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 other points in history when new technology helped make social change palat

These bacteria wear chicken shoes

Oct 14th, 2020 23m 29s

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 factory farms is partially to blame. In this episode, Lance Price and Cindy

Life on the fast line

Oct 7th, 2020 25m 6s

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 even faster. Isaac Arnsdorf, a ProPublica reporter, takes us deep into his

Chicken Big

Sep 30th, 2020 28m 50s

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 dollars in debt, and unable to bargain for better working conditions because Per

The paradox on our plates

Sep 23rd, 2020 25m 17s

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 routinely abuse pigs and chickens on farms, cutting off their beaks and tails with

Pig poop lagoon

Sep 16th, 2020 29m 21s

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 waste is collected in big outdoor lagoons, and then sprayed out across fie

The benefits of contemplating death

Aug 12th, 2020 59m 40s

Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Nikki Mirghafori, a Buddhist meditation teacher and AI researcher, about how to practice mindfulness of death Relevant resources: “Our calm is contagious”: How to use mindfulness in a pandemic, by Sigal SamuelIt

Can we raise better beef?

Oct 28th, 2020 24m 2s

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 rainforest has been cut down to provide land for these cattle to graze on

How to prevent a factory farmed pandemic

1 Oct 21st, 2020 24m 32s

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 roulette with potentially dangerous influenza strains on our pig farms.

What MLK and Malcolm X would do today

Aug 19th, 2020 1h 14m

Co-host Sean Illing talks to Peniel Joseph, a University of Texas at Austin historian of Black Power movementsRelevant resources: The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. by Peniel JosephFeatu

Sucking the carbon out of the sky

Apr 28th, 2021 43m 52s

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 out the gases that are already there? Akshat Rathi, a reporter at Bloomber

Engineering our way out of the climate crisis

Apr 14th, 2021 35m 59s

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 leader of a group called SilverLining that works to promote research into w

Unexplainable

Mar 16th, 2021 28m 45s

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-bending ways scientists are trying to answer them. New episodes drop every We

Trailer

Season 3: The beef with meat

Sep 9th, 2020 2m 28s

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 communities living around those farms and slaughterhouses. It affects our health c

Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic)

Jul 29th, 2020 1h 3m

Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Cornel West, professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard, about Black liberation theology, existentialism, and other philosophies that can help us through these times.Relevant resources: Cornel West

What Camus’s "The Plague" can teach us about this pandemic

1 Jul 22nd, 2020 1h 4m

Co-host Sean Illing talks to Robert Zaretsky, professor of French history at the University of Houston, about Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.Relevant resources: The Plague, by Albert CamusSimone Weil: An Anthology, by Simone WeilAlbert Ca

Muslim mystics on the power of pain

Jul 15th, 2020 59m 50s

Co-host Sigal Samuel talks to Omid Safi, professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, about the benefits of solitude and suffering, according to Sufis like Rumi.Relevant resources: Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Traditi

A rabbi explains how to make sense of suffering

1 Jul 8th, 2020 55m 37s

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.Relevant resources: Making Loss Matter : Creating Meaning in Difficult Times by Rabbi David Wolp

On Buddhism and Blackness

Jul 1st, 2020 1h 7m

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 to soothe us as individuals, but to tackle broader inequality, especially racial inequality.R

Trailer

Introducing Future Perfect: The Way Through

Jun 30th, 2020 1m 37s

We’re living through challenging times: a pandemic, a historic economic collapse, racial injustice, and social unrest. But it would be a mistake to believe that what we’re experiencing is somehow unique in human experience. People have confront

Bonus

Bonus: The power of the President

Jan 15th, 2020 28m 28s

The 2020 candidates have some bold ideas to tackle some of our country's biggest problems, like climate change, the opioid crisis, and unaffordable health care. A lot of their proposals have been tried in the past. This season, The Impact has t

Introducing Reset

Oct 22nd, 2019 30m 56s

Josiah Zayner is a biohacker who’s famous for, among other things, injecting himself with the gene-editing tool CRISPR. At a time when the technology exists for us to change, or hack, our own DNA, what are the ethics of experimenting on ourselv

Bonus

Introducing Land of the Giants

Jul 31st, 2019 13m 11s

Land of the Giants is a new podcast from Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network about the five major technology companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google – or “FAANG”) that have reshaped our world. Each season focuses on one of

Bonus

The money in the moon

1 Jul 17th, 2019 31m 48s

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 about what we’ve already learned from the first Apollo missions, and what’s left to discover.Then,

Your PTA vs. equality

Jul 10th, 2019 27m 33s

Big philanthropists can threaten democracy. But so can small ones, like you and me. One big example? Parent-teacher associations. We examine how rich PTAs can hoard opportunity and deny resources to poor kids.Dana Goldstein on the Malibu-Santa