
Advertise on podcast: Commonwealth Club of California Podcast
Rating
4.6from
This podcast has
2000 episodes
Language
EnglishPublisher
Commonwealth Club of CaliforniaExplicit
No
Date created
2021/10/06
Latest episode
2026/11/12
Average duration
62 min.
Release period
2 days
Description
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.
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Check latest episodes from Commonwealth Club of California Podcast podcast
Bryant Lin: An Exploration of Living When You Are Dying
2026/11/12
Join us as a leading researcher and cancer advocate distills the lessons for living that he’s learned as a doctor and as a patient, after he was diagnosed with his own terminal illness.
Over the course of a 20-year career, Dr. Bryant Lin treated many patients with lung cancer. He never smoked and never imagined that he would be diagnosed with the same terrible disease. After cycling through the stages of grief and two rounds of chemo, he realized that his diagnosis presented an opportunity to learn. For the first time, he experienced the cancer diagnosis and the complexities of treatment as a patient, rather than a doctor.
Determined to give back and to keep teaching, Dr. Lin created a course at Stanford Medical School called From Diagnosis to Dialog: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle with Cancer, to share his experience with a terminal illness as both a doctor and a patient. The class was a sensation on campus and soon attracted international attention.
Now, Dr. Lin brings us into the classroom to offer us an inspiring exploration of how to live when you are dying. How can we prepare for intimidating medical news and navigate treatment? How can we find hope in the face of terminal diagnosis? It’s a topic he explores in-depth in his new book Sunshine, Dr. Lin offers both philosophical and scientifically grounded insights into how we can make the most out of life even in the most challenging moments.
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Dana Bash: The Elections That Changed the World
2026/11/10
Elections matter—sometimes in ways we can’t even anticipate. As we near the end of another heated election season, CNN’s chief political correspondent and bestselling author Dana Bash joins us for a special online-only program looking at the most crucial elections in history, from the upheavals of Ancient Rome to our modern political scene.
Elections can have big impacts on economic prosperity, addressing stubborn challenges, and affecting the lives of all citizens. They can also lead to war, deepen divisions, and change values systems.
Bash and David Fisher teamed up to explore this in their new book The Elections that Changed the World, looking at the most consequential elections in global history, beginning at the dawn of civilization up through the present day. Whether you’re curious about whether your vote counts, or you want to learn more about how our current system came to be, don’t miss this program.
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Kevin Roose: Inside the Race to Create an Artificial Superintelligence
2026/11/09
Imagine a 21st century Manhattan Project, tasked with creating artificial general intelligence.
That’s what a handful of AI companies have been racing to do over the past decade, seeking to build the most powerful technology in history: artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a computer system capable of outdoing humans at almost anything. Some of them hoped AGI would cure diseases and heal the planet. Others feared it could kill everyone on Earth. They decided to build it anyway.
Kevin Roose reveals a behind-the-scenes account of the trillion-dollar sprint to create AGI in his new book The AGI Chronicles. Drawing on more than 150 interviews with insiders at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, as well as unpublished company documents and research memos, Roose reconstructs the most consequential decade in tech history. He takes us inside the rooms where researchers watch large language models learn to talk, reason and code at superhuman speed. He brings us to the White House, where top officials grapple with a technology that is improving too fast to understand, let alone regulate. Roose offers new details on the disagreements that led the founders of Anthropic to defect from OpenAI, and fresh reporting on Sam Altman’s dramatic firing―and equally dramatic reinstatement―as CEO. He gives us the inside story of Google’s frantic attempt to catch up to the AI frontier. And he ushers us into the San Francisco AI scene, where “accelerationists” in hacker houses and “doomers” at AI safety summits battle each other for supremacy.
Join us here in San Francisco, the heart of the AI revolution, to hear Kevin Roose reveal the most high-stakes technological quest in human history―an audacious attempt to create a new, alien form of intelligence that could either save humanity or destroy it.
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‘Traces’ Documentary Film Screening and Q&A
2026/11/07
Join us for a special screening of the documentary Traces, featuring Ukrainian women survivors of wartime sexual violence and torture resulting from Russia’s invasion of their country.
Traces is a feature documentary film directed by Alisa Kovalenko and Marysia Nikitiuk. It follows Ukrainian women who, after surviving conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and torture during Russia’s war, refuse to remain silent. At its center is Iryna Dovhan, a former captive turned activist and head of SEMA Ukraine, who documents the testimonies of survivors across de-occupied territories. Through her guidance, the film presents a collective portrait of trauma, resilience and hope, showing how survivors transform pain into power.
The film highlights survivors who, through mutual support and collective action, reclaim agency, challenge stigma, and insist on justice. Personal experiences shared by women showcase a broader strategy of war: sexual violence used deliberately as a weapon to intimidate, destabilize, assert control over occupied territories, and ultimately to break Ukrainians as a nation. Both women and men, including Ukrainian POWs, have been targeted by the Russian forces, highlighting the systematic nature of these crimes and their long-lasting impact on individuals and communities.
The title captures this multilayered impact—from the visible destruction of lives and communities to the invisible marks left on the human psyche: physical, psychological, and social. More than a record of war crimes, the film is a testament to solidarity and agency—survivors reclaim their voices, challenge stigma, and insist on justice. By bearing witness and refusing to remain silent, these women—guided by Iryna—create a powerful movement that illuminates the stakes of the ongoing war and asserts the vital importance of memory, accountability, and social transformation.
Following the screening, stay for a Q&A about the issues raised in the film.
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Balconies, Parking Lots and Solar Film: New Ways to Harness the Sun
2026/11/06
Common climate wisdom used to be that buying solar panels was one of the smartest long-term investments an individual could make – pay once up front for decades of carbon-free electricity. But it turns out layers of red tape make that process slower – and much more expensive – than it needs to be. And with federal rollback of longstanding tax credits and stiff competition from China, the U.S. solar industry is facing new headwinds.
Still, the future could be bright: More states are looking at allowing plug-in or balcony solar. Energy affordability nonprofits like Permit Power are helping state governments reduce red tape and costs for home solar. And solar developers see new potential in the millions of acres of commercial rooftops. Plus, researchers continue to work on new ways to maximize the power a solar cell can produce. This week we take a look at what the next era of solar power might look like.
Guests:
Bernadette del Chiaro, Senior Vice President, California, Environmental Working Group
Nick Josefowitz, Chief Executive, Permit Power
Juliane Borchert, Group Leader, Fraunhofer ISE; Early Career Group Leader, University of Freiburg
For show notes, transcripts, and related links, visit our episode page.
Climate One will present the 2026 Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication to Daniel Swain, Ph.D., a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR). Join us for a lecture and celebration of this fantastic climate communicator on Dec. 8, in San Francisco. Tickets are available at climateone.org/events.
Our 2026 audience survey is open, and we'd like to hear from you. It takes about five minutes and asks how you found us, how you engage with Climate One, and what you'd like more of. The survey closes Nov. 30. Take the survey at climateone.org/survey.
Support Climate One by going ad-free! Subscribe to Climate One on Patreon for exclusive access to all future episodes, free of ads. Sign up today.
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Kathi Zellwegger and Mike Chinoy: Saving Lives in North Korea
2026/11/02
North Korea has been practically a pariah nation for decades. The tightly controlled communist dynasty has alternated between hermetic silence and belligerence. But what did one woman learn when she worked on the ground in North Korea, providing humanitarian aide to its people?
Find out when Kathi Zellweger and Mike Chinoy join us to talk about her experience as a Swiss aid worker who engaged North Korea over nearly three decades. They’ll share the story of how Zellweger lived out her commitment to the poor and most vulnerable, despite the tensions and threat of conflict always looming over the Korean Peninsula.
Zellweger was the first foreigner many North Koreans had ever met or even seen. Playing a central role in the early years of international relief efforts in North Korea was a lonely job, as Kathi addressed the humanitarian needs of a suffering people largely ignored by the world because of their location. She befriended local doctors, nurses and caregivers; negotiated with suspicious government officials; overcame international doubts about the diversion of relief supplies to the military; and, over a period of years, spearheaded an effort that provided food, medicine and development aid. Ultimately, her efforts saved the lives of thousands of people—most of them children.
One official in Pyongyang declared to her during a visit in the late 1990s, that, even though she was not a missionary, “Miss Kathi—you are the Mother Teresa of North Korea!”
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Evan Barker: Nothing Left
2026/11/01
Has the Democratic Party lost its soul? Evan Barker says the party she grew up identifying with has been hijacked by out-of-touch activists, coastal elitists, and powerful special interests. She joins us to share her inside story of how she and the Democrats parted ways.
Barker had a bright future in Democratic politics. She was a prodigious fundraiser and relentless operator, raising tens of millions of dollars for Democrat candidates. But in August 2024, standing on the floor of the Democratic National Convention, Barker hit her breaking point. In that moment, she says she realized what no one inside the party dared admit: the Democrats had lost their way, and there was no path back.
Born into a union family in Kansas City with a rare genetic lung disease, Barker lived and breathed Democrat. The Democratic Party, she believed, was built to help people like her. But as she rose through the ranks, she says she saw a movement obsessed with moral posturing and identity politics rather than with the struggles of ordinary Americans. And when she spoke up, she became a target herself.
She tells this story in her new book Nothing Left, in which she reveals a world of donors, strategists, politicians, and activists who run the party. And she tells the story in-person at Commonwealth Club World Affairs.
This program is supported by the Ken & Jaclyn Broad Family Fund and Garry's List.
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Does it Pay To Go Green? Let Us Count The Ways.
2026/10/30
As the cost of living climbs, can clean energy technology help ease the burden? That seems to be the case in West Texas, where revenue from a wind farm is helping fund a rural county’s senior center, Meals on Wheels, and even a Valentine’s Day dance!
But the benefits of clean energy aren’t always spread evenly, largely because of how policies shape incentives and cost distribution. In some cases, utility scale solar lowers electricity prices while rooftop solar can shift costs onto households without it. Meanwhile, new balcony solar panels are helping renters cut their bills, and Every Electric and Con Edison are giving New Yorkers plug-in batteries to keep their AC running even during heat waves. And the fact that these solutions also cut climate pollution? That’s the cherry on top.
Guests:
Bekah Stolhandske McNeel, Freelance Journalist
Christopher Knittel, Professor of Applied Economics, Sloan School, MIT; Director, MIT Climate Policy Center
Andrew Wang, Co-Founder, CEO, Every Electric
For show notes, related links, and episode transcript, visit our episode page here.
00:03:34 Bekah Stolhandske McNeel describes Ozona
00:05:32 Bekah Stolhandske McNeel on country response to wind project
00:06:54 Bekah Stolhandske McNeel on where wind project proceeds went
00:09:56 Bekah Stolhandske McNeel on the Senior Center Valentine's Day Dance
00:20:29 Christopher Knittel on the “green premium”
00:25:05 Christopher Knittel on rooftop solar and your energy bill
00:28:42 Christopher Knittel on important policy choices
00:33:36 Christopher Knittel on equitable distribution of costs
00:37:18 Andrew Wang on how the power bank program works
00:41:54 Andrew Wang on connecting the power bank program to air conditioning
00:48:50 Andrew Wang on scaling the program
On November 5 at 5:30 p.m., join Climate One and the Children & Nature Network for an evening with Richard Louv, author of the internationally bestselling Last Child in the Woods. Tickets are available at climateone.org/events
Climate One will present the 2026 Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication to Daniel Swain, Ph.D., a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR).
Join us for a lecture and celebration of this fantastic climate communicator on Dec. 8, in San Francisco. Tickets are available at climateone.org/events.
Support Climate One by going ad-free! Subscribe to Climate One on Patreon for exclusive access to all future episodes, free of ads. Sign up today.
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Bing Gordon and Chloe Gordon: Everybody Wins
2026/10/27
What can the billion-dollar secrets of game design teach people about building products better and making customers happier?Video games are one of the biggest entertainment industry in the world—for a reason. Games tap into human psychology like nothing else. So how can we recreate the satisfaction we feel playing games in day-to-day life? How can we harness that feeling to grow better businesses?These are the questions Bing Gordon has explored over his 40-year career in the technology industry. Affectionately known as the godfather of the video game world, his influence and canonized “gamification checklist” have shaped the games and companies people engage with every day: EA Sports, Farmville, The Sims, Amazon Prime, Zynga, Spotify, Audible, Twitch, Duolingo, and Cameo, to name a few.
