The Vance Crowe Podcast

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Vance Crowe does a Thanksgiving Day special with a solo Ag Tribes Report.  This week he discusses the appointment of the new Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.  Vance explores her professional background and then makes his case for why the USDA needs to be moved out of Washington DC.

Then Vance discusses Rep Thomas Massie taking aim at the Farm Bureau for advocating for policies that may hurt small farmers.  Then Vance discusses his nuanced opnion of ethanol mandates and then plays a clip with Marc Andreseen discussing the power of the government to debank individuals.

Vance offers his own Peter Thiel Paradox and suggests and unorthodox worthy adversary.

If you would like to learn more visit: www.legacyinterviews.com/experience 

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The Ag tribes Report is brought to you by farm test, a field trial, design, execution and analysis service that makes it easy to ask your fields which management practices perform best to start your field trials. Visit farm test.ag, and legacy interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are, so the future knows who they really were. Listen now to a sneak peek of the short film a family's legacy interview experience, and watch the full story at Legacy interviews.com/experience

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having the legacy interview, you know, really helps them open up. I

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was surprised at the depth the questions went into, and see very authentic answers.

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I was watching it, and I was like, whoa, okay, this is like a new side of Jay that's coming out.

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I can see like how much excitement it brought him to share the things that he has a hard time talking about. I think

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in a day to day conversation, you won't be provoked to answer questions like that.

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Welcome to the Ag tribes report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crowe, the report begins in 321, 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 new co host that represents one of the many ag tribes throughout the United States and Canada. So that way, they can talk about the news and information that is impacting the culture of agriculture. But today is Thanksgiving, and I did not want to burden anybody with trying to pull away from the family, so I decided I would just do the show as a solo show alone. I am actually in my boyhood home in central Illinois. You if you've ever heard me talk on the podcast about my father's collection of books, they are right behind me, and this is only a small amount of them. I had to find a place to hide away from the kids who have already started singing Christmas carols, which, all right, let's buckle in and do that today on the Ag tribes report. Since it's just me, I'm going to report on three stories, and also another one that I got poked about during the Vance Crowe podcast this week. So we're going to talk about the new Ag Secretary. We're going to talk about Thomas Massie trying to point out that the American Farm Bureau is taking shots at some of his agenda. And we're going to talk about ethanol mandates. I brought that up on the Vance Crowe podcast, and I had somebody call me up and say, You're not nuanced enough. You have more that you should know about this if you're going to be critical of it. And then I'm going to do a story that is not directly related to agriculture, but I do want to talk about it. It is about de banking people. If you were following along with the trucker rallies, you know that one of the ways that they got all the truckers to disperse was they de banked them. And this has actually been going on in the United States, and it came to light this week on an interview with Mark Andreessen and Joe Rogan. So we're going to talk about that. I will also take the medicine that I give to my guests each week. I'm going to give my own Peter Thiel paradox, and I'm going to talk about a worthy adversary that I think is worth paying attention to. We're probably just going to jump over the Bitcoin land price report, because land where I'm at, I guess I could have done it for the price of a house, but I just didn't, because I didn't think it was a good comparison. We're going to do all this in just 30 minutes. I'm so glad you're here, and we'll jump right into this live stream. So to begin the new Ag Secretary under President Donald Trump is Brooke Rollins. She was nominated and is expected to take the helm at the USDA all this last week, there was different ideas and guesses on who was going to be that role. There was a lot of hope out there that it was going to be somebody that was really counter cultural, and that did not happen. Rollins is the president and CEO of the America First policy a think tank closely aligned with Trump's policies, and She previously served as the director of White House Domestic Policy Council during Trump's first term. So the Ag Secretary is, for those that don't know, is responsible for managing a vast array of issues, including trade negotiations, dietary guidelines, food safety, wildfire management and support of rural broadband. This is a 100,000

