Angry Planet

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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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 Peoples terrified the monarchs of the Late Bronze Age. During the 30 Years’ War, Europeans imagined Armageddon had finally begun.

But a funny thing happens after the collapse: things tend to get a little better for everyone.

Luke Kemp is here to hold our hands through the end of the world as we know it. Kemp is a researcher at Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author of the book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse.

• Beauty in collapse
• Matthew’s AI test
• The Doctor Doom mask
• “Collapse was good for most people.”
• Sea People’s mentioned
• Why a Goliath and not a Leviathan?
• Down with Thomas Hobbes
• Fear of a mass panic driving collapse
• “Emergency powers have a very funny tendency to stick around”
• The problem with guns, germs, and steel
• The Tree of Evil
• On the purpose of human sacrifice
• Doctor Doom is the belle of the ball
• Are we ending on a high note?

Buy Goliath’s Curse

Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

The rewards of ruin

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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 the consequences of a Supreme Court ruling that asked the question: is it illegal for the President to order SEAL Team Six to kill people? It was a surreal question that now feels more pressing.

A US Carrier Strike Group is moving into South American waters to support America’s highly kinetic War on Drugs. Military lawyers might have advised the Trump administration that extra-judiciously executing alleged criminals in international waters is, in fact, illegal. But Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is no fan of military lawyers and fired the Judge Advocate General (JAG) of both the Army and the Air Force. The Pentagon plans to turn as many as 600 of the remaining military lawyers into immigration judges.

The second Trump administration is perverting the law and sidelining anyone that might tell them it’s a bad idea. Since he was last on the show, Maurer has retired from the Army and is now a professor at Ohio Northern University’s college of law. He’s here to tell us how bad things are and how much worse they might get.

• The terminal parent metaphor
• A story that only ends one way
• What’s a JAG?
• Hegseth’s JAG hate
• Law as perversion
• Are these strikes legal? “No.”
• “It can be lawful, but not moral.”
• Legally speaking, you can’t be a combatant and a criminal.
• When Truman tried to take over the steel industry.
• Can state authorities arrest the feds?
• Life after Trump time

Are Military Lawyers Being Sidelined?

Defining ‘Rebellion’ in 10 U.S.C. § 12406 and the Insurrection Act

On Treason and Traitors

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here.”

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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 military. I spoke with ABC Special Correspondent John Quiñones about his new podcast, Vanished. It’s a good podcast that covers Guillén’s case in-depth and highlights the reforms the Pentagon instituted after.

We recorded the show on September 30, Guillén’s birthday. That morning, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth delivered a long speech about his own military reforms. Many of the changes Hegseth has pushed through conflict with the changes that Guillén’s death ushered in.

As such, I thought it was important to get John’s reaction to Hegseth’s speech. Before we began recording,I told him I planned to ask him about this and he agreed to talk about it.

When I asked the question during recording, a public relations person from ABC jumped on the line and asked me to stop talking about Hegseth. I pushed back, but not hard enough.

The next day, ABC PR reached out via email to ask if I would cut this moment from the show.

I will not. It’s included here in full.

Further, I want to take a moment at the top to highlight the reasons why I brought up Hegseth’s speech. There’s a lot to it and, honestly, it demands its own episode. Here are Hegseth’s thoughts on toxic leaders.

Guillén’s case also changed the way the Army investigates sexual harassment. Here are the secretary’s thoughts on the current state of official internal military investigations:

After the speech, Hegseth signed 11 memos that detailed these changes. I’ll link them in the show notes. The memos say that the military’s definition of “harassment” is overly broad, calls for the end of “anonymous complaints”—something Hegesth also said in his speech, and asks that investigations be completed quickly with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

I believe that is all important context for this episode. I also believe that Hegseth’s speech and the policy directives represent a regression in the American armed services. I will not pretend otherwise.

Listen to the All-New ‘Vanished: What Happened to Vanessa’ Podcast

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Political assassins often have incoherent politics and Tyler Robinson is no different. The young man who killed Charlie Kirk inscribed the shell casings of his bullets with obscure memes that say less about what he believed and more about where he spent time online. Robinson isn’t alone. Earlier this year the Annunciation Church shooter showed off a rifle inscribed with similar memes pulled from the internet. The Christchurch shooter in 2019 livestreamed their killing and left behind a meme laden manifesto.

So what the hell is going on? On this episode of Angry Planet, Michael Senters—a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech—has some unsatisfying answers. Senters painstakingly walks us through each message on Robinson’s bullets and explains the online spaces from whence they came.

If you don’t know a gropyer from a Helldiver or have never heard “OwO” said aloud, this episode is for you.

It will not make you feel better.

• 4,000 hours in seven games
• A painfully specific explanation of every shell casing meme
• “It can’t be Helldivers”
• “This kid has probably fried his brain online.”
• Hearts of Iron IV’s place in online fascist discourse
• Son, what’s a groyper?
• There’s no compelling evidence Robinson was a Groyper
• The terrible embarrassment of explaining memes out loud
• The 10 year old meme on the shell that killed Kirk
• Constructing an ideology here is a Sisyphian task
• Being online is about irony and performance
• How a moment in time becomes a memetic hieroglyph
• Assassination as performance
• Gamergate as a “critical junction” in the Republican party
• How GG spread the irony-poisoned posting style like a virus
• Filming a TikTok video at an assassination
• Re-evaluating our relationship to the internet
• A little bit about working in a bookstore
• The charging documents drop at the end of our conversation

What the shell casings in the assassination of Charlie Kirk do – and don't – tell us

Yes, It’s the Guns. It’s Also the Phones.

Read the Charges Against Tyler Robinson

Exclusive: Leaked Messages from Charlie Kirk Assassin

The “Notices Bulge OwO” video

The “Loss” comic

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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 blow up a boat it said was full of drugs then said the 11 people killed in the strike were terrorists.

Is this legal? Does that matter?

On this week’s Angry Planet, journalist Mike LaSusa of InSight Crime comes on the show to walk us through the ins and outs of America’s long-running War on Drugs and how War on Terror tactics are shaping the fight.

• What’s Tren de Aragua?
• The real connections between Tren de Aragua and the government of Venezuela
• Is this legal?
• How America’s drug interdiction works
• Does violence deter?
• On narcoterrorism
• Cartel as misnomer
• Violence isn’t sustainable
• “We don’t even know these people’s names.”
• America’s partners in the War on Terror on Drugs
• “Motivations matter.”
• How do you solve a problem like illicit drugs?
• How the Trump admin hurt its own cause in the drug war
• Poppies in Afghanistan
• Drug use as a moral failing
• 11 is a lot people for a drug boat
• The Cartel of the Suns

How War-on-Terror Tactics Could Change the Fight Against Organized Crime

Boat Suspected of Smuggling Drugs Is Said to Have Turned Before U.S. Attacked It

Rand Paul Reveals Venezuela Boat Attack Was a Drone Strike

Tren de Aragua: Fact vs. Fiction

How Trump’s Anti-Money Laundering Rollback Could Help LatAm Criminals

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The Pacific Northwest is known for its startling natural beauty, precocious rainfall, and propensity to birth serial killers. Why? Caroline Fraser has a theory and it’s a good one.

This week on Angry Planet, Fraser takes us on a journey through the American past and into the dark heart of the PNW. Her new book Murderland weaves together memoir, true crime, history, and science into a compelling narrative that’s as beautiful and deadly as the forests around Tacoma.

• Lead in the time of serial killers
• Crazywall as map
• America’s ultra-leaded 1970s
• The killer hubristic roadways of the Pacific Northwest
• The unique draw of Ted Bundy
• The beauty and horror of the PNW’s woods
• Lead poisoned psychos become pop culture geniuses
• Anne Rule and the different eras of true crime writing
• The Olympic–Wallowa lineament
• The current state of the true crime genre

Murdlerand: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Tacoma Smelter Plume project

Houses of Butterflies

A look back at the I-90 floating bridges before light-rail work begins

The Domesday Book

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All things move towards their end, even seemingly omnipotent political leaders, and authoritarian systems are shaped by the question of succession long before the leader dies. Xi Jinping is 72 years old and the Chinese Communist Party has started to consider what comes next. Those conversations are shaping the political reality of the country.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Brown University professor Tyler Jost comes on the show to explain China is navigating what life may look like after Xi.

• How succession shapes politics in an authoritarian system
• How does China’s government actually work?
• The path to the Chinese presidency
• As always, it’s all about who you know
• Princelings
• Xi’s path to power
• Corruption as influence
• When the eye of the leader lands upon you
• “Cyberpunk hellscape”
• Some parting notes on American Maoism

After Xi—The Succession Question Obscuring China’s Future—and Unsettling Its Present

Bureaucracies at War

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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, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Edward Charles Cardon and former House Armed Services Committee staffer Joshua Stiefel make the case for spinning off the Cyber Force into an independent branch. Both are part of a new commission at the Center for Strategic and International Studies — partnered with Jason’s new bosses at Foundation for Defense of Democracies — with the goal of preparing for a new branch that both feel is inevitable.

It’s a wild and wandering conversation that touches on Neuromancer, AI, and fighting a cyber war against the Islamic State.

• “A Cyber Force is inevitable”
• How cyber works now
• From Army Air Service to Air Force to Space Force
• Volt Typhoon as warning
• It’s hard to recruit hackers
• The Goldwater-Nichols Act mentioned, drink
• Basic training for hackers?
• A retired Lt. General at Defcon
• The weird nebulous thinking of AI and cyber
• The Army has soldiers, the Space Force has Guardians, what about Cyber Force?
• Neuromancers? Hackers?
• “The leaders of this domain have to understand the people they’re talking to.”
• Change is only possible in the aftermath of something cataclysmic
• “AI is gonna put the offense on steroids”
• Glowing Symphony
• Islamic State as the model conflict

CSIS Launches Commission on Cyber Force Generation in Partnership With Cyber Solarium

United States Cyber Force: A Defense Imperative

Volt Typhoon

Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986

The Rise of ‘Vibe Hacking’ Is the Next AI Nightmare

Russia Is Suspected to Be Behind Breach of Federal Court Filing System

Operation Glowing Symphony

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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 moment. Across the U.S. and Canada, avowed fascists have committed murder, attempted to destroy the power grid, and actively recruit online and in person. As these extremists work to hide their identity, journalists and law enforcement use advanced tech to expose them. But at what cost?

On this episode of Angry Planet, Jordan Pearson of the CBC’s visual investigations unit talks us through how he and his co-workers use open source intelligence to expose fascists. We also discuss the ethical struggles that come with using the tools of the surveillance state to track them down.

• Nazis hiding their faces
• Exercise as a path to fascism
• What’s the public concern?
• Hate speech in Canada vs America
• How a journalist decides when to unmask a fascist
• When a journalist uses facial recognition and leaked data in the public interest
• Falling into OSINT
• Using a boxing glove to find a specific gym
• The lightswitch!
• A gazebo with a chipped tooth
• Can AI help journalists? (yes)
• The nightmare of transcription
• “It’s trending towards Nazis”

How a Northern Irish town descended into 3 days of anti-immigrant violence

Man accused of facilitating terrorism used quarry outside Quebec City for target practice

Tracking Canada’s fascist fight clubs

What’s an active club?

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