Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's largest public affairs forum. The nonpartisan and nonprofit Club produces and distributes programs featuring diverse viewpoints from thought leaders on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast — the oldest in the U.S., since 1924 — is carried on hundreds of stations. Our website features audio and video of our programs. This podcast feed is usually updated multiple times each week.

Episodes

Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation

August 25, 2025 • 73 mins
Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner’s status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the C...
Mark as Played

CLIMATE ONE: Batteries Now Included

August 22, 2025 • 55 mins
The Trump administration has taken aim at green energy, but one technology has largely been left untouched: batteries to store wind and solar electricity. California alone surpassed 13GW of battery storage last year, and Texas has become the fastest growing market for the technology. But producing batteries isn’t without its downsides, especially when it comes to mining the necessary raw materials. The upside is that those material...
Mark as Played

The Future of Gun Violence Prevention with Rob Bonta, David Hogg, and Leaders in the Fight for Safety

August 21, 2025 • 79 mins
In the wake of the Parkland shooting in 2018, David Hogg and his classmates' rallying cry, #NeverAgain, echoed across the nation. Unfortunately, since that tragic event, countless other locations—the Tree of Life Synagogue, El Paso, Uvalde, Half Moon Bay and many more—have joined the heartbreaking list of mass shootings. For each of the past five years, the number of mass shootings in the United States has exceeded the number of da...
Mark as Played

Week to Week Politics Roundtable: August 18, 2025

August 20, 2025 • 66 mins
It's time for an end-of-summer discussion of politics and politicians.  Join us in-person or online for the Week to Week political roundtable. Learn more about the people, trends and topics driving the political news of the day.  Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California is a nonprofit public forum; we welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our online programming. See other upcoming Week to...
Mark as Played

Are We Living Inside a Video Game? Rizwan Virk on his 'Simulation Hypothesis'

August 16, 2025 • 66 mins
Are we living in the Matrix? Rizwan Virk—an MIT computer scientist, leading video game pioneer, entrepreneur, film producer, venture capitalist, professor, and a founder of Play Labs @ MIT—is a leading authority on simulation theory. Now he comes to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to discuss the issues raised in his new book The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics, and Eastern Mystics All...
Mark as Played

CLIMATE ONE: Cause of Death: Air Pollution

August 15, 2025 • 56 mins
In 2013, 9-year-old Ella Roberta died from a severe asthma attack. She became the first person in the United Kingdom (and possibly the world) to have “air pollution” listed as the cause of death on her death certificate. Her mother, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, founded the Ella Roberta Foundation and has become a global voice for clean air. Globally, the World Health Organization says that air pollution is associated with 6 to 7 mi...
Mark as Played

Hip-Hop Meditation: An Intriguing Evening of Music and Mindfulness

August 11, 2025 • 57 mins
Join us for an unforgettable evening of insight, rhythm and discussion. Hip-Hop Meditative Mindfulness blends two worlds that would seem to be at odds—the stillness of meditation and the vitality of hip-hop. Together, they invite you into a fascinating new space for powerful spiritual practice. Coupled with a discussion of how these practices can reach people immersed in popular culture and help them find the wisdom of mindfulness ...
Mark as Played

CLIMATE ONE: Young People Are Bringing Climate To Court. And Winning.

August 8, 2025 • 62 mins
We’re all feeling the effects of the fossil-fueled climate crisis, but young people will not let this threat to their future go unchallenged. They’re taking it to the courts. In the last year, youth plaintiffs have had notable legal successes in Montana and Hawaiʻi, challenging that those states were violating their constitutional rights in continuing to burn fossil fuels. In Hawaiʻi, the ruling compels the state department of tran...
Mark as Played

How Low Birth Rates and Longer Lifespans Could Disrupt the Global Economy

August 6, 2025 • 63 mins
While much of the focus in Washington is on fiscal debates, there’s another growing challenge with far-reaching implications for the United States and the global economy: the “youth deficit.”  A recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) finds that declining birth rates and aging populations could undermine productivity and living standards around the world. Unless leaders take action, “younger people will inherit lower ...
Mark as Played

Agents of Change: The Women Who Transformed the CIA

August 5, 2025 • 62 mins
Join us for a lively discussion of Christina Hillsberg's book Agents of Change: The Women Who Transformed the CIA. Hillsberg is a former intelligence operative who has written a narrative exploration of the agency’s history, told through exclusive interviews with current and former female CIA officers, many of whom have never spoken publicly until now. The book fills a necessary gap in the agency’s history and takes a critical view...
Mark as Played

Time to Strengthen Local Health Ecosystems in California

August 4, 2025 • 60 mins
Due to major cuts to Medicare, wildfire season, looming earthquakes, public health needs, and the increasing number of Californians without health insurance, now is the time to strengthen local health ecosystems statewide.  Join us to hear from leaders of social impact organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area about how they are building partnerships to address these challenges by working together and leveraging technology to bu...
Mark as Played

The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia’s Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing

August 3, 2025 • 67 mins
Why are activists in Thailand, Hong Kong and Burma willing to court danger to help one another? Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom met dozens of dissidents, including Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, known for his protests against compulsory Thai military service; Agnes Chow, co-founder of a political party now banned in Hong Kong; and Ye Myint Win (aka Nickey Diamond), who fled to Germany from Burma in the early 2020s, fearing reprisal from ...
Mark as Played

Sam Bloch: Shade, The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource

August 1, 2025 • 61 mins
On a 90-degree day in Los Angeles, bus riders across the city line up behind the shadows cast by street signs and telephone poles, looking for a little relief from the sun’s glaring heat. Every summer such scenes play out in cities across the United States, and as Sam Bloch argues, we ignore the benefits of shade at our own peril. Heatwaves are now the country’s deadliest natural disasters with victims concentrated in poorer, less ...
Mark as Played

CLIMATE ONE: Scorching Premiums: Climate Costs Hit Insurance Market

August 1, 2025 • 63 mins
Climate disruptions and growing risk are upending insurance markets, leading many insurers to abandon parts of the country all together. Due to fires, floods and other extreme events, more and more homeowners are facing rapidly rising premiums or being dropped from their insurance plans altogether. Increasing numbers of homeowners are taking refuge in the state insurance plans of last resort, straining the program resources. For ho...
Mark as Played

Vali Nasr: Iran's Grand Strategy

July 31, 2025 • 69 mins
Iran has for decades been one of the most significant—and tricky—foreign policy challenges facing America and the West. Unfortunately, most people do not know much about the country’s true goals. Join us as Vali Nasr examines Iran’s political history to explain the actions and ambitions of the country’s leaders. He says behind the veneer of theocracy and Islamic ideology, modern Iran pursues a grand strategy with the twin goals of ...
Mark as Played

“The Playbook of a Dictator”: UC Berkeley’s Erwin Chemerinsky on Trump and the Rule of Law

July 30, 2025 • 66 mins
UC Berkeley Law School Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s 2024 book No Democracy Lasts Forever examined how democracies collapse and give way to authoritarian regimes.  Trump’s second term, Chemerinsky says, is following the playbook.  ”If one were to design a path to authoritarian rule, it would be what we have seen in the first weeks of the Trump administration,” he wrote earlier this year. One of the country’s most prominent legal schol...
Mark as Played

Raising AI: An Essential Guide to Its Use

July 28, 2025 • 67 mins
In a world in which artificial intelligence will change everything, we need a leader to illuminate the impact of “the automation of thought” on our way of life. How is the widespread use of AI impacting our world, our minds, and our future—not just as a technical innovation but as a mode of culture? Should we be afraid? De Kai has been a trailblazer in the world of AI. He invented and built the world’s first global-scale online la...
Mark as Played

CLIMATE ONE ENCORE: AI’s Power Demands: Do We Really Have the Energy for This?

July 25, 2025 • 59 mins
In a previous Climate One episode, we discussed the good, the bad, and the ugly impacts of artificial intelligence. But AI isn’t going away. Humans rarely give up a nifty new tool unless something better comes along. AI’s share of energy consumption is enormous, and the Department of Energy estimates that data center energy demands will double or even triple in just the next three years. Demand on fresh water is at least as big and...
Mark as Played

Crystal Haryanto on Taylor Swift: An Icon in the Music and Business Worlds

July 24, 2025 • 65 mins
Taylor Swift is world-famous as a singer and cultural icon, even as a political influencer. But as a business leader? Absolutely, says Crystal Haryanto, a Bay Area economic consultant who has created the UC Berkeley course “Artistry, Policy, & Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version” and explores these ideas in depth in her new book The Glory of Giving Everything: The Taylor Swift Business Model. In 2023, Swift became the first billion...
Mark as Played

Gil Duran on Trump, Tech, and the Nerd Reich

July 21, 2025 • 65 mins
The Bay Area is typically known as an incubator of left-of-center ideas. But in recent years, it has become known as the source of an ideology influencing the Trump administration, a belief system journalist Gil Duran describes as “tech fascism.” In his newsletter “The Nerd Reich,” Duran looks at how controversial writers such as Curtis Yarvin—who has argued that the United States should be a “monarchy” run by a “CEO”—have shaped t...
Mark as Played

Popular Podcasts

    Stuff You Should Know

    Stuff You Should Know

    If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.

    Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2

    Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2

    Season Two Out Now! Law & Order: Criminal Justice System tells the real stories behind the landmark cases that have shaped how the most dangerous and influential criminals in America are prosecuted. In its second season, the series tackles the threat of terrorism in the United States. From the rise of extremist political groups in the 60s to domestic lone wolves in the modern day, we explore how organizations like the FBI and Joint Terrorism Take Force have evolved to fight back against a multitude of terrorist threats.

    Dateline NBC

    Dateline NBC

    Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

    New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

    New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce

    Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!

    24/7 News: The Latest

    24/7 News: The Latest

    The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.

Advertise With Us
Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

Explore

iHeart

Live Radio

Podcasts

Artist Radio

Exclusives

News

Features

Events

Contests

Photos

Information

About

Advertise

Blog

Brand Guidelines

Contest Guidelines

Subscription Offers

Jobs

Get the App

Automotive

Home

Mobile

Wearables

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.