Why Have We Become What We Are As A Culture? - With Tim Durbin

About this episode

Vance welcomes longtime friend Tim Durbin, a prolific note-taker and wealth advisor from St. Louis, for a wide-ranging conversation about what has changed in American culture across generations. They trace the decline of small-community institutions — the parish, the Rotary club, the extended family living within five miles of each other — and weigh whether "pillars of the community" like Tim's grandfather (an elder, mechanic, and trusted local fixture) can exist in an atomized, screen-driven world. The two dissect a controversial Lincoln Project podcast that stereotyped rural white America, agreeing it oversimplifies and others a whole class of people. They dig into parenting in the smartphone era, travel-sports burnout, the value (and cost) of higher education amid campus unrest, and whether people are inherently good — Tim says yes, Vance pushes back that individuals can be reasonable while groups rarely are. The conversation closes on agriculture's technological transformation (fewer, bigger, costlier machines; farmers working decades longer) and a shared belief that improving a fractured culture starts with local involvement, not national debate.

“And I wonder if there's gonna be people like that, you know, those pillars of their community, you know, another 50 to a hundred years, you know, what the direction that we're going right now, I do miss, you know, that type of upbringing.”

“You know, if we did it for 2000 years as a, as a, as a people, as a society and it worked, does it all have to change so rapidly? No, I think from a, you know, if, if you, if you come to, whether it's Rotary or if you go to another organization, you walk in, you don't know anybody...”

“we know that there's a lot of discourse right now focused on the divide... would you feel comfortable sending your kid to an Ivy League school? And you ask, you know, a lot of people right now, they'd probably say no.”

Key moments

• Tim describes becoming a prolific note-taker out of necessity (four kids, information overload) and Vance connects it to attention being "the only thing you truly own."
• Tim's grandfather is described as a community pillar — elder, mechanic, church writer — and Tim wonders whether such figures will exist in another 50-100 years (legacy).
• Vance and Tim dissect the Lincoln Project podcast's portrayal of rural America as "filled with rage" and "confused about the future," calling it an inversion of the outrage that would follow if said about any other group (mob, institutions).
• Tim argues louder, more polarized voices are exhausting normal people into disengaging rather than "fighting back" (mob).
• Vance argues Ivy League institutions face a coming existential split/schism as the monolith cracks; Tim counters that engineering and accounting degrees remain essential even as elite humanities programs falter (institutions, money).
• Both share stories of mentors (Vance's 104-year-old mentor Pete; Tim's Vietnam-vet first boss) shaping their trajectories through expectations rather than instruction (legacy).
• Discussion of travel sports economics — only 7% of kids play collegiately — and the divide it creates between families who can and can't afford it (money, mob).
• Vance states he intuitively disagrees that all people are inherently good, drawing a distinction between reasonable individuals and unreasonable groups (mob, trust).
• Vance describes how urban living atomizes responsibility to bureaucrats and business owners, making city dwellers less self-reliant by design, not by choice (institutions, trust).

Notable quotes

“individuals can, can be reasonable and groups of people are absolutely not reasonable... I intuitively disagree with the idea that all people are good people.”

“So much responsibility has been atomized out to the... bureaucrat or a business owner or something... everybody follows the rules and you are both not responsible and therefore not as self-reliant as you can be.”

“if you have only conservatism then you have a tyranny. Nothing can change. But if you are constantly changing, then what is your culture? What is it that you've figured out?”