Vance Crowe on Better Conversations, Family Business, and Hard Disagreements

Shay

Foulk: Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. Vance Crowe, how are you today?

Vance

Crowe: I'm doing well. I'm about a week and a half out of surgery and I feel 100% back in the saddle.

Shay

Foulk: Okay. Was that like a Brazilian booty lift surgery?

Vance

Crowe: No, it was like cutting out half my thyroid. They slit my throat open and cut out half of me and the surgeon came back in and was like, the mass was half a pound. And it was like, whoa. And when I started to recover, you could feel a half a pound out of me. It's, it's amazing.

Shay

Foulk: So, you know, that process, it seems like, came on pretty quick because I was listening. It was interesting, I had missed the first half of your last live podcast, and apparently that was the most important part about where you were having the, the health issue here that I didn't know about. How are you feeling? Um, and I guess just a little background on like how did it all come about?

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, so we met in person for the first time back in January when I was like going through all kinds of crazy health stuff, and ultimately they came to the conclusion, hey, you've got this big growth in your throat on your thyroid, and I was gonna just keep monitoring it. My wife was like, no, no, you're not, we're gonna get that thing out of there. And I went to the surgeon and he was like, ah, you could probably monitor it, and then he went away and called me at home in the evening and was like, Actually, I've been looking at more of your pathology stuff that's gotta come out. And so when your surgeon calls you at home at night, you're like, all right, let's go do it. So we did it and a week later, I feel great. I'm off all the pain meds I was on before. I'm feeling great. So it seems like it was the right decision.

Shay

Foulk: So this is a very specific thing. My wife, I mentioned, had a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma around her thyroid when she was 16. So we're far away from that. Everything's been good since then, but she's on a drug called levothyroxine. Uh, are you gonna have to be on any medication? I know you had talked about that briefly.

Vance

Crowe: Yes, so for men, removing half of your thyroid is not quite as serious as it is for women. Apparently men, uh, 80% of them regain full thyroid function from just half, whereas for a lot of women— my mother had a similar surgery, she had to go on the same medication your wife did. I'm hoping not to, but it is what it is, I guess.

Shay

Foulk: So is this a genetic thing, do you think? Is there any genetic correlation?

Vance

Crowe: Who knows? I mean, thyroid is very common, and I've had 2 doctors tell me if I was gonna have any kind of cancer or growth, thyroid's the one I'd want. So I guess if we're gonna have genetic problems, that's a good one to have.

Shay

Foulk: Interesting. Well, I got 2 non-related questions to today's conversation. The first one, I was thinking about your name this morning, Vance Crowe. What's your familial history? What's your heritage?

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, so my mother is 100% Irish all the way through, very Irish Catholic family for many generations. And my father is largely Swiss German. And so, you know, we were talking a lot about on my podcast the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. And as I've looked more into my history, half of my family come from what's known as Church of the Brethren, which is somewhat similar to Quakers. And— but that was not something I knew. It wasn't a part of our culture that was like celebrated or understood in my family. And I'm only just now as an adult going back and being like, all right, what does this mean? Where is this seen in our lives today?

Shay

Foulk: Anything stand out to you on the research that you've done there?

Vance

Crowe: You know, the Church of the Brethren are very much about finding ways to get along with people. There's a lot of like, let's figure out how to work in community, let's figure out how to cooperate. And definitely in my family, there is a very large sense of cooperation. As the middle child of 7, it was very much like everybody just kind of observes and knows what they should be working on. And that was— that's— I always assumed was the Irish Catholic part of it, but maybe it's the Church of the Brethren part.

Shay

Foulk: So are there similarities then with the Irish Catholic then of that?

Vance

Crowe: Oh, those are very, very different, uh, faiths, right?

Shay

Foulk: That's why I'm asking. But you mentioned like, hey, this is why, but, um, how would you say that that's different from the Irish Catholic background then?

Vance

Crowe: Well, like you and I have been talking about, and I ended up extending our conversation to a woman named Kate Crosby, and then I just recently did a podcast with a guy named Joshua Bach, and this conversation has just continued to roll on. My sense is that the more northern latitude religions were based on a more literal understanding of the world and the Bible, largely due to the further north you are,, the more you have to be like, we have calendars, we have schedules, we have tasks, we separate those tasks out. You're responsible for this and that. And the more southern latitudes or the Irish where there's a more temperate culture, you have less rigidity. And, you know, it's very easy for me to identify the literalism in other people because I think the more soft kind of symbolic thinking is very common in my family, the one that I grew up in.

