Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com On January 28, 2025, I sat down with Aram Shabanian to talk about how we thought the first year of the Trump administration would go. I put the audio in a vault and didn’t listen to it until now. We focused on geopolitics and the American military and our hit rate for predictions was about fifty percent. Domestically, it’s been much worse than I expected. Abroad it’s been much weirder than I expected. The bit about America seek...
Jan 16, 2026•1 hr 3 min
On the last Angry Planet of 2025, novelist and Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay returns to reflect on a year of spectacle and cruelty. Between the Pentagon’s boat strikes and the administration’s constant barrage of grotesque memes, it feels like America is a crueler and cruder place. For better and worse, the Presidency sets a moral standard for the country and Trump has lowered that standard. Klay wrote about all this in a piece at The New York Times and he’s here with us today to talk through i...
Jan 09, 2026•53 min
Earlier this year journalist Ben Makuch caught a glimpse of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, dancing at a club in Kyiv. It was a surreal moment, a snapshot of a tragic war that the West thinks is defining the future of conflict. Tech executives have flocked to Ukraine, courting the country in an attempt to get at a resource more precious than gold: data. Makuch was just there and has written about what he saw for The New Republic and he’s on the show today to talk about it. Some light smo...
Dec 19, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Another week and another Angry Planet about the horrifying systems that rule our lives. Is there a depressive theme running through the work right now? Possibly. I promise we’ll soon replace it with rage. This week on the show we have Sven Beckert to talk about his new book Capitalism: A Global History . Beckert is a professor of history at Harvard and his tome is an attempt to capture the entire history of an economic system in one book. It’s a doorstop, but it’s also readable and clear-eyed. S...
Dec 12, 2025•48 min
The White House is portraying the race to adopt AI as an existential crisis. It’s the next Manhattan Project, they say, a technology so important it will require an unprecedented build out of energy infrastructure and massive data centers. But the Manhattan Project was a government-led technological drive whereas AI is led by salesmen and corporations. What could possibly go wrong? On this episode of Angry Planet, Ben Buchanan is here to tell us about the government’s role in fostering AI. Bucha...
Dec 06, 2025•54 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com This week on Angry Planet we’re taking a break from the horrors of the present to explore horrors of a past distant enough now that they’re entertaining. But then, America found those horrors pretty entertaining at the time, too. Even when it was still a thriving community and a going concern, the town of Deadwood, South Dakota, was the subject of dimestore novels and tall tales. Peter Cozzens is here with us to talk about his ...
Nov 21, 2025•51 min
Is your Empire feeling less than fresh? Does it feel like the modern world’s best days are behind it? Do conquest and global power politics not hit as good as they used to? Welcome to the Age of Stagnation, a time when the fruits of the Industrial Revolution can be enjoyed but not replicated. It’s making us all a little crazy, especially world leaders. With us today on the show is Michael Beckley, a political science professor at Tufts University and his career includes stretches at the Pentagon...
Nov 14, 2025•59 min
We’re obsessed with apocalypses, big and small. We fantasize about what the future might look like after the fall of society and fear the coming tribulation. Rome fretted about decline until its end. Stories of the Sea Peoples terrified the monarchs of the Late Bronze Age. During the 30 Years’ War, Europeans imagined Armageddon had finally begun. But a funny thing happens after the collapse: things tend to get a little better for everyone. Luke Kemp is here to hold our hands through the end of t...
Nov 07, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com This week on Angry Planet we have returning guest and former judge advocate Dan Maurer. The last time he was on the show, Maurer walked us through the consequences of a Supreme Court ruling that asked the question: is it illegal for the President to order SEAL Team Six to kill people? It was a surreal question that now feels more pressing. A US Carrier Strike Group is moving into South American waters to support America’s highl...
Oct 31, 2025•1 hr
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The episode is about Vanessa Guillén, a US soldier who was murdered at Fort Hood in 2020. She also experienced sexual harassment while in the military. I spoke with ABC Special Correspondent John Quiñones about his new podcast, Vanished. It’s a good podcast that covers Guillén’s case in-depth and highlights the reforms the Pentagon instituted after. We recorded the show on September 30, Guillén’s birthday. That morning, Secreta...
Oct 15, 2025•48 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Political assassins often have incoherent politics and Tyler Robinson is no different. The young man who killed Charlie Kirk inscribed the shell casings of his bullets with obscure memes that say less about what he believed and more about where he spent time online. Robinson isn’t alone. Earlier this year the Annunciation Church shooter showed off a rifle inscribed with similar memes pulled from the internet. The Christchurch s...
Oct 02, 2025•1 hr 29 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com On September 2, 2025 the United States escalated its decades long War on Drugs with a tactic borrowed from the War on Terror. It used a drone to blow up a boat it said was full of drugs then said the 11 people killed in the strike were terrorists. Is this legal? Does that matter? On this week’s Angry Planet, journalist Mike LaSusa of InSight Crime comes on the show to walk us through the ins and outs of America’s long-running W...
Sep 19, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The Pacific Northwest is known for its startling natural beauty, precocious rainfall, and propensity to birth serial killers. Why? Caroline Fraser has a theory and it’s a good one. This week on Angry Planet, Fraser takes us on a journey through the American past and into the dark heart of the PNW. Her new book Murderland weaves together memoir, true crime, history, and science into a compelling narrative that’s as beautiful and...
Sep 12, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com All things move towards their end, even seemingly omnipotent political leaders, and authoritarian systems are shaped by the question of succession long before the leader dies. Xi Jinping is 72 years old and the Chinese Communist Party has started to consider what comes next. Those conversations are shaping the political reality of the country. On this episode of Angry Planet, Brown University professor Tyler Jost comes on the s...
