Angry Planet

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When Americans Became ‘Splendid Liberators’ Feb 20, 2026

Show notes

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 borders. It noticed the Spanish Empire was awfully close.

In Splendid Liberators, award winning journalist Joe Jackson chronicles the beginning of the American myth of the “good war.” He’s on the show today to talk to us about Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and a general who lay in state at the Alamo.

Recurring patterns in American history
Roscoe Conkling jumpscare
Remnants of the Spanish-American War in South Carolina
What did liberty mean in the 19th century?
Clara Barton, Leonard Wood and the dual American personality
The first modern concentration camps
The Battleship of Maine
When Congress used to fight, physically
Drones won’t win a war
The US in the Philippines
‘The water cure’
American historians facing reality in the Philippines
Teddy, finally
Laying in state at the Alamo

Buy Splendid Liberators

A Defense of General Funston

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Puffins, Zyn, and ‘Polar War’ Feb 06, 2026

Show notes

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, embedding with troops, yearning for snus, and smoking cigarettes with morticians in the long dark.

Rosen knows what makes the Arctic so important and can see the truths that undergird the obsession with Greenland.

Getting bombastic and angry about Greenland
“We already have Greenland”
How is Turkey “near Arctic?”
The Greenland obsession as proof of climate change
What makes a good Arctic force
Accession to NATO
Servicing subs in the Arctic
Trying to embed on a nuclear submarine
Mispronouncing place names
The most powerful navy in the world doesn’t have an icebreaker
Spies in the polar regions
“It should have been an article.”
Smoking under a tree in the dark
Snus vs Zyn
The death drive of the penguin

Buy Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic

US Army Poorly Prepared for Arctic Operations: Finnish Troops Forced Them to Surrender During Exercises in Norway

Can we just appreciate the fact State secrets were just leaked on this sub?

Life Aboard a Nuclear Submarine as the US Responds to Threats Around the Globe

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Online Culture Is the Whole Culture Jan 30, 2026

Show notes

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 posting Stardew Valleymemes about whole milk. A Customs and Border Patrol official is asking people if they’re triggered when they respond with empathy to the murder of a woman. Laura Loomer, one of the most online gargoyles to ever live, is a serious policy player in administration. The Secretary of War has a video game tattoo.

How did we get here? Michael Senters, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech, is here to explain how online culture became the culture.

It’s all for the posts
A YouTuber comes to town
What, exactly, does it mean to be terminally online?
The right goes all in on identity politics
The pandemic drove us all crazy
Turns out the post-modernists were correct
Posting yourself into a different form or reality
Survival tips for the extremely online
Depraved art and Hearts of Iron IV
Deus Vult?
Video games as propaganda
We should have been harder on the online Nazis
John Romero will make you his bitch
A brief history of Something Awful
Fighting the performance regime

How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch

Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow

Do you have stairs in your house?

Fuck You And Die: An Oral History of Something Awful

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How We Thought the First Year Would Go Jan 16, 2026

Show notes

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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 much worse than I expected. Abroad it’s been much weirder than I expected. The bit about America seeking violence though? Right now that feels spot on.

Hegseth’s reforms got worse for women (vindicated)
Conscription is not back (wrong)
The yearning for violence when the gloves come off (vindicated)
All the episodes that weren’t produced
Sicarioifciation continues apace
The bigger problem was that people felt bad
The dangers of boredom
“Drugs won the war on drugs and then looted the armories.”
Against burning it all down
Greenland is still on the table
The ceasefire didn’t last and war did not spread to Europe (wrong)
Elon Musk is out (vindicated)
X is still around, but it IS producing on-demand CSAM (wrong?)
WWIII and mass riots didn’t happen (wrong)
Martin O’Malley 2028?

The Cult of Sicario

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On Spectacles of Cruelty Jan 09, 2026

Show notes

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 wrote about all this in a piece at The New York Times and he’s here with us today to talk through it.

“It’s too easy to condemn.”
The project is spectacles of cruelty
“You’re not supposed to be joining a gang of thugs.”
What is this doing to us as a nation?
The lust for cruelty and domination
Klay’s review of Hegseth’s first year
War vs. Defense
“Read long things.”
Living in the Hell of opinions
Ending on a high note

What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes

Trump Admin’s Racist Halo Memes Are ‘A New Level of Dehumanization of Immigrants’

Trump has accused boat crews of being narco-terrorists. The truth, AP found, is more nuanced

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Google’s Former CEO Is Dancing in Ukraine Dec 19, 2025

Show notes

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 written about what he saw for The New Republic and he’s on the show today to talk about it.

