Angry Planet

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...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com This week on Angry Planet writer David Faris joins us to talk about his time in Syria and life in America. David’s travels from Lebanon to Syria When people hoped Bashar al-Assad would change Syria What a real totalitarian state feels like The nightmare that follows the collapse of a dictatorship Once again, the ugly legacy of co...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com This week Angry Planet turns its attention to Canada. Global News investigative journalist Stewart Bell joins us to walk through his two latest pieces and give Matthew a crash course on Canadian history. What do outlaw motorcycle gangs, extrajudicial assassinations, an Indian separatist movement, and a resurgent Islamic State all...

On today’s episode, I talked to Kollen Post about how and why Silicon Valley markets their drones as “battle tested in Ukraine.” We recorded it on Thanksgiving, Jason was busy spending time with his family, and Post and I went down some weird philosophical rabbit holes. Impromptu drone developers The Western image of the Ukrainian drone operator Open source is king The decentralized nature of Ukra...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com North Korean troops are fighting alongside Russian ones in Ukraine. Bringing the two together hasn’t all gone smoothly. There are language barriers, cultural barriers, and a whole lot of Russian territory to recover. The results have been mixed, but the partnership points to a deepening of the special relationship between the Dem...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The planet isn’t going to get any less angry. This week, Aram Shabanian comes on the show again to help us work through what the next Trump presidency may mean for America, Europe, and the rest of the world. Matthew’s hippie metaphor 1931 or 1939? America’s allies know it’s all on them now North Korea in Ukraine Who gets a nuke f...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com WARNING: This episode contains nuance in the discussion of subjects usually left to screaming and violence! This week we get into a bunch of stuff around Israel that we normally avoid. Settlements. Blame versus responsibility. The definition of colonialism. The social media posts of IDF soldiers. It’s a calm, nuanced conversation...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com How’s that sanctions regime working out for the U.S. and Russia? This week on the show, we have Stephanie Baker, a senior writer at Bloomberg, to try to answer the question. She just published Punishing Putin , a book all about it. What’s a Russian oligarch like in person? How America’s sanction regime against Russia works The nu...

Do you ever feel you’re living in a world where all the good stuff happened to the previous generation? Does it seem like America’s best days are behind it? Were you born into an empire just as it began to collapse? Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ We’d like to tell you about King Arthur. The story of Arthur has been told hundreds of times in everything from so...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ Israel is at war-again. Adversaries include Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. But behind all three is one enemy at the center of this web of violence: Iran. Is this war the one where Israel and Iran finally confront each other directly? The missiles launched by the ayatollahs say yes, but what will the Jewish state do in return....

The American civilian-military divide is stark. Only about 1 percent of the U.S. population has served in the military. We here at Angry Planet like to do what we can to bridge that divide and have found that the easiest way to do that … is just to talk to veterans and service members. That’s why you should listen to the podcast Tracer Burnout, a show where a pair of Army vets talk to other vets a...

This week on the show we’re honored to have Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nathan Thrall on the show. His 2023 book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama cuts to the heart of daily life in and around Jerusalem. In 2012, 5-year old Milad Salama was excited for a school field trip to a theme park. When his school bus hit a semi trailer, it upended the lives of everyone on the bus. What followed was a...

Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Thanks for letting us kick up our heels this August, it was a rough one. We may not have been releasing, but we WERE recording. The first episode upon our return is with terrorism and vice presidency expert Aaron Mannes. Mannes is lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and was one of the first peop...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein stops by Angry Planet this week to tell us all about his new project Doomsday Machines . It’s a deep dive into the weird post-nuclear futures we’ve built in pop culture. How Warcraft orcs got ICBMs Matthew confuses Camus and Sartre Food poisoning as practice for the radical acceptance of death...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ Facing a friendly audience at an AI expo earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp let loose on a list of controversial topics. He talked about Israel, Gaza, and campus protests. “The peace activists are war activists,” Karp said . “ We are the peace activists.” Palantir, Karp’s company, is promising a bold new way to wage war u...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ Ronald Reagan carried a gun in his briefcase when he was president. According to Edmund Morris’ pseudo-historical memoir of Reagan, Dutch , Reagan got the gun in Iowa. “It is a fact … that RR did acquire a 1934 Walther PPK .380 pocket-sized police pistol early in his stay in Des Moines and kept it lovingly the rest of his life,”...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ On July 1, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for “official acts” committed while in office. In the dissent opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised an interesting hypothetical . “When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from crimin...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ Influence campaigns, both subtle and unsubtle, are as old as statecraft. Agencies like the CIA, KGB, and Israel’s Mossad have all attempted to force friends and rivals to change. It doesn’t work as often as you’d think. Subversion campaigns are often so secretive that their effectiveness is hard to quantify. But Lennart Maschmey...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ We used to build things in America, things like fallout shelters. There’s a luxury hotel on the border between Virginia and West Virginia that’s been a favorite retreat of the D.C. elite for generations. After the fall of the atom bombs in World War II, Washington commissioned an addition to the hotel: a secret fallout shelter t...

Sign up at  angryplanetpod.com  to get instant access to the full episode. A direct link to the episode on Substack . Back in 2020, Daniel Perry was driving for Uber to make ends meet. He ran a red light and dove his car into a crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest. Garret Foster was there to protect the crowd and he’d brought an AK-47 along to do it. Foster, an Air Force veteran, approa...

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/ No one is really sure how many nuclear weapons are out there. Every number you see is a best guess. Russia and the U.S. have the most, sitting at around 5,000 each. France has just under 200, China has about 500 (and is probably building more), and North Korea has around 50. The world’s nuclear powers love to keep the details of...

Sign up at  angryplanetpod.com  to get instant access to the full episode. A direct link to the episode on Substack . American politics was bizarre in 2016. Alt-right figures dominated many news cycles and shared pictures of cartoon frogs online. A lot of those personalities, like Baked Alaska and Richard Spencer, flamed out and vanished from the scene. But there’s always money to be mad...