And I'm just parsing now, what does it mean if 50% of your family is Church of the Brethren? Where does that show up? Where does that fit into my hypothesis?

Shay

Foulk: So, this feeds into the second question that I had, and this is— the second question is more about maybe like environment, how you were raised, but I think there's some interesting parallels with what you just said there around structure and organization. And the reason I think of this is I sent you this Zoom link about 4 minutes before we were to hop on here. I'm not using AI to do that. There's a little bit of chaos that goes around the planning. And my question is, when you are working with people or conducting interviews, one thing that I've noticed is if you were raised in chaos, that's your comfort zone. And so when you get to a point in your life where you have the ability to have more structure, a lot of times people actually add in chaos. And I think, You know, I think personally, as I reflect on that, I think that's probably a little bit where I'm most comfortable.

And I wouldn't say it was a real chaotic upbringing, but it was multiple parts of the family and lots of extended family members. And maybe you're going to do this and you got 4 different Christmases that you're going to and whatever else. And so now when I get into an area of like a rhythmic outlook, it's like, oh, well, you know, I want— we're doing a grain bin project and a warehouse project and we're growing the farm and we're doing the software and the consulting and whatever else. And I like that. And I thrived in that environment. Firemen in the military. On the flip side, I think people that were raised in structure and had consistent schedules and, you know, we do this on Sunday and then we go out to eat and then we do whatever else, I think they really like that structure. What's been your observations around that? Have you noticed a trend or a pattern like that?

Or, you know, what do you say to that?

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, my immediate reaction is, uh, I am probably more personally comfortable with a little bit of chaos, like what's going on. I'm always throwing novelty in. If If something's working, I'm always like, well, why don't we try and make it better? Why don't we try and do something different? But with raising my family, I'm very much replicating what my dad did. My dad put structure to things, you know, and Sunday morning when we came down for breakfast, he was already playing church music. You could feel that things were different. The way they set the table was very structured. You knew forks and knives and where they went and where the napkins were. And I find myself implementing that on my family. And this is very different for my wife, right? She was an elite athlete, so were her two sisters. And so her family was waking up at 4 a.m. Go, go, go, go, go.

Put everything aside other than school and sports. And so the structure and the rhythm and the flow was not a part of it. And I think in a lot of relationships, this is where when you get married and you have a family, Now, you start having conflict that is not really like, "I dislike you. I don't want to be around you" or anything like that. It's about rhythm. It's about synchronizing. It's about how do we create a functional unit here? And this is something that you have to abate through trial and error and conversation. I think it's probably the hardest part of marriage, at least for me.

Shay

Foulk: Yeah. Well, and I find that interesting because I was mentioning beforehand my commitment to the family this year is from middle of May to middle of September, every Saturday, we're going to go to a nearby lake community, spend some time at the beach, you know, play in the water, go to the park, just kind of hang out as a family. And then Sunday, you know, we go to church in the morning. And those are kind of the foundational outlooks. And then they go to daycare 2 days a week, Tuesday and Thursday. But we have chosen to homeschool our children, at least for the time being. And so, I think about that too of like, I really like the idea of having structure for our kids because we notice that they perform, I shouldn't say perform, they thrive in that environment of, "Oh, we're doing this today and oh, we're doing this today." And bedtime is pretty routine and whatever else.

But I just, I find that interesting and hopefully it helps people connect with why why people maybe react the way that they do. And that's probably a good lead-in to the key topics that I wanted to dive in here today is you had sent over a prompt around, how do you ask a person that's very different from you, maybe how they were raised, maybe the occupation, maybe their belief system, maybe their, you know, just, worldview, I guess, would be a good way to look at it. How do you ask someone very different from you about their goals and about their values? And you've had a ton of experience with this, so I'd love to have you just kind of dive into some of those things.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, I think this came from you and I discussing the interview I did with the woman named Kate Crosby. So a little background on Kate, she is a geneticist that is also an expert on light, which seems weird, but she understands the color spectrum very well. She has actually invented a program to expose plants to different wavelengths so that you could get them to fruit 30% faster. So she essentially made what she calls a time machine because that's the way that normally a plant knows to grow is that it gets a certain amount of infrared light, a certain amount of white light, and then more infrared light. And so she tricks them essentially into coming to fruition faster. So she is brilliant, but she is totally different than me. She, she lives in California.

