Reveal

Latest Episodes:

We Regret to Inform You Jul 12, 2025

Show notes

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 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, he delves into his finding that officers have been using this tactic across California. He also finds that the information families disclosed before they knew their relative was killed later affected their lawsuits against law enforcement departments.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in November 2023.

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Is AI Pushing Us Closer to Nuclear Disaster? Jul 09, 2025

Show notes

Earlier this year, Daniel Holz from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced that its experts were moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 89 seconds before midnight. The hands have been moved only 25 times since the clock’s creation in 1947, and they’re now the closest they’ve pointed to imminent global destruction. On this week’s More To The Story, Holz sits down with host Al Letson to talk about the history of the Doomsday Clock, why we’re closer to destruction than ever before, and what we can do to stop it.

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Listen: Weapons With Minds of Their Own (Reveal)
Learn more: NUKEMAP
Read: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Read: Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Is So Essential to Its Identity (The Guardian)

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A Decade of Reveal Jul 05, 2025

Show notes

This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

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Jeffrey Goldberg on Signalgate, Pete Hegseth, and the Risk of WWIII Jul 02, 2025

Show notes

In March, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, began receiving top secret messages from national security officials in the Trump administration after he’d been inadvertently added to an internal Signal chat. Many of those same officials oversaw recent military strikes against Iran. On this week’s More To The Story, host Al Letson sits down with Goldberg to discuss what “Signalgate” taught him about the Trump White House and his concerns for the future of American democracy.

Producer: Josh Sanburn, with help from Steven Rascón, Artis Curiskis, and Julia Haney | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Executive editor: James West | Host: Al Letson

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Listen: In Fallujah, We Destroyed Parts of Ourselves (Reveal)

Read: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans (The Atlantic)

Read: All the Ways Trump Officials Are Downplaying the “War Plans” Group Chat (Mother Jones)

Read: New Report: Trump Administration Just Got Hit With Another Signal Chat Scandal (Mother Jones)

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Elon Musk and JD Vance Want You to Breed. A Lot. Jun 28, 2025

Show notes

What do Silicon Valley billionaires, religious parents of six, and eugenics-curious biotech founders have in common? Welcome to the world of pronatalism—a growing movement that aims to solve the so-called population crisis by making more babies.
We follow the unlikely alliance between tech futurists and traditional conservatives who think it’s their duty to repopulate the Earth—with intelligence, ambition, and carefully screened DNA. Many believe our economic future is at stake without more humans.

“If you think of government as a business, then babies are its future customers,” said Patri Friedman, grandson of the economist Milton Friedman.

This week on Reveal, we go inside NatalCon, a gathering where embryo optimization meets Old Testament values. From Elon Musk’s fertility tweets to startup founders planning five-child families like product launches, this isn’t just about babies—it’s about engineering civilization.

But in some corners of the movement, a darker theme emerges: Who’s deemed fit to reproduce, and who’s left out? We also talk with the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader in the Christian nationalist movement, about his multidecade plan to repeal abortion rights and push the American government to the right.

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Mohsen Mahdawi Fought ICE and Won His Freedom. For Now. Jun 25, 2025

Show notes

In April, Palestinian student activist Mohsen Mahdawi walked into an immigration office to obtain US citizenship. He left in handcuffs. The Columbia University student was detained by ICE and accused by the Trump administration of jeopardizing US foreign policy through his involvement in protests following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. On this week’s More to The Story, Mohsen talks to host Al Letson about his arrest by ICE, his role in campus protests, and his childhood growing up in a West Bank refugee camp.

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Read: Mohsen Mahdawi Has Been Released From Federal Custody (Mother Jones)
Listen: Gaza: A War of Weapons and Words (Reveal)
Read: Mahmoud Khalil, Finally Free, Speaks Out (Mother Jones)

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The 13th Step Jun 21, 2025

Show notes

Across the country, women seeking addiction treatment are being harassed and assaulted by men in positions of power. The problem is so pervasive that it has a name among those in the industry: the 13th Step.

“I fell right into it, right into it. You know, it’s like, it’s just, you're so vulnerable,” says a victim named Andrea. “The 13-stepper is like, um, when you take advantage of a newcomer. Like, they, they joke like, ‘Don’t be a 13th-stepper.’”

This week on Reveal, we join Lauren Chooljian from New Hampshire Public Radio, who started her investigation by looking at that state’s largest addiction treatment network, founded by Eric Spofford. After exposing allegations that he was harassing patients, Chooljian, her sources, and staff at New Hampshire Public Radio became the targets of intimidation and vandalism. In recent weeks, Spofford was indicted on charges that he orchestrated those attacks.

Chooljian then follows another case, this time in California, where the owner of a group of treatment centers was sexually assaulting clients and carrying out massive insurance fraud. The owner, Chris Bathum, was brought to justice after two women teamed up to gather evidence and take it to law enforcement.

This is an update of an episode that first aired in February 2024.

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“Madness”: A Retired Brig. General Slams Trump’s Military Power Grab Jun 18, 2025

Show notes

Greg Smith spent 35 years in the Army National Guard. But he’s never witnessed the military used the way it’s being deployed in Los Angeles in response to protests opposing the Trump administration’s immigration raids. On this week’s More To The Story, Smith discusses how the military appears increasingly tasked with enforcing a political agenda rather than defending the Constitution.

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Listen: Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Decades in the Making (More To The Story)
Listen: Immigrants on the Line (Reveal)
Read: The “Twisted” History of Trump’s Legal Theory for Using Troops Against Protesters (Mother Jones)

Read: Confessions of a Weekend Warrior: Thirty-Five Years in the National Guard(Greg Smith)

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2024 Broke the Democrats. Can They Put Themselves Back Together? Jun 14, 2025

Show notes

For the first time in two decades, the Democratic Party has found itself without a clear party leader or even an obvious frontrunner. Angry and adrift, politicians and voters are clashing over how to fight back.

They’re also grappling with an uncomfortable new reality: The places that shifted hardest away from Democrats last fall were the kinds of communities that formed the backbone of the Democratic coalition for years—working-class, nonwhite, and heavily immigrant areas of blue cities and states.

Now the battle for the party’s future and reckoning over its recent past is coming to a head in New York City, where support for Democrats has cratered among Latino and Asian voters. In one of the first big tests of the party’s direction after Donald Trump’s reelection, Democrats will choose between radically different options for mayor: a centrist former governor in his 60s who resigned in disgrace and a millennial democratic socialist whose rise in the polls has shocked the political establishment.

This week on Reveal, we head to New York to talk to voters who abandoned Democrats in November and take you inside the bitter fight to win them back.

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Trump’s Trade War Is Stressing Red State Farmers Jun 11, 2025

Show notes

Bryant Kagay is a farmer in Missouri feeling the uncertainty of President Donald Trump’s tariffs up close. He voted for Trump last year but now questions whether the trade war with China is part of a long-term strategy that could help US businesses or merely a short-term negotiating tactic. In this episode of More To The Story, he says the on-again, off-again nature of the trade war could restrict his ability to sell agricultural goods like soybeans when the harvest comes this fall.

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Listen: The Many Contradictions of a Trump Victory (Reveal)
Listen: What Trump’s Tariff Shock Will Cost You (More To The Story)
Read: Trump’s Assault on Small Farmers (Mother Jones)

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