Welcome to Nernite East Bay, I'm Rick Karnesky, I'm one of the co-bosses of Nernite East Bay. I am really excited to see so many people here, this is great. I want to make sure to give the Oakland Public Library a shout out, they're right there. Say hi to Sharon, she's an awesome librarian.  And if you get a card she'll keep coming back. Sharon has a list of resources related to the talks tonight, so be sure to check those out. And she has pins and free bookmarks, she has free bookmarks over there. There's also posters and our email sign up list where you could also volunteer to give the talk if the speakers up here tonight don't intimidate you too much. Speaking of the talks, our first talk tonight is on Easter. So we didn't have this earlier because we chose to have a talk on wheat chemistry that day I think instead. But to get you in the mood I wanted to show off some of the Easter traditions from around the world. Starting with the Czech Republic. Oh sorry, this is not the Czech Republic, this is actually in Nordic countries. So in Nordic countries the children dress up as witches, bring out their baskets, knock on doors, and get eggs and also candy. So we're not the only ones confused about when to put this on the calendar. This might make a little sense, I mean Easter itself is kind of screwy. It came from this celebration of a Teutonic goddess oyster, and I mean the bunnies that we do, they're also kind of like, again it's like fertility, bunnies have a lot of babies that kind of make sense, but in ancient times we actually thought that they were hermaphroditic and could have babies without sex. And in fact we know now that they're able to get pregnant a second time while they are already pregnant a first time. So they're quite hyper fertile. Now the Czech Republic. A warning to some of our scrimmage users, this looks like porn, it's not, but they have a very different culture than we do. Yeah, what you should contest. So in the Czech Republic, or in some regions of it, the men of the village will go around knocking on doors. For the women of the village they'll have water spanking in which they douse the women with water and then spank them. And this is not intended to cause suffering or be painful. A legend says that women should be spanked with a whip in order to keep their health and beauty during the whole next year. Yes, really. And then if a woman is not subjected to this, she apparently feels very sad in the Czech Republic instead of just happy that she has non rabie male friends. For those that are subjected to the water spanking, they give the men who water spank them eggs or even cash. Grease does it right. And I'm just going to let this video play it's about a minute long. So go to Grease, everyone. With that I'd like to introduce Alice Handley who will talk to you about how we chose the date that we now celebrate Easter. Hi, Alice. I'm not actually a professional historian. This is going to be a very sort of high level exploration in Easter. And so it's become very general, so do feel free to tell me how I'm wrong. Alright, let's start with what is Easter? If you guys didn't go to Sunday school, the answer is that Easter is the festival of the risen Christ. The story is Jesus had dinner with his bros on a Thursday night. It was the last supper. It was the festival of Passover. Next day he gets arrested, tried, crucified, well marched through town, crucified and dies. It was a big day. Did he bear it? Sunday rolls around he's not there. He's obviously still alive. This is the entire point of Christianity. The fact that Jesus rose from the dead is the reason that Christianity exists. Let's just keep this in mind. Christmas isn't a thing. At this point, Easter's the thing. Willow Riley would be freaking out about the war on Easter where he around then. So let's back up a bit. What's Passover? Passover is a Jewish festival celebrating the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Israel. Or Egypt Jesus Christ. Public speaking. So what happened is that basically God sent a series of plagues, saving the Jews from those plagues. The last one was the worst. It was losing your firstborn child.   It's great. That's celebrated on the 15th day of the lunar month of Nisan. This is going to be important. The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar. Unlike ours currently, which is a solar calendar. This math is hard. I'm not going to get into the math a lot. That's a separate nerd night, all the math of this stuff. I'm just going to high level it. Basically every lunar month, the seventh one I think Nisan, on the 15th day you celebrate Passover. But Jewish holidays start the night before the dusk before. So it's sunset on the 14th day of the month of Nisan. You have Passover. They've been doing it for thousands of years. They're still doing it. This calendar's been going on forever. It's the year 5, 7, 7, 5 in Israel? Anyway, they've got this on lockdown. So the first three books of the Bible agree. This is the story. Jesus had dinner on Passover, dies, is resurrected. Then you come to the fourth book of the New Testament, the book of John. And John gets a little weird here. He starts saying, well, what's really important here isn't just the literal story. It's that Jesus himself is the Lamb, is the Passover Lamb, that he was sacrificed. And he becomes a very literal symbol of this Jewish tradition. But this is a new thing. This is making Christianity kind of new. So this is kind of like right there already in the text. You have somebody kind of playing with this idea of what the date is and what it means. The very early Christians wouldn't have considered themselves Christian. I mean, they were Jewish just excited about this Christ guy. So they would have celebrated this whole Jesus situation on the dusk of the 14th day of Nisan. That's when we're like, yay, this all happened. No fuss, no mess, really. They became to be called the 14ers, the Cordo de Cimani in Latin. In the weirder corners of the internet, this is still a thing. So keep that in mind. These are the folks that celebrate Easter, this situation on the 14th of Nisan. Meanwhile, the church that's kind of starting to be growing up around Rome is like, what? We celebrate the resurrection every Sunday. Because every Sunday they have Mass, and that's where you kind of symbolically go through the resurrection. They're like, we don't need to celebrate that once a year. We already do it once a week.  But eventually they kind of get on board and about the mid-second century, they start being like, oh, okay, Easter's a thing. You can do that. But because they're centered in Rome, they have to start kind of conforming to Roman values. And the terrible analogy here, it's like a little startup being acquired by a huge company. I was going to say Google, but at this time in Roman history it's more Yahoo. You get a huge user base and you get a lot of power, but you've got some legacy code you have to deal with. And the legacy code they have to deal with is the Roman calendar. And the way the Romans at this point, they were using something called the Julian calendar, instituted by Julius Caesar, and I want to say 55 BC, it's a solar calendar. It consists of 365.25 days every year. So there's one leap year, or a day every four years. And it's very regular. It goes like that. It has months just like we do. It's not the Hebrew calendar. So the Romans are like, oh, sure, great. We'll celebrate Easter. That's cool. But it has to be on a Sunday. So it has to be on the first Sunday after dusk on the 14th of Nissan. Okay. So you have some people celebrating Easter on the 14th, dusk on the 14th of Nissan. You have some people celebrating on the 15th of Nissan because they're just confused. You have some people celebrating it on the first Sunday after the 14th of Nissan, and you have some people celebrating it on that Saturday evening because they're confused too. So you can see it's already getting a little hairy. There's not a lot of organization, but people don't think it's that big a deal until around the year 195 when the Bishop of Rome, and the Bishop of Rome is the guy who's going to turn into the Pope. But here he's still kind of jostling for position, but he's kind of the head of the church. And he's like, no, no, this isn't going to be a thing. And he excommunicates all the 14ers. He's like, nope, we do it our way. Oh man, all the other Bishops, especially the Bishops in Asia and the Near East, lose their minds. They're basically like, hold my earrings. This is not okay. The bitchiest letters start flying around. People have meetings. It's like, no, it's the 14th of Nissan. No, no, it's the Sunday after the 14th of Nissan. And finally, Victor Plifters has to back down and be like, okay guys, just do you. That's great. So it kind of farts around for a little while. Everybody's doing what they do. More and more people are becoming Christian until we get to... Here we are. We're going to talk about some really important church councils. And then, next slide. Okay, so now we have to move the scene to North Africa. Here we have a problem in the church. Remember when I said that Christianity is getting more and more popular? It definitely is, but you'll still get the odd repression. We had a little bit of a repression and the emperor, I think it was Diocletian, was pressing the Christians in North Africa. So some of them were like, oh, that's great. I'm not Christian. And so they give up their Bibles and stuff and they said, no, not me. That guy down the street, he's Christian. And then the repression stops and the people who hadn't done that were like, uh-huh, no, you're the problem. And so they started fighting. And the people who had given up their Bibles and said they were a Christian are called the Donatists. And this became the Donatism as this heresy. And if you want to know why they were arguing about this, it's because when the Christians who hadn't give up stuff were being repressed, the Christians who did give up stuff were like, oh, I'll watch your stuff for you while you're being repressed. And then when the other Christians came back, they're like, oh no, I'll watch your stuff. So they appeal to emperor Constantine, who's very Christian at this point. And in 1914, they have the Synod of Arles, which is now in France.  Backfire on them, they get excommunicated. But as a side show to this, it's decided that Easter needs to be celebrated on one day and at one time all over the world. Like, we need to get it together. But the council didn't decide what that day was going to be, so here we go. All right. Here we come to our next big heresy, our discussion.  And so you always get people who are trying to do these really old-timey things. Yes. For real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's artisanal Christianity, it's great. It's all about you. Do we have...  