The Commonwealth June/July 2019

Commonwealth The

THE MAGAZINE OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB OF CALIFORNIA

JUNE/JULY 2019

KARA SWISHER SILICON VALLEY

HIGHS & LOWS Chris Wilson Tony Thurmond Andrew McCabe Jerry Brown & Anne Gust Brown Josephine Bolling McCall London Breed

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INSIDE14 THIS ISSUE 35

Editor’s Desk

Vote for your weekend events!

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The Commons

News and views from the Club; plus your letters

Andrew McCabe

Program Information

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36

Former FBI chief

Two-month Calendar

Tony Thurmond

Improving California’s schools

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Jerry & Anne Gust Brown

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Up close with the Browns

First Word: Chris Wilson The master plan

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25

Josephine Bolling McCall Jim Crow in action

Kara Swisher

The challenge and necessity of taming Silicon Valley

On the Cover: Kara Swisher Photo by: James Meinerth

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Program Listings Events for June and July 2019

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Late-Breaking Events

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The mayor’s plan

By Gloria Duffy

Last Word: London Breed

Insight

On this Page: Kara Swisher and Irina Raicu before a Silicon Valley audience.

Photo by: James Meinerth

Regulation is coming for a lot of these [tech companies], very similar to regulating a chemical company that’s spewing poison into a river. Some of these tech companies are spewing poison into society, and they’ve got to filter it better. They’ve got to deal with fake news and election tampering and hate speech and all kinds of things that most of the people who run these companies are ill-equipped to deal with.

-KARA SWISHER

June/July 2019 - Volume 113, No.4

JUNE/JULY 2019

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EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY

The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and question-and-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub. org/watch-listen, podcasts on Google Play and Apple iTunes, or contact Club offices to buy a compact disc.

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Copyright © 2019 The Commonwealth Club of California.

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EDITOR’S DESK Vote for the Weekends

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am writing this editorial one week after I moderated a very enjoyable program that took place on a Sunday at the Club’s San Francisco headquarters. Six days from now, we will have a program at the same place on a Saturday.

These are not the first programs we have held on weekends; we have occasionally done them on Saturdays—and very rarely on Sundays—in San Francisco and Silicon Valley in the past, usually when it was the only time a speaker’s schedule would work for a program.

Now that we have our own building (and have increased the number of events each year from 450 to nearly 500), we are looking at doing more weekend programming.

We would appreciate hearing from you about how to make weekend programs fit your schedule and meet your needs. Please take a couple minutes to fill out this survey, and I will compile the responses and share it with our programs team.

Would you be more likely or less likely to attend a program if it were held on a weekend? ____ More likely ____ Less likely ____ Doesn’t matter What types of weekend programs would interest you the most? ____ Celebrity/entertainment ____ Serious topics/speakers ____ Small groups and discussions ____ Activities (walks, site visits, etc.) ____ Family-oriented programs ____ Not sure/doesn’t matter ____ Other; please explain: _____________________________ _____________________________ What days of the week work best for you when it comes to attending Club programs? (Select as many as apply.) ____ Sunday ____ Monday ____ Tuesday ____ Wednesday ____ Thursday ____ Friday ____ Saturday ____ Doesn’t matter

What time works best for a Saturday or Sunday program? ____ Early afternoon ____ Late afternoon ____ Early evening Would you be more likely or less likely to attend a program if it were held on a Friday evening? ____ More likely ____ Less likely ____ Doesn’t matter Where do you live? ____ East Bay ____ Marin ____ San Francisco ____ Silicon Valley ____ Elsewhere Please send your completed survey to my attention at: John Zipperer, The Commonwealth Club, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105 Or email your answers: jzipperer@commonwealthclub.org Thank you!

JOHN ZI P P E R E R VP, ME DIA & E D I T O RI AL

TALK OF THE CLUB Mayor Ed Lee addresses The Commonwealth Club of California.

Remembering Ellen Tauscher

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n late April, Ellen O’Kane Tauscher passed away, leaving behind a rich legacy of public service and a commitment to international security and peace.

Following a successful career on Wall Street that included becoming the youngest and one of the first women to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. She represented California’s 10th District from 1997 to 2009, when she joined the Obama administration as under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. She first got elected to Congress by challenging an incumbent GOP representative, and she remained so close to her constituents that people joked that any time three locals gathered together, one of them was Tauscher.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised her late friend to Politico, calling her “a brilliant politician . . . [and] one of the most effective and accomplished public officials I’ve ever known.” Senator Dianne Feinstein said Tauscher “was brilliant, gracious and generous and always did her best to lift up those around her.”

Tauscher has a long relationship with The Commonwealth Club. She spoke at our Centennial Conference in 2003, served on the Club’s Board of Governors and its Advisory Board, and moderated many programs.

A celebration of her life will take place Thursday, June 6 at 2 p.m. at the Lesher Center for the Arts (1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek). A survivor of esophageal cancer, she died of pneumonia related to her cancer surgery. In lieu of flowers, people are asked to make donations to the Esophageal Cancer Action Network at ecan.org or P.O. Box 243, Stevenson, MD 21153.

Economic Mobility Collaborative

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he Economic Mobility Collaborative is a multi-partisan association of Californians who share the view that barriers to economic opportunity and mobility present a critical threat to California’s future.

The Commonwealth Club is serving as fiscal sponsor for the this new organization.

Above left: Former U.S. Rep. Ellen O’Kane Tauscher moderated numerous Club programs. Above right: When he took to the Club’s stage, ML Cavanaugh made sure he had a trusted gavel—his own.

Tauscher photo by Ed Ritger; gavel photo by James Meinerth

Above: Disrupted rainfall patterns meant that the expected superbloom didn’t greet our recent Club travelers to Death Valley. As you can see above, however, the few flowers in bloom got more than enough love from our travelers. Expect more flowers and good spirits when the Club returns to Death Valley in 2020.

Photo courtesy Kristina Nemeth

The Collaborative operates on the belief that every Californian should have a chance to work, to discover their potential, and to share that potential with others, and that this is the surest way to an inclusive, robust and resilient economy that prepares the next generation to thrive as workers, employers, inventors, parents, and civic stewards.

Club CEO Gloria Duffy views the Collaborative’s focus as a modern incarnation of the issues the Club studied and sought to remedy in its early years, and to which it periodically returns. Lenny Mendonca, a Club Board of Governors member and chief economic adviser to Governor Newsom, created the Collaborative with Zabrae Valentine, who led the Club’s Voices of Reform project from 2004–2007 and

then cofounded California Forward. She continues to facilitate the Collaborative.

Learn more about the Economic Mobility Collaborative at cadream4all.org.

BYOG

Some moderators can’t help themselves and have to comment on how they’ve always wanted to bang the gavel at the beginning of a Commonwealth Club program. When authors and military experts Max Brooks and ML Cavanaugh took to the Club’s stage to interview each other, Cavanaugh brandished his very own gavel. Their topic? How the fantasy TV series “Game of Thrones” has lessons for modern military war planning.

We’re just glad he didn’t bring a dragon.

JUNE/JULY 2019

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LEADERSHIP OF THE COMMONWEALTH CLUB CLUB OFFICERS Board Chair Evelyn Dilsaver Vice Chair James Strother Secretary Dr. Jaleh Daie Treasurer John R. Farmer President & CEO Dr. Gloria C. Duffy

BOARD OF GOVERNORS Robert E. Adams Willie Adams John F. Allen Scott Anderson Dan Ashley Massey J. Bambara Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman** Harry E. Blount John L. Boland Maryles Casto**)

Charles M. Collins Dennis Collins Kevin Collins Mary B. Cranston** Susie Cranston Dr. Kerry P. Curtis Dorian Daley Lee Dutra Joseph I. Epstein* Jeffrey A. Farber Dr. Carol A. Fleming Leslie Saul Garvin Paul M. Ginsburg Hon. James C. Hormel Mary Huss Julie Kane Lata Krishnan John Leckrone Dr. Mary Marcy Lenny Mendonca Anna W.M. Mok Mauree Jane Perry

Faces

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ADVISORY BOARD Karin Helene Bauer

Hon. William Bradley Dennise M. Carter Steven Falk Amy Gershoni Jacquelyn Hadley Heather Kitchen Amy McCombs Don J. McGrath Hon. William J. Perry Hon. Barbara Pivnicka Hon. Richard Pivnicka Ray Taliaferro Nancy Thompson

PAST BOARD CHAIRS AND PRESIDENTS Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman ** Hon. Shirley Temple Black*† J. Dennis Bonney* John Busterud* Maryles Casto** Hon. Ming Chin* Mary B. Cranston**

LETTERS

Wow, the April/May 2019 issue of The Commonwealth has 7 pics of white male presenters but no women, no people of color, allowed to be seen presenting in the Commonwealth Club’s magazine? (Except the one pic with 2 women, but perhaps there was no other way to spotlight the 3 white men.)

Did we really need to see four of basically the same pic of the economy guys? That four pic series really emphasizes how Delong can’t go a minute without checking his phone.

The one where he’s ignoring everyone and engrossed with his soulmate the phone — was the discussion that boring? The audience that unworthy of his time? Way to put him in the spotlight of disrespect. Basic manners are so basic I don’t think they even teach that in “How to be good guest 101” or in “Presenting 101.”

I wonder what Laura Foote, executive director, YIMBY Action, looks like, or SPUR Community Policy Planning Director Kristy Wang, or San Francisco Compass Realtor Shelly Sutherland. How about the author of Leonardo’s Knots, Carolyn Cocciardi? Nope, no room for girls, we’re spotlighting Delong’s relationship with his phone in this issue. Four pages of housing were redundant but they did serve well to keep invisible any women who have anything of value to say on the topic.

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Donald J. Pierce Bruce Raabe Skip Rhodes* Kausik Rajgopal Bill Ring Martha Ryan George M. Scalise Charlotte Mailliard Shultz George D. Smith Jr. Dr. Marc Spencer James Strother Hon. Tad Taube Charles Travers Kimberly Twombly-Wu Don Wen Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox Brenda Wright Jed York Mark Zitter

Joseph I. Epstein* Dr. Joseph R. Fink* William German* Rose Guilbault** Claude B. Hutchison Jr.* Dr. Julius Krevans* Anna W.M. Mok** Richard Otter* Joseph Perrelli* Toni Rembe* Victor J. Revenko* Skip Rhodes* Renée Rubin* Richard A. Rubin* Robert Saldich** Connie Shapiro* Nelson Weller * Judith Wilbur* Dennis Wu* * Past President ** Past Chair † Deceased

I’m left wondering if Siri picked the “painted ladies” as a stand in for real women?

It would be so much more representative of what actually happened if people like me were included, along with the emphasis on white men, in the Club’s photo documentation and archiving works.

Good articles this month, but the photo selection needs a little more thought and effort.

Elizabeth Fisher Pleasant Hill, CA

InSightful

This month’s cover story was originally intended to be the cover feature of the April/May issue, but was moved due to a date change for the Kara Swisher event.

Creeped out

Lopsided

How about offering some more conservative people and viewpoints, instead of this onslaught of liberal hogwash?

I realize The Commonwealth Club is situated in the middle of the lunacy that is San Francisco, but since your organization claims to encompass the entire gamut of ideas and society, get with it!! Otherwise advertise as you really want to be—an outlet of the Democratic Party and all its unAmericanism.

More conservative items!!!!!

J. Brown No location given

The InSight in the August/September Commonwealth was startling and significant [“Supporting Care for the Elderly and Disabled,” by Dr. Gloria C. Duffy, page 58].

Many of us were unaware of the lack of safe procedures available to families seeking in-home caregivers.

Thanks to Dr. Duffy, we now have a fresh insight to finding appropriate care.

J. Brian Weller Redwood Shores, CA

I listened to Mayor Pete Buttigieg on last night’s show. Very interesting, but I was feeling kind of creepy about it. Why would you choose to give an entire hour on one of the white men running for president? I looked at your future bookings and don’t see Kamala Harris or Cory Booker or Elizabeth Warren there. Very strange indeed.

Pat Cull No location given The Commonwealth welcomes letters to the editor regarding Club programs and services and the content of this magazine. Email feedback@ commonwealthclub.org; or regular mail: The Commonwealth magazine, Letters, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105.Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

First Word

WITH CHRIS WILSON

THE MASTER

PLAN I

ended up spending 16 and a half years in prison. I studied every day. I remember coming home. In the state of Maryland, they release you with $50. So I had $50, was homeless, unemployed; but I had my master plan. I was going to get back in school; I had a college degree, so . . . I talked to the school and they were like, “Whoa, you’re a convicted felon. Let’s talk about this.”

I did my homework and showed up, had my resume and my master plan. I talked to the dean and said, “Dean Anderson, I just want you to give me the opportunity to demonstrate myself as a student. I’ve been working really hard; I’ve got this plan. Just give me a shot.” So the school gave me a shot.

Around this time, my mom found out I was home. I was with my friend and she called and was like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that you’re home! How did you get out? I thought you had life? Did you break out?” [Laughter.]

I was like, “Mom, I’m grown up now. I’ve got this master plan. I’m in school. I’m going to start a business one day. I’m going to travel the world. I think I got it figured out, Mom.” Mom was like, “I just really wish that we could move back into a house and live together.” I said, “Mom, you had me for 17 years; I’m not coming back home. I’ve got this plan.” She was like, “Yeah, I know, Chris. But there’s just some things I want you to remember.”

“Okay. What’s that?”

“I want you to remember to finish your plan and go be a good person. And just remember, I love you.”

“All right, Mom.” “Chris! Remember that I love you.”

“All right, Mom. You’re on speaker phone; you’re embarrassing me.”

When my mom hung the phone up, she wrote a letter and committed suicide. She never had a chance to see me as a free man.

If my mom was here today in the room, I would tell my mom I’ve been out of prison for almost seven years; I am the owner of two successful multimillion-dollar companies in Baltimore that provide job opportunities for people that need help the most. I would tell my mom that since I’ve been free, as of last Sunday, I’ve helped 272 people get jobs, and less than 10 of those jobs were minimum wage.

I would tell my mom how I am a semester away from earning my second college degree in business and I was offered a full ride from Harvard Business School. I would tell my mom how I went from having a life sentence to feeling invisible to getting out of prison and winning every award in the state of Maryland, including a presidential award from Obama and going to the White House three times. . . .

Or maybe I would just tell my mom that I loved her one more time.

—Chris Wilson, “The Master Plan,” February 26, 2019 JUNE/JULY 2019

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Photos by James Meinerth

KARA

SWISHER Taming Silicon Valley

KARA SWISHER

Executive Editor, Recode; Host, “Decode Recode” Podcast; Twitter @karaswisher

IRINA RAICU

Director of the Internet Ethics Program, the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics—Moderator

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T h e wo r l d ’s te chn o l o g y capital has made a lot of people ver y rich, and a lot of people ver y angr y.

From the March 12, 2019, program in Silicon Valley, “Kara Swisher: Silicon Valley and the Challenge of Ethics.”

R

ight after the election, I was really concerned that tech didn’t understand the responsibility of the things that they had created and were not taking responsibility for them.

So [tech and ethics has] been a major theme of mine for the past two years.

I was on a program called “10 Things That Scare Me,” which is a WNYC [program], and a lot of [the things that scare me] had to do with death. . . . I use this app called WeCroak, which is five quotes about death every day.

Anyway, right before this, I got one of my quotes of the day. This one, I thought, was really apt for today, which was: ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” which was [an etching by] Francisco de Goya, which I thought was really interesting [as] people [are] asleep at what’s happening right now.

I was questioned at dinner earlier about whether I like tech. I love tech. I think tech is the most amazing thing, and it’s always been the reason I started writing about it back in the mid-90s. I have loved tech from the minute I saw it, and so one of the reasons I think I’ve been so hard on the big tech companies recently is because I love it so much, and there was so much promise at the beginning of the Internet age.

I was there when they made it commercial, when Al Gore actually did invent the Internet—and he did in many ways.

He created legislation that was integral to commercializing it. I’ve always thought of the Internet as something that could be an astonishing thing, and I look at that kind of as a “Star Trek”-way of looking at it, that it unites people. It creates tolerance; it creates education; it brings people together; it shows commonality; it allows people to talk to each other across great divides. And it starts to uncover all kinds of talent across the world.

Where people were living in their smaller worlds, it creates a larger world.

I love the Internet, and I love lots of things that technology brings us. At the same time,

I think we can all agree recently some of the downsides and the dark sides of technology have taken over. We have to start thinking about them as we move forward, because there’s some really amazing technologies about to come into force that I think are both promising and amazing for humanity and scary. I think the big problem with technology is not so much technology, it’s the humans that use [it]. I think that’s always been the case of anything that we have.

I just did an interview with someone recently who was talking about capitalism— Shoshana Zuboff from Harvard. She has a new book called [The Age of] Surveillance Capitalism. I said, “Is there something wrong with this capitalism?”

She said, “Capitalism is like chicken. It tastes like whatever you want it to depending on the kind of capitalism you have,” which I thought was a great way of putting it. It’s the same way with tech. It tastes like whatever you want it to, depending on what happens.

What’s happened over the past couple of years has been an obvious misuse of data and people’s data as it’s being collected in the most massive quantities over the past couple of years by big companies like Google and Facebook, and Amazon to an extent.

I want to lay out some key trends you need to know are coming that are well beyond what’s happened down in the life we’re living. No one could have imagined 10 years ago, or a little more than 10 years ago, when the iPhone debuted, that it would create this much wealth, this much opportunity and this much trouble. I think the stuff that’s coming, you ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of the kind of technologies that are coming.

One is artificial intelligence [AI] and super intelligence (super AI); robotics and automation, self-driving [cars] or changes in transportation; the idea of endless choice; that privacy is under assault when data is gold; continuous partial hacking; continuous

partial attention; political and social unrest created by these technologies. Those are the main ones.

Let me get started with AI. I think we have to keep in mind to start this discussion—what it means is anything that can be digitized, will be digitized. That means jobs; that means entertainment; that means every single thing you do will be digitized that is possible. Not everything can be digitized, but lots of things can, and we are on our way to that in a way that I think is going to be massively profound. That means massive job disruption. Lots of jobs are digitizable.

[There are] the easy ones—like we’re going to have self-driving cars and therefore not cabs or not truck drivers. But it actually extends beyond that to many iterations—lawyers, accountants, doctors, very high-paying jobs, teachers, journalists. There’s an AI that was writing stories that were pretty good. That

means there’s going to be multiple careers for people, and they have to think about retraining people a lot and reschooling people.

One of the things you have to think about when you think about AI is that as it becomes smarter, we become dumber, and we rely on it more. So we have to think really hard about the ethics around that, of being guided around by computerized decision-making systems, of which there will be many, and they will be better at making decisions than human beings were. But it cannot fix the basic problem that we have, which is that—what are we going to do in this kind of environment, and how are we going to react to it, and what happens to our society when this occurs? And it’s already here.

The second thing is about robotics and automation. The robots are not killers that are coming. They don’t have to kill us to win at what they’re doing. I think we all have this idea. One of my favorite movies is Terminator. I think it’s great. I love the whole dystopian thing that they have going on. But the fact of the matter is they [computers] don’t have to do that. I did an interview with Elon Musk a couple of years ago. He’s been very concerned about AI and robots. His correct assumption is that they will treat us like house cats. They will not try to kill us.

They’ll just sort of be like, “Oh, it’s a house

cat. How nice. I’ll pet it,” that kind of thing, which I thought was great. His solution was to put a chip in the back of your head so you can keep up with them, which I thought was an interesting solution.

He also suggested that it doesn’t matter, really, because we’re all in a simulation, so it’s not really happening—he’s right, right?

The whole Trump thing—every day, you’re like, “no.” Then you’re like there’s this super race of people running this game, and they’re having the best time. Anyway, just put that in the back of your mind—that you may not be here actually, and I’m not really speaking to you.

When that’s the case, when you think about robotics and where it’s going, increasingly [we will see] the replacement of all repetitive jobs: mining, manufacturing, transportation, very specific robots that have to do with food, laundry, dish washing.

There’s now a thing in San Francisco—it’s a coffee one [robot], and then there’s one that flips burgers. Right now, the reason why they’re not coming to force is because people are cheaper at this point, but eventually they won’t be, or it will be cheaper for those robots to do those jobs.

They will not be human, so the idea of trying to make robots more human is kind of an interesting thing from Silicon Valley.

But actually, I think probably some of the direction is going in not being human. There was a whole video that went on the Internet of a robot opening a door. If you ever saw it, everyone was like, “Oh, it opens a door.” I’m like, “My kid when he was two could open a door.” It’s not that great a thing to do, but what it is is the idea that they’re replacing a lot of functionality.

That brings in the idea of robot rights. If some of these robots become more sentient, do they have rights? In this area, as in AI, we have to be careful of China, which is winning in a lot of these areas and putting a lot of money into them and could be dominating the next ages. All that brings with it as a country like China, which basically has a surveillance economy right now, whether they should be the ones making all these innovations or it should be in this country, which has more of a democratic bent. The same thing with self-driving [cars]. I’m writing a column for the Times right now saying cars are the horses of tomorrow. It will have an impact on everything, and how do we live in a non-car environment? It’s a really interesting question, because cars did so much to open up our societies and to bring tolerance, open up people and move people all around. What does it mean when you’re not going to own a car? That means cities that

“No one could have imagined . . . when the iPhone debuted, that it would create this much wealth, this much opportunity and this much trouble.”

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are car- and truck-free, and the reverberations are massive when you think about it. Not just cars themselves, car ownership, insurance, all kinds of things—it creates reverberations and ideas around the economy about how we should behave. I think it’s something we need to think about.

The next one is the idea of endless choice, which means what you want is entirely up to you, and the computer will know what you want before you know it. That’s another big ethical issue: Our society, which is based in sort of a hunt-and-gather system, is going to be bringing things to you when you want it before you think of it. They already anticipate what you want and what that means. That obviously means things like retail on demand, instant delivery, anticipation of needs and much more.

A joke I always tell is that you can see it already in a city like San Francisco, which I always call “assisted living for millennials.” But you think of the things they’re making; you get a sense of where it’s going. It’s true. Think about it, “What do I need now because I want to remain a child for the rest of my life?”

The question around privacy is obviously the biggest one in all this. How do we think about privacy? It’s something that people don’t think of very much. We were having a really interesting discussion at dinner over whether this is going to be a big issue in the election.

As you know, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) just announced this massive idea of breaking up tech, but a lot of people are also talking about privacy bills. There’s a California privacy bill that will take effect in 2020. People are worried that the federal government’s going to do a watered-down version of that, but we have to ask our questions as these societies become so much more data-heavy—what [does] privacy mean to me. It’s a very difficult issue to sell to voters and to citizens, the idea of being worried about your privacy. A lot of people aren’t worried as much as they should be; you’re vaguely worried about your privacy, although not in a way that’s substantive.

Again, the idea around that is that these products are really great. Google Maps are great. Amazon delivers—great. They [are] based on enormous amounts of data they have about you. The question is: What are they doing with their data? Are they good guardians of this data? I think right now we can pretty much safely say they haven’t been, and they haven’t been in many, many

instances, not just in hacking, but the use of data, the ability to have third parties access your data, the idea that you’re not the product here. There’ve been lots of discussion recently about that, especially around Facebook and what they’re doing with your data.

Obviously, Facebook is the largest collector of data—Google and Facebook together; Facebook really has a lot more personal data on you, but Amazon also does.

The question is: How do we think about what we want to give them? There’s all kinds of proposals out there about privacy and how we should handle it and how we should think of it. I think 20 years ago, Scott McNealy, who ran Sun Microsystems, said, “There is no such thing as privacy. Get over it.” Actually, there is such a thing as control of your privacy, even if there is no such thing as privacy. There’s a question of who controls your privacy and how you do it in a way that’s easy for people to understand rather than just clicking yes to everything.

One of the things we have to remember is that with all these changes, we’re about to undergo a period of time where it’s a never-ending revolution. As I said, if you think the changes that have come in the past 10 to 15 years are a lot, what’s coming is massive, including stuff around health care, body replacement, enhanced vision, enhanced bodies, the ability to track you everywhere, the ability to track your genes everywhere.

Really, we’re right at the cusp of this, and so we have to be thinking about the ethics behind what we want to do rather than sort of plunge headlong into this.

It also creates a situation. I think anybody who’s been on Twitter for half a second understands that cesspool, which is that people do not act well on these platforms. And the health of you as a person and the health of our society is being badly hit by many of these platforms because they appeal to the worst in people rather than the best.

Jaron Lanier, who wrote a great book about getting off of social media [Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now], is someone who also loves technology, called it the most important experiment in human communications in the history of the world, and it’s failing. I think he’s probably being kind [in terms of] what’s going on there.

We have to think about what that means as its never-ending revolution happens and what this lack of unity means to our society, JUNE/JULY 2019

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not just in this country but abroad. It creates divisions; it creates arguments, I think.

Again, anyone who’s been on these social media platforms—right now the good, even though some of it’s very clever and fun and interesting to use, is beginning to outweigh the bad, especially in terms of our mental health. That’s definitely an issue around screen/phone addiction and things like that, which is yet another issue that we have to think about as a society and ethically—what should these companies be doing? Are they cigarette companies, or are you on your own?

Is that your own fault for staring at these screens for so long?

Kevin Roose did a great column about going off his phone. He did a detox off his phone, [which he wrote about] in The New York Times. He said, “Send us your screenshots.” I ended up sending mine. It showed 17 hours online a day, but what I had done is I had left the screen on. It doesn’t ever turn off, so it looked like I was insane. And everyone was like, “You’re insane,” which I am. I use my phone a lot, but it turned out I’m using more like five or six hours a day, which is also a lot, as it turns out. The question is, are these phones being designed, are there ethical considerations when they’re designing them in terms of getting people not to use them as much?

I think we all realize we are in a state of continuous partial attention with our phones, and we like them—just like we like Amazon delivery, just like we like Google Maps; we like them. We like what’s going on on them; we like looking at them; we like staring at them, and part of it has to do with addiction.

These companies do hire people to make you do that. I think they do have culpability in how to make you not do that and maybe think about how to design them in ways that are more ethically fair, so that you’re not addicted like you are to a cigarette or sugar or something else. But it’s the same kind of things that you’re experiencing. The expression I use is it’s a “slot machine of attention,” and there’s always another minute to be spent on it. So I think another ethical issue is what these companies should do. Who’s responsible? Is it our legislators? Is it you? Is it these companies? I think it’s something we should be thinking about really hard.

Just to conclude: where we’re going. Obviously, regulation is coming for a lot of these things. [It will be] very similar to regulating a

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chemical company that’s spewing poison out into a river. Some of these tech companies are spewing poison out into society, and they’ve got to filter it better. They’ve got to deal with fake news and election tampering and hate speech and all kinds of things that most of the people who run these companies are illequipped to deal with.

I don’t mean to say they’re not smart.

I just think they’re incompetent at these issues, these ideas of understanding ethics and understanding humanities. They’re going to need a lot of help in doing so because while they benefited enormously through their inventions, they haven’t taken enough responsibility for those inventions and really do need to start thinking much harder about that. They are certainly listening now for sure.

But one of the things you’ve got to remember, though, is regulation is not going to save us.

There’s going to be certain regulation that’s going to work and certain regulation that’s not, but it’s certainly not going to save us.

Change is now a near constant. If that’s the case, how do we sit and think carefully about how we want to conduct our society? It’s a good question. The only thing that I can say is as things are coming in, as things are changing, you’ve got to really strap in. It’s going to be a really bumpy ride as we begin to figure our way out in how this happens.

I just did an interview and a column about Maria Ressa, who lives in the Philippines. She’s a journalist. One of the things she’s talking about is the downside of what happens when malevolent people get hold of these tools. One of the things that is nice about what we have now is most of the people running these companies are good people. For the most part, I don’t find any of them evil. I don’t find them difficult. I don’t find them not aware and not smart. It’s just that I worry about these amazingly powerful tools getting in the hands of the wrong people, and you’re starting to see it globally and then not having any kind of controls on them. As they can become more and more able to target people and follow people and trace people, including their genetics and other issues, you have to really start thinking hard about where it could go.

A lot of attention has been given to what’s happened in China around the social score, which basically if you jaywalk it’s noted; if you do this, it’s noted; if you don’t use this, it’s noted. So you get a digital social score, and then you get benefits based on how you behave. They’re tracking it digitally, which I think is brilliant and awful at the same time.

I don’t think innovation/invention is ever going to stop, but there’s certainly things we can put into place as it happens so that we’re protected as a society and also enjoy the benefits of this technology we can all agree on but at the same time are not impacted by the negative parts of it, which are so clear today as we move forward.

From the question and answer session IRINA RAICU: I wanted to ask what you make of the recent proposal [by Senator Warren] to break up big tech?

KARA SWISHER: Senator Warren is full of ideas. Let me just say, she’s really an idea factory, and I really do appreciate how many she has, and I like that in a candidate. She’s interested in policy, and she’s interested in ideas, and she’s interested in shaking up ideas.

She’s not interested in incrementalism; she’s interested in big ideas. That said, I think this particular proposal is not the correct way to

think about it. I think she’s doing it because it’s Elizabeth Warren, and this is how she thinks. But the idea of breaking up big tech, is just a shot-over-the-bow kind of thing. It’s like: I’m watching you. I think that’s what she’s doing, although part of me does believe she does mean it.

What was really interesting is she proposed that, and two people I interviewed this weekend at South by Southwest [were] Senator Amy Klobuchar (D–MN) and the Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is at the EU—she’s the competition head. Commissioner Vestager has been really tough on tech companies, has fined them enormous amounts of money and has held tech to task for a number of issues—all kinds of things from Apple to Google to Facebook. She’s got a number of lawsuits happening, a number of fines—whether it’s around taxes or local search or whatever. I was really surprised when I thought she would go along with [Senator Warren’s plan], like, “Yeah, break them up.” But what she said is she thought it was a remedy of last resort to break up these companies. She thought they are built this way. This is how they are, so how can we deal with the situation, say where Google has 100 percent of search, or Google and Facebook together own all of digital advertising and

nobody else can get in? She thought there were other remedies ahead of breaking them up, because what breaking up would bring is, first of all, huge disruption to these businesses, which have been built this way. Secondly, it would be a legal nightmare of many, many years and would never get resolved. To unwind some of these things that have been in place is really difficult.

Now, there’s a couple of things going forward. You certainly can stop these companies from buying new things. I mean, I think we can all agree Facebook cannot buy Snapchat, for example. I think that will be a problem if they try to. Or Google cannot buy Yahoo or whatever. Nobody wants Yahoo, but that’s okay. [Laughter.]

So that’s the question—going forward, can they buy things? That’s one. Can the big companies [buy things]—probably Amazon, Google and Facebook are the three that I think are the most problematic. Secondly, can we put regulations in place around data and the use of data? Amy Klobuchar thought about doing a tax on the use of data—how they use data, if they use it for more things.

She’s called for another investigation into Google about their behavior around local search, especially related to Yelp and some other things, because the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] investigation a few years ago was a toothless nothing burger, so she wanted to renew that. She thought about using these taxes to pay for more investigations from the FTC and make a stronger FTC, or any of these agencies that regulate these companies.

Other people think [we should make] changes in laws like the Communications Decency Act, Section 230, which gives broad immunity to Internet platforms. Maybe the big platforms don’t get the immunity any more. That’s already being chipped away from some other cases. And then [there’s the idea of ], obviously, antitrust action. I think that’s probably the one that’s most interesting. Senator Klobuchar is on the antitrust committee in the Senate. They’ve just hired Lena Khan, who has been a really big thinker on how to change antitrust. The idea right now in this country with antitrust is that it causes consumer harm, and it’s very hard to prove that, given how much we like Amazon,

Google. These are free products we get, and it doesn’t harm us—but it does. It harms rivals, and it could harm small startups, and it could harm the startup ecosystem.

The changes in how antitrust is perceived could possibly be happening. So the breakup certainly is good for a sound bite for sure.

[But] it’s never going to happen.

RAICU: What advice would you give to students who are educated in and about to contribute to Silicon Valley? Let’s say they’re going to work in these technology companies.

SWISHER: Well, I think one of the things that’s good about these technology companies, compared to other companies, is you do have more of a voice. You saw what happened at Google around them paying $90 million to someone who was accused of sexual harassment, which was a nice payment for that behavior . . . around forced arbitration around these issues. They changed stuff by speaking up. I think that’s one thing—when you’re at these tech companies, the talent is at a premium, and therefore you have an ability to say things in a way other workers can’t. That’s one thing—be outspoken. The second thing is if you’re making products or issues that you don’t agree with, you should talk about it and have a discussion about the implications of whatever you’re making rather than thinking about growth, growth, growth at all costs.

I think growth, growth, growth has been the mantra for most of these companies, without regard to the damage that they could do. Unfortunately, Facebook had the most unfortunate motto for a long time that they stuck up. They put posters on their walls like they’re Stalin or something. One [of the posters] was: “Move fast and break things.”

I think that was one that was a real problem, like when you really start to think about it—well, you broke some things, like, say, democracy or whatever, and you need to fix it. [Laughter.] That was interesting.

I think “move fast and build stable infrastructure” is what Mark is calling it now, which makes me laugh.

I think really being aware and speaking up and talking about the implications and making sure that you’re not part of something that—you know what you’re making. I think you have the ability if you’re a Silicon Valley engineer, surely, [more] than if you’re in other parts of the business world.

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Photos by Ed Ritger

Andrew McCabe

FBI MAN “Every night when I would come home, my daughter would say, ‘Did you get fired today?’ ‘Not today.’”

The former deputy director of the FBI recounts his tumultuous time at the agency.

From the March 13, 2019, program in San Francisco, “Andrew McCabe, Former Deputy Director of the FBI.”

ANDREW MCCABE

Former Deputy Director, FBI; Author, The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

AUDREY COOPER

Editor in Chief, San Francisco Chronicle—Moderator AUDREY COOPER: We have to start with the major news of the day, which is that Paul Manafort, the former campaign chairman for [Donald J.] Trump, was sentenced today to an additional sentence that will put him in jail for up to about 7.5 years. He was also charged with federal crimes in New York, which means the president can’t pardon him if he is convicted of state crimes. What do you make of this?

ANDREW MCCABE: Judge Jackson did what most followers and observers of Judge Jackson expected her to do: She stayed focused on the conduct that was before her. She didn’t really get distracted by trying to address what had happened in the Virginia courts the week before. She delivered a sentence that is actually kind of right in the middle of the range that offenders of those sorts of white collar crimes typically receive. So her sentence was certainly reasonable based on the facts before [her], and a professional and reasonable result.

The developments in New York are interesting. You know, it really kind of drives home the seriousness of a federal criminal investigation. Federal investigations, those done by the FBI, start in one place; they start when we have articulable facts that form the basis of a belief that a crime has been committed or a threat to national security exists. But once that investigation is off and running, and you’re collecting evidence and information and talking to people, you frequently become aware of all kinds of other activity that you might not have known about at the beginning. I think some of that solid investigative work is really coming back to haunt Mr. Manafort now in the new jurisdiction, this time of course in New York.

COOPER: We all know now how Director [James] Comey found out he was fired from a news report. How did you find out that he had been fired?

MCCABE: It was a Tuesday in May. It was the end of the day, and I had convened, as I did every day, what we call a wrap-up meeting. My leadership team would get together in my conference room, and we kind of talk about the events of the day, progress on different issues, that sort of thing. So I had done that on May 9, the day Director Comey had traveled to Los Angeles. I was the acting director for that day. Shortly after we began the meeting, one of my staff came into the room and told me that the attorney general needed to speak to me. I assumed he was on the phone. I left the room, said, “What line is he on?” They said, “No, no, no. He wants to see you in person.”

So I thought that is a bad sign. It did not happen often, certainly not at 5:30 in the afternoon. So I walked across the street, and . . . I walked into his office, which is [an] extraordinary, beautiful office in the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in D.C., which is right across the street from FBI headquarters. I walked into the attorney general’s office. He was there, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was there, and a gentleman who worked for Rod was also in the room. They were all three standing when I walked in, and all wearing their coats, which—investigative clue: That is not a good sign for any hastily convened meeting. So as I walked in, the attorney general looked at me and said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve had to fire the director of the FBI.” That’s how I learned.

COOPER: What happened after that?

MCCABE: I said, “I have not heard that. But thank you for telling me.”

It was totally disorienting. It’s one of those moments where you are confronted with facts that you know will inexorably shift your reality from that point forward. I had a million questions; I was surprised and shocked.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been. But I felt in the moment, you go back on your training, on your experience, having been confronted with kind of shocking revelations many times in the past, you try not to react strongly in the moment. You try to be nonjudgmental.

You just listen to the things that you’re being told, and that’s how I responded. He said, “We need you to run the FBI for some period of time.” He was very clear to point out that they were considering bringing in an interim director to serve until a permanent director had been confirmed.

So I [thought] that my time in the chair would be . . . very brief. I told him that I would do whatever was necessary to keep the organization moving forward.

COOPER: How long did you think you would serve as an interim or acting director?

MCCABE: Had no idea. I literally thought it could happen at any moment. I joked in the book that for that first week, every night when I would come home, my daughter would say, “Did you get fired today?”

“Not today.”

I really didn’t know. I knew that we had some work to do. I felt very strongly about trying to take some steps to ensure that the Russia investigation, which was the thing that had been consuming a lot of our attention for months, was on very solid ground. So depending on who came in behind me, if they wanted to end the investigation or close it, they would have to do so in a way that established a transparent record of how and why that decision had been made.

COOPER: So you prepared your family by joking about whether or not you get fired every day, and you prepared the FBI for putting in place these investigations that would be hard to undo.

MCCABE: That’s right. We wanted to make sure that whatever steps we thought needed to be taken, we wanted to take those now and do it in a documented and clear way so that for time immemorial the world would know how we thought about this case and what we thought should happen next in our professional opinion.

COOPER: Tell us about the first time you met the president.

MCCABE: They told me as I left the [Justice building] not to tell anyone that the director had been fired. I thought, “Okay.” . . . I said, “I should probably send some sort of a message out to the workforce.” They said, “Don’t do that. We want to check and see how the White House wants to handle it.

Don’t do anything; don’t tell anyone until you hear from us.” So I walked across the street with the gentleman who has assisted me with security, and he was like, “So what’s going on?” I said, “Nothing. Let’s get back to work.”

It was very awkward of course. By the time I got back, it was already on the news and everyone knew. So we were kind of in a crisis management mode at that point. Then I got the message that the president wanted to speak to me in the Oval Office. So I traveled JUNE/JULY 2019

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down to the White House and saw him for the first time. I had not met him before.

COOPER: What was that like?

MCCABE: It was interesting. It was strange, troubling, exciting—all those things at the same time.

COOPER: What were you expecting him to say to you?

MCCABE: I didn’t know. Certainly not what he actually said. I thought it was probably just a kind of meet-and-greet sort of thing. Ten seconds—I’d be in and out. And that would be it. I didn’t really have high expectations for the encounter. You know, it’s the Oval Office; I’m a career government servant; I had never been in the Oval Office before. It’s an awe-inspiring place. You think a lot about the history that’s taken place within those walls.

So those are the sorts of things I was thinking as I stepped inside. The president stood up from behind his desk and came around and shook my hand and began talking nonstop. It’s an overwhelming experience trying to talk to the president face to face.

He just goes. You don’t really have an opportunity [to speak]; he doesn’t really ask you anything. I mean, he eventually gets around to that, but not right away. He just kind of jumps from one topic to another, and he says things that are almost like he’s just seeking your agreement with the

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things that he’s saying, much of which is completely false.

COOPER: You become fascinated with staring at his desk during it. I just imagine you tuning out the president talking about his election and just staring at this historic desk.

MCCABE: He sits behind it kind of on the edge of his chair, and he’s a big man, and he leans across and he has his hands kind of coming at you. There’s not really any way to look away. Then you realize the desk is incredible. It is the Resolute desk. There was a British ship that was recovered by the Americans and returned to the Brits. Then they took the timbers from the ship and created this beautifully hand-carved desk, and [it] has all this incredible detail on it. You know the history of it; you know you’ve seen all the pictures of presidents sitting behind it.

So I become totally distracted by the desk.

I’m like, “I just want to touch it.” So at some point I think, “Pay attention. Stop looking at the desk.” The president is just talking and talking.

COOPER: You have a number of incidents in the book when you meet the president.

Most of the encounters seemed to be very similar, except perhaps increasingly more insulting.

MCCABE: That’s a good way to describe it.

He immediately, on our first meeting, began speaking about how great it was that he had fired the director. People were so happy about it, didn’t I think so? People from the FBI were thrilled; they really didn’t like [Comey], isn’t that right? I was like, that’s not what I’m seeing, and I tried to make it clear to him that I did not see things that way. But I was also at the same time trying to navigate that situation carefully with respect and without provoking an argument with the president, which I felt would be not productive, certainly in the tenuous position I was in. But

then after telling me how happy FBI people were, he said, “I understand you were part of the resistance.”

I had no idea what he meant. There isn’t such a thing that I’m aware of.

COOPER: There is in San Francisco.

MCCABE: That’s very different.

There was not a resistance in the FBI that I’m aware of. I told him I wasn’t following him, and he said, “I heard that you were one of the people who didn’t approve of Director Comey and you didn’t agree with him and the decisions that he’d made.” I said, “No, sir. That’s not accurate. I worked very closely with Director Comey, and I was a part of all of those decisions. I understand that people see them differently, and disagree about how we handled some of the things that we did, but I was a part of that.” He just kind of looked at me dumbfounded. It was very clear to me that that was my opportunity, and he didn’t like the way that I’d handled it.

COOPER: Fast forward to your looming retirement date: 26 hours before you were on paid leave, you get fired. How did you find out about that change in your employment status?

MCCABE: I was home with my wife and my two children, and we knew that some sort of decision was going to be coming from the department. We had heard that they had convened reporters to stay at the department; as the night went on and on, the reporters kept getting notice like, “Stay another few hours.” It was a Friday night. At around 10, they made their press announcement to the media. They also emailed, I guess, the same statement to me, but my first awareness of it was me watching the news.

COOPER: There are a lot of questions from the audience from people who want to know if you’re going to get your

full retirement benefits.

MCCABE: I have that same question.

Yeah. The answer is we are absolutely going to fight for that. I am in the final stages of preparing a civil suit that we intend to file in the next few weeks that will challenge all of the circumstances around my dismissal. The unprecedented, truncated, unfair process that led to my dismissal, the misrepresentations contained within the inspector general’s report, the absolutely false conclusions that they came to, and the fact that it was all done in this sprint to fire me before I could turn 50, which is exactly what the president himself had been demanding publicly for months.

So yes, we will challenge all of that.

COOPER: The reason that was cited for your dismissal is this report from the inspector general, an Obama appointee, who says you lied during the investigation four times, including three times under oath.

Now, one of your explanations for this was being confused by some of the questions, if I can paraphrase it, but you were in charge of interrogation techniques. Can you see why it strains credibility to say that you were confused by the questions?

MCCABE: I can’t, because I endured that situation. So I know the facts and the circumstances around it in a way that the rest of the public does not know. I would love to be able to go through all that in great detail with you—I’m afraid that one of my lawyers will descend from the roof like a ninja and spirit me out of here before I can say something else that they then have to deal with.

I’ll just say that it comes down to essentially two interactions. One [was] with some FBI agents who were investigating a matter that I asked them to investigate. And there was a misunderstanding that came from that meeting, they provided me with a draft signed, sworn statement I knew was inaccurate. I never signed it. Then that became the basis of an act of alleged lack of candor.

The second interaction was a meeting in which my presence was demanded to speak to representatives of the inspector general’s office to discuss an entirely different thing, which happened to be the revelation of the text messages between Pete Strzok and Lisa Page—first time I knew of the messages’ existence.

COOPER: Explain what those messages

were.

MCCABE: Pete Strzok was one of the lead investigators on both the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russia investigation.

One of the most senior and accomplished counterintelligence investigators in the FBI. Lisa Page was a senior attorney who worked on my staff. They engaged in a series of private text messages that were later released to Congress and the Hill, in which they talked about all kinds of things, including their shared distaste for then-candidate Trump. I learned of that on this day in July.

At the end of that interaction, I was asked questions about another matter. I felt they had the wrong impression about our discussion, so I contacted them the next day or two days after that to make sure they understood exactly what had happened with this authorized release of information to The Wall Street Journal several months earlier. That became essentially the second allegation of lack of candor, a statement that I corrected for them.

So, obviously, I have deep disagreements with them over the facts surrounding those statements, and the impact of those statements.

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Photos by Ed Ritger

TONY THURMOND

IMPROVING CALIFORNIA’S SCHOOLS

TONY THURMOND

California Superintendent of Public Instruction

RICARDO CANO

K–12 Education Reporter, CALMatters—Moderator The new head of the state’s schools discusses the challenges to public education. From the March 21, 2019, program in San Francisco, “California E d u c a t i o n C h i e f To n y Thurmond.”

RICARDO CANO: California: It’s the nation’s largest school system—6.2 million kids in public district and charter schools, and a majority of them come from low-income households. As superintendent, you bring a very compelling background to this office.

You’ve experienced poverty and adversity as a youth and can empathize with many of California’s disadvantaged kids in ways that others in state government probably can’t.

[Note: Thurmond’s father fought in Vietnam

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but did not return to the family after the war.

His mother died from cancer when he was six years old. Thurmond and his brother were raised by his cousin.] How is your job as superintendent influenced by these experiences that you’ve gained, and what is your vision for California’s public schools when it comes to educating our most disadvantaged students?

TONY THURMOND: I’m very conscious of the fact that education really saved my life, and I think about where I might be were it not for the education that I received, were it not for great teachers who really stood by me and supported me when I struggled as a student. I am the descendant of African-American slaves and immigrants from Panama and Colombia and Jamaica and Detroit, Michigan, by the way of Mississippi, where my father came from. Because of the circumstances in my life, losing my mom at a very young age, being raised by a cousin who I didn’t know until I showed up, my family often struggled. We relied on many public programs to overcome those adversities.

I was a student on the free lunch program.

All my friends made fun of me for eating the free lunch, and then I realized that every student in my school was on the free lunch program. I was on public assistance. I ate a thing called government cheese [processed cheese made for those on welfare] to help my family address hunger issues. But the

most important public program that I ever was able to benefit from was getting a great public education. My teachers really believed in me, and they taught me that if you believe that education can open doors for you, your life will be different than [how] it had started.

I really believe that were it not for the education, for my cousin who took me in, countless mentors, that I would have easily ended up in California State Prison instead of serving as California state superintendent of public instruction.

We owe this to all of the students in our state. We have many students who are homeless; they’re hungry; they’ve been impacted by trauma. These are conditions that make it hard to learn. It doesn’t mean that you can’t, but it means that we’ve got to provide the resources to help them. We have to provide more school counselors and more mental health programs, more health programs for students at our schools. We’ve got to make sure that our students can get a decent meal, and we have to build stronger programs for our students who are living in shelters and who are homeless. We have to do this while at the same time saying that every single student should be provided with computer science training and opportunities to help prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow, because our workforce depends on it; our society depends on it. There’ll be a million and a half jobs in

technology in just a few years and only half of those jobs will be filled unless we make changes that help every single one of our students.

Someone told me once that I should only focus on students who show promise and potential. I reject that notion. I think all of our students show promise and potential, and it’s incumbent on us to help our students find and shape and hone that potential. If someone had made those kind of choices about me—a very shy, quiet kid who could have easily fallen through the cracks—I wouldn’t have the opportunity to serve in this position and fight for our kids every single day. I think it’s incumbent on us as Californians, with all that we’ve been given, to give all that we can to all 6 million of our kids.

CANO: Let’s talk about some policy. In 2013, [former] Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), a landmark education reform that aimed to close the state’s achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their peers by rewriting formula that distributes funds to public schools. Schools with higher concentrations of students in need get more money now compared to those that don’t, and schools now have a lot more freedom in deciding how to spend that money as opposed to the rigid system of categoricals that we had from before. We’re in the sixth year of this new funding formula, and it’s not yet

clear that the achievement gap is closing. The state’s latest math and reading scores show minimal progress. Is it working?

THURMOND: I think it does make a huge difference. I love the framework for [LCFF] because as you described, being able to receive more funding for districts that serve [a] high level of disadvantaged students—foster youth and others—I think that is a road map for bringing more equity to our schools. When you look at flat test scores and some of the challenges that persist, I think what we’re seeing is that the Local Control Funding Formula by itself is not enough. It gives flexibility to districts to make decisions at the local level. It allows districts to make decisions about what they’ll fund and what they won’t.

That has removed some of the burdens that many school districts face. I know, because in 2008, I was on a school board, and the first night that I was sworn in, I was asked to vote to close 10 schools, and it’s because the state’s economy, and subsequently the state’s budget, were so bad that the pressure dictated making reductions of that nature.

I believe that the local control and local funding sources really move us in the right direction. But we are still 41st in the nation in per-pupil spending, even though California is the fifth wealthiest economy in the world. No matter what you do, until we resolve that, we’re going to continue to see challenges in our educational system—our

teacher shortage, our resource shortages. I believe that we’ve got to close that funding gap, and for a state of our size, we need to have billions invested and new permanent revenue invested to say that our kids are no. 1.

I’ve launched a working group that’s focused on one thing: identifying permanent funding sources that can augment our state budget. There are many things [going] on [in] the conversation. People are talking about making changes to Prop. 13 and creating a split roll tax. There’s a proposal that will be on the ballot in 2020 that, if passed, could generate another $10 to $11 billion for the state’s general fund—$5 to $6 billion more that could go into K–12 education. I believe that we have to look to investments like this that will move California to where it belongs—no. 1.

CANO: With regards to the Local Control Funding Formula, the legislature has asked the California state auditor to examine the funding mechanism and see how schools have implemented it this month. Clearly, there is a push among legislators for more transparency. Governor Jerry Brown, when he was in office, essentially said that this is an issue that should be handled in local school boards, local school districts, not in Sacramento. Should the state be tracking how schools are spending this money under the Local Control Funding Formula?

THURMOND: Yeah, I believe in full trans-

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parency and accountability. The citizens of the state of California have been very, very generous as it relates to providing revenue for our schools, providing revenue for our local roads and transportation measures for parks and water. Our citizens in this state provide more money through local parcel taxes and measures and bonds. I think that there should be full transparency in how those dollars get used. I think that is the promise that we make to the people who elect us—to be good stewards of public resources. I think we have to have the kind of open conversations where we say, “This is how the dollars are being used.” I think that is inherent in the spirit of what the Local Control Funding Formula is about—that there’s local decision-making for how dollars get spent. If citizens are asking for an accounting and a report of how those dollars are being used, I think we owe it to our citizens to provide that.

CANO: You did mention that you have a group looking at finding permanent revenues of funding sources—and that we are 41st [in

the nation] when adjusted for cost of living.

The state has put in $23 billion through LCFF, which basically just puts education where it was before the recession. I’m wondering—do you have a figure in mind that the state ought to be aiming for when it comes to spending on education, and what would public schools that are funded to this level look like?

THURMOND: There’s a report that was put out by a number of institutions called “Getting Down to Facts II,” and it analyzed what California spends compared to other states. Essentially [it] says that we should be spending billions more, in amounts that are comparable to, say, New York state. We are a large state, with complex and diverse needs, and so we should be spending more.

Spending more to me means that we can change the way we pay teachers in our state.

Right now, when you look at cost of living, our teachers are amongst the lowest paid anywhere, and there’ve been many strikes in the nation. There’ve been two since I’ve been sworn in. I spent 30 hours mediating the strike in Oakland to help those folks resolve their conflicts. I did a lot of behind-the-scenes work in the Los Angeles teacher strike.

These teachers—they’re adding their voices to teachers across the nation, who are saying, “Yes, we need to increase salaries,” but they’re also saying we have to improve the conditions for our students. They’re saying [we need] smaller class sizes; they’re saying more psychologists and nurses in our schools, and more support services for our students. If we increase the amount of revenue that we have for our schools, we can pay teachers more. We can provide more services for our students.

We can provide more technology for our students. It is unbelievable to me that there are places in California where a student can only get access to the Internet if a truck with a mobile hot spot pulls up at their school.

CANO: Let’s talk about charter schools.

THURMOND: Looks like it’s time to go!

[Laughter.]

Let’s talk about charter schools.

CANO: This issue has been simmering for a long time in California, and this year it really does seem to be coming to a head. Governor Newsom recently signed into law a fast-tracked transparency bill that requires charter

schools—publicly funded schools that operate independent of school districts and that account for 10 percent of California student enrollment—to follow the same open meeting and procurement laws as traditional district schools. At the same time, [some] Democratic legislators plan to advance bills this session that would impose more significant regulations on the state’s charter schools, including capping the number of charter schools allowed to operate at the current number of about 1,300. This was something that followed the L.A. teacher strike. Governor Newsom asked you to put together a task force to study the impact that charter school growth in the state has had on district budgets and to put together a report and policy recommendations by July 1st.

What is the scope of this effort, and what other questions will it answer?

THURMOND: In naming the task force, the governor cited the growth of charter schools and the fiscal impact that the charter schools have had on the traditional public school system. There are 6 million students in our state; 10 percent of them are in a charter school. I’m going to serve all of the students in our public schools.

There has been data that has shown that there has been for many districts a significant fiscal impact and loss of revenue directly attributed to the growth of charter schools.

Two districts in particular have been cited in a report. San Diego Unified School District has been cited to have lost $66 million related to charter school growth, and Oakland Unified has been cited to have lost $47 million.

[When] we have districts struggling just to manage their basic finances, those kind of losses are significant. For those reasons, there’s been a call for some kind of reform that takes into consideration the fiscal impact of charters, that takes into consideration how charters are authorized.

Right now, a charter school can get authorized at the state level even though the charter school sits in some part of the community where the state can barely monitor that school. I feel very honored that the governor asked me to put together this task force. We’ve had several meetings, and we’re facilitating a conversation about what would be reasonable charter reform, because right now there’s a huge fight in this state and in this country. It’s being played out like charter vs. non-charter.

Meet the Browns with Jerry Brown & Anne Gust Brown In conversation with

JERRY BROWN

ANNE GUST BROWN

Former Governor of California

Former First Lady of California

GLORIA DUFFY

President & CEO, The Commonwealth Club

Photos by Sarah Gonzalez

The former first couple discusses their lives during and after office. From the March 28, 2019, program in San Francisco, “An Evening with Governor Jerry Brown and Anne Gust Brown.”

GLORIA DUFFY: Let’s start by asking you both, two months out of public office, how’s it feeling?

JERRY BROWN: Actually, it feels the same.

ANNE GUST BROWN: For you, yeah, I know. [Laughter.]

JERRY BROWN: For me, yeah. I don’t sweat the details. I spend a lot of time thinking about big ideas. I talk to people. I read books.

I do stuff. So what’s the difference? [As] governor, when you have to sign and veto bills, that’s an issue. Every week, I had to look at 25 lifer paroles. That’s something. But I approach the job, I think, in a somewhat original way, always looking for what could be done that could be done because I was there, but nobody else. So I was always looking not

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

to the flow of the ordinary activity, which would take place whether I’m there or not, but what kinds of intervention could I make?

So now I’m not doing that, but I’m still, in my own mind, kind of running things.

GLORIA DUFFY: How about you? How has life changed in the last couple months?

ANNE GUST BROWN: It was a shock to leave office, and Jerry doesn’t sweat the details, so it wasn’t so shocking to him. But for me—we had to get a car. We had been driven around for eight years. I had to figure out how to move everything. He paid no attention to all of the millions of boxes of papers and books, and he’s still paying no attention to them. All of the details of getting out of office. And just the shock of, you’re so immersed in something for eight years, and a group of people, and then just one day, you leave and it’s gone.

It was very abrupt, a bit shocking. And then to go to a ranch. You couldn’t go to something more extreme. We were in the hubbub, and then we’re off with some cows and coyotes. So I found it shocking, but he’s right. He would just be on the phone, and I don’t think it shocked you nearly as much as

it did me. But like I said, that’s good. You’re very zen, or something, right? Or maybe you don’t realize you’re not governor anymore.

[Laughter.] Could be.

GLORIA DUFFY: I was struck, in studying up on your recent lives, by how the two of you were a team when you were governor and you were the first lady. Anne, how were you involved in the governance of the state through your relationship with Jerry?

ANNE GUST BROWN: Jerry and I had dated for 15 years before we got married—he’s into doing his due diligence, so we dated a long time. As many of you maybe know, I had a career. I was a lawyer; I was an executive at The Gap. I had a lot going on in my own life.

But when we decided to get married, we also decided I would be leaving The Gap and that I would run his campaign for attorney general at that point—which was kind of crazy on a number of levels, because I’ve never run a political campaign in my life.

Willie Brown said, “This is crazy, Anne.

You don’t become the campaign manager for your husband, because when the stuff goes wrong on the campaign, the first person you blame is the manager, and when that’s your

wife, it’s complicated.” And it’s not good for a marriage, all that sort of stuff. So it was a lot of change for me, and for the both of us, because we went from being a couple but having our own lives, like normal people do, to me leaving [my] job, starting something completely different, and getting married.

That was something, too.

In any event, it worked a lot better than I thought. I did have trepidation about it, to be together 24 hours a day and doing something difficult like running a campaign. But it really did work well, and I think we really have different strengths. Jerry leaves me to doing all the detailed stuff. He’s more the visionary.

So we sort of keep in our own lanes. Then when he became attorney general, because I had managed a legal department before and had a lot of legal management and other experience, I think I could fit into that role and help him really well, so I think that went smoothly. But what do you think?

JERRY BROWN: Well, first of all, you’d never run a campaign, but I’ve been doing nothing but campaigns. So I knew about the politics; you knew how to run things. Put the two together, it worked very well.

In the attorney general’s office, a lot of people want to bring in their political friends and cronies and managers and what have you, but the way we did it was, . . . the whole office ran with professional lawyers who were already there, and any kind of political input I could provide. Legal matters—for example, in the Countrywide [Financial political loan scandal] case, the office wasn’t being very aggressive at all on the bank fraud. Anne got right into that and made sure that before the statute of limitations expired that the attorney general of California had brought the proper action. . . . That fits in with my general view: If you have very skilled people who know what they’re doing, you don’t need too many of them.

Then, in the governor’s office, Anne helped me find some of the key players. She oversaw human resources at The Gap. So we got some very skilled people, and that worked very well, too.

The amazing thing was, because people were always a little concerned about how I handled things, surprisingly or chaotically, or whatever you want to call it, people were very relieved that an orderly manager was on the premises. No one dared complain, because the only alternative was me. So actually it

worked like a charm.

GLORIA DUFFY: Anne, you’d been chief administrative officer of The Gap, so you knew how to make things run well.

ANNE GUST BROWN: Correct, I did. I focus on getting the people in, managing, getting the trains to run on time, those sorts of things, and Jerry is more the visionary.

Like he said, he has a very chaotic style, as anyone who’s worked for him would know.

Meetings with you can last hours and hours, if not days, and he just pulls in what’s on his mind, and whatever. So someone needs to keep all of these things in mind and manage it to an extent, and that’s always been more my skill. But I don’t have the vision that you do.

JERRY BROWN: You have a lot of vision.

But I would say that the governor’s office is not about management. There is an element of management, but first of all, the number one thing is avoiding scandal and screwups.

Because whatever you do, if you tend to do good things, you have one big boo-boo, that’s what people remember. So being able to look over the landscape and see trouble and stop it before it becomes trouble is very important.

The other positive aspect is, what do you do? What’s important? [It’s] things like the budget. If you have a $27 billion deficit, it’s pretty important that you do something about it—and we got rid of it. We didn’t have to think a lot, because the problems showed up. We had to think about how you’d pay it off, and how you’d raise the taxes and cut programs. I worked with the legislature, and I had to veto their budget once just to keep everything in line.

You get a few ideas, you make them work, and you do it in that framework. I think we had the management, we had whatever the political component of that was, and as far as I know, it worked pretty good, so I have no complaints. There was one little factor— ANNE GUST BROWN: Oh, please.

JERRY BROWN: A huge factor. From the day I took office, the recovery was already a year in, going by the way they chart the beginning of these recoveries. From the first moment to the day I left and turned the lights out, California was growing month by month, always. Still growing, for that matter.

That was another [factor]. People feel good.

By the way, I had nothing to do with that.

That’s called a global economy. I helped avoid some screwups, fixed the budget deficit and

avoided a lot of crazy bills by vetoing them and a few other things, and stopping them by cajoling the legislature and all. But basically, it’s nice when things are going well, because a lot of polling [shows that] when the economy is doing well, they feel better about the executive or the leader, the president or the governor. When things get bad, then it really takes skill to keep your popularity up. So we had that nice upward trajectory, which hasn’t happened very often in California. Maybe one other time.

GLORIA DUFFY: You left the state in remarkably good shape financially, which was also the case at the end of your first set of terms. Was that also a coincidence?

JERRY BROWN: Reagan was elected in ’80; there was a big recession. The Federal Reserve jacked up the interest rates. Unemployment went to, I don’t know, 10 percent? So when I left, we did have a little shortage of funds.

ANNE GUST BROWN: But let’s be clear, you are a very frugal man, to put it mildly.

JERRY BROWN: In June of ’78, we had a surplus between $5 and $6 billion on a $24 billion budget. But on the other hand, [Proposition 13 political activist] Howard Jarvis came along, said, “Brown’s been squirreling all that money away. We’re going to take it back and give it to the hard-pressed property owners.” You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. If you spend all the

money, that’s a problem. If you save all the money, that’s another problem. This is not for amateurs.

GLORIA DUFFY: There’s been a lot of discussion, Jerry, about your values and your philosophy, your time as a seminarian, your study of Buddhism. Talk a little bit about the values that have driven you in public life.

JERRY BROWN: I’m very interested in large issues, and certainly the pursuit of the priesthood, Jesuit formation, all that is entailed by that, is a very big idea. It’s all about ultimate things, ultimate matters. In fact, they describe it as the practice of perfection, which in theory, after you haven’t done it for a while, you don’t get very perfect, so there’s a gap somewhere.

Zen is based on no images. So when you’re doing zazen, you’re sitting on your cushion following your breathing, the whole idea is to concentrate and be there, without following all the little ideas that go through your brain.

I don’t know what you would call that—more on the quest for how to live. What are our lives about, and how do you want to live them? That’s why I feel what I’m doing now isn’t all that much different than what I’ve always done, which is to find a path to follow and see where it goes, and opening up the possibilities of what life might hold, and what possibilities I discover in myself.

Buddhism and Christianity are different, but it’s interesting. One of the basic foundations of the Jesuit spiritual exercises is overcoming what they call inordinate attachments, so that the mind is free of bias and can be open to the movements of the Holy Spirit.

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[In] Buddhism, they talk about attachment and nonattachment. When you’re in a Buddhist retreat or a Buddhist monastery, one of the vows you recite is, “Illusions are endless.

I vow to cut them down.” That’s something that I think is true, [and] it doesn’t just apply to the spiritual life. It’s true of the intellectual life, or everyone’s life in general.

GLORIA DUFFY: Anne, you’re from a family that was also a little bit involved in politics.

ANNE GUST BROWN: I came from the Midwest, from a Republican family. My father was involved in politics. He ran for lieutenant governor with George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father. He did not win.

I still see the little fliers of me as a fiveyear-old: “Rocky Gust, the man you can trust,” and I’m sitting there. [It was] using the family as a prop. We grew up in a pretty wealthy suburb of Detroit, but on a 10-acre farm called Thimble Farm. We didn’t actually have animals and we weren’t really farmers, but we had land, and we did grow corn and things like that. I loved that part of growing up, of being out in the open.

We were Presbyterian. I have never had quite the pursuit that Jerry had, because it always was amazing to me that at such a young age, he wanted to go be a priest. His parents . . . wouldn’t let him for a while. But to be that young and to want to do something like that, where he wanted to explore this other universe, or this other— JERRY BROWN: Dimension.

ANNE GUST BROWN: Yeah—and to seek perfection. He was a more substantive sort of teenager than I was. In the Midwest, we

were drinking six-packs and things like that.

I don’t think I had that same sort of idea. I went to Stanford, fell in love with California.

I think Jerry and I do have common sort of Christian values, such as they are, but I don’t think either of us thinks of it in that way. We tend to agree on anything important morally, and I think that’s important. I’ve always wondered [about] these political couples where one’s way on the Right and one’s on the Left, and how that actually works, because I wouldn’t find that appealing. I can’t think of any big issue that we disagree on.

JERRY BROWN: Sometimes when I’m doing the lifer paroles with Anne, she takes a little more jaundiced view of men who kill their wives. [Laughter.]

ANNE GUST BROWN: Correct. Jerry literally has said things like, “Well, maybe she deserved it,” or something. [Laughter.]

JERRY BROWN: No, I didn’t. I didn’t say that. Let’s be clear.

ANNE GUST BROWN: And I’ve always said, “If I end up dead, maybe you should—” JERRY BROWN: I can see that after the guy’s been in prison for 30 years, he can reform himself. He might have a difficult time, so you have to think. That’s all.

ANNE GUST BROWN: He really does the right thing. He’s got a lot of mercy in his heart, and I don’t have as much. [Laughter.]

I don’t think that’s as good necessarily. But sometimes, yeah, I get a little chilled by the crime, in a way I think you do too, but you have more this notion of redemption, which I think is good. Sometimes we have to balance it.

Josephine Bolling McCall

Jim Crow in Action From the April 8, 2019, Humanities MLF program in San Francisco, “The Penalty for Success: My Father Was Lynched in Alabama.”

JOSEPHINE BOLLING MCCALL Author, The Penalty for Success: My Father Was Lynched in Lowndes County, Alabama In conversation with

MARGARET RUSSELL

Interim Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion, Santa Clara University

“Lowndes County was known as Bloody Lowndes. Even though they had the law, it was lawless. Whites killed whites and nothing was done about it, and whites of course killed blacks and nothing was done about it.”

Photos by James Meinerth

JOSEPHINE BOLLING MCCALL: My father, Elmore Bolling, was born in 1908 in Lowndes County, Alabama. He was sent to Montgomery at the age of 13 to begin his formal education. Once he got to Montgomery, which is about 30 miles from Lowndes County, he found out that all of the students in the class were a lot smaller than he [was], so consequently he dropped out of school.

He never learned to read or write.

Another thing that’s significant about my father is that he never used the pronoun “I.” He always spoke of himself as “me”—“Me will do this,” “Me will do that.” When he dropped out of school, he began working in Montgomery. Later on, his father in Lowndes County found out that he was not in school, so he said, “If you want to work, you can come down here and pick cotton.”

So he made him return to Lowndes County.

But in the meantime, my father had learned some of the things that the people in Montgomery needed, so he started meeting their needs through transportation. He started out with a mule and a wagon, and by the time he reached the age of 39, he had progressed from the mule and a wagon to a Model-T

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Ford that he converted into a truck, and then he eventually had three tractor trailer trucks.

MARGARET RUSSELL: The title of your book [is] The Penalty for Success. Why did you decide to call it that? What was his penalty for success?

MCCALL: My father acquired quite a bit in those 39 years, and that success, his prosperity, is the reason he was killed.

RUSSELL: Can you share with us some of the circumstances of that?

MCCALL: I was five years old. My father also had a store on Highway 80, and Highway 80 is the U.S. highway between Selma and Montgomery that has been designated a National Historic Trail. So my father’s store was on a very popular highway. We were at the store, and my father was killed approximately 200 yards from that store. We heard the shots and of course we went down there to the site.

But I would like to make everyone know where Lowndes County is. Have you ever heard of the march from Selma to Montgomery? Lowndes County is 22 of those historic miles between Selma and Montgomery, and if you go on Highway 80, you cannot get to Selma from Montgomery without going

through those 22 miles. You’ve heard of Viola Liuzzo, the the white mother who left her five children and went down South to help? She was murdered in Lowndes County. Jonathan Daniels—the Episcopalian priest who went there at the beckoning of Martin Luther King when he asks all clergy members to come and assist him—was murdered in Lowndes County. So Lowndes County was known as Bloody Lowndes. Even though they had the law, it was lawless. Whites killed whites and nothing was done about it, and whites of course killed blacks and nothing was done about it.

RUSSELL: At first glance, I think a lot of us think, well, there was a period of lynching which was the 1800s, early 1900s, and then there was the Civil Rights Movement, but it actually was a pretty continuously violent period and the violence took different forms.

The 4,400 African-Americans whose lynchings are documented by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, were shot, drowned, knifed, victims of various kinds of violence that really acted as a kind of racial terror; it was a reign of terror. One of the interesting things about your story of Continued on page 31

2020

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Antarctica Expedition aboard Le Boreal January 15-28, 2020 Explore Earth’s last frontier aboard one of the finest vessels in Antarctica, featuring private balconies and oceanview staterooms. Experience fantastically shaped icebergs, turquoise glaciers, bustling penguin rookeries and breaching whales. Join an expedition team of world-class naturalists. Optional extension to Iguazú Falls.

Cost: from $10,890 per person, double occupancy

New Zealand by Sea aboard Caledonian Sky January 27 - February 9, 2020 Visit Queenstown for two nights then board the 57-cabin Caledonian Sky. See dramatic glacial fjords, bubbling mud pots, tidy English gardens and untamed wilderness, tattooed Maori elders and white-suited lawn bowlers. Experience the remote and rugged beauty of Milford Sounds and Stewart Island.

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Journey Through Vietnam (Optional Cambodia Extension) February 14 - March 1, 2020 Experience the French-accented capital Hanoi; cruise through scenic Ha Long Bay; visit Da Nang’s acclaimed Cham Museum; explore the colorful village of Hoi An and the imperial capital of Hue. Explore the the Mekong River Delta and bustling Saigon. Optional extension to the temples of Angkor.

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Israel: Ancient Sites to Modern Day Startups February 25 – March 6, 2020 Experience Jerusalem, sacred to three major religions. Visit Yad Vashem, a living memorial to the Holocaust. Journey to Masada and float in the Dead Sea. Travel to Bethlehem and Ramallah in the West Bank. Visit a Druze village in the Golan Heights and explore cosmopolitan Tel Aviv.

Cost: approximately $7,495 per person, double occupancy

Understanding the Civil Rights Movement March 8-15, 2020 Walk across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge and through the doors of Little Rock High School. Meet with 16th Street Baptist Church bomb survivor Carolyn McKinstry, Bloody Sunday foot soldier Annie Pearl Avery, and Little Rock Nine member Elizabeth Eckford. Experience the new Memorial for Peace and Social Justice in Montgomery.

Cost: approximately $3,995 per person, double occupancy

Death Valley National Park March 15-20, 2020 Visit Badwater Salt Flats (282 feet below sea level) and enjoy a stunning panoramic view of all 11,049 feet of Telescope Peak. Hike amid surreal sand dune landscapes and between the multi-hued walls of Golden Canyon; experience sunrise at Zabriskie Point; and visit Ubehebe Crater.

Cost: from approximately $3,495 per person, double occupancy

Southern Africa Odyssey April 9-26, 2020 This extraordinary 18-day journey reveals the magnificence of four distinct Southern African nations, from Zimbabwe’s spectacular Victoria Falls and Botswana’s exceptional Chobe National Park to Namibia’s massive dunes and storied coast and South Africa’s beautiful Cape Town. Optional 4-day/3-night extension to the extraordinary Kruger region.

Cost: approximately $8,854 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Central Asia’s Silk Road: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan & Kazakhstan April 16 - May 2, 2020 Encounter a mélange of culture, religion, art and architecture. Discover the capitals of Ashgabat and Taskent. Explore Nisa and Khiva, both UNESCO sites; watch silk weavers in Buhkara; see Bronze Age petroglyphs; and overnight at a yurt camp. Experience legendary Samarkand and tour Russian-accented Almaty.

Cost: approximately $7,094 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

The Pearls of Dalmatia: Croatia & Slovenia (Optional Montenegro Extension) April 30 - May 14, 2020 Absorb Croatia’s remarkable history and unspoiled Dalmatian coastline on this captivating 15-day journey. Travel from Zagreb to Ljubljana to charming Opatija and on to beloved Dubrovnik. Enjoy the fascinating history and Mediterranean atmosphere of the alluring Istrian Peninsula. Optional 4-day/3-night extension to the Balkan gem of Montenegro.

Cost: approximately $5,984 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Sea of Japan aboard Le Soleal May 19-30, 2020 Explore Japan and South Korea during a 7-night cruise along the Inland Sea of Japan, plus three nights in Kyoto. Visit five UNESCO World Heritage sites. Explore Kyoto’s Nijō Castle; Hiroshima’s Memorial Peace Park; Miyajima’s inspiring Itsukushima Shrine; and the Buddhist wonders of Gyeongju, South Korea. Optional extensions to Tokyo and Osaka.

Cost: from approximately $5,995, per person, double occupancy

Amalfi Coast & Sicily: Rome to Malta aboard Le Bougainville May 24 - June 1, 2020 Discover an intriguing mix of cultures on this seven-night cruise from Rome to Valletta, aboard the exclusively chartered, 5-star, Le Bougainville. Experience Italy’s stunning Amalfi Coast, superbly excavated Pompeii, Sicily’s storied Taormina, the colorful seaside town of Sorrento, and the rich history of Malta. Optional extensions in Rome and Malta.

Cost: from approximately $4,595, per person, double occupancy

Walking France’s Dordogne & Loire Valleys May 25 - June 5, 2020 Enjoy an active walking tour amid France’s idyllic landscapes of the Dordogne and Loire valleys. See the towering cliffs of La Roque Gageac and discover the medieval town of Sarlat. Marvel at the painted Lascaux Caves. Enjoy local French wine and cuisine and Loire Valley gardens. Learn about the sparkling wines of the region.

Cost: approximately $5,895 per person, double occupancy

Portugal and Northern Spain May 22 - June 7, 2020 Experience fortified cities and fishing villages, rugged Atlantic coastline and commanding Pyrenees peaks. Stay in intimate lodgings in historic paradores and pousadas. Visit Lisbon, Oporto, Santiago de Compostela, León and Bilbao. Spend two nights in the stunning Pyrenees region; tour fabled Pampalona; and enjoy a 3-night stay in world-class Barcelona.

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Scottish Isles and Norwegian Fjords aboard Le Champlain May 30 - June 7, 2020 Journey to Scotland’s Orkney and Shetland Islands and Norway’s majestic fjords. Cruise from Glasgow, Scotland, to Bergen, Norway, aboard the exclusively chartered, 5-star, small ship Le Champlain. Visit the Scottish Highlands and ride on Norway’s Flåm Railway. Edinburgh/Glasgow and Norway/Copenhagen extensions available.

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Circumnavigation of Iceland aboard Le Bellot July 5-13, 2020 Discover the ethereal beauty of Iceland on a 7-night circumnavigation of this island nation aboard our 5-star expedition ship. See landscapes of ancient Viking ruins and crystalline glaciers atop simmering volcanoes. Cross the Arctic Circle on Grímsey Island and cruise along Surtsey, a UNESCO site. Reykjavík extension available.

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Cruising the Baltic Sea aboard Le Dumont D’Urville July 7-16, 2020 Experience six countries on an 8-night Baltic Sea cruise aboard the 5-star Le Dumont D’Urville from Stockholm, Sweden, to Copenhagen, Denmark, visiting Visby, Sweden; Helsinki, Finland; Tallinn, Estonia; and Gda´nsk, Poland. Spend two days in St. Petersburg. Hear a presentation by former President of Poland Lech Wałęsa. Stockholm and Norway extensions available.

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Machu Picchu to the Galapagos August 25 - September 9, 2020 Encounter two of South America’s greatest treasures on this 16-day journey exploring Machu Picchu’s enigmatic Inca ruins and seeing the fascinating Galapagos Islands’ wonders on a 4-night adventure. Further discoveries await in Lima, the Sacred Valley, Cuzco and Quito. Experience the Amazon rainforest with a 4-day/4-night pre-tour option.

Cost: approximately $10,093 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Imperial Splendors of Russia September 2-11, 2020 Explore the grand capitals of the czars—Moscow and St. Petersburg—on this 8-night adventure in Russia. Cross Red Square to St. Basil’s iconic domes and admire Faberge eggs inside the Kremlin walls. See the stately opulence of Peterhof and Catherine Palace. Stroll the canals of St. Petersburg and explore the world-famous Hermitage Museum.

Cost: approximately $3,795 per person, double occupancy

Global Symposium Series: Europe & the United States, An Unparalleled Alliance September 9-16, 2020 Featuring Budapest, Berlin and a five-night Danube Cruise aboard the Crystal Mozart, this symposium will reflect on the evolution of Europe over the past century. Guest speakers include David Cameron, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 2010 – 2016, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Presidential Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning Author.

Cost: from $14,990 per person, double occupancy

Great Lakes Cruise aboard Le Champlain September 12-19, 2020 Cruise the five Great Lakes from Milwaukee to Toronto, visiting islands and towns rich in history and natural splendor.

Delight in the Victorian character of Mackinac Island; visit Sault Ste. Marie, known to Native Americans as the “Gathering Place”; and witness the thunderous power of Niagara Falls. Optional extensions to Chicago and Toronto.

Cost: from approximately $4,995 per person, double occupancy

Perspectives of Iran September 17 - October 1, 2020 Explore Tehran’s palaces and view the spectacular Crown Jewels. Enjoy Shiraz, city of poetry and gardens. Marvel at the magnificent ruins of Persepolis. Discover Yazd, the country’s center of Zoroastrianism, and the most traditional Persian architecture. Experience Isfahan’s brilliant blue-tiled buildings and majestic bridges.

Cost: approximately $7,290 per person, double occupancy

Tanzania Safari (Optional Rwanda Extension) September 25 - October 6, 2020 Immerse yourself in the landscapes of Tanzania. Search for wildlife - lion, elephant, cheetah, giraffe and rhino in the Serengeti. Discover Ngorongoro Crater, home to rhinoceros, hippo, flamingo, ostrich and the black-maned lion.

Retreat to your tented camps offering superior comfort. Finish with a 2-night stay at the award-winning Gibbs Farm.

