The Last Mile & The Light Beam | Indiana Century S1E7

There's a kid in a library parking lot tonight trying to do homework. There's a farmer who can't get the data he needs to make decisions about planting. There's a small business owner losing customers because her website won't load. There's a grandparent who hasn't seen their family in months because video calls keep dropping.

The digital divide isn't abstract. It's real. And it's not a technology problem. It's a market problem. Private internet companies build where it's profitable—dense neighborhoods, affluent suburbs—and leave the rest of us behind.

This episode is about a different model. State-owned fiber. Open access. Co-located with the high-speed rail network we're building. One trench, two assets. The rail project pays for the digging. The fiber rides along.

We talk about what fiber enables: rural kids doing homework at the kitchen table instead of the library parking lot. Farmers using precision agriculture tools that save water and fertilizer. Telehealth appointments that don't require a three-hour drive. Small businesses competing globally from towns of five hundred people.

We also talk about who holds the switch. Featured book: The Master Switch by Tim Wu, a history of information industries and the cycle of consolidation. And why open access infrastructure is the only way to make sure no one ever holds the switch.

This isn't government control. It's public infrastructure for private competition. The same model we use for roads, for electricity, for water. It works. And it connects every Hoosier, not just the profitable ones.

Sovereignty isn't given. It's built.

IndianaCentury.org

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Episode 7, The Last Mile and The Light Beam. Part 1. The Library Parking Lot. There's a photograph I want you to hold in your mind. It's nighttime, maybe 9 or 10 o'clock. A public library in small town Indiana. Lights off, parking lot mostly empty, except for a handful of cars scattered at odd angles near the building. Not because the library is open, but because the library's Wi-Fi reaches the parking lot. Inside those cars are kids doing homework, parents filling out job applications, grandparents trying to video call grandchildren. They're not at the library to check out books like you would expect. They are there because it's the only place within miles where the internet works well enough to do what the rest of us take for granted. I've seen this all throughout Indiana. Maybe you have to. Maybe you've been one of those cars. Maybe you've sat in a fast food parking lot at midnight because the connection at home buffers and drops, and you had a paper due. Maybe you've driven your kid to town just to submit a scholarship application. Maybe you've given up on a video call with your grandkids because the screen froze for the fifth time. We talk about the digital divide like it's some abstract concept. Some policy term that belongs in Washington Reports and Utility Commission filings, but it's not abstract. It's a kid sitting in a cold car trying to submit work before midnight. It's a small business owner driving to town to upload files because rural broadband is a joke. It's a farmer who can't use precision agriculture tools because the data won't flow. It's a grandparent who hasn't seen their family's faces in months because a video call is too frustrating to attempt. Independent research says it's double that. In Indiana, we've got counties where less than half of the residents have access to minimum speed internet. We're talking minimum speed. The kind that barely loads a webpage, that drops your Zoom call, that makes you curse at your router for the tenth time that day. And here's the thing that people miss when they talk about this problem. It's not a technology problem. The technology exists. Fiber optics can carry data at the speed of light. Fixed wireless can cover rural areas. Satellites can reach remote homes. We know how to connect people. The engineering is solved. This is a market problem. Pure and simple. Private internet companies build where it is profitable. Dense neighborhoods where they can sign up hundreds of customers per mile. Affluent suburbs where people will pay premium prices, places where the math works and the shareholders get their return. They don't build where it is not profitable. Rural areas with houses spread out, small towns too far from the backbone, poorer neighborhoods where the monthly subscription is a stretch. Places where the math doesn't work. So those places get left behind. Or they get slow DSL from the phone company that hasn't been upgraded since 2003. Or they get satellite with data caps and latency that makes real-time use impossible. Or, sadly, sometimes they get nothing at all. The market has decided that they don't count. The return on investment isn't high enough, so they don't exist. There's a word for infrastructure that only serves profitable customers. That word is not infrastructure, it's privilege. And we've been calling it broadband for twenty years. So here's my question for this episode. What if we stopped waiting for the market to solve a problem it was never designed to solve? What if we treated internet access like what it actually is? Infrastructure and not a product? What if we built it ourselves? Part two From Luxury to Necessity to Infrastructure. Twenty years ago, having internet at home was a nice thing, a luxury even. You could get by without it, apply for jobs in person, go to the library for research, call people on the phone, mail letters if you had to. It was convenient, but not essential. Today? Try applying for a job without internet. Most applications are online only. Retail, manufacturing, healthcare, office work, they all expect you to apply through a portal. If you can't get online, you can't even submit your resume. Try doing schoolwork. Homework requires online portals, video submissions, research databases, collaboration tools. Your kid can't just open a textbook and read like we used to. They need to log in, download, upload, participate. Try running a business. Your customers expect a website, email, social media, online ordering. If you're not online, you are invisible. Try healthcare. Your doctor's appointment is a video call now. Your medical records are in a portal, your prescriptions get sent electronically. If you can't connect, you can't get care. The pandemic made this visible in a way that nothing else could. When schools went remote in march twenty twenty, we suddenly saw which kids had broadband and which didn't. When offices went remote, we saw which employees could work from home and which were essential only because they couldn't. When healthcare went remote, we saw which patients could see their doctors and which were cut off entirely. The digital divide wasn't new. It was just finally impossible to ignore. Think about what broadband actually enables in each part of life. For education, it means kids do homework at the kitchen table instead of the library parking lot. They access the same resources as kids in the wealthiest suburbs. They take online classes, participate in virtual field trips, connect with tutors and mentors. Without it, they fall behind. It's that simple. For healthcare, it means telehealth appointments that actually work. Remote monitoring for chronic conditions, access to specialists hundreds of miles away. Without it, rural health outcomes get worse. Emergency rooms get more visits for preventable conditions, and people die younger. For work, it means remote jobs that pay city wages while you live in a small town. Online applications that don't require a drive. Skills training that doesn't demand relocation. Without it, your options are whatever you can walk to. For agriculture, it means precision tools that save water and fertilizer. Real-time market data that improves selling prices. Equipment diagnostics that prevent breakdowns. Without it, you're farming in the way that your grandfather did, competing against farmers who aren't. For community, it means staying connected to the people you love, participating in social life, accessing accessing information that matters to you. Without it, you are isolated. Now think about what we're building in the Indiana century. Pillar two, high speed rail, is going to connect our cities and towns physically. But physical connection isn't enough anymore. You can put a train between Indianapolis and Kokomo, but if the people in Kokomo can't access digital services, if their kids can't do homework, if their businesses can't compete, and if their grandparents can't see their families, then what have we really connected? We need the tracks and the data. The spine and the nervous system. That's what this episode is about. Not just getting everyone online, but building the infrastructure that makes connection possible for everyone, everywhere, permanently. Part three, the fiber solution. So how do we do it? Let's start with the technology because the technology matters, and most conversations about broadband skip right past it. The gold standard is fiber optics. Glass strands thinner than human hair that carry data as pulses of light. Symmetrical speeds means same upload as download, which matters more than most people realize because uploading is what you do when you send files, join video calls, backup data, low latency means no lag, no delay, no frozen upload screens. And it's future-proof. You can upgrade the electronics at each end of the fiber optics without having to dig up the cable, which means once the fiber is in the ground, it's good for decades. Fiber is to the 21st century what electricity was to the 20th. It's the foundation. Everything else runs on top of it. Right now, fiber gets built by private companies. Comcast, Spectrum, ATT, a few regional players. They decide where to build based on return on investment. They look at a map, calculate how many potential customers per mile, estimate what those customers will pay, and build only where the numbers work. They don't build where the numbers don't work. That's not evil, that's just how private companies are supposed to behave. They have shareholders, they have fiduciary duties. Their job is to maximize return, not to serve every Hoosier. The result is patchwork coverage, high prices in areas with no competition, poor service in areas that aren't profitable enough to maintain, and a digital divide that maps almost perfectly onto the map of rural and low-income communities. If you are poor or remote, you get the worst service at the highest prices, if you get service at all. Now, imagine a different model. State-owned fiber, the physical infrastructure owned by the people of Indiana, not by a corporation in Philadelphia or Atlanta. Open access, meaning any internet service provider can use it on equal terms. The state builds the roads, private companies just compete to drive on them. Think about how the interstate highway system works. The government built the roads, billions of dollars, decades of work, public ownership. Private companies use those roads every day. Trucking firms, shipping companies, delivery services, your neighbor driving to work. Competition happens on top of public infrastructure. FedEx and UPS don't build their own highways. They use the ones we all own. We want to use the same model for fiber optics. The state builds the physical network across the state of Indiana. The glass is in the ground, the connections are made to every home that wants one. Then private companies compete to provide service over that network. Local ISPs, regional providers, even the big guys, if they want to play by our rules. Competition drives prices down and quality up. And because the infrastructure is public, we can ensure that every community gets connected, not just the profitable ones. So the kid in the library parking lot gets the same connection as the executive in Carmel. This is not a radical idea. It's how electricity works in most places. The grid is public or co-op owned, and private companies generate power and sell it to you. It's how your water works, municipal systems, private usage, it's how roads work, it's how ports work, it's how airports work. The idea that the internet should be different, that it should be left entirely to private monopolies is actually the outlier. We just got used to it because that's how it's always been. But here's the thing about how it's always been. It's only been that way for about twenty-five years. Before that, the phone system was regulated as a public utility. Before that, the postal system was public. Before that, the telegraph was treated as infrastructure. The idea that communication networks should be private monopolies is historically weird, and it's failing us. Part four, the co-location strategy. Here is where fiber optics and pillar two connect. Episode six was about high-speed rail, the innovation triangle, 30-minute connections between Indianapolis, Lafayette, and Kokomo. That rail line isn't just about moving people, it's about building the backbone of the state. Every mile of rail we build requires digging a trench. For the tracks themselves, for the ballast underneath, for the signaling systems that keep the trains safe, for the power lines that feed electric to the train. All of that requires excavation. While that trench is open, we simply also lay fiber optics. Same trench, same labor, same disruption to the land, paid for once. One pass through the earth, two assets in the ground. This is the co-location strategy. It's how we build the digital backbone of the state at a fraction of the cost of doing it separately. The hardest part of building fiber is actually the digging. The permits, the labor, the equipment, the disruption to roads and property. All of that is already going to be happening for the rail. The incremental cost of adding fiber to that trench is maybe 20% of what it would cost to dig a separate trench later. Let me give you some rough numbers. Building fiber independently costs$20,000 to$30,000 per mile in rural areas, even more in urban areas where you have to deal with existing infrastructure. Co-located with the rail, the cost drops to$5,000 to$8,000 per mile for the backbone. That's a 70 to 80% savings. That's the difference between a project that pencils out and one that dies. That's the difference between connecting the profitable areas only and connecting the entire corridor. The Innovation Triangle Rail corridor becomes the spine of the fiber network. From Indianapolis, north to Lafayette, east to Kokomo, and back around. That's about 150 miles of backbone. Then we build branches off of that to every town, every school, every community along the way. Lebanon gets a branch, Frankfurt, Tipton, every little town that lost its main street when the interstate went through gets a connection to the 21st century. Phase two simply expands the spine. South Bend, Fort Wayne, Evansville connect the major cities, then build branches outward from each. Phase three just fills in the gaps. The rural areas between the branches, the remote farms, the small towns that aren't on the main line, and phase four is every Hoosier, every home, every business, every school, every clinic, everywhere in the state. Now here's what makes this work economically. The backbone pays for itself through the rail project. The branches are funded by a combination of sources, federal grants, the bipartisan infrastructure law alone has$65 billion for broadband, host community fees modeled on what we talked about in episode four, local contributions from counties and towns that know how much this matters, and eventually revenue from leasing access to service providers. The point is we don't have to write one giant check. We build over time and prioritize. We use every tool available. And because we own the infrastructure, the revenue stays here. It doesn't go to shareholders in another state. It goes back into maintenance, expansion, and lowering costs for every Hoosier. Part 5. What fiber enables. Okay, so we build the fiber. What does it actually do for people? Let me walk through it community by community. Start with the rural towns that have been left behind. That kid in the library parking lot, now she does homework at the kitchen table. Same speed as the city kid. Same access to resources, same opportunities to apply for scholarships, take online courses, explore careers. She's not starting from behind anymore. The small business owner who drove to town to upload files. Now he runs his business from his home office. An Etsy shop, consulting firm, online store. It doesn't matter what it is. He's now competing globally from a town of 500 people in the middle of nowhere Indiana. The local doctor, now she does health telehealth consults with specialists in Indianapolis. Real-time video, high enough quality to actually examine a patient. Patients don't have to drive three hours for appointments. They