Police & Farming; Lyle Benjamin, storyteller, mountain man, whale pod.

Vance Crowe [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crowe podcast

Guest [00:00:07] Royalty.

Vance Crowe [00:00:08] Lyle Benjamin, welcome to the podcast. So it's Saturday night, it is April 10th,

Guest [00:00:16] 11th. Today it's

Vance Crowe [00:00:17] April 11th, and we are in the, the post Corona coronavirus world. What was your day like today, Lyle, and how was it different than had it been 19, 20 19?

Guest [00:00:30] A year ago, I would've still been a farmer and I would've, oh, this time of year I would've been just getting ready to start seeding. This time of year we'd be getting equipment ready, so getting the air drill ready, getting the sprayer ready, greasing things, and pulling some maintenance on different things. So that was April a year ago. As of February one, I'm no longer a farmer, and so I'm now an eight to five kind of a guy. So my Saturday I wake up and hang out, chill out, eat breakfast with the family just a little bit. And then as we're, we're kind of cleaning the house a little bit and packing things up and getting ready to make another transition here one of these days, so today was kind of packing up the office a little bit and packing up the house, and that, that was my day.

Vance Crowe [00:01:22] And how is your family different now? Coronavirus is going on, did would, is this pretty much what you would've done anyway?

Guest [00:01:31] This is kind of a normal Saturday? Yeah, the, I, I would say the boys in this Corona environment are bored out of their head. You know, schools closed, they're 10 and 13, so they miss the socialization with their friends. They get to do the digital stuff, you know, Google Classroom, Google Hangouts with during the school day. And so they, they've had a little bit of interaction that way, but outside of that, they're, they, they'd rather be with kids and, and be out running and doing things and throwing rocks and sticks at each other and, and playing in the sports and, and doing all that sort of thing. Today it snowed on us. We got about four inches of snow out here. So it was a, a good day to kind of stay hunkered down in the house and stay warm and drink cocoa a little bit. But that's, that's kind of what normal family day is here. Usually Saturdays I cook breakfast if I'm around and we have kind of a slow Saturday morning and then we roll into whatever the day's event is.

Vance Crowe [00:02:26] So this Saturday, it is not all that different for me. Like I normally I'd go to Juujitsu on Saturday, but my wife and I usually exercise in the morning. We spend a lot of time together, except for on this Saturday I was grilling outside and I had my dog out there, and then all of a sudden my dog is gone and I'm talking with my sister on the phone, and so I'm like, Hey, I got, I gotta go. I don't know where my dog is. This is crazy. And I go around the corner and I'm jarred awake because there is a guy there delivering my groceries and his son is like playing with my dog, letting it jump up on him and, and like petting her all over. And I, I was like really caught off guard. I, I, I had to control my temper because I was like all of a sudden in this place where I'm like, he may be touching my dog and getting coronavirus on it, and what if that dog goes in and touches my wife? Oh God. And I like absolutely had no idea that I would have this instantaneous reaction because I hadn't come in contact with people. And it was really, it was pretty upsetting for me, actually.

Guest [00:03:32] So was this a flight or flight kind of reaction, or was this just a, a heart leaps through your throat kind of reaction? Or what, what was the

Vance Crowe [00:03:40] It was actually, if I'm totally honest, it was anger. It was, it was immediate. It was destroy this thing that's doing that. Like why are you touching my dog? Kind of, what is this man doing? You know, setting things in my, in my yard. And it was very forward moving. And, and then I was like, it's just a kid. It's just, hey, it's just a kid playing with your dog. It was weird.

Guest [00:04:04] So the, the mild matter advance has this, this primitive response. Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:04:11] It had never, it had never occurred to me before in that way. Not, not since I was, you know, getting in fights in high school or something like that. Like I hadn't had that much, you know, you can taste well, you've certainly had adrenaline in your mouth. When was the last time, time you remember that taste being in your mouth? You know the one I'm talking about?

Guest [00:04:30] Yeah, I do. And probably it, it's been years ago, but it was probably, I, I was out harvesting. It was when I first came back to the farm after college and some ranching and some different things I'd done. And so I'm, I'm out on the combine and something screwed up on the right hand end of the header. And for, for whatever reason, I, I have no idea why I did what I did, but I, I got out of the combine, those old 88 20 eights, 88 twenties had a side door that you could go out the right hand side of the machine. So I got out that door, climbed down onto the feeder house. Those combines didn't have a automatic header disengage modern ones have a, a switch in the seat so that the header shuts off if you're outta the seat for safety. This one didn't have that. So for whatever reason, like, like an idiot, I, I walked down the feeder house and I climbed down this walk along the, the back of the header. It's a channel about oh six or eight inches wide. And the header, the reel is still turning and the the auger is still turning. The cutter bar is still, everything's running on this machine at an ile.

Vance Crowe [00:05:31] It's so nervous right now.

Guest [00:05:33] And I'm walking down this, this, the back of the header that's about six inches wide over the top of all these moving parts. And any of the farmers that are listening to this podcast are just, their parts gonna be in their throat as they listen to this. But, so I walk down this thing and the header's 30 feet long. So I've got this 15 foot balance bar that I'm essentially walking down and I get to the end and I look at whatever it is, and at that point I hop off the header to the, to the rear of it, so away from all the moving stuff and pull the weeds out of the sprocket and the chains

Vance Crowe [00:06:03] That are, that are

Guest [00:06:04] Still moving

Vance Crowe [00:06:05] With,

Guest [00:06:05] With my hands. And it, it wasn't until I got the weeds pulled out of there that I realized how completely stupid what I had just done was. And I, I, I still to this day, this is probably 2001 or 2002 when this happened, and there, I still just, I get a full body shutter sometimes when I think about how, how, how gruesome my end would've been if I would've fallen into all that mechanical stuff moving, I mean, I'm holding

Vance Crowe [00:06:35] My breath. It's like, you know, those experiences where you, you know, you're throwing something into a wood chipper or you're, you know, you're, you're back in the car and, and you realize like, oh my God, if I had gone one inch further and it was not anything other than luck that I didn't go just a little bit closer to that thing. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

Guest [00:07:00] And the silly thing is, as I think back on this, the only reason I did that, the way I did it was because it was the dust and chaff blows off the machine. And I, I was still in my clean clothes. It was early in the morning and I didn't want to get out the door on the downwind side and have to walk through the dust to go around the, the header to pull the, those weeds free. And it's easier to pull weeds free if everything's moving. So I mean, it, it's, it was this convenience factor that ultimately could have resulted in this very gruesome and messy farm death. And nobody ever would've known why that was, that I did what I did. But,

Vance Crowe [00:07:36] And you think you'd have died from it?

Guest [00:07:39] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because all, all these pieces are moving at probably 50 or 60 rpm, the entire function of the, of combine header is to pull things into it and then stuff it into the combine. So you, you've got this moving massive of things that are all designed to grab things and, and shove the crop into the feeder house. So I, I was, I was three feet away from, and, and, and one Darwin award away from falling into this massive machinery and getting pushed through this combine. That's, that's idling, that's a very powerful machine. I mean, this whole thing, just don't try this at home kids.

Vance Crowe [00:08:19] Whoa. And and you recently gave up farming, huh? You you like this, this level of adventure and then you actually just wrote a a, I saw it via Twitter and then you posted the whole thing about giving up farming in this place that had so much electricity.

