Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

David Gergen is professor of public service and founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, positions he has held for more than a decade. In addition, he serves as a senior political analyst for CNN and works actively with a rising generation of new leaders. In the past, he has served as a White House adviser to four U.S. presidents of both parties: Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton. Professor Gergen's work as director of the Center for Public Leadership has enabled him to work closely with a new generation of younger leaders, especially social entrepreneurs, military veterans and Young Global Leaders chosen by the World Economic Forum. Through the generosity of outside donors, the Center helps to provide scholarships to more than 100 students a year, preparing them to serve as leaders for the common good. The Center also promotes scholarship at the frontiers of leadership studies. In the 1980s, he began a career in journalism. Starting with "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour"

What will it take to get the world’s major economies off fossil fuels? In late 2019, former US senator and secretary of state John Kerry, declared a World War Zero on carbon pollution. “It’s really putting the nation on a war footing to avoid the next pandemic which will be exacerbated by the climate crisis, and the way to get ahead of it is to prepare and make the decisions now,” says Kerry. “The long-term energy future of America is not going to be written in fossil fuels” The COVID-19 pandemic is expected to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 7.5% in 2020 — exactly the rate needed globally to meet the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. But can other major emitters like China and Europe make plans to decarbonize at the same rate without throwing their economies over a cliff? “You really can't make any progress on climate without China making an effort,” says Justin Wu, Head of Asia-Pacific, at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “China basically has hit some of the climate goals it announced a few years ago

Racism, police and the pandemic are dominating hearts and headlines, but will they translate to votes in national and regional elections? One study found wavering Trump voters rank immigration and climate change as top reasons for a possible vote change, but it’s unclear if that will materialize. Other studies contend climate doesn’t even rank on the minds of swing voters. Young, liberal Americans are leading the charge on climate, but Bernie Sanders learned they are more likely to protest than vote. What issues are top of mind for Obama-Trump voters in swing states? How will the Coronavirus and racial justice crises of 2020 impact voters this cycle? Guests: Tiffany Cross, Co-Founder, The Beat DC; Author, Say It Louder! Black Voters, White Narratives, and Saving Our Democracy Rich Thau, President & Co-founder, Engagious Rick Wilson, Republican Political Strategist This program was recorded via video on June 23, 2020. For full show notes, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/

Join us for a virtual conversation with best-selling author, A. J. Baime, to discuss his latest book, the thrilling story of the 1948 presidential election, during which Truman mounted a remarkable comeback and staked a claim for a new course for America. On the eve of the 1948 election, America was a fractured country. Racism was rampant, foreign relations were fraught, and political parties were more divided than ever. Americans were certain that President Truman's political career was over, his own staff did not believe he could win, nor did his wife Bess. But win he did. Baime sheds light on one of the most action-packed six months in American history, as Truman not only triumphs, but also oversees watershed events: the Marshall Plan, the creation of Israel, the origins of the Cold War, and the first desegregation of the military. Not only did Truman win, he succeeded in guiding his country forward at a critical time with high stakes and haunting parallels to current events. MLF ORGANIZER George Hammond L

Zerlina Maxwell is an expert on the divisions plaguing the liberal left. As an MSNBC political analyst and staffer on both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaigns, Maxwell witnessed firsthand the successes and failures of the Democratic party’s attempt to unify voters. Now with the 2020 election boiled down to two older white male candidates, she is asking liberals to take an introspective look at why they have been unable to engage women and people of color for years. Maxwell’s new book, The End of White Politics: How to Heal Our Liberal Divide, asks progressives to hold themselves accountable for their own racist and misogynist blindspots while also challenging them to do better by their constituents. She argues that by leaning into a more diverse landscape in American politics, every single citizen would benefit. Join us at INFORUM, where Maxwell will give us her vision on the future of the Democratic Party and how she thinks there may still be time to save it. Learn more about your ad cho

COVID-19 cases are surging again across the United States. Governors, colleges, sports teams and others are announcing new plans every day. It’s hard to know what to expect, or understand the shifts. Is this part of the first wave of infections, or a second one? While hospitalizations are up, why are death rates are lower? With younger people making up a larger number of positive cases, what should the response be? Will schools open in the fall, and if so, under what circumstances? Will employees be able to go back to work, and even if they can, is it wise? More broadly, should we be easing restrictions or clamping down? Should our government mandate or only recommend mask wearing, social distancing, and business closing? Why does the United States seem out of step from the rest of the developed world? Never have public officials and individuals faced such complex choices and such an uncertain future. Hear two leading public health officials and policy advisors explain where we are in managing the pandemic, w

