Future Perfect

Good Robot #4: Who, me?

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 episode of our four-part s

Good Robot #3: Let's fix everything

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 with Vox’s Unexplaina

Good Robot #2: Everything is not awesome

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 concerns being taken

Good Robot #1: The Magic Intelligence in the Sky

Before AI became a mainstream obsession, one thinker sounded the alarm about its catastrophic potential. So why are so many billionaires and tech leaders worried about… p

Introducing: Good Robot

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

Most of our efforts to fight climate change, from electric cars to wind turbines, are about pumping fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But what if we could pull

Should I still have kids if I’m worried about climate change?

Climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas co-led a study that showed the single most effective thing an individual can do to decrease their carbon footprint is have fewer kids.

Engineering our way out of the climate crisis

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. Kelly Wanser is the l

Unexplainable

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 science and the mind-ben

Rethinking meat

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, she takes us back to o

Can we raise better beef?

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 chunk of the Amazon

How to prevent a factory farmed pandemic

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 are playing Russian

These bacteria wear chicken shoes

Right now, we can fight off a wide range of bacterial infections using antibiotics. But those antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective, and antibiotic use on fac

Life on the fast line

Workers in meatpacking plants already process our pigs and beef and chickens extremely fast, but recently, there’s been a push to make the meatpacking factory line move e

Chicken Big

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 thousands of dollar

The paradox on our plates

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. And yet, we routinel

Pig poop lagoon

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 factory farms, that

Season 3: The beef with meat

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 affects the communit

What the housing crisis means for the climate

Dylan Matthews sits down with housing policy experts and advocates Leonora Camner and Annie Fryman to discuss California’s housing crisis, climate catastrophe, and how mo

What MLK and Malcolm X would do today

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 Shield: The Revoluti