The Overlap

Illinois wrote the strongest license plate reader law in the country in 2023. By 2025, Texas cops had searched its cameras hunting a woman over an abortion, and CBP was inside through a pilot Flock’s own leadership says it didn’t know about.

A guy in Georgia filed a records request and found 400 agencies sharing one suburb’s data, railroad police included. 🚂

Will and Joshua on why this can’t be reformed, only ended.

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This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released July’s Consumer Price Index. Headline inflation came in at 3.4% year over year. Core CPI, excluding food and energy, hit 2.5%. Markets moved. The Federal Reserve was watching. That’s the whole story, if you stop reading here.

Joshua and Will don’t stop there. They start pulling on the one line in the report that barely got mentioned: nearly two thirds of that monthly increase came from a single category. Not gas. Not groceries. Shelter.

And shelter, it turns out, isn’t measured the way anyone actually pays for shelter. It’s measured with something called owner’s equivalent rent, a number built entirely from surveys asking homeowners what they think they’d charge themselves to rent their own house. Nobody in America has ever paid this number. The Fed uses it anyway, and has since 1983.

From there the trail gets longer. A 1996 commission that concluded the CPI was overstating inflation, whose recommendations quietly trimmed Social Security cost of living adjustments for millions of retirees. A 2012 decision to start targeting an even lower number, one the public rarely hears about, while the CPI headline stays the one everyone argues over. And this fall’s government shutdown, which didn’t just furlough workers, it broke the actual data collection pipeline, forcing the BLS to freeze last month’s housing estimate in place and guess.

By the end, it’s not really a story about a monthly report anymore. It’s a federal worker in Kansas City whose grocery bill doubled overnight. A mother of four in Missouri who can’t afford to buy in the neighborhood she grew up in, even though the official number insists housing is cooling. And a Fed chair who, under direct Senate questioning, admitted he isn’t confident the numbers he’s using are even accurate.

The headline said inflation eased. This episode is about what that word is doing all the work to hide.

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This week is not an episode. It is a tool.

There are two versions of this in the feed. This one has an intro on the front. The other one does not.

Listen to this one. Send the other one.

The first ten minutes explain who it is for, how to use it, and the thing I almost did before I thought better of it.

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Forty hours at a warehouse job. Here is the paycheck, every line of it, and what is left at the bottom.

Then a definition nobody has ever bothered to give you straight.

Not an argument and not a pitch. Every number in this is public and I say where each one is from.

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The State Department recently published a report naming progressive politicians, journalists, and Amazon labor organizer Christian Smalls as agents of foreign subversion. At the exact same time, the FBI is spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on defense contracts to build a predictive AI surveillance machine that analyzes your associations and data without a warrant. The FBI previously used secret watchlists to target the civil rights movement, send a suicide letter to Martin Luther King, and assist local police in shooting Fred Hampton. Now, the government is automating that identical architecture at machine speed while intentionally dismantling its own internal oversight boards. Joshua details the federal contracts and the missing legal safeguards actively threatening modern political dissent.

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In this gripping episode of The Overlap, Joshua dives into the sobering details of ICE-caused deaths—how a tourist, caught in an agency’s deadly machine, was killed while running from agents at dawn in Florida. What was supposed to be a simple visit to the ocean turned into a fatal encounter that the government refuses to explain or confirm. Why do the agencies tasked with ‘enforcing’ immigration laws operate with such impunity? How is the system designed to hide its mistakes and silence the victims’ families? And what does all this say about the true purpose of agencies like ICE?

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This week on The Overlap, we are measuring the massive gap between corporate AI promises and actual reality. Silicon Valley is dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into a hype machine, but we are checking the receipts.

We look at what really happens when expert developers are handed the best AI tools on the market. The actual math completely contradicts the marketing.

We explore the quiet catastrophe that followed a major fintech company loudly replacing its human workforce with a chatbot.

We uncover how a government agency is using a secret algorithm to deny Medicaid care to sick people while shielding the error rates from the public.

The billionaires selling the hardware are getting filthy rich off corporate FOMO, while the working class pays the price for the panic. Grab a drink and let’s look at the proof.

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The regime is cracking, but before they pack up their gaudy Home Depot gold Oval Office decor, they are handing you the bill. This week, we compare today’s economy to 1928, because who does not love a good prequel? Discover how 83,000 jobs vanished while guys in expensive coats tell you to suffer for the market. Skip the Walmart ground beef and let’s dive into why the guy in Toledo is still gonna hurt.

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The modern economy has been systematically reengineered to strip away included services and sell them back to you as premium up-charges. Through deliberate market consolidation and a process known as enshittification, corporations have eliminated competition to trap consumers in a cycle of endless wealth extraction. Learn how this architecture of manufactured scarcity operates and discover the coordinated actions required to permanently dismantle it.

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Elon Musk is worth $1 Trillion USD… The Overlap discusses how this happened, and what you should know about how it happened… It’s all part of the “trickle-down check valve”

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