All Episodes

April 16, 2025 13 mins

The Doomsday Clock is closer too midnight than it's ever been, which is not awesome. But what does this metaphorical clock even indicate?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck,
and we're sitting in for Jerry, who usually sits in
for Dave. So yeah, let's go.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Let's go.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
This is well, it's a follow up to our Doomsday
Clock episode. But it turns out we didn't do a
Doomsday Clock episode. I know we talked about this, so
it might have been in one of when we were
doing videos years ago. I think it was probably in
one of those. But I know for a fact the
only reason I would have known about this is because
of this job and you.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
That makes me feel good that I wasn't completely unaware
that we had done an episode on doomsteak clocks.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
Yeah, it popped up in someplace. But what's the Doomstak clock?

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Josh?

Speaker 1 (00:46):
So, the doomsday clock is a metaphorical clock that is
operated or overseen by the Bulletin Atomic Scientists, which was
a group of scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project.
They got together and they said, we need to create
a group that is going to basically keep an eye
on this nuclear proliferation that's starting up. And one of

(01:08):
the things they did in nineteen forty seven was create
the doomsday clock, and it essentially is this I guess
it's a graphic representation of how close humanity is to
self inflicted disaster like a nuclear.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
War, perfectly said elegantly said I see, yeah, So, like
you said, been around since nineteen forty seven.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
They set the time every year.

Speaker 3 (01:35):
It's sort of a thing where they say, like, all right,
the time for this year is going to be this,
would they move it forward if something really went down
within a year?

Speaker 1 (01:45):
I think they do it every year, so.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
Like in January they said it, and if like four
months later, like the s goes down, they wouldn't be
like they'd be like, nop, gota wait till next year.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Well, I think two things would happen. Either it would
be something that they would take into account the next year, yes,
or the world would end and they wouldn't have anything
to do anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:05):
Okay, But again, we're talking about it this year because
there was and you know, we'll.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
Talk about a little bit how it's fluctuated over the years.

Speaker 3 (02:13):
But the reason we bring it up is because this year,
January eighth, twenty twenty five, is when they moved the
second hand on the clock forward to eighty nine seconds
to midnight, yeah, which means it's the closest that clock
has ever been to midnight since they started.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah, since they started, or when they started in nineteen
forty seven, when the US and Russia were starting the
Cold War, creating nukes, testing nukes out in the open
underground in space, there was seven minutes to midnight. We're
now less than two minutes away from midnight because stuff
is just so close to hitting the fan. And we

(02:52):
should say that they've actually moved the clock backward. They've
moved the secondhand backwards further away from midnight in the past,
and the furthest away it was from midnight was nineteen
ninety one, after the Soviet Union Union dissolved. Uh huh,
it was all the way back from seventeen minutes to midnight,
which is work.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
I think.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
I think that's called teeky time.

Speaker 3 (03:14):
Yeah, it's like bust out the rum, everybody, exactly.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
We're all at seventeen minutes. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (03:20):
The closest pre this time in twenty twenty five was
in nineteen fifty three. It was two minutes before midnight,
So we're eighty nine seconds till midnight, And the closest
previous was two minutes. So that's you know, it's pretty drastic.
And again, you know, I guess we can go ahead
and mention. One of the criticisms of this is that
it's it's something that just gins up some the critics

(03:41):
will say it's something that just gins up paranoia in
people and like pushes the panic button and.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
What is it even doing? But what is doing? I
think it's a.

Speaker 3 (03:51):
Valuable thing because it just raises awareness every year with people.
It's just another thing to kind of say, hey, like
we're not headed in the right direction as amenity goes.

Speaker 1 (04:01):
Yeah. So the first editor of the Bulletin of Atomic
Scientists was Eugene Rabinowitch, and Eugene Rabinowich said that the
purpose of the doomsday clock is to quote frighten men
into rationality and to basically say like, hey, you know,
this is where this stuff's out of control. People. You
need to be paying attention to these things, because they

(04:22):
don't just say we're eighty nine seconds from midnight. See
you next year. They explain what the what the reasoning
is for moving or even not moving or moving back
the secondhand and this year being eighty nine seconds the
closest we've ever been. They had a whole crop of
issues that go well beyond the nuclear risk that was

(04:43):
originally the clock was originally designed to track. And I say,
we take a break and we come back and talk
about why we're so close to midnight right now according
to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
All right, everyone, we're back.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
We're eighty seconds to midnight, not ten minutes to midnight,
like Charles Bunson was and that great movie.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
What was it called ten Minutes to Midnight?

Speaker 3 (05:30):
Yeah, you didn't see that one. No, you should check
that out. It's got a couple of choice scenes. It's
about a creepy, uh, serial killer that's he's chasing.

Speaker 1 (05:40):
Oh Bronson's not the creepy serial killer. He's being chased
by a creepy dude.

Speaker 3 (05:44):
Charles Bunsen is always the guy on the hunt for
the bad guy.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
Have you ever seen Death Wish three, where like the
group of pos has taken over the neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yeah, all the Death Wish movies.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
I mean, the first one was genuinely pretty good, but
they got really sort of over the top after a while.

Speaker 1 (05:58):
Yeah, it's good though.

Speaker 2 (06:00):
It's good. You got the Death Wish pal this is
my favorite impression to do.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
But I can't wait till you get your Morgan Freeman down.

Speaker 2 (06:07):
Oh no, I don't think so.

Speaker 3 (06:09):
All right, So how do we get eighty nine seconds
to midnight? This comes direct from the bulletin website. Some
we can kind of summarize a few of these. I'm
just going to read outright because it's so like sort
of expertly put.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
But the first thing is.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
The ongoing war in Ukraine, and not just that, but
the nuclear risk therein involved in the third year of
that conflict that you know, hopefully it doesn't go that way.
Maybe things are wrapping up, but at the peak of
this thing, like any weird bad decision could have led
to something like that happening.

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah. Same with the Middle East right now that can
spiral out of control and suck in nuclear powers against
one another. That's a nuclear risk for sure. And then
we're back to increasing the size of our nuclear arsenal,
which is a reverse of what we were doing in
the eighties and nineties where we were getting rid of them.

(07:06):
That's not a good sign. And then one other thing too,
and this is definitely new countries that hadn't had nukes
before were basically like, well, we're never going to have
nukes because that's just not the way things are. It's
changed geopolitically, and now countries are starting to think about
developing their own nuclear programs, where if you have more
countries with more nukes, you have that much more risk.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Climate change is the next thing they have listed, and
you know, this one kind of speaks for itself.

Speaker 2 (07:34):
We don't need to beat a dead horse.

Speaker 3 (07:35):
But their take basically is that global greenhouse gas emissions
are still rising. No one is doing enough to combat this.
This is bringing on extreme weather and climate changed events
or climate change influence events, and it's affecting people all
over the world. And even if we're growing things like

(07:56):
solar and wind, it's just not fast enough and not
nearly an enough to make a dent and the damage
that's being done.

Speaker 1 (08:03):
Right. Also, there's the biological arena, as they put.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
It the boy, This one is very scary.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
That's the most mucisy arena.

Speaker 3 (08:13):
Yeah, but obviously coming out of COVID and with avian
the avian flu now expanding you know, to farm animals,
to dairy products, human cases, all this stuff is very
scary and the point of this episode isn't to scare
the cred out of everybody, but it's hard to read
the stuff and not get the crud scared out of

(08:35):
you sometimes.

Speaker 1 (08:36):
Yeah, also, don't leave AI on the sidelines. In their
disruptive Technology part, they were like, like, yes, AI. They
didn't get into the existential threat that AI itself pose.
They more looked at it like, hey, some militaries are
starting to incorporate AI in their like battlefield decision making,

(08:56):
Like we're a step away from AIS deciding whether to
kill or not kill and then eventually giving AIS control
over our nuclear arsenals. That's not a direction we want
to be going. And then the whole thing, this is
the reason why all these things that have been around
for a while or have been developing for a while
have been accelerated to eighty nine seconds from midnight because

(09:19):
of the threat multiplier of misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theories.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
Yeah, and this is the one I wanted to read
a part or two from this because it just kind
of speaks volumes of things. They really put it very succinctly.
Spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the
communication ecosystem increasingly blur the lines between truth and falsehood.
And then they talk about AI making it even you know,

(09:46):
we've talked about deep fake video and stuff like that,
like making all that stuff just so much easier, And
then this final line is really really good. The battered
information landscape is also producing leaders who discount science and
endeavor to suppress fe free speech, and human rights, compromising
the fact based public discussions that are required to combat
the enormous threats facing the world. So like, all of

(10:10):
the problems that we've been listing are bad enough, and
then when you've got disinformation and conspiracy theories and misinformation
thrown on top of that, and AI exacerbating all that,
that's when it's like they're moving that clock as close
to midnight as they've ever been.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
Yeah, And the reason why is because people would be
under that circumstance, they're being led away from paying attention
to the stuff the doomsday clock is warring against. And
that just makes it that much riskier too, because we
have to be paying attention to it, whether you like
it or not. For some reason, when I was researching
this today, I was like, this is striking me as

(10:48):
a little ridiculous, and like, I get the point of it,
and I think it is noble and worthy, but there's
also some like real, I don't know, real criticisms of it.
And I found one piece by a guy named Stephen
Johnson on Life Hacker and he interviewed Lawrence Krause, who's

(11:09):
a physicist and a member of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist. Sorry,
the New Republic interviewed Kraus and he said, it's not scientific.
It's a number that's arrived at by a group of
people exploring each of the questions and having a huge
amount of discussion and ultimately convergence on a number. That
number is frankly arbitrary. And that's true. You have to

(11:31):
remember it's a metaphor. There's no way to measure it. Okay,
for eighty nine seconds from midnight right now? How much
longer is the world going to last? And the big
problem with it, I think is national geographic put it.
If everything's a crisis, nothing's a crisis. So before the
whole thing was created to say this one thing, nuclear proliferation,

(11:53):
this is what we're warning about. Now you've got climate change,
AI avian flu information. It's just like being piled on,
and I think it's really diluted the point and the
pointedness of the whole thing.

Speaker 3 (12:09):
Yeah maybe, but that's also the world we're living in
right now.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Yeah, but it makes it so easy to just be like, oh, well,
I give up, I'm going to guess, so pay attention
to I don't know, flowers versus zombies. Do people play?
Let Still, I know that was the thing. I think
it was at some point unless I had a fever dream.

Speaker 3 (12:28):
Uh well, you didn't have a fever dream. One thing,
whether or not you agree with the doomsday clock or not.
One thing we can I can recommend because you're too
humble too. It's a little limited podcast series called The
End of the World with Josh Clark. That way you
can really learn something and take a deep dive into
real existential threats that face humanity.

Speaker 1 (12:49):
Thanks Chuck, I appreciate that.

Speaker 3 (12:51):
Holds up still great? I imagine I haven't gone back
and listen to it again.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
I bet it still holds up though.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
Yeah. Well, because one of the number one rules and
show businesses leave them wanting more, I say short stuff
is out.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, My heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff You Should Know News

Advertise With Us

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Chuck Bryant

Chuck Bryant

Josh Clark

Josh Clark

Show Links

AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSS

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.

Crime Junkie

Crime Junkie

Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.