In this episode, Vance Crowe shares a keynote delivered at the inaugural Flinchbaugh Forum for Agricultural Policy in Manhattan, Kansas, honoring Dr. Barry Flinchbaugh’s legacy of courageous, civil discourse. Vance unpacks the concept of “worthy adversaries,” explaining how respect and even resentment can guide individuals toward those who sharpen their ideas, and offers practical tools for productive disagreement: steelmanning, providing “click” moments of fascination, asking “how” instead of “why,” saying “tell me more,” and diagramming arguments to debate ideas shoulder-to-shoulder rather than person-to-person. Vance also explores how the Overton window shifts what’s thinkable and why humility and openness to change are essential for changing minds.
To test these principles, Vance presents a Peter Thiel–style paradox: Washington is correct that America needs more farmers, but mistaken in believing that printing money and transfer payments will secure that future. The argument is made that relentless monetary expansion inflates land and input costs faster than farm returns, and a provocative case is presented that Bitcoin—due to its digital scarcity—may siphon the monetary premium out of farmland over time. Vance challenges listeners to find their own worthy adversaries, articulate their own Peter Thiel paradox, and engage in courageous, curiosity-driven dialogue to keep politics rooted in conversation rather than coercion.
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Unknown:
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, I'm going to share with you a presentation that I delivered in Manhattan, Kansas last week at the Flinchbaugh Forum for Agricultural Policy. This was an inaugural forum, one that they hope will carry on into the future, doctor Flinchbaugh's incredible legacy of bridging cultural and political divides to be able to help create the best policy for American farmers and the country as a whole. In this talk, you'll hear me discussing things that I talk about a lot, how to have better conversations with your critics, and I'll be putting forward an idea that longtime listeners of the podcast might be familiar with but maybe haven't heard me describe in just this way. It's all born from a very simple question that the organizers asked me to answer. What is one thing that Washington gets right about rural and agricultural America, and what is one thing that they get wrong?
From there, I share an idea that I believe is very powerful and important, and I hope that you'll agree with me. So enjoy this presentation, and, we'll be back at the end to talk about it.
[00:01:14] Unknown:
To talk with people is courageous. It is difficult to engage with people that don't agree with you and to actually say something that might prompt them to dislike you, to think that you should be burned in effigy, to try and go around you and try and make problems for you. And when I think about courage, I think about this concept, the golden mean. What is courage? It is the golden mean, not the sinner, not the middle, but the fine line between being cowardly and being reckless. And it's not being all the way over on the reckless side. Right? Courage actually requires that you be a little bit concerned about the outcome of this thing.
What is the outcome of my words? What will happen if I say something that other people don't agree with? And since I was invited to give this talk, we all know and we can all see firsthand that there are only two options when it comes to deciding the future of our country. You can either talk, or you can have violence. And we all saw what happens when a man talks and people don't want to hear what he has to say. They killed him. So when I think about the importance of this conversation with you and everyone in this room, I recognize that the thing that I am proposing is no small thing.
To say things that matter will put you in a position that other people might not like it. So what I am proposing, what I would suggest Barry Flinchbaugh did that showed us so much about the world was how to be courageous, how to interact with people, how to engage them so that they can hear your ideas, and that we can keep the discourse in our country about talking and not violence. Now, my first experience after I talked with those lists of 50 people and then another list and then another list was that I was invited to speak at Iowa State University, and it was a, grad program in agriculture.
And I remember right as I was walking into this class, it was gonna be the first time that I'd ever spoken on behalf of Monsanto. They sent a scientist with me, but it was gonna be me talking. And I, I was talking on the phone to one of my friends. His name's Rob. And Rob said to me, Vance, if you can't win over the kids at Iowa State University, you should quit your job. So I walk in there, and it's a two hour lecture. And so I'm imagining that what's gonna happen is I'm gonna give them this presentation that's been prepared by the PR firm. They've message tested every single word, every single phrase, every single chart. Everything is perfect. They've dumped millions of dollars into this presentation, and so I think I'm gonna get through this presentation as quick as I can so I can get to the q and a, so that way we can have some fun. What's more fun than having banter back and forth with a bunch of ag kids about Montana and modern ag?
So I get all the way through this presentation. Now keep in mind, this talk is supposed to be two hours long. I go through this presentation. We all know we need GMOs to feed the world. Click. We all know that, GMOs are allowing us to produce more efficiently with less pesticide. Shoot. Click. You know, we're doing it more with less water. And click, click, click. I get all the way through this presentation in fifteen minutes. So now we've got an hour and forty five minutes for q and a. So I say the stadium style room. I say the entire room is filled. Teachers, students, and I remember when I was walking in that those kids didn't look like the ag kids that I knew, but that's okay. Maybe I'm not hip with it. So I go to say, are there any questions?
And a woman, all the way in the back of the room, raises her arms straight up in the air. You know this person, right? And I point at her, and I say, yes, you there. Do you have a question? And she goes, I don't believe a word out of your mouth. And the whole crowd goes wild. They are clapping and cheering, and I am like, oh my gosh. I am not where I thought I was. And so I said, well, could you be more specific? And she starts going through many of the complaints that I had had. You know, GMOs are potentially poisoning the Gulf Of Mexico. You guys are suing farmers. You're monocropping. You're doing all of these negative things.
And at the end, after we get through with the q and a, I can tell you what I did in response to this, but it's important to realize that this was my first experience in understanding how you shape your ideas, how you present them is entirely going to make the difference between whether people want to listen to you or if they reject you. And this experience was, scarring to me. Imagine yourself. Imagine being in a room this size right now, and everyone in there scoffing at you, laughing at you, trying to find a way to point out why you are not only wrong, but you should be pushed out of that room. And so I was terrified, and I went back to Monsanto, and I took a deep look at what we were doing.
And I threw out the slides, and I started to try and figure out how can I have more authentic conversations with people? How is it that I can have better dialogue with the people that don't agree with me? Because what I found out after I left was that this was not an ordinary graduate school on agriculture. This was at Iowa State. I don't know if you guys know this, but they have an an ag program, and then they had a group of people that broke off from the ag school and floated to the left side of campus, and they were the group on sustainable agriculture.
So I had literally gone to the very people that were pushing back and fighting back against modern agriculture. So from there, I spent the next five years traveling around, trying to figure out how to have better conversations, and that's what I want to share with you today. I want to talk about this idea of a worthy adversary. Who are the people that you should be engaging with? Because the truth of the matter is not everyone. Some people don't want to engage with you. Some people choose violence. But this is not all people. In fact, that's a very, very small number of people. And if we are to win over the larger group of people about whatever your policy ideas are, you need to go out and find those people, those worthy adversaries that don't necessarily agree with what you think.
And this is a concept that I actually learned from doctor Flinchbaugh. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Next, I wanna talk about productive disagreements. What is it that you can do to have conversation about those ideas that make you deeply uncomfortable, that threaten something within your own family operation or the larger industry? And how can you grapple with these ideas and actually learn enough to be able to say maybe I can tighten my own policy thoughts up. And then finally, in great doctor Blinchbau fashion, I want to present to you a radical idea that you can grapple with like this, one that may make you as angry as those Iowa State kids back five years ago.
Alright, so let's start off by first talking about this concept of worthy adversaries. After I was invited to speak, I went back and watched that interview that I did with doctor Flinchbaugh, and I realized that just in that one conversation, he had had a very large impact on me. Because in my podcast, which is called the Ag Tribes Report, every week, I engage what I call a worthy I ask my guest, who is a worthy adversary of yours? Now, I got this idea when I was interviewing with Doctor. Flinchbaugh, he he gave me this idea, he said, you know, the the people that view those that don't agree with them as their enemies can only fight, And if you want to change people's minds, you can't view them as your enemies, you have to view them as your adversaries, somebody that is challenging your ideas and making them better.
And I didn't guest, some farmer, somebody that represents some part of agriculture, who is one person that you respect, that you completely disagree with. Why is that important? Well, that's important because it is too often that we spend our time talking about our ideas with people that actually already agree with us. This is what I had done for those months in preparation for Iowa State, was that I had been talking only with people that already agreed with the perspective I was going to go out and share. So I was totally unprepared when somebody had ideas and arguments and perspectives that were wildly different than what we were prepared for.
