The Indiana Century Podcast

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

Kory Easterday Season 1 Episode 1

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 29:19

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:

  1. The Math That Doesn’t Work: Why wages have stayed flat for decades while costs for housing, energy, and groceries keep climbing
  2. The Infrastructure of Loneliness: How crumbling roads and vanished community spaces are isolating Hoosiers from one another
  3. 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