Shaun Newman Podcast - #254 - Vance Crowe

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Vance returns. He hosts the Vance Crowe Podcast. We discuss the inner voice, parenthood, a view of Ottawa & being disagreeable.  Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Support here:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/ShaunNewmanPodcast

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Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast. Happy Monday. Hope everybody got to see some family over the weekend. Hopefully, you know, for a lot of families, kids, everybody, lots of time off this week. Hopefully you're getting it to spend it with loved ones. And, you know, hopefully we get some warm weather coming here, too. Before we get to today's episode along, you know, Mr. Crow, who's been frequent up the podcast several times over the past couple of years, let's get on to some episode sponsors. Canadians for Truth, they are a non-profit organization consisting of Canadians who believe in honesty, integrity, and principal leadership in government as well as the Canadian Bill of Rights, Charter of Rights, and Freedoms, and Rule of Just Laws.

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Now on to that, Ram Truck Rundown brought to you by auto clearing Jeep and RAM, the Prairie's trusted source for Chrys of Dodge Jeep Ram, Fia, and all things automotive for over 110 years He's a communication consultant for international organizations. He's spoken to more than 100,000 people Former Director of Millennial Engagement for Monsanto, former communication strategist for the World Bank Group, returned US Peace Corps volunteer, host of the Vance Crowe podcast. Yes, I am talking about the one and only, Mr. Vance Crow. So buckle up, here we go.

Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by Mr. Vance Crow. Thank you, sir, for hopping back on. Oh, man, this is a great way to spend a morning. Well, I tell you what, for listeners who probably, well, I'm certain I've picked up different listeners who haven't listened to every episode I've ever done. You've been a, it's been a while since you were last on.

Obviously, I was just on yours, but, you know, you got to go back to last July, episode 187 or right before that 152 where you were on the podcast. So I always point to new listeners, if they haven't heard of Vance is, you should go back and do what I did over the last day or two and listen to our conversations because it's, it's really interesting that some of our conversations, how I look back. a year ago and I was like man that was that was a weird conversation like not like in the sense of like talking about sorcery or something right just like the conversation about the the damon I guess is the one that got me started and I fast forward a year and I go that isn't such a weird conversation anymore

but anyways that's where I wanted to start with you is um you know since coming back from Ottawa, I've, uh, I've done a lot of soul searching, so to speak, a lot of talking, um, working on myself. I, I think most people think of working on oneself as going in the gym and, and that type of thing, a very external thing. Uh, the internal is, well, it's a lot of chewing in my words. Uh, I like to chew on things. So I want to start back all the way back to the Damon conversation about, about talking with your inner voice. Um, what's something, you know, when we first talked about your podcast. You mentioned part of the direction of podcasting for you and your podcast was kind of working on your Damon or exploring that side of it. What, I mean, like you've been doing

just as many episodes as I've been. What's growing within you or what have you been working on? Well, I think like everybody, life progresses. So I'm doing all the things that time won't let you wait for. We have a child that's growing up. We got another baby coming. And then when you think about doing this podcast you got another one coming oh yeah man in july congrats i am thoroughly scared you know when we had the first one i had no idea what i was in for and my wife and i were laying in bed early this morning like 445 in the morning and i was like i'm worried about being up all night with a baby again like i don't know that i can handle this but when we did the first one you didn't know what you were in for so it's um it's it's a little bit scary but we're excited because to have another

little life force in our world is great. But that means that the podcast has to account for the changes to my life. And when I was a kid or a young person or before I had a family, I didn't really understand how those two things had attention. And it wasn't a tension that you wanted to just dissolve. You didn't want to just be like, oh, it should be just go away. It was one where you say, how do I make this find the balance that allows me to both be the sort of father that I want to be, but also pursue this thing that I think is deeply valuable, but is very nebulous and doesn't have some clear road that I'm just headed down. Yeah, here's the thing that's going to happen, or I believe will happen,

because your first kid is a shock to everyone, because you never had a kid before. It's like, you know, how can you imagine finding energy while not sleeping all night? It's, you know, as a younger person, you don't have that within you. And then you find out you can very well do that. It's uncomfortable, but you move through it. And then you get comfortable with one kid. I assume you've gotten comfortable as a parent with one kid. You're like, oh, I can handle this.

I can handle this. What's two? Well, that's a dumb idea. And then you have two. And you're going to go back through the same kind of progression. And then you're going to have my dumb thought. And that is, well, we can handle three. We can handle three.

I tell you what, after that, it's probably all bets are off on how many kids you can handle. But, you know, I listened to your last interview, and I'm forgetting her name right now. Geez. Alex Judah. Yes. No, yes. Is that her last name? Yes.

Geez, I don't know why I'm questioning you on her last name. Anyways, you guys got talking about the meaning of life with her and how people look at kids as just a money vort. text of all things. And I was like, gee, I remember thinking that. Like, I remember thinking 10 years ago, man, kids are going to be expensive. I still wanted them, but I'm like, kids are going to be expensive. And I've actually asked, like I literally just had an archive interview. You call them legacy. And I'm going to steal that at some point. We've had this discussion. But the archive I just had was with a lady who never had kids. And I was like, I think you're the first person I've interviewed that didn't have kids at an older age and she was a successful businesswoman. And anyways, so I questioned

her real hard on it because you don't come across that, or at least I haven't. But your conversation was really interesting because you got talking about people not having kids, women specifically, obviously, and that, you know, it's looked as a cost vortex and the meaning of life is different. And I was like, well, as soon as you have kids, you understand the meaning of life. Or I think you do. I don't know. I was listening to it. I was like, the meaning of life is in having kids.

Or at least that's what I think. Like so much your life is like, boom, there it is. Like you find so much more value in the time you have. Yeah. Well, once you've had kids, there's a depth to your own existence that wasn't there before. It's a responsibility and a connection and a time horizon that's just, different than, hey, I'm considering, you know, my own life. Now I have to consider what happens when I'm gone, what lives on, and what am I responsible for? And that responsibility, because I think

most of the value of life, maybe all of it, comes from the responsibility that you're able to shoulder. And if you don't have children, you can find other responsibilities to shoulder, but it's a different landscape. It's an entirely different way. And what Alex and I were talking about is the fact that for the first time in human history, as far as we know, 50% of the women in the U.S. that are over the age of 35 don't have children. And, you know, that's your own decision. That's that I personally, my life would be dramatically different if I didn't have children. But what I'm really curious about is, what does this change about culture if the people that were previously tied into the world and made their mark on the world by race?

by pushing them out, by helping them be prepared for society. If those people just aren't doing it, if women aren't doing that or half of them aren't, what happens to how people spend their time, either on business or on leisure or in politics? Because there's so much more time when you are not a parent that you can impact the outer world way, way more. Because when you have kids, you have to worry about that internal board a lot more, and it takes time and energy. I don't think it's good. I'm not saying that if you don't want to have kids, don't have kids by all means. But when 50% of women, 35 plus, I don't even know what that stat means overall.

Just that I go, I don't know, that can't be good, right? Like when I think about the society, like the family building block is a huge component of our society. And the fact that divorce has become a huge thing isn't good, right? Like that just that isn't good. I mean, my wife's a teacher. And I hear some of the stories not only from her, but from her friends, colleagues, different teachers, and some of the things that kids today are put through. And where they put through when I was a kid and you were a kid, Vance,

sure, there was bad parents out there. But like, there is an increased level of, like, just tough situations for young kids to be put in. right like that's it's strange and that can't be good in some ways that might be arguing for that it is a good change right if you say hey the people that we're going to get married and have kids um but we're going to likely get divorced just didn't get married and they just didn't get divorced now you have a situation in which yes you have fewer children and you have people that are unmoored from whatever tether that is children having but you you've limited that i mean one of the things that's really scary in the United States. I don't know if it's true in Canada, but something like 90% of the inmates in jail,

in prison, come from divorced families and or single parent families, is rather, because in a large part of the black community, it's not, they were never married to begin with. These are single mothers that, you know, either had a relationship that didn't work out or it was never going to work out. And you know, you see the societal ramifications of that. Actually, the truth of the matter is you don't see it because those prisoners are just gone. They're just locked up. They're put away somewhere. And we don't know very much about them.

Our taxes pay to keep them going. But we're locking up more people than anyone else in the world than the United States, right? This is like massive, massive housing of inmates. And they could be considered concentration camps in some way. So do you think it's? a good thing then that people aren't having kids? I think that it's, you know, like the adage, you know, the guy got a horse for free and his neighbors all said, oh, that's a great thing. And then he was like, well, maybe. His son got on there and broke his arm. And everybody's like,

oh, that's terrible. He's like, well, maybe. But then the army came along and said, hey, we're conscripting everybody. And his son had a broken arm. So now he can't get into the army. So everybody's like, oh, isn't that wonderful? Well, maybe, right? It just depends on how things play out. I do think it's a destabilizing force. I do think that it creates a, just like we have a rural urban divide in this culture, we will have a growing children, no children divide, and that will have very, very serious political implications because what those people want is different from what the other group wants.

You know, I never thought I'd be a traditionalist. But as I listen to you, I go, I wonder if I'm becoming a traditionalist in the sense that, I just don't know, like the maybe adage to women not having kids and not, you know, like the family aspect. I go, yeah, I get the maybe thing, but I go, long term, I just, it feels whimsical, you know, like, oh, like, you know, you can just do whatever you want with your life. And maybe things will be better. Oh, maybe they won't. And I go, I don't know.

Like, that's going to cause problems. It's probably going to cause some solutions to, you know? but like to me I feel like I'm turning into a traditionalist and I never thought I would utter that I think women should bear children and fall and men should like parent become dads but I'm like both of us can sit here and go that's where the meaning of life is like honestly like I can't imagine some days you play the game and I may have said this you know in our chats like some days you play the game I wonder what life would be like if I had not no responsibilities, and I just had money coming out my ears, and I didn't have to worry about being at son's hockey practice or daughter's dance or over here or whatever. Right. Time, right? That's the part.

And I play that game for about 15, 20 seconds, two minutes, and then it doesn't, like, I'm like, yeah, but I get bored. Like, I mean, I get so bored. So me and you could sit here and both go, yeah, and make reasons on why. Well, maybe they wouldn't have been good parents. It was like, well, yeah, but that are. could be thrown to anyone who gets married. Well, you know, just if it isn't working out, just get divorced. It's okay. Society will be okay with it. It's like, or maybe look at marriage and

a relationship like, it's going to be one of the hardest things you ever do and maybe don't go into it so light, like Lucy Goosey, right? Like, creating a society where we got Lucy Goosey, and geez, I hear to myself right now. I never thought I would say that. Like, I just, I mean, I think So I was listening to a really interesting interview between Michael Saylor and Lex Friedman, and they were talking about innovations in war. But I think that Sailor's point was as well taken, which is that the societies that are organized win, right? The best organized situation you have.

So that way you can make everything more efficient. You can make your crops more efficient, your military more efficient. You can make your economic system. And when you start to get societal breakdown is when that organization, whatever brought you together disintegrates. And so you want organization to be there. The other thing is every once in a while, there is a paradigm shift in culture. It could be that you've just now had this huge acceleration of technology when the internet made it that every book in the world is now available for free, essentially. You know, you can at least get access

to it in the way you used to have to build libraries. Carnegie, when it went around the country building all these libraries in the United States, now that's all free. So there's a huge paradigm shift. I think when we talk about this parent thing, my natural reaction is to be like, not only is that not good, it's flat out dangerous. I feel like, ooh, the people that don't have kids are going to make really different political decisions than me. But this Sailor interview reminded me if you aren't prepared, if your society could be as organized as it can possibly be, but every once in a while there's a paradigm shift. And the people that say,

now we're not going to use that innovation. We don't think planes are going to be that big of a deal or they're too dangerous. Well, they are a few years later sitting in their cities while planes go over top of it and bomb them, right? And they lose and those societies are gone. So there's a tension there between wanting what you know works and recognizing that whatever is going to break up,

whatever you know is going to feel really, really uncomfortable. So I try and resist the temptation to say it is inherently bad because that's my natural reaction. And I don't want to be knocked over by the actual impacts of this paradigm change. Well, for sure, could you get a woman president out of it, right? And could that be the greatest thing that the United States has ever seen? Yes. But I don't know if I equate, and I'm stealing for what you just said, I don't know if I equate the airplane to women not having children or not having, you know, like to me, I don't know.

And that feels like a stretch. But once again, here's the reason women can go to that age and not have children. And it was an innovation of birth control. Right. And I personally believe that we have not as a society grappled with how big of a technology that was, that that was larger than nuclear technology. That was a bigger shift in the way we work than somebody getting the atomic bomb or planes or even the discovery of the bullet and propulsion. Because you now can subvert the very thing that nature was doing, which is, yeah, people maybe don't want to have kids, but they have these urges for them to grind their private parts together and that results in kids. Well, once we took that off the table, now you've just like way up to the pleasure quotient that people can have.

and way lowered the risk one. And so a lot of the people that would have been ensnared in parenthood, maybe were doing it by accident and then discovered the secret of life was children, but now we've taken that away. Sex Ed brought to you by Vance Crowe. Can you imagine they grind their private parts together? Just for pleasure, kids, just for pleasure.

I was under the impression that this is somewhat of a family friendly show. I didn't want to just blow it out of the water. Oh man, that's, that's, that's, uh, uh, sometimes, you know, you forget how powerful humor can be, right? Like on serious conversations. Um, you know, one of the things I'm trying to do, uh, spoiler a little bit is this November, I got quick dick and twos and I'm working on another guy, uh, by the name of Lance Crow to maybe be in Lloyd Minster, because I'd really think that'd be a fun night to discuss some things. And as we both know with quick dick, for sure, um,

humor goes a long way, right? Like to breaking down issues. And it doesn't matter what the issue is. You know, I was like I said, I went back through all of our old conversations and I got chuckling about our recent one with Will Smith, right? If you're not allowed to bring some humor into the world, it can be a very dark, dismal place.

Yeah, I mean, humor, there's a funny thing. Like, so I go around and give speeches, a lot of times to ag audiences, sometimes banking audiences, and I've thought a lot about humor and laughter, because I'm not intrinsically like a funny wing-out jokes all the time, like Quick Dick or my buddy Dwayne Faber, but I like to get the crowd laughing. And one of the interesting things about laughter is that it's actually a social signal. If I am sitting and watching television and I hear a joke, but there's nobody around me to hear that joke also, it's unlikely that I'm going to laugh. That's why they put laugh track.

on there so people will actually engage more because laughter is actually a signal that ha ha ha is to say ah you've just connected two things that were separate that I didn't see before and now you've connected them and me going ha ha ha signals to the other people around me that they get that joke and so it actually is a social signal of people accepting some new understanding of things which is why comedians are so powerful and why powerful people that have their power ill gotten hate comedians right they want to push comedy out of the way because a comedian can route around things they can get people to open up their minds a guy named barry flinchbow used to tell me when i was speaking when people are laughing their minds are open so you've got to

make them laugh and i think that uh we're seeing the death of comedy or the canceling of comedy because people in power know this person can undress me they can tell me that the emperor has no close they're trying they're trying to cancel comedy they haven't quite officially done it but they're trying real real hard yeah exactly and i i mean it's why when you get comedians together you you uh you can't control them right you know you bring a guy like quick dick you may have it was something you want him to do but a real comedian you know they don't they're not they're not there to do to send your message they're there to you know break boundaries and kick open doors and explore things is well here's the thing with the ideas of the SMP presents it isn't there for me to up if anybody's learned

anything about me I bring on people because I have an idea but I let it go where it wants to and a night like that is I'm more I want to be somebody in the crowd that gets to sit and listen right because like you have no idea what's going to come out of that like quick dick mac dick and I know I've mentioned before to you 222 minutes, another guy who's very similar, small town Saskatchewan, of all things. And they just have ways of cutting through some of the BS with quick humor and like quick-witted thoughts. And you put those two guys on stage together.

I have no idea what it's going to do. Like the place might erupt or they might get egged. I have no idea. Either way, I want to be in the stands to see it and see what they do, right? Like to me, that's, that's what's beautiful about a comedian can go wherever. wants. I agree. And when it comes to me, I'm not trying to, I'm no like, this isn't the orchestra where I'm waving the one and you're playing your two. It's like, you want to, you want to play a solo? Go up and play a solo. I'm good with it. Well, and that's what makes what you're doing,

special relative to a conference where people are like, hey, we've got a party line and we want people to tow it. You know, it wasn't that long ago. Somebody called me up and they were sponsoring an ag organization and as the sponsor they wanted to pick the speaker and i don't know why this woman she just she clearly didn't listen to anything i'd done somebody just recommended me because she was like what we really want to do with this farm group i haven't told the story anybody what we really want to do with this farm group is they are not diverse enough and i can't stand up there and tell them that they should be focusing on um diversity and inclusion so when you're with your talk it doesn't have to be titled diversity and inclusion, but we really would like you to say X, Y, and Z. And I was like,

huh, well, I actually don't come up to a stage with me telling people, this is what you should think. What I do is I try and teach people how to think about things differently so they can arrive at those conclusions. And it is unlikely that people would arrive at the conclusions that you're describing by anything that I would show them. And she ghosted me. We just, she just stopped, she just stopped talking to me, stopped doing an interaction back and forth. But that's why you go to those conferences and they're set up by people that are like, this is the message we want to download onto the participants. Those meetings suck. Nobody wants to go to them. As soon as it starts, you want it to be over. And that's what you're doing. It's different is like, yours is an exploration of

idea is not a downloading. So I was literally, I had Paul Shoe on Friday. And we got talking, you know, he's a history professor. So we got talking about Ukraine, Russia. And I don't know how on earth Donald Trump, Democrats, everything comes up in the United States. I just, I mean, if I go back and listen, I can certainly tell you how. But like, I did not plan that. I was, you know, I wanted to learn about Ukraine, Russia, history and whatever.

And he starts talking about Bernie Sanders and how the Democratic Party basically buried him so that he wouldn't, you know, And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I'm like, because to me, where I sit, that's why the populace, the population has such a problem with the democratic process right now, is they try and control things. And with technology currently, social media, just like internet in general, you can see them trying to control things. And now that you can see it, I'm not saying they never control things. to the printing press. They were controlling things, but it's just so evident right now. And I go to what you're talking about with the speak. Oh, you got to talk about these things. It's like, that type of control when you can see it is really, really uncomfortable. Like, why? Why? No.

And you wonder why there's so much animosity in the population right now towards politicians is because it's so evident that they're trying to control the narrative everywhere they go. And it's like, but that isn't like we got to get away from this we don't and it's going to implode you know in the u.s for example the one of the ways that this message is so much more um burrowed into our society or really kind of endemic in it is what people don't realize let's say you're a large ag company right and you sell a certain amount of your product to the government it like montana used to sell a lot of round up to the government because they would buy it for their train tracks for ditches, right? So whether it's the state government or the federal government. Now, the federal

government will say, well, in order for you to get these contracts, you have to have these rules on your HR, which include like, hey, stats on how you're making decisions, hiring decisions, which may not be about the best person. It's about the color of their skin or their chromosomes. And so you have these companies that start bending over backwards to make this happen. And then they start being told like, well, you know, one of the ways that you can prove that you're committed to these things so we can keep buying your product for millions, hundreds of millions of dollars is have some people that'll come in and talk about things like diversity and inclusion. Now, all the people that are at this company are just trying to produce seeds or chemicals or sell it or, you know, do their work. And in order to do their work to get paid in order to, you know, provide for their families, they have to sit in on these talks. And these talks happen over and over and over again. And ultimately, some people are just like, okay, that's the message. That's what we're supposed to believe. Okay, I agree.

And then the other people know, the ones that don't agree, you will have to give up position, seniority, influence in meetings if you push back on these messages. And so they think in the short term, you know, I'm just going to go to the meeting. I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm not going to say anything about it. I'm just going to keep my head down. And what they don't realize is it goes from being a meeting once a quarter. to once a month to then being a committee that you have to be a part of once a week.

And now it is fully embedded into your corporation. And you can't get it out even if, even if somebody snapped their fingers and said, we no longer believe these things. It's way more endemic at that point. You're talking, I hate to bring up COVID, but you're talking about COVID in Canada.

That's the policies, the mandates. Everybody sat around and went, all right. Well, no, I can. Oh, okay. Yeah, and then what happens? The trucker's conflict.

And that's the only way you repeal some of it. And it isn't all gone. And it may not all be gone because, I mean, like you say, it might all be too far forward almost. But when a population or a company, if you had every employee or a good chunk of it, maybe not everyone, stand up and say, this isn't right, you might be able to pull back some of that. But that's a really tough thing to do because now everybody's exposed to their jobs. And the thing with the truckers was is half of them lost their jobs. jobs anyways. And the other half was like, if we don't, like, we're going down the road of where that, you know, like, it's just getting worse. I didn't realize that. So a lot of people that

participated in the trucker convoy lost their jobs, this was not without cost to them? Well, it would be with cost to them because they would have, they would have lost their job by going there or they would have been not been able to cross the border in the United States if they weren't vaccinated. So that part of it for sure, there was other people who went, who had already lost their job and weren't a trucker, right? So there were business owners who had, you know, closed up shop because they weren't going to abide by said mandates. You know, I talk a lot about Ottawa and that it wasn't just unvaccinated. There was vaccinated there too. But all of them shared in the, a lot of them shared in that they were losing their work. They were losing their job.

They were talking openly about it. By doing that, they'd been, you know, I don't know, was discriminated the correct term, right? Like, and so yeah, there was, there was a lot of personal cost by dragging yourself across Ottawa. You know, it strikes me because you interview all these people that have counter narratives, like heterodox ideas, and it's gotten you in a little bit of trouble canceled on YouTube, but you don't strike me as the type of person that is naturally disagreeable. I mean, I think you're okay with this agreement, but I don't, I don't think you were the guy that

would like, hear somebody say something. something incorrect while standing around the water cooler and you'd be like, excuse me, I need to jump in here and correct your thing. How accurate is that? Are you disagreeable? I would say I'm disagreeable. I would say the more you get to know me, the more disagreeable I become. But the less I know you, the more I'm like, you know, and I'm just, I'm just going to,

you know, it's not going to bother me that much, right? Have you ever taken the big five personality test? Oh, no. Oh, man, do yourself a favor. Spend the $10. Go to Dr. Peterson's website, the understanding myself, and take it. So I won't give too much away.

I actually, like, when I read it, I was like looking at it, and then I like push it up against my chest and like wouldn't let anybody look at it because I was like, ooh, this is spooky. This isn't like a horoscope that's like, you know, you'll find good health when you figure out the problems with your mother. Like everybody has that problem. This one was like, I am reading a bibliography of my. myself and I don't know how they knew this, but the one that was the most surprising to me and now has just been like, well, duh, was that on a scale of zero to a hundred, 100 being agreeable, this is like a mother that has a sleeping baby. She doesn't care at all. The arguments about she just wants everybody to get along so the baby doesn't wake up to zero being like the maniac that won't let you say anything that's even slightly out of line. Where do you think I fall on that list, on that scale, zero to 100?

I don't know, 60? I was a one. A one. Really? Yeah. And what I've come to realize was that- You're that disagreeable. I am, but I like getting along with people.

And so I disagree with people constantly, but they don't always realize that that's what I'm doing. And like you, as you get to know me better, there's a big sheen of that that comes off, where I'm no longer waiting or being polite, but like, I am, extremely disagreeable. And once you realize that, once I had that like, oh, gosh, I guess I am disagreeable, it made sense why I was the director of millennial engagement for Monsanto. What other job could I have where people would so vigorously argue with me? And I could literally just walk into anywhere, a grocery store, a party, a whatever, and be like, I work at Monsanto, and there are people ready to fight with me. This is like a drug for me in some way.

Then the world needs more vance. And what I mean by that is, we all should be a little more disagreeable, but in a polite way. That is, that's a skill because I guess, uh, I go like, I would put you as, I guess I equate agreeable or disagreeable to like, nice first mean almost, you know? Like, like I don't want to hang around that person. They're really disagreeable. And yet I really enjoy our conversations. Obviously, uh, to the listener, me and you talk more than just. on a podcast. Well, I was thinking about that. Remember what called me.

I remember I was outside my backyard. And you and I were talking, you were like, hey, man, this Mavericks party. It's got a bunch going on. I'm really thinking about it. And I think you thought that I was going to be like, rah, rah, rah, support.

And I don't know anything at all about the Mavericks party. This is not about that. I was like, well, this is how I think and this is what I feel about it. And what do you think? And our relationship, I think, solidified after that conversation.

Because it was no longer just you and I having a conversation where you say something nice and I agree and da-da-da-da. You get to the core of your relationships a lot better with people when you find out, can I tell you what I really think or do you require me to jump through hoops in order to be able to get information to you? And there's a push-pull on that, on both people's side, but you and I, we developed our relationship very, very quickly because we're both okay with having people disagree with us. Hmm. Yeah, but it's enjoyable.

Isn't that an, like, I got three older brothers and an older sister, right? We disagree on a lot and we argue about a lot. But if they just patted you on the back and said, you're amazing, like, I love, you're great. I don't think you'd learn anything. Like, by having disagreements, in a healthy way, I don't mean you got to call each other names and everything else. Sometimes you have to. Sometimes that's the only way to break through. a little bit of fuzz there that gets, you know, the wool over someone's eyes. But when you do that,

for me at least, then I walk away and I got to really think on that. Huh. I did not see that coming. And when you don't see things coming, then you chew on it, you know, and this leads me, you know, I think about this and I go, I got a couple of things rolling in my brain. I want to start with, I guess, you know, Ottawa was a big thing for me. Like when I look back, you know, you do your legacy interviews. When Vance Crow interviews me at 7 and I get to talk about my life, one of the events that'll stick out

will be Ottawa for a lot of different reasons. And I was curious, has Vance Crow ever protested? Have you ever gone to a protest? I one time went to a thing in D.C. that the Daily Show and Colbert

were talking about like, let's have the rational people party. I don't exactly remember. was but it was like let's take the rhetoric down and i was dating my wife at the time and we just kind of went to the edges of it and it was immediately uncomfortable for me and we we left very very quickly after i don't even think we stayed for for why we were there you know to see john stewart because at the time he was like a big comedian people really liked him um and it i think that comes down to like i am more afraid of mobs than i am of any other force on the earth there's no force that it scares me more than groups of people gathering together and losing their rational minds and giving themselves

over to, you know, what is the group want? And it really came true to me. We lived in Africa. And I saw, I was in the Peace Corps and I saw more than one time, twice real up close, where people didn't feel safe. They felt like somebody was stealing from them and that they were in jeopardy. and they got together in a and what they called a vigilante group and was a vigilante mob and they went and they found these people that they thought were guilty they pulled them out of their houses in the middle of the night they put tires over them they poured kerosene on them and lit them on fire so they burned to death and then i've seen um i saw the aftermath effect i wasn't there when they did it but i saw the next morning with the the burn stains on the ground and then a few months later i was in a city and a and a thief muesi is what they say in swahela grabbed something and started running and they don't have cops there right there's no police that are going to come and stop that and a person loses part of their store that's actually going to impact whether they can feed their family guy runs out of his store seeing somebody is stolen he points at a young guy maybe 15 17 years old and he says muzzi muzzi and the whole all the streets everybody

around there all the men even women pop their heads up look around for this guy chase him down take him to the ground and beat him and I got the hell out of there because it was like dozens and then hundreds like almost right away and once you've seen that force and that that was around justice but once you've seen that force you realize there is nothing on earth that could have stopped them you could have unless I was willing to stand there with a gun and be like get back get back you know to meet that force but even then I don't think so and so I avoid mobs I much of what I talk about is trying to get people to think for themselves and not mobs. And I don't think the trucker convoy turned out to be the mob,

but I was definitely worried about that for you, about you being a rational thinker that was around people that gave themselves over to the larger group, and you couldn't stop it even if you wanted to. And in fact, I wondered if that's why you left quietly was that you saw the danger of the mob. Now you and I have talked about it in a great depth, but that's what I thought.

I get the fear of the mob. I get the fear of like the violence and the rational thinking and the danger that comes with it. I've said this on multiple protests. Multiple podcasts. I've been to two protests in my life. Three, if you call, I guess, when the truckers left. But in my brain, two, like two words like protests. One was like basically the week before I went.

I interviewed a man, Brian Peckford. And so I went to Eminton to just see what it was. Just to kind of feel what I know. I listen to your podcast. I know. Yeah. I just kind of feel what it was. And I went and I don't know what to say about it,

but it just wasn't like, it wasn't like this crazy enjoyable experience. Wasn't a bad experience. I just knew when I walked away. I'm like, well, that ain't doing anything, right? Like that's, that's what I felt.

Like, it was great, but like I wasn't racing back to do it again. Ottawa, what was odd was, it was the safest place I've ever felt ever anywhere. Like, I don't know, you're walking around your house full of family. And I was curious, like, I don't know, but maybe that's what big protests are. People talk about Woodstock being like a concert, being like, that's what it is.

Everybody's happy, go lucky. But most protests, is that what most protests are? Like, I don't know. That's my question back to you. Is that what protests are? I was hoping you've been to multiple or seen or read or I don't know, Vance. Well, I read a fascinating book called, what is it, the true believer? And it's by a man named Eric Hoffer.