Now on the podcast, I recognize that this is actually a great challenge. Imagine being on a podcast in front of thousands of people, and somebody is asking you, who's somebody you respect but totally disagree with? This makes us very uncomfortable. We don't want to say who we disagree with. Right? That might put you in a position where you have to disagree with somebody, and it might get hot. But it's a worthwhile perspective because it is those people that will make our ideas better. And one of the key features of a worthy adversary is the concept of respect.
Respect is something that not everyone has. We don't have, naturally, respect for everyone. That's just the truth about human nature. We can act respectfully to everyone we meet, and we're called to that. We should treat people with dignity. We should interact with them in a way that allows them to hold esteem. But the truth is you only respect people that can do things that you can't do. This is why when we are thinking about those people that are on the other side of an issue, you need to really ask yourself, what is it that has helped this person gain an audience? Right? You might not like Maha, but what is it that he's done? What is it that RFK has done to be able to garner the interest and the support and the curiosity and the, like, loyalty.
You can't help but respect that because he's done something that's difficult to do. In fact, I would challenge any of us in the room, have not found a way to communicate with as many people as effectively as he has. So respecting another person doesn't mean that you agree with them. It just means you really do understand that they can do something that I can't do. The other thing that is hard to know when you're thinking about who is it that I should be going out, who are a worthy adversary, it's not just people you respect and that you disagree with. There might be a lot of those people, but really to think about this concept of resentment.
Right? Resentment is that feeling that we have deep inside of ourselves when we're watching someone succeed, and we don't think they should be. We're watching them gain some amount of favour. We're watching their ideas gain traction, and it burns us up. And typically, when we resent someone, we go to our tribe and we say, 'Isn't that person dumb? Isn't that idea stupid?' And we minimise their ideas so we don't actually have to grapple with it. But I would propose that if you want to be as effective as doctor Flinchbaugh, it is key that you use that resentment as a map to tell you, which idea should I be grappling with?
Where are there people and ideas that I need to engage my mind, my expertise, my background, and go and engage with those people. Now, that's not everyone that you resent. Certainly, there are people that you might resent that you don't respect. But those two key things will guide you to the exact people that you need to be engaging with if you want to make policy changes on a gigantic scale and I think everyone in this room recognizes that while we want ag to be stable there are big changes that need to happen if we are to have the farmers of today farming into the future. So if you find someone that you respect and completely disagree with, and potentially, you even really dislike their argument, what is it that you can do to make sure you are actually engaging with what they're talking about?
Well, there is this concept called the Overton window. How many of you are familiar with this idea? Overton window is actually a map on what ideas are allowed to be talked about in society. We might think, oh, we're in a policy room. We could talk about anything. But that's not true. There are certainly ideas in here that if somebody stood up and and brought them up, you would say, that's so radical that I dismiss it. I don't believe that's true at all. Inside of those ideas, inside of the overwritten window are acceptable ideas, both on the left and on the right.
And then somewhere in between those, you have sensible ideas and popular ideas, and somewhere, I wouldn't say in the middle. Right? We talked about the fact that you either have a consensus or a tyranny. Maybe it's not in the middle, but somewhere inside of that Overton window is policy, the laws that are going to govern us. This Overton window is something that's important to recognize If maybe six months before COVID, you said there's going to be a If maybe six months before COVID, you said there's going to be a law and it's going to mandate that people wear masks wherever they go out in public, you would have laughed that person off the stage. Six months later, due to the way that information flowed out, the way that our government pushed, out ideas, now all of a sudden, this wasn't a radical idea anymore.
It was law. The Overton window can change very rapidly, and to the point earlier today that ultimately this thing can be flexed and turned, and who's radical on the left might be very similar to the people on the right. Outside of radical ideas, there are certainly unthinkable ideas. I'm sure everyone in this room agrees with me that violence, shooting someone like Charlie Kirk, is an unthinkable idea. This is why it is so horrified our nation to use violence on someone that was just talking. But where should you be looking for the ideas that are going to impact agriculture? I would suggest that most of the ideas that are currently inside of this Overton window are likely not enough to push us towards the policy and the way of being that we need to be to have US agriculture succeed in the future.
So how can you argue with someone? What is the best way to engage with somebody? I know that for me, I would go on to stages, and I would talk in rooms of thousands of people, usually a lot of young college kids, and they would come to the stage, and they would be talking about GMOs. Now, the amount of knowledge that they had about GMOs was very, very little. They'd watched one or two documentaries. They'd read one book, maybe been in one class, and their belief in their knowledge was really high. But now when they're standing with a microphone and they're about to talk to the guy that they believe represents, you know, Monsanto, this dark evil place, then when they would stand there, they would actually shake.
They're not standing there with these dark ideas about the way that modern agriculture is because they're, twirling their moustaches and laughing about how they know these things. They are pushing back on these ideas because this is what they believe. So they would sit there, and they would shake as they asked me, do GMOs cause autism? Is this pesticide making my family sick or obese? Now, if you know a lot about a subject, it's very easy to hear an idea, and before they even get done explaining, you're like, oh, I know where this is going, and hit back at it. Right? That's the thing that makes us feel good. I already know that argument. I'm going to to stop you in your tracks so we can go faster. But if you actually want to change minds, you have to do steelmanning.
Steelmanning is where you are capable of expressing the idea of the other person so well that they sit there and say, yes, you do understand my perspective. Yes, you get this idea. This is hard. Right? We wanna jump past, hey, how how complicated is your idea? We wanna get right to the point of being like, no, I know why this is wrong, and I'm gonna tell you why it's wrong. But a person that is sitting there working up all their courage, walking past their nervousness to tell you what they think or to ask you a question, if you can give them back their argument more strongly than they were able to put it together, they will begin to loosen their grip on that idea.
Now, let's say you have a great number of reasons why the thing that they're proposing about water or pattern tile or or pesticide use is totally wrong, and you steel man their argument, and they say, Yes, I agree. What should you do next? Should you blow up their argument? Should you try and attack it as hard as you can? Well, I would suggest that's actually not the most effective way to do it. And in fact, the most effective way to do it Oh, I wanted to to make the point that this is absolutely what alternatives and consequences is. This is what doctor Funchbau taught. You know, not only do you have to know your idea, you have to know what the alternative ideas are, and you have to know the consequences of your ideas.
But let's say you've encountered an argument, and you have expressed it to them. You now they understand that you understand their argument. What should you do next? You should give them a click. What is a click? A click is when somebody is encountering some piece of information, something that they've never encountered before, and they have an moment. Right? They they're a little bit fascinated. We love these moments. We love having our minds say, oh, I'd heard about those things, but I never really made the connection there. So one of the clicks that I used to use is if I was talking with somebody about GMOs, They would get done with their question. I would express to them that I understood what their point of view was. And then I would say, before we talk about GMOs, can I tell you something that fascinated me when I came to agriculture?
So now they're kind of like, okay, I guess. You know, you've shown that you understand my argument. And I would say something like, you know, I was shocked when I found out that broccoli didn't occur in the nature in nature. And they'd be like, what? And I would be like, yeah. I mean, I used to think that the way that we got broccoli was there was wild broccoli all around, and somebody went and gathered up broccoli, put the seeds in and put it in straight rows, and that's how we got broccoli. But it's actually not how we got broccoli. Broccoli comes from this the Brassica family, and somewhere in Italy about six thousand years ago, this plant called Brassica oleracea used to grow up tall, and it had these bushy seed pods and these dark green leaves on it leaves on it. It had lateral buds. It had a root.
Now what ended up happening was somebody, hunters and gatherers likely, figured out, hey, wait, we love this plant. We encountered it by streams. We love to eat the whole thing. But if instead of eating all of it, when we find one of them that has a really bushy seed pod, a bushier one than all the rest, well, we're going to take those and we're going to put it in the ground, And it's going to grow up the same way the last one did. Only this one's going to have more bushy seed pods. And if you keep selecting for the bushiest seed pods over and over again a few 100 times, eventually, that expresses as almost entirely bushy seed pods, which is broccoli.
