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 referred to the development of AI in the US as “Manhattan Project 2.0.”

But is the buildout of LLMs and machine learning systems really as important as the development of the atom bomb? And what are the lessons from the atomic age that AI scientists should then learn? Do we need an AI Non Proliferation Treaty? An AI International Atomic Energy Agency?

On this episode of Angry Planet, Ankit Panda comes on to talk about the uses and limitations of the “AI as nuclear weapons” metaphor. Panda is an expert in nukes and a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He’s been sharing his extended thoughts on the AI-nuclear connection at his Nukesletter Substack.

• Stanislav Petrov
• AI as nuclear weapons
• Why nuclear weapons resonate with people in the AI field
• The Strategic Air Command story
• That time we spilled nuclear material all over Greenland and Spain
• NNSA and Anthropic
• AI as the next Manhattan Project
• A massive infrastructure project
• Fissile material as silicon
• What’s the AI version of an NPT and IAEA?
• AI and nuclear are both dual use
• On AI winters
• What AI is actually being used for, what it might be used for
• The socialization around AI will change.

AI Arms and Influence: Frontier Models Exhibit Sophisticated Reasoning in Simulated Nuclear Crisis

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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 their heroes and plot how to up beat their score. It’s a double bill on this episode of Angry Planet as two experts from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit that studies and works to mitigate violent extremists, discuss the brave new world of online-born violence.

First up is Milo Comerford, the co-author of a study about nihilistic violence. Then we’ve got Moustafa Ayad to talk about how the Islamic State is circumventing bans and pushing its message on social media.

• Staying sane on the internet
• Violence without ideology
• The Comm
• 764
• True Crime Community
• Saints Culture
• When fandom becomes a killing
• An aesthetics driven movement
• Online and offline have merged
• Moderation is impossible
• You don’t have to hand it to ISIS
• Broken text posting
• Copyright strikes and the Islamic State
• Facebook professional as the gold standard
• AI resurrects dead influencers
• Jihad influencers
• Even IS is obsessed with the Epstein files
• Virtual caliphates in Roblox and Minecraft
• “We must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
• Once again, it all comes back to 4chan
• Saying nice things about twitter dot com

Beyond Extremism

‘The Comm’: The Group Linked to a Nationwide Swatting Rampage

How the True Crime Community generates its own killers

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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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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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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 Valley memes 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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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 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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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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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 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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