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Transcript

What Counts | A Rancher, a Charging Station, and a Twelve-Million-Dollar Letter · I Believe

0:02
SPEAKER_00: A family driving north out of Denver.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: They left before light.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Mum's driving.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: Yellowstone tomorrow.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Lamar Valley and the bison and wolves and trout.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: Tonight, the Sheridan Inn.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: The car planned this stop in Buffalo before they crossed the Platte.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: It planned every stop.
0:22
SPEAKER_02: Hey, the World Cup is over.
0:24
SPEAKER_02: Let's take it down a notch.
0:48
SPEAKER_02: The paper kind, nobody's looking at it.
0:50
SPEAKER_02: Two kids in the back, a yellow dog between them with his chin on the armrest.
0:55
SPEAKER_02: Somewhere past KC, the little one got car sick.
0:59
SPEAKER_02: Mom keeps empty cups up front for it, and she passed one back without looking.
1:03
SPEAKER_02: The windows are down now.
1:05
SPEAKER_02: Summer heat and wind noise, and nobody's saying why.
1:10
SPEAKER_02: In one mile, exit right, charging stop.
1:14
SPEAKER_02: Buffalo, Wyoming.
1:15
SPEAKER_02: The chargers sit at the Miller Travel Center, across the street from the Best Western.
1:21
SPEAKER_02: Eight stalls, white posts, painted lines.
1:25
SPEAKER_02: Mom backs in on the first try.
1:27
SPEAKER_02: Dad's out of the car before it stops rocking.
1:29
SPEAKER_02: He takes a deep breath and clicks the cable home.
1:32
SPEAKER_02: The screen says 35 minutes.
1:35
SPEAKER_02: The kids step out slow.
1:37
SPEAKER_02: The dog tows the boy toward the grass strip at the edge of the lot, nose down, working.
1:42
SPEAKER_02: A good stop.
1:44
SPEAKER_02: Restrooms, coffee, a rack of postcards with bears on them.
1:48
SPEAKER_02: Everything works.
1:50
SPEAKER_02: And everything worked the whole way up, and it'll work the whole way to the park.
1:55
SPEAKER_02: Somebody built all of it so that it would.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: A pickup comes down 16, pulling a stock trailer.
2:01
SPEAKER_02: There you hear it before you see it.
2:03
SPEAKER_02: Nobody in the lot looks up except the dog.
2:06
SPEAKER_02: Leave the family at the charger.
2:07
SPEAKER_02: They're fine.
2:08
SPEAKER_02: Let's follow the truck.
2:16
SPEAKER_03: Welcome to I Believe, where we talk about America.
2:19
SPEAKER_03: I'm Joel Douglas, and I believe in America.
2:23
SPEAKER_03: Thanks for joining me.
2:28
SPEAKER_06: Act 1, The Baron.
2:32
SPEAKER_06: The same morning begins in the dark at both ends of the road.
2:36
SPEAKER_06: 4:30, and the kitchen light's the only one on for 11 miles.
2:40
SPEAKER_06: Coffee going.
2:42
SPEAKER_06: She's up, she always is.
2:44
SPEAKER_06: The talk is the day's work, not the letter that's sitting on the table.
2:48
SPEAKER_06: Pears come off the north lease today.
2:51
SPEAKER_06: The grass up there is done, and the section east of town has been resting since May.
2:56
SPEAKER_06: Move them today or watch them walk it to dirt by Friday.
3:00
SPEAKER_06: The letter's been on the table since Tuesday.
3:03
SPEAKER_06: It came certified from a company out of Denver with a name that doesn't say what it does.
3:09
SPEAKER_06: They want to buy the place.
3:11
SPEAKER_06: All of it.
3:12
SPEAKER_06: Deeded ground and leases and water, and the letter names the number they'd pay.
3:17
SPEAKER_06: He read it once standing up and set it down, and neither of them has touched it since except to move it off the spot where the coffee goes.
3:26
SPEAKER_06: In a good year, this place clears$120,000.
3:30
SPEAKER_06: The number in the letter is not that kind of number.
3:34
SPEAKER_06: He takes the letter off the table on his way out, not to do anything with it.
3:38
SPEAKER_06: It just doesn't seem like something you leave lying around, the way you wouldn't leave a loaded rifle on the porch.
3:45
SPEAKER_06: It rides on the dash.
3:46
SPEAKER_06: Jesse's already at the truck.
3:49
SPEAKER_06: Red heeler, ears up, been waiting in the dark by the left rear tire since the kitchen light came on.
3:55
SPEAKER_06: Chores first, then town, because the baler's down and the hay is nearly ready.
4:00
SPEAKER_06: The parts counter at six hundred forty five smells like oil and popcorn from yesterday.
4:05
SPEAKER_06: The bearing he needs is back ordered ten days.
4:09
SPEAKER_06: The counterman is a good man.
4:11
SPEAKER_06: He offers the other way out.
4:13
SPEAKER_06: The whole assembly in stock, four hundred and change, upgraded.
4:18
SPEAKER_06: Better than the old one ever was.
4:20
SPEAKER_06: He stands there maybe a minute.
4:22
SPEAKER_06: It's not four hundred dollars against zero.
4:25
SPEAKER_06: It's four hundred dollars against ten days of July.
4:28
SPEAKER_06: Against what a rebuilt bearing costs, against how many seasons the old assembly has left anyway.
4:35
SPEAKER_06: He's done this math his whole life standing at this counter, in about this light.
4:40
SPEAKER_06: The old assembly has two good years in it.
4:43
SPEAKER_06: The bearing wins.
4:45
SPEAKER_06: So order the bearing.
4:47
SPEAKER_06: Borrow the neighbor's bailer in the meantime, which will cost him a favor, and favors get paid back in this county at par.
4:55
SPEAKER_06: Nobody calls it anything, there's no form for it.
4:58
SPEAKER_06: But that minute at the counter is an audit, and everything that comes onto the ranch passes one just like it, or it doesn't come.
5:06
SPEAKER_06: The truck passed one.
5:08
SPEAKER_06: The trailer passed one.
5:10
SPEAKER_06: The dog passed one year ago.
5:12
SPEAKER_06: Out of the lot, up through town and on to sixteen with the empty gooseneck rattling behind.
5:18
SPEAKER_06: The chargers go by on the right.
5:21
SPEAKER_06: Eight stalls, white posts, painted lines, two cars on them with plates from somewhere else.
5:27
SPEAKER_06: His eyes do what a cattleman's eyes do with any pin, any chute, any gate, measure it.
5:34
SPEAKER_06: The approach, the spacing, the turnaround, thirty two feet of truck and trailer, and stalls drawn for sixteen.
5:42
SPEAKER_06: There's nothing to think about, so he doesn't think about it.
5:46
SPEAKER_06: North out of town the pavement gives out to gravel, and the gravel to two track, and the two track climbs to where the pears are scattered across the last of the lease grass, heads coming up one by one at the sound of the diesel they know.
6:00
SPEAKER_06: Two hundred and fifty miles south, a family out of Denver is passing chugwater, and their car is already counting on one of those stalls in Buffalo.
6:13
SPEAKER_01: Act two.
6:16
SPEAKER_01: The northeast is forty minutes of gravel and another ten on two track, a section and change of short grass running up against the timber.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: The grass is done, time to move on.
6:26
SPEAKER_01: The pairs know the truck and start drifting toward the corrals before he's got the gate.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: As soon as the driver's doors open, Jessie is out and running.
6:34
SPEAKER_01: Before he's in the saddle, she'll be out of sight.
6:36
SPEAKER_01: Bring in any pairs, not with the main group, and come back loping, tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.
6:41
SPEAKER_01: Ray's flatbed is already at the pens.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: Ray runs the neighboring lease, and they work it together every year.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: No money in it, just the arithmetic of neighbors kept square.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: Ray's cows wear collars now.
6:52
SPEAKER_01: He put them on two years ago when the math got undeniable.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: What the collars cost against what three miles of cross fence was going to cost, and the fence never got built and never will.
7:02
SPEAKER_01: Nobody from any government office asked him to do it.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: Nobody sends him a form about it.
7:06
SPEAKER_01: The collars either paid for themselves and held his cows off the creek bottoms, or they didn't.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: They did, and that was the whole conversation.
7:14
SPEAKER_01: They work the pairs quiet, hooves in the dust, cows calling calves, not much else.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: Jessie does most of the work.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: She'll get the fat off his ribeye at supper.
7:23
SPEAKER_01: First load on.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: Ray talks for a minute about the sale barn and goes back to his flatbed.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: While Ray's talking without exactly deciding to, he takes the letter off the dash and puts it in the glove box.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: Town is 25 minutes with a load on.
7:36
SPEAKER_01: Through Buffalo, Wyoming Public Radio comes over the speakers.
7:40
SPEAKER_01: The state's federal charging program has yet to break ground.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: 26.8 million allocated, the announcer says.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: While the chargers already running, including Buffalo's, were built by private companies.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: With zero chargers built, the state asked Washington to call the corridors complete.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: Then the weather, hot and cattle prices.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: High.
8:00
SPEAKER_01: He's watching his mirrors as he approaches the interstate by the travel center.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: Eight stalls, a car from Colorado on the cable, a yellow dog working the grass strip with a boy on the other end of the leash.
8:10
SPEAKER_01: The trailer rattles and the stalls go by at 30.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: Small town.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: When the chargers went in, they got talked about at church for a month.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: Same as everything else.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: Now they're just the thing across from the best western.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: His eyes do what a cattleman's eyes do.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: Measure.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: Every stall drawn for a car.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: You can't back up to a charger pulling a cattle trailer.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing to think about, so he doesn't.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: The east section is six miles on the other side of town, deeded ground, and it's been resting since May, which is the only reason today works at all.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: Grass is there, water is the problem.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: The section has one good well at the north end and nothing at the south.
8:46
SPEAKER_01: So the south half grazes short or doesn't graze.
8:49
SPEAKER_01: And every dry August he hauls water to it in a tank on the flatbed.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: 400 gallons at a trip.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: There's a fix for that, and it's not a mystery.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: It's pipe.
8:59
SPEAKER_01: He heard about a grant and applied for it in the spring.
9:02
SPEAKER_01: Cost share, water development.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: There's a conservation plan on file with his name on it.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: And the woman at the office says the money should be obligated when the government's new year starts in October.
9:13
SPEAKER_01: Then the engineer, then, if there's a backhoe left in the county, dirt.
9:18
SPEAKER_01: If you ask the program today, it would say truthfully that the dollars are on track to be obligated.
9:23
SPEAKER_01: The way it works is he fronts the money and gets paid back after the work passes inspection, which is fair enough if you have the money to front.
9:31
SPEAKER_01: Fronting it means this fall's steer money is spoken for until the government pays him back.
9:37
SPEAKER_01: He thinks maybe he'll be able to break ground in November.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: The grass needs water in July.
9:41
SPEAKER_01: So the tank he'll use again this August is the 400-gallon one on the flatbed, and the pipe exists in a plan, in a filing cabinet in town.
9:49
SPEAKER_01: He unloads the first load through the north gate, and while the pairs sort themselves out and go to grass, he checks the well.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: The pump kicks on.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: On the pole above it, there's a meter with the co-op's name on the tag.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: And the co-op's name has been on this place longer than he has.
10:05
SPEAKER_01: 1936, a Grange Hall not far from here, and a man from the power company stood up in front of a room of ranchers and told them what everybody with credentials knew.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: $2,000 a mile to string line to country like this, and no way it ever pays it back.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: He wasn't lying, it was his honest math.
