For this episode of Berkeley Talks, we are revisiting an October 2023 conversation in which Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist and host of the podcast The Ezra Klein Show, discusses the difficulties Democratic governments encounter when working to build real things in the real world.

Klein, who has since co-written the 2025 book Abundance with Derek Thompson, 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 invent more of the things that we need,” begins Klein. “It’s so stupidly simple, so obvious, that it seems weird there could be any need to write articles or podcasts or truly, God forbid, a book about it. And yet, the story of America in the 21st century — more than that, the story of liberalism, and particularly California liberalism — is a story of chosen scarcity. Why did we choose to build so few homes in the places people most need to live, including here? Why do we choose to build so little clean energy, and make it so hard to build clean energy, that red states are getting far more of the money in the Inflation Reduction Act than blue states?”

“There is this fight within liberalism,” he continues, “and actually also within the right, but I’m going to focus here on liberalism. There’s this division, this troubling of the liberal soul, about what kind of power government should have, how much it should be checked by courts, by regulation, above all, by process. That’s become the liberal way of restraining government. Give it the money to act, give it big ambitions, but make it possible for anybody to sue. And if anybody sues for any reason, then a long process of analysis and negotiation and hearings commence.”

This event took place on Oct. 5, 2023, in UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. It was co-presented by Cal Performances and UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures as part of the Jefferson Memorial Lecture Series.

Watch a video of the event on the Graduate Lectures website.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Lucas Foglia.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the tobacco industry’s entry into the food sector.

In the following decades, R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris expanded aggressively into the food industry, acquiring major brands, like Del Monte, Nabisco, General Foods, Kraft and 7UP, where they produced hyperpalatable, chemically-engineered foods now known as ultra-processed foods, or UPFs. These products were marketed especially to children and other vulnerable groups.

In Berkeley Talks episode 229, Laura Schmidt, a professor of health policy in the School of Medicine at UC San Francisco, discusses how ultra-processed foods — like cookies, sodas, instant noodles, fish sticks and cereals — are a direct legacy of the tobacco industry, and are responsible for a dramatic rise in obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases across the country.

“About 60% of the calories in Americans’ diets are from ultra-processed foods,” says Schmidt, who spoke at a UC Berkeley event in May. “In the mid-’80s, when we see ultra-processed foods starting to scale up in the American food supply, we also see obesity starting to really rise. That is the moment when some of the largest food companies are owned by tobacco companies.”

This talk took place on May 5, 2025, and was co-sponsored by the Berkeley Food Institute (BFI) and Berkeley Public Health. It was moderated by Isabel Madzorera, an assistant professor in food, nutrition and population health at Berkeley Public Health and co-faculty director at the Berkeley Food Institute.

Watch a video of the event on the Berkeley Food Institute’s YouTube page.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by HoliznaCC0.

Photo by Cory Doctorow via Wikimedia Commons.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 is to achieve equity in both the social and economic participation in our energy system,” says Reames, who served as deputy director for energy justice at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Biden-Harris administration.

In 2015, he says, some 14% of U.S. households couldn’t afford their energy bills, and 21% had to decide between buying food and medicine or paying their energy bills. Eleven percent were keeping their homes at an unhealthy temperature, either too hot or too cold, because they couldn’t afford energy or they couldn’t repair their HVAC system. Higher proportions of income spent on energy are linked to negative health outcomes, including premature deaths and a decrease in average life expectancy.

“Black households are more likely to live in communities in the shadows of fossil fuel generation,” says Reames. “Other communities of color are first and worst to experience the impact of climate emergencies. Communities with economies that rely on fossil fuels experience harm as our energy economy shifts. Think about predominantly white communities in Appalachia, offshore drilling communities on the Gulf of Mexico, and refining communities like Richmond here in the Bay Area.”

Although no country explicitly guarantees equal access to energy as a right in its laws, he says, he advocates for using important principles — like fairness, inclusion and repairing harm — to understand who is being left out or treated unfairly in our energy system, and how to guide our energy policies so they are more just and equitable.

This event took place on Dec. 4, 2024, as part of UC Berkeley's Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures.

Watch a video of the conversation on the Graduate Lectures website.

Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Photo courtesy of Tony Reames.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.