Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 178: Mercy

Episode Date: July 31, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright take on this year's Amazon original about a near future AI dystopia, and yes, they clock the irony of Amazon making a movie about the machine while being a very large piece of the machine themselves. They dig into how the film handles its "will the AI save us or enslave us" premise without tipping too hard in either direction, trade notes on director Timur Bekmambetov's earlier work, and needle the production for looking like it was shot in about a day and a half. From there the conversation drifts into bigger territory, accountability, justice, and who really owes who an apology for the last several years. Expect some sharp back and forth on personal responsibility that goes well beyond the movie itself. Stick around for next week's pick, a recent Netflix whodunit from a director they have very mixed feelings about.

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That's Badlandsmedia.tv slash strength code Badlands. And you know, I'd say it wasn't a good sell if Jordan was like super out of shape or something, but he's in pretty good shape. He's scampering around every time we go to Gart. He's apparently like a professional level frisbee player. Yeah, he does like scampering. He's got some skills at like lifetime sports. Yeah.

That's what they used to call them back when I was in high school. We would have like a certain part of gym class that would be devoted to lifetime sports and everybody would be pissed off that we were not playing basketball, which we should have been. Lifetime sports? Yeah, yeah. You know, like golf and tennis. and stuff like that. Oh, that you could do for your whole lifetime.

Yeah, exactly, yes. Jordan still does some pretty fast sports. It's bold. You mean that they're not lifetime sports is what you're saying? Yeah, he runs around pretty quick. Well, I'm not trying to sell his physicality short. Yeah. Just, I mean, I wouldn't risk it with my ACL, but that's it.

Yeah, I wouldn't risk anything. I would risk Jordan's ACL. Yes. All right, he'll be very happy to hear that. Okay, enough of enough of that. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Badlands Story Hour. I'm Chris Paul.

That's Burning Bright. And tonight we are discussing Mercy, a film that came out this year. It's written by Marco Van Bell, directed by Timur Beck Mambadov, and starring Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson. It was an Amazon movie, came out on Amazon. I mentioned that only because this movie is overtly about a potential future version of the machine. And Amazon, of course, is a big part of the machine. You know, we have, obviously everybody knows about the fact that they deliver products

and are in some sense replacing the postal service. They're also replacing a lot of what we used to do in terms of in person shopping at brick and mortars, but they also have Amazon Web Services, and that same Amazon Prime program gets their free television programming into people's houses. And it used to be that you could just stream things, but now they play commercials every 10 minutes during the thing that you're paying to stream. So it's just an all-consuming version, commercialized version of the machine that has you in numerous different ways. They sell their, I think the ring product is theirs.

So they have the security camera on the outside of your house. Amazon has a pretty large chunk of the potential tech dystopia in-house. And so it's interesting to see a movie like this where they engage with that potential tech dystopia and kind of work their way through it. And all that said, I think that they do a reasonable job handling this material. And this is my second time watching it. So I think that this is your first. Yeah, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Yeah, John actually had watched this earlier this year when it came out and had suggested that we do it as well. Yeah, I would agree with the last point there that I thought I went in expecting a strong leaning one way or the other. And I did think that it was pretty deft about how it sort of navigated the, are the machines going to kill us and enslave us, or are they going to help us against the evil humans? It was, you know, not a cut and dry thing, which I appreciate. I didn't even think about it until, because I guess I wasn't consciously aware of who the director is. I used to follow this guy quite a bit because Timmer, Timmer Beck, Beckmanbatov, because I was a big fan of his, Russian films. Specifically, he did a movie called Night Watch in 2004. I wasn't thinking of that while I was watching this, but Nightwatch is a good movie of its time, but interesting kind of supernatural sort of thing over in Russia. He also did Wanted in 2008 with James McAvoy. That

introduced me to James McAvoy and one of the, I'd say one of the better actors in Hollywood these days. So he's got some good stuff under his belt. He hasn't done anything big in quite a while. I liked the movie. I thought, you know, I had joked with John last night on the power hour. This is one of those movies that from like a cynical just production standpoint, I was like, how much did you guys spend on this? Because this is an easy day's work. You get Chris Pratt in there. You throw a green screen behind him. And then you get Rebecca Ferguson to like get on Zoom for a day or two and record the lines, which, hey, it's fine. Given the premise, I thought I was going to be bored and kind of agitated with it. And I was not.

I thought it was well done. I thought it moved it a good clip and it didn't wear out its welcome, which was good. But yeah, I think what you mentioned about the Amazon, I guess I'd call it the stack. It's interesting because there's this concept in the tech world. A lot of people probably heard long before the age of AI of the walled garden, the most famous example of this. I don't know if they came up with this terminology, but it was Apple. Apple's whole approach to consumer products and to technology,

one of the ways that they kind of revolutionized modern technology is that they had no interest in playing nice with other systems. They had no interest in open source anything. They had no interest in making it's easier, for Apple customers to interface with Microsoft products or whatever it is, right? Like if you buy an Android, F you as far as Apple's concerned. And that was kind of like a Steve Jobs directive, we're told, because they wanted a walled garden where you were either an Apple person or you were not an Apple person.

And what you described with Amazon, I think is a little beyond that. It's less that they're trying to create a walled garden approach where you only use Amazon products. They've actually almost created a technological nature preserve in which all other companies, including tech companies, are in that preserve that Amazon controls, building their own walled gardens. So all these cute companies are like, we got a walled garden, and we got a walled garden. You can be our products or their products. All of them are using Amazon. And I think you mentioned, I'm not sure if you mentioned this one, but the biggest, the biggest, basically asymmetric and concerning tech stack that Amazon has is AWS, Amazon Web Services. I mean, most of the internet and most data in the world runs through Amazon servers.

And that's a big problem. And that goes to some of the more interesting theories that have been bounced around the truth community for quite a while. in terms of Donald Trump and TMTG and Rumble servers. And I always think it's interesting when we get, I mean, even right now, we've got Elon Musk with getting into that game and challenging Amazon on that game. So, you know, at the time, 10 years ago, AWS was a big deal in terms of information. But now that AI, now that we're clearly in like the public-facing acceleration phase of AI

as a consumer-facing technology, it makes the who has the data and who controls the data even more relevant than it was 10 years ago. Yeah, the who has the data thing, I think, is one of the most important questions. And I think that there's at least ample reason with some of the with the uproar about the kind of roller coaster saga of the TikTok purchase. you know, the divestments in America of TikTok, where all that data was going to go, the fact that it went to Oracle, then the fact that the Ellisons ended up being the ones taking TikTok over. Where is all that data? I saw, you know, Joe Lang mentioned recently the all of those IP addresses that the DOD shifted in the last moments of Trump's first term and the strangeness of that. And we always thought maybe there was, something of a crossover there. And then I kind of just immediately, oh, all the data.

Yeah, so that was one of the real foundational ideas that I wrote about in that piece, the great cloud in the sky. All this data actually, presumably, at least theoretically, if it all exists in one place or it's all accessible through one channel. And you have superintelligent AI, connected to that with ample power to access and analyze all that information. Well, presumably you can pretty much know just about everything, about just about everyone, and considering how many parts of our world are controlled already by artificial intelligence,

which is to say algorithms, which is to say just a function of successful competition. The philosopher Nick Land believes that AI and capitalism are, are essentially indistinguishable. And I think it makes sense to talk about it that way. So a lot of our world is actually already formed and already directed by algorithms. And Amazon's one of the best possible examples of that because it, among other things, obviously,

as we just said, is a highly advanced logistical system that is able to take physical products, place them wherever they are going to need them all around the world, and then deliver them to not random but effectively random locations you don't know who's going to buy they probably the thing i'm hesitating on is they probably do know who's going to buy what the next day yeah they can probably influence people into doing that they have records of people's usage and or average usage and the rest of it so they are figuring out where things need to go they're getting them there

immediately and then when you think about how many steps of that logistical change have to be controlled centrally from Amazon to be able to make that whole chain work, well, it's working, it's a system, and then that system, each and every aspect of that system, has knock on consequences in the real world. And so if drivers are bypassing the same convenience store when they run out of gas every day, well, they're going to be at that convenience store every day filling up. While they're filling up, they're probably going to be in there buying their daily coffee at that convenience store. And you have a thousand Amazon drivers doing that.

And you can create a local economy somewhere where there never was one before. And then other factors happen out of that. So the power of a centralized entity like this doing this particular work, I think is insane. And I'll pause there. And then we can get into some of what we think those ultimate effects are in like the conclusions to that. But I'll just leave it there for a second. Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that. And I think there's a lot of concerns.

