Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 189: The Adjustment Bureau

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright take on The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi's 2011 adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, with Matt Damon as senatorial hopeful David Norris, Emily Blunt as Elise, and Anthony Mackie and John Slattery as the men in hats keeping him on plan. Chris points out how many real politicians and pundits play themselves in the opening campaign montage, and Burning Bright explains why Damon's Obama-era politics make that blend of fiction and reality hard to watch now. The two dig into The Daily Show and Jon Stewart's famous Crossfire appearance as a case study in controlled opposition, with Burning Bright borrowing the wrestling idea of the jobber to explain who was set up to lose. From there they read the Bureau as handlers nudging a candidate along a map of nodes and inflection points, why the system works best when most players don't know the plan, and how love can become leverage. They close on the movie's last line, that free will is a gift you won't know how to use until you fight for it, and pick 2001: A Space Odyssey for next week.

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a earthy flavor that works very well for me in coffee where sweet chocolate does not work for me when mixed with it. So I can confirm it does not taste like Hershey chocolate. It tastes like its own thing. It's good stuff. That is exactly right. Very good description. Okay. And with that we can get started. Good evening. Everybody. Welcome to Badland Story Hour. I'm Chris Paul. That is Burning Bright. And tonight we are discussing the adjustment bureau from back in 2011 written and directed by George Nolfi starring Matt Damon, Emily Blunt. And then you just have to make your way through this. Yeah, well, you got Anthony Mackie, John Slattery of Madman fame. You've got, man, who else is in this? Who am I forgetting? Pedro Pascal was the, yes, Michael Kelly's awesome.

No. I didn't even recognize it. The matri-dee. He's barely in the movie, but he is in there. Yeah. I didn't notice him. And then I thought the craziest thing was how many people from the political and media realms were in this film playing themselves.

And so I had the machine compile a list of these for me. Here are, here's what we've got. Michael Bloomberg, Madeline Albright, Jesse Jackson, James Carville, his wife, Mary Madeline. And, you know, they're the, I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican, Unip Party people. They're the married couple. Oh, we fight like hats and dogs, except we still love each other because it's all a Uniparty. Then you've got Terry McAuliffe, who was the ringer candidate in 2021's Virginia governor election that elected Glenn Yonkin.

We've got John Podesta of Pizsgate fame. And then John Stewart, Wolf Blitzer, Chuck Scarborough, and Betty Lou, who I guess is a Bloomberg reporter. But yeah, that brought the feeling of authenticity to this movie with politics playing out in the background. And it's it's always Democrats, especially in that era, Obama era flick. But this is a burning bright selection. So I'll pass it off to you and go ahead and kick things off. Yeah, we can maybe hang out at the beginning and a little bit of that real world politics stuff. Because the rest of the movie doesn't have that much to do with that. You know, the politics is more of window dressing.

There's obviously deeper themes at work. I brought up when you were talking about the cast. By the way, I'm not casting aspersions when I say they're character actors. I actually think that character actors are great and they should be more respected. Michael Kelly is actually like one of my favorite character actors. He's like my, that guy. And I only memorized his name a couple years ago because I think with my in-laws, we were watching, you know, all the CIA propaganda shows on Amazon.

the Jack Ryan one with The Officeman. But Michael Kelly, we watched, there was at one point when I was staying in Canada in the last few years, we watched like two or three of these sort of American spy thriller shows in a row. And all of them had Michael Kelly in them as like a prominent sort of side character. Like he's basically the guy that's in every other episode for two or three minutes. So he always plays like the kind of steady straight man guy who you can trust on the inside, who works through the procedural bureaucracy in order to get the guy on the ground the information he needs.

So he's usually answering phones and running back and forth in meetings, but he does a good job of it. The one movie that I randomly know about that Michael Kelly plays a guy completely against type, the rest of his type, is he is one of the main characters in Zach Snyder's 2004 Don of the Dead remake, in which he plays one of the mall cops who's like a bravado, badass kind of dickhead type of dude, very against type, and nobody recognizes him because he had all his hair in that movie. And I think that's what happened. He lost his hair, and then he started doing the CIA office guy gimmick. Um, he was also, he was also, um, Kevin Spacey's like right hand man in the show House of

cars. Oh, I never saw that. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's another, uh, political thing. This guy is always that character. It's crazy how often he's that character. And he does, as you said, a great job. But yeah, yeah, he just steady. He shows up in a scene and you're like, ah, this guy's going to tell us, you know, kind of keep things steady. Um, yeah, the, uh, first of all, I thought the movie was, uh, good, not great. Um, it was maybe a little. Um, it was maybe a little. better than I kind of remembered it being. I thought concept, this is one of those ones I just thought conceptually would be interesting. It was a little better than I remembered it being. Uh, but man, it, this is definitely one of those. We talk about like post-awakening, post-whatever eyes.

And that, that early montage of Matt Damon's character, Norris, going through the, you know, primary process and all this stuff. And specifically John Podesta, you know, for, for a long time, you know, retards and schizophrenics like me, you see that guy on there and you're like, oof, there's some energy there. We don't know what's true and what's false, but some dark energy coming off of that one. And I will say that Matt Damon has that energy as well to me. He's one of those guys that, like, I'm pretty good, given the context of what we do on this show in particular. I'm pretty good at separating art from artists these days. You know,

post-Pizzergeat era, post-conspiracy, not post-conspiracy theory era, but in the conspiracy theory era, when these things are so ubiquitous, even normies at the cookout now, you'll hear one of them talking about like the dark stuff they're doing in the government, right? No matter who they're talking about. They could be talking about the Trump administration, the Obama, Biden, whatever, but they could be talking about Hollywood. This stuff is all very normal to talk about now, you know, post Epstein and all that. 2011, it was not. And Damon is just one of those guys for me that even if you get away from all the really dark stuff, I think he's a good actor.

He's been in many of the best movies of the last 20 years. But he is so attached at the hip to all of that. mainstream Hollywood politics crap. And I remember, like, at this time, he was super on board the Obama stuff.

He's like Mr. Union guy. And it's almost like Matt Damon in real life has been playing a version of the Goodwill hunting character, which we haven't done and should do at some point, where it's like the Boston guy

that's sort of, he plays a very good every man, but he, he has used this to thrust himself into political arguments and conversations constantly over the years. Maybe in recent years he's pulled back a little bit, but I completely forgot that this movie had all these political undercurrents and plotting. I remembered it being like the bureaucracy and the shadow matrix chasing him around. I did not remember that he was the senator, that it's all.

about or the senatorial hopeful and just there's a weird blending of worlds in this one where you've got like Matt Damon the actor playing a character who's trying to become a senator but dealing with all the people that Matt Damon of that era was constantly pumping the tires on on every interview he could go on so like the beginning is gross to me where even besides politics it's like man This was 2011 right before like the next Obama election. And as you said, it was like, in hindsight, I was caught up in that stuff as a liberal at the time. And in hindsight, when you watch a high budget Hollywood movie like this with an A-list guy like Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, and you just see how obvious the like political collusion was in that Obama era toward all, as you said, all liberals, all Democrats.

It's like if there's any Hollywood movie that that tries to add some verisimilitude about the political things going on, it was like, these are all the good people, you know, good by association. And, you know, then it ends up working well as a backdrop. But the beginning, I found kind of jarring just because of all the real world figures that they were throwing into it and everything I already knew about Matt Damon. Yeah, they really do. try to create that environment and try to blend the i should say blur the lines between the two things

even more so than blend them and i mean we are this as you said is square in the middle of the obama era i used to actually work with the lady who was responsible for doing celebrity wrangling for baroque obama and it was funny my kind of one of the real splits for me from the hollywood political community, if there is such a thing, was the 2015, 2016 primary cycle. She asked me to work and do that particular job on behalf of Bernie Sanders. And I was like, no. So what does that mean getting them like getting interviewed, getting them spots and or me. Yeah, yeah.

It's just like basically like accessing your your network around town to try to find people who are interested in getting involved somehow in the political campaign and doing appearances for the candidate to make the candidate look very appealing, very young and hip and cool. Like, that's what they did with Barack Obama. That was all highly coordinated. And it worked. It worked on me. 100%.

It absolutely convinced the country that Barack Obama was extraordinarily popular. And that's a perfect example of how manufacture, consensus can replicate itself in a very real way. You can make something seem cool, make it seem like everybody wants that thing. And all of a sudden, the illusion as it's communicated to other people, they're like, wow, all these people want that thing. I want that thing too. And so they get the thing.

And it turns out that everybody is actually a real owner of that thing. They've created the consensus from nothing, showing it to be cool and popular. Everybody jumps on board because they want to do what consensus does. And then you've actually created a, real world phenomenon of a consensus being formed around a product or an individual. And in that case, of course, it was Barack Obama. And you can see that it took many years for that consensus that formed around Barack Obama to begin to break apart. And so one of the things they were really playing on that time is that celebrities know where or believe that the locus of power

is in Washington politicians. And so they want to be friends with Washington politicians. If you're friends with politicians, you start getting in that political circle, well, then you can go on and do shows like Bill Maher, and you start to seem like important and socially relevant and far more intelligent than you are because you're involved,

because you're that important political figure. And then, of course, the politician wants to be friends with the celebrity, the famous person, the athlete, whatever it is, because they help. the politician to become more popular. And so you've got a person like Matt Damon, who, as you said, the world's crossover anyway, then they bring in these ancillary political figures who are just in and around politics, commentating out politics, and the rest of it, they put them in a movie

like this. And it's like, well, is that character, a TV character because people actually care about their political ideas? Or are they playing the same part in both scenarios and their part is to translate the political agenda of global intelligence, the military industrial complex, transnational corporations, the rest of it, to this wide audience in these two different ways. And I think at this point, it seems mostly to be that. Now, I'm not as old as you, Chris, but I am getting old as people. I saw a clip from myself on DPH from like two or three years ago the other day. I was like, oh, God.

And then I literally shaved that day. I was like, let me try to, you know, rain some of this back in, get some of the grays under control. But the reason I say that is I am old enough, speaking of the programming and kind of the blending of worlds there, to remember when I thought John Stewart doing the Daily Show was so curious because I was like, that's the guy who's in the Adam Sandler movies. And like, that's who he was to me and my friends. It wasn't like, I mean, maybe he was well known in certain circles. But to me, as like a Normie in Normieville, Boston, I was like, the guy who like usually does gay stuff in one scene in an Adam Sandler movie, he wasn't even a guy whose name I knew. And then he was doing the Daily Show. But I've said before, especially to people, a lot of our audience have been or were Republican.

or conservatives. You know, there's the occasional lifelong independent. There's the very occasional former liberal like you and I were, you know, former Democrat, I should say. But I've told a lot of badlanders, like the brilliance, you got to respect game. Game respects game. The brilliance not just of the Obama era from a programming perspective, but specifically of the Daily Show really cannot be understated. For a millennial, and I think it was the case with a lot of GenX as well, it was such a great example of the controlled opposition dynamic that you talk about because it wasn't like, you know, we had the Bush era was when the Daily Show came about.

The Colbert stuff was years after that. So it was Daily Show played a little bit more straight at the beginning. And the brilliance of the controlled abo dynamic in that context was the Bush era was so dark for people who did not identify with it at that time. It was bloody. It was warbound. It was, you know, flag waving, jingoism, all the kind of stuff we've talked about before on the show. And the traditional version of the controlled opposition would just prop up, you know, political figures on the on the on the so-called left to say hey bush is bad what they're doing is bad but i think the machine recognized or got ahead of the fact that a lot of millennials and gen x were completely disillusioned with politics itself in the wake of the bush era or perhaps even leading up to it

and so they knew that the like liberals like me weren't watching CNN even if it was the quote unquote liberal news. But we were watching Comedy Central. So that's where they got us. And, you know, they put John Stewart on there to be like, this guy isn't a political guy. He's just kind of one of us. And we're going to watch it because it might be funny. And then it turned out, John Stewart is a really smart guy, too, in terms of just how he can he can communicate about a wide range of subjects. he can think circles around most of the people that are on the show that they bring in. So over a period of months and years, he actually developed like a real trust with me, with my brother, I remember, who was five years older with me, with people like us.

We were like, yeah, our parents watch the news. We don't watch the news. We watch the news that's about the news, which is the daily show. Really a precursor too to kind of the podcasting age. and you know it's like it was used for such evil purposes in propaganda now in hindsight the propaganda is absurdly obvious and it would probably be really difficult to get like a a plugged in zoomer or gen alpha or something right now to look at the original daily show and be like you didn't know that was propaganda dad it's like well son you have to understand that at the time we thought that the tv characters were actually good guys and the politicians were the bad guys. And again, this movie takes like that meta level of John Stewart and places it in a further meta level, a third layer of meta, which is the fictional Adjustment Bureau film with these fictional characters who are appearing on John Stewart and everything. And then of course, when you, when you

understand that like all of this was, it was this loop that was highly effective that both proceeded and followed the Obama era. And you're right, it did, it took some time for that Obama sort of zeitgeist to start collapsing. And then one more point on it would be this movie for me, this year for me, 2011 was a big year for me. I graduated university this year. And I vividly remember going, you know, people talking about the Obama economy was bad,

but I was a college kid. I didn't give a shit or know what that meant. was poor, but I'm like everybody is in college. And I went to an interview and like a 45 year old or 50 year old woman with like 20 years of experience beat me out for an entry level job that was offering like $27,000 in downtown Boston. And I remember going home and I got kicked off my parents health insurance the same month. And I remember going home and being like, oh, things are not okay.

And that was my black pilling. So 2011 was my black pillage year. And I guess they were still trying to get us back on the rails with movies like this, maybe. That's funny. To the John Stewart thing, you know, I've said this, I think about John Stewart before and certainly Bill Maher, one of the, these guys can say that they're just comedians. They're not just comedians.

I mean, they host intelligence assets and politicians on. their shows all the time. It's the same thing with Joe Rogan. The bookers are bringing those guys in for a certain reason. And if the hosts don't understand the reason that those guests are being brought on, then the hosts are ignorant and getting hoodwings. And I think that they're not actually that stupid. John Stewart and Bill Maher in particular, and Rogan is not guilty of this. And I don't think really at all. But I guess he does, I guess he, I guess he maybe aims it at other groups their their stick was presenting normie republicans often out of context but in ways that could make them look like the dumbest most evil most woman hating most racist blah blah blah you go on down the

list most war loving all of these things of anybody that you could ever imagine that's what they did they framed people that way and they framed the supporters of those people of those people that way. Bill Maher, who I used to love, and I used to love for this reason, like genuinely like seems to get off by calling strangers that he really has nothing to do with and probably has never really met in most cases, like normal Trump supporters, just Americans out there earning a living who happened to really dislike what government under people like Bill Maher became. He loves calling those people stupid. and awful for any variety of reasons.

