Angry Planet

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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 work. Will it be worth it? Does...

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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 this episode of the show as we ...

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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 this episode of Angry Plane...

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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 producer and Honolulu Star-Adv...

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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 between nations that plain don’...

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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 1800s on repeat. Well, look how tha...

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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 sometimes bite back”
• The bigges...

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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 on an angry planet.

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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 with firsthand knowledge.

Times ...

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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 U.S. media killed Prigozhin,...

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 here to help us through it. Rationa...

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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 mistakes.

What happens when the con...

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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 this episode of Angry Planet jour...

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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 defense systems.

• It all st...

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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 Human Rights Watch with a long h...

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• 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 trust between the U.S., China, and Russia....

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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 domestic terror attacks.

Today o...

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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 Russian interference in Ukraine,...

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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 colonialism rears its head
• The p...