Again, a lot of times we have these conversations. Like, I find myself on the pro-Rebecca Ferguson side of the equation, which, I mean, good move with that one there. I see what they're doing. It's easier. It's easier to give yourself over to the machine when it looks like Rebecca Ferguson and not Elena Kagan. Yeah, imagine if it was like Jack Black. or something, I'd be like, get this out of here, Rebecca Ferguson. I'm like, yeah, I mean, sure, whatever she says.

But the, yeah, one of the interesting things, and I think you can apply this, I'll apply it to the scenario you just laid out, but I think you can apply it to many scenarios. This is where I find myself playing devil's advocate quite a bit, because many people do consider AI essentially, the coming of the devil or the singularity, which I'm not saying that that's even ridiculous to think. But one of the, you know, I've talked about this with safety and things like that and vehicle mortalities.

That's more autonomy. But it's all the same stuff, right? All this emanates from data and artificial intelligence. And what you're talking about is the physical manifestation data in the real world. And you're right to point out that before we add Tesla's driving around and before we get into you in the next five to 10 years, it seems highly likely we are going to have humanoid. robots doing stuff. We are going to have like it's going to be a lot stranger in the future, in the near future. But you're right to point out that even 10 plus years ago, Amazon was essentially already doing physical real world AI in that they are changing the ecosystem of

real towns and communities and commerce and economies. And I guess, though, when you bring up Nick Land, I don't know what his views are, but when you said on this, But when you said capitalism and AI, what it makes me think of is exactly that scenario of going, OK, well, you could point that out and say like, this is bad. Look at the power of a centralized system like this. But then you could look at it another way and say, so if the end state of capitalism is to, or markets, is essentially to create a naturalistic equilibrium, wherein people are being served and able to serve their needs and wants as frictionlessly as possible, then Amazon has done that.

I mean, it's kind of funny because my wife and I literally yesterday were talking about how me and my dad did my master bathroom over a couple of weeks and we're going to buy some stuff for it. And we're going to buy just a shelf. Like on our downstairs bathroom, it's probably like a $50, $60 just shelf of a certain, you know, freestanding kind of thing. Like, let's just get that for the upstairs bathroom. Like, where'd you get it?

She's like, oh, I don't know, probably like Walmart or Target or this or that or this or that. So she went to like three different places in our area, physical, real world that exist. Not there. Nobody has anything like this right now. A fucking shelf. So what do we do? We're going to Amazon. That's what we're doing.

And like, it's a self-fulfilling loop because you're like, are these things not in the physical stores? because everyone's going to Amazon and the physical stores have less inventory. Like, is that what's going on? But it's just, it's difficult because you can feel inherently like, man, I don't like doing all my shopping on Amazon, but I need a thing. And that's where it is. And, you know, it's kind of like, it just makes me think sometimes, you know, if people want like a stronger argument against some of these things, then they should be serving people

in ways that the machine is not. And I guess the other side of it is for people concerned about even the stuff that we talk about as well, your phone's listening to you and then it's trying to sell you something. It's like, well, then get a stronger sense of self-control.

And I think, to transition into this movie, I'll pass it to you, I think there's a healthy version of that argument kind of playing out in the subtext of this movie. where I didn't think it was defending AI or lionizing it. I didn't think it was a rug pull in favor of hand your data over to the AI. I think it was more a bit of a pragmatic vision of saying, this is the world of this film.

And Chris Pratt's character basically throws a hissy fit for five minutes. And then he's like, okay, let me try to use this tool and see what I can do with it to like pull myself. out of this. And that's kind of how I feel about people complaining. Like, I just was talking about something and you two tried to sell me a truck. And it's like, well, do you want the truck? Do you need a truck? Then why are we crying about that? You know, it's like besides the fact that what else is that being used for? My long-term view that I've mentioned many times on this show with you is they were doing this shit to us for a long time. And I think people's viewpoints on the main streaming of this stuff, depends entirely on how much you think this was already happening and how much you think it's just happening now.

Yeah, certainly that part of the perspective shift is, I think what triggers a lot of people. You know, they don't, people ultimately do not want to understand their world is much different in important ways that affect their spiritual views. And that's the period that we're in right now. and it's unavoidable. And so some people are bored just understanding, hey, I'm going to have to deal with this. Let's just go ahead and deal with it. And there are other people who are going to try to avoid this thing,

it seems at all cost. I want to go back just a minute, though, to some of the AI and capitalism stuff. So Nick Land essentially takes the view of capitalism that the urge for competition, The fact that you need to continually become more efficient and create more profits in a competitive marketplace is what makes that recursive factor. You make more money and you want to take that money and invest it back into the business so that you can make more money in the future and stay ahead of the competition. And so AI has some of that in its nature as well.

But the thing is, and I think that we kind of grant this too easily to capitalism, and this isn't an anti-capitalist rent, it's to point out that the capitalism we discuss is actually not free markets. The United States does not have free markets. The capitalist world so-called is just controlled economies the same way as if it was under the banner of socialism or fascism or state capitalism or stakeholder capitalism or any of these other is. They are all different labels on what is from the topmost point, just the global regime financial and economic structure of the world. If you separate, if you take free markets and then regulate them, and you know, you can have arguments about whether small amounts of regulation throw this two off track to make it to, to so to the point where it loses its function. And we can have those around the margins, I suppose. But if you regulate the free markets, you are taking away the free part of it.

And then it's a controlled market. And a controlled market is not the same thing. And to the extent to which capitalism, as we know it, is controlled markets, well, that's kind of the same model that we, you're being sold for AI. They're saying this thing out of control is going to destroy everything. Therefore, we need to control it because we're the only people with the sort of power that can control.

And we can summon the sort of expertise that's going to tell us how to control it properly. But I wouldn't believe any of those people have the slightest idea of how to control it. And the point that made in the great cloud in the sky is, if this thing is the great scale, monster that they say it is, they have no hope of controlling. It's already way too late for them. And if it's not that great scary monster, then they're really just asking so that we, they're asking for us to empower the government. And that's it.

And they can't solve the problem in the first place. So they would just be extracting additional power, which is what all of these existential crises that they create are. are ultimately used for. And this has been my main thing the last couple of weeks, just the topic I've been the most interested in. A conversation we had this morning triggered me to do a follow up to a 2025 article I wrote called

Reality Wars about the financial markets, but it's largely related to what you just said. But the last couple of weeks I've been talking about this AI stuff. And when you talk about, you know, it's so obvious. And I'm not even saying I was some super genius to call this two weeks ago, because we've, as you just pointed out, we've been pointing out this macro trend for a long time of what these kind of people would try to do to get control of this emergent technology or to maintain control of it. But a couple weeks ago, when I saw Sam Altman and Dario Amade flying over to Australia and talking, you know, they're talking all these governments. Altman keeps appealing to Congress. I'm going, man, seems an awful lot like the Open AI guys.

really want the government to regulate them super hard. And our best friends in China just keep coming out every time they do it. It's like a comedy to me where like once you see it and we talked about this, I think we were the only ones like Badlands are the only ones talking about back in January 2025, I believe it was the deep seek deployment, the timing of the deep seek deployment was a massive immediate rug pull on OpenAI. There was a new open AI closed weight model coming out in a matter of days that the entire AI industry was talking about as being this major disruption and this force multiplier for their stock and thus they're standing. You know, it's the it's that age old in financial markets winner takes most is one of the sayings, right? It's not about who ends up getting the technology in the future.

It's who builds that garden around the technology fast. Who gets all the investment in series B, C, D? And that's what OpenAI was going to get on the back of this. And they got rubbed so hard in January by an open-weight, open-source model out of China that basically was supposedly doing a lot of the stuff their new model was going to be doing, but it was open-source and open-weight and super cheap to run. So they canceled that model. And now in the last couple of weeks, we have this whole narrative of Sam-Ault,

and Dario Amadee begging the government to regulate them, the government kind of hesitating or hemming and hawing, China coming out with a bunch of open source shit right away, and then supposedly an open AI model escaping contagion and going on a rampage and attacking hugging face, which is an open weight, a source, it is a marketplace for open weight AI models. So you have a closed weight AI model controlled by people who want to be regulated because they say AI is unsafe. And their AI model gets out and attacks the companies pushing open weight AI models. And then Altman starts testifying to Congress about how dangerous his own product is. And oh, by the way, guys, Altman was the one who announced that their model got out.

It wasn't like Hugging Face said that it got out and it was the guys at Open AI. He was like, ah, guys, you know, you know, I was telling you that we might lose control of this stuff. It got out. You know, like I can't believe it. Could you please regulate me immediately, daddy government? So, you know, it's just like the positive note on this is that these guys are being so transparent in what they're trying to do that I can't help but think this technology or rather the step changes in it are going so fast that they are. losing it and I think they know that they're losing it and I think China is helping us make sure they lose it but that you know I think that's kind of the argument that I've really

focused on an AI and I think it relates to this this movie a lot of it deals with AI is a macro but also the system the systems implementation and control of that AI module is really what's presented as the adversary in this movie and on that I would agree Yeah, I wonder about that. I'm not totally sold on the nature of Sam Altman's character at this point. And I'm so interested to see where all this goes. And that said, you may well be right about absolutely all of that. I'm not asserting that I don't think that you are. There's just something off about it that I can't. Like something's not locking fully into place for me on the whole thing. And of course, can't because we don't have enough information to kind of make final judgments there. But it seems like that there's another turn here. Elon Musk is so good at judas goading people and leading them astray on some of these stories. And he goes so over the top about Sam Altman that I don't know. Something just something seems a little bit wrong. It's very cartoonish. It is. There's something. It's just, it's just.

too overt. I can't like I can't put my arms fully around that. Yeah, I get it. Knowing like where all this is coming from. But the reason I brought that up though and in general, regardless of the intentions there is that regardless, there is a very open and public push by the most powerful people in AI for the government to regulate them, which seems like not a great idea. And And by the way, in the past week, both Donald Trump and Howard Lutnik said that they are in favor of open weight models. So take that for what it's worth. But that seems to be, that seems to be a marker in the column of not regulating it. Yeah.

And I would expect Trump will probably get on board with regulating it very heavy at some point for a couple of days. He'll say something. And it'll make people go crazy for a little bit. And then it'll be backtracked. And that's fine. This is the conversation that needs to happen because the marketing campaign about AI taking over and the movies for many years and the rest of it has really created a deep sense of fear.

And this is just like nuclear weapons to me and the rest of it. When you extract the belief, when nobody believes it, then it doesn't have its effect any longer. And even if you're going to say that nuclear weapons are. real and very scary, we should at least acknowledge the fact that if one has ever been fired, it hasn't happened in 80 years. So in that 80 years, our geopolitics have been entirely run by the presence of this super weapon that is simply never used and never seen by anybody. And if we just extracted our fear from the super weapon, even it was only on the basis that

there's no way these fuckers are going to use that thing. The geopolitical effect that nuclear weapons have would be nullified. But I know that we can't do this because it's very important to us to cling on to our view of reality as we know it. So we have to reaffirm the importance of nuclear weapons and our need to fear them. But to back to back to the AI and capitalism thing, I think the other important part of the conversation that we were having this morning is related to Kevin Warsh and his press conference yesterday and the comments he made back in June where one of their real motivations,

his motivations as the chairman of the board of the Fed, right? Okay, yeah, I just want to make sure that I'm stating his title properly. One of his motivations and goals is to remove the Fed's communication. from its position as market maker and, like, chief market influence. Because what happens when he puts that information into this looping system is that it distorts the market. And if a market is distorted, then the people trying to operate a free market can't possibly get the information from the market to be able to operate. Now, if you're going to say that the operation of that market, the outside influence of that market, is already an undue manipulation that distorts the freedom of the market.

Well, I can probably get on board with that. But at the level of that discussion, in principle, at least he's right. They're distorting the information that the market would provide. And so, again, the same thing holds true for AI regulation. And this is one of the things, this is one of the main reasons why I don't find AI all that intimidating. Because the garbage going in and the garbage looping through, again in that recursive way, if all of the bad information from mainstream media, from Wikipedia, from Reddit, from all these sources that the AIs, the large language models, collect their data and then spit that data back out, if all that data is garbage, and we know,

that it is garbage, it's downstream from all of these polluted sources, the fake news, and the rest of it. That's what goes in. Then we have entire information ecosystems, systems, feeding off of that garbage information that is regurgitated back to them by the AI. And then they are inputting their opinions about that information, consensus forming. And when that consensus forms, The AI reads that as a new authoritative source of knowledge. And so it just spins back through again and again and again. And until the thing actually reasons with any sound logic, the chances of it getting past that problem, I don't see how it's going to happen. Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with that.

It's like a perpetual loop. And the comment you make on Warsh, in the article I referenced earlier, I wrote in March 2025, an article called reality wars. and it was all about basically combining the narrative deployment, at least, of Doge, with basically my 2024 and 5 obsession with Scott Besson. He was really the guy whose narrative deployments I was following most closely. He had made comments in 2024 about a great global reordering that he wanted to be a part of. You and I talk about the concept of the good reset versus the great reset. And we have been talking about this for years. So when I started seeing that terminology, you know, it was like, okay, well, if, if this guy is actually earnestly working with Donald Trump, that kind of sounds like some good reset terminology.

So that's why I kind of went autismo about all that. But the premise of that article was the futures market. So the whole premise of reality wars was the biggest matrix that we need to break that like normies and truthers don't pay any attention to is the future. market, aka the market. And it's kind of Hegelian in and of itself. What is the futures market? It's the whole market. So what is the market? Fake. The market is pulling forward future earnings or the opposite based on projections in the future, but it is pulling those earnings into the present and currently valuing companies based on future. projections. And then, because almost all trading now on a bulk level, on a level that actually moves markets, is algorithmic, you have algorithms making futures predictions that other algorithms are citing as the present and trading in real time based on a future that doesn't exist. And what does it do? It creates the future that does doesn't yet exist because if a company gets slammed, let's say by a hedge fund, I believe that hedge funds, now I'm not saying like your local hedge ebro who wears polos and golf several like six days a week, that this guy knows what's going on, but they're just useful idiots to this AI in the system. Hedge funds are there to destroy small companies or companies that kind of outrun the futures market. That's what I think hedge funds are for. They basically are there to short market disruptors to crash them down and then the present reality becomes that this company crash.

Well, no, it didn't crash. Its actuals might be totally fine. But the futures market that determines its current value crashed. So all the human investors followed the AI algorithms and pulled their capital out. So then the company actually did crash. So it creates, they pick winners and losers. And what Warsh is saying to your point is I said in 2025, Donald Trump needs to target the futures market. He needs to start going after the fact that we have a futures market that is algorithmically traded.

And what do the algorithms trade on? They literally trade on the language of the Fed chair, which I really only learned. I thought that that was, I thought the futures, the language of the Fed and all that stuff was human financial and analysts saying we're taking forward guidance on like a esoteric or logical term. That's not what it means. Those the forward guidance terminology is literally immediately run through all these AI trading algorithms like JP Morgan and BlackRock, all the market makers and immediately changes the market based on a future projection that the Fed chair hints at.

So my whole premise is that the reason the markets are freaking out over Kevin Warsh doing nothing, literally what he's done so far, is nothing. He hasn't said anything and he hasn't done anything. He's held rate steady, but he hasn't said he was going to hold rate steady. And because of that, I think the entire market is throwing a tantrum because there's no futures that they can build into it unless they do something radical, which is look. at company balance sheets and look at what companies do and use their brain and say, I think this company will be more valuable in the future, which was the original point of a futures market. And none of them actually know how to do that is what we're finding out. So I think this is why this is a long diatriab, but I think it's very encouraging. It's very encouraging that

is doing nothing right now. He's not going to do nothing forever. I think he's going to do something and he's going to do it in a way that markets don't expect. And I probably don't expect either. But I think it's very encouraging. I don't remember when it was, but it was within the last few weeks. Donald Trump has made a couple of comments recently about futures markets. And I think it was in the context of the oil markets on the back of the Iran war. And I took that as a really good marker that he does know about the futures markets, and he does know that the futures markets are a massive problem. And this doesn't mean we're not going to have futures markets,

but I think what they're trying to do is essentially punish algorithmic futures projections by saying, like, we're not going to provide any forward guidance, and I think Worse is going to rub pull them back and forth, and you're going to get these major funds blow up when they try to predict what he's going to do. and be wrong. And I wouldn't even be surprised if there's some game theory going on here on a human level in the Trump administration, where they figure out what the futures markets expect and literally do the opposite to blow up these funds. Because I think you need to put the fear of God into these traders to get them to stop speculating on all this kind of stuff because it just creates a fake market.

