Badlands Media

Jon Herold, fresh off a whirlwind Labor Day road trip (and a recent engagement announcement), brings back Matt McDonagh for a deep dive on the ARC AGI 3 benchmark results and what they actually mean for artificial general intelligence. Matt breaks down the difference between AGI and ASI, argues America's biggest AI edge is energy and compute rather than algorithms, and makes the case that decentra...

Ashe in America and Zak Paine fill in on Labor Day while CannCon is off at a veterans event, opening with an honest and slightly spicy defense of civil disagreement between hosts after some chat pushback over Friday's show. The centerpiece is a major development in the election space, as DHS asks the DOJ to investigate ERIC over motor vehicle data that allegedly flowed to a Zuckerberg funded nonpr...

FUD stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Burning Bright has a theory about why everybody has been kind of a doomer lately. To illustrate it, he went digging through Badlands to find the single most incessant black piller he could think of, then invited him on so the chat can lovingly lift him up and beg him to stop destroying the movement. Enter tonight's guest, doomer extraordinaire Zak P...

Jonathan Drake dives into Spooner's first two economic propositions, starting with the deceptively simple idea that every man should keep the full fruits of his own labor. From there Jon works through why Spooner sees the employer employee relationship as a subtle drag toward poverty, and why he thinks a nation of entrepreneurs beats a nation of wage earners every time. Expect a genuinely fair min...

Jon Herold sits down for a first-time chat with Gabe of Good Brew, and fair warning, Gabe is a talker. What starts as a friendly get-to-know-you (Outer Banks roots, a detour into why so many businesses incorporate in Wyoming) quickly becomes an enthusiastic deep dive into gut health. Gabe's pitch is that Good Brew took the opposite road from the probiotic boom: instead of forcing colonizing microb...

Jon Herold and Chris Paul kick off with a Netflix documentary tangent about decoy planes and disguised operatives before shifting into one of the more philosophical episodes in recent memory. The centerpiece is a metaphor about a wall everyone secretly knows is black but publicly agrees is white, used to explain how Trump operates inside a collectively accepted false consensus and slowly walks peo...

Cam Cooksey opens episode 66 (September 5th) in a deliberately loose, laid back mood, promising a less structured, more conversational night as the final Flow before GarVegas. There's Hooks and Harmony recap, a Scales ad that sparks a childhood tangent, and plenty of chat love. The meat is a media integrity deep dive. Cam walks through the permanent removal of Maria Bartiromo from Fox News and the...

Host Matt Trump (pre-recording on a Thursday after a soundless first take) declares this a costume-changing romp through Burning Man, which is happening in the Black Rock Desert as he speaks. Drawing on his own three-year run (2012 to 2014), he plays internet footage from the festival's 40th year and cheerfully warns you it looks basically unchanged: same bicycles, same lights, same beautiful chao...

A genuinely heated debate breaks out over whether the anti data center pushback happening across the country is a legitimate concern or just a Chinese psyop, spiraling into a bigger argument about executive orders, farmland ownership, and whether the government could legally seize land tied to alleged foreign election interference. On the legal front, there's a rundown of jury selection concerns h...

Jordan and Nate are back live this week, kicking off with genuinely useful talk about mobility work, self experimentation, and using AI to plug in your own blood work and genetics for a targeted health plan. From there it is a stacked news day: Trump's fresh executive order cracking down on meat packing monopolies and opening up direct to consumer sales for small ranchers, plus Trump publicly defe...

Ashe in America and Ghost say Season 5, Episode 5 of The Chosen, "Because of Me," picks up the pace in a big way, and they are not exaggerating. This is the episode where Judas's betrayal finally becomes undeniable, and the hosts walk through a tense Last Supper sequence full of suspicion around the table as the disciples try to figure out who among them could possibly turn on Jesus. Meanwhile on...

Jon Herold kicks off Friday with a quick look at OpenAI's new ARC AGI 3 benchmark results before digging into a newly posted DHS letter from Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen to AG Todd Blanche, walking through referrals on QR code voting machines and the ERIC voter data sharing controversy in detail. Ghost joins midway through for a wide ranging geopolitical breakdown, mapping out a theory that Israel...

CannCon and Chris Paul close out the week with a report claiming Fox fired Maria Bartiromo over leaked internal texts about the network's coverage of election fraud claims, then turn to a pair of contradictory court rulings that show just how uneven election law has become. Missouri's Supreme Court blocks a new congressional map after the primary already happened, while Justice Kavanaugh declines...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior kick off with a mic malfunction confession before diving into one of the most heated debates the show has seen in a while. Alpha argues the military and intelligence community are already operating outside the Constitution when it comes to psyops and information warfare against Americans, and that it is a price worth paying to win the bigger fight against the deep state a...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright dig into this 2012 Prohibition era drama with a genuinely stacked cast, and both come away pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up. The pick came from a random YouTube rabbit hole that somehow led straight to Tom Hardy, which feels about right for how these episodes usually go. Expect a solid breakdown of the film's bootlegger versus corrupt lawman setup and why...

Frankie Val themes the night around things that just do not add up, and invites viewers to bring their own top picks of the week. First comes the strange news tour, from a maybe rabid fisher cat terrorizing the Northeast (the media can't decide if it's a weasel, a fox, or a squirrel) to the improbable comeback of the CD, which sends Frankie fishing for everyone's embarrassing first album. The cent...

CannCon and Ashe in America move on to Chapter 13 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, and this one takes a hard turn into geopolitics. This week's theme is Masquerade in Moscow, unpacking the secret society founded by Cecil Rhodes, its American offshoot known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and the surprising role outside financiers played in funding the Russian Revolutio...

JD Vance takes over the podium in his first solo White House briefing since the departure of the press secretary, and it is a marathon. He opens with fraud task force wins, over 2,000 shut down fraudulent trucking licenses, and a new 65 billion barrel oil reserve born out of the Venezuela deal, before fielding a genuinely sprawling round of questions. Expect a candid breakdown of the ongoing Strai...

Jon Herold walks through a detailed timeline theory that Trump may be quietly resetting the War Powers Act clock on Iran for a second time to keep Congress out of the loop, tracing notification dates back to February and July and predicting another possible reset is coming this weekend. He also fact checks Alex Jones' viral debate claims about NDAA Section 219 line by line, reading the actual bill...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior dig into the DOJ expanding its beef pricing investigation from the big four meat packers to eight of the largest grocery retailers in the country, unpacking how a handful of companies came to control most of what ends up on your plate and just how far prices have climbed over the past decade. From there they cover Democrats blocking a proposed constitutional amendment to...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright open with some personal banter (mystery health scares, homeschooling law rabbit holes) before landing on the real meat of the episode: Russia getting invited back to the G20 for the first time since the Ukraine war started. The guys walk through why that timing lines up suspiciously well with CIA Director Ratcliffe's recent trip to Moscow, and what it might signal abo...

Shipwreck kicks off with her new obsession, fiber maxing, and how a fiber heavy routine has quietly fixed years of health issues, before pivoting into a rant about surveillance cameras popping up in towns too small to need them. She connects that to a data center fight near her home, complete with a mysterious pro data center billboard nobody will claim credit for. There is a bit on subscription b...

Jonathan Drake joins Chris Ponder and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast this week to dig into natural law, the idea that God built physical rules for the universe and equally binding rules for human relationships, and why ignoring either one tends to end badly. Jonathan brings a research background on pattern and structure that pairs surprisingly well with Chris's information framework, and the conv...

Jon Herold leans on chat interaction for a genuinely slow Wednesday, working through a Hill piece framing a third Trump impeachment as inevitable given midterm polling, and pushing back hard on the idea that any political "consensus" can be trusted when he believes the outcome is already being engineered. He covers Trump welcoming Russia back into the G20 despite Moscow's continued support for Ira...

CannCon and Ashe open with a Missouri Deputy Attorney General surviving five days lost in the Wyoming wilderness before turning to Congress, where a ballooning lame duck agenda has lawmakers punting government funding, Iran war money, and surveillance authority extensions until after the election. They dig into the House voting to condemn socialism in all its forms with eight Democrats crossing ov...