She grew up in Canada and she's a lesbian with a partner and she is past the age and had told me recently that she had decided, you know, they weren't going to— they had thought about trying to have children through scientific means and they had made the decision, no, we're past the point where we're going to do that. And so in the podcast, we discussed, you know, when you become a parent, something about your future, what you're adding to the world, is about children. And so I asked her, what is it that you are planning to add to the world? Where will your energy go forward? And, uh, and you were like, hey, that seemed like it was a very comfortable conversation for the two of you. And I think— I thought a lot about this, and I think, um, one of the things that happens when we ask people questions that they are a lot really different from us we put in a tone of judgment, right?

We put in some kind of a tone of like, "Why do you do that?" Right? And, "Oh." And, I think that when I'm speaking with people, I've had enough practice and figured out over time that if you can adjust your tone and the way that you ask a question, the actual words that you use when you ask somebody a question that is deeply probing, something very intimate, something like, "What is your life if you're not having children?" If it's something that you wanted, if you are expressing deep curiosity, you are actually giving this person a gift because most of the time, the way that we think about things is because we get to speak, right? It's very difficult to think without speaking. We think of thinking as like, oh, I'm in my head. I was driving down the road and I was thinking about it. But really, most of the time, what we think of as thinking is actually the experiencing of emotion.

I'm afraid. I'm resentful, I'm regretting something I did, but it's more of a cloud of emotions. And so when you give a person the chance to take what was a cloud of emotion, a thing that guided them to a decision, and you ask them, how did you come to this decision? How will your life be in this, in this new pattern that you've had to establish? They all of a sudden get to take that cloud of emotion and put it into a linear series of thoughts. So that they are now doing— they're actually thinking right in front of you. And it's a very pleasurable experience for most people because when you're thinking, you're connecting dots and you're able to discover things that were within you that you didn't know, because most of the time we don't get a chance to think. So it's a very long answer to say I really try and focus on being curious without having judgment, and it really opens people up.

Shay

Foulk: So you have that innate curiosity or trained curiosity might be a good way to put it too. You're very diligent about watching your tone. One other thing that I find interesting, I just done a podcast with Quint Pottinger yesterday. I think it's posting here as we record this at the end of May of 2026. But he said that his wife is really, really good about thinking through questions, uh, and not just looking for an answer but maybe some of the background. And he referred to that as using qualifiers. And I think qualifiers and questions can be a huge benefit, but they can also probably have a negative tone, a negative outlook, similar to like a tone can. So how do you think about, uh, qualifiers and your questions? Because you have to provide background.

So I think the way that you did it with Kate was I'm gonna butcher this, but essentially you said, I am this way and I think about things like this. You're different in these certain ways. And I'm genuinely curious about how that impacts XYZ. So that was somewhat of a qualifier, but how do you think about handling those qualifiers as part of the question?

Vance

Crowe: First of all, Shay, I think I was actually thinking about this this morning. I think you are one of the best interviewers out there. You ask very insightful questions and observe things that even I myself don't. As I think about that, what you're calling a qualifier, I think of it as you're sharing a vulnerability. You're sharing, hey, this is the conclusion that I came to. This is how— where I'm at without asserting its correctness. You're not saying, hey, I do this and therefore, you know, you should too. And why don't you? It's really like, hey, I'm— I came to these conclusions. How is it that, that you are coming to your conclusions? You know, there's a guy kind of famous on X, Mizzou Tiger, right, that he gets into really strong disagreements with people on X. But my experience with him has not been that way.

And we view the world very differently on things like AI and Bitcoin. But I think in those discussions, I keep coming back to like, hey, I just— I don't— this is not the way that I think. How do you think? And in that, he comes back with, reasons and answers that I don't agree— they're not the way I don't agree with them, but I also get to hear a much more thoroughly thought-out version of his, his explanation because he doesn't feel threatened. He doesn't feel like he's being mocked. He doesn't feel like somebody's trying to one-up him. And so it gives him a chance to say, I'm going to share as much with you as I feel like you are being vulnerable with me.

