Angry Planet

This week’s episode is a long conversation with Joey Ayoub about Gaza, Palestine, and Israel. We cover a lot of ground and we’ve got a lot of show notes that accompany this episode. Show notes from Joey: Where the Palestinian Political Project Goes from Here “Divide and Rule”: How Israel Helped Start Hamas to Weaken Palestinian Hopes for Statehood Joey’s excellent podcast, The Fire These Times and...

Writing a blurb to describe a podcast episode isn't typically a difficult thing to do—between myself and Matthew, we've been writing for about 50 years—but as all things with Israel and the Palestinians, even writing a blurb is bound to offend someone. That's not our goal, but if you listen to the show, don't be surprised if there are a few things that you don't agree with, or even some that...

Paul Rieckhoff is a veteran with a lot to say about the state of the world. He came on Angry Planet to help us understand what happened when former President Donald Trump and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley crossed paths. What does it mean to swear allegiance to the Constitution above all, rather than to any particular commander-in-chief? What do you do if...

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 kno...

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 Ka...

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 hi...

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 he...

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 Sa...

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 co...

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...

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...

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 wo...

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...

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? An...

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 Ukrain...

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...

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 i...

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...

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...

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 t...

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 popu...

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...

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...

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. Join...

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 mea...