Angry Planet

Latest Episodes:

Why An Empire Eats Apr 25, 2025

Show notes

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 sometimes bite back”
The biggest caveats ever uttered on the show
“An empire eats”
The stories nations tell themselves
“Getting more America”
Picking the winners and losers
A little optimism at the end
How land confers power
Those Were The Days
The false promise of abundance

The Coming Age of Territorial Expansion

Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Erdogan’s Path to Pure Authoritarianism Apr 15, 2025

Show notes

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 on an angry planet.

Shilling for kagi.com
“Competitive authoritarianism”
Negotiating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
How to court the Kurdish vote while killing Kurds
A stable of failsons
“The Turkish Marc Andreessen”
Why Erdogan hates Pennsylvania
Disproving McDonald’s Diplomacy, once again
Leveling a park to build a mall
How Erdogan processed the Arab Spring
“Fools, knaves, and rubes”—Oh my!

Turkey Can’t Live With, or Without, Erdogan

Ukraine Has Written a Folk Song About Its Drone

Turkey and Israel are becoming deadly rivals in Syria

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Immigration Policy As Defense Policy Apr 11, 2025

Show notes

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 with firsthand knowledge.

Times have changed.

Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center is here to talk all about those changes. It’s an episode packed with bizarre anecdotes and interesting tidbits about how America runs now. You’ll learn why evangelical Christians are turning their back on refugees, why China won’t accept deportation flights, and how to navigate the Darien Gap using short form video posts.

Immigration is a foreign policy tool
Dissident refugees as a strategic win
What we know about how the “Gold Card” will work
“You simply can’t create greencards out of nowhere.”
How Mexico uses immigration to get concessions from the U.S.
“At a certain point the people who send you into the blades look like the bastards.”
Dealing with a dictator
20,000 Chinese nationals at the southern border
The internet has made it easier to immigrate
Navigating the Darien Gap, one TikTok video at a time

Op-ed: Trump’s gold card visa, explained

Domestic debate, global strategy: Revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policy

China owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Here's where

Weapons of Mass Migration

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Life Inside Wagner Before and After Prigozhin Apr 04, 2025

Show notes

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 U.S. media killed Prigozhin, why every theater (or market) is different, and the training regimen of a fresh convict recruit. It’s all in his new book Death Is Our Business: Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare.

The threats change…but the mercenaries stay the same.

Interlinking militant Islam and the rise of modern mercenaries
Russian mercenaries before Wagner
Prigozhin rising
Putin’s Chef was the father of ‘Hybrid War’
Wagner in Africa
‘No one said mercenary life was gonna be easy.’
Life inside Wagner
‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’
You can’t judge intent by results
The Russian “royal” court is full of self starters and entrepreneurs

The Tip of Russia’s Spear

Death Is Our Business

Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again

Taliban Bureaucrats Hate Working Online All Day, ‘Miss the Days of Jihad’

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Cult of Rationalism in Silicon Valley Mar 25, 2025

Show notes

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. Rationalism is responsible for a lot more than you might think and Read lays out how it’s influenced the world we live in today and how it created the environment for a cult that’s got a body count.

Defining rationalism: “Something between a movement, a community, and a self-help program.”
Eliezer Yudkowsky and the dangers of AI
What the hell is AGI?
The Singleton Guide to Global Governance
The danger of thought experiments
As always, follow the money
Vulgar bayesianism
What’s a Zizian?
Sith Vegans
Anselm: Ontological Argument for God’s Existence
SBF and Effective Altruism

READ MAX!

The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down - Eliezer Yudkowsky’s TIME Magazine piece

Explaining Roko’s Basilisk, the Thought Experiment That Brought Elon Musk and Grimes Together

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

The Government Knows AGI is Coming | The Ezra Klein Show

The archived ‘Is Trump Racist’ rational post

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How Israel Is Using Microsoft AI to Pick Targets in Gaza Mar 10, 2025

Show notes

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 mistakes.

What happens when the consequences are life and death?

Associated Press global investigative reporters Garance Burke and Michael Biesecker are part of a team that broke the story about Israel’s use of Microsoft’s commercial AI in a war. They’re on the show today to help us sort through it all.

Defining “AI”
Off the shelf solutions for war
Microsoft Azure as war’s translator and search engine
“The Israel military is one of the leading militaries in the world adopting the use of AI to assist in its war efforts. They’ve been doing this for years.”
AI is picking targets
Students to militants
AI’s mistranslations
Blaming AI for human sins
Matthew’s vision of a hellish automated future
Employees push back
The money is just too good

How US tech giants supplied Israel with AI models, raising questions about tech’s role in warfare

As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies

Microsoft workers protest sale of AI and cloud services to Israeli military

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The American Iron Dome Is an Expensive Boondoggle That Won’t Work Feb 19, 2025

Show notes

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 defense systems.

It all starts during a snowstorm in 1982 and with the High Frontier
Zombie defense pitches
It’s almost impossible to knock a bullet out of space with a bullet
How Israel’s Iron Dome works
Slow and hot vs fast and cold
Lasers don’t work, thanks Teller
Pitch: lasers in space. Reality: missile batteries in Alaska
These systems only work half the time and only under perfect conditions
SpaceX contracts abound!
A Pentagon Powerpoint slide enters chat
Jason’s Superman reverie, starring Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor
How do China and Russia react?
“The enemy gets a vote.”
The last arms control treaty
Ronald Reagan: anti-nuclear advocate
How SDI kept us from eliminating nuclear weapons
Anatomy of an arms race
AI is coming to nuclear command and control

Project 2025 and Trump Are Cooking Up a Recipe for a New Nuclear Arms Race

The Iron Dome for America Executive Order

The national missile defense fantasy—again

Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture

Why the US General In Charge of Nuclear Weapons Said He Needs AI

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The End of U.S. Soft Power Feb 10, 2025

Show notes

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 Human Rights Watch with a long history of humanitarian work. She’s here on Angry Planet today to walk us through this new era of the American Empire.