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The Indiana Century Podcast — Government
The Indiana Century Podcast

What if Indiana didn’t just participate in the next century… but built it?

Join the conversation as we transform Indiana from a crossroads into a command center of American innovation. This isn’t left versus right. It’s forward versus stuck.

Each week, we explore practical, sovereign solutions to our most pressing challenges: from energy independence through next-generation nuclear power, to revitalizing our heartland with high-speed rail and a circular hemp economy, to guaranteeing healthcare access in every county.

This is more than a podcast. It’s a blueprint for Hoosier Sovereignty: a vision of state-led investment in public-owned infrastructure that creates permanent competitive advantage. We’re talking concrete engineering, detailed financing, and a workforce trained to build what we’ll own.

Forget partisan politics. We’re building the Indiana Innovation Triangle. Join us as we chart the path from extraction to ownership, from dependence to sovereignty.

Subscribe to hear how we build the next century of Indiana, on our terms.

Topics include: Energy Sovereignty (SMRs/Nuclear) • High-Speed Rail & Connectivity (Fiber Optic Network) • Agricultural Renaissance (Hemp/Carbon Farming) • Healthcare System Overhaul • State Banking & Finance • Workforce Development (Indiana Century Corps) • Community Benefits & Anti-Corruption

For listeners of: Practical infrastructure policy, state politics innovation, energy independence, heartland economic development, and anyone who believes solutions should be built, not just debated.

Copyright: © 2026 The Indiana Century Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The Loneliness of a Broken System | Indiana Century S1E3 Feb 24, 2026

Show notes

We call it the Crossroads of America. But what happens when a place optimized for moving goods forgets how to connect people?

In Episode 3 of The Indiana Century Podcast, host Kory Easterday follows the $5 billion extraction from Episode 2 to its final destination: not a spreadsheet, but a feeling. The emptiness of a downtown that used to be something. The silence at a dinner table where a parent can't answer "What is there for me here?" The scroll through your phone when you're surrounded by people and still alone.

This episode diagnoses the three levels of disconnection:

The Civic Level: Since 1990, Indiana has lost 60% of its independent retail stores, 30% of its rural library hours, 25% of its community centers, and half of its active union halls. These were "third places," where trust was built over coffee, over cards, over conversations that happened just because people happened to be there. When they vanished, the habit of showing up vanished with them.

The Familial Level: The Succession Crisis from Episode 1 isn't just about land and jobs. It's about stories that stop being told. Skills that die. A farmer with no one to pass the farm to. A tradesman whose kids moved away. Two kinds of loneliness, facing each other across a table that used to be full.

The Psychological Level: When community structures atrophy, we're forced back on ourselves. Friendship becomes networking. Leisure becomes content. We're taught to see ourselves as isolated competitors, and that distrust is the fertilizer of loneliness.

Featured Book: The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Their decades of research reveal a devastating truth: more unequal societies don't just have more poverty at the bottom. They have worse outcomes for everyone; rich and poor alike. Lower life expectancy. Higher mental illness. Less trust. More violence. Inequality is a poison that seeps into every corner.

But this episode isn't just diagnosis. It's also the introduction of the cure.

The Indiana Century Corps, a sovereign workforce, modeled on the CCC and the discipline of the Nuclear Navy, is introduced as the antidote. Not just a jobs program, but a community-making machine. Crews that train together, build together, and create the shared project that pulls us out of isolation and into common purpose.

The core insight: You can't have sovereignty without solidarity. You can't have solidarity without trust. You can't have trust without places to build it, and projects to build it through.

Episode 3 connects the economic extraction of Episode 2 to the loneliness we all feel, and lays the groundwork for the solution: rebuilding the conditions for trust itself.

Listen to understand why your loneliness isn't a personal failure, it's a system's output. And why the cure is building together.

IndianaCentury.org

The Crossroads Trap | Indiana Century S1E2 Feb 17, 2026

Show notes

We call ourselves the "Crossroads of America." It sounds strong. Central. Essential. But what if that identity has become a trap?

In Episode 2 of The Indiana Century Podcast, host Kory Easterday builds on the diagnostic foundation from 1,067 conversations and follows the money ($5 billion of it) to show exactly how wealth created by Hoosiers leaves our state every single year, never to return.

You'll learn about the four extraction tolls draining Indiana's future:

The Energy Toll: $850 million in utility profits sent to shareholders in North Carolina and Ohio
The Harvest Toll: $2.8 billion in agricultural value-add we never capture because we ship our grain out as raw feedstock
The Health Toll: $1.1 billion in hospital and insurance profits funding corporate offices in St. Louis and Tennessee
The Financial Toll: $275 million in bank dividends sent to Wall Street

This episode explores the ideology that made this extraction possible, the "shareholder value myth" that transformed corporations from community institutions into financialized engines with one purpose: maximizing returns for distant investors, no matter the cost to places like your Indiana hometown.

We trace how this doctrine turned our "Crossroads of America" identity from a geographic fact into an economic mandate: be the low-cost node. Provide cheap power, cheap land, cheap labor. Let the value pass through. Collect the toll. And watch the communities along the highway slowly hollow out.

But diagnosis is only half the work. Episode 2 ends with the pivot: from extraction to ownership. From being a low-cost node in someone else's supply chain to becoming a high-value hub in our own sovereign network.

Featured Book: The Shareholder Value Myth by Lynn Stout

This episode is the economic groundwork for everything that follows. Listen to understand who's been cashing Indiana's checks, and how we can start cashing our own.

IndianaCentury.org

1,067 Conversations: Hearing Indiana's Truth | Indiana Century S1E1 Feb 10, 2026

Show notes

How do you build a new future for Indiana? You start by listening to the people who live here.

In this foundational episode, host and Navy nuclear veteran Kory Easterday shares what he learned from 1,067 recorded conversations across all 92 counties; from factory floors to family farms, from small town diners to college campuses.

You’ll hear the three universal patterns that emerged from these conversations, completely transcending partisan politics:

The Math That Doesn’t Work: Why wages have stayed flat for decades while costs for housing, energy, and groceries keep climbing
The Infrastructure of Loneliness: How crumbling roads and vanished community spaces are isolating Hoosiers from one another
The Succession Crisis: Why farmers, small business owners, and teachers fear their legacy (and Indiana’s identity) won’t be passed on

We begin with a story: a grandmother’s journey from rural Indiana to downtown Indianapolis that should already be possible with today’s technology, but isn’t. We trace how a builder’s mindset, forged in the Nuclear Navy, leads to a systems-view of our state’s decline. And we arrive at the core insight from a thousand voices: Hoosiers don’t want dependency. They want sovereignty.

This episode lays the diagnostic groundwork for the entire Indiana Century project. Before we discuss reactors, rail, or hemp, we have to agree on what’s broken. The solutions start next week.

Listen to understand why “Crossroads of America” has become a trap, and how we can transform it into our greatest platform.

IndianaCentury.org

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