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 grounded in moral courage and diverse perspectives to meet the challenges facing the country.

“Part of the reason I wanted to join you today is to speak to the importance of faith in the possibility of what we can do together,” she says. “And I use the word ‘faith’ deliberately. Especially in times like these, it takes belief, moral courage and determination in the face of despair to keep going. We have to find it inside ourselves, nurture that flame and keep it lit.”

More about the speaker:

Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the first Native American to serve as a U.S. Cabinet secretary. Before that, she was the U.S. representative for New Mexico's 1st Congressional District from 2019 to 2021, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. She is running for governor of New Mexico in the 2026 election.

Watch a video of Haaland’s keynote, followed by a conversation with Goldman School of Public Policy Dean David Wilson.

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

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U.S. House Office of Photography photo by Franmarie Metzler.

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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, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences
• Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering
• Marco Lobba, alum and co-founder and CEO of CatenaBio.
• Chancellor Rich Lyons (moderator)

Watch a video of the conversation.

Read more about the event.

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

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UC Berkeley photo by Keegan Houser.

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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 future on Earth.

While she admits there are “huge challenges,” Lubchenco stresses that there are solutions that already exist that can be scaled up, like enabling sustainable aquaculture, reforming fisheries management, employing nature-based blue carbon ecosystems and creating and strengthening marine protected areas.

“This ocean that we have, that connects us all, that feeds us all, is at the center of climate change solutions, health solutions, food security, recreational opportunities,” she said. “This is really all one ocean. It is possible to use it without using it up. We're not there yet. But given what I've said, it's not impossible. And I think that these findings and these actions and these results are leading to the emergence of a new narrative for the ocean.”

Lubchenco spoke at Berkeley on March 13, 2025, as part of the Martha Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures series. This lecture was one of two given by Lubchenco for the series, together titled “Agency, Urgency, and Hope: Science and Scientists Serving Society.”

Watch the event on the UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures YouTube page.

Lubchenco is former deputy director for climate and environment in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Wayne and Gladys Valley Professor of Marine Biology and University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University.

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

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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, literally made up, by the habits and skills of making that constitute us. So by making, and thus exposing what our lives as makers take for granted, art puts us on display … in ways that hold out the opportunity of changing us, of liberating us. Liberating us precisely from the bonds of habit which our activities consist in.”

Noë’s lecture was part of the 2023 Berkeley Art, Law and Finance Symposium, presented by the Berkeley Center for Law and Business.

Watch a video of Noë’s talk on UC Berkeley Law’s YouTube page.

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

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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 August.

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 explore what forgiveness is, how it works in the body and brain and the ways people can practice forgiveness that feel safe and empowering.

This event took place on Aug. 1, 2025, and was part of a Greater Good Science Center project on forgiveness supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Learn more on the foundation’s Discover Forgiveness website.

Watch a video of the conversation on the Greater Good Science Center YouTube page.

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

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Photo by Milad Fakurian via Unsplash.

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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 seminal paper on CRISPR was published in 2012 by Doudna and her key collaborator, French microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier. The pair went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, Doudna discusses how CRISPR can be used to correct disease-causing genetic mutations, the impact that it's already having on people's lives and where she sees the technology going in the future.

“We're in an era of programmable genome editing,” she says. “It's really exciting to see all the possible applications of this. We know that it can be safe and effective to treat and even to potentially cure human disease, and we need to continue to advance the technology so that it can be deployed more widely.”

Not only will that require continual activity on the science and technology front, she adds, but also in developing appropriate guidelines and regulations to ensure that CRISPR’s applications move forward responsibly.

Doudna’s talk took place on April 4 as part of Brilliance of Berkeley, a course offered every spring by the College of Letters and Science that celebrates the campus’s exceptional faculty and their accomplishments. Each week, students listen to two guest lectures by top Berkeley scholars from an array of fields, followed by a Q&A.

Watch the video on the Brilliance of Berkeley YouTube page.

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

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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 rollbacks.

Those interviews, which aired on KALW, became The Stakes Explained, a multimedia series where Berkeley professors, frontline journalists and community members unpack President Trump’s executive orders and actions to see what’s at stake for U.S. democracy.

In this Berkeley Talks episode, we’re sharing an hourlong special about The Stakes Explained that aired on KALX in July. In it, we hear several interviews with Berkeley scholars featured in the series, including law professor Sarah Song and Travis Bristol, an associate professor in the School of Education. They and other experts break down some of Trump’s executive orders, from those targeting diversity, equity and inclusion in education to others that are reshaping the immigration system and immigration enforcement.

Learn more about The Stakes Explained and watch videos of the interviews on UC Berkeley Journalism’s website.

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

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Photo by Alicia Chiang/UC Berkeley Journalism.

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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, pay at least as high an effective tax rate as those in the middle class.

“For the first time in decades,” he continues, “billionaires would pay at least the same effective tax rate as nurses, teachers or secretaries, ending a situation where, in many countries, the very richest pay less than the middle class. It’s a modest, pragmatic reform, but it would make a big difference for our democracies and social cohesion.”

Zucman spoke at Berkeley on June 23 as part of the campus’s annual Stone Lecture series. Now a professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics, Zucman previously served on the Berkeley faculty for a decade, first as an assistant professor of economics and then as founding director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality. He co-authored the 2019 book The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay with Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez.

Watch a video of his lecture, followed by a Q&A.

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

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Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley.

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