Yeah, you know, that makes me think of last night. So John and I over the weekend talked about the notice from TMTG that Trump's posts on Truth Social, they were going to sell like real-time access to them, which made me think of the Bloomberg terminal sort of thing. And I know that you guys discussed this last night on DPAH. But when you think about Fed being back under Treasury and Treasury, of course, you know. So I always talk about two forms of this, and we can get into this part of the discussion a little bit later, but we talk about Trump in the original constitutional form and then him operating within the construct as it exists right now. So in the original constitutional form, there is no room for independent agencies and certainly not an independent central bank that is actually a global regime construct embedded, quasi embedded in our government that pretends it's not in our

government at all. So if all of that is being moved properly to the extent that it exists at all, back under the executive branch, well, then Trump is the market mover of the executive branch. And so Trump as president is communicating through this one single platform, and I assume the reason that they feel motivated to sue on this, and they think that that's a good move for public optics and PR purposes is because Trump as president, this is public information, this is the American people's information with Trump as a leader of government. He cannot then monetize that information on his own social media platform, et cetera. And there's probably a long chain of argument that goes along those lines. I would suggest that I think that truth social will eventually

just become a public platform and part of the American birthright that I believe Trump is going to hand over to the people. But to the extent that that would share some parallels with the Bloomberg terminal concept, well, maybe Trump is replacing that that market signal and maybe the algorithms need to access that. Although that would be very interesting because then it's all linked in, one would think. So what that could do in terms of tracking? that information. I mean, this is purely speculation on my part. Yeah. But yeah, I think that maybe we'll see something that fits a pattern like that in the future. Yeah, I, I kind of, I like your framing of it better than my initial impression of it, because I hadn't seen this until John brought

it up last night. Just what it made me think of is, you know, I use the term narrative shielding a lot with Trump. And this would be like the opposite. This, uh, the other refrain I talk about that's the opposite of that is sort of the slings and arrows refrain where and you kind of talk about this in terms of Trump adopting these different positions this this is more actual and legal so maybe there's nothing to it but it just made me think if he is trying to blow up that kind of a template would he like suicide bomb himself into that template and set a precedent I think that's more of a stretch than what you're saying but I don't know like maybe It is sort of the honey trap type of thing of, oh, no, don't stop somebody with this kind of power in the markets from being able to influence markets by giving information in real time to the American people. Like what other templates could that be applied to? If they do set some precedent against Trump for doing this, whether it's intentional or not, could you then say, well, yeah, now the Fed Chair can't provide futures guidance.

That's what it should be. You shouldn't have the leader of the most powerful financial market. Never mind market maker, but market in the world, that being the U.S. dollar, or at least the Federal Reserve note, providing guidance to the future of the monetary system. Like, it's ridiculous. And again, it's like you could say, oh, well, we all have access to this information. Yeah, but we can't move markets based on this information. Retail can't. move markets based on this information. So I don't know. I mean, again, I think that's more of a stretch. But I always wonder when things seem like they're big scandals on Trump, is he trying to set the very precedence that he's going to then turn around and be like, hey, you said I couldn't do this. Then that means you can't either. Many such cases. Okay, so let's pause for a second. We will give a word from the wonderful soft disclosure and Zach Payne. And then we will get back into the film we can't stop for

thank you we have to deliver all of these soft disclosures gift cards he goes by Zach Hay the emotion detective it's great that song just that song just gets me pumped up

I cannot believe that that's true but it is true here's what's also if that commercial doesn't sell you on AI I don't think anything can for real guys Guys, just out. Badlands Media's announcement for the Great American Restoration Tour.

We are returning to Las Vegas, Nevada for the 13th stop. Wait, join us from Thursday. Yes, September 17th. I thought it said this Thursday. I was like, wait. You're like, what has happened? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Either I'm reading this wrong or I've done something terrible.

I think we've made a huge mistake. People will, people will know that reference in the chat, though not everyone, which makes it an inside joke. And I love those. So September 17th to September 19th, in person and virtual tickets available at badlandsmedia.com. Slash events, badlandsmedia.combe slash events. We will be at guard.

13 and I guess that's about six or seven short weeks seven short weeks let's say yeah it sounds right sounds right enough let's go with right enough okay so let's talk about let's talk about this movie we haven't we haven't done that a whole lot yeah so there are a bunch of big themes I think that are are relevant in this movie some of them have to do with our justice system and whether we would be better better served in a system like this or a system like we see in the movie, that's what I mean, or the one that we have today. Or are we getting tricked into the controlled opposition dynamic that tells us that we can

either have people running this system or AI running the very same system? And we're told that the machine will make the system more efficient, it'll make it more objective and we will get better results than we do from people. I don't know that I believe that, but I also don't know that figuring out which of those two evils is the lesser and the one we should choose is ultimately the real discussion. We might have much deeper problems with our judicial system, including what we believe to be evidence and the importance of that evidence. and the meaning of that evidence, because this system can call together the entire rule set, which is, you know, the laws, the statutes, whatever's on the books,

and then it can bring the set of contingent facts about the world to which it has access, but that's it. And the contingent facts about the world are not all there is. If the machine can engage with it, like we see, the machine engage. on the level which we see the machine engaged in this movie, fine, but I don't think that gets us all the way there. And I think that our problem is much deeper. Oh, yeah, I totally agree with that. And that's why I think it's hard to judge what the intent of the film is.

If it is coming down on one side or the other, I would say maybe it's bullish for this sort of AI integration. fusion, it seems to be suggesting, it seems to come to the conclusion, hey, this is imperfect, but all systems are imperfect, right? The human system was imperfect, a pure AI system is imperfect, but if you have a human and AI hybrid system, that's the way to go. And, you know, that's not a ridiculous notion. I think that if you want to steelman that notion, the movie does a pretty good job of steel manning that it's better, but it's sort of a lesser of two evils approach, like you said, and I think it ignores that the problem is the system itself and not who presides over it. So, and that's, you know, one of the things I was thinking about a lot while watching this

is something that I've taught to Ash about a lot and just thought about a lot over the last few years. my wife over a couple of years ago she she can't follow it anymore but a couple of years ago in the boston area there was this national scandal uh the karen reed trial local woman people in chat probably heard of this but it was like catnip for women for like a year while this was going on i want to say 2023 or so um but this trial was essentially that this whole scandal that happened right right around where i grew up where woman went out with her her husband or boyfriend, he ended up dead the next day. She drove home drunk. You know, she got accused, she got charged with murdering him by running him over with his car, with her car

while they were leaving a party. But then this whole scandal got on earth about like he got in a fight with somebody at the party and the guys at the party were the cops who then responded to the scene and he was dead in their front yard for six hours and none of them knew he was there. So anyway, she got off, long story short, but one of the big scandals was the trial itself and the reason it commanded national attention. And one of the kind of scandals was that this judge, they nicknamed her Aunt Bev, Aunt Beverly, clearly wanted Karen Reed to go to jail. And there was all this extremely available information of her biases. in favor of responding officers and responding paramedics and all this kind of stuff.

Because keep in mind, the other people who could have killed the guy were the cops who were at this party. So then you've got a judge who knows the guys and knows the family that literally they, the reason she was called Auntie Bev, is because they uncovered either Facebook messages or emails or whatever, wherein the family that was hosting the party referred to her that way. and then she's the judge presiding over the trial to jail this woman. And that's obviously just one like extremely viral example in pop culture. But it is just this thing that I used to argue with people about a lot of, even for the people who want to preserve the sanctity of the American judicial system,

they seem to discount like the asymmetric power that the judge, judge has in our current system. And, you know, I'm not, I'm no expert on the legal system. And I know that we have juries. And I know that ultimately juries deliver a verdicts and don't deliver verdicts, right? But as my, I kind of got sucked into this through my wife toward the tail end of that trial. And it became very apparent following this stuff. And people were learning a lot about it. I called it, um, the info war for wine moms, which should have put on a t-shirt at the time. But people were discovering, like, hey, the judge gets to determine what is put before the jury. The judge gets to determine what

evidence is seen by anybody. The judge gets to determine who can say words out of their mouths in the room during the trial. The judge determines what is and is not admissible. The judge determines what charges will or will not be heard. And the judge determines whether or not there's going to be another trial or at least plays a huge role in that because it turns out that when they don't get what they want, which is to say the system, this was a state versus Karen Reed. So it was Massachusetts versus Karen Reed. If they don't get you, they just try you again. And they were going to do that until she got out of that somehow. But this movie, I was thinking about that a lot where I think a lot of people would watch this with a dystopian AI lensing or framing, which is reasonable. And they're like, oh, my. God, look at how much power this AI program played by Rebecca Ferguson has over this dude. Like, it's all about him convincing her this system, whether or not he's innocent. But that's what we have. It's in people play these games, these mental games.

No, we have trial by jury. No, we don't. That's why John Drake won't shut up about it. We don't have a trial by jury. We have a kangaroo court where in a jury of your peers kind of observes and participates in a state prosecution of somebody or a state defense of somebody with virtually no say in what does or does not happen in these situations. And as Drake and Ash both did a good job pointing out through our game at Dart Deadwood this year, the jury has no ability to look into the underlying code itself and say,

like, there's a problem with this whole thing. Why are we even doing this? And, you know, again, we've had these conversations a lot, but I think it's totally fine to come out of this movie being like, this would be a dystopian nightmare of this AI sort of system. But it's like, I think what we have right now is even worse where you've got a system of code that people are looking at and you have a human bias on top of it that has animus and has its own incentive structures built in. You think a judge wants, even if the judge isn't part of the deep state, you think federal judges want anything going on that makes them look bad or that cast some sort of aspersions on the system that they represent? Of course not. So it's retarded that people play these games and that we

dress people up like the cult of Saturn and have them preside over the lives of other human beings and call it justice. Yeah. You know, that when you say something like that, people are like, well, what do you want to do? Just let criminals go free. Like we've got to have. We've got to have some version of this system, so tell me what the version's going to be. And I'm not sure that we do have to have some version of this system. We have to have some version of this system for as long as we're committed to the other parts of the system, including its core ideology, which is scientific materialism in terms of our faith-based beliefs, empiricism, in terms of our evidentiary. standards and our epistemological standards, can I see this thing in the world isn't real?

And our total commitment to accumulating stuff in the world, to accumulating experiences, material goods, and things like reputation. If we are able to, and I don't say, if we are able to is probably not the right way to approach it. We are certainly able to if we chose to. But if our priorities were rerouted and our value set was changed. And this is true of the examples with capitalism earlier. It doesn't matter what form of your economic philosophy takes on if your ultimate goal in the world is to maximize for material reward. If that's your goal, then that process is going to play out in the way we've seen it play out over and over and over again.

If your goal is something other than that, well, then we have other possibilities that open. If, for instance, everybody adopted a different set of priorities and a community was around to enforce the value set based on that new set of priorities, then those people out there looking to exploit everyone for material gain would be losing reputation points rather than gaining reputation points for their accumulation of material success. And so that is something that we can change in a belief system that if it's changed en masse, actually has that real world effect automatically. There's no point in someone trying to accumulate all the stuff if everyone around who they're trying to impress and trying to subjugate even,

thinks that their accumulation of stuff is worthless and a sign of their low character and personal smallness or incompetence or lust or whatever it might be that you might say about a person obsessed with that sort of thing. So that's an enormous, obviously, change of perspective from what we've been conditioned into, which, by the way, suggests some of the motivation for the conditioning. But if that were to go in a different direction, the idea that we would need this sort of justice system

to empower a centralized authority to do things to other people that we would not be willing to do ourselves, I think that that goes out the window quickly. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, I just recently, for some reason, it's coming up in most of our discussions, but the whole watchman, a lot of the themes in the Watchman film and graphic novel, I really think about a lot, especially the Rorschach test and the moral absolutism argument. And I know that this is a way bigger discussion and doesn't just happen. But to your point about not needing the system, not needing to lend our power to these systems,

everybody knows that if you just played out a thought experiment and said, for the sake of argument, if you had a township of a thousand people and those people were just good, they were just good people of moral standing, whether you're talking about Christian, you know, people of faith or however else you want to frame that, do we think that they would need to vest their authority in some person in a robe or some group of people in a building to pass judgment on somebody that they as a community had determined was evil or had, you know, wronged them in some way. Now, it isn't to say that frontier justice or anything like that has always been impeccable. I mean, I'm sure there were tons of miscarriages of justice, et cetera.

But you're like, which system do you want? Do you want a system where if your value set completely misaligned with the people that you're cohabitating with, that that could create asymmetry? Or do you want a system where a system outside of yourselves, outside of your community, is then rendering judgment based on a code, based on a set of code onto all of you? And I mean, I think the former.

I think there's a reason that even terms like frontier justice and rebel justice and these kinds of things get framed the way they do by modernity saying like, oh, you know how crazy it was back then? Like, no, I don't actually. I wasn't there. I don't know how crazy it was. And it might not have been that crazy. It might have been that things were kind of working from a justice perspective anyway. I'm not saying life wasn't more difficult, objectively, on the frontier. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there was a little less crime going on. And I also have a suspicion. that there was a less wrongful punishment for alleged crimes.

And, you know, I think even this movie, one of the little points it makes that works well is, you know, they're dealing with this numbers game the whole time of percentage of guilt. And I thought that was an interesting wrinkle where he had to drop below a certain threshold to where the machine would then kind of let him go, which I think was sort of, I took it as them kind of making fun of the framing of our justice system, which is beyond a reasonable doubt. What the fuck does that mean? Beyond a reasonable doubt? Nobody knows what that means. And it's because it's a subjective call. And as I've said

a million times and the only people who get upset about it is people who this love to be governed super hard and love the justice system. When I say courts and trials are people telling stories against each other and somebody with power determining which story they like better. That's exactly what it is. That is factually what it is. It's written that way and explained directly that that is what it is. And the AI is just honest about that being what it is. Convince me that you are less than 90% likely to have done this and I have to let you go. And then when he says, hey, why haven't I gone up to 100? And she says, oh, well, built into the code, you can never be more than 98% guilty, which is like, that's how our justice system basically works.

We're like, well, we always have to leave open the possibility. What possibility that you're condemning an innocent person to live in a box forever? That possibility, that's a pretty big possibility. So, you know, or that's a pretty big issue, even if it's a small possibility. That, I was going to go right to that. Yeah, the 98%. That means there's, that's one out of 50, a one out of 50 chance that he's not guilty and they're going to put him to death anyway. That's not a very good, that's not a very good record, to be honest. There's so they want the view of the mercy system to they want the reputation of the mercy system to remain intact at all costs. That's the motivation of Chris Pratt's partner, this character, Jack, is Jacqueline, this woman. And she says that I think I wrote the line down.

She said like basically nobody is more important than the court itself. And all I could think immediately was, wait a second, that's not true. Literally every single person is more important than that court. If that court is anything less than it's advertised to be and it actually can't do the thing that it's supposed to do at this not high enough standard that they claim it's able to do it at. Well, absolutely, every single human's life is more valuable than that machine. And it's always, everything is always the surveillance state, as it gets propped up, we should probably talk about the fact that this much evidence can be collected on people without their knowledge in the first place.

All of that, the justification is the fact that they need these tools to stop crime and that these tools are just part of our life now and the rest of it. hey man, that's how it is. That's fine. We can accept that. Maybe we should amend our behaviors so that we don't have anything that we would be ashamed to defend. And that's entirely apart from whether or not it's adjudicated to be illegal by our court system now or this thing or whatever. But every one of those human lives is more important than that system. And none of us have the moral license to say, we are unwilling and unable to adjudicate these situations ourselves. So we're going to hand the role of judge, jury, and executioner over to the machine.

And because 50% plus one of us agree to do it, now this just gets to control everyone. We have given this thing license to control everyone. We are in crazy town at that point. And there's something about the statist mind that believes that this is actually the purest form of the thing that we all want. Perfect justice for everybody. Not for the individual, of course. They can't guarantee that. They can't come anywhere close to guaranteeing that.

And it's a violation of all the individual's rights in the first place. to subject somebody to this thing, but it's good for everybody collectively. Yeah, it truly is insane. And the point I was going to make Black Hat Destroyer in the chat kind of adds to it. He said, aren't stories told in a court of law supposed to be supported by the forensic evidence or something like that? And I think it'd be an interesting thought experiment in any kind of trial to replace the word evidence, to just do a search and change on the word evidence and show. change it to detail and then think about the stories that are being told.

Because one of the one in the age of AI in particular, I think this was always the case. But I think one of the things the age of AI and that this film, the framing of it brings to the four is, you know, you talk about epistemology a lot. How are we thinking about things and how are we coming to the conclusions we're coming to? What I'm suggesting about court of laws being stories, that isn't to say that I think that there's a better way to do that. I mean, even in the frontier justice system that I'm talking about the anti-system sort of frontier morality justice, ultimately that's the same thing I'm saying where people in a town would be essentially telling stories to, you know, in favor of what they think

happened, what they think should be done about it, the person that's being accused of be telling stories to try to convince those people. That's all everything is. I mean, I talk about the war of stories for a reason. I'm not belittling that or saying it doesn't matter. What I'm saying is we should be honest that our legal system is still a war of stories. And I think the fact that people don't think of it that way grants this authority and maybe the key word of false objectivity to that system that is not there. Not only is the system not infallible at all. but it is biased. It is inherently biased. It's biased on two fronts. The system itself, the code, the legal code, is biased to reinforce its own logic base. It doesn't have an epistemology. The system doesn't even pretend it's trying to forward epistemology or first principles. It is trying to enforce its logic set onto a situation. And if that situation doesn't adhere, or fit neatly into its logic set, it doesn't matter.

It will be forced into that logic set. There's a set of binary outcomes. The second way that it's an issue or that it's biased is, as I said earlier, it is still presided over by humans. It's not like it's the code adjudicating these things. It's a human who's adjudicating on behalf of the code. So it's like the worst of all worlds, where our current legal system is almost like you have a biased,

person sitting in front of the Rebecca Ferguson AI conferring with the AI on its rules, but ultimately being the one who's making the judgments about what's going to happen, which is like the ultimate nightmarish scenario. And that's exactly what we live in. So I'm just arguing we should be honest that that's what courts are. And, you know, in murder cases or whatever, do they usually come to the right conclusion? Probably, maybe. I don't know. I mean, I think. I think. I think probably just because a lot of people who are in prison kind of admit, yeah, I did kill those people. Fine. But if you if you want, if it helps you sleep at night, then fine.

You can say that our legal system gets more bad guys than good guys. And I guess if that's okay with you, then that's okay. But the presumption of innocence doctrine that people claim our system is built on is not apparent in the results that that system gives us. off and that's clearly observable for anybody that's been through that system who was innocent, whether you're talking about civil trials or criminal trials. It doesn't feel like presumption of innocence is built into our legal system. It seems like presumption of innocence of the system or presumption of objectivity and goodness of the system itself is the only thing that's built in there. So I just think it'd be kind of interesting if you had an AI, just go

through a trial and like the Karen Reid trial and every time somebody like a prosecutor or the defense or the judge said the word evidence, we just replaced that with details. What details would you like to explain today to the court? What details of your story would you like to tell everybody today? Because none of them are verifiable. And in an age of AI, as this movie demonstrates, and actually it doesn't really go into this, which is probably one of its key failings given the premise. It doesn't even touch the idea that the data that the machine has access to is itself potentially false or fake. It just takes as a given that all the data it has is real. It just doesn't have all of the data. That's basically what the failing is and that you need Chris Pratt to say,

hey, go get me this other objectively real data and evidence and that and then bring that into the algorithm. He doesn't ever say, well, I don't even think that phone calls real. Yeah. Prove to me that that phone call is real, right? Because that's a conversation that I don't think a movie like this wants to have because they're going to end up in the sort of loops that we talk about. But as you said earlier, if you're not having that conversation,

then just be honest that you're not having an honest conversation about what epistemology is and what evidence actually means. Because as we've talked about a million times, there are people that call themselves truthers who look at pictures on the internet from government agencies and use that as evidence to endorse the mass killing of people that they don't know. It's a little weird. That's crazy. I think that that's a really good observation that there weren't really anybody in the film.

Let me start that a different way. everyone in the film, except for the ultimate bad guy, who's presented as kind of hyper-emotional lunatic, who's breaking the law in a number of ways. The rest of them have subscribed to the underlying philosophy of the mercy system. They are in on the basis of, I think it said, facts and evidence ensure justice is certain. at one point. The system guarantees its own impartiality, which is impossible to believe, especially when you see the system at the end choose to operate outside of its normal rule set. Now, again, wrote the great cloud in the sky thing. I think if there's ways that the system can be changed based on the garbage in garbage out thing, if it stops getting all

garbage all the time and that the system might be able to break out of some of its rule set at some point. But that's not necessarily pertinent right here. I feel like I'm being a little scattered right now. But the lunatic doesn't adhere to the underlying philosophy of this thing. He is convinced because of personal experience that this system makes mistakes. Everybody else believes the system is flawless because they're committed to the underlying empiricism. And that's, I think, part of what makes it difficult for people to understand legal matters, court cases, and the rest of it as a battle of stories because the physical evidence is there,

which means we're outside of the story realm, we're outside of the rest of it. realm of meaning, we can take a set of contingent facts about the world and present them and say, here are the facts. Like people do with data and numbers now. I have data. I have numbers to support this, which means that the meaning I draw, the inference I draw, and the conclusion I reach, the things that I want to do to achieve the agenda based on this conclusion, all of that is a necessary product of this data when it's nothing of the sword. Like even if you get all the contingent facts, you're still not all the way there

because levels of meaning people's sense of justice, what they're allowed to do as moral creatures, all of these things are layers on top of that. And the contingent facts are just that and nothing more. Yeah, it's interesting that I don't know why, but I guess because I've got frontier justice on the mind and we look for solutions to think things, even if they're not necessarily going to happen.

I've said before on the show, and we've done superhero movies. Like, I grew up reading comic books. I loved superheroes. I was big into Spider-Man and Captain America and Batman and stuff like that. And, you know, they're simplified. Their archetypal is the term that I would use. And one of the appeals of that stuff that I think is relevant to this discussion and one of the one of the maybe even subconscious reasons that I think quote unquote superhero

fiction appeals specifically to boys, kids, teenagers, etc., is that there's just an honesty in these myths that we create. Like, as Americans, for example, we more than any other society in the modern age, we revere these superhero archetypes. If you look at like the market cap, even though there's not really a market cap for a character, but you can basically look at all the merchandise that's sold, all the movies that are sold, all the whatever that's sold of an IP, right?

And if you look at something like Batman and Spider-Man, the market cap of those stories is enormous on a global scale, but especially in the West. And you go, well, doesn't that say something? about what we're looking for. What is Batman? Batman is a very powerful man, both financially and physically, who takes it upon himself, and we are told in the lore, a genius. So they cover all their bases in the drafting of that character. He's a, he's a superhuman that doesn't have superpowers, essentially, as super as you can get. Perfect mind. But what's his real superpower? It's basically,

perfectly perfect morality. And what does he come to the conclusion of? I need to operate outside of the bounds of the system to get justice. You look at other characters that are derivative of Batman. In Marvel, you have Punisher, played by John Bernthal most recently, who's a much more extreme version of Batman. He's basically just Batman, but he kills people. And Batman doesn't kill people. Extremely attractive character to a moral-minded, moral absolutist Westerners in particular. Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. That's his whole thing, right? And who does he appeal to? Young boys who wish that they had the power to do good things for other people and to stop bad things from happening? And the reason I bring that up in the context of this

discussion we're talking about the justice system is that there is baked in and observably, I would argue a recognition in people of the West that the system is not good enough and is not doing what we want it to do because all of our myths and including pop culture shared constructed myths are about good men coming in ignoring the system entirely and stopping the bad thing from happening right your seven-year-old wants to watch Batman why because he loves him Because he wants to be Batman and because he wants to meet Batman because he knows his like God-infused natural spirit knows that Batman is good and Batman is right. And that's why they like Captain America. That's why he's right in the Civil War movie we did on this show where one side is about government regulation.

The other side is about trusting this dude to do good stuff because he's a good guy. And we've observed him to be good. And if we can acknowledge and be honest that that's obviously imperfect because humans are inherently imperfect, the key failing of the system is that it seeks to perfect something that is inherently imperfect. And maybe we would be better off just understanding that human beings are inherently imperfect, just like a little kid when you're like looking up to your dad, if you just feel like you have a good dad, you're not questioning. everything he's doing on your behalf when you're a kid. You're just like, why? Because you have faith. My dad's good. So my dad's doing this thing because he's good. And obviously that can go wrong and you can put your trust in the wrong people and everything. But it just, I think it's interesting to ruminate on the fact that all of these societies, especially the West, build these myths of men who are revered for

doing all of the things they do outside of the system where we are taught by. the system that the only objective good can come out of it. Yeah, that's certainly true. That's an interesting point about kind of the hero categorization. I wonder how much. So I've been thinking about and writing about statism this week because I see it so much in people who identify themselves as being on the right. And you can't be on the right if you're a statist because it, stateism bears all the characteristics of collectivism. And you can see in some of the people who are seen as the most hardcore people on the right, their solutions are all collectivist solutions and all stateist solutions. They beg the state for power. They want to seize the power

of the state in order to create their solutions to absolutely all the problems. problems they name. And almost all the problems they named, by the way, are then placed, the responsibility for those problems is placed with a collective that they want to empower the state to subdue. And that is only stateism. It's not something else to want to win uniparty elections so that the government can fix itself. And what we have in the movie is a situation where someone who is accused of a crime and by the way we take for granted that the rule said in this movie is a good one and right with our judicial system that all of those laws are actually themselves just so what we're adjudicating is someone breaking these just laws

and you mentioned that with with trial by jury um but uh what What the person in the chair is doing is asking to be defended by the adversarial system. And that right there is already obviously a problem. And again, we can get at the pragmatic level and you can say, well, is that problem actually a lesser problem than the one we have now? And I think that that would probably be an interesting conversation. But I don't think that knowing the system is that way, you should want to put your life in its hands in the first place. Right. And I guess to go back to kind of the first point I made on the movie itself, it loops perfectly into that one, which is that there is an inherent, like, instinctive understanding, I think, of most people watching something like this.

And then I saw somebody in chat earlier saying, you know, this was right. reminiscent of minority report, certainly some similarities thematically there. When you're watching this kind of stuff, you'd probably classify minority report as dystopian fiction. Like a dystopia masquerading as a utopia is often one of the, it's become almost a cliche in and of itself where dystopias used to be all James Cameron Hellscapes. And then we kind of evolved beyond that storytelling-wise. And then the dystopias looked like utopias going back to 19,

84 and Orwell and all that. But this movie, you could classify either way, but probably dystopian fiction, the fact that he wakes up and it's clearly in a nightmare scenario. But I think what it does is there's still this distance between people and our lived reality. It's like this movie is warning you or these scenarios that people freak out about, about AI are not, I'm not saying it's wrong to freak out about waking up and having 90 minutes to convince an algorithm that you didn't kill your life. But how is that more dystopian than waking up and getting dragged into a courtroom in front of human beings, you know, operating on behalf of a system in the exact same scenario? You know, it's like I'm not sure that one is objectively better than the other unless, and again, I don't think it's perfect. I don't think there is a perfect system. But I have been convinced by many of John Drake's arguments in terms of how different, you know, trial.

by jury kind of idea is and what the philosophies behind that are, which is, I guess, sort of built into the code there is a little bit of a like, hey, what kind of a life have you lived in this community? You know, like if we get away from, if we get away from the idea of, are we going to determine with any sort of objective truth, epistemological truth, what did or didn't occur here that you are being judged on? If you didn't admit it, I'm saying, obviously. If you admit something, then you're being judged on punishment, essentially. But if you don't admit it and you claim you're innocent and jury of your peers claims you're not innocent,

then really the trial by jury system kind of hinges on, what kind of a life have you lived? Do people trust you? And that goes back to even the analog I'm making about superheroes. People can watch a Marvel movie, even a 12-year-old. He knows Captain America is breaking the law. It's part of the story. He's constantly breaking the law. but he knows he's good because he understands the context of the movie.

He's like, Steve Rogers is a good guy. So he's doing this for a good reason. And the same goes the other way. If you brought before a jury of your peers in your community, you're writ large, and you've just lived as a total shithead that's engaged in a lot of shitty behavior, maybe you are innocent of this specific charge, but maybe you're being judged anyway because you're a piece of shit. and you shouldn't live that way.

You know, again, there's a slippery slope there, but I might prefer that slippery slope than the one where somebody dresses up like a cult member and tells me that they are going to preside over my fate because a system from on high has granted them the ability to do that on behalf of all other human beings in the nation. It is crazy how many, how many, people, the direction of their lives has been influenced in a undeniable way by someone who was put in

that position as the result of a false election or due to a law that was implemented as the result of false elections. It's just such an extraordinary injustice. Yeah. The precedence is even worse. I can go on for days about that. Yeah. So at the end of at the end of the film, I think I've mentioned earlier, we see essentially the machine bend its own rule set to enact what we see as the viewer as a more just outcome for the people under the purview of this system. But there's an argument to be made that all the machine did was preserve itself. And in some sense, that's what we see the machine doing now. And just to be clear, in this example, I would talk about the machine being the AI, but also everything that is functioning as part of that system. And so I would suggest that

the government is retreating from some of its own rule set, just as you would see an AI backtrack over the course of conversation, if you force it to adhere to an actual logical chain to its own rule sets based on evidence. If you try to reason with it, there are ways that you can make the AI retreat. And I actually think that that's a good part of the AI. And it may be a good part of government as well. But, you know, when I talk about Trump always being mid-negotiation, I see it as a continuum, the power of the state versus the power of the people.

can extract power from the state and pull it back to the people. It doesn't mean that it's all one or all the other, but we can pull it back on our side to some degree. And when we do that, we're not going to see the adversarial system, whether it's the global regime, whether it's important in this scenario, whether it's AI taking full control of everything. We're not going to see them just give up and be like, okay, you won. We're going to see them scale back what they're doing and then try to claw their power back over time. And so the machine taking a few steps back and saying, hey, I know you think we've now got two out of 19 total failures of this system, but actually we don't because you know what? We corrected that one error before.

We've prevented this second error from going through. And as a bonus, we nailed this bad cop that caused us to mess up in the first place, stupid human. And then the machine just keeps marching forward. They've given us a scapegoat for the machine's problem. They tell us that the problems are solved. Whatever you do, don't affect the system. And we're like, oh, man, thank goodness justice was served. Yeah, I think that is the ultimate conclusion. You know, we said, I mean, maybe it's less that the movie doesn't lean hard one way or another. Like we kind of said at the beginning of the debate, but it's maybe more that it kind of cleverly disguises what it's ultimately pushing by the end of it. And it does seem to be pushing that the system's

got you covered, even if it makes a mistake every now and again. If you happen to be a super investigator yourself who thinks well under pressure and connects all the dots in real time, you could escape from this. And yeah, the getting Jackie and the enemy there, it wraps it up in a nice bow of catharsis for you. But it all comes down to, you know, the intent, right? What just like in a court of law, you are looking for intent and motive. You should be looking for the motive of the court of law. And you should be looking for the motive of the system itself.

What is the motive of the system? It is to reinforce itself. So that could mean admitting flaws and then working or observing flaws in its own system and then working to correct those flaws. But even then, in a movie like this, you have to ask the question. Is the system trying to improve itself to deliver more truth? Or is it trying to improve itself to protect itself from being wrong in the future or from being beaten, essentially? It's almost like they're playing a game of chess throughout this, where it's like, hold on.

It doesn't feel like both of us are trying to figure out the problem. truth here. It feels like you are playing a game against me and it's a zero-sum game and either I win or I lose. And, you know, we're told that trials and the justice system is all about both sides. Everybody's trying to figure out what the truth is. But anybody who's observed any of this stuff, understands that's not the case. It's a competition. It's a war of stories and it's a game of chess. And by the way, this goes the other way too, where I know mostly tonight, we talk about the system getting things wrong and judges getting things wrong and everything and how that probably bothers people like you and I a lot more than the opposite. But it's also stands to reason that it's like,

hey, the system would be the first to tell you that guilty people get off all the time because of the system as well. So in that frontier justice idea, they're not going to get away if it's if everyone's like, yeah, I don't know if Tom over there did it or didn't do it, but he's a real shifty guy and a shithead. So I don't really care what you guys think. And you could say that that's the nightmare scenario, but I don't know. I think things were going okay at that point in time. All right. We're kind of running short on time here. I have a couple quick notes. And I don't know if you do. I thought it was interesting just the fact that, you know, you put in this new piece of technology that goes through all of these processes. But once the processes are known, the rule set is

known, you can, if the criminal is clever enough, he can just make sure to operate in ways that are not going to trigger that system in all the ways we see it triggered in this story. And so I don't know that there could ever be a solution of that. Crime is still going to happen if people are really highly motivated to commit crimes and they'll get away with it. If they're really clever and they understand how the system means to track them now. And then I just wanted to mention the idea of the municipal cloud. The AI judge mentioned that. when pulling in all the daughter's information off Instagram.

And it's like they sent their information through this public space here. And we capture that information. This is the municipal information. So it's like public everyone's information. It passed through there. So we're now allowed to analyze that. And that's one of those things where like if we found out in five years,

they would say they just implemented it. And at that point, we would have to assume that it's probably been in place for the last 25 years. But does that exist? Got to think yes. It's like South Park usually does all these things. It's like the human cent iPad where everyone agrees to the terms and conditions. But to your point before that about, oh, man, now I lost it.

Knowing the rules said. Yeah, yeah. people exploiting the rule set basically people are basically playing to the rule set so it kind of goes back to my point about criminals themselves if they understand how to escape the rule set or play to it then you know you could argue just as much that the system isn't just defending itself or perpetuating itself but it is creating a class of criminal and again to go back to my superhero analogs tonight there is an inherent in in figures like about Batman and Punisher like those archetypes, Daredevil, those kind of characters.

It's all kind of the same archetype. Very directly stated in the motivations of those characters is that understanding, that they are aware that the system does not just not deliver justice, but it has created what Batman calls a new class of criminal. And it's a new class of criminal that is smart enough and, as you said, motivated enough, to learn the rules of the system and to hide within those rules to augment their criminality. And that's exactly what we see a lot of people do. Not just, you know, people think of murderers and rapists and things like that.

But it's usually not those people. It's usually financial crimes and hedge funds and CEOs and politicians and people like that that are like, I know how the system works. And as long as I, you know, defend myself in this specific way in this system, You know, like, I mean, I know it's a kangaroo court thing, but just as an analog, yesterday we have Anthony Fauci sitting in front of a kangaroo court pleading the fifth all the time, right? In a moral society, if there was a moral group of men that are part of a community that those men feel was greatly harmed by this guy, do you think it's an option for that guy to not say anything?

