I am a professor at the @UofCalifornia. I am appalled by the conduct of one of its Regents, Scott Galloway, appointed in August by Governor Newsom. @profgalloway is one of only 26 voting Regents entrusted with governing a university system serving hundreds of thousands of students & employing tens of thousands of faculty & staff. Twice, first on a live Pivot episode featuring Hillary Clinton & on Prof G with Fareed Zakaria, Galloway called Elon Musk a “traitor to the West.” He invoked Julius & Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed for espionage, and declared that Musk should be held to the same standards. He didn’t explicitly demand Musk’s execution. But invoking the deaths of two convicted spies while calling an American citizen a traitor makes the implication hard to miss. Musk has not been convicted of treason. Indeed, “treason against the West” isn’t even an actual crime. Now imagine UCLA alumnus @BenShapiro, appointed a UC Regent, saying the same about George Soros. Would the Governor defend his right to serve? Would Regent leadership shrug and call it provocative commentary? Or would there be demands for resignation? But there’s something worse here than another of Scott’s trademark podcast rants. He sits on the Regents’ Academic & Student Affairs Committee. The committee’s charter says it oversees student conduct, faculty conduct, academic personnel, & campus climate, among other responsibilities. This is not some honorary title. The Board sets university policy, controls institutional budgets, & appoints senior university leadership. You can unsubscribe from a podcast. A student who finds Scott’s comments morally repugnant can’t unsub from the Regents. UC bylaws require Regents to serve the public trust with a “high degree of ethics and candor,” including as private citizens. Professors owe students intellectual integrity. Regents bear an even greater duty: they govern institutions that teach it. Yet a Regent serving on the committee responsible for student & faculty conduct invokes executions while labeling a fellow citizen a traitor. What does that say to our students? That intellectual restraint is expected of the governed but optional for those who govern? That standards of conduct depend on whether the target of your rhetoric is politically fashionable to despise, as long as the audience applauds? This isn’t about defending @ElonMusk. He needs no defense from me. Nor is it about silencing Scott. As if that were possible. He’s free to express his opinions, however reckless they may be. But freedom of speech is not freedom from accountability, and holding a university office of public trust is not an entitlement. There is an enormous moral chasm between exercising your right to speak recklessly and demonstrating the judgment required of one of the 26 people who govern our great public university. The UC Board of Regents isnt a podcast sponsors can boycott. It’s a public trust. One final irony. At @NYUStern, Galloway teaches Brand Strategy, including a session on crisis management. His own prescription for leadership in a crisis is unequivocal: acknowledge the problem, have leadership take responsibility, and “overcorrect.” He’s praised the departure of corporate leaders as evidence of effective crisis management. Now Galloway himself sits on the UC Board of Regents. Will he hold himself to the standards he teaches, or does accountability apply only to other people’s institutions? Professor lecture thyself! I believe Scott Galloway should seriously consider whether his continued service on the Board of Regents is consistent with the ethical standards and responsibilities of that office, or whether he should resign. I welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with Galloway directly, including what standards we should expect of those entrusted with governing the world’s best university. Scott, you have an open invitation to join me on @Into_Impossible for an honest conversation.

In the year 2026, after a storm of unusual violence, I was cast upon a shore that no chart had ever recorded. Koch island as I named it, was small enough that, standing on a low hill, I could see its entire extent. Its meadows and woods occupied a finite space — a man might, with diligence, paint every inch of its surface before nightfall. Yet when I set out to walk its circumference, the path refused to end. Each stretch of beach I thought familiar dissolved, upon closer approach, into a jagged promontory: the middle third of every shore replaced by two new sides of a smaller triangle, thrusting seaward. What had been one length became four, each a third as long. I walked for hours. The island remained no larger, yet the distance before me grew without bound. No matter how carefully I followed the water’s edge, I could not complete the circuit in any finite time. A native, watching me from the trees, explained in a language of gestures that the coastline lived between dimensions. Magnify any portion by three and four identical copies appeared. Its measure, he indicated, was the logarithm of four divided by the logarithm of three — greater than a line, less than a surface. Continuous underfoot, yet nowhere could a straight staff be laid truly tangent to the shore. I had nearly abandoned the attempt when, from the interior of the island, a low horn sounded — long, pure, and unending. The native smiled and pointed toward a narrow, tapering valley that ran farther than the eye could follow. “Gabriel’s,” he said. “You may fill it with a finite measure of wine, yet no amount of paint will ever coat its walls.” I listened a long while, and did not try to walk around either wonder again.

Daniel Dennett, in his final interview: "You're not entitled to your own truth." I will never forget what he told me: some science isn't worth pursuing, but truth always matters, and we should hold people responsible for badly informed beliefs. Is believing something false without checking a moral failure, or just human? Full interview:

Daniel Dennett, in his final interview: "You're not entitled to your own truth." I will never forget what he told me: some science isn't worth pursuing, but truth always matters, and we should hold people responsible for badly informed beliefs. Is believing something false without checking a moral failure, or just human? Full interview:

Is yesterday more real than tomorrow? A) Yesterday: we have records of it B) Only the present is real C) All times are equally real D) Other (tell me below) @jimalkhalili says physicists are being sloppy about time. ⏳

Wharton AI Researcher: If AI Froze Today, It Would Still Rewrite Your Job @emollick Timestamps: 00:00 AI writes good papers now. Taste is the weak spot. 03:14 The jagged frontier: math olympiad gold, but not the Rs in strawberry 06:30 Deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency 09:44 Escalator or eschaton? 16:02 Does AI simulate wisdom or actually have it 23:46 The labs keep AI in English. Here is why. 32:28 Roles blur. Everyone does everything now. 36:42 My kids say I sound like Claude. They might be right. 38:12 AI found errors in his sources that his fact-checkers missed 46:34 What to do before giving a child access to AI

Wharton AI Researcher: If AI Froze Today, It Would Still Rewrite Your Job @emollick Timestamps: 00:00 AI writes good papers now. Taste is the weak spot. 03:14 The jagged frontier: math olympiad gold, but not the Rs in strawberry 06:30 Deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency 09:44 Escalator or eschaton? 16:02 Does AI simulate wisdom or actually have it 23:46 The labs keep AI in English. Here is why. 32:28 Roles blur. Everyone does everything now. 36:42 My kids say I sound like Claude. They might be right. 38:12 AI found errors in his sources that his fact-checkers missed 46:34 What to do before giving a child access to AI

Is yesterday more real than tomorrow? A) Yesterday: we have records of it B) Only the present is real C) All times are equally real D) Other (tell me below) @jimalkhalili says physicists are being sloppy about time. ⏳

Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) at Carnegie Hall, and I get to sit across from him Genes and the Meaning of Life October 20 | 7:00 PM | Carnegie Hall Fifty years ago, a 35-year-old zoologist gave us the gene's eye view, the word "meme," and a book that rearranged how we think about life itself. Now Richard Dawkins takes the Carnegie Hall stage for the first time, and I'll be in the chair beside him. We'll go past the greatest hits: his new work on the "genetic book of the dead," the idea that every creature is a readable archive of the worlds its ancestors survived. And a question I keep turning over: could our own genes be a giant colony of cooperating viruses? Get your tickets here -