It's Working: Flooding The Zone

The Overlap · Sep 3, 2026 · 51m · transcript

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…