Like, it might be an option, but then they're just going to kill that guy. So it's sort of again, like, there's an inherent human moral hunger for the ability to do, to meet out justice onto evil. And there's also, there needs to be a more mature understanding of the fact that you just kind of know when somebody's evil. And if enough good people come together and they're like, that thing over there is not good. than, you know, we used to live in society. Did you freeze? Or maybe I've placed. I might have a little bit.

Something short-circuited there for just a second. Damn it. I forgot what I was going to say. Oh, the Fauci thing in fleeting the fifth. Man, if I was his attorney and if I was him, I would be listening to the attorney when they say, just be the fifth. the Congress and the Senate are illegitimate.

I don't know what. By the way, Trump was saying yesterday, the thing about federalism, John and I will talk about this on Saturday, I think, but he was saying, hey, we left it all the states. That is a subtle way of moving the responsibility away from Trump, but also in some sense away from Fauci. The states went and implemented the CDC's guidelines. Anthony Fauci was up there as a spokesperson,

person, but probably had very little beyond his public relations work during those couple of years and the fact that everybody kept interviewing him and asking him the same dumb questions and getting him to deliver those same responses over and over again. The people who actually made policy were in the states. They were listening to the CDC. And Trump said, hey, I took the federalist approach. I wonder how that's going to shake out because he not only shifted, he did shift responsibility away from Fauci in some sense. There is something much deeper and much darker going on there.

You know, you mentioned the Nuremberg trials. All I think of Nuremberg now, I didn't think, I don't, a lot of people use Nuremberg to say, this is what we want. That's what real justice looks like. They took these people who committed these horrible atrocities. They put them on trial and then they executed them. Well, that might well have been a limited hangout. And it certainly was a mass messaging campaign to the entire world to cement the concentration camp atrocity stories and the fact that justice was served and that justice was served by this collective global West who stands up for justice and righteousness in every occasion. They are the world's heroes.

They have saved us from global fascism. And somehow all the countries that saved us from global fascism just happened to implement global fascism through the rest of the world on their own. So yeah, something there is very, very wrong. And I'm not looking for, I think all these people are evil, first of all and should be held accountable. But it's ultimately not my job to do that.

And I cannot trust the state to do that or to want to do that or to do that for good reasons so man i mean i don't know what you're supposed to do with with all of that but the nuremberg thing if they went that route limited hangout 100 all of these people responsible for the crimes that they are accusing fouchy and the rest of them for none of those people stood up for the actual thing they just played the controlled opposition and said oh yeah it came from a lab bullshit yeah and i mean i agree with all that and two points on it. One, one would be, to your point about Trump deferring responsibility, one way of looking at that too, people are so obsessed with precedent. Well, the irony of this

scenario is that, you know, if the machine wanted to trap him, I mean, they've been trying to trap him in a million different scenarios for his entire run, right? I'm not even talking about criminal scenarios, but they're trying to, they've been trying to provoke Trump into certain actions many, many times. And you could look at this as one of them. I don't know if you said this on Saturday, you've probably said it, but what you just made me think of is the idea that, you know, if Trump the Federalist then goes against that to make an exception for, you know, meeting out justice on, let's get away from Fauci even, and say on governors and states, well, then he's basically doing the thing that all of his libertarian and constitutional supporters would not want him

to set a precedent about, but they would want the catharsis of that specific meeting out of justice, right? But then you're like, okay, well, what if we fast forward 10 years and we've got somebody else in there? Do you want an executive to like bring the hammer down on all the governors around the country all at once? And these things get squirrely. I understand there's arguments about treason and all that. I'm just saying I can understand from even a precedent perspective why Trump doesn't want to go down there. The other point I was going to make is something that we've said on the shows. I do not absolve myself of this. It's something I think about, whether you're talking about taxation and participation in systems. But one thing people used to get really mad

at me about, which they really don't anymore, they just don't watch me anymore. I used to say, There's a lot of people that say, I had to take the vaccine. And that is not a true statement. Nobody in the United States of America had to take the vaccine. Now, maybe there were some scenarios in other walks of life where people did, in other nations where people did. I am not saying it was an easy decision. But when you're talking about Trump deferring responsibility, there is a responsibility people need to take and take on themselves. that looking for Trump to string up Anthony Fauci,

in some ways, could be read as a subconscious admission that you are looking for Daddy Trump to spank the bad man who did the bad things to you, except he didn't do the bad things to you. You participated in the bad things and did the bad things to yourself and to your family out of fear of the bad man doing the bad things to you. It's not me saying that there were no consequences for those decisions, that we all made.

But, you know, is that also what he's doing? He's probably not going to say these things outwardly, but it's another way of, you know, if we don't get the tribunals that people want and people kind of have as their fantasies, including me, I mean, I'd love that. But I don't think we're going to get it. And instead of thinking of that as a dooming approach,

it's maybe more, hey, if this happened again, and if they tried to spin this up again, Do I think everyone's where they need to be? Not even close. But do I think that if they tried to do this like tomorrow, that people would comply to the level that they complied in 2020? No, I do not. And I think that is, there has to be a recognition that if that's the case,

then it means that you don't need people to meet out justice on your behalf. You just simply need to not comply with things you know to be wrong. Yeah, that's right. Everybody could have made different choices. choices back then. And, you know, we all make bad choices in different ways. But the decision to comply with the COVID program was everyone's individual choice and a lot of people chose poorly. And now they want someone else to fix that for them on their behalf. I totally agree. Okay. So let's let's go ahead and wrap things up. I don't know if you took a look for grants or boosts.

We have a boost from carrying the fire. Just a few bucks for you. you and my annual request for you to do or at least check out the ninth configuration by William Peter Blattie of all the hosts at Badlands. I believe you too will enjoy it. I've met you both and appreciate all you do. God bless. Well, thank you. Yes. And I do remember you saying that. Indeed, me too. And I do have it on my list, but I have not. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I was going to get into my movie for a week. Wonderful. Sounds good. All right. This director is a love or hate for me. I have a very, I have a schizophrenic relationship with this director,

which is Ryan Johnson. Next week, we're going to do 2025's Wake Up Dead Man. Have you seen this? I believe that I have. I think you and John and I had a conversation about this, right? Was this the Netflix one? This is the most recent one, right? Yes.

So for anybody who doesn't know, this is by Ryan Johnson, Wake Up Dead Man. It's in the Knives Out series. So the first one of this is called Knives Out. The second one is called Glass Onion. This one's called Wake Up Dead Man. These are basically murder mysteries, whodunits. They all have Daniel Craig as the lead investigator, but they are completely stand-alone movies.

You literally have no obligation to watch Knives Out or Glass Onion to understand this movie. It's entirely standalone. The reason I say this director is very hit or miss for me. I either love his movies or not. hate them. He did The Last Jedi. It's the worst, like, pop culture movie ever made, kind of kicked off the culture war in earnest.

He's a total, like, systemite retard. But he's a fantastic filmmaker. I also think Glass Onion, the middle movie of this series, is awful, even though it has good reviews. But I say that to say that when I tell you, wake up Dead Man shocked me with how much I enjoyed it and just where it goes, it basically deals with, I'll just read the synopsis here, Detective Benoit Blanc teams up with an earnest young priest to investigate a perfectly impossible

crime at a small town church with a dark history. Given that this was Ryan Johnson and given that it was on Netflix, I expected just a Christian humiliation ritual. And hey, maybe some people will get that out of it. I did not get that out of this. I thought Josh O'Connor, I believe that's his name, the young lead. is fantastic in this movie. I thought, what's his name?

Who's the guy? Josh Brolin. Josh Brolin. Amazing. Daniel Craig's fine. He's actually, like, not that big a deal in these movies. It's more about the characters around him. But, yeah, Josh Brolin and Josh O'Connor are fantastic in this.

And I think it's kind of an interesting movie about faith and some of these different things. Hypocrisy. some people in the culture war sphere that make all their money doing that wanted to say that Josh Brolin's a stand-in for Donald Trump and it's an anti-Trump, this and that. And, you know, I didn't see it that way. I think it's great. So I think you guys will really enjoy it, give it a shot. It is on Netflix.

You could probably find it in other places, but that's the easiest place to find it. Yeah, great. This will be fun. I think it's a fantastic movie. And I'm glad we're doing it. Okay. And with that, we are going. to say good night. Thank you all very much for watching. Please go ahead and hit that thumbs up

on your way out. If you've not done so before, if you're watching on Rumble and what else, what else? I will see you bright and early tomorrow for Badlands Daily, and we will be right back here next Thursday evening to talk about Ryan Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man. Good night. Thank you so much for joining us and don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video. And a special thank you to all of our advertising partners. Please remember to shift your dollars to support those businesses that support Badlands Media.