1 00:00:00,500 --> 00:00:05,677 My wife and I just got back from two weeks in Japan for our tenth anniversary. 2 00:00:05,677 --> 00:00:10,054 We're a two income household with no kids and we chose that partly 3 00:00:10,054 --> 00:00:11,536 so we could afford trips like this one. 4 00:00:12,036 --> 00:00:14,017 It also helped that the yen is weak right now. 5 00:00:14,017 --> 00:00:17,770 So our dollars actually went further than they'll likely ever go in the future. 6 00:00:17,770 --> 00:00:21,773 That weak yen is one of Japan's real problems, 7 00:00:21,773 --> 00:00:26,487 and I'll get to it, but it's part of why we went now instead of, 8 00:00:26,487 --> 00:00:30,390 you know, someday. So I'm not broke and I'm not rich. 9 00:00:30,390 --> 00:00:32,521 I've worked since I was sixteen for what I have, 10 00:00:32,521 --> 00:00:35,033 and we took this trip for our tenth wedding anniversary. 11 00:00:35,033 --> 00:00:38,796 So that makes two things that will only happen once in a lifetime. 12 00:00:39,296 --> 00:00:43,667 I also know one bad diagnosis could take most of everything that we've worked for, 13 00:00:43,667 --> 00:00:45,748 and that goes for almost everyone I know. 14 00:00:45,748 --> 00:00:50,349 Somewhere in Japan I noticed I'd stopped carrying that feeling around. 15 00:00:50,349 --> 00:00:52,870 Japan felt light years ahead of us, 16 00:00:52,870 --> 00:00:55,631 and the technology had very little to do with it. 17 00:00:55,631 --> 00:00:59,152 Trains ran to the minute, and if you missed one, 18 00:00:59,152 --> 00:01:00,612 another one came in four minutes. 19 00:01:00,612 --> 00:01:03,593 The streets were clean and walkable, 20 00:01:03,593 --> 00:01:07,004 and public spaces felt like they belonged to everyone. 21 00:01:07,504 --> 00:01:12,087 A hospital bill there doesn't end up in bankruptcy because everyone 22 00:01:12,087 --> 00:01:14,838 is covered and what you pay out of pocket is capped. 23 00:01:14,838 --> 00:01:18,220 None of that is an accident. For decades, 24 00:01:18,220 --> 00:01:20,581 Japan put public money into rail, 25 00:01:20,581 --> 00:01:23,692 transit, and healthcare, education, 26 00:01:23,692 --> 00:01:29,026 and paid for them by keeping the people at the top paying their share. 27 00:01:29,026 --> 00:01:30,827 They invested in their people. 28 00:01:30,827 --> 00:01:34,069 We let the market decide who gets a train, 29 00:01:34,069 --> 00:01:36,190 a doctor, a decent education. 30 00:01:36,668 --> 00:01:39,119 And a livable wage. Then I flew home. 31 00:01:39,119 --> 00:01:44,440 And the first thing America handed me was Gate 52H at LAX, 32 00:01:44,440 --> 00:01:49,402 a symbolic reminder of how little we are cared about by the corporations 33 00:01:49,642 --> 00:01:53,843 who run our commercial airlines and who are starting to run our country. 34 00:01:53,843 --> 00:01:56,464 Japan has real problems of its own, 35 00:01:56,464 --> 00:02:01,045 but it decided a long time ago that its people were worth investing in. 36 00:02:01,045 --> 00:02:04,486 We made the opposite decision in 1981. 37 00:02:05,266 --> 00:02:06,791 And I want to show you what it cost. 38 00:02:29,888 --> 00:02:31,569 Hey and welcome back. This is The Overlap, 39 00:02:31,569 --> 00:02:33,821 and I am Joshua. If you're new here, 40 00:02:33,821 --> 00:02:36,594 welcome. We talk about the United States of America, 41 00:02:36,594 --> 00:02:40,167 labor, social issues, and systemic problems in our government. 42 00:02:40,167 --> 00:02:44,731 With a side of revealing the odd stuff that we grew up inside 43 00:02:44,731 --> 00:02:47,173 of without realizing how strange they actually are. 44 00:02:47,173 --> 00:02:51,196 If you've been around a bit, you know that I usually record with my intelligent, 45 00:02:51,196 --> 00:02:56,820 dad-funny co-host William. I asked William to do this as a solo episode because 46 00:02:56,820 --> 00:02:57,820 I have been 47 00:02:57,677 --> 00:03:01,591 processing this since the day I arrived in Japan with a lot 48 00:03:01,591 --> 00:03:05,385 of thoughts and feelings, but also so that he could have plausible deniability 49 00:03:05,385 --> 00:03:07,887 if I managed to start a movement or something. 50 00:03:07,887 --> 00:03:12,051 So, like I said, I just got back from Japan and the first thing America handed 51 00:03:12,051 --> 00:03:14,303 me was Gate 52H at LAX. 52 00:03:14,303 --> 00:03:19,758 This is a cramped basement room where you have to arrive by bus from 53 00:03:19,758 --> 00:03:21,490 a regular terminal, terminal four. 54 00:03:22,108 --> 00:03:25,729 It takes about 15 minutes to get there while your transport driver dodges planes 55 00:03:25,729 --> 00:03:29,770 landing and food trucks refilling and fuel trucks zooming about. 56 00:03:29,770 --> 00:03:34,912 But when you get off the bus, you're loudly escorted into the remote terminal. 57 00:03:34,912 --> 00:03:41,113 It's hot. There's like a grab and go counter with a $22 breakfast sandwich. 58 00:03:41,113 --> 00:03:46,075 And you have to walk across a hot tarmac to climb stairs onto a regional jet. 59 00:03:46,075 --> 00:03:47,935 It's been like that for years. 60 00:03:47,935 --> 00:03:49,956 Nobody in charge seems to think it's a problem. 61 00:03:50,782 --> 00:03:52,592 But in Japan, things just worked. 62 00:03:52,592 --> 00:03:55,443 Trains ran to the minute. If you missed it, 63 00:03:55,443 --> 00:03:56,934 there was one four minutes away. 64 00:03:56,934 --> 00:04:00,155 Public spaces felt like they belonged to everyone. 65 00:04:00,155 --> 00:04:04,396 I didn't feel the constant low grade pressure I feel here. 66 00:04:04,396 --> 00:04:07,857 The sense that everything is a is a fight over scraps and we're 67 00:04:07,857 --> 00:04:12,018 one hospital bill away from losing everything that we've scraped and saved for. 68 00:04:12,018 --> 00:04:14,809 Look, Japan has its own serious problems. 69 00:04:14,809 --> 00:04:18,750 That's not really a hedge or to sort of somehow soften the blow here. 70 00:04:19,134 --> 00:04:20,685 There are real issues in Japan. 71 00:04:20,685 --> 00:04:22,766 They have massive public debt, 72 00:04:22,766 --> 00:04:25,878 an aging crisis, declining birth rates, 73 00:04:25,878 --> 00:04:29,330 weakening yen, and ever increasing import costs, 74 00:04:29,330 --> 00:04:31,251 labor shortages, gender inequality. 75 00:04:31,251 --> 00:04:35,292 Not to mention, they're facing an increasingly assertive China, 76 00:04:35,292 --> 00:04:37,295 North Korea's nuclear program, 77 00:04:37,295 --> 00:04:42,318 and regional tensions. Japan is aggressively expanding its defense spending, 78 00:04:42,318 --> 00:04:46,300 testing the limits of its pacifist post-World War II constitution. 79 00:04:46,952 --> 00:04:49,614 And those are all very real and very present. 80 00:04:49,614 --> 00:04:52,957 But Japan still managed to prove something to me. 81 00:04:52,957 --> 00:04:57,041 A country can decide that its people are worth investing in. 82 00:04:57,041 --> 00:05:01,845 Ours decided otherwise. And I'm tired of pretending that was an accident, 83 00:05:01,845 --> 00:05:06,849 just a creeping failure that just so happened over time without us realizing it, 84 00:05:06,849 --> 00:05:08,771 like microplastics in the water. 