Advancing technology, changing social attitudes and evolving laws have all combined to make establish this as a time when LGBTQ people are looking to create or expand families. How do they do it? What do they need to know? To answer these and other questions, Michelle Meow talks with fertility experts from the medical and legal realms, as well as proud parents of a new 3-month-old baby. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As an old adage (mistakenly attributed to Confucius) notes, it’s difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. Conspiracy theories have always been prevalent in the United States, but today they seem to be especially popular, from politics to popular culture, particularly on social media. In the spirit of another adage, even paranoids have enemies: there are real conspiracies, and some of them are important and even dangerous. How do you tell the genuine conspiracies from the tinfoil hat ones? Dr. Eugenie C. Scott is the former executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Inc. Dr. Scott is an internationally known expert on the creationism and evolution controversy and science denialism, and she is called upon by the press and other media to explain science to the general public. The author of Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction and co-editor with Glenn Branch of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools, she is the recip

This event is the Middle East Forum’s fourth annual panel about how the Trump presidency is affecting the Middle East. Our distinguished panel of Middle East experts will continue the conversation and will also discuss why some believe that during the past year, Trump has helped destabilize the region with impulsive rhetoric and inflammatory actions, while others believe that Trump is making America safer. MLF ORGANIZER Celia Menczel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this discussion, the third in a series on the relation between catastrophe and narrative, Homer scholar Dr. James Porter and poet Gillian Conoley will discuss how disaster and catastrophe have found narrative expression from Ancient Greece to the present day. Unbeknownst to itself, the Western tradition is founded on violent catastrophe, and the wounds of this history are deeply embedded in its cultural memory. Homer's poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," commemorate a war that led to the capture and obliteration of an ancient city called Troy. Looming behind Troy lies a much larger catastrophe, the massive "systems collapse" that swept across the Aegean and Mediterranean East sometime around 1200 BCE and that wiped out Bronze Age palaces on the Greek mainland, on Crete, Cyprus, in the Levant and Asia Minor, and that threw these civilizations back into a prehistoric state, a truly "Dark Age," for half a millennium. How such massive changes could have come about in so many places at once and in so short a

The coronavirus pandemic has had a significant impact on the Latino community in California and throughout the United States. Due to a range of factors, the Latino community has disproportionately high rates of infections from the coronavirus as well as hospitalizations and deaths. These impacts can be seen in the Latino community throughout California—north and south, urban and rural. What are the risk factors, particularly around employment and housing that have made the pandemic such a public health challenge for the Latino community, and what are key Latino-serving organizations in the state doing to address these problems? This program will feature leaders from organizations and experts on the frontlines serving California’s Latino community. Learn how they have been handling these critical issues over the past few months and what they expect now as confirmed coronavirus cases continue to surge locally and nationally. We’ll hear from the head of the Latino Community Foundation and the executive directors

As President Trump seeks a second term in office, the apparent makeover of the GOP from a tax-cutting old guard into a populist new guard is a critical part of the upcoming 2020 election. But how much of this is just an appearance, and how much is a real shift among Republicans? In their new book, Let Them Eat Tweets, best-selling authors and political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a definitive answer: Trump isn’t a break with the GOP’s recent past. On the contrary, he embodies its tightening embrace of plutocracy and right-wing extremism―a dynamic Hacker and Pierson call “plutocratic populism.” As they argue in this new book and elsewhere, the GOP serves its plutocratic “masters” to a degree without precedent in modern global history. Today’s Republicans have doubled down on a truly radical, elite-benefiting economic agenda while at the same time making increasingly incendiary racial and cultural appeals to their almost entirely white base. Hacker and Pierson’s new book demonstrates that

Generation X writer Neal Pollack thought he had it all: a good writing career, a strong marriage, even a lucrative 3-day run on "Jeopardy"! That brought him national attention. Like many in his generation, he also smoked a lot of marijuana. He had discovered that food, music and even his beloved yoga was much better when he smoked. In 2014, as several states in the country legalized pot, Pollack scored a writing gig for a marijuana site that provided free weed. He saw his drug use as harmless and joked about it often in his writing. But as more states, including California, began to legalize the drug, Pollack’s life began to fall apart, in part because of his drug use. Both of his parents died and he soon found himself spiraling out of control, sometimes in public. By 2018, Pollack admitted publicly he had a marijuana addiction and set about to conquer it, through honesty . . . and humor. Pollack’s new book, Pothead, is about coming to terms with his marijuana problems just as the country increased its recrea

Chronic pain is a debilitating and very common condition. Tension headaches, and lower back and neck pain are listed among the top 10 leading causes of disability around the world, with billions of people experiencing pain on a recurring basis. Studies show that up to 50 percent of the population might experience chronic pain conditions during their lifetime. The latest breakthroughs in neuroscience and clinical practice could unlock game-changing approaches to treating chronic pain: a complete elimination of pain instead of “managing” it as a chronic condition. Dr. Howard Schubiner, a medical researcher, clinician and author of Unlearn Your Pain, will review new forms of treatment for various chronic pain conditions including, but not limited to, lower back, neck, arms, legs, or general pain conditions like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Russia’s interference in the 2016 election wasn’t a new problem with our Cold War adversary. Their meddling in 2016 marked only the latest chapter of a hidden and revelatory history. In his new book Rigged, David Shimer tells the sweeping story of covert electoral interference past and present. He exposes decades of secret operations—by the KGB, the CIA and Vladimir Putin's Russia—to shape electoral outcomes. John Brennan, as director of the CIA during the 2016 election, was at the forefront of this issue. In January 2017, Brennan, along with former FBI Director James Comey and others, briefed President-elect Donald Trump on the Russian interference efforts. Following his departure, he became a vocal critic of the Trump administration, culminating in Trump taking the unprecedented step of revoking his security clearance in 2018. Both Shimer and Brennan believe that understanding 2016 as one battle in a much longer war is essential to understanding the critical threat currently posed to America's electoral sov

Heidi Kuhn, a former CNN reporter and producer, will share her extraordinary journey as a peace activist and how she created Roots of Peace a nonprofit organization that removes landmines and replaces them with vineyards and orchards. Roots of Peace has removed more than 100,000 land mines and unexploded ordinances in Afghanistan, Israel, the West Bank Croatia, and elsewhere, and it has helped more than a million farmers and their families. Kuhn who has received numerous humanitarian awards and praise from Queen Noor of Jordan, Nancy Pelosi and Jane Goodall, among others, will discuss her new book, Breaking Ground: From Landmines to Grapevines: One Woman's Vision to Heal the World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comedian Loni Love has always felt like an outsider in Hollywood. Unlike most celebrities who leveraged their connections to catch their big break in the industry, Love grew up in low-income housing in Detroit and worked as an electrical engineer post-college to make ends meet. Even after striking gold as a comedian and host of the popular talk show "The Real," she still found herself at odds with what the entertainment industry expects of women who are on camera. She spent many years changing herself to try to fit in before she realized that she was thriving in her dream job because she didn’t fit a mold . . . and not despite that. Join Love at INFORUM in honor of her hilarious new book, I Tried to Change So You Don't Have To: True Life Lessons, where she chronicles her atypical path to Hollywood and reflects on the many mistakes and unexpected successes she encountered along the way. Tune in to hear her story and why embracing yourself for who you are is a much better plan than “fake it ‘till you make it.”

Expanding oil extraction and clean energy, supporting capitalism while fighting climate change: can humans ever really have it all? In their new books, authors Hope Jahren and Rebecca Henderson explore how a healthy climate might coexist with a consumption-driven economy — and what we need to change to get the best of both worlds. Meanwhile, is Norway the perfect example of having it all — or just a walking contradiction? Like “a drug dealer who doesn’t use its own product”, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the largest in the world, supported exclusively by petroleum revenues. As they continue to explore new avenues for drilling, the country has also moved away from using the fossil fuels they produce, electrifying their economy and leading in climate friendly technologies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a virtual conversation with Edward Larson to commemorate the 20th anniversary of his Pulitzer Prize-winning history Summer for the Gods, the definitive account of the pivotal battle between creationism and evolution. In his new epilogue, Larson assesses the lasting resonance of the Scopes Trial as clashes continue between science and religion, and about free speech and academic freedom. Larson takes us back to the 1920s, when Protestant fundamentalists started a national campaign against the teaching of Darwinism in American schools. Tennessee was the first state to honor the movement by banning Darwinism from its curriculum. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenged the ban and requested that teacher John Scopes reject it outright in his classroom, resulting in a 1925 trial of mythic proportions with a dramatic legal matchup that ignited massive media attention. Represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, John Scopes was pitted against William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinist

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens every aspect of transportation funding in California. State revenues from federal, state, regional and local taxes and fees are all at risk. Since California’s shelter-in-place order went into effect in March, the state has already faced plummeting revenues from gasoline taxes, tolls, transit fares and sales taxes. These revenue sources will most likely continue to be severely threatened in the coming months and possibly even years. Panelists will discuss the opportunities for every level of government to help recover transportation revenues in our uncertain future. Can we rely on our traditional mix of revenue sources? Will the COVID-19 crisis stimulate innovation in transportation finance? These and other revenue options will be discussed at the 11th Annual Norman Y. Mineta National Transportation Policy Summit. NOTES This program is supported by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San José State University Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices