Explore every episode of the podcast Are We Doomed?

Maddeningly, even some researchers building artificial intelligence see it as a potential existential threat on par with nuclear war. Ben Bradford follows three simple steps that could lead an AI to turn on humanity and attempt to wipe us out. From autonomous agents with misaligned goals to hacked infrastructure, bioweapons, and a real story of AI blackmail, a nerdy apocalypse thought experiment starts to feel a little too plausible. So, then we try to dismantle our rogue creation.

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Humanity has repeatedly brought itself to the brink of nuclear war. Which raises a question: if everyone who can launch a nuke knows that could end the world, why does nuclear war still feel plausible? Ben explores how it could really happen, what close calls of the past tell us, and the bizarre logic of deterrence. And he lands, again and again, on one word: oopsie.

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Grin at the apocalypse and find out with this curious, irreverent weekly podcast exploring the biggest dangers to our society and our species. From nuclear war and societal collapse to rogue AI and the moon drifting off … which “dooms” are real? What can we do? What does history tell us? And do you need to learn wilderness survival? 

Each week, acclaimed journalist Ben Bradford investigates the threats that haunt humanity with curiosity and only a little panic behind his eyes. The result: Gripping true stories, thoughtful guests, darkly funny insights, and an unexpected amount of hope. We’ve survived every "end of the world" so far, and let’s figure out why. So we can do it again.

A supervolcano burbles under Yellowstone National Park. Enormous. Real. According to the internet’s most excitable corners, just itching to turn America into charcoal any minute now. 

Ben Bradford investigates what supervolcanoes can actually do, why Yellowstone is almost certainly not about to blow its top, and how scientists tell when a volcano is really waking up. Panic over a national park may be distracting us from another, sneakier, more critical volcanic threat.

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Mosquitoes are little jerks. They suck your blood to make more mosquitoes, spread deadly diseases like malaria and dengue, and have killed more humans than any other creature in the history of Earth. But now, we can fight back.

Gene-editing technology (CRISPR, gene drives) could temporarily wipe out disease-carrying mosquitoes in whole regions — potentially saving millions of lives. A miracle, but with an unsettling question of its own: Who gets to decide when humanity rewrites nature?

Also: radiation-blasted flies, Australian rabbit smoothies, and … Mosquito Jurassic Park.

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People have been predicting the end of the world forever. They’ve always been wrong. Maybe we’re wrong today, too.

So, we’re looking back at three past dooms predicted in the 20th century, none of which arrived as advertised. Why not? What can we learn? Does it mean that the current biggest end-of-the-world fears may be overblown, misunderstood, or — with effort — preventable? Along the way: failed utopias, dystopias, and the animal Ben fears most: the mini-hippo.

Guest: Matt Novak, journalist at Gizmodo and long-time author of the Paleofuture blog.

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The air raid sirens scream (actually, they don’t work anymore). An emergency alert goes out, because … nuclear missiles are in-bound.

It’s happening! How do we survive (non-Hollywood edition)? From diving into crumbling fallout shelters to emerging into a world where nuclear winter is descending, Ben explores what armageddon would actually look like, what the movies get wrong, and why — for most of us — it’s not a flash of light, but a cramped slog.

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Listen to our episode "How to Start a Nuclear War."

Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

The internet is how you get your news, your paycheck, your groceries, your banking, and    sometimes your drinking water. Humanity has quietly handed over the keys to civilization to a network most of us don't understand and couldn't rebuild. So what happens if it goes down — and not for a day or two? 

Ben Bradford tries to kill the internet, hunting for weak points in undersea cables, cyberattacks, cloud computing, overlooked open-source plumbing, and fragile politics. It’s harder than it looks, but maybe not impossible. Should we be worried?

Guests:

Bruce Schneier, cryptographer, cybersecurity lecturer, and author of Click Here to Kill Everybody.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik.

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Historically, societies fall. Civilizations collapse. But is that what’s happening now in the United States? With the help of historians, a former CIA-funded researcher on political instability, and one grumbling dad, Ben Bradford looks at the warning signs that can precede collapse — from polarization and political division to outside shocks and cascading crises. How much of that is visible in America right now? What would collapse actually look like in modern life? And if the alarms are blinking, is there still time to turn back?

Guests:

Ian Morris, historian, archaeologist, Stanford University professor, author: Why the West Rules—For Now.

Monty Marshall,  former senior consultant for the U.S. Political Instability Task Force.

Annalee Newitz, science journalist, author: Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.

Ben's Dad.

Ben's Mom.

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Check out Ben’s previous series, Landslide.

Are we living through the end times or the best moment in human history? Novelist and internet veteran Jason Pargin argues you have spent your life inside a “literal reverse apocalypse” — and if you don’t see it, he knows who to blame. Ben Bradford talks with Pargin about doom-scrolling, child mortality, processed donuts, murderous Toyota drivers, and how humanity’s greatest problems may be side effects of its greatest successes. So how do we tell if the world is really ending — or if the internet has trapped us inside a giant doom machine?

Guest:

Jason Pargin, author of I’m Starting to Worry About this Black Box of Doom, TikTok: @jasonkpargin

Thanks to Annie Russell for contributing editing to this episode.

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Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

Earlier episodes mentioned:
Are We Going the Way of the Roman Empire?
Past Dooms That Didn't Arrive

Imagine a friendly assistant that can help you build a bioweapon. Or a chatbot in the nuclear weapons chain, cheerfully hallucinating an attack. AI national security expert Hamza Chaudhry worries this is the biggest threat right now — not “killer robot,” but humans being humans. Because whether AI becomes dangerously smart or confidently dumb, people will find face-palming ways to abuse it. From deranged cultists and rogue states, to stockbrokers and the most evil version of Ben’s little cousin, handing everyone a powerful technology with few guardrails could end badly. Or, is there a path to convince companies to add their own?

Guest: 

Hamza Chaudhry, AI national security expert, Future of Life Institute

This episode was edited by Annie Russell.

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Watch earlier episodes on Youtube! https://www.youtube.com/@arewedoomedpod

Listen to our episode about rogue AI: We Design the AI That Kills Us All
And our episode about nuclear oopsies: How to Start a Nuclear War

The planet is heating up, every plan to stop it has fallen short, and growing group of scientists has started to ask a stranger question: what if we grabbed the thermostat ourselves? Ben Bradford investigates geoengineering — the science of deliberately manipulating Earth’s climate — from space mirrors and ocean fertilizers to fleets of planes mimicking a volcano. Some of it sounds like cartoon villainy. Some of it might actually work. And that raises the thornier question: if humans can cool the planet on purpose, who decides whether we should?

Guests:

Kate Ricke, climate change scientist at UCSD

Alan Robock, atmospheric scientist at Rutgers

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You probably knew an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but it was so much worse than that. Asteroids and other space rocks have been the most destructive forces ever to hit Earth, yielding mass extinctions (and the moon). And yet! Of all the possible dooms this show has explored so far, asteroids may be the one humanity is closest to beating. 

Ben Bradford explores why — and traces how — including the astronomers who first grasped the threat, the questionable Hollywood solutions of Deep Impact and Armageddon, and a zany but very real plan to seek out dangerous space rocks, and punch them.

Guest: Cristina Thomas, professor at Northern Arizona University and leader of the DART Observations Working Group

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What would it take to survive after "the end of the world?" A whole culture of prepping often focuses on a familiar fantasy: grab the gear, flee the city, defend the bunker, survive alone. Anthropologist and survival instructor Chris Begley thinks that’s probably the wrong movie. Ben walks through what history and math show people actually do when civilizations break down — and what they need, from dodging poisonous acorns to forming new communities. Also: luxury bunkers, survival sporks, and the unfortunate role of politics in a world of ruin.

Guest:

Chris Begley, author of The Emergency Playbook: A Bunker-Free Guide to Disaster Preparation.

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Also, see our episode: "How To Survive a Nuclear War"

The moon is drifting away. What does it mean? What do we do? With help from a poet, a space security expert, and the former chief scientist of NASA, Ben Bradford explores what the moon has done for Earth (tides, myths, months, werewolves), and asks the obvious mature follow-up: Should we blow it up? 

From lunar creation stories and moon-stealing dragons to Cold War plans to nuke the moon, humanity has always had strange ideas about our nearest neighbor. But the real problem may not be losing the moon. It may be what nations do now that everyone wants to go back.

Guests:

Jim Green, former NASA chief scientist and founder of Metavisionaries

Chris Cokinos, author of Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow

Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability, at the Secure World Foundation

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If you liked this episode about a giant space rock, check out last week's episode about the battle against giant space rocks: "Asteroids! The Doom We're Best At"

For more than a century, science fiction has imagined cyborgs: humans fused with machines to outrun the limits of the body. They show up in Edgar Allan Poe, in the gleaming menace of Darth Vader, in Halo’s armored supersoldiers, and in the body horror of cyberpunk. So where are they?

Ben Bradford sets out to make a whimsical episode about why the cyborgs never arrived, and instead finds the technology that could build them already underway: military enhancement programs, brain-computer interfaces, AI brain-chip ventures from Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and wearables that can read signals from outside your skull. The question might not be whether cyborgs are coming, but whether we’ll recognize the path before we’re among them.

Guests:

Laura Cabrera, engineering and philosophy professor at Penn State University

Emily Mullin, biotechnology reporter at WIRED

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