walk to the local clinic, or they stay home and just log on. For farmers, this is transformational. Precision agriculture becomes a reality. Sensors in the field monitor soil moisture, nutrient levels, crop health. Data flows to the cloud, gets analyzed by systems that have seen millions of acres, and sends recommendations back to the tractor. Less water wasted, less fertilizer applied where it's not needed, higher yields, better margins. Equipment diagnostics happen remotely. The combine sends an alert before it breaks down, not afterward. The dealer schedules maintenance during downtime. No harvest lost to mechanical failure. Market data arrives in real time. Grain prices, weather forecasts, future markets. Farmers make decisions with information and not guesses. That's the difference between profit and loss in a bad year. For communities, fiber changes what's possible. Libraries become true community hubs instead of just Wi-Fi hotspots. Schools offer online classes, remote learning, virtual field trips that don't require buses and permission slips. Local news survives because people can actually read it online. Town meetings happen hybrid so people who can't drive at night can still participate. Grandparents can video call grandkids, not on special occasions or holidays, but any night of the week. The kind of connection that keeps families together across distance, that lets kids grow up, knowing their grandparents, even if they live hours apart. For the Indiana Century itself, this is the nervous system. Every sensor on every small modular reactor. Temperature, pressure, vibration, output, all streaming back to control centers in real time. Every train on the track, location, speed, maintenance needs, passenger counts, all coordinated for safety and efficiency. Every health hub has patient volumes, supply levels, staffing needs, all visible across the system, so resources go where they need. Every Indiana Century Core worksite will have progress, safety, training needs, all tracked and managed. This is the digital twin we'll talk about in episode 22, a real-time model of Indiana's infrastructure that lets us manage it as one integrated system instead of a bunch of disconnected parts. You can't have a digital twin without data. You can't have data without connection. And you can't have connection without fiber. Part six, The Master Switch. This episode's featured book is The Master Switch by Tim Wu. It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry, from the telephone to radio to film, once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks, Will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the web, the entire flow of American information, come to be ruled by a corporate Leviathan in possession of the master switch? Analyzing the strategic maneuvers of today's great information powers, Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent ATT, Wu uncovers a time honored path in which invention begets industry, and industry begets empire. He shows how a battle royale for the internet's future is brewing, and this is one war we dare not tune out. This book is a history of information industries in America, telephone, radio, film, television, the internet, and the pattern they all follow. Wu calls it the cycle. Every new information technology starts open, decentralized, anyone can play. Think early internet. Anyone could start a website, anyone could send an email, anyone could build an audience. It felt like freedom because it was freedom. Then, over time, the industry consolidates. A few big players emerge, they use their power to lock out competitors, control access, extract maximum profit. Think ATT before the breakup. When you rented your phone from the company and couldn't plug it into any other device. Think Hollywood Studios in the Golden Age, when they owned the production, the distribution, and the theaters. Think Comcast today, owning both the pipes and the content that flows through them. The title, the master switch, refers to the power to control what people see, hear, and say. In a consolidated industry, someone holds that switch. They decide which content gets distributed, which voices get heard, which businesses succeed, and which ideas reach the public. They hold the switch. Everyone else just hopes to be on the right side of it. In telecommunications today, that switch is held by a handful of companies. Comcast, Charter, ATT, Verizon. They decide where to build, what to charge, who gets access, what speeds are available, what content loads quickly, and what buffers endlessly. They hold the switch. Now, here's the question Wu leaves us with. Can we build information infrastructure that doesn't end up controlled by a few? His answer is cautious. The cycle has repeated itself so many times that optimism feels naive. But the history suggests one thing. The only reliable check on the master switch is to make sure no one ever gets a hold of it. That is what we are building with state-owned fiber. Open access infrastructure. Not government control, the opposite of government control. Infrastructure that's owned by the people, accessible to all, controlled by none. Not because we trust government more than corporations, because we trust competition more than monopoly, and open access more than closed gates. Wu's book is a warning about what happens when we let the switch get captured, but it's also an invitation to imagine something different. The cycle does not have to repeat. We can build something that breaks it. Part 7. Objections and responses. Let me walk you through the objections I hear most when I talk about this subject. Some of them are sincere concerns from people who've seen government projects go wrong. Some of them are talking points from companies that like the current system just fine. Either way, they deserve answers. Objection one, government can't run the internet. We're not running the internet. We're running the pipes, the physical infrastructure, the glass in the ground, the service, your actual internet connection, your email, streaming, everything you do online, comes from private companies that compete to serve you over that infrastructure. Think about it like roads again. The Indiana Department of Transportation doesn't drive your mail to your house. The post office does. Private carriers do. FedEx, UPS, Amazon, all of them use roads that the government built and maintains. That model works. It's not complicated. Objection two, it'll cost too much. Co-location with rail cuts the costs of the backbone by 70 to 80%. Branch lines to rural communities cost money, sure. But so does leaving those communities behind. What's the economic cost of a generation of rural kids who couldn't do homework? What's the cost of small businesses that never got off the ground? What's the cost of farmers who can't compete with other farmers that are connected? The construction cost is real. The cost of doing nothing is higher. And we're not paying for all of it at once. We build it just like we build the rail. We phase, we prioritize, we use federal grants that exist specifically for this purpose. The bipartisan infrastructure law alone has$65 billion for broadband. That's our money. We should just use it. Objection three. Private companies will do it eventually. Will they? They've had twenty years, twenty years of technological progress, falling costs, proven demand. Rural Indiana is still waiting. The market isn't going to suddenly discover that unprofitable areas are profitable. If they were, they'd already be there. We can wait another twenty years, or we can just build it ourselves. Objection four. What about existing providers? Won't this hurt them? Existing providers can compete on the open access network. They can offer services over our fiber. They can keep their existing infrastructure where it makes sense. The goal is not to destroy them, it's to create real competition where currently there's none. In places where they already provide good service at fair prices, nothing changes. In places where they don't, now there's an alternative. That's called a market. It's supposed to work that way. Objection five. What about wireless, 5G, satellite? Aren't those the future? Wireless is great as a complement, but wireless towers need fiber backhaul. All that data has to get to the tower somehow. But satellite has latency issues that make real-time use difficult, and data caps that make heavy use expensive. Fiber is the foundation. Once it's in the ground, you can upgrade the electronics forever without having to dig again. It's the only future-proof option. Objection six. This is socialism. No, this is roads. This is electricity. This is water. This is every piece of infrastructure we've ever built together because it made sense to build it together. Calling it socialism doesn't change the fact that private companies won't serve rural Indiana. It doesn't change the fact that the kid in the library parking lot deserves better. It's just a word people use when they don't want to argue the actual merits. Part 8. The last mile. That's the telecom jargon for the final connection from the network to the customer. It's the hardest part, the most expensive part, the part private companies skip when the math doesn't work. In our model, the last mile is where the real work happens. You've got the fiber backbone along the rail corridor. Great. Now how do you get it to the farmhouse 20 miles from the nearest town? To the small town that's been off the main line? To the rural school that's been struggling with DSL since before DSL was obsolete? The answer is deliberately, systematically, with public purpose, not private profit. We build branch lines. Fiber runs from the spine out to every community that wants it. Not just the big ones. Not just the ones on the way to somewhere else. Everyone. We use existing infrastructure where possible, utility poles, road right-of-ways, abandoned rail beds. We partner with rural electric cooperatives. Those cooperatives already know how to serve remote customers. They already have trucks and crews and relationships. They are natural partners. We work with local governments to coordinate digging and minimize disruption. One trench, one set of permits, one disruption to roads and property, then done. And we prioritize. We focus on schools first, so every school in Indiana is connected to fiber. We need to do that as soon as possible because every day a kid is sitting in a parking lot, not able to connect to the internet, is a day that they're falling behind. We also focus on health clinics early. Every clinic, every rural health center, every place where people go for care. Because telehealth saves lives and we shouldn't wait. Then focus on businesses, then government offices and homes. Make the biggest impact with the earliest investment. The cost per customer in rural areas is higher than in cities. That's just math. You're spreading the construction costs over fewer people, but the cost of not connecting them is also real. Kids who fall behind become adults with fewer opportunities. Businesses that can't compete just close. Young people leave for places with better internet, and towns shrink a little more each year. Communities slowly die because the thing that would let them thrive never arrived. What's the price of a town that survives? What's the cost of a generation that stays? You can't put that on a spreadsheet, but you know it when you see it. This program is not charity, it's an infrastructure investment. Connected communities are stronger communities. Stronger communities are more resilient, more prosperous, more likely to grow and thrive. The fiber pays for itself over time in economic activity, in tax revenue, in human potential. It's not a cost, it's a down payment on the future of Indiana. Part nine, integration with other pillars. Like everything else in the Indiana century, this doesn't stand alone. The fiber network connects to every other pillar, makes every other project work better. Pillar one, energy. Our small modular reactors and the rest of our energy infrastructure need monitoring, control, and communication. That happens over fiber. Every sensor, every valve, every safety system, every output reading, all connected, secure, reliable. Not dependent on commercial networks that could fail or be compromised or be sold. Not reliant on companies that might prioritize other customers. Our own network, our own control. Pillar two, connectivity. This is the digital twin of the rail system. Trains communicate with each other, with control centers, with stations. Signaling happens in real time, which means trains can run closer together safely, which means more capacity. Maintenance is predictive instead of reactive. Sensors on tracks and trains detect problems before they cause delays. Passengers have Wi-Fi that actually works, which makes the train more useful than driving. Pillar three is agriculture. Precision ag requires data. Lots of it. Soil sensors, weather stations, equipment telemetry, market information, satellite imagery, all of it flows over fiber. Farmers become data driven, efficient, competitive. The Hoosier Hemp Materials Initiative, the Farmer Owned Processing Co-ops, the Indiana Premium Brand, all of them depend on information moving fast and reliably. Pillar four is health. Telehealth requires bandwidth, real-time video, remote monitoring, electronic records, prescription transmission. None of it works up on dial up or spotty wireless. Fiber makes rural health possible. Health hubs connected to specialists. Patients seen where they live. Chronic conditions managed before they become emergencies. The clinic in a van fleet uploads data, downloads schedules, coordinates care all over fiber. Pillar five is funding. The Bank of Indiana needs secure, reliable communication, transactions, lending decisions, account management. The future fund needs data on investments, returns, economic impact. The transparency portal, all those meetings, documents, revenue streams will be public, accessible, and in real time. That requires infrastructure. Not a website hosted in another state or country, real infrastructure here in Indiana. The fiber network is the thread that ties everything together. Without it, the pillars are separate projects. Good projects maybe, but separate. With it, they become a system. Part ten. Conclusion and preview. Here's where we are today. There's a kid in a library parking lot right now, maybe in Switzerland County, maybe in Martin County, maybe in some town you've never heard of. She's trying to do her homework on a school-issued laptop that barely holds a charge, connected to Wi-Fi that cuts out every few minutes, sitting in a car because there's nowhere else to go. There's a farmer who can't get the data he needs to make decisions about planting. He's guessing about soil moisture, guessing about market prices, about the weather. He's farming the way his grandfather did, competing against farmers who aren't. There's a small business owner losing customers because her website won't load. She's got products to sell, skills to offer, value to add, but the connection won't cooperate, so the customers go elsewhere. And there's a grandparent who hasn't seen their grandkids in months because a video call is too frustrating to attempt with their internet. They miss birthdays, miss milestones, miss the everyday moments that add up to a relationship because the connection won't hold. This is not a market failure. This is a choice that we made. We've chosen to treat internet access as a product instead of infrastructure. We've chosen to let private companies decide who counts. We've chosen to leave people behind. We can choose differently. The fiber network we build alongside the innovation triangle changes the math. Co-located, cost-effective, publicly owned. It connects every Hoosier, not just the profitable ones. It creates real competition, real choice, real opportunity. It builds the digital nervous system of the Indiana century. And it does something else. It takes the master switch out of private hands and puts it where it belongs. In the hands of the people, not government control, public ownership. There's a difference. Government control is about telling you what you can do. Public ownership is about making sure you can do whatever you choose, whenever you choose, wherever you live. Next week, episode 8, the Indiana Sentry Corps. The sovereign workforce that builds and operates everything we've talked about. Not just jobs, a calling. Not just training, a culture. And not just workers, builders. We'll talk about who joins, how they're trained, what they build, why this is the most important workforce initiative in Indiana's history. The kid in the parking lot deserves better. The farmers deserve better. The small towns, the rural community, the forgotten corner of the state, they all deserve better. We can give it to them, not by waiting, but by building.