Some light smoking banter
Ben’s timeline
Google’s CEO dancing in a bar in Kyiv
Ukraine as laboratory for war tech
The JSOC era is over
In defense of the majestic American turkey
The great America vs China speculation
War, cheaper
On the actual frontline
Wheat fields of fiber optic line
The buzz of the drone
Life in the bloodlands
The human suffering of living in Ukraine
FPV-made propaganda
“Never underestimate human innovation when it comes to killing other humans.”
What’s Erik Prince doing in Ukraine?

New York Times on Military Reform

The Medieval—and Highly Effective—Tactics of the Ukrainian Protests

Who Is St. Javelin and Why Is She a Symbol of the War in Ukraine?

‘Cope Cages’ on Busted Tanks Are a Symbol of Russia’s Military Failures

‘Unauthorized’ Edit to Ukraine’s Frontline Maps Point to Polymarket’s War Betting

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‘Capitalism Is a Series of Regime Changes’ Dec 12, 2025

Show notes

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 history of an economic system in one book. It’s a doorstop, but it’s also readable and clear-eyed. Some come with me on a journey that runs through the plantations of South Carolina to the tech markets of Shenzhen.

Cotton as an entry point to the history of capitalism
The economic big bang
Industrial Revolution as mutation
“It’s still being born.”
Human data is oil to be fracked
The Quaker Oats metaphor
“The market is God.”
Ascribing morality to economics
When Gary Hart ushered in Neoliberalism
“Capitalism is a series of regime changes.”
Moments of great change offer opportunities

Capitalism: A Global History

The Old Order Is Dead. Do Not Resuscitate.

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The US Government’s AI Grand Bargain Dec 06, 2025

Show notes

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 of Angry Planet, Ben Buchanan is here to tell us about the government’s role in fostering AI. Buchanan was an AI advisor during the Biden administration where he helped write the policy that paved the way for private-public partnerships between DC and AI companies. Now he’s a professor at John Hopkins and, though he’s still an AI advocate, he’s got concerns. Slop, public land use, and autonomous weapons. We get into it all on this episode of Angry Planet.

AI as an arm’s race
Nukes are cheaper than AI
Government’s role in the construction of AI infrastructure
What are the stakes of the AI competition between the United States and China?
“More powerful AI systems will enable more powerful cyber operations.”
“It’s the hardest thing we do as a species.”
Turning over federal lands to data centers
How Trump is shooting himself in the foot regarding AI
“We’re just chasing power all across the country.”
“We’re going to be building data centers for a very long time.”
How the AI expert uses AI
“There’s a long list of concerns.”
Accident reports and autonomous weapons

The AI Grand Bargain

Ben Buchanan

DOE on federal lands for data centers

Anthropic Has a Plan to Keep Its AI From Building a Nuclear Weapon. Will It Work?

DoD Direction 3000.09 Autonomy in Weapons Systems

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Deadwood: The Town that Made the Wild West Nov 21, 2025

Show notes

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, was the subject of dimestore novels and tall tales.

Peter Cozzens is here with us to talk about his new book Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West. Cozzens is a historian who has written 17 books that focus on the U.S. Civil War, the Wild West, and the American Indian Wars. His latest work is all about Deadwood and the wild cast of characters who inhabited it. Come sit with us a spell and learn about the real Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickok, and Al Swearengen.

“Power comes to any man who has the color.”
Black Elk and how the West Was Lost
Conflicting perceptions of Wild Bill Hickock
Professional gamblers
Creating Calamity Jane
Softening George Hearst
“In the West, women didn’t wear underwear.”
Deadwood burns
How history becomes a dime store novel
“The most diabolical town on the face of the earth.”

Deadwood: Gold, Guns, and Greed in the American West

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Learning to Love the Stagnant Order Nov 14, 2025

Show notes

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, a political science professor at Tufts University and his career includes stretches at the Pentagon, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the RAND Corporation. To hear Beckley tell it, stagnation might not be such a bad thing. If we can avoid repeating the worst mistakes of the 20th century and let go of a “number go up” mind set, then maybe we can all learn to enjoy a long age of stabilization.

The diminishing returns of the Industrial Revolution
Winners and losers in the Age of Ascent
Moore’s Law sputters out
Stabilization isn’t so bad. “We’re some of the luckiest people who’ve ever lived.”
Shenanigans and shithousery
AI isn’t “ready” yet
Why conquest doesn’t work anymore
China as a paper tiger in the age of stabilization
America’s unique advantages
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” - Mike Tyson

The Stagnant Order

I Tried the Robot That’s Coming to Live With You. It’s Still Part Human.

Michael Beckley

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