Berkeley Talks

During a psychedelic experience in his garden, Michael Pollan became convinced that the plants around him were conscious. They seemed to be returning his gaze, he said — benevolent and perhaps grateful for his gardening. Back in ordinary consciousness, the author and UC Berkeley journalism professor emeritus faced a harder question: What should he do with that conviction? Was it an insight into re...

When W. Kamau Bell was a child, his mother bought the family a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home computer of the early 1980s. He also had Pong, a ColecoVision and, later, a MiniDisc player. Today, he is still the person his family calls when the TV stops working — and the father who sees technology’s potential to connect his introverted 11-year-old with cousins over FaceTime.  “I am not a tech...

When Aravind Srinivas arrived at UC Berkeley in 2020 hoping to join Pieter Abbeel ’s robotics lab, he encountered an immediate obstacle: The lab was already full. Undeterred, Srinivas proposed that he and Abeel work together for six months so he could prove himself. What followed was such a prolific stretch of research that Abbeel found himself repeatedly asking about his new student’s well-being....

In the early hours of November 2007, Amadou Cisse, a 29-year-old University of Chicago chemistry graduate student, was walking home when Demetrius Warren, then 17, and Benjamin Williams, 21, approached him. According to trial testimony, Warren pointed a gun at Cisse while Williams attempted to grab his backpack. A struggle ensued, and Warren shot Cisse in the chest. Cisse died from the wound. “Beh...

In 1957, a terrified 17-year-old girl lay on a Harlem kitchen table undergoing an illegal, backstreet abortion. Nearly dying from complications, she was rushed to a hospital ward where nurses badgered her and demanded to know what she had done. That teenager was Frances M. Beal. Long before she would write the seminal 1969 manifesto "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female" or co-found the Third W...

In the early days of personal computing, people imagined artificial intelligence as a single, self-contained system — a kind of digital brain with a fixed identity. Talking to AI meant asking questions to a clearly defined machine. That picture no longer holds, said David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University. Today’s large language models, or LLMs, run on d...

When Princeton University Professor Mark Johnston's daughter was 18 months old, she stood on a beach with what he describes as a "quizzical philosophical look on her face, as if she was thinking, 'Is this my only life?'" That question is the heart of Johnston’s talk at UC Berkeley this past March, where he revisits a topic he wrote about two decades ago. Back then, he believed that the hope for an...

As Halle Stanford drove through Topanga Canyon in Southern California, with Dolly Parton blasting from the car speakers, she was struck by a moment of inspiration.  “I had this vision of a little hedgehog on the side of the road in her little pink hiking boots, with her guitar in her bag, out to find the wows of the world,” says Stanford, an independent television producer.  A few days l...

Across the American West Coast in the 1980s, the burgeoning punk rock and skinhead scenes were much more than just raw music and counterculture fashion — they quickly became contested ground in an ideological battle against white supremacy. Neo-Nazi groups actively targeted these subcultures to recruit alienated kids, and anti-racist punks were forced to step up in response, organizing grassroots...

It was the morning after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and pianist Lara Downes was catching a flight from California to Kentucky, where she was set to perform later in the evening. “It was a very weird day to be anywhere,” she recalls. That night, she performed songs from her album America Again in Louisville, a city that mirrored the country's own jagged political divide. Coming from Calif...

While preparing his lectures for UC Berkeley, Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber spent hours poring over the memoirs and writings of former University of California President Clark Kerr , seeking wisdom from the architect of California’s 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education . Reflecting on this research, Eisgruber notes that he found more than just strategy; he found a personal...

Over her decadeslong career as a developmental psychologist, Alison Gopnik has observed a striking phenomenon: When children are given a new toy without an obvious use, they often outperform high‑achieving college students in figuring out how it works. While adults tend to test the most likely possibilities and quickly get stuck, children respond with playful experimentation.  "What children...

Two decades ago, when Hany Farid first began studying digital misinformation and manipulated media, fake content was easier to detect. Today, that landscape has shifted with a speed that he describes as “breathtaking.” In just the last year or two, he says, we’ve moved from an era where a computer takes seconds or minutes to produce a static file to "full-blown interactive deepfakes" that can hold...

When William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, the power of London’s theater lived almost entirely in language. The stage was mostly bare and the scenery imagined. To mark a shift in setting, an actor might simply declare, “This is the Forest of Arden.” But by the mid-17th century, this mode of performance began to change.  Following decades of civil war and Puritan rule, King Charles II’...

At age 10, Omar Yaghi walked into a school library in Amman, Jordan, and opened a book that changed his life. He saw molecular drawings — complex structures he didn’t yet understand, but which immediately captivated him. "I thought I discovered something that nobody had ever seen before," Yaghi recalls.  Yaghi, now a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley, shared this story during a recent Bri...

In 1957, 6-year-old Bernice Bouie Donald started first grade in rural DeSoto County, Mississippi. Although the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down school segregation three years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education , the young girl’s educational reality remained unchanged: Her all-Black school was a two-room cinderblock building with no indoor plumbing, and her books were hand-me-downs discarded...

In the early 20th century, factory workers — later known as the “Radium Girls” — were hired to paint watch and instrument dials with radium‑based luminous paint. They were instructed to keep their brushes sharp by shaping them with their lips. In the following years, many of these workers developed devastating illnesses, including severe bone and jaw damage, anemia and cancer, that were ultimately...

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Ramzi Fawaz , a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, explores why the humanities and psychedelics might have more in common than you’d think, and how literature, much like psychedelics, can help open one’s mind to the world. Fawaz, who spoke at UC Berkeley in September, argues that the humanities classroom functions as a vital space for share...

A broad group of leaders from academia and the private sector — including UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and neuroscientist Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the Greater Good Science Center — discuss how kindness is a strategic asset rather than a professional weakness, and why the traditional “jerk” model of leadership is scientifically flawed. This shift toward evidence-based management, the panelists...

Today we are revisiting a  Berkeley Talks  episode in which a cross-disciplinary panel of UC Berkeley professors, whose expertise ranges from political science to philosophy, discuss how they view decision-making from their respective fields, and how we can use these approaches to make better, more informed choices.  Panelists include:  Wes Holliday, professor of philosophy. &n...

Before there was the Chinese Exclusion Act, there was the Page Act.  Passed in 1875 amid growing anti-Chinese sentiment in the 19th century, the Page Act was one of the first national immigration laws in the United States. It targeted several categories of people, including contract laborers from Asia, women brought in for sex work and certain convicted criminals. In practice, however, it fun...

When UC Berkeley Professor Randy Schekman was 12, he scooped up a jar of pond scum and examined it under his toy microscope. “I just could not believe the world that was revealed,” he said during a campus event earlier this month. “This complex set of creatures that you can't see with your naked eye, and yet are moving and somehow mechanically independent, and able to do amazing things. And this w...

In the early 20th century, prominent figures in psychology, psychiatry and pediatrics in the U.S. began to promote a new standard for mothers: that they should serve as a constant, unchanging and wholly nurturing presence in their children’s lives. It was the best way, they claimed, to raise healthy and successful children. This ideal marked a shift away from earlier traditions where caregiving wa...

The United States is in a moment like no other in recent history, says Deb Haaland, former President Joe Biden's secretary of the Interior Department from 2021 to 2025. Every day, she says, it seems a new pillar of the American government is under attack. But what makes this moment unique aren’t these crises themselves, but the attack on the idea that problems can be solved at all.  “We face...

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...