Guest [00:08:40] Yeah, I, that, that, that's been the, the big event of the winter really. February one we decided to liquidate the farm. I'd been farming for 17 years and due to a, a series of economic and some management things and, and a, a variety of reasons, but we, we realized it wasn't feasible for us to continue farming. And we've, we liquidated. So over the past few months I've been selling equipment and kind of winding down the farm and wrapping my head around the new job that I'm doing now. And it's, so, it's been a big change. But the article I wrote today was, or I wrote it a couple of months ago and I just published today. But I was, I was talking about how I got to where I am and going through kind of some of the mental justifications for why I was okay with that. You know, farming is a really cultural, it, it's in your blood. And so if, if you're part of that farming culture, it's, it's historically very difficult to walk away from a farm. There's, there's that connection to the farmstead there. You know, it's the place that grandpa homesteaded or great-granddad homesteaded, and it's the place where grand, you know, dad buy his first machine. And, you know, there's all these family connections to a farm that are, that are just really, they're really basic and you know, it doesn't matter whether you're in Iowa or Montana or, or Georgia, they're, they're that same intrinsic feel goes with a, a family farm. And so I felt like it was important to talk about in this article how I was justifying being able to walk away from this farm at, at a stage before bankruptcy and before retirement and, you know, before all the other reasons that typically people leave the farming game.

Guest [00:10:28] And it, you know, as as it happened on Twitter, this, this article just blew up and I, it was, I mean

Vance Crowe [00:10:34] It's probably blowing up, up now. I bet your phone is just going nuts. But it's one thing to be a person that, that figures out, Hey, I'm gonna do this before I have to do it before somebody pulls the trigger on me. And then it's another thing to, to sit down and write about it and tell everybody about it. Because, you know, you could probably go a pretty long time where you tell people, Hey, I got out of the farm and you're only gonna have to answer as much as, as much as you want to. And most people aren't even gonna ask. 'cause you can be too embarrassing. So what prompted you to lay your soul bare there to, I mean, I, I, I think it was noble. I don't think there's anything to be embarrassed of, but I imagine if I was sitting on the other side of the pen, I might think that, not think that to,

Guest [00:11:24] To me it was, it was important. I, I feel like I'm not gonna be the only one that goes through this situation and I'm not gonna be the only one that experiences the emotions and the, the mental aspect of, of arriving at these decisions and then frankly following that decision, coming to peace with it and, and coming to grips with it. And so for me, I felt like it was important, partly in my leadership role with Montana Grain Growers Association, you, you, it's incumbent upon you to set the tone for the organization and to, to be a thought leader. And I felt like it was important for me going through this kind of relatively unique event to, to have that open conversation and, and let people know it was okay to ask me about it, frankly. And that it was, that it was a, a situation that is, it's not unique and it's not, it's, it, it's okay to to go through that. And it's, it's okay to to think very deeply about how you relate to your farm, how you relate to the family homestead, how you relate to that legacy that you have. In our case, our, our total family farm in Montana is a little over a hundred years old. We homesteaded in 1911. My brother's still on that place. So there's, you know, I didn't give up that connection, but I, I, I still felt like I was given up to a, to a degree, my part of me as, as I put this farm to bed that my wife and I farm on.

Guest [00:12:55] So I felt like it was important to talk about this and, and, and open that conversation because too many times when you see an event like this, people struggle with, neighbors struggle with this, this feeling that they don't want to tear off a scab. And so they don't ask the guy that, that just went bankrupt or that that left the farm for whatever reason. And so that poor guy sits there and he's a socially isolated then and you know, his, his friends don't wanna talk about it 'cause they're afraid they're gonna rip the scab off. And his neighbors that aren't maybe close friends but know him well, they don't want to talk about it because they feel like it's this painful thing to talk about. And so this poor guy's isolated kinda

Vance Crowe [00:13:41] Like within

Guest [00:13:42] His own

Vance Crowe [00:13:43] Clothes clean instead of going around and getting dirty and getting the shaft cleaned out, right? Like, if you keep your clothes clean, you got a good intention there,

Guest [00:13:51] Right? And these people don't, yeah, it, it's all good intentions. It's all great intentions and, and yet this poor guy doesn't get the benefit of this very cathartic conversation with friends and neighbors and, and be able to talk through it with anybody, but maybe his wife or his, if his dad's still alive, his dad, you know, and that's kind of the community culture. So I, I felt like it was important to break that, that cycle and, and have this very open conversation through this article that I wrote and, and, and get that out there in the open and, and let people know that it's o okay to talk about these things. And it's okay to ask a friend or a neighbor, Hey, what, you know, how are you feeling, man? What's, what's, how do you really think about this? And, and how are you justifying this in your mind? And, and on the other side of it, being able to tell that same farmer, Hey, you know, it's all right. Your family came out here and they homesteaded, you know, a hundred years ago. But there was a reason they came out here to this homestead. And it was because wherever they were at before, in our case, Idaho and before that, a few years, Missouri, things weren't good there. And so that those ancestors that came out here and built this homestead here left something behind that was, it wasn't as good as what they were coming to. And so that's how I've looked at this experience that I'm in now, is I was in, I was in a situation that was not working and it would, didn't offer the strong possibility of working. And so I, I felt like it was important to move to something better make d difficult decision

Vance Crowe [00:15:28] Better. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like

Guest [00:15:29] Move something better. Yeah, absolutely.

Vance Crowe [00:15:30] I, that, that is profound. And it actually describes, I remember I was dating my wife for not very long couple months, and she told me about how in her family that one of the family stories that they have is about how their family struggled in Czechoslovakia. So they took what few things they had, they had a, you know, a factory and they gave it all up and they came to another country 'cause it was gonna be better here. And then they started out as housekeepers and worked their way up. And that the family story really took a, the message wherever you are, that's not what you're tied to, what you're tied to is your family. Absolutely. And your family is what makes you who you are. And wherever you go, that's then that, that's a good thing. And I thought, man, a woman that thinks like this, like the family unit is what you're moving forward. It's not trying to hold onto a legacy or tradition that really opens up a lot of doors.

Guest [00:16:29] Yeah, it certainly does. Yeah. And I'm in, I'm in the middle of my family, you know, I've, I've my wife, my two boys, they're 10 and 13, that's at the end of the day, that's the only thing that matters to me is, is that we are, are, are well as a unit. And, and also if, if you look at the stresses associated with some very difficult thing like this, if if I'm not at my a hundred percent, it's hard for me to be a functioning part of that unit. And it's, it's so important as the family leader to be well medically, mentally, morally, holistically. You know, there's all these things that enter into that. And so that, that was, that, that was part of this. I I said, you know, is this worth getting up every morning and, and being stressed out about whether this is gonna work. And so it was, it was actually a really a relief to make this decision to walk away from the farm and, and, and do it before things went really south and do it in a time where I could still pay off every one of my vendors and I could still walk down Main Street and look everybody in the eye because I hadn't gone bankrupt and left them with, you know, less than what I owed them. And, you know, that that's, that's an important thing for me within how I do business and, and how I interact with the community.

Vance Crowe [00:18:02] Well, and by, by having integrity, it's what helped you come to the right decision about what moving forward is, right? If that, that's, I think a lot of times people think about integrity as like having to choose something you don't wanna do, but by having integrity, by having the things in place that tell you, hey, these are the parameters you don't wanna step outside of, that's what allows you to lead the life that you, that that, that you get to hold your head up. Right? Like, and what's more important than that?

Guest [00:18:32] Oh, it's, it's totally liberating. If if you have that that's been so ingrained into your, your very being, if if you live according to that code, then it's, it's totally liberating and, you know, it's, it's actually harder on you to go against that code and and kick against the pricks. I is is one way of putting it.

