Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Bestselling author and popular speaker Suneel Gupta knows what it's like to fail and to succeed. He's done both, and he says the key to creating a balanced, joyous life that integrates ambition, work and well-being is to find your dharma—your inner calling. He says we’ve been conditioned, from an early age, to believe that one day we’ll reach a moment of “arrival.” But no matter how much we achiev...

For thousands of years, the American buffalo evolved alongside Indigenous people who relied on them for food and shelter, and, in exchange for killing them, revered the animal. For millennia, this totemic animal lived in symbiotic relationship with grasslands throughout North America, then – in less than 100 years – new settlers and hunters brought their numbers from 30 million to the mere hundred...

The past three years of the pandemic and the widespread practice of working from home have had a huge impact on our cities, businesses, individuals, and real estate of all types around the world. What will the future look like when considering long-term trends in population, employment, office attendance, housing prices, and other factors? Join us for a special presentation featuring the results o...

When Joe Biden took his oath of office, the trajectory of his presidency—and the fate of our nation—remained unknown. Thousands of Americans were still sick with COVID, former presidents and first ladies sat masked on the balcony of the Capitol building—while Biden’s predecessor was notably absent. Just two weeks prior, the same building was under siege by a group of insurrectionists who sought to...

Congressman Ro Khanna has made a name for himself as a pragmatic progressive and critic of Big Oil. He grilled oil company CEOs under oath and helped negotiate with Senator Joe Manchin to keep climate policy in the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest piece of climate legislation ever passed in the United States. Despite being one of the more progressive voters in Congress, Khanna has a reputation...

Are you one in a million? One in a billion? What if an app could pick you out of a crowd based on your face alone?  New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds,...

Who is the most successful woman ever to compete on "Jeopardy"? Amy Schneider’s impressive 40-game winning streak was accompanied by an even greater prize—the joy of being herself on national television and blazing a trail for openly queer and transgender people around the world. Her new memoir, In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life explores some of the innumerable topi...

Jane Fonda has spent the last several decades fighting for Indigenous peoples' rights, economic justice, LGBTQ rights, peace, gender equality and more. Now, she is devoting herself to the climate emergency, beginning with Fire Drill Fridays, the national movement to protest government inaction on climate change she started in October 2019. Now, through the Jane Fonda Climate PAC, she is focused on...

Feel like you are always running out of time? What would you do differently with an extra 25 years of longevity to build a fulfilled life?  Please join us for a conversation on making the most of our increased longevity and designing lives with greater well-being, meaning and purpose. Dr. Laura Carstensen and Mark T. Johnsen will touch on the multiple facets of building a wealthier life with incre...

The climate crisis can be difficult to cover in a way that most people can relate to. The mechanism of harm goes from a person's gas car or stove to the Earth's atmosphere and back again in the form of floods and fires. That's why true stories of individuals and families experiencing the fallout of the climate crisis can be so impactful. They help us relate to each other on a more direct level, th...

The Bay Lights by artist Leo Villareal first went live on March 5, 2013. Exactly one decade later, the beloved artwork went dark. Ben Davis is the driving force behind The Bay Lights and the effort to bring the artwork back with twice the number of LEDs in a radically accessible new configuration. With the project 75 percent funded—and $2.5 million more needed to proceed—Davis will reveal what's n...

Fourteen years after receiving its permit, the nation’s first new nuclear reactors in decades just fired up in Georgia. Massive, traditional nuclear reactors like this have faced so many cost overruns and construction delays that the investment market for them all but vanished. Despite a handful of recent technical breakthroughs in fusion power, its promise of virtually limitless power remains jus...

In recent years, political and social turbulence have given rise to a new urgency around civics education in the United States. Civic leaders, educators and politicians across the ideological spectrum claim that reviving civics in schools will compensate for decades of neglect and ensure the future of our fragile democracy. But more civics learning doesn’t necessarily mean better civics learning....

Join us for a discussion with journalist Katie Hafner, who covers scientific advances, especially those by women, and her husband, Dr. Robert Wachter of UCSF, who is on the forefront of the digital transformation of health care and has been influential in advancing public understanding of the COVID crisis. Dr. Wachter coined the term “hospitalist” in 1996 and has overseen that medical specialty, t...

Since the industrial revolution, the global north has seen massive economic growth. Yet that growth has been linked to increasing greenhouse gas emissions. We also live on a planet with finite resources, so it's hard to believe that we can continue to consume resources and release emissions and not sail right past our collective climate goals. That’s why some people are starting to rethink perpetu...

Famed astronomer Avi Loeb returns to The Commonwealth Club to answer some of the biggest questions facing humankind: How do we prepare ourselves for interaction with interstellar extraterrestrial life? And can our species itself become interstellar? Loeb, the longest-serving chair of Harvard's Astronomy Department, shook the scientific community when he theorized that our solar system had been vis...

Summer's over and fall is about to begin. Come on out to our beautiful headquarters on San Francisco's waterfront for an end-of-summer Week to Week political roundtable! 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 Politic...

In today’s world, the acceleration of megatrends—increasing longevity and the explosion of technology, among many others—is transforming life as we know it. Leading sociologist and business economist Mauro F. Guillén explains that a new postgenerational workforce known as “perennials”—individuals who are not pitted against each other either by their age or experience—will level the playing field s...

Stories are the way we remember, the way we share knowledge, the way we play out possible outcomes. Climate fiction imagines dark or bright futures depending on how we address the climate crisis. And there’s a healthy debate about what kind of stories move more people to act: dark tales of a scary climate future or positive versions of a greener, more just world. “I think that if you want to creat...

Two eclipses of the sun are coming to North America during the 2023–24 school year—an annular (“ring of fire”) eclipse on October 14, 2023 and a total eclipse on April 8, 2024. People in two narrow paths will have the full eclipse experience each time. Everyone else (an estimated 500 million people, including all of us in the Bay Area) will see a nice partial eclipse, where the moon covers a good...

As the build out of infrastructure for electric passenger vehicles gets underway, another segment of transportation is just starting down the road to electrification: heavy duty trucks. It’s one of the hard-to-decarbonize parts of our economy. Right now, nearly all long-haul trucks run on fossil fuels. And if we continue with business as usual, freight will become the highest-emitting part of the...

Michelle Meow will sit down with American actress and transgender activist Shakina, to discuss the current state and future of the transgender arts and how we can uplift and support their community.  Join us for this free program in Palo Alto! This program is part of a collaboration with TheatreWorks New Works Festival: Songs and Stories with Shakina. Please visit https://theatreworks.org/new-work...

By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer shifts our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and focuses on how those who were enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California's appetite for slavery persists today in the trafficking in human beings who are lured by promises of jobs but who in...

With unprecedented numbers of anti-trans and anti-LBTQ+ bills being presented in state legislatures across the country, Tiffany Woods says it is critical that we stand up and fight for trans, nonbinary, and LGBTQ+ people now more than ever. In 2023, more than 500 anti-trans bills have been introduced in 36 states across the country, rolling back decades of progress on trans rights fueled by transp...

This year is shaping up to be the hottest year in 125,000 years. It may also be the coolest year a child born today will ever see. In “The Quickening,” science writer Elizabeth Rush documents her journey to Antarctica’s infamous “doomsday” glacier as she contemplates what it would mean for her to have a child at this time of radical change. In “Humanity’s Moment,” IPCC climate scientist Joëlle Ger...