Episode 159: Preserving Family Farms Through Effective Communication with Vance Crowe

Hi, friends, this is John. Welcome to the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. I have all kinds of fun conversations here, usually related to agronomy, but today we're going to talk about communications and how we communicate effectively with each other and with the stakeholders that are around us. Because the reality is that farmers are the foundational stewards of our ecosystems. And communicating the scope of the work that we are doing is fundamental to being as a society. We, our, our culture and our society collectively here in North America has drifted so far from understanding and appreciating what's happening and what's going on. Last week I was at an event where a speaker said that 80% of sixth graders today don't know where hamburger comes from. And that is pretty surprising. That's pretty surprising. I'm just laughing at Vance reaction here. And so communication is a piece that's going to become really important. So I've had several really awesome conversations with Vance Crow. And Vance, I'm delighted to have you here on the podcast. I'm really looking forward to getting into this conversation. You are a very articulate communicator, one of the best that I've had the privilege of having conversations with. How did that all come about?

Oh, man, it's great to be here. John, I, you know, when you are articulate, which people tell me that I am, you don't really know that you are. It's just the way that you think. But I, I will say this. I. I grew up in a family of seven kids and my siblings were way better athletes. They were way better, you know, better looking, stronger. I think in a lot of ways, the only way I was ever going to get anybody to pay attention to me was if I was able to take that very small amount of time that I had and say it in a way that would make other people understand. I think that, you know, almost all of our skills are developed painfully. And I think that was the pain I was dealing with.

How, how did that reflect itself in your professional career? What is, what has your journey and pathway been like? Tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to the scope of the work you're doing today.

Well, I grew up in small town central Illinois, and the only thing I wanted to do in the whole world was to get out of small town central Illinois. I couldn't see its value and I went away to school. And as I was trying to get away to school, I would always ask people like, what do you think I should study? Because I wasn't an engineer. And I didn't like singing and I didn't want to do these other things that were a clear path. And people are like, well, you, you seem to like talking to people. You should go into communications. And so I went and studied this thing that, that colleges have abstracted to a level that it's almost not valuable at all. It's like, you know, here's the three pillars of great communication or the, you know, the four concentric triangles or whatever it is. And I go all the way through school and I kind of have this mentality of like, I'm just going to go get the piece of paper so that that way I can get a job. And my last semester in my senior year, I had an internship with a PR firm. And, and the PR firm, the reason I chose this one over the other ones was that they were fighting a Walmart coming into town. And this really struck my, like, hey, let's fight against the big guy and I'll be on the little guy's team. We were on this, you know, preserve this small town. And so I did all this extra work and I was really into this. We're doing pr, we're going to do media outreach, we're going to do all the things that you do in, in corporate communications. And right before I'm about to present to the owner of the company, he stops me and he goes, you know, Vance, what's interesting about Client is that we were actually approached by Walmart first, but this, this town ended up writing us the check first, so we're working for them. And I was so deeply appalled by this. Like, I was like, wait, you're saying you were, you would have worked for the enemy? Like, what are you talking about? That I, that broke my brain. And it really, like, totally annihilated any idea that I had of going into corporate communications. And so I left and I went and became a deckhand on a ship. And then I moved to Africa and joined the US Peace Corps and then started bouncing around and doing a whole bunch of things, which, you know, led to being around other people that had a lot more experience communicating in a bunch of different ways that made me really develop my skills. But it was definitely not through going through corporate America.

Now hang on just a second here, Vance. Didn't you end up doing. Being a public spokesperson for corporate America for part of your career?

Yeah, so I, the, the job I took after I worked at the World bank was working at Monsanto. And I, I often tell the story about, like, I would have been the Last person. Well, maybe John Kemp would be the last person that would go to work at Monsanto. But, like, if you look at all of my career choices, I worked in public radio. I worked for, you know, the Peace Corps. I was on an ecotourism ship. This is not People that love Monsanto.

But.

