Podcast

In the Room with Peter Bergen

The January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol was the culmination of political trends in the United States that have festered for decades. And it may be a dress rehearsal for what comes next.

Listen on Apple Podcasts | Transcript

Episode 40: Hunting the Bidens
Feb 6 2024
How did Hunter Biden’s laptop, a digital chronicle of misadventures by President Joe Biden’s troubled son, become a political flashpoint and help spark potential impeachment proceedings? What personal and business secrets buried in the old computer are being weaponized against the Biden family during the 2024 campaign? Are any of them cause for concern about our government’s integrity or our national security? And how does the Hunter Biden saga stack up against corruption allegations against other White House families, including the Trumps?

51 mins

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 30 2024
Length: 43 mins
Podcast

Summary

The job comes with all sorts of risks and responsibilities plus exposure to a lot of violence and trauma — whether that’s out in a war zone or in the office, where analysts may work on cases involving horrific human rights abuses. All of that can take its toll. CIA Director William Burns has acknowledged the agency needs to do more to “take care” of its officers. You’ll hear how stressful and crushing intelligence can be from former intelligence officers who did it and from the CIA’s top psychologist and the CIA’s new wellbeing chief, about what can be done about it.

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 23 2024
Length: 40 mins
Podcast

Sean Kirkpatrick is one of the best guys on earth to answer that question. He set up the Pentagon’s new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. But he rarely gives interviews. Until now. You’ll hear what his investigators found out about sightings going back to Roswell, and what he thinks is the biggest UFO conspiracy of all.

Go to audible.com/news where you’ll find Peter Bergen’s recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript

Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 16 2024

Summary
Until recently, the eight nations whose borders creep into the icy Arctic haven’t had much of a reason to fight over this forbidding landscape. But as climate change melts the ice and opens up access to all kinds of precious resources, the United States is preparing for the possibility of conflict. So how will the U.S. defend its interests in a place where most of us have never set foot?

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript

Episode 36: Yes, the United States has a Space Force. Stop Laughing.
By: Peter L. Bergen
Narrated by: Peter L. Bergen
Jan 9 2024
Length: 38 mins
Podcast
5.0 out of 5 stars5.0 (2 ratings)

Meet the newest branch of the American military and learn how life as you know it could stop if it fails to do its job.

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript

In the summer of 2022, the United States military ran a major training exercise to prepare to respond if its ally Taiwan gets invaded by China. Central to the strategy: the tiny American island of Guam, the westernmost part of the United States, where the U.S. has more than doubled defense spending in recent years. But not everyone on Guam is convinced that all this additional military buildup, meant to deter China, will ultimately make them safer. As one legislator put it, it’s like the island has “a bullseye” on it. So how did this tropical island become central to U.S. strategy in the Pacific?

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Transcript

Revisiting history is never simple. Especially the history of the United States, which is often painful, and, invariably political. At dinner tables, school board meetings, and political protests, Americans disagree not only about how our past should be interpreted, but what actually happened in the first place.

From the myth about George Washington’s teeth to the true cause of the Civil War, three historians bring us into the impassioned debates about America’s origins and ask, does the fight over America’s past threaten our security today?

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Transcript

Hollywood may have portrayed him as a nerd, but Mike Vickers was the superstar architect of America’s covert war in the 1980s that drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. And this alum of the Green Berets and the CIA has some ideas about how to do the same thing in Ukraine today.

Listen on Audible | Apple Podcasts | Transcript

Some countries have fallen into a toxic cycle of tit-for-tat prosecutions, where every ex-president has to expect they’ll eventually end up behind bars. Could the U.S. be next? Two constitutional experts warn that some of the criminal cases against Donald Trump could cause cycles of retribution that poison our politics. And why our saving grace just might be — get this — government bureaucracy.

Listen on Audible | Transcript