Cost: $7,390 per person, double occupancy

Romance of the Douro River aboard MS Amalia Rodrigues September 29 - October 10, 2020 Explore Lisbon’s highlights and Alfama neighborhood. See the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290. Embark the ship in Porto, a colorful, historic town on the banks of the Douro river. Sip the region’s famous port wine at a traditional quinta. Enjoy Lamego’s quintessential blue and white tiles and explore elegant Salamanca.

Cost: from approximately $3,995 per person, double occupancy

Native American Voices October 4–12, 2020 Journey to the Dakotas and Colorado to learn about the Sioux, Hidatsa, Mandan, Lakota, Dakota, Ute, Navajo and Apache Nations. Admire majestic landscapes including Badlands National Park. Meet with community and tribal leaders, artists and activists. Experience Standing Rock and Pine Ridge Reservations and the site of the Massacre of Wounded Knee.

Cost: approximately $4,795 per person, double occupancy

Himalayan Kingdoms: Nepal and Bhutan October 23 – November 6, 2020 Visit Kathmandu’s iconic Swayambhunath Temple and culturally rich Patan, a UNESCO site. Admire Boudhanath, Nepal’s largest Buddhist stupa and visit Bhaktapur, known for its fine artisans. Dine with a family in Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu and take a rafting trip on Punakha River. Explore Paro and the legendary cliffside Tiger’s Nest monastery.

Cost: approximately $7,474 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Aqaba to Athens: Egypt, Jordan & Greece aboard Le Bougainville October 29 - November 11, 2020 Join us for a journey from the azure Aegean to the beautiful Red Sea, exploring the treasures of Greece, Egypt and Jordan aboard the exclusively chartered, 5-star Le Bougainville. Marvel at the beauty of Santorini’s legendary site of the Lost City of Atlantis. Visit the brilliant New Alexandria Library, the Great Pyramids of Giza and the rose-red city of Petra.

Cost: from approximately $7,995 per person, double occupancy

Chile: Total Solar Eclipse December 9-16, 2020 The total solar eclipse will cross one of Chile’s most stunning regions – laden with lakes and volcanos. Explore Santiago and Valparaiso. See Volcan Villarrica, and soak in the healing mineral-rich hot springs of the Termas de Huife. Enjoy three nights at our luxury tented camp directly in the “path of totality” of the total solar eclipse. Patagonia extension available.

Cost: from approximately $6,895 per person, double occupancy

Continued from page 26 your father’s success is that the success was a threat, his very success in the community.

Can you say more about that?

MCCALL: Yes. And just to emphasize what you’re saying, there’s nothing in the definition of lynching about the type of murder. The type of murder is not part of the definition.

The definition is that more than one person committed the crime, a mob, and that the person has no due process. That’s very important to recognize, because my father was actually shot six times with a pistol and once in the back with a shotgun. So that lets you know right away that it had to be more than one person who committed the crime.

But at the time of my father’s murder, lynchings were becoming—they didn’t want anyone to know that they were lynching people. They were becoming unpopular because you’ve probably read that lynchings were a public spectacular, that they put them on postcards; it was announced in the newspapers. Well, some lynching law legislation was being proposed, and some of the proposals were that if a sheriff lets someone take a person from prison, then the sheriff would be fined, the county would be fined. So conse-

quently they wanted to stop having lynchings identified as such. Lowndes County made an effort to make sure that my father’s murder did not appear to be a lynching.

The newspaper article that came out at that time—this is December 7, 1947—my father was actually murdered December the 4th, and I did not know anything about this article until I was almost 35 years of age. A lady came to my mom’s house and brought the article. After I read it, it gave me a whole lot of information. It mentioned that a white man was arrested for his murder—and that was an anomaly, because you didn’t arrest whites for killing blacks. It also mentioned that the grand jury was going to meet in March of the next year. This is where I learned that he was actually shot the six times with a pistol and once in the back with a shotgun.

The article was very significant also in that it said, “The dead Negro, Bolling, according to conversation last night in the surrounding neighborhood, appears to have had an excellent reputation, was married and had seven children, and over the years he had built for himself a small trucking business, valued at $5,000.” At that time, $5,000 was a lot of

money. But in addition to that, my uncle said that he had $40,000 in the bank.

The thing that also attracted my attention was that this was on the front page. Back then, we had a Negro news section in the newspaper. We had maybe one or two pages, depending on how much news they could find about the Negro. So the person who was writing the Negro news at that time made the statement that the only time a Negro got on the front page of the newspaper was [when] . . . he was famous or he had stolen a can of sardines. So this newspaper article was very significant in beginning my research. It also gave a reason for the murder: the person who was arrested said that my father insulted his wife over the telephone.

RUSSELL: You were 35 [when you read that article] and you were five when you saw your father [killed]. What was your family’s life between your father’s murder and the time when you decided to research this book?

What was the effect of this?

MCCALL: We went from prosperity to poverty almost overnight. My mother of course knew how to pick cotton and she knew how to run a store. But after we fled from Lowndes JUNE/JULY 2019

31

County to Montgomery, there were no black faces in storefronts. So she actually made a living working in the dry cleaners. The [two] brothers who were in school in Montgomery stopped school and took jobs. Consequently, I’m child number seven, and I am the only college graduate.

RUSSELL: You were telling me a little bit about your mother’s role in the success of the business and the family. Could you fill us in on that?

MCCALL: My mother was a wonderful cook and my father benefited from that, because he would transport parishioners to different churches in Lowndes County. [Some] churches met on first and third Sundays, and other churches met on the second and fourth.

So he would make sure parishioners got to these churches every Sunday, and when they got hungry, my mom had this great big trunk full of food, and they would buy plates from my mother, and they made $100 a Sunday off ice cream. There was no refrigeration at that time, so ice cream was a delicacy that you couldn’t keep otherwise. So whenever they went around Elmore Bolling, they were looking for ice cream.

But I would like to delve into . . . sharecropping a little bit. In the 1883 constitution of Alabama and it was rewritten in 1901—and I’d just like to tell you that that constitution is still in effect—peonage was legal if you lived on a plantation and you

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were sharecropping, and the person said you had to make $50 in order to clear yourself, if you only made $30, you couldn’t move off his property. If you moved off the property, the sheriff could come get you and put you back on, or they could simply kill you. Peonage is on the books in Lowndes County.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It was still a form of slavery, really.

MCCALL: Yes, that’s exactly right, and that’s what W.E.B. Du Bois found when he went into Lowndes County to investigate.

He said, “The county is still [honey]combed with slavery.”

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was born and raised in Mississippi, and I’m a graduate of the University of Alabama. I just graduated college when Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of murdering the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, and I remember the trial when Byron De La Beckwith Jr. was found guilty of murdering Mr. Medgar Evers.

If the man is still alive who lynched your father, would you be opposed to him being brought to trial today?

MCCALL: Absolutely not. But the only thing about that—and I want all of us to take this into consideration—I don’t know anyone who’s actually suffered who’s been jailed in that regards. If it has been, it’s only been one or two people.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just want to say thank you for your father, and thank you for

telling his story, because this is an amazing story. I too grew up in the South in Alabama, and I went to Tuskegee. I was born in the 1950s when these things were very common, and there’s not a day that I don’t think about them even though I’ve lived in San Francisco since the early ’70s. But to have you come and tell us your story is just really heartwarming, and I thank you so much.

I’d like to ask you [to] tell us something about your life [other] than writing the book.

MCCALL: I’ll tell you a little bit about growing up in Montgomery and the things that were hurtful. I also was there when we were having the bus protest. We couldn’t say “bus boycott” because that was illegal, so it’s called the bus protest. I remember having to stand at the back of the bus when seats were available in the front. There’re two situations that stand out most in my mind, and one of them was when the public library was integrated—they removed the chairs to keep us from sitting down next to whites. Next, there was a large park, Oak Park. When they integrated Oak Park, they cemented the swimming pool.

So those things stand out in my mind.

But as I mentioned before, my mother actually funded my education by working in a dry cleaners, and I have two degrees from Alabama State, and then I went to Auburn University and got AA certification in school psychology. I retired as director of special education in Phenix City, Alabama.

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L ast Word

WITH LONDON BREED

Photos by Sarah Gonzalez

THE MAYOR’S PLAN

L

ast year we were able to get legislation passed to eliminate fines and fees, and our late public defender, Jeff Adachi, was a leader in this particular effort.

What happens when someone does a crime—there is restitution, so this does not remove restitution if there is money owed—but the courts have all these layers of fees for your ankle monitor, your social this, your services that, your court fees. All of these fees.

What would happen at the African-American Art and Cultural Complex was, I would sometimes hire people who had served time, folks I know made a mistake, want a second chance, give them a second chance. After a few paychecks, all of a sudden you’re getting a letter to garnish their wages for these things. Then you have this young man upset and mad and saying, “I don’t even want to work.

I should go back out there and sell dope.”

You just think, No, you don’t want to break somebody, right?

Those kind of experiences, like living and knowing what people are going through just to try to get their lives together, and then what they choose to do when they feel like the system constantly financially beats them down for so many different reasons—it’s something I know we need to address.

So we’ve been doing it with the city, with the fines and fees. And before, when I was on the Board [of Supervisors, we worked at]

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reducing the fees for commissary and for phone calls and tow fees and all these things that sadly have a really horrible impact on poor people and their ability to survive in general.

So I think about those things, because I think about what I had to endure—my grandmother and our phone bills from my brother’s collect calls from jail. Our phone would get cut off on a regular basis because she couldn’t pay it.

But then there are other families who would put their phones in others’ names—just all of those things I think about when trying to make changes to policies, because it just sets you back and sets you back and sets you back, and you’re like, “When are we ever going to get ahead? When are we ever going to be in a situation where life is okay? I don’t need to be wealthy, but I just want things to be okay.”

So I think about all of my experiences and how policy can play such a critical role in really changing that.

—London Breed, March 7, 2019

The Commonwealth Club organizes more than 450 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs are held throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are typically one hour long and frequently include panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session. Many evening programs include a networking reception with wine.

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JUNE/JULY 2019

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MONDAY

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7:30 pm 5:15 p.m.Cities Blinding for the Flash of the Obvious Future 6:30 p.m. Ben Franklin Circles FM 6:30 p.m.

Changemakers: Movement Leaders on Civil Rights in an Uncivil Time FM 7:45 p.m. The Future of America’s Political

6 pm The San Francisco Civic Center 6 pm 88th Annual California Book Awards 7 pm Scott Kupor: Secrets of Sand Hil Road

5:15 pm Transgender Health in the Age of Trump: An Attempted Erasure of Trans Americans 6:30 pm Socrates Café

5 pm Middle East Forum Discussion FM 6 pm Standing Rock, Climate Change and the Green New Deal

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noon 10 a.m.

Secretary Chinatown WalkingShultz George Tour 6:30 Sallie 2 pmp.m.

San Francisco Krawcheck: Walking The Architecture Power of Women, Tour Work and Wallet 6 pm Secret San 7 p.m. Gopi Kallayil: Francisco Brain, Body and 6:30 pm Daphne Muse Consciousness

noon Innovation and Entrepreneurship 6 pm The Snow Clown 6:30 pm Eve Ensler

noon NPR’s Frank Langfitt: Inside the Real China 6:30 pm The Fate of Food 6:30 pm Elaine Welteroth: More than Enough 6:30 pm We Are La Cocina

6:30 pm Jonna Mendez

San Francisco

East/North Bay

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6:30 pm Still We Rise: A Conversation with Young Leaders

noon Larry Diamond 6:30 pm Sportswriter Rick Reilly: How Golf Explains President Trump 6:30 pm Shannon Watts

6 pm Change Your Genes, Change Your Life: A New Day in Personalized Health Care 6:30 pm Week to Week Political Roundtable

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6 pm The War for Kindness 6:30 pm George Will

Silicon Valley

noon Mamuka Bakhtadze noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 6:30 pm Imperfect Circles

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 4 pm Health & Medicine MemberLed Forum Planning Meeting 6 pm Epigenetics and the Story of Exosomes 7 pm Queer Eye’s Tan France

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 2 pm North Beach Walking Tour 6 pm The Kardashian-Free Conversation Club

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 6 pm The Incredible Slip Madigan

FM Free for members

noon Niveen Rizkalla: PTSD in Syrian Refugees and Secondary Tramatization in Aid Workers

9 am Mineta Transportation Summit: The Intersection between Transportation and Housing

FE Free for everyone

Saturday 5 pm Ash Carter, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

MO Members-only

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5:15 pm Shakespeare in Prison 6:30 pm Tom Siebel 6:30 pm Socrates Café

5 pm Middle East Forum Discussion FM

noon Why Great Workplaces are Better for Employees, Investors and Society

6 pm Using Shareholder Advocacy to Make the World a Better Place

6:30 pm Richard Clarke

commonwealthclub.org/events

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6:30 pm Esther Wojcicki 6:30 pm Week to Week Political Roundtable

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekly Tour FE 6:30 pm Week to Week Political Roundtable

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 2 pm Russian Hill Walking Tour 6 pm Cosmological Koans 6:30 pm Imperfect Circles

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 6 pm Seduction and Satiety 6 pm The Kardashian-Free Conversation Club 6:30 pm Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi

noon The Michelle Meow Show FE 2 pm Waterfront Walking Tour

noon Will U.S. Withdrawal from the Middle East put IS Back in Business

2 pm Commonwealth Club Weekley Tour FE 5:15 pm Reframing Elderhood 7 pm Adam Gazzaley and Robert Strong: The Neuroscience of Magic

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Secretary George Shultz: Thinking about the Future 6/4

SATURDAY, JUNE 1 BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE FERRY PLAZA FARMERS MARKET

Beloved by locals, chefs and tourists alike, the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market has been a trendsetting hub for local food for more than 25 years.

Explore this iconic waterfront destination as you never have before with the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, the organization that runs the market and its innovative education programs. On this behind-the-scenes tour of the market, you’ll enjoy coffee and a pastry, meet some of the SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTURE market’s farmers and food makers, and enjoy WALKING TOUR delicious tastes along the way.

Explore San Francisco’s Financial District SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Meet in front of with historian Rick Evans and learn the his110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco • Time: 8 tory and stories behind some of our city’s rea.m. check-in, 8:15–9:15 a.m. tour • MLF: Food markable structures, streets and public squares.

Matters • Program organizer: Cathy Curtis Hear about the famous architects who influenced the rebuilding of the city after the 1906 TUESDAY, JUNE 4 earthquake. Discover hard-to-find rooftop garSECRETARY GEORGE SHULTZ: dens, art deco lobbies, unique open spaces and THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE historic landmarks. This is a tour for locals, George P. Shultz, Distinguished Fellow, with hidden gems you can only find on foot!

Hoover Institution; Former U.S. Secretary of State; Author, Thinking About the Future In Conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club

In a rich and varied career that has included roles as U.S. secretary of state, secretary of the treasury and secretary of labor, George P. Shultz has aided presidents, confronted national and international crises, and argued passionately that the United States has a vital stake in promoting democratic values and institutions. In speeches, articles, congressional testimony and conversations with world leaders, he has helped shape policy and public opinion on topics such as technology, terrorism, drugs and climate change. The result is a body of work that has influenced the decisions of nations and leaders and impacted the lives of ordinary people.

In the more than half a century since Shultz entered public life, the world has changed dramatically. But he remains guided by the belief that “you can learn about the future—or at least relate to it—by studying the past and identifying principles that have continuing application to our lives and our world.” Here’s a rare chance to hear from one of America’s most respected statesmen.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 11 a.m. check in, noon program

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SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Galleria Park Hotel, 191 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: The tour involves walking up and down stairs but covers less than one mile of walking in the Financial District; the tour operates rain or shine; limited to 20 participants; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be sold at checkin; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (You will receive notification of this at least three days in advance)

SECRET SAN FRANCISCO

Ruth Carlson, Travel Writer; Author, Secret San Francisco: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

DAPHNE MUSE: CIVIL RIGHTS HISTORY THROUGH LETTERS

Daphne Muse, Writer; Social Commentator In conversation with LaDoris Cordell, Retired Superior Court Judge

Daphne Muse is a Bay Area writer, social commentator and cultural broker. Her collection of more than 3,700 handwritten and typed letters dating back to 1958 reflects the voices of activists, writers, artists, actors, world leaders and media innovators who shaped movements, created new artistic visions and drove the intellectual and cultural discourse for civil rights and human rights for the 20th and the early years of the 21st century. Award-winning authors Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, along with political prisoners, President Barack Obama and architect Sir David Adjaye, are among the hundreds with whom she’s corresponded. Fifty-two letters from students at the University of Baltimore were recently added to the collection.

Muse will discuss and read from the letters in her collection, reflecting the voices of key figures in the civil rights, Pan-African and Black Power movements. Come for a unique chance to see history through the words of those who lived it.

Have you ever taken an underground sewer tour in San Francisco? Or wandered through a labyrinth where the land meets the sea? Secret San Francisco unlocks these secrets and other little-known stories about our city’s most enduring icons. You’ll find out about the real crookedest street, local windmills and an air- SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarport for flying boats. Along the way, you’ll cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Franencounter bizarre and often hilarious history, cisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check in, 6:30 p.m. proincluding the origins of Burning Man, Santa gram Con and the fight to legalize public nudity.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5 And did you know that San Francisco was the site of the last American duel? Carlson takes WEEKLY CLUB TOUR you places locals would rather keep to themFor the first time since our founding 116 selves—that is, if they even knew about them! years ago, The Commonwealth Club has a per-

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

manent place to call its own, and we’re excited to share it with you.

Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., we’re giving members and nonmembers behind-the-scenes tours of our home at 110 The Embarcadero. Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member.

Space is limited, so reserve your spot now to visit San Francisco’s newest—and oldest—cultural treasure at our new location.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

STILL WE RISE: A CONVERSATION WITH YOUNG LEADERS

See website for panelists

The Bay Area stands at a crossroads. We are heading down a path of increased inequality and uneven access to economic opportunity: where thousands of jobs are being added, but the income gap continues to rise; where residents are being displaced and commutes are getting longer. The paths we choose will define our communities—and our country—for generations to come.

So what do those future generations think about it all? How are youth surviving and thriving in a changing Bay Area? What narratives do they see as underrepresented or even absent from our civic discourse, and how are they shaping their own? How do young leaders raise awareness on critical issues to change perceptions, influence policy change and spur civic engagement?

It’s time to let members of the next generation speak for themselves. Join us to hear how Bay Area young people are facing questions of representation, civic discourse and equity as they grow up in this beautiful region of contradictions and reimagine its future.

chellemeow John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable, The Commonwealth Club—CoHost

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinating—and often controversial—people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready.

See topics and speaker details at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

ages and walks of life, who also find it impossible to delegate to some infallible authority the task of providing all the answers to such questions. Life is not totally chaotic, even though it looks that way sometimes—so it’s helpful to be aware of any subtle patterns to our experiences.

Rejoin the continuing conversation of human civilization—this time at The Commonwealth Club.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

MONDAY, JUNE 10

IMPERFECT CIRCLES

THE SAN FRANCISCO CIVIC CENTER

Are you a person who never tires of talking or thinking about philosophical, scientific or religious theories? Are you interested in psychological insights, or attempts at such insights, into human life? There are many who would insist that being realistic about human life means you should ignore such fundamental questions—starting around the time the ink dries on your diploma. But it is unrealistic to ignore the fundamental explanatory concepts that underlie each successful human civilization; these concepts sometimes help and sometimes hinder us in our pursuit of happiness. Such profound questions are naturally provoked simply by living an alert life.

There are millions of realistic people, of all

local history of how the Civic Center was created. San Francisco is known for its iconic man-made structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars and the Transamerica Pyramid. Its Civic Center is yet another of its urban planning marvels. Featuring the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States, it was originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912 and is considered one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful Movement.

James Haas meticulously unravels the story of why the Civic Center was built, of how it became central to the city’s urban planning initiatives in the early 20th century, and of how

George Hammond, Author, Conversations James Haas, Attorney; Local Historian; Auwith Socrates and Rational Idealism—Mod- thor, The San Francisco Civic Center Monday Night Philosophy looks into the erator

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check in, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: This event is the latest in the San Francisco Foundation’s series on People, Place and Power

THURSDAY, JUNE 6 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 6/6/19

Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW-TV); Twitter @msmi-

Secret San Francisco 6/4

JUNE/JULY 2019

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it held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. Its history is riddled with controversy as well as inspiring leadership, but the Civic Center remains a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of San Francisco’s dynamism and creativity.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

88TH ANNUAL CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS

Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored the exceptional literary merit of California writers and publishers. Each year a select jury considers hundreds of books from around the state in search of the very best in literary achievement.

The California Book Awards have often been in the vanguard, honoring previously unknown authors who go on to garner national acclaim. John Steinbeck received three gold medals—for Tortilla Flat in 1935, In Dubious Battle in 1936 and The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.

Recent award winners include Adam Johnson, Jared Diamond, Karen Fowler, Kay Ryan, Bill

Vollman, Joyce Maynard, Andrew Sean Greer, Yiyun Li, Adrienne Rich, Chalmers Johnson, Richard Rodriguez, Michael Chabon, Philip Levine, Rebecca Solnit, Galen Rowell, Jonathan Lethem, Peter Orner and Kevin Starr.

versation led by Renske Lynde, CEO of Food System 6, a Bay Area based nonprofit organization that supports mission-driven entrepreneurs who are developing innovative solutions to some of our greatest food system challengSAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar- es. Renske will be joined in conversation with cadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francis- Dan Kurzrock, co-founder and chief grain ofco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, ficer of ReGrained; Andrew Falcon, CEO of 7:15 p.m. book signing Full Cycle Bioplastics; and Christine Su, CEO of PastureMap. Together they will discuss the SCOTT KUPOR: SECRETS ways in which their innovative solutions are reOF SAND HILL ROAD making the food system as we know it. Come Scott Kupor, Managing Partner, Andreessen prepared to be inspired by these entrepreneurs Horowitz; Author, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: and to learn how you too can become part of Venture Capital and How to Get It; Twitter the good food revolution. @skupor SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The EmbarIn Conversation with Alison van Diggelen, cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San FranHost, “Fresh Dialogues”; BBC Contributor cisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon pro-

As a managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Kupor has seen it all. He offers firsthand experiences and insider advice for every entrepreneur trying to secure venture capital funding.

Kupor has been with Andreessen Horowitz since its inception in 2009 and has overseen the firm’s growth from $300 million in assets to more than $7 billion. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Stanford Venture Capital Director’s College and was previously the chairman of the board of the National Venture Capital Association.

gram • MLF: Business & Leadership • Program organizer: Elizabeth Carney • Notes: In partner-

Andrew Falcon, CEO, Full Cycle Bioplastics Christine Su, CEO, PastureMap

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Arts • Program organizer: Anne W. Smith

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

THE SNOW CLOWN: CARTWHEELS ON BORDERS FROM ALASKA TO NEBRASKA

Jeff Raz, Performer, Cirque du Soleil and Pickle Family Circus; Author, The Secret Life of Clowns and The Snow Clown; Playwright, “Father-Land”

The Bay Area’s Jeff Raz presents an entertaining, inside view of his life on the road SILICON VALLEY • Location: Oshman Family and at home as a clown, actor, teacher and JCC, Schultz Cultural Hall, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo playwright. Raz explores both ridiculous and Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program, profound revelations in his second book about 8 p.m. book signing • Notes: Kupor photo by a decades-long clowning career, The Snow Aya Brackett Clown: Cartwheels on Borders from Alaska to TUESDAY, JUNE 11 Nebraska. He notes that as a teacher, a consultant and a medical clown, it takes practice INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURand skill to ask good questions and to be quiet SHIP: DRIVING CHANGE IN FOOD and acknowledge the other person in ways that AND AGRICULTURE build rapport.

Renske Lynde, CEO, Food System 6 Join us for a discussion on Raz’s life as a perDan Kurzrock, Co-Founder and Chief Grain former and the connections he’s made thus far.

Officer, ReGrained We face some unprecedented challenges today related to how we grow, produce, distribute and consume food. Changing climatic conditions, population growth and decades of unsustainable growing practices are leading to growing consumer demand for higher quality provenance and production practices and healthier food options. Entrepreneurs are at the forefront of this movement to design a food system that is focused on the health of people and planet.

Join Presidio Graduate School for a con-

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ship with Presidio Graduate School

Secrets of Sand Hill Road 6/10

EVE ENSLER

Eve Ensler, Tony Award-Winning Playwright, “The Vagina Monologues”; Author, The Apology In Conversation with Lauren Schiller, Host, “Inflection Point” on KALW and PRX; Twitter @laschiller

How do you come to terms with the need for an apology that will never come? How

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

can the trauma of a childhood in an abusive household be put into words? And how can recounting the pain of those histories become a process of healing and personal reconciliation? These are the questions that Eve Ensler grapples with in her newest book, The Apology.

It is a raw reckoning with a traumatic and unresolved past that has played an important role in Ensler’s artistic and political activist careers, and it shows other survivors of abuse how they may finally envision their own freedom from the past.

Ensler’s theatrical career took off when she wrote “The Vagina Monologues,” a work of such originality and power that it ran for more than 10 years and has been translated into 140 languages. The performances inspired the creation of V-Day, a global platform to share the stories of survivors and for groups to raise money for the cause through their own yearly performances of “The Vagina Monologues.”

Ensler has received numerous awards, including the Isabelle Stevenson Tony Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship in playwriting, an Obie, and Glamour’s Woman of the Year.

Come join us for a discussion with a woman renowned for her artistic work and political impact on a topic for which words do not come easily but need to be heard.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 12 LARRY DIAMOND

Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution and Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Author, Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russian Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency; Twitter @LarryDiamond

In 1974, nearly three quarters of all governments were dictatorships; today, more than half are democracies. Yet, by most measures, there are now 25 fewer democracies than at the turn of the millennium. Is democracy in decline? And if so, what has contributed to this regression? Larry Diamond has dedicated the majority of his life to answering these questions.

Now he is taking a strong and somewhat controversial stance: The defense of democracy depends upon U.S. global leadership. However, before it can fulfill this role, American democracy itself needs to be reformed from the

inside. Diamond not only shares his wealth of knowledge about democracies across the globe but also provides concrete and deeply informed measures that can be taken to reduce polarization, reduce the influence of money in politics and make elections fairer, both here in the United States as well as globally.

Join us for a conversation with one of the most respected scholars of democracy about its apparent decline, the challenges it faces and how we can best protect it.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing

SPORTSWRITER RICK REILLY: HOW GOLF EXPLAINS PRESIDENT TRUMP

Rick Reilly, Screenwriter; Author, Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump; Twitter @ReillyRick Joan Ryan, Former Sports Columnist, San Francisco Chronicle; Author, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes

For decades, many authors have tried to explain who Donald Trump is, what makes him tick and, since he has become president, what drives his political decision-making. Legendary sportswriter Rick Reilly thinks one of the best ways to understand who the 43rd president of the United States really is as a person is to study how he golfs, a sport Reilly reveres.

Reilly provides an on-the-ground and behind-the-scenes look at what he calls Trump’s “ethics deficit” on and off the course. Reilly has been with Trump on the fairway, the green and in the weeds and has seen firsthand how the president plays—and it’s not pretty. Based on his personal experiences and interviews with dozens of golf pros, amateurs, developers, partners, opponents and even caddies who have firsthand experience with Trump on the course, Reilly takes a deep and often hilarious look at how Trump shamelessly cheats at golf, lies about it, sues over it, bullies with it and profits off of it.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, JUNE 13 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 6/13/19

Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV); Twitter @msmichellemeow—Co-Host John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable, The Commonwealth Club of CalLarry Diamond 6/12

ifornia—Co-Host

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinating—and often controversial—people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready.

See topics and speaker details at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

HEALTH & MEDICINE MEMBER-LED FORUM PLANNING MEETING

This will be a discussion meeting for anyone interested in health and medicine topics and programs at the Club.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Executive Office, San Francisco • Time: 4 p.m. program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Bill Grant

EPIGENETICS AND THE STORY OF EXOSOMES: THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY BRIDGING MIND & BODY

Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., Author, The Biology of Belief; Spontaneous Evolution; The Honeymoon Effect

For more than a century, conventional science has attributed illness and disease to mechanistic failures of the body’s systems. Rather than “victims” of dysfunctional cells and genes, the new fields of epigenetics

and quantum biophysics reveal that your mind expresses creative mastery over your biology and the character of your life. A radical new insight into how the mind shapes the body was discovered in 2007. A population of exosomes, small submicroscopic vesicles in the blood, were found to be virus particles created by our own cells and designed to infect our own cells.

Lipton says that, via the cell’s membrane, consciousness is translated into gene- and behavior-controlling molecules. These information molecules can be conveyed by exosome viruses to specifically targeted cells. Exosome signaling coordinates the structure and function of the body’s cellular community in shaping overall health and wellbeing, including disease states, especially cancer. Understanding epigenetic and exosome mechanisms might offer profound insight into the process of expressing self-empowerment in the unfolding of our lives. Join Bruce H. Lipton for an illustrated and animated presentation that will engage your mind and challenge your creativity as you comprehend the enormous potential for applying this information in your life and practice.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Adrea Brier

QUEER EYE’S TAN FRANCE

Tan France, Host and Fashion Expert, Netflix’s “Queer Eye”; Author, Naturally Tan

This program is sold out.

As one of the Fab Five, performing makeovers for a diverse array of people, France has played a vital role in transforming the perception of “Queer Eye” from a niche fashion show into an authentic exploration of identity and difference, and it continues to captivate viewers across the country and around the world.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in and premium reception, 7 p.m. program • Notes: This program is

part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

FRIDAY, JUNE 14 NIVEEN RIZKALLA: PTSD IN SYRIAN REFUGEES AND SECONDARY TRAUMATIZATION IN AID WORKERS

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 ASH CARTER, FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF DEFENSE

Ash Carter, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense; Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy Niveen Rizkalla, Ph.D., Postdoctorate Fellow, School; Author, Inside the Five-Sided Box: Mack Center for Mental Health and Social Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon Conflict, UC Berkeley In Conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy, PresiIn the context of the catastrophic Syrian dent and CEO, The Commonwealth Club

refugee crises, Niveen Rizkalla will discuss her work with refugees struggling with PTSD and how secondary traumatization affects aid workers. Rizkalla, a postdoctorate fellow at UC Berkeley’s Mack Center for Mental Health and Social Conflict, has an impressive record of scholarship, research and volunteerism. A Palestinian Israeli, she earned her doctorate at the school of social work at Tel Aviv University and has worked professionally and as a volunteer with survivors of trauma, war and sexual violence.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

The Department of Defense is the single largest institution in America, managing the most complex information network, carrying out more research and development than Google, Apple and Microsoft combined, owning and operating more real estate and spending more money than any other entity. As such, it has incredible power and immense responsibility. There is no better person to explain the inner workings of such a place than the man who ran it all.

Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter takes us inside all that happens in one of the most secretive and secure locations in the nation— the obstacles it faces and the innovation taking place there. Unlike many of his colleagues in the Department of Defense, Carter was not always a career bureaucrat. His straightforward explanations of American foreign policy, and the ways in which the private sector and public sector can work together toward greater peace and security, reflect his moderate perspective in a highly politicized era.

Join us for a conversation with America’s 25th secretary of defense about what really goes on inside that mysterious five-sided box—and how people are learning to think outside it.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 4 p.m. check-in, 5 p.m. program • Notes: Attendees subject to search

MONDAY, JUNE 17 TRANSGENDER HEALTH IN THE AGE OF TRUMP: AN ATTEMPTED ERASURE OF TRANS AMERICANS

Tiffany Woods, LGBT Liaison, Oakland Police Department; LGBT Diversity Trainer, Police Academy; Former Program Coordinator and Co-Creator, TransVision’s Tri-City Health Center, Alameda County

When President Trump entered office, his administration immediately began rescinding new federal protections for transgender students in public schools. President Trump later announced, via Twitter, a ban on trans-

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Queer Eye’s Tan France 6/13

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

gender individuals from serving “in any capacity” in the U.S. armed forces. In Trump’s second year, the administration continued to introduce anti-trans policies. It created a new Health and Human Services Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, which is expected to offer greater protections for health-care workers who do not wish to treat transgender patients. The year ended with a leaked memo, which considered narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a government-wide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. Yet trans Americans and their allies have fought back. We will highlight and discuss trans policy under the Trump administration.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Psychology • Program organizer: Patrick O’Reilly

SOCRATES CAFÉ

devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic is asked to briefly explain why she or he considers that topic interesting and important. An open discussion follows, and the meeting ends with a summary of the various perspectives participants expressed.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

TUESDAY, JUNE 18 NPR’S FRANK LANGFITT: INSIDE THE REAL CHINA

Frank Langfitt, Correspondent, NPR; Author, The Shanghai Free Taxi In Conversation with Margaret Conley, Executive Director, Asia Society of Northern California

China, he started driving a cab and discovered a country amid seismic political and economic change. China—America’s most important competitor—is at a turning point. With economic growth slowing, Chinese people face inequality and uncertainty as their leaders tighten control at home and project power abroad.

Frank Langfitt will describe his free taxi service and how he got to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks such as Beer, a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life.

Come for a fascinating conversation that will help make sense of the world’s other superpower at this extraordinary moment in history.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11 a.m. check-in, noon program, 1 p.m. book signing • Notes: In association with the Asia Society of Northern California

As any traveler knows, some of the best and One Monday evening of every month the most honest conversations take place during THE FATE OF FOOD Humanities Forum sponsors Socrates Café at car rides. So when a long-time NPR corre- Amanda Little, Author, The Fate of Food: The Commonwealth Club. Each meeting is spondent wanted to learn more about the real What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter

A gift that truly keeps on giving.

You are invited to join a dedicated group of Club members who want to ensure that the Club’s mission to promote and uphold civil discourse is safeguarded into the future.

Legacy gifts made to the Club become part of our new endowment, which will support our programming activities in perpetuity.

As a member of the Legacy Circle, you’ll also be offered certain privileges and invited to special events. We are grateful for gifts of all sizes. For most kinds of legacy gifts, there is no minimum gift amount.

To Learn More: https://www.commonwealthclub.org/legacy-giving Contact: Kimberly Maas, Vice President of Development 415-597-6726

“I want The Commonwealth Club to continue to do constructive work for my community long after I am gone. That is why I made the Club a beneficiary of my estate.”

-Anonymous Legacy Circle donor

Change Your Genes, Change Your Life: A New Day in Personalized Health Care 6/19

World Twilight Greenaway, Contributing Editor, Civil Eats Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate One

How do we go about feeding a planet that’s hotter, drier, and more crowded than ever?

From a remote-controlled organic farm in Shanghai to a Norwegian fish farm and famine-stricken parts of Ethiopia, innovators are seeking to reinvent the global food system to be more productive and nutritious. Does this mean the end of animal meat? Can a clean, climate-resilient food system be built to distribute calories in a way that is efficient and equitable? Join us for a conversation on how innovation and agriculture, technology and traditional knowledge are coming together to sustain a planet of 8 billion.

SAN FRANCISCO • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. checkin, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. networking reception

ELAINE WELTEROTH: MORE THAN ENOUGH

her young staff to create content centered on not only fashion and beauty, but also politics, social activism, world news and other topics that painted a more realistic, well-rounded picture of teen life.

Throughout her wildly successful career, Welteroth has often noted that she consistently found herself alone as the only black woman in the room. Her life is filled with stories of triumph despite the numerous roadblocks put in her way, and now Welteroth offers invaluable advice to young women looking to change the world in their own terms.

She joins INFORUM to chronicle her life as a pioneer in media and to inspire a new generation of trailblazers.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program followed by book signing • Notes: This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19

CHANGE YOUR GENES, CHANGE YOUR LIFE: A NEW DAY IN Elaine Welteroth, Author, More Than Enough: PERSONALIZED HEALTH CARE

Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter Kenneth Pelletier, Ph.D., M.D., Clinical ProfesWhat They Say); Judge, “Project Runway”; Forsor of Medicine, University of California San mer Editor in Chief, Teen Vogue Francisco School of Medicine; Chairperson, In 2012, after moving up the ranks at American Health Association; Vice President, Condé Nast, Elaine Welteroth became the first American Specialty Health; Director, CorpoAfrican-American to hold the title of beauty rate Health Improvement Program; Author, and health director at Teen Vogue. At 29, she Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer

was promoted to editor in chief, making her the youngest to hold the title in the company’s 107-year history and the second person of African-American heritage. Her reign at Teen Vogue was undeniably historic as she led the magazine in a new, fresh direction that allowed

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Biology is no longer destiny. Our DNA doesn’t determine our health and disease prospects, as geneticists once believed. According to the new science of epigenetics, the vast majority of our genes are fluid and dynamic—and their expression is shaped by what we think

and what we do. Our genetic profile might signal an inherited vulnerability to a disease, but our choices and behaviors determine whether these genes will be switched on or off. Each of us can influence our genes to create optimal health and longevity.

Kenneth Pelletier will discuss the latest epigenetic research, including the Ancestry.com-inspired heritability study, and share timely media coverage, including details of the CRISPR babies and its potential impact on science.

He will also reveal the organizations and cutting-edge technology that will forever change the landscape of health and well-being.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Patty James

WEEK TO WEEK POLITICAL ROUNDTABLE 6/19/19

Panelists TBA John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Host

It’s summertime!

Join us as we discuss the biggest, most controversial and sometimes the surprising political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil and have a good sense of humor. Our panelists will provide informative and engaging commentary on political and other major news, and we’ll have audience discussion of the week’s events and award chocolate prizes in our live news quiz!

And come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our members social (open to all attendees).

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

SAN FRANCISCO • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in and social hour, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: Each attendee will receive 2 free drink tickets for a glass of wine or a soft drink during our social hour

THURSDAY, JUNE 20 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 6/20/19

“urban village.” In addition to learning about the conversation. The goal is to have an inforBeat hangouts, you’ll discover authentic Italian mal but informative discussion where anyone can speak and everyone will listen. Bring your cathedrals and coffee shops.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Victoria Pastry curiosity, your ideas and the desire to talk Cafe, 700 Filbert St., San Francisco (at Colum- about anything but the Kardashians. bus Ave., across from Washington Square Park) • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Take Muni bus 30, 41 or 45; use North Beach Parking Garage on 735 Vallejo St.; tour operates rain or shine; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be sold at checkin; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (you will receive notification of this at

Speaker TBA Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV); Twitter @msleast three days in advance) michellemeow John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable, The Commonwealth Club—Co- THE KARDASHIAN-FREE CONVERSATION CLUB Host Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s Charles DeLoach, Miri Miller and James Xiao long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinat- —Moderators

ing—and often controversial—people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready.

See topics and speaker details at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

NORTH BEACH WALKING TOUR

Join another Commonwealth Club neighborhood adventure! Explore vibrant North Beach with Rick Evans during a two-hour walk through this neighborhood with a colorful past—where food, culture, history and unexpected views all intersect in an Italian

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6–7:45 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: If you’d like to be added to the mailing list so you can receive the resources ahead of time, please email info@kardashianfreeconvos.com

FRIDAY, JUNE 21

MINETA TRANSPORTATION SUMMIT: THE INTERSECTION BETWEEN TRANSPORTATION AND HOUSING This program is for all curious members BUILDING BLOCKS TO THE FUTURE

of society who are eager for civil peer-to-peer discussion but are concerned with the lack of such conversation in our busy everyday lives.

Every third Thursday of the month, the Kardashian-Free Conversation Club offers an open forum for you and your peers to talk through topics that range from automation’s effects on the job market to climate change.

Here’s how it works: Before the event, members select a single news topic to focus on.

When a topic is chosen, the moderators will send out relevant materials, including podcasts, news articles, short videos and an easyto-read fact sheet with the bare necessities. So even if you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can quickly be brought up to speed and join

Keynote Introduction: Norman Mineta, Secretary (Ret.), U.S. Department of Transportation Featured Speaker: Asha Agrawal, Ph.D., Director, Mineta Transportation Institute National Transportation Finance Center Moderator: Karen Philbrick, Ph.D., Executive Director, Mineta Transportation Institute Additional Panelists TBA

While the San Francisco Bay Area is booming with jobs and (for many) high wages, people are increasingly priced out of the housing market. The region risks losing people to fill jobs that are essential to California’s economy.

A variety of taxes, grants, fees and other public revenue sources can help fund affordable housing. Moreover, an innovative solution is to involve public transportation agencies. To that end, agency-owned land in and around transportation hubs could be incentivized to create transit-oriented development projects, which place high-density housing above or adjacent to transit centers. This provides easy mobility while offering less-costly living space.

These and other innovations will be discussed at this free, half day summit.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 8:15 a.m. check-in and continental breakfast, 9-11:30 a.m. program • Notes: Free program; please register by Thursday, June 20 at noon; underwritten by the Mineta Transportation Institute

MONDAY, JUNE 24 MIDDLE EAST FORUM DISCUSSION

This discussion group, which primarily covers the Middle East, North Africa and Mineta Transportation Summit 6/21

JUNE/JULY 2019

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Jonna Mendez 6/25

Afghanistan, has been meeting for more than 10 years.

We discuss political and cultural subjects in a civil atmosphere, with respect for others and their opinions, and welcome those interested in joining our conversation.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 4:30 p.m. check-in, 5 p.m. program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

STANDING ROCK, CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL

Daniel Sheehan, Constitutional and Public Interest Lawyer; General Counsel, Lakota People’s Law Project; President and General Counsel, the Romero Institute; Author, The Public Advocate

In 2015, representatives of 193 nations gathered in Paris, agreed that global climate change is underway and that our use of fossil fuels is a primary cause, and set goals to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. President Trump ignored these agreements; overturned environmental protection standards; ordered the commencement of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone Pipeline; and opened national parks, Indian reservations and coastal protected areas to the extraction of oil, coal and natural gas. The dramatic opposition at Standing Rock by the Lakota people, other Native Americans and environmentalists inspired many to call for a Green New Deal.

Sheehan, known for his public advocacy on the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the Karen Silkwood Case, the American sanctuary movement case and the Iran–Contra scandal, will address this pivotal moment in history.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

TUESDAY, JUNE 25 JONNA MENDEZ

Jonna Mendez, Former Chief of Disguise, CIA; Co-Author, The Moscow Rules: The Secret CIA Tactics that Helped American Win the Cold War

The action-packed, technology-filled life of spies can be intoxicating to read about or watch on TV. Nowadays, it is hard to imagine these kinds of scenes playing out in real life— but for Jonna Mendez, a former covert operative in the Soviet Union and former chief of disguise for the CIA, everything from complex

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THE WAR FOR KINDNESS

Jamil Zaki, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University; Director, Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab; Author, The War for Kindness

Are Americans suffering from an “empathy deficit,” as Barack Obama claimed in 2006?

Studies do show that we are less caring than we were even 30 years ago. But Jamil Zaki argues that empathy is not a fixed trait we’re born with. It’s a skill we can all strengthen through effort. Drawing on both classic and cutting-edge research, including experiments from his own lab, Zaki shows how we can overcome toxic cultural divisions. He also tells the stories of people who are living these prindisguises to “Spiderman” rappelling technolociples—fighting for kindness in the most diffigy to high-speed car chases were part of her cult of circumstances. daily life.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The EmbarHer new book, The Moscow Rules: The Secret cadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San CIA Tactics That Helped America Win the Cold Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m.

War, recounts the most exciting parts of the program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanjob, as well as the moments with the highest ities • Program organizer: George Hammond • stakes for U.S. interests. Together with her Notes: This program is the latest in our memco-author and husband Antonio Mendez, she ber-led forums’ 2019 summer series: The Art explains the techniques and technologies that and Science of Well-Being; Zaki photo by Sarah helped the Americans get one step ahead of the Deragon KGB. Join us for a conversation with a real-life spy GEORGE WILL about her experiences as a covert operative and George Will, Columnist, The Washington her role in the advancement of the American Post; Author, The Conservative Sensibility; intelligence strategy that helped America win Twitter @GeorgeWill For more than four decades, George F. Will the Cold War. SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar- has attempted to discern the principles of the cadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francis- western political tradition and apply them co • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, to America’s civic life. Today, vital questions 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: This program is about the nature of humanity, rights, equalipart of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the ty and majority rule are bubbling just beneath Bernard Osher Foundation the surface of daily events in America.

The founders’ vision, articulated first in the WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26 Declaration of Independence and carried out WEEKLY CLUB TOUR in the Constitution, gave the new republic a Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., we’re giving framework for government unique in world members and nonmembers behind-the-scenes history. Their beliefs in natural rights, limited tours of our home at 110 The Embarcade- government, religious freedom, and in human ro. Join us for a complimentary tour of our virtue and dignity ushered in two centuries of beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s American prosperity. Now, Will argues, conwaterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering servatism is under threat—both from progresspace, which features a rooftop terrace with sives and elements inside the GOP. America unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San has become an administrative state, while deFrancisco Bay, you can learn about our storied structive trends have overtaken family life and history and the many amenities of being a higher education; semiautonomous executive Club member. agencies wield essentially unaccountable powSpace is limited, so reserve your spot now to er; Congress has failed in its duty to exercise visit San Francisco’s newest—and oldest—cul- its legislative powers; and the executive branch tural treasure at our new location. has slipped the Constitution’s leash.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: Marines’ Memorial Theatre, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m.

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

book signing • Notes: Will photo by Victoria Will; this program is part of our Ethics and Accountability series, underwritten by the Travers Family Foundation

THURSDAY, JUNE 27 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 6/27/19

Speaker TBA Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV); Twitter @msmichellemeow John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable, The Commonwealth Club

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinating—and often controversial—people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready.

See topics and speaker details at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

THE INCREDIBLE SLIP MADIGAN

the game in the 1920s and 1930s at Saint Mary’s College of California. He was the first mainland coach to play a game in Hawaii and also to travel coast to coast by train to meet an opponent, thereby putting the tiny St. Mary’s on the national map. He was foremost in his innovative thinking by playing at night and on Sundays. His teams scored more upsets, dressed more flamboyantly and drew record crowds, even without a campus stadium, while defeating college powerhouses with much larger student bodies. He was a coach who couldn’t be denied. Besides his achievements on the football field, he built St. Mary’s campus in Moraga, California with the financial success of his football teams. His Galloping Gaels were the definition of the mouse that roared. Come learn more about this one-of-a-kind coach.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: International Relations • Program organizer: Linda Calhoun

MONDAY, JULY 8

Dave Newhouse, Sports Journalist; Colum- WHEN REPUBLICANS WERE nist, Oakland Tribune; Author, The Incredible PROGRESSIVE Dave Durenberger, U.S. Senator from MinSlip Madigan Edward Patrick “Slip” Madigan was a foot- nesota (1978–1995); Retired Chair, National ball coach who was far ahead of his time, yet Institute of Health Policy, Co-Author, When Republicans Were Progressive he was also a coach for all time, modernizing In Conversation with George Hammond, Author, Conversations with Socrates; Son of a Wisconsin Progressive Republican Mayor

Monday Night Philosophy revives an almost forgotten aspect of 20th century American politics, played out mostly in the Midwest.

The progressive Republican Party that came to power in Minnesota with Harold Stassen’s election in 1938 had already faded into near obscurity by the 1990s, but Minnesota’s modern success story sprang from the ideas and ideals of that dynamic political movement, which emphasized effective government. Issues that are anathema to today’s GOP—environmental protection, assistance for vulnerable citizens and economic opportunity for low-wage workers and the middle class—were at the heart of the party’s agenda. Minnesota Republicans held that working across the aisle was a mark of strength, not of weakness or disloyalty.

Senator Dave Durenberger grew up in and helped build that party and explains how Minnesota’s progressive Republicans earned voters’ trust and delivered on their promises. Progressive Republican ideas only fell out of favor when an increasingly anti-government, anti-tax George Will 6/26

national party shifted Republican thinking to the right. In the ensuing partisan realignment, both the Republican and the Democratic parties have lost public trust. Durenberger argues that the principles and practices of progressive Republicanism are a fitting remedy for what ails American democracy today.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

TUESDAY, JULY 9 WHY GREAT WORKPLACES ARE BETTER FOR EMPLOYEES, INVESTORS AND SOCIETY

Emilie Aries, Speaker; Podcast Host; Founder; Author, Bossed Up Michael C. Bush, CEO, Great Place to Work; Author, A Great Place to Work for All; Investor; Teacher; Media Commentator R. Paul Herman, CEO and Founder, HIP Investor Ratings + Portfolios; Author, The Hip Investor: Make Bigger Profits by Building A Better World

These three compelling authors show the value of great places to work and how people are truly an asset to investors and society.

Michael C. Bush will explore what makes a company a great place to work. Emilie Aries provides understanding and tips to keep employees from burning out. R. Paul Herman explains how you can invest to pursue higher human impact and profit potential. See how you could enrich your understanding of how people-focused companies make the world better and how you can benefit.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Business & Leadership • Program organizer: Elizabeth Carney • Notes: In partnership with Presidio Graduate School

WEDNESDAY, JULY 10 WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., we’re giving members and nonmembers behind-the-scenes tours of our home at 110 The Embarcadero. Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member.

JUNE/JULY 2019

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Space is limited, so reserve your spot now to to infants as if they are adults. Allow teenagvisit San Francisco’s newest—and oldest—cul- ers to pick projects that relate to the real world and their own passions, and let them figure tural treasure at our new location.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embar- out how to complete them. Above all, let your cadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 child lead. She offers essential lessons for raisp.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour ing, educating and managing people to their highest potential. Change your parenting, ESTHER WOJCICKI change the world.

Esther Wojcicki, Educator; Author, How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results; Twitter @EstherWojcicki In Conversation with Roy Eisenhardt, Lecturer, UC Berkeley Law School

Esther Wojcicki—“Woj” to her many friends and admirers—is famous for three things: teaching a high school class that has changed the lives of thousands of kids, inspiring Silicon Valley legends such as Steve Jobs, and raising three daughters who have each become famously successful. What do these three accomplishments have in common? They’re the result of TRICK, Woj’s secret to raising successful people: Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration and Kindness. Simple lessons, but the results are radical.

Wojcicki’s methods are the opposite of helicopter parenting. As we face an epidemic of parental anxiety, Woj is here to say: relax. Talk

and other major news, and we’ll have audience discussion of the week’s events and our live news quiz! Come early before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our members social (open to all attendees).

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing • Notes: Wojcicki photo

SAN FRANCISCO • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in and social hour, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: Each attendee will receive 2 free drink tickets for a glass of wine or a soft drink

by Jo Sittenfeld

during our social hour

THURSDAY, JULY 11

WEEK TO WEEK POLITICAL ROUNDTABLE 7/10/19

THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 7/11/19

Join us as we discuss the biggest, most controversial and sometimes the surprising political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil and have a good sense of humor. Our panelists will provide informative and engaging commentary on political

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinating—and often controversial—people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready.

See topics and speaker details at common-

Panelists TBA Speaker TBA John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Ed- Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow itorial, The Commonwealth Club—Host Show” (Radio and KBCW TV); Twitter @msmiCome in out of the fog and let us clear up chellemeow—Co-Host things for you, at least as far as politics is con- John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable—Co-Host cerned.

Donate to the Club’s 2019 Annual Fund

Every year, we connect the changemakers of today and the leaders of tomorrow with people across the globe who are hungry for information and inspiration.

But we can’t do it alone.

Please give generously to the Club’s Annual Fund, and help strengthen the foundation of the oldest—and newest—cultural institution in the Bay Area.

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Visit commonwealth.org/memberfund and donate today.

THE COMMO N WE AL TH

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

wealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

RUSSIAN HILL WALKING TOUR

Join a more active Commonwealth Club neighborhood adventure! Russian Hill is a magical area with secret gardens and amazing views. Join Rick Evans for a “cardio hike” up hills and staircases and learn about the history of this neighborhood. See where great artists and architects lived and worked, and walk down residential streets where some of the most historically significant houses in the Bay Area are located.

SF • Location: Swensen’s Ice Cream, 1999 Hyde St., San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: Take Muni (Bus 45) or a taxi; there is absolutely no parking on Russian Hill; please take a taxi or public transport; the tour ends about six blocks from Swensen’s Ice Cream, at the corner of Vallejo and Jones; it is an easy walk down to North Beach from there; there are steep hills and staircases; the tour is recommended for good walkers only; the tour operates rain or shine; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not be sold at checkin; walks with fewer than six participants will be canceled (you will receive notification of this at least three days in advance)

COSMOLOGICAL KOANS

Anthony Aguirre, Professor of Physics, University of California Santa Cruz; Co-Founder, Foundational Questions Institute; Author, Cosmological Koans

and Science of Well-Being; Aguirre photo copyright Anthony Aguirre

IMPERFECT CIRCLES

MONDAY, JULY 15 SHAKESPEARE IN PRISON

Dameion Brown, Former Artist-in-Residence, George Hammond, Author, Conversations Marin Shakespeare Company with Socrates and Rational Idealism—ModMarin Shakespeare Company’s Shakespeare erator in Prison program originated in San Quentin

Are you a person who never tires of talking or thinking about philosophical, scientific or religious theories? Are you interested in psychological insights—or attempts at such insights—into human life? There are many who would insist that being realistic about human life means you should ignore such fundamental questions—starting around the time the ink dries on your diploma. But it is unrealistic to ignore the fundamental explanatory concepts which underlie each successful human civilization; these concepts sometimes help and sometimes hinder us in our pursuit of happiness. Such profound questions are naturally provoked simply by living an alert life.

There are millions of realistic people, of all ages and walks of life, who also find it impossible to delegate to one infallible authority or another the task of providing all the answers to such questions. Life is not totally chaotic, even though it looks that way sometimes.

Therefore, it’s helpful to be aware of any subtle patterns to our experiences. Rejoin the continuing conversation of human civilization—this time at the Club.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6:15 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

Cosmological Koans invites you to take an intellectual journey through more than 50 koans: pleasingly paradoxical vignettes following the ancient Zen tradition. Anthony Aguirre traverses the world from West to East, and through ideas spanning the age, breadth and depth of the universe.

Using beguiling koans and a flair for explaining complex science, Aguirre covers cosmic questions that thinkers from Aristotle to Galileo to Heisenberg have grappled with.

Aguirre explores the strange hinterland between the deep structure of the physical world and our personal experience of it.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: This program is the latest in our member-led forums’ 2019 summer series: The Art

Esther Wojcicki 7/10

in 2003 and has since expanded to include 13 facilities throughout the state. Former inmate Dameion Brown relates the transformative impact of finding Shakespeare at Solano State Prison and how it changed his life, the lives of those around him and the institution itself.

Brown’s voice is objective, informative and compelling and is a testament to the power of arts in correctional facilities. Outlining his personal growth through the power of arts, Brown also shares eye-opening insight into the criminal justice system.

Along with fellow actor and educator LeMar “Maverick” Harrison, Brown is one of two formerly incarcerated artists-in-residence

at Marin Shakespeare Company. Brown served 23 years in prison and studied Shakespeare at Solano State Prison with Marin Shakespeare Company’s Lesley Currier for one year before being paroled in 2015. Making his professional stage debut with Marin Shakespeare Company’s 2016 production of “Othello,” his performance in the title role received numerous accolades, including a Bay Area Critics Circle Award as best principal actor. Brown has since become a sought-after Bay Area actor, has been nominated for other awards, and has performed with Marin Shakespeare Company as Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” and in the title role as Pericles. In 2019, he will play Oberon in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Brown also teaches at-risk youth through Marin Shakespeare Company’s program at two youth correctional facilities. By sharing his experience, learning and artistic perspective with young people, Brown presents inspiring visions and guidance to those at risk in a way that is relatable, impactful and positive.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Fran-

cisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Psychology • Program organizer: Patrick O’Reilly

TUESDAY, JULY 16

USING SHAREHOLDER ADVOCACY TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER TOM SIEBEL Tom Siebel, CEO, C3.ai; Author, Digital Trans- PLACE

Andrew Behar, CEO, As You Sow; Author, The Shareholders Action Guide: Unleash Your The confluence of four technologies—elas- Hidden Powers to Hold Corporations Actic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelli- countable formation: Survive and Thrive in an Era of Mass Extinction; Twitter @TomSiebel

gence (AI) and the Internet of things (IoT)— says Tom Siebel, is fundamentally changing how business and government will operate in the 21st century.

Siebel will guide us through a fascinating discussion of the game-changing technologies driving digital transformation and provide a roadmap to seize them as a strategic opportunity. He will show how leading enterprises such as Enel, 3M, Royal Dutch Shell, the U.S. Department of Defense and others are applying AI and IoT with stunning results.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

SOCRATES CAFÉ

The Humanities Forum sponsors Socrates Café at The Commonwealth Club. Each meeting is devoted to the discussion of a philosophical topic chosen at that meeting. The group’s facilitator, John Nyquist, invites participants to suggest topics, which are then voted on. The person who proposed the most popular topic briefly explains why she or he considers that topic interesting and important. An open discussion follows, and the meeting ends with a summary of the various perspectives expressed.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30–8 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond

As You Sow is a national nonprofit leader in shareholder advocacy. Founded in 1992, the organization harnesses shareholder power to create lasting change that benefits people, planet and profit. Its mission is to promote environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy, coalition building and innovative legal strategies. The vision of the organization is a safe, just and sustainable world in which protecting the environment and human rights is central to corporate decision-making. Andrew Behar will discuss how current and emerging technologies impact communities and society and how a wider dialogue can raise issues and lead to solutions that can make the world a better place for all.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program, 7 p.m. book signing • MLF: Technology & Society • Program organizer: Gerald Harris

WEDNESDAY, JULY 17 WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., we’re giving members and nonmembers behind-the-scenes tours of our home at 110 The Embarcadero. Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member.

Space is limited, so reserve your spot now to visit San Francisco’s newest—and oldest—cultural treasure at our new location.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

ASTRONOMER ANDREW FRAKNOI: 50 YEARS SINCE OUR FIRST STEP

Andrew Fraknoi, Chair Emeritus, Astronomy Department, Foothill College; Former Executive Director, Astronomical Society of the Pacific

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THE COMMO N WE AL TH

Tom Siebel 7/15

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

What do we know about the moon?

July 20, 2019 is the 50th anniversary of humanity’s first steps on the surface of the moon.

In that time, the Apollo missions, a fleet of robotic probes and observations from Earth have taught us a lot about Earth’s surprising satellite.

In this non-technical talk, Andrew Fraknoi, who is sometimes called the Bay Area’s public astronomer, will look at the past, present and future of the moon, including its violent origins, the mystery of the frozen water we have found at its poles and its long-term future as it moves farther and farther away from us. Illustrated with beautiful images taken from orbit and on the surface, his talk will make the moon come alive as an eerie world next door, as a changing object in our skies and as a possible future destination for humanity and its ambitions. Come find out how the achievements of the Apollo program fit into the bigger picture of our involvement with our only natural satellite.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, JULY 18 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 7/18/19

Speaker TBA Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)—Co-Host John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable—Co-Host

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinating—and often controversial—people discussing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ community, and have your questions ready.

See this week’s topic and speaker details at commonwealthclub.org/mms.

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

SEDUCTION AND SATIETY: UNDER THE HOOD OF THE BRAIN CIRCUITS THAT DRIVE US TO OVEREAT

Stephan J. Guyenet, Researcher; Science Consultant; Science Communicator; Author, The Hungry Brain; Founder and Director, Red Pen Reviews

No one wants to overeat. And certainly no one wants to overeat for years, become overweight, and end up with a high risk of diabetes or heart disease—yet two-thirds of Americans do precisely that. Why does our behavior be-

tray our best intentions to eat healthy foods in moderation? The reason is that our appetites and food choices are led astray by ancient, instinctive brain circuits that play by the rules of a survival game that no longer exists. These circuits don’t care about how you look in a bathing suit next summer.

Join Stephan J. Guyenet for an exploration of some of these circuits and how they conspire with our modern food environment to expand our waistlines.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6 p.m. program • MLF: Health & Medicine • Program organizer: Patty James

THE KARDASHIAN-FREE CONVERSATION CLUB

Charles DeLoach, Miri Miller, and James Xiao moderators

This program is for all curious members of society who are eager for civil peer-to-peer discussion but are concerned with the lack of such conversation in our busy everyday lives.

Every third Thursday of the month, the Kardashian-Free Conversation Club offers an open forum for you and your peers to talk through topics that range from automation’s effects on the job market to climate change.

Here’s how it works: Before the event, members elect a single news topic to focus on. When a topic is chosen, the moderators will send out relevant materials, including podcasts, news articles, short videos and an easy-to-read fact sheet with the bare necessities. So even if you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can quickly be brought up to speed and join the conversation. The goal is to have an informal but informative discussion where anyone can speak and everyone will listen. Bring your curiosity, your ideas and the desire to talk about anything but the Kardashians.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6–7:45 p.m. program • MLF: Humanities • Program organizer: George Hammond • Notes: If you’d like to be added to the mailing list so you can receive the resources ahead of time, please email info@kardashianfreeconvos.com

TUESDAY, JULY 23 RICHARD CLARKE

Richard Clarke, Former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism; Co-Author, The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Com-

panies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats; Twitter @richardclarke

There is much to fear in the dark corners of cyberspace. From well-covered stories such as the Stuxnet attack, which helped slow Iran’s nuclear program, to lesser-known tales such as EternalBlue, the 2017 cyber battle that closed hospitals in Britain and froze shipping crates in Germany in midair, we have entered an age in which online threats carry real-world consequences. But we do not have to let autocrats and criminals run amok in the digital realm.

We now know a great deal about how to make cyberspace far less dangerous—and about how to defend our security, economy, democracy and privacy from cyber attack.

Clarke will take us inside quantum-computing labs racing to develop cyber superweapons, bring us into the boardrooms of the many firms that have been hacked and the few that have not, and walk us through the corridors of the U.S. intelligence community with officials working to defend America’s elections from foreign malice.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

WEDNESDAY, JULY 24 WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

We’re giving members and nonmembers behind-the-scenes tours of our home at 110 The Embarcadero. Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

WEEK TO WEEK POLITICAL ROUNDTABLE 7/24/19

Panelists TBA John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Host

Join us for a midsummer’s dream of political conversation.

We will discuss the biggest, most controversial and sometimes the surprising political issues with expert commentary by panelists who are smart, are civil and have a good sense of humor. Our panelists will provide informative JUNE/JULY 2019

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and engaging commentary on political and other major news, and we’ll have audience discussion of the week’s events and our live news quiz!

And show up before the program to meet other smart and engaged individuals and discuss the news over snacks and wine at our members social (open to all attendees).

SAN FRANCISCO • WEEK TO WEEK PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in and social hour, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: Each attendee will receive 2 free drink tickets for a glass of wine or a soft drink during our social hour

Roundtable—Co-Host

be sold at check-in; walks with fewer than six

SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30

Rebecca Tinsley, Human Rights Activist; Author

Join us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s participants will be canceled (you will receive nolong-running daily radio show. Meet fascinat- tification of this at least three days in advance) ing—and often controversial—people discussFRIDAY, JULY 26 ing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ WILL U.S. WITHDRAWAL FROM community, and have your questions ready.

See this week’s topic and speaker details at THE MIDDLE EAST PUT ISIS BACK commonwealthclub.org/mms.

IN BUSINESS?

a.m. check-in, noon program

WATERFRONT WALKING TOUR

Join Rick Evans for his walking tour exploring the historic sites of the waterfront neighborhood that surrounds The Commonwealth THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 7/25/19 Club’s headquarters. Hear the dynamic stories Speaker TBA of the entrepreneurs, controversial artists and Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow labor organizers who created this recently reviShow” (Radio and KBCW TV)—Co-Host John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political talized neighborhood. This tour will give you a lively overview of the historic significance of this neighborhood and a close look at the ongoing development.

THURSDAY, JULY 25

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. checkin, 2–4:30 p.m. walk • Notes: The tour operates rain or shine; tickets must be purchased in advance and will not

Rebecca Tinsley will discuss her assertions that the United States’ withdrawal from Iraq and the region will result in a resurgence of the Islamic State (aka ISIS) and a security vacuum, which Iran and Turkey will fill, allowing them to take over Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. She will also discuss her concerns that the already marginalized Sunni Arabs and Christian, Kurdish and Yazidi minorities will suffer the most.

Tinsley, a former BBC reporter, has founded charities to help survivors of genocide from Darfur, Rwanda and Uganda and was asked

by President Jimmy Carter to start the Carter Center in the United Kingdom. Recently, she has worked with Iraqi refugees suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

MONDAY, JULY 29 MIDDLE EAST FORUM DISCUSSION

This discussion group has been meeting for over 10 years. We do not debate. We discuss political and cultural subjects in a civil atmosphere with respect for others and their opinions. Those interested in contributing to our conversation and learning more about the regions we cover are encouraged to attend.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 4:30 p.m. check-in, 5 p.m. program • MLF: Middle East • Program organizer: Celia Menczel

WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 WEEKLY CLUB TOUR

Every Wednesday at 2 p.m., we’re giving members and nonmembers behind-the-scenes tours of our home at 110 The Embarcadero. Join us for a complimentary tour of our beautiful new headquarters on San Francisco’s waterfront. At our state-of-the-art gathering space, which features a rooftop terrace with unobstructed views of the Bay Bridge and San

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Reframing Elderhood 7/31

For current prices, call 415.597.6705 or go to commonwealthclub.org

Francisco Bay, you can learn about our storied history and the many amenities of being a Club member.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Osher Lobby, San Francisco • Time: 1:45 p.m. check-in, 2–3 p.m. tour

REFRAMING ELDERHOOD

munity Theatre, 4000 Middlefield Rd. (near Montrose & Middlefield), Palo Alto • Time: 6:30 p.m. check-in, 7 p.m. program • Notes: In association with Wonderfest

THURSDAY, AUGUST 1 THE MICHELLE MEOW SHOW 8/1/19

FRIDAY, JUNE 14 REP. ERIC SWALWELL: PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

Eric Swalwell, U.S. Representative for District 15 (D-CA); 2020 Presidential Candidate Marisa Lagos, Reporter for California Politics and Government, KQED

Speaker TBA Rep. Eric Swalwell launched his presidential Louise Aronson, M.D., Geriatrician; Educa- Michelle Meow, Host, “The Michelle Meow campaign in April. His announcement is antor; Professor of Medicine, UC San Francisco; Show” (Radio and KBCW TV)—Co-Host other marker of the generational shift emergAuthor, Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Trans- John Zipperer, Host, Week to Week Political ing in the 2020 election. forming Medicine, Reimagining Life and A Roundtable—Co-Host SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • LoJoin us for a taping of Michelle Meow’s cation: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family History of the Present Illness Jenara Nerenberg, Journalist, UC Berkeley’s long-running daily radio show. Meet fascinat- Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m.

Greater Good Science Center; Author, Diver- ing—and often controversial—people discuss- check-in, 6:30 p.m. program gent Mind—Moderator ing important issues of interest to the LGBTQ

Louise Aronson has received numerous awards for her medical work, teaching, educational research and writing. In Elderhood, Aronson urges a large-scale shift in society and medicine’s attitudes toward aging, and offers a powerful roadmap for how we all approach old age. She shares anecdotes from her 25 years of caring for patients and her own experiences of getting older and watching her parents age.

She also draws from history, science, literature and popular culture to offer hope about aging, medicine and humanity itself.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Toni Rembe Rock Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 4:45 p.m. check-in, 5:15 p.m. program • MLF: Grownups • Program organizer: Denise Michaud • Notes: Aronson photo by Anna Kuperberg

ADAM GAZZALEY AND ROBERT STRONG: THE NEUROSCIENCE OF MAGIC

Adam Gazzaley, Professor of Neurology, University of California San Francisco; Executive Director, Neuroscape; Twitter @adamgazz Robert Strong, The Comedy Magician; Twitter @RobertStrong

community, and have your questions ready.

THURSDAY, JUNE 20 See this week’s topic and speaker details at ED LEVINE: SERIOUS EATER commonwealthclub.org/mms.

Ed Levine, Founder, SeriousEats.com; Author, SAN FRANCISCO • MICHELLE MEOW PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Max Thelen Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program

LATE-BREAKING PROGRAMS MONDAY, JUNE 3 CITIES FOR THE FUTURE: WHERE LIFE MEETS DESIGN

Jan Gehl, Architect and Founding Partner, Gehl Architects Laura Crescimano, Co-Founder and Principal, SiteLab Urban Studio Greg Dalton, Founder and Host, Climate One

SILICON VALLEY • Location: Cubberley Com-

Food blog Serious Eats has combined storytelling and culinary expertise to become one of the most acclaimed food sites in the world.

SAN FRANCISCO • INFORUM PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 5:30 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program • Notes: Part of our Food Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation

What goes into designing a sustainable city that can withstand the challenges of cars, cli- MONDAY, JUNE 24 JIM SCIUTTO mate change and rapid population growth?

SAN FRANCISCO • CLIMATE ONE PROGRAM • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Auditorium, San Francisco • Time: 7 p.m. checkin, 7:30 p.m. program, 8:30 p.m. networking reception

THURSDAY, JUNE 6 From ancient conjurers to quick-handed MAMUKA BAKHTADZE, PRIME con artists to Las Vegas illusionists, magicians MINISTER OF GEORGIA throughout the ages have been expertly manipulating human attention and perception to dazzle and delight us. The phenomena of cognitive and sensory illusions are responsible for the “magic” of a magic trick, but how and why? Meet neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley and magician Robert Strong as they team up to demonstrate how magicians use our brains as their accomplices in effecting the impossible— and explain what scientists can learn about the brain by studying the methods and techniques of magic.

Serious Eater: A Food Lover’s Perilous Quest for Pizza and Redemption J. Kenji López-Alt, Chef; Chief Culinary Consultant, SeriousEats.com; Columnist, “The Food Lab”

Mamuka Bakhtadze, Prime Minister, Country of Georgia

Bakhtadze will address U.S.-Georgia bilateral relations. He will also discuss Georgia’s championing of sustainable and inclusive economic development and provide a perspective on advancing America’s commercial interests in Eurasia and beyond.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 11:30 a.m. check-in, noon program • Notes: In association with World Affairs of Northern California; attendees subject to Search

Jim Sciutto, Chief National Security Correspondent, CNN; Anchor, “CNN Newsroom”; Author, The Shadow War: Inside Russia’s and China’s Secret Operations to Defeat America

China and Russia (and Iran and North Korea) are carrying out bold acts of aggression and violating international laws and norms.

SAN FRANCISCO • Location: 110 The Embarcadero, Taube Family Boardroom, San Francisco • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program, 7:30 p.m. book signing

THURSDAY, JULY 25 DEBORAH LIPSTADT ON ANTISEMITISM

Deborah Lipstadt, Author, Antisemitism: Here and Now

What can be done to combat the latest manifestation of an ancient hatred?

SAN FRANCISCO • MARIN CONVERSATIONS PROGRAM • Location: Congregation Kol Shofar, 215 Blackfield Dr, Tiburon, CA • Time: 6 p.m. check-in, 6:30 p.m. program JUNE/JULY 2019

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INSIGHT

The Dis-United Methodist Church Dr. Gloria C. Duffy, President and CEO

T

he Methodist Church is the second largest Protestant denomination in the United States and in the world, with more than 12 million members in its most prominent component, the United Methodist Church. For many years, the church has had a stated position that homosexuality is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”

But in the United States, despite this assertion, LGBTQ clergy have been ordained and same-sex unions have been blessed in the United Methodist Church. A married lesbian, Karen Oliveto, serves as the ordained Bishop of the Mountain Sky region of the United Methodist Church, including Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Utah and some of Idaho.

A worldwide general conference of the United Methodist Church, meeting in St. Louis in March, voted to reiterate and enforce the church’s policy against LGBTQ clergy and marriages. A church Judicial Council, which met in April, upheld the decision. Under this ban, LGBTQ clergy could be tried and suspended or defrocked for practicing their sexual orientation or even excommunicated for performing gay marriages. The full set of resolutions is here: umc. org/what-we-believe/ask-the-umc-what-did-the-judicial-council-decideabout-the-traditional-plan.

My great-uncle, Dr. Freeman Redinger, was a leader in the Methodist church—a minister, district superintendent, and dean of a ministerial college. My grandmother, mother and I have all continued in the Methodist tradition, belonging to the Lafayette United Methodist Church.

The slogan of the United Methodist Church is “open hearts, open minds, open doors.” The church I know preaches a message of tolerance and inclusion. Among the large and tolerant Methodist churches in the Bay Area is San Francisco’s Glide Memorial, known for celebrating diversity and ministering to the needy. In this version of the Methodist church, one tries to live a joyful life of service to others and respects all differences among people.

It is widely embodied in American society and U.S. laws that discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, physical or any other inherent characteristic is wrong. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the right of gay people to marry.

Among the Methodists I know, the reaction to the church’s recent declaration has been one of disbelief. Many clergy are distressed. The Bishop of Northern California and Nevada, Minerva Carcano, has said, “How can love for God be true when we reject those whom God has also created and called good? I believe that the full inclusion of ALL God’s children is the necessary first step to being the church God calls us to be.”

There is discussion of the church splitting into separate denominations, and the pronouncements this spring outlined an “exit plan” for individual churches to leave. Church leaders worry about an exodus

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from the church by LGBTQ members and their supporters.

One explanation for the exclusionary action of the United Methodist Church is the composition of the Methodist General Conference and Judicial Council. Both are weighted in favor of the conservative churches in the U.S. South and Midwest, with 5.6 million members, and heavily populated with representatives from the Photo courtesy of Gloria Duffy 5.3-million strong African churches.

Thirty percent of Methodists worldwide are in Africa, where attitudes toward homosexuality are less tolerant than elsewhere in the world. The United Methodist Church in the more tolerant American West and Northeast has only around 1.5 million members.

None of the 8-member Judicial Council appears to be LGBTQ, and none of them appear to represent the broader American Methodist church, where 60 percent of members overall believe that homosexuality should be accepted.

One can’t help but wonder whether the overall climate of intolerance we are experiencing in the United States and worldwide, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright noted in her book Fascism: A Warning, is a factor in the timing of the decision.

Methodist church members are torn over whether to stay in the church or leave. When I think about this decision, I think of my husband’s and my close friend, former member of Congress and presidential cabinet member Norm Mineta.

In explaining why he went into politics, Norm frequently refers to his childhood in the Heart Mountain Internment Camp in Wyoming, where he was sent, at age 10, with his family as a Japanese-American detainee during World War II. He points out that at the time of the internment decision, there wasn’t a single Asian-American member of Congress. He explains that he went into politics, and has helped other Asian-American candidates, so that if a policy directly affecting Asian-Americans were on the table again, he and other Asian-Americans would have input into the decision.

My response toward the intolerance in the United Methodist Church is similar to Norm’s view. Before churches begin to secede from the denomination or congregants begin to leave, tolerant Methodists, including LGBTQ Methodists, need to try to get more seats at the table, in the Methodist General Conference and Judicial Council and other church bodies, so decisions like the recent one cannot stand. If the formulas for representation are weighted against tolerant Methodists, the formulas need to change. The cause of tolerance isn’t only important in our own personal environments, but in the institutions in our society as a whole.

Journey Through Vietnam SEPTEMBER 5-19, 2019 Highlights: • Experience the French-accented capital Hanoi and take a full-day excursion to scenic Ha Long Bay.

• Explore the tributaries and floating markets of the storied Mekong River Delta.

• See Da Nang’s acclaimed Cham Museum and explore the nearby colorful village of Hoi An, where many traditions hold sway.

• Conclude in bustling Saigon with tours of Reunification Palace, the History Museum, and the underground Cu Chi Tunnels.

• Visit the imperial capital Hue, once home to emperors.

• Learn from expert guides and guest speakers along the way.

• Cruise the Perfume River to peaceful Thien Mu Pagoda, a significant Buddhist monastery.

• A 3-day/2-night optional post-tour extension to Cambodia to explore the incredible temples of Angkor is also available.

Limited to 24 people maximum. Cost is $4,897 per person, in double occupancy and including economy air from SFO.

CST: 2096889-40

Brochure at commonwealthclub.org/travel

| 415.597.6720

|

travel@commonwealthclub.org

To purchase tickets:

The Commonwealth Club of California

visit commonwealthclub.org or call (415) 597-6705 or call (800) 847-7730

P.O. Box 194210 San Francisco, CA 94119

Periodicals postage paid in San Francisco, California

To subscribe to our email newsletter: visit commonwealthclub.org and use the simple “Be the First to Know” feature on the homepage

TUESDAY, JUNE 4

Details on page 38

MONDAY, JUNE 10

88TH ANNUAL CALIFORNIA BOOK AWARDS

GEORGE P. SHULTZ

George P. Shultz, Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution; Former U.S. Secretary of State; Author, Thinking About the Future

Since 1931, the California Book Awards have honored the exceptional literary merit of California writers and publishers. Each year a select jury considers hundreds of books from around the state in search of the very best in literary achievement.

In conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club

In the more than half a century since George P. Shultz entered public life, the world has changed dramatically.

But he remains guided by the belief that “you can learn about the future— or at least relate to it—by studying the past and identifying principles that have continuing application to our lives and our world.” Here’s a rare chance to hear from one of America’s most respected statesmen.

SATURDAY, JUNE 15

Details on page 42

ASH CARTER

Details on page 40

Come meet this year’s winners and celebrate the best of the state’s literary output.

TUESDAY, JUNE 18

Details on page 44

ELAINE WELTEROTH

Ash Carter, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense; Author, Inside the Five-Sided Box: Lessons from a Lifetime of Leadership in the Pentagon

Author, More Than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say); Judge, “Project Runway”; Former Editor in Chief, Teen Vogue

In conversation with Dr. Gloria Duffy, President and CEO, The Commonwealth Club

Welteroth, the youngest person to serve as editor in chief in Condé Nast’s 107-year history, led Teen Vogue in a new, fresh direction that allowed her young staff to create content centered on not only fashion and beauty, but also politics, social activism, world news and other topics that painted a more realistic, well-rounded picture of teen life.

Join us for a conversation with America’s 25th secretary of defense about what really goes on inside the Pentagon—that mysterious five-sided box, and how people are learning to think outside it.

Now she is chronicling her life as a pioneer in media and inspiring a new generation of trailblazers.