Why Rural and Urban America Live in Different Countries: Montana School Board Perspective

Lyle Benjamin [00:00:00] It, it's a struggle because you, you have, we have freedom of speech, which I absolutely advocate for, and yet somehow in our constitution, we don't have accountability for free speech. And I, I, I don't know how you get there. I don't know how you incent that accountability towards producing news content that isn't incendiary and that isn't extreme and that isn't edgy and yet still sells and, and appeals to people.

Vance Crowe [00:00:29] I'm Christina Hudson Kohler, an egg processing manager living in Syracuse, New York, and you are listening to the Vance Crowe podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today's interview is with my good friend Statesman Lyle Benjamin, who is a former grain farmer up in Montana. And you may remember him from some of the early Coronavirus interviews I did a few months ago. During this conversation, Lyle and I sit down and we talk about, now he is a member of the school board, so he had to be in an actual official position to decide should we bring our students back and what sort of protocols will we have on them. We also talk about the media and all sorts of other wide ranging things. I love sitting down and talking with Lyle, but I actually get a chance to do it quite often because Lyle is my co-host for the Articulate Ventures book club. Every month we get together and this year we've been exploring what we call Lindy Books, books that have been around and stood some test of time. Maybe it's 20 years, 40 years, a hundred years, or even several hundred years. And this month we are reading The Stranger by Albert Camu. It was a dark book, but a really quick read. So if you are interested in joining the book club, you can always send me a Twitter DM and I can get you a link to it. We have had more and more people showing up every month to do this. The conversation becomes richer and richer because every single person that comes brings something to it that is unexpected and makes the group better.

Vance Crowe [00:02:04] So I hope you consider joining us this Sunday, August 27th at 7:30 PM and if you're interested, just send me a Twitter DM and I'll be happy to get you that link. Also, if you're interested, you may want to join the Articulate Ventures network. Not only do we do things like the book club, which anybody can join, you don't have to be a member of the network, but we also do things like a speaking gym where people come once a week and they get to try out speaking not just on Zoom, but maybe they're practicing for their work or for their school. We do actual formal speeches. We have an opportunity for people to give feedback, and then we tell them, Hey, how did you do on giving professional level feedback? And then we do these off the cuff questions where everybody that hasn't given, gotten a chance to speak gets a chance to try out. And I give a question and you have to think on your feet and give an answer. And we give you feedback, not just on how well are you articulating your answer, but also on the content of what you're saying. We find that in so many places in our world today, we don't actually have a chance to say what we think and explore how these ideas actually work and what do people really think of the way we're describing things because of this? Because we don't have a chance to say what we think. We don't actually get to think. So I'd like to think of the Articulate Ventures Network as a place where people can take classes to get better at articulating their point of view. They can ask for feedback on work that they're doing, or they can come and join the speaking gym and get actual feedback and interaction with people from all around the world.

Vance Crowe [00:03:42] So if you're the type of person that's up for an adventure, you don't mind trying something and failing a little bit as long as people are around to give you honest feedback that helps you get better. You may wanna consider joining the Articulate Ventures network there you can meet people like today's guest, Lyle Benjamin, and we're gonna jump into that interview now. So thank you for joining us and let's go to the interview. Lyle Benjamin, welcome to the podcast.

Lyle Benjamin [00:04:08] Hey Vince, it's good to be back again.

Vance Crowe [00:04:10] That's you Were back on when COVID was going on and everything was wild and totally up in the air. And the last time we spoke, there were the border between the US and Canada was being shut down. Nobody had any idea how deadly coronavirus would be or how much it would impact things, but now that things have settled down, how are things in the great state of Montana?

Lyle Benjamin [00:04:34] I think they're as good as they've ever been. It's life is pretty good. I think when we talked earlier, I had just however you wanna look at it, I either retired from my farm or I'd quit farming and had taken a new job. And so now I'm six or seven months into that new life and, and life's pretty good, but looking around, I, I think the state's in a pretty good shape too. People are pretty happy. Things are the life is good in Montana.

Vance Crowe [00:05:03] If you just woke up in the town closest to you, you, you just, you, you didn't know where you were gonna be. Would you know that you were in the middle of coronavirus

Lyle Benjamin [00:05:15] In in my town? No, you wouldn't. There, there's a couple little signs on doors that say either wear a mask or if you're not feeling well today, please don't come in. And there's maybe a handful of people that are actually wearing a mask here and there, but outside of that, life's pretty normal here. It you, you'd think you were still in 2019

Vance Crowe [00:05:38] And your boys, are they back in school? Is everything up and running as normal that way?

Lyle Benjamin [00:05:42] School starts next Tuesday. And I, I guess since we've talked, I've also joined the school board here in town, so I've been part of the conversation on how, how we open up and how, how we approach this new reality. And so that's been interesting and we're, we're going with a full open. The only things that are gonna change is that the kids will wear masks in the hallways between classes and then as teacher's prerogative whether the kids wear masks in individual classrooms. But otherwise we're going for a pretty pretty routine type of opening with a, a background plan in case things fall off the rails. But I, the feeling in the community and the feeling amongst the teachers, and I think everybody else is that we need to be running our little town in kind of a normal way and that it's, that's that's gonna be the best for the, for our community.

Vance Crowe [00:06:36] I, that's an opening, like I have not heard anybody else doing teacher's prerogative and, and masks in the hallway. How, is that something you guys took the lead from somebody else or was that something you guys designed on your own?

Lyle Benjamin [00:06:47] I, our superintendent was pretty proactive on this and I think the community is fairly united. I, there's very little, I I would say that it's a, like, it's probably a 95% majority feeling that this isn't too big of a deal and it's kind of blown out of proportion. So it's, it's not a controversial thing at all. So even the masks in the hallways just kind of, we're just matching up with some state standards that's coming from our state office of public instruction. But it's, yeah, we, we came up with this on our own and, and kind of figured out how to make this work.

Vance Crowe [00:07:22] So running for, did you have to run for school board or is that something, how does that work out in Montana?