85 00:05:08,771 --> 00:05:13,825 The turn came in 1981. And I'm not the only one that feels this way. 86 00:05:14,325 --> 00:05:20,287 Reagan cut the top income tax rate from 70% to twenty eight percent over 87 00:05:20,287 --> 00:05:24,598 his two terms, and he fired more than eleven thousand striking 88 00:05:24,598 --> 00:05:28,959 air traffic controllers, telling every employer in the country that breaking 89 00:05:28,959 --> 00:05:33,650 a union was fair game. Private sector union membership has since fallen 90 00:05:33,650 --> 00:05:38,352 to about six percent. The idea underneath all of it was simple. 91 00:05:38,352 --> 00:05:42,933 Government is the problem, and the market will take care of the rest. 92 00:05:43,701 --> 00:05:45,532 Public investment became something to cut, 93 00:05:45,532 --> 00:05:49,035 not something to build with. And it worked because it convinced 94 00:05:49,035 --> 00:05:53,729 the middle class that they were closer to rich than they were to broke. 95 00:05:53,729 --> 00:05:58,773 The post-1981 sales pitch got working people to cut off their feet 96 00:05:58,993 --> 00:06:03,036 to benefit their scalp. They voted against their own health care, 97 00:06:03,036 --> 00:06:08,441 wages, and unions to protect fortunes they didn't have and were never going to get. 98 00:06:08,441 --> 00:06:11,443 The data shows how badly we were all fooled. 99 00:06:12,279 --> 00:06:14,660 Harvard economists Alberto Alesina, 100 00:06:14,660 --> 00:06:20,811 Stefanie Stantcheva, and Edoardo Teso found in 2018 that Americans 101 00:06:20,811 --> 00:06:26,483 consistently overestimate how likely a poor kid is to climb to the top. 102 00:06:26,483 --> 00:06:29,464 The more they believe they'll get rich, 103 00:06:29,464 --> 00:06:35,025 the less they want to tax the rich because they picture themselves paying that taxes 104 00:06:35,025 --> 00:06:37,585 someday. And the real odds are brutal, 105 00:06:37,585 --> 00:06:40,186 actually. Raj Chetty's research 106 00:06:40,858 --> 00:06:44,921 found that a child born to the bottom fifth of American incomes 107 00:06:45,762 --> 00:06:51,667 has about a 7.5% chance of reaching the top fifth. 108 00:06:51,667 --> 00:06:56,491 That's the top 20%. In Charlotte and Atlanta, 109 00:06:56,491 --> 00:07:02,165 it's under 5%. The chances of winning a lottery are only barely improved 110 00:07:02,165 --> 00:07:06,279 by buying a ticket. And the American dream works about the same way. 111 00:07:06,279 --> 00:07:08,971 I am not a Democrat. 112 00:07:09,751 --> 00:07:11,261 So I'm not gonna let them off the hook here, 113 00:07:11,261 --> 00:07:14,402 right? Clinton signed NAFTA, he gutted welfare, 114 00:07:14,402 --> 00:07:16,523 he helped repeal Glass-Steagall. 115 00:07:16,523 --> 00:07:20,614 Obama bailed out the banks while millions of families lost their homes. 116 00:07:20,614 --> 00:07:26,936 Both parties have spent 40 years managing the decline Reagan started instead 117 00:07:26,936 --> 00:07:30,968 of reversing it. This is not about blue versus red. 118 00:07:30,968 --> 00:07:34,169 This is not team sports. Since 1981, 119 00:07:34,169 --> 00:07:35,169 the US 120 00:07:35,265 --> 00:07:39,068 has largely treated public infrastructure as like a secondary priority, 121 00:07:39,068 --> 00:07:43,592 allowing critical networks to just sort of erode and crumble, 122 00:07:43,592 --> 00:07:47,465 which is what happens when you have to cut the budget due to a shifting 123 00:07:47,465 --> 00:07:49,116 tax burden to the wage earners. 124 00:07:49,116 --> 00:07:54,259 Under Reagan, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed the 125 00:07:54,259 --> 00:07:59,103 top marginal income tax rate from 70% to 50%, 126 00:07:59,103 --> 00:08:03,367 followed by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, 127 00:08:03,917 --> 00:08:08,899 which reduced the top statutory rate directly down to 28%, 128 00:08:08,899 --> 00:08:12,290 with a 33% effective bubble bracket. 129 00:08:12,290 --> 00:08:16,831 As federal tax receipts contracted relative to economic growth, 130 00:08:16,831 --> 00:08:22,643 Washington systematically reallocated its discretionary capital away from public 131 00:08:22,643 --> 00:08:25,653 works. According to the Congressional Budget Office, 132 00:08:25,653 --> 00:08:27,194 CBO data. 133 00:08:27,694 --> 00:08:33,349 Overall federal investment as a percentage of GDP plummeted from over 6% 134 00:08:33,349 --> 00:08:38,263 in the late 60s down to about 2.4% by the late 2010s. 135 00:08:38,263 --> 00:08:44,087 Direct federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure stagnated 136 00:08:44,268 --> 00:08:50,072 at a sparse 0.6%, that is six-tenths of 1% of the 137 00:08:50,072 --> 00:08:53,015 GDP over recent decades, leaving American highways, 138 00:08:53,015 --> 00:08:57,028 rail systems, and water mains in a state of chronic 139 00:08:57,296 --> 00:08:59,947 deferred maintenance. Across the Pacific, 140 00:08:59,947 --> 00:09:05,632 Japan pursued a starkly divergent post-1981 trajectory. 141 00:09:05,632 --> 00:09:10,257 They chose to maintain high top tax rates on upper earners to fund 142 00:09:10,517 --> 00:09:13,420 a world-class public infrastructure state. 143 00:09:13,420 --> 00:09:18,144 In 1988, when our top rate dropped to 28%, 144 00:09:18,144 --> 00:09:22,108 Japan's was still 60%, and it stayed at 50%. 145 00:09:22,958 --> 00:09:27,141 After that, while consistently leaning on state-directed capital 146 00:09:27,141 --> 00:09:33,235 to stabilize its economy, Japan routinely directed between 4% and 6% 147 00:09:33,235 --> 00:09:38,819 of its annual GDP into public infrastructure during the 80s and the 90s, 148 00:09:38,819 --> 00:09:43,743 nearly double to triple the relative American allocation. 149 00:09:43,743 --> 00:09:48,847 While American commuters navigated potholed interstates and legacy rail networks 150 00:09:48,847 --> 00:09:50,498 starved of public tax revenue. 151 00:09:51,194 --> 00:09:56,627 Japan deployed its tax capital to construct nationwide Shinkansen bullet train 152 00:09:56,627 --> 00:09:59,269 networks and modern transit hubs. 153 00:09:59,269 --> 00:10:03,011 The two models reveal contrasting national trade-offs, 154 00:10:03,011 --> 00:10:09,495 the U.S. prioritizing top tax bracket tax relief over federal physical assets, 155 00:10:09,495 --> 00:10:13,798 and Japan using sustained public revenue to establish 156 00:10:13,798 --> 00:10:16,780 a globally competitive transport ecosystem. 157 00:10:17,280 --> 00:10:22,172 So who pulled up the ladder? I I get accused often of blaming everything 158 00:10:22,172 --> 00:10:25,004 on the boomers and everything on Gen X, 159 00:10:25,004 --> 00:10:31,017 but Boomers and Gen X came of age in the most prosperous stretch 160 00:10:31,017 --> 00:10:33,498 in American history, not by a little. 161 00:10:33,998 --> 00:10:37,749 A lot of them bought homes when one income could pay for one. 162 00:10:37,749 --> 00:10:41,950 They went to college when tuition was just a summer job away. 163 00:10:41,950 --> 00:10:46,851 And they retired on pensions that generations to come will never see. 164 00:10:46,851 --> 00:10:51,052 Not all of them. Plenty of boomers lost their homes in 2008 165 00:10:52,012 --> 00:10:54,413 or watched their pensions get cut. 166 00:10:54,413 --> 00:10:57,694 Most of Gen X got a 401k instead of a pension, 167 00:10:57,694 --> 00:11:01,845 and the 2008 crash hit them right in the middle of their careers. 168 00:11:02,601 --> 00:11:04,743 That's you. You got squeezed too. 169 00:11:04,743 --> 00:11:07,035 Look, and nothing I'm about to say is about you. 170 00:11:07,035 --> 00:11:10,798 This is about what people did once they got theirs. 171 00:11:10,798 --> 00:11:14,881 As many of them built wealth, they voted to keep it. 172 00:11:14,881 --> 00:11:17,944 Tax cuts, deregulation, 173 00:11:17,944 --> 00:11:21,867 and less public investment for whoever came next. 174 00:11:21,867 --> 00:11:24,439 I don't know if that's a is that supposed to be a whomever? 175 00:11:24,439 --> 00:11:29,123 Whatever. A Financial Times analysis of US and UK elections 176 00:11:29,623 --> 00:11:33,917 found both generations moved right as they hit middle age and Gen 177 00:11:33,917 --> 00:11:37,809 X followed the boomers almost step for step once they reached 45. 178 00:11:37,809 --> 00:11:40,792 If you got the house, the cheap tuition, 179 00:11:40,792 --> 00:11:45,637 the pension, and then voted against those same things for the people behind you, 180 00:11:45,637 --> 00:11:48,399 that's what pulling up the ladder means. 181 00:11:48,399 --> 00:11:51,712 Most people who did it never really thought of it that way. 182 00:11:51,712 --> 00:11:55,325 And I get it, like I understand when you've worked that hard for something, 183 00:11:55,325 --> 00:11:57,847 protecting it, well, that just feels like common sense. 184 00:11:58,605 --> 00:12:00,536 But the results show up in the numbers. 185 00:12:00,536 --> 00:12:03,488 That economist Raj Chetty, I was talking about, 186 00:12:03,488 --> 00:12:09,762 found that 90% of Americans born in 1940 out earned their parents. 187 00:12:09,762 --> 00:12:13,744 For those born in the 80s, it's closer to half. 188 00:12:13,744 --> 00:12:19,297 The promise that every generation does better than the last just stopped being true 189 00:12:19,297 --> 00:12:23,560 for us. Millennials and Gen Z got the bill. At 35, 190 00:12:24,126 --> 00:12:29,240 Millennials are about 15 points conservative than boomers and Gen X were 191 00:12:29,240 --> 00:12:33,354 at the same age. The least conservative 35-year-olds on record. 192 00:12:33,354 --> 00:12:39,579 Now I'm, you know, 42, but 35 is right in the middle of that millennial stretch 193 00:12:39,579 --> 00:12:44,212 there. We just never built the kind of wealth that makes protecting it feel like 194 00:12:44,212 --> 00:12:46,004 the most important thing on the ballot. 195 00:12:46,004 --> 00:12:51,318 And Gen Z women see it too. In NBC's April 2025 poll, 196 00:12:51,318 --> 00:12:52,689 53% of women 197 00:12:53,756 --> 00:12:56,127 in Gen Z call themselves Democrats. 198 00:12:56,127 --> 00:12:59,689 Gen Z men are a completely different story. 199 00:12:59,689 --> 00:13:03,671 Only 35% said the same thing. 200 00:13:03,671 --> 00:13:09,694 And their approval of Trump ran nearly double that of the young women. 201 00:13:09,694 --> 00:13:15,768 Gallup now puts the ideological gap between young men and women at five times what 202 00:13:15,768 --> 00:13:20,239 it was in 2000. Those young men aren't shifting right because they got rich, 203 00:13:20,239 --> 00:13:21,240 they're broke. 204 00:13:21,980 --> 00:13:26,843 And they're alone. Gallup found that 25% of American men between 15 205 00:13:26,843 --> 00:13:30,645 and 34 felt lonely a lot of the previous day. 206 00:13:30,645 --> 00:13:35,147 That's higher in every other developed country except Turkey. 207 00:13:35,147 --> 00:13:40,480 And no other country in the OECD has a bigger gap between how lonely 208 00:13:40,480 --> 00:13:43,071 its young men are and how everyone else feels. 209 00:13:43,071 --> 00:13:47,254 They're angry about an economy that stopped working for them and they're right to be. 210 00:13:47,254 --> 00:13:51,216 Only one side showed up and gave them an explanation. 211 00:13:51,954 --> 00:13:52,954 So here's what we're gonna do. 212 00:13:52,905 --> 00:13:54,966 And I'm asking you to do it too. 213 00:13:54,966 --> 00:13:57,368 Stop telling them what's wrong with them. 214 00:13:57,368 --> 00:14:01,452 Tell them they're right. They were promised the deal their dads got, 215 00:14:01,452 --> 00:14:05,274 and somebody took it. Then get specific about what they'd get: 216 00:14:05,274 --> 00:14:10,238 a wage that can buy a house, a union contract that means you can't be fired 217 00:14:10,238 --> 00:14:15,522 for no reason, and healthcare that doesn't depend on keeping a job that they hate. 218 00:14:15,522 --> 00:14:17,373 And go where they already are: 219 00:14:17,373 --> 00:14:18,864 the job site, the trade school, 220 00:14:18,864 --> 00:14:20,065 the gym, the union hall. 221 00:14:20,441 --> 00:14:22,622 Instead of waiting for them to come and find us. 222 00:14:22,622 --> 00:14:24,764 If you're one of those guys and you're listening to this, 223 00:14:24,764 --> 00:14:27,196 I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong to be angry. 224 00:14:27,196 --> 00:14:30,818 You should be pissed. I just want you to be angry at the people 225 00:14:30,818 --> 00:14:32,650 who actually took the money from you, 226 00:14:32,650 --> 00:14:36,852 the ones at the top who got richer the whole time that you got squeezed. 227 00:14:36,852 --> 00:14:39,793 And every time someone says tax the rich, 228 00:14:39,793 --> 00:14:42,935 somebody in the middle hears, they're coming for my stuff. 229 00:14:42,935 --> 00:14:47,939 I get it. For 40 years, every promise to tax the top 230 00:14:48,387 --> 00:14:50,228 ended with the middle holding the bill. 231 00:14:50,228 --> 00:14:52,910 I've worked since I was 16 for what I have, 232 00:14:52,910 --> 00:14:54,571 and nobody's going to take that from me. 233 00:14:54,571 --> 00:14:57,414 So let's look at who would actually pay. 234 00:14:57,414 --> 00:15:02,157 Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax started at $50 million. 235 00:15:02,157 --> 00:15:07,822 That's about 75,000 households out of 130 million households in the United States. 236 00:15:07,822 --> 00:15:10,264 We have about 340 million people. 237 00:15:10,264 --> 00:15:12,916 It makes sense, that's around 130 million households. 238 00:15:13,416 --> 00:15:16,837 That's less than a tenth of 1% of this country. 239 00:15:16,837 --> 00:15:19,788 If you check your bank balance before you buy groceries, 240 00:15:19,788 --> 00:15:23,049 that's not you. If you own your house, 241 00:15:23,049 --> 00:15:26,450 max out your 401k and drive a paid-off truck, 242 00:15:26,450 --> 00:15:30,571 still is not you. You would still pay nothing new, 243 00:15:30,571 --> 00:15:33,731 not one dime. Now look at what you're already paying. 