Angry Planet
Matthew Gault and Jason Fields
300 episodes · Explicit
Conversations about conflict on an angry planet. Created, produced, and hosted by Matthew Gault and Jason Fields
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Episodes page 1 of 6
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Dreams of War in Space
Air Force Secretary Troy Meink casually dropped the news that America had space-based weapons during the keynote address at a cyber conference. “We are increasing readiness against existing threats, and the United…
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Human Decisions Are Behind Every ‘Rogue’ AI
A lot of people are afraid right now. I’ve lost track of the times OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have announced they lost control of their AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants to “pace the frontier” and Bill Gates is…
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The Cult of the American Military Academy
Journalist Jasper Craven joins the show today to talk about his new book God Forgives, Brothers Don’t. The book is a deep dive into the history of the American military academy and how it has shaped the country’s…
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If You Must Fight a Trade War, Fight to Win
The world I grew up in no longer exists. The decades after World War II were boom times for free trade lovers. During the Pax Americana it seemed that most diplomatic problems could be solved by exporting blue jeans…
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Iran Won Because America Is Stuck in the ‘Smart Bomb Trap’
Recorded in May. Join angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes early and commercial free. America’s war against Iran has gone on for more than two months and the United States has achieved none of its political objectives.…
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Navigating Reality and War During the Age of AI Propaganda
On the morning of April 21, Trump posted an image of eight women on Truth Social, claimed they were Iranian dissidents set to be executed, and demanded that Tehran release them. Detractors, and several Iranian sources,…
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Christianity Shaped North Korea’s Cult of Personality
Kim Song Ju, the man who would become Kim Il Sung, was born to devout Presbyterian parents. Billy Graham’s wife was born to christian missionaries in China and went to high school in Pyongyang. American protestants…
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Making the Case America Was Winning in Iran
Recorded March 24, 2026. Subscribe at angryplanetpod.com to hear episodes first and commercial free. Last week an article published in Al Jazeera by an academic at the University of Doha in Qatar proposed something…
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Neutralizing Iran’s Nuclear Material During a War Is ‘Nearly Mission Impossible’
America went to war in Iran, we’re told, because the idea of the country developing nuclear weapons was intolerable. Nukes are complicated and technical weapons that require scientists and experts to build, maintain,…
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The ‘AI as Nuclear Weapons’ Obsession
AI enthusiasts love to say that the technology is as revolutionary and important as nuclear weapons. Even the Trump administration has adopted the metaphor. The President and the Department of Energy have repeatedly…
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A Killer True Crime Fandom & Islamic State’s Digital Caliphate
Things have gotten very surreal in the dark corners of the internet. AI-generated prophets are preaching jihad in Facebook groups, Minecraft servers host digital caliphates, and school shooting fandoms gather to study…
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When Americans Became ‘Splendid Liberators’
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…
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Puffins, Zyn, and ‘Polar War’
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…
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Online Culture Is the Whole Culture
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…
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How We Thought the First Year Would Go
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com 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…
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On Spectacles of Cruelty
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…
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Google’s Former CEO Is Dancing in Ukraine
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…
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‘Capitalism Is a Series of Regime Changes’
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…
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The US Government’s AI Grand Bargain
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…
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Deadwood: The Town that Made the Wild West
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…
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Learning to Love the Stagnant Order
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…
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‘Goliath’s Curse’ and the Surprising Benefits of Societal Collapse
We’re obsessed with apocalypses, big and small. We fantasize about what the future might look like after the fall of society and fear the coming tribulation. Rome fretted about decline until its end. Stories of the Sea…
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Yes, US Strikes On Alleged Drug Traffickers Are Illegal. That Won’t Stop Them
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com This week on Angry Planet we have returning guest and former judge advocate Dan Maurer. The last time he was on the show, Maurer walked us through…
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Vanessa Guillén and the Importance of Speaking Up
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The episode is about Vanessa Guillén, a US soldier who was murdered at Fort Hood in 2020. She also experienced sexual harassment while in the…
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Assassinations Are Shitposts Now
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Political assassins often have incoherent politics and Tyler Robinson is no different. The young man who killed Charlie Kirk inscribed the shell…
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The War On Terror on Drugs
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com On September 2, 2025 the United States escalated its decades long War on Drugs with a tactic borrowed from the War on Terror. It used a drone to…
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Traveling America’s ‘Murderland’
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The Pacific Northwest is known for its startling natural beauty, precocious rainfall, and propensity to birth serial killers. Why? Caroline Fraser…
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After Xi
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com All things move towards their end, even seemingly omnipotent political leaders, and authoritarian systems are shaped by the question of succession…
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Does the U.S. Need an Independent Cyber Force?
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com If the internet is a battlefield, does that mean the United States needs a new military force to dominate it? On this episode of Angry Planet,…
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Hunting Nazis Online With Canadian Journalists
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Journalists and Nazis have changed a lot in the years since the end of World War II; journalists are on the outs while Nazis are having a bit of a…
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How Many Nukes Does It Take to Win a War? (Trick Question)
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The world is living with a Cold War hangover. The logic of deterrence, which dominates the minds of the people who plan nuclear wars, means that…
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A History of the Iranian Nuclear Program
Sometimes it’s good to back up and ask the basic questions: How do we know Iran was even developing nuclear weapons? On this episode of the show, the Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis walks us through the history of the…
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Talking With the Military Ethics Professor Who Resigned in Protest
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Pauline Shanks Kaurin PhD. was, until recently, the Stockdale Chair for Professional Military Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College. She’d been there…
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The Iran Strikes Beg the Question: What Is Airpower For?
You can’t win a war with airpower alone, despite what the U.S. Air Force will tell you. For more than 100 years, the masters of the air have promised that military and political objectives can be achieved if you just…
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Libya, China, and the Outlaw Ocean
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com The ocean is vast, beautiful, and lawless. Thousands of miles from any coast, power belongs to those who seize it. On this episode of Angry Planet,…
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Silicon Valley Wants ‘More Everything Forever’
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com 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…
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America’s Favorite Gunfighters and the Birth of the Old West
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com 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…
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The Horror of AI Generals Making Command Decisions
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Palantir, Anduril and a suite of other Tolkien-inspired tech nightmares want to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of the U.S.…
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America’s Pivot to the Pacific
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com 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.…
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India and Pakistan: Nuclear Neighbors on the Brink
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com Recorded 5/7/25 India and Pakistan have been unhappy neighbors since 1947 and Britain’s decolonization of the subcontinent. They’ve fought four…
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Donald Trump Wants to Divide Up the World With His ‘Friends’
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com 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…
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Why An Empire Eats
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…
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Erdogan’s Path to Pure Authoritarianism
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…
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Immigration Policy As Defense Policy
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…
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Life Inside Wagner Before and After Prigozhin
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…
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The Cult of Rationalism in Silicon Valley
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…
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How Israel Is Using Microsoft AI to Pick Targets in Gaza
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…
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Welcome to the Nerd Reich
Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com 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…
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The American Iron Dome Is an Expensive Boondoggle That Won’t Work
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…
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The End of U.S. Soft Power
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…
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