Angry Planet

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The planet isn’t going to get any less angry.

This week, Aram Shabanian comes on the show again to help us work through what the next Trump presidency may mean for America, Europe, and the rest of the world.

• Matthew’s hippie metaphor
• 1931 or 1939?
• America’s allies know it’s all on them now
• North Korea in Ukraine
• Who gets a nuke first?
• Musk diplomacy
• A 50% chance of nuclear war is too high
• Minuteman III’s for sale
• Don’t turn inward
• The future of news
• Call of the Hat Man

Elon Musk joined Trump's call with Zelenskyy

Musk joined a phone call between Trump and a Serbian leader

The Donkey Kong painting

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WARNING: This episode contains nuance in the discussion of subjects usually left to screaming and violence!

This week we get into a bunch of stuff around Israel that we normally avoid. Settlements. Blame versus responsibility. The definition of colonialism. The social media posts of IDF soldiers. It’s a calm, nuanced conversation with Shaiel Ben-Ephraim. No, really.

• Netanyahu as an obstacle to peace
• Why no one talks about what comes next
• Israel loses Matthew
• America and Israel’s “special relationship”
• When Bush (senior) stood up to Israel
• Going down the colonialism rabbit hole
• The social media output of IDF soldiers on the ground in Gaza and Lebanon
• “There’s terrible things they’re not taping.”
• Explaining Ben-Gvir and Smotrich
• How right wingers paralyze the Israeli government
• Israel is eyeing settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon which is, in fact, colonialism
• The difference between blame and responsibility
• The episode is not anti-Israel, so save your letters and phone calls.

Shaiel Ben-Ephraim Explains Israel 

The History Of The Land Of Israel Podcast

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How’s that sanctions regime working out for the U.S. and Russia? This week on the show, we have Stephanie Baker, a senior writer at Bloomberg, to try to answer the question. She just published Punishing Putin, a book all about it.

• What’s a Russian oligarch like in person?
• How America’s sanction regime against Russia works
• The nuclear warfare of it all
• Do Putin’s “red lines” mean anything?
• The complex nature of the world’s oil economy
• What are the limits of economic power?
• Where are the semiconductors coming from?
• What western technology tell us about Russia’s war machines
• RT
• Worshiping World War II
• This is the end of globalization
• The war doesn’t end without the end of Putin
• What to do with Russia’s bank reserves?
• Hungary?

He Had 5 Followers on YouTube. It Landed Him in Jail, Where He Died.

Go here to buy Punishing Putin

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Do you ever feel you’re living in a world where all the good stuff happened to the previous generation? Does it seem like America’s best days are behind it? Were you born into an empire just as it began to collapse?

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We’d like to tell you about King Arthur.

The story of Arthur has been told hundreds of times in everything from song to story to movie. That makes it a pretty big deal when someone can tell the story of the ancient British king with freshness and originality.

Lev Grossman, author of the well-known The Magicians series, has done just that with The Bright Sword. While the characters may be familiar in large part, Sword will still keep you guessing all the way through.

Angry Planet got a chance to speak with Grossman who shared insights into the book, how it was written and Arthur himself. Take a listen.

• “These stories about a lost golden age are a way of processing grief…grief, not over an apocalypse, but over massive change…I think that’s what stories like King Arthur are about.”
• We can’t stop talking about Station 11 for some reason
• Yes, Excalibur is the best Arthur adaptation
• Why the fay are important
• Radical social change and the apocalypse

Buy The Bright Sword here.

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Israel is at war-again. Adversaries include Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

But behind all three is one enemy at the center of this web of violence: Iran.

Is this war the one where Israel and Iran finally confront each other directly? The missiles launched by the ayatollahs say yes, but what will the Jewish state do in return.

This week we look at a fight that could bring a whole world into war, with Yaakov Katz as our guide. He’s a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, and chronicler of modern combat in the Middle East.

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The American civilian-military divide is stark. Only about 1 percent of the U.S. population has served in the military. We here at Angry Planet like to do what we can to bridge that divide and have found that the easiest way to do that … is just to talk to veterans and service members.

That’s why you should listen to the podcast Tracer Burnout, a show where a pair of Army vets talk to other vets about their service. The guys at the center of it are Dan and Roger, two friends who both grew up as Army brats. On this episode of Angry Planet, Dan and Roger stop by the show to tell us about Tracer Burnout and what it was like to grow up on American military bases.

• The origins of Tracer Burnout
• How Fury inspired a veteran to start a podcast
• Psychic soldiers in Fury
• The difference between the branches
• The changing relationship between the military and the American civilian population
• Californians in Texas
• The life of a military brat
• Frontier re-enactors
• Hardtack
• The anti-authoritarian streak in veterans
• What happens when the Army makes you to learn a language
• Life as a personal trainer in the Army
• Submariners
• Where the name comes from

Listen to the Tracer Burnout podcast here

https://tracerburnout.com/

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This week on the show we’re honored to have Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nathan Thrall on the show. His 2023 book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama cuts to the heart of daily life in and around Jerusalem.

In 2012, 5-year old Milad Salama was excited for a school field trip to a theme park. When his school bus hit a semi trailer, it upended the lives of everyone on the bus. What followed was a nightmare of bureaucracy that encapsulates what life is like for people living on the wrong side of the walls Israeli Arabs are forced to live behind. 

Masha Gessen and Nathan Thrall on The Whole Story of Israel and Palestine

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

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Hello and welcome to another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Thanks for letting us kick up our heels this August, it was a rough one. We may not have been releasing, but we WERE recording.

The first episode upon our return is with terrorism and vice presidency expert Aaron Mannes. Mannes is lecturer at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and was one of the first people to use big data sets to study terrorist group behavior. These days he’s really into vice presidents. We sat down with him for a wide-ranging conversation that covered everything from Aaron Burr to the Bonus Army.

• Why are America and Israel all-in on assassination?
• International relations versus the domestic tensions
• Stats out of dead bodies
• Assassination: Obama Style
• The terrorist’s dilemma
• Matthew immediately figures out how wrong he is
• The case for Aaron Burr
• The Bonus Army
• Taking a shot at the vice president
• 
  

Analyzing Assassination Plots Against VPs

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Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein stops by Angry Planet this week to tell us all about his new project Doomsday Machines. It’s a deep dive into the weird post-nuclear futures we’ve built in pop culture.

• How Warcraft orcs got ICBMs
• Matthew confuses Camus and Sartre
• Food poisoning as practice for the radical acceptance of death and suffering
• Is there any hope in The Road?
• Alex is hung up on the cannibals
• The video game aesthetics of the post-nuclear world
• Debunking gasoline futures
• Working for the authoritarian government to get the petroleum industry back on its feet
• The Civil Defense truncheon
• Deep thoughts on the Fallout franchise
• The American libertarian lone survivor

This American Life - Ends of the Earth

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Facing a friendly audience at an AI expo earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp let loose on a list of controversial topics. He talked about Israel, Gaza, and campus protests. “The peace activists are war activists,” Karp said. “We are the peace activists.”

Palantir, Karp’s company, is promising a bold new way to wage war using AI, one it’s testing out in Ukraine. Karp’s comments hit on an old promise. For generations, salesmen have tried to convince everyone they have a new way to conduct war that’s cleaner and better for everyone. That pitch is at the hard of dozens of new defense tech startups.

On today’s show we get into the weeds of the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley obsession with Michael Brenes. Brenes is a Yale historian who recently published a Quincy Institute brief about the rise of private finance and disruptors in the DoD contracting space. To hear Brenes tell it, companies have been trying to sell a peaceful way to make war for a hundred years.

It never quite turns out how they planned.

Private Finance and the Quest to Remake Modern Warfare

A.I. Won’t Transform War. It’ll Only Make Venture Capitalists Richer.

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