm sure, but so the well actually graph, we'll talk about all ideas have some discreet amount of value, right? And you can put that value of that idea against the number of people that know an idea. So at Monsanto, imagine you're hacking away through the genome of corn and ping, you discover something totally new and novel, something that nobody's ever seen. The value of that idea is really high, but the number of people that know that idea is incredibly low, very small, right?

Vance Crowe [00:10:33] But if we were to zoom the camera lens back and say, well we're not just talking about this one piece of technology, we're talking about any discrete piece of information, how does it flow into society? And if we think about, say like a stock tip, right? As more and more people begin to operationalize to to use that idea, the value of getting to that idea goes down. The amount you can pull out of that idea goes down. And this just like if you're trying to get your stock tips from M-S-N-B-C or Fox Business, right? You, that information has already gone way out into culture. Everybody already knows that idea. You're not gonna get any alpha out of that. Then if you're Monsanto and you're trying to figure out, hey wait, we wanna push back on these ideas, the further you wait to push back on those ideas, the more expensive it is. Because I make the point that this is when I would get a phone call from my mother and she'd say, Vance Vance, you're not gonna believe this. I heard this thing on CNN or Fox about GMOs or pesticides to my mother where CNN and Fox News. That is the cutting edge of news. But everybody in here knows, these are large slow lumbering organizations. This is not where news breaks these people find out last, really not last but pretty far down. And one time I was giving this presentation in an old grain trader came and I was drawing it on a whiteboard and he said, you know what Vance, you're right. And we at Monsanto and we in agriculture, we wait till all the way out here to respond to things, right?

Vance Crowe [00:12:05] So now it's become really expensive and really complicated because way out there, you're not just competing for my mother's attention about GMOs. You're competing with everybody else that wants my mother's attention. You're competing with Tide Laundry detergent, you're competing with car ads, you're competing with everybody that wants my mother's attention. So as the director of millennial engagement, I had to figure out, we don't have a budget big enough to change culture. If everybody thinks that you're evil waiting all the way down that graph, we need to go up the graph. And so what we started to do was to find outlets in places where we could start to find different audiences. And so maybe we would go, Hey, let's go talk to Wired magazine or let's go talk to Vice News, which was a terrible mistake and I shouldn't have done it, but we did. Or you know, let's go talk on Reddit. You know? And one of the things that you notice is as you go up this graph, the audiences get smaller and smaller, but the depth with which they wanna know things gets deeper and deeper. And so I always mark this point on the graph. This is the point where you're standing around at a party and everybody's talking about what's going on in the news, what's up? You know? And there's always that one person and one of you in here may be this person that's standing around waiting for a break in the, in the conversation to go, well actually, and then they tell you whatever it is that they know about that thing, right?

Vance Crowe [00:13:37] And that person gets to drive the conversation. They're the person that watched one documentary or read a book and now they know a whole bunch. But if they know just a little bit more than the other people in that conversation, they get to drive it. And so my work as director of millennial engagement was to figure out how can we go up the graph where there are less people that are talking about these things and try and change ideas. So this led me to working. I would go to college campuses, I went to MIT and to Berkeley. We would go into podcasts that were really rare like skeptics, podcasts or certain kinds of very narrow science podcasts because those are the places where they're not exactly where the new idea is coming out of the ground, but these are the first people to talk about it. And it was there that we were able to make the biggest difference on how people thought about things like GMOs and pesticides. Now this exact graph is actually the same graph about how technology enters. And so we are trying, if you are going to leverage new technology, it's to figure out how do I get up that graph? So I'm using things before everyone knows about them, before everybody has had a chance to use it and they've pulled the most value out of it. And so that's what we're gonna talk about going up the graph. Now, when I was first writing this presentation, I thought like, oh I gotta be academic. You know, this is the fusion conference. People are gonna be really intense here and they're gonna know about a whole bunch of these things.

Vance Crowe [00:15:10] So I've gotta have a, how do you go up the graph? And I thought about it and I thought about it and I really labored over this one slide. And then it came to me. The way that you get up the graph is actually incredibly simple. You have to play, you have to go take these technologies, these things that I'm about to talk with you about, and you have to go touch 'em and poke 'em and try 'em. And some of them might mean that you have to do something that everyone around you is like, that's dumb. I'm not into that. This is not your thing. This is, this is dumb people that are doing that. You have to walk past that and you have to pick up these technologies and you have to just play with them because it's in playing with them that you will discover a question that now you can say, Hey, how, how does this work? Or why is it doing this? Or can I do this? Or can I use it here? Can I try it and integrate it there? Or will this other person find value in it? So the case that I'm gonna make is all these things that I'm gonna show you, I want you to take in notes and figure out which of these things can I play with, right? Which of these things can I start to use? And you don't necessarily have to be directed, you don't have to already know where it's gonna fit into your operation. And we're gonna start by talking about artificial intelligence. How many people in here have used AI for some reason? Okay, I guess there's a selection pressure here for people that have used ai. What, which ones have you used? The reason I say that is 'cause last night I was talking to people at the, at the cocktail hour and they're like, no, I never used it.

