Episode
The Sand Trap
- Podcast
- I Believe
- Published
- Mar 31, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1922
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://joelkdouglas.substack.com/p/the-sand-trap
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Summary
You’re gassing up at a Flying J just west of Rawlins, Wyoming, and the wind is having its way with you. The gusts come off the high plains at sixty miles an hour, shoving your truck door open, ripping it from your hand. Down the interstate you passed two semis on their sides, lying in the median like dead animals. Strange lattice fences line the highway; if you’re not from here you don’t know they’re snow fences. They’re losing. Truckers and old wise ones call this stretch the Snow Chi Minh Trail. They’re not joking. You squeeze the pump handle and watch the numbers climb. You do the math without meaning to. You watch the bill tick higher. Higher. A refinery sits less than two hours west of here in Sinclair. You can see the stacks from the highway. Wyoming pumps oil. Wyoming refines oil. And somehow the number on this pump is set by a war seven thousand miles away in a gulf that doesn’t get cold like this. Why? The easy answer is oil. That’s the answer they give you on television. But it’s not the real answer. The real answer is older, stranger, and closer to your life than you’ve been told. It’s a trap. Act I. The Architecture Before we get to the gas pump, we need to go back. Five scenes. Each one has men in it making decisions, and those decisions still set the price on that pump in Rawlins. Scene one. Tehran, 1953. The smell of summer dust. Mohammad Mosaddegh is Iran’s constitutionally appointed prime minister. He has overwhelming democratic parliamentary support . An old man with a long face who sometimes wept in parliament and received foreign dignitaries in his pajamas from bed . The British thought he was mad. Crazy. He was not mad. He nationalized Iranian oil . The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which you know today as BP, had been pumping Iranian crude for decade…