10:21
SPEAKER_01: The ranchers formed a cooperative, borrowed the money from the government at cost, hired their own crews, and set their own polls, and built it for$825 a mile.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: They paid the loans back over decades, at a default rate under 1%.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: Nobody measured the program by how many meetings it held.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: The measure was whether the lights came on and whether the loan got paid.
10:41
SPEAKER_01: The lights came on, the loan got paid.
10:44
SPEAKER_01: The pump runs, he pays that outfit every month, 90 some years later, two more loads before supper.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: The town, the curb, the seams, the stalls, thirty-two feet of truck and trailer.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: By the second pass, the Colorado car is gone, and another one is on the cable.
11:04
SPEAKER_06: Act three, the tally.
11:09
SPEAKER_06: Second load on and coming south off the lease, his phone rings through the truck speakers.
11:14
SPEAKER_06: His daughter from Denver.
11:16
SPEAKER_06: She calls when she's walking somewhere, and he can hear the city moving around her.
11:21
SPEAKER_06: He's happy to hear from her anytime and tells her she never needs a reason.
11:26
SPEAKER_06: Family logistics first.
11:28
SPEAKER_06: Her mother's birthday, what she's sending, whether he's picked up anything yet.
11:33
SPEAKER_06: He hasn't, but he's known for months what he's getting her.
11:36
SPEAKER_06: She knows this too.
11:38
SPEAKER_06: Then her weekend, because he asks.
11:41
SPEAKER_06: They took the car up to Estes on Saturday and pulled into a charger they couldn't use.
11:47
SPEAKER_06: Wrong company.
11:48
SPEAKER_06: The plug fits the car and everything, but the company would only let their cars charge there, is how she explains it.
11:55
SPEAKER_06: Their charge app walked them back down the hill to a slow charger, and they sat for two hours having a beer in this old bar until they had enough charge to drive to a fast one they were allowed to plug into.
12:07
SPEAKER_06: She tells it as comedy.
12:09
SPEAKER_06: She says the word infrastructure the way her grandmother used to say the word government, and they both laugh, and neither of them explains a joke.
12:17
SPEAKER_06: She has to go into a meeting.
12:20
SPEAKER_06: Love you, Dad.
12:21
SPEAKER_06: The call drops off the speakers, and the diesel comes back up under everything.
12:26
SPEAKER_06: Through town again.
12:28
SPEAKER_06: The Colorado car is gone off the cable, and a Montana one is on it.
12:33
SPEAKER_06: Somewhere south of the stoplight he does the math because her story left it sitting there.
12:38
SPEAKER_06: Sailbarn runned a torrent in this fall.
12:41
SPEAKER_06: Two hundred and fifty five miles down with a full load of calves, and the electric trucks pull maybe 130 miles with that weight behind them before they're done.
12:51
SPEAKER_06: Say it's 150 being generous.
12:54
SPEAKER_06: That's a charge stop each way if everything goes right.
12:57
SPEAKER_06: And the one fast charger in that country is 50 kilowatts.
13:01
SPEAKER_06: He knows now what 50 kilowatts is.
13:04
SPEAKER_06: His daughter sat two hours in one on Saturday.
13:08
SPEAKER_06: That's if the stall's open and you can hook up with the trailer attached, and the company likes your plug.
13:14
SPEAKER_06: And there's nowhere in the arithmetic to put fourteen thousand pounds of calves standing in a steel box in the sun.
13:21
SPEAKER_06: The math takes him about as long as the baron took, it's not against the truck.
13:27
SPEAKER_06: The day the numbers come in, the truck is just another baron, and he'll buy one and never think about it again.
13:34
SPEAKER_06: The government can count dollars spent, stations built, corridors completed.
13:39
SPEAKER_06: He has to count what it costs to get a calf to market.
13:42
SPEAKER_06: Third load is the last and the shadows are getting long.
13:46
SPEAKER_06: Through town the last time.
13:48
SPEAKER_06: And the lot has a Montana car charging and a horse trailer parked way out at the edge of the gravel where the trucks go.
13:56
SPEAKER_06: The woman who hauled it is walking in for coffee she'll carry back a hundred yards.
14:00
SPEAKER_06: Doesn't take a meeting to figure out where to go if you're pulling a trailer.
14:04
SPEAKER_06: You learn quick.
14:06
SPEAKER_06: At the east section gate he reaches into the glove box for the tally book, and the letter comes out with it.
14:12
SPEAKER_06: He sets a letter on the seat and counts pairs through the gate against the book, out loud, under his breath.
14:19
SPEAKER_06: The count is right, and he opens the gate to the new grass.
14:24
SPEAKER_06: The pump is running at the north end, and the evening cool is coming down off the mountains, and for about a minute the whole outfit is doing exactly what it's supposed to do, every piece of it paid for and working.
14:37
SPEAKER_06: That minute is what the hundred and twenty thousand is made of.
14:41
SPEAKER_06: No part of that minute will appear in any report anywhere, because there's no line on any form for it.
14:48
SPEAKER_06: The letter rides home on the seat beside him.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: Act four, the number.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: The yard light comes on by itself at dusk, the way it has since the co-op set the poll.
15:04
SPEAKER_01: Supper's late because the day ran long.
15:06
SPEAKER_01: Jesse gets the fat off his ribeye, as promised.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: She's finished with it as soon as it hits her bowl, and then she heads to the porch.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: The evening cools fast, goes gold, and then blue.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: The letter came in from the truck with him.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: It's on the kitchen table.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: His wife's at the sink.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: He sits down with the coffee that's left and reads it again.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: All the way through through this time, sitting down.
15:27
SPEAKER_01: The company's name still doesn't say what it does.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: The paragraphs say the things those paragraphs say, honored to express interest, understand the deep connection to the land, prepared to move quickly.
15:39
SPEAKER_01: There's a phone number of a man whose title is three words long, and there's the number.
15:43
SPEAKER_01: $12 million.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: The pump out at the east section is running right now on 90-year-old wire.
15:49
SPEAKER_01: The pipe for the south half is in a filing cabinet in town on track to be obligated.
15:54
SPEAKER_01: The bearing is 10 days out.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: The steer money is spoken for from October till whenever the inspection passes.
16:00
SPEAKER_01: And the number on the table is 100 good years, and he doesn't have 100 years, and nobody who would pay 12 million dollars for this ground intends to run cows on it.
16:08
SPEAKER_01: He looks at it a while, she dries her hands and comes and reads it over his shoulder, which she hasn't done since Tuesday, and neither of them says anything for a minute, and then she says, Supper's getting cold, which is true.
16:20
SPEAKER_01: He folds the letter back into thirds.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: There's a drawer in the kitchen where the important papers wait until they're dealt with.
16:27
SPEAKER_01: Brand renewals, the lease file, the grant paperwork with his name on it, and he doesn't put it there.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: He sets it on the table, off to the side, on the spot where the coffee goes.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: They eat.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: The talk is tomorrow's work.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: The bearing might come early, the hay won't wait past Thursday, and somebody has to call about panels before fall.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Outside the yard light hums, and the pears are on new grass six miles east, and the well is running.
16:51
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere north, in a hotel room in Sheridan, a family is asleep with the curtains open, and their car is in the lot, charged, counting on nothing until morning.
17:00
SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow the wolves.
17:08
SPEAKER_03: A note on the reporting.
17:11
SPEAKER_03: You just spent half an hour with a mix of people I made up in ground truth, so you're owed a clear line between what I invented and what I didn't.
17:18
SPEAKER_03: I made up the rancher, his wife, his daughter, Ray, the traveling family, and their yellow dog, and the twelve million dollar letter.
17:27
SPEAKER_03: I did not make up Jesse.
17:29
SPEAKER_03: The red healer is real, and she gets the fat off a ribeye from time to time.
17:34
SPEAKER_03: Everything else these people touched is real too.
17:37
SPEAKER_03: Every program, budget, regulation, and date in the story is real, and I've linked every source in the written version so you can check me.
17:45
SPEAKER_03: You should check me.
17:46
SPEAKER_03: If the charging program sounded too absurd to be true, start there.
17:50
SPEAKER_03: Congress allocated Wyoming$26.8 million for fast chargers along interstates 25, 80, and 90.
17:58
SPEAKER_03: In October of 2025, the Federal Highway Administration certified Wyoming's corridors as fully built out.
18:05
SPEAKER_03: Those two facts are next to each other on purpose, because the gap between them is the story.
18:11
SPEAKER_03: On the day of that certification, the program had installed nothing in the state, not one charger.
18:17
SPEAKER_03: Private companies had built at least 39 stations with their own money, and the state pointed at those to satisfy the federal standard.
18:25
SPEAKER_03: Certified complete at zero.
18:28
SPEAKER_03: That's not my satire.
18:29
SPEAKER_03: That's the approval letter.
18:31
SPEAKER_03: Federal standards make a charging station report whether a trailer can pull through.
18:36
SPEAKER_03: They don't require a station to let a trailer pull through.
18:39
SPEAKER_03: Nobody backs a one-ton with a loaded cattle trailer up to a charger, and nobody unhitches 14,000 pounds of calves in July to top off a battery.
18:48
SPEAKER_03: Let's pull on that thread.
18:50
SPEAKER_03: Say the engineers get there, and one day an electric one ton outpulls a diesel, costs less to run, and can haul a loaded gooseneck the 255 miles to the sale barn without stopping.
19:02
SPEAKER_03: That's the day the truck passes the rancher's audit, the day he buys one and never thinks about it again.
19:08
SPEAKER_03: But sale day is a round trip.
19:11
SPEAKER_03: The calves stay in Torrington, the truck comes home, and it comes home on a charge it can only get from the network, the one built to a standard that only ever asked whether a car could park certified complete before he was ever its customer.
19:25
SPEAKER_03: The truck could earn its way onto the ranch tomorrow.
19:27
SPEAKER_03: The plug still couldn't reach the trailer.
19:30
SPEAKER_03: If the towing math sounded rigged against the truck, testers measured it, I didn't.
19:35
SPEAKER_03: A Ford Lightning pulling a 6100 pound camper went about a hundred miles.
19:39
SPEAKER_03: A Rivian went about a hundred and ten.
19:41
SPEAKER_03: And note that those trucks are half tons.
19:44
SPEAKER_03: The truck that actually pulls a loaded gooseneck is a one ton, and nobody builds an electric one ton yet.
19:51
SPEAKER_03: So the stories rancher was running his math on the closest truck that exists and giving it the benefit of the doubt.
19:58
SPEAKER_03: A heavy trailer turns today's electric pickups into hundred to one hundred and fifty mile trucks.
20:04
SPEAKER_03: That doesn't make them bad trucks.
20:06
SPEAKER_03: It means you'd build the whole job around the range, the charge time, the weather, and whatever's standing in the trailer while you wait.
20:13
SPEAKER_03: If the pipe in the filing cabinet felt like a cheap shot, it's mechanics.
20:18
SPEAKER_03: The conservation program ranks applications, obligates money when the government's new year starts in October, and pays the producer back after the work passes inspection.
20:28
SPEAKER_03: The producer fronts every dollar until then.
20:31
SPEAKER_03: Nothing there is unreasonable on paper.
20:34
SPEAKER_03: But notice that it asks the ranch to carry the government's share for a season, and a project can hold its schedule inside an agency and still miss the grass.
20:43
SPEAKER_03: Both sides keep their word, and the water still doesn't come.
20:47
SPEAKER_03: Raise collars, same test the story gives everything.
20:50
SPEAKER_03: Fence in rough country costs past ten thousand dollars a mile.
20:54
SPEAKER_03: The collars trade some of that for base stations, hardware, and a subscription.
20:58
SPEAKER_03: I won't defend them or attack them.
21:00
SPEAKER_03: They either hold the cattle and save more than they cost, or they don't.
21:04
SPEAKER_03: And if the Grange Hall sounded like nostalgia, it's the record, and it cuts against easy conclusions in both directions.
21:11
SPEAKER_03: In the mid-1930s, nine American farms and ten ran on kerosene, because the utilities figured rural line at fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a mile and said it would never pay.
21:22
SPEAKER_03: They weren't lying.
21:24
SPEAKER_03: That was their honest math under their business model.
21:27
SPEAKER_03: Then the cooperative standardized the designs, hired local crews, borrowed federal money at cost, and drove the price to about$941 a mile by the end of 1936, under$825 by$39.
21:42
SPEAKER_03: They built the loans to be repaid and they repaid them.
21:45
SPEAKER_03: The default rate stayed under 1%.
21:48
SPEAKER_03: So before we conclude, government programs can't work.
21:52
SPEAKER_03: Let's remember that Washington held meetings, approved plans, and mailed checks, and one of the best performing loan programs in American history called.
22:00
SPEAKER_03: Came out the other end.
22:01
SPEAKER_03: The meetings weren't why it worked.
22:03
SPEAKER_03: The lights came on, the pumps ran, and the money came back.
22:07
SPEAKER_03: That's why it worked.
22:09
SPEAKER_03: A note on EV use.
22:11
SPEAKER_03: Colorado passed 210,000 electric vehicles in 2025.
22:16
SPEAKER_03: Wyoming registered about eleven hundred in total.
22:19
SPEAKER_03: A charging network can serve real people and real demand and still fail the trucks and the trailers and the distances of the country it crosses.
22:28
SPEAKER_03: Both things can be true at the same time, and the story asks you to hear them together.
22:33
SPEAKER_03: The letter is invented.
22:35
SPEAKER_03: The market that mails letters like it is not.
22:44
SPEAKER_03: And in early 2026, landowners turned down 15.7 million dollars and eighty million.
22:50
SPEAKER_03: The number is fiction.
22:52
SPEAKER_03: The choice on the kitchen table is not.
22:54
SPEAKER_03: Here's why any of this should cost you a thought after the audio wins.
22:58
SPEAKER_03: The next program through your country, whatever or wherever that is, will report what it spent, who it enrolled, how many meetings it held, and what it mailed.
23:08
SPEAKER_03: Accepting that report as progress costs you nothing today.
23:12
SPEAKER_03: In the long run, it cost you the water and eventually the ranch.
23:15
SPEAKER_03: So ask the real question what got cheaper because it existed?
23:19
SPEAKER_03: What got safer?
23:21
SPEAKER_03: What got built that stayed built?
23:23
SPEAKER_03: What operation came out stronger or more profitable as a result?
23:27
SPEAKER_03: That's what counts.
23:44
SPEAKER_04: You took all the worries from my mind.
24:01
SPEAKER_04: And if we settle down, but we don't have to settle down.
24:12
SPEAKER_04: We can take our time and we may change our mind.
24:18
SPEAKER_04: But I can tell a good thing when a good thing comes along.
24:25
SPEAKER_04: Darling, tell me all about the dreams you had last night.
24:30
SPEAKER_04: You can be so restless and sleep.
24:40
SPEAKER_04: So very right.
24:42
SPEAKER_04: When you find good love, it's no longer cheating.
24:47
SPEAKER_04: And if we settle down, we don't have to settle down.
24:54
SPEAKER_04: Please don't be afraid of all things in tomorrow.
24:59
SPEAKER_04: We can take our time and we may change our mind.
25:06
SPEAKER_04: I can tell good things comes along.
25:35
SPEAKER_04: I can't take another man without by my side.
25:41
SPEAKER_04: Please come home and split me as you can.
25:46
SPEAKER_04: And if we settle down, we don't have to settle down.
26:00
SPEAKER_04: He may change our mind.
26:04
SPEAKER_04: I can tell a good thing when a good thing comes along.