But that's not alone. Those leaves that we talked about, if you select for those, you get kale. If you select for the lateral buds, you get brussels sprouts. If you select for the root, you get kohlrabi. This one plant gave us so many of the vegetables that all children hate. The reason that this click works with people is because all of a sudden, they realize there's so much about plants that I don't know, but instead of having this argument shoved on me, I got to join this discussion. I got to be fascinated. I got to have a click.
This is right in line with what doctor Flinchbaugh used to say. You know, we've mentioned when people's minds are laughing when people are laughing, their minds are open. Doctor Flinchbaugh was famous. He said it on my podcast. He must have said it to people in this room dozens and dozens of times. Every time you're giving a talk, you need to be able to make people laugh every five to seven minutes. I'm not capable of that. He was much, much funnier than me, and I was telling him that one time. He's like, well, I've had, you know, decades to be able to build up my repertoire. But it's important. Right? When people are laughing, what are they actually doing?
Have you ever thought about what laughter really is? We're all universally not taught this, but we have this sound. That sound is something that we almost only do when we are in the presence of other people. Laughter is a social signal saying, I understand. A a common comedian puts out an idea that are two disparate ideas. When they connect them, you have that click moment, you laugh. And that social signal of laughter tells everybody else, I get the joke, which is why when everybody's laughing at a joke, and you don't get it, what do you do? You laugh too, right?
Because we don't want to be excluded, which is why that click is so important. If you want to convince people of your ideas, you have to be able to find a way to give them a click because the argument alone will not win the day. Let's say you've encountered an argument that you can't steal men, that their ideas are so different from you that you don't actually know what to say in response. Well, now I don't actually spend most of my time talking to audiences like you. Now what I spend most of my time is recording people telling their life stories. I run a company called Legacy Interviews where I sit down with older adults that want to tell their stories, their family histories, the farm history, so that that way their grandchildren can know where they came from, what their stories are.
And one of the things that I've come to realize is I don't always have a good question for people. They get done telling me about their approach to life, something that happened to them, something that was deeply important to them, and a question doesn't come to mind. And so I use this phrase right here that I don't think we hear often enough in society. When we're arguing with people, how often, when you disagree with somebody, do you just say, tell me more? Tell me more about this idea. Let me understand what it is that you're really trying to say. Think about for yourself. If you're arguing with somebody really vociferously, you really disagree with them, but instead of them pushing back on your idea, they say, 'Tell me more.' This is the kind of thing that's not happening in our discourse, and certainly, it's very difficult to do on social media, but it can be done, and when you do, people will begin to gain respect for you. You're able to hold your passions back from just pushing back on them.
The next thing that I've learned is that how questions are far, far greater than 'why' questions. This is true both when you're arguing for policy and when you're having a discussion with somebody, your loved one. Right? We like to think, and in fact, it's a very big part of our culture that everybody knows, like, y is the centre of the circle. It's our motivation. It's, you know, what causes us to do things. But y is actually very complicated. Y is multifactorial. It is, it can, the reason that we do things, why we do them, is often so complicated that we don't even know why we do things.
And so if I'm interviewing somebody about their legacy interview, and they tell me about, for example, a bankruptcy that they went through, and I say, why did you decide to go through bankruptcy? A person now has to think, should I find a way to present myself in the best light? Should I try and be defensive? And they start thinking an answer that allows them to put forward their best face. But this does not actually get you any closer to understanding why. And in fact, I would suggest that most of the time when we ask people why, they lie to us because they don't know why they do what they do.
You don't know why you do most of what you do. Most of what we do is a reaction to something else. We just stumbled into it. So if instead of asking why, you ask how, how did you come to this idea? How did you decide this? How does this work? Help me to understand it. Now, people will go all the way back to the beginning, and they will start telling you a linear series of events. And as they do, as they express that how, the why emerges from it. And when you're discussing with people when they have to draw this linear series of events and how they think this idea is going to work, oftentimes they will discover gaps in their own process.
Gaps in their own thinking that now because you haven't pushed on them too hard, because you haven't turned this into an argument, they are now very open to discussing it with you, which is leading me to, I think, maybe the most powerful tool for disagreeing with somebody, and it is to diagram your ideas. We have continued over time now that we have cell phones right we have these little mental telepathy machines that we can type a thought into but that thought is stripped down to the most bare thing that it could be. It's basically ones and zeros describing words. There's no vocal intonation.
There's no, like, feeling involved in it. Right? It is just stripped all the way down. So that's why it's so much more impactful to get on the phone and talk with somebody than it is to read a text message. How many text messages have sent you in the wrong direction thinking, what is that person saying? Why did they say that? By talking on the phone, you're adding in a new channel of information. This is why emojis are so powerful. We add emojis in to be able to give what normally is done through our intonation, through the way that we speak. So if text messages are better if you add emojis and are even better in communicating your information if you're talking, but even more than that, adding the visual cues, which is diagramming your ideas.
This is a small diagram I drew when I was in a rather vociferous argument about the downsides of pattern tile, which I don't want to get into today because this is a pretty strong argument. But one thing that happens as you are diagramming your idea with a person that you strongly disagree with is that you have to convert your ideas, and now as you write them down, the person moves from being sitting across from you to being shoulder to shoulder with you. And now they're not arguing with you. Now you're arguing with the idea that's right there. And when we get away from having people perceive that our ideas are actually defining us, then now you can start to push on things. You can start to discover gaps. You can add in information. Not to mention the fact that by having diagrams, by putting visuals to this, you now are opening up incredible volumes of channels to allow people to understand what you're saying or see the gaps in their own argument.
Diagramming your ideas can work with some of your, you know, strictest critics and also with your family members when you're arguing about how should we load the dishwasher. Right? Diagram it. You'll finally solve that twenty year problem. But as I finish out, one thing that I want to stress is if you are talking to another person about why your ideas are right and their ideas are wrong, if you are convinced that you will not change any aspect of your argument, I would propose you have no chance of changing their mind. Dialogue has to include the ability for you to push up on an idea and discover, wait, there were gaps in the way that I think.
Maybe the way that I have been thinking about that is not as refined or as perfect as I thought. I remember being at that Iowa State group, and there was no chance I could deviate from those slides. I was there to to tell them exactly what we had to communicate. They could intuitively tell that woman that pointed at me wasn't wrong. She didn't believe a word out of my mouth because I was not there for dialogue. I was there to download. This is not the way to change people, to get them to consider new ideas. And I think that this is something that we all want to do. And so you have to be able to come with some humility to be able to say, maybe there's something that they know that I would benefit from having my ideas tested against. And we all know that phrase, iron sharpens our iron.
It is so much better to be in dialogue with people that push back on your ideas that can actually change your mind. I can tell you there's a podcast, and I I got done with it. It was a guy that was very pro tariff, and I was very against tariffs. And I have never had my clock cleaned so bad on my own podcast than with this guy. And by the fact that I was willing to change, willing to discuss with him, he told me, I'll come back on any time. We can discuss this at length. Being willing to change your mind allows people to have information flow back and forth between each other. So now, I'm going to give you guys a pop quiz on how well you have taken what I'm saying here. I'm going to get a drink of water before I say this, Because I want you to consider a radical idea today.
We've heard a lot of people talking about different policies here, about different ways of thinking about what Washington needs to do to be able to help agriculture in our farm communities. And I want to put forward an idea that I think you might find rather radical, if not almost unthinkable. Now, I do these kinds of thinking all of the time. Another aspect of my podcast is while I'm interviewing this representative of one of the many ag tribes, I ask them about their worthy adversary, and then I asked them about their Peter Thiel paradox. The Peter Thiel paradox is this concept of what is one thing that you believe that almost no one you know agrees with you on?
And I learned this from hearing Peter Thiel talk about how he hires. Whatever you think of Peter Thiel, he's been able to get some of the best talent in the world. And he says, I always ask people this question, because by asking this question, I can see, I can observe how free are their thoughts from just what everybody else thinks. And the the real challenge of this question, what is one thing that you believe that almost no one you know agrees with you on, is not only first coming up with that idea that nobody might agree with you on, but if you actually succeed at the first part of that question, you find an idea that I don't agree on, now you have a new problem, because now you've got to convince me of this idea that I don't agree with you on. So this percolates up new ideas.
It forces people to think, what is it that I actually believe rather than I'm just going along with what everybody else I know already thinks? So I would ask you right now, do you have a Peter Thiel paradox? Do you have ideas in your mind that if anybody else in here thought that you thought that, they'd be ready to go, you know, ready to talk about it, ready to engage with your idea? Now in preparing for this talk, the organizers actually gave me what turned out to be an incredibly difficult challenge. Because as I said, I am not a policy person.
I am about high throughput of ideas. How do I help somebody open up so that they wanna share their family stories with me so we can record it and pass it on to their grandchildren? How do we have discussions so that you can tell me your ideas and I can learn from them? How can we push back and forth? I'm not trying to get laws passed. I'm not trying to advocate for, new transfer payments. I'm not trying to do any of the work that you all are doing. So I struggled with this question. It's not an area that's safe for me. But they asked, I want you to answer two questions. One, what does Washington get right about agriculture, and what is one thing that Washington gets wrong about agriculture?
So what I would say to this group is Washington gets right that keeping more farmers is better for America. We hear all politicians. This is a no brainer. There is no congressman out there that says, it'd be better off if we just didn't have as many, farmers out there. Right? They know, left, right, whatever, center, all know that they can go out there and say this. And they get it right, and everybody agrees with them. So what is it that they get wrong? Well, I believe that the thing that they get wrong is that printing money is going to help farmers.
And what I mean by printing money is these transfer payments that are given, these tariffs that are maybe allocated to agriculture, we perceive this is going to help farmers we all know the stats 13 and a half percent of farm income comes from transfer payments. Then everybody in here is also thinking, well, wait, wait, wait. It's actually 75% of those payments go to 10 of the farmers. Exactly. As some farmers have gotten larger and larger, they get a bigger piece of the amount of money that the government is putting into the system. And the reason that I think that agriculture, what Washington gets wrong is every time they are giving those transfer payments, what's happening?
Land prices are going up. Input prices are going up. No one fails, so nobody leaves agriculture. I don't want to say no one, but there are few that we keep people afloat, and all of the costs go up, and all of the output goes down. And I believe that there is actually no way for agriculture to outpace the printing of money, and that the government has no choice. It doesn't have to do with agricultural policy, that the very cold truth is that in order for the US government to be able to pay the debts that it has, it has to keep printing money, and that printing of money is going to vastly outpace farmers.
And so what can you do? Well, my Peter Thiel paradox, the thing that I believe that I would guess almost nobody in this room agrees with me on, is about bitcoin. I believe that those that are engaging with bitcoin today will be the landowners tomorrow. Now, how many of you agree with me on this idea? How many of you strongly disagree with this idea? Alright. So the first part of the Peter Thiel paradox is succeeded. I have found an idea that everybody here disagrees with. So the way that I want to frame this is first maybe to talk a little bit about why I think this. Well, Bitcoin to me is a true modern marvel.
They have done something that is almost unimaginable. It's something that we don't think of as so complicated, but it really is. Bitcoin, for the first time, has made things that are digital. Right? Think about your photographs that you can take. You can take a photograph and you can replicate it infinitely you can take one photograph and make a million copies of it so everything that's digital that gets all the benefit of being digital right being able to send it from you to your spouse, to your children, all of these things that we get from it. Being able to make infinite copies so you don't have to pay 35¢ a, a photo at at Walgreens.
And it's done something truly amazing because it's made a digital thing scarce. You cannot replicate a bitcoin. There is only 21,000,000 that will ever be made. This is truly phenomenal. No one can come along and make more bitcoin. And we could go into the specifics of this, but just for a moment, hold this idea. There will only ever be 21,000,000 of them, which means the supply is capped. The only other thing that is analogous to a supply capped financial system, bitcoin, is land, is ag land. We can't make more of it, which is why so much money is being dumped into purchasing farmland. When people are looking around at the world and they have a little bit of cash, they've been able to make some money, now they start, trying to figure out, what can I do to keep that value of that money?
And what they do is they say, I'm going to buy farmland because there's not going to be any more made of it. The government can't print their way out of that, and that's what's happening. Every time we print money, we are sucking the value out of the the money that you were paid for past work, for things that you produced. So Bitcoin is allowing people to have a finite asset and to store their value there. And then because it's digital, it's allowing you to be able to send that value anywhere you want with no one standing in the middle of it. I believe that we are watching right now the demonetization of ag land.
We are watching the monetary premium that's in agriculture, and it's being sucked down. Because just like real estate has people buying it that have no intention in living in those houses or living in those apartments, There are many, many people that have family wealth offices, hedge funds, people that are buying ag land to be able to keep its to store its value. Well, now they're going to look at what is the return on ag land. What is it? 68%? Yeah, three to four. But the government is going to print money way faster than three to 4%.
And so what has happening is all of these money market managers, these money managers are going to take that value, and they're gonna say, I can get three to 4% value in owning this farmland, or I can get 65% in Bitcoin. And so when we think about this bit Bitcoin and the the value it brings, it is going to suck the money out of agricultural land, but it's not going to do it in nominal terms. The price of land in terms of US dollars is going to continue to go up and up and up. But the price of land in terms of Bitcoin is going down and down and down.
And so my suggestion, my thing that I'm offering that you may disagree with, but I would rec I would hope that you would all take as a challenge to learn more about is I believe that if you can't buy farmland, if you want to help a young person try and be able to figure out how can I get a foothold in this game, it is not to get them to take on debt to buy more farmland? It is to park real money into bitcoin and wait for the land to be able to be purchased by it. This is a, I recognize, a radical idea. But as I close-up, I would actually ask whether we have enough time here today to do it or not. Is nope.
Can anyone here steel man this idea? Does anyone in this room know enough about bitcoin to be able to say, no, that's patently wrong? I imagine many of you have a lot of reasons why you don't like it. But the first question is, can you steel man it? But I wanted to bring that up because it's so easy to look at what other ideas that other people have that I can, you know, throw away. But here, this is a real example. So as you're thinking about the time that we have remaining, I know we're going to have another panel, and then we're going to have drinks. It's great to talk about your Peter Thiel paradox with other people that are in your world, in your policy world, in your agriculture world. So think, do you have a Peter Thiel paradox? And I would encourage you to ask the other people tonight, Hey, what's your Peter Thiel paradox? And really listen to them. If you don't have one, you're free to argue about mine.
But I also want to remind you that very flinch bow called all of us to be courageous. That man stood up in front of people that could have booed him, that did burn him in effigy, and he did it, and look at the impact he had. He had impact not because he had all the right answers, but because he was willing to explore ideas unlike anybody else that we knew. And so I would encourage any of you, if you want to have as big of a difference or even half the difference that doctor Flinchbaugh had, then I would encourage you to explore ideas of your worthy adversaries. And to create better policies, we need to engage those worthy adversaries, we need to understand their opposing ideas, and we have to be willing to, to change.
Thank you.
[00:44:08] Unknown:
I hope you enjoyed this presentation at the Flinchbaugh Forum for Ag Policy. It was an honor to be invited, and it was exciting to put forward an idea that I think a lot of people in that room were resistant to hearing. If you'd like to learn more about Bitcoin, go to vancecrow.com/bitcoin. There, you'll find a video where I'm describing how you can move Bitcoin from an exchange onto a wallet. This is what I always say is the first step if you wanna get your arms wrapped around, how do I handle a Bitcoin? What's it all about? You'll also find more information about a talk that I can come to deliver to your organization.
This talk could be about how to theoretically use Bitcoin and how it might impact your organization or industry, or it could be a very practical hands on talk where I actually show you how to do things physically with Bitcoin. If you're interested to learn more, go to vancecrow.com/bitcoin. Thanks again for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today, I'm going to share with you a presentation that I delivered in Manhattan, Kansas last week at the Flinchbaugh Forum for Agricultural Policy. This was an inaugural forum, one that they hope will carry on into the future, doctor Flinchbaugh's incredible legacy of bridging cultural and political divides to be able to help create the best policy for American farmers and the country as a whole. In this talk, you'll hear me discussing things that I talk about a lot, how to have better conversations with your critics, and I'll be putting forward an idea that longtime listeners of the podcast might be familiar with but maybe haven't heard me describe in just this way. It's all born from a very simple question that the organizers asked me to answer. What is one thing that Washington gets right about rural and agricultural America, and what is one thing that they get wrong?
From there, I share an idea that I believe is very powerful and important, and I hope that you'll agree with me. So enjoy this presentation, and, we'll be back at the end to talk about it.
[00:01:14] Unknown:
To talk with people is courageous. It is difficult to engage with people that don't agree with you and to actually say something that might prompt them to dislike you, to think that you should be burned in effigy, to try and go around you and try and make problems for you. And when I think about courage, I think about this concept, the golden mean. What is courage? It is the golden mean, not the sinner, not the middle, but the fine line between being cowardly and being reckless. And it's not being all the way over on the reckless side. Right? Courage actually requires that you be a little bit concerned about the outcome of this thing.
What is the outcome of my words? What will happen if I say something that other people don't agree with? And since I was invited to give this talk, we all know and we can all see firsthand that there are only two options when it comes to deciding the future of our country. You can either talk, or you can have violence. And we all saw what happens when a man talks and people don't want to hear what he has to say. They killed him. So when I think about the importance of this conversation with you and everyone in this room, I recognize that the thing that I am proposing is no small thing.
To say things that matter will put you in a position that other people might not like it. So what I am proposing, what I would suggest Barry Flinchbaugh did that showed us so much about the world was how to be courageous, how to interact with people, how to engage them so that they can hear your ideas, and that we can keep the discourse in our country about talking and not violence. Now, my first experience after I talked with those lists of 50 people and then another list and then another list was that I was invited to speak at Iowa State University, and it was a, grad program in agriculture.
And I remember right as I was walking into this class, it was gonna be the first time that I'd ever spoken on behalf of Monsanto. They sent a scientist with me, but it was gonna be me talking. And I, I was talking on the phone to one of my friends. His name's Rob. And Rob said to me, Vance, if you can't win over the kids at Iowa State University, you should quit your job. So I walk in there, and it's a two hour lecture. And so I'm imagining that what's gonna happen is I'm gonna give them this presentation that's been prepared by the PR firm. They've message tested every single word, every single phrase, every single chart. Everything is perfect. They've dumped millions of dollars into this presentation, and so I think I'm gonna get through this presentation as quick as I can so I can get to the q and a, so that way we can have some fun. What's more fun than having banter back and forth with a bunch of ag kids about Montana and modern ag?
So I get all the way through this presentation. Now keep in mind, this talk is supposed to be two hours long. I go through this presentation. We all know we need GMOs to feed the world. Click. We all know that, GMOs are allowing us to produce more efficiently with less pesticide. Shoot. Click. You know, we're doing it more with less water. And click, click, click. I get all the way through this presentation in fifteen minutes. So now we've got an hour and forty five minutes for q and a. So I say the stadium style room. I say the entire room is filled. Teachers, students, and I remember when I was walking in that those kids didn't look like the ag kids that I knew, but that's okay. Maybe I'm not hip with it. So I go to say, are there any questions?
And a woman, all the way in the back of the room, raises her arms straight up in the air. You know this person, right? And I point at her, and I say, yes, you there. Do you have a question? And she goes, I don't believe a word out of your mouth. And the whole crowd goes wild. They are clapping and cheering, and I am like, oh my gosh. I am not where I thought I was. And so I said, well, could you be more specific? And she starts going through many of the complaints that I had had. You know, GMOs are potentially poisoning the Gulf Of Mexico. You guys are suing farmers. You're monocropping. You're doing all of these negative things.
And at the end, after we get through with the q and a, I can tell you what I did in response to this, but it's important to realize that this was my first experience in understanding how you shape your ideas, how you present them is entirely going to make the difference between whether people want to listen to you or if they reject you. And this experience was, scarring to me. Imagine yourself. Imagine being in a room this size right now, and everyone in there scoffing at you, laughing at you, trying to find a way to point out why you are not only wrong, but you should be pushed out of that room. And so I was terrified, and I went back to Monsanto, and I took a deep look at what we were doing.
And I threw out the slides, and I started to try and figure out how can I have more authentic conversations with people? How is it that I can have better dialogue with the people that don't agree with me? Because what I found out after I left was that this was not an ordinary graduate school on agriculture. This was at Iowa State. I don't know if you guys know this, but they have an an ag program, and then they had a group of people that broke off from the ag school and floated to the left side of campus, and they were the group on sustainable agriculture.
So I had literally gone to the very people that were pushing back and fighting back against modern agriculture. So from there, I spent the next five years traveling around, trying to figure out how to have better conversations, and that's what I want to share with you today. I want to talk about this idea of a worthy adversary. Who are the people that you should be engaging with? Because the truth of the matter is not everyone. Some people don't want to engage with you. Some people choose violence. But this is not all people. In fact, that's a very, very small number of people. And if we are to win over the larger group of people about whatever your policy ideas are, you need to go out and find those people, those worthy adversaries that don't necessarily agree with what you think.
And this is a concept that I actually learned from doctor Flinchbaugh. We'll talk a little bit more about that. Next, I wanna talk about productive disagreements. What is it that you can do to have conversation about those ideas that make you deeply uncomfortable, that threaten something within your own family operation or the larger industry? And how can you grapple with these ideas and actually learn enough to be able to say maybe I can tighten my own policy thoughts up. And then finally, in great doctor Blinchbau fashion, I want to present to you a radical idea that you can grapple with like this, one that may make you as angry as those Iowa State kids back five years ago.
Alright, so let's start off by first talking about this concept of worthy adversaries. After I was invited to speak, I went back and watched that interview that I did with doctor Flinchbaugh, and I realized that just in that one conversation, he had had a very large impact on me. Because in my podcast, which is called the Ag Tribes Report, every week, I engage what I call a worthy I ask my guest, who is a worthy adversary of yours? Now, I got this idea when I was interviewing with Doctor. Flinchbaugh, he he gave me this idea, he said, you know, the the people that view those that don't agree with them as their enemies can only fight, And if you want to change people's minds, you can't view them as your enemies, you have to view them as your adversaries, somebody that is challenging your ideas and making them better.
And I didn't guest, some farmer, somebody that represents some part of agriculture, who is one person that you respect, that you completely disagree with. Why is that important? Well, that's important because it is too often that we spend our time talking about our ideas with people that actually already agree with us. This is what I had done for those months in preparation for Iowa State, was that I had been talking only with people that already agreed with the perspective I was going to go out and share. So I was totally unprepared when somebody had ideas and arguments and perspectives that were wildly different than what we were prepared for.
Now on the podcast, I recognize that this is actually a great challenge. Imagine being on a podcast in front of thousands of people, and somebody is asking you, who's somebody you respect but totally disagree with? This makes us very uncomfortable. We don't want to say who we disagree with. Right? That might put you in a position where you have to disagree with somebody, and it might get hot. But it's a worthwhile perspective because it is those people that will make our ideas better. And one of the key features of a worthy adversary is the concept of respect.
Respect is something that not everyone has. We don't have, naturally, respect for everyone. That's just the truth about human nature. We can act respectfully to everyone we meet, and we're called to that. We should treat people with dignity. We should interact with them in a way that allows them to hold esteem. But the truth is you only respect people that can do things that you can't do. This is why when we are thinking about those people that are on the other side of an issue, you need to really ask yourself, what is it that has helped this person gain an audience? Right? You might not like Maha, but what is it that he's done? What is it that RFK has done to be able to garner the interest and the support and the curiosity and the, like, loyalty.