Lyle Benjamin [00:07:27] Well, it depends on good town you're in. My little town is small enough that when somebody goes off the board, they run around and ask somebody and then they finally get your right arm up behind your back up between your shoulder blades and tell you you're gonna be on school board. And so, so it, it's quite often in an appointed position. And then once you're on, you, you run for the next, you know, the next time there's an election you have to run to, to retain your seat. But so in, in my case, I was asked to sit on the board to replace a vacant slot, and as it happened, two of us were asked by different people, so we ended up having an interview process to, to pick which one of us would end up being appointed. So that, that was kinda interesting.

Vance Crowe [00:08:08] Have you ever held public office before?

Lyle Benjamin [00:08:11] I have. I was on school board at my, my first farm in the middle part of the county. I sat on the school board there for I think about six months before we actually moved up here. This, this move up to the second farm back at 2010 was kind of unexpected. And so I sat on that board for about six months and it was a, a two room country school. We had two teachers, one secretary, and I think at that time about eight or nine kids. And so the, the school board nearly outnumbered the population of the school. And it was interesting that that particular board was very homey and rural. So a board meeting to talk about two teachers, a secretary, and a couple of bus drivers. And the budget lasted about three hours once a month because it took about an hour's worth of talking about all the farming that we had been doing the last month. And then we talked for a few minutes about business and then the conversation shift over to farming again and kids and family. And it was very, it's pretty rural and, and not real professional. This new board that I'm on now is, is is pretty well run and it's, it's about a 45 minute meeting to handle all of the business we have. So

Vance Crowe [00:09:29] On my last episode I was with Rob Long and we were talking about a concept called fractal localism where the closer you are to the individual, you change your political spectrum. So for example, in my house, I'm a, I'm a communist, right? We share everything and, and it's all equal. And then as you get further out with your extended family, maybe you're more of a socialist and you keep going out and the further you go out, you become more libertarian, essentially a republican. One of the thoughts that I have with this concept though is as soon as I get outside of my neighborhood, it appears to me that joining the political system, trying to find a slot for me, whether it's on the school board or the city council, seems like, like Sisyphean task. Like I have no idea where to begin, but it's so big and it's already so entrenched that I don't even know where to begin. So a part of me kind of romanticizes the idea that you're in a small town, but I also think that might be giving myself a, you know, a free pass and not actually have to do something when I know I really should be getting involved.

Lyle Benjamin [00:10:40] That's an interesting concept. I I, I had not run across that term before, but I, I think it is incumbent on people to be part of their community and what whatever that looks like, whether you're on the Republican spectrum of things or you're fully over on the, the, the communal side of things, it's, you've gotta be active in your community. And, you know, some people say it's to give back, and I, I think that's probably a little bit pithy, but you, the, the community needs active participants to function and you know, you, you need the garbage collector, you need the dog catcher. You, you need the, the street sweeper and, and then you need people that, that are more management side of things and that's where your town council, your school board or county commissioners or whatever comes in. And tho ultimately those are all functional elements of society. And I think you can tie it back to your practical localism, you know, even in your own household there's a division of labor and a division of management and you know, you might be the manager of the garage and shop space and the the driveway manager and your wife might be the manager of maybe the stove and, and something else that she's concerned about. And then there's divisional labor that you divvy out the task. So you know that that concept works very well across these macro and micro things. And, and clearly in, in a household, if you don't participate in, don't take an active role in how you want the household to run, it's, it's gonna go on without you.

Lyle Benjamin [00:12:15] So, you know, that's that same thing applies at the community level. If, if you have an interest in how things are run and, and how your town or county works or, or whether or not it does work, you, you need to be involved in that. And it's, you, you need to take your perspective to that.

Vance Crowe [00:12:33] You know, there's a lot of angst going on in the cities and you see people throwing rocks and lighting things on fire and putting mobs up. And I, I often struggle with how much of that is going on and how much of it is the fact that Twitter can be a microscope or a telescope into problems. But either way, there are people that they had no participation in their political process before. So it seems, and now they're throwing rocks, it seems like a really dark path for somebody to go down. What's your take on the, on the way that people have reacted to, whether it's George Floyd or Coronavirus in the cities?

Lyle Benjamin [00:13:13] I, there's a saying out there that it goes something like if all of your, if, if all of your problems, if all you have is a hammer, all of your problems start to look like nails. And so the concept is, you know, if you only have one tool or one avenue, then you try to make all of your problems fit into that tool, even though it might be a screwdriver that works better, repair a pliers. And so I, I, that's, that saying fits into this. I think I, I look at the rioters and protesters and they have isolated themselves down to one tool, and as you say, they have not participated in the process in a productive way. And so now all of their problems look like nails. And the only thing that they can do, the only thing they feel they can do is throw a brick, set a fire, burn a cop car, beat a driver, and it's because they haven't looked at other tools and other processes to achieve the things that they want to change. And you know, there, there's, they haven't engaged in the conversation and conversations are how you find out what the other party or what the other group of parties think about things, what their perspective is, what their approach is, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and, and ultimately find consensus in a conversation.

Lyle Benjamin [00:14:44] And that's what we don't see in a riot or a protest is a conversation. It's all, all we see is the damage and the, the violence. And so I that, that, as I look at that, it's a failing somehow of the cities to have those conversations where on the rural side, we don't have those problems because there's a connectedness and a conversation that's always ongoing. You know, there's, in my little town there's probably 400 people I think, and I know probably half of them, probably a quarter of them quite well. And so that's a, i I feel very connected to my community and you know, as you branch out into the rural neighborhood, my, my sales territory and that I cover, I know probably a third of the farmers in a, in an area that's 150 miles to a side of a triangle. So, you know, there's a connectedness there and an understanding of what all's going on in these communities and rural areas that I don't think happens in very densely populated areas. How do you fix that? I, I don't know. In, you know, 30 years ago we, we addressed this with fraternal clubs, elk club, lions Club, rotary Club, you know, everybody that was an adult was a member of some sort of fraternal organization that, that had a conversation with a disparate group of, of other men or women. And you know, you, you could have these conversations on a weekly or monthly basis and, and figure out how to solve these problems in your community.