But I was living in St. Louis, and they were hiring for this job, Director of Millennial Engagement. And I thought that was the funniest thing I'd ever heard in my life. I thought that was hilarious. And I had an opportunity to come interview for him. And I thought, like, well, who doesn't want to see inside of North Korea? Like, I'll go take that job interview. And I got there and I was immediately disappointed because I thought I was going to come to, like, an 80 story building with dark storm clouds and everybody wearing, you know, black suits and Matrix style sunglasses. And what I encountered was a college like, campus with fountains and a woman named Holly that was wearing a sweater and had a ponytail that invited me in to do these interviews. And I ended up going through seven hours of interviews. And I don't know, you've never probably interviewed for a job, but interviewing for a job that you don't want is about as much fun as you can have because you could say anything you want. So. So they were asking me questions like, you know, what's your preferred management style? And I'd be like, I like to have a goal and then, you know, be left to work on my own. Why are dumping all these pesticides into the Gulf of Mexico? And, you know, then they'd answer my question, and then they try and bring it back to, you know, communications question or, you know, a style, a leadership style question. And I'd be like, why are you suing farmers? Why are Indian farmers committing suicide because of you? And I go through this, I do this to. To them for seven straight hours unrelenting. And, and I get all the way done with the interview, and Holly comes back in the room and, and, and says, okay, we're done with the interviews now. Do you have any remaining questions for me? And I was like, yeah, I got some questions for you. You're hiring this person to be director of Millennial Engagement, the person that's going to go out and represent this company that everybody knows is evil. How are you planning on training this person? And Holly said something that totally changed my life, something I did not expect. She said, you know, whoever we hire for this job, we're going to train them based on their skillset. And since You've been so curious. I think what I would do is write a list of 50 people from throughout the company if we hired you, and let you go talk with them. Geneticists, chemists, breeders, farmers, attorneys. And when you get done with that list of 50 people that, that you go and talk to for an hour, we'll sit down, you and I, and we'll figure out what you do and don't know. And then I'll write another list of 50 people. And right then a light bulb went off in my mind. I was like, these insane people have no idea what I can do. If I can go around and ask anybody anything I want, because I'm. I'm in the perfect situation. I am either going to find out that they are as evil as everybody says that they are, or I'm going to discover something different, something that I don't anticipate, something that I don't know. And you're in the hotbed. The most important question maybe in the history of modern civilization, which is we perceive that we're growing food more bountifully and more plentifully than we ever have before, and people are worried about how their food is being grown. And so, you know, if they're as evil as everybody says that they are, then I'm, I'm going to discover it and then maybe I'll go write the greatest tell all book of all time or I'm going to discover something that I didn't anticipate. And so I ended up taking the job and working for five years, and it really worked out that I get to ask anybody anything I wanted. I got to go talk about what I learned. I got to have my mind changed up and down and left and right. And that, that was my time in corporate America.

I'd love to dig into that further, Vance, but, you know, one thing that I find. What's the quote that I'm looking for? Something to the effect of don't. Don't give credit to stupidity or don't give credit to arrogance when ignorance will suffice. Yeah, we could, we could wrap. I think, just in general, my comment around that is that I think people as individuals, mostly truly, authentically desire to do the right thing and to benefit the other people around them. Now, we might have disagreements about their approach on that and whether they're actually doing that, but that is the intent that most people generally are coming from.

That's what I learned at Monsanto. Like, it shattered my brain that I had this idea that people were just sitting There plotting to do evil or plotting to do the wrong thing. And then when I get in there, you realize, like, these people are working as their life's work, as hard as they can to solve a problem. And I think one of the things I've learned since I've been out of Monsanto Bear is that oftentimes their way of thinking is very, very, very narrow, but very deep. And, and, you know, sometimes you can't see the woods through the trees. But to their credit, they had actually helped spark a revolution and they had solved problems that nobody had solved before. And so, you know, it's, it's hard to say that they, that they were doing anything other than their life's work that they feel very good about.

All right, so I want to ask you a bit more about communication, because within this role that you had, you were, you were, you are a very articulate communicator. Some time ago, several years ago, I interviewed Vern Peterson. I think it might have been in the interview or perhaps just in a personal conversation, and he, he made a comment that I haven't forgotten. He said that on the Consumer Trust Index, farmers rank close to the top of the list with the clergy, and agribusiness ranks close to the bottom of the list with government and pharmaceutical companies. And it's been interesting to observe how this has been leveraged by many different agribusiness companies who have all these training programs to train farmers on how to be effective spokespersons for agribusiness because they know the farmers are a trusted voice. What's your take on that?

Well, I think that's one absolutely true. Right. Like if somebody meets a farmer, that's, that's like instant credibility in some way. And I think it was probably more true five to ten years ago than it is now. I think that the, there's like, you know, that's the reason I think a lot of people refer to them as selves, as regenerative farmers, because it's a way to distinguish. I'm a farmer that thinks about things, things in this other way compared to these other farmers. But that's definitely 100% was the agribusiness strategy. And I think that they were so far behind engaging the public because they're, they're. One of the big reasons they got into a, a problem was they said, why would we go out and address these anti GMO people or these anti pesticide people? Like, we don't sell anything at all to them. Who cares if they stand out there and yell at us and in fact, the protesters themselves actually strengthened, in a paradoxical way, the position of the people working in the agribusiness companies. They benefited them. For people to be standing there and saying, you know, what you need is more regulation. You need more testing. And the company would be like, okay, well, we'll add on four more years of testing. And at $10 million more per year, what that means is, unless you have billions of dollars of resources, no new entrant will ever come into this market. And so for a long time, they thought, hey, this is actually a good thing for us. They're creating a moat. And then they woke up one day and realized, oh, wait a second. If these consumers don't want to buy what ultimately is produced by these farmers, and they hate you, now, you can't even go out and speak to them. You have to have farmers go do it on your behalf.

So there's. There's. Oh, my goodness, Vance, there's about half a dozen questions that I want to ask. I'm not even sure sure where to go in response to what you just described here. But I find this whole thing interesting and the. This conversation interesting in the context that farmers. I'm speaking broadly here as. As a group, because there's certainly many individual exceptions. But farmers, farmers broadly, are good at what they do. They're good at growing things because that's what they enjoy. Many of them are not so good at marketing, and I'm being very diplomatic. Many of them suck at marketing, let's put it that way, and marketing themselves, marketing their crops. In fact, we've gotten to this place in agriculture where marketing your crop is sometimes is the lexicon that's used to trade options and to do commodity trading. And that's not marketing. It has nothing to do with marketing.

So.

I see on one hand, I see tremendous opportunity. But I just. Let me just ask the question from an open perspective. You can take it wherever you'd like to go. Where do you see the big opportunity for farmers to be able to communicate more effectively and to market themselves more effectively to any audience?

Well, that's an excellent question. Um, you know, if we. If I think about the most important group that farmers need to talk to is probably their own families. I do. I actually. When I left Monsanto, I started a company called Legacy Interviews, where I record families telling their life stories so that the future generation knows about their history, about where they came from, about what they went through. And what has been absolutely staggering to me about this, many things have been. But. But the thing that really strikes me is the parents, when they're doing these interviews are often like, oh, the kids know this. They know that we didn't grow up with running water. Or they know that, you know, that I started off by having a horse that pulled the plow. And then you talk to the kids, they don't know. They don't have any idea. And you think about, like, if you don't know those stories, what other things do you not know? Well, they don't know how dad feels about them or about how mom, what she wants from the inheritance that she's passing down. There's so much that's going on within these families that they have worked their entire lives, in fact, entire generations, to be able to pass something down that's valuable. And the message that is embedded in that is not being communicated. And so I think the. The first and foremost place where people can improve. If you want to be a farmer, if you want to be a multigenerational family farmer, it's figuring out how to communicate. Not with people that are going to buy your products abstractly or at the farmer's market, but the people that you're working with and living with and trying to pass things down to.

You know, there is an element here of having perceived permission that we often hurt the people the most, that we are the closest to, and that can be directly, or it can also be by omission, simply not communicating, not being effective in, in sharing the things that are important.

There are so many times in the interviews, so I do interviews with people as individuals, and a lot of times somebody will say, like, I want you to interview my mom on her own, Interview my dad. And then I want to do one together. And partway through the interview, I'm going to realize this dad feels so much love and affection and trust and caring for his wife, but he has never told her that. And so it's. It's an interesting situation to be in where I get to be like you were telling me during your individual interview how great of a mother she was, what made her a great mother. And he turns to his wife and she looks up at him like she's 18 years old, like they just met, because she's about to receive something she never could ask for on her own. And he will just let it come fully flowing out of him. Now this is. They have. She will have waited 40 years of that marital stress and that, like, you do everything wrong. And I want to spend my money this way, and you're not letting me. And this is what we should do. But that underneath all of the day to day stress, he had all of these things that he believed and saw and had in her. And it's just amazing that that's so hard for us to get out. And that's, that's actually the thing she should know the most clearly. And yet oftentimes she may never hear that her whole life.

And the same holds true for all the other family members and the people that we're closest to. Yeah. You know, this reminds me of a conversation. I was on your podcast just yesterday and I spend a lot of time thinking about trying to understand the outliers and in many ways the Amish community, the culture of the Amish community is an outlier in the agricultural context as a whole, where family farms have been lost in large numbers. They're growing in numbers within the Amish and Mennonite communities and not in a small way. They're growing. I mean, they're essentially doubling every generation. And why is that exactly? What is so different? And there are a number of things that are different. But I think as I was thinking about this last night, following our conversation, one of the things that occurred to me is that we have this perspective that change is difficult. And change is particularly difficult in the farming community. And I think a large part of that is because we have rejected the innovative spirit and the warrior spirit of the young generation. Change is driven by 20 and 30 year olds, not by 60 and 70 year olds. And when I go to teach a day long seminar on agronomy and plant nutrition management In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, there'll be 200 to 300 people in the room, half of which are under the age of 30. I can't do that anywhere else in the country. And these are young men who are farming on their own, perhaps with their father or their family's financial support. But they've signed onto a mortgage on a farm and they're farming. They are on the hook for the success of that farm. What other communities does that happen in on a significant scale?

No. The Hutterites may. Yeah, maybe the Mormons.

This is another aspect of that family communication. That, that type of dynamic, that type of culture and that type of innovation and change can only occur when there is this authentic communication within the family, within all the family members from one generation to the next.

Yeah. I have had a chance to talk with people about like their farm businesses. Like there was a company called White Commercial hired me to, to interview the families that had successfully passed down grain elevators because they were like, hey, we want to know, like, what's the secret sauce here? How come some families are able to pass this down and other families aren't? And I interviewed this amazing family where the wife, like, really saw the importance of chairs in an office. And this will always strike me, and she said, it's okay to share. I'm not sharing any, like, private thing. But it was all about, like, how, you know, if the guy that's in charge sits in this chair, dad sits in his chair, and people come in and they talk with him. As long as dad sits in that chair, it doesn't matter that president got passed down over here or, you know, the, the, you know, somebody who's handed responsibility on, on a, on an org chart. As long as dad is sitting in that chair, everybody's going to treat him as though he's in charge. And so she made a big deal out of having almost a ceremonial passing on of the chair to the son and then ultimately to the grandson after about. It wasn't even that long, 10 years. And it was very much like, hey, it's. You're not going to one day sit in that chair when you're 60. You're going to sit in that chair when you're 30 and you're going to be making these decisions, and everybody around you is going to understand that because you're sitting in that chair, we mean business. And that that level of symbolism is something I try and talk about with people now when I go out and give talks about communication, is that even if you're not great at words, there are ways to communicate, passing down authority and passing down responsibility and ownership. And oftentimes it's going to come symbolically, but you've got to create the. The energy within those symbols.

Yeah, I would imagine the. The symbol of the chair is probably attached to an office, into an office space that also has its own embodiment. You know, one of my. In my opinion, one of the best sales books ever written is titled Pitch Anything by Oren Clough. And he goes into some depth talking about framing and being the alpha in the room. And I don't particularly care for that terminology. And he also had challenges with that terminology because it's so easily misinterpreted today. But what he was referring to is the social dynamics of the people who are engaged in a conversation. And he pointed out something very interesting that I find generally holds true is that the person who is perceived as being the principal authority in a conversation can make all kinds of statements, and he seldom has to defend his statements. Everyone else has to defend their statements to the alpha in the room, but the Alpha does not have to defend his statements to the rest of the room. And that's a very powerful position to be in and something that many people kind of understand implicitly and engage in that way and others don't understand at all.

You know, as you were saying this, I think one of the things that is a really powerful, I don't know, way to understand it is asking questions is so much more, I don't know, strength gaining than I think most people realize. Like, the other thing that, that the alpha, that character does in a room is they're the ones that turn to somebody that's quiet and they say, what do you think? You know, the low status, low power person in a, in a room never does that. Right. So the person that can turn and be like, you know, it's important that this person that's not speaking says something. And I think that that's one of those things that even if you're not an extrovert, even if you're not a person that has something necessary to say, you can draw a lot of energy from asking other people what they think.

