On this episode, Paul Stone leaves Florida in a pastel blazer and heads up the old eastern spine of America to see what is left of the towns that built it. He jumps off the interstate onto Bloody 11 and drives through Pennsylvania’s river towns along the Susquehanna. He finds shuttered diners, dog eared mill houses, and proud homes that can no longer be maintained, sitting next to a shiny new import dealership. Paul uses that road trip to unpack how 74,000 factories were allowed to leave, how offshoring, money printing, and corporate lobbying hollowed out the industrial heartland, and how our “representatives” stopped asking us anything. He connects the Magna Carta, prohibition, Obamacare, and speed limit signs nobody obeys to show how government lost credibility and people lost autonomy. This is part one of a mini series on the problem and the coming fight over AI, setting the stage for how we take our voice back from a government that no longer represents us.
