Should we worry about the end of the world?

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday story from Up First. The other day, I met a guy with a very unusual list. I've been keeping a notepad, a tally of ways the world could end. It has a 141 entries so far. Should we be worried? This is Ben Bradford, host of a new podcast called Are We Doomed. Ben's show explores the biggest risks society, the planet, and our species are facing. 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. And it helps listeners figure out which future dunes are actually worth worrying about and how we might survive whatever is coming our way. The postapocalypse, it turns out, is almost certainly a group project. Today on the Sunday story, is the world ending, or does it just feel that way? Stay with us. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Vanguard. Every day, shareholders meet to discuss important matters about the companies you invest in. Now you can make your voice heard too. Vanguard investor choice makes it easy to set your proxy voting preference for your eligible Vanguard index funds. Visit vanguard.com/investorchoice to learn more. Vanguard investors own shares of their index funds, and those funds own shares of the companies they invest in. Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. This message comes from Dell Technologies. Get long lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by series three Intel Core. Now from $699 with exclusive student pricing from $599. Visit dell.com/deals. This message comes from Mint Mobile. If you're tired of spending hundreds on big wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com/switch. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. We're back with the Sunday story. Today, I'm talking to Ben Bradford, host of the new podcast from the NPR network called Are We Doomed? Ben, welcome to the Sunday story. Great to be here. So why did you start making that list of doomsday scenarios? And, I mean, how how did you even begin to answer that question, like, are we doomed? Yeah. I had been a business reporter and 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 kinda 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 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 …