Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

For weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, John J. Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, was warning that it would happen. When troops finally crossed the border, he was woken in the middle of the night with a prearranged code. The signal was even more bracing than the February cold: it meant that Sullivan needed to collect his bodyguards and get to the embassy as soon as possible. The war had begun, and the world would never be the same.Sullivan has laid down his story in his new book Midnight in Moscow, in which he leads readers into the offices of the U.S. embassy and the halls of the Kremlin during this climactic period—among the most dangerous since World War II. He shows how the Putin regime repeatedly lied about its intentions to invade Ukraine in the weeks leading up to the attack, while also devoting huge numbers of personnel and vast resources to undermining the U.S. diplomatic mission in Russia. And he explains how, when Putin ultimately gave the order to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, he proved that Russia was not just at war with its neighbor: it was also at war, in a very real sense, with the United States, and with everything that it represents. But while Putin decided how this conflict started, its ending will be shaped by us.Join us for an online-only talk with Ambassador Sullivan as he shares his unique perspective on a pivotal moment in world history, how our relationship with Russia has deteriorated, where it’s headed, and how far we should be prepared to go in standing up to the menace in Moscow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last year was the hottest in recorded history, and this summer, much of the United States has already experienced record-shattering heat waves. That leaves millions of workers risking their health and possibly even their lives while on the job. And the danger is not limited to those who work outdoors. Warehouses, restaurants, and other indoor spaces are heating up. Most jobs lack heat protection from the federal or state government, but the same groups that brought us the 40-hour work week, child labor laws, and the weekend are now fighting for new worker protections.Unions across the country — from Texas UPS drivers to the Chicago Teachers Union — are negotiating to keep their workers protected from the effects of the climate crisis. Some are even going one step further and negotiating for their employers to cut the  carbon pollution that’s adding to global heating. How has the climate crisis spurred union action?Guests: Terri Gerstein, Director, The Labor Initiative, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York UniversityStacy Davis Gates, President, Chicago Teachers UnionAnita Seth, President, UNITE HERE Local 8Emily Minkus, Member, UNITE HERE Local 8Support 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 just $5/month.🎟️ We've added yet another event to our stacked fall calendar. This program will feature Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in conversation with Earthjustice President Abigail Dillen and Co-Host Greg Dalton. Tickets are on sale now.For show notes and related links, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join author Jeffrey Fuhrer , whose 27 years of experience at the Boston Fed informed his breakthrough expose about how false narratives about racism and meritocracy broke our economy. He argues that systemic racism continues to produce vastly disparate outcomes, and that our brand of capitalism doesn't reduce disparities.Jeffrey will be joined in conversation by Akilah Monifa, a trained lawyer and law professor, who's published many op-eds. She is the former director of public affairs and communications for CBS television and radio stations in San Francisco. She is now a retired Black lesbian mother and grandmother, and is the founder of BlackHistoryEveryDay.com.MLF Organizer: Ian McCuaig A Social Impact 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.Main image detail from The Myth That Made Us book cover; speaker photos courtesy the speakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In about a week’s time, the election changed—bigly, you might say. An assassination attempt, a huge court victory for former President Trump, the Republican National Convention, President Biden ends his reelection campaign, and Vice President Harris grabs the baton. It’s a whole new ballgame, and we’ll tackle those developments and more in our next political roundtable. Join us for a mid-summer dive into politics in this high-stakes election year.As usual with Week to Week, our panelists will discuss the latest political developments in an informed, civil (and fun) manner. And come early before the program for our social hour for some wine and light bites and an opportunity to talk with other Club members and friends.See other upcoming Week to Week political roundtables, as well as audio and video of past Week to Week programs.This program contains EXPLICIT language. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us to celebrate the 50th anniversary of August 8, 1974, the day President Richard Nixon resigned, and to remember an era in which there were still stark limits to what presidents could do and keep a straight face.Stephen Talbot will screen his film, The Movement and the "Madman", which debuted in 2023 on the PBS series "American Experience." Talbot’s 82-minute film tells the story of how two major anti-Vietnam War protests in the fall of 1969 pressured President Nixon to cancel what he privately called his "madman" plans for a major escalation of the war, including the possibility of his threatening to use nuclear weapons.After Talbot’s film is screened, he will answer questions about both the history of that time and his artistry making documentary films. Those who took part in the 1969 protests in the Bay Area are especially welcome to join the discussion, which will also include Talbot’s perspective on the relevance of Nixon’s resignation to our current international political situations―where threatening to use nuclear weapons no longer seems to cause irreparable shame and dishonor.MLF Organizer: George Hammond 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.This program contains EXPLICIT language.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Muir is widely and rightly lauded as the nature mystic who added wilderness to the United States’ vision of itself, largely through the system of national parks and wild areas his writings and public advocacy helped create. Critics say that vision, however, came at a cost: the conquest and dispossession of the tribal peoples who had inhabited and managed those same lands, in many cases for millennia. Muir argued for the preservation of wild sanctuaries that would offer spiritual enlightenment to the conquerors, not to the conquered Indigenous peoples who had once lived there. “Somehow,” he wrote, “they seemed to have no right place in the landscape.”Cast Out of Eden tells this neglected part of Muir’s story—from Lowland Scotland and the Wisconsin frontier to the Sierra Nevada’s granite heights and Alaska’s glacial fjords—and his take on the tribal nations he encountered and embrace of an ethos that forced those tribes from their homelands. Although Muir questioned and worked against Euro-Americans’ distrust of wild spaces and deep-seated desire to tame and exploit them, his view excluded Native Americans as fallen peoples who stained the wilderness’s pristine sanctity. Fortunately, in a transformation that a resurrected and updated Muir might approve, this long-standing injustice is beginning to be undone, as Indigenous nations and the federal government work together to ensure that quintessentially American lands from Bears Ears to Yosemite serve all Americans equally.MLF Organizer: Andrew Dudley 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.This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank Price will moderate a conversation between Gregg Hurwitz and Kevin Compton, both experts in "Thrillers, Tech, and Ethics in a Rapidly Changing World." Join us for a fast-paced discussion with plenty of twists to keep you on your toes.Gregg Hurwitz is a New York Times #1 internationally bestselling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and have been published in 33 languages. Hurwitz currently serves as the co-president of International Thriller Writers (ITW). Additionally, he’s written screenplays and television scripts for many of the major studios and networks, comics for AWA (including the critically acclaimed anthology NewThink), DC, and Marvel, and poetry. Currently, Hurwitz is actively working against polarization in politics and culture. To that end, he's penned op eds for The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Bulwark and others, and has produced several hundred commercials, which have received more than 100 million views on digital TV platforms. He also helped write the opening ceremony of the 2022 World Cup.Kevin Compton is a co‐founder of Radar Partners in Palo Alto, CA, a private investment partnership focused on venture capital and multi-asset investing. Previously, Compton was a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful high technology venture capital firms for almost 20 years. Compton and his partners invested in many of the most powerful and high profile start‐ups over the past 30 years, including Google, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, Netscape and Amazon. The Forbes “Midas Touch” ranking of top investors has named Kevin as one of the top private investors in the world on numerous occasions, ranking him in the top 10 three times.MLF Organizer: Frank Price An International Relations 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.This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we take a trip to Mexico, a petrostate that just elected climate scientist Claudia Sheinbaum as its next president. She’s also the former mayor of Mexico City, the largest city in North America, which has been going through a major water crisis due to climate change. It’s at risk of running out of water — and it has been for a long time. In fact, much of the country is coping with drought and heat waves exacerbated by climate change.Christine Colvin, a hydrogeologist with WWF International, was in Cape Town, South Africa, at the height of a recent megadrought. The city was approaching Day Zero, when it would not be able to supply water to residents. Colvin says that of all the ways climate disruption impacts our lives, the most critical may be to our relationship with water. "If the climate crisis is a shark, then water are its teeth. This is the thing that’s really going to bite us first and hardest." Guests:Oscar Ocampo, Coordinator for Energy and Environment, Mexican Institute of CompetitivenessChristine Colvin, Water Policy Lead, WWF InternationalClimate One has three exciting live shows on the calendar, featuring live conversations with Tom Steyer, Jane Goodall, and Justin Pearson. 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 just $5/month.For show notes and related links, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Summer Olympic Games are here! That means more than 300 events, ten thousand athletes and millions of spectators coming to watch. And the athletes are not the only ones with an Olympian task; the organizers of the Paris Games pledged to make their event emit only half of the carbon pollution of the 2012 London Games. In order to make that happen, they are trying to do more — by doing less. Instead of building huge new structures, they’ve renovated a number of existing venues and installed a lot of temporary structures that can be used elsewhere in the future. And that’s just one example. So what can we learn from the Paris Games that can transcend the big event and lead to broader emissions reductions?Guests: Martin Müller, Professor of Geography and Sustainability, University of LausanneHenry Grabar, Journalist, Author of “Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World”Oluseyi Smith, Two-time Olympian, Renewable Energy Engineer, Founder, Racing to ZeroAngel Hsu, Director, Data-Driven EnviroLab, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill☎️ Do you work outdoors, in a kitchen or a warehouse or at another workplace where you are feeling the heat? Have rising temperatures impacted the way you do your job? We want to hear your story. Leave us a voicemail at ‪(650) 382-3869‬ and let us know how climate change is affecting you on the job, and we may use it in an upcoming episode. Thanks for sharing!🎟️ Climate One has three live shows scheduled this August and September. 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 just $5/month.For show notes and related links, visit our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California and The Consulate of Colombia in San Francisco are pleased to invite you to the inauguration of the photographic exhibition Foto-Diásporas, a traveling exhibition making its debut in San Francisco. The exhibition is a research and creative project about Colombians' forced cross-border migration.Through the eyes and voices of 15 Colombian men and women, Foto-Diásporas uses the power of participatory photography to make visible the experiences of forcibly displaced Colombians living in the United States and their demands for recognition and reparation. This exhibition pays tribute to the victims from the past armed conflict and honoring their resilience, courage and hope.In our panel discussion, victims of forced migration will share their story. Program speaker Sonia Marina Pereira Portilla is the general consul of the Consulate of Colombia in San Francisco. The event includes Colombian food and refreshments, and music will be presented by Afro-Colombian group, Marimba del Litoral – Música del Pacifico.The event will be hosted by Ambassador Sonia Marina Pereira Portilla, consul general of Colombia, alongside Saday Osorio Córdoba, the Consulate's social advisor, human rights advocate, and director/founder of the Nativa Foundation.MLF ORGANIZER: Robert Melton 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices