Futurology
Berggruen Institute
The future never arrives all at once. It ripples through society long before we know what to call it.At the Berggruen Institute, we know that we need more than prediction to name what’s next; we need invention. Each week, Institute President Dawn Nakagawa introduces us to scientists and philosophers recalibrating our cosmologies, technologists coming to terms with alien intelligence, and policymakers scrambling to design systems for a world in flux. Join thinkers and doers from the Berggruen-verse as we imagine a future that we can accomplish together, instead of one that we’re all working to prevent.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Jul 8, 2025 • 1h 17min
What if Buddhists Ran the World? (with Stephen Batchelor and Bing Song)
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 on karma instead of capital?
In this episode, he sketches a vision of society grounded in awareness, compassion, and radical interdependence — a politics of presence rather than power. Stripped of its cosmologies, he argues, a secular Buddhism could light the way toward an ethical response to a world on fire.
Jul 1, 2025 • 59min
Letting Robots Know Where They Stand (with Fei-Fei Li and Dawn Nakagawa)
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 Fei-Fei Li. She's building a Large World Model that will enable artificial intelligences to situate themselves in our reality and create entirely new worlds of their own, for human minds to inhabit.
In this episode, we trace the evolution of artificial perception — from the early days of visual machine learning with stoplights and puppies to today's efforts to put robots in their place.
Jun 24, 2025 • 1h 10min
Inhabiting Artificial Minds... On Mars and Beyond (with Vandi Verma and Claire Webb)
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 onto rockets – who will roam alien landscapes.
In this episode, NASA roboticist Vandi Verma takes us inside the mind of a Mars rover — and into the process of building, steering, and co-evolving with machines that learn as they go. As we aim for unwelcoming planets and stranger moons, our robots must grow bolder to survive. With artificial intelligence on board, will they evolve to lead the search for life itself?
Jun 24, 2025 • 56min
After the End of History, an Age of Disorder (with Francis Fukuyama and Nathan Gardels)
More than three decades ago, Francis Fukuyama saw the future: a world order that looked inevitable, stable, liberal. What emerged instead is something bumpier, louder, and far more dangerous.
In this episode, Fukuyama takes us on a ride through the strange resurrection of 19th-century power politics, the rise of political strongmen, and the collapse of trust that can dooms institutions to failure. We discuss what’s left to salvage – and what a bureaucracy of the future could accomplish.
Jun 19, 2025 • 2min
Welcome to Futurology | Podcast Trailer
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 accomplish together, instead of one we must all work to prevent.
