Berkeley Talks

UC Berkeley is widely considered a leader in innovation and startups. Pitchbook university rankings from 2025 announced, for the third year in a row, that Berkeley graduates have founded more venture-backed companies than undergraduate alumni from any other university in the world. 

Some might wonder, says Chancellor Rich Lyons, if this entrepreneurial energy clashes with Berkeley’s tradition of top-tier research and teaching. ...

In this Berkeley Talks episode, renowned marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco discusses how a persistent narrative that the ocean is “too big to fail” has led to its degradation. While many now believe its problems are “too big to fix,” Lubchenco explains why we need to embrace a new narrative: That it’s too central to our future to ignore.

“There is a historic narrative about the ocean, one that has framed the way people have talked abo...

In his 2023 book The Entanglement, UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë argues that human nature is not a fixed phenomenon, and that art acts as a kind of “strange tool” that actively changes us. 

“Life and art are entangled,” says Noë, who spoke about his research at a Berkeley event in June 2023. “To say that life and art are entangled is to say not only that we make art out of life, all the habits and systems and meanings and ce...

As the science director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, Emiliana Simon-Thomas thinks a lot about how prosocial emotions and behaviors — like compassion and gratitude — influence our well-being and society as a whole. And recently, she’s been more deeply exploring the effects of forgiveness. 

“Forgiveness is an idea that most people endorse, that most people feel is a virtue or the right thing to do, but can often ...

For UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, the revolutionary discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing began 15 years ago with a meeting at the campus’s Free Speech Movement Cafe. 

“This is a quintessential story about Berkeley,” begins Doudna, a professor of molecular and cell biology and of chemistry, in a lecture she gave on campus in April. “The research that I'll talk about today wouldn't have happened … if I had been working anywhere...

Every spring semester, UC Berkeley Assistant Professor Shereen Marisol Meraji teaches a class on race and journalism. In the course, she and her students explore how colonialism and the legacy of its systems — including forced displacement of Native tribes, slavery and Jim Crow — continue to affect us as a society, and how journalists can meaningfully report on race in America today.

“It has led to persistent racial disparities in w...

In this Berkeley Talks episode, economist Gabriel Zucman discusses how wealth inequality and billionaire wealth has soared in recent decades, prompting the need for a global minimum tax of 2% on billionaires. 

“The key benefit of a global minimum tax on billionaires is not only that it would generate substantial revenue for governments worldwide — about $250 billion a year — but also, and maybe most importantly, that it would r...

Today we are revisiting an October 2023 Berkeley Talks episode in which Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties liberal governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world. He joins in a conversation with Amy Lerman, a UC Berkeley political scientist and director of the Possibility Lab.

“To have the future we want, we need to build and inven...

In the early 1960s, R.J. Reynolds, one of the largest and most profitable tobacco companies in the U.S. at the time, wanted to diversify its business. Its marketing strategies had been highly successful in selling its top brands, like Camel, Winston and Salem cigarettes, and executives thought, Why not apply the same strategies to, say, the food industry?

So in 1963, R.J. Reynolds acquired Hawaiian Punch. It marked the beginning of ...

In Berkeley Talks episode 228, Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan, discusses how the U.S. energy system has persistently harmed marginalized communities, a result of legacies of government-sanctioned policies, like redlining, land theft and resource extraction. He goes on to emphasize the need for intentional efforts to undo these harms. 

“When we think about energy justice, the goal...

By 2050, the global population is expected to reach about 10 billion people. That means we need to find a way to feed nearly 2 billion more mouths in the next 25 years. Industrial farming practices have already destroyed countless natural ecosystems, and experts say that expanding farmland even further would have devastating consequences for the planet. 

In Berkeley Talks episode 227, UC Berkeley Professor Timothy Bowles and jo...

It took nearly six years for bestselling author Daniel Handler to sell his first book, a satirical novel called The Basic Eight. When his agent sold it in 1998, it was “for the least amount she had ever negotiated for,” laughed Handler, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event earlier this month.   

More than two decades later, Handler has published seven novels. Under his pen name Lemony Snicket, he has written dozens of boo...

In Berkeley Talks episode 225, The Atlantic journalists Yoni Appelbaum and Jerusalem Demsas discuss the decline of housing mobility in the United States and its impact on economic opportunity in the country. 

Appelbaum, author of the 2025 book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, began by tracing the history of housing mobility in the U.S. and its rapid decline in recent decades...

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates is considered the father of Western philosophy, one whose most famous ideas have all but risen to the level of pop culture. 

We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His name has been invoked by politicians to bolster their stance against “cancel culture.” There’s even an AI chat app modeled after Socrates that promises intelligent conversations. 

But what ex...

When J Finley arrived at UC Berkeley as a graduate student in 2006, she planned on studying reparations and the legacy of slavery. But after a fellowship in South Africa, where she studied the Zulu language and culture, Finley says she realized Black people were never going to get reparations. Switching gears, she started thinking: “How else do Black people make do? Well, we laugh.”

In Berkeley Talks episode 223, Finley, an associat...

In Berkeley Talks podcast episode 222, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Brian Fitzpatrick, the Milton R. Underwood Chair in Free Enterprise at Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville, Tennessee, debate the merits of originalism in constitutional interpretation. Originalism is a theory that argues that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted based on its original meaning, as understood at the time of its adoption nearly 250...

In Berkeley Talks episode 221, American historian Heather Cox Richardson joins Dylan Penningroth, a UC Berkeley professor of law and history, in a conversation about the historical evolution of the Republican Party, and the state of U.S. politics and democracy today. 

Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, is the author of the popular nightly newsletter Letters from an American, in which she explains current poli...

If someone asked you to describe democracy in one word, what would you say? An October 2024 survey by the Political Psychology of American Democracy Policy Project, led by UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy Dean David Wilson, asked people just that. Many respondents said, “freedom,” but a lot of others said, “broken.” 

In Berkeley Talks episode 220, Berkeley political scientist Henry Brady discusses how we got to a p...

When Luke Messac began his emergency medicine residency at Rhode Island Hospital in 2018, he noticed a lot of his patients came to him concerned about costs. Some worried about his recommendations for them to stay in the hospital overnight. Others questioned his motives when he asked them to undergo a test, like an X-ray or MRI. A few came in way too late in the course of their illnesses out of fear of the cost. 

He’d heard abo...