The Changing Threat

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Caitlin Esch: How does it feel to be the one being interviewed?

Kai Ryssdal: It’s weird.

Hayley Hershman: Are you nervous?

Kai Ryssdal: Not yet.

This season of How We Survive is going to be a little different.

All right, we rolling?

Hayley Hershman: Do you want to give us a self ID first?

Kai Ryssdal: Sure. My name is Kai Ryssdal, and I’m the host and senior editor of Marketplace.

That’s producers Hayley Hershman and Caitlin Esch turning the tables on me.

Hayley Hershman: And before that?

Kai Ryssdal: How far back are we going?

Caitlin Esch: To the ’80s?

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, my God, so, to the ’80s.

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If you listen to Marketplace, or if you follow me on social media, you know a little something about me. I live in LA. I’ve got four kids. I’m a beer guy, hazy IPAs only, thank you very much. And if you really tuned in, you might have heard me mention that I’m a veteran. I spent eight years in the Navy flying and then on staff duty at the Pentagon. I went to officer candidate school right after college.

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So graduation was June-ish of ’85. Two weeks later, I threw everything I owned in the trunk of my car, and I drove from Atlanta down to Pensacola, Florida, and I did 14 weeks of boot camp.

Hayley Hershman: Do you have any first day memories?

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, yeah. You know, there’s spit and polish everywhere, right? I mean, it’s ship shape and all that jazz. You walk up, you open these doors, and you are immediately greeted by the officer candidates who are in their last week of training, but they start yelling and screaming at you about assuming the position of attention, and you get assigned to a room, Spartan military accommodation, obviously — single bed, single closet — and you’re getting to know people. And it comes time to turn out the lights. And then the next morning, at five o’clock, is when you meet your drill instructor. And the way I met Gunnery Sergeant Holtry of the United States Marine Corps was that at five o’clock in the morning, he grabbed the trash can, and these hallways are linoleum tile and really echoey. He grabs a trash can and he throws it down the hallway. And you scramble out of bed, and you go out the door, and you line up at the position of attention, and you start doing whatever Gunnery Sergeant Holtry of the United States Marine Corps tells you to do, literally, for the next 14 weeks.

Hayley Hershman: There’s a rumor about you that you’ve eaten a snake.

Kai Ryssdal: Have I eaten a snake? One of the things you do in flight school, actually, is you go through survival training, two different courses of survival training. One is land based, literally survival training. And it was to teach you how to, you know, trap fish. And they teach how to make a gill net from the threads of the parachute cord and all of that. And, and if you get lucky, you catch a snake. And the guy I was with, we woke up on day two or three of this, of living out in the woods in like flight suits and boots, and that was about it. We had a, we had a lean-to thing. And he woke up one day and he said, I want a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast. I want a fucking Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast right fucking now. We did not get a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast, but he did catch a snake a couple of days in, and we killed it and we stripped it and we ate it. And, I mean, if you’re hungry, you’ll eat anything, right? It, you know, it was okay and we were pretty hungry.

Caitlin Esch: Wow, sounds like a really intense, like summer camp.

Kai Ryssdal: It was, it was super intense. And it was also terrible. It was terrible, right? I mean, you know, it’s like, I’m not a camping guy, but it’s like camping gone horribly, horribly, horribly, wrong. Anyway, so that’s one kind of survival, and the other kind of survival is hostile survival, where they take you up to when I was doing it, it was Naval Air Station, Brunswick, Maine, and they put you through survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training, and they throw you out in the woods. They eventually catch you, and then they put you in a mock prison camp for three-ish, four-ish days. It was, it was wild. It was wild. You learn a lot about yourself under stress.

Hayley Hershman: What did you learn about yourself?

Kai Ryssdal: I don’t like to be hit. I am compliant to a point and, and in a way, I was a little bit too trusting.

Hayley Hershman: Reflecting on those moments, what do you make of that training and, and all those —

Kai Ryssdal: So look, I think, and again, I think you see this in me to this day, right? Discipline, willpower, grind it out, keep your head down and do your job.

Hayley Hershman: Is there any of that that you wish you could unlearn?

Kai Ryssdal: No. No, not a thing. Not a thing, right? I mean, it’s, this is gonna sound dopey, and I keep saying this, it is what made me what I am today, right? Of all the formative experiences in my life, right? Being a father, being a husband, having this job. That job is what made me.

Caitlin Esch: What was the political vibe at the time? What did you think that you would be fighting or protecting?

Kai Ryssdal: So remember, this was ’85, ’86, the Evil Empire, right? Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and it was the Soviet Union. It literally was the Evil Empire and the Cold War and Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev and all of that, and that’s what we were training for. And my first deployments were to the North Atlantic, intercepting Russian bombers coming around the northern tip of Norway. And they would fly down those sea lanes and fly down to the east coast of the United States, nuclear armed bombers, and just orbit.

Hayley Hershman: At what point, if at all, did you hear about climate change?

Kai Ryssdal: Not once, not ever. Not a single time. It just wasn’t something that trickled down to the troops.

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When I was coming up in the military, the threat was pretty straight ahead. It was the Cold War and the Soviet Union. Today, it’s harder to define. The threat is a shape shifter. It’s not easily seen from the battlefield. We do face traditional adversaries, absolutely, Russia, China, and others. Climate change, though, doesn’t have a flag or a face. It doesn’t care who you are, Russian, Chinese or American.

Senate Committee on the Budget (2024): Climate change threatens our military’s infrastructure.

ABC News (2024): The massive wave slamming a U.S. military base home to some of the Army’s most sophisticated space tracking equipment.

Senate Committee on the Budget (2024): What is more of a threat, climate change or our national debt?

Senate Committee on the Budget (2024): The climate has always changed, always will. We’ll have to adapt.

Senate Committee on the Budget (2024): Good luck finding a charging station in the middle of some foreign battlefield.

Kai Ryssdal: Welcome to How We Survive. This season, how the institution that shaped me is going to shape our climate future. You might not know that for decades now, the Pentagon has been funding research into global warming. As far back as the 1950s, the Office of Naval Research was paying for studies that documented rising levels of carbon dioxide and linking that with rising temperatures. And yet, the American military belches out more greenhouse gasses right now than any other institution in the world. So the Department of Defense is partly responsible for the climate crisis. All those planes and all those bases use tens of millions of barrels of fossil fuels a year. And here’s the thing, the military is also on the front lines, so to speak, of having to deal with the fallout. Climate change is a threat to national security, and that’s not just me saying that. It comes straight from the White House and the Secretary of Defense. So what’s the Pentagon gonna do about it? This is episode one, The Changing Threat.

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All right, it’s four o’clock in the morning, and I am taking, it’s an ingestible core temperature sensor. Now I’m gonna have some coffee.

Ingestible core temperature sensor. It’s just what it sounds like — a giant pill with a thermometer inside.

This things been in me for like, an hour and a little bit, and I gotta tell you, it feels like it’s stuck right here, like halfway down my esophagus.

And then I jumped in the car and headed down to San Diego, where that giant pill was my key into this place.

Eric Welsh: We are going inside to the Warfighter Performance Lab here.

Kai Ryssdal: Pay no attention to the guy with the microphone.

Captain Eric Welsh is the commanding officer of the Naval Health Research Center.

Eric Welsh: This is where we do physiological and cognitive studies on our warfighters to optimize their performance and increase their resilience.

Kai Ryssdal: In other words, warfighters, mostly young marines, come into the lab and do both physical and mental stress tests under what might fairly be called extreme conditions. Doug Jones is the head of the thermal physiology team.

Doug Jones: This environmental chamber goes from -25 degrees Fahrenheit all the way up to 135 so we can really run the whole gamut here, but we’re gonna drop it from 110 degrees Fahrenheit down to 34 degrees Fahrenheit. We’re also gonna get you wet and cold too, so you’ll be going through a lot of different things today.

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, my God. All right, okay. All right.

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I’m here because I want to understand what soldiers are facing today, living and working and fighting in temperatures and environments that are only getting tougher, hotter, colder, with less access to water, and how research like this could help them.

Doug Jones: Right here, go ahead and take a seat.

Kai Ryssdal: This is just a remarkable feeling. The whole guinea pig lab rat thing.

Doug takes me into a bare metal box of a room for the first test — extreme heat.

Oh, yeah, it’s hot. Oh.

It’s 110 degrees thanks to a bank of red warming lamps up in the ceiling.

This is like being in one of those food stations where they put the freaking chickens in the grocery store. There’s these IR lamps, right? Isn’t that what’s going on?

I walk on a treadmill in the heat for a solid 30 minutes. Got a little sweaty.

Caitlin Esch: How are you doing?

Kai Ryssdal: Well, you know, if I was loving life, that would be a lie.

Research team member: Do you prefer heat or cold?

Kai Ryssdal: Oh, heat by a mile, so cold is gonna be brutal.

And then I do a cognitive test to see how the heat affects my ability to function. It’s a simple exercise. All I have to do is differentiate between O’s and Q’s on a keyboard.

God, that was a Q. Computer’s wrong.

Doug Jones: Nice work.

Kai Ryssdal: Sorry about, sorry about the sweat on your computer.

Doug Jones: That is all good.

Kai Ryssdal: To be clear, this is way harder than it sounds, and the whole while, there’s a room full of scientists tracking my data. That temperature pill I swallowed is like a tiny computer in my gut. It can record and store 34 hours worth of my core temperature data. They’ve also got me wearing a shirt laced with plastic fibers that Doug and his team made that sends data via radio frequencies.

Doug Jones: So there’s no battery. And that’s the beautiful thing too is that cold temperatures and batteries don’t mix. So having this, you can turn them on and get temperature readings right away.

Kai Ryssdal: Right. And you just lace it through a garment and boom, you know, you’re all set.

So just to say this again, we’re doing this so that you can figure out how the troops function in extreme environments, cold, hot, wet, take your pick.

Doug Jones: Exactly, yeah, and that’s an important aspect of, you know, understanding all of this. And we know that heat stress, cold stress, it undermines warfighter performance, and therefore their readiness. So we do the research to figure out, you know, what can we do about that? How can we prevent it? If it’s occurring, how can we mitigate it? How can we prepare our warfighters for those types of environments?

Kai Ryssdal: Right, and weather extremes, obviously, are your enemy.

Doug and his team also study extreme cold in a hypothermia lab up in the mountains near Lake Tahoe.

Doug Jones: And about 30% of the class gets clinically hypothermic. But that’s the intent, right? There’s medical personnel, yeah, all that stuff. And so one of the things that we’ve been doing up there is looking at what’s the best way to rewarm them after they’ve gone through this, right? So we’ve looked at different rewarming strategies, different exercise intensities, going into a sleeping bag, giving warm fluids with calories and that type of stuff. It’s really interesting to see the psychological readiness of these individuals. So you’ll see some people that don’t lose really any heat, but psychologically they’re, for lack of a better word, freaking out in the cold water.

Kai Ryssdal: Time, I suppose, to test how much I freak out in the cold. Doug drops the room down toward 34 degrees.

Doug Jones: So we are about eight degrees away from getting you in there.

Kai Ryssdal: You guys put snowfall on the screen in there. Cut it out. Jesus, you’re killing me.

One whole wall of this room is a video screen about which more in a minute.

Doug Jones: You’re gonna be in here for 10 minutes.

Kai Ryssdal: Now, though, 10 minutes of standing in a 34-degree room in my skivvies, and then 10 minutes in a tub of 50-degree water.

Doug Jones: Whenever you’re ready.

Kai Ryssdal: I’ll tell you what. The more you talk, the less I’m doing this.

Doug Jones: All right. Let’s go.

Kai Ryssdal: Right away —

Oh, shit.

It’s not great.

Ooh. I can feel my muscles tensing, right. My thigh muscles are very tense right now, mostly because I’m jamming them together. Oh, fuck, I’m reasonably sure I hate you. If you were real producers, you’d be in here.

