Badlands Media

A rare crossover: Jon Herold, Chris Paul, and Burning Bright are all together live at Gart for this one, and the energy shows. They kick off with Trump's latest true social posts about a potential third term before getting into a genuinely strange story about AI supposedly nudging the country toward conflict with China, and the very convenient timing of the outlet that broke it getting banned from...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright revisit this Terry Gilliam adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo classic, and it turns out this one is a genuine dividing line between the two hosts. Expect an honest reckoning with a movie that's aged into something stranger and more uncomfortable than either remembered, plus real talk about psychedelics, why fear is often what actually sends a trip sideways, and...

Frankie Val leans into the damp, mosquito bitten edge of the season with a full cryptid and haunted places special. Before the guest, he wades through the week's grimmer headlines and his running theory that the Internet now incubates characters and legends that start manifesting in real life, from the postpartum murder mom to that Cat in the Hat figure the show keeps tracking. Then the main event...

Trump welcomes hunters, fishers, and outdoorsmen to the newly renovated Rose Garden to sign two executive orders that sound almost too niche to matter, until you hear the numbers. One opens up millions more acres of federal land for hunting and fishing on top of 92 million acres already unlocked, while protecting traditional lead ammunition. The other tosses out a widely mocked 10 mile per hour bo...

CannCon and Ashe in America finish out Chapter 14 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, picking up with what the book calls the Transfusion Mechanism. This week covers how American taxpayers ended up quietly subsidizing Soviet Russia and its satellites long after Lend Lease officially ended, through below market trade deals, guaranteed loans, and bailouts routed through agencies...

Trump lands in North Carolina to make one very clear pitch: pretend I'm on the ballot, because Michael Whatley basically is. The rally leans hard into crime, walking through the brutal murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zaretska and Governor Roy Cooper's early release of 3,500 inmates, before comparing it to the infamous Willie Horton ad that sank Dukakis decades ago. From there it's a full sweep o...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright pre record from the road this week and dive straight into a wild theory: that the AI safety story dominating headlines right now is timed suspiciously close to the midterms and might be less about safety and more about election interference. They play a clip of Todd Blanche calling the AI panic a hoax and posts from Trump comparing it to treason. Burning Bright lays o...

Kwast and Chris Ponder mark Constitution Day with a deep dive into America's founding document, tracing its full timeline and showing how it stacks up against basically every other legal document in human history, including, in a genuinely fun aside, Claude's own 82 page constitution compared to America's tidy four pages. Chris breaks down his method for structuring any document, the Constitution,...

CannCon and Ashe record a special late night edition ahead of travel to Nevada, opening with the Supreme Court's mail in ballot decision and the blistering Alito and Thomas dissent that raises real questions about who actually gets to set election rules. Ashe is still fired up from a Why We Vote episode recorded moments earlier. The bulk of the show works through a series of Kash Patel clips from...

Josh Reid flies solo again this week and does not waste any time, diving straight into what he calls a coordinated AI doom narrative playing out across media, tech, and celebrity circles all at once. He walks through a supposed AI hack that may not be what it seemed, explains the concept of regulatory capture and why it matters for the future of open source AI, and connects a handful of recent hea...

No in-studio guest tonight, just CannCon and Ashe in America playing prosecutor as they roll the tape on David Becker's members-only town hall, the one Ashe tried to record and got 49 minutes of silence for her trouble, now recovered from the group's own YouTube. They pick apart his victory-lap framing that the DOJ is a perfect zero for 23 in voter-data cases, his turnout sleight of hand, and a ca...

Shipwreck is fully checked out on voting this year, and she lays out exactly why, from gas prices to the same recycled promises no matter who wins. She digs into the online energy vampire theory, reacts to the Sydney Sweeney sports betting ad backlash and the double standard she sees in who gets outraged about what, and works through a wild Matrix inspired take on why everyone suddenly needs more...

Jon Herold digs into the Supreme Court's decision leaving a lower court block on the USPS mail ballot integrity rule in place for the midterms, reading through Alito's sharp dissent and Kavanaugh's concurrence to argue election officials and courts, not Trump, caused the timing crunch that killed it. He builds a theory connecting the AI industry's sudden safety slowdown push to the midterms, diggi...

CannCon and Zak Paine christen the new Tuesday slot with the Supreme Court finally ending the Schrodinger executive order saga, declining to revive the President's mail in ballot requirements with ballots already going out. From there they cover John Brennan getting subpoenaed to testify in a federal conspiracy case, complete with a six year Q delta that lands the same morning, plus James Comer de...

Ashe in America brings back Deborah Flora, joined this time by her husband Jonathan Flora, to talk about their newly released 9/11 remembrance film. Deborah serves as executive producer, and Jonathan wrote and directed the project, which Ashe caught at a private screening the night before recording. Rather than retreading conspiracy angles, the film focuses on something Ashe felt strongly about, t...

Jon Herold and Zak Paine open with breaking news out of the Supreme Court, breaking down a ruling that blocks new USPS mail ballot rules from taking effect before the 2026 midterms, and what that means for election integrity heading into the fall. The back half of the show shifts into much darker territory as the guys examine an anonymous online post alleging decades of abuse inside a prominent Ho...

Ghost jumps on for a surprise live show and finds a lot to unpack. He opens with Trump's off the cuff comments on Irish unification during his Ireland trip, which somehow snowballs into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland signing a joint pact toward independence from the UK, something Ghost frames as a genuine win for local sovereignty rather than the doom certain corners of the internet are sell...

The battle of the sexes returns for round three, and this time it's a full crossover between Y-Chromes and Alphas Make Sandwiches. Ash, Christy, and Jackie face off against Brian and Cam (poor Alpha forfeits by absence) in an AI-generated, Jeopardy-style trivia gauntlet that starts civil with sports, music, and movies, then gets gleefully lopsided once the categories turn to Glow Up, Herstory, Man...

Jon Herold kicks off Vegas conference week digging into the fallout from Joe DiGenova's resignation from the Fort Pierce grand jury investigation, reporting new CNN details about an apparent clash with Todd Blanche over a denied secure facility request, and connecting it to his broader theory that Blanche may not be the white hat everyone assumes. He spends the back half of the show unpacking Trum...

A short and sweet one, since the crew is doubling up before the Battle of the Sexes show. Alpha is out sick, which spawns a whole riff on how men become helpless ten-year-olds the moment they catch a fever while women like CannCon's wife power through food poisoning to go work a bar shift. Alpha earns the permanent nickname "Princess" for his trouble. The bulk of this one is a rapid Week 2 pick-em...

CannCon kicks off the new solo Monday format, with Zak Paine moving to Tuesdays, and a heads up that he is headed to Las Vegas for art week. The show opens with CBS finally catching up to a story CannCon has been covering for months, involving a foreign national quietly using American surrogates and imported fertilized embryos on a scale nobody is tracking, and why he sees it as the strongest argu...

JB White is coming off a big weekend, with the Gators handling Campbell and his beloved Jaguars taking down Cleveland, and he brings that victory lap energy into a wide ranging Monday show. He digs into a closely watched Massachusetts criminal trial and the debate swirling around one holdout juror, then pivots into a candid, unfiltered discussion about language, reclaimed words and what he sees as...

Josh Reid flies solo this Sunday, with Alpha Warrior home sick, and turns it into his first solo Badlands show. On the itinerary: the AI fear porn cycle and why the doom mongering matters for what comes next technologically, plus a Peter Thiel clip Josh reads as secretly on the right side of the argument. From there it is Trump against the globalists, framed as an unfolding fight with the old guar...

Solo show, take three. Burning Bright opens Episode 82 fighting a dying microphone and cheerfully choosing between two audio disasters until he can fix his setup after Vegas. This is the every-other-week format he is experimenting with: not a polished presentation but his version of a live dig, a "cognitive cascade" that stitches seemingly disconnected headlines together in real time. He warns you...

Jonathan Drake opens up about quitting his job before diving into Proposition 3 and the meaty Proposition 4 of Spooner's poverty essay, where the real target becomes usury laws. His case is that capping interest rates does not protect borrowers, it locks the very people who need capital most out of the market entirely, funneling wealth into fewer hands and trapping everyone else in generational wa...