You can't help but respect that because he's done something that's difficult to do. In fact, I would challenge any of us in the room, have not found a way to communicate with as many people as effectively as he has. So respecting another person doesn't mean that you agree with them. It just means you really do understand that they can do something that I can't do. The other thing that is hard to know when you're thinking about who is it that I should be going out, who are a worthy adversary, it's not just people you respect and that you disagree with. There might be a lot of those people, but really to think about this concept of resentment.
Right? Resentment is that feeling that we have deep inside of ourselves when we're watching someone succeed, and we don't think they should be. We're watching them gain some amount of favour. We're watching their ideas gain traction, and it burns us up. And typically, when we resent someone, we go to our tribe and we say, 'Isn't that person dumb? Isn't that idea stupid?' And we minimise their ideas so we don't actually have to grapple with it. But I would propose that if you want to be as effective as doctor Flinchbaugh, it is key that you use that resentment as a map to tell you, which idea should I be grappling with?
Where are there people and ideas that I need to engage my mind, my expertise, my background, and go and engage with those people. Now, that's not everyone that you resent. Certainly, there are people that you might resent that you don't respect. But those two key things will guide you to the exact people that you need to be engaging with if you want to make policy changes on a gigantic scale and I think everyone in this room recognizes that while we want ag to be stable there are big changes that need to happen if we are to have the farmers of today farming into the future. So if you find someone that you respect and completely disagree with, and potentially, you even really dislike their argument, what is it that you can do to make sure you are actually engaging with what they're talking about?
Well, there is this concept called the Overton window. How many of you are familiar with this idea? Overton window is actually a map on what ideas are allowed to be talked about in society. We might think, oh, we're in a policy room. We could talk about anything. But that's not true. There are certainly ideas in here that if somebody stood up and and brought them up, you would say, that's so radical that I dismiss it. I don't believe that's true at all. Inside of those ideas, inside of the overwritten window are acceptable ideas, both on the left and on the right.
And then somewhere in between those, you have sensible ideas and popular ideas, and somewhere, I wouldn't say in the middle. Right? We talked about the fact that you either have a consensus or a tyranny. Maybe it's not in the middle, but somewhere inside of that Overton window is policy, the laws that are going to govern us. This Overton window is something that's important to recognize If maybe six months before COVID, you said there's going to be a If maybe six months before COVID, you said there's going to be a law and it's going to mandate that people wear masks wherever they go out in public, you would have laughed that person off the stage. Six months later, due to the way that information flowed out, the way that our government pushed, out ideas, now all of a sudden, this wasn't a radical idea anymore.
It was law. The Overton window can change very rapidly, and to the point earlier today that ultimately this thing can be flexed and turned, and who's radical on the left might be very similar to the people on the right. Outside of radical ideas, there are certainly unthinkable ideas. I'm sure everyone in this room agrees with me that violence, shooting someone like Charlie Kirk, is an unthinkable idea. This is why it is so horrified our nation to use violence on someone that was just talking. But where should you be looking for the ideas that are going to impact agriculture? I would suggest that most of the ideas that are currently inside of this Overton window are likely not enough to push us towards the policy and the way of being that we need to be to have US agriculture succeed in the future.
So how can you argue with someone? What is the best way to engage with somebody? I know that for me, I would go on to stages, and I would talk in rooms of thousands of people, usually a lot of young college kids, and they would come to the stage, and they would be talking about GMOs. Now, the amount of knowledge that they had about GMOs was very, very little. They'd watched one or two documentaries. They'd read one book, maybe been in one class, and their belief in their knowledge was really high. But now when they're standing with a microphone and they're about to talk to the guy that they believe represents, you know, Monsanto, this dark evil place, then when they would stand there, they would actually shake.
They're not standing there with these dark ideas about the way that modern agriculture is because they're, twirling their moustaches and laughing about how they know these things. They are pushing back on these ideas because this is what they believe. So they would sit there, and they would shake as they asked me, do GMOs cause autism? Is this pesticide making my family sick or obese? Now, if you know a lot about a subject, it's very easy to hear an idea, and before they even get done explaining, you're like, oh, I know where this is going, and hit back at it. Right? That's the thing that makes us feel good. I already know that argument. I'm going to to stop you in your tracks so we can go faster. But if you actually want to change minds, you have to do steelmanning.
Steelmanning is where you are capable of expressing the idea of the other person so well that they sit there and say, yes, you do understand my perspective. Yes, you get this idea. This is hard. Right? We wanna jump past, hey, how how complicated is your idea? We wanna get right to the point of being like, no, I know why this is wrong, and I'm gonna tell you why it's wrong. But a person that is sitting there working up all their courage, walking past their nervousness to tell you what they think or to ask you a question, if you can give them back their argument more strongly than they were able to put it together, they will begin to loosen their grip on that idea.
Now, let's say you have a great number of reasons why the thing that they're proposing about water or pattern tile or or pesticide use is totally wrong, and you steel man their argument, and they say, Yes, I agree. What should you do next? Should you blow up their argument? Should you try and attack it as hard as you can? Well, I would suggest that's actually not the most effective way to do it. And in fact, the most effective way to do it Oh, I wanted to to make the point that this is absolutely what alternatives and consequences is. This is what doctor Funchbau taught. You know, not only do you have to know your idea, you have to know what the alternative ideas are, and you have to know the consequences of your ideas.
But let's say you've encountered an argument, and you have expressed it to them. You now they understand that you understand their argument. What should you do next? You should give them a click. What is a click? A click is when somebody is encountering some piece of information, something that they've never encountered before, and they have an moment. Right? They they're a little bit fascinated. We love these moments. We love having our minds say, oh, I'd heard about those things, but I never really made the connection there. So one of the clicks that I used to use is if I was talking with somebody about GMOs, They would get done with their question. I would express to them that I understood what their point of view was. And then I would say, before we talk about GMOs, can I tell you something that fascinated me when I came to agriculture?
So now they're kind of like, okay, I guess. You know, you've shown that you understand my argument. And I would say something like, you know, I was shocked when I found out that broccoli didn't occur in the nature in nature. And they'd be like, what? And I would be like, yeah. I mean, I used to think that the way that we got broccoli was there was wild broccoli all around, and somebody went and gathered up broccoli, put the seeds in and put it in straight rows, and that's how we got broccoli. But it's actually not how we got broccoli. Broccoli comes from this the Brassica family, and somewhere in Italy about six thousand years ago, this plant called Brassica oleracea used to grow up tall, and it had these bushy seed pods and these dark green leaves on it leaves on it. It had lateral buds. It had a root.
Now what ended up happening was somebody, hunters and gatherers likely, figured out, hey, wait, we love this plant. We encountered it by streams. We love to eat the whole thing. But if instead of eating all of it, when we find one of them that has a really bushy seed pod, a bushier one than all the rest, well, we're going to take those and we're going to put it in the ground, And it's going to grow up the same way the last one did. Only this one's going to have more bushy seed pods. And if you keep selecting for the bushiest seed pods over and over again a few 100 times, eventually, that expresses as almost entirely bushy seed pods, which is broccoli.
But that's not alone. Those leaves that we talked about, if you select for those, you get kale. If you select for the lateral buds, you get brussels sprouts. If you select for the root, you get kohlrabi. This one plant gave us so many of the vegetables that all children hate. The reason that this click works with people is because all of a sudden, they realize there's so much about plants that I don't know, but instead of having this argument shoved on me, I got to join this discussion. I got to be fascinated. I got to have a click.
This is right in line with what doctor Flinchbaugh used to say. You know, we've mentioned when people's minds are laughing when people are laughing, their minds are open. Doctor Flinchbaugh was famous. He said it on my podcast. He must have said it to people in this room dozens and dozens of times. Every time you're giving a talk, you need to be able to make people laugh every five to seven minutes. I'm not capable of that. He was much, much funnier than me, and I was telling him that one time. He's like, well, I've had, you know, decades to be able to build up my repertoire. But it's important. Right? When people are laughing, what are they actually doing?
Have you ever thought about what laughter really is? We're all universally not taught this, but we have this sound. That sound is something that we almost only do when we are in the presence of other people. Laughter is a social signal saying, I understand. A a common comedian puts out an idea that are two disparate ideas. When they connect them, you have that click moment, you laugh. And that social signal of laughter tells everybody else, I get the joke, which is why when everybody's laughing at a joke, and you don't get it, what do you do? You laugh too, right?
Because we don't want to be excluded, which is why that click is so important. If you want to convince people of your ideas, you have to be able to find a way to give them a click because the argument alone will not win the day. Let's say you've encountered an argument that you can't steal men, that their ideas are so different from you that you don't actually know what to say in response. Well, now I don't actually spend most of my time talking to audiences like you. Now what I spend most of my time is recording people telling their life stories. I run a company called Legacy Interviews where I sit down with older adults that want to tell their stories, their family histories, the farm history, so that that way their grandchildren can know where they came from, what their stories are.
And one of the things that I've come to realize is I don't always have a good question for people. They get done telling me about their approach to life, something that happened to them, something that was deeply important to them, and a question doesn't come to mind. And so I use this phrase right here that I don't think we hear often enough in society. When we're arguing with people, how often, when you disagree with somebody, do you just say, tell me more? Tell me more about this idea. Let me understand what it is that you're really trying to say. Think about for yourself. If you're arguing with somebody really vociferously, you really disagree with them, but instead of them pushing back on your idea, they say, 'Tell me more.' This is the kind of thing that's not happening in our discourse, and certainly, it's very difficult to do on social media, but it can be done, and when you do, people will begin to gain respect for you. You're able to hold your passions back from just pushing back on them.
The next thing that I've learned is that how questions are far, far greater than 'why' questions. This is true both when you're arguing for policy and when you're having a discussion with somebody, your loved one. Right? We like to think, and in fact, it's a very big part of our culture that everybody knows, like, y is the centre of the circle. It's our motivation. It's, you know, what causes us to do things. But y is actually very complicated. Y is multifactorial. It is, it can, the reason that we do things, why we do them, is often so complicated that we don't even know why we do things.
And so if I'm interviewing somebody about their legacy interview, and they tell me about, for example, a bankruptcy that they went through, and I say, why did you decide to go through bankruptcy? A person now has to think, should I find a way to present myself in the best light? Should I try and be defensive? And they start thinking an answer that allows them to put forward their best face. But this does not actually get you any closer to understanding why. And in fact, I would suggest that most of the time when we ask people why, they lie to us because they don't know why they do what they do.
You don't know why you do most of what you do. Most of what we do is a reaction to something else. We just stumbled into it. So if instead of asking why, you ask how, how did you come to this idea? How did you decide this? How does this work? Help me to understand it. Now, people will go all the way back to the beginning, and they will start telling you a linear series of events. And as they do, as they express that how, the why emerges from it. And when you're discussing with people when they have to draw this linear series of events and how they think this idea is going to work, oftentimes they will discover gaps in their own process.
Gaps in their own thinking that now because you haven't pushed on them too hard, because you haven't turned this into an argument, they are now very open to discussing it with you, which is leading me to, I think, maybe the most powerful tool for disagreeing with somebody, and it is to diagram your ideas. We have continued over time now that we have cell phones right we have these little mental telepathy machines that we can type a thought into but that thought is stripped down to the most bare thing that it could be. It's basically ones and zeros describing words. There's no vocal intonation.
There's no, like, feeling involved in it. Right? It is just stripped all the way down. So that's why it's so much more impactful to get on the phone and talk with somebody than it is to read a text message. How many text messages have sent you in the wrong direction thinking, what is that person saying? Why did they say that? By talking on the phone, you're adding in a new channel of information. This is why emojis are so powerful. We add emojis in to be able to give what normally is done through our intonation, through the way that we speak. So if text messages are better if you add emojis and are even better in communicating your information if you're talking, but even more than that, adding the visual cues, which is diagramming your ideas.
This is a small diagram I drew when I was in a rather vociferous argument about the downsides of pattern tile, which I don't want to get into today because this is a pretty strong argument. But one thing that happens as you are diagramming your idea with a person that you strongly disagree with is that you have to convert your ideas, and now as you write them down, the person moves from being sitting across from you to being shoulder to shoulder with you. And now they're not arguing with you. Now you're arguing with the idea that's right there. And when we get away from having people perceive that our ideas are actually defining us, then now you can start to push on things. You can start to discover gaps. You can add in information. Not to mention the fact that by having diagrams, by putting visuals to this, you now are opening up incredible volumes of channels to allow people to understand what you're saying or see the gaps in their own argument.
Diagramming your ideas can work with some of your, you know, strictest critics and also with your family members when you're arguing about how should we load the dishwasher. Right? Diagram it. You'll finally solve that twenty year problem. But as I finish out, one thing that I want to stress is if you are talking to another person about why your ideas are right and their ideas are wrong, if you are convinced that you will not change any aspect of your argument, I would propose you have no chance of changing their mind. Dialogue has to include the ability for you to push up on an idea and discover, wait, there were gaps in the way that I think.
Maybe the way that I have been thinking about that is not as refined or as perfect as I thought. I remember being at that Iowa State group, and there was no chance I could deviate from those slides. I was there to to tell them exactly what we had to communicate. They could intuitively tell that woman that pointed at me wasn't wrong. She didn't believe a word out of my mouth because I was not there for dialogue. I was there to download. This is not the way to change people, to get them to consider new ideas. And I think that this is something that we all want to do. And so you have to be able to come with some humility to be able to say, maybe there's something that they know that I would benefit from having my ideas tested against. And we all know that phrase, iron sharpens our iron.
It is so much better to be in dialogue with people that push back on your ideas that can actually change your mind. I can tell you there's a podcast, and I I got done with it. It was a guy that was very pro tariff, and I was very against tariffs. And I have never had my clock cleaned so bad on my own podcast than with this guy. And by the fact that I was willing to change, willing to discuss with him, he told me, I'll come back on any time. We can discuss this at length. Being willing to change your mind allows people to have information flow back and forth between each other. So now, I'm going to give you guys a pop quiz on how well you have taken what I'm saying here. I'm going to get a drink of water before I say this, Because I want you to consider a radical idea today.
We've heard a lot of people talking about different policies here, about different ways of thinking about what Washington needs to do to be able to help agriculture in our farm communities. And I want to put forward an idea that I think you might find rather radical, if not almost unthinkable. Now, I do these kinds of thinking all of the time. Another aspect of my podcast is while I'm interviewing this representative of one of the many ag tribes, I ask them about their worthy adversary, and then I asked them about their Peter Thiel paradox. The Peter Thiel paradox is this concept of what is one thing that you believe that almost no one you know agrees with you on?
And I learned this from hearing Peter Thiel talk about how he hires. Whatever you think of Peter Thiel, he's been able to get some of the best talent in the world. And he says, I always ask people this question, because by asking this question, I can see, I can observe how free are their thoughts from just what everybody else thinks. And the the real challenge of this question, what is one thing that you believe that almost no one you know agrees with you on, is not only first coming up with that idea that nobody might agree with you on, but if you actually succeed at the first part of that question, you find an idea that I don't agree on, now you have a new problem, because now you've got to convince me of this idea that I don't agree with you on. So this percolates up new ideas.
It forces people to think, what is it that I actually believe rather than I'm just going along with what everybody else I know already thinks? So I would ask you right now, do you have a Peter Thiel paradox? Do you have ideas in your mind that if anybody else in here thought that you thought that, they'd be ready to go, you know, ready to talk about it, ready to engage with your idea? Now in preparing for this talk, the organizers actually gave me what turned out to be an incredibly difficult challenge. Because as I said, I am not a policy person.
I am about high throughput of ideas. How do I help somebody open up so that they wanna share their family stories with me so we can record it and pass it on to their grandchildren? How do we have discussions so that you can tell me your ideas and I can learn from them? How can we push back and forth? I'm not trying to get laws passed. I'm not trying to advocate for, new transfer payments. I'm not trying to do any of the work that you all are doing. So I struggled with this question. It's not an area that's safe for me. But they asked, I want you to answer two questions. One, what does Washington get right about agriculture, and what is one thing that Washington gets wrong about agriculture?
So what I would say to this group is Washington gets right that keeping more farmers is better for America. We hear all politicians. This is a no brainer. There is no congressman out there that says, it'd be better off if we just didn't have as many, farmers out there. Right? They know, left, right, whatever, center, all know that they can go out there and say this. And they get it right, and everybody agrees with them. So what is it that they get wrong? Well, I believe that the thing that they get wrong is that printing money is going to help farmers.
And what I mean by printing money is these transfer payments that are given, these tariffs that are maybe allocated to agriculture, we perceive this is going to help farmers we all know the stats 13 and a half percent of farm income comes from transfer payments. Then everybody in here is also thinking, well, wait, wait, wait. It's actually 75% of those payments go to 10 of the farmers. Exactly. As some farmers have gotten larger and larger, they get a bigger piece of the amount of money that the government is putting into the system. And the reason that I think that agriculture, what Washington gets wrong is every time they are giving those transfer payments, what's happening?
Land prices are going up. Input prices are going up. No one fails, so nobody leaves agriculture. I don't want to say no one, but there are few that we keep people afloat, and all of the costs go up, and all of the output goes down. And I believe that there is actually no way for agriculture to outpace the printing of money, and that the government has no choice. It doesn't have to do with agricultural policy, that the very cold truth is that in order for the US government to be able to pay the debts that it has, it has to keep printing money, and that printing of money is going to vastly outpace farmers.
And so what can you do? Well, my Peter Thiel paradox, the thing that I believe that I would guess almost nobody in this room agrees with me on, is about bitcoin. I believe that those that are engaging with bitcoin today will be the landowners tomorrow. Now, how many of you agree with me on this idea? How many of you strongly disagree with this idea? Alright. So the first part of the Peter Thiel paradox is succeeded. I have found an idea that everybody here disagrees with. So the way that I want to frame this is first maybe to talk a little bit about why I think this. Well, Bitcoin to me is a true modern marvel.
They have done something that is almost unimaginable. It's something that we don't think of as so complicated, but it really is. Bitcoin, for the first time, has made things that are digital. Right? Think about your photographs that you can take. You can take a photograph and you can replicate it infinitely you can take one photograph and make a million copies of it so everything that's digital that gets all the benefit of being digital right being able to send it from you to your spouse, to your children, all of these things that we get from it. Being able to make infinite copies so you don't have to pay 35¢ a, a photo at at Walgreens.
And it's done something truly amazing because it's made a digital thing scarce. You cannot replicate a bitcoin. There is only 21,000,000 that will ever be made. This is truly phenomenal. No one can come along and make more bitcoin. And we could go into the specifics of this, but just for a moment, hold this idea. There will only ever be 21,000,000 of them, which means the supply is capped. The only other thing that is analogous to a supply capped financial system, bitcoin, is land, is ag land. We can't make more of it, which is why so much money is being dumped into purchasing farmland. When people are looking around at the world and they have a little bit of cash, they've been able to make some money, now they start, trying to figure out, what can I do to keep that value of that money?
And what they do is they say, I'm going to buy farmland because there's not going to be any more made of it. The government can't print their way out of that, and that's what's happening. Every time we print money, we are sucking the value out of the the money that you were paid for past work, for things that you produced. So Bitcoin is allowing people to have a finite asset and to store their value there. And then because it's digital, it's allowing you to be able to send that value anywhere you want with no one standing in the middle of it. I believe that we are watching right now the demonetization of ag land.
We are watching the monetary premium that's in agriculture, and it's being sucked down. Because just like real estate has people buying it that have no intention in living in those houses or living in those apartments, There are many, many people that have family wealth offices, hedge funds, people that are buying ag land to be able to keep its to store its value. Well, now they're going to look at what is the return on ag land. What is it? 68%? Yeah, three to four. But the government is going to print money way faster than three to 4%.
And so what has happening is all of these money market managers, these money managers are going to take that value, and they're gonna say, I can get three to 4% value in owning this farmland, or I can get 65% in Bitcoin. And so when we think about this bit Bitcoin and the the value it brings, it is going to suck the money out of agricultural land, but it's not going to do it in nominal terms. The price of land in terms of US dollars is going to continue to go up and up and up. But the price of land in terms of Bitcoin is going down and down and down.
And so my suggestion, my thing that I'm offering that you may disagree with, but I would rec I would hope that you would all take as a challenge to learn more about is I believe that if you can't buy farmland, if you want to help a young person try and be able to figure out how can I get a foothold in this game, it is not to get them to take on debt to buy more farmland? It is to park real money into bitcoin and wait for the land to be able to be purchased by it. This is a, I recognize, a radical idea. But as I close-up, I would actually ask whether we have enough time here today to do it or not. Is nope.
Can anyone here steel man this idea? Does anyone in this room know enough about bitcoin to be able to say, no, that's patently wrong? I imagine many of you have a lot of reasons why you don't like it. But the first question is, can you steel man it? But I wanted to bring that up because it's so easy to look at what other ideas that other people have that I can, you know, throw away. But here, this is a real example. So as you're thinking about the time that we have remaining, I know we're going to have another panel, and then we're going to have drinks. It's great to talk about your Peter Thiel paradox with other people that are in your world, in your policy world, in your agriculture world. So think, do you have a Peter Thiel paradox? And I would encourage you to ask the other people tonight, Hey, what's your Peter Thiel paradox? And really listen to them. If you don't have one, you're free to argue about mine.
But I also want to remind you that very flinch bow called all of us to be courageous. That man stood up in front of people that could have booed him, that did burn him in effigy, and he did it, and look at the impact he had. He had impact not because he had all the right answers, but because he was willing to explore ideas unlike anybody else that we knew. And so I would encourage any of you, if you want to have as big of a difference or even half the difference that doctor Flinchbaugh had, then I would encourage you to explore ideas of your worthy adversaries. And to create better policies, we need to engage those worthy adversaries, we need to understand their opposing ideas, and we have to be willing to, to change.
Thank you.
[00:44:08] Unknown:
I hope you enjoyed this presentation at the Flinchbaugh Forum for Ag Policy. It was an honor to be invited, and it was exciting to put forward an idea that I think a lot of people in that room were resistant to hearing. If you'd like to learn more about Bitcoin, go to vancecrow.com/bitcoin. There, you'll find a video where I'm describing how you can move Bitcoin from an exchange onto a wallet. This is what I always say is the first step if you wanna get your arms wrapped around, how do I handle a Bitcoin? What's it all about? You'll also find more information about a talk that I can come to deliver to your organization.
This talk could be about how to theoretically use Bitcoin and how it might impact your organization or industry, or it could be a very practical hands on talk where I actually show you how to do things physically with Bitcoin. If you're interested to learn more, go to vancecrow.com/bitcoin. Thanks again for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Setting the Stage: Flinchbaugh Forum and the Big Question
Courage, the Golden Mean, and Why Talk Beats Violence
Monsanto Lecture at Iowa State: A Tough First Lesson
From Slides to Dialogue: Learning Authentic Conversation
Worthy Adversaries: Respect, Resentment, and Who to Engage
Mapping the Overton Window: Where Ideas Become Policy
Steelmanning Critics and Creating ‘Clicks’ of Understanding
The Broccoli Click: Selective Breeding as a Bridge
Laughter as a Social Signal and Keeping Minds Open
‘Tell Me More’ and Asking How, Not Why
Diagramming Ideas: From Argument to Shared Problem-Solving
Humility in Dialogue: Being Willing to Change Your Mind
The Peter Thiel Paradox: Holding Unpopular Beliefs
What Washington Gets Right—and Wrong—About Agriculture
A Radical Proposal: Bitcoin, Money Printing, and Farmland
Can You Steelman Bitcoin? Challenging the Room
Share Your Peter Thiel Paradox and Be Courageous
Closing and Next Steps