And he talks about how mass movements get started, right? How they move from a few people getting together to a big group of people getting together to an actual political movement to revolution. and there's things in that that what you're describing, I think are the positive parts. Why do people come together? You know, they find some common goals. They find reasons to transcend their differences to come together. But that euphoria or that excitement, that happiness that you're feeling is not without danger.

I'm not saying you shouldn't everyone should avoid it because how would you have pushed back on what's going on with the government. but it only takes a few you know i've heard you describing some of the guys that would get involved or you interviewed a guy that was like that was doing the security that was like you know there's this guy and every time the police made a movement he interpreted it as though you know go time and we've got to you know round the troops up you know if you don't head every single one of those off part of the flock that is a part of this you know protest movement can pull hundreds or thousands more people into it. And so for me, I see the tension. It isn't protests are bad and not going to

protests are good, but it is like organization is good, but you know, the individual risks giving over their thinking to it. And so I've been very ambivalent about the trucker convoy, really ambivalent because 100% I see the value of fighting for your freedom and putting a line in the sand. But at the same time, I'm like, what happens if this gets out of control? Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of people had that fear that it was going to get out of control, you know? Big burly truckers go to Ottawa. Everybody goes one plus one equals two. And what happened was like something completely different in the equation because what showed up was the kindest human beings on the planet.

And I always go back was there some bad ones there? For sure there was. But overall, I don't know. The protests that ended up taking place was way different than what, you know, it wasn't black. Sitting up here in Canada, we watch Black Lives Matter destroy like loot, riot, like, just like, holy dinah. Like, this is wild.

And what happened in Ottawa was the complete opposite. People were, you know, I talk about the stuff. I told you I'm the like, you know, really disagreeable. There's a little bit more disagreeable. I would say the phrasing that you use about these are the nicest people that I've ever met anywhere in the world is actually the phrase that scares me the most. Because the reality is it is a distribution of people. Some of those people were really nice. Some of them had good intentions. Some of them were saintly. And some of them were like, hey, pretty good people. but for you, the experience of it and your trust level and the things that you believed that they

believed as well and held in common is actually a suspension of the details. Because if you knew the details of what they thought, you would come into more conflict with them. And so the feeling that you had allows you to get above that disagreement. And this is a positive thing. There's negatives and positives here but you i would actually say the you i've heard you described this many many times about how positive they were and that's the thing that makes me go ooh-oh this is the danger real danger yes i have uttered the sentence that even the most positive thing in the world can be dangerous and that was ottawa it was extremely positive but at some point it had to come to an end yeah i mean and i like i think that the media painted it as

as not a success, right? But when I hear all of the things that happened, I'm like, I don't know how we would have gotten the same freedoms back because I don't think in the US, I don't think you'll be able to galvanize that sort of a movement unless things are way, way, way worse. And in which case, once that mob gets going, you won't be able to stop it.

And so in Canada, maybe it was the right blend of patriotism and getting to know one another and sacrifice. But to me, like, you run that experiment a thousand times. I don't know that it's a thousand times that doesn't get violent. I don't know that it's a thousand times that it doesn't go too far. I think it's probably a lot more of a 50-50 split than maybe meets the eyes, even though you could say everybody that went there with good intentions.

Well, I don't know. I just everybody I went into and I said this before, right? I picked out the person who looked the scariest in the crowd because everybody thought they were in Tifa. That was just like the going phrase at the start. I was like, okay, well, I can either be afraid of that person. I can just walk up and start talking to them. So I just start talking to them.

Now, maybe everybody's a good liar because I tell you what, there are those out there. But I just found that that was not the case. The other thing that separates Canada from the United States is we have one road that connects us from the west to the east. That's wild. So like, it isn't like follow, you know, Because towards the end, there's like five or six prongs, right, coming from the East Coast and Toronto and whatever.

But for like seven days, eight days, whatever it was, there was one convoy going across one road from west to east through some of the harshest conditions that the earth has. And people were out there partying like it was Woodstock. And that rate there, that emotion, that feeling pulled more people to it. And then more people wanted to experience it. And then they had to get across the great rock, the great shield of Ontario and then arrive in Ottawa. And all that pull, all that like just watching it. You couldn't not watch it. Is like, that's something the United States couldn't do.

I mean, you'd have 17 million feeds from all the different angles because, I mean, yeah, you got some spots like the UP and Michigan and some, you know, up northern Montana and everything that borders Canada, you know, for the most part, has similar. But nothing quite like what we have here. Like, and the size and scope of Canada for one road where literally you put three tanks on it, you ain't getting people across the country. Like it's kind of almost laughable at times, right? Like how easy it would be to shut down our roadways, like really, really, really simple.

Even the Canadian military, as small as it is, could shut it down. And that's something in the United States. doesn't have yeah and i mean truthfully you guys accomplished something that if if if the americans had tried to accomplish it in the same mechanism it would have been danger way way more dangerous like i think you run that experiment a thousand times many many more in the u.s turn not good um but i'm not saying people shouldn't have gone i i mean you know i was devastated when you started having the media blackout because you you were there and i felt like this is giving me a periscope into the world. And I was religiously listening to them. And, and, but, but, uh, once you left,

I was like, well, there's, not only is there nothing to see here, there's how many people can I trust, uh, to be able to let me know, hey, there are good people here. And hey, the guy wearing the full on face snow mask is actually a good dude that's worth talking to. I tell you what, if there's a lesson I learned, you know, if I could take myself of today back to them and actually go around and interview people, I'd be better for it. But I think it's like, it's like one of those events in your life where you're not prepared for it. You just, you're just not prepared for it. I don't know how I could have been remotely prepared for that. And so I can go back and go, yeah, like, I wish I would, you know, like what you just said there is what a lot of people said. Like, I trust you. So you being there,

even though there's a thousand videos coming out a day, I trust what you were saying. I was like, oh, yeah, that's a good point. But regardless, it doesn't matter. Because, I needed to work on a couple things on the inside of Sean. And I don't know, Vance, have you had moments like that, like where you're just like, like, underprepared for what's going on? Like, I know when the mob came at you way back when, geez, I don't know how many years ago with that. I assume you weren't prepared for that one. No, I mean, just like we started the conversation, I wasn't prepared for having a child and like all of a sudden having something, you know, right in front of you that you're responsible for. And I mean, like,

But did you have, but did you, with kids, did, I feel like that's a shared experience with your spouse. Is that something that you really had to work on with inside yourself? Well, once the decision, you know, my wife and I really struggled. So I often tell this very plainly because nobody told me this when I was young. I thought I could be young forever. I thought you could have kids whenever. I thought your wife's worrying about her biological clock was like an adage of the past. right? And I was totally diluted. And so it wasn't until we started to try and have children,

and then it didn't work. And we had two years of it not working. Then I went from being like, kids are just one of these things that I kind of want, you know, maybe I'll get to, to being like, oh my God, what will my life be like if I don't get it? And so I was so focused on the joy of having it just about be here that I did not think about once it's here. what's that going to do? And so I was absolutely shocked. My wife had done all the nesting, the got the cribs and the whatever, and I was there supporting her, but I was kind of like, ah, we could do this whenever. I really did not know what was about to happen. And I'm the middle child of seven, right? So this is how blind I was. I was around kids growing up. I was in small town

America where we saw kids all the time. But still, it was as shocking to me as learning that the mob can turn on you is what responsibility I was now accountable for now that I had walked over these hot coals with my wife or watched my wife walk over these hot coals and now we have the thing that we thought we wanted and she cries all the time well that does happen yes yes I think that's pretty much universal what did you learn that like I mean I think a universal experience is probably you know there's the guy with the golden gun who just walks buy a girl and gets her pregnant. But I certainly, uh, it took, uh, we went to the doctor several times, you know, didn't take us two years, took us, uh, close to a year. And I started to have the same,

I'm like, oh my God, I thought, I thought it would just happen, right? Now I was a decade younger than you, but I looked at it and I was like, well, okay, well, you know, like, we'll try and whatever. But I don't remember like, and I'm, now I'm trying to think about this. Like when we had Shea, our oldest. Was I sitting there at three months in, two weeks in going, oh man, what have I done? And an inner dialogue with myself. I guess I had. I guess the inner, like coming, it's so fresh coming back from Ottawa and the conversations that I had in my head still continue to chew on is so fresh. Maybe that's why I can recall it so vividly. Going back, now having three children, I just, I don't remember those.

And maybe I've shocked them out of my system because having a kid is a big shock. Yeah, you do need to forget it in order to be able to do it again. You know, you mentioned I do these legacy interviews. So this is when I sit down with a person. Yeah. 55, could be all the way up to 75, 80. Sometimes I do it over Zoom or in person.

But what we're talking about is the five areas of their life, their childhood, their career, marriage, parenting, and then the legacy that they want to leave behind. And there's two questions at the closer to the end that I ask that I've found produce really insightful, interesting answers. And be interested in yours. The first one, and this is kind of one that you have to build towards, because in order for somebody to trust you enough to record them saying this, you really have to have built rapport. I say, what vices did you have to overcome to get where you are today? And if I've done my job well, this person has come to the conclusion that they can trust me to say the things that really hold them back, the impulses that drug them down the things that they wanted.

But this is the most valuable thing that they can share with future generations. Because imagine, if you're like me, you know, I can have one drink, I can have two. But if I have that third one, we're going the distance, right? it would be really good for me to understand, did my grandfather have that problem? And then if he did, how did he overcome it? And when you think about problems in this way of, like, what was the internal dialogue that my grandfather had

to be able to overcome these vices, it starts really telling you that, like, I don't know that you can hand down that wisdom that make it a lot simpler, but just having the conversation available to you so you can understand what somebody else, else's inner dialogue helped them overcome. For me, having a child was one of those crazy inner dialogues. For you, it was the coming back from the protest. And actually, maybe the real question

that's worthy of passing down is what made you decide to leave early? Family. It's hard to talk about on a podcast, to be honest, right? Very, very personal. One of the things I completely get when you talk about legacy. I worked with the Lloyd Archive. So I got to do all my archive interviews except for three in person, which I think immediately for building rapport with somebody, way easier to do in person than across Zoom or whatever technology. But asking deep questions is about trust and that there's no ill intention of asking such a question, right? So when it comes to, when it comes to Ottawa, because I believe that's what you're asking, right? Like, what was difficult in my mind is I didn't want to leave.

