Jeremy LaKosh; Economist talks about the Pilgrims and Illinois putting tampons in men's bathrooms

Guest [00:00:00] You do not need to judge anybody from a, you know, 500 years later standpoint, just read what they wrote. And you'll see there's plenty of politics existing then, and that's why I'm trying to do what I do. I wanna place people as close to the moment as I actually can. I'm Danica Klu, a grad student living in Fort Collins, Colorado,

Vance Crowe [00:00:21] And you are listening to the Vans Grow podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you are here. Well, today is something a little bit different. Last week I did a live in-person interview with Jeremy Osh, who longtime listeners of the podcast know that he is an economist and a historian and a really interesting character with all sorts of deep insight into Illinois politics and community. And just really a fun guy to talk with. So we sat in the studio and did our first live interview, and now I'm publishing it just in the audio format for anybody that didn't get a chance to watch the episode. In the future, I'm gonna be doing more in-person interviews live. In fact, I think from now on, if somebody comes and visits the studio, we're gonna try and just broadcast it right there. And then a couple days later we'll post up the audio like we are right now. It's a fun way to really force people to be in the moment. There's no going back. They don't have in the back of their head that they can erase something or re-say something. So it's a chance to really up the stakes and I think makes for a better conversation. If you're interested having great conversations, you may be interested in a project that I started a few months ago. It's called the Connections Project. And it really is a way for you to reconnect with people in your network, people that are longtime friends, past teachers that have had an impact on you, mentors or maybe just somebody that you've admired from afar.

Vance Crowe [00:01:55] Each week if you sign up for the email, I will send you a writing prompt that will say, Hey, this is a person to write about this particular subject. And then I give you an example of an email or a letter that I personally have written and sent out to a person. And then at the bottom I include a writer's note, some tips on how you can get better at writing emails. I often talk about how do I always open up emails, and if I have the same opening and I kind of tailor it to each specific person, it makes it easier to get started. And oftentimes writing a letter comes down to you just don't know where to start. So if you're interested in doing this project, we have had so many people sign up, it's been kind of overwhelming. You can go to vance crow.com/connections, that's vance crow.com/connections and sign up either for just the connections poster, you can have the podcast delivered to your inbox. Also, you will hear Jeremy and I talk about the Articulate Ventures network. If you have been looking around for a way to make your time online valuable to have conversations with people that are deeply thinking about things but are probably pretty different from you, whether they have a totally different job or they live in a different part of the country, then you may consider joining this digital neighborhood that we call the Articulate Ventures Network. The only place I ever talk about this is on the podcast. So the people that are there are already also listeners to the podcast, and they have a way of building out a community that is bigger than what I set out to do.

Vance Crowe [00:03:30] So we have conversations, we get together for book club and movie nights, and we practice speaking. And sometimes people just build relationships with other people that can help them answer questions and problems that they have going on in their life. So it is a fantastic community and we try and keep it private. It's a great way for you to support the podcast while also encountering really new and interesting people. So if you are interested in joining that, you can go to Network dot Articulate Ventures. Alright, enough about this. Let's head to the live interview that we did with my man, Jeremy Osh, 3, 2, 1. And we're live. Jeremy Osh, welcome back to the podcast.

Guest [00:04:17] Thanks for having me back and thanks for asking me to be a part of this live broadcast experience. I'm happy to, to be here. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:04:26] I think of you as the most dynamic, you know, guy that loves novelty and trying totally new things. So when, when a live stream came up, I thought, who would be the best guy to have here? Jeremy Osh. So for people that have never listened to the podcast before, Jeremy Osh runs a retirement community in my hometown, although we did not grow up in the same town. And the reason that this is so interesting is my town was like a little teeny tiny college town, little very Christian community, and I left and Jeremy moved into it. And somehow you integrated into this kind of, it's not cloistered, but it's it's definitely an in-group place and we've gotten to know each other and it's amazing to be friends with somebody that grew up in your hometown that you never knew.

Guest [00:05:10] Yeah, yeah. It's, it's interesting And, and it's also interesting, you know, with Eureka Illinois and how many people tie into that community. So, you know, I've been here in St. Louis for a couple of days, you've introduced me to a lot of interesting people. And Eureka Illinois will come up and somebody will say, you know, oh yeah, I, I went to school at Bradley 20 minutes away, or I used to work for an electrical business there. And it, it's just so fascinating that this small community can have ties, you know, so far broadly out in the Midwest. And it's, it's, it's refreshing to hear those stories from people too, because, and, and, and it's easy to build a, a common relationship with somebody when you have that to go back to,

Vance Crowe [00:05:56] You know, I, the the way that you and I met was I gave a talk and it was essentially about how Eureka Illinois prepared me to be a, you know, somebody that wait, went out into the world. And I think oftentimes in western culture, we think of people coming from small town as like country bumpkins, but I grew up in a microcosm. So in my hometown there's a really deeply religious community called the Apostolic Christians. And in the town of 4,500 people, there were 13 churches. So it wasn't do you go to church, it was which church do you go to? And but then this also led to, we had a college in our town, we had a whole bunch of farming going on, we had little bits of industry. So I feel like for a young person, I got an experience of being in this hyperdense community that then showed you all these different aspects so that when you went out into the rest of the world, it made more sense than if you grew up in a place like St. Louis, where you're just so tiny, it's really hard to know where you fit into the world.

Guest [00:06:53] Yeah, it's an interesting point. Eureka has everything you would need to live in a community. You don't have to go outside of Eureka to get anything. And I think that makes it, I guess, a big tiny town, if you will. And so when you do go out to cities like St. Louis, there's very few things that exist in big cities that you don't have in Eureka. We've also got a hospital, a doctor's clinic, just a bunch of different things. Two nursing homes.

Vance Crowe [00:07:24] Yeah, that's right.

Guest [00:07:25] And, and so I mean, there's, there's every type of service that exists and it does help, you know, and I think that plays a role in people's success outside of Eureka when they do leave the community.

Vance Crowe [00:07:40] But there's a big movement right now for people that are living in cities that are saying like, Hey, the dream of being cosmopolitan did not work out the way that I wanted. And so now they're moving out to small communities. I don't think Eureka's growing massively, but in Missouri there's a big movement people are moving to, to towns of 10,000 people or less. And I was reading Charles Murray's book Coming Apart, and he said he had a statistic in there that blew my mind. He said, one third of Americans live in towns of 10,000 people or less, which like, we don't really have a conception of that because popular culture, the fashion layer, everything you see on TV is the only time you ever see somebody in a small town. It's when the big city girl goes to small town America that she resented and now she's fallen in love with the, you know, the guy she left behind in high school. And those people are all seen as kind of simpletons and, but people are running multimillion dollar businesses in these small towns. They're just not doing it in the, in the cosmopolitan way. Yeah.

Guest [00:08:40] And you wouldn't even know it to look at 'em. They're very humble people. They're very down to earth. They look in your face, they shake your hand, they ask you questions about your life, they get to know you and you walk away from that experience thinking that you might have have just met the, the town barber or the town. I mean, you know, just somebody that works a simple job in the community and yet they're one of the wealthiest people in the community and one of the most successful. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:09:09] Yeah. So we both know the, the guy that did a much of the building in Eureka in the last 20, 30 years, a guy named Don Tweer, and he w he, when I turned 16, my dad said, well go down to Don's shop and ask him for a job. You know, like present what you're capable of doing. And he hired me and gave me minimum a little bit better than minimum wage, but you know, not much better. And that was one of the best jobs I could have ever had. I think about how hard it is for young people to get jobs nowadays because you have a high minimum wage. But Don knew the value of what he was paying me was not in money. It was in, now I know how to swing a hammer, now I know how to pick up nails. Now I know how to like run shingles up a ladder. And then you start watching people and you learn how to do these skills. And if you don't let young people do it because you've made the wage go so high, then somebody like me never meets Don Lit Waller. I never learn, Hey, anytime you're standing around you can pick up nails. You don't learn that. Then all of the other things that happen because you learn how to be a good worker when you're a kid, just don't happen. And I think, I'm sure young people can get jobs in the city now, but it's different, right? Yeah. Like we, we really screwed things up when we messed around with the minimum wage and made it so a guy that wasn't worth $12 an hour is being forced to be paid $12 an hour.

Guest [00:10:28] Yeah. And, and during the Obama administration, there was some labor legislation passed that basically forbid the working of kids under the age of 16. Now there's been some tweaking to that. So I think there are some exceptions, but at one point it was basically illegal if you were a farmer to have your 12-year-old son working on the farm, whether you were paying him or not. And, and I thought that was just a horrible disservice. Back to your point, how many people do we know that are successful who got their first job at age 2022?

Vance Crowe [00:11:06] Yeah. Right.

Guest [00:11:07] And, and I mean, and in our society today in the teenage population, the employment rate, the number of teenagers who are actually employed is historically low. It's like one in three. And so what are those folks gonna look like when their first job is at age 20, 22, 24?

Vance Crowe [00:11:27] Well, I, I saw it. So when I was in the Peace Corps, they, they put you through this training, there's about 40 people, they're all college graduates, they're really top of their class college graduates, right? So they, these people knew how to do the structured environment. The, we finished our, our big, you know, 10 week training where you're living in a home stay, you're learning the language, you're learning what you're gonna teach the people when you get put out into the countryside, when you're gonna be all alone. And the day before, they get us all around in a circle and they say, now we weren't able to teach you all of the language. We weren't able to teach you everything that you need to know. We only had 10 weeks. So let's talk about a time when you taught yourself how to do something in a job. And they go around this circle and a few people had had jobs, but most of those kids had literally never had a job. So the first job they were ever gonna have was traveling all the way to Africa in a language that they don't speak in a culture they have no idea about and they're gonna go help people. And yet they've never had a job and they've never learned how to do anything on their own. So everybody's supposed to say like, what is something you've taught yourself? I remember a guy was like, huh, one time my parents bought a stereo system and we didn't know how to put it together and we couldn't get somebody for two weeks to come out. So I got out the instruction manuals and I figured out how to plug in all those things. And now the stereo works. And you're like,

Guest [00:12:42] What?

Vance Crowe [00:12:42] That's not a skill. Like, that's not the, compared to the kid that's like, well, I framed, you know, on a construction job and then I bought a house and I tried to learn how to frame it up and I made mistakes along the way. And I, but if you don't have those experiences as a young person, you don't have the gusto to be able to do it as an adult.

Guest [00:13:02] So for those folks in the Peace Corps, I'd be interested in hearing how much of a back net that they were provided in terms of, so they're, they're going in the Peace Corps, they're going overseas, this is their first job,

Vance Crowe [00:13:16] Obviously

Guest [00:13:17] It's gonna be extraordinarily challenging. Were they in a situation where they had any kind of support if they fell back, or was it sink or swim?

Vance Crowe [00:13:27] So this is a little bit of talking outside of school because the people I was with, they had good intentions, they were good people. Like they, they wanted to do something good, but what happened was when they went to do site assignments, they would call you over and they'd, they asked you a few questions about like, what are you looking forward to get out of the Peace Corps? So this is, you're already in Africa, you're in Kenya, and they're saying, are we gonna send you a few miles from where the home base is or are we gonna send you way out? And there were a few people, and I got to see the list that these five people could go anywhere that they wanted because they, they trusted that they could handle it. And the other people, they put on varying degrees of how far away can you be from the city? Now I came in there and was like, I want to be in the most remote place that you could possibly put me. And because I had aspirations of just going native and, and getting outta there. And it turns out I got really, really sick. So there are a lot of people that I felt like didn't have the skills that I had, but they stayed a lot longer than the Peace Corps than me. So I have to be humble to say like, my, my skills didn't, didn't make it so I could stay the whole time. But I think a lot of people, what they ended up doing was putting them really close together. And when they started to feel lonely, 'cause you go to Africa, you may be the only white person that's ever been in this village, right? The, the people like I would be in church and people would reach up and touch the back of my hair. Little old ladies 'cause they'd never touched straight hair before. And when you start to feel that fishbowl, you want to get around things, you know, so you start getting around the people, you know. So then what ends up happening is the Peace Corps volunteers are in their site during the week, but then on the weekend they get together with all the Peace Corps volunteers.

Vance Crowe [00:15:01] And you're a young person, so whatcha gonna do, you're gonna drink. And so it ends up being that kind of feedback loop where a whole bunch of them really just got a, got a year or two of the weeks in the village and the weekends partying with their friends. So I don't,

Guest [00:15:14] You know, it's, I I asked the question because you, you, you wonder how much baptism by fire there is, and I'm currently reading about the Plymouth Pilgrims and their journey to America. And they faced a similar challenge in that they lived in the Netherlands for about 12 years. And they were in a situation where they didn't know the culture, they didn't speak the Lang language. And, and what they began to see was their children were becoming Dutch

Vance Crowe [00:15:47] And they were trying to escape England persecution.

Guest [00:15:49] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:15:50] You should go back to the beginning. 'cause we've talked about this. Yeah. And I was fascinated. So it's a weird thing. We all know that the Puritans were over in the colonies and we hear this term pilgrims.

Guest [00:16:00] Yeah. But

Vance Crowe [00:16:00] There's no connection between those two things. And so you kind of think like, oh, there were a bunch of people in England, they had these hats with buckles on 'em. They decided they wanted to leave and they went over to America. But that's not at all what happened. Right? Why did they even decide that they had to get outta England?

Guest [00:16:13] So yeah, it's interesting 'cause when you, and you know, this is why I do my podcast historical context, is to give people contextual understanding of what occurred in history. And I tell the story from the viewpoint of the participants of history, not what some academics saw thir 300 years later, and I'm right now working on the Plymouth Pilgrims and the Plymouth Colony. And what actually happened there is in 1607, the same year that Jamestown started, but 13 years before the Plymouth Colony started the Puritans of England, a group of 'em, a couple hundred decided to leave because they felt that the Church of England needed to be separate from the state. So they believed in the separation of church and state. And I think they may have been one of the first, they were definitely one of the first groups in the world to believe that they could have been the actual first. And they,

Vance Crowe [00:17:12] But see, I, okay, so just to clarify, yeah, because the Catholics definitely felt like there was a pillar that was royalty, the monarchs, and then you had the papacy. So you did have some sort of separation of church and state because they were, they were two different pillars, right? People were under a monarch, but then they could also be Catholic. So when you say they didn't believe in the separation of church and state, how is that different

Guest [00:17:38] That that there, there was tying in between the church and the state there, and, and I'll point to Spain. During the time of Columbus, there was a dispute between Spain and Portugal about where the exploration line, the, the line of longitude should be drawn. And the Pope at the time was Spanish. And the Spanish sent an envoy to the Pope and he created a papal decree that said, here's what's gonna happen. And a year later they actually, Portugal and Spain sat down and negotiated a new line. And so what span the Spanish government did is they tied in the papacy to break the one one tie to avoid conflict. And essentially that's where, so there was, there was physical separation, but they worked together all the time. So, but what what the puritans believed in is they believed in, you had the church here, an independent congregation. It wasn't, there was no leader outside of the church. It was independent congregation. And the state of England was completely separate. So people in government and people in the church interacted with each other, but they weren't of, you know, the same faith necessarily. And it was really bothersome to William Bradford, who was one of the leaders of the Plymouth Colony, that the Church of England was essentially run by King James.

Guest [00:19:13] And the the persecution piece of the Plymouth Pilgrims is true. I mean, they, they did, they jailed him. They banned.

Vance Crowe [00:19:22] And this is what, so they're saying, Hey, we are different religion. We don't believe in the Anglican church or the Church of England, so we're gonna be different. We're gonna wear these buckles on our hats and, and

Guest [00:19:31] We're gonna, we're gonna meet in secret. So that's what they did. They met in secret and they had church services in secret, and when they got caught, they'd get jailed. And so they decided around 16 0 5, 16 0 6, we are gonna leave England. We're gonna go to the Netherlands. And this is where a lot of people don't understand this.

Vance Crowe [00:19:49] Well, before we get there, 'cause you told me something that I I never really put in context, the stock aids, right? Where, where they would

Guest [00:19:55] Put

Vance Crowe [00:19:55] Somebody, they'd bend them over and they'd put their hands in and they'd have to stick their neck through. And you said if they got caught, maybe they'd have to spend an afternoon in the stock aids where people would come by, mock 'em, and it'd be really painful to be in that situation. And they were like, we're tired of this.

Guest [00:20:10] Yeah. Public humiliation. And they had some of that in Jamestown as well. And the Jamestown colony here in America, it wasn't that exact type, but it was, you were basically restrained in a public setting and humiliated for, you know, a whole day or something. And so that's what they did in England as well, to the Puritans. And so yeah, so they faced persecution, but they did not go to Massachusetts because of that persecution. They went to the Netherlands and they left and it was illegal to leave. So they had to kind of smuggle themselves out of the country. And it took about a year to get everybody over from Plymouth, England to the Netherlands. And I think the, the pronunciation of the town is Leiden that they, that they settled in and, and they got there and they realized maybe like somebody who leaves the, you know, leaves to go to the Peace Corps for the first time that they spent, they spent everything they had to get there. So they show up poor and they don't speak the language. So what do they do? They can only take menial jobs. You can't be a craftsman in a country where you don't speak the language. Seven.

Vance Crowe [00:21:24] Yeah. You don't know what kind of somebody wants seven.

Guest [00:21:26] Exactly. You don't know. Yeah, you can't, you can't communicate. So they ended up being the minimum wage workers, if you will, in the Netherlands. And what ended up happening is the children who may have wanted better lives, or maybe they wanted better lives for their kids, the children started assimilating with the Dutch culture,

Vance Crowe [00:21:44] They'd pick up the language a lot faster. It's just like people today, you know, your kids are the ones that figure out, hey, what's cool, what's not cool? How do you behave? And so your parents end up looking silly and old fashioned, and you're like probably getting married, you know, hooking up and, and moving in to becoming Dutch. Then.

Guest [00:22:01] So fast forward a decade later, about 1617, the, the, the puritans, I call 'em the Plymouth Puritans, and I'll tell you why I distinguish them from the pilgrims a bit later. But they're sitting there in the Netherlands and they're saying, my kids are, are speaking Dutch, they're getting married. We are not gonna exist as Englishmen in a couple of generations. We will be gone. And so now all of a sudden it became more important to be Englishmen than it did to be Puritan.

Vance Crowe [00:22:32] Whoa.

Guest [00:22:32] And they started thinking about how do we preserve being Englishmen? And that's when the idea of going to Virginia, as they called it, but that was the entire east coast of the United States came to mind. And the Dutch said to them, well, we're more than happy to have you go over, we want you to settle right around where Manhattan is today on the mouth of the Hudson River. And they said, well, wait a second, we're trying to escape Dutch culture. If we go to the where they're going, we're gonna have the exact same problem. So we need to have our own colony. So they appealed to King James and said, can we get a charter to settle in New England? Which New England was a new name for the northern part of the East coast. And King James said, no. And about a year later, in the spring of 1619, they actually physically sent somebody over to get to try again at the patent. And he said yes. And, and don't know exactly why he changed his mind necessarily. Maybe they saw money coming in from Jamestown and the tobacco where they said, okay, but they had to cut a deal. And that deal was about 40% of the people that that went over had to be mer what they called merchant inve, adventurers, tradesmen, merchants, non puritans. These were, these were English, English probably Church of England Anglican people. And William Bradford in his writings called the mix of the group pilgrims.

Guest [00:24:04] So that's why you have pilgrims and that's why you have puritans. Puritans are that religious sect, but pilgrims are the people who mixed together the Anglicans and the Puritans who went over on the Mayflower and established the first colony. And so that's how all of that ended up happening. And you know, I'm only up to, I didn't even, I'm not even at the first Thanksgiving yet, and I've read like 400 pages of primary William Bradford, Edward Winslow, a man named John Robinson, who was their pastor, her the Puritan pastor in the Netherlands. And I don't even think he ever came over. Some of them stayed in the Netherlands. Some of the Puritans stayed in the Netherlands. And obviously we don't know of that presence today. So they did assimilate in

Vance Crowe [00:24:53] The thing that's been fascinating about your historical context, the one that you did in originally, or actually it wasn't your first one, but, but a little bit later when with Columbus, when he's like first exploring the new world, you now are discovering that my understanding of Columbus was like a Disneyland understanding. It was like there was a guy named Columbus and he sailed over there and I hear he did a bunch of bad things. But then you start learning about the details of it and you realize like, what my like knowledge of this, it, it's not just that it's wrong, it feels like it's been hijacked, it feels like whatever I've been taught about history is so myopic, so slimmed down as to be like propaganda in, in some deep way. So when you think about you haven't gotten to the first Thanksgiving, what is your intuition about the difference between the way we think about Thanksgiving and the way that it actually happened?

