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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