"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 2

Episode 2: What Keeps General David Petraeus Up at Night?

May 8, 2023

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 2

Episode 2: What Keeps General David Petraeus Up at Night?

The celebrated American general takes you on a world tour of hotspots, sizes up the threats posed by China and Russia, assesses the risk of a military coup in the U.S., discusses a future where AI-powered machines are doing most of the war-fighting, and explains why he thinks the most apt metaphor for the challenges facing America in the current global landscape is…a very tricky circus act.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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David Petraeus: I think this is the period of the greatest number and greatest complexity of national security threats that we have faced in the, I'd argue, the post-World War II era, certainly in the post-Cold War era.

That's General David Petraeus, the leading American general of our time. He was the commander of the two wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

The U.S. Army was in Petraeus’ blood from an early age. In fact, his rise to general seems almost pre-ordained: he grew up close to West Point, he attended the Military Academy there, and then he married Holly Knowlton, the daughter of the school’s commanding officer, in the West Point chapel.

Petraeus has been called “the most competitive man on the planet.” Even as a senior officer, he often challenged younger soldiers to push-up contests — and he won. And when he was accidentally shot in the chest during a training exercise in 1991, a few days after his multi-hour surgery, Petraeus got out of his bed, did fifty push-ups, and demanded that he be let out of the hospital, which he was allowed to do.

At Princeton, he powered through his PhD in record time. He wrote his dissertation on the lessons of the Vietnam War for the U.S. military.

When Petraeus describes the security threats facing the United States and the rest of the world, it’s less professorial and more … Ringling Brothers.

David Petraeus: The guy in the circus, who puts a plate on a stick, gets it spinning, then goes over, gets another one going, then comes back to the first one, keeps it going, gets another one up, pretty soon you have a tent full of plates that are spinning and that's what the U.S. uniquely has to do more than all of the other countries put together. Though we have lots of other allies and partners who will help us keep some of these different plates spinning. The most important plate in that tent, bigger than all the others put together, is the plate that represents the U.S. and Western relationship with China. But there are lots of other challenges. The Russia plate has gotten more menacing, larger, if you will. There's still North Korea, there's Iran, there are new cyber threats of a variety of different types. There are still Islamist extremists. And one of the lessons of the post-9/11 period is that you have to keep an eye and pressure on them. There are threats as a result of climate change, there's pandemics. That landscape is enormously challenging especially for the U.S. We are uniquely the country that has far and away the greatest responsibility. And if we won't lead, it’s not necessarily going to get done.

I got to know General Petraeus back in 2008, when he’d recently assumed command of the Iraq War.

And then two years later, I met him again in Afghanistan, when the Taliban were staging a comeback.

Since leaving the military and the government Petraeus has worked as a partner at the global investment giant KKR.

He’s very well positioned to give you a tour of the world's hotspots and also, the most critical issues affecting your security.

We met in Washington, D.C. to discuss the state of the world in 2023 and beyond. I'm Peter Bergen, and welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC]

When it comes to global security, there's the view from the ground. And then the view from 30,000 feet. Petraeus understands both perspectives: the realities of combat, and also the ways in which events in one country can ripple across the globe, nudging over dominoes that will result in a collapse on another continent.

He’s not, for example, a fan of the peace deal that the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. A deal that the Biden administration followed through on a year later. You know what the result was. The Taliban took over Afghanistan, installing their theocratic government and providing shelter to leaders of al-Qaeda.

David Petraeus: I think that ranks with the worst diplomatic agreements in our history.

Peter Bergen: Why?

David Petraeus: Essentially we gave the Taliban what they wanted, uh, we're leaving. The only thing we got in return is a promise that they wouldn't attack us, sort of on the way out.

Peter Bergen: Do you think it's an accident that Putin moved a Russian army to the Ukrainian border three months after the final U.S. withdrawal?

David Petraeus: Well, I think what led him to do that was long in the making. You have read the speeches. We've read all of his communications over the years about how Ukraine doesn't have a right to exist. It should be part of mother Russia, as it was in his interpretation of history.

