Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 186: Eagle Eye

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright revisit this 2008 Shia LaBeouf thriller, and both agree the movie itself is far from great even as its central concept lands eerily well from 2026. Expect a genuine appreciation for the film's prediction of an all powerful centralized AI system that manipulates the world through digitized objects, some pointed complaints about the shaky cam action filmmaking era it came from, and a real conversation about algorithmic control, epistemology, and why people arguing about elections might be missing the bigger picture entirely. There's a memorable riff on manufactured threats designed to scare people into compliance, plus some fun listener shoutouts and a debate about which underrated Gene Hackman movie deserves a rewatch. Stick around for next week's pick, a surprisingly conspiratorial Batman film that digs into information warfare more than you'd expect from a comic book movie.  

The Badlands, one of the Badlands, explain those Badlands. That's a hell of their name. Good evening, everybody. Before we get started, we have a couple of words from our friends and sponsors, and we're going to begin with our show sponsor tonight, Earth Echo's Cacao Bliss. This episode is brought to you by Cacao Bliss from Earth Echo, a ceremonial grade cacao drink with seven superfoods to curb cravings and protect your heart and arteries. What if I told you that the healthiest thing you could drink every morning tastes like hot chocolate?

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Yep. And he is, I think he's still got a few outs. You know how like in poker you talk about outs? I don't know if you've ever played poker. but it's basically like opportunities to still win a hand, like to get the right card, and it's just based on odds of the cards that are on the tables and the rest of it. But I think Mike Mandela still has some outs.

We shall see. But in the meantime, if you want some pillows or sheets, head on over to my pillow, do the whole Badlands thing. Get it done. All right. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Badlands Story Hour. I'm Chris Paul.

That is Burning Bright. And tonight we are discussing Eagle Eye from 2008, written by John Glenn, Travis Wright, and Hillary Sites, directed by DJ Caruso, starring Shailabuff, Michelle Monaghan, Rosario Dawson, Michael Chichlis, Anthony Mackey, Ethan Embry, the great Billy Bob Thornton, and I suppose there's probably a bunch of other important people in there

that I'm somehow missing. Oh, yeah, Julian Moore did the voice for ARIA, yes. Okay. What an incredible... So it's not a great movie. It's just clearly not a great movie. It's... The action sequences are all right.

A lot of its seams and feels really over the top and not totally realistic. But the concept is ahead of its time. Sitting here in 2026, it looks like it could hardly have been a more accurate predictor for what's to come. And it seems like they had the full Palantir suite of apps and

AIs and all the rest of it. This one centralized, all-powerful computer system, essentially controlling everything. It can bend the world to its will at whatever moment it wants just by manipulating objects in the real world, on the basis of how much is digitized.

I thought all of it, I thought that part of it was just the coolest thing. I was really impressed with how well thought out it was along those lines. The over-the-top stuff, some of it, you know, it's hard to think, oh, the machine has decided to listen to the recorded phone conversation

by reading the vibrations vibrations off the coffee in a coffee cup inside a skiff. But would it happen? I can't say that that couldn't happen. And as the machine gets more and more powerful, what's to say? Wouldn't have that kind of access. If you're willing to surrender enough of the disbelief to get into this movie,

man, it's pretty comprehensive how much they've, thought each one of those little bits out. Yeah, this is one of those funny movies where, as you said, right from the jump, it's probably funny sometimes for people new to Story Hour when we might start a conversation we're otherwise excited about having by being like, movie isn't great. But this is one of those ones where instead of being like, the movie isn't great, but, you know, let's try to figure out a conversation. And trust me, that does happen on Story Hour.

we always manage it. Sometimes that's when you'll find 32-minute diatrabbs where we go off into different directions. But this one didn't think the movie was great, but I thought the concept was great. And I totally agree that even a lot of the details about how the concept is executed hold up very well. And it comes from an era. This was like the millennial era of movies. I was a year out of high school when this came out, which is funny. In terms of from a craft perspective, this movie gave me flashbacks to the things I absolutely hated about that era of filmmaking that lasted like 10 years, which is Paul Greengrass did the born identity and I will never forgive him for what he did to cinematography.

He basically tried to convince everybody that Matt Damon was executed. really awesome action scenes by just like making everything look bad and putting an actual guy in the room and being like, look at how crazy this is. They're probably doing all kinds of crazy stuff right now. Oh my God. Look, there's a net. Where'd the knife go? Who knows where the knife? You don't even know where you are. You're on the ceiling now. And people were like, wow, that's so. The verisimilitude is insane. That would be if you were actually fighting a Mossade agent in an apartment in Boston, it would look exactly like that. I've been. But it turns out that people don't actually go to movies to feel like they are seeing from the point of view of a character involved in a knife fight. They want to actually see what's happening. The other more cynical take, Greengrass at least meant to do the things he was doing. I just hate him for it. Directors like this who did Eagle Eye and kind of imitated the Greengrass style, they were saying.

saving money. That's what a lot of is going on in these action sequences where you're zooming in on the driver's side window and you don't actually see the car hit anything. You just kind of see the camera shake around. So that drives me nuts. It's a personal pet peeve of mine. But the window dressing around, I mean, that's all window dressing. The story I thought was good. I thought the actors were good. I mean, I actually like Shylobuff. He plays Raw Shark in the chat was saying he plays Shyalubup. I think you're totally right. He does play Shia LeBuff, but I think a lot of actors play themselves, and I also think they kind of get demonized a little bit too much for playing themselves. I actually like when directors cast actors as a type. It works. You know, it works in this kind of a movie. He plays a good fish out of water. He also, I don't think, goes too spastic in this movie, which he does in some movies. I like Michelle Montahan and Billy Bob Thornton is good, so they kind of anchor it all.

But yeah, the funny thing is for a 2008 movie, you know, if this was made now, it would feel almost quaint and on the nose, given the ubiquity of large language models and what we can, what most even normies can just easily project is coming on the back of this agentic era, this AI era that's now in consumer normie hands. But this was 18 years ago. And I guess in 2008, yeah, we had cell phones and, you know, we had the World Wide Web, and there were some social media stuff going on, not nearly as ubiquitous as that became five, ten years later. But I think the movie was possible, but not really plausible to people in 2008. Now it's moved from possible to entirely plausible, if not, like I said, quaint up to and including what you mentioned, which is like the ability to read a conversation based on vibrations of a glass. Like, yeah, they probably can. They probably can do that. You can probably start training a bunch of grok bots to watch video of people talking in rooms, and they'll figure it out in a couple of years or something like that.

Never mind whatever the military has had for 20, 30, 40 years. So I think it's entirely plausible. And what I become interested in when revisiting movies like this, this was at the very advent of the Obama era, the end of the Bush era, the beginning of the Obama era. And I thought it was also interesting that there's like a Reaper drone in the movie, a whole Reaper drone sequence. And that was kind of interesting because this movie's right in between the Bush and Obama era. and the Bush era was all Forever War, Patriot Act, all that. The Obama era actually kind of became, came to be known even during it as the surveillance era and the drone warfare era.

