Puffins, Zyn, and ‘Polar War’
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. |
| 0:05.2 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. |
| 0:09.0 | Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:13.1 | Hello, I guess I should do a real intro. |
| 0:15.8 | I've gotten so like, this used to be like a big produced show and then I found that the softer opening is usually better and more interesting. |
| 0:24.2 | So do you want to talk about Greenland in the Arctic with me? |
| 0:28.5 | No, I don't. |
| 0:29.7 | I'm so sick of Greenland. |
| 0:30.7 | No, yeah, we could talk about Greenland. |
| 0:33.0 | Sure. |
| 0:33.2 | I've got my pat answers all lined up. |
| 0:36.2 | Well, I mean, that's the, that's unfortunately, uh, as we |
| 0:40.0 | were talking about before we jumped on, you kind of, you get picked to the right topic for the right |
| 0:46.3 | time, right? Like now, now like the general public is interested in this in a way that I don't |
| 0:51.1 | think they were before. Yeah, even though the news cycle has swiftly moved past it, you know, and Greenland has fallen |
| 0:58.4 | to the wayside ever since Mark Root, the Secretary General NATO, said that they came to some |
| 1:04.4 | sort of framework agreement, but I'm convinced it'll come back into the, into the news cycle. |
| 1:10.0 | And if you were tracking a chronology of my media appearances as a book came out, you'll see I've become increasingly bombastic and angry when speaking about Greenland. So I'll try my best to temper the emotions today. |
| 1:24.0 | Why like why? Why increasingly bombastic, angry? By the way, that you are Kenneth Rosen, and we were talking about your book, Polar War. |
| 1:31.3 | Yeah. |
| 1:31.9 | Why increasingly bombastic and angry about Greenwood, though, just because it's, like, so ridiculous, |
... |
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