Now, Bing and Chloe Gordon have published Everybody Wins, in which they dive into each of the eight core elements of his checklist, lessons extracted from a lifetime in games: “wow moments” (lead with unforgettable moments of exaltation); everybody wins (engineer wins to be frequent, evident and earned); invest and express (create opportunities for self-expression and recognition); session economics (make every session feel worth the time it took); social integration (prioritize integrating social connection, always); retention hacking (build “forever franchises” that delight and grow) game loops (design satisfying repetition); and quantify everything (measure achievements at the micro-level).
Join the Gordons at Commonwealth Club World Affairs to hear unforgettable stories of Bing’s storied career and hard-earned wisdom they say any business and anyone can implement for creating irresistible products and experiences.
About the Speakers
Bing Gordon is a video game man. He was the chief product officer for Kleiner Perkins, a consultant to Amazon, and an advisor and mentor to dozens of gaming and social-tech start-ups. Bing was co-founder, chief creative officer and long-time executive at Electronic Arts, from its founding in 1982 until his “retirement” in 2008.
Chloe Gordon is an LA-based director, writer and documentarian who explores the intersections of technology, storytelling and culture. Her career spans multiple media forms, including creating and writing Amazon’s first scripted comedy series for Twitch, “Two Joysticks and a Couch,” and working on 108 episodes of “Saturday Night Live,” which earned her a spot on Billboard’s 2015 TV Top Music Power Players list. Her portfolio spans narrative film, nonfiction and journalism, and the occasional viral article (“I Worked at Fyre Festival. It Was Always Going to Be a Disaster”). Chloe frequently collaborates with tech founders and investors to craft essays, investment theses, and narrative pieces for organizations, including Y Combinator, Uptake and Dwarfstar.
Our moderator, John Doerr, is an engineer, venture capitalist, and the chair of Kleiner Perkins. He is the author of bestsellers Measure What Matters and Speed and Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now. For over 40 years, John has served entrepreneurs with ingenuity and optimism, helping them build bold teams and disruptive companies. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon and has helped to create more than a million jobs. A pioneer of Silicon Valley’s cleantech movement, he has invested in zero-emissions technologies since 2006. Outside Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs who are tackling systemic issues across climate, public health and education. In 2022, John and his wife Ann collaborated with Stanford University to launch its first new school in 70 years: The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
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Jessica Marie Alba: The Inner Work of Transforming a Region
2026/10/26
Join us for this Transforming Our Region Member-led Forum program on personal change and place-based identity, featuring Jessica Marie Alba. Together, we will explore how to live in ways that catalyze systems change for a Bay Area where people and nature thrive.
Every systems change strategy eventually runs through a person. Land use, governance, education, and collaboration all depend on people with enough capacity to hold a long horizon. Yet many of us working on the region’s future are running on empty. We are quick to name the visible constraints, the lack of funding and the lack of political will, and slower to name the other one: our own depletion. In this session, Jessica Alba argues that our disconnection from place and from ourselves is not a personal failing or an accident of modern life. It is what our systems are built to produce. We are shaped to be useful rather than fully alive, and productive rather than present. Drawing on two decades in Bay Area transportation and civic leadership, she offers a grounded account of where she believes humanity is heading, what is already underway beneath the headlines, and why the personal layer is not a soft addition to systems change but its precondition.
In the interactive portion, participants will map their own place-based identity and leave with two commitments made out loud: one thing they will say yes to in the coming year, and one thing they will stop giving their energy to. Whether you lead an organization, work inside an agency, advocate in your neighborhood, or simply care where this region is going, you will leave with a clearer sense of where you stand and what you are here to do.
About the Speaker
Jessica Marie Alba is the founder of Warriors of Harmony, a forthcoming book and a growing movement about what it takes to live fully in a world at a threshold. After nearly 30 years in Sweden, Jessica has spent the past two decades deep in sustainable transportation, planning, and civic leadership across the Bay Area. She joined Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates in 2004 and became one of the firm’s leaders before moving to Stanford Transportation’s leadership team in 2017. From 2020 through the end of 2025, she served as a director on the San Francisco Bay Ferry Board, appointed by the speaker of the California State Assembly. She resigned from Stanford in May 2025 without a next role lined up, following an instinct she had learned to trust more than the plan. Her work now sits where civic leadership, systems thinking, and personal transformation meet.
A Transforming Our Region 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.
ORGANIZERMatt BiggarNOTES
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Tom Rosenstiel: How the Press Must Change to Save Democracy
2026/10/26
Note: This podcast contains explicit language.
The crisis in journalism, says veteran journalist and media critic Tom Rosenstiel, reflects a crisis in American democracy. Faith in news outlets has dwindled, news deserts are expanding, and audiences are turning away from alarmist, partisan, and fragmented coverage.
In his new book The Next Journalism, Rosenstiel argues that the roots of journalism’s failure are intellectual, not just financial or technological. He outlines ten fundamental ways journalism must change to become more useful, trustworthy, and collaborative with the communities it serves.
From redefining news as a service rather than a product, to embracing transparency, to harnessing AI responsibly, Rosenstiel provides a bold, practical framework for rebuilding a press that empowers citizens instead of alienating them. With case studies, historical insight, and forward-looking ideas, this book offers journalists, policymakers, and readers alike a roadmap to ensuring democracy’s survival in the twenty-first century.
Tom Rosenstiel is a journalist, media critic, researcher, novelist, and professor. He is the author of seven influential nonfiction books, including The Elements of Journalism, and four novels. Rosenstiel has been a press critic for the Los Angeles Times, chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek, press critic for MSNBC, and director of media studies at the Pew Research Center. He also led the American Press Institute and now serves as Eleanor Merrill Professor on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland. His new book is The Next Journalism: How the Press Must Change to Serve Democracy.
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Annie Jacobsen: Biological War
2026/10/25
A bio attack. A lab accident. A global pandemic. The collapse of human society.
Who else would want to explore the possibilities of biological warfare than Annie Jacobsen, investigative journalist and the best-selling author of Nuclear War? For her latest book, Biological War, Jacobsen interviewed dozens of experts in politics, governments, medicine, and the military to explore a scenario of bio warfare. She says it would only take days from the beginning of a global bio infection before we’d be in a battle for human existence. Is the infrastructure that was built to handle this very scenario up to the task?
How would people deal with a dystopic world with mass death, societal breakdown, violent insurrections, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland in place of modern civilization? Jacobsen lays out what would happen, providing a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as startling, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.
Join us for special online-only program as Annie Jacobsen explores the unthinkable.
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Loubna Mrie: Defiance, A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria
2026/10/24
In the Syria in which Loubna Mrie was a schoolgirl, loyalty was survival. Curiosity was blasphemy. Dissent was betrayal.
Like any good Alawite girl, every day at school, Loubna Mrie pledged allegiance to Hafez al-Assad. When she complained about memorizing his speeches for class, she was told to shorten her tongue—without the president, her family believed, the Alawites would be persecuted by the Sunni majority, as they had been for centuries before the Assads came to power. A girl’s role was to obey, not to question. Loubna’s father, a mercurial businessman with close ties to the Assad regime, ruled over his wife and daughters with absolute authority.
Then everything changed in 2011, when the pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring reached Syria. Unable to suppress her curiosity, Loubna attended an anti-government protest. What she witnessed—the courage, the brutality, and the lies that followed—ignited something in her that would not be extinguished. She joined the resistance, risking her life by fearlessly proclaiming her Alawite heritage and, later, as a photojournalist documenting the war for Reuters and other outlets. Her defiance would come at a devastating cost: the loss of loved ones, her community, and ultimately her country. Leaving behind everything she knew, she would have to find a new home within herself.
She recounts all of this in her book Defiance—a finalist for this year's Kirkus Prize. She provides an account of one woman’s fight for freedom—against a father, a dictator, and the weight of inherited belief. From the streets of Aleppo to exile in New York City, it offers an electrifying portrait of moral courage in the face of authoritarianism and violence. Now she comes to San Francisco, where you can hear her describe what it means to wake up, to resist, and to become.
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The Gr8T Debate: The Race for San Francisco’s District 8
2026/10/23
San Francisco’s District 8, home to the Castro, Noe Valley, Glen Park, Diamond Heights, and the surrounding neighborhoods, will choose a new supervisor this November for the first time since 2018. With Supervisor Rafael Mandelman terming out, voters face a pivotal decision about who will carry the district’s voice to City Hall.
Commonwealth Club World Affairs and the San Francisco Democratic Party present "The Gr8T Debate," a live, one-hour debate featuring candidates Gary McCoy, Michael Nguyen and Darshini Patel. They’ll go head-to-head on the issues that matter most to District 8 residents: housing and affordability, public safety, small business recovery, homelessness and the drug crisis, and preserving the district’s LGBTQ+ history and culture.
Moderated by KQED’s Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos, co-hosts of "Political Breakdown," this is your chance to hear the candidates in their own words, compare their plans side by side, and decide for yourself before you mark your ballot.
Marisa Lagos is a correspondent for KQED’s California Politics and Government Desk and co-hosts the award-winning show and podcast, "Political Breakdown." At KQED, Lagos also conducts reporting, analysis and investigations into state, local and national politics for radio, TV, online and onstage. In 2022, she and co-host Scott Shafer moderated the only gubernatorial debate in California. In 2020, The Washington Post named her one of the top political journalists in California; she was nominated for a Peabody and won several other awards for her work investigating the 2017 California wildfires. She has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Los Angeles Times. A UC Santa Barbara graduate, she lives in San Francisco with her two sons and husband.
Scott Shafer is the senior politics correspondent with the KQED Politics and Government desk. He is co-host of "Political Breakdown," the award-winning radio show and podcast with a personal take on the world of politics. Shafer came to KQED in 1998 to host the statewide "California Report." Prior to that he had extended stints in politics and government. He uses that inside experience at KQED in his, reporting, hosting and analysis for the politics desk. Scott recently completed a 5-part podcast titled "The Speaker," examining Rep. Nancy Pelosi's life and legacy. Previously he collaborated on "Political Breakdown" and on "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown," an eight-part series about the life and extraordinary political career of the former governor. For fun, he plays water polo and swims with the San Francisco Tsunami.
See more Michelle Meow Show programs at Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California.
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CEO of Nation’s Biggest Utility Talks Affordability, Fires, Outages, and Public Outrage
2026/10/23
After PG&E pled guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter in the 2018 Camp Fire, Patti Poppe was brought on as the utility’s new CEO. Her stated mission: to fix it.
Now, rising electricity prices, repeated power outages, and the growing impact of climate change have put PG&E in the crosshairs of the public and legislators. Again.
This summer, California lawmakers rejected a bill that would have capped the utility’s liability if their equipment sparks another fire. In response. PG&E announced it would defer roughly $2 billion in capital investments planned for 2027 as it works to strengthen its finances and, in Poppe’s words, “reinvent” the company. That means plans to connect new housing projects, clean energy initiatives, and some technology upgrades may be put on hold.
In a climate-changed world, is the investor-owned utility model still sustainable? Are utilities putting too much emphasis on profits at the expense of maintenance? And how do utilities across the country balance the needs for affordability, reliability, and climate resilience?
Guests:
Patti Poppe, CEO, Pacific Gas & Electric
Ryan Reed, Co-Founder, FireGeneration Collaborative
Kyle Trefny, Seasonal wildland firefighter; Co-Founder, FireGeneration Collaborative
For show notes, transcripts, and related links, visit our episode page.
00:00 – Introduction
03:30 – PG&E CEO on rising costs of electricity
06:50 – Is PG&E beholden to Wall Street instead of Main Street?
10:00 – Why the utility hasn’t put more power lines underground
12:00 – Poppe on how data centers could help normal ratepayers with lower costs
19:00 – Can the grid handle all this new demand from data centers and electrification?
20:45 – Wildfire risk and liability
27:30 – Customer outrage about power outages, more calls to break up PG&E
30:00 – How much would it cost for San Francisco to buy out PG&E
32:00 – Lightning round
40:00 – Ryan Reed and Kyle Trefny on history of wildfire and fire suppression
45:00 – Reed and Trefny on the work of FireGen Collaborative
49:00 – “Good fire” versus catastrophic, climate-fueled wildfires
57:00 – Climate One More Thing
On November 5 at 5:30 p.m., join Climate One and the Children & Nature Network for an evening with Richard Louv, author of the internationally bestselling Last Child in the Woods. Tickets are available at climateone.org/events
Support Climate One by going ad-free! Subscribe to Climate One on Patreon for exclusive access to all future episodes, free of ads. Sign up today.
Ad sales by Multitude. Contact them for ad inquiries at multitude.productions/ads
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