Jon Herold and Zak Paine kick off Labor Day with a scheduling shakeup announcement before opening the phone lines for a full call in show. First up is a genuinely spicy debate over a proposed stay at home parent subsidy plan, with Jon arguing it's just another layer of government dependency dressed up as a conservative win, and Zak pushing back with a more sympathetic read on the policy.

From there, the floor opens to listeners, including some pointed callback energy aimed at a certain online figure named Alpha who keeps coming up in the chat. Things take a hard left turn later when a caller with his own bad movie podcast introduces the guys to a legendarily terrible filmmaker whose work makes cult classics look polished by comparison. Expect the usual sponsor breaks, tangents, and hosts who clearly enjoy needling each other as much as their audience.

Ashe in America welcomes back Corey from Break the Chains Media, joined partway through by George, cameraman for Wayne's Word podcast, for a firsthand account of a chaotic day at a Colorado student ICE out protest. Corey went in planning respectful "man on the street" style interviews, but things escalated fast once he approached one of the more radical booths, sparking a mob of high schoolers that surrounded and chased him. George's experience was worse, he was knocked to the ground and kicked while filming nearby, and both guests walk through the raw footage as it happened. Between video breakdowns, Ashe and her guests connect the incident to a bigger picture, the organizing behind these youth movements, the adults directing from behind the scenes, and how COVID era disruption may have helped seed it all. Equal parts firsthand journalism and cultural analysis, with some genuinely unsettling footage along the way.

Matthew Ehret pairs up two subjects you'd never expect to share a slide deck: a 19th century Whitechapel serial killer and the modern push to rebuild Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. He takes on the popular royal conspiracy theory behind the Ripper murders, the one made famous by a certain Johnny Depp movie, and argues the real story runs deeper into Templar revivalist networks, Freemasonic ritual symbolism, and organizations like the Roundtable movement and Theosophy that emerged as the British Empire looked increasingly shaky. Expect a wind through King Edward III's Order of the Garter, Cecil Rhodes, and the long afterlife of the Templars as they shapeshifted into the Jesuits and Rosicrucians. Ehret ties it all back to why certain modern figures keep referencing the same ancient symbols today. Equal parts true crime and secret society deep dive, this one is not for the faint of heart.

Recording from his in laws house on Labor Day, Ghost breaks down the biggest diplomatic weekend in months. Kushner and Witkoff spent three hours with Putin in Moscow, then flew straight to Kyiv to meet Zelensky, and Ghost walks through what a former Austrian foreign minister and a former Bush and Clinton trade advisor both made of it. He also unpacks Scott Bessent's awkward sideline meeting with Russia's finance minister at the G20, connects rising gas prices to what he calls software warfare, and pulls apart a leaked Financial Times map showing Ukraine potentially carved up between Poland, Hungary and Romania. From there it is Germany closing Russian consulates in a tit for tat spat, and Germany quietly signing on for Israel's Iron Dome, built at, of all places, a Volkswagen factory. Ghost has thoughts about the historical irony there. A dense, fast moving catch up.

Jon Herold, fresh off a whirlwind Labor Day road trip (and a recent engagement announcement), brings back Matt McDonagh for a deep dive on the ARC AGI 3 benchmark results and what they actually mean for artificial general intelligence. Matt breaks down the difference between AGI and ASI, argues America's biggest AI edge is energy and compute rather than algorithms, and makes the case that decentralized local AI will keep big tech from fully controlling the narrative. The conversation ranges into cognitive warfare, the difference between universal basic income and a wealth backed alternative, skepticism toward tech oligarchs' motives, and how AI might eventually help verify election integrity. Jon also touches on a viral (and likely overstated) story about Trump merch sales cratering, plus some real talk from listeners about the economy. Sponsor reads, conference plans, and engagement congratulations round out a lighter, interview heavy Monday show.

Ashe in America and Zak Paine fill in on Labor Day while CannCon is off at a veterans event, opening with an honest and slightly spicy defense of civil disagreement between hosts after some chat pushback over Friday's show. The centerpiece is a major development in the election space, as DHS asks the DOJ to investigate ERIC over motor vehicle data that allegedly flowed to a Zuckerberg funded nonprofit across at least nine states, potentially opening the door to penalties and a nonprofit status review. They also dig into stalled accountability for the weaponization of government and why two familiar election officials have gone unusually quiet. Elsewhere there is a cautionary influencer story that veers into a surprisingly deep conversation about bodily autonomy, plus Ambassador Huckabee condemning settler violence and what that means for Christian Zionist assumptions.

FUD stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Burning Bright has a theory about why everybody has been kind of a doomer lately. To illustrate it, he went digging through Badlands to find the single most incessant black piller he could think of, then invited him on so the chat can lovingly lift him up and beg him to stop destroying the movement. Enter tonight's guest, doomer extraordinaire Zak Paine, who plays along like a good sport.

With the midterms a couple of months out, the two poke at the thing we are all told we must care about more than almost anything ever. Should we? Does Trump? Is the so-called movement actually defined by it? They go wherever the conversation takes them.

Burning Bright also reflects on his new solo-and-guest rotation, then opens the back half to audience rants and questions.

A friendly intervention against black pilling, served with a wink.

Jonathan Drake dives into Spooner's first two economic propositions, starting with the deceptively simple idea that every man should keep the full fruits of his own labor. From there Jon works through why Spooner sees the employer employee relationship as a subtle drag toward poverty, and why he thinks a nation of entrepreneurs beats a nation of wage earners every time. Expect a genuinely fair minded wrestling match with the capitalist rebuttal to that claim, a clear line drawn between Spooner's thinking and actual Marxism (spoiler, they only sound similar on the surface), and some candid personal reflections on being tied to a job for over a decade. There is also a compelling case that a nation of employees conditions people to be more obedient to government overreach than a nation of independent business owners would be. Stick around for tax bracket rants, a Benson Honey Farms shoutout, and some real talk about property tax and self sufficiency.

Jon Herold sits down for a first-time chat with Gabe of Good Brew, and fair warning, Gabe is a talker. What starts as a friendly get-to-know-you (Outer Banks roots, a detour into why so many businesses incorporate in Wyoming) quickly becomes an enthusiastic deep dive into gut health. Gabe's pitch is that Good Brew took the opposite road from the probiotic boom: instead of forcing colonizing microbes through the stomach where most of them die, the idea is to tend the gut like a garden and support the foundation. He walks through spore-forming probiotics, metabolites, and glutathione production, all with the energy of a founder who genuinely believes the research is finally catching up to him. It mixes right into your coffee without changing the taste, which Jon can vouch for. This is health talk, not medical advice, but Gabe's conviction is contagious. The Labor Day deal, a 250th anniversary tumbler, and the Badlands discount code come up near the close.

This Week's Guest:

Jon Herold and Chris Paul kick off with a Netflix documentary tangent about decoy planes and disguised operatives before shifting into one of the more philosophical episodes in recent memory. The centerpiece is a metaphor about a wall everyone secretly knows is black but publicly agrees is white, used to explain how Trump operates inside a collectively accepted false consensus and slowly walks people back toward what's actually true.

From there the conversation goes deep into logos, divine order, and the idea that inversion, presenting things as their opposite, is the core mechanism of deception at every level, from elections to spiritual reality itself. The hosts connect it to cognitive warfare and flag the whole segment as one worth revisiting later. It's less news roundup and more philosophy hour this time around, for listeners who like their politics with a side of metaphysics.