Yeah. All right, Vance, I'm going to flip gears on you because I've got three things that I don't want to get lost in my head here. I'd love to follow up on what you just said, but something else that I don't want to lose sight of. A bit ago, you mentioned you have all these legacy. You have these legacy interviews where you're talking to people about their history, the history of their farming operation. And I. Originally, the original inspiration for starting this podcast was I had several mentors, people who were in their 70s and 80s, who had this encyclopedic knowledge that took the most of that knowledge to the grave with them. And I wanted to try to draw some of that out and capture it and preserve it so that it wouldn't get lost. And on the pathway, having all these conversations, there's this incredible wealth of knowledge of people who remember what farming used to be like and how they used to prevent all kinds of problems with cultural management practice and so forth and things that have largely been lost from the collective knowledge at this point. I'd love to ask you about that. What are some of the conversations you've had about people who remember, with people who remember what farming used to be like before there was an easy button?

Well, I would say about 70% of my clients are from farming and they've come from all over the United States. And what I have come to realize is like things that seem that I thought of as old fashioned, like bailing hay, for example, where you have this baler that first I remember, the last thing I remember are square bales and now they've moved on to round bales. But I've gotten to talk with people about how much effort went into collecting, you know, whatever you call them, the stovers of, of hay and loose hay and just the entire mentality that would have to go into hitching up your horses, but not too early because you have to wait for the dew to come off of the hay and then you were going to have to time this out so that you could have another team of horses ready and how you moved that hay. And the thing that I used to always think of farmers as, as like having a clock within them that's much deeper than people in the city because they're, they have to measure the seasons. But what I've come to realize is there is a clock of the day that is a synchronicity with overall nature. And it's, it's the dew and the air pressure and the, the temperature and that, that's something that is a synchronization that we just don't have anymore. Because I don't know if it's because people can go out and check with a, with a, you know, a meter or if it's that you, you, you do it in such large volumes or you can store it in a way that you don't have to do that. But there was a synchronicity with the time of day that was very important, I think.

Yeah, there are still elements of that. There's certainly a. For harvest of a lot of different crops. There are still elements of people who pay a lot of attention. But I would say it's generally accurate that our mindset, our paradigm of how we approach growing crops has become much more mechanistic than synergistic.

Yeah, well, I mean, just the very act of needing to use animals to do so much of your work required you to have a synergy, you know, not, not just horses, but I mean there was a reason why people kept hogs and cattle and horses and chickens and, and like, and the garden and how all of that worked in this symbiosis where now you could have thousands of acres of corn and soybeans and you don't see any chickens or if you do, it's just like a side hobby that mom kind of has, you know, when she wants to. But in the past it used to be like, otherwise the system won't work. We won't have meat in the middle of winter. We, we need things to can we need things. I'm not saying it was necessarily better. I just, it was a synchronicity with the, with the actual earth that I think is almost entirely lost.

Yeah, well, I think it still exists and it still exists in communities. It still exists in certain areas and regions with certain cultures. But also when you said the chickens in the backyard being a side project, it just reminded me again of change management and supporting and helping the next generation. Reminds me of a story of this young man up in Michigan. He was, I think he was 26 or 27 years old at the time. This story is there. He reached out to me and reached out to a couple of friends of mine and he grew up on a 4,000 head dairy and he's very passionate about dairy. He wants to get into dairy, but there's no room for him in the existing dairy operation. There's no financial room, there's no room for him to make a livelihood and an income there. And he just, he doesn't fit. So he asked for a small side project, asked for some acres to go off and do his own thing. He establishes, I think a 25 or 30 head organic dairy, organically certified with Jersey cows. Three years in, he nets more than the 4,000 herd, 4,000 head dairy cow herd. And so that was, he was given an opportunity to play around on existing land that was already owned and take that to another level of, of performance that wasn't possible with a larger scale dairy. You look at the, the number of farming enterprises that exist on a scale of thousands of acres that don't have the bandwidth or don't have the room or the desire to do smaller things like that. And the opportunity that would exist if there, if there truly were an authentic desire to help the next generation get started into farming. There's lots of pathways to do that if you really want to do it.

Yeah, I mean, I think of Jason Mox system, you know, where he's doing this, you know, all the different, like weird and unusual types of farming that he's doing. He's not doing it on all of the acres, he's just carved off a bit. And now he gets to experiment. And it's in that experimentation that he's finding, you know, what's the most profitable, what's the most, um, you know, what's the most interesting, what's the one that allows him to do other synergistic things. And I mean truly now the only way you're going to break into farming is to do something different because you can't like to enter the commodity game. It's like you and I can't go enter the steel game. We don't have enough capital to go to go mine the ore and smelt it. And so you've got to find different ways to do it. And, and like that's oftentimes the most important thing is dad giving you permission to cut off a couple acres and try something different.