And what I've talked to a lot of people about from Ottawa is they didn't want to leave. And everybody had their way of getting out, but it took effort and required a lot. what a lot of people probably don't understand is that like I didn't want to leave and that's a really hard thing to chew on right like I got a wife kids did it mean I didn't miss them I did miss them but I thought being there was more important and I and I always told myself at the beginning vans so there's a lot to friends when the podcast takes me away from my family I'm done with it I'm done with it. Like, I'm done.

Because I will not lose my family to success, fame, money, whatever comes. And that's what the protested. Is it kept pulling me to stay there. And so for two months, I had to really think about whether I wanted to continue this. Because if I don't, I had to be okay with it because I love doing this. I love talking to people like yourself. But if it's going to destroy what I hold dear, then it's not worth it. and that is a large question.

And so when I come back to my early, you know, when we start this off, you know, when I go back to the Damon and what you introduced to me, it was such a weird idea to have conversations with yourself because it seems like, I don't know if it's a popular narrative to talk about like schizophrenia or something like that, right? Oh, yeah. My close friends are like, quit calling it to Damon. Dude, people are going to think you're crazy. They're going to think you've got a demon in your mind that you're,

talking with like they're not going to get it but that's that's the that's the description right right so i guess i come back to it that's what i had a really big experience with was an inner dialogue with myself about what truly matters because i told myself for a long long time family matters family matters but when you're not in a place that you have to get that exposed it's very easy to say that and that became the forefront of the issue and even though I didn't want to lose my family. I didn't want to leave. Think about that.

That is a mind fuck. And that's where I got to. So when I come back to you and asking you the question, that's where I mean with your Damon, with your inner dialogue, have you ever got to a point where although you've been saying to yourself over and over and over and over again, could be for years, could be for decades, could be whatever, I believe this. What was the moment I got exposed to you? and did you still fall through with it you know that's actually it's it's a wonderful thing to be

asked a question like this i um when i was working for monsanto then it turned into bear i had been successful professionally there that i'd on a level that i'd never been before on a level where i was producing results that were better than the PR firm that was being paid tens of millions of dollars i was getting people to come to speeches i was getting people to read things i wrote you know, the company loved it. And they were like, hey, now that bears taken over, we don't have a role for director of millennial engagement, but we would love for you to go onto the executive track. You are now on this path. We're going to give you all of this support. And we expect that you will be a senior level executive within the next half decade, right? Like I didn't say that quite

that explicitly, but that's like, hey, you know how well you're doing right now? Just imagine you can add zeros onto the end of that. You could just, you could really explode this. Only I knew that I had no interest whatsoever in selling chemicals or seeds or anything. The only reason I was at Montano is because I thought, I believe something that other people don't believe, and I believe that if I can convince them that they should think like me, that will be the most good for the world. But now I was being offered a chance to really enrich myself and my family personally. And I, knew that this was not the job for me. It would be no fulfillment there other than money. And now I had to say, okay, the only way to keep doing what I'm doing, which is to talk about

things I care about, to keep doing speeches where nobody controls what I say, I get to say it. I have to give up not just where I'm at, but all this potential. And how am I ever going to make that up? And is it actually something I'm taking away from my wife and future children if I do that. And that was not an easy decision. That was a brutal decision, which at every step of the way, they kept trying to entice me with more and more to stay. And I'm certainly not recovered all of the loss of what they were offering me in that situation. And so there is not just the internal dialogue I had to have there. Now it's the internal dialogue that you have to have of like, yeah, you really enjoy your life more now and you get to spend all this time with your family and it's great,

but would it have been better? Would your family be more secure if you just sucked it up and done a job you hated but gotten a lot more money? I don't know. I would say no. I mean, I can't speak for you. I can speak for myself. If you're unwell, which can mean physically but can certainly mean mentally, that bleeds

out onto your family, which means all the money in the world, if you're unwell, if you're you're not happy going to do it, would bleed onto them. Whether it explodes in anger or, you know, you're not home or whatever the, the, whatever way it bleeds out, it will bleed out. I mean, that, that right there, I don't know what you were making up, Monsanto. You certainly don't need to say. But leaving Baker to go full-time podcasting, I had written down a leap of faith and I'd text you that, you know, like, for me, it's a leap of faith.

people asked me all the time like, oh man, you've really made it. And I'm like, no, like, I have not. No, the plane needs to fly. We're trying to get it to fly now. I jumped, I jumped out of the plane with a with a parachute half on, you know, and I'm trying to buckle it up. And then I didn't check the shoot to make sure it's in there, right? Like it's a leap of faith. Like I put myself in a decent position. It's still a leap of faith. But long term, and I would argue you could probably hop back into that world tomorrow if you want it. Maybe not as not at the same level, but I guarantee you could hop back in that world. I can hop back in that world tomorrow. If I want to, I want to see what this world has to do. And I think everyone that's around me is better for it. I, I, you know,

naturally. So this is the same thing of like many things. My natural belief is to believe this, right? But I don't want to delude myself. One of the things that happened was they said, hey, we know you're leaving. we would love to give you a great severance package. All you have to do is sign this document here that says you'll never disparage us till the end of time. And it wasn't quite this direct, right? It was like more of a loop-de-loo. You couldn't sign it?

And I didn't sign it, right? Because I was like, I don't want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I'm on Sean Newman's podcast and I say something they interpret as like negative or unfair or whatever that they just sue me to death. And, you know, I know exactly what that chunk of money was. And that's one that I don't regret. That's not at all. There's no, there's not even a sense of it.

Because to me, even though I didn't go out and say, oh, they're doing all these bad things, these evil things, which is what they were afraid of. The thing that I got out of this situation was, now I am still in the position where I don't have to worry in the back of my mind, am I free to say this? because that to me is, you know, you talk about family. I cannot be a good father. I can't be a good husband or friend, business partner, nothing. If I can't say what I actually think, a one on the on the agreeability scale means that

you can't look over your shoulder. And I'd have been selling a short term thing to look over my shoulder. But, you know, if you don't look back at those things and say, what would have been, you're kind of on blind faith that you made the right choice. good to go back and check on those things and say, what if I had looked and gone another way? I think it's a healthy thing. It's just not an easy thing. I don't like playing the what if game. I really don't like going back. What if I would have stayed here and not gone there? Actually, I'll definitely disagree with you on that. I'm full force. Like, let's move forward. There's no

point going back to that choice. That choice has been made. And I trust I'm best. I'm better for it. Like, definitely better for it. Ottawa was, when I go back, you go, maybe I shouldn't have went, right? And I say that because it really brought up some hard conversations, not only with myself, family, friends, you name it, especially taking two fans. For almost three years, I was just shy of three years, I never missed an episode. I was consistent as fuck. and I don't drop the F-bomb lightly. I didn't miss. I'm consistent.

I don't miss. And then you go to Ottawa and you don't do a podcast for two months. You know, like that's a complete opposite of who I am. So you could go back and say, well, what if you didn't go? Yeah, but the conversation that happened with Sean and with other people needed to happen. And it just needed to go there in order for it to spur it on. I go back to, I feel like this book, you know, I haven't been in the, the book club, the AVN network for some time. Me and you had talked about it. I just said,

like, I got spread too thin. Like, I just can't, I can't breathe right now. And yet, one of my favorite books I've read, and you've already heard me talk about this, everyone has a ton. I used it. I went and did a, I got invited to public speak about three months ago. Instead of quoting the Bible or something like that, I quoted Jurassic Park, because I was just like, the book surprised the hell out of me. And to me, I always come back to the straight line. If you go back and play the what-f game of all your life, and I'm not saying all your life, I shouldn't say that, of certain events, sure, yeah, you can play like, I may be over here, I may be over there, but I love that that that's the way the world works is like you make a choice

and now you're over here because of it. And I always think, I always look at it, even if you incur some negatives, you've incurred a ton of positives. And to me, Ottawa, for any negative it brought, it brought a thousand, thousandfold positives, like a thousandfold. Like I'm better for it, even if in the short term, there's some, uh, some things had to work through quitting Baker in the short term. Yes, sucks. I left a great company, great friends and a steady paycheck that paid quite well and I would have been just comfortable to live the rest of my life on. But overall, I would have been unhappy. Like it's just, and what is that? I mean, you only get one life. You only get one crack at

this as far as I know and geez you might as well jump in and go after it and see what comes of it and if that puts me broke and having to go back to the oil field I'm good with that like I'm more than good with that I gave it a crack so you were talking about the avian book club so I run a network Sean's in it's called the Articulate Ventures Network and we we do book club did I call it avian avian that's fine then we'd call it that in the in the network AVN the articulatory oh yeah sorry yeah yeah yeah yeah okay now when you say it that way I'm like oh yeah no that's exactly I said Articulate, yes. And one of the best experience, so one of the things that we do is every month, we take on a shared experience.

So we say, hey, take a cold shower at least once a day, right? And this is like we'll talk about what this experience is or experiment with having a bedtime or you go to bed on time. The one that we did that was really impactful on me, and I had already been a journaler, you know, I'd already written things. But when we did it as a group, it really made me think of like, what is the value of doing this journaling? And I think journaling is this self-authoring thing. It's the book that is your life. And when I say I go back and look at these things, I'm not encouraging people to think nostalgically.

Like, oh, you know, if only I'd had that money, if only I'd had this thing. I'm referring to it as you've got to go back and read those journal pages of what you were thinking when you made that decision. And you've got to go back and you've got to look at it and you've got to say, did I make the right decisions? here, could I have made this decision better? Is there something I should have considered? Because if you

don't, then you are putting on a blindfold and saying the path that I carved, the one that I had to trudge through the grass and the brush and the snow and the everything else, I'm just, I'm going to ignore the lessons that I had to learn along the way. And whatever is present in my mind right now about how I feel about that decision is the way I'm going to feel about it. Retrospection for me helps me not make the same mistakes twice. When you put it that way, my brain certainly got it as like, well, maybe I could have went this way and I play this like little, you know, when you talk about the voices in your, you know, I get, I get the voice and he's just like, yeah, maybe if we went this way,

would have we? And I just want to punch him right in the face, right? And when I hear you talk that, I'm like, oh, I get what you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a little, a little like reading how you thought. I don't. It's humbling, right? you go read it and you're like you little bitch is that really really that's what you thought oh you

oh this is the conversation you didn't want to have with your wife and you waited three months to do that instead of just you know telling her something that you knew she wasn't going to like and then using her to figure that out like the whole bunch of me reading my authoring is really me going back and picking on the little bitch that i was six months ago or five years ago and it's good for me because I can get drunk on like, you made every decision right. Look at how good it's turned out. Look how beautiful your child is. You were perfect. But I was definitely not perfect. Yeah, no, I, that's, that's, I phrase that in a different way about being the smartest man in the world at 18, 25, 30, 35, realizing I am a complete and utter imbecile. And I got nothing but a

lifetime of learning ahead of me. And that, that's a fun way to look at it. Because honestly, I know so little at times. You know, going back to your legacy interviews and you're talking about essentially, if you could have your grandparents tell you about how they got over a vice, you know, you could listen to them.

All I think is, yeah, but you'd still try the vice. Like, you still would. Because did you guys ever read Zorba the Greek? Zorba the Greeks came up. We just did that one in the podcast, in the group, yeah. Oh, man. I read that because a man I really respect had said his favorite book all time was Zorber

the Greek. And I was like, what? And I'd heard you guys talk about it right before I left. I was like, oh, Zorber the Greek. Yeah, I literally just had a guy tell me about that. So I went in Zorba the Greek corner. And I was like, this is a book we should read. Literally, if it's a guy who's in his 70s favorite book, it must be impactful.

And I like Zorba's way, I think. Not on everything. But like, sure, can you read all the books under the world and understand wisdom. Sure. But there's no better lesson than living it. Like you can't forget things that happen to you, like feelings, emotion, lose, you know, people, you know, like part of, uh, the archive interviews that I've done here in the oil patch in the 80s and, uh, you know, interest rate going to like 18, 20 percent and people losing their houses and stuff like that. that's the lowest part of life for a lot of people.

And hearing that firsthand is like eye opening. But you can't, you still don't know what it's like to have 18% interest or to have the bank come take your house and have kids and everyone out, you know, and what are you going to do and deal with like suicidal thoughts and things like that?

Until you've had all that happened to you, you don't actually fully understand. You can read it, you can listen to it, but until it actually goes on, you're like, I don't know. So I the second question, I mentioned there are two questions that we get at this. The second one I ask is what was the hardest lesson to learn that was the most valuable to know?

And what I've seen is as I've done dozens of these, getting close to 100, what you see is that it depends on how you count them. The ones that we've been doing recently in studio, I would say. like we're on track it's it's actually gone really well people a lot of the farming community did a bunch of these over zoom and they've been great yeah might be a bit of a stretch but in any case the the the thing that happens is when you do a bunch of them you start seeing patterns emerge and those patterns that's something that's helped me start to change the way i think about things like for example women over the age of 65 about 80% of them say the same some version of the same thing any

idea what 65 plus year old women would say was the hardest lesson to learn but the most valuable to know fire away vance i wish i had learned earlier that i shouldn't care what people think of me so much and uh you realize how much pain people go through trying to learn that and there's probably some chemical change that happens in the brain or some depth or relationship with your family that allows you to let that go but if you know that that was one of the hardest lessons for somebody else to learn but was really valuable to know, now all of a sudden you start exploring that. Is that something I do? Is that something that's holding me back? How should I think about this? So even if they can't hand that wisdom down, you know, received wisdom is a

dangerous thing. At least they pose to you the question that that allows you to think about things in your own life. And I find your family doing that. And, you know, what was the hardest lesson for my father to learn? Well, maybe he passed down to me the things. that make it that a hard lesson for me to learn too. And so I want to listen to this so that way I can contemplate it. And I hear that from the children of people that do these interviews all the time. Like I didn't know that my dad had the same problem that I did. I didn't know that my mom had to overcome something.

She seemed so resilient. It's so valuable to me. And you imagine sharing that 20, 30, 50, 100 years from now. You could have somebody that is your same genetics telling you about something, even though they lived in a world completely different than the one you're living in now. To me, that's like a really powerful part of the whole legacy interview project. I'll be interesting to hear in a year's time if you have the same thoughts on your legacy interviews. I really enjoy them, but I got to be close to, I would say I'm close to a hundred.

A lot of them have been released on the podcast. And they've been some of the funnest things to go back in time and hear some things like, you know, I, Cy Campbell to this day is one of the most popular, one of the most, you know, he fought in World War II. Like,

he was a rear tail gunner and can talk about D-Day and like, was like, with it, like, wild. And it's like going back and having a living person tell you about times that everyone's forgotten about, right?

And you talk about the lessons. One of the lessons that families, you know, married couples have really taught me, is what's the funnest part of life? And they always, you know, in different ways, just like you're saying with women, they basically say when you have a full house, when you have your kids are home, you have to cherish those years.

And I hear that over and over and over again. And then what do you do? You work your bag off when you're young. You're not around home enough. But I don't know what that even means. Like I don't think that means being home every waking hour. But you get the point. And we're all kind of like,

going to repeat the mistakes of past because we all are in the same stages, right? Like your kids are young for most formidable years, but you're not 80 and just sitting around home, right? Eventually, you either got to try and make your way in this world, which means for most of us, I'm an extremely hardworking guy, which means I'm going to push the dial. I'm going to try and construct it a way where I can be around for all their stuff. but you can't see what a choice makes and if that causes hardship and you have to work harder or you make billions and maybe now you whatever right you can't i don't know all i'm getting to is i found as they continue to go on my motivation to do them dried up a bit and maybe it's because

i was doing too much of the same style of person i have no idea right like i from my area it sounds really terrible to say because they've been like some of the most fascinating interviews I've done bar none but I found the longer it went on more I want to talk about now I want to talk about now and what's going on I want to be in the now because it's great to go back 80 years but what's going on right now is the most important thing known to man or or that you know Carl Jung talks about you're curious about the thing that you know your inner self needs to be about you know it's really difficult to get yourself to read a book that you're not interested in you're not curious about what happened to this character right then you

just have to fight through it and it's why it's awful but sometimes you pick up a book and that character is really interesting and it's because it was good for you and what you're doing and I would say that for me the the interviews had a I did them as a substitute because I love public speaking I love standing in front of a crowd and having an idea I've been working on and telling it to this crowd and feeling how they react and learning from the interaction that we're having as far as is this actually engaging or did I just deceive myself? Do you have things about this speech that I that I am saying wrong or didn't get clear enough and you're going to either get

bored or ask me during the Q&A? I love that tension and the audience loves it too. They can tell that that's what's going on. What I didn't know when I was doing these interviews was that these get me just as high as the speeches do because you have to be 100% present. If I look off to the side to look at a clock, I can take a person that's explaining something deeply important to them and run them into a wall. And so for me, there is like an adrenaline. Like I have to keep my pulse down because I'm right there on that edge. And unlike a podcast where I'm like trying to get my guest to say something that's interesting and I want them to have a good time and I want everybody to feel good. That's not my job in the legacy interview. The job in my legacy interview is to pull out

those things that the family members couldn't pull out on their own. That it'd be weird for you to ask your dad about this or your grandmother would she just wouldn't hear the question coming from you in the same way. Well, what that takes is me having balls to ask people questions. Then I'm not sure they want to be asked and then find a way to get them to do it. So for me, it's, it's, it's not fair to say it's like a drug. It's more like surfing. It is 100% attention. And my poor business partner, Ben, who does a bunch of the production work, he tapped on his cell phone and I could detect a little bit of light on his face just out of the corner of my eye. And when we got done the other day, I was like, don't you ever, you got to knock that off.

I need to have 100% attention. There's no distractions. Da-da-da-da-da. And like he was shocked, But it's because I'm like, I'm so tuned into this. So maybe that wanes, but my sense so far as it is accelerating, I find them to be completely engrossing. Interesting. Yeah, I, one of the things I've enjoyed about full time podcasting, and maybe you're feeling this right now, is I throw away my phone. So I gauge it off the conversation.

If I'm enjoying it and we haven't pre-discussed, like I have a heart out of this time, I'm like, okay, well, let's go. And the funny thing was when I first came back, and I had a few listeners get extremely angry at me, I cut them short because I'm like, oh, yeah, we probably wrap up. And I go back to when I first started podcasting, I had people get angry because, okay,

they got to be done by 40 minutes, 40 minutes on that, and then we're done, no matter of the conversation. And so many people are like, stop doing that. And that happened like a week ago, because obviously I'm pretty fresh again. And I'm like, oh, yeah, right, Sean, like, you know, like get back into this. It's like, but it's kind of like riding the bike a little bit.

it. Like, I know how to do it, but you're kind of like, oh, man, I got to work my way back through. The archive ones, the legacy ones, I agree with you. If you have, you know, like some of the most entertaining interviews have ever done have come with people 80 plus. And I don't think they've had people sit and listen to them in a while. And that'll be an interesting stage of life as long as God willing, we all make it to it, is when you have all the wisdom in the world, in theory. and nobody will listen to you. That'll be a wild time. The 98 year old could hardly use his tongue anymore.

And by the end of an hour, he was starting to talk, right? But it took some time because I just assume people talked over him. I just assume that. And that's no knock on them. That happens to everyone as they're, you know, as my grandparents got older, if they're not completely with it, it's hard not to just bypass them in a conversation. Well, I mean, I tell people this all the time. most people go most of their lives never having had anyone listened to them at all whether it's

in their own family or in their work you know you don't realize if you're a person like you are you you get the microphone you're interviewing people that are willing to talk right but most people don't have that they have these ideas these these conversations they've been fighting with their daman these lessons they've learned over time and nobody asks them and so there is this sense of euphoria. I've had people describe it as like landing after parachuting, you know, like jumping out of a plane, that when they get done, the time is just evaporated because for one of the first times in their lives, they don't have to be like, okay, he's asked me too many questions. I'm going to ask him some questions. I'm going to balance this out. They instead get to do this thing. And really,

the whole experience, if you do it in person, is almost like a spa experience. Not that I'm giving you a massage or, you know, giving you lemon, you know, minted tea or anything. But it's very much like an experience where the interview itself is actually probably more valuable than the video of the interview, just having had the experience of expressing oneself, which to your point, like a lot of people, nobody asks. It's counseling. I don't know if anyone's ever been to counseling or a psychologist

or a business coach or a life coach, anything like that. What do they do? they have you talk and you get to talk about what you want to talk about. And sometimes they spur on questions, other times they just let you go and what do you do? You talk out your problems. And that is extremely healthy. The euphoric high I get from that, you know, I'll put it to you. As these, as people come on the podcast like yourself multiple times, it becomes more of a conversation instead of an interview, which is interesting.

Because when it first started, I come and I, you joke about this in the first one, right? being the interviewee instead of the interviewer. It's kind of like uncomfortable. But it's kind of a high too because you get asked questions and you get to talk what your thoughts are instead of listening to what somebody else's thoughts are. And that's healthy. I mean, that's what getting some of the thoughts. I don't know how I would have survived COVID, like the two years in Canada, I mean,

if I hadn't have been podcasted because they isolated us. They didn't want you around people. and being around people is healthy and talking to people is extremely healthy and that's what you know there's like kind of a negative feeling around going to a counselor or um working on yourself right oh you're weak because you got to go talk somebody oh well maybe you should try it because when you go talk to somebody that is like taking a drug honestly right like that's you can feel that that's you feel lighter honestly i don't know about you vance but i don't know about you vance but i feel lighter after I talk to somebody. Yeah, particularly if where the opportunity is for you to

articulate things that you they've been your Damon, you're that they've been rolling around in your brain and that they're not easy to talk about like, like you can't just like go see your neighbor and be like, hey, you know, one of the vices that I overcame that I'm really proud of, but really pulled me down for a while was this, you know, alcohol problem I had for these years. Like you're just not going to do that. And so in some ways, it's counseling, in some ways, it's end of life. And in some ways, so I had a guy, I thought like, hey, we're going to do this one interview. And almost as soon as we were done, he was trying to book for a year from now. He's like, hey, I want to do this as a time capsule, you know, once a year. And it's, it's an investment. So he was really serious

about it. But he was like, hey, I don't actually ever get a chance to be, he has a bunch of kids, seven kids or something like that. He was like, I don't get a chance to have introspection. And this, you know, two and a half hours, I get to have and now it's done. And we can bookend it and I can keep moving. And you just see the value of allowing people to express all those ideas that are rolling around in their minds. I mean, you and I are kindred spirits, right? Like we, it's something that that lights us up. Other people would be bored to tears by doing these interviews. But if it lights you up, then that's why we're doing what we're doing. When you try and guard yourself from the conversation you want to have, so you got like, you know, like the Damon conversation, I'll talk about that you're going to laugh. It's like pumping your tires in a weird way. But that conversation really stuck with me for a long time.

Coming back from Ottawa, what I experienced, I found people were receptive to it. And I found even one more step further. Tons of people had similar experiences at different stages in their life. before and that surprised me and I went how have I been so blind that people have been experiencing similar things to me and it's simple I never asked the right question I never even broached the subject and if you're not willing to broach those subjects you don't realize how many people around you are going through the same bloody thing and it's like but you would have never known to have even thought about asking that question unless you'd experience it and that in itself is quite

miraculous and brings us right back to the the beginning of the conversation where we talked about the 50% of women over 35 years old don't have kids and they couldn't even know what it is that they're missing now some of them do some of them know and it was heartbreaking and they wanted to and they couldn't but the ones that are like i'd rather optimize for my career man i'd really love to go see barcelona and italy and this is just going to hold me back they don't even know to ask the questions. And so it's something they're blind to. You know, you mentioned while you're at Monsanto, you wanted to get on stage and convince, or you wanted to essentially convince people of your idea and then it would be better for the world. Did you do that? Or was that a tougher

task than you thought it was going to be? You know, maybe a better way to describe it was, I would learn these things and I would go find the meanest, roughest audience I could to disabue. me of the things that I got wrong. You know, if you want to learn something, go present it to a bunch of people that already don't agree with you and figure out if like the reason they don't agree with you is either because they're wrong or you're wrong or some mixture of the two. And that was, I call that a Renaissance period in my life because I had to learn so much. And it didn't do me any good to be a propagandist, right? Like here, let me show you these slides that the PR firm gave us. I did that one time and I had people at the end say, I didn't believe a word out of your mouth and the whole

thing just blew up on me. And that's when I got rid of the PR slides and I just started trying to have conversations with people. But the only way you can have a conversation with people that they view as authentic is if they truly believe that they can say something to you that will impact your thinking. Because if it's just like, hey, I'm going to stand up here and say whatever I want, which is what Monsanto gave me that I don't think Bear was really offering. What Monsanto gave me and they're gone now, which is national tragedy or maybe an international tragedy, was they were like, you don't have a line to say. You've got a job to do, which is go out and help people that really hate us see a different way of operating, whereas bear was much more

like, we have these messages, we want you to get them. So in this area, I was able to have discussions and see where it led and be changeable and be flexible. In the bear paradigm, it wasn't going to happen that way. Not that they had nefarious things, but that they didn't, it wasn't the same thing that you're trying to do with the Sean Newman presents in November where you're like, I'm not going to tell them what to say. I'm going to give them an opportunity

to mix it up and see what happens. And that's what we lost when Bear bought Monsanto. That's, uh, what a way to live life. I think to get paid to go on stage and be like, all right. So this is what I'm thinking today. Like,

that would be extremely, I like adventure. So I just, I guess to me that's a big adventure. Like that would be difficult because you would have to be constantly like, you know, you don't know how the audience is going to respond to that.

If you did the cookie cutter thing, chances are you're going to get cookie cutter, uh, questions, feedback. Even people are like, I don't believe you. Oh,

that's fine. Like this is just kind of, you know, like there's ways to respond. By going into it and being very creative, I guess, there's no way. way to predict how people are going to respond to that at all i mean it's exactly what you're doing right

now sean right like you had a guy on your podcast that wasn't going to be like rah rah ra rha canadian trucker convoy good right you're inviting comedians on that was that are going to be like i'm i'm going to tell them what subjects i think we should be talking about but they're going to say whatever they want you are on the very adventure that you're you're seeing me be on i mean i i've they're one in the same just in a different format, even really the same format in a lot of ways. Well, here, here's a final topic for you that I've been curious about because it's bothered me since I joined,

and I haven't been in there now for a while, the Avian network. I see how I pronounce it, the Avian network. Anyways, the Metaverse coming, everybody going into the Oculus goggles, the, you know, I'm like, really bothers me. Now, I can't figure out, fans, if I'm getting old, and it's just like, as much as I enjoy this, seeing your face and having this conversation, if I can figure out a way to have you in person in Lloyd Minster or vice versa be down in the States with you, I'd take that in a heartbeat. Like, it's just, there's no substitution for being in person. And what I see coming from the metaverse and like everything being online.

and creating characters reminds me of like Sims. It's like, yeah, it's fun, but at some point, it's not you. But what this is, what feels like this is doing is it's taking Sims on a new level and you get an avatar and like, does that make sense? And I'm curious what your thoughts are on it because, I mean, in the book club, you guys do this for your book club leading. Yeah, so what you're saying is in, we have this Articulate Ventures Network book club, and some of the time, the people that have Oculus headsets, if you don't have one, you can get on

your computer, instead of us meeting over Zoom, we get together in this, what we call the Avian bar, you know, which is like, it looks kind of like a comedy club, and we push all in there. And the reason we do it is because it creates a different dynamic than everybody being on Zoom. The biggest thing that I discovered by, I kind of, when I saw the headset and used one for the first time, I was like, bingo, I'm going to run around and explore this. I'm not going to become a true believer, but I am going to find out what's working here and what needs to be done. And one of the things that works really well in the book club is in Zoom, you have one channel of audio.

If I'm talking, it shuts your microphones down. And if you're talking and if two people are talking at the same time, it's just utter noise. It's just messes it up. But if you're in the Oculus and you're in our VR space, if you're standing next to someone in this thing that looks like a comedy club bar, if I'm standing next to somebody and I talk quietly enough, only me and the person I'm standing next to can hear me. And if I'm up on the stage, everybody can hear me. I'm projecting my voice. And you can also hear, as somebody presenting to the left of me, as somebody talking to the right of me. And so it created what we call

audio-propeoception. You have a feeling of where you are based on how it sounds. Now, that newness wore off, because you're right. While I'm in the book club, the thing that I don't get is to see people's faces reactions when I say, I loved Zorba or, you know, this character had this impact on me. So you lose all of that. And I think that is actually super valuable. And not really a tradeoff I'm going to make forever. Most of our book clubs now are held over Zoom. Every once in a while, we do them online.

But the other day I did something interesting. I had a guy on the podcast who is an artist and he has a studio in Brooklyn and in Japan. He's world famous. He's exceptional. These Japanese special printmakers. There's only two of them in the world. Come and try and replicate his art through prints. It just, he's amazing.

