California Live!

The Cal Alumni Association and California magazine have partnered with BAMPFA on this exciting speakers’ series. California Live! puts UC Berkeley’s most distinguished faculty and alums in one place for scintillating discussions about the things that interest people most: the future of technology, cutting-edge discoveries in science, our swiftly changing social landscape, wellness in an unwell world, dynamics in literature and art.

Each event features an exciting discussion with a Berkeley luminary, followed by Q&A with the audience.

Previous Events

 March 26, 2026 

Alone in the Algorithm: Human Connection in the Age of AI

A conversation with Prof. Jodi Halpern and technologist Jaron Lanier

Social media was supposed to connect us to the people we cared most about and yet we’ve never been more alone. Now come AI chatbots promising to be our tutors, therapists, coaches and companions—even our lovers. But what do we lose when we turn to AI for what was once the exclusive province of human connection?

Join California magazine’s Pat Joseph in conversation with UC Berkeley Professor Jodi Halpern and renowned technologist Jaron Lanier to explore the seductions and dangers of artificial intelligence against the backdrop of America’s deepening loneliness epidemic.

 March 27, 2025 

Enthralled: What Explains Our Unshakeable Fascination with Cults?

Prof. Poulomi Saha and California magazine’s Pat Joseph discuss what the surge of movies and documentaries about cults reveals about us.

Dozens of movies and documentaries about cults are currently streaming on services like Netflix and Hulu, while the number of podcasts and short videos devoted to the subject may number in the hundreds. What explains this explosion of interest?

Join California magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph in conversation with Poulomi Saha, who teaches the highly popular course “Cults in Popular Culture” and is currently working on a book titled Enthralled, about America’s long obsession with “communities and philosophies that offer total belief and total enthrallment—even and especially as we might claim that we would never ourselves join.”

 September 5, 2024 

What If Seeing Is No Longer Believing? Democracy and Disinformation in the Age of Deepfakes

with Hany Farid

Join California magazine’s Pat Joseph in conversation with Professor Hany Farid, whose lab has pioneered the field of digital forensics to authenticate media in the age of increasingly credible fake news.

Hany Farid is a professor at UC Berkeley with a joint appointment in electrical engineering and computer sciences and the School of Information. He is also a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, Berkeley Institute for Data Science, Center for Innovation in Vision and Optics, Development Engineering, Vision Science Program, and is a senior faculty advisor for the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

 March 28, 2024 

Will AI Be Humanity’s Last Act?

with Stuart Russell

Join California magazine Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph in conversation with Professor Stuart Russell, head of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence, about both the tremendous promise and considerable perils of artificial intelligence.

In 2023, TIME magazine counted Stuart Russell among the 100 Most Influential People in AI. He is coauthor, with Peter Norvig, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the standard text on AI, and the author of Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control, judged among the best science and technology books of 2019. A professor of electrical engineering and computer science and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley, he is also an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at UC San Francisco and Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics.

 September 7, 2023 

Life, the Universe and Everything
with Alex Filippenko

California magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Pat Joseph and astrophysicist and educator Alex Filippenko discuss Life, the Universe and Everything at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). Pat and Alex cover topics including the mysteries of dark energy and findings from the James Webb Space Telescope, as well as the Great American Total Solar Eclipse of 2024!