Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Roots of Peace in Afghanistan Nov 18, 2021

Show notes

For more than 25 years, Heidi Kuhn, at the helm of Roots of Peace, has been dedicated to cultivating peace and to helping rebuild war-torn countries by turning the scourge of land-mined areas into profitable agricultural land.

For example, in Afghanistan, a country 80-percent dependent on an agricultural economy, her esteemed charity has removed millions of landmines and planted millions of trees and vines, which greatly benefits countless Afghan farmers and their families.

Kuhn will also discuss her recent efforts to help her female employees emigrate and how after the ending of America's "forever" war and despite the unexpected, rapid Taliban takeover, Roots of Peace continues in Afghanistan.

MLF ORGANIZER

Celia Menczel

NOTES

MLF: Middle East, International Relations

SPEAKERS

Heidi Kuhn

Humanitarian; Founder and CEO, Roots of Peace

Atta Arghandiwal

Former Refugee; Author Lost Decency: The Untold Afghan Story

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 November 9th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Black Farming: Food Justice and Land Stewardship Nov 17, 2021

Show notes

Black communities have a long and complicated relationship with American soil. The ongoing call to address systemic racism, patterns of abuse, violence and dispossession have brought back to the mainstream the conversation of BIPOC communities' historical connections to land.

What are the connections between this history and current "food apartheid" (food deserts)? How is the Black farming movement connected to changes in larger food systems and the growth of worker cooperatives? How are people incorporating environmental sustainability into their work? And what can we learn from both the rich history of resistance and current strategies to inform how we resource a world where all people have access to healthy, fresh and locally sourced food?

Join the San Francisco Foundation and The Commonwealth Club of California as Doria Robinson, executive director of Urban Tilth, and Andrea Talley, worker-owner of the Mandela Grocery Cooperative, explore multiple issues and interconnections that surround farming and food access for BIPOC communities. In conversation with Natalie Baszile, noted author of Queen Sugar and We Are Each Other’s Harvest.

SPEAKERS

Doria Robinson

Executive Director, Urban Tilth

Andrea Talley

Worker-Owner, Mandela Grocery Cooperative

Natalie Baszile

Author, Queen Sugar and We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy

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 November 8th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Alec Ross: The Raging 2020s and the Fight for Our Future Nov 16, 2021

Show notes

Corporate America and our government both hold the power to shape our daily lives. However, Alex Ross says recently there seems to be a blur between big business and Congress in the “new Gilded Age”. Private companies have become as powerful as countries, leading many to wonder about the implications for everyday people.

In the face of unprecedented global change, New York Times bestselling author Alec Ross proposes a new social contract to restore the balance of power between government, citizens and business in The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People—and the Fight for Our Future.Through interviews with the world’s most influential thinkers and stories of corporate activism and malfeasance, government failure and renewal, and innovative economic and political models, Ross proposes a new social contract―one that resets the equilibrium between corporations, the governing, and the governed.

Join us as Alec Ross takes us through the changing landscape of the relationship between big business, government and people.

SPEAKERS

Alec Ross

Distinguished Visiting Professor, The University of Bologna Business School; Former Senior Advisor for Innovation to the U.S. Secretary of State; Author, The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People—and the Fight for Our Future

In Conversation with DJ Patil

Former U.S. Chief Data Scientist; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors

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John McWhorter: The Limits of Antiracism Nov 16, 2021

Show notes

Since the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, Americans have been engaged in a vast discussion on the state of race in America. Like many topics in the country, the issue has become a divisive, tense debate about how the country faces its racist past, the meaning of systemic racism, the role of critical race theory in K–12 schools and universities, and what it means to be "anti-racist" during this challenging moment in American civic life.

Renowned linguist and award-winning writer John McWhorter feels this debate and discussion has been dominated by a "woke mob" that subscribes to theories that are illogical, unreachable and, ultimately, racist in their impact, however unintentional those effects may be. In his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, McWhorter argues that an "illiberal neoracism," disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric.

In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new progressive approach toward race, from the original sin of “white privilege” to the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics. His book sets out to show how efforts that claim to “dismantle racist structures” are actually harming his fellow Black Americans by infantilizing Black people, setting Black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage Black communities. Some may call it “antiracism,” but to McWhorter, it features a racial essentialism that’s barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.

Please join us for an important discussion on the limits of antiracism with an increasingly visible writer who has a different roadmap to justice that he believes will help, not hurt, Black America.

SPEAKERS

John McWhorter

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University; Author, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

Debra J. Saunders

Fellow, Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership; Columnist, Creators Syndicate—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 November 2nd, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Sam Quinones: America in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

In 2015, renowned writer Sam Quinones woke up many Americans to the dangers of the opioid epidemic with his award-winning book Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic. In his new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, Quinones follows up Dreamland with an exploration of the terrifying next stages of the opioid epidemic, and the stories of individuals and communities that have fought back.

Quinones was among the first journalists to capture the true danger presented by synthetic drugs. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine, and laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills, causing tens of thousands of deaths—at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever. Combined, these new synthetic drugs wrecked communities across the country, particularly rural areas, led to a surge of mental illness concerns, and fed a growing homelessness problem throughout the United States. Quinones explores these issues and more.

At a time of great despair because of multiple drug epidemics, Quinones also finds sources of hope, in communities fighting back against rampant synthetic drug issues and helping individuals repair their lives. Quinones concludes that the nation has forsaken “what has made America great” and that “when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like drug traffickers, our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.”

Please join us for an important conversation on one of the country's most challenging problems, and what we all can do to rise to the challenge.

SPEAKERS

Sam Quinones

Journalist; Author, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

April Dembosky

Health Correspondent, KQED—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 November 4th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Jay Caspian Kang: The Loneliest Americans Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

Join us for a conversation with Jay Caspian Kang, who draws on a combination of family history and original reporting to explore—and reimagine—Asian American identity in a Black and white world.

In 1965, a new immigration law lifted a century of restrictions against Asian immigrants to the United States. Nobody, including the lawmakers who passed the bill, expected it to transform the country’s demographics. But over the next four decades, millions arrived, including Jay Caspian Kang’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

The Loneliest Americans is the unforgettable story of Kang and his family as they move from a housing project in Cambridge to an idyllic college town in the South and eventually to the West Coast. Their story unfolds against the backdrop of a rapidly expanding Asian America, as millions more immigrants, many of them working-class or undocumented, stream into the country. At the same time, upwardly mobile urban professionals have struggled to reconcile their parents’ assimilationist goals with membership in a multicultural elite—all while trying to carve out a new kind of belonging for their own children.

Kang recognizes this existential loneliness in himself and in other Asian Americans who try to locate themselves in what he calls the country’s racial binary. There are the businessmen turning Flushing into a center of immigrant wealth; the casualties of the Los Angeles riots; the impoverished parents in New York City who believe that admission to the city’s exam schools is the only way out; the men’s right’s activists on Reddit ranting about intermarriage; and the handful of protesters who show up at Black Lives Matter rallies holding “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” signs. Kang ties these various strands together amid a wave of anti-Asian violence and he adds his call for a new form of immigrant solidarity—one rooted not in bubble tea and elite college admissions but in the struggles of refugees and the working class.

About the Speaker

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on "This American Life" and "Vice," where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, which The Boston Globe called “an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.”

NOTES

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

SPEAKERS

Jay Caspian Kang

Writer-at-Large, The New York Times Magazine; Author, The Loneliest Americans

Michelle Meow

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

John Zipperer

Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Co-Host

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Dr. Sandro Galea: Preventing the Next Health Crisis Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

Within months of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, public health systems in the United States (and around the world) were stretched to the brink of destruction. The virus infected millions, killed hundreds of thousands, and effectively made the country stand still. Nineteen months later, the pandemic continues. Yet America was already in poor health before COVID-19 appeared. The country's failure to address many issues—marginalization and socioeconomic inequality among them—left the United States vulnerable to COVID-19 and the ensuing global health crisis it became.

Sandro Galea's new book, The Contagion Next Time, describes the foundational forces shaping health in our society and how we can strengthen them to prevent the next outbreak from becoming a pandemic. Had the country tackled these challenges 20 years ago, after the outbreak of SARS, perhaps COVID-19 could have been quickly contained. Instead, we allowed our systems to deteriorate. Galea, as he did in his previous book, Well, challenges all of us to tackle the deep-rooted obstacles preventing us from becoming a truly vibrant and equitable nation, and reminds us at this critical time that a country's health is a public good worth protecting as much as the country's physical infrastructure.

Please join us for this important public health conversation.

SPEAKERS

Dr. Sandro Galea

Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, Boston University School of Public Health

Mark Zitter

Chair, The Zetema Project—Moderator

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CLIMATE ONE: Climbing, Conservation and Capitalism Nov 12, 2021

Show notes

Rick Ridgeway estimates he’s spent about five years of his life sleeping in tents, often in the world’s most remote places alongside fellow outdoor adventure luminaries. Ridgeway worked for Patagonia for 15 years and was behind the company’s infamous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” ad campaign, which paradoxically advocated sustainability and increased sales.

Outdoor companies like Patagonia may push for sustainability, but they largely still present a mostly white, wealthy experience with nature, which can be off-putting for people of color. “You know if you can't see yourself in those spaces then it’s hard to feel invited or welcome in that movement,” says writer and social justice facilitator Amanda Machado.

What is the role of corporations in conservation? And how can the outdoor industry help make nature more safe, accessible and welcoming for all?

For transcripts and other information, visit: https://www.climateone.org/watch-and-listen/podcasts

Guests:

Rick Ridgeway, former Vice President of Public Engagement, Patagonia

Amanda Machado, writer and social justice facilitator

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Groundbreaking Innovations in Mental Health at UCSF Nov 10, 2021

Show notes

Building upon decades of work, the field of psychiatry stands at the precipice of a new era as advancements in neuroscience and population health are being successfully applied to the treatment of mental health disorders. From personalized brain stimulation for treatment-resistant depression to the use of technology to bring care to historically underserved groups, a wave of innovations is revolutionizing how mental health care is delivered in the Bay Area and around the globe.

A panel of clinical and research experts from the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences will discuss their efforts to transform our understanding and treatment of mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, eating disorders, autism and substance use disorders.

Part of The Commonwealth Club’s series on mental health, dedicated in memory of Nancy Friend Pritzker, with support from the John Pritzker Family Fund.

SPEAKERS

Christopher Bartley

M.D., Ph.D., Adjunct Instructor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF; Hannah H. Grey Fellow, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Andrew Moses Lee

M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Adjunct professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF

Katherine Scangos

M.D., Ph.D., Health Sciences Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, UCSF

Fumi Mitsuishi

M.D., M.S., Health sciences associate clinical professor, UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Director, Citywide Case Management, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital Department of Psychiatry

Andrew Krystal

M.D., M.S., Ray and Dagmar Dolby Distinguished Professor, Vice Chair, Research, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences; Professor in residence, UCSF Department of Neurology. Director, UCSF Dolby Family Center for Mood Disorders—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 November 5th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Risk with General Stanley McChrystal Nov 10, 2021

Show notes

From his first day at West Point to his years of deployment in Afghanistan, retired four-star U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal is no stranger to the deadly risks of combat. Throughout his illustrious career and efforts helping business leaders navigate a global pandemic, General McChrystal has seen how individuals and organizations have failed to mitigate risk by focusing solely on the probability of something happening as opposed to the interface by which it can be managed.

In his new book, Risk: A User’s Guide, McChrystal and co-author Anna Butrico offer a battle-tested system for detecting and responding to risk. This book offers an alternative way of maintaining a healthy "risk immune system" that involves monitoring 10 different dimensions of control the authors say can be adjusted at any time to effectively anticipate, identify, analyze and act upon the ever-present possibility that things will not go as planned.

Join us as General McChrystal reveals an entirely new way to understand risk and master the unknown.

SPEAKERS

General Stanley McChrystal

Retired Army General; Author, Risk: A User’s Guide; Twitter @StanMcChrystal

In Conversation with Dan Ashley

Co-Anchor, ABC 7 News; Member, Commonwealth Club Board of Governors; Twitter @DanAshleyABC7

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 October 24th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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