Well, we wanted to do one, an episode. We tried to do a podcast where we talked about art, but it just didn't work us talking over Zoom because we weren't looking at art. So what we did was we expanded the Avian bar and I made a virtual space that was a museum where I put in eight sculptures and paintings that I really like and he put in eight that he really liked.

And we walked around inside of this bar where he can see the artwork, I can see the artwork and we're talking to one another and we record this podcast. To go back and watch it in VR would be boring as watching paint dry, but to listen to people actually reacting to art, getting up close, backing up, talking about what it means, what's the context of it, why do you like it, how does it make you feel, created an experience between Alex and I that when I saw him in New York last weekend, we were friends, we embraced, we hugged, we felt like we knew each other in a way that I don't think we would.

would have if we had just tried to do it over Zoom. So that audio, really experience holds some value that is not, you shouldn't just write, not you one should not just write this off, but also understand it has super, super limitations right now. That, that's interesting that you hold it over doing something like this with them. You don't think it. If we had just been putting up like, hey, let's share our screens and let's look at the art the same. It had been a experience. Yeah, that, that, that is fair. And actually, as you talk about the book club and talked about the, the, the, the bar setting and the two different rooms and, and walking down the stairs or whatever, you know, like whatever we're, you know, I call it walking. I don't, you know, but it, it kind of gives the feel like you're, you're going to a place for, uh, an actual meeting, which was unique. And I didn't hate it. I didn't hate it at all. actually it's like God, you know,

I read Zorba the Greek and if I'd known you were reading that, I would have been like, well, I've got to hop in on that one. Like, I mean, I miss book clubs, and I said this on the last time you were here,

is like if you're not a part of a book club, you haven't found a few different people and you're listening to this, you should really search it out because there is something to be said and you taught me this, your book club taught me this. You don't have to go,

read, you know, like, I don't know, when I think of wisdom, I think of the Bible, right? Like, I just, like, that's one of the oldest books there, right? But when I hopped in yours, it was all these books that I'm like, why are we reading this? And then the most amazing conversations came out of it. Because people take and see different things from what they're going through in life, how they read a certain thing. Maybe they glazed over a paragraph, didn't even see that. Like, and that's what putting yourself in a room of and it doesn't have to be a big you know our group book club here in law it's five people your book club is certainly larger than that but it has a small feel like it's

it's it's intimate it's enjoyable and it turns Jurassic Park into what Jurassic Park has turned into me turned i would have never read that book without your club i would i would never ever thought about that well i'm i'm the same way you know it'd be i run the book club and there's a whole bunch of books that I would be like, I'll finish it later. You know, maybe I should read that, but I'm just not going to get around to it. But by having a deadline, you read it. And what you get out of reading a book at the same time with other people is a shared experience. You both went on that desert rocks of Arabia.

You both were chased by the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. This month, we're reading a book. You could still get it in, Sean. I'm telling you. It is called The Mandibles. And it is a book about what would happen if, the US lost the reserve currency status. If all of a sudden the US dollar goes into free fall,

inflated to hell, what would happen to society? And it is wild. And like, it was written in 2016, and you'll be reading the book and you'll walk past the television and you'd be like, oh my God, they just announced that China might price barrels of oil in Chinese yuan. Like that was in the book and then it is happening in real life. And so it is a dystopian terror book that I would say actually makes you confront a different

paradigm of the world. But I cannot wait to discuss this with the rest of the group to see what they took away. If it terrified them the way it terrified me. And that's the value of a book club. You're excited to do stuff with other people. What day, what day, Vance, are you guys discussing? We always do it the last Sunday of the month. So whatever that. The 30th. And people are welcome to to join and all you have to do is go to the as the crow flies book club I don't you'll put it I'll send you a link we can put it in the show notes all right well

challenge you accepted I haven't been to a book club meeting in how many months so I got a little over two weeks to plow through a book I tell you what it it sounds like when we read the dystopian future on if a nuclear bomb had gone off back in the 60s it is like a last Babylon right And I would say this book is, Alas Babylon meets Atlas Shrugged. If those two books came together in the modern day, that's the mandibles.

And it is a mind-blowing book. Okay. Well, here we go. I've just agreed to read a book in two weeks time. All right, fair enough. Well, here, let's do the final five brought to you by Crudemaster Transport, supporters of the podcast since the very beginning, Tracy and Heath and Tracy McDonald's. I've changed it a bit since you were last year.

Instead of five questions, I found I got, and I got to stop explaining this because everybody, every time I do this, but I found I just, I don't know. I didn't know, I didn't know, you know, five, anyways. So it's a time limit. And I've certainly butchered that in the first two weeks. I've gone from anywhere for an hour past the five minute mark to 20 minutes. 40 minutes late to a meeting. So we'll just do it quick because I just blew through. I was like, I'm enjoying this interview with Sean. I'm going to miss a meeting. Well, that's why you have to tell me when you have to go, Vance. This is too much fun.

Musk, I want to talk about Elon Musk and Twitter. Your thoughts, right? He buys a percentage. Now he's talking about buying Twitter. Good, bad thoughts. Oh, just watch for how people react. The most important thing is to see what is culture reacting to. You know, whether it's good or bad is not really for me to say.

I don't benefit from Elon Musk. Maybe it'll be better. Maybe it won't. But watch what people. are saying about whether it's good or bad and it tells you a lot more about where culture is at and I think right now what it's telling you is people don't want people in power don't want more freedom of discourse they they literally are saying we want more moderation and that's going to split the society so I think it says a lot more about society really so you don't you view it from

that point you don't go like man I hope Elon Musk succeeds or doesn't succeed you know of course i kind of do right like who doesn't love the trolling that elon musk does and who doesn't you know but at the end of the day i don't i don't know that his interests are aligned with mine i feel like they are but i also think he's a really intelligent guy that just like warren buffett who cultivated a personality where people are like oh shucks old man and he's doing good for us but he's not he's doing good for him and that's okay i don't resent him for it so i try not to root for big figures and I try and just say, what is this telling me about what's going on?

Hmm. You surprise me all the time because I look at Elon Musk and I go, wouldn't that be something? Like, what does Twitter look like if Elon Musk actually buys it? Right? Because he's a big proponent of free speech.

And one of the things that's happened on Twitter, I mean, geez, I've seen it over and over and over again, is the censorship that's become YouTube. You mentioned YouTube with me. But Twitter, I mean, I got tons of people that I've followed. then no longer there. I go under Elon, I figure that would be the biggest change. But is that good or bad? I don't know, right? Like that opens up. What does that open up? I don't know. But you don't

look at it that way. Well, you know, when you learn about the Dutch, what is the Indian Dutch company, the trading company, the giant one that was the Dutch Indian trading company, right, in the 1600s, they became hugely powerful. And I'm sure when they first started showing up with silks and spices and all these great things to the people. Everybody's like, this is awesome. But then they became a de facto government. They became so big and so powerful that they were more important than the king and more important than the church. And so when you know what they can do, whether or not Elon Musk is good, eventually maybe he dies and somebody else takes control of whatever he's doing. So there's always these complications that I try and ask myself as

best I can not what do I naturally feel is right but like how can I widen this angle out it makes me um it makes me uh not get to have as much fun relishing and like wouldn't you love to watch those cancels burn but like you know it's it's probably good so that way you don't get too swept up in popular culture yeah that's fair i uh well i you're right in the sense that when one man controls too much, his influence is like immeasurable. Like it's hard, you know, Bill Gates. Why do people hate Bill Gates? Because he has a controlling interest in a lot. Yeah. And like, think about things we've talked about already today. You know, we've talked about two parent families and staying together. I mean, Elon Musk's have several divorces. He's got children

with other parents, children with parents that he's not married to. Like, he may seem like we have values aligned, but maybe not. Maybe that's, you know, I'm not trying to disparage him. I'm just trying to say there's reason. Think about the bigger thing, the bigger picture. Well, heck, I've, I've certainly enjoyed sitting with you with events again. I appreciate you canceling a meeting. Oh, I didn't cancel. I just blew through it. But they're going to understand. It's not a big deal. Thank you, man. I love coming on here. I love what you're doing. And I just want to, I really want to encourage you to trust your own instincts. You seem to be really doing a great job.

And I think that the reason people tune in, the reason I tune in, is because I find an authentic man that is trying to do good in the world. And that's a rare thing. And just know, like, we're brothers, man. And I think the people that are listening feel similarly. Well, I appreciate that. That's high praise coming from a guy that I listen to. So I think, you know, if you haven't found Vance's podcast, how do they find you, Vance?

Because, I mean, there's a lot of good content that you're spitting out on a weekly basis. Yeah, it's the Vance Crow podcast. And then if you're interested in doing any of these legacy interviews, you can go to store. Dot articulate. And that'll give you a chance to look at like how we do them, whether you're in St. Louis or doing them from Zoom. But either of those two ways will get you to me. Cool. Are we expecting you in November events? Any chance? I think so. I think so. November is a very busy month. So we got to get dates on the calendar. We got to make things happen. My audience is going, what's happening in November? I've just released a little bit of a cat out of the bag. But I figured I'd hold you on live recording you to this that maybe I could hold you to your word right here. Oh, I'd love to. I love Canada. So the few times I've been there has been a great experience. And to see you and Quick and the two two guy,

you were always talking about. I'd love that. Right on. Well, thanks for hopping back on. Thanks, man. Hey, thanks for tuning in today, you guys. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to like, subscribe, tell a friend, leave a review, share, share, share. Appreciate it all. In the show notes, the Patreon account link is there. If you want to support financially, if not, tell me a fly kite. Either way, it's cool. We are back Wednesday. It's a crazy week for me. I think I'm recording like seven podcasts this week.

So who knows, I got some cool guests this week and look forward to hearing what you guys have to say in the coming days. So we'll catch up to you Wednesday.