Vance Crowe [00:16:17] Yeah, I think that that's exactly right. You know, if when people were going to church, whether or not they were getting the lessons out of church or some kind of virtues, I don't know. But I do know that you could no longer play your conversations like a zero sum game. You weren't trying to beat a person and then get all your friends to laugh or to agree with you because you had to see them next week at church and then the week after that and the week after that. And when, you know, you have to face another person, you know, unless you're gonna murder them, you're going to have to see them again in real life. And I think that that's one of those things that people are left with the impression that they're having a conversation, but they're not. And I, you know, I went through a really weird experience. I, I had just had my newborn child and I'm trying to, to interact with the world in the way that I had when I was just a married guy with a, with a wife that let me run around and do, you know, pretty much whatever I wanted. And now I'm reading Twitter and I'm having this emotional swing that I could have had before only I'm also holding my child. And that I can now start to tell that my emotional state is impacting the way that I interact with this little being that has nothing at all to do with anything outside of our little garden of Eden inside of our house. And I realize like something is way off here and I think it is that I keep thinking that I can behave the way that I was before where I can have these emotional gods, you know, to grabbing a hold of what I'm thinking and, and shaking me in different directions.

Vance Crowe [00:17:52] So I had to put it, put it down in a very different way.

Lyle Benjamin [00:17:56] That's, that's interesting. And I, I think that there's, you're also finding as a new dad that you, the world that you care about all of a sudden shrinks because now all of a sudden there's only a couple things in your life that really matter, and that's your wife and your daughter. And outside of that there's a, there's a bunch of peripheral things that you have to sort of care about. But I, I found as a parent that there was your focus shifts dramatically and it narrows up quite a bit. And there's a lot of things that cease to be important once you've got or or should cease to be important once you've got this little family unit that you're, you're trying to do the best you can for as a, as a father and, and as a head of house.

Vance Crowe [00:18:40] Yeah. And so I, when I imagine, I think that me having this experience helped me understand that the way that I was even interacting on Twitter, like the level of emotion that I would bring to how I was going to respond back to somebody, even if I was saying something that was not unkind, I still had the emotional flare that said, you need to pay attention to this right now. This needs to be sent right now. And that's just not true. But when you're in it, I mean, I quit smoking cigarettes years and years ago. I think that quitting Twitter or at least getting away from it was as difficult psychologically as quitting smoking was because you're giving up some the dopamine response, the energy hit that you get from it. And I did not know that. 'cause I had never given it up for even a few hours, let alone, you know, days or weeks.

Lyle Benjamin [00:19:37] That's an interesting thought too. I, I gave up Twitter the end of January about the same time I quit farming, which it was, it was a coincidence that the two things weren't related, but I, and Facebook was easy to leave behind for whatever reason. I I just shut it off one day and I, I never looked back and it was, I haven't looked back since. But Twitter is a different critter. I've been trying to get away from Twitter here for the last month or so, and it's, you, you're sitting around with the house one night and you think, I'm just gonna check on on one thing that happened a couple days ago, see what happened with that. And pretty soon you're right back in and an hour's passed. And I mean, it, it's, it's tough getting away. And I, you know, I I look at the signal to noise ratio of what's on there and you know, in an hour's worth of thumbing through your, your Twitter feed and there's probably one, maybe sometimes two insights you get and everything else is just noise. And, you know, so you look at that and you think, so I've just spent 60 minutes of my time and of that 15 seconds has been productive. Who's the greater fool here? You know, and, and, and who, who's winning on at this game? It's, you know, I, I look at my engagements on Twitter and you know, there's some of 'em that'll get 40 or 50 likes and quite often one or two. So you think, am I just shouting into the abyss here? And so what am I really accomplishing? Why, why do I spend this time, why do I waste this time?

Lyle Benjamin [00:21:09] And then you run

Vance Crowe [00:21:10] Cross it. So when you're talking about, well, so I was gonna say the signal to noise ratio on what people are listening to, I mean, that's with Twitter you feel like you're informed, but if we were gonna leave it or if you were gonna not use it as your news source, how would you get news? How would you know that you're informed?

Lyle Benjamin [00:21:27] I honestly don't know if I'd care if I was informed. I mean, there's, there's a, there's a couple of things that I need to know about and there's other sources for that information. And outside of that, it's you, you kind of look at how much do I need to know versus how much can I know? And so if I know this, this fact that I've learned on Twitter or on one of the, the big news sources, does that actually affect my life? Am I better for that or worse for that? Probably not. And so if that's the case, then do I need to waste any bandwidth of my mind at all on that thing? So why would I bother with news at all if all I really need to know is what the grain markets are doing and you know, kind of what my, my business and family interests are locally, that's all the information I really need. That's, that's actionable. You know, I, I look at the, at the national news, CNN Fox, M-S-N-B-C, take your pick of, of the alphabet news agencies. And again, the signal to noise ratio is starkly outta whack. I mean, there, there's a lot of news that really isn't news and it's not actionable. It doesn't make any difference to you. And it's, it doesn't have any bearing on our society really. It's a localized problem that should be handled locally. So I, you know, I, if I replaced Twitter with a news source, I don't, I don't know if I'd looked very hard for a replacement,

Vance Crowe [00:22:57] You know, when I was in school, whether it was grade school or then on to college, I remember having this sense that journalists were doing somehow like a, like a public service. And when I met my wife, I remember when we were just dating, she really disliked reporters. And it stemmed from the fact that when she was in high school and college and was an exceptional athlete, they would write long form articles and she would say there were entire paragraphs about, you know, my life or what I was doing. They were completely fabricated. So the, the wool had been pulled off of her eyes. So today I was washing dishes and I was thinking about journalists and I was wondering, you know, maybe we should give journalists the same level of credibility that we give actors. And it's not that they're like bad people, they're just playing a part and they, they don't have some civil society goodness be ra wrapped up around them. And I, I think that, that, like, I think it's a dangerous thing to say, 'cause you know, there's that quote that says, never get in a fight with a person that buys ink by the barrel. But at the same time, I think that we've given them a level of importance in our lives that they probably don't deserve more than Tom Hanks or Bruce Willis deserves in my life.

Lyle Benjamin [00:24:11] I think that's absolutely right. Yeah. And I, I think that there's, at some point in this country, we, and maybe this is overstated a little bit, but I think we went from journalism being a science to journalism being an art form. And when it became an art form, all of a sudden it's open to interpretation rather than just, here's the facts, this is what happened, and, and here are some things that are, are in the background to these facts. And so that's scientific journalism. And then you've got now art form journalism where it's, here, here's a few of the facts and here's a lot of things to think about them and here's how you should think about them and here's why you should think about them in this way. And that's art is how you feel about things, how you think about things, how you approach a, a, a piece of work. And you know, in art we don't tell each other how to view a a piece of work. You know, you don't look, you don't look at a, a symphony or listen to a symphony and, and have somebody tell you what you should feel while you listen to that. You just listen to it and it speaks to you. And you, you look at a painting, whether it's an abstract or a conventional or whatever it is, you look at that and you, you, you feed off of what that that image is, but without having to have somebody tell you, okay, this is the image and this is how you should feel about it and this is what you should think about it and this is how you should change your life to accommodate what this image is. I, I think that's what we're seeing in, in artisanal journalism today is, is that shift of rather than letting people make their own judgments based on facts, they are inferring quite a bit of things that are probably not necessary.

Vance Crowe [00:25:59] I have to wonder if the concept that you talked about with scientific journalism, if that's not a myth, right? If that's not the founding myth that we've built the, the, the whole thing on, I mean, I took journalism classes where you learned about the inverted pyramid and how you put these sentences in there and you should really only write thing. But when I look back, there's, there's an Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Missouri, and if you go there, you can walk through this hallway where they have the articles written about Abraham Lincoln both for him and against him. And they were every bit as wild as they are right now, the, the slander against him. You, I think you, if you took Abraham Lincoln out and put Donald Trump in there, you would see the same level of vitriol. And I think the same thing for Barack Obama or anybody else. Like they just take these characters and they say, we're going to fight over the figment of what this represents to people. And I mean, maybe there was a bygone era when, when journalism held some gold standard of truth. But I, I don't, I think I struggle to see that today that to or to believe that it was as true as we've been led to believe.

Lyle Benjamin [00:27:12] I, I think you're probably right. And I think that the difference that we, that we're seeing between what I would call a golden age of journalism, golden age of America, really is the, the, the entire country's spectrum of left to right and kind of where our center was relative to the edges was a lot smaller. And so a journalist could be kind of left wing or kind of right wing, and yet they were still an inch away from center rather than being, you know, feet or yards away from center. Maybe that's idealistic too, but I i i, I kind of wonder, and then the other thing that you see now is we have so many more media sources compared to the, the early days of TV where you had two or three stations and they went off the air at 10 o'clock at night, you know, the, the news cycle was, was actually finite. And so there was, you know, the, the range of opinion was pretty narrow also. And, and now we've got just a menagerie of news sources, both credentialed and non-credentialed and online and offline. I mean, there's, if, if you want an opinion, you can go find a news source for that opinion or if you have an opinion. So I, I think that that might be driving all this fragmentation as well, is that you can, you can go have that 2% opinion and you can find three north sources that back, that 2% opinion up and have it patch you on the back and agree with your perspective. And, you know, in the fifties and sixties when your perspective was Walter Cronkite, that was the only perspective there was to, for anybody to agree with was, you know, those one or two big league anchors.

Vance Crowe [00:28:54] You have to wonder if one of the, the diseases or dangers that we have in society is how quickly information can spread. Because I, I think that when we were, when I was first learning about the internet, everybody thought, look at how great this is. If we are to go to war with Iraq and there's the drumbeat for war, then we can just get on the internet and talk with the Iraqi people and ask them, do you want us to come invade you? And they can tell us yes or no, and we can understand and we can have citizen diplomacy. But that is not at all how it works because you still have to actually have connections with people over in Iraq and they could be citizens or government officials. And you still have to have a way to know if, you know, understand their language, understand their culture, even have a way to ask the question so that it makes sense to who, who they are and what they're thinking about. And I don't think that we accounted for this. And so we opened up this Pandora's box and we allow information. 'cause I think it's natural for, for there to be new ideas and people pushing on the, on the edges, like you were saying. And then you also have to have these trenches of, of old ideas or at least values that make us a coherent self. And I think maybe all this rapid spread and change, maybe more than human beings can handle.

Lyle Benjamin [00:30:14] I would agree with that. I, I think that we've looked at, we've looked at the informa, the internet as a be all informational source and sure you can go Google something and ping you pop up a paragraph about that, that thing. And yet all that is, is a data point. It's not a full understanding of that thing. You know, you, you go Google Plato and, and pull up a page about Plato and read about Plato, but that's not the same thing as spending weeks or months working through a, a book of Plato that's 1100 pages and, and slowly digesting what Plato talks about and what some of his questions and what some of his, his answers were. Those are two very different things. And there, there's a, a complexity and a nuance that you get from the right way or the old way of, of acquiring information versus this new way of acquiring information where you might have a data point, but you don't have a full grasp of the nuance of that, you know, all the complexities and all of the background to that thing. So, you know, I just because we have access to all this stuff doesn't mean that we are doesn digesting and using the western canon literature and, and creating logical societal pathways based off of that several millennia long literature group.

Vance Crowe [00:31:50] Yeah, the, I started a book that was essentially a compilation of Carl Young's lectures that somebody had compiled and then they read them, they read them like an audio book. And I've been reading it for listening to it for more than a year. I have no rush to get through it. I listen to maybe 20 minutes at a time and sometimes I'll go back and listen to it. I'm, I'm only in the fifth chapter. I think there's 13. And when you have an experience like that with a book where you keep coming back to it, the voice of it is a person that's consistent and you're revisiting it and you, you come across things at the time you need them to, it radically changes how you understand what that person was trying to say because almost all of my life I've prided myself on being a really fast reader and I just crank through books as fast as I can, bang, it's done, either put it on the shelf or toss it, and now I'm coming to the realization that like you're reading for taking something into your soul, you're not reading in order to be able to get it done. And unless you had that experience, you don't really know that there's a whole different side of literature that that, that you've maybe been missing.

Lyle Benjamin [00:33:03] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I, it, it is probably in some ways like reading the Bible where you can go get the cliff notes and you know, you can look up six or seven different verses and go, I, I know the New Testament now and I've read a chapter of Proverbs, so now I know the Old Testament, it's all there. And I read the first two chapters of Genesis, so now I know how all of mankind came to be. Okay, that's great. But you know, there's, the book is this thick and you've just read, you know, l less than a couple of paragraphs worth of of that book. So it's, you know, there's a lot of nuance in there and there's a lot of things that tie back and forth between the two halves of the, the Old Testament and the new, and it, it takes some serious study to, to find those things and, and figure out how they play into each other.

Vance Crowe [00:33:51] Oh man, that you bring up something that I've been wanting to talk about for a while. Yosha Bach Plin on Twitter wrote a tweet, I think right as the, my daughter was being born or maybe the day after. And it blew my mind. It, it was about how if you wanna read the Bible as a text that can help you read it as those people were entirely rational and they knew what they were talking about and they were instilling stories that allow you to, you know, understand things. And they talked about how basically Adam and Eve is the story of all parents with their children creating a walled garden where they keep the child from the knowledge of good and evil because you don't wanna scandalize your child. And so you can live in this paradise, but you can't live there forever. You have to eventually grow up and eventually you start to realize, wait, I'm naked, there are things that I should be embarrassed of, and I I have to be strong to go out into the world and I have to handle labor and bad things are gonna happen. But that, that book I, and I was like, Vance, you idiot. Because for years I was always like, look at how dumb that book is. Clearly this didn't happen. Who did Adam and Eve's children go marry and start having families with? It never dawned on me that the metaphor was right in front of me and I just didn't pick it up. And that's why, like, I'm not saying that there is some spirit in the Bible that makes it so everybody should go pick it up, but if you write it off, you write it off at your peril, you're missing some part of culture that is deeply important.

Vance Crowe [00:35:27] And I felt like an idiot. So I immediately went out and got a Bible and started reading it.

Lyle Benjamin [00:35:33] That was a mind blowing quote. I've, I've struggled in recent years with this, this piece of trying to read the Bible literally and say, you know, you know, man, nobody can walk on water and you can't turn water into wine. And there's, there's all these miracles that you, that you think, eh, so if that's wrong, where's the rest of this wrong? And, and that, that tied into our discussion about the Jefferson Bible here a few months ago in book club where that those, those things are distilled away and it's, it's down to the, just the, the bare truth and that, that read a little differently without those things that if you step back and look at the metaphor, the story behind the, the story or the, the, the idea behind the story, there's a richness there that is, is pretty amazing. But you have to, you have to read it with a, you have to read it artistically rather than scientifically to, in order to get that metaphor. And it's, that's been something I really struggled with trying to, to, to back off and say, Hey, let's look at this as the, as the story with the expanded meaning rather than re reading this as a true and complete history of the scientific evolution of, of that time and era. So

Vance Crowe [00:36:52] Yeah, and I had come to that conclusion a few years ago when Rob Long and I were trying to study the virtues. So we were going back and forth about it all the time and we started reading about Greek mythology and I had read Greek mythology and always been like, oh, look at those idiots. They believed Diane Isis gets everybody drunk and that, you know, that that lightning bolts are thrown down from Mount Olympus. But when you start looking at those for what is the metaphor in here that transcends time. And Rob said something to me one time, it never crossed my mind, the gods are all emotions that you have within yourself. And so if you can understand those as gods that can either be virtuous and do good things, or can be completely out of control and run your life, then all of a sudden you start being able to name aspects of your life and you're able to, to grab it. I mean, he who perceives is not possessed by something and that is like, and I don't know why I was not able to take the lens that I had for Greek mythology and place it onto the belief system of Christianity as these are beliefs that tr these are values that transcend time and help us become predictable to other people, and so that they are predictable to us.

Lyle Benjamin [00:38:11] Yeah, that's, that's a great way of looking at it. I, and it it makes me wonder as, as you look at these different things, you know, for example, the Quran is a, is a very foreign book to me. I've never, I've never so much as cracked the cover on one for a variety of reasons, but it makes me wonder there, there, there's certainly must be metaphors in that because that, that book has appealed to a vast segment of the world's population for thousands of years. And the same with other teachings. My father-in-law had some Buddhist belief system and, and influence in his life, and I, he died before I came along. So I, I never was able to learn anything from him about that. But it just makes me, there's probably some lessons in there that are useful to me about human experience or how I approach life and the people around me.

Vance Crowe [00:39:09] I, I, and that's one of the great things going into literature that you and I have had the chance to share throughout this whole year. So for podcast listeners that aren't familiar, we have a, the, the podcast as a book club and once a month we read a book and you've been helping me host this book club for the last eight months. Out of all the books that we've read, you mentioned the Thomas Jefferson Bible. What are the ones that stick out to you as having lessons within them that you weren't expecting?

Lyle Benjamin [00:39:40] I keep coming back to Dante's Infernal, frankly, which is one of the original books that we started with. And it's, I I, I'm still digesting that book and we've read that back in what, January or December, but I, I'm still digesting some of the things because it was so interesting how the different layers of emotion and process were dealt with, you know, what, what the punishment was for those and what the consequence was for those. And you know, some of those were kind of bizarre and some of those were yeah, that, that kind of makes sense. That's that there's, there was some intuition to it. And so that one has been really interesting to go back and, and read a chapter here and there and, and try to continue to process what Dante was thinking as he talked about these various sins and how they were dealt with. And I, there's, there's probably a metaphor there in, in how society deals with and thinks about sins and what their consequences are or, or activities and what their consequences are, what their costs should be relative to the, the, the buying price of that. And so that, that book has, has been quite thought provoking to me.

Vance Crowe [00:41:01] That book was so difficult, but because we did it as a group, it was almost like when you start lifting or running with somebody else, you know, you have somebody that picks you up. And I would agree that was one of those things that when you finally had the oomph to be able to pick it up, you start saying like, Hey, the time that he's talking about the, the intrigue and the lies and the deceit and the corruption that's going on today was going on then. And one of the biggest lessons I took away from it is you're never gonna clean that up. So you have to learn how in the, in the words of Michael Ring and probably in the Bible, you have to learn to live in the world but not be of it. And that that's exactly what that book is telling you because all the people that were becoming of it burned in hell for it. And they still exist today.

Lyle Benjamin [00:41:51] They haven't changed nothing new under the sun. Yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:41:56] And have you picked up this month's book, the Stranger?

Lyle Benjamin [00:42:00] I, it's on my short fast reading list. I haven't had time to get to it yet, so I, I've gotta, I've gotta do some quick homework to get ready for the end of the month.

Vance Crowe [00:42:07] Holy cow. So that book, if, if you've not, if you've not read it, is, is one of the darkest books I've ever read. And it's not because it's violent and it's not because it talks about graphic, you know, gore or anything, it's just the way that this guy approaches life. And just like all of the books we've read so far, it fits so well in today's life because you find out that this person basically is a nihilist manifesting his life. You know, if you don't believe in anything, if you don't think anything matters, if you don't even care about pain or death, then this is the path you will go on and you watch how he's not wrong about the other people that he engages with, with this nihilism. But it's a bleak world and I really enjoyed that book for how, how dark it was.

Lyle Benjamin [00:42:58] I'm, I'm looking forward to it. I that that'll be this weekend's project to Wade into the depths of that one. I'm that, that you remember, I, I pitched the, the Virginian to you last month, I think, and I, I think that might might be an interesting counterpoint to it because it's, it's the, from the point of view of a character of light and the, the, the guy that's trying to do the right thing and he is struggling with how the right thing fits into a several different layers of society as the book goes on. There's, there's the big, there's this, at that time, Wyoming wasn't a state, it was the territory. So there was the territorial perspective and the perspective of the ranchers. And then the woman comes into his life and all of a sudden he's got this family perspective of what, what's moral when you have someone looking over your shoulder into the world that you live in and is the, is the thing is the course of action that was right yesterday, still the right course of action today was someone who is not of your world looking into your world. So there's, there's a really interesting play in that book that's, that's kind of wild as it develops.

Vance Crowe [00:44:11] Yeah. And it's hard, like I'm seeing all of this, these questions about morality and about how to live in the world and how much things have changed and it's, it's, it's such an interesting time and I keep coming back to the question of is it crazier today than it was 20 years ago or 30 years ago? What is your take on that? Do you, do you think that right now it just feels more intense or more dangerous? Or is it actually, are we in a different time than, than than others? I

Lyle Benjamin [00:44:47] I, I think, I'm gonna come back to my quote here a minute ago. There's nothing new under the sun. I I think that the problems today may have a different face on them, but the, the underlying motivations and the underlying assumptions and the, the, the big picture I think is not different than 20 years ago or 50 years ago, or a hundred years ago or a thousand years ago. There's the, the problems haven't changed, you know, and, and that's I think why we can look at Greek writings and those questions and answers are as fresh today as they were then. And you can look at some Roman, you know, Seneca, the things that he talks about then are, are as true today as they were then. And you know, so there's people are people, and you could take any one of our people from this day and transport 'em back. And other than showing 'em how, how to live in that more primitive environment without internet, the thinking is the same. The, the motivations, love, hate, fear, passion, enthusiasm, happiness, all, all those emotions are the same then as now. And so IIII think this time is not different than, than earlier. It's, but the difference is that we're, we're living in this time and we didn't live,

Vance Crowe [00:46:13] You know, 50 years ago. Yeah. And that's true because I mean, like, just because the, we, our species survived, there are tens of millions of people at any given situation that didn't survive. You know, and the, if you were in Soviet Russia as the, as as they were coming to power, all of a sudden you might be labeled a olak and thrown, thrown up into a death camp. And that those things can definitely happen today. That's actually one of the biggest concerns that I have is that it, it appears to me that society always believes that we have transcended the, the darker parts of humanity. They, they always seem to believe that like, hey, we have science now, you know, we have enlightenment now and we don't have to worry about the dangers of tyranny or the dangers of somebody trying to grab too much power or, or just being deranged in general. And I don't know how you combat that because you can't sit everybody down and say, you have to think the way that I do. But you do want them to take seriously that bad things can happen to the tunes of tens of millions of people, which would include you.

Lyle Benjamin [00:47:24] Absolutely. Yeah. I, I read some history here a while back. One of my wintertime hibernation was reading a history of Poland and Poland's an interesting case study because Poland has had its borders changed continuously for centuries with Germany and one side Russia on the other, and then southern Europe on, and so, so that it's Poland's borders have looked like squishing a water balloon at your finger. They just shift back and forth left and right, north and south and all over. And so the Polish people have had multiple national languages, but they've always been poles no matter where those borders were at. And so the, the, this history of Poland talks about all the conflicts and, and how rapidly those border shift left and right and, and whether they were on Russian influence or German influence. The, there's, there's no constant state other than the spirit of Poland. And so it, it's kind of a picture of, I I think the broader global history and the broader human experience that things are always gonna be changing and yet the spirit never dies of, of wanting to be a certain kind of person or a certain kind of people. And so that was interesting reading through that and, and seeing that arc of history in, in Poland, Poland is actually now is in its longest peace time history of, of, of continuous borders for probably in the last three or 400 years, just since, since World War II and communism fell, Poland's borders have remained unchanged.

Vance Crowe [00:48:56] Why are they so contentious? Is do they grow food very well there or they have port, they only have one port city or one major, one or something along those lines, right?

Lyle Benjamin [00:49:05] They've got one port city, but you've got two vastly different cultures. You've got central Europe and then Russia, Asia, and, and there's, there's two kind of different cultures and there's Poland sits in the middle of that borderland between those two cultures. And so as those two cultures shift left and right and gain, gain strength and lose strength, Poland is that squishy middle that they use as a bulwark between those two cultures. And so the Polish people are caught on this seesaw between western civilization in Europe and kind of the Asian Russian amalgamation of, of thought and culture on the other side. So it's, it's a really interesting dynamic. And Ukraine fits into this a little bit. The, the history of specifically reading was Poland, but it's, so yeah, as you see this desire for strategic influence and raw materials and crops and, and social thought, you know, Frank, during World War ii, there was a, a conflict between communism on one side and socialism, or not national socialism, Nazism on the other. And those two things clashed in Poland and flattened Poland as they burned themselves out. And ultimately communism ended up being the winner in Poland there for a number of years. But, but that's, that's a, that's a look at Poland's history all through the years, all these different kingdoms, they were always pushing on Poland as, as that kind of borderland between some other culture or some other mindset.

Lyle Benjamin [00:50:42] And yet the Polish spirit of wanting lire and wanting freedom and wanting consensus never died in that time, which I thought was interesting.

Vance Crowe [00:50:50] When you say the Polish spirit is, is it the obvious things of probably religion was the same and the language was the same, or was there something even even deeper than that that draws everybody together?

Lyle Benjamin [00:51:06] I think the, the language is common, so the Polish language has never died, and religion is maybe a part of it. Although as you look at the reli religious span, there's, there's degrees of difference whether you're in European Orthodox or Russian Orthodox Eastern Orthodox or they, they all have the same kind of foundational thing, so there's not that great a difference there. So I, I think there's a desire by that people with that, that are united by their language around this concept of liberty and freedom and ne never quitting that some somehow is what unites 'em. And there's, there's a Polish liberty predated our American liberty in some ways, and, and the polls were early. They were the first country that acknowledged the American Revolution really as a, as a, their ambassadors acknowledged the formation of the colonies as a standalone Asian, because those radical ideas that were American were also very common in Poland. And they, they said, Hey, we get what you're, you're doing and you're on the right track, and you should throw off those colonial chains that you're under. And we feel the same way in Poland about the Russians and Germans that keep trying to enslave us. Do you,

Vance Crowe [00:52:32] Well, I, I'm, I'm curious if you've had this reflection on Poland. Do you read a lot about history? Do you think there is still a uniting feature in the United States? Do you think that there's something that binds everybody together that makes them have an American spirit?

Lyle Benjamin [00:52:48] I I think that there is, and I it that spirit may be a little dim right now, but I, I still have considerable faith in our country and where we've come and I think where we're going, and I, I think that spirit's still there, but it's that spirit, the, the, a spirit only thrives if it's fed. And I think right now that we're not feeding the American spirit as well as we could and we're not, or if we are feeding it, we're not feeding that American spirit on, on healthy things, run a junk food diet.

Vance Crowe [00:53:28] What do you think is going to happen around the election? Do you have any, any predictions on who will hit when or what will happen after, after the election happens?

Lyle Benjamin [00:53:38] At this point, I, I don't see anything good happening. I, I see a, a fractured population that doesn't have good choices on, on either side. And I, I, I, I think that we're in for a few, few more years of turmoil as we try to, as the, the edges burn themselves out, and we come back to some sort of middle ground or mainstream ground. And I don't know what that looks like, but I I think that the American spirit that's thrived for hundreds of years still has the ability to prevail in this. And we, we still have the ability to come together and unite, but the conversations need to shift dramatically, and they need to shift in a way that is truly conversational and not just bullet point talking point soundbite Gotcha. Sort of conversations. It really disturbs me to see on, on social media, everybody's excited about these debates that are coming up and, and depending on which side of the aisle they're on, they're saying, man, my guy's really gonna own this guy at this debate, and he's really gonna get this burned down point. And, and yet that's not what we need is people owning each other. We, we need a dialogue that finds a consensus in the middle, and that's, we need a robust discussion of ideas and how those ideas work or don't work.

Lyle Benjamin [00:55:11] And we need unity built around the common features of those ideas. And, and you don't get that when your entire focus in a debate is just making gotcha points and, and burns and, and, and quick little slams that are, they're, they're just fireflies. They burn out.

Vance Crowe [00:55:31] I mean, I don't think that the, I I think it's difficult to distinguish between a presidential election in the United States and WWFI think if you stripped away the, the pomp and circumstance around all of it and the actual seriousness of it, I mean, what, it's all character driven. It's, it's driven by like one side is good and the other side is evil. And, and you know, there's a reason why various societies have said if you give the masses the power to be able to vote and to be able to control their destiny, there's a danger in that because it can turn into spectacle and the people that have busy lives and they are ground down. I mean, I cannot, I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a single parent Now. I now being a parent with a wife that is nothing short of being a saint. I can't imagine how people do it. So if they're caught up by the, the craziness of the presidential elections and gotcha. Things like, I get it. Because who has time to pay attention to the details of how we should run for and policy or what our, you know, tax policy should be in these? So I, I think that there's a real question about how do you set up a democracy, a republic rather, that doesn't devolve into this WWF wrestling melee that it is right now.

Lyle Benjamin [00:57:00] And that, that's, that's an interesting question. And I've, I, I've struggled with that, especially as I've thought about the, the motivations behind how we end up at a WWF style thing. And, you know, if having worked with news media, some, you understand that it's all about what's gonna drive the headline and what's gonna sell a paper or what's gonna sell an ad in the, in the, within the tv. So if it bleeds, it leads you, you've gotta have bad news. You've gotta have something that grabs people that they wanna read. And so we naturally select with our freedom of speech in this country and our, our lack of accountability for speech, for responsible speech, we naturally select for the most extreme things every day as the headline for the news. So it, it drives what people's focus is to deals extremes rather than coming back to a plain old vanilla middle that isn't interesting. And that doesn't sell headlines or doesn't sell ad space, you know, on a, on a television channel. And so I, how how do you change that dynamic where you're rewarding the extreme edges of news production and, and the extreme edges of society? That's, it's, it's, it, it's a struggle. 'cause you, you have, we have freedom of speech, which I absolutely advocate for. And yet somehow in our constitution, we don't have accountability for free speech.

Lyle Benjamin [00:58:34] And I, I, I don't know how you get there. I don't know how you incent that accountability towards producing news content that isn't incendiary and that isn't extreme and that isn't edgy and yet still sells and, and appeals to people.

Vance Crowe [00:58:53] And, and maybe the answer is you can't, like, that's one of the things that people don't actually bring up. When I started to learn about how IQ works, and this can become a very controversial subject because even myself, I didn't want to, I didn't wanna believe it at all until you actually go and look it up. 100 is the median. So half of the population is below 100 and half is above. Well, 100 puts you at the ability to like do basic reception work, not even computer processing or anything like that. It's answering phones, it's making sure a message gets delivered. You're like telling, you know, calling a parent if a child is sick or something like that. It's not to say that all receptionists only have a 100, but that's what's required to do that. Just slightly below that is half of the population. And those are people that they can find a lot of satisfaction in doing rote work like factory work where the job is over and over and over again. And so the things that are gonna be interesting to them, the news that's going to be compelling to them is going to be different than the people that are just on the other side of that a 1 0 5 or a one 10. And it's, it's not, it's not fair. It, it's not a, it's not a good thing necessarily that we have these distributions of iq. It has nothing to do with how virtuous somebody is. But when half of the population is, is, I mean, not able to read the, the New York Times, then you can't expect that they're going to view the world in the same way.

Vance Crowe [01:00:28] And I think we're not really grappling with this. I don't think we're preparing college students. I certainly wasn't to say, what is your responsibility if you are in the higher IQ, to, to be able to help your fellow man be able to understand what's going on around them instead of just exploiting the hell out of them.

Lyle Benjamin [01:00:44] Right. That yeah, that's an interesting, yeah. I, so do you have two levels of news then? Do you have the, the parole news and the, the, the official news? I i, I don't know how you, what you do with that distribution of, of intellect. I, I, I recognize that I had an employee that was, I, I'll say in the below 100 level. And the things that appealed to him, the things that he'd show up in the morning and and ask me about were very basic, simple things that he'd read on the news, but they, they'd perked him up somehow and he'd ask me about 'em, and I would explain the nuance to him about those things and he'd look at me like I had a third eye coming outta my head because they didn't fit his simple soundbite thing that he'd gotten on the radio on the way to work. And he was always fascinated by what I could read into things. But certainly there was a different spatial level of understanding of, of the same news event. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:01:52] And, and I, I think about the, I mean, I've been around people that are a lot smarter than me. You know, you, you, you sit down to talk with Yosha Bach and you think, all right, please don't go too fast. You know, like, just keep it at a speed that I can be at. And you think about like what it would feel like to have people that are able to run circles around you intellectually go around telling you that you have to think this way, you have to believe this way. Eventually those people will say, well, I don't want to do that. Whether or not it's right or wrong is not that important to me. And those are the people that end up becoming very vulnerable to joining movements and to getting involved in with people that say, well, I'll tell you what the right way to think is and I won't make you feel bad 'cause you don't already think this. Yeah. And I think that this elitism that goes on is something over the long term elitism doesn't put you at the top. It burns everything to the ground.

Lyle Benjamin [01:02:50] I think you're right. Yeah. And we, we talked about that when we, we started the mass movements in the book club here a while back. And that's absolutely, it's, I I I think we need to be more of far more nuanced in how we approach all of these problems and, and, and how we interact with people at different levels of informational digestion.

Vance Crowe [01:03:14] Yeah. I read this book by Charles Murray called Coming Apart, and the book is really dense and it's, it's a long read, but it's really interesting. And he talks about the IQ distribution problem and how you have a centering, so college ends up putting people with higher IQs, it introduces them, they get married or they're in these classes and then they produce children that, and so you start selecting a way, in a way that our society hasn't. But he said something in that book that's away from IQ that I also thought was really important. One third of the US population lives in towns of 10,000 people or less. That is a statistic that I think most people aren't grappling with, with what's going on in our society because it looks like most of the people are living in big cities and, and there's just a few people living in the countryside. Well, that's not true. A third of the population in the United States lives in towns of 10,000 or less. And those people live in almost a different country than the people living in the cities.

Lyle Benjamin [01:04:13] I think that's true. Yeah. I, the, the interesting dynamic though is how many of those 10,000 population cities rub shoulders with another Exactly. Identical 10,000 population city. And so the statistics may be skewed in that sense, and you may, you may live in this demographic that belongs to Springfield, and yet there's a Springfield right next to Springfield and a Springfield right next to Springfield. And in the aggregate, that's an area that has 10 million people in it, and there's no corn fields and there's no wheat fields and there's no beef raised in that thing. So even though everybody fits into that population, that small, small town, small city population, their, their approach to life is very different than the somebody that lives in a county like mine that has a population density of less than one per mile. You know, it's, so there's, and I I, it'd be interesting to see what, how that, those statistics line up that way. I think we've talked before. I've Now

Vance Crowe [01:05:16] Do do, do you, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt.

Lyle Benjamin [01:05:19] I was just was gonna say, I live in a county that is so poorly populated that it's actually considered frontier. We lost enough population, it went from rural to frontier. We went backwards.

Vance Crowe [01:05:30] So there's been a bunch of talk about people wanting to move from cities into rural populated areas. Are you seeing that out in Montana where you're at

Lyle Benjamin [01:05:41] A little bit and there's, there's some interesting stats that are coming out and they're all anecdotal. So at this, at this point, I, I don't know what to do with them. But on the west side of the state where we have mountains and no wind and relatively more moderate temperatures and scenery, frankly, where people have already moved in and, and kind of filled up, we're starting to see a, a fair amount of real estate moves over there. Out here on the eastern, two thirds of the state where it's all either grain fields or cattle pasture. There's no scenery, there's lots of wind, we call it fresh air, and it's pretty extreme temperatures and, and pretty rough living. We haven't seen any movement out here onto the prairie for that. Real estate is essentially flat out here, although in our little town we did have somebody from Seattle by a, a vacant lot across the street from a mother-in-law's site unseen. So, we'll, we'll see if that turns into anything.

Vance Crowe [01:06:40] Well, Lyle, I always enjoy talking with you. I know I always get book club at the last Sunday of the month and I'm looking forward to, to doing that.

Lyle Benjamin [01:06:49] It's always great to visit Vance. I'm looking forward to it.