The Overlap

Something in your laundry room has been lying to you since 2014, and the company put the confession in writing. This week we find out why your cake mix, your toilet paper and a $3,500 fridge are in on it too.

GAO, “Consumer Prices: Product Downsizing,” report GAO-25-107451 (July 2025): https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107451

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Joshua went to Japan for his 10th anniversary and came home with a lot to say.

It starts at a basement gate at LAX. From there it goes places you won’t see coming: a parking meter deal in Chicago, a toll road in Norman named after a man who fought it, a city council job that pays less than you’d guess, a tax decision older than most of the people listening, a generation of lonely young men, a 150-year-old Japanese habit, the question of who owns AI, and what historians say happens when nothing changes.

It’s all connected. You’ll see how by the end.

William sat this one out. He wanted plausible deniability.

MENTIONED

SOURCES

BOOKS AND RESEARCH

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Bonnie Parker gave Kenneth Copeland’s ministry tens of thousands of dollars, possibly hundreds of thousands, hoping to be healed. She died believing she hadn’t given enough. When her family asked where the money went, they got an accounting firm’s opinion about a $20 million jet.

Joshua and Will dig into the prosperity gospel’s flying fleet: Copeland’s five aircraft and private airport, Creflo Dollar’s Project G650, Jesse Duplantis’s Falcon 7X, and a Gulfstream bought from Tyler Perry. They also cover the laws that keep the books shut. That includes a Senate investigation that ended without a single subpoena, a 1984 law that ties the IRS’s hands, one church audit in all of fiscal 2014, and an 18,000-square-foot “parsonage” that pays no property tax.

Nobody has proven any of this illegal. That’s sort of the point.

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When the government hands a decision about your life to software, who answers for it — and how does anyone check its work?

Joshua and Will borrow a real legal doctrine, qualified immunity, to name something newer: digital qualified immunity. The agency says the software decided. The vendor says the software is a trade secret. The person who lost their benefits or their job is left with nobody to question.

In this episode:

Consistent isn’t the same as correct. If software made a decision about your life this year, how would you know?

Note: We ran into some audio/video sync issues during recording. You may notice drift or more crosstalk than usual in places. We fixed what we could in editing. Thanks for bearing with us.

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The Bootstrap Con

In 1834, a labor paper made fun of a man who could supposedly lift himself over a fence by his own bootstraps. It was a joke, because nobody can do that. Starting in 2027, it’s a Medicaid requirement.

Will and Joshua trace how “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” went from punchline to moral test. The stops along the way are Hoover’s “rugged individualism,” Reagan’s welfare queen, the 1996 welfare law, and the drained public pools of Montgomery. Then they follow the test into the paperwork. In Arkansas, 18,000 people lost coverage in 2018 even though more than 95% of them were already working or should have been exempt. Georgia spent $54.2 million administering its “model” program and $26.1 million on actual care. Deloitte was paid more than $50 million for eligibility software that froze and wiped applicants’ information, and Maximus is telling investors the new federal rules mean growth.

We hear out the other side, too: what the welfare-to-work research shows, and what it doesn’t. Then we ask the question underneath all of it. Who gets paid when needing help looks like a character flaw?

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ederal agencies are quietly turning tens of thousands of acres of western public lands into expedited, cheap real estate for AI data centers. Between amended solar permits, 100-megawatt fast-track loopholes, thousands of unmonitored backup diesel generators, and 5,000-gallon chemical spills, the government is treating public ground as a permission slip for big tech rather than a shared resource. We break down the paper trail, local revolts, and who profits when compute meets land.

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Twelve years, one dead human rights lawyer’s warning, and the UN just produced a document with all the teeth of a permission slip. The US and Russia agreed on something for once: delete the word “ethics” from the paragraph about robots that decide who dies. Meanwhile a defense startup raised $5 billion in May and is pouring concrete on a factory in Ohio. Nobody’s waiting for Geneva. We talk about why “we can’t tie our hands because China won’t” is exactly backwards, and why losing this fight in 2026 means losing it until 2034.

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An AI-generated Space Force uniform posted on Truth Social explicitly credits Starship Troopers as design inspiration. We trace the high-cost absurdity, institutional friction, and 90-year aesthetic lineage behind a viral post that mistook anti-fascist film satire for an aspirational dress code.

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Joshua sat down Monday to pick this week’s episode, opened 3 tabs, and closed all 3 without picking anything. In his defense there were about 40. 🗂️

In 1984 a psychologist named Karl Weick published a paper explaining why people who care enormously about enormous problems reliably do nothing about them. Short version: make a problem big enough and the human brain quietly logs off. He was writing about social policy for an academic journal nobody outside psychology reads. 34 years later Steve Bannon described that exact effect to a reporter, cheerfully, as a governing strategy. He put it more colorfully. We use his actual words in the episode.

So this one has no docket number and no 412-page document. It’s the two of us asking whether being this tired is a personal failing or a policy outcome, and then, because we are apparently incapable of leaving it there, going and finding out what the research says.

It says a lot, actually. 39 injunctions landed on this administration by May of last year. The Congressional Research Service looked at 34 of them and found 41.2 percent still standing as of June. The birthright citizenship order died 6-3 at a Supreme Court nobody expected to kill it. 💀 Also the Fourth Circuit turned the anti-DEI provisions loose, trans Americans still can’t get an accurate passport, and the mail voting order has been blocked, unblocked, and blocked again since August. Both of those columns are real, which is inconvenient for everyone selling you a tidy version of this.

Then there’s Paul Gorski, who interviewed 22 people about why they left movements they’d given years to. The thing that pushed them out wasn’t the cops and it wasn’t losing. It was their own side, and a rule nobody ever says out loud: if you didn’t burn out, you were never really committed.

Sit with that one. We did.

Also in here: the statistic every activist you know has quoted at you, taken apart using the published objections of the researcher who found it. A 40-year-old paper that describes flood-the-zone 3 decades before anyone flooded anything. Will on why pacing is not cowardice. And a prediction, with a date attached, so you can come back and tell us we were wrong. We might be.

Yes, we are aware this is a podcast telling you to consume less. We thought about that. Then we made it anyway.

Everything below is real. Go check it. The whole point of the episode is that you shouldn’t take anybody’s word for anything right now, including ours.

SOURCES

Weick, K. (1984) “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psychologist:

Metag & Gurr (2023). Overload lowers your sense that paying attention does anything, and that’s what makes you stop:

Gorski & Chen, “Burnout in Social Justice and Human Rights Activists.” The culture of martyrdom finding is in here:

Chenoweth & Stephan, 323 campaigns, 1900 to 2006:

Chenoweth’s own cautions on the 3.5% rule. Read this before you quote it at anyone again:

Injunction counts and what is still blocked:

The mail voting order, August 24 and August 28:

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Christopher Lloyd (no relation) bought a flatbed in 2024 for $187,000. In 2026 he stopped washing it. A truck wash is $130, which is nothing, and it’s the most articulate decision in this whole episode. 🛢️

Working out why took us to 1987, to 1973, and into a $12.1 billion quarter that a CEO called “disciplined investment.” Somewhere in there is one number that tells you exactly how long this war runs. Analysts already know it. They’re saying “deep into 2027.” 🚛

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