Angry Planet

The world’s great military powers seem to have forgotten how to end wars. The traditional Clausewitzian model of armed conflict sees war as an expression of political power. It’s about using military might to extract concessions from an opponent. But the enemy always gets a vote and defeat must always look more attractive than the continuation of fighting. Russia wants unconditional surrender from...

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink casually dropped the news that America had space-based weapons during the keynote address at a cyber conference. “We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United States has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the Joint Force against hostile adversary action,” he said. But what, exactly, are those space weapons? Why has space becom...

A lot of people are afraid right now. I’ve lost track of the times OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have announced they lost control of their AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants to “pace the frontier” and Bill Gates is warning there’s a non-zero chance that AI will kill billions . The US military has embraced AI and it’s leading to grave mistakes. In Ukraine, an AI-controlled drone has killed three pe...

Journalist Jasper Craven joins the show today to talk about his new book God Forgives, Brothers Don’t . The book is a deep dive into the history of the American military academy and how it has shaped the country’s conception of manhood. Craven’s investigation led him from Valley Forge to West Point, uncovered a strange 20th century Joe Rogan who changed his name so it sounded like a lion’s roar, a...

The world I grew up in no longer exists. The decades after World War II were boom times for free trade lovers. During the Pax Americana it seemed that most diplomatic problems could be solved by exporting blue jeans and lowering the cost of consumer goods for everyone. But in 2026 trade is a serious weapon and economic policy seems less a path to prosperity and more a weapon for waging war. On thi...

Recorded in May. Join angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes early and commercial free. America’s war against Iran has gone on for more than two months and the United States has achieved none of its political objectives. American power has diminished, its munitions stockpile is low, and Iran now controls the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has all the cards. To hear Robert Pape tell it, this was all predict...

On the morning of April 21, Trump posted an image of eight women on Truth Social, claimed they were Iranian dissidents set to be executed, and demanded that Tehran release them. Detractors, and several Iranian sources , claimed the women were AI-generated. A day later Trump claimed the women would no longer be executed and that he’d saved them. The truth is that the women are real and many are sti...

Kim Song Ju, the man who would become Kim Il Sung, was born to devout Presbyterian parents. Billy Graham’s wife was born to christian missionaries in China and went to high school in Pyongyang. American protestants once spread the gospel in northwest Korea and found fertile ground for their gospel message. Kim listened, learned, and used those teachings to shape a cult of personality that rules No...

Recorded March 24, 2026. Subscribe at angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes first and commercial free. Last week an article published in Al Jazeera by an academic at the University of Doha in Qatar proposed something that felt crazy to some western war watchers: America and Israel’s strategy in Iran is working. On this episode of Angry Planet, author Muhanad Seloom is here to explain his position. S...

America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain, and manage. Highly enriched uranium (HEU) is core to the design and unless all of Iran’s HEU is accounted for the threat of it becoming a nuclear power will linger. So what would it t...

AI enthusiasts love to say that the technology is as revolutionary and important as nuclear weapons. Even the Trump administration has adopted the metaphor. The President and the Department of Energy have repeatedly referred to the development of AI in the US as “Manhattan Project 2.0.” But is the buildout of LLMs and machine learning systems really as important as the development of the atom bomb...

Things have gotten very surreal in the dark corners of the internet. AI-generated prophets are preaching jihad in Facebook groups, Minecraft servers host digital caliphates, and school shooting fandoms gather to study their heroes and plot how to up beat their score. It’s a double bill on this episode of Angry Planet as two experts from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit that...

America spent most of the 19th century at war with itself. It conquered its western expanse then collapsed into civil war. Once the North beat the South, partisan politics consumed the country for a generation. A string of assassinations, progressive firebrands, and civil service reforms burned people out on domestic politics and a bored and febrile nation began to search for meaning beyond its bo...

Greenland fever has faded for now but it will return. The world’s polar region, you see, is pretty damn important. As the planet heats and the ice melts, what was once an impassible warren of ice and snow has become a geopolitical opportunity. On today’s Angry Planet, we host journalist Kenneth R. Rosen who just published the book Polar War . He’s spent the past few years among the ice and snow, e...

There was a time, just before the pandemic, when folks would say “Twitter isn’t real life” as a means of dismissing the horrors of social media. This was a cope, a way to ignore the worst political and cultural actors who now dominate our psychic landscape. Now those people are in charge and they’ve manifested Twitter into real life in a way previously thought impossible. The White House is postin...

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 m...

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...

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 writte...

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...

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...

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,...

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,...

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: thing...

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...

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 Pentag...