Commonwealth Club of California Podcast

In Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes and Stories, Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and activist Alice Waters, chronicles her unique world of food, wine and travel. Singer shares the story of her own culinary coming of age and reveals the dynamic relationship between a mother and daughter through connecting, recipes and, cooking.

SPEAKERS

Fanny Singer

Author, Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes & Stories

Alice Waters

Chef, Chez Panisse

Carolyn Jung

Food Writer; Author, East Bay Cooks—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 11th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Experts widely report that mental health treatment in Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities is severely lacking. Cultural differences and misunderstandings lead to diagnostic problems and hesitancy to seek treatment. The National Alliance on Mental Illness found that Black adults are more likely to report persistent symptoms of emotional distress than white adults, yet only one in three Black Americans who needs support gets it. Latinx, Asian and Indigenous people similarly have poor access to quality mental health services. BIPOC youth are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, with their needs untreated. And the age of COVID has amplified the depth of these disparities and the ongoing systematic inequities for people of color.

How can medical professionals, government and the private sector work together in this challenging time to improve conditions and treatment as well as eliminate stigma for those needing care? UCSF Psychiatry Chief Dr. Lisa Fortuna will moderate and address solutions. San Francisco Human Rights Commission Director Sheryl Davis will focus on the impact of COVID-19 and racism across different populations. Stanford University psychiatrist Dr. Rona Hu will discuss treatment needs in Asian, Black and LGBTQ populations. YMCA President Emeritus Chuck Collins will provide community context based on his work with varied populations over the years. And youth activist Nicole Elmore will discuss her personal experiences.

Join this compelling conversation featuring health, community and human rights perspectives.

NOTES

Part of The Commonwealth Club’s series on mental health, dedicated in memory of Nancy Friend Pritzker, with support from the John Pritzker Family Fund.

SPEAKERS

Chuck Collins

President Emeritus, YMCA, San Francisco

Sheryl Davis

Executive Director, San Francisco Human Rights Commission.

Nicole Elmore

Community Youth Activist; Program Assistant, Opportunities for All (Mayor London Breed’s Youth Initiative for Workforce Development, Partnered with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission)

Dr. Rona Hu

Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University School of Medicine; Founder, Stanford Mental Health for Asians Research and Treatment (SMHART) Clinic

Dr. Lisa Fortuna

M.D., Chief of Psychiatry Department, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 10th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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This is your Commonwealth Club week in review. Hear what you missed this week, and what we’ve got lined up for you next week.

We’re always adding new programs - check out commonwealthclub.org/online for all of our upcoming events.

If you haven’t already - please consider becoming a member of the Club. Enjoy exclusive discounts and access to special programs all while knowing your contributions directly support our many public programs and civic initiatives.

Visit commonwealthclub.org/special, for special rates on memberships.

Thanks for your support and as always - thanks for listening!

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True to his campaign promise, President Biden dove right into the climate crisis on Day One, signing a stack of executive orders that signaled his determination. But how effective are they? 

“Executive orders, I think, are often very splashy when they're introduced, and they get a lot of attention,” notes Axios reporter Ben Gemen. “I think the better way to look at an executive order is sort of firing a starting gun for an extraordinarily long race.” But while he faces certain blowback from Republicans in Congress, there are signs that when it comes to conservative thought, the wind may be changing.

What can the Biden Administration accomplish using existing authority? How much will conservatives and businesses step in and step up on climate?

Guests:

Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), Chair of House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis

Rich Powell, Executive Director, ClearPath

Ben Geman, Energy Reporter, Axios

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Hear the dramatic inside story of the first four historic flights that launched SpaceX—and Elon Musk—from a shaky startup into the world's leading-edge rocket company.

In 2006, SpaceX—a brand-new venture with fewer than 200 employees—rolled its first, single-engine rocket onto a launch pad at Kwajalein Atoll. After a groundbreaking launch from the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Falcon 1 rocket designed by Elon Musk’s engineers rose into the air for approximately 30 seconds. Then its engine flamed out, and the rocket crashed back into the ocean.

