Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Latest Episodes:

A.J. Baime: White Lies Mar 31, 2022

Show notes

Bestselling author AJ Baime returns to The Commonwealth Club to discuss his biography of Walter F. White, a civil rights leader who often passed for white in order to investigate racist murders. White led a double life: one as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP in the early 20th century, the other as a white newspaperman who covered lynching crimes in the Deep South at the height of racial violence.

Born mixed race, with very fair skin and straight hair, White was able to “pass” for white. He leveraged this ambiguity as a reporter, bringing to light the darkest crimes in America and helping to plant the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement. He was simultaneously a second-class citizen subject to Jim Crow laws at home and a widely respected professional with full access to the white world at work. His life was fraught with internal and external conflict—much like the story of race in America. Starting out as an obscure activist, White became a prominent civil rights leader, but until now a character study of White’s life and career in all its complexity has never been told.

MLF ORGANIZER

George Hammond

SPEAKERS

A.J. Baime

Author, White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America’s Darkest Secret

In Conversation with Sheryl Davis

Executive Director, San Francisco Human Rights Commission

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 28th, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oded Galor: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality Mar 30, 2022

Show notes

Join us to discuss with economist Oded Galor his grand unifying theory to explain human flourishing and economic inequality. In a captivating journey from the dawn of human existence to the present, Galor offers an intriguing solution to two of humanity’s great mysteries. Why are humans the only species to have escaped (quite recently) the subsistence trap, allowing us to enjoy a standard of living that vastly exceeds all others? And why have we progressed so unequally around the world, resulting in the great disparities between nations that exist today?

Immense in scope and packed with interesting connections, Galor explains how technology, population size, and adaptation led to a stunning “phase change” in human history a mere 200 years ago. But by tracing that same journey back in time and peeling away the layers of influence—colonialism, political institutions, societal structure, culture—he also arrives at an explanation of inequality's ultimate cause: those ancestral populations that enjoyed fruitful geographical characteristics and rich diversity were set on the path to prosperity, while those that lacked it were disadvantaged in ways still influential today.

As we face ecological crises across the globe, Galor concludes that gender equality, investment in education, and balancing diversity with social cohesion are the keys not only to our species’ thriving, but to its survival.

NOTES

MLF: Humanities

SPEAKERS

Oded Galor

Herbert H. Goldberger Professor of Economics, Brown University; Founder, Unified Growth Theory; Author, The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality

In Conversation With George Hammond

Author, Conversations With Socrates

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 24th, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Markoff: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand Mar 30, 2022

Show notes

Iconic counterculture icon Stewart Brand has been at the center of many of the social and cultural movements launched and nurtured in the Bay Area. Whether it be early computing, the Merry Pranksters and the hippies, the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog, or the environmental movement, Brand has been at the center of them all. Yet many outside these movements only know him because Apple founder Steve Jobs quoted Brand's famous mantra—stay hungry, stay foolish—in a famous Stanford University commencement speech. Legendary science and technology writer John Markoff hopes to elevate an understanding of Brand's impact on our world.

In his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, Markoff provides the first serious biography of Brand, his impact and his many contradictions. A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. He also was early to the promise of the computer revolution—nurtured in the pages and community of the Whole Earth Catalog—and helped define it for the wider world.

Please join us as Markoff discusses Brand's influential and remarkable California life and the impact he has had on millions of people.

NOTES

This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

SPEAKERS

John Markoff

Writer-in-Residence, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; Author, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

Paul Saffo

Futurist; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lily Geismer: How Democrats Failed to Solve Inequality Play Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

Despite controlling two of the three branches of government in Washington, the Democratic Party is struggling with its identity and the policies it should emphasize, particularly when it comes to reducing inequality and poverty at a time of deep divisions in the United States.

For decades, the Republican Party has been known as the party of the rich: arguing for "business-friendly" policies like deregulation and tax cuts. But as our national and global economy confronts a crisis of inequality, some, like increasingly visible political historian Lily Geismer, question whether the Democrats are willing or able to take political risks to pursue policies that would help address or reduce poverty.

