Episodes
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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.
Thatâs 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 BurnoutHow Fury inspired a veteran to start a podcastPsychic soldiers in FuryThe difference between the branchesThe changing relationship between the military and the American civilian populationCalifornians in TexasThe life of a military bratFrontier re-enactorsHardtackThe anti-authoritarian streak in veteransWhat happens when the Army makes you to learn a languageLife as a personal trainer in the ArmySubmarinersWhere the name comes fromListen to the Tracer Burnout podcast here
https://tracerburnout.com/
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This week on the show weâre 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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Episodes manquant?
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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 heâs 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 tensionsStats out of dead bodiesAssassination: Obama StyleThe terroristâs dilemmaMatthew immediately figures out how wrong he isThe case for Aaron BurrThe Bonus ArmyTaking a shot at the vice presidentAnalyzing 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. Itâs a deep dive into the weird post-nuclear futures weâve built in pop culture.
How Warcraft orcs got ICBMsMatthew confuses Camus and SartreFood poisoning as practice for the radical acceptance of death and sufferingIs there any hope in The Road?Alex is hung up on the cannibalsThe video game aesthetics of the post-nuclear worldDebunking gasoline futuresWorking for the authoritarian government to get the petroleum industry back on its feetThe Civil Defense truncheonDeep thoughts on the Fallout franchiseThe American libertarian lone survivorThis 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. âThe peace activists are war activists,â Karp said. âWe are the peace activists.â
Palantir, Karpâs company, is promising a bold new way to wage war using AI, one itâs testing out in Ukraine. Karpâs comments hit on an old promise. For generations, salesmen have tried to convince everyone they have a new way to conduct war thatâs cleaner and better for everyone. That pitch is at the hard of dozens of new defense tech startups.
On todayâs show we get into the weeds of the Pentagonâs 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. Wonât Transform War. Itâll Only Make Venture Capitalists Richer.
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Ronald Reagan carried a gun in his briefcase when he was president. According to Edmund Morrisâ pseudo-historical memoir of Reagan, Dutch, Reagan got the gun in Iowa. âIt is a fact ⊠that RR did acquire a 1934 Walther PPK .380 pocket-sized police pistol early in his stay in Des Moines and kept it lovingly the rest of his life,â Morris wrote. âHe even toted it in his briefcase as president.â
Reagan was obsessed with the idea that he was a target of assassination and had been since his days as the president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s.
Thatâs just one of the bits of ephemera from this episode of Angry Planet where weâre joined by historian Rick Perlstein who is on the ground at the Republican National Convention. On Saturday, a gunman took a shot at former President Donald Trump. He missed, clipping his ear.
What can the lives of past assassins, both failed and successful tell us about Thomas Matthew Crooks? What is the duty of the historian at this moment? Is political violence on the rise in America or is this all business as usual?
Join us as we ask these questions and attempt to find some answers.
You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle
Gunmanâs Phone Had Details About Both Trump and Biden, F.B.I. Officials Say
A Blind Spot and a Lost Trail: How the Gunman Got So Close to Trump
âStay Strapped or Get Clappedâ
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On July 1, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that American presidents have immunity for âofficial actsâ committed while in office. In the dissent opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised an interesting hypothetical.
âWhen he uses his official powers in any way, under the majorityâs reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navyâs Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune.â
Itâs the kind of hypothetical situation that people would roll their eyes at during a dinner party. Now itâs on everyoneâs minds and in an official Supreme Court ruling. The president can order it, but that doesnât mean the operators would carry it out. It also doesnât mean state and local authorities would look the other way.
On this episode of Angry Planet, Army lieutenant colonel and judge advocate Dan Maurer comes on the program to take the SEAL Team 6 hypothetical seriously. Maurer is an expert military legal scholar who was willing to answer our questions, no matter how absurd they might be.
Want to know what happens if the President hires Pinkertons? Interested in a definition of an âofficial actâ or want an explanation of what the long term consequences of this might be? Looking for a bit of hope that cuts through the hysteria. We can help with that. We also ask a very silly question about Delta Force.
Maurer also wrote about the topic in Lawfare.
Can the Military Disobey Orders in the SEAL Team 6 Hypothetical?
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Influence campaigns, both subtle and unsubtle, are as old as statecraft. Agencies like the CIA, KGB, and Israelâs Mossad have all attempted to force friends and rivals to change. It doesnât work as often as youâd think. Subversion campaigns are often so secretive that their effectiveness is hard to quantify. But Lennart Maschmeyer decided to try.
Maschmeyer is on this episode of Angry Planet to tell us all about the limits of cyber war and subversion operations. Itâs the subject of his new book Subversion: From Covert Operations to Cyber Conflict. Maschmeyer is a senior researcher at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich and his book is a deep look at what works and what doesnât when countries try to influence each other. It throws cold water on Russiaâs much-hyped âHybrid Warâ and the idea of cyber Pearl Harbor.
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We used to build things in America, things like fallout shelters. Thereâs a luxury hotel on the border between Virginia and West Virginia thatâs been a favorite retreat of the D.C. elite for generations. After the fall of the atom bombs in World War II, Washington commissioned an addition to the hotel: a secret fallout shelter that would house Congress in the event of a nuclear war.
Matt Farwell of The Hunt for Tom Clancy is here to tell that story and others from the golden age of Atomic America. There was a time when Las Vegas casinos sold tickets to watch nuclear tests. It was an era when the concrete flowed like water and America built bunkers under a hotel and a military base in the heart of a mountain.
We might even talk about Nazis and aliens. Itâs a wild one. Join us.
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Back in 2020, Daniel Perry was driving for Uber to make ends meet. He ran a red light and dove his car into a crowd at a Black Lives Matter protest. Garret Foster was there to protect the crowd and heâd brought an AK-47 along to do it. Foster, an Air Force veteran, approached Perryâs car. Perry, an Army sergeant, pulled out a pistol and killed Foster from the car and drove away.
After a trial and a deep dive into Perryâs online history, a jury of his peers found him guilty of murder. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned him.
Why? Perry had become a symbol that transcended justice.
Christopher Hooks is here to walk us through the particulars of the case. Hooks is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. Heâs been writing about the Perry case and its consequences for Texas Monthly. Hooks tells us exactly what happened in 2020, when Perry committed the murder, and walks us through the colorful cast of Texas politicians who may soon take the national stage.
Why Did Greg Abbott Pardon a Racist Murderer?
Ken Paxton Takes Manhattan
What Azerbaijan Wants From Texas Politicians
D.A. Seeks to Overturn Texas Governorâs Pardon of Man Who Killed Protester
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No one is really sure how many nuclear weapons are out there. Every number you see is a best guess. Russia and the U.S. have the most, sitting at around 5,000 each. France has just under 200, China has about 500 (and is probably building more), and North Korea has around 50. The worldâs nuclear powers love to keep the details of these weapons secret, but not too secret. Itâs a complex game of signaling and secrets, one that can be difficult to parse from the outside.
Matt Korda of the Federation of American Scientists is here today to walk us through the worldâs nuclear powers and the wannabes. Over at the FAS, Korda spends his days looking at high resolution satellite photos of Chinese deserts, pouring over footage of Russian military drills, and reading every line of Pentagon budgets. All that information is mixed together to produce the Nuclear Notebook: a constantly updated inventory of world ending weapons.
The Nuclear Notebook
Nuclear Threats Are Looming, And Nobody Knows How Many Nukes Are Out There
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American politics was bizarre in 2016. Alt-right figures dominated many news cycles and shared pictures of cartoon frogs online. A lot of those personalities, like Baked Alaska and Richard Spencer, flamed out and vanished from the scene. But thereâs always money to be made and political power to be gained by playing to peopleâs base fears and a new brand of online far right weirdo has risen to take their places.
On this episode of Angry Planet we check in on the so-called âNew Rightâ with investigative journalist Jason Wilson. Wilson has chronicled far-right movements for years and recently exposed some of their thought leaders in The Guardian. If you want to learn why some people care about the âlonghouseâ or the importance of online anonymity when spreading weird ideas online, then this is the episode for you.
Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing house
Revealed: the extremist Maga lobbying group driving far-right Republican policies
At least 66 members of far-right group in rural Oregon standing for office
Revealed: how a US far-right group is influencing anti-gay policies in Africa
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International criminal organizations are more concerned about message security than the average citizen. The end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp or Signal is great, but drug traffickers are looking for a little extra. Enter services like Anom, EncroChat, Sky, and Phantom Secureâ discrete messaging services that charged big bucks and promised criminals a chat experience free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. But the cops always find a way. And one of those services was actually purpose built by the FBI to act as a spying tool on the worldâs criminals.
In Dark Wire, investigative journalist Joseph Cox tells the story of how the FBI built and maintained a phone service just for criminals. Heâs on Angry Plant today to tell us all about it.
Buy DARK WIRE here.
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A lot goes into keeping a navy afloat. Thereâs ship husbanding, maintenance, and buckets of haze gray. The U.S. used to be good at this, but it hasnât been on an active war-footing for a long time and the manufacturing base that created its massive navy has seen better days. So what happens if thereâs a war and America doesnât have enough welders, let alone drydocks, to build out its fleets?
Gil Barndollar is a senior analyst at Defense Priorities and the co-author of a recent piece in Foreign Policy about Americaâs inability to build new ships. Barndollar sounds the alarm on a number of different issues facing the U.S. military: the recruitment crisis, manufacturing issues, and sailors pushed to the limits of their physical abilities.
We might even talk about arming container ships with missile batteries to augment existing forces.
The U.S. Navy Canât Build Ships
Converting Merchant Ships to Missile Ships for the Win
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The big picture in Europe doesnât look good. Russia is moving to encircle key cities in Ukraine and is shaking its nuclear saber at the West. Ukraineâs nearest neighbors are, understandably, concerned about Moscowâs aggression and militarizing at an alarming rate. This summer, NATO will conduct Operation Steadfast Defender, a military exercise the Pentagon said is the largest since the Cold War. To Moscow, an enormous military exercise on its border could seem a tad aggressive.
Add to this Russiaâs recent nuclear rhetoric and missile exercise and the geopolitical situation is looking a bit tense. On this episode of Angry Planet, Aram Shabanian stops by to talk us through the troubling signs heâs seeing about a brewing conflict between Russia and NATO. Shabanian is the Open-Source Information Gathering Manager at the New Lines Institute. We also get into what happens when you mix Coke and Pepsi, how Reagan navigated a similar situation, and when itâs OK for everyone to stop worrying about the bomb. (Never.)
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Americans love shrimp. They love it so much they donât think too hard about where it comes fromâor the virtual slaves who are farming them. Joshua Farinella doesnât have that luxury.
A few years ago, Farinella took a job working for a shrimp production company in India. The money they were paying would set his family up for a long time to come, but what he saw when he landed in the country made him realize the cash wasnât worth it. He chose to blow the whistle.
On this episode of Angry Planet, Farinella sits down with us to talk about what he saw in the shrimp factory. It all starts one fateful night when he receives a WhatsApp message telling him that one of the plantâs workers was caught in the placeâs water treatment facility. âShe was searching for a way out of there,â the message said. âHer contractor is not allowing her to go home.â
After Farinella decided to blow the whistle, he began to document what he saw at the plant. Video, audio, and documents he secured can be viewed at The Outlaw Ocean Project.
Read The Whistleblower at The Outlaw Ocean Project
Read through the documents.
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In Russia thereâs a revolving door between prisons and the frontlines. What began as a Wanger program is now official: the Kremlin will pardon nearly any crime if the convict agrees to serve on the front lines in Ukraine. After a six month stint at war, murderers and rapists are free to return to the scene of the crime. Some come home to kill again.
On this episode of Angry Planet, New York Times journalist Milana Mazaeva is here to talk about what happens to Russian communities when criminals return to them after going to war. The first half of the conversation covers the articles and details harrowing stories of Russian murderers who became soldiers who became murderers again.
The latter half of the episode is about how hard it is to report from Russia right now, the incredible games of telephone Mazaeva plays to get the stories she does, and whatâs lost when you canât visit the place youâre reporting on.
Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again
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Luke Paxton and Han Lee know a good cause when they see one. When Russia invades Ukraine in 2022, the American vets know what they need to do. Their time in Afghanistan has given them the skills to help fight a war and the moral clarity needed to know when a cause is just.
But are they going to fight in Ukraine for the right reason? Do Ukrainians want them there? And does either matter when bombs are dropping all over the country?
On this episode of Angry Planet, author Matt Gallagher returns to the podcast to talk about his novel Daybreak. Itâs the story of Paxton and Lee as they travel to Ukraine to fight. Itâs a work of fiction that strikes at deeper emotional truths about the conflict. Itâs also pieced together from Gallagherâs own experiences in Ukraine, some of which wouldnât fit neatly into a work of journalistic non-fiction.
What fiction can do that non-fiction canât.Exploring Lvivâs mystical toy barter alley.The contractually required Joan Didion quote.Why Ukrainians are suspicious of Americans who say âI want to help.âThe structure of a Daybreak movie.Recorded 4/23/24Go here to buy Daybreak.
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The war between Israel and Hamas, which began on Oct. 7 when terrorists overran the Gaza frontier and killed more than 1,200 Israelis, is now more than six months old. More than 100 Israeli hostages are still being held in Gaza.
Israel, in return, has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, with two thirds of that number likely to be civilians, including women and children. There are negotiations for a ceasefire going onâat least sporadicallyâbut Dan Perry, former Associated Press bureau chief in the region, says that Hamas isn't playing by the same rules as Israel, or anyone else.
Hamas, according to Perry, welcomes the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Anyone and everyone can be a martyr for Hamas's cause, which is not peace, but a complete destruction of Israel. Whoever must be sacrificed in the process, well, other people's live are a price Hamas is willing to pay.
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A successful TV adaptation of the Fallout video game franchise has everyone excited about the post-apocalypse again so we thought it was a good time to finally do a bonus episode weâve been threatening for a long time.
Cultural critic, journalist, and YouTuber Noah Caldwell-Gervais comes on this episode of Angry Planet to discuss all things Fallout. Itâs a long episode, we dive into a lot of topics including
Jasonâs globe from 1937The peculiar pleasure of vacuum tube technologyCold War memoriesThe anxiety of worrying about dying in a nuclear blastWest Coast vs East Coast Fallout In defense of Fallout 76Power armor and Soviet TanksVault-Tec the ultimate villainFull spoiler warning for all of the Fallout video games and the entire TV show.
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