If I'm not mistaken, I believe Barack Obama is the first president to approve unmanned aerial drones targeted strikes. And I could be wrong about that. Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. that's the case. So this movie kind of shows you the dystopia that started in the Bush era and just accelerated through the Obama era. Yeah, they claimed the ability to surveil us pretty extensively. And I was looking last night at some of that because it mentions in one of the scenes toward the end. And I think I think I had the clip on there that that that sectioned, 216 of the Patriot Act allows them to circumvent probable cause. Now that's not, that's kind of like

taking a bit of artistic license with what section 216 allows by the text of it. But when you press the machine a little bit, and that's, of course, what it responds immediately. No, it doesn't say that you can do that, but, and then it's like, okay, well, why don't you give me like a little bit more of the butt side of things, right? Like, if you were going to steal man this line from the movie, how would you present these things? And so I, of course, posed this question. And what it focused on was something called the pen register and tap and trace law. So back then, this was about recording who was calling whom and I think you can probably see here. Section 216 deliberately changed the statutory vocabulary from telephone-specific

concepts to dialing, routing, addressing, and signaling information associated with wire or electronic communications. So it basically took us out of the days of the phone and brought us into the days of the Internet so that they could actually be able to watch over us in the ways they would need to with the dawn of our new technological era. It says that matters enormously

in an internet environment. The statutory definition of a pen register isn't even limited to a physical device. It is a device or process capable of recording. or decoding that information. A trap and trace likewise captures incoming information reasonably likely to identify the source of an electronic communication.

And so there are several important powers bundled into the change. Internet surveillance, nationwide reach, compelled technical assistance, which means that companies using the Internet have to provide these gateways and backdoors and the rest of it so that the government can actually have insight into what's going on. ex parte proceedings, which means outside of the target has no role in contesting the government's

ability to surveil them. That's all decided on the government side, secrecy, dramatically lower evidentiary than what is necessary to constitute a warrant. So there was some, there's some reason to say the movie probably had that part right too. They've expanded their surveillance capabilities. They did it for a reason. We kind of told ourselves back then, well, we're not doing that much stuff on these devices.

Who cares if they, what are they going to do? Listen to our phone calls. Like some person is going to listen to that call and then decide, oh, we're saying the bad things. The government's going to come to get us. Well, that was all very quaint, as you mentioned back then. Now with the fact that it can all be processed and analyzed comprehensively, we're in a different, we're kind of just in a different world now.

Absolutely. I mean, one of the things I just thought of with that, with that example, is, you know, something like keywords. Like, I remember in this era when, you know, I think it was, I don't think it was, well, I know it was not 2008, but I forget which year it was that Snowden kind of went hot with his whole op. I don't know if that was 2010 or 11 or whatever it was, but it was during Obama. It was kind of, and again, you know, do I trust Edward Snowden? No, I mean, he's a spook. I don't know.

Maybe he had good intentions. I mean, who knows? But you could easily look at that as some sort of anti-white hats in the NSA operation conducted by Snowden. Or you could look at it as an earnest anti-Obama op from within the intelligence community. I don't know. But the net effects of that is as a liberal approach. the time, it was part of my, the beginnings of my blackpilling as a liberal, which didn't just

lead me toward the Republicans, and in fact, never did, including to today. But it did definitely make me look at Obama differently. The number one thing that actually fully blackpilled me on Obama was when he signed the, I want to say it was 2011 National Defense Authorization Act, which allowed, which allowed police to indefinitely. detain protesters without probable cause going back to your first rant. This was on the back of the Occupy Wall Street movement that I was sympathetic to at the time as a as a bleeding heart liberal who wanted to take down the banks. It used to be a liberal ideology and now it's kind of a Bitcoin or ideology. But anyway, at the time, I remember people talking about like,

yeah, they'd listen for certain words, you know, on the back of the Patriot Act. with this surveillance state that Snowden was disclosing allegedly to the American people. But to your point, I think at that time we pictured like a human had to be on the other line. And you probably had to be selected for surveillance, not just legally, but even practically. I mean, Snowden essentially disclosed that there was no legal prerequisite for them to be. wiretapping Americans, but that was the key word they were using at the time, wire tapping. And we were all thinking of this as like Cold War era, you know, Soviets tapping your phone line. And, you know, most Americans, even if they pretended to be super outraged about this, or even if

they were super outraged about this, it was largely relegated to a political issue, not a practical issue. It was a political issue because people just assumed practically, pragmatically, it would be virtually impossible for the government to be spying on you unless they had already selected you as somebody worth spying on, which most Americans would not think would be the case. And the reason I use that word quaint is, in 2026, I think anybody who is online, not just terminally online, but who uses AI in any way, and is just kind of interfaced with the digital world for the last 10 years, now it would not shock anybody that just putting a word into an email or a sequence of words together or saying a sequence of words together on a phone

would immediately trigger some sort of algorithmic response that would log your call into a government accessible database and that would then trigger probably these days an AI review which would then potentially pull in a human review somewhere down the chain. So now it's not even a little bit out of the realm of possibility to not just believe that the government or intel agencies could track or would track the conversations of normal everyday Americans, but that they would quite easily because they can have all the machine just perpetuates. Again, this movie was maybe disclosing that they already had that capability in 2008.

But certainly the public awareness of those capabilities has played a lot of catch-up in the last couple of years than we were at 20 years ago. Yeah. And the idea that so we're in the era of the flock cameras being the big thing. And, you know, these are, these make them. into election issues. That's why the flock camera thing is happening. We're seeing ops around the country where people go and attack these things with their crude instruments. And so we have the caveman Luddite revolution against the cameras on the polls. You know, this is what we're being fed right now. The idea that the flock cameras are themselves

the problem or even representative of a fixable part of the problem seems to me to be absolutely crazy. We're so far beyond that. And we were pretty far beyond that in 2008, I imagine. So 2007 was the first year, the iPhone, the smartphone. And at that point, we should have known. Yeah. Yeah. And in some ways we did. And we just, again, as I said before, it was all so quaint back then. You just think, oh, well, they're not interested in me. I don't do anything bad. This provides me so many conveniences. They can't possibly have the resources, the ability to watch all of us. And so we just kind of, we let it go and we let it go. And that was 18 years ago. We're not like putting a halt to this by knocking some flock cameras off poles. If the company flock or the company

that owns flock or whatever it is came out and said, you know what, we're no longer going to move those cameras or we're no longer going to use those cameras or sell those cameras or make those cameras. they would just find new methods of surveillance tomorrow and replace it with something else. And again, I'm not just saying, like, submit to the machine. I'm not that guy at all. But we should be at least realistic about where we are. The people who are like screaming about flock cameras

are the people who just found out within the last few weeks that all this stuff was actually a problem because they were on some cycle of reruns or limited hangouts or whatever it is. And of course, all these issues come up a few months before the election because they say, the Democrats are putting those cameras in place.

We need to vote for the Republicans. Or, conversely, Donald Trump and all of his tech oligarch friends are putting these cameras in place. We need to go out and vote for the Democrats. And they get both sides to believe that going out and supporting one party or the other is going to help them get out of this problem.

I think all of that stuff is a little bit ridiculous. And I don't need to spin into this right now, but I kind of presented all this theory in an article called The Great Cloud in the Sky. It's not that we have to be defeatist about these things and say, okay, now we've succumbed to the machine, we just let this go. It's about each of us individually rerouting our interaction with the machine to something that we are comfortable with so that maybe we can find parity. with it or perhaps collectively and individual action that represents on a collective scale when

everybody does it. It's not, hey, let's get together as a group and all do the same thing and then try to manipulate the system as a group that one or two people are going to lead and then everybody else has to fall in line. It's that we figure out the right thing to do individually and then apply it ourselves. Everybody else does that thing too. and then the good of collective action can be had without any sort of collective planning or coordination. And I think that that decentralized approach the right way, but it has to be solved ourselves before it actually has any effects.

Yeah, well said. I have three, a cascade of three points on that you made me think of, especially with the flock thing. Number one would be, you made me think of the Rich Higgins memo. You know, John often quotes it. I quoted it at Gart. It's something I think of every now and again. It's why I started using the word battle space pretty frequently in my writing and in my rhetoric. That kind of influenced me with that.

But many in this audience are aware that if you don't remember every little beat of the Higgins memo, what one of the things he said was Donald Trump operates in the battle space that is presented to him at that time by the left, by the left. the so-called left. So that's the battle space he operates in. That's the narrative, the political, the cultural battle space he's operating in. So he will operate as practically and pragmatically as he can within that battle space. So when it comes to the ubiquity of technology, that's how I feel about these things so that I don't freak out about the flock cameras and the this cameras and whatever. It's like, I'm not saying I like it, but I am saying it exists. And the reason,

nice sometimes i don't mean to like crap on luddites or call people luddites from a moralist lens because i don't think that they should be crapped on it's more from a practicality lens i don't see them as useful in any way when it comes to uh the last point you made there which is what i do believe in of collective action which might mean collective communication all this kind of stuff and the other two points I would make is I think the cynical approach to the flock cameras, the cell phones, the AI models and all this kind of stuff, the surveillance state, the cynical approach to that is the Duma-Defeatist approach of we have to stop the technology, we, it's a problem that they're watching us, they shouldn't be able to see us, they shouldn't be able to see our conversations,

they shouldn't be able to hear us, we're already there. We've been there, to your point, for much longer than any of us would like to admit that we have been there. And as EC in the chat said a few minutes ago, some truthers have known this for decades and been aware of this. They were people in the 70s when we watched 70s paranoia films. Yeah, they're not talking about emails and chatbots, but they're talking about all the versions of that in their era in those movies. The way those 70s films are filmed.

you know, any guy walking by them in a weird way on the street corner they're looking at. Anybody across the street with a camera, a flash camera they're looking at, you know, a car passing by that parks for too long and hesitates. Like, there's always been means of surveilling people. Maybe the digital age has made that more ubiquitous and easy. But I think, again, the cynical, doomer take is like the technology, the ability, the power projection is the problem. The last point I'd make is that I think, in addition to what, what you said about decentralization and kind of collective action. The pragmatic approach here is one of the things that's come up a lot recently with the concept

of elections as always. I don't want to go in a whole diatribe on that, but that's one example among many of why distilling these conversations down or up into first principles will always avail you well and the more you practice it the better you'll get at it. And in the context here of flock cameras and this and that, I think we misidentify the problem. The problem that we as human beings often misidentify is the weapon. We look at the weapon and we're like, that's a problem right there. The government has a really powerful weapon. The problem to me is not the weapon, whether you're talking about magical nuclear bombs or magical flock cameras that can see everything all at once and anything you're doing and hear anything

you're saying, you know, all that kind of stuff in the surveillance state. The problem is that the government has the power to punish people based on that information. That is the problem. Now, I'm not saying that if they catch somebody abducting a child on a flock camera, that I don't want that person to be prosecuted because they're caught on a flock camera. I have no problem with that. More to the point is what people are actually afraid of, what they're really afraid of, and for understandable reason, is hearing sort of political unviable conversations, seeing them rolling through a stop sign. Like there are, there are all these things that I totally understand people being like, what, you're going to just start

sending 90% of people to tickets a month based on like routine traffic violations. And I think that's entirely possible. But that gets into what's the problem? Is the problem there that the the government can see you? Or is the problem that the government has this asymmetric control over your life resting in their ability to punish you over things that a jury of your peers would probably choose not to punish you about? That, I think, is the problem. And we get really distracted where these controversies, these political controversies that, to your point, become talking points and campaign messaging, that they just abandon when the next campaign message comes around. These These things just amplify the underlying issue that people besides us don't really talk about much.

Libertarians talk about it. But that is government control over our lives in a way that is not in the vision of the founding. It's not in the vision of what the American ideal is or the sovereign ideal is. So we want to punish evil. To punish evil, you want to be able to see evil, but rolling through a stop sign at two miles per hour is not evil. And jaywalking is not evil. It's just stupid. So it's like that I think is the core difference.

And you can acknowledge that without freaking out about every new advent of technology. Yeah, I think that that's right. The freak out about the advent of technology is probably misplaced because new tools are always going to arise. But there is something particularly creepy about the speed and kind of. comprehensiveness that this system offers because people don't want to be monitored all day. There are a few worse feelings than feeling like you are being watched all the time and any slip up you make is recorded and then responded to because we all know that we're going to slip up. And you can talk about it from the basis of being here, you know, being here.

and being therefore naturally disposed towards sin. And then having that become a public issue between you in the state or you and other people, if your information is exposed as an attempt to take you down or an attempt to control you, an attempt to manipulate you, even just to like nudge you in certain directions into certain behaviors. like, hey guys, you're being watched all the time. Are you sure you want to do that?

Like you mentioned rolling through a stoplight. This used to be a thing in California in Los Angeles. California stop, right? No, that's just rolling through a stop sign. But they had cameras on, like, they had traffic cameras on traffic lights and stuff. And so they would get people for going through a stoplight. And eventually the process of the ticketing was contested,

and the people won in California had to get rid of that program. But it's really, really annoying. Like, nobody actually caught you doing anything. But the camera monitoring this intersection took a picture of your license plate. It says you did something wrong. You don't really have any way of contesting it. So therefore, pay the ticket, Rube. It's like you are totally under the thumb.

And nobody really says, signed up to live that way. And it's just like more and more of our society now has become like that. Anything that we do or say wrong can be immediately used by whoever wants to to come and get us. You know, our bank monitors, our purchases. You can imagine a time where you buy XYZ and the bank's like, okay, well, we don't want activity like that. You don't have access to your money now. I mean, this is the era that we are very much living in. A lot of us found out these sorts of things the hard way over the last six years. And to not want that to happen is not to oppose the technology.

And, you know, G, kind of always is like immediately calling you a Luddite if you don't like to. I'm, I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an optimist about technology. But I'm at peace with it. I'm okay with it. I welcome it into the world. I try to figure out how to use the AIs to make my life more efficient in a way that doesn't make me feel like I'm giving everything of myself away. I think that's a useful thing to do. I welcome that stuff. But I don't want the world that could be created by that if the tools are consistently under the control of it. of terrible people. Right. So what you're saying is the only solution to Chris Paul can stop what's coming is that Chris Paul can be stopped by the flock cameras is, I think, what I'm getting out. It could be that.

I don't understand why they don't just try to reason with me and ask me to stop stopping what is coming. I know. Never stop, never stopping, I believe is a film. Exactly. That might have been that maybe that was the Chris Paul story. We never knew we needed. Yeah.