Shay

Foulk: When you say that, I think of self-awareness. And one thing that I've realized about myself here over the last few years is most of the time, going back to your comment about emotions, most of the time when I'm angry, what it really is is a feeling of inadequacy. That's me personally. So if I feel that I didn't have the proper information to make a good decision, and therefore, I did not perform well. I'm not angry at you, I'm angry at the feeling of inadequacy for my, for how I performed. And so part of that is a vulnerability of making sure I understand and identify what it is that's causing that emotion. But I think that self-awareness, not only from a conversational standpoint or from talking with people that you might disagree with or that have a very different background would be extremely helpful.

Do you have anything similar to that that you've maybe realized about yourself and how you engage or react with others?

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, I mean, you really landed on the one that I think is the, the one that's most important probably for men, right? Like, it's that when you feel anger, usually anger is a— is trying to prevent you from feeling something like fear, inadequacy. It's trying to prevent you from feeling these other things because those make you feel very good. I think the largest one, and I'm by no means perfect, right? This may be the pursuit of all people, is the exact thing you described about self-awareness. It is once you observe an emotion that you are having, you are no longer experiencing it. So, if you stop yourself and you say, "Hey, the being that is Vance, the one that I'm controlling this human through," He's feeling angry, right? As soon as you name that, all of a sudden you're not experiencing that anymore. You're observing it.

And this has been very helpful for me in a lot of situations, you know, particularly where when you're a business owner or you're the one in charge, you can't let your emotions run rampant. I mean, you can, but it will cost you and it'll cost you a lot more than whatever that present moment is. It will cost you the way that people feel about you, the way they react, how much they tell you in the future. And so the ability to observe your own emotions— you can't stop them. I believe they're involuntary. They are just going to come out. So the only thing you can do is observe them.

Shay

Foulk: So what if I observe that I'm happy? Does that then stop the emotion of happiness and become joy as more of a longer-term outlook?

Vance

Crowe: Or, you know, um, I think so. I, but I don't know that that's bad because I think that oftentimes our up emotions are, at least for me, I can go way up, right? I can get very excited. They are just as dangerous for me as down emotions, right? I can overpromise. I can be too optimistic. I can believe things that aren't real or aren't true. But even more than that, by observing happiness, you can convert happiness into what we actually want, which is satisfaction. We are satisfied. We are feeling a sense of wholeness or completeness. And to me, when I'm able to convert excitement, enthusiasm, happiness into satisfaction, that is the much more mature and strong way to be. But it's very hard because I love feeling up. I mean, who doesn't, you know, singing and putting your hand out the car window.

But there's something more going on there that if you can observe, you'll pull more out of it.

Shay

Foulk: So I want to go back to the differences, maybe to wrap up this portion of the topic. And the example that came to mind when we were talking the other day about your interview with Cade is Andy Frisella. He runs the Real AF podcast, MFCEO Project. He's now doing the Operator Standard. Really great business person, um, very outspoken on things related to government control, and I think quite insightful. But what I realized is he is so incredibly different from me because he doesn't have children. His goal is to be very wealthy. His goal is to have an impact on the world, but maybe in a much different way than I am. And what it got me questioning is Who do I look to as a role model that I want to be like?

And, and then how do you decipher, um, the bits and pieces of people that are in your life that have really good things that, yes, I want to be like this, uh, that Andy has, but I also don't want to be like this. Um, for me personally, then I start to look at, okay, So who's a farmer that does consulting, that has a vision for growing their family and community and business and whatever else? And now you start really narrowing down who those like ideal role models would be. And at the end of the day, you're working with infallible humans. So how do you pull bits and pieces of that? Or how do you think about that interaction with people that are different than you to not get discouraged by the outlook of your future, I guess?

Vance

Crowe: You know, I can really only speak for my own internal, um, thing as opposed to what people should do, but my experience is, uh, respect is an involuntary thing. You, you don't choose who to respect. And in fact, if somebody says you should respect me or this other person and you don't, there's nothing you can do about it. You can treat them with respect, but respect is an involuntary thing. And, and I, I believe it's you respect people that can do things you can't currently do, or you know how difficult it is to do because you did it. And when you look around at other men that are achieving things that you respect, the exact point that you made, like, you, one, don't ever want to vaunt people up too high. One, it's unfair to them. It's also really unfair to you because they are fallible. But then two, like you, we all are our own person with our own, you know, background.

The genetics that I have all the way from Swiss Germany to the crazy 7-child home I grew up in, to your, you know, you're being raised in the way you were. And those bring you to every single man's journey is alone, is alone in the sense that no one else can walk this path. And one of the things that I've firmly realized from doing legacy interviews. So for people that don't know, I record people telling their life stories and that way they can pass it down to their children or their grandchildren. One of the things I've come to realize is there is literally no one on earth I would trade places with. I have met some of the richest people in the world, and I mean that literally. And I've met people that I, when they walk in, I think, wow, who's this guy? He's kind of looks lame or, you know, whatever.

And they have ups and they have downs and they have things that they've achieved and things that have fallen down, but that at the end of the day, I would not be able to handle their life because the only reason they're able to handle their life is because they walked the path to get there. And this has been very liberating to me, and it enables me to do what you were saying about respect, which is just find people you respect and pull the bits out of them that you can.

Shay

Foulk: So this leads into the second part, um, of what you had sent over kind of as a prompt, and, and that's the value of being curious about other people. You know, the other day I was talking about, or I had posted on X about a grain bin project that we're doing and having a contract in place. And, you know, one of the gentlemen on there, Rick Bieber, he had replied and said, you know, I've never had a contract. We've always just done handshake deals. And I found a really good person close by that worked with the subcontractors. And I said, well, unfortunately, I've heard of too many horror stories. And I'm too young in my career to feel comfortable doing that.

And as I carry on to that conversation, what came outta my mouth or came onto the screen was, I think that clear communication is one of the highest forms of respect in both a familial outlook and a business outlook and in any form of life. But what I think your question here, or what you posit with curiosity, I think what you just said is curiosity is actually one of the highest forms of respect, because when you're curious about someone, now you have the ability to show genuine interest. You put yourself in a framework that maybe doesn't have that judgment and keeps you open-minded. What's your thoughts on that?

Vance

Crowe: Oh man, you nailed it. I think that prompt came from, you and I were talking about you on your operation and Chris talking about,— you know, a disagreement that you guys had and that you were able to not be like, "Ah, we gotta do it his way," or "I'm gonna have to struggle with this," or just saying, you know, and instead you had humbled yourself and been like, "Hey, I sense you're telling me not to do it the way that I'm preparing. Help me understand that." And to me, the man that can lower his ego in order to be able to understand something bigger than himself That's when you get the benefit of other people's wisdom. And, and like, if someone feels like they are filling your cup with wisdom that they hard earned, they, they will respect you.

They will like you because you're giving them that gift of being able to really understand something that they feel and they've experienced that if they were just sitting in front of a white blank page, they couldn't have. They— it's very difficult to get these ideas out without somebody wanting to pull it from you. And I think that to your point, if you're curious about other people, there's an electricity shared between you that's really powerful.

Shay

Foulk: So I'm going to give the specific example, but I want to come back to— don't let me forget— how do you become curious about people? So the specific example that I think we were talking about was my father-in-law and I were discussing a our grain bin project of moving old bins from a different site to our location. The price is right, we have someone that's willing to do the work that we trust. And when I, you know, we had talked through this, and I could just sense, I could feel that he was reserved. And I could feel that, you know, to me, it was more off-putting. And what I recognized there, I took a step back and said, instead of being frustrated about his posture or about his attitude towards it, I need to lean into that 'cause there's a reason that he feels that way.

And so instead of getting defensive or walking away or, I don't know why he's so damn negative about this or whatever else, I said, I just pointed it out. I just said, hey, you seem a little reserved about this. What are you thinking? Kind of what's on your mind there or whatever? And he just said, oh, well, you know, there's been instances in the past where we talked about doing this and the grain bin guy that I was working with, he just said, ah, it never pays because of XYZ. And I said, well, yeah, but in those cases you're paying, you know, $1 a pound or 50 cents a pound on the product, whereas this, you know, we're not. And he's like, oh yeah, yeah, I never, yeah, that's true. I suppose that's different. And it got us to this middle ground of understanding, whereas, you know, he had not looked at that perspective.

And if I didn't take a step back to really hone in on his cues, I think that was maybe the key, is honing in on his cues from his posture, from his tone, from his attitude towards the conversation. That got us to a common ground. And, and it was, in your words, it was my curiosity of why is Mark acting that way? Why, why is he, you know, and there's experience there and there's wisdom there. And I think that's so much of what I think the younger generation in any situation, whether younger is 50 or younger is 20, I think that's a lot of what gets missed is, well, why do dad or grandpa or mom or whoever else feel that way, act that way? There's probably some experiences that led into that. So maybe that leads into going back to my question there is, how do you become curious about people or how do you train yourself to have that genuine curiosity?

