Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

As government officials, diplomats and business leaders from across the Asia-Pacific converge in San Francisco for APEC 2023 Leaders Week, the question on everyone’s lips is: What next for the U.S.-China relationship? Amid the climate crisis, which necessitates urgent energy transition, how do the two largest economies work together against the backdrop of geopolitical tension? Where does Californ...

Colleges and universities across the country are the scenes of controversy these days, with students, faculty, lawmakers and donors all seemingly locked in high-volume debate over campus rights, free speech, human rights and international conflicts. Almost every institution of higher education touts its ability to set its graduates on a course for successful careers in their desired fields. Also h...

One of the most common questions people ask about climate is: what can I do? Since time is one of our most valuable resources – and we spend so much of our time at work – changing jobs may be the most effective individual climate action a person can take. Those changes could be big or small: Leaving the oil and gas industry for geothermal, or helping to bring down the emissions where you already w...

A Special Program for Families 家族向け特別プログラム “This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we?” – Dorothea Lange 「これが私たちがやったことです。なぜこのようなことが起きたのか？なぜこのようなことができたのか？」―ラング·ドロティア Fueled by racist fears and wartime hysteria, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945, many of them families...

We've all been through a lot in the past five years, but it's difficult to figure out what it all means, and how it applies to our shared existence in this democratic experiment. Heather Cox Richardson aims to remedy that.  As a historian she has been examining and explaining modern events aided by her deep understanding of history and insight into the forces working for and against democracy. In...

On November 22, 1963, the visual images of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, arguably the most significant crime in modern day history, were seared into the permanent memories of many who were then young adults, teens or children and have continued through the ages for those who have become obsessed with the president’s death. Sixty years later, the yearning for better answers to the...

Cancel culture—the term and the practice—has left its mark on American culture, business, academia and society at all levels over the past few years. Was it inevitable? Is it permanent? Or is it, as authors Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott argue, a dysfunctional part of how Americans battle for power, status and dominance? They say it is just a symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rh...

Climate affects everyone, but not equally. Those affected first and worst are often the same communities that suffer from housing and income inequality, and climate and societal injustice. Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Jr. has made striving for social, economic, and climate justice his lifelong pursuit. Rising to prominence in the Hip Hop community, Yearwood brought like-minded artists and creatives toget...

The Arts Member-led Forum and San Francisco Opera’s Department of Diversity, Equity and Community invite you to a powerful and thought-provoking panel discussion. As home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States, the Bay Area might have special interest in the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for music, Omar, by Grammy Award-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens and composer Michael Abels...

Take a walk on the warped side with this in-person program featuring stars in their respective fields. The new book The Warped Side of Our Universe is the result of the collaboration of Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne and award-winning artist Lia Halloran. It brings to vivid life the wonders and wildness of our universe’s “Warped Side”―objects and phenomena made from warped space and time, from collidin...

We constantly hear about cybercrime in the news, but do you have the knowledge to protect yourself from it?  In this talk, information security expert Dr. Carrie Gates will cover the clues that can alert you to something being a scam, along with some of the common types of attacks, such as phishing, smishing and vishing. Dr. Gates joined Bank of America in October 2018 as a senior vice president i...

Join us in-person for a Halloween edition of our political discussion series. At Week to Week, we're dedicated to the lively and informed discussion of politics—with a good sense of humor—as a platform for healthy involvement in the issues that drive our society. The Commonwealth Club's Week to Week Political Roundtable and social hour, now in its 12th year, will take a look at the politics of the...

The popular image of Edgar Allan Poe is that of a sickly, gloomy, dour fellow obsessed with all things eerie and terrifying. Tragically, both for his personal life and because it reinforced this literary myth, Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. The literary effect of his untimely...

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit has been examining hope and the unpredictability of change for over 20 years. In 2023 she co-edited an anthology called, “It’s Not Too Late,” which serves as a guidebook for changing the climate narrative from despair to possibility. How can we find hope on a warming planet? Guests:  Rebecca Solnit, Writer, Historian, Activist For show notes and relat...

The last five decades have seen the dramatic globalization of organized crime and corruption, now totaling trillions of dollars every year. Using the latest technology and the help of a “criminal services industry” — corrupt bankers, lawyers, accountants—criminal networks and the world’s most corrupt officials easily loot, launder, and hide stolen money for future use. This stolen, hidden money po...

“Country music is the people’s music. It just speaks about real life and about truth and it tells things how they really are.” —Faith Hill Miko Marks and Tookta Topline are two women who have both embraced and recoiled from the major music scenes in Nashville and Thailand before finding their true voices in San Francisco. Join us for a night of musical performance and conversation about how race a...

Will 2024 be America's last free and fair election?  That ominous warning comes from Stuart Stevens, a former chief Republican strategist whose clients included President George W. Bush; Senators Chuck Grassley, Dick Lugar and Dan Coats; and Governors Haley Barbour, John Kyl, Bill Weld and many others. He says the GOP is dragging our country toward autocracy, and the party is no longer a "normal"...

Think you know San Francisco and the rest of California? Think again. Two new books, Oldest San Francisco, and Secret California: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure, will inspire you to seek out spots even locals will be surprised to learn about and inspired to visit. Oldest San Francisco, by Alec Scott, draws a picture of the sudden city that exploded in the Gold Rush. It tells the stori...

Throughout his career, Rajiv J. Shah has tackled some of the world’s most intractable challenges head on. At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Shah played an integral role in the colossal effort to vaccinate 900 million children. At the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) under President Obama, he led the U.S. response to the Haiti earthquake and the West African Ebola pa...

Laughter can be good medicine, but when is it okay to laugh at something as deadly serious as the climate crisis? Jokes help us remember information that otherwise might not be retained. A snappy punchline can be a powerful way to get a message through to an audience. Comedy can also be a way for performers and audiences alike to cope with a shared societal problem, like climate or social justice....

It's a challenge to make the best decisions in a world that is unpredictable and full of contradictions. Help is now available in the form of advice from quantum physicist Jim Al-Khalili, who shares 8 lessons from the heart of science that he says can help people get the most out of life. As he writes in The Joy of Science, Al-Khalili invites people to engage with the world as scientists have been...

As CNN’s anchor and chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper is one of the most respected journalists in news today. He is also a best-selling author, and his heart-pounding new thriller All the Demons Are Here takes us back to the 1970s, with two unforgettable characters encountering many of the real-life figures and events that defined one of the wildest and most dangerous decades in American...

At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately one minute, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death and trapped many alive. For the next three days, fires ignited and nearly destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West. Join us...

Disasters caused by burning fossil fuels are becoming more frequent, and in the aftermath of hurricanes, floods and wildfires, federal and state responses are often slow or insufficient. There is a growing body of research showing that neighborhood ties can be the difference between life and death: Socially connected neighbors are less likely to die from excessive heat or other extreme weather eve...

Join us for the 13th annual Lundberg Institute Lecture, featuring Bob Matthews of MediSync discussing the advances artificial intelligence is making in health care. AI’s advances into various health-care fields have recently burst into public consciousness—generating excitement, concern and confusion among lay and professional observers. AI has already been relied upon in genomic medicine and in t...