In her powerful new book Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, Geismer shows how she feels the Democratic Party of the 80s and 90s—particularly during the height of the Clinton Administration years—furthered policy ideas that centered on helping the poor without asking the rich to make any sacrifices: "Doing well by doing good" was a popular theme. Social enterprise and micro-lending became big businesses, and private programs to promote democracy and equality abroad grew trendy. But as social programs in the private sector boomed, the structure of the government in the United States began to weaken, according to Geismer, contributing to a crisis that has now fully arrived. And the Democratic Party is divided about how to respond, leaving the poor without a true champion, and the public unsure where one of the country's two major parties stands on inequality.

Please join us for an important discussion about poverty, the Democratic Party politics that make it harder to address, and where we can go from here.

SPEAKERS

Lily Geismer

Ph.D., Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College; Author, Left Behind: The Democrats' Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality

In Conversation with Dan Pfeiffer

Co-Host, "Pod Save America"; Author, Batting the Big Life: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media Are Destroying America (forthcoming); Twitter @danpfeiffer

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 23rd, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marie Yovanovitch: Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

With war-ravaged Ukraine in the headlines every day, it’s more important than ever to hear from those with firsthand experience and an understanding of the complexities of the battle being waged there. Former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch not only served as U.S. ambassador to Kyiv from 2016–2019 but also has intimate family connections to the region as the child of survivors of the Nazi and Soviet regimes.

Yovanovitch is a diplomat and author with more than three decades of service in the State Department, having served as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Ukraine, as well as senior advisor to the under secretary of state for political affairs. She is a diplomat in residence at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and was a target of a 2019 smear campaign from supporters of the former president during the Trump-Ukraine controversy. She would go on to be a key witness during the public hearings of the ensuing impeachment trial. Her life is a testimony to the importance of transparency, accountability and integrity in government.

In her new memoir, Lessons From the Edge, Yovanovitch reclaims her own narrative and recounts her childhood, immigration to the United States and journey up the ranks of the State Department. Coming from a family that faced poverty, violence and totalitarianism, she warns of the dangers corruption and democratic backsliding pose to our free society.

Join us as Yovanovitch offers her perspective on the current situation unfolding in Ukraine, and tells her inspiring story of strength, bravery and honesty in the face of controversy, reminding us of how precious democracy really is.

NOTES

This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

SPEAKERS

Marie Yovanovitch

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine; Author Lessons From the Edge: A Memoir

In Conversation with Olga Oliker

Director, Europe and Central Asia Program, International Crisis Group

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

CLIMATE ONE: Coping with COVID and Climate Fatigue Mar 25, 2022

Show notes

Since March 2020, the global community has grappled with an unprecedented pandemic. At first, most people were willing to do what it takes to keep themselves and others safe. Two years in, pretty much everyone feels exhausted by the effort and by the general anxiety of living with COVID. The global community simultaneously faces an even greater existential threat: climate change. For those fighting to stave off this slower-moving catastrophe, fatigue is a familiar feeling. What have we learned from two years of COVID disruption that can inform how we deal with climate fatigue?

Guests:

David Wallace-Wells, Editor-At-Large, New York Magazine

Britt Wray, Human and Planetary Health Fellow, Stanford University

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Neda Toloui-Semnani—They Said They Wanted Revolution: The Memoir of My Iranian Parents Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

Neda Toloui-Semnani is the daughter of Iranian revolutionaries, activists, immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Her parents left the United States in 1979 to join the revolution in Iran—a decision that changed the course of Neda’s life. She experienced profound personal loss due to her parents’ choices and conflict over whether these decisions that impacted her life were worthy costs of the revolution that took place.

In her new book, They Said They Wanted Revolution, Toloui-Semnani, an Emmy-award-winning writer and producer, looks back at her family’s tragic experience with the Iranian Revolution. She pieces together the past in search of familial identity as the child of two risk-taking political activists. She untangles decades of history to discover her family’s legacy during her journey of self-discovery.

Join us for a moving program that explores the costs of righteous activism across generations, and how the Iranian Revolution continues to impact the United States and Iran even decades later.

This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

SPEAKERS

Neda Toloui-Semnani

Senior Writer, Vice News Tonight; Author, They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents

Sasha Khokha

Host, "The California Report," KQED—Moderator

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Reshma Saujani: Confronting the "Big Lie" of Corporate Feminism Mar 23, 2022

Show notes

Women have been sold a mistruth—roll up your sleeves, smash the glass ceiling, and you too can have it all. Critics say the unspoken realities in this agreement are that many women must also do the majority of household work, childcare, and bear the burden of keeping this endless task list running in their minds. However, the inequity in unpaid work isn’t news to anyone. It is well-rooted and widespread, benefiting a system that has always been designed for the benefit of men.

Flash to 2021, when women left or were pushed out of the workforce en masse resulting in the lowest proportion of women in the labor force since the late 1980s. This downturn was matched by a decline in women’s mental health and financial independence.

Author, activist and lawyer Reshma Saujani is calling on corporations and their leaders to make vital changes to this toxic and worsening situation. Her rallying call: It’s time to pay up. Her forthcoming book Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work outlines her four-step action plan to realize this change and serves as a field guide for women, empowering them to demand what they deserve.

Join us at INFORUM welcoming Saujani as she paints a picture of the future she sees for women.

This program contains EXPLICIT language

SPEAKERS

Reshma Saujani

Founder, Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Mom; Author, Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It's Different Than You Think)

Ina Fried

Chief Technology Correspondent, Axios—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 22nd, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff Yang, Phil Yu and Philip Wang: Rise—A Pop History of Asian America Mar 22, 2022

Show notes

When the Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965, opening up U.S. immigration to non-Europeans, it ushered in a whole new era. But even to the first generation of Asian Americans born in the United States after that milestone, it would have been impossible to imagine that sushi and boba would one day be beloved by millions, that a Korean boy band named BTS would be the biggest musical act in the world, that one of the most acclaimed and popular movies of 2018 would be Crazy Rich Asians, or that we would have an Asian American vice president. And that’s not even mentioning the creators, performers, entrepreneurs, execs and influencers who've been making all this happen, behind the scenes and on the screen; or the activists and representatives continuing to fight for equity, building coalitions and defiantly holding space for our voices and concerns. And still: Asian America is just getting started.

Join us for a special program featuring the talented authors of Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now. The timing is great for this intimate, eye-opening and frequently hilarious guided tour through the pop-cultural touchstones and sociopolitical shifts of the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s and beyond. Jeff Yang, Phil Yu and Philip Wang chronicle how we arrived at today’s unprecedented diversity of Asian American cultural representation through engaging, interactive infographics (including a step-by-step guide to a night out in K-Town, an atlas that unearths historic Asian American landmarks, a handy “Appreciation or Appropriation?” flowchart, and visual celebrations of both our "founding fathers and mothers" and the nostalgia-inducing personalities of each decade), plus illustrations and graphic essays from major AAPI artists, exclusive roundtables with Asian American cultural icons, and more, anchored by extended insider narratives of each decade by the three co-authors. They provide an informative, lively and inclusive celebration of shared experiences and singular moments, and all the different ways in which we have chosen to come together.

This program is part of The Commonwealth Club's Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

This program contains EXPLICIT language

SPEAKERS

Jeff Yang

Writer; Editor; Co-Author, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

Phil Yu

Founder and Editor, Angry Asian Man; ; Co-Author, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

Philip Wang

Co-founder, Wong Fu Productions; Co-Author, Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

Michelle Meow

Producer and Host, "The Michelle Meow Show," KBCW TV and Podcast; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors—Host

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 21st, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A History of Wiretapping in the United States Mar 18, 2022

Show notes

Our privacy was not first invaded by J. Edgar Hoover. They’ve been listening in for far longer than that. Wiretapping is nearly as old as electronic communications. Telegraph operators intercepted enemy messages during the Civil War. Law enforcement agencies were listening to private telephone calls as early as 1895. Communications firms have assisted government eavesdropping programs since the early 20th century―and they have spied on their own customers, too. Such breaches of privacy once provoked outrage, but today most Americans have resigned themselves to constant electronic monitoring. How did we get from there to here?

Hochman explores the origins of wiretapping in military campaigns and criminal confidence games, and tracks the use of telephone taps in the U.S. government’s wars on alcohol, communism, terrorism, and crime. At the same time that high-profile eavesdropping scandals fueled public debates about national security, crime control, and the rights and liberties of individuals, wiretapping became a routine surveillance tactic for private businesses and police agencies alike. Hochman traces the long and surprising history of wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping in the United States, and also explains how earlier generations of Americans confronted these threats to our privacy―threats that seem more urgent now than ever.

NOTES

MLF: Humanities

SPEAKERS

Brian Hochman

Director of American Studies and Associate Professor of English, Georgetown University; Author, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States

In Conversation with George Hammond

Author, Conversations With Socrates

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 17th, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected