Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

Discussions of immigration can feel not just deeply impersonal, particularly at the national level, but even negligent of the human cost of harsh immigration policies. In her new book, Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in America, journalist Maria Hinojosa shares a personal account of America’s greater immigration crisis. Hinojosa discusses her perspective through her upbringing on Chicago’s South Side, her early reporting on immigration detention camps and her varied experiences as the host of NPR’s "Latino USA" radio program. An Emmy award-winning journalist and a leading voice in the Latinx community, Hinojosa brings her more than 30 years of experience in journalism to her crucial perspective on this urgent issue. Join Hinojosa at INFORUM, where she will discuss how the problems facing America’s immigration system are not accidental, but the result of years of broken governance. This conversation will be moderated by Jacqueline Martinez Garcel, CEO of the Latino Community Foundation. Note: This program contains explicit language.

Join us for a virtual conversation with Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman, two of America's leading constitutional scholars, about the issues surrounding the freedom of religion clauses in the Bill of Rights. Views on the proper relationship between the state and religion have been deeply divided throughout American history. But with the recent changes in the composition of the United States Supreme Court, First Amendment law concerning religion might shift dramatically if the wall separating church and state continues to be thinned out. Chemerinsky and Gillman defend a robust view of both First Amendment religion clauses and work from the premise that the establishment clause was precisely worded to make the federal government strictly secular, not allowing any special exemptions for religious people from neutral and general laws that others must obey. Chemerinsky and Gillman provide both a pithy primer on the meaning of the religion clauses and a broad-ranging indictment of the Supreme Court's misinterpretation of them in recent years, arguing that a separationist approach is most consistent with the concerns of the founders who drafted the Constitution and with the needs of a religiously pluralistic society in the 21st century. MLF ORGANIZER George Hammond NOTES MLF: Humanities

Few have dominated the podcast arena like Guy Raz. Raz co-created National Public Radio’s "How I Built This," "Wow in the World" and "TED Radio Hour." From program intern to podcast virtuoso, Raz has worked in many capacities at the broadcast media organization with highly successful results—his podcasts garner more than 19 million downloads per month. It’s no surprise why, as his programs welcome thought-provoking guests in a format that combines narrative storytelling with insightful advice. In his new book, How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs, Raz shares highlights and lessons from the more than 200 entrepreneurs he’s interviewed as host for "How I Built This." From planning a timeline for corporate development to making a good idea profitable, Raz has insights galore to share at INFORUM from more than four years’ worth of episodes. This conversation will be moderated by Aarti Shahani, an NPR contributor in Silicon Valley.

The global pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in all industries and made lasting business and human impact. Silicon Valley and Bay Area companies have, in many ways, been ahead of the curve and the center of attention for continued innovation. Hear from business leaders from leading Bay Area companies, large and small, on how they are building the business resiliency to outmaneuver uncertainty and thrive in the new world that has demanded rapid business changes; the role of technology and the cloud in maximizing employee and customer engagement and productivity; gaining or regaining brand and organizational trust; and more. Join us for an interactive panel discussion and live Q&A. Meet our panelists: Sally Gilligan is the chief information officer and head of strategy for Gap Inc., overseeing the company’s corporate strategy team and technology organization that serves as the engine that drives retail, e-commerce and global enterprise technology for millions of customers. Gilligan has been with Gap Inc. for more than 16 years, serving in a variety of roles in the organization with a focus on process and economic optimization. Prior to serving as CIO, she served as senior vice president of product operations and supply chain strategy, leading a global team responsible for building and deploying capabilities to enable the end-to-end, demand-based operating model. Sally holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago. Everett Harper is the CEO and co-founder of Truss. Truss builds software and infrastructure to help companies and public agencies scale and modernize digital services. They apply expertise in human-centered design, engineering, product, infrastructure, and security to clients such as healthcare.gov, Nuna and DOD-Transcom, enabling them to deliver impactful, sustainable products and services to more than 20 million customers and end users. Harper graduated from Stanford University (MBA, M.Ed) and Duke University (BSEE, Biomedical Engineering), where he was an A.B. Duke Scholar. Karen Mangia is vice president of customer and market insights at Salesforce, engaging current and future customers around the world to discover new ways of creating success and growth together. She serves on the company’s Work from Home Taskforce, where she is helping the company’s 50,000+ worldwide employees to better adapt to a work-from-home environment. She holds a B.S. degree in international business and a Masters in Information and Communication Sciences, both from Ball State University, as well as an Associates Degree in Hospitality Administration from Ivy Tech. Scott Bowden is managing director, software and platforms industry lead for North America, at Accenture. In this role, Bowden is focused on supporting a diverse portfolio of platform companies to innovate and operationalize for long-term success. This includes supporting rapid customer expansion, protecting customer and user communities, and equipping a growing workforce with the technology and process tools to be successful. A key facet of Bowden’s responsibilities is to develop Accenture’s S&P industry thought leadership, build employees’ industry skills and foster collaboration across Accenture’s businesses supporting the S&P industry. Over his career with Accenture, Bowden has worked with U.S. and international clients across industries, including consumer products, publishing, high tech, software and platforms. He has most recently led Accenture’s efforts in enabling new economy hyper growth companies from pre-IPO unicorns to post-IPO profitable enterprises. Bowden received a Bachelor of Science in industrial economics from Union College with a minor in mathematics and philosophy.

In mid-March California became the first state to mandate sheltering in place to fight the coronavirus. Since then we’ve been bombarded with information about masks, social distancing, quarantining and infection risks. Some of that information has changed over time, some has stayed constant, and much of what we didn’t understand in March remains a mystery. How much do you know about how to protect yourself and others from COVID-19? You can find out through this interactive quiz-based program that will use anonymous polling to test your knowledge and compare it to the rest of the audience’s. Infectious disease expert and clinical professor emeritus at UC Berkeley Dr. John Swartzberg returns to The Commonwealth Club—exactly 6 months after his first appearance at the Club to discuss COVID-19—to provide answers to the most common questions about COVID-19 transmission. Come ready to test your understanding of how the virus spreads, its symptoms and health impact, how to avoid infection, what to do if you get sick and more. This session will challenge your thinking and leave you with a clear sense of what you can do to stay healthy.

Join us for this special program in The Commonwealth Club's series recognizing recipients of The Club's 2020 Distinguished Citizens Award. This program honors both Recology, the company, and its leadership. Recology's mission represents a fundamental shift from traditional waste management to resource recovery, developing sustainable practices that can be implemented globally. Recology has more than 45 operating companies that provide integrated services to more than 889,000 residential customers and 112,000 commercial customers in California, Oregon and Washington. Farmers across California and Oregon use Recology organic compost for fruit, vegetables, flowers, plants and vineyards. Recology is also 100 percent employee-owned. As Recology's president and CEO since 1980, Mike Sangiacomo has led and inspired many of the company's innovative recycling and diversion programs. Sangiacomo also serves as a director and an executive officer of Recology’s subsidiaries. He holds a B.S. degree in business administration from the University of San Francisco. Dennis Wu, chair of Recology's Board of Directors since 2013, is one of San Francisco's best-known business executives and a long-time leader among Asian Americans in the Bay Area. Born in the Philippines of Chinese ancestry, Mr. Wu is a retired partner of Deloitte and currently the managing partner and co-founder of WuHoover, a CPA advisory firm. Mr. Wu is also a past chair of The Commonwealth Club's Board of Governors. He is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of California and received his B.S. and M.B.A. in accounting/finance from the University of California Berkeley. Join this unique conversation with two of the Bay Area's most prominent trailblazers.

John Mackey started a retail and organic food movement when he founded Whole Foods, bringing natural, organic food to the masses and not only changing the market, but breaking the mold. In his new book, Conscious Leadership, Mackey closely explores the vision, virtues and mindset that have informed Mackey’s own leadership journey, providing a roadmap for innovative, value-based leadership—in business and in society. The book is a follow up to groundbreaking bestseller, Conscious Capitalism, which revealed what it takes to lead a purpose-driven, sustainable business. In this book, Mackey demystifies strategies that have helped Mackey shepherd Whole Foods through four decades of incredible growth and innovation, including its recent sale to Amazon. Mackey challenges business leaders to rethink conventional business wisdom, through anecdotes, case studies, profiles of conscious leaders, and innovative techniques for self-development, culminating in an empowering call to action for entrepreneurs and trailblazers—to step up as leaders who see beyond the bottom line. At a transformative time for American business, the informed wisdom of John Mackey could not come at a better time. Please join us for a timely conversation. Note: This Program Contains Explicit Language

Join us for a discussion with journalist Laura Flanders about the state of our country, politics, progressive talk radio, women in radio, and her brand new show on PBS. Laura Flanders is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center. By 1990 she was co-hosting "CounterSpin," the weekly radio report from the media watch group FAIR and reporting from Central America, the Middle East and Europe for media outlets like In These Times, New Directions For Women, Ms., Outweek, The Nation, and Pacifica Radio. The mega-mergers of the 1990s left the media landscape packed with ads and partisan punditry, but devoid of news from most of the country or the world. Invited to host a daily call-in, Laura launched “Your Call” on San Francisco's public radio station KALW in 2001 and then "The Laura Flanders Show" on Air America Radio to engage listeners in a deep-dive into the issues of the day. Supported by FreeSpeechTV, Laura moved to television in 2008, starting "GRITtv," a daily national news show that covered the financial crisis from the grassroots up. Laura emerged determined to introduce audiences to a wealth of people, places—and policy options—that other media ignored. Her latest endeavor is "The Laura Flanders Show," which launched on public television stations in September 2020. The same year, Flanders received a Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation “for her tireless work as an independent journalist, interviewing activists who are creating solutions to economic injustice and catastrophic environmental destruction. Her body of work helps the American public begin to imagine alternatives.” Don't miss this conversation with a pioneering journalist about the issues the media doesn't discuss enough, what it discusses too much, and why it matters.

As the United States goes through its most seering domestic crisis in decades, navigating and defending free speech and cultivating a more inclusive public culture is critical for the future of the country, according to PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel. Nossel will discuss a way to promote free expression while also addressing online trolls and fascist chat groups, cancel culture, and controversial lectures on campus and elsewhere. In an era in which one tweet can launch—or end—your career, and free speech is often invoked as a principle but rarely understood, learning to maneuver the fast-changing, treacherous landscape of public discourse has never been more urgent. At a time when free speech is often pitted against other progressive axioms—namely diversity and equality—Nossel argues that the drive to create a more inclusive society need not, and must not, compromise robust protections for free speech. Nossel provides concrete guidance on how to reconcile these two often misunderstood sets of core values within universities, on social media and in daily life.

Since his election to the U.S. Senate in 2006, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown has enjoyed broad support across the political spectrum as a populist advocate for blue-collar workers, unions and the middle class. When Brown arrived on the Senate floor, he learned that his desk came with a proud history. In Desk 88: Eight Progressive Senators Who Changed America, he tells the story of the senators who sat in the same space before him. They range from Hugo Black, who helped to lift millions of American workers out of poverty, to Robert F. Kennedy, who became an advocate for the poor after an eye-opening trip to the Mississippi Delta. Brown uses these stories to highlight the triumphs and failures of progressivism over the past century. By defying his state’s rightward turn while promoting the strength of labor unions and the working class, Brown also serves as a model for how progressive Democrats can win tough races throughout middle America.

Matthew Yglesias, cofounder of trend-setting news site Vox, has become an increasingly visible and provocative digital journalist, with a following that includes policy wonks of all ages, and top economic and political journalists. In his latest book, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, Yglesias outlines his belief that, at one of the most critical times in American history, the country has lost the will and the means to lead on some of the most important issues facing Americans. Yglesias believes that if America is to win its own future, the county will need to have more: more ideas, more ambition, more utilization of resources, more people. Quite simply, he thinks the county needs to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial, according to Yglesias: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Yet the country seems to have lost its ambition. Please join us for an important conversation about what America must do to regain its verve and stay on top forever.

From pipelines to clean power, the world’s biggest economies are brokering developments in oil, gas, and renewables that will shape climate and politics for years to come. But COVID, plummeting oil prices, and expectations for diversity and sustainability are changing the way successful industries must do business. “This isn't about supply and demand, this is about the economies being open or closed,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Yergn. Will the pursuit of energy and economic efficiency help solve our global dependence on fossil fuels — or leave many societies behind?

On the exact 6-month anniversary of San Francisco’s shelter-in-place ordnance, UCSF infectious disease experts look back at what we’ve learned about the strengths and weaknesses of our public health systems and look forward to the next stage of the fight against COVID-19. Panelists will discuss how the pandemic has taken advantage of inequities in our society to continue spreading despite the region’s early response—and the growing understanding that stemming the tide of COVID-19 will require much greater support for low-income essential workers, incarcerated populations, and others least able to protect themselves. They will explore how partnerships between community leaders, UCSF scientists, and public health officials are pointing the way forward to a more just, equitable and effective response to the pandemic. Meet the panelists: Joe DeRisi, Ph.D., is Tomkins Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at UCSF and co-director of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, an independent research institute dedicated to eradicating disease. DeRisi has a long history as a “virus detective” and inventor. During the severe testing backlog at the start of the pandemic, his team built a state-of-the-art COVID-19 testing center in 8 days, which soon became the hub for processing test kits from public health departments across the state. Diane Havlir, M.D., is chief of the UCSF Division of HIV, Infectious Disease and Global Medicine. At the start of the pandemic, Havlir—who is a veteran of the fight against AIDS—joined forces with Latinx community leaders such as Jon Jacobo of the Latino Task Force for COVID-19, to document inequalities in the pandemic’s impact on low-income workers and their families, and to link those infected with the support they need to go into isolation. This “test-to-care” approach has become a model for similar efforts across the country. Jon Jacobo, of the Latino Task Force for COVID-19, helped spearhead the group’s partnership with UCSF, called Unidos En Salud, and has worked for policy changes to support low-income essential workers during the pandemic, in partnership with the City and County of San Francisco Department of Public Health. Jacobo is director of engagement and policy for TODCO Group, a San Francisco affordable housing and advocacy nonprofit, and an appointed commissioner overseeing the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection. Brie Williams, M.D., M.S., is a professor in the UCSF Division of Geriatrics and founding director of UCSF Amend, an initiative dedicated to transforming correctional culture to improve the health of people living and working in America’s prisons. Her research has pushed for changes in how California’s prisons have handled outbreaks during the pandemic, not only to protect prisoners and prison workers, but to prevent spill-over into the community at large. Moderator Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, Ph.D., M.D., M.A.S., is vice dean for population health and health equity at the UCSF School of Medicine and director of the UCSF COVID-19 Community Public Health Initiative. She has written about how the pandemic has created “two Californias”—those with the privilege of sheltering in place, and the low-income workers who have been forced to choose between keeping food on the table and protecting their families from the virus In association with UCSF

On his wildly popular podcast “Making Sense,” Sam Harris and his guests explore some of the most important questions about the human mind, society and current events. Every week, he dives into some of the most controversial and thought-provoking issues we face in society today. Harris’ new book, Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality and the Future of Humanity, shares 12 discussions from “Making Sense” that are meant to push traditional conversations in unconventional directions. For Harris, honest conversation, no matter how difficult or controversial, represents the only path to moral and intellectual progress. Join Harris for a candid conversation as he discusses how we can all “make sense” of our complicated world with honesty, clarity and reason. Note: This program contains Explicit language.

On August 10, 2018, veteran FBI agent Peter Strzok was fired after personal text messages from 2016 disparaging then-candidate Donald Trump were released. President Trump celebrated, writing on Twitter “Fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok is a fraud, as is the rigged investigation he started. There was no Collusion or Obstruction with Russia, and everybody, including the Democrats, know it.” But Strzok’s story is anything but straightforward. He led the FBI’s investigation into both Hillary Clinton’s private email server and Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, drawing the ire of conservative allies of the president. When his text messages were released, they provided ammunition for the conspiracy theory of a “deep state” out to undermine Trump’s presidency. Join Strzok as he tells his side of one of the 21st century’s most explosive stories. He’ll draw on lessons from a long career in law enforcement and explain why he’s convinced that the commander in chief has fallen under the sway of America’s adversary in the Kremlin.