Vance, one of the things that you did recently that really caught my attention and I think caught a lot of people's attention was your use, your in depth use of AI and AI tools. You recently conducted an interview, or rather you had an AI tool interview you about how you were using AI and how you expected to see that evolve. And I think you also communicated in a couple of social media posts how deeply you had been testing and experimenting with various AI tools to just see what best fit for you. And I've, I've been on a very similar pathway. I've, I've done very in depth testing with Claude and with Gemini and Grok and ChatGPT and, and really trying to determine where each of these systems which one of them performs best and at which tasks and why. Why are these various differences? And I've come to the realization from using these tools that anyone who doesn't start using these AI tools is rapidly be going to become obsolete. I don't think it's a question of at least at this stage, it's not a question of AI replacing people, but AI making those people better. It's like living in the year 2000 and choosing not to use Google Search or something like except 10 times more than that or maybe 100 times more than that. So I'd love to get your perspective, tell us about your journey and your process of playing around with these AI tools that eventually led you to be interviewed by an AI and to post that because I think that caught a lot of people's attention.

Yeah that that was the most feedback I've ever gotten from anything I've ever published. I hundreds of text messages and emails. It was profound. But the story leading up to that was I had a good friend that was saying hey, the way that I'm using AI is I am assigning it different tasks. You AI, you're going to be my marketing person and I'm going to feed in everything That I know about in. In this particular case, like selling my product and service, you know, who are my clients, what are our brand colors, how is all this working? And so I started doing the same thing. I have an AI that's operating as my chief financial officer. I have one that's my office assistant. I have one that's doing marketing. But when I started to feel that sense of dread and doom came when I used this one called Notebook LLM. And in this one, you can take either transcripts or actual audio itself. Maybe you should try this, John, is that I could take all of my old podcasts and feed it into this system, and then I can hit a button. And after about five minutes, it produces its own podcast with a woman and a man talking, doing a full podcast about the content of the 100 or so podcast that I uploaded to it. And it was so good, it sounded like two people on NPR or something like that talking about it. So accurate, because it was only informed by my own things, that I had this sense of, like, actual existential dread where I was like, if this can do that, who am I? What am I? Like, how can. If it can abstract this information? And it was from that point that I kind of came to the same conclusion that you did. Like, there is no sitting out, or you can, but you'll have a very different life. You'll have a very different, you know, existence. Maybe you have to become more like the cyborg. Maybe you have to find some way to integrate it or use it as a lever. And that is what has really informed the amount that I am relentlessly, even when I find things that make me uncomfortable, using it, because I know it produces as good a podcast as me.

So from your perspective, Vance, if it can produce a podcast as good as you, then what. What is the value that you can bring?

Well, I think the. The legacy interviews, the conclusion that I've made on that, because it's going to be very simple. You're going to have a. A, A figure made on the computer, on the tv, that's going to look like a real person, probably a really beautiful person that you can feed it thousands of questions that I've asked it. And so it asks the right question. But there is something about the electricity between two people. And I think this kind of two of the things that I think are primary to being human. The first one is that humans can say no. And I think that that's what makes a dynamic between two people talking. I can ask a question to a human being and they can tell me. No, I don't want to answer that. And, or this. Vice versa. Right. Like that whole ability to say no actually signals the will that creates the spark, the energy between two people. And so I think that that is something that's really important with legacy interviews, is that there is a spark, there is energy there that can't exist between an AI client and a person.

There's a relationship.

Exactly. The, the like, hey, we're doing this together. We both choosing to do this. We are, we are looking at each other, we are making eye contact, and the eye contact isn't vacant behind it. And so there's an energy there. And then the other side of it is that I, I don't believe that AI can create art. And we could get into a deep philosophical argument like, about what this means. I think AI can entertain you and I think it can mimic the things that have been created before. But there's something about art which is expressing an idea that hasn't been expressed before. It's. It's pushing the amalgamation of your experiences and your words and your feelings and your emotions and your hormones and all of those things into the world. That, at least for right now, I think that that's something that's different than can be done with an automated legacy interview. But I also may be delusional here. I'm open to the idea that it'll. It'll feel the same way too. I don't know. What do you think?