Vance

Crowe: I think the core way to do it is the— is the really the only way we learn anything, which is through humility. And humility is the understanding that there is still more to learn. And when once you come to that conclusion, oh man, no matter how good I am at something, there is still more to learn. It is very, very easy to set down the, oh, I don't want them to think I'm dumb. Or I don't want if I get his answer for him to think now I have to do what he thinks, right? You just, you just come to the conclusion I will be improved if I find out what this person knows. And I teach in this class, Interest Based Communications, that everyone you talk to has interests and it is almost never in somebody's interest to express, you know, disappointment or annoyance or frustration with you. Unless they have something to share with you that you are not yet like exploring.

Now, that's not to say you should react to everybody that's annoyed with you or frustrated or whatever, but it is saying when you get that signal, it's very easy to be like, uh-oh, pain is coming. I'm going to avoid this. I'm going to go around it. And instead, the thing that you can do is say, they probably know something I don't know. It may hurt to hear. It may alter my plans. It may make this harder. I may have to undo something that I've already done. But I will get the benefit of whatever it was that they went through that taught them this lesson. And this is the easiest to do with strangers and the hardest to do with the people that we're closest to. I mean, it is not an accident, you know, you're never a prophet in your own land. We are also like, it's also hardest to hear the prophecies of people that are closest to you.

Shay

Foulk: One thing that I think about when you say that is, What I found is when I open up my vulnerabilities and share my failures and am transparent about the things that are going wrong, you know, I fricking sprayed 64 acres today 'cause we busted 2 hydraulic lines and then I had my boom too low and I smacked the tips into the ground and there goes $400 out the window. And, you know, trying to express that vulnerability and that pain gives me common ground with the other person. The line that I try to walk carefully though is I don't wanna come off as complaining. I want to pose it as a, I feel the same things that you do. And those vulnerabilities that exist behind the curtain of your conscience, especially with the people that are close in your community, when you open up to them, that's where some of the best conversations come from.

'Cause they're like, oh, well, you wouldn't believe what I did the other day. I had the corn at 120,000 population 'cause I switched over some soybeans and I forgot to change the stupid thing or whatever. You know, is your experience, um, that sharing that pain and sharing that vulnerability helps open up that conversation? And, and if so, how do you navigate that without sounding like you're complaining?

Vance

Crowe: Well, I mean, I, I personally believe that the most alive thing that humans do, the things that will persist furthest into the future is the stories that we tell. Our minds are set up to like hear stories and be really curious about what's going on. And then also to learn from and share those stories. So I think as long as your story is— I actually just quickly drew this graph. I don't know. Can you see that from there?

Shay

Foulk: Hold it back a little bit. Yeah. Somewhere in there.

Vance

Crowe: Yep. So like every story that's really, really good, right? Things are going good. I thought I knew what was going on. Oh man. Then I actually found out that I know nothing. And you start collapsing and then things are not going well. And this point down here in the story is the pivotal moment. If you make a change to get better, things go upwards, right? And if you don't, then they go down, right? That's the tragedy. And all human beings are looking for this point right here because that's wisdom.. And what we want to know is if I'm listening to your story, am I going to be able to avoid a similar fate or am I going to be able to learn from that? And as long as your stories, the stories that we hate hearing are the ones that instead of them having this weird arc, they're just, oh, all up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Things just went better. And look how good I am.

Look how much better I am. Or the stories that are down, down, down, down, down. Oh, and then this happened and then this bad thing and then this bad thing happened. The way you get out of that is you're showing where was the change point. And that change point is always, what did you change? What did you have to learn from that? And that's actually, I think, the best way to give advice. It's not to say, hey, you ought to do this. It's to say, when I was in a situation that's kind of like this, I got myself into a bad situation. And this is what I did to either change or where I failed to change. And we had a tragedy result.

Shay

Foulk: And I think in that scenario that I gave of, you know, I busted up the sprayer boom or whatever else, typically when I'm sharing that, then it's like, well, but you know what, we had a couple of good spray days later on, it got a little bit warmer, the field conditions were better, you know, that tends to work out better anyways. And we always get it sprayed, we always get the crop in, whatever else. I think that's where the shared common ground is of that inflection point. And I don't know if it's wisdom on my end other than I just look at it as, How do I put a positivity spin on this to make it a good engagement to where, hey, Bill, I recognize you have the same problems that I do. I had this problem and we got it fixed and I'm on the up. I feel good about it. We're gonna be okay.

