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What does the 2021 UFO Pentagon Report signal?

The UAP question stopped being a late-night joke the moment the Pentagon put it in writing: these objects show up across multiple sensors, they’re intruding into restricted military airspace, and the stigma around reporting has to go. From there, the real mystery is not just what pilots are seeing, but what it would do to us if the best explanation really is nonhuman technology.

I’m joined by Professor Alexander Wendt, a leading scholar in international relations and the author of *The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty*.

If you’re curious about UFOs, UAP, Pentagon disclosures, national security, and what “not being alone” could mean for politics and everyday life, you’ll want to hear this one. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves a good mystery, and leave us a review so more listeners can find the show. What do you think UAP are, and what would responsible disclosure look like?

Have you had a UFO/UAP experience? Would love to hear about it. Contact me at bookclues.com

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Pyongyang wasn’t always a synonym for missiles and mass parades. Long before the Kim dynasty, it was called the Jerusalem of the East, packed with churches, schools, hospitals, and missionary energy that helped make Korea one of the most Christian places in the world. That single fact flips the usual “North Korea history” narrative on its head, and it’s where our conversation with Wall Street Journal journalist Jonathan Cheng begins.

Jonathan joins us to unpack his book The Korean Messiah: Kim Il-sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality Cult, tracing how Protestant Christianity spreads in northwest Korea, how Japanese colonial rule turns the church into a shelter for national identity, and how shattered political hopes push some Koreans toward Marxism-Leninism. We also dig into Kim Il-sung’s origin story as Kim Song-ju, a boy steeped in the Bible, church music, and Sunday school, and why that background matters when he later builds a regime that functions less like a normal state and more like a political religion.

We talk about what a cult of personality looks like when it becomes daily ritual: portraits in every home, badges worn over the heart, bowing at statues, weekly sessions that resemble confession, and information control that keeps alternative realities out. Jonathan also shares what he saw on visits to North Korea, plus the strange late-life moments when Kim Il-sung invites Billy Graham and opens tightly managed churches that offer a narrow “crack of light” without real religious freedom.

The Free Press Book Club thefp.com/forum/book-club

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The Mississippi looks familiar on a map, but it gets weird fast when you stop treating it like a single line and start treating it like a living system. I’m joined by writer and nature critic Boyce Upholt boyceupholt, author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, to ask a deceptively simple question: where does the Mississippi actually begin? The answer opens into “thinking like a watershed” and realizing that a million-plus square miles of rainfall, tributaries, and human choices all belong to the same river story.

If you enjoy natural history, American history, climate risk, and big landscape stories, subscribe, share this conversation, and leave a review so more listeners can find it.

Find Boyce Upholt's beautiful magazine Southlands

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Europe looks peaceful right up until you inventory what’s actually ready to fight. After spending months in Europe, Professor Andrew Michta joins us to lay out a sober strategic picture: a continent still disarmed, a defense industrial base that will take years to rebuild, and a NATO alliance split by radically different threat perceptions from the Baltic Sea to the Sahel.

We get specific about what modern war is teaching in Ukraine. Drones are changing everything, but Andrew explains why tanks and armor still matter because wars are ultimately decided by mobility and control of terrain. The real breakthrough, he argues, is not just more unmanned systems, but restoring maneuver through electronic warfare and spectrum dominance so soldiers can move without being hunted on a transparent battlefield. We also unpack the hard math behind “arrow vs arrow” economics and what that means for sustainable deterrence.

From there, we zoom out to NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative and the urgent need for allies to take ownership with concrete regional planning, exercises, and capabilities. Andrew connects that to a bigger US problem: a crisis of simultaneity across Europe, the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Korea, at a time when force structure and supply chains are stretched thin. We close with a plainspoken answer to the question many Americans ask: why should anyone in a town far from Europe care about Poland, Finland, or the Baltics? Because Europe and Eurasia shape US prosperity, shipping lanes, and homeland security, and because strong alliances are how democracies avoid fighting alone.

If this conversation sharpens your thinking, subscribe, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

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Looking for a big timely summer read? Dad book extraordinaire! This is it.

From LaSalle to Thomas Jefferson, the story of how our country was made in the grand sweep of time.

A true American tale as bold as the people who lived the story. Native Americans, Immigrants and enlsaved people. Lives coming together to establish a nation.

Four cents an acre. The greatest real estate deal in history. A clean swap that doubled the United States overnight. Those lines are catchy, and they’re also wildly incomplete. We sit down with historian Alexander Mikaberidze, author of The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, to rebuild the story from the ground up and follow the long chain of events that made 1803 possible.

We start where most retellings don’t: the Seven Years’ War (the French and Indian War) and the imperial scramble it triggered across North America. From LaSalle’s sweeping 1682 claim over everything west of the Mississippi River to the hard reality that Indigenous nations already held sovereignty, Louisiana begins as a gigantic, poorly defined idea. That ambiguity fuels decades of rivalry among France, Spain, and Britain and turns places like Natchez and New Orleans into high-stakes borderlands where diplomacy, trade, and military power collide.

If you like early American history, Napoleonic history, constitutional debates, and the real origins of US continental expansion, hit play, then subscribe, share this with a fellow history reader, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

Find Professor Alexander Mikaberidze https://www.amikaberidze.com/

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What is conservatism? How can conservative principals replace MAGA and populism in the Republican Party

Connect with Our Republican Legacy ourrepublicanlegacy.com

The Republican Party is headed for a reckoning, and the real battle is not going to be fought on cable news. It is going to be fought in precinct meetings, county conventions, state parties, and the delegate math that decides who gets to call themselves “conservative” in 2028.

We dig into the mission of Our Republican Legacy and why it is organizing inside the GOP rather than building a third party or another think tank. You will hear the five principles they want to unify around: peace through strength, free enterprise, fiscal responsibility, national unity, and the Constitution and the rule of law. We also talk NATO and alliances, tariffs and free trade, and how rapid tech change and AI pressure-test both free enterprise and civil liberties.

Politically homeless? but still care about constitutional government, this conversation gives you a concrete path to engage before the 2028 presidential cycle accelerates. Subscribe for more idea-driven conversations, share this with a friend who argues in good faith, and leave a review with the principle you think the country can’t afford to lose.

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Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World, Dan Werb

published by crown books of penguinrandomhouse.com

Smart nature writing, urban planning ideas, and clear-eyed conversations about conservation and public health

Nature is moving into the city, and it is not waiting for our permission. I sit down with award-winning writer and epidemiologist Dan Werb to talk about Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World, a book that reframes urban life as something far more alive than we usually notice. Once you learn the word synanthropy, you start seeing it everywhere: wild species living “together with humans,” adapting to our buildings, our routines, and our blind spots.

Why are cities are no longer “biological deserts,” and why urban is ecology forcing a correction in how we think about biodiversity and conservation?. Dan shares stories that make the science feel personal, from bats thriving in the built environment to the startling discovery that giant Pacific octopus can be more common near the most industrial parts of Seattle’s waters. That leads to a bigger realization: the reach of urban development does not stop at the shoreline. Our roads, rail, and waste reshape land and water, and that reshaping creates winners, losers, and unexpected new neighbors.

Because Dan is also an infectious disease researcher, we also talk openly about zoonotic disease spillover, outbreaks, and what pandemic surveillance can realistically do to reduce risk without turning wildlife into a scapegoat. We keep coming back to practical coexistence: why garbage is often the real “wildlife management” issue, how simple infrastructure changes reduce conflict with rats, raccoons, baboons, bears, and coyotes, and why fortress conservation alone cannot solve human-wildlife tension in a crowded world.

If you enjoy , subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review. What wild animal have you noticed in your own neighborhood lately?

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