In this episode of the Ag Tribes Report, host Vance Crowe reflects on the one-year anniversary of the show, sharing insights and stories from the world of agriculture. With no co-host this week, Vance dives into the latest headlines affecting the agricultural community, including the impact of deportation notices at an Iowa meat packing plant, Oregon's proposed agritourism regulations, and John Deere's new digital repair tool. Vance also explores the complexities of immigration, the challenges of agritourism, and the ongoing right to repair debate, inviting listeners to share their thoughts and perspectives.
Vance also delves into the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, discussing the differences between Bitcoin and altcoins, and the role of stablecoins in the global economy. He shares his views on the potential financial crisis posed by index funds and the importance of having worthy adversaries to challenge one's beliefs. The episode concludes with a call for diverse voices in agriculture to join future discussions, and an invitation for listeners to engage with the show by sharing their insights and stories.
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The Ag Tribes Report is brought to you by Legacy Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guest Steve Alt on the importance of preserving stories for future generations today.
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I grew up with my dad and my uncle all the time, and I heard all the old stories. When the kids and the grandkids want to remember what happened those years ago, I think it's a really good idea. Legacies, I mean, it made me nervous, don't get me wrong, when we first starts talking about all this stuff. But, you know, if you keep waiting so long, the memories do fade. I'm not saying I'm getting old, but when you can relax enough to get into it, that's where the stories come from.
[00:00:49] Unknown:
Welcome to the AgTribe's report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crowe. The report begins in three, two, one. Let's begin.
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Welcome to the Ag Tribes Report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week, I bring on a cohost to represent one of the many ag tribes that collectively make up US and Canadian agriculture. At the last minute this week, I realized I had a scheduling problem. And so I called a man to be there to help me. I, I knew he was the only one for the job. I reached out to him because I knew that I could depend on him and I've never asked him for any favors. I've never wanted anything from him. That man's name is Jay Curtis. And when I reached out to him and asked him if he could come on the ag tribes report with just thirty minutes of head heads up, you can tell if you're watching this show that he said, no, I'm totally kidding. Jay's a good friend of mine. He wouldn't do it because he didn't feel prepared. But that means that it's just you and me here today for the ag tribes report.
And, Hey, that's gonna be all right. In fact, it's actually a good time for me because I've been doing the ag tribes report since July 2024. So it's about one year exactly since I started, this program and I am absolutely elated with how all this has gone. It has given me a chance to talk with people from all over American and Canadian agriculture to talk about, ideas and stories that are going on. I've had a lot of people challenge assumptions that I have. I remember the tariff guy coming on and ripping me to shreds. I've talked with people that are nervous about putting out worthy adversaries, people that have put together pretty good Peter Teal paradoxes, and, you've loved it. This has been a show that continues to grow and grow and grow, and so I'm really excited about it. And so in a way, this is a great way to do a, an annual kind of look back.
So because it's just me, I would love it if you would comment, if you would, put, you know, send down your thoughts on what I'm talking about in the story, and I'll try and reply to it in x. If you just hit reply, it'll come right up here on the show for me. Otherwise, if you're watching on YouTube or Facebook, just put it in the comments. And I would love to hear what you think of this week's stories and some of the other topics we're covering. Tonight on the Ag Tribes report, we're gonna dive into the deportation notices that are disrupting an Iowa meat packing plant. We're gonna talk about Oregon's proposed rules threatening agritourism and John Deere's new digital repair tool addressing the right to repair concerns.
We're gonna do that. We're also gonna talk a little bit and about Bitcoin. We're going to talk about my latest Peter Thiel paradox, and I'll do a little thing on worthy adversaries, and we're gonna try and do this in just thirty minutes. So let's get started. Story number one, deportation notices disrupt 200 workers at an Iowa JBS plant. From agriculture.com on July 29, the JBS meat packing plant in Ottumwa, Iowa issued deportation notices to 200 workers from Haiti, Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua after their work visas were revoked. And this is according to mayor Rick Johnson. The decision stems from May 20 Supreme Court ruling upholding president Trump's authority to terminate Biden era programs granting temporary legal status to immigrants from these nations.
JBS, which employs 2,700 at the facility, is providing a $1,000 stipend to, per worker to aid in their relocation, but mandates immediate termination and departure. On x, there were people out there expressing alarm over the labor shortage. You know, if you can't, do the meat packing, that's gonna really gum up the works, but there are also some people, and they're saying, hey. This is 7% of the workforce, so this could actually delay processing. It could, raise beef prices. Then there's, of course, other people out there saying, hey. We need this stricter immigration enforcement. This is what can what Trump campaigned on. This is what I want. And, but it's gonna throw some, wrinkles in the system. JBS insists that operations will remain unaffected, but local businesses reliant on these workers face some strain. So what do you think about this? I know for me, I believe that, there is attention here that we are not talking about. The first one we are hearing people say like, hey. Trump campaigned on this. If you are gonna say we're gonna throw out illegal immigrants, you can't just, focus only on the bad ones. You have to focus on the ones that are employed and the ones that are doing hard work. Some people are saying, well, that's gonna raise our food prices. Who's gonna do these jobs. But I've heard from people in the past that when a Nebraska facility, was rated, they had a line out the door of American workers trying to apply for those jobs right, right after it happened. So it seems like there there may be enough people to fill this work.
We're gonna see. But the other problem is you have to ask yourself, why are these people coming? Why are there so many illegal immigrants here? It is because everyone's currency everywhere in the world is inflating. And in The United States, it's just inflating slightly slower than everywhere else. So the reason those people are coming from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, it's because their currency doesn't allow them to work hard, work an incredibly difficult job and make enough money to be able to pay for their families. If they come here, they work illegally, they don't get the benefits. They're they're going to work here until we solve the inflation problem. We are going to continue to have illegal immigrants working here. Not only because it's better for them, but because as labor costs go up, people that are trying to keep their businesses afloat are going to keep hiring them. So I don't see another way to solve this immigration problem other than to fix the money. But until then, you're gonna have this tension where the Trump administration is gonna try and score points by deporting big numbers of people.
And it turns out in this scenario, it's like the ones that, were following the rules because they, they they looked at this Biden era policy. They're the ones that are getting kicked out and the people that have, stayed well under the radar, they're not getting targeted and picked out. Who knows how this is gonna shape up, but, I'm sure JBS is gonna change their operations as quick as they can. And, I I bet they won't miss a beat. All right. Moving on to story number two. This is from America. UN one Oregon's proposed rules, jeopardize agritourism for small farmers on July 27, Oregon's department of land conservation and development proposed rules tightening agritourism, prompting fierce opposition from small farmers. The regulations redefine farm stand, requiring land use approvals for permanent structures and prohibiting sales of non farm items like crafts and souvenirs or even cider donuts made from farm ingredients.
Promotional events such as hay rides, petting zoos, or farm to table dinners could be capped at 17 annually or banned unless strictly educational. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported over 2,300 calls and emails flooding governor Tina Kotek's office, leading her to pause the rulemaking. A viral Instagram post from Topaz Farms viewed 3,000,000 times, warned of potential farm closures, because this is where a lot of farms are getting some, income from. And, but, and, and supporters like 1,000 claim the rule safeguards, farmland from commercial overuse, citing traffic and noise complaints.
Farmers emphasized, agri tourism accounts for 50% of income in one of, in, for one in five Willamette Valley farms supporting 11,000 jobs. So there is a lot of temptation here, to, to, or I'm sorry, a lot of looking at this and saying, wait a second is agritourism, is it farming? Should they still get the same farming protections? Are, what is this? What about people's quality of life if you are running a regular commercial farm, and now you have your neighbor bringing hundreds or even thousands of cars over your roads to park on your farm and have so many more people out there impacting when you can do spring, when you can, drive up and down your roads, how dangerous it is. The, I think America on one did a really good job of trying to highlight, both sides of the issues, because there's some farms out there that are saying, like, look. This is, what we the the path that we decided. We made investments into this to be able to make our farm stay sustainable, to be able to keep this as cropland.