And, it's a twisted interpretation to be sure. But I also do think that what happens in one part of the world reverberates around other parts of the world. I remember talking to the prime minister of a very important Southeast Asian partner. And he said, “You know General, that stuff just doesn't echo throughout the Middle East. It has implications out here as well.” I believe President Xi of China highlighted that in one of his speeches and, and noted that this showed that the U.S. was not a dependable, reliable partner and ally.

And also the way it was conducted showed that the U.S. was a great power in decline. So yes, I think this has implications and I think I should note that there are much bigger reverberations from the way that we have, I think very impressively, led the world in responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, leading not just in terms of providing extraordinary quantity of arms, ammunition, materiel and economic assistance to Ukraine, but leading the world as well, pulling the world together because you can't do this if you're not all together when it comes to imposition of financial, economic and personal sanctions and export controls on Russia.

Peter Bergen: Is Putin making NATO great again?

David Petraeus: Very much so. And it's hugely ironic because he set out to make Russia great again. And what he really has done is make NATO great again, including, in a sense, pushing two historically neutral countries on his border, most significantly Finland, but also Sweden, into NATO membership. Which eventually, I think, Hungary and Turkey will agree to. It's also produced a degree of NATO unity that I certainly hadn't seen since the end of the Cold War.

Beyond that, I think another massive irony is that Putin, of course, quite publicly felt that Gorbachev had done enormous damage, to bring about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and so forth. And he didn't even go to his funeral, as you may recall. An enormous slight, when Gorbachev died this past year. I think it's arguable that he is doing more damage to Russia than Gorbachev did to the Soviet Union because this is by no means done.

And it won't be done of course, until he ultimately is led to recognize that this is unsustainable for him. Keep in mind that they've already lost somewhere from six to eight times what they lost in Afghanistan in nearly 10 years, they lost in the first, say, 10 months of the war in Ukraine.

And over time, this will not be sustainable for Russia. And the more we can do to hasten the moment when he arrives at that realization, the better. Because only then can you actually engage in the kind of negotiations that can bring about the kind of resolution that both countries need.

Peter Bergen: Were you surprised by how badly things went for Russia?

David Petraeus: Not entirely. Keep in mind that we all know, have known for years, that Russia has this very top-down, command and control system. It has no professional non-commissioned officer corps the way most Western forces do, which generally is seen as the backbone of the force.

Where I was surprised with the sheer ineptitude just in the campaign design, the campaign emphasis, and then the inability to even support their forces adequately. We did know that their logistics hinge on use of rail lines, but once they left the rail line, they turned out to be even less capable than many of us anticipated.

One small example, but it's one of many, is that the Russians radios, their system broadcasts very widely. It's very easy to identify in the clear, not encrypted. So any Ukrainian citizen with a police scanner can find it, record it. This is why the Russians started stealing cell phones off the street just to try to communicate with one another. And it's also why the generals kept getting killed. They literally couldn’t find out what was going on on the front lines. They would go to the front, they’d get out of their armored vehicle and very well, Western-trained snipers picked them off.

What I was stunned by was also the fact that despite all these months of maneuvers, I mean, I would've died to have had months of training, before the invasion of Iraq. Now we'd had months of training, but not in Kuwait sitting there waiting, you know, you can imagine the training you could conduct.

And I thought this is presumably what their leaders are doing. Given that they were out there for so many months with an opportunity to train, but clearly didn't. I mean, I think they were just out there camping or something like this.

[MUSIC TRANSITION]

David Petraeus: Another huge lesson to state the obvious is leadership matters. And I've built a whole website, I was a fellow at Harvard for six years, non-resident. We built a website on strategic leadership, and it identifies the four tasks of a strategic leader: get the big ideas right, communicate them effectively, oversee their implementation, and determine how to refine them and do it again and again and again. And of course, President Zelensky has done this magnificently, brilliantly.

