Futurology
Episodes
The Future of Sovereignty Is Closer Than You Think (with Graham Brewer and Grant Slater)
23 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The current world order seeks to make sovereignty simple. One map. One flag. One final authority. But in Indian Country, the borders break down. Triba...
Conjuring Art from Machine Hallucinations (with Refik Anadol and Claire Webb)
16 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For Artist Refik Anadol, data is not just information. It is pigment. He feeds weather records, river flows, forests and archives into custom AI model...
The Dangers of Seeing Ourselves in Artificial Intelligence (with Anil Seth and Nils Gilman)
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Humans are built for pattern recognition. It is the engine behind perception, emotion, and the fragile sense of self that feels so solid from the insi...
What Whales Can Teach Us About Talking to Aliens (With David Gruber and Claire Webb)
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if we could speak to aliens? The key could lie in understanding whale songs. The first whales appeared around 50 million years ago and for most...
The Big Lie Behind AI (with Jaron Lanier and Grant Slater)
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence isn’t alive. But our belief that it is may be the most dangerous illusion of all. Tech leaders talk about AI as if it thinks...
How to Spot an Alien Civilization (with Adam Frank and Claire Webb)
11 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For the first time in human history, we can see other worlds. Nearly six thousand planets have been discovered orbiting distant stars — and more app...
When the Machine Becomes the Medium (with Ken Liu and Nils Gilman)
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The first machines mimicked our muscles. Today, they’ve learned to mirror our minds. Now they’re beginning to imitate something even closer to the...
A Cosmic Voyage Through Deep Time (with Ross Andersen and Grant Slater)
30 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Humanity has a deep time problem. Our internal clock simply cannot compute on a time scale that takes into account the rise and fall of civilizations,...
The Spiritual Life of the Microbiome (with Aminah Bradford and Jonathan Blake)
23 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, the breakthrough Human Microbiome Project confirmed that – within our own bodies – we are outnumbered. For every human cell, there are th...
The Wisdom of Not Knowing (with Pico Iyer and Nathan Gardels)
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We live in a culture hooked on speed and certainty. Hot takes, quick fixes, and algorithms that claim to know us better than we know ourselves. Yet de...
The Artful Politics of Picturing the Cosmos (with Lois Rosson and Claire Webb)
09 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Each and every image of the cosmos is an act of interpretation. Scientists collaborate with artists and illustrators to saturate the colorless data of...
Why Globalization Can't Stop War Anymore (with Pascal Lamy and Lorenzo Marsili)
02 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, world leaders told us that global trade would keep the peace. Markets would bind nations together, and economic interdependence would mak...
The Making of Ideas That Matter (with Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels)
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The Berggruen Institute began with a simple conviction: ideas shape the world. Out of the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis,the Institute's co-fou...
A Breakdown in Global Governance (with Nathan Gardels and Anne-Marie Slaughter)
19 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The liberal world order was built for a different era — more centralized, more hierarchical, more predictable. In the 21st century, power has gone f...
The Cyborg Watershed of the American West (with Lauren Bon and Grant Slater)
12 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The ever-branching network of lakes, rivers, and streams that flow west from the Rockies enable human life to flourish in one of the hottest places on...
The Death Knell of the Nation-State (with Rana Dasgupta and Jonathan Blake)
05 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The modern nation-state wasn’t just a conglomeration of laws and armies. It was a belief in borders, in belonging, in the promise that citizenship c...
How We Discovered Our Own Extinction (with Thomas Moynihan and Benjamin Bratton)
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
For most of human history, the end of the world was a divine promise, inevitable and liberating for the holy alone. But the invention of extinction ch...
The Rise of the Cyberocracy (with John Markoff and Grant Slater)
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the 21st century, Silicon Valley has coded into existence a vast memetic machinery — a self-replicating ecosystem of feedback loops, default sett...
Did the Sun Ever Set on the Age of Empire? (with Niall Ferguson and Nathan Gardels)
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On America’s 250th birthday, historian Niall Ferguson suggests that the US has reached an age when most republics fizzle out. Donald Trump’s rise ...
What if Buddhists Ran the World? (with Stephen Batchelor and Bing Song)
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Stephen Batchelor has spent decades stripping Buddhism of its dogma to find what wisdom it can offer the modern world. Could cities and countries run ...
Letting Robots Know Where They Stand (with Fei-Fei Li and Dawn Nakagawa)
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before robots can act, they need to know where they are. That’s the deceptively simple premise behind the latest effort from machine vision pioneer ...
Inhabiting Artificial Minds... On Mars and Beyond (with Vandi Verma and Claire Webb)
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If we ever land on another planet, we won’t be the first to arrive. It will be our machines — the ones we’ve trained, calibrated, and loaded ont...
After the End of History, an Age of Disorder (with Francis Fukuyama and Nathan Gardels)
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
More than three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama saw the future: a world order that looked inevitable, stable, liberal. What emerged instead is somethin...
Welcome to Futurology | Podcast Trailer
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Futurology is a new a weekly podcast from the Berggruen Institute where we work to name what’s next. Join us as we imagine a future we can accompl...