Guest [00:25:47] I think that the first Thanksgiving was probably some type of English ritual that was already in place. So there's gonna be some things that they did that you can actually tie back to England. But at the where I'm at in my reading right now, I'm just a few months ahead and the the pilgrims did a much better job making friends with the natives than the Jamestown colonists did. And they,

Vance Crowe [00:26:13] So say more about that. Yeah. So

Guest [00:26:14] People

Vance Crowe [00:26:15] Have no concept of Jamestown or what it, or at least I didn't. So

Guest [00:26:18] Jamestown, there was a lot of conflict not only amongst the colonists and the natives, but amongst the na the colonists themselves. They, they were putting people to death in their own colony left and right for violating different laws. And the whole reason that happened in my opinion, is because there was a food shortage when in, in, in Virginia itself amongst the natives and the colonists when the colonists arrived. So fighting for food became the priority for survival. And that's why natives and colonists were killing each other. But it's also why I think colonists were killing each other. They, they, they created these stringent martial laws to try to control people's behavior because they would go out and do these terrible things in the name of trying to survive. And so Jamestown, frankly, the Jamestown colony should have probably been abandoned. They should have gotten back on the boat and came back over to England and said, look, things there aren't working. And Plymouth should have been the first colony that we talk about as a success story. Because when they, when they came over, it wasn't that food was plentiful, it was that a plague had killed 90% of the natives in New England, a plague of unknown origin. And so now food was available and the population was so small that the pilgrims were able to come in and share those resources and build relationships with the different native tribes.

Guest [00:27:53] You

Vance Crowe [00:27:53] Know, you bring up the idea about how people were behaving when things were scarce. And I think that that's something that even myself, the only thing I can do is read about when people were living in environments where they didn't have literally everything that they could possibly need to survive, not necessarily thrive and be entertained and, you know, have all these things, but like the human animal operates differently in times of lean and as, as a human that was born in this modern age that we live in now, I don't really have a sense for that. I, I a little bit in Africa where you'd see people that were living on the edge, but even those people weren't starving to death. Right. The, there, there, there are people in in Africa that don't make it because they don't have enough food. But it's a funny thing to think about like this entire aspect of the human psyche where you don't really know what you would do if you were listening to your baby cry and not have food. You don't, you don't really know what you would do if you're hungry and you see somebody else eating and you don't know when you're going to eat again. Because then I think you really do come down to a much more base primal level that we don't, we don't, we don't experience as, as human beings, it's hard to even predict how we would behave because all we have is the ancient writings of what it was like when people were like that.

Guest [00:29:09] So yeah, tying in your Columbus comment with that, I think that history just naturally for, for human beings gets diluted over time because people aren't living in that era anymore. And so what survives is only what you read about essentially from a third party, because a lot of Americans don't realize how many primary sources are out there to read from first experience. And so what ends up happening is you have this fairytale version of Columbus, it gets diluted down, it gets broken down, it gets chopped up, and the school system has only so much time to teach it to you. So now it gets rushed. And so now you have this different viewpoint, but what has happened to your second point is we are now living in the age of plenty. And so the age of Plenty, which has existed in this country for decades now, has produced a generation of people who look back on what happened during Columbus' era and they start judging those individuals based on their cultural age of plenty experience. Well, I would've never done that. Well, I would've never done that. And then, so that's creating and, and, and it's inserting politics into our history, which is so inappropriate because if you read Columbus's actual writings in that there was plenty of politics going on, then you, you do not need to judge anybody from a, you know, 500 years later standpoint just read what they wrote.

Guest [00:30:46] And you'll see there's plenty of politics existing then. And that's why I'm trying to do what I do. I wanna place people as close to the moment as I actually can and, and try to give them an experience. And as, as the number of primary resources expands as you get into the 17th and 18th century, what I'm hoping to do is alter that into where it's almost a current events type deal where you feel like you are living in that historical moment and you don't know what's gonna happen next. Because I've brought it down to such a deep level that your understanding of history, like, you know, Plymouth pilgrims were persecuted by England. Well if I tell you the story of them going to the Netherlands, you're like, wait a second, what's gonna happen next? That's what I wanna do. For things like the American Revolution and, and the very beginnings of American history and American government and I, and, and for me it's a journey and I think it's gonna be really fascinating to Try to live that as close to a current event as possible.

Vance Crowe [00:31:46] Yeah. The, and I think there's no better time than right now because in our culture, when you live in a time of plenty and people, in my opinion, people have right now a very serious lack of meaning. And they, they feel a hole in their lives. They have their food, they can be entertained at any time with the, with just put not even pushing a button, right? Just flicking your finger. You can be constantly entertained. And yet there's some sort of gap that people feel. And my sense is that to fill that gap, people join movements, whether it's the environmental movement or some sort of political or social movement because they keep thinking, if I dedicate myself to something higher than myself, then I'll, I'll be able to fit in i'll this void that I've had will somehow get filled. And it's the, you know, SAMO Bura who I had on last week, he, he calls it a social technology. So he actually, it'll come out Monday, I guess people haven't heard it yet, but he talks about social technology, which is what are the things that human beings invented to be able to solve problems so that they could survive and thrive? And, and one of them he talks about is church is a social technology that you use to create community because it gives us a way we meet, you know, regularly for Christians every Sunday, you know, you see everybody there and everybody has a set of values that they say, you're gonna follow those values. I'm gonna follow these values. This is where we're headed. Which I think is a big thing, right? Like having an idea of the goal of our lives is to get into heaven, for example.

Vance Crowe [00:33:19] That means we may not be all taking the same path, but at least we're headed in the same direction. And when you don't have that, people I think are naturally designed or, or they evolve to go searching for that. And when, when we, when we, when church didn't keep up with where society was going or society outpaced wherever church was going, now all of a sudden people are feeling like, well, I gotta go join the environmental movement. I've gotta go join this political movement. Whether it's the Black Lives Matter that are protesting or sexual movements or environmental movement, it doesn't really matter, but people are doing it because they're looking for meaning, in my opinion.

Guest [00:33:55] They're looking for problems to solve. And sometimes you, you gotta sit back and say, Hey look, we've as a society and a culture have developed to the point again, age of plenty, where it is no longer a priority to put food in, you know, every kitchen and, and a car in every garage. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:34:21] Yeah. Chicken in every pot has been achieved.

Guest [00:34:23] Yeah. And, and so now what do you do? Well, when we also live in the era of big government and big government can't sit back and say, you know, everything's great, we're good to go. Big government has to have a problem to solve. Because if they don't have a problem to solve, the people might look at them and say, why are we paying all this bureaucracy to do nothing? So big government thrives on problems to solve. And I would, I would challenge people to look at state governments as an example of that and compare the various state governments and see what they're actually doing. And in Illinois it has gotten to the point where some of the extremities that they're taking, they're, they're essentially creating problems outta nowhere and then solving them with absurd legislation because

Vance Crowe [00:35:12] They're not capable of solving the problem. That's a real problem.

Guest [00:35:15] Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a real problem in, in urban areas of Illinois violence, you've got real problems there. You've got, you need economic development, Illinois, we've got our $250 billion pension liability. It's unfunded. We need to do something about that. But they can't solve those real problems, so they go out and create new ones. And as you and I have talked about, one of the pieces of legislation now is to require tampons in boys restrooms for grades four through 12 is absurd. That's, that's state, that's a state legislation. That's a house bill that has passed.

Vance Crowe [00:35:55] It has passed. It has. I thought you were just saying somebody put that forward.

Guest [00:35:58] No, it has passed. And, and when, and you know, it was interesting because the way it's being talked about in Illinois, they're talking about we're requiring tampons in men's restrooms. It's way worse than that. You're requiring it in public schools for grades four through 12. So, you know, and, and in grade four you're sharing the same bathroom as a five or 6-year-old boy. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:36:23] A second grader. Yeah. I mean, like where I went to school, which still exists right now, Davenport Elementary. Yeah. Fourth graders go to the same bathroom as the second graders. So if you have to put it in for fourth graders, now all of a sudden second graders are looking at that and saying, what is that? Yeah. What are they for? And they, you're taking them out of the Garden of Eden. Children should be able to live in an environment where there's a whole bunch about life that they don't have to think about. You know, there's really only three real phases of life. There's the pre reproduction phase, there's the reproduction phase, and then there's the post-product, you know, reproduction phase. And that pre reproduction phase. It, it's, it's so tiny. It's so fleeting. And once you're out of it, there's no going back to it. And so if you take children and you say, Hey, you should know about these things in the reproductive phase so that, that way you can think about things like sexuality or attraction or, or gender at all. Right? You should stop thinking about what you're thinking about as a child, learning about dinosaurs, figuring out the names of the animals, discovering what you love and you're getting better at, and you're forcing that in there. I mean, I don't really see a big difference between putting tampons in a fourth grader's bathroom than I do about putting signs up about human sexuality. I mean, it is straight up a decision where you're not allowed to not send your kids to school. Right.

Guest [00:37:44] So

Vance Crowe [00:37:45] This is like forced propaganda on children. And no matter how you feel about the issue, why are we taking children in the pre reproductive phase and forcing them into the reproductive phase? 'cause you can't go backwards,

Guest [00:37:57] Right? Yeah. And, and the ultimate hypocrisy here is that several Illinois state legislators send their children to private schools who are not governed by that legislation. And that's where, I mean, I'll say it here and I'll continue to say it. Each time a public education bill comes up, if I track down an Illinois legislator that supports this bill, but they send their children to private school, I'm going to challenge them to then indoctrinate or put that indoctrination into that private school. So every Illinois legislator who supported this tampon bill should be pushing their private school that their children go to, to putting those in the, the boys' restrooms there too. And I, I tell you what, I know, I know for a fact it's not gonna happen. It's, it's the ultimate hypocrisy where, and and it's a really sad situation, but I think,

Vance Crowe [00:38:55] Well, because we're using children as the lever of politics. Yep. Which like, that's evil. Yep. You know, the def for me, the definition of evil is creating suffering where it does not need to exist.

Guest [00:39:07] There

Vance Crowe [00:39:07] Are problems that need to be solved if you focus on this one. And then you take children who should be in a phase where we're, we've got a walled garden around them, they get to live in this place just for a small brief period of time, and then they've gotta deal with the chaos of the world. But you say no, because we don't want you to look at the fact that we're not handling pensions. We're gonna make the entire media cycle, we're gonna make all these podcasts talk about this issue. Because if they don't, then they're stuck with a second grader being exposed to tampons being in the bathroom. I think the better punishment here is the legislators that vote yes for this. Anytime boys flush tampons down the toilet and plug up the plumbing, a legislator should be called to clean that thing out. Yeah. That I think that solved the legislator. It shouldn't be a janitor that has to do this. Yeah. Get the legislators that thought it was so important to make this happen.

Guest [00:39:55] Yeah, I, I agree with that. And, and ultimately we'll probably see this get revoked. It'll probably early on, it'll get executed. It'll be a total disaster and then it'll go away. And the reason that'll happen is because there are a lot of parents in Illinois who are moderate voters. They are sitting on the fence and they go one way or the other every two to four years. And when these democratic legislators start seeing an independent come to their meetings or write to them and say, Hey, I don't like what's going on here, this is a problem. Why are you doing this? It's not gonna be about, well, I need to preach to them so that they understand my way of thinking. It's gonna be, oh no, the voter base is shrinking. We need to do something to expand the voter base because that's their primary motivation. Ill, ill the Democratic Party of Illinois. Now, this isn't a national thing, it's the Democratic party of Illinois always crafts policy based on the movement of the voter base. And I'll give you an example the other way. They were gonna pass a bill that required you to put a meter in your car and you were gonna be taxed per mile with toll roads, with everything else going on. They put that meter in and the people revolted. I mean, there was, and they, early on in their hearings, they were like, this is a great thing. We got the technology. This is great technology. It'll be great revenue. It's perfect. It's a good way to get away from the fuel tax, the declining revenues of fuel tax because of electric vehicles.

Guest [00:41:29] This is great. People got mad, I mean mad. And they pull, they couldn't have pulled it fast enough. They could not have pulled that bill fast enough.

Vance Crowe [00:41:39] What's the relative population dis difference between the Chicago land area and the rest of Illinois?

Guest [00:41:46] Cook County has approximately 40% of the total state population according to the Federal Reserve. So, and it was, so that was in 2010, and in 2000 it was 44%. So Cook County is shrinking faster than the rest of the state. But here's what's funny. If you look at the Illinois Senate districts, the Illinois Senate districts in 2000 had 50% Cook County in them. So, so 50% of the Illinois Senate districts had Cook County in their geography, even though Cook County went from 44% to 40% of the state's population, they added a Senate seat.

Vance Crowe [00:42:34] How did that happen? Is Gerry

Guest [00:42:35] Gerrymandering the same people that control the legislature, control the maps and they, we just went through it again. And what I'm hearing is it's going to obviously be worse. They do it behind closed doors, they ram it through the legislature quickly, and then they get the governor to sign it and nobody knows what the maps look like until they're passed. So there's no public inquiry, there's no hearings, there's nothing,

Vance Crowe [00:43:00] Is there a better way to draw those maps? Is there, is there like a way that you would do it where it's not like, Hey, you got control from the Democrats and now Jeremy gets it, so he's gonna draw it his way. Is there a way to do this far less partisan?

Guest [00:43:14] I think, I think technology could help here and, and utilizing software systems to draw maps up based on population density. I'm a big proponent of every single legislative district being within 1% of a population of another. But what they do, I

Vance Crowe [00:43:32] Don't understand what does that mean?

Guest [00:43:33] That means if I have a hundred legislative districts in Illinois and there's 12 million people, that there's roughly 120,000 people per district. Okay. And apparently my understanding is that

Vance Crowe [00:43:46] That's not what happens. That's, that's my impression of what that is.

Guest [00:43:48] So my, my understanding of it, and somebody will have to correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is they can alter that if they believe it will provide more representation of a protected class of individuals in the legislature. And so if, if they could, they could shift those maps slightly because it's a more urban area. You get, you get more African American votes in that district, they could shift things around. But I haven't looked at, I, I can't verify that yet because I haven't looked at the, the, the population numbers. But the governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker in his press conferences has said we need more minority representation in our voting. And so I think that's what they're using to justify the, the population differences.

Vance Crowe [00:44:40] So I've talked about this on the podcast a couple of times, and I only have probably a Disneyland understanding of this. But when they were first setting up the Constitution and they were saying who is gonna be the national representatives, senators weren't elected in the same way that house representatives were. Can you tell me a little bit about what was it set up before? 'cause now it just looks like everybody's a popular vote just depending on where you're at. Yeah, but it wasn't always that way. No,

Guest [00:45:07] No. The, the US Senate was elected by their respective state legislators. And I think that went all the way till,

Vance Crowe [00:45:16] Meaning that your state, you would have all these representatives and then they would say out of these representatives, we're gonna choose somebody and we're gonna vote inside of our state. So you elect the, the state representatives, the state representatives then say, we're gonna choose these two people and we're gonna send them to dc.

Guest [00:45:33] And it was, and I believe the federal government gave the state a lot of leeway in terms of how they wanted to do it. They needed to do it through the legislative process, but maybe it wasn't both state houses, maybe it was just the state Senate, maybe it was both state houses. I think they gave them the flexibility to decide that. But it was state legislators that voted and selected the two Senate representatives from each state. And

Vance Crowe [00:45:59] So now why is that different than a popular election? What does that change about the nature of a senator? If they're not elected by popular vote, they're now elected by their legislator?

Guest [00:46:09] I think that you have, you have an elected group of people who is still accountable in your legislators, and they ultimately have to decide on who they want representing their state at the legislative level nationally. And so I believe that more prudence was probably done in terms of, of that process,

Vance Crowe [00:46:31] Finding somebody that could be a balance between the two as opposed to the, the right one or the left one. And now as long as we can, we're gonna hold that seat and try and tilt things towards the national level. I think that's the main impression. So I used to, I had interviewed a guy named Dr. Barry Flinch Bow, and he said one of the big things that changes when you set this, that senators used to be focused really on their state, but now because they're in this popular election, what they do is to gain power. They have much more interest in being a part of the Democratic party or the Republican party. So instead of representing the state, they're now a part of the larger national machine. And all it does is go to centralizing government control. And we like, now we live in it. That's the only world I've ever lived in. I've only known it where senators were directly elected. But I think it's, it's only made the process of mob voting ruling by mob that much worse.

Guest [00:47:30] Yeah. Yeah. It, I guess it would be considered more of a move towards a total populist idea. And it's probably gonna come up again when we decide whether or not we're gonna continue with the electoral college. What

Vance Crowe [00:47:44] Do you think on this, you think the electoral college survives into the modern, into the next age?

Guest [00:47:49] For right now, I think it does, but I wouldn't be surprised if proponents of eliminating it bring this Senate thing up and say, well, we changed this. And it, you know, it worked just fine. And, and I guess there's a point to what Dr. Fletch boss said in that, you know, my US Senator, Dick Durbin, he's been in the job 35, 40 years, who knows how long he's a career politician. But I rarely hear him talk about Illinois issues. He talks a lot about what's going on in other parts of the country. So does my governor, by the way too, he likes to weigh in on social media about what's going on somewhere else. And it is, it is a little annoying, honestly, when you see that. But I do think the electoral college will survive because I see the rural urban divide as getting worse. It's, there's a lot of friction there. But to the credit of the people that live in the urban area, and I'm not gonna, I'm gonna get a lot of flack from my rural friends for this. They do bend under certain circumstances. And so if the rural side gets enraged enough about the electoral college, the urban side will let it go. And I know that when, I believe it was Elizabeth Warren really brought this up, the rural side of this country really didn't like it. And so I don't think right now it gains

Vance Crowe [00:49:23] Steam. Well, that's an interesting perspective. We had a chance just yesterday to go to America's Central Port, which is essentially the farmland coast in St. Louis. It's where a whole bunch of cargo comes off of ships and trucks and goes on the river down or upstream. And it was really interesting because they were talking about how, because the LA ports and the West coast ports are so full and so backed up, and there's so many problems going on there that now shipping con companies are saying it's worth doing the two or three days of extra transit or paying the huge fee to go through the Panama Canal in order to be able to get your stuff up to Louisiana and then route it up through the Mississippi River. And I think for a long time, what most people don't understand how important transportation is to the politics of the country, right? If you have grain and you can't get it out of the country, that grain is essentially maybe not worthless, but it's worth a hell of a lot less, right? There's not that many people that are gonna buy it. So the fact that the ports are growing and that they're able to not just move grain up and down the, the Mississippi, but now can start bringing in cars and electronics and steel and route around that, then you start having these urban, dense, urban populations who get, derive a lot of their power. People don't realize ports are deeply important. Those are powerful things. And by having multiple routes to get your goods out, it helps the rural areas, I think retain some power to be able to control their destiny. But if all of your ports run through major cities and all of those cities are oriented away from the electoral college, you can end up forcing the people in the countryside to be peasants that, or surfs that just serve the cities.

Guest [00:51:07] Yeah, I mean it's, it's very well possible. And I know if you go back to your home county and talk to people, they'll argue that they kind of feel that way now and that, you know, all of the politics of the state of Illinois is coming mostly outta Chicago, a little outta Springfield, a little outta Decatur and, and champagne area. And, and that's it. And they're not having any say in, in what goes on. And they're, for the most part, they are correct there. But if they get, if you get angry enough, if you get angry enough, it's, it's fascinating how, how the, the political party that controls Illinois will back down from something.

Vance Crowe [00:51:46] So you're an interesting character in the way that you have had to deal with government. So we've had you on, we talked about your a government's guide to exploiting the elderly. But it's an interesting thing because I don't think I've, I maybe have called, I've called the legislator one time to, to make something move, but you really do pick up the phone and call people. So what is your kind of operating model? How do you decide what you're gonna spend your time on, who you call, what you pay attention to? Because you seem to make the gears move at least a little bit based on the fact that you, you generate energy, you get angry in your own words. Yeah,

Guest [00:52:20] So I have a great state representative, his name is Tom Bennett. He has one of the largest districts in the state of Illinois. And that's thanks to gerrymandering. It actually runs from Eureka all the way to the Illinois, Indiana border. Oh

Vance Crowe [00:52:34] Wow. That's

Guest [00:52:35] Like a hour and a half hour, 45 minute drive. And I often, when I introduce Tom to groups, I'll say, do you know why Tom has such a large district? And they'll, you know, they'll gerrymandering, you know, and I'll say, no, it's because he does such a great job and he's probably gonna get a larger one, come 2020. But, but Tom, you call his office and he has, he has an outstanding chief of staff there. Her name is Deb Arch. And I'll say to Deb, Deb, I've got a problem and I'll explain to her what it is, and I'll email her the documentation and they get right on it. And they don't, they talk to very high level people in Illinois government. So it's not like they pick up the phone and call the driver's services office that's right there in Roanoke. No. They'll call somebody that reports directly to Jesse White in the Secretary of State's office and they'll say, look, this is the problem that I'm having. And in before Coronavirus, it was very effective. But because of Coronavirus where we've now sent government employees home to do nothing and get paid, nothing's getting done. And so they're having, even, they are now having a frustrating time with getting things done with the government. The the big thing in Illinois is unemployment fraud, man, is it outta control? Unbelievable. I hope that somebody comes in and audits that when it's all said and done. I'll be shocked if less than a billion dollars was fraudulently taken from Illinois taxpayers in un fraudulent unemployment claims.

Vance Crowe [00:54:06] So how does somebody get a fraudulent unemployment. I wouldn't even know how to do that.

Guest [00:54:10] So it's done a couple of ways. First, it's done by actual individuals filing unemployment claims. So when COD hit and the thousand dollars sweetener, whatever it was, was thrown in there, I got hit with more unemployment claims in my business than I had total employees.

Vance Crowe [00:54:29] What?

Guest [00:54:30] Yeah, I had, I had more unemployment claims than I had total employees. None of my current employees quit. None of my current employees filed, everybody was a former employee of mine who filed, I had one person who showed up to work for one day and then quit. No call, no. Showed 15 months later when COVID hit, filed an unemployment claim. And the way the state processes those is you have 10 days from the moment they filed the claim to send back an appeal. And you gotta consider the fact that the post office is gonna take three days to get it to you and three days back. So during COVID, when the unemployment claims flooded, I got stuff that was filed on April 10th that I had until April 20th to reply back to postmarked April 23rd.

Vance Crowe [00:55:23] Whoa. So there's no way for you to pay, it's already been

Guest [00:55:26] Automatically approved, and those people should be getting a check,

Vance Crowe [00:55:29] And that's charged against you, right? You pay as a part of, like, for every employee you're paying into a fund that says, if for some reason we have to let this person go, they're gonna be able to collect benefits so that way they're not starving in the streets and they can find another job.

Guest [00:55:44] Your business is taxed based on the amount of claims. It's like an insurance thing you pay based on your claims. And that was the case until June when the Illinois State legislature voted to exempt employers from taxes, from unemployment claim taxes during COVID. So originally for three months, I thought that was gonna be the case, but then the state legislature came in and nixed it, and that tells you how bad the fraud is.

Vance Crowe [00:56:13] Oh. Because they knew everybody's getting hit with this. So there's all these

Guest [00:56:15] Everybody's, yeah. So instead of them saying, Hey, we're gonna start enforcing and making government employees do their job and vet this and create a process and invest in technology that would automatically deny claims, we're not gonna do any of that. We're gonna make the employers exempt from unemployment taxes. That's how they solve the problem. Meaning less money goes into the unemployment system, the fraudulent claims still keep flowing, and the financial situation actually gets worse. But they did that to appease the business owners, because again, like I said earlier, they got mad enough about it.

Vance Crowe [00:56:49] You know, it's, it's somewhat of a morbid fascination than I have with the state of Illinois, because I see how bad the political situation is, and I keep thinking it's gonna fall apart tomorrow. And yet it doesn't. Like there was a period of time where if you mowed a lawn for, for, let's say you're at the Capitol, you're the guy that got hired to mow the grounds, it would be something like 12 or 18 months before you would get paid for that. And I think, well, eventually people will just quit mowing the lawn for the state, because you can't, who can have an 18 month period where they don't get paid for work that they did. How is it that the state of Illinois continues to exist when they're in such arrears on bills when they're so behind? How do they keep going? Yeah,

Guest [00:57:36] So they, they have just ended their vendor backlog, but it lasted for 13 years. So from 2008 to 2021, the state of Illinois owed billions of dollars to vendors that they couldn't pay. And it, and that to me, anytime, anytime a member of the Illinois controlling political party says, we respect businesses, that's my ultimate BS card. Because you waited 13 years to take care of that

Vance Crowe [00:58:14] And to pay bills.

Guest [00:58:15] To pay bills.

Vance Crowe [00:58:15] Yeah, that's right.

Guest [00:58:16] And then they had a press conference. We've paid all our bills because we're financially competent. But what they actually did is they went out and borrowed $10 billion in short term bonds to help cover some of that. And then they took the coronavirus stimulus that they got and used it to cover the rest. So the reason that these bills are paid isn't because they're fiscally competent, it's because they went out and borrowed money from a different source and then took a bailout from the federal government. And, and so, so to answer your question, how do these vendors operate? Well, I'd like to audit some of those payments, because I bet there were at one, at, at its height, we owed $15 billion to vendors. 15 billion, I bet. Well, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what the percentage of checks that are gonna go out and those businesses no longer exist.

Vance Crowe [00:59:11] Oh, really?

Guest [00:59:11] Oh, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:13] Wow.

Guest [00:59:13] I'd, I'd love to know that. I think the comptroller has to report open checks or checks that I, maybe they don't. Illinois, Illinois kills you with transparency. They're transparent about everything. So you have to read through hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation to get to the truth, death by transparency. And so, but I'm sure they have to report their open checks at the comptroller's office. But I would be shocked if, I'd be shocked if less than less than 40% of those checks

Vance Crowe [00:59:50] Match. So ultimately, if you're in this situation, they got the COVID bailout, like do you, do you in effect, start nationalizing states? Do you end up saying, Hey, this state, the only way it can pay its bills is if the federal government steps in. So we're just gonna have the federal government pay these bills. I mean, if the federal government pays money, they're going to want something out of the fact that they bailed out your state. And you know, they're, they're not gonna come for just a little thing. They're gonna come for a big thing. And my sense is that that's political power or political clout or votes or something. But I still don't understand how the state still exists. Like how, if you don't have money, if you're really in arrears, how do you keep going?

Guest [01:00:33] Well, they, Illinois also controls the court system in, in the state. So in order to get any action from them, you have to file a federal lawsuit. And it takes like three or four years to get through. So they tie up the legal system as well, so that you can't force them into what, I mean, frankly, what they need to do is literally file for a state form of bankruptcy. And I know that's not legal right now. States are not allowed to file bankruptcy, but they need to create a way to do that, to clear all this crap off the books and, and settle with everybody, including the pensioners. And they don't, they don't want to do that. So the reason they stay open is they, they, what they really ultimately do is they pick up the propaganda machine and they start telling people, well, we'll pay you eventually. Or in the case when I was with the nursing home, they basically just said, that's the way it is. I mean, you wanna take care of Medicaid people. You're a faith-based not-for-profit. You wanna take care of people with no money. We're the only shop in town, and you don't have the money to sue us, which we didn't. So you're just gonna sit there and take it, and you're gonna wait and we'll have a check if we have a check for you. And so, and, and you have to, you do have to result. I don't know what I would necessarily call it. It's not corruption, but you have to be so firm with them that they real, if you wanna get something from them, you have to make them realize your way is the path of least resistance.

Vance Crowe [01:02:03] Yeah. The, the famous Greg, Greg on

Guest [01:02:05] The, the Greg Knapp quote, your way is the path of least resistance. And when you get them to recognize that they'll tend to do things your way, but it's a battle. I mean, you have to really risk everything and make them work for you to get what you want. And so I think a lot of people, unfortunately, sadly, Vance, have just kind of accepted it, okay, state's not gonna pay me. I'll, I'll eventually get a check. So I'll just sit here and wait. Now people do stop providing services to the state doctors did for a period of time. I mean, it, it did get bad. It did get bad, but the state just goes and finds other people to provide those services. And, and that's kind of how they operate.

Vance Crowe [01:02:50] So where does this go? I mean, like, how, because, so I've been, I've been trying to not be in Doom loops. In fact, going to see America's Port made me be like, Hey, there is a lot of industry going on. There is a lot of goods moving up and down. We got to be on the river. We got to see, you know, people moving giant barges through the, through the channels there. Like, it was, it was neat that, that actually was like a very hopeful thing for me. But then when we look at the political situation, I get into a doom loop where I'm like, anything the government touches is so negative and so bad that I think like, I, I can't look at it, right? Like, then, then my life becomes consumed by thinking about these things. And they're putting tampons in fourth graders bathrooms. Like, but how long does, what happens in a society where this is what happens in the states? Like,

Guest [01:03:40] You know, I don't feel doom Lish. And the way I stay out of it is, is I look at the community I'm living in, and my wife and I are very blessed to be there, and the people around that community. And what we need to start doing as a community is pushing back. And frankly, the way to push back with the tampon issue is say, we're not gonna put 'em in the bathrooms. Come and enforce it. Come and enforce it. Let's make this a public issue. And all of a sudden what will happen is that Bill will become a facade bill where it's actually law, but we're not actually gonna enforce it type deal. And so I think the way to stay out of the doom loop is you pick your battles and you know who to pick 'em with, and you stay firm in what you do. And you, you realize that with the people around you, the allies that you have, that it's gonna be a bit of a fight to do. But like I said earlier, you get mad enough, those people cave, they don't have morals. They don't have morals. Well,

Vance Crowe [01:04:45] I mean, I, it may be a better way to put it, is they don't have a long-term interest in fighting with you.

Guest [01:04:51] Right? They don't, they don't have a foundation of a belief set that is in any way, shape or form static. It's this constant wobbling of trying to make the voter base happy enough to continue to stay elected. So if you come in and represent a threat to that voter base, they're going to, they're going to, they're gonna give up whatever the policy is in order to keep that voter base moving. And like I said earlier, they've had some ideas that they've just absolutely loved and killed. The second that the anger level reached a certain point, and to give you an idea of how little they actually respect the, the, the populace as a whole, they actually had press conferences when they killed some of this stuff, complaining about the people being angry about it. So, I mean, yeah, I, I should say they don't have any morals. I, I should say that their belief system is so fluid, you can't really pin 'em down. And I mean, they, they support the environmental movement, but they don't support cleaning up their own neighborhood. Or they'll say they support cleaning up their own neighborhood. And then you go down the street with a camera and there's trash everywhere. It's stuff like that that these, these hypocrisies that continue to intersect each other that are so amazing. So

Vance Crowe [01:06:09] You're a student of history. We started off by talking about the Puritans and the pilgrims, but the puritans being locked in the stockades, we're not there, right? We're not in the place where people are killing each other for food. So there's some level of balance. But I always like to ask the question, is today seem like things are on fire because we're living in it right now? Or

Guest [01:06:32] Is it

Vance Crowe [01:06:32] Actually different than it was in the past? Because, you know, like you go listen to, I, I quoted this with Ben Anderson a couple weeks ago on the podcast. Like, it's like you listen to Billy Joel, we didn't start the fire. Those things seem like pretty serious issues that he's talking about throughout the, you know, sixties, seventies and eighties. You seem pretty worried about that stuff. Are we the same level of worried right now? Or is something tangibly different about our society than it was when Billy Joel was singing? We didn't start the fire?

Guest [01:07:01] I think social media has changed things just a little bit. It's allowed people to either panic faster. So I think some of the reason why we're a little more, we may be a little more amped up than we were, is because of social media and the 24 hour news cycle. You know, when we were kids in the 1980s, the only source of information was the evening news. There wasn't a 24 hour news cycle, there wasn't an internet, there wasn't smartphones. And so you had to have the evening news provide you with whatever the information was that you felt was important. Today, social media can, through a false story, set off a panic. The 24 hour news cycle can actually pick up stories that aren't true. An early example of this early example is in 2004 when 60 Minutes ran the Bush National Guard Papers, and there's a movie about that called Truth that I recommend people watch, but it was an early example of technology through forgery trying to create an issue that started a firestorm around President Bush. But then almost instantaneously when people found out it was a forgery, the fire came back and blew the other way.

Vance Crowe [01:08:29] Wait, so that wasn't real. I, I mean, like, I have no, that's funny because my, so 2000 to 2004, I would've been in college. The, you know, Bush would've been seen as the Devil. And yeah, it was, it was almost obvious that he had skipped out on, on his service or been bad. I don't, I don't even remember what it was, but my general taste in my mouth, even today as he cheated the system, what's the true story there?

Guest [01:08:54] So it may be true that he did cheat the system, but the story that was run on 60 Minutes was based on documentation that was forged. The memos were typed in Microsoft Word.

Vance Crowe [01:09:05] Oh, yeah. So that didn't exist and run through a copier.

Guest [01:09:08] And, and Mary Mapes was the executive producer. And, and I, I wanna say this too, you know, Mary Mapes was drug through the mud for what happened.

Vance Crowe [01:09:17] I don't know who Mary Mapes is.

Guest [01:09:18] She was the executive producer of the story. She also won a Peabody for Abu Gray, the Abu Gray story, which was a really good piece of journalism. But then she went to this Bush National Guard thing, and, and, and Dan rather got tied into it. This is how Dan rather lost his job with CBS news.

Vance Crowe [01:09:40] I remember him like he was the knowing something he did wrong. Like, but this was all the Melu. I didn't even understand what, so what happened with Tell the Story, man, this is the story I don't understand.

Guest [01:09:48] So the, the movie Truth presents it in a way that's sympathetic to Dan Rather and Mary Mapes. And I'm not quite, I don't think that was quite the way to go, but I do think it's a little more towards the middle. They made a mistake. They should have apologized for it. They should have said we're moving on. But what happened was some retired colonel called Mary Mapes, and he said, I have documents for you that show that President Bush skipped out on his National Guard responsibilities. And so Mary went to meet with this colonel and they sat down and talked, and he, he was not in good health. And he presents her with all these documents and he says, you know, the orig, she's like, where's the originals? Well, they had to be destroyed. They were copies. They were all photocopies of these things. So Mary starts to work on verifying this story. Well, a couple people are dead. And there was a guy named Ben Barnes who was Lieutenant Governor of the state of Texas. And he, in a public speech, said that he got George W. Bush and the National Guard, and it was recorded and he didn't know it. So Mary got the recording and went to him and said, you gotta sit down and talk about this. So that added to the, the situation, 'cause she wanted to prove that it was like a good old boy's club where all the rich kids came into this division of the National Guard, didn't do anything, and, and got their guard, got their Vietnam service, and avoided going to actually going to Vietnam. So she moves forward with these documents and she gets a retired general on the phone, and she reads the documents off and she says to him, is this consistent with this individual who wrote this letter who's now dead?

Guest [01:11:27] And he says, yes. And so 60 Minutes uses that then to run the story. So they use the general on the phone, his name is General Hodges, they use the retired colonel providing the paperwork, and they use Ben Barnes. And they run this story. And it was maybe 48 hours later, people online started saying, those memos are fake. They're Microsoft Word reproductions. And so 60 Minutes started doing the investigation and they noticed, yes, they are Microsoft Word reproduction, and I should step back here and say that they had four document examiners review the documents. And two of them felt that they were authentic based on signature analysis. And then another one said, well, I'd like to look at the original documents. And so they just kind of ignored what she said and went with the other, the other people. And, and they also talked about the tone of the letters. So this is authentic because of the tone. Well then the whole thing started unravel, you know, you had the Microsoft Word situation. Then they went to the colonel who originally said, I got these documents from another military source. And he said, actually, I got called to a Holiday Inn and this woman named Ramona gave me the documents and never gave me the originals. And

Vance Crowe [01:12:56] Oh, so it really was planted. It,

Guest [01:12:58] It really got unre. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:12:59] So somebody came in there and was like, we are gonna, we're gonna plant this. It wasn't just like, and it

Guest [01:13:03] Was, it was a very strategic plant of, of information, but you, Mary Mapes and they, they had two other executive producers resign. And then ultimately Dan Rather left. And it wasn't tied together. They made him kinda wait, he waited until after the election and after the inauguration actually to leave. It's a good movie, but it tries to make you sympathetic to what they were doing. And frankly, I would never go on television with stuff like that without further verification. And so I, I think they made a mistake. I I think they should have apologized. But yeah, the, the fervor that came, it was one way, and then it switched way over to the other was credible.

Vance Crowe [01:13:49] I worked in for, I was an intern for a news magazine and it was called now on PBS and I, there is, it was with a guy named David Bro Cacio, who now, if you turn on NPR in the morning and you hear the market report, that's David Brown cio, good guy. Right? But I did get an insight into the funding model that they used to be able to create these 60 minutes, like News magazine shows. And even then, so that would've been, I don't know, 2010 or something like that, that I was doing that maybe a little earlier 2008. And there is so much pressure for them to take complicated story and make it one simple enough for a sixth grader to be able to understand. And two, intriguing enough that you're like, I must watch this because if I don't, there'll be some, some thing about the world that I don't understand.

Guest [01:14:39] And

Vance Crowe [01:14:40] I think that the, the reporters at the time, you know, they were good people. They, they definitely had a political bent. They definitely had like a way of viewing the world, but they were not trying to go out and, and, you know, spread bad stories. The, their, their whole thing was they were trying to get a paycheck. And the way you got that paycheck was you kept people's attention. The thing that it did for me when I was doing this news magazine is it helped me to understand that 60 Minutes is a brand, but it does not make people qualified to give you any more information than the people that you meet at the coffee shop or the people that you meet in these other environments because they're just a person telling a story and they know how to operate a camera. That was really, really healthy for me as social media began accelerating and you start seeing things online and it's so easy to agree with the thing. It's, it's so easy to propagate the ideas that you agree with about how bad the other guy is or how good the other one, I mean, and I can even tell right now as you're telling the story, like, I'm far more conservative than I was certainly as a grad student, right? So as I hear you telling the George Bush story, I'm like, oh, I bet they treated him badly. And then I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm pretty sure he probably didn't want to go to Vietnam, and I'm pretty sure he had the power with his family to not do things right. So there's probably some truth there that somebody was trying to get out and then they just get off the track and they go further and further and further.

Vance Crowe [01:16:10] And I think social media has turned regular people into the same incentive structure as those journalists that are just trying to, you know, get the feedback that they're looking for so that that way they can keep going. And I think the perverse incentives on social media is, is, I don't think that's anything revolutionary that it, that it's kind of destroying the way we think about things. But I don't know how we get out of that. And I don't see how it gets better.

Guest [01:16:36] I think we get out of it by frankly not giving attention to it. So if somebody, if somebody blasts something on social media that is like, you know, breaking, breaking news, you need to verify that before you feed into it in any way, shape, or form. So if somebody breaks in and says, you know, well the, the, the one that's been going on lately that maybe some of your listeners can relate to, especially in cities, is people are doing fake mass shooter alerts.

Vance Crowe [01:17:10] I saw that. Yeah, I saw that. So talk about that.

Guest [01:17:12] So, and I don't know, I don't know too terribly much about it because I am not as tied into like Twitter as others. So I, and it, they did it

Vance Crowe [01:17:21] In the Capitol, right? Yeah. I, they said like there was a mass shooting, it's on the grounds and they end up scrambling like real. And

Guest [01:17:28] If there's some guy out there that hates some business or some mall, he'll start that rumor that there's, you know, an active shooter nearby and, you know, scare the crap out of everybody and close the business down. And you have the police out there. And I mean, it's just, it's, but it's one of the things that's going on that, that talks to that whole panic culture on social media. And I'll see those now and obviously my blood pressure will go up for the folks in that area, but then I stop and say, I need to verify this. And that's where the Twitters, the Facebooks of the world are gonna need to get on board with some type of authentication of some of this stuff. Because they will become less relevant if the people that are given the attention are not telling the truth.

Vance Crowe [01:18:17] Oh, I don't think that, I don't, you don't think that, think

Guest [01:18:19] It'll be the other way around.

Vance Crowe [01:18:20] 'cause their attention generation machines, like whether or not they lose credibility, like people go to Twitter to find the things that agree with what they, they say, I think the best thing I've seen Twitter do, I hate it when they mess around with my newsfeed. I just want my newsfeed to be whoever I have chosen to follow, show it to me in real time. But they added this new thing where if you see a tweet that somebody's put out, let's say I, I see that you've posted an article and I like the headline, right? So I think, oh, that's interesting. So I just hit retweet, but I haven't actually clicked on the article. It does send this little reminder up that's like, are you sure you don't wanna read this first? And there's been, it's only happened to me twice, and that was enough for me to be like, that's probably good. I probably shouldn't be retweeting articles that I'm not reading that. I just like that headphone headline. And that's the kind of verification that I think they can do. But you don't want them in the news curation business. You don't want them in the information curation business because the people living and working in that world, the way they view what is true, or the way they view how to verify something is really different than the way Jeremy la you know, views something and reviews it. And I don't think they're gonna get you any more accurate information if they do that. And they certainly don't think AI can, can do any better. So

Guest [01:19:34] Does Twitter then become like a tabloid It

Vance Crowe [01:19:37] Is a tabloid, is that what it's it's a hundred percent that. I mean that's,

Guest [01:19:39] I mean, I don't, I'm not on it often enough to, to really, the only time I'm on there is to, to interact with the Illinois state legislators that I know are gonna respond to me. That's about the only time I'm on Twitter. And so I don't, I don't use it enough to know it. But, and, and the other thing is, is I absolutely hate if I fall for one of these fake stories, I get so angry, it like ruins my day, you know? And so I'm incentivized just based on how I am to stay away from anything that I think is, and, and I'm very slow on the news cycle. If, if there was a, a legitimate mass shooting that occurred, I would probably not know about it until several hours later after the whole, you know, thing was resolved.

Vance Crowe [01:20:26] Well, and nothing wrong with that. You know, the, the, I remember hearing, I've never verified this, that it was something like 13 days between when Lincoln was shot to when Europe found out about it, right? Yeah. Like, and you know, maybe, maybe it's good, you know, there's benefits that come with news moving fast, but there's also benefits of, of news moving slow, which is really valuable. Like we really don't, we didn't know and we couldn't have imagined what would it be like if I could use telepathy to send you an idea in my head all the way across the ocean to a mass audience immediately, you know, that's a social technology or a, or a change to how human beings are laced together that we didn't, I don't even think it crossed people's minds like, hey, this could have some downsides, right? You could, you can take rage that people are feeling in the center of the United States, the, the center of the North American continent, and drop that right into Europe in, in, in the blink of an eye as fast as I can get it in Chicago. I can hear about it in, in France. And I, I think that, I think we'll look back on this time period and be like, we were handing out nuclear bombs to people just like, you know, willy-nilly and not really having a way around it. And my real belief is that the meaninglessness that people are feeling, coupled with the technology that we're talking about and living in an age of plenty, we're gonna see cults develop and the cults are going to turn into religions. And I think they're gonna start in areas like food, you know, creating restrictions on what you can and can't eat.

Vance Crowe [01:21:59] And then those people will become healthier and people will say, Hey, what does that person believe? I wanna, I wanna go get involved in that. It's gonna move to what technology diet do we have? What are you allowed to look at, not allowed to look at? Because we want our community to not be jerked around by this and it's gonna have rituals like a regular meeting. I mean, I think people being separated from each other for months on end leaves you with no community, no connection. So I think there's gonna be, I I've been calling it a resurgence of church, whether or not it's Christian or not, I don't know. My, my my sense is that astrology is making a giant boom back into culture. And there's a chance I think that somebody could come along and lace together some really good stories about astrology and then combine these other features. So I think we will see cults that will initially be persecuted, you know, where, where we'll say, whoa, they're doing things that are so different. We don't want that here. You're not welcome here 'cause you're not open enough or you're not understanding enough. And, and they'll, they'll make movements, I think we are in whether, I don't know that it'll happen right away, but I think in the next decade or two, we're gonna see a massive proliferation of new religions in the form of cults that, that some of them will survive.

Guest [01:23:13] You know? And I see your point, I think, I think it's gonna be political movement type deals. I see a point in Illinois where people will begin to start controlling what you eat. So they'll, they'll tax different unhealthy things, they'll pass taxes on those or they'll, they'll mandate different things. And the reason, and and there's, you know, variety of reasons, you know, for that. But I definitely see us moving into a movement where people try to control what you eat based on the fact that they wanna provide free healthcare to you. That's the only way, that's the only way you have even a shot at doing it economically. And even then it's not gonna work. But I mean, they're not gonna let people eat whatever they want and then provide 'em with free healthcare. It'll be a disaster right out of the gate. But, you know, I don't know, I don't know if it's gonna be, if your model would be tied around religion mainly. I think it'll be tied more around politics than anything I think, or social issues.

Vance Crowe [01:24:23] I think we like, just like we started this conversation about where is the line between the social technology of government and the social technology of a church or religion. And I think that we could lose the, the, we could lose the technology of the separation of church and state and we could, you know, get it back in some form of politics. But you gotta have faith in something in order to become a true believer of it, which is what causes that wheel to move forward on its own. And I think, I mean, hell, I think right now where you could draw the line between politics and religion right now, and society I think is a lot harder than people initially think. You know, there's like, you know, we talked about the, the tampons in the fourth grade bathroom, right? Like how, where do you distinguish between that being a government choice and that being a moral choice and what that ends up ultimately, when does that become a religious choice? Yeah.

Guest [01:25:20] I

Vance Crowe [01:25:20] Don't think it's as clear as it as like, we look back on the puritans in the Anglican church, what was the line they wanted to draw between church and state? It's, it's much, much blurrier than it was before.

Guest [01:25:29] And, and even, well even then, I I'm almost certain based on my understanding of history, that the puritans ended up not getting what they wanted because during the Salem witch trials, it was the church and the state working together.

Vance Crowe [01:25:44] That's exactly right. And a fervor

Guest [01:25:46] Yeah. That's similar to a social media panic, if you will, that that flared up and then just kinda went away when, and and that's another thing about, about human beings. When I see things that are bordering on hysteria, I tend to sit back and say, well, this is eventually going to go away because it's in that hysteria phase where there's a lot of energy building into it. And that energy, that amount of energy and attention is not sustainable. And so eventually we're not gonna be talking about it anymore. It might still be around, but it's not going to be bombarding us in the way that it would be today.

Vance Crowe [01:26:29] So I mean, that's kind of taking a lesson from the Salem witch trials, which were what, 16 hundreds? Six,

Guest [01:26:35] Late 1680s. Okay.

Vance Crowe [01:26:36] So versus looking at the social movement of Cambodia, Soviet Union, Germany, you know, ma Mao like we're talking, those are far more recent things where hysteria doesn't result in 50 people being burned as witches or hung That resulted in literally millions of people dying. So I, to me, when I look back on history, the, the, the idea that we're in this age of acceleration lends more towards hysteria, resulting in millions of people dying as it does to 50 people and having it be contained. I mean, I think if you went out on the streets and asked the average person how many people were killed at the Salem witch trials, it's a hundreds or thousands, right? They don't understand who's actually relatively contained. But also, you told me this last night that I didn't know that the Plymouth community was really only started with like, what, like 50 or 70 people? Yeah. It was very, very small. Yeah. And yet that small group of people holds such an important place in our history that it's a very, it's a very different thing. So I, I don't know, man, I don't mean to go into the doom loop, but Right. I think that, I do think that the idea that if we just hold our breath long enough that the fervor will end, I I don't, I don't see that it's,

Guest [01:27:48] It's not necessarily holding your breath long enough. There, there will be opportunity to step in and represent, I get, for lack of a better term, a counterculture that says, Hey, look, don't you think we've overdone it here? Or, or something more rational that comes about. Now again, I think, I think your wife said this yesterday, there's gonna be something else too that tends to be just as hysterical that'll come in and substitute

Vance Crowe [01:28:16] Because it feels so good to be worked up right when we can be worked up about what, you know, they're, you know, one side is worked up about the other one. And you and I feel that same way.

Guest [01:28:25] And I, and I think, I think our biggest danger as Americans is that we are raising generations of people who Don't have to work for what they have. You know, oh, you, you want to go to college and you want me to, as your parent to pay for it, and you don't want to have to work. Oh, that's fine. You know, you go ahead and do that. And by not creating that work incentive and instilling it at a younger age, we are creating a generation of people who are susceptible to maybe an individual who speaks romantically, but does so not from a real world life experience. And then we get caught up into that politics and that fervor. And what we end up doing is we end up creating a generation or a group of people who think productivity is yelling and screaming or trashing somebody or, you know, wanting to tear something down versus a generation of productive people who say, I wanna start a business. I wanna invest in my community. I want to hire people, I wanna mentor someone, I wanna volunteer at my church. Those types of things.

Vance Crowe [01:29:42] Yeah. Th so this makes me think of, there's a guy, this is kind of edgy. There's a guy out there from Canada who is a guy named Tom McDonald, and he started posting these, you know, rather like counter-cultural music videos and they're out competing.

Guest [01:29:58] Yeah. You

Vance Crowe [01:29:58] Know, he's one of the, the, I think he made $12 million last year selling records on his own. And he talks about how young people are being told the best way that you can help is by getting mad on social media. And that goes right in line with a really important thing we talked about at America's Port. We talked about it, which is succession planning, right? Yeah. There is not a culture being taught right now of apprenticing, you know, where you get in underneath a person and yeah, at first you're starting to get 'em coffee, but over time, you know, you learn how to carve wood the way that they did or learn how to buy real estate the way that they did or how to renovate places. We, that culture doesn't exist right now. And in part because of where we started in this conversation with the minimum wage going away, right? We, you've made it so expensive to have an apprentice if you're gonna do it legally, that it, that it just doesn't happen. And that part of our culture being able to pass down how do you run these businesses? How do you build this community evaporates? And if you don't have somebody teaching you how to do these things, you have to invent the wheel on your own.

Guest [01:31:00] If you're required to pay somebody a living wage, which essentially means you pay for what they feel is a living wage, which is totally different than what was 30 years ago. You know, housing, appliances, car, you're required to pay for that person right out the gate. You can't afford it if they're not productive. And so, like let's say you have no minimum wage. What's that? You know, what does that look like? Well, I hire somebody who comes into my business and they're unproductive. So maybe I do pay them under a living wage, but they gather skills and they become productive and they become valuable because as a business owner, it's my incentive to have a productive, competent employee. It's their incentive to learn skills, to learn trades, and to become a better apt to handle themselves in the real world. When you raise the minimum wage so high that you can't hire unproductive people, you, you actually contribute to the wealth inequity that we're constantly complaining about here in America.

Vance Crowe [01:32:07] Yeah. Because you only give it to the people that already have the skills productive. That's right.

Guest [01:32:10] Yeah. You can only hire the people that are skillful and productive and yeah. So I mean, and, and, and that does tie into the succession planning crisis. I thought succession planning before I, before I came down to visit, was something that is problematic because you have an aging group of executives, baby boomers, essentially. And so if you would've said, what's the three biggest problems in corporate America right now? I probably would've put succession planning at two or three. But now, after talking and hearing that there's only one person in an organization that knows how to do 30% of what gets done for, you know, there might be six

Vance Crowe [01:32:51] People. Well, we were hearing, we were hearing about a, their technology is these 1940s presses to make screws and bolts and stuff. And they ran into the problem that literally the only people that knew how to service the things were like about to die. Yeah.

Guest [01:33:05] And

Vance Crowe [01:33:05] So they brought in these college and do this, and that's only the explicit knowledge about how to make those things work that you, you can write down. Now that doesn't include all the implicit knowledge, which is how do you make this business run? How do you call the port when something doesn't go right and you've gotta solve a transportation issue or you know, the, the other, you know, oh hey, we're not able to get metal out of this country anymore. We gotta get it from somewhere else. How do we go about doing that? That's all that implicit knowledge. And without succession planning that goes away and those companies just can't survive. And then you have to literally reinvent those companies, which they, which they don't exist. And the way that you'll reinvent them is you'll do it automation and then there'll be no people there. Yeah,

Guest [01:33:50] Yeah. You'll do it with automation or you'll offshore outsource and send it over, you know, to another country. And that's been a hot, you know, button issue here, which, which frankly lately hasn't really been talked about much, but still, you know, is an issue that we, we have to keep an eye on. I would encourage anybody, if a young person came up to me today and said, you know, what can I do? What can I do? There's a, you know, there's obviously a few things. Getting involved in your community I think is huge in, in participating in your community.

Vance Crowe [01:34:25] Well, you did something that I think most people would look at as old fashioned, but you and the other guy, Travis Libe, who's the president of St. Louis Bank did, which joined Rotary. Yeah. And you didn't just join it, you joined it, you participated, you came to all meetings, you moved your way up. Eventually you became president of that organization. And because of that, how much did your world open up? Right?

Guest [01:34:43] Oh, a ton. A ton. I mean it and, and it wasn't, yeah. I mean the relationships you built were huge. And now if you ran into a problem in your workplace that you couldn't solve, you knew who to pick up the phone and call to come in and solve it. 'cause there's a lot of times where people have a problem and they're like, I, I don't know. You know, I don't even know who to call. Right. I don't. And and so now you've got, you've got a, an inertia crisis basically because you don't know what direction to move in now. I mean, I can't remember the last time I've necessarily had that type of event occur. I'm like, I, I'll even call people who I know don't personally solve that problem, but know somebody who does. And so it's, yeah, it Rotary definitely opened that door up for me. But I'd also, I'd also advise young people to go out and purchase an asset that is not their home or their car. Purchase an asset that must produce a return to improve your life. Whether it's a barbershop, an empty building, a vacant piece of land, whatever it is, go out and start doing that. And, and, and then also invest in yourself for the skillset. You know, the, the, the example you gave of the old businesses, the old equipment and somebody had to come in and fix that. Young people are are natural learners. If you give them a problem they're interested in solving in, it may not be the first person that walks in the door, but they'll be somebody.

Guest [01:36:17] And if, if young people today would go around and look for real problems, you know, the business on my corner over here, they have a problem that I'm willing to invest in to help them solve things like that.

Vance Crowe [01:36:33] Well, and like I, you know, it's not exactly easy. You have to go to places that are not luxurious. Yeah. So yesterday after we got done with America's Port, we got a chance to go visit Ben Anderson, who's, who bought a house in, in a part of St. Louis called Nor it's north of Delmar, which means like, it's in a rougher part. In fact, we made jokes about like, is it gonna be safe for us to go visit Ben's house? I don't, I don't know. You know, I'm mean, take my little daughter, I don't know if this is a good idea, but we go there and you see, he's like, Hey, I bought this house for, I don't know, $1,500. And then now he's been living in it, it doesn't have a good air conditioning system. He is had to like suffer through cold water showers every now and then. But he was able to buy an asset and slowly add money into it. So it wasn't like he had to have a pile of cash. He didn't ha he didn't have somebody coming in and saying, here, let me write you this check so you can go get all this done. And he's been building it by the time he's done, even if that house is not something he can sell, let's just imagine it's not, first of all, he's had a place to live, basically rent free. And then second of all, all the things you learn about installing tile, about wiring, he talks about the fact that he was scraping his door, it had paint all over it and he was scraping it for, for days and days and days. And finally one of his neighbors across the street comes over there with a heat gun and says, Hey, you know, if you run this heat gun over this paint, it just comes right off. Right. And so then he learns that, and now Ben will never again have to learn that lesson. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:38:04] He knows it, it's integrated and all of the other things about finding contractors and you know, when you hit a problem you don't know how to solve. And that's the way to do it. It's, it's not, you don't have to have a pile of cash. All you have to do is figure out where is a low value thing that my work and my ingenuity can make it a higher value thing. But it's a hard thing to do. And if you haven't had a job until you're 20, you're never gonna do it. Yeah. 'cause you don't have the confidence to do it.

Guest [01:38:29] Yeah. You don't have the confidence. And you'll, and yeah, and and that goes back to the sense of community. The guy across the street comes over and says, here, try this and it makes you better. That's the community at work. And it's interesting to see the revitalization that is beginning in that neighborhood. And I'm very excited for that part of St. Louis, because I think there is a opportunity there and people coming in and, you know,

Vance Crowe [01:38:55] Beautiful houses, beautiful houses. If you tried to build them now

Guest [01:38:58] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:38:59] It would cost you a million dollars.

Guest [01:39:00] Yeah. We're talking, yeah, we're talking about late 19th century brick homes that have, as has been, you know, told us three layers of brick and they're very well built and I mean, they had to be very well built. Some of 'em have sat empty for three decades.

Vance Crowe [01:39:16] Yeah.

Guest [01:39:16] So, and, and so, and it's no light remodeling need that's done. But anytime he needs help, he's reaching out to a member of the community to do it.

Vance Crowe [01:39:27] So I wanna wrap up with this last thought 'cause you had some interesting commentary on it while we were hanging out. This week we're reading for the book club, the a book called The Seventh Son. And I, I know you're not reading it, but I am, and I think this is one of the best books we've read in book club. It is like a fantasy historical novel. A novel by Orson Scott card, the same guy that wrote a book called Enders Game. And in the book, I'm not giving away anything, he says, Benjamin Franklin said that the best thing that he ever invented, it wasn't the trifocal, it wasn't the, you know, his discovery of how electricity works or these various technologies, the best thing he ever invented, in fact, the only thing he ever invented was the idea that you could be an American. And I, I really thought about this and basically the, the story is, and I thought this was fictional until you told me otherwise, that he was like, well how are we gonna bind all these people together? They're, you know, they're all different. They come from different races, they come from different religions, they speak different languages. But one thing that we all are is Americans we're living here, and that that bound people together. And that by having a shared identity, now they could have shared purpose. And I thought, oh, isn't that cute? It's in the book and I was telling you about this, and you're like, no, that's actually the way that it happened.

Guest [01:40:45] Yeah. Benjamin Franklin may have very well been the first American, and the reason I say that is because he attended one of the first multi colonial conferences. It was called the Albany Congress in the 1750s. This is before the stamp act. This is before any of the, the, the, the issues you read about causing the American Revolution. And in that meeting, don't necessarily know Franklin's contribution in terms of what he said, but the Don't Tread on Me flag came out of that meeting. It didn't come outta the American Revolution. Like people think it was, you know, a 1775 thing. No, 1752 at the Al

Vance Crowe [01:41:26] Culin Whoa

Guest [01:41:27] Is when Benjamin Franklin created that illustration that eventually morphed into, you know, yeah. The, the rallying cry of, of the United States. And so he, he is probably one of the first people that tried to bind to everyone together. Now. And of course I'm gonna be reading a lot about different things as we go along. So I may see something else, Bacon's Rebellion, which was in the la la latter half of 17th century, I don't know much about it. It occurred with a, a Virginia planter who rebelled against the colony, ended up dying of Typhoid fever, which thus ended the rebellion. But he may have actually been successful had he not gotten sick and died. Don't know very much about it. I'm interested though, because some of his writings have survived, you know, things like that. So maybe he was one of the first people that said, Hey, look, we need to be working together with other people and, and trying to do things. I don't know. But it appears as if Benjamin Franklin, if you say Benjamin Franklin was the First American, it's probably pretty legitimate.

Vance Crowe [01:42:33] So before I have you give a pitch for historical context, I'd love to hear your quick thoughts on the Articulate Ventures network. Why, why you're in there, and what value you get out of being in there.

Guest [01:42:44] So yeah, the Articulate Ventures network is great. It's a, it's a group of people we're now numbering into the sixties who have varying professional backgrounds. But they're interested in deep conversation. They're interested in how things work, why things are the way they are, and they want to dive far beyond the superficial of what you see. And, and one of the greatest values to me in that group, quite frankly, is it actually connects me to the agriculture community better than any other way that I can think of. And so I can learn about agriculture by asking sensitive questions. You know, the Ring Brothers are in there, why is the price of cattle not rising? You know, everything else is going up. Why? And, and they have an explanation for it. In fact, I mean, a very good explanation. So you learn a a lot more about how things work by, by being in this group. And Kate cos Kate Crosby's another great example of, she taught us how sunlight affects different plants. So you can't plant a tulip in the month of August and expect it to grow because the sunlight distribution is decreasing and it only activates when it's increasing and that's why they come up in March and April. So just cool things like that, that, you know, when I, if I decide to go play in a garden, I'm gonna be more mindful of what I'm doing and be more productive in my hobbies as a result.

Vance Crowe [01:44:18] Well, Jeremy, you are in the midst of publishing a historical context. Give us the pitch. What, what are you working on right now and how can people learn more about it?

Guest [01:44:26] So youtube.com/see/historical context is the actual URL. It is a, it's a podcast about, you know, telling the story of American history through the people who are actually there and wrote about it. And I'm going to be doing a just a couple of creative things there to help people interact with the channel better. But right now, if you go on there, I basically break things up into units. I use the playlist model. So I have Christopher Columbus, I have 16th century explorers, people who explore the lower 48 states before there was any colonization. I have a unit on colonization before Jamestown. People don't realize that 30 years before Jamestown, people were trying to, to colonize South Carolina. North Carolina. In fact, it's my most watched episode, the French Hu Knots in South Carolina. It's a cool story. So that's, that's the colonization before Jamestown. And then I move on to Jamestown, which is where I'm at right now, and talk about the Jamestown colon,

Vance Crowe [01:45:30] Which is a wild story. It's just, it's totally nuts. It's,

Guest [01:45:32] It's like Lord of the Fly. And, and then I'm going next to, to Plymouth in New England. And, and to tell that story, it's so, and for me it's a journey. You're watching me reflect on a journey that I'm taking to read about our country and how things started. So I know you had asked me at one point you said, Jeremy, share with us on there what you didn't know before. And I was like, well, that's 80% of what I'm talking about. None of this stuff I knew before. I mean, it was just, you know, the, the, the pilgrim spending a decade in the Netherlands and having all those issues, that's relevant stuff for people who at least want to, to learn more about history. I'm, it's not gonna be a channel for everybody, but I think that if you want to hear the stories that are being told to come on over and I invite listeners to share information with me. I had somebody actually reached out to me and sent me a Google Drive of thousands of pages of documentation that they had saved and gone out and looked at. And I, I was like, I couldn't believe it. I love that. I want people to come in to interact and to share other things that they want me to look at, but I'm gonna go as slow as I possibly can to tell that story. 'cause I don't wanna skip over something that becomes relevant at a later date. I wanna source where did this movement come from? Where did this happen? In the American Revolution? There's over 30,000 primary documents related to the American Revolution, and I can't wait to read 'em.

Vance Crowe [01:47:04] Well, Jeremy Osh, author of a Government's Guide to exploiting the Elderly. My good friend, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Guest [01:47:11] Thank you, Vance.

Vance Crowe [01:47:14] So I don't know, you know how to shut this thing down, Ben. I do.