Japan Ruined America: We Can Fix It!

My wife and I just got back from two weeks in Japan for our tenth anniversary.

We're a two income household with no kids and we chose that partly

so we could afford trips like this one.

It also helped that the yen is weak right now.

So our dollars actually went further than they'll likely ever go in the future.

That weak yen is one of Japan's real problems,

and I'll get to it, but it's part of why we went now instead of,

you know, someday. So I'm not broke and I'm not rich.

I've worked since I was sixteen for what I have,

and we took this trip for our tenth wedding anniversary.

So that makes two things that will only happen once in a lifetime.

I also know one bad diagnosis could take most of everything that we've worked for,

and that goes for almost everyone I know.

Somewhere in Japan I noticed I'd stopped carrying that feeling around.

Japan felt light years ahead of us,

and the technology had very little to do with it.

Trains ran to the minute, and if you missed one,

another one came in four minutes.

The streets were clean and walkable,

and public spaces felt like they belonged to everyone.

A hospital bill there doesn't end up in bankruptcy because everyone

is covered and what you pay out of pocket is capped.

None of that is an accident. For decades,

Japan put public money into rail,

transit, and healthcare, education,

and paid for them by keeping the people at the top paying their share.

They invested in their people.

We let the market decide who gets a train,

a doctor, a decent education.

And a livable wage. Then I flew home.

And the first thing America handed me was Gate 52H at LAX,

a symbolic reminder of how little we are cared about by the corporations

who run our commercial airlines and who are starting to run our country.

Japan has real problems of its own,

but it decided a long time ago that its people were worth investing in.

We made the opposite decision in 1981.

And I want to show you what it cost.

Hey and welcome back. This is The Overlap,

and I am Joshua. If you're new here,

welcome. We talk about the United States of America,

labor, social issues, and systemic problems in our government.

With a side of revealing the odd stuff that we grew up inside

of without realizing how strange they actually are.

If you've been around a bit, you know that I usually record with my intelligent,

dad-funny co-host William. I asked William to do this as a solo episode because

I have been

processing this since the day I arrived in Japan with a lot

of thoughts and feelings, but also so that he could have plausible deniability

if I managed to start a movement or something.

So, like I said, I just got back from Japan and the first thing America handed

me was Gate 52H at LAX.

This is a cramped basement room where you have to arrive by bus from

a regular terminal, terminal four.

It takes about 15 minutes to get there while your transport driver dodges planes

landing and food trucks refilling and fuel trucks zooming about.

But when you get off the bus, you're loudly escorted into the remote terminal.

It's hot. There's like a grab and go counter with a $22 breakfast sandwich.

And you have to walk across a hot tarmac to climb stairs onto a regional jet.

It's been like that for years.

Nobody in charge seems to think it's a problem.

But in Japan, things just worked.

Trains ran to the minute. If you missed it,

there was one four minutes away.

Public spaces felt like they belonged to everyone.

I didn't feel the constant low grade pressure I feel here.

The sense that everything is a is a fight over scraps and we're

one hospital bill away from losing everything that we've scraped and saved for.

Look, Japan has its own serious problems.

That's not really a hedge or to sort of somehow soften the blow here.

There are real issues in Japan.

They have massive public debt,

an aging crisis, declining birth rates,

weakening yen, and ever increasing import costs,

labor shortages, gender inequality.

Not to mention, they're facing an increasingly assertive China,

North Korea's nuclear program,

and regional tensions. Japan is aggressively expanding its defense spending,

testing the limits of its pacifist post-World War II constitution.

And those are all very real and very present.

But Japan still managed to prove something to me.

A country can decide that its people are worth investing in.

Ours decided otherwise. And I'm tired of pretending that was an accident,

just a creeping failure that just so happened over time without us realizing it,

like microplastics in the water.

The turn came in 1981. And I'm not the only one that feels this way.

Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70% to twenty eight percent over

his two terms, and he fired more than eleven thousand striking

air traffic controllers, telling every employer in the country that breaking

a union was fair game. Private sector union membership has since fallen

to about six percent. The idea underneath all of it was simple.

Government is the problem, and the market will take care of the rest.

Public investment became something to cut,

not something to build with. And it worked because it convinced

the middle class that they were closer to rich than they were to broke.

The post-1981 sales pitch got working people to cut off their feet

to benefit their scalp. They voted against their own health care,

wages, and unions to protect fortunes they didn't have and were never going to get.

The data shows how badly we were all fooled.

Harvard economists Alberto Alesina,

Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso found in 2018 that Americans

consistently overestimate how likely a poor kid is to climb to the top.

The more they believe they'll get rich,

the less they want to tax the rich because they picture themselves paying that taxes

someday. And the real odds are brutal,

actually. Raj Chetty's research

found that a child born to the bottom fifth of American incomes

has about a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth.

That's the top 20%. In Charlotte and Atlanta,

it's under 5%. The chances of winning a lottery are only barely improved

by buying a ticket. And the American dream works about the same way.

I am not a Democrat.

So I'm not gonna let them off the hook here,

right? Clinton signed NAFTA, he gutted welfare,

he helped repeal Glass-Steagall.

Obama bailed out the banks while millions of families lost their homes.

Both parties have spent 40 years managing the decline Reagan started instead

of reversing it. This is not about blue versus red.

This is not team sports. Since 1981,

the US

has largely treated public infrastructure as like a secondary priority,

allowing critical networks to just sort of erode and crumble,

which is what happens when you have to cut the budget due to a shifting

tax burden to the wage earners.

Under Reagan, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed the

top marginal income tax rate from 70% to 50%,

followed by the Tax Reform Act of 1986,

which reduced the top statutory rate directly down to 28%,

with a 33% effective bubble bracket.

As federal tax receipts contracted relative to economic growth,

Washington systematically reallocated its discretionary capital away from public

works. According to the Congressional Budget Office,

CBO data.

Overall federal investment as a percentage of GDP plummeted from over 6%

in the late 60s down to about 2.4% by the late 2010s.

Direct federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure stagnated

at a sparse 0.6%, that is six-tenths of 1% of the

GDP over recent decades, leaving American highways,

rail systems, and water mains in a state of chronic

deferred maintenance. Across the Pacific,

Japan pursued a starkly divergent post-1981 trajectory.

They chose to maintain high top tax rates on upper earners to fund

a world-class public infrastructure state.

In 1988, when our top rate dropped to 28%,

Japan's was still 60%, and it stayed at 50%.

After that, while consistently leaning on state-directed capital

to stabilize its economy, Japan routinely directed between 4% and 6%

of its annual GDP into public infrastructure during the 80s and the 90s,

nearly double to triple the relative American allocation.

While American commuters navigated potholed interstates and legacy rail networks

starved of public tax revenue.

Japan deployed its tax capital to construct nationwide Shinkansen bullet train

networks and modern transit hubs.

The two models reveal contrasting national trade-offs,

the U.S. prioritizing top tax bracket tax relief over federal physical assets,

and Japan using sustained public revenue to establish

a globally competitive transport ecosystem.

So who pulled up the ladder? I I get accused often of blaming everything

on the boomers and everything on Gen X,

but Boomers and Gen X came of age in the most prosperous stretch

in American history, not by a little.

A lot of them bought homes when one income could pay for one.

They went to college when tuition was just a summer job away.

And they retired on pensions that generations to come will never see.

Not all of them. Plenty of boomers lost their homes in 2008

or watched their pensions get cut.

Most of Gen X got a 401k instead of a pension,

and the 2008 crash hit them right in the middle of their careers.

That's you. You got squeezed too.

Look, and nothing I'm about to say is about you.

This is about what people did once they got theirs.

As many of them built wealth, they voted to keep it.

Tax cuts, deregulation,

and less public investment for whoever came next.

I don't know if that's a is that supposed to be a whomever?

Whatever. A Financial Times analysis of US and UK elections

found both generations moved right as they hit middle age and Gen

X followed the boomers almost step for step once they reached 45.

