Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The Invisible Water: How Culture Shapes Mental Illness and Healing Apr 29, 2026

Show notes

“I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.”

Like a fish in water, we rarely notice the cultural forces that surround us every day—especially when it comes to our mental health. Join UCSF psychiatrist Dr. Descartes Li as he dives into the invisible cultural currents that shape the human mind. From the American emphasis on “talking it out” and finding your “true self,” to the physical experience of distress in other parts of the world, this fascinating lecture will reveal how deeply our beliefs and cultural norms construct our understanding of illness, suffering and healing.

About the Speakers

Our speaker today is Dr. Descartes Li, a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Dr. Li has spent his career at the intersection of clinical care, medical education and cultural psychiatry. Recognizing the unique mental-health needs of diverse populations, he founded and directed the UCSF Asia America Clinic to provide specialized care to the Bay Area's Asian American community.

In addition to his focus on cultural psychiatry, Dr. Li is a highly respected clinical leader, serving as the director of both the UCSF Bipolar Disorder Program and the Electroconvulsive Therapy Service. He recently completed a five-year tenure as UCSF's vice chair for education in psychiatry, and his impact on global medical education includes serving as a distinguished professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. A returning speaker to Commonwealth Club World Affairs, Dr. Li brings decades of frontline clinical experience, a passion for understanding the human mind, and a commitment to humanistic care.

A Psychology Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

Organizer: Veronica Ortega & Patrik O'Reilly

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

CLIMATE ONE: Nancy Pelosi’s Seat is Open. Meet Two Candidates Vying to Succeed Her. Apr 29, 2026

Show notes

This year, one of the most powerful politicians in the country decided not to seek re-election. For nearly 38 years, Nancy Pelosi has represented the people of San Francisco in the US House of Representatives. As one of the most powerful House Speakers in U.S. history, Pelosi played a central role in advancing landmark environmental and climate laws, and bringing energy and climate policy to the forefront of the national agenda.

Her retirement opens up a space for a new person to take up her mantle as an advocate for climate and energy policies, as well as the other priorities of the people of California’s 11th District. Saikat Chakrabarti and Scott Wiener are both vying to represent the district in congress. How does each candidate plan to balance serious climate action with the everyday economic pressures facing Bay Area communities? Can they refocus Congress on climate solutions? And what, specifically, is their plan?

Guests:

Saikat Chakrabarti, President, New Consensus

Scott Wiener, California State Senator

For show notes and related links, visit ⁠ClimateOne.org/podcasts⁠.

**********

Support Climate One by going ad-free! By subscribing to Climate One on ⁠Patreon⁠, you’ll receive exclusive access to all future episodes free of ads, opportunities to connect with fellow Climate One listeners, and access to the Climate One Discord. Sign up today at ⁠patreon.com/ClimateOne⁠.

Ad sales by ⁠Multitude⁠. Contact them for ad inquiries at ⁠multitude.productions/ads⁠

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

From American Dream to Uncertainty: The Refugee Experience and Who Defines Who Is American Apr 28, 2026

Show notes

Join us for a special Songkran program celebrating the Southeast Asian New Year. We’ll bring together Lao American community members who will offer perspectives on the human consequences of the current U.S. immigration policy.

Raised in the United States, many Lao American refugees are vulnerable to current immigration policy changes, with some facing deportation back to a country unfamiliar to them. Through storytelling of their own lives, we’ll explore issues of belonging and the impact of families currently being separated.

The discussion will conclude with a special musical performance by Tookta and Morlam SF, followed by a reception featuring a traditional blessing and Southeast Asian flavors.

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

Jennifer Doleac: The Science of Second Chances in Criminal Justice Apr 28, 2026

Show notes

Jennifer Doleac studies the economics of crime and discrimination. And when she considers criminal justice reform, she’s not only hopeful but actually optimistic that things can improve for the entire system as a whole. In her new book The Science of Second Chances, Doleac lays out her view of how to reduce both crime and incarceration. She draws on cutting-edge economic research and experiments to offer a reform blueprint. She says shifting the incentives that people face can produce dramatic changes in the decisions they make, which can result in significantly fewer people going through the criminal justice system.

