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

NLW is launching a new podcast called How We Got Here, born from a recurring problem on The AI Daily Brief: some topics have too much backstory to fit into a daily episode. The new show is designed for those stories—deep dives into how today's most important trends, events, and phenomena actually came to be. The first episode, "How Tech Lost America," begins with a striking reversal: in June 2025, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro celebrated Amazon's $20 billion investment in data centers as "the largest capital infrastructure in Pennsylvania Commonwealth history," promising jobs and declaring that "the future of AI runs right through Pennsylvania." Just 14 months later, Shapiro signed an executive order imposing "the strictest standards in the nation for AI data centers," vowing not to let Pennsylvanians be "bullied by greedy developers and bulldozed by the lawyers working for these big tech companies." What happened in between is the story of how America fell out of love with the tech industry—and how that shift predates and now threatens the AI boom.

The Data Center Backlash in Numbers