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person agency, and this her appointment, broke the hearts of many that wanted it to be somebody that broke up the traditional ag system a few weeks ago, Joel Salatin said that he was a part of a six member team. And this raised a lot of eyebrows. People thought, Oh, well, if Joel Salatin is on there, then an RFK is being, you know, put into HHS, then this is clearly going to be somebody that's going to break. The system. But as it turns out, Rollins, who is a part of the America First policy she does not have what a lot of ag thought of as Big Ag credentials. She was definitely a part of the FFA in Texas. She has has been a part of agriculture. Now she shows cattle with her daughter. And so people said this is not enough, either one to run an agency or two, that she doesn't actually represent the hardcore part of agriculture. You know, I can't say very much of that. I don't even show cattle and I'm involved in agriculture, but it definitely put us bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. So I decided I had heard a lot about this America's first Policy Institute, and so I decided I'd go look into that. This is a conservative policy group that hosts training sessions for potential government employees, and it influences policies through its network of the Trump administration. It's engaged in legal action challenging voting and election laws. And so it seems like this organization, which she was the leader of, it's interesting to note that she also founded the organization. So my sense is that this is a go getter, somebody that is really active and in, you know, forward, moving, trying to get things done, but likely was not chosen because of her ag credentials, as much as she was proven to be a Trump loyalist. So if people are thinking about, what is it going to take to change the USDA, it really just depends on what is RFK influence on this, that six person panel you know, are people like John Kemp going to have sway over all this. Joel Salatin, are they really going to get to make some moves? I personally believe that the only way you're going to really change the USDA, it's not going to be enough to just slash jobs at the USDA. You actually, if you want to change it, have to move it out of Washington, DC. Trump had mentioned that before, and it got kind of, you know, parlayed. It didn't really happen. My goal is actually to get it to move to Kearney Nebraska. I choose Kearney because I had one of my great bosses at my time at Monsanto, used to say the only reason you go to Kearney Nebraska is because you have something to do there. There's no other reason to swing by there or stop there. And that's what we need. We need people that are at the USDA, because they are there, to try and influence policy, whatever sort of choices you need to make. If you need a USDA at all, it should be razor thin. And the one of the most important things is to get professional bureaucrats out of there. One of the things that I learned by living in Washington, DC, and working there, you find out that the only people that are really in charge are the people that didn't have to leave if you get married and start having kids. Washington, DC is too expensive to live on a government salary, and so the people that stay there are people that either don't get married, or if they get married, they don't have kids, or they are, you know, not going to get married. Maybe they're they're homosexual, maybe they're people that just don't have an interest in having children. So those people start to move up in the organization, and they never leave, and they become a part of this permanent class of bureaucrats that are in Washington, DC. And so if you want to change that, if you want to make this a a radical change that's going to that's going to really impact what policies are coming up, how are we being influenced, then you've got to remove it from DC, and you've got to put it in a place like Carney Nebraska, so that, that way all these lifetime bureaucrats have to make a really serious decision. Am I going to move out to Kearney, Nebraska, where I'm where I'm away from the rest of my political advocates, and I'm not going to be able to jump up the chain in other departments? Then that's going to change their whole behavior. So I believe it is very important that even if you don't like the Ag Secretary, maybe one of the most important things you can do is push, push, push for this to be moved out of Washington, DC and into a place like Kearney Nebraska. All right, moving on. Now. We're going to hit a really hot button subject this week on x. Libertarian representative Thomas Massie, said to the farm said to his followers, are you a member of the Farm Bureau, or do you buy their insurance? They're using your money to lobby against legislation introduced by small farmers to help small farmers. So what he did was he took a screenshot and actually posted it to his ex talking about the different amendments that the American Farm Bureau is advocating for. So he on here, it has amendment 76 AFBF opposes rep sparks amendment to seek to defund the operation of any program established under 501. The Federal agri. Cultural improvement and Reform Act, amendment 83 AFBF opposes represented in the Hageman out of Wyoming's amendment, which seeks to prevent funds from being used to finalize, implement, administer or enforce the proposed rule titled use of electronic identification ear tags, you will official and identification in cattle and bison. Long time listeners the podcast know that this is about RFID chips and out of the state of Wyoming, there are people saying, No, we don't want our money being used to advocate for this. We don't want this. And Massey is pointing out that the AFBF is pointing out that they want it. And then finally, amendment 87 AFBF opposes rep Massey's. This is the guy who posted it amendment which would prohibit funding from being used to issue any new rule regarding the number of owners of an animal for purposes of customs, custom slaughter exemption of the Food Safety Inspection Service, limiting persons that may own an animal and requiring custom operators to keep records. So what Massey is saying here is the American Farm Bureau is advocating to representatives that the American Farm Bureau opposes these things, and he's saying these are things being put forward by small farmers. Now if you're not familiar with the Farm Bureau system, it is a federation. Each state has their own Farm Bureau, and within each state, they are run by counties. And when they get together during their annual meeting, they put together a slate of things that they want to propose, both to their state government, but also what they want to be pushing upwards towards the national agenda. The American Farm Bureau itself only really has one Farm Bureau member that's in Washington, DC. That's the president, Zippy Duvall. The rest of the organization is there to implement what the collection of States wants. So it's hard to say what it is that the American Farm Bureau wants. These are they are supposedly putting forward what the states want and what they vote on, and really that is an incredibly complicated voting system. I sense that there is, right now, a schism building inside of the American Farm Bureau and the states. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how the Illinois Farm Bureau was kicked out by the American Farm Bureau for the way that they counted their numbers. I have also spoken with several other State Farm Bureaus that have been expressing frustration that they feel like a lot of the things that they want to advocate on their state level, when the national level gets involved, it is it goes in the opposite direction. So I am not surprised to see Massey putting this out there. It's one of his amendments that was being pushed back on by this large American Farm Bureau organization. But I don't know what's going to happen. I think this is going to be an interesting time in the next few weeks and months, as we see the administration coming in, I sense that there is a lot more strife within the Farm Bureau system. They've certainly weathered that in the past before, but I think there's going to be a lot of fireworks at this upcoming annual meeting that they have coming in January. I don't know much more than that, if there's anybody that does, let me know, and we can talk about it more here on the Ag tribes report. All right, moving right along. This week on the Vance Crowe podcast, I ended up talking about ethanol mandates. I had a guy named Ryan Cooper on who is aggregating a bunch of small farmers to be able to sell milk, eggs, beef, pork, chicken, and he was asking me about what changes would need to be made to the larger system that is in agriculture. And I said, Look, there's a couple of things that if you don't change those, then nothing is going to change in agriculture, and one of those is the ethanol mandate. And I went on to say how much I dis strongly dislike the ethanol mandate. So a buddy of mine that works with one of these corn organizations in an I state, I don't think he really wants me to tell about it, said, You know, I finally heard you, and I think I understand you what your point is, but I've never actually heard you articulate it very well. This is what you don't know about the fuel mandates. And then I think you ought to explain your point of view. So what he pointed out is, there's actually three levels of mandates with the ethanol. There is the Renewable Fuel Standard, which is the federal mandate, and they decide how much ethanol from the national stockpile is going to be blended into our petroleum fuel so in the last year for 2022 the mandate set by the EPA, who's the one that sets the mandate, was for 15 billion gallons of corn based ethanol to be blended into the nation's fuel Supply, with the biofuel mandate reaching 20.8 2 billion gallons for that year. So there's that level where you have the federal government mandate. Then another level is the state level. There are seven states right now in the United States, Missouri, my home state, being one of them that says, Look, you have to have all gas station retail gas stations. Have to have at least a 10. Percent blend on that on that fuel. And then in addition to those two, there is a third one, where sometimes cities have a blending that they you have to have, which apparently improves the quality of fuel. So if you're living in a high density location, this additive, which is made from ethanol, decreases the amount of smog. So from my perspective, one of the things my friend pointed out is, I don't actually have a problem with ethanol. If ethanol works, that's awesome, then blend it. If that's the choice that retail gasoline stations want to make, if that's a thing that consumers want to demand, fine. But when you make it a mandate, you do all sorts of things to the economy that we don't want. And the first thing is, as soon as you say, Hey, this is valuable, you're now going to make a loss. So we have to have this much fuel in there now, all of a sudden, there's no more r, d that goes into making that ethanol better. Or if it does go into it, it's not in a competitive marketplace. So imagine you have somebody else coming up with a different product, something that can, you know, improve smog, or make our fuel less, less reliant on petroleum in some in some way, then they have to now, not only do they have to invent that technology, now, they have to overcome the inertia of the law that was created there. Anytime you create these mandates, you lower the amount of innovation that's going on, and you make it so we don't actually know if 40% of the corn would be going to gasoline or and blending into into our fuel if we didn't have this mandate, because right now we're required to use this much, and so it's distorting the market. So corn farmers can say, Look, this is a great product. I actually want this. I would choose this for my truck or my car. Well, we don't actually know that, and we can't know that because there's not a free market. What my friend went on to say is, hey, the mandates helped you build all of the processing facilities. Well, now that we don't have a processing facility, let's remove the mandate, because now they've gotten up and running and let them stand on their own. I agree with him. You can't just walk in and start ripping things out. You have to say, this is what is but I believe that ethanol mandates, if you don't change them, we're not going to be able to find a better mixture of crops in the United States. And I know that upsets a lot of my good friends. Just know I want you to be successful. I want you to grow and and prosper, but I don't want to do it through the efforts of a rule, which, anytime you set in a law, you're making it so the government is saying these consumers, they must pay farmers for their corn, even if they didn't choose to. That's not a free market. That's not the America that I want to live in. All right, we are now going to go to the fourth and final headline. This is about Mark Andreessen, the venture capitalist that runs Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as a 16 Z. He went on Joe Rogan and described what went on with the D banking in the United States. This is kind of a long clip, but it really run with me. This is something that I actually have seen happen, as I was a member of a on the board of directors for bank, and you see how the how much regulation banks are under. But I have never heard anybody go out into the world and talk about this. And it's something that is really important, because even though the trucker rally that happened in Canada isn't our banking system, this is what happened to them, and this is what the government is, a power that the government should not have. So let's listen to a little clip of Mark Andreessen talking about being de banked in the United States. This

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started about 15 years ago with this thing called Operation truck point, where they decided to as marijuana started to become legal, as prostitution started to become legal, and then guns, which there's always a fight about under the Obama administration, they started to de bank, legal marijuana businesses, escort businesses, and then and then, and then gun shops, just like your gun manufacturers, and just like you're done, you're out of the banking system. And so if you're running a medical marijuana dispensary in 2012 like you, guess what? You're doing your business all in cash, because you literally can't get a bank account, you can't get a visa terminal, you can't process transactions, you can't do payroll, you can't do direct deposit, you can't get insurance, like, none of that stuff is you've been sanctioned, right? None of that stuff is available. And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders, and then, just generally, political opponents. Yeah. So that's that's been, like, super pernicious. I wasn't aware of that. Oh, 100% is called, so operation short point 1.0 was 15 years ago against the pot and the guns. Short point 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and then to their disfavored tech startups. And it's hit the tech world like we've hard. We've had like, 30 founders de banked in the last four years. Yeah, it's been, it's been a big recurring pattern 30. This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. It's like, we just can't, we can't live in this world. We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing and then they literally, like, get sanctioned, right, and embargoed by the United States government through a completely unaccountable No, by the way, no duplicate. Process. None of this is written down. There's no rules, there's no court, there's no decision process, there's no appeal. Who do you appeal to? Right? Like, who do you go to to get your bank account back?

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So this is something that I think is of deep importance, because this is the way that the governments can control their people, and I know firsthand, people that were at the trucker rally that had their bank accounts shut down. Now all of a sudden, they had to figure out, do I have enough cash to fill up my semi with diesel to be able to drive it back to wherever I'm from? Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta. This is a horrible power that if you are advocating for anything to go on with the Trump administration. We want to remove this power. We want to remove any agency that believes they have this power. And we also want as many banks to be allowed to come up and proliferate and try what they're doing. Operation choke point absolutely went after some a group called that was trying to start up a Bitcoin Bank, which was going to be a fully Reserved Bank, meaning, instead of taking your money that you put in in deposits and turning around and loaning it out, it instead would say, if you want us to hold your money, you have to pay us a fee. But in exchange for us holding that fee, we are not going to lend out your money. And so when they applied for a federal Charter, the Federal Reserve said, No, you can't do that. And all of the people involved in the banks that were connected to this, all the sudden, started being choked out. So you heard about these Bitcoin banks that had failures Well, that was caused by the United States government. So I bring this up not because it is ag related, but because AG is so closely tied to banking that you need to understand this is a power we don't want, um, any any administration to have this so as you're thinking about advocating, putting your position forward, absolutely, absolutely push against the government having this ability. All right now we are done with our headlines. I'm going to skip over the Bitcoin land price report. I have to say that Bitcoin, last time I checked, was at 95,000 which after last week's 98,000 and it almost kissed 100,000 it's down a little bit. I would wonder what's going to happen with it after Thanksgiving, because there's probably a lot of people that we're talking about it over Thanksgiving dinner. Whether that's an effective way to get more people to invest in it, I don't know. But on to my Peter Thiel paradox. This is where I ask my guests, what is one thing that you believe that no one in your tribe agrees with you on? And I am going to say this is we're going to continue on with this crypto and Bitcoin thing. Obviously, in my tribe, this is what's very important. I'm going to say, within 10 years, more than 20% of land lending will be collateralized by Bitcoin, and that every farmer should start storing their non operating cash in Bitcoin as a hedge against land depreciation. I mean that I believe that land has the very strong potential to lose a ton of its value right now. That is the way that people know that they're wealthy. That's the way that people go to the bank and get operating lines of credit. But I believe that over time, there is a strong possibility that land prices could drop, and that one thing you can do is to hedge against it is to start holding Bitcoin, because eventually, I believe that banks will accept Bitcoin as collateral. Now I'm going to use a clip of a fascinating interview that I heard on CNBC earlier this week. I think that this is the start of the way that it could happen in agriculture. So we're going to go now to watching a CNBC clip where they talk about multifamily home lending using Bitcoin as collateral. Check this out. And if you disagree with me, you should absolutely stay to listen so you can know more about what you disagree with.

