The Traditionalist vs Post Coronaist; Pivoting & anti average during Coronavirus | Sarah Bohnenkamp

About this episode

Vance's weekly business check-in with leadership coach and rodeo-world speaker Sarah Bohnenkamp becomes a wide-ranging exploration of his "traditionalist vs. post-coronaist" framework and the Overton window theme in full force. Bohnenkamp describes her speaking business pivoting to contingency contracts (beef-for-speeches barter, deposit-plus-virtual-workshop deals), a surge in podcast requests from people newly hungry for substantive conversation, and a coaching client base of small business owners scrambling to reinvent pricing and delivery. The two dig into agricultural economics (price gouging vs. price signals, country-of-origin-labeling politicization, the "supply chain needs to be stronger, not longer" line), education policy (a teacher barred by device-ratio rules from going live daily, and Vance's speculative vision of decentralized mega-classrooms), and social dynamics — Vance's "whale pod" concept (geographically scattered but tightly connected communities communicating through digital channels) and a viral Instagram dustup about parental time-poverty as an illustration of tribal judgment/bubble effects. A dark, provocative stretch has Vance framing COVID as an unavoidable "baptism" for most people and arguing the healthcare system should judge those who gain weight during lockdown the way it judges risky behavior generally — a rare, sharply-worded prediction/opinion moment. The episode closes on rodeo-world specifics: Miss Rodeo state queens pivoting to livestreamed story hours and virtual cattle shows, and stock contractors and cowboys losing their entire livelihood overnight.

“So you and I have talked many times about the Overton window, the ideas that are acceptable in a society, and then you have a catastrophe, and suddenly what everybody did as normal is no longer necessarily available. So now you have a whole bunch of ideas that used to be radical or even unthinkable that are allowed to come into society to test.”

“You could upend the education system in the United States and who knows what that does to the future of the country, right? Because our education system is what is what tells everybody what's the constitution, who are the leaders, how does the system work? And if you then decentralize that and have it so you can deliver it online, the world starts changing in big ways.”

“This is why the new digital medium of having conversations like this is, is so, so much more real than what a lot of people are giving it credit for... it's the fog of war or the dark of night. And so you have to go out and find these communities... My whale pod includes you out in Colorado, Lyle Benjamin up in Montana, all these people that I'm reaching through the podcast.”

Key moments

• Bohnenkamp on four weeks of lockdown forcing new family engagement patterns and noting Colorado's outsized case numbers relative to its size.
• Vance introduces the Overton window framework explicitly as the episode's organizing lens; Bohnenkamp self-identifies as "riding the fence" but leaning futurist.
• Contract innovation examples — beef-for-speech barter deal and deposit-plus-pivot-to-virtual-workshops arrangement.
• Vance's story about a hostile Twitter critic he DM'd and turned into a podcast guest, framed as a model for de-escalating online conflict.
• Vance's institutions counterpoint — the existing beef supply chain "delivered... consistently for 50/60 years safely," complicating calls for wholesale change.
• Vance's price-gouging/price-floating argument as a specific economic literacy critique of pandemic-era public opinion.
• The viral Instagram parenting post and its brutal comment section, used to illustrate mutual judgment across different life circumstances.
• Vance's "whale pod" concept — geographically distant but digitally close communities — introduced and applied to his own network.
• Vance's speculative vision of a decentralized, pay-per-student virtual education system replacing traditional schooling.

Notable quotes

“My whale pod includes you out in Colorado, Lyle Benjamin up in Montana, all these people that I'm reaching through the podcast... people are actually socially distant yet are incredibly close in this digital world.”

“There's a huge percentage of the US population that doesn't understand, if you demand that prices stay the same and yet supply doesn't go up and demand goes up, then you have shortages.”

“There is a better than zero chance that coronavirus is a baptism that everyone has to go through except for the people that can completely isolate for 18 more months until you get a vaccine.”

“Why can't we do Google Hangouts every day... she says, well, because there are rules that I can't because you have to have x percent of your kids that have internet... I was like, that is bullshit.”