But then on the other side of it, you've you've gotta understand that the farmers that are trying to do this at production scale and industrial scale, it's gotta be really difficult to have all of these, you know, normies coming on to your farm or around in your area. So there's an a lot of tension here. I don't have any idea what the answer should be, but I would sense that outlawing agritourism is not gonna be a winning gambit. I mean, I'm I'm definitely of the free market. You know, whatever works for the free market, you should probably do. But at the same time, if, somebody tried to buy my neighbor's house and put up a, you know, a a an apartment building, I probably wouldn't be very happy about that. And I think that this is very similar. If all of a sudden you're turning farmland into a place where lots of people are coming to, it seems like it's not a great situation.
All right. Before we move on to story number three, Josh Peterson said they're quote, not illegal immigrants. The us government issued them work visas. Yeah. He's absolutely right in the Biden era. Whatever policy that they put forward. It was, they weren't considered illegal. In fact, they were now working legally as long as they registered. And so it does feel a little shady that they had brought these people in and then pulled out the rug from underneath them. Alright. Moving on to story number three. John Deere's a $195 digital tool to, responds to right to repair battle.
On July 30, just yesterday, John Deere launched Operation Center Pro Service, a digital repair tool for farmers and independent technicians addressing criticisms in the FCC versus John Deere right to repair lawsuit priced at a $195 per machine annually. The tool provides machine health insights, diagnostic diagnostic trouble codes, model specific manuals, software reprogramming, and interactive tests, replacing the limited customer service advisor, which they'll phase out over the year. On X, farmers welcome the enhanced access, but criticize the subscription cost and the restrictions such as requiring owner permission for technicians to use the tool antitrust attorney, James Kovac, who had previously called the earlier tool incomplete, arguing they restricted full repair cap capabilities.
John Deere's Denver Caldwell emphasized the tool support for self repair with plans for future updates. The release may ease tension, but won't resolve the ongoing legal battle, as advocates push for broader access without fees, independent repair shops vital in rural areas see potential for benefit, but are awaiting the pricing details for their machine shops. So, I mean, the obvious question that I would ask somebody if they were a guest on here is, what do you think? Does this go far enough? And, as somebody that doesn't have to repair my own tractors, but does live in the world of constantly being hit with subscriptions and trying to run a business where every time you turn around, somebody is saying like, hey, just pay this small subscription and we'll give you access to, you know, this tool or we'll give you these things instead of being able to buy it and use it up. So I'm sure that the subscription model per machine has got to be incredibly grading for farmers.
On the other hand, this has gotta be a big win. I mean, this is like when you're trying to work on your own vehicle and you can't even find out what's wrong with it. Even though, you know, if I just plug this little device into my truck, I can know what's wrong with it. I can I could probably go to most parts stores for simple fixes and do it myself? So being able to do this with your own tractor is going to one, save a huge amount of time. And, when you have problems out in the field, it's gonna be able to allow you to keep doing your, harvest, keep doing planting, and not get hung up on that. And two, it's going to give you some options. Are you gonna be able to, just find, hey. What part do I need? I don't just have to go to my John Deere advisor and then use the one part that he suggests. Maybe I can now go on Amazon or go to my parts store, and be able to to get something in. So I'm I imagine that this is like almost all things. They never seem to go, quite far enough.
And, and but it is a good first step. So I'll be interested to see if any of you, get the, the ability to, plug your system in and get to see all these codes, how much it impacts you. And, is it going far enough? Is this just enough to be able to get them through the lawsuit, or is it something that, is really gonna be a game changer? I think time's gonna tell on this one, but I'll be interested in hearing from you about that. Alright. Well, we're cutting through the news stories, much faster than normal because I don't have a farmer perspective. All I can do is issue both sides of this. So it shows all the more why this has been such a great program to have different people on each week, to be able to talk about like, Hey, this is my perspective. And I gotta say most of the time, I almost always disagree with the people on their perspective, but they're the ones living in every day. So it would be nice to know, you know, is this gonna be a big change for you and your operation?
You know, is is this, are the immigration things, stuff you're seeing around where you're at? And, so one thing I wanna know is if you're a farmer and you have an interesting perspective, I am particularly looking to get to farmers that are well outside of the Midwest. I know a lot of real crop farmers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, even in Missouri, but helping me get outside of this band and even finding different crops, let me know. I'm interested. You can always reach out to me on x and say, hey. I run this kind of operation. I'd be interested in coming on the show, and, let's try and increase the amount of diversity of people, what types of craps they're raising, what type of operation they run, know that I'm always open to it, and, I'll be I'll be very interested, to meet some new people. Here's some new perspectives.
Alright. Also, if you have shows, if, stories that I should run on this show, you can always send them to me on x at Vance Crowe, or or you can email them to me, Vancelegacyinterviews dot com. All right, moving on to the Bitcoin land price report. So when I did the first Bitcoin land price report, it wasn't actually at the first Ag Tribes report. It was actually on the third one. It was almost exactly one year ago, that I had, somebody come on and then mention the, the Bitcoin land price report. And, at the time, Bitcoin costs $65,500, and now it's a $116,500.
And we could go on and on to talk about, you know, this price appreciation, and I could talk all about, my feelings about how, you know, eventually Bitcoin will demonetize land. But I actually wanna set that down for a moment because what I wanna do now with this amount of time, since I'm not gonna compare it to land prices here in St. Louis County, where I live, what I wanna do is talk about, the hype that you are probably hearing right now, all over mainstream news, which is not about Bitcoin. It's about altcoins. It's about stablecoins.
It's about what people, from my tribe all call shitcoins. These are, different types of cryptocurrencies that have sprouted up as a result of people saying like, oh, there's Bitcoin. This works really well, but I can't make money on Bitcoin. I can only invest into it myself. So what they do instead is they say, well, I'm gonna give a clone to this, or I'm gonna do one that's kinda like Bitcoin, but I'm gonna have it do something else. One of these that you might hear about quite a bit, Ethereum, is one of these one of these cryptocurrencies. And there may be some use case out there. I don't know what it is, but I do know that Ethereum does not have the principles or the properties that make it what Bitcoin is. So Bitcoin had the immaculate conception. There was a white paper that went out and then you were anybody that knew about Bitcoin could start mining it. And nobody got a first pull at first, like, allotment of Bitcoin before everybody else. It was, if you knew about it and you started mining, you could get access to it, but there's only new Bitcoin put out every ten minutes.
Ethereum or Ripple or any of these other shit coins, what they do is they create a new cryptocurrency and then they issue a bunch to the founders and to the investors. And that could be hundreds or thousands, maybe millions of those coins. And now they start selling the rest of them to the public. And as that price appreciates, people that didn't have to do the proof of work that you have to do with Bitcoin, They were just given this or as an investment. They can sell those out. That ends up actually becoming the very thing that people criticize Bitcoin for. People say, oh, it's a Ponzi scheme. Oh, you've always gotta wait for somebody else to come along. What Bitcoin does that's different than all of these is there's no central issuer. There's nobody coming along saying, I'll decide who gets these ahead of time. And they they are decentralized in their distribution.
So when you're hearing all of this, people are gonna be talking about like, oh my gosh. Did you see how much ETH went up this week? I gotta get my hands on some of that. Oh, I wish I could I can't get it because Bitcoin is so high. I can't get leverage there. So I'm gonna buy these other coins that are priced way lower so I can get more of them. So if they go up, they may go up. I don't know. Maybe they will. But the the real challenge is what are you actually buying? With Bitcoin, you are buying a store of wealth. There is only ever going to be 21,000,000, Bitcoin.
With Ethereum, we don't know that. They may they may add more. They may change it. You can change Ethereum in a way that you can't change Bitcoin. Another, key component of this is there's nobody that can reverse transactions in Bitcoin. It is self sovereign. You must be responsible for it. With Ethereum, some of these other tokens, they can say like, oh, oh, oh, there were some transactions we didn't like. North Korea did a, a heist, and we don't want North Korea to get that Ethereum, so we're gonna reverse that. So Ethereum and all of these other altcoins are not Bitcoin, and they're gonna try and be Bitcoin. They're gonna be celebrating it all over the the Internet. They're gonna be, hyping it up, getting excited. And the reason you're gonna see them is because they have marketing departments.
They have, people that they're paying to show up and, be sparkly and and shiny and be like, oh, you should tell you should hear about this new thing and look how cool it is. But those are not a store of value. There's something else. Maybe they're a tech stock. Jack Mallers came out this week and said, you know, with Ethereum, maybe it will be a tech stock. Maybe that's how you could make equivalent. Maybe it's as good as Amazon, but Bitcoin is not that. Bitcoin is actually a a total change to currency and the way that we store value. And the heights that Ethereum could reach, even if it is everything that it says it could be, is maybe Amazon.
The heights that Bitcoin can reach are all of the currencies all over the world, all of the places that people now try and store wealth. So you do what you want, but I'm just gonna use this small amount of time with the Bitcoin land price report to say, it is very important that you don't fall prey to all this altcoin bullshit. And instead, just stay the course, stay involved with Bitcoin, and just buy small amounts over and over and over again. And eventually, your stack will get to the point where, it's gonna make a real difference, and you aren't ever gonna have to worry about, all these other things. As far as stablecoins go, man, stablecoins are wild. I don't really understand them very well. I know they are being issued as one for one with US dollars and what I am reading now is that stablecoins are a new way, to be able to purchase US treasuries. In fact, stablecoins hold a 150,000,000,000 in US treasuries, making them the eighteenth largest holders.
And this has gone up by almost 60,000,000,000 or about 64 in the in the first quarter, since the 2023. So what's going on with stablecoins is they are trying to issue these all over the world to regular people who can't normally buy US treasuries, who know that their local currency is not very valuable. So they're buying these stable coins in order to be able to have access to a currency that is not inflating as fast as their local currency. But what's happening in The United States is stable coins like Tether, when they take profits from the transaction, from the exchange rate between, the their local currency and these stable coins, and then they go out and buy treasuries.
Tether is taking those profits, and they're buying Bitcoin. That's their strategy for making real long term money. So these stablecoins, they are, they're they're not, they're a different thing than the altcoins like Ethan Ripple, but, ultimately, the strategy of the largest, stablecoin holders is to make that exchange happen and then turn their dollars into Bitcoin so that it holds value. So this is just a little primer. I thought it'd be kinda fun to go through rather than me trying to compare prices. I love talking about this subject, but I have to say I am a little bored with most of the arguments that people are giving me. People that are watching out on x, you see that I talk with Jared McDaniel all the time.
I'm trying to think Lawrence McLaughlin. I've even heard, some people from that have been past guests on the podcast that are saying, I think it's a Ponzi scheme. What can you buy with it? What's its value? I I can't like, it's it's, made by the CIA. These are not sophisticated arguments, and there are people all over the place that are are, able to debunk this. I've talked about it a bunch. What I would love to see is people having really sophisticated arguments that are actually attacking the core of Bitcoin or how it works, how the nodes work, how mining works, how the structure is set up. Because if you know something I don't know, I wanna know it. But, it's it's a little like when you, encounter people that know, you know, very little about glyphosate and the attacks they give on it. And you're like, I I could spend my time going over and over and over again on the same arguments, but it doesn't seem to be helping. I would I would make the equivalent thing here. So know that I am very, very open to criticisms of Bitcoin or whether it's gonna demonetize land, but, I want these arguments to be more interesting and sophisticated.
One last note, there is one podcast that I listen to every single week as soon as I can, and it is on Wednesday. It comes out, and it is called This Week in Bitcoin. If you have been looking for a podcast that is, interesting and engaging and I would give a full endorsement of, I really think that Chris l a s is, is doing great things with Jupiter Broadcasting. He is an excellent, podcaster, and you will get to hear the inner workings of Bitcoin, and it may be a way for you to be brought into this tribe. That's definitely my tribe, are the Bitcoin tribes. And I think that podcast this week in Bitcoin is one of the very best ones.
Alright. Moving on to the Peter Thiel paradox. Okay. So I thought about this for a while today. After Jay wouldn't come on, I couldn't hear his Peter Thiel paradox. But, I didn't wanna do one on Bitcoin because you guys have heard me talk about this quite a bit. I thought for quite a bit about different things that I could do, and I should start from the onset to say this is not investment advice. I'm not I'm not telling you where to put your money. With Bitcoin, I feel very confident about that. But this is just an idea that I personally am exploring, and, I believe it really strongly. Other people don't, but I'm very open to having somebody come along and be like, no. You're wrong because of these reasons, which is the value of having a Peter Thiel paradox. It's not that you have an idea and then you convince everybody that you're right. It's that you put together this idea that's different because you believe it, and then you allow people to push back on it. And mine is that I believe that the ETF, the index funds the index funds craze that's gone on, the Jack Bogle Vanguard, hey, you don't have to buy one stock. You should just buy an entire haystack of stocks.
I believe that this is going to bring the apocalypse of, a financial crisis to us. And the reason that I think this, the reason I think index funds are so terrible is that they are creating zombie money for corporations. Every single Friday, when people in large corporations are getting paid, they take a part of their money and then part of it gets matched and it gets put right into their four zero one ks. And with that four zero one ks, you could buy individual equities, but you don't know which stock is the best. And so you're like, all right, well, my investment advisor has told us, let's buy index funds, which is just a collection of these stocks. Maybe it's one of every single one in the S and P 500 or one in this particular, set of small capitalized, companies.
Now the challenge with this is this means that every single week, we are injecting doses of capital into the entire market, pumping it up. Right? It just keeps going up and up and up, and it's going up faster than people are taking money out. But this is giving capital to companies not based on how well are they doing, not based on what products are they producing. It's did they get on the index fund list. And a lot of these things, a lot of people don't know this, a lot of these are like, oh, I'm I'm a part of the climate change index fund where our company fulfills all the sustainability requirements, so you should give us money. So they are focused more on delivering, results that get them in the climate change fund than they are about delivering products to people at a lower at a higher price than it costs them to produce. And I think there is a whole bunch of dead zombie companies on the market that have no business being there. And eventually the index funds and themselves are not going to be enough to keep them up. And we are going to watch a massive collapse of US equities, that are outside of the magnificent seven, outside of the Amazons and the Facebooks and the Googles.
And I think that this is something that all of us have been walking towards because everybody's been like, oh, it's way better. Jack Bogle showed how you can't beat the stock market, so you should just buy all of them. Warren Buffett talks all about index funds. I think that over the long term, this became such a well known idea that it has actually created a gigantic and terrible, terrible trap for us. Now I've told this to people and they fight against me and they disagree with it. People that I respect, people that I like, but nobody's ever convinced me otherwise of this argument, but maybe you can. Maybe you have a way of understanding why index funds are the right way, why passive investing isn't going to cause this incredible apocalypse. But when I see how much money is pumped in, how these zombie companies are operating, how it gets them to focus on meeting the requirements of getting on index funds lists as opposed to producing products, I think that the end result of this is a bubble that gets exploded.
But let me know what you think in the comments. I would love to know what you, are considering here. Alright. Now on to worthy adversary. This is where I talk about who is one person that you respect but you really, really disagree with. And, I I struggled with this, but not because I'm one of those people that's like, oh, I don't wanna ever say anything mean. I don't want to, hurt anybody's feelings. In fact, that is not the point of the worthy adversary. The point of the worthy adversary is to say, you there, you have an idea or a set of ideas that I think are bullshit, and I don't like them. And I I fight against them all the time, but I fight against them because they make me better. Because by exploring your ideas and hearing what you're thinking about makes me have to really broaden push, and it makes me stronger and better. So in the past, I've said Jared McDaniel.
I've said Damien Mason. That actually was a great one, prompted me to have him on the show. I, now I'm like one of the biggest Damien Mason fans that there is, Jeff Murphy, who I now buy flower from and and, really find him engaging. Greg Gunthorpe was one that I we thought was a worthy adversary. So all of these people, I've now had on the podcast, and it's been one of those great experiences. So this is what I'm saying, like, don't be such a sissy and not say who your worthy adversary is. I hate that. Don't you? Like, when we're doing the the ag tribes report and I'm like, who's your worthy adversary? And they said, well, my mom said, you know, never say anything. If you can't say something nice about something, then don't say it all. I think saying that you don't have anybody that you respect but disagree with maybe is not very nice in and of itself or at least isn't very, comprehensive. But since I've said so many people that I've disagreed with, I thought actually, an idea that popped into my mind comes from legacy interviews.
So for legacy interviews, for people that don't know, I sit down and record people telling their life stories so that future generations have the opportunity to know their family history, where they came from, what their lives are like. And so I sit down, and I've had a chance to record hundreds and hundreds of people talking about their lives, and when I go out to give a talk, I I always get the question like, what's the piece of wisdom that you've heard? What's something that's really resonated with you? And I I I struggle with this, but I not that long ago, I came up with something that really has impacted me. It's that I asked this question, what is, what was a difficult lesson to learn that was valuable to know?
And men and women answer this question differently. And I'm not saying all women answer this way and all men. I'm just saying, like, if you look at the whole of hundreds of interviews that we've done, one thing comes out with women that I think is very interesting, and that is a lot of women say, I wish it hadn't taken me so long to not care what people think of me. And I think a lot of that, you you could boil that down to vanity or something like that. But I think a lot of that has to do with in a lot of families, you need a PR person, particularly if you're in a rural community. You need a person that's like, hey, we need to think about the bigger picture. Who are we as a community?
How are our family viewed? You know, so they're they are concerned about that, but that's not a bad thing. In a small community, you need to keep up your reputation. You need to, monitor and and be careful about how people perceive who your family is, how do you behave, what's going on there. Men do it too, but I think women are concerned with it. And I think that a lot of women hit a certain age when they realize, like, I've let that dominate my life too much. I've gone too far, and I had to let that go. I had to I had to let go how much what my mother-in-law thought of me or or, you know, how much my friend group, you know, controlled me. With men, the thing I've heard, and this relates to the worthy adversary, is men often say something like, I wish it didn't take me so long to realize that my wife was my partner, that my wife could be trusted, that my wife was trying to help me.
Now I'm saying it more directly than they say it. A lot of times men are sitting there thinking about their lives, and they look back and they realize like, ah, that was a big moment that changed my life. And so this is a long way of explaining for my worthy adversary. I'm going to say it is my wife, Anne. My wife, Anne, is my harshest critic. She is the person that, like, I'll be trying to explain to her, hey. I'm thinking about doing this speech topic, or this is an idea I have. And she never rolls her eyes. She's always respectful, but you can tell instantly that that is not an idea that she agrees with or thinks is good enough or, you know, thinks is, something I should be out talking about. And, and and all kinds of things. Like, as my business has grown, she'll be asking me about, you know, like, how is this working or how is that going? And I fight it so much. You know? I'm always pushing back against that. Like, I don't know that I I want, you know, your feedback on this. You don't understand how this really works.
But the thing that I've discovered, and I've probably been more aware of it because of legacy interviews, is that if I actually listen to her, not always that her ideas are right, but if I actually listen to the feedback she's giving me and I trust that I I like say she's never saying this for her own ego. She's not trying to make her situation better. She's she is trying to make her situation better by making sure I don't make a mistake, and I shut my ego down, then I am able to hear things that I disagree with, but that actually do have some value. So I for me, I'm choosing my worthy adversary, and I give you this long explanation because I think it might be valuable for you.
If you have a spouse and you are constantly graded by the feedback that they give, you know that there are hundreds of men that have told me, I wish I would have realized that my wife was my partner earlier. That may not be your situation, but that's one piece of advice, that I've picked up on over the years. Alright. So I am going to be back next week. I will have another farmer for the Ag Tribes report. Definitely, I want you to reach out to me and say, hey. I I farm apples in Michigan. I'm ranching out in Utah. I am doing something over here in Florida. Let me know and know that I'd love to have you on if you're, if you're willing to have a good conversation. As I go, I, I do wanna mention, oftentimes, we're talking about legacy interviews. The other time that I'm not doing legacy interviews, I go out and give talks.
And one of the talks that people have been inviting me to give, I wanted to tell you about because you might be involved in an organization, a firm bureau, a co op, you know, a group that gets together. One of the talks that I has become very, very popular is a talk called how is greater than why. And this talk is about communications. But before you say, like, I don't I don't wanna hear a talk on communications. What's that gonna be about? I think maybe it's worth me talking a little bit about it. So this the the name of the talk, how is greater than why, is because for a long time, a guy named Simon Sinek has been pumping the idea that why.
You know, the motivations that people have is the most important thing. And if you wanna motivate other people, you need to know their why. So he has this whole concept of start with why. And that may be true when you're talking about deep inner motivation, But when you're having a conversation with somebody, if you start the conversation or you try and dig dig deeper into what they're saying by saying, why did you do that? And you can all imagine, you know, your your dad saying, why did you do that? Right? As soon as you say why, people become defensive in a way. Right? They cross their arms. They say, like, I don't why should I tell you why? I don't I don't know. And really, what they're calculating in their minds is not why they did something. In fact, I would say most of what we do, we don't know why we do it. We do it because it's the thing that happened in front of us. So most of the time when you ask somebody why, they're either choosing, like, should I frame this so that I look less guilty, or should I frame this because you wanna know why, because you want me to brag about myself?
And neither one of those two approaches to the answer, answering that question get you closer to what you wanna know. And so you may want to know why somebody did what they did. Why did you treat the animals in the way that you did? Why did you handle that problem the way that you did? But if you go with why, you won't get a good answer. But what I've learned from doing legacy interviews is if I instead ask, how did you do that? How did you decide to go through, bankruptcy? How did you, pull yourself out of that hole? How did it come about that you had this problem? When people are asked how questions, they go back and they start telling you the linear series of events, what happened.
And from that linear series of events, why will emerge. It will become very clear. And and frankly, the why that you will hear there is actually way more sophisticated, way, way more interesting because our whys are almost always multifactorial. They have many reasons. So I give a talk on all kinds of ideas like this that can give you little skills and little understandings about the quirks of communication that will really help you connect with your employees, connect with other family members, be more effective in your board meetings or whatever it is that you're doing. So if you are a part of a group and you've been thinking about like, hey, I've got a conference coming up in this in the winter or the spring, send them a note and tell them about vancecrow.com, which is my speaking site. And, tell them you're interested in doing the how is greater than why or maybe another talk about, you know, the changing culture or negotiations.
Either way, I would love to, to meet you. So try and set something up like that. Alright. I'm gonna go. I am so grateful you're here. Thanks for bearing with me when, Jay dropped the ball and wouldn't come on in the last thirty minutes. But, as always, feel free to disagree.
The Ag Tribes Report is brought to you by Legacy Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guest Steve Alt on the importance of preserving stories for future generations today.
[00:00:17] Unknown:
I grew up with my dad and my uncle all the time, and I heard all the old stories. When the kids and the grandkids want to remember what happened those years ago, I think it's a really good idea. Legacies, I mean, it made me nervous, don't get me wrong, when we first starts talking about all this stuff. But, you know, if you keep waiting so long, the memories do fade. I'm not saying I'm getting old, but when you can relax enough to get into it, that's where the stories come from.
[00:00:49] Unknown:
Welcome to the AgTribe's report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crowe. The report begins in three, two, one. Let's begin.
[00:01:05] Unknown:
Welcome to the Ag Tribes Report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week, I bring on a cohost to represent one of the many ag tribes that collectively make up US and Canadian agriculture. At the last minute this week, I realized I had a scheduling problem. And so I called a man to be there to help me. I, I knew he was the only one for the job. I reached out to him because I knew that I could depend on him and I've never asked him for any favors. I've never wanted anything from him. That man's name is Jay Curtis. And when I reached out to him and asked him if he could come on the ag tribes report with just thirty minutes of head heads up, you can tell if you're watching this show that he said, no, I'm totally kidding. Jay's a good friend of mine. He wouldn't do it because he didn't feel prepared. But that means that it's just you and me here today for the ag tribes report.
And, Hey, that's gonna be all right. In fact, it's actually a good time for me because I've been doing the ag tribes report since July 2024. So it's about one year exactly since I started, this program and I am absolutely elated with how all this has gone. It has given me a chance to talk with people from all over American and Canadian agriculture to talk about, ideas and stories that are going on. I've had a lot of people challenge assumptions that I have. I remember the tariff guy coming on and ripping me to shreds. I've talked with people that are nervous about putting out worthy adversaries, people that have put together pretty good Peter Teal paradoxes, and, you've loved it. This has been a show that continues to grow and grow and grow, and so I'm really excited about it. And so in a way, this is a great way to do a, an annual kind of look back.
So because it's just me, I would love it if you would comment, if you would, put, you know, send down your thoughts on what I'm talking about in the story, and I'll try and reply to it in x. If you just hit reply, it'll come right up here on the show for me. Otherwise, if you're watching on YouTube or Facebook, just put it in the comments. And I would love to hear what you think of this week's stories and some of the other topics we're covering. Tonight on the Ag Tribes report, we're gonna dive into the deportation notices that are disrupting an Iowa meat packing plant. We're gonna talk about Oregon's proposed rules threatening agritourism and John Deere's new digital repair tool addressing the right to repair concerns.
We're gonna do that. We're also gonna talk a little bit and about Bitcoin. We're going to talk about my latest Peter Thiel paradox, and I'll do a little thing on worthy adversaries, and we're gonna try and do this in just thirty minutes. So let's get started. Story number one, deportation notices disrupt 200 workers at an Iowa JBS plant. From agriculture.com on July 29, the JBS meat packing plant in Ottumwa, Iowa issued deportation notices to 200 workers from Haiti, Cuba, Guatemala, and Nicaragua after their work visas were revoked. And this is according to mayor Rick Johnson. The decision stems from May 20 Supreme Court ruling upholding president Trump's authority to terminate Biden era programs granting temporary legal status to immigrants from these nations.
JBS, which employs 2,700 at the facility, is providing a $1,000 stipend to, per worker to aid in their relocation, but mandates immediate termination and departure. On x, there were people out there expressing alarm over the labor shortage. You know, if you can't, do the meat packing, that's gonna really gum up the works, but there are also some people, and they're saying, hey. This is 7% of the workforce, so this could actually delay processing. It could, raise beef prices. Then there's, of course, other people out there saying, hey. We need this stricter immigration enforcement. This is what can what Trump campaigned on. This is what I want. And, but it's gonna throw some, wrinkles in the system. JBS insists that operations will remain unaffected, but local businesses reliant on these workers face some strain. So what do you think about this? I know for me, I believe that, there is attention here that we are not talking about. The first one we are hearing people say like, hey. Trump campaigned on this. If you are gonna say we're gonna throw out illegal immigrants, you can't just, focus only on the bad ones. You have to focus on the ones that are employed and the ones that are doing hard work. Some people are saying, well, that's gonna raise our food prices. Who's gonna do these jobs. But I've heard from people in the past that when a Nebraska facility, was rated, they had a line out the door of American workers trying to apply for those jobs right, right after it happened. So it seems like there there may be enough people to fill this work.
We're gonna see. But the other problem is you have to ask yourself, why are these people coming? Why are there so many illegal immigrants here? It is because everyone's currency everywhere in the world is inflating. And in The United States, it's just inflating slightly slower than everywhere else. So the reason those people are coming from Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, it's because their currency doesn't allow them to work hard, work an incredibly difficult job and make enough money to be able to pay for their families. If they come here, they work illegally, they don't get the benefits. They're they're going to work here until we solve the inflation problem. We are going to continue to have illegal immigrants working here. Not only because it's better for them, but because as labor costs go up, people that are trying to keep their businesses afloat are going to keep hiring them. So I don't see another way to solve this immigration problem other than to fix the money. But until then, you're gonna have this tension where the Trump administration is gonna try and score points by deporting big numbers of people.
And it turns out in this scenario, it's like the ones that, were following the rules because they, they they looked at this Biden era policy. They're the ones that are getting kicked out and the people that have, stayed well under the radar, they're not getting targeted and picked out. Who knows how this is gonna shape up, but, I'm sure JBS is gonna change their operations as quick as they can. And, I I bet they won't miss a beat. All right. Moving on to story number two. This is from America. UN one Oregon's proposed rules, jeopardize agritourism for small farmers on July 27, Oregon's department of land conservation and development proposed rules tightening agritourism, prompting fierce opposition from small farmers. The regulations redefine farm stand, requiring land use approvals for permanent structures and prohibiting sales of non farm items like crafts and souvenirs or even cider donuts made from farm ingredients.
Promotional events such as hay rides, petting zoos, or farm to table dinners could be capped at 17 annually or banned unless strictly educational. Oregon Public Broadcasting reported over 2,300 calls and emails flooding governor Tina Kotek's office, leading her to pause the rulemaking. A viral Instagram post from Topaz Farms viewed 3,000,000 times, warned of potential farm closures, because this is where a lot of farms are getting some, income from. And, but, and, and supporters like 1,000 claim the rule safeguards, farmland from commercial overuse, citing traffic and noise complaints.
Farmers emphasized, agri tourism accounts for 50% of income in one of, in, for one in five Willamette Valley farms supporting 11,000 jobs. So there is a lot of temptation here, to, to, or I'm sorry, a lot of looking at this and saying, wait a second is agritourism, is it farming? Should they still get the same farming protections? Are, what is this? What about people's quality of life if you are running a regular commercial farm, and now you have your neighbor bringing hundreds or even thousands of cars over your roads to park on your farm and have so many more people out there impacting when you can do spring, when you can, drive up and down your roads, how dangerous it is. The, I think America on one did a really good job of trying to highlight, both sides of the issues, because there's some farms out there that are saying, like, look. This is, what we the the path that we decided. We made investments into this to be able to make our farm stay sustainable, to be able to keep this as cropland.
But then on the other side of it, you've you've gotta understand that the farmers that are trying to do this at production scale and industrial scale, it's gotta be really difficult to have all of these, you know, normies coming on to your farm or around in your area. So there's an a lot of tension here. I don't have any idea what the answer should be, but I would sense that outlawing agritourism is not gonna be a winning gambit. I mean, I'm I'm definitely of the free market. You know, whatever works for the free market, you should probably do. But at the same time, if, somebody tried to buy my neighbor's house and put up a, you know, a a an apartment building, I probably wouldn't be very happy about that. And I think that this is very similar. If all of a sudden you're turning farmland into a place where lots of people are coming to, it seems like it's not a great situation.
All right. Before we move on to story number three, Josh Peterson said they're quote, not illegal immigrants. The us government issued them work visas. Yeah. He's absolutely right in the Biden era. Whatever policy that they put forward. It was, they weren't considered illegal. In fact, they were now working legally as long as they registered. And so it does feel a little shady that they had brought these people in and then pulled out the rug from underneath them. Alright. Moving on to story number three. John Deere's a $195 digital tool to, responds to right to repair battle.
On July 30, just yesterday, John Deere launched Operation Center Pro Service, a digital repair tool for farmers and independent technicians addressing criticisms in the FCC versus John Deere right to repair lawsuit priced at a $195 per machine annually. The tool provides machine health insights, diagnostic diagnostic trouble codes, model specific manuals, software reprogramming, and interactive tests, replacing the limited customer service advisor, which they'll phase out over the year. On X, farmers welcome the enhanced access, but criticize the subscription cost and the restrictions such as requiring owner permission for technicians to use the tool antitrust attorney, James Kovac, who had previously called the earlier tool incomplete, arguing they restricted full repair cap capabilities.
John Deere's Denver Caldwell emphasized the tool support for self repair with plans for future updates. The release may ease tension, but won't resolve the ongoing legal battle, as advocates push for broader access without fees, independent repair shops vital in rural areas see potential for benefit, but are awaiting the pricing details for their machine shops. So, I mean, the obvious question that I would ask somebody if they were a guest on here is, what do you think? Does this go far enough? And, as somebody that doesn't have to repair my own tractors, but does live in the world of constantly being hit with subscriptions and trying to run a business where every time you turn around, somebody is saying like, hey, just pay this small subscription and we'll give you access to, you know, this tool or we'll give you these things instead of being able to buy it and use it up. So I'm sure that the subscription model per machine has got to be incredibly grading for farmers.
On the other hand, this has gotta be a big win. I mean, this is like when you're trying to work on your own vehicle and you can't even find out what's wrong with it. Even though, you know, if I just plug this little device into my truck, I can know what's wrong with it. I can I could probably go to most parts stores for simple fixes and do it myself? So being able to do this with your own tractor is going to one, save a huge amount of time. And, when you have problems out in the field, it's gonna be able to allow you to keep doing your, harvest, keep doing planting, and not get hung up on that. And two, it's going to give you some options. Are you gonna be able to, just find, hey. What part do I need? I don't just have to go to my John Deere advisor and then use the one part that he suggests. Maybe I can now go on Amazon or go to my parts store, and be able to to get something in. So I'm I imagine that this is like almost all things. They never seem to go, quite far enough.
And, and but it is a good first step. So I'll be interested to see if any of you, get the, the ability to, plug your system in and get to see all these codes, how much it impacts you. And, is it going far enough? Is this just enough to be able to get them through the lawsuit, or is it something that, is really gonna be a game changer? I think time's gonna tell on this one, but I'll be interested in hearing from you about that. Alright. Well, we're cutting through the news stories, much faster than normal because I don't have a farmer perspective. All I can do is issue both sides of this. So it shows all the more why this has been such a great program to have different people on each week, to be able to talk about like, Hey, this is my perspective. And I gotta say most of the time, I almost always disagree with the people on their perspective, but they're the ones living in every day. So it would be nice to know, you know, is this gonna be a big change for you and your operation?
You know, is is this, are the immigration things, stuff you're seeing around where you're at? And, so one thing I wanna know is if you're a farmer and you have an interesting perspective, I am particularly looking to get to farmers that are well outside of the Midwest. I know a lot of real crop farmers in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, even in Missouri, but helping me get outside of this band and even finding different crops, let me know. I'm interested. You can always reach out to me on x and say, hey. I run this kind of operation. I'd be interested in coming on the show, and, let's try and increase the amount of diversity of people, what types of craps they're raising, what type of operation they run, know that I'm always open to it, and, I'll be I'll be very interested, to meet some new people. Here's some new perspectives.
Alright. Also, if you have shows, if, stories that I should run on this show, you can always send them to me on x at Vance Crowe, or or you can email them to me, Vancelegacyinterviews dot com. All right, moving on to the Bitcoin land price report. So when I did the first Bitcoin land price report, it wasn't actually at the first Ag Tribes report. It was actually on the third one. It was almost exactly one year ago, that I had, somebody come on and then mention the, the Bitcoin land price report. And, at the time, Bitcoin costs $65,500, and now it's a $116,500.
And we could go on and on to talk about, you know, this price appreciation, and I could talk all about, my feelings about how, you know, eventually Bitcoin will demonetize land. But I actually wanna set that down for a moment because what I wanna do now with this amount of time, since I'm not gonna compare it to land prices here in St. Louis County, where I live, what I wanna do is talk about, the hype that you are probably hearing right now, all over mainstream news, which is not about Bitcoin. It's about altcoins. It's about stablecoins.
It's about what people, from my tribe all call shitcoins. These are, different types of cryptocurrencies that have sprouted up as a result of people saying like, oh, there's Bitcoin. This works really well, but I can't make money on Bitcoin. I can only invest into it myself. So what they do instead is they say, well, I'm gonna give a clone to this, or I'm gonna do one that's kinda like Bitcoin, but I'm gonna have it do something else. One of these that you might hear about quite a bit, Ethereum, is one of these one of these cryptocurrencies. And there may be some use case out there. I don't know what it is, but I do know that Ethereum does not have the principles or the properties that make it what Bitcoin is. So Bitcoin had the immaculate conception. There was a white paper that went out and then you were anybody that knew about Bitcoin could start mining it. And nobody got a first pull at first, like, allotment of Bitcoin before everybody else. It was, if you knew about it and you started mining, you could get access to it, but there's only new Bitcoin put out every ten minutes.
Ethereum or Ripple or any of these other shit coins, what they do is they create a new cryptocurrency and then they issue a bunch to the founders and to the investors. And that could be hundreds or thousands, maybe millions of those coins. And now they start selling the rest of them to the public. And as that price appreciates, people that didn't have to do the proof of work that you have to do with Bitcoin, They were just given this or as an investment. They can sell those out. That ends up actually becoming the very thing that people criticize Bitcoin for. People say, oh, it's a Ponzi scheme. Oh, you've always gotta wait for somebody else to come along. What Bitcoin does that's different than all of these is there's no central issuer. There's nobody coming along saying, I'll decide who gets these ahead of time. And they they are decentralized in their distribution.
So when you're hearing all of this, people are gonna be talking about like, oh my gosh. Did you see how much ETH went up this week? I gotta get my hands on some of that. Oh, I wish I could I can't get it because Bitcoin is so high. I can't get leverage there. So I'm gonna buy these other coins that are priced way lower so I can get more of them. So if they go up, they may go up. I don't know. Maybe they will. But the the real challenge is what are you actually buying? With Bitcoin, you are buying a store of wealth. There is only ever going to be 21,000,000, Bitcoin.
With Ethereum, we don't know that. They may they may add more. They may change it. You can change Ethereum in a way that you can't change Bitcoin. Another, key component of this is there's nobody that can reverse transactions in Bitcoin. It is self sovereign. You must be responsible for it. With Ethereum, some of these other tokens, they can say like, oh, oh, oh, there were some transactions we didn't like. North Korea did a, a heist, and we don't want North Korea to get that Ethereum, so we're gonna reverse that. So Ethereum and all of these other altcoins are not Bitcoin, and they're gonna try and be Bitcoin. They're gonna be celebrating it all over the the Internet. They're gonna be, hyping it up, getting excited. And the reason you're gonna see them is because they have marketing departments.
They have, people that they're paying to show up and, be sparkly and and shiny and be like, oh, you should tell you should hear about this new thing and look how cool it is. But those are not a store of value. There's something else. Maybe they're a tech stock. Jack Mallers came out this week and said, you know, with Ethereum, maybe it will be a tech stock. Maybe that's how you could make equivalent. Maybe it's as good as Amazon, but Bitcoin is not that. Bitcoin is actually a a total change to currency and the way that we store value. And the heights that Ethereum could reach, even if it is everything that it says it could be, is maybe Amazon.
The heights that Bitcoin can reach are all of the currencies all over the world, all of the places that people now try and store wealth. So you do what you want, but I'm just gonna use this small amount of time with the Bitcoin land price report to say, it is very important that you don't fall prey to all this altcoin bullshit. And instead, just stay the course, stay involved with Bitcoin, and just buy small amounts over and over and over again. And eventually, your stack will get to the point where, it's gonna make a real difference, and you aren't ever gonna have to worry about, all these other things. As far as stablecoins go, man, stablecoins are wild. I don't really understand them very well. I know they are being issued as one for one with US dollars and what I am reading now is that stablecoins are a new way, to be able to purchase US treasuries. In fact, stablecoins hold a 150,000,000,000 in US treasuries, making them the eighteenth largest holders.
And this has gone up by almost 60,000,000,000 or about 64 in the in the first quarter, since the 2023. So what's going on with stablecoins is they are trying to issue these all over the world to regular people who can't normally buy US treasuries, who know that their local currency is not very valuable. So they're buying these stable coins in order to be able to have access to a currency that is not inflating as fast as their local currency. But what's happening in The United States is stable coins like Tether, when they take profits from the transaction, from the exchange rate between, the their local currency and these stable coins, and then they go out and buy treasuries.
Tether is taking those profits, and they're buying Bitcoin. That's their strategy for making real long term money. So these stablecoins, they are, they're they're not, they're a different thing than the altcoins like Ethan Ripple, but, ultimately, the strategy of the largest, stablecoin holders is to make that exchange happen and then turn their dollars into Bitcoin so that it holds value. So this is just a little primer. I thought it'd be kinda fun to go through rather than me trying to compare prices. I love talking about this subject, but I have to say I am a little bored with most of the arguments that people are giving me. People that are watching out on x, you see that I talk with Jared McDaniel all the time.
I'm trying to think Lawrence McLaughlin. I've even heard, some people from that have been past guests on the podcast that are saying, I think it's a Ponzi scheme. What can you buy with it? What's its value? I I can't like, it's it's, made by the CIA. These are not sophisticated arguments, and there are people all over the place that are are, able to debunk this. I've talked about it a bunch. What I would love to see is people having really sophisticated arguments that are actually attacking the core of Bitcoin or how it works, how the nodes work, how mining works, how the structure is set up. Because if you know something I don't know, I wanna know it. But, it's it's a little like when you, encounter people that know, you know, very little about glyphosate and the attacks they give on it. And you're like, I I could spend my time going over and over and over again on the same arguments, but it doesn't seem to be helping. I would I would make the equivalent thing here. So know that I am very, very open to criticisms of Bitcoin or whether it's gonna demonetize land, but, I want these arguments to be more interesting and sophisticated.
One last note, there is one podcast that I listen to every single week as soon as I can, and it is on Wednesday. It comes out, and it is called This Week in Bitcoin. If you have been looking for a podcast that is, interesting and engaging and I would give a full endorsement of, I really think that Chris l a s is, is doing great things with Jupiter Broadcasting. He is an excellent, podcaster, and you will get to hear the inner workings of Bitcoin, and it may be a way for you to be brought into this tribe. That's definitely my tribe, are the Bitcoin tribes. And I think that podcast this week in Bitcoin is one of the very best ones.
Alright. Moving on to the Peter Thiel paradox. Okay. So I thought about this for a while today. After Jay wouldn't come on, I couldn't hear his Peter Thiel paradox. But, I didn't wanna do one on Bitcoin because you guys have heard me talk about this quite a bit. I thought for quite a bit about different things that I could do, and I should start from the onset to say this is not investment advice. I'm not I'm not telling you where to put your money. With Bitcoin, I feel very confident about that. But this is just an idea that I personally am exploring, and, I believe it really strongly. Other people don't, but I'm very open to having somebody come along and be like, no. You're wrong because of these reasons, which is the value of having a Peter Thiel paradox. It's not that you have an idea and then you convince everybody that you're right. It's that you put together this idea that's different because you believe it, and then you allow people to push back on it. And mine is that I believe that the ETF, the index funds the index funds craze that's gone on, the Jack Bogle Vanguard, hey, you don't have to buy one stock. You should just buy an entire haystack of stocks.
I believe that this is going to bring the apocalypse of, a financial crisis to us. And the reason that I think this, the reason I think index funds are so terrible is that they are creating zombie money for corporations. Every single Friday, when people in large corporations are getting paid, they take a part of their money and then part of it gets matched and it gets put right into their four zero one ks. And with that four zero one ks, you could buy individual equities, but you don't know which stock is the best. And so you're like, all right, well, my investment advisor has told us, let's buy index funds, which is just a collection of these stocks. Maybe it's one of every single one in the S and P 500 or one in this particular, set of small capitalized, companies.
Now the challenge with this is this means that every single week, we are injecting doses of capital into the entire market, pumping it up. Right? It just keeps going up and up and up, and it's going up faster than people are taking money out. But this is giving capital to companies not based on how well are they doing, not based on what products are they producing. It's did they get on the index fund list. And a lot of these things, a lot of people don't know this, a lot of these are like, oh, I'm I'm a part of the climate change index fund where our company fulfills all the sustainability requirements, so you should give us money. So they are focused more on delivering, results that get them in the climate change fund than they are about delivering products to people at a lower at a higher price than it costs them to produce. And I think there is a whole bunch of dead zombie companies on the market that have no business being there. And eventually the index funds and themselves are not going to be enough to keep them up. And we are going to watch a massive collapse of US equities, that are outside of the magnificent seven, outside of the Amazons and the Facebooks and the Googles.
And I think that this is something that all of us have been walking towards because everybody's been like, oh, it's way better. Jack Bogle showed how you can't beat the stock market, so you should just buy all of them. Warren Buffett talks all about index funds. I think that over the long term, this became such a well known idea that it has actually created a gigantic and terrible, terrible trap for us. Now I've told this to people and they fight against me and they disagree with it. People that I respect, people that I like, but nobody's ever convinced me otherwise of this argument, but maybe you can. Maybe you have a way of understanding why index funds are the right way, why passive investing isn't going to cause this incredible apocalypse. But when I see how much money is pumped in, how these zombie companies are operating, how it gets them to focus on meeting the requirements of getting on index funds lists as opposed to producing products, I think that the end result of this is a bubble that gets exploded.
But let me know what you think in the comments. I would love to know what you, are considering here. Alright. Now on to worthy adversary. This is where I talk about who is one person that you respect but you really, really disagree with. And, I I struggled with this, but not because I'm one of those people that's like, oh, I don't wanna ever say anything mean. I don't want to, hurt anybody's feelings. In fact, that is not the point of the worthy adversary. The point of the worthy adversary is to say, you there, you have an idea or a set of ideas that I think are bullshit, and I don't like them. And I I fight against them all the time, but I fight against them because they make me better. Because by exploring your ideas and hearing what you're thinking about makes me have to really broaden push, and it makes me stronger and better. So in the past, I've said Jared McDaniel.
I've said Damien Mason. That actually was a great one, prompted me to have him on the show. I, now I'm like one of the biggest Damien Mason fans that there is, Jeff Murphy, who I now buy flower from and and, really find him engaging. Greg Gunthorpe was one that I we thought was a worthy adversary. So all of these people, I've now had on the podcast, and it's been one of those great experiences. So this is what I'm saying, like, don't be such a sissy and not say who your worthy adversary is. I hate that. Don't you? Like, when we're doing the the ag tribes report and I'm like, who's your worthy adversary? And they said, well, my mom said, you know, never say anything. If you can't say something nice about something, then don't say it all. I think saying that you don't have anybody that you respect but disagree with maybe is not very nice in and of itself or at least isn't very, comprehensive. But since I've said so many people that I've disagreed with, I thought actually, an idea that popped into my mind comes from legacy interviews.
So for legacy interviews, for people that don't know, I sit down and record people telling their life stories so that future generations have the opportunity to know their family history, where they came from, what their lives are like. And so I sit down, and I've had a chance to record hundreds and hundreds of people talking about their lives, and when I go out to give a talk, I I always get the question like, what's the piece of wisdom that you've heard? What's something that's really resonated with you? And I I I struggle with this, but I not that long ago, I came up with something that really has impacted me. It's that I asked this question, what is, what was a difficult lesson to learn that was valuable to know?
And men and women answer this question differently. And I'm not saying all women answer this way and all men. I'm just saying, like, if you look at the whole of hundreds of interviews that we've done, one thing comes out with women that I think is very interesting, and that is a lot of women say, I wish it hadn't taken me so long to not care what people think of me. And I think a lot of that, you you could boil that down to vanity or something like that. But I think a lot of that has to do with in a lot of families, you need a PR person, particularly if you're in a rural community. You need a person that's like, hey, we need to think about the bigger picture. Who are we as a community?
How are our family viewed? You know, so they're they are concerned about that, but that's not a bad thing. In a small community, you need to keep up your reputation. You need to, monitor and and be careful about how people perceive who your family is, how do you behave, what's going on there. Men do it too, but I think women are concerned with it. And I think that a lot of women hit a certain age when they realize, like, I've let that dominate my life too much. I've gone too far, and I had to let that go. I had to I had to let go how much what my mother-in-law thought of me or or, you know, how much my friend group, you know, controlled me. With men, the thing I've heard, and this relates to the worthy adversary, is men often say something like, I wish it didn't take me so long to realize that my wife was my partner, that my wife could be trusted, that my wife was trying to help me.
Now I'm saying it more directly than they say it. A lot of times men are sitting there thinking about their lives, and they look back and they realize like, ah, that was a big moment that changed my life. And so this is a long way of explaining for my worthy adversary. I'm going to say it is my wife, Anne. My wife, Anne, is my harshest critic. She is the person that, like, I'll be trying to explain to her, hey. I'm thinking about doing this speech topic, or this is an idea I have. And she never rolls her eyes. She's always respectful, but you can tell instantly that that is not an idea that she agrees with or thinks is good enough or, you know, thinks is, something I should be out talking about. And, and and all kinds of things. Like, as my business has grown, she'll be asking me about, you know, like, how is this working or how is that going? And I fight it so much. You know? I'm always pushing back against that. Like, I don't know that I I want, you know, your feedback on this. You don't understand how this really works.
But the thing that I've discovered, and I've probably been more aware of it because of legacy interviews, is that if I actually listen to her, not always that her ideas are right, but if I actually listen to the feedback she's giving me and I trust that I I like say she's never saying this for her own ego. She's not trying to make her situation better. She's she is trying to make her situation better by making sure I don't make a mistake, and I shut my ego down, then I am able to hear things that I disagree with, but that actually do have some value. So I for me, I'm choosing my worthy adversary, and I give you this long explanation because I think it might be valuable for you.
If you have a spouse and you are constantly graded by the feedback that they give, you know that there are hundreds of men that have told me, I wish I would have realized that my wife was my partner earlier. That may not be your situation, but that's one piece of advice, that I've picked up on over the years. Alright. So I am going to be back next week. I will have another farmer for the Ag Tribes report. Definitely, I want you to reach out to me and say, hey. I I farm apples in Michigan. I'm ranching out in Utah. I am doing something over here in Florida. Let me know and know that I'd love to have you on if you're, if you're willing to have a good conversation. As I go, I, I do wanna mention, oftentimes, we're talking about legacy interviews. The other time that I'm not doing legacy interviews, I go out and give talks.
And one of the talks that people have been inviting me to give, I wanted to tell you about because you might be involved in an organization, a firm bureau, a co op, you know, a group that gets together. One of the talks that I has become very, very popular is a talk called how is greater than why. And this talk is about communications. But before you say, like, I don't I don't wanna hear a talk on communications. What's that gonna be about? I think maybe it's worth me talking a little bit about it. So this the the name of the talk, how is greater than why, is because for a long time, a guy named Simon Sinek has been pumping the idea that why.
You know, the motivations that people have is the most important thing. And if you wanna motivate other people, you need to know their why. So he has this whole concept of start with why. And that may be true when you're talking about deep inner motivation, But when you're having a conversation with somebody, if you start the conversation or you try and dig dig deeper into what they're saying by saying, why did you do that? And you can all imagine, you know, your your dad saying, why did you do that? Right? As soon as you say why, people become defensive in a way. Right? They cross their arms. They say, like, I don't why should I tell you why? I don't I don't know. And really, what they're calculating in their minds is not why they did something. In fact, I would say most of what we do, we don't know why we do it. We do it because it's the thing that happened in front of us. So most of the time when you ask somebody why, they're either choosing, like, should I frame this so that I look less guilty, or should I frame this because you wanna know why, because you want me to brag about myself?
And neither one of those two approaches to the answer, answering that question get you closer to what you wanna know. And so you may want to know why somebody did what they did. Why did you treat the animals in the way that you did? Why did you handle that problem the way that you did? But if you go with why, you won't get a good answer. But what I've learned from doing legacy interviews is if I instead ask, how did you do that? How did you decide to go through, bankruptcy? How did you, pull yourself out of that hole? How did it come about that you had this problem? When people are asked how questions, they go back and they start telling you the linear series of events, what happened.
And from that linear series of events, why will emerge. It will become very clear. And and frankly, the why that you will hear there is actually way more sophisticated, way, way more interesting because our whys are almost always multifactorial. They have many reasons. So I give a talk on all kinds of ideas like this that can give you little skills and little understandings about the quirks of communication that will really help you connect with your employees, connect with other family members, be more effective in your board meetings or whatever it is that you're doing. So if you are a part of a group and you've been thinking about like, hey, I've got a conference coming up in this in the winter or the spring, send them a note and tell them about vancecrow.com, which is my speaking site. And, tell them you're interested in doing the how is greater than why or maybe another talk about, you know, the changing culture or negotiations.
Either way, I would love to, to meet you. So try and set something up like that. Alright. I'm gonna go. I am so grateful you're here. Thanks for bearing with me when, Jay dropped the ball and wouldn't come on in the last thirty minutes. But, as always, feel free to disagree.
Introduction and Host's Reflection
Deportation Notices in Iowa Meat Packing Plant
Oregon's Agritourism Regulations Debate
John Deere's Right to Repair Tool
Bitcoin and Altcoins Discussion
Peter Thiel Paradox: Index Funds
Worthy Adversary and Personal Reflections
