Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

John Boehner spent nearly 25 years in Congress and served as the 53rd speaker of the House. During his time, his responsibility and decision making to preserve the American Dream was driven by the values of economic freedom and individual liberty. When he announced his resignation, President Obama called to tell the outgoing speaker that he'd miss him. "Mr. President," Boehner replied, "yes you wi...

What does it mean to be a “real adult”? As a former dean of freshmen at Stanford University and the New York Times-bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult and Real American, author Lythcott-Haims has spent her career helping young adults pursue their goals. In her new book Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, Lythcott-Haims provides compassionate and practical guidance on how to navigate the wonders...

Please join us for a Tuesday morning inspirational talk on old-time radio programs by Noah Griffin, a native San Franciscan, former television talk show host and former radio broadcast host for WJIB in Boston, and KFOG and KGO in San Francisco. Griffin's connection with radio stems back to when as a 6-year-old in 1952 he was given his first Hopalong Cassidy radio. His presentation will be energizi...

Despite its historic role in American life, the U.S. Supreme Court has served a surprisingly impactful policymaking role in the United States over the past decade. Starting in 2011, when Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, until this March, Congress enacted hardly any major legislation outside of the tax law President Trump signed in 2017. In the same period, the Supreme Co...

Join us for a virtual discussion with Sabine Hossenfelder, live-streamed direct from Frankfurt, Germany, about her concern that theoretical physicists have failed to make any major breakthroughs for more than four decades because they are obsessed with the goal that an accurate theory must be beautiful—at least to mathematicians. Hossenfelder argues that when this belief in beauty becomes too dogm...

Dr. John Torres has spent his career fielding medical emergencies at home in the ER and abroad on humanitarian trips to Central and South America. As a U.S. Air Force veteran, he has been on the front lines of varying medical crises. As NBC News’ senior medical correspondent, he has spent the last year covering the COVID-19 pandemic. Dubbed “Dr. Disaster,” Torres has all the knowledge of best prac...

The impacts of climate change may come fast or slow. A wildfire amplified by drought may rip through a town in a matter of hours, or rising seas may take years to destroy a neighborhood. Health impacts may show up in months, or take the form of devastating cancer rates that rise over a decade. Regardless of speed or intensity, the climate emergency will impact us all. How do we live alongside clim...

When Isaac Newton established the laws of motion in 1687, he created a foundation of understanding that still guides physicists to scientific discoveries today. As studies evolve, scientists get closer to understanding the deepest mysteries of space and time. Once physicists can successfully combine theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, all forces in the universe will be recognized and tie...

The real-life tale of Ted Ngoy, "the Donut King," is one of fate, love, survival, hard knocks, and redemption. It's the rags to riches story of a refugee escaping Cambodia, arriving in America in 1975 and building an unlikely multi-million-dollar empire baking America's favorite pastry, the donut. He sponsored hundreds of visas for incoming refugees and helped them get on their feet teaching them...

Join us for a virtual discussion with Mustafa Akyol, who takes us on a fascinating journey into Islam's diverse history of ideas, and argues that the next "Islamic Enlightenment" may be on the horizon. Akyol diagnoses “the crisis of Islam” in the modern world and offers a way forward. Diving deeply into Islamic theology, and also sharing lessons from his own life story, he says Muslims lost the un...

Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent her decades in public service advocating for guaranteed rights and protections of all people. She transformed the legislative landscape by pioneering conversations on American freedom with a particular focus on gender equality. In the new book Justice, Justice Thou Shalt Pursue, UC Berkeley law school professor Amanda Tyler celebrates the life work of RBG to tell the stor...

Theoretical physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wants to share the wonders of the universe with people who might think they are inaccessible. As a professor at the University of New Hampshire in theoretical physics and women’s studies, Prescod-Weinstein teaches and studies the outer reaches of scientific understanding and seeks to make complex concepts understandable. In her new book The Disord...

Join us for a far-reaching conversation with co-authors Dr. Jane Mahakian and Alyson Kuhn about their practical guide for caregivers and the rest of us. Learning to communicate with someone with dementia is an enormous first step toward making that person’s life easier and richer in the moment. The more of us who want to talk and listen to people with dementia, the less “socially disappeared” they...

For many of us, the story of the American wilderness begins when Europeans arrived on these shores and began conquering it. The wide open spaces of the American West loom large in our country’s mythology. But what often gets written out is the history and culture of those native societies who were here to begin with - and whose relationship to this land is very different. And while one-percenters...

There have always been officials in the political arena who lie to appease their constituents and undermine their opponents. In recent years, lying and falsehoods have only worsened. All over the world, people circulate and amplify damaging lies through social media platforms that influence the masses. These untruths serve to plant seeds of doubt in everyday citizens, citizens who can no longer te...

Women in male-dominated industries face a wide-range of sexist and misogynist obstacles that bring moral and societal dilemmas to the forefront. In these industries, CNN's Brooke Baldwin says that women-led “huddles” are necessary to provide young women in the workplace with the necessary support, inspiration, and strength to succeed. These all-girl learning and work environments ensure that self-...

Monday Night Philosophy celebrates National Poetry Month (in partial atonement for a few harsh words about poetry in Plato's Republic) by virtually welcoming acclaimed poet Phillis Levin, the author of five books of poetry, to San Francisco. Since its inauguration in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with poets, p...

This is your Commonwealth Club week in review. Hear what you missed this week, and what we’ve got lined up for you next week. We’re always adding new programs - check out commonwealthclub.org/online for all of our upcoming events. If you haven’t already - please consider becoming a member of the Club. Enjoy exclusive discounts and access to special programs all while knowing your contributions dir...

Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya is home to more than 200,000 Somali refugees. Of these 200,000 people, 56 percent are children. These young boys and girls growing up in the world's largest refugee camp must resist recruitment into extremist groups, avoid brutality from security forces, and forego dangerous job opportunities. Asad Hussein, a Somali refugee born and raised in Dadaab, found resistance i...

Entrepreneur Suneel Gupta argues that it's more important than ever to be "backable," to get the support we need for re-entering the workforce, changing life direction after quarantine, and navigating a very different social scene. Gupta, who comes from a family of highly backable people—including his mother, Damyanti Hingorani, the first woman engineer for Ford Motor Company, and his brother Sanj...

Ethan Russell is a multi-Grammy nominated photographer and director, and was the tour photographer for The Rolling Stones on the 69 Let it Bleed tour. Russell was almost literally on the last chopper out of the Sixties when he was airlifted with The Rolling Stones from Altamont in the far East Bay of San Francisco. These moments and many more fill the pages of Russell's recently released career re...

Celebrate April Fool's Day by joining us for a virtual discussion with Shankar Vendantam about how useful fooling ourselves can actually be. It is of course clear that self-deception does terrible harm to ourselves, to our communities and to the planet. But if it is so irretrievably bad for us, why is it so ubiquitous? Paradoxically, Vedantam argues that self-deception also plays a vital role in o...

San Francisco-based Michael Pritchard travels America teaching the art of learning through laughter and play. He has done voices for many characters on television and in movies and cartoons. A first-prize winner in comedy and counseling, Michael will use humor and humanitarian observations from his decades of working in the education and justice fields to talk (and laugh) about building compassion...

Discussions on immigration policy often focus on building and tearing down walls, keeping people out of the country, and maintaining law and order. Debates over the social contract and the rights of citizens versus noncitizens shape our understanding of immigration and influence the extent to which protections are provided for immigrants. In her new book The Walls Within, historian Sarah Coleman s...

America prides itself on freedom and guaranteed rights for all its citizens, but has the explosion of rights resulted in a partisan divide among its citizens? You have the right to remain silent and the right to free speech. The right to worship, and to doubt. The right to be free from discrimination, and to hate. These rights were not written at the founding of our country, but rather an aftertho...