Introducing How We Got Here -- NLW's new podcast

Hello, AI Daily Brief friends. Today, I'm launching a new podcast. It came directly out of making AI DB. Pretty frequently, there are important topics that just have way too much backstory to fit into a daily episode. This new show is the place for those stories. It's called How We Got Here, and it's the deep dive story of how today's most important trends, events, and phenomenon came to be. The first episode starts with anger over data centers, then goes back fifteen years to explain how America fell out of love with the tech industry. Episode two is about how stuff got cheap while life got expensive. So, it's not just tech. Anything in society, culture, or economics is fair game. The bigger idea behind it is that a lot of modern cynicism comes from feeling like the way things are was inevitable when, really, it was the outcome of a set of decisions. When we understand the decisions that got us here, we realize we have a lot more agency to shape what comes next. New episodes come out every Monday, run for about forty five minutes to an hour, and each one comes with a fully illustrated companion essay. So here's what would be so helpful from you. Go follow How We Got Here wherever you listen and rate and review it. The link is in the show notes, and launch week is when those things count the most. In just a second, you'll hear the first five minutes of episode one, How Tech Lost America. Back in June 2025, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro made an announcement that had become an increasingly common type of announcement at that time. Excitedly, he shared that Amazon planned to invest $20,000,000,000 into his state, representing the largest capital infrastructure in Pennsylvania Commonwealth history. That $20,000,000,000, in fact, was, of course, to build new state of the art data center campuses across the state. This was, Shapiro made clear, a thing to be excited about. Governor Shapiro said it would create thousands of good paying, stable jobs, generate new revenue for Pennsylvania's local communities, and, quote, ensure that the future of AI runs right through Pennsylvania. Fast forward just fourteen months later, and what governor Shapiro had to say about data centers had changed quite a bit. On 08/18/2026, he posted: I just signed an executive order implementing the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers because I will not allow Pennsylvanians to be bullied by greedy developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies. I'm putting these developers on notice and letting them know that we will not let them bully Pennsylvanians, disregard our constitutional right to clean air and pure water, and drive up our utility bills. So what happened to get this sort of head spinning shift in just a little more than a year? Well, what happened is that data centers, which were never particularly popular but also weren't really …