Montana’s unofficial tagline is “the last best place” — which should tell you something about the way the state thinks about itself. It’s a political frankenstein, incredibly beautiful, increasingly filled with tourists, and a twelve-hour drive from one corner of the state to the other. Oh, and just over a million people total live there. Including Chris La Tray, who’s just finishing his tenure as Montana Poet Laureate, and one of my favorite thinkers on what makes Montana so easy to fall in love with — but not always a very easy place to live.

In this episode, we talk about our favorite, most contradictory, and most hostile parts of Montana culture, from exorbitant housing prices to what it’s like to live in a place that falls in love with its own area code. If your vision of Montana culture comes from Yellowstone, this is a great corrective… that will also make you want a huckleberry milkshake.

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• FIRST AND FOREMOST: FIND OUT MORE ABOUT INDIGIPALOOZA HERE — AND DONATE HERE!

• Now subscribe to Chris’s newsletter (my most-opened/most-read newsletter):

• Classic Montana Self-Obsession (“Last Best Place”) from The Last Best Store

• The “406” Collection from The Montana Shirt Company

• A few of the pieces I’ve written on Montana: on the Special Election in 2017. reporting from a Trump rally, Love Lives in Whitefish Montana, But So Do Neo-Nazis

• The evolution of internet slang (and how it’s affected how you speak offline, too)

• REGIONAL ACCENTS!!!! (We have a accent/dialect expert as co-host!)

• Sabrina Carpenter????

• Food Trends (like, what are you seeing on the menu in all the restaurants? Why are people pushing this particular ingredient or prep in their recipes???)

• Fiction concierge!! Much like our old movies episode, let us know a few books you read and loved as well as whatever other parameters you want to put in place, and Maris Kreizman and I will make some recs!

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment!

• As always, you can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here