A Soybean Breeder on Surviving Cancer, Hand-Pollinating Flowers, and Finding Meaning in Suffering

Christie Wiebbecke [00:00:00] That's why when I got the news, I would do anything. I would do anything in the world to fight and hope that I get the chance to be here longer for my boys,

Vance Crowe [00:00:13] This is the Vance Crow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. I am clearly not shooting for my studio today. I am in Regina, Saskatchewan for the Giant Aggravation Show. Last night I came into town with Dwayne Faber, and a few hours later, Jared McDaniel from Ag Uncensored came by. And we are all here to get ready for this podcast, this live taping we're gonna do on Wednesday morning. But before that, I have an interview with one of my favorite people in the whole world, Kristi Beck, who is a soybean breeder that I met while I was working at Monsanto. Now, soybean breeding is interesting, and you'll see in the back, like one third we talk about soybean breeding and how complicated it is and the tiny flowers and what Christie sees when she looks at a baby soybean plant, she can see its parents, but there's a more interesting conversation here, and it begins right outta the gate. And that is that Christie knew that her mother died from cancer when she was eight years old. And she watched that process start from when she was three years old. So she had a five year vision of her mother suffering and ultimately being taken by cancer. And that's what prompted her to go get tested to see if she had the gene that would code for a specific kind of breast cancer. I don't wanna give anything away because Christy does an excellent job of explaining where she was coming from and how surprising it was. But once you get past the initial shock and what happens with the cancer treatment, what you see in Christy's story is an exceptional one of resilience and strength and bravery.

Vance Crowe [00:01:52] She talks about a person that we've talked about before on the podcast, an inspiration named Jocko Willink. We end up talking about the Jordan Peterson event that happened when I was working at Monsanto, which is actually why Christie and I met. And then she goes on to talk about sacrifice and suffering and what does it take to transcend the place that you're at to get to be somebody that you wanna be in the future. So I'm gonna jump right into that. I am so grateful that you're here and we'll see you on the other side. Buckle in. This is perhaps the most emotional ride I've been on since we started this podcast. Kristi Beck, welcome to the podcast.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:02:30] Thank you.

Vance Crowe [00:02:31] You and I have an interesting connection because I met you on perhaps the worst day of my life. I had had a family tragedy that probably not worth going into, but I just heard the news that I had gotten this terrible thing that had happened in my family. And then a few minutes later, I was asked to go on a panel where I was in front of a whole bunch of PhD soybean breeders from all over the company. And that's where you and I met.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:03:01] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:03:01] And if I recall correctly, you had had actually really bad news just if just a little bit before that yourself.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:03:08] Yeah, I was two weeks out of my second surgery. So a month from, no, three weeks from finding out the news.

Vance Crowe [00:03:16] And what was the news that you found out?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:03:19] So I was diagnosed with breast cancer after a preventative surgery.

Vance Crowe [00:03:23] After a preventative surgery, yes. Why did somebody go in for a preventative surgery?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:03:27] So last year was an interesting year. I had always been suggested my mom passed away from breast cancer, and last year would've been the 30th year of her passing away. And I had always been told by doctors to consider getting the gene test genetic testing, and I had never wanted to know that information. I said, that's a sentence. It's not something that I feel like is gonna add value to my life. It's just gonna be okay, now you have a gene and now you're gonna get breast cancer. That's the way I looked at it until last year and something changed last February. I was thinking about my oldest son turning three, and I was three years old when my mom was diagnosed. And so looking at him and thinking, you're gonna be three this year, if there's anything I can do and take advantages of the technology and research that's available now compared to 35 years ago when my mom was first diagnosed, I should take advantage of every opportunity. So I decided to get the genetic test, and I thought nothing of it. I went in for my mammogram because that's what you do when you're a girl and you have a family history of breast cancer. Nothing came on that. And so I thought, okay, I am, I'm good. My sister doesn't have any indication. She's older than me and she doesn't have the gene, so I'm not really worried about it at that point. And the day before my youngest turned one, I got an envelope in the mail with my genetic test results, and I had one of the breast cancer genes. And I just sat there in shock and was like, what the heck?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:05:01] I mean, it took me aback and I swallowed my pride.

Vance Crowe [00:05:05] So you open up the envelope and it's, and it is clear as day, or did you

Christie Wiebbecke [00:05:08] Have to read? It's clear as day, it says you have this gene and this is your risk. And I was like, what? Oh my God. I mean, I knew in the back of my head it was a possibility. I looked just like my mom. I have a lot of characteristics like my mom, but at the same time, I just, until you see it in writing in front of you, you just go, it's not gonna happen. And so I, I went into the mode that I always go into when I find out news that I, I am like, okay, what do I need to do? Who do I need to talk to? The next day, my OB called me and said, Hey, I got your test results. And I'm like, dude, shouldn't this have been the other way around? Shouldn't you have called me before I got the le whatever? Anyway, he called me and he's like, you should really see this doctor. I'll get you referred to a breast surgeon, genetic counselor to be able to talk through your options, what your, what your best alternatives are, being that you're young. And at that point, I, in my head, I knew I was done having kids. I wanted to be here for the ones that I had, and I would do anything for that. And I think that was a little bit of a challenge for my husband because he wasn't totally sure that we were done having kids. But at the same time, he understood he wants me around for the two boys that we have. So oh, probably a month later I got in with the genetic counselor and I had done my research, if you have a gene, one of the options is preventative surgery.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:06:45] She talked about a couple of the other options of you can be put on a chemo pill for years. And basically that's supposed to help your body because basically if you have a breast cancer gene, your body doesn't know how to detect cancer in those cells, in those organs that are related to that gene. And that means my body doesn't know in my breasts and my ovaries how to recognize and fight cancer where any other place in my body, my body naturally knows how to do that. And so if you get,

Vance Crowe [00:07:14] I had no idea that, so that's what the genetic test is searching for is will your body be able to detect cancer? It's,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:07:21] I, it's te it's telling you that you have a mutation in that gene, and so your body, because you have a mutation in that gene, your body doesn't recognize.

Vance Crowe [00:07:30] Okay, makes

Christie Wiebbecke [00:07:31] Sense. Cancer, cancer cells makes sense.

Vance Crowe [00:07:32] Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:07:32] And know how to fight them. So if you remove those tissues, then the cancer's not going to develop because you don't have those tissues anymore. So my logical choice, when I went in and talked to the doctor, I was like being on a chemo pill for God knows how long. That wasn't an option. That, and I had kind of decided in the back of my head, kind of feel like that part of my life is done having kids. So the logical choice in my head was, okay, we're gonna have the surgery, we'll do it in a couple of months, and then,

Vance Crowe [00:08:08] And what is the surgery? And

Christie Wiebbecke [00:08:10] So it, it's a pro prophylactic mastectomy. So they take your breast tissue and then you work with a plastic surgeon, which I never thought I'd know a plastic surgeon in my life, but he's amazing. He's probably one of my fa, one of my two favorite doctors is my plastic surgeon. So you have the breast surgeon that removes all your breast tissue and then your plastic surgeon reconstructs you at the same time. So I met with her thought the best option was have the surgery because there's no indications of cancer. Then you remove that body part and you say, okay, now I'm good. My cancer risk goes from at 70, 75% risk at 50, about a 50 a coin flip. By the time I'm 50, I'm not that far away from 50. So a coin flip is not really good odds in my book. But if I did the surgery, I would take it down to less than one.

Vance Crowe [00:09:04] Less than 1%.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:09:05] Yeah. So it was like, no brain, okay, sign me up. How let's do this. So she had said, oh yeah, I could probably get you in in May. And I thought, well, that's quick. Kind of quicker than I thought. But the more I thought about it, as I came home, talked to my husband about it, I said, why not? Why not just do the surgery and recover in the spring when I'm less busy, be recovered fully in the summer so we can enjoy the summer and I can be fully back to normal Christie by fall. And that was the plan. I went in a week before my surgery for an MRI, because they make sure they do an MRI, just to check everything came back clean, everything was good. So we scheduled a day. I, I told my boss that I was doing something and I needed to be able to work from home for a couple of weeks that it was a medical thing, but I was gonna take a week off to recover. And then I'd work from home for a couple weeks and I'd be good to go. And they were totally fine with it. They have, that's why I love the place that I work. I have tremendous support. I've always had tremendous support if I, I, I don't go above and beyond to ask for favors, but if I need support from them, they know I'm gonna deliver on what my job is. So I've always had that support.

Vance Crowe [00:10:26] And this was Monsanto at the time? Yes. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:10:28] Yes. And so, and it was literally three weeks before the surgery, I changed my role. So it was a brand new boss, brand new manager. But she was amazing. She rolled with punches and she was like, yep, I get it. No problem. So I was supposed to be coming back to work. The, the next day I was, I had my surgery. It was the day after Memorial Day, the day after my mom died, 30 years. And one day to the day after my mom died, and I got a phone call from the doctor, actually a nurse saying, Hey, we got your biopsy results. And so they always do a biopsy of everything to make sure there's nothing that they missed. And in that biopsy, they found a tumor the size of a half care at Diamond,

Vance Crowe [00:11:19] That's not very big.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:11:20] No. Incredibly small. And because of where it was located, it was located on my pec muscle, it would've had to be significantly larger to be able to feel it and to have imaging detected. So my mom and a lot of other guardian angels were watching over me. They, sorry.

Vance Crowe [00:11:43] That's okay.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:11:45] They wanted to make sure that every chance I got to push the date. I, I didn't wait. I took every opportunity. Something drove me in February to change my mind on getting the genetic test. And within a month, I had seen the doctor. The next, after I had had my referral, the next day, the next doctor followed up and it was like boom, boom, boom. Everybody was in line just making these appointments and following up with, let's do the next step. And so because of that, I was proactive and I did this proactive surgery, and we found something that was undetectable. If I hadn't scheduled that surgery, I would've been in the scenario of a mammogram six months later. And you have, there's no studies out there that say, what would the tumor have grown to in that time? You don't leave tumors in. People don't know what it could have spread to. And so by the grace of God, I did the surgery and we found out, but that meant as soon as I found out that I had that they detected cancer, that meant I had to have a follow-up surgery because they needed to make sure that they had the margins clear and they, and I needed to talk to my plastic surgeon about whether,

Vance Crowe [00:13:04] Oh, so you weren't in the clear because they had gotten it?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:13:08] No. So I had one surgery, I found out six days after that that they found a small tumor, and then we had to go in, clear the margins and do another surgery. And so they wanted me to wait a month to do this and recover from the first. And I said, what the heck? No, I don't wanna heal from that and then be put to ground zero. I said, how quick can we do this? So I pushed again and a week after I found out the news, I was back in the hospital with a second surgery to clear the margins, check my lymph nodes and redo my reconstruction. And all of that came back clean. I had no lymph node involvement. I had, we got the reconstruction the way it needed to be. And, but that meant that now from when I left work and thought I was only be gone for a couple weeks now it was a six week recovery. And I couldn't drive at that time because of all of the muscle work they had to do. I had to be like T-Rex.

Vance Crowe [00:14:10] Oh, really?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:14:11] Yeah. I could only move my hands like this. And I have a 1-year-old and a two and a half year old.

Vance Crowe [00:14:17] And so for people that are listening from, from just listening, you have no use of your biceps and being able to move your shoulders? No.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:14:23] You pretty much glue your elbows to your waist. And that's the range of motion you're supposed to have. You're definitely not supposed to re reach. Like if you're washing your hair, you gotta lean your head down and put your head as close to your hand as possible, just so that you don't tear all of the stitching that they did. And that means that you know, you, all of the muscle that you had or fitness that you had, you're pretty much just

Vance Crowe [00:14:49] All the way down to zero

Christie Wiebbecke [00:14:50] Six weeks of rest and recovery. But I couldn't lift, lift anything over five pounds. So I couldn't pick up my boys. They had to crawl into my lap. I couldn't put 'em to bed. The little one was still in a crib. I have a saint of a husband to put up with all of this. I put up with his not the right word. He's my rock through all of this. And I am really fortunate that he's the dad and husband. He is.

Vance Crowe [00:15:26] When you two were starting to face this, or your family is starting to face this, you had watched your mother go through getting cancer.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:15:35] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:15:35] And what did you learn from, from what was going on with your mother? How you were young. You were three years old.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:15:41] Three when she was first in the hospital. So I think that's why as soon as I found out that surgery would make my risk down to one I, it was a no brainer. Because 35 years ago, if you could imagine what chemo is today, and if you've ever seen anybody go through chemo, it takes a toll. It attacks any fast growing cell. Well, there are different types of chemo, but basically it attacks things that are fast growing. So it'll kill healthy, it's, it's ambiguous to what it attacks. It'll attack your healthy cells, it'll attack the cancer cells that are rapidly growing and it just puts a beating on your body. And so I watched her with cancer drugs that they don't even consider anymore because of how aggressive they are. And now it's a generally outpatient thing. She was in the hospital for three months. When I was three years old. We would go up to visit her. She would be laying in the bed. And back then the way they treated breast cancer, she found a lump. The doctor didn't really think it was anything, come back. And they're like, no. Six months later, he comes back, oh no, it's not nothing. Then they call her back and they go, actually, no, we think it's cancer. So it was a mess. And she did a one side mastectomy because that's what they did back then. They didn't do the other side. She didn't know her gene. She didn't know genetic testing. They did chemo to try to get all of the cancer that was still there that they didn't get.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:17:13] And unfortunately, because they didn't do the full mastectomy and her body didn't know how to fight that cancer, it came back in five years. And so the year that I came back, I was eight years old and I heard my mom fall down in the bathroom. And so we go in to find her, and she's on the floor. She can't get up. It was attacking her spine, it was attacking her brain. It had my metastasized from her breast and just spread through her entire body.

Vance Crowe [00:17:45] When you had said she had fallen down, my immediate reaction was that she had fallen down because of bad news. But you're saying no, the cancer had actually,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:17:52] At that time, it had metastasized already. And so when she went back to the hospital, they found lesions on her spine and all the way up into her brain.

Vance Crowe [00:18:01] And how much longer than did she survive?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:18:04] So I was eight. I didn't know all of these things back then. Obviously I was a kid and she did radiation to try to kill the cancer that was there to give her the best chance. She went through chemo all over again. And as a kid, I got baptized that year. And we were hoping for Easter that she would be able to come to church to watch me get baptized. The weeks before that you could see her starting to fail. She couldn't come from the hospital to church just to watch my baptism. And then like as an 8-year-old, you don't understand what's going on. But I could see enough, I would say my prayers every night and I'd say, let my mom see me get married. I'd time would go by and then I'd say, let my mom see me graduate college time would go by and I'd say, let my mom see me graduate high school so I could visibly see her deteriorating. She lost her ability to speak. She couldn't communicate to us one of the memories that you've seen on Facebook. One of the fun things my mom did when my sister and I were little, she'd take us to McDonald's and get the old shamrock shakes.

Vance Crowe [00:19:33] Yeah, I remember this. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:19:35] And so we would share a shamrock shake. I remember that year sharing a shamrock shake on St. Patty's Day in the hospital with my mom. That's why I still get 'em. They're not quite, they're not the same, but it's a memory. It ties me to my mom. And so I could see her deteriorating. And at the end of the year, I finished third grade and finished the track and field day. And I had won the one lap run. And I wanted to run into her hospital room and tell her I won the one lap run. They were changing our sheets so we couldn't go in and see her. And we went home and my dad went back up that evening to, 'cause he came home to do chores and take us to my grandma who was staying with us while he was home dropping us off. She passed away.

Vance Crowe [00:20:26] Oh wow. So you were eight years old then. Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:20:31] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:20:32] And, and so all of the memories of how horrific that must have been were then with you as you're imagining what happens if we don't get it all.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:20:42] Yep. And in the back of my head, it was it, well, it is the thing that I most fear. I mean, having cancer and having that diagnosis and seeing my mom go through that. And then being raised without a mom, that's hard. And then imagining my kids not have a mom and my husband, not having a partner who we signed up to do this life with and signed up to have kids and have a family. It just put it all right in front of me. And that's why when I got the news, I would do anything. I would do anything in the world to fight and hope that I get the chance to be here longer for my boys.

Vance Crowe [00:21:32] So after the second surgery, are you then done?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:21:36] No. So I, I'm not that old. Lymph nodes clear. Everything was good. A week after that surgery, the nurse calls me and she goes, you're cancer free. And I said, what? Can you really say that? And she goes, no, we no evidence of cancer in your body. And I was like, okay. Sigh of relief. But then you still have meetings with medical oncologists to say, given your age and given the type of cancer that you have is should you have any other treatments? And because of my family history, because of my age, because I had a breast cancer gene, I'm met with two oncologists, and the first one was a disaster. Thank God for my husband sitting there. He, he couldn't believe this doctor walked in the room with three options. One was do nothing. And she said that was perfectly okay. And then the one was the most aggressive treatment plan you could imagine, and no rhyme or reason to why one was better or the other. And what my risk was without doing anything. And what my risk was if I did this super aggressive, throw everything at it type of approach. So we went around and around with her and I was so stressed at the point when I came to see you speak, I had called a friend and I was like, Hey, I hear Vance is coming to Iowa.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:23:07] I've heard all about him in the company. I really wanna see him speak. I convinced him to take me, even though I was still not able to drive, I hadn't been cleared by my doctors to, to be fully back to work. I was just working from home. We drove over, got to see you. And in that time I was trying to sort out all of the next steps. We were meeting with oncologists and trying to figure out treatment plans. But the best thing that the nurse did when she called me the first time was she said, your case is nothing like I've ever seen. It caught all of the doctors off guard. We should have seen it. We should have detected it. When you do a pre preventative surgery, you shouldn't be finding something we should have known before the surgery. And she said, if I was you, I would get a second opinion on what to do next. And so immediately I set myself up to go to Mayo and I wanted to see if they would review my case. And they said they would review my case. And so we had all of these six different treatment options with a doctor in town. And that was a disaster. And she could never tell me what the advantages or disadvantages or what my risk reduction would be with all of these different options, why one was better than the other. And I said, this makes no sense to me. Give me a confidence interval. I'm gonna calculate my risk. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:24:24] Because you, I'm, yeah, you're a PhD scientist. PhD, yes. You know what's

Christie Wiebbecke [00:24:27] Going on. And I have a genetic background, right? I mean, I have a minor in genetics, so you tell me these things, I'm gonna figure it out. I told her, okay, so if this is my risk now this is my, what my risk would be if I did the treatment. She goes, oh no, you're overthinking it. It's not that scientific. I'm like, I'm pretty sure medicine is a science. I mean, it is a science. So we go to Mayo walk in the room within two minutes of the doctor that I see in Mayo walking in the room, she said, your doctor's not wrong, but this is the reason why I don't think that plan is the best for you. And this is the reason why I think this plan is the best for you. This is the risk. It would be if you did nothing. And this is what I think it would be if we did this approach. And it knocked my risk in half again. And I said, okay, sign me up.

Vance Crowe [00:25:16] And what were you signing up for then?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:25:19] Four rounds of chemo and it was called ct. So I'd go up there every three weeks and have two different chemo drugs administered. And then you lose your hair in 10 days after you start chemo. And when I met you, my hair was down to,

Vance Crowe [00:25:38] Yeah,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:25:38] Middle of my back. And so that was another thing. I'd watched my mom lose her hair and I was, that was traumatic. They have things you can do to try to save your hair. It just didn't feel right for me to take that approach. Some people choose it. I just wanted the reassurance that I did everything possible. And so if my hair had to go, my hair had to go again. My husband took one for the team and he was the one that shaved my hair.

Vance Crowe [00:26:08] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:26:09] Yep. It started to fall out in clumps and I knew it had to go. And so he cut it for me.

Vance Crowe [00:26:15] You know, I can remember a movie from when I was in high school. I can't remember exactly which one. I think it was the one about witchcraft. It was like a, and I remember there being a scene where there was a woman and she was washing her hair and she watched a clump come out. And that was such a visceral experience to me, because that is a signal that things are very wrong,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:26:36] Not right. Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:26:37] And so you actually got all the way to the point where the clump started coming out.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:26:42] It was within like 10 days. It was thinning. Like if I touched my hair, I'd have hair come out in my hands.

Vance Crowe [00:26:49] Oh my God.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:26:50] Yeah. But then when you shower and you wash it, I did this in the shower and all of a sudden I just had a handful of hair. And I was like, okay, this is beyond just a little bit of thinning here and there. And then when I got outta the shower to dry my hair, it was just all snarled. Like your dog, when it's shedding, it just gets all matted together and tangled and you can't comb through it. And when you try to comb through it, more of it just pulls out. And so I could just tell that there were just bald spots going. And I'm like, okay, you've just gotta it goodbye. It's on,

Vance Crowe [00:27:25] I mean, that, that would put me on the ground. I mean like,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:27:27] Oh, it was a hard day. It, yeah, I'm, there were, the moment that I got the news, the first thing I did was called my husband. And I said, I need you now. I need you to come home. And thank God he has the support of his bosses and he's in the military. And so they, they were extremely, and still are, extremely supportive. He immediately came home. He was with home within as quick as he could have left work and got home. He was home and supported me through me being extremely fearful because I'd watched my mom fight this thing and not having the certainty that I wouldn't end up in the same boat as her even. I mean, she, she had chemo, she had radiation, she fought, how is my story gonna be different? But I have always believed, and I've always said 30 years have gone past. There's been so much research, science, technology has improved. I've always believed my mom's story would be different if she was alive today. And thankfully, through a lot of God winks and guidance along the way, I am given the opportunity to prove that story is true.

Vance Crowe [00:28:51] You seem very logical about it, and you have some hindsight that, that I'm sure you're able to bring to it. But were you able to have this level of cold logic as you were going through this?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:29:05] I'm sure not. Well, I, no. I mean, in the moment I would get pissed off and angry. But what is gonna happen if you just stay in that place? You're gonna sink into a deep, dark hole.

Vance Crowe [00:29:25] Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:29:25] That you can't crawl out of. Even on your best day, you're not gonna come out. So yeah, I got angry. I got mad, but when I saw my boys, there's no way I am gonna let them see me broken down on the floor. They need a mom. And as much as my husband has seen me break down on the floor when he had to shave my head and I was in tears, just sobbing, he's like, he shaves it off. And he goes, you know, it doesn't look too bad.

Vance Crowe [00:29:51] Good.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:29:51] And when my boy saw me the next morning, didn't even phase him. They're just like, oh, it's mom. They would pick out my, whatever if, if I was wearing a scarf or if I was wearing one of my wigs, I'd let them pick it out. I'd make fun of it. I've seen people choose to give up the fight, and I know how close I could have been to being in that hole that I knew. I had to figure out how to stay positive in all of it. And so I read a lot of books. I listened to, I started listening to a podcast last year, and I was listening to a lot of things that just helped me stay in a positive frame of mind because I needed that at the time. I needed to just not fall into that deep, dark hole and figure out, okay, yeah, this sucks. It's miserable, but the only way you're gonna get through it is if you stay positive and see the light in all of it. And so I, I saved bible verses and quotes from friends, and people would send me notes. And we made it into a story of Mommy was fighting bad guys because my boys love The Avengers, which I know you don't watch the movie.

Vance Crowe [00:31:08] I'm always Yeah. Lost.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:31:09] It's obsessed. It's, it's something that they're, yeah, they're little boys. They love Spider-Man and Captain America.

Vance Crowe [00:31:16] Well, they're hero stories. Is that great? Yes. They're hero stories.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:31:18] Exactly. And so when I had to figure out how do I tell a three year, a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old, what is going on? 'cause they know mom's worn down. Mom can't pick 'em up. Mom's losing her hair. Mom's tired all the time. They could see all of those things. I had to figure out how, what's the story that I'm gonna tell 'em? Well, on the day that I was leaving, the day before we were going up to do chemo for the first time, I broke down in tears on the floor. And my oldest son, he looks at me, he goes, mommy, what's wrong? And I said, mommy has to go fight the bad guys. And he turned and looked at me and he charged out of the room. And he goes, mommy, I fight him with you. And I was like, oh my God. I go, come back, come back, come back. And he comes back to me and he goes, mommy, don't worry. I'll fight him with you and gives me the biggest hug. And it's like, okay. We fight 'em together.

Vance Crowe [00:32:14] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:32:15] So you just, you do. I mean, yeah, I had bad days. I had bad moments. But they have to be the moments in between all of the good. And even though I was going through chemo, we tried to do little trips. My husband was a saint. And on the weekends when the boys would nap, I would lay down and take a nap too, because I was so tired. He took it on, took care of the house, he took care of them, he bathed them, he helped with cooking. I felt so guilty because I wasn't doing anything. We hired house cleaner cleaners just because I felt like I wasn't contributing. But, so a lot of times I'd be so tired I would just sit and watch 'em play on the floor. But the fact that I was still able to go to work every day and challenge my mind, and I read books and I would listen to things and challenge myself to see the good. And the best thing in all of this is I have, I mean, it's, it's not a good thing. I have friends who've been diagnosed with cancer since this, and now I get to be a support to them. And I get to help prop them up and lift them up and pay attention to when I know they're going in for a chemo day and send them a little text to say, Hey, I am thinking of you, because I know how impactful that was to me. And I know people in my life who are 20 rounds of chemo in don't know when they're gonna end their fight.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:33:46] How can I complain? I only did four.

Vance Crowe [00:33:50] I remember when we met that it was probably four months in between the first time we met. And then when I kind of found out more about your story, and I realized that while I knew people that knew other people that had cancer, it had never come within one hop of my network. And that you were actually the first person I'd ever met that had had cancer. And I remember finding myself feeling like, I wanna do something positive here, but I don't know actually what another person wants or needs. Like I, you know, if something goes wrong with me, I pretty much don't wanna talk about it. Maybe I would be in a different place. But I remember that being like a mental struggle for me. Knowing what you know now, what do you wish most people knew about when someone gets diagnosed with cancer and how they as outsiders or should interact with you?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:34:52] I think it depends on the relationship you have with the person and the person. I mean, did I wanna talk about it every day? No. I, I didn't. I wanted to just be, but if you sent me a note and said, Hey, I'm thinking of you, or, you know, kick cancer's ass today, I, those are nice little things. You don't have to have a long drawn up discussion about life and everything. Some people are really private and they don't wanna have it out there. I made sure that I let people know because I knew I had family and friends that wanted to stay, and they wanted to know what things were going on. So for me, I created a private Facebook group, and that was where I shared my updates. So I didn't have to do 50 conversations with people. But if you wanted to know my story, and you wanted to know day to day how things were going and how life was, that was a way that I could put my thoughts out there. And I've had people tell me when they read my posts that they'd say, one minute I'd be crying the next minute I'd be laughing. And then you'd get us all to be smiling by the end of it. And they couldn't believe that that was my life. But that's the way it is. And there's a moment where you're just angry and pissed off and you've gotta let it out. And having just little people, little comments from people of support and say, Hey, keep, keep fighting.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:36:26] You're doing awesome. It just means the world. You don't have to have grand gestures to just have a, an indication of support, because everybody needs to know that there's somebody in their corner cheering them on, on their hero's journey.

Vance Crowe [00:36:42] Yeah, absolutely. So maybe it's worthwhile setting a little bit of context. I'm not even a hundred percent sure you know exactly what my perception was when we met, but I had just, I had been invited up to give a talk internal to the company. They had been putting on a special day about like, how do you engage with consumers about things like GMOs and pesticides? And I was one of the people that was invited to come up and give a talk. Yep. And I gave a talk, and then I got the worst news of my life. And then I was on a panel.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:37:12] Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:37:12] And the panel is now in front of everybody, whereas the talks were kind of smaller groups. Now it's everyone there. It's a whole bunch of my colleagues that I don't actually know very well. Like I know a few people in the room. Yep.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:37:24] But

Vance Crowe [00:37:25] The context was a few months earlier, I had invited Jordan Peterson to the American Farm Bureau,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:37:32] And

Vance Crowe [00:37:33] There were some people that from the outside of the company that really didn't like it. And so they wrote articles and they wrote to my boss and tried to get me fired and tried to say, why are you supporting somebody that is, you know, the alt-right figurehead and, and espouses all these terrible things about women and about gay people and transsexuals. And which was nothing to do with what we were inviting him to come to talk to the farm bureau about. And the company had basically said, Hey, things went sideways. We, we know you didn't try and bring this intention to the company. We would just prefer that. You just don't talk about it too much. And so, here I am at this panel, everything's going along fine. You know, we're having good conversation. And here's this little tiny woman sitting off to the right hand side. And do you remember what you asked me about?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:38:28] I asked how, how you managed. I basically, my question, the way that I remember it was I wanted to get to the point of how do you handle a situation where people associate you with this idea that you're not necessarily at all tied to?

Vance Crowe [00:38:45] And my perception, the way that I heard it was why did you do this to us? And, and because I was not in my right mind. Yeah. I had just received the worst news of my life. And here is this person that's sitting there, and I think I finished answering kind of garbled. And you came back and you wanted, like, we, we had like an interaction.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:39:05] And

Vance Crowe [00:39:05] I am a little bit like, what the fuck? Like, clearly I'm not allowed to talk about this. I'm, I'm in front of executives at the company, but all right, I'll, I'll keep going. And then like, we answered it and you were perfectly pleasant. Like, I don't wanna represent that you were anything other than respectful, but I was definitely like, come on. Like

Christie Wiebbecke [00:39:25] What

Vance Crowe [00:39:25] Is going on here? Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:39:26] And

Vance Crowe [00:39:26] Then the panel wraps up and there's always people that want to talk with you afterwards, and you are waiting patiently. And then we go outside and I'm like, here we go. This is gonna be a person that's gonna try and pin me to the wall. And I like, my perception of that was because there were people from the inside of the company that were supposedly my colleagues that were showing up at meetings and saying terrible things about me. Yes. And trying to pin me down and to say like, awful things. And there were meetings I wasn't allowed to go to. I mean, it was a mess for me. So I had not that far away from that bad thing. Then I had this day, now you're sitting there waiting for me. And I'm a little bit like, how am I going to handle this person professionally? 'cause she's gonna beat me with a stick here in the hallway and try and really pin me down.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:40:09] Oh, no.

Vance Crowe [00:40:09] And I could not have been more wrong because you came up and you were like, I'm so interested in your life. I'm so interested in what you're talking about. Yeah. This is really important to me. And it was one of the most earth shattering moments of my life because I'm trying to fight back tears and here's this person that's very earnest in like trying to learn more about me.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:40:32] Yeah. Well, and I, so the reason that I, I mean, I sought you out because I saw all of your ability to communicate and how you were reaching out to groups outside of our company and outside of our industry to try to share our story. And moving into my new role, which is a commercial development breeder, I was gonna be more customer facing. And so I was going to have to be out there telling our story and sharing our story and sharing why these products are valuable and why I believe in them. And, and I was wanting to know your perspective on standing up in front of a group and having them potentially not like something you say or something that your company does. And having all of a sudden being, you are this because you're on the stage with this. And that's the way that I saw the Jordan Peterson thing. And I had seen the awful, awful comments and horrendous posts, and I could not believe that I was reading all of this about this person just being on the stage with somebody else. I mean, you got thrown under the bus beyond and driven over like 50 times. And I was heartbroken to the fact that somebody, somebody would treat somebody else like that and not just walk down the hall and say, Hey, can you explain this to me? And so I was approaching it as, help me understand h how did you manage that tension because you did it beautifully and I feel like I can learn something from you.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:42:07] And at the same time, oh my gosh, it, why would anybody treat a human, somebody else like that? You can have differing opinions. I, I know there's a lot of people in the company that I have differing opinions with, but that doesn't mean that we can't get along and I can have my differing opinion. You don't have to force yours down my throat and make me change my mind. And I feel like some people were like, you have to believe the same way I do. And if you do anything beyond this, then you're evil. That was not cool in my book.

Vance Crowe [00:42:46] Yeah. And I remember you being like, I, you know, there are all these things written about you and it doesn't match up with this is the person that you are. And now in hindsight, looking back on that conversation, I'm like, oh, what a nice thing to say. But at the time I was like, what are you trying to do to me up here? And I think it was that, that had been such a pivotal time in my life. Yeah. Because here I had been trying to do something that I thought was really important. So Jordan Peterson had been invited in because what I had said was, the farmers don't understand why people are angry with them. And they, they send their kids away to college. And one of two things is happening, and I heard this all the time from farmers. Yep. They would say to me, either I send my child away to school and they spend four years being told they're not allowed to do anything outside of the Ag College because what their family is doing with their GMOs and their pesticides are evil and bad. So they get isolated over under the ag campus,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:43:42] Or

Vance Crowe [00:43:43] They go away to college and they hear all these terrible things that are going on with the farms, and they become ideologically possessed, and they start thinking, what my family is doing is wrong and bad, and I want to get rid of those values. So I thought, who better in the world than to talk to the farmers about this? So for me, it was like, everyone wins here, we're just gonna have a really good conversation about how to prepare your children

Christie Wiebbecke [00:44:08] To

Vance Crowe [00:44:08] Face the storm that is life. And it went really sideways.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:44:13] Oh. I think the perception went sideways. I think if you look at the, when I went back and watched the, the fireside chat, I, I was like, Vance is redirecting to get to the conversation at heart. And whether you like Jordan Peterson or not, I think he has some ideas and philosophies that you can think about how, how to be your best self and put forth effort and, and show up every day. I mean, those are good qualities, at least in, in my life. I think those are, are very valuable lessons. And I think people get turned off by some of his approach just because he does have a, a pointed way of speaking. But if you take the ideas out of the,

Vance Crowe [00:45:03] The tone

Christie Wiebbecke [00:45:04] Yes. The, and just take a step back and listen for a moment, you can learn so much from discussions like that. So I, it,

Vance Crowe [00:45:16] It, it, it was surprising to me because one of the ways that I got really good at my job was that I spent the first six months to a year learning about our company and about how our technology works. And then from then on, I was like, I've got that pretty well down. I mean, I, I stayed in touch with mentors and I had people teaching me. Yeah. But for the, for the most part, then what I did was I'm gonna go read as many of my critics as I possibly can. I I'm gonna read the people like the Indiana Shiva, who think that Monsanto is the evil empire and that Indian farmers are killing themselves because of it. I'm gonna read Nassim Taleb, who thinks that GMOs are, could create a Black Swan event where everything breaks down because of it. Like I I, I went through and thought the most valuable thing you can do once you understand something, is to go to find the people that don't understand it and listen to them to make sure they don't know something that they, that you wanna make sure that

Christie Wiebbecke [00:46:12] You don't know something they d

Vance Crowe [00:46:13] They do. Yeah. That, that they have knowledge that would be helpful to you. Yeah. And so I was really given a firsthand education that a lot of people don't think that way. That a lot of people think if they have ideas that I don't agree with, the best thing I can do is destroy those ideas. And if I can't destroy those ideas, then I'm gonna destroy the person Yep.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:46:33] And

Vance Crowe [00:46:34] Make it so that they have no quarter, that no one wants them around. Yep. And you know, when you and I actually spoke out in the hallway, you are only the second person that I didn't know that had heard of, heard about that situation that came up and talked to me. And like, from my perception, like there were people out there saying I was like a horrible racist and that I was a sexist and that I should be fired. People wrote the heads of the company to say that, that they wanted a public apology. And so I was not prepared to have this little person come outside and be like, I wanna know more. But that began a really important friendship for me because in tandem with that, then I'm dealing with all my terrible news. I see this person that gives me a, a form of kindness, and then I think I just dumped right on you. Like, this is what I'm going through right now.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:47:26] Well, yeah. And to not share all of that, but I could see after I talked to you, I could see how much it affected you. I didn't know what was going on that day, but I could just see that there was something not right. And when you shared what had happened that day, I think I'm, I could relate because the same thing happened in our lives and we went through a very similar situation and

Vance Crowe [00:47:57] Sharing that. I think for anybody that that's wondering, I think anybody that's wondering about the bad news, it's just bad news that happens to families. Yeah. And it doesn't really matter what it was. Yeah. It was just unexpected really bad news that like I wasn't prepared for. Yeah. I started the day off one way and it ended a totally different way. And it, that's all that needs to be said. But everyone has that in their life. At some point, if you haven't had one, it's going to happen. And I, it's just the first time that it ever happened to me. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:48:22] You get a blow to your stomach and you're like, what the, I thought we were on this trajectory. Now I have to rethink my trajectory. How do I, how do I comfort the family that's around me? And how do I process this at the same time? Because we're gonna process all of this differently. And I think I could see all of that going on. And then you have the turmoil of work and everything. I could see all of that. And it was, it was a good, I could learn from you on the things that you're excellent at. You're an excellent communicator and you have different ways of thinking about communicating. And I appreciated all of the little tips and tidbits and things that you would share. I'd make sure to listen and watch the podcast or whatever read the manifest. What,

Vance Crowe [00:49:15] Oh, the eco Modernist Manifesto. Yes.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:49:16] Yes. Those are important things. To your point, I think we've talked about it before, but when a mentor or somebody suggests something to you, you need to follow through. Otherwise, your, your word is less valued. So if you wanna start a relationship with somebody and ask them for feedback, you better do the homework. If they say, Hey, check this out, it could be helpful in whatever you're, if you're willing to spend that time and do the homework, that's gonna put you in a different position because you get a lot of feedback from 20 places and putting the effort and time into shows that you value their opinion and you value the, the effort they're putting into you. And I think

Vance Crowe [00:50:01] A hundred percent, I mean, like, my perception is if somebody comes up and says, Hey, I randomly think you ought to read this book, you can blow that off. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:50:08] But

Vance Crowe [00:50:09] If you go to another person and you say, Hey, I'm dealing with this problem, or I'm thinking about this thing, what do you think I should do? And they say, you should read this book, guess what? You just signed up to read that book. Yep.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:50:18] And,

Vance Crowe [00:50:18] And if you can't read that book, you at least need to pick it up and try and find out what is the information that they thought here. Otherwise, you have not sent them the signal that you're willing to put in the time and the energy to follow up. And really what you wanted was the easy way, as opposed to what is the a real answer?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:50:35] Yeah. Or, or do you really value their opinion?

Vance Crowe [00:50:38] Right.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:50:40] I I mean, you wanted the easy way and you wanted them to tell you that easy answer. Or did you really just wanna vent and really didn't wanna value, you didn't want honest feedback. So funny, the, the whole year I was listening to John O'Leary, who's a St. Louis guy, and I don't know if you've ever heard of him. You're

Vance Crowe [00:51:02] The second person to tell me. I listened to his podcast while running a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:51:05] Yeah. So he came and gave a talk to us last in 2018 in March. And we all got books from him, his on fire book. And so I started reading that before all of the diagnosis and everything. And then in the hospital, my breeding lead, he had recommended his parents' book called Overwhelming Odds. So while I was in the hospital the first time, and probably a little bit the second time I read the parents' book about how they dealt with his life.

Vance Crowe [00:51:34] So John O'Leary's story is he was a little boy. He was playing with gasoline Yes. And matches in his garage. Yep.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:51:40] And

Vance Crowe [00:51:40] He burned the house down and the family lost everything. It blew

Christie Wiebbecke [00:51:44] Up, it blew up on him. And so he had 90% of his body severely burned.

Vance Crowe [00:51:49] That's right. And then, and so the two books that there are is one is his story, and then the other one is his parents telling the story of how do you handle it? If you have a bunch of kids, one kid gets almost all of the attention. How do you manage that?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:52:04] And, and all of the community support around it and how all of the, all of the community came and, and helped support their family while they were going through this horrible thing. So that was a really good path for me for a long time to, to try to keep myself in a positive mind. My husband came down one morning while I was walking on the treadmill working out, and he said, Hey, why don't you think about listening to this other podcast? And he told me about Jocko Willink. And so I started listening to Jocko Willink podcast, and that was where I, I heard Jordan Peterson talk again. And it, listening to that podcast and listening to John O'Leary's story puts you in your place almost daily to think, you know, I, yeah. I had a cancer diagnosis, I've had gut checks in my life and, and bad things happen in my family comparative to people who lived in the Hanoi Hilton for six years. I don't know if you say Li lived, but they survived that experience for six long years. Or people who get their legs blown off and can run. There's a guy that was on the podcast, Rob Jones. So

Vance Crowe [00:53:18] To put this in perspective Yeah. Jocko Willink is a retired Navy Seal

Christie Wiebbecke [00:53:22] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:53:22] Who is a massive guy. Yep. And you, if you probably saw him on the street, you'd think, Hey, you're just like a meathead kind of, you know, war junkie or something. But when you find out, when you listen to his podcast is he is going deep into subject material. So he'll read a book that is not easy, the Gulag Archipelago.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:53:43] Yep.

Vance Crowe [00:53:44] And then he's gonna come and talk about it. He's gonna read clips of it sections, and then he is gonna, and then he's gonna take his experience or his guest's experience and add in color that makes it so people can understand what does it really to be at war. Yep. What does

Christie Wiebbecke [00:53:59] It

Vance Crowe [00:53:59] Mean to truly be suffering?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:54:01] Yep. And, and not even to, to me, although I have military, half of my life is military with my husband, but I, I think it's the story of human nature and how humans suffer and how you overcome or overcome suffering. And when you look at situations where, from the books that he's read or the people that have been on that podcast, it puts life in perspective to, to be able to say, you know what? You get up and you fight every day, and you make sure you put your best foot forward every day. And if you're able to, to keep that mindset, even if you don't want to show up every day and put forth your best effort, you can overcome almost anything and surrounding yourself with good people who lift you up in times where things are falling apart around you, or you feel like things are falling apart and you're trying to find your path in life that's so impactful. And it, it really changes your story. And I think that's the tie in to, from me to you, is that's kind of how our lives connected. You were going through stuff, I was going through stuff, and we were able to mutually support each other through all of life. And it's been a cool relationship that's evolved.

Vance Crowe [00:55:22] Yeah. One of the funniest things that happened in our friendship was you and I were having lunch at work and, and you said, Hey, do you ever listen to this Jocko Willink podcast? And I was like, nah, you know, I tried. I don't really like it. And you're like, I really think you should. I I think you should check it out. And then I start digging into it, and I realize you are going through this cancer process and you're just little, you know, Christy and, and, and you're listening to a gigantic behemoth of a man. And it isn't just that he relates to you. You're now going around to your friends being like, you should listen and you should listen and you should

Christie Wiebbecke [00:56:01] Listen. I'm obsessed. It's okay. Yes.

Vance Crowe [00:56:03] I mean, but the, the, the benefit of that, I was just given a talk out in Arizona. I was at the Arizona Farm Bureau and one of the, one of the talking points I had, because they were saying, how can we be prepared for disruption? And one of the things that I talked with them about is, and it's not my line, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You know, they are the people that are, they're either building towards something, they're working on something they're sacrificing in order to get somewhere else, or they're not. But you are the average of whoever the five people you spend the most time with. And if you include podcasts in on that, because you're giving your, your brain can't distinguish between a conversation you heard when you were sitting right in front of somebody. Yeah. And when, when you were just listening in your car while you're washing dishes or while you're, you know, doing something in the lawn, you have now just increased the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you're spending time with somebody like Jocko Willink,

Christie Wiebbecke [00:56:57] Well that, that would be pretty cool. Hopefully someday I get to meet him. But it, it,

Vance Crowe [00:57:03] What was it to you? Why, why did that, why did this giant military guy have such an impact on you?

Christie Wiebbecke [00:57:08] So it, it's, it's kind of funny. My si I as a kid was known to be very stubborn. I'm kind of bullheaded and when when I see something that I wanna do, I I find the most direct path and go towards it.

Vance Crowe [00:57:26] That sounds like exactly what you did with your cancer.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:57:29] Well, yes, it, it applies to all, all phases in life. And I think the thing that I can appreciate is he's, I've learned a lot of more about balance and taking a step back from emotion because I can be very emotional. I can, I can get down on the floor and cry, or I can get really super mad about something, but that doesn't serve the purpose in the end. And so how, what's the goal and what's the ultimate thing that I really wanna accomplish? It's being the best mom. It's being able to have a successful career. It's being a good wife to my husband. And, and being able to do that means that I'm balancing all of these things. And one thing that, even though I'm stubborn, my stubbornness is that I'm gonna be dedicated to doing all of these things. So now my, all of my stubbornness is put to a good use is what my sister said. She's like, it's nice to see, I, it may have taken me a while to figure it out, but I channeled all of this energy. And I have to say in, I mean, being a mom changes you. There's just phases in your life that change you. But definitely being diagnosed with cancer and being faced with the thing that I most fear and having to fight that battle, one of the My Boys and I's favorite book is Jocko's book that he wrote for little kids called Mikey and The Dragons.

Christie Wiebbecke [00:59:02] And it's about over overcoming your fears. And we read that book every day, last winter, every evening we would read that book from start to finish. And if you ask my kids what they wanna be or what they wanna be like, they will tell you that they want, they wanna be brave, strong, and healthy. And that they're warrior kids because they've heard me play Warrior Kid Podcast in my car. They've heard his voice. They know how much, being brave and being humble and being kind is important in our family. And they have role models through, through my husband and I to be able to, to lead and see that. And it's changed my life. I think I'm, I, I hope I'm, I'm much a better person because of all of it.

Vance Crowe [00:59:52] You know, Jocko, I, I can't give him enough credit. When you told me about the, how much you enjoyed that book, I talked with my brother Dan about it, and he got his son Oliver, the, the way of the Warrior kid.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:00:05] Oh, that's a good,

Vance Crowe [01:00:06] And Oliver has taken that on. He has a code of conduct now,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:00:10] And

Vance Crowe [01:00:10] He has principles and he's exercising. And you see how big of an impact that can have. That's

Christie Wiebbecke [01:00:16] Cool.

Vance Crowe [01:00:17] One of the things that I think is kind of a hard question to ask, but one that I think is important is most people, when they think about their mortality, it's 30, 40, 50 years away. It, it's a, it, it's at an indetermined time. That is a long time from now. But you had to stare at it and say, I'm gonna fight. I don't wanna die, but I may have a limited amount of time. And, and that becoming real. What did that change about how you were living?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:00:51] I wanna make sure that my boys have the lessons now. Even, like, I'm really proud of the fact that a 4-year-old can tell you those things. And even our 2-year-old, he'll tell you, mommy, I'm brave. I'm a warrior kid. And whether they totally understand what all of that means, but just being able to lay the foundation and have good principles. My mom wrote me books when she passed away. I don't have 35 years ago and 30 years ago you didn't have video cameras all over the place. I don't remember her voice. I wanna leave those lessons and memories because I know how much the lessons that I remember from my mom, I will never wave her on. That was something she told me, by God, I'm going to meet her one day and say, I never, I never backed down on that. I wanna make sure that my husband knows how much I appreciate him. I want to, I wanna do a good job and, and have a successful career. And I hope it's a long, successful career. I don't plan to go anywhere anytime soon. But I think it's, you don't waste those little moments. You make sure you're living as healthy and productive of a life as you possibly can. And set myself up. I'm not, I mean, yeah, we did a few silly kind of crazy things, but it was more crazy things that we said, you know what?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:02:22] Life's too short. I don't wanna be 70 and say, I wish I would've, so let's enjoy life now and do it anyway. So we went and bought a car that we always wanted, and it was our fun vehicle. We made chemo treatments ca cancer dates. My husband and I would just figure out a way, because we don't have a lot of time when you have two little ones to just be on our own. So, hey, we're going to have a chemo treatment. Let's go out to lunch and have a drive on the way to Mayo and we'll take one of our fun vehicles and we'll just make it into a date day. But you don't wait on life. Life's too short. I, I'm so thankful that I have my parents and his parents so close to us. We have family close to us that are very important in our lives. And I'm in a fight every day that I'm here to live that life and get better every day.

Vance Crowe [01:03:27] What do you think would be different if you had not had the cancer diagnosis? Let's say you, you didn't have the gene and you were gonna be Christie on the path that you were on. How, how would life be different?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:03:45] That's a really good question. I haven't thought about it.

Vance Crowe [01:03:49] Maybe that's for the best, right? Maybe it's, it, it doesn't matter. You know, this is who you are. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:03:54] I, I don't, I mean, cancer was close to me. It was very close. I had family members, cousins, aunts and uncles parents all diagnosed. And you think, you know, you think you understand what that's like until you've walked those shoes and had that phone call. I mean, like I said, I was three to eight at that time. You are little still. You don't get the significance. I knew, I knew what was happening to my mom. Losing my mom changed my life. It changed the person that I became in many, many ways. Having that phone call hit my house and having, seeing what that could, how that could impact my kids and my husband, if something were to happen to me, I wanna do everything that I can to, to leave a legacy and live as long as I'm able to, the best way possible. And I think I took that for granted. Even though I had had those things so close to me when I was young. You just kind of move past it. You forget about it. You, you just focus on your life.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:05:25] And like you said, it's 40 years from now. It's 50 years from now. My grandma lived to 106. I have some longevity genes in there. But you just put a shit out of your mind and you're like, okay, it's, you know, it's another day. We're gonna go to daycare, we're gonna pick up the kids. I'm going to work. Life's too short. You need to get up every day and fight. And that's completely, I, my, my husband knows how obsessed like Jocko will be in my head from Sun up, because I wake up at four 30 to work out now. I listen to his podcast for a month and a half, and I was like, you know what? I'm missing out on my kids. I'm, I'm working out because that's one of the things that will help me prevent recurrence. So I work out every day, but I would work out when I would get home from work. 'cause that's what I always used to do before kids. And I'm like, okay, that it's a decompression from work. I was missing time with my boys. I would watch them play while I was working out. Well, that's stupid if it, if both are important sacrifice, Christy, get up and sacrifice. So I get up at four 30. I work out before my boys wake up. My boys are early risers. Sometimes they wake up and work out

Vance Crowe [01:06:44] With

Christie Wiebbecke [01:06:44] Me.

Vance Crowe [01:06:45] Sometimes

Christie Wiebbecke [01:06:46] They are up with me.

Vance Crowe [01:06:47] But

Christie Wiebbecke [01:06:47] Then when I get home in the evening, the evening is family time. It's family time until the boys go to bed. And then maybe my husband and I have a little bit of time together, but it's dedicating that time. And I don't think I would've seen life that way. I don't think I would've recognized the sacrifices that I needed to make as much as I recognize the sacrifices that I will make the rest of my life to, to try to be here as long as I can.

Vance Crowe [01:07:15] I feel like the concept of sacrifice, I was just talking about this with a friend yesterday, that the concept of sacrifice is not actually talked about that much in our society. And I, I know in Christianity, like the cross symbolizes sacrifice and that that's a big part of even Judaism like it, but it was not well explained to me that you give up something now for something greater in the future. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be directly related to you or finances or anything like that. It is what am I willing to put down so that my life is somehow different so that the contribution I'm making is somehow larger. Yep. Did you have a sophisticated understanding of sacrifice?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:08:01] No. I, I can say, yeah, no, I didn't click with me until I started listening to Jocko. It didn't click. And it's, it's odd because I do have faith. I was raised in a Christian Church. My mom was very dedicated. We would do family groups where you'd have the kids and the parents and you'd all come together and we'd pay Bible games. As a kid, I struggled a lot though as a kid because I was, I also loved science and nobody could rectify that, the Bible and science. And I'm like, I don't totally believe this thing, but how do they tie together? And so it was a, it took me time as I got to be an adult to say, you know what? These two things can actually get along.

Vance Crowe [01:08:54] That was my staggering realization when I started listening to Jordan Peterson.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:08:58] Yes.

Vance Crowe [01:08:58] Because there are few people you will ever meet in the world that know more Bible stories than this guy right here. Like, I know the Bible from my picture Bible cold. I was the obnoxious kid in Sunday school. Like, oh, please

Christie Wiebbecke [01:09:10] Pick me,

Vance Crowe [01:09:12] Pick me. Because they were all stories. And I love stories, but I never really understood that those stories can stand on their own as whether or not you believe that there is deep religion or there's God there. Those stories help you understand when I confront a situation that is similar to this. Yep. That there's some, there's some guide here. And that those stories have lasted for 2000 years because they tell us things about human nature. Yes.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:09:44] And

Vance Crowe [01:09:44] That was really important to me. That's why Peterson's so had had such a big impact on my life, because all of a sudden, all of this knowledge that I had of random Bible stories, which was no different than the Avengers to me. Right? Yeah. It was just like random stories. Yeah. Now all of a sudden I would be like, oh my gosh, think about the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son. Or why is a brother Cain killing Abel? Why is that the ultimate terrible thing? And why is that all the way in the beginning of the Bible? Why is that the first thing that we start with?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:10:16] None

Vance Crowe [01:10:16] Of these stories had context into my life. They weren't sewn in there. They were divorced. And that was really impactful to me.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:10:25] Yeah. I, so I just started, I shared with you that I just started reading 12 Rules for Life.

Vance Crowe [01:10:31] Oh, yeah. Right. I didn't know that

Christie Wiebbecke [01:10:32] You did. Yes. Okay. Well, I'm only a chapter in, but it, I, that was a really interesting revelation when I was reading the prologue and then started reading the book.

Vance Crowe [01:10:42] 12 Rules for Life is the Jordan Peterson

Christie Wiebbecke [01:10:44] Book. The Jordan Peterson book. Yeah. And it's really interesting how he takes the biblical verses and turn and explains, this is what you're supposed to learn out of it. I'm like, why did I not learn this in church? What the heck? But I do have tremendous faith. And like I said, I, along my journey over the last year, I feel like I've had God winks along the way. And I don't know if you believe in those or your listeners do, but it was a way for me to feel like I was on the right path. And there were little things that you could not, some people may call 'em coincidences or just random things that happened, but you could not make these things all happen every time the way that they happened. And some of them were small, some of 'em probably people think are silly, but it was still, to me, it was like a door opening to say, you're here. This is the right path you're supposed to be on in this moment. You're supposed to be here. And I had those, every time I'd go to a chemo treatment, there'd be a little sign along the way. Every time I'd go to a new doctor. The day that we went to Mayo the first time there was a little sign, the last surgery that I had last November, I finished my, I was miserable. I had been down here doing deployment discussions, and I had lost my voice and I was not feeling that great. And I was like, man, I have a surgery scheduled for next week. Should I just postpone it?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:12:15] Went into the doctor, they said everything was fine. I was cleared for surgery. But in the back of my head, I started doubting it. I started doubting the pushing you've been through, this would be your fourth surgery in six months. Is it worth it? Is it worth it to just say, you wanna be done with all of this? Or do you just take a break and you'll get it done? And, and I'm like, no, just be done. Just keep pushing, Christie, just be done. So you can start your next chapter, you can start working out, and you can start putting this all to build yourself to be the new Christie that you're gonna become. And

Vance Crowe [01:12:51] Is that the way you thought of it? Is that the way you think of it? I, there's a new

Christie Wiebbecke [01:12:54] Christie. I'm not the same person.

Vance Crowe [01:12:56] Okay.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:12:56] Physically, mentally, emotionally, I'm stronger, tougher, braver than I ever would've dreamed.

Vance Crowe [01:13:02] I, I in in no way have faced anything to what you're talking about. But I feel like once I understood the concept of sacrifice, the concept of becoming someone that I always wanted to be

Christie Wiebbecke [01:13:16] Became

Vance Crowe [01:13:16] Real.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:13:17] Oh, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:13:17] And, and until you understand what that word is, then you don't really have a way, you're, you're like, I'm giving up something or I'm investing, or, but you don't really know

Christie Wiebbecke [01:13:27] It. I'm gonna do it for a week.

Vance Crowe [01:13:28] Yeah, that's right. Where, where all of a sudden, like Jocko talks about that you don't need motivation, you need discipline. Yep.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:13:35] Motivation

Vance Crowe [01:13:35] Wanes, discipline doesn't,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:13:37] Oh yeah. It sucks to get up at four 30. Like this morning I was like, I've already worked out Sunday, Monday, this is Tuesday. I'll get my five because my goal is five workouts a week. I started a year ago. The only two week day weeks that I haven't is two weeks. I got sick and I just was maybe Jock would say, come on. No, I was just too sick. I was, I needed to recover. But as soon as I felt good enough, I was like, okay, I am doing something and I won't let myself slip. I used to go on business trips and I wouldn't pack my workout gear. Now screw it. You're not taking that away from me. This is too important for my life. I am gonna make time no matter where I am. It's important.

Vance Crowe [01:14:20] And once you like that, the, the other thing that goes along with sacrifice is suffering and suffering is an interesting concept because you only suffer un right up until the moment when you accept that suffering. And now it's something you enjoy. It's something you want. Like I, I lifted weights for years and I was only doing it because I was like, I need to do it. I've gotta do it. But the whole time I accepted the fact that it was terrible and I hated it, and I didn't want anything to do with it Right up until the moment when I was like, wait a second. When you get to that ninth and 10th rep and it's really hard and you wanna stop, that's when all of the good stuff is. Yep.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:14:57] And

Vance Crowe [01:14:58] So you quit feeling like the, the pain that I'm going through, or the fatigue that I'm going through now, you're not trying to avoid it. You're actually leaning into it.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:15:07] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:15:07] And then it, all of these things that you've been carrying around like burdens, they're no longer burdens.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:15:13] Yep. So it, you know, you can, you can make your life be as miserable and fall into that dark hole, like the phone, the phone rings and you get news that you never ever wanted to hear in your life. You get a knock on your door and you find out a family member died, you don't get the job you wanted. All of those things could, could make you spiral and work. It could make you spiral personally. Or you could say, okay, what can I learn? How can I grow? How can I change this moment into something positive? And I had a little bit of that. I mean, I, I think generally I was an optimist, but man, when you face your worst fear and you have to say, okay, how am I gonna show up and be, still be as much of a mom as I can be? Maybe I can't pick up my kids and I can't play with them the way that I would wanna be. I still wanna be able to go to bed and say prayers with them and sing songs with them and create memories with them and have life lessons. How am I gonna turn this into good? How am I gonna turn this into, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get through chemo. I'm gonna get through all the dumb surgeries. I'm gonna go to all the stupid appointments. I can complain about it. Or I can say, you know what, good, good.

Vance Crowe [01:16:40] Give

Christie Wiebbecke [01:16:40] This me a give me this growth opportunity. And it, it has truly been a growth opportunity. I could be angry and miserable and close the door to people that I care about and choose that path. I I know people in my life who have chosen that path. And you leave a wake of a lot of people dealing with you not being there.

Vance Crowe [01:17:13] Yeah, that's right.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:17:14] So if you actually care and wanna be there for the people that you love, you need to figure out a way to make it good.

Vance Crowe [01:17:23] When I was running my 500 miles this year, I was maybe into March. We had a really cold winter, and it just kept going on and on. So I'm up at 4 45 in the morning going, going for my long run. And I had been carrying the image of a person that I was trying to beat or to overcome with me. And I thought that that was helping me. And I remember Goggins one time, David Goggins, who's the, the guy that wrote the book, can't Hurt Me, which I really was impactful to me. He was like, Hey, if you drag that person in your mind out there with you, the physical person doesn't have to do any of that terrible work with you, but you're stuck with the person who you don't wanna be be around and they're company. And you're like, now stuck out there. You're not making them deal with your suffering. You're just dragging them along. And I was like, wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:18:12] And

Vance Crowe [01:18:12] Then I quit doing things to spite other people, my, my suffer. And I think that these are all stages that people have to go through as they're learning about their suffering, overcoming resistance, and then not dragging your, your bad baggage to try and beat somebody else. Like Yep. There's, there's a lot to all of this.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:18:30] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:18:31] Do you feel like, I, I don't, I don't even know the exact right question. If you faced your largest fear, what else is out there?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:18:43] It, if it comes back, it's this fear is still out there.

Vance Crowe [01:18:48] And what is the status of your cancer?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:18:51] It's, I, so they don't use the word remission, but I'm cancer free. I just go in for checkups and I have to pay attention to my body. So if something changes that is not explainable, I need to go get checked out, and I have to have good relationships with my doctors and check 'em off of the, the list every six months to, then they'll back 'em down at some point to a year, and then they'll back 'em down from there. But it's, it's really basic. And it's weird to say that that's all that I do, but I know my doctors and I trust my doctors, and I know that they're gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep on 'em because that's who I am. I wanna know, have you had any new research in the last six months? Have you learned something? Because that's the awesome thing about my doctor at Mayo. She spends half of her time doing research and half of her time doing clinicals. So me sciencey brain research geek that I am, I can go in there and I can ask questions and she can explain it to me in a sciencey enough way that I understand it. And I know she's staying on top of the latest and greatest possible research that there is out there to fight breast cancer. And if it, I participate in one of their clinical survey things, if there's anything that I can do to help somebody who's being diagnosed now, or being diagnosed five years from now to have a better outcome. Because the, the crazy thing, although they don't use my mom's chemo anymore, the chemos they do use are not that new.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:20:28] They're not specific. They're not, they don't target things. It's like all of the possible technology, it seems like we should be doing more. So I I, I am all in where I have opportunities to support cancer research because there, it seems like there has to be a better way. All of the things we do in ag, surely we spend a lot more money in medicine than we do in ag research. There's gotta be ways that you can target genes to be able to teach myself, teach my genes how to fight cancer for God's sakes. That you can do something to teach them. And I think someday they will be. And so even though I went through this, hopefully my kids never have to experience this. Hopefully they don't have a spouse that gets diagnosed or they don't have to. Hopefully they never are old enough where they really, really know the significance of having a pan, a parent diagnosed with cancer, because that can rock your world all over again. I mean, I don't think anybody who's been diagnosed will ever say they're in the clear, you're always gonna have it in the back of your mind, but I'm gonna do everything I can to make sure that I stay as healthy, as positive. And half of the battle is just maintaining that positive outlook. You have to believe that you can fight it. And I think the day that you give up the fight is the day that the fight is over it. You're just, when you say you're done, you're done.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:22:02] So keep fighting until the last, last day

Vance Crowe [01:22:06] When someone gets a cancer diagnosis. Knowing what you know now, if you could, if you could hand them some piece of information or, or something that, that helped you understand what was going on, what, what would that be?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:22:22] So, so I did exactly what the doctors tell you not to do because I am a sciencey, researchy kind of person. They're like, don't look it up on the internet. There's too much stuff out there. And what do you do? What do you do?

Vance Crowe [01:22:35] You surf the internet for

Christie Wiebbecke [01:22:36] Sure. Use

Vance Crowe [01:22:37] The internet. Oh yeah, Google for

Christie Wiebbecke [01:22:38] Sure. You are like, okay, what do I have? And it's this and this and this, and what's your prognosis? And then you're trying to develop treatment plans for yourself. And you're like, well, if I do this, then this. And there's so much information out there. Find a team of doctors you trust. I mean, my experience would've been a disaster if I would've stayed with a doctor that I had co consulted in Iowa because my blood pressure was through the roof. I broke out in hives.

Vance Crowe [01:23:08] Oh, wow. You're not kidding.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:23:10] No, it was, it was like bad, bad. I I, I never would be stressed out when I'd go to see my plastic surgeon always calm as a cucumber, low blood, blood pressure. But when we were going through the last part of trying to figure out in between doctors, I went into him one day. I had hives everywhere. And my blood pressure was like, I mean, they were like, should we put you in the hospital? And I said, no, I think it's just stress. Just let me sit here for a minute. I'm a little overwhelmed with everything that's going on and trying to figure out the doctor. You need to have a doctor that you trust, that you know that if you have questions, you can ask them the dumbest questions in the world. Why are my fingernails looking weird? Or My hair hasn't started to fall out? Should I, is is it gonna fall out? You know, all of the timing of things you need to be able to say, because some of 'em change how your fingers feel. You need to feel comfortable being able to say, Hey, my fingers don't feel right. But they don't,

Vance Crowe [01:24:09] They change how your fingers feel.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:24:11] Some of the drugs can cause nerve numbing.

Vance Crowe [01:24:15] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:24:16] And so you have to be really careful of that. 'cause if you don't say something, it can become permanent. Well, you better have a team of doctors that you trust enough because you wanna make sure you don't lose other abilities just because you're fearful or you don't think they're gonna respond to you or they're

Vance Crowe [01:24:31] Not gonna handle. Yeah. And if you're really stressed out, you're not able to think of these things. Like you lose track of what you were asking about.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:24:36] I would take an iPad and I would take notes in the doctor's appointments because I knew my brain was like fried everywhere. When I wanted to focus, I needed to be able to take notes. And I always had somebody with me so they could rem remind me questions, but I would jot down all of the questions I needed to ask. And then as they were telling me things, I'd be taking notes so that when I got home, I had a reference point. And then I know a lot of, a lot of places, I'm sure have portals that you can do this, but Mayo is amazing. I put a question in the system by the end of the day, most of the day, I, I would have a response back from the nurse or the doctor that I saw, and they would either be reassuring or I would just say, Hey, my, I'm feeling great. My new list worked. Everything's good. And I would just let 'em know because I was five hours away. They can't, they don't see me besides when I'm up there three every three weeks. But making sure, make sure you have a team of doctors you trust and feel confident in their guidance because you're going to, you could be faced with something else that you don't know. And you wanna be able to have that news come from somebody you trust that's gonna be able to guide you with the best options that are available in front of you. And I'm thankful that I was guided to go to Mayo and I was, I'm thankful that I have the doctor that I have at Mayo and the support system of doctors that I have. They, they all work together and they, I I had awesome care.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:26:12] It, it's a little weird. I didn't get the traditional like, oh, what is this? I feel something I need to go get it checked out. I never

Vance Crowe [01:26:20] You never felt like you had cancer?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:26:22] No. I, I was fine. I was, I had, it was baby was 1-year-old. I was just starting to work out again. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna get in shape and yeah, I have to do this thing, but I'm gonna start to get in shape because as soon as I'm done recovering from this preventative surgery, it's go time. It's mommy getting back in shape so that I can be active and be healthy for my boys. That was me going into it. But then all of a sudden it was a tailspin. It was like, what? Just what? So you deal with it and have a lot of really good support people in place.

Vance Crowe [01:26:59] And so outside of the experience of cancer and the, and the fighting like hell, and thinking about being a mother and, and having a wonderful husband, you are actually a really advanced scientist working on soybeans. Yes.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:27:15] So

Vance Crowe [01:27:15] How does somebody my day job decide that somebody wants to do that?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:27:20] So this is fun. It it, it's a one of those stories. My dad was a seed dealer for DeKalb when I was growing up. And after I graduated high school, my dad said we needed to get a real job because my job prior to that was helping milk goats on our farm. And I would

Vance Crowe [01:27:42] Oh, you're a farm girl.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:27:43] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:27:44] I didn't know that.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:27:44] Yeah. We had a dairy goat farm. And so as a kid, IM milked dairy goats all through high

Vance Crowe [01:27:50] School by hand.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:27:50] Yes. Oh yeah. I had so fun story when I was probably three or four years old, I don't know, I was, you know, really little. We would go to the Iowa State Fair and my dad, they would have the queen milking competitions where the queens come and they milk out a goat. And so my dad had one of our goats up on the stanchion, and the queens were trying to milk out the goat, and they don't wanna touch the teets. And they're all in their pretty outfits and everything and our goat's up there. And so I'm sitting there watching the goat and my dad's out in the show ring because he was helping with the show at the time. So I ask my mom if I can go milk out our goat in the middle of the show ring. So I walk down and I go to my dad and I say, dad, after the queens are all gone, I go to my dad. I say, dad, can I milk out our goat? And he gives me this bucket that's probably half the size of me. I carry it over to the stanchion. I sit down and I milk the goat out. I got a standing ovation because there's this little itty bitty pip squeak who beat all of the queens. But it, I mean, yeah, I grew up in a barn. So my dad was a seed dealer. And all through high school, I never wanted to do anything with ag. That was not my passion. I loved math, I loved science. I was involved in everything. It was a small school. My husband and I went to high school together. We're high school sweethearts. I asked him to senior prom. Another good story. My mom knows my husband. I told her in second grade I was gonna marry him.

Vance Crowe [01:29:20] Whoa.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:29:20] Yeah. She was a teacher though. So that didn't go over well. I said he was sexy and that I wanted to marry him. And she made me write standards that said, I will not say sexy. And she said, if you're

Vance Crowe [01:29:31] Gonna

Christie Wiebbecke [01:29:32] Marry him, we better call his parents and tell him. And I was like, no. So senior year, apparently, I still thought he was cute and I ended up marrying the guy.

Vance Crowe [01:29:45] Yeah. He didn't, he didn't ask you fast enough. You, you jumped in there. No, took control. He,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:29:49] He knew. He knew that I was gonna ask him and he just waited for the, waited for me. And

Vance Crowe [01:29:56] Did you go straight into school to, to study soybeans?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:30:00] No. So after, so okay, back to the, back to the real question. So after high school, I, my dad said we needed a real job and we went to, he, he had people that he knew at Beam in Iowa where we had soybean production at the time. And there was this green old house where the research farm was operated out of. And they had a soybean breeding program. And that soybean breeder needed summer help. So we were hired on, back in the time when we were moving from conventional to the first round of bread crops to cross soybeans, to help clean fields, because you couldn't use Roundup to spray the fields to keep them clean. We still had to walk all those fields to keep the weeds out because one of the things that you need in breeding is really high quality data to be able to sort out what genotypes are the best genotypes in the field. So my job was walking a lot of bean fields, towing weeds and crossing these soybeans. And I was like, what is this? I thought ag was just farmers planting in the fields. And my dad's selling seed, and that's really not that cool, in my opinion. That wasn't my passion. But all of a sudden there's science behind it and there's research. And so I went to Iowa State and I was gonna do sociology in a semester. And I decided that was not a good idea. And I changed my major to agronomy at all because of the soybean breeder. So I was really motivated because my husband was in California, in the military, and I

Vance Crowe [01:31:30] Was he already your husband at that point?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:31:32] No, it, we were fiance. So we got engaged and married really young, but he was out in California and I was in Iowa. We looked to move me to California, but it was gonna cost astronomics. So I was like, okay, I'm just gonna graduate in two years, save the money, all of my money that I'm saving. You

Vance Crowe [01:31:50] Graduated college in two years?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:31:51] Well, I changed my major, so three total.

Vance Crowe [01:31:54] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:31:54] I gradu I changed my major and then I spent two years in my major at Iowa State. And I took summer classes and I took 20 credits a semester so that I could graduate as quick as possible. I didn't have a life. My boyfriend was across the country.

Vance Crowe [01:32:08] Ah.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:32:09] So I spent tons of time studying and I didn't work, I just focused on school. I'd work in the summer. So I worked the following summer with that same breeder. And then I worked for Monsanto as a production intern. So I worked one summer in corn and then got married, moved to California. And the day of graduation for my undergrad, I was walking across the stage and one of the professors that knew me really well in one of my senior classes, she said to me, Christie, you should have thought of being a teacher. And I'm like, what? Why are you telling me this? Literally as I'm going to get my

Vance Crowe [01:32:43] Book diploma? That does seem pretty shitty.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:32:46] I'm like, wow, why would you, so this thing is in the back of my head, and we're moving to, we lived in the Mojave Desert. So it's Joshua Trees, tumbleweeds, aerospace engineering. It's a test military base, not any ag. They grew carrots and had alfalfa. There was one USDA employee in the county. No opportunity for agricultural Christie to get a job. So I was left trying to figure it out. I did some work in a paint factory testing aerospace paint. And then that didn't fit well. So I went back to that thought of that professor saying, Hey, you should have thought of being a teacher. And I thought, well, my mom was a teacher. Maybe there's a little bit of teacher in me. After all, I started substitute teaching and then I started taking classes to get my credential in California. And then I ended up with a master's degree in education and taught in California for four and a half years. My own classroom, my taught earth science and biology. And a year after I was a full-time teacher, they put me with student teachers. So I was the teacher of the student teachers a year after I graduated.

Vance Crowe [01:33:59] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:33:59] And that was, I was prob I was 24 at the time, which is pretty young

Vance Crowe [01:34:05] To be Yeah. A lot of those people are your contemporaries to

Christie Wiebbecke [01:34:07] Be teaching teachers. So I would've been tenured in the school. I would've been set, my husband got orders and he was deployed to Iraq, and we were debating what's the next phase in our life. He was to the point where he had to either re-up for the military or we got out and,

Vance Crowe [01:34:29] And what does he do in the military?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:34:31] So at the time, he was a cargo plane mechanic. And then he was a fighter mechanic for a while, and now he's an intelligence officer.

Vance Crowe [01:34:39] Okay.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:34:39] So he, he went from being an enlisted to retraining and reclassifying and got his officers candidates. Six years ago he became an officer. So he's had a really good career, but at that time, he had decided we had tried to relocate in the military and put in for orders. And we never got orders outside of, we were gonna be at that base for our career probably. And that wasn't, we didn't wanna live in California. And if we had a family, we didn't know if we were gonna have a family, but we wanted to be closer to our families if we were gonna have a family. So he decided he wanted to go back to get a college education and was looking at schools and decided Iowa State was where he wanted to go. I was really excited because I'm like, oh yes, my alma mater, this is awesome. So I started applying for jobs and interviewed with, I put my application out to all the companies I interviewed for Pioneer. All of a sudden I get a phone call from Monsanto and they're asking me about my work experience. And I, she asked me to tell her about this role in Beam in Iowa. And I said, well, that's actually the whole reason I got into ag. This breeder had such an impact on me. I was so curious why she was crossing this soybean at this soybean. It just changed my perspective on agriculture. And she said to me, she goes, do you know that this position is on her team?

Vance Crowe [01:36:05] Whoa.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:36:06] Yeah. So five years later,

Vance Crowe [01:36:09] I'm starting to see why you have this angel winks thing, right? Like you've got the, the professor that tells you maybe be a teacher, and then

Christie Wiebbecke [01:36:15] It's

Vance Crowe [01:36:16] This comes about there.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:36:17] Yeah. There's, so you never know where your path is gonna lead. And as a high school kid who just got outta high school, I could have not performed well. I could have just showed up and been whatever, but apparently I had an impact. And I showed up and did good work, asked good questions. She let me cross her soybeans in the greenhouse, which were the special ones. I got to learn little bits and pieces. So interviewed for the job after being a teacher for four years, they took a chance on me. I said, I'm really passionate. I wanna get back into ag. I wanna get back into research. My ultimate dream would be to go back and get either a research master's or a PhD. I told them that in my interview.

Vance Crowe [01:37:00] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:37:01] That was ball. I, I don't know how smart that is, but I did. And I explained how teaching curriculums tie to whatever job things they wanted. I tied it all together and they took a chance on me. And so I started with a company and I learned how to combine. I was thrown into the combine. Oh, a month or so after I started, I was driving a combine in the fields harvesting. And I would do that every day for a month. I was responsible for combining these single

Vance Crowe [01:37:32] Roadblocks

Christie Wiebbecke [01:37:34] And taking all of the notes. And then the next summer I ran her crossing block. And I, I said, a year after I started there, I said, I'd really like to go back to school and, and take some classes. Because of the work that I was doing, I was doing her crossing blocks. So having a more advanced plant breeding degree or class would be helpful. A more advanced plant pathology class would be helpful. Because I was running some of the disease screening. I was doing some statistical analysis. So I took some statistics classes. And so I started to take a class a semester. And in that time, our soybean breeding group was noticing that there weren't a lot of breeders coming out with solid industry experience, and that could roll right into the company. And so they set up this program where you could apply if you had been with the company for a little while and had a master's degree. Didn't matter what. So education degree, Hey, it's a master's. I had been with a company, I put in an application to try to get accepted to this program, had letters of referral. And it ended up that myself and another person at, at the company got selected. And we both were able to go to Iowa State in two separate programs at Iowa State. But we both were able to go to Iowa State. And so Monsanto sent me back to school, and I was a full-time student working in the lab and still maintained my full-time status at the company.

Vance Crowe [01:38:58] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:38:58] To become a breeder.

Vance Crowe [01:38:59] You know, this is a total non-sequitur, but you keep saying the name Iowa State. And did you know that the worst experience I've ever had with a crowd was at Iowa State? I

Christie Wiebbecke [01:39:08] Do. I heard the story. Not from you, but I, I heard from somebody I think who was in the room.

Vance Crowe [01:39:14] Yeah. Well, so the, the, you can share if you

Christie Wiebbecke [01:39:16] Want

Vance Crowe [01:39:17] The story of it is that I, I was, it was the first talk that I was ever invited to give as a, as a member of Monsanto.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:39:23] And

Vance Crowe [01:39:23] We, it was new to the company that they were sending people out to go give talks, particularly people that weren't either executives that had had a bunch of training or some kind of scientist that was putting on a scientific talk. I was going to, to a college campus. And I had been told, this is an ag school And we want you to come in and talk about sustainable ag. And I'm like, all right, this is great. And I end up talking to my buddy. I, I mentioned him a lot on the podcast, Rob Long, he goes by Plantables on Twitter, definitely worth following. And I'm talking with him on the phone as I'm walking in, and he goes, if you can't win over the crowd at Iowa State University, you should quit your job. Because that's the home team, right? Like, if there's, if there's one school in the planet that that's supportive of you. So I go in there and I look around as, as I come into this like stadium style seating situation,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:40:10] I've probably been in that room

Vance Crowe [01:40:12] And I'm looking around, I'm like, you guys don't look like ag kids, but all right. And I go through the slides that the PR firm, they, they tried to do their job. They were trying to do it, but everything they put forward was like super shiny and

Christie Wiebbecke [01:40:25] As

Vance Crowe [01:40:25] Corporate as you could possibly be. Yep. So I flip through the slides. This is a two hour lecture, and I flip through the slides as fast as I can. I'm just like, Hey, we all know GMOs are good and lowering insecticide, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. I get an hour long presentation done in 20 minutes. And then I go, yes, sir. There any questions here? You know? 'cause I'm thinking now q and a is gonna be,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:40:44] It's gonna be fun.

Vance Crowe [01:40:45] It's gonna be a blast. Right. This is gonna be playing to the home team. It's gonna

Christie Wiebbecke [01:40:48] Be

Vance Crowe [01:40:48] Great. Yeah. And so a woman all the way at the top raises her arm straight up in the air. And I go, yes, you there. Do you have a question? And she puts her hand down and she goes, I don't believe a word out of your mouth.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:41:01] And

Vance Crowe [01:41:01] The whole room exploded in laughter and clapping. And I was like, oh, dear God, where am I? And I'll tell the story some other time about like what happened after that. But what I found out was at Iowa State, they had an ag program in the seventies that broke away from the regular Ag school. And it was much more about kind of environmental friendliness and kind of ecological. I was very lefty kind of group. And they floated to the left side of campus. So I had not been invited to the AG College. I had been invited to the Sustainable Ag program group. Yeah. And like, they were like inviting me into do gladiator style.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:41:42] You didn't, yeah. You didn't have the right context on that one. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:41:45] It was, and but that, so anytime somebody says Iowa State, I've been back several times since then, but anytime somebody says Iowa State, I'm always like, oh man, that one was bad. That was real bad.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:41:55] My, my dad graduated from there and 40 years later I finished my PhD there. So it's, it's a family history thing. And now my husband and I have both graduated there. There's a little bit of rivalry, obviously Iowa and Iowa State. But in our family, some other people are Iowa fans. But we're, I love the school and the campus is beautiful. I like the, the land grant universities with the open campuses. That's just, yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:42:22] You drive up to it and it, and it, it really like, I don't even know how, like a kingdom almost like as you come and the stadium is there and it's, it's all flat all around it. So you can see it from a long way away. It's really neat. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:42:34] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:42:34] When, when most people think of soybeans, I think they think of it as like corn's little brother that you have to plant in order to not be, you know, planting corn on corn on corn. What do you think is something people should know about soybean fields as they're driving past them?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:42:55] So I think the same thing about corn.

Vance Crowe [01:42:57] You think it's soybeans little brother?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:42:59] No, I, I think it's just corn. When I drive past it, I'm like, it's just corn. But the coolest thing happened. I, I walked a cornfield with a corn breeder. And it, when, especially when you walk plots, it's, it's amazing to see the diversity and see all of the different things that they're looking at in season and at the end of the season. And even as a breeder, I didn't realize what was in that other crop. Soybeans was my start in breeding. And it made me so excited about agriculture and the possibilities of agriculture. That, that's why I go by mini bean. My, I was leading a crossing crew and we were making shirts and they decided to put nicknames on all the shirts. And they nicknamed me, I didn't know anything about this. So the shirt shows up and it says mini bean. Well, it stuck. So that's my Twitter handle.

Vance Crowe [01:43:52] Ah, okay. Is

Christie Wiebbecke [01:43:54] Is how that all came, came about. But,

Vance Crowe [01:43:57] And what is your exact Twitter handle?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:44:00] IS uco min Bean, but my name is Minnie Bean.

Vance Crowe [01:44:05] Got it. Okay. Yes.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:44:10] I think people don't realize the beauty and the potential in soybeans.

Vance Crowe [01:44:15] Yeah. I don't,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:44:16] Yeah, they look, they look green and they look like everything else. But when you actually look at the flowers, and I have, because I crossed them, they're actually really, really, really tiny, beautiful flowers. And when you think about the level of what it takes on a field day, I'll take out my tweezers and I'll show farmers how to cross the soybean, the intricacy and delicacy that you have to have to be able to cross this flower with this flower to get the, the pollen from one flower that you say is gonna be the male variety, and then the, the other genes from the female variety. And you cross 'em together. And the potential that that works and the amount of seed that you get, one to three seeds when you do that. And you can probably do, if you're really good, a couple hundred crosses in a day. And if you're really good, maybe you have a 50% success rate. It's very labor, labor intensive. So

Vance Crowe [01:45:08] That's all being done by hand.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:45:10] It's all being done by hand. There's some male sterility out there that you can use insects. But the primary way that we cross soybeans is by hand.

Vance Crowe [01:45:18] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:45:18] Yes. So tiny, tiny little flowers that are probably the size of my fingernail. And you're using jewelers tweezers to take the flower parts apart. That was what changed my view of what was possible. It's like you can take your favorite variety and you can try to combine it to this thing that doesn't have all of the traits, but you wanna combine it together to make it better and improve it. And so you pick the agronomic characteristics that are important in your region. And for me in Iowa, I need white mold. I need sudden death syndrome resistance. I need iron deficiency sclerosis resistance. I need SCN resistance, phyto resistance. I need standability and I need yield, and I need herbicide tolerance for whatever herbicide that the farmers wanna have on their farm. So you put all of these things together between the two parents, you cross 'em together and you create a population of individuals that are like your siblings. They're all unique. And each one of those seeds could turn out to be a variety. So my job is 90 per 99% of the time, I'm trying to get rid of the stuff that doesn't have value. And I'm trying to focus to the things that look like they have the highest potential to bring success in a farmer's field that are going to drive their bottom line higher and improve their, improve their success. That's my ultimate goal is to try to figure out if it's not gonna be successful on a farmer's farm, it's really not adding value. So I need to bring all of the characteristics and traits together.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:46:49] And that's the fun of searching through all of these populations and searching through all of the data we have, is to find those individuals that have the highest potential to deliver the next thing. And it, that's, that's cool. I geek out in the fall. I walk tons of plots across all of the states that I'm responsible for. And I'm the happiest. I don't listen to podcasts. I don't listen to anything. I just walk beans and I just look at 'em and see what the potential is in the bean. And I rate it and I describe it in that environment. And I take notes on the environment to describe the environment so that I can understand how things are gonna perform in all of these different conditions that growers are gonna put them in. And then work with our teams to build those recommendations on the varieties that are coming to market. And I get to tell the whole breeding story. That's really cool.

Vance Crowe [01:47:36] I the fact that you can walk through those fields and see different things and it's beautiful to you. That's to me, one of the things that I'm learning through this podcast is that masters of a subject or experts in a field, they see the world literally differently.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:47:54] Like,

Vance Crowe [01:47:55] I could go and stare at a plant or two soybean plants and for hours, have as much time as I want to say, what's different about these two things? And never be able to make those observations. Whereas you, you couldn't miss those observations even if you wanted to at this point.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:48:11] Yeah. And I think that's the, that's the art of breeding. It's learning the germ plasm. It's looking at the pedigree and understanding this is what you get from your mom. This is what you get from your dad. And seeing them combine together. And I can see the qualities from both parents sometimes.

Vance Crowe [01:48:26] Really?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:48:26] Yeah. If I know the parents really well, if they're commercial products or if they're lines that I developed that came outta my pipeline, I can look at the pedigrees and I can say, Ooh, you look like your mama.

Vance Crowe [01:48:37] Wow. And that's

Christie Wiebbecke [01:48:38] Fun. How can I not be excited about that? I have two little boys that are my B best F ones, but I also have in my wall, that's plant breeding joke. Ha ha. And on my wall in my office, I have all of the commercial products that I've ever created, and each one of them has a story. Some of them never saw the light of day because their lessons learned that that didn't work. But they're really good stories and lessons that I'm very proud of. The efforts that I was able to, from figuring out what, what genetics and what combinations come together. Crossing them, breeding them, and breeding them, selecting them generation after generation to end up with a product that's gonna be in a farmer's field with a sign on it driving down the road. That just makes me so proud because they're my babies too. I, I mean, I created them from here and now I get to see 'em across the countryside.

Vance Crowe [01:49:32] When you as a breeder, you, you feel like I created those, I they, because they wouldn't exist, I guess, if you hadn't made some of the decisions that you made.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:49:40] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:49:42] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:49:42] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:49:43] And I've often heard it said that genetics is applied statistics. Do you agree with that?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:49:49] I'm, I'm sure.

Vance Crowe [01:49:51] Do you like statistics? Is that something that's fun

Christie Wiebbecke [01:49:53] For you? No, I like to figure out, so I like to understand the attributes of both parents and really understand the potential of both parents and how they fit. And then try to think, how can I bring those two things together and improve them by selection, putting them in different environments, putting them into plant health screening to improve a certain characteristic. That's the part that I think is really cool. It is a numbers game. It is a statistics game, but where I, my passion and why I am in my role now is really trying to understand genetics and placement and how they fit in the environments they fit in.

Vance Crowe [01:50:39] A couple weeks ago, I had Dr. Doug salmons on and he made the comment that he thinks soybeans and corn will be grown in Africa.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:50:48] I heard that.

Vance Crowe [01:50:49] What do you, what do you think of that as a soybean breeder? What, what stands in the way of that happening? Is it just economics and capital infrastructure or is there more? There's,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:50:58] I think that's probably, I, I actually was just talking to my cousin last night. He, he has his own seed soybean processing facility and he's very into going into other regions and farmers are willing to grow anything and everything in the areas that he's worked with them in remote areas of Africa and Europe and Asia. If there's a place where they can utilize the grain, so if there's processing facilities where they can utilize what they've, the crop that Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:51:36] Where right. Sure. Then

Christie Wiebbecke [01:51:37] If there's that infant, sorry, if there's that infrastructure there, then, then I think they're willing to grow anything. I think from a genetic standpoint, I think there's gonna be challenges to figure out what germ plasm works well in those regions, because there could be different disease pressures or soil types and, and really understanding what agronomic practices they use compared to the us. I know our, our Canadian friends, they have different growing plot sizes or row widths, and you really need to think about that when you're selecting things because that can change the phenotype and the architecture of the plant. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:52:15] Wow.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:52:16] And you wanna think about how are you gonna maximize the architecture of the plant in that management practice. Some respond differently. I some germplasm responds to that management, some doesn't. So you need to sort all of that out. And I think that's the, that's the thing that when we're pushing a crop into a new region that it hasn't been grown or adapted for, you have to figure all of that out. What genetics works best, what, and, and then select it so that you can enhance those characteristic that's, that those growers need in those managements.

Vance Crowe [01:52:47] Wow. That I, that I'm glad you brought that up because I knew that there'd be some breeding pressures, but I never even considered the architecture of the plant and how wide the, the rows are.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:52:58] If you soybeans, people will say they naturally compensate, which some of them do. Some of them, if you, if you space plant them more, you can get them to branch more. But some beans don't branch. They're narrow, slender varieties that just have an upright architecture. Well, that's not really gonna be that. Well, some of them will really pod pod, but if you're putting 'em in 30 inch rows, you're not maximizing your light interception. So is that architecture better for a more narrow canopy or are the ones that branch out more gonna be more maximizing more of the yield resources? So those are the things that you can, if you look at different agronomic characteristics, there's opportunities to, to think about how we place and how we recommend placement of varieties. Because this one is going to branch more if you put it into this type of a management situation or this one gets, gets lo so don't push it on high management because you put all those nutrients and all those resources into that crop, it's gonna get too growthy and it's just gonna fall over. That's not valuable to the grower because then they're backing off their combine having to slow down. They're angry at Christie because why the heck did she develop this soybean that's falling flat on the ground? Yeah, it has yield, but I'm driving over it with a combine. I'm not harvesting any of that yield. That yield's not valuable.

Vance Crowe [01:54:15] Wow. So,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:54:17] So there's, there's tools and ways we can think about it. And I think that's the really cool thing that we, that's the future of breeding is thinking about how, how to be more innovative in, in how we think about selection in different environments and where there's opportunities for, as we see different management trends, what are those opportunities where we think we need to bring those into an earlier phase? And are they selectable characteristics that are heritable? So you always have to think, is this a heritable thing or that we can actually select to improve? And there's a balance that we al we always wanna go for yield and agronomics, but are there other opportunities where we can select and, and chase after new characteristics we haven't looked at yet?

Vance Crowe [01:55:06] It seems like you, the way you describe it with the amount of passion, it seems like it's an exciting place to be soybeans.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:55:12] I I like soybeans. Yes. I'm the, I'm the bean girl at a meeting that's all excited about beans when corn is done. I'm still excited about beans.

Vance Crowe [01:55:22] So one final question I have for you about soybeans and then I, we have to wrap it up, but there was a claim one time that Monsanto was having cross pollination with GMOs and soybean fields that are acres, Andre and acres large.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:55:39] And

Vance Crowe [01:55:39] I've heard it said that that's not possible because of how far pollen will float. When, when, when it's out in the air breeder of soybeans. How far does pollen float from one plant to the next?

Christie Wiebbecke [01:55:54] They're very inbred. I don't know the percentages or numbers, but the generally, the way that out crossing would occur is not through wind because soybeans actually are self pollinated before they open. So when we're crossing soybeans, you actually have to get a flower that has an A bud that hasn't even opened because if it, if it has opened, it's already been pollinated. Oh,

Vance Crowe [01:56:18] So

Christie Wiebbecke [01:56:19] You're taking this flower apart that hasn't even opened to be able to expose the stigma so that you can pollinate it to something that's elsewhere. So the, my knowledge of soybeans, the most often way that they get outcross is through insects who come and pollinate the flower. There are some soybeans that are more attractive to insects because they smell different and the insects are more attracted to 'em. I've seen that in my PhD research. I was doing a male sterility research at through Iowa State and the male sterile flowers, for whatever reason, I sat in a lot of soybean fields crossing soybeans in my life and the male sterile flowers, I would see bees bouncing down those rows in all of the other rows of soybeans that I had out in the field. No bees would be there, or very, you'd see bees, but not like, oh, I'm, go check out, check, check the flowers out. These would be literally bouncing down like they were pollinating your roses at home. So I, I think that if any out crossing occurs, it's a very, very small percent. And if that happened, it likely is due to insects not wind.

Vance Crowe [01:57:32] And it wouldn't be uniform. It would be, no,

Christie Wiebbecke [01:57:34] I don't think so.

Vance Crowe [01:57:35] Very interesting. Of all the people I've ever asked that, I have never heard that answer before. So this was fantastic. I am so it was a lot of fun. Glad you were able to make time to stop by. Yeah.

Christie Wiebbecke [01:57:45] And

Vance Crowe [01:57:46] So thank you for coming by and you'll be welcome back anytime. Thank

Christie Wiebbecke [01:57:48] You. Thank

Vance Crowe [01:57:49] You. Okay, well that's gonna do it for this week's podcast. Thank you so much for coming by. I hope you enjoyed Kristi Beck. She can be found at ISU Mini Bean. She is a prolific tweeter and a big supporter of people out there trying to make things happen. So tune in on Friday. I'm gonna do my absolute best to have a podcast for you guys there. I'm traveling for aggravation. It's Thanksgiving. We have a whole lot going on, but I will try and create something that's valuable. We got such positive feedback from last week's, you know, kind of finding the shadow, the passport to the underworld that I wanna keep doing that. And I wanna make sure you guys are still writing in your journal. So we'll be back on Friday if I can, to publish an as the crow flies episode. Thanks. Ah.