Vance Crowe [00:18:56] Well, you know, you are a guy that I think takes life really, really seriously. And I I don't mean that in a negative way. You're, you're able to laugh and have fun and make jokes and, but I mean like, you're here to play the best game that you can. Where did you pick this up? Like where, where, where did you get the integrity and the, the lessons? Because a lot of the things that you do are counterintuitive or at least they're counter impulsive.

Guest [00:19:25] It, it was just the way I was raised, you know, I, and, and not just by mom and dad, but by my grandparents lived the same sort of integrity. And so I, from, from a very early age, this was all I knew. This was, you know, dad was my role model, grandpa was my role model. And as I watched those two do business and interact with their families and interact with their neighbors and, and be part of the community and, and you know, just as I watched them look, that was the, the only thing I ever saw was to do things the right way to, to make sure that whenever he did a deal, the the other guy got the bigger half of the deal and you know, go that second mile. And it was just, that was the way I was raised. So it's, it's just part of my being and I, I don't know any other way to, to live. So I, I, you know, I can I point to a single thing that's tho those are the things that I, I grew up with and watched and saw and I, I saw the results of those and I saw how the community benefited from that sort of positive interaction. And, you know, I, to use just a little anecdote, dad taught us that if you're ever driving somewhere and somebody's parked alongside the road, you stop to see, see if they needed help. And that was, that was just one of those lessons that was just ingrained from the time I can remember ever driving anywhere. And, you know, whether it was 20 below and the snow was going or it was summertime, dad always stopped for somebody that was stranded.

Guest [00:21:01] Whether they were, you know, stopping to change a diaper on a kid or whether they were stopping to change a tire. It was, it was something dad stopped to, to see what the problem was. And so those were the kind of lessons that I grew up with. Was that always, you've always got time for the other guy.

Vance Crowe [00:21:19] And when you were a kid and you're, you know, living, were you living in Montana clearly then?

Guest [00:21:24] Oh yeah. Yep, yep.

Vance Crowe [00:21:26] Were you, were you dreaming of being a cowboy or a, or a farmer or what, what were you imagining you were gonna be when you grew up?

Guest [00:21:35] Oh, I was a typical kid. I was gonna be a half a dozen different things. I was gonna be a al and I was gonna be a cowboy and a farmer and oh, probably, I think in, in my early grade school days, I was gonna be a backhoe digger and that was gonna be my thing was, was run this construction company. And so, you know, I, I had all these different things that I was gonna do and, and in high school, I, I took the ASVAB test and it said I'd be a really good cop or else a fighter pilot. And I, eh, that'd be kind of cool to do. And as it happens, I, I'm one of those but not the other. So I, you know, life has these strange turns, but I I, I grew up on a farm and so I, I think probably the baseline was that I was always gonna be a farmer and of the, the, there's myself and two brothers and two sisters of, out of five of us, four of us are farming all within 30 miles at the home place. So, you know that, that is very definitely part of the family.

Vance Crowe [00:22:34] And I'm, I'm trying to find like a clever way to get you to tell some cop stories because your stories, like, I would've expected Montana farm rancher, the only thing, like if you're a sheriff, you're going out on the Indian reservation and having problems there. But that, but that's, 'cause that's all I see on tv, but you're actually dealing with real police problems.

Guest [00:22:59] Sure. I I'm a reserved deputy. I've been doing that for about 10 years and it, it's got its, it's got its moments. You know, certainly there's anecdotes that come up. I, I, let's see, what's a good one to, to tell you here tonight? I, you know, I, my, so 2009 was when I went through the training, training and I, I started patrolling. We we'd, 16 hours a month was your minimum requirement for the reserve side. So I'd go in and work a shift and you never knew what was gonna go on. And so I, I went in one night and I was just gonna work like four hours. And so I'd been on for about a half hour. I jump in with my, the guy I was gonna ride with that night and we're hanging out, figuring out what we were gonna do, and town's dead. There's nothing going on. And all of a sudden we're, we're sitting in dispatch and all of a sudden phone rings off the hook. The nine one one call comes in and it's nine one one has a, a separate ringtone and dispatch from the landline. And so, you know, things are, are getting frisky and so not only does line one one ring, but the landline rings. And so dispatch grabs one, I grab the landline and we, we get to this call out in the country and in the meantime, the line one, one call hangs up. And the long story short is this ended up being a, a domestic violence case. That was the first major felony that I ended up working.

Guest [00:24:30] And so Quist and I jump in the Durango and we go driving out there and it's, it's on the county line. And so Glacier County's also responding to this thing. And you know, I'm, I'm a rookie still. I've, I've only been on the job for like two months, three months maybe. And I, I, my first inclination that this was gonna be a little friskier than usual was that Sun Quist pulls his phone out of his shirt pocket and calls his wife and says, Hey baby, I love you. I'm going on a call and this thing might get bad, so I just wanna let you know I'm thinking about you. And then he hangs up and punches the throttle and away we go. Yeah. So, so we're, we're trying to figure out what we got going on with this thing as we're driving out to this thing at about 70 miles an hour. And we, we'd go faster, but those durangos were just death traps and they were really unstable at speed. The wind was blowing like 15, 20 miles an hour and so you just can't go fast. But we, we were making all the speed we could and we, we get about halfway there and he said, did you bring your rifle? And I, yeah, I brought him a rifle. How about your helmet? I said, oh yeah, I've got that too. It's in the trunk. You, you might need that on this call. So I mean the, the, we're setting the stage for this thing that's, that's getting kind of wild. And so we, we roll off on this place. Glacier County had beat us to the scene by about, oh, maybe 45 seconds. So they already had the guy in cuffs when we got there. But as it happens, this, this was kind of a major dis domestic. This guy had, his wife was leaving him and she moved in with some other guy and he found out where she was at and he spent the whole day drinking in the bar, getting his curry up and decided to go get her and told everybody that he was gonna go.

Guest [00:26:14] And so he goes out there and meanwhile the, the boyfriend, the new guy finds out that he's gonna, that the husband is gonna go out there. So he, he calls 9 1 1 and says, Hey, I, I'm, I heard that this guy's going out to pick up my girlfriend and he's kind of violent and so I'm gonna go out there and this is all on, on 9 1 1 tapes. And he, so he gets out there and he pulls over the hill and he, he says, okay, I, I see the guy's pickup, he's there. I'm, I'm driving in the yard and I have a pistol with me. Is it okay if I shoot this guy if I need to? And dispatch says, don't do that. Don't shoot him. And so in the meantime, this husband sees this guy coming in and he goes out, jumps in his pickup and he t-bones this car, which ironically is an ex-cop car. And so he t-bones this thing at about 40 miles an hour. And you hear it on the 9 1 1 tape later, and then you hear woo. And the guy backs up and hits him again and hits him kind of off corner, throws the car outta the way, and you hear all, you hear both impacts on 9 1 1 tape. And the guy says, he just hit me with his pickup. Can I shoot him? Dispatch says, no officers are coming, don't shoot him. And so this guy has his pistol with him. Meanwhile, the bad guy gets out of his pickup, comes around and he can't get in the driver's door 'cause he is just collapsed that with the pumper of his pickup. So he reaches in the passenger door and pulls this poor boyfriend out over the passenger seat and says, do not point your pistol at me.

Guest [00:27:51] And the guy points his pistol at him. And so the bad guy takes the pistol away from him and pistol whips this guy, I mean, just beat him to

Vance Crowe [00:28:00] A pole.