Caitlin, I am sorry. That was uncalled for. I don’t know if I was freaking out. Caitlin might disagree, but it was miserable.

Doug Jones: So what’s what’s going on right now is basically your cold temperature receptors are responding.

Kai Ryssdal: Yes, they are! Sorry.

Doug Jones: And so you are feeling intense sensations of cold, probably some pain, I’d imagine. Do you want to know the time or no?

Kai Ryssdal: No, absolutely not.

Doug Jones: So you can think about all the Marines that have gone before you in this.

Kai Ryssdal: Caitlin did take mercy on me at one point, tried to pull me out.

Caitlin Esch: We can call it at any time.

Kai Ryssdal: No, we can’t.

Doug Jones: Two more minutes. Think warm thoughts.

Kai Ryssdal: Holy shit, I don’t understand doing this for 90 minutes. I bet you get deep inside yourself.

Doug Jones: So think about the application of this, right? So, right, you’re in a ­­—

Kai Ryssdal: You’re being very clinical right now, but go ahead.

Doug Jones: Arctic cold weather environment. You break through the ice, but you still have to operate. So that’s gonna be the next phase of this is, you have to get out of here, and then we’re gonna have you shoot.

Kai Ryssdal: After what were honestly 10 of the longest minutes of my life —

Doug Jones: You’re going to get up and you’re going to step on this towel.

Kai Ryssdal: Even standing was difficult.

Doug Jones: Let me know if you need a hand.

Kai Ryssdal: Dripping wet, still in that bare metal room set at 34 degrees, it’s time for the next stress test.

Kai Ryssdal:

Can you hear the gun shaking?

It has been 38 years since I’ve shot a weapon, not since boot camp, but with a laser modified rifle in my hands.

Oh, come on, Kai.

I take aim at a figure that appears in a snowy mountain landscape on that wall sized screen.

Definitely cannot feel my fingers anymore.

There is mercifully, a hot shower waiting for me, although the shaking and the shivering continues for a while as the thermal team and I go over my results.

Doug Jones: All right, so we’re gonna walk you through your your data that you produce here in both the hot and cold environments.

Kai Ryssdal: I didn’t do great in the heat related cognitive and reaction tests. Worse than the average Marine, I should confess. In the cold though, the shooting, I actually did pretty well. The stress they said might have made me more accurate. It’s not really about my results, though. This day felt almost like an up-to-date version of that hostile survival training I went through almost 40 years ago, a tiny glimpse of what soldiers and Marines are going to have to be training for in the future, because climate change is changing where and how the military operates. Hotter hots, colder colds in unexpected parts of the world.

Eric Welsh: We’re right now in San Diego, which has one of the best climates in the world.

Kai Ryssdal: Here’s Captain Eric Welsh one more time.

Eric Welsh: But we don’t always have the luxury of operating in those environments. And you can be on a ship and be too cold. You can be on a ship and be too hot. So the climate of the world today, the global climate, offers many, many different conditions that really put people at stress.

Kai Ryssdal: In other words, the changes are already happening.

Eric Welsh: Humans are not meant to work in really cold conditions or hot conditions, and you know that’s true right now. We operate from the Middle East to the Arctic and all over the world.

Kai Ryssdal: Conditions and consequences that are only going to be getting more extreme.

Sherri Goodman: Climate change amplifies all the other instabilities we face, from great power competition to terrorism, the fight with Russia, the potential fight with China, the difficulties we’re having in the Middle East now.

Kai Ryssdal: Climate change as a threat multiplier after the break.

BREAK

Kai Ryssdal: I’ve got a picture in my office someplace of how straightforward, relatively speaking here, the national security threat used to be. It’s a black and white shot of a Soviet Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bomber, red star on the tail and all, being escorted by four jets from the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Three F-14 Tomcats, one F-18 Hornet, we launched on 15-minute alert off the boat to make the intercept as the bomber came around the North Cape of Norway down on its way to the east coast of the United States. Mostly it was us letting them know that we knew what they were doing. During my eight years in the Navy, we talked about and trained for the Soviets nonstop. The Evil Empire, Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall, that whole thing. Not one time did I hear the words global warming.

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To a layperson, explain climate change as a national security threat.

Sherri Goodman: Well, we often think of stability as the ideal state. We want stability in our relationships around the world and war is that state of instability, but there are many places along that. So climate change amplifies all the other instabilities we face.

Kai Ryssdal: When you start reporting on climate change and national security, Sherri Goodman is the one person everybody tells you you have to talk to.

Sherri Goodman: So for example, in the Arctic, we have a whole new ocean that’s opened in our lifetimes because of retreating sea ice and thawing permafrost and rising temperatures. And now we have a space where Russia, China and the U.S. can be competing for resources. And then you have parts of the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia becoming plagued by drought that puts people into conflict because there’s not enough water, there’s not enough food, so you have rampant food and water insecurity made worse by the risks of climate change.

Kai Ryssdal: Sherri’s been in the national security establishment for a long time. She got her start back in the 1980s overseeing nuclear weapons plants and environmental cleanup as the Cold War wound down.

Sherri Goodman: President Reagan’s Secretary of Energy had said, We’re awash in plutonium. And then I say my career went from weapons to waste. Within really less than a year, we went from having these operating plants, one of which I had visited in Colorado and was told I shouldn’t go in because I was a woman of childbearing age and it was unsafe. And there were women who worked in that plant at the time in the glove box operation, and within a few months, the FBI had shuttered that facility.

Kai Ryssdal: In the Clinton administration, she was the first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for environmental security.

Tell me what that first day was like.

Sherri Goodman: Well, it was rather daunting and somewhat overwhelming to walk up the steps of the Pentagon and think that I was going to be working here. I was only 34 at the time, and I was greeted by the pictures of all the male leaders, the Secretary of Defense and all the military leaders, the chairman, as I walked in.

Kai Ryssdal: While she was there, she worked on the DOD’s first ever climate change strategy. And when she left the Pentagon in the early 2000s, she kept working on these kind of national security issues.

Tell me, would you, when you realized climate change was a national security threat?

Sherri Goodman: It was in 2006 when I convened the first group of U.S. generals and admirals to study the national security implications of climate change, and we met with the nation’s leading climate scientists, and our eyes were opened to the impacts this would have on both America’s security and on global security.

Kai Ryssdal: And they realized that they needed a way to talk about climate change and national security that would make people get it. Branding, kinda.

Sherri Goodman: We were sitting around a conference room in Alexandria, Virginia. We were trying to put the finishing touches on our report and how to communicate it. And when I said threat multiplier, everyone said, Oh yeah, that’s it. That’s it. And that stuck. In military parlance, we often use this term force multiplier, which often refers to a technology that makes our weapon systems have more impact, more lethality, like stealth did in the ’90s. And so I was looking for a framing that would convey and connect climate with the security impact, and that’s how threat multiplier evolved.

Kai Ryssdal: A lot’s changed in the 15 or so years since Sherri Goodman came up with threat multiplier. Every branch of the military has a climate action strategy today and plans for how to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The Pentagon and the White House know that climate change is a national security priority. Sherri wrote a whole book about it, called Threat Multiplier, Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security. It came out in August.

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You write in this book that the military is one of the world’s strongest forces in the fight against climate change. That’s a big swing. Back it up.

Sherri Goodman: Well in every dimension in which the military operates, it’s now integrating understanding of climate to become more resilient and more operationally effective. So start with military bases, many of them are significantly affected by sea level rise along the east coast, from Norfolk down all the way to the Gulf Coast in the West, from wildfires and in the Arctic, from permafrost thaw and collapse. So in every place the military is taking action today to become more resilient. For example, Tyndall Air Force Base in the panhandle of Florida, which lost almost all of its facilities in hurricane Michael in 2018 is now becoming a climate resilient base of the future, to the tune of $5 billion of taxpayer investment.

Kai Ryssdal: Not only were buildings destroyed, virtually leveled, the Air Force says, but some F-22 fighters as well, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, were also damaged. Tyndall has become the example of military base climate vulnerability. And it’s not just bases that are adapting to a stormier, hotter, less predictable future. It’s also main battle tanks, jets, logistics, all the basics of national defense.

Sherri Goodman: Think of the Abrams battle tank that is a big gas guzzler. So we learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan that trucking fuel to the front was putting our soldiers driving those trucks, most of which were for fuel and water at risk from improvised explosive device attacks, IED attacks. So today, we’re looking at alternatives. How can we better power our vehicles at the front? Can we use better batteries? Can we use solar, wind where it’s available? Can we use other forms of fuel? And so looking at electrifying our systems where it’s appropriate.

Kai Ryssdal: All right, so here’s the put up or shut up question, can we do it and can we do it in time?

Sherri Goodman: I don’t think anyone knows the answer to that question, Kai. If, we all have our crystal balls, you know, it is true that the rate of climate change often seems to be advancing much faster than our ability as societies to prepare for it, because temperatures have just been rising and sea levels have been rising beyond what was even predicted. But I also am hopeful in the sense that we can’t underestimate our ability to use innovation and to use, you know, our our smarts and our own people and the power of our communities to make change. And sometimes that change is building for a long time, and then you hit, you know, a tipping point.

Kai Ryssdal: Thing is, not everybody agrees.

What do you do about the people in the military, and I’m not talking about the chairman and the Joint Chiefs, but the people at the operational level that we’ve been talking to and reporting out this series, who say, look, climate change is real. And I get it, but my job is, to paraphrase, bombs on time on target, and I got to finish my mission, and climate change has to take second place. What do you say to that?

Sherri Goodman: Well, we always have to perform our mission, but climate change is part of the of the mission today. It’s part of being able to get those bombs on target in the right way, because if you can’t fly your plane anymore because it’s become too hot and you need more fuel to have it take off in the hotter temperatures, then you’re not going to be able to get your munition on target. So we have to understand how climate is affecting us, and we need to become, we need to adapt to it. It’s not a tradeoff.

Kai Ryssdal: Climate change is going to affect how we train and how we fight. A warming planet will destabilize whole regions and force millions of people to migrate. It’ll open up new parts of the globe to competition and confrontation, and it’s going to complicate alliances. On this season of How We Survive, we’re going to places where climate change is hitting the military the hardest, a missile test site in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a key piece of national security infrastructure is threatened by rising seas.

Voice 1: Everybody was trying to get people’s attention, like, hey, here comes the wave, and then the first one kind of slapped against the door. That’s where you hear me saying, Hold the door.

Kai Ryssdal: Literally trying to hold back the ocean.

Voice 1: Well, you know, it’s just a piece of it. I didn’t think it was gonna be too big.

Kai Ryssdal: We’ll game out a possible future where shit gets real.

Voice 2: Climate change actually changes us. That will make us hot, tired, and grumpy, and that may not make us as good a neighbor as we would want to be.

Kai Ryssdal: And we’ll ask people up the national security food chain how things are really going.

Is climate change affecting the Marine Corps’ ability to provide for the common defense?

Voice 3: I believe that it is, and I think that this the small impacts are collectively felt.

Kai Ryssdal: Believe me when I tell you those small impacts, they’re gonna add up.

And speaking of that, coming up, next time…

Voice 4: Are you cold?

Kai Ryssdal: Yeah, and the mic is dying too. All right, let’s get back in the car. This is crazy. This is actually where it’s happening. This is like, climate change, up close and personal.

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Up close, personal and really, really cold. Climate change, national security, and more competition and conflict in the Arctic.

Thanks for listening, and as always, if you like what you hear, please do rate and review. I’m Kai Ryssdal. Sophia Paliza-Carre produced this episode. She had help from producers Hayley Hershman and Katie Reuther. Caitlin Esch is our supervising senior producer. Editing by Nancy Farghalli. Scoring and sound design by Chris Julin. Mixing by Brian Allison. Our field engineer in the Warfighter lab was Charlton Thorpe. Gary O’Keefe helped us out in Washington, D.C. Bridget Bodnar is the Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is the Vice President and General Manager of Marketplace. Our theme music is by Wonderly.