Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

In 1991–93, Mark Brzezinski was a Fulbright Scholar in newly post-communist Poland. Thirty years later he returned as the U.S. ambassador to Poland, a country embedded in the EU and NATO, and an ally deeply involved in providing support for Ukraine following Russia’s invasion of that country.Join us for an in-depth conversation with Brzezinski about Poland, Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, Germany, the European Union and more.Mark Brzezinski has worked in the private sector and in government positions. He previously was U.S. ambassador to Sweden, served on President Clinton’s National Security Council staff, worked in the law and capital management industries. He will be in conversation with Abraham Sofaer, the George P. Shultz Fellow in Foreign Policy and National Security Affairs, Emeritus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A third of Americans say that they've skipped food, medicine, or something else to be able to afford their energy bills. Much of the increase in the cost of electricity is driven by rising demand from artificial intelligence and data centers, industrial onshoring and hotter temperatures. How does your electricity bill get calculated, and who’s in charge of setting those rates? Does public power serve consumers better than investor-owned utilities? And will rising electricity prices dampen the transition to cleaner sources of energy?Guests: Shelley Welton, Professor of Law and Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania Severin Borenstein, Professor, Haas School of Business, UC BerkeleyKevin Miller, Reporter, Maine Public RadioOn March 24, Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer Kate Brandt and Irina Raicu, Director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Markkula Center, will speak with Climate One about the development of sustainably powered artificial intelligence. Tickets are on sale through our website.And on April 22 and 24, Climate One will once again be hosting a series of SF Climate Week events at The Commonwealth Club! Join us for conversations with environmental luminaries such as Margaret Gordon, Jenny Odell, Project Drawdown, Grist, and Abby Reyes. Tickets are on sale now.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.For show notes and related links, visit our website.Ad sales by Multitude. Contact them for ad inquiries at multitude.productions/ads Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2013, the trajectory of Amanda Nguyen’s life was changed forever when she was raped at Harvard.Determined to not let her assault derail her goal of joining NASA after graduation, Nguyen opted for her rape kit to be filed under “Jane Doe.” But she was shocked to learn her choice to stay anonymous gave her only six months to take action before the state destroyed her kit, rendering any future legal action impossible. Nguyen knew then that she had two options: surrender to a law that effectively denied her justice, or fight for a change―not only for herself but for survivors everywhere.She comes to Commonwealth Club World Affairs to discuss the issues raised in her memoir of survival and hope, Saving Five, which braids the story of Nguyen’s activism―which resulted in Congress’s unanimous passage of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act in 2016―with a second imagined adventure, of Nguyen's younger selves as they―at ages 5, 15, 22, and 30―navigate through dramatic incarnations of the emotional stages of her path toward healing, not only from her rape but from the violent turmoil of her childhood.Nguyen did go on to work at NASA and other scientific institutions, and in 2024, private space company Blue Origin announced that Nguyen would be the first Vietnamese woman to fly into space on one of its upcoming missions.Additionally, Nguyen ignited the Stop Asian Hate movement and continues to help others through Rise, her civil rights accelerator. For her groundbreaking contributions she was nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and is a 2022 Time Woman of the Year.Our program will begin with an introduction by Rowena Chiu, a former assistant to Harvey Weinstein. In 1998, she was sexually assaulted by him at the Venice Film Festival, and was coerced into signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which silenced her for over 20 years. In 2017, a New York Times journalist came to her home and doorstepped her husband of over a decade, revealing information about the assault and NDA. Rowena was featured in the subsequent Timesinvestigation, but she insisted on remaining anonymous. In 2019, she finally broke her story on the NBC "Today" Show, live in front of 3 million viewers. Rowena's story has featured in both the book and the movie, She Said. She has given over 1,000 media interviews across four continents, for international news outlets such as: ABC, BBC, CBS, and NBC. She has testified at the House of Commons, the Massachusetts State House, and attended the State of the Union. She is writing a memoir, a novel, and a screenplay, in addition to working as a global #MeToo activist, advocating for the rights of those who are oppressed or voiceless, in churches, schools, universities and workplaces around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Has America ceased to be the land of opportunity? Many people here take it for granted that good neighborhoods—with good schools and good housing—are only accessible to the wealthy. But in America, this wasn’t always the case.Though for most of world history, your prospects were tied to where you were born, Americans came up with a revolutionary idea: If you didn’t like your lot in life, you could find a better location and reinvent yourself there. Americans moved to new places with unprecedented frequency, and, for 200 years, that remarkable mobility was the linchpin of American economic and social opportunity.Join us as Yoni Appelbaum, historian and journalist for The Atlantic, argues that this idea has been under attack since reformers first developed zoning laws to ghettoize Chinese Americans in 19th-century Modesto, California. The century of legal segregation that ensued—from the zoning laws enacted to force Jewish workers back into New York’s Lower East Side to the private-sector discrimination and racist public policy that trapped Black families in Flint, Michigan, to Jane Jacobs’ efforts to protect her vision of the West Village—has raised housing prices, deepened political divides, emboldened bigots, and trapped generations of people in poverty. Appelbaum says these problems have a common explanation: people can’t move as readily as they used to.They are, in a word, stuck.Applebaum will cut through more than a century of mythmaking, sharing the surprising story of the people and ideas that caused our economic and social sclerosis and laying out commonsense ways to get Americans moving again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Economic warfare has become the primary way the United States confronts international crises and counters rivals. Sometimes it has achieved spectacular success; other times, bitter failure. The result we live with today is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy.It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government.Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official and author of the new book Chokepoints, goes deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons, exploiting America’s dominance in global finance and technology. Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill.Join us as Fishman shares a thrilling account of one of the most critical geopolitical developments of our time, demystifying the complex strategies the U.S. government uses to harness the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Big Oil against America’s enemies. At the center of the narrative is an eclectic group of policy innovators: the diplomats, lawyers and financial whizzes who’ve masterminded America’s escalating economic wars against Russia, China and Iran.Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California is a nonprofit public forum; we welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our programming.Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you find you're having unpleasant battles that create too much heat and too little light, or you're avoiding fraught discussions entirely, then come to this experiential event to learn the skill of nonviolent conflict management from Kazu Haga, the author of the acclaimed books Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. Find out how to deal with conflict in a way that repairs and deepens relationships instead of breeding resentment and anger.Kazu Haga is one of the most experienced trainers of Kingian nonviolence, which is derived from the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He'll show us the framework and outline a few specific steps for defusing an argument in ways that we can put to immediate use in our lives. We'll practice a few exercises and come away with a solid start and a path to better relationships and leadership.Organizer: Eric Siegel A Personal Growth 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many people are convinced our lives, and all actions in the universe, are totally determined. One question remains: How did they make up their minds that that is true?One decent definition of the difference between mind and matter is that minds make decisions. Even if you decide to let someone else make all your decisions for you, that itself is a decision. Which you can revoke at will.Join us at Monday Night Philosophy to remind yourself (in the Platonic sense) that there are indeed many reasons to recover your own agency, to realize that you make decisions all the time that are not determined by—even if they are influenced by—outside forces, and to refresh your awareness of the inner control over your own life that everyone inherently possesses, whether they sense it or not, whether they feel it or not. Because when you have recovered your former certainty that you have free will, you will also understand that one of the most intriguing and ironic uses of our free wills are our always temporary decisions to believe that we don’t have it.Organizer: George Hammond Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California is a nonprofit public forum; we welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our programming.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.Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This presentation by Dr. Descartes Li looks at some of the complexities and controversies about psychiatric diagnoses. It examines the DSM-5's "Harmful Dysfunction" definition, contrasting it with the NIMH's Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. The lecture also discusses philosophical approaches to understanding mental illness, including reductionism, cultural relativism, emergentism, and mechanistic approaches to psychiatric diagnosis. Finally, it outlines four perspectives for viewing mental disorders: disease, dimensional, behavioral, and life story, advocating for a comprehensive approach to diagnosis.About the SpeakerDr. Descartes Li is professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, Weill Institute for Neurosciences. He currently serves as director of the UCSF Bipolar Clinic and the UCSF Electroconvulsive Therapy Service for the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is a dedicated teacher in the School of Medicine and internationally. He is a member of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators.Organizer: Patrick O'Reilly 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Please join us for a special film documentary screening and an intimate conversation with filmmaker Doug Harris and civil rights attorney John Burris. The film, John Burris: The Godfather of Police Litigation, highlights Burris’s life, police brutality, and Burris’s high-profile cases: Rodney King's civil trial, the Oakland Riders case, the Oscar Grant case, Barry Bonds, Mario Woods and among others. Filmmaker Doug Harris points out that the Burris film documentary “is very special—the majority of my previous biographical stories have been about people who are deceased, and this project has given me an opportunity to form a close bond with a living legend.” As Burris looks forward, he is “really working hard to pass the baton on to the next generation of attorneys to carry on this type of civil rights legal work.”Organizer: Robert MeltonCommonwealth Club World Affairs is a nonprofit, nonpartisan civic forum. We welcome donations made during registration to support the production of our mission.An Arts 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.Commonwealth Club World Affairs is a public forum. Any views expressed in our programs are those of the speakers and not of Commonwealth Club World Affairs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Take a breath. Just breathe. And then reserve your ticket for a special online-only talk with New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer, who will tell you all about what just went into your lungs. Zimmer will share the ideas that are in his new book Air-Borne, giving a fascinating, previously untold story of the air we breathe, the hidden life it contains, and invisible dangers that can turn the world upside downEvery day we draw in two thousand gallons of air—and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. This last great biological frontier remains so mysterious that it took more than two years for scientists to finally agree that the Covid pandemic was caused by an airborne virus.Zimmer will lead us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery. From the tops of mountain glaciers, where Louis Pasteur caught germs from the air, to Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh above the clouds, where they conducted groundbreaking experiments. Meet the long-forgotten pioneers of aerobiology, including William and Mildred Wells, who tried for decades to warn the world about airborne infections, only to die in obscurity.Zimmer also chronicles the dark side of aerobiology with gripping accounts of how the United States and the Soviet Union clandestinely built arsenals of airborne biological weapons designed to spread anthrax, smallpox and an array of other pathogens.Breathtaking, isn’t it?In Association with Wonderfest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices