Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

How has consumer and business banking changed in 2025? What can we expect in the future? Tim Myers, president and chief executive officer at Bank of Marin, will take us through the challenges that financial institutions, businesses and consumers will face in 2025. Join us for this important discussion. Organizer: Frank Price   An International Relations Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club...

It is hard to believe that February 12, 2025, marks the 21-year anniversary of when then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom sparked a ground-breaking civil rights movement by legalizing same-sex marriage. In doing so, he not only changed our nation’s views on life, love and marriage, but demonstrated the power of how a community can change discriminatory laws in its pursuit for equality.  Join us fo...

From hurricanes on the East Coast to wildfires in LA, to floods in Vermont and storms in Texas, communities across the U.S. are facing a growing number of intense and devastating disasters. There are significant disparities in who has the means to evacuate during a disaster and who has the resources to rebuild once the storm has passed. Long after the immediate impact, the challenges continue, wit...

It's our anniversary! In February 2012, Week to Week debuted, starting an ongoing community with civil discussions about sometimes heated topics. Join us in-person or online for the latest edition of our Week to Week political roundtable, and get set to talk about new leadership in San Francisco, DOGE and executive orders in Washington, and much more.  Come early for a pre-program social hour with...

Award-winning investigative journalist Charles Piller joins us in San Francisco for an in-depth look at what he says is a world of fraud, corruption, deceit, and greed that have set back important work on treating Alzheimer’s disease. Nearly seven million Americans live with Alzheimer’s, a tragedy that is projected to grow into a $1 trillion crisis by 2050. While families suffer and promises of ph...

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between publ...

The crisis of American Christianity has become a crisis for democracy, says award-winning journalist Jonathan Rauch. A lifelong atheist, he is warning that the waning of the church in this country is tied to the waning of our democracy. What happens to American democracy if Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends? In...

Reject the default path, define your priorities, and achieve lasting happiness with this transformative guide to your dream life—that’s Sahil Bloom’s recipe for a life centered around five types of wealth. Bloom says that throughout your life, you’ve been slowly indoctrinated to believe that money is the only type of wealth; in reality, your wealthy life may involve money, but in the end, it will...

Tension is high this time of year, personally and politically, and award-winning University of Michigan Professor Ethan Kross is in town for a special evening to help explore how emotions work and how we can manage them. An international speaker and bestselling author, his first book, Chatter, helped readers understand how to change the "voice" in our head. And now he returns with his new book, Sh...

The Phoenicians were the most civilized people of the Near East and the greatest businessmen and conduits of culture of the ancient world (e.g., they gave us all the alphabet). Their expansion westward across the Mediterranean, driven by the trade in metal ore, is told in myth, archaeology, and the accounts of the people they impacted (including the Berbers, Etruscans, Greeks and Romans). The Phoe...

At this moment, the cheapest way to create electricity is by pointing a solar panel at the sun. That’s good news for the climate. It’s also good news for communities who want to take control of their own electricity generation. In the heart of Brooklyn, UPROSE is helping to build a solar project that will be owned by the community, provide jobs, and help residents bring down their energy costs. In...

Joan Baez returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs nearly 45 years after she came here to discuss “Human Rights in the Eighties.” She's coming back not for a performance but for an in-depth talk about her personal thoughts and life experiences—the person behind the stardom. Baez has been writing poetry for decades, but she’s never before shared it publicly. Now in her book of poems When You See...

More than a century of civil rights activism reached a mountaintop with the arrival of a Black man in the Oval Office. But hopes for a unified, post-racial America were deflated when Barack Obama’s presidency met with furious opposition. A white, right-wing backlash was brewing, and a volcanic new movement—a second civil rights movement—began to erupt.  In the highly anticipated follow-up to his E...

The advent of artificial intelligence has spawned numerous nightmare scenarios of a runaway technology negatively affecting everything from jobs to national security to individual rights. Now Reid Hoffman shares his unique insider’s perspective on an AI-powered future, making the case for its potential to unlock a world of possibilities. Imagine AI tutors personalizing education for each child, re...

“Ukraine is like porcelain, easy to break yet impossible to destroy.” —Slava Leontyev Join us for a Q&A with the co-director and the producer. Under roaring fighting jets as war ravages their homeland, three artists—Slava, Anya and Andrey—stay behind in their native Ukraine, defiantly finding beauty amid destruction. Armed with art, cameras and—for the first time in their lives—guns, they show tha...

Join us to learn about scientific achievements that might give you and your loved ones access to transformational treatment options today or in the near future.  Maybe you've heard about CRISPR gene editing or stem cell therapy in the headlines—now you can find out what these and other technologies really mean for you. Can you imagine if your cells could be taken from a simple blood draw, reprogra...

When individuals want to take action on climate, it’s often in the form of electrifying a home, voting, or maybe even traditional activism. Those are very important, but we often overlook how individual skills and talents can also make a difference.  This week we’re highlighting creative forms of climate action. Pattie Gonia is a drag queen, environmentalist and advocate for inclusivity and divers...

The Walter E. Hoadley Annual Economic Forecast, presented by Bank of America. Major changes are coming to tax, tariff, and regulatory policy in the wake of the November 2024 election. What impact will the new administration and Congress have on the economy in 2025? Will inflation be a big factor? How will our international trade fare? And will unemployment and consumer spending continue on their c...

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation about technology and humanity with Silicon Valley Read’s featured authors Charlee Dyroff (Loneliness & Company), Dr. Fei-Fei Li (The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI), and Ray Nayler (The Mountain in the Sea). Attendees are invited to come early to see two robot dogs and visit the Euphrat Museum of Art, for their spe...

The second Trump administration has hit the ground running. The president has signed a flurry of executive orders targeting everything from birthright citizenship to pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords. This is a far different moment from the first Trump term. The president is more focused, his team is more focused, and energy policy is at the top of their action list. However, the renewable...

The Chinese have a saying, or perhaps a curse: "May you live in interesting times." From Taiwan to Ukraine, the Middle East and now Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and the Gulf of Mexico—from existing conflicts and perhaps soon-to-be conflicts, these are interesting times we find ourselves living in. Who better to help us understand and navigate through the swirling news and events in the dawn...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, from predictive analytics to advanced data systems, has emerged as a catalyst for innovation. Yet, the criminal justice system lags decades behind, as more than 3,000 counties in the United States continue to rely on outdated and manual case management systems, making the path to justice far from linear. This technological gap means that while other sectors...

The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have caused incredible destruction — loss of life, thousands of homes and businesses gone or damaged and hundreds of thousands of people displaced. While the scale and speed of these fires may feel unprecedented, the dry, fire-prone foothills around LA burn often. Yet increasingly we see wildfires spurred by climate factors including warmer temperatures and weath...

How did the billionaire businessman Jimmy Lai become one of Hong Kong’s leading activists for democracy—and China’s most famous political prisoner today? Jimmy Lai escaped mainland China when he was 12 years old, at the height of a famine that killed tens of millions. In Hong Kong, he hustled; no work was beneath him, and he often slept on a table in a clothing factory where he did odd jobs. At 21...

California faces an urgent housing crisis: Median home prices are double the national average and while in 2016 it was projected that the state needed to build 3.5 million new homes by 2025 to meet demand, just one quarter of those have even been permitted. Is building new cities from scratch the solution—or is it just a Silicon Valley pipe dream? Join us for an eye-opening fireside chat with Gabe...