Ben Bradford

speaker

162 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Ben Bradford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Up First from NPR · Should we worry about the end of the world? · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

I've been keeping a notepad, a tally of ways the world could end.

It has 141 entries so far.

Should we be worried?

There are so many things that could take humanity out.

Nuclear war, climate change, pandemics, maybe AI.

And the less immediately worrisome, your super volcanoes, aliens, or something called gray goo.

The post-apocalypse, it turns out, is almost certainly a group project.

Great to be here.

Yeah.

I had been a business reporter, an energy environment reporter, a politics reporter.

And I think that those things together start making you wonder if you're doomed.

And then over the last several years, I was covering political history and division and polarization and what shaped where we are.

And I think it's kind of natural to ask, well, what's

coming next.

And I do think that there's this real feeling of doom in our culture right now.

This sense of bleakness.

And I wanted to know, like, what's real and what's not?

And also, why are we so obsessed with it in our pop culture, with our zombie movies and our alien movies and all of those things?

And so that's what we do on our show.

And that's actually been really fun to look at those things and also to ask questions like, well...

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