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Future Perfect podcast

Future Perfect explores provocative ideas with the potential to radically improve the world. We tackle big questions about the most effective ways to save lives, fight global warming, and end world poverty to create a more perfect future.

In our new season, hosts Dylan Matthews and Sigal Samuel bring you stories about how the meat we eat affects us all, from the non-human animals to the farmers and factory workers who raise those animals and slaughter them to the environment. And you’ll learn about some potential changes, big and small, that could make the food we eat more sustainable and more humane. Produced by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Why scientists are cloning black-footed ferrets

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3 core myths about eating animals — and why food tech may vanquish them

Beef is bad for the planet. Can we make it better?

Factory farms are an ideal breeding ground for the next pandemic

How factory farms are making the antibiotics we use less effective against disease

Chicken plants are more dangerous places to work than coal mines

Growing chicken is big business. So why are many farmers forced into debt they can’t pay off?

Pigs are as smart as dogs. Why do we eat one and love the other?

Why North Carolina has giant lagoons of pig poop

Two experts explain why solving the housing crisis helps the climate

What MLK and Malcolm X would do today

The surprising benefits of contemplating your death

A nun on the radical possibilities of Christianity

Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic)

What Camus’s The Plague can teach us about the Covid-19 pandemic

What would Rumi do in a pandemic?

A rabbi explains how to make sense of suffering

On Buddhism and Blackness

Going back to the moon could cost $30 billion. It might be worth it.

How can it be wrong to give to your kid’s school?

Mark Zuckerberg wanted to help Newark schools. Newarkers say they weren’t heard.

10 years ago, “AI risk” was a joke. Now it’s a serious concern. Thank Jaan Tallinn.

He co-founded Skype. Now he’s spending his fortune on stopping dangerous AI.

Dead people leave billions in their wills. How long do we have to listen to them?

The town philanthropy rebuilt

This billionaire rebuilt her town — while funding a right-wing revolution in her state

“The time of vasectomy”: how American foundations fueled a terrible atrocity in India

The incredible influence of the Federalist Society, explained

How a resort weekend for judges made courts more conservative

How charitable donations remade our courts

What Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy can teach us about the mega-rich today

13 of Vox’s best podcast episodes of 2018

How to pick a career that counts

How to be a better carnivore

How to rethink our borders

How to cool the planet with a fake volcano

How our drinking water could help prevent suicide

How to make prisons more humane

How to save a stranger’s life