Dream Hacking, Beer Ads, and the CIA’s Leftovers

Welcome back to the overlap.

I'm your host Joshua.

Before you ask, no, Will is not here.

Will is still on hiatus.

I got a text from him uh last night, but it was just a blurry photo of a Faraday cage he's building in a root cellar in the Ozarks.

He didn't say why he's building it, but after researching today's episode, I'm starting to think he's the only sane one left.

So you're stuck with me, just me.

Today we're going to talk about something that makes our usual topics, you know government overreach and economic collapse and corporate greed Look like a children's tea party

today.

We're gonna talk about the final frontier No, not space space is boring.

Well, not boring, but space is just rocks and you know billionaires trying to escape the climate they destroyed We're talking about the frontier that is much much closer We're

talking about

the three pounds of wet, electrified meat inside of your skull.

We're talking about neuro rights and the colonization of the mind.

All right, let's start with a scenario.

want you to imagine it's 2021, not 2026.

Five years ago, the Super Bowl's coming up.

You're a marketing executive at Molson Coors, the company that makes Coors light.

You have a problem.

You want to show ads to people, but people are tired of ads.

They skip them.

They block them.

They pay premium subscriptions to avoid them.

So where is the one place a human being goes where they cannot skip the ad?

where they're completely vulnerable, where they have no premium subscription to protect them.

Their sleep.

In 2021, Coors Light ran a campaign.

They didn't hide it.

They bragged about it.

They offered free 12 packs of beer to people if they agreed to participate in a sleep study.

Here's what the study was.

You watched a specifically designed video of flowing streams and refreshing mountains for one minute before bed.

Then you played a soundscape.

It was an eight hour audio track while you slept.

Using a technique called targeted dream incubation or TDI, the audio played specific cues during the, the hypnagogic state, right?

That trippy kind of floaty moment right before you fall into deep sleep.

What was the goal?

To literally insert the concept of Coors Light into your dreams to make you dream about beer.

Now pause.

If I told you this in a sci-fi novel, you'd say it was two on the nose, maybe tongue in cheek.

You'd say, that's inception.

that's black mirror.

But this was very, very real.

They actually did it, right?

They successfully planted images of their product into the subconscious minds of willing participants for the price of a 12 pack of watery lager.

So you fast forward to today, 2026, the technology didn't go away.

It actually got better.

It got cheaper like most technologies and it got quieter.

According to a survey by the American Marketing Association conducted just last year in 2025, 75 % of major marketers now plan to deploy dream shaping technologies within the

next three years.

Imagine waking up on a Tuesday morning, you're thirsty, but not just thirsty.

You have a specific burning craving for Mountain Dew.

You don't know why.

You don't even like Mountain Dew.

You haven't seen a commercial for it, but for eight hours last night while your smart speaker was monitoring your sleep cycles for your health, it was also whispering

ultrasonic frequencies designed to trigger the Citrus Soda Association in your hippocampus.

You aren't a consumer anymore.

You are the terrain.

Your brain is the billboard.

This is dream hacking, right?

It's kind of the tip of the iceberg here because while dream hacking is creepy, it actually relies on sound.

It's external.

The real threat, the one that has venture capitalists salivating in Silicon Valley right now is internal.

It's the brain computer interface or the BCI.

We spent the last decade laughing at Elon Musk and his Neuralink pigs.

We even made memes about monkeys playing pong, but while we were laughing, the tech has matured.

We now have wearables, headbands, headphones, even glasses that can read EEG data, electroencephalography, with a pretty decent clip of accuracy.

Now, maybe not to the everyday person, but

to the actual algorithm, it's pretty, you on the nose.

We have technologies and companies like Emotive and Muse that have been selling these devices for years as meditation aids or focus tools.

Wear this headband, you know, it'll tell you when you're stressed, it'll help you meditate.

But here's the question they don't answer in the brochure.

Where does the data go?

If you type into a search, you know, search engine, Google or DuckDuckGo or whatever, they own that data.

DuckDuckGo is a little bit more privacy focused, but Google owns the data that you put into that search box.

So when you post a photo on Instagram, Meta owns that data.

When you wear a device that records the electrical firing patterns of your brain, who owns your thoughts?

Who owns the raw data of your anxiety?

Who owns the biometric signature of your arousal?

Who owns the neurological footprint of your political descent?

In 2026, the answer is they do, right?

The venture capital, VC pitch decks, they're not hiding it.

I've seen them.

They call it the final enclosure.

History lesson.

I know, boring.

The 18th century England, the enclosure acts took common land and fenced it off for private owners, right?

So then in the 20th century,

Intellectual property laws fenced off ideas.

Now the 21st century neurotech is fencing off the inner self.

It's the ultimate violation of the non-aggression principle.

If I punch you in the face, that is an aggression.

But if I reach into your skull, scrape your neural data, and sell it to an insurance company who then denies you coverage because your brain waves show a predisposition for

depression, is that not an aggression?

Is that not a form of violence?

And don't think you can just opt out easily, right?

Like, I don't buy the brain chip, you say.

I'll stay analog.

I'll be a Luddite.

But what happens when your boss makes you wear a safety headset to drive the forklift that monitors your attention levels?

What happens when your car insurance rates triple unless you wear a focus cap while driving?

What happens when schools require children to wear attention bands to ensure they're paying attention to the standardized test?

Spoiler alert, China has actually been doing this in pilot programs since 2019.

The frontier of surveillance has crossed the blood brain barrier.

They aren't just watching what you do anymore, they're watching what you think.

Now you might be thinking, surely this is illegal.

Surely there are laws against stealing my thoughts.

Well, yes and no, mostly no.

But there is one country that actually saw this coming.

One country that looked at the dystopian nightmare coming down the pipe and said, not today, Satan.

And strangely enough, it was not the United States.

When we come back, we're going to talk about the law.

We're going to talk about a former senator in Chile, a company called Emotive and the first ever Supreme Court battle for the rights of the human mind.

And we'll ask the question, can a piece of paper actually protect your neurons from big tech?

You're listening to the overlap.

Don't fall asleep.

They might be listening.

we established that your dreams are now ad space for beer companies, right?

And your boss might soon require a headset to track your focus.

It sounds hopeless.

It sounds like we are already living in the prequel to the matrix, but believe it or not, there is resistance.

And strangely enough, the resistance actually didn't start in DC.

It didn't start in Brussels.

It started in Santiago, Chile.

In 2023, a man named Guido Guirardi, a former Senator and neurosurgeon, bought a device.

It was the Emotive Insight.

It looks like this sleek futuristic headband.

You can look them up on Google.

They'll own your data, but it's about $300, right?

It promises to track your cognitive performance, your stress levels, your mental health.

But Girardi read the terms of service, which let's be honest, that alone makes him a superhero because nobody reads the term of service.

We've talked about this on the overlap before.

He realized that the device wasn't just

showing him his brain data, it was actually uploading it to Emotives cloud servers.

It was taking the electrical blueprint of his thoughts and storing it in a database owned by a US company.

So what does any person who feels violated do?

They sued.

And a landmark ruling, actually the first of its kind in human history, the Chilean Supreme Court actually sided with him.

They actually ordered Emotiv to not only delete his data, they ruled that brain data is a fundamental human right and effectively said, the inside of your skull is your sanctuary.

You cannot enter it without a warrant.

You cannot enter to scrape data for an algorithm, period.

Chile actually amended their constitution to include neuro rights.

In it, they enshrined five protections.

One, you have a right to mental privacy.

Two, you have the right to personal identity.

Three, the right to free will.

Four, the right to equal access to mental augmentation.

And five, protection from bias in algorithms.

Meanwhile, in the United States, we have the mind.

This was introduced at the end of 2025.

The mind act is Congress's attempt to play catch up.

It says basically that big tech, please ask nicely before you sell someone's actual neural data.

But let's be real here.

We're talking about a government that can't even regulate ticket master fees.

Do we trust them to regulate the harvest of human consciousness against the most powerful lobbying force on the planet?

The Chileans are actually treating this like a human rights crisis.

Americans are treating it like a consumer protection issue.

And Donald Trump's administration has tried very hard to gut our CBP, the Consumer Protection Bureau.

Oh, did they steal your thoughts?

Here's a coupon for $5 off your next identity theft protection service.

But why are we so worried?

Why is the idea of mind control or subliminal influence so terrifying?

because we have been here before.

And the last time the US government got interested in the mind, it didn't end in a court case, it actually ended in torture.

If you think mind control is a conspiracy theory, you haven't read the Senate Church Committee reports from 1975.

From 1953 to 1973, the CIA ran a top secret program called MKUltra.

What was their goal?

To crack the code of human consciousness.

They wanted to create a Manchurian candidate, like a programmed assassin.

They wanted to learn how to even wipe people's memories, you know, like the men in black device.

They wanted to learn how to force

a confession.

They didn't use algorithms.

They actually did it using blunt force.

They used LSD.

right, sign me up.

They dosed people without their consent, prisoners, mental patients, even their own agents.

They also use sensory deprivation.

They used electro shock therapy, a technique they called psychic driving, where they would basically

give a patient a whole lot of drugs and then just play a looped tape of a message thousands and thousands of times, trying to rewrite their personality like brute force.

One of the most infamous figures was Dr.

Ewan Cameron.

He worked in Montreal, funded by the CIA, but he would put patients into a drug-induced coma for weeks, playing these tapes under their pillows.

He destroyed lives.

He wiped people's memories so completely they forgot how to use a toilet, but he failed.

The CIA eventually shut the program down or so they say, because it was too unpredictable.

LSD makes people hallucinate.

It doesn't make them obedient robots.

But here is the terrifying realization for 2026.

What the CIA failed to do with drugs and trauma, Silicon Valley is achieving with dopamine.

and convenience.

The goal of MKUltra was behavior modification.

They wanted to make you do things you wouldn't normally do.

Look at your phone.

Look at the infinite scroll.

Look at the variable reward schedules.

That's the slot machine mechanic in your social media feed.

They don't need to drug you to change your behavior.

They just need to nudge you.

They need to track your eye movements.

They need to read your brain waves to see exactly which color of red makes you click by.

So this brings us to the subliminal panic of the 1950s.

In 1957, a guy named Vance Packard wrote a book called The Hidden Persuaders.

He basically warned that advertisers were using psychological warfare against the public.

And there's even a famous story later, apparently it was a giant hoax, but

The impact was very real, but basically it said that a movie theater inserted single frames of film saying drink Coca-Cola and eat popcorn into a movie.

The frames flashed for one three thousandth of a second, which theoretically would be too fast to see, but somehow the subconscious would see it and supposedly popcorn sales

skyrocketed.

The public freaked out.

The CIA freaked out.

We were all terrified that a flash of light could hijack our free will.

Now, look at 2026.

We have smart TVs that listen to our conversations to service ads.

We have VR headsets that track our pupil dilation to measure our emotional arousal.

We have dream incubation entering our sleep.

We were scared of subliminal messaging flashing for like a millisecond.

We should have been scared.

of the device we voluntarily brought into our bedroom and plugged into the wall right next to the bed.

Vance Packard wasn't wrong.

He was just early.

So we have the legal fight, which we are losing in the United States.

We have the historical precedent, proves the government is definitely interested in controlling your mind.

And we have the technology, which is getting stronger every day.

When we come back for a second, for the second half of the show,

We're gonna talk about kind of the philosophy.

We're gonna talk about cognitive liberty.

And I'm gonna talk about the only way to win this game.

Hint, it involves taking off the headset.

This is the overlap.

Keep your thoughts to yourself, literally.

All right, so we've covered the tech, we've covered the law, we've covered the history of the CIA trying to scramble your eggs with LSD.

But now we need to ask the big question.

Why does this matter?

Joshua, you say, I have nothing to hide.

They can scan my brain.

It'll help me focus at work.

It helps me sleep better.

What's the problem?

The problem is we're crossing a line that's never been crossed in the history of the human species.

We're talking about cognitive liberty.

Now this is a term coined by legal scholar, Nita Farahaney.

And she has a book called The Battle for Your Brain.

You can look it up, really good read.

It's a little dry, you know, it's an instruction manual kind of for the nightmare we're living in.

She defines cognitive liberty as the right to mental self-determination.

It's the right to access your own mental states.

And more importantly,

the right to block others from accessing them.

Think about it.

For thousands of years, no matter what happened to you, no matter if you were in a prison cell, no matter if you were enslaved, no matter if you were being tortured, you had one

sanctuary, the inside of your mind.

You could hate your boss while smiling at him.

You could plot an entire revolution while standing in formation.

You could dream of a freedom.

while you were in chains.

Your thoughts were the only thing that was truly undeniably yours.

Neurotechnology kind of abolishes this sanctuary.

It's what philosophers call the final enclosure.

We talked earlier about the Enclosure Acts of the 1700s where they fenced off the land.

Then they fenced off culture with copyright.

Now they're fencing off the self.

So if a corporation can read your fatigue levels, your political dissent, your sexual orientation directly from your brain, you are not a person anymore.

You're a data set.

Let's bring in a little, a little philosophy.

know I'm not going to go full academic on you, but this is, this is important.

There was a French philosopher named Michel Foucault.

He talked about the panopticon.

The Panopticon is a prison, right, where the guard can see every prisoner, but the prisoners can't see the guard.

Because you might be watched at any moment, everyone acts like they are being watched.

You discipline yourself.

That was the 20th century.

That was the camera on the street corner.

But another philosopher, Gille Deleuze, said that we're moving past that.

He said we're entering a society of control.

In a disciplinary society, described by Foucault, they force you to mold to a mold.

They put you in a factory, a school, a prison, a society of control, in opposition, opposed by Deleuze.

They don't force you.

They modulate you.

They use algorithms, they use dopamine, and now, neurofeedback.

They don't have to lock you in a cell.

They just have to tweak the algorithm so you feel happy when you obey and anxious when you rebel.

This is why the non-aggression principle, the core tenet of libertarianism and anarchism is being violated in a way we never anticipated.

We always thought the aggression would be a boot stamping on our human face.

We didn't realize that this aggression would actually be just a gentle nudge from a headband that rewrites your desires before you even know you have them.

Shoshana Zuboff calls this behavioral surplus.

Google and Meta just don't want to know what you buy.

They want to know who you are so they can predict what you will be.

And with brain data, they don't have to guess.

They don't have to look at your click history to know you're depressed.

They can see the alpha waves in your frontal lobe slowing down.

And then they sell that data to a pharmaceutical company

that targets you with an ad for antidepressants the moment your brain chemistry dips.

That's not just marketing, that's predatory.

It's human farming.

So where does that leave us?

If the state wants to control you, know, MK Ultra style, and the market wants to farm you, Zuboff style, is there any way out?

Is there any way to keep a part of yourself offline?

Listen to that.

That's the sound of a data-free environment.

No algorithms, no push notifications, no ultrasonic frequencies trying to sell you beer while you sleep.

Just reality.

I spent the last little bit kind of scaring the hell out of you.

We've talked about dream hacking and brain scraping and the co-modification of your consciousness.

So now we have to answer the question, what do we do?

If you're waiting for Congress to save you, don't hold your breath.

Yes, you we have things like the mind act.

Yes, Colorado and California are trying to pass privacy laws, but asking the government to regulate big tech right now is like asking a cat to regulate the tuna industry.

They're too well fed to give a shit.

And even if they pass the laws, the companies always find a loophole.

They will bury the neuro data consent and a 500 page user agreement that you click.

I agree on just because you want to play a new VR game.

The only real resistance and the only strategy that actually works is refusal.

It's unfortunately technological abstinence.

Now in the 20th century, the rebel was the guy who stood on a tank.

In 2026, the rebel is the person who doesn't wear a smartwatch.

The rebel is the woman who refuses to bring her phone into her bedroom.

We need to establish what I call analog sanctuaries.

These are spaces, both physical and temporal, where the digital world is basically verboten.

The bedroom should be a Faraday cage for the soul.

No screens, no microphones, no sleep trackers.

Do you really need an app to tell you you slept shitty?

You know how I know when I slept shitty?

I'm tired.

I don't need a graph to validate my exhaustion.

We need to normalize the right to be offline.

We need to reject the quantified self.

Silicon Valley has told us that we are broken machines.

All we need to do is be optimized to be happy.

Track your steps, track your heart rate, track your focus.

Why?

To be more productive for your boss?

To lower your insurance premiums?

No, screw that.

Be inefficient, be unoptimized, be a human being, not a data set.

If your employer asks you to wear a focus band to track your attention, just say no.

If your car insurance offers you a discount to monitor your eye movements, pay full price.

I know that's hard.

Privacy, apparently, is a luxury now.

It's a tax on luxury that you're just gonna have to pay.

But it is the best money you'll ever spend.

In a lot of ways, you'll save money by not doing things.

The battle for your brain is not gonna be fought on the battlefield with guns and muskets and cannons.

It's gonna be fought with convenience.

They aren't gonna force some chip into your brain

They are going to market it to you.

They're going to tell you it's going to cure your depression.

They're going to say, it will let you control your phone with your mind.

It'll make you smarter.

Maybe it'll help you lose weight.

And look, maybe it will.

But the price tag isn't the 299 hardware cost.

The price tag is your autonomy.

It's the last private place in the universe.

The space between your left ear and your right ear.

So here's my challenge to you for the next week.

Create yourself a sanctuary.

Some people call it, you know, touching grass, but take an hour a day, just an hour, and just disconnect everything.

Leave the phone, take off the watch, go for a walk, read a paper book, stare at a wall, go to a bluegrass jam, reclaim your own attention.

Because if you don't own your attention, somebody else will.

And they're selling it to the highest bidder.

That's the show.

I'm Joshua.

This has been another solo run of the overlap.

Will, if you're listening in your bunker, stay there.

You might have the right idea.

For the rest of you, keep your gold buried, keep your powder dry, and for the love of Thor, keep your brain offline.

See ya.