The Indiana Century Podcast

We've spent eleven episodes building something. Reactors that pay counties ten million dollars a year. Rail lines that turn a region into a neighborhood. Fiber that connects every Hoosier. A bank that keeps our money here. A corps that trains people who were written off to become builders.Once you build something valuable, someone will try to take it. Not with violence. With legislation. With lobbyists. With a quiet change to the law when no one's paying attention.This episode is about defense. Institutional defense. The systems we put in place to make sure what we build stays built. Constitutional locks. Revolving door bans. Transparency portals. Citizen enforcement. The things that keep the foxes out of the henhouse.We walk through the four constitutional amendments. Amendment 1 (Infrastructure Corridors) protects property owners while making project development predictable. Amendment 2 (Public Asset Lock) requires 60% voter approval to sell any state owned infrastructure asset. Amendment 3 (Revenue Lock) requires 60% voter approval to change revenue allocations from truck tolls, cannabis, and Host Community Fees. Amendment 4 (Public Banking Authorization) puts the Bank of Indiana in the constitution where a simple majority can't undo it.Each amendment requires a long, difficult process to pass. Two differently constituted General Assemblies must approve the same language. Then voters decide. That's the point. These locks are meant to be hard to remove.We also cover the revolving door ban. Indiana already has a one year ban for state officers and, as of 2025, a three year ban for legislators. The Indiana Century Project proposes a five year ban for everyone working on the project, with citizen enforcement and real penalties.The transparency portal would be a public website. Every meeting, every document, every revenue stream. Searchable. Real time. Sunlight as disinfectant.Citizen standing is written into the amendments. Any Hoosier can sue to enforce them. You don't need to prove you were personally harmed. If you win, the state pays your legal fees.Indiana has done this before. The property tax caps amendment passed in 2008-2010 with over 70 percent voter approval. The 1851 constitution added a debt prohibition that has protected taxpayers for 175 years. We know how to build locks. We just need to build them again.Featured book: How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Democracies don't fail in a day. They fail slowly, through a thousand small erosions. The same is true of public assets.IndianaCentury.org

Special: In today's episode, I discuss the animals my family adopted and what they mean to us!Animal welfare isn't separate from human welfare. It's the same thing.Stray dogs spread rabies. Feral cats spread disease. Overcrowded shelters become breeding grounds for infection. When we protect animals, we protect people too. This is called One Health, and it's the foundation for everything in this episode.In Episode 11, we talk about the Pet Product Stewardship Fee. One percent on non-essential pet items. The fancy toys, the boutique treats, the stuff you don't really need but buy anyway. That one percent funds low-cost spay and neuter, veterinary care for families who can't afford it, and the Animal Stewardship Corps.We cover real Indiana examples. In February 2026, an Indianapolis shelter was at 104% capacity. The director said they were "at a breaking point." In 2025, Indiana lost 8.6 million birds to avian flu. That's an agricultural disaster and a public health warning. And across the state, vet deserts leave communities with no access to spay and neuter services.The Animal Stewardship Corps is part of the ICC's Resilience Corps track. Corps members provide mobile clinics, shelter support, and emergency response. They go into vet deserts, bringing care to parking lots and fairgrounds. They help families who can't afford veterinary care. They reduce stray populations before they become a crisis.Featured book: The Bond by Wayne Pacelle. The deep, ancient connection between people and animals. And the responsibility that comes with it.This episode also includes personal stories about the rescued cats and dogs who inspired this work.IndianaCentury.org

There's a nuclear plant in Illinois, just across the state line from Indiana. It's been running for decades. Every year, it generates billions of dollars in value. Clean power. Good jobs. Tax revenue. None of that money comes to Indiana. The jobs are in Illinois. The tax revenue stays in Illinois. The economic activity happens across the river.Indiana has power plants too. Coal plants, mostly. Some are closing. Some have closed. When they close, the jobs leave. The tax revenue leaves. The towns that grew up around them are left with empty buildings and a tax base that can't support the schools they built. The company walks away. The community is stuck with the cleanup, the empty buildings, the lost revenue.That's the extractive model. The company builds. The company operates. The company takes the profit. The community gets the plant during its life and the liability after it's gone.The Host Community Fee flips that.Four to five dollars per megawatt hour. Every reactor pays it directly to the county where it sits. For a typical small modular reactor, that's ten to twelve million dollars a year. Every year. For forty years. For eighty years.Forty percent for property tax relief. Thirty percent for schools. Twenty percent for rural health clinics. Ten percent for animal welfare.That's what sovereignty looks like at the county level. Not an abstraction. A check.We also talk about the Trump administration forcing Indiana to keep old coal plants open. And we break down how a reactor actually makes money: building it, selling the power to manufacturers, steel mills, college campuses, and hospitals, then sharing the revenue with host counties.The fee is locked by constitutional amendment. Amendment 3, the Revenue Lock. Sixty percent voter approval required to change the allocation. That money belongs to the county. Permanently.Featured book: The Fight for the Four Freedoms by Harvey J. Kaye. FDR's vision of freedom from want and freedom from fear. The Host Community Fee is how we keep that promise in Indiana.IndianaCentury.org