And that is something that made our politics really, really toxic in the last 20 years. And I don't think that because these guys would call themselves comedians, that they can really get past that complaint. They did this. They are responsible for doing this. And I have no doubt that characters like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly and you can go on down the list. Tucker Carlson. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, Tucker wasn't always, yeah.

I mean, he was always the, the Republican in these conversations. But that dude used to be on Crossfire. I don't know if you are familiar at your young age of the, the appearance of Tucker Carlson, or sorry, of John Stewart on the show Crossfire. Did you, did you ever see that? I don't remember. No. Oh, my gosh. I will. I don't even know what Crossfire is, I don't think.

Okay. Go ahead. And if you want to respond to anything, I just said, go ahead. I'm going to pull this clip up. You are going to be floored by this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, just briefly, I would just say the, that this, the clear disdain for like the Republican normie of that era by this intellectual elite of the John Stewart's.

And, you know, some might say Jews as well. I see the chat. I understand. It worked because those people, many of them, even in our personal lives, as Democrats at the time had been roped into supporting this Bush era jingoism and did look like that to people like me. So, you know, it's what we talk about sometimes where the brilliance of the machine, and this does tie back into the movie in terms of planning, because I think there's a lot of meta commentary in this movie about plans and how, while this movie presents it as kind of magical planning and foresight, and what's the word like precognition.

If you have information asymmetry, you have what appears to be precognition. I mean, you talk about this a lot in terms of informational time travel, very similar type of concept. And, you know, they were programming disaffected liberals of that age to hate the Normie MAGA, what would become Normie MAGA in advance. And the two party too. Yep. And just like the last point on it would be just like they were also programming who were going to become Norma Maga to hate the intellectual liberal that was represented by people like me in the Northeast. So then the best examples are the most effective examples

of the controlled opposition dynamic are ones where both sides genuinely feel that utter toxic, you know, well-founded hatred for the other in their own mind. And then, of course, in hindsight, you realize that we were all just goyam being given stones, you know, by whoever was in charge to hurl them at each other. Well, speaking of that, it's also important to know that John Stewart's name is actually John Stuart Liebevitz. I heard, yeah. So, okay, here is the, here is that crossfire appearance. I think that he was on for the, the entire episode, which is like 22 minutes long. So this is CNN in the early 2000s, half an hour daytime talk show.

Okay, here we go. Crossfire. Crossfire. We're talking to John Stewart, who was just lecturing us on our moral inferiority. John, you're bum in a sap. Tell us, what do you think of the Bill O'Reilly vibrator story? No. I'm sorry?

I don't. I'm here to confront you because we need help from the media, and they're hurting us. I made a special effort to come on the show today because I have mentioned this show as being bad. It's not so much that it's bad as it's hurting America. So I wanted to come here today and say, wait, wait, let me. Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys. Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

I watch your show every day, and it kills me. I can tell you a lot of it. so all it's so painful to watch your partisan what do you call it hacks you have a responsibility to the public discourse and you fail a job and miserably I think you're a good comedian I think your lectures are boring you're on CNN say my the show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone call what is wrong with you it's someone who watches your show and cannot take it anymore I just can't fail job and miserably I

think you need to go to one now this is theater i mean it's it's how old are you 35 and you wear a bow tie yeah i do so i hate to do so at all i do think you're more fun on your show just my opinion but can all right and i do remember seeing those clips of stewart but i completely do not remember tucker at all yeah so that was a show on cnn where they would have um a guy from the left and a guy from the right. And it would be either Tucker Carlson or this guy, Robert's something, I can't remember his name. And you got Paul Begala, and I think maybe sometimes Carville on the other side, but they would just argue back and forth within the controlled opposition dynamic. And this is something I've been writing a little bit about over the last like few months. But what they're doing is

modeling arguments for the American people so that the American people argue in the exact ways that they saw these men argue on TV. They replicate those arguments in their own lives with all the same passion points, all the same talking points, all the same emotions. And whoever performs what they saw on television best is considered the winner of an argument in the normie sphere. This is this is like how people's political interactions have been formed in the last few decades. And I would suggest it's all a product of exactly this stuff. And I think that John Stewart, was right about Crossfire, but this is one of those things where you're like getting rid of the old lame version of the thing and bringing in the new cool version.

This isn't a whole lot different than what John Stewart did on Colbert's CBS late night show a few years back when he came on to do the whole histrionic take on, oh, we can all admit that it didn't come from the wet market when the COVID lab is just like right down the street. It's like a bat kissing a pangolin and you know. Yeah. It's it's like it's social permission what we were saying at the time. Also, Chappelle on SNL, I think was around that same period of time when you're talking about the COVID, the John Stewart-Caubre appearance. People can fact check me in the in the chat. I'm curious when Chappelle hosted SNL in the last few years because when he did, it was two or three years ago it was similar where he was kind of like giving normie liberals who

watched CNN permission to be like hey you know let's not be as mean to maga people now because we can kind of understand what they liked about Donald Trump but thank God all that stuff's behind us that's what it felt like to me he was talking about how Trump had told everybody the truth about how all politicians are criminals um to your point about Stewart uh Rorschart we have ghost and raw shark in the chat so it's it's good timing to bring up the analog um raw shark said watch johns watch john stewart throw the fight or sorry watch Tucker carlson throw the fight to your point about the controlled apod dynamic and ghost often talks about uh wbwe and one of the core you know we talk about k fabe a lot and that's one of the main concepts that we bring in from world wrestling

entertainment but another major um thing in combat sports that was very very injected into the DNA of the WWE was the concept of jobbers. I don't know if that's like a common term or not to people. But jobbers is ubiquitous in world wrestling, but it's also just a thing in sports where you would basically, if you're trying to build somebody, if you're trying to build a new face, you're going to have them go up against guys

that are going to build their standing and build their stardom. So you get them to go up against infamous guys who used to be at the height, right? But they've kind of fallen a little bit from their peaks. And we call them jobbers. So you'd have a guy. And the idea was that terminology came from the fact that this guy who used to have a big following and still has something of a following was brought in for a job. And that job was to lose to the new guy to make the new guy ascendance. So in combat sports, we call people jobbers, part of what.

I've done as a career is find out all the jobbers in the world, basically. You call him tomato cans. There's different terms for them. But it's basically guys who are there not just to lose a fight, but to lose the fight in a way that elevates the standing of the other guy. And to Roshark's point, that's exactly. And to your point about Stewart, yeah, Stewart won that argument and came off looking way better because Tucker was the jobber in that scenario. So he was there. It's like, you know, this is the changing of the zeitgeist. We got the millennials watching. You're supposed to take down this bow tie wearing clown that is supposed to be representative of the Republican Normie out there or the guy the Republican Normie likes. So these are all just archetypes and concepts that they've been using forever. You know, the positive reading of the Trump era, as Ghost has talked about extensively, is the idea. And what you talk about, was the idea. the TV characters is the idea that Trump is extremely well versed in how that theater works

and seems to have an uncanny ability to kind of turn it around on people who have been playing that game for a long time and ultimately make them look ridiculous in ways that they're not used to looking. I'm 100% with you on that. Okay, so shall we get into some of the films, stuff, the more film-oriented parts of it. It sounded like you have something that you want to hit right now. Sure. The start, I mean, to lead us from kind of the political stuff, I mean, obviously in the movie, we've got Matt Damon playing, you know, a senatorial hopeful.

And what they lean on, it's even embarrassing to me as a Bostonian because it's like, it's all that rhetoric that you grow up with, his speeches in the movie. are, it's what you would hear a Bostonian politicians say, or a New Yorker or a Jersey guy, you know, like tough. Make sure you hit these talking points. Make sure you tell them that you're blue collar. Make sure that you imply that you've been in fights. Make sure you imply that you've lost fights, but you get back up again.