[MUSIC STING]

David Petraeus: The very first big idea is “I don't need a ride. I need ammunition.” He's staying and his family's staying. And, and all men are gonna stay, and we're all going to, we're gonna mobilize the entire country — something Russia hasn't remotely done — and this is our War of Independence. And he communicates, of course, let's remember, he is an actor, after all.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF ZELENSKY DOING STAND UP COMEDY]

David Petraeus: I mean, he was a comedian, yes, or a satirist or whatever who played the president, which is really what got him elected.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF ZELENSKY DOING STAND UP COMEDY]

David Petraeus: He has done that magnificently as well. The very nuanced speeches, including to a joint session of the U.S. Congress.

ARCHIVAL Volodymyr Zelensky: And next year will be a turning point. I know it. The point when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom.

David Petraeus: The example he's provided, the energy, the determination, the will, then getting into how do you motivate and inspire and visits to the front. Putin's holding court in the Kremlin, and he's out in the front lines in Bakhmut. This is really quite extraordinary. And then constantly tweaking the big ideas and refining them and doing it again, and again and again. And contrast that with Putin, who obviously completely miscalculated. The big idea’s completely flawed, totally underestimated his opponent, completely overestimated the capabilities of Russian forces.

Completely underestimated the reaction of the rest of the world. Again, perhaps, influenced by what had happened in Afghanistan and perceptions of what that reflected when it came to the U.S. in particular. And then the oversight has been very, very flawed, as well. It's really quite haphazard and then there certainly doesn't seem to be any learning process here because they keep doubling down on stupid as one of my old comrades famously used to say.

[MUSIC TRANSITION]

Peter Bergen: Putin has sort of flirted with the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Do you think that's plausible? What, if anything, should the U.S. do to deter that and what are tactical nuclear weapons exactly?

David Petraeus: Well, tactical nuclear weapons are nuclear devices that have a small yield. Now, small is relative. So in other words, perhaps the yield or even smaller, of what we dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which did of course extraordinary damage, and much smaller than that as well.

They have still battlefield nuclear weapons. But just think of it as the equivalent of very substantial quantities of conventional explosives in, in their effects. And it's certainly conceivable. But I think unlikely, in fact, I tend to think it's a sign of his desperation that he has repeatedly rattled the nuclear saber as he has, just trying to grasp for anything that might dissuade the west, the U.S. in particular, from continuing to support Ukraine. And perhaps intimidating Ukraine, to the point that they might be willing to surrender territory that Russia already occupies or something along those lines.

The practicalities of using it though, keep in mind that they achieve a tactical effect. In other words, a local effect. Yes, it can be devastating. And by the way, their own forces are in the areas where they most want to achieve these effects. But I don't know what this achieves on the plus side for him on the battlefield.

And I do know what it would lead to when it comes to the reaction from the west and the outside world, which would be: intensify the financial, economic, personal sanctions and export controls. Keep in mind there's almost 1,200 Western companies that have either left Russia, some never to come back, or reduced their operations there. This is setting Russia back a decade or decades in terms of its economic development.

Peter Bergen: You mentioned Xi, what are the lessons learned for him when it comes to Taiwan where they would have to go over a hundred miles of water? It's very different than just crossing a land border, presumably.

David Petraeus: The foreign policy, national security community, comes at this in two directions. One that says this is a very cautionary set of lessons for China. This has gone terribly. It shows, if you haven't really done this for decades — real combined arms operations, real major campaign, real expeditionary logistics. It's pretty hard to pull it all together, especially as you noted, a hundred miles of open water and if a country sees this as existential, the citizens truly commit, this can be really painful. And a host of other lessons like that — the surprising, again, global unity against Russia.

But there's another viewpoint which is, hey, we're not Russia. We're vastly more capable. We're much more disciplined. Don't have remotely the corruption, the ineptitude. They can't do to us what they do to Russia.

Peter Bergen: What does Xi want, do you think?

David Petraeus: The legacy achievement that has not yet been achieved: reunification with Taiwan. Now there are grander ambitions as great powers have — influence in the region, in the world, uh, make the world safe for their kind of government, safe for autocracy, if you will. The, not necessarily near term, but mid or longer term objective clearly has to do with Taiwan.