Sep 05, 2025•57 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com If the internet is a battlefield, does that mean the United States needs a new military force to dominate it? On this episode of Angry Planet, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Edward Charles Cardon and former House Armed Services Committee staffer Joshua Stiefel make the case for spinning off the Cyber Force into an independent branch. Both are part of a new commission at the Center for Strategic and International Studies —...
Aug 29, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Journalists and Nazis have changed a lot in the years since the end of World War II; journalists are on the outs while Nazis are having a bit of a moment. Across the U.S. and Canada, avowed fascists have committed murder, attempted to destroy the power grid, and actively recruit online and in person. As these extremists work to hide their identity, journalists and law enforcement use advanced tech to expose them. But at what co...
Aug 15, 2025•52 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The world is living with a Cold War hangover. The logic of deterrence, which dominates the minds of the people who plan nuclear wars, means that America must have enough nuclear weapons to credibly threaten to destroy the world should someone launch nukes at it. That thinking led to a world with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and that was just when the U.S. had the Soviet Union to think about. Now it’s facing the twin th...
Aug 08, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Sometimes it’s good to back up and ask the basic questions: How do we know Iran was even developing nuclear weapons? On this episode of the show, the Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis walks us through the history of the Iranian nuclear (weapons and energy) program. It’s got it all: diplomacy, assassinations, cowardly politicians, and uranium fever. Lewis is a professor at the Middlebury Institute, member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control, and former mem...
Jul 23, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Pauline Shanks Kaurin PhD. was, until recently, the Stockdale Chair for Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College. She’d been there since 2018, teaching philosophy and ethics to U.S. military officers and the occasional civilian. Then came Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and marching orders she said stifled academic freedom. So she resigned. On this episode of Angry Planet, Pauline talks us through her decision and...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr
You can’t win a war with airpower alone, despite what the U.S. Air Force will tell you. For more than 100 years, the masters of the air have promised that military and political objectives can be achieved if you just let them drop enough bombs. It’s a theory that’s been tested, and fallen short, many times. Operation Midnight Hammer, the Trump administration’s use of 14 GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iranian nuclear sites, is just the latest test. The promise is that this has set back...
Jul 09, 2025•55 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The ocean is vast, beautiful, and lawless. Thousands of miles from any coast, power belongs to those who seize it. On this episode of Angry Planet, journalist Ian Urbina stops by to discuss the Outlaw Ocean Project and the second season of its incredible podcast. Urbina and his team of investigative journalists are telling stories about human rights, labor, and the environment on the vast swaths of the planet covered in water. ...
Jun 25, 2025•59 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible? On this Angry Planet, astrophysicis...
Jun 17, 2025•55 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com America loves the Western. Stories about frontier towns, outlaws and lawmen, and—most of all—killing. How did the myth and legend of the gunfighter come to permeate the U.S.? Were there rules to gunfights? How did you become famous by killing people? Did Texas, yes Texas, make all this possible? We’ll answer those questions in this episode of the show as we discuss the new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild . It...
Jun 07, 2025•58 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Palantir, Anduril and a suite of other Tolkien-inspired tech nightmares want to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of the U.S. military. Both companies have software suites they’re pitching as agents that will help make command decisions during combat. An AI general, if you will. Yes, that’s a terrible idea. On this episode of Angry Planet, Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn Bowen will tell us why. Hunter is a research...
May 28, 2025•56 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The Pentagon has been trying to pivot to the Pacific for years now. Under President Donald Trump 2.0, who is focused on China, it just might happen. It’s a complicated body of water with dozens of players and a bloody history. One where Beijing is increasingly asserting itself. Here to walk us through some of it is Angry Planet producer and Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Kevin Knodell. He’s just back from the Philippines whe...
May 23, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Recorded 5/7/25 India and Pakistan have been unhappy neighbors since 1947 and Britain’s decolonization of the subcontinent. They’ve fought four wars and there have been countless skirmishes. As Indian jets streak over Pakistani skies and that Muslim nation threatens retaliation, it’s unclear if this is war or just another blip between nations that plain don’t like each other. Joining us is Sushant Singh, a man with a background...
May 10, 2025•1 hr
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Great power competition has gotten old for President Donald Trump—never one for a fair fight. He’s looking for a little great power collusion instead, dividing the world with his best buds, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. This kind of thing isn’t new, though, Stacie Goddard, a professor at Wellesley, tells us, in fact it’s the 1800s on repeat. Well, look how that turned out… World War I, anybody? BTW, check out her terrific arti...
May 02, 2025•57 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Conquest is back baby! Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Greenland, Canada? It’s all on the table—and maybe up for grabs. Here to help us sort through this new age of empire building is University of Chicago political scientist Michael Albertus. As always, climate change Whither Canada? The coming Canadian century “Territorial ambitions sometimes bite back” The biggest caveats ever uttered on the show “An empire eats” The stories nations...
Apr 25, 2025•59 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Turkey’s president has grabbed a bit more power for himself with the recent arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. The mayor was thought to be one of the few politicians who could challenge Erdogan. Steven Cook will take us through it. Talking about authoritarians is one of the things we do here, so strap in for another tale of turmoil on an angry planet. Shilling for kagi.com “Competitive authoritarianism” Negotiating with the Kurdi...
Apr 15, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Special for our international listeners, did you know you can now buy a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the low, low price of $5 million sent directly to the U.S. treasury? For decades America’s immigration policies were a boon to its national defense. No one has better intelligence on a rival country than a fleeing dissident with firsthand knowledge. Times have changed. Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center is here to talk all abo...
Apr 11, 2025•59 min
