THE WEEKLY REVEAL
Saturday, July 12, 2025
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Is AI Pushing Us Closer to Nuclear Disaster?
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Hi, I’m Kara McGuirk-Allison, editor with More To The Story.
I don’t remember exactly where I first heard about the Doomsday Clock. But I’m pretty sure it was either from Doctor Who or Watchmen. The clock has been a symbolic plot device foreshadowing our own destruction of humankind since its creation in 1947. But the clock, and everything it stands for, is very real.
More recently, maybe you saw the movie Oppenheimer. Well, creating the atomic bomb scared those scientists right out of their lab coats. So the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock and set it to 7 minutes before midnight. And to give you some context, earlier this year, its experts moved the clock’s hands to 89 seconds before midnight, the closest they’ve ever been to pointing at imminent destruction.
Our guest on this week’s More To The Story is Daniel Holz: professor of physics, researcher of black holes, and chair of the decision-making group that turns those metaphoric hands of doom. And while threats like nuclear weapons, AI, disinformation, and climate change all affected the decision to shift the clock’s hands, Daniel says the clock is actually a symbol of hope that citizens of the world will acknowledge our circumstances and do the right things to turn those hands back—together.
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Find this episode wherever you listen to Reveal, and don’t forget to subscribe:
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Credit: Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
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Bruce Praet is a well-known name in law enforcement, especially in California. He co-founded a company called Lexipol that contracts with more than 95 percent of police departments in the state and offers its clients trainings and ready-made policies.
In one of Praet’s online training webinars, he offers a piece of advice that policing experts have called inhumane. It’s aimed at protecting officers and their departments from lawsuits.
After police kill someone, they are supposed to notify the family. Instead of delivering the news of the death immediately, Praet advises officers to first ask about the person who was killed to get as much unflattering information as possible.
Reporter Brian Howey started looking into this advice when he was with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. This week on Reveal, in an update of an episode that first aired in 2023, he delves into his finding that officers have been using this tactic across California. Howey also finds that the information families disclosed before they knew their relative was killed later affected their lawsuits against law enforcement departments.
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🎧 Other places to listen: Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Attacks on Public Media...and How You Can Help
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We need your help to fight back against attacks on public radio.
A bill in the Senate right now calls for taking back $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a crucial funder of many of the public radio stations that air our weekly show. You can help us fight back in a few ways:
1. Donate to Reveal today.
2. Call your elected officials and share why public broadcasting is important to you.
3. Donate to your local public radio station.
We can’t do this work without people like you supporting us. Thank you!
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