Badlands Media

The crew tackles a genuinely interesting theory this week: that Sam Altman and other AI lab heads are quietly begging governments for regulation while China's open weight models keep blowing up their plans, essentially forcing an AI arms race nobody asked for. There's also a dive into why NATO officials seem baffled by JD Vance's silence on the Iran war, some spicy speculation about the Adelson fa...

Host Matt Trump invites you to grab your passport for a summer abroad, trading the just-finished World Cup for a walking tour of one of the most talked-about square miles on Earth: the City of London. Styling himself as the Rick Steves of Badlands and armed with a guidebook he bought in London back in 2000 (and is only now actually reading), he drops you off at Bank Station and strolls past Mansio...

Ghost comes in hot off his third recording of the day for a whiplash inducing news cycle. The big story is the US Saudi civilian nuclear deal, signed one day and seemingly upended by Trump the next with a surprise Abraham Accords condition. Ghost walks through the CNN and Zero Hedge reporting, then spends serious time explaining why he thinks the whole "confusion" narrative is theater aimed at a v...

Four companies just did something nobody's pulled off in over fifty years, and Trump is here to celebrate every second of it. This one kicks off with a genuine nuclear power milestone, private reactors going critical for the first time in decades, before sliding into a sprawling press Q&A that somehow covers the Saudi nuclear deal fallout, a blunt assessment of Iran's crumbling military, and a...

Jon Herold wraps up the week digging into the newly passed 1.5 trillion dollar NDAA, flagging a notable change that swaps "Military Information Support Operations" back to psychological and cognitive warfare language, plus a new brain performance enhancement program for Special Operations Forces. He weighs in on Politico polling showing Americans think gas prices are worse than they actually are,...

CannCon and Chris Paul open with California's Attorney General quietly rewording a voter ID ballot measure to sound far more restrictive than it actually is, and dig into why the polling on this issue is so lopsided in the first place. From there they play a clip of Elon Musk pushing back hard on a European interviewer's framing of mainstream border and spending policies as far right extremism. Th...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright pull the trigger on Tarantino's 1992 debut, and it turns into one of those episodes that wanders in the best possible way before it even gets to the movie. Expect detours into AI generated political speeches quoting Scorsese films, a deep dive on Grok's credibility problem, and a genuinely wild story about an AI detection tool that can be fooled just by rearranging a...

Frankie Val scrapped the whole show at 3:45pm and went solo, which somehow makes for one of the more freewheeling nights in a while. Up top: Russian warlocks charging desperate motorists $210 to lift hexes off their fuel tanks, because alchemy beats a mechanic. Then things sober up with the $1.15 trillion NDAA, Section 219, and a bipartisan revolt over deeper US and Israel defense tech integration...

CannCon and Ashe in America dive into Chapter 9 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, tracing the origin story of fractional reserve banking itself. This week the hosts follow the money from ancient Greece and Egypt through the banking hubs of Damascus, Barcelona, and Venice, where things get interesting fast. They walk through the rise and fall of early banks that tried to stay...

Trump heads to the EPA to expand his Ratepayer Protection Pledge, the plan that has tech giants footing the bill for the data centers powering the AI race instead of everyday electricity customers. Expect a parade of governors and utility CEOs getting shoutouts for freezing rates, eliminating property taxes, and handing out surprise bonuses to school teachers, all while Trump makes the case that A...

A special bonus episode, and a personal one. Ghost opens with some real life news of his own (nothing dramatic, just change on the horizon) before diving into Trump's Oval Office meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun. They cover the new US Lebanon framework aimed at ending hostilities with Israel, why Ghost thinks the real standoff is between Trump and Netanyahu rather than Lebanon and Hezbo...

Jon Herold runs through a busy Thursday news cycle starting with House Republicans joining Democrats on a symbolic war powers vote aimed at Trump's Iran authority, plus fresh Truth Social posts on the Saudi civil nuclear deal and a pointed warning to the Houthis. He digs into a Wall Street Journal report on Schumer's closed door "election doomsday" tabletop exercises, drawing comparisons to the 20...

Ashe in America and Ghost close out Season 4 of The Chosen with episode eight, "Humble," and they are not holding back on how much this finale delivers. The theme running through the whole season crystallizes here as humility and ego collide across nearly every storyline, from the Pharisees Shmuel and Yusuf finally reckoning with what they witnessed after Lazarus was raised, to Judas drifting furt...

CannCon kicks off with some bittersweet news as Ghost announces he is heading back to a full time day job, meaning fewer daily appearances but not a full goodbye. From there they dig into Jack Smith getting hit with a criminal referral over testimony to Congress, plus a very telling comment from President Trump about China that raises more questions than it answers. The back half is a Ghost geopol...

Buckle up, because this briefing tries to cram in a World Series celebration, a Correspondents Dinner preview, tax refund bragging rights, and a Saudi nuclear deal with strings attached, all before lunch. The press secretary walks through record breaking tax refund numbers, a data center ratepayer pledge expanding to cover 80% of American power delivery, and a civil nuclear agreement with Saudi Ar...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright pick up the thread from the last two episodes, breaking down their reactions to the election fraud disclosure now that the dust has settled, and floating a theory that the intelligence community, not the election itself, might have been the real target all along. There's also a look back at the Saturday deep dive Herold did with Chris Paul going through the declassifi...

The House just passed a bill deepening US-Israel military ties, and Shipwreck is trying to sort fact from panic while also side-eyeing South Carolina's newest senator (hi, Lindsey Graham's sister). She revisits why she never needed Candace Owens to tell her something felt off about Charlie Kirk, reacts to the military's new testosterone policy backlash, and unpacks the marketing con behind protein...

Josh Reid joins Chris Ponder and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast to push the "Tools for Truth" framework further, tackling one big idea: the universe itself is information, and if you can learn to structure it, you can out-think even AI. Josh brings a healthy dose of skepticism from last episode and asks the questions you're probably asking too, while Chris breaks down the "information operation n...

Trump heads to Marietta for a full victory lap rally that somehow covers the Trump savings accounts, drug pricing negotiations with Emmanuel Macron, a Dover Air Force Base tribute, and a very enthusiastic case against communism, all with the Atlanta Braves' CEO and Hall of Fame manager making a cameo. Expect a parade of Georgia candidates getting the full endorsement treatment, several families sh...

Jon Herold gets fired up for tonight's Power Hour while working through a batch of newly posted declassification documents Trump shared overnight, including Michigan's fraudulent voter registration numbers, non citizen voting data from a handful of states, and a CIA rundown of Chinese election influence tactics. He plays clips of Pete Hegseth defending a $1.5 trillion defense budget request and Tr...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior dig into a fast moving story out of New Jersey, where thousands of people who marked themselves as non citizens somehow still ended up registered to vote, and hundreds of them actually cast ballots. The hosts trace how this same software issue is popping up in state after state, turning a supposedly rare problem into something that looks a lot bigger than officials want t...

Alpha Warrior and Josh Reid go long this week, starting with a General Kane budget speech that turns into a masterclass on how modern warfare is changing. From there they dig into what a mountain fortress in Iran might mean for classified weapons, why China keeps showing up behind the scenes of every major flashpoint, and how energy, chips, and rare earth minerals fit into a much bigger global che...

Fresh off President Trump's big election speech, CannCon and Ashe in America bring on a heavy hitter: True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht, one of the original voices in the election integrity world. She revisits the Georgia GBI saga, the Konnech story that sent her from FBI briefings to a stage in the Arizona desert telling a room to stop filming, and a $5 million check that raised more qu...

Ghost sits down with geopolitical analyst Firas Modad of the Lotus Eaters for a sprawling, two hour conversation that covers an enormous amount of ground. They dig into the stalemate in Iran, the shifting alliance between Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and why Israel keeps finding itself on the outside looking in. From there the discussion turns philosophical, touching on multipolarity,...

CannCon and Ashe open with a run of immigration stories, from a fiery ICE protest in Manhattan to a viral grandmother arrest story that looks far less sympathetic once the full record comes out, plus a controversial farm worker amnesty bill splitting the GOP. From there they dig into New York's mayor tangled up in an awkward Iran and Israel mixup while trying to leverage an international court aga...