He wants to know that if... Do we start the calendar at one because of Easter? The answer is yes and no. It's not directly related to Easter, but because they had this pressing need to figure it out, figuring out a calendar got really important. And while they were solving that question, somebody was like, well, we're going to start the calendar at one. And while they were solving that question, somebody was like, well, when does it start? So they decided to go with one. They kind of averaged out years and got to one and just like, let's just start it from one, which is Jesus' birth. People are trying to get away from BC, just before Christ in Anodomomy AD. And see, he is like common era. It should still be from the same one as us. Yeah, it's just they're just saying it different. Yeah, it's because you don't want to say in the year of our Lord if you don't believe in our Lord. It's good, but it's just trying to strip out Christianity from a really basically Christian calendar. Yeah, what are you going to do? You try to do another calendar, it's hard. I don't suppose you know anything about the Muslim calendar. I don't want to know. It's like they don't know when it is until it is. I don't. Oh, she even wants to know about the Muslim calendar. And it's called the Adrian calendar. It started when the Prophet Muhammad, he started. He started. By the way, happy eats. Pardon me. Oh, can you hear me? Happy eats, by the way. So, yeah, the Adrian calendar, it started when Prophet Muhammad, he went out on a journey from Mecca to Medina where people welcomed him. So that is a time when Hajri calendar 1A, sorry, not 1AD, but 1Hajri started. So this year is 1473 of Hajri calendar is today. I mean this year. So the month is called Dhul Kifl. That is after Ramadan, it's called Dhul Kifl and after is Dhul Hajj where people perform Hajj to Mecca. So that's how Hajri calendar started. My name is Mohsen, Mohsen Abdul Qadir and I live in San Francisco. Thank you. I guess I should have clarified that the thing is Passover can occur on any day of the week because it's a lunar calendar. So it's the same thing, all lunar calendars you'll get it any day of the week. And it's only Christians who really need it to be on a Sunday. Is there a giant hook or do I keep going? I keep going. Can you talk about when was the development of the liturgical calendar and how is it related to the development of the liturgical calendar? Okay, the question is the development of the liturgical calendar and as it relates to the growing calendar, the liturgical calendar is just like what we do in the year religiously. So it would have evolved pretty, the growing calendar came in 1582 and the liturgical calendar, as far as I know might still be developing, but when it was finalized in the western church, I bet you know more than I do. Yeah, the liturgical calendar is just which dates you celebrate when and it's going to change as saints are added and saints are taken away. But the base, yeah, you can get unsainted, it happens. Now you just turned out to be fake. But the basic dates of Christianity really probably are nailed down. By the council in ISEA, they probably wouldn't know the basically liturgical calendar that people follow today. No, the growing calendar is just more scientific. It's more how long things are and not what the dates are within it. If that makes sense. Is there one more? I guess I explained the whole thing.  So are you ready to talk about climate change? An intro for Dan's talk about climate change and in my research I realized something there's nothing funny about climate change. There's just nothing. It's really hard to find an angle that's fun and lighthearted.   But I culled out for you guys a carefully curated collection of the best climate change humor I could find. I'll warn you these aren't funny. First one. Did you know I'm obsessed with wind farms? I'm a big fan. It's the funniest one, okay? Yeah, just set that up. As far as the best one. Don't expect anything to top that. Next one. Did you hear the one about the aluminum recycling plant? No. It smelled. You should immediately start talking about global warming. Why? We're worse than these. These are really the best. How many climate change scientists or climate change deniers?  How many? There's a couple of answers. Wait, are we absolutely certain that light bulb needs changing? It's too early to tell. Yeah. It's not that funny because it's like true. And the other one is none will eventually correct it. Exactly. And then to be fair, I have how many climate scientists does it take? Does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is none. That's a job for an engineer. All right. That's the best you're going to get when it comes to eco comedy. All right. But here with an entertaining and informative talk about what we can actually do to help with the issues of the climate, we have Dan. But we're going to talk about some scary stuff but we're also going to talk about some pretty helpful stuff and some really exciting simple things that we can do to really change things.  So as Tom Friedman said, you may not be interested in climate change, but climate change is interested in you. This will be the biggest global story this century, period. And if there are wars and things like that that kind of try to take, they'll probably be triggered by things by climate change as it's happening now. So this is something that everyone and not enough people pay attention. We only need a small group of people to be really engaged to make things change quickly and we do have to change things quickly. So it's your issue as well. I want to tell you just a little bit how I got started. It was in the early 90s and I was reading a magazine article and was describing how 96, a Swedish Nobel Prize winning chemist knew about these new greenhouse gases in the early 1800s. We realized that CO2 was a greenhouse gas and he just wondered to himself what would happen to the temperature of the earth if you doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. He knew we were burning fossil fuels and he never thought this would ever happen but it was kind of an interesting academic article. So this is the first paper on global warming in 1896 and he got it about right even though he never thought it would actually happen and he was from Sweden so he thought if it did happen it would actually be kind of a nice thing because things would be a little warmer. Reading more about they talked about how we're putting all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with this article how there's this thing called global warming and it just felt to me like wow this is something that could actually happen. I never thought it would happen this quickly so I learned a lot more about it. I started talking to climate scientists started reading about it started giving talks on it and I've learned a lot of things and I'm going to share some of those with you today. So one of them is that first of all climate change is not a scientific controversy. It may be a political controversy but there really is no controversy. We know this as well as we know about gravity. In fact we might probably know more about it than we know about gravity. As you probably heard 97% of climate scientists in every single major scientific academy in the world says that global warming is real, mostly caused by humans and requires urgent action. Now people think well you know there's models and there's all these predictions well climate change is already with us. Now this is an interesting chart a little hard to understand right at first but then when you see what's going on here Jim Hanson is one of our foremost climate scientists and he took a look at all the global temperatures for about 60 years. They took kilometers all over the world and they eliminated the ones in big cities because there's something called the urban heat island effect so they took all the other temperatures around the world and then for every place like Anchorage and Miami places outside of these cities and little places in between they just looked at what's the average temperature for that place and then over a few decades they said well sometimes the average summer temperature is cooler but sometimes it's hotter than the average and you do that for all over the world and you end up with a bell curve like that and to the spread of you take statistics or something called standard deviations and so most of the hot temperatures are no more than two standard deviations from the mean and usually no cooler than two standard deviations and then the question is okay you'll see that it almost never than three standard deviations from the mean almost never once every 500 years do you have a summer that's more than three sigma about the average and then you say that was period 1951 to 1980 what happened in the last decade this is not a prediction it's not a model this has already happened and what it showed is that because of global warming that is the shift of the curve to the right it's not that this is global warming by the way QED that is what global warming is it's the shift it's the warming of Earth but you'll notice that the tail here this dark red area this is the average summer temperatures that are more than three standard deviations above the mean used to happen every 500 years and now it's happening about every 10 years that's a 55 that's a 5000% increase in about 50 years and this is not just math these now when you have a summer temperature that's more than three sigma above the mean you say there's a 98% chance where 49 out of 50 chance that is caused by global warming and a one out of 49 chance that it was natural so that means that when you have that now like 2010 heat wave in Russia which was a three sigma that was caused by climate change that raised food prices around the world and triggered the Arab Spring so these are real things there was one in 2003 three sigma in Europe killed over 50,000 people it's happening in Texas and Arkansas and the United States so these are real life things that are happening today not predictions and they're not models these are already happened just a month or two ago and we've officially crossed one tipping point in the climate and that is that these glaciers in West Antarctica have passed their point of no return and they will collapse there's nothing we can do to stop them now that's to do with the configuration and water underneath them it's just that it's unstoppable over the next several hundred years it's going to contribute maybe around 10 feet to sea level rise that's on top of the sea level rise so that's what Florida looks like with 15 feet of water and that's in the next 100 to 300 years probably at this point unstoppable the last time that CO2 was as high as it is today not the future today it's 400 parts per million used to be 280 parts per million pre-industrial the last time it was 400 parts per million sea levels were 75 feet higher than they are today there's no time to meldice but that's where we're heading if we don't do something about it we're going to talk about doing something about it by the way a little later so people like to ignore climate change but it's not something you can ignore and you can't wait to address it later the one thing that's different about CO2 pollution than all other kinds of pollution you're used to in the environment like water pollution and stuff if you pollute a lake, you clean it up for hundreds to thousands of years so when you stop putting it in there, it doesn't go away it stays there, essentially forever as far as we're concerned so it's not something you can wait to fix we have to fix it now so what are the things I worry about besides sea level rise you can move it's not good, you have to abandon Florida and a lot of other places but this is something that's already happening now and this is predictions for 2060 this is a drought map when you see orange and red that's about the dust bowl and when you see light purple and purple that's three times the dust bowl take a look at the Mediterranean there and take a look at the United States it's almost everywhere except for Alaska which gets wetter by the way northern parts get wetter dry areas get drier so this is not good and this is where we're heading if we don't do something about it there's a little taste of it but it's nothing like what it could be and this is what I call the scariest graph I've ever seen this is from MIT, actually a few years ago where they wanted to give us an idea under no policy in other words business as usual we better not stay on business as usual but this is what happens if we do and the temperature there's different things that impact temperature so they give probabilities of reaching certain temperatures but the first thing you gotta know is every one degrees we better not go over two degrees celsius or 3.6 Fahrenheit everyone, the president, all climate sciences everybody agrees let's not do that but of course not do anything about it and you'll notice that under these scenarios we cross that in mid-century and what this says there's a 95% chance we're gonna hit 3.5 degrees by the end of the century with no policy and 50% chance we're gonna hit 3.6 degrees celsius, 9 degrees fahrenheit warming and by the way the oceans are cooler so that over land it's even more and so these are just not good things but you say well, you know it varies that much in a single day so how can that really cause any problems so what does that all mean so what does 4 degrees warming mean for example it's 7 degrees fahrenheit so there's a climate scientist Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall center in the UK what he said of 4 degrees warming it's not compatible with an organized global community so you have to kind of think what that means for a moment and then it's also beyond adaption so you're not just gonna turn up your air conditioning and everything will be okay you do get to the point where things just are not okay anymore it's devastating to the majority of ecosystems and we depend on those ecosystems and a high probability of not being stable in other words 4 degrees would lead to 5 and 6 and more so he said that this must be avoided at all costs there's no argument you can make that says it's better to continue business as usual and go to 4 degrees there's no discount rate you can use that will prove that this is a good thing to do just not unless you want to sacrifice your children or something so that's not a good thing to do so what should we do and what about that doing it for free part so we'll get to that so the main thing we need to do is to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and there's ways you can voluntarily ask people to do it and you can change your light bulbs in your house you can drive a fuel-fishing car and you should do all of those things but asking everyone to do it on a voluntary basis is a little bit like trying to lower the national debt by having people voluntarily send checks to the government if you send a check to the government it will reduce the national debt and it will make no difference whatsoever and it's the same thing with climate change we either all do it or it's not going to work because if you use less fossil fuels you're going to make fossil fuels cheaper and somebody else is going to use more of it so we need to put policies in place that encourage everyone and I mean everyone to use less and there's turns out some great policies to do that so we can do it and what it's called is fee and dividend it's really simple what you do is you first put a rising price on the CO2 content of fossil fuels paid for by the fossil fuel companies and they pay for it right where they get the stuff out of the ground at the well or the mine or the port of entry so there's not a lot of places you need to collect the money you start off with small about ten dollars a ton of CO2 about ten cents a gallon for gas and you raise it ten dollars every year for ten years and get up to a hundred dollars a ton which is a dollar a gallon roughly and that will raise the price of everything a fuel, a food everything that uses fossil fuels and flying and everything you say well that doesn't sound very good I'm not too happy yet there's a little bit more but first of all the high price will discourage people from using fossil fuels and encourage them to use clean energy alternatives and make it more competitive probably we'd agree that that would be one of the results but how do you get rid of this fact that everyone's going to complain about your raising prices people just hate to pay more for things so what you do is you take a hundred percent of the money collected every single penny and you give it back to every person on an equal basis every legal resident so you take the total amount collected divide by the number of legal residents and send out a check every month to every person little adjustments for kids and things like that so it turns out that there's this 80-20 rule that 80% of the CO2 is generated by 20% of the population 80-20 rules apply to almost everything but because of that if you think about it that means that most people will earn more in their dividend than they pay in higher prices most people will earn more with the dividend than they pay in higher prices so people will really like that and the rich folks who fly a lot and have multiple homes and things like that will pay more but it's not going to be that much of a difference to them so that's pretty cool but you say okay well that sounds good but you know what that's going to put American industry it's going to be a competitive problem for American industry because they're going to have higher prices in our country than other people have in other countries and also if we cut our emissions to zero tomorrow and China and India and all those other countries continue on the path they're on we are still totally screwed so just feeling good about doing our own without getting everyone to do it doesn't work so there's something else you do when you do a fee and dividend plan you implement what's called a border duty or a border adjustment on products coming from countries that don't have their own price on carbon and then those countries are faced with the following decision should I send lots and lots of money to the United States or should I keep it myself it's very simple either can send the tax money to us because we're going to tax it but if they put their own price on carbon then they get to keep it they will all choose to keep it themselves and they will all have a price on carbon a few years after we implement this and probably we would do this with the EU and China who's ahead of us on carbon pricing and you get those three groups to start every country will follow quickly UN has been trying to do something for 20 something years and nothing's happened so this would actually happen right away so sounds good then you might ask has anyone done a study to show what the impacts of this plan would be I'm glad you asked so this group regional economic models and synapse energy economics did a study of did a study of what the impacts of fiat dividend the plan I just mentioned would be so the first thing is you wanted to cut emissions and it does about by a third in 10 years and over 50% in 20 years that's a lot create 2 million jobs over 10 years and 2.8 million jobs over 20 years increase the GDP by 1.4 trillion dollars over what it would be otherwise and save over 200,000 American lives because of reduced pollution and to give you an example of how much you get year 2025 family 4 would receive about $3,500 a year in the dividend and remember you don't have to buy the fossil fuels hopefully you're going to get solar or wind or something else you'll buy a fuel efficient car so you won't pay that much for the extra cost of fossil fuels that's the whole point of it is to get you to switch over so if you don't do this and follow on business as usual we're going to collapse the economy and civilization that's pretty expensive by the way but this actually generates jobs it increases GDP saves lives so it's actually better than free it's actually better than free and one thing that will happen so I'm a clean tech venture capitalist there's not enough clean tech venture capitalist unfortunately but if you put a price on carbon you will spur investment and innovation and clean energy that will put the internet to shame internet opportunities are measured in the billions and the billions of dollars clean tech opportunities like energy food water are measured in the billions and the trillions of dollars so you start putting a price on carbon you're going to see cool stuff happen we're already working on cool stuff I'm going to show you two quick examples of cool things we're working on so this is a battery a company called Gritential located in south San Jose and it's a lead acid battery that has the performance of a lithium ion battery so lead acid batteries are really cheap but if you want to use them for solar storage they really suck you ever leave the lights on in your car sometimes in a row your battery is dead so lead acid batteries are not very good for discharging all the way and then cycling through them lithium ion is really good but it's very expensive and likes to blow up so those are some problems with it so this one you can discharge down to zero for hundreds and hundreds of cycles without hurting it and it's extremely efficient in other words energy in and energy out and the way it works is they took a lead acid battery they took out the metal grids that have been around lead acid is really old technology and they inserted plated silicon wafers like solar cells kind of thing but inside the battery and it turns out that's a great material for the inside of the battery and stops it from failing and allows you to discharge that very deep discharge and it does amazing things so this is the alpha battery and it's working better than expected so we're hopefully going to move on to licensing the battery companies around the world and that will help being used for not for cars because it does way more than a lithium ion battery so for electric cars probably not the right thing but for wheelchairs, lift trucks and especially for storing solar energy at your house it's a great solution basically the performance of lithium ion which is very expensive at the price of lead acid and one of the most exciting things I think we're working on a company called Inventus Thermal Technologies up near Vancouver, Canada and they figured out a way to capture CO2 from power plants for just about $15 a ton and that's about a third to a sixth of the cost of existing technologies to do this which are not used because they're way too expensive and also the other ones are huge or chemical plants that are as big as the power plant that they're trying to control and this thing is way smaller 10th to 100th the size so they can stick it inside the existing plant and strap it to the flu and capture the CO2 you then take the CO2 and put it back underground where it came from and it turns out there's lots of room underground to put CO2 and so this is something that might save our ass someday but unfortunately there's no business model for saving the world no one will pay you to save the world right now so that's why we need a price on carbon so it incentivizes these kinds of things so you say well I'll take some money to put these on power plants and things like that but it turns out that the cost of acting is really cheap compared to the cost of acting there's a lot of examples in your life where you just wish you maybe taking a prudent step down then so you say well that sounds great it sounds like a great plan, I love it but we have this congress that you can't even imagine doing anything ever right? it's true but I'll tell you the good news so the good news is that there's a tipping point that's coming when it comes to action on climate change we are going to go from impossible which we can say today to inevitable and we're never going to pass through probable, it's just going to happen one day, just like gay marriage if I told you five years ago federal government is going to legalize gay marriage you know, it's crazy and then it just happened so I'm confident this will happen but the question is will it happen in time and that's up to you so you need to get engaged and learn more about this you need to talk to your family and your friends your colleagues and your elected leaders and let them know that this is one of the most important issues to you because it actually is one of the most important issues to you and what you need to do is find your own personal tipping point to get engaged and there's some simple things you can do one is join 350.org which is trying to spur divestment and colleges to get them to divest of their fossil fuel holdings just like happened with apartheid in South Africa a long time ago which kind of started in Berkeley by the way and kind of moved around the world and that will happen too but we can make it go faster and Citizens Climate Lobby is a grassroots organization that is pushing the fiend dividend plan and they're going meeting with elected representatives both and democrats if you think about it it's kind of a republican plan it does not increase the size of government at all and it doesn't pick winners or losers just puts a price on the bad thing and lets the market do its magic so if you were a republican this is what you want and they're going to need to do something soon because you know you can be against climate change but as someone said you can ignore reality but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality so republicans are kind of like the flat earth society and Columbus has already sailed you know what this is going to be they also know it's real in reality they just can't talk about it so they're going to need to do something to pivot and I think fiend dividends a way to do it so if you want more information you can go to my website climateplace.org have slides and references and suggested books and links and all that kind of stuff and get going thank you back there where they gone rid of the carbon tax well I think they're idiots but you know it's a political thing they didn't have fiend dividend they have the cap and trade and cap and trade does not work and we're going to spend a whole talk on cap and trade versus fiend dividend so yeah the number one country getting clobbered by climate change is like ignoring it and you know it's insane actually is what it is yeah oh don't be shy here we go what's the number one argument that you have to deal with against what you're not showing model what's the common argument against what you're saying what's the common argument against what I'm saying well there's two different things climate deniers who are kind of people ignoring them now it's ridiculous you know because everybody now knows personally that the climate is different than when they were kids right everybody can feel it everyone sees this year or next will be the hottest year in recorded history there you go you know so you can only deny so so there's that and that's getting pushed aside which is a big change it's like only two years ago that the newspapers always had a quota denier in every article right now they ignore them what's the argument against being dividend first of all hardly anyone knows about it okay they were pushing cap and trade a lot of people are going to make money on cap and trade no one's going to make money except for every citizen there's no it's like a three page bill right there's no place for lobbyists to stick in little things for themselves so they don't have that support so it's something new so we have to spread the word republicans are still denying that there's any problem they don't want to do anything oh they also well the biggest thing is that fossil fuel companies are really really rich and they pay money to confuse the public and that kind of thing however they also assume this will already happen almost all of them have what's called a phantom price of carbon of about 40 to 50 dollars a ton for every new project they build they say can we pay a 40 to 50 dollar beyond carbon and still make this be profitable the head of I heard the head of shell give a talk on this so so it's you know it's it's one of those things that's why we're going to just flip one of the every person go wow this is getting really bad what are we going to do here's a great solution yes why no so the question is why would we build why would we continue to build the power plants fossil fuel power plants you mean or to mean others like right so why would you build fossil fuel the first thing that would happen when you implement this is you would stop building coal plants because they'd say well 10 years from now it's going to be $50 a ton and coal gives a lot of CO2 so that would that's whole point by the way as usual you want to stop that also people think that fossil fuels are cheap but they're only cheap because they don't include their external cost so I think it's somewhere like West Virginia the cost of coal power the cost of the health care to treat coal illness and not climate changes illness is more than the value of the electricity produced but the coal company doesn't pay for that your insurance pays for it the state pays for that so fossil fuels are actually the most expensive thing you could ever imagine burning for energy it will actually kill us all it actually will kill us all if we continue on the path we're on so it's insane actually but it's not insane from a fossil fuel company point of view because they don't pay those costs you're already paying higher insurance costs higher health care costs higher taxes to pay for Sandy and Katrina and on and on so it actually is already happening and it's nothing like what it's going to be when that drought hits in you know 2060 I mean it's insane so actually the renewables are actually the cheapest thing clean energy is actually the cheapest and the point of fee and dividend is to monetize those external costs and get them into the price of fossil fuels when you do that the right choices will be made and clean energy will be shown as it really is to be cheaper so that's what will happen last question two questions oh so my question is about re-explanation one of the problems we've been talking about increasing gas so first question regressive tax you just put a tax on CO2 and do nothing else then the poor people are hurt the most because you know they're one driving the work this is the opposite of that this the poor people make more money on this relatively speaking then they get because they're not flying cross country and they're not doing with the 80% the 20% of the generation 80% of the CO2 so they might have a long commute or something like that but they're going to definitely make more money on the dividend that they pay in the fee so they're going to do the best actually if you take the bus to work or take the bar or something you'll definitely do better there'll be maybe a few instances where there's some people that have crazy commutes for some reason so that's great about fee and dividend is that it's anti-regressive and then people say wait you're re-distributing wealth but you in a sense are but you're not doing it for that reason you're doing it because rich people pollute more so if you pollute more just like rich people pay more property taxes because they have more property so it's the same thing so it's really just putting a tax on the bad thing people have most of the bad things pay most of the money and in this particular case poor people do quite well the other question is phantom price so they build in their economic model assuming that there will be a price on carbon so they don't want to build like a new well if when you put a $30 price on carbon the thing's not economical anymore so another way of putting it is to make it a lot of money right now because they're still going to make a lot of money after the fees on and there's no fee right now where's the documentation of it oh you can look it up the president of shell gave a talk at the commonwealth club they'll look that up at climate one the commonwealth club that's where he talked a lot about it a lot of information on that thanks so much yeah thanks to Dan we're going to take a 10 minute break Dan's going to be in theater too to answer more questions welcome back welcome back welcome back so there's more sometimes so my favorite part of this gig in addition to actually finding awesome people that I want to hear from is definitely the intros but sometimes I get so overwhelmed researching one specific topic that I just kick out and so we're back to Easter even though the next talk is on mental illness but that's okay first of all Easter eggs Easter eggs are fantastic they're a lot of fun I was surprised that there are Easter eggs for the deaf so we have the technology to make things beep it turns out so that's awesome despite adding technology to the mix we do not necessarily know how to really get Easter eggs in this country so this is what they do in the Ukraine right I can't even make it that small like that's my laser pointer size I don't know how they do it it's the pusanka in the Ukraine the legend goes that the reason that they make all these eggs is that there is a giant serpent that is chained up and if they ever stop making the eggs the serpent becomes chained if they ever make eggs that aren't as decorative as the previous year or fewer decorative eggs the chains will be loosened if they make more than the previous year they'll be tightened it sounds kind of crazy which I guess kind of blends into the next talk but at the same time there's an email sign up list right over there and if there are not more names on it well, last month with that I'd like to introduce Sharon who will talk to you about the history of mental illness in the US I'm Sharon and I very foolishly offered to talk about 400 years of history in 20 minutes so I've sort of sacrificed a lot of detail for breath so please bear with me hopefully if you have time at the end for questions then you can ask about all the details that I leave out alright so we're going to try to answer these two questions at various points in the past 400-ish years alright so we're going to start in 1600s and so among white Christian people mental illness was really thought to be punishment for sin so if you were an adulterer you committed murder then you might go crazy as a punishment and the biggest sin was idleness or sloth and so if you weren't contributing your share of labor then you could very likely go crazy and you were mostly treated for in the home by family members or sometimes in prisons as they start to be built or in alms houses and that's pretty much the way it is into the 1700s it's still really about your labor contributions it's how you're considered to be ill or not and hard labor is the main treatment so you're whipped you're chained up usually and you're whipped and then you're just forced to work until you collapse pretty much all the time and then here this couple has paid to get in to see the lunatics as they were called just like we would go to the zoo so not a very pleasant time not a very pleasant time yeah so in 1791 a young woman named Hannah Mills she was a Quaker she died in an asylum in England because of maltreatment that she received there and this death really galvanized the Quakers to start their own their own asylums places for care that were much more based on the Quaker philosophy which is really humanist very humane and so this came to be known as moral treatment and a moral treatment for some reason to me sounds bad like you're being punished for not having the right morals but it's not that at all in fact moral treatment was all about sort of giving you a break from what you're going through and rest in these small home like facilities so it would be kind of like an extended family and while you're there you'd be fed well as opposed to the prisons or the alms houses before you'd be fed well and you would exercise a lot there would be gardens, libraries so you're really like engaging in a very relaxing way which by by standards at that time and today would be an amazing place to go for care we don't really have anything like that well we do but you have to be a millionaire to go there unfortunately and so yeah so that's moral treatment and so in these asylums things are pretty good things are really great actually but pretty much elsewhere cares the same you're still it's hard labor and so this woman right here is Dorothea Dix and as a young woman she had a breakdown and her family sent her to England to receive care and she happened to end up meeting one of the founders of the moral treatment philosophy and when she recuperated and returned back to the US she decided to become a really tireless advocate for improving care in all the facilities in the US so she was like a great muck raking journalist so she would just travel all around and find the absolute worst conditions and then publicize them to no end and kind of like almost yell about them and so this is an address to the Massachusetts State Assembly in 1843 so yeah so she was very effective and so a lot of states actually listened to her and started building new asylums with sort of better facilities updated care and so this should be a good thing right okay new buildings yeah things should be looking up fortunately what gets built are these giant behemoth institutions so forget about moral treatment you're not in like a family setting you're not you're not going outside to exercise like these are other people who are coming to look at the asylum that's not people staying there and with the asylums being so big they also become custodial so it's not rest and then return back home you check in and you never check out unfortunately so that's another problem with these new asylums and so in 1840 there's about 2500 people in the U.S. who are living in hospitals and there were about 18 at that time and then by the time we get to 1890 there are 74,000 people across the country who are living in these facilities and there's about 140 of them so yeah oh the other downfall of the asylum is that doctors get involved right so again another thing that you think okay doctors yeah some legitimacy okay people are actually going to be getting care everything's going to be good but so these are some of the medical treatments at the time that were used so this is called the swinging chair and the guy at the top is a doctor or a doctor's assistant and he by moving that lever it makes the chair just spin around super fast and so people would be spun for I think about half an hour so people really just threw up everywhere lost control of their bowels and were just sort of stunned into stupor next you can see this says the fractious patient spread eagle form receiving medical treatment of douche bath in the Pennsylvania hospital for the insane and so you can see this does a medical treatment I mean this is really what people were doing and was best practice this is called the crib there's a bunch of different variations of the crib but this is one where you're just and most of them you're locked in for a very long period of time and then finally the tranquilizing chair with this chair that there's a bucket down beneath the seat and that's for your excretions so you're not sitting in this for like 20 minutes this is like a day or more and so the goal of all of these treatments is really just to subdue people to make them tranquil and so in a sense they were all sort of effective in that people eventually were subdued whether from shock or nausea or just being confined and becoming weak but in terms of effectiveness after a few hours there's there's no real treatment provided by these as you I think you guessed throughout the history of the US all of the sort of conceptions of illness have really been based on racism and sexism no surprise so this was in the 1840s they're saying that slavery is actually what's keeping people of African descent healthy I can't really say anything else about that this was an actual diagnosis that was proposed in 1851 to the Medical Association of Louisiana and they described this condition as a flight from home madness so to be diagnosed you only needed to fit two criteria okay you have to be a slave and you have to run away more than once so wanting to be free is literally considered to be insane and fighting for your freedom and so Nat Turner would certainly have been would have fit those criteria and so this the sort of is also to reflect as deeply flawed as it was the move to codify diagnoses and make them more uniform it was really a free for all for a long time and it's still a free for all for a long time after this but at least I guess for the better some people are just starting to think about okay what are some actual diagnoses that are we can all use together that actually represent conditions and so another guy doing this in Europe was Emile Craplin and so you probably recognize this on the left manic depression and you probably don't recognize this on the right but dementia pre cox is what we would now call schizophrenia that was like the original term and so Emile Craplin he did a lot of research with people who are receiving treatment for mental illness at the time and he looked at their behaviors and group them into these two categories which is helpful right so before this there were like 20 or more types of psychosis because it was like whichever doctor you went to they said oh this is you know likes trees too much psychosis and it was very like willy-nilly so he he comes up with these two categories which was great except that in the population that he was doing his research on it included people that we now in retrospect know to have had things like dementia and also organic brain disorders particularly one called encephalitis lethargica and other things like developmental disabilities and so maybe this wouldn't be a problem except that these are really the two main categories that we're still using for psychotic disorders today so the situation as we get into the turn of the last century is still pretty much the same big big state hospitals and you're there for life and forget about it and so in the 1930s doctors start developing more treatments right so you're so excited to hear about these new treatments right so there are things like insulin coma where they just like just inject you with insulin and you literally go into a coma and metrizol is a similar thing go into shock lobotomy and then electroconvulsive therapy or electroshock treatment and you've probably this room one flew over the cuckoo's nest you probably know this and so these treatments also had all the same goal of just subduing people keeping people calm and in that sense they were also more effective than the last sort of round of treatments but partly because almost all of them cause brain damage like lasting brain damage and so actually I found this website that was kind of like well oh and I should mention that electroshock is the only one that's still being used today it's usually a last resort these days so I guess that's good but it's definitely alive and kicking and I found this website that was like don't worry like electroshock today is like it's so much safer and everything's cool and don't worry about it it looks like this and I was like I don't know to me that's not reassuring compared to it looks pretty much the same as it did a while ago so yeah so post world war two was a really big time for mental illness in the US we have the development of the diagnostic and statistical manual the DSM in 1952 and again this was sort of like the last big push to codify diagnosis and it stuck we're still using the DSM today we have a run to the DSM 5 and I think sort of famously like homosexuality was included as a disorder in the first edition and wasn't removed until the 70s and it wasn't removed until gay rights activists like stormed the American psychiatric association so a lot of complaints about the DSM are that it's very very subjective and I wouldn't say that that's far from the truth considering how things get in and get left out also at this time and still post world war two as the war ended a lot of attention turned back domestically and people started looking at what was happening in the asylums in the hospitals and really were shocked generally shocked and horrified and there was a big humanitarian movement I mean people really outraged and this is an example this was actually a still from a movie called the snake bit which was based on a book written by a nurse at one of the hospitals and there were a few big pieces of big exposés at this time that were really important so there's this humanitarian push on one side there's also the development of a new drug called chlorpromazine which sedates people very very very effectively because it was developed to sedate people for surgery and and that really makes doctors think that they can treat people outside of the hospital instead of in because instead of doing all these other crazy things they can just give this medication and be done with it and then finally sort of number three is that there's a constant cost of healthcare and no one wants to foot the bill so these three sort of streams come together and lead to the community mental health centers act of 1963 which is the policy that led to what you know may know as deinstitutionalization which is I think a word that's thrown around a lot and is sort of a complicated word that doesn't necessarily mean that in 1955 the hospital like the psychiatric hospital population peaked at 550,000 and by 1994 that was down to 75,000 and it's been decreasing ever since so so really the question is where did everybody go they're not in these hospitals anymore so people went to adult homes that's a big one that's kind of like a nursing home without much nursing care and for example in LA alone after deinstitutionalization there were 11,000 former patients of the hospitals living in these adult homes and they're completely unregulated so there's been a lot of abuse that's happening in those and people are still in adult homes unfortunately and then oh and I forgot to say so part of why the part of why we have to wonder about wherever it went is the community mental health centers act had a few big flaws one it had to be implemented state to state which as you've seen with the Affordable Care Act leads to big differences state to state and some people get okay treatment and some don't so that's one I mean it was really expensive to set up a bunch of community mental health centers that's not a small undertaking you have to build a whole network of care that had not been there before and a lot of states either couldn't afford or didn't want to invest in setting that up three there was no new housing created so were people have been living in these pretty much since their teens or twenties which is when most mental illness you have the onset so people have been living there their whole lives and then they're told to all leave but no literally not a unit of housing is created so yeah that's a big problem and finally there was no continuum of care provided for the community mental health centers act and what I mean by that is these outpatient centers were set up and they could provide good care sort of care light I might call it but for people who had really serious illnesses or had brain damage from some of the treatments or had just a harder time functioning in life there was no intermediate level of care so that's a huge huge problem and so then as you know I think a lot of people ended up homeless unfortunately there's a lot of reasons why people ended up homeless specifically urban renewal is one of them a lot of affordable housing was destroyed in the seventies and then also just Reagan is the best way to sum up all the other reasons they all come back to him pretty much whether as governor of California or as president sorry well I'm not sorry and we actually don't really know how many people became homeless because there were no counts at that time literally we have no idea still the first census of homeless people was in the late eighties and that was in New York I think and then starting in the eighties but really increasing in the nineties and now people ended up in prison which is really probably the worst possible place for people with serious mental illness for a lot of reasons that you might be able to imagine there's I unfortunately I can't talk too much about this just in the interest of time but there's been a really good series in the New York Times this summer and spring about the really complex issues involved the care of people with serious mental illness in the New York City jail which is Riker's Island and I really strongly recommend that you look those up because they're great pieces this image right here the man in the photograph in the photograph is Jerome Murdo who was a a man with serious mental illness who was homeless he was arrested for trespassing and his trespassing was that he was sleeping in a stairwell and they set bail at $2,500 no one could pay that to get him out and so he was in jail and the cell was overheated where he was it was 101 degrees which may not sound that high but I'll explain in a second and he just died of hyperthermia in his cell and this was just in February that he died psychotropic medications a lot of them make you more sensitive to heat so it's like he's someone who was taking medication who was trying to be well and yeah so it's an incredibly fraught problem and the last count that I saw was 2012 there's about 380,000 people with mental illness in prison in jail in prison so now I've totally depressed you and you're like so miserable right I'm sorry I'm really sorry but things are about to start to look up okay and for real this time for real so okay what's going on in prison is a huge problem and I don't want to dismiss that at all but there are a lot of great things happening since the 90s one of them is supportive housing which is exactly what it sounds like it's housing with supports for people who need it and this is a beautiful example right here in Oakland it's the historic California hotel that's been rehabbed yeah it's been rehabbed and it's a I think 137 units of housing for affordable housing for people who need it with social workers there sometimes and nurses that come in and really great things are happening and there's a lot of beautiful supportive housing around also something that's looking up there's definitely still a lot of problems with medication a lot of them have a lot of really terrible toxic side effects but okay but but there's a lot more medications out there now to try and so you can try something less bad first and move on and so that's great also there are a lot more behavioral health treatments that have found to be really effective that are now making their way to sort of care in every setting so even people in with you know medical or in safety net clinics have access to some of these really wonderful behavioral treatments that are out there yeah so that's great and then oh all right here's the best part so beginning in the 70s there's been a huge movement by people who've actually experienced the worst of mental health services to really get involved as decision makers and so these are three amazing activist women who've done a great job and changed services for the better for all of us this is Judy Chamberlain on the left who unfortunately died a couple years ago she was an amazing activist and Mary Ellen Copeland on the top right and she has developed this amazing wellness recovery action plan which I strongly encourage you to look into it's like a fascinating process and then in the center is Pat Deegan who is just very inspiring to me personally she has this amazing story of she was just told she'd never recover from schizophrenia ever she was just left in a hospital she had a ton of terrible treatment and then ended up just changing her life because people were supportive to her and she got a PhD and does amazing work now so yay I think another thing it's looking up is we're finally starting to understand the role of trauma in a variety of health outcomes sorry this is hard to read but that says scientific gaps over there on the right so those are sort of the aspects of trauma that we understand very well but trauma is I think gonna I think we're taking the very first few steps towards developing prevention of mental illness and promotion of mental health which as a public health person that's very exciting but I think we're learning just a little bit about it now and I think this is gonna be the way of the future and you're gonna hear a lot more about it soon so stay tuned for that yeah what can you do I know this is sort of a bleak picture and I'm really sorry but some things that you can do are you can sort of talk about mental illness and mental health and share your stories if you have them personally or sort of come out in a sense I think the more that we talk about experiences we've had in this field the more people will realize oh it's not just it's not other people it's people at my job it's family members, it's friends and I think that's really powerful next don't be a nimby so if a supportive housing building is gonna come to your neighborhood don't fight it go support it and I say this because a lot of people I've heard so many arguments like supportive housing is terrible there's gonna be a bunch of people with mental illness in my neighborhood and substance use problems and I hate to bring it to you but they're already living wherever you live like just so you know they're there already so you could have beautiful refurbished supportive housing where people can live with supports or you can be like really grouchy and say no go live somewhere else and I really think that more more housing more affordable housing is really the only way we're gonna tackle homelessness also you can go to this amazing exhibit at the Exploratorium has anyone been? this was an amazing exhibit and it's still there for a little while more it's the changing face of what is normal mental health, strongly recommend it I think I'm not sure if they still have it there but they actually had one of those cribs that you could get into there, yes you can see what it's like and then finally you can support great organizations like the one that I work for called Lifelong Medical Care we're a non-profit and we are a safety net clinic here in Oakland and in Berkeley and in Richmond we provide care to anyone and we also just provide really great quality care so if you need a doctor or mental health services or dental services, come on in and also donate, okay cool so I think that's it, yeah sources alright thank you all so much in 1998 I broke into an abandoned mental institution in Philadelphia quite disturbing and the cops didn't even have the guts to go in there because it was seriously disturbing but what we found and what had been going on for decades is the age of this population it looked as if everyone had just gotten up in their desks and walked away, there were papers, there were chairs there were records everywhere there were VHS and Baymax everywhere, why when they shut down these hospitals should it look like people sucked up into a vortex and just disappeared, why are, why are these places now being torn down so that there's very little history of this left in the United States which I think is dangerous and there isn't like this record but what I saw with my own eyes was shocking and I don't know why it looked like why does this place clean up why people just walk away from their jobs and just leave so the question is sort of why were the old hospitals abandoned so subtly at the time and sort of also just commenting that the history being erased is really tragic so that's a good question de-institutionalization was sort of implemented differently in different places and some places had more or less success with some of the community mental health centers part of why things were left as they were was just who would pay to take them apart like this whole thing is already about saving money and not spending money and so why bother cleaning up but also there's an amazing amazing exhibit called the Willard Suitcase Exhibit Willard W-I-L-L-A-R-D Willard Suitcase Exhibit and that was at the exploratorium for the first half of the exhibit I think that part has now left this is a hospital in upstate New York that someone went into recently meaning the 90s and found all the suitcases of people who had checked in and had died there because at that time you lived your whole life there so they found everyone's like hundreds and hundreds of people's entry admission suitcases and it's incredibly poignant incredibly powerful just seeing the lie it's called the lives, the subtitles the lives they left behind and just showing suitcases filled with really people's lives before they came in so and you can look it up online it's online there's a book about it it's yeah so you can the Willard Suitcase Exhibit the Suitcase Exhibit the lives left behind Google all those things and you'll find it any other questions oh yeah hi oh awesome oh sorry yeah the Willard Suitcase Exhibit it's still at the exploratorium for two more months thank you so much yeah thanks yeah okay so the question at the time how many people were diagnosed yeah the percentage of people okay so the question is at the time what percentage of people were diagnosed into either of those two categories of psychotic disorders and and the second part sorry it's sort of a follow up though like how many people in today's present diagnosis like just like related to present day and okay and so what percentage of people would fall into those categories now okay so so this is a question that I'm actually not very well equipped to answer because you pretty much have to be a clinician but so the way the DSM is organized is so there's a general category so there's like the depression category and then there's a bunch of major types of major depression and then there's little corollaries off of them and there's a numbering system that goes along with it and it's unfortunately I can't explain it very well but so in recent years I've seen so okay so I can't give you numbers about schizophrenia or not because it's kind of complicated by all those little subtypes right but recently past 20 years I would say there's been a lot more people diagnosed with what's called schizoaffective disorder and schizoaffective disorder and then you have different types of that so there's schizoaffective disorder bipolar type and this is a very confusing issue because it's it's kind of like showing the problems with those two categories because those are really still the two main I mean you can get diagnosed with schizophrenia and you can get diagnosed with well we don't call it manic depression anymore bipolar disorder but you can get diagnosed with either of those two and so there's this whole schizoaffective category which is coming up which is kind of I'm sorry I'm not doing a great job explaining this but it melds the categories and it it's showing sort of how problematic the types are I can, I'd love to if you can make your email address I can send you more information on this I'm sorry I'm not explaining well but I am not a clinician actually after all yeah oh okay so hi so the question is that has like I mentioned that historically people in different demographics are diagnosed differently with disorders and is that still true and yes that is still true so women tend to be diagnosed with depression more men are diagnosed with schizophrenia slightly more yeah and then there's just still a lot of problems with race and ethnicity because as much as we want to pretend that these are objective and scientific they are cultural they're very very culturally bound I mean yes there's some more scientific aspect to it but we still don't actually know what's happening in the brain when certain with certain illnesses we don't quite understand all the mechanisms completely so there's a lot of issues with especially kids of color getting diagnosed with all sorts of diagnoses very early on and this again goes back to the role of trauma the more that we understand about trauma the more that we're going to hopefully fix that most people are really just experiencing trauma the after effects of trauma and they developed coping skills to deal with the trauma like childhood sexual abuse or just the trauma of being extremely poor as a child is I mean that can really change your coping skills and then those skills are viewed as problematic when people get into different settings so I think trauma is the key to that but yes there are still differentials and that's another thing I can explain more about here so thanks to Sharon if you have more questions for her you can hit her up in the lobby right after the show I did want to give a quick plug to some upcoming events over the next month first of all Mt. M is obviously awesome but having science talks there is awesome the Leonardo art science evening interview is at UC Berkeley this month Wunderfest always does great events of course you can check out our sister internet in San Francisco we got a lot of responses from people who wanted to give talks in August when I emailed out that we had a last minute gap I would encourage you to apply to this instead they pay much better than we do if you don't know what a bad ad hoc hypothesis is I'll just show you Zach's comic and you can read it at your leisure wait for laughter as people read probably it's like four there's five there's six okay but our next show I'll close on Zach's comic but our next show is going to be awesome we're going to have talks on encryption and bitcoin we're going to have a talk on bicep so cosmological background radiation it's going to be awesome and we're going to have a talk on undersea drones so we'll see you then and we'll go back to the comic


it that I'm thinking about right now one of them is I find myself thinking about I can't remember the title of it but you all will help me that fad was a transformation of virginia resizing book and big fat beast and change over time as I recall it's been a long time since I've read it does not happen within the chapters in that book he has these kind of one page or couple paragraph introduction to each chapter it's not even an introduction it's I recall it was in italics and he does all the change in that little spot right and then you read the chapter and it's just a deep being located in a place and it seems to me you could do that with a play as well you could with each scene or each act you could do some of that deep change if you wanted and structural change so that even though the story then appears to have a sameness or a repetitiveness to it you will have located it differently situated it differently so I think the play structure could accommodate that particular issue one of the things that that when I first got into this project I mean I've looked at a lot of different categories of products and injury but when I first started looking at the flammable fabrics material I saw this story of these children's cowboy suits and then it produces legislation 1953 flammable fabrics act and there you have tragedy in a sense you know really awfulness leading to this positive outcome and so I first thought of owning hazard as this thing that was going to shift right? the individual owns the hazard then there is a shift if you will to the manufacturer through the payment of damages and then a shift if you will to the state when the state takes the hazard out of the hands of the consumer what happened as I started looking you know expanding my time frame and seeing the story repeated again and again was that I couldn't I could no longer see the ownership of hazard as something that passed hands so that and that really is what I wanted to try to get at here and I also thought someone can be paid damages but when you read when you read the evidence in these cases and when you look at the photographs so as I said these children are generally in court the photographs of they make it are and you know no amount of damages, burn victims and this is a particularly brutal awful kind of injury when we see someone who has been horribly burned we do not want to look at them we are repulsed it is hard to look at someone who has been grotesquely burned so the sense that even in the payment of damages whatever you are going to pay someone is going to shift the owning of hazard no so I really did want to and I think that so this is both I guess you know an exercise in history but I think also an exercise in something that is not about history about yeah I just wanted to because what I really loved about your staging was that I thought you were playing with the relation this is to bring Roger's point about art back into the conversation from yesterday you were playing with the empirical with verifiability, truth as verifiable which is the operative notion of truth that we have in evidence in courts is indeed the basis for evidence and indeed for historical evidence we narrate historically because we believe the truth is empirically verifiable but if we read Plato or if we read a novel we understand when we read something that is really intense or we see a film we say oh my god that is so true that is truth literary truth as the unverifiable this is not me this is my teacher Patrick Spivak speaking through me but that is what one of the things I have learned you captured in that synchronic staging was the articulation of a sense of violence that is in some ways always unverifiable a kind of literary truth that is unverifiable and if for example to take a Morton's point about the value of life I was thinking when you brought that up Morton about Bopal, right so I mean you can talk about product liability and like X number of cases in the United States or you can talk about thousands of people in one incident in Bopal what is the value of life there we don't even know how many people and they never get articulated you don't even get their bodies photographed right so what are the limits so in some ways the ability to articulate unverifiable truth conveys that violence in a way much better than any kind of diachronic history and you know I just have another thought in Nader's Unsafe at any speed you know one of the things he talks about is how auto accidents were dealt with you know that police and whatever they come in quickly and remove all of the you know they're trying to clear the roadway right and so all of the particular evidence there in terms of what caused this accident has been since the crime scene if you will has been destroyed by this effort to clear the roadways and it seems to me that one of the things here that you know we don't know so when you ask you know has the incidence changed we don't know because so many of the victims don't know never knew and I think that's true with product hazard in general you know I studied a lot about cosmetics you know people who have had all kinds of illnesses from cosmetics that they they never knew were related to this product that they were using to remove unwanted facial hair right sort of things so I think the numbers question is actually always a challenging one I'm making a suggestion from UC Berkeley this question is for Chris Schmidt the first I just wanted to thank you for your paper I found it really in the paradigm altering actually I think this idea of law and society and that divide has been beneficial is really counter intuitive but the question that I had is sort of beneficial for what purposes because it seemed in the description descriptions of the incidents you gave the separation is really fruitful for moments of change or transformation but maybe it's less beneficial when the goal is to actually entrench norms or maybe even to defend old ones and I guess what I'm thinking of is that a lot of recent law society work is moving toward the idea of change in looking at more recent histories and sort of change as conservatism right and change is a movement toward a movement toward old ways and away from liberal ways and so that's not really sort of broadening the perspective but another way that I would be curious to know what you think about is sort of borrowing from political science or American political development those kinds of ways of thinking about history is to think about path dependence and resistance as opposed to change in either direction so I guess I was curious to know sort of how would law and society, socio-legal history benefit methodologically and substantively from thinking about resistance and not just change in the sense of progressive change Yeah, when I put this project together I didn't really see a particular ideological valence to the use of this because the first example I have is actually an effort to try and entrench and stabilize the way it becomes the system which is very much dependent on the creation of the law society divide just as the challenges to it accepted the law society divide just a question about the causal influences that go back and forth so I think it can go either way I think it can go to a progressive direction I think it can go toward slowing up change and as again the King Bickel dichotomy brings to light these are two people who are both engaged in a project of challenging the divide and their politics were going in very different directions it came to very different conclusions so I think it's very instrumental it's very contextual there's no generalizable message about the use of law society divide quarantine in one direction or in continuing changes already developing or slowing I think it's used very selectively for different ads in different places so this is very much historically contextualized approach to this particular issue it does raise questions for me about how this might play out in another area because I just picked out a few episodes that seem to resonate around this question but I imagine looking at other more recent social movement issues could very well maybe challenge some of the assumptions that I was laying out here I'm going to exercise my chair's prerogative and just ask a follow-up on that but it might others might want to respond to it too in particular maybe Roy which is when we talk about discourse and this is to go off on Morty a little bit right and we think about who you all have chosen to talk about their discourse and discourse is embedded in it's created by people it's embedded in institutions and in networks and one thing that was so striking about your talk and the sit-in demonstrators is they see themselves in conversation with the lawyers and they see themselves as in opposition to the lawyers they're both in solidarity with and in opposition to the lawyers but it struck me that they're deeply in conversation with the pro-segregationists they agree with the pro-segregationists that you have to change folk waves that you have to change minds that you can't just go to the courtroom and get a decree you actually have to perhaps in ritualized interactions like sit-ins you have to actually show people and convince people that change is good and I was just curious if you see that right from what you've written it doesn't seem like they understood themselves to be in a conversation like that but I wonder if they were and if that helps us think about discourse they're situated at the center of these different groups who have different ways of thinking about the last society divide but in general I think it goes to how we think about discourse production both who's producing it what institutions they're in and who they think they're talking to are these different groups of economists talking to each other or to like to pass each other things I think that's absolutely right and it does get back to the idea that the way it pulls out ideologically is just very confusing when they put themselves in opposition to the lawyers were actually putting themselves in terms of strategy on the very same page of the business owners and the local officials in the men's communities because they didn't want to go to court they wanted to sell it through negotiation because the local community thought that negotiation was where they had their advantage they had the power the students thought negotiation was where they could actually exercise their power from the exclusion of the lawyers so they actually agreed on this basic generalizable tactic the basic idea of the relationship between law and not law and about sort of directly addressing these issues not using the law is the most effective the most long lasting way of going about doing it and students actually were able to use that for some leverage because eventually they were able to get these people to the table but in the context of the national support that threw themselves behind the students and there's fascinating sort of memorandum by the NAACP trying to make sense of this because the NAACP are writing this memoranda to each other and to the students saying that you're never going to win once they get you to the table it's going to be anything you get will be temporary and that's the exact reversal of what they were thinking the legal victories they saw actually were temporary or just ineffectual and if they could actually get people at the table to change even if it was something even if they're going to martial to say this is not real change this is just sort of window dressing this was more real to them because of the way they understood the sort of interesting what they were doing what the lawyer was doing so this is really a follow up question can you turn it over does that work to Chris because I was really interested to hear how you in one sense collapsed the distance between the uses of society the desegregation struggles and the labor so in one sense I think we have tended to think about the virtues of the one society is a way of really thinking historically about law of rendering law contentant but in fact in the society as well that could be an advantage and the the attitude in the society of course has been one that's been positive ever since people have started thinking seriously about the social and I think I'm not doing this in order to tell you that this was done before but you know the Scottish Enlightenment is all about the sciences and the social which are positive against the law and you have then a romantic your version of it you know of quantum social science you know of Darwinian social science you know of William and Alexander and then you have whatever follows in the 20th century and you could respond of course saying you know you're interested in a certain kind of structural relationship in one society but I was wondering if you had thought about the vulnerability of historians and the social and what you might do for I hadn't actually thought in that direction but the way you framed it actually makes really nice sense we as legal historians tend to go back there and try to figure out the law and I think we're instead of expanding what we mean by the law but when we see efforts to create this a provisional boundary between a law and society just tell us something about how people view what's on the other side of that boundary and what is this society and I do think that segregationist folk ways approach that seem to resonate for so long and still actually resonates you can see some indication of that in scholarship some of the more pessimistic scholarship about I mean even if you go to the scholarship around the Howe of Hope the idea is the limited efficacy of litigation there is some narrowing assumptions there about society as being somehow more powerful there are assumptions about society that are embedded in our discussion about the law so I hadn't explicitly thought of it that way but I think I've actually really used a way to see some of the implications of what I'm looking at historically I just have a question because I thought this panel was really interesting because I learned a lot about the economy and the law staff which has been a little bit foreign to me the second one is because I think that it gives a really nice range of approaches to what it is that in the comments was being referred to as discourse which happens to be a word that I don't use and so even though I'm in a letter department I think that's why so I'm just wondering how each of you conceives your own turn into a history to what's being referred to as discourse and whether you consider that turn to discourse to be how it is that I think in some ways it's being taken for granted as a version or a derivation of social construction and whether it's possible that just as in some fields one would distinguish between discourse in our constructions and other terms that are important in thinking about language for instance but is there more going on than just for each of you that discourse is just another way of looking at social construction and can you explain in kind of pedagogical ways so that would be a range of your punches here. Can I say before we start not that much time left and I'm sure we could all talk about this for a very long time so if we could condense version would be great. Does anyone want to start? No. That's good. That's super short isn't it? You know it's so funny I thought one of the media was said to know reference to Foucault that we all read in the first year of graduate school and I thought about well that actually depends on when you were in your first year of graduate school so I thought that looked like you in time I temporized it, we're an historian and so you know one of the things I will say that critical legal theory has so shaped my head that it's really hard to imagine in a sense a world where I took things as real whether it's language or anything else and so I guess I wonder about when we were talking yesterday about the new new thing or the next new thing so what will be the next because it's not like we're done here it's not like we've found with this whatever that this is the last stage in our thinking so I think but then if you have graduate students fortunately if you have graduate students you keep doing the first year of graduate school in a sense which I think is actually a wonderful thing about teaching is that you don't get to just get left out of the mainstream at least if you don't want to be so my sense would be that I wonder right now we're taking this as almost the normal the given the thing that's going to last what it being open to what might be next and I guess yesterday the other comment was that history is always last where that you know the catcher uppers or something along those lines so you know so that's just one reflection which doesn't really answer your question I don't really think about the this exercise that I engaged in I'm not going to now write everything I do as a play but to me as I said to more for me it was literally very much an exercise in thinking so at the same time that I was imagining a production for an audience that the process of doing it was for me a thought process so I think encouraging students to actually write in different genres would be productive you know whether you're going to ask them to write a novel or an advertisement or a play or you know to ask them to actually think through the same story or the same issue through different genres that seems to me is potentially interesting I'll say two sentences I think historians generally I don't use the word discourse either unless I really really need to oh sorry I don't use the word discourse unless I really really have to I think often historians distinguish unfortunately between discourse and then material reality I think the discursive is a way of reading the world and so for me maybe the interesting questions would be how can we think of these places like or sites if you will like law or history as arenas of agency I mean the law is a condensation of a certain kind of agency so for me social constructivism is one way to get into this but I would say it presupposes the social that's Knoll's point so I suppose I'd ask people to think and to translate how why people act and how people act without falling back on say the name culture they act because of their culture or they act because of economic rationality or they act because of this or that so I think the challenge pedagogically is to get people to describe a habitus and hegemony if you will in new ways I mean I have a lot but I don't know that I could say in a sentence so maybe we should take another question Peter okay I have the last question and then lunch oh well maybe I have a break I have two questions but they're very short the first is from Roy it's very struck by the $10 bill and in the bottom right we could have the picture of Ganymede born up by an eagle which is a common sort of eaglematic theme maybe think that in sort of Peraldo in the other treatise on NSSIGNS the images on coinage are incredibly important for communication because they circulate much greater currency semi-artically than almost anything else and there was this wild array of pictures on the notes that you were looking at I just was intrigued as to whether I had a significance for you or whether there was a sort of symbolic similogical dimension to that so that was my question to you and Ritu I was intrigued by the opposition Logos and Lamos which I thought was probably a ruse device that you were using but there is a kind of politics to Logos and common law which in Sancti itself precisely it's the conversations of men they go to Ireland where they also have a common law and that common law is actually not as common as English common law so there's a sort of universality of Namos that renders this conventional that then in some sense is taken to India so the more obvious from my limited experience of India the more obvious is the kind of antinomy between Logos and Grafos and this whole rich cultural tradition of writings coming out of water and Logos was perhaps a little bit too common law and a little bit too English where we know immediately if you don't speak in a manner symbolizes those in how it's a realm below the river river trends and so on and we're not really using Logos at all The short answer is no no, of course it's a huge emblematic, hugely important I haven't done nearly enough work on it I've read a lot of work on it about coins and about disseminating disseminating the software but the stuff on notes is quite mysterious to me and I haven't worked on it I'm really interested in the question of Grafos and I have to think that through but what I will say is that for me there's always a slippage between Logos and Nomos so for me the interesting question is in any context, I mean even in the context of the common law in England there's a slippage between Logos as a logic and Nomos as practice so for me what I wanted to try to play out which I would have done better if I'd actually been able to elaborate my examples in a 45 to 50 minute talk would be about that slippage between habitus and practice and the processes that and also are unable to catch it and unable to systematize it so for me that's the sort of historical descriptive attention Thank you, thanks for your time