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Excited to announce today on Squawk Box, this loan that we've just completed, we combined a seasoned multi family asset in Philadelphia, about 50 meters away from the First Bank of the United States, the one that Alexander Hamilton started. We combine that asset with around 20 Bitcoin, and we provided a loan to refinance the existing mortgage on the property, to provide the asset sponsor some funding for capital improvements, and with the remainder to buy the 20 Bitcoin, okay, we got

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to go backwards. Go ahead. You gotta go backwards. We just can slow the whole thing down. Everybody understands what happened. Okay, so there's a property, yeah, physical property, 63 units, the multi family property, the sponsor, the effectively, the owner of that property, yeah, needs a loan. That's right. Okay, they come to you that's right. Okay, you say, we'll provide you the loan in the form of a loan, a classic loan, that's right, okay, so you're going to give them cash. That's right. Term financing, term financing. And how long is the loan? Just 10 years, 1010, year loan. Okay, that's right.

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That's. Above market rate or below, or what's the market rate, interest rate? I'm

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just trying to slow holding. Okay, now let's introduce the Bitcoin piece into it. That's right. So no, no. Explain how the Bitcoin piece and relate. So the loan has been provided.

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The use of proceeds is to pay off the existing financing. So use of the proceeds of the loan, of the loan to retire the existing mortgage rights as an old, mortgage. They're going to pay the old mortgage, often paid off, okay? Now they have a little bit extra money to make some improvements in the property, right?

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So, a little bit extra cash, so you're the amount of money you've lent pays off the old loan. That's right, it's also as you have a little bit extra to fix

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property, yep. And then with the remainder, which is a little bit a little extra return, and that, instead of cash out Bitcoin in and we use it to purchase some bitcoin and add it to the collateral package of the loan. So now our loan is supported by both the traditional asset, the 63 unit apartment building, and the Bitcoin the loan, it was maybe $2 million more. So that's how you get exactly point out exactly right. So it's on the assumption that the bitcoin is going to rise faster and that will become an asset over the life of the loan, for sure. So we think, on the downside, this provides us with much better protection compared to a traditional lender, because a traditional lender, if something goes wrong, they have to recover against that particular building, which is idiosyncratic risk, something might happen with the maintenance or but that also

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requires conviction on your end, that Bitcoin is not a volatile asset, asset over time, over time, and that is either going to go up or at least stay where it is. Well, that's

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by fusing the Bitcoin with credit, and by fusing it with traditionally financeable assets, it gives us the luxury of expressing that medium term view on Bitcoin. And that's what's key. It's volatile in the short run. You know, I mean minute by minute today, who knows it could cross 100,000 that would be exciting, 10 years, and the minimum hold period for the bitcoin is four years. So what we say to the borrower is we say, Look, you can repay the loan at any time for any reason, with no penalty, which is a really valuable feature compared to a traditional loan. Yeah, that's like a home mortgage. Like a home mortgage, almost. That's very unusual for commercial financing. But what we do say is that to the extent that the loan is repaid at year four or earlier, the minimum will release the property, but the minimum length of time that the Bitcoin has to stay in escrow is four years.

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So this is a lot of talk. If you've been involved in banking, you probably understand a lot of it. I know I still have some questions, but it is happening, and I know this is something that when I talked it about it two years ago, even a year ago, people thought, no, there's this is not going to happen. They're not going to be used as collateral. It's already happening. And so if you are looking for a non traditional way to be able to store up value so that you can get into the farming game or buy land or do something that's going to require capital purchasing, Bitcoin might do that for you. I hope that you started that position. You absolutely hated the idea, but that it rattles around in your mind and that it's something you consider, you know, just consider an idea that you don't already agree with. That is the value of the Peter Thiel paradox. All right, we are going to move on to the final section. This is the worthy adversary, and I have to say that this week, I encountered a guy that made me really uncomfortable, like I was like, whoa. What is going on here? He goes by defund the USDA. It's at dusty 42402999, and he started the hashtag seed corn wars. 25 which has absolutely blown up on x. He's taking shots at the system. That is, he was definitely, I mean, we definitely agree on the defund the USDA, but he is talking about a lot of challenges that he has to the seed corn industry and what he thinks about traits that are off patent, that are still being sold with a technology fee. He's making all sorts of claims about the value of that corn, and he is claiming that he is getting cease and desist orders from some of these seed companies. I don't know if any of that's true or not, and I certainly don't have the same disposition where he's out there kicking up dust and fighting, but it is interesting to see somebody be really passionate about something, have a bunch of points to say, and then watch how many people are responding to it. So I am definitely putting him on the worthy adversaries list. He is somebody to watch, because he is clearly making a difference and getting a lot of engagement along there. You know, I think the most important thing when we talk about worthy adversaries is to find people you disagree with and then just talk about ideas with them. Talk about the things that you don't like about what they're saying. Talk about the the ideas and why you disagree with them. But. It is totally worthless to call names at people. So I saw that happening. I think it happens over Thanksgiving. Maybe people get drunk and they think it's a good idea to talk smack using names, but the best thing to do is just to talk about ideas, because you never know what you will uncover. All right, if you have been with me through this entire ag tribes report, I am so grateful. It is been a wonderful Thanksgiving. I know my family did a very gracious thing by taking my young girls and going out Christmas light looking I hope that you're doing something like that. I also hope that if I said anything in this podcast that you don't agree with definitely make comments below. Reach out to me on x at Vance Crowe, because I would love to learn more. And my buddy that called me about ethanol, I learned more in that small conversation about ethanol than I'd learned in a long time. If you stayed here this long, I want to give you a special treat. Many of listeners know that I do legacy interviews, and in this legacy interviews, I sit down with people to record their life stories so that future generations can know who they were. They can hear those stories. They can know where did the farm come from, what matters to you? How did you become who you are? Well, we had a very special guest named Jay Curtis and his wife, Karine, who's a wonderful woman. After they did the interview, they invited us to come up and film them actually watching the legacy interview with their family and what you're about to see my creative director put together as a video describing what it was like for their family to have done this. I believe it is an absolutely beautiful and wonderful video. It's interesting to watch, even if you're not interested in legacy interviews. So thank you for being here. I'm going to sign off by having you watch this amazing video called a family's experience. Thanks so much, and feel free to disagree. Oh.

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We're on our family farm northeast of St Thomas, Ontario. We were the original people who settled this land in 1832, in earlier times, it was very common for the man of the house to be harder or seem harder less, talking out ideas of emotions. I think that's very common all of the farm world. I think it's common, probably in everybody's world. And I think today it's better to be more open. I've known about the legacy interview offerings for quite some time. Got thinking about it more deeply, and then Karine and I went down to St Louis, and we did it on site, which was really cool. So

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this weekend, you've come stay with us to film us seeing the final production of our legacy interview. We're

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gonna sit down as a family unit and we're gonna watch this production. We

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haven't seen it yet, so the children are watching it with us, so we can get their reactions. It'll be interesting just to see how it all goes down.

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It's a beautiful fall weekend. Yeah, everybody's home, so we're gonna enjoy the time together.

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I'm really curious to see my children's reaction to this, and I hope they enjoy it.

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How did the two of you meet?

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Well, the first time I met Jay was at a party at a friend's place. But then our best friends married at the time, married each other, and so we were kind of getting together with their wedding plans and everything. And then he got the nerve to ask me to go out. I thought

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they were just making a trip down to St Louis because we had some other plans that kind of fell through in the summer. Didn't find out until after they got back, they're going down to do an interview of their legacy. I

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thought that it was more of like a friend trip. I wasn't really sure exactly what it entailed.

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I don't know if my dad's like, super good at explaining things. Sometimes, like, we were both kind of a little confused, I

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think maybe a little nervous. One

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or two weeks later, he had, like, a clip that he showed us. He's like, Oh yeah, this is what we did. And I was watching it, and I was like, whoa, okay. This is, like a new side of Jay that's coming out,

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gathering together with the family to watch. It was, was really nice. It was it was sweet, it was funny. And for my dad, it was really impactful. I can see like how much excitement it brought him and how much joy it brought him to share the things that he has a hard time talking about with us he's not, at least in the past, wasn't a very emotional person. So it's kind of nice to see him, him be able to talk more openly. For me,

34:56
I think I saw Jay in a new perspective, to see. Let him reflect on who he was growing up to be in that room with him as that's happening, like, kind of like, heartwarming that he does have that emotional side, especially like, looking forward to like, when we eventually have a feeling, like, I want that for our children too. Sharing the experience

35:13
with my brother is great. I think it was kind of funny. We never really hear our parents, like, together sharing stories about us. So it's kind of funny to hear both perspectives.

35:23
I thought it was cool to, like, reflect on some of, like, the childhood memories, like they brought up, like, you know, me climbing trees, or Carrie doing a awkward dance as a child, you know, like things like that. Like, I knew these things happen, but like, just hearing them again because it's been so long for some of these things. You know, one part that really stuck with me out of that interview was my dad talking about our childhoods and, like, you know, work a lot, and it kind of felt like, you know, they didn't stop to smell the roses. There

35:53
was definitely some like, like, bittersweet moments, yeah, like hearing my dad, hearing that he, like, regretted not being around when we were younger,

36:07
is not something I've ever heard. Listening to my dad talk about, you know, working too much or missing out on certain things, you know, like, it means a lot to me. It just kind

36:16
of helps, I think, put some of the old arguments and stuff to bed a bit. It's kind of nice to hear. I think it's good for our relationship to have that openness

36:27
the last few years, like, he's retired now, and seeing him, you know, enjoy life more means a lot. When

36:33
Carrie and Neil were watching together, like, obviously, they were also able to talk about it afterwards. And I think that's good looking back on it and being able to kind of debrief together, and then, you know, it creates more conversation within the family.

36:44
I definitely view my mom as a storyteller. She always has been kind of like the historian of the family.

36:50
Neil's mom is so sweet and heartwarming, and she's so humble, and she's always so considerate of other people. It's

36:58
like, she's so, like, naturally funny and, like, warm.

37:02
She doesn't really like being photographed or filmed, but I don't know. I think she's a really interesting person, and she has a cool story to share, and I liked hearing it, because, like, when you're growing up, you know, you hear little snippets here and there, like how they met, but you don't have, like, the whole story, like driving around a truck in London with music too loud, or, you know, just funny things like that. You know, it's just cool to like, see their love for each other and how much they care about each other.

37:27
I was surprised at the depth that the questions went into, and to see some of those more like, very authentic answers, it was honestly a lot more meaningful than I guess I had originally anticipated.

37:39
It's cool to capture all that knowledge, because, you know, in the future your children are might want to know where they come from.

37:47
The stories that green and Jay talked about, it would be neat to, like, look back on that just to say, like, oh yeah. Like my great grandfather had those same similarities. And I think in a day to day conversation, you won't be provoked to answer your questions like that.

38:02
I feel having the legacy interview, you know, the questions asked really helps them open up. I think it's worthwhile.

38:09
Every family has worthy stories that need to be told. A lot of people don't think they're worthy, but they all are. It's kind of a relief, a weight, somewhat lifted, being free to discuss good things, difficult things. In my case, it changed my openness, ability. It's kind of teaching an old dog new tricks, and I think it's a great gift to anybody coming behind you to be clear and honest and safe whatever needs to be said you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai