Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Everyone knows her name. Mary Trump grew up in a family divided by its patriarch’s relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump—the highly accomplished, dashing eldest son of wealthy real estate developer Fred Trump—and Linda Clapp—a flight attendant from a working-class family—Mary lived in the shadow of Freddy’s humiliation at the hands of his father. Fred Trump embodied th...

For 13 turbulent and consequential months, H.R. McMaster served as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the hyper partisanship of American politics. Join us as McMaster shares his stories of helping an unpredictable president drive necessary shifts in U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment in history. He says that while all...

Tom Steyer rose to public prominence as the billionaire investor and climate organizer who ran for president in the 2020 election on a climate-first platform. While he didn’t secure the Democratic nomination, his dedication to supporting and advancing climate solutions has remained steadfast.  In his new book, “Cheaper, Better, Faster: How We’ll Win the Climate War,” Steyer argues that we are in a...

The U.S. military is one of the world’s largest consumers of fossil fuels. And its carbon pollution is equally huge. At the same time, climate disruption is already amplifying crises and conflicts around the world — making climate change, in the words of one military expert, “a threat multiplier.” The Department of Defense has been making moves to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. The Air For...

Has the U.S. Constitution become a threat to American democracy? Does it need to be dramatically changed or replaced if secession is to be avoided? Join us as Erwin Chemerinsky returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to share his deeply troubled thoughts of the Constitution’s inherent flaws. The dean of the UC Berkeley law school came to the sobering conclusion that our nearly 250-year-old foun...

Bankruptcy is the busiest federal court in America. In theory, bankruptcy in America exists to cancel or restructure debts for people and companies that have way too many debts—a safety valve designed to provide a mechanism for restarting lives and businesses when things go wrong financially. Legal scholar Melissa B. Jacoby argues that bankruptcy has also become an escape hatch for powerful indivi...

People think they know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top; he controls the police; the police threaten the people with violence; there are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks compose...

The leaders at the top of the Republican Party want the U.S. to double down on carbon-intensive oil and gas — and avoid reckoning with the damage they cause.  As temperatures continue to rise, a majority of young Republican voters say clinging to that stance could spell trouble for the sustainability of the GOP. And yet, conservatives aren’t a monolith when it comes to climate. A small wing of the...

Dr. Paul Alan Cox is an American ethnobotanist whose scientific research focuses on discovering new medicines by studying patterns of wellness and illness among Indigenous peoples.  Chosen by Time magazine as one of 11 Heroes of Medicine, Dr. Cox leads a remarkable team of world-class scientists. Their objective is singular: to improve patient outcomes for individuals suffering from Alzheimer's, A...

In 2020, Latinos became the second largest ethnic voting group in the United States. They make up the largest plurality of residents in the most populous states in the union, as well as the fastest-growing segment of the most important swing states in the U.S. Electoral College. Fitting neither the stereotype of the aggrieved minority voter nor the traditional assimilating immigrant group, Latinos...

President Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on July 21, and in the few weeks since, Vice President Kamala Harris has garnered enough delegates to become the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. During the Democratic National Convention in a couple of weeks, the party will feature its new challenger to Donald Trump. For months, Biden had trailed Trump in the polls, but Harris...

The nation’s electric grid needs to be expanded and made more reliable for our future energy demands and climate forecasts. The way we’ve built transmission in the past — regionally siloed with short term planning — is now suffering from reliability and capacity issues and won’t work for the next century. The Department of Energy is drafting plans for national transmission corridors to help speed...

For weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, John J. Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, was warning that it would happen. When troops finally crossed the border, he was woken in the middle of the night with a prearranged code. The signal was even more bracing than the February cold: it meant that Sullivan needed to collect his bodyguards and get to the embassy as soon as possible. The war...

Last year was the hottest in recorded history, and this summer, much of the United States has already experienced record-shattering heat waves. That leaves millions of workers risking their health and possibly even their lives while on the job. And the danger is not limited to those who work outdoors. Warehouses, restaurants, and other indoor spaces are heating up. Most jobs lack heat protection f...

Join author Jeffrey Fuhrer , whose 27 years of experience at the Boston Fed informed his breakthrough expose about how false narratives about racism and meritocracy broke our economy. He argues that systemic racism continues to produce vastly disparate outcomes, and that our brand of capitalism doesn't reduce disparities. Jeffrey will be joined in conversation by Akilah Monifa, a trained lawyer an...

In about a week’s time, the election changed—bigly, you might say. An assassination attempt, a huge court victory for former President Trump, the Republican National Convention, President Biden ends his reelection campaign, and Vice President Harris grabs the baton. It’s a whole new ballgame, and we’ll tackle those developments and more in our next political roundtable. Join us for a mid-summer di...

Join us to celebrate the 50th anniversary of August 8, 1974, the day President Richard Nixon resigned, and to remember an era in which there were still stark limits to what presidents could do and keep a straight face. Stephen Talbot will screen his film, The Movement and the "Madman", which debuted in 2023 on the PBS series "American Experience." Talbot’s 82-minute film tells the story of how two...

John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. Critics say that vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for mi...

Frank Price will moderate a conversation between Gregg Hurwitz and Kevin Compton, both experts in "Thrillers, Tech, and Ethics in a Rapidly Changing World." Join us for a fast-paced discussion with plenty of twists to keep you on your toes. Gregg Hurwitz is a New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary a...

This week we take a trip to Mexico, a petrostate that just elected climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum as its next president. She’s also the former mayor of Mexico City, the largest city in North America, which has been going through a major water crisis due to climate change. It’s at risk of running out of water — and it has been for a long time. In fact, much of the country is coping with drough...

The Summer Olympic Games are here! That means more than 300 events, ten thousand athletes and millions of spectators coming to watch. And the athletes are not the only ones with an Olympian task; the organizers of the Paris Games pledged to make their event emit only half of the carbon pollution of the 2012 London Games.  In order to make that happen, they are trying to do more — by doing less. In...

The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California and The Consulate of Colombia in San Francisco are pleased to invite you to the inauguration of the photographic exhibition Foto-Diásporas, a traveling exhibition making its debut in San Francisco. The exhibition is a research and creative project about Colombians' forced cross-border migration. Through the eyes and voices of 15 Colombian men and w...

This November, voters may have the rare opportunity to choose based on the records of two administrations that have each already had one turn at the helm. Regardless of who ends up at the top of the Democratic ticket, when it comes to climate in particular, a lot is at stake.  As Biden’s presidency winds down, the administration has been enacting numerous climate initiatives on top of his already...

Join us for a special program in which vintner Tor Kenward shares a lifetime of great wines, famous friends, deep knowledge and insider insights. Kenward will draw from his book Reflections of a Vintner, which recounts the lessons learned, relationships forged and observations made from an insider’s nearly 50-year journey through the burgeoning wine industry in Napa Valley. From the mid-seventies,...

In an era when America’s chief rival, China, has ordered that all commercial firms within its borders make their research and technology available for military exploitation, strengthening the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley is an urgent necessity, argue Raj Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff. They come to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to offer an inside look at an elite unit withi...