Future Perfect
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Good Robot #4: Who, me?
22 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What can we actually do as our world gets populated with more and more robots? How can we take control? Can we take control? This is the final episod...
Good Robot #3: Let's fix everything
19 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A simple parable about a drowning child sparks a moral revolution. Can AI help us do the most good in the world? Good Robot was made in partnership w...
Good Robot #2: Everything is not awesome
15 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When a robot does bad things, who is responsible? A group of technologists sounds the alarm about the ways AI is already harming us today. Are their c...
Good Robot #1: The Magic Intelligence in the Sky
12 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before AI became a mainstream obsession, one thinker sounded the alarm about its catastrophic potential. So why are so many billionaires and tech lead...
Introducing: Good Robot
05 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A new series about AI from Unexplainable and Future Perfect Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Sucking the carbon out of the sky
28 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Most of our efforts to fight climate change, from electric cars to wind turbines, are about pumping fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But wh...
Should I still have kids if I’m worried about climate change?
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas co-led a study that showed the single most effective thing an individual can do to decrease their carbon footprint...
Engineering our way out of the climate crisis
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In an ideal world, cutting carbon emissions would be enough to stop global warming. But after dithering for decades, the world needs a back-up plan. K...
Unexplainable
16 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Unexplainable is a new podcast from Vox about everything we don’t know. Each week, the team looks at the most fascinating unanswered questions in sc...
Rethinking meat
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How can we convince people to change their relationship with meat? Melanie Joy has been grappling with this question for a long time. To answer it, sh...
Can we raise better beef?
28 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Beef cattle take a huge toll on the environment. In Brazil, a huge chunk of greenhouse gas emissions comes from ranching alone. And a California-sized...
How to prevent a factory farmed pandemic
21 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What if the next pandemic comes, not from wet markets overseas, but from our own factory farms? Martha Nelson, who studies viruses at the NIH, says we...
These bacteria wear chicken shoes
14 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, we can fight off a wide range of bacterial infections using antibiotics. But those antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective, and a...
Life on the fast line
07 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Workers in meatpacking plants already process our pigs and beef and chickens extremely fast, but recently, there’s been a push to make the meatpacki...
Chicken Big
30 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1992, Craig Watts got into growing chickens for Perdue Farms because he was told he could turn a good profit. Instead, he found himself hundreds of...
The paradox on our plates
23 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the US, we spend billions of dollars a year pampering our pets. We have laws to protect them from harm and to punish those who inflict it on them. ...
Pig poop lagoon
16 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
North Carolina is home to around 9 million pigs. Many of those pigs live in big factory farms, and all of those pigs produce a lot of waste. On these ...
Season 3: The beef with meat
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The meat we eat affects us all. It affects non-human animals, but also the farmers and factory workers who raise those animals and slaughter them. It ...
What the housing crisis means for the climate
07 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dylan Matthews sits down with housing policy experts and advocates Leonora Camner and Annie Fryman to discuss California’s housing crisis, climate c...
What MLK and Malcolm X would do today
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sean Illing talks to Peniel Joseph, a University of Texas at Austin historian of Black Power movements Relevant resources: The Sword and the...
The benefits of contemplating death
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Nikki Mirghafori, a Buddhist meditation teacher and AI researcher, about how to practice mindfulness of death Relevant...
A nun on the radical possibilities of Christianity
05 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sean Illing talks to Sister Ilia Delio, a Franciscan nun and Catholic theologian, about the power of love and suffering in Christianity. Relev...
Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic)
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Cornel West, professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard, about Black liberation theology, existentialism,...
What Camus’s "The Plague" can teach us about this pandemic
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sean Illing talks to Robert Zaretsky, professor of French history at the University of Houston, about Albert Camus’s novel The Plague. Rele...
Muslim mystics on the power of pain
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Omid Safi, professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, about the benefits of solitude and suffering, according to S...
A rabbi explains how to make sense of suffering
08 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sean Illing talks to David Wolpe, senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, about God and how to make sense of suffering in human life. Rel...
On Buddhism and Blackness
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Valerie Brown, a mindfulness teacher with a racial justice lens, about how to use Buddhist spiritual teachings not just ...
Introducing Future Perfect: The Way Through
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We’re living through challenging times: a pandemic, a historic economic collapse, racial injustice, and social unrest. But it would be a mistake to ...
The money in the moon
17 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Fifty years ago this summer, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Now, NASA’s talking about going back. But is it worth it? We talk to lunar geologists abo...
Your PTA vs. equality
10 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Big philanthropists can threaten democracy. But so can small ones, like you and me. One big example? Parent-teacher associations. We examine how rich ...
Move fast and break schools
03 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When Mark Zuckerberg gave $100 million to Newark’s schools, he raised a big question: Who will decide where this money goes? The answer: Not the peo...
Who's afraid of killer robots?
26 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Most charity is focused on the near term. So what happens when you try to only give to charities that will help humans a long time from now — not ju...
Donors from beyond the grave
19 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Billions of dollars are donated every year from the fortunes of people who’ve died but are using their wills to influence our world from beyond the ...
Sim City, Wisconsin
12 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Diane Hendricks is the richest self-made woman in America, and she has used her fortune to remake the city of Beloit, Wisconsin. But she’s also used...
A foundation-funded atrocity
05 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1950s and ’60s, Western foundations like Ford and Rockefeller pushed hard to control India's population by sterilizing its people. In 1975, I...
He bought the law
29 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
John M. Olin isn’t a household name, but his foundation helped create the Federalist Society, turned federal judges against environmental protection...
Gilded Rage
22 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
To put our new age of extreme inequality in perspective, we look back at Andrew Carnegie, who gave America a huge number of libraries so they’d forg...
Season 2: Philanthropy vs. Democracy
16 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On the second season of Future Perfect: how philanthropy clashes with democracy. First episode drops Wednesday, May 22nd. Subscribe on your favorite p...
How to pick a career that counts
28 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What do you want to be when you grow up? Do you want to make a lot of money, or follow your bliss, even if it’s not lucrative? The group 80,000 Hour...
How to save a species (if you really want to)
21 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The black-footed ferret was thought extinct — until a Wyoming rancher rediscovered it, in 1981. Since then, conservation workers have been doggedly ...
How to be a better carnivore
14 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most fish die by slowly suffocating to death on the deck of a boat, struggling for air. That’s horrendously cruel, but it also makes for acidic, rub...
How to rethink America's borders
07 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The most reliable, best-documented way to lift someone in a poor country out of poverty? Let them come to the US (or another rich country). That’s t...
How to cool the planet with a fake volcano
31 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When volcanoes erupt, they spray particles into the atmosphere that cool the planet for a bit. As we get closer and closer to truly catastrophic globa...
How our drinking water could help prevent suicide
24 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lithium is a potent drug used to treat bipolar disorder, but it’s also the third element in the periodic table, and you can find tiny amounts in mos...
How to make prisons more humane
17 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Karianne Jackson was working for the North Dakota prison system in 2015 when a trip to Norway changed her life. There, she saw a prison with no bars a...
How to save a stranger's life
15 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016, Dylan Matthews donated his kidney to a complete stranger. He didn’t think he was doing anything really extreme or remarkable. He was just t...
Introducing Future Perfect
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Explore provocative ideas with the potential to radically improve the world. Vox’s Dylan Matthews tackles big questions about the most effective way...