Vance Crowe [00:16:45] No I never tried it. And I was like, oh no, my presentation's gonna be way too fast. How? What have you guys, how have you used AI chat? GPT chat, GPT, and what have you done with it? Ask

Guest [00:16:56] Them how would, what would be the easiest way to explain this?

Vance Crowe [00:16:59] Great. What would be the easiest way to explain it? What else? My son's math homework. Hey son's math homework. That's really good. Yeah. Vacation planning. Vacation planning. This is getting good. All right. Business plan generation. Business plan generation. Lesson plans. Lesson plans, Lina spreadsheet formulas, spreadsheet formulas. This is great. Yeah, I have an app that reports all of my board meetings and then sets out a tasks that I need to complete from the board meeting as well as transcribes my meetings. Is that through Microsoft their their one or what are you using? It's called meetings. Okay, great. So it's transcribing meetings. So there's all these uses in there. And so this crowd, I may have slowed this down a little bit 'cause I had a whole bunch of really advanced stuff and then I was like, oh no. And so you guys seem quite proficient, but let's talk, talk a little bit about some of the uses that I think we're gonna see with ai. And I'll even talk about certain things I've done, and this is in particular, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say almost everything that I talk about two years from now, you are going to see that it is ubiquitous. You're gonna be like, this is what everybody always knew we were always going to do with this. And I I I, my goal here actually is I remember the first time I was at a conference at a college, I was a little kid, my dad took us to a, a conference about the future and that I saw roller blades for the first time and I remember I saw roller blades there for the first time. And so I want this to be your rollerblade moment is like you're gonna hear something that you're like, I didn't even know that existed.

Vance Crowe [00:18:31] And now it's everywhere. So some of the uses that I think that are gonna happen with AI particularly that that were gonna impact the Farm Bureau is things like your policy book analysis right now you can take a PDF of an entire policy book and you can put it into like rock three is the one that I use. And then you can ask it questions, you can ask it questions like where are there conflicts in here? Or you can ask it a question, I want to do this. Will the policy allow me to do it and list all of the things that are around it that would either keep me from doing it or, or allow me to do it. I think it's gonna inform just like the, the college ag discussion that you're doing, like it is going to inform this. I am certain that from now on, whenever people get their discussion meet questions, they are going to AI and they're having a discussion with it. Now I, I think this is the same thing, like people can hate this and say like, this is not good, but it is going to be so ubiquitous. It's gonna be like saying no, you're not allowed to use a calculator on math. Like, well when am I going to exist in the future where I can't use my calculator? You may not like it, but it is going to inform debates that happen around Farm Bureau. It's also going to give a ton of historical context. So in the past, you know, if there's been changes to policy books, you think about some of the policies that are way deep into your organization and people are like, we don't even know where that came from or why we're following that rule. Well, over time organizations are going to have their own AI data bucket and you're going to be able to put all of the policies that you've had throughout the years in there and then you're gonna be able to say, when did we make this change and how did it impact things?

Vance Crowe [00:20:16] And the AI is going to be able to do what it used to require hundreds of hours of your staff time to do and it will integrate it in there. It's gonna give you answers about how the history of Farm Bureau is going. And ultimately all legislation is going to be drafted through ai. There will be virtually nothing that is not created at least the first pass through that. And so I think that this is important to recognize because it's going to be something that if you leverage first can help you write your own legislation. It's also going to mean that the activists that are out there can draft legislation much faster, much cheaper. They aren't gonna have to have a fleet of attorneys on there. So many of the things that you guys are working on or pushing back against that, while you can leverage it for your own benefit, there are also going to be your critics and people that are on the other side that are using this to hugely amplify the resources that they have. So I wanted to throw this up there. I didn't know how well you can see this, but I am on my homeowner's association, I'm a trustee there and one of my neighbors wrote me a question and it was kind of complicated about trimming his trees and having signs and I was like, ah, I do not have time to answer this question. And so I put our policy book into AI and then I copy pasted his question and then it wrote out all of the sections that are related to his question. And then I said, now reflect on the Ladue city council laws, which is the town I live in. So it put that in there and I was like, now write him an email explaining this is exactly what should happen next.

Vance Crowe [00:21:50] It wrote him a three paragraph letter and I was done with this whole thing in five minutes and the quality of that was way better than anything I would've come up with on my own. This is, I just wanted to use this as an example of how policy is is gonna get shaped by this other AI uses. I wanted to talk a little bit about as communicators, I know many of you are communicators in your organization or you're trying to get ideas out into the world. I, I was just talking with with somebody from Virginia and they were saying, Hey, this is helping me draft my speeches, this is helping me write things that I can be creative. All I had to do was put in the bullet points of what I wanted to say and then it turned it into a full on speech. And over time you are going to be able to put speeches that you wrote, even transcripts of speeches that you wrote and the AI will be able to say that's Vance's style. That's Jana's style. And so I'm gonna take that and I'm gonna write the speech in the style of Vance or in the style of another person. If you want to see something kind of interesting, ask chat GPT Orrock or any of these ais a question and then ask it to give you the answer in your favorite author's writing style. So I did Hemingway and it's like hilarious. It's got this like super folksy answer to it. This is going to be a a big thing. So your own original work will actually inform AI going forward, brainstorming. How many of you guys use AI right now to have it ask you questions and how do you use it?

Vance Crowe [00:23:25] In what way you have it brainstorm with you.

Guest [00:23:27] Yeah, so like I'm an ag teacher, so when our students are writing for like coming with ideas for agriscience fair projects or speech topics for public prepared public speaking, have 'em come up with 25, you know, plant science based science fair projects or speech topics or whatever and just go back and forth until they get what they want.

Vance Crowe [00:23:48] Anybody else use it for brainstorming? Yeah, I have a generate social

Guest [00:23:51] Media post and blog posts for me and works

Vance Crowe [00:23:55] Pretty great. So lot of time. Yeah. And could oftentimes be more on on point than what you would on your own. Yeah. Yeah. And you had one.

Guest [00:24:04] Yeah, AI came up with a lot of my speech topics as well as the thesis

Vance Crowe [00:24:09] Sentence. Hey, there you go. Right? And this is, yep. Can you just say those

Guest [00:24:14] Two names again? You said 'em real fast. The programs we

Vance Crowe [00:24:17] Could use. Oh, so there's chat, GPT and I. This is a very neutral presentation. I don't have very much in there. The one that I use is Grok, GROK, but there's many others. And maybe when I get through this list, maybe we'll actually throw out the names of some of the other ones that you guys are using. Another thing I wanted to point out is that in the future, if you want the AI to reference your material as opposed to the activist material, you're going to have to start changing how you write because AI is searching through different websites, different books, all this content. And you can even go to grok right now and say, if I wanted this to be the content that you referenced rather than that person's, how can I write it? And it will tell you. And so this is going to be very important. We are in an arms race. And it used to be, and this is true of like even the government right now, it used to be that if the government wanted to propagandize their citizenry or the opposition, they would have to get floors full of propagandists and they would have to pay them and feed them and let them go to the bathroom and sleep. And so how much propaganda could they crank out? Only so much. Right now you have an infinite amount of propaganda that you can put out there and there is nothing that will stop it. It was, you know, a $25 a month subscription will allow you to put enormous amounts out there. And so the reason this is so important is if you are going to be fighting against your critics, you need to be aware this is coming.

Vance Crowe [00:25:51] And then finally, the last thing I wanted to say, and this is the one that actually like really it, it seems like such a small thing, podcast descriptions, titles, and clips. I have a podcast where it's two, I have the Vance Crowe podcast and the ag tribes report. And I was paying a guy to just do that. Just take it, write descriptions, write the clips, tell me where I should cut it. And I found out that there was a website called Podhome.fm. I moved my podcast over to there and now when I upload my podcast, it will, it's kind of hard to see. It will say, would you like us to generate episode descriptions and title ideas, generate episode chapters, generate clips, it listens to the entire conversation, listens, creates a transcript, and then describes the conversation totally neutrally in in a way that's very descriptive. And so these kinds of things will actually really help you. How many people in here, anybody in here have a podcast? Yeah. Would it make your life easier to have that happen? I wrote it down already. See? There you go. Podhome is is one that I highly recommend one 'cause the AI's great, but I'll rec I'll tell you about another reason in just a second. So before I move on from ai, is there anything in here that you guys disagree with and you say, nah, that that won't be there. Yeah, we can all see it. What AI should, should we be writing down? What systems do you use that I haven't mentioned yet? I mentioned Rock and Chat.

Vance Crowe [00:27:22] GPT, deep Shark. What's that one? DeepSeek. DeepSeek. Yeah, that that's the Chinese one that just came out. Deep Seek. Deep seek. Yeah, that's right. There's Claude, which is I think more about writing and personal blogging, these kinds of things. Any other ones? Magic School, AI for Teachers, magic School, ai. All right, I had not heard of that one. And what does it do for teachers?

Guest [00:27:48] There's a lot of options, but it can like generate worksheets. Like you can just plug in that I need a math worksheet and it'll phrase the problems for you rather than you have to like make up a bunch of story. So there's all sorts of like teacher specific things.

Vance Crowe [00:28:03] It's coming and it will be for every single industry. Okay, so the AI one is the one that seems the most obvious. Six months ago was not this obvious. In fact, I remember last March I was up in Canada and I was describing for people what AI was, and the room literally had no idea what I was talking about. They were like, ai, what are you talking about? You can talk to this thing. One of the crazy things that I would recommend that's kind of mind bending is grok. If you, that's the one that Elon Musk created. There's a whole version that is audio. So when I landed in Denver, I walk off the plane, I'm walking to where baggage claim is, and I'm expecting that I'm gonna get an Uber, but I turn on Grok and I ask it, I'm trying to get to the Sheridan Hotel in Denver and I just landed, what should I do? And the AI says, well you could take an Uber, a taxi, or there's a train. And I was like, tell me more about this train. And they're like, for $10 you can do this and da da da da. And I was like, how do I get there? And they're like, when you come to this thing, take a left, then walked down here. And so I just did that. I just walked along, I'm listening to it. Everybody that's watching me thinks I'm talking to a human and this thing tells me exactly what to do. And I got down here in like 25 minutes and saved $60. It was wild, right? So I would recommend trying this, and that's what I mean by play. You're gonna see these functionalities and you're gonna be like, I don't know why I would use that. That's dumb. And you'd be like, but why don't I play with it a little bit?

Vance Crowe [00:29:36] Okay, so that one was a little obvious. That one was like, all right, everybody in here kind of knows and understands it. Maybe it's pushed you a little bit on that. Now we're gonna talk about the Lightning Network. Is there anyone in here that knows what the Lightning Network is? Okay, how many people in here know what Bitcoin is? How many of you feel strongly that you could explain Bitcoin? Alright. Okay, so Lightning is a component of Bitcoin and the case I'm gonna make is I believe that lightning is the key to new farmers that are trying to sell directly to consumers. It will unlock potential in agriculture like nothing else will in the next two years. I think it is a deeply important technology that right now you guys will be like, what? I don't think so, but it's going to become important. So in order for you to understand this, I have to first do a very small, very high level overview of what Bitcoin is. This is my favorite subject. So I could talk about this for the rest of the talk after the talk all the way to the airport on the plane. So we can talk about it as much as you want, but I'm trying to get to a point that I think will be the most valuable for you and your membership and your own operation. So Bitcoin is digital money. It is just a way for you to have value that you can buy things, but instead of it first being natively paper that you then give to the bank and then they create digital credit cards and you know, Venmo and all those things, it is natively digital.

Vance Crowe [00:31:17] It is fascinating for many reasons. The reason that I think with agriculture it is so fascinating is it is the, you know how land is so valuable? Because it's finite, right? You can't go make more farm ground. Bitcoin is the only other thing on earth like farmland. You can't go make more Bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million. There will never be more. And unlike gold, where if the price of gold goes up, you go buy more steam shovels and more dump trucks and more miners and you go dig more gold out of the ground. So more gold gets put into the system. Bitcoin doesn't work like that for some people. That's really controversial concept, but it's a fascinating one because it says Bitcoin will hold value or actually increase. So in our lifetime, it's never been a smart move for us to put money in a savings account. But in the future, or even now, putting money in Bitcoin will allow you to not have to not have to put it into the stock market. We, this could get very bizarre, but let's keep it high level. It is digital money. It's managed by passwords. So meaning I have Bitcoin and the way that I send it from me to you is I type in my password and then I can get it to send to you. And there is no middleman. If you are using Bitcoin properly, there's no bank and there's no credit card that can say yes, you can use that, or no you can't. And this might not seem like that big of a deal.

Vance Crowe [00:32:49] But if we think back to the trucker rally in Canada, right? There were people that were trying to send money to support the truckers that were trying to push back on COVID regulations. And the government and the companies came in and stopped it. They said, Nope, we're gonna reverse those charges. You put, you donated that on Patreon, we don't like that. We're gonna reverse that because there's no middleman in Bitcoin, it can't be stopped. So it has functionality that no other thing does. So just as a little example, Bitcoin that, let's say I have my address, right? So I have my Bitcoin and my address, just like an email address. And let's say I wanna send it to Rilla and I say, Rilla, what's your Bitcoin address? She tells me what her address is. I put in my Bitcoin password, I pay a very small fee and it transfers the Bitcoin from me to Rosea. It is way, way, way more complicated than this. But that gives you a first understanding of Bitcoin. How many for you, this is the most you've learned about Bitcoin to date. Okay, great. It is a beautiful and fascinating topic and we could talk about it forever, but let's just leave it right there. 'cause I wanna go to a little bit, just a little bit more. So a Bitcoin, right? If you go look at the price of a Bitcoin, does anybody have an idea what a Bitcoin costs right now? 80, 86,000, right? Most people have this concept of like, I don't have $86,000 to Vyvanse's digital crazy money, right? Well, the truth is you don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin.

Vance Crowe [00:34:22] A whole Bitcoin is just an arbitrary number. A Bitcoin is actually made up of a hundred million Satoshis. A satoshi is the smallest amount that you can break a Bitcoin into. So just like a penny is $0.01, a satoshi is 0.0 0, 0, 0, 0 0 1 Bitcoin and it takes a hundred million Satoshis to make up one Bitcoin. It's like this starts to be kind of bizarre. This is very simple algebra, but just to show you that you can break Bitcoin into smaller amounts than even a single penny, right? And so the question is like, all right, people always say this like why don't you if, if Bitcoin is money, how come I can't go buy a cup of coffee with it, right? If it's money, I should be able to go and buy a $3 and 50 cent coffee. And if I did, it would cost 0.00040 Bitcoin. Well, the problem with Bitcoin is for small transactions like coffee, is that it actually takes a little bit of time for me to move money from my address to Rosella's address. It can take all the way up to 10, even 20 minutes. And so these transactions can't move that fast. If I'm sitting in line, I'm like, here, let me pay with my Bitcoin and now we'll wait for 10 minutes to make sure that it's moved from my address to your address. That's not gonna work. Also, fees vary significantly.