If you got the house, the cheap tuition,

the pension, and then voted against those same things for the people behind you,

that's what pulling up the ladder means.

Most people who did it never really thought of it that way.

And I get it, like I understand when you've worked that hard for something,

protecting it, well, that just feels like common sense.

But the results show up in the numbers.

That economist Raj Chetty, I was talking about,

found that 90% of Americans born in 1940 out earned their parents.

For those born in the 80s, it's closer to half.

The promise that every generation does better than the last just stopped being true

for us. Millennials and Gen Z got the bill. At 35,

Millennials are about 15 points conservative than boomers and Gen X were

at the same age. The least conservative 35-year-olds on record.

Now I'm, you know, 42, but 35 is right in the middle of that millennial stretch

there. We just never built the kind of wealth that makes protecting it feel like

the most important thing on the ballot.

And Gen Z women see it too. In NBC's April 2025 poll,

53% of women

in Gen Z call themselves Democrats.

Gen Z men are a completely different story.

Only 35% said the same thing.

And their approval of Trump ran nearly double that of the young women.

Gallup now puts the ideological gap between young men and women at five times what

it was in 2000. Those young men aren't shifting right because they got rich,

they're broke.

And they're alone. Gallup found that 25% of American men between 15

and 34 felt lonely a lot of the previous day.

That's higher in every other developed country except Turkey.

And no other country in the OECD has a bigger gap between how lonely

its young men are and how everyone else feels.

They're angry about an economy that stopped working for them and they're right to be.

Only one side showed up and gave them an explanation.

So here's what we're gonna do.

And I'm asking you to do it too.

Stop telling them what's wrong with them.

Tell them they're right. They were promised the deal their dads got,

and somebody took it. Then get specific about what they'd get:

a wage that can buy a house, a union contract that means you can't be fired

for no reason, and healthcare that doesn't depend on keeping a job that they hate.

And go where they already are:

the job site, the trade school,

the gym, the union hall.

Instead of waiting for them to come and find us.

If you're one of those guys and you're listening to this,

I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong to be angry.

You should be pissed. I just want you to be angry at the people

who actually took the money from you,

the ones at the top who got richer the whole time that you got squeezed.

And every time someone says tax the rich,

somebody in the middle hears, they're coming for my stuff.

I get it. For 40 years, every promise to tax the top

ended with the middle holding the bill.

I've worked since I was 16 for what I have,

and nobody's going to take that from me.

So let's look at who would actually pay.

Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax started at $50 million.

That's about 75,000 households out of 130 million households in the United States.

We have about 340 million people.

It makes sense, that's around 130 million households.

That's less than a tenth of 1% of this country.

If you check your bank balance before you buy groceries,

that's not you. If you own your house,

max out your 401k and drive a paid-off truck,

still is not you. You would still pay nothing new,

not one dime. Now look at what you're already paying.

Your family health plan costs about $27,000 a year.

Your share is about $7,000 of that.

And that's before the deductible even starts.

A new car costs you about twelve thousand nine hundred dollars a year to own.

And in most of this country, you don't get to say no.

The average student borrower owes almost $40,000,

and that number has never been higher.

Those are taxes. They're just not paid to the government.

You pay them to insurance companies,

you pay them to banks, to toll authorities.

And nobody ever asks you to vote on how much they'd be taxing you.

Japan spends about a third as much per person on healthcare as we do.

It covers every single person.

And they live about five years longer than we do.

Nobody in Japan loses their house over a cancer diagnosis.

We pay three times as much to die younger and go broke on the way out.

And somebody is getting rich off of that difference.

A good train doesn't take anything from the guy who drives,

right? Toko, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka,

and Hakone were full of people driving cars.

They just weren't forced to. Investing in each other isn't like this zero-sum game.

Anyone who tells you it has, like,

has a, I guess, a really big bank account they'd rather you didn't look at.

So, what that looks like up close,

of course, here in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority announced ACCESS

Oklahoma in 2022. That's a $5 billion plan for new toll roads through Norman

and Cleveland County. Now they put these right past people's homes

and right up against Lake Thunderbird.

The agenda item that set it in motion called it,

quote, certain turnpike projects and quote,

SP65.

Nearly two hundred residents sued under the Open Meetings Act because nobody could

tell from those agendas what was coming.

Then this year, lawmakers named a planned connector after Toby Keith,

a man who literally opposed the project and joined a lawsuit against it.

I used to be a Toby Keith fan.

Don't really care much for his opinions or politics,

but he did oppose the turnpike,

and they named it after him anyway.

There's lots of rumors. They say his kids made the decision,

whatever. I think there's some money that exchanged hands.

I don't really know the details of it all.

But that's not infrastructure for people.

It's infrastructure done to people by an authority that answers mostly

to bondholders, not to the people who actually live here.

Compare what we could build. Spain and Italy.

Keep their rail lines in public hands,

public ownership, and let multiple companies compete to run trains on them.

When Spain opened Madrid to Barcelona to competitors in 2021,

the actual fares of riding those trains fell.

And within a year, more people were riding them before the pandemic.

Tracks owned by the people, trains run for comfort and price.

We know how to do this.

We choose toll roads and bonds instead,

selling our natural resources to the highest bidders.

Now I've heard the opposition,

they say, America is just too big for this.

Japan is a small country. They're wrong.

Japan is a small nation. I I'm not gonna,

you know, pretend that it's not.

It's it's much smaller than the United States,

but nobody rides a train from Maine to California,

right? High speed rail works one section,

one one metro at a time.

And we have plenty that match Japan's.

Tokyo to Osaka is about 320 miles.

Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago to St.

Louis, Dallas to Houston are all in that range or shorter.

Boston to Washington holds about as many people as Japan's busiest rail corridor.

Then China comes in and completely lambastes the argument because it's about

the size of the US.

And they have built more than 45,000 kilometers.

That's 28,000 miles in freedom units,

which is about 3,800 miles or so longer than the equator

of the earth of high-speed rail in roughly 15 years.

That means China has built more than the rest of the world combined.

And size really has nothing to do with healthcare or schools.

Canada and Australia are enormous and they're incredibly sparsely populated,

and both guarantee healthcare to everyone.

"We're too big" was never a reason.

It was just an excuse for deciding not to.

And underneath all of it is the fear most of us carry that one bad diagnosis

or a few unemployed months means not affording food or care.

That is not a personal failing,

it's a policy outcome.

So what we have to do is we have to fix the foundation of this first.

We have to put the partisan fights second.

Abortion, immigration, and the culture war matter to a lot of people,

me included. And those arguments are not going away and they shouldn't.

But if we don't fix the foundation,

there won't be a country left to argue about it in.

And I know what some of you will say trans rights matter,

abortion rights matter, immigrant rights matter,

and you can't ask people to wait.

You are right that they matter.

And I'm not asking anyone to wait.

I'm asking you to look at what happens to those rights when a country falls apart.

In the 1920s, Berlin had one of the most open queer communities in the world,

including Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science,

which performed one of the first known gender-affirming surgeries anywhere.

But when the Weimar Republic

collapsed, the Nazis made that institute one of their first targets.

They raided it in May of 1933 and burned its library in the streets.

Fixing wages, healthcare,

And who gets a seat at the table is how we keep a country stable enough that

nobody's rights can be voted, legislated,

or burned away. I'm fighting for the ground every one of these fights stands on.

I want to call this what it is.

It's investment in our future.

Public rail, public health care,

and public schools are things a country owns together,

the same way it owns its roads,

its military.

Calling that socialism or communism is a scare tactic.

Selling off what we own is what should be the radical idea.

But we've been selling it. In 2008,

Chicago leased its parking meters to private investors for

75 years for 1.15 billion dollars.

The city's own inspector general found it had been undervalued by about a billion.

And the investors earned their money back around 2020 with more than

60 years left to still collect. In 2006,

Indiana leased its toll road for 75 years.

The operator went bankrupt eight years later.

Here in Oklahoma, the Turnpike Authority runs public roads like a bonding business.

Each deal is a piece of America handed to someone who answers

to shareholders instead of to constituents.

This message works across party lines.

Bernie Sanders proved it in 2016,

winning working class voters who went on to back Donald Trump.

People want wages, health care,

and a country that works, whatever team they think they're on.

If the complaint is bipartisan,

then why can't the solution be?

Now look, another thing that's probably hard to picture in the same conversation

is trains and hospitals, but AI is becoming the next piece of infrastructure that

we all have to live with. And it's the next thing that they're selling off,

even though we built it. Every AI model was trained on decades of our writing,

our research, and our conversations.

A lot of the science behind it was actually done with public money.

The internet came out of DARPA.

And a lot of the foundational research

ran on NSF and university grants.

The public supplied the raw material and paid for the groundwork.

A handful of companies are getting insane valuations and making money

off of the bets on this right now.

When this all started, I really hoped that AI would help to govern

us with reason and fairness.

But AI is really only as fair as whoever owns it.

And right now that's companies whose job is to extract more from us.

That's what capitalism is, whether or not you're a fan of it.

It's the act of inserting layers of extraction between the product and the profit.

That's the parking meter deal on a scale we've never seen.

And they're doing it with data centers too.

We'll see just enough of those profits to talk us into selling our land,

our water, and their power.

While they make billions of dollars in profit.

But who do you think that gets extracted from?

Us. Japan has a habit that explains a lot of what I saw.

For about 150 years, it has studied other countries on purpose and then just copied

what worked. If you're a middle child,

I'm sure you understand exactly what this looks like.

In 1871, it sent a delegation of government leaders through the US.

And Europe for almost two years just to take notes.

Its schools were modeled on France and the US.

Its first railways were built with British engineers.

And its first health insurance law was modeled on Germany's.

Japan didn't invent most of what I know we could have here if we really tried.

It watched what worked in other places,

picked the best of it, and then used our tax dollars or their tax dollars

to build it.

Now, AI is a little bit too new for that.

Nobody has a 50 year track record to study yet.

And right now, even Japan is mostly handing public money to companies like SoftBank.

But a few countries are already treating AI the way Japan treated trains,

as something the public pays for,

so the public should own it. Switzerland's public universities released

Apertus, which is Latin for open.

In 2025, a fully open model built with public money that anyone can use.

Spain, the same country that opened its high-speed rail to competition,

released ALIA, a government-funded open model built at

its national supercomputing center.

The Netherlands is building GPT-NL through a public research institute trained only

on data it has the rights to use.

Singapore's government funds SEA-LION,

an open model for Southeast Asian languages.

India's national AI mission rents subsidized computing power to

its own researchers and startups,

so the hardware isn't only available to whoever can afford it.

Even the U.S. started a National AI Research Resource pilot in 2024

to give researchers public computing power.

And Alaska already shows how shared wealth can work.

Its oil fund sends every resident a check every year,

an AI dividend, a

public stake in the profits from our own collective work is the same idea.

None of these countries have it figured out,

but they've made the same decision Japan made about trains.

If the public pays for it, the public should own a piece of it.

We should own what we have built.

And that leads me to who gets to govern.

So I served on a local committee for about six months.

It met on Tuesdays at 1 p.m.

I didn't know that until after I joined.

So who exactly is supposed to make that with a job?

Nobody bans working people from local government.

There, you won't find it on a law anywhere.

And if they did, I'm sure it would be struck down immediately.

They just schedule it while we're at work.

And pay almost nothing to serve.

I live in Norman, Oklahoma. I I know I've never,

I don't think I've really talked about that,

but some of my listeners come from Norman.

Norman Norman City Council pays their city council members $100 per month.

My city council member spends 30 to 40 hours a week

on city business alone, which means they are currently earning somewhere between

58 cents and 77 cents per hour.

Oklahoma state legislators make about $47,500 a year.

So let's be honest, the seats go to retirees,

business owners, and people who, whose employers will just kind of cover for them.

And then everyone wonders why government doesn't understand the rest of us.

Japan ran this experiment for us,

actually. A city council member there earns about 400,000 yen a month,

which is about $2,500 or more,

depending on the exchange rate.

That's more than 20 times what Norman pays.

And really, it only works out to about $15 an hour.

But it's treated like a job because it is one.

But in Japan's small towns and villages,

they have what's called an assembly.

The assembly pay averages about half that,

right? And those assemblies look just like ours,

mostly older men with an average age in their 60s.

In 2019, eight of them couldn't find enough candidates to fill their seats.

One village looked at replacing its entire assembly because nobody could afford

to serve. Same country, same culture,

opposite results. The only thing that changed was whether the job paid enough

to live on. I would run for office if I could.

I can't afford to, and neither can most people who'd fight the hardest

for working families. That's the ladder getting pulled up again.

One meeting at a time. The fixes are cheap,

they don't really cost much.

Evening meetings, a remote option,

stipends that cover real time,

and child care during sessions.

None of it needs a constitutional amendment.

It needs a council willing to vote for it.

Or in the case of Norman, the citizens have to vote for it.

In 2022, Norman voted on raising council pay from twelve hundred dollars

a year to fifty four hundred dollars a year.

Still, that's about two dollars and sixty cents an hour.

Fifty-seven percent of Norman voters said no to a raise that would have cost

us each thirty-two cents a year.

For thirty-two cents, a teacher,

a nurse, or a guy working the line at a plant could afford to sit on city council.

But when the job pays nothing,

the only people who can take it are people who don't need the money.

Japan's villages learn the same lesson.

We keep voting to make sure people like us can't afford

to represent us. This is a warning.

I don't want a revolution. That means somebody would get hurt.

I don't want anyone hurt. But honestly,

I'm getting really afraid of what happens if nothing changes.

And the people who study this are afraid too.

Political scientist Barbara Walter,

no S, not related, in a book called How Civil Wars Start,

found that instability rises

when large groups of people feel locked out of power with no peaceful

way to change their lives. I just described that.

It's a city council seat that pays 58 cents an hour,

meeting at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday,

and a toll road hidden behind SP65.

None of that feels like the start of something dangerous.

It feels like Tuesday. That's just how it starts.

Peter Turchin spent decades studying why societies come apart.

He links unrest to two trends running at once.

Wages falling for ordinary workers and wealth piling up at the top.

In 2010, he predicted the U.S.

would hit serious turmoil in the 2020s.

We're in the middle of the 2020s now,

and I don't think anyone listening would call these calm years.

History is blunt about where that leads.

Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's

The Great Leveler, argues that across thousands of years,

big drops in inequality came almost entirely from four major shocks:

Black Swan events, mass war,

violent revolution, state collapse,

and plague. The Black Death killed a third of Europe and left survivors with higher

wages. That's the record. And it kind of sucks.

I don't want any of those. I don't want anyone hurt.

So the question is whether there's another way to move this fast.

There is evidence that there is.

Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied every major resistance

campaign from 1900 to 2006 and found that nonviolent movements

succeed about twice as often as violent ones.

Poland's Solidarity, the Philippines in 1986,

the Velvet Revolution.

None of them needed a guillotine.

They needed millions of people just refusing to accept the status quo.

Chenoweth found that almost no campaign in her data failed once

it drew active participation from 3.5% of the population.

Here, that's about 12 million Americans.

The 2017 Women's March drew several million in a single day.

So here's what we demand. Voting matters.

And I'll come back to that. But another state,

another slate, another docket of Democratic senators will

not fix this fast enough for people who can't afford insulin or groceries right now.

And the establishment in both parties has had 40 years to notice.

Pressure has to come from

outside the ballot box as well.

Here's what the pressure should demand:

labor that can actually stop the economy.

Rebuilt union by union.

Organizing outside of the two-party system so progressives stop being

a bloc that Democrats can take for granted.

Local government

working people can actually participate in evening meetings,

real pay, a seat for everyone,

and specific demands, public rail,

guaranteed health care, public ownership of what we built,

paid for by taxing the wealth that's piled up since 1981.

If you want to see this laid out as a full platform,

you can listen to Max's episodes of UNFTR.

He has one called The 5 Non- Negotiables,

5NN: This Is How We Win. It lays out five non-negotiables.

The first three are meant to kind of earn people's trust back.

And the last two are meant to protect our democracy and our planet.

Those are Housing First, treats shelter as a right.

You give people a stable home first,

then help with everything else because nobody gets their lives together while

sleeping in a car.

A civilian labor corps is a public jobs guarantee for work that matters

to a community, but won't turn a profit.

So the private sector never does it.

Max pitches it as sort of a way to brace for AI wiping out jobs.

And I would point it straight at 40 years of deferred maintenance,

water, rail, bridges. Medicare for All is healthcare as a human right,

one public plan.

with no premiums, no deductibles,

and no bankruptcy after a diagnosis.

Election integrity, which means getting the money out of politics.

As long as a politician's career depends on the people with the most to spend,

they will answer to them first.

Always.

Climate action is what Max calls Social Security for the planet.

A shared safety net we pay now,

so the next generation inherits something that we can live in and that they

can live in in the future. I don't line up with them on everything,

but I think they get the order right.

They start with the things that change daily life,

then protect the democracy that makes everything else possible.

Go find that episode. I'll try to link it in the show notes here.

You know, I didn't I didn't expect this episode to go in so many directions,

but I came home with a lot to say.

In Japan, I didn't keep my head on a swivel.

I relaxed, I let my guard down,

I stopped carrying around the fear that one bad diagnosis could take everything.

For two weeks, I got to see what citizenship could feel like.

In 1871, Japan sent its leaders around the world for two years to take notes

on what worked.

I went for two weeks, and this episode is my notes.

Some of what Japan does, we probably can't copy.

Our culture is different. And hey,

maybe that's another episode. But a lot of it we can.

Trains that come every four minutes,

streets you can walk, health care that doesn't end in bankruptcy,

and a government that treats its people like an investment instead

of a revenue stream. None of that is magic.

But someone somewhere chose this for us.

And for 40 years we've made the other choice.

We sold the parking meters, we hid the toll roads behind SP65.

We scheduled democracy for Tuesdays at 1 p.m.

and then voted down 32 cents to fix it.

Now we're about to hand AI built from our work and paid for with our

tax dollars to the same kind of people who bought the meters.

Gate 52H has been a hot basement for years because nobody

Who decides what it looks like ever has to sit in it.

The same goes for the people who decide what a council seat pays,

where a toll road goes, and who owns AI.

That's the whole episode in one room.

And everyone stuck in that room is on the same side,

whether they know it or not. The young guy who's broke,

angry, and listening to the only people who offered him an explanation

is not my enemy. He's on the bottom with the rest of us.

And rent.

And wages are his top issues. The people fighting for trans rights,

abortion rights, and immigrants' rights are not asking for too much.

Those rights only last in a country stable enough to keep them.

And Berlin in 1933 showed what happens when it isn't.

And nobody in the middle has to give anything up for this.

The money is at the top and it's been piling there since 1981.

And nothing has ever made it trickle down.

So here's where we are. We fix it now through investment and reform while

we still can, if we still can,

or we just keep selling it off piece by piece and find out what Walter

and Turchin already warned us about.

I know which future I want to live in.

I'm voting in the midterms like the country depends on it because it does.

But the day after the election,

that's when work starts. Every Democrat who flips a seat,

every candidate who wins owes us.

We should call their offices, pack their town halls,

and show up at every meeting they'd rather that we skipped peacefully,

relentlessly, and with the ferocity of people who know exactly what's at stake.

This ship is sinking. We've got to grab a bucket.

I'll see you at the next meeting.

Be kind to each other.

Because we need each other more than you realize.

Don't forget to check out our website at fof.foundation,

just fof.foundation.com. You can send us an email at

the overlap at fof.foundation.

Or you can hit us up on our socials,

our Bluesky, our Mastodon, or check us out on your latest podcast app.

Give us a review. Five stars if you will.

We'll see you next time. Bye.