Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

Nowhere is the dual threat of climate change and geopolitical competition felt more strongly than in the Arctic. Sea ice is declining rapidly, wildfires are burning, and permafrost is thawing. At the same time, global interest is growing rapidly as the region transforms from being a frozen desert into an international waterway.

Mia Bennett, a geography professor at the University of Washington and the co-author, with Klaus Dodds, of the new book Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, will join us to examine the state of the Arctic today. She’ll explore how the region is becoming a space of experimentation for everything from Indigenous governance to subsea technologies. Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption. Countries—including Russia, China, and the United States—are investing in the Arctic and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building.

The consequences of this emerging “Arctic Anthropocene” are truly global—from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territories and resources, and the well-being of Indigenous peoples who have fought for centuries for rights and recognition.

In association with Wonderfest.

A People & Nature 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: Andrew Dudley

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

Young King: The Making of Martin Luther King Jr. Jun 08, 2026

Show notes

We know who Martin Luther King, Jr. became, but who was he at the beginning of his life? How did his youth inform his outlook and his approach to activism and service?

Before Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights leader, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and a global hero, he was an emotional boy, and an average high school student devoted to fashion, dancing, and dating. On his way to college, he took a summer job that left the Jim Crow South behind and tested his oratory skills—preaching in the tobacco fields of Connecticut, which ultimately gave him a sense of hope for a life of racial peace and harmony.

Stanford University’s Lerone Martin traces the youthful roots of this legendary American to reveal the makings of a mighty force. Filled with revelations and written with compassion, Martin offers a new understanding of the influential preacher and activist’s emotional life, his youthful confusion about his future and career direction, his inspiration to fight for justice, his teenage missteps, and his first revelations of courage. As America undergoes another era of turmoil and change, this powerful biography offers encouragement for readers at a similar moment of life and provides an understanding of how greatness comes to light. To that end, Martin illuminates both King’s weaknesses and the social failures that shaped him, including the brutal racism he endured growing up.

Join us to hear, from a preeminent King scholar, the origin story of the man, the minister, and the civil rights hero who inspired our nation to change itself—and the world.

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

CLIMATE ONE: ENCORE: Cities Leading the Way Jun 05, 2026

Show notes

While the federal government has all but abandoned trying to address the climate crisis, cities around the world are stepping up. C40 is an international network of 97 cities representing 920 million people and 23% of the world’s economy. Seventy-three percent of these cities have already peaked their emissions. Here in the US, Climate Mayors is a bipartisan network of nearly 350 U.S. mayors, representing 48 states and over 70 million Americans. How are cities innovating on reducing emissions, adapting to increasing climate risks, and — perhaps most importantly — sharing their knowledge?

Guests:

Eric Garcetti, C40 Ambassador for Global Climate Diplomacy; Former Mayor, Los Angeles

Kate Gallego, Mayor of Phoenix; Former Chair, Climate Mayors

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

Outdoors Writer Tom Stienstra Shares His Tales of Survival … and Top Adventure Spots Jun 03, 2026

Show notes

For more than 40 years, outdoor enthusiasts have turned to Tom Stienstra for guidance on the best waterfalls, unforgettable campsites, and hidden wild places. A longtime outdoors writer and editor for the San Francisco Chronicle and KCBS-FM, Stienstra is also the bestselling author of essential guidebooks like Moon’s California Camping and 52 Weekend Adventures in Northern California.

His adventures have taken him deep into the wilderness—hiking, camping, boating, canoeing, kayaking, flying, trekking, hunting, and exploring some of the most remote corners of the West. As longtime Sunset magazine travel editor Peter Fish put it, “Tom Stienstra is the Yoda of the outdoors. He literally has been everywhere and knows everything.”

In his new book Heaven Delayed: One Man’s Survival of 16 Near-Death Encounters, Stienstra reflects on a lifetime of close calls: surviving a hatchet attack to the back of his head, being charged by a wild cow, and multiple near-drownings—including one rescue by his brother in an icy lake and another by his best friend in a flooding river. Then came cancer and six brain surgeries. All are brought to life in his new book, one compact volume of heartfelt writing from a man who has lived enough adventure for several lifetimes.

Come hear Stienstra discuss his new memoir, his extraordinary life outdoors, and his tips for summer adventures in the Bay Area and beyond.

Stienstra photo courtesy the speaker; the image on the book cover was created by artist John Blanchard of the San Francisco Chronicle—it shows the author in two phases, before and after treatment for cancer.

Notes

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

The Fight Against AI-Powered Surveillance with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Adam Savage May 31, 2026

Show notes

When the Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” this March, the dispute put a spotlight on civil liberties concerns in the AI-era. Anthropic had reportedly hit an impasse with the Trump administration over the company’s push for guardrails banning the use of its Claude model to conduct mass surveillance. Anthropic’s CEO had called such surveillance a “red line” it would not cross. But where exactly should those lines be drawn, and who should draw them?

Few people have spent more time thinking about those issues than Cindy Cohn, executive director of the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation. Throughout her career, EFF’s executive director has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Her new book, Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, chronicles her battles to protect our right to digital privacy.

Cohn weaves her own personal story with the history of the Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a seasoned leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she also details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into “one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.”

Cohn will be joined by Adam Savage, former co-host of the Discovery Channel show “Mythbusters,” to talk about the issues raised in her book, EFF’s work, and the emerging battle over AI surveillance.

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

Safe Play: Creating Inclusion in Sport May 30, 2026

Show notes

Pride House SF and Commonwealth Club World Affairs are proud to assemble three hour-long events designed to showcase the importance of celebrating self and sport. Using the backdrop of this summer’s global soccer event—and the significance of Bay Area representation on the world stage—each program will feature local experts convening around a designated theme.

In our first program, meet leaders on and off the field who are changing sports and acceptance.

Christina Jefferson is the first-ever senior director for inclusion & culture at the San Francisco 49ers. Jefferson leads inclusion and diversity efforts across the organization and created the team's internship program. She is also responsible for managing the team's recruitment and hiring activities and its internship and fellowship programs. Jefferson earned her B.S. from the University of Southern Indiana and her Master's in human resource management from Golden Gate University. Christina has been a coach for Resetting the Table since 2021, and is a member of several boards, including the chair of the Jews of Color Initiative, Repair the World, and Resetting the Table. She is also a 2025 Sports Business Journal Woman of Influence.

Roscoe Mapps III is a strategist and social impact leader working at the intersection of sports, culture and systems change. As chief diversity officer for the San Francisco Giants in his eleventh season, he oversees diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across workforce, culture, business practices and community impact—focused on turning aspiration into execution and building systems where belonging is experienced, not just stated. Across a 25-year career spanning corporate talent, global advocacy, and civic leadership, he has consistently advanced equity through coalition-building, narrative change, and large-scale initiatives, including the Mission Rock development, which secured historic voter approval while embedding housing, workforce and economic inclusion commitments.

Meghan O’Leary is the founding owner of LOVB San Francisco and Olympic rower. Meghan O’Leary is a two-time Olympian, founder, investor, and sports media professional with more than 20 years of experience helping leaders and teams perform under pressure, navigate transition and lead with purpose. A seven-year member of the United States Rowing National Team, she represented Team USA at the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, earning multiple World Championship and World Cup medals. A longtime advocate for athlete empowerment and gender equity, O'Leary served eight years on the US Rowing Board of Directors, helping shape the organization’s commercial strategy, governance and commitment to advancing equity and the growth of the sport. As an angel investor and startup advisor, she partners with early-stage founders and funds shaping the future of sports, media, healthtech and wellness.

This program is made possible by the support of Pride House SF, San Francisco LGBT Center, Spikes and San Francisco 49ers.

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

Fake News for Good? Reporting from the Future to Save Democracy Today May 29, 2026

Show notes

When the news moves faster than we can process it, how do we grasp what any of it actually means for our lives? And what happens when that overwhelming feeling isn’t accidental, but rather a deliberate political strategy (“flooding the zone”) designed to ensure that no issue of consequence can get the sustained attention it deserves?

Strategic futurist Jason Tester has pioneered an answer—“speculative journalism,” a new form of what-if reporting on high-probability, high-stakes futures before they materialize. Through two novel projects created over the past year, Tester demonstrates how this approach can make abstract or hypothetical consequences feel urgent, visceral and deeply personal. His project One Big Beautiful Aftermath: Dispatches from Near-Future America translates the sprawling “One Big Beautiful Bill” into compelling human stories, revealing the legislation’s projected impacts on everyday Americans in the coming years. His other groundbreaking scenario, Insurrection: An American Future, has proved disturbingly prescient. Published in January 2025, months before federal forces were deployed to Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and Minneapolis, it depicts an eerily similar de facto military occupation of San Francisco’s streets.

But creating photorealistic imagery of events that haven’t happened raises hard questions: When does “fake news for good” risk becoming just fake news? And who gets to decide?

Join Jason in conversation with Michelle Meow to explore how speculative journalism can cut through information overload to strengthen democracy, the crucial role generative AI plays in telling these stories, the ethical red lines this work demands, and why reporting from tomorrow might be the most important journalism we can do today.

About the Speaker

Jason Tester is a strategic futurist and speculative designer whose work explores the human consequences of political, technological and social transformation. For more than two decades, he has used visual and immersive storytelling to make future possibilities more understandable and resonant for numerous companies, nonprofit organizations and governments around the world. A former research director at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Tester is a leading figure in the field of speculative design and a fierce advocate for democratizing futurism. Based in San Francisco for more than two decades and deeply rooted in the city’s LGBTQ+ community, his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and on MSNBC and CNN.

See more Michelle Meow Show programs at Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.

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

CLIMATE ONE: Healing Ourselves and the Planet with Katharine Wilkinson and Uncle Pappy May 29, 2026

Show notes

When real and internal maps come up short, and the path ahead is uncertain, how do we find our way? In her new book⁠ “Climate Wayfinding⁠,” Dr. Katharine Wilkinson (co-founder of the All We Can Save Project) offers a compassionate and empowering guide for navigating through ache to action, doubt to possibility. Whether we’re steeped in climate or newly curious, we can look inward with care, outward with curiosity, and forward with courage to shape our unique contributions to healing the planet we call home.

In Florida, social media star Uncle Pappy blends his unique mix of philosophy, humor, and love of nature into his own brand of inspirational messages.

“I feel a moral imperative to nature to try to remind people of how incredible it is, and at the same time, I feel a moral imperative to people to remind them of how incredible nature is.”

Guests:

Katharine Wilkinson, Author, “Climate Wayfinding;” Co-founder & Executive Director, The All We Can Save Project

Blair Carlyle (aka Uncle Pappy), Instagram influencer; Law student

For show notes, transcript, and related links, visit https://www.climateone.org/podcasts

Highlights:

00:00 – Intro

04:15 – Katharine Wilkinson’s climate journey

10:45 – Climate is big, global, multifaceted, yet impacts are close and intimate

17:45 – How to transform overwhelming grief into power, joy, and meaning

21:00 – Answering the question, “What can I do?”

29:15 – Reading of the poem “Equinox" by Tamiko Byer

33:00 – How Blair Carlyle, aka Uncle Pappy, pivoted to environmental subjects

36:15 – Carlyle’s Connection to the outdoors

40:00 – “Pappy is the realest version of me, the version I aspire to be”

45:00 – Carlyle on reaching people of all political beliefs, regardless of their climate views

53:30 – Climate One More Thing

**********

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

Dion Lim: My Fight for Asian America May 24, 2026

Show notes

February 24, 2020, started out like any other day for journalist and television anchor Dion Lim of San Francisco’s ABC News. Planning her pitches for the morning’s editorial meeting, she checked her Instagram account and saw a message from someone she didn’t recognize. Attached was a horrifying video in which men were beating and yelling racist slurs at an elderly Asian man who had been collecting cans in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. Lim felt compelled to investigate the story, help the man who “looked freakishly like my dad,” and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Thus began Lim’s four-years-and-counting quest to bring attention to the appalling rise of anti-Asian hate and violence in America, which she chronicles in her new book. Featuring an emotional foreword by actress and outspoken anti-Asian harassment advocate Olivia Munn, Amplify! My Fight for Asian America (from Third State Books) brings readers on an eye-opening journey alongside Lim, who has unwittingly become a national hero for her relentless fight for Asian American visibility.

Through deeply personal anecdotes about her own life as a Chinese American, exclusive interviews with survivors, activists, and historians, and incisive historical context, she provides the very first book to tackle one of the biggest political and social controversies of this century from the perspective of the AAPI community.

Come meet Lim and hear her story.

See more Michelle Meow Show programs at Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.

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

ABC News' Martha Raddatz: The Hero Next Door, Stories of Patriotism and Purpose May 23, 2026

Show notes

Martha Raddatz has seen the uncommon courage of service members and their families, and she has watched—in war zones and on the home front—as they have faced daunting odds and come out stronger. She asked veterans whose character and actions have impacted her deeply to relive their most challenging moments, so that others will know who they are and what they have done. In her new book The Hero Next Door, Emmy Award–winning ABC News journalist and bestselling author Martha Raddatz shares 10 stories of American warriors and their families, whose superhuman sacrifice and resilience—on and off the battlefield—show that true courage comes in many forms.

She introduces readers to an air force rescue parajumper who put his life on the line to save a man whose fate would become entwined with his; a marine ambushed in Helmand whose life-changing injury forced him to take on a different kind of fight; a trailblazing F-18 fighter pilot flying missions over Syria; a combat surgeon who pioneered a new way of saving people with traumatic brain injuries and turned his world upside down to train doctors in Ukraine; an intelligence officer who forged a lifetime friendship with the man who saved him on 9/11; and two mothers whose love and sacrifices embody the ideal of selfless service.

Some of these people were inspired to join the military by parents who served, and some left abusive families, determined to do better. Some joined when everyone was against it. They were there because they wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves. Raddatz says the qualities that made them shine on the battlefield gave them the strength to conceive of transformative second acts. The focus, mental resilience, and emotional fortitude kept them going through physical and emotional setbacks. They started companies to fill a need, created nimble nonprofits, and hunted for humor wherever they could find it.

Most Americans don’t know these people. Join us as Martha Raddatz changes that.

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