Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

What happens when community knowledge, nonprofit purpose, business expertise, and long-term philanthropy come together to solve a basic neighborhood need?

San Francisco’s Sunnydale Market offers a compelling and nutritious answer.

Created in response to residents’ love of neighborhood, and their need for fresh and affordable groceries, the Sunnydale Market is catalyzed by community voices, the nonprofit 18 Reasons, and the for-profit Bi-Rite Family of Businesses. The Sunnydale Market partnership finds its home in a larger redevelopment made possible by Mercy Housing, Related Companies, and HOPE SF.

It is important that this partnership is made...

Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual—including repeated popular appearances at the Club—is well-known for his significant, bestselling works of political philosophy and history. Now, for the first time, he examines his own political and intellectual evolution across five transformative decades. 

In his new memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man, Fukuyama invites us to follow him from the circle of students around the conservative intellectual Allan Bloom at Cornell, into the halls of power in Washington and at the RAND Corporation, and into private conversations with world leaders from Muammar Qaddhafi to China’s powerful...

Emily Wilson, whose translations of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad have captured a generation’s imagination, joins us virtually to explore the complicated terrain of reading and writing about the ancient past. Drawing on 20 years of scholarship and teaching, Wilson reviews the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work.

Ranging from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitations of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” styles, Wilson e...

How should Democrats campaign on climate? Some are quietly shelving climate-specific language ahead of the midterms in favor of terms like “energy crisis” and “affordability.”  But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island has been talking about climate change on the Senate floor for more than a decade, and he has no plans to stop now. 

“The most important thing that can be accomplished on the climate front is to end the pollute-for-free business model of the fossil fuel industry. It is morally wrong, it is economically wrong, it is an environmental sin, and there's literally no merit to it, which...

Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Carlos Lozada has spent years examining the books, ideas and figures that shape American politics. Now, as America marks its 250th anniversary, he turns to the country’s global role. In Lozada’s view, the United States has gone from the leader of the free world to a “dangerous nation.”
Whether in the war in Iran, the jailing of Venezuela’s president, or Trump’s stated desire to “take Cuba,” Lozada sees a consistent pattern. Under Trump, he writes, U.S. leadership has been remade “from authority to domination, from persuasion to bullying, from nurt...

Come hear the story of a single nuclear bomb’s deep origins, brief life during the Cold War, and lasting environmental and political legacies―and how some are viewing the entire sweep of the American nuclear enterprise. A grave reminder of the frightening truth about nuclear testing, as international norms waver.

As the United States and Russia let one treaty after another falter and expire, Jon Else reminds us of the terrible price of those tests. In his new book Frenchman Flat, Else recounts the science, politics and human experience of those who developed nuclear weapons, suffered the...

After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, Sarah Longwell did what she's done nearly every week for the past eight years: She sat down with voters. She conducted hundreds of focus groups, listening to thousands of ordinary Americans―Republicans, Democrats, and the politically homeless―with the goal of understanding politics through the eyes of the people who will decide our country’s future. 

American voters, and what they want for their country, are at the heart of her new book How to Eat an Elephant. Longwell, the founder of The Bulwark and a popular political communicator, lays out the play...

The Social Impact Forum examines how promising approaches to social challenges translate into measurable results. This conversation will explore not only the role of belonging and connection in addressing homelessness, but also questions of effectiveness, accountability, duplication of existing services, and whether organizations practice the relational values they promote.

Homelessness is one of the most vexing issues in the social impact field. Despite countless attempts and huge budgets to address it, and everyone anxious for results, it persists. Many talk of housing first, what other inputs can achieve results, and how can they be measured?

...

As the 2026 midterms approach, voters are contending with concerns around affordability, the AI boom, and climate disruption in their daily lives. AI data centers have become the wild card in energy politics, driving up energy demand and utility bills, and playing a large role in a battleground House primary. A year after the One Big Beautiful Bill Act rolled back key parts of the Inflation Reduction Act, many climate advocates assumed the energy transition was stalled out, but new research suggests otherwise. 

How will climate and energy shape the ballot box this year? And what's it like t...

Join us on Thursday, September 10 at the Commonwealth Club for “Reading the Signals: Predictions, Polls & the 2026 Midterms,” featuring renowned nonpartisan election analyst Nathan Gonzales, editor & publisher of Inside Elections and election analyst for CQ Roll Call.

At Inside Elections, Nathan he analyzes every competitive race in the country. With more than two decades covering presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races, Nathan is widely recognized for delivering clear, objective, data-driven analysis that cuts through speculation and partisan spin. A frequent political analyst for CNN, NPR, CBS News, and other major national media, he is known for providing clear, objective insi...

When families have support, children and youth do better at home, in school and in their communities. Yet many conversations about “student success” focus narrowly on classrooms and test scores, overlooking the pregnancy, early childhood, housing, mental health, special‑needs and basic‑needs supports that shape whether children can show up ready to learn in the first place.

This program will explore how family resource centers and other family support services operate in San Francisco, drawing on the experiences of community leaders and parents who know these systems firsthand. Through stories from their work and lives, the panel wi...

Note: This podcast contains explicit language.

Is American democracy doomed? Robert Reich doesn’t think so, even though he is more than capable of pointing out how it has fallen short and is being challenged by powerful anti-democratic forces. He says we can reclaim a sense of community and a democratic capitalism based on American ideals we still have the power to salvage.

To know where to go next, it helps to know how we got here, and in his new book Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, Reich tells us how he got...

Skye Perryman—a Time 100 honoree and CEO of Democracy Forward—offers an urgent, inspiring blueprint for how ordinary people can fight for freedom in extraordinary times.

She says the future of our country lies in all of our hands. From protecting voting rights and public schools to finding courage in the face of fear, Skye Perryman makes the case that defending democracy isn’t the job of lawyers or politicians alone—it’s a role for every one of us, seasoned and brand-new activists alike.

Drawing on her frontline experience challenging threats to democracy in courtrooms a...

Note: This podcast contains explicit language.

Dating and relationships can be messy. The apps, the expectations, the endless options—it’s a lot. But there’s real science behind how people connect, commit and build a relationship with someone who will “be there when you need them the most.”

So how to find such a person, especially in such a world?

Fortunately we have a guide! Dr. Justin Garcia is the executive director of the Kinsey Institute, the premier research center on human sexuality and relationships, where he leads a team that has been delvin...

Growing power demands – coupled with increasingly frequent climate-driven disasters – have led even staunch environmentalists like NRDC head Manish Bapna to rethink their past opposition to nuclear power. 

Three Mile Island didn't kill anyone or cause major public harm, but it fundamentally changed U.S. nuclear policy for 40 years. Why did an accident with a relatively contained consequence have such a chilling effect – and what’s really different today? With dozens of new, purportedly safer designs at various stages of development and construction around the world, is it time for all of us to give nuclear energy a fresh loo...

Amidst a backdrop of unprecedented attacks on trans athletes, Schuyler, Chella, and Cal teamed up to take on the Ironman 70.3 relay in Oceanside, California, together on March 28, 2026—placing third in the men’s relay category. Schuyler in the water, Chella on wheels, and Cal hitting the pavement, these trans masculine athletes defy the erasure so commonly perpetuated against them, leaning into movement as essential empowerment, teamwork as vital community, and self-love as fuel. 

On June 29, Schuyler, Chella, and Cal invite us into their Ironman journey for a special event at the Commonwealth Club, with a panel discussion of th...

For decades, scholar and journalist Orville Schell has been one of the nation’s leading experts on China. The author of numerous books on China, Schell runs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. 

In his new book, Inside China’s Secret Prisons, Schell recounts the extraordinary investigation that uncovered China’s prison labor network, and the personal cost of reporting the truth. 

Schell delivers the first behind-the-scenes account of the landmark 1991 “60 Minutes” investigation that revealed China’s vast “reform through labor” prison system and documented how prison-made goods were illegall...

Gladstone’s Steven Finkbeiner shares how Gladstone’s AI-powered microscope is racing to cure neurodegenerative disease.

Imagine a scientist that never sleeps, runs thousands of experiments at once, and learns from every success and failure in real-time. It’s not a person—it’s a microscope. Scientist Steven Finkbeiner, M.D., Ph.D., of San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes, introduces us to a mind-boggling new reality: a “thinking microscope” powered by autonomous AI. By looking beyond the limits of human imagination, this machine is mapping out how diseases such as Alzheimer’s and ALS unfold, and discovering how to reverse the...

Introduction: Cole Thomason-Redus, co-chair of the Arts Forum, Commonwealth Club World Affairs

Film: Flicka: A Love Letter 

Frederica “Flicka” von Stade has built an extraordinary legacy that reaches far beyond her celebrated opera career. In the documentary Flicka: A Love Letter, audiences follow her journey from one of the world’s most beloved mezzo-sopranos to a devoted mentor, educator and humanitarian. Through interviews and archival footage, colleagues, friends and family illuminate not only her artistry and musical brilliance but also the warmth, generosity and deep compassion that have defined her life and work, including her end...

Sinclair Lewis is said to have predicted, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” Democratic congressman Jared Huffman says he witnessed something eerily like that vision on January 6, 2021, and it was his wake-up call to the shocking power of Christian nationalism.
He explores this topic I his new book No Prophets, in which he argues that Christian nationalism is now America’s most dangerous political movement. Huffman uncovers the landscape of this movement―who they are, what they want, and how they plan to get it―and argues that it has dest...

While most Americans think of a truck or a sedan when they hear “electric vehicle,” a quiet revolution is happening in other countries on two and three wheels. In China and India, the electric vehicles doing the most to push out oil aren't cars – they're scooters, mopeds, motorcycles and the three-wheeled rickshaws and tuk-tuks that move people and packages through some of the world's busiest cities.

According to BloombergNEF’s EV Outlook report, 46% of global sales of two- and three-wheelers were electric last year. Collectively, they’re ⁠displacing more oil⁠ than cars. Electric delivery vehicles are also starting to sh...

“... reading it made me so hopeful and excited that I've been telling everyone I know about it. This is not just a book for MBAs or people who work in business. It's for anyone who has wondered, 'Is capitalism fixable?'"
—Ari Shapiro

What if the most radical idea in business is that purpose is the best tool for unlocking long-term growth? And what if the secret to sustaining your organization’s integrity is readily available if you look in the right places?

In his new book Incorruptible, a New York Times and USA Today best...

Since the passage of Proposition E in 2024, San Francisco has expanded its use of technology in public safety, including drones, automated license plate readers, and the city’s new Real Time Investigations Center. As these tools become part of everyday policing, they’ve prompted conversations about how the city can pursue safer streets while protecting privacy and civil liberties.

How should new technologies be evaluated and overseen? What transparency and accountability measures make sense? And what can San Francisco’s experience teach other cities considering similar approaches?

Join us for a thoughtful conversation about technology, public...

When Silicon Valley says it is “moving fast and breaking things,” the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. In his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Gil Durán argues that something far more sinister is at work: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.
Durán chronicles what he calls the “tech-authoritarian movement” from its early days in San Francisco politics to its current moment on the international stage, exploring the wild and dystopian ambition of the technocrats at its center, and offering his road ma...

There were 61 candidates on California’s June primary ballot for governor, but the race is now down to two: Republican Steve Hilton and Democrat Xavier Becerra. 

Hilton is a former Fox News commentator and political advisor. He was endorsed by President Trump and promises to “restore the California Dream” by cutting government spending, reducing taxes and energy prices, and slashing regulations. 

Join us as Hilton delivers a speech outlining his vision for the state and sits down for a conversation with KQED’s Scott Shafer.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega...

Join us as we explore the worldwide phenomenon behind the revival of Homer’s 3000-year-old story, the kaleidoscopic and hallucinogenic return of Odysseus to Ithaka, the Greek island that has become an icon for home itself.

There is the immense beauty of the poem itself and the historical importance of Homer’s accomplishment, but what does the story mean to us now, how can it help illuminate the chaos of our lives today? Composed by the Poet Known as Homer, around 650 BC, it was based on a story about the Trojan War that was already hundreds of year...

Protest is the ultimate in equal-opportunity political action. As Annie Leonard, former executive director of Greenpeace USA says, “Making change is like laying a stone path across the garden. Peaceful protest may be every 4th or 8th or 200th stone; it helps us get where we want to go but also we need a lot of other stones too.” Leonard explores the history of protests in her book “Protest: Respect It. Defend It. Use It.” 

And while protest is the loudest and most visible tool, it’s only one of many ways to take action. Through community building, c...

We all complain about the heat, yet it's a climate threat we routinely underestimate. In the U.S., extreme heat kills more people each year than floods, fires and hurricanes combined. About 16,000 excess deaths were recorded during Europe's June heatwave – a striking and tragic number. What does extreme heat do to our bodies, our wallets and our cities, and what can we actually do about it? 

From creating insurance programs that pay out before the disaster to protecting workers who labor in the heat, many people are working on solutions. Cities are finding ways to prepare for tem...

For centuries, meat has been a cornerstone of cuisines and cultures around the world. Yet as global demand continues to rise, questions about sustainability, food security, human health, animal welfare and the environmental impact of food production have become increasingly urgent.

In his new book, Meat, which will be available to purchase, Bruce Friedrich explores a provocative question: How can we continue to satisfy humanity’s appetite for meat while addressing the challenges facing our food system? As founder and president of The Good Food Institute, Friedrich has become one of the leading voices in the development of...

Join us for an evening of film, data and dialogue exploring one of the most consequential workforce questions of our time, featuring the documentary Ninety-Two: The Silent Revolt No One Saw Coming.

Black women are among the fastest-growing groups of breadwinners in America. Yet despite their outsized contribution to families, communities and the economy, they continue to experience disproportionate levels of burnout, workplace inequity, financial strain and invisible labor.

What happens when the very people holding up the economy can no longer sustain the weight?

The event will feature a screening of Ninety-Two...

At a time when nearly everything feels polarized, Benji Backer is trying to carve out a different path, one where caring about the natural world isn’t a partisan issue. As the founder of Nature Is Nonpartisan, he’s bringing together voices from across the political spectrum who might disagree on climate policy, but still share a desire to preserve public lands, wildlife, and the outdoors. 

Similarly, climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe firmly believes conversation – even with people you disagree with – can be one of the most powerful tools for climate action. And it starts from a place of respec...

In a recent floor speech, California Senator Adam Schiff outlined ways he says that President Trump has used the presidency to enrich himself and his family, and how it’s driving up costs from gas to groceries for families. Schiff’s remarks came after the president reported making more than $2 billion dollars in his first year in office, mostly from cryptocurrency businesses. 

“The payments to the president and his family have been massive,” Schiff said. “The self-dealing and profiteering have been absolutely breathtaking in their scope.”

Schiff has a long history of political battles with the president...

For 500 years, telescopes have opened windows on the cosmos with increasing power and precision. Beginning with the historic telescopes funded by Andrew Carnegie and built by George Ellery Hale atop Pasadena’s Mount Wilson, where Edwin Hubble confirmed the existence of the universe beyond our Milky Way galaxy and revealed its continual expansion, the United States has stood at the vanguard of observational technology.

Through the past century, our country has developed ground- and space-based telescopes that have revolutionized how astronomers understand the cosmos and humanity’s place in it, from the Hubble Space Telescope and JWST to t...

Natural and human-made extreme weather events are disrupting food systems worldwide, threatening the long-term economic stability and health of already vulnerable populations. Across the globe, 80 percent of the poorest live in rural communities and rely on smallholder farming for their household food and income. And smallholder farmers produce around one-third of the total share of the world’s food, yet are disproportionately affected by climate risks, uncertainty, and poverty, often having limited resources to adapt to these changes.

Then how are these communities building resilience and developing better strategies to cope with a changing climate?

Th...

It has been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Yet Jeremy Lent says that is what this historical moment urgently calls for. As climate chaos, inequality and social fragmentation intensify, humanity faces an imminent choice: continue with a system built on extraction and endless growth, or reimagine civilization itself. He says incremental policy improvements are no longer enough, and what is needed is a deep transformation of our current civilization to continue to survive.

Lent offers up such a reimagination, grounded in...

Russian officials and experts often voice the view that the United States was hell-bent on undermining, even destroying Russia during the turbulent period of the Soviet breakup 30 years ago. The primary U.S. goal, in this telling, was to expand NATO to Russia’s borders to isolate and threaten the Russian state.

Former NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller, drawing from the historical record and her own professional experience, refutes this notion. Gottemoeller argues that, to the contrary, successive American presidents were convinced that deep cooperation with Russia is essential to international security and stability. This conviction wa...

Founding Father James Wilson’s bold vision for American democracy was lost to scandal. As a young lawyer, Wilson made the case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the much more famous James Madison, played an essential role in its creation.

Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, but fought unsuccessfully for a...

Join Matt Biggar, Ph.D., for a lively discussion of his new book, Connected to Place: Regenerating Nature, Community, and Local Economies Through Systems Change, followed by the introduction of Transforming Our Region, a new Member-led Forum at Commonwealth Club World Affairs. This new forum will apply the systems change approach featured in Connected to Place to the Bay Area through expert presentations and interactive activities. 

Biggar discusses place-based systems change as a real-world solution to our growing environmental and social challenges. He says at the core of accelerating climate change and biodiversity loss, rising economic inequality, a...

Wisconsin was written off by many Democrats after the GOP gained total control over the state’s executive, judicial, and legislative branches. For a while, the state—once known for clean government and transparency—became a national symbol of a highly gerrymandered state. But the Democrats figured out how to win, and they slowly and methodically rebuilt their power, regaining the governor’s office, cutting into legislative majorities, and are now on a run of consecutive landslide election victories for Democratic-leaning state supreme court justices, who are in the majority.
How did it happen? 
Get an inside look when...

In a recent essay, President George W. Bush hails George Washington’s decision to leave the presidency after two terms, ensuring America would not become a monarchy. “[His] humility in giving up power willingly remains among the most consequential decisions and important examples in American politics.”

Bush’s essay is part of the In Pursuit project, a new bipartisan civic initiative tied to the 250th anniversary of the United States. In Pursuit brings together an extraordinary roster of contributors, including reflections by Barack Obama on Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton on Theodore Roosevelt.

“Presidents are powerful p...