From DNA databases that increase the likelihood of catching repeat offenders to leniency programs for first-time defendants, she reveals a series of surprising interventions that she says actually work, along with cautionary tales about great ideas that never panned out. Doleac says we can have both public safety and a smaller, “less intrusive” justice system without waiting for big structural reforms that might never happen.

Can small changes result in big results? Come with your questions and find out when Jennifer Doleac joins us in San Francisco.

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

Jim Collins: What to Make of a Life Apr 27, 2026

Show notes

It is a question just about everyone confronts in their life, and it centers on how we find our way in the world. How do we deal with challenges that can radically change a life? And what comes next?

Author Jim Collins returns to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to share his lessons on constructing—and reconstructing—a life through those “cliff moment” challenges and transitions that come up repeatedly in our lives. Collins devoted a decade to studying these questions and to minutely analyzing those moments when life flips from clarity to confusion and casts us into a befuddling fog.

He followed people in side-by-side positions who shared “cliffs,” and he analyzes the different decisions people made and the divergent paths taken. Such as two rock musicians facing a future without the group that brought them success. Or two public figures who endured scandal and then had to figure out how to rebuild their lives. Two suffragists achieved their big goal—and then had to decide out what to do next. Then there are two figure skaters scoping out a new life’s purpose for their post-Olympic careers.

From Collins’ studies, he developed a framework for figuring out how a life can be rebuilt and constantly renewed. Come hear him for yourself and hear his deeply researched prescription for discovering deeply fulfilling roles in life, enduring tough times and even pivotal events, and building personal momentum, decade after decade, throughout life.

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

Maya Shankar: The Other Side of Change Apr 25, 2026

Show notes

Change can come from out of nowhere. A relationship ends, a doctor gives an unwelcome diagnosis, a business closes, a loved one passes away. At times like those, it can feel as if we’re in free-fall into the unknown.

Maya Shankar, a cognitive scientist, has spent decades studying the human mind. When she experienced an unwanted change in her own life that left her reeling, she sought out people who had navigated major disruptions in their lives, and she tells what she learned in her new book The Other Side of Change. She shares their stories, along with insights from science to shine a light on universal lessons.

She says we can rethink how we engage with change altogether. When something big happens to us, she says, it can lead to profound change within us. That can lead to uncovering new abilities, perspectives, and values; the process can transform us in extraordinary ways.

Can moments of upheaval be seen as opportunities for positive change? What potentials lie within people waiting to be unlocked?

Join us to hear a scientist’s take on finding meaning in the turmoil of changes.

The program contains EXPLICIT language.

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

CLIMATE ONE: ENCORE: Taylor Brorby and Suzie Hicks Tell The Stories We Don’t Always Hear Apr 24, 2026

Show notes

Finding one's voice in climate action can come in many forms. Author and activist Taylor Brorby grew up in Center, North Dakota as a fourth-generation member of a fossil-fuel family. He struggled to find his place as a young gay kid who loved art, music, nature and poetry. Over time, he turned that tension into writing that challenges the fossil fuel industry, makes space for others stuck in a broken system, and inspires a more just future.

Suzie Hicks felt the weight of climate concerns but after college, didn’t know what to do with those feelings. After doing an internship at the New England Aquarium, they realized they could merge their love of performing with a career focused on climate. With the help of a sunflower puppet named Sprout, Suzie created a children’s show that teaches kids about climate change through a frame of possibility and hope, not doom and gloom.

Guests

Taylor Brorby, Activist, Author, “Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land”

Suzie Hicks, Climate Media Maker and Educator

For show notes, transcript, and related links, visit ⁠ClimateOne.org/podcasts⁠.

Highlights:

00:00 – Intro

02:20 – Taylor Brorby describes the N.D. town where he grew up

05:00 – What he learned from the prairie landscape

07:30 – Other queer writers from the Great Plains

13:30 – Influential environmental writers

17:00 – Writing optimistically rather than dystopian narratives

20:00 – Getting arrested protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline

25:30 – Why we need to be supporting rural writers

30:00 – Project Tundra, a carbon capture project near Center, N.D.

34:00 – Origins of Suzie Hicks, the Climate Chick

36:30 – It’s okay to have complicated feelings about climate change

40:00 – Working with kids' existing love for nature in educating them about climate change

42:00 – Why introduce kids to climate change? Because it’s already happening.

47:00 – How Hicks sees their role as a positive storyteller around climate change

**********

Ad sales by ⁠Multitude⁠. Contact them for ad inquiries at ⁠multitude.productions/ads⁠

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

Jessica Riskin: The Power of Life Apr 23, 2026

Show notes

Rarely does a historian of science have the opportunity, in the midst of changing trends in a science, to point backwards in time and explain how dismissive reactions to the ideas of a scientific pioneer might have harmed the accuracy of that science for centuries. Jessica Riskin has seized such an opportunity in her new book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology.

For centuries evolutionary theorists have discredited Lamarck due to his theory of self-transforming organisms, since they rejected (and mocked) the idea that animals could play an active role in shaping their own evolution. But new findings suggest that Lamarck’s basic claim was, in many ways, correct.

Riskin also argues that that denial of the agency of living beings led to two centuries of eugenic policies and environmental destruction, encouraging people to regard the living world as so much raw material to be shaped and exploited for economic, industrial, and imperial gain.

Riskin’s melding of biography, history, politics, and science sets out to correct this record. She tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces attempting to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science?

Join us as Riskin shines a much-needed light on an underappreciated biologist whose evolutionary theory offered a more inclusive, collaborative, and enlightened approach to science.

A Humanities Member-led Forum program. Forums at the Club are organized and run by volunteer programmers who are members of The Commonwealth Club, and they cover a diverse range of topics. Learn more about our Forums.

Organizer: George Hammond

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

Dr. Maya Kornberg: Stuck—How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress Apr 22, 2026

Show notes

Congress has long been a punching bag for American dissatisfaction with their government or with the direction of the country. But its unpopularity keeps plumbing new depths, even as the major party polarization has strengthened. In short, Congress—the central democratic institution in the country—is hanging on by a thread. But its biggest liability might be its inability to reform itself.

Maya Kornberg, a senior research fellow at the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, has explored the ways that Congress has become increasingly inhospitable to change. The “Watergate babies” of 1974, the Contract with America conservatives of 1994, and the historic 2018 class fueled by backlash to Donald Trump all represent younger, more diverse, and less entrenched members who arrived in the capital energized and idealistic. Today, Dr. Kornberg says political violence, astronomical campaign costs, relentless fundraising demands, shrinking staff, and centralized party leadership all constrain the ability of new members to legislate and represent their constituents. Social media, while offering new platforms for political expression, has also heightened harassment and fed a performative culture that rewards spectacle over substance.

Kornberg talked with dozens of individuals, examined congressional records, and heard from lawmakers past and present—including Henry Waxman, Toby Moffett, Phil English, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Lauren Underwood. She presents her findings in her new book Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress. In it, she chronicles the efforts of congressional reformers over the last 50 years and documents the mounting forces that have kept their reforms from creating meaningful change. Come hear her talk about the sobering portrait that emerged of a legislative body paralyzed by its own internal dynamics.

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

The Political Giant Who Led the Fight to End Colonial Rule in Africa Apr 22, 2026

Show notes

Acclaimed historian Howard W. French’s new book, The Second Emancipation, recasts the liberation of 20th century Africa through the lens of revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah. The first prime minister of Ghana, Nkrumah “was in his day as important as Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Mohandas Gandhi of India,” according to The Wall Street Journal. In fact, French writes, African opinion polls often rank Nkrumah as the greatest Black person of the last 100 years, surpassing Mandela.

The Second Emancipation is the second work in French’s trilogy about Africa’s pivotal role in shaping world history. The title―referring to a brief period beginning in 1957 when dozens of African colonies gained their freedom―positions this liberation at the center of a “movement of global Blackness,” with one charismatic leader, Nkrumah, at its head.

That so few people today know about Nkrumah is an omission that French demonstrates is “typical of our deliberate neglect of Africa’s enormous role in the birth of the modern world.” Join us to hear French talk about Nkrumah’s legacy and dramatic life story, the history of African liberation, and the current state of America’s engagement with Africa.

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