Berkeley Talks

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 are doing is exactly the kind of open-ended, non-utilitarian, exploratory learning that allows you to find out things about the world that you would never find out any other way,” says Gopnik, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology.  In this Berkeley Talks episode, Gopnik argues that human intelligence is not a single, general capacity, but a collection of distinct cognitive modes — exploration, exploitation and care — that are distributed across different stages of a person’s life. Childhood, she says, is evolution’s way of creating a dedicated “explorer” phase, made possible by a specialized care system pro

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 a live conversation in real time.In this Berkeley Talks episode, Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, discusses the rapidly accelerating landscape of generative AI and the unique threat it poses to our collective understanding of the world.Farid notes that tools once reserved for governments or well-funded organizations are now freely available, radically expanding the threat landscape. “We have taken a mechanism that was in the hands of state-sponsored actors and bad actors and given it to 8 billion people in the world," he says. This democratization of powerful te

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’s 1660 restoration of the monarchy reopened public theaters that had been closed for nearly two decades. It marked the beginning of the Restoration era, when movable scenery debuted — massive painted flats slid along wooden grooves, transforming the stage in seconds — and women, immigrants, servants and enslaved people first moved across it as performers and stagehands. The English stage became a space of motion, a vivid counterpart to a London rebuilt after the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of 1666.In this Berkeley Talks episode, UC Berkeley Professor Julia Fawcett discusses her 2025 book Moveable Londons: Performanc

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 Brilliance of Berkeley lecture to illustrate how a life defined by scarcity can be transformed through the pursuit of science. Growing up in a family of 10 children, Yaghi lived in a single room that lacked electricity and running water. The family shared their living quarters with cattle, separated from the animals only by sacks of feed. Education was the family's singular priority; his parents spent everything they earned to keep their children in school to ensure they had a path toward a different future.In 2025, Yaghi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks, or MO

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 by white students.Donald went on to have a decadeslong career as a federal judge, and at a recent UC Berkeley Law event, she shared her personal memories to highlight a sobering truth: The rule of law is not self-executing. For the promise of Brown to reach her classroom, Donald explained, it required "extreme moral courage" from judges who faced bombings, social ostracization and death threats to enforce the law. Without that bravery, she warned, the law is "simply words on a piece of paper."This ongoing challenge was at the heart of a Dec. 5, 2025, panel discussion featuring Donald and a group of legal experts. Toge

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 traced to chronic radium exposure.For Holly Elmore, an evolutionary biologist and executive director of PauseAI US — an organization that seeks a global pause to advanced AI development — this tragedy is a stark warning for our current era. In a talk she gave Dec. 9 for the Berkeley AI Risk Speaker Series, Elmore argues that we’re repeating this mistake with artificial intelligence by assuming we can safely play with a technology we don't fully understand. “The expectation of many people in AI safety, for many years, has been that when we got to this point, the AI, once it was aligned, would figure out the answ

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 shared sense-making, where deep engagement with art and literature can rewire the brain much like a psychedelic experience — helping students heal from the rigid constraints of competitive individualism.During the talk, Fawaz recalls reading bestselling author and Berkeley Professor Emeritus Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. “I am sort of mind-boggled by the specific chapter where he talks about the neuroscience of psychedelics,” Fawaz tells Ramsey McGlazer, an associate professor in Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature, with whom he joined in conversation. “As I was reading it, I was like, ‘He’s jus

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 point out, is backed by massive datasets. “When companies perform very well, we find that prosocial CEOs are more likely to share credit with others,” explains Weili Ge, a professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, drawing on data from a decadelong analysis of 3,500 corporate leaders. “And when firms don't do well,” she continues, “they're less likely to shift the blame, they're more likely to take responsibility. This is quite different from self-centered CEOs, who are more likely to take credit when things go well and shift the blame when things don't go well."The panelists inc

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. Holliday studies group decision-making, including the best methods of voting, especially in the democratic context. Marika Landau-Wells, assistant professor of political science. Landau-Wells studies the effect that threat perception has on national security decision-making, and how some decisions we make to protect ourselves can endanger many others.Saul Perlmutter, Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor of Physics and 2011 Nobel laureate. Perlmutter co-teaches a Big Ideas course, called Sense and Sensibility and Science, designed to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers by ex

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 functioned mainly to restrict Chinese and other Asian women from entering the country.“It had enormous implications for the issues of race, gender and labor in U.S. immigration history and Asian American history,” says UC Berkeley history professor Hidetaka Hirota, who moderated a campus discussion in April to mark the Page Act’s 150th anniversary.In this Berkeley Talks episode, a panel of Berkeley scholars unpack how the Page Act helped institutionalize racially targeted exclusion and gendered surveillance at the border, and how it laid the groundwork for the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and later immigration laws. They a

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 was so fascinating.”Schekman went on to become a professor of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley and win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013 for his discovery of how yeast membranes work. His research has led to advances in food and fuel production, as well as life-saving drugs and vaccines. In this Berkeley Talks episode, Schekman explains the molecular building blocks that define who we are, the cellular processes that drive health and illness, and how curiosity-driven research leads to revolutionary insights into disease and opens doors to new possibilities for medicine and human health.This l

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 was often distributed among extended family members, hired help and community. In her new book, Mother Media: Hot and Cool Parenting in the Twentieth Century, UC Berkeley associate professor Hannah Zeavin explores how the new ideal of constant mothering was advanced by the mind sciences during the rise of the nuclear family and became especially powerful for white, middle-class mothers.Yet this expectation was both unrealistic and deeply shaped by issues of race and class, says Zeavin, who spoke last month at a Berkeley Book Chats event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities.As more mothers entered the w

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 a creeping cynicism that suggests that our real enemy is our desire to make a difference,” she said during the keynote address at the Goldman School of Public Policy’s Annual Conference and Alumni Gathering in September. “We face attacks on the very idea of wanting to make things better. That's why the Goldman School of Public Policy is so vital. Without places like this, without people like those in this room today, America wouldn't have a prayer of meeting this moment.”In this Berkeley Talks episode, Haaland discusses how policy — not politics — is the only path to real change, and why we need a unified effort groun

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. But Lyons sees it differently: These forces fuel each other, combining to drive the campus’s ultimate goal of making a lasting difference in the world. It’s a dynamic duo, he says, that keeps the campus pushing boundaries and shaping the future. In this Berkeley Talks episode, a panel of prominent Berkeley faculty and an alum join Lyons to discuss how the campus’s startup culture has powered their work and encourages the next generation of scholars to grow their ideas.  The panel, which took place on Oct. 6 during Homecoming weekend, includes: Ana Claudia Arias,

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 about the ocean and have treated the ocean for almost all of human history,” Lubchenko told the audience at a UC Berkeley event in March. “The ocean, for thousands and thousands of years, was seen as so immense, so endlessly bountiful that people thought it must be infinitely resilient and impossible to deplete or disrupt.”But now, she said, the impossible has happened — “it’s depleted, it’s disrupted, it’s polluted, it’s warmer, it’s more acidic, it’s deoxygenated" — and we need to create a new narrative, one that acknowledges that a healthy ocean is central to a just and prosperous f

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 certainties, but that art then works these raw materials over — art works us over, art makes us new. Art makes us.”In this Berkeley Talks episode, Noë discusses how humans are in a constant state of becoming, and that art works to unveil us to ourselves in ways that empirical inquiry common in scientific fields cannot. By removing an object, like a photo, from its normal setting, he says, it allows us to reflect on what we normally take for granted about the object and presents an opportunity to make new meaning from it. “We are makers,” he continues. “We are put together, litera

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 be more challenging than we expect in actual day-to-day life,” Simon-Thomas said during a Berkeley event in July. Not only is it difficult to put into practice, she says, but it’s also hard to define — it’s often understood differently from person to person and culture to culture. In this Berkeley Talks episode, Simon-Thomas is joined in a conversation by child clinical psychologist Allison Briscoe-Smith, a senior fellow at the center, and clinical neuropsychologist Melike Fourie of the Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Together, they e

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 else. And that's because we have a really collaborative environment on our campus.”At the cafe, Doudna listened while a Berkeley colleague described a possible adaptive immune system in bacteria that helps them fight off viral infection. Doudna's lab went on to research the molecules involved, discovering a pathway that allows bacteria to "learn" about viruses, store the information and use it for protection.The scientists realized this same system could be used to trigger DNA repair in plant, animal and human cells, effectively allowing them to "rewrite the code of life." The

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 wealth, in education, housing, healthcare, in policing and incarceration,” said Meraji, who leads the audio program at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “I firmly believe that you can't meaningfully report on any of those issues, here in the United States, without an understanding of how race operates.”When President Trump signed a surge of executive orders in January 2025, many that directly intersect with race, Meraji suggested that her students interview experts at Berkeley to help make sense of these new anti-DEI policies, immigration enforcement changes and regulatory ro

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 restore a sense of fairness,” says Zucman, a UC Berkeley summer research professor and director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality’s Summer Institute. Today, billionaires pay only about 0.2% of their wealth in taxes, says Zucman, because they often structure their wealth to minimize taxable income through control over corporate dividends, delaying capital gains and using holding company structures, among other methods. The 2% tax rate proposal is a modest one, he argues, and would merely ensure that billionaires, comprising about 3,000 families around the world,