Guest [00:28:01] And, and then he, he hits him so hard with the pistol that he, he loses part of his ear. And so we roll up onto this scene. This, this guy's sitting on the porch just a bloody mess. His face looks like hamburger, his ears hanging. I mean, this guy looks like a bear attack

Vance Crowe [00:28:19] Bet he didn't think this was gonna happen when he started hooking up with that chick,

Guest [00:28:23] Right?

Vance Crowe [00:28:24] Yeah.

Guest [00:28:24] And so there's, there's glass all over the, the, the bad guy kicked in the front door. And I mean, it, it was a bad scene. And so we go in, we kind of figure out what we've got going on, and I'm, I'm back at the patrol car, we've got the bad guy in cuffs. He's sitting up in the cage and I'm inventorying the, the pistol. That was the kind of the centerpiece to this, quite a bit of this activity and it, okay, and I'm saying this out loud to this other deputy, okay, we've got this 1911, it's got a loaded magazine in it, then safety's on, oh, and there's a, there's a, a round in the chamber and the bad guy hears this up in the cage and he says, th that was not loaded. I pulled, I even made, pulled the trigger and it wouldn't go off. It wasn't loaded. So, so it's

Vance Crowe [00:29:11] Got an excited utterance.

Guest [00:29:14] So, so we've got this, I mean, now we, we went from this major assault to attempted homicide

Vance Crowe [00:29:22] And you know,

Guest [00:29:24] So a little cop story for you.

Vance Crowe [00:29:27] Whoa, that is intense. And as you were driving up there and you're imagining the rifle, this is like, are you nervous? Are you scared? Are you excited? Or like, what, what's going on in your head as somebody tells you to prepare for war?

Guest [00:29:49] So I'm fresh off my training on the reserve side. And so your, your training is as you roll into something, you're, you start going down through the checklist of what you're gonna do and, and where you're gonna move, what you're, what you're gonna look for. What are the, what are the elements of the crime, what are the threats, what are the dangers? And so as we're rolling into this, I'm, I'm, I'm on the radio with dispatch, trying to figure out what the yard looks like, where the house is, kind of what we're gonna roll into. And so, so for me it was just a checklist of, okay, we're gonna come in from the north as, as we see this, it's a, it's a farm yard. So as we're driving down into it, we can see, okay, there's, there's two buildings off to the east side, there's this house, there's a couple of vehicles parked in the middle of the yard that are very close together. So where's the bad guy in this? We, we knew that there was a, by this time we knew that there was a gun involved. And so we're trying to figure out kind of what we, and we're making a, the, the other deputy and I are making a tactical plan, you know, where are we gonna, where are we gonna approach, where are we gonna park? How are we gonna move into this house? So that, so it, it's really just a, a, a, a checklist of, of how you're gonna approach this thing. And so I, I didn't really have time to think about should I be scared? Should I be worried? I, I, I checked my rifle to make sure it was loaded. And other, other than that, that, that was kind of what you're setting into.

Vance Crowe [00:31:19] Man, that kind of training would be very valuable to anybody. It wouldn't just be valuable to a police officer just being able to analyze a system like that. It, it reminds me of learning logic in philosophy where you learn, you know, this is how you define a word. This is how you construct an argument. This is how you make logical leaps from one step to the next. I mean, that sounds like you're doing logic, but in a physical way.

Guest [00:31:45] Oh, absolutely. It, it's a very flow chart, sort of a approach that you take to a problem. Do you see this? Okay, we see this. Okay, if, if you see this, then how, how do you respond to that? One of the things that we talked about a lot in training I still talk about as I train new deputies now, is this OODA loop. So, observe, orient, decide, act, it's a, it's a principle that was developed by Colonel John, Colonel Boyd back in the fifties or sixties in the Air Force. And it was a way to orient yourself to problems and to a way to think about how to position yourself within the problem. So you, you observe it, what the thing is, you orient yourself what this means to me. You decide what you're gonna do about it, and then you act. And so the OODA loop, and it, it's a, it is a continuing loop that that functions and it, it's, it's really a fundamental way to work through things. But the interesting thing about it is, if you observe some new thing partway through the cycle of this loop, you start over your, your brain resets. And so if there's some new stimulus, you're, and you're, you're, but somewhere between decide and act, your brain has to re-serve reorient and then come up with a new decision about how to respond to that. So if you, we, we, within the law enforcement world, we talk about getting inside somebody's OODA loop and that's simply being able to, to process what we're doing faster than they can and, and stay ahead of them in, in the, in the fight or in the field interview or whatever it is we're doing.

Guest [00:33:22] And it applies to all, you know, there you can use that across a number of different things in life.

Vance Crowe [00:33:29] I read that book, but I did not take that away from it. I mean, I loved the hot shot guy who's just not gonna take it from anybody and he's gonna do his thing even when they tell him he can't. And, and, but the actual most important part, I just realized I had walked past because that you're, what you're explaining is exactly what that book talks about.

Guest [00:33:53] Yeah. It's if, if you start to think about it, you see yourself doing it in all kinds of different things in life. It, you know, you're going down the street and you, you realize, hey, I just saw this and I'm gonna do this about it. And okay, now I'm gonna do that. And it's, it's, it's foundational to really how the human brain works.

Vance Crowe [00:34:11] So now we're living in coronavirus world or post coronavirus world, would you say, I, I don't know if you've heard me describe this, but I think there are the traditionalists, the people that believe that coronavirus is gonna go, when we get done with this, pretty much things will go back to normal. And then there's the post coronas, which are, they could be, you know, really dark glassed like, like thinking that things are all gonna go negative and they're not gonna be good. And it's really terrible. I'm sure you could go positive in some way, but, so which one are you, where, where do you fall on this and how could I tighten up those definitions?

Guest [00:34:51] I, I think that there's three camps and I, where I fall in it would be that we'll never go back to where we were. Certainly this is, this is a, a new paradigm that we're in. I mean, it it's kind of like being pre-World War ii, post World War ii, the, the world fundamentally changed. Is that gonna be good or bad? I don't know. We, we already see companies realigning themselves with this reality and making, as I see it, some pretty big changes to how they do business. Those changes are gonna reverberate through our economy. They're gonna reverberate through our politics. We see people making some really fundamental changes with how they interact with neighbors in the neighborhoods. Those things are gonna reverberate through culture and through, I I think our society a number of ways, are they gonna be good or bad? I i, it scares me to see how people culturally are handling this. The, some of the social shaming and some of the things like that, particularly in the, the higher density populations that spooks me a lot. What do

Vance Crowe [00:36:07] You mean the social

Guest [00:36:08] Shaming on business side?

Vance Crowe [00:36:08] Tell me about that. What do you mean?

Guest [00:36:11] So particularly on social media, but also in in the meat space, you see this really binary attitude towards people that are cavalier about coronavirus or it seems to be kind of a one way thing. The people that don't take it seriously are looked at as kind of this threat by people who do take it very seriously. And you know, the, at the extremes of it, you hear, you hear people say things like, how dare you go out in public without a mask on? Or how dare you go out in public at all because, you know, you could be carrying this virus and it could be, you could be spreading it and, and you, you're you, you are going to be the cause of this virus. You're gonna murder somebody by going out. And so it's, it's this really, it feels extreme attitude towards people who are defying this social norm. And it's, that's fundamentally at odds with the way our country has been for the last, at least all, all through my life, people have always been kind of live and let live. You know, if, if I feel like I should do something, I do it. And if somebody else feels like they should do it a different way, that's kind of just the way it is. And you know, which

Vance Crowe [00:37:34] I think a lot of that's your Montana view. I I think that we actually maybe are in the perfect storm. I'm in total agreement with you about the way that people are treating others and how they're reacting to them. But we have been gearing society up for online mobs for the last five years for sure, maybe even the last 10 years. And, and it's this idea that everyone you see can be distilled down to either right or wrong, good or bad. And, and you wanna be the first one to point out that somebody that we used to think was good is bad. And, and, and so that's what allows mobs to form and really get going is that they could do it on social media trying to earn social credit, not realizing there are real people's lives in, in the balance here. It's no longer, you know, accusing somebody of being racist. This is actually coming down to jailing them for, for doing something bad.

Guest [00:38:37] I, I would agree with that. And I would say I, I would agree that the base of it is social media. We've certainly seen the way people interact with each other is fundamentally different on social media than it is, you know, face to face out on the street. You, we, we talk about it's online personality versus a real personality and how some people are so very different in their online life than the way they are when you actually meet 'em and shake hands. And I, I wish I knew how to, how to address that. 'cause it's, people should fundamentally be the same person whether they're behind a screen or, or shaking your hand. But it's, I I don't see that,

Vance Crowe [00:39:18] You know, it, it was interesting the other day, a guy that I talked to just in text message wrote me and said, Hey, who's this internet tough guy? And he was talking about this guy that had been replying to me and him and I was like, oh, I interviewed him on the podcast. And he was like, what? That was him. And, and you realize like, I'm not sure if people know that they sound like an internet tough guy or the way that they're, that try and translate the voice inside of their head into, you know, digital speech or if they actually do turn into that because there are people out there, I think they're, they're just not good at, at converting their emotions into written word that can be seen by everybody. But then I think there are also some internet tough guys, so it's hard to figure out which are, which.

Guest [00:40:12] Absolutely. Yeah. I, I always get a kick out of meeting people that I've known online for years and, and seeing what the real person is. I've, I, I don't view myself as being a real digital person, but I've, one of my networks extends back to 2004 that I joined and a all of those guys I have yet to meet and the, a few of 'em I've met over the last few years and in fact, I, I was at, as part of a group last year, I, I met about 20 of these guys and I, I've interacted with them since 2004 and it's, they're, they're all pretty cool guys and you know, there, there isn't really a, an internet tough guy mob in that particular network that I'm in. But it was really interesting to put a face to 'em and put a name to 'em and, and put a name, a real name to a, a call sign that they'd been using for years and, and, and then interact with these guys over the course of a few days. We went hog hunting and it, it was really a great experience, but it's, it was just really interesting to see how how a call sign matched up with the reality of that person.

Vance Crowe [00:41:21] That's interesting to call it a call sign 'cause it really is. And I mean I had that, I've had that same experience with Jared McDaniel and Dwayne Faber and it's funny 'cause you and I have never met in person, but I I I find it hard to believe that, well I guess we have met in person. You were at a talk that I was giving or you you came to Monsanto when I was working there, but I don't, I don't remember that

Guest [00:41:46] I'm crushed pants. I thought I was a more memorable personality than that.

Vance Crowe [00:41:49] Yeah, I think you purposefully are kind of a wallflower. You're one of those guys that in, in our whale pod, in our group of people that are sharing information all over the, all over the world, you're the guy that shows up and is like, oh, if you need to know how to store milk for, you know, five days or this is the type of armor you should have if you're worried about getting caught in a gunfight. And so it's, it's, every time I talk with you, I realize this is, there's a side to this guy that I didn't even know before. You're like a many, many sided person.

Guest [00:42:30] I I've had people accuse me of being a renaissance man and I don't know if that's entirely correct, but I-I-I-I-I just am fascinated by many different things and it's, I I have tried to live life by the model of taking life by the horns and when adventures offer themselves, you take 'em and it's, it's, you know, the the one thing leads to another and I, I can't say I've planned a great deal in my life, but it's, it's, I I've enjoyed every minute of it and it's, it's, it's fun to, to think back on some of the places I've been and some of the people I've met and, and probably the people I've met is, is the, the bigger part of most of these stories.

Vance Crowe [00:43:12] Yeah, I mean that's, the people are everything for me. I, I, I've always tried to say this like I, I don't actually like traveling just to see scenery. Like if we're going just to see a mountain, then I want to go with somebody because I want that, that experience of us going there together. And when I travel, I wanna meet the people. I don't even care if they're the janitor. Like those are the things that make the thing the most interesting to me. And I find that a hundred percent true with you, you are that way.

Guest [00:43:44] It is just so much more interesting to, to interact with the people that are the, the day-to-day reality of the place. When I was up in Alaska, we met this old cat named Jack Ross, and he'd been a forest service employee up there for, I think he had 35 or eight years in forest service. He, he had came from the outside and, and moved up there and spent all his time in Alaska. I mean, just a super interesting guy to download. And so this guy's in his probably mid seventies at this point, he lives four miles down a lake from this native village that we're at, that is 150 air miles from Anchorage. There's no roads to this place. And so you're dealing with a, the people, this reality is totally different than, than anything in lower 48. Their, their food all comes in on an airplane. There any big things come in on a, on an airplane that's big enough to land on the ice of the lake that's outside the village. I mean, it's just this totally different reality. So you just have to talk to these people to find out what that's like. And so this guy, he we're, we're talking to him and he, he jumped in his little skiff to come up the lake to get his mail. He's got a four mile trip in a boat to get his mail every three days. And so we're talking to this guy and he says, yeah, a bear got into the house here the other day and he, he tore up our freezer. So I've got a freezer coming in on the charter plane, you know, and, and I mean his reality was just so different than, than my Montana reality. And so we're talking to him and he, he says, yeah, he said, my, my wife made me, he said I had too many airplanes and my wife said I had to sell some, so, so I sold one in Anchorage the other day and he says the guy paid cash for it, it was $80,000 and he paid cash and a hundred dollars bills.

Guest [00:45:23] He said, that's seven inches of money if you stack it up and hold a ruler next to it. And I mean the, the, that relating to money by using a ruler to, I mean, where do you get stories like that outside of just talking to somebody and, and so this guy goes on, he says, yeah, this, this both that I'm running today. He said, I had all that money and she said I didn't have to bring all of it back. So I stopped at the boat shop and I spent an inch and a half of it on this skiff that I'm driving today. So he is got this 20 foot aluminum skiff that he spent an inch and a half of money on. I I How do you get stories like that without just loving to talk to people that you're, that you're in their area. I mean, it's, it's great.

Vance Crowe [00:46:05] Are you worried about having to measure our money in inches?

Guest [00:46:12] I am. I'm worried that we might have to measure it with wheelbarrows or, or dump trucks. I, as we look at this unprecedented federal spending, that's, that's clearly all deficit spending. I, you know, our our budget wasn't in great shape before this and now we take essentially a year's worth of tax revenue and, and blow it all in the course of a week's time. That's really worrying to me. I and I, I don't see Congress losing their appetite for doing that kind of reckless spending. I recognize that we're in this totally uncharted water as we shut down 30 to 60% of the nation's economy. But, oh boy, I don't know if this is the right way to, to handle that particular problem. It's, it's certainly a running the printing presses like we are, it's, it, it feels a lot like an African country in some ways where it's just we turn on the faucet and print money until it's becomes worth less than the paper written on.

