On September 25, 2025, I had the incredible privilege of joining my colleague Ramsey McGlazer at UC Berkeley, my alma mater, for a public conversation about my recent research and writing in the psychedelic humanities. You heard right, there were two Ram-zee’s in the house that day, geeking out like nobody’s business. The room was packed with an amazingly diverse audience of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, and many Bay Area community members interested in plant medicines and psychedelic healing practices. You’ll see that I was fully in my element at this event, talking freely and playfully about these ideas with dear friends and former mentors in the room. The Q&A was passionate and energetic. The Nerd from the Future team felt this was a perfect way to top off our first season, with a live episode of your host nerding out in front of a live audience.

After a season of tackling some of the biggest hot button issues relating to higher education today, I felt it was time to share with you how I became the thinker, teacher, and public intellectual you’ve been listening to all these weeks. I couldn’t possibly do that without introducing you all to my nerd from the future—the person who convinced me I could make a living, better yet, a life, as an intellectual. In this very season finale episode, we sit down with my great mentor Dr. Kathleen Moran, Emerita professor of American Studies at UC Berkeley, and another one of her former students, Justin Gomer, a professor of American Studies at Cal State Long Beach. Higher education brought Justin and I into Kathy’s luminous orbit. In my case, as an eager, nerdy undergraduate searching for my calling, in Justin’s, as an early career PhD student building the confidence to pursue his intellectual passions. But our incredible life-long bond with this brilliant, energetic, bold, and loving scholar was the unexpected outcome of years studying and growing alongside Kathy. Though the three of us come from different generations, in a way we’ve all grown up together: first as students and mentor, then as friends, then as colleagues, and now as chosen family. Since I graduated from Berkeley twenty-two years ago, Kathy has been like a second mother to me, one of my most enduring champions and cheerleaders, an avid reader of my scholarship, and of course, a model of the kind of teacher I always aspire to be to my students. In our wide-ranging conversation, the three of us share how we each traveled a different road to becoming our own version of a Nerd from the Future, while somehow managing to cross paths along the way, forever transforming one another at crucial moments in our lives. Over and over, we return to a central idea that has animated this podcast since our first episode: namely, that the magic of getting educated lies in the spontaneous, unpredictable collision of people willing and ready to be changed by the ideas and perspectives of others. Kathy, Justin, and I were the beneficiaries of this unexpected collision, one that can technically happen in any walk of life, but that the university specializes in. I could spend hours gushing about Kathy and the astonishing impact she’s had on my life, but I think I’ll let you see for yourself.

In this very special episode, I rejoin my bestie Cindy Cheng alongside our esteemed colleague Armando Ibarra, to talk about our own slice of the world, the University of Wisconsin, Madison (or the UW as it’s often affectionally called). Depending on what poll you look at, UW Madison is either the 26th or 10th highest ranked public university in the world. Founded in 1848, the university is one of the nation’s oldest land-grant institutions, supported directly by the federal government as a public institution serving the people of Wisconsin and the Midwest more broadly. In any given year we teach a total of over fifty-thousand students with a combined faculty and staff of over twenty-seven thousand personnel. Despite being the most prestigious university of the state, we accept 61% of our Wisconsin-based applicants, which reflects our deep commitment to educating as many state residents as possible; compare that to the acceptance rates of UCLA and UC Berkeley, which respectively land at 9 and 11%, reflecting an increasing move toward public schools as elite universities. UW Madison is driven by a core mission called “The Wisconsin Idea,” a phrase said to be coined by UW President Charles Van Hise in 1904, remembered by his famous quote, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state.” The Wisconsin Idea website captures the spirit of this charge simply: “One of the longest and deepest traditions surrounding the University of Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Idea signifies a general principle: that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom.” In this episode, we discuss the legacy of UW Madison's extraordinary work on behalf of the public good of Wisconsin and the toll that recent attacks on higher education have taken on the school's outreach efforts.