We're already paying. Five billion dollars leaves Indiana every year. Every time you flip a light switch, fill your tank, buy groceries, see a doctor, deposit a paycheck. The money leaves. It doesn't come back.The question isn't "Can we afford to build the Indiana Century Project?" The question is "Can we afford to keep watching our money leave Indiana?"This episode is about the funding flywheel. The system that captures value that's already ours and puts it to work for us. Not higher taxes. Not more debt. Capturing value that's already leaving.The revenue streams:Truck tolls on out-of-state trucks generate $150-200 million a year from non-Hoosiers. Cannabis revenue captures $300-400 million a year that's currently going to Illinois and Michigan. Host Community Fees from reactors send $10-12 million per year directly to host counties. Federal grants bring our tax dollars back from Washington.The engine: The Bank of Indiana.A state owned bank, like North Dakota has had for over a century. State deposits go into our own bank. Two billion dollars to start. Then local governments can deposit their money. Then, eventually, you can deposit yours. That money stays in Indiana. It doesn't fund hedge funds in New York. It gets lent at 3-4% to Hoosier small businesses, farmers, homebuyers, and towns building infrastructure.The Bank of Indiana doesn't compete with local community banks. It partners with them. Provides liquidity. Shares risk. Offers services at cost. That's the model. Not competing. Completing.The accumulator: The Indiana Future Fund.A sovereign wealth fund. Target: $100 billion by 2050. At 5% earnings, that's $5 billion a year. Every year. Forever.What does $5 billion a year buy? Permanent property tax relief. The Hoosier Birth Grant: $5,000 for every child born in Indiana, invested until age 18, growing to $14,000-17,000. Infrastructure maintenance. Healthcare for people who can't afford it.Objections:The Chirinko study (April 2025) says the Bank of North Dakota's success is due to the fracking boom, tax exemption, and risk shifting. We design around that. The Bank of Indiana pays taxes. It gets FDIC insurance. We don't rely on a boom. We create our own.Featured book: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. Meeting needs. Circulating value. Not endless growth, but thriving communities.This is how we stop being extracted from and start investing in ourselves.IndianaCentury.org

Who builds America? The roads, the bridges, the power plants, the rail lines. Who pours the concrete and turns the wrenches? Who shows up every day and does the work that makes everything else possible?Right now, the answer is complicated. We rely on private contractors, out-of-state crews, a patchwork of trades that varies by region and project. The average age of a skilled trades worker in Indiana is pushing fifty. Major projects get delayed because there aren't enough workers. Small towns can't find electricians or plumbers or heavy equipment operators. The people who know how to build things are retiring, and there's no one behind them.The Indiana Century Corps is our proposed answer. A civilian builder-operator corps. Not the National Guard. Not the military. A sovereign workforce, owned and operated by the people of Indiana, trained to build and maintain everything we've been talking about.The ICC has four branches. The Energy Corps, based at Purdue, trains reactor operators, fuel handlers, grid operators. The Connectivity Corps, based at Grissom with a dedicated High-Speed Rail Institute, trains rail operators, track crews, fiber splicers. The Agriculture Corps, based at Vincennes and regional hubs, trains hemp processors, co-op managers, carbon measurement technicians. The Resilience Corps, based at Regional Health Hubs, trains community health workers, Clinic-in-a-Van operators, Animal Corps members.Every member goes through twelve weeks of boot camp at Grissom. Not military, but disciplined. Safety, teamwork, the builder's mindset. Then eighteen to twenty-four months of A-school. Then assignment to a crew. Then advancement: crew member to journeyman to master to leadership.Where do the people come from? Young people who need a path. Veterans who need a mission. Displaced workers who need new skills. Rural kids who want to stay home. And the inmate pipeline: non-violent offenders released under cannabis legalization become the first ICC class. They go to Atterbury, live in one set of barracks, repair and update the next set. They learn construction skills from union journeymen. Then they move to Grissom and build the ICC boot camp itself. The next class moves into Atterbury. The cycle continues. People who were written off become builders.Featured book: A History of America in 10 Strikes by Erik Loomis. A labor history that grounds the ICC in the long struggle for worker dignity. The sanitation workers in Memphis carried signs that said "I Am a Man." That's what the ICC is about. Not just jobs. Dignity. Not just skills. Purpose.IndianaCentury.org

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

The interstate highway system was a marvel. It moved goods faster than ever. It connected cities. It made America an economic powerhouse.It also bypassed every small town it touched.Main streets emptied. Downtowns hollowed out. The places where people used to run into each other couldn't compete with exit ramps. We optimized for moving things. We forgot about connecting people.This episode is about building something different. High speed rail, but not as transportation. As infrastructure. As the spine that holds the body together.The Innovation Triangle connects Indianapolis, Lafayette, and Kokomo in thirty minutes or less. Not someday. Now. Electric trains powered by our own SMRs. Stations that become new Main Streets. Fiber running alongside, connecting every Hoosier. Health hubs co located where the trains stop.We talk about how it gets built. The technology. The route. The funding. The constitutional amendment that protects property owners while making it possible. And why this isn't about getting from one place to another faster. It's about turning a region into a neighborhood.Featured book: The Master Switch by Tim Wu. About who holds the switch, and how we can make sure no one ever does.IndianaCentury.org

The nuclear power your parents feared and the nuclear power we're building are related in name only.In Episode 5 of The Indiana Century Podcast, host Kory Easterday kicks off the deep dive on Pillar 1: Energy Sovereignty. This is an honest look at why nuclear, why now, and why Indiana is perfectly positioned to lead.You'll learn:🔥 The fire we're all standing in – Why getting off fossil fuels isn't optional, and why renewables alone can't do the job at our current consumption levels.📊 The economics nobody talks about – Drawing on the groundbreaking "Chasing Cheap Nuclear" research by Jessica Lovering and Jameson McBride, we break down the trade-off between scaling and learning. Why the first SMR will be expensive. Why the 50th will be cheaper than coal. And why South Korea is the model we need to copy.☢️ The waste opportunity – The $15 billion Yucca Mountain failure. 95,000 tons of stranded spent fuel. $62 billion in federal liability. And how Indiana can turn America's mistake into our revenue stream.⚠️ The risks, honestly addressed – What radiation actually is. What really happened at Chernobyl. Why meltdowns can't happen in modern SMR designs. And a preview of deeper dives to come.✏️ Nuclear 101 (whiteboard edition) – Atom splits, heats water, makes steam, spins turbine, makes electricity. That's it. That's the whole thing.Featured Research: "Chasing Cheap Nuclear" by Jessica Lovering & Jameson McBride (2020)Featured Book: Atomic Awakening by James MahaffeyIf you've ever wondered whether nuclear can be safe, affordable, and ours, this episode is for you.Sovereignty isn't given. It's built.IndianaCentury.org

We've been told there are two paths for a place like Indiana.The first: beg corporations to build here with tax breaks and subsidies. Cut the ribbon. Celebrate the jobs. Then watch, a decade later, as they leave for a better deal somewhere else.The second: accept decline. Watch the young people leave. Watch the Main Streets empty. Tell ourselves this is just how it is.Both paths lead to the same place: extraction. Both assume our future is something that happens to us, not something we build for ourselves.In Episode 4 of The Indiana Century Podcast, host Kory Easterday names the third path: sovereignty.This episode lays the philosophical foundation for everything that follows. You'll learn what sovereignty actually means and how we use it as a practical framework for building. We break it down into four elements: ownership, capacity, infrastructure, and will.And then we introduce the Five Pillars of the Indiana Century Project:Energy Sovereignty: A public utility authority building Small Modular Reactors across the state. Power owned by Hoosiers. Profits that stay here, funding schools and property tax relief through the Host Community Fee. The ultimate goal: zero spent nuclear fuel and 100% renewable energy.Connectivity Revolution: High-speed rail connecting Indianapolis, Lafayette, and Kokomo in 30 minutes; with eventual connections to other hubs. State-owned fiber running alongside the tracks. New Main Streets for towns that lost theirs.Agricultural Renaissance: Farmer-owned processing co-ops. The Indiana Premium brand. The Hoosier Heritage Land Trust. The Indiana Carbon Bank. And the Indiana Grain Reserve, giving farmers the power to wait for a fair price.Health & Compassion: A Hospital Receivership Authority that takes over failing hospitals instead of letting them rot. Rural health hubs. A Clinic-in-a-Van fleet blanketing all 92 counties. The Animal Stewardship Corps.The Funding Flywheel: Truck tolls. Cannabis revenue. Host Community Fees. The Bank of Indiana: a state-owned bank partnering with local lenders. The Indiana Future Fund: a sovereign wealth fund targeting $100 billion by 2050. Constitutional locks protecting it all.Featured Book: Thomas Paine and the Promise of America by Harvey J. KayeThis isn't left vs. right. It's forward vs. stuck.Sovereignty isn't given. It's built.IndianaCentury.org

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

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 OhioThe Harvest Toll: $2.8 billion in agricultural value-add we never capture because we ship our grain out as raw feedstockThe Health Toll: $1.1 billion in hospital and insurance profits funding corporate offices in St. Louis and TennesseeThe Financial Toll: $275 million in bank dividends sent to Wall StreetThis 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 StoutThis 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

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 climbingThe Infrastructure of Loneliness: How crumbling roads and vanished community spaces are isolating Hoosiers from one anotherThe Succession Crisis: Why farmers, small business owners, and teachers fear their legacy (and Indiana’s identity) won’t be passed onWe 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