And you've got all those cliches that he's hitting in this. I was looking for a little bit more of a takedown of the phony character that the phony character that Norris was playing in the movie, but they never actually go to that third layer. They have the concession speech where he's like, ah, you know, this is all basically engineered. And, you know, we have market research and focus groups that kind of tell us how scuffed up my shoes will be.

But even that speech now is such a cliche for like, oh, I'm the guy who kind of lets you peek behind the curtain and shows you that, I can't play this political game anymore. I'm just worn out by it. So he falls into that stuff. But in terms of the key conception of the movie, it's kind of matrix aligned, but there's definitely a reading of it where if you keep it on the politics and then you look at this adjustment bureau, you know, before you get into the more esoteric stuff about angels and God and all of that that's clearly threaded throughout the movie, you've kind of got this side. disturbing reading of it of like, if you do have politicians, real people that are getting any

kind of groundswell support or movement, do you have this shadowy system that at a certain point does bring them in and they try different ways? You know, maybe they try the friendly way at first. Maybe they try the little bit clandestine way and sorted way. And that probably works with a lot of political hopefuls. And then maybe there's some of them that don't fall into the sorted things. And maybe they do live clean lifestyles. And maybe they also are not motivated solely by money. That's probably a small number of people who are running in politics.

But I bet they exist. And then for those ones, do they get brought in by the Adjustment Bureau, whatever that is? And there is that, you know, the cliche, even in Normieville that like your uncles will talk about is the cigar smoke lounge. Like you get brought into the back room where they tell you how things really work. So that's been a cliche baked into the American psyche, I think, for a long, long time. And this movie kind of literalizes that. Yeah, I thought that the nudging part. part of it that aspect was really interesting i mean we're essentially talking about

i know that they're angels or whatever and that there's some spiritual aspect of this and they have like knowledge of what the secret plan is and let's just put that aside for a second and imagine these people simply as handlers because that's roughly what we have going on here the the anthony macky character harry is the matt damon character's handler because they're trying to trying to groom this guy to be president and it's all happening off screen. And one of the crazy things about this to talk about the connection to the political real world is, and this is such a Hollywood thing to do, is to keep pumping the president as like the king. This is the best thing anyone can ever be is president of America. You can change the world. Right. If you become

presidents of america you have won the ultimate american contest and now the world is yours to do with it as you see fit you control the military you're in control of the government everything that happens is your responsibility the buck stops with you you know what i mean it's just the most powerful position that anybody could possibly imagine and everybody wants it more than anything matt damon will give his whole life away this the love of this girl the future he sees with her doesn't matter everything because you could be president someday. Don't you want that? And so they just press him,

impress him, impress him on that. But he's being handled the whole time. He's being nudged. He's being directed. Other aspects of the world are being kind of bended, shifted, moved to, or bended, bent, shifted, moved to, to create the world that they need it to be

so that he can be funneled into that position, where he will take that power and then presumably keep enacting their plan because they've got control over him. So are they just trying to place a Manchurian candidate in office or are, and they're like, hey, Manchurian candidate, we need you to not have that girlfriend. Otherwise, this will never work. Very strange aspect of the whole thing. But you have to bring in the romantic relationship. Otherwise, it's just a depressing, dystopian political movie. But I think you get my points. Yeah, absolutely. One of the funny things about this movie is even though they dress it all up in this fictional gimmick, which by the way, I think this was based on a,

was it a Philip K. Dick novel, the agency or the bureau. I forget which one it was, but I have not read that, so I have no idea how accurate to it that this is. Obviously, it was adapted for it today. But in terms of the sort of plot mechanics, the lore, the in-world lore of the movie. They have all these rules. They show you. They've got their, you know, little planners. Their kind of paper blackberries,

where they've got the little nodes, and they can show you where they're going in this maze. And the funny thing about that, though, more to your point, is that as fictional, as fiction coded as all the magic powers are, the nudging, as you referenced, the map with the nodes going in their directions, the maze that exists statically on one page,

but then if the node goes off script, the maze kind of starts rewiring itself and breaking apart and then reforming. Even sort of like the intersection of different nodes, they even literally had a scene where I believe they called them inflection points where like if the node was going off script, there would be these red kind of markers on the page

off in no man's land on the map, And one of them was explaining, oh, those are inflection points are popping up. And we got to be careful because any one of these inflection points could derail the whole plan. As kind of silly as all of that is, it's all very real. It's all very realistic. It's like if I watch this at the time, I'd be looking at that as, you know, clever, fictionalizing and, you know, interesting ways to conceptualize controlling a plan and omniscience. and all that. Now, having spent years researching, reading about, talking to people who read about, and talking about game theory, that's all this is. It's like, it's a very performative kind of

fictionalized version of game theory where really, if you just literally boil down all the rules that the Adjustment Bureau guys are talking about, none of them. are inherently unrealistic besides the literal impossibilities that you see them doing. You know, they're running through portals to different worlds and that's how you make it a fun sci-fi movie. But you could basically have them do all of the things that they do by just saying, like, hey, we're giving these characters nudges in different directions. We're planting a guy in a situation that they think is part of the organic situation, but he's actually one of ours. There's a police officer who delays Norris at an accident scene longer than he should be there, and that's a person from the bureau.

And all these things that are kind of dressed up as magical plot devices are entirely realistic. Not all that crazy to imagine, even up to and including the idea that a guy like Norris in the real world could be an earnest actor acting in what he believes is his own self-interest. And that, yeah, you have this bureau, this powerful group of people using game theory and sort of placing incentive and disincentive nodes all over the map of his personal life, his professional life, his political life. And kind of seeing how this node bounces off of those various challenges or plot points that you put in his way. And now I think the way to make this realistic is to say they've got 50 of these operating at all times. So there's going to be 15 of them that immediately bounce off of the first diversion. They don't respond to the incentive structures the way the machine or the bureau wants. What's prospect number 16 doing?

And then they kind of follow these guys. And the reason I say it in that way is the more I've kind of gone through my own journey of like how does the political world work. and how much of it is real, how much of it is fake, etc. I don't mean elections. I mean like the people that we see running for these offices. The more I've backed further away from the idea that these people are like, all of them are, they're growing in a lab and they're like, they're reading from a script, they know exactly what's going on,

certainly some of them. But I actually think it would be more advantageous to the Matrix, to the shadow players, if most of these candidates are not actually that read in on these things, because then they're organically moving through a map. They believe of their own volition. That makes them more controllable in one reading of it. And then the secondary thing is it makes them more believable to normal people

because they do do things that are unpredictable, right? Like they say stuff that are kind of unpredictable. they might get involved in a scandal that the machine actually didn't plan for. And then the machine accounts for it. And it's like, well, I mean, it makes you look more like a real person. So I guess we'll just map this into the next chapter. So as fictionalized as it is in this movie, you can really see how this actually is a closer version of how these things work in real life. Well, if your game is influence and you are trying to get people involved in that,

that web of influence and replicate that influence themselves from like their own personality, you are going to look for people who are doing it of their, primarily of their own volition. They feel incentivized. They like the incentives. They don't want the disincentives. They are happy with the deal that's on the table and they accept the deal and they do their part in that deal. Their part in that deal does not include knowing about the planning,