In 2007, SpaceX undertook a second launch. This time, the rocket rose far into space, but just before reaching orbit it spun out of control. Confident of success in 2008, Musk and his team launched their third rocket with several paying customers. The first stage executed perfectly, but instead of falling away, it thudded into the second stage. Another failure. Elon Musk had only budgeted for three attempts when he founded SpaceX.

Out of money and with a single Falcon 1 rocket left in its factory, SpaceX decided to try one last, dramatic launch. Over eight weeks, engineers worked furiously to prepare this final rocket. The fate of Musk’s venture mirrored the trajectory of this slender, single-engine rocket aimed toward the skies. If it crashed and burned, so would SpaceX. In September 2008, SpaceX’s last chance for success lifted off . . . and accelerated like a dream, soaring into orbit flawlessly.

That success would launch a miraculous decade for the company, in which SpaceX grew from building a single-engine rocket to one with a staggering 27 engines; created two different spacecraft; and mastered reusable-rocket descents using mobile drone ships on the open seas. It marked a level of production and achievement that has not been seen since the space race of the 1960s.

But these achievements would not have been possible without SpaceX’s first four flight tests. Drawing on unparalleled access and exclusive interviews with dozens of former and current employees—engineers, designers, mechanics and executives, including Elon Musk—Eric Berger tells the complete story of this foundational generation that transformed SpaceX into the world’s leading space company.

MLF ORGANIZER

Gerald Harris

NOTES

MLF: Technology & Society

SPEAKERS

Eric Berger

Author, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX

In Conversation with Alison van Diggelen

Host, “Fresh Dialogues” and Contributor, BBC

This program contains EXPLICIT language.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 11th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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At 75, Norma Kamali looks—and acts—nearly half her age. Join us for a conversation with Kamali, who will share her lessons on authentic beauty, timeless style, career-building, fitness and health through personal stories, worldly insight, and actionable advice designed to help women of every age create their happiest, healthiest, most successful and fulfilling lives.

The secret, she writes in her first book I Am Invincible, is learning to age with power: Embracing a healthy lifestyle and looking forward to every milestone and the changes they bring, with the realization that reaching one’s potential has no date. Manifesto, memoir and essential guide, her book is informed by 50 years of Kamali’s twists, turns, triumphs and failures experienced while finding the courage and conviction to race after her dreams and never look back.

Kamali feels that we are empowered when we are our best selves. Sleep, a healthy diet and exercise are life’s universal solutions for a healthy life. The outcome is a great, authentic you.

MLF ORGANIZER

Denise M. Michaud

NOTES

MLF: Grownups

SPEAKERS

Norma Kamali

Fashion Designer; Author, I Am Invincible

Denise Michaud

Chair, Grownups Member-Led Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on February 10th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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Life is everywhere. From birds in the sky to bushes on the ground to the humans who surround our everyday lives. We assume life is easily identifiable, yet as scientists learn more about the living world, they find life to be a difficult word to define. In his new book Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive, acclaimed scientific author Carl Zimmer seeks to answer one of biology’s greatest questions: What is life? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts—whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.

Life’s Edge explores lab experiments attempting to create life, poses questions of what life is like in our grand universe, and offers insight into scientific developments shaping the way we understand living beings. Charting the obsession with Dr. Frankenstein's monster and how Coleridge came to believe the whole universe was alive, Zimmer leads us all the way into the labs and minds of researchers working on engineering life from the ground up.

Join us as Carl Zimmer explores life and investigates why scientists have struggled to define the boundaries of the word.

SPEAKERS

Carl Zimmer

Columnist, The New York Times; Author, Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive

In Conversation with Rachel Becker

Environment Reporter, CalMatters

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 10th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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This program will feature four vitamin D researchers who will discuss the evidence they generated and/or collected showing that vitamin D has important health benefits.

Carole Baggerly, CEO of GrassrootsHealth.net, will outline the findings of health outcomes of more than 10,000 participants in their studies who take vitamin D supplements, measure their vitamin D levels every six months, and report any health changes. She will also discuss the evidence that vitamin D reduces risk of COVID-19. Dr. Carol L. Wagner will present results from studies of high-dose vitamin D supplementation of pregnant and nursing women, such as significantly reduced risk of preterm delivery. Professor Joan M. Lappe will discuss her clinical trials on vitamin D and calcium on prevention of cancer. William B. Grant, Ph.D., director of the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center in San Francisco, will moderate the discussion.

MLF ORGANIZER

Robert Lee Kilpatrick

NOTES

MLF: Health & Medicine

SPEAKERS

Carole A. Baggerly

Founder and Director, Grassrootshealth.net

Carol L. Wagner

M.D., Professor, Pediatrics Department, College of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina

Joan M. Lappe

Ph.D., R.N., Professor and Associate Dean, College of Nursing Research, Creighton University

William B. Grant

Ph.D., Founder and Director, Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center; Vitamin D Researcher

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 9th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Monday Night Philosophy asks (on a Tuesday afternoon): What are we doing here? And answers: We are pursuing desires — because we are pursuing happiness, and happiness results from fulfilling a desire. But since unhappiness results whenever we don’t fulfill a desire, and since that happens so often, individual life is sometimes seen as a perilous journey, a valley of tears, or even a worthless endeavor, to be escaped via the nothingness of Nirvana, or by retreating to Heaven, or by merging with Oneness.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Just as right after a divorce, when it is common to forget all about the fun and enjoyment which came before, we lack perspective. We forget our judgment is untrustworthy in despair. So let’s step back, as philosophers love to do, and see how much more intelligently we could 1) pick which desires to pursue before we pursue them, 2) pick which motives to favor, and which to discard (because our motives are our deeper desires), 3) sort out our conflicting desires so we don’t face certain unhappiness, and 4) make contingent any desires that are dependent for their fulfillment on sources outside our control. And then see how much more happiness, and how much less unhappiness, we would experience.

Because the only way to get everything you want in life is to be very clever about what you want.

MLF ORGANIZER

George Hammond

NOTES

MLF: Humanities

SPEAKERS

George Hammond

Author, Rational Idealism

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 9th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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A healthy constitutional democracy requires a citizenry that has the knowledge, skills and desire to participate in it. The United States is incredibly polarized, and we now have a citizenry and electorate that are poorly trained to meet the modern challenges we are facing. One major reason? The country has disinvested in history and civic education. For example, at the federal level, we spend approximately $50 per student per year on STEM fields and approximately 5 cents per student per year on civics.

A lack of consensus about the substance of history and civics education—what and how to teach—has been a major obstacle to maintaining excellence in history and civics education in recent decades. In response to this critical moment, The Commonwealth Club is pleased to support a new effort, Educating for American Democracy, a significant new initiative to provide tools to make civics and history a priority so we as a country can rebuild our civic strength. This education-based special program will focus on this new effort with three participants who participated in the development of the project.

Educating for American Democracy is an unprecedented, cross-ideological effort to provide guidance for excellence in civic and history education for all K–12 students—and to enhance the way in which the subjects are taught in schools so they generate prepared, informed and engaged citizens. The project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education through a grant to iCivics, Harvard University, Tufts University and Arizona State University.

A national network of more than 300 scholars, educators and practitioners from ideologically and demographically diverse backgrounds have collaborated to create a roadmap and accompanying documents that provide suggested educational strategies and content for history and civics at every grade level—along with strategies for implementation in schools—so every state and district can fit the needs of their own, different communities. States and local school districts can use the roadmap to transform the way they teach civics and history so it meets the needs of today’s diverse 21st century K–12 student body.

The roadmap is not a national curriculum, nor is it a mandate. It is a series of guidelines that states and districts may opt to use. It is committed to providing instructional strategies and content for all learners to ensure that excellent history and civic learning opportunities are delivered equitably throughout the country.

Last year, at the beginning of the pandemic, The Commonwealth Club launched its own civics education effort, Creating Citizens, with founding support from the Koret Foundation. This program is part of that growing effort.

NOTES

Part of The Commonwealth Club's Creating Citizens initiative.

SPEAKERS

Paul Carrese

Founding Director, School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State University

Michelle Herczog

Coordinator III, History-Social Science, Los Angeles County Office of Education

Kent McGuire

Program Director, Education, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Emma Humphries

Ph.D., Chief Education Officer, iCivics; Deputy Director, CivXNow—Moderator

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 5th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California.

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