Vance Crowe [00:47:22] You know, it, well first of all, we're printing so much money that we aren't even actually printing the money. It's just ones and zeros on computer screens, right? It's, it's not actually printed. But the other thought about this with the inflation, it, it would seem to me that people that are really itching to go back to work, and I am a person that wants to see the economy moving again. And I don't like having laws be the thing that, that are instituting on people. But I do think that you have to consider that the people in the White House have taken economics. They, they do understand that if you print money that it does cause inflation. I just don't think that care. And I think that it should show you that they are very, very concerned about this disease and probably more concerned than the theater show you're seeing on the, when Trump gets up there and he argues with, with reporters or fauci that, that to me all seems like an opera. The people that are really playing in this game, they're the ones that turned on the printing press of the money. And I think that's something to watch.

Guest [00:48:32] I I would agree. I, my time in DC representing grain industry, I've, I've, I've seen DC operate at, at the, at the functional level rather than at the news bite level or the soundbite level. And you know, for, for as much flak as we like to give Congress and the executive branch and, and you know, frankly DC in general, there's the people that are back there largely are doing the best that they can for the benefit of the country. And you know, certainly there's philosophical and, and political differences, you know, some of them are in fact profound. But at the end of the day, you strip away the, the sound bites and the, the, the tiddly wink kind of part of it, you know, they're, they're, they're working hard, they're trying to do the right thing. And that's as, as discomforting or as dis comfortable as I am with where we're at there, there is that comfort that I've, I've seen how it works on the ground level and, and how it, how there is that care for the country and how there's,

Vance Crowe [00:49:53] I think that this has been a, a tool that has done served you very, very well, Lyle, for a very long time, which is you're functioning within the system that's there. And if you sit there and just complain and say, those guys are all crooks and losers and you can't get anything done, then you'd have to just give up. So I think that that is a noble thing, but I wanna push back and say that I think that the system that we have built is going to show whether or not it's resilient. And I think that the people that we have in a lot of these areas are, they're just theater actors and they're overseeing way, way, way more than any human being really could. And we're centralizing a lot of power in the federal government, and I think that there's probably a time for some change up on who controls what and how much control is in the central national government. And it may not happen quick, but the system that's there seemed like it was ill prepared for the problem that we have right now. Would you agree?

Guest [00:51:01] I I would, and I, I would, I would frame it in this way. You've got Congress made up of several hundred people that are trying to take responsibility for a country 330 million that spreads from between two oceans and across five or six times zones. There's a lot going on in this country. And I, i, I just, I just don't know how several hundred people can have that down in the weeds. A approach it takes to, to really deal with local problems. And, you know, as you look at the, the function of our government, but the separation between federal powers and state powers, we're, we're, this is a fascinating time because we're seeing those interplays right now as governors are taking the lead in, in certain aspects of the response and, and are doing things that are, you know, in some ways even counter to what the federal response is. And yet it fits their local reality. Although it may not fit the state that's three states away is reality, you know, also, I, I think we're gonna see that grassroots or, or state's rights versus federal interaction. I think that's gonna play into this in, in probably in increasing way. What does that look like? I don't know. But it's, it's sure wild when you have the governor of California coming out and saying, you know, this, the federal response doesn't fit us and we're, we are now a nation state. That's,

Vance Crowe [00:52:33] That's a level of, i I saw that and was really worked up about that. And then upon a deeper look, it sounds like he is slipping that in, and I don't think he's doing it by accident, but he is, he was describing that, that they are, their economy is the size of a nation state and everybody already knows that. I, I mean, I think it's probably a wink in a nudge, but I don't think it's good for, because when I originally saw that quote that where Gavin Newsom said we're a nation state, I thought he was basically declaring independence. And I was like, oh god, oh, this is real bad. But it wasn't that bad.

Guest [00:53:12] It certainly, you know, to use the old concept of pacing and leading, it's certainly a, a powerful position to stake or a significant position to stake out. Yeah, I, this whole thing is just a, a fascinating, it is almost a, a Louis Carroll through the looking glass sort of a experience.

Vance Crowe [00:53:34] You know, I think that people have been looking at the, oh, in two weeks it's gonna be really bad. Hey, this week is gonna be really bad. I think that one of the things that people are struggling to deal with is the time horizon and the fact that you don't know a time horizon or nobody stood up to just be like, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna put it up on this time horizon. I think that's what's making people antsy and that antsiness is gonna turn into political action as either people feel like they have to be free and let outta their houses, or they have to force somebody else to stop other people from leaving theirs.

Guest [00:54:14] And that's two pretty significant and diametrical positions, right? Where, where's the middle ground in that

Vance Crowe [00:54:22] Nobody that's come on, my show has much of a middle ground, right? And if you begin the middle ground conversation, there are people that'll come out and say, oh, well you, you know, you're, you don't care if there are bodies in the street, just as long as you can get money. And that's it. It's like the most ridiculous shut down. Every aspect of conversation is possible, but it happens every single time. Anybody comes anywhere near that, we should lift the quarantine thing.

Guest [00:54:48] Yeah, I I, I've seen that there's a Venn diagram running around right now that's, are you concerned about the economy? Are you concerned about coronavirus and are you concerned about the country, the direction the country's going as its response? And, you know, I I, I guess I personally sit right in the middle of that Venn diagram. There's, there's certainly big concerns in all three of those areas, and I, I, I, I think it's important to, to be kind of take a kind of a centrist approach to that rather than sit way outside on the edge of one of those circles that's, you know, one of those three groups or, or, and it's prob there's probably more than three groups in that conversation, but it's, you know, the, the way you reach consensus about a course of action is not to a stake out the salt and pepper or the oil and water position that's, that's just exactly separate from whatever the, the opposing position is. It's, you need to have that conversation that, that kind of takes a multitude of viewpoints and perspectives into account and, and ultimately benefits the, the broadest group of people.

Vance Crowe [00:55:56] I mean, I absolutely 100% do not know what's going on. And I have spoken with 30 people for nearly an hour that have their own expertise at what's going on, and nobody has the answers. And every time I get done with a conversation, I'm like, yeah, I guess things are getting better. Yeah, it looks like we should probably let, let everybody outta quarantine and go. And then the next conversation I'm like, oh man, it is the black plague and things are bad. And I'm not that hyperbolic of a person generally. I, I just, I, I it's anybody that feels like they know what's going on, I want to talk to that person because I, I don't know what's going on.

Guest [00:56:41] Well, and I think that ties back to what I'm talking about, this consensus thing. You know, there's, there's all, all of these viewpoints that are, some of them come from a very scientific perspective. Some of them come from a very emotional perspective. Some of them come from a very pragmatic perspective or a economical perspective, or, you know, there's, there's all these different competing viewpoints on, on how to, how to approach that. And, you know, ultimately there's middle ground somewhere and, you know, what does that look like? Do we, do we quarantine just the, the crowd that's at most at risk, if you take my county's numbers, that's not a winning strategy. I was looking at some numbers this week, and I, I think we've got at least two people in every decade age bracket that have coronavirus at this point. Is that a concern so far? A number of those people are, have either recovered or they're getting worse with the disease. So, you know, I, where, where is that balance? The fatalities that we've had in this county have been in the, the 80-year-old demographic. So, you know, maybe that winning strategy is to, to look at that 60 or 70 plus crowd and say, yes, we need to be very careful with these. And if, if you have some kind of immune deficiency, yes, probably you should quarantine or, or limit your exposure. And, and the rest of the world can continue to practice these social distancing and hand washing, but they don't need to be barricaded in their homes and they don't need to have the restaurants all shut down.

Guest [00:58:22] And the, you know, all, all of these different elements that we're seeing that's, that's wreaking such havoc on the economy. And I, you know, may maybe that's that middle ground that, that eventually we're gonna arrive at.

Vance Crowe [00:58:32] I mean, you're gonna have to have some ideas put forward before the solutions are brought forward. Because if you don't know where the line is on what makes it possible for people to go out, then, then when somebody presents you with a solution you don't really know, is that helping me get over the line that we all agreed to was where we wanted to get to? And that's, that's one of the things that I've observed is very few people are willing to put forward. So I hear people thinking in two week timeframes, and I ask them intentionally, you know, what do you think the world looks like in two weeks? But I also notice that people are told by the White House, Hey, it's gonna be two more weeks, or, Hey, when we're out in May, everything's gonna be fine. And the the scale of which the change is gonna happen to the world is so much bigger than two weeks. The two weeks barely gives you a pinhole in, into what's going on.

Guest [00:59:28] Yeah. We're, we're looking through a keyhole into a, a mansion kind of as a, as a perspective on this problem. And if, if anybody says on June 15th there won't be any coronavirus in the US or on July 15th, the world won't have coronavirus. I mean, it's, it's, it's just foolish. It's, it's, that's crazy talk because if you, if you understand bio virology at, at even a middle school level, we know that this thing isn't going away. It's, it's not gonna be, it, it won't be like polio where we can eliminate it in three months.

Vance Crowe [01:00:05] I read this tonight with, I didn't read the actual paper, but it was from a guy who posted on Twitter. They said there are eight different strains of coronavirus that, that I, I don't know that they are necessarily doing anything different to people's bodies, but that's how much it's changed, which means like we know nothing at all about it because people could be impacted by this differently because it could be a different disease.

Guest [01:00:31] Oh, absolutely. And each of those eight strains, if they, if that's where we're at today, you know, we applied to R one theory to this, the survival of the fittest that there's gonna be, some of those will emerge as stronger strains. Some of those will weaken, some of those strains are certainly going to attack different population segments at, at greater or lesser rates. You know, this, this is, this is kind of a weird bug in that it's, it's being so readily adaptable to so many different coping strategies and things. This is, you know, as a farmer, I look at the, the, the weed pressure that we have dealt with over the years and, you know, weeds evolve slowly over time. We've seen some herbicide resistance in the last, oh, 10 or 15 years and that that's a response of those weeds to a particular selective herbicide. And so now we're seeing this virus that's responding in on, you know, maybe not a daily basis, but it's responding over the course of a couple months, it has morphed into these eight different versions. That's pretty spooky when you, when you view it from this farm perspective of a weed evolving or a weed species evolving over 10 or 15 years compared to this virus evolving over the course of just a few months. That's, that's wild.

Vance Crowe [01:02:00] Yeah. And I, I, I have no idea whether it's just a little bit worse than the flu or if it's the same as Spencer Wells came on my podcast this morning and said that he thought it was the only thing comparable to it is the Black plague. Do you know anything about the Black Plague? I mean, I know that it sounds bad, but I don't know anything at all about it.

Guest [01:02:22] The, the closest I come to the Black Plague is watching Monty Python segments where the, you know, they bring out the dead, bring out the dead, and then they honk that guy with a hammer that, that's as close as I come e except for knowing that it, it, you know, obviously decimate Well, I didn't, didn't decimate Europe. It wiped Europe in half or more. I, I don't, I I don't even know the the raw numbers of, of what it did, but it was, it was huge. And I, I, I was reading some something here the other day about some explorers in early 18 hundreds out on the Pacific coast. So the Seattle area coming across tribes of Indians that were there was just dead Indians or, or, or dead natives in the village. And they didn't know what happened, but there was just bodies everywhere. And so at some point in that early 18 hundreds, there were some kind of virus that went through those Pacific Coast tribes, which must have acted something like the Black Plague, or it must have been something similar, but it wiped those tribes out. They don't exist to this day. And it makes me wonder if some of those were some of the things that happened down in the desert, Southwest in the, you know, the cliff goings and things down in the Anasazi Park and Vandal air and places like that.

Vance Crowe [01:03:39] Oh wow. I had never really thought about disease. You know, disease was never all that real to me until this, you know, of, of any of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You, you know, I took a bioterrorism class and I, I, I remember studying this stuff, but even when Ebola became real, I was never like, oh, this could happen to me. I always thought like, this is just something that's out there and you just hope that you're, you know, just like you hope you don't run into a deer, but you still gotta drive your car. But now that's everybody hit a deer.

Guest [01:04:14] Right. To, to use a sample, an example that most people are at least passingly aware of the, the smallpox infestation that went through the Native American tribes during the settling of the West. I mean, that was, that was a virus. And it was, you know, there, there's some background to there that I won't get into, but that wiped out a large number of Western tribes. It it, I mean it, there was hundreds of thousands that, that died as a result of that particular strain going through the, the west.

Vance Crowe [01:04:50] Did we have a theory of germs at that point? Did we understand that disease spread, human to human contact, that kind of thing?

Guest [01:04:59] I think there must have been a little bit, there's certainly some history that indicates that the smallpox was, was understood well enough that it was intentionally spread through those tribes as a, as a, as a way to conquer them, which is, you know, from, from our 21st century is really, I don't know if they're strong enough words to describe what that is from our perspective today, but that was the reality of that. The time.

Vance Crowe [01:05:31] Wow. I mean, that, that's actual, I remember learning that the, that supposedly the Japanese have done this to the Chinese tried to, tried to do biological warfare by spreading, I think they spread lice into the, into China with certain diseases on it. And I think about that, man, that is an insidious, terrible way of doing war. And I, I don't know that shooting somebody is any more honorable when you're fighting in that, on that level, but man, that's bad.

Guest [01:06:03] Yeah, it certainly puts the, the experience of World War I into a new context. I mean, it's as, as horrible as chemical warfare was all through World War I, using germ warfare is, to me, an order of magnitude worse even than that.

Vance Crowe [01:06:20] And what do you think makes it that way? Partly because

Guest [01:06:25] There's probably several things, but I mean, there you could, you can talk about the moral aspect of it and the, the, that, that side of it quite a bit. But to me the, the non-selective nature of derm warfare is pretty fearsome specter because it goes everywhere. You know, the chemical warfare in World War I, the, the only areas that were affected were the areas where the chemical was released. It dispersed over a relatively small area of the battlefield. And it certainly affected civilians. And it, it, to this day, there's places that are no-go zones because there was so much chemical that was used on some of those battlefields, but the compare that to releasing a smallpox virus in a tribe of people and wiping out not only the Native Americans or the first peoples, but but also anybody else that came in contact with that was slightly immunocompromised. I mean, it's non selective. It goes everywhere. It goes wherever it wants. And that to me is just, it, it, the, the lack of control of that is, yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:07:42] I don't know what the words are are, it's unleashing, it's unleashing Pandora's box or something. I mean, it truly is saying, I wanna win and I don't care what the costs are, right? Like the, because there's no way for me to calculate the costs. I can't know it. So I'm willing to pay whatever price I release onto this. That's, that's shit, man. That's dark. That's dark

Guest [01:08:05] Is, yeah. And I think that's what's so spooky about it. And you know, this, this coronavirus there's, there's all these theories about what the Chinese knew and when they knew it and you know, where it originated and how it, how it did what it's doing. But at the end of the day, that all doesn't matter because this disease is so non-selective. It's, it's, you know, there, there's no way that somebody can, can hit the off switch on it. And at least at this point, we don't have a vaccine. We don't have a, a, a reliable antibody test and we don't have these other, other ways that we can just say, okay, the what, once this particular strategic objective is achieved, we can shut this disease off and remove that threat from the thing. So I mean, to me, that takes some of the fire out of the conspiracy theories because it is so nonselective, why would you release something that was, that affected your own population just as dramatically as it does the entire global population? It it's just, it's inconceivable.

Vance Crowe [01:09:03] Yeah. And they, they've gone to some pretty significant links to try and to try and stop it. So Lyle, I'll, I'll ask you the question I've been asking everybody. It is April we decided it was April 11th, 2020. What does the world look like in two weeks,

Guest [01:09:25] At least locally here? I'd say it gets closer to something like normal. I was down in Great Falls here Wednesday, and I was kind of surprised at how complacent people were relative to where they were a week or two prior to that. So I, I think that this new normal has kind of set in and I, I don't know that our restaurants and things like that, the service injuries so much are, are gonna be open in two weeks, but the, the rest of society seems to have just kind of dropped into this groove and is slowly emerging from it. So I I I, I don't see a big change in two weeks, at least locally here. And, and from a farm perspective, it's, we, we work by the seasons, so it's coming into the planting season and guys get busy and you, you go whether you can or not be, just because your time windows are so critical for getting the, the plants in the ground. We, we operate within that glowing growing season. And if you're two weeks late, your entire crop is affected by that. So at least in the ag community, things are gonna get back to normal. I would say 95% just because of the biological aspect of farming.

Vance Crowe [01:10:51] And then the rest of the world, will they still be in their houses? Will, will there be a strong state lockdown in Missouri and Illinois and these other places?

Guest [01:11:05] I, I would expect that it's, that continues. I, again, we get back to this thing of, of what's that deadline, you know, what, what, what's the benchmark? Do, do we have a number that is that, that is the peak number or do we have a number that is once the curve has flattened or started to bend in this, at this radius, is that the number? Right? I I I'm not seeing that yet. And so until we get some sort of definable metric, I, I don't see the, the defensive strategies really backing off too much. I i I, I don't know if I see 'em ramping up unless there's all of a sudden a huge spike in either disease acquisition or mortality.

Vance Crowe [01:11:53] Yeah, I think that there's, the, the, it's funny to see them say, Hey, our best thing that we have to fight the virus is everybody staying at home. Well, even if you flatline it, then if your best defense is everybody still stay at home, that's going to be what they're doing. I, I put out on Twitter the question, you know, what would you do if quarantine, if you knew that quarantine was gonna go on for 18 months? And I, I'm not putting that out there 'cause I want that to happen. Or even that, I think that it'll happen. I really don't know. I, I doubt it. I think it'll be within a year that we'll be outta this, but maybe not. But I, I wanted to see the thought experiment to say what would people start changing and pivoting about their lives? Because as soon as you know what pivot you're gonna have to make, just like you talked about with your letter on farming, it's good to make that pivot. Even if it doesn't feel good at first, it's going to someplace better. So it's trying to figure out what, what do I think the world is gonna be like and if it does stay like this for a while, how should I adjust my life to be better adapted to it? Do you have any thoughts on that?

Guest [01:13:02] I don't know if I have any well formulated thoughts on it, but as I look at particular the food industry and some of the gyrations we're seeing within that industry as, as we see meat plants shutting down or throttling way back and things like that, I, you start to look at the sustainability of what our, our supply lines look like. And you know, certainly we've seen the, the food service parallel track just get evaporated. And so food is looking for a home. We see this, this, this odd problem of having too much food and yet shortages in these other places. So that's the part of this that really concerns me is that our, our our fundamental supply lines are just in time supply lines. Are they, they've been coping and they're, they're, they're adequate to cope for a while. But if, if we're in this situation for 18 months, I I get pretty concerned about how we, we feed these really dense populations, how we get the food into those populations and, and how that whole supply chain works. 'cause you know, I, we were talking here a couple weeks ago about the efficiency of our, our US and even the global supply chain, how we're, we operate at probably as close to a hundred percent efficiency as as it's possible to get, you know. And so now we start to see all these links in the supply chain that are critical links either get stretched or in some cases break over a very short amount of time.

Guest [01:14:44] And, you know, we're only a couple months into this thing. I I don't, it, it spooks me to think what 18 months of that stretching and breaking looks like. Well, and then how you rebuild that supply chain.

Vance Crowe [01:14:56] Yeah, I mean like that that, so it strikes me that our local grocery store had a COVID patient, somebody came up positive and they'd been working in that store and that store I, I think now is going through like extensive cleaning and they're gonna have to move around some workers, but they're planning to get back and going. And so on the one hand I wonder is the, is the meat packing industry is that the way they're gonna be able to do it? Some people get sick, you just send everybody home, clean everything and then bring 'em back and work because that's what they're doing at the grocery stores right now. But that's 'cause they have to, I don't know if that's gonna be the way that we capture and stop it or if my local grocery store is now gonna have five guys go down because those first people spread it around while they were, before they knew they had it. What do you, what do you think is, are are packing plants gonna get shut down or are places where work gets done not going to be able to do it because of the disease?

Guest [01:15:55] There's certainly that worry man. As far as doom and gloom as I was just talking about. You have to step back also and look at what has made this country function. And that is in fact all the, all these businesses and business structures that, that frankly are that supply line and their, their motivation is to work and to function at the highest level that they possibly can. So the, the inertia on, on any of these businesses is to get back to a, to an increased rate of function. And you know, there's an economic incentive to do that. There's a financial incentive to do that. There's, i I would say there's a, there's a intrinsically human spiritual inertia to do that because people, people want to thrive. They try to thrive, they try to, to ultimately do the, the best they can for themselves. And so there's, there's this, that inertia I think is going to, to continue to push the system even against some of this momentum back to, its maybe not to equilibrium, but at least closer to a center that is functional at, at a, at a functional, if not an optimal level. So I, you know, there's, we, we can look at all the things that could break, but we can also look at all the things that make the system work a against pressure and against friction and you know, so that there's, there's actually some optimism out there I see in, in the very friction that's, that's happening because the, the, the, the normal center is, is is the inertia of that is headed towards this, this improved function.

Vance Crowe [01:17:35] Hell yeah man, that is a great way to look at it. That's the, that is actually the American spirit and kind of defines that everybody's here because they came from somebody else to, because they, they had to pivot and make a better life for themselves. And man, that that, that's the most hopeful thing I've heard all week. And I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna wrap up on that man, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for spending Saturday night hanging out.

Guest [01:18:03] Yeah, absolutely man. It's always a pleasure visit

Vance Crowe [01:18:06] And if people wanted to find you on Twitter or read the article that you were, that you and I were talking about before,

Guest [01:18:15] My Twitter handle is Lyle Benjamin four, so at Lyle Benjamin four and it's pretty close to the top of my feed and it's, as you said earlier, it's, it's probably blowing up. So it's, it's probably still very much at the top of my feed. So, and that, that article is it there it is a thread that's about, I think there's 15 or 20 tweets that make, that comprise it.

Vance Crowe [01:18:39] Well it is the most candid, authentic piece of writing maybe I've ever read. And it was very clear. And I think it doesn't matter whether you're in farming or not, you know what it is to, to tell everybody, Hey, I'm making a change and this is the pivot I'm making. So I think everybody is better 'cause you were willing to write that.

Guest [01:18:59] Thank you. Be i I hope that it makes a difference to, to the people that need to read it.

Vance Crowe [01:19:06] Well, amen brother, thank you so much and we'll talk to you later. Be safe out there.