Well, I look at this from. I've. I mean, I've been thinking about developing software and technological tools to make the information around regenerative agriculture more accessible for a decade plus. So I've been thinking about this for some time. And what defines. What is the basis of a technology that, that regenerates relationships rather than fracturing relationships, which is what most technology today does. Most technology today fractures relationships between people. It fractures relationships between people and their ecosystem, the landscape that they're responsible for stewarding, etc. And so I think beneficial technology will be technology that is intentionally, deliberately designed not to replace people, but to make people better, to make people better at the things that, that they can uniquely contribute. So there is no. There's this old saying that the best fertilizer is a farmer's footsteps. There is something about the presence of a farmer in the field who is observant. That's the key part. They have to be observant. So in our technological development work, I've been very deliberate about how do we create technology that makes people better let's not replace people in the field with a multitude of sensors. The ultimate sensor is someone who's out there in the field who can say, this doesn't feel right, something doesn't feel right. And then to be able to ask the questions, to turn that intuitive feeling into a set of observations, to say, all right, have you looked at this? Have you evaluated that? And to develop this whole set of human oriented observations that they're not a replacement for data, but they are as valuable as the data, perhaps more valuable, but also more difficult to quantify. So I think we have to. From my perspective, the future is embracing these technological tools, but coming to a very clear understanding of what it is that they cannot bring and what we should not try to create with them, and what it is that we bring uniquely as humans that we should not try to replace. And how can we make our contribution more effective with these tools? You think about the development of any other tool, a chainsaw, a bulldozer, a pen, a gun, a hammer, they all made us more effective in specific ways, accomplishing specific tasks. Technology has done that historically as well. And it's also fractured us because we've not used some of those tools. Well, this is just another iteration of that that draws us ever nearer to the cliff's edge in some way.

You know, you said something and it's made this idea come to my head. I'd love to talk about it a little bit, which is a good friend of mine talked about how much his life changed when he said he heard this adage about you need to go tell the bees and it's where somebody died, you need to go tell the bees, you know, something happened in the community and you go tell the bees. And he's talked about this like that ever since he started doing that, how much his life has blossomed. And as you're describing this, I'm realizing that's part of that. Farmer's footprints are the best fertilizer. It's the. You're going to tell the bees. You're observing. I don't know what relationship the bees have. I don't, I don't want to turn it into like a magical thing, but it does seem to me that there's something important there. Is this a framing you've heard before?

Absolutely. There's an element of conscious presence there and deliberate communication, deliberate intention. When you think about what is it that humans bring to the landscape that no other organism brings, that we know of, I think it comes down to deliberate intention and consciousness, stewardship, consciousness like you can't say that humans are the only organism that brings care and love to the, to the landscape. Because when you start looking at interactions between mother trees and daughter trees and livestock and so forth, they absolutely bring care. But we have the ability to bring foresight, long range planning and stewardship, and deliberate intention that we are the hyper keystone species where we can guide the manifestation of how an ecosystem develops. That's something that we can uniquely bring and we should seek to amplify and to foster that.

There's something about time that is, I think, critical about humans. Right. So we definitely are aware of the past and yet we can't recreate it. So it's like not really a thing. Right. We can imagine the future, but you can't do anything in the future. You can only make actions happen in the present. And we can change our perception of these scales. You know, am I thinking five minutes ahead? Am I thinking an hour, a month, a generation or five generations? And that may be one of the critical things that we bring to the ecosystem is a sense of time and a, and a change in how we operate in the present, considering different futures and probably learning from the past, both of which don't actually exist. Well, if you can, if you can.

Visualize them, then they exist somewhere. They exist in your head if nowhere else.

Yeah.

Vance, this has been a fascinating conversation. What important topics would you like to talk about that we've missed?

Well, I, I always love talking with you. The, the I, I find us, our perspectives to be strangely different and also similar. I think one of the topics that has been fun and we talked a little bit about it yesterday and media is the concept of a worthy adversary and the benefit of learning how to disagree, because that may be one of the most important skills that is being lost right now is the ability to, to articulate the, what you don't agree with somebody else on and, and turning that not into a negative, but instead into a positive to get out of some kind of local optima.

Yeah. You know, it's very interesting for me to have this conversation, Vance, because I come from a cultural background and perspective where to a certain degree, perhaps to a large degree, it was unsafe to have a point of view or a perspective that was different from the culture of the community around you. And so there's been a lot of shackle bursting, if you will, to get to that point where of being comfortable disagreeing and also being comfortable being disagreed with this whole dynamic of us sitting here and having this conversation when, when I was growing up, even through my teens, early 20s, I was the quiet guy back in the corner that nobody ever heard a word from. So there is all of a sudden, as we're having this conversation, it's just bringing this, this rush of, of how, how far I've actually come and how many of those, those cultural barriers and boundaries I've had to overcome to, to get to this point.

You know, my wife and I were talking about how, you know, I have employees and they're great, they're creative, they're young. And I sense sometimes that even though I'm a great communicator, like, I'm like, I think that they're afraid of me sometimes and I don't know what's going on there. And she's like, oh, it's that you're so direct and that, you know, this is something that is, is not normal in their everyday lives. And so. And I'm like, yeah, but I think of myself as a great communicator. And she was like, well, the reason that you think that is that all of your friends are hyper logical, really disagreeable people that are completely comfortable arguing with people. And they don't end up having very many friends because they're, they're constantly arguing. And there's not very many people that are like, you know, can, can withstand that. But I, I'm like, drawn to it and I, I don't really know where I'm going. But you, you were mentioning the personal anecdote. Like, this is something I'm gr. I definitely sense that my communication skills that you were very complimentary of in the beginning are really good, but still have a lot of honing to do because there's, as culture changes and as. Where you are, your environment and your, the group that you're with, you have to adapt to that. And I am learning that there are serious gaps in the way that I communicate that have to be adapted. I can't say you guys are wrong because you, you don't like the way that I communicate. I have to figure out like, what do I need to change to make it so they don't perceive me in that way.

Maybe this is why you and I have hit it off on a personal level in such a, in such a strong way because I have a similar communication style that is very direct and I desire for other people around me to also communicate very directly. Like it's one of the fastest way to annoy me is to have a long preamble introduction to a conversation, like, just tell me already what it is. You want to tell me. Don't waste my time. We don't have time to waste. Life is short. Let's keep moving. You're not going to offend me. And that's, that's a very different dynamic from what many people are comfortable with.

I think that that's the only way the human mind, not the only way, but like disagreeing is where you find new things, right? Like, and, and directness has such value there. You know, that's how I came to, you know, discover Bitcoin early. It's how I came to be involved with Monsanto. Like, it gave me an opportunity to find people that thought things different than me. And I had no problem being in a room full of people where the entire room was like, no, Monsanto is bad and your products are bad. I did not desire to change their minds. What I desired to know is what is it that you know that I don't know? And I'll tell you as honestly as I can what I know. And if you know something better than me, I'll change. I'm, I'm not tied to my ideas. And I think that that's, yeah, probably the, the, the gift that God gave me was, was that like, desire to know what's going on in other people's minds on like a hyper scale. Because like I, I guess I, I don't, I mean, sure, I've got my strong opinions about things, but like, I'm more curious, I'm not so curious about, I'm not trying to get you to agree with me. I want to know more about what you think.

You know, just the way that you articulated that and expressed that if, if more of us, if we had more of that energy collectively as a society, if more individuals had came from that place within of really authentically trying to understand other people's perspectives and, and that open mindedness, we wouldn't have the polarized society that we now do from a political perspective and otherwise. Where we have these, these increasingly extremist views, it appears where we have more and more people on the opposite ends of the spectrum and viewer and fewer in the middle.

I think that that's because our hierarchical systems, like our brains are designed to figure out the alpha in the room that we were talking about before. It's designed to figure out where do I fit. And as we scaled up the number of people whose attention we were trying to do something with, the more we became like a mobile and the more that we, we benefited from being an emotional being in, in response in the way that you respond to things because that emotional response grabbed the attention of other people and. And helped you attain some level of hierarchy. And because we spend so little time in physical community, I think that that is distorted what we think of as valuable interactions. And I think that the only way to restore that is to spend time in. In the space of atoms or to look in somebody's eyes. I mean, it's a lot easier to disagree with somebody over X than it is even over zoom. I mean, if you and I were, you know, arguing and mad, I'd, you know, I'd be looking away. It'd be hard, right? It'd be uncomfortable. But, like, social media has reinforced these signals in our brain so much that it's made it so we're not actually curious. We're much more trying to score the tribal points that will raise us up in the hierarchy that doesn't even really exist in a mob.

Vance, I've enjoyed this conversation so much. Thank you very much for being here for all of your work. For all of our listeners, the knowledge of the generation that has gone before us, the wisdom that they. Not just knowledge, but the wisdom and the experience that they have is so much worth capturing and paying attention to. So please connect with Vance and his work at Legacy Interviews. Thank you for all that you're doing. Thanks for this conversation, and I look forward to talking with you more again soon.

Thank you, John.