Once a year, leaders from around the world leave their capitals behind them for a trip to the Big City, New York. What could pull these powerful men—and far fewer women—away from affairs of state? Is it the revival of Spamalot on Broadway? No, the opening is still a few weeks away. Could it be the glittering bars, restaurants, and hotels? The easy availability of the ingredients for every vice known to humanity? Is it simply the lights on Broadway? Nope. It’s the one, the only United Nations Gen...
Oct 04, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Aram Shabanian stops by this week to talk to us about the strong men of the Caucasus. We start with a deep dive into what’s going on in Armenia and Azerbaijan right now with a focus on the 1990s. Shabanian calls Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyevl, the “Saddam Hussein of the Caucasus” and comes to grip with the realpolitik of the conflict. Then we turn our attention to Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov and discuss rumors of his failing health, mixed martial arts, and how a brutal warlord became ...
Sep 25, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re taking another look at the climate here at Angry Planet. This week we’re joined by Peter Kalmus of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Talking to a scientist about how hot the planet is getting can be jarring. Kalmus, like other experts in the field, brings a sense of doom to the subject that fits perfectly in the Angry Planet cannon. Kalmus talks about dining with oil executives and shares his thoughts on How to Blow Up a Pipeline . We cover a lot of ground in this episode and we’re happy t...
Sep 18, 2023•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mysterious producer Kevin Knodell comes on to Angry Planet this week to tell us about his recent reporting trip to Maui. A timeline of the fire Playing the blame game Matthew screws up island names The politics of taro farming Yakistan The Range 12 Fire Don’t ask him about the fucking tree Our fiery future Angry Planet has a Substack ! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support ...
Sep 07, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast On July 26, a military junta deposed and imprisoned Niger’s duly elected president, Mohamed Bazoum. You are probably saying three things—perhaps all at the same time: Where the hell is Niger? Who is Bazoum? Why the fuck would I care? That’s what this episode is all about. We answer those three questions and fill you in on the context around the event as well as the region where it happened, the Sahel, which is where Saharan Africa meets sub-Saharan Africa. It’s a place that’s at the mercy of nat...
Aug 21, 2023•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast Christopher Atwood returns to the show this week to talk about a report he helped write for at the New Lines Institute. It’s an in-depth analysis of Russia’s ongoing genocide in Ukraine. Here’s a link to the report: The Russian Federation’s Escalating Commission of Genocide in Ukraine: A Legal Analysis Angry Planet has a Substack ! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict. https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe Support this show ...
Aug 14, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joe Cirincione is back on the podcast this week to walk us through the science of nuclear weapons and give us his preliminary thoughts on Oppenheimer . Cirincione is a national security analyst and author with over 40 years of experience. He’s been a congressional staffer, a program director, a philanthropist, an advisor the the State Department and three presidential campaigns. Now, he writes at a substack . He’s recently completed a six part series detaling the history of the nuclear world. Ge...
Aug 07, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Freelance journalist Kelsey Atherton joins Angry Planet to talk about Oppenheimer . The movie does a good, but not perfect, job with history and tends toward mythmaking. Matthew loved it and Atherton had some issues with it. In this wide-ranging conversation that covers nuclear history, our renewed atomic fears, and the people left out of the story, the two nuclear journalists dissect Hollywood’s latest blockbuster. The People Building AI with 'Existential Risk' Are Really Not Getting 'Oppenheim...
Jul 28, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast When you’re talking about disasters, natural and manmade, it’s always the first responders—soldiers, police, EMTs—who get all the credit. But what about the people who not only support the first responders, but who help people once the front line has moved on? On this show, we talk a lot about wars and weapons and such. We talk about geopolitics and strategy. We rarely talk about people who are working to make things just that little bit better. Today we’re changing that in the case of Ukraine. ...
Jul 18, 2023•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast On this subscribers only episode of Angry Planet, Kremlin expert Mark Galeotti comes on to walk us through the military and political machinations of Russia’s “adhocracy.” According to Galeotti, Russia is a modern state that’s run by a Medieval court. He walks us through the implications of the Wagner mutiny, the different court players, and what the future of Putin’s court might be. Here’s Mark’s piece in The Economist that details Putin’s “self inflicted wounds.” Mark’s excellent podcast In Mo...
Jul 10, 2023•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nobody outside of the Kremlin—and maybe inside the Kremlin, too—knows exactly what happened over the last weekend. We do know that Yevgeny Prigozhin led something that looked like a rebellion against Vladimir Putin’s government. Columns of troops and tanks turned toward the motherland and elements of the Wagner Group made it inside of 200 miles from Moscow. What did Prigozhin really want? And what happened to end the crisis? And is the crisis really over? Joining us today is Mark Katz of G...
Jul 03, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ukraine’s counteroffensive is well under way. One of the best places to go to get stories and reporting about what’s happening is counteroffensive.news , a substack run by former U.S. Army Medic and NPR investigative journalist Tim Mak. He’s here with us today to talk about the war, the counteroffensive, and the charms of Kyiv. This is my mom’s brain on Russian propaganda French fighter for Ukraine, musing about God, heads to the frontlines; update on early counteroffensive She secretly sneaks t...
Jun 26, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast The results of Turkey's presidential election are finally in and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had been forced into a runoff against his chief opponent, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, gets to keep his job as leader of NATO’s most troublesome member. Were the elections free and fair? Meh, says Foreign Policy/Council on Foreign Relations expert Steven Cook. This week he joins us to wrap up one of the world’s most anticipated elections—even if the suspense was never more than mild. Erdogan isn’t either a benevole...
Jun 05, 2023•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast World War II is still killing people. Unexploded ordnance, the remnants of globe spanning conflict, litters the fields of Europe and the waters of the Pacific. The world spends a lot of money and time cleaning up UX in Europe and helping its victims. In the Pacific? Well, there it’s a different story. Especially in the Solomon Islands. Thomas Heaton is a reporter for Civil Beat and the author of its ‘Lethal Legacy’ series, which focuses on the devastation World War II is still wreaking in the Pa...
May 30, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s 2023. It’s time for authoritarian leaders to update their aesthetic. Sure a stuffy military uniform used to lend an air of authority, but today’s young leaders are looking more and more like silicon valley tech billionaires. A backwards baseball cap. Laser eyes on their Twitter profile. Plans to build a city powered by a volcano that mines bitcoin. Mega-prisons ripped from the pages of Judge Dredd. That kind of thing. This week we’re talking about El Salvador and its millennial leader Nayib...
May 22, 2023•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are authoritarians and there are tyrants, and sometimes they’re the same person. But would a true tyrant put himself up to face the people in an election that could be free and maybe even fair? With Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, we’re going to find out the exact flavor of authoritarian he is on Sunday, May 14, and in the days immediately following. Erdogan has been in power in his nation of more than 80 million people for nearly two decades, and in some ways, he’s brought it to near ruin,...
May 12, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s a subscriber only episode of Angry Planet where we sit down with drone and UAP journalist Kelsey Atherton to deliver on an old promise: making up for a balloon-related episode from February some of you didn’t like. But first, we got into the news of the drone attack on the Kremlin, which occurred a few hours before we sat down to record. After that, Atherton takes us through his thoughts on the great high altitude object panic of 2023 and we dig into the meat of the episode: why it’s so har...
May 09, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast You may have noticed that we end our show with a snippet of the video game Fallout (my favorite). “War - war never changes.” What if that’s both true and not true? You have to love a dichotomy. Anyway, we are lucky today to have University of Chicago professor Paul Poast on the show. He looks at foreign policy—war—using statistics to make some sense of it all. This is a break down of why wars popular on the history channel (World War II, the Civil War) aren’t indicative of how wars are actually ...
May 01, 2023•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast How is that a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman posted government secrets to a private Discord group for almost a year before anyone noticed? On today’s episode of Angry Planet, Bellingcat’s Aric Toler walks us through the culture that created poster and edgelord Jack Teixeira. Toler also talks about working with The New York Times , dodging phone calls from the FBI, and the digital forensics he used to identify Teixeira. We talk about the Something Awful Forums, 4chan and KiwiFarms, and why Te...
Apr 24, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Islamic State has largely fallen out of the western press with the weird exception of ISIS brides. And when we talk about the Islamic State, western press often ignores its broader crimes. The plight of the Yazidi, specifically, is largely ignored by press and NGOs. The plight of the so-called “ISIS bride,” however, is very much in fasion. But I wanted that photo and that testimony to lead off this post. Today’s episode is mostly about the women of the Islamic State, but the Yazidis are a cr...
Apr 17, 2023•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1983, President Ronald Reagan stood before the American public and promised to put lasers in space. The Strategic Defense Initiative was meant to be the ultimate bulwark against communist intercontinental ballistic missile. It didn’t work. Deriseively called Star Wars, the system never worked. To this day, methods for shooting an ICBM out of the sky are shoddy at best and fantasy at worst. Joining us today is Joe Cirincione. In his own words on his substack at joecirincione.substack.com . He ...
Apr 05, 2023•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dictatorships of the last century had some famous youth groups. Hitler had his Youth, Lenin had his Young Pioneers, and Mussolini had his Opera Nazionale Balilla. Such groups once attracted huge followings but have largely fallen out of favor in the West. But, like so much else with the irredentist Vladimir Putin, he’s bringing it back. To help us understand this new youth movement and what it means for the future, we have the perfect guest. Ian Garner is a historian and analyst of Russian cultu...
Mar 29, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast You know, we wanted to talk about European (and especially German) views of the war in Ukraine today. And we still will. What’s an IRIS-T, for example. What’s up with those Leopard tanks? But then a Russian Su-27 fighter jet crashed into an American MQ-9 Reaper above the Black Sea and the guest we planned to have on, well, she knows a lot about drones. With us today is Ulrike Franke. Franke is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. She’s an expert in all things Germ...
Mar 21, 2023•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, Angry Planet talks with Caleb Larson who has been working as a journalist in and around Ukraine’s Donbas region where much of the war is currently being fought. He paints a picture of the situation on the ground and tells us where to buy groceries in time of war. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 13, 2023•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast As the planet slowly broils, we keep hoping that some technological revolution will save us. Not just carbon capture or seeding the oceans with iron to grow algae that will drink in all the carbon dioxide right out of the atmosphere, but solutions that we can power our homes with and drive around. But what if we’ve put all of our money on the wrong horse? David Ko and Richard Busellato former hedge fund managers, have a different solution, but can it really save the Earth? After you listen to th...
Mar 06, 2023•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1973, as most American troops left Vietnam, President Richard M. Nixon ended compulsory military service for males over the age of 18. It was an end of system that had been in place since the Second World War and came in answer—at least in part—to an ever-growing anti-war, anti-draft movement. Historian and writer Max Boot joins us to talk about the history of the draft and the all-volunteer force that now has 50 years under its belt. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege . ...
Feb 27, 2023•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast What’s the biggest Chinese threat to the United States? Well, if you ask security expert Stephanie Carvin, it’s not a balloon—no matter how large and how many missiles it takes to shoot down. So, what should we really be worried about from China’s security apparatus? Well, you could start with more traditional spying, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Feb 21, 2023•51 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast All three Angry Planet guys are on the show today. Kevin went to South Korea in September and he’s here to tell us all about it. “A shrimp stuck between two whales.” Shopping for a frigate in a glossy catalog Why America doesn’t remember the Korean War The Don Draper connection “MASH was about Vietnam.” A nuclear penninsula? No one knows what’s going in in North Korea. Angry Planet has a Substack ! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in con...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast Only Nixon can go to China. The now-forgotten aphorism once represented so much in American politics. After Nixon met with Mao, relations between the Communist country and America thawed. Trade opened up and, the popular notion went, with economic benefits would come a lessening of authoritarianism in China and the eventual end of Communism. Here in 2023 the idea that economic modernization and prosperity would lead to a flourishing of democracy in China seems quaint. What happened? And do the W...
Jan 30, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s only human to play games. Some might argue it’s in the DNA. Games are part of how we learn, and can be the best way to teach or solve a problem. But some games are more serious than others. A game recently played at a Washington think tank is about as serious as it gets. It looked at what might happen if China attacked Taiwan, and the results weren’t pretty for anyone. Joining us today to discuss what they found in playing the game is Mark Cancian. He is a retired marine corps colonel...
Jan 23, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
