Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Join us for a special edition of our Week to Week political roundtable as we talk with Debra J. Saunders, the White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a syndicated columnist. For the past several years, Saunders has been reporting from the center of the political world, covering some of the biggest news stories and controversies in politics. Before that, of course, she was a...

Addressing the climate challenge requires incremental and transformational change on both personal and systemic levels. That means altering our personal habits as citizens, consumers, employees and parents. At the same time, society needs to fundamentally modernize the food, transportation, building and energy systems. That mind-blowing amount of change is so daunting, it’s no wonder people want t...

Join us for a special online Week to Week political roundtable, in which we'll discuss the political impact of the coronavirus on local, state, and national communities. We'll also tackle other big political news of the moment, including the latest in the heated presidential primaries. How will it work? This program is presented via a video livestream. You will be able to submit questions for our...

Steve Disselhorst's life has been consumed with the quest to create a family. As a Catholic boy raised in the Midwest, he grew up thinking he was straight and would marry a woman and have children. When he was confronted with his attraction to men and the eventual realization that he was gay, he gave up that dream of having a family. But the dream wouldn't die. Eventually he resumed his quest for...

Combatting the coronavirus pandemic has quickly become a global health priority. Communities across the United States, including here in the Bay Area, are using a range of strategies to mitigate the spread of coronavirus. In its first program on the coronavirus crisis, The Commonwealth Club will feature two experts who will discuss why significant community interventions are so important and what...

Join us for a virtual conversation with Adam Hochschild, the award-winning author who has spent his literary life delving into the details of crises inflicted on ourselves by man's inhumanity to man, and our rising above such crises through passionate involvement to bring better ideas to bear upon our culture. We will discuss Hochschild's research into colonialism in the Belgian Congo, the unfound...

Director Abby Ginzberg is a Bay Area original; her films highlight struggles of race and social justice. Her new film Waging Change is having its San Francisco premiere at the Castro Theatre on March 22. It features Saru Jayaraman (Chronicle Visionary of the Year), Lily Tomlin, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and Jane Fonda, who have been working tirelessly for One Fair Wage, a campaign to end the sub-m...

For years, scientists and politicians have been saying that the climate battle will be won or lost in the next decade. That narrative was boosted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which contends global emissions must be halved by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 to avoid climate catastrophe. Politicians moved quickly to incorporate the 2030 deadline into their speeches and ad...

Crises pose a challenge to leaders as no other tests they confront can. Veteran journalist Kenneth Walsh offers a probing look at how presidents from FDR to Trump have dealt with the crises they faced. Delving into both domestic conflicts and international conflagrations, Walsh goes in search of lessons we can learn. His findings focus on the presidential attributes and skills that matter most in...

Does solving climate change mean re-thinking old top-down approaches and embracing big change at high speed? A half-century after the first Earth Day, some environmental advocates argue it’s time to challenge some of our basic assumptions about climate action. In the new book A Better Planet: 40 Big Ideas for a Sustainable Future, editor and Yale law professor Dan Esty showcases innovative ideas d...

At a time of anxiety about the effectiveness of our national government, Rahm Emanuel believes local government offers a clear vision, for both progressives and centrists, of how to get things done in America today. In his new book, The Nation City, Emanuel, the former two-term mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s first White House chief of staff, offers a firsthand account of how cities, rather...

We spend one third of our lives at work, whether it’s at a job we love or one we can’t wait to leave. As the job market shifts with the increase of automation and artificial intelligence, a flexible mindset is more important than ever. Stanford professor Bill Burnett (co-author of the No. 1 New York Times best seller Designing Your Life) believes we can transform our work experience by building an...

Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, however, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. In the San Francisco Bay Area, fleets of private buses ferry software engineers past the tarp-and-plywood shanties where the homeless make their homes; a...

Recent feminist movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp have called out sexism. They have empowered women to become more aware and also raise more questions: How do we find common ground in the new world we are building? How do we keep the momentum going with individual power, structural power and the power of movements? How do we handle a real situation at work, which could affect our livelihoods?...

In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on it. Today, the social network that Zuckerberg created in 2004 has grown far beyond its original iteration, larger and more powerful than anyone could have imagined. Facebook has grown into a tech giant, the largest so...

Joseph S. Nye Jr. provides a concise, penetrating analysis of the role of ethics in U.S. foreign policy after World War II. Nye works through each presidency from FDR to Trump and scores their foreign policy on three ethical dimensions: their intentions, the means they used and the consequences of their decisions. He also evaluates their leadership qualities, elaborating on which approaches worked...

Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter is renowned for strategy, innovation and leadership for change. Her insights guide leaders worldwide through teaching, writing and direct consultation to major corporations, governments and startup ventures. She is either the author or co-author of 20 books. Her breakthrough work with hundreds of successful professionals and executives, as well as aspiring young entr...

On June 21, 1964, more than 20 Klansmen murdered three civil rights workers. The killings, in what would become known as the Mississippi Burning case, were among the most brazen acts of violence during the civil rights movement. And even though the killers’ identities, including the sheriff’s deputy, were an open secret, no one was charged with murder in the months and years that followed. It took...

Is there an answer to the widespread—and increasingly public—rise of racial extremism? Come learn about the white nationalist movement from someone who was a leader in it until he renounced racism and devoted his life to helping others leave it behind. Christian Picciolini went from leading neo-Nazi bands with names such as Final Solution and White American Youth to running a record store that onl...

As a young officer in World War I, George Marshall's sterling reputation started forming when he planned and executed a nighttime movement of more than a half million troops from one battlefield to another, leading to the armistice. Between the world wars, he helped modernize combat training, restaffed the U.S. Army's officer corps with future leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and Ge...

Revelations about misconduct at the biggest startups and tech companies seem to saturate today’s news cycle—but it wasn’t always this way. In 2017, when penning her now famous 2,900-word blog post about the pervasive culture of sexual harassment at Uber, soon-to-be whistleblower Susan Fowler was stepping into uncharted territory. Her decision to share a blog post about her “very, very strange year...

Tobacco companies, opioid suppliers, gun manufacturers and the fossil fuel industry -- all have been brought under fire, and into the courts, for knowingly causing public harm, and even death, with their products. Should corporations be held liable for harmful outcomes like mass shootings, the opioid crisis, and climate change? We all benefit from the energy fossil fuels provide, from the lights w...

After more than a decade of inquiry, the artist David Maisel was granted access to photograph the terrain and testing facilities of Dugway Proving Ground, a classified military site covering nearly 800,000 acres in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. This is a site where chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs were developed, tested and implemented by the U.S. governmen...

Renowned Washington Post columnist and author E.J. Dionne Jr. says the 2020 election will be a test for progressives and moderates. Will they feud or unite to defeat President Trump? Dionne postulates that if progressives and moderates are unable―and unwilling―to overcome their differences, they could not only enable Donald Trump to prevail again but also squander an occasion for launching a new e...

Until recently, it was widely believed that the brain was hardwired from childhood and resistant to any remodeling in adults. Breakthrough research and clinical practice has recently shown that our brains are remarkably plastic across the human life span. Neuroplasticity accounts for functional self-improvement at any age, often remarkable recoveries from brain injury or stroke, demonstrated impac...