Vance Crowe [00:35:55] Sometimes a Bitcoin transaction will cost you, you know, one Satoshi and sometimes it might cost you 500 Satoshi or a thousand or 10,000 Satoshis. It just depends on how many other people are moving Bitcoin around. So this doesn't work for coffee, right? You just can't have those fees be so wild. So what happened instead? Yes. Sorry, if there's no middleman, who's collecting the fee? Who's collecting the fee? Oh, the great question. If there's no middleman who's collecting the fee? You've heard of minors? Yes. So minors are the system that makes it so I can't double spend a Bitcoin, I can't send one to Rosea and one to Jana. The the system has to say, where are all these Bitcoin at? You can only send it once. And in order for me to put my Bitcoin to those miners to add it to a block, I have to pay a small fee to the miners that are mining. It gets really complicated,

Guest [00:36:54] But

Vance Crowe [00:36:54] It's super fun and it's beautiful, I promise. Good question. The fee goes to the groups of the groups of people that are securing the system, but it's not directed by any one individual. It's directed by algorithmically through code code. So the Lightning Network does something kind of interesting. What lightning is, is its Bitcoin pocket change. So instead of using the 10 minute, very slow but incredibly secure, never been broken system, what you do is you use lightning. It has incredibly low fees. So for me to send Bitcoin from me to you, it's going to cost me less than one penny most of the time. And it moves immediately. So I send money from me to you on lightning and it's, it happens right away. The way that this works is that you have a Bitcoin and I say, I'm gonna take a little bit of Bitcoin and I'm gonna send it to a Lightning wallet. And you wouldn't wanna send very much because Lightning is not anywhere near as secure as what Bitcoin is. So let's say I send $20 up there, then I can make as many transactions to other lightning wallets. So other people that have a lightning address, we can send back and forth as many times as we want. And then if we decide, no, I want to put that back in my secure Bitcoin storage, then we put it back into Bitcoin and only one Bitcoin transaction has happened. You do not need to understand the details of this.

Vance Crowe [00:38:27] Just having a faint understanding of it will make sense as we go forward. Yes.

Guest [00:38:33] So you said both fees are there, is there a fee in the Lightning Network to transfer to another Lightning network? And if so, how are those fees? Is it based on how much Satoshi's you're transferring or how, how's the fee structured?

Vance Crowe [00:38:49] Okay, so her question is about fees and how are they structured in Bitcoin there is a block, right? You've heard the blockchain and everyone is competing to say, I wanna find space in that block. 'cause there's only so much space in there. So if there are a lot of people putting transactions into that block, the fee goes up in Lightning, there are things called channels. So it's, it's determined by how many people, this is really complicated. It changes all the time, but it's, it's changing by, it's either one Satoshi or maybe three Satoshis. Whereas Bitcoin could be thousands of Satoshi, it could be a lot more, I know you just have to suspend belief with me if we're gonna do this in an hour. Okay? So how I think this could play out, and actually I think that it will play a role in, in farming operations, is that imagine right now if you want to sell directly to a consumer and they want to pay with a credit card, how much does that cost the farmer? Three 5%? Yeah, 2.9% could be more, right? So that is coming straight out of the bottom line, right? So that is just totally cut right out. What I believe what will happen over time is that people will store money in Lightning and the farmer and the consumer are gonna say, Hey, I actually just like we do with cash, right?

Vance Crowe [00:40:22] It's cheaper for me to buy this with cash or I'm gonna do it just with a check. They're gonna do it with lightning and be able to have digital instantaneous payment. You don't have to wait for that check to clear the bank and it will go from one person's account to another. And what you'll do is you'll hold up a little u or a little QR code and that QR code will say this half of beef is $1,600. And then they'll say, all right, I agree. And they'll click that and they'll have a chance to send money straight to it. I think it's gonna eliminate credit card fees and it's gonna make transactions money move way faster. This already actually exists on platforms that maybe some of you use like Square and PayPal. This, this technology currently exists. You can do this right now there's another company called Zap, right? Which that's what they do. They help new businesses set up the ability to accept payment in Bitcoin. I have accepted Bitcoin for Legacy Interviews and I love it. It's, it's actually when I looked at how much money I gave the credit card companies after a year of transactions, it burned a fire in me so deep that makes me want to come here and teach all of us about lightning. Yes. When

Guest [00:41:36] It comes to traceability, this is gonna be a really bad question, but I'm a photographer, right? So if I take pictures, someone can pay my personal PayPal and I don't necessarily have to report that as PayPal. If someone pays you in cash or borrow, right? Like yes you should report in your taxes, but let's spend that for a minute. How is this digitally tracked permit income perspective?

Vance Crowe [00:41:57] So the first thing to know about tracking with Bitcoin is everything is tracked. Everything you they like it is clear, everyone can go look up every single transaction that's ever happened on Bitcoin, on Lightning, it's a little bit different, it's harder to do that, but we're just going to, since we're suspending taxes, we can suspend disbelief here. That's what these companies are actually trying to figure out is how to track that for tax purposes, right? So how can you make sure that you're able to track, I sold this for this amount at this price and you know, if, so there are companies that are trying to do this, but if you're using this as a system to get around or do bartering, that's not great. This is not for you. It's very traceable, it's very, very traceable and, and, but it's also anonymous, right? So this is where it gets kind of complicated, right? The, we can know where every single Bitcoin is at every single address. We don't know who owns which addresses. So there's like, there's a unique kind of weird trade off. It's like, yes,

Guest [00:43:05] So like doing taxes at all, they ask a question, do you use Bitcoins at all? Should you say yes or should you say no

Vance Crowe [00:43:20] Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's? And yes, there's no like, like tax evasion is forever

Guest [00:43:29] Is trying to find out who is using Bitcoin. So they put that on your taxes. They have that question and there's, there's three different ways they're asking that and all and they change the wordings around and everyone's like, what is this? What, what are you talking about?

Vance Crowe [00:43:49] Yeah. So this is a serious question and you know, if you were a person that mined Bitcoin, so you hooked up a computer and then you were getting Bitcoin, you have Bitcoin that no one on earth knows that you have it if you've done it securely. So you could say to the government, no, the problem is the IRS is forever. And if you ever went to go spend that, there's a chance that they could be like whoa, whoa, whoa. Where is this expenditure coming? You couldn't, it'd be like having money that's been taken outside of the system. You go to use it inside the system and people are like, so I recommend pay your taxes. One thing that they don't do is ask you right now you say yes I have Bitcoin. They don't ask you what your addresses are or where they are, right? So they they're they're asking because the IRS is incredibly invasive and wants to know everything about you, right? Yes.

Guest [00:44:42] You mentioned like when you transfer money from Bitcoin to here, you said it's not as secure, it may be smaller amounts then you use the example and that it could take 10 to 20 minutes but use the example of $1,600 for beef. So if I'm at the farmer's market and I have a customer that wants to pay that, do they have to transfer that money right then and there 'cause it's not as secure so they're doing it kind of in the moment or they have money sitting here similar to how we have money sitting in Venmos just waiting to be spent and will it still be a longer transaction for people to pay?

Vance Crowe [00:45:15] So that's a great question. So did you guys hear her question? It's like what, what's the used Vance? You said $1,600 but then earlier you said pocket change $1,600 in some pocket change. What are you gonna do about this? I probably shouldn't use the half of beef as my example. I probably should have used like a packet of carrots or you know, your box of, of like vegetables. When you get up into the $1,600, I would just do a single Bitcoin transaction. I would just say what's your address? Okay, we're doing a larger transaction. If we're doing $1,600, I'm willing to wait around 10 minutes for it.

Guest [00:45:49] So would you say that feels exclusive to some consumers who may like, 'cause we're pasture poultry and flowers, they have big spend at the farmer's market so they may want to use, you know, credit card or Square or something else that they may have more access to rather than like if it's a larger spend, like what would you say is ideal in terms of the range of spending someone does on lightning?

Vance Crowe [00:46:11] I think lightning. So right now I have lightning wallets and I have no problem having $200 on a lightning wallet. I'm like, ah, if I lose $200 I'm gonna be like, ah, but I'm not gonna be like, oh no, with Bitcoin I use what is called cold storage, meaning the Bitcoin has never touched the internet and in order for me to be able to send it, I actually have to be sitting at my house. I have to do something. Like I have to do a somewhat complicated process to sign these things and then that, those are for the larger transactions. I think when you're talking about like how do we get consumers into this? I wouldn't spend a bunch of time doing that for consumers, but there is a huge and growing movement of people that are way into Bitcoin that are also into food sovereignty. And if they see you at a farmer's market with a lightning address up there, they're going to be lying towards you and they're gonna be like, I wanna buy from you with Bitcoin and I want to participate. I think there's two cultures that are gonna come together and right, I think it's absolutely made in heaven the farmers and food sovereignty people.

Guest [00:47:20] So when you say secure, are you meaning like just as insecure as a credit card could be? Or

Vance Crowe [00:47:25] You Probably less, it's less, it's less insecure than a, it's more secure than a credit card, but like unless you really know what you're doing, it's a little dangerous.

Guest [00:47:36] Is that a fair time to provide the disclosure when selling to consumers? That one Bitcoin right now is worth 86,000, but two weeks ago was worth hundred and 10 a few years ago was worth 20,000 if year prior to that was worth 80,000. Again, that if you're gonna put all your money into crypto, you should really understand it. It's a good time to provide that disclosure.

Vance Crowe [00:47:56] Yeah, I mean like Bitcoin is certainly going up and down. It's, it's a, you know, wildly volatile asset and I, when I buy things using Bitcoin, I actually start off in the dollar system, convert it to Bitcoin and then pay people in it right away because I am one of those people that believes never sell your Bitcoin because it's going up forever. And so I'm, I'm a big believer in if you have Bitcoin, hold it and, but I wanna see more and more dollars moved into the system. So I have a friend for example, that brings me eggs once a week and every time he does that I convert dollars into Bitcoin and send it to him. And now we've just removed more dollars outta the system into Bitcoin. It's a volatile asset. There's no, no, no doubt about that. Okay, if you've been listening to all this talk about Bitcoin and you've decided, you know what, I wanna give it a shot, I wanna try and buy some Bitcoin then I have used a lot of platforms and the one that I recommend for buying if you're a US customer is river.com. They have become a sponsor of the show. So if you buy Bitcoin using my link, then they, you'll be supporting the show. We'll get a few Bitcoin, you will even get a few Bitcoin for it and it really helps us out. I like River because if you set up a dollar cost averaging, which means instead of just buying one large amount, you spread out your purchases, maybe you make a small purchase of a few dollars every day or every week or even every month, then they will waive the fees and over the long run this will allow you to buy a lot more Bitcoin for the same amount of money.

Vance Crowe [00:49:31] And I really just think that is an incredible service. They've been great to work with, they've been really supportive of the show. And so check out the show notes and you'll see a link there that will take you directly to river.com where you can set up your own account and buy Bitcoin there. Alright, let's get back to the very end of the up the graph talk. Yes. You're referring to, and there's also cryptocurrency, but aren't there lots of different types of cryptocurrency? I mistaken that they're all specific type of cryptocurrency, correct? Yes. So her question is like, hey, like I hear about all these other things, XRP, ripple, Solana, Cardano, all these things. I'm, I'm going to say Bitcoin is the only one, it's the only one that matters. And all of the rest of them are shit coins. They're all lies and they're all made up by investor groups and they have boards of directors and they have marketing teams and they have people that they're trying to like pump up the price. Bitcoin is completely algorithmically traded. The person that created it created this system and then walked away and there was no what's called a pre mine. So all these other ones, somebody builds this new coin and they say we are gonna keep 20% for ourselves and we're gonna sell all the rest of these and when the price goes way up, we're gonna sell all the ones that we have and we're gonna rug pull in Bitcoin that doesn't exist. And Bitcoin because of the miners, which we won't go into the into great detail on this, they have what is called proof of work.

Vance Crowe [00:51:05] All the rest of these things used like dazzling systems to not have to have these miners. And the miners are what make Bitcoin truly beautiful and completely secure. Yes, you can ask questions infinitely, this is no problem for me. Just thinking like you talk about like sound sour,

Guest [00:51:22] I can go down a hole here, rabbit trail, but is it, is it trackable from an IP or is it seen as more of like an anonymous

Vance Crowe [00:51:31] Currency? Can they track you to where you traded it Bitcoin? Yes. So you're asking a complicated question. It depends on how you hold Bitcoin. So I'll give you an example. I have a lightning wallet on my phone which looks just like this, right? And every time I'm going to make a transaction on there, there's an IP address associated with my phone, hit this app and made these changes every single time. So yes, they could say that phone interacted with a lightning network somehow, right? I have another thing called a cold card here, which is a, a Bitcoin wallet done correctly. There's no way to know when this is on the system or off the system or trading or doing anything like that if you know what you are doing. But this requires like a very deep level of understanding, far deeper than any normal person would need to know. But I try not to go into these details 'cause they scare people and then you won't play. And I want you guys to go play with this because then you'll ask these questions and you'll be like, I'm gonna go find the answer out. Using ai, using ai, AI actually is very helpful. So I wanna throw something out there. There is a thing called value for value. So there is an app out there called the Fountain app and if you, they have on that app for listening to podcasts, just like an Apple podcast or Spotify, they have a lightning wallet on that app.

Vance Crowe [00:53:09] So you can send Bitcoin to the Fountain Wallet. And then you see this little bar down here. What that is, is I say, Hey, for every minute I listen to this, I want you to take 10 Satoshis from my wallet and send it to the guy that's put this podcast out there. And so if you listen for, you know, a hundred minutes, he's gonna get a thousand Satoshis. And so it's this way of allowing creators to get paid for the work that they're producing as creativity. So, for example, and there's many, many ways that this will play out, I think, but right now the reason you couldn't do that is 80 SATs is less than, I don't even know what it is. Like it's less than a dollar. And if I tried to do that transaction with a Visa, they would charge me at least $2 and 50 cents in the transaction fee. And so it doesn't make sense to do that. Whereas with the Lightning Network, there may be charging me one sat, you know, for this entire transaction. So you're gonna see, this is what I was saying about how podcasters are going to be able to start getting their stuff monetized and it's actually gonna cut out the advertising industry. So imagine if instead of me getting the attention of all of my listeners and then selling their attention to an advertiser, imagine if I just said, Hey, if my listeners will give me 10 SATs per minute or 20 SATs, or whatever that is, well then we can cut out the advertisers entirely. And people are paying just for what they listen to, which I think is pretty neat.

Vance Crowe [00:54:44] It'll also be true with photography, it'll be true with all kinds of creative work this way. Okay, so I was talking about playing, I have an idea. I want you to try, I want you, if you are open to it, to downloading a Lightning wallet and anybody in here that downloads a Lightning wallet and sends me their receive address, I will send you 250 Satoshis. So a lightning wallet. I, my, my podcast is sponsored by River, so I use this, you can use that QR code and it will take you to River. You can download that app. When you download it and you have this app, there's a little button called Receive. If you push that receive, that means, Hey, I want to open up a wallet that says Vance can send money to this account. Then you go and you click on the Lightning invoice on the bottom of that. And what that's gonna do is give you this crazy weird sequence of letters. You'll notice that the letters say LN and then this huge string of, of letters and numbers and whatnot. That's what I want you to email me at Vance at Legacy Interviews dot com. Don't do it at 2:00 AM or or in the middle of the night or whatever, because you only have an hour from when you generate an invoice to when it's turned off and you can't use it anymore. So they only last for an hour. You always have to generate new ones. This is a way they create security. So if you're like, Hey, I'm, I'm, I've got this.

Vance Crowe [00:56:18] I want fans to send me lightning, just send it to me in the subject line. Write, write something like lightning address. Don't write anything else in there, just send me that code and I will, as I'm riding on the train tonight, going to the airport, or as I'm at the airport, I will zap you 250 SATs. Once you have those 250 SATs, what I want you to do is find somebody that will download an, an app and send them some sets and just start playing. Does anybody in here think they're gonna do it? Alright, a few of you. How are we doing on time? Alright, we're running close on time. The last thing that I wanna share, so if any of you guys wanna get a photograph of that, that'll, that we can go to that. I wanna mention a thing called Nostr. And the reason I wanna mention this is, this is gonna be way outside of what you guys are into. Has anybody in here heard of Nostr? You have, do you use Nostr? That

Guest [00:57:14] That was a spinoff after Lobster, wasn't it?

Vance Crowe [00:57:17] I, I don't know. So Nostr is a very interesting PLA way that social media I think will go in the future. And right now, if you are trying to build an audience on Facebook, on any of these pla on any of these platforms, no matter how much you like their founder, no matter what it is like building barns on rented land, they can at any time be like, you there, we don't like what you're selling, we're turning you off, and now you're out. And all that relationships, all those people that followed you, that stayed connected with you, they can't follow you anymore. And so there is a, a group of programmers, and this is gonna take a long time for this to build out, this is still in the very nascent stages. They build what is called Noer, which is an open system where instead of the platform giving you a profile, 'cause on this one, right, you, when you go to Facebook or you go to Instagram, you say, will you give me a profile? Will you give me a place that's mine? And they can take that away. What Noer does is it says you create a profile, you create what's called an a public profile, an nub, and then you have your password, the Nsec. Then you go onto any one of these platforms and they're not good right now. Right now, if you went there, it's just the Wild West. It's crazy.

Vance Crowe [00:58:48] It's, it's totally out there. But now if I decide to move from, so this is a platform called dus. This is a platform called Primal. Let's say I'm on dus and I don't like what's going on there, but I have amassed a thousand followers now with Nostr. If I move from dus to to Primal, I just move using my password, I move over to Primal and all my followers come with me. And so that frees us from the social media companies being able to say, who can and can't have a profile here, what can and can't you say? Now I could go way into detail about how these work, but I, I think the most interesting part about this is there's a whole ecosystem where they're building the equivalent of Twitter. On, on, on Nostr. They're building the equivalent of Instagram. They're building the equivalent of YouTube out there. And right now it seems totally wild and out there, but as we go through more censorship, as more companies prove that they're willing to kick people off for different reasons, this will become I think very powerful. I'm gonna leave it there 'cause we only have three minutes left. But now, whenever you've seen these roller blades out in the wild, you'll know, you'll be like, I remember I saw it at Fusion. All right, question. So where

Guest [01:00:08] Do we go to find more in depth information about all this?

Vance Crowe [01:00:12] You could check out my podcast 'cause they talk about this stuff all the time. That's the Vance Crowe podcast. I'll throw something out there, just like with the last few moments. If you are really on the edge and you wanna do something really different, try and get on Nostr. This is my end pub, so this is my public profile. I put it on that QR code. If you get on Nostr and send me a note, I'm not gonna give you any more Satoshi's, but I will think that you're really cool and that you are out there playing. But this will give you a chance to find a platform. I, I didn't have time to go through all of it, but yeah, just try it. Yes, just

Guest [01:00:51] Looking for clarity. When you're talking about ai and it sounded like you could also use AI to make sure you're filtering out information. I think you used, like, I forget if you used activists as an example, but how AI scans all information. Well, they're scanning maybe misinformation or other articles from writers or you're saying that you can also use AI to block out that information to make sure you're only pulling from

Vance Crowe [01:01:16] Oh gosh, I that I don't know AI well enough to know. It just depends. I don't think so. I mean, like, I'm, I'm sure you'll be able to create AI that says we only want you to reference this information rather than that, but you won't be able to control the public in that way. Gotcha. Well, let me ask a question. Did I make anybody uncomfortable with any of the things I said today? No discomfort, I would say in a good way. Okay. All right. I'm, I'm fine with discomfort. I, I love discomfort. This is great. Well, I wanna thank you guys for coming to this wild and unkempt presentation. I, I hope to see you guys out there on Nostr and I really will be excited if you send me an invoice requesting some Satoshis. So thank you very much.