And I think that sense of optimism and that sense of wisdom is probably where the connection point happens in conversation as much as in a story, like when you're giving a speech or talking through a presentation.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, I've come to the very real conclusion that the stories that people keep repeating over and over and over again, and you're like, "Yeah, I know, Dad. I've heard this story a bunch of times," is actually a function in the brain that's happening that says there's something to be learned from this. What is it that you have not yet learned? And so, by giving somebody an opportunity to tell a story and then one of my favorite questions to ask somebody when they're telling me something that's not gone well even really tough ones, is to say, what was the lesson in that? Because once somebody pulls out a lesson from whatever tragedy happened, you watch that they don't need to tell that story as often. And you find that people that are not ready to tell you a story in which they have learned a lesson, that means there's still something going on there.

And I think that this is just fundamental to the human experience. I think we— our brains work in terms of stories. And when you're trying to end on that high note, the real thing is what did you change? What did you discover that allowed you to make that change? And it could just be, I'll never do that again. The amount of mud I had to dig out of that thing, well, you know, I'll remember that for the rest of my life.

Shay

Foulk: I got a story about the Grand Canyon that my father-in-law likes to tell that I've heard at least 119 times. So I need to ask him, what was the lesson out of that? That. But I love the story. It's, um, you know, there's also probably a, uh, outside of just the lesson of why did you enjoy that period of time, you know, because it's him talking about trips that he took with his kids, and that was a special event. It was a new experience. It was unique. It was— there was something totally different. So I think even if there's not a lesson there, it's more so that, uh, reminiscing on a really good period of your life or a really good time. So I try not to— I've backed off saying, yeah, I've heard that story a bunch of times.

More so, I just listen to it and enjoy the experience that he looks back on that as a fond memory of time that he got to spend with his kids away from the farm, away from the business. And that's the lesson for me, I think.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, I mean, I once read this book called Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins, and then 20 years later, I got to interview the author. And the book is all about the family stories that get told and the family stories that don't get told. And really, there are family stories where it's like, and this person was a hero. Let me tell the story about how they won. And then you have the black sheep like, oh, this is Uncle Roger. And Uncle Roger, he turned into a drinker and you don't want to be like Uncle Roger. One of the things to observe about your family is which stories persist. What is the oldest story that your family is passing information down to is a very powerful thing.

It's to say, "Where is it that this fits into our lives and why did my ancestors find this valuable to share?" And when you still have your grandparents around, absorbing as many of those stories as you possibly can may be one of the greatest gifts that you can do for your children and grandchildren, which is to allow information to persist that was earned through hard knock life, which is what everybody has.

Shay

Foulk: And a lot of what you do in your work is not only pulling out those interviews and those stories from folks, but also empowering others to have these conversations, to work through that. And I know that's where your interest-based communication courses comes in. What we've talked about here is just scratching the surface of that. I know several people that attended our conference, my brother attended the interest-based communication. Tell the listeners a little bit more about what your plan is here as we go through 2026 on those interest-based communication courses and how they can be involved if they would like to be.

Vance

Crowe: Oh man, what a great opportunity. So yeah, I had a couple of opportunities to teach people about communications and then I realized I need to formalize this because people are telling me this is life-changing work. So I created a course that is— has 5 parts. It's— we start off talking about negotiations and we turn that from being a bad word or something about manipulations into something that's really comfortable and something where, you know, hey, I can advocate for myself and I can help people get what they need. Then we talk about storytelling and the value of that in your life and how to introduce yourself, how to talk about your work or your family or your organization. Then we talk about how to ask better questions in conversation.

And, and then we have a whole section on conflict where, hey, when things are really going off the rails, what are things you can do to make sure you understand what the other person is thinking and they can understand you? And then finally, we wrap it up with a section on presenting. How do you take ideas and share them with groups of people? And I've done this in corporate settings. I've been invited to private equity firms, pharmaceutical companies, like large corporations. But I realize I want to share this with individuals. I want to share this with small operations that have 1 or 2 people that really need to learn this. So, I created a course. Uh, some of the early ones were 2 days. Now, we've turned it into 3 days where people show up on Monday around 1 o'clock. We do classes at night.