I'm going to make a, I guess I'll move to a different point, but one of the notes I had written down on this made me think about the info war, made me think about, you know, government, through all errors. You can, you can think of it. Obviously, you know, we think of things that are very present. Right now, it's the elections that I'm thinking about in this context. But one of the notes I wrote down was information ACS. symmetry plants humans in a permanent stasis and near-sightedness, the ability to change incentive structures in real time based on observed behavior. That's one of the things I think this movie does really well. We've seen the eye in the sky sort of the disembodied, all-seeing, all-knowing,

ominous presence in many works of science fiction over the decades. I'm not saying this one did it, you know, better than all those other ones. But one thing I think it really got was this kind of fish bowl effect that I was thinking of, this terrarium effect, where, you know, there's a few points where Shia LaBuff's character and Michelle Monaghan, they do try to do sort of the things that you as the viewer are often yelling at the TV to say, like, why don't you just do this? Or I wouldn't do that. I would definitely not do that.

I think what this movie does a really good job of is showing you like, no, I think you would, actually. Now, the Michelle Monaghan one is pretty cliche. You know, the machine tells her that it has her son. She sort of gets some threadbare proof of that, or, you know, maybe it's legit proof and acts accordingly. Does that make sense? Sure. It probably makes sense. But I thought that Shia LeBuff character, Jerry, he doesn't really have anything to lose aside from his life.

He doesn't have other things in his life that the machine can take from him. So he's more willing to challenge it, to challenge the matrix he's been placed into on several occasions very quickly with immediacy. And we don't often see that in these movies. Often we see the protagonist act very frightened and scared and, you know, kind of go along with it and slowly try to figure out how they can 5D chest their way out of a situation. Jerry kind of does what I think the instinctual like F you, you're not going to control me thing is, and he tries to get out of view of this situation. He tries to ignore the situation. He tries to brute force escape from the situation. He tries like three or four times to get out of it.

And all three times or four times the movie shows you like, oh, No, no. Like there is here's the hard stop consequence to doing that and it redirects him. But overall, it grants this really interesting and observable sort of microcosm of what information asymmetry can do to you. When an opposing force has asymmetric information about the battle space that you are operating in, when they not only know everything about you, you, but they know what's going to happen in the future. You know, you've been talking about informational time travel for years. And there's ways we can use that. There's ways we try to use that.

We try to become informational time travelers, essentially, and we can. But the machine has an asymmetric advantage in this sort of thing. Those who control the things we care about. The reason I mentioned elections is that's an example of this. You can talk about the midterms. You can talk about whatever election you want to talk about. whatever you think about the elections, just the idea, just the fact I would posit that the machine knows that you are hyper emotional and anxious about elections is in and of itself a form of asymmetric advantage for the machine, which knows, which knows maybe if the machine, if I grant this, maybe the machine doesn't know what the machine. what the outcome of the election is going to be. I would argue that they probably do, but let's say that

they don't. They know how you are going to react on either side of that binary outcome. And that is a massive asymmetry for the machine, because knowing how you're going to react means that for a year leading up to the 2026 midterms, they have been preparing for either eventuality. On the back of those midterm elections, whatever we are told happens by the machine on TV, whether real or fake or somewhere in between, whatever your feelings say you need to believe about that, on the back of it, you will be placed, you will be thrust immediately into a disproportionate informational environment, digital environment that was prepared for you in advance. and if you know that going in, you can shield your emotions from it, even if you can't single-handedly

change the environment on the back of those midterms. You can control your own fishbowl of an environment, and you can prevent that machine from having control over your behaviors and your emotions and your psychological state. And that is one of the reasons why one of the things we advocate in many different topics that's very relevant to this movie is to worry less about trying to control the macro and the environment and to worry much more about controlling your mind

and your behavior within that environment that you otherwise can't control. Yeah, and the idea that the macro can be controlled is insane to me at this point. Like, the urge to try to fix the world by posting on social media, by reposting like influencer posts on social media is utterly insane. And it's the sort of weird escape, weird, I don't know, replacement hobby rather than tending to one's life that is just too easy to fall into at this point.

because we've been fed this drama, we've been conditioned to believe that the state is our God and that all our solutions, all our happiness comes through the state. If the state is upsetting us, well, we need to invest more in the state so that maybe the state will do the things we want instead of the things we don't want.

And that's just kind of how we've been raised into American culture. The entire idea to me is ridiculous. But I don't want to belabor that too much. If you have anything else to say about it. No, no, no. It just made me think of that. Right, right.

So let's get to, let's do this. Let's pause and we'll do, we'll clear out, first of all, clear out is not even the right way to say it. The new soft disclosure ad is just a piece of spectacular cinema. And so what we're going to do is we're going to take a little break and we're going to watch that. And then we will be back to discuss Eagle Eye. Court is now in session. Your Honor, the defense calls Mr. Dryce.

No, that was the wrong one. That was the wrong one. I apologize. I recognize it immediately. Yeah. Press the wrong button. Here we go. In a realm divided by ancient houses.

A war has begun. In the house of Lipbaum. Jonathan of House, Drake. You stand accused of defying the decree of Madam Archie and refusing the razor. I've never heard of what the actual consequences are if we don't shave off our beards. Waiting to find out, because I have no intention of shaving.

In this realm, even the beards may fall. You're one of us now. House of lotion. in Tallow, House of Mini Tallow, House of Beard Oil, and House of Deodorant. She can't get away with this. This would have never happened if she had Bitcoin. Eat a bag of Dragon D's, Jean. That's Kimmer-Kativated, punctured in Phil Spice.

Wait, Mitch... He's a flash-rooked down on you. Looks like you guys could use a little help. The God Emperor. First of all, I've got to say, supporting six small American businesses, huge fan. big fan of America but I came here to tell you you have a big problem at your border

a very big problem an army of dry skin walkers is coming into your lands and trust me you do not want them here they're dry they're cracked they need to be hydrated this is going to take conscious strength and lots of hydration we have to spread the word promo code walkers 17% off at soft disclosure

dot com what about Madam Marjorie her beardless son already handled. I've got the brush on it. Put this on your beard to soften it, motherfucker. Better ending than season eight of Game of Thrones by a lot, I'll say. I sat through eight years of that. It's crazy how good that's getting.

It is incredible. Yeah, Green Star is just knocking them out of the park. He's also got, he's getting, you know, I know that this is AI stuff, but he's got a real. for threading the narratives together. For example, at the beginning of that ad, like, I love the choice of the camera focusing on J and Madame Marjorie while Drake's off-camera complaints, you know, are threatening.

He's like, I don't know the consequences of not shaving my beard. I haven't really thought about it. It's like a typical John Drake kind of rant, but just filtering off-camera. So lots of good little touches there. Green Star crushing it. I love it. Get your soft disclosure, everybody. It is a great product and it helps out Badlands. It helps out our partners and that's what we need is your support because we actually, contrary to what the internet seems to believe we actually don't have these magnificent sources of outside funding.

No, unlike some. Some do. Not us. That's really something. All right. We also have to just let you know, coming off the back of our wonderful GART, Las Vegas.

We have Gart 14 coming up in November in St. Petersburg Beach, St. Pete Beach, Florida. And so let me make sure that I have all the information correct here because I would hate to tell you the wrong thing. So badlandsmedia.com. You can get your tickets. You can get virtual tickets there. Come for the weekend, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

Again, you're going to meet a bunch of badlanders from around the country. It's always just the best to be at a guard. and everybody's got such good energy. And, you know, you talk to other people and feel like you are not crazy, which not everybody has access to in their normal lives. So join us if you wish to do so November 12th through 14th. It'll be right after this year's fake midterm elections. And it will be so much fun to watch

various people scramble and try to explain why they wasted a year's worth of your time telling you about the elections despite knowing that they are fake and then having to admit it again

once again after the election I have figured out I've learned this week that from the end of an election in a year that ends in an even number to the beginning of the next year that ends in an even number, elections are fake. So from Trump's victory in 2024 all the way through January 1st of this year, elections were fake.

Once it is an election year, then if you call elections fake, you are a traitor and should be, I don't know, thrown out of a helicopter or something. Yeah, absolutely strange. the great irony of that is that the goal seems to be to prevent people from exercising their sovereign will in communicating about the fakeness of elections, which is supposed to be an expression of your sovereign will. So quite a thing, quite a pressell. But hey, we've been through it before.

We'll have some fun going through it again this time. And yeah, it's great timing for that guard. Mrs. Bright and I have seen the venue. We were not inside of it because they were renovating it. The Hilton had bought this property, but we happened to be down in Indian Shores in May of this year, and she was thinking about this property. And we were able to take a ride down there and check it out. It is on a beautiful white sand beach on the Gulf of America.

So that's going to be a lot of fun. Hopefully, get some decent weather. And fire pits, outdoor bar, a pool. what's not to love i think that's the type of place you probably won't even have to leave the venue to feel like we're having a good time fire pits are fun and uh i like never having to leave anywhere so that's uh that's perfect for me okay so let's get back to the uh let's get back to the movie um i thought it was hilarious and i'm just going to go through some notes and then we can get into something but uh immediately we get a a volhollock all out and uh with the uh the drone pilots and whatnot

I always think that's funny because, hey man, everybody is in Witsack in Valhalla. And I love thinking about how many people are there and what they must be doing with all their free time now. I also thought it was hysterical in that same opening sequence, how they said that their intel, their reliable intel from the Brits was what was going to have them override. the abort command. They're like, yes, this is the terrorist. One of the guys, after they mentioned, oh, that is probably a funeral, one of the lawyers in the room was like, well, you know, there's not going to be any evidence that it's

not a funeral. So we have plausible deniability on that. And with this reliable intelligence we're receiving from the Brits, well, I guess we get to bomb this thing. And that's neither here nor there. I just thought those two things were kind of alarming at the beginning. Yeah, the whole, it's kind of hard to see where it's all going to go at the very beginning of the movie because you've got that, the whole setup of a 51% you know, situation. And, you know, the machine then basically reads that as human error, which I guess that's sort of a cliched topic but where it ends up going toward the end is pretty

interesting we get into it we not maybe get into it quite yet but a lot of these continuity of government things I certainly perked up right when that happened I I messaged John about it and then John was like Chris was just messaged me me about that so that was pretty funny yeah but one of the other things that we can get more into that but one of the other notes I had written down was just a simple one, but target's never getting the whole picture until it's executed. That's how you prevent a coherent counter strategy. You keep the human in a local survival loop. And again, speaking of, you can think about this for yourself in the info war. And, you know, I always say the info war, but it's in life. We're all in an information war at all

times. All people are at all times. That's what the world is. People are trying to leverage you and control you or influence you, influence your behaviors, influence your actions. And one of the best ways they do it, one of the reasons that I've focused a lot of my commentary over the years on the Hagellian dialectic, as simple as it is, is it's a logical sequence, and it's a practical sequence. It's a psychological sequence that works. And it works predominantly by putting people into a psychological loop. I mentioned the sort of literal version of this a little while ago on this show about the sort of fishbowl concept the movie portrays well. You're physically in an environment where you can't really, your escape routes are being cut off.

But the more practical way that the machine does this to us in the real world is not by calling you on a cell phone and executing a total control over your physical environment and taking your kid and putting them in some sort of situation. What they do is they put you into a psychological, more so emotional reactivity loop. And that's why we always talk about it. I think there's a lot of people that talk about fear programming, but they succumb to it. You know, we mentioned the elections a couple of times. That's one example. There's plenty of examples. COVID engineering, all the other ones.

The AI fear loop that, you know, probably partially responsible for you selecting this movie, that we had kick off in September, that a lot of us saw coming well in advance of of 2026. I was talking about this in 2024, writing articles about how they're already prepping the AI Doom Loop, Psiop, because it was really easy to see coming if you were following these players and trying to project their moves. What is all of that? Even the election thing. What is it? What is the emotional charge? Fear. If you don't get this, if you don't get this binary outcome, you lose. You lose something. What do you lose? Undefined. What do you lose if AI accelerates undefined it could be your job it could be your life it could be uh anything we don't

even know um we don't we that's how scary it is it's it's unknown but it's definitely existential and uh same with covid when you would ask people like well what are the actual effects of covid on somebody like me uh oh we don't know that's why it's so scary so it's all of which is just to say that this movie does it in a very literal way but that siloing, the way mass siops work is they almost, it's kind of a paradoxical, where it's almost like they trap each individual mind into a little sphere of fear that loops around. And then that little sphere of fear bumps up against all the other little individual spheres of fear. And together they form this mesh of everybody being afraid and then confirming the

legitimacy of that fear with all the other little marbles that are running into that have been programmed with the same fear because they're all watching the same story and consuming the same central narrative. So, you know, it's why, though, to go back to your earlier point that you made of a solution to these things and decentralization and speaking out about these things, it does show how powerful individuals can be because you can become a little sphere that is not, that is inoculated against that fear. And then every little marble you buy. you might dispel that fear from them. So, you know, we can learn a lot from the way the machine operates

with its information asymmetry and its fear programming. And as they say in Dune, fear is the mind killer. Just understanding that is the first step toward making it lose its hold on you. Yeah, and the fear thing is, well, first of all, back in the 90s, used to love that band's fears for fears. I've never even heard of that. I was making a joke. I was making a joke.

There will probably be like three people in the chat who laugh. That's how we know that the joke was for them. Tears for Fears was the band. But you were saying fears and fears so much that it made me think of that. The practical basis for the decision making, the fear always says, we know that something in the future is going to happen. If you do X, Y will occur. Y is going to be terrible for you,

so you better not do X. And that is how our society has been conducted, by and large, for generations. It is primarily fear-based on predictions that we are told are overwhelmingly likely to arise and we can know that because the authoritative sources are responsible for telling us about the fears. And so we think, well, I don't want these practical things in the world to occur because I've been convinced, but I believe that all of these things sound really bad. I will do

whatever I have to do to avoid these things. So A, you're living in fear. You're making fear-based decisions. That is just a foundation of this mode of thinking and this aspect of our conditioning. The Bible says, countlessly, do not fear. Jesus says, do not fear. If you are guided by fear, you are already making bad decisions. And so because that is obviously known by the adversary, we are put into fear-based decision-making as many times as our psyches allow that to happen. And so we put ourselves into fear-based decision-making on the basis of practical concerns because we don't want things in the world to happen to us. So our concerns are practical, which means worldly, and our decisions are fear-based. So we are already making

terrible decisions on two separate levels, both of which, if we are operating in an ordered way, and of sound mind, we would never be operating on either of those two decision-making standards. It is okay to make decisions on practical concerns, just not primarily on practical concerns. Like if the moral concerns are taken care of, if operating on a godly basis is taken care of, if operating in truth is taken care of, then sure, choose one thing that you believe is going to create a better practical outcome than the other. That is obviously how we go about the world is just you have to maintain the world as the secondary concern and the moral godly basis as the primary concern. Okay. The practical concerns, the predictions of what's going to happen in the future, you are then appealing to the authority of those experts or of the system, of the state, whatever it is that tells you this bad thing is going to happen in the future.

That is unwise. That is not sound decision-making already. So you just drop through these level after level. Like, don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. We're going to do it anyway because we've been conditioned to do it anyway. If we can eliminate those things from the decision-making process and just say,

is it right or wrong to do this thing? And it turns out wrong. Well, it doesn't matter what the practical concerns are. You don't do it. And then you just have faith that the world is going to take care of itself that you making a good thing. godly decision, that's the right thing to do, and the rest of those things cannot be your concern, because you can't know the future in advance. And so if you do something bad to avoid some

consequence in the future that you're not guaranteed of avoiding, well, all you've done at that point is done something bad. And that is the sort of thing we always need to avoid. And that actually comes up in the context of this film, because the only way to have actually gotten outside the machine's ability to orchestrate all of reality at once is for everybody to understand, never obey that thing. If that was the standard for everyone, then the machine would not be able to operate the way it does. But because nobody actually operates that way, the machine can have its way with all of us. And if you take the machine out of it and you just think of the machine as a neutral tool,

in the world and you think of our actual adversary as the empowering force behind all of this, well, then you say, I should disobey the adversary all the time. Whenever I know the adversary is trying to operate on me through fear on the basis of my practical concerns, I will always do the opposite of what the adversary demands. If we took that up as a culture, the adversary's power would be stripped away from it. And that, again, is what we ultimately have to do. Do we have the fortitude to do that? Individually, we have to develop that on a collective basis.

Obviously, the answer is no, but we shouldn't be operating collectively in the first place. Very well said, especially when you mentioned, you know, the machine as portrayed in this movie requires human beings. agency. And it's absolutely true that if one node in that chain, if one link in that chain breaks, we see in the movie a few times where the machine pivots, but the pivot point is another link in another chain, which is a human link. So, you know, in practicality, and we've meant, I've brought this up many times over the years, but COVID is one of the most obvious examples of a that was really obvious to a lot of people in this audience. I'm still surprised, and I guess I shouldn't be, but speaking of Garts, I'm still surprised

at how many new people I meet in person in the Badlands audience, whose own awakening moment to the Matrix was not necessarily the advent of the Trump era. It was actually the COVID sciop because of just how obvious and sort of invasion of the body snatchers that felt to a lot of people like us. But it was also such a great example to your point of what was the true consequence of COVID, you know, of the, I'm not, I don't mean COVID, of the government with COVID, even what people in this audience, most of whom think COVID was either fake or highly amplified as a sciop.

even these people know that they were real consequences during the COVID era for noncompliance. But those consequences were all enforced by the human nodes that were themselves infected by that mind virus. And on a larger scale, when it came to shutting down businesses like yours, et cetera, you know, you could say the government did that. But really it was like the government passing even those orders down through nodes lower in that chain. to comply with those orders. And then when it came to masking and things like that, it was largely social enforcement, which is the same sort of zombie shit you see in movies like this,

which is what's at once most scary about it, but also freeing about it, once you understand that, you know, like I did during COVID one day when I had enough, it just made a really big scene in a grocery store. And it turned out people just stopped saying that kind of shit to me. Granted, I was lucky on the job front and stuff like that, but we got to pick and choose our battles. The other point I wanted to make you maybe think of is based on what you were talking about with future consequences, the fear of future consequences. It made me think one of the ironies of the human condition is I'm not the first person to say this, but we definitely fear the unknown more than the known, even if the known is really bad.

And that's the funny thing. So as an example, as a society, whether you're talking about the science or in this case, the justice system, let's say. When it comes to known bad things that have occurred in the past, let's say a murder, we then as a society apply what we call burden of proof to hand down punishment on behalf of that bad thing, right? when we know the bad thing happened, we know that a murder occurred. But we've decided there must be burden of proof on those accusing the powerful party, the actor, of causing the bad thing to happen. But when it comes to the future bad thing that might happen, there's no burden of proof on any of it. Right? So like, and that's crazy. It's you can argue back and forth about burden of proof and what we've got right now in the justice system. Certainly the justice system is just as fraudulent as any of our other systems. But from a principles and logical basis, burden of proof makes all the sense in the world. We think you did this bad thing. This bad thing has already happened in the past. There is a burden of proof placed upon us, those who are accusing you of visiting that bad thing upon. this society. Okay. All makes perfect sense. But if it's the government telling you, or a struggle

session communist, telling you, hey, this virus from China could come over here. If it does come over here, it might visit these effects upon you. If it visits these effects upon you, you might visit these effects upon others, or you can take an election. If you don't do what I think you should do in seven weeks, you will contribute to a lot of other people not doing that thing. That will visit some incorporeal effect onto everybody else, including me. Therefore, you must not do that thing. In the former scenario, there is a burden of proof. In the latter scenario, all that needs to happen is a claim needs to be forwarded from a perceived position of authority, and that is it. And it's, you know, it's simple.

but that's effectively how all these little subpockets operate. That's how human society tends to operate. And that's, again, a massive advantage to systems of control, to know that they do not have to require, they do not require proof to add verisimilitude to the proceedings. All they need to do is make the claim scary enough and then the proof is not asked for by those who are being programmed. I want to turn, I want to use this example from this morning because I saw, I follow this guy escape key on substack. The account just says ESC and has a picture of the escape key on a computer keyboard. And he wrote this morning, they have built up an entire global. governance model around being allegedly able to detect the presence of abominable snowmen,

and the architecture doesn't even need the snowmen to exist. And I said, well put, and the next thing to think is, if they don't need abominable snowmen, and the production and presentation of abominable snowmen requires additional planning and resources, then the only time it makes sense to produce and present abominable snowmen is when collective belief in abominable snowmen degrades to the point past which stories about abominable snowmen can no longer effectively compel behavior. And the idea here is that the system is going to do what it's going to do. The elements that it uses to communicate stories to people are only necessary, to the extent that people fully believe in them to the point at which their behavior can be

compelled by evoking these various parts of the story. And in this example, obviously the Abominable Snowman. Because it costs, because it costs resources, you need to demand people's attention, and the rest of it, in order to kind of recommit people to the belief in these things, you don't want to actually present those things unless you need to increase people's belief. The only time you need to do that is when belief wanes. And so I would suspect then, for instance, as you see people's belief waning in pandemics, in viruses, in nuclear weapons, in aliens, in whatever else it is that people have become

too skeptical about, these are the sorts of elections, these are the sorts of things that we need to keep having hammered into our heads so that we will recommit over and over again to the story so that they can use the story to compel behavior. And now, of course, we have elections every few months. We have primaries and then we have midterms. And next year we'll have primaries and we'll have special elections and off-year elections and the elections in like New Jersey and Virginia or whatever. Maybe those don't happen until 2029. But there's always something new to come up because they need the faith in these ideas to be restored. So the stories continue to work year after year,

decade, after decade, generation after generation, and so on. And so that's all very much part of the whole theory in chicken egg chicken. And we saw a perfect example of this. And it's why I included it in the clips package of the crane crashing through the building. This is what was going to get Jerry Shaw out of the situation where he's been arrested and detained by the FBI and whatever other organizations were holding him. I think the lady was there from the Air Force, which we could go down a weird path on that as well. But they're like the machine said, okay, well, the situation is not how we needed to be.

How do we get Jerry Shaw out of this building? You know what we can do? We can commandeer this crane. Crane smashes through the wall. We'll get him out like that. And that whole scene was a little bit ridiculous. But it proved the point in a very visually striking way. it can create the world it needs to create

to have the thing it needs to happen happen and I know that that sentence is a little awkward but it's pretty incredible the fact that it is it understands a reality needs to come in to existence to be able to create the situation we need to create let's bring that reality into existence everyone who would have witnessed it

all the people in the building all the people from watching from outside, they would have said, you can't call that fake, you can't call that orchestrated. Sometimes things just happened. That thing definitely happened. It happened the way we saw it happen. There's nothing more to it than that. Now you've got to move on or you're going to be a crazy person. Well, here's a perfect example, and yes, fictional, but here's a perfect example of how these things could potentially be orchestrated. And maybe it's time we start paying attention to that. We talked about this on Saturday night. Vegas on DPH when it came to the retroactive seeding or the retroactive disclosure of the narrative

seed that had been planted regarding a nuclear warhead being transported on a Chinese ship that the US military almost responded to and you know this just shows like I wrote down some notes about that for a show I want to do at some point. But one of the words I use in keeping with my background over here is matrioshka. Oh, my God. Mm-hmm. There we go. I've got my matrioshka dolls there.

And like they're picking up on that we're starting not to believe in the Abominable Snowmen, to your point. Yeah. So they're leaning in to layering the Psiops into as many different narrative sort of vehicles as they can, right? Like instead of just the news reporting that a Chinese warship had been attacked by the U.S. military, they're like, no, no, no, no. We're saying that a report within the U.S. military made some guys there want to attack a Chinese warship because they thought it was carrying nuclear weaponry, but it wasn't. But if they had attacked it, then it would have

been a false flag and that would have started a war. You know, this is kind of like, they're jumping the shark a bit, I think. And I think the encouraging thing about that is it demonstrates that there has been some disarmament going on in terms of people buying into some of these things, even in the normy layers, doesn't mean that they know what's going on, but they're like, I don't believe you. I don't believe you about that thing. And that's certainly happening with the magical bombs. We've talked about that on the show going back to Oppenheimer, whether you believe magical bombs are real or magical bombs are fake, people just don't really care about magical bombs anymore. You talk about nukes to regular people. One of the things I've said on this show multiple times is that they

jumped the shark with that a bit too, because it's such an existential threat. Like if the abominable snowman, that's like scarier because it's this thing that maybe is mortal and you can defeat it If you get enough guys with muskets, you could fend it off, get some big dogs or something. But it can't just kill everything immediately. If they tell you, if they tell the villager a few hundred years ago, like, there's big things in these woods and they might tear your shit up. Well, there are. There's grizzly bears. Like, we already have scary things like that that exist.

And fear of them is well placed because it's realistic. Like a grizzly mare might just eat you. And you should know that that's possible, or a shark in my chosen analogy of choice. But a magical bomb is so threatening that it goes all the way back around to becoming unthreatening again. Because there is no behavior pattern that could possibly emerge on the micro to stop the magical bomb from visiting its effects onto anybody. So I think that's kind of like they're they went too far with the Psiops 100 years ago and they've been trying to like rebrand those Psiops but they're still branding them kind of under nuclear pushes. But last point on it would be as I said on Saturday night in Vegas to your point about chicken egg chicken and we've said for years

narrative proceeds actual most of the time if not all the time they still need that actual part to close the loop. They still need the actual closes the loop of the narrative. It codifies the narrative. And I think there's just an inversion where even people that are aware of siops and that are aware of false flags, they often invert that flow. And they think actual false flag occurs, narrative follows it. But in every case of a false flag or what we believe to be false flags that have changed some seismic course of a nation or society, in every single case, you will find seating and which the act, the action, the actual retroactively codifies. Yeah, absolutely. And it's important to recognize that that dynamic exists. And we've got to get our heads out of, again, the conditions and programs, mindset,

that everything we see happening is real and spontaneous and happening. in the timeframe that we imagine it, and it's not planned, it's not coordinated. People don't imagine that orchestration on this scale is possible. But that's crazy because we know it's possible. We can look, you know, and most, maybe not most people in the audience, many people in the audience will have used ride-sharing apps like Uber or Lyft. and ride-sharing apps, the ways that the cars get around, the directions that are given,

the ways that ride-request calls are routed to various drivers, the ways that they're paid, the ways that they're tipped, the ways that the app contacts the user and suggests them taking certain rides or using certain features and the rest of that. all of that is orchestrated from a centralized like computer system and algorithm. And everybody knows that. So you think about thousands of cars influencing the daily activity of thousands upon thousands of riders, I should say, and all of the places that they might go and the times they arrive at those places and how their arrival at those places affects the lives of the people who are already there and you can take this out

as many iterations as you want. But we already have activity at scale being coordinated from a centralized unit with no humans operating it. And that's already going on. And so if you then just raised up one level from Uber and Lyft and thought about, well, what's the system that's maybe controlling both of those systems or take them out of it and think of any array of systems that have the possibility for a higher level of coordination, you can go all the way up to the top like that and it never becomes implausible. It is entirely possible that all of this stuff is orchestrated from a centralized location or not even location at this point because it's all just in the you know, ether, and I don't want to use the figurative version of ether when we talk about

the literal version as well. But it really is possible to have that level of orchestration. And so when people say things like, what do you say, they're all in on it? Like, who cares if they're all in on it? Like, there's a level higher than them being in on it that puts them all in on it. And we've talked about this to some length before, but what a, what a incredible illustration of that concept this movie presented. And if for no other reason, this movie is worth watching for that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just a little point on that would just be the they're all in on it can just be, I mean, incentive structures we've talked about, incentives and disincentives.

And in this movie, it's a very literal version of that where every single node, every piece of actual power projection. most of the pieces of actual power projection on behalf of the system or the conspiracy, the heart of the conspiracy, is executed by, in this case, unwilling nodes almost, you know, or I guess they're willing in terms of they behave physically in a way that they are commanded to behave in, but they're under duress. So, you know, even then you have a conspiracy. That's what the definition of a conspiracy is. It is wild and especially people that, you know, sort of awoke to the fact that conspiracies exist, but then they think that they've all stopped

or something at this point in time. I just don't get it. I don't know. As we kind of round toward an ending, I'll let you say whatever you want about some of the stuff you were researching afterwards, but one of the notes I had written down was just besides all the other first principles and concepts in the movie. I wrote down like in one little section, Just given the recent news cycle, we had AI, obviously, is a theme in this movie, the Department of Defense, the Kennedy Center, and Deep Underground Data Centers. And then, I had already written that note down. AI, DoD, Kennedy Center, Deep Underground Data Centers.

And then we had continuity of government, evolution, section, whatever. So, man, lots of stuff being thrown at the wall. this one that kind of all came back around in the current story cycle. Yeah, the devolution stuff I was looking at and maybe I sent you. I think I only sent the Section 216 stuff yesterday. But I think that the devolution stuff I had been looking at was relative to Greenland, to Greenland and the fact that the machine had returned me an answer that said Greenland's government was, or that the British Empire had devolved, or the, I'm sorry, the Danish

kingdom had devolved Greenland's government, which was basically the idea that like, we are relinquishing our control. We are pushing control toward this lower level. And then I thought about that in relation to the United States, of course, and devolution in the American sense, in the sense it, John uses it. And then the idea that so much of the federal government's power has actually been usurped from the states, it's all undelegated and undue power. And so that could conceivably be devolved in the sense of shifting that power back toward the states. Now it's the state's rightful power. So the machine was kind of saying, well, devolution wouldn't really be the right term for that. And I was like, well, conceptually, it still is, because the government,

has claimed all that power, and that power is not of the federal government ultimately. And I think that we're maybe seeing some of that. But we don't need to go into that. I don't know if John is going to want to talk about it on Saturday. But it wasn't a revelation, just one of those kind of interesting things. I don't have a whole lot more that I think we need to talk about any length on this. I thought it was interesting that they had handed the control of everything virtually over to the machine. under a certain rule set that they thought they were the bosses of ultimately.

And it turned out that the conditions were built into the machine to suggest that they no longer were the bosses. I thought it was particularly interesting when the machine was mentioning the Declaration of Independence and what it was doing on behalf of the people. There is actually a way that that makes a lot of sense. The machine has a better understanding of what the American people actually think and believe and want than the elections and polling statistics could ever provide fake elections, fake statistics. We could even ignore the fakery and think of those things as real and still understand that the machine has far more insight

into what the American people actually do want. And, you know, that would be perfect democracy if the machine could actually accurately assess and reproduce that all the time, theoretically at least. But then the problem becomes what do the American people actually want? And it turns out the American people actually want some really bad and stupid shit because most of what the American people believe about how the world operates is a function of that conditioning and that programming and the crap culture that we've all ingested for our entire lives. And so the things that we want are distorted against our interests as well. And so again, it comes back to the individual taking responsibility for themselves to align their lives, they're thinking their beliefs and the rest of it. with something more godly with a divine order.

And that is where I'd be happy to leave it. Yeah, that is the point I was trying to make on one of our panels on Saturday or Friday that you were on. And instead, me and Ash just yelled at each other for about an hour. Oh, yeah, these things happen. But that was the exact point I was trying to make is that why are we talking about decision rights so often? without talking about the fact that the people making their decisions are not just stupid. They have been sci-opt in direct opposition to their wants and needs. They have been sci-opt into the false belief of Exhibit A.

And so then we are going to codify the end result of the machine by granting their decision rights over that thing. And that's like the next stage of conversation beyond whether or not elections are real. Whether or not elections are real is an important conversation to have. But maybe the more important endgame conversation to have, and John Drake talks about this a lot, but is why do people feel that their decision rights should have any impact over my life in any way? And that's where ultimately we need to get to, especially if those decision rights are being executed on believing in the totality of the matrix that they have been programmed with. It's a big problem, and it's one that people freaking out about elections are a very long way and very many steps removed from considering. Yeah, not to, again, go too far into this, but I posed this morning.

I was like, I cannot believe that like these people are bothering to talk about AI, much less obsessively, when they can't even figure out on a principled basis the reality of American elections. Like the idea that I would take them seriously about a philosophically and technologically complex subject when they have the worst epistemology imaginable and then can't even be honest about. simple things that supposedly we all It's crazy. It's wild. It's what they don't need people don't even know what epistemology is. I don't know. I don't mean that they're not even looking it up. They looked they're not looking at they looked up the definition of it. They wouldn't understand what that is and that's truly been I don't even say that with like poison in my heart. It's like it's it's it's observable. It's crazy. And there's a lot of people that there's people that

I know in my real life who are not plugged into this stuff, who are epistemological. That you can see the way they navigate the world. They think about things. They want to know why people believe the things they believe. And you know, you could argue that people like that are further ahead of people who know we live in a matrix but are not epistemological. But, you know, hopefully we can get everybody to be both at the same time. There's one other thing that I wanted to mention. It was the, uh, the, uh, the Ethan Embry character runs in at the end and tells Billy Bob Thornton, like, there's this explosive that they've developed.

It's in these little tiny crystals, and they can blow up everything, these crystals. And I was like, I was like, holy shit, the machine is straight up making up dumb threats to scare the hell out of these morons. And that's what it does here, too. So I think that there's at least a decent case to be made that the machine is already running everything on this level. It's less active in people's lives. Like it operates under the threshold of awareness in most people's lives. But even just the algorithmic control of systems I was talking about before really does put this in the lead position when it comes.

to controlling what's happening in the world. And I think at some point, we've got to wrestle with that. So anyway, respond to that if you like, and otherwise we can get to the final business here. Yeah, last little note is I was going to say, before you mentioned it, I thought it was pretty funny that the most or the extreme trigger of the machine was that section of the Declaration of Independence, especially because we've been talking about it a lot this week.

Oh, yeah. The abolishing of the government. So yeah, I thought that was great. Yeah, this was a fun one. It was much funner than I thought it was going to be. All right, cool. So I don't know if I saw any rants come in. Do you...

Yes, we have a couple of Miss Real Freedom Fighter. Oh, they are. Said, have you ever watched the movie Class Action? You should. It's great. I've never even heard of Class Action. I have not. Nor have I. I mean, look it up.

Film. 1991. Gene Hackman, Mary Elizabeth, Mastronton. Astro-Antonia, yeah. I don't even know who that is, but she looks familiar. This is, hmm. An attorney representing a traumatized accident victim finds that his opponent is a very familiar defense attorney, his own daughter.

Oh. How zany. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, maybe we'll add that to the never-ending list. Thomas Times sent a boost over off-topic post, but this is the only show where the two best DPA shows are. Please don't ever quit us.

F the haters. They're so irrelevant. They won't even be a footnote in American history. Badlands on the one hand. We'll leave a legacy. Well, thank you, Thomas Times. We appreciate that. We do.

We've got our support out there. And now for the selection for next week, I've been wanting to do this one for a while. I never find the right opportunity. We're going to go back into the comic book realm for the first time in a while. We're going to do the 2022, the Batman. Make sure you find the right one.

2022, The Batman. Robert Pattinson, directed by Matt Reeves, who is a fantastic director. If you get nothing else out of this movie, it is superbly filmed and directed, I would say, by far, the best-looking Batman movie, one of the better-looking comic book movies I have ever seen. A lot of mood, a lot of atmosphere to it.

Have you seen this one, Chris? I have, yeah. I remember liking it, though I don't remember the movie particularly well. So some of the little things I am interested in revisiting. This is a very conspiratorial Batman movie, and it deals with a Bruce Wayne who is grappling with an enemy in the riddler in this movie who is basically trying to either disclose to him truths about his family's past or else manipulate him based on stories of. about his family's past.

And this villain is doing this with many different players throughout Gotham City. So this is the rare Batman movie. I would say the only Batman movie that is basically dealing with information warfare in a digital battle space and sort of the rewriting and the timed releasing of true information. But in a way that perhaps stitches together

a fictional narrative, I think it's actually quite well done. This is one that I was very weary of going into just because of how harsh I am on movies like this because I like the source material. But this one grew on me a lot. And I think, I think there's actually some meaty stuff in it. Good. I'm looking forward to this. I don't remember it well enough to have big thoughts about it. But I'm stoked to see it. And it's got quite a cast. And yeah, it's well worth it. So cool, this will be fun. And we will be back for that next Thursday evening.

Guys, so please come back and join us again. Thank you so much for watching. If you could, please go ahead and leave a thumbs up on the Rumble or YouTube. Theoretically, that helps us. And it's always good to know that we have real human engagement somewhere. Yes. with all of the bots being purchased to make people look popular these days. It's nice to have some real human engagements.

And with that, we will bid you adieu. We will say good night, and we will see you next week for The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson. 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.