I have just been loving the format and guests on the Commonwealth Club podcasts, and strongly recommend them to you. They apparently are a West Coast fixture from decades back, but I only became aware of them when I came across their recordings in the iTunes Music Store. The format, typically, is a too-long, too-fawning intro, followed by perhaps a 20-minute speech, followed by questions from the audience. They profess to be nonpartisan and the presentation respects the claim, but the lefty-dominated San Franciscans in attendance tend to tilt the proceedings. Since I'm a lefty too, I'm OK with that. The subjects often are on book tours, so there's a talk-show-circuit sameness there, but one balance to that is that they rarely stray into pop culture. One of their current missions is to cover environmental topics, making it a valuable resource in that way, too. Recent speakers whose talks I've held onto for second listening were Adam Werbach, Gary Hirshberg (Stonyfield yogurt), and Frances Beineke (president, NRDC). All of these are available for download. Though I didn't hang onto it, I was also fond of a talk that Rick Wagoner, CEO of GM, gave. I didn't find him inspiring as I did the others; far from it. But it was interesting to hear him come into hostile territory — one of his first assertions to the crowd was that GM isn't their enemy — and try to make his case. I didn't buy his case, but it was interesting. One of his plaints was that it's hard for companies to have to deal with a patchwork of state regulations, his way of telling California to back off its tough environmental standards and leave it to the federal government. I could see the hardship companies face, but I also saw that he would have been crying a different tune if the federal standard was the tough one. Other speakers recently have been Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who popularized microfinancing; author Michael Eric Dyson, a powerful, no-bullshit presentation particularly on issues of racism and politics; Dennis Kucinich; Bob Barr; and John Bolton.