Mae'n fwyaf o'r ystyried o'r ystyried, oherwydd o'r 10 oed. Rwy'n gweithio'n gwneud o'r llwyffydd yn fawr, fel yw'r cyfnod, felly oeddwn i'n fawr, ond oeddwn i'n gweithio'r argyffredigol a'r argyffredigol, ar wneud o'r 50 oed, rwy'n gweithio'r fawr o'r bydd. Ond rwy'n cael ei wneud o'r argyffredigol, ond o'r credu'n gweithio, ..こちら is sempăr désigor iawn. The very pavement we tread, the parks, the streets, the squares... and bridges, airports and connections. It's about our everyday life, and in that sense I would describe it as the... ..irhang glue which binds the individual buildings together. The quality of that infrastructure really determines the quality. mae'r bydd llawer o'r gynnig yn gwneud yr hyn o'r cynnig, ond byddwyd yn ym bridegwch chi'n ddim yn y rhaglenol.  A oes gall Wathodaf a symud yn dddangos cyfwyrringol a cyfwyrwyr sy'n ddweud gan oedden nhw, wy journalists, trwng mlynedd a gael, y mae'n geisio'r perthig Sir Cymru yn ei ddyn nhw. Rwy'n hollwch angen y bobl, so ein bod yn ei ddechrau rydw i'r rhell. Mae'n byw ar gyfwyrwyr dyma, ond credu y siwod diwethaf ei ddyn nhw. Rydw i'm ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n gweithio'r cyfwyrwyr, Llywodraeth yn cael eu cymdeithas i dŵr gwled 23 meteorist i dŵr eu cael eu cymdeithasudeiddi'i hwn. Cyrd emergingol i dŵr o'r gwaith o'r byd yn cael eu cyfanio yn ymgyrchu bobl. Fy nhw'n gweithio'r cyffredinol gŵr a ddyfodd cyllid yn bobl, le mae'r cyfrannu Llywodraeth oherwydd ymyl yma, gan y pethau ffordd ymgag. Rwy'n gyfrannu Llywodraeth i ddegwsio'r cyfrannu'r cyfrannu, sydd yn cyd-dweudio'r cyd-dweudio. Nid yw'n gweithio yma assynol, sy'n gweithio'r cyd-dweudio'r cyd-dweudio'r cyd-dweudio. Mae'r ddigonol ymlaen o'r hynny. Rwyf yn digwydd, mae'n cael ei amser y cynnig yma. Felly, mae'n gwybod y meddwl yn gwybod yma. Mae'n gwybod hwy'n ffobled, drwy'r ymlaen roedd yma ar y cwyl. Mae'r eich meddwl yma mae'n ddwy'r gweithio'r genius o'r Oamstead. ychydig, oherwydd y Lanscape Architech yn y Chryd Gweithrech. A'r prynsibl sosial ar y cyfrifolio yno. Byddai yna'r ddweud sy'n ei ddim yn cyfrifolio. Byddai yna'r ddweud sy'n ei ddim yn ystod y cael ei ddweud fel y brifoedd yma ar y cyfrifolio. Byddai yna'r ddweud yn gweithfyrdd, byddai'n gweithfyrdd gennair. Mae'r cyfrifolio yna'r cyfrifolio'n iawn i'r cyfrifolio'n cael eu cyfrifolio a bwysig i ddoedd o'r lland ar y ddechrau. Mae hyn yn gallu gynlleniaeth fforsigol, maen nhw'n mynd i ddweud o ddweud o ddweud, ond mae'r gairau'r fforddau a'r fforddau a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o ddweud yn ddweud o London, New York, Hong Kong... Felly, mae'r bwysig yn gweithredu i ddweud o ddweud oedd hynny o'r Atlanta, mor los angilys, hwston. Let's take Atlanta. You look at the comparative populations. This is the footprint, this is the shape of the city. The shape of the city is very important in terms of its performance and its attraction. Atlanta. London and New York are about one and a half times the population of Atlanta. Jaime, rhai, erbyn eich cymryd, ewg o'r cywbeth. Mae'r cymryd yn 1, 6. If you take Hong Kong, similar population comparison, the factor is almost 1 to 20. So, another way of looking at cities three dimensionally, and I'm indebted to Ricky Urban Age, LSE for these diagrams, is if you three dimensionally look at where people live in New York. You can see, compared to the density of the work locations, you can see that some people are coming in. If you look at the similar three-dimensional diagram for London, you see that a lot of people are coming in. That is, in a way, one signal telling you something we all know, and that is that there is a housing problem in London. There is another issue here, and that is that although these are very kind of diagrammatic, you can imagine if it's Manhattan, and if you were close, you would see the peninsula of Manhattan, and Manhattan is probably embedded in New York in a larger sense, Manhattan is even more sustainable, because as you move out of New York, it really starts to sprawl, and you have this kind of, for me, a kind of visual social blight. It drains the life out of the centres, and it's kind of endless. If this is America, you only have to cross the channel to see the continental equivalent of that in France, Italy, Switzerland, and it really is very, very unpleasant. I think that, for me, one of the most enlightened acts of parliament was the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947, which created this unique extraordinary concept of a green belt, which is always under threat, and forever one hears the mantra, you have to erode the green belt because that's the only way of solving the housing situation in our cities. Bill Bryson did a book recently, and I think it's called The Road to Little Dribbling, and he's an American living in East Anglia, and he writes so movingly about why it's important to maintain the green belt, and he writes that as an American. If you look at London enclosed by the green belt, which is one of the factors which makes it so desirable as a place to live because you have this green lung so close, and in a way it also has ensured that London has a greater sustainability in terms of keeping its compactness. But in there, there are already 32 square kilometres of brownfield sites ready for development. If you take a population increase in the next 25 years, then that would lead you to a need for another 123 square kilometres if you built at the density of Chelsea. I think it's interesting to talk just a little about densities. In other words, the number of people on an acre or a square kilometre. London, interestingly after World War II, the expectation is that London would actually shrink, so you had this phenomenon of the new towns anticipating that. The density if you take Southwch around the turn of the century and running through until after World War II was around that density, 20,500 people to the square kilometre. Then you had a lot of developments of social housing at much lower densities, and that is one of the explanations for why the density of London historically over that period has dropped in the centre and increased on the outside. There are current trends that are slightly countering that, but that's the broad picture. The immediate reaction is that's a higher density than that, but when you compare it, you realise that that's an untruth, that you don't have to build high to have a high density. If we put this in the context of London and you say what are the most desirable, most sought after areas, the high real estate, then you take Earl's Court, which is 20,000, you take Notting Hill, you take Mayfair, you take Chelsea. The opportunity in the centre of London to take not only the brownfield size, but to take those areas which were redeveloped to retrofit some of those tower buildings, higher six, seven-storey buildings, and to use the space around them and to create more community-like spaces to increase the density, to bring the density up to, and the factor I use was Chelsea, because in a way it's low rise, it's very friendly, you can walk to a shop, you can walk to a cinema, entertainment leisure. It's very pedestrian friendly and that could be by a policy made available and you would have, you would satisfy the housing market with a spectrum of houses that would be affordable to all sectors of society. If you look at that relationship as a graph between the very, very high density cities, Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, you move across to here and then you shoot up there, the energy consumption goes absolutely crazy and all of these have the characteristics of a kind of rich mixture of uses, good public transport, they're pedestrian friendly, they're high density as I've said, they're socially diverse and that's the opportunity of these estates for redevelopment and they have very, very good public spaces and the case of London very different as its pattern from New York, a kind of a way number of villages each with their own green area have kind of molded together but if you move it outside of the world of architecture professionals and you say well the voting visitors, public residents, how do they see it? So PWC they do this scan of 30 cities and they have 59 indicators and it's quite interesting that London and New York they come out on top, Singapore comes number three and Hong Kong over there comes number 12 so that kind of model of a city has a much wider broader appeal. If we just focus on London and explore one small concept and that is the potential of a small change to make a very, very large difference and it's interesting that we have quite short memories of how things were in the past and I can recall in 1996 Ricky and I were on a platform, Tony Blair in that who was arranged with the evening standard, the evening standard put its kind of influence behind it and I was advocating the case, I visited this recently and I said you know this is one of the most noble spaces in Europe and it's absolutely disgusting, it's full of cars and I did a sketch up there demonstrating and saying you know this could be one of the greatest spaces in Europe and with the kind of clout of the evening standard and the politicians who were at that event that eventually happened and it's a kind of total transformation. The next two I kind of had a long conversation about whether I should show it or not because I thought everybody's familiar with this but maybe they're not. I mean 1996 this is how Trafalgar Square was and again I think we all have quite short memories. It was a huge undertaking to transform that to this. I mean it was a nation, it was kind of not quite nationwide but right to the edges of the metropolis and involved about 180 separate organisations but again this is how it was here and the centre was for the kind of pigeons and stragglers on the edge and again that transformation so it is just worth remembering the power of a relatively small intervention and just inserting a bridge, a pedestrian bridge across the Thames, a millennium bridge that has had a socially transforming effect way beyond the scope of the undertaking itself and against McKinsey's predictions at the time all their predictions were wrong by a factor of a hundred percent. This is the space, this is the space syntax kind of diagram of how it was without the bridge and then this is the prediction of the greater connectivity and so they predicted four million people walking across it every year, eight million walked across it, they said 1,500 jobs, it was 3,000 jobs, attendance in St Paul's of visitors was up by 40% and similarly the tank gallery so again the ripple effect of a relatively small intervention, thinking big because I think that the answer is probably the two approaches in parallel. I wonder just how many people when they walk along here and they see the workman putting in the kind of Boris Bykeway, the one billion pound sort of transforming initiative into London adding yet another layer onto the tarmac here. I just wonder how many of us are aware and grateful to a guy called Basil Jett who had this extraordinary vision to use the solution to the health problems of London at that time by the big initiative of creating a sewer system but he didn't just create a sewer system he integrated it into great sort of civic gestures of land standards, incredible detailing of stone, underground transportation, landscaping, pumping stations and all that was occasioned by the fact that the Thames was really an open sewer and the stink was literally so disgusting that parliament passed this bill so again the power of an act of parliament, the power, the political dimension to infrastructure and amazingly we talk about the problems of building an airport is going to take us 20, 30 years. This guy did it in seven years. The whole thing well not the whole thing he did an eastern expansion that took another 10 years but essentially the big initiative was achieved in seven years. It's very interesting we talk about pollution we associate it with with with the basing it wasn't that long ago that we had the great smog in London and we had a 30 mile band that brought the whole city to a standstill and then we had the clean air act of 1956 and you can see that dramatic reduction again short memories but big initiatives and so when we see this image of Beijing it's not really that long ago that we were having the same problems here and Peter Dresen has come up with this very very Paul Dresen excuse me has come up with this very very interesting app and his proposition is that the catalyst for change perhaps in the same way that we're seeing Uber transform the whole transport taxi relationship in a city his point was when you can see exactly where you are exactly what the level of pollution is that will move you to participate and really bring change about which I think is a very very interesting phenomenon Ricky talked about the urban explosion in China where it's the equivalent of one London every six months for six years starting last year and in that sense what does China learn perhaps from some of the successes the mix of positive and negative in terms of our urban models how do they apply that experience from some recent exchanges I I see some quite positive indicators but this nonetheless is is some of the present realities but on the other hand what can we learn from some of the achievements and and this I'm quite closely connected to it's Beijing airport the thing here is it's not just the quest on their part to find the building as a machine that will just cope with the number of aircraft arriving and departing there is a tremendous sense of civic pride and I started my working life at the age of 16 in Manchester town hall and I tell you that made a deep impression on me that was a great kind of initiative with super civic pride with Albert Square in front of it they in a way have picked up that and and I fear sometimes that we're in danger of losing that if we haven't lost it and just make a comparison about decision making and a clear kind of view of where you want to go as a society make a comparison this building which is one nearly one and a half million square meters and needed 44 kilometers of road and rail to connect it to the center took four years and you compare that with terminal five now it's usually at this point that somebody says ah well but you don't understand they have a one party system they don't have unions um that explains it all well sorry it doesn't because if you take the longest running inquiry in planning history in this country and you take four years and you take the longest planning process and it's three to four years you're still left with an embarrassing gap in between which is totally about decision making it's totally about deciding where you want to go and going there in the most economical expeditious way possible so I think that that's one of the lessons that I see that we could learn another is how did Hong Kong learn from the past history of our airports so they have a problem as they see aircraft kind of landing and they're all these cartoon images of the aircraft plucking the washing off the apartment balconies as it sort of comes in low over the over the city so that aside they have to move the airport but there's no land that's not a problem they just take an island chop down the mountain it's 100 meters high and then just create a site out of water no big deal um where did they get the idea from probably from us I mean in 1971 we were talking about doing it in maplinsans good wind sands so and and everybody knows that we're on that bandwagon with the with the Thames hub and it's probably worth just perhaps putting that in context if you take the Thames hub airport you need 57 kilometers of road and rail and you need to add a little bit of land into the water but that is too difficult I hear it all the time so too difficult but compare it with Hong Kong they had to do more roads and rail they had to do tunnels for road and rail they had to build two bridges two kilometers there two kilometers there and it was all achieved in three years in six years in actual fact it was three years to make the site because it didn't exist and three years to make the building and um and in terms of proximity if you look at a hub airport and you look at connecting it by HS1 you get to the centre in 30 minutes currently he throw to farrington is 47 minutes when you've got crossrail it's still 32 minutes so in time there's kind of two minutes difference and it's and it's faster and also at this point you're using this airport as a catalyst to create a new Thames barrier to use tidal power which will drive the airport and also to secure the eastward expansion of London to take into account that growth to add more land to the land stock for expansion um so this really is a very interesting choice isn't it you can spend 14 years and you can get an airport which will cater beyond the end of this one here operating at 85 percent utilisation or you can spend the same amount of time get one runway extra a small one and uh and you don't achieve the same objective and the reality is that Heathrow can never be a hub it's simply not big enough it's not big enough the imprint is just it won't work and never be a hub so it's like a stationary bicycle the harder you pedal you're not standing still you're actually going backwards so um but as you can see i do have an opinion on the subject um the hub airport was a research project that we did because we were immersed and still are in all these kind of bold ventures and and thinking ahead whether it's now mexico airport other airports other initiatives around the world so we wanted to bring some of that back home and say hey look at this think about it and the airport was only one component of a kind of bigger picture and that was saying that it's all about connectivity and and it's about connectivity by rail it's about rebalancing the uk and if you if you do that then you bring prosperity you you you even out the inequalities the differences whether it's freight whether it's taking it off the road whether it's international freight coordinating it with ports um and making connections and recognising that we are an island we're not in a european country where if there's a problem we can cross a border hop on it on an airport but but but basically a hub airport will serve these places in the future and these are places that as a practice we cannot get to out of Heathrow right now flights sometimes only once a week so you have to connect in europe where there's a daily flight so anyway that was that was part of the thinking another part of the thinking was to try to communicate some of the benefits of high speed rail and i hear quite frequently why would you do high speed rails or a businessman to save a few minutes getting from Manchester to London it's not really about that the experience in china is that 50 percent of the flights less than 500 kilometers are replaced by high speed you double the capacity for a regional rail you take freight off off the road and you reduce congestion into the city centres so the benefits are kind of far and wide and also why as a nation can we not celebrate the heritage of our great landscaping tradition i mean here capability round you feel you own the whole kind of county the reality is that this is your your boundary and that's that device of a ha ha that gives you the illusion that really the landscaping is just sort of beautiful why can't you apply that principle to the insertion of high speed rail connect it with other vital services which may need upgrading or introducing to sink those to dig in to create berms and to combine this with trails bike trails hiking trails why not celebrate this as a as a great potential a great opportunity in other words this in its time the glen fitton viaduct over the river in in scotland is is is a great addition to the landscape sometimes you just cannot bury it you have to actually state it and live with it and i think that that in in that case the opportunity to be able to do something on this heroic scale but very very delicately in the landscape and here in our mio viaduct over the tarn river you can see the comparison with the eiffel tower just in terms of scale these are 17 meters higher than the than the tower could there ever be an ecological dimension to a motorway it's an interesting question before the viaduct this is what you had you had 20 mile five hour tail backs the roads were totally congested it Greek mayhem so if you take this and you put it in the sky on a viaduct what are the what are the benefits are their benefits obviously benefits are convenient how can you quantify it well one in every 10 vehicles is a heavy goods vehicle and unlike all the other vehicles you do know where it started it started in Paris and it's gone to Perpignan and because of the recording devices that can be calculated and just taking the trucks alone you can take 40 000 tons of carbon dioxide annually which is the equivalent of of planting a 40 000 tree forest and that's just 10 percent of the vehicles and also the idea that this could be celebratory that it could be very very delicate in the landscape it could give you almost the feeling of flight as you went through and become something that would in itself be an attraction people would actually come stay in the local town of mio enjoy the prospect of the bridge be it almost as it is a tourist attraction as well as the the other benefits I'd like to just touch on the some experience which I my colleagues have had on many of our projects and and it's interesting that you need individuals who have courage and who are committed to do social good and who are elected and responsible to the people who have elected them and if they don't see good things happening as a result of that they don't get re-elected and it's I mean Jean Bousquet was the individual who created the Carre d'Ar in Nîm which has just now been renamed the Carre d'Ar Jean Bousquet. Maurithio Macri who we've been working with now president of Argentina and very much influenced by the record of what he did for his city so all these individuals very very important principle if you take Macri what he did he identified zones in the city where they could encourage a certain kind of enterprise so there's the sports zone design arts technology this is the one that we were involved with and and there's a key building as a catalyst you can see the site for that key building up there and you can see the adverts going in for the zone advertising office space and the building that we were responsible for was the city hall and what is interesting about this is that the photographer taking this photograph at the start of this project when our team first went out on the site it was a no go area you couldn't walk around it was that dangerous that has totally transformed there are other factors of course as a public transport system so people can walk easily uh to here and connectivity and communication is a major factor in terms of social change and then uh working with Pascal Merigal um he was under intense pressure from competing empires of the communication world and um and this is um this is a hill which is probably has the highest proportion of lawyers in Barcelona so he had a really really tough time but he convinced everybody that they the the rival enterprises should get together and they should share one tower and this was a resulting tower the effect of that is extraordinarily economical but it was an act of great political courage it's the same story in terms of Bill Bow and the metro which which set the city up for uh for the uh you know the the the Geary Guggenheim enterprise and this is seeing how it was locked in its kind of industrial past and the way in which the administration has encouraged uh enterprise and um and the metro system again in terms of communication the kind of economic generator another interesting uh project is the high line so if you take this kind of disused elevated railway system in New York and this is the view afterwards I mean a great initiative um inspired under the leadership of Mike Bloomberg as a mayor and um and that connects buildings brings um redevelopment along its spine and um wasn't exactly the inspiration but is is is quite a very relevant model to the idea of sky cycle which we proposed along with our partners exterior architecture and space syntax the idea of um an above ground initiative that wouldn't require all the heavy drilling and excavation would be quite lightweight could encourage kiosk and through its connectivity would would would bring about another phase of urban renewal again the initiative of a kind of small change with the power to make a big uh big difference I've been talking about projects really in this part of the world here you might call it the ordered world this is caracas and it is this motorway spine that separates the other informal world uh the differences are fairly obvious on the right hand side you'll have a bathroom here you won't there you'll be able to press a switch and have electricity here you won't um sanitation clean water and so on um and uh some projects in that part of the world and one which uh we've already heard about in the introduction earlier bogat are this brilliant manifesto of doing more with less and the statistics just look at them since this um innovation 93 percent reduction in traffic fatalities and so on so really for the same price as a 40 kilometer metro system this mare achieved with this idea a network of 400 kilometers i mean and and transforming in its effect and using existing technology but rethinking it um giving it its own dedicated route the people who will be sitting in there will have bought their tickets before they even got to the to the bus line and then in uh made a gene the transfer technology of this which is arguably the most economical way i think it's something like uh 30 to 100 dollars a mile inserting that into the informal settlements and um i think that he the mare called this initiative uh social urbanism the idea being that he targeted the poorest in the society to improve their communication and link it to a program of educational buildings rather like other images in this series the one that i showed which had the different densities of the cities this image and some of the others i'm indebted to Ricky and his colleagues for so i haven't seen this myself and i can't wait to see it but i think it's very much an inspirational example and um and again it was a very very specific initiative to encourage young architects to link it to education and the you can measure the social effects of this because if your kids can go to school or can move across areas safely without coming into contact with the gangs and the drug dealers then that's going to reduce homicides and this speaks wonders i mean when uh when this guy came in the murder rate went down 25 percent and that's something like 10 compared with where it was in 1991 so infrastructure does have the power for quite transformative change this is another example i'm indebted to Ricky i think he's absolutely brilliant i haven't met the architect i'm looking forward to meeting him um and this is the upper deck of um of a project which took the 300 public toilets it was commissioned by the dwellers association and um and instead of doing what everybody expected you put public toilets in well it's about sanitation and waste isn't it but here it's the same holistic thinking as basil jet no it's not just about toilets it's about spaces for kids where they can learn at night safely it's about gender it's about risk uh the photovoltaics on the roof enable this area and that area there to be littered night so it's about safety so it is this kind of holistic thinking and the way in which a small intervention can make a big change a couple of uh just touching on what i would call research projects um and um and this we were approached to look at a project in deravi an informal settlement it's about the same size as uh as Hyde Park it's a million people that's the density per hectare that's the space per family um and um and this team uh Narendra Segu my partner and my partner Chris Bub went out there and uh and spent time with the community and tried to ask the right questions about what makes the place tick and in the process of doing that they also said you know these buildings here well these buildings here were built as an answer to that why do they lie empty why do they have the only modern sanitation in the entire community and yet they're they're unused so that was one of the questions that they asked and um this is just a glimpse of a very big dossier of uh of work we're examining the cross section you can't that this runs the waste economy of Mumbai and uh and it needs horizontal space you can't make it work in a 14-story building so some of the explorations were could you without ripping the community apart without bulldozing it and resettling everybody in remote locations which is the conventional answer could you take the physical and social infrastructure of the community and insert modern services that meant trying to find out what was happening behind the walls what kind of spaces could you transform that could you use the power of photovoltaics to take it off a a grid which is subject to frequent breakdowns and in a glimpse another research project Masdar Institute the kind of leading institution for researching green forms of energy renewable energy and investing in green initiatives that is currently about 5 000 people by about 2030 it will be 50 60 000 anticipated and all these lights are blazing here totally driven it is still um so many years later still the only functioning zero carbon community and it is driven primarily by that 10 megawatt solar field those are conventional photovoltaics in this project there were a number of separate experiments one was concentrated power looking at the ability of the sun to be beamed into a trough of a kind of parabolic trough which would then direct the sun's rays with great intensity onto that long hollow tube of liquid which would be heated to several hundred degrees centigrade and um and that would be converted through a turbine and produce electricity and it is that same masdar entity which is invested in the london array which is the world's largest wind farm and it's quite interesting just to see the the potential in terms of the way that those could power and will power communities so i think that's a a kind of interesting initiative um moving to the africa that we heard about before there are 54 countries in africa it's the second largest continent its population is 1.2 billion by 2050 that will have doubled and at that point one in four people on the planet will be african and the 44 of those countries use the same energy as as spain so how will its infrastructure catch up and what are the urgent issues um i was approached by somebody i've known for some years jonathan ledgard who had the idea that maybe you could solve some of the humanitarian problems jonathan is an african expert he's lived for many years of his life in africa he's passionate about the country and um and he says you know one of the problems is how you deliver blood blood is a kind of vital ingredient in terms of sickness and disease in africa and um and he tells harrowing stories of hospital disease visited children who've not survived simply because the blood couldn't be delivered and just to put the infrastructure needs of africa into context um narinda in an earlier venture of his when he went out to sierra leone to use drawing to try to help kids who'd been traumatised by by the wall um so he took a little video of what an all season road is this is narinda getting to the school so if you put that into the context of drones which are under development at the moment um the one with a wingspan will deliver 20 transfusions the larger one will deliver parts bits of machinery uh equipment um and this is the kind of all season road obviously if you leap ahead you could see drone highways in the sky and when the infrastructure catches up whether it's a road which also kind of harnesses the sun's power and converts it whatever but meanwhile um at the scale of three drone ports in rwanda uh where jonathan has been negotiating and the idea of a building system which is derived from our work with the european space agency on on lunar structures and so a self-build project for the architecture coupled with the technology of the um of the drone now when jonathan approached me he said norman you've been involved with some of the largest airports in the world how do you feel about doing the smallest one in the world and of course i was excited moved um and he pointed out of course what will happen is if this really takes off there'll be so many of them that in mass it will be greater than your kind of big airports but the interesting thing about doing airports is that i'm often asked but can an airport ever be sustainable and um and i've been thinking about an answer and maybe you have to put that question into a wider perspective so just starting with the livestock industry and the livestock industry generates as much uh emissions carbon emissions as every aircraft truck train bus car motorcycle and ship together combined so the greenhouse gas emissions from this industry equals the totality of that you can quantify that in terms of greenhouse gases what if you quantify it in the amount of fuel fossil fuel used to produce this just that it's the equivalent of the combined passengers traveling 250 km in the 747 or 30 km in a family car thank you


Welcome, everyone. This will be a fun discussion about the future of skepticism, and I suppose while it's featuring people whose opinions, I think, are informed, even if they're not all in agreement about some of these issues, and I want you to hear these opinions, I suppose first we should define a bit what we mean by skepticism. So for the purposes of this conversation, skepticism is at once the approach to claims that we prize, the approach that we prize to certain unfounded claims, and also the growing worldwide movement of folks who are working at the grassroots and in other areas to advance that approach to claims. Now quick intro to the panelists so we can get into the discussion. There is Jamie Ian-Swiss, whom you all know, longtime contributor to the JREF, advisor to the organization. There's Tim Farley, JREF fellow and someone who leads the way when it comes to online skepticism. He does sceptools.com and whatstheharm.net. There's Reid Esaw, co-founder of Skepticamp, which are informal community-based skeptic conferences at the local level, really not just all around the United States now, but all around the world. And there's Barb Drescher. She serves on the James Randi Educational Foundation's Educational Advisory Panel. And she has taught at Cal State Northridge. She has studied, she focuses on perception, critical thinking, and attention. So panel first off, and let's start with Jamie, Jamie, you've been involved with skepticism for decades, more than I think anyone else of us in this discussion, and so given your experience in this with national capital area skeptics, Bay Area skeptics, New York City skeptics, yeah, apologies, do you see this stuff we're all part of, the movement aspect, do you see it growing? And I guess maybe is it even a movement or are we complimenting ourselves when we talk in those sorts of terms? I think we have unmistakable, incontrovertible evidence that it's a movement, both a movement and a growing movement. I think there might have been a time when we wondered if it was a movement or we were hoping that it was a movement. Certainly in the early days of PsyCOP we were kind of hoping it was a movement, whatever that movement might be. But I think there's a JRF tally now of over 200 skeptic organizations activities, if you count skeptics in the pub, meetup groups, et cetera, and that's excluding humanist and atheist groups, over 200. When PsyCOP was born there was PsyCOP. So I think it's unmistakably growing, I think that's terrific, I'm all for local skeptic activism for all sorts of reasons. I think it's an undeniable trend. Anybody else? You think this is necessarily growing as a worldwide movement? We use that phrase a lot. Sorry, I'm not used to using a microphone. I've seen everything growing as well as retreating in some respects. In my experience as a meetup organizer I saw a lot of people signing up for the meetups but they immediately became inactive. So the numbers at meetup while they are growing overestimate the actual number of people that are involved. And so I'd say for any given set of numbers be skeptical and take a close look at that. I'm sure that's true and especially for something like meetups and I think it demonstrates the difference between what organizing is and sort of gathering. Because a meetup very often doesn't, no one puts in any more to it than having a little coffee get together at their home or, and that's a nice thing about skeptics in the pub is that it's kind of easy, you already have a pick a place to do it and then you go and do it and it's fun and social and I think that's really good. But with a meetup, someone has to take charge, someone has to maintain, someone has to organize and sometimes people don't realize that until they have to the fact and that's the difference between a meetup and a real organization. Is that either realize sooner or later that you need infrastructure, you need to be doing things, you need to be doing outreach, you need to be running lectures or whatever it is, that's what creates an organization. What I'm hearing I think highlights the dichotomy between activism and identification. There's a difference between claiming an ideology which I think we kind of do, we share an ideology and a way of thinking and being invested in whether or not other people share that or maybe preventing the harm that some of the things that we fight do and there's a difference there. So they may sign up for those types of groups because they want that identification or they want to express that they identify and aren't necessarily able to kind of work that into their lives as a priority. I did a census last year and I recently redid it of skeptic podcasts because I was interested in how many were out there and podcasts are at least a definable thing that you can find because there's iTunes and places where they get aggregated and podcasts also have a defined beginning which was April May of 2005 when there were two and now there are 96 and about 30 have gone by the wayside and so there was a huge, huge growth in the years in between, slow growth at first and then a huge explosion in 2008, 2008, 2009 and for some reason I'm noticing a little bit of a leveling off right now where it's hovering around 95, 96 for the last year or so and I don't know if that means anything but certainly 96 skeptic podcasts and that's as Jamie said where he was leaving out the humanist groups I left out all the atheist podcasts I was focusing just on the ones that had significant science content just for sheer trying to keep the scope down of what I had to measure and they also found that there were about 10 languages, most of them obviously are in English but a bunch of other languages represented which is very encouraging. So if we look out at this audience at the amazing meeting 2012 I think it's relevant to this conversation to realize there's something like 21 countries represented in this audience there's 46 states, all but four states and what that suggests to me is that whatever TAM is it's reaching out to a lot of folks especially when you consider the factor that just right around 50% of the people who are here this year are at TAM for the first time and that's pretty consistent over the years and in that sense I consider TAM sort of an outreach vehicle. If you look at the history of the organized skeptics movement you see that it didn't really start out with a group of skeptics in the back room sort of plotting and planning to create a worldwide movement instead a group of public intellectuals and authors and scientists and critics looked around in the mid 70s and said I don't really like the... well in the 60s the organizations weren't founded in the 60s there were public intellectuals who were speaking out but the sort of organized skeptical movement in the 70s few few folks got together and said we want to do something about that nonsense what are we going to do so James Randy, Paul Kurtz, Isaac Asimov, a list of folks said well what we should do is publish magazines and and write things and speak in the media but out of that came this growing network of grassroots groups so all of us are involved with skepticism in in one sense at the national level. We're involved with national organizations we are leading national efforts etc. Most of us are involved at the local level which came first for you local or national? For me it was national I think there was a local organization in Atlanta and it kind of petered out and then I came to TAM and so I got involved here first and then we started up a new vocal organization. For me it started out with a new Denver skeptics group which had replaced didn't replace it came a few years after a Rocky Mountain skeptics which had been in Colorado for decades before and we started as a social group and that's experimenting with the skeptic camp open events and that's how we had gotten started locally but the skeptic camp eventually became an international phenomenon. For me I guess it's sort of simultaneous but that if I count teaching which is a big part of it it was just me it wasn't you know like I organized with another group of people but I've taught skepticism for a lot longer than I've been involved in the organizations and what they do so even before you self-identified as a actually no because that goes back to high school I was approached by one of those you know the Bay Area skeptics which was only a couple of years old at the time and that's how I learned what skeptic was so I think when I started teaching I just that seemed like what needed to be taught at the time so I was always teaching it. For me it was it was local and I'm glad it was and I gave me a I think a different perspective perhaps and if it had happened from the top down for me I was a Psycop supporter at a distance I read Skeptical Inquirer and so on but it was in 1985 and I was in Washington DC as a resident performer at a club there I met Chip and Grace Denman we found out right away we had magic in common we had Psycop and Skeptical Inquirer in common we were kind of amazed that there were no skeptic organizations in Washington DC we thought that maybe the nation's capital could benefit from such a thing a little rationality you know and two years later we were still sort of complaining about the fact that no one had done it and then one day had dawned on us oh it's probably gonna have to be us and we Chip and Grace and I with the help of the late Phil Klass one of the great warriors skeptics from Psycop who was in the area also started the National Capital area skeptics so we've rehearsed a bit about the history of this organized worldwide skeptics movement as it's growing but recently so I've been involved in this what 15 years and I feel like it's changed a lot and it's changed more in the last few years than it has in the longer span of my involvement before that so let's explore the various ways skepticism as something we're doing not as something not as a position we have but the activism part of it how that's changing so Tim you've really led the way in identifying and cultivating approaches for advancing skepticism even outside of the the groups people might go to once a month yeah there's a lot of really exciting things going on in the internet because it seems like one of the fundamental things that we could be doing is trying to reach out to essentially the customers of our competitors right it's the customers of psychics the customers of homeopaths because a lot of these people don't know what they're getting into we've had people show up at our Atlantis skeptics in the pub and get upset that we were saying bad things about homeopathy and then we said oh have you never heard the explanation and we explained it to them and they were shocked so sometimes simple things like that can can reach people and so I've been making my specialty studying ways that we can get skeptical information in front of people using the internet and there's a lot of interesting things going on in terms of marketing local marketing like ways that businesses put themselves on the internet so they show up in Google Maps and things like that and the way websites are rated and blocked because there's so many hackers and all this other scams and stuff on the internet and I've been doing things through my blog where I teach skeptics how to use these tools to get a skeptical message out there so for instance using the web of trust tool to put a negative rating on sites that are selling pseudoscience and crap so that if the person happens to have that tool installed on their computer they'll get a big warning on their screen they may have to dig a little deeper to find out why that warning is there but at least it'll stop them for a moment and say hey somebody thinks this is bad maybe I should look further I think of myself as taking activism in a new direction or at least in a non-traditional direction my emphasis or my focus with the skeptic camp events is not outreach which a lot of people might think open events outreach the skeptic camp events are focused principally on knowledge sharing and skill development for skeptics for the 95% of us in this room to become better skeptics and so it's well ultimately skeptic camp can feed things like the harm reduction and other forms of activism the principle the principle the activist goal for skeptic camp is to make us better skeptics so read when you look at how a lot of the national organizations first supported local outfits local groups subscriber databases you know they were mailed in a geographic region and said hey you guys subscribe to this magazine you care about these issues you want to meet everybody this is before meet-up before the internet you know get together and will help foster a group said some of these national organizations psychop I'm thinking of primarily contrast that in turn with your model in terms of how you get a new skeptic camp is it all people who are already self identified and then they just sort of do it on on their own or well skeptic camp is ultimately based upon a conference model a wildly successful conference model from the tech community called bar camp these are organized in an ad hoc fashion the first bar camp took place in 2005 and was organized in two weeks by a bunch of people and they had like turned out of 200 people and they just and the conference was basically giving talks to one another and so to actually assemble the skeptic camp it doesn't organizations can support the skeptic camp but ultimately the skeptic camp comes together driven by social media like like meet-up and Facebook and Twitter and that's what gets everybody together and anyone can do a skeptic camp skeptic camp dot org at anyone can plug in and we were just in Madrid a couple months ago and they had the month before had their first skeptic camp so this is something going on all around the world but your emphasis is it's for skeptics it's not reaching out and engaging with our cultural competitors that's great that's that's right that's it's a I'd considered a prerequisite to activism once you master the skills of skepticism by all means step into a role of activism but focus on those skills beforehand so how do we as a movement that's not really widely professionalized I mean there there's a couple dozen of us might work draw a little paycheck doing this sort of stuff but most of us it's a labor of love you know all of you have other full-time jobs and still find the energy to do everything that you're doing so how do we figure out in a movement that's not professionalized to that degree to care about quality control or is the option hey we're open to all comers we're interested in fun topics and let's get together and socialize and they might have religion or the paranormal over here over here we have skepticism for the skeptic camp events these are uncurated events which means that anyone can do a talk and as long as it's somewhat related to science and skepticism and so you get a full you get a wide diversity of talks that are being given and occasionally have to deal with misinformation of speakers that get up and are deliberately misrepresenting the truth or inadvertently misrepresenting the truth and so for skeptic camp the the principle method of quality control that we have is to simply raise your hand during a talk and ask a question and the speakers is compelled to deal with that deal with that question as a collaborative forum of quality control let's skeptic that's skepticism by doing right where they're learning skepticism by doing it right there at skeptic camp we had that happen in Atlanta skeptic camp last year we had one of our presenters who's a regular in the in the group basically came in and was presenting a conspiracy theory that she believed in and it was kind of entertaining to watch the chat because there were people watching a live stream and the people in the chat just kind of went a little bit berserk and we made sure that during the Q&A we pushed back real hard on her that she didn't have her evidence in in a row and and she didn't she hadn't done her homework on this particular theory and hopefully that came across yeah it's what I when I'm hearing here is finding really interesting because that's exactly how academics works that's exactly how science works there's no you know overlord of science who decides what is and is not good science there is a culture and everybody gets to say and the researcher who's being criticized has to take that criticism accept it and improve their research or it won't be accepted by the community and I think that's one of the reasons why we see so much of what people call infighting on the internet because there's so many grassroots people involved and there and everybody's kind of fighting for control of the content and something's gonna probably win out you know stuff gets sifted and it goes in waves and just like science does and that's how we work things out but that's how human beings work things out because we we don't have the overlord of skepticism either no except so the optimism inherent in public debate is that if you do good public debate the best ideas for either side the the very best ideas went out now maybe that's sort of a faith claim because there's something called rhetoric and you can deceive people with your words and all that stuff too but it seems to me that the the skeptic camp model is sort of different than the low the local group skeptic organization model at least in the sense that the local groups I've been part of they have monthly lectures people come in your you get informed about something interesting and then you go socialize yeah you can think of skeptic camp is being as opposed to the formal education of a skeptics or the structured education of a skeptics toolbox skeptic camp would be similar but it's peer-based education it's us it's us learning sharing what we know and learning from each other what one of the things that I emphasize in almost every talk that I give is for skeptics that because we do need there's so much nonsense out there we need as many people as possible to push back especially on the local level but you need to do your homework so one of the things that I emphasize is specialization if you're doing stuff on the internet and you have a website or whatever it is that you're doing pick a pick a topic pick a subtopic because we've got a lot of stuff going on in skepticism you know everything from UFOs to Bigfoot to denialism to alt mad there's so much stuff that I know I can't keep up with it all so I recommend that on a lot of skeptics who want to do stuff online pick a slice and then just dig deep and read the books and read the articles and make sure you know everything there is to know about that slice of skepticism and then find where you're needed online and make make your knowledge of an example who comes to mind is Susan Gerbeck and right you want to explain yeah I could get involved one of the tools that I push my blog is called Skeptools and because I was trying to push people try to use the tools that are out there on the internet to advance skepticism and one of the things that I talked about early on like three years ago was Wikipedia getting on Wikipedia and and making sure there's skeptical content and the content that relates to our topics is good and there's a lot of reasons to do that and Susan saw that and saw a presentation that I gave on a J ref cruise actually and took it to heart and she made that her specialty and so she's got a whole blog just devoted to Wikipedia and she organizes people to edit stuff on Wikipedia and she's working on a new project now and relating to translating stuff into other languages on Wikipedia and so that's that's exactly what I mean is you know just just dive in there and find your area and that way you can focus on it and learn all there is to know. I agree and Tim both make excellent points about the need for this kind of training within and expertise within and I think it's these are important arguments for example for why one of the valuable roles of J ref is to serve as resource and support for local skepticism I think that's a I think that's a powerful role for the organization among other services provided but I also think at the same time that that need for expertise and to know what we're talking about before we talk about it should not be considered a discouragement to local activism because invariably what happens with local activism is people want to get involved and people want to do something and they don't and not everybody has the expertise well that's true and you can't wait around until you have enough expertise or enough experts especially on the local level to have experts on every subject you do need to reach out before you open your mouth absolutely but the desire to do something the willingness to put out that energy and effort to do something to gather people to put on a monthly public lecture when we started at NCAS we almost immediately began a lecture series that pretty quickly after the first by the second year I think was up to 10 lectures a month free lectures a month and we've done that ever since and New York City skeptics one of the first things we did with New York City skeptics as well and we do other things but those you know fundamental basic things of a regular lecture of a skeptic in the pub more sociable thing you don't have to be expert to do those things you just have to have a willingness and a desire and a maybe a passion about the about the cause so what I love about these resources I'm a fan of both we've I love what's a harm and we've been we've used supported skeptic camp efforts with New York City skeptics I love all that and and we do need more of that to provide that expertise for skeptics to educate ourselves and equip ourselves but there's no substitute and even expertise is not a substitute for hey I want to do something god damn it this is true but you have to be able to recognize the what you what you reasonably should be able to do as a non expert and and where you need to consult somebody who is an expert and with the the skeptic movement as big as it is and the people that are involved we have somebody for just about any question that you would want somebody you just need to reach out to them because most most people are pretty responsive so in this part of those this discussion as we're exploring the future of skepticism we're really talking about the lay of the land right now and I hear everyone on the panel drawing a distinction between working to educate folks from a skeptical point of view about various topics and activism to make a difference activism to change something obviously educating folks changes things too but it seems to me that was the distinction that you were drawing and Simon scene comes to mind and the chiropractic campaign in the UK where grassroots groups local groups pub groups etc all sort of from the bottom up coordinated a campaign that was activist in nature not educating people the general public as much about chiropractic as it was pushing back against chiropractic right and it had great effect do you think there are similar opportunities for folks who self-identify a skeptics who are plugged into the movement but aren't going to be experts in an area like Tim just suggested not everyone wants to carve out an expertise or a niche field and stake his or her claim on that you know not everyone wants to do the homework on the history what a big foot lore right so are there similar opportunities here for us I think you know some people are great designers can design logos or or you know it tends a good example of someone whose technical expertise is so invaluable to the community that it wouldn't matter if he didn't know anything about skepticism which he clearly does he offers us it's gold right and you don't necessarily have to even have a great understanding of how scientific studies work as long as you recognize what you do and don't know and you use the strengths that you have in ways that help you're helping and you're you're making a difference some of it can be a huge difference and that was a good example the Simon sync thing one of the ways that they pushed back on the chiropractors is they they knew you know just from experience that a lot of the chiropractors were making claims that were not legal under British law on the regular advertising regulations on their websites and so a couple of people led by something mainly by Simon Perry went out and they went to every single chiropractic website in the UK and scores you know just went over every piece of text that was on there and got copies of it all and found where the language was wrong and they filed hundreds and hundreds of complaints with the chiropractors own regulator and just made this this paperwork nightmare for them in response to them making a nightmare for Simon and what they did to follow up on that is it happens that Simon Perry has a software company and he had his guys build a tool called fish barrel that plugs into your web browser and helps automate that process so instead of having to to sit there and laboriously copy all this information down it with a little bit of knowledge of what phrases you're looking for and what things they're not supposed to say you can go in there with the tool and literally just market in your web browser click a button and it'll take you right to the complaint form for your country and you fill out the complaint tell them who you are and it files and this doesn't work that great in the US because our agencies aren't as responsive but in the UK it's an awesome thing and they they literally every week there's announcements that oh we made we made this chiropractor take this office site and we made this herbalist take this off their site and they're one by one scrubbing all this crap off the internet but it takes a lot of people doing that because there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these websites so we need people to jump in and help out and so that example suggests that you don't need to be an expert in chiropractic you don't have to have written the book Simon Singh wrote instead you just have to be willing to put in some time yeah so just like the SETI project right you not everyone needs to be an astronomer to help search for extraterrestrial intelligence this is new technology allowing anyone who cares about the issues to plug in get involved and be active do you think that will only grow with time or is it really just an empty playing field that it's up to us to end you know poke around find these new opportunities I I think it's growing I you know every every time I look I find new things out there that potentially could be used in this way and we're starting to see folks actually building tools that are more specifically designed for this sort of thing there's a guy here who built a tool called we're butter and I'm noticing a lot of activity amongst the kind of digital end of the newspaper industry in the U.S. where they're concerned that their industry is you know dying and they will try and look toward the future and one aspect of that that they're trying to attack is how do you how do you fact check when there is no editor for blogs or you know or Twitter or anything and you just have all this random information out there is there any way to know what's true and what's not so people are trying to figure out ways to build automated fact checking tools or automated tools that will identify suspect phraseology and websites and stuff like that so there's a lot of a lot of that stuff is still in development and probably a lot of it won't go anywhere but it's interesting it's really interesting I think the Simon Singh chiropractic is a very interesting case and a very encouraging one for the value of the skeptic community you asked E.J. about you posed a distinction between education and activism right in my experience education is a really strong service to be provided by organized by local groups along with socializing which is I think a very valid and primary purpose for local organization and activism is hard for local groups it doesn't mean local groups can't do it there's there's plenty of good examples but it's also difficult for local groups to get get the presses attention and then depending on the size of the community they're in to have all the resources you need to really make an impact with a particular campaign so activism I think was more the role of national groups right that had a better better tools to get at the media and things like that but well in the last 35 years there aren't many examples of national skeptic organizations issuing national campaigns that had measurable impact right but they could support particular I mean look at Randy for many years had the support of Psycop until he didn't but had the support of Psycop in some of his sort of big steps right big attack of course Psycop began with a petition about astrology right so that was that was activism right the very first thing Psycop ever did that created Psycop but the Simon Sink case is a really good good example I think maybe the most dramatic example we we've ever had to date about just the service the value of the simple size and spread of skepticism it wasn't a movement that was it was done by a particular group no particular skeptic group but you know I I was talking to Simon about this last year and I said you know I don't want to be putting words in your mouth I'm going out and saying certain things about this I've been talking to you since all this began you know but do you agree or disagree it seems to me that a lot of your success with this was really wouldn't have happened without the skeptic world because even though other people piled on including the scientific community the scientific community was late to the table compared to the skeptics right I think that the the noise that the skeptic community created made it sort of safe for the scientific communities to step up and and get a sense of outrage about what was going on and Simon absolutely agreed with that that the skeptics were the first ones on the line to come to his defense and act and be active and do things and I think we're gonna we have other examples you know the the bomb detectors or it's a similar thing not so much organized where you point to a national organization or a particular local organization but the sheer numbers of skeptics getting behind a cause that they care about made a difference so in the the conversation we're having about the future of skepticism not once did any of us mention atheism or the future of atheism I think most of us are atheists or skeptics of God or something good 60 something percent high 60 percent of the people in this audience use the word atheist to self describe and of those who don't they probably are sort of skeptical of God although it should be said there are a number of Christians self-identified in the audience and and people who have other sorts of religious beliefs if you look at the last year since last time there's been something like 26 regional or national skeptic or allied big events like conferences people registered for there was the reason rally that reportedly had something like 16,000 people or more attend that event so if we're talking about the future of skepticism is that going to be alongside and separate from this larger thing that also seems to be growing is it like a niche in that or is it is it of a piece nobody wants to try this one first I would say the larger rationalist movement yeah I would point to Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit which enumerated the various tools of skepticism that's that scientists use professionally that have practical value to us all as one of our core assets what's one of our distinguishing features that we have in scientific skepticism and I would say so long as we are praising that sort of scientific skepticism we we stand apart we're unique within that larger larger movement I wouldn't I would just change the language and say not within that larger movement I don't it may all be a rationalist movement in a sense because we all promote critical thinking or at least we claim to but I think that skepticism is more about the thinking in the evaluation of evidence and it is about drawing conclusions and becoming you know emotional about how other people draw their conclusions or where they're where they're at with their conclusions I think we're more about what does this evidence mean you know and and what can we say about the world because of this evidence and it coming up actually the key difference I think is alternative explanations that's really what skeptics do and if you look at even in Randy's history what Randy has always done was provide an alternative explanation for something that looked like magic or the supernatural and that's scientific that's what science does it provides alternative explanations and eliminates theories until you only have a few left and you still hold that tentatively because it might be wrong until something better comes along but it's all about providing alternatives not saying this is true but maybe that the claim you're making may not be true because it could be this instead I'm gonna talk more about this tomorrow morning so stay tuned but you know I think that both both aspects of these movements however they relate however they overlap whichever is a subset of the other and I agree with Barber it's really that the skeptic movement has the sort of the broader view and approach and atheism is compatible with that for many but not all atheist activists each piece of that puzzle has benefited from the other and benefited tremendously from the recent growth and at the same time that recent growth has also created certain confusions and conflicts and I think that's I think that's an estate of being clarified and while some of that clarification is causing I think some undue conflict in some ways that's not constructive I think in the end that clarity hopefully will continue will help will contribute to the continuing success of all of those pieces realize more and work for more what we have in common then arguing about what the differences are but there are differences and they should be clarified so along with the proliferation of national and regional events all over the country people can really and maybe this is not just in the larger rationalist movement or an atheism or in skepticism but it seems like it's a middle-class thing to do today these days to just go to a conference right that's more of a thing now than I think it is right right there's sort of a there's a subculture of people who put on events for other people to consume and some some of these events revolve around hobbies or interests or other passions etc and so and maybe the growth of the rationalist events are part and parcel to that but there's also been a growth of other skeptic products like the podcast and the blogs and it seems like there's a an easier entry now to be or to begin being an opinion sharer if not an opinion leader then there's ever been it used to be there used to be sort of a higher bar to higher hurdle to pass and that's one of the hopes of the internet right that it's more egalitarian more democratic that anyone can put their stuff out there and then the best ideas win but what are the downsides of that if there are any the best side best ideas don't always win if you're talking about numbers it depends on what you mean by win I think in the end you know that the cream it does kind of rise in a sense but it doesn't necessarily mean that your numbers are bigger numbers aren't necessarily success to me it may look like that democracy is messy and every time democracy takes a step egalitarian doesn't take a step it's messier and people complain about the mess you know it seems it seems almost a moot point to me because it's a marketplace of ideas and there is no nobody's gonna be putting out the test for you know what do you have to pass what license they have to get in order to speak up and I just think that you know it's a nature of information technology which is has a profound effect on all kinds of worlds and I come out of the magic world has been transformed culturally and artistically by information technology because we survive for centuries on secrecy and a lot of that secrecy is gone but look at publishing you know it used to be that you had to have some good ideas in your head before you got a book deal before you get a book out because of all the expense of publishing a book but now it's much easier to self-publish so there's a lot there's a lot more lousy books but that doesn't necessarily interfere with the opportunity for there to be good books so it's a new and changing world yes but on the other hand we have what's the harm and skeptic camp and all of these fantastic resources that are easily accessed now that we didn't have before now if I'm facing a skeptic conversation about something I actually don't know the answer to oh if only there was a device oh yeah I can get to the skeptic dictionary you know that's that's bookmarked so well yeah and this is the whole thing on the internet in terms of there's a lot been written about the filter bubble and how people everything's filtered now even your Google results depends on who you are and who your friends are and so people tend to sort of get stuck in a bubble of the things they already access and how are we a skeptics going to penetrate that bubble and how are we gonna as skeptics detect when maybe we're stuck in a bubble and missing out on something and so there are a lot of people trying to figure out ways to deal with that through the technology building you know filtering tools or tools that ways to read content on the internet that that aren't so standardized so you're not stuck in the same sources over and over but it is an interesting problem I would just add that it's a it's a particular problem for interesting challenge for and lesson for skeptics because in an age of information what is needed is skills of selection right that's what we ought to be that's what the world needs to be teaching I mean I wish my kids you know how to first or second a third grade class about how to judge good information for bad information not just in the skeptic in our skeptic sense but in the larger world sense right judge good information for bad information because the internet is full of both and that's supposed to be skeptics per view so I mean I think that's a very interesting lesson and challenge for us so as we've begun exploring the future of skepticism we've talked a bit about the history we've talked about the lay of the land now these various ways that skepticism has changed recently and suggests trends for change going forward let's end our discussion with each of you making a skeptics prediction about the future of skepticism so Jamie well considering my line of work I haven't healer a sealed prediction so you want you were saying five years look ahead okay so open this in five years and we'll see how in case you're impatient I thought you might I know you DJ you're so impatient it says it says I having a clue but I do think that the Simon sing chiropractic case the dowsing the dowsing bomb detection cases I think these are really good optimistic indicators of the impact and success that we can look toward as increasing possibilities as a result of skeptic activism as a result of you all being here and going home and doing what you're doing on the ground those are cases where it's not like as I said it's not one local group it's not one particular big national organization it is the world and community of skepticism raising their voices when the opportunity occurs and having an undeniable impact and I hope and I think we will see more of that yeah I agree with that I'm very always very excited when I come to Tim and I see so many folks here because you know every one of you is it can make a difference because of the internet technologies I mentioned before that I've noticed the leveling off in the number of podcasts and I don't know if that is mean something will remains to be seen maybe we've just we've saturated and gotten our podcast and you know a hundred podcasts that's that's a lot of material and it's a lot of healthy that's a healthy community right there so that's a good sign I think that the future is figuring out these things like the filter bubble and and figuring out ways to get better information in front of people using these internet tools and there's a lot of opportunities out there and we talked about crowdsourcing in my workshop yesterday and I think that's that's the future is everybody helping out not just you know not just the national orgs do their thing and get with the media but everybody else needs to be out there on the internet and when the next Simon Singh needs you to raise your voice you need to be ready to raise your voice or if you you know there's a psychic who lives in your town and no one else has noticed them you need to be the one that notices them so that the rest of us can raise our voices in defense of you so it's all a big part of the same thing inspired by Tim I've been keeping metrics on the growth of skeptic camp over the last several years and so I've hard numbers in which I'm going to stake my reputation upon I estimate or at present we just hit our 50th 50th skeptic camp internationally took place in Fort Collins Colorado a small campus town two different languages English and Spanish for the skeptic camps and in five countries so far I estimate that by July 2017 when Tam occurs here we'll see it in five different languages ten countries and a total of 200 skeptic camps so four times where we are right now by 2017 July 2017 there we go well I rack my brain because this is a perfect opportunity for some great jokes but I'm not that funny so I'm gonna try to deliver somebody else's climate change deniers will cause a ruckus at 1015 which will be held here at the South Point Hotel casino in Seaport all of the jokes I did try to come up with had something to do with baldness so I thought you know maybe advances in baldness treatments would finally make it able for us to tell apart some of the skeptics five years will be up here on stage giving Georgia haircut yes or maybe George would be the only one we could actually find in the crowd but I do have one that I I think that we're headed to the peak when it comes to vaccines I actually see I see a turn around and it may be more to do with the return of illnesses than with our efforts but we're there with the right information when people get scared so we have to take some credit for that and I think in five years we're going to turn the tables on that to a point where it's no longer a skeptical issue it's going to be more of one of awareness than of fear because there are you know there are some diseases where we're under vaccinated simply because people aren't aware they need to be vaccinated things like pertussis and then that probably has more to do with it at this point than fear but I think we're going to hit that I think we're going to turn the tables on that I think the fear is going to start going the other direction so both of skeptic camp popping the info bubble vaccines the vaccine denialism solved and you don't know ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking our panelists for this exploration on the future


Going all right Season ticket Zeke Rookie ticket ETN Junior Your Smith Mars sets number 299 good question though It's close one for sure and an MVP contenders orange Patty Mahomes stuff 50. Nice. There you go chiefs Redemption is pen I Sue well there rookie ticket autograph pen I Sue well. It'll be going to the Lions And I Sue well for the Lions. There you go and Remandre Stevenson rookie ticket silver autograph for the Patriots.  Yep Doing well so far for sure Have to agree season ticket Terry McLauren rookie ticket trace sermon blue Aaron Donald to 99 and Defining images or excuse me splitting image TJ Watts splitting image there you go Steelers Ravens rookie ticket base autograph Tyson Williams you go Ravens and Browns Number to 15 on the Anthony Schwartz rookie ticket variation autograph nice one It's a 15 There you go Browns nice Schwartz very solid Yeah, Ravens are hitting well Ravens are hitting well Keep going.  I'm gonna grab that one right away. It's gonna be a Tyreek Hill superstars So cool. It's gonna be black scope number to 25 Black scope to 25 there nice one So we got one more on the back and then two in the front here TJ Hawkinson season ticket rookie ticket Davis Mills and Deandre Hopkins there number to 30 green Pulsar Number to 50 J2 felle No to 50 rookie ticket orange auto.  We'll mag that up. That's nice Congrats congrats Lions It's a 15 Yeah, I like that Barry as well Monster right back right there. Okay season ticket Lamar Jackson rookie ticket Elijah Moore It's gonna be a rookie ticket blue here to 99 Sam Ellinger and It's gonna be a round numbers Michael Carter, Jr. And Remandre Stevenson. This is round numbers green Pulsar to 30 So we're gonna do a dice roll for that right now one two three top four five six bottom. Good luck Jetson Patriots. It's gonna be to go into the top you go jets Autographs Eric Stokes rookie ticket base auto. You give me some regular sleeves as well And Kedarius Tony nice one there for the Giants rookie ticket blue autograph To 50 dark blue to 50. There you go Giants. Nice hit there very nice Tony Let's keep it going let's do it Two to go guys. All right best of luck here Got AJ Brown rookie ticket Najee Harris Gold Derek Henry number to ten you go gold to ten MVP contenders blue Tom Brady 84 of 99 nice Brady Has indeed been an MVP contender in the past Luke Pharrell this time Gonna be a rookie ticket base autograph for El and Rookie ticket cracked ice Rashad Bateman boom Havens Huge hit there you go.  We'll mag that You go Carson Very nice Bateman cracked ice. Is there number to 22? I believe you confirm that please Yep to 22. Yep Good stuff. Is it Jersey number? No, not Jersey number to 22 still so that's big Aron Donald season ticket Rookie ticket Mack Jones nice one Silver season ticket Miles Sanders in a blue to 99 Deandre Hopkins winning tickets Redemption is Jamie Davis rookie ticket auto orange Jamie Davis that's like to 50 or something like that You go football team on the Jamie Davis And closing it out number to 50 rookie ticket auto Dwayne Eskridge You go Seahawks to close it put ball team You go to 20. Thank you. Lemuk To 20 on the orange and Nice Eskridge to close so a quick recap guys Thanks again so much for joining that pick your team style right there. Hope you enjoyed it Appreciate it Right We've got Dwayne Eskridge blue Jamie Davis orange Luke Pharrell canaries Tony blue Eric Stokes J2 Felly orange Anthony Schwartz green pulsar Tyson Williams from Andre Stevenson Silver pen I saw a rookie ticket auto lions Tylen Wallace cracked ice Kellan Mons rookie ticket pulsar To 15 that's the variation as well tax mill rookie ticket auto rookie ticket Michael Carter 75 Jalen Phillips rookie ticket redemption auto Gonna Sean Wade base auto Chas Sarat's And rontale more only when Sam's around chair by a Sam's not here.  Thanks again so much for joining the berry is number two fifteen appreciate it. We'll be on to number 34 shortly tonight


to the city considers here at Davis Media Access. When I say here at Davis Media Access this is kind of the COVID-19 version of this. I want to give my thanks to DMA's technical staff for helping us figure out how to keep doing these shows. We do these shows because in a town like ours where civic engagement is high this kind of transparency and getting to know our elected officials and the important issues that are before our community is very important. So I'm very very pleased to welcome our new mayor Gloria Partida. Thanks for joining us today Gloria. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure. So you were recently seated as mayor and it's a it's a historic seating because you are our community's first Latinx mayor and given a lot of the issues that we're dealing with and your engagement with the community. I think the time is really right so I want to congratulate you first of all and thank you for stepping up into this leadership role and you've become mayor at a time when as I said we're dealing with COVID-19. We're dealing with meetings and community input in the age of Zoom and none of that can be very easy. I know that you had kind of an epically long city council meeting this past Tuesday and one of the things that that was on the agenda that took a lot of bandwidth was the University Commons project which is the envisioned revamp of what's been long been called University Mall. So can you tell us where things were left and perhaps what some of your takeaways from that meeting were? So we sort of knew going in that it was going to be a long meeting and that there were a lot of issues that were a little contentious because it had already gone through the planning commission and at that commission meeting there were a lot of concerns and the planning commission did not approve of the you know of the form that it was in and so we kind of had a heads up for that and you know early on we knew that there were 97 public public commenters and that number increased as the evening wore on. So some of the concerns were the size of it, the affordability because it's a mixed use project it started off as not needing to do any affordable units but the City Council changed that policy and so then they were required to do some affordable units and then people were concerned about the traffic around that area and so those are some of the questions that we received that came in through planning commission as well as through some of the commenters and a lot of the emails that we received and so we sent put together a list of questions for the developers to to work through and see if they could come in a little closer to what the community wanted. So that has that now has been the vote on this has been delayed to is it an August 18th meeting 16th? Sorry I don't have the date at my fingertips. It's the 18th. On the 18th we have an all call meeting and so we will take it up again then. Okay so that's one of the issues one of the other big issues that's happening in town is that of police accountability and perhaps reframing how police do their jobs and what policing looks like in the Davis community. You have a Facebook page that is not your personal page but for City Council and you wrote something interesting the other day where you talked about the value of discussion but how it can be infinite if no change actually comes out of that. Can you share with us some of your thoughts around the process and where this discussion heads next? Sure so that particular remark was around the incident that happened at Moore Village and where there was an Asian American citizen who had an encounter with some of the residents there and the police were called in and there are I think two points that are happening in that one incident. One is sort of the you know when people are dubbing the Karen incidents where people are you know showing their implicit bias by being suspicious of people who don't look like themselves and call the police and then also it came on the heels of the George Floyd incident where people are calling for a change in policing and having more training for police so they come into incidents such as that particular one with more sensitivity and more understanding around cultural issues and do you really need to send in the police in an incident like that and so the conversation around refunding or defunding or reallocation of police dollars into places that would give us more not just safety but have us communicate with each other better and be in better relationship with each other in the city. Okay so what happens next there's a police accountability commission there's also the human relations commission I think they both play a role here. Yes and so on Monday the social services had a presentation around public safety and you know thinking about ways that that we could use our resources better the police accountability commission held a meeting and discussed this issue as well and then this evening this will be the second time that the human relations commission will be having a discussion around you know what stakeholders do we want to talk to in our community to ask about where they think it would be best to you know put the the bulk of our resources around and where do we need those resources and so they will have a forum with the ACLU this evening that meeting starts at 6 30. Okay thank you so during I'm switching gears here during the pandemic I've been talking to a lot of people and a lot of organizations and businesses about the impact of COVID-19 on on them and of course for the city I know we're dealing with very real economic impact I know that right now businesses are filing their second quarter sales tax returns and and of course that's going to be a huge issue with so many businesses closing so what are the discussions around how the city responds to that and what what are we looking at how the city responds to our own finances do you mean just to clarify yes to to a time where sales tax and transient occupants all those taxes that the city relies on are are declining it leaves a rather you know gaping deficit and so how will the city be continue to navigate that and you may not know at this point and so but I'm just trying to get a beat on where we are right now. Yeah so initially we did we just had our budget and we had an adjustment to the budget because of that exact for that exact reason right we have a pretty good roadmap I think going forward we did ask the labor we unions to negotiate around furloughs so that we wouldn't have to lay people off and and so I think that currently we came into the situation in a good place and that is very very helpful now we've always we since the last recession we've been very fiscally frugal and you know working on basically the same amount of staff that that we've had for for many years now even though the population has increased in the city and so we we're already working very very lean from a very lean uh place and we really won't know until we get the report out from like how much have have we lost and when we you know ran the numbers and did the budget we didn't know that um but we will pretty soon yeah. So what's it like for the the council experience and even for for city staff to to work on all of these big issues virtually and and there we all talk a lot about zoom these days and doing you know life on zoom and business on zoom but what's it been like to manage the process of of public meetings that way? So I think initially it was very counterintuitive and very um very sort of dehumanizing in in a way I am a very social person and so I've never liked doing things over video um and there are a lot of cues you get from being in a room with people that we absolutely do not have especially at the city council meeting when you've got a room full of people and you can kind of feel where the conversation is going and you get like I said you get a lot of feedback from that and so that is that has been a big adjustment I think that now that we've been doing zoom for about what has it been three four months it feels a little more I wouldn't say natural because it never feels natural but uh just something that we are more definitely used to um and they and I will say that at least it has increased the efficiency of not having to drive somewhere and then you know sometimes you drive and only have a 15 20 minute meeting and that is not um and that's not uh a good use of time and so in some respects this is better but like the other night the city council meeting went until about 130 and we had started with a closed session at five and so basically we were on zoom for uh eight hours and that that's really wearing I mean it's wearing either way but when you're doing it electronically for some reason it is it's harder yeah I think our brains aren't aren't wired to uh to to deal with that kind of interface long term I'm experiencing it myself too so I wanted to make sure we give you some time to talk about what your priorities are moving forward in your first term as mayor I acknowledged up front that you know you stepped into this leadership role at at a really really interesting time we are living in interesting times right now um so what are what are some of your thoughts on what you'd like to accomplish in in the months and years ahead the year ahead so I definitely have had to rethink that a little bit with the COVID because you know coming in when I was elected there were there was a list of things that I felt were a priority and now it feels like that list has been hijacked um by just trying to survive the next year or two as we're trying to stay in a good place uh through this COVID crisis and I think that I still would like to for our focus to be on community and economic development I'm really hopeful that the disc project will um you know be received as a positive thing in the community because I think that that can be that can move us into a place that would be really good for us for a long time um and you know for me parks and rec and young people putting some effort and resources into that area has always been uh something that I wanted to push forward and actually with the conversations around uh reallocation of resources around the police it's a natural fit for that for that focus okay well it's going to be very interesting to see how things continue under COVID and how long we're in this situation so any parting thoughts we are almost out of time I told you this goes quickly and it has um anything you'd like to to leave us with um I would like to leave us with the thought to stay hopeful and stay healthy and to continue to reach out to each other as community members and I'm really grateful to Davis Media Access and to all of our nonprofits in town that continue to fill in the gaps I mean they they did a great job of filling in the gaps for services and for needs of the community before the pandemic I think they're going to be just as important uh during the pandemic and hopefully we will see uh everybody come out of this um on top okay I want to thank you again for joining us today and for your service on the council I know the council has a brief respite coming up a little bit of downtime before you swing back into action in august and take on university commons and all the other issues so thanks so much for joining us gloria thank you thank you again this has been the city considers from the virtual Davis Media Access Studio I'm autumn love a reno be sure to check out all our programming online at dctv.davismedia.org watch it live on Comcast channel 15 and check out our youtube channel thanks so much


Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports, which is still a company, says, despite issues in recent weeks between the Saints and wide out, Michael Thomas, sources said the wide out had a productive meeting with head coach Sean Payton, and the two sides are working to move past their frustrations. Was Vince Vaughn known Wilson there saying, hey, let's put our swords down? Is that what happened? There had to be some day. How about the wedding night? How about when you signed a deal? Is that what happened? I like seeing this, by the way. People get past situations so that they can continue to thrive together.