Angry Planet

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 independe...

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 h...

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 weapo...

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, m...

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...

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...

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 storie...

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...

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 th...

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 t...

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 p...

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 be...

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 180...

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 so...

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...

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 wit...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com For mercenaries, death is a business. It’s all about finding the right market. Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups have found willing markets in Africa. Journalist John Lechner spent years in Africa among the mercenaries and he’s on the show today to tell us about what he learned. Lechner tells us how Wagner’s men think the...

A lot of the people designing America’s technology and close to the center of American power believe some deeply weird shit. We already talked to journalist Gil Duran about the Nerd Reich , the rise of the destructive anti-democratic ideology. In this episode, we dive into another weird section of Silicon Valley: the cult of Rationalism. Max Read, the journalist behind the Read Max Substack, is he...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The Israeli military is using AI products from Microsoft to conduct its war in Gaza. Off the shelf AI products powered by the tech company’s Azure cloud computing system and OpenAI are helping the IDF sort through data, translate Arabic, and even pick targets. But AI translations aren’t perfect and these systems often make mistak...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com We’re living in a bizarre age of technofascism. The richest man who has ever lived, a man who dreams of colonizing Mars with his children , is America’s CEO. Donald Trump, the man people voted for, is just the chairman of the board. What does Elon Musk believe? Is there a playbook for DOGE? How bad are things going to get? On thi...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com President Donald Trump wants to build an American Iron Dome. He even signed an executive order to make it happen. It’s a terrible idea, one we’ve tried before, and one that will make America less safe. In this episode, Joseph Cirincione returns to the program to detail his personal history with complicated and costly missile defe...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is the interim head of USAID, for however much longer the agency lasts. For 60 years, the massive bureaucracy was a vehicle for American soft power abroad. Trump, Elon Musk, and all their creatures don’t like it. It might soon be gone. Nicole Widdersheim is the deputy Washington director of Hum...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The pros and cons of globalization The end of trust in the global system What was behind the WTO protests of the 1990s How 1999's WTO Protests Influenced the Policing of Protests Today China, China, China The Covid shock White goods ? And we have to talk about McDonald’s How sanctions created the multipolar world “There’s no trus...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow. Marine Corps veteran J.D. Vance will soon be vice president. Pete Hegseth, a man with a Crusader Kings tattoo who doesn’t want women to serve in combat roles, is probably going to be confirmed as secretary of defense. Over New Years, two members of the U.S. military committed dom...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com It’s hard to read the mind of a dictator, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. When Russian President invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, there were a million columns, videos and podcasts explaining “the real reason” for such a “crazy” move. Well, anyone who tells the story from February 2022 is missing decades of Russia...