We have experiences where we send you to dinner and we give you something to do that I believe will be memorable for the rest of your life, an experience that gets you to practice some of these skills. We do exercises and live fire experiences. And when people walk away, I think they, they describe it as being like a very transcendent experience, one that they go home and they can use it with their spouse, their boss, their employees. And it's really been my life's work and I've really enjoyed it. So now I'm instituting it. I'm doing a class here in July and then another one in, in late August.. And I have loved the people that came from the Ag View Solutions Group. I mean, that actually made up most of the last class I put on.

Shay

Foulk: And so the outlook on this too, my brother Joseph, who you did not know we were brothers until a few days ago, is one of the quieter men that I've met and is a very dry sense of humor. And his openness to you was you could probably charge 3 times as much for the course because of the value that it came out. And so, you know, you not knowing him personally, for me to hear that reinforces that 10x because I really value his opinion and kind of how he perceives the world. So you mentioned July, you mentioned August, probably going to have a few others there. And then you will be returning to the 2027 Ag View Solutions Executive Business Conference in Florida this year. When are the dates in July and August? Just real quick, if you would please, Vance.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, so the dates here in August are— or for July, sorry, I gotta actually pull this up so I don't get this wrong— is July— let's see here— July 6th, 7th, and 8th. And then we have another session scheduled for August 31st through September 2nd. And then one probably pretty hard for harvest people, but October 12th through the 14th. And we've, we just opened that up. I, we've already started selling a bunch of slots for it. But it's, it's one that you could be sending somebody that's new in your operation or younger that you wanted to, hey, give them a real boost to be able to express themselves.

Or if you're running an operation and you want to say, hey, I want to come back and teach my people this stuff, I always say, What I'm teaching is a philosophy, and I want people— you can take my workbook, you can make copies of it, you can do whatever you want, because what I'm trying to do is to make it so human beings can synchronize, they can share, they can improve their situation, because if we do this, everyone gets better.

Shay

Foulk: And so the Vance bot that you built that runs websites and businesses and has taken control of some aspects of your life has created a website for this. What is the website that they can go to to get more information?

Vance

Crowe: It's articulate.ventures/IBC, Interest Based Communication. So articulate.ventures/IBC. There you can go. You can see people talking about the course. You can see the course layout and then what sessions we have available and how many seats. It's a very small group. We're going to do it right here in the Legacy Interview Studios. We only have 12 people. And it's gonna be a real experience. People will walk away feeling like, wow, that was something I couldn't get in any regular corporate communications training.

Shay

Foulk: That's awesome. And so you have also started back up on a— I don't know if I would say a less structured basis, but back into the Vance Crowe Podcast that you and I had had the conversation people can go back and listen to. I mentioned that so people can go find some of the prior episodes. There's lots of really great stuff there. But what, what do you kind of have in mind for the next couple of weeks? What's top of mind for Vance as we head into summer of 2026 to leave the listeners with?

Vance

Crowe: We are in an age of acceleration, and I just the other day interviewed probably the leading mind in all of artificial intelligence, a guy named Yoshua Bach. And he— I was asking him, what do you think AI will be in a year? And he was like, there is no way to know. And so to me, the only answer to this is to improve the communications with the people that are your people. And your people can be defined by your faith, by your nationality, by your work, your whatever that is. But figuring out a way for humans to communicate amongst each other will be literally the most important skill that humans need to retain to absorb the amount of change that's happening.

So for me, I am going as hard as I can on recording family stories to be passed down and teaching these courses and in hopes that whatever the change is, not only that my family and my people are preserved, but that other people's families and their groups of people are preserved to make the best world possible, no matter what that could be.

Shay

Foulk: Exciting times.

Vance

Crowe: Yeah, man. Shay, I, I just want to stress again, I, I genuinely believe you are one of the great interviewers, and, uh, I'm so grateful you were willing to have me on and, and talk. I, I truly love your observations, and, uh, yeah, man, I'm so glad we've gotten to know each other over the last year.

Shay

Foulk: Well, thank you for that. We're going to do a few more of these too, I think, uh, some of these key topics. And I would just recommend anybody that, uh, can make it to the Intraspace Communication courses. Definitely go check that out. So Vance, thank you so much for the time.

Vance

Crowe: Thanks for having me, Shane.

Shay

Foulk: And thank you everyone for listening to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. We will catch you next time.