Badlands Media

Frankie Val settles in for a rainy Thursday with cousin Sherry riding shotgun in the studio. The opening stretch dissects the endlessly re-aired Candace Owens versus Andrew Wilson debate, why Frankie lands somewhere near "Candace proximity" without joining a tribe, and how the whole spectacle folds back into the year long Charlie Kirk case and what he calls true crime psychosis.
From there the show wanders in classic fashion. The Library of Congress buries a 250th anniversary time capsule holding synthetic DNA, a Coca Cola bottle, an iPhone, and the Phillies lineup, not to be opened until the year 2276. There's nostalgia bait too, teasing a future Great American Sleepover episode about the pre Internet slumber party.
It closes on the eerie: a replay of that infamous Las Vegas 911 call reporting eight to ten foot aliens in a backyard. Raffle night as always.

The Rose Garden gets a very unexpected guest of honor this time: an actual IndyCar, gorgeous, roaring, and parked right next to the podium ahead of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix. The event centers on First Lady Melania Trump's Fostering the Future initiative, which just added Indiana University and Purdue to its growing list of 26 partner schools offering foster youth a path to college and career. Roger Penske, Doug Bowles, and Fox Sports' Eric Shanks each take a turn praising the partnership before four IndyCar champions, including two recently naturalized American citizens, roll up to present the First Lady with a gift and talk about Sunday's historic 250 mile race through the streets of Washington D.C., past the Capitol and the Washington Monument. It's part scholarship celebration, part racing preview, with genuine warmth around what happens to foster kids once they age out of the system and why this initiative matters.

CannCon and Ashe in America continue through The New Alchemy section of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, landing on Chapter 12: Sink the Lusitania. This week the hosts dig into JP Morgan's role financing England and France during World War I, and the far less patriotic reasons America may have ended up in that war at all. They trace the origin story most of us learned in school, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and challenge the idea that it was ever really the cause rather than just the spark. Expect a hard look at how loans, politics, and a certain infamous ship collided to shift American public opinion, along with the hosts' usual candid detours into modern health, big pharma, and everything in between. Heavy subject matter this week, handled with the show's signature mix of bluntness and heart.

Jon Herold deals with a wave of fraudulent charges on his own bank card while running a genuinely slow Thursday show, leaning heavily on chat interaction. He covers the national debt officially crossing 40 trillion dollars, plays a Scott Bessent clip on whether the deficit has peaked, and digs into reports that the FBI seized former Congressman Eric Swalwell's electronics amid a sexual misconduct investigation. Other topics include Trump's sweeping new economic pressure campaign against Iran, a DOE critical minerals funding announcement, and a look at how both anti Trump Democrats and the Freedom Caucus are struggling in this year's primaries. The chat also pulls Jon into a lengthy, somber discussion of an ongoing Massachusetts murder trial that dominates a good chunk of the show. Sponsor reads, a new Badlands group chat setup, and plenty of live chat banter round out a lighter but talkative Thursday.

CannCon and Alpha Warrior open with a spirited debate over the national debt, the Federal Reserve, and whether the president can actually fix an economy that constitutionally belongs to Congress, sparked by a rant from the chat and a batch of new Trump comments on Bitcoin and interest rates. They also work through a chat claim about Bitcoin's origins that does not survive contact with the numbers. From there it is a look at University of Michigan scrapping letter grades for freshmen and the Army walking back tougher ROTC academic standards. The back half covers Michigan's election bureau moving to kill a proof of citizenship ballot measure over a thousand signature sample, a painful Sean Hannity cleanup attempt after a rough debate moment in South Carolina, and Israeli airstrikes in Syria that drew an unusually pointed rebuke from a US ambassador. A packed Thursday with plenty of friendly disagreement.

Shipwreck is fired up this week, unloading on Nancy Mace's new YouTube channel and the wider grievance politics swirling around Congress, immigration, grocery prices, and Chuck Grassley. She works through a Gnostic breakdown of the hylic archetype and how it shapes her view of people who seem checked out from anything deeper than politics, sports, or the weather. There is real vulnerability too, a story about seeing God the moment her youngest was born, and a candid rundown of the lifestyle changes she has made this year: quitting drinking, losing weight, cutting back on doom scrolling, and cooking more at home. She also shares a wild local story about a small town fighting a proposed data center. It is raw, unfiltered, and occasionally uncomfortable, exactly what regulars expect from Shipwreck when she has had enough. Next week she is joined by Kyle Seraphin.

Jon Herold and Burning Bright open with a mystery eye injury bit before pivoting to celebrate, ironically, the country officially crossing forty trillion dollars in debt. From there it's a full rundown of the week's declassifications, including an Eric Swalwell related document that's more interesting for how it got declassified than what's actually in it, plus new filings in the James Comey case that Herold still isn't convinced amounts to anything real.
There's a segment on the former NIAID official who quietly pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges without much media attention, a discussion on US sanctions against the International Criminal Court president, and a longer debate about whether Comey could plausibly be guilty of something bigger than what's currently charged. The guys also touch on Venezuela, voting machine history, and revisit the ever popular Epstein files question. Dense news week, delivered with the usual banter.

Cam Cooksey steps in as a new co host alongside Chris Ponder and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast for a scale bending episode that zooms out from your neighborhood block all the way to the edges of the observable universe, and back down to the quantum level. The trio maps how the "paragon" framework, the idea of the universe itself as one giant information system, can replace encryption with something far simpler: truth that's written directly into the structure of reality, impossible to fake without instantly sticking out. Along the way, expect a fun mental exercise involving cosmic latitude and longitude, a breakdown of why Bitcoin still needs trust in its coders, and a walk through how buildings, blocks, and cities fit into the same pattern as galaxies and superclusters. It's ambitious, a little dizzying, and genuinely fascinating.

Trump gathers a genuine who's who of finance, crypto, and tech ahead of the CFTC's first Innovation Advisory Committee meeting, and the room reads like a highlight reel: Coinbase, Robinhood, Kraken, Ripple, Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Winklevoss twins all in one place. Expect a victory lap on firing Gary Gensler, launching the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and signing the Genius Act, plus a full court press for the upcoming Clarity Act vote from CFTC and SEC chairs alike. Between industry testimonials on tokenization and stablecoins, Trump veers into interest rates, AI data centers, and a genuinely spicy comparison of America's borrowing costs to Switzerland's. The Q&A afterward wanders even further, touching Canada tariffs, North Korea, term limits, and Iran sanctions, because apparently no roundtable stays on topic for long around here. It's a packed room, a packed agenda, and a whole lot of enthusiasm about America's crypto future.

Jon Herold welcomes back Ghost for a deep geopolitical breakdown, replaying an old clip of Ghost's David's Corridor prediction before diving into the Mecca Accords, a Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Turkey defense pact he calls bigger than the Abraham Accords, and a web of new oil pipeline deals connecting Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran. Ghost also unpacks a reported Tulsi Gabbard back channel with IRGC leadership, the timing behind Assad's in absentia death sentence, and his theory on where the Syria nuclear material narrative actually originated. Jon separately covers a former Fauci advisor's guilty plea, new US sanctions on ICC officials, a Trump and Canada tariff pause tied to reviving the Keystone pipeline, and a Moderna cancer vaccine breakthrough he views with some skepticism. Sponsor reads, market updates, and a preview of tonight's Power Hour round out a busy Wednesday show.