244 00:15:33,731 --> 00:15:38,932 Your family health plan costs about $27,000 a year. 245 00:15:38,932 --> 00:15:40,963 Your share is about $7,000 of that. 246 00:15:41,565 --> 00:15:43,626 And that's before the deductible even starts. 247 00:15:43,626 --> 00:15:49,708 A new car costs you about twelve thousand nine hundred dollars a year to own. 248 00:15:49,708 --> 00:15:53,489 And in most of this country, you don't get to say no. 249 00:15:53,489 --> 00:15:57,950 The average student borrower owes almost $40,000, 250 00:15:57,950 --> 00:16:00,271 and that number has never been higher. 251 00:16:00,271 --> 00:16:03,812 Those are taxes. They're just not paid to the government. 252 00:16:03,812 --> 00:16:05,732 You pay them to insurance companies, 253 00:16:05,732 --> 00:16:07,923 you pay them to banks, to toll authorities. 254 00:16:08,637 --> 00:16:12,298 And nobody ever asks you to vote on how much they'd be taxing you. 255 00:16:12,298 --> 00:16:16,619 Japan spends about a third as much per person on healthcare as we do. 256 00:16:16,619 --> 00:16:18,660 It covers every single person. 257 00:16:18,660 --> 00:16:21,721 And they live about five years longer than we do. 258 00:16:21,721 --> 00:16:25,802 Nobody in Japan loses their house over a cancer diagnosis. 259 00:16:25,802 --> 00:16:31,284 We pay three times as much to die younger and go broke on the way out. 260 00:16:31,284 --> 00:16:33,885 And somebody is getting rich off of that difference. 261 00:16:34,385 --> 00:16:37,378 A good train doesn't take anything from the guy who drives, 262 00:16:37,378 --> 00:16:40,441 right? Toko, Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, 263 00:16:40,441 --> 00:16:43,634 and Hakone were full of people driving cars. 264 00:16:43,634 --> 00:16:50,001 They just weren't forced to. Investing in each other isn't like this zero-sum game. 265 00:16:50,001 --> 00:16:52,682 Anyone who tells you it has, like, 266 00:16:52,682 --> 00:16:57,117 has a, I guess, a really big bank account they'd rather you didn't look at. 267 00:16:57,617 --> 00:16:59,138 So, what that looks like up close, 268 00:16:59,138 --> 00:17:03,961 of course, here in Oklahoma, the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority announced ACCESS 269 00:17:03,961 --> 00:17:09,734 Oklahoma in 2022. That's a $5 billion plan for new toll roads through Norman 270 00:17:09,734 --> 00:17:13,947 and Cleveland County. Now they put these right past people's homes 271 00:17:13,947 --> 00:17:15,608 and right up against Lake Thunderbird. 272 00:17:15,608 --> 00:17:19,390 The agenda item that set it in motion called it, 273 00:17:19,390 --> 00:17:22,112 quote, certain turnpike projects and quote, 274 00:17:22,112 --> 00:17:23,503 SP65. 275 00:17:24,003 --> 00:17:28,514 Nearly two hundred residents sued under the Open Meetings Act because nobody could 276 00:17:28,514 --> 00:17:31,215 tell from those agendas what was coming. 277 00:17:31,215 --> 00:17:36,876 Then this year, lawmakers named a planned connector after Toby Keith, 278 00:17:36,876 --> 00:17:41,918 a man who literally opposed the project and joined a lawsuit against it. 279 00:17:41,918 --> 00:17:44,138 I used to be a Toby Keith fan. 280 00:17:44,138 --> 00:17:48,139 Don't really care much for his opinions or politics, 281 00:17:48,139 --> 00:17:51,660 but he did oppose the turnpike, 282 00:17:51,660 --> 00:17:53,260 and they named it after him anyway. 283 00:17:53,760 --> 00:17:56,512 There's lots of rumors. They say his kids made the decision, 284 00:17:56,512 --> 00:17:59,354 whatever. I think there's some money that exchanged hands. 285 00:17:59,354 --> 00:18:01,335 I don't really know the details of it all. 286 00:18:01,335 --> 00:18:04,057 But that's not infrastructure for people. 287 00:18:04,057 --> 00:18:09,881 It's infrastructure done to people by an authority that answers mostly 288 00:18:09,881 --> 00:18:12,923 to bondholders, not to the people who actually live here. 289 00:18:12,923 --> 00:18:17,055 Compare what we could build. Spain and Italy. 290 00:18:17,869 --> 00:18:19,830 Keep their rail lines in public hands, 291 00:18:19,830 --> 00:18:24,133 public ownership, and let multiple companies compete to run trains on them. 292 00:18:24,133 --> 00:18:30,377 When Spain opened Madrid to Barcelona to competitors in 2021, 293 00:18:30,377 --> 00:18:33,779 the actual fares of riding those trains fell. 294 00:18:33,779 --> 00:18:37,501 And within a year, more people were riding them before the pandemic. 295 00:18:37,501 --> 00:18:42,604 Tracks owned by the people, trains run for comfort and price. 296 00:18:42,604 --> 00:18:44,365 We know how to do this. 297 00:18:44,973 --> 00:18:47,464 We choose toll roads and bonds instead, 298 00:18:47,464 --> 00:18:49,655 selling our natural resources to the highest bidders. 299 00:18:49,655 --> 00:18:51,746 Now I've heard the opposition, 300 00:18:51,746 --> 00:18:54,037 they say, America is just too big for this. 301 00:18:54,037 --> 00:18:56,478 Japan is a small country. They're wrong. 302 00:18:56,478 --> 00:18:59,079 Japan is a small nation. I I'm not gonna, 303 00:18:59,079 --> 00:19:00,410 you know, pretend that it's not. 304 00:19:00,410 --> 00:19:02,181 It's it's much smaller than the United States, 305 00:19:02,181 --> 00:19:05,912 but nobody rides a train from Maine to California, 306 00:19:05,912 --> 00:19:09,904 right? High speed rail works one section, 307 00:19:09,904 --> 00:19:12,415 one one metro at a time. 308 00:19:12,915 --> 00:19:14,837 And we have plenty that match Japan's. 309 00:19:14,837 --> 00:19:17,589 Tokyo to Osaka is about 320 miles. 310 00:19:17,589 --> 00:19:20,331 Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago to St. 311 00:19:20,331 --> 00:19:24,174 Louis, Dallas to Houston are all in that range or shorter. 312 00:19:24,174 --> 00:19:29,539 Boston to Washington holds about as many people as Japan's busiest rail corridor. 313 00:19:29,539 --> 00:19:34,673 Then China comes in and completely lambastes the argument because it's about 314 00:19:34,673 --> 00:19:35,673 the size of the US. 315 00:19:36,498 --> 00:19:39,999 And they have built more than 45,000 kilometers. 316 00:19:39,999 --> 00:19:42,551 That's 28,000 miles in freedom units, 317 00:19:42,551 --> 00:19:48,893 which is about 3,800 miles or so longer than the equator 318 00:19:48,893 --> 00:19:53,395 of the earth of high-speed rail in roughly 15 years. 319 00:19:53,395 --> 00:19:59,277 That means China has built more than the rest of the world combined. 320 00:19:59,277 --> 00:20:02,398 And size really has nothing to do with healthcare or schools. 321 00:20:03,080 --> 00:20:08,114 Canada and Australia are enormous and they're incredibly sparsely populated, 322 00:20:08,114 --> 00:20:10,395 and both guarantee healthcare to everyone. 323 00:20:10,395 --> 00:20:12,597 "We're too big" was never a reason. 324 00:20:12,597 --> 00:20:15,299 It was just an excuse for deciding not to. 325 00:20:15,299 --> 00:20:21,874 And underneath all of it is the fear most of us carry that one bad diagnosis 326 00:20:21,874 --> 00:20:26,808 or a few unemployed months means not affording food or care. 327 00:20:26,808 --> 00:20:28,739 That is not a personal failing, 328 00:20:28,739 --> 00:20:30,020 it's a policy outcome. 329 00:20:30,520 --> 00:20:33,741 So what we have to do is we have to fix the foundation of this first. 330 00:20:33,741 --> 00:20:37,053 We have to put the partisan fights second. 331 00:20:37,053 --> 00:20:41,535 Abortion, immigration, and the culture war matter to a lot of people, 332 00:20:41,535 --> 00:20:45,086 me included. And those arguments are not going away and they shouldn't. 333 00:20:45,086 --> 00:20:47,547 But if we don't fix the foundation, 334 00:20:47,547 --> 00:20:50,428 there won't be a country left to argue about it in. 335 00:20:50,428 --> 00:20:53,949 And I know what some of you will say trans rights matter, 336 00:20:53,949 --> 00:20:56,770 abortion rights matter, immigrant rights matter, 337 00:20:56,770 --> 00:20:58,691 and you can't ask people to wait. 338 00:20:59,191 --> 00:21:00,842 You are right that they matter. 339 00:21:00,842 --> 00:21:02,883 And I'm not asking anyone to wait. 340 00:21:02,883 --> 00:21:08,026 I'm asking you to look at what happens to those rights when a country falls apart. 341 00:21:08,026 --> 00:21:14,350 In the 1920s, Berlin had one of the most open queer communities in the world, 342 00:21:14,350 --> 00:21:18,052 including Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, 343 00:21:18,052 --> 00:21:23,755 which performed one of the first known gender-affirming surgeries anywhere. 344 00:21:23,755 --> 00:21:26,347 But when the Weimar Republic 345 00:21:26,469 --> 00:21:30,292 collapsed, the Nazis made that institute one of their first targets. 346 00:21:30,292 --> 00:21:36,157 They raided it in May of 1933 and burned its library in the streets. 347 00:21:36,157 --> 00:21:38,138 Fixing wages, healthcare, 348 00:21:54,732 --> 00:21:58,944 And who gets a seat at the table is how we keep a country stable enough that 349 00:21:58,944 --> 00:22:02,006 nobody's rights can be voted, legislated, 350 00:22:02,006 --> 00:22:07,720 or burned away. I'm fighting for the ground every one of these fights stands on. 351 00:22:07,720 --> 00:22:09,671 I want to call this what it is. 352 00:22:09,671 --> 00:22:11,322 It's investment in our future. 353 00:22:11,322 --> 00:22:13,683 Public rail, public health care, 354 00:22:13,683 --> 00:22:18,046 and public schools are things a country owns together, 355 00:22:18,046 --> 00:22:20,107 the same way it owns its roads, 356 00:22:20,107 --> 00:22:21,438 its military. 357 00:22:21,952 --> 00:22:25,315 Calling that socialism or communism is a scare tactic. 358 00:22:25,315 --> 00:22:29,639 Selling off what we own is what should be the radical idea. 359 00:22:29,639 --> 00:22:33,442 But we've been selling it. In 2008, 360 00:22:33,442 --> 00:22:37,146 Chicago leased its parking meters to private investors for 361 00:22:37,146 --> 00:22:43,252 75 years for 1.15 billion dollars. 362 00:22:43,252 --> 00:22:47,996 The city's own inspector general found it had been undervalued by about a billion. 363 00:22:48,958 --> 00:22:53,351 And the investors earned their money back around 2020 with more than 364 00:22:53,371 --> 00:22:57,394 60 years left to still collect. In 2006, 365 00:22:57,394 --> 00:23:01,196 Indiana leased its toll road for 75 years. 366 00:23:01,196 --> 00:23:04,218 The operator went bankrupt eight years later. 367 00:23:04,218 --> 00:23:09,180 Here in Oklahoma, the Turnpike Authority runs public roads like a bonding business. 368 00:23:09,180 --> 00:23:13,984 Each deal is a piece of America handed to someone who answers 369 00:23:14,004 --> 00:23:17,166 to shareholders instead of to constituents. 370 00:23:17,666 --> 00:23:19,767 This message works across party lines. 371 00:23:19,767 --> 00:23:21,848 Bernie Sanders proved it in 2016, 372 00:23:21,848 --> 00:23:26,471 winning working class voters who went on to back Donald Trump. 373 00:23:26,471 --> 00:23:29,493 People want wages, health care, 374 00:23:29,493 --> 00:23:33,195 and a country that works, whatever team they think they're on. 375 00:23:33,195 --> 00:23:36,277 If the complaint is bipartisan, 376 00:23:36,277 --> 00:23:38,208 then why can't the solution be? 377 00:23:38,708 --> 00:23:43,232 Now look, another thing that's probably hard to picture in the same conversation 378 00:23:43,232 --> 00:23:46,985 is trains and hospitals, but AI is becoming the next piece of infrastructure that 379 00:23:46,985 --> 00:23:50,457 we all have to live with. And it's the next thing that they're selling off, 380 00:23:50,457 --> 00:23:55,642 even though we built it. Every AI model was trained on decades of our writing, 381 00:23:55,642 --> 00:23:58,484 our research, and our conversations. 382 00:23:58,484 --> 00:24:03,568 A lot of the science behind it was actually done with public money. 383 00:24:03,568 --> 00:24:05,990 The internet came out of DARPA. 384 00:24:05,990 --> 00:24:08,242 And a lot of the foundational research 385 00:24:08,510 --> 00:24:10,642 ran on NSF and university grants. 386 00:24:10,642 --> 00:24:15,446 The public supplied the raw material and paid for the groundwork. 387 00:24:15,446 --> 00:24:20,070 A handful of companies are getting insane valuations and making money 388 00:24:20,471 --> 00:24:22,182 off of the bets on this right now. 389 00:24:22,682 --> 00:24:27,336 When this all started, I really hoped that AI would help to govern 390 00:24:27,336 --> 00:24:29,248 us with reason and fairness. 391 00:24:29,748 --> 00:24:32,500 But AI is really only as fair as whoever owns it. 392 00:24:32,500 --> 00:24:37,364 And right now that's companies whose job is to extract more from us. 393 00:24:37,364 --> 00:24:40,366 That's what capitalism is, whether or not you're a fan of it. 394 00:24:40,366 --> 00:24:46,031 It's the act of inserting layers of extraction between the product and the profit. 395 00:24:46,031 --> 00:24:49,374 That's the parking meter deal on a scale we've never seen. 396 00:24:49,374 --> 00:24:51,435 And they're doing it with data centers too. 397 00:24:51,435 --> 00:24:55,628 We'll see just enough of those profits to talk us into selling our land, 398 00:24:55,628 --> 00:24:57,219 our water, and their power. 399 00:24:57,857 --> 00:25:00,569 While they make billions of dollars in profit. 400 00:25:00,569 --> 00:25:03,371 But who do you think that gets extracted from? 401 00:25:03,371 --> 00:25:08,114 Us. Japan has a habit that explains a lot of what I saw. 402 00:25:08,114 --> 00:25:14,638 For about 150 years, it has studied other countries on purpose and then just copied 403 00:25:14,638 --> 00:25:17,300 what worked. If you're a middle child, 404 00:25:17,300 --> 00:25:19,842 I'm sure you understand exactly what this looks like. 405 00:25:19,842 --> 00:25:25,335 In 1871, it sent a delegation of government leaders through the US. 406 00:25:25,739 --> 00:25:28,290 And Europe for almost two years just to take notes. 407 00:25:28,290 --> 00:25:31,492 Its schools were modeled on France and the US. 408 00:25:31,492 --> 00:25:34,634 Its first railways were built with British engineers. 409 00:25:34,634 --> 00:25:38,757 And its first health insurance law was modeled on Germany's. 410 00:25:38,757 --> 00:25:44,410 Japan didn't invent most of what I know we could have here if we really tried. 411 00:25:44,410 --> 00:25:47,101 It watched what worked in other places, 412 00:25:47,101 --> 00:25:52,615 picked the best of it, and then used our tax dollars or their tax dollars 413 00:25:52,615 --> 00:25:53,615 to build it. 414 00:25:53,605 --> 00:25:55,366 Now, AI is a little bit too new for that. 415 00:25:55,366 --> 00:25:59,379 Nobody has a 50 year track record to study yet. 416 00:25:59,379 --> 00:26:04,613 And right now, even Japan is mostly handing public money to companies like SoftBank. 417 00:26:04,613 --> 00:26:09,917 But a few countries are already treating AI the way Japan treated trains, 418 00:26:09,917 --> 00:26:11,738 as something the public pays for, 419 00:26:11,738 --> 00:26:16,662 so the public should own it. Switzerland's public universities released 420 00:26:16,662 --> 00:26:21,155 Apertus, which is Latin for open. 421 00:26:21,977 --> 00:26:26,718 In 2025, a fully open model built with public money that anyone can use. 422 00:26:26,718 --> 00:26:30,609 Spain, the same country that opened its high-speed rail to competition, 423 00:26:30,609 --> 00:26:35,091 released ALIA, a government-funded open model built at 424 00:26:35,091 --> 00:26:37,201 its national supercomputing center. 425 00:26:37,201 --> 00:26:42,473 The Netherlands is building GPT-NL through a public research institute trained only 426 00:26:42,473 --> 00:26:44,303 on data it has the rights to use. 427 00:26:44,303 --> 00:26:47,544 Singapore's government funds SEA-LION, 428 00:26:47,544 --> 00:26:50,715 an open model for Southeast Asian languages. 429 00:26:51,215 --> 00:26:55,779 India's national AI mission rents subsidized computing power to 430 00:26:55,779 --> 00:26:57,480 its own researchers and startups, 431 00:26:57,480 --> 00:27:01,263 so the hardware isn't only available to whoever can afford it. 432 00:27:01,263 --> 00:27:07,427 Even the U.S. started a National AI Research Resource pilot in 2024 433 00:27:07,455 --> 00:27:10,351 to give researchers public computing power. 434 00:27:10,351 --> 00:27:13,653 And Alaska already shows how shared wealth can work. 435 00:27:13,653 --> 00:27:17,916 Its oil fund sends every resident a check every year, 436 00:27:17,916 --> 00:27:19,738 an AI dividend, a 437 00:27:19,894 --> 00:27:24,760 public stake in the profits from our own collective work is the same idea. 438 00:27:24,760 --> 00:27:27,404 None of these countries have it figured out, 439 00:27:27,404 --> 00:27:31,389 but they've made the same decision Japan made about trains. 440 00:27:31,389 --> 00:27:35,014 If the public pays for it, the public should own a piece of it. 441 00:27:35,014 --> 00:27:37,858 We should own what we have built. 442 00:27:38,358 --> 00:27:40,739 And that leads me to who gets to govern. 443 00:27:40,739 --> 00:27:46,102 So I served on a local committee for about six months. 444 00:27:46,102 --> 00:27:49,534 It met on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. 445 00:27:49,534 --> 00:27:51,966 I didn't know that until after I joined. 446 00:27:51,966 --> 00:27:56,448 So who exactly is supposed to make that with a job? 447 00:27:56,448 --> 00:27:59,900 Nobody bans working people from local government. 448 00:27:59,900 --> 00:28:01,521 There, you won't find it on a law anywhere. 449 00:28:01,521 --> 00:28:04,413 And if they did, I'm sure it would be struck down immediately. 450 00:28:04,413 --> 00:28:06,334 They just schedule it while we're at work. 451 00:28:06,838 --> 00:28:08,979 And pay almost nothing to serve. 452 00:28:08,979 --> 00:28:12,120 I live in Norman, Oklahoma. I I know I've never, 453 00:28:12,120 --> 00:28:13,663 I don't think I've really talked about that, 454 00:28:13,663 --> 00:28:16,185 but some of my listeners come from Norman. 455 00:28:16,185 --> 00:28:21,829 Norman Norman City Council pays their city council members $100 per month. 456 00:28:21,829 --> 00:28:26,912 My city council member spends 30 to 40 hours a week 457 00:28:27,132 --> 00:28:31,956 on city business alone, which means they are currently earning somewhere between 458 00:28:31,956 --> 00:28:35,028 58 cents and 77 cents per hour. 459 00:28:35,528 --> 00:28:40,120 Oklahoma state legislators make about $47,500 a year. 460 00:28:40,120 --> 00:28:43,121 So let's be honest, the seats go to retirees, 461 00:28:43,121 --> 00:28:47,753 business owners, and people who, whose employers will just kind of cover for them. 462 00:28:47,753 --> 00:28:52,265 And then everyone wonders why government doesn't understand the rest of us. 463 00:28:52,265 --> 00:28:54,646 Japan ran this experiment for us, 464 00:28:54,646 --> 00:28:59,709 actually. A city council member there earns about 400,000 yen a month, 465 00:28:59,709 --> 00:29:01,870 which is about $2,500 or more, 466 00:29:01,870 --> 00:29:02,904 depending on the exchange rate. 467 00:29:03,680 --> 00:29:06,062 That's more than 20 times what Norman pays. 468 00:29:06,062 --> 00:29:09,254 And really, it only works out to about $15 an hour. 469 00:29:09,254 --> 00:29:12,636 But it's treated like a job because it is one. 470 00:29:12,636 --> 00:29:16,039 But in Japan's small towns and villages, 471 00:29:16,039 --> 00:29:18,420 they have what's called an assembly. 472 00:29:18,420 --> 00:29:21,252 The assembly pay averages about half that, 473 00:29:21,252 --> 00:29:23,494 right? And those assemblies look just like ours, 474 00:29:23,494 --> 00:29:26,726 mostly older men with an average age in their 60s. 475 00:29:26,726 --> 00:29:32,170 In 2019, eight of them couldn't find enough candidates to fill their seats. 476 00:29:32,584 --> 00:29:37,196 One village looked at replacing its entire assembly because nobody could afford 477 00:29:37,196 --> 00:29:40,077 to serve. Same country, same culture, 478 00:29:40,077 --> 00:29:45,059 opposite results. The only thing that changed was whether the job paid enough 479 00:29:45,059 --> 00:29:47,580 to live on. I would run for office if I could. 480 00:29:47,580 --> 00:29:51,671 I can't afford to, and neither can most people who'd fight the hardest 481 00:29:51,671 --> 00:29:54,903 for working families. That's the ladder getting pulled up again. 482 00:29:54,903 --> 00:29:59,264 One meeting at a time. The fixes are cheap, 483 00:29:59,264 --> 00:30:00,405 they don't really cost much. 484 00:30:00,893 --> 00:30:03,314 Evening meetings, a remote option, 485 00:30:03,314 --> 00:30:05,615 stipends that cover real time, 486 00:30:05,615 --> 00:30:08,096 and child care during sessions. 487 00:30:08,096 --> 00:30:10,757 None of it needs a constitutional amendment. 488 00:30:10,757 --> 00:30:13,338 It needs a council willing to vote for it. 489 00:30:13,338 --> 00:30:17,840 Or in the case of Norman, the citizens have to vote for it. 490 00:30:17,840 --> 00:30:22,773 In 2022, Norman voted on raising council pay from twelve hundred dollars 491 00:30:22,773 --> 00:30:25,624 a year to fifty four hundred dollars a year. 492 00:30:25,624 --> 00:30:28,245 Still, that's about two dollars and sixty cents an hour. 493 00:30:28,745 --> 00:30:32,868 Fifty-seven percent of Norman voters said no to a raise that would have cost 494 00:30:32,868 --> 00:30:35,069 us each thirty-two cents a year. 495 00:30:35,069 --> 00:30:37,851 For thirty-two cents, a teacher, 496 00:30:37,851 --> 00:30:43,595 a nurse, or a guy working the line at a plant could afford to sit on city council. 497 00:30:43,595 --> 00:30:45,697 But when the job pays nothing, 498 00:30:45,697 --> 00:30:49,780 the only people who can take it are people who don't need the money. 499 00:30:49,780 --> 00:30:52,622 Japan's villages learn the same lesson. 500 00:30:52,622 --> 00:30:56,835 We keep voting to make sure people like us can't afford 501 00:30:57,019 --> 00:30:59,391 to represent us. This is a warning. 502 00:30:59,391 --> 00:31:04,695 I don't want a revolution. That means somebody would get hurt. 503 00:31:04,695 --> 00:31:07,928 I don't want anyone hurt. But honestly, 504 00:31:07,928 --> 00:31:12,241 I'm getting really afraid of what happens if nothing changes. 505 00:31:12,241 --> 00:31:14,963 And the people who study this are afraid too. 506 00:31:14,963 --> 00:31:17,726 Political scientist Barbara Walter, 507 00:31:17,726 --> 00:31:22,509 no S, not related, in a book called How Civil Wars Start, 508 00:31:22,509 --> 00:31:24,511 found that instability rises 509 00:31:25,383 --> 00:31:29,686 when large groups of people feel locked out of power with no peaceful 510 00:31:29,686 --> 00:31:32,388 way to change their lives. I just described that. 511 00:31:32,388 --> 00:31:36,151 It's a city council seat that pays 58 cents an hour, 512 00:31:36,151 --> 00:31:38,472 meeting at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday, 513 00:31:38,472 --> 00:31:42,275 and a toll road hidden behind SP65. 514 00:31:42,275 --> 00:31:45,937 None of that feels like the start of something dangerous. 515 00:31:45,937 --> 00:31:49,140 It feels like Tuesday. That's just how it starts. 516 00:31:49,140 --> 00:31:53,593 Peter Turchin spent decades studying why societies come apart. 517 00:31:54,279 --> 00:31:57,406 He links unrest to two trends running at once. 518 00:31:57,906 --> 00:32:02,310 Wages falling for ordinary workers and wealth piling up at the top. 519 00:32:02,310 --> 00:32:04,821 In 2010, he predicted the U.S. 520 00:32:04,821 --> 00:32:07,554 would hit serious turmoil in the 2020s. 521 00:32:07,554 --> 00:32:10,056 We're in the middle of the 2020s now, 522 00:32:10,056 --> 00:32:13,598 and I don't think anyone listening would call these calm years. 523 00:32:13,598 --> 00:32:17,280 History is blunt about where that leads. 524 00:32:17,280 --> 00:32:20,723 Stanford historian Walter Scheidel's 525 00:32:20,723 --> 00:32:24,907 The Great Leveler, argues that across thousands of years, 526 00:32:25,287 --> 00:32:31,252 big drops in inequality came almost entirely from four major shocks: 527 00:32:31,252 --> 00:32:34,295 Black Swan events, mass war, 528 00:32:34,295 --> 00:32:38,919 violent revolution, state collapse, 529 00:32:38,919 --> 00:32:45,755 and plague. The Black Death killed a third of Europe and left survivors with higher 530 00:32:45,755 --> 00:32:49,308 wages. That's the record. And it kind of sucks. 531 00:32:49,308 --> 00:32:52,761 I don't want any of those. I don't want anyone hurt. 532 00:32:53,715 --> 00:32:58,058 So the question is whether there's another way to move this fast. 533 00:32:58,058 --> 00:33:00,339 There is evidence that there is. 534 00:33:00,339 --> 00:33:06,764 Political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan studied every major resistance 535 00:33:06,764 --> 00:33:13,268 campaign from 1900 to 2006 and found that nonviolent movements 536 00:33:13,609 --> 00:33:16,871 succeed about twice as often as violent ones. 537 00:33:16,871 --> 00:33:21,574 Poland's Solidarity, the Philippines in 1986, 538 00:33:21,574 --> 00:33:23,075 the Velvet Revolution. 539 00:33:23,661 --> 00:33:25,392 None of them needed a guillotine. 540 00:33:25,392 --> 00:33:30,255 They needed millions of people just refusing to accept the status quo. 541 00:33:30,255 --> 00:33:36,179 Chenoweth found that almost no campaign in her data failed once 542 00:33:36,179 --> 00:33:41,303 it drew active participation from 3.5% of the population. 543 00:33:41,303 --> 00:33:44,865 Here, that's about 12 million Americans. 544 00:33:44,865 --> 00:33:50,259 The 2017 Women's March drew several million in a single day. 545 00:33:50,759 --> 00:33:53,081 So here's what we demand. Voting matters. 546 00:33:53,081 --> 00:33:57,023 And I'll come back to that. But another state, 547 00:33:57,023 --> 00:34:03,127 another slate, another docket of Democratic senators will 548 00:34:03,127 --> 00:34:09,971 not fix this fast enough for people who can't afford insulin or groceries right now. 549 00:34:09,971 --> 00:34:15,354 And the establishment in both parties has had 40 years to notice. 550 00:34:15,354 --> 00:34:17,485 Pressure has to come from 551 00:34:17,665 --> 00:34:20,136 outside the ballot box as well. 552 00:34:20,136 --> 00:34:22,477 Here's what the pressure should demand: 553 00:34:22,477 --> 00:34:27,558 labor that can actually stop the economy. 554 00:34:27,558 --> 00:34:30,719 Rebuilt union by union. 555 00:34:30,719 --> 00:34:36,427 Organizing outside of the two-party system so progressives stop being 556 00:34:36,427 --> 00:34:39,501 a bloc that Democrats can take for granted. 557 00:34:39,501 --> 00:34:41,812 Local government 558 00:34:42,678 --> 00:34:46,720 working people can actually participate in evening meetings, 559 00:34:46,720 --> 00:34:49,502 real pay, a seat for everyone, 560 00:34:49,502 --> 00:34:52,423 and specific demands, public rail, 561 00:34:52,423 --> 00:34:57,105 guaranteed health care, public ownership of what we built, 562 00:34:57,105 --> 00:35:03,649 paid for by taxing the wealth that's piled up since 1981. 563 00:35:03,649 --> 00:35:06,160 If you want to see this laid out as a full platform, 564 00:35:06,160 --> 00:35:09,852 you can listen to Max's episodes of UNFTR. 565 00:35:10,460 --> 00:35:13,621 He has one called The 5 Non- Negotiables, 566 00:35:13,621 --> 00:35:17,912 5NN: This Is How We Win. It lays out five non-negotiables. 567 00:35:17,912 --> 00:35:21,903 The first three are meant to kind of earn people's trust back. 568 00:35:21,903 --> 00:35:25,644 And the last two are meant to protect our democracy and our planet. 569 00:35:25,644 --> 00:35:30,505 Those are Housing First, treats shelter as a right. 570 00:35:30,505 --> 00:35:32,746 You give people a stable home first, 571 00:35:32,746 --> 00:35:36,547 then help with everything else because nobody gets their lives together while 572 00:35:36,547 --> 00:35:37,547 sleeping in a car. 573 00:35:37,787 --> 00:35:42,711 A civilian labor corps is a public jobs guarantee for work that matters 574 00:35:42,711 --> 00:35:45,363 to a community, but won't turn a profit. 575 00:35:45,363 --> 00:35:47,385 So the private sector never does it. 576 00:35:47,385 --> 00:35:53,850 Max pitches it as sort of a way to brace for AI wiping out jobs. 577 00:35:53,850 --> 00:35:58,414 And I would point it straight at 40 years of deferred maintenance, 578 00:35:58,414 --> 00:36:05,239 water, rail, bridges. Medicare for All is healthcare as a human right, 579 00:36:05,239 --> 00:36:06,600 one public plan. 580 00:36:06,910 --> 00:36:08,942 with no premiums, no deductibles, 581 00:36:08,942 --> 00:36:11,045 and no bankruptcy after a diagnosis. 582 00:36:11,045 --> 00:36:14,988 Election integrity, which means getting the money out of politics. 583 00:36:14,988 --> 00:36:20,215 As long as a politician's career depends on the people with the most to spend, 584 00:36:20,215 --> 00:36:21,797 they will answer to them first. 585 00:36:21,797 --> 00:36:22,797 Always. 586 00:36:23,238 --> 00:36:26,559 Climate action is what Max calls Social Security for the planet. 587 00:36:26,559 --> 00:36:30,360 A shared safety net we pay now, 588 00:36:30,360 --> 00:36:34,342 so the next generation inherits something that we can live in and that they 589 00:36:34,342 --> 00:36:37,833 can live in in the future. I don't line up with them on everything, 590 00:36:37,833 --> 00:36:39,083 but I think they get the order right. 591 00:36:39,083 --> 00:36:41,844 They start with the things that change daily life, 592 00:36:41,844 --> 00:36:45,065 then protect the democracy that makes everything else possible. 593 00:36:45,065 --> 00:36:47,906 Go find that episode. I'll try to link it in the show notes here. 594 00:36:48,406 --> 00:36:51,518 You know, I didn't I didn't expect this episode to go in so many directions, 595 00:36:51,518 --> 00:36:53,970 but I came home with a lot to say. 596 00:36:53,970 --> 00:36:56,531 In Japan, I didn't keep my head on a swivel. 597 00:36:56,531 --> 00:36:58,853 I relaxed, I let my guard down, 598 00:36:58,853 --> 00:37:05,218 I stopped carrying around the fear that one bad diagnosis could take everything. 599 00:37:05,218 --> 00:37:09,782 For two weeks, I got to see what citizenship could feel like. 600 00:37:09,782 --> 00:37:15,976 In 1871, Japan sent its leaders around the world for two years to take notes 601 00:37:15,976 --> 00:37:16,976 on what worked. 602 00:37:17,703 --> 00:37:20,344 I went for two weeks, and this episode is my notes. 603 00:37:20,344 --> 00:37:23,705 Some of what Japan does, we probably can't copy. 604 00:37:23,705 --> 00:37:25,906 Our culture is different. And hey, 605 00:37:25,906 --> 00:37:29,047 maybe that's another episode. But a lot of it we can. 606 00:37:29,047 --> 00:37:30,788 Trains that come every four minutes, 607 00:37:30,788 --> 00:37:35,010 streets you can walk, health care that doesn't end in bankruptcy, 608 00:37:35,010 --> 00:37:38,641 and a government that treats its people like an investment instead 609 00:37:38,641 --> 00:37:41,252 of a revenue stream. None of that is magic. 610 00:37:41,252 --> 00:37:44,614 But someone somewhere chose this for us. 611 00:37:45,114 --> 00:37:47,575 And for 40 years we've made the other choice. 612 00:37:47,575 --> 00:37:52,177 We sold the parking meters, we hid the toll roads behind SP65. 613 00:37:52,177 --> 00:37:55,708 We scheduled democracy for Tuesdays at 1 p.m. 614 00:37:55,708 --> 00:37:58,179 and then voted down 32 cents to fix it. 615 00:37:58,179 --> 00:38:03,211 Now we're about to hand AI built from our work and paid for with our 616 00:38:03,211 --> 00:38:07,622 tax dollars to the same kind of people who bought the meters. 617 00:38:07,622 --> 00:38:12,404 Gate 52H has been a hot basement for years because nobody 618 00:38:12,724 --> 00:38:16,446 Who decides what it looks like ever has to sit in it. 619 00:38:16,446 --> 00:38:20,968 The same goes for the people who decide what a council seat pays, 620 00:38:20,968 --> 00:38:24,570 where a toll road goes, and who owns AI. 621 00:38:24,570 --> 00:38:28,233 That's the whole episode in one room. 622 00:38:28,233 --> 00:38:31,455 And everyone stuck in that room is on the same side, 623 00:38:31,455 --> 00:38:34,176 whether they know it or not. The young guy who's broke, 624 00:38:34,176 --> 00:38:37,368 angry, and listening to the only people who offered him an explanation 625 00:38:37,368 --> 00:38:40,559 is not my enemy. He's on the bottom with the rest of us. 626 00:38:40,559 --> 00:38:41,559 And rent. 627 00:38:41,698 --> 00:38:45,859 And wages are his top issues. The people fighting for trans rights, 628 00:38:45,859 --> 00:38:49,770 abortion rights, and immigrants' rights are not asking for too much. 629 00:38:49,770 --> 00:38:53,872 Those rights only last in a country stable enough to keep them. 630 00:38:53,872 --> 00:38:59,193 And Berlin in 1933 showed what happens when it isn't. 631 00:38:59,193 --> 00:39:02,493 And nobody in the middle has to give anything up for this. 632 00:39:02,493 --> 00:39:08,015 The money is at the top and it's been piling there since 1981. 633 00:39:08,439 --> 00:39:11,321 And nothing has ever made it trickle down. 634 00:39:11,321 --> 00:39:17,435 So here's where we are. We fix it now through investment and reform while 635 00:39:17,435 --> 00:39:20,146 we still can, if we still can, 636 00:39:20,146 --> 00:39:25,249 or we just keep selling it off piece by piece and find out what Walter 637 00:39:25,249 --> 00:39:26,730 and Turchin already warned us about. 638 00:39:26,730 --> 00:39:28,911 I know which future I want to live in. 639 00:39:28,911 --> 00:39:32,993 I'm voting in the midterms like the country depends on it because it does. 640 00:39:32,993 --> 00:39:35,194 But the day after the election, 641 00:39:35,756 --> 00:39:39,397 that's when work starts. Every Democrat who flips a seat, 642 00:39:39,397 --> 00:39:41,688 every candidate who wins owes us. 643 00:39:41,688 --> 00:39:45,189 We should call their offices, pack their town halls, 644 00:39:45,189 --> 00:39:49,931 and show up at every meeting they'd rather that we skipped peacefully, 645 00:39:49,931 --> 00:39:56,694 relentlessly, and with the ferocity of people who know exactly what's at stake. 646 00:39:56,694 --> 00:40:00,255 This ship is sinking. We've got to grab a bucket. 647 00:40:00,255 --> 00:40:01,815 I'll see you at the next meeting. 648 00:40:01,815 --> 00:40:03,126 Be kind to each other. 649 00:40:03,852 --> 00:40:05,535 Because we need each other more than you realize. 650 00:40:06,035 --> 00:40:10,078 Don't forget to check out our website at fof.foundation, 651 00:40:10,078 --> 00:40:14,181 just fof.foundation.com. You can send us an email at 652 00:40:15,042 --> 00:40:18,085 the overlap at fof.foundation. 653 00:40:18,085 --> 00:40:20,186 Or you can hit us up on our socials, 654 00:40:20,186 --> 00:40:25,190 our Bluesky, our Mastodon, or check us out on your latest podcast app. 655 00:40:25,190 --> 00:40:27,642 Give us a review. Five stars if you will. 656 00:40:27,642 --> 00:40:30,254 We'll see you next time. Bye.