stages of what it is they're being directed to do. They just understand when they are directed to do these things. They are to do these things. They are totally happy with the deal. They're happy with the people that they work for. They believe in what they're doing to the extent that it has been explained to them. So there's no real need to question the plan. There's the likelihood of them saying no to something is very low because they're into it. They want the money. They want the power, they want the social access, they want the women, whatever the attraction to the role is, that's what they're satisfied with. They will take the deal and then they will do the work. And I think that that's the best way to operate that system. And then if you think about it

kind of on a deeper, maybe more spiritual level, like what is the tool of evil? Well, let's flip these things around so that good appears as evil and that evil appears as good. And then we're going to supply temptations that will hit you in your vices, in your desires, in your insecurities, whatever it is that is going to appeal to you. They can offer you that thing. They can tempt you with that thing. They can say, here, go go this way. This is where the prizes are. Go that way. That's where the prizes are. Don't go down that way. That's not going to be good for you. and people are going to respond to that almost all the time. And if you have a control system with enough information and enough processing power,

we kind of have now, you can basically make people do virtually whatever you want them to do in nudges and influences and the rest of it that can probably all be directed to them one to one through the screen. at this point. And that is a level of control, like totally unseen. It doesn't even have to be centralized control. It can be set. It can be decentralized through all those different nodes, as long as they're operating on the same, uh, incentive and punishment structures. We often talk about. This is what drives behavior. And it's actually not that hard to control politicians, to control business people, to control celebrities, to control athletes and the rest of it. we're seeing a simple visualization of how something like that has done it's it's not nearly as

complicated as people make it out to be oh really they're going to control a million people i mean the mat the macky character even mentions it there's just too many people out there for us to do this for everybody oh god it so you're only doing it with the important people right that you need for important roles and you have selected those people so that they can play out those roles. So they are unwittingly actors and they don't even know it. This is not far off from where we are. No, and that's why I said like when you're watching it through fiction, sci-fi framing, um, these representations of men and black hats running through portals and shadowy doorways and, uh, you know, magical realism, I guess is probably the,

the genre that I would stick this in in, in the sci-fi subgenre. And, you know, the, the visual that I keep thinking about with the movie was the depiction of the plan, like the actual physical depiction of the map and the plan. And yeah, you know, when you take all the magic out of it, you take the special effects out of it and the sci-fi out of it. It is not difficult at all for people in this audience to think that that's not only how these things work, but that it's not actually as hard as I certainly used to.

to think something like this is. You know, in the early days of getting into conspiracy world and questioning the base nature of politics, government, history, a lot of the things we talk about, we do have a tendency almost to overestimate the system and put it on this pedestal. Like, oh my goodness, the brilliance, imagine the IQ it takes to,

imagine the levels of control it must take to do this. And on some level, it is brilliant. On some level, if it works, it works. You are what your record says you are. One of the things I've often said is for the fact that people say, oh, these people are stupid. Well, what does that say about us if we have been kind of losing to these people for decades and decades and generations, if not centuries,

and perhaps more than that? it demonstrates the faith that is ultimately placed in the system and that faith in the system is the greatest is the greatest boon to the system because then it allows them to only concentrate on those few nodes uh nodes is one of the main words i was really thinking of coming out of this movie because that's really all it is you know and it goes both ways by the way i think that the positive reading of that is that that concept can that principle can be reverse engineered. One of the ways I used to talk about these people in my writing is I use the term

cipher a lot or mind movers. Donald Trump is a mind mover. Elon Musk is a mind mover. Joe Biden is a mind mover. And you know, that goes, that's neither good nor bad. But when you kind of recognize, it's not so much recognizing that, well, this is the system, so these are the rules we have to play by. I think it's more in recognizing the system that built itself around an observation of

of human psychology that was this. This is what I often talk about when it comes to storytelling. People don't speak in parables because other people speak in parables. Jesus didn't speak in parables because like, he was the first one to do it, so this is what worked. It's more like this is how human beings think. They attach to stories, they attach to figures, they attach to idols.

And if the system records, recognizes this going back to however far you want to go back. You can go back to presidential elections or you can go back through the history of civilizations. Controlling systems, controlling parties or structures, I think have recognized the ones that have lasted have recognized this is what people follow. This is how people think. And this is how easy it is to control them. All right. Let's take a quick pause.

We have, well, some Badlands announcements to get to. And we'll start with such. Peace between the houses was never meant to last. He will pay for this. House tallow has called its banners. House Beard Oil has answered. You want a war? I'll give you a war. But this war won't be decided on the battlefield.

It will be decided by now. Buy anything at softdisclosure.com. Then choose your allegiance. Your purchase is your vote. House tallow to fight for House tallow, or House Beard Oil to stand with House Beard Oil. Shop now and fight for your house. The realm will know it's Victor.

Very, very exciting if you want to see your face in the next game of lotions ad at Gart 14 in the St. Pete Beach. Just a few weeks from now, you got to place a soft disclosure order and then email your photo and order number to hello at soft disclosure.com by October 20th. We got five days left for a chance to make a cameo. Even better if you're holding your soft disclosure products or wearing the merch. So place your order, send us your best photo, and you just might end up on the big screen. Your face.

Our commercial questionable decisions may follow. I don't know what questionable decisions are being referred to there. Hopefully only by Green Star. And, yeah, I don't do anything questionable. and then photograph it and then send it to Badlands. That sounds like an extraordinarily bad idea. I would not encourage that for anyone. Then we would have control over you if you ever should decide

that you have certain political ambitions. You best remember that soft disclosure ad that you participated in. That is quite threatening, in fact. And then we have this business. I got the poster there with all 6,000 speakers. So you guys can enjoy that. Badlandsmedia.tv slash events. There are still plenty of tickets available.

Well, I don't know if there is VIP tickets available, although I think there are. But there are tickets available. I don't know if there'll be single day. I saw people asking about single day tickets. We usually do those a couple weeks before the event. So check back when we're closer. But the one thing I forgot to mention last night

is that the Early Bird Virtual Special ends tomorrow, I believe. Believe it ends on Friday. I don't know if that's end of day Friday, but if you want the early bird special, if you're not going to be there in person, Badlandsmedia.tv slash events, grab the virtual tickets.

You can get them for 25% off before Saturday. Awesome. That is going to be a great time. They always are. And if you're someone who's in one of those cooler climates like old Burning Bright is over there, yeah Florida in November sounds like probably a great idea all right cool so let's get back into the film here

what uh where should where should we take this I mean I can always think of places but I mean if you have something we can go well um changing changing the plan that is one of the interesting aspects of this movie so they're they can't be kept a Matt Damon and so wait, what is his name? David Norris and Elise. So David and Elise cannot be kept apart because they were like soulmates in a former version of the plan and there's still some kind of residue left

from that former version that has gotten mixed into this new version. Whatever world was going to open up for David and to be together that has since closed. Well, other aspects of that world were already locked in place and they keep driving David and Elise together. So at some point, the chairman has had to rewrite the plan. And then at the very end of the film, we hear about him being willing to rewrite it again on behalf of the love that David and Elise share. And they're fighting for one another. And they're They're ultimately choosing one another as an act of free will, even if it means giving away the things that they were destined for, these great and important things that they were destined for. That is what allows them to rewrite this story.

So ultimately, human free will overrides the plan of the chairman. And now if you put the chairman in place of God, I guess that we have kind of a different discussion about this. And I was looking through some of the commentary on this film. out that there has been that type of discussion, that discussion was actually kind of popular, that Bishop Barron guy who goes on like the establishment podcasts and gives the religious view about what's happening. I don't know him. Like, yeah, yeah, he, I don't know.

He does like the Ben Shapiro type stuff or he would go talk to like Matt Walsh or it's like he's kind of, he seems like he's daily wire adjacent. and one of those religious, like cultural communicators who's always brought out to give, this is the official opinion of religiondom. You know, everybody has to know that this is why it is because it says this and blah, blah, blah. That sort of commentary is just nonsensical to me at this point in my life.

But, uh, so that, that was the commentary on it, though. This is the theological aspect. Can this human decision making, and free will override God's plan. And I think that that is probably getting the question wrong in the first place. But that's the plot device here, is that the chairman is rewilling to, or willing to rewrite the script, to rewrite the plan. So something apparently has stopped what is coming.

And it's just, it's love because love conquers all. Love conquers all. And it maps, it's pretty clever because there's, again, many men. META games being played with a movie like this. Who knows if even all of them are... Who knows if the director and writers are even aware of all of the layers, the meta layers that they are dealing with in a movie like this? Yeah, we've talked about this before where people in Hollywood

may well actually believe that all of these political characters that they're casting in the opening scenes of this movie are like the good guys. and they are trying to propagandize in the context of the movie, but they don't know the meta level that they are operating in when it's like you got to imagine some of these political figures who might actually kind of know some of these campaign managers and people who have really made the system run for a long time, the pedestrians of the world,

are probably kind of laughing at the director of the Adjustment Bureau being like, man, you don't really know what you're even doing here, do you? You think this is some fun Philip K. Dick little exploration in a little thought experiment. But another reading of the changing of the plan stuff and the chairman, taking the theological discussion out of it and going back to sort of the controlling of these nodes. One interesting thing is there's kind of the, there's kind of the cliche or the refrain

in thrillers and conspiracy in conspiracy theory that if you have, of compromising, right? This is age old. This is just something that is known. If whether you're talking about normie politics or deep, dark conspiracy theories about the darkest people in the world and shadowy cabals, how does that world operate? Compromise. Even Normie level politics operates on the level of compromise. If you know secrets about somebody, Hollywood operates on the level of compromise, right? The performative layer on top of the movies and the TV shows and the talk shows and all that where you've got the tabloor.

and who is dating who and who is sleeping with who and who has the rumors, you know, churning about them and who doesn't. It's all compromise and blackmail and all this kind of stuff. And through the context of this movie kind of spins it as, oh, you know, the chairman, the system is willing to sort of contort itself around, you really love this girl. And maybe that's true, but I think a more cynical and realistic reading of this from a political perspective or a deep state perspective would be you really seem to have strong, strong feelings for this person in your life, very human feelings, very vulnerable feelings. And we are definitely willing to work that into the plan that we have for you in the future. But this movie frames that.

as the plan is now going to kind of open up for you. You now have more freedom because the plan is reorienting itself around you and your true love. That's the Hollywood version of it. The compromised darker version of this would be we know who you love. We know who you care about. We now know what we've learned about you is that you're actually not motivated by the money, the character in this movie, Norris. You're not motivated by the money. you're not actually motivated by the fame. You're motivated by true love, which is the most compromising way to be motivated

to a system that can take anything from you at any point in time, right? So the first half of this discussion, a lot of what we talked about is, what can the system give to you to incentivize you? But what we rarely talk about is the disincentive structure that is built into the system. And that's the more darker stuff. The disincentive structure is once you're in, you're in.

That's what the godfather is. That's what all organized crime is. And what is the deep state? What is the cabal? What is intelligence? It's organized crime. What is the government? It's organized crime.

We all know this. So once you're in the belly of the beast, the deeper layers that you go in to that belly of the beast, the more your personal attachments are actually going to be the things that compromise you. if you have those, because if you're dealing with more and more powerful people and organizations and groups, you're dealing with people who can take those things away from you in any manner of directions. And I think that that for sure has happened throughout human history. You know, we've had the most cartoonish examples of this are like JFK being assassinated on TV, right?

But even beyond that, it's like you got senators' nephews who get killed in car accidents under strange circumstances. And I absolutely believe that we're dealing with weaponized intelligence that have been starting world wars. You think they're not going to kill a senator's nephew because they don't like the stuff he's saying? I mean, this is how the system works. So it can be dressed up as a fairy tale. But I would argue that if you're in that world, probably the last thing you want is people that you really, really care about in your orbit. having people that you really, really care about can absolutely be compromising the, yeah, you know, this is one of those things. I don't, I don't spend a lot of time on Freemasons and

secret societies and the rest of the, but we kind of brought it up to, I kind of brought it up today just with Trump and his weird comments about the helmet he was given at a meeting with, I think a fireman's union. talking about how if you'd only had that at the butler event he really could have used it there but i didn't think of it that way yeah so the one of those one of those stories that always kind of creeps me out is the idea how and somebody in the chat will describe this much better than i will and i'm already i know botching it but like going after the sacrifice of the firstborn thing thing that, you know, we hear is kind of an element of his, you know, various aspects of

cultures historically. Secret societies and all that. Yeah, but you still kind of hear that stuff now. Yeah. Because, well, you know, if you are willing to sacrifice something important to you, then you can be trusted. You know, if something tragic happens and you keep silent about it, then you can be trusted that kind of stuff.

They go through these elaborate and really horrifying and disgusting rituals to know like who the good guys are that they can count on. And when you begin talking about secret societies that will prioritize their allegiance to one another above their commitments to living a godly life, above their commitments to family, whatever it might be, above their commitments to the truth as it's communicated to the public. Well, a couple little nodes, we can use that word again, and little nodes of influence that can give little nudges

wherever they are necessary or change a document or what have you, you start getting into a level of influence and the ability to cover up corruption on a pretty significant scale because virtually everyone within like if you need a thousand people to do to involve themselves in a particular project but if you know you can just corrupt one or two of them and then change the result of the entire project and the 998 never suspect a thing well then that's a pretty easy situation where you can manipulate a whole lot of things on a pretty massive scale.

And again, I think that's a pretty accurate model of how a lot of the world around us is built. Yeah, I mean, what you just made me think of with that. And, you know, I went to, I went to school with a concentration in journalism at first before I switched that up. Again, disillusioned even before the MAGA era. But the one of the, one of the things you just made me think about there is when you start realizing that the global media is a propaganda arm of an international criminal network,

which is what it is. In the early days of doing that, you can be prone to thinking of this stuff as very mechanistic. In other words, everybody writing for CNN, everybody writing for the Washington Post, like, they're part of it. They're all part of it, right? It's like they live. They're part of it, they're part of it. And they are. But early into your rabbit holes, you're like, and this writer, and this writer, and this writer, and that's not how it works. And I don't say that because I don't think that the system is extremely subversive and that the cabal is this evil. I say it because that's a bad idea if you're the cabal to involve that many people in a plan. The much easier thing to do is to have compromise or influence over by hook or by crook,

the owner of a newspaper and a publication or the editor-in-chief. And that editor-in-chief doesn't have to send in out a 4-am email. And I know we have the 4-A-M talking points thing that says, this is the line of CNN on this crisis. They can't do that because all it takes is one intern who is like, I don't know, to leak that or say like, hey, they're telling everybody what to say. say on this network. I know we all know that that's functionally how something like CNN operates, but the reason it operates that way, in my opinion, of course, is all conjecture, but is that

the incentive and disincentive structures are set up that way, right? So you just get one or two key notes and let's say the COVID response, the COVID narrative response. These are the stories we're going to run today. That's chosen by one person at CNN. There were literally leaked calls of these meetings during the COVID era. Yeah. Because there were bleeding heart liberal systemites who didn't like what was going on, even in those meetings where the editor, the editorial staff of something like CNN, Waypo, pick your, pick your poison, are saying, this is what we want to talk about.

And this is what we're not going to talk about. And literally all they do is just give daylight to the stories that help push their agenda. They drown out the stories that don't help them push their agenda. help them push their agenda. Over time, writers who are earnest, which doesn't mean they're good, but the writers who gravitate to that propaganda will apply to that network because they believe in and want to perpetuate that propaganda. And the people who do not believe in that propaganda are either ousted or they leave of their own volition. So it's actually less complicated than a lot of conspiracy theorists, including myself in the past, make it where we think,

like, oh, man, how many people work at CNN? Well, add all them to the deep state. I bet they've got deep state membership cards. And it's like, no, I bet you half of one guy has a deep state membership card in the way that we're thinking of it. The rest of them are useful idiots. And the reason the term useful idiots exist is because they do all the work. They push all the propaganda. And they might not be, you know, idiots doesn't mean stupid. It means ignorant. They don't know what they're actually pushing. They know the political talking points they're pushing. But they don't know like, hey, all right, Kabbal's Anonymous.

This is what we're going to talk about today. We're part of an ancient Sumerian death cult. You guys know how it is. We're going to push a jab that's going to kill your grandma today. We're going to call MAGA like bad. White people are down. Men are out. That's not what they do.

Instead, when they want to make Marvel gay, Chris, all they have to do is put a bunch of gay people and women in a boardroom. and have them write Marvel stuff and it will turn gay. So that's kind of what they did with reality as well. That's a good way of describing it. One of the other aspects to the compromise thing we were just talking about is like inextricable from the desire in our culture to want fame and power. I mean, we've been conditioned into thinking that being famous is the best thing. that you can be. It makes life really easy after that because everybody wants to know you,

everybody wants to be you, everybody wants to give you things and exalt you. And I mean, there's a degree to which that's absolutely true, but that's not the entire picture of it. You know, there are, there are certain kinds of people that absolutely want that life. And there are actually some people out there that handle that kind of life pretty well, relatively relatively speaking, but the degree to which that life looks desirable on the screen is a hell of a lot different than the degree to which that life is actually desirable if you are living it, unless you are that certain kind of person that handles it really well. And there aren't all that many people that handle that really well, because that is basically the situation, as I described

before the temptations, the temptation specifically towards certain vices. Well, that's basically just like taking all the reins off and saying, hey, you have no limits now. You can't even really be judged because all the rest of these people are peons and they're not even on a level that can contend with you. Now, there's a different way to talk about that. None of those people's judgments should matter because God is there to judge you and there's nothing else there to judge you. And so we can put that aside in this particular situation, though, that I'm describing, it's like those people that are judging you out there in public, those are levels below you. The only people whose judgment you should worry about are the ones above you. And they're the

ones who think you are doing a great job handling this role that they have enabled you to assume and embody. And it really does take a certain kind of person. I used to think that I wanted that kind of life. I don't want that at all anymore. And that's been a really good part of this process, like not to talk about me personally very much. But over the course, the last six years, like I don't do as many shows as I used to do right now.

I don't like really want to be spending my time, like telling people what they should think on an internet TV show. You know, I think that these issues are interesting and that we have interesting conversations. What does the world mean? How are we conditioned? How are we programmed? How has that influenced our lives? How can we get out of that thing?

That stuff is all still really interesting to me and very much worth the time and conversation. But the other aspects of it, like I want, like, can you imagine being Candace Owens? Like, this is why they hire fully controllable intelligence assets for. these jobs because who else could possibly want them? Yeah, it's, uh, I mean, it's like the Faustian bargain sort of, uh, scenario. And it's, it's so ubiquitous in fiction. But I think a lot of people, a lot of, I was going to say Americans, but just people in general everywhere has, has, has, have idle cultures.

And this is nothing new in modernity. You know, Hollywood is just a. Hollywood stretching back a hundred years almost is just. it's almost like a they took the inherent weakness of idol worship that kind of comes packaged in people and they made it really really easy to amplify you know you're talking like from the time you're a kid you're seeing this stuff on TV you're seeing it on the internet you're see you know and for people that think it's going away and now you've got the age of the influencer and if you really like

sit in a dark room and think about the word influencer over and over again. You do that thing or play that game when you're younger where you just say a word. I don't know if this is like a weird thing or if it's a thing other people do. But if you just say like a word over and over again, it starts to deconstruct itself in your mind. It starts to divorce itself from the meaning of that word. But if you do that with things like influence or things we just say as shorthand, like, oh, this influencer, this person on Instagram, this teenager you talk to you today is going to talk about an influencer. don't look at celebrities anymore Chris they don't they they're done with that

Hollywood stuff they know about those actors are all phony right so they watch Instagram influencers or yeah podcasters or whatever it is and that becomes the new idol class which is why it's difficult world to navigate with that stuff then you realize that there's a certain subset of people that anybody who's who's amplified or gets amplified whether that's organically in the form of an audience that likes what these people are saying or likes what we're saying or it's so organic and it can be very difficult including for people in this stuff to understand what is organic and what is not organic on both sides of the glass it creates a strange scenario

but i think if you if you stick in it long enough and if you can't be compromised in some of those ways that many people can be some of the value in it going back to that node word the word of the episode that's what i try to reorient myself around fail many times but of the idea I've used a term on my substack a lot over the years, radiation, the idea of radiating. You know, it's like, okay, what's the purpose? To your point, if we can't or shouldn't be telling people how to think because of the frequency with which all of us as humans are wrong, based on the information that we have available to us and, you know, the suppositions we make and how we're wired, then what use can we be?

And the way I think of these things is radiation. Like if you are, maybe you're not providing an answer, but just by people watching an earnest attempt to figure stuff out, that practice in it of itself starts to radiate outward. And, you know, more people start thinking in first principles. And to tie it back into the movie, very cliche, but one of the early scenes when they're kind of when they bring David Norris into the dark room and they pull them behind the curse. as they say. They have this meta-conversation with each other, the Adjustment Bureau, in his presence, and it basically is them threat assessing him. And the threat that he poses to him is questions. So there's a couple quotes here. There's no way the chairman would approve a full reset. Interesting terminology, given what you and I talk about a lot. And the other guy says,

questions will burn in him until the day he dies. We'll have to watch him forever. there will be endless ripple effects. And that made me think of this concept I talk about of radiation, of if you do these first principles things, if you ideate in real time and you try to stay committed to ideating and being honest about your ideation, that stuff radiates, that stuff has ripple effects, that stuff influences people, maybe in a good way.

So it is accurate that custodians of a system that they want control over, what that system does fear the most is people who just keep earnestly questioning it and questioning the plan and questioning the system. We see this a lot these days on all different layers of reality, of the info war, of media, of politics. And I would just say that when you see systems and groups of people all coalescing, not around a narrative, but around saying you are not allowed to question, anything that tends to be a system pushing back on you. It's like an immune response of a system

pushing back on you that might not even be aware of why it's pushing back on you. You know, each of the nodes in that system might not be aware, hey, I'm part of a threat response, an immune response of a system right now. But, you know, if you are accidentally pulled into a struggle session, let's say you, you're kind of doing what they are showing in this movie or it's like, Why is this guy a threat? Not because he's bad, not because he wants to be. He doesn't say he wants to blow the system up. He's just going to keep opening doors.

And they don't want him to do that. That's a big threat to them. Yeah. I mean, he's just trying to live his life as he best sees fit. And yeah, that part of it, the, it's kind of cool that people are like, we've gotten to the point where so many things have been sifted out and so many things have been exposed. that the things that were trying to appear as something they were not are getting to the point where they are just like coming out and admitting what they have been the whole time.

Like the gatekeepers are beginning to own gatekeeping. They're saying gatekeeping is good. Yes. And the, uh, and the, the, the uniparty next year, if they join together to impeach Trump, they might as well at that point just be. like, hey, we're the political establishment. The thing that Trump has said he's been opposing this whole time. We tried to play nice.

The Republicans said that they were, you know, your friends. And then we tried to be nice to Republicans every now and then. But forget all that. Trump and MAGA are actually on that side. We can get rid of these other loony tunes on our side of the fence too. We're going to come together as the unit party. And we're just going to oppose that thing out in the open. all of these answers in the inside here,

they are all wrong. They're not going to actually get anyone out of this matrix, out of this system. The answer that is going to get them out is outside of our system. So we need to make sure that no one can get out there. And if they do get out there, got to make sure they can't bring that thing back in. Because if they bring that thing back in here,

the whole thing is going to fall apart. And so we are watching the protection of that system right now and that protection is growing weaker over time as far as I can tell. Yeah, and I, that, what you just described is basically I was actually on a podcast out earlier on a YouTube show and I had said,

the most encouraging baseline foundational argument I can make even if everything goes badly from here on out, is that, you know, in the context of politics and some of the stuff we talk about cultural movements, there is before Trump and there is after Trump in terms of just there is the way things functioned and the way that system had to define itself before and now. And I totally agree that like the system can still win. The system can still have power. but you can't put the genie back in the bottle once you converge and it is it is the game theory

i play with of you know if trump is the norris in this situation you know and the system has been trying to corral him down different pathways for 10 years and more again this is in the reading of trump as an earnest actor um then one of my you know macro theories with him has been uh you've been using the term bait all year like he's baiting the gop he's baiting the gop he's baiting this is nothing new. A lot of our audience has been talking about. Trump obviously baits Democrats. He baits, you know, people in interviews, et cetera. But I mean, there's some macro bait going on. There's some, there's some macro baiting. There's some reality baiting going on. And I think it touches on what you're saying where, you know, there really might be scenarios here, red button scenarios where Trump is like, I'm in your house.

I'm in your castle. And if you, you're, there really might be scenarios here, red button scenarios where Trump is like, I'm in your house. I'm in your castle. and if you want me out, you're going to have to fire every sling arrow you've got at this house, at this political establishment, at this system in order to get me out of it and destroy my reputation. And that's why I think about Batman even more these days in the context of Trump. More so I think of the hero we need versus the hero we deserve refrain a lot. And I increasingly start to play with that reading of the plan as is Trump totally willing to destroy his own reputation, even in the hearts and minds of his most steadfast loyalists in order to destroy whatever faith they had left in an inherently corrupt and irredeemable system. Yeah, maybe. And the funny thing is, it's not really going to destroy him.

It's only going to destroy their like interpretation of him. Yeah. Because there's so much that's been invested into pretending that that interpretation was based on special information that only they can parse and that it was infallible. And so that's going to be the hard part to let go. and it's probably going to be what drives those people crazy. So I guess we'll see how all that works out. I don't know if you have any final points, but I just got one.

I guess it's literally the last line of the movie, I think. But as a first principle, can't argue with it. It's very relevant to a lot of our discussions recently, both publicly and privately. Free will is a gift you won't know how to use until you fight for it. I think that's the chairman's real plan that may be one. day we won't write the plan you will whether you're talking about god whether you're talking about don't trump but i'm not conflating those terms but i mean in the context of a big political and cultural movement one of the things we've been talking about a lot lately certainly at badlands is the is

is going back to that 2017 speech and just in his own words of saying do you believe what he was saying in that speech do you believe that that was actually what he wants to do for the next 10 years. Are you doing that? And I think applying that sort of framework to any sort of movement that you're following, any sort of philosophy you're adopting, whether it's political or religious or whatever, it's really baked into this first principle. This isn't the first movie to do it. It won't be the last free will. You've got to fight for it. You have to exercise it. And if you ever find yourself as part of something, even if it makes you feel good, that really, doesn't want you to do that little thing, that little part of it, then you might not be in the good

thing. You might be in that other thing. So were the baddies is what you're saying? Could be, could be. All right. So I saw that Snowcat operator donated a bunch of subscriptions. So thank you very much, Snowcat. And I believe Keith O'Higgins has blessed us. He said, I've gotten so tired of the media, Wag the Dog narrative. That's why Katie Zachariah is a breath of fresh air because she's a Chinese lawyer. We've gone from Wag the Dog to Walk the Dog. W-O-K for those. Oh, wow.

Who didn't quite get the true depths of Keith O'Higgins' genius. Very well done. Thank you, Keith. And then Sherry Berry. It's an awesome show tonight, guys, great movie, too. By the way, Chris, when is your birthday? It is in a matter of just a couple of weeks. Right.

And that's as close as I am going to get free. Nice try, adjustment bureau. Oh, man. I keep just scrolling my movie list. I didn't make a before the episode decision on what we should do. So I'm attempting to make it during the episode decision on what we should do. do. Yeah. And I am, oh, man, I'm trying to, I'm trying to give me a way to choose for you without telling me why this. Probably, well, maybe. I'm trying to, like a big older classic or

a Nick Cage movie that is not a classic, but maybe is the Nick Cage movie, national treasure no no okay you know what I almost picked that a few weeks ago we didn't do we didn't do we didn't do 2001 Space Odyssey did we no okay no all right so so I saw something today um I think Elon might have posted something with a clip from the sequel and I did not know that there even was a sequel to 2001 space odyssey and it's i guess it's 2010 it's called the year we make contact and it's like roy shiter and john lithgow and i have never seen this one but i'm also not going to see it for this reason but i i think maybe we should do the the o g stanley kubrick 2001 space odd because we are kind of in

you know, we're getting the, the, the, the AI that has, that has big plans and it can can maybe outlast us at some point. And then in the clip that Elon played, it's kind of the explanation of why the AI went in a, in a bad direction. But yeah, let's do that. Kubrick's, Kubrick's awesome. We could, it would be valuable to do every one of his films. I think we've done full metal jacket. We've done, we've done eyes wide shut. And is that it?

I guess maybe that's it. I think we should do 2001. At some, I almost chose clockwork orange. That was the movie I was originally thinking of. And, you know, with crime and punishment beginning to become an issue again at some point, I think we're, we're going to have to do that. And I love that movie. So that'll be cool.

But for next week, let's do 2001, a space odyssey by the great Stanley Kubrick. I have, like, really no concept of this movie. I haven't seen, I have not seen it as an adult. I shouldn't say I have no concept of it. I could not tell you what it's about. But my dad had me watch it when I was like nine. Oh, wow. That's what I remember.

And I didn't get it. I was just like, what is going on here? And I vaguely remember the AI thing. Isn't it like a can't like a red dot or it's like a camera? Yeah. Yeah, that's how. So yeah, Hal, I remember that. And I remember a dude like walking through extremely vivid,

um, strange looking like geometric environments. But I might have made that up. Uh, I don't remember well enough because it's probably been 20, years since i've seen it but um the monolith at the beginning yeah that's classic classic scene and that was uh kind of there was a an homage to that at the beginning of the barbie movie oh yeah you recall yeah yes so anyhow okay so let's yeah we'll leave it there guys thank you all so much for watching thank you for participating in the chat please go ahead and hit the thumbs up on your way out if you're watching or listening on rumble or youtube that theoretically

helps us and we will see you again next week for 2001 a space odyssey good