Peter Bergen: You've said the U.S.-China relationship is the most important one in the world, and U.S. policy makers need to kind of keep this in mind as they make their decisions. And then, the Trump and Biden administrations seem to have a pretty similar view about China as a major rival and their national security strategies both say much the same. And the whole idea that China would liberalize as its economy got bigger, that turned out to be false. So if we're gonna have a mutually beneficial relationship as, as you say we should,

David Petraeus: Well, I'd, I'd, I'd like to see —

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

David Petraeus: My hope is that the relationship could be as mutually beneficial as is absolutely possible, recognizing that this is a severe competition, but nonetheless hoping that there could be a variety of areas in which there can be benefits to both sides. Can't we all just get along and enjoy a much more beneficial relationship than has emerged because of the onset of this severe competition?

Peter Bergen: But if Xi were to try and invade Taiwan, I mean all that cooperation would evaporate overnight. And would it trigger something akin to World War III?

David Petraeus: Well, World War III implies a degree of escalation. But again what we want to do is make sure there are no questions about our capabilities and our will — the two elements of deterrence — to deter, to dissuade, President Xi from even thinking about that much less, uh, actually deciding to, to do it. And that's the key.

Peter Bergen: On Iran, we've seen these protests. Is the regime really threatened?

David Petraeus: I think the regime is really threatened, but that doesn't imply a sense that it can be overthrown. In Iran, the regime is so large, you don't just have those right around the Supreme Leader. You have the Revolutionary Guards Corps, in addition to, of course the regular Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Uh, you have the Revolutionary Guards Quds force. And then you have the Basij militia, essentially pipe swingers, street thugs who if necessary will confront and at some point shoot and kill fellow citizens.

David Petraeus: So the problem is vastly more challenging and you have a situation where, in a way, the strength of the demonstrators is their weakness.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF IRANIAN PROTESTS, CHANTS]

David Petraeus: They have no real central organization. There is no particular leader. It's not leader-less, but it is, it's this huge group of deeply angry and dissatisfied citizens, who can assemble flash mobs, but don't have a central ideology or leadership or any real opposition structure, because if they do, it'll be taken down. And they're unarmed and unorganized, against a regime that is highly organized, highly armed, and willing to kill.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF IRANIAN PROTESTS, CHANTS FADES]

David Petraeus: I don't see how this culminates in an overthrow of the regime, at this point. I would tend to think that the regime is going to make its way through this over time, rather than be overthrown.

Peter Bergen: Relatedly, in 2018, the United States got out of the nuclear agreement…

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: The Iran deal is defective at its core. I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Peter Bergen: So, (A) was that a mistake? (B), they are now enriching fissile material. Reports they may have enough for a nuclear bomb. Do you see a nuclear arms race in the Middle East? How does this end?

David Petraeus: Well, let me start at the beginning, because the agreement had some significant pluses and some significant minuses, and, and so I was never… massively embraced it. But again, there were some very significant benefits. And by and large, the inspection measures were quite intrusive. They weren't completely satisfactory. There were a couple of locations that we wanted more access to that there may have been untoward stuff going on and so forth. But at the end of the day, we had quite a good understanding of what it was that was going on in the various nuclear facilities.

But now that the United States has pulled out of the deal, Petraeus says that Iran is on track to become a nuclear power.

David Petraeus: These aren't trivial. Iran started enriching again, and now they're much, much closer, than they ever have been, to being able with just a bit more enrichment, to go to weapons grade. And this is very, very worrisome.

A world tour of security threats includes those that cannot be contained by any nation's borders. Threats like pandemics and climate change. The COVID pandemic certainly made me rethink the way I conceived of national security, and I wanted to ask General Petraeus what he thought.

David Petraeus: If you think broadly about national security, it is in a sense the security to use the same term or say the defense, not just of your territorial integrity, your national sovereignty, your economy, physical security of your citizens and your institutions. It's the wellbeing of one's citizens in general. And obviously if so many have died from a particular threat, whatever it is, I think that that has to be addressed in a sense when it comes to the security of your country and your population.

Peter Bergen: Do you think we're prepared for the next pandemic?

David Petraeus: Not as well as we should be. I think we learned a lot of hard lessons out of this one. I'm not sure that all elements of society have embraced all of those. Sadly there's been a degree of division about certain components of how you have to answer this. They've been politicized, I think, sadly, and I think that's problematic, but I think we will ensure that the stocks are better.

I think that there will be more central management of what is done in response to a pandemic. I think there's a much more anticipatory, stance, about this looking for the indicators trying to identify them and trying to address them, early and often, as opposed to being slow in that response.

Peter Bergen: You’ve said that income inequality could be considered a national security concern. Why do you think that?

David Petraeus: It's not just the wellbeing of the citizens, although that is obviously very important. But if there is a sense, among a sufficient element of the population that they are being left behind, that's problematic. We were actually closing that gap in recent years and we'll see how it works out as we make our way through what is undoubtedly going to be a difficult year economically for the U.S. and many other Western countries.

Peter Bergen: The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th involved dozens of veterans.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF JANUARY SIXTH CHAOS]

ARCHIVAL Unidentified Voice: Multiple Capitol injuries.

Peter Bergen: Were you surprised by that?

David Petraeus: We have had elements in the military in the past that have been drawn to what I think can accurately be described as extreme causes. This is a profession where you pull the trigger, and a tiny number of those who are drawn to the service of their country are, are attracted by that component of it. So I wasn't stunned that there were some individuals that were party to this.

Although clearly some of them, especially after the fact, acknowledged that they'd just been drawn into these social media silos, echo chambers, that just transformed them, from the individual that they were. And somehow this resonated with them and a number of them, of course, because of individual challenges in their lives: lack of fulfilling jobs, maybe lack of any job, perception of a lack of opportunities, personal relationships breaking down, and then a sense ‘The country's going to the dogs' and all of a sudden it just ends up in, in something that I think many of them now look back on disbelief and asking themselves, what was I thinking?

Peter Bergen: Could there be a military coup in the United States?

David Petraeus: No, no, never.

Peter Bergen: Because?

David Petraeus: Well, I think it's just ingrained in the military, to try to be as non-political as is absolutely possible, recognizing those at the very top in particular going to be drawn into, and they have to try very hard to resist that.

Peter Bergen: During the Trump administration, without getting into names of particular generals, a number of generals either sort of embraced Trump or publicly criticized him.

David Petraeus: Not in uniform.

Peter Bergen: Retired generals.

David Petraeus: Right. Retired generals. And, and again, I think this is unhelpful to the country for a variety of reasons. One is that it starts to erode the popular perception that this particular profession, the military, is non-political. If you get sucked into the orbit of one or the other parties too heavily, the objectivity one might assume, is no longer present. And therefore just the regard for that profession erodes, which is very unhelpful.

Peter Bergen: What are the lessons for the future of warfare that we're seeing in the Ukraine war?

David Petraeus: Just to begin with, the fact that the unthinkable is not unthinkable. The idea that a major country, a great power would invade a neighbor, really without provocation. n the first invasion of a sovereign country in Europe since the end of World War II, that in itself is very, very significant.

Beyond that, there's a host of lessons of which we just see glimpses actually in Ukraine because this is a war largely fought by Cold War equipment. It's the old tanks, it's the old artillery. It's largely those tactics. There's nothing all that sophisticated about what Russia has done. But there are glimpses. First and foremost actually of all things is that the context in which this is being conducted has smartphones and social media.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF EXPLOSIONS, SOUNDS OF CONFLICT IN UKRAINE]

David Petraeus: So the level of transparency, the level of information from social media is staggering.

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF A SOLDIER SPEAKING AMID AN ATTACK]

David Petraeus: It's just really incredible. I think you can feel this war, at least I have a sense that I can from afar in a way that I could not have prior to this.

ARCHIVAL American Fighter in Ukraine: Very difficult to do this while in the middle of a fight…

[ARCHIVAL AUDIO OF EXPLOSIONS, SOUNDS OF CONFLICT IN UKRAINE FADES]

David Petraeus: You know, the drones are pretty modest in their capabilities, yet the Ukrainians are using them brilliantly to find the enemy and to identify where the logistical bases are, the fuel depots, the ammo storage sites, the headquarters, the troop barracks.

These do show what's potential, but think about what could be seen, let’s say in an Indo-Pacific scenario. Where you have all of the long range drones, you have all of the space systems, you have all kinds of cyber systems, and the range and the precision and the speed when you get into hypersonics, and then increasingly unmanned and perhaps even algorithmically guided, including swarms of these that are not just these relatively modest capability, Iranian-provided drones that Russia's throwing at Ukraine, but very sophisticated, perhaps even stealth systems that are enabled by machine learning and AI. That's the future of war.

Petraeus also sees a future of warfare in which humans are increasingly absent and the machines take over.

Peter Bergen: You know, the U.S. Air Force has always said they want to keep a human in the loop for these kinds of drones and, and you were mentioning the swarms of maybe stealth drones, which are using machine learning. At what point does the human really no longer become part of that?

David Petraeus: At the point where it is machine on machine and the slowest machine loses. And if you have a human in the loop at the final moment, your machine's gonna lose because it's going to be slower than the machine that is enabled by AI. And so what you have to do is you say that you have the human in the loop becomes not the human who's gonna pull the trigger, but the human who designs the algorithm that sets the conditions for enabling the machine to take action on its own when you do actually give it the authority to do that.

Peter Bergen: It's kind of a potentially dystopian future with the swarms of stealthy drones that are guided by artificial intelligence, and the Chinese are certainly already in this space, is my understanding.

David Petraeus: Well we're in this space as well.

Peter Bergen: Yeah.

David Petraeus: And yes, it is dystopian. It is, it's scary. And it should be. And we need to make it as scary as is humanly possible so that no one thinks they could roll the iron dice and that it would all go smoothly and well. Of course that's the essence of deterrence. At the end of the day, there are two elements to deterrence. It's the potential adversary’s view of your capabilities on the one hand and your will to employ them on the other. And we have to ensure that our capabilities are so substantial, so formidable, yes, so scary, that no one dreams of crossing the threshold into actual conflict, especially between great powers. And also ensuring that there's no question about the will to employ those capabilities.

Peter Bergen: One final question. We're calling the show In The Room. And I can't think of anybody who's been in the room more than you, whether it's in the Situation Room or elsewhere. How do you prepare yourself for being in the room when these big decisions are being contemplated?

David Petraeus: I think that you have to, throughout your life, without sounding overly pompous or something, that there was this great destiny or something that I was trying to fulfill, but you just have to have a sense there could be opportunities and you need to be prepared to make the most of them to discharge your responsibilities if these opportunities come along.

There's this great adage that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” And I think you really truly have to prepare and I mean really commit to that. This is where a gentleman's B or too cool for school— that doesn't cut it.

You've gotta compete to be the very best you can be, including the best team player you can be, and to develop the intellectual capital, experience, expertise, skills, knowledge, attributes, et cetera, that you will call on if that moment arrives. And now there's no guarantee that these moments arrive. But I was perhaps more, if you look at it that way, fortunate or privileged or what have you, literally than anyone else, in recent decades at least, to command two wars, at the height of each of them. I literally did spend a lifetime trying to develop the knowledge and expertise and experience and all the rest of that, that if it happened, at least I could give it the best shot that I possibly could.

Peter Bergen: Well, thank you, sir.

David Petraeus: My privilege. Thank you. Always great to do something with you.

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If you would like to learn some more about General Petraeus, the book The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Petraeus is also the co-author of the forthcoming book, Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.

AMERICAN WAR GENERALS is a documentary on National Geographic, produced by my wife Tresha Mabile and myself, that traces the careers of the generals who commanded the post-9/11 wars.

In the Room with Peter Bergen is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and Fresh Produce Media.

This episode was produced by Laura Tillman, with help from Luke Cregan.

It was sound designed by Claire Mullen.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

And our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Holly Demuth, and Sandy Melara.

Theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce are Colin Moore and Jason Ross

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec

Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer